Digital communication is contagious insofar as it occurs on an emotive or affective register, without mediation. . . Digital “content,” even if it holds very little significance, spreads like an epidemic, a pandemic racing through the Net. It is unburdened by the weight of meaning.
Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2017.
Our daily experience of the world is more and more deriving from images, often juxtaposed with label-like portions of texts to create memes that populate the live feed of our digital lives. We seem to bask in a river of content activated by the lazy scroll of our fingers, which only stops when something catches our attention, and we allow that decontextualized piece of information to reach our synapses and play a role in the formation of what we consider real. Reality—or what we perceive it to be —is, therefore, a product of constant negotiation with the mediascape with which we empathize. We act as individuals, that are certain of their piece of truth and unable to seek interaction with that which sits outside of it.
All the Blind Men is the title chosen by artist Babak Golkar to frame his ongoing research into the role and responsibility of images in the formation of a political climate. It can read as a reference to the mass—or rather the “swarm”[1] —of people who blindly wander in the mediascape grabbing at bits and pieces of truth while failing to understand the bigger picture. In the time of fake news and Cambridge Analytica, the information we gather visually tend to be fabricated by algorithms, allowing images to serve political agendas and to manufacture consent through the manipulation of our emotions. Much like the history of art is entangled with that of propaganda, the role of the artist is intertwined with the power structures that filter what is made visible.
One reoccurring protagonist of Golkar’s recent production is the elephant, as the title of the exhibition The Elephant (An Intermission), at Sabrina Amrani Gallery in Madrid, reveals. The phrasing of the title alludes to Bertolt Brecht’s early play Man Equals Man—addressed by the artist in earlier works—here reappearing with reference to its intermission, titled The Elephant Calf. In Brecht’s writings, the elephant is probably a reference to Kipling’s bias imagery around the British Empire and its jingoistic control of the Indian territories and workforce. Brecht uses, in the intermission, the animal as a metaphor of the ultimate manipulation where a man is convinced to buy a fake elephant after being brainwashed by colonial soldiers. Similarly, Golkar introduces, with such title, an investigation around the dismantling and reassembling of reality in the mediascape, reminiscing the propaganda that the German author was addressing in the late 20s, with the Nazi socialist party on the rise.
The centerpiece of The Elephant (An Intermission) is a suite of thirty-one emotionless black-and-white paintings titled Deaf Feet (December 1–31, 2017).
The paintings, to be understood as daily artistic exercises, depict an upside-down elephant, repeated thirty-one times. Deaf Feet refers to the displacement of the elephant’s feet, metaphorically putting the animal in a disadvantaged position, rendering it unable to hear (as elephants rely on sound waves that travel through the ground rather than the air, allowing it to detect communication from miles away). The work draws on the well-known Rumi parable about a group of sightless men who experience an elephant for the first time, each touching a different part of the animal and each perceiving something unique—a snake, a fan, a tree trunk, and a rope, among other things. Each man regards the others’ partial “view” as dishonest, and the ensuing fight prevents them from knowing the elephant as a whole. Not only Golkar reflects on this blindness as a metaphor for the shortsightedness of our gazes today, but he also projects it into the daily gesture of painting the same upside-down pachyderm for each day of December 2017. Furthermore this prismatic refraction of the animal into thirty-one canvases—lying on the floor against the wall—touches upon the fragmentation of our points of view on reality, and the frailty of the single subjectivity against the entirety of truth in its complexity.
One year into Trump’s administration, with its rooting in Steve Bannon’s doctrine, Golkar marks the anniversary by reframing the Rumi parable through the Law of Prägnanz, a fundamental principle of Gestalt Psychology. Namely, by focusing on the forms without getting lost in the contents, the artist turned his canvases bottom up; therefore defying the traps we can fall into when perceiving shapes pre-registered in our brains. Golkar’s assembly of elephants reverberates with the history of the manipulation of perception, suggesting that we are all complacently blind and deaf to the signals of danger that echo from a not-so-distant past.
In addition to Deaf Feet, Golkar’s contributions to the exhibition include Palimpsest, a second series of black-and-white paintings, and a porcelain sculpture of an elephant, reminiscent of a piggy bank. Both works are revolving, in different ways, around the same topics and investigation. The artist’s works developed as part of the exhibition represent a visualization of his distrust of the retinal sphere. It is a journey that dissects the circularity of history, in the reappearance of fascism via the simplification and forgery of facts from the political sphere to the masses.
[1] Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his influential book In the Swarm. Digital Prospects, introduces the idea of the “‘swarm”’ to characterize the behavior of the masses in the digital era
Babak Golkar’s “Grounds for Standing and Understanding” explores representations of space by creating a sculptural interface between bodies and architecture that generates contemporary forms by opening a new dimension on a historical mode. This conceptual intervention produces a critique of the ideology underpinning architecture and the design of public space, questioning their use and effects while posing imaginative problems that encourage the bodily engagement of the viewer.
Golkar’s recent work develops critical acuity by establishing a coherent spatial vocabulary as it surveys the postmodern juncture of concepts, acts, subjects and objects which are spatially interrelated. Exploring spaces traditionally supposed to be sacred, zones excluded from the everyday, Golkar examines their philosophical integrity, illuminating contradictions in the gulf between thought and activity. But this exclusion from the everyday is revealed as a metaphysical fantasy that a particular space could be exceptional; that something escapes the ubiquity of terrain. Golkar reveals these spaces as produced in a sense similar to that established in Henri Lefebvre’s theory: the space of his work is not a neutral, accidental container of objects and events, but is itself the product of activity, and the expression of otherwise unconscious interactions (The Production of Space). In what follows I will review the way Golkar’s practice moves from literal space to symbolic spaces; from content to ideological frame.
Golkar’s earlier Parergon series functions as a fine introduction to the expanded spatiality of his practice. These parerga, or frames, disrupt the expected function of literal framing: where usually a frame surrounds an artwork, here the work is the frame, disrupting the familiar opposition of inside/outside. The extrusion of an architectural silhouette through space generates an interrupted frame which secretes the recognizable referent, the exterior shape of a mosque, in a dimension of the frame that is usually closed-off: the cross-section. The literal lack of closure of the frame leaves just enough information to disclose the building, a holy site hidden in plain view.
Each Parergon forces consciousness of the fact that the architecture depicted literally frames behaviours in situ; this is doubly true of the symbolic space of mosques, buildings repeatedly transformed by historical overdetermination and religious claims. The Dome of the Rock, for example, a historically contested symbolic site, is spatially significant to both Jews and Muslims, itself framing a foundational stone deemed holy by both traditions.
According to Jacques Derrida’s definition, “a parergon is against, beside, and above and beyond the ergon, the work accomplished [...]. But it is not incidental; it is connected to and cooperates in its operation from the outside” (“The Parergon” 20). But Golkar’s innovation of the frame flattens the expected spatial dichotomy of inside/outside: these works literalize the “internal structural link by which [parerga] are inseparable from a lack within the ergon,” (“The Parergon” 24). The ergon, the work itself, is invisible until the viewer looks “awry” (to paraphrase Slavoj Zizek,) and adopts the required framing of her own perspective.
Golkar’s pieces, which leave the space within the frame empty and open, appear to have allowed their content to escape, disclosing “a lack within the ergon.” A frontal view of Golkar’s Parergon appears to offer only an abstract partial frame, its cross-sectional relief collapsed. As Derrida notes, Greek philosophical tradition dictates that parergon “is that which should not become, by distinguishing itself, the principal subject”; “parerga should not be allowed to take precedence over the essential” (“Parergon” 20). But Golkar deftly refutes this prohibition, inverting and canceling the presumed difference between a primary object of attention and its supplement by foregrounding a neglected spatial dimension of the frame.
As Golkar’s work demands vertiginous perspectival shifts of the viewer, requiring movement through gallery space and conceptual space alike that animate the visual object and generate new images, it brings the often invisible influence of space on social practice to the fore. Engaging the signifiers of both Suprematism and Islam in “From God to Malevich...”, Golkar dictates the viewer’s position and motion to induce an imagined space through the relatively simple effect of a lenticular illusion, an image situated behind a lens so that it appears to move as the viewer changes position. In order to see what the work does, a viewer must obey its full title: “From God to Malevich: 80 degree View, Left to Right, Then Reversed, To Be Viewed at an Arm’s- Length.” From one perspective, the viewer is hailed by the work, interpellated as a moving imaging-platform, a seer in the specific space of the gallery. In treating the viewer as an object encountering another object, a spatialized cubic version of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, the work almost elides subjectivity, even while disclosing the appearance of a moving image that relies on the participation of the individual. But the ambiguous cube establishes a simultaneous association with the Kaaba of Mecca, the black cubic building toward which Muslims pray. Appearing to turn before him in response to his own steps, the cube also interpellates the viewer as a Muslim pilgrim following the traditional Hajj, which requires every Muslim to circumambulate the building at least once in his life. Here a contested, ambiguous space is produced which is both profane and sacred; which recalls both the Suprematist response to Catholic icons in Black Square, and the locus of sacred Muslim tradition in the Kaaba.
Golkar’s myriad spatial interventions culminate in the series Grounds for Standing and Understanding. A semantic doubling hints at the manifold nature of the project: the “Grounds” are both a conceptual basis for communication and a literal support on which people stand.
The pieces that make up Grounds for Standing and Understanding engage with the traditional craft of Persian carpets by making them the pattern for a speculative fantasy architecture. Related to the earlier Parergon, the extrusion this time is through not horizontal, but vertical space. By selecting patterns in the woven two-dimensional surface and translating them upward as tower structures, the artist generates objects that traverse the three dimensional space above the plane. These stacked forms that emulate the distinctive shapes of traditional weaving grow out of shapes that alwaysalready implied geographic and architectural patterns: traditional Persian carpets function as particular representations of space, including gardens, waterways, walls and paths.
Golkar’s series forms an oblique response to the architectural mega-projects of the past decade: as they stretch upward his forms call to mind the phenomenon of ever-taller skyscrapers rising globally with increased frequency, and concentrated recently in the Middle East. Vertical projections from the carpets form a wholly new architectural idiom which also bears an uncanny traditional appearance, due to its origin in the millennia-old Persian tradition of weaving. The traditional forms on the carefully chosen carpet often give rise to areas that might function as public space; but these are dominated by towering skyscrapers, forms that soar with geometrical precision and remain aloof from the lower structures of the carpet’s surface. It is difficult not to see a reference in these competing towers to a real world monument to the vertical dimension such as the recently completed Burj Khalifa in Dubai (about which more below). Why do we build up with such fevered obsession? If it is an attempt to escape the pull of gravity, or the profanity of the Earth, then the question is raised— escape into what? More to the point: for whom do we build ever higher?
In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, the “Autre” or “big Other” is the presumed god-like perspective that sees all from above and anchors meaning. Lacan’s claim that there is no big Other does not mean that it does not function: in fact, now that “god is dead” the big Other has more power— we observe ourselves with imagined acuity from the perspective of an empty place. The postmodern big Other is a force dwelling in an imaginary Earth orbit, always above, beyond the horizontality of mortals, compensating for their limited vision: seeing an ordered whole where mortals perceive contingent chaos.
It is this perspective for which feats such as Dubai’s Burj Khalifa are engineered. At 2,717 feet, architect Adrian Smith’s mammoth tower is taller than both World Trade Center towers stacked; from its pinnacle the curvature of the Earth is clearly visible. When seen from above, its three-lobed footprint resembles the Hymenocallis, a regional desert flower. But for whom is this shape developed: who will ever see this view? So far only those who have viewed a satellite image of the structure. In a similar bid for the attention of the big Other, Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan carved “HAMAD” into the restricted desert island he owns; his name is legible only at altitude. Both of these cases contain a feature that is invisible in the horizontal experience of terrain, but which leaps into view when seen from the perspective of the orbital big Other. This perspective has now been visualized by Google Earth, a digital atlas, itself a carpet of stitched-together satellite photographs. The conspicuous characteristic of this software is a scale fluidity that allows a flying eye to freely zoom in and out, from street view to continental and planetary comprehension: to both examine detail and survey vast area. The apparent resolution into recognizable content from the orbital perspective is both an affirmation of the imaginary power of the other’s surveillance, and an opportunity to dethrone the big Other, to assume the perspective which confers omniscience. Moving among Golkar’s architectural miniatures, which elide any hint at their precise scale relative to the human body, the viewer might feel traces of the overhead flight offered by Google Earth, soaring over the rooftops of fantasy skyscrapers, peering down at a distant surface.
The forms that rise like three dimensional expressions of the carpet are both complemented and complicated by scaled-up segments of his imaginary building, generating a body-space relationship closer to street-view on the scale continuum. Without their incorporation in a building, these architectural elements pulled from their context recall Robert Morris’s “Untitled (three L beams)” (1965). Golkar’s elements pose spatial problems in terms of function and scale: function, in that they appear to have a purpose, but no ready use; scale, in that the sharp-eyed viewer will recognize these architectural elements from the miniature building complexes that rise out of the nearby Persian carpets. As they partially enclose and divide space from space in complex patterns, these building fragments also resonate with Richard Serra’s sculptural interventions in public space, with their bewildering effect on the locomotion of those who travel through the space.
Here the collision between miniature-scale towers that one can walk among while looking down at their details, and bodily-scaled portions of those models creates a feeling of vertigo by enhancing the implied magnitude of the models and creating the sensation that the viewer has been shrunk to fit into the carpet-generated forms. These contradictory feelings show the flaw in our perceptual systems that can so easily be misled by the imagination: human bodies appear to us as a universal standard of scale, but the scale-fluidity of Golkar’s work produces a vertigo of relative sizes. Bodies feel bigger or smaller relative to the geometric environment that embraces them. This generates a dynamic resizing of the viewer in response to what is actually the scale fluctuation of the environment. It is pertinent to ask, ‘what is the zero-level of scale? Are the large pieces magnified or actual size? Do the “miniatures” stand in for something massive, or are they actual size?’ By one reading, Golkar’s poetics of scale produces a spatial derangement which sends one back to the most recent reference points: in this case the nation, the “imagined community” that has resurged since its apparent attenuation with the rise of globalization [Anderson; Derksen; Smith]. By another reading, this derangement, this scale-vertigo, could be read as mimetic of a postmodern characteristic: a hyper-awareness of the spatial dimension of reality that is revealed in the relations of globalization and the technology of the space age.
Resisting stasis by compelling the viewer through gallery space, the work of Golkar’s work inheres in his dialectical engagement with perspective itself. The combination, even oscillation, between a first-person horizontal view and an (imagined) overhead view forces the subject to see a broken continuity as itself an object; to see distortions of the large at small scale and the small at large scale; to see what is normally elided by our fixed vantage points, both literal and ideological.
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