has fun with words

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Scott Valentine’s Project Targeted

In Culture, Politics on April 23, 2012 at 5:44 pm

Scott Valentine’s Project Targeted began life as an attempt to discover – or create – a community for gay men that they would “want to share.” He was, like so many other gay men, killing time on Grindr: an geosocial networking app that allows users to locate and talk to other men in close proximity. Recruiting volunteers, Valentine began to collect as many portraits of gay men as he possibly could. Then, following successful Kickstarter backing, he shot those portraits with .38 caliber rifle.

Project Targeted - Scott Valentine, 2011.

Exhibited in the UK at Big Shed in Suffolk, the portraits were hung as though in a shooting gallery. Suspended in space, it’s at first hard to make out the bullet holes as bullet holes. The exit tracks could be the artefacts of printing, or even birth-marks. What you see are uneven rows of faces, in which there is little – if anything – to identify sexuality. Seen from the reverse, the commonality of the bullet tracks swims into sharp focus: no faces at all, just the traces of violence. A zine produced as a Kickstarter backer reward – which also catalogues the portraits – is less ambiguous about who these men might be, even though their faces defy visible stereotypes of sexuality.

Project Targeted - Kickstarter reward zine

This work is not intended as an account of victimisation – an analogue for all too real acts of homophobic violence – even though it might easily be read that way. A second artwork, a poster produced as a further sponsor’s reward, offers a manifesto statement that frames the portraits as the participants putting themselves figuratively “in the line of fire” for an encompassing queer community. Posed explicitly against the stereotypical definition of both queerness and masculinity – against weakness and heroism – Valentine’s work attempts to address assumptions of what makes a queer person different and, in turn, how that difference might found a community.

There are, though, difficulties in the logic of this work and questions of how composition might describe politics. If these men are standing in the line of fire, the bodies that might be shielded by such an act are absent: it is a kind of heroism without an object or, perhaps, a heroism that tries to will into existence its community without knowing that community. One of queer theory’s blind spots is here: how does one recognise a plurality of difference without anticipating – and limiting – what that difference might be?

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On site-specific game design

In Games, Theatre on April 12, 2012 at 5:20 pm

Dear Esther doesn’t have a narrative. I mean, it has one if you want one. It offers you a voice – images and events, cryptic signs and scribbled diagrams – and invites you to create a narrative, but that’s not at the heart of the work. Dear Esther has an island. It’s a site-specific game.

One of the dominant ideas surrounding site-specific performance is that it’s a kind of theatre which is made of and from a particular place: its stories, myths and landscape. Rather than acting as a seemingly neutral backdrop – as in a conventional theatre venue – place and space (and sometimes the community found there) are intrinsic parts of site-specific performance. To change the site would be to completely change a site-specific work. Think of NTW’s The Passion, a work inseparable from Port Talbot or the 1000-plus community volunteers who supported the three-day spectacle.

A similar relationship to space (though not community) might be at work, I think, in Dan Pinchbeck and Robert Briscoe’s Dear Esther, a game not only set on a remote Hebridean island but in which passage across the island is the most distinctive feature of the work’s aesthetic. While the island itself might be treated metaphorically – an empty space of isolation and loneliness – I’m more interested in the ways in which the different texts of the game combine through that space, and in which that space is inseparable from those texts.

At the level of game mechanic, Dear Esther’s fragmentary narration is triggered by the player’s chosen path across the island, by the locations he or she choses to visit and the order of progress. At the same time, the player is slowly introduced to spatial cues – not only carefully framed mise-en-scène of abandoned campsites and shipwrecks, but to figures which hover on the edge of vision, shadows or ghosts who fade and vanish when you turn to look directly at them. Memories of a car crash overlap with images of what look like medical records, circuit diagrams and chemical equations – distributed not only in time as you progress through the game, but in space.

Elements of this fragmentary, spatial structure – deliberately fragmented or obscured to invite, if not force, the player to try to make connections – might be compared to the storytelling devices of previous games like Bioshock, whose distributed audio-diaries slowly fill in the events of the fallen city of Rapture. What’s different in Dear Esther, I’d suggest, is the role played by landscape – by the ways in which the game plays with the view in the distance as much as the immediate location in which the player is located.

As an artwork, then, the experience of Dear Esther arrives through lines of sight in movement, from shifting perspectives as the player moves across the island. Dear Esther works, I think – and to crib terms from Tim Ingold – by allowing the player paths of observation, by the deliberately slow pace to and through the spaces of the island: the climb from the shore up towards the radio tower which moves in and out of sight.

The gameplay mechanic of movement through space, then, isn’t merely the way in which information or narrative fragment is parcelled out. It frames and shapes the way in which the player understands and responds to that material. Put simply, the view is the game and the game is the view.

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Homosocial Detective Adventures

In Culture on February 28, 2012 at 9:31 pm

If the casting of Lucy Liu in the role of Watson holds true, CBS’s Elementary may be a “re-imagining” of Sherlock Holmes which abandons one of the key elements of the source material. After all, Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories – and the overwhelming majority of adaptions which have followed – are stories about the homosocial; that is, they’re about relationships between men. Put bluntly, Doyle’s stories are about men because – at the turn of the c19th – they arose from a culture which was dominated by men and structured by their financial, emotional and, yes, sexual, relationships.

In the stories themselves, you can’t help but notice that we mainly encounter Holmes through Watson: Watson’s account of Holmes’ words, or his own narration of Holmes’ actions. The original short stories are about men watching other men, pursuing other men, fighting other men, outwitting other men, killing other men.

Even A Scandal In Bohemia – infamous for introducing Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Holmes – is largely disinterested in the female form. While Doyle has Watson linger on the King of Bohemia (“A man entered who could hardly have been less than six feet six inches in height, with the chest and limbs of a Hercules”) and Holmes on Adler’s husband-to-be (“He was a remarkably handsome man, dark, aquiline, and moustached”), Adler’s own appearance is noted only fleetingly: a “beautiful creature”, little more.1

Watson’s wife is only significant insofar as she comes between Watson and Holmes, though even that influence is – at best – rendered as passive and indirect. In fact, Watson’s account of his changing relationship with Holmes doesn’t even mention her:

My marriage had drifted us away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.

It’s all about the boys.

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ Sherlock makes hay of the tension and/or confusion between the homosocial and the homoerotic: in annoyance rather than anger, Watson repeatedly explains that he and Holmes are not a couple. With the role of the narrator supplanted largely by the eye of the camera, we end up watching Watson, watching Holmes. While Adler reappears in A Scandal in Belgravia, the infatuation seems to be almost hopelessly one-sided. We learn, a few episodes later, that the only numbers listed in Sherlock’s phone are for three men: his brother, Watson and Inspector Lestrade.

The decision to cast a woman in the role of Watson, then, isn’t just stunt-casting; it’s either a chance to re-write one of the grounding dynamics of the source fiction or – depending on your tastes – a horrible mistake. Looming lawsuits aside, it’s rather too early to tell.

  1. We might, though, read this as an emphasis on Adler’s intellect over her appearance. That said, there’s little evidence of Doyle fleshing out the other female characters in the Holmes cannon in substantial detail. [↩]
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