What we’re reading #3: Winter 2025
What we’re reading returns for 2025 by picking up on works that expose the politics of narrative – how history, crisis, and dissent are mediated. From a critique of colonial reenactments that obscure lived realities to a clickbait piece that declares photography’s renaissance given ‘AI becomes harder to detect’, Thomas King traces docudrama, revisits Mike Davis’ urgent interventions on California’s wildfires, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, and explores uncompromising responses to institutional narratives – or their reinforcement – via the furore surrounding Nan Goldin’s recent speech at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Thomas King | Resource | 6 Feb 2025
‘A Kenyan Docudrama’ | Zoe Samudzi for ArtReview, October 2024
How can we weigh present materialities against historical wounds? In ArtReview, Zoe Samudzi writes about Max Pinckers’ State of Emergency, a close collaboration over ten years between Pinckers and members of the Mau Mau War Veterans Association (MMWVA), wherein the veterans perform vignettes of their experiences, which are juxtaposed against an extended cache of archival photographs and texts. She proffers that, in practice, the work perpetuates a sense of incuriosity about the African present and relies on a narrative approach that favours constant reference to the European archive rather than a fluid multi-directionality in which the violence of the past are readily made visible beyond the bodies of its still-living victims. Samudzi asks why Pinkers would recapitulate and foreground the British narrative by positioning the ‘demonstrations’ as rebuttals against his archival roundups of imperial panics about a wanton and ‘terroristic’ native insurgency or corroborations of the archive’s reluctant admissions of torture.
For Samudzi, Pinckers’ reliance on the British colonial archive inadvertently re-centres imperial perspectives, undermining the possibility of crafting a genuinely decolonial narrative – reenactments are framed as either refutations or corroborations of imperial fears and reluctant admissions of torture. Yet, they ultimately recapitulate British vantage points, reinforcing rather than dismantling colonial epistemologies. It suggests that alternative epistemic frameworks might better honour the veterans’ agency and the lived realities of postcolonial dispossession. Thus, weighing present materialities against historical wounds demands an approach that neither collapses the past into the present nor isolates them entirely.
Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster Verso Books, 1998
A close friend who studies at UCLA recently returned to Los Angeles after a weeklong evacuation. ‘Classes have resumed while the city burns around us, and Trump is now president,’ she writes. This served as a reminder of Mike Davis’ classic work, The Ecology of Fear (1998), where he demands that we confront the uncomfortable reality of a world where our environmental and social crises are inextricably bound, democracy has already crumbled, and unchecked economic greed chokes any possibility of ecological salvation. From earthquakes to floods, tornadoes, and a complete systematisation of disaster films and novels, he warns that the danger lies not in the absence of solutions but in a political climate that refuses to tackle problems deemed too vast to fix.
One essay in the book, The Fire Boom, reveals how policymakers and developers abandoned millennia of pre-colonial fire prevention practices in favour of rampant real estate overdevelopment in LA’s mountains. Here, Davis argues that fire-prone buildings prioritise aesthetics and property values over ecological balance, rejecting measures such as controlled burns that could mitigate fire risks: ‘Indeed, a growing risk of entrapment and death is inevitable as long as property values are allowed to dictate firefighting tactics.’ The Lever revealed a year before Davis’ death that efforts to limit high-risk construction, including some houses engulfed in the recent fires, had been blocked by powerful real estate lobbies. Now, his comprehensive exposé of urban vulnerability brings renewed attention to the long-standing environmental inequalities that amplify the impact of disasters, particularly on marginalised communities. ‘In Southern California, we bury our dead and forget,’ he writes.
‘As A.I Becomes Harder to Detect, Photography Is Having a Renaissance’ | Julia Halperin for The New York Times, October 2024
The death of photography has been declared almost since its inception. So, seeing an article in The New York Times touting its “renaissance” is enough to raise an eyebrow – especially when juxtaposed with the supposed growing indistinguishability of AI-generated images. Halperin’s article starts with questions about representation, truth and the perception of images, but falters when it tries to shoehorn AI as a justification for the clickbait headline. Perhaps the more accurate assessment comes earlier in the article: Halperin cites those who suggest this alleged resurgence of interest reflects a cooling art market, photography commanding significantly lower price points than high-end painting or sculpture. The claim of this moment’s uniqueness considering the rise of AI stretches thin, amounting to little more than a brief overview of exhibitions indulging in the “nostalgia” of the photograph.
While these shows undoubtedly explore the medium’s rich history, can we genuinely put this down to the rise of AI? Consider the nostalgia surrounding film photography – its physical, tangible nature and graininess – existed long before the advent of AI-generated images (resoundingly familiar to discussions around the advent of digital and rise of the smartphone). It’s questionable whether we’ve reached a point where the rise of AI image generators – Grok-2 on Musk’s X being the latest – has made physical prints ‘all the more like fine art objects’, as the writer suggests. It’s perhaps more productive to explore the relationship between AI and photography with the understanding that if we frame the ease of producing hyper-realistic AI images as a threat to the photograph’s credibility as a truthful representation, we undermine the integrity of photojournalism and documentary photography, not to mention attendant issues around its use as instrument of control, exploitation of the most vulnerable or encroachment on intellectual property.
‘The Fabrication of a Scandal: Nan Goldin at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie’ | The Left Berlin, December 2024
The Left Berlin delivers a trenchant analysis of the events surrounding Nan Goldin’s opening speech at her retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, last year. A rigorous critique is levelled not only at the museum director, Klaus Biesenbach, but also at the broader institutional apparatus and what it embodies, namely ‘the absence of genuine dialogue in Germany when it comes to Palestine, the monopoly of narrative in the current German cultural, institutional and political landscape, and the doggedness towards any voice not aligned with the Staatsräson.’
The Berlin publication observes that the controversy originated with a symposium that purported to offer a neutral platform for open discourse. However, as Strike Germany contended, it functioned instead as a pre-emptive defence against any criticism of Biesenbach for presenting the work of a vocal anti-Zionist like Nan Goldin (the strike group described the symposium as advancing a narrowly constrained, highly selective agenda.) Goldin subsequently withdrew and demanded the event’s cancellation. Additional reports of arbitrary exclusions, excessively stringent security protocols, and the barring of key participants compounded the tension. Nan Goldin’s defiance was more than admirable, as were the protesters’ actions during the chaotic opening. And just a little over a week later, we heard Turner Prize winner Jasleen Kaur’s powerful acceptance speech on Palestinian solidarity at Tate Britain. Yet, the impossibility of real dialogue persists within these institutions, including those that claim to support freedom of expression while continuing to perpetuate censorship and marginalise dissenting perspectives.
‘Subversive, warm and wild at heart: David Lynch deserves all his tributes’ | Barbara Ellen for The Observer, January 2025
David Lynch’s passing at the age of 78 has sparked an outpouring of tributes, and understandably so. It’s no exaggeration to say that Lynch didn’t just work within cinema – he remade it in his own image. A “Lynchian” universe is one of multiple genres, features, television, music, and art as a spiritual practice. It is also one of countless artists influenced across generations and all mediums. Lynch began his life’s work, “the art life,” when he attended art college in the 1960s and made his first experimental short, Six Men Getting Sick (1967), while a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
He was notoriously taciturn about explaining away his artwork, uncompromising in his approach, and the eccentricity of much of his output fuelled his cult success, cementing his legendary reputation for capturing the absurdity that resides within all of us. Eraserhead would mark his first feature in 1977, a nightmarish plunge into the deepest recesses of dread and disorientation. Later would come a string of award-winning films, including Blue Velvet (1967), Wild at Heart (1990), Mulholland Drive (2002), and the landmark TV show Twin Peaks (1990). Out of all the comments and tributes to Lynch, the following stood out: “It did not occur to me that David Lynch could die; what a strange world we live in,” as if Lynch’s very existence was inseparable from the surreality of the strange worlds he created. That much is true. ♦
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Thomas King is Editorial Assistant at 1000 Words and a student on BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism, Curation at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
Images:
1-Beninah Wanjugu Kamujeru, John Mwangi, Ndungu Ngondi, Joseph Gachina and Wilfred K. Maina (left to right), Murang’a, 2019; from Max Pinckers et al., State of Emergency, 2014–24.
2-Cover for Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Verso Books, 1998)
3-Klaus Biesenbach at the opening of the exhibition Nan Goldin. This Will Not End Well at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, November 2024
4-Kyle MacLachlan in Twin Peaks (1990)
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