As a burgeoning field of audiovisual analysis, videographic criticism allows film and screen studies scholars to analyze, dissect, and reimagine screen media in ways that promote insights previously limited by traditional modes of scholarship. Just as literary scholars produce written scholarship, film and screen studies scholars have begun producing scholarship in the same medium as their primary sources, through the use of editing software. As English PhD candidates with research interests in film and game studies, we (Samuel Santiago, Jacob Reese, and Meg Healy), formed a videographic working group to familiarize ourselves with the tools and techniques of video editing with the goal of uncovering the potential of this quickly growing mode of scholarly inquiry.

An obvious starting point was the Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop. Held annually at Middlebury College in Vermont, this renowned workshop promises to introduce scholars to the tools necessary to produce videographic work. Our working group sought to emulate the exercises and collaborative process of the Middlebury workshop, albeit closer to home. Using essays and examples available through the online text The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy by Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant, we worked through various constraint-based exercises that honed our editing skills, deepened our understanding of videographic techniques, and provided new insights into films we felt that we already knew well. 

Below, we include the results of our “multiscreen composition” exercises. This exercise tasks participants with pairing their own text with that of another group member, prompting the films to “speak” to one another by placing their imagery side by side within one frame. In effect, this exercise asked us to look “for ways in which the movies might show their potential for positive valence, echoing one another through visuals, sound, or dramatic intensity” (Keathley, et. al.). Incidentally, we all chose sci-fi films: Santiago working with Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Reese working with Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1982), and Healy working with 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). As a result, there were a myriad of opportunities for potential overlap and valence, and, as we would find upon viewing each other’s works, plenty of opportunity for originality despite the use of the same texts.

Sam Santiago – Blade Runner 2049 and 2001: A Space Odyssey

I’ve been obsessed with the “baseline test” sequences of Blade Runner 2049 since I first saw the movie. They’re a fascinating escalation in tone from the first (1982) film’s more subdued Voight-Kampff tests. Where the first film’s Voigt-Kampff tests framed interrogation as an interview, 2049’s baseline test is loud and demanding. With this multiscreen composition, I wanted to compare the baseline test device and HAL 9000, from Healy’s text, 2001. The juxtaposition of the scenes’ light and dark colors was a serendipitous bonus, providing stark visual contrast between the films while I otherwise explored their similarities—namely their depictions of callous and intense machinelike voices projecting from wall-mounted devices with watchful lenses. Both films use slow moving and static cameras to keep the devices centered while they uncannily project human speech. What I found most interesting was both films’ tendency to present these devices in extremely flat, head-on shots that kind of phase them into the walls; the lack of depth in the shots compliments the machines’ shallow views of their human counterparts—HAL conceives of Dave as an obstacle to be rid of, and the baseline test aims to maintain the suppression of Agent K’s emotions.

These observations arose from chopping up and reorganizing bits of the films, finding visuals that paired interestingly and fiddling with timing to synchronize or juxtapose them in ways that felt interesting and meaningful. Although Meg, Jacob, and I all worked with 2049, our three multiscreen compositions elicit divergent tones and focus on different details despite our overlapping subject matter. I found it interesting that all three of our videos, despite the differences of scene selection and accompanying background music, are paced with a kind of lurching motion. The burst of violence at the midpoint of Healy’s video gets bookended by slower shots that more slowly emphasize the direction actors’ gazes. Meanwhile, Reese’s video focuses on the combined cinematic motion of human bodies and of water. These videos are more exercise than essay, allowing us to experiment with editing tools more so than to offer specific filmic critique. Nevertheless, it’s clear that thinking through film(s) with editing tools unlocks a great deal of perspective on how we can engage with them not only by discussing their contents, but by interacting with the way that film captures time, space, and sound.

Jacob Reese – Stalker and Blade Runner 2049

I often approach scholarship by working with texts individually, so putting two films in direct conversation with one another was a novel challenge—particularly with the constraint of using only their audiovisual components. Comparative viewings of Stalker and Blade Runner 2049, however, led me to discover unexpected resonances between not only the films’ visual qualities and kinetic movements, but also their thematic harmonies. Water, light, and movement became the framing elements that led me to think about life, death, and the inter-personal moments between. As I began assembling my project, the editing timeline enabled me to construct a dialogue between concurrent clips in ways that made visible these thematic harmonies and helped me think about comparative critical analysis in a new way. Using only the films’ audiovisual language required that I let go of my reliance on words to provide a clear argument about the project—and that I learn to trust the films to speak for themselves. 

This new understanding was reaffirmed as I watched the others’ projects. Healy’s composition highlighted, for me, the intersection between the technological and the biological in both films, and the resulting tensions between knowledge and violence. In dealing with the same films, Santiago calls similar clips into question, but with an entirely different effect, aligning moments of interrogation and fear between the autonomous and the rational, blurring the lines between the two. In both creating and viewing works of videographic criticism, I’ve come to appreciate how this novel approach to screen and media scholarship can be used not only to communicate one’s ideas through the language of the films themselves, but also to facilitate modes of viewing and thinking that are generative and potent for new observations.

Meg Healy – 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner 2049

When first approaching this exercise, my initial idea was to focus on shots and sequences that stood out as visually similar between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner 2049. Upon reviewing scenes from the latter, however, I was struck by both the visual and thematic symmetry of the monolith from 2001 and the tree from Blade Runner 2049. Both the monolith and the tree act not only as points of revelation for key characters, but also as precursors to violence. As a result, my multiscreen composition explores these themes of revelation and violence as they appear across both films by pairing similar shots, sequences, and dialogue. 

In viewing Santiago’s and Reese’s multiscreen compositions, I was pleased to find that despite using the same films, we each produced quite different work. Reese’s video, with its emphasis on overlapping moments of community, care, and weather, paired with melancholic music, highlighted the somber and atmospheric elements that pervade both Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Villeneuve’s Blade Runner. Although we used the same two films, Santiago’s use of dialogue to cue shifts to new sequences in both fullscreen and multiscreen moments evoked a sense of anxiety present in both 2001 and Blade Runner 2049, especially anxieties around the boundaries being crossed between humans and technology. Together, all three videos highlight the potential of videographic work to convey complex and original ideas about audiovisual texts without sacrificing the medium itself. Through a literal reframing of media objects, videographic criticism opens up space for reconsidering how screen studies scholars watch, read, interact, and think through our work.

Author Bios:

Samuel Santiago currently studies visual rhetoric and performance in video games, with a particular focus upon how interactive experiences of cyberpunk science fiction provide avenues to reevaluate and reimagine conceptions of consciousness and personhood. He often studies texts prominent within gaming popular culture, and aims to form a critical understanding of digital play as a transformative experience wherein diegetic and nondiegetic identities converge. Other interests include Early Modern literature and theater, adaptation studies, media studies, and film studies.

Jacob Reese is a PhD candidate in English at Syracuse University whose research focuses on the intersections between slow media and the environmental humanities, with a particular emphasis on how “slow” video games function in conversation with broader cultural sustainability movements. He has taught courses on American literature, popular culture, and environmental rhetoric, and has served as a teaching assistant for courses on the Western humanities, video games, and film.

Meg Healy is an English PhD candidate whose work explores the relationship between cinematic and literary science fiction. She seeks to understand how science fiction became a cultural dominant by focusing on how the genre is discussed, defined, and redefined among contingents from varied sectors of the social world that produce, distribute, and consume science fiction.

References:

Keathley, Christian, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant. The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. 2019, videographicessay.org. Accessed on 16 September 2025.

Kubrick, Stanley, director. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.

Scholarship in Sound & Image. Middlebury U, sites.middlebury.edu/videoworkshop/. Accessed on 16 September 2025.

Tarkovsky, Andrei, director. Stalker, Goskino, 1979.

Villeneuve, Denis, director. Blade Runner 2049. Warner Brothers Pictures, 2017.

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Cyberpunk’s penchant for representing wealth and poverty as a matter of “up versus down” generally results in the depiction of lofty spaces such as high-rises as bastions of security, while lower spaces like city streets carry countless dangers. However, while cyberpunk media almost always foregrounds the societal violences of extreme inequality, those violences are not always neatly contained to the streets. An early scene in RoboCop (1987) presents a example wherein cyberpunk’s thematic concerns of corporate greed and government privatization give rise to violence within a supposedly secure space of an upper-class corporate high-rise. As I’ll unpack below, RoboCop’s depiction of the violent killing of a wealthy bureaucrat during a boardroom meeting can add nuance to our understanding of the spatial arguments in cyberpunk’s representations of urban design: namely that cyberpunk does not relegate the violence of its necroscapes to the lowly realm of the streets—in fact, this scene from RoboCop insists that necroscapes envelop society as a whole, including the socioeconomic elite.

In the RoboCop scene, a scaled down model of the utopian urban revitalization project known as Delta City occupies the foreground of the frame (fig. 1) before the scene shifts toward what would now be referred to as a “big tech takeover” of Detroit’s local police force. Executives and business partners of Omni Consumer Products (OCP) listen while the company’s unnamed CEO remarks that “Although shifts in tax structure have created an economy ideal for corporate growth, community services, in this case law enforcement, have suffered.” Infused with irony and foreshadowing the upcoming moment of gory satire, the CEO states “I think it’s time we gave something back” before another businessman, Dick Jones, introduces a bipedal tank-like robot called ED-209, a “24-hour-a-day police officer” that needs neither sleep nor meals. A handgun disarming demonstration with the robot goes awry and the hesitant volunteer who held the gun to ED-209, Mr. Kinney, gets shot repeatedly as the boardroom watches in horror and technicians fail to disable the robot (fig. 2). Excessive spurts of blood and chunks of flesh fly about the room in the film’s unrated director’s cut, but even in the toned-down theatrical release, the thoroughly bloodied Mr. Kinney gets thrown back by the gunfire, landing upon the table displaying the model of Delta City, literally shattering OCP’s corporate-utopian visions of future Detroit, staining its white plastics with his viscera. During his presentation before this incident, Dick Jones had noted that while policing generally functions as a public service, OCP often successfully “gambled in markets traditionally regarded as nonprofit. Hospitals, prisons, space exploration.” He continues, “I say good business is where you find it.”

Within cyberpunk’s necroscapes, everyone and everything is good business, or at least a resource for good business. After some initial gasps, several businessmen present in the boardroom resume discussions as usual, one making a successful pitch to the CEO to forego the now-embarrassed ED-209 project to instead fund the film’s eponymous RoboCop program. The ED-209 crisis makes RoboCop appear ever more the opportunity. The fatal malfunctions just witnessed signify to OCP executives only that they need to innovate policing with a new product, rather than prompting consideration of their involvement in and militarization of policing to begin with. The terrible irony that permeates this scene stems from its satirical reinforcement of corporate hubris in the face of a shocking event that should cause dispute; the CEO’s remarks about “an economy ideal for corporate growth” echo the deregulatory policies of the Reagan administration contemporary to the film. With public services in disrepair both in RoboCop’s fiction and the realities it reflects, corporations posture as saviors to communities facing crises of crime and poverty, but pose solutions through profit-driven systems, as opposed to the nonprofit systems of social benefit that OCP declares it has successfully dominated.

While Mr. Kinney’s bloody crash upon the Delta City model shatters the allure of technologized business solutions for socioeconomic problems only momentarily for the characters in the scene, this incident confronts audiences with a striking representation of the “infrastructural brutalism” that Truscello discusses in his book of the same name. He says the term describes “the historical context in which industrial capitalism has met the limits of its expansion and domination, and yet continues to press for unprecedented commitments to build more” (Truscello 4). The bloodied, shattered Delta City model illustrates that even when such violent tragedies transpire on the human level, the broader systems undergirding corporatism keep ticking along, keep pressing for those “unprecedented commitments” by constructing naïve aspirations such as utopian future cities rather than attempts to resolve the issues already at hand. Infrastructural brutalism—in other words, capitalism’s overextensions—actualizes frequently in the form of “exciting” new products (such as Delta City, ED-209, or RoboCop himself) that corporations successfully market as solutions regardless of their actual viability when deployed within the communities that they will affect.

Just before the shooting, in an over-the-shoulder shot that aligns the robot’s gun barrels, Mr. Kinney, Delta City, and Detroit itself through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the high-rise boardroom, the many businesspeople scatter about in fear and surprise (fig. 3). However, opposite to Mr. Kinney’s rightward presence on the screen, the OCP CEO appears calm in the background of the upper left, sitting at the head of the conference table whereas the others have all sprung up in fear, resting his chin upon his hands with haunting indifference. Unnamed, referred to by others simply as “the Old Man,” the CEO functions less as a character and more as a figurative representation of the institutional drive and will of OCP as a corporation. Though an employee of OCP, Mr. Kinney remained expendable. As Carlen Lavigne explains, cyberpunk is “closely associated with North American economic and labor concerns of the 1980s; its citizens, devalued as interchangeable and easily replaceable assets within corporate society” (12). Illustrated by the abundance of his suited coworkers in the scene, within a necroscape even those who have climbed the corporate ladder often function as surplus populations, described by Marx as “a relatively redundant working population . . . superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization” (782). Alphin attests that present day neoliberal capitalist governments “eliminate surplus bodies that fail to function in the production of value” (1). With Mr. Kinney, it becomes apparent that even those ostensibly contributing to the production of value remain expendable within the full systemic scope of a corporation like OCP.

Alongside this scene’s visual foregrounding of the Delta City model, the prominently featured floor-to-ceiling windows maintain the presence of actual Detroit[1] in the background as members of the boardroom rather nonchalantly make investment and technological development decisions in a corporate space vertically removed from the populace of the city itself. Furthermore, the exaggerated verticality pictured by the central towers of Delta City declare an intent for an even further distancing between this controlling class of corporate executives and the Detroit citizenry. ED-209 targeting Mr. Kinney depicts not only malfunction, but disregard for collateral damage—satirical in the self-destructive crushing of Delta City, and symbolic in its taking aim upon Detroit in the distance.

In addressing cyberpunk’s imaginary worlds, I suggest that the capitalist overextensions that Truscello terms as “infrastructural brutalism” drive the elimination of the surplus bodies that this kind of societal organization kills “in subtle and overt ways” (Alphin 93). Tendencies toward deregulatory policy, alongside incentives for continuous corporate growth that disincentivize sustainable planning, establish conditions that devalue lives—not only the lives of the lower classes who in the RoboCop example would be policed by the violent machines onscreen, but even the lives of those integrated into corporate hegemony, like Mr. Kinney. Thus, infrastructural brutalism permits indiscriminate brutality.

Notes

[1] The “actual Detroit” of the fiction, at least. In reality, the window featured in figs. 8 and 9 overlooks Dallas, Texas, the film’s boardroom set located on the 54th floor of the city’s Rennaisance Tower (Maschino and Gallagher).

Works Cited

AKIRA. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Toho, 1988.

Alphin, Caroline. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout. Routledge, 2021.

Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. Warner Brothers, 1982. The Final Cut, 2007.

Maschino, Brian, and Danny Gallagher. “RoboCop Versus Reality: Looking at Dallas Locations of the Film’s Scenes.” Dallas Observer, 11 July 2017, https://www.dallasobserver.com/slideshow/robocop-versus-reality-looking-at-dallas-locations-of-the-films-scenes-9647490/9647497. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.

RoboCop. Directed by Peter Weller, Orion Pictures, 1987. Director’s Cut, 1995.

Truscello, Michael. Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure. MIT P, 2020.

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Eduardo Kac, Adsum, 2019

Adsum is a 1x1x1cm glass cube with a series of symbols laser-engraved inside. The symbols, described as a “spatial poem,” are designed to be interpreted in multiple directions, a response to the multiple gravitational paradigms the cube will experience (“Adsum” 20). The hourglass and infinity symbols can be read as representing human and cosmic time scales, respectively, indicating the role Adsum plays in bringing the two together as it occupies the lunar surface ad infinitum. On his website, Kac details the five phases of the project, from early proof-of-concept to final sculpture. Over the course of these five phases, various preliminary versions of Adsum traveled to the International Space Station, the lunar-orbiting Orion spacecraft, and the lunar surface itself. Through his detailed description of the years-long process, Kac demonstrates his deep knowledge and enthusiasm for his craft. 

While the project of creating artwork for the moon is undoubtedly fascinating, Kac seems far less interested in examining the ideologies which underpin his work or the systems making it possible. No phase of the project would have been possible without the vast amount of resources expended by both governmental and private space programs in the name of capital or national supremacy. However, rather than critiquing these systems, Adsum reinforces a kind of human exceptionalism under which expansion into outer space is imperative. The title of the work, Adsum, means “Here I am” in Latin, equivalent to the “Here!” of a roll call. Kac states that he considers the title a response to the phrase “ad astra” (“to the stars”) commonly used in reference to space travel (“Art on the Moon” 20). It remains unclear whether the responding “I” refers to a homogenized collective humanity or the artist himself. 

By anticipating a call to humanity from the stars, Adsum makes the need to respond by expanding beyond the planet Earth appear self-evident. Kac certainly believes in this inevitability, anticipating somewhat conceitedly that far-future “space archaeologists and astro-art historians” will be able to find and appreciate his work (“Art on the Moon” 23). Indeed, Kac’s space artwork contributes to the ideological projects of the Deleuzian “royal science,” defined by Braidotti as “institutionally implemented and well-funded” science which is “compatible with the economic imperatives of advanced capitalism” (47). He receives support from this royal science in the form of the space program, while producing work reinforcing its cultural or aesthetic necessity. In the process, his own brand is elevated. While Kac’s words frame expansion into outer space as humanity’s inevitable future, an attention to his collaboration with the royal sciences reveal his active role in making that future a reality. 

In a period of ecological and social upheaval like the one we live in, progressivist narratives of space exploration appear particularly troubling. Kac’s participation in narratives of outer space as the “final frontier,” in which Adsum stands in for the artist as a kind of pioneer for a “new cultural phase in humanity’s history,” suggest an evasion of the many entangled issues that lie inside the Earth’s biosphere. (“Art on the Moon” 21). Kac frames this evasion as a heroic break from tradition, pointing out that, “The entire history of art is predicated on this planet’s gravity, on this planet’s atmosphere and temperature variations, on this planet’s ability to partially shield itself from cosmic radiation” (“Art on the Moon” 21). In creating artwork for the moon, he seeks to transcend these previously implicit limitations and expand the possibilities of what forms art can take. However, the shared material conditions of Earthbound art and Earthbound life are part of what enables such far-reaching engagement between the two. Kac’s Adsum, despite being designed to live on the moon, does not bind itself to any location; rather, it imagines itself as part of a movement, one of humanity’s first steps on a new journey of cosmic discovery. The work’s placelessness untethers it from the conditions of the present and projects a future in which the work’s significance can be maximally realized. 

In the end, my purpose is not primarily to cast aspersions on Kac’s motivations for Adsum. Rather, I want to prompt a reexamination of some of the basic questions concerning art. What can this artwork do, and who is it for? The space travel industry and the CLPS initiative exemplify an ideology in which progress for progress’s sake is always justified, but that ideology is one of many. Artworks like Adsum that reinforce popular narratives in high-profile settings have the power to naturalize these ideologies unless they are properly examined. Through such a naturalization, Adsum compels its audience to subscribe to its ideology in order to comprehend its significance. That kind of transformative power can surely be put to a better use in the service of the present people of Earth in all their variation, rather than for the benefit of an imaginary, homogenized, spacefaring humanity inhabiting one of many possible futures. 

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Huma Bhabha, My Ancestor, 2023 (photo: David Zwirner)

My Ancestor features two upright nubs of cork with white chalk lines depicting the amputated legs of a hooved animal affixed to a single wooden board, giving the impression that they presumably supported a once powerful anthropomorphized figure. In its ruinous state, however, the sculpture reads as a secular relic. Showcasing its durability, My Ancestor materially carries its history into the present, using its affective rhetoric to inspire reverence and belonging. Symbolically laden, the legs signal the destruction of the hidden yet living natural world, rendering unintelligible My Ancestor’s material composition—cork, chalk, and wood—to highlight the power of images and language, which, at once, give meaning to and conceal the world.

Language, particularly the politics of naming, has positives and negatives. Naming is a form of recognition and sense-making. Negatively, it can constitute a violent act, distribute false identities accepted as natural and erase a subject’s complex history. 

My Ancestor’s material components, while signaling resource extraction and globalization, serve as instructional aids for a new way of knowing. Cork oak trees, or Quercus suber, are indigenous to the Mediterranean region. These trees produce cork valued for numerous industrial applications, most notably the familiar wine stopper. Devoid of its familiar uses, cork’s bare materiality discloses the work’s artistic nature and thingly character, properly casting My Ancestor as a disruptor of habits. Following Bill Brown’s definition, a thing is an “irresolvable enigma” that “hover[s] over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable;” it specifies “a particular subject-object relation” via the “work they perform” in behaving their subjects.² Cork is a dead protective layer that replaces the tree’s epidermis. With the factual evocation of cork as skin, My Ancestor, whose “sensuous presence” defies its supposed inanimate character, inspires us as humans to alter our relationship with the world, enrich our relational capacities, and encourage an intercorporeality with nature that stimulates empathy, responsibility, and generosity.³ If one considers the “body [a] thing among things,” a permeable “dividual” or “quasi-object” deeply “entangled” in a relational world who shares an embodied kinship with “all things and everything,” then My Ancestor presents a point of origin, an oracle with regenerative powers offering renewal.⁴ Quercus suber can produce cork for centuries after multiple harvests. Hence, the Ancestor who emerges from the wood below produces not only an image of human impact but a lesson in how one should approach things. Chalk only furthers this notion. As a writing and educational tool that is “powdery and brittle,” ironically much like language, it plays a supporting role to My Ancestor’s raw charismatic power. 

Along with Bhabha’s other living sculptures, My Ancestor presents nature as a haunting. According to religious scholar David Morgan, “haunting seems to happen where enchantment has been banned and suppressed.” Suppressed needs give rise to ghosts, defined as “nagging forms of memory” who “[object] to their mistreatment” and “refuse to let the past go away.”⁵ Monuments to Confederate generals and colonizers provide an all-too-relevant example. As ghosts who have been animated and granted a voice, their material traces evoke competing colonial memories. While a majority hear hate speech, others hear these inanimate statues enacting their freedom of expression, acknowledging their calls for protection from citizens who commit against them “willful injury.” Nature, too, objects to its mistreatment and demands protection. Its voice comes through in rising sea levels and ever-stronger hurricanes, which has only accelerated the “Rights of Nature” movement. 

Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2023
(photo: David Zwirner)

Extending the “right to life” concept, in addition to complicating our way of seeing, are Bhabha’s enigmatic, Untitled visages, whose aggressive liminal qualities evoke discomfort and sympathy. One rarely sees a picture in its entirety. A beholder discerns different aspects by alternating between the image and the medium. In these works, canines, gorillas, and humpback whales, among other animals, form pupils and supernatural eye colors; silent cries howl through agape mouths fashioned by dog hair; and a photograph of a brick wall forming the creature’s nose deceptively appears as tree bark from a distance. Viewed as a defense mechanism, the latter’s employment of mimicry marks an attempt to gauge a beholder’s relationship as parasitic or mutualistic before revealing itself. In these portraits, Bhabha toys with the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia to lend nature an ambiguous face. With these creatures’ true nature obscured, they blur the distinctions between culture/nature and human/animal, stressing relatedness and a deeper engagement with the sensible world. 

Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2022
(photo: David Zwirner)

The medium of collage, a historic form of cultural critique, presents further challenges. Subordinate to the overall composition, pasted photographs signal reality and emphasize the picture’s surface, allowing Bhabha’s subject matter—nature’s destruction—and the reality of climate change to directly confront believers and deniers alike with a sense of immediacy.

The mediums of Bhabha’s works are the message. She highlights the symbolic veil that confines nature’s “resources” to secondary agents unable to tell their (his)stories to return this human-centered privilege to the natural world. Her humanoid yet alien creatures aid her effort by placing us face to face with our culpability, calling attention to our indirect relations to and unconscious consumption of nature. As actors in the world, their agency provokes reflection. If one truly sees these creatures, their once menacing and monstrous demeanor can appear quite sweet, relatable, and innocent. Perhaps, blinded by our “knowingness,” we are the monsters, who, selfish and ignorant, possess a ghoulish greed in our Darwinian “struggle for existence,” thus, committing violence.  

The misinterpreting of an artwork can of course be read as another form of violence, a “roving arbitrariness” as Martin Heidegger names it.⁶ But in attempting to understand one’s environment and things’ mysterious nature, one does justice. If receptive, Bhabha’s convincing works can attune us to nature’s aliveness and direct us toward a “democracy of things,” as Peers and others have argued.⁷ 

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. According to art critic Ben Davis, ecological disaster art no longer “shocks” or provokes action; it is one crisis of many that proves too overwhelming.⁸ The public, as well as governments, have grown tired, resorting to imposing penalties and labeling climate activists “eco-clowns” and “eco-terrorists” no matter how informative and clever their actions. One of Just Stop Oil’s latest at Stonehenge, whose generous dusting of orange corn flour transformed the iconic structure into a series of glowing embers, served to mimic the fire within activists and nature. Fittingly accompanying such passions is the widely accepted interpretation of the megaliths as “ancestors,” who, standing over crematory remains, produce an enduring image of a triumphant Nature.⁹  

While Bhabha’s works are often described as apocalyptic or antitheses of progress, revelatory appears better suited. Built from an assemblage of pasts, her works confront the limitations of language while making present an image that brings the unknown closer to us, gifting beholders a glimpse into a potential future. Let us hope they are not cast as Cassandras. Despite their alien appearance, her creatures are very much of this world; it is their message that appears foreign, strange because we begrudgingly acknowledge that they teeter on the edge of a new way of knowing. Just as anthropogenic evolution has altered animals’ environments, behaviors, and genetic compositions, so too will humans be forced to adjust to sub-optimal habitats. Huma Bhabha’s haunting project urges us to reassess our role within a larger ecosystem, to acknowledge nature’s mute scream, and to see ourselves as “living beings [among others] … not just in the world,” but as Hannah Arendt argued, “of the world.”¹⁰  

Notes:

1. Glenn Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums: How Do Byzantine Things Feel? (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021), 1. ︎
2. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 4-5, 7, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344258. ︎
3. Brown, “Thing Theory,” 5. ︎
4. Brown, 5; Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums, 1, 14. ︎
5. David Morgan, “Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment,” in Re-Enchantment ed. James Elkins and David Morgan (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 5, 9. ︎
6. Erwin Panofsky, “On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts” trans. Jaś Elsner and Katharina Lorenz, Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2012): 477, https://doi.org/10.1086/664547. ︎
7. Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums, 5, 26. ︎
8. Ben Davis, “The Shocks Are Not Shocking,” Spike Art Magazine 79: The Pessimist Issue (Spring 2024): 106-109. ︎
9. Oliver J. T. Harris and Rachel J. Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies from old materials,” in Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality ed. Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey (United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2018), 62-66. ︎
10. Veronica Vasterling, “Arendt’s Post-Dualist Approach to Nature: The Plurality of Animals,” HannahArendt.Net 11 no. 1 (2022): 115, https://doi.org/10.57773/hanet.v11i1.461. ︎

Further Reading:

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Federico Ferrari. Being Nude: The Skin of Images. Translated by Anne E. O’Byrne and Carlie Anglemire. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

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Referencing his mother’s passing in 1992, Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “aim as an artist [was] to make a work that [was] so palpable and so dynamic and so incredibly felt that [his] Mom could literally walk off the surface of the canvas and back to life.”[1] The result was Untitled (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) from 2000, which was exhibited at his high school “Senior Art Exhibition.” Now housed in a private collection, the portrait offers a rare glimpse into Quinn’s early artistic process while communicating themes of loss, longing, dignity, purpose, parenthood, rebirth, and reciprocity.

Today, Quinn’s composite portraits of friends and relatives defy traditional portrait conventions. Employing a lone exquisite corpse technique, chance encounters of distorted and realistic body parts combined with incongruous brushstrokes create subjects that border on the unfamiliar, laying bare the body as an archive of undeveloped images. The embracing of chance, intuition, and the incorporation of familial memories highlight the spontaneous nature of his work. In their own state of becoming, the portraits express Quinn’s vulnerability and participatory role, and speak closer to the process of artmaking than the finished works themselves. Their dichotomous nature—being completed works that never quite seem finished—offer a surreal experience that remains firmly grounded in reality.

This reality is no less present in his mother’s portrait. In the black space of the foreground, she stands commandingly in swagger pose, reminiscent of Grand Manner portraiture. Bathed in a white light and taking up nearly the entire frame, her protruding stomach, rigid posture, and “chin-up” mentality, add to her regal and confident demeanor. The folds of her fuchsia gown add visual weight and further cast her apart from her gloomy environment, where a depressing, blue sky looms over inward-leaning grey towers to create a sense of claustrophobia. 

Born in 1977, Quinn grew up in poverty on the South Side of Chicago in the now demolished, and presumably depicted, Robert Taylor Homes. Built with good intentions in 1962 as a waystation to foster social mobility, federal and municipal policies, soon hijacked by private interests, allowed the buildings to fall into disrepair. Social disorder followed as living standards worsened throughout the 1980s and 90s; crime, gangs, and drugs became the norm. The Home’s notoriety, “considered the worst slum area in the United States” according to the Chicago Housing Authority in 1998, would unfairly extend to its inhabitants, who were nearly all Black. Exacerbating matters, the practice of segregated development created not only a “great wall of exclusion” but a “psychological barrier,” which strengthened negative stereotypes that would plague a whole community, spawning myths that remain all too prevalent today.[2]

The Artist’s Mother is at once a denouncement of such myths and an affirmation of humanity, embodying concepts of home and community, which often fail to extend to public housing.[3] Here, Quinn rightly expresses the body as “an amalgam of numerous experiences… built from a history of joy, sadness, ups, and downs.”[4] Her grey countenance, which mimics the towers in the background, surrenders to brown hues and full pink lips. While brown serves the purpose of skin tone, it also highlights certain elements within the composition: a fragmented eye, a delineated hand, and narrow legs. Eyes, one sensitive, the other ostensibly weary, can convey one’s memories and inner emotions; as windows to the soul, they maintain the capacity to tell narratives words alone cannot. Hands can connote work, responsibility, determination, caretaking, or reference a future act of creation. The hand’s prominent singularity, a possible reference to his mother’s partial disability due to multiple strokes, performs as an accessory to motherly greatness.

From the dreary, she emerges as a complex figure whose pillar-like stature confronts historic misconceptions, which the vanishing point behind her head assists in perpetuating. Through her confrontational gaze, she assertively erases and inverses this vanishing point, a visual metaphor for single-mindedness, or more aptly, tunnel vision. In doing so, she undermines once-assured gazes; she is not what she appears. Her defiant and towering presence, which renders the picture plane abstract, commands an act of submission, a beholder’s acknowledgment of their shrunken state and similitude with the receding towers in the background.  

Quinn’s baroque sensibility and compositional framing allow for such a submission to take place. While the pyramidal composition lends his mother stability, Quinn’s foreshortening of her right foot, presenting a passage between two worlds, places this stability in question only to reaffirm it. The foot’s formal insignificance, which gives the misleading impression of a safe and comfortable bird’s eye view, demonstrates its symbolic strength by withstanding a crushing environment, and possibly, the weight of a child. No matter the picture’s placement, whether hanging on a wall or sitting on the floor, one is unable to “look down” upon this woman; the foot’s deceptiveness, at once, reveals our culpable gaze and champions her irreducible presence.[5]

Bearing a symbolic weight similar to her meager right foot, the bright blue sole of her left sandal aids in our transcending of such limiting views while referencing his mother’s deceased, yet magisterial state. In formal terms, this blue provides visual relief from a black background and corresponds with the sky above, adding a lightness to her imposing stature. The connection evokes the Christian belief of death as gain and a new life in the beyond. Between feet, a delicate balance is struck, contributing to her dichotomous nature. While one appears to hover, the other is firmly grounded; their joining marks her eternal and palpable presence—two feet, two realms. In her fragmented state, she stands as a celestial being whose given corporeal presence extends from the felt absence of Quinn’s living memory. The balancing of these juxtapositions suggests not only a determined mother ceding to succumb to a “desperate” atmosphere, but a watchful, awe-inspiring maternal icon whose transcending of such settings bestows upon beholders gifts of resilience and comfort.

These gifts, conveyed through a calming smoothness that overtakes the harsh geometrics of her setting and fragmented make-up, also aid in capturing the conflicting nature of parenthood. The rigidity and stiffness of her posture, meant to convey a sense of fear, awe, and respect, are accompanied by soft outlines, bouncing strands of hair, pillowy draped folds, and a weightless flowing gown. These contrasts, which add a sense of playfulness to an otherwise unfriendly set of circumstances, are the convincing measures of a parent’s undeniable love, and a child’s acknowledgment of their parent’s role as disciplinarian, guide, and protector.

Seemingly a memorial portrait of his late mother, in superseding her referent, the painting communicates much more than an act of remembrance. The essence of the work, of his mother, hides in plain sight by way of the painted stroke. As gestures of intimacy and longing, they are the literal transformation of life into matter. Here, in this mood-inherent medium, his mother is both immanent and transcendent, and challenges further dichotomies of subject/object, active/passive, and animate/inanimate to lend her an irrefutable existence with equal participatory powers. The depicted hereafter paradoxically presents the here and now.

“At Wabash,” Quinn “learned… to be a human being… to transcend social conditioning… to be free,” an awakening he extends to his mother.[6] Expanding upon this notion, commonly said is that having children is akin to having your heart outside your body. This feeling is mutual for Quinn, hence the adoption of his mother’s name, which he signs on the back of every canvas as co-creator, accompanied by three hearts. In this sense, the picture presents a contradiction, who has given birth to whom? Regardless of her pregnant status, or if her belly perhaps houses an unborn Quinn, there is, nonetheless, an acknowledgment that he would not be where he is today if not for his mother’s sacrifices. As a bodily extension of Quinn’s memory, the portrait communicates a reciprocal act of creation in painterly form, a gracious and resurrectionary gesture of a beloved lost soul, and for Quinn, the beginning of a new life filled with passionate pursuits.

[1] Richard Paige, “When Sunday Comes,” Wabash Magazine (Winter 2017): 28.  https://issuu.com/wabash_college/docs/wm_winter_2017

[2] Nicholas Degan Bloom, Fritz Umbach, and Lawrence J. Vale. Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 34, 50.

[3] Quinn’s mother “was literally around the building, helping people, feeding gangbangers and the drug users when they didn’t have anything to eat, letting guys help her with the groceries and paying them to help out.” “Mary: The Making of Nathaniel Mary Quinn.” Hindman Auctions, September 28, 2022. https://hindmanauctions.com/items/10615750-untitled-portrait-of-the-artist-s-mother#_edn1.; Bloom, Umbach, and Vale. Public Housing Myths, 57-59; Audrey Petty, High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s, 2013), 17-18.

[4] Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Wabash Magazine (Winter 2017): 2.

[5] This analogy extends from my own experience with his mother while working as an intern at Hindman Auctions in Chicago and witnessing both the work’s installation and de-installation. Several times a day I walked past her hanging in the gallery. Each time, her silent gestures made subtle commands upon my body, a radiating stillness that beckoned me as if wishing to disclose a secret. Not once did I refuse to acknowledge her, whether through a quick glance or, when time permitted, through a more formal conversation, where, seemingly of my own volition, I walked respectably as I would toward any elder past the other pictures in the gallery—the massive Paul Jenkins on view never stood a chance. When standing before her, I felt inferior, but never unwanted. Each encounter was a boost in self-esteem. I looked forward to our conversations and contemplated them afterward. This would all last until her departure, where I witnessed her on the floor propped against the wall surrounded by shipping supplies. When I approached her saddened to say goodbye, even though I stood above her, my smallness remained intact. Her awesome presence denied her objecthood and demanded my humility, which I felt obliged in part for what she had given me. My sadness came in knowing that she had more to say and that I would never see her again in the flesh.

[6] Paige, “When Sunday Comes,” 28.

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The story kicks off with two trespassers tagging “I Came By,” in a posh London flat. The message is meant to highlight the vulnerabilities of human existence regardless of racial or class status. The taggers, Jay, and Toby, gain notoriety in London’s underground scene. Jay soon learns he’s to be a father and opts out of tagging for good while Toby persists and tries to convince Jay, a Black man, to remain committed despite Jay’s fears of drawing police attention. Unable to convince Jay, Toby, on a solo tagging project, discovers a disturbing secret in the home of a prominent UK judge: Hector Blake.

Breaking into the home of Hector Blake, Toby follows sounds that lead him into the basement. It is here that Toby discovers the presence of a prisoner and jumps back in alarm before fleeing in panic. As the story unfolds, audiences learn about Hector Blake’s troubled childhood, his wealth coming from the spoils of war, turning a history of violence and theft into a benefit. Hector Blake’s rise to government conceals a life of profound loneliness and inability to form healthy bonds. The brutality of colonialism, in this case, has backfired on its beneficiaries, leaving a profound mark on Blake’s psyche, in an apparent parallel to the larger pathologies characterizing modern, neocolonial societies built on theft and never-ending war.

Toby explains what he saw to Jay and proposes they free the prisoner. Jay, however, remains committed to his family and wary of stepping out of line. Evidently, Hector Blake is known for supporting immigrants and minorities and has a reputation in professional and academic circles as ‘Saint Blake’ an advocate on behalf of the underprivileged. Left to his own wits, and blundering through the story, Toby first notifies the police who, it turns out, are led by a sergeant who plays tennis with Blake at the local health club. Realizing the futility of alerting authorities, Toby’s second attempt to free the prisoner, by brute force this time, also fails when Blake simply overpowers him. Left missing, his distraught mother, Liz, also starts looking for him and goes missing, leaving the reluctant Jay with a new resolve to find answers.

While I Came By is a story about struggle against the wealthy elite, it also provides an account of the possible effects of colonialism on social organization structures, interpersonal dynamics, and human bonds in the context of advanced industrial societies.^[1] Out of this larger environment of hyper-efficiency, the pursuit of excellence, individualism, and unceasing wars, emerges the child of an ethnic elite family raised with resources and access to opportunity yet lacking any of the normal care and affection from his caregivers. It is important to note here that while Toby, Liz, and Jay are ‘good guys’ in this story and Blake is the ostensible ‘bad guy,’ Liz, Toby, and Blake all have several things in common. As members of the dominant ethnic group in Britain, they share a common thread of isolation, loneliness, and unearned advantage. The film weaves together these personal stories with broader themes related to the consequences of benefiting from colonial violence, theft, and war. For instance, Toby lives in his mother’s attic, doesn’t work, and waits for the release of his father’s inheritance while his relationship with his mother is strained, marked by sarcasm, and mutual disapproval. They spar over trivial things. In contrast, however, Jay lives with his partner, Naz, in a modest flat while both work and look forward to the arrival of their first child.

Blake, after eliminating two different people who discovered his secret, moves to a new, remote country home where he maintains his prisoner. Here, Jay finds him and confronts him asking about the whereabouts of Toby and Liz. In the ensuing struggle, viewers see what is perhaps the most telling scene in the film: an injured Jay repeatedly punching Blake and shouting the words “what did you do to them, Hector? Where are they?” while the camera slowly focuses on an image of Blake, as a child, all alone and smiling sadly, behind shattered glass. Afterward, and with a noticeable limp, Jay exits the scene while police lights illuminate the area. Police find Blake tied up next to the moniker, “I Came By.”

Like Intrusion and The Lie, I Came By considers the effects of war, colonialism, the rise of industrial society, and the ideals that come with these transformations on the lives of ordinary people, families, and children. Privilege, in this case, is paradoxical: it feeds and it poisons. To bridge the gap left by his fractured upbringing, Hector Blake seeks solace in unhealthy relationships and violent bonds.

The story of Jay, Liz, Toby, and Hector serves as a poignant reminder that unearned advantages can confer material advantages but do not shield their beneficiaries from the emotional and psychological costs that come from war and theft. Hector’s journey highlights the interplay between personal history, societal organizations structures, and the human need for connection and belonging, shedding light on the complexities of privilege in the context of colonialism’s legacy.

^[1] I’m borrowing the phrasing “advanced industrial societies” from Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man.

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Tracey Emin, Like A Cloud of Blood, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 59 7/8 x 71 5/8 in. (152 x 182cm)

The difficulty in comprehending Tracey Emin’s Like A Cloud of Blood (2022) is the paradox of witnessing a disappearing figure coming into being. In Emin’s painting, an incomplete and empty body lies isolated in curled tension, presenting an image of discomfort, pain, and human frailty. Yet beauty is still present. Leaving aside beauty’s bifurcation into the sublime and the beautiful, its historically malicious tactics,[1] and its reduced role to something nostalgic and irrelevant, what interests me is beauty’s moral dimension, in particular, its capacity to “intensif[y] the pressure we feel to repair existing injuries.”[2] With beauty as a starting point, my aim in sharing this picture is not to arrive at a singular meaning, but rather offer a formal investigation that highlights the beholder’s essential role in the viewing process in an attempt to understand, as scholar W.J.T. Mitchell wishes us to contemplate, what pictures want.

Tracey Emin is a multi-media, conceptual artist loosely affiliated with the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group that rose to prominence in the 1990s for their sensationalist art and entrepreneurial spirit. Throughout her oeuvre, Emin has expressed “how it feels to be a woman” through motifs of bodily absence and alienation.^[3] These themes can be seen in indexical artworks such as Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), My Bed (1998), and Death Mask (2002), among others.

The diaristic and the confessional, in which Emin’s work is so often read, is a response to her fraught upbringing. Her father, having a second family, abandoned Emin when she was young, leaving her family in poverty. She was raped at the age of thirteen and guiltily underwent two abortions in the early 1990’s, all which contribute to the unsettling quality her works tend to evoke. Like a Cloud of Blood is no exception; it was one of her first paintings after recovering from bladder cancer.

While all artworks mentioned can imply the absent body of Emin, a re-embodiment need not belong exclusively to the creator. Confronting solely the artwork, such an absence would invite the beholder to perform an “unselfing,” signaling a search beyond the singular and autobiographical for real and/or imagined others. As a characteristic of being in beauty’s presence, one’s selfish concerns vanish and direct themselves outward toward the concerns of others.

Elaine Scarry, in her book, On Beauty and Being Just, describes beauty as something sacred and unprecedented, an unexpected greeting that turns one to stone in its presence. In our reverence or in our staring, whether prolonged or for mere seconds, the sheer conviction of beauty causes a search for truth and opens one up to the world, people, and things. Enthralled by beauty, with its life-affirming and life-giving qualities, it makes one vulnerable and curious, inciting a desire to create or replicate, hence Scarry’s position of beauty as the basis for education.

She also acknowledges that beauty resides in the particulars, in this instance, lines and their formal relations. Building upon this notion, a line, or mark, is a present absence. It traces a moment in time, a past event that is no longer. This event is the all-too-ephemeral present structured and informed by our emotions. The individual mark, like time, constitutes such emotions. As latent forms of expression they require a close reading, or preferably, a greater visual attentiveness, a request quite at odds with the diminished attention spans yielded by the digital age.

In the painting, Emin’s lines are unsettling and convey a range of conflicting emotions. They appear rushed, scratchy, agitated, and frantic, fading when the ink runs out. Most are deliberate and aggressive, applied with a confident force, others affectionate, hesitant, and slow. Each individual mark, short or long, thick or thin, faint or distinct, implies a form of release, and along its journey can possess a different tone, personality, pulse, or intensity. The soft swell of the figure’s lower back along with the gentle curvature of its left knee compete against quick strokes of agitation, giving the impression that these caressing lines of self-care are meant to calm moments of pent-up frustration and/or uncertainty. Furthering this tension, forceful smears of deep magenta double at the top of the figure’s head and between its legs, forging a distressing mind/body connection. Comforting this upsetting scene are broader supportive swaths of muted pinks and white that sit below and cushion the contours of the figure, the very fibers of its being.

Yet not all marks can be attributed to the human hand. Seemingly taking on a will of their own, bloody streams of pink angst permeate the figure’s body and seep through the canvas, the figure’s perceived world, for pain slows time and invites loneliness. Solely belonging to one’s self, pain closes one off from the world. That said, the alienating nature of pain also unites people by virtue of all having experienced its effects.

Beauty’s long held correlation to truth affirms this figure’s fragility and pain. The exigencies of line, their perseverance and visceral tensions not only prompt but demand an engagement with the image and the environment that produced it—our world. In addition to conveying memories, consciously or not, the lines of this embodied image carry the artist’s silent and palpable presence. While the urge exists to ascribe Emin’s traumatic biography to the figure, an image extends beyond personal experience. It takes form from a wealth of collective imagery both real and fictive which an individual internalizes, recalls, and imaginatively transforms into an image of their own.[4] Regardless of whether this body belongs to Emin, there appears a tempering of the artist’s raw mental state on display, a coming to terms with the ghostly body before her, wishing for it not to disappear. Through the use of line, Emin builds up this body through traces of its painful past while simultaneously recognizing its need for care and compassion.

The figure’s vulnerability is further manifested by the gaps in the contours of its body, which the beholder fills in to repair the body to completeness. Although these interruptive gaps hint toward the figure’s disappearance and its slow decay into the affliction it suffers from, they also aid in the contour lines becoming ever more acute and in need of suturing. Becoming involved in the figure’s making, our eyes offer a form of nourishment. Sealing the body, clothing it in flesh, we animate the figure, lifting and removing it from the ground it was confined to. In our looking, wanting to empathize and care for this figure, we open ourselves up to the image, which, in turn, opens itself up to us and reciprocates a nourishing gaze. In this sense, the beholder gives life to the image, and the image affirms life for the beholder. With this reciprocal act, in our shared state of vulnerability, it allows us to reach a place of understanding wherein the figure’s world and our world become one; its burden is our burden.

Furthering this notion, the figure’s fleeting hand reveals a desperate impulse expressing a need, a want, or a desire. The chaotic manner in which these faint hurried lines are displayed—literally wearing themselves out—denotes multiple attempts to no avail. In addition to signaling a loss, the desperate gesture refers to its own vanishing. As if on its last breath, these fading lines are given a greater intensity, a felt sense of urgency. The figure’s frantic search leads one to hypothesize the what: a form of relief? a recovered self? bodily autonomy? longing? acknowledgement? a human’s touch? The beholder, however, via sight, has already provided a response to the figure’s plea, thus ending its search. Our restorative gaze acts as a metaphorical helping hand. Our vision is a haptic vision, a liberating recognition that attempts to pull this figure into existence, to rescue it from its lone state. It is a visual act that wishes for the figure, in a sense, to get out of its own head.

Beauty, Scarry asserts, demands a sense of “moral urgency” that comes with an urge to preserve and protect. The sketch-like quality of the image, its flattened perspective, the figure’s instability and human scale, and the visual weight of the medium atop the figure that ungraciously assists it further toward the bottom of the frame into nothingness and despair, adds to this sense of immediacy.Effectively weakening the power of the beholder, the image compels one to offer a more secure and nurturing environment, to reverse its downcast horizon. One must remember that a work of art is the objectification of human experiences; hence, we not only preserve and protect the artwork for its beauty, but its ability to express the beauty of being human and feeling alive, which extends to human rights and equitable justice. Scarry explains this urge as the “particular” manifesting itself into the “distributional,” that is—after succumbing to and identifying beauty—the need to share and convince another of the beauty they see in an effort to adjust another’s perceptual error (e.g., this essay). If such distribution is successful—meaning a population’s agreement on what is beautiful—actions, such as implementing new laws, would be upheld, and shouldered by a community, thus leading to a more just society.[5]

Having fortified a sense of solidarity with the figure, meeting it on equal terms, Emin’s work can be said to redirect claims of individualism toward helping our fellow man. Her work unabashedly embraces the less admired fundamental conditions of being human: vulnerability and dependency. Moreover, her telling of women’s stories through art—taking into account her own—can extend to a woman’s plight, the violence perpetrated against them, and reproductive rights, all of which the literal and metaphorical pressures of magenta come into play. Making explicit reference to female sexual anatomy and perhaps its inner bodily functions, these pressures direct attention to the mental and physical afflictions that plague these two sites. With this in mind, the previously mentioned streams of pink angst, which bleed down the canvas in unison, could be said to perform the dual role of signifying “period positivity” while acknowledging women’s slow and mentally draining fight for equality. But more to the point, and as Emin reminds us, “we all bleed.”[6]

Ultimately, what Emin’s work achieves—which all art should strive for—is that it provokes questions. Or put another way, demands answers. Art and our encounter with it presents a negotiation. Its aim is not to provide solutions, but to bring one closer to truth. Its ambiguous nature offers shared experiences and sustenance. While we all seek predictable and stable lives, it is art’s instability that we cherish, its ability to rattle our realities and awaken our cognitive faculties. To some, this is poppycock, hence the demonization of liberal arts and humanities programs in universities across the nation. But as we inch closer to climate catastrophe and a world where so-called “obscene” books cease to exist, all the while contending with an automated society run by AI, humans may soon be relieved of their critical thinking skills and agency and instead prescribed a permanent role as spiritual healers in search of new ways of knowing. So, in this not-so-fictional dystopian state, having the ability to master the art of close reading and engage in matters beyond the surface may come in handy after all, for being able to see beauty in the flatness of the everyday or take pleasure in the commonplace may be all we have left. “The question, maybe,” as cultural critic Megan O’Grady engaged with, “has never really been whether or not art can heal us but rather to what extent we have the courage to heal ourselves.”[7]

It is Emin’s visceral venture into the unknown, her artistic process akin to a healing touch, which brings a pleasure that exceeds pain and offers one the courage needed for an uncertain future. Like A Cloud of Blood, at once poignant and consoling, heavy yet tender, endeavors toward a humanist ideal of acceptance. Asserted through resistant lines of conviction, the painting’s confessional quality assists in bolstering Emin’s claim that “Honesty is beauty.”[8] Beholden to this picture’s beauty, which can paradoxically be expressed as a distracted contemplativeness, helps remove us from the everyday while simultaneously bringing it into greater focus. Our intimate encountering and animation of this supposed “dead matter,” complimented by an appreciative and empathetic viewing, enables the beholder to share in emotional time with this figure and adopt its calls for human betterment and relief for those in need.

While I have expressed that a sympathetic entering into an alternative world can birth new perspectives, growth, and understanding, the choice ultimately rests with the beholder to see this figure as a static, mute image or a living image. But in seeing the beauty of the latter, such a view can be adopted and directed toward the injustices and human sufferings found throughout our world. I, of course, acknowledge that my close reading may be viewed as speculative and subjective—although pure objectivity is just as illusory—but in my dialogue with this picture, perhaps this is what it wanted all along: to be seen, heard, and valued on account of a beholder’s inquiry, an attempt to understand its point of view and what it asks, or possibly, demands of us.

Notes

[1] Eric Michaud, “Self-Mimesis and Self-Portrait Gods,” in The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 49-93.

[2] Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 57.

[3] Sotheby’s, “Sotheby’s Talks: Tracey Emin CBE RA and Simon Shaw on Edvard Munch’s Women,” YouTube, March 2, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MqFXvdYrJw.

[4] Hans Belting, “The Locus of Images,” in An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 37-61.

[5] Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 9-16, 65-67, 74-75, 80-82, 86-119.

[6] Sotheby’s, “Sotheby’s Talks: Tracey Emin CBE RA and Simon Shaw on Edvard Munch’s Women.”

[7] Megan O’Grady, “The Artists Bringing Activism into and beyond Gallery Spaces,” The New York Times, October 1, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/t-magazine/art-activism-forensic-architecture.html.

[8] Sotheby’s. “Sotheby’s Talks: Tracey Emin CBE RA and Simon Shaw on Edvard Munch’s Women.”

Further Readings

Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Elkins, James. “Marks, Traces, ‘Traits,’ Contours, ‘Orli,’ and ‘Splendores’: Nonsemiotic Elements in Pictures.” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 4 (1995): 822–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344069.

Mitchell, W. J. T.. “What Do Pictures Want?,” in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 28-56.

Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Vetlesen, Arne. A Philosophy of Pain. Translated by Jon Irons. United Kingdom: Reaktion Books, 2009.

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The American flag, in its original form, presents a highly organized design. The horizontal and alternating red and white stripes provide the visual foundation for the flag and the symbolic foundation for the nation, supporting fifty white stars housed in a field of blue. Red symbolizes hardiness and valor; white, purity and innocence; and blue, vigilance, perseverance, and justice.[ii] In her haunting reinterpretation, Clarke complicates this ordered visual in terms of reconfiguring the composition along with the mental image, or idea, that the American flag evokes.

The American flag is a sacred symbol that signifies the country’s past, present, and future. It forces one to recall her battles for independence, the birth of a liberal democracy, the countless lives lost in her defense, our inalienable rights, ceaseless fights for equality, the formation of established values and traditions, and the culminating of a fully formed nation that promises life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all her inhabitants. The “desecration” of this sacred symbol—a contentious issue dating to the early 20^th century that still holds relevancy—displays an act of symbolic speech. Clarke’s symbolic act signifies a provocative, yet beautifully poetic gesture admissible by the very symbol she redesigns. 

Compositionally, the quilted flag is predominantly white. Modest geometric fragments of blue resemble shattered glass while feeble red stripes convey an equally disquieting note. “This quilt,” Clarke states “represents the (lack of) gender and racial diversity in the US Senate during the 116th Congress” (2019-2021). Every blue triangle in the star field represents a female senator; the red stripes represent the proportion of non-white senators.”[iii] Red and blue, once equally prominent and offering a sense of harmony within the original, lose their sense of vitality in Clarke’s interpretation. In their diminished state, these colors reflect the marginalized and the unheard, which serves to underscore the work’s uneasy tension.

Perpetuating further tensions is the frieze-like pillowed fabric resembling an oozing discharge from that of a wound, which contrasts sharply with the quilt’s uneven horizontal bands. Running from weakened, yet taut red strips of fabric, one can infer that the white discharge not only references a predominantly white male run Congress, but stems from a wounded, bleeding nation, a nation that has witnessed a rise in white nationalist groups, the emergence of a Black Lives Matter movement, an insurrection on our nation’s Capital, an overflow of disinformation, a floundering educational system, harrowing numbers of mass shootings, a widening wealth gap, increased polarization, and a misremembering of America’s past that has perpetuated a fictionized post-racial present. If one were to consider the works’ aliveness and predict the outcome of its continuous seepage, the white discharge would soon engulf the few red stripes that remain, erasing one of the very elements that lends the work its alluring magnetism. The work’s transformation into a dull homogenous whole would coax an infectious and uniform way of seeing with no alternative subjectivities to complicate or supplement the composition’s projected worldview.

But not all is lost, for the act of quilting is a delicate one, one that—like all art forms— requires tender patience and an understanding of the medium. Clarke’s stated “aim” is “to further blur the line between art and craft, old and young, science and emotion, and the individual and the community.”[iv] Through quilt making, Clarke offers a unifying and reparative gesture. Notwithstanding heart ache, the “tangible” and functional qualities of her work convey the comfort of reassurance and affectionate warmth, bringing a sense of calm to uncertain times. The critical message of These Colors Should Run, thus, not only illuminates Congress’s unacceptable lack of diversity, but suggests a process of healing, where the metaphor of stitching symbolically mends a divided nation.

Aside from Clarke’s role as artist/practitioner, her current profession aligns with that of a facilitator. At the heart of her work is a librarian’s spirit to organize and disseminate information. “Motivated by the juxtaposition of modern themes with traditional textile techniques,” Clarke wishes “to provoke viewers and users into seeing new and alternative perspectives,” in turn, creating new ways of understanding.[v] The creative transformation of “hard data” to “soft textiles,” enables Clarke “to visualize information in a tangible, visceral way with the ultimate goal of introducing­ quilting to digital natives and technological provocations to quilters of traditional demographics.”[vi]

Yet, her work extends beyond mere instruction. As an ominous forewarning of threats to democracy, These Colors Should Run offers an alternative narrative of patriotism in material form, asking us to partake in critical reflection. Albeit at times unwelcome, her quilt acts as a sympathetic and helpful guide to a more equitable and accepting future while acknowledging it a painful process. In a nation whose dissatisfaction with democracy grows, her work, however, brings a softness to the “visceral” tensions on display, tensions that recall the emotive rationale behind the recent acts of iconoclasm against Confederate monuments [vii]. As an allusion to hope and possibility, These Colors Should Run emanates an elusive sensibility that awakens an array of sensations from melancholy to revelation, thereby presenting a palpable visual rhetoric that embodies affective politics and rekindles one’s sense of civic duty. The quilt forces us to constantly question, rework, and re-define what our mental image of America is and what we want it to become. The “desecration”—or rather, a skillful reimagining—of the American flag paradoxically reflects a re-sanctification of a sacred symbol, one that we all wish to see uphold its founding principles. Reaffirming this lofty aim is the work’s loaded title; terminating in the word Run, which extends itself to the directional flow of a liquid, a form of physical exertion, management, and the political arena, the implied communal nature of These Colors Should Run demands that we—colors—run together in the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness to create a better, less pernicious world.

[i] Rachel Ivy Clarke, “Toward a Design Epistemology for Librarianship,” The Library Quarterly 88, no. 1 (2018): 41–59, https://doi.org/10.1086/694872.

[ii] “History of the American Flag,” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, June 27, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/a-capitol-fourth/history/old-glory/.

[iii] “Art Quiltsgoing Forward – Paqa-South,” PAQA, accessed January 19, 2023, https://www.paqa-south.org/artquiltsgoing-forward.

[iv] Rachel Ivy Clarke, “Art and Design.” Accessed January 19, 2023. http://archivy.net/ivywp/art-and-design/.

[v] Clarke, “Art and Design.”

[vi] Clarke, “Art and Design.”

[vii] Richard Wike, et. al., “Social Media Seen as Mostly Good for Democracy Across Many Nations, but U.S. is a Major Outlier.” Pew Research Center. December, 6, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/PG_2022.12.06_Online-Civic-Engagement_REPORT.pdf

Works Cited

“Art Quiltsgoing Forward – Paqa-South.” PAQA. Accessed January 19, 2023. https://www.paqa-south.org/artquiltsgoing-forward.

 Clarke, Rachel Ivy. “Art and Design.” Accessed January 19, 2023. http://archivy.net/ivywp/art-and-design/.

Clarke, Rachel Ivy. “Toward a Design Epistemology for Librarianship.” The Library Quarterly 88, no. 1 (2018): 41–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/694872.

“History of the American Flag.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service. June 27, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/a-capitol-fourth/history/old-glory/.

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In the last 25 years, the American media landscape has been flooded by stories of war and conflict in the Middle East. In the perspective of many American spectators, the Middle East is a chaotic and even frightening place full of terrorists and extremism. While such terrors exist in the Middle East, attending to the intersection of colonialism and war can tell a different tale of terror in the region. In this post, I analyze how this plays out in the 2016 Iranian horror film Under the Shadow where the arrival of an American-made missile in 1980s-Tehran brings with it a haunting by a Djinn.[1] The film provides nuanced commentary on the history of the Middle East which acknowledges that regressive readings of the Islamic faith domestically have been worsened by outside economic meddling by British and American corporate interests. Not unlike Jordan Peele’s now canonical Get Out (2017), Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow is part of a wave of films describing the horrors of inequality and racism in a globalizing world that serves the needs of modern, European, industrial societies while robbing the rest of the world’s people of basic means of subsistence.[2]

The titular shadow refers both to the rise of mandatory veiling laws and the continued colonial interference by British and American oil companies—interference which has disrupted and continues to disrupt the socioeconomic stability of the Iranian people in a modern, rapidly industrializing world. The film weaves together criticism of this economic theft and the development of toxic misogynistic habits from within to show how these forces feed off each other. For instance, the demonic entity—or djinn—that appears after the arrival of a bomb is shown in an Islamic veil, or chador, reflects the anxieties that Iranians continue to feel about the role of religion, spirituality, and native consciousness.[3]

Under the Shadow opens with Shideh (Narges Rashidi) who learns that her university appeal process has been denied and that she can’t go back to school to finish her doctoral studies. Shideh’s political activism during the Islamic revolution has disqualified her (it is implied) because she is a woman. In this opening scene, the university’s cleric tells her, in harsh and uncompromising terms, that she will not be admitted to university. In this scene we see two different participants in the 1979 revolution who are now on opposite sides of the newly born Islamic republic contending about gender roles. During this conversation, just before he determinedly denies Shideh entrance to the university, the cleric and Shideh’s eyes are both drawn to a window where the audience sees a bomb exploding in the visible distance. Once brought back to the matter at hand, we learn that Shideh is officially barred from attendance. The timing here is crucial. In this scene, we are shown how sexist tendencies in one community can be multiplied by the imposition of a chaotic situation from outside—in this case, from British and American petroleum interests and the wars and instability they had instigated.[4]

Iran is not unique in its fate as a cash cow for advanced industrial societies whose consumption patterns have outrun their own stocks of natural resources. Many people have written about how the profoundly unequal allocation of Earth’s resources is the real reason behind most world conflicts even if many descriptions in popular media focus on culture and religion as primary causes instead.[5] The messiness of global connections are again and again reviewed from both an anti-sexist and anti-colonial perspective in Under the Shadow. The film makes it clear that these sexist mentalities were already there long before outsiders came to snatch up the petroleum, but the theft of such resources has made it much worse.

Concurrent with this critique of colonialism, the film addresses internal sexism in a number of scenes throughout the film such as when Shideh’s landlord accuses her of failing to lock a garage door, implying that because she is the only women in the building who drives a car, it must be her negligence causing the problem. Later in the film, Shideh’s husband makes a vague claim about how Shideh is neglectful of their daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), and advises that Shideh should behave in a more conventionally motherly fashion. Under the Shadow shows the many faces of sexism inside a society that has contradictory ideas about women’s competence in both public and private spaces while also—and very importantly—noting that these problems are informed by, and multiplied by, incessant outside meddling. When a community is under threat, policies are sometimes made to pander to male frustrations that generate a sense of security in the public. When the Napoleonic Code was put into force in France during the wars of 1848, for example, women were stripped of their individual liberties and authority was consolidated into the hands of men. Similarly in Islamic history, when the newly-formed Muslim community initially fled from their place of origin, Mecca, to a neighboring city Medina, something alike to the Napoleonic Code was put into place. Amid the drama of founding a new religion and fleeing their place of origin, the new Muslim community encountered hostility and harassment from the people of Medina, particularly towards Muslim women. When asked for a suggestion, the prophet famously told women to stay at home. Centuries later, sexist Muslim men who don’t read their own histories or holy books use this statement to try and control women.

The example of the Napoleonic code from modern French history and the 6^th century example from Islamic history share a similar thread: communities under threat often pander to male frustrations as a peace-keeping tactic.[6] This phenomenon is a recurring theme in Under the Shadow. After the missile lands on the roof of the apartment building (without detonating), it leaves a rupture in the ceiling through which the aforementioned djinn enters and exits the world of Shideh and Dorsa. After being spotted by Dorsa, the djinn engages in a campaign of fitna against Shideh and Dorsa. The Islamic notion of fitna refers to “civil strife” and is rooted in the first civil war in the history of Islam, the one that erupted soon after the death of the prophet (PBUH), and the one which continues to haunt the Muslim community through ongoing Shia/Sunni tensions.[7] It is important to note that the Iran-Iraq war broke out two years after the 1979 Islamic revolution when Saddam Hussain made territorial claims on Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province and the Reagan administration armed and aided both sides (Iran and Iraq) during this conflict. This is a textbook example of fitna where colonial powers prolonged and amplified a war that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis.

Just like this fitna that the Reagan administration stirred between Iran and Iraq, the djinn hides Dorsa’s doll and starts telling Dorsa that her mom has taken it away. The djinn also hides Shideh’s workout cassette, which Shideh later finds in the garbage, implicating Dorsa as she is the only other person in the house. The sowing of fitna, or civil unrest, in this household alludes to the strategic and calculated fitna imposed on Iran and Iraq by the Reagan administration and acknowledges how imperialism from outside and sexist bias from within can feed on each other. While Under the Shadow critiques sexist oppression in post-revolutionary Iran by focusing, in some sense, on the private sphere, it folds the narrative into a larger social and historical event (the Iran-Iraq war), to describe the impact of imperialist intrusion on internal social development.

As the djinn’s aggressions escalate throughout the film, Shideh flees her home forgetting to wear the newly mandatory Islamic veil. She is promptly picked up by revolutionary guards and sent to jail where she is reminded, by yet another cleric, of her main duty in life: to guard her modesty. With this dark turn, Shideh and Dorsa are sent back into the private sphere to a now escalated haunting. In their second attempt to escape this home that has now become a prison, the djinn seizes Dorsa, and Shideh throws herself into an attack on the djinn, creating the most visually striking scene in the film: Shideh is shown drowning in the fabric of an Islamic veil. This heavy-handed symbolism makes a clear statement about women’s struggles in the Islamic Republic while avoiding criticisms that categorically denounce Islam and suggest that Iranians see themselves as pseudo-Europeans instead.[8] Perhaps most importantly, this film’s critique of the Islamic Republic acknowledges the influence of interference from more powerful and wealthy countries. With a critique anchored in native ideas and mythologies, this diaspora film gives a nuanced reading of the crises facing Iranian people without rejecting what remains sacred to many Iranian people who don’t find themselves in European culture which is, after all, a culture that does not easily accept outsiders and differences.In its very title, Under the Shadow, provides a double-edge criticism of internal sexism and external imperialism by highlighting how women’s situation in post-revolutionary Iran is always informed by both: the shadow is a demonic entity haunting the splitting of society into public and private spheres and the shadow is an American-made missile sold through Israeli channels.

Now, in January of 2023, Iran continues making headlines for the current popular protests erupting in the streets of the nation and the media continues to focus on culture and religion as if it is totally separate from historical struggles and ongoing trade wars. Despite this, Iranians are making their will known to the authoritarian clerical regime that has so miserably failed the promises of the 1979 revolution as they crack down on protesters and brutalize their own people who are protesting an economic situation that has left half of the nation in poverty. Meanwhile, the Western media continues to focus only, perhaps obsess over, the image of the veil.

[1] The Djinn are entities from Islamic theology said to inhabit an invisible world that exist parallel to the one inhabited by human beings. Of the Djinn it is said that 30 tribes exist and walk on land, move in fires, and fly in the sky, et cetera.

[2] For a brief history of the third-world struggle, please see Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third-World or Anour Majid’s Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World.

[3] The chador is a covering that conceals the entire body, except for the face, and is worn within or outside the home. The in-home chador is usually made of colorful and floral fabrics and is the veil of choice during prayer. The outdoor chador is normally all black or navy blue and is almost always worn by women who work in public service. The djinn in this story appears in an in-home chador perhaps emphasizing the ways that the private sphere of the home became such a major enclosure for women in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

[4] Like many regions in the Third-World, British and American corporate interests have dramatically re-shaped the destinies of entire nations as British and American governments either stood by tacitly or actively aided in maintaining these corporate interests. In the case of Iran, the British government enabled William Knox D’Arcy’s brazen theft of Iranian oil and American business interests motivated the 1953 CIA-backed overthrow of a democratically elected secular leader (Mohammad Mossadegh). For one small glimpse and altogether depressing look into this history, please see The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century by Giuliano Garavini.

[5] Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis provides this kind of reading of current world crises.

[6] In the case of this famous statement by the prophet, as Fatima Mernissi notes in her book The Veil and the Male Elite, the city of Median in which the young Muslim community had taken shelter was under siege when members of the prophet’s household were being specifically targeted and harassed by unwelcoming locals. So, when new Muslims in this new experimental community came to the prophet about the harassment of women, the prophet made a comment about women staying at home. For a detailed account of Islamic history written from a feminist perspective, please see The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam by Fatima Mernissi (85-101).

[7] The “Ummah” means global Muslim community in Arabic. “Peace Be Upon Him” is invoked by believers who speak the prophet’s name.

[8] Marjane Satrapi’s brilliantly illustrated and iconic Persepolis has some subtle and not so subtle moments of Eurocentrism that I discuss at length in “Global Mobility and Subaltern Knowledge” available online via Peitho https://cfshrc.org/article/introduction-to-the-fall-2022-issue/.

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This overlap of thematic and ludic genres creates a complication for the application of genre and adaptation studies to video games because questions of adaptation and iteration must also consider the impact of player input on the generic experience. In examining the centrality of player input on genre expression, Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar 2018) serves as an example which seeks to adapt the Hollywood Western into the format of an open-world, third-person action game. The game’s generic alignment begins even before the world has loaded, with loading screens displaying daguerreotypes of animals, landscapes, and wooden buildings, calling attention to the environment which the player will inhabit as the play.

When the game finally loads, the screen usually shows the player’s avatar, outlaw protagonist Arthur Morgan, in a relaxed pose: crouching to observe a flower, looking at a distant mountain, observing a sunrise at the edge of a forest clearing, standing outside of a saloon, or other such calm poses. The game immediately calls attention to the character’s place in the Western landscape before handing the reigns over to the player. At this point, the game’s digital assets have loaded and the various programmed systems—meant to create the illusion of a living, breathing Western landscape replete with townspeople and wildlife—are fully functioning. If the player does not input commands to the controller, however, the game will continue to run its Western procedures, but doesn’t yet allow its systems to affect the character.

To illustrate: during one play session, I sat to observe what the game would do without a player. It was nighttime, and Arthur sat crouched observing a flower. In previous play sessions, my actions as Arthur caused him to incur a bounty; though I hadn’t interacted with the game yet, its world kept moving and eventually bounty hunters arrived to gun Arthur down and collect their reward. Three men on horseback arrived and began to open fire. The game’s logic is designed with the intention of creating dynamic Western moments which feel unscripted and natural. Ideally, such bounty hunters would catch the player unawares, recreating the thrill of suddenly having to deal with a gunfight against a Western backdrop. But, up until the point that the player makes their first controller input (for example, making Arthur walk forward) their avatar is invincible. As a result, the men proceeded to fire endless amounts of ammunition into Arthur’s person for twenty minutes as I watched and took screenshots to capture the passage of time. When the sun rose, I decided that enough time had passed, and as I pressed the left stick to begin walking, the game spurred Arthur to “life” and began to process the damage of each shot—the Western shootout finally bearing its intended weight and consequence with a player at the helm.

In the scene which I’ve described, a threshold between what the game is attempting to accomplish in its creation of a Western world and what it is actually able to accomplish without the player’s participation is revealed. While the systems and procedures of the game may call upon events, scenarios, and iconographies which invoke the Western genre and give the illusion of a self-sustaining Western simulation, there is a limit to the game’s expressive potential in the absence of the player’s actions and reactions within the generic Western setting and scenarios. As games scholar Clara Fernández-Vara states regarding the player’s performing role within games, “The game designer does not have direct control over the experience of the player, particularly because the game needs the input of the player to become a performance” (Fernández-Vara 6). Until the player is present to participate in the world, the systems of the game (in this case the dynamics which construct the Western iconography in Red Dead Redemption 2) have little payoff and don’t invoke the full implications of the actions and consequences associated with the game’s thematic genre. As such, the game’s themes and systems are unable to come to their full generic fruition.

            The player is not only necessary to the game’s generic functions, but also to the direction that the game’s generic expressions take. While some have called Red Dead Redemption 2 a gamification of the revisionist Western, the game employs generic elements of various Western subgenres including the frontier Western, the cowboy Western, the outlaw Western, etc. This is true not only in the game’s worldbuilding, but also in the variety of gameplay activities and opportunities afforded to the player within the open-world framework. Within this generically broad structure, the player is the able to choose what sets of iconographies they will be interacting with during their play session. Whether the player has bounties to capture, cards to play, cattle to herd, fish to catch, or a train to rob, they can decide at a moment’s notice what sub-genre of Western they will be performing through their interactions. As a result, the overall generic expression of the Western as gamified in Red Dead Redemption 2 is difficult to track as it oscillates, sometimes jarringly, between various generic modes as the players engages with, enacts, and performs different versions of the Western.

            To conclude, tracing the application of well-established genres into video games requires additional considerations beyond the adaptation of iconographies, tropes, and themes. As players are central to the performance and expression of genre in interactive play, one must examine how the game’s systems function to create generic meaning, what role the player fills in the enactment of those meanings, and how the player is able to ultimately shift and manipulate the intended generic expression through modes of play. If Red Dead Redemption 2 can teach us anything about studying genre in video games, it’s that genre can be difficult to wrangle.

Works Cited

Fernández-Vara, Clara. “Play’s the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance.” Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts, 2009.

Red Dead Redemption 2. PS4 version, Rockstar Games, 2018.

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