Month: April 2022

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Orbán Victorious

On 3 April 2022, Hungarian voters went to the polls and awarded Viktor Orbán a fourth consecutive mandate to govern. Orbán’s Fidesz and the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) will return to the National Assembly with 135 out of 199 seats, after winning a record 53.13% of the popular vote. The main opposition coalition, United for Hungary (EM), was expected to win at least 40%, but instead picked up a paltry 35% and 56 seats. In the concurrent referendum on the government’s so-called ‘Child Protection Act’, appeals from LGBTQ groups for voters to spoil their ballots evidently succeeded, and the number of valid votes failed to clear the required 50% threshold. Nevertheless, many believed that the referendum – which included questions such as ‘Do you support the promotion of gender-reassignment treatments to minors?’ – was merely intended to increase election turnout; and in this sense it may have served its purpose.

EM encompassed the two largest opposition parties, the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) and Jobbik, both of which were severely punished by voters. Each will have just 9 members in the Assembly compared to 15 and 17 respectively in the current parliament. The MSZP remains associated with the brutal shock therapy reforms of the 1990s and 2000s, when its unabashed neoliberalism created an enduring rift with the organized labour movement. Jobbik, founded in 2003 as an antisemitic nationalist outfit obsessed with policing ‘gypsy criminality’, has meanwhile tried to reinvent itself as a pro-European, anti-corruption ‘people’s party’. Yet, although Jobbik’s opportunistic transformation caused some of its hardliners to abandon ship, it was never complete or coherent enough to gain the support of the liberal or left opposition. 

Most worryingly, the new legislature will host seven members from Mi Hazánk, the fascist party convened by ex-Jobbik Vice President László Toroczkai, who received 6% of the vote. Toroczkai, mayor of the Serbian-border village of Ásotthalom, is the onetime leader of the irredentist Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement, who has used his position to institute local bans on the Islamic call to prayer and wearing of the hijab. Mi Hazánk describes itself as a force to protect ‘Northern Civilization’ against anti-national forces, its propaganda animated by apocalyptic visions of the ‘great replacement’. Now that the parties of EM look set to turn on one another in the wake of their defeat, the telegenic Toroczkai could become one of the most prominent national opposition leaders.

EM’s failure was expected, even if its scale was not. During the final weeks of the campaign the government was leading in polls, 50% to 40%. Yet, as in 2018, the Fidesz-KDNP machine pulled out all the stops to prevent a last-minute opposition breakthrough. A new law allowed voters to register outside their residential jurisdiction, legalizing the practice of voter tourism. The postal ballot system meanwhile benefitted Fidesz-KDNP by prohibiting postal voters from registering a Hungarian residence, which confined the practice primarily to Magyar residents of Transylvania, Vojvodina and other neighbouring enclaves. Some 100,000 émigré voters in the UK, many of whom have a registered address in Hungary, were forced to travel to London or Manchester to cast their votes in person. Reports of pro-EM ballots being destroyed in Transylvania are yet to be substantiated, but there was undoubtedly a degree of voter coercion in Hungary’s smaller villages, where Fidesz mayors often exchange public-sector jobs for vote guarantees. 

Whatever the extent of these manoeuvres, Hungary’s highly concentrated media landscape, combined with Fidesz’s use of public funds in its election campaign, made unseating Orbán unlikely. Yet, this year, circumstances for the opposition were uniquely favourable, as EM managed to present a single electoral ticket with a common political platform. In 2010, Orbán swept to power on a wave of discontent with the incumbent Liberal-MSZP coalition and its prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, who had presided over mass privatizations in the preceding decade. Orbán’s first legislative supermajority allowed him to denude the High Court, change the electoral system to benefit Fidesz-KDNP, introduce a liberalized labour code, and begin to abolish faculty governance in the university system.

When elections were held in 2014, Orbán faced two main opposition camps: a left-liberal Unity ticket headed by the MSZP’s Attila Mesterhazy, and Jobbik. In the aftermath of the vote, when Unity, Jobbik and the Green Party together polled close to 52% (compared to Fidesz-KDNP’s 44%), the opposition began to consider the prospect of an all-party ticket: a plan that was initially undermined by lack of endorsement from Jobbik and other non-Fidesz Christian politicians. By 2018, when Orbán again captured a legislative supermajority with less than 50% of the popular vote, it was common to blame his political longevity on the fragmentation of the opposition – with Jobbik identified as the chief culprit.  

Yet in 2018, Jobbik’s recalcitrance was weakened after it failed to make headway at the ballot box, winning only 3 extra seats. The dashing of its hopes opened the party up to cooperation with other anti-Orbán forces, which in turn precipitated the departure of hardliners like Toroczkai. Subsequently, as Jobbik gained a profile as the most cohesive opposition organization, some centrists and progressives lent their votes to the far-right party in marginal districts. Ahead of the 2022 ballot, it seemed that EM – which now included not just the nominally ‘left’ parties, but also Jobbik and the centrist Momentum – could avoid the pitfalls of the last two elections, and present a unified front. 

A hasty internal primary elected Péter Márki-Zay as EM’s prime ministerial candidate, after he beat MEP Klára Dobrév in the second round. Compared to Dobrév, who is married to the deeply unpopular Gyurcsány, Márki-Zay seemed capable of appealing to the Christian middle-class voters on whom Fidesz relies. Once a marketing manager for a French industrial group, Márki-Zay ran as an independent in the 2018 mayoral byelection in the small market town of Hódmezővásárhely, which Fidesz had governed since 1990. He professed himself a ‘right-wing Christian’ and ‘disappointed Fidesz supporter’, but gained the backing of the MSZP, Jobbik and the Greens. His victory was a morale boost for the ailing opposition, which showcased the potential for a left-right alliance to defeat Fidesz-KDNP.

In a sense, EM was a national version of the Hódmezővásárhely coalition. Márki-Zay once again presented himself as a genuine Christian Democrat in contrast to the corrupted Orbán. Parties associated with EM but not represented on its candidate list were mostly drawn from a conservative bourgeois milieu, whose political vehicles included the New World People’s Party formed by Orbán’s former education minister, and New Start, led by the veteran right-wing mayor of Gödöllő. With these actors on-side, EM hoped to shatter the impression that Fidesz-KDNP was the sole choice of Hungary’s middle-class bürgertum.

Now that the results are in, the difficulties involved in scaling up the Hódmezővásárhely coalition to national level are evident. EM did not pick up the moderate, well-to-do Christian voters whom they hoped would gravitate to Márki-Zay. Far from it. The coalition received a staggering 1 million fewer votes than its constituent parties in 2018. With the exception of three suburban constituencies in Buda, EM did not win any middle-class Fidesz strongholds. Márki-Zay himself was defeated by the Fidesz candidate in his home seat of Csongrád-Csanád. The opposition had managed to unite around a plan for rescuing Hungary’s democratic-constitutional order from the corrosive effects of Orbán’s rule; on this question, its rhetoric was clear. But absent a similarly unified social-economic vision, it was incapable of mobilizing sufficient popular support under conditions of degraded electoral democracy. 

On paper, the EM parties agreed to oppose some of the most extreme economic reforms of the Fidesz-KDNP government, such as the so-called ‘Slave Law’, which removed overtime restrictions and allowed firms to delay payment to workers for up to 36 months. Yet such positions were part of a broader EM programme that emphasized restoring the ‘rules-based’ market economy over which Gyurcsány presided. Marki-Zay’s timid appeals to the labour movement fell flat, as the leader drew a distinction between the ‘interest representation’ of unionized workers and the ‘wellbeing’ of the economy as a whole – suggesting that the former would ultimately be subordinate to the latter. For many voters, such restorationism, harking back to the dark days of the post-Soviet transition, did not amount to a compelling vision of the future. 

Fidesz, by contrast, promised to modernize the country and empower its upwardly mobile Christian middle class. In his 2021 speech at the Fidesz party congress, Orbán set out his vision for elevating Hungary to the status of a ‘developed nation’. As well as defending extant social hierarchies (from the macroeconomic to the domestic sphere), he pledged to create a dynamic national bourgeoisie – one that has hitherto been elusive in a semi-peripheral state like Hungary. This project tapped into a problem in Hungarian politics that stretched back to before the 1990s: how to form a distinct national identity while simultaneously playing economic catch-up with western Europe? ‘Illiberal democracy’ and hyper-neoliberal authoritarianism provided an answer, however illusory or mendacious, to that question. The opposition, by confining itself to constitutional matters, did not. 

Now that Fidesz-KDNP has been re-elected, we can expect more efforts to slacken the labour market and align educational policies with the interests of foreign and domestic capital. Last January, at a conference of the German-Hungarian Industrial and Commercial Association (AHK), delegates discussed the best means to provide Hungarian businesses with a sufficient supply of cheap labour – including training programmes, guest-worker schemes and émigré-recovery policies. The influx of desperate refugees over Hungary’s Transcarpathian border may do part of the job; prior to the election, the Orbán government announced a twelve-month programme to subsidize firms that employ Ukrainian citizens. Yet there will also be a further push to institute what are pitched as ‘German-style’ worker apprenticeships, scrubbed of trade-union involvement and boasting ultra-exploitative terms. The transformation of Hungary’s public education sector into a national workforce training department – pursued in lockstep with Orbán’s better-known efforts to privatize higher education – will continue apace.

Aspects of the government’s economic agenda may, however, be frustrated by the concerted action of the EU. Fidesz no longer has the protection of the European People’s Party, and on 16 February the European Court of Justice ruled that the Commission could make budgetary outlays conditional upon ‘the principles of the rule of law’: a provision directly aimed at Hungary and Poland. Earlier this month, Ursula von der Leyen confirmed that the EC would initiate this ‘conditionality mechanism’ against Hungary over concerns about corruption and misappropriations (even though, as Wolfgang Streeck has pointed out, the Commission has never applied these standards to more supportive member states, such as Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Malta). Tens of billions of euros, earmarked for infrastructure schemes and other vital programmes, hang in the balance if Hungary is sanctioned. EU funding cuts would be even more damaging given the government’s balance of payments deficit, caused by the recent devaluation of the forint, which will impede its efforts to tackle inflation. The brunt of such bureaucratic interventions will be borne by the country’s poorest citizens. Whether Orbán tries to avoid this outcome and appease the EC remains an open question. 

Yet even if the government manages to deal with pressure from above, it may still encounter resistance from below. One bright spot in the election was Budapest’s 6th constituency, where the long-time community organizer András Jámbor successfully ousted Fidesz mayor Botond Sára. Jámbor, founder of the socialist-environmentalist group Szikra (‘Spark’), prevailed thanks to hundreds of hours of canvassing across the district. The candidate had been at the forefront of struggles against short-term tourist lets and odious public-private development plans, including Orbán’s controversial scheme to gift land earmarked for social housing to China’s Fudan University. He pledged to use his Assembly seat to continue this fight, which may yet inspire similar mobilizations outside the metropole. 

Indeed, the last few years have seen a surge in street-level opposition to the Fidesz project. In January 2019, protests against the Slave Law erupted in towns and cities across the country. Workers at Audi’s massive engine plant in Győr launched an unprecedented strike that resulted in an 18% minimum pay rise for all employees. The week-long action catalyzed a wave of strikes at other plants. Workers at the Hankook tyre factory in Dunaújvaros struck, causing production to drop from 45,000 to 100 tyres per day, and winning a minimum raise of 20%. At large corporations like Suzuki, Bosch and Continental, employees organized protests, threatened strikes and won similar improvements. 

This uptick in labour militancy has continued into 2022. As people went to the polls last Sunday, 20,000 of Hungary’s public school teachers had launched a national strike. The action was called by two previously rival formations, the Democratic Union of Teachers and the Union of Teachers, to fight back against desperately low wages and the ongoing assault on labour rights. The unions have framed their walkout as a defence of the right to strike tout court, launching a public campaign that has attracted support from students, parents and other trade unions. These developments suggest that the factionalism and atomization which characterized Hungary’s post-1990 labour movement may now be giving way to a cooperative approach. Orbán remains electorally ascendant, yet such revolts contain the glimmers of a freer, fairer, more solidaristic Hungary. Let’s hope they find a viable party-political form sooner rather than later.

Read on: Iván Szelényi, ‘Capitalisms After Communism’, NLR 96.

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Sharp Edges

Beware of books with ‘paradise’ in the title. Fernanda Melchor’s third novel, about the living hell and unconscious death wish of two boys in the tropics, voices the furious emptiness that defines lives without prospects in today’s stalled Mexico, where inequality, social decomposition (especially in the countryside, drained of adult males following the destruction of communal land tenure in the 1990s), political corruption and the abdication of institutions have turned a once centralized country into a patchwork of narco-regions. These conditions are especially acute in Melchor’s home state of Veracruz, where her work is set. If Mexican literature has been overwhelmingly urban over the last fifty years – and the cities are still comparatively functional – Melchor’s nose for national decay leads her to provincial small towns and edgelands.

Melchor was born in 1982 and studied journalism at the University of Veracruz. Mexico is the most dangerous country in the world for journalists outside official war zones; nonetheless, while working in PR at the same university, she soon began to research hybrid, non-fiction crónicas, later collected in Aquí no es Miami (2013), as well as publish instantly acclaimed fiction. Though she has since moved inland to Puebla – and is currently part of the Artists-in-Berlin programme – her writing remains steeped in the heat, lust and precarity of the eastern seaboard.

Life’s blights are always conveyed from within her characters’ minds, mostly in free indirect style, mixed with direct or reported speech. Melchor has created a lusciously carnal brand of orality (as she has pointed out, few would understand the way Veracruzans really talk). One novel has no paragraph breaks at all, and her sentences can be extremely long, in an overarching past tense that makes a change from the primacy of the present in contemporary fiction.

That’s why he only ever started drinking once he was safely on the dock: he’d sooner endure that bitch of a thirst than the fear of being spotted by one of the residents or that prick Urquiza. Once there he would crack open a beer, or on a good day take a good glug directly from whatever bottle of hard stuff he’d been able to afford, and wait for the warm, cottony relief to envelop his entire body, cushioning him from the world’s sharp edges, and he’d pull out a cigarette from its fresh packet and …

Or, more typically:

… and all he could think about was sticking two fingers up to them all, quitting his miserable, piss-pay job and punching that idiot Urquiza on his way out, a quick one-two to his smug fucking egghead: who’ll wash your car now, you fucking faggot …

The slide in and out of crude subjectivities of recollection has pedigree. José Revueltas’s sublime horror of a prison fable, The Hole (1969), mingles turpid streams of narrative and consciousness in a way that surely influenced Melchor. The technique was earlier employed by Vargas Llosa in his tremendous second novel, The Green House (1965) – an interiority inspired, like much of Latin America’s ‘boom’ experimentation, by Faulkner. In the acknowledgments of her Hurricane Season (2017) – shortlisted for the Booker International Prize in 2020 – Melchor mentions García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), but she doesn’t adopt its lyricism. If her work risks airlessness with its identity of form and content – violent experience expressed in violent language – it makes up for this with an irresistible propulsive energy.

The novels differ more in their structures than in their psychic worlds. Her debut, Falsa liebre (2013) moves between two pairs of characters whose paths finally cross; Hurricane Season is polyphonic, each rambling chapter told by a different person to cast light, or rather darkness, on a local witch’s murder; Paradais emanates entirely from the mind of sixteen-year-old Polo, the gardener at a gated community called Paradise (the title is the phonetic spelling in Spanish). Yet its dynamics are those of a two-hander. Where Hurricane Season shuffles between the viewpoints of a connected but riven group of villagers, variously deranged by desire and despair, Paradais rests on opposites of poor and rich: the proud, fed-up Polo and his unlikely boon companion, the abject, repulsive Franco, who lives with his grandparents in the posh development, and is referred to as ‘fatboy’. In fact, though neither would notice, they are similar. Both are loners, both have been expelled from school (next term, Franco will be sent to a punitive military academy), and both identify fulfilment with an impossible dream.

For Polo, it is a kind of nirvana on the river, independence at the tiller of the boat his feared but loved grandfather promised to build them. But Grandfather died, and with him the dream. For Franco, it is sex with his neighbour, the classy Señora Marián whose ‘blow-job lips’ and ‘sumptuous tits’ obsess him to the point of spoiling ordinary porn. There is just one, early passage where we enter Franco’s mind and become privy to his single concern. The rest of the time we only see him through Polo’s contemptuous eyes, ‘his love handles and his weeping pimples and his sad manboobs that wobbled obscenely each time he moved his hips’. Franco’s monomania, fed by boozing with Polo on the dock every night, grows into a reckless plan to rape Marián. Polo goes along with it, for the sake of the jewels he could steal as a calling card to the narcos he imagines impressing. Yet he also claims never to have taken fatboy seriously. The whole novel is presented as a self-justification in flashback, often repeating its first sentence – ‘It was all fatboy’s fault, that’s what he would tell them’ – and rhetorically demanding more than once ‘how the fuck was he supposed to know what the crazy prick would be capable of doing in order to bone that bitch. Who could have known he really meant what he said?’

Naturally, the plan goes horribly wrong. Narrated in a long, strobe-like sequence of what Polo remembers as ‘almost soundless instants’, their blunders in the family’s house involve much pathos (tying up the young sons), much gore (everyone but Polo dies, including Franco), and even some ghastly comedy, as when he helps subdue the woman Franco had expected would cooperate: ‘I told you just the hands, for fuck’s sake, how am I supposed to fuck her if you tie her legs together?’

Polo escapes the scene by swimming across the Jamapa river, the place he associates with peace and happiness, and persuades himself he has been cleansed. The dissociation from reality that afflicts both adolescents peaks on the last page, as the survivor returns calmly to his workplace the next day in ‘the comforting certainty of his total innocence’. This is unlikely to wash with the police, for the impunity that coddles the top layers of Mexican criminality does not extend to the bottom. Coolly non-judgmental herself, Melchor leaves us to grapple with the matter of personal responsibility. The boy’s craven self-exculpations, for instance: there are surely some broader excuses for him, that occur only to us. Is it his fault that the generation of multi-skilled, self-reliant men like his grandfather has passed nothing down? The political and economic backdrop is never explicit in Melchor, but its repercussions touch all her characters. It is due to the few options available for women if all that awaits Polo at home, a place he avoids by getting drunk, is a nagging mother and a detested older cousin, Zorayda, who once seduced him and is now idle and pregnant, about to ‘saddle him with that kid who, as far as he knew, could be pretty much anyone’s in town’. It is due to the failings of public education and the few legal options for rudderless boys like him that he is forced to support both women with the exploitative, humiliating job at Paradise.

In this senseless space, void of institutional, traditional or ethical parameters, the logic of cause and effect has dissolved, so it’s easy for characters to make crazy choices with no sense of consequence. A darkly comic scene at Walmart brings this home. The boys fill a trolley with equipment for the night’s larks: packing tape, later swapped for what the assistant helpfully identifies as ‘kidnapper tape’, torches, black trousers and hoodies, black tights for balaclavas. Polo is briefly terrified – ‘it was so obvious what they wanted all that for’. But nothing happens. Conversely, Polo ignores the glaring consequences for his best friend Milton of working with the drug gangs (coyly italicized as ‘them’). Milton has become a wreck, but he drives a showy SUV, and so Polo clings blindly to the suicidal illusion that they might offer the deliverance he seeks in the temporary numbness of drinking, which ‘was never enough to knock him out completely, to send the whole world packing, to switch off completely, be free’.

Anxious, performative machismo is the great underlying theme of Melchor’s writing. Misogyny permeates Mexican society, epitomized by the hundreds of ‘femicides’ that first became notorious, along with the shocking official inaction, in the northern-border factory district in the 1990s. Melchor’s men may hate most other men, but they hate women absolutely, qua women; their bodies inspire horror, as when Polo imagines ‘the murky, yellowish fluid filling Zorayda’s revolting stomach’. Meanwhile Melchor’s women have internalized the culture to be as mean, libidinous and foul-mouthed as any man – though, crucially, they often accept responsibility, and do not see themselves as victims. Some of her more towering females merge with the mythic.

Thus, the murdered recluse around whom Hurricane Season revolves is not the classic victim of femicide – young, semi-emancipated yet vulnerable – but a powerful healer and abortionist who convened orgies in her mansion, seducing both sexes, and is believed to have pots of money stashed away, like an ogre. Likewise, the sight of Señora Marián brandishing a knife dripping with gore at the top of the stairs merges for Polo with the Bloody Countess legend that always scared him on the way to the dock. And Milton’s drug boss is a fearsome young woman.

Paradais reads more easily than its predecessor, lacking Hurricane’s bewildering profusion. But it is slighter: the narrator is eaten by resentment, something necessarily repetitive. The other fellow, forever wanking, farting and wiping away drool, is a caricature, even if he marks an important divorce of depravity from deprivation. The translator Sophie Hughes, who gave us Hurricane, once more provides a ringing version of Melchor’s orality. My only reservation is that it reads so much more coarsely in English than in Spanish, hitting a maximalist note all the time. Terms like pinche or pendejo are everyday speech in Mexican – it’s just a sweary lingo. Every vieja is not, as here, a ‘bitch’ and few uses of cabrón, an interpellation that peppers friendly chat, warrant the here inevitable ‘asshole’. Even a harmless phrase like ‘sabría Dios el motivo’ (‘God knows why’) is rendered as ‘who the fuck knows why’.

In more nuanced language, the work would be just as unsettling. Latin American literature today is full of transgressive female writers concerned with cruelty, Ariana Harwicz and Selma Almada to name just two. Like Melchor’s, their refusal to comfort or spare the reader in any way is what makes them so exciting seen from an Anglo-American panorama where the redemptive and uplifting threaten to kill us with kindness.

Read on: Al Giordano, ‘Mexico’s Presidential Swindle’, NLR 41.

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No, no, no

Amy Winehouse has been dead for almost eleven years now. Her work is unforgettable. Still, the complexity of that work, and that story, tends to get lost, dispersed and then reduced, wrapped up tight, a small pellet of abject, glamorous pain. Traces of Amy remain indelible: a lyric, a phrase and always an image: derived from a photograph, it’s nevertheless recognizable as a silhouette, outlined in black and white. At the beginning of her career, Amy chose to be instantly identifiable, with an expansive hair-do and intense eyeliner marking out a look that was hers alone. It was a quotation and an exaggeration, like a logo or a joke. The repeated and repetitive story goes like this: Amy Winehouse was a singer who achieved great fame very quickly and made a lot of money, and it killed her. Or she killed herself. Or drugs and alcohol killed her. Her dominating father killed her, or was it that boyfriend? (She wouldn’t go to rehab, right?) No, no, no.  

‘Paparazzo’ is the name of the fictional street photographer who follows Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, and Marcello Mastroianni, the tabloid journalist, in La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini’s film of 1960. This name (which in Italian has a connotation of something that buzzes around you, like a wasp or a mosquito) was quickly re-functioned as a nickname for aggressive photographers who chased celebrities, looking for a shot they could sell to the increasing numbers of cheap celebrity papers and magazines. A symbiotic relationship between the paparazzi and their targets quickly developed: 1960s photos of Sophia Loren, and others, pausing to pose in the street for the camera, prove it was always thus. Still, the classic paparazzi photo is by definition unposed, non-consensual, sudden and almost violent in its capture of the subject, denying the star the right to walk down the street unseen. It’s an interruption and an idealization at once.

‘Amy 4’ (2021), courtesy of the artist and Commercial Street
Photographer: Morgan Waltz

In 1969 Jacqueline Onassis told her secret service people to ‘smash the camera’ when Ron Galella, the paparazzo who pursued her every day, leaped out of the bushes to photograph her nine-year-old son riding his bike in Central Park. Galella sued, Jackie counter-sued, and the court determined that in future he had to stay 25 feet away from her, and 50 feet away from her children. In other words, with a zoom lens, Galella still had visual access to the most famous woman in the world, while she was protected from immediate physical proximity. A photograph of Galella approaching Jackie with a huge measuring tape makes fun of this restriction; his comment in court that he thought that his constant unwanted attention would distract Jackie from her grief is particularly bleak. Widowhood is no protection.

Diana Spencer’s death in Paris in 1997, almost thirty years later, crashing at speed very late at night while driven by a drunk chauffeur in a limousine to avoid paparazzi chasing them on motorbikes, provides the narrative closure to this classic story. It’s an old story, about a beautiful woman who wants something, some kind of recognition, and gets so much of it that she can’t leave her house. It’s a fairy tale of some kind, where the punishment is to have too much of what you want: money, fame, recognition. It’s about being turned into an image, an image that itself becomes transformed into a commodity, to be consumed by millions, when maybe all you want these days is some kind of a life.

Bedros Yeretzian’s recent show at Commercial Street in Hollywood presented seven silkscreen enamel prints on aluminium, placed flat against the walls of the space. Each was taken from a paparazzi photo of Amy Winehouse, who seems almost ghostly, moving in and out of definition as we move through the space. As we get closer to the work, she dissolves: we find ourselves looking at a translation of a print image into something like text, or maybe it’s a translation of something like text into an image. The work tips back and forth, as we close in and recede, proposing a temporary equivalence.

‘Amy 1’ (2021), courtesy of the artist and Commercial Street
Photographer: Morgan Waltz

This is an ASCII image, evoking early computer printers that ‘lacked graphics capability’, so images were constructed (along with other graphic patterns, like text breaks) out of text itself, using the limited resources of fonts arranged in non-linguistic ways. American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) images date from the early 1960s, although some forms of poetry had for centuries made use of the possibilities of print (and, later, typewriters) to distort and construct meaning through shaping printed text on the page. Looking at these images of Amy, we first see that the picture is built out of code, in a throw back or shout out to the 1960s, our digital heritage, and then that the code is not the dots, dashes, punctuation marks, and letters of a conventional typeface, but another kind of code altogether. Turning to the minimal information provided by the artist, we discover that this ASCII image-generator is using an open-source typeface that ‘simulates the International Code of Signals’, a communication system using a limited number of flags with simple geometric patterns to send messages between ships. The International Code of Signals was ‘originally developed in the 1850s by the British Board of Trade.’

So this is about translation, a series of transitions from a living body (belonging to Amy Winehouse, before her death in 2011) to spontaneous, unposed photographs in public spaces (the language of paparazzi photography) that are subsequently put through an automatic ASCII image-generator (an online resource) using a specific font (sourced from dafont.com) that was adjusted to make the font fixed-width (otherwise ASCII won’t work) that itself derives from and simulates the International Code of Signals. Each move inserts a level of distinction and difference into the system of representation. Each shift takes me further away from Amy Winehouse and closer to an analysis of power and violence.

The image of the woman (recognizable, mediated through paparazzi photos) dissolves into something called code (also recognizable, but unreadable), a set of signs functioning as an obstacle rather than a vehicle for meaning. It’s a liminal space, hovering, referencing the capacity of code to capture information at the same time as it refuses to relinquish it, to release meaning into the void. We find ourselves suspended in a zone of uncertainty – with Amy’s iconic image always in play, stabilizing and destabilizing in turn. We move closer, she fragments, the detail of the code pops out; we move further away, she appears, in a shadow form and the code becomes imperceptible. When I’m staring at an image and I know it’s made out of code, a code that’s out of reach, my mind goes to my phone, so close at hand. I’m looking at images of women on my phone all the time, and I know that image is made out of code, zeros and ones, they tell me, and I can’t read that, I can’t even perceive it, I can only see the image it presents. This is a description of Instagram, where we live now.

‘Amy 1’ (2021) close-up, courtesy of the artist and Commercial Street
Photographer: Morgan Waltz

This particular code, the International Code of Signals, belongs to the history of the British colonial project, dating from the mid-nineteenth century, before radio waves changed our world. A way of communicating that is imbued with both trade and war, the code was standardized to allow different fleets to signal typical messages (such as location and status) to each other, through combining flags in specific sequences. At the same time, the entire set of flags stands in for the alphabet and the numbers zero to nine, with a coded capacity for repetition that removes the need to have multiple sets of flags. Individual flags are used for emergency messaging and simple responses, like yes (‘C: Charlie’) or no (‘N: November’). N and C together (no and yes) functions as a distress signal, a fundamental binary undone or confused constituting a call for help.

It is a code that precedes our digital world yet in some ways predicts it. And gradually a sequence unfolds: the image of the woman, the star, presented as a site where money is made (trade/capitalism), where her subjectivity is taken over and commodified (colonialism), where her rage and pain are spectacularized (war). Still, unlike some maritime experts, I can’t decipher this code: I am situated by the work in a position that is both open and restricted, at the limits of meaning. I’m inside a system that I can’t take apart (like my phone), up against the invisibility and illegibility of capitalism, war, the colonial project, each of which are everywhere and nowhere. (They are the air we breathe.) And it is the image of the body of the woman that holds these contradictions.

Here this code has been subjected to the logic of the ASCII image: by turning the International Code of Signals into a digital font, it has been subsumed into another system entirely. Even if someone came into the gallery with a magnifying glass and could ‘read’ the lines of flags across the images, it would not make any sense. The dominant system of representation is the photographic image itself, while the capacity for these geometric flags, carefully arranged in sequence, to communicate messages between floating bodies persists only as a trace, a material implication. There is no secret message buried in Amy’s Fred Perry handbag, I think.

‘Amy 1’ (2021) close-up, courtesy of the artist and Commercial Street
Photographer: Morgan Waltz

Nevertheless, the title of the show, Enemies, opens up a set of questions about language and the image; while we recognize ASCII as a quotation from another era, the early digital, here it incorporates another archaic language system, the symbolic flags of the maritime world. The singer’s image floats within a contested space, delimited by the overlapping co-operations of these two sign systems, an image that itself construes more explicit scenes of conflict: the endless battle played out between paparazzi and star, the struggle for so-called self-determination carried out by the singer herself. Arguably paparazzi photography is a sign system also: there aren’t two signifying systems producing a third thing, the image; it’s the encounter of at least three distinct systems producing something like the skeleton of an image.

Enemies holds these different histories and ideologies in suspension, in a kind of stalemate, or a recognition that the various subjects of the artwork may be dispersed among them, while inviting us to recognize our own participation, as viewers, or critics, and the artist too, hanging out together in a state of hostility. There’s a quiet suggestion that the only aesthetic move that remains is to overlay various different more or less unintelligible semiotic systems, intending thereby not to cancel them out, nor to decode them, but on the contrary, to expose the multiple ways that their automatic operations determine our inner and outer landscapes, in a kind of relay that moves in perpetual circles, never landing on a conclusion.

And then the whole thing warps, turning inside out, revolving again. Because hey, these images were made by hand. The silkscreened enamel on aluminium is flat and hard, slightly reflective, recalling the qualities of manufactured objects. Still, they’re imperfect, or maybe it would be more accurate to say they are almost perfect, just shy of perfect. Traces of the gesture, the specific instance of the pull of the squeegee across the screen, registers another body, an indexical mark buried within the photographic remains. Someone made this thing: an unrepeatable moment in time, like the grain of the voice in Amy’s recordings. The counterpart lies in the grain of the screen print, haptic (we want to touch the surface) and alive, returning us to a memory of a living body that is precisely not an image.

In sensing these physical movements in the imperfection of the image, we participate in another, more ancient, coded system, one that we read with our own bodies. The imperfect gestures leave gaps in the coded image, areas of emptiness, suggesting the incompleteness of our digital world, where the living body is itself signified in negative, in absence, in lack. Amy Winehouse is dead. The body that exists in the work is not hers, and it presents, through failed gestures, as an absence within the image. Such small failures and imperfections may recall Warhol’s Marilyn, his Jackie, the intentional slight mis-registration of the silkscreens that left traces of an imperfect body in the image of a goddess. And maybe an embodied imperfection, incompleteness, can evoke what it’s like to be alive, and therefore soon to be dead, more profoundly than any photograph.

The embodied gesture of the pull, making the image, reminds me that Amy is not alone – Marilyn, Jackie, none of them is perfectly solitary in their apotheosis. There’s another body there, at least one and maybe, probably, more than one, doing the work of remembering. It’s the one who made the image, a kind of exchange between the goddess, star, celeb, singer, queen, and the one over here, on our side of the equation, fan, photographer, image maker, consumer, archivist. The one building the memorial, remembering the flaws, marking the absences and the remaining traces of something lost and gone.

‘Amy 7’ (2021), courtesy of the artist and Commercial Street
Photographer: Morgan Waltz

More than one, yes, because it seems like an implicit collectivity is built into the material forms this artist has chosen. It’s partly a result of the ready-made effects of the open-sourced, free software – ASCII, the International Code of Signals, dafont.com – put together with the proliferating subjects belonging to the project of paparazzi photography. And there’s an automatic dimension here, again recalling Warhol; the screen print is itself mechanical in its implicit aspiration to a perfectly smooth surface, and the paparazzo too, perhaps, automatic in his unhesitating exploitation of the moment. The artist surrenders to the apparition, the collectively invented ready-made, glad of the respite. Certain forms of artistic agency, valued in a romantic context, are rubbed out, erased by the pressure of public, downloadable formats and their operations. Among this cloudy multitude, Amy appears, angelic.

Still, despite everything, these pictures return me to a bodily reality, recalling simple things: there’s no ideas without chemistry, signals moving around that fleshy brain lump in my skull, no conversations without a heartbeat and a wish. (Death is very close.) In the gaps that opened up within these representations, recognizable and unrecognizable at the same time, in the search for clarity and connection, people in the gallery, encountering Bedros Yeretzian’s work, pulled out their phones, using them as a viewing device, to produce another level of legibility. The phone cameras changed the image, intensified it, making it more accessible, more coherent, less dispersed. A phone snapshot of an artwork is a memory aid: curiously, in this case the mediation of the phone resulted in a temporary clarity, artificial, itself contaminated by the logic of a code whose operation I do not understand. In this layering of code upon code, another body is manifest, the digital ghost of Amy Winehouse.

She’s no longer with us, yet she’s everywhere.

Read on: Julian Stallabrass, ‘Sublime Calculation’, NLR 132.