Diamanda Galas rips up the Barbican this April

Diamanda Galás: her film Schrei 27 has its world premiere
at The Barbican in April

International performer Diamanda Galás will be launching her first major film collaboration, Schrei 27, at the Barbican's avant garde Spill Festival on April 22nd. Galás has been in the headlines in New York recently with the banning from their National Portrait Gallery of Fire in My Belly, a film by David Wojnarowicz which was inspired by Galás’ famous AIDS requiem Plague Mass and features one of her songs.

Schrei 27 is a 27-minute film comprising several 'chapters' which follow a person (played by Galás and a male actor, Salvatore Bevilacqua) who is taken into a mental hospital after being arrested for treason and is then subjected to horrific psychological and physiological torture in order to extract a confession.  Galás has created a unique vocal soundtrack of raw human sound, calls, chants and silence.  The score features passages - including extracts from the Book of Job and St. Thomas Aquinas - about transitions between life and death, salvation and condemnation, sanity and madness.

The film, by Diamanda Galás and Davide Pepe, will be at the Spill Festival of Performance at the Silk Street Theatre, Barbican, London, from 1 – 9pm on 22^nd  and 23^rd  April 2011. The Spill Festival of Performance at the Barbican Centre is an artist-led biennial festival of experimental theatre, live art and exceptional artists from around the world.  It was initiated in 2007 by artist/performer Robert Pacitti. His 2011 Festival is curated around the idea of ‘infection’.  

The film presents a powerful unrelenting psychological and physiological portrait of trauma caused to enemies of the state in a "medical facility" where trained doctors deliver incremental changes of shock, light, heat and cold to their "patients" in confined spaces.  Schrei 27 was commissioned from Galás by New American Radio in 1994, to explore themes of political or personal asylum and institutionalisation. It was further developed as Schrei X in 1996, as a live performance staged in darkness, and in 2007 curated as a quadraphonic installation, again in the dark, in Spain and the Canary Islands.

This is Galás’ first major film collaboration with Bolognese film and video artist Davide Pepe whose most recent feature Giardini di Luce, was presented at the 60th Berlin Film Festival’s Berlinale Shorts Competition.

Hailed as one of the most important singers of our time, Diamanda Galás has earned international acclaim for her highly original and politically charged performance works, as well as her innovative treatment of jazz, blues, and rembetika. 

Born to Anatolian and Greek parents, Diamanda Galás has lived in New York City since 1989.  She came to international prominence with her quadrophonic performances of Wild Women with Steak Knives (1980) and the album The Litanies of Satan (1982). Later she created the controversial Plague Mass, a requiem for those dead and dying of AIDS, which she performed at Saint John the Divine Cathedral in New York City in 1990 and released as a CD.  In 1994 Galas and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones collaborated on the visionary rock album, The Sporting Life.  Over the past two decades Galás’s wide range of musical and theatrical works have included The Singer (1992), a compilation of blues and gospel standards; Vena Cava (1993), exploring AIDS, dementia and clinical depression; Malediction and Prayer (1998), a setting of jazz and blues as well as love and death poems by Charles Baudelaire, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Salvadoran guerrilla fighter and poet Miguel Huezo Mixco; La Serpenta Canta (2004), a greatest-hits collection from Hank Williams to Ornette Coleman; Defixiones, Will and Testament (2004), an 80-minute memorial tribute to the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian victims of the Turkish genocides from 1914-1923; and Guilty Guilty Guilty (2008) a compilation of tragic and homicidal love songs.

Galás has contributed her voice and music to Francis Ford Coppola’s, Dracula, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, Spanish/Nicaraguan filmmaker Mercedes Moncada Rodriguez’s El Immortal, and films by Wes Craven, Clive Barker, Derek Jarman and Hideo Nakata. In 2005, Galas was awarded Italy’s first Demetrio Stratos International Career Award. Galas was featured in Roza von Praunheim's films POSITIVE (1991).  Video collaborations have included 'Sleazy' Peter Christopherson, Roza von Prauneheim's mix of David Wojanorowicz and Diamanda Galás in the censored and most popular version of Fire In The Belly and Fred Sodima's Judgement Day. 

Visit  http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/  and  http://www.diamandagalas.com/

Sky Sports magazine hails rapist Mike Tyson as a 'legend'

I’ve got Sky TV and every couple of months we automatically receive a listings magazine, plus Sky Sports magazine. In the February/March 2011 issue of Sky Sports magazine is a long and loving interview with rapist Mike Tyson (jail time: a super flyweight 3.5 years). He is named on the cover. He is named on the contents page, ‘The Legend: Mike Tyson’, with a picture of him holding a pigeon in his fist and kissing it so that its beak is shut tight between his lips. The three page feature starts on page 48, red-tabbed THE LEGEND at the top, and the headline quote is, ‘I’m extreme in whatever I do.’ The strapline underneath says, ‘He was the great heavyweight champion who became his own worst enemy. Now Iron Mike [the nickname is in bold] says he’s the happiest he’s ever been. We met him to find out why…’

The article is by a staff journalist, Claire Bloomfield, whose fawning write-up does not mention Tyson’s rape conviction or previous interviews in which he has said that he likes to ‘totally dominate’ women. The piece begins, ‘One of the last times you saw Mike Tyson was probably in hit comedy The Hangover …Yet Iron Mike’s enduring appeal means that he crops up in less starry surroundings too’, like his successful speaking tour, The Baddest Man on the Planet. I would contest this title: rape and brutalisation by men is mainstream and, to give Tyson some comfort, I do not think he is the worst perpetrator. He should be reassured that there are many men worldwide who have raped and beaten more women, children and other men than he has.

On tour, writes Bloomfield, Tyson ‘meets his people and answers questions about his extraordinary career.’ She also mentions his recent trip to Mecca, as though he is some kind of peace pilgrim or Deepak Chopra/the Dalai Lama, only with a rape conviction and face tattoos. Bloomfield notes with plangent sentimentality, ‘Such is the life he now leads, a far cry from his destructive final years in boxing when his life spiralled out of control.’

I feel disgust at the leeway, leniency, generosity and euphemisms here. They cover the reality of what Tyson has done. Out of all the sportsmen in the world, the ones who don’t rape, the ones who aren’t violent, this magazine chooses not only to acknowledge but cravenly to celebrate and lionise one who does, and in the most abject, glowing terms.  Bloomfield continues, ‘Tyson wants you to know he’s not the person he once was’ as ‘his darkest hours are behind him.’ Whatever darkness Tyson has experienced, it is as bright as the sun compared to what his victims have gone through. Mike Tyson, Iron Mike to his fans, Rapist Mike to the few people who care about his victims, is not ‘his own worst enemy’. He is women’s worst enemy.

When Tyson has not beaten and raped women for free, for the sheer enjoyment of it, he has beaten men for money. Bloomfield reminisces about Tyson’s heavyweight heyday, when he was ‘burning with a charisma not seen since.’ Perhaps it was this charisma which led to him being permitted to serve just three and a half years for rape.

Let me now just throw my abject disbelief onto the page and punch it until it begs for mercy or passes out from the pain (not that I’ll stop then). Bloomfield’s article exists in a morally inverse world in which rapists are victims, committing rape is something terrible that happens to a great man, rape victims don’t exist and a perpetrator’s existential pains (translation: his excuses, whingeing, projections, denial and petty grievances) are the basis of a heroic myth about recovery from devastation. But it is rape survivors who must recover from devastation.

Tyson is full of self pity, as though he has been unfairly treated: ‘If I won the Nobel Peace Prize I am still gonna be a scumbag to America.’ There is no likelihood of Tyson winning the Nobel Peace Prize as he has never worked towards world peace. I do not care if he feels like a sad little lost childlike soul on the inside; everyone feels that way at times. But not everyone is violent or a rapist. Tyson himself alludes to his raping: ‘Because this guy made a bad mistake in his life, does that mean it overrides everything he’ll ever do in life?’ Yes Michael, rape does mean that. One rape victim is one too many.

Tyson talks as though Fate has done something bad to him. But he is not a victim. He is a perpetrator. On his tours he connects with ‘a crowd of people that have pain, so I want to share mine with them and let them know that everything is gonna be alright.’ When a rape survivor truthfully reveals the pain of being hurt physically, psychically, psychologically and spiritually they are told they are lying to hurt men’s public standing. When a rapist lies about how he hurts existentially he is believed, forgiven and rewarded. Still, Tyson is right about one thing: everything will be all right for him, as it is for the overwhelming majority of all rapists and domestic abusers. They can look forward to enjoying the favourable odds of a virtually nonexistent conviction rate, notoriously low sentencing and the guarantee of financial, cultural, legal and career support from abuse-condoning people afterwards.

Tyson says, with risible piety, ‘I want to establish a healthy relationship with my family. I want my wife to realise that I’m not ever going to cheat on her. When we dated years ago, I admit, I cheated on her all the time.’ If I were in a relationship with Tyson I wouldn’t worry so much about infidelity, I’d worry about being beaten up and raped.

Tyson speaks like someone whose human rights have been violated and who will be in recovery for the rest of his life. He speaks as though he has had to use every ounce of inner strength to rebuild himself after a cataclysmic act of destruction, hatred and sabotage. He speaks as though he has had to overcome people’s unjust disbelief, mistrust, social stigma. But these are the things a rape survivor goes through.

A rape survivor feels alone but Mike Tyson is surrounded by cronies. He says, ‘when I’m overseas I enjoy the celebrity status’ and mentions countries including Turkey where ‘the president or the prime minister comes to meet me at the airport or at my hotel.’ There is an international community of powerful men who want to give him a great life, because they think he is a great man. His supporters include major players in film and TV, men with women colleagues, partners, daughters, sisters, friends, mothers.

Out of 3.5 billion men in the world, it was rapist Mike Tyson who was offered a role by Todd Phillips, the director of The Hangover. Another man, James Toback, made a sympathetic documentary about him (just like director Steven Soderbergh made a sympathetic documentary about rapist Roman Polanski). Tyson’s next project is an American TV series called Taking on Tyson, about pigeon racing. He will also be in the upcoming series of Entourage, the sequel to The Hangover and Men in Black 3. The producers of these shows are making a specific choice to help a rapist by actively enabling him to reinvent himself as a light entertainment figure. Who is helping his victims? Under-funded local counselling and medical services? Understaffed phone helplines? Do his victims live, like Tyson does, in a sympathetic, helpful, wealthy, well-connected world of wholly credulous employers, friends, family, society and media?

Amongst many other events and media slots Tyson has appeared at the SXSW festival promoting a video game modelled on his likeness, been interviewed on the Ellen DeGeneres show, been on Dancing with the Stars and featured in a spoof music video with Bobby Brown, the singer famous for beating up Whitney Houson in much the same way that today's hot young singer Chris Brown is famous for beating up Rihanna. The media coverage of all these events has been positive. The Daily Mail did not refer to Tyson's raping, just his 'controversial private life' and CBS News calls him 'a boxing legend' as do most other journalists. 

The directors, producers, crew, participants and actors in The Hangover, Taking on Tyson, Men in Black 3, Entourage and all his other projects, events and media outlets hate women. If they didn’t, they would refuse to work with Mike Tyson because he is a rapist. Instead, they reward him. They are making an explicit demonstration of their partiality by overtly helping the career, profile and bank balance of a man who’s committed one of the most common and destructive acts of hatred in the world. Men and women who refuse to boycott men who abuse women hate women. Men and women who actively praise and compensate men who abuse women hate women down to the last dregs in their stomachs.

No doubt violent men and their many fans say that ‘people’ deserve a second chance. I agree. The survivors of violence deserve a second chance to live their lives free from the threat of brutality.

The editor of Sky Sports magazine is Ryan Herman and the director of BSkyB Publications is Robert Tansey. They can be written to at BSkyB Publications Ltd, Grant Way, Isleworth, Middlesex TW7 5QD. A note on page 4 of the magazine says, ‘Sky Sports Magazine has the largest circulation of any sports magazine in the world.’

UPDATE: Within 90 minutes of this article being up, the deniers and apologists are already out. Someone named Wyn Lewis, finding the link to this article on my Facebook page, has left a comment saying this: I think you mean "rape". I have barred the user and the comment has been deleted, although I have kept the email alerting me to the comment and quoting it.

Orgasm Inc: business interests are not women's interests

Just because she's wearing a white coat
doesn't mean you should trust her.

Last weekend at the ICA I was privileged to be invited to chair a debate about sexuality, body issues and the pharmaceutical industry, following a screening of Liz Canner's documentary Orgasm Inc. The doc itself is a chilling examination of the false creation and medicalisation of a host of sexual 'dysfunctions' in women, prompted by the success of Viagra and companies' desperation to capitalise on the possibility of a female Viagra. While a series of funny and excruciating tests of female arousal for various pills, thrills, creams, patches and other devices throws some comedy over the issue, the underlying material is shocking. Canner's film shows executives at one of the pharmaceutical companies laughing amongst themselves and crowing over their stock options. When asked to justify their pathologisation of the 'female dysfunction' area, they can barely keep straight faces. Snickering, they say "The statistics never lie" but they become tongue-tied, evasive and nervous when questioned further. They push products which are proven not to work, and these products are endorsed in the media by a host of seemingly neutral physicians who, it turns out, are being paid to promote the products. This horrible, vast and lucrative world is thickly populated with quack doctors, opportunists and greedy tycoons - or wannabe tycoons - who do not give a damn about women, but give a big damn about big dollars. They are making money because there are so many women out there who are out of touch with their bodies, unconfident in their sexuality, unsure about what they 'ought' to be doing and oppressed by an absolutely artificial image of what satisfactory sexuality looks and feels like.

Contrasted with their avarice and callousness is a woman who is in a trusting, sensual and loving relationship, who has never been able to climax through intercourse alone. This is normal, but she doesn't know it. Instead she beats herself up about not having a 'real', 'proper' or 'normal' experience. She thinks that, despite the pleasure and joy of her life, there is a right and wrong way to do sex; when asked what she thinks about when making love she says immediately "war - fighting with myself." Her desperation to do it 'the right way' is painful to watch. She submits to any and every experiment, including the gruesome insertion of a nerve-stimulating device into her spinal cord. The risks of such a procedure are huge - she could die of shock or be paralysed - and the shot of the wires emerging from a hole in her back make the viewer shudder. The experiment fails utterly and one is left nauseated by the people who are, effectively, experimenting with the bodies, feelings and insecurities of these women, who trust them so completely.

I recommend the documentary, although it focuses more on the workings of the pharmaceutical industry than on the stories of the women who feel they need these products, even though they have proven to be ineffectual. To even up the debate, BEV invited the psychosexual health expert Dr Sandy Goldbeck-Wood and Sam Roddick, activist and owner of the Coco de Mer 'erotic emporium' (joke - I had promised her I wouldn't describe her beautiful shop of  sexy things in 1970s soft porn speak) as well as a leading figure in international fair trade and grassroots movements and the founder of Bondage for Freedom. These two speakers were an excellent combination: Sandy was crystal clear, calm, cerebral, very thoughtful and precise in referring to the women and men she treats; Sam was fiery and inspirational, a broad, warm and extremely engaging and voluble speaker. Together they provided a comprehensive and compassionate take on sexual 'dysfunction' in its commonest forms. Both advocated that people must learn to listen to and ground themselves in their own bodies, that the body is a barometer for the emotional self, that sex is something which happens between individuals and is not something that is done to you or that you 'do' to someone else, that pleasure flows from joy, connection and happiness and that there is - above all - no 'right way' to do it. We agreed that the image of sexuality which currently exists not only in the mainstream (say, in Hollywood romances or in novels) and in seemingly frank depictions of sexuality, like porn, are all falsified in some way. Either they are painfully raw, unsensual and workmanlike or they are airbrushed to perfection. As one woman in the doc comments, in a Hollywood film a couple is always beautiful, sex is natural and easy, it looks great, it's not messy, it's brief, nobody jokes around and they climax together. Every - single - time.

Both Sandy and Sam commented that, for all the seeming sexualisation of our culture, people are in fact extremely shy about talking about sexual problems with their doctors, with their partners or even with themselves. There is a fundamental split between the mind and the body, culturally, which leaves each person feeling alone and feeling as though they are a failure. Liz Canner's documentary shows what happens when huge corporations step into the breach and seem to offer solutions, which take advantage of individuals' feeling of inadequacy and reap the benefits while offering precisely no meaningful comfort, help, pleasure or care.

Andrea Buttner wins the MaxMara Art Prize For Women



Andrea Büttner, Vogelpredigt (Sermon to the Birds), 2010, woodcut on 2 papers,
180 x 240 cm, courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London.
Image taken from Whitechapel Gallery web page about MaxMara Art Prize.


Iwona Blazwick OBE, Director Whitechapel Gallery and Chairwoman of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, has announced artist Andrea Buttner as the winner of the third Prize. Büttner, who lives and works in London and Frankfurt, was honoured at the prize giving ceremony at London’s Whitechapel Gallery on 23 March. Shortlisted artists Becky Beasley and Elizabeth Price were also in attendance.

From 1 to 10 April 2011 at the Whitechapel Gallery. Andrea Büttner, the winner of the third Max Mara Art Prize for Women in association with the Whitechapel Gallery, will be showcasing the work of art made on her Italian residency after winning the Prize. Her work explores the crossover between religion and art using traditional materials such as woodcut prints. In the last five years Büttner has held solo exhibitions at Pawn Shop in Los Angeles, Crystal Palace in Stockholm, Goethe-Institute in Dublin, the ICA in London, and in 2009 at Croy Nielsen in Berlin, amongst others. She has studios in East London and in Frankfurt. There is an excellent write-up of her work at The Guardian, here.

The Max Mara Art Prize for Women promotes and nurtures talent based in the United Kingdom, enabling artists to develop their potential and providing each winner with an opportunity to produce new works of art. The Prize is awarded biannually to one UK based artist who has not previously had a major survey exhibition. Winners receive a fully funded six-month residency in Italy, based at the American Academy in Rome and the Pistoletto Foundation, Biella, as well as funding to realise a new work or works that will be exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery and acquired by the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy.

For each Prize a judging panel of four art-world professionals, chaired by Iwona Blazwick, devise a short-list of between three and five artists. The short-listed artists are invited to the Whitechapel Gallery to make a presentation about their practice and the work or works they would make during or resultant from their Italian residency and funding.

The Max Mara Art Prize for Women celebrates the diversity and dynamics that female artists brings to the contemporary art scene in terms of aesthetics and discourse and provides them with a platform in which to reach a widespread audience. It is a unique initiative set up to promote and nurture female artists based in the United Kingdom, enabling artists to develop their potential through the conception of a new work. Shortlisted candidates are asked to develop a proposal for their desired projects, which is then judged by an all female panel. The inaugural Max Mara Art Prize [2005 – 2007] was won by film-maker Margaret Salmon and the second edition of the Prize [2007 – 2009] was won by Hannah Rickards who works with sound, video and installation.

The jury for this third edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women 2009-2011 was announced on 9th September 2009 at the Whitechapel Gallery on the occasion of the special opening of the film No, There Was No Red [2009] by Hannah Rickards. Chaired by Iwona Blazwick, the new jury comprises; Fiona Banner, Turner Prize nominated artist; Alison Jacques, Gallerist; Valeria Napoleone, Collector and Polly Staple, writer and Director of Chisenhale Gallery.

Read the press release for the Max Mara Art Prize Announcement 2009-2011

For further information about the Max Mara Art Prize for Women please contact Dorothea Jaffé at  DorotheaJaffe@whitechapelgallery.org



Text taken from The Whitechapel site and from the offical MaxMara Art Prize press release. Copyright is theirs, not mine. 

Self Made, directed by Gillian Wearing

This new full length film by Turner Prize winning artist Gillian Wearing will be screened on Friday 11th March at the ICA Cinema 1 at 20:45 as part of the Birds Eye View film festival.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Dave, one of the Self Made participants

Revelation or manipulation? Therapy or torture? Self Made is such a chilling film that three days after watching it, I’m still waking up with its scenes in my mind. The set-up is simple. Ordinary people answer an advert inviting them to experience a series of Method acting workshops, culminating in a short film which pulls together the characters and stories they’ve developed from their own experiences.

Those selected to be filmed are vulnerable in some way, seeking closure, catharsis or revenge. The viewer’s dread is increased by footage of the initial warm-ups, voice exercises and small tasks designed to get the group to lose their self-consciousness and connect with their bodies. “Close your eyes,” says the tutor, and they do – but we keep ours open to watch them. We are in the realm of deep psychological excavation, voyeurs in a mental trip that the participants think is just a drama rehearsal. The voice exercises sound like funeral dirges and the sight of the participants, eyes closed, sitting on plastic chairs in a huge warehouse, circling their heads and shoulders, hiccoughing and crying, has a whiff of cultish control. It is these rehearsals which form the main body and interest of Self Made. The finished snippets the participants act in are often the least fascinating element (for us) of the experience.

Gillian Wearing is of course an internationally renowned artist working in photography and film. She gained mainstream fame for her much-imitated series of photographs in which people on the street were invited to write a phrase expressing themselves and hold it up to the camera. The most striking image was the well fed, suited city boy with his office pass around his neck, grinning confidently while his sign said HELP.

In Self Made, Wearing’s power uncovers the base wounds of people’s suffering, the childhood trauma stuff, while the sufferers themselves have no idea just how much they’ve revealed to the world through their speech, interactions and body language.  Well, tough for them, great for us. This is an extremely interesting and totally absorbing film. The viewer is struck but just how deep and eloquent, noble and sometimes sinister ‘ordinary’ people are.

There are some participants who are untrustworthy. There is Dave,* a warehouse worker man in his forties, a cold, frightening, blank individual who admits to bullying colleagues and whose professed vulnerability – revealed in an apparent confession after the acting tutor gently upbraids him for his bravado – does not convince. He introduces himself by saying “I’m reasonably amiable”, which reminds me of the truism that it’s always the ones who feel compelled to tell you “I’m a really honest person” who turn out to be the psychos, pathological liars and manipulators. In an attempt to intimidate and to give an impression of himself as a tough and mysterious guy he says he wants the Method sessions to be like an “exorcism” and describes his inner soul as “a wasp buzzing about inside myself.” He does not participate fully in the exercises, batting off the other participants with glibness, stupid jokes, silence, backchat or laughter. He visibly irritates the usually calm and understanding tutor. He claims that he is vulnerable, having been lonely since he broke up with his girlfriend way back in the mid-90s. But there is something not quite right about this anecdote, this token of “I’m a nice guy” persuasion, and he gives no further details. He does not crack or change during the sessions; his morbidity invites cynicism and mistrust, not sympathy. After the first  exercise he is asked for his reaction and, after hearing everyone else candidly confess to feeling lighter, or sadder, or braver, he shrugs and creepily says, “There’s nothing there. If my death was like that I’d be fine with it.” Later, in a moment of ‘weakness’ which again does not seem authentic he reveals, “I’ve chosen a day that I’ve decided I’m going to die.” But this suicide day, egotistically chosen because it’s a reconfiguration of his birthday, is some [delete: nearly fifteen] years into the future and I do not believe he will go through with it. Predictably, his chosen film snippet is the least interesting, most self-indulgent and sensationalist and most sordid. At the end of Self Made, his eyes glinting with self-satisfaction, he says that the project has not made any difference to him, his feelings, his personality or his plans.

The star of the piece has the quietest story and the quietest demeanour. She is a live-in carer, a woman of only forty whose life is a success in many ways and who gives much to the world, who wants love and a family. When asked whether she was hugged when she was growing up, after a long pause she simply replies, “My father  hugged me, but not in the right way.” She shudders. “I didn’t like him.” She is an intelligent, calm, perceptive and honest woman. She is one of the few participants who has a sense of humour about herself, explaining dryly at the beginning, “I don’t think the camera likes me… you know how the camera knows you’re photogenic? That’s not me.” After some initial wariness she is induced, in a delightful improvisation exercise about a shopper buying a dinner service, to throw plates and dishes against a wall. At first she is protective of the plates – “What’s it ever done to you?” – and then, with relish, away they fly.  This woman achieves something none of the other participants do, which is to get under the skin of the tutor. He tells her – sincerely and with liking and appreciation – that he’s impressed that she has taken her experiences and, instead of turning them into blocked rage or the desire for revenge, developed “this incredibly beautiful emotion called sadness.” He is right; the short black and white scene she acts in at the end of her story is, indeed, beautiful, and she is a wonderful actress.

The power of Self Made is that it reveals people’s hypocrisy and the ease with which childhood pain can turn into hatred and then into a fetish, a sexualised death drive whose target is often a projection or shift away from the real perpetrator. There is a local council worker named Asheq Akhtar [I had originally misheard this as 'humanitarian aid worker' and have now rectified it] in the group, a guy who’s always felt he didn’t fit in. He cries during every session and says that his worst fear, the most awful thing he can imagine, is being an aggressor – but he is very easily persuaded into kicking, with sickeningly powerful thuds, the corpse of a pig, which has been chosen because it is similar in density, weight, size and consistency to a human body. He really enjoys himself, then dissolves into solipsistic tears afterwards. This youngish man grew up with an absent father and is tormented by the memory of an abusive boyfriend of his mother’s, but when he is asked to do a word association exercise, looking at three static and silent actors posed to represent a father, a mother and a son, it is the woman he expresses the greatest hatred for. In his projection she is just a wife and mother, a contemptible parasite who has allied herself with a rich man out of “laziness” and “desire for an easy life."

It’s extremely disturbing that this person, the one who seems like the nicest and gentlest guy, appears in the end to be the biggest misogynist. When it comes to putting together the film he’ll be in, his fantasy is one of extreme violence against a physically vulnerable woman. In his real life, however, none of the aggressors or perpetrators have been women. They have been men. In justifying his choice he says that this is because it’s the worst thing he can imagine, but the quickness and zeal he brings to it and the self-pity he shows every time tell a different story. This makes his finished piece the most horrifying of the lot. It is excerpted at the beginning of Self Made and sets a tone of foreboding and concealed danger which permeate the whole project.

There is a terrifying underlying theme to the film, a terrible real thing moving beneath the surface: the commonness of male abusiveness towards women and also towards other men. All the aggressors and perpetrators, bullies, beaters, yobs and abusers identified by the participants are men. An air steward has joined the project because she wants to come to terms with the fact that her father was absent, left her mother to start a second family and often let her down. This young woman is intelligent, with a likeable bluntness and a determination to overcome her pain. It makes the heart lift to see that she makes quick progress which permeates and transforms her life beyond the film.  

Self Made reveals the wounds adults bear from their childhoods. Time has not healed them, it has made them suffer more. The cuts have gone deeper. They have spread. The pain has coloured everything. It has twisted their personalities in long-lasting and sometimes perverse ways. The sufferers know immediately, when asked, what has caused their pain. They know what the problem is, who the fault lies with and what effect it has had. An energetic young man who works in a bar explains the effects of childhood bullying: “It made me worthless.” When asked what makes him feel worst these days he says without a second’s hesitation, and with tragic simplicity, “Seeing people happy.” He conducts other actors in a recreation of a bullying incident and, again by that strange projection I have described, he seems to get off on directing the actors playing the bullies, his eyes bright with excitement as he breathlessly darts around the improvisation, urging “Take off his hat, it makes him more vulnerable – take off his jacket – knock him to the ground, he’s nothing.” In a stunning moment of violent ecstasy he acts out a wordless revenge attack after spotting the bully alone in a train carriage years later.

The variety of the ways these people act out their pain is intriguing. The woman with the absent father confronts him in an eloquent scene from King Lear; one in which she is tearful, but Lear is indifferent. The woman who wants love enacts a scene of mutual tenderness and poignancy. The local council worker viciously attacks a woman, crying crocodile tears all the while. He defends himself by saying “I wanted it to be metaphorical.” Guess what, pal. It isn’t. You really did just brutally attack a woman.  Dave, the suicidal, untrustworthy man only appears to hurts himself, in a grandiose performance which elevates him to heroic status. And it is all very interesting and very creepy and very haunting.

Gillian Wearing is to be congratulated once again. Self Made is an unflinching masterpiece of psychological horror.

*UPDATE, as at 11th October 2011. Dave, one of the participants in the film has emailed me. This is what he has to say. All capitalisation, spelling and grammar original and unedited:

okkyboyes@gmail.com
dateTue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:45 PM
subjectSelf Made, a film directed by Gillian Wearing (your review of)

Hello Bidisha,

     my name is Dave, I am one of the participants in Gillian Wearing's Self Made that got an art house cinema release at the start of last month. I read Your rather eloquent review that You posted earlier in the year, I suppose this is what You'd call a bit of (albeit belated) feedback.
     First of all I'd like to say thankyou for Your criticism as criticism in my book is of far more value than indifference and much of it is even quite valid, Your efforts may have even gone some way to raising the film's profile if only on the web.
     I'm glad that despite the inclusion of (maybe too many) males in the film You found it extremely interesting and totally absorbing, for what it's worth it was actually quite an interesting project to take part in.
    Your review which I thought was very impressive (and I'm sure You'll forgive Me if I say I found slightly amusing due to this anti-male thing You've got going on) does however contain a couple of errors. just for the record Asheq is not a humanitarian aid worker, He works as an arts development officer for a council based on the outskirts of South London. Also unless I've got My maths skewed the 16th of August, 2016 is not nearly 15 years in the future but less than 5. No big deal. That's all I wanted to say really. Anyhow best wishes and I hope You have a great life.  Dave