Scattered light on leaves in a flux of colours that only ever exist related to each other and by dint of their proximate situation, under over above and in motion. It sounds of waves. The aching surround sound of vibrating substances alive.[1]
Sic, so sweet, so sensorial. To me, Ghislaine Leung’s Bosses (Divided Publishing, 2023) is a generous publication; a soulful search, and quest, in text-body form. Written from a wholly personal point of view, here note-like passages and ekphrastic reflections convene as an atmospheric embrace. Indeed, turning each page, I can almost feel Leung beside me, her hand leading my own through the complexities of her life-in-practice. Further, and unfolding from this proximity, Bosses gestures beyond itself, with criticality, foregrounding a sense of freedom found when one removes the heavy mask of individuated autonomy and feels across the shared folds of our sensorial world; as Leung opens,
I felt you before I heard you. Heard you before I saw you. Felt the heavy purple pull and drag of birth, the force of push and tugged life. So short and numb and bright with lights and people.[2]
I first read Bosses in an afternoon, tucked up on my sofa—brown leatherette beneath a shore of fuzzed cream cushions. I read as the summer sun scorched the city outside. I read iteratively, looping back and forth and even beyond the publication’s four sections. I read, that is, so as to allow my mind to lap blissfully, cooly caught up in Leung’s artistry and voice. Almost bare of foot or endnotes, I am grateful for the expansive horizon this text-body set before me—the way it affords my thinking nearby.[3] Twenty-four hours later and I have resumed a seat—at my desk this time, it’s lacquered, beech-looking, with highlighter markings winking like jewelled threads in a length of beige. I am trying to put into words something of my affinative travelings with Leung’s publication. I do not merely wish to relay my experience reading Bosses, nor do I want to offer a quick interpretive summary of Leung’s critical take on the becoming face of Neoliberal individuation—nothing so don. Rather, I want to sit with this text-body and to tell you about what I feel folded and unfolded through Leung’s “off-ashen” artistry.
As an adjacent affair, the horizon I see with Bosses is a placeless place, one constituted first and foremost by my appreciation of Leung’s writerly style; “[a] simple manoeuvre of turning, of moving from one position to another. Rotting with festering mouldy leaves and a tiny new base growth”. As an allusion to the thinking underpinning the publication, Leung’s use of turning prose rewrites social connotations (ie, the negative associations of rotting and festering) making the given senses of words operate differently (to follow Leung, rotting and festering become “condition[s] of living and living well, inclusive”).[4] That is, here, through Leung’s voice, words become vulnerable to their interdependent feel—those senses beyond the socially given (to stress the definitive)—and abound so as to create points of intimacy. I feel this, at once in Leung’s language but more so in the text’s structural body.
Structurally Bosses breaks down into four layered sections. Rather than distinct chapters, each is an aerated mass of note-like passages and reflections—reflections that touch upon Leung’s experience of life, her artistic practice, as well as our socio-political surround. Slowly, over the course of reading, these sections dissolve—they sway, rot and glimmer into one another—becoming ever more intertextual weaves, burgeoning and held together with sic descriptive digressions. An example from the publication’s near end,
The sweet smell of frying minced meat, sticky onions, water slowly releasing.
I get paid 21.24 GBP per twenty-four-hour day, seven days a week for my job in the care industry. This is allocated for thirty-nine weeks, after which I will get nothing and no provision to work elsewhere without paying to do so. Implicit in the conjecture that I must buy myself free, is that I was born into debt.
Translucent semi-opaque frosted double-glazed panel blurring several objects in mint green, white, grey, royal blue, red, and shaped oblong, round and circular.
My mother was born in 1943.
High-contrast soft-focus wet light. Slimy flattened hairs on pulsating belly in aforementioned light.
Partner Look.
A car so compressed as to look toy-like.[5]
To me, this dissolving gives the text’s body a porosity; a sense where edges break down, allowing everything to flow with a haze and coolness. Far from a passive affliction, this flow has a tactility. Indeed, it invites my imagination’s touch, allowing me to feel beyond the confines of a rigid structural body and to sense some other figures, perhaps commonly adrift, in the horizon I gleam. And so, through this feel, here, I hear an echo of John Cage. Specifically, the philosophical way he privileges all the “purposeless” noises constituting silence,[6] so as to highlight how life is always more alive, more magical, than the frameworks used to hold it fast.
As with Cage’s musical compositions, the structure of Bosses allows for an equality across its constituting part. Here, Leung’s descriptive digressions are writ with a significance and a value equal to that of personal narrative or critical reflection. Taking the example above, Leung renders these small moments of sensorial life—the smell of frying meat, the view out of a window (perhaps), hairs on a belly—subjectively, in “high-contrast soft-focus”, using an ekphrastic mode to pattern the supposedly purposeless spaces that fizz and flow and fold in between an account of capitalist indenture and references to one’s human dependencies (mother and partner and child) who are also bound to this industrial mode of existence.
Now thinking about being, becoming and the allocation of one’s place within a hard system of debt and decorum, a lull of Virginia Woolf’s thinking ambles into the space of my misty mind view. Personally, the small moments of life elevated by Leung are not meek phenomena propping up a singular existence; they are fundamental moments of hapticity—moments of touching (to use the verb form purposely)—where the space of our being in the world is not only made newly sensorial but given a presence that allows us to feel across arbitrary divisions (personal/critical, etc.). That is, they are moments where we are able to find and to feel the interdependent folds constituting our social world. To quote Woolf,
Behind the cotton wool [of life] is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art […] We are the words; we are the music; we are the things itself […] One’s life is not confined to one’s body and what one says and does; one is living all the time in relation to certain background rods or conceptions.[7]
To pause, and step away, I want to consider my citing of Woolf and Cage here. Personally, I see an affinity between these cultural figureheads and Leung. To me each leans into the minute, the overlooked and the personal as a way to refrain, or to suspend with a sense of dissonance,[8] the socio-political context of their time. For Woolf, it was by rewriting the richness of her memories, weaving into her memoirs sparkling Moments of Being,[9] that she was able to question the artificial requirements placed upon her by the early 20th-century bourgeoisie—requirements which not only burdened her body but which debased her of sensorial contact with the artwork that is our world, hemming her into an individuated existence. Following Woolf’s autobiographical work, Cage’s canonical “Silent Prayer” (his ambient sonata, 4’33” from 1952) can be seen as a direct statement against the mind-washing Muzak of the Post-Fordist production line. With his empty score, Cage provoked listeners into embracing all the magic that is alive with and in and all around us, therefore blurring arbitrary divisions instituted by a managerial class wholly concerned with keeping workers’ isolated, productively in their place, so as to increase profit revenues.[10]
As with Woolf, as with Cage, for Leung the “raft of soft foldings” that patterns our being in and as the world are often effaced by socio-political background rods. Specifically, they are treated as purposeless, incoherent, unvaluable and therefore void in a culture that prioritises “for-profit speculative models of individualised financial independence” over the vivid feels found in the folds of our interdependent aliveness.[11] That is, a culture which privileges Neoliberal thought.
Following Leung, and numerous other contemporary writers,[12] we are living in an age stage managed by objectivising metrics. An age where freedom is falsely found in the form of an individuated self—a singular, self-owning self surmounted—detached from the flows and feels, and further, from those interdependent folds connecting our world, by a logic of compartmentalisation; as Leung states, “when you can compartmentalise, you can understand a thing, and you can make it efficient and you can profit from that. [In a Neoliberal society] there is a need to segregate yourself into parts in order to profit, to be successful in one part at the cost of all others”.[13] In this type of ever-optimising society Leung goes on, “your coherence is based upon whether you can trade as a certain commodity”.[14] This is a toxic ideology. One totally ensnared with self-exploitation and painful feelings of alienation. It is a logic that thrives on the production of inhuman levels of anomie, where one feels nothing, wrong if not centred, like a scared child, a body—barely a body—broken by fear and by guilt, a body asphyxiated by its own stasis. To quote Leung further,
… alone in the bathroom I failed to recognise the creature that stared back at me from the mirror.[15]
And so, to breathe and to look back out to—that is into—the pages of Bosses, it is against, or rather from within this logic, that Leung conveys how we are more than singular things; more than speculative property, hard pressed by background rods and market conditions. As a continuation of Leung’s practice, the publication’s textual dissolving enacts a kind of “low performance”, a way of resisting tight-wrought forms of deregulated individuality by “being too close, proximate and thigh-deep [in our interdependent folds] as a form of lived embodied critique”. For Leung, this way of working is about creating the “capacity to notice how things are”, doing this by tuning into the forces that manage how a being is (to stress the definitive), and rewriting these structural forces, making them vulnerable in a sense, in order to “imagine how they could not be as they are”.[16] This contingent rewriting imbues Leung’s often subtle gestures with a sense of suspense, a sense that asks a viewer to become cognisant of the layers of aliveness which fold to make our world.[17]
As I blink and look again into the shimmering haze of my horizon, a collection of bare, documentary-esque photographs at the heart of Bosses render visible the another way actions central to Leung’s practice and indeed to this publication-cum-portrait. Critically aligning with Cage’s philosophy of emptiness and Woolf’s thinking around the interdependencies of being, these photographs suspend the “look, remember me” spectacle and over-saturation associated with individuated cultural production, foregrounding the quiet reverberations innate to our common world. Further, in a way that riffs off the literary notion of a silver lining, these photographs confuse the compartmentalisations that uphold the background rods of contemporary (art) economies—the division of art and life—[18]alluding to a way of being more communal and forgiving.
Mostly black-through-white, or rather charcoal-snow-through-fluorescent-steel, these photographs each depict the temporary exhibition space within the Museum Abteiberg (Germany). Specifically, they depict this space during Leung’s 2021 solo exhibition at the museum (Ghislaine Leung, PORTRAITS, June 3 – October 24, 2021). If one is unfamiliar with the museum’s spatial body these images appear as minimal architectural views; marble floors and metallic pillars glisten under the museum’s lattice-like strip lighting. Almost wholly bare, even for someone who knows the museum’s space well, it could be hard to recognise the artwork we first encounter in these photographic spreads. “Browns [2021] is the flood for me. It is the work where the walls are painted with brown paint to hanging height, on all available walls”.[19] Leung’s description of the artwork shown running across these initial photographic pages makes it clear why Browns is not overtly visible in these documentary relayings; the warm pulse of the brown paint used to stain the lower half of the museum’s walls is not visible when rendered greyscale.
As an example of Leung’s practice of rewriting the normative ways things are done (once again, to stress the definitive), I find this ironic gesture hugely enjoyable. At once these photographs describe the artwork and Leung’s presence within the museum in high resolution. Operating through the formal opacity given in the editing process however, Leung’s refrain, her decision not to reproduce Browns in colour, literally makes me question what I am looking at. It is an open-handed pause. In a similar manoeuvre to the ekphrastic digressions that weave through the publication, these photographs draw my attention to the overlooked but fundamentally interdependent contingencies of a space—be these a physical or agential. Leaning into this conceptual side of Leung’s editing process, these photographs make newly sensible way labour folds so as to bolster the value and consumption of art, letting this “infrastructure of dependency” flow anew.[21] And in this way, they foreground the potential of porosity to confound Neoliberal ideologies where freedom is only found in the streamlined form of the autonomous individual.
To move this thinking into our own infrastructural bodies, Leung recognises the risks associated when a being—a you or a me—becomes porous in this way; when one trusts beyond the enclosed structure of a self, unfolding the innate vulnerabilities of being interdependent with all the others us that make this work of art Woolf calls the world. As a practice of resistance—of imagining other ways of being outside of toxic compartmentalisations—this is a risk Leung is willing to take. Indeed, it is a risk Bosses unfolds from.
All tender and all exposing, the first few pages of Bosses are given over to an account of Leung’s experience of postnatal motherhood. Specifically, the very earliest days of her motherhood, of holding her newborn child in her arms and feeling undone by the weight of Neoliberal expectation—the desire she had embodied to fulfil the self-sufficient role of The Mother. And further, how by aspiring to this self-sufficient role, Leung severed herself from the small folds that constitute her place in and as the world. This account is not an autobiographical commodity—it is not a narcissistic dictum hawked in the face of Neoliberal desire—rather, it acts as the first layer in an intimate blanket that unfolds and unfolds in lush syncopations throughout the text’s four sections. By exposing her own vulnerability—her realisation that freedom is not found in a notion of individuated autonomy so preached by the gods of “financialised disincorporated life” but rather reciprocated in caring dependencies—this account foregrounds the importance of interdependent relations, of love, to life-practices and freedom.
Blink blink, and again. Sitting beside Leung and looking out to the haze of my horizon—sensing Cage, sensing Woolf—I am reminded of James Baldwin’s own reflections on oppressive social structures (the racism of society). Specifically, how he foregrounds the importance of love to practices of resistance; as he states, “love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within”.[22] Personally, I see Leung’s practice, and its reflection in the pages of Bosses, as fundamentally being about the importance of love—of freedom found within intimacy, actual or desired. As a recomposition and unmasking, writ through the small moments of a life-in-practice, Bosses can be seen as a quest to rewrite the insipid logic at the heart of Neoliberal thought, using intimate exposure to transform a dictated sense of vulnerability into a position of resounding power. It is a daring quest, one that moves towards the glimmers of an interdependent horizon, where skies and salt seas are all washed up together, to riff on Leung’s final sentence; one where love, not only takes off the mask isolating our bodies but becomes a common blanket unfolded between hands.
—Toby Üpson, Autumn 2023
Bosses
Ghislaine Leung
https://divided.online/#bosses
978-1-9164250-0-2
15 b&w and 2 colour illustrations
21.6 x 13.9 cm
Paperback, 104 p.
September 2023
Notes:
1. Ghislaine Leung, 2023. Bosses, Divided Publishing. Page 94.
2. Bosses. Page 1.
3. A way of thinking that, to follow Lisa Robertson, “can help us to open our ways of coexisting, and so our mentalities, if not always to hope, at least to a discernment that evades the market-driven flattening and squandering of our intellectual and spiritual beings”. See Lisa Robertson, 2020. The Baudelaire Fractal, Coach House Books. Page 25.
4. Bosses. Page 19.
5. Bosses. Page 94.
6. Cage uses the term “purposeful purposelessness” to describe actions which affirm life. Such an action is “not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord”. (See John Cage, c.1973. Silence: Lectures and writings by John Cage, Wesleyan University Press (1973). Page 12.) Personally, I see an affinity between Cage’s philosophy and Leung’s practice.
7. Virginia Woolf, c.1982. ‘A Sketch of the Past,’ in Moments of Being, Triad/Granda (1982). Page 84.
8. To use the sense of the term Leung sets out in her text Complicity, Fetish, Agency. (See Ghislaine Leung, 2019. ‘Complicity, Fetish, Agency,’ Netwerk Aalst [online] https://www.netwerkaalst.be/en/text/ghislaine-leung-complicity-fetish-agency/.)
9. Roughly, moments of being are shocks in life where the artificiality of social convention is perforated, allowing us to see and to feel the reality that lives beneath our social face. For Woolf, these shocking moments come from the minute and the everyday. Further, by coming from quotidian experiences, these moments allow us to transcend tight-wrought social expectations and to become an undifferentiated part of a greater whole. (For a more detailed account see Jeanne Schulkind, c.1982. ‘Introduction,’ in Moments of Being, Triad/Granda (1982).
10. See Kyle Gann, 2010. No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”. Yale University Press. Pages 128-130.
11. Bosses. Page 15.
12. To name a few contemporary examples which I have engaged with: Lisa Robertson, Amber Husain, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
13. Bosses. Page 35.
14. Bosses. Page 91.
15. Bosses. Page 3.
16. Bosses. Page 16.
17. It is of note that most of Leung’s artworks operate through the engine of a ‘score.’ Leung’s scores are short written sentences which set the parameters for how a particular work gets shown. Rather than reiterations of 1970s conceptual art practices (instruction based artworks, for example), Leung’s scores operate in much the same way as musical compositions—ie, Leung’s short sentences define the notes to be played but the performer (an institution or exhibition body) are ultimately responsible for how these constituting notes are played. In this way, Leung’s scores accentuate the relationships that make here artistic practice possible.
18. For a detailed account of this division see Brian O′doherty, c.2000. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Expanded Edition, University of California Press (2000).
19. Bosses. Page 68.
20. When I say folds of labour, I am not merely alluding to all the time and resource that goes into artistic production, nor just to the unseen labour needed to ready an art space for a new exhibition. I mean to cite all the unseen, unvalued intangible labour that goes into maintaining the sanctified white-walled art space—from administrative labour to that of the cleaners, and further to that all the intangible acts of care that enable tangible labour to be undertaken.
21. That is, for Leung, it is by recognising the “complete porosity of everything,” how we bleed beyond our edges, beings intimately interdependent, all folded together, that she (and indeed we) are able to “create [new] boundaries that allow different things to breathe”. (Bosses. Page 35.)
22. James Baldwin, c.1993. The Fire Next Time, Vintage Books; 1st Vintage International edition (1993). Page 106.
Toby Üpson 