When your fiancée brings home #SHADOWHOUSEFALL by the brilliant @danieljose1 and you feel like Christmas has come early, your depression is cured, climate change is reversed, white supremacy is fatally kicked in the face by Sierra Santiago. Shall I go on? READ THIS BOOK. #bookrecommendations #yafantasy #bookstagram #reading #sierrasantiago #booklife
⮤ Screenshot of Chauncey K. Robinson’s review on Sorry to Bother You (Authors own 2020, unpublished).
Today I read a Guardian Film Review... and Robinson’s connections between Riley’s film & reality.
In this review I read from the Guardian newspaper, Chauncey K. Robinson covers the plot, themes and a few thoughts on the movie that were shared by Boots Riley following an advanced screening of Sorry to Bother You.
She also touches on the conflict artists experience as activists by highlighting performance artist Detroit (Tessa Thompson), to which I have linked with the art of Santiago Sierra.
I know there is a sense of bias involved in film reviews that make them unreliable sources of academic information, but I find reading them can reveal another perspective to the characters, scenes and film techniques used. In this review, Robinson draws a connection between the surreal world in which the movie takes place and the reality we currently live in by referencing surveys on the attitude today’s generation have towards capitalism. In fact, she makes some important points on how Cassius Green’s character is based on the millennial attitude and lifestyle fighting or unknowingly working for people like Steve Lift, the absurd ‘capitalist boss’ within the film (Robinson, 2018).
As I read in Michael T. Martin & Yalie Kamara’s interview with Boots Riley on the matter of the “good fight”, Robinson also brings attention to the point Riley makes artists and their roles as activists (2020). Unlike that journal article, however, Robinson highlights the conflict in Detroit’s art: although she is aims to deliver a ‘social justice message’ in her work, she only perpetuates these injustices by selling her work off to the rich white people in order to make a living (Robinson 2018).
This reminded me of the work of Santiago Sierra, a Spanish and (controversially) politically-motivated artist who paid people $12 per hour to perform dumb, degrading or menial tasks in gallery spaces (e.g. pushing heavy blocks across a room or holding heavy plinths up in the air). With this, Sierra draws attention to labour exploitation, although we ask whether he critiques capitalist ideologies or simply perpetuates them.
⮤ Image of Sierra Santiago’s Nine forms of 100 x 100 x 600 cm each constructed to be supported perpendicular to a wall performance art for Deitch Projects in 2002 (Deitch Projects 2002).
REFERENCES MENTIONED:
Deitch Projects 2002, Image of Nine forms of 100 x 100 x 600 cm each constructed to be supported perpendicular to a wall, Deitch Projects, June 29, viewed 2 September 2020, <https://deitch.com/archive/exhibitions/nine-forms-of-100-x-100-x-600-cm-each-constructed-to-be-supported-perpendicular-to-a-wall>.
Robinson, CK 2018, ‘Sorry to bother you’, The Guardian (Sydney), 30 May, p. 11.
Martin, MT, Kamara, Y & Riley, B 2020, ‘Boots Riley on Sorry to Bother You and the Matter of the “Good Fight”’, Black camera: The Newsletter of the Black Film Centre/Archives, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 176-215.
