Introduction
by Cher Tan
RETURN TO THE NORMAL
RETURN TO THE NORMAL
RETURN TO THE NORMAL
RETURN TO THE NORMAL
RETURN TO THE NORMAL
RETURN TO THE NORMAL
RETURN TO THE NORMAL
RETURN TO THE NORMAL
The spectacle is a hall of mirrors. It is an affirmation, a way of validating a reality that is unreal even as it evolves in real time. The clock ticks. Convex view. Conclave lens. It seems now almost trite to invoke Baudrillard and his simulacra, or Debord and his Societé, but their ideas endure because the challenges ahead are still waiting to be discovered, to be imagined into reality. Spectacle persists, in our real-life science fiction of living, where the president of the most powerful country in the world started out as a hammy businessman in a TV show, where his new sidekick is a alt-right edgelord who relishes jamming the culture with frenzied avarice. I won’t continue. I loathe to mention it. But continue and mention it I shall. After all, power equates to capital, and capitalism thrives on exponential growth. Upward mobility, return on investment, key performance indicators. And on and on. The developed world, versus the developing world. You get the gist. We could ignore the elaborate pageantry of the United States, but its many reproductions and representations trickle down to us in the Asia Pacific, in so-called Australia, where in front of Parliament in the nation-state's capital lies a monument dedicated to its glory. Further north, in Pine Gap, a top-secret military base operates out of sight, yet hypervisible in its architectural monstrosity. The tools we use too, from the various social media apps and even this CMS, now, have origins in Occupied Turtle Island. The spectacle spreads falsehoods and masquerades itself as propaganda. Meanwhile, the real gets swallowed up.
As fascist movements gain momentum on a global scale, political dynamics in Western democracies, in so-called Australia and elsewhere, are further entrenching racism, suppressing Indigenous and Black voices, and stifling dissent against the state. Governments frame this escalating violence as normal and necessary, making it more difficult to recognise that this repression endangers the freedom and well-being of our communities. That is where the spectacle comes into play, which Debord identified as '“at once unified and divided”. “But the contradiction,” Debord continues, “when it emerges in the spectacle, is in turn contradicted by a reversal of its meaning, so that the demonstrated division is unitary, while the demonstrated unity is divided.”
Meanwhile, as global extremism emboldens racial, gendered and queerphobic violence here, we see ever more instances of escalating censorship, aimed at destabilising what we understand as artistic freedom, such as when the State Library of Victoria abruptly cancelled workshops by three writers due to their advocacy for Palestine, or when our national broadcaster fired a journalist for tweets in support of the same. Most recently, a distinguished scholar of Palestinian descent has stoked queries about her Australian Research Council funding, while federal arts funding body Creative Australia has hastily rescinded an invitation—selected by an independent peer assessment process—to a prominent Muslim artist and his curator for a European Biennale.
Why no names? Because it could happen to anyone—and it will continue to happen—as spectacle attempts to envelope all attempts at dissent, “radical” or otherwise. It is a clear function of spectacle that even the mildest critiques are positioned as extreme by the state, a type of co-optation that then deems radical action as even more worthy of criminalisation.
These six responses that compose the ‘Spectacle’ series were commissioned and edited throughout most of 2024 as the spectacle continued above me, drawing me in and out of the different realities they were trying to convince me to endorse. Yumna Kassab offers an all-too-timely and (devastatingly) evergreen poem on submitting to an Art Board’s mercies inside the Art Industrial Complex, while Judy Kuo illustrates a simple yet arresting image of the chaos and pain in front of our eyes every second of every day, particularly since Israel’s attack on Gaza and Occupied Palestine fifteen months ago. Aurelia Guo puts together text from various sources as she finds opaque ways to interrogate the politics of victimhood in this iteration of capitalism. Meanwhile, Annie Zhang presents a short story where the protagonist’s vision causes confusion and dismay as she wonders about the disintegration of her relationship with her sister. Dilan Gunawardana pens an essay commenting on the Godzilla film franchise and how uncanny sounds gleaned from sensational stories remain in one’s consciousness, possibly passed on to our descendants. Finally, Kushim Magani—incidentally an alias for someone evading the watchful eyes of the State—wonders about the global sand trade during a time where capital’s guises remain ever more spectacular.
The text in the marquee above is the English translation of “retour à la normale”, a slogan used by the Situationists during the May 1968 revolt in France—it is meant to be read ironically as the sad observation of consensual submission, a byproduct of how the media manufactures consent for politicians and governments to manage public opinion. I’ll leave you with another (pictured): be realistic, demand the impossible.
Liminal is a recipient of Creative Australia funding.
Read Liminal’s statement regarding Creative Australia’s removal of Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino from the Venice Biennale here.
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Cher Tan is an essayist and critic. Her work has appeared in Hyperallergic, Sydney Review of Books, Art Guide Australia, Disclaimer Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, The Guardian, The Age and Overland, amongst others. She is an editor at Liminal and the reviews editor at Meanjin. Her critically-acclaimed debut essay collection, Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging, is out with NewSouth Publishing.