As the nightmare of the UK election unfolded, I headed to Beeler Gallery here in Columbus, Ohio for Instance No. 5 of Jo-ey Tang’s exhibition Follow the Mud – a screening of documenta 14 artist Michel Auder’s 1970 film Cleopatra amid an installation created by Michael Stickrod.
I made a special Minus Plato edition for the screening – a reproduction of a conversation between Auder and documenta 14 artistic director Adam Szymczyck included in the 2014 book Stories, Myths, Ironies and Other Songs. On the cover I included an image of Boris Johnson’s appalling imitation-Classicism (which if you look closely has been tampered with to include a manipulated version of the Augustus Prima Porta statue with Trump’s head on it).
Accompanying the image, I placed the following excerpt from Auder’s conversation with Szymczyck:
Over and over again the same things happened, wars and everything else, showing the arrogance and incompetence of the governing classes. CLEOPATRA is about the behavior of the politicians controlling the world in general, but, of course, it is not precisely that. And the film is degenerated in a good way.
The image of the soon to be emboldened Johnson playing Caesar, with all the hubris that imitation entails, contrasts the degeneration of Auder’s film. Citing Hito Steyerl’s essay ‘In Defense of a Poor Image’, documenta 14 editor in chief of publications Quinn Latimer writes in a short text ‘Heads in Love’ (one of her ‘Twenty -Film Poems for M. Auder’ also included in the Stories, Myths, Ironies and Other Songs book:
In 2009. the filmmaker copied five minutes of footage from Cleopatra‘s orgy scene – the film the rust color of blood – and titled it Heads in Love. The reddish bodies blushing against Oriental rugs look like odalisques, like Ingres’s supplicating nudes, like many other dusky classical paintings depicting Cleopatra and her entourage (those by Lerouisse, for example). If M. Auder’s poor images are slowed down, as the poor often are, they are not quite still. They are not paintings: they are copies, mobile. Copies of “superstar” odalisques holding roses, draped in jewels. Viva’s hair the color of rust, as if on fire. “That rare prints of militant, experimental, and classical works of cinema as well as video art reappear as poor images,” Steyerl writes, “reveals much more than the content or appearance of the images themselves: it also reveals the conditions of their marginalization, the constellation of social forces leading to their online circulation as poor images.” The constellations are bright tonight, circulating. So bright, so circuitous, that we forget that their stars are dying. That is their brightness, their poverty; that is their poverty, their brightness.
Auder’s film and Latimer’s poem confirmed for me that now, with dangerous leadership cults in two fragile democracies, is not the time for so-called “Classical Reception Studies” to celebrate the poverty politics of imitation, whether of a Johnson Caesar, or a Trump Augustus (switch them around if you prefer). Now more than ever so-called “Classics” must be abandoned as a dying star, the light of which blinds us to our continued marginalization by the arrogance and incompetence of the governing classes. Only actors in a degenerate art (Viva’s Cleopatra in Auder’s Cleopatra) and its continued degeneration (in a good way) via circulation (by Auder’s Heads in Love, Latimer’s words, and this very Minus Plato post) can brighten the darkness of the course of the Brexit Empire to come.