Time-specific art extends the principles of site-specificity into the fourth dimension, by integrating circadian rhythms or extreme duration, say, into its performance language, or by staging a work to coincide precisely with when it’s set. There seems to be a lot of it about, at the moment, perhaps because it offers a live corrective to the always on, ever present homogeneity of digital culture. ‘The ephemerality and transitory nature is its power,’ as Séan Doran puts it. ‘You either got to it or you didn’t.’ Doran is the creative director of Arts Over Borders, who have just announced two new programming strands.
Last Thursday evening, more than twenty Metropolitan police officers – some armed with tasers – broke down the doors of the Quaker meeting house in Westminster to arrest six young women. The women were attending a welcome meeting of Youth Demand, a small, non-violent activist group currently dedicated to action against climate change and the genocide in Gaza. None has been charged. Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, objected to the ‘aggressive violation of our place of worship’.
Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, was arrested early in the morning of Wednesday, 19 March, on two charges – one related to corruption and the other to terrorism. He released a video of himself shortly before the arrest, talking to the camera while nonchalantly adjusting his tie. ‘Hundreds of police officers have arrived at my door,’ he said. ‘I entrust myself to the people.’ The previous day, his diploma in business administration from Istanbul University was nullified, supposedly because of irregularities in his transfer from a private university in Northern Cyprus in 1990. More to the point, someone without a university degree cannot run for president.
France is the most visited country in the world, with over 100 million tourists a year. To welcome the merry hordes, property owners have converted vast amounts of housing into holiday rentals. There are more than 800,000 such listings in France; Paris alone has 60,000. Finding a place to rent to live in is a lot harder. Last year, France passed an ‘anti-Airbnb law’ that cuts tax breaks for holiday rentals and gives more powers to local authorities to regulate short-term lets and put quotas on tourist accommodation.
Last month, the Rwanda-backed March 23 Movement set up shadow administrations in key areas it has conquered in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rebels are closer to taking full control of the region’s minerals, especially its coltan reserves, which according to UN observers at the end of last year were providing them with $800,000 a month.
NYPD officers policing a protest outside Columbia University on 24 March. Photo © Kena Betancur / VIEWpress
There’s nothing surprising about Trump’s attack on the universities, or on the liberal law firms that he also despises. What is shocking is the ease with which his attack has so far succeeded. Like the academics and politicians in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, American college administrators and lawyers are responding to Trump’s bullying as if it were an opportunity to carry out ‘reforms’ – and as if they were secretly relieved that their hand has been forced by the Leader. This is a tale not so much of capitulation to an authoritarian leader as of collusion with him.
Tom Lowenstein, the poet and ethnographer, died on 21 March. His fieldwork in an Iñupiaq village in north-west Alaska began in the 1970s and resulted in seven books. Some were orthodox monographs; others, including Ancient Land, Sacred Whale and The Structure of Days Out used a combination of verse and prose (as well as personal observation) to take the measure of a complex society dealing with the onrush of modernity. His last piece for the LRB was a verse ‘conversation’ with Murasaki Shikibu, the 11th-century author of The Tale of Genji.