Stop With the Memoirs!

“Socialist Realism” by Trisha Low, 2019

This book is not really about socialist realist painting. Call me fooled. It mentions several Soviet socialist realist artists, including Kazimir Malevich and Victor Koretsky, yes, but in translation it means some kind of present Utopian longing within the real world - but not really. Socialism, let alone communism, was never achieved in the USSR. Nor is it achieved in this confusing agglomeration of diary, memoir, notes, commentaries and quotes.

Anarchist Diary

Low switches her narrative between Singapore, New York, Hong Kong, London and Oakland, California at random. She's a kid, then an adult, then a teenager. It's one year, it's another earlier year, it's a later year - because time, place and age are all subjective! It's about many movies, but it's not Zizek. It's about art shows, performance art, installations and exhibitions. It's about bi-sexuality, S&M, Freud and water-boarding. It's about her family, friends and occasional lovers. It's about hurting her knee at a May Day march.

Low's always talking about 'the revolution' in 'late stage capitalism.' She rejects identity politics while repeatedly mulling over identities.

Low's an anarchist, nihilist, punk, artiste. She's a cultural rebel running away from the strictures and capitalist 'success' of Singapore. She's obsessed with herself. I counted 12 references to “I” and “me” in one short, random paragraph. There are 99 quotations in this 158 page book which she meditates on, showing her erudition or perhaps substituting for her own lack of ideas.

The movies and documentaries she comments on: Adam's Rib, Rosemary's Baby, Snow White and the Huntsman, The Talented Mr. Ripley, No Home Movie, Freaks and Geeks, Jurassic Park, Repulsion, Amour, In a Lonely Place, This is Us, Loulou, House in the Woods, United in Anger, Army of Shadows. It's not all high-brow. She wonders if she and her friends could become the ordinary anti-fascists in the French film Army of Shadows about WWII partisans in France. We shall see. Perhaps she won't have a choice.

Low is from a middle-class Chinese family. Her father was an economist and professor. She went to a boarding school and later earned a Masters at NYU. She mentions her 'boss' once in the whole book, so it's not clear how she earns a living. Certainly it is not from book sales.

Post-modernism evidently infects current declasse, hipster radicals if this book is anything to go by. For some like her it might be entertaining and enlightening. For me it was a chore even to scan, although there were good bits about Singapore and about actual socialist-realist art by Robert Bird. Trisha Low's life is not that interesting, no more than the rest of us.  So save us from public memoirs and diaries. Save it for your family members or children. Please.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms if you are actually interested in art:  "Marxist Theory of Art," "Art of the Soviets," "Adios Utopia," "Art is Dead," "Desert of Forbidden Art," "Beethoven and Shostakovich," "9.5 Thesis on Art and Class," "Ways of Seeing" (Berger), "MInneapolis Institute of Art," "La Biennale Arte de Venizia 2019," "The Tate Modern," "Wanda Gag and Elizabeth Olds."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist  / June 13, 2024