The Square (MA). Director: Ruben Östlund. Starring: Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, Terry Notary. 151 minutes
Last year Brooklyn Museum of Art held an exhibition of radical 20th century works by American women of colour. The radicalism ranged from overt (the sculpted head of a black man framed by a metal hoop styled as a gun sight) to subtle: Elizabeth A. Sackler's The Hole Truth is a vast but innocuous looking mural that reveals itself up close as a collage of countless hole-punched confetti, produced by the artist by hand in an implicit commentary on women's labour.
The exhibit was titled 'We Wanted a Revolution', and the very act of producing the art in an era when women — let alone black women — were expected to expend their labour largely within the home, constituted a large part of said revolution. 'For me, a black woman artist, to walk into the studio, is a political act,' said Emma Amos, the Atlanta, Georgia-born painter of the self-portrait Flower Sniffer (1966). Her words provided a thematic lynchpin for the exhibit.
But curating is about much more than putting artworks in a room. The narrative constructed by the Brooklyn curators of 'We Wanted a Revolution' was deepened and enlivened by its colocation with the long-term installation The Dinner Party. Judy Chicago's 1970s creation is a spectacular, powerful piece of Second Wave feminist art, that has long been noted for its white, middle-class preoccupations. Here the two exhibits sat side-by-side, in terse, illuminating dialogue.
All of which sheds light on the plight of Christian (Bang), the central figure of Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund's strange and captivating art-world farce The Square. Christian, chief curator of a prestigious Stockholm museum, is on the cusp of launching a new exhibit titled The Square, tasked with synthesising the artist's intentions with a curatorial and promotional narrative that will speak to the public and serve the museum's commercial and reputational imperatives.
Yet for Christian, there is a cognitive dissonance between the artwork's socio-political intent and the way he exists within the world around him. The work is accompanied by a statement by the artist: 'The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.' The film sees Christian confront a series of professional and personal challenges that entail weighing his own rights and obligations. Frequently the former is ascendant.
Consider his careless treatment of Anne (Moss,