Tommy Malekoff: The Bluffs

Tommy Malekoff: The Bluffs, courtesy of  Galleria Zero

By WM STAFF February 6, 2025

They don’t abandon the city for alterity itself. They linger at the brink of unknowing…”

 —McKenzie Wark , 2017

Last week, artist Tommy Malekoff opened his two channel film installation The Bluffs in a derelict town house in Mexico City, the second stop on a three-city tour that includes Milan in January and Los Angeles in March.  The townhouse was a fortuitous replacement for an exhibition venue withdrawn at the last minute, but the three city tour was designed to rhyme with the work itself—a two channel montage of film shot among the golden hour and nightscape ruins of Detroit, Galveston and Memphis, TN.  All of the footage was shot as the artist traversed the rivers and bays of these great (post) industrial cities.  Call it the cis-aquatic Gothic.

The filmic vocabulary will be familiar from those who have followed Malekoff’s work, particularly the installation he presented in the underground space at Rockefeller Center in 2022.  His full color cinema verite weaves together moment of collision between nature and “civilization” as the two domains become enmeshed in one another. Estuaries and beaches are ideal zone in which to film, and theorize, such moments of entanglement. Manatees learn to navigate boat traffic, or peri-marine structures like docks and locks slowly decay back into the bays they demarcate. The projected film slips between two channel separation and overlapping montage, and is held together by an ambient/noise soundtrack composed by Rafael Anton Irisarri. The resulting score resembles equal parts William Bazinski tape loop and two stroke marine engine. Composer La Monte Young famously suggested that the 60hz of long-distance electrical wires was akin to a new heartbeat of the world. One wonders about the lub-dub-dub of seaborne trade since at the least the steam engine.

The Bluffs contains a number of remarkable shots, such as when the glassed-in Pyramid of Memphis (home to the world’s largest Bass Pro Shop) glides into view from Mississippi at dusk, looking like nothing less than a time swept vision of Memphis, Egypt floating past the Nile at any point over the last several thousand years. Or maybe not quite—the vegetation is temperate forest rather than desert.  Rather, the scene resembles the flora and chroma of European ruins painting (Canelleto, Frederic Edwin Church) transported back into the era in which the Pyramids at Giza did actually grace the banks of the Nile.     Malekoff himself cites Church’s Syria by the Sea, for its melding Roman, Islamic and European elements, as an inspirations for The Bluffs. Everything moves and gets overwritten and then overridden.

In another moment of palimpsest, Malekoff overlays a breathtaking shot of an illuminated of pod of dolphins racing through the ocean on top of a chilling profile of the derricks off the coasts of Galveston.  As the scores rises to a harmonic crescendo, the viewer is led into a feeling of release—the heaviness of the film seems to let go for a few precious moments.  There is the suggestion of renewal amidst toxicity, a sentiment that the companions exhibition text describes as an impulse for “cities to unmoor and float toward a future Atlantis.” And yet, Malekoff seems precisely an anti-eschatological thinker. Collapse and rebirth occur like the flooding and retreating of a riverbank, cycles with both planetary-ecological and human-historical timescales. The spaces remain the same, the places become irreconcilably different.  Like Nick Land’s figure of the poet described in the above epigraph, we “linger at the brink of unknowing, like a jury always out to lunch.”

Tommy Malekoff: The Bluffs

The larger passage from which this quotation is drawn indeeds provides a useful interpretative counterpoint for Malekoff’s film at the political moment of its debut.  Writing in response to the ideas of neo-reactionary philosopher Nick Land, theorist McKenzie Wark cites Land’s poet, an earnest figure with a "merely internal critique” of rationality, as symptomatic of our condition living on the crest of unimaginable  change.  Unable to theorize our own futures in any means better than the manatee, we gape at the maw of real time history.

For Land, global capitalism is of course the propulsive force, but is itself undergoing profound changes.  In the present moment of techno-modern acceleration, the rules of exchange are losing their “Kantian, juridical persona and becoming more like this poetics.” Much as a river will carve new paths flowing to the lowest path around a dam, capital is now aqua-forming its own brave new world. As Wark puts it eerily, “an irrational thing” is “supplanting capitalism with something else,” a new paradigm “that is also sovereign and unbound by any law.”

This words, written in 2017, sting in 2025. The breadth of the disruption, and the possibility of civilizational retreat, is impossible to digest in real time.  It seems unlikely the US will invade Panama, buy Greenland, or “own” Gaza. We almost certainly will not LBO El Salvador with its own Bitcoin.  And yet, the projection of soft American power abroad has likely been severely dented, with who knows what consequences. Voluntarily retreat from the world stage is not unprecedented, but it is historically anomalous. Perhaps the closest analogy might be with the Ming. Like our present world, 17th century China was riven by crises of cultural identity brought about by the extension of Empire far beyond the shores of familiar power. Leaders focused on regional ethnic rivalry rather than global strategic competition. They were undermined by climate change they could feel but not control, as well as by new capital markets they could not see, let alone understand. The pressure resulted in Executive Orders called the haijin—policies aimed to Make China Great Again through sharp restrictions on immigration  and trade.  Though the damage took some time to manifest, it turned out that policies such as seizing and burning all private ocean going vessels would cripple the reach of the state. The economy shrank, piracy loomed, corruption blossomed and rebellion flared.  And that was all before the Europeans showed up in force. For many Chinese, the ensuing centuries of debasement are now only maybe beginning to reset themselves.

Or, pace Malekoff, not even the dolphins know what will rush into the vacuum of empire. WM