Bangladesh - Still from Whores' Glory - A Kino Lorber release.

Still from Whores' Glory - Thailand, A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Vinai Dithajohn

Director Michael Glawogger has a knack for shadowing pimps and hookers through the city’s armpits. If he could stick his camera into a sulphur pit, a mining crevice, a slaughterhouse, or a city-sewer while knee-deep in slime, he’d do it. The third part of his existential trilogy that began with Megacities and Workingman’s Death culminates in the whorehouses of three metropolises – in the fishtanks of Bangkok’s red-light districts, at Faridpur, the City of Joy – a whore-ghetto in Bangladesh, and in the Camorra-run brothels and crack-joints in Reynosa’s La Zona in Mexico.  Besides the CocoRosie soundtrack what makes Whores’ Glory unique is the girls have separate spins on sin, sex and capitalism through the prisms of their separate faiths, Islam, Buddhism and Catholicism.

One sunny afternoon, we sat at a midtown park chatting about Asian whores, and I recalled the hostile reception I got once when trying to shoot inside Sonagachi, Kolkata’s whorehouses where they were naturally more welcoming of men. “No, women couldn’t go there. It’s the opposite of the world outside. Complete female rule,” stated Glawogger who is Austrian, and shoots with an all-male crew.

Faridpur in Bangladesh, much like Mumbai’s Falkland Road, is an all-female ghetto hundreds of years old, and Glawogger films like a fly on the wall observing some incredibly candid conversations and bitch-fights that makes Zana Briski’s brilliant 2004 doc Born into Brothels appear tame. “When you’re there everyday for so long, they just live their lives. We weren’t sneaky to catch anything – they get angry because they steal customers from each other, and they don’t care about others [watching] – they just want to hit each other,” Glawogger recollected. “Of course, there are limits,” he says, “The mothers are quite brutal, but you don’t see it probably to the extent that it is happening. Also, when the first attraction is over, people get bored of you.”

Still from Whores' Glory - Thailand - A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Vinai Dithajohn

It took Glawogger a bit of negotiating to film in these sin cities, and 2 years to gain permission in Thailand. “The King of Thailand, a very adored figure, said there is no prostitution in Thailand. So you have to apply [to shoot] about something else.” Glawogger returned over and over again, gaining his contacts’ trust, giving them photos, money and gifts.  “Slowly, we became part of it…”

He selected girls that knew each other enough to gossip freely. “I usually give them a task – to have a conversation while they wash, lice each other, do make-up, so it comes naturally.” Sometimes they show-off for the camera: “I caught them often lying to me, telling different stories, but I made a contract to myself, whatever they say is truth, because even if they do come up with funky lies – it’s part of their job to fake it, so why shouldn’t they fake it with me?”

“Thai girls don’t make such a fuss about sex, they are playful,” says Glawogger speaking about their Buddhist take on life. Workers mainly cater to Thais, though there’s a big industry catering to foreigners. “Thais are quite racist about it because they don’t like girls that have been touched by foreigners. The Japanese are even worse about it. Very high-class brothels in Bangkok are exclusively Thai. If you’re a white guy, they’ll politely say you can only take girls with the red numbers, and if you asked why, they’d say the others are students, or that foreigners have too big dicks.”

“From prostitutes you can get a world geography of dick sizes,” says Glawogger laughing.

Bangladesh, Still from Whores' Glory - A Kino Lorber release.

Now, even Asian girls learn to imitate western ways of being ‘sexy,’ and with Internet chat-rooms and gay apps like Grindr being used in Bangkok and Goa, geo-tagged hookups have gone global. I tell him that in Thailand I get mistakenly approached, as I’m told my breasts are big by Thai standards. “Yes in Thailand you’d be good, but not so good in Bangladesh, because they all want bigger bellies. They really power-feed the girls – with steroids sometimes. They even bleach them.”

I notice that they say penis in English even when speaking in Bangla. “Yes pay-nis, pay-nis…they have no word. No word for fuck, only the word work, doing work,” says Glawogger having gotten to know their girl-talk.

In her on-camera monologue a Bangladeshi girl coyly suggests, Allah did not make her mouth to suck dick. “Oh it’s very tame,” he explains, “she puts up her sari and it takes 5 minutes, there is no undressing. But of course they are lying about this dick-sucking because they do it for special money. Also, it’s interesting in terms of linguistics because they don’t have a word for it in Bangla, and it’s called doing ice-cream,” Glawogger quips.

Still from Whores' Glory - Thailand - A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Vinai Dithajohn

He gets the johns, who are usually stigmatized, to unload on camera. “Many people go to brothels – and they’re not the kind that rape young girls or are horrible people.  The only huge injustice is it doesn’t work both ways, [except] in Thailand. Young men in the subcontinent want to brag, be manly…either they do some gay stuff or go to brothels. As a young man in Bangladesh you can go nowhere, the house is full of family; the park is full of policeman. You can only have sex when you’re married. They go in and the conquest costs 50 takas. [US 60 cents]

Bangladesh - Still from Whores' Glory - A Kino Lorber release.

Whorehouses seem to be the most democratic of places. “But there are also many bad things,” says Glawogger, “When a young woman is alone on the street she’s already considered a whore, so they can just grab and sell her. In some social areas, if these girls fall in love, and if the guy finds a way to sleep with her, she’s fucked, then he can sell her as a prostitute because she had sex before marriage.”

In a visceral and poignant scene, a woman wails at her own misery: The desperation makes one question how fate conspires to place them there – trapped and ‘born to die’ as one mused in Workingman’s Death. But Glawogger questions my patronizing view, “I am not so sure about the no-future thing – it’s more about the moment, of how and when we do things.  There is no right life. What’s powerful is how they cope. I’d probably be happier working in a shipbuilding yard than in an office in Manhattan…” he says, looking at the caged midtown skyline around us. “A lot of people say, I could never live like that, but I totally disagree. Everybody can live like that when they have to. Going to an office and swallowing pills and seeing a shrink to make you happy is also not the solution.”

I suggest that in every human culture prostitution is the oldest alternative and by-product of mainstream monogamous culture. “I think it makes men utterly happy when they can just choose, and say No.33 – now! And the second aspect is they can go away afterwards,” says Glawogger frankly. “We are a pseudo-monogamous culture, enjoying the pretense of being monogamous and doing the opposite. The brothel is nothing more than a playground for easy access.”

Glawogger, who has shot in other Islamic countries, says sometimes the industry is ambiguous, “In Iran you can marry a prostitute for 2 hours, or marry her for a week and take her on vacation.” And then you can divorce them: “There are imams sitting in the brothel doing it,” he says.

Still from Whores' Glory - Mexico - A Kino Lorber release. Photo Credit: Maya Goded

In Mexico, Glawogger filmed a consensual sex scene between a prostitute and her preferred customer. I asked him what the difference was between pornography and prostitution with issues of privacy.

“In the process [of filming] I got turned down by many women who were otherwise quite frank, but said ‘listen I have an old daddy and he’s going to get a heart attack if he sees me.’”

After completing all three segments he traveled back to preview the film with the prostitutes in each country. “It was amazing, especially with the Mexican women because they were getting so angry about Thailand.” The Mexicans pitied the Thai in their fishtanks not being able to connect to their customers.  “They hated it, saying, thank god I live in Mexico,” he chuckled, “The Bangladeshis were totally uninterested about everyone else and just wanted to watch themselves. From an ethnographical sense they were amazed. For instance Hassina, the mother, saw herself, and pointing to the TV said, ‘what this woman says is true…what she says, the whole world should hear!’” Amused, Glawogger tells me they liked the film so much they gave him ‘permission’ to take them to the market and buy them new saris – he obliged.

What were his next projects, I ask.  “I’m always traveling the world hunting after a theme. Now, I’ll try to make a film about nothing.”

Every ten years a filmmaker comes along and takes the genre to the next level … Watching footage of the slaughterhouses in Nigeria in Workingman is tough on the eye, but remains a devastating depiction of death, showing how close animals and human come in their abjectness. I tell him I would love to seem more from Africa next. “I think Africa really shocks me,” says Glawogger, “and I am not easily shocked. And I haven’t even seen the worst. …Those are happy guys with good jobs [in the slaughterhouses]; it’s a strange beauty; can death be beautiful? It’s something unexplained, and those are the moments I am after.”

Director of Whores' Glory, Michael Glawogger

For more information:
http://www.whoresglory.com/
http://www.glawogger.com/

Barry Friedman Ltd. Work: Gottfried Helnwein, NY, The Armory Show 2010 © Gabriele Heidecker

Art fairs, with their aggregation of art dealers forming a one-stop shopper’s marketplace for art, attract high-spending collectors, generate greater sales, and have to some extent replaced galleries with their increasing drawing power. Before the recent market collapse, the frenzied demand for new art had peaked with the proliferation of smaller, budding art fairs. Some as satellites to the major European events, the biennials, art festivals and fairs such as Basel, Venice, Documenta, catered to lesser known, emerging artists. Even more notable are the fairs that have sprouted in Asian countries and off the map destinations, creating alternate markets for art, challenging the existing western hegemony – such as the Shanghai Contemporary, Art Dubai, Art Summit New Delhi and SP-Arte in Sao Paulo.

Berlin based photographer, Gabriele Heidecker has been documenting this new trend for the last few years, as a follow-up to her already published volume Art Affairs, containing candid behind-the scenes images of such events as Art Basel Miami Beach, London’s Frieze, ARCO Madrid, FIAC Paris, Art Cologne, which serve as watering-holes for artists, dealers and high-rolling investors alike. Heidecker’s photos reveal the subtext of commerce under the carnival-like atmosphere of the fairs, making us wonder if the transformative value of art is subsumed by its monetization.

Lady on the floor, Frieze Art London 2004 © Gabriele Heidecker

I met Gabriele Heidecker aptly enough, on a plane from India to the Emirates as she globe-trotted between art events in Kolkata to Art Dubai and Sharjah, which are emerging capitals in the nexus of new art in the Middle East. I asked Ms. Heidecker about her new book in progress.

Art Dubai '09, Waterhouse & Dodd, works by Ahmed Moustafa, catalogue with Shirin Neshat ©Gabriele Heidecker

What are some of the interesting new emerging art fairs you’ve been documenting for your new book?

All of the art fairs which I have attended since 2008 have unique atmospheres: Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair 2008, Art Dubai, India Art Summit New Delhi, Contemporary Istanbul 2009 and this year I’ve been to The Armory Show, Fresh Paint Tel Aviv, ART HK 10 Hong Kong. For example, Art Dubai is remarkable because of the attire of its visitors: the men wearing white robes and the ladies in black. The India Art Summit for the fresh, unprejudiced approach by its visitors. I’m looking forward to Art Moscow. Hopefully I shall be able to document the art fairs in Johannesburg, Seoul, Mexico City, and eventually Sao Paolo, Tokyo and Singapore, which are on my agenda for 2011.

What have you seen in these emerging fairs that are different to what is going on in the bigger fairs?
To mention a few differences, they are not as perfect as in our expectations of European Art Fairs and, the selection of works that are shown, are a result of different cultural conventions and understanding of what art is. The behaviour of the public is led by fresh curiosity and sometimes there is less of a distance between the viewer and the object of art. This has become particularly obvious at the east Asian Art fairs, for example at ART HK 10. But also they add a breath of fresh air to the usual bazaars of the art world – something very new may emerge from this confrontation between western logistics, style, understandings and – from my point of view, the unfinished, uncontrolled, regional but vivid state of these new art fairs. This may in turn lead to new horizons and greater opportunities for the more established art world and fairs in general, which are usually characterized by their exhaustive professionalism.

Art Dubai 2009 © Gabriele Heidecker

Will you be exhibiting the new images soon?
Yes in 2010/11, I intend to exhibit each of the “photo-portraits” in the respective cities where the photos have been taken – for example in Istanbul, the series on Contemporary Istanbul 09 will most probably be shown at the fair ground; in New Delhi and Hong Kong talks are underway with representatives of the Goethe Institute. Then there is an exhibition planned – including the publication of the next book, in Berlin with selections of all the art fairs including the European ones. My aim with these photo-portraits is to capture the special character of the individual art fairs as determined by the respective country’s culture and perception of art. I’m also interested in the people who set up these fairs as well as in the people who visit them and how they deal with this art-phenomenon.

Do you feel that we are tending towards a universal art, a global language transcending cultural conventions which will become a unifying force?
With art fairs appearing everywhere there seems to be a global aspect to this market – the phenomenon of the art bazaar can be compared to a global language. The art fair as an expression of western culture, as a benchmark for up-to-datedness and civilisation, and at the same time, as a type of implant, has been accepted and implemented worldwide – it is this phenomenon of the art scene which seems to me – to have a dimension of time on its own – and which I try to capture in the expanding moment.

Do you feel this will result in a homogenization of artistic influences – resulting in a singular codification of art history that will dampen future artistic expression?
To what extent and if at all this development will take place I dare not make any projections . . .

See Gabriele Heidecker in action on German TV.

The Armory Show , New York 2010, Leo König inc. New York, works Tony Matelli, Nicole Eisenmann, Ridley Howard © Gabriele Heidecker

India Art Summit 09 Sakshi Gallery: work: Isa Ho © Gabriele Heidecker

Contemporary Istanbul 2009; CDA Projects, works by Balkan Naci Islimyeli © Gabriele Heidecker