Art and the Politics of Visibility: Contesting the Global, Local and the In-Between 9781350985407, 9781786732941

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Zeena Feldman is Lecturer in Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She publishes on the relationship between social media and everyday life.

‘Things do not get seen by simply existing. In the world of visual culture, visibility remains highly political and a much-contested concept that touches upon issues of identity and representation, ethics and recognition, responsibility and justice. This rich collection of texts is a commendable attempt to rethink the politics of visibility in the context of art. It is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the vicissitudes of (in)visibility.’ Btihaj Ajana, Senior Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries, King’s College London and Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies ‘Art and the Politics of Visibility provides a lively and productive space for academic debates between visual culture, critical theory and transnationalism to meet, to develop and to exchange. It is wide-ranging in scope, moving from feminist arguments over the veil to the precarities of Chinese art, from the hospitality of Thai cinema to racialisations of UK video production. A powerful concern with ethics, borders and transnational knowledge exchange runs throughout this thoughtful collection, which will be of great interest to scholars across a range of disciplines’. Jo Littler, Reader in the Centre for Culture and Creative Industries, City University of London

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 ‘This is an extraordinary book. Genuinely transnational and transdisciplinary, it troubles borders and asks important questions about art, politics, representation and visibility. In doing so it opens up new ethical, intellectual and political spaces for thinking about visual culture. An exciting and contemporary read, it will be of interest to artists, students, philosophers, sociologists, media scholars, film-makers and journalists and anyone interested in the spectacular visuality of our rapidly changing world.’ Rosalind Gill, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, City University of London ‘At a time when interdisciplinarity has largely ceased posing the exciting challenges that it posed 30 years ago and has been comfortably assumed into old orders of discourse, along comes Zeena Feldman with Art and the Politics of Visibility to reassert the radical possibilities of such work. Bravo to her and her brilliant contributors’. Toby Miller, Visiting Professor for the Department of Social Communication at Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia

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Art and the Politics of Visibility Contesting the Global, Local and the In-​Between EDITED BY ZEENA FELDMAN

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Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright Editorial Selection © 2017 Zeena Feldman Copyright Individual Chapters © 2017 Chris Berry, Zeena Feldman, M. I. Franklin, Rachel Garfield, Patrick Hanafin, Janet Harbord, Juliet Steyn The right of Zeena Feldman to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by the editor in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art 17 ISBN: 978 1 78076 906 6 eISBN: 978 1 78672 294 2 ePDF: 978 1 78673 294 1 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by Knowledge Works Pvt Ltd Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements



Introduction: Why Visibility Matters Zeena Feldman

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Recognition and Misunderstanding Reading Visual Culture Through the Politics of Visibility

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1 Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World: Yang Fudong and the Politics of Precarity Chris Berry Introduction The Precarious Gesture in Yang Fudong’s Work The Precarious Space of the Artscape The Politics of the Precarious Gesture





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21 21 25 33 42

2 The Blind Spots of Representation: The Difficulty of Reading Juliet Steyn

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3 Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing M. I. Franklin

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Introduction Rationale and Argument Intellectual Background Veiled Bodies Misbehaving: ‘Islam is the New Black’ Naked Bodies in/as Protest Analysis: Modalities of Refusal Conclusion: The Geopolitics of Seeing v

73 77 79 81 91 98 103

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Contents

4 (In)Visibility as Resistance: Performing the Right to Disappear in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K Patrick Hanafin Introduction Narrative Voice and Writing as Effacement Tactical Invisibility or a Poetics of Disappearance Conclusion



5 Valences of Subjectivity: The Politics of Personal Narrative in Video Art Rachel Garfield Contemporary Contexts: From Race to Faith and the Persistence of Visual Codes Some Historical Junctures in Art The Personal Narrative



6 Hauntology and Hospitality in the Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul Janet Harbord The Beginning The Beginning II Haunted Film Spectral Knowledge Hospitality: A Seat at the Table



7 Ethics and Visual Culture Zeena Feldman Bibliography Index

115 115 118 122 129 137

137 148 152 167 167 169 174 178 181 189

211 225

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List of Figures 1.1 Fifth Night, 2010.

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1.2 Installation view of Fifth Night.

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1.3 From First Spring, 2010.

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1.4 From East of Que Village, 2006.

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1.5 The First Intellectual, 2000.

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2.1 Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy, 2011.

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2.2 Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy Classroom, 1994.

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3.1 I Heart Orgasms, Sarah Maple, 2007.

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3.2 Vote For Me, Sarah Maple, 2007.

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3.3 The New Black, Sarah Maple, 2007.

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3.4 Fighting Fire With Fire, Sarah Maple, 2007.

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3.5 Rebellious Silence, Shirin Neshat, 1994.

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3.6 Untitled, Shirin Neshat, 1996.

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3.7 Nida (Patriots), from The Book of Kings series, Shirin Neshat, 2012.

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3.8 Untitled, Shirin Neshat, 1996.

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5.1 My Song, Barbara Walker, 2006.

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5.2 ‘6.24’ from the series Chapter Six –​Racism, Dave Lewis, 2001.

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5.3 Video grab from You’re Joking, Rachel Garfield, 2005.

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6.1 Still from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010.

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List of Figures 6.2 Still from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010.

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6.3 From the Primitive Project.

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7.1 Asphalt and Chalk, Michael Brown, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Titus Kaphar, 2014.

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7.2 Yet Another Fight for Remembrance, Titus Kaphar, 2014.

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7.3 Boys in Winter, Titus Kaphar, 2013.

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7.4 Board Game: Suffragettes In and Out of Prison Game and Puzzle, 1908.

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7.5 Anti-​Suffrage Postcard: Where women vote there is no rest, 1910.

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7.6 Poster for an Equal Pay demonstration, 1944.

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7.7 SlutWalk Paris, 28 September 2013.

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7.8 Women’s March on Washington, DC, 21 January 2017.

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List of Contributors Chris Berry is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. In the 1980s, he worked for China Film Import and Export Corporation in Beijing, and his academic research is grounded in work on Chinese cinema and other Chinese screen-​based media, as well as its neighbouring countries. He is especially interested in queer screen cultures in East Asia; mediatised public space in East Asian cities; and national and transnational screen cultures in East Asia. Together with John Erni, Peter Jackson, and Helen Leung, he edits the Queer Asia book series for Hong Kong University Press. Prior to his current appointment, he taught at La Trobe University in Melbourne, the University of California, Berkeley and Goldsmiths, University of London. Zeena Feldman is Lecturer in Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Her research ­investigates intersections between communication, technology and everyday life. She is especially interested in the relationship between online and offline spheres, and the ways in which digital communication technologies impact understandings and performances of traditionally analogue concepts –​for instance, romance, friendship, conflict, work and self-care. Feldman has published in various journals, including Information, Communication & Society; Cultural Policy, Criticism & Management Research; and openDemocracy. Her monograph, Belonging in a Social Networking Age, will be published next year. M. I.  Franklin is Professor of Global Media and Politics at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research explores issues arising from the ways in which internet technologies collude and ix

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List of Contributors collide with changes in society, culture and politics. She has been active in recent years in research and advocacy on human rights issues and the internet, and is currently Chair of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) and has served on the International Communications Section Executive, as Chair of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the International Studies Association and co-​ Chair of the Internet Rights and Principles Dynamic Coalition (2012–​ 14) at the UN Internet Governance Forum. She has published widely, including Digital Dilemmas: Power, Resistance, and the Internet (2013). Rachel Garfield is an artist who also writes on contemporary and modern art. Garfield is Associate Professor in Fine Art at the University of Reading. Recent exhibitions include Unsensed, a group show at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (2015); London Short Film Festival (2013), ICA, London; and a solo show at Beaconsfield, London (2012). Selected relevant texts include Anwar Jalal Shemza: The British Landscape (ed. Iftikhar Dadi, 2015); ‘Parallel editing, Multi Positionality and Maximalism: cosmopolitan effects as explored in some works by Melanie Jackson and Vivienne Dick’, Open Art Journal (2013) and ‘Playing with History: Negotiating Subjectivity in Contemporary Lens Based Art’, in The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures (2014). Patrick Hanafin is Professor of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, where he also directs the Law School’s Centre for Law and the Humanities. His research engages with questions of law and the biopolitical, law and literature, human rights and citizenship, and the construction of community and identity. He has held research fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence, at the Human Rights Programme at Harvard Law School, and at the University of Cape Town. His books include After Cosmopolitanism (with Rosi Braidotti and Bolette Blaagaard, 2013); Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures (with Rosi Braidiotti and Claire Colebrook, x

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List of Contributors 2009) and Conceiving Life: Reproductive Politics and the Law in Contemporary Italy (2007). Janet Harbord is Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Her background is in English, Philosophy and Critical Theory and she is currently working on archaeologies of recent and early cinema. Her research is interested in the ways in which film exceeds the paradigm of entertainment as it appears in contexts of work, medicine, art, museology and domestic space (so-​called amateur film). Recent monographs include Ex-​centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology (2016) and Chris Marker: La Jetée (2009). Juliet Steyn has published widely on art and cultural criticism, and the politics of memory and identity. These themes are explored in her anthology Other Than Identity: The Subject, Politics and Art (1997), her monograph The Jew: Assumptions of Identity (1999) and a collection co-edited with Nadja Stamselberg, Breaching Borders: Art, Migrants and Waste (2014). She has been on the Editorial Board of Art History; Trustee of Pier Trust; and Chair of the Editorial Board and Trustee of Rear Window. She was previously Senior Lecturer at City, University of London. Steyn also served as Advisory Curator for Delivery & Patience (2001), Mike Nelson’s exhibition at The Venice Biennale and co-curator of Pretext: Heteronyms (1995).

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Acknowledgements First and foremost, my deepest gratitude to this volume’s contributors for their insights and seemingly endless patience with this project. Likewise, the team at I.B.Tauris, especially Lisa Goodrum, Anna Coatman and Baillie Card. Lisa, what a pleasure to work with an editor who still believes in editing. This book was inspired by a one-​day symposium I organised with the Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art in 2011. My warmest thanks to Parasol’s founder and director, Ziba Ardalan de Weck. Thanks also to the marvellous Charlotte Hale and to everyone else involved in the event, including Isaac Julien, Shani Orgad, Alan Ingram, Phillip Crang, Anthony Gardner, Gail Marsom, Evelyn Wilson, Richard Wight, Irida Ntalla and Nela Milic. I am forever grateful to the artists who contributed their work to this collection. Those pieces have enriched the collection immeasurably, and allowed it to challenge the politicised optics of assumed recognition. Special thanks to Titus Kaphar, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Sarah Maple, Shirin Neshat, Rachel Garfield, Barbara Walker, Xu Bing and Yang Fudong. Thanks also to the Marian Goodman Gallery, the Gladstone Gallery, the Jack Shainman Gallery, Kick the Machine Films and the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics. Finally, to the friends and colleagues who’ve supported this project and its editor over the years. Marianne Franklin and Jo Littler, your intellectual support and unwavering kindness have meant everything. Lynn Stermer, words are not enough. For Anthony Pavese, Devon Tumgoren, Hedvig Andersson, Jamie Nulph, Matthew Upton, Lena Patel, Faradane O’Callaghan, Carmina Guzman, Alex Quiroga and Sumedh Shastri, words will have to do. Finally, to Takanobu Takeuchi and to pizza: you make life worth living. xiii

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Introduction: Why Visibility Matters Zeena Feldman

Recognition and Misunderstanding This collection takes as its starting point the complex relationship between visual culture and transnationalism –​a relationship increasingly marked by the porosity and reconfiguration of borders. As a wide range of research in art history, media studies, material culture studies and beyond has shown, art can no longer be considered outside the media or the market, and both media and market are profoundly enmeshed with the transnational.1 Likewise, the processes and agents of globalisation mean that the products of visual culture are increasingly tied to a multitude of geographies and geopolitics.2 Art and the Politics of Visibility:  Mediating the Global, Local and the In-​Between, thus, investigates expressions of the political within transnational economies of symbol production. This volume argues that through a vortex of intersection and category seepage comes a politics of representation in which rigid dualisms  –​between, for example, the West and the Rest, cause and effect, remembering and forgetting –​have proven bankrupt. It is a politics in which hiding can be a strategy for being seen, and 1

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Art and the Politics of Visibility a politics where being seen can gesture misrecognition. And it is precisely through these politics of interrelation and (mis)recognition that this book attempts to locate the discourses that inform what it means to be a ‘global’ subject today. Indeed, the contributors to this volume challenge us to rethink the very utility of ‘global’ as a marker of meaning. These contributors include an internationally recognised artist, a media and politics scholar-​cum-​activist and distinguished scholars from the fields of visual culture, film studies, digital humanities and the law. Together, they approach art in an expansive way –​one that embraces fine art traditions alongside literature, popular culture image-​making, fashion and film. Interdisciplinarity is at the heart of this endeavour. This book, and its interdisciplinary approach, was inspired by a symposium I organised in 2011, while a doctoral candidate at City, University of London. As a frequent witness to academic conference conventions (and an occasional participant thereof), I  noticed a troubling pattern to how such ‘meetings of minds’ routinely panned out. More often than not, these encounters were etched by disciplinary demarcation, by the compartmentalisation of knowledge: a workshop for sociologists here, one for art practitioners there, a conference for film scholars someplace else. It was a situation, it seemed to me, remarkably similar to Rudyard Kipling’s old imperialist lament, ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’.3 I found this approach baffling. Why erect boundaries to knowledge exchange? Why fetishise narrow frameworks of sameness when intersection seemed to offer so much to the task of understanding? Why not tap into the conceptual cross-​pollination that difference makes possible? Isn’t that the point of scholarship and thought in the first place? To that end, I  wanted to do things a bit differently. Instead of gathering a bunch of people with a shared intellectual lexicon, 2

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Introduction: Why Visibility Matters I hoped to bring together participants from different walks of life and divergent intellectual traditions. Luckily, I was able to convince Ziba Ardalan –​art historian, curator and founder of the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art  –​to go along with the experiment and partner up for a one-​day symposium about art not run by artists or art critics. We quickly learned that there was a voracious appetite for this unconventional approach. The symposium drew enthusiastic delegates (and a long waiting list) from a wide range of specialisms and backgrounds. Among the speakers we hosted was Turner Prize nominee Isaac Julien; media and communications scholar Shani Orgad; art historian Anthony Gardner; cultural geographer Philip Crang; political geographer Alan Ingram, as well as some of the contributors to this volume. Collectively, the experiment demonstrated that there is a lot to say about art, and visual culture more broadly, and not just by its historians or practitioners. It is precisely this interdisciplinary, border-​busting way of seeing that underwrites Art and the Politics of Visibility. Through dialogue with fine art, film, literature and fashion, the contributions here draw attention to the power relations implicated in and upset by claims to visibility. They show how visual culture and the cultural industries are today complicated by the geopolitics of location and mobility, inscribed with tensions between knowledge and perception. What are we to know by what we see? Indeed, might our ways of seeing actively support misrecognition?4 This volume suggests that we abandon the modernist goal of intercultural dialogue and translation:  the goal of mutual understanding. We would do better  –​ethically and conceptually  –​to acknowledge the misrecognitions embedded in what we think we know and see. Juliet Steyn, through Agamben, notes that ‘The ways in which we do not know things are just as important… as the ways in which we know them’. Thus, perhaps it is from the vantage point of not knowing –​from the perspective of our infinite ignorance –​that 3

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Art and the Politics of Visibility we may avoid repeating the mistakes committed in the name of identity and visibility. Through case studies and theoretical interventions, this collection explores juxtapositions between the ‘here’ and ‘there’ and reflects on what such terms might mean in an increasingly globalised world. What are we to understand, for instance, by a ‘Chinese’ exhibition on view at a London gallery? How does the visibility offered by the global art market speak to the politics of misrepresentation and misunderstanding? Such questions put into sharp relief the challenges of understanding either ‘there’ or ‘here’ because they underscore the limits of the visual as a modality of recognition. To see something is not the same as to know it. Through attention to translocal circulations of symbols, goods and mediatised representations, this volume invites readers to engage critically with articulations of ‘self ’ and ‘other’, ‘global’ and ‘local’, and to consider anew how these frames of meaning (fail to) help us understand the visual cultures of elsewhere.

Reading Visual Culture Through the Politics of Visibility To initiate the dialogue between visual culture and transnationalism, this book begins with the work of renowned Shanghai-​based video artist Yang Fudong. Yang’s films address the uncertainties of contemporary globalised life, and the unstable connections between visibility and knowledge, between the global and the local. His work poses the twin questions of what it means to be an international artist, on the one hand, and a ‘local’ citizen, on the other. How does (or should) an artist navigate between –​and within –​these labels? How might it matter to be marked out as ‘one of ours’? And critically, who determines the marking? As Ai Weiwei’s now-​familiar political struggles have shown, these labels can have real purchase 4

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Introduction: Why Visibility Matters on freedom of expression and movement, not to mention on one’s professional livelihood. Film scholar Chris Berry explores these tensions in his chapter, with particular attention to Yang Fudong’s image-​making practices and how these intersect with the domestic and international visibility, understanding and valuation of the artist and his work. As an artwork moves into the transnational market –​what Berry calls the ‘artscape’ –​the work often acquires new vectors of meaning. In Yang’s case, his visibility in the ‘artscape’ in is invariably linked to signs of geopolitical identity and inscribed in terms of citizenship. He is seen first and foremost as a Chinese artist; his work is read by the transnational art market as necessarily ‘Chinese’. What are we, as cultural critics, to make of this? Are we confronted here with the limits of the transnational as a geographically and politically agnostic category? Worse, are we witnessing a sort of cultural imperialism whereby the ‘foreign’ artist is confined to a conceptual framework of someone else’s making, rendered an object of someone else’s knowledge and stripped of her/​his unknowability, singularity and infinite heterogeneity?5 Or might the artist retain a certain agency and power by playing with audiences’ limited understanding of the visual cultures of elsewhere? Berry suggests that both possibilities may be at work. He notes that Yang’s films draw on particular constellations of national identity  –​namely, those that favour ‘the deployment of signs of Chineseness that foreigners can recognise and like’. Here, the artist makes use of aesthetic and ontological repertoires of ‘Chineseness’ that connote a certain ease and familiarity to foreign audiences. The result: consumer-​friendly representations of the national self, and a warm welcome by the global art market. Yet Berry proposes ‘the precarious gesture’ as a more critically robust framework for understanding the aesthetics, mechanics and politics of Yang Fudong’s work. For Berry, the precarious gesture is ‘a double term to understand both Yang’s conditions of production 5

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Art and the Politics of Visibility and the aesthetic characteristics and themes of his work’. The chapter argues that ‘Yang’s films constitute a new cinema of the gesture that is tentative, mysterious, and beguiling, but also sometimes frustrating’. This new cinema is frustrating precisely because it resists conceptual capture; this is art that refuses to give up its meaning (nb. Hanafin, Chapter 4). And in large part, this mysteriousness is what underwrites and facilitates Yang’s success both at home and abroad. Yang’s work plays with the core elements of visibility: time, narrative and perception. By combining diverse historical iconography in a mysterious, not-​quite-​real present, the artist upends temporal and narrative certainty. As a result, the viewer never quite knows where (or when) she is. Likewise, this sense of dislocation is enhanced by the multi-​channel nature of Yang’s video pieces –​for instance, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2008) and Fifth Night (2010). With each work spanning multiple screens, Berry writes, ‘the viewer is even less sure where to look or how to make sense of what she sees’. Indeed, Berry’s chapter suggests that ‘these qualities of the work are themselves responses to what suits both the Chinese art market and the transnational art world’. In other words, global consumer society and non-​democratic polities both favour a degree of inscrutability. They both support a visual culture of ‘I’m not sure’. Such ambiguity allows Yang to skirt domestic political sensitivities while enjoying the spoils and visibility proffered by global capitalism. Berry notes that participating in the local Chinese art market and the transnational one ‘is a precarious gesture in the double sense of danger and opportunity’. And while he rightfully observes that ‘What viewers will make of art is always beyond control’, questions of (mis)reading remain. To that end, (mis)reading is the central concern of cultural theorist and art historian Juliet Steyn’s contribution to this volume. Part personal reflection, part philosophical intervention, the chapter questions how the art world’s various actors  –​audience 6

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Introduction: Why Visibility Matters included  –​encounter ‘foreign’ art. In unpacking the interpretive practices (and failures) of ‘making sense’, Steyn engages with the works of Yang Fudong, Xu Bing and Michelangelo Antonioni. In the process, she seeks both to understand the role of criticism and to locate its limits. How, then, do individual viewers read a work of art? How do ‘we’ come to understand what ‘they’ –​the artworks and the artists of elsewhere –​mean? What role do viewers’ own national mythologies play? How might culturally distilled constellations of reference –​oftentimes, synonymous with ethnographic (and historical) pastiche  –​influence our understanding of what we think we see? Moreover, how might we foster interpretation outside national frames of Identity? Echoing Berry, Steyn observes that ‘there will always be misreadings, mispronunciations and blind spots’. Some of these, the chapter usefully suggests, are linked to the role the global art market plays in focusing audience attention, in delineating the public’s cartography of aesthetic knowledge and interest. This global market achieved $63.8 billion in sales revenue in 2015,6 and it is instrumental in driving the visibility of particular visual cultures and geographies of production. The power centres of art-​making, in other words, are invariably linked to economic formations. And today, Steyn notes, China is in. Picking up on Berry’s concern for how meaning travels  –​or fails to –​Stern looks to Yang Fudong’s work to ask how his pieces manage to signal geographic certainty whilst remaining open to the epistemological ambiguity prized by the global market. Yang’s work employs a Chinese aesthetic vernacular, but it manages this ‘without foreclosing [upon] the potentiality of meaning for a differentiated public (and for the global art market)’. Steyn suggests that Yang’s international success may be rooted in his work’s challenge to the way art from ‘other’ cultures –​particularly non-​Western cultures –​has long been thought. While art from 7

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Art and the Politics of Visibility the West has historically been seen as Art, art by the ‘other’ tends to have been read as ethnography. This tradition set up a binary between aesthetics and ethnography –​a (false) dichotomy between Art and something less-​than (e.g., documentary, observation). And Steyn observes that a related binary seems to govern how we read work by Chinese artists today: art versus politics. That is, the work is seen either as the self-​referential deployment of art history7 or as a political statement constructed through ornaments. The critical question for Steyn is whether, in this current arrangement, it is possible to ‘salvage art from subordination to politics’ and to do so without turning a blind eye to the political. Indeed, art criticism necessitates an ethical obligation –​an ‘obligation to be clear about [the critic’s] vantage point’. Hal Foster, for instance, frames his analysis of Xu Bing’s artwork as ‘from a Western perspective’ (Steyn, Chapter 2). Yet this cultural positioning  –​ whereby we read the ‘other’ from the perspective of the ‘self ’  –​is itself ethically fraught.8 Elizabeth Lee, for example, insists that Xu’s work must be read ‘first and foremost, as Chinese’.9 But it seems to me that such teleological argumentation simply reinscribes the aesthetics-​versus-​ethnography, and art-​versus-​politics, binaries the contributors to this volume are so keen (and right) to challenge. Those binaries suggest that there is a ‘right’ way to read a work of art. Yet as Steyn reminds us, Every work of art offers the prospect of many readings, many interpretations and in the historical context of its making and reception some readings may be preferred over others –​preferred by the artist, by the spectator and by the critic.

Opportunities for misrecognition abound. But this should not be read as endorsement of a defanged cultural relativism. On the contrary, Steyn’s analysis seems to insist upon not knowing as the ultimate ethical responsibility of the critic. Uncertainty allows the critic 8

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Introduction: Why Visibility Matters to acknowledge the complexity of influence and unknowability of intention. Raymond Williams noted that ‘Nobody really knows the nineteenth-​century novel; nobody has read, or could have read, all its examples’.10 Likewise, we might argue that nobody really knows Chinese –​or any ethnically demarcated form of –​ art. As previously discussed, openness of meaning is skillfully deployed by Yang Fudong. His video pieces in particular are structured by unknowability, by what Steyn calls the ‘I’m not sure’ and Berry dubs the ‘precarious gesture’. This ambiguity provides an opportunity to reevaluate the role, and expectations, of art. Is art meant to foster shared understanding? If so, then how can the work of art ever exceed politics, or ethnography? How can it ever approach the ‘aesthetics-​plus’ to which Steyn refers? There are many ways to read and misread the work of art. Steyn’s chapter suggests that it is by embracing art’s unknowability –​by championing uncertainty –​that ‘we might avoid the disasters that are, and have been, committed in the name of Identity’. A key task of criticism is to explain what one sees. But this formulation has its limits. Perhaps, then, rather than trying to describe the visible we would be better served by seeking to understand why we see things a certain way –​to try to understand the ways by which we strive to make sense of what is in front of us. Caught in the trade winds of the global art market, the viewer stands perched on the precipice of misunderstanding and naïveté. This, Steyn hints, is the ethical position to which criticism should aspire. Picking up on Steyn’s concern for blind spots, M.  I. Franklin’s chapter turns attention to how political commitments –​in this case, liberal and feminist –​can create barriers to knowledge and understanding of the body and sartorial practice. Through engagement with works by artists Sarah Maple and Shirin Neshat, and activists Aliaa Magda Elmahdy and Amina Sboui-​Tyler, Franklin locates the (mis)alignments and tensions embedded in the relationship 9

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Art and the Politics of Visibility between art and politics, between art and protest, particularly as related to representation of Muslim women’s bodies. Franklin explores these (mis)alignments vis-​à-​vis two parallel contexts: ‘the regulation of Muslim veil dressing’ in the EU and the US on the one hand, and ‘women’s naked protests’ in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) on the other. To that end, Franklin juxtaposes women’s social movements with the history of the veil in order to draw attention to the ways in which corporeal and sartorial expression can become politically instrumentalised. In other words, how aesthetics can become subordinate to politics. She notes that in the 1970s, for instance, female students in Turkey and Egypt were taking up the veil whilst their counterparts on European and American university campuses ‘were mobilising against forms of sexual discrimination […] by disrupting beauty pageants and holding public “burn the bra” events’. Both histories speak to the body –​ its representation and its materiality –​as a site of socio-​political conflict, knowledge and (mis)understanding. By exploring how the veiled and unclothed female body is mobilised in the West and the MENA region by artists and activists, Franklin offers poignant analysis of the ways in which displays of Muslim women’s bodies can come to function as proxies of global geopolitics. The body is thus rendered a site of struggle in debates about what emancipation looks (and is dressed) like. Among the ‘defiant embodiments’ Franklin examines are British artist Sarah Maple’s humour-​saturated self-​portraits. Maple’s work combines sartorial symbols of Muslim identity with aesthetic gestures to Western liberal feminism. One painting (2007), for example, shows a burqa-​clad woman wearing a badge which reads ‘I heart orgasms’. Another piece plays with the visual culture of democracy by employing and subverting the conventions of the political campaign poster. That work (Vote for Me, 2007) shows Maple in a hijab asking for people’s votes and warning that not voting for her would be Islamophobic. As Franklin astutely notes, ‘What makes [Maple’s] 10

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Introduction: Why Visibility Matters images challenging is that they confound both Islamophobic and Islamist readings of veil dressing and Muslim womanhood’. Likewise, two young women in Egypt and Tunisia, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy and Amina Sboui-​Tyler, used social media to broadcast their own ‘defiant embodiments’, posting naked and partially clothed selfies on Facebook. Elmahdy and Sboui-​Tyler aligned their actions with the gendered liberation politics of the ‘European-​based Femen organisation’  –​an organisation that deploys female toplessness as its chief method of protest. Through these women’s online activism, Franklin explores formations of rebellion and refusal ‘through user generated content rather than formal artistic practice’, in yet another fusion of aesthetics and politics. Social media has the power to give voice. This ‘talking back’ capacity, as explored in the defiant selfies case study, draws attention to the increasingly mediatised and, to some extent, pluralist and populist, nature of contemporary geopolitics. The Elmahdy and Sboui-​Tyler case shows how, through a ‘global’ communication platform like Facebook, corporeal visibility can come to serve as a modality of the political. Through art and user-​generated content, Franklin shows how women on both sides of the veil are confounding expectations of what a woman should look like, how she should be seen and by whom. Emancipation and oppression, Franklin shows, are both subject to blind spots. Indeed, it is by questioning assumptions that so often over-​determine the visual culture of identity that we can locate ‘synergies between art and protest’ and engage in a ‘morality of refusal’11 –​an ethical politics of unknowability. Unknowability is at the foreground of Patrick Hanafin’s contribution to this volume. Hanafin –​a critical legal scholar –​turns to literature as an art form by which we might unpack the vagaries and (mis)workings of identity. Through engagement with the writings of Maurice Blanchot, Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka and others, Hanafin beckons us to reassess what visibility is ‘good’ for, 11

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Art and the Politics of Visibility and to ask for whom it is ‘good’ and at whose expense. These questions prove provocative, with the chapter staging a radical subversion of the very categories and mechanics of identity. Consequently, it also sketches the undoing of the politics, ethics and, indeed, the utility, of visibility. Conventional wisdom dictates that identity, as both ongoing process and fixed state, is largely conferred through visibility. This suggests that recognition and understanding are derivatives of visibility, and that power is an outgrowth of ocular knowledge. This view, in effect, insists that identity is powerful only so long as it can be seen and named. (We need only look to the history of Europe’s mapping –​ and its history of war –​to see this logic at work.) Yet Hanafin seeks to subvert this orthodoxy by showing us how invisibility and the lack of identity can act as sources of even greater power. To that end, the chapter examines J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K and, through it, champions the right to (and empowerment via) invisibility and disappearance. Coetzee’s novel tells the story of Michael K, a partially disfigured man who ‘lives in the gaps of [a] society’ that views those who don’t belong with suspicion and hostility. In fact, the State rounds up people like Michael K –​‘those who have no fixed place, the homeless, the vagrant, the old, the infirm’ –​and deposits them in internment and labour camps. It is from inside one of these camps that we come to understand the tyranny of articulated identity and the violence of regimes based on recognition. Camp authorities repeatedly ask Michael K to identify himself; Michael K repeatedly fails to do so in a way that satisfies the authorities. Hanafin deftly shows that it is precisely through this silence and refusal to be categorised that Michael K unwittingly threatens the very fabric of political order. ‘The representatives of power attempt to force him to speak in order to form him as a citizen with an identity. They attempt to form him and make him visible, to identify him’ (Hanafin, Chapter 4). Yet Michael K resists such interpellation. He 12

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Introduction: Why Visibility Matters resists the trappings of identity-​as-​visibility/​identity-​as-​knowledge-​ claim. It is thus through this refusal of identity that we see how the categories of self and other –​‘us’ and ‘them’ –​work to prop up State biopower. By refusing the persona of citizen or foreigner, Michael K attains a sovereignty delinked from State formations of power, and it is in this delinking that the State becomes imperiled. As Hanafin notes, ‘What the law cannot abide is non-​identity’. Thus, it is by embracing non-​identity –​in refusing to be captured by state-​sanctioned categorisation –​that Michael K ‘creates the possibility for action and for the cultivation of freedom’. Through namelessness and invisibility, Michael K becomes free. To lay claim to identity through visibility and pre-​defined categories is, on the one hand, to have a place in the here and now. Likewise, identity links one to narrative history, to a linear story about ‘us’. Yet Hanafin points toward the possibility of a more liberatory temporarily and a more progressive politics enabled by invisibility. This is a politics which ‘provides an opening to the future, not a monumentalisation of the past’. It is a politics made accessible when forms of togetherness are not hinged on State power or on pre-​inscribed narratives of self and other. The politics of invisibility, in other words, allows for expressions of sovereignty and community not beholden to shared repertoires of recognition, understanding or certainty. Hanafin’s chapter thus opens the door to another kind of subjecthood in which visibility is delinked from knowledge, and where power is not contingent on being seen or named. The relationship between visibility and knowledge is also the subject of Rachel Garfield’s chapter. A cultural theorist and acclaimed artist, Garfield charts a shift in how politics is represented in visual culture, paying particular attention to the changing narratives of self and other in video art. Through critical engagement with her own work and that of others  –​including Barbara Walker, Dave Lewis, 13

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Art and the Politics of Visibility T. J. Demos, Francis Alÿs, Shirley Clarke, Mel Jackson, Emily Jacir, the Otolith Group, Adrian Piper, Nikki S.  Lee, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Omer Fast and Walid Raad –​Garfield asks important questions not only about who is visible in narrative art today, but also about how they are made visible and at whose expense. Contemporary artistic practice, the chapter argues, has turned its attention away from identity politics. Instead of the once-​dominant ‘politics of subjectivity’, artists are increasingly concerned with narratives about ‘the politics of population mobility and power’ –​what Garfield later terms ‘the politics of war’. Local issues, and interest in micro-​representations, in other words, have given way to more global concerns. As a result, the visual culture of the-​personal-​is-​ political has ceded to representations attendant to much broader psycho-​geographies –​focusing, for example, on refugee flows, border control, terrorism and state surveillance. As art’s political narrative shifts toward the global, Garfield notes that ‘focus on colour and (individual) visibility have diminished considerably’. The chapter skillfully questions the impact and utility of this replacement (and displacement). How are we to read, for instance, the supplanting of one visibility with another? After all, just because art about personal politics is no longer de rigueur, it hardly means that individual narratives of struggle have disappeared. Indeed, Garfield shows that the replacement of one kind of politics (i.e., local) with another (i.e., global) has ‘serve[d]‌to render local racisms invisible in art discourse’. Where personal narrative does exist in contemporary video art, she suggests that it speaks ‘of the alienation of the digitised, post-​humanist subject seen in Ryan Trecartin’s or Hito Steyerl’s work, not the classed or raced alienation of Jo Spence or Adrian Piper’. Echoing a concern voiced throughout this book, Garfield also challenges the ocular logic that typically structures perceptions of the Other. She notes that, ‘Despite critiques of the last 30 odd years in popular culture and in art there is still often a reliance on the 14

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Introduction: Why Visibility Matters visual to understand the subject. [Yet the] visual is an extremely crude signifier of difference’. The crudeness of visual assumption has considerable consequences for the subject of the gaze. Chief among these is the paradox of overreliance on ocular repertoires of recognition:  by assigning identity at first glance, we actually strip the subject of agency and visibility.12 This is precisely what happens when art veers toward ethnography, as noted by Steyn and Franklin (this volume). In identifying the other merely through what they look like, Garfield warns that both artist and audience become complicit in dividing the world into ‘those who have culture (the white liberals, who can chose to imbibe in culture) and those others who are culture (the working classes and the non-​white)’.13 This danger is particularly acute in narrative art about global politics, where space for the unassimilated and unavowed individual simply does not exist. And thus Garfield points us to the continued importance of art that explores personal identity and the politics of self. Such narrative art serves a critical role ‘as a deflationary tactic [by which] to rethink what is at stake in Identity and how that might impact on the world from home’. Garfield’s analysis suggests that representations of visibility ought to exceed the simplistic opposition between global and local. It is by resisting this binary that representations can remain attendant to the myriad ways in which interaction between macro and micro inflects contemporary subjectivity. Next, in the volume’s penultimate chapter, cinema scholar Janet Harbord offers up a spectacular disruption of the relationship between visibility, identity and location  –​between the local, global and the in-​between. Through the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Harbord examines cinema’s challenge to assumptions about what constitutes ‘home’ and ‘away’. As these ‘electric shadows’14 migrate from screen to screen, from one audience to another, this chapter prompts us to further question the 15

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Art and the Politics of Visibility extent to which knowledge and ‘truth’ can be gained from what we (think we) see. Early cinema, Harbord explains, articulated a utopian vision ‘of film as a global vernacular’ –​a medium that urged connectivity and shared understanding through the common language of the visual. Through aesthetic rather than linguistic grammar, silent film brought ‘us’ all together, as it were. The introduction of sound in 1927, then, added new borders to cinema. Among these were the practices (and problems) of translation: dubbing or subtitles now accompanied the cinematic experience. This significantly changed the experience of watching films from elsewhere. Seeing became an act of confronting difference and domesticating it –​a process whereby the strange (i.e., the film from elsewhere) was made familiar. The films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul challenge the process, and utility, of such domestication. In fact, Weerasethakul’s works hinge on the dislocation of familiar categories and oppositions. Works like Tropical Malady (2004) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), for instance, bring together human and animal, and past and present, in ways that challenge anthrocentrism and chronological linearity. These films preserve a sense of otherness and mystery all but lost in the contemporary ecosystem of global cinema. Moreover, they resist traditional narrative devices, and in so doing, disrupt the notion of film as archive or memory. To that end, Weerasethakul recalls his early experiences seeing films from abroad  –​experiences marked by the Thai practice of live dubbing. He describes sitting in a glass enclosure within the cinema where he could hear the ‘real’ voices of the actors but also listen to the Thai dubbing filtering in. From inside this glass box, Weerasethakul could regard the audience members sitting on the other side of the glass, just as they could see him. The question for Harbord, then, is how we might understand this double experience of cinema from elsewhere without resorting to a colonial logic of 16

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Introduction: Why Visibility Matters translation –​a logic by which we ‘think the other from the standpoint of the Same’.15 Might we be able to delink seeing the other from the reflex of imposing sense (and the sense of self) onto her/​him? Harbord seeks to advance this possibility, and with it a reformulation of ‘foreign’ cinema, through the tropes of ‘hauntology’ and ‘hospitality’. Read via Derrida’s notion of unconditional welcome,16 hospitality provides a way into accepting the other’s otherness –​a path toward acceptance not predicated on understanding the other. This is an ethical gesture of welcome that eschews assimilation. Hauntology, by extension, ‘refers us not simply to temporal disjunction, but to the register of others within the economy of the same, the founding of Europe on the expulsion of others who then are rendered spectral, and in legal terms “alien”, within that domain’. Noting the inadequacy of the hegemonic centre and periphery model by which visual culture is often read, Harbord ‘seeks to understand cross-​border exchange as a process of translation that is none the less dealing with irreducible difference’. This, in a sense, represents the work of this collection as it aims to generate deeper and broader inter-​disciplinary evaluations of the relationship between art and the trans/​national. This volume concludes with a final reflection on visual culture, identity and the political. Therein, I draw on a range of recent events and artist interventions in the UK, EU, United States and Middle East in order to think through the ethics and embodiments of representation. By examining the art and social media content derivative of, for instance, the Black Lives Matter movement and the visual cultures of Brexit and the Syrian refugee crisis, this closing chapter underlines the very real stakes attached to contemporary claims (and denials) of visibility –​stakes that far transcend the academic explorations bound here between covers. The politics of being seen, in other words, transcends abstract tensions around knowledge production. This politics throws up a challenge to see the other’s humanity without reducing art to the political. 17

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Notes 1. Nb. Doreen B. Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); David Held and Henrietta L. Moore, Cultural Politics in a Global Age: Uncertainty, Solidarity, and Innovation (Oxford: One World Publications, 2008); Held, David and McGrew, Anthony, Globalization Theory: Approaches and Controversies (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2007). See also Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994). 2. Nb. Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader, 3rd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2012); Stephanie Hemelryk Donald and Christoph Lindner (eds), Inert Cities: Globalization, Mobility and Suspension in Visual Culture (London: I.B.Tauris, 2014); Christoph Lindner (ed.), Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities (Oxon: Routledge, 2010). See also Jonathan Reggio, Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei (London: Faber & Faber, 2013). 3. ‘The Ballad of East and West’, Rudyard Kipling, 1889. See P. R. Krishnaswamy, Stories From the Poets (Retold for Children): The Ballad of East and West (Madras: S.V. & Co., 1926). 4. Nb. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972). 5. Nb. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality/Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1969 [1961]). 6. Clare McAndrew, TEFAF Art Market Report 2016 (Maastricht: TEFAF, 2016). See http://​www.tefaf.com. 7. Nb. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). 8. E.g., Gideon Baker, ‘Cosmopolitanism as hospitality’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 34/​2 (2009), pp. 107–​28. 9. Elizabeth Lee, ‘Chineseness in contemporary Chinese art criticism, Journal of Undergraduate Research 3 (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2007). Available at http://​www3.nd.edu/​~ujournal/​ wp-​content/​uploads/​Lee_​07-​08.pdf (accessed 2 February 2016). 10. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976 [1961]), p. 54. 11. Arjun Appadurai, The Morality of Refusal:  100 Notes, 100 Thoughts. Documenta Series 023 (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2012).

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Introduction: Why Visibility Matters 12. Nb. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-​coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000). 13. Nb. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 14. James Bell (ed.), Electric Shadows: A Century of Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2014). 15. Baker, ‘Cosmopolitanism as hospitality’, p. 109. 16. The unconditional welcome reverses the guest-​host power relationship. Therein, the host gives up all sovereignty. S/​he is not even permitted to ask the guest her/​his name. See Derrida, Of Hospitality.

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1 Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World: Yang Fudong and the Politics of Precarity Chris Berry

Introduction Yang Fudong1 is a ‘hot property’ Chinese artist, and ‘almost every month at some art-​world outpost, one of his films or videos is being screened’.2 The inclusion of his epic five-part work Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest in the 2007 Venice Biennale marks his global breakthrough. As attested to by the 2012 launch of Moving Image Review and Art Journal –​a forum for debates surrounding all forms of artists’ moving image and media artworks’3 –​ as moving images are by now well-​established in the gallery, and the work of artists like Yang Fudong demonstrates that they are also a staple of Chinese contemporary art. The emergence of the gallery as a space for the moving image is also an important resource for Chinese independent film, because an artist film is also a kind of independent film. The overlap between artist films and independent films goes beyond shared sensibilities and aesthetics that set them apart from commercial filmmaking. What makes a film 21

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Art and the Politics of Visibility qualify as independent in China has its own specificity, including not sending the film to be censored by the Film Bureau of the State Administration of Film, Radio and Television (SARFT) for commercial release in movie theatres.4 Artist films also fall outside the purview of SARFT, and this is another reason why they are effectively also independent films. What are the political implications of the emergence of moving image work into the visibility afforded by the art gallery, including the space of the transnational art world? Because art galleries in China are not regulated by the notoriously strict Film Bureau but by other state agencies, local galleries can often exhibit movingimage work that might not otherwise win approval from censors. Furthermore, the local and transnational art worlds have become important sources of funding as well as alternative exhibition sites. If we understand agency as the ability to act shaped by circumstance and therefore distinct from the Cartesian ideas of the sovereign subject and artistic genius,5 how have these production conditions enabled, shaped and constrained the agency of Chinese filmmakers and moving-image artists? I argue that Yang’s work can be characterised by what I call the ‘precarious gesture’. What does it mean to invoke ‘precariousness’, or as it is increasingly called, ‘precarity’? For some writers it marks the vulnerability of the human condition, where the unpredictable demands of others create ethical and political quandaries that test us in various ways.6 Drawing on Levinas, Judith Butler writes that, ‘Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other’.7 For others, precarity has become more common because of neoliberal capitalism and the concomitant retreat of the state, leaving us exposed on the global labour market with fewer legal protections. This new condition has led to the coining of such terms as Paul Virno’s ‘the precariat’,8 which Simon During argues has taken over from the subaltern as the figure of those completely excluded from the power structure under 22

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World contemporary conditions.9 However, ‘precarization has really a double face: it is possible to speak of a kind of flexibilization from below […] a contested field […] in which the attempt to start a new cycle of exploitation also meets desires and subjective behaviors which express the refusal of the old, so-​called Fordist regime of labour and the search for another, better, we can even say flexible life’.10 In other words, we must not only pay attention to precarity as a new strategy of exploitation but also to the tactical responses it generates in efforts to turn it to new ends. Chinese artists lead a more precarious existence today compared to the era of the security of socialist planning that lasted until the market economy took off in the early 1990s, and the experience their precarity in a double sense specific to China. During the command economy of Maoist China, recognition as an artist led to membership in the China Artists Association, which guaranteed salaries and housing but also prescribed the form and content of artistic output. (There were no independent artists.) In the market economy, however, there are few guarantees but also greater latitude as state prescription has given considerable space to market constraint and opportunities.11 Elisabeth Slavkoff has argued that Yang Fudong makes direct reference to this emergence of precarity in Chinese social and labour conditions in the title of his eight-​ minute multi-​channel installation work Close to the Sea (2004), because the Chinese title Xiahai (下海) is also a common colloquial expression for leaving the iron rice bowl of the state system and operating in the market economy.12 Yang Fudong and the reception of his art are certainly dependent on others, and in particular the unpredictable tides of Chinese politics and fickle fashions of the transnational art market. However, his success and (I presume) wealth mean he cannot be compared with the remittance workers often held up as typical examples of the precariat. Comparing Yang Fudong and the remittance worker, two aspects of precarity are highlighted. First, precarity in human labour conditions sums up 23

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Art and the Politics of Visibility peculiar mixes of vulnerability and opportunity that form new conditions of risk.13 Second, the resulting experiences of precarity are highly variable: ‘nobody should simplify precarization into a new identity’.14 Indeed, if we are to understand the politics of precarity under globalised neoliberalism, we must attend to its ‘double face’ and its variety. Where, then, does precarity inhere in Yang Fudong’s work and working conditions, and perhaps by extension those of other Chinese contemporary artists using moving images in the transnational art world? I  propose the ‘precarious gesture’ as a double term to understand both Yang’s conditions of production and the aesthetic characteristics and themes of his work, as well as how they are linked. To that end, I first detail the precarious gesture as a quality of the work. Perched on the watershed of various possibilities, Yang’s films constitute a new cinema of the gesture that is tentative, mysterious and beguiling, but also sometimes frustrating. Second, I argue that these qualities of the work are themselves responses to what suits both the Chinese art market and the transnational art world, or, as I will call it, the ‘artscape’. To operate in the artscape is itself a precarious gesture, where artists, critics, curators and audiences mix under conditions of mutual unfamiliarity, and even more so for non-​Western artists because the artscape remains dominated by Western culture. Finally, I return to Yang’s works to ask whether the price of operating in the artscape is self-​orientalism and apolitical pastiche. I argue that Yang Fudong’s work refuses to deliver messages but that it does dwell on the gesture. In so doing it, it is shaped by the need to deliver work that can be consumed on the global artscape, but simultaneously it invokes the local Chinese history of those gestures to interrogate what it means today in globally engaged China to be an intellectual –​a social category that in China includes artists. This mixture of responding to the unpredictable demands of the other in the artscape and using the possibilities afforded in so doing to further Yang’s own art is precisely his own 24

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World embodiment of precarity as a contemporary Chinese artist and a response to that condition that reveals the politics of global visibility in the artscape.

The Precarious Gesture in Yang Fudong’s Work In what sense do Yang Fudong’s artist films come to constitute a new cinema of the precarious gesture? Because artist films in China (and elsewhere) are more inaccessible than most theatrical work, it is both necessary and difficult to convey this quality to the reader. Yang’s multi-​channel works could not be circulated by the single-​ screen medium of DVD anyway, and even his single-​channel works are not readily available on DVD or accessible through other platforms. This elusiveness impedes close and specific analysis. Perhaps the fleeting opportunities to view the works are themselves a part of their precarity. What is the status of this and other elements composing precarity in art today? Nicholas Bourriaud argues in favour of precarious art as responding to a precarious society: art not only seems to have found the means to resist this new, unstable environment, but has also derived from it […] we need to reconsider culture (and ethics) on the basis of a positive idea of the transitory, instead of holding on to the opposition between the ephemeral and the durable and seeing the latter as the touchstone of true art and the former as a sign of barbarism.15

Following this affirmation, Bourriaud and others have offered lists of qualities to look out for. Bourriaud himself speaks of ‘transcoding’ (where the ontological status of what we are looking at is undermined), ‘flickering’ (where temporal dimensions are destabilised) and ‘blurring’ (where focus is unclear).16 In an article on the Canadian exhibition Silent as Glue, Katherine Ritter stresses indeterminability, yielding interpretation to the viewer and leaving the 25

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Art and the Politics of Visibility future of the work to fate rather than trying to preserve or fix it as constituting precarity.17 At first sight, Yang Fudong’s artist films do not seem to fit these definitions. After all, films are fixed and not open to interventions from the public. Furthermore, in Yang’s case, the works appear carefully planned, highly polished and betray few signs of contingency in the production process. Nor are they particularly fragile. However, Bourriaud also warns that, ‘This precarious state […] is largely confused with the immaterial or ephemeral character of the artwork’. He goes on to emphasise that, ‘The precarious represents a fundamental instability, not a longer or shorter material duration; it inscribes itself into the structure of the work itself and reflects a general state of aesthetics’.18 With these observations in mind, certain characteristics of ‘fundamental instability’ can be observed in Yang’s works. The first precarious trait of Yang’s work is an unstable temporality produced by the invocation of different times and places in the one setting. Perhaps this is a kind of ‘flickering’, in Bourriaud’s sense. For example, his monumental Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, (2003–​7) consists of five parts, respectively lasting 29, 46, 53, 70 and 90 minutes, making a total of almost five hours.19 Shot in black-​and-​white on 35mm film, it has been transferred to DVD and, in my experience, is usually projected onto very large screens. The projection of the video sometimes creates a softness to the image that is, perhaps, reminiscent of inkwash landscape paintings associated with pre-​modern Chinese art. This might be what Bourriaud calls ‘transcoding’. In the first part, the characters appear in classic Yellow Mountain (Huangshan) misty settings with twisted pines, also invoking the landscape painting tradition and the pre-​ modern era. Furthermore, the title of the work refers to the legend of the seven sages of the bamboo grove. These neo-​Daoist figures survived a time of political and social upheaval in the transition between the Wei (220–​65 CE) and Jin (265–​420 CE) dynasties by 26

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World retreating from the court to engage in a life of poetry, thought and the natural pleasures of life such as conversation and wine. Their behaviour is widely understood as challenging the suppression of desire and commitment to duty that characterises Confucian norms.20 Through the five parts of Yang’s work, his five young men and two young women also explore all kinds of experiences and sensations.21 However, judging by their clothing, none of the figures in Yang’s Seven Intellectuals are pre-​modern, nor are all the settings as iconically evocative of the pre-​modern tradition as the Yellow Mountains. Instead, Yang’s intellectuals are modern young men and women, and, to add to the instability of temporality or ‘flickering’, some of the men appear to be wearing early twentiethcentury Western-​style clothing, whereas the women are in more contemporary outfits. Precarious temporality appears in many of Yang’s works. For example, the ten-​minute work Fifth Night (2010) is a multi-​channel projection. Like Seven Intellectuals, this piece was shot in black-​and-​ white on 35mm, but this time it has been transferred to HD video, which is projected on seven screens.22 Each screen captures part of the same scene in a single long take, but from a different angle, and usually also involving tracking movements. Simultaneity is verified for the viewer by characters exiting one screen and entering another almost immediately after, or being captured doing the same thing at the same time from different angles on different screens. The setting for this carefully choreographed scene appears to be an open area surrounded by early twentieth-​century Western-​style buildings of the kinds associated in China with Shanghai. The male figures are dressed in either 1930s-​style working men’s clothing or the Western-​style suits of the middle classes, which more or less disappeared after the 1949 Revolution. The women are dressed in contemporary fashion (see Figure 1.1). The mixing of period references also appears in a nine-​minute video called First Spring (2010), which Yang shot for Prada 27

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Art and the Politics of Visibility

Figure  1.1 From Fifth Night (2010). Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. 

menswear.23 One critic sums it up as having ‘Fudong’s trademark imagery, black a​ nd ​white film, beautiful young people dressed in a mix of traditional Chinese and Western outfits, aimlessly drifting in a surreal moment’.24 The set is, I believe, the famous ‘Shanghai Street’ back lot at Shanghai Film Studio, featuring Nanjing Road as it was in the Republican era before the 1949 Revolution. The Republican era is also referenced in the old-​fashioned but Western-​style suitcases the male models carry, and which are among Yang’s favourite props. But, of course, the men’s outfits are contemporary Prada fashions. On the other hand, some of the women’s costumes and the outfits of the runners anachronistically accompanying the Republican-​era tram refer back to the latter years of the Qing Dynasty before the 1911 Revolution. A second precarious quality is most prominent in Yang’s multi-​ channel works. These are laid out in such a way that it is impossible to see them all at once, leaving viewers in danger of ‘swivel-​heading’ 28

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World

Figure  1.2  Installation view of Fifth Night. Parasol Unit, London, 2011. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy of the Artist and Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art. 

as they try to catch as much as they can. Maybe this is the multi-​ channel version of what Bourriaud calls ‘blurring’ or disturbing focus. Not only does Fifth Night consist of seven long takes projected on seven screens, but these screens are also laid out in a row across one wall of a darkened space. There are just too many of them for the viewer to keep them all in her field of vision at the same time (see Figure 1.2). As a result, the viewer wants to know if something is going on in the screens that are out of her field of vision, and scans back and forth. The ‘swivel-​head’ effect is exacerbated in One Half of August (2011), a black-​and-​white multi-​channel video work25 displayed on eight screens arranged all around the room, so that the viewer absolutely cannot see them all at once and has to keep turning her whole body around to catch as much as she can. This difficulty of seeing clearly is amplified by the imagery itself, which consists of fragments from Yang’s own early works projected onto 29

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Art and the Politics of Visibility other fragments –​of buildings and furniture –​that distort the image because they are not flat. These might be variants of what Bourriaud calls ‘transcoding’. Another eight-​screen example is No Snow on the Broken Bridge (2006), shot in black-​and-​white on 35mm film and transferred to DVD, and featuring precarious temporality by combining a Hangzhou setting reminiscent of classical poetry26 and contemporary actors dressed in early twentieth-century costumes. Yang says, ‘I chose multiple screens to present the film’s plotless scenes, and I imagined the audience falling into a daze in front of the screens’.27 The effect of not quite knowing where to look also sometimes occurs in Yang’s single-​channel works. This is because of the third precarious quality in Yang’s work, which concerns narrative. Because identifiable figures appear and interact in the works, they seem at first to be characters engaged in some sort of narrative set of actions linked by cause and effect. However, in practice, there is no logic; as Yang says, these are ‘plotless scenes’. In the absence of clear cause-​and-​effect logic, meaning also becomes precarious and the viewer is even less sure where to look or how to make sense of what she sees. For example, Part Three of Seven Intellectuals includes the attention-​grabbing and seemingly dramatic slaughter of an ox. But we never discover if this is a ritual act that perhaps forms part of a religious ceremony or has some other meaning, nor do we see any consequences. The ‘intellectuals’ talk about all kinds of topics, but there is none of the consistency that might enable us to designate them as characters –​the conservative one, the joker and so on. Instead, it sometimes seems as though they are quoting aphorisms at random. In Yang’s later works, dialogue disappears altogether, and the actors wander around, seemingly curious but without clear direction or purpose. In First Night, a Republican era car pulls into the square, and young men in Western-​style suits from the time pile out. They run across the square, and their suitcases fall open. Other 30

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Figure 1.3 From First Spring, 2010. Courtesy of the Artist and Prada.

characters look at them. But they do not speak to each other or interact any further. Similarly, First Spring opens with two of the male models staggering backwards as they stare at and past the camera in apparent shock, but we never see what they are shocked by and no consequences follow (see Figure 1.3). Despite the seeming lack of cause-​and-​effect logic, some scholars have tried to interpret Yang’s films in a classic semiotic way. Xiaoping Lin relates his Liu Lan (2003), a 14-​minute, 35mm black-​and-​white film transferred to DVD,28 to two specific Republican-era films that also feature fisherwomen and young Westernised men. She argues that his obsession with suitcases, as carried by the young man in Liu Lan, refers back to the image of the Westernised young men in the films of the 1930s. When the suitcase turns out to be empty in Liu Lan, it is an image of the emptiness of the promise held out by Westernised modernity to China.29 Intriguing though this analysis 31

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Art and the Politics of Visibility is, I find it difficult to read Yang’s work in such a definitive way. The same suitcases appear in First Spring and Fifth Night, and when they spill open in the latter work, they turn out to be full. Yang Fudong’s artist films bear a surface resemblance to narrative cinema. But instead of characters, we have figures; instead of narrative, we have tropes in search of a narrative; and instead of signification, we have gestures. The use of black and white, the Republican-era references and the decision to avoid dialogue in Yang’s recent work combine to remind us of the silent film era. Writing during that period, Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs argued that cinema was producing a ‘language of gestures’ as opposed to the ‘culture of words’.30 More recently, the idea of cinema as gestural has been revived by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. For Agamben, the contrast is not to words but to the image, which is associated with Gilles Deleuze. In his two-​volume work on the cinema, Deleuze distinguished between the movement-​based image of montage cinema and Hollywood, and the time-​based image, which he mostly illustrates with examples from the post-​World War II European art cinema.31 For Agamben, ‘the element of cinema is gesture and not image’, unfreezing the image and restoring gesture by rendering movement.32 For the purposes of this chapter, the important point is that both philosophers’ writings about cinema can be counterposed to the semiotic tradition that emphasises meaning. In other words, instead of Balázs’s ‘language of gestures’, which led him to imagine ‘a lexicon of gestures and facial expressions’,33 Yang’s moving image works also seem to resist signification and emphasise the gestural in itself and apart from any particular meaning. Why might Yang Fudong’s works prefer the gestural over the semiotic? And is this necessarily a withdrawal into some sort of formalism? These questions are related, but they need to be answered in turn. Below, I will argue that the precarity of Yang’s art is a response to the precarious conditions of its production. For Bourriaud, 32

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World precarity in art is both shaped by the conditions of its production and a political response to them. He argues that ‘the main function of the instruments of communication of capitalism is to repeat a message:  we live in a finite, immovable and definitive political framework, only the décor must change at high speed’. Therefore, he goes on to say, ‘the political substratum of contemporary art is not a denunciation of the “political” circumstances that are immanent to actuality, but the persistence of a gesture: spread the precarious almost everywhere, keep the idea of artifice alive and productive, undermine all the material and immaterial edifices that constitute our décor’.34 Whether Bourriaud’s precarious gesture is the same as Yang’s, and in what way it might be political, will be the subject of the final section.

The Precarious Space of the Artscape Yang’s artist films are exhibited (and sold) in the overlapping spaces of the local Chinese and transnational art worlds. Operating in both these spaces at once is a precarious gesture in the double sense of danger and opportunity. On the one hand, it is impossible to predict when the expectations associated with these different spaces are going to come into conflict with each other and limit or disable the artist. In an essay on the global circulation of Chinese contemporary art, Ivan Gaskell worries about ‘misapprehension after misapprehension, as participants of all kinds tend to see what they want to see in the work, and nothing more’.35 On the other hand, there is the promise that participating in the transnational art world might enable things that are not possible by remaining in the national space alone. This section of the chapter will argue that this transnational art world can be seen as an ‘artscape’ of contingency and unpredictability where artists from all over the world chance their luck on an uneven playing field still heavily controlled by Western-​based institutions, critics, collectors and curators. It 33

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Art and the Politics of Visibility will go on to suggest that some of the characteristics of Yang’s work can be seen as displaying successful adaptation to these precarious circumstances. First, perhaps we can get a sense of how precarious operating in the transnational art world is from the case of Sunflower Seeds, Ai Weiwei’s 2010 installation in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London. I got there as soon as I could after it opened. And, like many other visitors, I could not resist taking my shoes off and walking across the carpet of ceramic sunflower seeds making up the work. I found myself talking to someone next to me about longforgotten childhood visits to Britain’s notorious shingle beaches. Reading the blogs and critical reviews, it soon became clear that I was not the only British visitor making these connections.36 How did Ai Weiwei know about our special relationship with shingle beaches in the UK? Of course –​I assume –​he did not. I also assume Ai did not know about Britain’s culture of ‘health and safety’ regulations. A few days after Sunflower Seeds opened, it was decided that the dust being generated by visitors walking across the seeds was dangerous for the employees of the Tate Modern, who might breathe it in. Therefore, we were not allowed to walk across the sunflower seeds anymore.37 These two unpredictable moments illustrate the precarious life of artworks in the transnational art world as they encounter ‘misapprehension after misapprehension’. What viewers will make of art is always beyond control. But the shingle beach moment also exemplifies how the unpredictability of interpretation that Kathleen Ritter values so much in precarious art, as discussed above, is amplified when the work travels from the culture in which the artist operates to one s/​he is less familiar with. Furthermore, the equally unpredictable health-​and-​safety moment seems to feed into and extend the dimension of Ai’s work that encouraged us to think about labour cultures in the era of globalisation. The seeds themselves were accompanied by videos that showed the workers in Jingdezhen, 34

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World China’s famous centre for the production of ceramics, painstakingly making by hand the million seeds destined for the West. China is not well-​known for any equivalent of the British health-​and-​safety culture. If anything, the reputation is that working conditions there tend in the opposite direction. So perhaps the whole situation might have made some visitors think more about the globally linked but differentiated labour regimes that structure globalised capitalism’s networks of flow and exchange today. This returns us to the question of how we should think about this transnational art world. How is it linked to the local Chinese art world, and how do artists negotiate this articulation? Before turning to the specific example of Yang Fudong to get some concrete answers, we can locate this phenomenon in relation to theories of globalisation and transnationalism. Arjun Appadurai has famously proposed that we think of cultural activity under globalisation as enabled by a series of ‘scapes’ where various people and things flow across borders:  an ethnoscape, a mediascape, a financescape and more.38 We could think of the transnational art world as the ‘artscape’, where artists, curators and artworks flow through a global network of galleries and exhibitions. But what does it mean to claim the transnational in this way? Appadurai positions his work as an intervention against the arguments of those Marxist ‘world systems’ and ‘cultural colonialism’ theorists who argued that globalisation was tantamount to pure homogenisation and Americanisation.39 Appadurai argues instead that the intensification and multiplication of connections between cultures produces heterogenisation and disjuncture. The peculiar fate of Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern could be seen to support Appadurai’s observations, not only because Ai is able to participate in the transnational art scene as an agent in his own right rather than simply as some sort of outsourced labour, but also because his works produce unpredictable responses as they flow across geopolitical and cultural borders. 35

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Art and the Politics of Visibility Other authors have also questioned the idea of globalisation as a one-​way street to American world domination, without denying the great strength of American state power and transnational capitalist corporations. Among those ideas that may be useful for understanding this mixture of heterogenisation, contingency and uneven power that characterises the operations of the artscape is Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zone’.40 Originally written to describe the situation when two hitherto completely unfamiliar cultures and societies meet under the circumstances of colonisation, Pratt acknowledges power difference but emphasises that there are at least two actors at work and numerous unpredictable effects generated by mutual unfamiliarity. Of course, the artscape is not like the original contact zones that Pratt studied, not least because the forces and actors involved are already known to each other to at least some degree. Nevertheless, the idea of multiple actors who interact in a manner structured by power difference and limited mutual understanding is useful to understanding what can happen in the artscape. Also useful here is Anna Tsing’s distinction between globalisation, which she links to the homogenising direction of global capitalism, and the transnational in general. She points out that the former expands the latter, but that rather than treating the transnational as one thing, we need to understand it as composed of a range of varied ‘transnational projects’. These include the operations of transnational corporations, but they may also include those of anti-​globalisation activists, for example.41 Taken together, Appadurai draws our attention to the unpredictability of disjunctures in transnational encounters that lead to heterogenisation; Pratt enables us to see the crucial role of power inequality, cultural difference and mutual unfamiliarity in structuring encounters in ‘contact zones’; and Tsing focuses our attention on analysing the specific character of individual ‘transnational projects’. 36

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World Bearing these theoretical insights and the example of Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds in mind, we can get a better idea of what it means to say that entering the transnational art world is also a precarious gesture. Not least, it is precarious because everyone operating in it is engaged in a triple experience that can be highly disjunctive. The artist is coming from a more-​or-​less familiar space (China and the Chinese art world, in Ai Weiwei’s case), entering the less familiar space of the artscape and its internal codes and customs, and then also simultaneously encountering another local space depending on where the particular part of the artscape entered is anchored (the Tate Modern in London in the case of Sunflower Seeds). As artworks flow across various borders, the triple experience mutates, and new challenges and possibilities are thrown up, making this encounter both dynamic and risky. Curators, visitors to art galleries, dealers and everyone else who enters the artscape is also negotiating these kaleidoscope-​like triple experiences. Yang Fudong has negotiated the challenge of the artscape with aplomb so far, following the rapid learning curve of the Chinese art world in general, and indeed China itself, as it has moved out from isolationism to join the global market economy. Until the 1980s, there was almost no independent or abstract art in China, where the government only accepted realism.42 But today every contemporary art museum in the world that wants to be taken seriously must exhibit Chinese art. Yang himself was trained in oil painting, and he says his first work ‘was Soviet and socialist realist’.43 He studied at the prestigious Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou in the early 1990s, but ‘in my first year there, a visiting German art critic gave a seminar on modern art, including a lot of photography and film and video art, and it opened my eyes’.44 Since moving into contemporary art and launching himself internationally, how have Yang’s choices and decisions helped him to become a successful artist in this space? Four  –​conscious or unconscious  –​strategies are noteworthy:  a tendency to increasing physical inaccessibility, adding aura and 37

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Art and the Politics of Visibility financial value, or, in other words, collectability; beautiful mysteriousness, opening the work up to different interpretations by viewers from different backgrounds and therefore also maximising the size of the market; moving from initial eye-​catching monumentality to viewer-​friendly works, building the market beyond collectors to create the ‘brand’; and the deployment of signs of Chineseness that foreigners can recognise and like. In some ways this final characteristic is the most interesting one, because it reveals the continuing unevenness of the artscape. American artists do not necessarily benefit from using signs of Americanness, but non-​Western artists are still likely to be marketed through ethnic-​marking. Some people would see the deployment of such a strategy as self-​orientalism, but more on that later. First, Yang started out producing single-​channel moving-image works like Seven Intellectuals and Liu Lan. More recently, however, there has been a shift towards more multi-​channel works like First Night and One Half of August. This shift marks an adaptation to and exploration of the physical space of the gallery as site for the display of moving image work, as opposed to the movie theatre, domestic television screen, or computer. As Gaskell notes, such self-​referentiality and ‘art about art’ fits the demands of what I am calling the artscape.45 Formats such as multi-​channel installation also distinguish artist films from those of filmmakers who do work in the cinema world. Last, and not least, multi-​channel works are harder to pirate. Artist films are sold in limited editions rather than by mass sales of DVDs. Much less effort has to go into protecting the value of a multi-​channel work than a single-channel one, and in the process aura, collectability and exchange value are all enhanced. Second, the beautiful-​and-​mysterious quality of Yang’s work can also be seen as well-​adapted to the artscape. As discussed in the previous section, his work invokes but does not deliver on the codes of narrative cinema. The resulting mysterious quality is often enhanced 38

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World by the addition of foreboding music, as for example in Fifth Night. Whatever other reasons Yang might have for this aesthetic decision, there are some practical advantages. Within the Chinese art world, if it is difficult to know if your work has a ‘message’, then it is much more unlikely to have problems with censors. Furthermore, if mysteriousness is understood as deliberate, the work flows more easily across the artscape without requiring viewers to figure out a cultural background they know little of. Third, there is a shift over Yang’s career so far from the kind of attention-​grabbing work needed to create a breakthrough to work whose form allows it to flow more easily across the artscape. The episodes of Seven Intellectuals vary in length, but add up to almost five hours, and whenever I have seen them, they have always been projected on very large screens. Combined with subtitles and rather abstract dialogue, the resulting artwork is demanding on both viewers and exhibition spaces. It is also an attention-grabber, and helped Yang to become widely known. However, in more recent years, dialogue has disappeared from his works, making them more accessible for non-​Chinese-speaking viewers on the artscape. They are also mostly much shorter than the 90-​minute duration of the final part of Seven Intellectuals, making them more suited to a stroll through spaces of the gallery, as opposed to the cinema. This user-​ friendliness is not necessarily important for increased sales of the work itself, but at the same time as it helps to build the audience for the artist, it also develops the artist’s ‘brand’. Having a recognisable brand is an important precondition for other opportunities beyond direct sales of the work itself, such as, in Yang’s case, the Prada commission of First Spring. Finally, not only do Yang’s works supply various signs of ‘Chineseness’ as discussed in the previous section, but they also tend towards the Chineseness that will find most welcome in the artscape. First Spring includes an ample array of recognisably ‘Chinese’ elements. Even the elements from Republic Shanghai, 39

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Art and the Politics of Visibility which read as ‘Western’ to Chinese eyes, look ‘Chinese’ elsewhere. Furthermore, these signs of Chineseness are glamorous ones from a Western perspective: this is Last Emperor Qing Dynasty China, and Lust, Caution Republican Shanghai. The Chinese contemporary art scene is growing rapidly –​albeit unevenly –​and local buyers and galleries are of increasing importance.46 Nonetheless, foreign and, more specifically, Western collectors, critics and curators remain very important for Chinese artists in the transnational artscape. Yang Fudong himself is represented by ShangArt, which is the longest-​established gallery for contemporary art in Shanghai. ShangArt deserves huge respect for all the work it has done to make Shanghai contemporary art known to the world, growing in the process from a very small operation to a large one. But there is no getting away from the fact that the links into the transnational art scene through its Swiss founder Lorenz Helbling –​links that have been so vital for the visibility and success of the Chinese artists ShangArt represents –​do perpetuate dependence of Chinese artists on Western cultural brokers.47 Amongst those artists, Yang Fudong is one of the most successful. And, whereas many of ShanghART’s other artists produce work that is not necessarily recognisably Chinese in content, Yang Fudong not only delivers the recognisably Chinese, but also a Chineseness aesthetic that goes down well in the artscape. The glamorous and exotic Chinese imagery of works like First Spring, Fifth Night, Liu Lan and Seven Intellectuals, which evoke the beauty of inkwash paintings as well as modern Chinese settings, can be contrasted with East of Que Village, a six-​screen work produced in 2007 (see Figure 1.4). Set in the areas of rural Hebei where Yang grew up, the work is neither bucolic nor nostalgic, instead confronting the viewer with impoverishment, ugliness and stray dogs, reported in various accounts as barking, starving and even eating each other’s corpses.48 ‘Local audiences were quite shocked by its brutality’49 at the Sydney Biennale in 2010, and one visitor 40

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Figure  1.4 From East of Que Village, 2006. Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. 

observed, ‘It’s difficult to watch, less because of the content itself more because the poverty on display jars so badly with some of the Chinese high-​art lite on display elsewhere’.50 This China does not flatter transnational capital and the transformative magic it has supposedly brought, nor does it pander to Western tastes for the glamorously exotic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, despite some appreciative reviews of East of Que Village, his recent work has returned to more easily consumed imagery. In addition to rarely delivering images of poverty or ‘ugliness’, Yang rarely –​but not never –​delivers the ‘Mao Goes Pop’ imagery that used to be a major component of Chinese contemporary art on the global scene, especially in the 1990s.51 Transnational art lovers might have tired of the glut of Mao imagery. But we can also speculate that Yang’s favourite periods to pastiche also fit a change or perhaps a tension in Western projections about China, especially those of the Western elite. On the one hand, in the aftermath 41

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Art and the Politics of Visibility of Tiananmen in 1989, there was the demonisation of China and Chinese socialism, which has never completely gone away. On the other hand, with China’s ascent on the global economic and political stage, there is the desire to forget socialism ever happened and to pretend that China is no longer a socialist state. The relative scarcity of socialist iconography in Yang’s works may be another factor helping to make his work more appealing than the ‘Mao Goes Pop’ variety today. However, if Yang seems to be self-​orientalising, it is important to recognise this as a strategy and one that may contain a kind of resistance at the same time as it appears to pander. As Rey Chow points out in her discussion of Zhang Yimou’s cinema of the early 1990s, which was also criticised for self-​orientalism, there is a distinction between self-​orientalising and orientalising yourself in a process that also entails seizing agency. Furthermore, Chow uses the term ‘force of surfaces’ to suggest that Zhang delivers the appearance of what Western viewers think they want but that this is all surface with no depth, and no fixable meaning.52 Of course, the circumstances of the last decade, during which Yang Fudong has come to prominence, are very different from the era immediately following Tiananmen that Chow is writing about. But it is important to recognise that although Yang indulges orientalist tastes, he may also be using the force of surfaces. This opens up the question of the politics of Yang’s pursuit of the precarious gesture, and here I want to conclude by arguing that although Yang may be using the force of surfaces, this is not because there are no depths to his work, but rather to obscure those depths from international viewers in the artscape, who are perhaps of limited interest to him.

The Politics of the Precarious Gesture Having considered the precarious gesture of participation in the artscape, I now return briefly to the precarious gesture in Yang’s art 42

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World itself, and one gesture in particular: the off-​screen gaze. But first, let me acknowledge that Yang’s mix a​ nd ​match compilations of various bits of China’s past not only raise the question of self-​orientalism but also Jameson’s criticism of pastiche and nostalgia as characteristic of postmodernity. For Jameson, postmodernism features a move from time and history to spatialisation, where the past becomes reified as nostalgic but politically neutralised objects of pastiche and consumption.53 Wang Hui has also argued that contemporary China is characterised by ‘depoliticized politics’ that forecloses upon the possibility of political engagement and change.54 Yang himself seems to join this withdrawal from engagement, when he says, ‘I’m not interested in politics’.55 But who knows what this really means? After all, participation in politics in China is a risky business. To say publicly that one is interested in politics is asking for trouble, as Ai Weiwei has found out.56 However, what if we think about Yang’s works not as taking a political position on the conditions they display, but as an embodiment and exploration of those conditions via his gestural cinema? Perhaps this is the agency that the artscape affords him –​materially in terms of financial support, aesthetically in terms of the kind of work it supports, and politically in terms of sidestepping the zones controlled by the party-​state in China. Is there anything in the work itself that supports such an interpretation? Elisabeth Slavkoff has argued that the kinds of figures we see in Yang’s artist films display an enduring fascination with the history of China’s educated classes, ranging from literati to students, and that this class is loaded with political significance in the Chinese context. She points out that various different terms in Chinese are used for these people and in the titles of many of his works, and each term is related to a different historical period.57 Today, the most common term is ‘zhishifenzi’, and this is usually translated into English as ‘intellectual’ –​as in Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest. At least some of the young people in Fifth Night would appear to 43

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Art and the Politics of Visibility belong to this class, although there are more working class people in this film than is usual for Yang. The young man in Liu Lan and the models in the Prada piece, First Spring, might also read in this way. For Slavkoff, to invoke the intellectual is to invoke contemporary Chinese debates about a class traditionally seen as the advisors to rulers and their moral compass up until their eclipse by the market economy ushered in after the crushing of the 1989 Democracy Movement. Now more young people are formally educated, but their role is to consume and critical distance as their class position has been foreclosed upon. All of this would likely be invisible to the global audience on the artscape. How does Yang Fudong depict this class in his ‘plotless scenes’? I argue that his work uses the cinema of gesture to display their condition. These gestures include their vague wanderings, their exploration of all manner of emotions and embodied experiences, and more. One of his earlier works that directly engages the educated classes is a photographic series from 2000 called The First Intellectual, which shows a bespectacled young man in a suit and tie, standing on a Shanghai street with blood running down his face and holding a brick (see Figure 1.5). Although Yang says, ‘It is about somebody who gets hurt, but he does not know where the injury comes from’,58 looking at the picture it is uncertain if he has just picked up a brick that has been thrown at him or if he is about the throw the brick. Asked further about the work, Yang commented, ‘I touched on a concept that still preoccupies me: one wants to accomplish big things, but in the end it doesn’t happen. Every educated Chinese person is very ambitious, and obviously there are obstacles’.59 Even in the statement, Yang presents a condition without offering any analysis or explanation of why this condition has been produced. Like his works, his own comments embody the very precarious condition they explore. Furthermore, the young man in The First Intellectual is looking off-​screen. This gaze off-​screen is common in Yang’s works. I have 44

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Figure 1.5  The First Intellectual, 2000. Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

already noted a strongly marked example at the beginning of First Spring, but throughout his films, his young men and women gaze off-​screen (see Figure 1.1, for instance). Just as the figure of the intellectual invokes a history of its cultural significance in China, so too the off-​screen gaze invokes a history of its uses in cinema in general 45

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Art and the Politics of Visibility but in Chinese cinema in particular. As is well known, in Hollywood cinema, the off-​screen gaze is most popularly incorporated into the shot-and-reverse-shot structure, where two gazes end up looking at each other. This is the stock cinematic grammar of romantic love, where desire is privatised into the formation of the couple. In Yang’s works, the gaze is rarely answered in this way, or at all. In fact, as in the dramatic example from First Spring, we do not even see what has provoked the young men’s shocked stare. More common than shock in his work is curiosity, bewilderment, interest and other relatively mild emotions, but we do not see what has provoked these feelings (as is Figure 1.1, from Fifth Night). This contrasts with at least two other powerful patterns in the deployment of the off-​screen gaze in the history of Chinese cinema. In the Republican era, so beloved by Yang Fudong, the gaze off-​screen is much favoured by the desperate and the dispossessed. Here it is a gesture of despair, full of a desire that the film narratives have no way of answering. One of the best-​known and most dramatic examples is the ending of the star Ruan Lingyu’s last film before her suicide, The New Woman (Xin Nüxing, 1934, directed by Cai Chusheng). Ironically, in the film, she plays a young woman driven to attempt suicide. Too late, she realises she does not want to die, and gazes beyond the camera as she beseeches the doctors and everyone around to save her. The second major pattern of the off-​screen gaze is a complete contrast to the Republican pattern. This is the confident gaze upward into the middle-​distance associated with the post-​1949 revolutionary cinema. Usually, as in Yang’s films, there is no reverse of field, presumably because communist utopia is too sublime to be depicted. But there are exceptions. At the end of Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi Ge, 1959, directed by Cui Wei and Chen Huai’ai), the film ends when the heroine attains her long-​cherished goal of joining the Communist Party. Her swearing-in ceremony is a bit like the conventional ending of a romance, but instead of a wedding, she is 46

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World marrying the Party. And, when she gazes wet-​eyed into the middle distance, the reverse shot is not of her groom but of the five-​starred Chinese red flag flying in the breeze.60 The unanswered off-​screen gaze in Yang’s film is one of the precarious gestures that exemplify how he has made his art the embodiment of his own condition and that of his generation of Chinese intellectuals. He finds himself materially well-​off but operating across two spaces that not only generate that wealth but also foreclose upon the traditional critical role of the intellectual: China today with its ‘depoliticized politics’ and the artscape where mutual unfamiliarity narrows engagement with the work to the kind of aimless floating from one sensation to another that Yang himself depicts his young intellectuals as experiencing in so many of his works. Yang Fudong rejects any idea that he is pandering to foreigners, protesting, ‘They think we do our work for them. We do not. We do it for China’.61 Unlikely though this claim may seem at first, perhaps it makes sense as a kind of acknowledgment of the limits and possibilities of participating in the artscape. In the absence of a deeper global experience and global set of cultural, social and political institutions the possibility for global profundity is foreclosed upon. But the artscape can still be used to produce art that may reflect back upon the local space the artist has come from like a heterotopic mirror, not commenting so much as displaying or spotlighting a condition.

Notes 1. This is a revised version of a paper presented first at the ‘Politics of Visibility’ conference in 2011, and later to classes at City University and to the Independent Chinese Film conference in Liege in 2012. Thank you to Zeena Feldman, Juliet Steyn and Eric Florence for inviting me and to the audiences for their very helpful responses. Thanks also to my PhD student, Corey Schultz, whose work on class in Chinese cinema has helped me in thinking about the figure of the intellectual in Yang’s artist films. 47

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Art and the Politics of Visibility 2. Michael Young, ‘Yang Fudong’, Asian Art. Available at http://​www. asianartnewspaper.com/​article/​yang-​fudong (accessed 19 August 2011). Archived as ‘Profile: Yang Fudong’ (2012). Available at http://​ www.asianartnewspaper.com/​article/​profile-​yang-​fudong (accessed 26 July 2013). Further details of his exhibitions can be found at http://​ www.ShanghARTgallery.com/​galleryarchive/​artists/​name/​yangfudong/​bio (accessed 12 June 2013). 3. See http://​w ww.intellectbooks.co.uk/​journals/​v iew-​Journal,id=207 (accessed 12 June 2013). 4. For further discussion on independence in the Chinese context, see my essay, ‘Independently Chinese:  Duan Jinchuan, Jiang Yue and Chinese documentary’, in Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (eds), From Underground to Independent:  Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (London:  Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), pp. 102–​22. 5. The literature on this distinction is huge. The sovereign subject is frequently associated with the work of Descartes and his notorious cogito ergo sum (‘I think therefore I am’) in Discourse on the Method, which is usually understood to imply a realm of autonomous action free from outside determination. This could be to Judith Butler’s elaboration of J. L. Austin’s performativity in Gender Trouble, which argues that we always act according to a given script, but that we never perform the script in exactly the same way. 6. Judith Butler, ‘Precarious Life,’ Precarious Life: The Powers of Morning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 128–​51. 7. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), p. 14. 8. Sonja Lavaert and Pascal Gielen, ‘The dismeasure of art: An interview with Paolo Virno’, Open 17 (2009). Available at https://​chtodelat.org/​ wp-​content/​uploads/​2009/​10/​Virno_​Dismeasure.pdf (accessed 10 July 2013). 9. Simon During, ‘From the subaltern to the precariat’, Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 32/​1 (2012), pp. 72–​80. 10. Frassanito Network, ‘Precarious, precarization, precariat?’ MetaMute (2006). Available at http://​www.metamute.org/​editorial/​articles/​ precarious-​precarisation-​precariat (accessed 16 July 2013). 11. Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-​ Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 129. 12. Elisabeth Slavkoff, ‘Alternative modernity:  Contemporary art in Shanghai’, MA dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art (2005).

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World Available at http://​www.ShanghARTgallery.com/​galleryarchive/​texts/​ id/​128 (accessed 19 October 2011). 13. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society:  Towards a New Modernity (London:  Sage, 1992). Writing before the impact of neoliberalism and globalisation, Beck’s emphasis was on planetary risks generated by modernity, such as the risks associated with nuclear power. But perhaps the return to risk in labour marks a deeper entrenching of the human experience of the risk society. 14. Network, ‘Precarious, precarization, precariat?’ 15. Nicholas Bourriaud, ‘Precarious constructions:  Answer to Jacques Rancière on art and politics’, Open (2009). Available at http://​www. onlineopen.org/​precarious-​constructions (accessed 3 June 2016). 16. Ibid., pp. 33–​4. 17. Kathleen Ritter, ‘Notes on precarity’, in Lynda Gammon, Mark Harle, Elspect Pratt:  Silent as Glue, curated by Micah Lexier (Oakville Galleries, 2010), pp. 3–​4. 18. Bourriaud, ‘Precarious constructions’, p. 32. 19. See http://​www.ShanghARTgallery.com/​galleryarchive/​artists/​name/​ yangfudong/​available (accessed 2 July 2013). 20. For a more detailed discussion of the legend and its role in Chinese art, see Ellen Johnston Laing, ‘Neo-​Taoism and the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” in Chinese Painting’, Artibus Asiae 36/​1–​2 (1974), pp. 5–​54. 21. For a detailed account of the work, its production and its circulation, see Molly Nesbit, ‘Wild Shanghai grass’, October 133 (2010), pp. 75–​105. 22. See http://​www.ShanghARTgallery.com/​galleryarchive/​artists/​name/​ yangfudong/​available (accessed 3 July 2013). 23. See http://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=nhswOlqbPUU (accessed 3 July 2013). 24. Young, ‘Yang Fudong’. 25. See http://​www.ShanghARTgallery.com/​galleryarchive/​artists/​name/​ yangfudong/​key (accessed 3 July 2013). 26. Chen Shuxia, ‘Interview with Yang Fudong’, Artspace China blog, University of Sydney, 13 April 2011. Available at http://​blogs.usyd.edu. au/​artspacechina/​2011/​04/​interview_​with_​yang_​fudong_​by_​1.html (accessed 28 July 2011). 27. Ibid. 28. See http://​www.ShanghARTgallery.com/​galleryarchive/​artists/​name/​ yangfudong/​key (accessed 13 July 2013).

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Art and the Politics of Visibility 29. Xiaoping Lin, ‘The video works of Yang Fudong: An Ultimate escape from a global nightmare’, Children of Marx and Coca-​Cola:  Chinese Avant-​Garde Art and Independent Cinema (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2010), pp. 167–​71. 30. Béla Balázs, ‘Visible man’, in Erica Carter (ed.), Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010 [1924]), p. 11. 31. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-​Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B.  Hammerjam (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1986)  and Cinema II:  The Time-​ Image, trans. H.  Tomlinson and R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 32. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, in Means Without End, trans. V.  Binetti and C.  Casarino (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 55. 33. Ibid., p. 12. 34. Bourriaud, ‘Precarious constructions’, p. 36. 35. Ivan Gaskell, ‘Spilt ink:  Aesthetic Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 52/​1 (2012), p. 15. 36. For examples of the beach interpretation, see Laura Cumming, ‘Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds; Canaletto and his rivals’, The Guardian, 17 October 2010. Available at http://​www.guardian.co.uk/​artanddesign/​2010/​oct/​17/​ai-​weiwei-​seeds-​canaletto-​rivals-​review (accessed 29 October 2011); David Barrett, ‘Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds’, Art Monthly 343 (2011), pp. 24–​5; and Bakary Cafe blog, ‘The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei, Tate Modern, 21 January 2011’, 23 January 2011. Available at http://​bakarycafe.co.uk/​2011/​01/​23/​the-​unilever-​series-​ ai-​weiwei-​tate-​modern-​21-​january-​2011 (accessed 29 October 2011). 37. Fisun Güner, ‘When will it end? Dust continues to spoil fun for visitors to the Tate Modern’, The Arts Desk, 17 October 2010. Available at http://​www.theartsdesk.com/​buzz/​when-​will-​it-​end-​dust-​continues-​ spoil-​fun-​visitors-​tate-​modern (accessed 29 October 2011). 38. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 33–​7. 39. ‘World systems analysis’ is heavily associated with Immanuel Wallerstein, author of The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974), and ‘cultural imperialism’ with scholars such as Herb Schiller, author of Communication and Cultural Domination (Armonk:  M.E. Sharpe, 1976). See Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 32. 40. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

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Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World 41. Anna Tsing, ‘The global situation’, Cultural Anthropology 15/​3 (2000), pp. 327–​60. 42. Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists of Twentieth-​Century China, 128 ff. 43. Jérôme Sans, ‘Interview:  Yang Fudong  –​silence tells more’, Breaking Forecast: 8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation Artists exhibition catalogue, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (2010), p. 187. 44. Michael Donohue, ‘Beyond tomorrow:  Yang Fudong’, W Magazine (2007). Available at http://​www.wmagazine.com/​culture/​art-​and-​ design/​2007/​11/​emerging_​artists_​fudong (accessed 17 July 2013). 45. Gaskell, ‘Spilt ink’, pp. 3–​5. 46. Didi Kirsten Tatlow, ‘Seeking visibility for China’s art’, New York Times, IHT Rendezvous blog, 6 May 2013. Available at http://​rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/​2013/​05/​06/​seeking-​visibility-​for-​chinas-​art (accessed 17 July 2013). Tatlow reports that the Chinese art market is now the second-largest in the world, despite a dip in 2012. See also Robin Pogrebin, ‘China’s new Cultural Revolution: A surge in art collecting’, New York Times, 6 September 2011. Available at http://​www. nytimes.com/​2011/​09/​07/​arts/​chinese-​art-​collectors-​prove-​to-​be-​a-​ new-​market-​force.html (accessed 12 September 2011). 47. For more information on ShangArt, see http://​www.artspeakchina. org/​mediawiki/​ShanghART_​香纳格画廊‎, (accessed 17 July 2013), and on founder Lorenz Helbling, see Tom Mangione, ‘Talking To: Lorenz Helbling’, Talk Magazines (2012). Available at http://​shanghai.talkmagazines.cn/​issue/​2012-​06/​talking-​lorenz-​helbling (accessed 17 July 2013). 48. For more on this work, see ‘East of Que Village’, http://​www.mariangoodman.com/​exhibitions/​2009-​05-​06_​yang-​fudong (accessed 17 July 2013). 49. Chen, ‘Interview with Yang Fudong’. 50. John Matthews, ‘On Biennale of Sydney @ Cockatoo Island’, Artkritque blog (2010). Available at http://​artkritique.blogspot.co.uk/​2010/​06/​on-​ biennale-​of-​sydney-​cockatoo-​island.html (accessed 17 July 2013). 51. Nicholas Jose et al., Mao Goes Pop: China Post-​1989 (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993). See also Jiang Jiehong (ed.), Burden or Legacy:  From the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007). 52. Rey Chow, ‘The force of surfaces:  Defiance in Zhang Yimou’s films’, Primitive Passions:  Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Chinese Contemporary Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 141–​72.

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Art and the Politics of Visibility 53. Frederic Jameson, ‘The cultural logic of late capitalism’, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 19–​22. 54. Hui Wang, ‘Depoliticized politics, from East to West’, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 3–​18. 55. Ibid. 56. T. P., ‘Orwell, Kafka and Ai Weiwei:  House Arrest in China’, The Economist, Analects blog, 13 April 2012. Available at http://​www.economist.com/​blogs/​analects/​2012/​04/​house-​arrest-​china (accessed 28 December 2014). 57. Slavkoff, Elisabeth, ‘Chinese Intellectuals in Yang Fudong’s Work  –​ A  Western View’, Shanghart Gallery (2005). Available at http://​ www.shanghartgallery.com/​galleryarchive/​texts/​id/​124 (accessed 19 October 2011). 58. Ibid. 59. Yang Fudong, ‘Artist’s Statement’, in Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, No Snow on the Broken Bridge:  Film and Video Installations by Yang Fudong exhibition catalogue (London:  Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2006), p. 119. 60. For further analysis of the use of the shot-and-reverse-shot structure in these and other films, see Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 108–​34. 61. Jane Perlez, ‘Casting a fresh eye on China with computer, not ink brush’, New York Times, 3 December 2003. Available at http://​www.nytimes. com/​2003/​12/​03/​arts/​casting-​a-​fresh-​eye-​on-​china-​with-​computer-​ not-​ink-​brush.html (accessed 19 August 2011).

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2 The Blind Spots of Representation: The Difficulty of Reading Juliet Steyn

If, as Umberto Eco has noted in Misreadings,1 it is difficult to read a book, how then can we approach and read artworks such as those by Yang Fudong, issued in a different culture and continent, a markedly different world? Whether or not inflected by the assumptions of post-​ modernity’s cosmopolitan embrace, globalisation and an international art market, there will always be misreadings, mispronunciations and blind spots. This chapter will try to capture and explore some of these and their implications for interpreting artworks from other cultures. Yang Fudong was born in Beijing, 1971, studied oil painting, graduating in 1995 from the China Academy of Arts (formerly the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts) in Hangzhou. My first encounter with his work was the exhibition catalogue of the Parasol Unit’s exhibition No Snow on the Broken Bridge: Film and Video Installations by Yang Fudong.2 It was then a rather literary introduction. I read the book from cover to cover, captivated not only by the photographic images, essays and an interview with the artist but also by the design, the skilful placing of text and image. The catalogue is 53

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Art and the Politics of Visibility a beautiful object bringing together Roman script and Chinese characters: West and East. The latter for me are utterly mysterious figures, elegant dancing images dispersed on and across the pages: aesthetically pleasing yet sadly a blind spot for me as I cannot read Chinese. Yet the essays and the still photographs meet and I  read them across the abyss that perforce still divides West and East. Crucially in the catalogue these worlds cannot be kept apart: they permeate each other. Like osmosis, each destabilises the identity of the other, causing what might be dangerous reverberations and heralding an experience of identity at its limits: my own knowledge at its limits; a staging of my own ignorance. Moving away from the catalogue and finding out what others say about Yang Fudong’s work becomes a labyrinth of competing claims. His work by now is a vital part of the international art world and market place. To give just one example, the five-​part cycle film entitled Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, completed in 2007, was shown in its entirety at  The Venice Biennale  in the same year and parts have been shown at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, in Castello di Rivoli, Turin and Kunsthalle, Vienna. The 1990s was the decade that gradually opened the Chinese market to the West. The critic Pi Li, in an article published by Third Text, ‘Chinese contemporary video art’, notes that ‘While the opening of China’s market appeared rather slow, when judged by the wishes of Western investors, multinational enterprises were still willing to spend large amounts of money to maintain their representative offices in China’.3 The opening of the market includes the art market. As such, China’s artists become subject to its whims.4 The selectively exclusionist nature of the global art market indicates what is in and what is out –​and from where. The regions that are favoured raise political as well as economic questions and alert us to issues that impact and affect the cacophony of art discourses as well as their silences and omissions. The ways in which works are 54

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The Blind Spots of Representation mediated, exhibited, spoken about and eventually categorised is what gives them value. A common concern in accounts of Yang Fudong’s work is to whom it is addressed. Anxiety about these topics is palpable and can be traced in the commentaries, criticism and Yang Fudong’s own statements about his work. Yang himself has said that Western collectors fail to comprehend the deep confidence Chinese artists have in their own culture: ‘They think we do our work for them. We do not. We do it for China.’5 Thus, if Yang’s avowed address is to China then, following Chris Berry (Chapter 1), ‘how does he mark himself out as Chinese’? But I  would add a supplementary question:  how does he mark himself out as Chinese without foreclosing the potentiality of meaning for a differentiated public (and for the global art market)? Then there is the question of method or approach to art produced outside the European/​American trajectory. The politics of both art history and criticism are beset with the anxieties posed by post-​coloniality. So what happens to art from, for instance, Southeast Asia which lays outside the map, making a difference, a differentiation in the interpretative approaches that are used to explain it? Joan Kee, in her ‘Introduction’ to the special issue of Third Text devoted to ‘Contemporaneity and Art in Southeast Asia’, suggests ethnographic methods predominate. Her concern –​following Patrick Flores –​is whether ‘ethnography reinforces the marginalisation of contemporary Southeast Asia art by unduly emphasising context at the expense of the artwork, which [Flores] describes as an anxiety born of the contrast between the “aesthetic” and the “anthropological”’.6 If a work is deemed the subject of ethnography, a priori, then this suggests it does not have aesthetic value outside and apart from ethnographic identification; as a result, the work is only incorporated by exception into the art market system (or so the logic goes). However, when it comes to works by Chinese artists –​either from the mainland or émigrés –​it is not the binary of ‘ethnography’ versus 55

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Art and the Politics of Visibility ‘aesthetics’ that pertains, for China is ‘in’ and its art market is buoyant. But there is another binary in place, and this is art and politics. It is here that meanings are fought over. Hsiau-​peg Lau and Sheldon H.  Lau claim that ‘During the Mao era, the slogan was ‘literature and the arts serve politics’. In the post-​Mao era (New Era), the task is to salvage art from subordination to politics’.7 So what is the implication of this move to ‘salvage art from subordination to politics?’ Let’s turn back to the Cultural Revolution that, as the Laus make clear, is a spectre that still haunts China. Indeed Xi Jinping, President of China and General Secretary of the Communist Party, in a 2014 speech, declared that artists should ‘serve ordinary citizens’, an idea that echoes Mao’s comments 70 years ago that artists and the masses ‘must be completely integrated’.8 In On Photography, Susan Sontag provides a telling account of the critical and/​or political reception in China in 1974 –​at the height of the Cultural Revolution –​of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, Chung Kuo.9 He had been invited by the People’s Republic of China to direct a documentary about New China and travelled with his crew to Beijing, Nanjing, Suzhou, Shanghai and Henan for eight weeks in 1972. The result was a three-and-a-half-hour-long film. Sontag explains that the extreme and negative criticisms it provoked from Chinese authorities were occasioned by the very devices of photography used by the filmmaker. She argues that everything valued by the Western photographic gaze –​informality, close-​ups, informal poses, discontinuity and so on –​were themselves the sources of the outrage, a vermin in the service of the imperialists –​un verme al servizio degli imperialisti.10 The film was deemed to intentionally present China in a bad light and with hostility. From this example, Sontag inferred: In China [today], only two realities are acknowledged. We see reality as hopeless and interestingly plural. In China what is defined as an issue for debate is one about which there are ‘two lines’, a right one and a wrong one. Theirs 56

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The Blind Spots of Representation is constructed around a single, ideal observer; and photographs contribute their bit to the Great Monologue.11

Accordingly, in China, photography during the Cultural Revolution was expected to present a monocular perspective. In the West photographs were valued for their polysemic character. Hence, as Sontag concludes, in China, photography in the Western sense had no place. Much, of course, has changed in the intervening years. To return to the present, Elizabeth Lee in, ‘Chineseness in Contemporary Chinese Art Criticism’, argues that a distinguishing quality of Chinese art discourses is a sense of responsibility to society: ‘The very recent history of the People’s Republic of China is still so fresh in time that it seems almost wrong for a critic to think of contemporary art outside of politics’.12 ‘Almost wrong’, she writes. What does her prevarication signal? Certainly politics appears at the forefront of the New York Times reviewer Ken Johnson’s mind when writing in 2009 about Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest: Viewed against a backdrop of recent Chinese history  –​ the decline of Maoism, the rise of capitalism, the accelerated importation of Western art and culture –​[the film] exude[s]‌a mournful ennui that is the opposite of go-​go modernity. Welcome to China. Here are the educated classes who aspire to the intellectual and material rewards of modern, global culture, but risk losing their traditional sources of identity and spiritual energy. And there are worlds where life is unforgiving, and death is always near at hand. The future seems bleak.13

The bleak image of China’s social and political landscape conjured up by Johnson chimes with the artist’s own pessimism:  ‘there are obstacles, obstacles coming either from society or from inside oneself ’.14 In the main, Yang Fudong claims to have no interest in politics and his utterances tend to be vague and equivocal. 57

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Art and the Politics of Visibility In a move that might be said to salvage art from subordination to politics, Hal Foster eschews overt politics in his essay ‘Xu Bing:  A  Western Perspective,’ and elucidates the work with the resources of ‘Western’ semiotics, linguistics. Trained as a printmaker, Xu Bing’s primary medium is written language and his art often takes the form of books as installations. Xu Bing’s Book From the Sky, created between 1987 and 1991, consists of an alphabet of 4,000 fictitious Chinese characters carved into wooden printing blocks. Out of these he made hundreds of books using traditional typesetting and binding techniques. Foster links Xu Bing’s meticulous creation of Chinese characters with the work of the nineteenth-century Orientalist, Jean-​Léon Gérôme; Dada sound poetry; and early Jackson Pollock. Foster is clear that his reading –​as his subtitle makes plain –​is from the perspective of Western art history. Underlying his interpretation is a space, an ethical space of differentiation, a clear acknowledgment of Difference, of perspective. Above all, it is a statement of the obligation to be clear about his vantage point, his vista. In another work, Square Word Calligraphy, Xu Bing writes English words through Chinese brushstrokes (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2). There, both Chinese and English script is disturbed:  whilst promising legibility, they are not easily comprehensible (if at all). He says of his work: ‘To strike at the written word is to strike at the very essence of the culture. Any doctoring of the written word becomes in itself a transformation of the most inherent portion of a person’s thinking’.15 His work affirms the centrality of the written word in the formation of subjectivity and identity at the same time as frustrating it. If politics is not explicit in his work, ontology, the theorisation of existence, of being, is its condition. Elizabeth Lee is vexed by Hal Foster’s avowed positioning from a ‘Western Perspective’ on the artist Xu Bing.16 Foster’s understanding is consequently for Lee, ‘limited in its scope’ and as such a misreading.17 Foster is criticised by Elizabeth Lee for his reflexivity. 58

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The Blind Spots of Representation

Figure 2.1 Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy, 2011. Installation view ‘Square Word Calligraphy Classroom’, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2011. © Xu Bing Studio.

At the core of her contention is that the work should be read, first and foremost, as Chinese. Are there echoes here of the criticisms of Antonioni’s film of 30 years ago? Instead of affirming the potentiality of its meaning from a variety of perspectives, Lee would rather confine it to a monocultural view and one in which, as mentioned above, ‘it seems almost wrong for a critic to think of contemporary art outside of politics’.18 I am not here advocating an either/​or, or an ‘anything goes’ post-​ modernist, approach to art criticism. Every work of art offers the prospect of many readings, many interpretations and in the historical context of its making and reception some readings may be preferred over others –​preferred by the artist, by the spectator and by the critic. These ‘preferences’ occur in specific contexts and provide a frame for meanings which do not necessarily define them and fix them forever in an identity. The possibilities inherent in language 59

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Figure  2.2  Xu Bing, Square Word Calligraphy Classroom, 1994. Mixed-​ media installation: desk, chair sets, copy and tracing books, brushes, ink, video; dimensions variable. Exhibition view ‘Square Word Calligraphy Classroom’, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2011. © Xu Bing Studio. 

make it open to signification that lies outside the logic of a framing identity. While art criticism often seems to desire certainty and Identity, this I would argue is precisely what Xu Bing’s work refutes and to this extent may be deemed political. 60

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The Blind Spots of Representation The desire for the ‘authentic’ or ‘legitimate’ reading is evident too in the critical reception of Yang Fudong’s work and competition abounds for ‘who’ (Chinese or otherwise) can understand it, possess it, claim it as their own. Again repeating the trope of West versus East, Ziba Ardalan de Weck, discussing the work of Yang Fudong, has argued: Western viewers tend to emphasise the visual beauty and sensual appeal, whereas a Chinese critic may perceive them somewhat differently by decoding the symbolism in works such as Liu Lan and by focusing more on the troubling elements of dissonance in their content.19

It seems clear to me that Yang Fudong’s work is visually beautiful and sensuous and also symbolic. It seems to invite a range of responses from which possible experiences are solicited and meanings can be inferred. For many artists, curators and critics in China, to rescue art from politics and politics from aestheticisation is itself a challenge to Western hegemony and art criticism. Yao Yun argues that to understand a work of art in a global context requires Western viewers to engage more deeply with the culture of the ‘other’. Yao Yuan draws the viewer’s attention to the sense of tension inherent in Yang Fudong’s work –​a tension that he suggests is born of antagonism towards the modernised city and towards everyday life.20 Pi Li explicitly cautions against what he describes as a blind acceptance of Western interpretations of Chinese contemporary art. He suggests that by not examining, as he puts it, ‘exterior critique’, China’s contemporary art is in danger of being subservient to Western values and taste. Yuko Hasegawa, in ‘The white cloud drifting across the sky above the scene of an earthquake’, argues that if Western interpretations are dispensed with, we can discover in Yang Fudong’s work the secret to ‘unlimited freedom’.21 Thus assumptions of the universality 61

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Art and the Politics of Visibility of the Western aesthetic model are being questioned, post-​colonial critiques developed and Eastern attitudes and values are being affirmed. Hasegawa likens Yang Fudong’s attitude to his art-making with that of a Taoist: His detached point of view and introspective approach is that of the Taoist, who listens intently to his inner voice, reads the flow of chi around him, and lives in harmony with it.22

Accordingly, Yang Fudong’s work reinvigorates Eastern tradition and thus poses a limit to Western aesthetics and creates one of many blind spots. A suite of black and white images from No Snow on the Broken Bridge features four, to my eyes, strangely clad figures, walking through a landscape that resonates ‘Chinese’, reminding me –​ through the foliage, bamboo, rocks and steps honed out of stone, and multiple perspectives –​of traditional Chinese landscape paintings. The shifting viewpoints connote a time span rather than the single moment preferred by the Western tradition. Indeed, Yang’s work announces a complete break with the single viewpoint demanded by proponents of the Cultural Revolution described by Sontag earlier and is more akin to the traditions of Chinese landscape art. Yang’s images are fabricated dreamlands. The first part of No Snow on the Broken Bridge, completed in 2003, is located on Yellow Mountain (Huang Shan), a well-​ known site in Chinese painting, revered by Taoists and a popular tourist destination today –​a frequent subject of tourism photography. Couples who go to the mountain often buy two locks symbolising security and eternal lasting love. Susan Sontag has argued that taking photographs is a comforting activity that allays feelings of insecurity that are likely to be accentuated by travel. Photographs, she says, ‘give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, and they also help people take 62

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The Blind Spots of Representation possession of a space in which they are insecure’.23 For the tourist, then, the very act of taking photographs and in the case of tourists to Yellow Mountain, who purchase locks, they are emblematic of this need for security. Photographs may cite the ‘universal’, insofar as the ‘universal’ allows the very possibility of meaning, but it is also through the condition of universality that we are able to witness the breaking of codes and expose the false or illusionary unity of identity. To insist upon ‘Chinese’ as the sign through which the works are explained unavoidably skews interpretation in favor of Identity. Such is the tightrope walked by anyone daring to investigate the vagaries of ‘Chinese’ (or other) identity-​fuelled discourses or artworks. Yang’s work is informed by the aesthetic of film. The critic Yu Yang suggests the artist’s influences can be located in Chinese cinema from the 1940s –​films like Baqianli lu yun/​The Moon and Clouds over the Eight-​Thousand-​Mile Road (1947) by Shi Dongshan, Wuya yu maque/​Crow and Sparrow (1949) by Zheng Junli, and Fei Mu’s, Xiao Chen zhi chun ​and Spring Time in a Small Town (1948). But Yang also uses fragmented editing and non-​linear narratives associated with Western avant-​garde cinema.24 Independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, according to Ken Johnson, is also an important influence. Jarmusch pithily suggests that we ‘always remember what Jean-​Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from –​ it’s where you take them to’. The interaction between different cultures, the uncertainty of national identity, and disrespect towards ethnocentric, patriotic or nationalistic sentiments are recurring themes in Jarmusch’s films and perhaps these are the characteristics that attracted Yang Fudong to his work. Yang uses both Western and Eastern film traditions and conventions as differentiated, if not dissonant, identities. Yang’s approach to filmmaking produces work that is deliberately open-​ended and cannot be pinned down to a single vision 63

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Art and the Politics of Visibility or, to refer back to Sontag, to an ‘ideal observer’. They allow a plurality of interpretations. But I should stress, it is not that his work is endlessly open, rather that there is an openness structured within. The connotative power of his images lies in its precarious relationship with the boundaries provided by rigid systems of classification. Cinema is for Yang Fudong the ‘poetic representation of images that are found in the depths of people’s hearts and minds’.25 We can infer that he is seeking to address something that humans have in common beyond, and across, cultural specificity, something that is ‘universal’. The universal is cited only to be disrupted. His work provokes us to make connections and to think about certain themes yet prompts an awareness of the existence of the blind spot, of the ‘I’m not sure’, to any one of the possible meanings. I want to turn now to Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest –​a film that consists of a multi-​channel series of five discrete films. The title is borrowed from folklore that tells of seven sages in a bamboo forest who sought sanctuary from the chaos of the Warring States Period, where they could enjoy serious discussion undisturbed by worldly concerns. The intellectuals in the film wear clothes from the 1940s, perhaps a reference to neo-​realist films and according to Yang Fudong, they are pictured in the way he remembered French intellectuals pictured on book covers. He is not explicit about whom. But I cannot help being reminded of Jean-​Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and the Tel Quel group, including Julia Kristeva, Philip Sollers and Godard and their enthusiasm for the Cultural Revolution. In the West, the intellectual has been the spokesperson for modernity, enlightenment. She or he has created and represented the subjectivity of the larger whole –​Society. The artist has been a part of this avant-​garde. The attempts at undermining and discrediting the Intellectual in the West over the decades, and those French intellectuals particularly who embraced the 64

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The Blind Spots of Representation Cultural Revolution, may suggest a measure of irony in the film. Yang Fudong himself observes: Like all of us, I’m a bit like that ‘first intellectual’:  ‘one wants to accomplish big things but in the end it doesn’t happen. Every educated Chinese person is very ambitious, and obviously there are obstacles coming either from society or from inside oneself.26

Here, I  am reminded of the early Federico Fellini film I Vitelloni (1953) –​the little heifers, the useless ones –​and Cesare Pavese’s self-​ lacerating view of intellectuals. The deliberate incoherence of the narrative and film structure suggests the loss of an intellectual vanguard in the West and of stable subjectivity and of authority that no longer pertains either in the East or West. Critics Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yuko Hasegawa and Elizabeth Slavkoff, in their different ways, seem to agree that Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest investigates the anxieties of a new generation and the fate of intellectuals in the China of the twenty-​first century. The work, they suggest, comments upon the impact that the radical economic, social and political changes are having on individuals in their search for a role and an identity. For Hans Ulrich Obrist, the work is about the ambiguous position of intellectuals in contemporary China  –​their longing for individual freedom in the shifting context of an emergent capitalist society. Meanwhile, Hasegawa suggests the film is ‘a metaphor for the resistance of the young Chinese who feel unable to keep up with the pace of change in China and, as a result, experience a kind of identity crisis’.27 There again today’s situation, according to Slavkoff, has pushed intellectuals into the margins and forced them to seek an autonomous space of their own. Yang Fudong, she argues, translates the situation of intellectuals into a retreat from public affairs. Slavkoff, citing Wang Hui –​one of China’s most influential public scholars –​ goes on to suggest that the dramatic social changes after 1989 have undermined the category of intellectual. A highly stratified division 65

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Art and the Politics of Visibility of labour of experts, scholars, managers and technocrats has now been created. Moreover, as she puts it, [this] relentless process of stratification in Chinese society has brought about a loss of spirit and silence of intellectuals on social conditions which is in stark contrast to the new enlightenment intellectuals of the early 1980s.28

The intellectual class according to Eva Evasdottir, in ‘Obedient Autonomy’, is uncritical (hence obedient), which through the system of guan xi (personal relationships) and the clever handling of relationships with the central authorities, manages to maintain a space of freedom (autonomy). However, this autonomy, she argues, has nothing to do with the individualism or the anti-​government liberalism of the West but is the result of the position of the intellectual and the negotiation of that position.29 If Chinese artists achieve a measure of negotiated autonomy, it is circumscribed. As Chris Berry (Chapter 1) points out: the Chinese authorities tolerate ‘alternativeness but not opposition’. Ai Weiwei is a case in point. From the vantage points of West or East, ‘who’ or what might Yang Fudong’s Intellectuals stand for? Just who are the protagonists and how might ‘we’ make sense of them? Is Yang Fudong picturing a redundant class lost in the drive of the market economy? Today, what critical perspectives can the work sustain? Xi Jinping has declared that artists should not be driven by commercial success. They should not be ‘slaves’ of the market’ or ‘lose themselves in the tide of [the] market economy nor go astray while answering the question of whom to serve’. Yang Fudong’s art might serve Xi Jinping’s mission perfectly when Xi promotes art in the following terms:  ‘Chinese art will further develop only when we make foreign things serve China, and bring Chinese and Western arts together via thorough understanding’. Art should, he continues, ‘disseminate contemporary Chinese values, embody traditional Chinese culture and reflect Chinese people’s aesthetic pursuit’.30 It is 66

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The Blind Spots of Representation clear how difficult it is for artists to escape politics in China today, however much an artist, such as Yang Fudong, might try. In Yang’s work tradition persists in the present, inviting connections across temporalities (and politics), between contemporary China and its pasts. For him China is at a moment ‘when we have to negotiate our past while inventing our present’.31 He bemoans the loss of traditional values and tradition which he configures, like Xi Jinping, as a loss to be reinstated. Indeed, loss is a recurrent theme in his work. Yang’s relationship with the rapidly modernising city Shanghai, which to the Chinese observer signifies the West and indeed the place Yang has chosen to live, becomes the site in which his alienation from the urban context is expressed. He observes that his own unease with change also seems perceptible in many of his fellow citizens: ‘Many people seem to have become ‘non-​believers’. They have lost their faith in everything’.32 The alienation he observes may be the human condition or the condition of many. I am not meaning to cover up differences in the ‘real’ world between China and the West (or indeed, other parts of the so-​called East) or the lived contradictions and conflicts. Rather, I wish to suggest that Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest provides an opportunity to uncover some of the difficulties of reading and to work out some of the differences. Howard Caygill has suggested, ‘Aesthetic legitimacy depends not on an ‘artist’s universal mandate’ but on the ‘artwork’s universal address’.33 Asking how art ‘speaks’ is not the same as the universal mandate or authority in the Sartrean sense of the intellectual who is the moral conscience of the age, the person who speaks for all. As Michel Foucault explains, we have travelled a long way from the notion of the intellectual in the vanguard: The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself ‘somewhere ahead and to the side’ in order to express the stifled truth of collectivity:  rather, it is to struggle against 67

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Art and the Politics of Visibility the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘discourse’.34

Foucault’s description may help to articulate the limits of both the Global and Local. From this spot we can recognise and acknowledge the limits of the universal and the particular, the blind spots that make us aware of our ignorance, from which we may come to know. Film, while perhaps offering a sort of universal language –​after all, the universal is only heterogeneous singularity –​also contains the limits of that language, the limits of knowledge and recognition. Georgio Agamben suggests, ‘The ways in which we do not know things are just as important (and perhaps more important) as the ways in which we know them’.35 I have yet to learn Chinese, and I cannot pretend to be an expert on current Chinese art practices, but my foray into the work of Yang Fudong shows me the truth of Agamben’s suggestion: ‘The zone of nonknowledge is the touchstone of all our knowledge’.36 The ways in which we are able to be convincingly ignorant to ourselves first of all are precisely what define us. What I  have tried to convey here is something of a dialogue between history and tradition, between East and West. I have tried to avoid what I see as temptations and traps of privileging Western or Eastern perspectives in interpreting Yang Fudong’s work. They have pointed me in the direction of not knowing. The challenge then is to recognise the paradoxes explicit in the commitment to the uniqueness of diversity and the heterogeneity of the universal. Ultimately the issue for the present is not to resolve or determine the knowledge of Identity, Chinese or otherwise. The undecidability of Identity is a peculiarly modern state and perhaps it is here that we might avoid the disasters that are, and have been, committed in the name of Identity. Where else can this be achieved if not through art and criticism?37 68

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Notes 1. Umberto Eco, Misreadings, trans. W. Weave (London: Jonathan Cape 1993). 2. Ziba Ardalan de Weck (ed.), No Snow on the Broken Bridge:  Film and Video Installations by Yang Fudong exhibition catalogue (London: Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2006). 3. Pi Li, ‘Chinese Contemporary Video Art’, Third Text 23/​3 (2009), pp. 303–​7. 4. A good example is collector Chong Zhou, who owns more than 100 works by Zeng Fanzhi, Yoshitomo Nara and Yang Fudong. He now focuses on China’s younger artists, born post-​ 1975, such as Qiu Xiaofei, Sun Xun and Shi Zhiying. Instead of a museum to house his collection, he has opened a restaurant, Macasa, in Shanghai, which features rotating shows. See Barbara Pollack, ‘Young and Worldly: China’s Newest Collectors’, ArtNews, 21 October 2014. Available at http://​ www.artnews.com/​2014/​10/​21/​new-​generation-​of-​chinese-​art-​collectors (accessed 9 January 2015). 5. Quoted by Ziba Ardalan de Weck, No Snow on the Broken Bridge, p. 111. 6. Joan Kee, ‘Introduction Contemporary Southeast  Asian Art’, Third Text 25/​4 (2011), p. 379. 7. Sheldon H. Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Post Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 8. Austin Ramzy, ‘Xi Jinping calls for artists to spread “Chinese values” ’, New York Times, Sinosphere blog, 16 October 2014. Available at http://​ sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/​2014/​10/​16/​xi-​jinping-​calls-​for-​artists-​ to-​spread-​chinese-​values (accessed 20 January 2015). 9. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1978). 10. Spettacoli, La Stampa, 28 November 2004, p.  41. Available at http://​ www.lastampa.it/​spettacoli (accessed 21 October 2011). 11. Sontag, On Photography, p. 172. 12. Elizabeth Lee, ‘Chineseness in contemporary Chinese art criticism’, Journal of Undergraduate Research 3, University of Notre Dame (2007). Available at http://​www3.nd.edu/​~ujournal/​wp-​content/​uploads/​Lee_​ 07-​08.pdf (accessed 9 January 2015). 13. Ken Johnson, ‘From an Ancient Bamboo Grove to Modern China’, New York Times, 28 May 2009. Available at http://​www.nytimes.com/​ 2009/​05/​29/​arts/​design/​29yang.html (accessed 11 October 2011). 14. Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Yang Fudong Interview’, in Ziba Ardalan de Weck (ed.), No Snow on the Broken Bridge: Film and Video Installations by 69

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Art and the Politics of Visibility Yang Fudong exhibition catalogue (London: Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2006), p. 122. 15. Xu Bing quoted by Brita Erickson, Words Without Meaning, Meaning Without Words: The Art of Xu Bing (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001), pp. 13–​14, cited in Lee, ‘Chineseness in contemporary Chinese art criticism’, p. 11. 16. Hal Foster, ‘Xu Bing: Western Perspective’ in J. Silbergeld and D. C. Y. Ching (eds), Persistence/​Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 89. 17. Lee, ‘Chineseness in contemporary Chinese art criticism’, p. 12. 18. Ibid., p. 4. 19. Ziba de Weck Ardalan, ‘Nets Cast into the Deep Blue Sea’, in Ziba de Weck Ardalan (ed.), No Snow on the Broken Bridge:  Film and Video Installations by Yang Fudong exhibition catalogue (London:  Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2006), p. 111. 20. Elisabeth Slavkoff, ‘Chinese Intellectuals in Yang Fudong’s Work  –​ A Western View’, Shanghart Gallery (2005). Available at http://​ www.shanghartgallery.com/​galleryarchive/​texts/​id/​124 (accessed 7 January 2015). 21. Yuko Hasegawa, ‘The white cloud drifting across the sky above the scene of an earthquake’, trans. Pamela Miki. Parkett 76 (2006), p. 84. Available at http://​www.parkettart.com/​downloadable/​download/​ sample/​sample_​id/​91 (accessed 7 January 2015). 22. Hasegawa, ‘The white cloud drifting across the sky’, p. 80. 23. Sontag, On Photography, p. 10. 24. Sergei Eisenstein was influenced by Chinese open metaphorical language in the development of his theory of film montage. 25. Marcella Beccaria, Yang Fudong: The Foreigner and the Search for Poetic Truth exhibition catalogue (Torino:  Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Skira, 2005). 26. Yang Fudong in Ulrich Obrist, No Snow on the Broken Bridge, p. 122. 27. Hasegawa, ‘The white cloud drifting across the sky’. 28. Slavkoff, ‘Chinese Intellectuals in Yang Fudong’s Work –​A Western View’. 29. Cited in Slavkoff, ‘Chinese Intellectuals in Yang Fudong’s Work  –​A Western View’. See Erika E. S. Evasdottir, Obedient: Chinese Intellectuals and the Achievement of Orderly Life (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). 30. Austin Ramzy, ‘Xi Jinping Calls for Artists to Spread ‘Chinese Values’. 31. Yang Fudong, ‘Artist’s Statement’, in Ziba Ardalan de Weck (ed.), No Snow on the Broken Bridge:  Film and Video Installations by Yang Fudong exhibition catalogue, p. 115. 70

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The Blind Spots of Representation 32. See http://​www.stedelijk.nl/​en/​exhibitions/​yang-​fudong-​recent-​films-​ and-​videos (accessed 13 January 2015). 33. Howard Caygill, ‘Response to Thierry de Duve’ in Diarmuid Costello and Dominic Willsdon (eds), The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), p. 158. 34. Michel Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power:  A  Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’, L’Arc 49 (1972), pp.  3–​10. ‘This discussion was recorded on March 4, 1972, and it was published in a special issue of L’Arc dedicated to Gilles Deleuze’. Available at https://​ libcom.org/​ l ibrary/​ i ntellectuals-​ p ower-​ a -​ c onversation- ​ b etween-​ michel-​foucault-​and-​gilles-​deleuze (accessed 9 January 2015). 35. Georgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. D.  Kishik and S.  Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 113. 36. Ibid., p. 114. 37. This remark has a particular resonance today as we face the contradictions posed in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo slaughter in Paris in January 2015.

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3 Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing M. I. Franklin

Introduction This chapter develops work on ‘Burqa-​Ban’ controversies in light of the ‘post-​feminist’ debates about the global beauty and fashion industries’ partnership with popular TV makeover shows.1 It looks at the politics of visibility in the context of controversies in the EU and the US about the regulation of Muslim veil dressing and comparable controversies in the Middle East and North African region about women’s naked protests. In both cases national-​ regional debates became global, mediatised ones. It does so from the perspective of how these politics are rendered in, made visible through artists’ interventions and, conversely, how embodied political actions incorporate artistic references and theatrical idioms in turn. It is part of a tripartite project to articulate a viable critique of Burqa-​Ban discourses in the EU and with that, to address related, often moribund, debates about what sorts of well-​dressed, or undressed embodiments count, and for whom.2 The main aim is to point these arguments in another direction by 73

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Art and the Politics of Visibility confronting a Western liberal –​and feminist –​blind spot about which vested interests are being served when staking claims on what sorts of (naked or dressed) bodies can, or should, emit the appropriate signs of ‘emancipation’. This means coming to terms with how an inner ‘illogic’ of dress-​sense and dress codes at the psycho-​emotional level interacts with societal, including sub-​cultural, codes of conduct. Before proceeding, however, some historical context is called for; in the first decade of the twentieth century British suffragettes were grabbing newspaper headlines with their direct actions. Today, it is just over a century since Emily Davison became the first casualty of the movement when she threw herself –​or fell –​under one of the horses at the 1913 Epsom Derby. The photograph taken of that moment has become iconic for the history of twentieth-century women’s rights activism. At around the same time, in Egyptian cities and other countries in the region including Algeria and Tunisia, women were taking off their customary headscarves (hijab), marking another wave in the history of unveiling and veiling that punctuates the Middle East and North African region’s shifting gender power hierarchies before, during and since colonial rule.3 By the 1970s, women students on Egyptian university campuses were taking up the veil again, a new form of Islamic dress that marked the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood as a religious and political force to be reckoned with.4 In Turkey women were doing likewise. Meanwhile, on US and other Anglo-​European university campuses feminists were mobilising against forms of sexual discrimination, through legislatures and by direct action; for example, by disrupting beauty pageants and holding public ‘burn ​the ​bra’ events. Slogans such as ‘our bodies ourselves’ and ‘the right to choose’ –​emblematic of that era –​have continued to echo down the generations of Western feminism. Back in the Middle East and North African region, a few decades later, in 1999, a woman deputy, Merve Kavakçı, entered the Turkish 74

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing parliament ‘wearing a white headscarf with fashionable frameless eyeglasses and a long-​skirted, modern two-​piece suit’5 to a raucously critical reception. Her fashionable accessories aside, it was her hijab that incensed critics. Following close on the heels of that year’s election of the first veiled woman deputy from a pro-​Islamic party, other women deputies also condemned Kavakçı’s action for its avowing of the ‘ideological uniform of Islamic fundamentalism’.6 Returning to Western Europe, since the turn of this century (though presaged in the 1990s) there have been concerted efforts in a number of EU member states to regulate the hijab and other public forms of veil dressing such as the chador, or niqab. Current moves to instigate an outright ban on all if not certain forms of veil dressing have been championed by a loose confederation of antiimmigration/Eurosceptic populist parties to the right of the political spectrum. Whilst eschewing the xenophobic polemic of ‘Burqa Ban’ arguments, centre-​left, liberal and feminist voices have also expressed their own sense of unease with visibly Muslim forms of dress for EU residents and citizens.7 These measures, as a political response to how the veil represents an apparent increase in the number of Muslims who ‘refuse’ to integrate, have polarised opinion-​makers, and academe. For it is visibly Muslim, and not any sort of ‘modest’ dressing from other faiths that is under scrutiny.8 In the heat of this debate, contemporary forms of hijab and, with them, local-​global fashion trends and personal sartorial inflections have been reduced to a symptom of Islamic fundamentalism’s inroads into Western society. Consequently, all women wearing the veil become positioned as oppressed rather than active subjects, incomplete rather than full citizens in these nominally secular societies and so ipso facto unfashionably clad with respect to liberal capitalism’s consumerist codes of aspiration and modernity.9 Nonetheless, and for many reasons, Muslim women living in these increasingly intolerant and xenophobic societies have been insisting on their right to wear what they deem to be appropriate, refusing 75

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Art and the Politics of Visibility to conform to these crosscutting prescriptions; their (veiled) bodies themselves, their right to choose.10 Amidst legislated and spontaneous changes in public dress codes in urban centres, and rising anti-​Muslim sentiment amongst some EU residents, what then to make of the two young women in Egypt and Tunisia, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy and Amina Sboui-​Tyler, uploading photos of themselves naked or bare-​breasted onto their Facebook pages, in 2011 and 2013 respectively. Reactions –​from religious authorities, burgeoning secular powers, Muslim and non-​ Muslim women’s and civil rights activists, in the region and in the West –​were fierce and divided. On record both women declared that they were protesting against their respective governments. But it was their allying themselves through these actions with the European-​based Femen organisation, notorious for the staging of topless, ‘flash’ demonstrations against human trafficking and prostitution, that pushed debates out beyond Egypt and Tunisia as the images went viral. Their acts echoed the rhetoric of individual emancipation, freedom and equal rights from the heyday of mid-​ twentieth-century feminism. First, that ‘my body belongs to me, it is not the source of anyone else’s honour’11 and second, that ‘I am not shy of being a woman in a society where women are nothing but sex objects harassed on a daily basis by men who know nothing about sex or the importance of a woman’.12 But they also point to wider issues at the intersection of changing dress codes, women’s embodiments, and sociopolitical orders all of which underscore ongoing contestations around civil rights in societies marked by the aftermath of the events of 9/​11 and the Arab (and Persian) Uprisings. The above interwoven timelines set the scene for this discussion. They also underscore the conceptual framework underpinning this juxtaposition between art and politics, and the gender geopoliticisation of the ‘everyday corporeal practices’13 of Muslim women’s veil dressing. They illustrate the ways in which the body, in Foucault’s terms, ‘is also directly involved in a political field; power relations 76

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing have an immediate hold on it, mark it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. The political investment of the body is bound up [in]… complex reciprocal social relations … the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body’.14 More specifically they reveal how women’s bodies, and the ways in which women deploy their own bodies, ‘emit’ as well as resist the complex social relations that interested Foucault. In the above scenarios, all of these women –​fighting for the right to vote, by insisting or desisting from veil dressing, or going naked in public –​are confronting the power relations that hold them back, that dictate the signs their bodies are supposed to emit, and for whom. Those refusals to conform as a subjected body in societies based on highly disciplined ‘homosocial’15 orders that police the physical separation of male from female ‘interior, intimate, gendered’ spaces16 –​such as Iran or Saudi Arabia –​appear more dramatic. However, when it comes to controversies around Muslim women veil dressing, or un-​dressing as the case may be, in ostensibly liberal –​and allegedly liberated –​European or North American societies, we see a comparable effect albeit on another status quo, another ‘order of things’. These actions around women’s bodies and claims for the right to choose, and responses to them, leave no one untouched, no one a neutral bystander, no intellectual a disinterested, non-​gendered observer.

Rationale and Argument In this chapter I take this line of thought in two directions: defiant embodiments as rendered by artists and as/​in protest. In the first case I explore these tensions through the humorously disruptive self-​ portraits of British artist, Sarah Maple, vis-​à-​vis those by US-​based Iranian artist, Shirin Neshat. Maple’s work pokes fun at perceptions of veil dressing, sexual propriety and (Muslim) womanhood within would-​be multicultural societies whilst Neshat’s challenging 77

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Art and the Politics of Visibility portrayals of the ‘domestic, and culturally crafted … bodily codes of an “Islamic woman’’17 are embedded in the geopolitical and intimate consequences of the Iranian Revolution and subsequent Islamic fundamentalism in Iran and amongst the Persian diaspora. I then (re)turn to the controversies that arose from Elmahdy and Sbnoui-​ Tyler’s naked ‘selfies’ as their actions were picked up by Western blogger-​journalists and explore how the geopolitical dimensions of conflicting interpretations of the women’s actions were ratcheted up a level through the link between these two protagonists and the Femen movement. The intersection of aesthetic idioms and/​as politics in this social media frenzy underscore how the deployment and display of (semi-​)naked women’s bodies in public spaces still polarises opinions across the cultural, religious and political spectrum.18 Through the cases above, this chapter aims to do three things in particular. First, to highlight the intentional and spontaneous synergies between art and protest, as these bear on the injustices and hypocrisies that Burqa Ban sentiments have imposed on Muslim women living in the West.19 The second is to consider the ways in which women’s bodies, clothed and unclothed, work to ‘signal resistance or protest against the views of the majority ... [by making] visible a presence of a dissenting minority’20 in their respective sociocultural and political settings. In both contexts veil-​dressing issues underscore the labour entailed in maintaining the respective ‘regimes of power organized on principles of visibility’.21 This is particularly acute for those cases where women (veiled, naked) embody forms of defiance and refusal that are either not compatible with the protest traditions and idioms that characterise Western civil rights activism or violate other cultural and ‘bodily codes’.22 In both scenarios we see women engaging a ‘morality of refusal’23 either by volition or force of circumstance. A third aim is to show how in these instances women’s rights advocates round the world –​across historical eras, generations and cultures –​do still share common ground, despite marked and entrenched differences in voice, idiom 78

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing and ways to fight social injustice at large and women’s oppression in particular. These commonalities are being subsumed at present in Burqa-​Ban controversies pivoting on supposing that the veiled face of the Other is that of ‘a disguised enemy’.24

Intellectual Background Being visible, and with that the politics of seeing, permeates Leila Ahmed’s 2011 book, A Quiet Revolution. Part of a growing literature on veil dressing, religion and culture from an insider’s perspective, this book is a personal and intellectual encounter with women activists in Egypt and abroad who opt to veil dress.25 Ahmed reflects on the rise and fall and rise again of veil dressing in twentieth-century Egyptian society as the litmus paper for the changing power relations between secular and religious (read Islamist) power blocs during and since the end of colonial rule, from Nasser through to the present day. Ahmed argues that at all points of this timeline women taking up the veil, or conversely ‘de-​veiling’,26 generates controversy because, on the one hand, it operates as a ‘quintessential sign (among other things) of irresolvable tension and confrontation between Islam and the West’.27 On the other hand, Ahmed argues that there is more than one meaning and set of experiences indicated in the observable (albeit statistically less significant) rise of veil dressing in the Muslim world and how these figures emerge elsewhere in the world where Muslim communities form a substantial constituency.28 The multiple albeit ‘new meanings of the veil’ for wearers and onlookers highlights a double paradox: veil dressing is at once seen as an ‘emblem supposedly of Islamic patriarchy and oppression of women [but it also] emerged today in America [and elsewhere] as an emblem of a call for justice, and even for gender-​justice’.29 For Ahmed there is significant intellectual work to do in fully apprehending the ‘dynamics and meanings with which these debates over the veil [have been] charged … [and] why this 79

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Art and the Politics of Visibility garment continues to be such a volatile, sensitive, and politically fraught symbol today’.30 Her account of how she came to realise that reductionist and ahistorical understandings of the politics of ‘the veil’ (as a pejorative noun) end up obscuring women’s religious and political agency is the flipside, I would argue, of Western Burqa-​Ban debates that overlook the wider sociocultural context and practices of veil dressing (as a verb) in a multicultural modality, even if greeted within a monoculturalist setting. In both cases, it is the viewer whose worldview is at stake, as in their unarticulated investment in the ‘ideological framework’31 of Orientalist thought, and with that Western colonial rule of the Middle East and North Africa. This deflection of the discomforting dimension to those who confess their unease when encountering women choosing to dress a certain way overlooks Muslim women’s multifaceted resistance to both these sorts of impositions.32 Leila Ahmed’s account –​that of a committed, non-​veiled feminist –​is a corrective to the double bind that many Western liberal –​and feminist –​critiques of ‘The Veil’ suffer from; namely the obfuscation of the racialised dimension to how Burqa Ban laws in Europe dovetail with corollary debates about contemporary migration flows from the Muslim world and cultural identity in a nominally secular west. References to Patriarchy or Religion do not suffice in explicating this misapprehension that Muslim veil dressing, in all its many forms and applications, is ipso facto proof that the veil wearer is a subjugated body. The events of 9/​11 and their aftermath have underscored this unease in intellectual and political circles, and media outlets, with the increasing presence of indigenous and immigrant Muslim communities who are at home in the Western world. To date there has been little critical space to consider the shifts in veil dressing practices that Ahmed recounts as one example of the changing personal and gender geopolitics of visibility. Nor is there a concerted effort to consider how these practices might be rendered, or reconsidered, 80

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing within the sartorial and global fashion-​ beauty industrial complex that exerts enormous influence on what women should (or should) not wear.33 In the polarised geopolitical times in which women are getting dressed or undressed today –​whether in Tunis or Amsterdam, Cairo or London –​what (not) to wear in public has become politicised in ways that exceed traditional modes of critical post-​colonialism and the spectrum of feminist politics. For when women themselves are active participants in their veiling –​or unveiling as the case may be –​cogent analysis tends to stall. It stalls because casting veiled women as actors who are responding to, and making sense of, their world within variously restrictive and permissive contexts, and doing so with and through their own bodies as tools of action in variously (un-​)clothed embodied encounters, means leaving to one side reductionist modes of analysis. To borrow from Göle (2002), it means shifting the gaze from arguments about what counts in this context as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (e.g., feminist politics, modest dressing, forms of religious observance, sex gender roles) to consider instead the specific moments of everyday life and/​ as modalities of defiance without resorting to overgeneralisation or anything-​goes relativism that ignores the gendered and racialised dynamics of repression. When it comes to how some groups of women dress, the (geo)politics of everyday life are thrown into relief.34 As the two cases below show, women’s dress, or state of undress, in public highlights how in this respect ‘refusal is the first principle of civil disobedience’.35 Before looking at how Appadurai’s observations contribute to this discussion, let us turn to the two cases in point.

Veiled Bodies Misbehaving:​‘Islam is the New Black’36 The UK artist Sarah Maple, winner of the 2007 ‘Four New Sensations’ competition sponsored by contemporary art impresario Charles Saatchi, has made a name for herself through a series of self-​portraits 81

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Art and the Politics of Visibility in which she depicts herself in hijab, chador, or burqa doing ‘odd’ things such as smoking, wearing a lapel pin with the words ‘I ♥ Orgasms’, eating a banana, or campaigning with the caption ‘vote for me or you’re Islamaphobic’ (see Figures 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3). These photographs and paintings saw Maple come under intense scrutiny from Muslim community leaders in the UK; a painting of her holding a piglet (entitled Haram) generated a lot of negative attention in particular.37 What makes her images challenging is that they confound both Islamophobic and Islamist readings of veil dressing and

Figure 3.1  I Heart Orgasms, Sarah Maple, 2007. Acrylic and oil on board, 60 x 47 cm. Courtesy of the artist.  82

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Figure 3.2  Vote For Me, Sarah Maple, 2007. Courtesy of the artist. 

Muslim womanhood. Maple sees her ‘art [as] a form of activism’38 as she combines a feminist politics with references to life as a young, Muslim woman growing up in the predominately non-​ Muslim southeast of the UK. Poking fun at veil dressing, and attitudes about veil dressing, or assumptions that veiled Muslim women are asexual, abstemious and apolitical is a provocative act in a climate characterised by 83

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Figure 3.3  The New Black, Sarah Maple, 2007. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 190 x 170 cm. Courtesy of the artist. 

discursively racist and culturally reductionist media stereotypes of Islam.39 Maple acknowledges here that a lot of people think that I’m mocking when that’s not my aim. And people also think that I’m not taking the subject seriously when it’s a very serious subject. But I’ve approached things in a tongue-​in-​cheek way, and some people can’t grasp that ... I suppose from looking 84

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Figure 3.4  Fighting Fire With Fire, Sarah Maple, 2007. C-​type. Courtesy of the artist. 

at other Muslims and speaking to other Muslims, they look at the religion very differently than I do. And what I perceive to be a good Muslim isn’t what other people perceived.40

Her ‘naughty Muslim’ images provoke strong, ambivalent responses precisely because they make you chuckle (see Figure 3.4). But whilst these images have attracted publicity they are only one aspect of 85

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Art and the Politics of Visibility Maple’s work. She also pokes fun at a range of sex/​gender stereotypes; hence, her veiled ‘women misbehaving’ are corollaries to other upbeat depictions of herself as a woman whose body defies and requires grooming, invoking and satirising assorted rules of etiquette, behavioral norms and sexuality. For instance, the signature painting of her 2012 show, ‘Menstruate with Pride’, at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham depicts a woman (herself) with menstrual blood on the outside of her white dress surrounded by shocked and curious onlookers (young men, mothers and children), making explicit an everywoman moment of dread: having one’s menstrual cycle ‘show’ in public.41 Maple’s veil dressing series also evoke the work of the US-​based Iranian artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat, although Maple’s irreverent sense of humour and use of pop-art idioms are in stark contrast to the sombre tones and political overtones of Neshat’s artistic practice. Neshat’s photographic (self-​)portraits and her feature films focus on the everyday realities and perceptions of the separation between female and male domains in Iran following the Iranian Revolution. Her work also speaks to the waxing and waning of diplomatic tensions between Iran and the US since then. Neshat achieves this through depictions of women who, from ‘behind the veil’, meet the onlooker’s gaze unapologetically –​an aesthetically radical depiction of those who, for some, epitomise the archetypical Islamic fundamentalist. The subjects of Neshat’s 1990s series Women of Allah, like those of Maple, all look at you, straight up and into the viewer’s gaze (see Figure 3.5). In distinction to Maple’s tongue-​in-​cheek captions, Neshat superimposes Farsi and design motifs onto or behind the bodies, faces, and hands of her subjects (see Figure 3.6). In this series, the texts –​for those who can read them –​operate as literal and symbolic, conjuring up the exotic and familiar and encapsulating the politicised and familial dimensions to the everyday lives of her subjects. In so doing Neshat underscores the ambiguities that ‘Women of Islam’ 86

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Figure 3.5  Rebellious Silence, Shirin Neshat, 1994. RC print & ink, 118.4 x 79.1 cm. Photo by Cynthia Preston. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. 

represent to both Iranian exiles and Western commentators. These women figure as silent, militant and confined subjects as Neshat’s depictions work with ‘four symbolic elements…: the veil, the gun, the text, and the gaze’42 to unsettle how we, the viewer, see these 87

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Figure 3.6  Untitled, Shirin Neshat, 1996. RC print & ink, 121.6 x 84.5 cm. Photo by Larry Barns. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. 

images. As Hamid Dabashi notes in his take on Neshat’s work, the discomfort that this interplay generates for the viewer primarily occurs because of the enduring assumptions of what constitutes an ‘Islamic woman’ [that] are at once domestic to that culture and 88

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing colonially crafted on it ... Shirin Neshat manages to target both of these divergent yet colliding agents ... Her photographs show and tell what has been forbidden to show and tell ... without violating the bodily codes of an ‘Islamic woman’.43

Several films and two decades later, Neshat’s 2012 exhibition Book of Kings takes the interplay between text and the gaze in new directions, from symbolism to narrative. In these life-​size black and white photos, the Persian national epic the Shahnameh is inscribed onto the portraits of both men and women who gaze out of the frame at the viewer (see Figure 3.7).44 Both Maple, and Neshat before her, invoke a response from those publics suffering from what Nancy Nussbaum argues is an accelerating fear that fuels the rise of religious intolerance in the US and Europe,45 a fear that according to Nussbaum requires ways to ‘understand it and to think how best to address it’.46 Nussbaum’s diagnosis, and proposed treatment of this ‘fear’ based on the existence of a ‘real problem’,47 the psychology of displacement behaviours, and the ‘idea of a disguised enemy’48 are evident in the way both artists challenge the viewer. Using different aesthetic idioms, both Neshat and Maple make use of personal, biographical and cultural-​political narratives to show how those who are the objects of this fear49 are also living, breathing subjects. As Mukhopadhay puts in his analysis of Neshat’s work, these works have a countermanding force to Nussbaum’s fearful, non-​Muslim, anti-​veil citizen in that they cut both ways by working as a confrontational force. Not only do they question the ability of the ‘Orient’ to speak back and address a systemic denial of expression, but they also contort multiple power relations, often stemming from rigid gender roles. … [They] manage to ‘undo’ this matrix of privilege by challenging understandings of who derives actual benefit from this power.50 89

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Figure 3.7  Nida (Patriots), from The Book of Kings series, Shirin Neshat, 2012. Ink on LE silver gelatin print, 152.4 x 114.3  cm. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. 

The seriousness of Neshat’s work –​no attempt at humour or irony here  –​underscores how expat as well as Western-​born Muslim women artists are engaging in a a new politics of vision, in which the ‘exoticisation’ of the East slowly disappears in the wake of new systems of 90

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing representation, heralding a turn in conventional practices of seeing. These artists affront their viewers with imploring stares from today’s Near East [and, in Maple’s case, western Europe], asking them to reflect on their own prejudices and inherited assumptions.51

Neshat’s photo of a fully veiled mother holding the hand of her naked boy-​child whose body is ‘clothed’ in decorative motifs and a poster Maple designed for Amnesty International  –​to take just two ­examples  –​encapsulate the way these artists issue this challenge within their respective aesthetic and generational idioms (see Figure 3.8).52

Naked Bodies in/​as Protest The second case of Amina Sboui-​Tyler and Aliaa Elmahdy and their depictions of nakedness takes us online, in the context of the internet and social media’s role in the Arab world, particularly during and since the region’s 2010–​11 uprisings overturned the political order there. In Tunisia and Egypt, internet access and mobile phones –​using the ubiquitous global social media brands of the era (i.e., Twitter and Facebook) –​have been a significant means and platform for younger generations to mobilise, find a voice and engage in public political discourses and, in so doing, to potentially disengage from majority (or regime-​sanctioned) opinion. These interventions, in idiomatic social networking tropes, took place in the heat of polarised electoral politics, political assassinations and, in the case of these two women, poor progress for women’s rights and everyday lives in the wake of conservative parties’ election victories. Social media is a window into this world and one that talks back. Here, women –​the same age as Sarah Maple –​living through major socio-​political transformations, and their (counter-​revolutionary) aftermath, have been generating their own gender geopolitics of visibility, this time as spontaneous ‘user-generated content’ rather than formal artistic practice. 91

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Figure 3.8  Untitled, Shirin Neshat, 1996. RC print & ink, 135.3 x 95.9 cm. Photo by Kyong Park. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. 

In February and August of 2013, Amina Sboui-​Tyler placed several photos of herself topless on her Facebook page in protest of the poor record of women’s rights in post-​Arab Spring Tunisia. At the time of her action, Sboui-​Tyler was inaugurating the Tunisian chapter of the aforementioned feminist activist organisation, Femen, as 92

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing she posed in this first photo, still accessible on Facebook, topless whilst reading the Koran and smoking a cigarette. Across her chest are the words ‘my body belongs to me. It is the source of no-​one else’s honour’.53 This photo was just the start as another shot shows her bare torso with the words, in English, ‘Fuck your morals’.54 These images went viral, instigating protests in support of her actions in Tunisia and abroad, online and on the streets; Femen organised a ‘Topless Jihad Day’ in her support shortly after her arrest and two-​ month imprisonment.55 But this is not the first instance in the region of a young woman from the generation of ‘Digital Natives’ appearing naked online. Two years earlier in Egypt, Aliaa Elmahdy posed fully naked on her Facebook page,56 a form of ‘nude art’, in her words, but also a protest to the deterioration of women’s rights under the Muslim Brotherhood. These images circulated at lightning speed around the world, snapped up, for instance, by print and online opinion-​makers like the New Yorker and Huffington Post. It is at this point that Femen’s intervention to mobilise for Amina’s release from prison catapulted her case into the global blogosphere and with it, sharpened debates about the relevance and effectiveness of Femen’s topless tactics, in the West but more particularly in the Muslim world,57 as a quintessentially feminist politics. The demarcation lines drawn as a result between Western and non-​Western feminists, complicated further by those demarcating religious and non-​religious Muslim women, have overshadowed the original audience that both Sboui-​Tyler and Elmahdy were addressing at the time: Tunisian and Egyptian electorates and incumbent sociocultural authorities. What makes these photos remarkable and pertinent to this discussion is Elmahdy and Sboui-​Tyler’s use of their own bodies –​the gaze outwards –​and the multidirectional forms of address that these images invoke in ways comparable to those of Neshat and Maple. In the case of Sboui-​Tyler, we also see text used as an integral part of the provocation, comparable I would argue to the way 93

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Art and the Politics of Visibility Maple’s image of herself in hijab with a cigarette dangling from her mouth (see Figure 3.4), or Neshat’s self-​portraits of her caressing or pointing a gun, as they both gaze out at the viewer. Guns, cigarettes and naked torsos are arguably traditional tropes of masculine agency, from James Dean to Marlborough Man cigarette ads to shots of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin’s naked torso. Here, they are made all the more subversive in the context of strict religious observance and the explicitly controlled domains for women’s attire and behaviour. But in the case of these two naked online protests, what looks like a carbon copy of Western feminist understandings of women’s liberation, as the shedding of oppression quite literally, is not as it seems at first sight. According to Amina Sboui-​Tyler herself, her nakedness was not to show that ‘I want to wear short skirts. I could do it if I wanted to. But I want women to be able to become president if they want to. I want women in rural areas to stop suffering’.58 As political power struggles between secular and Islamist factions intensify in parliaments and on the street, women in the region like Sboui-​Tyler and Elmahdy use nakedness as a means to an end, not an end in itself. This is where critiques of the Femen organisation converge on the actions of these two women. Critics cast Femen’s insistence on nakedness as dogmatic if not Islamophobic59 and sensationalist if not neo-​colonialist60 when transported to non-​Western settings. According to one trenchant critic of Femen’s tactics, the problem about both these women’s use of nudity and acknowledgment of Femen as a source of inspiration lies in the controversial image that Femen has for many of its detractors in the Muslim world; as ‘an organization with a problematic viewpoint on the region. It also strikes me that, if the aim of specific tactics is to work toward societal change, these actions would be more effective if modified to fit the given context’.61 Criticisms of Femen also come from Western feminist circles, zooming in on the apparent prominence of ‘skinny, pretty women’62 figuring in these protest actions, and no less by the 94

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing Femen leadership. Overlooking the many images of Femen protests that feature women of all shapes and sizes, the point in this debate is that ‘nude protests are not the problem. The problem is that, within our pornified culture, women seem to only be able to find power in their sexualized bodies’.63 These actions, and Femen’s mobilisation in major European cities, generated another sort of comment from Muslim women around the world. For these critics Femen’s appropriation of Amina’s action meant that ‘nuance is lost, the actual material realities of Tunisian women are ignored, and feminist activism that has been taking place in Tunisia for decades is erased’.64 Stronger still, both women’s acknowledgement of Femen saw them positioned as collaborating with ‘certain problematic discourses’65 in the West that reduce Muslim women, and veil dressing, to Orientalist sexual tropes.66 In so doing they become complicit with the idea that Muslim women are suffering from ‘false consciousness’ because they cannot see (while Femen can see) that the veil and religion are intrinsically harmful to all women. Yet again, the lives of Muslim women are to be judged by European feminists, who yet again have decided that Islam –​and the veil –​as key components of patriarchy. Where do women who disagree with this fit? Where is the space for a plurality of voices? And the most important question of all:  can feminism survive unless it sheds its Eurocentric bias and starts accepting that the experiences of all women should be seen as legitimate?67

For communities of Muslim women who do disagree, Facebook also emerged as one site for counter-​ protests, particularly in response to Femen’s Topless Jihad Day in April 2013. Two examples are the ‘Muslimah Pride’ and ‘Muslim Women Against Femen’ social media campaigns replete with Twitter accounts, hashtags and articulate bloggers.68 Protagonists, supporters and critics walked a 95

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Art and the Politics of Visibility fine line indeed online, incurring direct forms of punishment and retribution there and on the ground as a result, nuance notable by its absence in Anglo-​American mainstream media coverage. As one blogger puts it, this lack of nuance and awareness of context matters in more ways than one: Unpacking this issue relies on understanding one thing: Muslims are not monolithic. Muslims in the West (Europe, Canada, America) face a different set of challenges than those in the Middle East. And hence, they’re going to react differently to those circumstances. You know, just like everyone else. In the West, neither Muslim nor non-​Muslim women would face what Amina Tyler has. Nudity is, at most, considered a misdemeanor … Context matters. You can’t disconnect actions from the longstanding cultural environment it came from. When Elmahdy and Tyler went naked, they were protesting specific groups dictating policy in their home countries. Activists in the West don’t have that context. Railing against Islamists here means attacking an immigrant group while reinforcing centuries’ old prejudices.69

Amidst all these arguments, Amina Sboui-​Tyler took her distance from Femen on her release from prison. But here too, commentators questioned her autonomy, if not with respect to her Femen affiliation then to whether she was now under pressure from Islamist forces in Tunisia to retract her affiliation, an accusation levelled at her from Femen representatives themselves.70 Amina measured her words carefully: ‘I don’t want my name to be associated with an Islamophobic organization. I did not appreciate the action taken by the girls shouting “Amina Akbar, Femen Akbar” in front of the Tunisian embassy in France … These actions offended many Muslims and many of my friends. We must respect everyone’s religion … I thank them all for their support. They took some good actions, but it wasn’t the case for all of them’.71 96

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing The web and its role in raising the public profile of Femen, a media-​savvy group by its own admission, and spreading news of the harassment and arrest of both Aliaa and Amina as a result of their actions goes beyond the scope of this chapter, as does a fuller exploration of the politicised aesthetics of DIY art and politics in a web-​ saturated world. Suffice it to say that these overlaps did not escape the attention of the two protagonists. On being asked why she posed naked, Elmahdy responded that the ‘photo is an expression of my being and I see the human body as the best artistic representation of that. I took the photo myself using a timer on my personal camera. The powerful colors black and red inspire me’;72 likewise, although in another political art idiom, for Sboui-​Tyler. When asked why she published yet ‘another topless photo’ of herself on quitting Femen she replied that this was different because it was ‘a topless photo of myself bearing a painted circled A, the anarchist symbol’.73 In this photo she stands topless, this time in profile and lighting a cigarette from a lit Molotov cocktail; on her torso she has written, in English, ‘We don’t need your Dimocracy’ (sic).74 These preoccupations about women’s public dress and demeanour, and how these embodiments map over time onto the uneasy dividing line between religious politics, personal conviction and civil liberties reflect inchoate conflicts within and between societies about the gendered dimensions to social order and cultural identity. These become a lightning rod for perceived, if not engineered, crises of conscience when certain women appear to get away with (not) dressing according to the assumed or prescribed norm. As such, they go to the heart of ongoing debates within feminism about what counts as agency in a world still premised on structural hierarchies of gendered inequality. The ‘underlying assumption … [that] female liberation can be directly linked to what women wear … is not a new idea, and in fact has formed the basis of much of Western feminism … This type of logic automatically leads to the conclusion that in order to progress, women who veil must unveil, and 97

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Art and the Politics of Visibility therefore “free” themselves’.75 It is this logic that feeds the intransigence of Burqa-​ban legislation in Western societies today, as well as one that underpins the ongoing ‘politics of discomfort’ with which feminist and liberal critics of this legislation see Muslim women’s veil dressing at the same time.76 In this context, as the converse to stripping off or going topless in public, women in hijab, with or without a niqab, are cast as religious zealots, Islamic fundamentalists, oppressed women. Simply getting dressed in the morning for these groups of women in Brussels, Paris or Amsterdam has become an act of defiance by definition. It is this particular context in which artists and filmmakers like Sarah Maple and Shirin Neshat remind the viewer of the underlying psycho-​emotional struggles that constitute the everyday embodiments of gendered, ethnic and class-​based production of order, and how these unfurl as multiplex contradictions rather than in monolithic ways. They also point to how individual and community subjects embody resistance to said order at an everyday level rather than as a response to an exceptional event, that level of exception reserved for military mobilisation or national protest actions for instance.77 In the case of Muslim veil dressing, these struggles call into question notions that the constitution of any order comes readymade. The furore around more explicit expressions of non-​compliance with the established order recall the Gulliver-​like ways in which those incumbent or emerging powers with something to lose maintain their social order through the minutiae of socialisation, legal and moral codes of political and religious authority, peer pressure, and when these no longer work, through violence.

Analysis: Modalities of Refusal So what do these examples tell us, first about defiance and refusal for women deciding to ‘dehajibise’, or the converse,78 in polarised political settings and, second, for how Muslim women artists depict –​or 98

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing deflect  –​these tensions in their art? This is where Foucault’s productive and subjective bodies meet Arjun Appadurai’s observations on the embodied morality of refusal that for Appardurai underpins Mahatma Ghandi’s (admittedly masculine) use of non-​violent resistance to colonial rule in India. In a short essay, Appadurai highlights the need to make a distinction between non-​violent protests –​referring to the program of civil disobedience in Ghandi’s case –​as an active form of resistance, on the one hand, and the violent responses that this use of passive resistance as a ‘mobilising strategy’ can inspire on a mass scale, on the other.79 This focus on refusal as an active force rather than a passive one, puts to one side the Western liberal lens of utilitarian thinking that undergirds moral philosophical traditions80 or the assumption that liberation is always synonymous with a ‘superior’ form of personal empowerment, as exemplified by undressed or suitably fashionable women’s bodies in Western women’s liberationist understandings.81 The iconography of Gandhi’s own embodiment over time shows, in the most iconic photographs at least, how in his male ascetic case, nakedness is also a moral commitment, part of an evolving and mobilising worldview. As Appadurai argues when looking at the way embodied forms of refusal worked in the context of Gandhi’s role in the history of Indian independence, these forms of civil disobedience as a ‘large-​ scale resistance to imperial or colonial rule’ were embedded in ‘a particular way of mobilizing the inner link between asceticism, violence, and non-​violence in the Indic world’.82 In this sense this was a particular articulation of refusal that was ‘intimately connected with the politics of the body and the morality of avoidance, abnegation, and abstention’.83 It may well be a leap from the Gandhian movement of civil disobedience that is steeped in his own lifelong experiments with his own bodily limits (as part of the mass mobilisation that culminated in Indian independence) to the social media statements of topless 99

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Art and the Politics of Visibility and naked Muslim women versus their veiled sisters, or to the ironic humour of a Sarah Maple self-​portrait, or the shock tactics of Femen protest events. But the leap is not so far, I would contend, because in all these cases, non-​violent, even if highly theatrical and mediatised, forms of protest show how strong female actions ‘invite the forces of violence to declare and enact themselves and to manifest themselves practically’.84 When these actors are then marked as a dissenting or indeed defiant minority, the forces of violence swing into action, close to home as well as further away, through global media channels for instance. Whilst distinct from Gandhi’s ascetics, we can still see in the case of veiling and unveiling, in posing or protesting (semi-​)naked, how non-​violence here works as a form of active refusal. These are not expressions of a ‘quietist’ or acquiescent politics,85 as civil disobedience both incurs and fuels dogmatic forces. Appadurai is pointing to the intricate and intimately violent ways in which order is imposed and maintained in everyday life. He reminds us how the world in which we live is one ‘characterized by forms of violence that have deep histories, in forms such as rape, torture, warfare, forced ritual mutilation, and so on’.86 Precisely because when it comes to forms of civil disobedience, conscious or unconscious, spontaneous and individualised or organised against a clear opponent (e.g., colonial powers, sexist advertising or violence against women), the tension between the politics, and moment of refusal as one modality of resistance that does not take up arms, and violent reprisals to such actions. What is being made visible, as deed as well as word and image, is the way in which the production of routine social life is a complex project in which ordinary persons strive to find the right balance between attention and abstraction, compromise and confrontation, visibility and recessiveness, in their bodily presence, and between greater or lesser knowledge of the circumstances of their daily lives.87 100

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing What Appadurai wants to emphasise here, pace Foucault, is that not only the production but also the maintenance, and implicitly the contestation, of any social order is fraught with violent outcomes because of the way that stability, real or imagined, has to be fought for, whatever the circumstances. Those with the power not only to steer this order, by exercising discipline if not dishing out direct forms of punishment in so doing, are intuitively looking to control what is the ‘generally vulnerable outcome of uncertain social processes’.88 As with the case of the Suffragette Movement a century ago, or a naked ‘selfie’ on a password-​protected blog, non-​violence also works ‘as a militant morality of refusal’.89 This morality is one that includes artistic practice alongside more self-​conscious forms of protest action. Whilst neither is reducible to another, these two scenarios show how forceful the response can be to ‘peaceful opposition to established legal orders’90 that women can, and do, use. What this means for critical analysis in the context of veil dressing and its discontents is that if non-​violence and violence are not to be construed as ‘reciprocal and symmetrical forms’ but rather as ‘different resources for managing social life’91 then the gender geopolitics of (un-​)dressing in public are less about utilitarian arguments that religious intolerance is futile92 or testimonies of the effects of revolution and counter-​revolution on people’s life-​paths.93 These pleas for deeper understanding from an historical and experiential perspective are important. However, for this chapter, I would argue that these two cases of defiant embodiments in a post-​9/​11 and, as far as we can tell, a post-​Arab Uprising, context tell us more about the cynical politicisation, and with that the racialisation of all forms of Muslim veil dressing by political demagogues in Western societies. The gender geopolitics of seeing is what is at stake. In terms of veil dressing debates and the political contortions they currently inspire (in the Anglo-​Euro-​American context at least), such polarities affect the ‘actual lives of Muslim women … in the United States or women who live abroad and whose lives are directly affected by 101

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Art and the Politics of Visibility American views and policies [and those of their allies]’94 in several ways. First, for Western observers, whether or not they are opponents of Burqa-​Ban legislation, the consequence is that all forms of Muslim veil dressing becomes religiously motivated, culturally backward. The flipside of this equation is the assumption that all unveiled Muslim women are ipso facto secular ‘moderns’ and so unveiling is in itself liberating, a progressive act, if not by a process of social and cultural progress then helped along by law, as in the case of Turkey and now European Union member states.95 Second, as Muslim feminist commentators underscore, an understanding of both the immediate and the wider context is indispensable to being able to distinguish between instances in which women can be ‘experimenting with dress and fashion for their own reasons, deciding for (and disagreeing amongst) themselves what meaning the veil’ holds on the one hand or, on the other asserting their cultural identity, religious convictions, political solidarity, or communal affiliations against a largely disapproving majority.96 Third, for critical scholars, a macro-​level analytical view of geopolitical power relations needs to be accompanied by a micro, actor-​centred viewpoint. Both levels of analysis matter to understanding how veil dressing has become encoded since the mid-​twentieth century as the visible manifestation of radical Islam at the same time as these practices incorporate ‘old and new meanings of the veil’97 as experienced by their wearers. Religious and sartorial practices can, and do, converge in this respect as the meanings imputed to veil dressing differ from place to place, generation to generation, for wearers and onlookers, domestic and foreign powerbrokers respectively. This is because of the way in which, in this case, the gender power ‘relations between body and surrounding instruments, tools, spaces [are] both constraining and enabling for the movements, be they physical or mental’.98 The challenge for critical analysis of these dressing/​undressing controversies is to avoid the twin perils of facile cultural relativism or ethnocentric judgments about how women, if they are to 102

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing be recognisable, indeed recognised as ‘authentically’ liberated subjects, should look and conduct themselves. This means making a careful and time-​sensitive distinction between those moments of deliberately political forms of embodied defiance (e.g., going topless, putting on or taking off a veil, chaining yourself to the railings, burning a bra) and those forms of refusal that the context renders, by definition, an implicit, more ‘everyday’ transgression (e.g., going topless, taking up the veil, dressing modestly for personal or religious reasons, or not knowing ‘what not to wear’ according to the fashion rules of the day). The shriller tones of Muslim veil dressing debates in western Europe nowadays, and in colonial times, underscore how both liberationists and prohibitionists can be ‘as despotic about liberating us [women as they can be despotic] about our enslavement’.99

Conclusion: The Geopolitics of Seeing In the digital age, no editor or mediator gets to decide how to frame a public battle. A woman has a room, a body, a camera, and a Facebook profile of one’s own (Greenhouse 2013).

The above observation underscores how these struggles around how dress codes confirm, or indeed challenge, dominant understandings of the ideal society (whatever the religious or political constitution) are taking place in the highly visible and visualised environments of consumer societies and that these are now being augmented by the digital interfaces and cyberspaces of the internet’s visual and material cultures. The embodied defiance, veiled or naked, of these moments from over a century of women’s rights protest exemplifies how bodies operate as conduits for complying with and contesting ‘relations between body and surrounding instruments, tools, spaces both constraining and enabling for the movements, be they physical or mental’.100 They are also indicative of how women’s bodies 103

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Art and the Politics of Visibility are conveyed, and so can be deployed, in non-​violent ‘moralities of refusal’.101 To recall, in 1970s Egypt, taking up the veil was a conscious decision, an act of a particular political consciousness and identity politics. Observers at the time and since have noted that the 1970s saw a particular sort of veiling emerge, the most visible aspect of ‘new and formidably concealing styles of dress’ that differed from their rural counterparts or pre-​colonial precursors.102 As Nilüfer Göle points out in her discussion of the analytical conundrums raised by the ‘new visibilities’ of Islamist politics in Turkey, ‘one of the arguments widely used against the headscarf is that it has been appropriated as a political symbol, so the desire to wear it is not a disinterested one’.103 When counter-​posing these arguments for or against veil dressing, and its regulation in either Muslim or non-​ Muslim settings, with naked protests –​those of the Femen movement in general or Sboui-​Tyler and Elmahdy in particular –​we see that the underlying issue is less about clothing than it is about deploying the body as a site and conduit for civil disobedience. Polarities between Muslim-​ Secular East and Christian-​ Secular West, and feminist and post-​feminist politics in a globalising consumerist world, are found wanting when it comes to considering how these forms of nakedness and modest dressing –​veiled forms in this case –​operate in polarised settings, when they are not being deployed directly as a form of protest. We also need to consider the online-​offline interconnections of everyday life, together with the gender geopolitics and moralities of refusal that surround today’s veil dressing controversies. We could do this along the lines that Walter Benjamin encapsulated in his Arcades Project; namely, not to look for mono-​causal explanations or grand narratives of historic-​ cultural changes in the way people live but, rather, to study more closely the multiplicity of specific instances within any given context. In this way those seemingly banal and exceptional instances show how the 104

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing transmission of culture (high and low), … is a political act of the highest import –​not because culture in itself has the power to change the given, but because historical memory affects decisively the collective, political will for change. Indeed, it is its only nourishment.104

These transmissions now happen at the interstices of offline and online lives. but what about simply catching the bus with niqab or even chador? Are such decisions always to be read as defiance or protest? Yes  –​and no  –​given the corrosive effect that Burqa-​Ban laws have on fundamental rights, at least in the EU. By the same token, when considered in light of women (un)dressing in public, whether or not they do so in closely patrolled or ostensibly liberal settings, we see how Muslim veil dressing on the one hand and, on the other, women’s (semi-​)naked protests embody ‘the elaborate labour of coexistence’105 that targets certain groups and individuals in an anxious age –​Muslim women in particular. These bodies, and our bodies (I am, after all, also a woman), exist and persist as productive and subjected bodies through conflicting moralities of refusal, defiance and compliance that are embedded in the ‘complex reciprocal social relations’ underpinning the local-​global gender power hierarchies in which we –​and they –​live. It is all too easy to judge people by their appearance or beliefs, which is why liberal societies pride themselves on their rights-​based jurisprudence. But unlike women’s right to vote, which is now uncontestably enshrined in international law after decades of concerted embodied resistance by women themselves, the unwritten laws about what (not) to wear in public are, for many women around the world, still ‘under advisement’ at best.

Notes 1. M. I. Franklin, ‘Veil dressing and the gender geopolitics of “What Not to Wear”’, International Studies Perspectives 14/​4 (2013), pp. 1–​23. 105

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Art and the Politics of Visibility 2. Ibid. 3. Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011); Fadwa el Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy, and Resistance (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2003). 4. Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, p. 82 passim. 5. Nilüfer Göle, ‘Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries’, Public Culture 14/​1 (2002), pp. 173–​90. 6. Hürriyet cited in Göle, ‘Islam in Public’, p. 178. 7. Overtly religious items of clothing, from the male fez to the female headscarf, have been a contentious issue since the founding of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s. Entering the Turkish parliament dressed in this way was publicly flouting 1970s legislation that had institutionalised an implicit ban on religious dress in public office, including universities, in the 1924 constitution. This ban was lifted in 2013 as part of a reform package from the Erdoğan government, a sop to fundamentalism according to government critics; a stride forward in allowing religious freedom according to others. The main forms of veil dressing in contention here are the hijab (headscarf), niqab (face-​veil), chador (the Persian term for the head-​body covering thrown over other garments), and burqa (the head to toe covering originating in Afghanistan). ‘Hijab’ is a term for Islamic dress code in general. 8. Emma Tarlo, Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith (London and​ New York: Bloomsbury, 2010); Judith Brown, ‘Glamour’s Silhouette: Fashion, Fashun, and Modernism’ in Jean-​Michel Rabaté (ed.), A Handbook of Modernism Studies (Oxford: Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2013), pp. 297–​312; Didier Bigo, ‘Globalized (In)Security: The Field and the Ban-​opticon’, in Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala (eds), Terror, Insecurity, and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes After 9/​ 11 (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 10–​48; Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, p. 82 passim; Martha C. Nussbaum The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 19, 42 passim. 9. Franklin, ‘Veil dressing’; Alexandru Balasescu, Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills:  Aesthetic Bodies, Political Subjects (Bucharest:  Zeta Books, 2007). 10. ‘The Veiled Woman: What I’m Really Thinking’, The Guardian, 30 April 2011. Available at https://​www.theguardian.com/​lifeandstyle/​2011/​ apr/​30/​what-​really-​thinking-​veiled-​woman (accessed 11 November 2016). 106

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing 11. Sboui-​Tyler in Sophie Récamier, 2012, ‘L’automne des femmes arabes agite Facebook’, Les Inrocks, 3 November 2012. 12. Elmahdy in Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, ‘Egyptian blogger Aliaa Elmahdy: Why I posed naked’, CNN Inside the Middle East, 20 November 2011. Available at http://​edition.cnn.com/​2011/​11/​19/​world/​meast/​nude-​ blogger-​aliaa-​magda-​elmahdy (accessed 2 November 2012). 13. Emma Tarlo and Annelies Moors (eds), Islamic Fashion and Anti-​ Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 14. Michel Foucault, ‘The Body of the Condemned,’ in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 173. 15. Roger G. Denson, ‘Shirin Neshat: Artist of the Decade’, Huffington Post, 30 December 2010. Available at http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​ g-​roger-​denson/​sherin-​neshat-​artist-​of-​t_​b_​802050.html#s216201 title=Attributed_​to_​alWasiti (accessed 13 January 2012); Lila Abu-​ Lughod, ‘The Active Social Life of “Muslim Women’s Rights”: A Plea for Ethnography, Not Polemic, with Cases from Egypt and Palestine’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6/​1 (2010), pp. 1–​45. 16. Göle, Islam in Public, p. 175. 17. Hamid Dabashi, ‘Foreword’, Women of Allah (Torino:  Marco Noire Editore, 1997). Available at http://​iranian.com/​Arts/​Dec97/​Neshat/​ index.html (accessed 13 January 2012). 18. Femen was founded in the Ukraine in 2008 and is currently based in Paris. Calling itself a ‘sextremist’ activist organisation, it has made a name for itself through its staging of highly theatrical and mediagenic, sexually provocative and increasingly topless protests in major European capitals. Their main focus is human trafficking and prostitution particularly focusing on the run-​ups to major sporting events such as the Olympics or international football tournaments. Their interventions around women’s rights are not confined to the Muslim world as Femen protesters have also targeted the Catholic Church. A gallery of press images is available online through the Cryptome website (http://​cryptome.org/​info/​femen/​femen-​protest.htm) and Femen’s own website (http://​www.femen.org/​en). Whatever women might feel about Femen’s tripartite mantra of ‘Sextremism, Atheism, Feminism’ (http://​femen.org/​about) or whether their success does rest on their looks, their modus operandi does articulate a Foucauldian insight: i.e., ‘In the beginning, there was the body, feeling of the woman’s body, feeling of joy because it is so light and free. Then there was injustice, so sharp that you feel it with your body, it immobilizes the body, hinders its movements, and then you find yourself your body’s hostage. And so 107

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Art and the Politics of Visibility you turn your body against this injustice, mobilizing every body’s cell to struggle against the patriarchy and humiliation’ (ibid). 19. Franklin, ‘Veil dressing’. 20. Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, p. 210 21. Balasescu, Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills, p. 280. 22. Dabashi, ‘Foreword’. 23. Arjun Appadurai, The Morality of Refusal: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts. Art by Nalini Malani, Documenta Series 023 (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012). 24. Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance, p. 19. 25. See, for example, El Guindi (2003), Abdul-​ Ghafur (2005), Abu-​ Lughod, (1998, 2010), Al-​Qasimi (2010), Göle (2002). See also Tarlo 2010, Tarlo and Moors (2013). 26. Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, pp. 283–​4. 27. Ibid., p. 11. 28. Saleemah Abdul-​ Ghafur (ed.), Living Islam Out Loud:  American Muslim Women Speak (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). Annelies Moors, ‘The Dutch and the face-​ veil:  The politics of discomfort’, Social Anthropology 17/​4 (2009), pp. 393–​408. 29. Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, p. 8. 30. Ibid., p. 11. 31. Ibid., p. 35. 32. Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies:  Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998); el Guindi, Veil. 33. Franklin, ‘Veil dressing’; Linda Duits and Liesbet Van Zoonen, ‘Headscarves and Porno Chic:  Disciplining Girls’ Bodies in the Multicultural Society’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 13/​2 (2006), pp. 103–​17; Rosalind C. Gill, ‘Critical Respect: The Difficulties and Dilemmas of Agency and Choice. A  Reply to Duits and Van Zoonen’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 14/​1 (2007), pp. 65–​76; cf. Moors and Tarlo 2013. 34. Thanks to Zeena Feldman for this insight. 35. Appadurai, The Morality of Refusal, p. 10. 36. This is the caption on Maple’s 2008 painting of a woman wearing a black burqa; the pun works both ways in this image; see Anikka Maya Weerasinghe, ‘Islam Is The New Black:  A  Conversation With Sarah Maple’, Art Threat, 24 November 2008. Available at http://​artthreat. net/​2008/​11/​sarah-​maple-​interview-​islam-​new-​black (accessed 12 January 2012).

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing 37. Her first solo show in London in 2008 was put under spotlight and police protection, after an incident of vandalism due to accusations of blasphemy. 38. Emerge Gallery, Fighting Fire with Fire crowdfunding project, 2013. Available at http://​www.kisskissbankbank.com/​fighting-​fire-​with-​fire (accessed 20 May 2014); Robert Klanten et al. (eds), Art & Agenda: Political Art and Activism (Berlin: Gestalten, 2011). 39. Gholam Khiabany and Milly Williamson, ‘Veiled bodies  –​naked ­racism: culture, politics and race in the Sun’, Race & Class 50/​2 (2008), pp. 69–​88. 40. Maple in Anikka Maya Weerasinghe, ‘Islam Is The New Black:  A  Conversation With Sarah Maple’, Art Threat, 24 November 2008. Available at http://​artthreat.net/​2008/​11/​sarah-​maple-​interview-​ islam-​new-​black (accessed 12 January 2012). 41. See http://​sarahmapleart.blogspot.nl/​2012/​07/​menstruate-​with-​pride-​ on-​display-​at-​new.html (accessed 12 January 2012). 42. Sayantan Mukhopadhay, ‘The use of the written word in the art of Shirin Neshat and Lalla Essaydi’, Reorient, 30 June 2013. Available at http://​w ww.reorientmag.com/​2013/​06/​shirin-​neshat-​lalla-​essaydi, original emphasis (accessed 12 January 2012). 43. Dabashi, Foreword. 44. See Sayantan Mukhopadhay, ‘The use of the written word’; Erin C. Devine, ‘Shirn Neshat: Book of Kings and OverRuled’, New York Arts, 23 Feburary 2012. Available at http://​newyorkarts.net/​2012/​02/​shirin-​ neshat-​book-​of-​kings-​overruled (accessed 20 March 2012). Another take on the veiled, violated and naked Muslim woman’s body is the hallmark of the 2004 short film Submission, written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the late Theo van Gogh. Here, the Qur’anic script on the women’s naked backs is aligned to scars on the bodies of the naked victims of domestic violence whose accounts animate this film; depicted semi-​ naked in submissive positions, their naked torsos visible beneath diaphanous black veils. The use of Qur’anic script, veils and naked bodies in this film’s wholesale condemnation of Islam implicitly draws on Shirin Neshat’s work (van Jole, 2004) albeit for a different political project. 45. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance, p. 9. 46. Ibid., p. 19. 47. Ibid., p. 28. 48. Ibid. 49. The Veiled Woman, 2011.

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Art and the Politics of Visibility 50. Mukhopadhay, ‘The use of the written word’. One of Maple’s photographic self-​portraits, entitled ‘Ballerina’, exemplifies this point as she poses head and shoulders, topless but for the blurred out (read, censored) area of her breasts. This is Maple’s own ‘fave’ photo, part of her 2012 ‘It’s a Girl!’ exhibition at the Aubin Gallery in London. Its corollary is her 2009 video work, Page Three Girl, in which she and her team of ‘Art Ninjas’ insert photos of Maple wearing a large, pink bra into The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper with a long history of photo features of topless women. The edition that day featured the headline ‘My Hubby the Violent Bully’. It is just visible as Maple and friends insert her alternative page-three girl into sales outlets in central London; double entendre, double standards, and double burdens in one frame. See Maple’s blog post on this action, http:// ​ s arahmapleart.blogspot.co.uk/ ​ 2 009/ ​ 1 1/ ​ t aking- ​ o n- ​ p age-​ three-​171109-​next.html 51. Mukhopadhay, ‘The use of the written word’, emphasis in the original. 52. See the Women of Islam series (Neshat 1994)  and the poster Maple designed for an Amnesty International event for International Women’s Day in which she juxtaposes one of her ‘smoking hijab’ images with a verse from Corinthians, in the New Testament (Maple 2010). 53. In Emily Greenhouse, ‘How to provoke national unrest with a Facebook photo’, The New Yorker, 8 April 2013. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/amina-tyler-topless-photos-​ tunisia-activism.html (accessed 15 May 2015). 54. Greenhouse, ‘How to provoke national unrest’. 55. The initial photo and subsequent ones of Amina and her supporters that include other Arab women as well as Femen activists, clothed and naked, has been made available as a slide show on the French language edition of the Huffington Post (Hamadi, 2013, see Beji, 2013). 56. Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, ‘Nude Art’ blog entry, 23 October 2011. Available at http://​arebelsdiary.blogspot.co.uk/​2011/​10/​nude-​art_​ 2515.html (accessed 20 December 2013). 57. Maryam, ‘Femen vs. Muslimah Pride:  Fighting for the Voices (and Bodies) of Muslim Women’, Autostraddle, 15 April 2013. Available at http://​w ww.autostraddle.com/​femen-​vs-​muslimah-​pride-​f ighting-​ for-​the-​voices-​and-​bodies-​of-​muslim-​women-​authors-​draft-​172860 (accessed 20 December 2013). 58. Cited in Sarah Ben Hamadi, ‘Amina Sboui quitte les FEMEN: “Je ne veux pas que mon nom soit associé à une organisation islamophobe” ’,

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing Huffington Post Maghreb, 20 August 2013. Available at http://​www. huffpostmaghreb.com/​2013/​08/​20/​amina-​quitte-​femen_​n_​3782513. html (accessed 20 December 2013); Huffington Post, ‘Amina Sboui Quits FEMEN’. 59. Sara M. Salem, ‘Femen Strikes in Tunisia –​the Case of Amina’, Muftah, 26 March 2013. Available at http://​muftah.org/​femen-​strikes-​in-​ tunisia-​the-​case-​of-​amina (accessed 20 December 2013). 60. Meghan Murphy, ‘The naked protester (or, how to get the media to pay attention to women)’, Feminist Current, 31 January 2012. Available at http://​feministcurrent.com/​4383/​the-​naked-​protester-​or-​how-​to-​ get-​the-​media-​to-​pay-​attention-​to-​women-​2 (accessed 29 May 2013); Sandro Lutyens, ‘Pour Inna Shevchenko, leader des Femen, Amina “joue le jeu des islamistes” ’, Huffington Post Maghreb, 20 August 2013. Available at http://​www.huffpostmaghreb.com/​2013/​08/​20/​inna-​ schevchenko-​femen-​am_​n_​3783784.html (accessed 20 December 2013); Sara M. Salem, ‘Femen’s Neocolonial Feminism: When Nudity Becomes a Uniform’, Al Akhbar English, 26 December 2012. Available at http://​english.al-​akhbar.com/​node/​14494 (accessed 20 December 2013). 61. Salem, ‘Femen Strikes in Tunisia’. 62. Murphy, The naked protester. 63. Ibid. 64. Salem, ‘Femen Strikes in Tunisia’. 65. Salem, ‘Femen’s Neocolonial Feminism’. 66. Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 67. Salem, ‘Femen’s Neocolonial Feminism’. 68. Sofia Ahmed, ‘Muslimah Pride: We reject Femens Islamophobic and neo-​colonialist crusade to save us’, Huffington Post, The Blog, 9 April 2013. Available at http://​www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/​sofia-​ahmed/​muslim-​ women-​against-​femen_​b_​3044015.html (accessed 12 May 2014); Maryam, ‘Femen vs. Muslimah Pride’. See also https://​www.facebook. com/​muslimah.pride and https://​www.facebook.com/​MuslimWomen AgainstFemen. 69. Maryam, ‘Femen vs. Muslimah Pride’, emphasis added. 70. Huffington Post, ‘Amina Sboui Quits FEMEN:  “I Do Not Want My Name To Be Associated With An Islamophobic Organization” ’, Huffington Post, 20 August 2013. Available at http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​2013/​08/​20/​amina-​sboui-​quits-​femen_​n_​3785724.html (accessed 20 December 2013); see also Sarah Ben Hamadi, ‘Amina

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Art and the Politics of Visibility Sboui quitte les FEMEN’; Sandro Lutyens, ‘Pour Inna Shevchenko leader des Femen’. 71. Cited Huffington Post, ‘Amina Sboui Quits FEMEN’; see also Ben Hamadi, ‘Amina Sboui quitte les FEMEN’. 72. In Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, ‘Egyptian blogger Aliaa Elmahdy: Why I posed naked’, CNN Inside the Middle East, 20 November 2011. Available at    http://​edition.cnn.com/​2011/​11/​19/​world/​meast/​nude-​blogger​aliaa-​magda-​elmahdy (accessed 20 December 2013). 73. In Huffington Post, ‘Amina Sboui Quits FEMEN’; see also Ben Hamadi, ‘Amina Sboui quitte les FEMEN’. 74. In Ismail Beji, ‘La Femen tunisienne, Amina Sboui, publie une nouvelle photo choc’, Huffington Post Maghreb, 15 August 2013. Available at    http://​www.huffingtonpost.com/​2013/​08/​20/​amina-​sboui-​quits-​ femen_​n_​3785724.html (accessed 20 December 2013). 75. Salem, ‘Femen’s Neocolonial Feminism’; see also Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, p. 293; Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies. 76. Annelies Moors, ‘The Dutch and the face-​veil’; Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance; Franklin, ‘Veil dressing’. 77. Appadurai, The Morality of Refusal, pp. 11–​12. 78. Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, p. 284. 79. Arjun Appadurai, personal conversation 27 January 2014. 80. See Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance. 81. Scott in Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance, p. 136. 82. Appadurai, The Morality of Refusal, p. 9. 83. Ibid., p. 10. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., p. 11. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., p. 12. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., op cit p. 13. 90. Ibid., op cit p. 12. 91. Ibid., p. 12. 92. Nussbaum, The New Religious Intolerance. 93. Ahmed, The Morality of Refusal. 94. Ibid., p. 198. 95. Franklin, ‘Veil dressing’. 96. Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, pp.  45, 78, 212; Emma Tarlo, Visibly Muslim; The Veiled Woman, ‘What I’m Really Thinking’, The Guardian Weekend, 30 April 2011. On the distinctions between references to being Muslim as a religious identity, Islam as world religion, and 112

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Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of Seeing Islamism as a social/​ politico-​ religious movement with specific regional and historical inflections, see Göle, ‘Islam in Public’, note 1, p. 173 and Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, p. 96 passim, p. 131 passim, p. 269. 97. Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, p.  212; Lila Abu-​Lughod, ‘The Active Social Life of “Muslim Women’s Rights” ’; Noor al Qasimi, ‘Immodest Modesty: Accommodating Dissent and the ‘Abaya-​as-​Fashion in the Arab Gulf States’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6/​1 (2010), pp. 46–​74. 98. Alexandru Balasescu, Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills, p. 25; el Guindi, Veil; Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, p. 27 passim, 212 passim; Göle, ‘Islam in Public’, p. 180. 99. Cited in Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, p. 34. 100. Balasescu, Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills, p. 25. 101. Appadurai, The Morality of Refusal. 102. Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution, pp. 47–​9. 103. Göle, ‘Islam in Public’, p. 181. 104. Susan Buck-​Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1989), pp. x–xi. 105. Appadurai, The Morality of Refusal, pp. 11–​12.

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4 (In)Visibility as Resistance: Performing the Right to Disappear in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K Patrick Hanafin

Introduction In this chapter I examine how literature as an art form can represent invisibility in a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Life and Times of Michael K. The novel presents a complex critique of the politics of identity and resistance and how a politics of invisibility can assist us in subverting categories of identity as well as notions of borders both literally and metaphorical. Coetzee’s writing and characters constitute a stubborn refusal to accept the fixed categories of genre, which, as Gerald L. Bruns reminds us, ‘is always purposeful and just … susceptible to formal description and differentiation from an ensemble of alternative possibilities’.1 Coetzee plays with these limitations to open another way into writing as a space which refuses to give up its meaning, to give the account demanded of it. In a short essay entitled ‘Refusal’ written in 1959, in opposition to Charles De Gaulle’s capture of power and denigration of democratic citizenship in France, Maurice Blanchot observed that refusal 115

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Art and the Politics of Visibility was a means of exposing the perversion of democracy that was being carried out. He noted that: ‘Those who refuse and who are bound by the force of refusal know that they are not yet together. The time of common affirmation is precisely what has been taken away from them’.2 Such a refusal is also a refusal to be constructed as an identity to be managed by the State. Such a strategy of refusal to be constructed as an identity has the advantage of allowing one to remain beyond the grasp of the State’s ability to make visible and incorporate such identities into a biopolitical regime. When groups claim the recognition of an identity by the State, such a claim can be used to capture and contain such identities. This mode of claiming identity recognition in the liberal State, as Patchen Markell reminds us: furthers the state’s project of rendering the social world ‘legible’ and governable; to appeal to the state for the recognition of one’s own identity –​to present oneself as knowable –​is already to offer the state reciprocal recognition of its sovereignty that it demands.3

The refusal to be formed as an object of governance by the State constitutes an important mode of resistance to biopower. In this chapter I examine the relationship between modes of refusal and their representation in writing through a reading of J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life and Times of Michael K in order to examine its implications for a critique of the political within writing itself. Coetzee’s writing appeals to an unassimilated community, a community not yet captured by the narrative of identity. As such his writing configures with Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the ‘narrative voice’ which, as Jacques Derrida notes, ‘has no fixed … place. It takes place placelessly, being both a-​topical, mad, extravagant, and hypertopical, both placeless and overplaced’.4 Such a writing marks the refusal of a narrative of fixed identity and history and moves from the comfort of an illusory past to an unknowable future. As such it 116

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(In)Visibility as Resistance becomes, in the words of another of Coetzee’s characters, Elizabeth Costello, ‘a sketchy, bloodless affair’.5 The risk of a future without identity, ‘sketchy and bloodless’, is the one that Coetzee takes. Coetzee’s unforeseen readings and detournements of accepted understandings provide the basis for a rethinking of the relation of writing to the political. In developing this argument, this chapter looks at how the relationship between refusal and the narrative voice plays out in Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K. Michael K is exemplary of how, in Coetzee’s works, characters emerge who block the possibility of what Mark Sanders calls the ‘ruse of an end’.6 As such, Michael K evades narrow categories of identity and in so doing confounds any possibility of a neat political resolution of identity conflict. Life and Times of Michael K constitutes a mode of thinking another form of community, an unavowable community of the not yet assimilated. Such a thinking of community provides an opening to the future, not a monumentalisation of the past. K as unformed identity provides a means of thinking refusal in both literary and political terms. Such a model of refusal of identity opposes the model of subject identity formation in the modern State. In post-​apartheid South Africa, the model of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought to hail forth a new plural political identity by urging public confession and apology as a means of reconciliation and post-​conflict resolution. Despite the multiple identities of the new rainbow nation, the underlying model of the State was one which constructed individuals on the basis of their identity as citizens. Coetzee instead short-​circuits this model and opens up a thinking of community beyond legal identity formation The refusal to be interpellated by the State does not allow for the neat formation of identity after apartheid which the State desires and disrupts the neat compartmentalisation of history and marking out of the present. This could be seen as an instantiation of the impossible ‘right to disappearance’ to which Derrida refers in the tenth session of the 117

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Art and the Politics of Visibility second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign. There, he observes that ‘there is no right to disappearance’,7 although such a disappearance has an uncanny and paradoxical way of making itself felt from time to time. This right to disappearance heralds an alternative sovereignty which is like the sovereignty of the writer who does not exist either before or after the literary work. As Blanchot had put it: ‘before the work, the writer does not yet exist; after the work, he is no longer there: which means that his existence is open to question’.8 The non-​existent right to disappearance co-​exists with the duty to appear, to be formed as a sovereign subject of power. It exists as its impossible companion, its silent double. This impossible ‘right to disappearance’ may well assist us in thinking another form of sovereignty, not one bound to sovereign will or power but intimately linked to becoming imperceptible, a right to live dying. This sovereignty as disappearance is one which escapes formation and surveillance, and subsists elsewhere, not in the Day of biopolitical ordering but in the Night, beyond the scopic order of law. For Roberto Esposito, Blanchot developed a means of translating the notion of the neutral or the third person into a politics, ‘by locating a public language which corresponds to a philosophy of the impersonal … [which] consists in the programmatic cancellation of the proper name –​of every proper name –​in favour of anonymous and impersonal activity’.9 This praxis of disappearance as anonymous and impersonal activity which is simultaneously political is the striving for the creation of a right that does not and cannot exist, an impossible right but as such, one which must be striven for continuously.

Narrative Voice and Writing as Effacement For Maurice Blanchot, the narrative voice10 is marked by writing as a form of effacement, which ‘produce[s]‌the absence of the work’.11 In other words, the writing assumes a worklessness. Such worklessness 118

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(In)Visibility as Resistance is the antithesis of the ordered biocratic, identity producing State. Being workless and unavowable, it does not impose a form but can be seen more as, in Foucault’s terms, a form of ‘contestation that effaces’.12 This is a writing which refuses to produce an account of itself. For Blanchot, the narrative voice conveys what it is: to live once again in another, in a third person, the dual relation, the fascinated, indifferent relation that is irreducible to any mediation, a neutral relation, even if it implies the infinite void of desire; finally, the imminent certainty that what has once taken place will always begin again, always give itself away and refuse itself ... But who is telling the story here? ... it is rather the one who cannot recount because she bears –​this is her wisdom, her madness –​the torment of the impossible narration, knowing herself … to be the measure of this outside where, as we accede to it, we risk falling under the attraction of speech that is entirely exterior: pure extravagance.13

This ‘one who cannot recount because she bears … the torment of the impossible narration, knowing herself … to be the measure of this outside where … we risk falling under the attraction of speech that is entirely exterior’, is that singularity which exists outside of the frame of legally and politically imposed personhood. In an analysis of Blanchot’s notion of the narrative voice, Derrida observed that it is: a neutral voice that speaks the work from out of this place without a place, where the work is silent. The placeless place where the work is silent: a silent voice, then, withdrawn into its ‘aphony’. This ‘aphony’ distinguishes it from the ‘narrating voice’, the voice that literary criticism or poetics or narratology strives to locate in the system of the recit, of the novel, or of the narration.14 119

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Art and the Politics of Visibility This form of writing, like the characters contained within it, performs a stubborn refusal to accept the condition of legal and political subjectification. Coetzee’s writing conveys this ‘unconstructed voice of the singular and the irreducible’. It does not come in response to a call but rather emerges from the margins unsolicited, an instance of ‘unexpected speech’15 or speech ‘that is entirely exterior:  pure extravagance’. Coetzee’s writing has, in the words of his strongly opinionated narrator in Diary of a Bad Year: ‘a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible’.16 This thinking with and against a law of ordering allows us to think writing not as a work in the sense of a completed object, a monument to memory, but an opening to the future. The narrative voice points to a story not yet recorded, to the possibility of a future. In this regard it opposes such models as that of the apartheid state based on a national mythic narrative of racial supremacy as well as the narrative of the post-​apartheid state based on the narrating of a truth or truths about the past which aim to overcome conflict and reconcile the nation. Both share a common need to give an account of the nation in the form of a narrating voice. The narrating voice is, as Derrida reminds us, the voice of a subject recounting something, remembering an event or a historical sequence, knowing who he is, where he is, and what he is talking about. It responds to some ‘police’, a force of order or law … In this sense, all organized narration is ‘a matter for the police’, even before its genre … has been determined.17

In opposition to this, Coetzee’s writing provides an example of the narrative voice which undoes or refuses narratives of fixed identity and opposes rigid genre demarcation.18 This could be seen as an instance of what Gilles Deleuze has termed writing as becoming: 120

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(In)Visibility as Resistance To write is … not to impose a form … Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed … It is a process … Writing is inseparable from becoming … always has a component of flight that escapes its own formalization … To become is not to attain a form … but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or undifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule –​neither imprecise nor general, but unforeseen and non-​preexistent, singularized out of a population rather than determined in a form.19

Coetzee’s writing is not a response to a demand for truth nor is it a confession. Instead, it engages specifically with the impossibility of a confessional narrative, the impossibility of writing in response to a demand to produce the truth of writing itself. What Coetzee does in his writing is to refuse all entreaties to follow a particular generic mode. For Coetzee forced confession is part of a political apparatus which imposes obedience and order and which puts the citizen-​subject in their place. Words are extracted from one’s mouth, not one’s own words, but some words which represent the Truth for the inquisitor, the definitive word, the measurable word, the word that counts as information. To not speak, to not respond, in such circumstances, with an account of oneself, would be to produce a rupture in the circuits of biopower. Thus, such a refusal disrupts the ordering of lives by states in the context of biopower, the exploitation of individual lives in the interests of the state. Such a refusal enables us to see a mode of resistance to political ordering of individual lives. This points to another model of being together in relation with others. One which does not have an end in the sense of extracting a confession or indeed nation-​ building. Rather than seeking to be recognised by the State one refuses it. 121

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Tactical Invisibility or a Poetics of Disappearance In Life and Times of Michael K the eponymous character does not fit into any fixed identity category. He exists in the gaps of society. Set in an unnamed state (which bears a striking resemblance to the South Africa of the 1970s and early 1980s), the novel portrays a state in the grasp of civil war and a state of emergency. It is set in a period of interregnum, between two orders. In such a State, those who have no fixed place, the homeless, the vagrant, the old, the infirm, are rounded up and placed in labour and internment camps. Everyone who is not in their place is viewed with suspicion as an object to be controlled. Michael K, a character who seems perpetually out of place, due to his physical deformity, a hare lip, as well as his lack of mental agility, lives between the gaps in a world of silence. He works as a gardener and following an attempt to return with his mother to her place of birth exposes himself to suspicion as a would-​be aider and abettor of insurgents and finds himself in an internment camp where the camp commandant and medical officer attempt to wrestle a narrative from him, without success. It is perhaps when he disappears into another temporality and space that Michael K takes on some form of sovereignty. To paraphrase Maurice Blanchot, it is ‘as nobody [that he is] sovereign’20 and it is in this paradoxical state that his power of resistance resides. After his mother has died on the journey to her home, Michael is left totally alone. He comes across a deserted farm and takes up temporary residence there. Instead of inhabiting the farmhouse he builds a burrow-​like structure in order to be hidden from government soldiers searching for insurgents. Here we see a trace of Kafka’s short story, ‘The Burrow’, a story which concerns a creature who has completed a burrow and lives in constant anxiety of making this burrow safe against an unnamed ‘enemy’. Not without coincidence, to be sure, Coetzee himself had written an article on ‘The 122

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(In)Visibility as Resistance Burrow’ which appeared in print two years before the publication of Life and Times of Michael K. Coetzee treats this topic from the point of view of the narrative’s temporality, what he calls in the case of ‘The Burrow’, ‘an everlasting present’.21 This everlasting present beyond linear time is also present during K’s time in his burrow, where he ‘was living beyond the reach of calendar and clock in a blessedly neglected corner, half awake, half asleep’.22 Like Michael K, Kafka’s creature’s ‘whole life is organized around the burrow, his defense against an attack which may come at any moment and without warning’.23 Indeed in a prescient account of his novel to come Coetzee writes of the time of ‘The Burrow’ which resembles that in Michael K’s burrow: Time in ‘The Burrow’ is discontinuous in a strictly formalizable sense. Any moment may mark the break between before and after. Time is thus at every moment a time of crisis … Life consists in an attempt to anticipate a danger which cannot be anticipated because it comes without transition, without warning. The experience of a time of crisis is colored by anxiety. The task of building the burrow itself represents a life devoted to trying to still anxiety naturally without success; for without warning ‘the enemy’ is in the burrow.24

This mirrors the everlasting time of the interregnum in Michael K. Michael K lives in such a state, constantly waiting for the enemy in the form of the state and its agents to come for him. Just as Michael K does not fit into the time of society as such, or the society which the State imposes on him, neither does he fit into the internment camp. Michael K is a character who cannot be pinned down in one identity category or another. He is, as he observes, ‘out of all the camps’.25 He exists as a sort of unassimilable excess, being there and not there at the same time. According to the camp’s medical officer, K does not fit into pre-​existing categories 123

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Art and the Politics of Visibility of meaning. He is ‘a human soul above and beneath classification’.26 Instead of narrating himself or providing an account of himself in response to the questioning of the camp authorities, K is unable to give such an account. He refuses to narrate and to be narrated. Here we see a resistant character in a resistant text. What Life and Times of Michael K does is to provide a detailed fictive reflection on the impossibility of giving a narrative. Michael K’s refusal of identity, his very inoperativity, is viewed with suspicion and as a threat to the order of the State which relies on willing operatives to keep it in motion. As the medical officer asks: Did you think you were a spirit invisible … a creature beyond the reach of the laws of nations? … the laws of nations have you in their grip now: they have pinned you down in a bed beneath the grandstand of the old Kenilworth racecourse, they will grind you in the dirt if necessary. The laws are made of iron … No matter how thin you make yourself, they will not relax. There is no home left for universal souls.27

In the internment camp in this exceptional state of civil war, what is important is the way in which all aspects of life are governed and behaviour is modified so that internees become mollified and compliant citizens. As the medical officer observes, the internees: ‘will pass out certified pure of heart and willing of hand’.28 This dictation of what one does in the camp makes all acts predictable. Michael K’s silence testifies to a short-​circuiting of the order of the camp. In another sense he exposes the fiction of all power and law in its attempt to create order. The medical officer and the camp commander attempt to make Michael K speak. He is viewed with suspicion as a would-​be supporter, aider and abettor of insurgents. To borrow Branka Arsić’s phrase, the authorities attempt to assign Michael K: ‘a specific place, bring him under its own power by removing him into its very interiority’.29 Michael K’s appearance 124

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(In)Visibility as Resistance before the representatives of the law mirrors the position of the narrator in Maurice Blanchot’s novella The Madness of the Day, who is similarly asked to give an account of himself to the representatives of power/​knowledge, namely, to a psychiatrist and an opthamologist. Like Blanchot’s narrator, Michael K interrupts his own representation by the law. He is asked to explain himself, to relate a narrative which would be useful to the state in its re-​imposition of order. The representatives of power attempt to force him to speak in order to form him as a citizen with an identity. They attempt to form him and make him visible, to identify him. As Deleuze would have it: ‘Formed substances are revealed by visibility.’30 However, in not allowing himself to be given form he remains invisible to the biocratic order. The law demands everything and demands an identity. What the law cannot abide is non-​identity. It has no mechanisms for dealing with those who cannot be assimilated within the frame of citizenship. Such non-​identity escapes the law’s appropriating grasp. It is formless and cannot be categorised and therefore contained. In Michael K’s encounter with the medical officer, he challenges the medical officer’s own legitimacy. The medical officer tries to make Michael K talk thus: ‘Listen to me, listen how easily I fill this room with words. I know people who can … fill up whole worlds talking’.31 Similar to the lawmen in Blanchot’s novella, the medical officer attempts to announce his ownership of the space and its rules. Indeed, Blanchot’s description of the space of the interrogation describes perfectly the encounter between Michael K and his interrogators: One is not aware of it but these men are kings … they would say: ‘Everything here belongs to us.’ They would fall upon my scraps of thought: ‘This is ours.’ They interpellated my story: ‘Talk’, and my story would put itself at their service.32 125

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Art and the Politics of Visibility Michael K is asked to form himself, to be identified when he is asked to:  ‘Give yourself some substance, Man’.33 He is asked to explain himself and make himself appear, but in the end he disappears, not allowing himself to be formed or to inform. K undoes the interrogator-​ interrogee relation and as such, in Michael Marais’ terms: dispossesses the state functionaries of their power without himself assuming a position of dominance. Being silent, he never assumes a subject position in relation to an object: in linguistic terms, he is intransitive … his silence can be construed as an anarchic repudiation of all power relations; it is the means by which he resists becoming a character in the text of history, a text characterized by a struggle for power between master and servant on a national scale.34

What occurs here is close to what Maurice Blanchot articulates as the reversal of the ordered dyadic relationship of inquisitor and victim. The Powerful One is the master of the possible, but he is not master of this relation that does not derive from mastery and that power cannot measure: the relation without relation wherein the ‘other’ is revealed as ‘autrui’ … Hence the furious movement of the inquisitior who wants by force to obtain a scrap of language in order to bring all speech down to the level of force. To make speak, and through torture, is to attempt to master infinite distance by reducing expression to this language of power through which the one who speaks would once again lay himself open to force’s hold; and the one who is being tortured refuses to speak in order not to enter through the extorted words into the game of opposing violence, but also, at the same time, in order to preserve the true speech that he very well knows is at this instant merged 126

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(In)Visibility as Resistance with his silent presence –​which is the very presence of autrui in himself.35

Michael K begins to vanish literally and metaphorically out of the story and out of history, if he was ever there. This ‘whatever’ or unnameable singularity, being without categories of identity taunts and undoes the state. ‘It excited him, he found, to say, recklessly, the truth, the truth about me. I am a gardener’.36 Michael K finally thinks that: ‘Perhaps the truth is that it is enough to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time’.37 In this move from confession to contestation we see what Judith Butler terms the putting of: ‘life into truthful form’.38 In abnegating the authority of speech, K disappears, is not formed. Of course Michael K’s silence does not mean that there is no speech, but such speech emerges elsewhere, not in response to the threatening question which seeks to forcibly extract ‘the’ truth. When speech comes forth without being forced through torture then what we have is a breaking of the frame of that which is expected and accepted within regimes of war or biopower. That this does indeed undo the conditioned and dictated word of the camp is underlined by the reaction of the camp’s medical officer to Michael K’s withholding of his narrative. For the medical officer, Michael K’s stay in the camp was an allegory: ‘of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it. Did you not notice how, whenever I tried to pin you down, you slipped away?’39 Michael K disappears from the sight of the representatives of the ruling order. He is not visible in their terms, they cannot recognise him. Michael K finds himself in a position similar to that of Blanchot’s narrator in The Madness of the Day: when at last nothing was present but my perfect nothingness and there was nothing more to see, they ceased to see me too. Very irritated, they stood up and cried out, ‘All right. Where are you? Where are you hiding? Hiding is forbidden, it is an offense.40 127

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Art and the Politics of Visibility In refusing to be an object whose identity is imposed from without, Michael K reverses the power relation. The State officials have no power if there is no object to govern. The State ‘disappears’ objects and makes them appear, forms them. However, this does not happen with Michael K who refuses to make himself appear and resolves to disappear of his own accord. Michael K interrupts the law’s representation of itself as well as its representation of him. Being invisible, not being marked with an identity is an offense. This is what so offends the State. The attempt by the law to fit Michael K’s account into an ordered narrative frame, to form his words for their ends, fails. The law wants to make of Michael K an object, a pure mask resounding with the magisterial voice, the perfect persona. However, he contests this attempt to extract an account from him. Like the narrator in The Madness of the Day, Michael K ‘was not capable of forming a recit’.41 To paraphrase Derrida, in not giving a satisfactory account of himself, Michael K: not only troubles the representatives of the law … who demand of him, but are unable to obtain, an organized recit, a testimony oriented by a sense of history or his story, ordained and ordered by reason … he alarms … the lawmen, he radically persecutes them and … conceals from them … the truth they demand and without which they are nothing.42

Michael K has a profound psychic impact on the camp’s medical officer, making the latter rethink his position in the biocratic regime. After the encounter, the medical officer reflects that ‘I was wasting my life … by living from day to day in a state of waiting … I had in effect given myself up as a prisoner to this war’.43 The medical officer is forced to admit to himself that K exists beyond all camps, all histories and texts. In addition to not giving an account of himself, Michael K also refuses to eat in the camp. He wants to 128

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(In)Visibility as Resistance disappear both in vocal and visual terms. Such refusals to speak and to eat are the last vestige of power as non-​power, which those in the abject position of the excluded retain. Yet, Michael K in his reduced, emaciated form represents a certain hope for the future, a confused beacon of resistance to the molding of the individual will to the State’s desires. This negative affirmation of agency by those not deemed worthy of full citizenship can be seen as an instance of the stubborn refusal of mere life to be categorised and ruled. Indeed, to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase, such refusals can be seen as: ‘critical acts of resistance … incendiary acts that somehow, incredibly, live through the violence they oppose, even if we do not yet know in what ways such lives will survive’.44

Conclusion The performance of Michael K, as well as being a stubborn refusal to submit to the order of the camp, to be ‘out of all the camps’, is also a testimony to a being beyond the order of law. It is a refusal to surrender to the role imposed on the detainee as source of information. If, as Jean-​Michel Landry has noted, ‘to confess, to seek to know, and to produce the truth concerning oneself, amounts to submission’45 then the refusal to divulge is a form of power as non-​power, an act of insubordination. Confession then is a mode of governance behind which, as Landry points out, ‘lies a political technology of obedience’.46 In refusing to allow the law to have what it wants Michael K attempts to counter this violent authority of the interrogating State. He exists in: ‘the interval between speech and violence’.47 At the end of the encounter between Michael K and the medical officer, it is the medical officer who is temporarily disarmed. In inhabiting the interval between speech and violence Michael K leaves traces, both on the law and its agents, rather than being traced and formed by the law. Michael K exposes the paradoxical nature of the political technology of obedience which contains within it its own undoing in the 129

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Art and the Politics of Visibility form of disobedience. As Etienne Balibar has argued, disobedience may be considered the only possible positive condition of law: there is no political community without the inclusion of a principle of disobedience or dissidence within the legal frame of obedience itself, which radically challenges the purely legal understanding of the law … What is strange, indeed remarkable, is that the ‘negative’ argument provides the institution with its only possible positive condition, and the positive argument entirely concerns a ‘dialectical’ inclusion of the negative within the positivity of the law, albeit not in order to overcome it, rather in order to give it life.48

Coetzee evokes the complex paradoxical nature of obedience wonderfully in a scene where the medical officer contemplates Michael K’s unique form of resistance: You were not a hero and did not pretend to be, not even a hero of fasting. In fact you did not resist at all. When we told you to jump, you jumped. When we told you to jump again, you jumped again. When we told you to jump a third time, however, you did not respond but collapsed in a heap; and we could all see, even the most unwilling of us, that you had failed because you had exhausted your resources in obeying us … Your body rejected the food we fed you and you grew even thinner … I slowly began to understand the truth: that you were crying secretly, unknown to your conscious self (forgive the term), for a different kind of food, food that no camp could supply. Your will remained pliant but your body was crying to be fed its own food, and only that.49

Disobedience then does not lead to an overcoming of law but rather creates the possibility for action and for the cultivation of freedom. Such moments of disobedience of the accepted order can be seen as preludes to political resistance and change. Movements 130

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(In)Visibility as Resistance for political change such as the indignados provide an example of how individual citizens can come together to refuse the current order and press for political transformation. As Balibar notes: without a possibility of disobedience there is no legitimate institution of obedience –​a thesis … rooted in the pragmatic understanding of how democratic regimes, ‘constitutions of liberty’, emerge and collapse in history.50

As such Michael K allows us to think of the paradoxical nature of political obedience and the subject’s willed servitude to order. The action of refusing such servitude points to the beginning of resistance to biopolitical modes of production. Indeed, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri observe in their analysis of Michael K’s particular model of refusal: Michael K … is … a figure of absolute refusal … he is continually stopped by the cages, barriers, and checkpoints erected by authority, but he manages quietly to refuse them, to keep moving … The barriers … seem to stop life, and thus he refuses them absolutely in order to keep life in motion … K’s refusal of authority is as absolute as Bartleby’s, and that very absoluteness and simplicity situate him, too, on a level of ontological purity. K also approaches the level of naked universality.51

Hardt and Negri link Michael K’s refusal to Etienne de la Boetie’s politics of refusal where resistance can be performed as much in a deliberate refusal to support the tyrant as in the violent toppling of the tyrant. As De la Boetie exhorted: ‘Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed’.52 In such a refusal Hardt and Negri see the beginning of a liberatory politics. However, it is only the beginning. The larger project requires for them the creation of ‘a new social body, which is a project that goes well beyond refusal. Our lines of flight, our exodus must be constituent and create a real alternative. Beyond the simple refusal, we need also to construct a new mode of 131

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Art and the Politics of Visibility life and above all a new community’.53 The beginning of the outline of such a coming community can be seen in figures of refusal such as Michael K. Michael K’s Bartleby-​like work to rule demonstrates both the inoperativity of all attempts to resist power while at the same time noting the impossibility of doing otherwise. Indeed in the mode of De la Boetie, the medical officer sees the significance of Michael K’s resistance in terms beyond the toppling of one power and its replacement with another equally violent one: as your persistent No, day after day, gathered weight, I  began to feel that you were more than just another patient, another casualty of the war, another brick in the pyramid of sacrifice that someone would eventually climb and stand straggle-​legged on top of, roaring and beating his chest and announcing himself emperor of all he surveyed.54

Michael K, in effect, performs what Michel Foucault calls ‘[the] right to bear witness, to oppose truth to power … That right to set a powerless truth against a truthless power’.55 In our role as either citizens or rights-​claiming subjects in contemporary liberal democracies the efficacy of our speech is limited because, to paraphrase Foucault, we as speaking subjects are also the ‘subject [matter] of the statement’.56 The interlocutor (the lawman) is always in the position of authority. The refusal to divulge in such circumstances is a form of power as non-​power, a non-​positive affirmation rather than a withdrawal into silence. The uncalled for ‘No’ is an affirmation of a provisional non-​power which contains the possibility of the beginning of a liberatory politics. Nothing is ostensibly changed, the institutions continue, yet something will never be the same. This is the imperceptible moment of subversion, which, as workless, as pure excess, achieves nothing, but this is its very force. It counter-​poses worklessness to the work of power, non-​identity to identity, responsibility to one’s own non-​responsibility. This ‘counter-​law’ is: ‘the 132

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(In)Visibility as Resistance condition of the possibility of the law … an axiom of impossibility … [which] confound[s]‌its sense, order and reason’.57 Michael K’s literal and metaphoric border crossings provide us with a means of thinking invisibility as resistance. His eluding of fixed categories frustrates the state’s aim of putting citizens in their place. His politics of invisibility point to another kind of witnessing as resistance. This is a move to a form of witnessing as contestation, as active intervention in the political life of the community, as opposed to a subject-​forming and subject-​ordering witnessing as confession. His being out of all the camps undoes the hegemonic politics of identity and conflict allowing for the possibility of another politics. It is a praxis of disappearance as anonymous and impersonal activity which enables citizens to escape the identities allotted to them and open the way to a transformative politics beyond the scopic order of the state.

Notes 1. Gerald N.  Bruns, ‘Anarchic temporality:  Writing, friendship, and the ontology of the work of art in Maurice Blanchot’s Poetics’ in Kevin Hart et al. (eds), The Power of Contestation: Perspectives on Maurice Blanchot (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 125. 2. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Refusal’, Maurice Blanchot: Political Writings, 1953–​ 1993 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 7. 3. Patchen Markell, Bound By Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 31. 4. Jacques Derrida, ‘Living on’ in Jacques Derrida, Parages, John P. Leavey (ed.), (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 130–​1. 5. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: QPD, 2003), p. 38. 6. Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 182–​3. 7. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 145. 8. Maurice Blanchot, ‘After the fact’, Vicious Circles: Two Fictions and ‘After the Fact’ (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1985), p. 60. 9. Roberto Esposito, Terza Persona (Torino: Einaudi, 2007), pp. 157–​8. 133

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Art and the Politics of Visibility 10. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 379–​87. 11. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, p. 424. 12. Michel Foucault, ‘The thought of the outside’, in James Faubion (ed.), Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–​84, Vol. 2 (London: Allen Lane and The Penguin Press, 1998), p. 152. 13. Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, p. 462. 14. Derrida, ‘Living on’, p. 130. 15. Maurice Blanchot, Les Intellectuels en Question (Tours: Farrago, 2000), p. 36. 16. J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (London: Vintage Books, 2008), p. 23. 17. Derrida, ‘Living on’, pp. 130–​1. 18. In another of Coetzee’s novels, Disgrace, we again encounter refusal as a mode of resistance to subordination, this time not in a state of exceptional civil war but in a post-​conflict liberal order. Such a refusal also points to an undoing of being defined in relation to the state as a victim or as a perpetrator. It is a refusal to be categorised. By refusing to accept a way out of losing his job by issuing an apology, a confession of guilt made publicly to a committee, David Lurie in effect refuses to be interpellated by the post-​apartheid liberal state as a particular kind of identity. 19. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Literature and life’, Critical Inquiry 23/​ 2 (1997), pp. 225–​6. 20. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1981), p. 16. 21. J. M. Coetzee, ‘Time, tense, and aspect in Kafka’s “The Burrow”’, MLN 96/​3 (1981), pp. 556–​79. 22. J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K (London: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 116. 23. Coetzee, ‘Time, tense, and aspect’, p. 574. 24. Ibid., p. 575. 25. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, p. 182. 26. Ibid., p. 151. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., p. 143. 29. Branka Arsić, Passive Constitutions or 7 ½ Times Bartleby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 105. 30. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 65. 31. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, p. 192. 32. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, p. 14. 134

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(In)Visibility as Resistance 3 3. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, p. 192. 34. Michael Marais, ‘Languages of power:  A  story of reading Coetzee’s “Michael K”/​Michael K’, English In Africa 16/​2 (1989), pp. 31–​48. 35. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 132. 36. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, p. 181. 37. Ibid., p. 182. 38. Stuart Murray and Judith Butler, ‘Ethics at the scene of address: A conversation with Judith Butler’, Symposium:  Review of the Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy 11/​2 (2007), p. 416. 39. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, p. 166. 40. Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, p. 14. 41. Ibid., p. 18. 42. Jacques Derrida, ‘The law of genre’, in John P.  Leavey (ed.), Parages: Jacques Derrida (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 245. 43. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, p. 157. 44. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), p. 62. 45. Jean-​Michel Landry, ‘Confession, obedience, and subjectivity: Michel Foucault’s unpublished lectures on the government of the living’, Telos 146 (2009), p. 112. 46. Ibid., p. 122. 47. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, p. 62. 48. Etienne Balibar, ‘(De)Constructing the human as human institution: A reflection on the coherence of Hannah Arendt’s practical philosophy’, Social Research 74/​3 (2007), p. 737. 49. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, p. 163–​4. 50. Balibar, ‘(De)Constructing the human’, p. 735. 51. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 203–​4. 52. Etienne de la Boetie, The Politics of Obedience:  The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (New York: Free Life Editions, 1975), pp. 52–​3. 53. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 204. 54. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, p. 164. 55. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and juridical forms’ in James Faubion (ed.), Power:  The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–​84, Vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 33. 56. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 61. 57. Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, p. 220.

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5 Valences of Subjectivity: The Politics of Personal Narrative in Video Art Rachel Garfield

Contemporary Contexts: From Race to Faith and the Persistence of Visual Codes Famously, a new zeitgeist was marked by the events of 11 September 2001, when the World Trade Center in New York was attacked by Al Qaeda. Since then, concerns such as religion, especially Islam, and the movement of people by the forces of neo-​liberalist wars have come to dominate the media. Art practice has also shifted its focus from Identity politics towards politics of the global: work on border control; refugees; war. In other words, the interests of artists, writers and curators have transformed from a pre-​9/​11 concern with the politics of subjectivity to interest in the politics of population mobility and power. In this chapter, I engage with the discourses that envelope discussions of Otherness (despite my difficulty with this term –​i.e., other to whom?) and argue that despite a current context where the personal account is regarded as narcissistic or just merely passé, there are still important questions to be asked and art to be made that addresses the subject and subjectivity. I will 137

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Art and the Politics of Visibility do this by looking at what is at stake through some of the historical accounts of ‘black art’ and post-​colonial art and the journey towards the contemporary focus on globality and war. The writing will draw in a range of writers and artworks in a broad contextualising sweep, finally focusing in a more speculative way on the possibilities for the personal narrative in artwork, the direct address and the dialectical relationship between personal responsibility and political engagement on a larger scale, through one of my own pieces You’re Joking (2005) and Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967). Tariq Modood wrote in the 1990s that the anti-​racist accounts of the time were preoccupied with colour racism, thereby ignoring the centrality of culture and religion in the formation of subjectivity through faith, race and geographic specificity. This lone plea to encapsulate faith into the discussion on identity has, since 9/​11, become the academic norm, although not in the way that Modood had envisioned. Academic writings in art in the UK have undergone a distinct shift away from interest in the Subject and visual identification in art practice. Where once the importance of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks was unquestionable, this text has given way to Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life as the beacon of the artists’ avant-garde. This, I would suggest, is due to a wider visibility of the operations of power on a global scale through the ‘War on Terror’, through post-​9/​11 public awareness of sites such as Guantanamo Bay and through the heightened levels of awareness of population movement across the Global South due to the ‘war on terror’. Furthermore, racism, from 9/​11 until the recent activism around police shootings of young black men in the US has been firmly directed towards the ‘Muslim threat’. Public outrage to the killing of Michael Brown –​a young, unarmed black man –​by police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 has shone light on the many similar killings (and in the British context, ‘stop and search’ harassment) that are committed, and this may yet have an effect on art practice and 138

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Valences of Subjectivity the curatorial interests (see also ­Chapter 7, this volume). However, at this moment in time, in the UK, it seems to me that the debates in art that focus on colour and visibility have diminished considerably, disappearing behind a potent and seemingly more urgent global field of politics. In sum, the politics of identity has given way to the politics of the dispossessed. After decades of US furtive involvement in wars held at the peripheries of American political power (such as Nicaragua), the idea of war has now taken centre stage in the national imaginary. Put in positive terms, the individualistic concern with identity politics as the main focus of the political sphere –​after the turn away from vanguard politics –​has now given way again to looking outwards to the politics of global powerbases. Long before 9/​11, the October Group of art historians published a discussion reflecting on the 1993 Whitney Biennial. This debate, entitled The Politics of the Signifier, was of key interest at the time and through this forum the Whitney exhibition was criticised for instrumentalising art in the service of identity politics. In the wake of this, there was a mass turning away in the Atlantacist paradigm from identity politics as a productive enquiry in art. Hal Foster wrote, in part following Krauss’ Lacanian reading of narcissism and the screen, that: What disturbed me is that the project of the art is often to critique Identity, but the subject is almost always presumed, either as the Subject that addresses or the subject to be addressed, or both. So there is a turn to autobiographical identity often in the very moment of its questioning (I see this in critical theory too). How productive a paradox is it?1

This famous critique has been generally upheld since, so that any focus on the self or intention of putting oneself in the frame has become a device that is considered indulgent, lacking any conceptual bite or certainly any political bite. 139

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Art and the Politics of Visibility There are a few dissenters, however, who continue to interlace Politics (of global movements and struggles) with politics (of racism, sexuality and sexism). Amelia Jones, for example, is dedicated, in part, to countering what she sees as facile proclamations that we are ‘beyond’ identity –​proclamations that are either based, as with the Freestyle exhibition, on a frustration with some of the simplifications and binaries of conventional 1970s-​style identity politics and on a desire for publicity, or are made by those oblivious to the history of identity politics and activisms of the past that have enabled whatever freedoms are had in the present.2

I am not aiming to conflate those who proclaim a weariness to Identity with those who claim the politics of war is more pressing a topic (and nor is Jones, of course). However, I would argue that an either/​or situation (i.e., the replacement of the politics of war with the politics of racism) serves to render local racisms invisible in art discourse. It is a commonplace understanding that art constitutes culture. As such, these issues would impact on popular culture, reintroducing questions of racism into the public arena –​questions that are particularly relevant given the hidden (and not so hidden) racisms that inflect many post-​9/​11 debates on Islam, ‘stop and search’ and the continued numbers game of immigration. Both the return to concerns of global struggle and the turn away from the personal narrative are part of a wider culture of presentism: declaring arguments obsolete when they have merely seemed irresolvable at the time. The resurrection of older discussions about collective struggle and revolution that were not resolved and have been, at best, shelved and more often, completely undermined could also be accused of presentism.3 In terms of art that deals with Politics, artists such as the Berwick Street Collective, The Hackney Flashers or Mierle Laderman Ukeles have given way to artists such as Ursula 140

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Valences of Subjectivity Biermann or Phil Collins. The former artists were directly dealing with local struggles of workers using lo-​fi technology. Conversely, the younger contemporary artists are travelling around the world with film teams exposing the impact of war, by default re-​inscribing the focus on faith and on the differences between ‘us’ and the peoples far away, in the Global South. As a result, the personal narrative in art today focuses on discussions of the alienation of the digitised, post-​humanist subject seen in Ryan Trecartin’s or Hito Steyerl’s work, not the classed or raced alienation of Jo Spence or Adrian Piper. The issue here isn’t the recent directions of interest in themselves but the overall disconnect between these different spheres of operation. To connect some of these dots, it is important to note that while the frameworks of the debate on otherness have shifted from ‘race’ to faith, and from localised struggles to global ‘clashes of culture’, the same old signifiers of the stereotypical image are still relied upon. Despite critiques of the last 30-​odd years in popular culture and in art there is still often a reliance on the visual to understand the subject. The visual is an extremely crude signifier of difference that has several flaws.4 Firstly, it essentialises difference through focus on the skin rather than on position; for example, ‘faith’ does not mean Christianity (and indeed the persecuted Christians in, say, Egypt and Iraq are not much discussed) but is a smokescreen for Islam. It also assumes absolute divisions and denies intersections of otherness. Finally, it writes out other forms of insistent racist oppression such as towards the Irish, the Jews and the Roma. Moreover, this shift is in fact part of the conservatively motivated ‘clash of civilisations’ discourse and as such, it often unwittingly re-​inscribes the perception of division between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. The talk of faith is still often backed up by an image of imagined otherness. Jones cites the fatal mistake that led to the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes by the police in 2005. Jean Charles was an electrician from Brazil, living in London, who was shot down by the 141

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Art and the Politics of Visibility police while exiting the underground station near his home because they thought he looked like a Muslim terrorist. To reiterate, Jones would say that is an image of presumed otherness built on stereotype and is just one example of the dangerous and sometimes fatal misrecognition of innocent people because of their presumed identity.5 I would build on her argument by emphasising here the dialectical relationship between racism towards Muslims or the flawed assumption of what Muslims might look like and the emphasis in art moving decisively towards the wars in the Global South and the Middle East at the very moment when Muslims were re-​created as the internal threat par excellence. The late Stuart Hall problematised the focus of multicultural debates to counter the racism embedded in national discourse. Hall called for an end to what he called the numbers game of immigration. His point6 was that focus on how many are in the country –​the ‘we have too many Poles’ type of argumentation –​will only allow for the counterargument of another number (i.e., ‘no, there are less than that’) and in this way the conversation never changes. The personal narrative in art can move this debate away from the numbers by joining the dots between the narrative and the politics. Twenty-​six years on, this numbers game has not been challenged by popular political discourse. Instead, it continues to serve as the main legitimate focus of debates about human mobility, as exemplified by the shameless ratcheting up of xenophobia in relation to the exaggerated expectations of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants to the UK in January 2014, merely the latest in a long tradition.7 On a prosaic level, I still get told or asked, on a regular basis, ‘You’re not English are you? Where are you from?’8 (I have to admit that I sometimes ask that question, too.) Often it is a benign address from another friendly Other (although sometimes not), yet it can never really be as benign as it is ostensibly intended. This question itself problematises both the idea of the so-​called fluidity of identity and the schema of the white/​not white dichotomy, for, as 142

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Valences of Subjectivity an Ashkenazi Jew, I am meant to be white, and, of course, in some contexts I am. As a Londoner with a strong London accent this in itself points to a visual foregrounding on the part of the addressor. It also points to nationalist prejudice. At the same time, the stories of ‘home-grown’ terrorists that repeatedly emerge in the media also reveal the fear of the invisible Other within; this belies, via negativa, an ongoing desire for certainty of the Other through visual means, for if the Other is identifiable so too is the self.9 Sara Ahmed, another dissenter, argues that identity is a visual economy and in her study of suburban Neighborhood Watch schemes demonstrates that visual discernment (i.e., racism, often at the intersection of class prejudice) is alive and well.10 The rhetorics of subjectivity must not be just numbers; it is also about the relationship between a perceived type of whiteness, citizenship and belonging. Merely one of the recent examples in the media is that of the abduction of ‘white’ children into ‘gypsy’ families.11 Another, more recent example was a report that found police were eight times more likely to stop a black man than a white man in a ‘Stop and Search’.12 Eliding all other manifestations of racism is the sheer paranoia and fear of the terrorist threat (and there are many examples of the very real threat) which in turn elides art that deals with more local racisms than global warfare or terrorism. The relative invisibility of the work of artists dealing with anti-​black police racism is a testament to this shift. Barbara Walker and Dave Lewis are two such examples of artists who have been working consistently in this area for several decades. Barbara Walker’s work features pencil drawings of black men and women. A key work of hers is Louder than Words, which chronicles the incidences of Stop and Search that her son has had to undergo by the police on the actual police ticket of each arrest (see Figure 5.1). She draws his portrait on the ticket. The image here is of a young man, a loved son, in direct contrast to the ticket, which acts as a testament to the perceived threat that he is seen as by the police. Dave Lewis’s piece Chapter Six –​Racism 143

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Figure 5.1  My Song, Barbara Walker, 2006. Mixed media on digital print paper, 40 x 55 cm photo by Gary Kirkham. Courtesy of the artist. 

(2001), which uses texts from the Macpherson Report published in the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence killings, and places them as captions below photographs –​close up, haptic and fragmented images –​of young black men (see Figure 5.2). In Lewis’s work a contrast is also drawn between the intimacy of the portraits of the 144

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Figure 5.2  ‘6.24’ from the series Chapter Six –​Racism, Dave Lewis, 2001. Colour photographs and text, 59.4 x 42 cm. Courtesy of the artist. 

body and the charged but officious language of the report. In both works the relationship between the intimacies of the subject and the distance of a crushing bureaucracy are central to the understanding of subjectivity and the main defence that art can personalise what is depersonalised through visual stereotype (of ‘stop and search’), assumption and the numbers game. This has value and importance. One popular argument put forward in the ‘post-​identity’ world is the notion that hybridity is now accepted as commonplace in the 145

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Art and the Politics of Visibility urban city and as such, we all just rub along in an agonistic cosmopolitan equality. A few examples of this can be seen in literary theory and novels such as the figures conjured in the novels of Zadie Smith and in Jonathan Freedman’s Klezmer America:  Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (2009), which claim to foster new associations and identifications across the many identities that populate the United States. In art, Nikki S.  Lee’s work speaks to this tendency. Lee made her fame in the 1990s with work where she inserted herself into different communities for a few months, blending in with a range of crowds from the elderly to the Hispanic, from hip hop groups to trailer park communities. This kind of work seems to have internalised a benign and privileged performativity that is able to eschew the violent coercion of the normative.13 What I mean to say here is that in this work, adopting an identity is a bit like shopping: she can put it on and take it off a few months later. She is at home everywhere and in that case, nothing is actually at stake:  it is a cosmopolitan dream that flattens outs the power relations of racism. A rather different example can be found in the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who brings people together through events that involve cooking Thai cuisine. Although both artists are still making work on the international stage, the moment of their prominence is past and while an argument can be made for a dynamic and agonistic mix, particularly in some inner city areas, overall, there is a limit to the idea of tolerance that this work represents (and tolerance marks the border of its own limits) through bringing people together. As with Nikki Lee’s work, danger has been erased and there is nothing at stake. Sara Ahmed points out in Strange Encounters14 that the constitution of the stranger demonises anyone who is not seen as normative. She demonstrates how suburban Neighborhood Watch schemes create a fear of anyone who is not normative by differentiating between those who do and do not belong, particularly via notions of what they look like 146

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Valences of Subjectivity and how they behave. This is a moment of interpellation (or re-​ interpellation in Ahmed’s terms) where bodies are formed and reformed through encounters. The relationship between spaces of value and the production of the stranger is a key point in her argument, foregrounding that the making of the stranger is an essential process in creating our own sense of value of what ‘we’ have (and who ‘we’ are). Arguably, Lee and Tiravanija turn this around by making symbolic (if not real) friends of strangers in their work. Demonstrating who becomes the stranger shows who and what the hegemonic normative is (and in how people become friends, where the hegemonic power lay –​ sometimes with the privilege of the artist!). Yet those who are tolerated are also produced as strangers, as Wendy Brown explores in Regulating Tolerance. She discusses how tolerance is a term of control and normativity wherein deviance extracts a high price. Explaining the need to reflect on the term, she argues, ‘When political or civil conflict is explained as a cultural clash, whether in international or domestic politics, tolerance emerges as a key term’.15 It is a term of the limits of acceptability measured by a norm in which ‘we’ are democracy and have moral autonomy while ‘they’ are culture.16 Tolerance, Brown shows, ‘can thus work as a disciplinary strategy of liberal individualism to the extent that it tacitly schematizes the social order into the tolerated’.17 The term tolerance, as suggested here, is a measure of racism in itself. That is not to say that the notion of the performative, or identity-​ in-​process, doesn’t make an important contribution to identity formation. Indeed, this is a concern that I take up and develop in my own writings and explore in my own work later in the chapter. But here, I am merely arguing that its corollary should also be commonplace: an acceptance of the inadequacy of the fixing of identity in visual markers on the body. However the prevalence of media attention on visual judgment as I have described above or the desire for visual certainty that this reflects shows how much work there is still 147

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Art and the Politics of Visibility to be done: the media attention delineates the limits of race tolerance that many claim to enjoy.

Some Historical Junctures in Art In 2006, Stuart Hall presented a genealogical trajectory of three ‘moments’ of productive development in postwar black arts in the UK.18 Hall discusses the first wave of artists who arrived in the UK, France and the US in the postwar period, who grew up in colonial conditions and who came because they were, in Hall’s description, modernists, cosmopolitan and avant-​garde. The second wave he describes is the emergence of the Black Arts Movement in the 1980s spearheaded by second-generation African-​Caribbeans in the UK.19 Hall stated he did not know what the third moment would be, as it was unfolding at the time of writing. However he paves the way for T. J. Demos in proclaiming, ‘What we can say is that “black” by itself –​ in the age of refugees, asylum seekers and global dispersal –​will no longer do’.20 T. J. Demos, in his own triad of steps towards the present, takes up this trajectory and backtracks to suggest Mona Hatoum as the foundational work in his contemporary paradigm. He describes the ‘stages’ from Mona Hatoum giving voice to the longings of enforced exile in the now seminal Measures of Distance, through the figure of the nomad as a force liberated from the constraints of nationhood –​ linked to Chantal Mouffe’s writing21 on the nomad as the quintessential modern subject and popularly imagined in the work of, say, Francis Alys.22 Demos completes the journey with his call for the trope of global refugee or ‘within proximity to what Edward Said has called permanent exile’, citing Emily Jacir and the Otolith Group amongst others as his primary exemplars. Both these latter examples bring the personal narrative into their work to explore the impact of displacement and the post​war contract of social mobility and revolution. However, these examples do not answer the Hal Foster’s 148

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Valences of Subjectivity question, cited earlier: ‘So there is a turn to autobiographical identity often in the very moment of its questioning. How productive a paradox is it?’ In my own genealogy of identity work I will begin to address Foster’s issue of the paradox of essentialising the subject through a reliance on the authenticity of the autobiographical at the moment when the artist claims to be calling it into question. Adrian Piper’s work was impactful in the 1980s and early 1990s in her direct critique of the problem of visibility and assumptions of visual recognition with now classic works such as Calling Card and Self Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features, and also with writings such as Passing for White, Passing for Black. However, these works seem to have had a limited legacy despite their historical importance and ongoing relevance. While I  wish to acknowledge the importance of Piper’s work, and its influence on my own art making, it is also important to delineate its limits. Pieces like Calling Card were embedded with an underlying essentialism of blackness as a fixed category. These works were also marked by didacticism and a reliance on victim narratives. Where blackness becomes a category, as Amelia Jones notes, ethnic insiderism also lurks: Piper, I  would argue, fails to see that her claiming of ‘black’ is contradictory to her insistence that racial identity (at least its social meanings and values) is determined through processes of intersubjective exchange (including institutionalized forms of discrimination or privilege). Calling Card, like much of her work in the 1970s and 1980s, both rests on and resists the fact that value and identity are reciprocal; the piece begins from an assumption that Piper’s blackness is a stable and self-​evident (if invisible) quality.23

A younger generation of artist have, on the whole, drawn different conclusions and rejected the perceived simplistic aesthetics and messages of earlier identity work.24 The turning away from claims to visibility, the politics of establishment and naming in work such as 149

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Art and the Politics of Visibility Piper’s has much to do with the double bind artists were placed in to be ‘black artists’, as discussed in Jean Fisher’s essay ‘Some thoughts on “contaminations” ’.25 This next generation moved towards the cinematic strategies of, say, Yang Fudong, whose celebrated work Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest presents a timeless subject steeped in myth and metaphor, or whose The Fifth Night re-​imagines stereotype as a cultural heritage. For others, like Nikki S. Lee or Rirkrit Tirivanija, the answer lays in performative strategies. For Tirivanija and Lee, the superficiality of address is precisely the point to be made –​that people rub along together. For Tirivanija, the group is self-​selected, educated and often from the privileged world of the art public. For Lee, meanwhile, the very process of infiltration re-​inscribes the notion of concrete divisions between groups, even if on the basis of choice and even if in the end, the work is subject to Jones’ critique of Piper. That is, by naming the different communities (The Yuppie Project; The Hispanic Project) Lee re-​inscribes absolute divisions between groups, undermining the very fluidity of people’s possible identifications in a similar way to Piper (‘I am Black. I’m sure you didn’t realize that when you made/​laughed at/​agreed with that racist remark.’).26 Lee’s work also suggests a colour blindness that is not born out in reality. While she can choose to be Hispanic, black or white in her infiltration of these groups, the lived experience of many Americans (as exemplified, for example, by the Ferguson shootings or by long-​ standing housing discrimination practices) shows that this kind of passing is merely a chimera. Most people remain caught in the harsh realities of their (visibly read) subject positions. The nomad, as identified through the Demos triad, is the third strategic figure that was adopted in the 1990s as quintessentially contemporary and a critique of the nation state –​the nation state, within this rationale, being the founder and propagator of contemporary racism. The ongoing popularity of artists such as Francis Alÿs is a testament to the continued currency of this view.27 In contrast, 150

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Valences of Subjectivity and in agreement with Sara Ahmed, I would argue that the artist nomad is a figure of privilege, more like the colonial artist traveller, collecting beautiful landscapes and objet. As a paradigm, this excises the politics of lived relations that gives it specificity28 which effectively renders the artist as tourist or ethnographer and so too the viewer.29 This trope of the nomad is still very much part of the doxa, with many artists following commissions around the Global South and non-​West to either uncover some relatively invisible concern or conceit or to follow and popularise specific causes or struggles.30 The nomad trope also reinforces the power of privilege in the dual demands for flying around the world and for high production values. Furthermore, the emphasis on the ‘other’ world reinforces the nation state as an entity that keeps some people out; of a sense of the war-​torn outside the safety of the ‘civilised’ world that the privileged inhabit; of Fortress Europe; and finally of the rich Atlantacist and European nations needing to know and act –​a recent form of Orientalism. While the complicity of the West is sometimes acknowledged (such as in the much-​acclaimed Enjoy Poverty by Renzo Martens –​ a new self reflexive twist), this is the exception rather than the rule. What we see instead is the reinforcing of the notion described by Wendy Brown of those who have culture (the white liberals, who can chose to imbibe in culture) and those others who are culture (the working classes and the non-​white), rather than the nation as an entity requiring permanent proximity of strangers. The paradigm set out by Sara Ahmed, which claims that Neighborhood Watch schemes set up structures that differentiate between spaces of value and the production of the stranger, can also be seen to encompass flows of art production and display across the world. According to Ahmed, ‘they (the strangers) do not enter into the exchanges of capital that transforms spaces into places’. One could draw comparisons here between the populated urban centres with street life, albeit populated by those who do not own the means of 151

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Art and the Politics of Visibility production that built those centres of exchange (nb. Mel Jackson’s work Some Things You Are Not Allowed to Send Around the World is instructive here)31 versus the empty spaces of suburbia where those who walk in the street are judged as dangerous. What is at stake is a pronounced inequality in visibility: while the much-​filmed problems of ‘the rest of the world’ are highly visible in museums and galleries, the home-​grown problems of racism and inequality are now virtually invisible. I would argue, against the grain, that the politics of war as envisioned in art can in itself be a narcissistic trump card parading a faux altruism. Renzo Marten, through his work, foregrounds how this operates by making visible the artist’s ego and his/​her authority in delineating the ‘truth’ of war and its causes and effects. The film Episode 1 vividly performs this. The artist travels around Chechnya with his camera making a documentary film about himself. In the war-​torn, disputed land where people are suffering considerable hardship Martens consciously fails to draw the local inhabitants out about their experiences, instead choosing to ask them if he looks good. By constantly drawing attention to himself, he also draws attention in a contemporary way to how documentary work reflects back on the filmmaker and puts the film’s subjects in subordinate positions.

The Personal Narrative And yet… there must be something to recoup from the personal narrative, to answer Hal Foster’s question –​something that destabilises the subject in terms of not assuming the addressee nor the addressed, something that produces a ‘productive paradox’. How might we acknowledge the power of visual identification with the Subject while also acknowledging its many complexities and in a way that makes no assumptions? And more, how might such work –​ unlike that of the Otolith Group and Emily Jacir or Nikki Lee and 152

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Valences of Subjectivity Rikrit Travanija –​effectively question assumptions of knowability and visibility in the face of the Other? I return to that critique again and again as I try to find a way forward that doesn’t presume a Subject addressor or addressee but instead presumes an excess in both that undoes assumption. This is a core issue for racism in the encounter. I have written in the past about the possibilities of adopting personas in art as a way of building a critique of the link between who you see and what you think you might be seeing –​or rather, who you think that person looks like –​and at best that is the aim of the work of Nikki S. Lee. Over a decade ago, Ali G was an exciting example of possibilities that has since given way to a more cynical critique on manners, hierarchies of power and oppression and anti-​Semitism through Borat. As Amelia Jones states, The point in using a term such as ‘black’ is not to imagine or imply that we know what it means … but to indicate it is a culturally relevant term, with different meanings depending on who is using and thinking it, which reciprocally taps into and molds perceptions about where the person comes from and who they ‘are’.32

We know also from Judith Butler that accounting for oneself or others in this way is a discursively produced effect of power relations that wreaks psychic violence in its negotiation with the normative. Butler has had an enormous impact on cultural identity debates. Stuart Hall discusses her contribution in ‘Who needs “identity”?’, stating that her theorisations on gender foregrounded that the question and theorization of identity is a matter of considerable political significance and is only likely to be advanced when both the necessity and the ‘impossibility’ of identities, and the suturing of the psychic and the discursive in their constitution are fully and unambiguously acknowledged.33 153

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Art and the Politics of Visibility Butler has also had an enormous impact on artists’ practice. Much of this can be seen in work that explores the possibilities of drag, such as contemporary British artist Oreet Ashery’s Marcus Fisher or Harold Offeh’s Mammy work. Both of these pieces, however, fall back on the stereotype for their purchase. I would suggest that there are other, more productive directions to pursue. A possible response to Foster could be argued through Butler’s later work Undoing Gender,34 which implies a discussion about the limits of the body and the possibilities for being beyond the body, uncertain with over-​ identification, in this case, in grief. If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I  never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible. It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility.35

‘Lets face it’, Butler continues, ‘we’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something’.36 If Judith Butler is right and we undo each other, then video is a medium that can offer distinct ways of understanding this ‘undoing’. While art is never totalising, the documentary in its verité form, by turning the camera on to the subject and performing as little intervention as possible, lays claim to some kind of truth. Yet this has been contested again and again. Lately, we are also familiar with the death of the index in documentary, but a trace of this truth claim seems to remain, even in its critique. It is the trace of this feature that allows for an interesting contemporary slippage in understanding the subject. Through the interplay of the speech act and the presence of a black body, in the case of my You’re Joking (2005) and Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967) for the purposes of this chapter, that slippage occurs in the viewing experience, between the stated expectations of the subject and us, the viewing subject and our expectations of him. The more the narrative is expected to place 154

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Valences of Subjectivity and contain the body the more it exceeds that remit. As Butler states, ‘language remains alive when it refuses to “encapsulate” or “capture” the events and lives it describes’.37 In other words, there is an ongoing tension between the insistence of the indexical link to the real in documentary photography and video –​the police mugshot, the newspaper photo or YouTube video being obvious signifiers (despite the break with the index through the digital) –​and the possibilities to destabilise that through the use of time and the contingencies of editing as I  will discuss through You’re Joking. As noted earlier, the notion of undoing the visual economy of otherness is an important project. As previously discussed, assumptions of who the other is and what they might look like has profound consequences. Consider this in relation to the contemporary figure of the nomad, who is never a stranger but is at home everywhere. Ahmed, herself critical of the figure of the nomad, instead returns to the local as the important site of exchange, where those who do not belong re-​make relationships through a different kind of engagement with their new-​found locale. Although Ahmed posits this as a critique of the differentiation that creates the figure of the stranger, there may be some conditions where the discomfort of not belonging can offer a radical possibility for subjectivity as well as a position of worrying at the limits of the interpellative call in undecideability where this differentiation is broken down. I would also suggest that in opposition to the cinematic and the global, the intimate and the local can offer a kind of agency that the sublime scale of global inequality may not. In order to find another trajectory than suggested by either Hall or Demos, I would like to rethink a form of documentary that draws on an intimate encounter through the direct address. There is a history of work in film such as The Diary of David Holzman (1967) and Portrait of Jason (1967) that grapples with the issue of unknowability and presumed authenticity. These films, through the devices of autobiography, question the stability of the subject and the certainty 155

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Figure 5.3  Video grab from You’re Joking, Rachel Garfield, 2005. 8 minutes, mini DV. Courtesy of the artist.

viewers can achieve by merely looking. I feel it is worth going back to 1967 to scrutinise the enduring questions that Portrait of Jason sets up. I will then analyse a contemporary response to Portrait of Jason by turning attention to my own video work You’re Joking (2005), a piece that can be seen as a counterpoint to Portrait of Jason. My entry into the earlier film, through You’re Joking, focuses on how an incoherent subject may harness a destabilisation of the authentic subject and the knowability of the other in the visual economy cited by Ahmed (see Figure  5.3). In order for the other to be contained, and re-​constituted by those in power within this scenario, the other has to be silenced. The differentiation of stranger or s/​he who belongs is a one-​sided affair. Talking back thus has its own power. Both pieces start with the confessional, relying on notions of authenticity that derive from visual verification. In other words, the confessing subject is authentic because we have visual proof of the subject as a black male. You’re Joking plays on the construction of victim stories and the power these can convey in the 156

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Valences of Subjectivity telling. Portrait of Jason plays on the performance of self, playing ‘to the gallery’. Both rely on the interplay between the revealed artifice of the filmmaking process and the slippages and strategies of the filmed subject. As Foucault famously outlined in The History of Sexuality, the confessional relies on an interlocutor who holds the authority to listen and judge. While the camera, lens and audience (e.g., filmmaker, crew) may seem such an interlocutor, Micheal Renov claims that in the autobiographical video the lens is the most powerful. To make his point, he refers to Lyn Hershman Leeson’s statement that while she would address the camera, she would not speak if there was a person in the room.38 While neither Clarke’s nor my own videos are self-​filmed, the power of the lens nonetheless calls the performer into action. Maybe then, the lens can be an instrument that works in the opposite direction of Foucault’s claim. By prefiguring a viewing subject, power may be conferred onto the subject of the film: the power of establishment. To cite one example, consider the work of the Otolith Group, where the interpretive voiceover is the establishing voice of power. Here we hit paradox again as the power of establishment in these films is dashed by the presentation of incoherence. Incoherence is a device that Renzo Martens also uses. Both Jason and Wayne, the subjects in Portrait of Jason and You’re Joking, respectively, turn the tables on the power relationship between the viewer and the subject of the film through the direct address as filmic strategy. In both films there are moments where they talk back to the audience, putting the viewer in the position of dilemma, although how each does this is different. Portrait of Jason is a feature-length film of Jason Halliday, a young black male hustler who spends a night recounting his life to the camera. You’re Joking is a short film of four two-​minute vignettes of Wayne Atkinson, an actor and friend, recounting incidences of racism he has witnessed. The four vignettes are displayed side by side as a heterogeneous narrative. In some ways 157

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Art and the Politics of Visibility You’re Joking is a contemporary reading of Portrait of Jason. In You’re Joking, Wayne acts the telling and each narrative identifies a different manifestation of identity establishment through the telling. He actually experienced each incident, in that he is telling the truth, but in this piece he is consciously acting: he tells and retells the narrative many times in different ways ‘as if he is bored’; ‘as if he is angry’ and so on, and each telling undoes the truth he thinks he knows. Each vignette is edited as a composite from the different accounts of each incident as a disrupted narrative that cannot be placed within a neat time or place. You’re Joking I tells of how a young girl calls him a ‘nigger’ in an Oxfam shop. You’re Joking II recounts a woman visiting the farmers’ market where Wayne works telling him how the Jews are responsible for the problems in Africa. You’re Joking III tells of an African-​Caribbean woman instructing an Eastern European woman, begging at a bus stop, to go back to where she came from. In the final vignette, Wayne tells of how his manager instructs him to talk to ‘Jungle Jim’, an African colleague. Wayne is perplexed at his own invisibility as a Black Subject in this final scenario. ‘Do you get it?’, he asks the audience finally, shaking his head. Portrait of Jason was filmed one night in 1967 by Shirley Clarke in her hotel room. She invited Jason Holliday to tell the camera about his life. Ostensibly, this was meant to be a straightforward interview with Jason, a good-time guy who was hanging around the scene that Clarke inhabited and who fancied Clarke’s then-​boyfriend. Jason works his way through alcohol and cigarettes as he tells his story. There is minimal film crew. This is a piece that reveals the construction of the filming process. Each film reel is ten minutes, each marked by the focusing of the camera. At one point the reel is changed while the sound is left running with a black screen; at other times we hear muffled questions from behind the camera, building to a finale of Clarke’s boyfriend goading Jason. What is meant to reveal the hidden ideologies of cinematic language and its coercive 158

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Valences of Subjectivity nature (à la Althusser) is rendered literal by the virtuosity of the performance of the subject. Gavin Butt outlines some of the film’s historical social context in the search for the authenticity of folk and how this dovetails with exoticisation of the primitive in the avant-garde of the 1950s New York art scene.39 This film was made at a time when there was a fascination with the other as a liberating force from bourgeois constraints. ‘He (Jason) makes himself a spectacle’, Butt explains, ‘of marginal subjectivity’ and of course it is this marginality that makes Jason worthy of the recording. Butt also talks about how the work escapes the constraints of such a reductive reading through elements of Jason’s subjectivity that doesn’t quite cohere, from the subjectivity knowingly formed through Hollywood and from a queering of the subject in its lack of boundaries. From the beginning Jason Holliday takes up that role and plays it against itself. He declares early on that his name is Jason Holliday, stating it twice to be sure, then changing his mind: his name is Aaron Payne and continuing in this vein, states that ‘Everyone in New York has a gimmick’. His is the service of others, as hustler, as entertainer, as houseboy. He talks about his life, peppered at all times with a knowing understanding of his role as a black, queer stereotype, as exotic, as down and out. ‘There’s a lot of material here, and I’ll give you some more later’, he teases. He knows what’s expected of him and he delivers. While getting increasingly drunk and stoned during the night he tells his stories, performs the cabaret act he is intending to perform as he performs his life that will also be the cabaret, of his intended career. In its incoherent subjectivity this piece is a gift to a contemporary reading. What is being revealed implies what is being concealed. The experiences he tells of are those arising out of oppression. What is naturalised in Portrait of Jason is rendered explicitly constructed in You’re Joking. The protagonist Wayne is not simply asked to recount his life but his performance is prescribed through an implicit structure of repetition that foregrounds the faltering constructions of 159

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Art and the Politics of Visibility self. Atkinson is no victim; he is complicit in the naming, as we all are. The accounts, as narrative, explore the formation of subjectivity. As the story is told, slippages occur that reveal how a sense of self in relation to the event is formed, reformed and established through each reminiscence. Wayne Atkinson, the protagonist, decides who he thinks he is through this process that never stands still. Here the subject is directed into revealing his incoherence through a strategy of implied citation that undoes notions of truth in the event, where the past is contingent upon a continuous present of telling, but a continuous present that is disjointed and forced, aware of its own function as a story to tell. Contingent also are the meanings created through the imposed structure: the repetition is important as it shifts the experience of the viewer in the telling and in so doing answers a question, possibly, that Judith Butler poses in Exciteable Speech: ‘Is there a repetition that might disjoin the speech act from its supporting conventions such that its repetition confounds rather than consolidates its injurious efficacy?’40 And if it can, then that leaves a space for a talking back of sorts. By loosening the links between the sovereign subject and the speech act, Butler suggests, ‘the sovereign subject founds an alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of responsibility’.41 Therefore in You’re Joking, responsibility must be taken even in complicity. That is, as all speech is citational we are at once complicit and agents of choice. In the talking back, questions are also presented of how the telling implicates not only those told about but also those told to: the listener falters alongside the narrator in the listening, having to decide, maybe what they (we) think of the story being told, just as s/​ he in places is seen to be weighing up the best way to tell. Thus, not only is the agent of the speech act taking responsibility but the audience is too. However, in this taking up of responsibility some of the ambiguity that gives the richness of play is gone. You’re Joking plays on the dismantled ontology of authenticity. Of course he is playing! But the question of complicity remains. 160

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Valences of Subjectivity According to Butt’s analysis of Portrait of Jason, Jason is inassimilable: he keeps us guessing through the unbounded sense of self that breaks down expectations of the authentic subject –​there is no authentic Jason because there is no knowing what is performance and what isn’t. He moves around so fast that there is no sense of any solid self. In one outstanding example of his voice, barely audible and coming from the fog of his blurred image, we hear Jason utter ‘Don’t trust me Richard, because I’m out to get you. Fuck you Richard’. And in the very moment when the viewer may believe in some mirroring of interior/​exterior self, Jason himself comes back to confound it. Carl, behind the scenes asks, ‘You don’t hurt do you?’ ‘Hell no!’, Jason exclaims and the spell is broken. Jason is filmed in a single room in The Chelsea Hotel, and the camera shifts mainly to follow Jason’s movements. At the end of each reel the camera moves into focus. Sometimes, towards the end of the film the out-​of-​focus shots last longer. The blurring, as stated earlier, is a device to reference the filmmaking process in order to foreground the artifice of film and to comment on the usual opacity of the process in mainstream cinema. Through the film it becomes a metaphor for the opacity of the character of Jason. By contrast, the purposeful blurring of the image in You’re Joking serves no purpose in the video, with its 90-​minute reels and automatic focus. Here the conceit becomes a reminder of the violence of the image of the black male in the media who loses his sovereign identity in the stereotype, and of the fear of the confrontation it relies on, as if standing too close. It is also a moment of losing the lens in the direct confrontation just as it becomes apparent in the blurring. Compositionally the mise en scène of both films is casual but sparse. Both are filmed in the home of the filmmaker, which sets up a relationship of power. The interventions that confound that relationship reveal the period of making; in Jason the crew are not silent and Jason occasionally engages in discussion with them, sometimes erupting into argument and sometimes asking for his spliff or drink. 161

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Art and the Politics of Visibility The argument is crucial to Butler’s ‘talking back’, for the argument is on equal terms between the men, and Jason’s artifice protects him in these encounters. In You’re Joking the concern is not with claiming ‘This is my identity’ but with the structures that interpellate the subject into being: in this way You’re Joking posits an unbound subject. In this piece, the power of the interlocutor is absolute and acknowledged through the processes. The shift in strategy is part of a more general paradigm shift that many artists use as their functioning device. Artists such as Omer Fast or Walid Raad, for instance, have moved their focus from the authentic subject to the decentred subject and from the implicit to the explicit. However, these two examples are less ambiguous and more established in their attention to the subject. In Portrait of Jason, the aim of the devices is to reveal the artifice of the film while also allowing the authentic subject to shine through despite the filming process. But Jason himself takes back the power by confounding those gestures in his knowingness: ‘It’s a funny thing, having a film made about you’. Still, through the intention of a verité documentary the proliferation of meaning becomes subordinate to the desire for wholeness overall.42 In You’re Joking, the contemporary fragmentation allows the inverse to operate: there is no possibility for authenticity and no development of the subject speaking. The speaking subject may believe what he is saying. However, the citational force of the construction undermines this expectation, as does the acting. I eradicate any authenticity from You’re Joking: Wayne’s subjectivity is explicitly my construction. Where on the one hand both pieces need to address the register of whiteness as norm, both talk back to the camera in a subverting gesture that demands equal regard. In this way, the interlocutor shifts from authority to subordinate. Gavin Butt has written about the queering of the audience’s gaze in Portrait of Jason, which allows it to rise out of the trap of exoticisation through the ambiguity of the performance. Jason was, in fact, enamoured with Shirley Clarke’s 162

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Valences of Subjectivity boyfriend and this becomes an important factor in the film’s reading towards its conclusion. The autobiography in both Portrait of Jason and You’re Joking is questionable and it is this awkwardness that holds my attention –​ in their mise en scène, editing and narration. At its best, the awkwardness breaks down into a subjectivity that is untidy with aporias, allowing the imagination of the viewer to posit future subjectivities. In each of these works there is a drive towards heterogeneity and paradox through a subject that doesn’t cohere and an awkward filmic voice. The subject in the film is as uncertain or uncomfortable as the viewer is expected to be. It is this parity that liberates the viewer towards agency. In order to make these points more concrete I will bring us back to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes –​the man who was shot because he ‘looked like’ a terrorist. This is where the economies of the visual and the divisive assumptions of Otherness have real power. You’re Joking acknowledges and plays with the visual economies of power, differentiation and racism. Through the narrative, the everyday encounter and the incoherence of the subject in its filmic form it demands acknowledgement of the intersectionality of race, class, faith and gender. This is work that does not rest on the contingencies of time and place nor on the epic landscapes of pain or inequality that tell the viewer to do something (everyone hates war but how to end it?). You’re Joking, conversely, calls for transformation through responsibility in the everyday encounter and in this way the subject can make change. I am here advocating for a return to the personal narrative as a deflationary tactic to rethink what is at stake in Identity and how that might impact on the world from home.

Notes 1. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Silvia Kolbowski, Miwon Kwon and Benjamin Buchloh ‘The politics of the signifier: A conversation on the Whitney Biennial’, October 66 (1993), p. 7. 163

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Art and the Politics of Visibility 2. Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. xx. Freestyle was an exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001 that proclaimed a ‘post-​black’ position. 3. ‘Presentism’ has different meanings, but according to Robert Fine’s account (2007), it refers to being too quick to discount old arguments and positions. He uses it in this way from sociologist Ulrich Beck who, ‘argu[ing] in relation to 9/​11 … for new categories of understanding and new standards of judgment to deal with this event, (also) he declares his own debt to the seventeenth century political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and poses his analysis of global risk society in essentially Hobbesian terms’. See Robert Fine, Cosmopolitanism (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). See also Barrie Axford, who suggests that ‘For analysts the trick lies in avoiding the presentism found in those accounts which treat the current frisson as sui generis’ (2000, p. 245). 4. As argued in my artwork; e.g., So You Think You Can Tell and What Am I To You? See also Rachel Garfield, ‘Ali G: Who does he think he is?’, Third Text 15/​54 (2001), pp. 63–​70 and Rachel Garfield, Identity Politics and the Performative: Encounters with Recent Jewish Art, unpublished PhD (London: Royal College of Art, 2003). 5. Jones, Seeing Differently, p. xxi; see also Jones on So You Think You Can Tell, p. 151. 6. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’ in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), p. 20. 7. For example, http://​www.politics.co.uk/​news/​2014/​01/​01/​press-​ scaremongering-​over-​romanian-​and-​bulgarian-​immigration and http://​w ww.independent.co.uk/​news/​uk/​politics/​fear-​of-​migrants-​ is-​s caremongering-​says-​romanian-​foreign-​minister-​8478767.html (accessed 25 March 2014). 8. I was born in the London Hospital in Whitechapel and have a strong London accent. 9. See http://​online.wsj.com/​news/​articles/​SB1000142412788732476 3404578433113880189762; http://​articles.timesofindia.indiatimes. com/ ​ 2 013- ​ 1 2-​ 0 5/​ u s/​ 4 4806364_​ 1 _​ l aw-​ e nforcement-​ c ommunities-​terror-​threat and http://​www.telegraph.co.uk/​news/​uknews/​ terrorism-​in-​the-​uk/​7871139/​Terrorism-​in-​Britain-​mostly-​home-​ grown-​report-​says.html (accessed 25 March 2014). 10. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-​Coloniality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 164

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Valences of Subjectivity 11. See http://​www.dailymail.co.uk/​news/​article-​2473971/​3-​Roma-​Gypsies-​ arrested-​ANOTHER-​child-​kidnapped-​Greece.html (accessed 25 March 2014). Again in 2015 in Paris, after the horror of the Charlie Hebdo murders and the siege and murders in the Kosher supermarket, there were counter-attacks on presumed Muslims in the streets of France. Nb. http://​www.mirror.co.uk/​news/​world-​news/​greece-​girl-maria-gypsy-​ couple-​2477760 (accessed 25 March 2014). 12. See http://​www.theguardian.com/​law/​2013/​oct/​20/​stop-​and-​search-​ streets-​police and http://​www.theguardian.com/​law/​2014/​feb/​04/​ court-​ of-​ appeal-​ rejects-​ c hallenge-​ r ace-​ s top-​ and-​ s earch-​ p owers (accessed 25 March 2014). 13. See Rachel Garfield ‘Parallel editing, multi-​positionality and maximalism:  cosmopolitan effects as explored in some art works by Melanie Jackson and Vivienne Dick’, Open Arts Journal 1/​1 (2013), pp. 45–​59, for a further elaboration on cosmopolitanism, nomadism and privilege. 14. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters. 15. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 150. 16. Ibid., p. 151. 17. Ibid., p. 44. 18. Stuart Hall, ‘Black diaspora artists in Britain: Three “moments” in post-​war history’, History Workshop Journal 61/​1 (2006), pp. 1–​24. 19. The Pan Afrikan Connection was set up by Donald Rodney, Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper. The BLK Art Group was subsequently set up by Chambers, Piper, Rodney, Claudette Johnson and Marlene Smith in 1981. 20. Hall, ‘Black diaspora artists in Britain’, p. 22. 21. Chantal Mouffe, ‘For a politics of nomadic identity’, in G. Robertson, M. Mash, L. Tichner, J. Bird, B. Curirs and T. Putnam (eds), Travellers Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 105–​13. 22. T. J.  Demos cites Alÿs’s Paradox of Praxis, where the artist pushes a large ice cube around his adoptive Mexico City as a nomadic piece. See T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 10. 23. Amelia Jones, ‘The undecidability of difference:  The work of Rachel Garfield’, in Rachel Garfield, You’d Think So Wouldn’t You? exhibition catalogue (Hatfield:  University of Hertfordshire Press, 2005), pp. 19–​34. 24. Although the resurgence of interest in the Guerilla Girls at a time of renewed currency of feminist discourses demonstrates that the 165

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Art and the Politics of Visibility contextual level of interest forms an integral part in the value judgement of art work. 25. Jean Fisher, ‘Some thoughts on “contaminations”’, Third Text 9/​32 (1995), pp. 3–​7. 26. Adrian Piper, Calling Card 1, 1986. 27. See also Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). 28. The same argument was used in Culture, Modernity and ‘the Jew’, with regards to the Jew as paradigmatic other in modernity. The Jew as paradigm elides real Jews. See Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (eds), Culture, Modernity and ‘the Jew’ (London: Polity, 1998). 29. See also Hal Foster’s cogent criticism in the chapter ‘Artist as ethnographer’ in Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 171–​204. 30. A recent example is the Otolith Group’s contribution to dOCUMENTA (13), a piece titled The Radiant that reflects on the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. 31. See Garfield, ‘Parallel editing, multi-​positionality and maximalism’. 32. Jones, Seeing Differently, pp. xxviii, xix. 33. Stuart Hall, ‘Who needs ‘identity’?’, in P. du Gay, J. Evans and P. Redman (eds), Identity: A Reader (London: Sage Publications, 2000), p. 29. 34. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2004). 35. Ibid., p. 19. 36. Ibid. 37. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 9. 38. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (eds), Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (Minneapolis and London:  University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 89. 39. Gavin Butt, ‘Stop that acting!: Performance and authenticity in Shirley Clarke’s “Portrait of Jason” ’, in K. Mercer (ed.), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Cambridge and London: MIT Press/InIVA, 2007), pp. 36–​55. 40. Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 20. 41. Ibid., p. 15. 42. Butt, ‘Stop that acting!’.

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6 Hauntology and Hospitality in the Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul Janet Harbord

The Beginning That is, the beginning as a place to start rather than origin, a place from which we may begin to take our bearings. This beginning is about a memory, a memory of cinema, and its place is Khon Kaen, Northern Thailand, in the 1970s. In an essay entitled ‘Ghosts in the Darkness’, filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul recalls his early life of cinema-​going in the jungles of Khon Kaen, where ‘going to see a film was an event that had to be prepared for’, involving what he names a sacred ritual of ‘travelling, queuing, buying tickets, refreshments, and no matter how bad the film was, because of this ritual it always seemed better for this’. The ritualised activity extends beyond the approach to watching a film, and includes the seating arrangements and architecture of the cinema itself where further rites were enacted. I will cite Apichatpong Weerasethakul here at length: The Khon Kaen [cinema] and the Raja would show films from the west and they both had a small glass room for 167

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Art and the Politics of Visibility the last row of seats, called the soundtrack room. It was a room where you could listen to the ‘real’ voices of the actors. It seemed to be only for a select few since you had to pay more. Our parents always took us to sit in the glass room. I suppose they wanted us to learn English. But you could always hear the Thai dubbed soundtrack filtering in from outside. It made watching those films special, to be able to listen to them in two languages at the same time.1

Apichatpong goes on to speak about the live-dubbing tradition as a regional practice influenced by Japanese ‘Benshi’, spreading from Japan to Thailand, Taiwan and Korea. It was a practice that continued into the 1980s, when finally Thailand transitioned to sound dubbed onto the film itself, ‘with us thinking all the while that live dubbing was customary around the world’.2 There are several things that are striking about this description of cinema-​going. Certainly, the image of a glass box effecting a separation between an audience listening to the recorded and foreign language soundtrack, and those listening to and watching a cinema being enacted live by a Thai star performer, provides a neat metaphor for indigenisation, as the anthropologists call it, and its counterpart, the ‘pure’ experience of an Other cinema as an Other language. It is also an image of boxes within boxes, the glass box nesting within the auditorium, which is within the cinema, an ensemble of different parts that lends itself, perhaps, to a psychoanalytic framework. The glass box is introjected and remains as ‘difference’, whilst the performing Thai star incorporates the foreignness of the film through her or his actions of metabolising the foreign film. The fabric of the separating screen is significant, for glass allows the audience members to regard each other from their respective positions or enclosures. They are each at a distance and yet proximate, watching a film together yet in different modes, visible and yet without sound, strangely present and absent to each other. The essay ends with the statement that, ‘The cinema itself is like a coffin with bodies, sitting 168

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Hauntology and Hospitality still, as if under a spell … In this hall of darkness, ghosts are watching ghosts’.3 In this particular context, it is difficult to conclude which culture is haunting the other, and whether the ghosts are on screen, or in the auditorium, and if the latter, on which side of the glass box? The event is one in which a foreigner arrives (a film from elsewhere), is presented within the terms of the local custom (dubbed and performed), whilst being simultaneously preserved within its own specificity (the glass box). There are questions here of hosts and guests, of hospitality, of conditional and unconditional welcome and of translation. These are questions intimately tied up with ghosts, with haunting and history, and the irreducible presence of the past in the now and the there in the here. The partition however is not at all complete; Apichatpong says of his experience of foreign film actors, ‘[I]‌was able to listen to them in two languages at the same time’. In this situation there is both separation and a mixing together, Thai and English language, live and recorded, performance in the venue and performance on film, the bodily movement of the interpreter and the bodily stasis of the spectators, enclosed behind glass and exposed to the screen. I imagine the live performer somewhere near the front of the auditorium, to the right, whose whole body is a system of signs gesticulating to an audience who may or may not be watching, who may be as still as corpses in a scene in which it is not entirely clear who or what is animated most.

The Beginning II Where film gets to, the paths it takes and the encounters it stages, is something of a vexed question for thinking about the local, the global and what we more recently call the transnational. Early film, the accounts of which happen to heavily prioritise American film, furnishes us with the anxieties and the possibilities of such travel. On the side of possibility, there was something of a utopian perception at play in the concept of film as a global vernacular (not only 169

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Art and the Politics of Visibility D. W. Griffiths but also the writers of the journal Close-​Up). Film, in its silent form and unencumbered by the localising restrictions of language, could travel across borders, articulating a common language of internationalism, which the arrival of sound in 1927 was seen to radically threaten. This account was revisited in 1999, by the American film scholar Miriam Hansen in an essay on cinema’s modern form, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism’, a backward glance at the ways in which American film attained a passport to many places. The essay wields a number of complicated arguments concerning classical film (classical film belonging to a period designated as the years between 1920–​50), taking aim at the categorisation of cinema as squarely mass-​ produced entertainment, suggesting instead that during this period cinema was part of a culture of modernism and modernity, at a nexus between the specific agenda of an art movement and a loose temporal category. Drawing on Benjamin’s notion of modernity as simultaneously a shock to thought and a new economy of sensory perception, Hansen makes a case for understanding the global appeal of American film as one resting on cinema as ‘a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernisation and the experience of modernity, including a paradigmatic transformation of the conditions under which art is produced, transmitted, and consumed.’ She continues: I am referring to this kind of modernism as ‘vernacular’ (and avoiding the ideologically over-​determined term ‘popular’) because the term vernacular combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability.4

Hansen’s article was written in the wake of a turn towards empirical audience study, moving away from the treatment of films as 170

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Hauntology and Hospitality isolated units of meaning or the endpoint of a production process and towards an understanding of the situations and situatedness of film as it was exhibited in different socio-​historic contexts. Many films, she writes, were literally changed, ‘both for particular export markets, and by censorship, marketing and programming practices in the countries in which they were distributed, not to mention practices of dubbing and subtitling’. In this account, the American dominance of foreign markets is subtended by the eclectic and haphazard conditions in which film was inevitably localised, indigenised and appropriated. Hansen’s central thesis is that the over-​riding appeal of American film in this period was its capacity to offer the shock of the modern, in whatever context. The essay foregrounds a method of a semi-​imagined historiographic account of early audiences and their viewing practices, including the conditions and atmospheres within the cinema, evoking in particular the sensory appeal of cinema. One could, tendentiously, try and shoe-​horn into this model Apichatpong’s account of cinema-​going in Thailand during his childhood as the sensory recall of a local practice of viewing American film. The audience is simultaneously subject to an audio-​ visual culture from elsewhere, and embedded in local practices of reception including complex arrangements of translation and performance. Yet this move repeats a familiar trope of re-​imagining the past through a prism that privileges a notion of the modernist world as a centre from which all culture emanates. Lúcia Nagib’s critique of Hansen’s notion of vernacular modernism5 is aimed at precisely this reinscription of a centre and periphery. Despite the difference, in these two renditions of cinema, recreated through personal memory and analytical reconstruction respectively, the significance of borders and boundaries is unequivocal. In Hansen’s account, the film is the medium that may cross borders and open itself to appropriation. In Apichatpong’s version, borders are present at the site of exhibition, albeit glass borders and leaking sound barriers. Both raise the question of 171

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Art and the Politics of Visibility what happens when films cross national borders, a question that has become buried somewhat in the flight to describe the present cultural condition as transnational. If the transnational has become a standard account of transmissions across borders,6 it points simultaneously to the descriptive failure of the term ‘national’, put under erasure, crossed through and yet still visible. The transnational refers us to the movement across borders; as a prefix, ‘trans’ brings the processes of over and through, pointing to ‘beyond’. Its success and appeal as a critical term is its gesture to the (increasingly) impossible task of thinking ‘the nation’ as a discrete unit, culturally, historically and economically, ushering in the model of a more fluid set of relations across rather than between territories. Trans-​is the term that has enabled a conceptual development of borderless flows and exchanges. Its appeal is that it enacts the critical desire to be done with the nation state and with it the nineteenth-century residues of nationalism. Yet paradoxically, it is the product of a ‘late’ yet expansive development in the machine of capitalism that achieved this shift rather than a progressive politics. In this move from national to transnational, however, there is a term that has become obfuscated, dropping into the cracks between the more prominent historical modalities, and that is the ‘international’. An older term deriving from Bentham and accruing political import throughout the nineteenth century, ‘international’, brought attention to the relations between nations, suggestive of the traffic of a middle ground, intermediary states requiring negotiation and compromise to establish any form of agreement applying to more than one nation. The term brings with it a sense of difficulty and difference, as a well as the dramatically utopian desire to establish commonality between nations in the form of a workers’ movement. Marx’s involvement with the First International in 1864, whilst writing notes and essays on wage labour, foreign trade and the state, is a reminder of how the term has been harnessed to one of the most potent re-​formulations of socio-​political power relations. 172

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Hauntology and Hospitality Rather than re-​ assert the significance of the international, my desire is to reinsert it along with its complex historical resonances within the paradigm that seeks to understand cross-​border exchange as a process of translation that is nonetheless dealing with irreducible difference. The concept of translation shares with the term international a sense of two (or more) systems that are incommensurate, and that their lure and threat may be precisely this failure to find equivalent signs, values, sensibilities and desires in the one system for what exists in the other. The question of what we can call this mark of difference that may manifest in various linguistic, visual and haptic modes, is in itself contentious. In this chapter, Apichatpong’s figure of the ghost, or spectre, will be taken for the sign of a remainder, an excess or residue that is not fully present but yet will not disappear. His use of spectres also plays with the idea of reincarnation and return in Thai Buddhism, with the question of where the dead go to (can an old spirit haunt a new body?), or the notion of co-​existence (life after death describes a type of parallel trajectory always just out of reach). Apichatpong’s suggestive ghosts will be brought into contact with the ghosts in the deconstructive texts of Jacques Derrida, and indeed the sub-​discipline of what has become known as hauntology. Ghosts then may be the most potent term we have for the incomplete understanding of cultures that come from elsewhere, from other places as well as other times, evoking the uncertainty of both meaning and vision, the inability to give a full and fully qualified account of oneself to an Other. A ghost story is always poised on the paranoid edge of dis/​belief. Its affective magic is produced through a final indetermination of truth from falseness, reality from illusion, offering the loss of certainty as a vertiginous pleasure. The ghostly brings an anxiety simply by its presence, which is always and only a half-​presence, an ‘appearance’ of an Other that cannot fully emerge because the ghost is always by definition out of place (of another place, ‘foreign’). This, it would seem to me, is a fine description of the arresting objects, 173

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Art and the Politics of Visibility like film, that appear to us as a mirage of elsewhere, that bear an enigmatic trace of that which is beyond complete comprehension. Against the labour of a ‘correct’ translation, the ghost invites an intuitive response, issues a call to follow blindly, requires us to become suspended in darkness. How does one respond to ghosts? Hamlet speaks to them and risks madness. Apichatpong invites them to the table. How we respond speaks to the way in which we allow an Other to host us or in turn how we entertain the spectre; within the word ‘ghost’ we find nestled the term ‘host’, and this is the trajectory of this chapter, from hauntology to hospitality, from ghost to host.

Haunted Film In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film projects, there is something like an instruction operating, or an invitation perhaps, to listen, to be with, that is to endure the undecidable meaning of the other and the other’s culture. The filmmaker makes this his work across different media with film as a privileged vehicle, including feature films and art gallery works, films drawn from stories and books, from reported speech. These works are full of ghosts, but not in any simple sense; the films elaborate the figure across different borders that may be sketched in the following way. First are characters that are ‘carried over’ from one film to another, so that each film is haunted by its predecessor; the corpse at the beginning of Tropical Malady (2004) is the corpse from Blissfully Yours (2002), and the elderly man from Mysterious Objects at Noon (2000) reappears in Blissfully Yours. As James Quandt has commented, not only characters but ‘objects, shots, settings, and faces recur from story to story, between and within films, their cyclical exchange serving the traditional role of overall structural unity, but in a Buddhist spirit of incarnating connectedness’.7 The second form of haunting occurs with the appearance of characters who have returned from the dead, most 174

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Hauntology and Hospitality notably Boonmee’s wife and lost son, who returns as a monkey, in the film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Third, through the use of a bifurcated narrative that divides, breaks off or mirrors the former part, the story itself takes the form of an apparition. The second part of Tropical Malady that removes to the jungle, creates a curious spectral mirror of the first, and in Uncle Boonmee, a character gets up and walks from a hotel room, leaving his former self sitting on the bed watching television. Haunting takes the form not only of temporal shifting but spatial disjunction, as though the present can multiply and reproduce states that co-​ exist. In the fourth version of ghosting, human figures are haunted by their creaturely counterparts, those that may also be predecessors or antecedents. Boonmee becomes a fish, a man becomes a tiger, a boy becomes a monkey (see Figure 6.1). The process of evolution as linear and unidirectional is undone by the affinities and crossings

Figure  6.1 Still from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010. Courtesy of Apichatpong Weera­ sethakul and Kick the Machine Films.  175

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Art and the Politics of Visibility between humans and non-​human animals, or what we might call the reclaiming of the human animal. There is another set of ghostly figures that pertain to Apichatpong’s film works outside of the diegetic space and film structure. The first of these are the stories of reincarnation that circulate in Thai culture. In an essay entitled ‘The memory of Nabua: A note on the Primitive Project’, the filmmaker starts with a description of a temple close to Apichatpong’s home town; this is the place, he writes, where a monk ‘told me about ghosts’. The monk has ‘an unlimited supply of incredible stories’,8 and he is also the supplier of a book entitled A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives. This is the tale of a man, Boonmee, who came to meditate at the temple and, during meditation, found that he could experience previous lives as an elephant hunter, a cow, a buffalo and a wandering ghost. This story of Boonmee motivates the research for the film as a journey into the north-eastern region of Thailand, where Apichatpong travelled with his main actress, Jenjira. During the course of the journey, they happened upon ‘reincarnation cases’, ‘a young woman who could recall her previous life as a boy in another village’, leading to a conflict between her current parents and the parents from her previous life: this case ‘reveals the complication of remembering too much’.9 The visit to the north-eastern area takes us to the next form of haunting, which invokes the political history of the region. As the director and actress travel along the Mekong River, they come across the violent history of the repression of communist sympathisers, manifest most forcefully in one ‘sleepy’ village, Nakhon Panom. ‘Everywhere we went there were stories’,10 he writes in his description of working with the local teens whose presence ‘made Nabua’s air breathable’. One of his projects becomes making a portrait of the teenage sons who are descended from the communist farmers. Events from the 1960s and through to the 1980s will not be laid to rest; the village of Nakhon Panom was occupied by Thai army 176

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Hauntology and Hospitality members whose purpose was to suppress communist insurgents. After visiting, the director describes how the village and its history remained with him, leading to his return and the staging of part one of the Primitive Project. His experience of the region, its stories and their legacy, is the source of what became Uncle Boonmee, and three other shorter works, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009), Phantoms of Nabua (2009) and Primitive Installation (2009). The haunting stories of the village from this period tell of daily violence, brutality and false accusations, leading to the men of the village fleeing to the nearby jungle from where they fought government forces. In the aftermath, the village was left occupied by women and children, and takes the name of ‘widow town’ in local parlance. Apichatpong retraces the conflicts (‘everywhere we went there were stories’),11 working with the local teens whose presence ‘made Nabua’s air breathable’, to make a portrait of the teenage sons who are descended from the communist farmers. The ultimate ghost is that of cinema itself, a form that Apichatpong has spoken of with some nostalgia as a passing medium. His essay ‘Ghosts in the Darkness’ (cited at the beginning of this chapter) is a memory of cinema-​going, ending with a recent visit to the Khon Kaen cinema, now derelict. In a scene reminiscent of Tsai Ming Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), the narrator enters a hole in the wall and observes the tattered raked seats, the sky appearing through a hole in the roof and two girls playing in the ruins. Cinema, by the end of the essay and in the present, has become a haunting memory of particular places and times, a rare practice less glamorous or ritualised than it was in the childhood memory. But there is caution needed in this tale of ghosts, for Apichatpong does not lead us to think of cinema as a practice eclipsed by increasingly sophisticated media; rather, cinema is distinct as the compensatory device of what has been lost. The mythical, possibly once-real character of Boonmee, presents this inversion of the notion of progress in his ability to screen 177

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Art and the Politics of Visibility his own multiple histories. According to Apichatpong, ‘he could see and replay his past lives, he didn’t need cinema’. Those who live in the present by comparison ‘are too crude, too primitive’ to invoke multiple temporality. The term primitive in these short-​form works circles, comes round to refer to the uneven treatment of categories of peoples linked to place (the anthropological reading of certain regions and nations) and time (the primitive as a Darwinian rendering of an earlier incarnation of Western man). This statement of Boonmee not needing cinema returns to haunt those in the West, and their dependence on the cinema as recording, or archive. Not only the ritual of storytelling (as Walter Benjamin poignantly argued) but memory has been farmed out to cultural technologies of which the cinema is the exemplary case, recast as a prosthetic device for sifting and combining different temporalities, charged with the power of connecting that which has become disconnected over time. Is the cinema a symptom of a culture that can no longer recall its past lives in person, that delegates this duty, and if so, is cinema a symptom of our inability to undertake the work of mourning?

Spectral Knowledge Hauntology as a critical framework takes its cue largely from the work of the recently deceased Jacques Derrida, who in turn was answering a call from Marx.12 More literally the call came from the University in California. In 1991, and in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union’s collapse, Derrida received an invitation to speak at a colloquium, ‘Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective’ –​a geographical crisis or a crisis framed in geographical terms. Derrida answered with a speech that crosses the axes of geography and history, a speech elaborated and published in 1993 as Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. ‘[H]‌aunting is historical, to 178

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Hauntology and Hospitality be sure, but it is not dated, it is never given a date in the chain of presents’, he writes, it does not happen to … Europe, as if the latter, at a certain moment of its history, had begun to suffer from a certain evil, to let itself be inhabited in its inside, that is, haunted by a foreign guest … Haunting would mark the very existence of Europe.13

Hauntology then refers us not simply to temporal disjunction, but to the register of others within the economy of the same, the founding of Europe on the expulsion of others who then are rendered spectral, and in legal terms ‘alien’, within that domain. What is key to the ghost, or what Derrida prefers to call the revenant, is first of all, the unreal quality of the thing that is named spectral, and conversely its ability to cast doubt on any version of the ‘real’. In a symposium that followed the publication of Derrida’s book, Fredric Jameson evocatively puts it in this way: ‘spectrality is not difficult to circumscribe, as what makes the present waver:  like the vibrations of a heat wave through which the massiveness of the object-​world –​indeed of matter itself –​now shimmers like a mirage’.14 The spectre of Marx is prefigured by a spectre haunting Marx. In the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx names this spectre that haunts Europe as communism. Whilst Derrida’s recall of Marx appears to conjure the ‘past of the past’ with Marx naming the ghost of his own time, the aim here is to diffuse the sense of haunting as linear, with spectres respecting a chronology to haunt those in whom they remain as a living memory. The suggestiveness of Derrida’s text is that ghosts are the trace of traces among traces, which constitute not only the context in which we live,15 but our own human existence as a trace. The spectre of communism does not belong to one place and time, but thickens the air of different moments brought into simultaneity. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, 179

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Art and the Politics of Visibility communism was not ‘over’, but simply transmuted into the spectral, and thus rendered a potential spectre of a future return: At bottom, the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back; in the future, said the powers of the old Europe in the last century, it must not incarnate itself, either publicly or in secret. In the future, we hear everywhere today, it must not re-​incarnate itself; it must not be allowed to come back.16

The notable difference between the versions of haunting that appear in Derrida’s text (drawing on both the writings of Marx and the apparitions that appear to the character of Hamlet as key manifestations of the spectral), and those of Apichatpong’s films and writings, concerns fear. In the former, fear of the ghost and a circling around the question of its mode of apparition characterises the dramatic play of haunting including future haunting, and the fear of the ghost as the return of the past. In the latter, the ghost is always already in the world (the jungle, the city, the genre of urban mythology) as a presence that marks an absence. ‘I have killed too many communists’, Boonmee states at one point, not in fear of the communists returning but as a statement that acknowledges their spectral presence crowding the landscape. In Uncle Boonmee, ghosts multiply and continue to do so, not only from the past but from other places. ‘How can you expect me to live here with all the ghosts and migrant workers?’, asks Boonmee’s sister Jane, who will inherit his estate after his (imminent) death. The ghost as a figure of liminality, undecidability, a figure from elsewhere, remains both enigmatic and an element of the everyday in Apichtapong’s version. We return then to the question of how we greet the ghost, and what implication this may have for how film, as a spectral absent-​presence from elsewhere, is hosted and in turn hosts its guests. 180

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Hauntology and Hospitality

Hospitality: A Seat at the Table There is a scene that in all of Apichatpong’s work stands out in terms of hosting and haunting. The scene is at night in the film Uncle Boonmee. At a house in the forest where there is a table set for dinner, the ghost (former) wife appears (see Figure 6.2) and is offered a seat at the table and a glass of water (although her hand passes through it). His son appears in the shadows, a red-​eyed, hesitant creature in the form of a hybrid monkey-​boy, and is persuaded to take his place and be seated. The scene is figural, resonating across philosophy with other scenes of dinning and its significance as a ritual of hospitality; for example, the dinner table in Michel Serres’s book The Parasite, where the scavenging creatures come to disturb the uniform practices of the townsfolk, and in turn change their rituals and routines. There is also a table at the beginning of Giorgio Agamben’s

Figure  6.2 Still from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010. Photo by Nontawat Numbenchapol. Courtesy of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kick the Machine Films.  181

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Art and the Politics of Visibility The Open, a work questioning the ‘anthropological machine’ that produces difference and hierarchy among species. In the opening pages, there is a picture of a banquet at a post-​Apocolyptic feast on the Day of Judgment, the concluding chapter on Humanity according to the Hebrew Bible (the text in which the image appears). The figures gathered around the table, however, are not conventional figures of humanity, but under their crowns the righteous have animal heads; an ox, an ass, a lion and a leopard. The interpretation Agamben gives to this depiction is that on the last day, ‘the relations between animals and men will take on a new form, and that man himself will be reconciled with his animal nature’.17 The table then comes to the fore as the site of hospitality, of invitation, an opening to others. Agamben’s interpretation of this image has some affinity with Derrida’s project in Spectres, which is the sense of being with ghosts as the acceptance of an inheritance, and with that a responsibility for others, beyond categories of the human and the non-​human animal. This may indeed include what is beyond the thinkable or intelligible. In his other works, Derrida writes more closely on the concept of being with and speaking to others, particularly through his notion of hospitality, a lecture published as a small book.18 Derrida’s meditation about hospitality reminds us that it is a practice underpinned by both generosity and violence, the conflicted terms at work in the possibilities of unconditional and conditional hospitality. Writing with regard to Kant’s notion of hospitality that appears in the third article of ‘To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, Derrida works through the implications of this formulation. On the one hand, he argues, the unconditional law of unlimited hospitality (which Kant invokes) commands a welcome without reserve, without the imposition and command of ‘the same’, that is to live as the host lives and by his rules. On the other hand, hospitality cannot not demand a suspension of unlimited hospitality in the service of the protection of a community, be it a linguistic, cultural or territorially 182

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Hauntology and Hospitality demarcated host. Therefore, hospitality is of itself conditioned and conditional. The guest may be subject to the host’s rules, to the laws of the land, and the command to speak the host’s language, that is, to make herself understood within the terms of the host culture. In this sense, the question of hosting and of hospitality is always a question of violence, or what Adam Atkinson has called monstrous possibilities.19 Why violence? ‘Is not hospitality an interruption of the self?’, Derrida asks in Adieu.20 In Of Hospitality, the sense of interruption opens the text as the question of the foreigner. ‘Isn’t the question of the foreigner [l’étranger] a foreigner’s question? Coming from the foreigner, from abroad [l’étranger]?’, he asks, suggesting that the foreigner, simply by appearing, poses a question of how the host is to understand this other. It is a question that is simultaneously a putting-​into-​question of the host, of the one who receives, for whom this question of foreignness cannot but in turn raise a question of being. The foreigner therefore represents a violent interruption of the host’s being-​self. As a result, and as a way of shoring up the host’s identity, hospitality imposes an invitation that may be hard for the guest to refuse; invited to be seated at the table, the guest is expected to conform to all manner of ritual and to belief systems that are not theirs, to eat food that offends. And here we may find the link between the foreignness of people, and the foreignness of objects that circulate across borders, the invocation of foreign food (to be ingested and made the same or spat out) and foreign film. And so, coming back to the question posed by film as a foreigner, as a thing from elsewhere, alien, speaking a language that is not ‘ours’: how do we host it? The category of ‘foreign film’ is itself a curious one given that films, as Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour note, are ‘foreign to some audience somewhere’.21 They raise the interesting possibility that subtitling may be a form of subjugation, of translating a culture into another mode that is not commensurate with the ‘original’, or 183

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Art and the Politics of Visibility of dubbing as a form of ventriloquising that raises more questions than it resolves. Who, in the practice of dubbing, is ventriloquising whom? In Apichatpong’s work and working practice, this question of foreignness is omnipresent, not only in attention to national cultural differences, but also differences of region, class and indeed species. In the Primitive Project, when the director returns to Nabua, finding himself with a sense of unease drawn back to the place, more and more teenagers appear, and soon ‘Primitive became a portrait of the teenage male descendants of the farmer communists, freed from the widow ghost’s empire’ (see Figure 6.3).22 Apichatpong builds a spaceship in the village, a collaborative effort, sketched by one of the teenagers and welded by the village elders. A place to be alien, for alienness to exist in the midst of the community, the spaceship is used in diverse ways, as a place young people decorate with coloured lights and get drunk in at night, a space for farmers to store rice crops, and as a prop in the production of a film. Each is perhaps

Figure  6.3 From the Primitive Project. Photo by Chaisiri Jiwarangsan. Courtesy of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kick the Machine Films.  184

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Hauntology and Hospitality alien to the others, and in this sense, the filmmaker creates an ethical framework within which difference co-​exists at least temporarily without the violence of hosting or conditional welcome. The village, after all, is not hosting the filmmaker, he has simply ‘landed’; in signalling his own foreignness, the filmmaker is not subject to the rules of local hospitality. But there is also a way in which hospitality itself can be inverted, turned inside out when applied to cinema and the circulation of film through various channels and across temporal windows. Film, it might be argued, hosts us, its alien others, grouped here and there in different sites in different cities, bringing along our specific anticipations, expectations and language requirements. We demand that the film be ‘good’, perhaps entertaining, or profound, that it conform to our criteria for such things. And yet foreign film, it might be observed, quietly hosts us. Ignoring our expectations, it invites us into its world of other taxonomies, practices, rituals and languages. This inversion of who is hosting whom mirrors another inversion of received thought, concerning mortality, apparent in Apichatpong’s essay on cinema with which this chapter opened. We tend to think and speak about film as though it ages and belongs to the past whilst we live on, and whilst its actors pass on and become ghosts in the machine, we remain. And yet the reversal of relations with which we started challenges the certainty of this view; cinema’s ghosts are not those on screen, but we, the audience. Each film at each screening hosts us fleeting figures; perhaps we are the ineffable, oneiric creatures who are passing through and have gathered here to listen, to watch momentarily, leaving little trace of having ever been: ‘The cinema itself is like a coffin with bodies, sitting still, as if under a spell … In this hall of darkness, ghosts are watching ghosts’.23 To conclude, in considering the idealism of film as a global vernacular universally intelligible in its transition across borders24 in relation to a different, personally located interpretation of cinema as a culture marked by otherness,25 what emerges is the 185

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Art and the Politics of Visibility incommensurate difference between systems of thought. The argument being made here then is that cinema does not ‘overcome’ difference, but on the contrary, it manifests the particularity of cultures by acting as a residue, an offering from a table elsewhere that can never be fully digested. Through the work of Apichatpong the concept of haunting as a temporal schism is combined with a spatial or geographical manifestation of the term. Whilst cinema has been traditionally deciphered and valued in terms of its relation to time (primarily, according to film scholars, through its foundation in the indexical), its own residue, we might say, is that of space and its (un) intelligibility as the site of the foreign.

Notes 1. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, ‘Ghosts in the darkness’, in J. Quandt (ed.), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Vienna: Synema, 2009), p. 106. 2. Ibid., p. 107. 3. Ibid., p. 113. 4. Miriam Hansen, ‘The mass production of the senses: Classical cinema as vernacular modernism’, Modernism/​modernity 6/​2 (1999), pp. 60. 5. Lúcia Nagib, ‘Towards a positive definition of world cinema’, in S. Dennison and S. H. Lim (eds), Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), pp. 30–​7. 6. Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman (eds), World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). 7. James Quandt (ed.), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Vienna:  Synema, 2009), p. 20. 8. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, ‘The memory of Nabua: Notes on the Primitive Project’, in J. Quandt (ed.), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Vienna: Synema, 2009), p. 192. 9. Ibid., p. 194. 10. Ibid., p. 198. 11. Ibid. 12. Colin Davis contends that hauntology comes from two related but distinct sources: Derrida within deconstruction, and the psychoanalytic writers Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (see ‘Hauntology, specters and phantoms’, French Studies 59/​3 (2005), pp. 373–​9).

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Hauntology and Hospitality 13. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, B. Magnus and S. Cullenberg (eds), (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 3. 14. Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx’s Purloined Letter’ in Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson (eds), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (London: Verso, 1999), p. 38. 15. Or in which we attempt to learn to live. Derrida famously opens the text, Spectres of Marx, with the statement, ‘Someone, you or me, comes forward and says:  I would like to learn to live finally’ (‘Exordium’ in Spectres of Marx, p. xvi). 16. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 48. 17. Giorgio Agamben, The Open:  Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 3. 18. The engagement with otherness and hospitality runs intensely through Derrida’s salutation to Levinas, in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-​Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), to Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000). Derrida notes in Adieu that the term ‘hospitality’ appears only sporadically in the writings of Levinas, yet his work can be seen to produce the vocabulary that leads here. 19. Adam Atkinson, ‘On the Nature of Dogs, the Right of Grace, Forgiveness and Hospitality: Derrida, Kant and Lars Von Trier’s “Dogville”’, Senses of Cinema 36 (2005). Available at http://​sensesofcinema.com/​2005/​ the-​metaphysics-​of-​violence/​dogville (accessed 14 April 2014). 20. Derrida asks in Adieu. 21. Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour Subtitles:  On the Foreignness of Film (Cambridge and London:  Alphabet City Media and MIT Press, 2004), p. 20. 22. Weerasethakul, ‘The memory of Nabua’, p. 198. 23. Weerasethakul, ‘Ghosts in the darkness’, p. 113. 24. Hansen, ‘The mass production of the senses’. 25. Weerasethakul, ‘Ghosts in the darkness’.

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7 Ethics and Visual Culture Zeena Feldman

Art and the Politics of Visibility speaks to the complexities of representation and identity in visual culture. The book’s chapters are bound by a shared concern for ethics, particularly ethics of care for the other. Variously, the contributions prompt readers to consider how the theme of responsibility unfolds in the world of representation and across exhibition platforms –​from digital spaces to traditional galleries to our own psycho-​geographies. This book also speaks to the ways in which a politics of ignorance can facilitate an ethic of care, justice and a pathway to interpretive freedom. Indeed, across the collection, one sees how not knowing can function as an ethical response to the other –​the other as artist, as representation and as audience. In the process, it is revealed how the task of intellectual mastery, of understanding –​especially through visual faculties –​can double as conceptual violence and an assault on truth’s ungraspability.1 In other words, how representation can prompt misrecognition and act as a vessel for misunderstanding. We, in the UK, saw this abstraction made all-​too-​real during the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign. There, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) commissioned its infamous ‘Breaking 189

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Art and the Politics of Visibility Point’ poster:  a billboard-​sized photograph showing a crowded queue of mostly non-​white, male migrants and the slogan ‘Breaking point: The EU has failed us all’.2 This image sought to render those on display known and understood:  as objects of danger and ill intention, as ‘undeserving’, as a uniform mass unworthy of individual narratives, identities or names. The ‘Breaking Point’ poster’s representation of crowded corporeality echoed the ‘swarm’ description Prime Minister David Cameron applied to migrants in 2015.3 In both instances, visibility was marshalled as condemnation and ethical disavowal. It functioned as a means test of belonging, whereby looking like a migrant made one suspect. The politicisation of aesthetics is a historically familiar theme. Indeed, each chapter in this collection can be read as a variation on this theme. From representations of struggle (e.g., Garfield) to the political baggage that accompanies reading a ‘Chinese’ or a ‘feminist’ work of art (e.g., Berry, Steyn, Franklin) to the complete refusal of identity as meaningful project (e.g., Hanafin, Harbord), this volume wrestles with the ethical and epistemological tensions embedded in visibility. Without sustained reflection, such tensions are at risk of being ignored. Yet these anxieties demand attention. Otherwise, visual markers can easily slip into simplified and reductive assumptions of identity, and these assumptions exploited for political ends. Juliet Steyn (1999), for instance, examines this practice in the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of the Jew, drawing attention to how the ‘science’ of physiognomy was used to visually determine the unwanted Other.4 The ‘Breaking Point’ advert can be seen in the same context. This volume, however, seeks to unsettle the reliability of optics-​ as-​identity. Janet Harbord’s chapter in particular confronts us with the limits of time and place, and of sight and sound, as drivers of knowledge. Through the concepts of hauntology and hospitality, 190

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Ethics and Visual Culture Harbord challenges the reader to think of encounter and translation as non-​violent acts in which seeing is not reduced to knowing. In this way, hauntology is a modality of understanding that nonetheless preserves the other’s mystery and unknowability. Resistance to conceptual capture can serve as a virtue. In defying the temptation to name or to enclose the other within one’s own borders of knowledge, we –​as artists, critics and audiences –​resist foreclosing on possibility. Simultaneously, we acknowledge the limits of ocular recognition. It is thus, perhaps ironically, through deliberate ignorance and its engineering that one might remain ethical towards an Other.5 Deliberate ignorance in this instance requires abandoning the habit of defining the other in one’s own terms. This means that a work of art is always to some degree a mystery, unseen. Likewise, the stranger on the street or, indeed, the migrant on a billboard. Sustained ignorance allows escape from the illusion of certainty. The condition of fixed knowledge, in other words, is necessarily undermined by its own (fluid) conditions of production. As Henrik Vroom argues, One only knows the truth, in effect, when one knows the totality of experiential facts. The whole of experience, however, is tied to history. History is not yet final. It is therefore impossible to know the whole truth … Knowledge of truth is historically determined.6

Certainty, in other words, is a historical impossibility. The nowdebunked ‘sciences’ of physiognomy, phrenology and graphology are cases in point. Each draws attention to the inadequacy of the visual as a reliable proxy for knowledge. And knowledge, as Vroom shows, is always incomplete. Manufactured ignorance, then, offers a pathway toward the ethical horizon proposed by Emmanuel Levinas7 –​an unreachable horizon in which the other’s alterity must not be represented. 191

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Art and the Politics of Visibility And yet representation remains. As this book shows, artists are routinely defined by their passports. In the context of Donald Trump’s America and post-​Brexit Britain, such representations and national labels seem especially fraught. The London-​based writer and artist Tom McCarthy, for instance, describes his decision to decline a British Academy invitation to an event honouring ‘British’ creativity.8 McCarthy frames his refusal as a resistance to prevailing political tides: in the autumn of 2016, the cloak of Britishness draped too neatly over the ideology of nationalism. He notes that ‘current talk of “British” X or Y or Z (“values” or “decency” or “culture”) usually marks one end of a chain, at the other end of which someone is being shunned in a playground, spat at in a supermarket, or worse’.9 Indeed, following the Brexiteers’ electoral victory, England and Wales saw considerable spikes in official hate crime reports –​up 58 per cent by some counts.10 It is in this context that one might ask, à la McCarthy, to what degree association can be read as complicity? This collection shows that who and what we (think we) see is culturally and politically conditioned. But one’s ways of seeing also link up to market formations: typically expressed in the art world through the language of worth and investment. At the same time, this book examines the extent to which the artist or author, through the process of making, succeeds in exposing inequalities. At both local and transnational territories of meaning and experience, we see how makers can leverage audience ignorance as a modality for knowledge and value. Consider, for example, Yang Fudong’s (possibly) willful exploitation of the Western, Orientalist gaze. Today, there is a lot at stake in being visible. Consider the so-​ called Muslim Ban introduced by Trump in the first days of his presidency. While White House officials claimed the executive order was not aimed at Muslims, its focus on citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen told a different story.11 Nationality 192

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Ethics and Visual Culture had, by decree, become a marker of menace, with passports operating as proxies of stranger danger.12 Trump’s travel ban drew swift condemnation abroad and ‘at home’, including from the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.13 Quickly, the art world also mobilised. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, for instance, ‘rehung part of its permanent collection with works by artists from some of the majority-​Muslim nations whose citizens’ were affected by the ban.14 In Massachusetts, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College launched the Art-​less campaign in which it removed all displayed works that were ‘created or donated by immigrants … One of the main works missing is a portrait of George Washington created by Adolf Ulrik Wertmuller, an immigrant who came to the US in the 1970s’.15 But alongside such gestures of resistance, anxieties remain, with artists from geographies deemed to be the ‘wrong’ elsewhere still subject to the optics of identity and to State governance of mobility. This leaves the viability of nascent artist exchanges between, say, the US and Iran in doubt.16 Visibility and invisibility are politically operationalised by both policymakers and the art world. The irony, of course, is that both ‘sides’ of the debate rely on the same crude markers of identity. Yet, and as this collection makes clear, such reductionism in visual culture risks blurring the lines between that which counts as art and that which is considered less-​than (nb. Steyn, Chapter 2). Politics in the Global North in 2017 is increasingly marked by rising populism and isolationism. This represents a seismic turning away from the transnational projects and aspirations that defined much of the previous century. From Trump’s America First to a Front National-​besotted France and beyond, today’s political landscape seems a retreat back to the national(ist) insularity of the past. A striking example of this appeared in Theresa May’s October 2016 speech17 outlining her ‘vision for Britain after Brexit’. Therein, May chided that ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a 193

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Art and the Politics of Visibility citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word “citizenship’ means”.18 The values of cosmopolitan belonging were suddenly suspect. Europe is rife with similar attempts to reify divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In the milieu of the ongoing refugee crisis, populist political movements –​including the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom (PVV), Italy’s Five Star Movement and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) –​are actively deploying the discourse of control-​ under-​threat. This entails a visual and linguistic marking out of the undeserving alien, and an implicit nod to UKIP’s Brexit imperative to ‘take back control’. The politics of visibility is today explicitly linked to a politics of misunderstanding –​a collision of ignorance, misrepresentation and protectionist instincts. Yet this marking out of the unwanted other obscures a wider reality:  that of transnational interdependence. Rebellion against the elsewhere and reverence of the local simply obscures the gears of global capital that churn on. Alongside the money, culture also continues to move. The art market is emblematic of this symbolic and material mobility. Meanings travel. So do canvasses and artists. Indeed, the very viability of nationality-​demarcated artists as meaningful categories (e.g., ‘Chinese’ artists) is underwritten by geographies of flow. This is to say, the politics and policies of isolationism are fundamentally at odds with how visual culture works, with how it develops. This clash was on full display in September 2015, with the heartbreaking photos of Alan Kurdi, a three-​year-​old refugee from Syria whose body washed up on a Turkish beach.19 The images were published by media outlets the world over. These images shocked in their intimate devastation. As representations of the refugee plight, they also signalled the visceral power of the visual to narrate experiences of struggle and (in)justice. Likewise, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has utilised visual culture to highlight the power of representation. The BLM 194

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Ethics and Visual Culture movement first emerged in the United States in 2012, initially mobilising against police brutality targeting young black men. In effect, the movement sought to disrupt the ordinariness of race-​specific police violence. It sought to draw attention to the reality of ‘crimes’ such as ‘driving while black’ –​in other words, to the long-​standing, oft-​ignored institutional criminalisation of race. Among artists who engaged with BLM is the painter Jordan Casteel. In her 12-​piece Visible Man series (2013), Casteel ‘asked black men to show her a place where they felt safe and she painted them in the nude’.20 Through these works, Casteel skillfully disrupts the orthodoxy of how black men are routinely portrayed in the media. In representing her subjects’ vulnerability, she brings into question the dominant narratives of danger and violence through which popular culture habitually sketches the black male. Since its initial articulation BLM has become a more inclusive and increasingly international movement,21 with artists and activists seeking to represent the broader context of violence against black subjects. Mariame Kaba, for instance, curated the Chicago exhibition, Blood At The Root: Unearthing the Stories of State Violence Against Black Women (2015), in order to highlight violence against black women –​both trans and cis-gender. The same year, the Smack Mellon arts organisation in New York hosted RESPOND –​a BLM-​ inspired exhibition of work by over 200 American and international artists.22 There, the artist Titus Kaphar exhibited a chalk drawing featuring the faces of four young men –​Michael Brown, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo and Trayvon Martin –​who had been ‘lawfully’ killed in the United States.23 The piece ‘overlays these unarmed black boys and men’s faces, one on top of the other, to visually represent the present day and historical nature of police brutality’ (see Figure 7.1).24 This drawing can be thought of in Harbord’s sense as hauntology (Chapter 6), in its delicate teasing out of tensions between visibility and mystery, between past and present, between here and there (see also Figures 7.2 and 7.3). 195

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Figure 7.1  Asphalt and Chalk, Michael Brown, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Titus Kaphar, 2014. Chalk on asphalt paper, 124.46 x 90.17 cm. © Titus Kaphar. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Such tensions were also on display in artist Adam Pendleton’s BLM installation at the 2015 Venice Biennale, where he ‘lined the walls of the Belgian Pavilion with a set of black-​and-​white paintings and large-​scale vinyl text-​based works that simply read “Black Lives Matter’’’.25 In so doing, Pendleton aimed to ‘bring the language of ‘Black Lives Matter’ into conversation with other political and art historical movements’, including the Black Power movement of the 196

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Figure 7.2  Yet Another Fight for Remembrance, Titus Kaphar, 2014. Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 60 x 121.92 cm. © Titus Kaphar. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

1970s and the Dada art movement of the early twentieth century.26 While the installation was situated in a particular geography and temporality of injustice, it also engages in dialogue with a much older tradition of artmaking-​as-​politics. 197

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Figure 7.3  Boys in Winter, Titus Kaphar, 2013. Oil on canvas, 162.56 x 162.56 x 3.81 cm. © Titus Kaphar. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Kaphar and Pendleton’s works point to the continuity of visual culture’s role as an agent of political consciousness raising and challenge. And indeed, visual cultures of protest have a long history. Women’s struggle for parity, for example, is rich in visual artefacts that challenge (or, in some cases, reinforce) existing inequalities, from early twentieth-century Suffragette and anti-​Suffrage efforts (e.g., Figures 7.4 and 7.5) to mid-​century struggles for reproductive sovereignty and equal pay (e.g., Figures 7.7) to contemporary constellations like Slut Walks and Pussy Hats (e.g., Figures 7.7 and 7.8). Among the most iconic works of feminist modern art –​at least for this author –​is Barbara Kruger’s (1989) screenprint Untitled 198

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Figure 7.4 Board Game: Suffragettes In and Out of Prison Game and Puzzle, 1908. Courtesy of The Women’s Library at LSE.

(Your body is a battleground). Created in response to the Reagan-​era clawing back of legal protections for women’s reproductive free­ doms, the work deploys the visual language of tabloid newspapers to deftly showcase intersections between commercial media, art and 199

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Figure 7.5  Anti-​Suffrage Postcard: Where women vote there is no rest, 1910. Courtesy of The Women’s Library at LSE.

politics. In its conceptual dexterity, Kruger’s piece might be thought of as the ‘aesthetics plus’ for which Juliet Steyn’s chapter calls out. Yet the ‘lo-​fi’ construction and composition of Kruger’s piece is also significant for foregrounding the DIY ethos that has long informed visual cultures (and practices) of feminist activism. From 200

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Figure 7.6  Poster for an Equal Pay demonstration, 1944. Courtesy of The Women’s Library at LSE.

punk bands like Fifth Column27 and Bikini Kill28 to riot grrrl zines29 to feminist printshop collectives30 to the recent Nasty Women exhibitions,31 gendered art has routinely relied on do-​it-​yourself forms of action and knowledge representation. In some ways, this DIY ethos is today facilitated by social media platforms –​for example, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. The 201

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Figure 7.7  SlutWalk Paris, 28 September 2013. Photograph by Marianne Fenon. 

Figure  7.8 Women’s March on Washington, DC, 21 January 2017. Photograph by Aimee Custis. 

functionality of these platforms allows for a talking back and one that is not dependent on substantial technical expertise.32 Perhaps as a consequence of their relative accessibility, these 202

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Ethics and Visual Culture digital communication tools have been instrumental in the contemporary politics of visibility. The BLM movement, for instance, achieved much of its public profile through Twitter, where participants routinely engaged in what Augenbraun calls hashtag activism.33 Users’ digitised engagement captured the extent to which social media platforms can be used to call into question established forms of hegemonic power. Although these challenges deploy pixels rather than embodied repertoires of activism, they are nonetheless part of the participatory, discursive practices of meaning-​making that are constitutive of visual culture and politics writ large. Meaning-​making, as politicised reflection, was also at the core of a social media project titled If They Gunned Me Down. This project exists in the form of a Tumblr blog dedicated to representations of young black men and women. The blog allows visitors to upload two photographs of themselves, which are then displayed alongside the prompt ‘Which picture would they use?’. One photo is meant to be more flattering than the other, and the site asks visitors to consider which image mainstream media outlets would publish if the individual pictured were ‘gunned down’. Consider this pair of images: one shows a young black woman taking a selfie. She looks straight into the camera wearing a serious expression and a white tank top with a pink strap showing beneath it. The woman wears no makeup; her face is somewhat blotchy. She looks as if she might have just woken up. The other photo shows the same woman wearing a string of pearls, a cosmetically perfect smile, and a red graduation cap and gown. Her face is flawlessly made up and she is holding a red, leather-​ bound diploma with the words ‘The American School of Dubai’ embossed in gold. The blog implores viewers to consider which of these photographs the media would use if this young woman happened to be the victim of gun violence. Alongside these images of herself, the poster writes: 203

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Art and the Politics of Visibility They (the mainstream media) wouldn’t show the smiling girl who graduated abroad at one of the best schools in the country. The media would portray me as a hard and mean-​looking girl who was asking for it. They wouldn’t honor the life I  had lived, but rather, justify the reason I was dead.

This reflection and the juxtaposed images vividly demonstrate what is at stake in representation and what is at stake in being seen in a certain way. It highlights the politics of vision and especially the visual codes by which various actors –​whether media outlets, artists or ordinary citizens  –​seek to make sense of people. Most importantly, If They Gunned Me Down draws attention to the ethical danger of seeing individuals merely as social categories, as symbols of a group. This, of course, is the great philosophical knot at the heart of this book. How does one –​as audience or artist, as representor or represented  –​balance concern for the struggles of the subaltern and the misrepresented with the Levinasian virtue of responsibility to preserve the other’s otherness?34 In other words, how does one square commitments to justice with the corresponding danger of using identity as a project? And who defines what constitutes justice anyway? These questions resonate across Art and the Politics of Visibility, but as I write this, they bring me back especially to Garfield’s chapter and its reckoning with the micro and macro scales of representation. Garfield articulates contemporary art history through frictions between the ‘politics of subjectivity’ and the ‘politics of war’, and in the various examples discussed here, we can see ways in which these frictions complicate visual culture and the relationship between art and politics. In light of these complications, and to return to the recent refugee crisis in Europe, one is unsure what to make of the art created in 204

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Ethics and Visual Culture the makeshift migrant encampment in Calais dubbed ‘The Jungle’.35 How is one to approach these migrant-​made works? Are they truly art or might they be too political to wear that badge? Does this distinction matter? If so, who stands to benefit from the demarcation? Recalling Steyn’s work (Chapter 2), we can also consider how the temptation to label migrant art ‘ethnographic’ dovetails with legacies of colonialism. To avoid this trap, it is important to note the ways in which cultural specificity is embedded in technologies of representation and image-​making. How might this impact one’s reading of an artwork made with donated supplies by a culturally and geographically displaced person? How do vulnerability, dislocation and individual experiences of trauma map onto received wisdom of what constitutes art? Likewise, how do they map onto wider understandings of what art is for? Is fostering mutual understanding the goal of art? Should it be? Surely, there are many ways to read (and misread) the work of art. While interpretive battles rage on, it is worth remembering that art also performs a significant economic function:  for some practitioners and critics, it secures livelihoods; for some investors, it activates the flow of global capital. And in the current climate of rising isolationism and suspicion of the visibly other, it is also important to note the essential mobility of culture, the humanity of the other and the translocal workings of influence. The tentacles of globalisation are far-​reaching;36 as such, it seems intellectually fraught to think of a work of art only within the narrow frames of the national. This book has served as a critical, interdisciplinary reflection on the relationship between art, politics and the transnational. It is quite possible that the volume succeeded in opening up more questions than it helped answer. But this is the likely outcome of any query concerned with the ever-​unfolding, perpetually unfinished dialogue between time, space and meaning. Visibility is a powerful

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Art and the Politics of Visibility arbiter of value. Value is contingent on context. And context is what makes visual culture both fundamentally political and forever open to misunderstanding.

Notes 1. Nb. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000). 2. Heather Stewart and Rowena Mason, ‘Nigel Farage’s anti-​migrant poster reported to police’, The Guardian, 16 June 2016. Available at https://​w ww.theguardian.com/​ p olitics/​ 2016/​jun/​ 1 6/​ nigel-​ f arage-​ defends-​ukip-​breaking-​point-​poster-​queue-​of-​migrants (accessed 26 February 2017). 3. BBC News, ‘David Cameron criticised over migrant “swarm” language’, 20 July 2015. Available at http://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​politics-​ 33716501 (accessed 26 February 2017). 4. nb. Sharrona Pearl, About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-​Century Britain. (Cambridge, MA and London:  Harvard University Press, 2010); Gilman, Sander, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991). 5. nb. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 6. Hendrik M. Vroom, Religions and the Truth: Philosophical Reflections and Perspectives, trans. J.  W. Rebel (Amsterdam:  Editions Rodopi, 1989), p. 68. 7. Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2008). 8. Tom McCarthy, ‘Don’t call me a British artist –​I’m thoroughly European’, The Guardian, 8 October 2016. Available at https://​www. theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2016/​o ct/​08/​british-​artist-​european-​writers-​politically-​neutral (accessed 26 February 2017). 9. Ibid. 10. Katie Forster, ‘Hate crimes soared by 41% after Brexit vote, official figures reveal’, Independent, 13 October 2016. Available at http://​www. independent.co.uk/​news/​uk/​crime/​brexit-​hate-​crimes-​racism-​eu-​ referendum-​vote-​attacks-​increase-​police-​figures-​official-​a7358866. html (accessed 26 February 2017). 11. Adam Liptak, ‘Court Refuses to Reinstate Travel Ban, Dealing Trump Another Legal Loss’, New  York Times, 9 February 2017. Available at https://​ w ww.nytimes.com/​ 2 017/​ 0 2/​ 0 9/​ us/​ p olitics/​ appeals-​ c ourt-​ trump-​travel-​ban.html?_​r=0 (accessed 26 February 2017). 206

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Ethics and Visual Culture 12. Nb. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-​ Coloniality (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 13. Matt Zapotosky, ‘Federal appeals court rules 3 to 0 against Trump on travel ban’, Washington Post, 9 February 2017. Available at https://​ www.washingtonpost.com/​world/​national-​security/​federal-​appeals-​ court-​maintains-​suspension-​of-​trumps-​immigration-​order/​2017/​02/​ 09/​e8526e70-​ed47-​11e6-​9662-​6eedf1627882_​story.html (accessed 26 February 2017). 14. Jason Farago, ‘MoMA Protests Trump Entry Ban by Rehanging Work by Artists from Muslim Nations’, New  York Times, 3 February 2017. Available at https://​www.nytimes.com/​2017/​02/​03/​arts/​design/​moma-​ protests-​ t rump- ​ e ntry- ​ b an- ​ w ith- ​ w ork- ​ by- ​ a rtists-​ f rom-​ muslim-​ nations.html (accessed 26 February 2017). 15. Roisin O’Connor, ‘Wellesley College museum removes artwork created by immigrants in protest against refugee ban’, Independent, 18 February 2017. Available at http://​www.independent.co.uk/​arts-​entertainment/​art/​ news/​wellesley-​college-​davis-​museum-​immigrant-​art-​donald-​trump-​ muslim-​ban-​immigration-​a7587156.html (accessed 26 February 2017). 16. Tim Cornwell, ‘Art world reels from Trump’s immigration ban’, The Art Newspaper, 1 February 2017. Available at http://​theartnewspaper.com/​ news/​art-​world-​feels-​effects-​of-​trump-​s-​immigration-​ban-​ (accessed 26 February 2017). 17. See http://​w ww.telegraph.co.uk/​news/​2016/​1 0/​0 5/​t heresa-​mays-​ confer​ence-speech-​in-​full (accessed 26 February 2017). 18. While these comments were directed at the ultra-​wealthy, the sting of May’s nationalist derision was felt by a much wider audience. 19. See http://​www.independent.co.uk/​news/​world/​europe/​if-​these-​extra ordinarily-​powerful-​images-​of-​a-​dead-​syrian-​child-​washed-​up-​on-​a-​ beach-​don-​t-​change-​10482757.html (accessed 28 February 2017). 20. Antwaun Sargent, The art of the #blacklivesmatter movement’, i-​D, 10 September 2015. Available at https://​i-​d.vice.com/​en_​us/​article/​the-​ art-​of-​the-​blacklivesmatter-​movement (accessed 26 February 2017). 21. Ibid. 22. Thrasher (2015). 23. Michael Brown, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo were all killed by on-​ duty police officers. No officer linked to these killings has been convicted in a court of law. See Eyder Peralta and Bill Chappell, ‘Ferguson Jury: No Charges For Officer In Michael Brown’s Death’, NPR The Two-​ Way, 24 November 2014. Available at http://​www.npr.org/​sections/​ thetwo-​way/​2014/​11/​24/​366370100/​grand-​jury-​reaches-​decision-​in-​ michael-​brown-​case (accessed 3 May 2017); Matt Flegenheimer and 207

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Art and the Politics of Visibility Al Baker, ‘Officer in Bell Killing Is Fired; 3 Others to Be Forced Out’, New  York Times, 23 March 2012. Available at http://​www.nytimes. com/ ​ 2 012/ ​ 0 3/ ​ 2 4/​ nyregion/​ i n-​ s ean-​ b ell-​ k illing- ​ 4 - ​ officers- ​ to- ​ b e-​ forced-​out.html (accessed 3 May 2017); and Robert D. McFadden, ‘The Diallo Verdict:  The Reaction; Verdict Bares Sharp Feelings on Both Sides,, New  York Times, 26 February 2000. Available at http://​www. nytimes.com/​2000/​02/​26/​nyregion/​the-​diallo-​verdict-​the-​reaction-​ verdict-​bares-​sharp-​feelings-​on-​both-​sides.html (accessed 3 May 2017). Trayvon Martin was killed by civilian George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was charged with second-​degree murder but acquitted by a jury. See Lizette Alvarez and Cara Buckley, ‘Zimmerman Is Acquitted in Trayvon Martin Killing’, New York Times, 13 July 2013. Available at http://​www.nytimes.com/​2013/​07/​14/​us/​george-​zimmerman-​verdict-​ trayvon-​martin.html (accessed 3 May 2017). 24. Sargent, ‘The art of the #blacklivesmatter movement’. 25. Antwaun Sargent, ‘ “Black Lives Matter” Makes It to the Venice Biennale’, i-​D, 9 September 2015. Available at https://​creators.vice.com/​ en_​us/​article/​black-​lives-​matter-​makes-​it-​to-​t he-​venice-​biennale (accessed 26 February 2017). 26. Ibid. 27. Kevin Hegges, She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column, 2012. 64 minutes, Toronto, Canada. 28. Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front:  The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). 29. Lisa Darms (ed.), The Riot Grrrl Collection (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013). 30. Jess Baines, ‘Experiments in democratic participation: feminist printshop collectives’, Cultural Policy, Criticism & Management Research 6 (2012), pp. 29–​51. 31. See Nasty Women Exhibition at http://​ nastywomenexhibition.org/​ other-​nasty-​venues (accessed 28 February 2017). 32. Social media are by-​and-​large accessible to most in the Global North, provided one has a fast-​enough internet connection. For example, 78 per cent of the US population in 2016 had a social network profile. See Statistica, Social Networks Statista Dossier (New York: Statistica, 2016). 33. Eric Augenbraun, ‘Occupy Wall Street and the limits of spontaneous street protest’, The Guardian, 29 September 2011. Available at https://​ www.theguardian.com/ ​ c ommentisfree/ ​ c ifamerica/​ 2 011/​ s ep/​ 2 9/​ occupy-​wall-​street-​protest (accessed 26 February 2017). 34. See, e.g., Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) and Derrida, Of Hospitality. 208

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Ethics and Visual Culture 35. E.g., Lydia Smith, ‘Meet the Sudanese refugee artist painting the migrant crisis in the Calais “Jungle’’’, International Business Times, 24 May 2016. Available at http://​www.ibtimes.co.uk/​meet-​sudanese-​refugee-​artist-​painting-​migrant-​crisis-​calais-​jungle-​1561586 (accessed 26 February 2017). 36. E.g., Mike Savage, Gaynor Bagnall and Brian J. Longhurst, Globalization and Belonging (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005).

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224

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Index Number references in italics are for figures. activism 83, 202 Adieu 183 Agamben, G. 32, 68 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life 138 Open, The 181–​2 agency art subjects 15 Butler, J. 160 filmmakers 22 nude photographs 97–​8 resistance 129 women 80 women’s rights activism 94 Yang Fudong 43 Ahmed, L. Quiet Revolution, A 78 Ahmed, S. 143, 151, 155 Strange Encounters 146–​7 Ai Weiwei 4–​5, 43 Sunflower Seeds (2010) 34–​5, 37 Al Qaeda 137 Alys, F. 148, 150 ambiguity 9, 86–​8 Antonioni, M. Chung Kuo (1972) 56–​7 Appadurai, A. 35, 36, 99–​101 Arab uprisings (2010-​11) 91 Arcades Project 104 art criticism 8, 55, 65, 67, 68, 178–​80 art market 54–​5 art practice 137, 151, 154 art work 34, 53, 63, 138, 139 artist films 21–​2, 25, 32

artscape agency 43 precariousness 33–​42 transnational art world 24 visibility 25 visual culture 47 Yang Fudong 37, 38–​9, 61 Ashery, Oreet Marcus Fisher 154 Atkinson, Wayne You’re Joking (2005) 160 Balibar, E. 130, 131 Baqianli lu yun/​The Moon and Clouds over the Eight Thousand Mile Road (1947) 63 barriers 9–​10 Beast and the Sovereign, The (2011) 117–​18 beauty industry 73, 80–​1 Benjamin, W. Arcades Project 104 Bentham, Jeremy (1748-​1832) 172 Berry, C. 55, 66 Black Lives Matter 194–​5, 196–​8 Black Skin White Masks 138 Blanchot, M. identity 118 Madness of the Day, The (1981) 125, 127 narrative voice 118–​19 power 126–​7 Refusal (1959) 115–​16 sovereignty 122 Blissfully Yours (2002) 174

225

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Index Blood At The Root: Unearthing the Stories of State Violence Against Black Women (2015) 195 body politics 76–​7, 104 Book From the Sky (1991) 58 Book of Kings (2012) 89 borders 1, 16, 171–​2, 185 boundaries 171–​2 Bourriaud, N. 25–​6, 29, 30, 32–​3 Brexit referendum (UK 2016) 189–​90 Brown, W. Regulating Aversion 147 Bruns, G.L. 115 Buck-Morss, S. 105 Burqa-Ban 73, 80, 98, 105 Burrow, The 122–​3 Butler, J. art practice 154 Excitable Speech 160 language 155 power relations 153 precariousness 22 resistance 129 Undoing Gender 154 Butt, Gavin 159, 161 Cai Chusheng New Woman, The (1934) 46 Calling Card 149 Casteel, Jordan Visible Man (2013) 195 catalogue 53–​4 Caygill, H. 67 Chapter Six – Racism (2001) 143–​4 China Chinese art 40 Chinese contemporary video art 54 demonisation 42 globalisation 24, 54–​5 independent films 22 politics 43 visual culture 7, 21 Wang Hui 43 Yang Fudong 33 Chinese artists 8, 21, 23, 33, 40

Chineseness in Contemporary Chinese Art Criticism (2007) 57 Chung Kuo (1972) 56–​7 cinema culture 170, 186 ghosts 177–​8 hospitality 185 live-dubbing 168 as memory 178 off-screen gaze 44, 45–​6 ritual 167–​8 Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2008) 150 visual culture 15–​16, 32 Yang Fudong 63–​4 citizenship 5, 143 civil disobedience 99, 104 Clarke, Shirley Portrait of Jason (1967) 138, 154, 158–​60 Close to the Sea (2004) Yang Fudong 23 Coetzee, J.M. Diary of a Bad Year (2008) 120 Elizabeth Costello (2003) 117 invisibility 127, 133 Life and Times of Michael K (1983) 12–​13, 115, 116, 122–​4 narrative voice 117 obedience 130 power 129 representation 128 resistance 124–​6, 132 writing 120 communism 176–​7, 179–​80 community 13, 117 context 96, 102, 103, 206 culture art 140 cinema 170 cultural imperialism 5 globalisation 194 mobility 205 Otherness 174, 185–​6 politics 104–​5

226

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Index Dabashi, H. 88–​9 Deleuze, G. 32, 120–​1, 125 democracy 10, 116 Derrida, J. Adieu 183 Beast and the Sovereign, The (2011) 117–​18 ghosts 173 haunting 180 Of Hospitality 183 invisibility 128 narrative voice 116, 119, 120 To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch 182–​3 Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993) 178–​9, 182 Diary of a Bad Year (2008) 120 Diary of David Holzman (1967) 155 discourses 73, 79–​80 disobedience 129–​31 dress codes 75–​6 During, S. 22–​3 East of Que Village (2007) 40, 41 Eco, Umbert Misreadings 53 economics 7, 205 Egypt 74, 78, 91, 104 Elmahdy, Aliaa Magda 76, 91, 93, 97 Enjoy Poverty 151 Episode 1 152 Europe 179, 194 European Union 73, 89, 102 Evasdottir, E. Obedient Autonomy (2004) 66 Excitable Speech 160 Facebook 93, 95 faith 138, 141 Fanon, F. Black Skin White Masks 138 fashion industry 73, 80–​1

Fei Mu Spring Time in a Small Town (1948) 63 Xiao Chen zhi chun 63 Fellini, Frederico I Vitelloni (1953) 65 Femen history 107n.18 internet 97 Middle East North Africa (MENA) region 94–​5 Sboui-​Tyler, Amina 92–​3, 96 women’s rights activism 76, 78 feminism 74, 93 Fifth Night (2010) cinema 150 installation view 29 off-​screen gaze 46 terminology 43–​4 Yang Fudong 6, 27, 28 films borders 171–​2 foreignness 183–​4, 185 ghosts 174, 180 indigenisation 168 language 68 modernism 171 transnational art world 169–​70 transnationalism 185 United States of America 170 visual culture 22 First Intellectual, The (2000) 44, 45 First Night 30, 38 First Spring (2010) 27–​8, 31, 39–​40, 44, 46 Fisher, J. Some thoughts on “contaminations” 150 Flores, P. 55 Foster, H. 8, 59, 139, 148–​9, 152 Xu Bing: A Western Perspective (2001) 58 Foucault, M. 67–​8, 76–​7, 99, 119, 132 History of Sexuality, The 157

227

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Index Freedman, Jonathan Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (2009) 146 freedom of expression 4–​5 Garfield, R. 157–​60 You’re Joking (2005) 138, 154–​5, 156 Gaskell, I. 33, 38 gender geopolitics 80, 91, 101, 203 geopolitics 1, 3, 5, 10, 11, 35 ghosts 173, 176, 177–​8, 181, 182, 185 Ghosts in the Darkness 167–​9, 177 globalisation art 14, 205 art work 34–​5 China 24, 54 fashion industry 73 misrepresentation 194 precariousness 24 transnational art world 36 visual culture 1 Göle, N. 81, 104 Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) 177 Great Britain 190, 192 Hall, S. 142, 148, 153 Hansen, Miriam Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism, The (1999) 170–​1 Hardt, M. 131–​2 Hasegawa, Y. 62, 65 The white cloud drifting across the sky above the scene of an earthquake 61 haunting 174–​5, 176, 186 hauntology 17, 178–​80, 191 history 107n.18, 176–​7 History of Sexuality, The 157 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life 138 hospitality 181–​5 Hsiau-​peg Lau 56 hybridity 145–​6

I Vitelloni (1953) 65 identity art 15, 163 art criticism 68 citizenship 143 cultural 153 faith 138 formation 147 geopolitics 5 interpretation 63 invisibility 127 Life and Times of Michael K (1983) 122 literature 11–​12 politics 104, 115, 117, 139 racism 142, 146, 161 representation 192 State 116 tensions 190 visibility 13, 15–​16, 193–​4 visual culture 17, 189 You’re Joking (2005) 162 If They Gunned Me Down 203–​4 ignorance 189, 191 inaccessibility 25, 38 independent films 21–​2 indigenisation 168 installation view 29 intellectuals 67–​8 internet access 91, 97 interpretation 38, 63, 205 invisibility 12, 13, 115, 127, 133 Islam 137, 140 Islamic women 88–​9 Jameson, F. 43, 179 Jones, A. 140, 141–​2, 149, 150, 153 Kaba, Mariame Blood At The Root: Unearthing the Stories of State Violence Against Black Women (2015) 195 Kafka, F. (1883–​1924) Burrow, The 122–​3

228

29

Index Kaphar, Titus Asphalt and Chalk, Michael Brown, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin 196 Boys in Winter (2013) 198 Yet Another Fight for Remembrance 197 Kee, J. Third Text 55 Khon Kaen 167, 177 Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (2009) 146 knowledge 9, 191, 203 Kruger, Barbara Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989) 200–​1 language 59–​60, 68 Lee, E. 8, 59 Chineseness in Contemporary Chinese Art Criticism (2007) 57 Lee, Nikki S. 146, 150 Lewis, Dave 6.24 Chapter Six –​Racism (2001) 145 Chapter Six –​Racism (2001) 143–​4 Life and Times of Michael K (1983) Coetzee, J.M. 12–​13, 115, 116, 122–​4 invisibility 127, 133 narrative voice 117 power 126, 129 representation 128 resistance 124–​6, 132 literature 11–​12, 78, 115 Liu Lan (2003) 31, 38, 44 Louder than Words 143 Madness of the Day, The (1981) 125, 127 Mammy 154 Man Who Can Recall Past Lives, A 176 Maple, Sarah art work 10–​11 Fighting Fire With Fire (2007) 85 I Heart Orgasms (2007) 82

The New Black (2007) 84 Sboui-​Tyler, Amina 94 self portraits 81 veil dressing 77, 98 Vote For Me (2007) 83 Marcus Fisher 154 Martens, Renzo Enjoy Poverty 151 Episode 1 152 Marx, Karl (1818–​83) 172, 179 Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism, The (1999) 170–​1 Memory of Nabua: A note on the Primitive Project, The 176 Menezes, Jean Charles de 141–​2, 163 Middle East North Africa (MENA) region 76, 94–​5, 96 migrants 190, 205 Misreadings 53 misrepresentation 4, 189 misunderstanding 4, 189, 194 morality of refusal 99–​101, 104 Moving Image Review and Art Journal 21 multi-​channel works 28–​9, 38 Muslim Brotherhood 74, 93 Muslim threat 138–​9 Muslim women art work 77–​8 context 96 dress codes 75–​6 imagery 85 politics 101 representation 10–​11 United States of America 101–​2 veil dressing 73, 102 women’s rights activism 95 Mysterious Objects at Noon (2000) 174 Nagib, L. 171 naked bodies 91–​8, 103–​4 narrative 30, 148, 149, 152, 175, 177

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230

Index narrative voice 116, 118–​21, 125, 127 nation state 150, 151 nationalism 193–​4 Neshat, Shirin Book of Kings (2012) 89 Muslim women 77–​8 Nida (Patriots) (2012) 90 politics 86 Rebellious Silence (1994) 87 Untitled (1996) 88, 92 veil dressing 98 Women of Allah 86 No Snow on the Broken Bridge (2006) 30 No Snow on the Broken Bridge: Film and Video Installations by Yang Fudong (2006) 53, 62 nomads 150, 151, 155 non-​violence 100, 101 Obedient Autonomy (2004) 66 Of Hospitality 183 off-​screen gaze 44, 45–​7 Offeh, Harold Mammy 154 On Photography (1978) 56–​7 One Half of August (2011) 29, 38 Open, The 181–​2 Otherness art 191 art practice 137 cinema 168 culture 174, 185–​6 Europe 194 faith 141 ghosts 173–​4 hospitality 183 ignorance 189 nation state 151 prejudice 143, 163 representation 190 visibility 153 visual culture 155

Parasite, The 181 Parasol Unit No Snow on the Broken Bridge: Film and Video Installations by Yang Fudong (2006) 53 Passing for White, Passing for Black 149 Pendleton, Adam Black Lives Matter 196–​8 Phantoms of Nabua (2009) 177 Pi Li 54, 61 Piper, Adrian Calling Card 149 Passing for White, Passing for Black 149 Self Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features 149 Politics of the Signifier, The 139 population mobility 14, 137, 142 Portrait of Jason (1967) 138, 154, 156–​7, 158–​60, 161, 162–​3 poverty 41 power art practice 137 artists 14 Blanchot, M. 126–​7 films 157 gender hierarchies 74 insubordination 129 invisibility 12 Life and Times of Michael K (1983) 126, 129 politics 94 resistance 122 transnational art world 36 veil dressing 78 visibility 78 You’re Joking (2005) 163 power relations 3, 153 precarious gesture 25–​33, 42–​7 precariousness artscape 33–​42 Bourriaud, N. 32–​3 films 22–​3 politics 24

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231

Index Virno, Paul 22 Yang Fudong 24–​5, 26 prejudice 143, 163 Primitive Installation (2009) 177 Primitive Project 177, 184 protest Appadurai, A. 99 art 78 Elmahdy, Aliaa Magda 93 naked bodies 91–​8 non-​violence 100 Sboui-​Tyler, Amina 92–​3 social media 91

politics of refusal 131–​2 power 122 travel ban 193 RESPOND (2015) 195 responsibility 160, 189 rhetorics 143 Ritter, K. 25–​6, 34 Ruan Lingyu New Woman, The (1934) 46

Quiet Revolution, A 78–​9 racism art discourse 140 identity 142, 146, 161 Islam 140 Muslim threat 138–​9 nation state 150 police 143 tolerance 147 You’re Joking (2005) 163 refugees 194, 205 refusal 116, 121 Refusal (1959) 115–​16 Regulating Aversion 147 religious intolerance 89, 137 Renov, Michael 157 representation gender geopolitics 203 identity 189, 192 Life and Times of Michael K (1983) 128 Muslim women 10 refusal 116 Steyn, J. 190 visibility 15, 194–​5 visual culture 17, 189, 204 resistance invisibility 133 Life and Times of Michael K (1983) 124–​6, 132 politics 115

Sboui-​Tyler, Amina Femen 96 Maple, Sarah 93–​4 naked bodies 91, 94 nude photographs 97 protest 92–​3 text 93 women’s rights activism 76 Self Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features 149 Serres, Michel Parasite, The 181 Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2008) art criticism 65, 67 cinema 150 influences 64 review 57 terminology 43–​4 Venice Biennale (2007) 54 Yang Fudong 6, 21, 26–​7, 30, 38, 39 Shi Dongshan Baqianli lu yun/​The Moon and Clouds over the Eight Thousand Mile Road (1947) 63 Slavkoff, E. 23, 43–​4, 65–​6 social media 11, 91, 95, 103, 203 Some thoughts on “contaminations” 150 Song of Youth (1959) 46–​7 Sontag, S. 62–​3 On Photography (1978) 56–​7 sovereignty 13, 118, 122

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Index Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993) 178–​9, 182 Spring Time in a Small Town (1948) 63 Square Word Calligraphy (1994) 58, 59, 60 Steyn, J. 3, 8–​9, 190 Strange Encounters 146–​7 subjectivity 138, 143, 145, 160, 163, 204–​5 Sunflower Seeds (2010) 34–​5, 37 Sydney Biennale (2010) 40–​1 symbolism 61, 89 terminology 43 text 89, 93 Thailand 167, 176 The white cloud drifting across the sky above the scene of an earthquake 61 Third Text 55 Tiravanija, Rirkit 146, 150 To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch 182 transnational art world 24, 33, 35, 40, 169–​70 transnationalism 1, 172, 185 Tropical Malady (2004) 16, 174, 175 Tsai Ming Liang Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) 177 Tunisia 91, 92–​3, 95 Turkey 102 Turkish parliament 74–​5 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) 16, 175, 177, 180, 181 understanding 9, 12 Undoing Gender 154 United States of America 86, 89, 101–​2, 170, 193

Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989) 200–​1 veil dressing agency 97–​8 connotations 102 fashion industry 80–​1 identity politics 104 literature 78–​9 Maple, Sarah 82–​5 Muslim women 73, 76 non-​violence 101 politics 80, 101 women’s rights activism 78 Venice Biennale (2007) 21, 54 victims 149, 156–​7 violence 183, 195 Virno, P. ‘the precariat’ 22 visibility art subjects 15 art work 139 artscape 25 gender geopolitics 80, 91 identity 12, 15–​16, 125 inequality 152 knowledge 13–​14 migrants 190 Otherness 153, 192–​3 Piper, Adrian 149 politics 193–​4 power 78 representation 15 social media 203–​4 tensions 190 value 206 Visible Man (2013) 195 visual culture activism 202 China 21 Chinese artists 8 context 206 cultural imperialism 5 democracy 10

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Index films 22 frictions 204–​5 geopolitics 3 identity 17 knowledge 191 misrepresentation 4 politics 13, 17, 198 representation 189 symbolism 61 transnationalism 1 Vroom, H. 191

Muslim Brotherhood 93 naked bodies 103–​4 politics 90–​1 social media 95–​6 Tunisia 95 veil dressing 78 visual culture 202 World Trade Center 137 writing 116, 117, 118–​21 Wuya yu maque/​Crow and Sparrow (1949) 63

Walker, Barbara Louder than Words 143 My Song (2006) 144 Wang Hui 43, 65 Weerasethakul, Apichatong Blissfully Yours (2002) 174 films 174 foreignness 184 ghosts 173, 176 Ghosts in the Darkness 167–​9, 177 haunting 180, 186 hospitality 184–​5 Letter to Uncle Boonmee, A (2009) 177 Memory of Nabua: A note on the Primitive Project, The 176 Mysterious Objects at Noon (2000) 174 Phantoms of Nabua (2009) 177 Primitive Installation (2009) 177 Primitive Project 177, 184 Tropical Malady (2004) 16, 174 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) 16, 175, 177, 180, 181 Whitney Biennial (1993) 139 Women of Allah 86 women’s rights activism British suffragettes 74 context 103 Maple, Sarah 83 Middle East North Africa (MENA) region 76

Xiao Chen zhi chun 63 Xu Bing Book From the Sky (1991) 58 Square Word Calligraphy (1994) 58, 59, 60 Xu Bing: A Western Perspective (2001) 58 Yang Fudong ambiguity 9, 192 ambition 65 art criticism 55, 61 art work 5–​6, 53 artist films 32 artscape 37 cinema 63–​4 cinematic strategies 21 Close to the Sea (2004) 23 East of Que Village (2007) 40–​1 Fifth Night (2010) 27, 28, 29, 43–​4, 150 First Intellectual, The (2000) 44, 45 First Night 38 First Spring (2010) 27–​8, 31, 44 fragmentation 30 inaccessibility 38 influences 64 Liu Lan (2003) 31, 38, 44 multi-​channel works 28–​9 narrative 30 No Snow on the Broken Bridge (2006) 30

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Index Yang Fudong (cont.) No Snow on the Broken Bridge: Film and Video Installations by Yang Fudong (2006) 62 off-​screen gaze 46 One Half of August (2011) 29, 38 politics 43, 57 precarious gesture 25–​33, 42–​3 precariousness 24–​5 self-​orientalism 42 Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2008) 26–​7, 30, 38, 39, 43–​4, 150

Steyn, J. 7–​8 themes 67 transnational art world 33 You’re Joking (2005) agency 160 Garfield, R. 138, 154–​5, 156 identity 162–​3 racism 157–​60, 163 Zheng Junli Wuya yu maque/​Crow and Sparrow (1949) 63

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