On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture 2014033704, 9781138822351, 9781315742861

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On Not Looking

On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture focuses on the image, and our relationship to it, as a site of “not looking.” The collection demonstrates that even though we live in an image-saturated culture, many images do not look at what they claim, viewers often do not look at the images, and in other cases, we are encouraged by the context of exhibition not to look at images. Contributors discuss an array of images—photographs, films, videos, press images, digital images, paintings, sculptures, and drawings—from everyday life, museums and galleries, and institutional contexts such as the press and political arena. The themes discussed include: politics of institutional exhibition and perception of images; censored, repressed, and banned images; transformations to practices of not looking as a result of new media interventions; images in history and memory; not looking at images of bodies and cultures on the margins; responses to images of trauma; and embodied vision. Frances Guerin is senior lecturer in the School of Arts at the University of Kent, UK.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

1 Ethics and Images of Pain Edited by Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson

6 Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture Edited by Lewis Johnson

2 Meanings of Abstract Art Between Nature and Theory Edited by Paul Crowther and Isabel Wünsche

7 Spiritual Art and Art Education Janis Lander

3 Genealogy and Ontology of the Western Image and its Digital Future John Lechte

8 Art in the Asia-Pacific Intimate Publics Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Natalie King, and Mami Kataoka 9 Performing Beauty in Participatory Art and Culture Falk Heinrich

4 Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture Edited by Maria Pia Di Bella and James Elkins

10 The Uses of Art in Public Space Edited by Julia Lossau and Quentin Stevens

5 Manga’s Cultural Crossroads Edited by Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina KümmerlingMeibauer

11 On Not Looking The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture Edited by Frances Guerin

On Not Looking The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture Edited by Frances Guerin

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data On not looking : the paradox of contemporary visual culture / Edited by Frances Guerin. pages cm. — (Routledge advances in art and visual studies ; #11) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Visual perception. 2. Cognition and culture. 3. Art and society. 4. Art—Philosophy. I. Guerin, Frances, editor. BF241.O5 2015 306.4'7—dc23 2014033704 ISBN: 978-1-138-82235-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-74286-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction

vii ix 1

FRANCES GUERIN

PART I Images that Don’t Look 1 Not Looking into the Abyss: The Potentiality to See

43

DANIEL SACK

2 The Rest Is Noise: On Lossless

63

REBECCA BARON AND DOUGLAS GOODWIN

3 The Men in the Bathroom: Reflections on William E. Jones’s Tearoom

77

JAMES POLCHIN

PART II The Privilege of the Other Senses 4 Peripatetic Sculpture: The Exhaustion of Looking in the Presence of Richard Serra’s Promenade

103

FRANCES GUERIN

5 Burrowing under the Apparent: The Blindfold Drawings of Claude Heath CRAIG G. STAFF

123

vi

Contents

PART III Not Looking at Bodies and Cultures on the Margins 6 ©AMOUFLAGE

139

ALESSANDRA RAENGO

7 The Horizon to Come: Planetary Aesthetics in William Kentridge’s Felix in Exile and Galileo Galilei’s Moon Drawings

164

SONJA A. J. NEEF

8 Between Looking and Not Looking: Race, Spectacular Scenes, and Counter-Spectacular Effects in Paul Pfeiffer’s Long Count Series

185

ELIZABETH ADAN

PART IV Institutions Overpower Images 9 Looking at the West Looking Away: Khmer Rouge, Western Blindness, and Documentary Images

211

STÉPHANIE BENZAQUEN

10 The “Coffin,” the Camera, and the Commodity: Visualizing American Military Dead at Dover

229

REBECCA A. ADELMAN

11 Lessons from the Life of an Image: Malcolm Browne’s Photograph of Thich Quang Duc’s Self-Immolation

251

ØYVIND VÅGNES

Contributors Index

265 269

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7

Antony Gormley, Blind Light II, 2007. Antony Gormley, Blind Light II, 2007. Kurt Hentschläger, ZEE, 2009. Kurt Hentschläger, ZEE, 2009. Relative frame dimensions for common digital cinema formats Still from Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, Lossless 1, 2007. Still from Victor Fleming, The Wizard of Oz, 1939 Still from Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, Lossless 3, 2008. Still from Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, Lossless 4, 2008. William E. Jones, Tearoom, 2007. William E. Jones, Tearoom, 2007. William E. Jones, Tearoom, 2007. William E. Jones, Tearoom, 2007. William E. Jones, Tearoom, 2007. Claude Heath, Drawing 188, 1996. Claude Heath, Head (Drawing 137), 1995. Hank Willis Thomas, Branded Head, 2003. Hank Willis Thomas, Alive with Pleasure! Chorus Line, 2010. Hank Willis Thomas, Now, That’s Funny, 2010. Hank Willis Thomas, Afro-American Express, 2004. Hank Willis Thomas, The Chase Mastercard, 2004. Hank Willis Thomas, Priceless #1, 2004. Hank Willis Thomas, Absolut Power, 2003.

48 49 53 55 67 68 69 71 73 80 81 82 83 85 124 130 140 143 144 146 147 148 150

viii

Figures

6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 8.1 8.2 8.3 11.1

Hank Willis Thomas, Are you the Right Kind of Woman for It? 1974/2007. Hank Willis Thomas, It Didn’t Jest Grow By Itself, 1940–2008. Hank Willis Thomas, The Cotton Bowl, 2011. Hank Willis Thomas, Life Imitates Ads/Art Imitates Life/Art Imitates Ads, 2009. Hank Willis Thomas, Absolut Reality, 2007. Image of the hotel room in Paris. William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994. The landscape that it opens out to. William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994. Still or detail of charcoal drawings/redrawing as technique in process. William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994. The self in the mirror. William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994. Nandi and her telescope. William Kentridge, Felix In Exile, 1994. Nandi’s celestial visions. William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994. Paul Pfeiffer, Long Count III (Thrilla in Manila), 2000. Paul Pfeiffer, Long Count II (Rumble in the Jungle), 2001. Paul Pfeiffer, Long Count III (Thrilla in Manila), 2000. Malcolm Browne’s iconic picture of a self-immolating monk in Saigon, June 11, 1963.

152 153 154 155 157 166 167 169 173 175 176 186 188 193 253

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers from Routledge for their insightful observations on the manuscript in draft form. I would also like to thank all those who generously supplied images and copyright permissions for the book. I would like to thank James Polchin for his enthusiasm and inspiration for the project in its earliest days, Roger Hallas, Joe McElhaney and John David Rhodes for their valuable insights into and criticisms of the project as it was being developed. My sincerest and most important thanks go to the contributors whose commitment to and enthusiasm for the project has sustained me. I am grateful to them for their inspiration.

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Introduction Frances Guerin

Our image-saturated cultural imaginary is pervaded by enigmas. To name just a few of the questions without answers that confound our cultural landscape. If images are deceptive, and only an illusion of the real world, why do we continually look to them for the truth? If images are a mimetic representation of the world they picture, why do we turn away from them in search of the truth about that same world? If images are but a fabrication, why is there a demand for their existence to attest to historical events? And if images are closer than words to the expression of human emotion, why do we look elsewhere to understand the human condition? These are just some of the enigmas that pervade contemporary experience in our image-saturated cultural imaginary. Another paradox that colors our historical moment is that while images have never been so readily available, we increasingly don’t look at them. As the demand for images continues to escalate, so does the wont not to look. An obvious example that comes to mind here is the disregard of the Holliday footage of the beating of Rodney King by four Los Angeles Police Department officers in 1991. The footage marked the occasion of home video images being submitted as visible evidence in a United States court of law. The footage was accordingly shown in court with suspicion surrounding its ability to identify the events it saw: the footage was freeze-framed, run backwards and forwards, shown in slow motion, in fast motion. However, despite all of this physical manipulation, there was no need to look at the footage because the one Asian, one Hispanic, and ten white members of the jury already knew, in advance, what it showed. They did not need to look at the evidence to confirm the innocence of four white LAPD officers and the guilt of a single black man being beaten on a residential street in suburban Los Angeles.1 Not looking is always a political gesture. Jacques Rancière has convinced a generation of thinkers that art and the image are always bound up with the struggle for political recognition and influence. Because politics only ever “revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”2 By extension, art makes visible and

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sayable, and through this gesture of exposure, it is a meeting ground for the sensible world and potential configurations of that world. It is logical that if images have this power to reconfigure the historical world, so the gestures of looking and not looking at them, what Rancière might call the “interpretive,” whether conscious or unconscious, are inherently political. The currency of images—which often has less to do with what is in the image itself and more to do with the way it is used, how it circulates, is written about, the expectations we have of art—is deeply embedded in the sociopolitical fabric and organization of both social governance and everyday life. As Rancière argues through reliance on Plato’s discourse on the social and political significance of the arts, most often, the power and impact of images is not made visible, or put into words.3 It is our task to interpret and reinterpret them, thus to make images visible. On Not Looking contributes to the project of shedding light on the making visible and sayable within the power and impact of images. It does this through interrogating the layers of meaning that are generated by turning away from how and what images show and tell. Hand in hand with a political—in its broadest possible sense—investment in the persuasive role of images, we live in an age of iconoclastic practices underwritten by iconoclastic beliefs. Iconoclasm and the destruction of images is everywhere the solution, marker, and fait accompli of social revolution in our age. One after the other, we have seen revolutionaries destroy statues of Lenin and Saddam Hussein, the Taliban destroy Egypt’s Antiquities, and so on, in vitriolic celebration of an appropriation of power. As I elaborate below, the history of iconoclasm and iconoclastic practice is long and complex. At this stage, it is enough to assert that in light of the immense power given to images by destroying them, together with the weaving of images into political governance and everyday life, we need to find new ways of approaching images and icons. We need to continue the search to understand how and why images are bestowed with such agency. That is to say, hand in hand with the enquiry into the significance of not looking in its various forms, we need to interrogate what lies before that turn away. Peter Weibel, among others, offers a comprehensive history of iconoclastic Western art into the present day. He is particularly concerned with its fueling and subsequent contribution to the dissolution of modernity.4 As Weibel repeatedly underlines, the iconoclastic urge is today a paradigmatically political urge. As such, he claims there is an urgency to find alternative relations to images—relations that would necessarily have images play a different role in our daily lives. While Weibel’s solution is on the level of philosophy, On Not Looking approaches the same problem from the perspective of the viewer (who does not look) placed physically before an image, as well as from the perspective of individual images that do not look. In the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, we need to find new ways of conceiving of the power of images, the fear of that power, the symbolic role of images, our skepticism towards them in our daily lives,

Introduction

3

and of course, the tendency to indulge in as well as distrust them. On Not Looking is thus conceived as one way of recasting notions of contemporary iconoclasm as well as expanding its conception, with the goal of further understanding its ramifications. WHAT IS NOT LOOKING? WHO IS NOT LOOKING? In the examples given above, images do not look because the object or event has been removed from a figurative image, or the image signals its turn away from the object or event before it, thus, in turn, prohibiting us from looking. Not looking takes a number of different forms that are connected through either the spectator’s physical turning away from the material image—usually leading to the use of other senses—or of the image’s withholding of the object or event that is its focus. Broadly speaking, the three sites, or practices, of not looking that are interrogated in the pages of On Not Looking are demarcated thus: images that do not look, images that look at practices of not looking, and viewers who either choose or are forced to not look. And in each case, not looking is interpreted as a productive, political practice that goes hand in hand with looking. This inextricable link between looking and not looking is one of two key revelations that are also the assumptions of On Not Looking. As I go on to clarify, the other important fact is that not looking is distinct from not seeing in that it involves a physical, or material, in the case of the image, gesture that consciously turns away from or is turned away from an object of or in representation. The physicality of not looking by viewers can be understood to find its echo in the way that the image reproduces a reluctance to look—either in the form of a degradation of material defacement of the image itself, its incitation to a privileging of the other senses, a literal censorship of the image that is somehow contained within it, or a conscious decision to look away as a political and/or ethical turn.5 In each of these instances, vision and the ability to see may indeed be obscured, prohibited, denied, or ill-advised. However, the grounds for such obstructions remain a physical distraction of the look. To give one example from a set of images that has been discussed at length in scholarly discourse, filmic and photographic images of the Holocaust, the concentration camps, the effects and remains of Nazi brutality are often reproduced in contemporary films. And today, as was the case when the first images appeared in the postwar years in films such as Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), the images of emaciated, walking skeletons, and other images of unprecedented evil are often deemed not fit to be looked at.6 This discursive insistence on not looking is founded on the claim, as I have argued elsewhere, that the pain and suffering of the victims cannot be given a mimetic representation without violating their integrity as physical, emotional, individual human beings.7 And so, the images are not exhibited.

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Rancière also remarks upon this shift in cultural practice, where once something intolerable was found in the image has become transformed into “the intolerability of the image.” In turn, the intolerability of the image turns away from the assumption that what is in the image is given a visible form by the image. Instead, it is now (mistakenly) assumed that the image envisions the event itself, that we are looking at the event itself when we look at the image. For Rancière, as spectators, we must take action. Specifically, action is to witness, to look at the image as a reconfiguration, and potential further reconfigurations of the “intolerable reality” that is seen therein. For Rancière, rather than turning away from the image, our task is to see it for its reality and effects, to obey its potential, and not to ask whether the image can represent the reality of what it sees but how it represents what it sees.8 In the wake of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah (1985), Holocaust scholarship in the 1990s revisited this dilemma, lifted the ban on images, and has gradually come to agree, though not unanimously, on the importance of looking as an imperative to remember the destruction.9 Rancière uses various examples—Alfredo Jaar’s work on the Rwandan Genocide, Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and others—to demonstrate what we might call, looking again, from a different perspective as a “redistribution of the intolerable” in order that we see traumatic events differently. From a different perspective again, Georges Didi-Huberman also stresses the imperative to look at “intolerable images.” He responds to the criticism that images of living bodies at Auschwitz, however humiliated, are not representations of the Holocaust per se because they are not inside the gas chambers witnessing extinction. In his response, he argues that even images of those who are not killed in the gas chambers are images that witness Nazi horrors. They show that “the image of hell . . . is nonetheless part of the truth of Auschwitz.”10 Again, as I argue in Through Amateur Eyes, looking at all images of the destruction is crucial to the process of remembering the magnitude of the trauma. And as we look at the images we keep alive the devastation caused by these horrific historical events: the images become a reminder that looking is essential to the prevention of such events in the future. Even as this argument for the imperative to look at images of historical trauma becomes widely accepted, it is astounding to see the ways and means that political power has to ensure that events for which it is responsible are not looked at. The anthology addresses and engages with some of these contemporary instances. In the past ten years, documentary films have begun once again to include images of the victims in all their dehumanization.11 And yet, there are as many instances of not looking at such images often generated by their prohibition or rejection at an institutional level. Still, today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, there exist institutions—museums, television stations, the press—that echo the ban on images by refusing to show “offending” images in exhibitions and publications.12 In an interesting sideline to the ethical debate regarding the importance of protecting viewers from the

Introduction

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disturbance that might be caused by images of the Holocaust, when I show these images, especially to students, but also to general audiences, I always warn in advance that they may not want to look at the horrifying images. I reiterate that they are free to leave if they do not want to look. No one ever does. And yet, many will cover their eyes at the moment of watching, thus exercising their choice not to look. Viewers look away driven by the human desire not to experience pain. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that viewers want to look. The exact same gesture is enacted when watching horror films at the multiplex. It begins, as Susan Sontag convinces in Regarding the Pain of Others, with the expectation that photographic images tell the truth, that they are evidence of what lies before the camera. And again, as Sontag points out, even before the digital revolution which ensured that images could be fabricated with no event in sight, the photograph as spontaneous witness to an unforeseen event has always been a rare occurrence.13 Images do not represent unedited the events they see, and yet we behave towards them as if they do. This is another contradiction that chapters in On Not Looking throw into relief. In a film that reproduces the lost footage taken by a Nazi cameraman in the Warsaw Ghetto, Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (2010) documents a survivor who does not look at the images of mass graves. The survivor is filmed watching the footage fifty-five years later, and we see her cover her eyes as a way of protecting herself from the horror. Hersonski claims that at the moment she turns away from the images, the survivor commences to watch another film inside her head.14 And we, too, as audience members, are struck by the imperative to turn away from such scenes. Even as we have not seen or experienced them, the images create a visual memory for us. In this example, it is necessary to turn away, to not look, in order to be able to see the reality of our own memories. Similarly, the turn away is a creative act as it generates new images, all be they in the mind only. Indeed, once again, not looking is intimately and definitively connected to looking, the two inextricable in the practice of spectatorship. The production of one set of images to look at (in the mind) is the result of not looking at the images on the screen, and vice versa. It is likely that we have already seen the images created in the mind, the images that we choose over those on the screen, in different contexts, at an earlier time. We are not distracted from looking; we are too horrified to look because of the memory we carry of such images. The images remembered, whether personal, lived memory, or experienced through like representation, have already provided a surfeit of visual material, such that we no longer want or need to look at the screen. Alternatively, the images of the Holocaust may give substance to our deepest fears of trauma, powerlessness, victimization, and vulnerability. We may be looking at such horrible images for the first time, but they trigger in us a recognition of what we already know to exist. The anthology also sets out to reveal these and other complexities of what lies behind, before, and because of not looking.

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There are also instances in which we cannot see what we are looking for because it has been removed or withheld—either literally or metaphorically. Typically, in such cases our search becomes even more concerted. Yet again, the paradox of looking lies in its inextricability from the call not to look, and vice versa. Similarly, the agency of not looking as a resistance to political power, again, as Rancière would have it—in the creation of a community that opposes the given political space and time, becomes ignited. Whether it be thanks to the image’s deliberate withholding of the trauma it pictures—in the case of depictions of the wars in Iraq discussed below—or the viewer’s choice to not look at a traumatic picture, not looking in the contemporary moment is driven by having seen too much, having looked too often in the past. As becomes apparent across the collection, such tendencies usually find a corresponding practice by official images such as those discussed by Paul Virilio, typically disseminated by the press, that tell us we do not need to look.15 The inherent paradox of not looking’s dependence on looking is here co-opted by the (usually) Western press to ensure ignorance of its political responsibility, whether it be in Iraq, Tibet, Rwanda, or at home, on its own soil. And likewise, in the example cited above of the desire to not look at Holocaust images, not looking becomes an act of resistance to the perversions of power that brought about the inhuman deaths, the annihilation of six million people in the Nazi Holocaust. And yet, today, as images become increasingly sourced on the World Wide Web, this form of censorship usually leads to a concerted public attempt to find the withdrawn or repressed images, and ultimately, to look. Thus, we have entered into an era when the imperative or directive to not look motivates looking. In another permutation of this paradox, still and moving images are adamant that they themselves are either not looking or unable to look at what nevertheless lies before them. Thomas Struth’s well-known museum photographs can be held up as the visual realization of this theoretical practice and discourse.16 Typically, Struth’s photographs do not look at the iconic image we nevertheless know is the object of the photographed museum visitor’s visit. Rather, as the viewer of Struth’s photographs, we look at other (diegetic) people in the act of looking and not looking in the museum. Diegetic viewers do not always look at the image before which they stand: in Struth’s photographs, people read the guidebook, look at the others looking, watch out for their children, listen to the tour guide, or simply turn away from icons such as Michelangelo’s David in the Accademia, Florence; Géricault’s, Raft of the Medusa in the Louvre; or Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. In his photographic representations of the spectatorial practices of museum visitors, Struth replicates and simultaneously questions, the fetishization of the artwork as cultural icon. The historical discordance between the museum and the visitor, as well as that between the painting and visitor within the photograph, produces a series of distances that lead to a reminder that what is important is not the icon being aggrandized but

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the fact that “I was there to see it.” To take the outcome of Struth’s photographs one step further, what matters is that “I have photographed the artwork,” and thus, produced evidence to say “I was there.” Looking at the icon is of course necessary, but only as a confirmation of what has already been seen in reproduction, in the guidebook, on the postcards stuck on the wall at home, on the poster advertising the museum, and on the World Wide Web prior to arrival. Looking is only a prerequisite of a day at the museum insofar as it enables a looking again, and most importantly, leads to an engagement with the museum’s modes of distraction. That is, as Struth pictures, we look, relook, and eventually, do not look at the icons. Struth’s photographs ask us to look at ourselves not looking. Although she does not analyze it, Irit Rogoff includes a reproduction of Struth’s Pergamon Museum I, Berlin 2001, on the title page of her essay “Looking Away.”17 According to Rogoff’s argument, the contemporary practice of not looking captured in Struth’s photographs is also political because it rearticulates the “relations between makers, objects and audiences” within the museum today. For Rogoff, not looking in this particular form of distraction from images and objects on display opens up an attention to, a picturing of, other aspects of the museum as cultural institution.18 As a result, as visitors we develop new and more dynamic relations to the institution, particularly relations characterized by a disregard for what the museum would have us revere: its images and objects on display. I agree with Rogoff that alternative pathways through the museum can be liberating. Indeed, this argument is compelling particularly as it relates to her experience of a party at the Courtauld Institute, surrounded by students at the opening of an exhibition of contemporary art, selected and hung by postgraduate students. However, the path of not looking as one moves through the world’s greatest art collections is so often scripted by the museum itself. Listening to the audio guide that prescribes a passage with designated stops to learn more about the museum’s self-determined greatest treasures, getting waylaid in the bookstore, and searching for the Mona Lisa with blinkers on are the designated intention of the museum. As such, these so-called digressions are anything but creative and inspiring. Struth’s museum images, however, critique the cultural practice of being in a great museum when they invite us to look at ourselves not looking: we see ourselves caught in the web of institutional directives without thinking. Struth’s works perspicaciously exemplify the tensions and contradictions that arise because of the impetus to not look, whether it be at an image, within an image, or thanks to the tour of distraction that we cannot resist. This self-consciousness is, I would argue, radical and productive. The contributions to On Not Looking also make conscious this central tenet as it is exemplified in Struth’s museum images: the interdependence of looking and not looking, the imperative to look in spite and as a consequence of an image that does not look, or a practice of not looking, as being crucial to the agency of both. Again and again, looking is made possible or

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underlined by a practice of not looking. The anthology demonstrates that, within this discourse, looking is a twofold paradox: in the contemporary moment, not looking is a form of being retrained to look as opposed to a negation of looking and the expression of power and subjugation associated with looking. Thus, the collected essays offer an antidote to the pessimism that usually surrounds the image and has come to dominate contemporary discourses on the image and vision more broadly. Most obviously, in a strand of cultural theory best illustrated by Virilio, images, articulately encapsulated by the television images of war and theatres of military aggrandizement, are no more than a distraction from the ever-elusive possibility of civil peace. The images paraded across our screens are like a blanket that keep “invisible” the real time and space of the political present. Technological instrumentality protects the powers that be from what might be termed “acts of resistance.” These would be acts of resistance to what for Virilio is a “dictatorship” that nevertheless declares its visibility and that of its acts through the same invisible manipulation of images.19 For On Not Looking, in the post-Benjaminian world in which contemplation has become irrevocably transformed into a pessimistic form of distraction as it is detailed by Virilio, resistance might still be possible.20 Indeed, it is possible if we conceive of distraction as a permutation of the practice of not looking. Following this logic, the blanket of invisibility that distracts us also holds within it the incentive to look, and thus, its own dichotomous, unsuspecting, but ever-possible relinquishing of agency. A concrete example here might be the “image as weapon” produced by a camera mounted on Humvees and tanks in Iraq, ensuring that the documentation (or drama) of the war delivered to our screens was not one in which people died or suffered in any way. As Nicholas Mirzoeff clarifies, this image is a weapon of propaganda, “something hard, flat and opaque designed in itself to do harm” that simultaneously arouses the desire of those who oppose the war to look for further evidence of what is not seen.21 Once again, the image that doesn’t look is a pathway to looking. In another related form of not looking, the irony of contemporary modes of surveillance illustrates the agency arising from interaction with images intended to distract. While surveillance cameras are placed everywhere—in our cities, institutions from the library to the Federal prison, at traffic intersections and train stations alike—the images produced by such technologies do not always look at what they claim. In the United Kingdom, CCTV surveillance is ubiquitous. It is commonly used to capture evidentiary images that establish a suspect’s presence at a particular time and place.22 Even when these images do not successfully record the person in the act of a crime or at an event, CCTV footage of the presence of the suspect is enough to indict and convict. Despite what they claim, these cameras do not watch us in our daily activities. They provide images that are a screen for real time and space; they are a distraction from, as Rancière would call it, the political present. Indeed, so often the now, anarchic video surveillance footage is

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not looking; it does not see what it might nevertheless want or claim to see: what happens is usually obscured by the grain of the image, it takes place out of frame, or what it looks at is so benign as to be inconsequential. In this, it is no different from the footage of the war in Iraq seen from the point of view of a military Humvee. If up-to-date forms of surveillance video images look elsewhere, they leave the most penetrating and invasive forms of surveillance to mechanisms that remain invisible: hidden in the chip of our credit cards, the activities of our cell phone numbers, and our use of the Internet via social networking, email, and cookies. Similarly, these forms of data surveillance are now working together with geo-surveillance techniques to monitor our movements. Indeed, data-, movement-, and activity-based surveillance mechanisms encapsulate the irony of modern social control: while we are not looking, they monitor our activities, all the time, pretending that we are being watched or looked at by something and someone. This veil of a system of surveillance that doesn’t look, a way of tracking our movements with no need to look at them, affords the pretense of freedom, the promise of security, and, simultaneously, underlies our assumption, which is, in reality, a command that we, in turn, do not look. Thus, to reiterate: On Not Looking explores the myriad ways that images that do not look, images that look at practices of not looking, and viewers who either choose or are forced to not look, pervade, even dominate, our burgeoning image environment today. In doing so, the intervention made by the anthology has radical ramifications: On Not Looking reveals not looking to be a political practice. Images that do not look, and practices of not looking at images are placed here within the context of governance—most notably by the governments in the West, but also, the governance of social as well as political institutions more generally. This includes, for example, the dynamics of power as it is played out through gendered, sexual, racial, and class difference. Consideration of the multiple instances of not looking is a way of analyzing discourses about images, and as such, the contributors collectively contest a status quo that controls and oppresses either through prohibitions on looking, or demanding that we do look. The individual contributions demonstrate how, so often when we are engaged in acts of looking, we do not see what we want to see, because we do not look at what we think we look at. Rather, we look at and we see as we are told to. Simultaneously, when the subject of the photographic image and the photograph as subject choose not to look, that power is seized back from the oppressive eye of the one who looks—culturally as well as at the picture—and the discourses of assumption, and consequently of assertion, are shattered.23 On Not Looking makes its intervention in the process of demonstrating this political agency of not looking when, within the discursive frameworks set in motion by the images and viewers discussed, not looking is transformed into a creative form of agency. This agency can be enjoyed or practiced alternately by the viewer or the image that does not look. In turn, to

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make this argument, individual chapters in the collection take up concerns such as: contemporary skepticism towards the truth claim of images, especially in the press; the turn away from images because of censorship, prohibitions, the violence of the image, or distraction; the relationship between not looking in the contemporary moment and centuries-old forms of iconology and iconoclasm; the privilege given to the other senses in the contemporary visual landscape. Irrespective of the permutation of not looking, the anthology points to the paradox inherent to the iconoclasm of the contemporary moment. In addition, it sustains this paradox through focus on particular images and sets of images that interrogate practices of not looking. That is, individual chapters explore questions of not looking at images via privileging the image as the site of aesthetic and epistemological inquiry. Before elaborating on other issues, a word on the materiality of images, of looking, and the anthology’s insistence on the contemporary. While practices of not looking and images that do not look can be identified throughout the centuries, the contributions here focus on instances of not looking as opposed to not seeing in the contemporary moment. It is true that the potential and productivity characteristic of the contemporary wont not to look may be reminiscent of the Romantic and Enlightenment productivity of blindness and not seeing. However, the distinction of the practices here analyzed is the divestment of the imaginative dimension of seeing, viewing, and looking in the contemporary moment. The emphasis on the material dimension of not looking and with it the refrain from journey into the imagination, or any form of inner contemplation is key to the specificity of the contemporary. In keeping with contemporary art’s refusal of the Romantic strains of yearning, transcendence, and reverie, analyses of images in On Not Looking often identify a physical turning away from the object, the image, the world of and in representation. The focus on contemporary images thus presents a unique kind of not looking. In some way, each of the contributions is concerned with a turning away from the image that is defined by the body. Not looking is here defined as a physical, material, sensorial turning away generated by an array of situations and images. Thus, while the practice of not looking is founded on forms of visual perception that might result in not seeing, this very form of not seeing is generated by a physical turn away from the image, or alternatively, a deliberate act of not looking in the first place. The anthology’s focus on the embodied materiality of not looking is motivated by a number of factors. First, in distinction to the conceptions of vision, seeing and looking in the post-Enlightenment marked by an insight that came from a transcendental form of looking, a form of looking in which the subject could not see; the paradox of the contemporary is enabled by a shift away from transcendental reverie appropriate to modernity. The centrality of the body and its relationship to technologies of looking that were developed around the end of the nineteenth century insisted on the

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corporeality of seeing, looking, vision.24 In keeping with this insistence on the physical and sensorial presence of the modern viewer, this is the place from which my notion of not looking is based. Second, the focus on the material image distinguishes the subject matter of the anthology from the modernist belief that insists on the reinforcement of power and dominance through practices of looking. That is, the anthology eschews conceptions of looking-based power exercised independently of the content, substance, or very existence of an image to be looked at. The introduction of, and insistence on the material image as the springboard to the complexity of not looking thus enables and ensures the double edge of looking, the agency of not looking. Even if the objects or modes of analysis in the essays here collected make sense within a modernist tradition, they are written from a postmodernist standpoint. This contemporary perspective places the complexity and contradictions of looking in the foreground and thus exposes the inadequacy of the equation between looking and power. In particular, the centrality of specific images that do not look or represent not looking to individual chapters underlines the departure from a marriage of power and looking irrespective of the object. Lastly, the collection emphasizes the physicality and materiality of looking, to engage with the postmodernist practice of creating corporeal and multisensual viewing experiences. In postmodernist art, this is done through installation work, film, as well as sculptural environments that attempt to disturb the regimes of power that are ordinarily put in place by official or mainstream images. The physical experience of the viewer in the present moment as she moves through such exhibitions often provokes her to come face to face with the banalization of political violence, war, and horror as it is represented in images produced and disseminated by official systems and sources of information. The viewer or visitor’s experience of her own body in such installation environments of particularly political artists, for example the Chilean Alfredo Jaar (discussed by Rancière), are often designed as a direct challenge to the distraction and ultimate fiction of the surfeit of images disseminated by television and across the World Wide Web. The sensorial experience of Jaar’s work functions to take back, to transfer ownership of the right to see and to speak, to the spectator. In turn, the spectator experiences, thus comes to know the horror of, in the case of Jaar’s art, the Rwandan genocide.25 As I discuss elsewhere in relationship to the installations of Christian Boltanski, this corporealization of vision is a particularly postmodern strategy to challenge the deleterious effects of the anonymous images that characterize the contemporary culture of visibility.26 This “corporeal turn” that places the somatic experience and the body as site of meaning, became crucial to cultural and visual studies as well as art practices in the wake of Michel Foucault’s recuperation of the subjectivity and power of the stigmatized, marginalized, and, for want of a better term, socially “othered,” body.27 Typically, the body of both artist and viewer is invoked as a recuperative measure of empowerment and identification in the

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face of violence, injustice and horror. On Not Looking recognizes that even within modernism, the full potential of not looking thanks to a triumphing of the other senses has not yet been fully explored. Indeed, I would argue that this so-called corporealization of vision, reimagines and opens up to alternative modes of looking and knowing even when there is no horror, violence or systematization of the image. By extension, it is anticipated that On Not Looking will bring new perspectives and new modes of looking to images, objects and viewers beyond those specifically discussed here. THE POLITICS OF NOT LOOKING Over the past forty years, the temptation and imperative to not look has gathered increasing momentum. Indeed, in the second half of the twentieth century, with the explosion in image production as well as the massive expansion in access to the modes of production, the image and looking at images have become more and more threatening to power structures in the West. This began, one could argue, with the television coverage of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, concurrent with the events themselves. At the outset, the television coverage was considered by all to be exciting, a way to revolutionize the perception of war as well as the carrying out of war: television promised the closing of the gap between battlefield and living room on the home front, it promised a living connection between the soldier and his family. Moving images also promised the increased sophistication and accuracy of wartime intelligence and strategy. Then, in March 1968, the American media saw its troops setting fire to the village of My Lai. The massacre of innocent villagers, and dead bodies of women, children, elderly people strewn on the road leading out of the hamlet appeared on the nightly news. The victims’ bodies were horribly mutilated, raped, beaten, and tortured, the children naked and covered in burns. These images escalated the collapsing support of national belief in the offensive involvement in Vietnam. The images gave fuel to an already angry and protesting American public.28 Although not fully acknowledged for twenty years, these television images were used as evidence in the eventual indictment of the United States Military for its crimes. The images were so convincing a record of the growing opposition as the war went on, that Presidents Johnson and Nixon set about “managing” the press coverage.29 It was silently agreed upon that the US press would not go to the battlefield again. As war historians and critics now agree, indeed, as Daniel Hallin points out, the connection between the American failure and television presence in Vietnam was outwardly acknowledged by the British government when it imposed stringent restrictions on television coverage of the Falklands War in 1982.30 In the next war that would be led by an American government, the war in the Gulf, or “Operation Desert Storm” in 1991, the American press showed

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no images of blood and war. If we were to believe the nightly news and press coverage, there was no rape, torture, or violation of innocent civilians. In effect, there was no destruction and no apparent “enemy.” Instead, we saw patriotic, “sanitized” images produced by the “Coalition Media Center” on a $250,000 television set. We saw images created by cameras mounted on smart bombs, and the infinite horizon line of a parched desert that might be shot anywhere, at any historical moment, save for the odd piece of machinery or soldiers at rest in their brand new Humvees. We were treated to parades of sophisticated technology that boasted the power of the United States Army. As Jean Baudrillard mused at the time of the first war in the gulf, there was nothing to see of war in these images.31 The official cameras were not looking at the war on the battlefield or on the home front. Rather, they were preoccupied with controlling the American people’s perception of war.32 In time, thanks to a debate begun by the second Bush Administration in 2001 and continued by the Obama Administration, images of American body bags, mutilated bodies and violated Iraqis were censored at government level. The detritus of war as we knew it from images of Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1940s, and Vietnam in the 1960s, was a thing of the past. Most significantly, the cameras were no longer looking at the damage done to Americans at war. While Luc Delahaye’s photos of the dead Taliban covered the New York Times, and the iconic images of the first war in the Gulf could be published if the bodies were Iraqi, showing the maimed, dead, and destroyed bodies of American soldiers in images became a rarity. Ever since the massacre at My Lai, the image of war fed to the American people via the press has been heavily censored. While the decisions and policies surrounding what can and cannot be published have mutated since this time, today it is the adverse effects of America at war on American soldiers that have been deemed not fit to be looked at. When it comes to the representation of war, not looking in a number of its manifestations has become a deeply political tenet.33 I have already mentioned a few of the numerous examples where governments and their institutions overtly prohibit us from looking at their activities as a way of maintaining ideological control. These instances go hand in hand with the apparent not looking at us as the subjects of institutions when, of course, we know they are looking in ways that we cannot anticipate. While the imperative to not look will come as no surprise, the prohibitions on looking are everywhere built into citizen control in the “global North.” Beyond the representation of war and violence, in our everyday lives, we are continually encouraged to not look through the processes of distraction that ensures we are not too focused. These processes maintain our lack of involvement in our own lives and especially their social and political dimensions. In another context, or perhaps in another framework, this rhymes with the culture of distraction discussed by Virilio as he sees our loss of the art of seeing generated by mass culture.34

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Virilio draws attention to the “inattention” that occupies the center of cultural and aesthetic spectatorship. In place of looking—at art, at the world—“panic” has become the defining characteristic of our age. He says, With ‘teleobjectivity’, our eyes are thus not shut by the cathode screen alone; more than anything else we now no longer seek to see, to look around us, not even in front of us, but exclusively beyond the horizon of objective appearances. It is this fatal inattention that provokes expectation of the unexpected—a paradoxical expectation, composed at once of covetousness and anxiety, which our philosopher of the visible and the invisible called PANIC.35 To reiterate, this panic is the result of an all-seeing technology that begins with the television, the Internet, and, today, the art work. Virilio talks about how we have lost the art of seeing. We have reached a state of voluntary blindness, supine and incapacitated on the floor in front of the television with “eyes wide shut.”36 Apparently, looking through the most sophisticated scientific optical instruments, the ostensible descendants of Galileo’s telescope, we end up not looking at what is before us. Of course, Virilio writes of vision in its metaphorical sense. For him, blindness is ignorance. Nevertheless, the blind panic that characterizes our millennium of mass culture is conceived on the back of the endemic practices of not looking. It is not only we who no longer look, but for Virilio, the artwork in its reduction to abstraction (for which he cites Yves Klein as the progenitor) and its eventual removal of the aesthetic (for Virilio, particularly land art) is itself no longer looking. Such images and art objects direct the one-time viewer away, retraining the look, often through the encouragement of the other senses. For Virilio, to look is too dangerous for it would mean that we are going to become engaged intellectually, and in the worst case scenario, politically.37 On Not Looking offers an antidote to Virilio’s Holocaust-inflected pessimism. As chapters demonstrate, the paradox of not looking at pictures is found in this very gesture: it is located in the gesture of our being retrained to look. Not looking is not a simple negation of the insights of the Enlightenment, it is a practice of creativity, productivity, and in its most notable examples, of political resistance. As I discuss below, this reversibility of images, the flexibility of viewing is perhaps best explored by W.J.T. Mitchell in his continuing preoccupation with the lives and loves of images. He discusses an important feature of the biopicture as “the destruction of an image may also be the production of an image.”38 We may be tempted to sideline Virilio’s importance in such debates because, as always, his work is metaphorical, overarching, and polemical in its philosophical argumentation. Nevertheless, Virilio not only speaks the language of a generation of image theorists who inherit the mantel of Benjamin, and after Benjamin, Foucault. This generation of thinkers follows in

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the twentieth-century line of philosophical thought that is, from the beginning, suspicious of the prominence of vision as epistemology. As such, Virilio represents the other side of the argument that prominent thinkers such as Jonathan Crary make in their claim for vision as the preeminent sensory perception, and epistemological tool for knowing and understanding the world following the Enlightenment. Crary, for example, exposes the problems and deceptions of vision in modernity, most notably, the forms of control that are the legacy of the “technologization” of vision. According to Crary, these revolutions in the way we see are based on new modes of looking that, in turn, are enabled thanks to the emergence of photographic and precinematic apparatuses. Nevertheless, even though Crary’s is prima facie an iconoclastic discourse, vision, and looking, observing and being observed remain the primary mode of accessing the phenomenological world and maintaining social relations in that world.39 For Virilio, however, vision and looking have now been erased by the mass-media-dictated environment given to those of us unlucky enough, he believes, to live in the twenty-first century. On Not Looking goes some way towards reinstating the material image as well as the productivity of not looking into the cultural landscape that Virilio critiques. Through opening out the discourse on vision, the instances of looking and not looking identified by the authors not only analyze images that don’t look as well as practices of not looking. They also offer an antidote to Virilio’s pessimistic position: the paradox of not looking is that it retrains us to look. The ultimate consequence of this antidote yields a reintegration of the importance of the image back into the spaces and places from which Virilio would have it erased by the mass media. And this ultimate intervention, we will remember, comes from a collection devoted to practices and images that do not look. “PRACTICES OF LOOKING”: THE MODERNIST INSISTENCE Despite the contemporary wont to not look, to look away, to look elsewhere, scholarship in the more traditional disciplines of art history, cinema, photography and media studies, and the relatively recent interdisciplinary fields of visual and image studies has remained focused on discussions of “practices of looking,” “how we see,” and has developed widespread debates around related topics such as the precision of vision in modernity.40 This continued insistence on the primacy of visual perception and the visual metaphor in analyses of spectatorship comes in spite of the sustained philosophical inquiry into the denigration of vision in the post-Enlightenment period.41 Indeed, one could argue that it is because of the unrelenting focus on looking, seeing and the concentration on the visual that images and the perceptual experiences of their spectators eventually fall short of or are irretrievably compromised in the search for truth and an ultimate clarity via

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the image.42 I have discussed this skepticism towards the image elsewhere in relation to the iconoclastic impulse of trauma studies; in twentieth-century philosophy’s search for truth in art, the image always disappoints.43 In addition, however flawed and whatever the shortcomings of images and the visual in the philosophical and critical discourses, the search for truth is built on a belief in the ultimate authority of sight, and the expectation that the image has an unquestioned potential to attain the status as truthful witness to the world. There is an abundance of critical work that questions the existence, indeed the possibility, of ultimate truth, even before the image supposedly represents such a truth. Typically, this work assumes an intellectual and political position that takes its cue from Foucault’s conception of truth as constructed through discourse as opposed to being sui generis to an object, event, or an image.44 Again, these criticisms do not necessarily speak Foucault’s position but rather, appropriate his terms, often without the complexity with which he originally used them. On Not Looking extends and complements this field of criticism when it recasts what it means to see and to look, when it embraces practices of not looking as necessarily linked to looking. And through this recasting, On Not Looking demonstrates that in the search for truth in an image, it is not simply that this truth is relative and discursively dependent, but that it is always fueled by the possibility of its own undoing. In turn, this undoing can be harnessed for its creative potential. As noted in relationship to Crary’s nevertheless penetrating study of the post-Enlightenment abandonment of classical perspective as key to a visual access of reality, even though philosophers and critics of vision in modernity have repeatedly pointed out the problems, vision, sight, and that which is seen continue to occupy a privileged position within the cultural imaginary. Philosophical discourse may have defamed vision as the once noblest of senses, and questioned the clarity of vision in the wake of the Enlightenment, but sight remains the most dominant sense. On Not Looking does not challenge the force of occularcentrism but rather it adds to or extends these debates by engaging with the physical bodily responses of viewers to works that ask that they not be looked at. Or alternatively, of works that themselves do not look, often for political or ethical, but also for aesthetic reasons. Thus, the practices and images of not looking that are discussed in the anthology add dimensionality to theories of vision, notions of the gaze and related power dynamics, how and what we see, all of which are central to cultural understanding. To elaborate on a point made above, unlike the blindness that is conceived of particularly by Romantic philosophers, writers, and critics, here “not looking” is a physical response that has none of the Romantic imperatives of wandering, nostalgia, or yearning that are played out in the shadows, in the interstice between encroaching darkness and the promise of light. While blindness may be the result of not looking, unlike the Romantic imagination

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that is inspired by and revels in the play of illusion, typically the blindness of not looking at stake in the anthology gives way to the dominance of the other senses.45 That is, according to the contributors, the body of the viewer and the material of the images she does not look at are central to insight. We will recall that the Romantic vision, descendant from the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, is in itself, always a form of distraction from the politics of knowing and acting in the world, in the present moment.46 Romantic vision is a form of distraction because it invites a meditative transcendent viewer who leaves the material image behind to turn inwards to the timelessness and placelessness of the imagination. Any visual conception of an exterior world is, for the Romantic, created in the mind of the individual subject. Each of the contributions to the anthology clearly grounds analysis of not looking in the physical senses as the body interacts with and experiences the material co-ordinates of the everyday. Nevertheless, for all of its differences from Romantic vision as dominated by the imagination, in the same way that philosophical discourse has convinced us of the imbrication of blindness with insight, On Not Looking maintains that practices of not looking give way to cultural conversations and revelations that are as instrumental to understanding the potential agency for change in the twenty-first century. As a result, the technological turn that brought with it an amelioration of the call to look at the time of the Enlightenment, the ability to see through perceptual looking, the triumphing of vision over the other senses is, according to On Not Looking, connected to an emphasis on not looking, turning away, distraction, and the obscurity of the visualized. And, in their most radical intervention, the contributions to On Not Looking insist that these forms and practices of not looking have a productive, creative possibility that has not only been ignored but at worst critically disregarded. In Practices of Looking, a key reference work within visual studies, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright focus on the social, historical, political, ideological, and cultural meanings of images.47 In turn, they demonstrate how understanding (through looking and seeing) of images informs and shapes the meaning of daily life as well as the cultural imaginary. While writers such as Sturken and Cartwright include discussions on the “blindness,” “deception,” “invisibility,” and “distance” of images and viewers, these are all the pessimistic result of looking. In their “Introduction to Visual Culture,” Sturken and Cartwright trace the persistence of the models of vision and visuality from modernism to postmodernism, and effectively demonstrate that despite the historical changes in the production, reception and meaning of images, the visual environment continues to be underwritten by the desire for and imperative that an image access the truth. That said truth will vary, and it may be cultural, phenomenological, aesthetic, or indexical, for example. However, even in the digital age, when images “occupy” a virtual time and space, and notions of authenticity and originality have new meaning, there is still an attachment to notions of “good” and “bad” images, where

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good and bad are determined by the degree of ideological manipulation.48 On Not Looking represents an opportunity to approach the role of images and viewers in daily life from a different, more productive, yet unpredictable, perspective. The anthology embraces the paradox expressed by the images: not looking generates an active and optimistic dynamic rather than a passive or negative strategy. This new perspective optimistically highlights the possibility of challenging the discourses that claim the image’s want to hide, deceive, and destroy. Similarly, it contributes to the discourses on vision and visuality that insist on the belief in the ultimate power dynamics of looking/being looked at. Within this context, the essays in On Not Looking not only remedy the glaring absence of attention to images that do not look, and practices of not looking. They also provide a unique vantage point that ultimately leads to insight into and revitalization of the power of images and viewers, even as they do not look. Not looking is thus a form of looking as it has been discursively conceived in the ever-expanding field of image studies. It is true that while cinema and visual studies have privileged looking, seeing and all permutations of the ocular in their approach to images, continental philosophy as well as philosophical perspectives from within cultural and literary studies have produced an extended and thought-provoking body of work that has sought to challenge the hegemony of vision as the Western paradigm for knowledge, truth, and reality, particularly within the post-Enlightenment. The essays collected in David Levin’s Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, for example, all, in some way, point to the ambivalence and ambiguity in either the annexation or denigration of the ocularcentrism that governs epistemology in the twentieth century, and, we can argue, continues to do so in the twenty-first.49 Whether it be in Foucault’s apparent critique of the sovereign power of visibility as the legacy of the Enlightenment or the connection between ideology and obscured vision within Jürgen Habermas’s social critique, according to these Western European critics the discourse on vision in its physical, metaphorical, ideological, and political forms is never monocular or fixed. Within European modernity it is plural in conception, differentiated in its discursive articulation, and multiple in its modalities. In anthologies such as Levin’s, the heterogeneous and nonhierarchical conception of vision within twentieth-century philosophy and the scholars who describe it are placed in the foreground.50 As a result, this scholarship attempts to find new perspectives, new formulations of vision that will relieve the present of its mire in obfuscation, blindness and deception, even while continuing to look. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision unveils the impact of visual metaphors on the history of philosophical thought. As a result, in spite of its emphasis on heterogeneity and multiplicity, it nevertheless undergirds the primacy of vision as epistemology. On Not Looking certainly embraces the possibility of conceiving of not looking as an epistemology and thus theoretically extends the concerns of the work done in philosophy and related fields

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of psychoanalysis, anthropology, and cultural studies.51 However, none of the chapters seeks to reestablish the dominance of centuries-old conceptions of looking or the precise landscape of Enlightenment ocularcentrism. Rather, collectively, they place looking and vision in a more measured relationship with the other senses, which in turn often go hand in hand with the practice of not looking. In distinction from the abovementioned works, On Not Looking eschews the overwhelming skepticism towards the image and begins with a consideration of the objective, material elements of the image. These elements of the image are then interpreted as they relate to its, as well as our own, tendency to not look. On Not Looking thus extends and consolidates the debates on looking and the role of the visual metaphor as epistemological cornerstone in a series of academic fields. Through paying attention to these aspects of not looking, the essays point to ways that the image and visual representation do not fail to represent and inspire. Indeed, the same gesture that examines where the image is not looking, that is, where its power is apparently compromised, actually reinvests it with a power. When approached from the perspective of not looking the image gains in potency, if at the same time, its epistemological priority is renegotiated. Perhaps the discourse that comes closest to the conception of not looking as a pathway to revelation and intervention is that in postcolonial studies on the potential, particularly the political potential, of opacity.52 The identification of opacity in images, often produced by or about the racial other is found in those moments where there is a deliberate decision not to render transparent, to create obscurity with the goal of frustrating knowledge, of producing “unknowability.” Opacity is a discourse, translated by critics such as T. J. Demos to be a visual strategy that aims to resist and oppose. For decades the postcolonial and politicized discourse emphasized the importance of making visible what has always been invisible. In distinction, opacity understands the designation of a place from which to speak that remains invisible, and consequently creates a confusion that muddles mainstream codes and forms of visualization. The power of opacity is in not seeing, not being seen, even when one is looking. If the mainstream official discourse is focused on making visible, on truth, on forming public opinion through the delivery of apparent reality, the oppositional force of opacity undoes this visualization and thereby creates potential. The recourse to visual opacity is particularly used in the representation of people, places, and cultures such as those in Lebanon, Palestine, South Africa—that is, in worlds where people don’t have the right to see and to look. Accordingly, their apparent disenfranchisement is harnessed and transformed into the means of empowerment.53 Writers such as Éduoard Glissant and critics such as Demos, who appropriate Glissant’s notion of opacity, demarcate the spaces of opacity, the moments, places and ways of looking that are given by the absence of an image. This moment of opacity is resistant because it is overtaken by

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absence, and therefore, always unknowable.54 On Not Looking extends this understanding of opacity by considering what it means to not look when an image exists, when it is present and conspicuous, but not looked at thanks to a physical turning away. If postcolonial scholars annex the moment of invisibility, On Not Looking does the same for visibility that is not looked at. Put another way: opacity is found beyond the spaces of representation, in places the camera is unable to see, or alternatively, where the camera overdetermines the field of representation such that the spectator’s conditions of perception, her relationship with the image and its subjects, become clouded and marked by uncertainty. Not looking can be conceived of as another form of potential: where representation is perspicacious, and yet the decision is made to not look by cameras and viewers. In turn, this act of not looking holds within it the possibility of new insight. ICONOCLASM/ICONOPHILIA/ANCIENT EXPRESSIONS OF SKEPTICISM TOWARD IMAGES On Not Looking brings into focus what might be thought of as contemporary forms of iconoclasm. If not looking is placed in a historical tradition of Western iconoclasm, the forms of physical turning away, distraction, prohibition against looking discussed by contributors are both specific to the contemporary early twenty-first century context and simultaneously add texture to the political commitment of centuries-old practices of iconoclasm. Typically and historically, the iconoclastic gesture is contradictory and often ambivalent. If we accept the iconoclastic gesture as a politically progressive event due to its destruction of existing religious as well as political and social conventions, contemporary not looking takes up and transforms the politics of that gesture.55 However, there is a side to iconoclasm that is in the perpetuation of institutional power. To cite an early example: protestant violations of graven images were always performed in the name of safeguarding the principles of the Bible as religious doctrine.56 On Not Looking engages with this contradiction by demonstrating an awareness of the contemporary ambivalence toward images and spectatorship. In contemporary manifestations, this is commonly found in instances of not looking within institutional boundaries—museums, the police, the press—and as contributions here demonstrate, not looking is a strategy used to safeguard conservative State control as well as to contest it, simultaneously. In its historical manifestation, not looking can be traced back to some of the earliest religious prohibitions on the temptation to look, a temptation which necessarily led to idolatry.57 To name the most obvious example, in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, the prohibition on image idolatry begins with the second commandment: the ban on graven images. This ban is, in turn, an insurance against the temptation to worship false gods, thus to ensure that which has earthly beauty is not placed in higher regard,

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or idolized, above and beyond God himself.58 Classical iconoclasm and iconophobia were connected to and practiced by those wanting to maintain such religious beliefs and conventions.59 Political and social acts of iconoclasm extend back to medieval times, and in modernity they are generally thought to be set in motion by the destruction of Louis XVI’s statue in Place Vendôme in central Paris at the time of the French Revolution.60 In the twentieth century, the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution, fueled by religious iconoclastic principles, are said to echo the battle for the French Republic and liberal democracy as it was founded in 1871. In the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, political and social acts of iconoclasm have continued to protest against religious or State dogma. For example, the Communist overthrow of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1920s and 1930s included the widespread destruction of religious imagery.61 When the destruction of icons and idols in the name of revolution in the twentieth century were not motivated by religion, in their rebellion against political regimes, they overthrew States that took the place of religion or the monarchy as an omnipresent power. For example, the widespread destruction of Lenin’s statue throughout Eastern Europe that transformed the Soviet Union into Russia in 1989 echoed the Soviet Revolution seventy years earlier. In Soviet society, dictatorial politics were upheld as religion, and the downfall of the system was underlined by the destruction of its idol.62 These acts of iconoclasm speak out against a regime that had replaced religion: as Boris Groys puts it, the more recent civil unrest in the former Soviet Union represented “the ceremonious dismantling and removal of the fallen idols of socialism, this time in the name of the even more powerful religion of unrestrained consumerism.”63 Yet another form of worship was put in its place, a system in which material forms and rituals are destroyed and redeployed in cyclical fashion. Contemporary image theorists such as Rancière, Demos, Ariella Azoulay, Bruno Latour, and Peter Weibel, to name those whose work has direct relevance, set the stage for On Not Looking because they engage the contradictory impulses of iconoclasm.64 In its address of questions of distraction, contemporary iconoclasm, and the struggle against the destruction of images, as well as the wont not to look, Latour and Weibel’s work penetrates the élan of contemporary image culture through what they call its domains of knowledge.65 The Iconoclash exhibition at Karlsruhe and catalogue essays rerepresent, summarize, and interrogate the conceptions of iconoclasm that have held sway for two millennia. They also historically contextualize the contemporary departures from ancient through classical and modern forms of iconoclasm. On Not Looking’s conception of not looking is indebted to the history outlined by Latour. Most significantly, Latour himself, and by extension the Karlsruhe exhibition he cocurated with Weibel in 2002, insisted on the necessary imbrications of iconoclasm and idolatry, the destruction and creation of images, and the other paradoxes invested in the structures that produce and look at images in contemporary culture.

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For Latour, every act of destruction is an act of genesis and creation—an atonement for, often in the form of an unconscious reconstruction, through the act of destruction. It is, in effect, an act of conservation and reparation for the damage caused to images out of hatred, even as they are destroyed. As Latour demonstrates, this is not a historical phenomenon. It is a result of the very motivation and process of icon smashing. Latour travels across centuries, oceans, media, political cultures, and cultural institutions to demonstrate his argument: Jesus chasing the merchants out of the Temple, Bach shocking the dull music out of the Leipzig congregation’s ears, Malevich painting the black square to access the cosmic forces that remained hidden in classical representative painting, the Tibetan sage extinguishing the butt of a cigarette on a Buddha’s head to show its illusory character. The damage done to icons is, to them, always a charitable injunction to redirect the attention towards other, newer, fresher, more sacred images: not to do without the image.66 It is important to note that Latour’s monumental exhibition and accompanying catalogue are focused on the destruction of and nihilism toward and in images, which, of course, goes hand in hand with the worship of images. He is not interested in not looking as a physical gesture before a material image. The Iconoclash exhibition and the accompanying catalogue are, in keeping with the scholarship on iconoclasm, less about specific images and acts of looking and more about the philosophical tradition concerned with how images behave in the world, how we behave towards images. The catalogue essays examine the destruction, erasure, and defacement of images that have failed to tell the truth—a truth that is so vehemently, sometimes religiously, demanded of images. Contrarily, On Not Looking identifies the creativity of acts of not looking and in images that do not look, even when they are involved in iconoclastic practices. On Not Looking speaks to other reconceptions of the image, and studies on the role of the image in contemporary culture as they are determined by an iconoclastic perception. For example, Ann Kibbey’s Theory of the Image is indicative of the work done in the fields of gender, race, and sexuality studies that seek to undo or refute the power relations motivated by a dynamics of desire between the viewer and the viewed.67 Critics continue to investigate the trafficking of desire, power, and objectification of the other through the gaze. Other critics have also continued to theorize ways that the objectified might in fact avoid or resist that gaze.68 Kibbey’s book works to counter the plethora of literature on conceptions of “the gaze” that has, from the beginning, been concerned to articulate the woman’s entrapment by and within the image, and thus the capitalist ideology that produces her. Since the early work of feminist critics such as Laura Mulvey, Griselda Pollock, and Mary Ann Doane, who focused on the objectifying properties of the

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male gaze, the mechanisms of the gaze have become ever more refined and nuanced.69 However, Kibbey challenges the very preconditions and assumptions on which these theories are based. Rather than reformulating existing conceptions of the gaze and its object—for example, conceptions that are built on conservative and racist assumptions about contemporary photographic and filmic images—she questions the assumptions themselves.70 Ultimately, a critic such as Kibbey demonstrates how the image has been misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted through a belief in an “iconic cinema.” Significantly, On Not Looking does not assume that images have been misread or misunderstood. Rather, the collection departs from these theoretical assumptions in an attempt to uncouple the previously fixed, and dichotomous, oppositional relationship between looking and not looking as the basis for a rupture of the logic of the gaze as it has been conventionally and historically conceived. Lastly, in work that currently sits at the forefront of theorizations of the political potential of the image, Ariella Azoulay has shifted the terms of understanding the way that photography produces meaning and agency for those it engages.71 In what she posits as a response to the turn away from images of horror and trauma by theorists in the latter half of the twentieth century—Roland Barthes, Baudrillard, Sontag—Azoulay reconceives the power of photography. She is interested in the space between the photographic act, the photograph itself, the photographed person(s), the spectator. The space created between these “subjects” of photography is a “civil space,” a critical space in which the participants share a recognition and responsibility of their agency as a community. Thus, the ethical imperative to engage with the photograph is political because this is where meaning, and thus the possibility of change, lies. On Not Looking extends and elaborates on Azoulay’s discussions of the withholding of the image as a strategy of power, a tool of violence, particularly for her as it is practiced in the institutional and state taboos on images in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967.72 According to Azoulay, it is our responsibility to engage in the dialogue with photography, its subjects and producers, that is, to cosign the “civil contract of photography.” Effectively, all of the chapters here take up this mantel, and the book as a whole participates in current debates by offering different modes of retraining the look to ensure resistance, opposition and more conscious “citizens.” However, in distinction to Azoulay’s urgent call to look again, as well as for the first time, throughout On Not Looking the power of not looking is conceived as a conscious act. Images and viewers that do not look open up to the possibility of a retrained looking, looking that, in turn, produces new understandings of images and viewers. In the contemporary moment there is an urgent call to interrogate and understand what images see, who produced them and why, the uses to which they are put, the beliefs and expectations that are attached to them. Because of their imbrication in wars, violence, repression, political and personal oppression, material images impact people’s lives like never before.

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Similarly, even in a digital age in which images and the objects or the events they picture are apparently no longer coexistent, according to the discourses that surround them, the two have never been more inseparable.73 For these reasons, “seeing” from different perspectives, knowing through not looking and understanding anew through looking and not looking are conscious activities that must go hand in hand with the proliferation of images today. On Not Looking is conceived as one such activity.

SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS

Images that Don’t Look On Not Looking is organized into four sections, each of which is organized around shared theoretical and thematic concerns. Simultaneously, the different chapters are arranged to ensure a conversation between sections, the first of which is concerned with images that don’t look. The three chapters in this section demonstrate the embrace of not looking as a practice that opens up to the possibility of a mobile and thinking spectator, as well as creates the space for multiple viewing responses. Each demonstrates how the resonance of not looking on the manifest level of the image is primary to its agency. The chapters in this section are perhaps best understood within the context of discussions on the agency of the image to effect change, to speak on behalf of the silenced, to represent the powerless. Often recalling the work of Bertolt Brecht and subsequently that of Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, twentieth-century critics insisted on the imperative to look as the basis of a conscious spectator who does not simply fall into a subconscious reverie, a reverie that Adorno after Brecht convinced us was the intention of mass culture. The spectator in these discourses has to be thinking as well as entertained.74 The most notable theorization and conceptions of the active, thinking spectator were those of critics whose work was inspired by 1970s Screen theorists, albeit in a gesture of countering their insistence on the role of the unconscious in the spectatorial experience.75 However, it is rarely proposed that not looking might be a conscious, political choice on the part of the image and of the spectator. The three contributions to this section add the necessary complement to this line of thinking when they argue that not looking in fact enables an active, politicized spectator. Daniel Sack offers an innovative interpretation of the potentiality of blindness and the prohibition on looking that is the result of Anthony Gormley’s Blind Light (2007) and Kurt Hentschlager’s ZEE (2008), both of which create clouds that produce a completely different relationship to the world, different from our usual choice to see as a tool to orient, to understand, to know. Through the experience of the cloud, dense opaque nothingness as a form of material and existential oblivion of the artworks encourages a spectator who looks but discovers she is not looking, and,

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consequently, sees herself in a different way. Both art installations remove the “responsibility” that goes hand in hand with the look and with visual perception. Freed of this encumbrance, therefore, the enlightened spectator or visitor to these installations becomes engaged in the politics of vision and looking as it has been theorized and theorized again in the twentieth century. Because that vein of looking is rendered redundant, it is through not looking and not seeing that the spectator is made critical and conscious. Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin provide a commentary on and analysis of their own DVD images Lossless (2007–) which is, itself, an analysis of digital media’s operation beyond the limits of human perception. Baron and Goodwin reproduce and manipulate the tiny black squares that are the only visual resonance of the digitized image. Thus, in a curious unveiling through making visible the (non) materiality of the digital, the artists transfer 16 mm fragments of well-known films to DVD and argue that we are never looking at what we claim to be seeing. Indeed, we never see what it is we are looking at. However, unlike the policemen in William E. Jones’s Tearoom (chapter 3), the viewer of Baron and Goodwin’s images knows that she is not looking at the original film; that is, she knows it is a referential image. Thus, Baron and Goodwin argue that the viewer of the digital is not deceived, does not project expectations and preformed images onto the graphic shapes. Rather, the images point up modes of (not) looking that require a whole new phenomenology and epistemology of the digital— conceptions that have not yet been conceived. James Polchin analyzes Jones’s Tearoom (2007), a video representation of footage that shows a deliberate placement of the film camera, a placement that nevertheless results in an unawareness of its not looking at what it claims to see. In this instance, police footage does not look at the clandestine and illegal acts of homosexual sex in a men’s public bathroom in Ohio, 1962. Nevertheless, as Polchin demonstrates in his examination of Tearoom and the life story of the archival footage it collates, the images are treated by various State institutions—including the press, the law, the Ohio State government—as though they look at the acts in full view. Polchin’s reading of Jones’s video representation of the police footage within the context of its dissemination and use in the early 1960s magnifies the insidiousness of not looking in the interests of reinforcing homophobic prejudice in Midwest America in the 1960s. Polchin sees Tearoom during its exhibition at the Whitney Museum Biennale in 2008 and there encounters a new context for the original footage in its represented form. This in turn creates another discourse of discomfort, and eventually, not looking at images of sexual activities in the museum space in forty-six years later.

The Privilege of the Other Senses Engaging with the long discursive history of looking and seeing as epistemology, the contributions in this section expose the way that the other senses are, today, in the forefront of aesthetic modes of perceiving and

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understanding the world. Traditionally, if the hand or the haptic were shown, it was thought to be for the purpose of depicting a form of destruction, of countering vision, of rendering looking null and void. Hands were considered to wipe the slate clean, destroying the work of the eye.76 More recently, scholars of the moving image in particular have complicated these assumptions in their theorizations of touch as an epistemology that complements seeing.77 Indeed, it can be argued that while the insistence on the primacy of vision and ocularity has continued to gather force in the writing on images, images and art objects themselves have always sought to engage the other senses. In my chapter on Richard Serra’s Promenade in the Monumenta series at the Grand Palais in 2008, I demonstrate how peripatetic motion was the required mode of experiencing the work. In turn, this motion was interwoven with a pull to the plates that both incited other senses—touch, hearing—as well as encouraged the visitor to look elsewhere. This embodied form of “spectatorship,” together with the materiality of the sculpture and its engagement with modernity as it is manifest in the material history of the structure of the Grand Palais, Serra’s work challenges the overwhelming privilege apparently given to vision, sight, and looking as the defining experience of modernity. I demonstrate how Promenade confuses the limits of modernity, modernist sculpture, and the expectations of an artwork such that the predominance of vision and ocularity within these histories is questioned, or dispersed. Through integration into contemporary Paris, the sculptural installation embraced the city’s history as it conversed with the Grand Palais as an iron and glass cathedral to turn of the twentieth-century modernity. At the very same time, through a unique process of experiencing the steel plates, the visitor becomes lost in a peripatetic motion that creates an intimacy with the steel plates, thus losing the city as reference to the experience, resting in the present experience of the body. Looking at the five steel plates of Promenade leads to various forms of not looking that, in turn, are integrated back into knowledge and understanding through the senses. These multiple experiences of looking and not looking in the presence of Promenade reflect on the complexity of vision in conceptions of early twentieth-century modernism and modernity. Craig G. Staff analyzes the drawings of Claude Heath, works in which the hand does not disenchant or dispel the illusion but rather is used as a way of creating—not looking but seeing, truth and sanctity. According to Staff, in Heath’s drawings, looking is dethroned as the primary and necessary way of knowing the world and the genesis of creativity. In its place, touch and a haptic visuality become the medium of communication between artist, drawings as image, and viewer. Staff demonstrates that this unique mode of perception and production is in fact the legacy of the Surrealists, and that Heath’s innovations bring to light the importance of not looking in the production of European avant-garde art in the prewar years. Again, while vision is often celebrated as the mode of discovery in Surrealist art, it is undergirded by a turning away and physical blindness.

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Not Looking at Bodies and Cultures on the Margins The three contributions to this section are consciously grouped together to emphasize certain images’ inversion of assumptions about disenfranchisement through looking at, objectifying, entrapment of those who are not given, or are robbed of the privilege of speech and action. Typically, these assumptions have dominated literature on race, gender, and nation. In an elaboration of the theorization of opacity, these chapters examine images that invert, turn inside out, and subvert both the conventional ways of looking at black and marginalized bodies, and cultures of disempowerment. The images examined are radical because their complication of conventional ways of looking—through different strategies of not looking—enables a rearticulation of the subjectivity and personhood, or what Azoulay would call the citizenship of the peoples and cultures in the images. The three chapters in this section sit at the cutting edge of the possibility of what can be realized through not looking. In each case, the still and moving images—photographs, video, cinema—embrace not looking as a political strategy that frees the subject of race, gender and nation from the intransigence of the subject-object/master-slave dichotomies that are the basis and the result of conventional discourses and practices of looking. Alessandra Raengo’s contribution is the first of two pieces concerned with the historical struggle of African Americans to be seen. “©AMOUFLAGE” extends the now canonical work of cultural critics and theorists such as Franz Fanon and more recently, Henry Lewis Gates, and their attunement to the complex racial dynamics of seeing and being seen. Raengo focuses on Hank Willis Thomas’s reformulation of well-known advertising campaigns that center on the exploitation of the male body. Raengo studies Thomas’s photographs, and penetrates the complex ways that advertising and other forms of visual representation are culturally designed to objectify the black body for the ease of its consumption, a consumption that is central to the perpetuation of capitalism. Raengo unveils Thomas’s refusal to allow the viewer of his images to look at, thus to consume the black body by fragmenting it. Similarly, Raengo reveals just how unsettling these images are because, like Pfeiffer’s, they point back to the epistemological and ontological conditions that sustain the cultural ignorance of racial identity and histories. However, unlike Adan’s essay, according to Raengo, it is our tendency not to look, rather than to look too much at race that is the offense of the white audience of the image of the black man. Sonja A. J. Neef offers a radically new approach to the palimpsestic films and drawings of the South African artist William Kentridge. Kentridge’s work has often been discussed as a making visible of memory, history, and colonialism. Neef’s analysis of Felix in Exile (1994), however, argues differently. Neef claims that for all the looking, the use of instruments of seeing (such as the telescope, the film camera, the camera obscura and so on), the depiction of truth in Kentridge’s films lies in the space of disappearance, the trace of what is no longer, and the practice of not looking in these

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spaces and places. Similarly, where exile, colonial injustice, and apartheid are conventionally understood to be enforced and reinforced through the technical instruments that pervade Kentridge’s images, Neef argues that, according to Kentridge, it is in fact the opposite: that the imperceptible laws of such injunctions are found in the censorship and not looking that is performed through these instruments of supposed visibility. Neef’s contribution establishes a conversation with the earlier chapters on images that do not look, as well as those on not looking at bodies as a political act. However, rather than removing or fragmenting the image to be looked at as a strategy to bring the oppressed or colonized body back into existence, Neef argues that Kentridge insists on the possibility of rehabilitation on what she terms the “horizon of disappearance,” a horizon that Kentridge draws, rubs out, redraws and replaces again and again. Elizabeth Adan’s chapter on Paul Pfeiffer’s Long Count series speaks to the same cultural discourses that define the field of race studies as those addressed in Raengo’s chapter. Adan annexes Pfeiffer’s digital effacement of the black male body (such as Mohammad Ali) from archival footage of 1950s boxing matches. Adan shows how Pfeiffer replaces the once hypervisible black body with a palimpsestic image of the audience present at the same boxing matches. Thus, the audience now in the ring becomes the “spectacle” that is consumed and subsumed by us as the audience of Pfeiffer’s image. Pfeiffer’s visual transformation of the politics of looking at black male bodies on display not only destabilizes the politics of their spectacularization, but through looking, through watching its surrogate, we devour what we nevertheless do not look at—the display of black male prowess in the ring. Thus, Adan argues that Pfeiffer’s audience is destabilized through the video maker’s refusal to pander to its own desire to look and objectify through looking.

Institutions Overpower Images This section foregrounds three intriguing instances in which practices of not looking undergird invisible forms of manipulation of the viewer-assubject by State institutions in the interests of bolstering their political and ideological power. In the wake of Foucault’s compelling theorization of the Panopticon and other mechanisms of State control, political and ideological manipulation have been theorized over and over again as being achieved through the power of the “gaze,” through looking and visual surveillance. The three essays in this section unsettle the dominance of Foucault’s model of governance by visual control when they reveal how the refusal, inability, and prohibition to look are as insidious to the maintenance of the social status quo in the United States as well as abroad. Stéphanie Benzaquen’s chapter points to an example of government manipulation, in this case by the Khmer Rouge in Democratic Kampuchea in the 1970s. Benzaquen exposes how the Khmer Rouge’s professed “image”

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of Kampuchea subtly manipulated Western journalists such that they did not look at the crimes and violence of the dictatorship on its assumption of power. Benzaquen considers the life of two sets of photographs: first, an image of President of the Cambodian Assembly Ung Bun Hor, who was violated by officials at the French Embassy in Phnom Penh as it fell to the Khmer Rouge on May 19, 1975. Second, she brings to light a series of photographs taken in 1978 and published in 1979 by Swedish photographer Gunnar Bergstrom, which picture the idyllic and productive lives of Cambodians, images taken during Bergstrom’s official guided tour of the country. In both cases, the photographers chose to accept the official image given them by the State and choose not to look at the uncompromising violation of human rights that were the day-to-day reality of life under the rule of the Communist Party. Benzaquen reveals the devastating consequences of this type of not looking by the West as it is here exemplified in the journalists’ photographs. Thanks to the dissemination of the images, the Pol Pot regime was free to continue its governance without repercussions from the international organizations to which the rulers were supposedly responsible. While Benzaquen’s chapter is specifically concerned with the unacknowledged and unchallenged violation of human rights in 1970s Cambodia, its findings hold a mirror to the West’s ongoing blindness toward contemporary crimes in other states, a blindness that begins with ideologically determined practices of not looking. Rebecca A. Adelman considers the complex historical and political ramifications of the American press ban on photographing dead and wounded soldiers on their return home from the battlefield. In a policy that has held since the days of the Crimean War in 1855, photographers and filmmakers have been instructed not to photograph their own dead, dying, and injured bodies at war.78 This was until Barack Obama gestured to lift the policy that banned the photography of US military coffins in 2009. Adelman demonstrates how, despite this apparent lifting of the ban by the Obama Administration, there has been little change in the current policy as it was imposed by George H. W. Bush’s Administration in 1991. Adelman argues that the effective prohibition on images of the dead is a way for the US government to maintain its power and mobility on the battlefield. By not allowing its people to look at the tragedy, the cost of human life on the battlefield, they are given no evidence with which to condemn the governmental perpetuation of its senseless involvement in war. While this hiding of the reality of war might be nothing new to an educated audience, I deliberately juxtapose Adelman’s and Benzaquen’s contributions to create a suggestive possibility of consistency between Pol Pot’s regime and the blinding of American citizens by successive administrations in the post-Vietnam War period. Øyvind Vågnes’s chapter on Malcolm Browne’s photograph of the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc focuses on an example of simultaneous looking and not looking at a traumatized victim. Again, its resonance with

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the other two chapters in this section is provocative: even though Vågnes discusses an event apparently at a historical and geographic remove from traumatic historical events closer to home, the West’s involvement, its decision to not look, literally and ideologically, as well as its removal of the possibility of a viewer’s look is still a strategy of power used today. In what can be argued as a characteristic of all photography, while Browne’s photograph became circulated as the iconic image of this event, it did not show or make visible the reason why the Buddhist monk set himself on fire on the night of June 10, 1963, in Saigon. This is, nevertheless, the question demanded of the image by audiences, viewers, and people around the world who have looked to it ever since for an explanation of the events it captures. Vågnes’s contribution considers the imbrication of not looking in the hermeneutic of photography as a medium when he shows that the image of self-immolation has become an iconic protest of the Vietnamese against their government for allowing the American invasion. As such, it is not supposed to provide answers but works better as a form of not looking, not giving access to what everyone wants to know. We look to the image for something that it does not see because it was not looking in the first place. The political ramifications of Vågnes’s argument are immense: Browne’s image of pain was not looked at and it visualizes a collective pain that was not looked at, was ignored in the first place. Or put another way, the image of Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation is a form of looking at “what is not looked at,” what is ignored in the cultural imaginary. Vågnes demonstrates how the image’s refusal to “look at” the motivation for the self-immolation enables its own appropriation of the act of self-immolation for the staging of protests outside of itself. Thus, in the representation of not looking in Browne’s photograph we see the exact opposite political and ethical ramifications of the practice of not looking, of images that do not look. Once again we find in Vågnes’s reading of the image and its context, an articulate embodiment of the anthology’s assertion that the political does not lie inherent to the image itself but rather in the way it is used.

NOTES 1. Hamid Naficy identifies the prosecution and defense use of the Holliday footage as an “overreliance on vision as a marker of truth,” an overreliance that has raised many issues for film and television studies and its understanding of the “authenticity of the image.” Hamid Naficy, “King Rodney: The Rodney King Video and Textual Analysis,” in The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, ed. Jon Lewis (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 300–04. 2. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 13. 3. Jacques Rancière, “The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics,” Ibid., 12–19.

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4. Peter Weibel, “An End to the ‘End of Art’ ”? On the Iconoclasm of Modern Art,” in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 636. 5. Each of these types of not looking is taken up in the anthology. As illustration of them, see chapters by Neef, Vagnes, and Raengo, respectively. 6. See also, for example, Sidney Bernstein and Brian Blake, A Painful Reminder: Evidence for All Mankind (London: Granada Television, 1985). This argument was an extension, and many claim a misinterpretation, of Adorno’s claim that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz in a letter to Walter Benjamin. It was theoretically articulated by Saul Friedländer in his Introduction to Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’ ed. Saul Friedländer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 1–21. 7. Frances Guerin, Introduction to Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xiii–xxiv. 8. Jacques Rancière, “The Intolerable Image,” in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 83–105. 9. Barbie Zelizer was one of the first within image studies to come out and openly say that looking is a necessary part of dealing with the trauma of the Holocaust for survivors of every generation. See, for example, Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). More recently, Georges Didi-Huberman’s work on the images taken by resistance workers has the potential to revolutionize the way we see any images, particularly, those taken by Germans. See Georges Didi-Huberman, “Against All Unimaginable,” in Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 19–29. Didi-Huberman’s book received severe criticism because the images of naked women being driven towards the gas chamber amid open air burning of corpses were a lie. According to Gérard Wajcman, the four photographs did not represent what they said they did; they did not represent the Nazi Holocaust. See Gérard Wajcman, “De la croyance photographique,” Les Temps modernes 56, no. 613 (March–May 2001): 46–83, 63; Élisabeth Pagnoux, “Reporter photographe à ‘Auschwitz,’ ” les temps Modernes 56, no. 613 (March–May 2001): 84–108. See also Guerin Introduction to Through Amateur Eyes. 10. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 44. 11. There are an increasing number of examples of such films, particularly those depicting crimes in regions otherwise forgotten or ignored by the West. See for example, Ted Braun, Darfur Now (USA: Crescendo Productions, 2007); Greg Barker and Darren Kemp, Ghosts of Rwanda (USA: Frontline, 2004); Andre Anton, Defying Deletion: The Fight over Iraq’s Nineveh Plains (USA: Lamassu Productions, 2011). 12. The most obvious and complicated examples of image censorship comes in the publication of sexually explicit documents on the Internet. Then there are the examples of art deemed politically dangerous, such as that of Ai Weiwei for the Chinese government. 13. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Penguin, 2003), especially chapter 3. 14. Hersonski made this observation in a question and answer session at a screening of her film at New York University, in April 2011. Yael Hersonski, A Film Unfinished (Tel Aviv: Noemi Schory and Itay Ken-Tor, 2010). 15. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

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16. See Hans Belting, Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs (Munich: Schirmer/ Mosel, 2001). 17. Irit Rogoff, “Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture,” in After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, ed. Gavin Butt (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 117. 18. Ibid., 119–20. 19. Paul Virilio, Art as Far as the Eye Can See, trans. Julie Rose (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007). 20. See also Paul Virilio, Art and Fear (London: Continuum, London, 2003), in which Virilio argues that the contemporary cultural landscape is marked out by a bombardment of sound and images that deliberately stymie looking. 21. Nicolas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2005). Quotation from 75. 22. Benjamin J. Goold, CCTV and Policing: Public Area Surveillance and Police Practices in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also Gary Armstrong, The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV (Oxford: Berg, 1999). 23. This is discussed in chapter 6 by Alessandra Raengo with reference to Hank Willis Thomas’s photographs. 24. Jonathan Crary’s work has been influential in bringing these discourses, particularly as they have developed around new technologies from the late-nineteenth century, into widespread circulation. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Film theorists such as Laura Marks and Vivian Sobchack have taken the notion of the embodiment of vision to a whole new level in their discussions of the multisensory film experience. See, for example, Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). 25. Rancière, “The Intolerable Image,” pp. 97–100. This same end of creating memories of traumatic historical events in the body of the viewer who has not experienced the events is explored in a multiplicity of ways in diverse postmodernist art installations. See, for example, my discussion of Christian Boltanski’s installations: Frances Guerin, “The Corporealization of Memory in Christian Boltanski’s Installations,” in Memoryscapes: Filmformen der Erinnerung, eds. Ute Höll and Matthias Wittman (Berlin: Diaphenes, 2014), 157–77. 26. Ibid. 27. These forms of exhibition and display are often calling for a performative engagement from the spectator. See Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s discussion of this in a range of cultural and artistic displays in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Rogoff also gives another example of this performative engagement in Rogoff, “Looking Away.” 28. There is a wealth of material on the intimate relationship of the media and the United States government in Vietnam. See, for example, Daniel C. Hallin, “The Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). Hallin also details the centrality of television in the demise of the American military offensive. 29. See, for example, William M. Hammond’s detailed account of the complex and often contradictory relationship between press and the government. William M. Hammond, Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000).

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30. Hallin, “The Uncensored War,” 105–06. 31. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 32. As George Roeder Jr. argues, this has been the concern of the US government since the participation in World War II. The censoring of images of war is not new to a post-Vietnam society, but rather, it is the ease of access to the medium of production that creates a proliferation of images that fall through the cracks, and it is when this happens that new sanctions are imposed on the imaging of war. See George Roeder Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 33. Interestingly, the sanctions imposed on circulation of images of America at war have been both directly and indirectly challenged by a proliferation of amateur images that began to flood the World Wide Web. Until this channel of circulation then became censored and used in the interests of bolstering, not countering authority. On the manipulation of these images see Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon. 34. Virilio, Art as Far as the Eye Can See. 35. Ibid., 5. 36. Ibid., 30. 37. Paul Virilio, Art as Far as the Eye Can See. 38. W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror? The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 79. 39. Crary, Techniques of the Observer. 40. For a selection of essays on the heterogeneity of this debate see, Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay, eds. Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight (New York: Routledge, 1996). 41. See especially Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 42. Michael Kelly makes the argument that philosophers from Hegel to Arthur Danto repeatedly expect to find truth in the image and are then disappointed and so see it as a failure. See Michael Kelly, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On this side effect of contemporary iconoclasm, see also Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, Introduction to The Image and the Witness, eds. Guerin and Hallas (London: Wallflower, 2007), 8–10. 43. Ibid. 44. This work was really first done in relationship to literature and history by people such as Stephen Greenblatt (literature) and Hayden White (history), and since the 1990s has spawned a specific methodology and intellectual position. See Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Hayden White, The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 45. The notion of a Romantic vision or insight that is enabled in the interstice between darkness and light, and that has a clarity that is beyond the contradictions and harsh polarities of lived reality can be traced in the work of philosophers such as Nietzsche (The Wanderer and His Shadow) to painters such as Casper David Friedrich, and in France, writers such as Diderot or Victor Hugo. 46. On the role of vision and the thematization of visual perception in works of the Romantic period, particularly in Germany, see Brad Prager, Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images, Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture Series (Rochester: Camden House, 2007).

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47. Lisa Cartwright and Marita Sturken, eds., Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 48. Cartwright and Sturken, eds., Practices of Looking. See particularly chapters 5 & 6, “The Mass Media and the Public Sphere” and “Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire,” Ibid., 151–236 49. David Levin, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). See also Martin Jay, “The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism,” Poetics Today 9, no. 2, Special Issue on the Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric (1988): 307–26. 50. Thus, for example, Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes examines the critique of vision in twentieth-century France. Jay unravels the skepticism of leading French thinkers towards vision as a mode of accessing the world due to its annexation as a way to promulgate spectacle and surveillance. See also David Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999) and Levin, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Both works are devoted to the dominance of ocular discourses, practices, and institutions in modernity and the problems such dominance has caused. 51. For the anthropological discourse on vision, see Lucien Taylor, ed., Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R., 1990–1994 (New York: Routledge, 1996). 52. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for Routledge for pointing out these discourses to me. Much of the contemporary work that engages with opacity begins with Éduoard Glissant’s work on the unknowability of the other. See, for example, Éduoard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). For a discussions of opacity as it relates to contemporary art, see T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), especially chapter 9. 53. See also Stuart Hall and Sarat Maharaj, “Modernity and Difference,” in Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in an Era of Globalisation, ed. Gilane Tawadros (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2004), 190–95. 54. Also, it is a strategy taken up by Western, often dominant, discourses within modernist art, even digital art. Hall is interested in a more conventional practice of making visible the traces and remnants that escape representation, or are left behind. In keeping with his commitment to the postcolonialist discourse, Hall discusses practices that are concerned to make the invisible visible, the what is not said and seen sayable and visible. 55. See Alan Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 56. The Old Testament forbids the making of “any graven image, or the likeness of anything that is in heaven above or in the earth below.” Exodus 20:4–6, King James Bible. 57. Besançon, The Forbidden Image. 58. The commandment found in Exodus is echoed throughout the Old Testament as a prohibition on idols other than God. Exodus 34:17, Leviticus 26:1, Numbers 12:8 are some examples. 59. Leslie Brubaker, Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2012). 60. Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). 61. Richard Stites, “Iconoclastic Currents in the Russian Revolution: Destroying and Preserving the Past,” in Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order

Introduction

62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69.

35

in the Russian Revolution, eds., Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 1–24. See also Nicola Lambourne, War Damage in Western Europe: The Destruction of Historic Monuments During the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). Besançon also has a chapter on the iconoclasm of monochrome Russian art. See Besançon, “The Russian Revolution,” in The Forbidden Image, 319–72. See, for example, Dianne Kirby, ed., Religion and the Cold War (London: Palgrave, 2013). Groys, “Iconoclasm as an Artistic Device/Iconoclastic Strategies in Film,” in Iconoclash, 282. Rancière, “The Intolerable Image”; Demos, The Migrant Image; Latour and Weibel, Iconoclash; Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008). Latour is best known for his work as an anthropologist of science and culture. See, for example, Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Latour, “What Is Iconoclash,” 27. Ann Kibbey, Theory of the Image: Capitalism, Contemporary Film, and Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). The work of W.J.T. Mitchell and James Elkins also challenge to the assumptions and philosophies of ocularcentrism is the reinstatement of the image at the center, as the focus of our approach to the phenomenological world. Both elaborate on the idea of looking but not seeing. Elkins bemoans the tendency to not look, to look without seeing, and in its place proposes ways of looking. While Mitchell’s work is motivated by the fact that we don’t take images seriously, that we look at them with a preconceived agenda—specifically a Capitalist desire to consume and destroy—never asking them what they want or what they are about. See W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); James Elkins, How to Use Your Eyes (New York: Routledge, 2008). Some of the most interesting work in this area has been done by critics of race, gender, and sexuality. See, for an early example, bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992); and also, for an example of the type of criticism that had become widespread by the turn of the century, Karina Eileras, “Reframing the Colonial Gaze: Photography, Ownership, and Feminist Resistance,” MLN 118, no. 4 (2003): 807–40; and, more recently, in his important work on the way the enslaved, colonized and otherwise marginalized take back the gaze in a gesture of resistance, Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Palgrave, 1989), 14–30; Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 2003); Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23, nos. 3–4 (1982): 74–88. The second generation of feminist film theory creates more nuanced spaces of looking and pleasure, again, with significant influence by developments in postcolonial studies. See, for example, Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory,” Cultural Critique 4 (Autumn, 1986): 59–79;

36

70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

76. 77.

78.

Frances Guerin Tania Modleski, “Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 208–28. Again, Mirzoeff’s work is one of the most recent and most sophisticated of these rearticulations. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look. Kibbey, Theory of the Image. Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography. Interestingly, in the final pages, Azoulay discusses the blindfolding of Palestinian prisoners as a symbolic refusal of vision akin to the absence of photographs of rape. She doesn’t make the equation, but the two types of photographs have the same status in her argument. Ibid., 217–470. A number of critics and historians are committed to analyzing the images that underline the urgent project to continue examination of the role of images in the political culture. See, for example, Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All; Rancière, “The Intolerable Image”; Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); the essays collected in Geoffrey Batchen, ed., Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (London: Reaktion, 2012); Leigh Renee Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). For an engagement with Adorno’s argument on mass culture and the resonance, if through critique, in conceptions of postmodern spectatorship, see Max Pensky, The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997). See, for example, the work of feminists such as Claire Johnston, ed., Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1975). Also significant here is the work of the postcolonial image theorists, work that burgeoned in the 1980s. Again, bell hooks work is a good example here. See bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks, 115–51. A more recent example from film studies would be Alison Ravenscroft, The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race (London: Ashgate, 2012). Gamboni, The Destruction of Art. Marks, The Skin of the Film; Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts; Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and, more recently, Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009). The major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum devoted to the imbrication of photography and war makes convincing evidence that despite these directives there has always been an abundance of images of death, destruction, and the violations of war on and off the battlefield. See Anne Wilkes Tucker et al., WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012).

REFERENCES A Film Unfinished. Directed by Yael Heronski. Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2010. A Painful Reminder: Evidence for All Mankind. Directed by Sidney Bernstein and Brian Blake. Granada Television International, 1985. Armstrong, Gary. The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV. Oxford: Berg, 1999.

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Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Barker, Jennifer. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009. Batchen, Geoffrey. Editor. Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis. London: Reaktion, 2012. Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Belting, Hans. Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2001. Besançon, Alan. The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Brennan, Teresa, and Jay, Martin. Editors. Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. New York: Routledge, 1996. Brubaker, Leslie. Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2012. Cartwright, Lisa, and Sturken, Marita. Editors. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Darfur Now. Directed by Ted Braun. Warner Independent Pictures and Participant Productions, 2007. Defying Deletion: The Fight Over Iraq’s Nineveh Plains. Directed by Andre Anton. Lammasu Productions, 2014. Demos, T. J. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Originally published as Images Malgré Tout. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2003. Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator.” Screen 23, nos. 3–4 (1982): 74–88. Eileras, Karina. “Reframing the Colonial Gaze: Photography, Ownership, and Feminist Resistance.” MLN 118, no. 4 (2003): 807–40. Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Simon and Schuster,1996. ———. How to Use Your Eyes. New York: Routledge, 2008. Friedländer, Saul. Editor. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Gaines, Jane. “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory.” Cultural Critique 4 (Autumn 1986): 59–79. Gamboni, Dario. The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. Ghosts of Rwanda. Directed by Greg Barker and Darren Kemp. Frontline, 2004. Glissant, Éduoard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Goold, Benjamin J. CCTV and Policing: Public Area Surveillance and Police Practices in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Greenblatt, Stephen. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Guerin, Frances. Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ———. “The Corporealization of Memory in Christian Boltanski’s Installations.” In Memoryscapes: Filmformen der Erinnerung. Edited by Ute Höll and Matthias Wittman. 157–77. Berlin: Diaphenes, 2014. Guerin, Frances, and Hallas, Roger. Editors. The Image and the Witness. London: Wallflower, 2007.

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Hall, Stuart, and Maharaj, Sarat. “Modernity and Difference.” In Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in an Era of Globalisation. Edited by Gilane Tawadros. 190–95. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2004. Hallin, Daniel C. “The Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Hammond, William M. Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Jay, Martin. “The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism.” Poetics Today 9, no. 2, Special Issue on the Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric (1988): 307–26. ———. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Johnston, Claire. Editor. Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1975. Kelly, Michael. Iconoclasm in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Kibbey, Ann. Theory of the Image: Capitalism, Contemporary Film, and Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Kirby, Dianne. Editor. Religion and the Cold War. London: Palgrave, 2013. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Lambourne, Nicola. War Damage in Western Europe: The Destruction of Historic Monuments During the Second World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. ———. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Latour, Bruno, and Weibel, Peter. Editors. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Levin, David. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. ———. The Philosopher’s Gaze. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. ———. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Mirzoeff, Nicolas. Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. ———. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. ———. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ———. Cloning Terror? The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Modleski, Tania. “Cinema and the Dark Continent: Race and Gender in Popular Film.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Edited by Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, Sarah Stanbury. 208–28. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

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Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Visual and Other Pleasures. 14–30. London: Palgrave, 1989. Naficy, Hamid. “King Rodney: The Rodney King Video and Textual Analysis.” In The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties. Edited by Jon Lewis. 300–304. New York: NYU Press, 2001. Pagnoux, Élisabeth. “Reporter photographe à ‘Auschwitz.’ ” les temps Modernes 56, n° 613 (March–May 2001): 84–108. Pensky, Max. The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Prager, Brad. Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images, Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture Series. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art. London: Routledge, 2003. Raiford, Leigh Renee. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Originally published as Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique. Paris: La Fabrique-éditions, 2000. ———. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso, 2007. Originally published as Le destin des images. Paris: La Fabrique-éditions, 2003. ———. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2009. Originally published as Malaise dans l’esthétique. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2004. ———. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Steven Corcoran. London and New York: Continuum, 2010. ———. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso, 2011. Originally published as Le spectateur émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique-éditions, 2008. Ravenscroft, Alison. The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race. London: Ashgate, 2012. Roeder, George Jr. The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Rogoff, Irit. “Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture.” In After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance. Edited by Gavin Butt. 117–34. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Stites, Richard. “Iconoclastic Currents in the Russian Revolution: Destroying and Preserving the Past.” In Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution. Edited by Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites. 1–24. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Penguin, 2003. Taylor, Lucien. Editor. Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R., 1990–1994. New York: Routledge, 1996. Tucker, Anne Wilkes, Michels, Will, and Zelt, Nathalie. WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012. Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ———. Art and Fear. London: Continuum, 2003. ———. Art as Far as the Eye Can See. Translated by Julie Rose. Oxford: Berg, 2007.

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Wajcman, Gérard. “De la croyance photographique.” les Temps Modernes 56, n° 613 (March–May 2001): 46–83. White, Hayden. The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ———. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Part I

Images that Don’t Look

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1

Not Looking into the Abyss The Potentiality to See Daniel Sack

When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks back into you. —Friedrich Nietzsche1

We stood on the cusp of that great abyss, expecting a vastness miles deep and wide. We had imagined it many times before, had preconceived its possible contours in the midmorning light from photographs and landscape paintings that had tamed the massive formation into recognizable compositions and complexions. But when we came upon the Grand Canyon on our drive eastward, there was nothing at which to look. Trees giving way to rocky descents plunged into blank fog suspended in the air all around. Nearly a whiteout, the thickest fog, no reimbursements at the visitor’s center. A palpable sense of disappointment also hung in the air, whispered in German and French. Crowds gathered longing for the occasional shreds in the veils of white to show suggestive forms below: the shadowed curl of a tree, hunched backbone of a boulder, surfacing in midair for a glimpse before sinking under again. These hints of appearance eliciting responses far greater than a full view would have entailed, awe that much more acute. We continued our travels east, wondering if we had seen the Grand Canyon. We certainly had not looked at it, for what was there for the eye to catch hold of, to reel the pupil into focus? But was there something more sublime, more inhuman, in this disappearing act than in the sight itself, the way it beckoned our further approach and promised to disclose its veiled secret? There we were waiting for that great red beast to make its appearance. We knew it must be there—the signs said as much—but what it would be when it arrived was suddenly a matter far beyond the snapshot. For, as Walker Percy describes it in his own reflections on the landmark, the canyon carries with it a whole opaque symbolic logic; it is paved over with the countless photographs, the studium of common appearance, not the punctum of an encounter.2 No, we had not looked at the Canyon. We had seen the abyss, and it had seen the abyss in us. In his A Theory of /Cloud/, French art historian Hubert Damisch conducts a semiotic analysis of clouds depicted in paintings from the sixteenth

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century to the twentieth century. He argues that the cloud occupies the limits of perspective as a system of representation, that it marks the unmarked, gives body to the formless and the mutable. On a conceptual level, a “cloud” is an unstable formation with no definite outline or color and yet that possesses the powers of a material in which any kind of figure may appear and then vanish. It is a substance with neither form nor consistency, onto which Correggio imprints the emblems of his desires, just as Leonardo, before him, imprinted his onto the stains on a wall.3 In other words, cloud is the ground from which figures differentiate themselves. In the paintings that Damisch reads, clouds part like curtains to reveal the transformed, or act as the surface upon which saints and other celestial beings stand to separate themselves from the terrestrial below or beyond the nimbus. Discrete objects only regain stability upon emergence from these Baroque folds.4 Cloud qua cloud becomes the ground for, and of, sight, so that we may look upon the figure it will unveil. It stands as a visible and delineated surrogate for our potentiality to see, before there is any thing to look at in actuality. Forever promising an appearance it withholds, the cloud displays how not looking is not the same as not seeing, how we can see our capacity for vision by not looking at a particular figure. And yet, this sense of potentiality seems somewhat exhausted as a result of its representational capture. The painted cloud, too, becomes a thing at which the spectator can look and can possess as one part in relation to the other parts of a canvas’s composition. A further enervation of potentiality derives from the instantaneity of object-based art and such an object’s permanence. In spite of all the suggestive turmoil in a Correggio or a Constable cloud study, what lies behind or within the cloud of these paintings is effectively excluded from the possibility of actualization for all eternity. Compare this with how the earthbound cloud in my visit to the Grand Canyon did not form an object at which to look; it kept churning itself sideways and otherwise in time, holding my attention in anticipation. For a field of potentiality to retain its congenital relationship to an indeterminate future, revelation must remain viscerally immanent, threatening at any moment to realize an actualization. After all, what is potentiality without the pressure of an impending release, however extended that expectation may be? A look at an object is an instantaneous discovery. But we can see or encounter visibility, while not looking at an object. This seeing of one’s potentiality to see requires a durational, lived experience. Like the sense of potentiality itself, the sense of not looking I explore here must be experienced live as a time-based proposition.5 This chapter will consider two performance installations that stage a scene of potentiality in the form of a cloud, but not as a localized figure seen from a distance and not with the attendant problems of delineating an edge

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to its amorphous form and compass. Instead, in Antony Gormley’s Blind Light (2007) and in Kurt Hentschläger’s ZEE (2008), spectators are situated inside the cloud and subjected to its productive instability. Within such clouds, vision becomes tactile, leveling all sense of distance, proportion, and shape as volume crowds close around the viewer. And where being blindfolded or submerged in pitch darkness would encourage attentiveness to the other senses, here the blindness brings the visible to the fore. While morphologically related, the two performance installations represent divergent models for realizing potentiality as a lived experience: Gormley reduces vision to a field in stasis, withholding the eye’s capacity to discern or create a difference; Hentschläger’s piece realizes an excessive or complete production of this capacity to do or create something different from itself. These two ways of presenting the clouded abyss—as void and as chaos—allow one to see the potentiality of vision without looking at a figure and, in turn, they see the viewer while “not looking” at him or her as a (human) figure.6 Looking at an object allows one to be looked at as subject, an exchange that instantaneously places one in a (spatiotemporal) coordinate relation to an other outside. Think of Lacan’s sardine can floating in the ocean and returning his look as if to say “you are there at the same time that I am here.”7 Disoriented sight not only disperses one scene across a frameless field, but it also spreads the one seen and looked at across a field of potential appearances. The cloud does not look back from here or there; it takes up a position everywhere and nowhere at once. This is to invest the cloud with an active presence, as if it were some kind of alien life form or spirit confronting and, perhaps, conjoining us. For ultimately we must ask: facing the cloud do we really possess such a faculty of sight or, deprived of the directional relationship between a subject looking at an object, does the faculty possess (in the demonic sense) us? Does it disperse one into a cloud of many sensations? Before addressing the two works in question, let me trace an outline of the relationship between vision and a theory of potentiality. The distinction between seeing and looking that I employ here derives for the most part from common usage. The OED states that to see is merely “to perceive with the eyes.” To look is “to direct one’s sight,” “to apply one’s power of vision.” The former, then, implies an impression of the visible autonomously received by the subject while the latter insists upon an intervention or active participation in the perception of a sensation. In the case of looking, one “applies one’s power” or actualizes the faculty of sight upon a selected focus. It requires that one consciously acknowledge the object of the gaze. However, we can think of seeing without looking as the reception of an event without the attachment to a particular focus; in this position the one who sees possesses the potential to look but does not choose to actualize attention in a look. Gazing off in reverie, the pupils dilate to attend to the broader field of vision, the peripheral sharing the same plane as the focal. At its extremity, one senses the activity of sight, but there is nothing to look

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at—only an open and horizonless expanse. When the entire field of vision becomes a single holistic object of sight, looking crosses over into a kind of not looking. In these terms, one does not look into an abyss, one sees oneself in what could be called a pure act of seeing, seeing nothing, drifting. One senses the sense of sight. Aristotle touches upon this notion of “sensing a sense” in his writings on the biological faculties, De Anima (On the Soul). Akin to what we now call proprioception (one’s “perception of the position and movements of the body”), it is that through which the living being becomes aware of its own sensation.8 De Anima offers inconclusive considerations of such self-sensing at work throughout the five senses, but it is the faculty of sight that accounts for the text’s most suggestive articulation. Here Aristotle writes of how the faculty of sight makes itself known through the experience of absolute darkness, an absence of color or light that nonetheless presents itself as a positive presence, the sense seen in its complete lack of content. Opening our eyes in the pitch dark, our capacity for sight is made apparent without confining its vast expanse to a focal point or object. This does not imply a lack of sensation or a blindness—one feels sight’s liveness and preparedness for appearance—only that there is no object at which to look, on which to focus. The potentiality of vision appears in making present the lack of an actual object, in seeing that one could (is able to) not have a look. Such is the connection that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has taken up as one of the foundations for his own longer rumination on potentiality: “What is essential is that potentiality is not simply non-Being, simple privation, but rather the existence of non-Being, the presence of an absence; this is what we call ‘faculty’ or ‘power’. ‘To have a faculty’ means to have a privation.”9 Potentiality displays a capacity to do or to make—to differentiate—without expressing such a capacity in an action or form. Another way of reading this notion of capacity or “faculty” is as the appearance of a medium prepared for, but withholding, articulation; it is a circumscribed field or ground without figure, or a figure becoming a ground. Aristotle uses the metaphor of the tabula rasa or wax surface before imprint to explain such potentiality.10 In this way, we understand that potentiality is not diametrically opposed to actuality: a field or faculty must be actually present in order to express its potentiality. It is not an absolute negation. By dividing vision into seeing as the ground of sight and looking as the figure of sight, I want to propose that seeing while not looking allows one to encounter visible potentiality. Considered historically, claiming darkness as the potentiality of vision poses problems for contemporary spectators. Jonathan Crary has explained how classical theories of optics from Aristotle through Locke suppose visual perception as the immediate reception of an external stimulus. Following Aristotle, such a faculty lies dormant in the dark, possessing its capacity to sense while awaiting the stimulation of a lighted source. Crary argues that this conception of vision changes radically in the nineteenth century.

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Referencing Goethe’s writings on afterimages and contemporaneous investigations that reveal how stimulations of an eye could produce perceptions without a light source—in other words without reference to, and revelation of, an external object—Crary shows how in the early 1800s vision is no longer a matter of a separate subject effected by a discrete outside source. Seeing becomes intertwined with the viewer’s body. When coupled with the wave theory of light, which prompted scientists to approach light as akin to magnetic and electric waves, “light loses its ontological privilege” in relation to vision.11 Instead, color becomes the phenomenal basis of sight, a subjective sensation without a necessary relationship to spatial or luminous referents. While this experience was certainly available to prior subjects, it only now becomes discursively possible to see color without looking at an external thing. What color then? Instead of pitch darkness’s negation of the visible field proposed by Aristotle, I would like to suggest that one could see white light—the fount of all color—as the potentiality of vision. In his performance “A Lecture” delivered in 1968 at Hunter College, filmmaker Hollis Frampton speaks of the projector’s unadulterated white light in similar terms: “It is only a rectangle of white light. But it is all films. We can never see more within our rectangle, only less.”12 To turn to the cloud is perhaps to concretize Aristotle’s metaphor of the blank slate as an appearance of potentiality. After Crary, however, it seems especially suitable to this newfound order: “Perception occurs within the realm of what Goethe called das Trübe—the turbid, cloudy, or gloomy. Pure light and pure transparence are now beyond the limits of human visibility.”13 Perhaps not even white, then, but the cloudy. For, rather than an immediate access, the cloudy makes the “not” in not looking a visible interference, a sight suggestive of the potentiality for other depths behind this veil. In Antony Gormley’s installation Blind Light (see Figure 1.1), the white cube of the art gallery contains a smaller white cube: a chamber of glass walls each about 10 meters long, suffused with uniformly thick and still white fog.14 Spectators can circle the exterior of the cube, peering into it as if into some opaque aquarium. Evenly dispersed lighting holds the mass like a cloud in suspension, no darkened spots or visible variation, everything in balanced white. Entering the enclosure through an opening, one encounters an empty field of vision, the dry and slightly cool fog so dense that one loses sight of one’s outstretched hand. Others wandering around the interior only emerge in the most immediate proximity, literalizing one particular conception of the visual as a ground out of which the figure emerges, but also compromising the visual’s remove, bringing appearance up close and intimate (see Figure 1.2). The air itself gathers about like an eyelid or cataract, the depth of field contracted into a uniformly consistent surface, a tabula rasa enveloping the viewer. Blind Light poses Aristotle’s claim about darkness in the affirmative, by making the potentiality of vision a visible presence, albeit one that still suspends the sensory capacity as a passive negation of the

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Figure 1.1 Antony Gormley, Blind Light II, 2007. Fluorescent light, water, ultrasonic humidifiers, toughened low iron glass and aluminum. 320858858 cm. Installation view Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Photograph by Stephen P. Harris. © the Artist

image. It is, as the paradoxical title so aptly states, a blindness or darkness made light, a potentiality that contains its impotentiality. Not looking at an other or even one’s own extended body, one sees a vision without content. Best known for producing lead casts or casings of his own body, work that fits more easily into sculptural discourse, Gormley’s Blind Light represents something of a departure for the British artist.15 Even when these other lead works are arranged in a larger composition or installation—clusters of several iterations of Gormley posed in iconic manner throughout a gallery or across a cityscape—they maintain a distinctly figurative presence, demanding to be looked at and encountered as human bodies however hollowed. Yet the question of a body’s potentiality is central to the artist’s oeuvre. The casings index a corporeality suspended in its capacity to move or do, frozen still in the heaviest of shells. It is as if these lead containers not only protect against radiation but also permanently withhold the potential energy of the body that once lived within. So weighty a prison will release no kinetic energy, however much it seems to hoard such force within its walls. Speaking with Ernst Gombrich, Gormley says of the process of

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Figure 1.2 Antony Gormley, Blind Light II, 2007. Fluorescent light, water, ultrasonic humidifiers, toughened low iron glass and aluminum. 320858858 cm. Installation view Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Photograph by Stephen P. Harris. © the Artist

making these sculptures: “I get out of the mould, I re-assemble it and then I re-appraise the thing I have been, or the place that I have been and see how much potency it has. . . . The potency depends on the internal pressure being registered.”16 In Blind Light, Gormley shifts from a representation of his own past instances of potentiality captured in fixed forms, objectified so that he can look back at them as enclosed states, to an experience for the spectator to undergo through which she confronts her own present potentiality to see the future. Seemingly a matter only for the eye, the potentiality displayed here affects the entire body of the spectator, just as the casts had taken up Gormley in body and eye. As limbs and orientations disappear into Blind Light, one threatens to become the celebrated “disembodied eye” of high modernist art.17 Yet, the voices and sounds of other spectators in the space insinuate

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surrounding presences just out of sight, and the remembered dimensions of the chamber itself promise a limit to this plane somewhere beyond the visible. One expects these to loom up so suddenly that they would become not figures or walls, but felt intrusions on the skin of the eye. Also at odds with the transcendentally disembodied eye is the gnawing desire to delve deeper under this enveloping surface. Again, there is nothing to look at in here; and yet one feels as if an object—perhaps one or many of Gormley’s doubles—has been buried deep within the center of the cataract, some blind spot against which this field of white determines itself. And so one searches, searches for that missing difference (Gormley quips that upon encountering Blind Light for the first time Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, asked him, “Where is the sculpture?”).18 This reflects a felt need to find something to look at, to attain an outlook upon some object that we can claim as an end to our future actions, but which Blind Light pointedly denies us. In everyday life and looking, we recognize time and our place in it by referring to our surroundings as the ends of recognizable actions. I know how long it would take me to reach that wall or sit in that chair, and performing that action shows me how long I have lived that action. The future becomes divisible into separate foreseeable parts. The painted representation of the cloud marks the threshold of the seen, the furthest edges where human action may direct its ends. To look there is to begin to contemplate a known future. Entering the cloud, those projected lines for action are obscured and made available everywhere at once. Wide-eyed in wonder and anxiety one faces the blank slate of the actionable and of the visible. Here, the future extends endlessly, timelessly, into the field opened up by not looking. To be deprived of such ends is an entirely unnerving and uncanny experience. During a 2007 roundtable discussion with Gormley that reflected on the opening exhibition of Blind Light, psychoanalyst Renata Salecl spoke of the sense of anxiety that the work produces, making the distinction between a fear of the known and anxiety that faces the unknowable, the objectless: We know from Kierkegaard that anxiety is an essential human condition that has to do with the possibility of possibility, with the fact that the subject is, in a way, free. Sartre says this anxiety has to do with the fact that, when I am standing in front of an abyss, I am not afraid that I will fall, I am actually afraid that I have the power to throw myself into the abyss.19 Vertical and horizontal axes give way to a vertiginous sensation, as if one has stepped into the abyss with Alice to begin an interminably long, slow fall, with all the time in the world to wonder what will happen next.20 To take a step in the cloud is to lose (sight of) one’s footing and start that slow fall until the ground is met solid underfoot; it is a small act of faith that there will be somewhere to place each foot. By removing the visible

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coordinates of the articulated body, Blind Light reembodies the spectator as a phenomenal consciousness disassociated from an optical organization of parts and pieces. Combined together, these affects force the body of the spectator to perform an unseen dance towards an unseen end. Like some Beckettian character just remembering how to walk, I stumble on, my hesitant shuffles careful of the encroaching glass walls and wandering spectators somewhere out there. Perhaps this is why Salecl speaks of feeling as if Blind Light possessed a kind of monstrous force threatening to envelop or invade the viewer, a threat energized by the unseen presence of these other bodies that are not looking at me. One is reminded of Michael Fried’s attack against the theatricality of the minimal/literal object in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” a theatricality deriving at least in part from the sense that an anthropomorphic presence hides unlooked at behind the even industrial surfaces of the white beam of a Robert Morris sculpture or Tony Smith’s six-foot cube, Die (1962). For Fried, this arises in part from the seeming hollowness of the minimalist object: “The quality of having an inside—is almost blatantly anthropomorphic.”21 For Fried, the secret inner life of the minimal object gives the impression that it is always looking out at the observer, awaiting her arrival.22 From the outside, Blind Light’s industrial walls, “painted” white from the evenly lit cloud behind the glass, recall nothing so much as a gigantic minimalist object. Perhaps it, too, seems to look upon us. Upon entering its domain, it is as if we have stepped into the interior of such a cube only to discover that the hiddenness the exterior seemed to obscure does not end at the dividing line between inside and out, but extends into an absolutely consistent interior. It is a hollowness, yes, but one that while negating an object for my looking, still harbors unseen forces—or, rather, forces me to see everywhere. No longer an object posing as a subject (as in the minimalist object’s confrontation with the viewer), but instead, as a field of visible hollowness, Blind Light cannot look at me either. If, from the outside, the object parlays in the language of looking, inside it sees without looking. Its potentiality for producing an appearance mirrors my own potentiality to see, so that the installation itself stages a faculty of sight common to myself and my surroundings. This is a radically isolating proposition. While each spectator presumably sees the “same” lack of an object, it is impossible to share a common perspective with another inside Blind Light—each individual must encounter his or her own private potentiality face to face. I say “face to face” for several reasons: because Gormley’s cloud leaves no room between the spectator’s visage and its own—it lies like a mask flush against the human face; because one cannot turn aside or back to its approach since it faces us from all directions; and because for all these reasons it shows our potential for sight to be alive with unknown secrets, inhuman and no thing to look at. A brilliantly white and alien abyss that, as Nietzsche tells us, returns our blank gaze. If something definite appears, it will not be through my look, but through the realization of the cloud itself.

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The cloud is not only a means of obscuring the view of an object; as mentioned above, it is also the scene for transformations. Damisch writes: “Cloud, in the ever changing variety of its forms, may be considered the basis, if not the model, of all metamorphoses.”23 Looking up at clouds in the sky, I can project any number of images onto their formations. This look outlines the distant amorphous shape into a recognizable form so that the world may look back at me and recognize me, my anthropomorphisms confirm my own humanity as the nexus of a knowable world. In this way, a cloud seen from without contains many possible articulations—as many as the spectator chooses or waits to see. If this is the case, looking at Blind Light from the exterior, as the bounded minimal white cube, illuminates how both clouds and minimal objects act as potential sources of withheld imagery: the white cube as the block of stone before the sculptor’s stroke carves a look into its matter or as the boxed cloud before its contours spill out into countless possible representations. But the cloud is also the emblem of active, time-bound metamorphosis. Unlike the fixed and unchanging blot, or the minimal object hunkering down in the gallery’s expanse, in time clouds churn over into other figures or collapse completely. Looking out an airplane window at the clouds passing by, one cannot tell where one begins and another ends, or how scale and distance intercede. Recall as well how many truly impossible transformations, such as those in the myth of Zeus and Io, take place within a cloud.24 These metamorphoses dispense with shape and form and their promise of representable bodies. In his Meterologia, Aristotle describes clouds as masses of tiny reflective surfaces (molecules of moisture) that fracture the shape of an image, but transmit its color.25 In Kurt Hentschläger’s ZEE, the cloud expresses mutations of color as the basis for seeing form. It places one at the origin of white light’s disintegration, as if immersed in a rainbow still caught in its storm, suspended in chaotic display before its earthbound descent fragments into ordered bands of light. The piece stages another form of seeing while not looking, here through the constant formation and deformation of sight too fleeting for an objective stare. As in Blind Light, Hentschläger’s ZEE features a chamber uniformly thick with fog, but instead of the stasis of Gormley’s deep tabula rasa, a performance of constant variation fills the space.26 Assistants lead groups of six visitors into a room of unknown dimensions, bounded by a rope at waist height (see Figure 1.3). Left alone in the fog’s clasp, they hold the rope as a last tether to stability, otherwise lost to each other and their own disorientation.27 Flashes illuminate the grey surround, and, as the frequency of the bursts establish conflicting rhythms of flicker, forms and shapes begin to coalesce across the full range of each individual’s vision. A series of stroboscopic lights hung along the perimeter of the space send out the flashes that trigger this dance of color. With the fog acting as a projection screen that brushes against the retina of the eye, the lights stimulate one’s vision at such a rate that they soon begin to inspire what are known as “flicker-induced hallucinations.” For the seemingly timeless fifteen minutes

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Figure 1.3 Kurt Hentschläger, ZEE, 2009. Photograph by Otto Saxinger. Courtesy Otto Saxinger and Kurt Hentschläger

of the performance—timeless because the rapidity and ineffability of the hallucinatory onslaught moves at an inhuman pace—one sees the full potentiality of sight actualized over and over, simultaneously an exhaustion and renewal of the visual capacity without the possibility of clinging to an object. One encounters another form of blinding light, of seeing without looking. Indeed, the title of the piece seems to suggest a mutation of the very word to “see.”28 “An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colors exploded behind my eyelids, a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time.”29 So wrote artist Brion Gysin in describing his first experience of such flicker-induced hallucination, a seeing without looking rife with color. The vision would inspire Gysin to invent the Dream Machine in the 1960s, a kind of slotted screen placed over a turntable and illuminated from within that could produce flicker effects on spectators.30 First recorded by physiologist Jan Purkinje in 1819 (roughly the same period as Goethe and the scientists Crary discusses were investigating after-images), these hallucinations of brilliantly colored moving patterns are caused by the stimulation of light flashing between eight and twelve times per second. The frequencies mimic alpha waves, an electrical rhythm produced at times of rest or relaxation in the part of the brain that contains the visual cortex. Grey Walter, the first scientist to explicitly investigate flicker through experimentation, “found that the alpha rhythm disappears from most of the brain during mental tasks that require purposeful thinking,

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and is even reduced by the simple act of opening the eyes.”31 Since external visual patterns seemed to interfere with the illusory images, Gysin instructed users of his Dream Machine to close their eyes in order to see the hallucinations. The cloud accomplishes the equivalent by blocking out the intrusion of objects and bringing the screen of projection up against the retina like a second skin. Setting multiple strobes at diverging frequencies, as in ZEE, seems to cause further disturbances in the brain and produce even more variegated and mutable imagery. It produces a chaos of sights fleeing the look’s grasp. As with Gormley, Hentschläger’s larger interests could be framed as an interrogation of sensory potentiality.32 Having studied architecture before turning to the visual arts, Hentschläger’s work foregrounds the spatiality of vision and sound, how they take and make place in live time around an embodied spectator. He first experimented with the idea of combining fog and stroboscopics in a 2004 collaboration with French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, but ZEE descends most directly from his 2005 performance FEED.33 While the first part of FEED focuses upon projected 3-D models of human figures free-floating in space (adapted from the 1999 video game Unreal Tournament), the second section of the piece makes use of fog and flicker in a manner akin to ZEE. Fog pours into the performance space to obscure the projections, as strobe lights barrage the audience with a less complexly programmed version of the light storm from the later performance. FEED anchors its audience in a bank of seats within a space whose contours it has come to know over the preceding action, so the obscurity of the cloud is always in a dialectical relationship with the original location. ZEE, however, unmoors the spectator to the impulses of her own drifting wander in a space of unknowable dimensions; one leaves the chamber as one enters it—though an unassuming door—without ever looking at the extent of its bounds (see Figure 1.4). The free-floating wander encouraged by ZEE (as by Blind Light) situates one as an actor instead of as either a passive or active viewer. One is an actor-participant not just because of the piece’s peripatetic demand, but also because these fugitive sensations differ radically for each visitor. In a cab drive from the theatre I described checkered geometric patterns receding while my companion spoke of seeing gently floating amorphous shapes. We were trying to find words for forms far removed from recognizable objects. This singularity of vision leaves the performance impervious to documentation: a video recording of the piece shows a field of fog with intermittent flashes of light, a photograph even less, both capturing the external production of light’s action but without the temporally embodied sight that sees its affects.34 Scientific researchers working on flicker-induced hallucinations lament how the constant variation and ephemerality of the imagery disrupt attempts at analysis.35 If the recording of a live performance differs from the live event by virtue of its framing, its iterability, its texture, and a host of other deformations necessitated by the medial shift, then ZEE

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Figure 1.4 Kurt Hentschläger, ZEE, 2009. Photograph by Kurt Hentschläger. Courtesy Kurt Hentschläger

makes these distinctions in the starkest terms, secreting away the actual performance from all objectival capture or trace. For ultimately the event of ZEE takes place not in the chamber, but in the individual’s reaction to the external stimulation, the flashes of light inspiring one’s phantasmagoric display only as a privately seen response, as it were after the fact. In this respect ZEE is a quintessentially live performative work of art, exaggerating the ontological fact of liveness as that which makes itself known through disappearance.36 Unlike an ever-receding live performance, however, one cannot mourn over the negation of this present as it moves into the past. For it is the very collision of appearance and disappearance, compressed into shuddering past in light and dark, that produces the piece’s continuous stream of constantly emerging color. Likewise, it encourages one to attend to the affirmative power of seeing rather than conceiving of not looking as a negation of appearance. ZEE performs a cascade of differentiation quite impossible in any actual everyday scene. In the words of Andrew Pickering, “if our capacity for cognitive tasks is immediately before us—I already know that I can

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do crosswords and sudoku puzzles—the epileptic response to flicker was, in contrast, a surprise, a discovery about what the performative brain can do.”37 For Pickering, the brain is “performative” because in addition to thinking intentionally or in terms of the known ends of a task, it acts as autonomous creator. Flicker reveals the potentiality of sight to be much more expansive and intensive than one could anticipate according to expected uses and expected things to look at. Brion Gysin suggests as much in celebrating the visions produced by his flicker-based Dream Machine: “What is art? What is color? What is vision? These old questions demand new answers when, in the light of the Dream Machine, one sees all ancient and modern abstract art with eyes closed.”38 Indeed, research subjects exposed to flicker have reported that the colors produced in the hallucinations are more vivid than any incarnated color in the “real” world.39 The intensity of this seeing exceeds objectively oriented looking, becomes not looking. At the same time, the scenes produced achieve a realization of the entire field of vision impossible in everyday directed looking. To look at an object is to focus one’s eyes on a part within the larger surrounding expanse, it is to actualize a definite point from amidst the open field that lies ahead, a field otherwise filled with infinite potential points of attention. Flicker does not allow one to look at such a focal point; it comprehensively occupies the entirety of one’s sight, out to its furthest edges, suspending all as a potential site for emergence. It possesses the full extent of the visual faculty.40 This is to say that ZEE takes the potentiality of my sight away from my ownership and makes of it what it will; no longer a potentiality that expresses my possession of a faculty, its “possession” passes into the demonic register as if it were a spirit that overtook my body. As in Blind Light, the experience of ZEE is profoundly disturbing not only of the arrangements that one uses to operate in the world, but also of the boundaries between the internal and external, between who or what possesses the threshold of the sensible. Visitors to the Gormley piece reported a fear of the cloud infecting them; here, the chaos of colors infiltrates the spectator even when one closes one’s eyes.41 It appears that there is no escaping the affects of not looking. Crary writes of scientists from the nineteenth century whose experiments on afterimages eventually resulted in severe damage to their sight. They would gaze at the sun until it produced a proliferation of incandescent color. . . . Not only did their work find the body to be the site and producer of chromatic events, but this discovery allowed them to conceive of an abstract optical experience, that is of a vision that did not represent or refer to objects in the world.42 ZEE stages this embodied optical experience of chromatics without reference to an actual object. Rather than a negation of the content of the look, here potentiality expresses itself as an affirmation of difference, a constantly differentiating form where ground and figure fold into one another. Just as

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the scientists Crary mentions burnt out their eyes on the glare of the actual only to be transfixed by phantasmagorical blossoms of colored afterimages, the performance installation destroys the world in order to simultaneously make it anew as pure color. ZEE offers up an apocalyptic vision, ending one world to form another and another and another. Every figure that appears becomes a ground for further differentiation, the event constantly exhausting and renewing vision’s potentiality for change by undermining the stability of a localized look. Potentiality, then, offers us two abysses: the calm and the storm, the still and the chaotic. But perhaps at root these two senses of potentiality are not so far apart as they may seem at first glance; as Heraclitus wrote, “it is in changing that things find repose.” Gormley and Hentschläger’s stagings present both sides of this potentiality—on the one hand, an extraterrestrial vision without horizon or ground suspended eternally (for, ostensibly, one could remain lost in Blind Light forever), on the other, an apocalyptic vision creating and destroying the world of the “lookable,” and forestalling the fixation of looking, all at once. Dante’s heaven was a place of increasingly indescribable white light, held in a kind of timeless stasis and dwarfing the pilgrim’s human capacities with its presence, looming larger and larger; a divine sense of potentiality overtook the limits of his articulation as the cloud of white overtakes perspective’s comprehension of the scene. Or perhaps one becomes the many-colored beast, falling and falling into sight with no actualized ledge upon which the look can grab hold. In the clear sky of the everyday, one looks at a world composed of knowable parts. I imagine looking at the Grand Canyon on such a cloudless day, as if it were a landscape I already know, through past pictures and through paths and cliffs I can relate to in the previously named terms of my own expected negotiations. In choosing how to look at these objects and others, I recognize them as stable entities available to my possible use or engagement, as parts in any number of possible chains of action unfurling a past and promising a future. A sense of relationality accompanies this look as I come to place myself against the actualization of these possible ends and uses, identify alliances and obligations as well as perform my actions. However, in the cloud of visible potentiality I am relieved of the burden of my responsibility to look actively towards a purposeful end—to look and be looked at (or not to look and not be looked at). I see where there is nothing to look at, nothing to acknowledge, and a nothing that acknowledges me in turn. It is a Faustian bargain, though, for my possession of that potentiality is my possession by that same vastness. I am taken up by an immanence that exceeds my use of the sensible, taken away from the enclosed self I sense so well and conjoined with the outside. The apocalyptic future seen without looking is a world after the one in which I am a subject amidst objects. I will join that nothing that cannot be looked at in the thickets of the cloud. No one—only nothing—will see me as I disappear into, and become one with, that field.

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NOTES 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 69. 2. See Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature,” in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (New York: Picador, 2000). 3. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 31–32. 4. “Cloud (and at this point we should remember the importance that Wölfflin attached to the motif of the veil in Baroque imagery) reveals only as it conceals: in every respect, it appears to be one of the most favored signs of representation, and manifests both the limits and the infinite regress upon which representation is founded” (Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, 61). 5. I explored this sense of potentiality inherent to live art more fully in my doctoral dissertation. A revision of the text will be published in 2015 with the University of Michigan Press under the working title The Futures of Performance. 6. These divergent modes are discussed further in The Futures of Performance. 7. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminars of Jacques Lacan Seminar XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 95. 8. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the origin of the word “proprioception” as 1906, but the concept of a “common sense” has a much longer history. See Daniel Heller-Roazen’s genealogy of the sixth sense, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). The following paragraph benefits from his luminous text. 9. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 179, emphasis in original. 10. Aristotle’s “Metaphysics,” The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 580. Plato refers to the tabula rasa in Timaeus as a medium that must be leveled into a pure ground without differentiation before receiving the content of an imprint. Plato, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 1177–78. 11. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 91. 12. Hollis Frampton, “A Lecture” in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 125. I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for directing me to this source. 13. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 71. 14. The installation, which premiered at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2007 (May 17–August 19) and which I encountered at the Sean Kelly Gallery (October 26–December 1) in New York later that year, is actually a chamber 11 meters by 9.5 meters by 3.5 meters. 15. Gormley has recently produced more installation work concerned with disrupting the architecture of the gallery. The 2009 installation Clearing V, for example, contains 12 kilometers of metal rod looping through the gallery in a continuous tangled line. Spectators wander within this spatialized line drawing. 16. John Hutchinson, ed., Antony Gormley (New York: Phaidon, 2000), 18.

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17. “The illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye.” See Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” in The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 107. Brian O’Doherty explores how the modernist gallery composes this disembodied eye and the body it leaves behind in his Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 18. Antony Gormley, Darian Leader, Susie Orbach, and Renata Salecl, “Public Space and the Body,” Subjectivity 24 (2008), 361. 19. Ibid., 358. 20. “Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next.” Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 3. 21. See Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 156. Gormley’s 1991 sculpture Sense captures in harrowing fashion the affect that Fried decries. Sense is a concrete cube with holes or absences where head and limbs would press out of the surface, as if a body were interned in the block or had been contained, but is no longer. Whereas the lead casings entrap the potentiality of the figure to move, this sculpture, as the title clearly states, purports to firmly grip sensation, a sensation claustrophobically narrow in its dimensions. Blind Light submerges the figure in a singular object as thick and consistent as concrete. Not yet set, it is light as air and as open to free movement. 22. As Gormley states in an interview from exhibition catalogue for Blind Light, “this reversal of the normal relationship between viewer and art object is a preoccupation that has run through my work for a long time—the idea that the individual becomes slowly aware that he or she is the focus of this witnessing field.” W.J.T. Mitchell, et al., Antony Gormley: Blind Light (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2007), 47. 23. Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, 23. 24. Ovid tells how Zeus desired the nymph Io and how, to distract the watchful eye of his wife Hera, he hid her in a cloud. He then transformed the nymph into a cow and took the form of cloud himself, all to no avail. Hera demanded the heifer as a gift and he was forced to comply. Hera then placed Io under the watch of the many-eyed Argus, forcing that she be looked at interminably in her metamorphosed state. See Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated by Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 21. 25. Ibid., 36. 26. ZEE was originally commissioned in 2008 by OK-Center in Linz, Austria, and the Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I saw the piece during its New York premiere at 3LD Art & Technology Center (October 28–November 15, 2009). 27. After five minutes the assistants returned to check on the visitors (there had been isolated cases of epileptic seizures in previous performances) and to encourage those willing to wander away from the roped perimeter of the room. 28. “ZEE” also evokes the horizonless expanse of the sea and the gender-neutral pronoun “Se” (pronounced “See,” or “Zee”) that queer theorists have used as a replacement for “He” and “She.” This bears significance for the posthuman life that I argue appears through the performance. I am grateful to Jennifer Cayer, Jenny Spencer, and Erika Rundle for their reflections on these possible connotations of ZEE and their broader comments on this essay. 29. John Geiger, The Chapel of Extreme Experience (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2003), 11. In 1958, while riding on a bus in Southern France, Gysin saw this

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31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

Daniel Sack display through closed eyes as the vehicle passed through intermittent rays of light and dappling shadows cast along the road. Geiger’s book provides a survey of the history of flicker-induced hallucinations. See also B. C. ter Meulen, D. Tavy, and B. C. Jacobs’s “From Stroboscope to Dream Machine: A History of Flicker-Induced Hallucinations” in European Neurology 62, no. 5 (2009): 316–20. A more recent experiment on the composition of these hallucinations offers the following, more measured, description of the effect: “The reported visual phenomena . . . were highly complex in nature, and seemed, on the basis of observers’ anecdotal reports, to be relatively uniformly distributed across the whole visual field. They were subject to constant structural variation such that existing forms and colors continually transformed into other forms or colors. Subjective experiences were thus in general transitory phenomena, which could lead to the general experience of motion across the visual field.” Cordula Becker and Mark A. Elliott, “Flicker-induced Color and Form: Interdependencies and Relation to Stimulation Frequency and Phase,” in Consciousness and Cognition 15 (2006), 179. Geiger, The Chapel of Extreme Experience, 17. Hentschläger states: “The questions around the capacities of human perceptions, external or internal, real, dreamed or fantasized, are fascinating [to] me.” Interview with Laurent Catala, “Kurt Hentschläger: Sensorial Food,” mcd: musiques et cultures digitales 55 (2009), accessed June 17, 2014, unpaginated, my emphasis. http://www.digitalarti.com/en/blog/mcd/kurt_hent schlaeger_sensorial_food. Ibid. Hentschläger states that the piece “is not documentable, because the visual impression unfolding is rendered in the brain, its not really seen, even though one seems to ‘see’ it.” Here, Hentschläger refers to the second part of FEED, rather than ZEE, but the principle remains the same. Interview with Marco Mancuso, “Feed, Visible Space Collapse” in Digimag 26 (August 2007), accessed June 17, 2014. http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-026/feedvisible-space-collapse/. “Unfortunately, perception of flicker-induced form is multistable, the fleeting shapes obscured by a riot of dynamic form and color that thwarts serious study. . . . Theoretically, no spontaneous state is predominant, and, experimentally, none are stable, perhaps because each flicker can disturb the previously elicited state.” Vincent A. Billock and Brian H. Tsuo, “Neural Interactions between Flicker-induced Self-organized Visual Hallucinations and Physical Stimuli,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, no. 20 (May 15, 2007), 8490, 8493. Peggy Phelan opens her famous essay “The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction” with the following lines: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. . . . Performance’s being . . . becomes itself through disappearance.” Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: Politics and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 146. Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 77. Gysin, quoted in Geiger, The Chapel of Extreme Experience, 62. Ibid., 23. “The interesting point is that, independent as they are of a prominent part of the eye’s mechanism—its shutter and lense [sic]—these effects cover the entire visual field and are everywhere in focus. This is a sharp contrast to normal

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vision in which only a small center portion of the visual field is in focus.” Ian Sommerville, “Flicker” in William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Ian Sommerville, Let the Mice In, ed. Jan Herman (New York: Something Else Press, 1973), 26. The effects of monochromatic flicker in Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (1966) and Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1958–1960), and chromatic flicker in several of Paul Sharits’s films (such as Ray Gun Virus from 1966) have been widely discussed by theorists of film. However much these, too, inspire afterimages, negative coloration, or even hallucinated imagery, as projections on a physically distinct screen these structuralists’ films offer a different ontological experience from that of Hentschälger’s cloud and its claustrophobic surround. Amidst the wealth of material on these artists see in particular P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage: A “Minor” History (New York: Zone Books, 2008). 41. Closing the eyes can even intensify the experience as in Gysin’s prescriptions for the Dream Machine, which was intended to be “viewed” with eyes shut. Only covering the eyes with one’s hands and blocking out the light completely prevents the flicker from triggering hallucinations. 42. The scientists in question were Sir David Brewster, Joseph Plateau, and Gustav Fechner. See Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 141.

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 2001. First published 1941. Becker, Cordula, and Elliott, Mark A. “Flicker-induced Color and Form: Interdependencies and Relation to Stimulation Frequency and Phase.” Consciousness and Cognition 15, no. 1 (2006): 175–96. Billock, Vincent A., and Tsuo, Brian H. “Neural Interactions between Flicker-induced Self-organized Visual Hallucinations and Physical Stimuli.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104, no. 20 (2007): 8490–95. Burroughs, William S., Gysin, Brion, and Sommerville, Ian. Let the Mice In. Edited by Jan Herman. New York: Something Else Press, 1973. Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Damisch, Hubert. A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Frampton, Hollis. “A Lecture.” In On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton. Edited by Bruce Jenkins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 125–31. Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Geiger, John. The Chapel of Extreme Experience. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2003. Gormley, Antony, Leader, Darian, Orbach, Susie, and Salecl, Renata. “Public Space and the Body.” Subjectivity 24 (2008): 356–75. Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” In The New Art: A Critical Anthology. Edited by Gregory Battcock. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966.

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Heller-Roazen, Daniel. The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Hentschläger, Kurt, and Catala, Laurent. “Kurt Hentschläger: Sensorial Food.” mcd: musiques et cultures digitales 55 (2009). Accessed June 17, 2014. http:// www.digitalarti.com/en/blog/mcd/kurt_hentschlaeger_sensorial_food. Hentschläger, Kurt, and Mancuso, Marco. “Feed, Visible Space Collapse.” Digimag 26 (2007). Accessed June 17, 2014. http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-026/ feed-visible-space-collapse. Hutchinson, John. Editor. Antony Gormley. New York: Phaidon, 2000. Joseph, Branden. Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage: A “minor” history. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminars of Jacques Lacan Seminar XI. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Meulen, B. C. ter, Tavy, D., and Jacobs, B. C. “From Stroboscope to Dream Machine: A History of Flicker-Induced Hallucinations.” European Neurology 62, no. 5 (2009): 316–20. Mitchell, W.J.T., Stewart, Susan, and Vidler, Anthony. Antony Gormley: Blind Light. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2007. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: Politics and Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Plato. The Collected Dialogues. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Percy, Walker. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Picador, 2000. Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

2

The Rest Is Noise On Lossless Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin

Now if you’re playing the movie on a telephone you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You’ll think you have experienced it, but you’ll be cheated. It’s such a . . . sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real. —David Lynch1

Lossless is the authors’ ongoing collaborative project that highlights representational failures, economic pressures, and technological presumptions embedded in contemporary audiovisual technologies. As of this writing Lossless includes one 16-mm film loop and five digital videos. It may take other forms as we follow developments in the field. This chapter will address three of the pieces, Lossless 1, 3, and 4 as they relate to perception.2 Lossless began after a conversation with filmmaker Ken Kobland. We were visiting him in his studio in 2007, and he was excited to show us the results of the side-by-side test shots he had made with a 16-mm film camera and a prosumer MiniDV camera. Looking over the video Ken pointed at the dark blocks rapidly filling one corner of the frame and wryly said, “We’re not supposed to be able to see that!” We laughed. The dark blocks are plain to see. When asked, most people remember having seen these Lego-like forms in fade-outs and fade-ins on DVDs and streaming video. Few seem bothered (or amused) by these artifacts of compression, happy to turn their attention and stay focused on the plot and content in the frame. Before meeting Ken that night we had been reading about how digital video constructs moving images. We were especially attracted to the “Lossy” methods that discard aspects of the image that supposedly lie outside the thresholds of human perception. How are these thresholds determined? Had Ken found an artifact from botched laboratory research? It may be true that in a laboratory setting, people cannot see the gradation from one dark color to another. But Ken’s video tests demonstrate that video compression turns shadow areas in an image into Tetris blocks that move nervously every time the light within the frame changes. It is not subtle. Did the designers of MPEG2 video compression make a miscalculation?

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Or is it that only “visual people” are unable to not look at compression artifacts? When we talk about the limits of human perception, are we actually talking about not looking? Or are we talking about the limits of attention? We wondered if “sustained glancing” would better describe what we do when we watch compressed media. If not only the losses, but also the additions of clearly visible artifacts were now part of the viewing experience, did we need to redescribe the phenomena of cinema? We decided to find out. COMPRESSION: LOSSY VS. LOSSLESS There are two types of compression: lossy and lossless. Lossy compression sacrifices faithful reproduction of the original media to reduce file size. Media on the web and in personal media devices are lossy copies of larger files. The compression starts by removing the “least significant” media. The aesthetic, political, ideological and phenomenological implications of such determinations are the subject of the Lossless series. Lossy files require a degree of imagination to reconstitute. For example, David Lynch’s quotation at the beginning of this essay can be compressed by removing all the vowels: Nw f y’r plng th mv n tlphn y wll nvr n trlln yrs xprnc th flm. Y’ll thnk y hv xprncd t, bt y’ll b chtd. t’s sch sdnss tht y thnky’v sn flm n yr fckng tlphn. Gt rl. Lossy compression is a long good-bye. No amount of processing power can restore the original from a lossy copy. The imagination may do a fair job, but you will never in a “trlln yrs” experience the original. We routinely subject media to lossy compression. Lossy compression introduces persistent ambiguities. Presumably, the discarded detail is that from which we would glance away, never perceive, and not miss. Lossless compression, however, is designed to be fully reversible. The original media can be recovered, at the same resolution as the compressed file. Here is an example of lossless compression: 6”*.êek(§Ø^âzÚμé^¦’{*.Â)eëÞ®)Ú¶¸¥*’É櫱ìiz¸Ççâf(°Ym)äÊ¡j÷Æ«éÜ yØnër¢éemç!y«^tl²ç!jÆë,¶Ê)äʯzǧâj’Ê«~ç$x-zW©Þëky©@ #3 No amount of imagination could decompress this string. It’s just noise to the eye. We glance just long enough to establish that it’s incomprehensible and then turn away. The materiality of digital video is the basis for our investigation. In the words of Braxton Soderman, the renditions of appropriated films are certainly not “lossless” (i.e., a copy of the original in which nothing is lost), but rather gainful: through

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various techniques of digital disruption—compression, file-sharing, the removal of essential digital information—the pieces reveal the gain of a “new” media, full of material forms ripe for aesthetic sleuthing.4 Soderman’s observation underlines our own interest in shaking hands with compressed media and meeting it on its own terms, recasting its impoverishments as qualities. We thought we’d get to know digital media by looking at what it offered instead of what it did not, recognizing the artifacts of compression as not only worth noticing, but worth appreciating. We selected source materials from both the mainstream and fringes of cinematic production. Depending on the specific inquiry pursued, we worked with everything from The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) to Serene Velocity (dir. Ernie Gehr, 1970). We started working on Lossless when DVDs were still the primary means of watching movies at home. With the pace of technology accelerating predictably, it’s easy to imagine a time when DVDs are no longer with us. Innovation, economy, and convenience tip production towards smaller, sleeker, and more compressible media. The trend shows media moving towards complete dematerialization (of media) and acquisition on demand over electronic networks. The convenience of this distribution method trumps concerns of ownership and quality. We know that we aren’t seeing all of the media, and that we aren’t seeing it in its original form. Most people seem willing to exchange the loss in image and sound detail for the convenience of watching movies on their cell phones. Must we now define what seeing a movie means according to venue and format? Or perhaps, it’s a generational issue, a question of youth. While at Harvard, film theorist David Rodowick remarked to us that his students have the great privilege of attending course screenings at the Harvard Film Archive, with films projected in 35 mm. But rather than being swept away by the experience of the big screen and surround sound, the vast majority of them are happier to see the films at the study center on DVD. We had assumed that the students would be unable to resist the immersive power of the big screen, but we were wrong. Rather than lament the students’ “inability” to appreciate what they were missing, we decided to find out exactly what they were missing. Lossless is not a statement about the superiority of analogue over digital media. Instead, it is a concentrated investigation of their differences. The series is unapologetic and unnostalgic, emphasizing the character of the media, peeling back its top layer to look at those aspects we have found to be strange, beautiful and worth a closer look. It is often said that film is the medium that is constantly disappearing, denying us more than a glance at an individual frame. The frames move so fast that in effect what we see are their differences. These differences add up to the illusion of natural movement. Film’s smooth articulation owes as much to the imagination as it does to the discrete frames produced by the intermittent movement of the camera and projector. And while film projection sets the standard for the representation of motion in digital video, in fact their similarities are few.

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Despite its verisimilitude, moving image representation is an abstraction. Lenses collapse three-dimensional space into two. Digital media collapse optical space even further into statistical space, with visual patterns rendered in algorithms.5 While it is usually easy to see the relationship of film images to what has passed in front of the camera’s lens, what do we see when we look at digital video? Frames of numbers? Digital video is inaccessible to the senses until it emerges on the screen. Once recorded, digital images and sounds slip into another dimension. They are immaterial, immanent and may only be experienced after rematerialization.6 NOT LOOKING COMES BEFORE SEEING We started to think about that rematerialization as a kind of live performance, where no two presentations are ever exactly the same. Suddenly, “lossless” compression revealed its vulnerability to inconsistency, calling into question its claim to fidelity. Digital video seemed to define itself as a set of instructions for video projectors and loudspeakers to perform, and the digital video itself was the script. Like a script, digital video is specific and 100% repeatable, however the conditions of performance change on every viewing. As information is reconstituted into sound and image, a space opens in which errors and inconsistencies occur. Lossless captures and embraces the slippage that occurs in the performance of media, revealing how its flaws and other artifacts lend a materiality to digital video.

Lossless 1, Lossless 3, Lossless 4 Lossless 1 is a 16-mm film loop derived from 48 frames (two seconds) of Dorothy clicking her ruby slippers together from The Wizard of Oz. The frames come at the end of the last color reel, as Dorothy follows Glinda’s instructions on how to return home. The iconic image served us well: the shot loops seamlessly and leads to a return home. Our idea was to see the difference between film and digital video. We wanted to know what those missing pixels looked like. We hatched a plan: rent a 35-mm print, buy a DVD, (PAL to avoid pull-down issues), scan and rip frames from each, then subtract the digital video frames from the film frames and show the remainder. We rented a film print and laid the forty-eight frames of the clicking ruby slippers down on a flatbed scanner acquiring them one by one. This procedure was slow, but it did the job without inflicting further damage to the well-used print. Each of the forty-eight frames was scanned at 2K resolution; that is, we made 2048 x1496 pixel Photoshop files. At the time this was a typical start for DVD transfers (the standard for scanning of film frames has increased 400% to 4K since; see Figure 2.1).7 Each frame file was saved with lossless compression. This print was many generations

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Figure 2.1

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Relative frame dimensions for common digital cinema formats

away from the 1939 source, and the frames were soft, an unknown number of generations away from the original negative, but it was the best image we could afford. On the digital side, Warner Brothers had just released a new version of The Wizard of Oz in “Ultra Resolution.” The restoration technique employed in the digitization was remarkable enough to be nominated for a Technical Academy Award. This technique has been used to restore many films in the studio’s vast library including Singing in the Rain (dir. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952), The Searchers (dir. John Ford, 1956) as well as The Wizard of Oz. We copied the frames from the PAL version of this Warner Brothers DVD. After acquiring the forty-eight frames in the computer from both sources we matched them against each other, frame to frame then calculated the difference between each, generating a new frame from that difference. We came to this after many discussions and experiments addressing what that would really mean. This was a more complicated process than we initially predicted. We had assumed that the film print would be our gold standard, a touchstone for measuring the inferiority of the digital video. But the Ultra Resolution DVD was of such high quality and the film so poor that the difference produced something we could not have anticipated. We had to think not in terms of hierarchy but in terms of difference. The film was different from the DVD and not necessarily better. We came to this by thinking about sound recording—some people prefer the richness of vinyl while others prefer the sharpness of digital sound. This acknowledgment allowed us to reset our thinking.

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We wrote software that compared each pixel and showed if and when there was a difference between them.8 Where the pixels had the same color, the pixel in the new frame goes to black. When different, the new frame shows an average of the two colors. For example, two pixels of the same green hue result in a black pixel. Two pixels, one yellow, the other orange, result in a yellowish-orange pixel. We saw some familiar compression artifacts: gridding from the pixel matrix on the smooth surface of Dorothy’s legs and blockiness in the blue gingham print of the skirt and the shadows on the floor. But the most visible artifact—the bright blooming halos surrounding Dorothy’s moving legs—wasn’t coming from the digital video. To our surprise, the artifacts we captured were exposing how soft the film print had become. We first showed the piece as part of “COLLISIONeleven”9 on the balcony at MIT’s Stata Center in the spring of 2007 (see Figures 2.2 and 2.3 for examples of the source frames). We were amused and somewhat dismayed when the appearance of our Eiki Slimline 16-mm film projector generated as much, if not more attention than the image projected by it. It was hard to keep people’s hands off the machine: they responded as if the piece were showing in an interactive science museum. More than once we heard kids asking their parents to explain what a film projector was. The show had

Figure 2.2 Still from Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, Lossless 1, 2007. 16-mm film loop, color, digital sound file, 2-second loop

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Figure 2.3

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Still from Victor Fleming, The Wizard of Oz, 1939

more of a science fair feeling than we thought was appropriate, but given the context of MIT, maybe that shouldn’t have surprised us. In the audience response to the piece, there is an interesting case of not looking. The audience is not looking at the images, but is fascinated by the projector. Even more startling was the response we got to the image itself. People glanced at the looping image and said something like, “Ohhh, I love this movie!” before turning back to the projector or jumping in front of the drawing robot or lying down on the vibrating pink couch, some of the other exhibits on offer in the same space. The performance of Lossless thus became a kind of world’s fair exhibit, a spectacle which did not induce looking, but wonder, looking away, and distraction. Lossless 1 resembles the source frames only incidentally. The motion of the figure is the same but everything else is changed. We wanted to challenge people with this distressed image, but it became apparent that people weren’t seeing the image. Instead they were seeing only a pointer towards the original work that not only satisfied them, they couldn’t even recognize it as altered. The imagery of The Wizard of Oz is so known to us that it blocks our ability to see. And the viewer response to the images confirmed this; no one was looking at Dorothy clicking her shoes in The Wizard of Oz. In 2007, months before we met with Ken, we were learning about the psychophysical models that define the thresholds of the visible and audible.

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These models are used by engineers to discard the ultraviolet and infrared that are supposed to lie outside our perception. But you don’t need to be a dog to sense extrasensory whistles: infrareds feel warm on your face and ultraviolet will give you a sunburn. More to the point, the blocks in the dark corners that compression creates in DVDs are obviously visible. Visual artifacts are produced by every medium. Film has flicker, scratches, and grain. Video has interlaced scan lines and blooming phosphors. Digital video has blocky fades and palimpsests. We notice the artifacts on our first experience of a medium. We are supposed to look away and concentrate on the representation instead. On a conscious level this works well enough, yet the artifacts do not entirely disappear. They lend an emotional tenor to the work. The artifacts specific to film tie it to a particular time. Like crickets on a summer night or the smell of wet asphalt these artifacts provide a memorable backdrop. We also realized that despite our clear memories of the glorious Technicolor world unveiled by Dorothy’s bump on the head, we had never seen The Wizard of Oz anywhere but on television. We, too, carry around an imaginary “Dorothy with ruby slippers,” like the viewers at MIT glancing at our diminished image and seeing only an idea. The image acts as a pointer to something else. But what? What is the source of the model? Is it a construction of the imagination? Some vague recollection of the film’s firsts (first color film!—no that wasn’t it . . . first Technicolor film! no . . . can’t quite remember . . .) Are the numerous versions available to the home market nothing more than pointers suggesting this imaginary model? Are they enough? Maybe so. When we have exhibited Lossless 1 we have witnessed viewers seeing only (their idea of) the original. They say, “Oh, I love that film,” and walk on. Perhaps this is the meaning of losslessness. Have we failed in our endeavor, or weirdly and wildly succeeded? Not looking, we no longer need to look because we already know, even if we have not seen before.

Synthetic Glances: Lossless 3 Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford’s The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film’s temporal structuring to render a kinetic painted desert of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it. Truth, 24 frames a second! is rewritten according to the odd clock-times of digital processing, splaying movement and transition into the void of machine temporality. In the Lossless series, the artists themselves are the searchers, seeking to uncover differences between the bitstream and the celluloid strip. These differences might be blurry at our historical juncture, but Baron and Goodwin’s work leads us closer to the over-coded heart of the digital video image, dissecting its anatomy to expose its entrancing mechanisms [see Figure 2.4].10

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Figure 2.4 Still from Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, Lossless 3, 2008. Digital video, color, sound, 10 minutes

In Lossless 3, the aim was to exhibit how space is saved in the production of DVDs. Unlike film where every frame is a complete and autonomous picture, digital video saves space by recycling pixels in areas where there is little change between frames. The compressor understands the frame as a matrix of blocks. When the color of the block doesn’t change significantly over time, the color is reused and that area of the frame is not updated. Where there is movement, the compressor must update that area of the image in every frame. To safeguard against total chaos, periodic “keyframes” occur. Keyframes are fully resolved frames that anchor the pixels to the film image. They occur at regular intervals and keep the image from drifting into abstraction, a safeguard against overzealous economizing. For example, if there is no camera movement or shifts in lighting during a shot, landscape and architecture will not change and the blocks making up these portions of the frame are thus repeated until some change occurs. However, anything moving through the landscape makes for significant change in each frame, and those areas of the frame must be continuously updated. Periodically, a keyframe updates the whole scene and keeps the image fresh and in place. Imagine a wide shot looking up at a snowy hill. Two-thirds of the frame is white, the hill is highest on the right and falls off gently to the left. Above the hill is an unbroken blue sky. Two horsemen appear on top of the hill. The snow is deep; the horses’ legs are swallowed up by the snow as the riders ride down towards the camera. The camera pans slowly left to follow the horsemen. This is an easy sequence to compress. The white and blue areas of the frame are pure and flat. The only action in the frame is that of the

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horsemen (and the tracking of the white hilltop against the sky as the camera pans). The only areas of this frame being refreshed from frame to frame are those areas containing the horsemen and the hilltop. The horsemen (sound and picture) draw our attention away from the snow and sky. We don’t notice that the film grain is not being updated from frame to frame. We don’t see details staying fixed as horses move. We look away exactly as the engineers and psychologists would have us do. This is an image from The Searchers. The film’s formal properties, with its majestic landscapes crisscrossed by characters on horseback made it a compelling subject for our investigation. We removed the keyframes, and we were startled by what was revealed. The flowing, melting taffy-pulled images were unlike anything we had seen in digital media. These flows are always present on DVDs, though they are wiped away at regular intervals by the keyframes. Under normal conditions the keyframes keep the pixels in place, but we liked what we saw when they were allowed to drift. The iconic landscapes remained more or less in tact while cowboys and Indians became molten blurs tearing through the frame. This process also had the effect of inverting the relationship between foreground and background and between what moves and what is still. The crispness of the background thrusts it forward. We showed the work to friends who are more avid backpackers than cinephiles and they identified Ford’s locations in shot after shot. Freed from the storyline, the film becomes more emphatically about landscape than ever. Lossless 3 also challenges how we think of naturalized movement on screen, reframing the terms of its construction as a change in pixels over time. Thus, another form of not looking at the image is introduced as viewers look at pixels.

Calculating Visual Attention: Lossless 4 Continuing our exploration of digital artifacts and the methods used to compress digital video, we uncovered a debugging routine used by engineers to detect flaws in compression (see Figure 2.5). This routine analyzes movement within the frame. It employs vectors laid over the image to trace motion. The arrows point in the direction of the movement, their length indicating the amount. These arrows resemble meteorologist’s notations on a satellite image showing the movement of air over the land. Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970) seemed ripe for this particular Lossless treatment. Gehr’s film is a rhythmic study without any actual movement in it: the camera is locked down and nothing moves through the frame. Through simple shifts of the focal length of a zoom lens, the film captures radical jumps without moving the camera. By adjusting the zoom lens every four frames, moving incrementally from the center of the lens’s focal range to its extreme telephoto and wide positions, Gehr’s film transforms a hallway into a sublime hallucinatory experience. The formal rigor of the film and its forceful graphical quality made it a compelling source.

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Figure 2.5 Still from Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, Lossless 4, 2008. Digital video, black and white, silent, 14 minutes

This, plus its appearance on the website UbuWeb compelled us to use it. UbuWeb’s mission is to make available hard-to-see avant-garde sound art, poetry, and film. Much revered (and much despised) UbuWeb provides files of varying degrees of quality for dozens of films that once circulated exclusively in small venues. These films were shown to enthusiastic small houses often with the maker supervising the particulars of the viewing experience. UbuWeb specializes in films rigorously designed for flickering-lightthrough-film projection, such as Serene Velocity. UbuWeb described the film’s runtime as fourteen minutes and fifty-two seconds. A note on the site reads: “00:14:52 (according to other sources it’s 23 minutes, but . . . well it’s what I could get—fitz)”11 At first we were perplexed as we watched the muddy little frame. The film wasn’t cut off at the end; it ends with the sunrise visible through the doors at the end of the hallway, as usual. We then realized that the shortened length was due to the streaming video running at 29.97 fps as opposed to the original 16 fps. Fully compromised by convenience, it was clear, that this would be our source. We activated the debugging routines and every four frames the arrows illustrated the effect of the shifting lens. We then removed the muddy image

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leaving only the pulsing arrows. Lossless 4 retains the rhythm of Serene Velocity, and the arrows trace enough of the features so that audiences familiar with Gehr’s film are able to detect it as our source. Depending on the projection, Lossless 4 sometimes manages to hint at the wild kinetic experience of seeing the original film. Perversely, a purely graphical expression has replaced a purely optical one. Yet another case of not looking is realized. Audience members familiar with Serene Velocity tend to readily detect it as the source of Lossless 4 and have expressed delight in their experience of the film. There is only a trace of the sensation of watching Serene Velocity, but it’s enough to produce a pleasurable memory. However, those unfamiliar with Gehr’s film have often found the piece to be too much of a challenge to watch, and they have literally had to look away. Without the experience of watching the original, Lossless 4 points to nothing and turns some viewers away. CONCLUSION This project started as an inquiry into precisely how images were impoverished by compression. We wanted to look at the loss. We found that this procedure was much more interesting than we had assumed. By visualizing the difference between film and digital video we could see what was being added in the compression process. These additions are multivalent: they are visually and sonically complex. We found them to be beautiful, and in their nakedness they opened up larger questions about perception, phenomenology, and economy. In 1963, George D. Stoddard, Chancellor of NYU argued for the primacy of the intellect to his audience at the Museum of Modern Art: We should not over emphasize the technique of vision. We cannot think with our eyes, and we may think without them. Vision brings in the data, the raw materials, and the cues that drive our steps. The eye is an invaluable sense organ, a true part of the brain through its optic nerve, but the frontal lobes preside over the problems created and they are not to be denied. The artist is a man seeing and thinking–both at once; his cunning is in his brain.12 The creators of digital video have demonstrated that the opposite is true. If the eye could not think, if it were simply a gatherer of photons, then none of this would work. In some strange way that thinking eye is the subject and the material of digital media, and the subject of Lossless. We’ve come to recognize that most people glance at digital media rather than look at it. Images are references to other images, and may prove powerful enough to prevent us from seeing what is on the screen in front of us. Is this mental

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montage a new kind of intelligence and a new kind of visuality? Are we seduced by new technology so much that we are willing to overlook its flaws? Or do we prefer the new image in some way that we cannot explain just yet? Is there a phenomenology of new media that is yet to be theorized? Are these new dog whistles portents of new forms of representation? What kind of images can we make that address this new aesthetic? These are among the questions that will be addressed in forthcoming pieces in the Lossless series. NOTES 1. David Lynch, “David Lynch on iPhone—YouTube,” 2007. Accessed October 6, 2014. http://youtu.be/wKiIroiCvZ0. 2. Lossless 2 addresses the circulation of films traditionally screened in cinematheques, cineclubs, and other small venues in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks (e.g., bitTorrents). A bitTorrent of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 film Meshes of the Afternoon is the source material for Lossless 2. Hito Steyerl’s insightful essay “In Defense of the Poor Image” elaborates on the issues addressed in Lossless 2 and by the series at large. 3. This is an ASCII representation of Base64 encoding. 4. Braxton Soderman, film notes for the Inappropriate Covers show, at Magic Lantern Cinema, Providence, Rhode Island, April 8, 2009, in Braxton Soderman and Justin Katko, Inappropriate Covers Catalog, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 2009. 5. Example. A camera pointed up at a small cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Frame the cloud in the lower right hand corner of the frame. The lens collapses the space between the camera and the cloud, and our viewers know to read that white shape as a distant mass of water vapor instead of a cotton ball or white paint. Color analysis in the camera determines that the blue of the sky is uniform enough that it may be represented by #1E80F0 (a sky blue rendered in hexadecimal code) in all parts of the frame untouched by the cloud. The spatial mapping of blue has just been reduced to a simple algorithm: point blue everywhere but in the lower right hand corner of the frame. 6. It may be helpful to contrast digital video to the analog encoding process of making LP records. The grooves pressed into the vinyl have a direct correlation to audio waveforms. The wiggle of the needle is applied to a paper cone. The linkage is direct and every wiggle is heard, including the wiggles produced by dust and scratches. In digital video, the noise and dirt are removed from information before it ever reaches the medium. 7. 2K resolution refers to any video frame that is approximately 2,000 pixels wide. Typically a 35-mm print scanned at 2K is 2048 pixels wide × 1556 pixels tall. 4K resolution is a 35-mm print scanned at 4096px2160px. 8. We use the word difference carefully. We refer to the difference that is used in set theory. This same difference is a bit hard to wrap the mind around, though it is a familiar to us via software. Of two frames, this difference is the set of pixels that are in either one of the frames but not in both. Imagine laying the frame of video over the top of the film frame. Line up the elements in the frame. Now paint every pixel that is the same as that spot on the film frame below in black. If a pixel is different than the film leave it alone. Now put the film frame on top of the video and repeat the procedure. What you have left is what you see in Lossless 1.

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9. Jonathan Bachrach and Dan Paluska, “COLLISIONeleven,” in Collision Collective, April 20, 2007. Catalog.pdf. Accessed July 15, 2014. http://people. csail.mit.edu/jrb/cc/c11/catalog.pdf. 10. Braxton Soderman, notes for the Inappropriate Covers show, Providence, RI, April 8, 2009. 11. “UBUWEB—Film & Ernie Gehr—Serene Velocity (1970).” Accessed July 15, 2014. http://www.ubuweb.com/film/gehr_serene.html. 12. Creativity and Its Cultivation (Addresses Presented at the Interdisciplinary Symposia on Creativity, Michigan State University), ed. Harold H. Anderson, xiii, 293. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959. Accessed July 15, 2014. http:// ann.sagepub.com/content/335/1/231.extract.

REFERENCES Anderson, Harold H. Editor. Creativity and Its Cultivation (Addresses Presented at the Interdisciplinary Symposia on Creativity, Michigan State University). New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959. Bachrach, Jonathan, and Paluska, Dan. “COLLISIONeleven Catalog.” Collision Collective, April 2007. http://people.csail.mit.edu/jrb/cc/c11/catalog.pdf. Lynch, David. “David Lynch on iPhone—YouTube.” 2007. Accessed July 15, 2014. http://youtu.be/wKiIroiCvZ0. Serene Velocity. Directed by Ernie Gehr. 1970. Soderman, Braxton, and Katko, Justin. Inappropriate Covers Catalog. David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI, 2009. Steyerl, Hito, and Berardi, Franco. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.

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The Men in the Bathroom Reflections on William E. Jones’s Tearoom James Polchin

TEAROOM A central paradox of Tearoom: it is strictly “factual” and was made with very specific intentions, and yet it is mysterious. —William E. Jones1

On the entrance to the viewing gallery for William E. Jones’s film Tearoom (2007) at the Whitney Museum Biennale in 2008, patrons confronted a disclaimer: “Contains sexually explicit material and may not be suitable for all audiences.” This was the first time the Whitney had to tag a work of art with such a cautionary directive. The grainy, 16-mm color surveillance film of a men’s public toilet was made by the Mansfield, Ohio, police department during three weeks in the summer of 1962. Jones’s use of this film footage in video format, only slightly edited from the original, raises questions about the visual experience and ethical context of the film’s meaning as a museum object. The square viewing gallery had black walls and hard plastic chairs aligned in rows to give the look of a theatre. Sitting with about five other patrons all dispersed in the room, I watched in silence as the video reproduction of degraded color film projected upon the white screen. The 16-mm film presents images of men’s bodies moving through the narrow spaces and dimly lit room of a public restroom. There is no voice over. No music. The viewer sits in relative silence through the whole film, only the noises of the other patrons shifting or stirring, entering and exiting the gallery accompany the viewing experience. All attention is focused on the mystery of this silent film, as the viewer contemplates men cruising other men in their awkward and shy ways, and later in the film, men having sex half hidden behind stall walls or the shadows of the bathroom corners. The camera rarely moves. Instead, it sits like a surveying eye, or like those early silent films where the camera was stationed in front of a theatre stage and dancers or actors would perform. The bodies moved rather than the camera. These moving bodies in the men’s bathroom transfixed me, but not so much for what they were doing. Rather, in the silence of the film, I was made

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acutely aware of myself watching. The silence, like the static camera, evokes a certain distance between viewer and subject that provokes a number of questions and mysteries. After a while, the film conjures other experiences and memoires for me: sitting in back rooms of sex clubs or video theatres, the shiny, shimmering images of men’s bodies projected on rough walls, both tantalizing and ultimately disappointing in their perfection. Tearoom has none of the glamor of those films, none of the theatrical efforts that attend such porn films. This is the intriguing paradox of Tearoom, mixing images that have the grainy quality of home movies, with a distancing gaze of the police surveillance apparatus, and representing the awkward erotics of the men’s sexual interactions in video format. Unlike porn, these encounters are not scripted for the camera’s eye. They are random and awkward in their actions with each other. We are, in turn, uncertain and uneasy with the movements in front of us. Caught in this paradox, we strive to put meaning to it, to define it in some way within the context of the museum exhibition. The familiar, intimate quality of the images, the silence that surrounds the viewing, the sex acts that were never meant for our viewing, and the singular spectacle of the police camera provoke questions that unsettle the experience of looking. How do we find a place of looking in a film like this, I wondered. And then, Who are we in front of this film? What are we to call it? Who were these men who unknowingly made themselves the subject of this film? In raising such questions, presenting us these frail moving images of men in a public toilet, Tearoom asks us to reflect on our relationship to the film footage, and to the history it conjures. Jones was born in Mansfield, Ohio, the same year the police set up cameras in the men’s bathroom in the town’s Central Park.2 But as he related in an interview, the events of that summer were not part of the town’s collective memory. “While I was growing up, no one ever talked about the dozens of men convicted or the tactics used to round them up. I knew nothing at all about the case until I happened to find a film about it on the Internet.”3 From that discovery, Jones would later find actual footage in the garage of a retired Mansfield police chief, not far from the house he grew up in, and, like much of Jones’s earlier work with found visual objects, he did little editing to the footage. He moved the last reel, which presents how the police department staged the surveillance, to the first part of the film, contextualizing the footage within the specifics of the police department’s surveillance procedures. He also titled the work Tearoom, drawing on the vernacular term used by gay men to describe public restrooms for anonymous sexual contacts.4 “I do not impose a reading upon the material in advance,” Jones said in an interview. He experimented with different ways of presenting this police evidence but with little success: “The images of all these men meeting and having sex had a great sense of pathos,” he related, “because I knew that these men had been prosecuted and sent to jail. The whole experience

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was really overwhelming. I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to do much to the footage anyway, but I did attempt to put the footage into some form that looked like art. I made a version like that, and it was simply too much; the aesthetic decisions I made seemed arbitrary.”5 In this sense Tearoom exists, by Jones definition, between art and surveillance, between its original uses and its reappropriation as a video object in a museum exhibition. But its very status and how we come to interpret the film, depends so much on its context, and the history of its uses over the preceding decades. It some sense the film is both archive and art object, documentary and art installation. Its mystery rests in the spaces between such terms. Jones’s found footage of public urinals evokes modernist ready-mades, recontextualizing not only the objects but also the experience of looking at such objects within the walls of a museum of gallery. Tearoom provokes a number of questions and problems not only in our position as spectators (or witnesses) but also regarding the ethical uses of this surveillance footage reappropriated for art installation. Many of the anonymous men in this film were later arrested, convicted, and either sent to jail or to mental institutions where they endured years of forced debilitating treatment in the effort to “cure” them. Tearoom in effect replays that moment of “criminal” activity, presenting the movement and encounters between those anonymous men in the bathroom over fifty years ago, as a present and ongoing visual experience today, played again and again in fifty-six-minute showings in the museum gallery. From police surveillance to courtroom evidence, to local stag film, to forgotten archive, to museum installation, the multiple uses of this film object are vital to understanding its visual complexities. Throughout this chapter, I make a distinction between the surveillance footage and Jones Tearoom so as to illuminate the historical uses of the film and how those uses shape our experiences and understanding of it as a museum object. This distinction also allows us to consider the changing meanings of what the film makes visible. By this I mean to contrast what the video shows us, with what it suggests in our experiences of looking and not looking at the work. With the earlier uses of the film for police surveillance and courtroom evidence, the act of looking depended upon a relationship between the factual elements of the film and the visual certainties and uncertainties of the images. While what it shows rests upon a number of historical and culturally specific definitions of the men being recorded (i.e., criminals, mentally ill, sexual outlaws, closeted gay men), the film’s visibility in the Whitney Museum of American Art presents a more elusive and interpretative element, connecting the actions portrayed in the film with how the film was used and interpreted outside of the bathroom walls. The question of visibility vitally connects the experience of the film with its history, and illuminates the complex layers that adhere to the work as a museum object. The central question then is not what Tearoom shows us (the factual or aesthetic qualities the work offers) but rather what the film makes visible.

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SURVEILLANCE Officials said although they suspected such activity in the toilet facility, no one expected to witness the bestial scenes which the camera recorded.6 “Visibility is a trap,” wrote Michel Foucault in his now famous discussion of the invention and uses of the Panopticon, that circular, all-seeing prison mechanism designed by Jeremy Bentham in nineteenth-century England.7 The visibility trap understands the ways looking, within a political and governmental structure, confers a powerful position for those who are looking, while it is meant to control those who are subjected to the gaze of surveillance. Visibility in this sense depends upon the act of looking as a controlling suspicion, creating an unbalanced experience of looking between the visible subject and the invisible observer (hidden behind screens, two-way mirrors, or video cameras connected to distant monitors). In such surveillance, being visible depends upon the subject not being able to look back. His or her visibility becomes available precisely by the viewer’s invisibility. Tearoom illuminates this paradox from the beginning in the edits Jones makes, presenting the demonstration of the police surveillance set up as the first encounter with the film footage. With a police detective as our visual

Figure 3.1 William E. Jones, Tearoom, 2007. Video, color, silent. 56 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

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guide, Tearoom opens by taking us down a narrow set of steps into the bathroom, submerged beneath Mansfield’s Central Park—the camera burrowing into a darkened underground space, descending into the underworld and all the associative meanings such a visual symbol might conjure. The camera scans the bathroom, stops on a small, crudely cut glory hole in the side of a stall wall, evidence, we are to believe, of sexual activity. The hole both functions as sexual conduit as well as a peephole to view occupants between stalls. It is a vital form of contact and looking through stall walls. As the policeman points to the hole, his finger next to the mark becomes a literal gesture of pointing out the clues of sexual activity. This simple gesture and its place in the film underscores how the surveillance footage attempts to look for something rather than looking at something. As John Berger has noted, “to look for something . . . is the opposite of looking” for it defines a space within the field of vision, a focus to direct your attention, ignoring and not looking at other elements.8 Surveillance is, in this respect, a constant act of looking for something, of narrowing the field of looking, choosing certain details, and not looking at others. Next, Jones presents original footage that shows how the surveillance camera is hidden behind a two-way mirror attached to a concealed door. The mirror sits next to a paper towel dispenser, drawing the anxious looks

Figure 3.2 William E. Jones, Tearoom, 2007. Video, color, silent. 56 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

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and intent stares of the men who idle around the central space of the bathroom. The camera captures many moments of men gazing in the mirror either for grooming or as a directed stare at the activities of the other men behind them. Finally, the police demonstrate how they paint the walls a neutral gray and install brighter light bulbs so as to better capture the behaviors of the men in the dark, underground bathroom. All of this setup underscores how the spectacle of surveillance is a curated visual experience. Sitting behind the double mirror, confined to a small closet, the police cameraman holds the camera at an angle such that the central space of the bathroom becomes an open stage. To the extreme right is a row of sinks. To the extreme left are three, doorless stalls, all aligned on a perpendicular to the camera such that we can only see the men enter and exit the stalls, but never really see what is happening inside them. The doors of the stalls were removed years earlier in response to complaints about public sex in the bathroom.9 The surveillance in the summer 1962 was the first effort to use surveillance film technology for the policing of the men’s room, making the film itself evidence for the court.10 Between the stalls and the camera on the left sit three urinals trapped in the darkest part of the bathroom and thus outside the camera’s full attention. What we see is the ground-level view—facing the men as they entered and exited the room from an unseen door to the right of the camera. So

Figure 3.3 William E. Jones, Tearoom, 2007. Video, color, silent. 56 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

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often the sexual activities happen just beyond the camera on the other side of the stall walls. We can only glimpse moments when the activities spill out into the central space. Fragments and shadows of moving bodies slowly become visible to the camera. Some men enter or hover at the stalls’ thresholds, pants dropped, bent over, facing outward or inward. There was a legal reason for this visual barrier. Filming the activities in the stalls themselves would have presented evidentiary problems, with defendants challenging the film evidence on the basis of unlawful search and seizure. In essence, the camera’s place inside the stall would be a form of illegal government surveillance. What happens in the space between the stalls and the sinks was public domain, ruled the judge.11 But this limitation of the camera’s field of vision is central to what Tearoom doesn’t allow us to look at. The surveillance was meant to record crimes of public indecency. More often it eludes the subtle signs and voyeuristic gestures between men, the exchanges that remain invisible and out of reach of the camera’s gaze. As historian Thomas Waugh has shown, the two-week Mansfield police surveillance was the first major effort to record “the fearful unseen” of the public men’s toilet so as to transform the unseen into legal evidence, eradicating in the process the very behaviors that were, ironically, difficult to measure and capture by police. “For those criminalized sexualities that are themselves especially invisible,” writes Waugh, “the

Figure 3.4 William E. Jones, Tearoom, 2007. Video, color, silent. 56 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

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imperative to see, represent, examine, verify, accuse, incriminate, confiscate and destroy was all the more elaborate.”12 The use of the 16-mm camera made such an imperative easier but also presented limitations. The police cameraman needs to move the camera to different angles to capture moments of physical contact. At times the lighting is too low (or the film is too degraded) and the activities are barely detectable. While the camera often sits steady, conjuring a distant objective gaze of an observer, at moments the camera moves with an unsteady hand from stall thresholds to urinals, from the urinals to the sinks, pointing and focusing its lens towards details of activities. Early in the film, we see men cruising each other, looking into the stalls, entering and exiting the stalls, washing their hands at the sink. The camera strives to capture these simple movements as if searching for something it can’t see. In the early parts of the video, the sexual acts themselves take place beyond the camera’s eye, hidden in the stalls and left for us to imagine. Men hover at the stall entrances gyrating with bodies or hand movements as they constantly eye the bathroom entrance to the right of the camera. There is a range of diversity in the men, their clothing serves as signs of social class: T-shirts and jeans on some, white starched shirts and ties on others. Similarly, there is a range of age differences, young men and older men, as well as racially different men. Often the camera fixates on the erotic couplings that cross these differences, where race or class lines are threatened by sexual encounters, for example. These couplings that transgress social order further an anxiety about the implications such encounters have beyond the sexual activity itself in small town Ohio in the early 1960s. The film in this sense conjures a set of social transgressions where homosexual sex is implicated in a larger breakdown of class and racial boundaries. Such breakdowns would not have been unnoticed by the jury, and underscore a strong element in the film’s courtroom influence for the prosecution. What is striking about Tearoom is how much looking is being looked at. The men wander in, peer into the stalls, stretch and contort their bodies to look behind them as they stand at the urinals or groom themselves in the mirrors by the sinks. Almost everyone keeps a constant eye towards the bathroom door and the potential threats that may come through it. Some men are acutely nervous, the agitated movements always returning to look back at the bathroom door, unaware that their actions are already being recorded. In this sense, the film is filled with moments of imagining something beyond what we can see. The actions of the men are constantly shaped by the fear of being caught, exposed, made visible. We know as spectators that they are already visible. But this paradox of looking raises a question about the surveillance itself: what are we missing in our own act of looking? What is beyond our viewing frame? As the film progresses, the sexual acts take to center stage, but even these moments of explicitness resist the camera’s force. In one scene, the camera agitates up and down trying to focus on the waists of two men, the fragments

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Figure 3.5 William E. Jones, Tearoom, 2007. Video, color, silent. 56 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

of exposed buttocks and the movement of hands barely recognizable in the shadowy light and grainy film footage. In the next moment, it shifts left to the stall, the least lit part of the room, where a man stands with his back to us, presumably masturbating, or at least this is what the camera tries to show us through its focus on the man’s arm movement. Indeed, while there is much displayed between stalls and sinks, there is even more that is connotative, suggestive of sexual activities. Often the camera, like a searching bloodhound on a trail it knows is near, moves with a kinetic energy that only underscores its inabilities at capturing what the police cameraman is looking for—but can’t fully see. The work of the Mansfield Police Department set a precedent in such policing efforts. Other areas of the country modeled similar surveillance operations, and the FBI produced a training manual based on what happened in Ohio.13 Waugh relates that in 1964 the state of Florida published a handbook entitled Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida, the result of a year-long investigation by a legislative committee into the “rise of homosexual activity” in the state that was distributed widely.14 But it was the imagery of the handbook that was intriguing and ultimately scandalous. As Waugh notes, the images included, “two men kissing,” an image

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of “smiling pre-pubescent boys nude or in underwear,” “a physique mag shot of a pensive blond hunk” in bondage, and the most alluring image of the four: “a clearly authentic surveillance photo of a glory hole blow-jobin-progress.”15 The subject, his hips pressed against the stall wall turns to his side to look at the photographer. But the reproduced image places a black rectangular strip across his eyes, performing in photographic form what the surveillance film does in the moving image: invalidate the subject’s ability to look back. But strangely, this blocking out of the subject’s eyes limits our own abilities to look, and turns our attention away from the subject’s face towards the sex act itself. The handbook image draws us to the erotics of the glory hole in a message meant to eradicate such efforts. Looking turned into erasure. A few months after it was published, the handbook made its way to Herman Womack, who founded Guild Press in Washington, DC in the late 1950s, a publishing house dedicated to homoerotic books directed to the increasingly visible gay culture.16 In reprinting this government handbook and selling it to his huge mailing list of eager male readers the images took on a different purpose and meaning, their eroticism, most acutely evident in the surveillance photograph, experienced with pleasure and instruction. “Gay sexual culture,” writes Waugh, “achieved a new visibility if not legitimacy with these images recycled for pleasure, pride, and profit.”17 On a more profound level, this republishing and recontextualizing underscore how such surveillance depended upon transforming one way of looking into another. The intention of the surveillance was to record and make public the very actions the government wished us not to look at. For Guild Press readers, it was precisely those sexual components that defined the pleasures of looking. Indeed, there is evidence that the Mansfield surveillance film circulated among the town’s respectable residents as a crude but titillating underground porn film, shown in private homes of the town’s residents much like stag films of the era.18 The circulation of such images beyond their original uses illuminates the slippages between looking and not looking, between looking at something versus looking for something, that Jones’s video makes acutely clear. The Madison, Ohio, three-week surveillance resulted in 38 arrests.19 Many others who were identified by the police as “sexual deviants” were subject to random police questioning. The different uses of the surveillance film made visible the very desires and experiences it was meant to eradicate. Or, to phrase it another way, the surveillance was meant to make visible those desires and sexual acts we were not supposed to look at. COURTROOM EVIDENCE The deployment of sexual images in judicial settings was becoming widespread and transforming justice into voyeuristic spectacle.20

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Nowhere was this looking as not looking more evident than in the courtroom. The surveillance footage entered the legal realm as evidence, though plaintiffs contested its importance and veracity. As Waugh writes, the defendants claimed the surveillance film constituted an unlawful search and seizure and “showing the film in the courtroom was clearly unnecessary and insufficient in itself, intended only to affront the jury and ensure conviction.”21 Both arguments were dismissed by the court: the first because the toilet was deemed a public space, and the second because it was uncertain what the footage would arouse in the jurors. In several cases, defendants claimed that they were not the individuals in the film, prompting juries to request a second or third viewing of the film in their deliberations.22 The concerns about the veracity of the film, what is showed or didn’t show, was vital to the film’s place in the courtroom. But all such concerns were ignored in the cases, for the film footage as evidence was crucial to the prosecution’s case, where the voyeuristic experience of the surveillance served a useful function in making the sexual acts more spectacular in their appearance. The film, in effect, turned those men into criminals by making visible the connotation of sexual acts. Beyond just evidence, the spectacle of the bathroom activities conjured an unsettled filmic experience where looking at that which should not be seen was a useful emotional tool for the prosecution’s effort to persuade the jury. We also need to keep in mind that the three-week surveillance was prompted by the admission of Jarrell R. Howell, convicted for murdering two young girls after they refused his demand for oral sex, something, he claimed, he learned from men in the Mansfield Central Park public toilet.23 Howell stomped on the girls and then threw their bodies in a nearby river. The crime prompted public outrage, and the police, in an effort to diffuse criticism, directed their attentions to the problem of “sexual deviants” in Mansfield. The homophobic logic played on popular beliefs that equated child molestation with homosexual sex. In this instance, it was the experience and the viewing of homosexual sex in the public toilet that corrupted the young Howell, turning the invisible acts of consensual sex into the violence of murder. Locating the evidence of the cause of such violence was a problem for the police and the prosecution. The film as evidence then served a number of functions in transforming the invisible sex acts into repeatedly watched crimes, and, more acutely, connecting queer sex acts with necessary modes of surveillance as vital to social order. Historian Lee Edelman has described the public restroom as space of “intrinsic uncertainty” for it embodies a space where private and public experience overlap and where citizens enact notions of hygienic purity.24 It is, more profoundly, a place that attempts to stabilize sexual and gender differences, and has historically played out, in Edelman’s words, as an “unacknowledged ideological battleground in the endless—because endlessly anxious—campaign to shore up ‘masculinity’ by policing the borders at which sexual difference is” defined.25 In exploring this battleground,

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Edelman relates the case of Walter Jenkins, a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, who was arrested in a public bathroom in Washington, DC, in the fall of 1964—just two years after the Mansfield arrests. Jenkins was a victim of an undercover police stakeout of the bathroom where the state peered through stall peepholes and over doors. The arrest of such a high level advisor provoked a brief but acute national concern, in which Jenkins’s story connected homosexual activities with larger Cold War anxieties. Such cases were part of a larger, historical experience. While there is evidence of surveillance of the men’s toilets stretching to the late-nineteenth century in both the US and England, by the Cold War 1960s, the public toilet had become a particularly fraught site of American sexual and social identity.26 In his famous 1970 sociological study of public sex in men’s toilets titled Tearoom Trade, Laud Humphries noted that “perhaps the public toilet is one of the marks of ‘civilization,’ at least as perceived by European and post-European culture.”27 He relates a letter he received some years after the first edition of his book was published. The letter was “from a sailor stationed in North Africa during World War II in which he called the people ‘uncivilized’ because they had no public restrooms and used streets and gutters for the purpose of elimination.” Humphries continued, in a veiled justification for his particular research site, “for the cultural historian, American park restrooms merit study as physical traces of modern civilization.”28 Setting aside the symbolic meanings for public toilets that Humphries contends, his study reimagined the activities of the men’s bathroom from criminal activity to a sociological analysis, focusing on the boundaries of male sexual experiences.29 Humphries conducted his research during the mid-1960s while a sociology graduate student at the University of St. Louis. His researcher’s gaze was both distant and at times participatory, mostly serving as a lookout for his subjects, alerting them to other men entering the bathroom. At the time, many considered his work ethically problematic, with criticisms that Humphries was colluding with criminal activity rather than conducting sociological research.30 Such critiques privilege only two positions in the act of looking at queer sex in public toilets: either as criminal or policeman. Humphries’s sociological looking offered a different position in making the activities of the men’s toilet evidence for larger social meanings. His work provided more possibilities for what such looking can make visible beyond erotic attraction of criminal conduct, showing how these activities were part of social habits rather than a threat to them. In encountering Jones Tearoom, we confront these historical layers and uncertainties of the surveillance evidence. One paradox of the film is how it turns the spectacle of queer sex in a public toilet into its own experience, outside the police or legal apparatus and beyond the sociological gaze. Jones’s video reminds us that like the public toilet space itself, our frenetic looking into the men’s toilet holds its own “intrinsic uncertainty” between the public and private spaces of sexuality.

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Similarly, as much as Tearoom draws on the historical investigations into public toilets, it also engages the contemporary moment. At the same moment that patrons sat in the darkened viewing room watching Tearoom on one of the last weekends of the Whitney Biennale, fans lined up on a warm spring day at Midway Stadium in St. Paul, Minnesota. They came in anticipation of a limited-edition, first of its kind, bobble foot memorabilia—a small replica of a men’s bathroom stall with the occupant’s right foot, anchored on a wire spring, tapping left and right. Officially, the promotional event for the St. Paul Saints minor league baseball team was to commemorate National Tap Dancing Day, and as its press release noted, “in tribute to all [of the team’s] toe-tapping friends and fans from around the nation who may ever have set foot in Minneapolis–St. Paul . . . even just a change of planes.”31 The underlying joke of the giveaway was a reference to the arrest of Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig in June of 2007 for his “inappropriate” conduct with an undercover policeman in a bathroom stall at the Minneapolis airport. Craig’s arrest was based on the impression by an undercover policeman that Craig was signaling for a sexual encounter by tapping his foot inside the adjacent stall. Craig would later dismiss the charges as inaccurate or misinterpreted, plead guilty to “disorderly conduct,” and then attempted to change his plea to innocent.32 The incident produced T-shirt slogans and pundit double entendres across a wide spectrum of the media. Throughout the months after Craig’s arrest, the media retold the story through interviews and discussions and in editorials critiquing Craig’s defense, or questioning the realities that public restrooms continue to be under surveillance by police. In one such notable critique, Laura MacDonald wondered in an editorial in The New York Times that, “what is shocking about Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom arrest is not what he may have been doing tapping his shoe in that stall, but that Minnesotans are still paying policemen to tap back.”33 Much of the media discussion was framed around a general confusion about the nature of sex in a public toilet and, by extension, how such encounters even happen in the first place. In October of 2007, Craig went on national television to claim that he was, without a doubt, not gay. In an exclusive NBC news interview with talk show host Matt Lauer, he explained how he was the victim of “gladiator politics.”34 Sitting with his wife by his side, in the cozy warmth of his home and surrounded by family photos, Craig reminded Lauer and the viewers that he did not approve of the “homosexual lifestyle.” The interview was meant to confirm not only Craig’s conservative heterosexuality, but also offered moments of Lauer’s own confusion as to the tactics of male cruising. As The Washington Post television critic Tom Shales related the exchange: “At one point, Lauer said the records included ‘a guy who claims you “cruised” him—whatever that is.’ This, it seemed, was Lauer’s way of winking into the camera and saying, ‘I’m not gay.’ ”35 Such implicit and explicit claims to heterosexuality were a constant theme in media discussions and late-night talk show jokes.36 Craig’s arrest served a moment of comedic

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relief, editorial chat, and TV ratings, suggesting a near-hallucinatory sexual panic across the nation that hinged upon imagining the act of homosexual sex behind the stall door in a public bathroom. The fascination with the Craig case was further fueled just weeks later with the arrest of Florida Republican State Represented Bob Allen in July at the Veterans Memorial Park bathroom in Titusville, Florida.37 According to the police report, the arresting officer had noticed Allen entering and exiting the bathroom. Suspicious of Allen’s movements, the officer went into the bathroom to wash his hands. In his report he described what happened: I realized there were no paper towels to dry my hands so I walked in to [sic] the handicap stall to dry my hands. As I stood in the stall drying my hands I observed Allen look over the door of my stall and make eye contact with me. Allen then stepped away and then came back to the door of my stall and looked in, making eye contact with me again. I said ‘hey buddy’ and Allen said ‘hi’ and then stepped away again. About 5 seconds later Allen pushed open the door to my stall and stepped inside. I was standing against the far wall of the stall. Allen closed the door behind him and stood against it. I said, ‘what’s up’ and Allen said ‘hi.’ Allen then said ‘this is kind of a public place isn’t.’ I said ‘do you have somewhere else we can go.’ Allen said, ‘How about across the bridge, its quiet over there.’ Allen engaged me in a conversation in which it was agreed that he would pay me $20.00 in order to perform a ‘blow job’ on me.38 Allen was arrested for solicitation of prostitution, though he pled not guilty to the charges. The ensuing trial, like that of Craig’s, focused on the question of the bathroom activity and what exactly transpired in the stall. In one particularly bizarre moment of questioning, Allen’s attorney John Eisenmenger questioned one of the arresting officers precisely in the etiquette of bathroom looking. Florida Today reported the exchange: “What was significant about someone looking at you?” Eisenmenger asked. “From a men’s restroom? There’s something strange about it,” Jackson said. Jackson said he knew from a previous experience that men will look or stare at someone if they are trying to hit on them. Eisenmenger replied, “Officer Jackson, I’ve been looking at you the entire time. Do you think I’m hitting on you?” “I don’t know. Have you?” Jackson said, triggering laughter among the spectators.39 The heart of Allen’s defense rested on the fraught meanings of looking in a men’s toilet. The defense team, in an odd twist of legal proceedings,

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admitted into evidence the bathroom stall itself, and brought the entire jury, judge, and court reporters to the park bathroom. As Florida Today reported, “Jurors milled around [the] . . . park on Thursday afternoon and took turns peering into the men’s restroom. . . . The five women and three men also checked out the handicapped stall Allen is accused of entering to speak with Officer Daniel Kavanaugh.”40 The report continued with details of the evidence: Sitting on the bench, the wall of the first stall of the men’s room was clearly visible. The handicapped stall also appeared large enough to fit both Kavanaugh and Allen, as Kavanaugh had testified. But it wasn’t as clear whether Allen would have been able to peer over the 5-foot7½-inch tall stall door as Kavanaugh said the lawmaker did twice that summer day.41 The definitions of looking and not looking, of what was looked at and what couldn’t be seen, were central points in the case. The jurors were asked to imagine what happened, or rather didn’t happen, in the public bathroom. Amidst all these theatrics, the bathroom replaced the courtroom where the visual exchanges, the eye contact, the movement of bodies in the stalls, the position of the men as they glanced at each other—or didn’t—were recreated and questioned. What was so utterly confounding in the whole case was not so much what happened in the bathroom stall as was the issue of what one man looking at another man in this public space indicated. As much as these cases drew attention to and raised concerns about peering over or under the bathroom stalls to imagine the spectacle of homosexual sex, they more profoundly wrapped this spectacle within mystery and confusion. The bobble-foot giveaway was of course a view from the outside of the stall. The tiny wooden door was firmly glued shut. These court cases, so thoroughly and obsessively imagined in the media, produced a curious moment when a generalized homosexual panic with a range of symptoms from jokes to outrage rested on the very dangers and mysteries of looking inside the men’s room stall. Consider another use of such imagery to transform the voyeurism of homosexual exchanges into an abject scene of imagined fear. On televisions across the United States in January of 1993, when Congress was considering lifting the ban on homosexuals in the military, NBC Nightly News offered a report titled “Will It Work?” which brought viewers into the shower stalls and urinal spaces of a military men’s bathroom. Richard Meyer, in his book Outlaw Representation, has described the segment as thus: The story opened with the title question [Will It Work?] superimposed upon a shot of two showerheads spewing water. Following this shot, the camera panned down to reveal the shaven head and upper torsos of two men (presumably members of the armed forces) as they showered

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James Polchin in close proximity to each other. The camera then pulled back to reveal several more men (and several more showerheads) within the same communal space. Finally, the camera cut back to the original two men, now framed from behind, as they emerged from the shower and, their bodies glistening with water, proceeded toward a row of toilet stalls.42

Meyer notes that while lesbians suffered much more under the military ban on homosexuality, the imagery of this debate in the early 1990s was often of men’s restrooms and barracks.43 Bringing television viewers into the men’s barrack bathroom served as yet another moment in the history of men’s restrooms’ voyeuristic spectacle where we are asked to ponder the threat to heterosexual masculinity. The news imagery focused our looking at naked soldiers (filmed from the waist up), wet and glistening from the shower. But it asked us to imagine what may happen, what can happen, through a mix of voyeurism and voiceover commentary. The concerns that these images were meant to provoke, similar to the uses of the surveillance footage in Mansfield, linked the potential threat of homosexual exchanges in public toilets with more profound fears of social order. In this way, Jones’s Tearoom defuses such threats, maintaining the nearly original surveillance footage as it is, erasing the various narratives of lawyers and judges and policemen who would define this evidence, shaping a way of looking at it, forcing us to grapple with the film’s historical and contemporary realities within the museum’s viewing room. Paradoxically, the film undercuts its own spectacular potential by foregoing the interpretive narrative, and thus making visible how such surveillance anchors on the connotative. Beyond the proscriptive, voiceover narratives that shape the film’s meaning, the footage doesn’t direct our gaze, allowing for a range of responses that play with our fears and pleasures about the sexual activities of men in public toilets. MUSEUM OBJECT These men inhabit this artwork in perpetuity, and without asking whether they wish to live like this forever, our continued watching does them ongoing harm.44 We know from the very start of Jones’s Tearoom that the men we look at had no idea that the police were looking at them. They are not performing for the camera. The men move in awkward ways in their encounters with each other, and as Jones has noted, “this is what gay sex looked like before porn. Now men look at porn and figure out how to fuck.”45 Their gestures and actions were without visual cues taken from pornography, taken from performances of what “homosex” should look like. As one critic has pointed out: “Whether we believe we are watching an historical evidentiary

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relic, or a contemporary artwork, or neither or both, these scenes are undeniably unexpected. Nobody expected furtive, anonymous, homosexual sex would look like this.”46 More importantly, the men in Tearoom were unaware that others would be looking at them: in the police department, in the prosecutor’s office, the judge’s chambers, the courtroom, the jury room, in private stag parties in Mansfield—and years later, in the museum. With this film, the State of Ohio was able to convict over thirty-five men on charges of sodomy with a mandatory one-year prison term. Many of the men convicted were sent for a period of time to the Lima State Mental Hospital where homosexuals were labeled psychopaths and were subject to shock therapy and heavily addictive medications.47 At the Whitney Biennial, as the film neared its completion, a group of five high school students wandered into the room, just at a moment when the grainy colors of the film portrayed one man fondling another man in front of one of the stalls. The students burst into laughter, and one loudly whispered, “Oh, fuck.” They raced out of the room, their anxious giggles echoing down the entrance hall. This response was not unusual. Recounting the audience reactions to the film, Jones relates, “some spectators laughed at the footage. Laughter is a fairly common reaction to unexpected images.”48 But laughter is only one response. “Some audiences are very angry when they see the footage,” Jones continues, I try to deal with these situations as calmly as possible. They are angry at having to confront such blunt images of oppression. Other audiences are very polite and seem to appreciate the footage. It’s really a broad spectrum of reactions. Recently I had two screenings in Los Angeles. The first one was a shouting match. One person was extremely angry and was shouting people down. He was blaming me, saying how horrible it is to expose the public to this footage and to invade the privacy of these men who had been under surveillance.49 Another viewer, in a letter to the artist, stated that his experience of the film at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh was a repeated abuse of the men in the film: Viewing the film cannot be done without again victimizing the men who were filmed without their knowledge or consent and even the most sympathetic audience was viewing who surely would be humiliated knowing the film. It is just too personal. That fact is inescapable and paramount. We can be enlightened to the audacity of the police without viewing the film.50 This viewer concluded, “the film should never have been made. It should be destroyed. The historical value is no greater than the dignity these men

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lose every time the film is viewed.”51 Such a harsh critique speaks to the way that Tearoom engages questions about spectatorship. As a video object grounded on voyeuristic film surveillance practices, it entices us to look, but then it unsettles us with the recognition that we constantly and problematically occupy the place of the policeman, prompting a recognition of our own participation in the work of surveillance. Doubts about Tearoom as museum object are at the heart of the critique by legal scholars Katherine Biber and Kenneth Dalton. In their article “Making Art from Evidence: Secret Sex and Police Surveillance in the Tearoom,” they question the ethics of turning courtroom evidence into museum object.52 In equating the film with another voyeuristic film, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1964), which was filmed just six months after the Mansfield police surveillance, Biber and Dalton write, “Warhol has the gift of turning viewers into voyeurs, each craving some new visual pleasure, then marveling at his audacity to withhold it from view, forcing the viewer to imagine it for themselves. Watching Tearoom feels like this.”53 While they make this analogy with Warhol’s work, they ultimately conclude that Tearoom lacks the power of mystery. “Certainly we see erections and masturbations, and bodies of various sexual arrangements” they write, “But still, somehow, [Tearoom] is not a film about sex, or pleasure, or risk, or crime. This is a film about watching. This is a film about the experience of watching, about the urge to look at an image and form a conclusion.” They add, “We come to the film with a belief that if we watch long enough, watch closely enough, the truth will spill out of the screen. But, by the end of Tearoom, we realize that this is our fantasy, impossible, untenable and—most importantly—improper.”54 This improper fantasy of finding truth in the viewing experience of the film raises a problem of ethics for both Jones and the viewer. They write: “These men inhabit this artwork in perpetuity, and without asking whether they wish to live like this forever, our continued watching does them ongoing harm. Each of us will decide for ourselves whether it was worth it: did we learn something? Did we feel something? Did we enjoy it?”55 This critique approaches Tearoom as a visual object that is only about its content, stuck in its history as a surveillance film. They leave aside the ways the video is crucially about what it makes visible beyond the actions of the men filmed. Biber and Dalton don’t consider the work’s complicated history of looking as not looking, the spectacle of surveillance that adheres to the experience of it as art object. Certainly Tearoom as a museum object is experienced differently than the surveillance film footage and courtroom evidence, for it raises questions about our own place in front of the screen. In some sense, the artistic force of Tearoom is how it translates the history of not looking at homosexual sex into its own experience of looking. In this process, we ask questions about our relationship to the film, what the film makes visible about us as viewers. Who are we sitting there watching in silence these men in a public bathroom engaging in sex?

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Warhol’s Blow Job conjures a similar kind of self-reflective experience of looking, the camera focused on the beautiful face of a man leaning against a roughly textured wall. We never see anything more than his facial gestures, looking down, to the side, his head thrown backwards and his face contorting at moments of pleasure (or pain). We are meant to imagine the man is getting a blowjob by someone we can’t see (the title tells us this is so). This film is also without sound, and draws us into our own voyeurism. We are constantly aware of the intimacy of the film as it directs our gaze on the handsome face of the actor Warhol hired, even as we are aware that this is all a performance for the camera. His expressions and gestures connote what might be going on, but never do we actually see what happens below his waist, turning the whole film into an imagined performance. This play between theatrics and actual adds to the film’s compelling mystery. However, Tearoom denies its theatricality for these men are not actors performing for the camera. Our viewing of the film today is not about the actions of these men in the public bathroom, or about the sexual acts themselves. Can we be shocked that men had (and continue to have) sex with other men in public bathrooms? Are we to view this film as documentary that educates us on such histories and behaviors? When we ask such questions, we quickly see that Jones’s Tearoom has very little to do with the men in the bathroom, with what the film shows us. Rather, there is something more intriguing that this film makes visible. Tearoom turns the experience of watching into a self-conscious act where looking and not looking are in tension. We are made aware of not looking’s power to counter the force and oppression that looking (particularly surveillance) can have when used against citizens deemed “criminal.” We come to this film with our assumptions and ideas (as Jones has contended) transforming the film from the subjects being filmed to ourselves as spectators, or witnesses, or voyeurs. Jones’s video makes visible our own place in this historical and cultural experience that defined queer sex acts as suspicious and illegal. As police surveillance footage and courtroom evidence, the film was meant to make visible experiences that would be then erased through conviction, imprisonment, or the incarceration in a mental hospital for an unspecified period of time. It was a kind of looking meant to erase all such looking. But as museum object, Tearoom makes visible that which is meant to erase as well—though in different terms. For what it ultimately questions is the veracity of all surveillance evidence, and particularly the mysteries that linger between voyeuristic pleasures and police evidence. Jones’s video turns against its earlier film uses, and in the process asks us to question who we are as viewers, what we are looking at, and why are we looking at it. If we get distracted by what this video shows us, we lose sight of the complex tensions between voyeurism and surveillance that anchor what the work makes acutely visible.

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NOTES 1. Luigi Fassi, “Sexuality as a Utopian Promise,” interview with William E. Jones, Mousse Magazine 17 (January 2009), accessed September, 24 2012. http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=5. 2. Ibid. 3. William E. Jones. Tearoom (Los Angeles: 2nd Cannons Publications, 2008), 6. Jones produced and published this limited edition pamphlet that compiled historical documents about the trial, the arrests, the use of film in surveillance work in the 1960s. It provides context to the film, but unlike a narrative voiceover, doesn’t intrude on the encounter with the film itself. 4. The term has its origins earlier than midcentury, most likely originating in England where the word tea would be another name for urine. See Lee Edelman, “Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 553–74. 5. Dietmar Schwärzler, “More Than One Way to Watch a Movie,” interview with William E. Jones, Smell It (Vienna: Kunsthalle Exnergasse, 2009), 74–79. Reprinted at williamejones.com, accessed September 24, 2013, http://www. williamejones.com/collections/about/11. 6. Donn Gaynor, “Hidden Movie Camera Used By Police to Trap Sexual Deviates (sic) at Park Hangout, 17 Arrests Climax Probe,” Mansfield News-Journal, August 22, 1962, reprinted in Jones, Tearoom, 4–5. 7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Press, 1995), 200. 8. John Berger, “On Visibility,” in The Sense of Sight (New York: Vintage International, 1985), 219. 9. Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 372. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid, 374. 12. Ibid., 370. 13. Ibid., 375. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Jones, Tearoom, 32. 19. “Mansfield Tearoom Sodomy Convictions,” in Ibid. 20. Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 374. 21. Ibid. 22. See McKee, William, “Camera Surveillance of Sex Deviants—Evidentiary Problems,” Law and Order 12, no. 8, (August 1964). Reprinted in Jones, Tearoom, 12–13. 23. Jones, Tearoom, 40. 24. Edelman, “Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet,” 561. 25. Ibid. 26. For the Anglo-American history of such policing, see George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995), and Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago:

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27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

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University of Chicago Press, 2005). For an understanding of homosexuality in the US Cold War era, see David Johnson, Lavender Scare: The Cold War Prosecution of Gay and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Laud Humphries, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 3. Ibid. For a consideration of the criticisms of Humphries work and the larger context of voyeuristic sociological research see, Janice M. Irvine, “ ‘The Sociologist as Voyeur’: Social Theory and Sexuality Research, 1910–1978.” Qualitative Sociology 26, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 429–56. For an overview of the response to Humphries work, see John Galliher, Wayne Brekhus, and David P. Keys, Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality & Sociology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), and Janice M. Irvine, “ ‘The Sociologist as Voyeur’: Social Theory and Sexuality Research, 1910–1978,” Qualitative Sociology 26, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 429–56. “Saints Tap Way to 2008 Promotions” (press release), accessed September 3, 2012, http://www.saintsbaseball.com/news/saintsnews/index. html?article_id=731. Paul Kane, “Craig Asks Court to Waive His Guilty Plea,” The Washington Post, September 10, 2007, accessed 3 September 2012, http://www.washing tonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/10/AR2007091000482.html. Laura M. MacDonald, “America’s Toe-Tapping Menace,” The New York Times, September 2, 2007, accessed September 3, 2012, http://www.nytimes. com/2007/09/02/opinion/02macdonald.html?_r=0. “Sen. Larry Craig Interview with Matt Lauer,” NBC News, video and transcript, accessed September 3, 2012, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21303825/t/ sen-larry-craigs-interview-matt-lauer/#.U-Kf_YBdXi4. Tom Shales, “NBC’s Matt Lauer, Making the Least of an Opportunity,” The Washington Post, October 16, 2007, accessed September 3, 2012, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/16/AR2007 101602494.html. One constant symptom of the heterosexual panic was the barrage of jokes by editorial writers and talk show hosts alike. A list of such jokes has been compiled in the political humor section of about.com. Accessed July 23, 2011, http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/sexandpolitics/a/larrycraigjokes.htm. Even The New Yorker used the event to poke political satire at then-president of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comments critical of homosexuality in Iran. On its October 8, 2007 cover, artist Bill Blitt rendered the president sitting in a bathroom stall while peering at a sandaled foot reaching towards him from the adjacent stall. Accessed July 23, 2011, (http://archives.newyorker. com/?i=2007–10–08#folio=002). “Florida Representative Charged with Pedaling Oral Sex,” The Advocate July 13, 2007, accessed, 23 July 2011, http://www.advocate.com/ news/2007/07/13/florida-representative-charged-peddling-oral-sex. State of Florida vs. Robert Allen. Arrest Report published in Florida Today, July 11, 2007, accessed 23 July 2011, http://www.floridatoday.com/assets/pdf/ A98128182.PDF. Susanne Cervenka, “Jury Tours Park, Site of Allen Arrest” Florida Today (November 9, 2007), accessed July 23, 2011, http://www.floridatoday.com/ article/20071109/NEWS01/711090358/Jury-tours-park-site-Allen-arrest Ibid.

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41. Ibid. 42. Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 19. 43. Ibid., 20. 44. Katherine Biber and Derek Dalton, “Making Art from Evidence: Secret Sex and Police Surveillance in the Tearoom,” in Crime and Media Culture 5, no. 3 (2009), 256. 45. Schwärzler, “More Than One Way to Watch a Movie.” 46. Biber and Dalton, “Making Art from Evidence,” 256. 47. William E. Jones, “A Witch Hunt at Amateur Hour,” in Jones, Tearoom, 40. 48. Jones, Tearoom, 6. 49. Schwärler, “More Than One Way to Watch a Movie.” 50. Schwärler, “More Than One Way to Watch a Movie.” 51. Biber and Dalton, “Making Art from Evidence,” 263. 52. Ibid., 256. 53. Ibid., 262. 54. Ibid., 262–63. 55. Ibid., 264.

REFERENCES Berger, John. “On Visibility.” In Sense of Sight, 85–62. New York: Vintage International, 1985. Biber, Katherine, and Dalton, Derek. “Making Art from Evidence: Secret Sex and Police Surveillance in the Tearoom.” Crime and Media Culture 5 no. 3 (2009): 243–67. Cervenka, Susanne. “Jury Tours Park, Site of Allen Arrest.” Florida Today, November 9, 2007. Accessed July 23, 2011. http://www.floridatoday.com/ article/20071109/NEWS01/711090358/Jury-tours-park-site-Allen-arrest. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1995. D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Edelman, Lee. “Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 553–74. Edited by Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. Fassi, Luigi. “Sexuality as a Utopian Promise.” (Interview with William E. Jones.) Mousse Magazine 17 (January 2009). Accessed September 24, 2012. http://mousse magazine.it/articolo.mm?id=5. “Florida Representative Charged with Pedaling Oral Sex.” The Advocate, July 13, 2007. Accessed July 23, 2011. http://www.advocate.com/news/2007/07/13/ florida-representative-charged-peddling-oral-sex. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Press, 1995. Galliher, John, Brekhus, Wayne, and Keys, David P. Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality & Sociology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Gaynor, Donn. “Hidden Movie Camera Used By Police to Trap Sexual Deviates (sic) at Park Hangout, 17 Arrests Climax Probe. Mansfield News-Journal (August 22, 1962). Reprinted in William E. Jones. Tearoom. Los Angeles: 2nd Cannons Publications, 2008.

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Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Humphries, Laud. Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Chicago: Aldine, 1970. Irvine, Janice M. “ ‘The Sociologist as Voyeur’: Social Theory and Sexuality Research, 1910–1978.” Qualitative Sociology 26, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 429–56. Johnson, David. Lavender Scare: The Cold War Prosecution of Gay and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Jones, William E. Tearoom. Los Angeles: 2nd Cannons Publications, 2008. Kane, Paul. “Craig Asks Court to Waive His Guilty Plea.” The Washington Post, September 10, 2007. Accessed September 3, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/10/AR2007091000482.html. MacDonald, Laura M. “America’s Toe-Tapping Menace.” The New York Times, September 2, 2007. Accessed September 3, 2012. http://www.nytimes. com/2007/09/02/opinion/02macdonald.html?_r=0. McKee, William. “Camera Surveillance of Sex Deviants—Evidentiary Problems.” Law and Order 12, no. 8 (August 1964). Reprinted in William E. Jones. Tearoom. Los Angeles: 2nd Cannons Publications, 2008. Meyer, Richard. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. “Saints Tap Way to 2008 Promotions” (press release). Accessed September 3, 2012. http://www.saintsbaseball.com/news/saintsnews/index.html?article_id=731. Schwärzler, Dietmar. “More Than One Way to Watch a Movie.” (Interview with William E. Jones.) Smell It. Vienna: Kunsthalle Exnergasse, 2009, 74–79. Reprinted on Jones’s website. Accessed September 24, 2013. http://www.williamejones. com/collections/about/11. “Sen. Larry Craig Interview with Matt Lauer.” Video and transcript, NBC News. Accessed 3 September 2012. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21303825/t/sen-larrycraigs-interview-matt-lauer/#.U-Kf_YBdXi4. Shales, Tom. “NBC’s Matt Lauer, Making the Least of an Opportunity.” The Washington Post, October 17, 2007. Accessed September 3, 2012. http://www.wash ingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/16/AR2007101602494.html. State of Florida vs. Robert Allen. Florida Today, July 11, 2007. Accessed 23 July 2011. http://www.floridatoday.com/assets/pdf/A98128182.PDF. Waugh, Thomas. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

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Part II

The Privilege of the Other Senses

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4

Peripatetic Sculpture The Exhaustion of Looking in the Presence of Richard Serra’s Promenade Frances Guerin

I never know how people experience my work. —Richard Serra1

When I entered the Grand Palais in Spring 2008 to see Richard Serra’s Promenade, I was overcome by a certain anxiety and a tinge of disappointment: where was it? Where was the sculpture? What was I supposed to be looking at? I couldn’t see what I was looking for. Familiar with Serra’s overwhelming torqued spirals that fill museums in New York, Bilbao, and Madrid, knowing their dominance and the disorientation they invoke, I assumed and expected Serra to fill the magnificent space of the Grand Palais in the same way. However, the all-embracing, almost claustrophobic intensity of the torqued spirals was nowhere to be seen inside the Grand Palais. Seen from the perpendicular perspective of the entrance, and also on the opposite side from the café, visitors had to search for Serra’s plates. There was nothing spectacular, nor monumental, even monolithic, but rather, in the Grand Palais, it took time to find what we had come to see and to acclimate to the sculptural presence. It took time to adjust to the plates’ very slight width, their reach upwards, not towards the visitor, to the glass roof of the building.2 Promenade comprised five plates, each 56 feet high, 13 feet wide, and 5½ inches thick, weighing 73 tons. The plates were perfectly erect, evenly spaced along the central axis of the nave. Each was shallowly anchored in the ground, precisely placed and angled, leaning twenty inches in or away from its axis to create the shifting, unpredictable lines of sight familiar to Serra’s sculptures. The plates were quietly dramatic, serene, reaching as if against the force of gravity into the immense vault of the nave. More like an ancient mythological landform than sculpted steel, Promenade became integral to its environment. Promenade was especially elusive when time itself impacted the plates’ appearance and meaning: the shifting light of day, as the sun moved from east to west, cast its mark on the plates in the form of latticed shadows from

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the glass and iron roof of the dome. Similarly, at these times, the plates took on the appearance of bending toward or away from the viewer, or better, the promenader. Serra describes the optimal viewing conditions of Promenade as the early morning, late afternoon, and under artificial light at night. For Serra, these times of the day gave the steel surfaces a particular resonance that was more weighty, more profound, while simultaneously their materiality became ethereal.3 Secluded and protected from the rest of the city within the Grand Palais, at these times of day the promenader further drew and redrew the plates and the planes they had already created in light and shadow. As well as the sculpture’s changes, the architectural and natural environment transformed readily and fluidly in synchronization with the movement of the promenader. The plates’ rhythms, volume, density, the patterns they formed, the spaces they carved out, depended on the presence and movement of the visitor. As the visitor promenaded, the experience of looking became secondary to that which emerged from perambulation. The dependence on movement, together with the unpredictability resulting from the plates’ relationship to the passing of time meant that their physical properties also became bracketed across the experience of the visit. They existed and belonged only as they were brought alive by and in the one who promenaded through, around and along the axes they were always in the process of drawing. We were encouraged to see beyond the possibilities presented by looking, to experience the plates bodily, through other senses. The bodily experience invited by Promenade, thus the creation of the work by an embodied visitor in motion, is typical of Serra’s sculpted steel installations.4 Serra’s visitor did not become lost in visual contemplation of the art work as material object, but rather, was invited to experience her own corporeality through movement, touch, hearing, as well as inhabiting the physical space created and recreated by the interaction of sculpture, location, time, and motion. Visual perception was only a preparatory phase in the journey that led to the significance of Promenade. In their articulation and rearticulation of the environment—the Grand Palais and the modern urban landscape of Paris—the steel plates were realized in the passage of time, together with their occupation of shifting notions of space. Moreover, the relationship was reversed: the plates refigured the architectural and urban environment when they came alive through a visitor in motion. In addition to walking,5 visitors experienced the installation through different senses. Notably, the massive steel sculpture wanted us to look away from its surfaces, to look up, to observe and to study the vaulted iron and glass ceiling of the magnificent Grand Palais. Under the influence of the plates’ magnetic attraction, visitors were enticed up close, where the only way to look was to follow the line of sight given by the plates: upwards. Thus, in the very same moment that the sculptures encouraged a looking away, the visitor’s look was reactivated, redirected upwards and outwards. Looking and not looking were intertwined in a process of redirected looking.

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In this chapter, I examine the visitor’s experience to Promenade as one involving an exhaustion of looking. I place this experience within the context of conceptions of industrial modernity as ocularcentric. Again and again, modernity has been theorized for its celebration of new forms of visuality, the excitement of wholly new ways of seeing and new perspectives on the world.6 Moreover, mobility and the peripatetic have been particularly associated with an abstracted knowledge of the world as it is seen at high speed from a train window, from above thanks to modes of transport that began with the hot air balloon, dirigibles, and all manner of flying machines. In modernity, vision in motion was heralded by avant-garde filmmakers in particular for its purity, its abstraction from the object of vision such that vision itself became the discursive object.7 Through unfolding in a time and space marked by the exhaustion of looking, Promenade thus challenged longstanding beliefs about the prominence of vision and seeing as the primary access to understanding the world in modernity. As Hal Foster points out, the shift in Serra’s work away from the meaning of sculpture as a static, knowable object to one given meaning by an ambulatory viewing subject is a shift away from a “minimalist fixation on the object.”8 And, to Foster’s conception, I add that Serra’s reformulation of sculpture from a noun into a verb motivated by the bodily movement of a spectator is a necessary shift or passage beyond the limits of vision and the visual for a post-minimalist, post-modernist sculpture. In turn, Serra’s restoration of the body to the centrality of art within a (post)modernist landscape comes as a radical critique of the power of vision as it is experienced in the time-space of the modern city, of Paris in particular. I argue that Serra’s steel plates engage the quintessential turn of the century icons of modernity: great steel bulwarks that echo the industrialization of life, icons of rationalization and systemization that determine the experience of regulated time and spatial coherence in their presence. Promenade simultaneously offers an experience of the Parisian landmark (the Grand Palais) as a synecdoche of the modern city in which the other senses join to provide a creative peripatetic experience. In turn, this experience leads to an understanding of the experience of modernity as marked by a heightened sense of corporeality, a more intimate experience of the world that is in direct contrast to the alienation and distance of the “disinterested” observer who is the commonly accepted subject of modernity, so famously captured in Baudelaire’s flâneur. Lastly, through their refusal of our look, the five steel plates lay challenge to the apparent superficiality which is the post-modern experience of art.9 Instead, Serra gives us a physical experience of art that restores the body’s interaction with the reality of time and place as the vessel of our experience and knowledge of the world. In short, as others have noted, the steel plates are experienced phenomenologically.10 And within this phenomenological experience of sculpture, if the body becomes alienated from the social world in the discourse on modernity, then Serra’s work (for which Promenade is an example, but not interchangeable) recuperates

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the body. This material body becomes the basis of a post-minimalist sculptural challenge to the preeminence of vision as a vehicle of knowledge.11 NOT LOOKING: IN THE PRESENCE OF PROMENADE At the heart of this possibility of Serra’s steel plates is their inability to be described, photographed, documented, or grasped visually. It is impossible to know Promenade through looking alone. The plates are without potential for reproduction, and visual representation; their meaning derives from the physical experience of walking in their presence.12 The interstitial spaces and places, times and histories inhabited and explored by Promenade in its dialogue with each individual visitor have infinite possibility. Thus, conceptually, in spite of their inert materiality, their industrial manufacture and their material association with railway lines, buildings, and bridges, the steel plates are an articulate embodiment of modern art with its aura still intact. If we see them through the wisdom of Walter Benjamin, the plates of Promenade rest in their autonomy and resistance to mediation. They cannot be fully reproduced in still or moving images. And neither do they have use value, or resemblance to any object that might be produced or able to be used. The plates are free of and resist our manipulation, including representation, with a power that issues from within, a power that cannot be seen, but rather, is phenomenologically experienced.13 Serra confirms this as his objective when he asserts that the steel plates are not objects that contain meaning in their materiality.14 Rather, their meaning is in the way that we as visitors to the Grand Palais experience them. In keeping with this demotion of the importance of material substance, as transpired in their period of exhibition, the steel plates were not made solely to be looked at. When asked what he would say to a visitor to the Grand Palais, Serra responds: The content resides in you as a viewer . . . the subject matter is not these big plates in the air: the subject matter is your experience walking into, through and around the entire field. The content is your experience of this piece in this space. There is no content within the plate: it’s a steel plate . . . the inhabiting of the space and the temporal aspect of this work is its content, in relation to how the viewer understands it.15 Promenade did not consume space, but rather the plates created a space to be experienced over time. Promenade guided the viewer, the promenader, around a time and space wholly outside of the manufactured steel plates. And yet, both the reality of the plates and the time-space co-ordinates of the visitor’s body were appropriated for the duration of the visit. Promenade may have been executed in an industrial material, but it did not exist outside of the phenomenological experience of the visitor to the Grand Palais

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in the six weeks of its installation. This constant movement in times and spaces that were themselves in a process of appearing and disappearing was Promenade’s insurance against ogling, contemplation, and often, even the most cursory of glances. The insufficiency of looking was simultaneously the basis of the work’s opposite: a recovery of a modern way of being in the world founded on the restitution of the body to the experience of art in the twenty-first century.16 INTIMACY AND MONUMENTALITY: THE OTHER SENSES How do steel plates give themselves over to an experience of the body that exhausts the practice of looking? How can a sculpture, an edifice, a form of any kind be both monumental in size as well as efface its material existence? In the presence of Promenade, this can be explained in the curious interaction between the plates and their environment. The intractable steel plate may have an overwhelming presence, and yet it beckoned the visitor, it implored her to form a relationship with it, to get up close, touch, feel, and huddle beside it. The movement and behavior of visitors to Promenade described this experience. The intimate relationship was in direct, irreconcilable contrast with the hulking, all be they, delicately poised, plates of steel. It was in this grey space between massive steel plates and the intimate relationship they incited that visitors were invited to experience and understand the full ramifications of Promenade.17

Touching Following a period of acclimation and the deflation of expectations for monumentality, the plates demanded that we move through and into the space of the nave, following the interaction of light with the steel surfaces as it streamed through the uninterrupted glass and iron roof. The title, Promenade was not a mere suggestion: it was an imperative. The task of the visitor was to walk around the plates, between them, wandering at leisure, looking, feeling, listening, smelling. If visitors stopped, it was usually to gather, in groups, in the auratic presence of a plate. As the sun streamed through the glass and iron dome, depending on its angle, some of the plates, all or none of them changed color and temperature. As the visitor approached, she felt increasing warmth, a warmth that was the effect of the sun reflected through glass, infusing the metal. Irrespective of the physics, as visitors promenaded the rise in body temperature was palpable.18 While the physics of the propensity of steel that enable it to absorb the temperature of the air are in no way mysterious, the changing temperature of Promenade between early morning, midday, and nightfall was filled with surprises. This was the first and most obvious way that the installation, as Serra insisted, could not be pinned down.19 It was the first

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and most obvious way that vision was not wholly adequate to the experience of Promenade. Serra’s steel sculpture created an environment that was, like the natural world of the mountains given by Benjamin in his example of the aura, independent, unique, and in a constant state of flux. It was an environment that had to be experienced physically: there was no alternative but to touch the steel plates. In their desire to be touched, the plates demanded that the basis of our relationship to them be tactile. I watched other promenaders and recognized that the emphasis on a physical relationship with the plates was inevitable as one after the other was seduced into touching them. One man pressed his body against a steel plate, and another with an impressive array of cameras sat using the plate as a backrest in an attempt to capture the others from an optimal viewpoint. Other visitors lay down on the floor, just to be next to a plate, while still others turned upside down and rested their feet against the plate. It was as if they contorted their bodies to experience it in a private, previously unimagined proximity. Children hit it, enthralled by its resilience, and their ability to make it sing. They continued until they hurt their hands and stopped in frustration or pain. In these examples of various visitors’ interaction with a single steel plate, through the need to touch it and hit it, or lean against it, looking is only the beginning of a complex physical relationship formed with the work.

Listening As Serra anticipated, in keeping with his insistence on the sanctuary of the installation, a silence blanketed the voluminous space that surrounded the steel plates.20 As steel absorbs heat, so it also absorbs sound, insulating it from the outside environment. Thus, when the promenaders’ refuge was invaded, and noise punctured the tranquility around the plates, it was as if a riot had opened up on the floor. A man dragged a trolley piled with supplies for the café across the concrete floor, and the noise of the contraption was deafening, echoing and redefining the volume of the nave all over again. A child’s piercing cry cut the air when it ripped through the calm that resonated from the plates. Steel, especially industrial steel, is not only typically unsightly, it is commonly loud, noisy, creating a commotion when found in its most common uses as a building material or railway lines. At the very mention of steel we immediately hear banging, sawing, milling, trains racing by. And yet, guided by Serra’s steel plates, as visitors promenaded in and around the installation, it was the steel that remained quiet, silent, elegant, meditative. The plates’ inner peacefulness is an example of how they deconstructed their own existence as articulations in steel. Moreover, their silence, the contradiction of all they should have been, was underlined by the sonic exaggeration of human activities that often confronted visitors. It was as though these noises were the product of another, far-off world that intruded periodically into

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the environment created by and for Serra’s sculpture. In these moments, the noises and activities around the plates, not the plates themselves, overwhelmed the space, making it difficult to inhabit, grating on our sense of hearing, and thus our preconception of an art exhibition. As the cleaner moved across the floor with his trolley creating a deafening noise in his wake, and, in another example, a loudspeaker announcement that Serra would sign books in the bookstore filled the space, the noises marked out the interior dimensions of the Grand Palais, drawing our attention to the silence of the steel. Thus, within the auditory environment created by Promenade in an interaction with the Grand Palais, visitors perceived its power when interrupted by the indelicacy and clamor of human everyday noises. The steel plates as indices of—and thereby allusions to—forms of skilled industrial labor as we associate it with modernity became ethereal and transcended their materiality when they did battle with the noises made by cleaners, loudspeaker announcements, children. In his earliest sculptural work with lead, Serra turned to the industrial manufacture of objects in a simultaneous shift away from the artwork as iconic object to be consumed.21 Here, in the Grand Palais, the plates pointed to another shift, namely, to a post-modern world where the limits of work and industrial manufacture, the struggle between a preestablished exhibition space and the shifting creative spaces of art, are crossed and confounded. As a result, a space where these familiar power struggles are left behind was opened up.22 Simultaneously, these unpredictable sounds of human life and labor in the presence of Promenade distracted the visitor. When they penetrated the silence, we momentarily forgot the steel plates and were pulled away both physically and mentally. We were impelled to look for the source of the sounds, an impulse made possible by the silence that enveloped the plates. At these moments we were pulled back into looking: we looked in order to know and understand the reorganized time-space reality. In these moments we were jolted into recognition and reminder of our physical location: we walked across a concrete floor, protected by the harshest of materials, pulled back from the harmonious and abstract embrace of a promenade in the presence of steel. By taking us out of the aura, back into the world of human production, the sounds, by default, alerted us to the fact that otherwise simple erect steel plates had plunged us into a world far from the instrumentality of the physical world. Once back in everyday reality, we were able to recognize we had become the wanderer, the walker charged with understanding the industrially generated world from a place beyond its limits.

Looking, but Away Having walked between the plates, around them, attempting to discover them, the quest to know through looking was soon abandoned. Alone with one, drawn to stand next to it, the visitor’s look was directed upwards, away from the surface of the plate. Again and again, once visitors were

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close enough to touch the plates as if in response to a sublime object, their next gesture was to look away.23 There were a number directions in which visitors looked away. Side by side with Promenade, the demand was to look upwards, to the lure of the Grand Palais’s latticed iron roof. Alternatively, visitors turned around, their backs to a plate and attempted to perceive Promenade as a community of five plates. Of course, this quest to know and understand, to rationalize the logic that holds the plates together was futile. It was futile because when visitors turned away from one plate, they looked at four others. When knowledge was pursued through looking at rather than away from steel as a metal object, frustration followed. Looking upwards along the face of the plate, as if it were a telescope, one plate made sense: it was not skewed, or out of line; it did not confuse or frustrate. It was perfectly proportioned. And on looking up, visitors found that each plate was symmetrically aligned with the iron frame of the vault, at right angles, reassuringly erect and geometrically positioned. Nevertheless, at the moment the geometrical symmetry was perceived, that is, the moment the perception of a rational relationship to the space and structure was experienced, it disappeared. In the very same gesture that promenaders aligned the top of the plate with the iron frame of the roof, they lost that alignment. The elusiveness of the alignment was caused by the curve of the iron-latticed roof. Thus, when visitors turned to visual perception as a mode of knowing and making sense of the architectural structure, it immediately failed them. After a matter of seconds, the obtuse and oblique angles created in the conversation between the steel plate and the iron and glass roof lead to a disturbing imbalance. Visitors felt queasy, disoriented, and lost, a response familiar but of a different genre to that had when walking the curvature of a Serra Torqued Spiral. As rational beings we instinctively search for order and logic, a sense of stable location. This could not be located through looking at Promenade. And so, unsettled, visitors stayed in constant motion, moving around the steel plate, driven by the desire for a place from which to find a center, a stable place to look and to see. Ultimately, no such place existed. This loss of orientation is the confirmation of the technical brilliance of Promenade. What we did not and could not understand was that what sustained the allure of Promenade was the interaction of the time and space of the steel plates with the reality of the architectural structure, and in turn, with the physicality of our motion. This is Serra’s radical transformation of the definition of modernist sculpture.24 Inside Serra’s Torqued Spirals, the experience oscillates between one of being safe, protected, surrounded, and one of becoming dizzy, nauseous, even menaced, in fear that the structure will collapse as we are forced to walk around the outside of one steel spiral and the inside of another that leans in on us.25 As we reach the center of the spirals, we are destabilized because we lose all sense of the relationship between inside and outside. Serra claims that “the feelings of confusion and confounding of perception happen after the fact.”26 What we think we know, what we see, and what

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the man standing next to us sees are inconsistent. If, in our experience of the Torqued Spirals we become lost in a search for a telos of our centripetal motion, our experience of Promenade confuses because we cannot create either a vertical or a horizontal axis along which to behold the plates. Thus, visitors experienced an oscillation between standing still—bringing with it a looking upwards and away—and motion, walking both with and without goal. If we did not look upwards, we stood next to a single plate and looked away from it, perpendicular to its four siblings in anticipation of an objective view. Again, momentarily, the others as a community were understood from the perspective of the one, but what we saw was a community of four, not the five plates that were Promenade in its totality. Even then, the attempt to know by looking became frustrated in the very same moment of trying. It was awkward, indeed impossible to stand still with the one form and simultaneously experience its place within the group. The plates continued to shift before our eyes. We continued to move in the presence of the plates. Apparently, there was a place at the endpoint of the nave’s horizontal axis from where it was possible to see the logic and rhythm of the movement of Promenade as a community of five steel plates.27 However, that point was also elusive. If this place existed, the monolithic plates constantly evaded the possibility of locating it. Visitors who continued to promenade with the goal of finding this location from which to see Promenade objectively found the journey to be interminable. Indeed, the only option for comprehension was to let go of the need to look, and to obey the invitation to know through touch, audition, and the experience of motion through space. Promenade’s power thus lay not only in its setting in motion of the experience of sculpture such that movement becomes the very definition of the form, but in the refusal to provide a single place from which to know through looking.

Walking The visitor’s complex experience that defined Promenade might well be understood through reflection on the nineteenth-century Parisian flâneur. The promenader in the presence of Serra’s sculpture was both like and unlike the flâneur as it was introduced into French literature by Sainte-Beuve, Honoré de Balzac, and the poetry of Baudelaire, particularly as it is taken up by Benjamin.28 In keeping with interpretations of the complex actions and purpose of the flâneur, the visitor’s experience through looking, when walking, unsurprisingly, oscillated. While the flâneur, immersed in the crowd, yet a solitary alienated figure, engages in complex activities of observing and whiling away time within the city streets, Promenade’s visitor formed a relationship with a material object that existed in a real but secluded time and space, if only to be carried beyond it. This relationship with the industrially manufactured plates ignited a different kind of perception, one that was physical, but not only visual. In turn, this embodied perception is a return

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of the visitor, the solitary walker, to a kind of social or physical (non)integration. This interaction with the physical world, an interaction for which our bodies are central, likens the visitor to and distinguishes him from the flâneur of late-nineteenth-century French literature. Baudelaire’s flâneur is arbitrary in the paths along which he idles.29 The flâneur is at times “an observer of life” and at others he is swept up by “the ebb and flow of movement” of the modern city. Never is the flâneur involved in, or a part of the city, rather he is identified by and finds his identity in a detachment from the world through which he moves. And yet, he is dependent on the city streets of Paris for his identity. The flâneur is autonomous and individual, often removed from the speed and anonymity of the modern world, and simultaneously, a part of it, the measure of it. For Baudelaire and his contemporaries, this is the purpose of the flâneur: to look and inquire into the meaning of modern life from a distance while simultaneously being immersed in it. Immersed in the experience of modern life the flâneur is shocked, jarred out of his habitual modes of perception, and thus, without mastery, this ambivalent experience gives him the substance for a to-be-realized representation of the alienation of that modern life. Like the flâneur, when we promenaded through the Grand Palais, we were confused, unsettled, and constantly looking for orientation. In the presence of Promenade we were immersed in the space, time and perceptual experience opened up by the work, an experience that led us away from habitual modes of perception. Namely, we were enticed into not looking at an art installation that nevertheless surrounded us. Accordingly, like the flâneur we were faced with an unease that made us conscious of our sensuous responses within this environment. At the same time, we were motivated by the force of our irresistible curiosity: “pleasurably absorbed in gazing . . . and mingling . . . through the medium of thought . . . in pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed countenance that has, on an instant, bewitched”30 Immersed in the environment of Promenade, in response to the challenges of looking and knowing, we engaged in a search to make sense of, to understand this ephemeral time and space, just as the flâneur was engaged in his urban experience of Paris under Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. We were likewise at the center of a world from which, under the roof of the Grand Palais, we were necessarily hidden. And the promenader walked to find the experience in this particular time and space. It was an experience that, like that of the flâneur began with walking and looking. However, unlike the flâneur, the promenader was not engaged in a distracted vision of the sort that characterized the experience of modern life. Promenade placed the body at the center of its meaning, both through the invitation to engage the senses, and in the pursuit of knowledge and a rational understanding. The nineteenth-century flâneur walks to secure a self-understanding in his environment, whereas the promenader was always in motion, engaged in a search for command over the object. Our purpose was of a different nature. Thus, the modes of looking and not looking were

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different. To further articulate the process of looking and not looking in Promenade it is useful to turn to Serra’s most notable commentators. BEYOND POST-MINIMALISM In keeping with his intimacy with the behavior of steel in its rolled, forged, milled, and cast forms, Serra points out that the speed with which we walk is determined by the height of the plates.31 The higher the steel walls, the slower the movement of the body as we walk through them. Foster identifies three principles at work in Serra’s sculpture: the constructivist, the phenomenological, and the situational. Foster argues that the three come together as the language of sculpture used by Serra “in order to motivate a body and to demarcate a place: not a fixed category of autonomous objects but a specific relay between subject and site that frames the one in terms of the other, and transforms both at once.”32 And, by extension, the speed of each individual piece must be a central component in the language of Serra’s sculpture. In turn, this is a speed determined by its relationship to the gaze. In a conversation with Yve-Alain Bois at the Louvre at the time of the installation at the Grand Palais, Serra talked about the speed of Clara-Clara.33 To mark the occasion of Promenade in the Grand Palais, the twinned curves of Clara-Clara like parentheses in steel were placed with their convex sides together in their original location at the Place de la Concorde entrance to the Jardin du Tuileries. To walk through the space between them was to follow the axis between the Arc du Triomphe and the Louvre, as if we were the King himself, surveying the land. At twelve feet high and one hundred and eight feet long, the experience of Clara-Clara was foreshortened because of the curvature of the sheets away from each other. The inclined steel sheets of Clara-Clara were designed to pull us through between them, along the axis to the Louvre at high velocity. Whereas the five erect plates of Promenade invited a slow strolling, a promenade, around not through the space. The more contemplative nature of the walking in the Grand Palais was the result of their erectness as well as their fifty-five feet of height. Unlike Clara-Clara, which is more typical of Serra’s installations in steel, and in radical distinction from the importance of the object and its material of minimalist sculpture, Promenade offered no specific path through which to move in order to optimize the experience.34 The physical movement and the time defined by this movement are consistently remarked upon in the literature on Serra’s sculpture as the way that it departs from the minimalist attachment to the object. And the specifically, nondirectional strolling demanded by Promenade, together with the punctuation of the stroll by not looking, extends the discourse on post-minimalist sculpture. Krauss explains the tendency of Serra’s work of the 1970s drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. She describes the creation of a vision in motion that, in an extension of that explored through

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Serra’s films, is dependent on the body of the spectator as the meaning of his sculptural work. She writes: The mutual transitivity of seer and seen, their activity as they exchange positions through visual space to affect one another—this chiasmatic trajectory is Serra’s subject in much of his work. It is an abstract subject, most often given “support” by correspondingly “abstract” forms, like . . . the enormous steel plates (8'24') of Circuit that extend from the four corners of a room to leave a one-meter gap in the work’s “center” within which the viewer’s body is invited to turn. But it is a subject that loses none of its abstractness which its support is a real object. 35 In Promenade, Serra realizes his goal as a sculptor always to “follow the direction of the work [he] opened up early on for [him]self and try to make the most abstract moves within that.”36 The work incites a movement that defines the human body, and shifting perception as the subject of Promenade when the visitor (and by extension the steel plates) move through space and time. If we follow Krauss’s thinking and Serra’s statement about his own work, the move towards a more complex abstraction in Promenade is the demand that we look away and experience it and our own bodies through means in surplus of the imperative to look.37 But it is indeed more complex still. Because modernist sculpture, for Krauss and, by extension for Serra, “tends towards a radical abstractness [that] also testifies to a loss of site . . . the site of the rest of the body.”38 Sculptures such as Promenade mark out the site as a nonsite, or specifically, they create a labyrinth in which the stalwartness of medium, in this case steel, and the absence or abstraction of that medium, the physicality and ethereality of space and site, coexist to resist the fixity of modernism. The physical distortions of the body experienced in the presence of Promenade define sculpture beyond the object itself, pushing towards an even deeper level of abstraction. As such, Serra’s work extends post-minimalist sculpture to focus on the relationship between spectator and object, as well as on the processes that are invoked beyond the physicality of the spectator’s body. The intimacy of a physical relationship developed with the individual plates of Promenade is found at the level not just of the movement of the body in and around the steel, but of the contortion of the body, and the simultaneous exhaustion of looking. The one man lies down on the ground, the tourists become stuck to the bottom of another plate, the child hurts his hand as he repeatedly hits the plate. The plates not only demand that we walk and wander, all the time looking and looking away. In addition, they lure the promenader into impossible spaces of viewing, touching, hearing, feeling the temperature of the body change in their presence. And so, the visitor experiences a unique kind of corporealized perception. Beyond this experience of the body, the unique form, materiality and structure of Promenade invite a perspective that is distant, beyond that of the physical body

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itself. This viewing experience is a visuality that is not limited by the fixity of modernist art, but it is nevertheless, ground in that vision. MATERIAL In the same way that the continual motion of the visitor through Promenade dethrones the optical as the sole mode of understanding, the plates themselves are always in a process of transformation. This transformation ensures their resistance to fetishization, their elusiveness to the desire to know through looking. They are always in motion, in spite of their apparent intransigence, a contradiction that is born of their material of construction. Serra transforms steel into sculptural form that, he claims, begins with no “central, interior space from which the energy of living matter derives.”39 Steel, like any other metal, has its own entropy. Every structure is its own physical and material characteristics, distinct from the carbon and iron that go into its making. Serra knows how steel is manufactured, how it behaves, its characteristics, speed, agility, propensities. He relates his fascination for the possibilities of steel when he sees an eighty-foot forge at Thyssen in the Ruhr Valley in Germany: A forge is a hydraulic hammer which displaces metal under compression. It differs from casting in that in an equal volume, the cast will weigh one-third to one-half less than the forged work of the same measurement. I found out that the hotter the material is, the less you have to pressure the hammers. I used a carbon, which has to be heated to 1,280 degrees, which is white hot, in order to control the manipulation of the hammers. I was able to make the analysis of the principles of teeming: pre-poured molten metal has to be taken from the ladle of the ingot mold. By using a magnesium and carbon steel, I found that its molecular structure, when heated to 1,280 degrees, was cubic.40 The milling of steel is a science, a technology that Serra’s language transforms into an aesthetic experience with temperatures, movements and energies all its own. For Serra, the inner properties of steel, its internal propensities are the vibrancy of the metal. How it looks in the end, is irrelevant. It is, perhaps, the sheer weight of steel that, in Serra’s hands, becomes inherently mystical, it is the characteristic that most marks the uniqueness of his steel sculptures, their most iconoclastic gesture.41 In a sculpture such as Promenade, the enormous dead weight becomes simultaneously ethereal. The steel plates of Serra’s works hold this contradiction in delicate balance. In the space created by impossible merging of the materiality of steel and steel as ethereal is the phenomenological experience of sculpture. That is, the visitor’s experience of this contradiction takes over as the subject of Promenade. The mystical transformation of steel into an ethereal substance,

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driven by a physical experience that exhausts looking, taking steel out of the visible, knowable world, also challenges the technological limits of industrial steel when Serra makes sculptural plates that have no graspable logic or coherence. In the Grand Palais, the complexity of Serra’s use of steel enters into a space not previously encountered: steel is redefined again by the space in which it is housed. THE GRAND PALAIS The Grand Palais was built to house the 1900 Paris World exposition. It was built in the name of extravagance, grandiloquence, and the cultural, political, and economic supremacy of France. Every inch of the monumental architectural icon exudes this excess. The significance of the Grand Palais as icon is perhaps best encapsulated by George Récipon’s giant twelve-ton quadrigae that crown the corners of the building: Immortality Outstripping Time and Harmony Triumphing over Discord. These enormous chariots pulled by racing horses are themselves a monument to the power and wealth of France at the turn of the century before last. While the insistence on transferring meaning from sculpture as object to a visitor in motion underlines Serra’s adversity to monumentality,42 Promenade nevertheless makes a home in the Grand Palais, even as it transforms it. As it is articulated by Promenade, the Grand Palais is a disused empty building that mirrors all of the grandness of industrial modernity of another era. And yet, Promenade turns this monument to modernity into an antimonument that, in itself, is set in motion, becoming unstable and uncertain as we are thrust into perpetual motion. The Grand Palais is not only significant as the site for Serra’s work to critique the grandiosity of colonial France, but the structure engages all the discourses on modernity. It is, like the train stations of Europe, the nearby Gare St. Lazare, and the one time station, now the Musée d’Orsay on the opposite side of the Seine, a temple to industrial modernity. With its immense glass and steel vaulting, the nave is built beneath the magnificent dome. Serra’s Promenade weaves in the history of the building as exhibition space through its use, and transformation, of steel, a material that is as crucial to the bulwarks of modernity in iron and glass. Within the Grand Palais, Promenade’s dialogue between two eras a century apart is a dialogue begun by an abstract steel sculpture that itself turns the iron and glass structure into a transient space, as Krauss would have it, a nonsite. The architectural surrounding of Promenade is at the same time transformed from a solid monumental object into an ethereal space described by shifting perception and perspectives. The perpetual motion to understand and to know Promenade is dependent on its relationship with the Grand Palais when we look upwards and outwards, when we sense its shifting temperatures, and react to the sounds created in its midst. As Promenade leads us into these shifting physical experiences, it

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likewise tempts us to continue the search to understand its relationship to, thus the limits of, the Grand Palais. In this search, our attempts are always frustrated because as we are in motion, so the building continues to move and to shift, both as we perceive it physically and conceive of it intellectually. This endless conversation motivates Promenade’s transformation of the Grand Palais into an antimonument, a nonsite: it is no longer a building that we ogle and admire, but rather, it becomes a space through which we promenade. We can no longer look at the building as a fixed historical marker, commemorating or remembering a particular moment in France’s colonial past. Rather, like the visitor in her peripatetic motion, the building itself becomes unfixed. We don’t even look to the roof to admire it but to examine its structure, to line up the lattice with the apparent perpendicular force of the plates. Thus, when attention is focused on the building, it is not as an icon of a glorious past but a structure that plays a role in a specific sculptural environment. This transformation of the architectural building into a shifting spatial environment is yet another gesture that exceeds the limits of minimalist sculpture. In turn, through this transformation of a building at the center of Paris as the modern city into an unstable and uncertain space, Serra effectively uses his sculpture to undermine the confidence of an otherwise unerring history. The bodily contortions, the looking away, and the excess of visuality come together to question this narrative. CONCLUSION Behind Michael Fried’s condemnatory claim in 1967 that sculpture had become invaded by theatricality was the temporal extension of sculpture, a temporality that can be identified in the visitor’s experience of Serra’s sculpture.43 A work such as Promenade exists only in time, rarely in a static place or space. Space and place, site and architectural limits are unreliable, always in motion as long as Promenade occupied the Grand Palais. What for Fried was the dissolution of the value of sculpture, can be understood as the power of Serra’s works more generally and Promenade in particular. Because the plates only come into being in their experience in time in a given space—a space that is simultaneously transformed into a nonsite—it means they exhaust the ability to look and to be looked at. This exhaustion, forces a process that begins with vision and then shifts to a conversation between sight and the other senses, a conversation that, in turn, makes us think about the limits of visual perception. And moreover, these limits necessarily begin with an insistence on looking as a springboard to reflection on its inadequacy.44 Thus, a work such as Promenade pushes at the limits of modern ocularcentricity by inviting an experience of sight that sets in motion a journey away from visual perception. By extension, this refusal of the objecthood of sculpture is Serra’s critique of the material limits that are the sine qua non of modernity. In Promenade,

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Serra refuses the inevitability of minimalist sculpture when he moves beyond the significance of looking to locate the meaning and experience of his work in an interaction between the ethereality of sculpture and the movement of the human promenader. Similarly, the aggrandization of France as colonial power is thrown into imbalance by Promenade. Thinking back to the flâneur, we will recall that it was through the dichotomy of his visual relationship to the city he roamed that the flâneur formed his insightful and critical attitude towards the anonymity of the crowds, the speed of modern life, and the new spatial and temporal configurations enabled by industrial progress in late nineteenth-century Paris. That is, Baudelaire’s flâneur knew the world through different levels of looking. However, when Serra removes the objectness of the sculpture and deflates the monumentality of the Grand Palais, he gives ontological consequence to space and time as they are created by bodily movement. Thus, knowledge and meaning are not derived in the interstice between different levels of looking, but in the elisions between looking, looking away and an antiocular perambulation. This, in turn, creates a very particular relationship between the body and the sculptural plates—a restoration of the not necessarily visual, physical experience of the body in the presence of a (modernist) sculpture that is both excessively large and vulnerable in its intimacy in the time-space of post-modern sculpture. Serra thus restores the physical senses to the post-modern environment and through this experience of that environment, confuses the limits of modernity, modernist sculpture and the expectation that an artwork necessarily give dominance to vision and ocularity in its perception. The transformation of steel, of the Grand Palais, of the modern cityscape, and the centrality of looking to the inevitable exhaustion of looking in Promenade repositions the (nonessentialist) body at the center of a post-minimalist sculptural landscape. And simultaneously, Promenade challenges the history on which it still depends. NOTES 1. Richard Serra in conversation with Robert Storr. “Face à l’oeuvre de Richard Serra,” Grand Palais, May 15, 2008, 19h30. 2. Serra’s Promenade was the second of the Monumenta projects installed in Paris’s Grand Palais for a short sojourn in the newly restored cruciform nave. For more on the series, see “Monumenta” on Grand Palais website, accessed July 29, 2014. http://www.grandpalais.fr/en/The-building/History/The-eventsstaged-in-the-Grand-Palais/Arts/p-597-lg1-Monumenta.htm. 3. Richard Serra in conversation with Robert Storr. “Face à l’oeuvre de Richard Serra,” Grand Palais, May 15, 2008, 19h30. 4. Hal Foster, among other critics, notes that the perambulatory spectator is the motivation of Serra’s sculpture from the beginning. It is of course, Serra’s answer to the objectness of modernist sculpture. See Hal Foster, “The Un/ making of Sculpture,” in Richard Serra, ed. Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 175–200.

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5. Below I explore this wandering in relationship to that of the nineteenth-century Parisian flâneur. See Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (Phaidon: London, 1995). 6. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). See also the theorizations that would argue, even if the vision of modernity is clouded, it is still the primary sense through which to see and know. For example, Jonathan Crary, Techniques of The Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); and T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), among others. 7. The work of filmmakers as the leading proponents of the European avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century, such as Moholy-Nagy, Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp celebrate the primacy of vision. Even as other filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali challenged the dominance of seeing through slicing open an eye, championing blindness and the confusion of narrative order, they still celebrated the power of the cinema’s achievements as optical. 8. See Foster, “The Un/making of Sculpture,” 177–78. 9. After Foucault, the body became the focus of histories written as an attempt to politicize the contemporary understanding of culture and social identity. The historicization of a nonessentialist, nonbiological view of the body understandably impacted contemporary, post-modernist art. Within this turn to corporeality, Serra’s work as I present it might be given context by that of other artists such as Francis Alÿs or Ernesto Neto, both of whom foreground the movement of the spectator to enable unexplored experiences of the body, thus self-identity. While both of these and other artists challenge the prominence of visuality, Serra’s work is distinguished by its commitment to the modernist structures and discourses that are its substance. 10. This idea of Serra’s sculptures as phenomenological has been written about before. The idea that the sculptures exist in relation to the body, not as “its representation but as its activation, in all its senses, all its apperceptions of weight and measure, size and scale.” See Foster, “The Un/making of Sculpture,” 178–79. But it is always talked about in this way. Few are interested, however, in the consequences that this phenomenological experience had in the presence of Serra’s work might have for the relationship to power and knowledge. Rosalind Krauss makes a compelling argument for the applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception to Serra’s sculptures from as early as the 1970s. See Rosalind Krauss, “Richard Serra: A Translation,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 260–75. 11. My reading here converses with the anti-optical arguments of art historians and art critics who have also questioned the reign of pure visuality as the defining characteristic of modernist art. Most notably, Krauss’s rewriting of Greenberg and Fried puts forward the notion of an anti-opticality that rests within the domain of the “unconscious” of art. It is an experience in which the retinal nevertheless remains central and the “desire of vision” or the repressed, invisible unconscious erupts inside the body and is brought to the fore. The distinction of my conception here rests on the not looking provoked in the process of promenading. 12. The Centre Pompidou published a small catalogue to accompany Promenade. Alfred Pacquement, who wrote the text for the catalogue, does not tell us what to expect of Promenade. His omission of any information about the

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13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

Frances Guerin installation itself is explained by the fact that the work did not exist until it was erected inside the Grand Palais. Pacquement admits: “I am closely familiar with all the components of the work to be installed in the Grand Palais, and still I know next to nothing of the work itself. The description of its constituent parts is in no way tantamount to a description of the finished work. This will exist only in the space within which it is installed, and for which it has been conceived. Only when the gigantic volume has been defined, when the modular sculpture has been installed, will we be able to measure, reassemble, restructure and deconstruct it—for such are the sculptor’s own methods and approach here. Serra himself will not fully understand his sculpture until it is installed in the space.” Pacquement’s inability to explain what Promenade is can be attributed to the fact that its power lies beyond a simple looking at the object. Any visual reproduction of the work will be insufficient, unsatisfying because even if it could be reproduced or envisioned, it only comes alive in our experience of it through senses and activities in excess of looking. See Alfred Pacquement, Monumenta 2008: Richard Serra. Promenade (Paris: Adagp, 2008), 55. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 221–23. Richard Serra, in discussion with Robert Storr, “Face à l’oeuvre de Richard Serra,” Grand Palais, 15 May, 2008, 19h30. “Richard Serra in His Own Words,” unpublished interview with Alfred Pacquement, October 2007 quoted in Pacquement, Monumenta 2008, 55. Krauss is one of the first to discuss Serra’s use of industrially manufactured steel by transforming it into what it is not. See Krauss, “Richard Serra: A Translation,” and Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes, eds., Richard Serra (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000). This really gets brought to the fore in the Bilbao installation and the writing around that. See Carmen Jiminez et al., Richard Serra: The Matter of Time (Bilbao: Steidl/Guggenheim, 2005). The antiopticality of Serra’s art has a long history in the urban installations of which Tilted Arc (1981) commissioned, installed, and subsequently removed from Federal Plaza in New York is the most obvious example. Through its attraction of controversy, graffiti and public spectacle, the 10-ft self-rusting steel curve that effectively obstructed movement across the plaza and frustrated office workers’ daily routines, underlined the alienation of abstract art. Not only was Tilted Arc not an object to be looked at but it was greeted with hostility and frustration by the office workers who lived with it on a daily basis. See Harriet Senie, The Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). The changing temperature of Promenade’s steel plates, the absorption of their environment, was reminiscent of the difference between The Matter of Time installation of rolled steel sculptures at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2005), and those on exhibition in the sculpture garden in summer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007. At the Bilbao Guggenheim, the structures in The Matter of Time are cold and brusque because they absorb the temperature of the air-conditioned hall. By contrast, outside, on a perfect New York summer’s day, the Torqued Ellipses in the sculpture garden at MoMA in 2007 were hot to the touch. See Kynaston McShine et al., Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), and Jiminez et al., Richard Serra. In the same unpublished interview with Alfred Pacquement, Serra talks about the piece: “As you walk the plane, an illusion occurs in terms of just which way it is relating to the space. It has a lot to do with your locality to the plate.

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22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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From far away, it might seem static and as you move toward it, it may either appear to lean away from you or toward you: but depending on where you are, it may also shift its relationship to your perception, so a piece of that height in that space is going to engage your perception, as you move through it. Pacquement, Monumenta 2008: Richard Serra. Serra quoted in the flyer that visitors were handed on entry to the Grand Palais. See Douglas Crimp, “Redefining Site Specificity (1986),” in Richard Serra, eds. Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 147–73. These are the noises that embody soft, service economies of post-modern labor (as it exists in the West). On Serra’s challenge to the art gallery space, that is, on the shift to his use of the materials of heavy industry as a challenge to the viewing and commercial relations of the gallery see Crimp, “Redefining Site-Specificity,” 147–71. Thanks to John David Rhodes for pointing out this level of the sculpture’s interaction with work and everyday life. Again, this is what Serra anticipates will happen in the presence of the plates. See “Richard Serra in His Own Words.” The plates look upwards to the roof of the Grand Palais as the only part of the structure where the vertical and horizontal lines that are the axes of the cruciform can be perceived. But this same axial vision is simultaneously the source of confusion: ultimately, visitors sought the intersection of the plates and the plane on which they sat, an intersection that did not exist. As John David Rhodes pointed out on a reading of a draft of this chapter, people have died installing Serra’s artwork. The threat of the industrial structure looms large inside these works. Richard Serra in conversation with Yve-Alain Bois, Louvre auditorium, May 9, 2008, accessed July 5, 2010, http://archive.monumenta.com/2008/ content/ view/122/28/lang,fr/. Ibid. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 9, 12. Ibid., 7. Richard Serra in conversation with Yve-Alain Bois, May 9, 2008. Hal Foster, “The Un/making of Sculpture,” 179. Richard Serra in conversation with Yve-Alain Bois, May 9, 2008. Even though minimalist sculpture typically shifts emphasis into the space of the viewer, it still has the focus on the visual existence of an object as reference point. Krauss, “Richard Serra: A Translation,” 270. Quoted in Ibid., 272. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 269–87. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 34. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 253. Richard Serra, “Rigging,” Writings/Interviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 99. While he usually works with engineers, millers and construction workers in the fabrication of steel structures, Serra is familiar with every aspect of the production process. Richard Serra in conversation with Yve-Alain Bois, May 9, 2008. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 (Summer 1967): 12–23.

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44. Similarly, they cannot be reproduced in an image, even if it is an image in motion. The French Ministry of Culture published a DVD to accompany the installation. Fodil Chabbi, Monumenta 2008 Richard Serra, France 2008.

REFERENCES Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated by Jonathan Mayne. Phaidon: London, 1995. Originally published 1845. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. 217–52. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. ———.The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Charney, Leo, and Schwartz, Vanessa. Editors. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,1996. Clark, T. J. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of The Observer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Crimp, Douglas. “Redefining Site Specificity (1986).” In Richard Serra. Edited by Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes. 147–73. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Foster, Hal. “The Un/making of Sculpture.” In Richard Serra. Edited by Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes. 175–200. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (Summer 1967): 12–23. Jiminez, Carmen, Polidori, Robert, Reinartz, Dick, and Serra, Richard. Richard Serra: The Matter of Time. Bilbao: Steidl/Guggenheim, 2005. Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44. ———. Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981. ———. “Richard Serra: A Translation.” In The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. 260–75. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. McShine, Kynaston, Cooke, Lynne, Rajchman, John, and Serra, Richard. Richard Serra Sculpture. Forty Years. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007. “Monumenta.” Accessed July 29, 2014. http://www.grandpalais.fr/en/The-building/ History/The-events-staged-in-the-Grand-Palais/Arts/p-597-lg1-Monumenta.htm. Monumenta 2008 Richard Serra. Directed by Fodil Chabbi. PAL, 2008. DVD. Pacquement, Alfred. Monumenta 2008: Richard Serra. Promenade. Paris: Adagp, 2008. Senie, Harriet. The Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Serra, Richard. Writings/Interviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ———. Richard Serra in conversation with Yve-Alain Bois, Louvre auditorium, May 9, 2008. Accessed July 5, 2010. http://archive.monumenta.com/2008/con tent/view/122/28/lang,fr/. ———. Richard Serra in conversation with Robert Storr. “Face à l’oeuvre de Richard Serra.” Grand Palais, May, 15, 2008, 19h30.

5

Burrowing under the Apparent The Blindfold Drawings of Claude Heath Craig G. Staff

As such, and in the moment proper to it, the operation of drawing would have something to do with blindness, would in some way regard blindness [aveuglement]. —Jacques Derrida1

Whether shaping reality or illusion, our hands and bodies do not merely play out some script of culture; rather they impart and introvert meaning in the involute operations of thought and action, conduct and communication. —Simon J. Bronner2

Between 1994 and 1998, the artist Claude Heath, wearing a blindfold, drew a range of personally selected objects, including a woodcarving, orange peel, and a plaster bust, by exploring their physical characteristics with his left hand and committing to the sheet of paper a corresponding series of marks (e.g., see Figure 5.1). These drawings collectively sought to provide an account of the object that was given entirely through the contingencies of touch rather than through the dictates of vision. Ostensibly, Heath’s enquiry was foregrounded by the desire to, as it were, not look While seemingly rejecting the primacy of the visual as a means of enabling empirical data to be mapped, Heath’s drawings nevertheless remain steadfast in their ambition to articulate the outward appearance and overarching form of the objects he selects. To this end, and despite the semi-abstract configurations he produces that would appear to work against this claim, Heath’s drawings remain “in the domain of [visual] representation” to the extent that the artist is seeking to elucidate a certain truth with regards to the physical appearance of the objects he selects.3 In order to understand what motivates an artist to not look during the production of, in this case, a series of drawings, this chapter will first examine an antecedent example whereby other artists adopted another comparably

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Figure 5.1 Claude Heath, Drawing 188, 1996. Ink on paper, 70100 cm. Reproduction courtesy of the artist and Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich

novel approach to picture making. To this end, the place and significance of automatism within Surrealism will be considered as an example of a process of image making wherein form is intuited rather than directly observed. From this point, and having also considered the place of expression within a particular discourse that pertained to drawing during the nineteenth century, the aim of this chapter is to consider Heath’s Blindfold drawings with respect to the implications they have for both artistic agency and how the drawings themselves might be interpreted. While Heath’s Blindfold drawings are representative of an artist tendentiously opting to withhold the spatial co-ordinates enabled by vision during the entirety of the artwork’s production, the apparent novelty of such a strategy belongs to a much longer tradition. According to Steve Garner, within the development of modern art throughout the twentieth century there has been a regular emergence of artists reacting against the conventional assumption that the basis of drawing is visual perception. Drawing after a model, for example, was rejected by the Surrealist artists who followed the principle of automatism and gave free rein to the hand—no longer tied to the direction of the eye.4

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As the statement by Garner suggests, arguably what mobilized Surrealism’s formal experimentation and lent certain works that fell within its purview an expressive, if not altogether entirely legible, force was the idea of automatism. To this end, such was its importance that, according to Dawn Ades, the “definition of Surrealism in the first manifesto turned on the principle of automatism.”5 By no longer looking outwards towards the realm of recognizable appearances, the spatial co-ordinates of vision became eschewed. Instead, and by artists attempting to look, as it were, psychically inwards, automatism as an artistic process became ostensibly understood as the means by which the inner workings of the unconscious mind, unfettered by rational or conscious decision-making processes, could be accessed. Surrealist André Masson retrospectively gave a salient description of what the process of automatic drawing entailed in a lecture given in 1961. According to Roger Cardinal, Masson’s overarching ambition during the production of his automatic drawings was to “create an emptiness within oneself.”6 From that point on, “the first graphic apparitions upon the paper are pure gesture, rhythm, incantation.”7 Certainly, in Birth of Birds, (c.1925), a work on paper executed by Masson a year after he had joined the Surrealists, the series of wispy, inconclusive lines would appear to corroborate this intention. A relatively small work on paper, (42  31 cm) and executed predominantly in line, Birth of Birds’ sinewy abstractions of form brush up against, if not gain a degree of purchase within the world of appearances, as in the bird-like shape towards the upper right of the image, only to withdraw to an unformed, nascent state wherein an intuited line, drawn in ink, exists simply as that. With respect to the process of how automatism was understood by several Surrealists, including Masson, from the immediacy of automatism’s first phase, the expressive force of the marks enter a second, more mediated phase. This is realized, as Cardinal notes, “by the emergence of a perceptible image.”8 According to Masson, the “image (which had been latent) now asserts its rights. Once the image has appeared, it is time to stop.”9 As Masson’s closing remark suggests, and indeed, despite Surrealism’s belief that the emancipation of the unconscious mind could be achieved through the adoption of certain automatist techniques, what will become evident is that the possibility that an artist could still intuit, could still, as it were, have a hand in an artwork’s meaning, remained. As well as experimenting with collage, Max Ernst, another artist associated with Surrealism, devised a number of automatist processes to elicit the workings of the unconscious. In many respects Ernst’s utilization of these techniques was more broadly indicative of Surrealism’s fascination with children’s games. One such game adopted by the Surrealists was “the exquisite corpse.” This entailed each individual player working on a different folded section of the same piece of paper. Because each of the participants

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was unaware of what the previous player had drawn or written, novel and at times perturbing forms would emerge. For example, in Cadavre Exquis (1926–1927), a composite drawing on paper, the artists Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro, and Max Morise all contributed to what appears to be a hybridized female figure with an apparent snail’s shell for her torso and a pair of tennis racquets for feet. Along with frottage and grattage, two techniques that entailed processes of rubbing and scraping respectively, the starting point for a work such as Ernst’s Europe after the Rain, (1940–1942) was a process called decalcomania. In effect this entailed pressing the surface of the canvas up against another flat surface that had recently been painted. Having left the design of the image to the vicissitudes of chance, when the two surfaces were lifted apart, a pattern of organic-looking shapes emerged upon the surface of the support. These biomorphically suggestive areas, essentially blots, would then be subject to a degree of working in order to expose latent forms of imagery that, up until that point, had remained dormant. Like several artists working during this period, Ernst adopted the process of decalcomania to generate the painting’s indeterminate yet nevertheless evocative forms as representations of his own personal unconscious. Evidence for this can be found if we draw our attention towards the center of the canvas where Ernst has positioned a figure with a bird-like head that casts its gaze across the calcified remains of the landscape. As well as birds being a recurrent motif within the oeuvre of Ernst, he also invented an alter ego, named Loplop. In this respect, the artist’s aesthetic revisions echo Sigmund Freud’s own claims regarding the final stage of dream work, a process he called “Secondary Revision.” For Freud this process, which, within the context of The Interpretation of Dreams, at least was part of what he termed the “dream-work,” worked to ensure that “the dream loses the appearance of absurdity and incoherence, and approaches the pattern of intelligible experience.”10 Moreover, the process of Secondary Revision becomes directly analogous to Ernst’s revision of the initial form that had been created as the result of the introduction of chance into an image that has some purchase, however oblique, with the world of appearances. By bringing conscious intent to the production of the artwork, the possibility for automatism to provide a direct and unfettered account of the artist’s unconscious is short-circuited. Certainly, Ernst’s delineation of semi-figurative imagery echoes Freud’s own claims that the dream, to a certain extent, relinquishes its absurdity and incoherence. Given the Surrealist’s overarching project of wanting to valorize the irrationalism of the unconscious mind, Freud’s idea of Secondary Revision is not entirely unproblematic. As Willard Bohn has observed with respect to the idea of Secondary Revision, though he could equally be describing the process wherein meaning becomes ascribed to Europe after the Rain: “Like this (unconscious) operation, which eliminates the initial absurdity and

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characterizes the dream work, passive interpretation transforms the original version into a logical scenario.”11 While the process of decalcomania, with its generation of seemingly random shapes, can be understood as part of European modernism’s pursuit of the technically radical, the proclivity for artists to use visually indeterminate forms emerged in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci in 1651. In his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo makes the following observation: He is not universal who does not love equally all the elements in painting, as when one who does not like landscapes holds them to be a subject for cursory and straightforward investigation—just as our Botticelli said such study was of no use because by merely throwing a sponge soaked in a variety of colors at a wall there would be left on the wall a stain in which could be seen a beautiful landscape. He was indeed right that in such a stain various inventions are to be see, I say that a man may seek out in such a stain heads of men, various animals, battles, rocks, seas, clouds, woods and other similar things.12 Alexander Cozens, writing towards the end of the eighteenth century, adopted Leonardo’s recommendation. Indeed, he considered that he had improved upon this artistic technique. In “A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape,” first published in 1785, the blot, as a form of mark whose indeterminacy eschewed any straightforward illusionistic reading, became invested with a centrally governing role in the generation of the image, providing the artist with “a quickness and freedom of hand in expressing the parts of a composition, beyond any method wherever.”13 Though Leonardo and Cozens respectively used the stain and the blot as a means of generating consciously derived imagery, Surrealism’s adoption of automatism was intended to represent the unconscious mind. In their fascination with dream-like states and, moreover, automatist imagery, the range of novel, semi-abstract marks, ultimately served the Surrealist’s pursuit and valorization of the oneiric. As Ades has noted, “Suspension of conscious mental direction was required for the practice of automatic writing, but this was not dissimilar from the state of the waking dream, or half sleep, which was to produce some cherished images, just as dreams themselves were to do.”14 In effect, then, the practice of automatism occurred over two stages. The first stage, which Ades has claimed was “purely automatic,” entailed an ostensibly random series of marks being placed on the artist’s chosen support, for example, through the automatist technique of decalcomania.15 The second stage, whereby the “image was recognised,” involved a more tendentious level of consideration with regards to the formulation of the image into a recognizable, or at least semi-recognizable form.16 It is arguably during automatism’s second identifiable stage that the first telling distinction between automatism and Heath’s Blindfold drawings can

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be located. The “compositional reflex” that Cardinal describes implies a second stage at which the original image or configuration of marks is somehow made more recognizable through a more tendentious process of elaboration. However, the Blindfold drawings were the direct result of one sustained process wherein once Heath removed his blindfold the drawing was, in effect, finished. Therefore, the further emergence/formation of the representational figure in a process akin to Cardinal’s “compositional reflex” does not occur. According to Heath, to look at the work before it is finished would be to relinquish the “state of innocence about what you’d drawn. To then go back and add something would be a kind of tautology.”17 Nevertheless, with regard to Heath’s decision not to look during the drawings’ production, Surrealism’s attempt to map the psychic terrain of the unconscious mind through a set of automatist techniques and processes provides one context within which his own practice, and specifically the Blindfold drawings might be understood. Certainly the artist’s drawings carry particular affinities with automatism that are not, as Andrew Patrizio has claimed, entirely stylistic in nature.18 Surrealism’s adoption of automatism and Heath’s Blindfold drawings are characterized by their respective attempts to relinquish the emphasis accorded vision. For Surrealism, the exclusion of the external object was so that its plastic form could “exist in terms of its relationship with the interior world of consciousness.”19 More specifically, what purportedly became evinced as a direct result of this exclusion was the concrete manifestation of the artist’s psychic state. While Heath’s drawings are equally borne out of the artist having “an intimate connectedness” with his choice of subject matter, it would be misplaced to construe the Blindfold drawings as somehow being ciphers of the artist’s own unconscious mind.20 Rather, and with respect to what has already been claimed, his project remains very much rooted within a desire to ascertain the particularities of an object via the sense of touch rather than that of sight. While the object is present to the intimacy of touch, the object that he is drawing remains unequivocally absent from the artist’s vision. However, to return to the affinities the Blindfold drawings and twentieth-century Surrealism. As can be seen in a work such as Birth of Birds, Heath’s drawings are the result of the imposition of a very particular set of rules or parameters, while at the same time, and seemingly paradoxically, they concern themselves with a particular understanding or measure of control becoming relinquished. Equally, the indeterminacy of form one sees in Birth of Birds seems characteristic of Masson’s adoption of automatism as a way of relinquishing art’s conflation with the world of appearances. As a result, form is found, disclosed, or disinterred as much as it is directly and deliberately produced via the act of looking. However, with respect to Heath, while Levy might be correct in his assertion that, historically, representation has been dominated by “external objectivity rather than internal

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perception,” in other words, the unconscious mind, the Blindfold drawings are not reducible to either of these two impulses.21 While external objectivity is, in effect, bracketed due to Heath eschewing the sense of sight during the process of the drawing’s manufacture, that is, he doesn’t objectively draw what he sees, neither is the drawing, unlike for example Birth of Birds, borne out of an unconscious process. Heath remains conscious and indeed fully cognizant of the object that he is attempting to depict throughout the time he is, as it were, not looking. Evidently, then, what separates Heath’s own decision to not look from that of those artists associated with Surrealist automatism is the nature of what was being pursued and, furthermore, claimed. While, broadly speaking, this can be understood in terms of differing rationales, more specifically, what distinguishes Heath from an artist such as André Masson is the centrality of touch to this particular series of drawings. Indeed, one could say that the images that become inscribed are directly borne out of this sensory mode. If, as Derrida notes, the “theme of the drawings of the blind is, before all else, the hand,” then Heath’s drawings, as approximations of the objects that he has chosen to draw, inscribe the agency of the hand of the blind in two ways.22 First, the artist’s hands are used as the sole means by which the selected object—for example, a life-sized plaster bust of the artist’s half-brother—can be explored and information gleaned. Second, and due to a certain freedom that Heath’s drawings afford, the various inscribed lines that go to make up the drawing and, it is hoped, present the viewer with a representation of the object, never entirely relinquish their identity as marks that causally index the artist’s hand. Claude Heath, Head (Drawing 137), (1995) is a drawing made using a colored biro pen that emerges from a plaster life-cast of the head of the artist’s half-brother, Toby. With the bust attached to the studio wall and positioned at the same height as the paper that Heath works on, the drawing served as a visual register of the life-sized white plaster bust that he could feel with his left hand. What’s immediately striking about the drawing is the fact that it was executed entirely in line. This, no doubt, is primarily for pragmatic rather than aesthetic reasons due to the fact that unlike any tonal values the cast may have, the sense of touch is more capable of discerning, even schematically, the outlying contours and physical shape of a thing. While Heath’s use of line in this particular drawing is characterized by its fluidity, there are certain areas where the line, however fleetingly, adopts a more explicitly descriptive role. This is evident in the case of a solitary, looping line towards the right of the drawing that purposefully traces the outer contour of the life-cast’s left ear. While the actual weight of the line remains relatively consistent, unlike a more traditional and versatile drawing medium such as graphite, biro is

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Figure 5.2 Claude Heath, Head (Drawing 137), 1995. Ink on paper, 7050 cm. Courtesy of the artist

limited in terms of the range and richness of marks it can make. There are nevertheless areas where a certain density of accumulated lines function in a more broadly descriptive way. For example, from the top of what we assume to be the cast’s head, a flurry of lines iteratively arc vertically down towards the bridge of the cast’s nose at which point their collective energy becomes dispersed, their intensity and emphatic presence, to a certain extent dissipated. For Head (Drawing 137), as with a number of pieces in the Blindfold series, the locus Heath uses to orient himself is a piece of Blu-Tack, placed directly upon the sheet of paper or chosen support. While this prop, if we can call it such, is subsequently removed once the drawing has been completed, its silhouette is discernible due to an accumulation of marks that

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have gradually built up around it as a result of the nib of the biro pen repeatedly returning to this tangible point and directly abutting it. As well as serving a practical role by enabling the artist to reorient his pen back to a given point on the support, resulting in the centripetal effect of this activity being rendered visible, the Blu-Tack also works to ensure a particular fidelity between the object and the drawing. By iteratively returning to this fixed point in space, a series of lines issues forth from it, evidencing Heath’s working method. Namely, the drawings have been produced by a number of discrete, incremental stages. In effect, each stage lends the drawing an additional inscription which approximates, if not denotes, a particular detail of the object’s exterior form. For the artist, an intensification of the present tense within which the drawing is being made to a certain extent eschews the conditions of possibility of having recourse to both the recent past or an anticipated future moment the drawing may potentially inhabit: But if you’re using touch only, you’re at the mercy of your fingertip which is the only thing you have in contact with the object. And the other hand is holding the pen, is making a mark. So there’s not much sense of what’s gone before or what’s coming after. It’s a lot of particularities all put together.23 The visual result of the process Heath describes, a process that transfers the particularity of what is felt into a corresponding mark, lends the drawing an immediacy, the probing nature of Heath’s line denoting a series of improvisations of a first attempt at giving concrete form to physical sensation. The gradual accumulation of particularities that occurs within what the artist William Furlong has described as Heath’s “step-by-step” process is on one level symptomatic of how, in relation to the visual sense, touch, or its synonym, the tactile, has been understood. Accordingly: We habitually extend the presumed difference in temporal mode to the spatial dimension so that vision appears all-encompassing while touch is limited to a local or proximate area . . . In effect, touch acts as the figuring agent for vision. It converts vision’s totality into personalised, fragmented experience identified with the time and place of the artist.24 In this sense, while vision, according to Richard Shiff, is considered necessarily atemporal, touch, in the case of the process of image making that Heath’s Blindfold drawings engage, echoes Shiff’s statement. For Heath, touch becomes located, indeed localized, within the physical sensation of exploring the life-cast with his left hand. However, the agency of touch extends to and directly corresponds with the particular time or touch of the drawing’s making, indexing through this contingent process how this artistic agency has, in another sense, taken effect. This is evidenced most directly

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by the series of lines or hatchings that iteratively return to and proceed from the point on the paper’s surface where the Blu-Tack was originally attached. It is at this locus that the artist’s own touch, as a form of applied pressure onto a given surface and indexed through the inscriptions of a biro pen are most keenly expressed, if not felt, by the artist and indeed by the viewer. If Shiff is indeed correct to the extent that the sense of touch privileges notions of proximity and even intimacy, then it would appear that the repudiation of sight doesn’t automatically precede the repudiation of intuition. Indeed, and despite Heath’s own adoption of an ostensibly counterintuitive strategy by not observing the thing he draws, the improvisatory quality of Head (Drawing 137) is suggestive of an intuitive decision-making process. The form of the object is intuited as much as it is physically felt. One could even argue that it is intuited through Heath’s sense of directed and directional touch. However, while intuition isn’t entirely bracketed, it would be erroneous to interpret it as rehearsing a historically received reading of drawing as being an innately expressive medium. That is to say, what remains unique about Heath’s drawing is that it is neither fully intuitive nor can it be interpreted according to the historically received understanding of drawing as an expressive medium. For instance, in Max Klinger’s only theoretical work, Drawing and Painting, privately published in 1891, he attempted to conceive of drawing as an expressive tool rather than as a mode of enquiry capable of presenting a truthful account of a thing’s outward appearance. Conflating drawing with the “intense subjectivity of the artist,” it was, according to Klinger, drawing which facilitated an artist’s response “in accordance with his own capacity for expression . . . giving free artistic rein to his own-most joys and pains, to his most fleeting and profoundly felt emotions in a spontaneous sequence and structure dictated solely by the force and power of the former.”25 In a sense, Klinger’s statement carries certain affinities with the ambitions of Surrealism as they became played out through their adoption of automatist techniques. For like Klinger’s claim, automatism gave credence to the artist’s interiority. Moreover, and to reiterate Garner’s observation once more, it did so through giving, in the case of automatism, free rein to the hand and, in the case of Klinger, free rein to artistic agency generally. Certainly Klinger’s statement attests to the veracity of an artist’s subjectivity as being the fundamental locus through which his or her expressivity can become the bearer of certain truths, regardless of how individuated they might be. We can also square this interpretation of Klinger’s statement with the overarching ambitions of Surrealism, directed, as they were, to the disclosure of the inner workings of the unconscious mind. For though Surrealist automatism sought recourse to a number of novel or unorthodox strategies, such technical radicalism nevertheless remained committed to the

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veracity of the image that remained at the service of a set of internally driven motivations. In terms of artistic agency, while the Blindfold drawings are characteristic of the artist’s interiority, this is given, in part, at least “proprioceptively,” that is, as somehow being physically felt as much as psychically imagined. Reading Heath’s approach to picture making in this way opens up the conditions of possibility for what Jennifer Fisher has identified as the “haptic sense” to become inscribed. According to Fisher, the haptic is a sense that “renders the surfaces of the body porous, being perceived at once inside, on the skin’s surface, and in external space. It enables the perception of weight, pressure, balance, temperature, vibration and presence.”26 Moreover, while Heath remains motivated by the ambition of wanting to claim a certain veracity for the image, because he chooses not to look, his process necessarily remains conditioned by and stems from a position of uncertainty. For Klinger and for Surrealism, interiority was primarily bound up with the purported sovereignty of the artist’s inner-subjective state, the space, as it were, from which Heath’s drawings emerge is aporetic. That is, though Klinger’s statement doesn’t in itself ratify vision, it does, nevertheless, mobilize the work of art through the predisposition, or at least assumed predisposition, to an artistically direct process of communicability. Whereas Heath’s capacity for expression will always remain indirect, occluded, contained if not constrained by the artist’s decision to not look. In this respect, there is a certain consonance between what Heath does and John Berger’s broader understanding of drawing as being a form of “burrowing in the dark, a burrowing under the apparent.”27 While Berger seeks to articulate the activity of drawing by way of simile, Heath’s Blindfold drawings were made while the artist quite literally was immersed within a self-imposed darkness. Moreover, as the spatial metaphor “burrowing under” implies, there is an understanding that the apparent, as it were, has a tangible presence and locatable position that is to be negotiated, oriented around and in Berger’s case, underneath. Moreover, the act thus conceived in the case of the Blindfold drawings would be that of finding the apparent in order to repatriate it. However, to do so, as Berger has claimed, requires burrowing underneath it first. In so doing, once more, the apparent becomes disinterred, becomes carried out. While rejecting or at least working against the spatial imperatives of vision as a means of enabling the artist to orient himself around a given object, Heath’s drawings nevertheless remain rooted in their ambition to render form apparent. And so while Heath’s own approach to imaging and imagining what is physically felt rather than visually observed is directly borne of a deliberate act of occlusion, a work such as Head (Drawing 137) recasts the terms upon which notions of interiority and expressivity are given. For while we can square Heath’s ambitions with those of a figure such as the nineteenth-century critic Edmund Duranty to the extent that what drawing’s pursuit entailed was “wanting to know nature intensely and to embrace nature with such

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strength that it can render faultlessly the relations between forms, and reflect the inexhaustible diversity of character,” any notional understanding that these drawings index some inner-subjective state of Heath’s unconscious would be erroneous.28 Heath’s own decision not to look is not a rehearsal for the understanding of artistic agency as expressive, spontaneous and unmediated. While Head (Drawing 137) eschews a more orthodox set of drawing techniques that are collectively dependent upon the perspicuity of vision, and neither is it a rehearsal for the understanding of artistic agency as necessarily expressive and unmediated. Rather, as Derrida notes with respect to Lucas Van Leyden’s Christ Healing a Blind Man (1531), “In showing, he does [fait] something. No more than any drawing, the movement of the right hand is not content with simply pointing out, describing, or stating the truth of what it is. It neither represents nor simply presents; it acts.”29 This statement can well be used to understand Heath’s drawings. The act thus conceived in the case of the Blindfold drawings would be that of finding the apparent in order to repatriate it. However, to do so, as Berger has claimed, requires burrowing underneath it first. In so doing, once more, the apparent becomes disinterred, becomes carried out.

NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 2. 2. Simon J. Bronner, “The Haptic Experience of Culture,” Anthropos 77, no. 2, (1982), 360. 3. Mel Gooding, “Seeing Things,” in Claude Heath (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2002), unpaginated. 4. Steve Garner, Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008), 60–61. 5. Dawn Ades, André Masson (London: Academy Editions, 1994), 12. Interestingly, according to Roger Cardinal, though “automatic drawing might seem to be the sine qua non of Surrealist visuality . . . it is a curious fact that its concerted actualization within the Paris group flourished for only a few months in the early 1920s.” Roger Cardinal, “André Masson and Automatic Drawing,” in Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality, ed. Silvano Levy (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997), 79. 6. Cardinal, “André Masson and Automatic Drawing,” 83. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. Tom Griffith and trans. A. A. Brill (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 338. 11. Willard Bohn, The Rise of Surrealism: Cubism. Dada, and the Pursuit of the Marvelous (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 148. 12. Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings, ed. Martin Kemp (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 201.

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13. Alexander Cozens, “A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape,” in Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 852. 14. Ades, André Masson, 13. As Ades remarks, in “ ‘Entrée des mediums,’ his account of this potent but soon abandoned episode, Breton linked the term surrealism, which had been borrowed from Apollinaire, and defined it as a kind of psychic state quite close to the state of dreaming.” Ibid., 13. 15. Ibid., 14. 16. Ibid. 17. “Claude Heath Interviewed by William Furlong,” in What Is Drawing?, ed. Angela Kingston (London and New York: Black Dog, 2003), 21. 18. Andrew Patrizio, “Perspicuous by Their Absence: The Drawings of Claude Heath,” in Ibid., 34. 19. Silvano Levy, Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality, ed. Silvano Levy (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997), 7. 20. Catherine Lampert, In Between the Lines: Recent British Drawings (London: Trinity Contemporary Limited, 2009), 74. 21. Levy, Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality, 7. 22. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 4. 23. Heath, quoted in “Claude Heath Interviewed by William Furlong,” 20. 24. Richard Shiff, “Cézanne’s Physicality: The Politics of Touch,” in The Language of Art History, eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 149. While any polarization between mutually exclusive registers, that is hapticity/vision will always be problematic, it is of significance that this was one strategy that figures working within deconstruction adopted. According to Claude Gandelman, “especially haptic qualities are demanded of the deconstructionist performer, spectator, and reader; not to follow optically the ‘line of ideas’ in a text or in a picture and see only the representation proper, the surface, but to probe with the eyes the pictorial texture and even to enter the texture and probe below the texture.” Claude Gandelman, Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991), 140. 25. Max Klinger, “Drawing and Painting,” reproduced in Art in Theory 1815–1900, eds. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, 1054. 26. Jennifer Fisher, “Relational Sense Towards a Haptic Aesthetics,” Parachute 87 (July–September 1997): 6. 27. John Berger, Berger on Drawing (Aghabullogue: Occasional, 2005), 77. Upon describing the act of writing without seeing, Derrida imagines a lidless eye opening at the tip of the hand of the blind’s fingers, guiding, as he says, “the tracing or outline [trace], it is a miner’s lamp at the point of writing, a curious and vigilant substitute, the prosthesis of a seer who is himself invisible.” Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 3. 28. Edmond Duranty, “The New Painting,” in Art in Theory 1815–1900s, eds. George Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, 582. 29. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 12.

REFERENCES Ades, Dawn. André Masson. London: Academy Editions, 1994. Berger, John. Berger on Drawing. Aghabullogue: Occasional, 2005. Bohn, Willard. The Rise of Surrealism: Cubism. Dada, and the Pursuit of the Marvelous. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.

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Bronner, Simon J. “The Haptic Experience of Culture.” Anthropos 77, no. 2, (1982): 351–62. Cardinal, Roger. “André Masson and Automatic Drawing.” In Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality. 79–93. Edited by Silvano Levy. Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997. “Claude Heath Interviewed by William Furlong.” In What Is Drawing? 19–25. Edited by Angela Kingston. London and New York: Black Dog, 2003. Cozens, Alexander. “A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape.” In Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. 852. Edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Da Vinci, Leonardo. Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings. Edited by Martin Kemp. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Nass. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Duranty, Edmond. “The New Painting.” In Art in Theory 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. 576–83. Edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Fisher, Jennifer. “Relational Sense Towards a Haptic Aesthetics.” Parachute 87 (July–September 1997): 4–11. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Edited by Tom Griffith. Translated by A. A. Brill. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Gandelman, Claude. Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991. Garner, Steve. Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008. Gooding, Mel. “Seeing Things.” In Claude Heath. Unpaginated. Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2002. Klinger, Max. “Drawing and Painting.” In Art in Theory 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. 1050–54. Edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Lampert, Catherine. In Between the Lines: Recent British Drawings. London: Trinity Contemporary Limited, 2009. Levy, Silvano. “Introduction.” In Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality. 7–10. Edited by Silvano Levy. Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997. Patrizio, Andrew. “Perspicuous by Their Absence: The Drawings of Claude Heath.” In What Is Drawing? 33–35. Edited by Angela Kingston. London and New York: Black Dog, 2003. Shiff, Richard. “Cézanne’s Physicality: The Politics of Touch.” In The Language of Art History. 129–80. Edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Part III

Not Looking at Bodies and Cultures on the Margins

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6

©AMOUFLAGE Alessandra Raengo

When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. —Ralph Ellison1

The poster for Here & Now: African & African American Art & Film Conference (15–18 November 2007) features a profile shot of the shaved head of an African American youth with a Nike “swoosh” seemingly branded on the side. The photograph is cropped so that we cannot see the subject’s facial features. Made by contemporary artist Hank Willis Thomas, this work, titled Branded Head (2003; see Figure 6.1), has become iconic.2 During a panel featuring Willis Thomas alongside Kehinde Wiley, Wangechi Mutu, Leslie Hewitt, and Mickalene Thomas, one of the few white women in attendance sat a couple of rows ahead of me and gently tapped a (shaved) African American attendee on the shoulder to serendipitously ask, “Is that you in the picture?” Despite still cringing, as I recall this question predicated on the visual exchangeability of African American bodies, I also appreciate that in that moment Willis Thomas’s piece had performed its cultural work. It had lodged itself in the complicated, power-ridden interstices of visual culture where we do not look. But, to begin, who is this “we”? As this essay implies, “we” is a highly volatile designation that changes along trajectories and ways of looking in relation to who does the looking and who is being looked at, who needs to be reckoned with and who, instead, can be or has been entirely ignored. The conference attendee’s response makes this clear: in seeking the model, the real-life referent in a random African American male, the woman’s reaction foregrounds the very fact that a racialized logic of vision operates as an economy of exchange.3 More to the point, the woman’s response to the work encapsulates the location of the black body in trajectories of looking. This location, I will argue, is a blind corner constituted, among other things, by the visual exchangeability of the black body to which the conference

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Figure 6.1 Hank Willis Thomas, Branded Head, 2003. B®ANDED series. Lambda photograph. Inventory #HWT05.001. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

attendee responds. It is also the blind corner that the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man lights up at the end of the novel by rerouting the services of the local electric company, Monopolated Light & Power, to his basement. “Light,” he explains, “confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.”4 This discovery leads him to seek to recreate the perceptual conditions for his own invisibility: an environment in which an excess of light makes it impossible to look at him. The brightness is such that he can hide behind it.5

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What is hidden behind the brightness? What is it that, even when we, just like the conference attendee, think we see, we are still not looking at? Hank Willis Thomas’s work can help us begin to answer these questions. A lot of his work is located precisely within this blind corner, but rather than submitting to it, he employs it as a pivot to explore more profound and endemic failures to look. Willis Thomas has claimed to be interested in what Barthes has described as “what-goes-without-saying,”6 the taken for granted in the field of vision, what falls to the margin of our attention, all of which he has extensively explored by creating works that camouflage as advertising. This strategy allows Willis Thomas to draw an important parallel between the paradox of vision that the black body and the advertising image share as both simultaneously visually striking and easily negligible, but also to explore how the advertising image reiterates, sometimes in unnoticeable ways, the continued relationship between race and capital. And, in fact, Willis Thomas’s works overlay images and artifacts of the slave trade with icons of consumer culture in order to point to a deeper level where race is imbricated in the computational logic of finance capital.7 Hank Willis Thomas’s artistic program, however, is fraught with multiple challenges, the first of which, as my opening anecdote suggests, is the sociocultural expectation that a black body must be identical to itself. Semiotically understood as a trace of race, skin color (the epidermal signifier) is a surface feature that is expected to deliver a sociological world behind it—what we commonly understand as “race.”8 The possibility of making the black body intransitive and unyielding is made difficult by the weight of the historical processes that have sutured race onto the body as the face of value, as its natural and transparent expression, and as its corporeally grounded signifier. A second challenge lies in the double bind that faces contemporary non-white artists, particularly those comprised under the loose and still contested umbrella of “post-black”: a demand that they transcend their racial identity while, paradoxically, making such acts recognizably seen in their work.9 Blackness, as Darby English argues, is too often expected to provide a “visual gift” to its observer, something to look at, something we can recognize. Paradoxically then, blackness needs to be visually recognized as something that does not need to be really looked at, so much so that, a non-white artist faces the paradox of her own disappearance vis-à-vis her work. The disappearance of the body at the center of the image, as I will indicate below, is a defining trait of a lot of Hank Willis Thomas’s work. If not looking is the paradox of a contemporary visual culture saturated with images that do not invite us to look, then the black body is effected by this paradox twice over. In fact, the black body has been historically caught between hypervisibility and invisibility, simultaneously subject to too much and too little looking. More to the point, as Frantz Fanon has so influentially argued (and Ellison’s epigraph also crystalizes), while the white look

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registers a seemingly natural retinal pop that cannot be controlled or suppressed (“Look, a Negro!”), a gaze that institutes the black as a distinctive visual object, this gaze also has the capacity to make the black body recede into the background and lose the ability to claim its distinctive singularity. The raced body becomes visually indistinguishable from other bodies similarly lumped under the same overdetermined category: blackness.10 Otherwise put, Fanon’s primal scene speaks to, among other things, the perceptual impossibility of color blindness, the fact that, even though we might not be looking, culturally and historically, at least in the Western world, we cannot not see skin color. The exclamation of the conference attendee, instead, expresses the other term of the paradox: the fact that, even though skin color cannot not be seen, it is often the only thing really looked at, while the person is discarded, neglected, overlooked. Thus, the compulsive direction of the look Fanon describes covers over much deeper forms of not looking and glosses over marks of individuality in favor of the perception of an overarching system of visual equivalences: the body that bears recognizable traces of race is hardly looked at as individual, but it is rather immediately figural as well; it is similar, analogous, and, eventually, exchangeable. It exists in a state of resemblance, which Michel Foucault has described as the product of socio-culturally constructed grids of discourses and practices.11 If, in the former case, the blackness of the body commands attention for its seemingly self-evident visual difference, in the latter it invites a distracted vision and performs a work of abstraction: covering over individual differences, blackness acts as a mere signifier of exchange. But so does the advertising image. Michael Schudson has described the aesthetics of advertising as “capitalist realism,” the imagination or visualization of a way of experiencing things that supports the material and social relations of capitalism. For Schudson the advertising image is self-referential, tautological, and nothing more than a vehicle for capitalism to say “I love you” to itself.12 The advertising image offers a temporary embodiment necessary for this romance to take place. Yet, it is also mere surface: it is the face that capitalism must provisionally but also repeatedly assume in order to interface itself, in order to lovingly caress its own skin. Like blackness, it is what sits on top while it also lies in between.13 Thus, first and foremost, the advertising image seeks exchangeability. Like the black body, it acts as currency: at all times it is both a commodity and a general means of exchange. Secondly and more profoundly, it is simultaneously subject and object of not looking: it has seen and has been enchanted by commodity fetishism, but when it comes forth and exhibits itself to the perspective customer, it no longer looks and coyly turns away. Hank Willis Thomas’s works on advertising act very similarly. The artist has to date several series of works. The B®ANDED series (2001–2011) is built predominantly around the dialectic between advertising logos and the visual and material culture of the archives of slavery; the UNBRANDED series (2008) engages more directly with the language and aesthetics of

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advertising. For this series, Willis Thomas collected print advertisements featuring African American models or directed at black consumers published between 1968 (the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated) to 2008 and digitally removed their captions. While the first series focuses on effects of corporealization that the black shares with the commodity, specifically in relation to the multiple associations triggered by the idea of “branding,” the latter engages more directly with the self-referential ontology of the advertising image and its desire to circulate. In a similar vein, the FAIR WARNING series focuses exclusively on African American women. Again, removing captions, logos, and any other reference to consumer products allows Willis Thomas to just exhibit the black female body in the pose it is made to assume by the seductive imperative of advertising (see Figure 6.2). In the REBRANDED series, begun in 2010 and still in progress, each work features a combination of old and contemporary ads placed so that their central figures—and therefore also “then” and “now”—appear to dialogue with, but also bleed into, one another as if suspended in the static and self-referential place and time that characterizes the advertising image itself (see Figure 6.3). What I find most interesting is not only that Willis Thomas has found in advertising an archive worth plunging in order to bring to the surface the imbrication of race and commerce, or even the resilience of blackness as commodity form in contemporary culture, but that so many of his works are created to camouflage as such. His intention has been to employ advertising’s global language and the channels of its ubiquitous “one-way

Figure 6.2 Hank Willis Thomas, Alive with Pleasure! Chorus Line, 2010. FAIR WARNING series. LightJet print. Inventory #HWT10.011. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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Figure 6.3 Hank Willis Thomas, Now, That’s Funny, 2010. REBRANDED series. Installation view CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

conversation” in order to, instead, “talk back.”14 Thus, what I want to focus on is not merely the profound and astute archival work that led to the UNBRANDED, REBRANDED, and FAIR WARNING series, or, even more directly, to House of Cards (2009), in which Willis Thomas glued to the wall of a small room photographic portraits of African American subjects with the handwritten note: “remember me,” or Black Is Beautiful (2009), a collection of Jet magazine’s “Beauty of the Week” pages, from the 1950s to the present.15 This work indicates an interest in exploring the idea and the practice of the aggregate and the type of visibility it affords. However, my primary focus is on Willis Thomas’s archeological impulse as it manifests in the decision to create works that camouflage as advertising, that occupy the same locations, look the same way, and engage us similarly. Willis Thomas’s acts of camouflage that I, in turn, mimic in the title for this essay, begin with the name of the series of works that brought him to the attention of the art world: B®ANDED. Immediately, the name announces the intended exploration of the intimate relationship between commodity form and race, through a visual effect of différance. That is, the name suggests how subtle displacements of the signifier can open the possibility to explore the work of race as a work of writing, the inscription of a visual order onto the body. Itself branded with the recognizable mark of intellectual property, the series title demands to be looked at, not just read through,

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for us to see the commodity logic lodged within artistic expression. Furthermore, the title announces the desire to work from within a given regime of representation by manipulating its surface, its face value, in fact, by problematizing the connection it establishes between face and value—here, made to flicker, with the use of the symbol ®. The images that Willis Thomas revives could be described as “found” objects (objets trouvés), in the sense that they are often repurposed preexisting materials. Yet, the archival work that the artist performs to find and collect these images exposes the extent to which, despite becoming increasingly essential to the language of advertising, the black body has historically gone unnoticed as well. So, more than found, these images and material culture objects might be better described as ready-mades, unchanging visual syntagmas, which Willis Thomas has exhumed from a sea of neglect and rescued from a history of not looking.16 And yet, as he takes them, polishes them, or strips them of their advertising copy, and puts them in a gallery or in a public space, he also makes sure to maintain the traces of the original disregard, the initial not looking that had first prompted them. He achieves this, if anything, by daring to make these images dangerously close to being interchangeable with advertising itself. From the blind spot, from the place behind the brightness, from the spaces where we do not look, Willis Thomas creates art that, in important ways, mimics our own acts of not looking. He makes works that flicker, and in so doing, they also always imply a lenticular vision, an alternation between looking and not looking, sameness and difference, all of which occur on the works’ surface.17 Considered together, these series of works are built on the realization that the visuality of the black body is always already flickering between the human form and the commodity form. The black body is already always caught in an oscillatory movement between the two, even though, despite its pervasiveness, the commodity form continues to be object of visual neglect. Instead, with works that pass as, mimic, and share the social ontology of the advertising image, Willis Thomas succeeds in unfolding this flickering by slowing down the rapidity with which the advertising image exchanges. He does this by making us notice its language and making us look twice. Not only has Willis Thomas appropriated, redirected, and dislocated highly familiar advertising logos (Nike, Timberland, and NBA, to mention a few), bringing them to bear upon the unrecognized labor of the black body, but some of his works, including Branded Head, and the works presented at the CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival (see Figure 6.3), have been exhibited in public spaces normally occupied by advertising, in billboards, phone booths, or bus stops and other transient locations, such as airports, outside of the canonical space of the museum.18 Furthermore, the works’ commonplace appearance “gives them the kind of legitimacy accorded to things existing in the natural world.” This is a natural world that appears as such because of the unremarkable presence of advertising

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and the ruse of naturalness elicited by its cumulative effect: “the insistence with which it clutters our visual landscape.”19 Because some of Willis Thomas’s works appear in places that are common, shared, unmarked, their purpose seems to want to pass, to be not looked at, and to go unnoticed. But as they pass, they also call attention to what they pass through and to. With their quasimetaphysical stillness they arrest viewers in their tracks, just before being dispatched as other advertisements are.20 Several works in the B®ANDED series excavate the widespread adoption of the credit system that emerged in the eighteenth century to stabilize cash flows delayed by the transatlantic slave trade. They do so, through a flickering effect whereby on the one hand, they appear virtually indistinguishable from advertising images, while on the other hand, they index the archives of slavery and the Middle Passage. Unremarkable at first sight, the Afro-American Express card (2004; see Figure 6.4) maintains characteristics from the actual American Express card—green background, font, and layout. However, upon closer scrutiny, we can detect the “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” emblem, the engraving of the slave ship Wildfire, seized by the US Navy in 1860, a membership that dates back to 1619, and the slaves’ silhouettes employed in the Description of a Slave Ship (1789)—one of the most widely circulated pictures about the Middle Passage.21 It is only upon a painstaking second look that we notice the signs of an encroachment of commerce in the sphere of the human. We also discover why the advertising image wants to live on its surface and encourage a superficial, cursory

Figure 6.4 Hank Willis Thomas, Afro-American Express, 2004. B®ANDED series. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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viewing. As we initially mistake it for an actual advertisement, in fact, we would be prone to let our noncommittal gaze caress, without looking at, the work’s surface. However, as we detect signifiers and artifacts of the slave trade we are caught in the centripetal energy of the image. Our own gaze drowns in the high waves of the transatlantic voyage we are forced to conjure up. The surface of the work now appears blinding, like the light bulbs the Invisible Man has lit in his basement, and therefore makes it difficult for us to really look. Yet, building on the recognizability of these icons (as images that we have seen, even though possibly never looked at, before), Willis Thomas makes us look twice, and as we do, we also appreciate the mechanics of our own not looking. It is the recognition of the familiarity and naturalness of these icons that stops us in our tracks. Or, consider The Chase Mastercard (2006; see Figure 6.5),22 a cropped photograph where a model in impeccable business attire holds and exhibits the card for the viewer, with the thumb pressing against the reproduction of the Scourged Back23 featured in the card’s background.

Figure 6.5 Hank Willis Thomas, The Chase Mastercard, 2004. In collaboration with Ryan Alexiev. B®ANDED series. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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The model’s hand and the Abolitionist icon and artifact are linked by a shared corporeality, which the Scourged Back exhibits by wearing it on the sleeve of the raced body: the whipping marks, indexical traces of the brutality of slavery, are a reiteration and further exteriorization of the epidermality of race. The Chase slogan, “The right relationship is everything,” in its empty exchangeability, rings very differently when this physical contact is highlighted. Just like the bodies that underwrite it, the MasterCard carries the signs of the master’s ownership, but, after Willis Thomas’s repurposing, it instead flaunts the purchase power of those who were once the purchased. A similar approach prompts the widely discussed pseudo MasterCard banner Willis Thomas created from a photograph taken at the funeral of his cousin Songha Willis, shot dead outside Club Evolutions in Philadelphia on February 2, 2000 (see Figure 6.6). Built and publicly hung as a billboard outside the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, this image’s deceptive face, fully compliant with the aesthetics of other priceless MasterCard ads, at first encourages a cursory look. The superimposed text, however, quietly, but sternly, demands that the viewer conjures up the horrible loss that lies beneath, thus revealing how

Figure 6.6 Hank Willis Thomas, Priceless #1, 2004. B®ANDED series. Lambda photograph. Inventory #HWT05.006. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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the original ad is premised on the imperative to not look. Its rhetoric, which reproduces the litany of purchasable items for which MasterCard can be used, also exposes how the idea of pricelessness is built around a fixed set of values—things that common sense agrees have a price tag and things that do not. Race is the socioontological formation that sits at the heart of this distinction because of how the slave inhabits the precariously maintained line between human and thing, price-less and price-full. Furthermore, all MasterCard ads from the “priceless” campaign proceed as a series of computations in accumulation, reaching its climax with an item that is considered beyond the just reiterated logic of exchange and labeled “priceless.”24 They are a mounting love, a vain promise of an orgasmic fullness that the advertising image is supposed to deliver. Ironically, even though purportedly detached from monetary value, it is this final image, and hence the visual itself, that is unintentionally posited as the ultimate token of exchange. Hank Willis Thomas’s Priceless, instead, refuses to deliver such a fulfillment and counteracts the ads’ exhibitionism with a scene that withholds closure, resists romance, and ultimately stages the unexchangeable object as a nonvisualizable and nondisplayable blind corner: the casket laying outside the frame that the photograph itself cannot bear to look at. As they slow down the frenzy of circulation and begin to flicker, Willis Thomas’s images also demand a double regard: at first sight we read them at face value but, upon a second look, we can detect not only the signs of exploitation lurking just beneath the surface but how the overtaking of the human form by the commodity form is intimately linked to an ability to refuse to look while denying others the ability to look. By camouflaging as a MasterCard ad, Willis Thomas’s Priceless seeks to counteract this monetization of human life by exhibiting, as its blind corner, the historical roots of the logic of finance capital that has generalized the exchangeability of the human, which begins in earnest with the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In Absolut Power (2003; see Figure 6.7) Willis Thomas unearths the archives of slavery by reproducing the Description of a Slave Ship (1789) in the shape of an Absolut vodka bottle. By doing so, he establishes a reversible relationship between inside and outside, container and contained, then and now. The ship is both the vessel and the content of commodity exchange; the liquor bottle is both the commodity exchanged for slaves and the means of transportation to their commercial destination. Absolut Power is a picture that makes visible capitalism’s power to refuse to look. Its flickering effect jolts the viewer into an awareness that the marks of exploitation had been there all along, just below the surface, invisible only because of our own refusal to look. Willis Thomas’s excavation of the material culture of both slavery and abolitionism needs to be seen as the realization that slavery should not be regarded as a historical occurrence, as an episode of the past that has nothing to do with our present historical moment, but rather as an historical ontology, as a social construction that has historically acquired the

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Figure 6.7 Hank Willis Thomas, Absolut Power, 2003. B®ANDED series. Inkjet print on canvas. Inventory #HWT05.002. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

authority of an ontological fact.25 Even though no longer a legal possibility, slavery survives in intensified form in the transactions of the finance capital it originally made possible.26 The blind spot to which the slave is consigned and the blind spot that allows the black body to signify and facilitate the circulation of commodity fetishism and desire in late capitalism are still the same. Furthermore, when it comes to slavery, Stephen Best observes, there is

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an absence at the heart of the archive “for slaves are not the subject of the visual imagination, they are its object.”27 And even then, the only look that is extended to the slave, as Nicholas Mirzoeff argues in The Right to Look, is the one of the overseer.28 Or, for Huey Copeland, “historically, visuality itself has been construed as the mastering conceit from which black peoples have sought refuge.”29 Thus, the historiographical framework that treats slavery as an historical ontology and capital as its motor faces, in turn, the blindness of its own sources. With entries recording the purchase and trading of slaves in exchange for rum and gold, for instance, as well as a host of corollary transactions involving food, water, and firewood, the slave ships’ logbooks would only register the slaves’ coerced transportation, the transactions they made possible, and, thus, their conversion into money.30 Like the slave owner ledger or the slave ship’s logbook, both Priceless and Absolut Power demand a gaze that is willing to be arrested by the recognition of its own failure to restore visual presence to the human, that is, that which has not left a computable trace. This is an important point for Willis Thomas, who has explored this blind spot in another work made in response to the death of his cousin. In Bearing Witness: Murder’s Wake, Willis Thomas photographed people whose lives had been changed by coming in contact with Songha. “The impossibility of the task becomes its theme,” writes the artist, while “these faces, unfolding exponentially, become a conceptual portrait of Songha Willis.” As the faces multiply, so do empty spaces in between the photographs, which “represent those who will always remain unknown,” a series of blind corners that attest to the look’s failure to behold a person’s life.31 Yet, at the same time, Willis Thomas’s work deliberately inhabits the world of commerce and participates in its economy of exchange. By camouflaging so, it succeeds in slowing it down so that the human form can be ethically and compassionately conjured up in the flickering between the commodity and the person; reading and looking; speaking and silence. That is, from the depths of the spaces where we do not look. Willis Thomas explores the parallel between the raced body and the ontology of the advertising image beginning with his UNBRANDED series and continuing with REBRANDED and FAIR WARNING, where the advertising copy is digitally removed from actual advertisements. This critical act of disrobing further exposes the superficiality of a language that is already entirely focused on its outer appearance and has no referent outside of its own economy of desire. Without captions anchoring them to a specific sales pitch, the images float and freely exchange, speaking only to each other, rather than to the consumer product to which they were originally connected. Thus, what comes to the surface is the sheer logic and lure of exchange, for which the black body functions as facilitator. Inoculated within this self-referential and highly mobile field, the black body appears now aesthetically absorbed within the narcissistic thinness of the advertising tableaux, thus bringing to the surface the centrality of blackness in consumer culture’s trajectories of desire.32 In these series, black bodies are

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sometimes simply items within a color palette and at other times part of a wish fulfillment—always vital ingredients to the reproduction and reaffirmation of a color capital that remains optic white.33 In Alive with Pleasure! Chorus Line (see Figure 6.2), beautiful African American women pose, smile, dance, and lure the viewer. Yet, what makes them move? What triggers their—not our—desires? Without the original context, it is impossible to say. Here, again, the black body is not an agent of desire but is only looked at to the extent that it affords an eroticization of the advertising image and the fantastic scenarios on which it depends. In these images there is nothing to read—only a profound emptiness, once the chatter of the advertising copy has been silenced. Now that it is made mute, what W.J.T. Mitchell has described as the subaltern position of the image comes to the foreground. It does so, however, not as the foundation for an ethics of looking, but rather as the pretext for an erotic fantasy, whereby we do not need to look, but only imagine and feel.34 In one of the UNBRANDED images, for example, the peacock chair that in the late 1960s had become part of the image of black militancy in the famous Huey P. Newton portrait is repurposed by the language of advertising in a way that diffuses the specter of African American takeover and uncovers instead dynamics of desire (see Figure 6.8).

Figure 6.8 Hank Willis Thomas, Are You the Right Kind of Woman for It? 1974/2007. UNBRANDED series. Inventory #HWT07.003. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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If that transformation might have gone unnoticed in the original advertising, it does not in Willis Thomas’s reanimation of the titillation that lays hidden within the shock effect of the image of an armed black man. Retitled as Are You the Right Kind of Woman for It? the peacock chair is now the fulcrum of an erotic fantasy staged as a playful and yet daring reversal of a scenario of colonial domination. In colonial attire, cigar in the mouth, shiny black boots, an African American model sits in the chair with two white women at his side and tropical fruit basket at his feet. The décor echoes the mildly exotic color palette of the fruit in the women’s outfits, their sandals, and the flowers they wear in their hair, thus establishing a visual equivalence between the colored man and the colorful women. Almost touching each other’s hands over the man’s crotch, the two women submit to the part of the (not quite) virgin land the black colonizer will conquer and possess. As much as unbranding the advertisement foregrounds its disembodied evanescence, the image of the black man with (literal and metaphorical) gun is not fully etherealized and continues to linger in the erotic associations it has already stirred up above and beyond our own act of looking at the advertisement. Pushing further, It Didn’t Jest Grow by Itself 1940–2008, from the REBRANDED series, juxtaposes a stripped advertising image of a smiling woman in a cotton field with a similarly smiling woman in a tea field (see Figure 6.9). The contiguity between the two advertisements explicitly covers the historical distance between similar types of field labor, emphasizing the immutability of laborers’ conditions. The image could be read as a gloss on Gayatri Spivak’s notion of the “native informant,” the female figure of colonial history that is foreclosed, that is, theoretically necessary, yet never looked at, in the history of modern Western thought.35 What we discover

Figure 6.9 Hank Willis Thomas, It Didn’t Jest Grow By Itself, 1940–2008. REBRANDED series. LightJet print. Inventory #HWT08.036. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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in this image, is that we still do not have ways of looking at the human labor congealed and yet mystified in commodity fetishism. Furthermore, the work’s caption echoes fantasies of antebellum plantation life, immortalized in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where this same failure to look is personified in the character of Topsy, the young slave girl who has no knowledge of ever having been born and, amused, suggests, “I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.”36 By juxtaposing these two images and evoking the sentimental fiction of the notorious abolitionist novel, Willis Thomas shows that the human form and commodity form are made interchangeable in the black body because of a continued foreclosure, a continued refusal to look at labor as such. One of the purposes of the archival work of excavation Willis Thomas has undertaken with the UNBRANDED series has been the idea of a representational continuum that maintains the black body in a state of neglect, regardless of its visibility. When, asks the artist, does an image become “positive”?37 When does rejection turn into desire? The REBRANDED series addresses these issues openly: as figures from a contemporary and a historic advertisement face one another (as in Figure 6.2, or in the similarly arranged original image of Figure 6.10) across time, space, movements, and trajectories of looking, the commodity too comes to look at itself in the face.

Figure 6.10 Hank Willis Thomas, The Cotton Bowl, 2011. Strange Fruit series. Digital c-print. Inventory #HWT11.015. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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By staging face-to-face encounters, these advertisements reproduce the dynamics of their own characters’ disappearance: we can see the very process of disregarding the body that the advertising image had temporarily singled out and brought to (some type of glamorous) visibility. Archival research is central to Willis Thomas’s work in two important ways: first, as a historiographical project of excavation (particularly in the B®ANDED series), and, second, because of how it foregrounds the paradox of not looking that is intrinsic to archival practice itself; that is, how sheer accumulation ultimately invites a distracted look so that an archive’s scale challenges our ability to really see what we might be looking at.38 The visual culture archive presents an irresolvable tension between the singling out of a remarkable body (as in the “Beauty of the Week” series from Jet magazine) and its disappearance, the moment it joins company with similarly remarkable, yet increasingly interchangeable and disposable, bodies. Willis Thomas has brought a similar visual logic to bear upon his lenticular works. A first set of text-based works was presented in South Africa as part of the exhibition All Things Being Equal (2010), a title that comments not only on South Africa’s history of apartheid but also on capital’s logic of equalization between life, art, and commerce (see Figure 6.11). In these works, the idea of the flickering between the human and the commodity form is taken to yet another level, because now the works themselves stage the double regard Willis Thomas’s work demands more in general.

Figure 6.11 Hank Willis Thomas, Life Imitates Ads/Art Imitates Life/Art Imitates Ads, 2009. Lenticular. Inventory #HWT09.038. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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They do so by acknowledging and implicating the viewer’s embodied point of view. As the viewer moves in the gallery space, the text becomes more or less visible, or, in certain cases, changes altogether. One notable work, which revisits a series of Warholian statements the artist had made before, comprises three panels: the first two read, with variable clarity: “ads imitate ads” and “life imitates life,” while in the third, the lenticular effect, makes the first and third term alternate between “ads” and “life.”39 In this case the flickering effect has become structural: the double regard occurs because the object itself provides a double lens, since it knows that aspects of the work would otherwise not been looked at. The work reacts to the viewer’s looking or not looking and, almost pivoting on itself, it slowly puts forward its many sides. As it shows itself, it also claims, “I see you.”40 This self-referential loop, which Andy Warhol explored by feeding a look that does not/cannot see, is the location Willis Thomas has crafted for his work in order to explode the paradoxical status of the advertising image from within, as one that strives to be looked at, and yet, is increasingly ignored. That is, for Willis Thomas, the advertising image endorses the same paradox of vision that instead victimizes the black body: as it strives for singularity and attention—it longs to be looked at—the advertising image also seeks circulation and exchangeability; that is, it encourages forms of not, or distracted, looking. Furthermore, like blackness, the advertising image is both a commodity and the commodity’s surface; it is the face the commodity puts on top, the smile it wears on the outside, and the skin through which it interfaces. In passing as advertising, Willis Thomas’s works perform a reflexive turn, holding up a mirror to the property structure that underlies capitalism itself and the paradox of vision that chains the black body to its grammar. This is the paradox that Fred Moten describes, summarizing the visual conceit of Ellison’s Invisible Man, as the fact that the mark of invisibility is a visible racial mark.41 Or, stated more broadly (and with intentional pun), that one is not looked at because of the way one looks. Consider how Willis Thomas’s Absolut (see Figure 6.12) digitally inserts an icon of consumer culture in the body of the image, which is rendered as an organic entity—the man’s blood having temporarily and accidentally outlined a consumer icon. Wet and bloody, the texture of the photograph inoculates the bottle within the intractable grain of the forensic image. This offers a counter-scene to the UNBRANDED series where the black body was instead inoculated within the color palette of capitalist realism. Here the sign of capitalist realism is made to bleed and is therefore weighted down to a much thicker ontological plane, that of the corporeality of race and death. What oozes out of this body is what in the Branded Head was conspicuously sitting on top. In this picture the human figure is not the beholder of the look. Rather, it is the commodity that, seemingly, turns around and looks out onto the space of the viewer. Through this pivot, capitalism finally looks at itself in the face.42

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Figure 6.12 Hank Willis Thomas, Absolut Reality, 2007. B®ANDED series. LightJet print. Inventory #HWT07.044. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Willis Thomas’s images force us to look at race while they are not looking back. By entering the visual economy of blackness and whiteness camouflaged as advertising, Willis Thomas’s works disrobe it from within. They force the viewer to enter the blind corner they so effectively conjure up and then, pivoting on themselves, they align her with the commodity, which, like the slave, and, by extension, the advertising image, can finally see itself in the face. Seen through/from its blind corner, Willis Thomas’s art reveals how capitalism can indeed see itself in the face—straight in its own eyes. NOTES 1. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 3. 2. I have used this work for the cover of my book On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013), and it is also featured on the cover of David J. Leonard and C. Richard King, eds., Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports (Lanhman, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011).

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Alessandra Raengo Hank Willis Thomas’s work has been central to a series of arguments I make in On the Sleeve of the Visual surrounding the imbrication of capital, photography and race, indexicality and affect, and ultimately the assertion of the centrality of the black body in the ontology of the image. In the book I expand on the idea that a hermeneutic practice of surface reading (i.e., reading the black body at “face value”) has and continues to provide an ontology of the image that endures even in the digital age. I want to thank Dartmouth College Press for permission to reproduce some of the prose from my book. See Amy Robinson, “Forms of Appearance of Value: Homer Plessy and the Politics of Privacy,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). For Robinson, racial passing is proof of a visual economy invested in the value of appearances and therefore a visual culture that rehearses the visual logic of commodity exchange. “An exchange based economy,” she claims “is, above all, an economy which poses the question of social value as a problematic of visuality.” Ibid., 248. Ellison, Invisible Man, 6. The idea of a blinding brightness has acquired a new relevance in hip-hop and the visual culture of “bling.” See Krista Thompson, “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop,” The Art Bulletin 91, no. 4 (2009): 481–505. Hank Willis Thomas, Pitch Blackness (New York: Aperture, 2008), 82. Initially only part of his artist statement, prominently featured on his website (http://www.hankwillisthomas.com) in 2011, “What Goes Without Saying” has become also the title of a 2012 sculpture made of a wooden pillory with a microphone located in front of the aperture where the victim’s head was supposed to be. Here we find a conflaction that mirrors the tension between looking and not looking—the flickering movement whereby they quickly reverse: it is between the unsaid (e.g., what does not get to be said) and what doesn’t have to be said, what circulates (“goes”) without any need to be theorized or even acknowledged. I further explore this connection in On the Sleeve of the Visual, where I argue that blackness, photography, and finance capital share the same “social ontology.” See especially chapter 3, “The Money of the Real.” See also Alessandra Raengo, “Reification, Reanimation, and the Money of the Real,” The World Picture Journal 7, “Distance,” Summer 2012, accessed July 31, 2014, http:// www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_7/Raengo.html. The idea of the “epidermality” of race comes from Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008/1952) and is explored in a semiotic and psychoanalytic key in Alan Read’s anthology The Fact of Blackness (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), and in particular Stuart Hall’s contribution “The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skins, White Masks?” Ibid., 12–37. This is what Darby English has described as “black representational space,” which can be understood to indicate the segregating protocols of viewership and sets of injunctions demanding that non-white artwork be both exemplary, and representational, if not of race as a lived experience then at least of the maker’s racial identity. Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Boston: MIT Press, 2007), 1–26. I discuss this further in Alessandra Raengo, “In the Shadow,” Camera Obscura 83, vol. 28, no. 2 (2013): 1–43. I use the term raced to underline that racialization is a process that is initiated in the eyes of the beholder. That race is made, rather than found. See Irene Tucker, The Moment of Racial Sight: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), for a genealogical account of the visual construction

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of race, and Mark Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), for a discussion of its sensorial construction. I refer specifically to This Is Not A Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), where Foucault elaborates on the distinction between resemblance and similitude against the burden of representation. Building on Foucault’s notion, I also intend to emphasize that resemblance is work, a labor directed at producing an effect of referentiality, a work that Willis Thomas attempts to disrupt. Michael Schudson, “Advertising as Capitalist Realism,” Advertising & Society Review 1, no. 1 (2000), accessed July 31, 2014, http://muse.jhu.edu/jour nals/advertising_and_society_review/toc/asr1.1.html. I have previously relied on this conceptualization in my “Optic Black: Blackness as Phantasmagoria,” in Beyond Blackface: Africana Images in US Media, ed. Akil Houston (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2010), and Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual, chapter 3. I further develop the idea of the in-betweenness of blackness in my essay “Blackness, Aesthetics, Liquidity,” liquid blackness 1, no. 2 (April 2014), accessed July 23, 2014, http://liquidblackness.com/LB2.pdf, last accessed July 23, 14. “Hank Willis Thomas in conversation with Mark Anthony Neal,” Left of Black Season 1, Episode 19 webcast, January 21, 2011, accessed July 23, 14, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWm8wNFW048. Black Is Beautiful, 2009, Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles. House of Cards is part of the Digging Deeper Exhibition in collaboration with William Cole, which plunged the archives of the Amistad Center at the Wadsworth Atheneum, 2009. Willis Thomas has variously described himself as a “visual conceptual photographer” or a “photo conceptual artist” and a “visual culture archeologist.” See again Willis Thomas’s interview in Left of Black. I draw the distinction between objet trouvé and ready-made from Margaret Iversen, “Readymade, Found Object, Photograph,” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (2004): xx. Hank Willis Thomas is considered a key figure to the project of interrogating the possibilities of visually engaging with the experience of slavery discussed in the special issue of Representations, eds. Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, “Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual,” Representations 113, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 1–15. In Reconstructing Dixie, Tara McPherson argues that narratives of the South construct a racial visibility that follows a lenticular logic, that is, a “monocular logic, a schema by which history or images that are actually copresent get presented (structurally, ideologically) so that only one of the images can be seen at a time.” Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 7. I find that this idea of the lenticular resonates in Willis Thomas’s own strategic use of lenticularity, first metaphorically, in works that demand a second look, and then literally, in his text-based lenticular paintings, and, more recently, in the lenticular photographic work made in collaboration with Sanford Biggers, which I mention below. Branded Head, for instance, has been installed outside the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, in a leased Viacom kiosk, in 2003, while Priceless, discussed below, has been exhibited outside the Birmingham Museum of Art, in Alabama. Willis Thomas has also exhibited his work in billboards at the CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival. There, the artist presented works derived from advertising (already “doctored” for the UNBRANDED series

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Alessandra Raengo and the FAIR WARNING series) and “noticeably aged images. . . . To engage with passersby.” (From www.hankwillisthomas.com, accessed December 28, 2012). Viewers, claims the artist, “should not have to rely on background information to understand that these are not typical advertisements; but we do provide clues for those interested in exploring the work further: subtle placement of our web address, visible from a car, or small descriptive panels for pedestrians.” Cited in Ruby Beesley, “Photography & the Pervasive Influence,” Aesthetica, 34 (April–May 2010): 34. With the ©ause Collective, Willis Thomas has also made video work (Along the Way, 2007, I See it Now, 2010, The Long March, 2013, and others) that has been exhibited in transient and public spaces, including the Oakland International Airport and the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. René de Guzman, “Nothing Better,” in Pitch Blackness, 95–96. The concept of “metaphysical stillness” as a defining characteristic of mainstream representations of blacks was developed by James Snead, White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). The “Am I not a Man and a Brother” emblem was initially a seal for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the 1870s and then was rendered as a jasperware cameo by Josiah Wedgewood. As Robin Kelley notes, the cameos were mass-produced objects and quickly became “the hottest fashion accessory among the abolitionist and anti-slave trade elite.” The engraving of the slave ship Wildfire was published in Harper’s Weekly on June 2, 1860 and its shock effect depended greatly on the fact that it had been derived from a daguerreotype. Kelley’s attention to the fact that Willis Thomas’s images are derived from artifacts foregrounds a blurred distinction between visual and material culture that runs through the artist’s entire oeuvre. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Burning Symbols: The Work of Art in the Age of Tyrannical (Re)production,” in Pitch Blackness, 103–4. Made in cooperation with Ryan Alexiev. The Scourged Back, 1863, was a widely distributed carte-de-visite, with photograph of the back of a black man named “Gordon” mutilated by a brutal whipping. It was also published as an etching in Harper’s Weekly July 4, 1863, issue. See Pitch Blackness, 105. The tagline of the MasterCard “priceless” campaign is as follows: “There are some (http://www.adslogans.co.uk/site/pages/gallery/there-are-some-things-moneycan-t-buy.-for-everything-else-there-s-mastercard8606.php) things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.” Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 175–207. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). Stephen Best, “Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive,” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011): 151. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Or, at most, as Saidyia Hartman observes, the suffering of the slave becomes intelligible to sympathetic observers only to the extent that they can imagine themselves in the slave’s place, thus erasing her suffering twice over. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Huey Copeland, “Glenn Ligon and Other Runaway Subjects,” Representations 113, no. 1, (2011): 85. This point is compellingly made by Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, chapter 1.

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31. Willis Thomas, Pitch Blackness, 44. 32. For the concept of the “advertising tableau,” see Roland Marchand, Advertising and the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 33. “Optic white” refers to the metaphor of color capital that Ralph Ellison employs in the “Liberty Paint” episode in Invisible Man. There, the narrator discovers that the secret of the factory’s best-selling optic white paint is black boiler worker Lucius Brockway, who operates the factory’s machinery, adding ten drops of “dead black” liquid, and “dipping his finger” in the white mixture. As he famously claims: “Them machines just do the cooking, these here hands right here do the sweeting.” For a commentary on this episode see Harryette Mullen, “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” Diacritics 24, no. 2–3 (1994): 71–89. 34. Mitchell argues that the question of what pictures want demands, among other things, “the construal of pictures not as sovereign subjects or disembodied spirits but as subalterns whose bodies are marked with the stigmata of difference, and who function as ‘go-betweens’ and scapegoats in the social field of human visuality.” W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 46. 35. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 36. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (1852, reprint, New York: Penguin, 1986), 356, quoted in Stephen Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 190. 37. “Hank Willis Thomas in conversation with Mark Anthony Neal.” 38. This is a central issue in the debate surrounding “big data.” One interesting attempt to process visual culture archives in order to visualize what he describes as a “cultural fact” is Lev Manovich’s work in the Software Studies Initiative, and the particularly iconic study of Time covers’ visual designs “Mapping Time,” accessed July 23, 14, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ culturevis/4038907270/in/set-72157624959121129. 39. In 2010, the artist’s website greeted the viewer with a home page exhibiting three white cards that developed a somewhat Warholian argument: the first read “ADS IMITATE ART,” the second read “ART IMITATES LIFE,” and the third read “LIFE IMITATES ADS.” 40. Another set of photographic lenticular works, such as Crossroads and Zero Hours (2012), were made in collaboration with multimedia artist Sanford Biggers, who acts as photographic model and is dressed and made up so that one half of his face, body, and outfit is white and the other half is black. Inspired by the “dandy” persona of a nineteenth-century African American entertainer, the works reflect on contemporary issues of racial and cultural hybridity by, once again, relying on the viewer’s double-take: while the photographs’ mise-en-scène presents a strikingly polarized scenario, the lenticular aspect of the work emphasizes the blurring between the two dichotomous halves. See Rachel Wolff, “Hank Willis Thomas Stages a Photo Shoot: How Sanford Biggers Came to Strike a Pose as a Two-Faced Dandy,” ARTnews (2012): 126–33. 41. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 67–68. 42. This idea, which I further develop in On the Sleeve of the Visual, comes from Walter Benjamin’s statement that it is in the prostitute that the commodity celebrates its becoming human. The prostitute is where the commodity can “look itself in the face.” Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” New German Critique 34 (1985): 42.

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REFERENCES Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Beesley, Ruby. “Photography & the Pervasive Influence.” Aesthetica, no. 34 (2010): 34–37. Benjamin, Walter. “Central Park.” New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985): 32–58. Best, Stephen. The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ———. “Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive.” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011): 150–63. Brown, Bill. “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny.” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 175–207. Copeland, Huey. “Glenn Ligon and Other Runaway Subjects.” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011): 73–110. Copeland, Huey, and Thompson, Krista. “Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual.” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011): 1–15. de Guzman, Rene. “Nothing Better.” In Pitch Blackness. New York: Aperture, 2008. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1995. English, Darby. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Boston: MIT Press, 2007. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Originally published in 1952. Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe. Translated by James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Hall, Stuart. “The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?” In The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Edited by Alan Read. 12–37. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1996. “Hank Willis Thomas in conversation with Mark Anthony Neal.” Left of Black Season 1, Episode 19, webcast. Accessed January 21, 2011. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=TWm8wNFW048. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Iversen, Margaret. “Readymade, Found Object, Photograph.” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (2004): 44–57. Kelley, Robin D. G. “Burning Symbols: The Work of Art in the Age of Tyrannical (Re)Production.” In Pitch Blackness. New York: Aperture, 2008. Leonard, David J., and King, Richard C. Editors. Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011. Marchand, Roland. Advertising and the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. McPherson, Tara. Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Mitchell, W.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Mullen, Harryette. “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness.” Diacritics 24, no. 2–3 (1994): 71–89. Raengo, Alessandra. “Optic Black: Blackness as Phantasmagoria.” In Beyond Blackface: Africana Images in the Us Media. Edited by Akil Houston. 159–177. Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2010.

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———. “Reification, Reanimation, and the Money of the Real.” World Picture 7 (2012). Accessed August 2, 2014. http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_7/ PDFs/Raengo.pdf. ———. “In the Shadow.” Camera Obscura 83, vol. 28, no. 2 (2013): 1–43. ———. On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013 ———. “Blackness, Aesthetics, Liquidity.” liquid blackness 1, no. 2 (2014). Published electronically April 2014. Accessed July 15, 2014. liquidblackness.com/ LB2.pdf. Read, Alan. The Fact of Blackness. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1996. Robinson, Amy. “Forms of Appearance of Value: Homer Plessy and the Politics of Privacy.” In Performance and Cultural Politics. Edited by Elin Diamond, 237–61. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Schudson, Michael. “Advertising as Capitalist Realism.” Advertising & Society Review 1, no. 1 (2000). Smith, Mark M. How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Snead, James. White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. New York: Penguin, 1986. Originally published 1852. Thompson, Krista. “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop.” The Art Bulletin 91, no. 4 (2009): 481–505. Tucker, Irene. The Moment of Racial Sight a History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Willis Thomas, Hank. Pitch Blackness. New York: Aperture, 2008. Wolff, Rachel. “Hank Willis Thomas Stages a Photo Shoot: How Sanford Biggers Came to Strike a Pose as a Two-Faced Dandy.” ARTnews (2012): 126–33.

7

The Horizon to Come Planetary Aesthetics in William Kentridge’s Felix in Exile and Galileo Galilei’s Moon Drawings Sonja A. J. Neef These are the many worlds, the countless other, the more distant heavenly bodies of which the man they burned has spoken. He has not seen them, he awaited them. —Galileo to Sagredo1

VISION AS POSSIBILITY “September 77, Port Elisabeth, weather fine. It was business as usual in police room 619.” It is thirty-five years ago now that Peter Gabriel launched this catchy song with verses we cannot get out of our heads: “Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko, Yihla Moja, Yihla Moja. The man is dead.”2 Port Elisabeth, summer 2010. The town has become the site of a global party. The World Cup semifinal being played in the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium is broadcast by the media all over the planet, the sound of its vuvuzelas can be heard from the Southern to the Northern hemisphere and smother the planet in a cloud of buzz. The games have become ubiquitous, literally “tele-visual.” Their sounds and images circulate in a global information space, displayed in newspapers and on screens, communicated via the World Wide Web, using artificial satellites as extraterrestrial switches to bridge the latitudes and longitudes that divide the world into North and South, East and West, as if to overcome the planet’s spherical shape. This is precisely the moment that South African artist William Kentridge has awaited. A long time before he drew his Bicycle Kick (2009) as Official Art Poster for the FIFA World Cup 2010 limited art collection, Kentridge had already prophetically dedicated his work to this moment when South Africa would present itself to the global public as a free, open, and democratic society and the site for global hospitality. Kentridge did not really expect this moment. Rather, he awaited it; he considered it a possibility, as something to happen in the future. Already in his earlier work and more particularly in his film series Drawings for Projection (1989–1999), he critically asked how the free world perceives South Africa in its media and how it will look at the country in the future. Kentridge thus asked how South

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Africa will be remembered in a time that, when he was designing his film series, was in no way knowable to him—with one exception, constituted by that figure which always marks any prophecy, that is, the paradoxical figure of the predictability of oblivion. It has often been discussed that Kentridge has a serious interest in memory.3 Taking Kentridge’s video artwork Felix in Exile (1994) as my object of investigation, I too will argue that Kentridge deals with the visual dimension of memory, and its counterpart, oblivion. Unlike the representation of memory, it is much more challenging for forgetting to be visualized. It is important to notice that forgetting is not the simple equivalent of the invisible. In a film, not even a black screen would meet the visual condition of oblivion. It is precisely this problem that Kentridge faces in his video artwork: finding an inscription technology that is adequate to what Martin Heidegger calls the “uncanny structure” of oblivion. Oblivion considers the visible to be there, but “concealed,” as Heidegger put it, by a “cloud of forgetting.”4 Forgetting is thus based on visibility as a possibility, as something that could be looked at but for some reason is not. This possibility can be formulated in via negativa as an act of not looking. I will argue in this chapter that Kentridge’s technology of filmmaking is devoted to the invention of a particular visual aesthetics, an aesthetics that explores visibility as a possibility that is defined by Heidegger’s “cloud.” This cloud structures the interplay of memory and oblivion, and insofar as these are considered in the field of vision, of looking and not looking. This cloud can take the most diverse forms: it includes in fact all the obstructions and resistances to a successful act of looking. Insofar as looking (back) at South Africa takes place in a global context, the spherical shape of earth itself becomes one such obstacle that poses a challenge to the act of looking. Its basic problem resides in the limitations of vision that emanate from the horizon as the line beyond which the visible surface of earth is concealed. Its basic problem resides in the limitations of vision emanating from the horizon as the line beyond which the visible surface of earth is concealed. This characterization refers to what horizein literally means in Greek: to border, derived from hóros: boundary, landmark, understood as the apparent borderline that separates earth from sky.5 Crossing this border virtually requires the “tele-visual” potential of the so-called world media: the World Wide Web, artificial satellites, radio, and telegraph. It is by their technologies that events are perceived beyond the horizon and become global, or on the contrary, that they are disregarded, not looked at, denied or blocked out from memory. I will argue in what follows that William Kentridge’s video artwork Felix in Exile is about the crossing of this double-edged activity of looking and not looking. The focus of my analysis will be the question of how Kentridge’s film deals with the curvature of the earth as the dispositive that decides what can be looked at and what cannot be looked at. In turn, I consider how the earth in Kentridge’s film negotiates the geographic, medial, aesthetic, and political conditions of not looking.

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POETICS OF SEGREGATION Felix in Exile is one of nine short animation films that together form the film series Drawings for Projection. The series tells the story of the ruthless late-apartheid Johannesburg mining industry. The main character is named Felix Teitlebaum and is portrayed as the sensual, vulnerable, and often naked alter ego of William Kentridge himself. Felix is a tragic character, suffering from an undefined, eternal loneliness that plays at different levels: Felix finds himself “in exile,” separated from his beloved, a woman named Nandi, as much as from his home country, South Africa. His isolation is as social as it is poetic and political, for it concerns a particular mode of being alone, exiled, separated, or “apart” from—to refer to the historical context of the segregation politics of South Africa that frames the films. Felix in Exile cross cuts between two spaces. On the one hand, there is a room, maybe a hotel room, in Paris, equipped with a bed, a chair, a toilet, and a washbasin with a mirror, and the icon of the migrant: a suitcase. In this room lives Felix (see Figure 7.1). The room is closed; it has no horizon. Instead of opening through windows or doors, it opens through images. Drawings and photographs ooze out of the walls, the mirror, the suitcase. Like a mise en abyme the images allow a second space to burst into

Figure 7.1 Image of the hotel room in Paris. William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994. 35 mm, copied on DVD. Courtesy of Lisa Cloete, Johannesburg

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Felix’s room. This second space depicts a wide and open landscape, a steppe with drinks in South Africa, the home country of the exiled (see Figure 7.2). The soil appears as grey as the sky, the horizon lies in between them like a classical landscape painting. This second space is surveyed by an African woman called Nandi, using optical instruments such as a telescope and a theodolite. Seen through the lenses of these devices, the landscape appears as a site for the exploitation and control of ore mines and, finally, also as the scene of bloody acts of violence. Kentridge created Felix in Exile in 1994, on the eve of the first democratic, fully representative, supraracial elections, as we remember, four years after Nelson Mandela was released from his twenty-seven year detention, and one year after being awarded, together with Frederik Willem de Klerk, the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. At a moment long before the FIFA World Cup came to South Africa and before Mandela was elected president, Kentridge had already raised the question of how the apartheid regime and the many people who lost their lives in the battle for democracy would be remembered in the future. He thus recalled a time that had still to come, “a future for which APARTHEID will be the name of something finally abolished,” as Jacques Derrida wrote, likewise some time beforehand.6 Kentridge’s

Figure 7.2 The landscape that it opens out to. William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994. 35 mm, copied on DVD. Courtesy of Lisa Cloete, Johannesburg

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Drawings for Projection are memory traces in this grammatological sense: headings for a future to come to our memory. IMPRINT AND TRACE The inscription technologies Kentridge uses are aesthetically complex. For Felix in Exile, he creates almost forty large-sized charcoal drawings on which he continually works further: on one and the same sheet of paper, he first draws a key frame, then rubs out individual sections only to redraw them, repeating this process over and over again, sometimes adding a touch of blue or orange pastel. He photographs the in-between stages with a 35-mm camera using stop-motion technique.7 In doing so, Kentridge combines two distinct inscription technologies: drawing and photography, one based on the concept of the “trace,” the other on the “imprint.” The “trace” results from the work of the hand drawing a graphic line and is thus to be considered an anthropomorphic, individual, and unique practice. The trace becomes visible in the looping and swooping of the line, like handwriting. It occurs in the process of drawing and redrawing, and as a grammatological practice, it is also marked by disappearance. Its material basis resides in a charcoal line and thus in the ashes, as that which remains after burning (see Figure 7.3). The “imprint,” by distinction, has the click of pushing the release button of the camera as its basic gesture. The imprint is to be considered mechanical or technological, standardized and repeatable. Although its movement is contrary to that of the current and flowing trace, the photographic imprint, too, is based on the alternation of presence and absence.8 Photography requires releasing the object at the moment it occurs to the camera. It virtually postpones it to a future in which it cannot be looked at anymore. This deferral is essential to photography, as Derrida writes in “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” the photographic referent “does not relate to a present or a real but, in another way, to the other.”9 Any affirmative notion of presence as a singular tense is, according to Derrida, always already permeated with a future absence, with “the other” that becomes visible only afterwards, as a past presence that is looked at, at best, belatedly. In the context of art criticism, Rosalind Krauss has paid much attention to Kentridge’s drawing technique because this differs from conventional, cell-shaded animation in which each change of view calls for a new rendering. Krauss uses the concept of the palimpsest to explain the modifications taking place on one and the same sheet of paper. She emphasizes that “the substance of the expression is charcoal, constantly modified by the application of the eraser.”10 The palimpsest is just such a practice in which the act of looking at a visible surface cannot be performed in a simple, affirmative manner but is always questioned by the other possibilities of vision lying hidden in the depth of the image. The palimpsest is underwritten by a practice of not looking.

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Figure 7.3 Still or detail of charcoal drawings/redrawing as technique in process. William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994. 35 mm, copied on DVD. Courtesy of Lisa Cloete, Johannesburg

It is precisely this spatial paradox of two visible surfaces emerging at the same time that Mieke Bal is interested in when she focuses on the temporal counterpart of the palimpsest, that is: “heterochrony,” by which the real now-time is permeated with another time. Bal explores the specific aesthetic mode of cultural articulations originating in the context of contemporary migratory movements and finds it in the temporal asynchrony that unavoidably goes along with migration. The moving image and, more particularly, video art appear to her to be ideal media of migratory culture in our age of globalization. Bal argues that the temporal texture of our cultural world resides in heterochrony as the aesthetic means of film that “can be seen as a form of foreshortening. Like its better known spatial counterpart, foreshortened time is distorted—made wider or thicker—and condensed.”11 In her analysis of Felix in Exile Mieke Bal argues that “the tool he [Kentridge] uses to achieve heterochrony is the trace,” and specifies that “this, of course, can be read as a metaphor of memory.”12 It cannot be stressed enough, as I would like to add to Bal, that the concept of memory also includes oblivion, to touch on that most tender point of the trace as a heterochronic device. When Kentridge draws and redraws his objects by using the same sheet of paper again and again, he

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cannot avoid erasing an object in order to draw another one. For example, within one and the same shot, Kentridge turns the close-up image of a closed eye into a landscape, using the horizontal line of the eyelid as the horizon. Elsewhere in Felix in Exile, a constellation of stars is dissolved into a scrunched sheet of a newspaper which is then modified into a pall covering a face. This process is in principal infinite; it could go on, at least until the paper tires. The drawing technique that produces the palimpsest cannot satisfactorily explain the complexity of Kentridge’s inscription technology, nor does the heterochrony of film do so. The act of drawing, erasing, and redrawing as the basic technology of the palimpsest indeed relies on the presence of that which is looked at; but not quite. It rather reveals the condition of presence as a possibility. It is by means of the photographic imprint that erasure becomes visible as that aspect of the drawing that withdraws itself from being looked at. Kentridge’s palimpsests are not just traces, they are imprints of traces. They are concerned with drawing as much as with withdrawing, with appearance as much as with disappearance, with the possible as much as with the impossible. PLANETARY AESTHETICS In combining drawing and photography, or imprint and trace, the idiosyncratic inscription technologies in Felix in Exile mix up the codes of time and space. They bring two separate spatiotemporal worlds into contact with each other, a time to be remembered and a time of remembering, a world hosting Felix and another world hosting Nandi, one on the Northern, the other on the Southern hemisphere of the globe. Although these two spaces along with their respective characters are “separate,” or “apart” from one another, they come into contact in the interplay of imprint and trace. The idiosyncratic inscription technologies in Felix in Exile are concerned with the politics of separation insofar as they function as an aesthetic mode of crossover, or contact. Throughout the film, water is flowing from one image into the other. Its source is a drink in the African steppe from where it flows across the rim of the image, so as to ooze out of the mirror in Felix’s room and deluge it. In its flood, the world seems no longer cut by the equator in two halves but rather turns into an “archipelago” in the sense of Édouard Glissant, a flowing space in which nothing stays separate or apart, but everything becomes a part of the “tout-monde,” engages in the “poetics of relation” and leads into “planetary flows.”13 Like the water tap, the telescope, too, functions as an interface generating impossible connections between distant spaces. The telescope appears as the primal medium of the global gaze. It brings distant objects into the reach of vision, celestial bodies as much as the other space that lies beyond the horizon on the other hemisphere of the planet.

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Another worldwide communication channel is delineated by the circulation of sheets of drawings and newspapers that are blown over and float from one shot to the next, from Africa to Felix’ room and vice versa. These sheets of paper carry pieces of unspecific news about massacres in South Africa with them and spread the news across the world. Like flocks of birds, they fly away, with every flap of their wings leaving wan imprints behind on the section of the drawing from where they were rubbed off, forming vague memory traces. They take the shape of waste paper encasing the globe, documenting what the world does not look at an archive of worldwide oblivion. Kentridge’s idiosyncratic inscription technology renegotiates the conditions of vision. The video artwork is never about looking in a simple and affirmative way. Whenever the visible materializes in a graphic line, in the next moment it floats away, leaving imprints of its past presence behind. Looking is always entangled in a double bind that embroils the attraction and withdrawal of the line with the release of photography. In this sensory feedback there comes into being a particular aesthetics, that is, in the first place, an aesthetics of the impossible. For film, the impossible has a rich historical tradition. It is not by chance that Kentridge’s films pay homage to Georges Méliès. It is not only Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902) that is quoted in the Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003), but also Felix in Exile repeatedly cites Méliès’s images of the starry sky and celestial bodies, and more particularly images of the moon. Kentridge’s stars are, as Méliès’s, peculiar luminaries. They are not just objects of observation, but animated objects.14 They occur in the telescope’s ocular, and as if by magic, they are connected by a line forming the contours of a water tap. Water streams out of the tap on the moon and continues flowing via the telescope into the basin in Felix’s room. Its flood creates a line that is drawn and redrawn; it runs out of the image and blazes its trail across the borders of space and time. And so the sky and the stars in Méliès’s films open up to another site for Kentridge to overwrite/overdraw the ubiquitous horizon. It is an horizon that nevertheless is not looked at. With respect to Méliès’s “magic film art,” the realization of the impossible by means of tricks and animation is mostly referred to as “surreal,” and often with reference to early filmmakers’ enthusiasm for the technical possibilities of the then new medium of film. Kentridge’s film art is likewise concerned with the surreal. Kentridge’s surreal is an effect of the tricky interplay of imprint and trace. It plays with the real in a way that is as ironic as it is discerning in that it experiments with the global gaze as an impossibility. The outcome of this experiment is a critical, if not ethical statement about looking, which materializes in an idiosyncratic aesthetics that I call planetary aesthetics. Planetary aesthetics is the product of a complex artistic inscription technology standing up to the temporal and spatial segregation of the world. This aesthetics receives its poetic strength from the conflict between opposite principles, trace and imprint, or drawing and photography, the one anthropomorphic handwork, the other mechanical or digital.

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The opposites come to meet in interlocking circuits, where they are not just combined but rather complicated by or embroiled with one another. In this complication, the planet’s surface is no longer structured into adjoining places locatable within the pattern of latitudes and longitudes. Rather, every single place latently carries within it another place as a possibility. The South African landscape and the European exile come to meet at intersecting horizons. The diegetic space in Felix in Exile takes the shape of a fold, so that distant places converge. Intimate closeness and cosmic distance come to touch each other in the spatiotemporal anomaly that Walter Benjamin has referred to with his famous dialectic dictum of “a distance, however close.”15 EXILING EXILE Planetary aesthetics is literally dedicated to the surreal: it renders possible the impossible, or looks at what cannot be looked at, or—as one could add to this in a related context—it translates the untranslatable. It translates even this “untranslatable idiom,” as Derrida calls apartheid: “racism’s last word” that has always already been “the archival record of the unnameable.” No tongue has ever translated this name—as if all the parlances of the world were defending themselves, shutting their mouths against a sinister incorporation of the thing by means of the word, as if all tongues were refusing to give an equivalent, refusing to let themselves be contaminated through the contagious hospitality of the word-for-word.16 With this explanation, Derrida gives “an immediate response to the obsessiveness of this racism, to the compulsive terror that above all forbids contact.”17 According to Derrida, apartheid is always already affected by its own logic. It needs no remedy from the outside, because it suffers from its one internal malady. Following its own basic principle of segregation, it has remained alone, and untranslatable, as Derrida emphasizes, because all language by means of apartheid protects itself against apartheid. The video artwork Felix in Exile is about precisely this: the paradoxical idea of an isolation isolating itself. The most literal articulation of this idea is expressed in the title of the film. The word Felix is “first a proper name, granted,” as Derrida would have it, and as such “almost untranslatable.”18 Admittedly, as a given word in a given language (Latin), Felix is indeed translatable insofar as it is a common noun meaning “the happy one.” However, this translation of Felix, as much as any attempt at meaning production, remains inadequate to the structure of the proper name, which is untranslatable. Imagine a person named Mrs. Miller. One would not call her Madame Meunière when she travels to France, nor Frau Müller when

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she travels to Germany. The proper name can travel beyond multiple frontiers, but it cannot be translated. It figures the impossibility of a true or pure translation. As a word, it persists in isolation insofar as it refers to nothing but the unbridgeable limits of translation. In this sense, Felix as a proper name obeys the linguistic law of apartheid that forbids translation. However, when Derrida describes the proper name as “almost untranslatable,” this “almost” is not nothing. For this word, or this letter sequence, F-E-L-I-X, carries within it a hidden, anagrammatic remainder, of which it cannot get rid. It only needs a tiny graphic manipulation of the letter F to transform into E to invoke this subliminal other word that is unreadable on the official surface of the proper name. And yet, as an unofficial, a-grammatical and ana-grammatical order, it reveals the very structure of the proper name as being doomed to E-X-I-L-E by the same law that apartheid is doomed to isolation, to prohibition of contact, to solitary confinement, to a prison imprisoning itself and, in so doing, delineating a space that withdraws from being looked at. In this sense, in Kentridge’s video, not looking is the visual equivalent to the linguistic law of translation. Not far off is another aesthetic means that I have already mentioned and that also functions as a procedure to expose apartheid to itself, namely, the use of the self-portrait. Like the proper name, the self-portrait brings the

Figure 7.4 The self in the mirror. William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994. 35 mm, copied on DVD. Courtesy of Lisa Cloete, Johannesburg

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play of a semiotic operation to the fore as a self-referential loop that cannot be escaped. The drawing appears to be a duplicate of the one drawn, or vice versa. This encapsulation of the self within the self as in the strictest isolation occurs also on the diegetic level of the film when it finds a dramatic expression in the mirror scene (see Figure 7.4). As an optical device, the mirror exposes Felix to himself by means of reflection. What the mirror reflects is Felix’s mirror image in the sense of a repetition of the same. This image is indeed identical with the self, but not quite. The uncanny of the mirror scene resides in the fact that the confrontation of the self with himself is not just pure repetition but rather the repetition of the same with a difference. Felix gazes in the mirror, and he faces the experience of lonesomeness that becomes visible as the impossible presence of Nandi. The mirror scene is about the failure of the act of looking. At the same time, however, it brings to the fore the possibilities emerging from not looking, insofar as the intimate encounter of the self by the self in the mirror turns out to be the most forceful detachment of the self from the self. And yet, at the same time, it allows for an encounter with the other. MOON VIEWS It is striking that the processes of observation in Felix in Exile are essentially an effect of optical instruments, among which is the mirror, as well as the devices for geodetic and celestial observation. When in the mirror scene Felix and Nandi look at each other as if through a window, there grows a remarkable telescope between their eyes, its two lenses located at both sides of the mirror so that the subject and the object of vision are indiscernible (see Figure 7.5). In other scenes, when Nandi surveys the land, her theodolite functions like a laterna magica, disclosing impossible images of past and future acts of violence to her. Actually, Nandi is a “seeress.” Like a clairvoyant, she sees falling stars drawing lines that do not disappear instantaneously onto the night sky, but in blazing their trails, they delineate something that cannot be seen under normal circumstances (see Figure 7.6). For example, she sees the falling stars form a tap on the moon. Or they connect points of the stars until the peculiar constellation of a suitcase is defined. From a media-historical point of view, Kentridge’s surreal images of the starry sky not only recall Méliès’s moon images but at times also a tradition of astronomical images. They remind us of that primal scene of modern astronomical painting that goes back to December 1609, when Galileo Galilei in Padua focused his telescope on the moon to perform the first ocular moon view in the history of humanity. Galileo attempted to keep hold of the ephemeral sight of the moon by translating his look in a movement of the hand. The object of knowledge was not ascertained either by looking or

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Figure 7.5 Nandi and her telescope. William Kentridge, Felix In Exile, 1994. 35 mm, copied on DVD. Courtesy of Lisa Cloete, Johannesburg

touching, but rather, by means of a “motoric intelligence” which is referred to as “disegno” in renaissance art theory. The “disegno” seeks the process of perception in a sensory feedback of eye and hand.19 With this aesthetic strategy, Galileo succeeded in creating images that were both scientifically and artistically felicitous. A new type of image was born; Horst Bredekamp calls it a “technical image.”20 The technical image occurs in the very moment when the observer picks up an optical instrument that detaches the object of vision from his body. Although composed by hand, Galileo’s moon drawings qualify as technical in this sense because they are the product of the telescope as prosthesis of the naked eye. In this process, the telescope performs perhaps the first “apartheid” of the senses. The physical detachment of the seeing body and the seen world was then, however, bridged instantaneously in a liaison of hand and eye. Seeing and drawing became joined technologies, allowing for perception of the object of knowledge in a double-bind of vision and touch. This bisensual, visual-tactile mode of perception is essential to the inscription technologies of a planetary aesthetics, because it translates the untranslatable law of apartheid by retracing it sensually as a graphic line. It is precisely this sensual double-bind that Felix in Exile takes up in its process of drawing.

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Figure 7.6 Nandi’s celestial visions. William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, 1994. 35 mm, copied on DVD. Courtesy of Lisa Cloete, Johannesburg

THE DILEMMA OF THE TELESCOPE As if the mirror scene in Kentridge’s Felix in Exile mirrors Galileo, already for Galileo the telescope did not simply function as an optical device to improve vision. Rather, at closer sight, Galileo’s first telescopic investigations dealt with looking as much as with not looking. Bertolt Brecht pointed this out in his famous play on Galileo, when he stated that the citizens of Padua were just ogling or gaping (“glotzen”) when looking at the Jupiter moons through Galileo’s telescope.21 They saw the otherwise invisible celestial bodies, indeed, but they did not grasp the consequences of what they saw. Looking is not self-explanatory; it rather requires a theoretical frame in order to qualify as a critical activity. As long as the subject of vision refuses pondering on the presuppositions of the gaze, looking remains naïve, not just in the sense of innocence but rather in the sense of a forceful political tool of denial. In the context of Galileo’s telescopic gaze, the political dimension of not looking becomes manifest in the censorship towards the idea of a new world order. The telescope can be considered a critical device in yet another respect. In his study of early modern scientific culture, Hans Blumenberg speaks about the “dilemma of the telescope” as an instrument that operates from

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two ends. On the one hand, the telescope indeed allows augmentation of the range of the human gaze due to its magnifying effect. In Galileo’s hands and with the Copernican theory in mind, it adduces the visual evidence for the heliocentric world model. In so doing, according to Blumenberg, the telescope helps to abandon the ancient, Aristotelian thesis that the knowable would be limited to the visible. On the other hand, the epistemic shift caused by the telescope is based precisely on that rhetoric of an “eidetic reason” against which it expostulates. The new astronomy attaches itself to the visible as the ultimate instance of truth, as Blumenberg argues, and thus affirms precisely the Aristotelian tradition that it seeks to refute. After all, the subject of the telescopic gaze knows that more efficient telescopes will enhance the optical range further and allow for more precise observation. The telescopic gaze is a critical gaze insofar as the subject of vision is aware of this technical condition of looking. It thus cannot avoid suspecting any new vision in its turn of being limited, preliminary, and thus, able to be surpassed.22 In sum, the dilemma of the telescope resides in the fact that it determines modern astronomical knowledge as a visual paradox that relies on overcoming the limitations of visibility as much as on recognizing them. The telescope is as much a tool of looking as of not looking. Blumenberg’s thesis of the “dilemma of the telescope” is true in yet another way. In his analysis of Galileo’s treatise The Sidereal Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius, 1610), Blumenberg discusses with great detail the results of Galileo’s telescopic observations and the epistemic shift that arises from the new, ocular astronomy. Galileo recognized that the moon has no perfect spherical shape but that its surface is serrated by calderas and mountain peaks—just like earth’s. He understood that the moon has no light of its own but that it reflects the light of the sun. By optical analogy he concluded that—just like the full moon—also the full earth glows (when it is full from the point of view of an extraterrestrial observer). The stirring moment of The Sidereal Messenger, however, concerns not just the detection of new celestial bodies such as the Jupiter moons, thus Blumenberg’s thesis, but the “new star” it gives account of is, in fact, earth itself. By looking at a distance, Galileo had recognized that the earth is just “a star among stars,” in other words, that earth is not the one and unique, but just another celestial body.23 Galileo’s telescope looks—like Kentridge’s—in two directions. The moon and the starry sky come to function as a mirror in which the viewing subject encounters itself in the very moment of looking at the distance. Both Galileo and Kentridge, each in their specific historical frame, combine optical instruments with drawing technologies to actualize that global gaze that is by definition impossible because it is based on the impossibility of observing earth from a terrestrial point of view. In order to view earth as what it actually is—a globe of which the surface is serrated by calderas and mountain peaks, a globe that glows in the distance just like other celestial bodies—one needs the look to overcome the horizon of vision, while at the

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same time remaining aware of the conditions of the global gaze as a critical undertaking. WORLD, GLOBE, PLANET According to Blumenberg, the first telescopic examination of the sky can thus be understood as the primal scene of modern occidental self-identification. The telescope in Galileo’s hands transforms the moon into a mirror, and in so doing, from a natural into an artificial satellite—namely, into a communication device that sends images of earth back to earth. In this visual experience, humanity is prompted to recognize its planet as a globe among others, or: itself as other. When already Galileo’s telescope is marked by a dilemma, as Blumenberg argues, this double structure captures the world media in our contemporary age of accelerated globalization. Artificial satellites, along with other media of telecommunication, prompt us daily to rethink our place in the universe and to ask who we are as planetary subjects. And they also touch on the question of rethinking South Africa. When we speak today about South Africa, that is, after the system of apartheid has been abolished and even after South Africa has became the host of the FIFA World Cup 2010, we still have to renegotiate the relation between North and South. With the spherical shape of Earth in mind, we must reconsider the concept of the globe and ask what world, planet, and globe mean in our age. In this context, it is striking that the American critic Gayatri Spivak claims a conceptual shift: In this breakneck globalization, I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization is achieved by the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere. . . . The globe is on our computers. No one lives there; and we think that we can aim to control globality. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan.24 Kentridge’s film is dedicated to this very planetary imperative. In Felix in Exile, planetarity is acted out in the interplay of a graphic line with a photographic print that together compose an idiosyncratic style of filmmaking. With this style Kentridge links the separate hemispheres to each other to overcome their separation and to extradite apartheid to the “poetics of relation.” In doing so, he responds to Spivak’s claim for a planetary ethics with what I call “planetary aesthetics”: a critical aesthetics that reinvents the planet beyond its limiting horizons. It is not categorical, however, that world events such as the World Cup are planetary events, and worldwide media are not necessarily planetary media, as Spivak points out in her distinction between the global and the planetary. The technology of artificial satellites is marked by a similar visual

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dilemma that qualified Blumenberg’s telescope. On the one hand, the satellites orbiting earth produce an encompassing and united information space by overcoming the globe’s natural spherical shape. The same technology, on the other hand, divides the inhabitants of the globe into those connected to the information system and those who, due to technical, political, economic, religious or sexual circumstances, stay “apart” from it. In this sense, we can today continue to interpret Kentridge’s film as an imperative to act against this form of segregation in our globalized world, in that “future for which apartheid is,” to echo Derrida, “the name of something finally abolished.”25 The imperative to act against apartheid is thus based on not looking. ONE SELF/ONE ANOTHER: ON ONANISM Kentridge’s planetary aesthetics become manifest in still another form in Felix in Exile. I have discussed the interplay of the look and the touch, or hand and eye, in the context of Renaissance art theory and Galilee’s technology of astronomic painting. Now I shall conclude my chapter by focusing on another dimension of the process of drawing. It occurs as a detail that can easily be overlooked, but once noticed it will demonstrate the critical dimension of the concept of planetary aesthetics in still another way. This detail concerns the work of the hand. In Felix in Exile, the hand of the drawer repeatedly appears. The hand draws, it draws itself, and it draws Felix, as the intimate and naked alter ego of William Kentridge. Like viewing, which is essentially organized as a self-referential act or, more precisely, an act of identifying the self as other, touching, too, is self-affective in Felix in Exile. The hand draws itself, and it does so even when it is itself invisible. For example, we see this when Felix turns his back to the camera, or hides his hands under the suitcase from where sheets of paper well up, or in his lap under the blanket, where a movement is adumbrated that Derrida has called the “supplement.” Let us remember: in Of Grammatology, Derrida reflects on onanism by referring to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. Following Rousseau, Derrida calls it the “dangerous supplement” which arises from an absence or a deficiency. Derrida, however, points out that the practice of onanism, as a self-affective presence, incorporates the figure of différance as deferral in a downright ideal manner. The “imaginary seductions” of self-affection, as Derrida writes, are indeed performed with respect to an absent other, by feeling its (his/her) trace as the touch of an absence: “this onanism that permits one to be himself affected by proving himself with presences, by summoning absent beauties.” Onanism is just such a practice that is the effect of a separation of the other, or virtually, of the apartheid of presences. At the same time, however, an auto-reflexive touch also surrounds, embraces and caresses the self as much as the other: “Affecting oneself by another

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presence, one corrupts oneself [makes oneself other] by oneself [on s‘altère soi-même].”26 Taking Derrida’s deconstruction of onanism as a point of departure, it is also in this respect that apartheid is bound up with solitude—that is, with the sexual lonesomeness of the exiled, sitting on the bed of his hotel room, his suitcase with drawings portraying his beloved on his lap, suffering from the deferral, almost touching her physical presence by observing the images “with one hand.” The work of the trace is most intimate here. It tenderly enacts a political apartheid which finds itself interwoven with a sexual apartheid. The process of drawing and photographing, or of imprint and trace, then, gives rise to a planetary aesthetics that—just like onanism—objects to apartheid, or more precisely, it directs apartheid against itself. It does so as a self-affective caress which has always already been a caress of the other, and with a self-reflective look in which the self encounters itself as other.

A HORIZON TO COME The horizon as the apparent borderline separating earth from sky cannot be situated in a definite way. It withdraws as one draws closer to it. It is always to come. It is precisely this horizon to come that Glissant addresses when focusing on “the realized horizon of the worlds.”27 It is remarkable that Glissant refers to the horizon by specifying it not just as an optical frontier, but rather, as “how all . . . places circle the planet,” thus as a mode or a manner to overcome the border of vision. It is as if Glissant had Spivak’s planetary imperative in mind, when he imagines a future for the humanity to come in the age of cultural globalization: “humanity is updating all over again, in a deplorable manner . . . , by ‘projecting’ against yet unimaginable places, to the interplanetary horizon.”28 From Glissant we learn that we must think the globe as a whole, as a “tout-monde.” From Kentridge we learn about the aesthetic artifices to perform a global gaze by combining imprint and trace into an idiosyncratic film style that reinvents the earth-planet beyond the many manifestations of segregation and apartheid. Kentridge’s idiosyncratic inscription technology induces an impossible look that abrogates the horizon as a limitation of vision and reinstalls it as a contact line where the Northern and Southern hemisphere come together. His horizon functions simultaneously as borderline and as interface. It reminds us that there might be something beyond the immediate reach of vision, something that is not looked at. This “other,” to echo Derrida, is not simply invisible. Rather, it is concealed by the visual obstruction caused by the spherical shape of the globe. This concealment does not just lead to visual skepticism. Rather, it becomes a forceful tool for a planetary aesthetics that reformulates Spivak’s concept of planetarity in the domain of vision as the imperative to look. Look at what? Look at our planet when it arises like a distant star. This earth-up cannot be looked at in a realistic manner, indeed. But it can be drawn and photographed and enacted in a film, as a possibility.

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NOTES Many thanks to Frances Guerin for her generous commitment to improving the linguistic quality of this chapter. 1. “Das sind die vielen Welten, die zahllosen anderen, die entfernteren Gestirne, von denen der Verbrannte gesprochen hat. Er hat sie nicht gesehen, er hat sie erwartet.” Bertolt Brecht, Leben des Galilei (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 33. As is well known, Brecht is referring to Giordano Bruno as “der Verbrannte” (the man they burned). This chapter is part of a larger project that conceptualizes the possibility of “thinking globally” as a basis for addressing and acting on the relativity of terms such as nation, identity, frontiers, language. For further information, see Sonja A. J. Neef, Der babylonische Planet: Kultur, Übersetzung, Dekonstruktion unter den Bedingungen der Globalisierung (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013); Sonja A. J. Neef, Henry Sussman, and Dietrich Boschung, eds., Astroculture: Figurations of Cosmology in Media and Arts (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014). 2. Peter Gabriel, “Biko,” Peter Gabriel 3 (Melt), studio album produced by Steve Lillywhite, published in the UK by Peter Gabriel Ltd./Hit & Run Music Pub. Ltd., 1980. 3. See, for example, Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal, Art in South Africa: The Future Present (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Phillip, 1996); Judith Hecker, William Kentridge: Trace (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 9–15. 4. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 82. 5. Kluge Etymologisches Wörterbuch (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1995), 383. 6. Jacques Derrida, “Racism’s Last Word,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Psyche, Inventions of the Other. Volume 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 377. Derrida wrote his essay for the occasion of the opening of the exhibition of the artworks of the association of “Artists of the World Against Apartheid” in November 1983 in Paris at the Rothschild Foundation. The works of William Kentridge were not included in this collection. 7. Staci Boris, “The Process of Change: Landscape, Memory, Animation, and Felix in Exile,” in William Kentridge: Exhibition catalogue, ed. Neal Benezra, Staci Boris, and Dan Cameron (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art/New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), 29–38. 8. For a detailed analysis of the relation of “imprint” and “trace,” the first thought of by relying on art theory of Georges Didi-Huberman, the second on the work of Jacques Derrida, cf. Sonja Neef, Imprint and Trace: Handwriting in the Age of Technology (London: Reaktion Books, 2010). 9. Derrida expands on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida in his chapter “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” in The Work of Mourning, trans. and ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 53. 10. Rosalind Krauss, “ ‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” in October 92 (2000), 3–35. For the concepts of “substance” and “expression,” Krauss refers to Louis Hjelmslev’s structuralist system (21–7). 11. Mieke Bal, “Heterochrony in the Act: The Migratory Politics of Time,” in Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Conflict, Resistance, and Agency, ed. Mieke Bal and Miguel-Angel Hernandez-Navarro (Amsterdam: Rodopi [Thamyris], 2011). 12. Ibid. 13. “des flux ‘planétaires,’ ” Édouard Glissant, “Créolisation dans la Caraïbe et les Amériques,” in Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 25, my translation.

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14. Tom Gunning has examined the aesthetic relation between Kentridge and silent film in his essay “Doubled Vision: Peering through Kentridge’s ‘Stereoscope,’ ” Parkett 63 (2001): 66–73. For a collection of film-historical essays on Georges Méliès’s film trick, see Georges Méliès—Magier der Filmkunst, Frank Kessler, ed. (Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993). A wonderful collection of essays on Méliès’s Trip to the Moon, including contributions by Tom Gunning and Frank Kessler, is Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon, Matthew Solomon, ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011). 15. Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography” [1931], in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kinsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997), 250. For a close reading of the analytic potential of Benjamin’s concept of the photographic print in relation to the Derridean concept of trace, see Neef, Imprint and Trace, 153–57. 16. Derrida, “Racism’s Last Word,” 377–78. 17. Ibid., my italics. 18. Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” in Difference in Translation, trans. and ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165, italics in original. 19. Horst Bredekamp, “Gazing Hands and Blind Spots: Galileo as Draughtsman,” in Galileo in Context, ed. Jürgen Renn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 153–92; Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., “Galileo, Florentine ‘Disegno,’ and the ‘Strange Spottedness’ of the Moon,” Art Journal (Fall 1984): 225–32. 20. Horst Bredekamp, Birgit Schneider, and Vera Dünkel, “Editorial: Das Technische Bild,” in Das Technische Bild. Kompendium zu einer Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Birgit Schneider, and Vera Dünkel (Berlin: Akademie, 2008), 8–13. 21. Bertolt Brecht, Leben des Galilei, 13. 22. Hans Blumenberg, “Das Fernrohr und die Ohnmacht der Wahrheit,” in Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (Nachricht von neuen Sternen), ed. Hans Blumenberg (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1965), 12–19. 23. Ibid., 18–22. See also Hans Blumenberg, “How Horizon’s of Visibility Are Conditioned by Views of Man,” in The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2000), 617–22. 24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet (Vienna: Passagen, 1999), 44. 25. Derrida, “Racism’s Last Word,” 377. 26. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. and ed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 150, 153, italics and additions in square brackets by Spivak. 27. Édouard Glissant, “Open Circle, Lived Relation,” in Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997), 221. 28. Ibid., my italics.

REFERENCES Bal, Mieke. “Heterochrony in the Act: The Migratory Politics of Time.” In Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Conflict, Resistance, and Agency. Edited by Mieke Bal and Miguel-Angel Hernandez-Navarro. 211–39. Amsterdam: Rodopi (Thamyris), 2011. Benjamin, Walter. “A Small History of Photography” [1931]. In One-Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kinsley Shorter. 240–57. London: Verso, 1997.

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Blumenberg, Hans. “Das Fernrohr und die Ohnmacht der Wahrheit.” In Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius (Nachricht von neuen Sternen). Edited by Hans Blumenberg. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1965. ———. The Genesis of the Copernican World. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2000. Boris, Staci. “The Process of Change: Landscape, Memory, Animation, and Felix in Exile.” In William Kentridge. Exhibition Catalogue. Edited by Neal Benezra, Staci Boris, and Dan Cameron. 29–38. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art/ New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001. Brecht, Bertolt. Leben des Galilei. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. Bredekamp, Horst. “Gazing Hands and Blind Spots: Galileo as Draughtsman.” In Galileo in Context. Edited by Jürgen Renn. 153–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———, Schneider, Birgit, and Dünkel, Vera. “Editorial: Das Technische Bild.” In Das Technische Bild. Kompendium zu einer Stilgeschichte wissenschaftlicher Bilder. 8–13. Edited by Horst Bredekamp, Birgit Schneider, and Vera Dünkel. Berlin: Akademie, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated and edited by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ———. “Des Tours de Babel.” In Difference in Translation. Translated and edited by Joseph F. Graham. 191–225. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985. ———. “The Deaths of Roland Barthes.” In The Work of Mourning. Translated and edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. 31–67. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ———. “Racism’s Last Word.” Translated by Peggy Kamuf. In Psyche, Inventions of the Other. Volume 1. Edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. 377–86. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Edgerton, Samuel Y. Jr. “Galileo, Florentine ‘Disegno,’ and the ‘Strange Spottedness’ of the Moon.” Art Journal (Fall 1984): 225–32. Gabriel, Peter. “Biko.” Peter Gabriel 3 (Melt), studio album produced by Steve Lillywhite, published in the UK by Peter Gabriel Ltd./Hit & Run Music Pub. Ltd., 1980. Glissant, Édouard. “Créolisation dans la Caraïbe et les Amériques.” In Introduction à une poétique du divers. 11–32. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. ———. “Open Circle, Lived Relation.” In Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. 195–204. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997. Gunning, Tom. “Doubled Vision: Peering through Kentridge’s ‘Stereoscope.’ ” Parkett 63 (2001): 66–73. Hecker, Judith. William Kentridge: Trace. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010. Heidegger, Martin. Parmenides. Translated by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Kentridge, William. Felix in Exile. Film transferred to video, 35mm transferred to DVD, color, sound, 8’43”, 1994. Kessler, Frank. Editor. Georges Méliès—Magier der Filmkunst. Basel: Stroemfeld and Roter Stern, 1993. Kluge Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1995. Krauss, Rosalind. “ ‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection.” October 92 (2000): 5–35. Neef, Sonja. Der babylonische Planet: Kultur, Übersetzung, Dekonstruktion unter den Bedingungen der Globalisierung. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013. ———. Imprint and Trace: Handwriting in the Age of Technology. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. ———, Sussman, Henry, and Boschung, Dietrich. Editors. Astroculture: Figurations of Cosmology in Media and Arts. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014.

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Solomon, Matthew. Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet/Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten. Vienna: Passagen, 1999. Williamson, Sue, and Jamal, Ashraf. Art in South Africa: The Future Present. Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Phillip, 1996.

8

Between Looking and Not Looking Race, Spectacular Scenes, and Counter-Spectacular Effects in Paul Pfeiffer’s Long Count Series Elizabeth Adan

In the three videos that constitute his Long Count series (2000–2001)—The Long Count (I Shook Up the World), The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle), and The Long Count (Thrilla in Manila)—artist Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966) withdraws an iconic scene from the field of vision. With this withdrawal, which prevents his viewers from looking at scenes of three historic boxing matches they would otherwise be able to see, Pfeiffer creates an unconventional, and highly interventionist, set of images that exposes and explores two key issues: first, visual schemas and perceptions of race, especially as they circulate in mass media contexts, and second, the predominance of vision and looking in such contexts, as well as in the larger sense of what Guy Debord has termed “the society of the spectacle.”1 Above all, Pfeiffer’s Long Count series reformulates spectacular scenes to produce counter-spectacular effects, configuring an alternative mode of perception that shuttles between looking and not looking. In his Long Count artworks, Pfeiffer digitally alters footage from three pivotal boxing matches in the career of Muhammad Ali.2 Specifically, employing blurry and grainy video sources from the 1960s and 1970s, Pfeiffer uses Adobe Photoshop software to replicate visual details from the background of each scene, which he puts in the place of the figures in each of the boxing rings. Through these digital image manipulation techniques, the artist merges the copied background data almost seamlessly with the rest of the image, which, as he describes it, “literally tak[es] the figure[s] away” from his borrowed footage (see Figure 8.1).3 In other words, Pfeiffer subsumes the figures in the boxing rings into their surrounding scenes, emptying his video sources of their central forms, and the focal points upon which viewers would otherwise train their attention are rendered all but invisible.4 As a result, his artworks are made up of pixelated images in which there appears to be nothing to see, and The Long Count series displaces, or perhaps even replaces, conventional acts of looking with experiences of not looking. In their painstaking replication of source imagery, Pfeiffer’s image manipulations call to mind the workings of mimesis.5 However, while Pfeiffer’s artworks employ mimetic techniques, they do not generate recognizable

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Figure 8.1 Paul Pfeiffer, Long Count III (Thrilla in Manila), 2000. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

representations that their viewers can perceive in any familiar or predictable way. Instead, their visual properties and effects are arguably closest to those of mimicry, articulated by authors such as Roger Caillois. For Caillois, who examines the phenomenon of mimetic camouflage in animals and insects, mimicry is not a conventional system of resemblance in which an organism is understood to take on the visual appearances of its environment as a means of defense.6 Instead, according to Caillois, mimicry is “a disturbance in the perception of space,” in which an organism experiences space as a “force” that “assimilat[es]” it into its “surroundings.”7 Indeed, in The Long Count series, the figures within the boxing rings seem, as Caillois writes, to “tak[e] a step backwards” into their respective scenes.8 Through Pfeiffer’s digital image manipulations, The Long Count videos incorporate the figures within the boxing rings into their surroundings to such an extent that, as the artist has noted, they appear to be “consumed by the background” of his borrowed footage.9 However, it is not just any figures that disappear in these artworks, but particularly the African American boxers and, above all, the visible signs of the half-naked black male bodies that would otherwise be on display. Given the ways in which the artist superimposes background imagery over the exposed bodies of Muhammad Ali and his opponents, The Long Count series especially renders the boxers’ skin color and related visual features invisible, and Pfeiffer’s videos thus remove highly charged bodily markers of race from view. But at the same time that the artist eradicates bodily markers of race from these scenes, Ali and his opponents do not entirely vanish. As Pfeiffer himself has asserted, his image manipulations do not completely “eras[e]” the boxers; although his artistic techniques merge the imagery of the boxers with the surrounding scenery, traces of these figures remain.10 Specifically,

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the visual data that Pfeiffer copies and puts in the place of the boxers charts their actions through each scene, creating shadow-like spasms of motion that pulse across the artist’s video screens.11 With these flickers of movement that track the otherwise invisible African American figures, Pfeiffer effaces the signs through which the central figures become visibly racialized, but the artist does not subtract the figures from the image altogether. As elements of Pfeiffer’s artworks created through digital replication, these flickering forms recall Homi Bhabha’s conceptualization of mimicry as well. Bhabha explores the ways in which mimicry informs, and arguably constitutes, colonial contexts and practices, and, similar to Caillois, he notes that rather than producing an indistinguishable likeness between colonized subjects and their colonizing models, mimicry gives rise to a fundamental ambivalence within colonial relations, in which subjects are “almost the same [as their models], but not quite.”12 In particular, considered in relation to Bhabha’s discussion of mimicry— which, in its examination of colonialism and attendant issues of race and racism, is especially pertinent to The Long Count series—Pfeiffer’s mimetic techniques can be understood to formulate the figures within the boxing rings as what Bhabha describes as “a ‘partial’ presence.”13 Such a presence may not wholly displace or erase its source, but it is “both ‘incomplete’ and ‘virtual’,” and, as such, it does not create a familiar, recognizable image that would secure the forms and meanings of the source that it is supposed to represent (or, as Bhabha writes, that it is supposed to “re-presen[t]”).14 Instead, through its “ ‘partial’ presence,” the copy produced via mimicry signals “an uncertainty” in the status of its source.15 Ultimately, through this “uncertainty,” mimicry “radically revalue[s] . . . normative knowledges.”16 In Pfeiffer’s case, with the grainy, blurry, flickering imagery that he uses to reformulate the boxers’ bodies as simultaneously visible and invisible, The Long Count videos reconfigure dominant systems of visual perception, disrupting the sense of looking with an experience of not looking. In these respects, Pfeiffer’s digital replication techniques, along with Bhabha’s conceptualization of mimicry, also call to mind Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art, which undoes the conventional workings of mimesis and counters what Rancière terms the representative regime. In particular, while the representative regime is an order of artistic and cultural practices governed by a “concordance” between forms, perceptions, and the meanings and responses they produce, the aesthetic regime assumes no such harmony, stability, or other fixed position between art and its audiences.17 Instead, the aesthetic regime interrupts familiar and established forms of sensation and “transforms a given form or body into a new one,” producing what Rancière describes as “a new configuration [or distribution] of the sensible” that “change[s] the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible.”18 Specifically, in art under the aesthetic regime, “what the artist does,” Rancière asserts, “is to weave together a new sensory fabric by wresting

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precepts and affects from the perceptions and affections that make up the fabric of ordinary experience.”19 That is to say, in the aesthetic regime, art “suspends the ordinary connections” between formal qualities and perceptual experiences, as well as their meanings and implications, and insofar as this suspension remains, precisely, suspended and in tension, rather than reverting to any established relationships between forms, sensations, and their effects, it gives rise to “a discrepancy, a dissemblance,” and specifically to an “indeterminate effect.”20 This indeterminacy, Rancière continues, calls forth “dispositions of the body and the mind where the eye does not know in advance what it sees and thought does not know what it should make of it.”21 Such dispositions, which counter any predetermination of sensory experience, foster the dissensual politics of art in the aesthetic regime.22 The Long Count videos give rise to just such an indeterminacy in their formal and perceptual properties. For instance, at certain moments, the pulsing figures of the boxers’ bodies, though faint, are nonetheless quite evident, as visible silhouettes that move across the screen (see Figure 8.2); at other moments, though, these flashes of movement seem to be nothing more than random bursts of pixels in Pfeiffer’s borrowed footage and are thus far less noticeable (see Figure 8.1). What is more, even in those moments in which they are visible, the silhouettes register both presence and absence,

Figure 8.2 Paul Pfeiffer, Long Count II (Rumble in the Jungle), 2001. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

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for at the same time that they are apparent, the silhouettes also manifest the disappearance of the boxers’ bodies, in that they draw attention to the boxers’ bodies as invisible forms or, to be more precise, as forms whose conventional visual appearances have vanished. Accordingly, perception shifts between disparate modes of experience in The Long Count videos as well.23 In order to engage with the grainy, blurry, pixelated imagery of The Long Count series, viewers might, at various moments, squint, blink, shift their line of sight, open their eyes especially wide, and/or adjust their visual focus; they might also peer closely and intently at Pfeiffer’s artworks and, at other moments, step back to gain some distance from the screens.24 That is to say, just as the silhouette forms pulse unexpectedly in and out of view and conjoin visibility and invisibility, perception similarly fluctuates in relation to these videos, confounding established modes of vision through a transposition of, and between, looking and not looking. And specifically, this suspension between looking and not looking involves, again, perceptions of race. Indeed, with their reformulation of perception, The Long Count videos call to mind what Paul Gilroy has described as “a profound transformation in the way ‘race’ is understood and acted upon.”25 In part, this transformation reconfigures eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments of race as an historical, social, and cultural phenomenon founded upon and codified by acts of looking. As Gilroy writes, “the history of scientific writing about ‘races’ has involved a long and meandering sequence of discourses on physical morphology,” in which “cognition of ‘race’ . . . involved from its inception a distinctive visual and optical imaginary” predicated upon “somatic markers” such as skin color and related corporeal appearances.26 However, for Gilroy, a number of more recent developments in scientific, medical, and computer technologies have altered these systems of perceiving and classifying race. While some of these more recent developments have made bodies increasingly open to medical, and at times surgical, interventions to alter those physical features that mark them as belonging to a particular racial classification, the invention of various “image-processing technologies” has similarly facilitated new approaches to representations of race.27 In particular, through digital image manipulation technologies such as, Gilroy notes, Adobe Photoshop, “the self-evident, obvious authority of familiar racialized appearances” has been “call[ed] into question,” and images of race can be “readily manipulated” in myriad ways.28 Using the very technologies that Gilroy names, Pfeiffer’s digital mimicry “atomiz[es]” its “visual elements,” transforming highly visible markers of race and what would otherwise have been the familiar, racialized and racist images of Ali and his opponents into “incidental” and at times indecipherable tremors of pixelation.29 However, as I have already noted, this atomization of established visible forms and visibilities does not simply disavow the presence or impact of race in these scenes, or in visual perception

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more generally. Instead, it creates perceptual discrepancies and disruptions for which conventional acts of looking cannot account. As such, in The Long Count series, the flickering forms that are often difficult to make out, together with the grainy and blurry footage that otherwise appears to present nothing to see, formulate an alternative mode of perception that attends to race with a far greater degree of complexity, a mode of perception that combines, and shifts between, looking and not looking. In this conjunction of looking and not looking, The Long Count videos acknowledge the ways in which, at the same time that race has historically been predicated upon the hypervisibility of certain corporeal markers, it has also frequently been constituted via outright absence. In particular, as authors such as Kobena Mercer have noted, in modern Western representational systems, notions of race, and specifically of blackness, have typically been populated in part by images of black men “in the public eye” and “exposed to glaring media visibility,” along with what Mercer describes as “invisible men.”30 Ed Guerrero recounts a similar scenario, in which images of black men “generally fall in two reductive, disparate categories . . . the grand celebrity spectacle of black male athletes, movie stars, and pop entertainers” as well as “faceless black males” who “live . . . at society’s margins” and “in its shadows.”31 In his Long Count videos, Pfeiffer brings together visibility and invisibility, along with looking and not looking, in order to reformulate the visual appearances and perceptions of race in relation to the phenomenon to which Guerrero refers: the spectacle.32 Debord’s term for a shift in modern Western culture in which images and acts of looking have become an extension of capital, “spectacle” signals the historical and social phenomena in which images can be understood to distance individuals from the engagements that, according to Debord, have constituted civic public life.33 In Debord’s explication of the spectacle, images function in largely the same manner as commodities, as mediating screens through which life is not so much experienced or lived but watched and consumed.34 To be more specific, the spectacle is characterized perhaps most forcefully by acts of looking that make any and all objects and experiences into images.35 And, at the same time that such acts of looking transform the world into images, they visually consume these images, in the joint process of spectacularization.36 Debord does not discuss race, but he does address two especially prominent manifestations of the spectacle: first, the “mass media,” and second, the figures that the mass media simultaneously depends upon and produces, “media stars” or “celebrities.”37 It is on these topics that authors such as Mercer and Guerrero have expanded Debord’s notion, through an extensive investigation of the transformation of race into a spectacular phenomenon, and specifically into a highly visible commodity image.38 Similarly, bell hooks has also examined the “contemporary commodification of blackness” and its spectacularization of race.39 In particular, hooks argues that one of the most prevalent spectacular images of the black male body is that of the

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African American “sports figure,” who has increasingly been “use[d] . . . to sell products . . . in television commercials” beginning especially in the 1970s and intensifying in subsequent decades.40 With their borrowed footage of three heavyweight boxing matches that feature black male athletes—Muhammad Ali, Sonny Liston, George Foreman, and Joe Frazier—as “media stars,” The Long Count videos draw upon scenes that put race explicitly on display in order to be looked at and visually consumed.41 The three boxing matches from which Pfeiffer borrows his footage are “some of the first sporting events formatted for television,” including the match sensationally publicized as the “Rumble in the Jungle,” which was “one of the very first attempts at a live, global broadcast” of such an event.42 Pfeiffer also employs footage from the boxing match that is one of the first sporting events to be successfully broadcast via pay-per-view on cable television, the so-called Thrilla in Manila.43 With these source materials, which make black bodies into commodity images for visual consumption in commercial contexts, the spectacular connections between looking and race are a primary concern in The Long Count videos.44 The artist himself has also recounted the close connections between looking and race, and specifically between Debord’s notion of the spectacle and the mechanisms of racialization and racism formulated under colonialism and investigated by Frantz Fanon. Pfeiffer: “colonial subjects are alienated not just from their labor but from their sense of who they are, as something more than a spectacle for other people.”45 Following both Debord and Fanon, this comment registers at least two ways in which colonial subjects are submitted to the spectacle. First, colonial subjects are themselves subordinated to the larger forces of capital that are the basis of spectacle, in which colonial subjects are, as the artist puts it, “alienated . . . from their labor.” Second, Pfeiffer’s comment indicates that colonial subjects are typically constituted as spectacular images for others to visually consume.46 This latter point the artist draws especially from Fanon, who describes his own experience of being interpellated as racially other by the exclamation “ ‘Look, a Negro!’,” which articulates its interpellation of racial difference as, precisely, an act of looking.47 This interpellation, Fanon writes, makes him into “an object in the midst of other objects,” and particularly into an object of vision that is “fixed,” he declares, by “the glances of the other” and “dissected” by “white eyes.”48 As a result, Fanon becomes “overdetermined from without” by his “appearance,” and above all by the color of his skin, in an experience that he calls “epidermalization,” which, Fanon continues, makes him “completely dislocated” and distanced from himself, “far off” from his own “presence.”49 In other words, what Fanon articulates is his own unwilling but unavoidable, and highly alienating, transformation into and objectification as a racialized and racist image that is simultaneously constituted and consumed via acts of looking—that is to say, his spectacularization in racial and racist terms. What is more, not only is this transformation alienating, it is also

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violent; Fanon describes the experience as “an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spatters . . . [his] whole body with black blood.”50 In Fanon’s case, these references to physical violence are primarily metaphors that evoke the psychological violence of the spectacularization of race under colonialism. However, as authors such as Elizabeth Alexander have demonstrated, spectacular scenes often do put physical violence on display. As Alexander writes, “black bodies in pain for public consumption have been an American spectacle for centuries,” in the form of phenomena that range from criminal acts such as “public rapes, beatings, and lynchings” to media events such as “basketball and boxing,” all on display in order to be looked at and visually consumed.51 Similarly, Muhammad Ali—the figure at the center of The Long Count videos, though a figure who, at that center, becomes simultaneously visible and invisible—has also drawn connections between acts of looking, race, and violence. In particular, Ali has described the “nightmarish image” that he “always had” about boxing, “this nightmarish image . . . of two slaves in the ring. Like the old slave days on the plantation, with two of us big, black slaves fighting almost on the verge of annihilating each other while the masters are smoking lit cigars and urging us on, looking for blood.”52 In Ali’s comment, race and violence are spectacularized in tandem, in that it is black bodies inflicting violence upon one another that are on display to be looked at. What is more, in the scene described by Ali, spectacularization is itself a source of violence, an act of looking that not only constitutes and consumes these black bodies as images but that also “look[s] for blood.” It is precisely such scenes, which construct race as an image to be visually consumed in racist and violent terms, that Pfeiffer transforms in The Long Count videos. By using his digital replication techniques to remove the visible signs of race that mark the bodies of Ali and his opponents, the artist interrupts the visual capacities that such scenes formulate, those acts of looking that violently racialize the boxers’ bodies and “loo[k] for blood.”53 Pfeiffer’s image manipulations thus offset and oppose spectacular acts of looking with perceptual experiences of not looking, to produce a new “distribution of the sensible” with regard to race, one that has counter-spectacular effects.54 However, in their interruption of such modes of looking with not looking, The Long Count videos do not constitute a complete injunction against vision. Indeed, such a move might challenge the spectacularization of race, but it would also arguably give rise to artworks comprised of empty scenes or blank screens, in which there is literally nothing to see.55 As I have noted, it is certainly the case that, in removing the African American figures from the center of his borrowed scenes, and specifically the visible signs that mark these figures in racial and racist terms, Pfeiffer produces artworks in which there appears to be nothing to see (Figure 8.1). But as I have also discussed at some length, at the same time that The Long Count videos render the figures in the boxing rings invisible, these figures also remain evident, via

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the flickering forms that visibly trace the boxers’ movements throughout the artist’s videos (see Figure 8.2). The Long Count series thus does not eradicate looking or renounce vision altogether. Rather, in reformulating his borrowed footage, Pfeiffer draws upon visual capacities—if in unfamiliar, modified, even disruptive ways—to forge an alternative mode of perception that, again, refashions, and fluctuates unpredictably between, looking and not looking in relation to the spectacularization of race. What is more, Pfeiffer draws upon visual capacities, even in unfamiliar ways, not simply because they are a necessary foundation or an unacknowledged assumption of his interventions in the spectacularization of race. Indeed, through their digital image manipulations and their conjunction of looking and not looking, Pfeiffer’s videos focus on and reconstitute not only those figures subject to the spectacle within these scenes, but also the figures that themselves signal visual capacities and enact spectacular looking in his borrowed footage, the audiences at each of the sporting events. And with this second set of figures, The Long Count series draws attention to and reconfigures the spectacle in additional ways. Through his digital techniques that copy visual data from the background and merge it with the rest of each scene, Pfeiffer remakes his source footage into almost seamless images of the surroundings at the sporting events,

Figure 8.3 Paul Pfeiffer, Long Count III (Thrilla in Manila), 2000. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

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venues filled with thousands of fans intensely absorbed in spectacular looking. In other words, by superimposing digitally replicated visual data from the background over the figures in the boxing rings, the artist remakes these scenes into images of the audiences at the three boxing matches (see Figure 8.3). As Niklas Maak has written, Pfeiffer’s viewers “look directly at the crowd that is following the match from behind the ring; they see distorted, screaming, apathetic faces.”56 Similarly, according to Stefano Basilico, these videos create an “unexpected encounter,” one that “brings two types of audience face to face: the people looking at the boxing match and the people looking at the video.”57 In these respects, The Long Count series could function as a mirror of sorts, in which Pfeiffer’s viewers encounter something of a visual surrogate for themselves, scenes of audiences actively involved in acts of looking. And yet, as such, these artworks would arguably make their own viewers into little more than appendages of the screaming fans that surround and consume the spectacularized boxing matches otherwise on view.58 In this scenario, Pfeiffer’s videos implicate their viewers in the racist and violent spectacular acts of looking that are operative within the source footage, and these artworks could thus be taken to create a closed circuit in which one instance of spectacular looking replicates and generates another.59 The Long Count videos do more, though, than replicate spectacularization, in part because, in reconfiguring their borrowed scenes, these artworks make the spectacle itself evident. As Sharon Mizota has observed, Pfeiffer’s artworks “forc[e] viewers to look at the vast apparatus . . . that surrounds such spectacles.”60 Indeed, with his digital manipulations, Pfeiffer focuses attention on not simply the audiences at the sporting events, but above all their spectacular acts of looking, which exposes the workings of the spectacle to view.61 In this, The Long Count series further destabilizes spectacular modes of perception, for, according to Debord, typically the spectacle is “not . . . perceptible to the naked eye.”62 In particular, the spectacle disregards its own existence as anything other than natural; spectacular acts of looking and related forms of thought “cannot and [do] not,” Debord notes, “apprehend [their] own material foundation in the spectacular system.”63 Instead, the very modes of perception to which the spectacle gives rise are, Debord contends, “inaccessible” to their own acts of looking.64 As such, though it may be conceived as all-seeing and all-consuming, the spectacle exempts itself from its own acts of looking, meaning that it is predicated upon an otherwise hidden or disavowed experience of not looking as well.65 In other words, along with their interruption of the spectacularization of race, Pfeiffer’s artworks also configure a new “distribution of the sensible” in relation to the spectacle as itself a system (or, again, a distribution) of perception.66 That is to say, through Pfeiffer’s formulation of images in which spectacular acts of looking are themselves put on display, the artist’s digital techniques give rise to additional sensory and perceptual possibilities, and The Long Count videos generate a second set of counter-spectacular effects.

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What is more, the spectacular acts of looking made evident in Pfeiffer’s videos become exposed to visual scrutiny in part because they no longer have an object; in using his digital techniques to remove the boxers from his borrowed scenes, Pfeiffer all but vanishes the figures that are otherwise subject to spectacularization by the audiences within these scenes.67 To the extent that these audiences and their acts of looking are repositioned to become a focal point, they do so as audiences with no object at which to direct their acts of looking, let alone to visually consume. As a result, the audiences within Pfeiffer’s borrowed footage could be understood to engage in acts of not looking rather than looking. Or, to be more precise, the acts of looking in which these audiences engage—and which, through the artist’s image replications, The Long Count videos put on view—are arguably no longer spectacular. In these respects, the acts of looking pictured within Pfeiffer’s videos disable the workings of the spectacle in a third sense as well. However, this third set of counter-spectacular effects potentially counteracts those previously articulated. In particular, while the two prior senses of counter-spectacular effects are predicated upon looking and vision conceived as quintessentially spectacular, this proposed third set can be taken to formulate looking as non- or unspectacular. In their reconfiguration of the perceptual system of the spectacle, The Long Count videos thus give rise to something of a paradox, in which some of their counter-spectacular effects seem to invalidate or negate others. Rather than a negation, though, this paradox—that these videos put racist, violent, spectacular acts of looking on view at the same time that they reconfigure such looking as non- or unspectacular—can be understood as a further indeterminacy at work in The Long Count series. Specifically, following Rancière’s account of the aesthetic regime, the indeterminacies that characterize Pfeiffer’s artworks are found in not only their forms and perceptions but also their meanings and effects.68 Just as The Long Count videos suspend visibility and invisibility, along with looking and not looking, they also involve divergent counter-spectacular meanings and effects, which similarly fluctuate with and between one another. And, rather than doing away with any of the disparate forms, perceptions, meanings, or effects, this suspension and fluctuation holds them together in tension with one another, such that they all—visibility and invisibility, looking and not looking, dissonant counter-spectacular meanings and effects—continue to operate, if in atypical ways, to reconfigure a range of new and altered possibilities in The Long Count series.69 With these indeterminacies across not only their forms and perceptions, but also their counter-spectacular meanings and effects, Pfeiffer’s artworks disrupt the system of the spectacle in relation to both race and the system itself. In Pfeiffer’s videos, images of race, and specifically of black male bodies, are no longer governed by mutually exclusive properties of either hypervisibility or outright disappearance. Instead, the artist reconstitutes

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the figures within the boxing rings as flickering forms that are both visible and invisible, in a move that thwarts visual forms and perceptual experiences that would otherwise spectacularize Ali and his opponents in racist and violent terms. In a related vein, the system of the spectacle no longer operates according to its dominant assumptions and conditions in The Long Count series. Rather, these artworks expose the workings of the spectacle to view at the same time that they undo them, “render[ing]” even their counter-spectacular effects “uncertain.”70 Thus, Pfeiffer’s videos suspend typical visual experiences with and between one another, producing indeterminacies that counter both the spectacularization of race and the formulation of the spectacle as a system of perception. Given the extent to which it is Pfeiffer’s image manipulations that produce these indeterminacies, his digital replication techniques are fundamental to the disruptive possibilities of The Long Count videos. That is to say, although the artist’s digital techniques are mimetic, they do not mirror or otherwise reproduce established perceptual systems, meanings, and effects. Instead, the artist’s replication of visual data within his borrowed footage creates images that draw upon familiar visual abilities in order to intervene in them, destabilizing established relationships between visibility and invisibility and disturbing conventional experiences of looking with not looking.71 In other words, through mimetic interference that functions according to the operations of mimicry and transforms existing formulations of race and of the spectacle into unfamiliar perceptual experiences, Pfeiffer’s image manipulations give rise to an alternative, and highly disjunctive, mode of perception. In this, the alternative mode of perception generated by The Long Count videos might itself be most accurately described as not looking, but not, as I have noted, in the sense of a rejection or foreclosure of vision. Produced via the artist’s digital techniques that copy, but ultimately refashion, formal properties and perceptual capacities, as well as their meanings and effects, Pfeiffer’s artworks give rise to a mode of perception that is “not quite” the familiar visual experience that either the audiences within Pfeiffer’s borrowed scenes or the viewers of his artworks might expect to have, a mode of perception that is other than any predominant act of looking.72 Or, to put it another way, in their production of dissensual images and experiences of both race and the system of the spectacle, Pfeiffer’s image manipulations forge an alternative mode of perception in the artist’s Long Count series that is simply, precisely, not looking.

NOTES 1. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). 2. Each of Pfeiffer’s videos features approximately three minutes of its respective fight, the first of which is Ali’s 1964 boxing match in Miami (when he

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still fought under the name Cassius Clay) against then-heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, in which Clay beat the heavily favored Liston; at the end of the fight, Clay famously shouted, “I shook up the world!” The second is Ali’s 1974 rematch against George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), promoted by Don King as the “Rumble in the Jungle” (a fight that Ali also won), while the third is the rematch between Ali and Joe Frazier staged in the Philippines in 1975, the so-called Thrilla in Manila (also promoted by King), which went fourteen rounds before a member of Frazier’s team ended the fight. For an overview of Ali’s career and a discussion of these three matches, see Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 326–34. See “Erasure, Camouflage, and ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ ” from “Paul Pfeiffer: Interview and Videos,” Art: 21, accessed July 19, 2010, http:// www.pbs.org/art21/artists/pfeiffer/clip1.html. Pfeiffer’s comment is made specifically in relation to his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse project (begun 2000), a series of photographs in which he digitally removes celebrity figures from commercial images, but it also addresses his techniques more generally, including those used in The Long Count videos. On related points, see Valeria Liebermann, “The Presence of Absence,” trans. Shaun Whiteside, in Paul Pfeiffer (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004), 14–20, 17. A number of authors have similarly described Pfeiffer’s work as characterized by erasure and absence; see, among others, Cornelia Gockel, “Paul Pfeiffer—Monuments in the Flood of Mass-Media Image Production,” trans. Elizabeth Gahbler, in Paul Pfeiffer, eds. Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek (Munich: Sammlung Goetz; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 57–77; “Go for Broke? A Conversation between Hal Foster and Paul Pfeiffer,” in Paul Pfeiffer, eds. Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek (Munich: Sammlung Goetz; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 129–43; Jennifer González, “Paul Pfeiffer,” Bomb 83 (Spring 2003): 22–29; Chrissie Iles, “Paul Pfeiffer,” in A Decade in Conversation: A Ten-Year Celebration of the Bucksbaum Award, 2000–2010: Interviews with Paul Pfeiffer, Irit Batsry, Raymond Pettibon, Mark Bradford, and Omer Fast (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 10–18; Joan Kee, “Processes of Erasure: Paul Pfeiffer’s Narratives of the Global,” ArtAsiaPacific 32 (2001): 64–69; Niklas Maak, “On Paul Pfeiffer,” in Paul Pfeiffer, ed. Octavio Zaya (Barcelona and New York: ACTAR, 2009), 42–56; Dominic Molon, “Corporealities,” in Paul Pfeiffer, ed. Kari Dahlgren (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), 11–21. For a further discussion of the painstaking nature of this process, see “Paul Pfeiffer and Thomas Ruff in Conversation,” in Paul Pfeiffer (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004), 62–75, 70–71; see also “Erasure, Camouflage, and ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ ”; Sharon Mizota, “Paul Pfeiffer: MC Kunst, Los Angeles,” Artnews 106, no. 6 (June 2007): 142–43, 142; Stephan Urbaschek, “On the Empty Beach of Santa Monica,” trans. Elizabeth Gahbler, in Paul Pfeiffer, eds. Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek (Munich: Sammlung Goetz; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011), 97–105, 97. Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley, October 31 (Winter 1984): 16–32, 23–25; see also 18–20. Ibid., 28, 27 (italics in original); see also 30. Caillois further asserts that this perceptual disturbance necessarily “depends on vision” and involves not only physical or kinesthetic experiences of space, but also “represented space” (Ibid., 28). Ibid., 30 (italics in original). Stefano Basilico, “A Conversation with Paul Pfeiffer,” Documents 21 (Fall 2001/Winter 2002): 30–43, 43. On these and related points, see also “Erasure, Camouflage, and ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ ”; Liebermann, “The

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Elizabeth Adan Presence of Absence,” 15, 17; Maak, “On Paul Pfeiffer,” 45. For a different discussion of Caillois and the mimetic elements of Pfeiffer’s work, see “Go for Broke? A Conversation between Hal Foster and Paul Pfeiffer,” 131–32, 140. “Erasure, Camouflage, and ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’ ” On these and related points, see also Basilico, “Conversation with Paul Pfeiffer,” 40; Stefano Basilico, “Disturbing Vision,” in Paul Pfeiffer (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004), 22–27, 23; “Go for Broke? A Conversation between Hal Foster and Paul Pfeiffer,” 134; Liebermann, “The Presence of Absence,” 18; Maak, “On Paul Pfeiffer,” 45; Frances Richard, “Paul Pfeiffer: The Project,” Artforum 39, no. 7 (March 2001): 143–44, 144. For a similar description of Pfeiffer’s artworks, see Molon, “Corporealities,” 12. And for a contrasting take on the role of ghostly forms and related effects in recent examples of contemporary art, see Tom McDonough, “No Ghost,” October 110 (Autumn 2004): 107–30. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring 1984): 127–33, 127 (italics in original); see also 126. For related points, see also Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 18–36; Homi K. Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity: The Postcolonial Prerogative,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 183–209. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 127. Ibid., 127–128 (italics in original); see also 129. In contrast to conventional modes of representation, Bhabha notes, mimicry engages in repetition (Ibid., 128), which is not unlike the replication of visual data involved in Pfeiffer’s digital techniques. Ibid., 127. Ibid., 131; for a further discussion of these points, see also 129. And for an alternative reading of Pfeiffer’s work in relation to Bhabha’s notion of mimicry, see Lawrence Chua, “Jerusalem: Violence, Space, and Mimesis in the Work of Paul Pfeiffer,” in Paul Pfeiffer, ed. Octavio Zaya (Barcelona and New York: ACTAR, 2009), 170–84. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2011), 60; see also Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 114. Above all, Rancière describes the aesthetic regime as a “break” or “rupture”; for his use of this language, see, for instance, Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 32; Future of the Image, 120; Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), 7, 8, 97, 126; Emancipated Spectator, 20, 62, 64, 71, 75. However, these citations are by no means exhaustive. Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 66, 71–72. As many readers likely already know, the phrase Rancière commonly uses to articulate the workings of both politics and aesthetics is “the distribution of the sensible.” For an extended discussion of this concept, see especially Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 12–19. Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 56. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 30; Future of the Image, 7; Emancipated Spectator, 104. See also Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 42, 60; Emancipated Spectator, 14, 22, 63, 73, 75. Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 105; see also 107. Rancière has also discussed this indeterminacy, and the tensions and suspensions that give rise to it, as a key feature of what he terms the “pensive image.” On indeterminacy in the pensive image, see Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 113–15; for his full chapter on the pensive image, see 107–32. In a related vein, Caillois writes

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that, in mimicry, an organism “no longer knows where to place itself” with regard to perceptions and representations of space (Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 28 [italics in original]). Pfeiffer has also discussed his interest in provoking new or altered perceptual experiences for his viewers; see, for instance, Basilico, “Conversation with Paul Pfeiffer,” 40; González, “Paul Pfeiffer,” 24, 26; “Paul Pfeiffer and John Baldessari in Conversation,” in Paul Pfeiffer, ed. Kari Dahlgren (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), 31–41, 32–33; “Scenes of Horror—‘Poltergeist,’ ‘The Exorcist,’ and ‘Amityville Horror,’ ” from “Paul Pfeiffer: Interviews and Videos,” Art: 21, accessed July 19, 2010, http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/pfeiffer/clip2.html. See also Jane Farver, “Morning after the Deluge,” in Paul Pfeiffer, ed. Kari Dahlgren (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), 43–46. Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 105. Rancière addresses the dissensual possibilities of art in the aesthetic regime, and dissensus more generally, throughout his work; for passages in which he explicitly discusses dissensus, aesthetics, and art, see, for instance, Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 96; Emancipated Spectator, 48–49, 58, 66. See also Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2010). For a related point about variable “forms of attention” in different types of visual, artistic, and mass media, see González, “Paul Pfeiffer,” 26–27 (italics in original). As Hal Foster has observed, Pfeiffer’s artworks can give rise to an experience in which one tries to “figure out whether to stand back from the image or to dive into it” (“Go for Broke? A Conversation between Hal Foster and Paul Pfeiffer,” 140; see also 135). Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2000), 11. Ibid., 35; see also 44–48. Similarly, Jennifer González notes, “race has always been a profoundly visual rhetoric, evidence of which can be found in the complex vocabularies developed to delineate social hierarchies based on variations in skin color and phenotype over the last few centuries” (Jennifer González, “Morphologies: Race as a Visual Technology,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, eds. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis [New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003], 379–93, 380). For a further discussion of these issues, see also Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race,” Camera Obscura 70 (2009): 7–34; Jennifer González, “The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice,” Camera Obscura 70 (2009): 37–65; Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, eds. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 79–109; Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, eds. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 163–81. Gilroy, Against Race, 23; see also 14–15, 19–21. For a related discussion of the ways in which “the rapid development . . . of computer graphics techniques” has given rise to visual and mimetic practices that are “radically different” from earlier representational techniques, see Jonathan Crary, “Modernity and the Problem of the Observer,” in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990), 1–24, 1. However, Crary does not discuss of the impact of these technologies on conceptions and categories of race.

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28. Gilroy, Against Race, 23. 29. González, “Paul Pfeiffer,” 26; Gilroy, Against Race, 36; see also Gilroy, Against Race, 35–38. For a similar description of Pfeiffer’s videos, see Richard, “Paul Pfeiffer: The Project,” 144. 30. Kobena Mercer, “Black Masculinity and the Sexual Politics of Race,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 131–70, 159. For another discussion of black men and masculinity in relation to hypervisibility and invisibility, see Ken McLeod, “The Construction of Masculinity in African American Music and Sports,” American Music 27, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 204–26, 220–222. In addition, representations of black women are also shaped by these categories of hypervisibility and invisibility; on hypervisibility and the spectacularization of black women, see Nicole R. Fleetwood, “Excess Flesh: Black Women Performing Hypervisibility,” in Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 105–45; bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 61–77. On the invisibility of black women in the visual field and in representational practices, see Adrian Piper, “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists,” in Next Generation: Southern Black Aesthetic (Winston-Salem, NC: Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 15–22; Michele Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 223–37, 474–85. For related points, see Katy Siegel, “Openings: Paul Pfeiffer,” Artforum 38, no. 10 (Summer 2000): 174–75. 31. Ed Guerrero, “The Black Man on Our Screens and the Empty Space in Representation,” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 181–89, 183, 187. 32. For an additional discussion of Pfeiffer’s work in relation to Debord’s notion of the spectacle, see especially “Go for Broke? A Conversation between Hal Foster and Paul Pfeiffer.” 33. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 12–13, 17, 19–24. Debord extends his discussion of the spectacle in Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London and New York: Verso, 1990); see also Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” October 50 (Autumn 1989): 96–107. Given Rancière’s opposition to Debord’s conceptualization of the spectacle, my engagement with the work of both authors may seem contraindicated. However, while Rancière identifies a number of inconsistencies within Debord’s work (see Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 13–15, 44–47, 63, 75–76, 86–88; see also Future of the Image, 28), Rancière’s critique is at times also potentially problematic. In particular, in my reading of it, Rancière’s rejection of Debord’s ideas, along with his criticism of many artworks that engage with or attempt to intervene in the spectacle (see Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 52–60, 121–33; Emancipated Spectator, 27–30, 74–78), disregards the possibility that we could take the spectacle—however flawed, conservative, or overdetermined a concept it might be—as itself a “distribution of the sensible,” which in turn could be reconfigured or redistributed in new and unexpected ways. It is in this sense that I draw upon Rancière’s work to inform my examination of the ways in which Pfeiffer’s videos engage with Debord and intervene in the spectacle; I subsequently discuss these matters in more detail. 34. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 12, 26–27, 32. 35. Ibid., 21, 29.

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Ibid., 14; see also 16–17, 32. Ibid., 19, 38. On related points, see also McLeod, “Construction of Masculinity,” 222–24. bell hooks, “Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic,” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 127–40, 131. For a related discussion, in which hooks notes the prevalence of the spectacle with particular reference to Debord, see “bell hooks—Cultural Criticism and Transformation” (Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 1997), accessed January 1, 2011, http://www.scribd.com/doc/26321284/Bell-Hookscultural-Criticism-and-Transformation. Numerous authors have detailed the transformation of African American athletic abilities, as well as African American social and cultural achievements and African American bodies more generally, into commodity images and objects; see also, for instance, Herman Gray, “Black Masculinity and Visual Culture,” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 175–80; hooks, Black Looks, 21–39; Wallace, Dark Designs, 318–23. In addition, for a discussion of similar developments in hip-hop music that argues for their transgressive potential, see Derek Conrad Murray, “Hip-Hop vs. High Art: Notes on Race as Spectacle,” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 4–19. hooks, “Feminism Inside,” 133. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 38. Several authors have noted that Ali is an early example of a global celebrity figure in sports; see, for instance, “Go for Broke? A Conversation between Hal Foster and Paul Pfeiffer,” 130; Urbaschek, “On the Empty Beach,” 97. For a related discussion of celebrities in Pfeiffer’s work more generally, see also “Go for Broke? A Conversation between Hal Foster and Paul Pfeiffer,” 130–32. González, “Paul Pfeiffer,” 24. The so-called Rumble in the Jungle, staged in Kinshasa, Zaire, had a 4:00 a.m. start time to facilitate its live transmission to the United States; see When We Were Kings, dir. Leon Gast (Universal Studios, 2002), DVD. See also Muhammad Ali and Richard Durham, The Greatest: My Own Story (New York: Random House, 1975), 392; on related points, see Milton Viorst, “Deal of the Century: The Ali-Foreman Fight,” New York Magazine 7, no. 31 (August 5, 1974): 47–49; “The Business of Sports,” Black Enterprise 5, no. 5 (December 1974): 43–45. This boxing match was transmitted live via satellite from the Philippines to the United States; see Mark Robichaux, Cable Cowboy: John Malone and the Rise of the Modern Cable Business (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2002), 49–52, cited in Boddy, Boxing, 437. On related points, see Viorst, “Deal of the Century.” González, “Paul Pfeiffer,” 24; see also 23. For related points, see “Paul Pfeiffer and John Baldessari in Conversation,” 39. Pfeiffer also discusses postcolonialism, globalization, and the relevance of Fanon in his work in his interview with Hal Foster; see “Go for Broke? A Conversation between Hal Foster and Paul Pfeiffer,” 130–31, 141–43. See also Siegel, “Openings: Paul Pfeiffer.” González, “Paul Pfeiffer,” 24. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 109, 111. Ibid., 109, 116. Ibid., 116, 112. In these respects, Fanon’s description of his interpellation and objectification as racially other—which makes him into, again, “an object in the midst of other objects” (Ibid., 109)—recalls Caillois’s discussion of

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Elizabeth Adan mimicry. According to Caillois, the atypical spatial experience of mimicry is one in which an organism experiences itself as “one point among others” (Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 28). Although the experience that Fanon describes is not spatial, and the condition that Caillois articulates is not concerned with the question of race, in both instances a subject is made to align with an external phenomenon that profoundly disturbs, and perhaps even threatens and dismantles, its sense of self. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 112. Elizabeth Alexander, “ ‘Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, ed. Thelma Golden (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 91–110, 92. Ali and Durham, The Greatest, 247. Cited in Kath Woodward, “Rumbles in the Jungle: Boxing, Racialization and the Performance of Masculinity,” Leisure Studies 23, no. 1 (January 2004): 5–17, 13–14. Ali has also observed that “those who profited most from” his boxing matches, and the sport more generally, “didn’t think of fighters as human or intelligent. They saw us as made just for the entertainment of the rich. Just for breaking each other’s nose, bleeding and having the cuts patched up and pushed back out in the ring, round and round while we’re killing each other for the crowd. And at least half the crowd was white” (Ali and Durham, The Greatest, 247). In a related vein, one of the most historically prevalent spectacles that intersects race and violence is the crime of lynching, frequently represented in photographic form. On lynching as spectacle, see, for example, Michael Hatt, “Race, Ritual, and Responsibility: Performativity and the Southern Lynching,” in Performing the Body, Performing the Text, eds. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 76–88. On the prevalence of photographic representations of lynching in the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see also James Allen, ed., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000); Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Shadow and the Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, eds. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 111–26; Leigh Raiford, “The Consumption of Lynching Images,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, eds. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 267–73. Ali and Durham, The Greatest, 247. For related points, see “Paul Pfeiffer and John Baldessari in Conversation,” 39; “Scenes of Horror—‘Poltergeist,’ ‘The Exorcist,’ and ‘Amityville Horror.’ ” However, it is important to note that while one of the primary ways in which Pfeiffer’s artworks disrupt established modes of spectacular perception and produce a new “distribution of the sensible” is with regard to race, in fact Rancière does not address the role that race plays in systems of sensation. That is to say, Rancière nowhere examines the ways in which a “distribution of the sensible” might give rise to images, modes of perception, individual positions, and social formations that are structured by, and give structure to, race, gender, sexuality, and related matters, in either dominant or dissensual forms. In a similar vein, Rancière founds his work upon political subjects that he describes as “human beings without qualities” (Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 49), which I take to mean not only without qualities of greater or lesser knowledge and intellectual ability (Ibid., 8–11), but also without qualities of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and the like. It would be extremely valuable to consider in more detail the implications of such an assumption, for

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both Rancière’s work and the larger possibilities of politics and aesthetics, but such a project is outside the scope of this essay. In his commentaries on Debord’s work, Rancière makes a similar point; see Ibid., 86; see also Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 41–42. Maak, “On Paul Pfeiffer,” 48. Basilico, “Disturbing Vision,” 23. For similar points, see also Gockel, “Paul Pfeiffer—Monuments,” 63–64; Liebermann, “The Presence of Absence,” 18. In a related vein, it could also be argued that Pfeiffer’s digital image manipulations are themselves implicated in processes of spectacularization. In particular, by assimilating the figures of Ali and his opponents into the scenery of their surroundings, Pfeiffer’s artworks could be understood to visually consume the African American boxers at the level of the video itself. That is to say, The Long Count videos arguably appear to cannibalize their own imagery—and especially the black male boxers—as a result of the artist’s digital mimicry. In these respects, Pfeiffer’s replication of his source footage could be taken to subject the black male athletes to visual consumption and reenact spectacularization in yet another form. However, as I have detailed, these image manipulations do more than consume or vanish the figures of Ali and his opponents altogether and thus involve a number of highly complex counter-spectacular effects. For a further discussion of the intricacies of these matters in Pfeiffer’s work, see “Go for Broke? A Conversation between Hal Foster and Paul Pfeiffer”; see also Iles, “Paul Pfeiffer,” 12. On these points in relation to Pfeiffer’s work, see also Basilico, “Disturbing Vision,” 23; Maak, “On Paul Pfeiffer,” 48; in addition, see note 58, above. What is more, for a discussion of the ways in which video apparatuses and practices can give rise to a closed circuit or feedback loop, see Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 50–64. And for a discussion of vision as a circuit, in which looking loops in upon itself and gives rise to extremely complex power relations, see Jacques Lacan’s work on the gaze, especially “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a,” in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1981), 65–119. Mizota, “Paul Pfeiffer: MC Kunst,” 143. Mizota’s comment describes an example of one of Pfeiffer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse photographs, which the artist produces using the same basic digital techniques as in The Long Count series, and the comment is thus applicable to Pfeiffer’s videos as well; see also note 3, above. For a related point, see Betti-Sue Hertz, “Audience as Subject, Part Two: Extra Large,” exhibition brochure (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2012); Liebermann, “The Presence of Absence,” 17–18. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 17. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 17. It is with these aspects of Debord’s work that Rancière especially takes issue; see Rancière, Future of the Image, 28; Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 41–42; Emancipated Spectator, 12–15, 42–49, 86–88. For a related point, see Kee, “Processes of Erasure,” 69. In this, I am proposing that dissensus can develop with regard to the spectacle, or, to be more precise, that the counter-spectacular effects of The Long Count videos involve dissensual possibilities. As I have already indicated, I realize that such points diverge from Rancière; see notes 33 and 64, above. For a related point, see Gockel, “Paul Pfeiffer—Monuments,” 63–64; Hertz, “Audience as Subject, Part Two.” See Rancière, Future of the Image, 114; Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 25; Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 60, 69–73, 82, 103, 122–23.

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69. For a related point, see “Go for Broke? A Conversation between Hal Foster and Paul Pfeiffer,” 140–43. 70. Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 22; see also 17. For a related point, see Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 127. 71. For similar points, see Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 56, 66; Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 28, 30–32. 72. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 127 (italics in original); see also 126.

REFERENCES Alexander, Elizabeth. 1994. “ ‘Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s).” In Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. Edited by Thelma Golden. 91–110. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Ali, Muhammad, and Durham, Richard. The Greatest: My Own Story. New York: Random House, 1975. Allen, James. Editor. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000. Basilico, Stefano. “A Conversation with Paul Pfeiffer.” Documents 21 (Fall 2001/ Winter 2002): 30–43. ———. “Disturbing Vision.” In Paul Pfeiffer. 22–27. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004. “bell hooks—Cultural Criticism and Transformation.” Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 1997. Accessed January 1, 2011. http://www.scribd.com/ doc/26321284/Bell-Hooks-cultural-Criticism-and-Transformation. Bhabha, Homi K. “The Other Question.” Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 18–36. ———. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (Spring 1984): 127–33. ———. “Interrogating Identity: The Postcolonial Prerogative.” In Anatomy of Racism. Edited by David Theo Goldberg. 183–209. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Boddy, Kasia. Boxing: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. “The Business of Sports.” Black Enterprise 5, no. 5 (December 1974): 43–45. Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” Translated by John Shepley. October 31 (Winter 1984): 16–32. Also published as “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” Translated by Claudine Frank and Camille Nash. In The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Edited by Claudine Frank. 89–103. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Chua, Lawrence. “Jerusalem: Violence, Space, and Mimesis in the Work of Paul Pfeiffer.” In Paul Pfeiffer. Edited by Octavio Zaya. 170–84. Barcelona and New York: ACTAR, 2009. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race.” Camera Obscura 70 (2009): 7–34. Crary, Jonathan. “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory.” October 50 (Autumn 1989): 96–107. ———. “Modernity and the Problem of the Observer.” In Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. 1–24. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995. Originally published as La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967.

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———. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Malcolm Imrie. London and New York: Verso, 1990. Originally published as Commentaires sur la société du spectacle. Paris: Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1988. “Erasure, Camouflage, and ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’ ” From “Paul Pfeiffer: Interview and Videos.” Art: 21. Accessed July 19, 2010. http://www.pbs.org/ art21/artists/pfeiffer/clip1.html. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press, 1986. Originally published as Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1952. Farver, Jane. “Morning after the Deluge.” In Paul Pfeiffer. Edited by Kari Dahlgren. 43–46. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003. Fleetwood, Nicole R. “Excess Flesh: Black Women Performing Hypervisibility.” In Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. 105–45. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2000. Gockel, Cornelia. “Paul Pfeiffer—Monuments in the Flood of Mass-Media Image Production.” Translated by Elizabeth Gahbler. In Paul Pfeiffer. Edited by Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek. 57–77. Munich: Sammlung Goetz; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011. “Go for Broke? A Conversation between Paul Pfeiffer and Hal Foster.” In Paul Pfeiffer. Edited by Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek. 129–43. Munich: Sammlung Goetz; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011. González, Jennifer. “Morphologies: Race as a Visual Technology.” In Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self. Edited by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis. 379–93. New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003. ———. “Paul Pfeiffer.” Bomb 83 (Spring 2003): 22–29. ———. “The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice.” Camera Obscura 70 (2009): 37–65. Gray, Herman. “Black Masculinity and Visual Culture.” In Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. Edited by Thelma Golden. 175–80. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Guerrero, Ed. “The Black Man on Our Screens and the Empty Space in Representation.” In Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. Edited by Thelma Golden. 181–89. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994. Hatt, Michael. “Race, Ritual, and Responsibility: Performativity and the Southern Lynching.” In Performing the Body, Performing the Text. Edited by Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson. 76–88. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Hertz, Betti-Sue. “Audience as Subject, Part Two: Extra Large.” Exhibition brochure. San Francisco: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2012. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. ———. “Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic.” In Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. Edited by Thelma Golden. 127–40. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Iles, Chrissie. “Paul Pfeiffer.” In A Decade in Conversation: A Ten-Year Celebration of the Bucksbaum Award, 2000–2010: Interviews with Paul Pfeiffer, Irit Batsry, Raymond Pettibon, Mark Bradford, and Omer Fast. 10–18. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Kee, Joan. “Processes of Erasure: Paul Pfeiffer’s Narratives of the Global.” ArtAsiaPacific 32 (2001): 64–69.

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Krauss, Rosalind. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October 1 (Spring 1976): 50–64. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1981. Liebermann, Valeria. “The Presence of Absence.” Translated by Shaun Whiteside. In Paul Pfeiffer. 14–20. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004. Maak, Niklas. “On Paul Pfeiffer.” In Paul Pfeiffer. Edited by Octavio Zaya. 42–56. Barcelona and New York: ACTAR, 2009. McDonough, Tom. “No Ghost.” October 110 (Autumn 2004): 107–30. McLeod, Ken. “The Construction of Masculinity in African American Music and Sports.” American Music 27, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 204–26. Mercer, Kobena. “Black Masculinity and the Sexual Politics of Race.” In Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. 131–70. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Shadow and the Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index.” In Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self. Edited by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis. 111–26. New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003. Mizota, Sharon. “Paul Pfeiffer: MC Kunst, Los Angeles.” Artnews 106, no. 6 (June 2007): 142–43. Molon, Dominic. “Corporealities.” In Paul Pfeiffer. Edited by Kari Dahlgren. 11–21. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003. Murray, Derek Conrad. “Hip-Hop vs. High Art: Notes on Race as Spectacle.” Art Journal 63, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 4–19. “Paul Pfeiffer and John Baldessari in Conversation.” In Paul Pfeiffer. Edited by Kari Dahlgren. 31–41. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art. 2003. “Paul Pfeiffer and Thomas Ruff in Conversation.” In Paul Pfeiffer. 62–75. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004. Piper, Adrian. “The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists.” In Next Generation: Southern Black Aesthetic. 15–22. Winston-Salem, NC: Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Raiford, Leigh. “The Consumption of Lynching Images.” In Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self. Edited by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis. 267–73. New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Originally published as Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique. Paris: La Fabrique-éditions, 2000. ———. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso, 2007. Originally published as Le destin des images. Paris: La Fabrique-éditions, 2003. ———. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2009. Originally published as Malaise dans l’esthétique. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2004. ———. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Steven Corcoran. London and New York: Continuum, 2010. ———. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso, 2011. Originally published as Le spectateur émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique-éditions, 2008. Richard, Frances. “Paul Pfeiffer: The Project.” Artforum 39, no. 7 (March 2001): 143–44. Robichaux, Mark. Cable Cowboy: John Malone and the Rise of the Modern Cable Business. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2002.

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“Scenes of Horror—‘Poltergeist,’ ‘The Exorcist,’ and ‘Amityville Horror.’ ” In “Paul Pfeiffer: Interview and Videos.” Art: 21. Accessed July 19, 2010. http://www.pbs. org/art21/artists/pfeiffer/clip2.html. Sekula, Allan. “The Traffic in Photographs.” In Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self. Edited by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis. 79–109. New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003. Siegel, Katy. “Openings: Paul Pfeiffer.” Artforum 38, no. 10 (Summer 2000): 174–75. Urbaschek, Stephan. “On the Empty Beach of Santa Monica.” Translated by Elizabeth Gahbler. In Paul Pfeiffer. Edited by Ingvild Goetz and Stephan Urbaschek. 97–105. Munich: Sammlung Goetz; Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011. Viorst, Milton. “Deal of the Century: The Ali-Foreman Fight.” New York Magazine 7, no. 31 (August 5, 1974): 47–49. Wallace, Michele. Dark Designs and Visual Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Wallis, Brian. “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes.” In Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self. Edited by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis. 163–81. New York: International Center of Photography and Harry N. Abrams, 2003. When We Were Kings. Directed by Leon Gast. Universal Studios, 2002. DVD. Originally released in 1997. Woodward, Kath. “Rumbles in the Jungle: Boxing, Racialization and the Performance of Masculinity.” Leisure Studies 23, no. 1 (January 2004): 5–17.

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Part IV

Institutions Overpower Images

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9

Looking at the West Looking Away Khmer Rouge, Western Blindness, and Documentary Images Stéphanie Benzaquen Nobody knows where Cambodia begins. Is it on Khmer soil, in Peking, or in certain cafés in Paris? —Ismail Kadare1

“We do no longer use the terms ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’: we use the terms ‘secret’ and ‘open’.” So declared Nuon Chea, one of the top Khmer Rouge leaders and ideologist of the regime, to a delegation of the Communist Workers Party of Denmark touring Democratic Kampuchea (as Cambodia was then called) at the invitation of the country’s government in July 1978.2 This statement by Brother Number Two, one of the codenames of Nuon Chea, did certainly not surprise the Danish guests. For Cambodians and foreign observers alike, the Khmer Rouge regime was shrouded in mystery.3 Once in power, the Communist Party of Kampuchea kept applying the conspiracy-like methods that had ensured its survival during years of clandestine struggle, first against Cambodia’s leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in the 1960s, then against the US-backed Republic of Marshall Lon Nol, in 1970–1975. Unlike other Marxist–Leninist regimes, in Democratic Kampuchea there was no cult of personality. Faceless and anonymous, the Khmer Rouge leaders hid behind the facade of the shadowy Angkar (Organization). Yet, as the sociologist Alexander Laban Hinton points out, Khmer Rouge propaganda often depicted Angkar as clear-sighted and clairvoyant.4 Out in the open it engaged in a merciless war against the “hidden enemies burrowing from within,” the “germs” plotting in the dark the end of the healthy Democratic Kampuchea body politic.5 It is within the constellation formed by these sets of opposition—open and secret, light and dark, visible and invisible—that this chapter examines the idea of not looking and its relation to the West turning away from the tragedy that unfolded in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge, who combined ultra-Maoist ideology with strident nationalism, ruled over Cambodia from April 1975 until January 1979, when the Vietnamese army chased them out. In the hands of the Khmer Rouge, the country became a gigantic hard labor camp in which almost two million Cambodians lost their lives. Their crimes

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were mentioned in Western mainstream media but news about the situation in Cambodia never reached a critical mass in public opinion. Khmer Rouge atrocities were perpetrated amid international indifference. This chapter examines some aspects of the relation between such Western attitudes at the time and Khmer Rouge politics of (in)visibility. On the basis of photographs that denote situations in which Western witnesses and bystanders turned away, I investigate not looking at two levels: in the interaction with Khmer Rouge manipulations of events and images, as well as the way it still affects present-day perceptions of Democratic Kampuchea and the responsibility of the West in Cambodia’s ordeal. I draw on the notion of “public secrecy” that is elaborated by Michael Taussig in his work from the 1980s in Colombia.6 The anthropologist was struck by the silence of Colombian peasants who, although they knew that the military and police were deeply involved in terrorism and drug running, never spoke about it: We all “knew” this and they “knew” we “knew” but there was no way it could be easily articulated, certainly not on the ground, face-to-face. Such “smoke screens” are surely long known to mankind but this “long know-ness” is itself an intrinsic component of knowing what not to know.7 This chapter analyzes two specific situations of Western “knowing what not to know” of Khmer Rouge abuses and their photographic representation. I transpose Taussig’s notion of “actively not knowing” into the visual realm where it becomes “actively not looking.”8 The first example in which we see this choice of not looking is a set of photographs made by Swedish Maoists visiting in Democratic Kampuchea in August 1978. In 2008, the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an independent institution in Cambodia documenting Khmer Rouge atrocities, and its Swedish partner for the project, the Living History Forum in Stockholm, reorganized the pictures as an educational book and exhibition, both titled Gunnar in the Living Hell after the name of one of the Swedish delegates, Gunnar Bergström.9 The second example I discuss is a photojournalist’s record made in April 1975. It shows two gendarmes of the French embassy in Phnom Penh apparently handing a high-ranking official of the Khmer Republic, Ung Bun Hor, over to the Khmer Rouge. The photograph was published in Newsweek on May 19, 1975. It was used as evidence in a trial against the French government initiated in 1999 by Billon Ung, the widow of the victim.10 These photographs were forgotten, or more precisely, ignored for a long time, and they only recently emerged into the arenas of justice, education, and human rights. Within these contexts, questions are raised: how do these photographs make past instances of not looking visible in the present? How does the present-day beholder, informed by other practices of memory, simultaneously look and not look at these photographs? To what do these images bear witness today? Is it to the past or changes in perceptions of Western liability in the Cambodian tragedy? Not looking, as I conceive of it here, reminds that photography is at the same time a recording and

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an interpretation of a situation. The constructedness of visual mediation is expressed in what does not figure in the picture as much as in what the beholder sees in it. The question is thus how to bring these two aspects into interaction. The cases I examine here suggest two possibilities: on the one hand, to look for clues or signs, “involuntary confessions” that can tear away the “smoke screens” that perpetrators and photographers created.11 On the other hand, to incorporate the photographs into complex information environments including the discursive practices that defined the meanings of the pictures and the networks that disseminated them. I consider the photographs of Gunnar in the Living Hell and Newsweek as “interfaces of secrecy” that enable articulation of the notion of not looking across past and present, examination of transformations in the visualization and exposure of Democratic Kampuchea–related “public secrets,” and clarification of the reconfiguration of the relationship between Cambodia and the West around the traumatic memory of Khmer Rouge crimes.12

THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Gunnar in the Living Hell 1978–2008 Gunnar Bergström (mental nurse), Jan Myrdal (writer), Marita Wikander (journal editor), and Hedda Ekerwald (student in sociology) were members of the Maoist Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association who toured Democratic Kampuchea between August 12 and August 26, 1978. They were not the only Westerners who visited in Cambodia that year. Urged by their Chinese allies to show a more “human face,” the leaders of the Communist Party of Kampuchea invited sympathizers from all over the world to visit the country. As well as the pro-Maoist Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association, they hosted American Maoists from the newspaper The Call; members of Marxist–Leninist Communist Party (PC-ml) from France and Italy; the Norwegian Workers Communist Party; representatives of the Belgium-Kampuchea Association, and so on.13 The Khmer Rouge tourist machine ran smoothly. The international guests were taken to model cooperatives, rice fields, construction sites, factories, exotic locations such as Angkor Wat and crocodile farms. They also visited various sites in Phnom Penh such as the hospital and the technical school, and villages destroyed by American bombardments during the civil war. They met with dedicated workers, happy peasants, and refugees coming from zones under Vietnamese attack. When he went back to Sweden, Bergström praised the Khmer Rouge revolution. However, he left the Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association a few months later. Once aware of the extent of the crimes committed by Pol Pot’s regime, he released a statement in which he recognized his former misjudgment of the Khmer Rouge. Years passed, and the journey in Democratic Kampuchea of the Swedish delegation sank into oblivion. It would have

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remained so without the discovery made by Peter Fröberg Idling, a Swedish legal advisor working for an aid agency in Cambodia in the mid-2000s. One day, in a small bookshop in Phnom Penh, Idling came across Kampuchea Between Two Wars, the report published by the Swedish delegation in the spring of 1979. It contained two black-and-white photographs: on the front cover was an image of Cambodians workers, and on the back, Bergström and his companions posed in front of Angkor Wat. Upon his return to Sweden, Idling started looking for the delegates: Where were they now? How would they remember those hot stuffy August days spent in Democratic Kampuchea twenty-five years before? What would their attitude be now to the enthusiastic testimony they once brought home from their journey through mass murder?14 At the same moment, Youk Chhang, the director of the DC-Cam, went to Sweden for a seminar on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Bergström was in the audience.15 The two men met afterwards. Youk Chhang convinced the Swede to lend the DC-Cam all the records of his 1978 trip—films, photographs, and musical tapes of revolutionary songs—in order to organize a project based on this material.16 A selection of photographs (ninety-three, mostly Ekerwald’s) was published as the educational book and exhibition, both titled Gunnar in the Living Hell. The pictures showed life in the countryside: smiling workers harvesting rice fields and building irrigation dams; factories producing rubber, textile, and farming tools; model cooperatives with care for children and communal eating halls; ferry stops and bus stations. Phnom Penh was not forgotten: streets of the city; preparation of medicine and bedrooms at the hospital; children studying at the technical school; a spectacle by Romanian dancers at the theatre. Gunnar in the Living Hell was presented at the Reyum Arts Gallery in Phnom Penh, and again in the building of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in November 2008. That same month the exhibition toured the country, going to cities such as Kampong Cham, Takeo, and Battambang, where Bergström also met with Cambodian villagers and survivors in DC-Cam organized forums. Gunnar in the Living Hell is now permanently displayed at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes in Phnom Penh. A duplicate exhibition, Dinner with Pol Pot (Middag med Pol Pot), was organized in Stockholm by the Living History Forum, the DC-Cam’s partner for the project, from September 2009 to March 2010. NO SANCTUARY FOR UNG BUN HOR After the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, hundreds of Cambodians sheltered at the city’s French embassy, the only diplomatic representation that remained open. Among those taking refuge were

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high-ranking Republicans such as Prime Minister Prince Sirik Matak and the former President of the Cambodian Assembly Ung Bun Hor, as well as members of the Cambodian royal family. Some refugees figured on the list of “supertraitors” to be executed as it was drafted by the Khmer Rouge. These officials surrendered to the new regime a couple of days later and were immediately killed. Billon Ung, the wife of Ung Bun Hor, and their four children had left Cambodia for the security of France the week before Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. It is from the French television news that Billon Ung learned of her husband’s death. A journalist explained that terrible things had occurred at the French embassy in Phnom Penh, and prominent members of the Khmer Republican government had been handed over to the Khmer Rouge. He showed some photographs, scenes of panic in which Cambodians massed at the gate of the French embassy, trying to enter the compound. Ung Bun Hor was on one of them. Billon Ung remembers: I understood it was over. I went to my bedroom and cried in silence because I did not want to look weak in front of my children. I had only one hope left: that the Khmer Rouge had killed him quickly without making him suffer. But his body has never been found.17 Billon Ung thought that her husband would be safe at the French embassy. So what happened there? Did the Khmer officials willingly leave the compound? Did the French personnel hand them over to the Khmer Rouge? The answer to these questions came in the form of a black-and-white photograph published in Newsweek a few weeks later, on May 19, 1975. It shows Ung Bun Hor apparently resisting Pierre Gouillon and Georges Villevieille, two French embassy gendarmes. Both are wearing civilian clothes. There is a fourth man in the picture. He is seen from the back. Claude Juvénal, then (1975) the correspondent of the AFP (Agence France Press) in Phnom Penh, recently identified himself as that man.18 The caption in the article that accompanied the image read: “No sanctuary: Ung Bun Hor is ousted by the French.”19 The claim of the caption is also the opinion of Billon Ung. In an interview for The Guardian on January 27, 2006, she declared that “the French knew exactly what would happen to [him], they just threw him out.” A picture of her holding the Newsweek photograph as proof accompanied the interview.20 In November 1999, Billon Ung took legal action at the Regional Court of Créteil, France, a procedure made possible by the fact Ung Bun Hor’s body was still missing. She decided to sue “persons unknown” for “crimes against humanity” perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 and “illegal confinement, assassination, acts of torture and barbarity.”21 She targeted the French government of 1975 for having denied her husband asylum and protection. She added the Newsweek picture as evidence to the accusation file. Although it was not the first time in the late 1990s that Cambodians living in Europe initiated trial procedures related to Khmer Rouge

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crimes, Billon Ung’s decision to take legal action was a first.22 So far, nobody had judicially implicated a Western government in events in Democratic Kampuchea. Since then, Billon Ung’s trial has been stopped and resumed several times.23 Media, primarily in France and Cambodia, but also in Britain, for instance, covered each new legal development and often illustrated their articles with the Newsweek photograph. SIGHTSEEING IN DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA IN 1978 “Phnom Penh, August 1978,” the third photograph in the book Gunnar in the Living Hell, shows a deserted street corner and dilapidated gas station. In the foreground, on the left of the picture, a signboard reads CALTEX, symbol of American imperialism rendered meaningless in the revolutionary world of Democratic Kampuchea. The picture is presented with a set of three captions.24 Thoughts from 1978: “Isn’t this a waste of resources to let things go to rust and decay?” “But we must trust the leaders, and they must have good reasons for this policy. This evacuation was a violation of people’s rights. Let’s hope the revolution grows up.” Thoughts today: “There seems to have been a perverted ideology in the minds of the Khmer Rouge leadership confusing their ‘class analysis’ with viewing almost all city inhabitants as enemies.” Forbidden thoughts at that time: “The revolution misunderstands both Marxism and Communism.” The captions refer to the first measure taken by Khmer Rouge within hours of their victory: the relocation of all city residents into the countryside. Unorganized, forced at gunpoint, the evacuation of Phnom Penh set the tone for the next four years. The new regime mixed ruthless violence and ill-conceived planning. “Phnom Penh, August 1978” placed at the beginning of Gunnar in the Living Hell is not only a chronological marker of Year Zero.25 In the context of the book it also signals that a threshold is crossed as the Swedish delegates enter the “tropical twilight zone” of Democratic Kampuchea.26 It raises, from the outset, the question of the state of mind of the Swedes while facing the sight of the utter emptiness of a city inhabited until April 1975 by two million people. Could such an eerie

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landscape convince them that all the gruesome stories about the evacuation that had circulated for three years in the media were true? Would it trigger a different reaction, an active not looking? Bergström declares at the end of the book: “We talked about the trip a lot before we left. We wanted to avoid being used as propaganda for murder and genocide. Therefore we wanted to believe that the allegations were largely untrue.”27 To what extent did the Khmer Rouge facilitate such belief? A photograph such as “A typical stop on the trip to film and take photos” provides an answer. It shows Bergström and Myrdal (the latter is filming), who stand in company of their Khmer Rouge guide and guards on a soggy path amidst rice fields. Thoughts from 1978: “We are allowed to stop anywhere and film what we want. This can’t be a show only for us.”28 Thoughts today: “The things we were shown did disprove some of the rumors about Cambodia. But we were not shown everything and the things refugees were saying were compatible with what we saw. We should have realized the tour’s limitations.” To today’s readers and viewers it is obvious that the stop was neither typical nor random but carefully chosen. However, Western guests, at least some of them, barely knew about peasant life in Southeast Asia (all the more in a country damaged by years of bombing and war), and such a scene must have looked like an ordinary sight.29 No doubt the Khmer Rouge found it easier to stage such idyllic situations in the countryside.30 The attitudes of the Swedes were also a great help to the regime’s “directors.” The delegates had a ready-made explanation for whatever seemed wrong: “The revolution misunderstands both Marxism and Communism,” a remark that recurs many times throughout Gunnar in the Living Hell. The Khmer Rouge played on such a patronizing view in a masterly way and engineered cliché situations that merged preconceptions of Marxist–Leninists in the West towards non-Western revolutions with colonial stereotypes on Asia. For instance, the members of the new egalitarian and puritan society of Democratic Kampuchea wore black-pajama uniforms, but their heads were still covered with the traditional krama scarf and their hands held ancestral tools. Visitors were literally fascinated by such staging of their own fantasies. Doubt, however, sometimes crept into the mind of guests, as indicated in the photograph “Mobile brigade building a smaller dam north of Phnom Penh,” showing workers digging and carrying earth loads.31 The Swedish delegates asked their guides whether they could meet with any city dweller working at this spot, but the request was denied under the pretext the

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workers were too “busy.” “What if the stories are true?” Bergström wondered, “What if they have in fact killed most of the cities’ inhabitants?”32 Suspicions soon evaporated, outweighed by the sight of Khmer Rouge architectural achievements. Yet, it was one thing to believe tales of revolutionary zeal outdoing trucks and excavators in building Communism; it was another to accept that revolutionary spirit inspired uneducated children in solving complicated mathematical calculations, as depicted in photographs taken at the technical school of Phnom Penh.33 The Khmer Rouge “smoke screens” were in certain cases less effective. Then visitors had to work harder to dismiss elements that interfered with their attempt not to expose—to themselves as much as to the outside world—what lay plain in their faces, namely that Democratic Kampuchea was not the socialist paradise they had dreamed of. At stake in Gunnar in the Living Hell is how to turn such photographs into educational tools and make them “witnesses in spite of themselves.”34 The process implies deconstructing the Potemkin village that the Khmer Rouge had erected for their Swedish visitors. Some of the sceneries retain their power of persuasion, as demonstrates the reaction of Peter Fröberg Idling to the movie that Myrdal had filmed in Democratic Kampuchea. Although he had listened to “countless witnesses” of Khmer Rouge atrocities, Idling found himself thinking in front of footage images showing happy workers in rice fields and cooperatives “that perhaps it wasn’t quite so bad [under the Khmer Rouge regime] after all. That perhaps there has been some kind of misunderstanding.”35 If somebody as knowledgeable about abuses perpetrated in Democratic Kampuchea as Idling experiences such an episode of cognitive dissonance, what might happen then with less informed audiences? It is not the only difficulty the organizers of Gunnar in the Living Hell had to deal with. They also had to develop representations or displays to reflect the variety of strategies the Swedes resorted to for not looking at the realities of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and connect to Western political and cultural assumptions of that period. Gunnar in the Living Hell faces the complex issue, which Andrea Liss underscores in relation to Holocaust photographs, of forming “participants, spectators, and distant witnesses.”36 To do so implies not discrediting the pictures Bergström and his companions took in 1978 as mere propaganda, but contributing to an environment in which the beholder rethinks “the ways [such photographs] are made to perform as transparent evidence to the events.”37 In this respect, Gunnar in the Living Hell epitomizes the attempt to bridge what Liss terms the “chasm” between those who experienced the events and those who look at representations of these events nowadays.38 This is what the palimpsest-like captioning of the photographs in the book and exhibition tries to achieve. The writing and rewriting of thoughts show that such a chasm must be reassessed within—even replaced with—a continuous process of commenting that has roots in the past (the clash between official and forbidden thought) and develops over years into new interpretations.

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THE FORMS OF “PUBLIC SECRECY” With the case of Ung Bun Hor and the photograph published in Newsweek in May 1975, I want to examine another context in which not looking interacts with the possibility of forming “participants, spectators, and distant witnesses,” to draw on Liss’s words. For years it was assumed that the picture of Ung Bun Hor had been taken on April 20, 1975, when he left the French embassy, whether willingly or by force. Lately, however, dissonant voices have been heard. The consul Jean Dyrac, the gendarme Georges Villevieille, and the journalist Claude Juvénal claimed that the photograph was taken on April 17. These three days make a considerable difference: for on April 17, Ung Bun Hor was not on the way out of the embassy, but on the way in. Thanks to the displacement of the crowd, the former President of the Cambodian Assembly, who had been rejected at the entrance gate the first time, managed to enter the embassy compound. He was so weak and nervous that, after he identified himself to the authorities, he had to be supported by the gendarmes.39 The only one who could solve the mystery of the date, the photographer himself, cannot be found. His name appears neither in the Newsweek issue nor in the books of United Press International (UPI), the American agency that holds the copyright to the picture.40 The authors of the article, Paul Brinkley-Rogers and Kim Willenson, were not on the spot in Cambodia at the time (Brinkley-Rogers was in Vietnam, Willenson in the United States) and they do not remember the photographer. The photographers who were present in Phnom Penh in April 1975, such as Al Rockoff, Arnaud Borrel, Sylvain Julienne, Roland Neveu, all denied taking the image.41 Yet, Billon Ung used the photograph as evidence in her prosecution. How does such a picture qualify as evidence in a judicial context in spite of its indeterminacy? The Newsweek photograph was presented to some of the French embassy protagonists in the frame of the trial’s hearings. Their versions of what happened greatly differed. According to Jean Dyrac and the ethnologist François Bizot (who served as intermediary between the Khmer Rouge and the French authorities), Ung Bun Hor willingly surrendered to the new regime with the hope that Prince Sihanouk would soon be back in power to help him. Other witnesses, such as the physician Etienne Plagie and Father François Ponchaud, are adamant that the Khmer politician did not want to leave the embassy, and his resistance caused incidents on his inevitable exit.42 The journalist Arnaud Borrel claims that Ung Bun Hor, who knew he would be killed, was pushed out of the French compound, a version confirmed by Pierre Gouillon, the second gendarme in the photograph.43 The Newsweek picture does not make it possible to favor one version over another, yet it is still evidence of something. The multiple readings of the photograph account for the ambiguity of what occurred at the French embassy on April 20, 1975. Similarly, when juxtaposed with the testimonies, the image reveals that the bystanders and witnesses are still unable, thirty years after the events, to

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confront the reality of what happened, their involvement in events or passivity in front of them. In this respect, the Newsweek photograph functions as the “developer” in which processes of psychological repression are made visible. It bears witness to the unreliable nature of traumatic memory, as the same event, apparently a shock for all those implicated, is retold in different ways, and consequently left inaccessible. It illustrates what Liss presents as the paradoxical working of trauma, as trauma’s “filtering and protective mechanisms issue a warning that the representation of events cannot be completely lucid or easily accessible.” Whereas its “confrontational dynamics also insist on their breaking through this web of opacity.”44 Confronted with such a photograph, the distant witness is thus the one who, while observing this working and even participating in it by patching together pieces of information, acknowledges the impossibility of ever reaching a single version. The story of Ung Bun Hor is particular in that it combines distinct levels of not looking in the unfolding of events at the embassy in April 1975: the individual one and that dictated by the raison d’état, the latter still hardly discussed in recent years.45 In this context “public secrecy”—the passivity if not compliance of Westerners in the context of early massacres in Cambodia—becomes a State secret. Not looking at the photograph and the events before the camera is realized through political manipulations aimed to conceal another, higher level of responsibility. In order to reveal this high level of responsibility, the Newsweek photograph has to be read with a different set of captions, together with part of the prosecution file of Billon Ung: the telegrams that Jean Dyrac exchanged with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the government in France on April 17 and April 18, 1975. The telex messages were declassified following the action of the first judge in charge of Billon Ung’s trial. The documents clearly incriminate the French authorities. The latter, informed by the consul that Cambodian officials had sheltered at the embassy, showed no intention of protecting the Republicans. The telegrams involve the upper reaches of the French government. Eight messages bear the annotations PM (Prime Minister) and PR (President), Jacques Chirac and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, respectively. François Bizot’s description in his memoirs, The Gate (2003), of the French embassy as an insulated, fragmented milieu, where talks were held behind closed doors and decisions made by a small diplomatic circle, aptly summarizes the situation.46 The embassy was a microcosm of what was played on a bigger stage and with key actors. It is this aspect that the Newsweek photograph comes to symbolize. It is not so much its indexical power as its iconic power that makes it an image of state secret. By capturing a liminal zone, neither in nor out, a moment of undecidability and arbitrariness, the image points to the gate. The photograph shows a door to Khmer Rouge hell activated by external mechanisms that remain out of sight, confidential. In that sense, the picture visualizes the existence of something behind the scene and at the same time the impossibility of knowing

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more about it. It is the forbidden core, what cannot be looked at and must be protected by layers of veils. SELECTIVE VISIONS OF “IDEOLOGICAL BLINDNESS” Photographs in Gunnar in the Living Hell are presented with three levels of captions: past (“Thoughts from 1978”), present (“Thoughts today”), and repressed (“Forbidden thoughts at that time”). Often simplistic and repetitive, the captions fail to open up a critical reflection on what I am referring to as not looking at public secrecy. Rather, they point to the need for a broader discursive apparatus—including, for instance, recent and older statements by all protagonists as well as comparisons with the impressions of other visitors—in order to better reflect on the different attitudes of not looking adopted by the Swedes during their travel in Democratic Kampuchea. If we take again the example of the photograph “Phnom Penh, August 1978,” the set of captions seems to imply that anybody facing such an empty urban landscape would have understood that something was wrong in Democratic Kampuchea. Yet, the juxtaposition of these captions with the depiction by Elizabeth Becker of Phnom Penh in December 1978 shows that such a judgment should be mitigated. She describes pots of bougainvillea and frangipani replacing wire and barricades, freshly painted government buildings, immaculate parks, and clean streets—a Potemkin village à la Khmer Rouge that could deceive visitors temporarily.47 In the same way, a more layered captioning would restitute the differences in motivations, concerns, and approaches of the members of the Swedish delegation, which was far from being an homogenous group. Jan Myrdal was a hardcore sympathizer of Pol Pot’s revolution and long-lasting friend of China’s People Republic, the main ally of the Khmer Rouge.48 Bergström came from the anti-Vietnam War movement. In this respect, their relation to Marxism–Leninism or the situation in Indochina was not the same, something that could not but impact on what and how they documented their trip in Democratic Kampuchea. The DC-Cam and Living History Forum do not delve into the subject: how differences in ideological assumptions and professional background could have affected the way the Swedes documented their travel and still influence the viewer’s perception of such documentation today. Instead, the two institutions create an all-explanatory framework for reviewing the photographs: what they identify as an “ideological blindness,” in the way that the exhibition was advertised. The Swedes were so brainwashed by Maoism that they did not even see the tricks of the Khmer Rouge. The video advertisement produced for the 2009 exhibition in Stockholm put it playfully: the Swedes wore red “Mao glasses” (Mao Glasögon).49 The shortcut, however, does not do justice to the actual situation: first, because the delegates did not wear the same kind of “Mao glasses,” and second, because they were not the only ones suffering from selective vision. At the time “ideological blindness”

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was a general condition entailed by polarized worldviews of Cold War politics. It is hardly mentioned in Gunnar in the Living Hell. For example, the turnabout of Western governments in 1979, as they shifted their support to the Khmer Rouge, remains conveniently out of frame, although it had far bloodier consequences for Cambodians than a few articles published in Maoists-run newspapers.50 Gunnar in the Living Hell presents readers and viewers with a paradoxical situation. For a project allegedly dealing with the effects of ideology, it is remarkably void of direct address of ideological issues. The organizers follow a process that the cultural anthropologist Allen Feldman analyzes as the transformation of trauma narratives into “technologies of memory that generate biographical archives or are grafted onto biographical artifact, transforming the latter into juridical and emotive currency.”51 The meetings that the DC-Cam organized between various segments of Khmer society and Bergström during the latter’s second journey to Cambodia in November 2008 reflect this same depoliticization through transformation. They fit the “prescriptive plotting” that Feldman describes as including stages such as “overcoming through redemptive survival, recovery, and a restorative justice.”52 As he traveled across Cambodia, the Swede encountered villagers, survivors, and community leaders. Many asked him how he could have been so misguided that he did not see the terror that pervaded Democratic Kampuchea. However, reports of Bergström’s journey show that the purpose of these meetings was not so much to explain why he had been so blind as to apologize to Cambodians and to atone for his mistakes.53 It was considered a form of reparation, not only for Cambodians but also for Bergström himself. It was a “healing process,” in the words of Youk Chhang, who adds “he [Bergström] is part of our history now, and it’s our mission to help people reconcile and move on.”54 The role a project such as Gunnar in the Living Hell plays in the context of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal is well analyzed by Sarah Jones Dickens: “While the tribunals may indeed pave the way for the beginnings of national reconciliation, reconciliation must happen on the ground. It must involve bystanders who aided through their moral support and silence.”55 Gunnar in the Living Hell is part of the outreach activities of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. It supplements a dialogue between individuals that the trials in Phnom Penh—focused on top Khmer Rouge leaders—did not provide. Obviously, the narratives of redemption, the book and exhibition put in the fore obscure many political issues. For example, the role of foreign powers in Cambodia before 1975 and after 1979 is still a hazy issue. Yet, in the very way therapeutic and legal paradigms distort historical knowledge and at the same time open the historical terrain “for potential critical inquiry,” Gunnar in the Living Hell is not a one-sided project.56 If it helps cast aside inconvenient ideological or geopolitical matters, it also contributes to shaping a new political agency in which representatives of the civil society (DC-Cam), foreigners, and Cambodian citizens together decide about the forms of their relation to the Khmer Rouge regime.

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CONCLUSION If the photographs examined here show something today, it is certainly changes in the perceptions of the West not looking at the Cambodian tragedy, both as it unfolded at the time and as this vision integrates our collective consciousness today. The two sets of images here discussed reveal one instance of how we remember and what we deem worthy, or otherwise, to remember. The emergence of images such as Bergström’s and Newsweek’s into the set of images usually resorted to in representing Khmer Rouge atrocities; for example, the infamous execution center S21, now Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes, or pictures of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, is welcome for several reasons. Not only does their publication show that turning away from the situation in Cambodia was an attitude shared across a wide spectrum of people in the West, from radical leftists to governmental officials, but also the exercise of contextualizing both the seen and unseen in these photographs offers the possibility to develop new narratives, whether they be complementary, alternative, or clashing. The images encourage us to ask what other situations or events related to the Cambodian genocide that have not yet been considered. These include, for example, the role of the Khmer Republic in the coming to power of the Khmer Rouge or the support of Western powers to Pol Pot’s guerrillas after 1979. The images also ask how we might thus begin to look at them.

NOTES 1. Ismail Kadare, The Concert (London: Harvill Secker, 1994), 177. 2. Mentioned by Laura Summers in “The CPK: Secret Vanguard of Pol Pot’s Revolution,” Journal of Communist Studies 3, no. 1 (1987): 11. Quoted by David Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 16. 3. The historian David Chandler stresses the preference of Democratic Kampuchea leaders for “being clandestine, for verbal ambiguity, and for subterfuge, a conspirational style of government.” In “A Revolution in Full Spate: Communist Party Policy in Democratic Kampuchea, December 1976,” in The Cambodian Agony, eds. David A. Ablin and Marlowe Hood (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 166. 4. Alexander Laban Hinton, “Songs at the Edge of Democratic Kampuchea,” in At the Edge of the Forest: Essays on Cambodia, History, and Narrative in Honor of David Chandler, eds. Anne Ruth Hansen and Judy Ledgerwood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 79. 5. Chandler, Voices from S-21, 43. 6. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 7. Ibid., 6. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Gunnar in the Living Hell:. Democratic Kampuchea, August 1978 (Phnom Penh: Documentation Centre of Cambodia, 2008).

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10. Philippe Broussard, “Le Jour où la France Céda aux Khmers Rouges,” L’Express (May 12, 2009), accessed June 3, 2010. http://www.lexpress.fr/ actualite/monde/asie/le-jour-ou-la-france-ceda-aux-khmers-rouges_760065. html/. 11. The expression is from the historian Michel Vovelle, Ideologies and Mentalities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 40, quoted in Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 12. 12. Taussig, Defacement, 59. 13. The newsletters published in 1978 by the Democratic Kampuchea’s representation in France, the Comité des Patriotes du Kampuchéa Démocratique, provide a detailed list of these delegations. Some travels are well documented. François Rigaux, from the Association Belgique-Kampuchéa, wrote, “Un Socialisme à la Spartiate: le Kampuchéa Démocratique” (September 1978). The French Maoists Annie Brunel and Camille Granot published serialized articles under the title “Mille Kilomètres à travers le Kampuchéa Démocratique,” in the PC-ml newspaper L’Humanité Rouge, nos. 949–957 (October 12–24, 1978). The editor of The Call, Daniel Burnstein, and his companions David Kline and Robert Brown, released Kampuchea Today: An Eyewitness Report from Cambodia, in December 1978. 14. Peter Fröberg Idling, Pol Pots Leende [Pol Pot’s Smile] (Sweden: Atlas, 2006). The book has not been translated into English, but some chapters are available. Accessed August 9, 2014, http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/ from-pol-pots-smile/, 15. Stéphanie Gée, “Les Excuses d’un Suédois pour son Soutien aux Khmers Rouges,” Ka-Set, November 22, 2008. 16. Erika Kinetz, “Pol Pot’s Former Dinner Guest Admits to Lapse in Judgment,” The Cambodia Daily, November 1, 2007, accessed June 12, 2010, http://www.cambodiadaily.com/stories-of-the-month/pol-pots-former-dinnerguest-admits-to-lapse-in-judgment-279/. 17. “Moi j’avais compris que c’était fini. Je me suis enfermée dans ma chambre et j’ai pleuré en silence, pour ne pas montrer de faiblesse devant mes enfants. Je n’avais plus qu’un seul espoir : que les Khmers rouges le tuent rapidement sans le faire souffrir. Mais on n’a jamais retrouvé son corps.” Catherine Rebuffel, “Le Combat de Billon Ung en Mémoire de son Mari,” La Croix, January 30, 2007, accessed July 26, 2011, http://www.la-croix.com/Archives/2007–01–30/ Le-combat-de-Billon-Ung-en-memoire-de-son-mari-_NP_-2007–01–30– 282795. 18. Broussard, “Le Jour.” 19. Ibid. 20. Jon Henley, “Thirty Years on the Nightmare of Pol Pot’s Terror Haunts a Widow in Paris suburb,” The Guardian, January 27, 2006, accessed June 14, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jan/27/france.cambodia. 21. It is a process she describes in detail in her book Rouge Barbare (France: Respublica, 2009). 22. Elyda Mey, “Cambodian Diaspora Communities in Transitional Justice” (Briefing paper, International Centre for Transitional Justice, New York, March 2008), 6–16. At that time the United Nations and the Cambodian government were still discussing the establishment of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia. 23. In 2007 the examining magistrate withdrew on the grounds that he could not apply the universal competency principle because Ung Bun Hor was not a French citizen. His withdrawal put an end to the investigation. After several

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26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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appeals by the lawyers of the International Federation for Human Rights representing Billon Ung, the Supreme Court of Judicature ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. In January 2009 it invalidated the magistrate’s decision. The Court of Appeals confirmed the verdict and appointed a new magistrate in January 2010. Soren Seelow, “Khmers Rouges: La Justice Rouvre le Dossier de l’Ambassade de France,” Le Monde, February 26, 2010, accessed June 8, 2010, http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2010/02/26/khmers-rouges-la-jus tice-rouvre-le-dossier-de-l-ambassade-de-france_1310476_3224.html. CALTEX stands for Petroleum Corporation of Texaco and Chevron. Photograph, Gunnar (Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2008), 9. The expression “year zero” refers to the process of tabula rasa the Khmer Rouge performed in Cambodia, the destruction of social, economical, cultural, and religious structures. It also features in the first book that supported testimonies of Khmer refugees on the atrocities perpetrated in Democratic Kampuchea, Cambodge Année Zéro, by Father François Ponchaud (Paris: Julliard, 1977). The expression is by the American journalist Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (New York: Public Affairs, 1986), 402. Gunnar Bergström, “Travelling in Kampuchea in the Time of the Khmer Rouge,” in Gunnar, 99. Photograph, Gunnar, 18. It was a recurrent argument among visitors in Democratic Kampuchea. Burstein claimed, “We traveled more than seven hundred miles, we stopped where we wanted to stop” (Kampuchea Today, 6). The French Maoists stressed that they circulated freely in the country and had always a photo camera in the hand (L’Humanité Rouge, no. 952). Not all the guests, as shows the example of Malcolm Caldwell, lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. When confronted with the same situation during his journey in Democratic Kampuchea in December 1978, he “preferred to stay in the car and laugh at the clumsy photo opportunity” (Becker, When the War, 416). The manipulation of the fellow traveler’s experience was one of the strategies applied by Marxist–Leninist regimes hosting Western guests, as analyzed Hans Magnus Ensenzberger in “Tourists of the Revolution,” Critical Essays, eds. Reinhold Grimm and Bruce Armstrong (New York: Continuum, 1982), and Paul Hollander in Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (1981, 4th edition, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009). Photograph, Gunnar, 19. These questions caption the photograph as “Forbidden thought at that time.” Photograph, Gunnar, 63. Brothers, War and Photography, 21. Idling, Pol Pot’s Smile, no page number. Andrea Liss, Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 10. Ibid., 85. Ibid. Broussard, “Le Jour.” The website of the newspaper L’Express credits the photograph as follows: DPA/Ullstein. Does it refer to DPA the Deutsche Press Agentur or is it a mere confusion with UPI? The forum for Khmer communities Khmer440 gives the same information, probably after L’Express, accessed June 3, 2010, http:// www.khmer440.com/chat_forum/viewtopic.php?p=147611.

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41. Broussard, “Le Jour.” 42. François Ponchaud, “Il ne Faut pas Croire qu’On les a Volontiers Poussés vers la Porte,” Cambodge Soir, October 22, 2004, accessed June 14, 2010, http://archives.cambodgesoir.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article& id=14974:francois-ponchaud—il-ne-faut-pas-croire-quon-les-a-volontierspousses-vers-la-porte&catid=43:archives&Itemid=191. 43. Piotr Smolar, “Phnom Penh 1975: Nuits Rouges sur l’Ambassade,” Le Monde, January 17, 2007, accessed June 7, 2010, http://www.lemonde. fr/asie-pacifique/article/2007/01/16/phnom-penh-1975-nuits-rouges-sur-lambassade_855979_3216.html. 44. Liss, Trespassing through Shadows, 122. 45. Either France knew it could no longer ensure her geopolitical and economical interests in Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia and wanted to withdraw as soon as possible and without incident, or it sought to ingratiate the new leaders by not interfering when they settled account with their former enemies. 46. François Bizot, The Gate (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 2003), 167–68. 47. Becker, When the War, 399. Of course, “beyond the stage-set perfection . . . the city had been left to rot,” a fact the journalist discovered when she strolled Phnom Penh by herself, 403. 48. Myrdal traveled in the Yenan region as soon as 1962. His Report from a Chinese Village (1963) is quoted at length by Ensenzberger in his text “Tourists of the Revolution,” 181–84. 49. Directors Robin Robinovitch and Filip Hammarströhe for Agency JMW, accessed June 29, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewIVvZt-Wg8. 50. Eager to counter the Soviet enemy, which had set the foot in Southeast Asia through its proxy Vietnam, Western powers sent financial and military assistance to the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. It led to a protracted civil war (until the late 1990s) between the Cambodian government and the Khmer Rouge forces. 51. Allen Feldman, “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma Aesthetic,” Biography 27, no. 1 (2004): 167. 52. Ibid., 165. Feldman underscores that our current understanding of events of violence is premised on a process in which these events have first been “legally processed or therapeutically exposed and treated” (169). This view echoes concerns expressed by scholars about the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and its pathologization of Democratic Kampuchea regime, turned into “a series of individual experiences of violence” with no relation to “the international and local political and economic context.” Caroline Hughes and Vanessa Pupavac, “Framing Post-Conflict Societies: International Pathologization of Cambodia and the Post-Yugoslav State,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 6 (2005): 874–875. 53. Guy de Launey, “Repentant Khmer Rouge Fan Returns,” BBC News, Novermber 18, 2008. Ker Munthit, “Swede Apologizes for Sympathizing with Khmer Rouge,” Taiwan News, November 16, 2008. Stéphanie Gée, “Le Pélerinage Expiatoire de Gunnar Bergström Laisse les Cambodgiens en Quête de Réponses,” Ka-Set, December 4, 2008, accessed June 22, 2010, http://ka-set. info/actualites/khmers-rouges/cambodge-gunnar-bergstrom-pol-pot-suedoisphotographe-retour-081204.html. Guy de Launey, “Repentant Khmer Rouge Fan Returns,” BBC News, November 18, 2008, accessed June 12, 2010, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7734749.stm. Ker Munthit, “Swede Apologizes for Sympathizing with Khmer Rouge,” Taiwan News, November 16, 2008, accessed June 11, 2010, http://ki-media.blogspot.nl/2008/11/swede-apologizesfor-sympathizing-with.html. Sarah Jones Dickens, “Gunnar in the Living Hell: Democratic Kampuchea, August 1978.” A Retrospective Exhibition of and Seminars with Gunnar Bergström, Searching for the Truth 4 (2008): 4–5. 54. Ker Munthit, “Swede Apologizes.”

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55. Dickens, “Gunnar in the Living Hell.” 56. Feldman, “Memory Theaters,” 170.

REFERENCES Becker, Elizabeth. When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution. New York: Public Affairs, 1986. Bergström, Gunnar. “Traveling in Kampuchea in the Time of the Khmer Rouge.” In Gunnar in the Living Hell: Democratic Kampuchea, August 1978, 99–100. Phnom Penh: Documentation Centre of Cambodia, 2008. Bizot, François. The Gate. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Brothers, Caroline. War and Photography: A Cultural History. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Broussard, Philippe. “Le jour où la France céda aux Khmers Rouges.” L’Express, May 12, 2009. Accessed June 3, 2010. http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/monde/ asie/le-jour-ou-la-france-ceda-aux-khmers-rouges_760065.html. Brunel, Annie, and Granot, Camille. “Mille kilomètres à travers le Kampuchéa Démocratique.” L’Humanité Rouge (October 12–24, 1978): 949–57. Burnstein, Daniel. Kampuchea Today: An Eyewitness Report from Cambodia. Chicago: Call Pamphlets, December 1978. Chandler, David E. “A Revolution in Full Spate: Communist Party Policy in Democratic Kampuchea, December 1976.” In The Cambodian Agony. Edited by David A. Ablin and Marlowe Hood. 165–179. Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1990. ———. Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. de Launey, Guy. “Repentant Khmer Rouge Fan Returns.” BBC News, November 18, 2008. Accessed June 12, 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7734749.stm. Dickens, Sarah Jones. “Gunnar in the Living Hell: Democratic Kampuchea, August 1978.” A Retrospective Exhibition of and Seminars with Gunnar Bergström. Searching for the Truth, Fourth Quarterly (2008): 4–5. Ensenzberger, Hans Magnus. “Tourists of the Revolution.” In Critical Essays. Edited by Reinhold Grimm and Bruce Armstrong. 159–85. New York: Continuum, 1982. Feldman, Allen “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma Aesthetic.” Biography 27, no. 1 (2004): 163–202. Fröberg Idling, Peter. Pol Pots Leende. Om en Svensk Resa genom Röda Khmerernas Kambodja (Pol Pot’s Smile: A Swedish Journey Through the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge). Sweden: Atlas, 2006. Accessed August 9, 2014. http://word swithoutborders.org/article/from-pol-pots-smile/. Gée, Stéphanie. “Le pélerinage expiatoire de Gunnar Bergström laisse les Cambodgiens en quête de réponses.” Ka-Set (December 4, 2008). Accessed June 22, 2010. http://ka-set.info/actualites/khmers-rouges/cambodge-gunnar-bergstrom-polpot-suedois-photographe-retour-081204.html. Henley, Jon. “Thirty years on the nightmare of Pol Pot’s terror haunts a widow in Paris suburb.” The Guardian, January 27, 2006. Accessed June 14, 2010. http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jan/27/france.cambodia. Hinton, Alexander Laban. “Songs at the Edge of Democratic Kampuchea.” In At the Edge of the Forest: Essays on Cambodia, History, and Narrative in Honor of David Chandler. Edited by Anne Ruth Hansen and Judy Ledgerwood. 71–91. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Hollander, Paul. Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society. 1981. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009.

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Hughes, Caroline, and Pupavac, Vanessa. “Framing Post-Conflict Societies: International Pathologization of Cambodia and the Post-Yugoslav State.” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 6 (2005): 873–89. Idling, Peter Fröberg, Pol Pots Leende [Pol Pot’s Smile]. Sweden: Atlas, 2006. Accessed August 9, 2014. http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/from-pol-pots-smile/. Kadare, Ismail. The Concert. London: Harvill Secker, 1994. Kinetz, Erika. “Pol Pot’s Former Dinner Guest Admits to Lapse in Judgment.” The Cambodia Daily, November 1, 2007. Accessed June 12, 2010. http://www. cambodiadaily.com/stories-of-the-month/pol-pots-former-dinner-guest-admitsto-lapse-in-judgment-279/. Liss, Andrea. Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Mao Glasögon. Promotional video directed by Robin Robinovitch and Filip Hammarströhe. Accessed June 29, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew IVvZt-Wg8. Mey, Elyda. “Cambodian Diaspora Communities in Transitional Justice.” Briefing paper, International Centre for Transitional Justice, New York, March 2008. Accessed June 6, 2010. http://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-CambodiaDiaspora-Justice-2008-English.pdf. Mey, Elyda. “Cambodian Diaspora Communities in Transitional Justice.” Briefing paper, International Centre for Transitional Justice, New York, March 2008. Accessed June 10, 2010. http://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-CambodiaDiaspora-Justice-2008-English.pdf. Munthit, Ker. “Swede Apologizes for Sympathizing with Khmer Rouge.” Taiwan News, November 16, 2008. Accessed June 10, 2010. http://ki-media.blogspot. nl/2008/11/swede-apologizes-for-sympathizing-with.html. Ponchaud, François. Cambodge Année Zéro. Paris: Julliard, 1977. ———. “Il ne faut pas croire qu’on les a volontiers poussés vers la porte.” Cambodge Soir, October 22, 2004. Accessed June 10, 2010. http://archives.cambodgesoir.info/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14974:francois-ponchaud— il-ne-faut-pas-croire-quon-les-a-volontiers-pousses-vers-la-porte&catid=43:ar chives&Itemid=191. Rebuffel, Catherine. “Le combat de Billon Ung en mémoire de son mari.” La Croix, January 30, 2007. Accessed July 26, 2011. http://www.la-croix.com/ Archives/2007–01–30/Le-combat-de-Billon-Ung-en-memoire-de-son-mari-_ NP_-2007–01–30–282795. Seelow, Soren. “Khmers Rouges: la justice rouvre le dossier de l’ambassade de France.” Le Monde, February 26, 2010. Accessed June 8, 2010. http://www.lem onde.fr/societe/article/2010/02/26/khmers-rouges-la-justice-rouvre-le-dossier-de-lambassade-de-france_1310476_3224.html. Smolar, Piotr. “Phnom Penh 1975: nuits rouges sur l’ambassade.” Le Monde, January 17, 2007. Accessed June 7, 2010. http://www.lemonde.fr/asie-pacifique/arti cle/2007/01/16/phnom-penh-1975-nuits-rouges-sur-l-ambassade_855979_3216.html. Summers, Laura. “The CPK: Secret Vanguard of Pol Pot’s Revolution.” Journal of Communist Studies 3, no. 1 (1987): 5–18. Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Ung Boun-Hor, Billon. Rouge Barbare. France: Respublica, 2009. Vovelle, Michel. Ideologies and Mentalities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

10 The “Coffin,” the Camera, and the Commodity Visualizing American Military Dead at Dover Rebecca A. Adelman On October 29, 2009, before the sun was even up, something momentous seemed to be happening in Delaware. There, at Dover Air Force Base—the primary entry point for American military casualties from overseas—in a solemn and choreographed media event, President Obama served as a witness to and participant in eighteen “dignified transfers,” the careful and routinized procedure for transporting American military dead back home.1 By making this predawn trip and orchestrating this staid photo opportunity, saluting the dead and praying over their bodies, Obama seemed to be flouting the repressive tendencies that had characterized President George W. Bush’s approach to the media and the casualties of the War on Terror. By joining this funerary ritual, Obama demonstrated his support for revisions to the Dover press policy that the Department of Defense made in February 2009.2 This change overturned the ban on media coverage for the arrival of military dead at Dover that had been in place since 1991. The prohibition was initially implemented by the Administration of George H. W. Bush during the 1990–1991 Gulf War, and was then fortified prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush. Generally unremarked upon and often ignored prior to that point, the Dover press ban ignited a controversy in 2004 when the government was compelled to release almost three hundred photos of precisely those arrivals. Five years later, the policy instituted by the Obama Administration permitted journalists to cover arrival and related ceremonies of military casualties as long as they had permission from the families of the dead to do so. The photographs from Obama’s predawn trip consisted of various views of the President at the head of a line of uniformed military personnel saluting flag-draped containers that held the remains of American casualties. The images were shot at eye level, as if to invite us to look at Obama and then follow the line of his sight onto the containers themselves, and there, to note that he is looking, and ultimately, to register what he is looking at. These containers, in colloquial and media usage, are often referred to as “coffins.” In fact, these vessels are transfer cases designed for the transport of bodies back to the United States, not the actual caskets or coffins in which those dead would be buried.3 Supporters heralded this 2009 policy change as a

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triumph for freedom of the press, evidence of a new administrative transparency, and a way to provide Americans with a realistic view of the heretofore invisible human cost of the war. In what follows, I argue otherwise. Certainly, there are practical differences between the Obama Administration’s relatively open policy and the more restrictive guidelines that had governed media access to the military dead since 1991. However, in this chapter I contend that there are substantive continuities between these superficially different approaches to image management. Specifically, I demonstrate that both press policies recognize the potency of the photo of the dead servicemember and leverage it for political gain, transforming the dead and their images into political currency. Beyond this common instrumental approach to the military casualty and attention to its public relations cost or benefit, there is also a persistent obscuring of the material fact of death, the corporeal realities of which are masked by the very visual practices that claim to reveal them. This hiddenness, built into the images themselves, vexes any effort to look at the pictures. Essentially, it dictates that any act of looking at the pictures is also, paradoxically, an act of not seeing the dead. Moreover, it means that any look, regardless of its intention, risks being subsumed by the objectifying visuality of the state. This visuality regards military casualties as state property—both physical and symbolic—and uses them accordingly in the service of its own interests, without any substantive concern for them or their families, except insofar as such attention would be politically expedient, whether to consolidate state power over the visual or to make a public gesture toward supporting the troops. Developing a meaningful alternative to this visuality would necessarily entail another kind of looking, which may actually require not looking after all. THE STATE AND THE CAMERA IN THE COMPANY OF DEATH Covered with flags that draw our gaze even as they delimit it, these containers and the bodies of returning US servicemen and -women within them are situated at the intersection of two histories of death: that of photography and that of the state. Photography has long “kept company with death,” particularly during wartime.4 Roland Barthes has famously argued that upon seeing oneself in a photograph, one experiences a “micro-version of death,” and that “death is the eidos” of such a photograph, the very form of it.5 Despite—or perhaps because of—this close association between death and photography, contemporary Western viewers often experience a kind of squeamishness when confronted with a photograph of a dead body. However, this unease was largely absent from at least the first half-century of photography, when postmortem photography was a common component of mourning. The taboo on photographing the dead emerged gradually, as Americans in general came to regard death as something too private and too extraordinary to be captured in a snapshot. While these cultural

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understandings of death shifted, other forms of portraiture began to replace the genre of the postmortem that had been so popular in the nineteenth century.6 For its part, since the Civil War, the US government has taken an increasingly interventionist approach to the bodies of its military dead.7 It has sought increasing jurisdiction over them and their images, claiming authority over the circulation of both. The practices through which the state exercises these claims have lately intertwined at Dover, which has become a site for the contestation of death, visuality, and state power. The state’s needs, even more than those of the families of the military deceased, have dictated press policy at Dover. Press policy at the base has oscillated between showy and secretive, alternately defining looking and not looking as the appropriate ways to honor the military dead. For the government, war dead are a bureaucratic issue and a public relations challenge, especially, but not exclusively, when the war is controversial; in those instances, casualties threaten to undermine rather than galvanize popular support for the war.8 Accordingly, Dover press policy bears the imprint of the need to manage both the logistics and the representation of military death. In a practice that has its roots in the mid-twentieth century, the United States became one of the first countries to insist that its war dead be sent back home, and is essentially peerless in the effort it now expends to facilitate that return.9 This custom serves to reunite American military families with their dead loved ones, and enables the state to assert a proprietary interest in the body that it takes such pains to repatriate. In turn, this interest extends beyond the bodies themselves to the photographs that capture them. Government interventions in the funerary procedures for military dead are never wholly altruistic: as Paul Achter notes, “because [soldiers’] bodies are borrowed by the state for warfare, they are central to definitions of national identity—their health, their deaths, and their wounds serve as metonyms for both the nation’s health and the condition of the war.”10 The state’s careful management of the dead and, moreover, their representation is inherently self-interested and strategic. During both World War I and World War II, the American government was often content to let deceased American military personnel be interred overseas. Policy shifted toward repatriation of the dead during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, though homecomings for remains of troops killed in Vietnam did not garner much fanfare, primarily because the government recognized the potential for the antiwar movement to co-opt such scenes for its own purposes. In the years following Vietnam, as patterns of American military engagement changed, ceremonious homecomings for overseas fatalities “became increasingly common and elaborate” at a variety of locations and were even occasionally attended by presidents.11 Unlike military personnel killed in Vietnam, casualties of a large-scale and deeply divisive war, the bodies coming home in the post-Vietnam late 1970s and early 1980s were victims of small skirmishes, isolated attacks, or ambushes, such as the

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Marines killed in Beirut in 1983.12 Casualties like these were easily represented as uncomplicated emblems of American heroism, and so—unlike in Vietnam—the government risked very little by mourning them publicly. Most observers agree that Gulf War press policy was motivated by a tacit concern about a nationwide relapse of the “Vietnam syndrome”—namely, the belief that public awareness of American fatalities translated into popular antipathy to the war that caused them.13 In late 1990, as it prepared for the Gulf War, the government put preventative measures in place that hinged on careful management of looking and not looking alike, alternately courting publicity and rigorously enforcing a system of press restrictions. On the one hand, Administration press policy evolved, in Paul Virilio’s terms, from “military secrecy . . . to the overexposure of live broadcast,” characterized by a willingness to put war on display.14 New weapons technology, which often built cameras into the ordnance itself, resulted in an ample supply of footage that made the war seem clean, precise, and victimless. The resultant images—of precision strikes on intended targets, of buildings and bridges demolished without human casualties—were the sights that the government encouraged American spectators to look at, precisely because there was so little to see. On the other hand, while the government encouraged news outlets to pick up and rebroadcast these scenes, it also pursued a concerted strategy for managing media access to those images that were not so tidy, and therefore, not to be looked at. The first Bush Administration, under the guidance of its Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, simply prohibited journalists from viewing those scenes that could not be sanitized, including the bodies of those killed in the war, both Iraqi and American. The Administration’s media relations arsenal included mandated press blackouts, regulations governing the mobility of journalists in the Middle East, and more subtle, targeted restrictions on story and image content. Among these was a new prohibition against photographing the arrival of remains at Dover. The ban was implemented during the Gulf War and remained in effect after that, but it was not aggressively enforced during the Clinton Administration or during the first half of George W. Bush’s first term. Even during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the media was permitted to publish photos documenting the homecoming of American fatalities.15 One likely explanation for this is that the invasion of Afghanistan, apparently a direct retaliation for the attacks of September 11, was far less controversial than the subsequent invasion of Iraq, the subject of widespread domestic and international protests even before it was launched. In March 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon issued a directive that reiterated the 1991 ban. It stipulated that there should be no arrival ceremonies or media coverage for any military dead returning to the United States. The ban was later reinforced by a Senate vote of 54–39 to defeat a measure aimed at relaxing the restrictions on photography at Dover.16 Although the Bush Administration claimed that the policy was motivated by its concern for the privacy of military families, critics suggested that it was a thinly

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veiled effort to preempt dissent over the already divisive military excursion. This repressive stance toward Dover arrivals is consistent with a general preference for secrecy on the part of the Bush Administration that predated the September 11 attacks and intensified thereafter.17 Nevertheless, the Bush Administration only embargoed a certain kind of information about the war dead. It did not deny that there were American casualties, nor did it lie about the number of American dead; it simply sought to prohibit them from being represented in images. The United States Department of Defense has been candid in its treatment of casualty figures from the various fronts of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), and this information has long been available on the department website.18 Compared to individual tributes, aggregate casualty counts are a convenient solution for the state, providing a record of the sacrifice made by military personnel without the complications that might arise from paying individualized tribute, whether through words or images. In dealing with war dead, according to David Simpson, Western nation-states must negotiate between acknowledging their individuality and preserving the unifying idea of “a common cause and a common fate” among the fallen and the countrymen who survived them.19 Often, this means that whenever nation-states try to commemorate the dead, the “real dead are simultaneously forgotten, replicated, sequestered, serialized, and unknown.”20 Simpson suggests that the “real scandal” provoked by the 2004 Dover “coffin photos” was not so much that they depicted military dead, or even that there were so many of them, but rather that they starkly revealed the “mechanical” routines that the government uses to process the dead, which risk divesting them of their “individuality.”21 As vivid illustrations of these grim bureaucratic procedures, which might grate against civilian intuitions about how dead bodies ought to be handled and treated, the photographs documented state systems that might otherwise have been hidden from view. The most salient risk to the state, therefore, is not so much exposure of the dead, but visibility of its relationships to them. Some of the photographs, like those of the planes landing or the transport of cases into a waiting hearse, are taken from a distance. The photos that would come to define the event are those that focus on the transfer cases, shot from much closer. They are often taken in the claustrophobic space of the plane itself, placing us into close visual proximity with the cases, the flags covering them, and the people tending to them. Overall, the scandalous collection of coffin photos is actually rather monotonous, and the photos are all variations on a theme: shots of Air Force personnel, at various times of the day or night, managing various quantities of transfer cases, in and around cargo planes. Indeed, those “coffin photos” were not even coffin photos at all, a point that bears repeating because so much of the discourse about them incorrectly identifies them as such. To avoid replicating this obfuscation, I will subsequently refer to them as the “Dover photographs.” Actual coffin

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photos, pictures that clearly showed coffins or their contents, would satisfy a voyeuristic impulse, while also raising the political and ideological stakes of the demand for the right to look at them and inflating the significance of subsequently being allowed to do so. The persistent misnaming of the pictures as “coffin photos” reflects more than imprecision. It demonstrates instead a wish, on the part of curious spectators, that the images would show something other, something more, or something grittier than they do. EXCEPT THAT WE WERE NOT: LOOKING AT THE DEAD? April 2004 was an extended public relations nightmare for the Bush Administration: the battle of Fallujah, the Abu Ghraib photos, the televised broadcast by journalist Tom Brokaw of the names of American military personnel killed in Iraq, and the release of the Dover photographs.22 All of these events threatened to further undermine popular support for the mission that had already gone on eleven months longer than the Administration had claimed it would. As the debate about the pictures unfolded, dead military bodies and the photographs that purported to represent them became currency in a much larger trade. The contentious pictures placed two of the state’s obligations in conflict: on the one hand, the duty to honor and commemorate its war dead, and on the other, the imperative to uphold the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press that are guaranteed by the First Amendment. Reflecting on the ways that different lives and deaths are invested unevenly with significance, Judith Butler writes, “The differential distribution of grievability across populations has implications for why and when we feel politically consequential affective dispositions such as horror, guilt, righteous sadism, loss, and indifference.”23 She is commenting primarily on those deaths marked as unworthy of being mourned, like those of enemies or civilian “collateral damage.” Conversely, in the case of the “coffin photos,” it is precisely because the deaths (and preceding lives) have been endowed with so much significance that their photographs become vulnerable to such exploitation. In early 2003, the Bush Administration reinforced the extant press ban at Dover as, in Dana Milbank’s terms, a “simple solution” to this problem, wielding the ban preventively in anticipation of potential controversy about the war in Iraq and the American lives it would cost.24 Despite public support for media access to homecoming ceremonies of military casualties at Dover, the Administration prohibited them on the grounds that they were “insensitive” to the families of the deceased.25 Whether or not this was an accurate assessment of military families’ wishes is unclear, but a freelance writer, editor, and iconoclast named Russ Kick believed that the larger issue of freedom of speech superseded all other concerns. Kick is perhaps best known for his website The Memory Hole, versions 1.0 and 2.0.26 With their promise of “Rescuing Knowledge, Freeing Information,” Kick’s digital archives are a monument to suppressed histories, histories that otherwise

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would have been lost or destroyed.27 The sites were built largely around documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, including FBI files on famous people, FOIA case logs that track the number and status of all the claims that each agency receives, and the full complement of available Abu Ghraib photographs. By curating The Memory Hole, Kick aimed to expose the state’s inner workings and make this information accessible to the general public. In November 2003, Kick filed an FOIA request for all the photographs of casualties that had arrived at Dover since February of that year.28 He did not explain why he sought the photos, and his account of his FOIA request process did not include professions, for example, about a wish to honor military dead. Eventually, after an initial rejection and an appeal, the US Air Force acceded to Kick’s FOIA request for photos of Dover homecomings, sending him a CD containing 361 photographs. Recalling his receipt of the CD with the photos on it, he wrote simply, “Score one for freedom of information and the public’s right to know.” This collection documented the transport of two types of national dead: seventy-three of the photographs depicted transfer cases containing astronaut fatalities from the 2003 Columbia explosion, while the remaining 288 pictured those of military casualties of the GWOT. Kick estimated that 98.4% of these images depicted fatalities from Iraq. “Except,” as Simpson points out, “that they were not pictures of the dead.”29 They showed only the flag-draped vessels designed to transport them safely home. Beneath their flags, the dead were encrypted both literally and figuratively. Beyond the potentially inflammatory fact of the casualties themselves, there was nothing controversial in the images. There was no sign of any kind of misconduct with the cases, for example, and because the Air Force removed all identifying information from the coffins, viewers had no way of naming who was inside. But for Kick, this was immaterial. “Be this as it may,” he wrote about the anonymity of the dead, “the significance of the photo release remains unchanged. We were not allowed to see the war dead arriving at Dover. Now we are.”30 For Kick, looking at the photos was synonymous with seeing the dead, and also with rebelling against a repressive government. Many spectators seemed to agree. Once Kick published the photos, it was also revealed that two people working for a private company handling dignified transfers in Kuwait had been fired for taking pictures of the process. The media seized on both the photos themselves and the dramatic story of their release.31 Public demand for the images exceeded the bandwidth of The Memory Hole, and Kick directed frustrated viewers as follows: “Due to the huge traffic (4 to 5 million hits per day) in the days after the photos were posted, the following sites have mirrored the Dover photos: Antiwar. com/Exit Consulting/Warblogging.com.”32 Lauren Berlant has argued that America “loves its dead objects.”33 The clamor for the pictures of the “coffins” containing them confirmed this assertion. This affection was intensified

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by the doubly forbidden nature of the images: they were taboo both because of what they depicted and because they were banned by the government. By posting the pictures on his site and inviting everyone to browse at leisure, making it possible for all to have the experience of ostensibly looking at the dead, Kick forged a new kind of mourning ritual, where participation in national grief requires only the effort necessary to click through a slideshow. Given this, Kick’s representation of the images has the potential to trivialize the dead. Indeed, the callousness of the display vindicates, at least partially, the Pentagon’s main stated rationale for not wanting a media presence at the homecomings: namely, the impossibility of abiding by every family’s wishes for how they would proceed. The logic was that giving every fatality a customized homecoming would present an insurmountable logistical difficulty, and that permitting a media presence could also compromise the “privacy and dignity” of the dead and their families.34 As it happens, if the dead people represented in the photographs had been ordinary civilians, it is possible that the government would have been unable to release them under the FOIA, because “personal information affecting an individual’s privacy” is exempt from the Act.35 This provision is meant to ensure that the government cannot be coerced into revealing personal information about private citizens, but the Air Force ultimately reasoned that these particular images were not subject to such protection. In The Memory Hole, the act of looking at the photos upstaged the photos themselves. Kick, after all, asserted that the “significance of the photo release remains unchanged.”36 This implies that the release (and the preceding wresting of these photos away from the government) was itself the most important part of this whole affair. Indeed, the photographs, similar to ones that had already been published and revealing nothing additional about the deaths that they marked, promised no unique insight or experience. Nor was there a civic lesson to be taught. John Mueller has argued that though the military worked “enterprisingly” to conceal the photographs, they were superfluous to any effort to “drive home the basic reality of mounting casualties,” which Americans already comprehended.37 There was no information about who the casualties actually were, what killed them, or their appearances.38 This is not to say that the photographs were insignificant. Rather, their significance remained outside the frame in the self-referential relationship that spectators had to them. Put another way: the spectacle was the photographs as mere objects—their existence, censorship, and eventual publication—rather than what they conveyed. The spectacle around their suppression and release made visible only the fact of visibility. Because it seemed so astonishing that we were allowed to look at the photographs, it was easy to forget that in many ways, we were not looking. The photos themselves, posted online almost entirely without captions or explanations, yielded very little knowledge. Simultaneously, the anonymous sameness of the transfer cases highlights the fact that we cannot know who is contained within them, commanding us to look but refusing to cede anything beyond the superficial to our probing, inquisitive gazes.

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We were told we were looking at the dead. But in reality we were not. This was looking as an alibi for not looking, the spectacle of the photo release distracting us from the fact that the real, bodily truth of the war remains firmly and permanently hidden. It was secreted within the transfer cases and shrouded by the flags draped over them. It was also eclipsed even more thoroughly by the assertion that it had finally been revealed. “I SEE FIRSTHAND THE TERRIBLE WAGES OF WAR”: REVERSING THE BAN The value of the “coffin photos” was determined largely by the secrecy surrounding them and the spectacular way they were subsequently exhibited, rather than their subject matter. Their status changed in late February 2009, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates officially reversed the ban on photographing the return of military dead. In a practice patterned on policies at Arlington National Cemetery, photography would be allowed as long as the family of the casualty consented. Though he supported the revocation of the ban, Obama himself was circumspect about it in public, perhaps sensing that being too outspoken about this issue could be politically dangerous. Rather than addressing the policy directly when he mentioned Dover in various speeches, Obama instead emphasized how much he had learned from his funereal visits there.39 Still, this gesture toward greater transparency would certainly have appealed to his constituents, and so it often fell to then White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, to reiterate that Obama concurred with the decision Gates had made.40 Some, like John Ellsworth, a gold-star father and the president of Military Families United, criticized the decision to undo the ban as a concession to antiwar groups that would make it easier to “ ‘politicize our fallen.’”41 However, major news institutions and some activist groups lauded the policy as a victory of truth over censorship. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was “ ‘very, very supportive’ ” of the new policy because it is so “family-centric.”42 Certainly, it is significant that the new policy extends additional liberties to the families of the dead, should they choose to exercise them. But the state also stood to gain something by reversing the ban. The assertion of its concern for the rights and wishes of military families may have been sincere, but it was also strategic and self-serving. Not only did the reversal keep the corporeal secret of combat death, but it also enabled the Obama Administration to present itself as an advocate of press and information freedom. Beyond its political efficacy and its public relations value, this more permissive stance toward media coverage of Dover homecomings had other advantages, insofar as the state has a vested interest in regulating the visual. On October 28, 2009, Obama dramatized his support for the revocation by making the pilgrimage to Dover. In addition to generating a new

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batch of news photos, featuring the President solemnly saluting passing transfer cases, this visit also became an important rhetorical and ideological touchstone.43 Even before the visit, Obama’s support of the revised policy had proven politically useful, as when Gibbs invoked it as evidence of the President’s commitment to transparency, citing it in an effort to mitigate the controversy that resulted from Obama’s decision to block the release of additional detainee abuse photos in May 2009.44 In that case, after authorizing the publication of memos about “coercive interrogation” tactics, the President had said he would permit the photos to circulate, and then backtracked, citing their lack of informational value and the security risks they might pose. Critics interpreted Obama’s retraction of his promise as evidence that he had been disingenuous in his expressed commitments to transparency and to ending torture.45 In the wake of this, Obama’s active demonstration of support for media coverage at Dover had the potential to signal the sincerity of his beliefs in the former, if not his conviction about the latter. After Obama returned from his trip to Dover, both he and Gibbs repeatedly cited that experience to indicate that the President understood the gravity of the decision to deploy troops to Iraq and Afghanistan.46 And ultimately, whether we think the new policy is better, nobler, or more enlightened than its predecessor, whether we think that this is a way of honoring or exploiting dead soldiers, the debate reveals one constant: although their photographs may now be produced, circulated, and consumed differently, the dead remain valuable visual commodities, a value they retain even if, or perhaps, as long as we do not or cannot actually see them. In relationship to the material fact of death, the photos function like the transfer cases and the flags that adorn them: they hide the bodies while announcing their deaths. Showing so much and so little at once, these images of the war dead are also transferable visual commodities. Both the Bush and Obama Administrations recognized their value: the former responded by hiding them away, whereas the latter traded them for political gain. Because we are not actually looking at the dead, the Obama Administration risks nothing by giving media access to the dignified transfers. This permission serves retroactively to decrease the value of the hard-fought Dover photos, and by extension, other potentially damning images that the state released under duress, co-opting their meaning and readjusting spectators’ relationships to them. Although many antiwar activists implied that the sight of the “coffin photos” would arouse popular opposition to and protest against the war, in practice, the mediated act of witnessing the suffering or death of others tends to diminish spectators’ empathy for or interest in the casualties thus depicted.47 And in this case, there was not even any death to see. Protocol virtually guarantees that nothing offensive or scandalous will appear before the camera; even the suppressed photos that Kick published documented funerary rituals that were, in Simpson’s terms, “above all decorous and respectful.”48 And finally, the anonymity of the dead in

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these images militates against observers’ identification with them, as spectators remain trapped in and distracted by their own gazes and the overstated promises about what they are seeing.49 For these reasons, it is unlikely that these pictures would suddenly galvanize opposition to the ongoing war, but just in case, Obama has worked to control the discourse about them, offering his visit as evidence that he understands the importance of the war and can thus rationalize American deaths within it. During his quietly hawkish December 1, 2009 speech about the “way forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the President averred: I’ve traveled to Dover to meet the flag-draped caskets of 18 Americans returning home to their final resting place. I see firsthand the terrible wages of war. If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow.50 Obama repeatedly invokes the language of the visual in recounting his Dover experience, but of course, he did not actually see the “terrible wages of war.” Rather, he saw the boxes encasing the result of war. He looked at, and saw something, but not quite what he claimed. In this small but significant elision, Obama utilizes the sight of the caskets—which actually hide rather than display those terrible wages—for precisely the opposite ends that the antiwar movement had originally envisioned them. At the same time, by asserting that he both looked at and saw those casualties, he reiterates and reinforces the claim that revoking the photography ban actually revealed something to the American public. There is no more substantive information about American military casualties to be gained from the presence of press at Dover now than there was from the first batch of photos. Those 2004 photos provided their viewers with the frisson of seeing something that had previously been hidden from them. The newly authorized photos that could potentially be created at Dover will offer the state the benefits of showing, all the while eclipsing the actual dead and the real truth of war. The dead, having already given up so much, now unwittingly offer their services to the state again. In turn, the state, which has already claimed its authority over them alive and dead, reuses them as pawns in an effort to reconfigure and reassert its power over the image. “WHAT IS THE NEED TO SHOW THESE CASKETS?”: ON INSTRUMENTALIZING THE DEAD In articulating this dim view of the reversal of the ban on photography at Dover, I do not mean to understate the policy differences between the Bush and Obama Administrations. Nor, to be sure, am I advocating censorship. The reversal of the ban potentially offers military families more control over

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the bodies of their loved ones and their mourning, and provides the families access, should they want it, to a much larger stage upon which to make meaning of their sacrifice. It makes it easier, also, for journalists to provide a fuller account, should they desire to do so, of wars and some of their consequences.51 Overall, this policy change is an important affront to the institutionalized secrecy of the Bush Administration. Nevertheless, there are substantive continuities between the two sets of Dover press policies, between even the repressive 2003 Pentagon ban and Obama’s 2009 highly visible trip to the base. In his study of the relationships between the state and the visual in Argentina and Brazil, Jens Andermann argues for an understanding of the “state as a visual form: as a way of looking and as the objects the command observation.” The state, he says, is a “relation that binds a certain gaze to a particular artifact.”52 This formulation suggests that the state organizes our perception not only by shaping the perspective from which we view things but also by creating the visual landscape that we inhabit, providing things for us to look at. Despite the Obama Administration’s modification of the Dover press policy, the visual formation of the state has not changed, nor has its power over the dead or our ability to look at them. The artifact at which we are (not) looking is the same: the transfer cases hidden underneath flags. As Americans, our gaze at the dead, whom we see but do not see, is likewise unaltered. Past and present policies governing photography at Dover are simply different configurations of the magnetic visual relationship between the spectators and the dead. The state has always positioned itself between them: before as an obfuscating screen and now as a transparent connector. The 2009 iteration of the Dover press policy, which invites the media back in as a conduit for the looking that is now permitted, simply fortifies the linkages that have always existed between the state, the spectators, and the dead. Only the details of those bonds have changed. Neither the antagonistic course of action pursued by Kick nor the institutionalization of thanatography facilitated by the Obama Administration’s policy reflect any kind of nuance about the photographs. Both emphasize, rather uncritically, the rights of American spectators and so are aimed at rendering visible all of the things that Americans are, supposedly, entitled to see. Discourses of rights and freedoms further muddy the already complicated practical issues that inhere in press coverage of Dover homecomings. Whether or not the Department of Defense was being disingenuous in 2003 when it emphasized its concern for the wishes of individual families is impossible to know, but that assertion is one of the only public acknowledgments of a set of visual stakeholders other than spectators and the state (never mind the dead themselves). The presence of myriad and competing interests, and the powerlessness of the subjects of the photographs to dictate the terms by which they are represented, underscore the ethical messiness of this visual situation. This ethical complexity cannot be resolved through the political means of administrative fiat.

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Commenting on the Bush Administration’s refusal to allow press photography at Dover, Mary L. Clark argued that these interventions were representative of the “impulse toward the use of the dead to promote a particular understanding of the nation” as a powerful and positive force struggling successfully against terrorism abroad.53 Now that another Administration has conceded the open secret that the fight is more difficult than initially predicted and the enemy more intractable, that narrative is no longer persuasive. The decision to permit press photography (which still does not show what it claims to show) represents a turn back toward the domestic, an emphasis on burnishing the image of the Administration as the representative of a nation that admits to hard truths and confronts them determinedly. Wary of a political ploy, John Ellsworth posed this rhetorical query: “‘What is the need to show these caskets, other than to try to inflame controversy?’”54 So far, the controversy that he feared has not come to pass, but his general question about whose interests are served in the release of the photographs remains unanswered. No matter who has sought to control the creation and circulation of these photographs, everyone has needed something from them, and therefore, everyone has instrumentalized the war dead. Their debates, focused on how much the state shows or does not show, distract from the corporeal facts of war and reveal, ultimately, that the actual casualties are and always have been beside the point. Consequently, the assertion that Americans have a right to see images like the Dover photos might be somewhat misguided. In a reflection on the visualities of American prisons, Ruby C. Tapia considers the dearth of images of incarcerated women, a lack that mirrors the general invisibility of prisons and their inhabitants in the United States. However, in confronting this absence, Tapia observes that “what to lament . . . is not entirely clear,” as visibility alone, with its uncontrollable exposure and attendant risks of objectification and dehumanization, is no solution.55 In the photographs from Dover, whom to lament is also unknown, unknowable. These photos reveal nothing about their subjects: no names, no genders, no races, no ages, no identities beyond “military” and “casualty,” and no information about the circumstances of their deaths, their thoughts or feelings about the war they were fighting. Perhaps what spectators are actually mourning, unknowingly, when they mourn the Dover photos is not only the dead themselves but the way the photos frustrate our desire to look at them and limit the power of our look to extract information. But this may not be a loss worth grieving very deeply. A demand for unfettered access to more images, or to more explicit images, is an inadequate answer to the urgent questions that the Dover photos pose. Instead, we need to consider what it means to demand access to such images. We need to query the extent to which that desire to look (which can seem so radical when it is forbidden, and therefore, antagonistic to the state that forbids) reflects the visual system that the state itself has organized around the dead and their representations. In what ways does the

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state delimit or expand our vision, our very perception? What conditions us to want to look at the war dead? Why do we feel entitled to do so, and angry when we cannot? Candid responses to self-reflexive questions like these are necessary preconditions for any kind of ethical looking at these photos, for any hope of a spectatorship that places the status, subjectivity, and claims of the dead before our own. Seeking to nuance the often knee-jerk emphasis on visibility and transparency, Ariella Azoulay notes that “with contemporary conditions being such that injury to others is largely visible, the problem is not so often the concealment of objects from the gazes but the constant threat to the public civilian capacity to see as spectators.”56 For Azoulay, spectatorship is more than seeing, or looking, but rather is the process of entering into an active relationship with the camera, the photograph, the photographer, and the people pictured in the frame. In light of this, if we are truly committed to looking at the war dead in a way that does not objectify them, our answers might gnaw at us until we reconsider the act of looking altogether. REFUSING THE GIFT Eventually, the dead will be buried and, having served their final purpose for the state, will be left alone. The state, for its part, will do as it wishes. Spectators, constrained by the intractability of death and the willfulness of the state, are left to make a choice in the narrow space between them. For Americans, the flag on the photographed transfer cases “hails viewers as citizens.”57 Thus interpellated, Americans are pulled into a network of looks, the parameters of which are governmentally determined and ensure that much of the looking will actually amount to no looking at all. The meaning of the images will always be defined, at least partially, by their connections to the state, which has now transformed them into public property that promises to reveal far more than it actually does, marking them as a public good in the service of honoring and memorializing the dead. Azoulay has claimed the importance of “challeng[ing] the transformation of the photograph into an object of private property,” but the case of the Dover photographs is additionally complex because they are claimed as public property by the state;58 the most vexing problem is that the photos are seen as “property” of any kind. Azoulay’s framework hinges on the assertion that a person’s willingness to be photographed while they are suffering “presumes” a connection between her or him and the viewer, what Azoulay describes as a “civil space” in which that relationship might be elaborated.59 While Azoulay’s argument generally focuses on beings who are alive and suffering before the camera, the past suffering (which almost surely attended their deaths in combat) and present vulnerability (which is not diminished by their deadness) means that we must still consider these dead as political and photographic subjects. The fundamental difficulty here

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is that the—obliquely—photographed dead have never given their consent. Instead, consent has been granted on their behalf by a range of other actors. The permission given by these self-appointed proxies does not remedy the impossibility of knowing what the dead would have wished for these photographs. With the work of exposing the photographs done, spectators need now to decide how to look at them. Located at an unbridgeable remove from the dead, we have various ways of looking available to us, various modes of consuming their mediated likenesses. We might glance over them in a state of distraction, idly surfing through television channels or toggling between webpages. We might seek them out because of curiosity, to gratify a need for news or even a research interest. We might be moved to look by sympathy, or compelled by a sense of outrage. We might understand this kind of witnessing as a patriotic duty, a way of honoring or commemorating strangers who died on our behalf or in our stead. We might even confess to looking because of a voyeuristic impulse, deriving pleasure from seeing something we suspect we ought not to be seeing. Realistically, spectators probably shift repeatedly among these ways of looking. At a certain point, however, the differences between these spectatorial positions, some of which seem honorable and others of which seem objectionable, becomes insignificant. They all involve using the dead in one way or another, even if they are pressed into the service of an ostensibly ethical cause. Writing about the effort to put the photographs from Abu Ghraib to some kind of broader ethical purpose, Elizabeth Dauphinee cautions that the ethical use of the imagery of torture and other atrocities is always in a state of absolute tension: the bodies in the photographs are exposed to our gaze in ways the render them abject, nameless, and humiliated—even when our goal in the use of that imagery is to oppose their condition.60 Although I do not want to elide the specifics of the Abu Ghraib photos and the Dover photos under consideration here, or collapse the differences between them, Dauphinee’s warning serves as a reminder that the conditions in which some photographs are created and displayed can override spectatorial intentions toward them. In short, there can be no pure, faultless, or harmless way of looking at these images, no matter how careful we are. Alternatively, perhaps, we might find ourselves not looking. This might happen by default, if the images are not readily available to us. Not looking might be the result of ignorance, a lack of awareness that there is anything to look at. We might not look because we are indifferent to the situation of the dead, or because we are overwhelmed by it, or fatigued from encounters with so much suffering. We might not look because we are squeamish, afraid of what we might see. All of these forms of not looking share a common passivity. Not looking, in these cases, is merely happenstance or a reflex. Ultimately, this kind of unexamined opting-out is complicit with the state’s

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(now relinquished, or satisfied) need for visual secrecy, and so is problematic in its own right. I would like to conclude by raising the possibility of an active, intentional, politicized not looking as a radical alternative to these courses of (in)action. Wendy Kozol has observed that when we confront photographs documenting the unsavory truths of war, we tend to respond with “sentimental and often solipsistic claims of compassion or denial.” She argues for the importance of moving “beyond” these reactions by attending to the politics and ethics of spectatorship.61 Paradoxically, in this case, not looking might be the best way to do that essential work. This intentional aversion of the gaze is a way of refusing the instrumentalizing power of the state and its morbid gift of a visual commodity. This rejection refuses to accept these commodities because it recognizes them as a ruse, a way of purporting to show the truth with a promise that hides it even better. Admittedly, not looking denies an audience to families who sought it out, but this is not the bureaucratic indifference of the officials that initiated and then upheld the photography ban. Rather, it is a way of operating apart from the visual economy of death, of withholding a small portion of the profits from those who oversee it. NOTES 1. For a journalistic account of the rituals and procedures surrounding military death, see Dan Baum, “Two Soldiers: How the Dead Come Home,” The New Yorker, August 9, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/ 08/09/040809fa_fact1. 2. Obama returned to Dover, with much less fanfare, in August 2011, to greet the remains of thirty US troops who died when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. See David Nakamura and Craig Whitlock, “Obama Pays His Respects to Slain Troops at Dover Air Force Base,” the Washington Post, August 9, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/44/post/ president-obama-to-pay-his-respects-to-troops-at-dover-air-force-base/2011/ 08/09/gIQA2Aak4I_blog.html. 3. Baum, “Two Soldiers,” n.p. I discuss this misnaming in more detail below. 4. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 24. 5. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 12–13. 6. Andrea L. Volpe writes about the ascendancy of cartes de visite and other forms of inexpensive and accessible portrait photography. “Cartes de Visite: Portrait Photographs and the Culture of Class Formation,” in Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People, ed. Ardis Cameron (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 42–57. The availability of these technologies made it possible for many people to integrate photography into their everyday lives rather than reserving it for extraordinary occasions. 7. Mary Clark, “Keep Your Hands of My (Dead) Body: A Critique of the Ways in Which the State Disrupts the Personhood Interests of the Deceased and His or Her Kin in Disposing of the Dead and Assigning Identity in Death,” Rutgers Law Review 58 (Fall 2005): 45–120.

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8. War Dead provides a detailed overview of the methodical way that governments in Western nations have handled their war dead. See Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, War Dead: Western Society and Casualties of War, trans. Richard Veasey (Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2006). 9. David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 91–2. 10. Paul Achter, “Unruly Bodies: The Rhetorical Domestication of Twenty-FirstCentury Veterans of War,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 1 (2010): 49. 11. Dana Milbank, “Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins,” the Washington Post, October 21, 2003, para. 6. 12. Ibid., para. 7. 13. Simpson, 9/11, 91. 14. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Verso, 1989), 66. 15. Jane E. Kirtley, “Transparency and Accountability in a Time of Terror: The Bush Administration’s Assault on Freedom of Information,” Communication Law and Policy 11, no. 4 (2006): 499. 16. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), “Senate allows ban on photos of soldiers’ caskets to stand,” June 22, 2004, accessed August 4, 2014, http://www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=3940. 17. Kirtley, “Transparency and Accountability in a Time of Terror,” 484. 18. United States Department of Defense, “Defenselink Casualty Report,” accessed July 11, 2014, http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf. 19. Simpson, 9/11, 2. 20. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (New York: Verso, 1998), 56. 21. Simpson, 9/11, 93. In her sketch of universalized vulnerability, Judith Butler writes, “over and against an existential concept of finitude that singularizes our relation to death and to life, precariousness underscores our radical substitutability and anonymity in relation to both certain socially facilitated modes of dying and death and to other socially conditioned modes of persisting and flourishing.” Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 14. What is revealed in the photos, therefore, is the state’s orchestration and management of this substitutability for a population that it purports to value, uniquely. 22. Tony Grajeda, “Picturing Torture: Gulf Wars Past and Present,” in Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror,” ed. Andrew Martin and Patrice Petro (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 206–7. 23. Butler, Frames of War, 24. 24. Milbank, “Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins,” para. 2–4. 25. Barbie Zelizer, “Death in Wartime: Photographs and the ‘Other War’ in Afghanistan,” Press/Politics 10, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 30. 26. As of this writing, the websites are no longer operational. They were previously visible at http://www.thememoryhole.org. A mirror of the original page can be found at http://www.antiwar.com/doverimages/index.htm (accessed August 4, 2014). 27. The title of the website is a reference to George Orwell’s novel 1984; in this dystopic world, “memory holes” were incinerators for unpleasant or damaging information. 28. During the same period, Tami Silicio, an employee of a private company handling dignified transfers in Kuwait, snapped a picture inside the cargo hold of a plane. After the media picked up her photographs, Silicio was roundly

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

Rebecca A. Adelman condemned by both the Pentagon and her employer, which fired her, accelerating the scandal around the “coffin photos.” Smolkin provides an account of the facts of the case and the ways that Silicio’s story intersects with Kick’s. See Rachel Smolkin, “Photos of the Fallen: The Controversy over Coffin Photos Illustrates News Organizations’ Frustrations with Depicting Death in the Iraq War,” American Journalism Review 26 (June–July 2004), accessed September 15, 2010, http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=3677. Simpson, 9/11, 92. Kick, “The Memory Hole,” http://www.thememoryhole.org (accessed February 27, 2009). Smolkin, “Photos of the Fallen.” Kick, “The Memory Hole.” Lauren Berlant, “Uncle Sam Needs a Wife: Citizenship and Denegation,” in Visual Worlds, ed. John R. Hall, Blake Stimson, and Lisa Tamiris Baker (New York: Routledge, 2005), 30. Elisabeth Bumiller, “Defense Chief Lifts Ban on Pictures of Coffins,” The New York Times, February 27, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/ washington/27coffins.html, paragraph 5. Office of Privacy and Open Government, US Department of Commerce, “FOIA Exemptions,” 2005, accessed August 4, 2014, http://www.osec.doc. gov/omo/foia/exemptions.htm. My emphasis. John Mueller, “The Iraq Syndrome,” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 6 (November/ December 2005): 45. After the release of the images, the Pentagon reiterated the importance of the ban on photography, citing concerns over the privacy of the fallen. For many media personnel, this claim was a red herring (see Smolkin, “Photos of the Fallen”) precisely because the photographs reveal so little. See, for example: The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Obama and Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore before Meeting,” October 29, 2009 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ remarks-president-obama-and-minister-mentor-lee-kuan-yew-singaporemeeting); The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” December 1, 2009, (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ remarks-president-address-nation-way-forward-afghanistan-and-pakistan); and The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President to the Troops,” March 28, 2010 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ remarks-president-troops). In fact, before Obama even went to Dover, his press secretary at the time, Robert Gibbs, cited Obama’s support for the revocation of the ban as evidence of the President’s commitment to transparency after his controversial decision not to release additional photos from Abu Ghraib despite having promised to do so. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs: May 13, 2009,” Office of the Press Secretary, May 13, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ press-briefing-press-secretary-robert-gibbs-5132009. Bumiller, “Defense Chief Lifts Ban on Pictures of Coffins,” para. 13. John J. Kruzel, “Defense Department to Allow Photographs of Caskets with Family’s Permission,” American Forces Press Service, February 26, 2009, http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=53250, para. 13. Many of the news stories about this event feature similar photographs. One example is Jeff Zeleny, “Obama Visits Air Base to Honor Returning Dead,” The

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44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

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New York Times, October 29, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/ us/30obama.html. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs: May 13, 2009.” See, for example, Scott Wilson, “Obama Reverses Pledge to Release Photos of Detainee Abuse,” the Washington Post, May 14, 2009, http://www.washing tonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051301751.html. This story includes quotes from Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, criticizing the President’s decision. Amnesty International published a report on Obama’s retraction, “USA—Transparency and Accountability Dealt Another Blow: Administration Reversal on Release of Detainee Abuse Photos,” May 14, 2009, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ AMR51/067/2009/en/afba751c-176b-4f3d-a35f-441d3a66985d/amr51067 2009en.html. See, for example, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Obama and Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore before Meeting; The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, 11/30/09”; “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan”; and “Remarks by President to the Troops.” Carrie A. Rentschler, “Witnessing: US Citizenship and the Vicarious Experience of Suffering,” Media Culture Society 26 (2004): 297. Simpson, 9/11, 93. Beginning from the premise that “people are often unable to take in the sufferings of people close to them,” Susan Sontag suggests that photography exacerbates this difficulty. She continues, “for all the voyeuristic lure . . . it seems normal for people to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others, even others with whom it would be easy to identify” (Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador, 2004), 99. The distancing effect of the medium, in the case of the Dover photographs, is compounded by their blunt refusal to reveal any human details with which spectators might connect, the spectacle surrounding them, and their tantalizingly forbidden status. “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” In a surprising, if apparently counterintuitive, claim in the context of her argument about the civic significance and necessity of photography, Ariella Azoulay suggests that the “duty to photograph” a person or scene does not automatically imply a “duty to show” the resultant images. Further consideration of the significance of this disaggregation is, regrettably, beyond the scope of this chapter, but it does point to a potentially interesting form of meaningful but circumscribed witnessing of the return of these casualties. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Daniell (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 356. Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 2, 207. Clark, “Keep Your Hands of My (Dead) Body,” n.p. Quoted in Bumiller, “Defense Chief Lifts Ban on Pictures of Coffins,” para. 14. Ruby C. Tapia, “Profane Illuminations: The Gendered Problematics of Critical Carceral Visualities,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 686. Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 343. Achter, “Unruly Bodies,” 50. Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 98. Later, she writes, “the duty derived from the civil contract of photography is simultaneously to reject one’s

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claim to be the owner of a photograph that one possesses as well as anyone’s attempt to appoint him or herself as a guardian of another in an attempt to prevent that other person from being photographed” (104). 59. Ibid., 18. 60. Elizabeth Dauphinee, “The Politics of the Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery,” Security Dialogue 38, no. 2 (2007): 139–55, 145. 61. Wendy Kozol, “Battlefield Souvenirs and Ethical Spectatorship” (text of paper presented at Feeling Photography Conference, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, October 17, 2009).

REFERENCES Achter, Paul. “Unruly Bodies: The Rhetorical Domestication of Twenty-First-Century Veterans of War.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 1 (2010): 46–68. Adelman, Rebecca A. Beyond the Checkpoint: Visual Practices in America’s Global War on Terror. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. Amnesty International. “USA—Transparency and Accountability Dealt Another Blow: Administration Reversal on Release of Detainee Abuse Photos.” May 14, 2009. Accessed October 6, 2014. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR51/ 067/2009/en/afba751c-176b-4f3d-a35f-441d3a66985d/amr510672009en.html. Andermann, Jens. The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Anderson, Benedict. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. New York: Verso, 1998. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. Translated by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Daniell. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Baum, Dan. “Two Soldiers: How the Dead Come Home.” The New Yorker, August 9, 2004. Accessed August 7, 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/ archive/2004/08/09/040809fa_fact1. Berlant, Lauren. “Uncle Sam Needs a Wife: Citizenship and Denegation.” In Visual Worlds. Edited by John R. Hall, Blake Stimson, and Lisa Tamiris Baker. 15–42. New York: Routledge, 2005. Bumiller, Elisabeth. “Defense Chief Lifts Ban on Pictures of Coffins.” The New York Times, February 27, 2009. Accessed August 4, 2014. http://www.nytimes. com/2009/02/27/washington/27coffins.html. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Capdevila, Luc, and Voldman, Danièle. War Dead: Western Society and Casualties of War. Translated by Richard Veasey. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2006. Clark, Mary. “Keep Your Hands of My (Dead) Body: A Critique of the Ways in Which the State Disrupts the Personhood Interests of the Deceased and His or Her Kin in Disposing of the Dead and Assigning Identity in Death.” Rutgers Law Review 58 (Fall 2005): 45–120. Dauphinee, Elizabeth. “The Politics of the Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery.” Security Dialogue 38, no. 2 (2007): 139–55. Grajeda, Tony. “Picturing Torture: Gulf Wars Past and Present.” In Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror.” Edited by Andrew Martin and Patrice Petro. 206–35. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Kick, Russ. “The Memory Hole.” No longer available. Accessed February 27, 2009. http://www.thememoryhole.org.

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Kirtley, Jane E. “Transparency and Accountability in a Time of Terror: The Bush Administration’s Assault on Freedom of Information.” Communication Law and Policy 11, no. 4 (2006): 479–511. Kozol, Wendy. “Battlefield Souvenirs and Ethical Spectatorship.” Text of paper presented at Feeling Photography Conference, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, October 17, 2009. Kruzel, John J. “Defense Department to Allow Photographs of Caskets with Family’s Permission.” American Forces Press Service, February 26, 2009. Accessed July 8, 2014. http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=53250. Milbank, Dana. “Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins.” The Washington Post, October 21, 2003. Mueller, John. “The Iraq Syndrome.” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 6 (November/ December 2005). Accessed February 19, 2007. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/61196/john-mueller/the-iraq-syndrome. Nakamura, David, and Whitlock, Craig. “Obama Pays His Respects to Slain Troops at Dover Air Force Base.” TheWashington Post, August 9, 2011. Accessed July 1, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/44/post/president-obama-to-pay-hisrespects-to-troops-at-dover-air-forcebase/2011/08/09/gIQA2Aak4I_blog.html. Office of Privacy and Open Government, U.S. Department of Commerce. “FOIA Exemptions.” 2005. Accessed August 4, 2014. http://www.osec.doc.gov/omo/ foia/exemptions.htm. Rentschler, Carrie A. “Witnessing: US Citizenship and the Vicarious Experience of Suffering.” Media Culture Society 26 (2004): 296–304. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “Senate Allows Ban on Photos of Soldiers’ Caskets to Stand.” June 22, 2004. Accessed August 4, 2014. http:// www.rcfp.org/newsitems/index.php?i=3940. Simpson, David. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Smolkin, Rachel. “Photos of the Fallen: The Controversy over Coffin Photos Illustrates News Organizations’ Frustrations with Depicting Death in the Iraq War.” American Journalism Review 26 (June-July 2004). Accessed September 15, 2010. http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=3677. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003. Tapia, Ruby C. “Profane Illuminations: The Gendered Problematics of Critical Carceral Visualities.” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 684–87. United States Department of Defense. “Defenselink Casualty Report.” Updated regularly. Last accessed July 11, 2014. http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Translated by Patrick Camiller. New York: Verso, 1989. Volpe, Andrea L. “Cartes de Visite: Portrait Photographs and the Culture of Class Formation.” In Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People. Edited by Ardis Cameron, 42–57. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary. “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs: May 13, 2009.” Accessed July 6, 2014. http://www.whitehouse. gov/the-press-office/press-briefing-press-secretary-robert-gibbs-5132009. ———. “Remarks by President Obama and Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore Before Meeting.” October 29, 2009. Accessed July 6, 2014. http:// www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-obama-and-ministermentor-lee-kuan-yew-singapore-meeting. ———. “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, 11/30/09.” November 30, 2009. Accessed July 6, 2014. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ briefing-white-house-press-secretary-robert-gibbs-113009. ———. “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” December 1, 2009. Accessed July 6, 2014.

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http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-address-nationway-forward-afghanistan-and-pakistan. ———. “Remarks by the President to the Troops.” March 28, 2010. Accessed July 6, 2014. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-troops. Wilson, Scott. “Obama Reverses Pledge to Release Photos of Detainee Abuse.” The Washington Post, May 14, 2009. Accessed October 6, 2014. http://www. wash ingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051301751.html. Zeleny, Jeff. “Obama Visits Air Base to Honor Returning Dead.” The New York Times, October 29, 2009. Accessed July 5, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/ 10/30/us/30obama.html Zelizer, Barbie. “Death in Wartime: Photographs and the ‘Other War’ in Afghanistan.” Press/Politics 10, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 26–55.

11 Lessons from the Life of an Image Malcolm Browne’s Photograph of Thich Quang Duc’s Self-Immolation Øyvind Vågnes On the night of June 10, 1963, Malcolm W. Browne, an American correspondent for the Associated Press stationed in Saigon, received a phone call from a Buddhist monk named Thich Duc Nghiep, who advised him to attend an important event the following morning. Browne had lived in Vietnam for two years and knew well the background to the invitation. In his memoir he describes how he had observed the gradual erosion of the popular support for South Vietnam’s first President, Ngo Dinh Diem, who many Vietnamese held responsible for the escalating American presence in the early 1960s.1 Diem and his family were Catholics, and his presidency was widely believed to favor Catholics for jobs in higher office, in spite of the fact that the population was overwhelmingly Buddhist. A month earlier, a demonstration in Hue on the ceremonial birthday of the Buddha (May 8, 1963) had been brutally brought to a stop when eight demonstrators had been killed and dozens injured. Browne understood that the members of the foreign press were summoned on June 10 to report internationally on the Diem regime, and that an event was being staged for this very purpose. After having attended a ceremony in a pagoda the next morning, Browne joined a march headed by an old Austin sedan carrying five monks. It halted at the intersection of two main streets, where the marchers formed a circle. Three of the monks got out of the car, two young monks assisting the elder one. After having helped him settle himself into the lotus position on a cushion, the young monks doused the elder one with gasoline, and then stepped away. The old monk, named Thich Quang Duc, lit a match and let it fall in his lap, setting himself on fire. “Numb with shock I shot roll after roll of film,” Browne writes about the incident in his memoir.2 Of the several photographs that went over the Associated Press wire, one was distributed particularly widely and ended up winning the 1963 World Press Photo Award (see Figure 11.1). This chapter, the title of which deliberately echoes that of Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary on Robert McNamara, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, will argue that this picture has both “learned” and “taught” a number of lessons concerning the ethical problematic of looking and not

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looking over the years that have passed since it was taken. These lessons are profoundly marked not only by the content of the image but also by the shifting conditions of, and circumstances under which, it appears. The spectator enters into what Ariella Azoulay describes as a “collaboration” with the image, one marked by the fact that its statement “can never be completely and ultimately sealed.”3 When the iconic press photograph is “republished frequently in diverse contexts,” Holly Edwards observes in an attentive reading of what she calls “the life cycle” of Steve McCurry’s “Afghan Girl,” its meaning is necessarily “altered and augmented with each reincarnation.”4 We tend to talk about such pictures as if they exist independently of the constraints of any one medium and as though they are unfixed in historical time. They appear to us frequently on screen and on paper in our everyday lives, in ever new forms of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have described as “remediation.”5 Iconic images, such as Browne’s photograph, thus “travel” through and across vast cultural and medial territories. As I have argued elsewhere, the implications of this expansive movement extend well beyond matters of technology.6 In his influential book on the agency of images, What Do Pictures Want?, W.J.T. Mitchell suggests a conceptual and discursive clarification which better equips us to address how these ongoing processes of technological and cultural transformation affect our changing understanding of such a photograph. Mitchell proposes a distinction between “picture” and “image.” Whereas one can hang a picture on a wall, the image “seems to float without any visible means of support, a phantasmatic, virtual or spectral appearance,” Mitchell suggests.7 As will be evident from what follows, this duality of materiality/immateriality is instrumental for our understanding of how Browne’s actual photograph resides in cultural and collective memories at the same time as it seems to hover over our visual cultures. One does not contemplate this photograph for long before realizing how strongly it raises several pressing questions concerning the fraught spectatorship it enacts, documents, and instigates. In addressing this conflicted status of Browne’s iconic press picture, the place to begin is the space contained between its frames: in the image. In doing so, we do well not to merely ask what we as spectators look at when we are confronted with it, but also what the image looks at. In the middle foreground, and at the center of our immediate attention, Duc’s figure is engulfed in flames. What is perhaps most immediately striking about the picture, and never fails to be commented upon by anyone who comes to see it, is the stoicism of the monk’s composure, his insistent rigidity as the flames dance wildly around his burning body. If we break down the composition of the image and look at its axis, the horizontal line in the background draws our attention to the car on the left and a group of monks on the right. In the lower left corner, the can that was used to douse Duc is tossed away. Whereas the objects are almost trivial in the way that they suggest a causal narrative of foregoing events, the presence of the crowd makes the image immediately contested.

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Figure 11.1 Malcolm Browne’s iconic picture of a self-immolating monk in Saigon, June 11, 1963. Courtesy Malcolm Browne/The Granger Collection/NTB scanpix

The burning monk is not facing us, the viewer of the image, but the group of bystanders are. The viewers within the image are looking at the figure in the center of the image, and so our gaze is confronted by theirs. These elements constitute the framing of the image as well as the limits to the act of witnessing it displays. In short, what it looks at, and what it will continue to look at over the years that it continues reappear in different media. But there are also a number of things the image does not look at. The picture cannot show us what happens outside of its frame. As Azoulay points out, a photograph “attests to what ‘was there,’ ” but “what was there is never only what is visible in the photograph.”8 Neither can it be able to tell us much if we are searching for motives or reasons; its fraught temporality is such that it does not look at what happened before or after the instant of its taking. Photographs are recognized for their capacity to freeze a moment in time, and one of the implications of this common observation is that Browne’s image captures a specific moment of looking and makes it available over time. This temporality implicates future acts of conflicted spectatorship that are bound to change markedly with the cultural status of the image. Each time the image reappears it thus also invites us to consider once again what it does not look at. The various questions raised by this act

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of not looking will be the main concern of this chapter: How does the image urge the spectator into concern for what does not appear in the picture, for a source of the agony it displays, and thereby draw public and political attention to the cause for Duc’s protest? And as the urge to respond, embedded in the act of not looking that Browne’s image displays, extends beyond solely documenting an individual event and opens up to an extensive range of performative functions, another question is raised: How does the act of not looking gradually unanchor the image from its specific political and historical context, as the event of Duc’s self-immolation, as well as the specific political circumstances it was meant to address, pass into history? In turn, the answers to the questions we ask of what the image does not reveal lead to its most profound revelations. LAND ON FIRE, BODY ON FIRE As Browne’s photograph continues to look unflinchingly at the burning monk, the first question it raises is: Why? The decision to set oneself on fire is necessarily a desperate act, but it can be notoriously difficult to locate or identify a single source of this desperation.9 As Michael Biggs, one of the few scholars to have written on self-immolation as protest, observes, such acts are committed to make claims for a collective cause rather than for personal or familial grievances. They are public, performative acts, occurring in a public place, often accompanied by a statement addressed to political figures or to the general public. In distinguishing self-immolation from other forms of protest with which it is frequently compared, such as suicide bombings, it is also important to note that to harm anyone else or inflict material damage is never intended.10 There are numerous historical examples of self-sacrifice in religious practice in South Asia, where mythic, folkloric, and iconographic expressions are widespread in all religious traditions.11 As Biggs observes, Duc’s self-immolation was controversial among the monks in Saigon because many considered it to clash with the Buddhist injunction against killing.12 But the burning of bodies also holds a central place in Mahayana Buddhism, predominant in Vietnam. Thich Nhat Hanh, known as a founder and a developer of the “engaged Buddhism” movement, has returned to Duc’s act throughout his speeches and writings in the decades that have followed the event.13 Two years after the self-immolation, in June 1965, Hanh stressed the sincerity of any utterance that is performed by a human being who sets himself on fire in an open letter addressed to Martin Luther King Jr.: “To express will by burning oneself,” he wrote, “is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, i.e., to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people. This is not suicide.”14 “When Thich Quang Duc made himself into a human torch,” he wrote thirty-three years later in 1998, “people all over the world had to recognize that Vietnam was a land on fire, and they had to do something about it.”15 Browne’s picture first extends the light of

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this torch, and later engages its spectator in the construction of the cultural memory of Duc’s sacrifice. The land on fire and the body on fire: Browne’s photograph joins Hanh’s two images, in a metaphorical visualization of a land on fire through an overwhelmingly real visualization of a body on fire. Indeed, the very unambiguous and immense pain of self-immolation as protest can be said to represent a form of “visual analogy.” I borrow the concept from Barbara Maria Stafford, who describes analogy as a “demonstrative” practice, as a way of “putting the visible into relationship with the invisible and manifesting the effect of that momentary unison.”16 Browne’s photo creates a direct link between what was invisible to the world generally and the US public specifically (the suffering of Vietnamese Buddhists under Diem and the Buddhist uproar) and the visibility of the pain it depicts (the suffering of Duc). Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, then, the act of not looking directs our attention to what has not been looked at, to what has been suppressed or ignored, but what is represented through its absence. Namely, a nation in flames. In the event of political protest, self-immolations confront us with an “image of pain” in a double sense—for even though they most immediately and horrifyingly force us to face individual, self-inflicted physical pain, they simultaneously demand that we consider this pain as an image of a different form of pain, namely, one that is collective. The self-immolator-protester visualizes this other pain, precisely by making it impossible to turn away from or respond with indifference to the pain we are witnessing. In a very important sense, then, self-immolations are—in their prerecorded state, so to speak—paradoxical acts of political as well as visual, real “representation.” The image urges the spectator into concern for what does not appear in the picture. All these aspects of self-immolation as protest suggest that it is a contested and complex act of visualization even before it is caught on film. Its extravagant self-harm is meant to be seen, but neither the act itself nor any photographic record can render the reasons for it visible. Thus, the image does not look at the source of the agony it displays and implicates us as spectators in this act of not looking. To encounter any pictorial record of self-immolation is to recognize that this source remains invisible in the picture, but that any spectator nevertheless is likely to keep looking for it. This is the first lesson of Browne’s image, both when it appears as news photograph and as archival image. We look to the image for something that it does not see because it was not looking for it in the first place; each time it reappears, the image inevitably involves us in this act of not looking. STAGING SUFFERING FOR THE CAMERA The fact that Browne’s image looks at individual pain and only by association at collective pain is of some consequence for how we are to regard its political efficacy. If the public response invited by Browne’s picture did not merely reflect empathy for an individual, but also an acknowledgment of

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collective suffering, it did represent a call to those with political power to act on its implications. David Perlmutter has argued that we tend to take the political efficacy of pictures that are “icons of outrage”—pictures that seem to demand our attention—as a given, whereas the case is often that the viewer projects her own individual response on the general viewing public.17 We know they are resonant, and that they have some sort of aesthetic appeal, Perlmutter writes—but are they “politically powerful”?18 In the case of Browne’s picture, it is very widely believed to have been politically powerful. Several sources mention how it had a great impact on President Kennedy, who was Diem’s main sponsor. They also speculate on the degree to which it contributed to the overthrow of Kennedy’s regime a few months later; certainly, it played a prominent part in the ongoing reporting on and analysis of events in Vietnam. Thus, the photograph had a role in shaping public opinion about the war in the United States.19 What the image did not look at did attract public and political attention. Hanh has described how the very idea of self-immolation as protest seemed disturbing to Western eyes to the degree that it was difficult, if not impossible, for him to share his views on the act at the time. According to this logic, Duc’s act was so horrifyingly barbaric that it left the beholder no other choice than to turn away from Browne’s photograph as if from the event itself.20 The image thus instigates yet another, very different way of not looking when we consider that many simply turned away from its confrontational vision. It took a few days for the image to spread as widely as it would eventually do. The event was extensively reported in the US, but the major news media chose not to use the photograph. The New York Times would not print it. Browne has described in an interview how the picture “was not fit fare for the breakfast table.”21 Whereas the image was not used on US broadcast news, and the Chicago Tribune also chose not to print it, the Los Angeles Times printed it a week later (June 16, 1963). The editorial choices of the picture magazines were different again. Barbie Zelizer observes that Life ran a full page version of the picture (June 21, 1963), and Time (June 21, 1963) and Newsweek (June 24, 1963) also chose to print it at this point, in spite of the fact that the event had, by the final week of June, already been widely reported.22 As Zelizer argues, this cultural confusion about what to print and not to print illustrates a changing of the parameters for the display of graphic images at the time.23 The photographic depiction of an act such as Duc’s and its proliferation in visual culture clearly represents a case of what has been referred to as an “aestheticization of suffering”; surely, this as Browne himself suggests, worried the editors at The New York Times. As Mark Reinhardt observes, the critique against “aestheticization” in the discourse on photography involves a slippage between, on the one hand, aestheticization in the sense of “inviting only pure formal pleasure” and, on the other, aestheticization

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in the sense of having any kind of formal properties whatsoever. A suspicion of a kind of morally obtuse obscuring or exploitation of pain slides into an anxiety—inchoate or understated, but perhaps more powerful for that—of the formal choices and rhetorical conventions, and the resulting transformative work, of representation itself.24 The aesthetic power of Browne’s photographic composition is undeniable, and revolves to a great degree around its perplexing and contradictory central motif: the seemingly impossible, controlled posture of the monk and the uncontrollable movement of the flames. This tension between movement and stillness captures the political urgency of the image, both the violence and the dignified stoicism of its act of protest. What draws us to the image is precisely what makes us anxious in looking at it: what we are puzzled by, cannot stop thinking about, in our confrontation with the image. The photograph seems such a unique representation of the event that it is bound to be hailed as an icon of press photography. And yet, we hesitate to describe it in terms of aesthetic appeal. However, would we feel better if the image was of a poorer quality or had not been taken at all? Browne’s photograph thus establishes itself as a fraught site for the looking/not looking problematic in the very specific historical and political moment of its taking. As Azoulay points out, every photograph is always “the product of an encounter, even if a violent one, between a photographer, a photographed subject, and a camera,” and involves what she calls an “instrumentalization” of what is photographed.25 The event was carefully orchestrated by the organizers and by Duc to produce an image with impact, and the photograph is as much a documentation of this as of certain, impending death. The space that was chosen functioned as if in a photo-op, and the ceremonial proceedings that led up to the self-immolation lends it an air of choreography and unmistakable theatricality. The picture would not have existed had Browne chosen not to bring his camera to the site and not taken a photograph. Therefore, the image also undeniably serves as a manifestation of the very choice to take it. Thus, there is a contrast in the image between the alarming self-destruction and the calmness of the carefully planned event of which it both is a product and depicts. “Numb with shock I shot roll after roll of film,” Browne writes about the incident, “focusing and adjusting exposures mechanically and unconsciously,” “trying hard not to perceive what I was witnessing.”26 Among the monks we see encircled around Duc in the photograph, some turn away, but most of them look straight at the burning figure; none were surprised to see what happened. A few bystanders can be vaguely detected but we do not get an impression of their response to what they see. This element of planning impacts on how we are bound to regard the strategy of making the picture. Unlike so many images of suffering, it would be wrong to say that Browne’s photograph instigates what we might call a rhetoric of compassion.27 Duc is not a victim of violence, in any traditional

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sense of the word, but a willing participant in bringing his own brutal death about before the camera. As Hanh’s comments suggest, the monks did not intend for the photographs and reports to invite pity in the beholder; they considered the protest to be a dignified and noble way to bring attention to the cause. To them, the act of not looking that the image performs and instigates, thus, serves a political purpose. This is the second lesson of the image. Self-immolation as protest is a display of suffering even before it is photographed, but when it is arranged in order to be photographed, the picture must be considered accordingly as both a document of, and an act performatively integral to, the act of not looking that it both enacts and depicts. NEW FIRST ENCOUNTERS The gradual shift from withholding to showing, from not printing to printing Browne’s eventual prize-winning photograph also shows the tendency of its impact to grow over time. It also suggests, as Zelizer points out, an ability of the picture to appear significant beyond being newsworthy: “the uses to which it could be put,” she holds, was “as important as what it conveyed.”28 Put differently, Browne’s photograph depicts the self-inflicted death of an individual as a protest against a political regime, but the image’s connotative range far exceeds this specific historical context. As Zelizer observes, the image appeared in a variety of contexts fairly quickly, including church-organized protest against the Vietnam War in the US.29 In one of the uses to which the image was put, Biggs provides a detailed account of how in the years immediately following the event there were several instances in which Duc’s act was clearly copied. In the process, self-immolation was established as a transcultural form of protest; the causes differed, but the method was repeated. Self-immolation was thus introduced into what Biggs calls “the global repertoire of protest.”30 Among the many instances that followed Duc’s act was the self-immolation of Alice Hertz, an eighty-two-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany, in Detroit in 1965. In a cultural, political and religious context very different from that of Duc’s, Hertz’s act provoked much ambivalence for the “dramatic dimension” of its protest.31 To Hertz and a number of others, Duc’s act was symbolic of a particularly strong form of radical pacifist protest that could be applied for different causes. The urge to respond, embedded in the act of not looking that Browne’s image displays, thus extends beyond solely documenting an individual event, as it opens up to an extensive range of performative functions. The act of not looking gradually unanchors the image from its specific political and historical context. If we return to W.J.T. Mitchell’s distinction between image and picture, we might say that the act of not looking sees the picture become an image. In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield charges polemically against a tradition of writing on photography that “was responsible for establishing a

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tone of suspicion and distrust,” and shares her passionate plea “to respond to and learn from photographs rather than simply disassemble them.”32 Five decades after Malcolm Browne lifted his camera and photographed Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation, we can see that the history of Browne’s image, such as it is, takes the shape of a trajectory that reflects our changing interactions with photographs of suffering. That the very specific geopolitical situation Duc identified as the cause of his action is invisible in Browne’s photographic record of it defines the permanently transitory state of the motivating events. As the event of Duc’s death as well as the specific political circumstances it was meant to address passes into history, the photograph achieves a status as icon of protest and archival image, as religious symbol and commodity. The picture became an image and took on a life of its own, and circulated widely in popular culture. When it appeared on the cover of Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut album (1992), cropped so as to leave out any witnessing monks, the picture functioned as an emblem of the California band’s social activism.33 The implications of this cropping is that the picture zooms in on the burning figure so that the image does not look at the group of bystanders in the background. The theatricality of the event, its quality of being staged, is lost. In another example, when it appeared in the fifty-fifth episode of South Park, “Chef Goes Nanners” (2000), it was in the context of a dark-humored, antiracist satire.34 The series, Virginia Heffernan writes in The New York Times, is “not great for being reckless; it’s great for being a series of funny, topical parables.”35 The episode describes protests against the town’s racist flag, which reach their climax as Chef produces Browne’s photograph before setting a monk on fire, in a moment that more than suggests the way in which the image has been transformed into a readily available, reusable icon of protest. And in a more recent reproduction as a miniature reconstruction built out of Lego by Mike Stimpson, the gesture was clever but ultimately hollow. The point is not so much to make the image reappear in a poignant or iconoclastic way as merely to meticulously reconstruct its various elements in the absurd and presumably hilarious context of children’s toys.36 The light-blue Austin sedan has found its final parking place behind the main sanctuary of Thien Mu Pagoda in Hue, the temple where Duc was a monk, where anyone can walk up to it and photograph the shades of rust which cover its hood. Reverence has thus come to surround objects that were central to the way the events unfolded that day in Saigon, objects that are mostly absent from the album cover’s cropped version, where the viewer can barely make out the car in the background, but which is, nevertheless, essential to the original composition of the photograph. The expansive performativity of the image, its extensive recontextualization, instigate ever new instances and acts of not looking. As the image proliferates in reproduction, the historical context, June 10, 1963, is increasingly distant, and therefore the call to not look, ever more inevitable.

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A recent and telling instance of this came when Browne’s photograph came to the surface once again when a Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in protest over the confiscation of his fruit stand on January 14, 2011. Scholars and analysts will continue to debate the impact of the act and what it set in motion across North Africa, where several protesters were reported to copy Bouazizi’s act in the days that followed. However, Bouazizi’s protest was not photographed, and neither were many of the other acts that were described to happen in response to it. And so Browne’s image appeared extensively, at times in a compensatory manner, in order to provide a pictorial background to various “brief histories of self-immolation.”37 However different, all of these cases are likely to have produced several first encounters with Browne’s photograph, both because more recent events have turned people back to Browne’s image and because that image is routinely shown as an illustration of similar but distinctly different events. Its analogical force as an icon of pain and protest is thus the cause of the undeniable irony of its diffusion, as it comes to betray its original analogy. This is its third and somewhat melancholy lesson. The act of not looking that propelled the image into its status of protest icon enables it to stand as a symbol for all acts of self-immolation. As a consequence, we end up looking neither at the cause for Bouazizi’s self-immolation, nor the specific historical and political circumstances of his death. As Browne’s photograph gained cultural prominence as a trope for political struggle, its status as iconic image ultimately transformed it into an empty vessel, an image to fill with ever new content. Once unbearable to look at, it has almost become cliché. Its inclusion in formulaic news reportage on more recent self-immolations is a sign not only of the lack of original footage but also of imagination. It is the lesson learned and taught by the travelling images that resonate through visual cultures over an extended period of time, whether for decades or centuries. Such documentary photographs made into icons are as powerful as they are powerless, as we continue to invest our cultural and political imaginaries in them. NOTES 1. Malcolm W. Browne, Muddy Boots and Red Socks: A Reporter’s Life (New York: Random House, 1993). The early pages of Browne’s memoir inform my account of what happened. 2. Ibid., 11. 3. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 411, 199. 4. Holly Edwards, “Cover to Cover: The Life Cycle of an Image in Contemporary Visual Culture,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, eds. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago: Williams College Museum of Art, in association with the University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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5. According to Bolter and Grusin, no medium “can now function independently and establish its own separate and purified space of cultural meaning.” Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 55. 6. Øyvind Vågnes, Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). 7. W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 85. 8. Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 126, 127. 9. It’s important to note that in most cases there is no such record, and that self-immolation occurs with some frequency outside of the realm of political protest. Several journals of psychiatry document past psychiatric history in the event of self-inflicted burns and associate self-immolation with acute psychosis. In a majority of such instances, self-immolation is a spontaneous and private act. See N. C. Andreasen and R. Noyes Jr., “Suicide Attempted by Self-immolation,” in American Journal of Psychiatry (1975), 554–56; Joseph Antonowicz, Lisa H. Taylor, Peggy E. Showalter, Kevin J. Farrell, and Sheila Berg, “Profiles and Treatment of Attempted Suicide by Self-immolation,” in General Hospital Psychiatry 19, no. 1, 1997, 51–5; and J. M. O’Donoghue, J. L. Panchal, S. T. O’Sullivan, M. O’Shaughnessy, T.P.F. O’Connor, H. Keeley, and M. J. Kelleher, “A Study of Suicide and Attempted Suicide by Self-immolation in an Irish Psychiatric Population: An Increasing Problem,” in Burns: Journal of the International Society for Burn Injuries 24, no. 2 (1998): 144–46. 10. Michael Biggs, “Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963–2002.” In Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 174. 11. See David M. Knipe, “Self-Sacrifice,” in South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia, eds. Peter J. Claus, Sarah Diamond, and Margaret Ann Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003), 540–42. The etymological roots of the word “self-immolation” brings us back to the Latin immolare, to make sacrifice. 12. Biggs, “Dying,” 179. For more on this conflict, see the third chapter of Jane Ardley’s The Tibetan Independence Movement: Political, Religious and Gandhian Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2002), which addresses the self-immolation of Thupten Ngodup, a member of the radical Tibetan nongovernmental organization the Tibetan Youth Congress, and the debate that ensued. When the Tibetan government and the Dalai Lama failed to support the protest, representatives of the TYC responded with disappointment and political outrage (50–51). Russell T. McCutcheon argues that the way in which Duc’s act has been interpreted by scholars of religion reflects the dominance of the discourse on sui generis religion; focus is on authoritative Chinese Buddhist texts from the fifth century onward rather than on sociopolitical and historical context; see Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 167–77. 13. See Stephen J. Laumakis, An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 254–62; Sallie B. King, Being Benevolence: The Social Ethics of Engaged Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 172–76. 14. From a letter to King dated June 1, 1965, reprinted in The Lotus in the Sea of Fire: The Buddhist Story (London: SCM Press, 1967), 118. The book provides a historical context for the uprising in Saigon in the summer of 1963. 15. Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 81. In the 1960s, Hanh, who studied at Princeton and lectured at Cornell and Columbia, became a central figure in the global peace movement; Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.

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16. Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 24. “Analogia, or ana/logos,” Stafford writes, “signifies ‘according to due ratio’ and ‘according to the same kind of way.’ Analogon, then, is the proportion or similarity that exists between two or more apparently dissimilar things . . . with Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, Aquinas, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the late Wittgenstein, this elastic knot of unity assumed a wider epistemological meaning than numerical equidistance and logical symmetry. It emerged as a form of dialectics attempting to bridge the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown. Proportionality, or the like and reciprocal relation between two proportions, is distinct from mere identity, the illusion of full adequacy in the explication of one term by means of another” (8). 17. David D. Perlmutter, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crises (Westport: Praeger, 1998), xiv. 18. Ibid., xiv. 19. See, for example, Lisa M. Skow and George N. Dionisopoulos, “A Struggle to Contextualize Photographic Images: American Print Media and the ‘Burning Monk,’ ” in Communication Quarterly 45, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 395; Eva Breitenbach, “Conflicting Reports: The State Department’s Press Relations, May–August 1963,” Foundations IV, no. 1, 2009, accessed August 2, 2014, http://web1.johnshopkins.edu/foundations/; Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 221. Whether Kennedy was involved in or informed about not only the coup but also the assassination of Diem (on November 2, 1963) remains a controversial topic; see, for example, John Prados, The White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President (New York: The New York Press, 2003). 20. Hanh, Lotus in the Sea of Fire, 9. Hanh describes a meeting with “an American woman doctor” who, although she agreed with the motives behind the movement to end the war, considered Duc’s self-immolation as “the act of an abnormal person,” “an act of savagery, violence and fanaticism, requiring a condition of mental unbalance.” The encounter made Hanh realize “that she could never understand” (9). 21. Browne is quoted from Susan Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 404. 22. Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 223–24. 23. Ibid., 225. 24. Mark Reinhardt, “Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago: Williams College Museum of Art in association with University of Chicago Press, 2007), 23. 25. Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 13, 99. 26. Browne, Muddy Boots and Red Socks, 11. 27. In tracing the word’s etymology, Marjorie Garber observes how “compassion” came into wide use among disaster relief agencies in the mid-1980s, where images where used to urge donations to help victims; see “Compassion,” in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (New York: Routledge, 2004), 19. Susan Moeller’s Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999) argues that intense and pervasive news coverage of crises is “formulaic” and “sensationalized” in the way that it lingers over images of suffering, and that this produces “moral fatigue and exhausted empathy” (52–53). 28. Zelizer, About to Die, 221–225. 29. Ibid., 224.

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30. Biggs, “Dying,” 181. 31. Cheyney Ryan, “The One Who Burns Herself for Peace,” Hyspatia 9, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 20. Hertz, a Quaker who described herself as “part Jewish and part Christian,” was also a member of both Women’s Strike for Peace and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; Cheyney Ryan describes in an article how her self-immolation was felt to conflict with the ethics of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, who believed that nonviolent protest should be “an essentially undramatic affair” (20). 32. Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), xiv, xvi. 33. Rage Against the Machine (1992), Rage Against the Machine. US: Epic. 34. “Chef Goes Nanners” is the seventh episode of the fourth season of South Park, and originally aired in the United States on Comedy Central on July 5, 2000, accessed August 2, 2014, http://www.tv.com/shows/south-park/chefgoes-nanners-2471/. 35. Virginia Heffernan, “What? Morals in South Park?” The New York Times, April 28, 2004. 36. Prints of Stimpson’s photographs can be purchased on line, accessed August 2, 2014, http://www.imagekind.com/Monk-On-Fire-art?IMID=c5a02 65d-9901–445b-9217-ee9ef9555e30. 37. John Sanburn, “A Brief History of Self-immolation,” Time Online, January 20, 2011, accessed August 2, 2014, http://content.time.com/time/world/ article/0,8599,2043123,00.html.

REFERENCES Andreasen, N. C., and Noyes, R. Jr. “Suicide Attempted by Self-Immolation.” American Journal of Psychiatry 132 (1975): 554–56. Antonowicz, Joseph, Taylor, Lisa H., Showalter, Peggy E., Farrell, Kevin J., and Berg, Sheila. “Profiles and Treatment of Attempted Suicide by Self-Immolation.” General Hospital Psychiatry 19, no.1 (1997) 51–55. Ardley, Jane. The Tibetan Independence Movement: Political, Religious and Gandhian Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2002. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Biggs, Michael. “Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963–2002.” In Making Sense of Suicide Missions. Edited by Diego Gambetta. 173–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Bolter, Jay David, and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Breitenbach, Eva. “Conflicting Reports: The State Department’s Press Relations, May–August 1963.” Foundations IV, no.1 (2009) 59–98. Browne, Malcolm W. Muddy Boots and Red Socks: A Reporter’s Life. New York: Random House, 1993. Duc, Thich Quang. The Lotus in the Sea of Fire: The Buddhist Story. London: SCM Press, 1967. Edwards, Holly. “Cover to Cover: The Life Cycle of an Image in Contemporary Visual Culture.” In Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain. Edited by Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne. 75–92. Chicago: Williams College Museum of Art, in association with the University of Chicago Press, 2007. Garber, Marjorie. “Compassion.” In Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Edited by Lauren Berlant. New York: Routledge, 2004.

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Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Heffernan, Virginia, “What? Morals in South Park?” The New York Times, April 28, 2004. King, Sallie B. Being Benevolence: The Social Ethics of Engaged Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005. Knipe, David M. “Self-Sacrifice.” In South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia. Edited by Peter J. Claus, Sarah Diamond, and Margaret Ann Mills. 540–42. New York: Routledge, 2003. Laumakis, Stephen J. An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Linfield, Susie. The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. McCutcheon, Russell T. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Moeller, Susan. Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat. New York: Basic Books, 1989. ———. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. New York: Routledge, 1999. Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. O’Donoghue, J. M., Panchal, J. L., O’Sullivan, S. T., O’Shaughnessy, M., O’Connor, T.P.F., Keeley, H., and Kelleher, M. J. “A Study of Suicide and Attempted Suicide by Self-Immolation in an Irish Psychiatric Population: An Increasing Problem.” Burns: Journal of the International Society for Burn Injuries 24, no. 2 (1998): 144–46. Perlmutter, David D. Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crises. Westport: Praeger, 1998. Prados, John. The White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President. New York: The New York Press, 2003. Rage Against the Machine (1992). Rage Against the Machine. US: Epic. Reinhardt, Mark. “Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique.” In Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain. Edited by Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne. 13–36. Chicago: Williams College Museum of Art in association with University of Chicago Press, 2007. Ryan, Cheyney. “The One Who Burns Herself for Peace.” Hyspatia 9, no. 2 (1994): 21–39. Sanburn, John. “A Brief History of Self-Immolation.” Time Online, January 20, 2011. Accessed August 2, 2014. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/ 0,8599,2043123,00.html. Skow, Lisa M., and Dionisopoulos, George N. “A Struggle to Contextualize Photographic Images: American Print Media and the ‘Burning Monk.’ ” Communication Quarterly 45, no. 4 (1997): 393–409. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Vågnes, Øyvind. Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Zelizer, Barbie. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Contributors

Elizabeth Adan is associate professor in the Department of Art and Design at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where she teaches modern and contemporary art history and is affiliated faculty in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research intersects postwar, postmodern, and contemporary art histories; feminist, critical race, and queer theories; and political, aesthetic, and cultural notions of representation. She has also worked as a practicing artist, a freelance arts administrator, and a museum curator. Rebecca A. Adelman is assistant professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She has published on spectatorship, transparency and visual ethics, methodologies, and pedagogies as they intersect with militarized violence. Her book, Beyond the Checkpoint: Visual Practices in America’s Global War on Terror (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), maps the visual circuits linking the terrorized American nation-state, its citizens, and its enemies by exploring the practices of image creation, circulation, and consumption that animate these relationships. Rebecca Baron has taught at California Institute of the Arts since 2000. Her work has screened widely at international film festivals and media venues including Documenta 12, New York Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, Toronto Film Festival, London Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty Film Seminar, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2010, the Austrian Film Museum presented a retrospective of her work. Stéphanie Benzaquen is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Historical Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. Her research focuses on visual histories of atrocity. Her recent publications include: “Looking at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes, Cambodia, on Flickr and YouTube,” Media, Culture & Society 36, no. 6 (2014); “Re-mediating

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Genocidal Images into Contemporary Art: The Tuol Sleng Mug Shots,” in Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory, and the Performance of Violence, edited by Joram ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Douglas Goodwin has had several careers, from engine repair to software architecture. He also teaches computers how to write. The results are Kerouac Machine, a Teletype machine that delivers occasional communications from Jack Kerouac and Nonsense nor Sensibility, a new novel by Jane Austen. His films include Artifact #1: Ford vs. Chevy, and, with Rebecca Baron, the Lossless series. He is currently lead developer for Communications: Web and Mobile at the LA County MTA (http://metro. net). He can be found at http://cairn.com and occasionally at https://twit ter.com/dgoodwin/ Frances Guerin is senior lecturer in the School of Arts, University of Kent, Canterbury. She is the author of A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). She is co-editor (with Roger Hallas, University of Syracuse) of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (Wallflower Press, 2007). Her numerous articles have appeared in international journals, including The Moving Image, Screening the Past, Cinema Journal. You can read her blog on contemporary art and culture at http://fxreflects.blogspot.com/ Sonja A. J. Neef was junior professor of European Media and Culture at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, from 2003 to 2010, and from 2011 to 2013, Feodor-Lynen stipendiary of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Evry (Paris). In April 2013, she passed away. She is author of Abdruck und Spur. Handschrift im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Berlin: Kadmos, 2008), in English: Imprint and Trace. Handwriting in the Age of Technology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011); Der babylonische Planet. Kultur, Übersetzung, Dekonstruktion unter den Bedingungen der Globalisierung (Heidelberg, 2013); Astroculture. Figurations of Cosmology in Media and Arts, co-edited with Henry Sussman and Dietrich Boschung (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2014). James Polchin is on faculty in the Liberal Studies program at New York University where he teaches courses on writing and visual cultures. His research considers the intersections of the history of gender and sexuality with visual culture. He has published reviews and essays in The Smart Set, Lambda Literary Online, and is a contributing writer to the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. He is the founding editor of writing

Contributors

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in public (www.writinginpublic.com), an online journal about the new humanities. Alessandra Raengo is associate professor of moving image studies in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University and coordinator of liquid blackness, a research project on blackness and aesthetics. She is the author of On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Dartmouth College Press, 2013) and is currently working on a book titled Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled, for Bloomsbury Press. She has co-edited several volumes: Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation and A Companion to Literature and Film (Blackwell, 2005 and 2004), with Robert Stam. Daniel Sack is assistant professor in the English Department and Honors College at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His writing on contemporary interdisciplinary performance has been published in Theatre Forum, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Studies in Theatre and Performance, Theatre Journal, TDR: the Drama Review, Theater, and American Theatre magazine, as well as a number of edited collections. His monograph on futurity and performance is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press in 2015. Craig G. Staff is reader in fine art at the University of Northampton. He is the author of After Modernist Painting: The History of a Contemporary Practice (I. B. Tauris, 2013); Monochrome: Darkness and Light in Contemporary Art (I. B. Tauris, forthcoming). His current research is engaged with examining notions of “afterness” within contemporary art. Øyvind Vågnes is postdoctoral fellow at Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, where he is affiliated with the research project “The Power of the Precarious Aesthetic.” Among recent publications are Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture (University of Texas Press, 2011), which received Honorable Mention from the American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence at the 2011 PROSE Awards; “The Unsettling Moment: On Mathilde ter Heijne’s Suicide Trilogy,” in Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson, eds., Ethics and Images of Pain (Routledge, 2012); and “John’s Story: Joe Sacco’s Depiction of ‘Bare Life’,” in Daniel Worden, ed., The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World (University Press of Mississippi, 2015).

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Index

Abu Ghraib 234 – 5, 243, 246n41 abyss 43, 50; as clouds 45 Ades, D. 125, 128 advertising 27, 141 – 3, 146, 151 – 3, 155, 157 aesthetics 115, 165, 168 – 71, 173, 175, 179 – 80, 187 – 8, 195, 256 – 7; see also planetary aesthetics Afghanistan 232, 238 – 9, 244n2 agency of not looking 9 – 11, 133; see also image or artwork, not looking at Ali, M. 28, 185 – 6, 189, 191 – 2, 196 alienation 105, 112 animation 164 – 84 apartheid, 167, 172 – 3, 175, 178, 180 archive 79, 145, 151, 154 – 5, 171 – 2, 255, 259 Aristotle De Anima (On the Soul) 46; Meterologia 52, 177 artifacts 147 – 8; digital 72; visual 70 automatism 124 – 9, 132 avant-garde 26; art, poetry and film 73; filmmakers 105 Azoulay, A.: The Civil Contract of Photography 21, 23, 27, 242, 247n52, 252 – 3, 257 Baron, R.: Lossless 25, 63 Barthes, R. 23, 141; Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography 230 Baudelaire, C.: The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays 105, 111 – 12, 118 Baudrillard, J.: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place 13, 23 Benjamin, W. 8, 14; The Arcades Project 111; Illuminations: Essays and Reflections 106,

108; One-Way Street and Other Writings 172, 182n15 Berger, J. 81; Berger on Drawing 133 Bergström, G. 29, 212 – 14, 217 – 18, 221 – 3 Biber, K.: Making Art from Evidence: Secret Sex and Police Surveillance in the Tearoom 94 Biggs, M. 254, 258 Bizot, F. 219 – 20 blindness 17 – 18, 24, 26, 29, 45, 123, 129, 140 – 63; as darkness 48; as invisibility of body 185 – 96; of light 53; as not seeing 46; see also body Blumenberg, H. 176 – 9 body: black body 26 – 8, 139 – 63, 185 – 207; celestial bodies 44, 170 – 1, 174, 176 – 7; deceased 29, 229 – 50; invisibility of 114, 117 – 18, 119nn9 – 10, 165; male 27, 77 – 8, 83, 91; sexual 77 – 99; of viewer 10 – 11, 17, 47, 49, 51, 56, 104 – 5, 107 – 8, 112 – 13 Brecht, B. 24; Leben des Galilei 176 Browne, M. 29 – 30, 251 – 60 Bush, G.H.W. 29, 229, 232 Bush, G. W. 229, 232; Administration 13, 232 – 4, 238 – 41 Caillois, R. 186 – 7 Cambodia 29, 211 – 20, 222 – 3; see also Democratic Kampuchea; Khmer Rouge capitalism 143, 150, 156 – 7; capitalist realism 142; commerce 155; consumer culture 141, 151, 190 – 2; consumption 27

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Cartwright, L.: Introduction to Visual Culture 17; Practices of Looking 17 celebrities see media censorship 3 – 4, 6, 9 – 10, 12 – 13, 20, 24, 28 – 9, 31n12, 176, 236 – 7, 239 Chhang, Y. 214, 222; see also Documentation Centre of Cambodia cinema 23, 27, 63 class 9, 84, 216 Clinton Administration 232 clouds 47, 50 – 1, 54, 57, 165; as abyss 45; metamorphoses 52; in paintings 43; as veil 44 Coffin photos see Dover photos colonization: of the body 28, 187; colonizer 153 color 47, 52 – 4, 67, 71, 107 Communism 21, 29, 211, 213, 216 – 18; see also Maoism; MarxistLeninism compression 64 – 5, 67, 72, 74 corporeal and multi-sensual viewing 11 – 12, 48, 104 – 5, 114, 189 – 90 Craig, L. 89 – 90 Crary, J.: Techniques of The Observer 15 – 16, 46 – 7, 53, 56 – 7 Dalton, K.: Making Art from Evidence: Secret Sex and Police Surveillance in the Tearoom 94 Damisch, H.: Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting 43 – 4, 52 Debord, G.: The Society of the Spectacle 185, 190 – 1, 194 decalcomania 126 – 8 Democratic Kampuchea 28 – 9, 211 – 14, 216 – 18, 221 – 2; see also Khmer Rouge Demos, T. J. 19, 21 Derrida, J.: Difference in Translation 172 – 3; Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins 123, 129, 134; “Racism’s Last Word” 179 – 80, 181n6; The Work of Mourning 167 – 8 Diem, N. D. 251, 255 – 6 différance 144, 179 digital 5, 17, 24 – 5, 28, 143, 151, 156, 171, 185, 187, 189, 192 – 4, 196,

234; media 65 – 6, 72, 74; as video 63 – 4, 66, 70 – 2; see also video distraction 7 – 8, 10, 13, 17, 20 – 1, 69, 243; of the look 3; see also not looking documentary: film 79, 95; photography 211, 252, 260 Documentation Centre of Cambodia 212, 214, 221, 222 Dover Air Force Base 229, 231 – 5, 237 – 41 Dover photos 229 – 44 drawing 26 – 7, 104, 123 – 36, 164 – 84 Duc, T. Q. 29 – 30, 251 – 2, 254 – 9 DVD 63, 65 – 7, 70 – 2 Dyrac, J. 219 – 20 Edelman, L. 87 – 8 Ekerwald, H. 213 – 14 Ellison, R.: Invisible Man 139, 140, 156 Ellsworth, J. 237, 241 Enlightenment 10, 15 – 17, 19 epistemology 15, 18 – 19, 25 – 7 Ernst, M.: Europe after the Rain 126 – 7 ethereal 115 – 16, 118 Fanon, F. 27; Black Skin, White Masks 141 – 2, 191 – 2 fetishism 150, 154 film 65, 70, 73, 165 – 6, 169 – 72, 174 flâneur 111 – 12, 118 Foucault, M. 11, 14, 16, 18; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison 80; This Is Not a Pipe 142 France 214 – 16, 219 – 20 Freud, S.: The Interpretation of Dreams 126 – 7 Fried, M.: Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews 51, 117 Galileo 14, 164, 174 – 8 Garner, S.: Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research 125, 132 gaze 16, 22, 28, 45, 51, 112 – 13, 142, 147, 151, 170 – 1, 174, 176, 237, 244, 253; camera 83; at the dead 240; global 177 – 8, 180; male 23; observer 84; sociological 88; viewer 92, 95, 239

Index Gehr, E.: Serene Velocity 72, 74 gender 9, 22, 27, 35n68, 87; masculinity 92 Gibbs, R. 237 – 8, 246n41 Glissant, É.: Poetics of Relation 19, 170, 180 globalization 169, 180 Goethe, J. W. 47, 53 Goodwin, D.: Lossless 25, 63 Gormley, A.: Blind Light 24, 45, 47 – 52, 54, 57 Gouillon, P. 215, 219 Grand Canyon 43 – 4, 57 Grand Palais 103 – 22 Guerin, F. 32, 33; Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany 4, 31 Gulf War 12 – 13, 232 Gunner in the Living Hell 212 – 14, 216 – 18, 221 – 2 Gysin, B. 53 – 4, 56 hallucination 53, 54, 72; see also Gysin Hanh, T. N.: The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation 254 – 6, 258 haptic 26, 133 Heath, C.: Blindfold drawings 26, 123 – 36 Hentschläger, K.: ZEE 45, 52, 54, 57 heterochrony 169 – 70 Holocaust 3 – 6, 14, 31n9, 218 homophobia 25, 83, 86 – 7, 89 – 91 homosexuality 77–8, 84, 86–8, 91, 93, 95 Hor, U. B. 29, 212, 214 – 15, 219 – 20 horror: banalization of 11; of death 234; films 5; of the image 12, 23; of Nazism 4 icon 2, 6, 7, 21 – 2, 141, 147 – 8, 156, 166, 185, 252, 254, 256 – 7, 259 – 60 iconoclasm 2 – 3, 10, 15 – 16, 20 – 3, 115, 234 iconophilia 20 iconophobia 21 ideology 13, 18, 28 – 30, 211, 222, 234, 238 Idling, P. F. 214, 218 idolatry 20 – 1 illusion 1, 17; the blot 127; of natural movement 65

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image or artwork: cultural imaginary 1, 16, 30; materiality of 10 – 11, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 106, 111; physically turning away from 10, 20; politics of 1 – 4, 7 – 8, 11 – 14, 16, 23 – 4, 28 – 30, 176, 180, 188, 230, 239, 242, 255 – 7; truth of 16 – 19, 22, 26, 27, 30n1; of war 12 – 13, 29; as weapon 8, 12, 13, 232 image or artwork, not looking at 1 – 3, 5, 7 – 16, 18 – 20, 23 – 4, 26 – 7, 30; as drawing 123 – 36, 164 – 84; as installation 43 – 62; as photography 139 – 63, 211 – 28, 229 – 50, 251 – 64; as sculpture 103 – 22; as video and film 63 – 76, 77 – 99, 164 – 84, 185 – 207; see also not looking imprint 168, 170 – 1, 180 installation artwork 11, 25, 44 – 5, 51, 57, 79, 109, 112 institutions 7, 13, 23, 145; government 9, 23, 25, 29, 80, 86, 145, 231, 237; museums 4, 20; press 4, 10, 12, 20, 25; State 20, 28, 88, 233, 241, 243 internet see World Wide Web invisibility see blindness; visibility Iraq 6, 8 – 9, 13, 229, 232, 234 – 5, 238 Jaar, A. 4, 11 Johnson, L. B. 12, 88 Jones, W. E.: Tearoom 25, 77 – 99 Juvénal, C. 215, 219 Kennedy Administration 256 Kentridge, W.: Felix in Exile 27 – 8; Felix in Exile, Bicycle Kick, Drawings for Projection 164 – 84 Khmer Rouge 28 – 9, 211 – 23 Kibbey, A.: Theory of the Image 22 – 3 Kick, R. 234 – 6, 238, 240, 246n29 King, M. L. 143, 254 Klinger, M.: Drawing and Painting 132 – 3 Krauss, R.: Passages in Modern Sculpture 114, 116; “Richard Serra: A Translation” 113; “‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection” 168

272

Index

Latour, B. 21 – 2 Lebanon 19, 232 Liss, A.: Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust 218 – 20 looking 5, 7 – 12, 14 – 15, 17 – 19, 22 – 3, 25 – 9; images that look 79 – 86, 252 – 3; importance of 4, 21, 146 – 57; new modes of 15; seeing 9, 17 – 18, 174 – 80; viewers that look 6, 278, 49 – 51, 65, 77, 104, 189, 194 – 5; see also perception; spectatorship; vision lossy and Lossless see compression Lynch, D. 63 – 4 Mansfield, Ohio 78, 86, 92; Central Park Restroom 80 – 1; Police Department 77, 85, 93 Maoism 211 – 13, 221, 222 Marxist-Leninism 211, 213, 216 – 17, 221 mass culture 13 – 14, 24, 142 Masson, A.: Birth of Birds 125, 128 – 9 media: as analogue or digital 64 – 5, 72; as world or mass media 15, 74 – 5, 86, 91, 164 – 5, 169, 178, 185, 190, 192, 212, 216, 217, 229 – 50, 256; see also digital media stars 190 – 1 Méliès, G.: A Trip to the Moon 171, 174, 182n14 memory 5, 27, 74, 78, 165, 168 – 9, 171, 212 – 13, 220, 222, 255 Memory Hole, The see Kick, R. Meyer, R.: Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art 91 – 2 mimesis 185, 187; see also mimetic mimetic 185, 187, 196; camouflage 186; of image 1; of victims 3 minimalist 117 – 18 Mirzoeff, N.: The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality 151; Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture 8 Mitchell, W.J.T.: Cloning Terror? The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present 14; What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images 152, 252, 258

modernism 12, 17, 114, 127 modernist 79, 114 – 15, 118 modernity 2, 10, 15, 26, 105, 109, 116 – 18 museum object 79, 92, 94 – 5 museums 4, 6, 7, 20, 25, 79, 103; see also institutions My Lai 12 – 13; see also Vietnam War Myrdal, J. 213, 217 – 18, 221 Newsweek 212 – 13, 215 – 16, 219 – 20, 223, 256 Nietzsche, F.: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future 43, 51 not looking: artist who does not look 123 – 36; images that do not look 43 – 62, 63 – 76, 77 – 99, 185 – 207, 211 – 28; images that look at practices of not looking: 63 – 76, 123 – 36, 139 – 63, 164 – 84, 251 – 64; viewers who cannot see 43 – 62, 229 – 50; viewers who do not look: 43 – 62, 103 – 22, 211 – 28; see also blindness; paradox of not looking Obama, B. 29, 229, 237 – 40, 244n2, 246n41; Administration 13, 229, 237 – 40 objectify 28, 242 oblivion 165, 169, 171 ocularcentrism see primacy of vision ontology 27, 47, 55, 118, 143, 145, 149 – 51, 156 opacity 19 – 20, 24, 27, 43, 47, 220 painting 6, 43 – 4, 126, 167, 179 palimpsest 168 – 70 Panopticon 28, 80; see also Foucault, M. paradox of not looking 1, 6, 8, 10, 14 – 15, 18, 21, 29, 78, 80, 84,141 – 2, 155, 165, 169, 177, 195, 222, 230, 244, 255 Pentagon, the 232, 236, 240, 246n29, 246n39 perception 10, 15, 20, 22, 25 – 6, 46 – 7, 63 – 4, 74, 104, 110 – 12, 114, 116 – 18, 142, 175, 185 – 90, 193 – 6, 221, 240, 242; see also spectatorship; vision

Index performance 54, 57, 66; for the camera 95; impervious to documentation 54; installations 44 – 5; live 54, 57; space 54; as spectacle 69 Pfeiffer, P.: The Long Count series 28, 185 – 207 phenomenology 15, 17, 25, 64, 74 – 5, 105 – 6, 113, 115, 199n10 philosophy 2, 18; truth in art 16 photography 5, 6, 9, 15, 23, 27, 29, 149, 151, 166, 168, 170 – 1, 180, 212 – 15, 217 – 20, 223, 230 – 1, 233, 236, 238, 241, 243, 252 – 3, 255, 257 – 9 pixels 66, 68, 71 – 2, 188 planetary aesthetics 172, 180 Plato 2, 17 Post-colonial 19, 36n75 post-Enlightenment 16, 18 post-minimalist 106, 113 – 14, 118 post-modernism 10, 17, 105, 109, 118 Pot, P. 29, 213 – 14, 218, 221, 223; see also Khmer Rouge potentiality 44 – 5, 49, 51, 57; sensory 54; of sight 56; of viewer’s body 48; of vision 46 – 7 primacy of vision 19, 26, 35n67 prohibition see censorship propaganda 8, 28, 217 – 18 psychoanalysis 19, 50; see also Freud, S. public secrecy 220 – 1 race 9, 22, 27, 35n68, 84, 141, 144, 148 – 9, 151, 156 – 7, 172, 185 – 6, 189 – 93, 196 racism 23, 187, 191 – 2, 194 – 6 Rancière, J.: The Emancipated Spectator 187 – 8; Future of the Image, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Emancipated Spectator 195; “The Intolerable Image” 4, 6, 8, 11, 21; The Politics of Aesthetics 1, 2 Romanticism 10, 16 – 17 Rwandan Genocide 4, 6, 11 Salecl, R. 50 – 1 screen 66, 164 – 5 sculpture 26, 48, 49, 103 – 22 Searchers, The 67, 72 Secondary Revision see Freud, S. segregation 172, 179 – 80

273

self-immolation 29, 30, 251, 254 – 60 senses 25 – 6, 45, 49, 66, 104 – 5, 107 – 8, 112, 114, 117, 123; listening 108 – 9; other senses 17; seeing 46; sound 116; touching 111, 128 – 9, 132, 179 – 80; see also looking; perception; vision Serra, R.: Clara-Clara 113; Promenade 26, 103 – 22; Serene Velocity 65, 72 – 4; Torqued Spiral 110 – 11 sexuality 9; sexual activities 87 – 9; study of 22, 35n68; see also homosexuality Sihanouk, N. 211, 219 silence 78, 108 – 9, 151; installation 108; the silenced 24, 152, 222; watching in 77 – 8 Simpson, D. 233, 235, 238 skepticism 10, 19, 20, 34n50, 180 slavery 146 – 8, 150 – 1, 157 Soderman, B. 64 – 5 Sontag, S.: Regarding the Pain of Others 5, 23, 247n50 South Africa 19, 164 – 7, 171 – 2, 178 space 106 – 7, 111 – 13, 116 – 17, 156, 166 – 7, 170, 186 spectacle, 28, 87 – 8, 91, 94, 236 – 7 spectatorship 14–15, 18, 20, 22, 26, 45, 47, 49, 53, 78–9, 94, 104–5, 114, 149, 157, 189, 194, 196, 219, 239, 242–3, 252–5; at African American bodies 139; civil space and citizens 23, 27; contemporary 46; embodied 54, 56; enlightened 25; ethics of looking 152; invisibility 80; multiple viewing responses 24; visible 84 Spivak, G.: A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 153; Imperatives to ReImagine the Planet 178 Struth, T. 6 – 7 sublime 43, 72, 110 Surrealism 26, 124, 126 – 9, 132 – 3, 171 – 2, 174 Surveillance: CCTV 8 – 9, 28; police 78 – 83, 85 – 9, 92 – 5 Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association 212–14, 216–18, 221 tabula rasa 46 – 7, 52 technology 13 – 15, 17, 63, 65, 75, 82, 115 – 16, 165, 168, 170 – 1, 175, 178 – 80, 189, 232, 252

274

Index

television 12, 14 Thomas, H. W. 27, 139 – 63; Absolut 156; Absolut Power 149, 151; Alive with Pleasure! Chorus Line 152; All Things Being Equal 155; ‘Are You the Right Kind of Woman for It?’ 153; Bearing Witness: Murder’s Wake 151; Black is Beautiful 144; Branded Head 139, 145, 156; B®ANDED series 142, 144, 146, 155; The Chase Mastercard 147; FAIR WARNING 143 – 4, 151; House of Cards 144; ‘It Didn’t Jest Grow by Itself!’ 153; Priceless 149, 151; REBRANDED series 143 – 4, 151, 153 – 4; Scourged Back 147 – 8; UNBRANDED series 142, 144, 151 – 2, 154, 156 trace 168 – 71, 180; see also imprint transformation 115 – 17, 191 trauma: historical 4, 30; victim of 5, 16, 23, 29, 31n9 uncanny: experience 50, 174; structure 165 unconscious 24, 125 – 9, 132, 134 Ung, B. 212, 215 – 16, 219, 220 United States 12 – 13, 28, 29, 88, 91, 92; see also Dover Air Force Base; Mansfield, Ohio; Pentagon, the verisimilitude 66, 133 video 1, 8 – 9, 25, 27 – 8, 221; as art 77 – 99, 164 – 84, 185 – 207; as digital 27, 63 – 76 Vietnam 30, 211, 213, 251, 254 – 6; see also Vietnam War Vietnam War 12 – 13, 29, 221, 231 – 2, 258 viewer see spectatorship Villevieille, G. 215, 219

Virilio, P.: Art as Far as the Eye Can See 13 – 15; The Vision Machine 6, 8; War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception 232 visibility 8, 11, 18, 20, 28, 44, 47, 79 – 80, 86, 144, 154 – 6, 165, 177, 189 – 96, 212, 233, 236, 241 – 2; hypervisibilty 141, 190, 195; with invisibility 80, 140 – 1, 156, 189 – 90, 195 – 6, 241; see also blindness; vision vision: as an act of looking 54, 105 – 6, 108, 112, 115, 123 – 5, 128 – 9, 132, 133 – 4, 141 – 2, 145, 165, 168, 170 – 1, 174 – 7, 180, 185, 187, 189, 193 – 5; of the eye 3, 8, 10 – 12, 14 – 16, 26, 44 – 7, 50, 52 – 4, 56 – 7, 81, 83, 105, 118, 123 – 5; politics of 25, 221, 223, 242, 256; see also spectatorship visual culture 141, 155 visual experience 69, 80 voyeurism 86 – 7, 92, 94 – 5, 234 Warhol, A.: Blow Job 94 – 5, 156 Waugh, T.: Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall 83, 85 – 7 Weibel, P. 2, 21 Whitney Museum 25, 77, 79, 89, 93 witness 253, 259; as action 4; death 238; distant 218 – 20; ourselves as 95; patriotic act 243; problems of being a witness 79; traumatic memory 219 – 20; truth 16; trying not to perceive 257; turned away 212, 255; an unforeseen event 5 Wizard of Oz, The 65 – 7, 69 – 70 World Wide Web 6 – 7, 11, 164 – 5 Zelizer, B.: About to Die: How News Images Move the Public 256, 258