Beauty in Contemporary Art

Video © 2013 Institute of Art and Ideas 

Here is a video discussion (length - approx. 37 minutes) on the role of resurgent preoccupation with beauty in contemporary art featuring critic Julian Stallabrass, art historian Griselda Pollock and Norwegian artist Sidsel Christensen.

Stallabrass, ed. Documentary

Yesterday I posted on a dispute between Susie Linfield and Julian Stallabrass that emerged from a review the former wrote of the latter. In the course of preparing that post I came across yet another recent book (edited) by Stallabrass. You can find publication details here. I've only just now ordered the book but this promises to be yet another offering in a very useful series.

Linfield Reads Stallabrass ... and so on.

"Reading this anthology—many of whose pieces date from 2008, and some of which were previously published—is like trolling through a flea market looking for gems. The book mounts no sustained argument, or arguments; instead, it covers—in a fairly haphazard fashion—such issues as the role of embedded photographers; the use of torture in the wars in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq; and the ways in which technological changes are affecting the reception of photojournalism and the work of photojournalists. Still, I like flea markets ..." ~ Susie Linfield

The passage above opens Linfield's review of the collection Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images* by Julian Stallabrass at the Aperture blog. Turns out that Stallabrass replies and Linfield responds. These are two of the best writers on photography around. Where they disagree is over the assessment of US imperialism. Here I side with Stallabrass. Linfield in many respects wants us to draw a curtain over the US role in Iraq prior to the military adventures and war crimes of Bush #2 and his minions.

"Everything that Julian Stallabrass says about how Iraq was strangled, weakened, and torn up by international sanctions and the U.S. invasion is correct. What he doesn’t say is that Iraq had been strangled, weakened, and torn up by previous decades of misrule by Saddam Hussein’s pathologically violent, repressive Baath regime. I am always mystified as to why “anti-imperialists” believe that the history of a country begins when the U.S.—or another power—invades it."

And she wants to call attention to the obvious flaws of the Iraqi resistance.

"The “resistance” in Iraq is rabidly intolerant, sectarian, murderous, and misogynistic; like the Taliban in Afghanistan, it represents a reactionary, totalitarian program. To romanticize, or even remotely defend, these movements is, I think, a cruel hoax. They do not represent any sort of liberation, or any sort of decent future, for their fellow citizens."

Let me be clear - Linfield is right in this second passage. I am not defending the opposition. However, nothing she says there excuses the US intervention. Moreover, it is disingenuous to suggest that Saddam Hussein simply emerged  as a vicious dictator of his own accord. We ought not to frame our arguments so narrowly that they neglect the documentary record.

This, of course, is Donald Rumsfeld, among the primary architects of Bush #2's foreign policy disasters, caught in a compromising pose. This was his earlier incarnation (1983) as Special Envoy to the Middle East under Reagan. The latter, of course, underwrote Hussein politically and financially. (Background here.)  Hussein surely was a pathological tyrant, but he was to some considerable extent our pathological tyrant. In other words, recognizing the disaster that is the current Iraqi opposition is wholly consistent with forcefully pointing out the duplicitous meddling (and much worse) of the US in Iraq for decades. Linfield surely knows that.
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* The book is published in the UK by Photoworks.

What makes a good photograph?

That's the question. There are five answers here - from Julian Stallabrass, Sean O'Hagan, Martin Pugh, Colin Graham and Jim Bell.  All surely well placed to reply. I supposed no women were so situated? That's not the author's fault. Their essays are brief and moderately interesting. I have trouble getting two enthused about undertakings of this sort.

The War of Images ~ Interview with Julian Stallabrass

1.53 am Oct 20, 2003. Detainee is handcuffed in the nude to a bed
and has a pair of panties covering his face, the Abu Ghraib prison,
Baghdad, Iraq. Photo taken using cameras owned by Cp. Charles
A. Graner Jr. and Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick II.

I lifted this image from this interview in FOTO8 with Julian Stallabrass, an incisive art critic and historian who curated the Brighton Photo Biennial this fall. I recommend the interview and want to call your attention to this exchange between Stallabrass and Guy Lane, his interlocutor. Lane starts, articulating views that, while commonplace, I suspect are not his own:

On a related point, in considering material for the exhibition did you come across photographs which you considered, on moral grounds, to be unsuitable to display? I’m thinking of Abu Ghraib…

We are displaying Abu Ghraib pictures. We’ve chosen to do it in a particular way: they will be seen in a gallery along with others as part of a grid printed on vinyl, so I guess we’re trying to discourage the view of these things as artworks.

What do you say to the argument that re-publishing them perpetuates the abuse, in a way, on the grounds that initially the photography was part of that abuse and torture?

I don’t really go along with that. Rather, my feeling is that they haven’t been seen enough, or remembered enough. They seem to have almost dropped out of public memory, in the West anyway, as if they were some kind of aberration rather than a photographic outcrop of standard US military policy. We’re juxtaposing them with other material – images from Iraqi resistance websites, and also official pictures taken by US Army photographers. So I think to re-present them in these circumstances, to use them against the US Army’s own propaganda, can have an instructive effect.

It's true that photography was used as a “force multiplier” in Abu Ghraib: the taking of pictures, the presence of women, the dogs in the jail – all functioned to terrify and humiliate prisoners. I think it’s one thing to say the act of taking a photograph in those circumstances serves that purpose; but it does not follow that to show the photograph in other circumstances re-enacts that abuse.

The general question raised here, of course, concerns the uses of photography. Surely, the U.S. Military Personnel at Abu Ghraib photographed prisoners for their own purposes, some of which were to "terrify and humiliate" their captives. But republishing them - especially under the circumstances Stallabrass sketches and especially given that in the U.S. they have fallen wholly off the public's radar screen even as Obama commits to not conducting even a legal inquiry (let alone prosecutions) into the use of torture as official policy - seems like a necessity, an ethical and political imperative. It seems to me that not keeping these images in the public eye perpetuates the abuse, allowing our torturers to evade notice and consequences and ourselves to avoid seeing our complicity.

Photographic Locations: Allan Sekula

"I hoped to describe the attitudes of people waiting, unarmed, sometimes deliberately naked in the winter chill, for the gas and the rubber bullets and the concussion grenades. There were moments of civic solemnity, of urban anxiety, and of carnival.

Again, something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the city streets against the abstraction of global capital."

From "Waiting for Tear Gas, 1999-2000." © Allan Sekula

In 5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle & Beyond (Verso, 2000) Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair report enthusiastically on the anti-WTO demonstrations that took place in Seattle in the fall of 1999. Their text is accompanied by 30 photographs by Allan Sekula under the title "Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black]." The photograph shown here, which may well be the most poignant of the series, and the text quoted above, are from Sekula's section of the book which he describes as "anti-photojournalism" because it is preoccupied less with capturing a "defining image" than with conveying "the lulls, the waiting and the margins of events." I will set aside the possibility that, despite his efforts, Sekula might well have made a defining image. I also will set aside the vexing question of whether Sekula's photo-essay constitutes "art." I am more interested here in the trajectory of the photograph and how that trajectory reflects and effects the way it is used.

I was reminded of this image because I am re-reading Julian Stallabrass's terrific art INCORPORATED (Oxford UP, 2004)* for my undergraduate class this term. Stallabrass adopts a no-nonsense neo-Marxist approach, portraying the putative "freedom" of contemporary art as largely illusory and suggesting that that illusion distorts the multiple ways the art world functions to support advanced capitalism. I don't buy a lot of what Stallbrass peddles, but the book is both very smart and an exemplar of this sort of analysis. Among the places where I find Stallabrass especially flat-footed is in his assessment of Alfredo Jaar as tacitly lending support to "neoliberal values." And the reason that the Sekula image struck me is that Stallabrass presents it (pages 195-201), by way of contrast, as art that resists the pull of capitalism and its servants among art world elites. Sekula's "Waiting for Tear Gas," acording to Stallabrass, exemplifies"the political use of art" which helps expose the "contradictions" in "the logic of capital" precisely to the extent that, in it, "corporate sponsorship and museum curatorship do not define what is seen."

It seemed to me on first reading that this sort of blunt contrast illuminated the shortcomings of Stallabrass's theoretical commitments. I plan to push my students on this point. So, I went to the web, searching for a copy of the image that I could show in class. Ironically (and conveniently for my argument) I discovered that Sekula's image apparently has migrated from a small text published by a lefty press to the permanent collection of the Swiss Fotomuseum Winterthur. Perhaps it has lodged itself in other prestigious locations as well, thereby falling sway to the vicissitudes of "corporate sponsorship and museum curatorship." How and why might this migration compromise the political uses to which Sekula's work can be put?
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* OUP has repackaged this book as Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (2006).