Thoughts on Political Space

There is a typically provocative piece by Rebecca Solnit here at TomDispatch.com. As she tends to do, Solnit ranges widely, drawing parallels and inferences that may not immediately seem apparent, but that actually coalesce into a persuasive pattern. All in the service of peddling of what she calls 'hope in the dark.' And there is a video here at Al Jazeera about the role of images and new social media in fomenting and sustaining the 'Arab Spring.' The various amateurs interviewed for the video bring to mind the phrase a democracy of images that became the title for the post-9/11 exhibition in lower Manhattan. The phrase travels well.

To their credit, the reporters who constructed the video strive to impress on viewers that the revolution was made by real bodies - courageous and vulnerable - in the streets and not just by images. Indeed, both Solnit and the Al Jazeera video reminds me of what Allan Sekula wrote in the preface to his series of photographs "Waiting for Teargas: White Globe to Black" where he wrote of the WTO protests in Seattle - "something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the streets against the abstraction of global capital." Solnit forms her essay as a letter to the young vendor Mohammed Bouazizi whose self-immolation ignited the Tunisian revolution and much else by extension. And the videographers have their subjects - the individuals who filmed crucial episodes in the protests in Tunisia and Egypt - acknowledge the heroes in the streets, risking life and limb against the security forces. Yes, images and social media are new tools, but what they depict and disseminate are real agents taking real actions in dangerous situations. So while Sekula's phrasing is oddly passive - "the human body asserts itself" - I think he is on to something about the power of actual embodied protesters asserting themselves and being caught in the act.

This is the basic message I find lacking in this otherwise interesting recent piece by Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times. He is right, of course, about the power of place and especially about the importance of public space to politics. I can hardly dispute that sort of claim given what I've written here in the past. But I think Kimmelman neglects the conflict and contestation involved in how political agents must occupy and act out their freedom in public. The Al Jazeera video depicts just that process.

Looting, Politics and 'Art'

"Most European museums are, among other things, memorials to the rise of nationalism and imperialism. Every capital must have its own museum of painting, sculpture, etc., devoted in part to exhibiting the greatness of its artistic past, and, in other part, to exhibiting loot gathered by its monarchs in conquest of other nations. . . . They testify to the connection between the modern segregation of art and nationalism and militarism." ~ John Dewey (1934)

In The New York Times today is this story confirming both Dewey's observation and the general failure of art critics to get it. The critic - in this instance Michael Kimmelman - sides with the imperialists in the case of the Elgin marbles, possessed by the British but claimed by the Greeks. In part, he adopts a post-modern view of "culture" as freely circulating and so devoid of any "authentic" locus. But, ultimately, that is simply scaffolding for his claim that the British were able to take the marbles and so should keep them. The Greeks, he thinks are simply playing symbolic politics: "The Greeks argue for proximity, not authenticity. Their case has always been more abstract, not strictly about restoration but about historical reparations, pride and justice. It is more nationalistic and symbolic."

I think that claims of authenticity are moot - not for post-modern reasons, but because there never was any authentic possession to which one or another group might lay claim. In other words it is not that authenticity has been superseded but that it has always been specious, a rationalization for power and deception (including self-deception). Yet there is a good amount of rationalizing self-deception going on in Kimmelman's essay. I leave to one side his presumption that culture generally and art specifically constitute clearly bounded, discrete domains and, therefore, afford a terrain on which disengaged critics can ply their trade. I am more concerned here with the broader political implications of Kimmelman's position. Here is another juicy bit:

"Over the centuries, meanwhile, bits and pieces of the Parthenon have ended up in six different countries, in the way that countless altars and other works of art have been split up and dispersed among private collectors and museums here and there. To the Greeks the Parthenon marbles may be a singular cause, but they’re like plenty of other works that have been broken up and disseminated. The effect of this vandalism on the education and enlightenment of people in all the various places where the dismembered works have landed has been in many ways democratizing.

That’s not an excuse for looting. It’s simply to recognize that art, differently presented, abridged, whatever, can speak in myriad contexts. It’s resilient and spreads knowledge and sympathy across borders. Ripped from its origins, it loses one set of meanings, to gain others.

Laws today fortunately prevent pillaging sites like the Acropolis. But they stop short of demanding that every chopped-up altar by Rubens, Fra Angelico or whomever now be pieced together and returned to the churches and families and institutions for which they were first intended. For better and worse, history moves on"

Here the incoherence of Kimmelman's position is clear. He rightly speaks of the sorts of "vandalism" and "looting" that have been central to colonial enterprises, excusing them even as he protests that he does not. And he celebrates the fact that such actions now are legally proscribed. In the end he adopts a sort of let by-gones be by-gones stance. History after all does move on!

Yet, Kimmelman also hints at a sort of consequentialist approach to the whole matter when he suggests that the display of pillaged art works has been "democratizing" and that it has "spreads knowledge and sympathy across borders." If we want to consider consequences - and I think that is precisely what we ought to consider - then we ought to ask what precisely is the message being sent if the British are allowed to retain the marbles (or if other countries in possession of looted works are allowed to retain them in the face of legitimate claims). The answer, it seems to me, is this: the powerful and the rich can do what they please; the claims of justice are irrelevant or, at best, such claims trade upon the good graces of the rich and powerful. I presume, of course, that it is possible to sort out how to do justice in various cases and that it is possible to differentiate legitimate claims from those that are not. Those are difficult matters. But the underlying claim remains sound - we should look at consequences and when we do we should look at how the consequences impact common understandings of justice. The latter surely do not sanction simply allowing the rich and powerful to get way with whatever they have managed to get way with thus far.

David Levine (again)

Of David Levine, whose carcature of Wittgenstein I've lifted here, Michael Kimmelman suggests that he was "hands down, he’s the greatest modern-day caricaturist and one of the great artists of the last half-century." Levine died yesterday. You can find Kimmelman's appreciation in The New York Times here.

Monuments and Politics

Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos, the Valley of the Fallen.
Photograph © Alvaro Lobo Felgueroso for The New York Times.

In The New York Times today is a nice article by Michael Kimmelman on the controversy surrounding memorials to the late, unlamented Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco. The article is accompanied by this slide show. As Kimmelman makes clear, Franco's Fascist Falange Party and its bloody legacy in many ways represented a Catholic reaction to the modern, more secular, more liberal trends they saw in the Spanish Republic. Part of the problem is that, for some Spaniards at least, the dead General is not exactly unlamented. Another part of the problem is that apparently there has been very little explicit, public reckoning with the past in Spain. Against that background, recent legislation has mandated that all memorials to Franco be removed and allows families to disinter and re-bury relatives who had died in the Civil War. At many sites (like Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos where Fascists and Republicans are buried together) this latter prospect obviously poses considerable difficulty.

The current political situation in Spain is but one example of such wrestling over history and memories, collective and individual. Effort to erase the past are troubling. In the first place they, often inadvertently, have the effect of covering over massive criminal acts. And they also encourage future cycles of re-writing. (As Kimmelman notes: "Survivors build monuments to remember the dead, and tear down the statues of the tyrants who killed them, but mostly in vain. Statues and memorials inscribe history, which each generation rewrites to suit itself.")

On these matters I would recommend two really terrific books, one by a lawyer, the second by an anthropologist - Sanford Levinson's Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (Duke UP, 1998) and Katherine Verdery’s The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (Columbia UP, 1999). Each book is grounded in specific cases - Levinson focuses on Confederate Monuments in the American south and Verdery on Post-Communist countries after the fall - and both are remarkably sensitive to the politics involved.

I have to say that I agree with Kimmelman's conclusion:

But legislating [the removal of] monuments doesn’t rectify injustices of the past, it just fumbles with the symbols of history, reminding us why we devise them in the first place. Ultimately monuments gain meaning when we imbue them with it, otherwise they join the statues of cruel monarchs and bloody generals that have become the civilized backdrop to our parks and plazas.

Monuments are like symbols and the cultures they demarcate more generally. They have meaning only so long as we invest them with it and that process is necessarily contested and conflictual. The difficulty is how, in particular places at particular times, different groups address such conflicts of meaning. My own view is that that is part of the value of democracy.*
__________
* James Johnson. 2000. “Why Respect Culture?” American Journal of Political Science 44(3): 405-18.

Nachtwey Exhibitions

There are two different exhibitions* of James Nachtwey's** work currently showing in NYC. Here is an insightful review/essay by Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times. What I take to be the crucial passage runs as follows:

"Beauty is a vexed matter in scenes of suffering, cruelty and death. The difference between exploitation and public service comes down to whether the subject of the image aids the ego of the photographer more than the other way around. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Along with bravery and perseverance, Mr. Nachtwey’s pictorial virtue makes him a model war photographer. He doesn’t mix up his priorities. His goal is to bear witness, because somebody must, and his pictures, devised to infuriate and move people to action, are finally about us, and our concern or lack of it, at least as much they are about him and his obvious talents."

Kimmelman, with whom I regularly disagree, rightly points out that Nachtwey's images are designed to outrage us, to haunt us, to provoke us. And the question arises as to how they might be best used to that effect, how they might be located so as to be unavoidable, standing remonstrances to we who are complicit but do not actually suffer directly from the wars and epidemics and mass displacement that Nachtwey captures.
__________

* [1] “The Sacrifice” runs through April 24 at 401 Projects, 401 West Street, at Charles Street, West Village, (212) 633-6202.

[2] “World Free of TB” runs through April 27 in the visitors’ lobby of the United Nations, First Avenue at 46th Street, Manhattan, (212) 963-0089. (Closed on April 6.)

** By the way, Nachtwey won the 2007 TED (Technology, Entertainment Design) Award.

Project Row House

It is Christmas Eve. Two of my sons, Doug & Jeff just phoned me to say they are on their way over to the house for dinner (which is in the oven). My youngest son August is spending his first Christmas Eve with his mother and grandparents in Eugene, Oregon. He will be here tomorrow evening. The boys are my joy. I came close to simply writing about them tonight. But I also want to write about something hopeful out there in the world; after all this is the world in which they are coming of age. So I will go ahead and write about a sign of hope. This post is for Doug, Jeff, & August.

**********

Let's begin with a passage from Dewey's Art & Experience:

"Works of art that are not remote from common life, that are widely enjoyed in a community are signs of a unified collective life. But they are also marvelous aids in the creation of such a life. The remaking of the material of experience in the act of expression is not an isolated event confined to the artist and a person here and there who happens to enjoy the work. In the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity."

This passage came to my mind because my friend Susan Orr called my attention to this article from The New York Times (17 December 06) reporting on a truly inspiring development taking place largely outside, and more or less directly challenging, the familiar institutions of the elite "art world." Despite that locus, The Times reporter Michael Kimmelman suggests that Project Row House "may be the most impressive and visionary public art project in the country." From the sound of things, I would tend to agree. The project, founded in 1993 by artist Rick Lowe and still coordinated by him, aims to defend and extend social and cultural traditions in Houston's African American Community. In describing the venture Kimmelman refers to Joseph Beuys' "enlarged conception of Art,” which aims to integrate art and life, to tap the creative aspirations and capacities of each individual. I don't know much about Beuys (but intend to find out more). Kimmelman also might have invoked pragmatists like Dewey for whom art and experience were inseparable. In answer to the question "Is the work Mr. Lowe and his collaborators are doing art?" Dewey might respond: "the work of art has a unique quality ... that of clarifying and concentrating meanings contained in scattered and weakened ways in the material of other experiences." This, it seems to me, affords the basis for an indisputably affirmative answer.

Regardless of its sources, Mr. Lowe's vision should provide hope well beyond Houston's Third Ward. I will close by citing an appropriate remark from Rebecca Solnit's wonderful Hope in the Dark:

"Problems are our work; we deal with them in order to survive or to improve the world, and so facing them is better than turning away from them, than burying them and denying them. To face problems can be an act of hope, but only if you remember that they're not all there is."

Enrique Metinides

In The New York Tines today there is a report by Michael Kimmelman on an exhibition at the Anton Kern Gallery (NYC) of work by Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides. The pictures deal almost exclusively with random and "senseless" death and violence and suffering. The first of the images here (both © Enrique Metinides) shows the bad ending of a training flight that killed both student and instructor. The second records the grief of men at an undisclosed tragedy. And these are hardly among the most gory and graphic of his photographs.

What are we to make of this work? It brings to mind a criticism that Susan Sontag leveled at Diane Arbus.

"Arbus photographs people in various degrees of unconscious or unaware relation to their pain, their ugliness. This necessarily limits what kinds of horrors she might have been drawn to photograph; it excludes sufferers who presumably know they are suffering, like victims of accidents, wars, famines, and political persecutions. Arbus would never have taken pictures of accidents, events that break into life; she specialized in slow-motion private smashups, most of which had been going on since the subject’s birth."

Sontag faults Arbus for rendering "history and politics irrelevant," for remaining resolutely "not interested in ethical journalism," for "concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate - but without the compassionate purpose that such a subject is expected to serve." Well, compassion is perhaps not the appropriate motivation for a political project. But what of Metinides' lifelong project of recording accidents and personal tragedy? There is no sense in which it is political. Is it ethical? Kimmelman claims that "sometimes" the photographs register compassion, but "not too much." So, if ethics centrally involves compassion (a contestable claim) it hardly is ethical either.

Some time back I posted on a short essay by Susie Linfield in which she asks about the market for pictures of atrocity. She has in mind photographs of war and famine and other large scale, man-made disasters. And she wonders aloud what would prompt someone to buy and own such an image. Here the question presses itself even harder insofar as Metinides records the random and arbitrary things that befall individuals - car crashes and accidents and so forth. What would prompt someone to buy and own graphic images of such fatalities? These are not Arbus' images "slow-motion, private smashups," they reveal the excruciating outcome of real time catastrophes, making certain they are put on public display, depriving those involved, alive or dead, of privacy and solitude and whatever dignity that might afford them. Why would someone choose to buy such an image? Why would someone spend a lifetime recording them? I am perplexed.

Making Excuses for the "Liberal" Media, II

[As the title suggests, this is the second of a two-part post; the first installment was yesterday.]

Now for Kimmelman. His article is a review of an exhibition of photographs by Harrell Fletcher entitled "The American War." Fletcher's photos are pictures of photographs on display in Ho Chi Minh City at the War Remnants Museum. The museum originals depict the Vietnam war and its consequences from the Vietnamese perspective. According to Kimmelman: "It is an ingenious little show; heartbreaking too. It would be a pity to miss." Unfortunately, I did miss the show in New York and Cambridge. Perhaps I can catch it elsewhere (Rochester, despite being tied into photographic production in obvious ways is off the map as far as such exhibits are concerned!).

Fletcher took his pictures surreptitiously, his "photographs of photographs" are made in such a way that it is "clear that he was there, in the museum." This according to Kimmelman introduces a sort of reflexivity into the viewing experience in which viewers are not just seeing but are aware of themselves seeing the photographs. This, as philosopher Patrick Maynard argues in The Engine of Visualization is how photographic depiction commonly works. So Kimmelman has not actually added much there.

What is disturbing about his review is when he compares Fletcher's work to another recent show in NYC, this one by Thomas Hirschhorn. Kimmelman suggests that "the connection between Mr. Fletcher's 'American War' and the war in Iraq is almost too obvious but his show does more than make that comparison. In a nearly invisible way, it raises a general question about looking at photographs: about what it means to see something from someone else's point of view . . . and also about how strangely, even alarmingly, compelling war pictures can be." So, having drawn the parallel between Vietnam and Iraq, Kimmelman immediately changes the subject eventually drifting off into musings on the personalized dimensions of seeing animated by ritualized reference to the often cited, little read Walter Benjamin.

All that is problematic enough. But, here is Kimmelman's assessment of Hirshhorn whom he takes to task for his use of war photographs from the Middle East: "The show, boasting about its inclusion of pictures that the American media generally find too gruesome to disseminate, was in retrospsect infuriating. It is difficult to make art out of war but easy to exploit violence and congratulate oneself for looking at pictures that other people can't or don't or won't. Piety is an abuse often heaped on top of bloodletting."

I have not personally seen Hirschhorn's work. I am not here to defend it. Instead I want to pose some questions to Kimmelman. What if the American media generally and The New York Times specifically did not self-censor? What if they actually confronted the American public with the costs of the war by actually publishing pictures of American casualties? Wouldn't that deprive Hirschhorn of the shock he seeks to exploit? Beyond that, by what right do members of western publics whose governments are prosecuting war in Iraq under completely false pretenses maintain that they "can't or don't or won't" look at disturbing images of war? If Kimmelman is outraged by Hirschhorn's alleged piety perhaps he ought to check in on his own self-righteous resentment and anger. After all, the newspaper Kimmelman writes for abdicated (by its own admission) its responsibility to challenge the administration in the lead up to the war. And the LA Times report I discussed yesterday makes it clear that once the war commenced that same newspaper has presented a sanitized narrative of the war's costs. Now that is infuriating! So much for the liberal media. If it were doing its job we would not have to focus our indignation on artists like Hirschhorn. We might instead focus on those perpetrating war in our name.

Making Excuses for the "Liberal" Media, I

[As the title suggests, this is the first of a two-part post; the second installment will appear tomorrow.]

On a single day last month (Monday, 5 June) The New York Times ran not one but two stories on war photography - Michael Kimmelman "Photographs of Vietnam: Bringing the War Back Home" (B1,7) and David Carr. "Show Me The Bodies" (C1,5). Both authors draw parallels between the way the American press is depicting (or, actually, not depicting) the current war in Iraq and how it portrayed the War in Vietnam. Kimmelman’s story appeared in the Arts section, Carr’s in the Business pages. The two stories are, in different ways, a mess; they reflect, I think, the authors’ effort to absolve our largely supine mainstream press for the irresponsibility it has shown in covering the war. I will use this post to discuss Carr and another to address Kimmelman.

Carr takes as his point of departure a story in The Los Angeles Times by James Rainey entitled "Portraits of War: Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories" (21 May 2005). Rainey reports that during a six month period (1 September 04 through 28 February 05) a significant number (559) of American and allied troops died in Iraq. During that same period a systematic review of six major newspapers and two news magazines discovered precisely one photograph of a dead American solider. Now, this is a pecculiar pattern and Rainey's analysis is actually quite nuanced. By contrast Carr is concerned to explain it or, more precisely, to explain it away. In the process he ties himself into knots.

Carr is especially concerned to dismiss the possibility that a there might be a political explanation for the pattern that Rainey discloses. He insists that "it is practical, not political realities that dictate what we see" in the nation's mainstream press. In making this claim he derides un-named "conspiracy theorists" who "suggest that a sanitized visual narrative is being constructed for an increasingly unpopular war." Two things are important about Carr's claim. First, there is the inconvenient matter of timing. Rainey's study covers a period before public support for the war really started to deterioriate. We were getting a sanitized visual narrative even when the administration enjoyed considerable support. Second, and more importantly, one need not be a conspiracy theorist to identify political sources for the way the mainstream meedia cover the war. Consider what Rainey actually wrote: "Journalists attribute the reltively bloodless portrayal of the war to a variety of caauses - some in their control, others in the hands of the US Military, and the most important related to the far-flung nature of the conflict and the way Americana news outlets perceive their role."

It is not difficult to find politics lurking here and to do so with no hint whatsoever of conspiracy. Consider the first factor. Iraq is a big country (compared,, say, to Vietnam) and the relatively few reporters and photojournalists who are assigned there not only operate in a highly dangerous environment but remain hostage to the vagaries of where fighting (and so casualties) might occur. You cannot, after all, photograph events if you are not present. Let's think now. Why is Iraq so dangerous? Perhaps because the administration did not feel the need to plan for what might happen in the aftermath of the US invasion. Why are there so few reporters and photojournalists assigned there? Perhaps because the Pentagon is trying very, very hard to maintain control over information. Or, perhaps because the major media deem it unpatriotic or commercially inconvenient to focus too much on the war and especially on its real human costs (Of course the mainstream press does regularly show Iraqi war dead, but do Americans care about that?). And what about getting access to actual fighting? Well, since most (not all, but most) reporters and photographers in Iraq are "embedded" they really are at the mercy of their miltary hosts. So the problem is not just the size of Iraq and geographically dispersed nature of the conflict. The problem in very large measure is with political decisions that limit access or make it too dangerous.

Consider the second factor. Editors and publishers back home in the States have many things to worry about. Commercial considerations for one thing. Public reaction for another. Advertisers may not like pictures of war dead. And not just wacky right wing bloggers but the families of the dead or of those still serving in Iraq might object. Well, all of that seems to me to be directly political. Are newspapers supposed to follow public opnion or lead it? Are they supposed to report the news or remain supine in the face of commercial interests? Carr seems to think such things are outside the realm of politics. But when editors, as he says, "leave germane but grisly photographs ... on the darkroom floor" out of obesiance to "commercial considerations" or "a squeaamish public aesthetic" (for the alleged existence of which Carr humself offers considerable counter-evidence), they are quite simply making political decisions. They are deciding that reporting the costs of war is less important than some other aim. No conspiracy needed. We are getting a sanitized view of war and the "liberal" media is giving it to us.