Abstracts
Abstracts for all conference speakers are listed below. Details of the panel organisation can be found on our programme page. For more information please contact the conference organisors: artpgconf@essex.ac.uk
Keynote speaker
Professor Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds)
When History Assumes an Image: Problems with Knowing What You Are Seeing
For the last four years I have been co-directing a research project on Concentrationary Memories which examines the politics of representation in the aftermath of the invention by Nazism of what David Rousset, a political deportee to Buchenwald named 'the concentrationary universe'. The representation of what happened between 1933 and 1945 has largely been subsumed under the label, the Holocaust, without sufficient attention to key differences within the horror and terror perpetrated by Nazism. One of the major debates surrounding this has focussed on the legitimacy or politics of using documentar y photographic and filmed images to produce knowledge of these events. The Resnais/Lanzmann now Lanzmann/Didi-Huberman and Lanzmann/Rancière debates can be revisited productively. The prism of concentrationary memory as a political-aesthetic gesture of resistance allows us to re-open the classic debates and re-examine the historical and theoretical questions of visibility and the politics knowledge.
Graduate speaker abstracts
Hana Buddeus (AAAD, Prague)
Photography and Fiction in Czech 'Action Art'
"[W]e cannot even recognize the representational power of a medium except with reference to other media." (Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media)
Following-up on the quoted text, I will show what we come to know about the possibilities of photographic representation during the moment when photography enters into a relationship with performance art. I will thus concern myself with the relationship between a photograph and an action taking place which is recorded onto the photograph, and I will attempt to show that for the making of a photograph an actual realization of the "action taking place" is not necessarily needed. For example, within its broader whole a photographic series or sequence has this photographic ability to create the illusion of temporal succession and of the fluency of the recorded action. The photographic series then serves as a tool for inducing the impression that the depicted action really took place. In such a case, a paradoxical situation arises, in which evidently, if it were not for the photographic equipment, the action would not have occurred.
I will trace the described principle in concrete examples of Czech art from the 1970s. In then politically isolated Czechoslovakia, action art, not tied to institutions and artistic operation, presented a space for free creation. Easily transportable photographic records moreover guaranteed the possibility of publication in foreign magazines and even exhibiting on an international level. If I were to mention just one example for them all, I would introduce Karel Miler, whose work was abundantly published and exhibited in the form of photographic documentations. At the same time, his earliest works correspond exactly to what is described above; i.e., his actions were performed primarily for the photographic camera, not at all for the attending public, and were presented in the form of a photographic series.
Natasha Adamou (University of Essex)
'Photography as a Hole': Gabriel Orozco and Photography after Conceptual Art
In a conversation with Benjamin Buchloh, Gabriel Orozco resists the art historian's tendency to look at his photographic practice in the light of conceptual art strategies because the work is not conceptual in the sense of involving textual references and notions of the archive. Orozco claims that in conceptual art the photograph is treated like a relic. On the contrary, Orozco's conception of "photography as a hole" opens up his inquiry into the realm of "the real." In this paper, I argue that the way the artist employs photography in recording his found objects and exploring the notion of "reality" is more in line with André Breton's conception of surrealist artists as sensitive recording instruments, the strategy of automatism and the idea of the marvelous.
Giulia Smith (UCL)
Zero and Zero: Nigel Henderson's Camera Work
Upon his return from the RAF, in the aftermath of WWII, Nigel Henderson relocated from Bloomsbury to the bombed-out East End of London. At the time he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and the long walks he took with his camera amid the ruins were the only relief he could find from his hallucinatory fits. For him the eye of the camera became a protective screen. This paper reconsiders the alleged transparency of the photographic medium in light of such a dynamic of "psychic fencing". This is thematised in Henderson’s photographs through an insistence on wall surfaces: walls left freestanding by the bombings, walls in close-up to reveal the smallest signs of destruction and "fictional walls", abstract photograms whose scarred texture was only a product of darkroom manipulation. This iconography is taken as an epistemological key to access a catastrophic imaginary that after the war loomed large in the city’s collective memory. In a famous scene of Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, premiered in London in 1957, Hamm asks Clove to climb on a ladder, peer out the window and tell him what he sees outside, beyond the wall.
"Zero…zero…and zero", Clove replies. This scenario resonates with the aesthetic of Henderson’s photographs. Him and Beckett similarly attempted to give visual and spatial definition to a collective "bombed-out consciousness", as Theodor W. Adorno defined it in his interpretation of Endgame. The German critic asked what form language might take to represent speechlessness in the face of disaster. The same question might now be posed to the medium of photography.
Rachele Ceccarelli (University of Aberdeen)
Indexing the War
"The Day Nobody Died" is a work created by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in 2008 during their experience as embedded reporters with the British Army units in Afghanistan. War photography has long been criticized for exploiting a conventional rhetoric of aestheticized suffering and illusory objectivity that generates conformism and atrophies dissent. More recently embedded photojournalism, with its promise of immediacy and transparency, has been questioned for its complicit contribution to the establishment and the perpetuation of dominant discourses and regimes of truth. Instead of taking stereotypical photographs with their cameras, Broomberg and Chanarin responded to every casualty and event by exposing to the sun a seven-meter section of a roll of photographic paper contained into a cardboard box. The result is a series of large abstract photographs, produced by the chemical reaction on the paper triggered by light and heat. These images efface figuration, refuting the iconic and descriptive logic of realism to highlight the indexical dimension of photography. Thinkers such as Green and Lowry, Didi-Huberman, Doane, Hollier, and Mulvey have recently returned to Peirce's often misused and abused semiotic category, stressing that the deictic, circumstantial and ostensive dimension of the photographs puts them in an intimate relationship with the real. These theoretical debates on the "politics of the index", as Mary Ann Doane defined it, provide the theoretical framework for an investigation of Broomberg and Chanarin's project as a radical alternative to mimetic documentation and narrative intelligibility. Their images do not claim to provide a truthful representation of facts and objects, they do not promise a readable assertion of meaning; instead, they highlight the indexicality of photography as a performative and contingent trace of an event. They make a claim of presence, asking the viewer not just to look, but also to imagine what they do not tell and show.
Patrizia Munforte (University of Zurich)
Visibility and Invisibility in Photographic Memorial Portraits of the Deceased of the 19th Century
As a mirror of reality and a "mirror with a memory" (Oliver Wendell Holmes) the photograph stands at the interface between scientific documentation and memorial culture. This oscillation is particularly evident in a deceased person’s portrait photograph, with the medium fluctuating between objective and subjective perception. Ambiguous readings are inherent in the photograph of a dead body, whereby the image can be interpreted as medical study as well as private devotion.
This paper demonstrates the different ways of visualising mortal processes in art and photography of the 19th century. I will pursue the question of how the semantics of mortality and the living can be read in various media, with emphasis placed upon how photography presents and represents the process of death. I will confront portraits of deceased and memorial images of the 19th century with their temporal und intermedial discourse about death and life, which is demonstrated in the delineation of mortal processes (pre- and postmortal).
The denotation 'memorial portrait of the deceased' may suggest the visibility of death as a central theme. But in fact this genre conceals the signs of mortality: death becomes invisible — unrepresentable. The argument raises the issues of the presentable and unpresentable in private memorial photography. To evidence an apparent "life" in the portraiture of a deceased person was crucial as it was inappropriate, according to Christian belief, to show the corpse alone due to proscriptions against a direct look at death. Paradoxically, it was important to stage the dead person as once alive. This applies, due to its medial capability, especially to photography, which is presumed to represent the subject as authentic reality—oscillating between evidence and ambivalence, visibility and invisibility of death.
Heather Linton (University of South Florida)
Illumination and Victimisation: Mental Illness in Paris and Abidjan
The impossibility of translating a comprehensive definition of mental illness into visual language manifests in photographs featuring people living with the disability of mental illness itself. The means in which one relates to peers and functions within the community substantiates measures of mental health, according to the World Health Organization, which connect to levels of social value and otherness. I explore how social and visual contexts contribute to degrees in which mentally ill persons are portrayed in photographic works and how those contexts signify victimization and/or illumination of the subjects photographed.
A visual analysis of Paul Régnard's photographs taken under the instruction of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris during the 1870s is compared with Dorris Haron Kasco's images of "Les Fous d'Abidjan" from the former capital of Ivory Coast during the 1990s. Examinations of the social contexts include a mental institution in Paris and public spaces in Abidjan, which offer a basis for interpreting further the implications of relationships to the subject. The specific images I examine highlight formal qualities in conjunction with the roles of and relationships between photographer, audience, and subject in each body of work.
After looking closely at the social and visual elements central to the topic of mental illness as it relates to the photographic work listed above, a discussion of anthropologist and writer Allen F. Roberts's inquiry into the roles of victimization and illumination is applied to the photographs of both Régnard and Kasco. I demonstrate how relationships surrounding both sets of photographs as well as social settings of institution and public space work to victimize and/or illuminate the mentally ill persons photographed.
Anne-Sophie Garcia (McGill University)
Blurring the Lines between History and Fiction: Walid Ra’ad and the Atlas Group
The Atlas Group −a project established in 1999 by Lebanese artist Walid Ra'ad −aims to "research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon". Paradoxically, the artworks (which the group calls "documents") addressing the Lebanese civil wars systematically omit images of the conflicts. The proposed research is based on Missing Lebanese Wars, an artwork consisting of a notebook that belonged to a fictional Lebanese historian. My analysis intends to demonstrate how visual art enables an appropriated language for the expression of collective trauma, shedding a new light on traditional historiography.
More than two decades after Lebanon's complex and devastating civil wars, there is still no consensus on the history of these conflicts to the point where many Lebanese refer to them as "the events". Moreover, the government undertook a series of initiatives in order to forget these episodes and move on, a process that Sune Haugbolle names "state-sponsored amnesia". The consequence is that these traumatic memories of the wars have not been acknowledged or situated in a historical narrative.
Traumatic memories become then repressed, falling from consciousness and representation. Based on studies of art historian Jill Bennett, I examine how the collective traumatic experience of the civil wars translates into an artistic language. For Bennett, art that draws from trauma does not engender an emotional or moral response from the viewer; instead, it triggers an empathic response that leads to thought and critical inquiry.
This empathic dimension brings a new perspective on traditional historiography and its limits in accessing traumatic events. I propose to examine how artistic practice - which offers a language for the expression of trauma - can contribute to historiography. I base my analysis on studies of historian Dominick LaCapra who proposes a hybrid historical practice balancing both the claims of reference of traditional historiography and an empathic dimension of the traumatic experience.
Art and its empathic dimension can offer a new lens for looking at the past, opening access to an original understanding not available through traditional historiography.
Edward Bacal (UCL)
Repetition, Return and Representation: Alain Resnais and the Traumatic Temporality of Mechanical Reproduction
The work of filmmaker Alain Resnais presents an exceptionally incisive and extensive reflection on the photographic image's capacity, and ultimate failure, to represent trauma. Throughout his oeuvre, Resnais' films (of which I focus on Night and Fog, 1955), combine themes of trauma and memory with a self-reflexive meditation on the function of mechanical reproduction. As such, his work evinces the inability of the indexical photographic image to represent the traumatic event, insofar as any representation is only ever a re-presentation. In other words, Resnais explores how the photographic image is always-already temporally deferred, and accordingly serves to re-present an event that (pace Freud's theorization of trauma) is experienced not in the present but as a subsequent compulsion to repeat. Following this logic, I read Resnais' work vis-à-vis Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology (the radical untimeliness by which the spectres of history disassemble the order of past, present, and future) in order to theorize the camera’s own compulsion to repeat. I thereby argue that Resnais grasps mechanical reproduction's capacity to deconstruct the temporal ordering of representation, and that in doing so he contravenes the repression of culpability in cultural trauma (e.g. the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the Algerian occupation). By activating the affective potential of mechanical reproduction, Resnais evokes the traumatic past without negating it by attempting to make it present; such evocations, furthermore, conjure the spectral non-presence of the historical past in order to articulate the ethical injunction of bearing witness. Ultimately, Resnais posits a formidable aesthetic and affective model of political communication, and as such, radically interprets the political function of photography-based representation.
Yoko Tsuchiyama (EHESS)
Visibility and Invisibility of the Nuclear Image in The Family of Man
My presentation will focus on the narrative and representation of the nuclear power through photographs in the context of the fifties. The exhibition The Family of Man organized by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, expressed a vision of peace and hope after World War II through humanist photographs. It is known, however, that the exhibition implicated itself in the then nascent political ideologies of the Cold War. For example, from 1953, the American President Eisenhower started the "Atoms for Peace" program. At that time, the question of nuclear weapons and that of the peaceful use of nuclear energy were kept apart. Two contrasting strategies are employed: on the one hand, it presents the viewer with images which allude to its hovering presence within everyday life; on the other hand, the exhibition equally contains more direct representations of the raw power of nuclear weapons.
The text of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto and the pictures of Nagasaki and of the H-bomb trial were juxtaposed to give expression to latent fears. Through the rhetoric of color, size, layout of pictures, they are clearly visualized. At the same time, images became symbols whose primary function was to communicate a message, losing thus their documentary character. Each textual document and photograph came from real documentary records, but through the exhibition become the material for the construction of a narrative.
At the end of the story, Steichen himself raised the question whether the existence of nuclear weapons was a common crisis for all humankind or not. However, the resolution of crisis was laid exclusively at the doorstep of the United Nations within the story constructed by the exhibition. Accordingly, it did not represent a universal vision, and was considered to be a form of Cold War propaganda.