HANNAH WHITAKER

Hannah Whitaker, Talk, 2017

Our current issue, Subjektiv part II, invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. Today's statement from Hannah Whitaker:

OMG That’s So Truuuuu.

Dismantling a photograph’s claim to truth is a favorite pastime of photography theorists. Recently, broader conversations around truth and fact are everywhere. Leftist intellectuals, normally favoring Baudrillard’s simulacrum to such pedestrian impulses as truth claiming, find themselves suddenly shouting the superiority of their facts to those claimed by the right. Indeed, normal knowledge systems are breaking down, and the photographic order has not been spared. Strangely, photography itself has played a crucial role in its own upending.

In spite of decades of fist-shaking at those who’d be so naïve as to conflate a thing with its image, to the broader public, the veracity of photography remains more or less intact. The New York Times associates the very word photograph with an implication of truth, designating images that have had any post-production as “photo-illustrations.” This way, for an image deemed sufficiently believable as to be called an actual photograph, one can be sure of the basic facts, or at least those conveyable by optical means.

However, even the simplest of truths are contentious of late. Donald Trump’s indifference to them is widely known. He brings new subjectivity to that which formerly felt like objective fact—that one number (the amount of people at his inauguration) is smaller than another number (the amount of people at Barack Obama’s inauguration). These quantities were estimated by crowd scientists using aerial photographs. That there can be any disagreement, however misguided, on these images, which were shot from approximately the same position at the same time of day, points to the slipperiness of deriving definitive information from photographs. Oddly, Trump’s refusal to believe these widely accepted conclusions make him an unlikely bedfellow for left-wing art theorists who dismiss the supremacy of photographic truth.

Hannah Whitaker, OK, 2017

Speaking of supremacy, right-wing Internet trolls (or, in pre-digital parlance, assholes) routinely take this ambivalence about accuracy a step further by falsely linking various innocuous symbols with white supremacy. Rather than simply denying or ignoring basics truths, they gleefully, nefariously manipulate the public. Symbols that they’ve attempted to associate with white supremacy include milk, the polar bear emoji, the peace sign, and the rainbow flag. In February 2017, an anonymous poster to 4chan launched “Operation O-KKK” by urging, “We must flood twitter and other social media websites with spam, claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy. Make fake accounts with basic white girl names and type shit like OMG that’s so truuuuu.” The poster goes on to add, “Bonus points if your profile pic is something related to feminism.” (In addition to white supremacy, feminists—and how annoying they are—seem to be a fixation for 4chan tricksters. One suggests perpetrating the notion that clapping is “anti-feminist.”) Essential to the success and insidiousness of these hoaxes is that they employ visual, and therefore photographable, signs. The manipulation of the meaning of these signs allows any image, even those with totally apolitical intent, to be weaponized. Radical fringe groups can appear to communicate wordless solidarity, even if they aren’t actually doing so.

The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz. This version was published in 1915.

Photographers who have long internalized a suspicion of photographic veracity traffic much more comfortably in symbols. Non-literal content, like metaphor or affect, is understood to be reliant on subject position and thus is spared from problematic claims to universal truths. However, since it is culturally dependent, it can easily be misunderstood. In his essay On the Invention of Photographic Meaning, Allan Sekula cites discourse as essential to even the possibility of meaning, which he defines as a “bounded area of shared expectations.” The limitations that enclose this arena allow for understanding. For example, in Alfred Steiglitz’ famous 1907 photograph, The Steerage, common knowledge about clothing indicates the presence of two distinct classes of people. This allows the photograph to stand in for something unphotographable, like an idea—in this case, economic inequality. But what to doMwhen the arena comes unbounded? Or when expectations are not only no longer shared, but explicitly undermined? Or when misunderstanding becomes not simply a possibility, but an inevitability by design?

Those of us invested in the idea that photographs can have meaning must ask ourselves these questions. It seems the systems for understanding even the types of content that admit to subjective contingency are breaking down. Like a photograph’s truth claim, its symbolic content is becoming tainted. Photographs are then not simply contingent on subjectivities that offer differing interpretations, they are becoming untethered from the structures that allow for meaning at all. They become utterly senseless, or aggressively meaningful, or both, or neither. Or perhaps meaning is simply quaint. For more understanding, we should all be directed to the Truth Claim (Photography)’s handy Wikipedia page, which features useful subsections entitled “Understanding of reality,” “potential for manipulation,” and “the continuing reality effect.” Perhaps “reality” is being used here as it is in “reality television”—that is, to mean its opposite. Or if not its opposite, then whatever you want it to mean.

Hannah Whitaker, OK,OK,OK,OK,OK,OK, 2017.

HINDE HAEST

Clément Lambelet, Collateral Visions (2016-ongoing)

Subjektiv part II invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. Today's statement from Hinde Haest: Photography has been considered both the epitome of truthful representation and the most treacherously manipulative of mediums. The relation of the photograph to reality is highly paradoxical; its truthfulness has been contested from the outset. The more advanced our contemporary imaging technologies become, the more we trust its observation over our own. Of course, the more advanced our imaging technologies become, the more elaborate and immeasurable is the potential to create our own visually constructed versions of reality. In this scenario the photographer is both humbly subjected to the technological eye, while simultaneously subjecting it to his or her imagination. This schizophrenia makes the photograph both the most objective and subjective of mediums. 

Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away, 1858, Albumen silver print from glass negatives, The Royal Photographic Society at the National Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom.

What we tend to forget, even if we consider photography an objective medium, is that it is just that: a medium, a moderator that only presents the truth it is being fed. Since photography’s infancy, it is artists who have come closest to fathoming the paradoxical quality of the medium and tapped its true potential: to use  reality to imagine alternative worlds as if they were real. In 1858, Henry Peach Robinson’s staged image of a dying girl caused public outrage. Not because the girl in the picture was dead, but because she was not dead while a recording technology clearly demonstrated she was. The truth value of technologically mediated reality - and an understanding of the photograph as a “chemical and physical process that allows nature to reproduce herself” (Daguerre) or a "pencil of nature” (Talbot) – was broken irreparably. 

Nearly two centuries later, we seem none the wiser. The nineteenth-century celebration of imaging technology as the objective bearer of truth persistently trumps a collective distrust in our own observations. And it is still artists who demonstrate that imaging tools do not only allow us to replicate reality, but also to reinvent and recompose it, for better or for worse. A complicating factor (and unprecedented opportunity) for the current generation of photographers is the accelerated speed at which images are being created and circulated online, a development that has invested the photograph with additional subjectivity that transcends the depicted. The power – and vulnerability – of the image is increasingly determined by the frequency with which it is being shared, the networks it travels and the context in which it is perceived.  

Clément Lambelet, Happiness is the only true emotion, 2016

Amid the exponential number of images we are exposed to, we can only observe so much. What we see and fail to see is largely curated by technology. Big-data analysis, visual-recognition technologies, and algorithms increasingly determine who sees which image in which context. Contemporary artists working with photography are increasingly concerned not with what is depicted, but with how the depicted finds its way to the beholder. For example, Swiss artist Clément Lambelet investigates advancing algorithmic ecosystems. The artist scrutinizes the objectivity of the image at a time of rapidly developing computer-vision technologies and increasingly automated forms of surveillance. Instead of discarding such technologies as flawed, he repurposes them to expose previously unnoticed inconsistencies. For Collateral Visions (2016-ongoing) the artist scours found US Army footage for details accidentally captured by the lens, such as two donkeys peacefully grazing amid a US drone strike on an IS target. In Happiness Is the Only True Emotion (2016), Lambelet questions the reduction of bodies to digits by showing algorithms can be functionally prejudiced. The work examines the failings of emotion-recognition technologies, which only ever identify happiness. 

Lambelet puts his finger on some of the fundamental questions about contemporary methods of representation. What is not shared or seen can be more influential in defining how we perceive the world than the information that does enter our peripheral sight. Lambelet’s algorithm can only identify happiness because it primarily learns from images depicting happiness. This does not mean the algorithm is defective, or that sadness does not exist. It simply proves that imaging technologies are as subjective as the realities they are being fed.

One question that follows is whether anything we see online is real. By “real” I do not mean factual, but rather what an image (whether true or false) can tell us about ourselves. As Hito Steyerl aptly put it in a conversation with Marvin Jordan for DIS Magazine: “Everyone has to be seen and heard, and has to be realized online as some sort of meta noise in which everyone is monologuing incessantly, and no one is listening. Aesthetically, one might describe this condition as opacity in broad daylight: you could see anything, but what exactly and why is quite unclear.” A number of artists are attempting to distil a contemporary human condition from the continuous, collective digital trail of visual information that people leave on the internet. It is a megalomanic undertaking that resonates with the humanist photography of the postwar period, kindled by a belief in a shared experience of what it is to be human. 

Thomas Kuijpers, Find shelter! (The Rain Started), 2017

Rather than mapping humanity through ethnographic or anthropometric visualization—a technique alarmingly resonant with contemporary facial-recognition technology—the humanists employed photography to depict people as they loved, grieved, played, and fought. Come the digital age, the photographic image connects people worldwide more than ever, and our visual language has become increasingly emotive and subject to careful construction and curation. However, the subjectivity of the image today does not mean it is untrustworthy. If anything, it reveals more (often uncomfortable) truths about us and the ways we perceive the world. For the work Bad Trip (2017) Dutch artist Thomas Kuijpers analyzed the circulation of online imagery in an attempt to pinpoint the visual fundamentals of the most primal human emotion: fear. He amassed an archive of publications’ front pages, sensationalist headlines, and popular images that kindle a collective fear of terrorism. He ventured into the fringes of the web, tracking the posts of several anti-Islamic communities to study the kind of information their members consume. In an attempt to retrace what exactly inspires his own angst, he filmed and photographed situations in his daily life that triggered associations with terrorism. By collecting and deconstructing the visual make-up of a shared paranoia, Kuijpers questions how our perception of reality is conditioned largely by sensationalism, fake news, and irrational fears. 

Lambelet and Kuijpers demonstrate how our consumption of images is increasingly based on knowledge drawn from existing information. Algorithms present us with the future, but they only learn from the past. Such visual self-reference was cleverly examined by David Horvitz. Inspired by Bas Jan Ader's 1971 video I’m too Sad to Tell You, Horvitz uploaded a stock image of himself with his head in his hands and kept an inventory of how the image made its way on to various websites as an illustration of depression and myriad other mental states. Horvitz’s sadness only acquires meaning after it has been bought or otherwise appropriated and placed in context. The image (signifier) thus precedes its meaning (signified). With his work, Horvitz not only points us toward the deplorable human condition manifested in collective depression and fatigue; he also inverts the truth that lies embedded in code by reclaiming the imaginative power of the reproducible image, as had Henry Peach Robinson in the nineteenth century.

David Horvitz, Sad, Depressed, People, 2012, New Documents.

Hinde Haest is a curator at Foam, photography museum Amsterdam.

ANDRIANNA CAMPBELL

Photo courtesy: Matthew Placek.

Subjektiv part II invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. Today's statement from Andrianna Campbell: Subjectivity has been the concern of every serious student of philosophy for the last few millennia. Moreover, despite claims for subjectivity’s recent politicization, its politics has also run in tandem. In Aristotle’s Politics, he writes, “[That] man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech.” Speech is an indicator of the possession of subjectivity; speech conveys into the world the subjectivity of the subject, even when that subject is unaware of how one relates to oneself. The possession of speech, as an ancient form of discourse that we associate with the Greek Lyceum or the Chinese Apricot Altar (Xingtan), not only may convey one’s subjectivity but also one’s politics. Our sociability, how we assemble, is rigorously tied to the acceptable criteria for discussion. Today, affectivity has surpassed objectivity as the defining criteria of cultural dialogue in both public and private discussion platforms. Spaces of feeling have outgrown spaces of discourse (even those in isolated communities and groups). What is clear is that the technology of the digital era has interlinked communities across multiple platforms (Twitter, Facebook, other chat venues). Furthermore, unlike previous eras of social organizing, which produced radical leftist groups such as the Weather Underground or the German Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion or RAF) and radical right groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or Mussolini’s Blackshirts, today’s reinvigorated versions of these radicalized groups have adopted selective exposure and customization of their information feeds. This has led to widespread confirmation bias and a flagrant distrust of traditional sources. It has been good news for the isolated fashion blogger and good news for the white supremacist fringe group.

I begin with Aristotle because that is where I began to examine the self. I studied Aristotle in middle school in a magnet program for inner-city children in Hartford, CT. It was shortly after my family had immigrated to the United States and two years before we moved to the suburbs. In order to protect me from a violent school system, my mother enrolled me in a Classics program at Quirk Middle. I remember Mr. Callahan’s receding white hair. I was one of two students paying attention in his Philosophy 101 class. For most of the others, it seemed disconnected from daily reality. I liked the Greeks because I liked my worn copy of Edith Hamilton’s mythologies. The other alert student, Lara, seemed much more rigorous in her thinking, and less of a romantic. I don’t know her as an adult, but I know from social media that she went on to Princeton and then to law school. She was always perfectly dressed and pressed; she never had a hair out of place. I also remember that the day we studied “the unexamined life is not worth living,” a student had died a few hours earlier. He was stabbed in the courtyard before the morning bell. This was Hartford in the 1990s; when Dan Rather had visited for a nightly news segment, he had worn a flak jacket. It was a “war zone.”

I have never since seen anything like that attack in my life. Our family had no roots in the United States, so it was easier to leave. The horror of those events never became quotidian. I sometimes think about that day, our journey from Aristotle to the Cartesian model of the self, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am). And in the years that followed, the shift to reading Jean Paul Sartre. All of this is a flood of visuals: he sees a man in a public park who he recognizes as a man and also as an object. He is seen by another. Thus seeing-the-other is the same as being-seen-by-other. One’s own subjectivity is the site of someone else’s objectivation. The self modified by this moment of cogito in reaction and awareness of an other in the park. That moment of sight also reminds me of Fanon on the train, of the moment in Black Skin, White Masks in which the black protagonist (Fanon) is a triple person. “I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness.” Being black in himself, he does not experience his blackness among other blacks, but in encounter. Fanon draws on and is in contradistinction to both Sartre and Hegel; Fanon wants to escape the perceived dualism in their thinking and therefore deduces his theory of a third consciousness. 

I returned to the study of Aristotle in a college course on Western ethics, where our old, white—and often drunk—male professor would begin every class by denigrating diversity. He was even so emboldened, on occasion, as to blame the Jews for the Holocaust. His line of argumentation was that they should have tried harder to fit in to German society. He was often looking at me when he began some diatribe on multiculturalism eroding ethics. Following this, he couldn’t help himself not to comment on the sexual proclivities of the women in the class. This was our ancient philosophy and ethics course. It never blemished my love of Aristotle, but the fury of my response led me to file a formal complaint. My department head said that there was nothing that could be done except another note on his record. It wasn’t the first. These layers of hypocrisy were the very problem of the study of Western ethics as it has been replicated by so many abhorrent figures. Now, with technology, we have vanishing and highly invisible selves. We don’t have to be the people we pretend to be (Socrates) in real life; so much of our pretense happens online. There have been quite a few consequences: an emboldening of public displays of narcissism, and of trolling and bullying behind secretive masks; an attachment to terms such as post-truth and alternate-facts; a distrust of science and theory; a disregard for authority. What happened to values of introspection, honor, sincerity, duty, and ethics? Is there any place for these now, and have those values (in the post-modern sense) been the very means of oppression? Or, as Bruno Latour writes, “are they (as they came out of rationality) fixed in an age that we need variable values?” One can’t help but wonder if, in order to achieve a more democratic body, we must aim to include some of these traits into mutable models. 

I am typing this now on my phone while I text my colleague Joanna Fiduccia. I am not looking inward or outward, nor neither or both. I am projecting into the technology an outward self: a self as an extension of mind, body, and spirit. I wonder whether, as in the case of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, the self projects onto another, which brings about a move from the subjective to the objective. Or if technology brings about, in his words, an “end to the antithesis of subject and object.” I wonder if the subjective, when it is placed online, mimics the objective—and if there has never been any division between them. Is the self just a plane of information roaming from one polarity to another? Most information exists in the middle somewhere. The key question: if hierarchies of information become invisible, how we do know who is speaking and why? Remember, speech is a conveyance of subjectivity and a politics. If these mechanisms are invisible, their “enforcement mechanisms … are even harder to discern.” I think about this often because Joanna and I have begun a journal of art writing and art-historical scholarship called apricota. We envision it as subjectivities run amok; however, we were also taken aback by the election. We worry about the value of erudition after the rise of affect and the seeming diminution of truth. As scholars, we both aim for objective knowledge alongside other forms of knowing. We must attempt to get the facts, or get as close to them as possible. Of course, we must be transparent in our opinions. We can address other ways that information circulates—in conversations, in anecdotes, in details that seem personal or even juicy, yes—and try to judge whether it should be part of how we understand culture. We realize a key to so much of this is transparency: of our aims and desires (as much as we can know them). We wish to combat propaganda, to be clear when editorializing, and to promote journalistic integrity. These ideals rest on the long academic tradition of citing sources and giving credit. apricota draws its knowledge accumulation from both the outside, even the liminal, as well as from the inside: we’ll even make room for  ancient male philosophers in the Western tradition. If we can write/produce/present/generate this variegated history, then we political beings can create a model—one that trains new generations with the critical judgment to navigate the challenges of upcoming eras. apricota is a journal for a digital age (singular, so far as I understand it), for our age. Or, rather, it is a journal grasping for some dimension of subjectivity that earlier philosophical models could not obtain.

Andrianna Campbell is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she specializes in American art in the modern and contemporary period. She is co-founder of the forthcoming journal apricota. 

KIM WESTERSTROM

All images are by Kim Westerström.

Subjektiv part II invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. Today's statement from artist Kim Westerström:  The camera is a room inside a room. Inside the camera, there is light only when the shutter opens. You push the button and for a short time everything is frozen and an image appears. This room could also be a small nest, a shell, a drawer or perhaps a wardrobe. But those were the places of childhood; the camera exists outside time. The camera exists beyond technical innovation. It is just a dark room with a small hole. It is indifferent to whether it is a simple camera obscura or the latest iPhone camera.

Since its invention, the camera has figured centrally in the desire to remember, to recall the past and to make the absent present. My works are in a way all about indexicality. I imagine a small path in the woods, a trace of something that moved but now no longer exists. Everything in the present is marked by the traces of the past. Although, strictly speaking, absence is a thing without matter, absence is ordered, remembered, evoked and made discussable and sufferable through materiality.

By using objects, language and photographs, my works convey an interest in material culture, and in the ways that meaning can transform and translate in different contexts. I use things from everyday life that are marked with absence: chairs, clothes, books, tables, coins, photographs – things that are always around us, which are our culture; things that are what they are because their forms have been moulded by time; things that mankind has shaped into functional forms that represent us; things we live in and with and are more than mere accessories of ourselves. They are our existence, growing out of us, sometimes so tightly bound to us that it is difficult to see the differences between us and them. 

When presence is turned into absence, we are faced with irreversible cuts and ruptures of time. For example, in the late 1970s, around the year when I was born, my father had a deep interest in radio communication. He was a radio amateur. One of my first memories is of the wires he installed in the garden, with the goal to receive New Zealand national radio. This antenna was like a net that covered the garden in an attempt to catch the transmission signals. Every time contact was successfully made with a radio station, the station would send my father a postcard with a short text. The entire wall in my father’s office was covered with these postcards. Years passed and new interests awoke and eventually all communication tools were replaced by the internet. The radio amateur was history. Eventually, my father took down the postcards, which left marks on the sun-bleached wall. The radio transmitter was removed to a box in the basement.

Both the future and the past haunt us simultaneously. The present is the most insecure state, but also the only thing that exists, since the past is forever lost and the future still to come. The present leaves a trace and it is through these traces that the absent past creates its presence in memory. Stones talk, chairs talk, dust talks. What is dust? Dust is a fine powder or earth. Dust is a secondary product of dirt. Dust is what we find in corners. Dust is history. 

CATHERINE OPIE

Catherine Opie, Freeways (1994–5). All images by Catherine Opie. Courtesy Catherine Opie, Regen Projects & Peder Lund.

Morten Andenæs on Catherine Opie

Dear Catherine    …… is how my partner suggested I start this piece, when I expressed that I would find it difficult to do justice to an exhibition for which my initial reaction was simply, fucking great. 

Keeping an Eye on the World at Henie Onstad Art Centre is the first survey exhibition in Europe, of American-born Catherine Opie’s photographic work, and to borrow a phrase from the editors of the New York Times Style Magazine, this text will be a ‘by no means exhaustive list’ of all the avenues of thought the exhibition had me wandering along. The show is accompanied by a very detailed catalogue containing all the works on display and more, texts by Ana María Bresciani and Natalie Hope O’Donnell, and four interviews with the artist conducted over the course of twenty years by Russell Ferguson, but I opted to see the exhibition as separate from this background information in order to experience what Opie’s pictures do. And they do, a lot. 

The ‘Dear’ in ‘Dear Catherine’ may seem inappropriate given that I do not know the artist. I could have opted simply for ‘Catherine’, but my partner, without having seen the show, was onto something when she suggested this mode of address. As an overwhelming rule of thumb, when she points the camera at other people, Opie titles her photographs with their names. This acknowledgment, or introduction, is just one of the myriad ways in which her works speak of the difficulty facing the documentary photographer as he or she tries to do justice to their subjects. How do you make the complexity of a subject visible, and how is it possible to do for it (a show, a person, a situation) a fraction of what it does for you?

On confronting any photograph, I often begin by naming. Naming allows me to orient myself; it is a mnemonic device and it functions as a handle, both literally and figuratively. I look and categorise, explain what is before me and try to name that which resists explanation. I look and speak, speak and look; no word without sense, no world without word. In Keeping an Eye on the World, I begin by naming ‘mother and child’, the photograph that is in fact called Self-portrait / Nursing, from 2004, hung above the stairs and overlooking the main exhibition hall. 

A looming, topless, female figure holds a child in her arms, while the infant sucks on her breast, their eyes are fixed on one another. This reciprocal gaze, so desperately needed between mother and child- to look up and see our look absorbed and acknowledged- is the single most indispensable part of a person’s later psychic wellbeing. The picture triggers something at the base of the neck. It is instantly recognisable. It is an image ingrained in us, partly due to its ubiquity, but also because it evokes a sense of something inscribed but not clearly recollected, the vague memory that we too, were once like that child, in the comfort of that giant body, nestled in the safety of our mother’s arms, ideally anyway. Opie’s piece is a self-portrait, and though hung by itself here, it must be seen in conjunction with the other self-portraits made a decade earlier. Because of this lapse of time, the self-portrait speaks more to change, memory and the passing of the years (a recurring theme in this exhibition) than it does to the current trend of mothers pouring out their #baby-nursing pics on Instagram or Snapchat. Several blue-black tattoos wind their way around Opie’s upper right arm, the arabesques mirroring the draped background, which puts one in mind of a drawing-room portrait. But then, across her chest, scar tissue reveals the word PERVERT. 

Any student of photography will be told that photo-graphis is the business of writing with light, and yet it has also been described, perhaps more tellingly, as ‘etching’ with light. The rays bouncing off the subject of the world out there burns its way like acid into whatever light-sensitive surface we use as the foundation for our image, much like the shadows of the dead in Hiroshima, fixed on the ground by the bright light and devastating heat. This idea of etching, like a scar, puts me in mind of John Berger, who said that photography did not come onto the scene to replace drawing, but memory. The scar is a memory inscribed into the being of a person. 

Those of use who have spent any time with children understand that it is experience, rather then a written injunction from another, that is the best teacher of all. The scar, as we know from Self-Portrait/Pervert, which we will see later in the exhibition, was once a painful, bloody mess, an open sore. And growing up in some ways has to do with coming to terms with that sore, of learning how to live with it and the designations we once gave ourselves, the categories we forced ourselves into in order to stand out, sharp and defined, against whatever background we found ourselves wrestling.

The nursing of a child will invariably figure as the template for all its later interactions, but it is also a first step in the most basic process of teaching it about categorisation: an I, a you, and a we. – The same goes for looking at photographs. It is a learned experience. Adults who have never seen a photograph can’t translate the homogenous, two-dimensional surface into an experience of a heterogeneous space. Looking is discerning, creating hierarchies, and looking at pictures is a social process. My daughter and I look at the green apple in the book and mouth the words together. We point to the apples on the table. They are red, yes, but also apples. I reach for one and say ‘My apple’. I hand her one and say ‘Your apple’, and together we negotiate the difficult task of being separate entities living communally. 

Being and Having

Entering a shared space demands that we deal with our own, and others’ issues of intimacy. To live with others, particularly in the industrialised West, is to negotiate between the desire to be oneself, and the risk of losing that sense of self within a larger social framework. The title of the series Being and Having (1991) speaks of a similar relationship, another negotiation: the opposition between experiencing oneself as vital and malleable on the one hand, and the wish to leave this inevitable ambivalence behind, and become sharply defined. 

Descending the staircase from Self-Portrait / Nursing (2004), the viewer is met by twelve photographs from this series. Much has been said and written about their content, and arguably, any photographer could point a camera at a group marginalised on the basis of its sexual orientation and espouse claims similar to those made by Opie about the complex and heterogeneous nature of that group’s identity. However, what makes this series so powerful, and the professed complexity clearly discernible, is the interplay between the subjects (the ‘what’ of the pictures), and the gesture or execution (the ‘how’). Instead of simply documenting some gender-bending play-acting, rather than just show and tell, this interplay does something. These photographs of women’s faces with obviously fake facial hair, set against a bright, rather unpleasant yellow background and framed in thick black frames with metal nametags, mimic a certain crudeness and lack of artistic elegance that might at first be associated with the term ‘Butch’. On closer inspection, however, and over time, it occurs to me that in fact the disproportionately thick frames and uncomfortable, artless cropping of the subjects’ faces reveals a surprising subtlety. The framing is the message.

The development of the photographic frame and formats, and how these relate to compositional techniques, rests on certain preconceived notions of what makes a ‘good’, i.e. harmonious, picture. These formats, like colour film, are to some extent, culturally coded. What strikes me the most about Being and Having is not what is made visible within the frame, but the way the series throws light on how one behaves within any given frame. Though playing around with guises and stereotypes is what grabs us at first, it is the relationship between these stereotypes and the framework within which they are forced to exist which is the most interesting aspect of the series. It is as if the women are coming up at me from the other side, a little too close to the frame itself. The effect is uncanny: at first glance it’s as if they’re peering out at me, but as I linger, an ambivalence is felt; there is a distance with which they approach, regard and relate to the frame, and the space beyond. They do not plead, do not demand; they are simply there. Opie enables a meeting or an encounter; she offers an introduction, not as an appeal to the viewer’s sympathetic (i.e. privileged) nature, but for a meeting that stages the complexity of the situation. We are, subject and viewer alike, asked to acknowledge the frame. If we could recognise and agree that these frames through which we view one another distort and determine how we see on another, perhaps living side by side wouldn’t be such a potentially threatening idea.

Though this series was made more than twenty-five years ago, it is highly relevant, to say the least, in the current climate. What better time to revisit the notion that to meet someone face to face, to engage in the complexity of another and see how much is in fact shared between diverse groups, and how little of others’ experiences and being in fact conform to the stereotypes about them that we carry around?

In Freeways (1994–5), the frame again figures prominently. The series of forty photographs is shot with a panoramic camera and each photograph is printed, like a contact copy perhaps, approximately 6x17 cm in soft, luscious warm tones of grey. They put me in mind of picture postcards found in great grandmother’s valise in the attic, or, perhaps more to the point, photographs of the miracles of modern engineering from Germany in the 1930’s. And yet, for all these references, my strongest reaction is that there is something so lonely about them, or perhaps, about the one behind the camera. In Opie’s portraits, the photographer recedes in order that the subjects come forth, but in these freeway pictures, the person behind the camera becomes noticeable. Taken from under freeway overpasses, or from the vantage point of the shoulder of the road, the most noticeable aspect is the lack of cars. Added to that is my awareness of how on the side-lines, and thus conspicuous, the presumably walking figure of Opie must have been, in a space that is by no means meant for stopping. The only people who do spend time in these places are those who for various reasons lack shelter and do not belong in any way in the kind of photograph most associated with the American freeway- the one taken from the middle of the road, the eye reaching to the horizon and beyond. This typical shot is absent here. Instead, what we get are diagonal lines reaching across the frame, from side to side, obstructing our view of the sky; roadways weaving in and out of each other like bodies that never touch, recalling the thousands of drivers alone in their respective cars, their angry cries, their sing-alongs to distant voices on the radio, or shouts for help muffled by windshields: they are in the world, but completely cut off from each other.

However bleak that vision is, freeways do promise to connect people more quickly and efficiently, like the way in which a name can sum up a person’s characteristics. Names figure prominently in Opie’s portraiture; names that we viewers surmise were either given to the subjects at birth or were adopted by the subjects themselves in order to carve out a more fitting identity. Frankie. Mitch. Ron Athey. Trash. Bo. Crystal Mason. Daddy Irwin and Mark. Mike and Sky. Alistair Fate. Vaginal Davis. Idexa. James. Justin Bond. Pig Pen. Cathy. Raven. Gabby. Monica. Angela. Cathy. Ian. Julie. Amy. Pervert. Dyke. Mary. Oliver & Mrs. Nibbles. Guillermo & Joaquin. Kara. Ron. Anthony & Michael. Kate & Laura. Lawrence. Conor. Rusty. Collin. J.D. Tyler S. Faifo. Tyler. Daphne. JD. Chicken. Chief. Ingin. J. Jake. Luigi. Oso Bad. Papa Bear.

Names are tricky. Ideally we grow into them, become our names and wear them like a well-fitting sweater, but just as often we fail to live up to them. 

In the earliest portraits, where the name of each subject functions as its title, the sitters are photographed in poses ranging from the tender to the self-assured, from cocky or playful to distant, from solitary beings to couples. The subjects are seemingly cut out against the brightly coloured backdrops, and put us in mind of children’s picture books, where a similar relation between figure and ground is pronounced in order to aid identification. Opie seems to challenge the viewer to see these subjects as at once conforming to certain stereotypes, and as individuals that can in no easy way be reduced to those stereotypes.

In the later portraits, those made between 2012 and 2017, where a few of the sitters from the earlier series re-appear, and new ones like her son and his mouse emerge, the artist has left the colourful backgrounds behind in favour of one that is dead black.

This move could be telling of a shift in the artist’s perception of her subject matter, or of her own understanding of the medium and its possibilities. In the transition from the portraits of 1993–97, the series Self-Portraits and Dyke, the Portraits and Landscapes from 2012–17 and High School Football 2007–9, we witness a gradual transformation of Opie’s subjective stance towards the medium, her subjects and herself as artist. Photography can ideally make what was hitherto invisible, visible. But visibility and exposure always stand in danger of becoming overexposure and thus invisibility, in the same way as saying a word over and over again will lead to its loss of meaning. Perhaps what appears in the later portraits as a kind of genre-painting style, complete with softly spot-lit bodies cloaked in black, some printed as ovals rather than rectangles, is a nod to how the photographing of any marginal group at some point suffers from fatigue and becomes yet another genre. Or could we view this turn in Opie’s portraiture as a productive doubt, revealing a certain maturity? 

Courtesy Catherine Opie, Regen Projects & Peder Lund.

As Jose Saramago points out: ‘inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.’ By posing her subjects in these later portraits against the pitch-black background, an existential dimension, less noticeable or overlooked in her earlier work, becomes visible. Once you begin being, once you recognise it as more vital than having, you are faced with a certain loss of ground, mirrored in this vast blackness. One of the marks of maturity is perhaps to leave behind the illusion that a name, self-designated or otherwise, or belonging to a certain group, will suture the chasm between yourself and others, between the demands of the world and your own needs, or make you complete. I think of the word ‘Dyke’ tattooed across the nape of the neck, that most sensitive part of the body, in the picture Dyke from 1994, and of the repossession of that slur by the lesbian community. The youthful figure with her back turned to us conveys a need to define oneself and take over the meaning of derogatory terms in order to redefine them. This need of empowerment, so often felt in formative years, to brandish oneself, to define and identify with a certain group, recalls Pervert, the self-portrait from 1994 that left a scar visible a decade later. It is a need to show that which cannot be shown, to confront the suffocation of certain terms, of one’s own unruly desires, the straightjackets imposed or self-imposed. A decade or two on, when new relationships and new communities have been forged by a whole set of different circumstances, a child and a family perhaps – relationships born of being rather than having – PERVERT is a scar reminding you that who you were and who you are are two sides of the same coin: you are different but still you. 

I look at Opie’s Football Landscape, part of her High School Football series, focusing on this staple of American life and culture, and I think of the artist standing on the side of the football field in the pouring rain. I am reminded of my own three years spent in an American high school in Singapore: the jocks occupying the three first tables in the cafeteria, those football players with names like Josh, John, Justin and Rick, these kids my friends and I so clearly defined ourselves as being in opposition to, whose automatic response to pretty much anything was ‘Dude, that’s so fucking gay’, and I wonder what it’s like to revisit those kinds of places as an adult, seeing similar kids with the distance of a generation. I look at the photographs that Opie has made of these high-school football players – tender, slightly off-kilter photographs mirroring off-kilter bodies and clumsy, wonderfully diverse individuals – and I notice that this idea that the ‘jocks’ are a homogenous group of boys, like in a John Hughes movie from the eighties, has been shattered to bits. And it is precisely this that Opie and her photographs do.

By blending the what of her photographs with the how so subtly that she risks reinforcing the stereotypes she seeks to dispel, Opie challenges us to see beyond our own frames of reference, first impressions, preconceptions and idiosyncratic proclivities. This challenge is a way of doing justice to the beholder, a sign of trust, a reaching out. By setting up these encounters, where we face others who in turn face us in all our complexity and strangeness, Opie forges community, rather than simply talking about it. In increasingly polarised times, when US and THEM again seem to dominate the public discourse, whether we live in the hills of Oslo or Beverly Hills, Opie reminds us that community is not simply a set of practices, styles, ideologies or any of a myriad affinities that might exist between people to make them feel safe. It is rather the sum of our differences, the relations to which these differences give rise, and in the end, how we negotiate all that diversity and find suitable solutions for cohabitation, however impossible that might seem.

1. John Berger, Another way of telling, 1982. Copyright John Berger and Jean Mohr. Pantheon Books, New York.

2. Jose Saramago. Blindness, 1995, English translation, 1997.

Catherine Opie, Keeping an Eye on the World, at Henie Onstad from October 6 through January 7, 2018. 

LAUREN DAVIS

Subjektiv part II, invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. As a warm up, we'll share some statements here. Our coverartist Lauren Davis: Today, much of what we know is collapsing. Not only are our institutions changing, but the ideas and concepts we have come to know as absolute truths are rapidly transforming. Even the notion of distance is collapsing – everything is accessible and increasingly globalised. Combined with the oversaturation of visual news, these shifts make it difficult to articulate our place in the world, as well as in new media. Technology and the media are shaping our lives faster than we are able to create the language to describe, and we feel a shared dissonance. One of the affects of this tension of navigating through new media that is predictably unpredictable is that we retreat. We cling as much as possible to the voices and images that are familiar and comfortable when everything else is so uncertain.

The world has always undergone changes, but now it is much more apparent; every shift becomes tangible. Artists must be intent on reimagining futures. This does not have to be in a dystopian manner; there’s a way to represent the future by acknowledging history and the voices that have been underrepresented within it. Queer people, trans people, disabled people and women of colour have all been doing this work, creating in the margins of society and campaigning for our collective liberation for some time. Our attention must be tuned into their voices. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel; we just need to build upon the work that has already been done. To do this, we should look at communities that are different from our own and realise that banal attempts at diversity and inclusion will not work. People in positions of power must be willing to hand over their microphones so that marginalised voices can be amplified: listening to voices that have been silenced; listening as resistance.

I’m weary of the ways in which racism and inequality exist and manifest themselves all around the world in ways that are not always immediately visible. During this time I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to occupy space. As a black woman, I’m always acutely aware of my surroundings and the way my body functions in a space, whether I’m the only black face or if I’m amongst many black faces. I’m always thinking about my identity and my body, not because I choose to, but because my survival and self-preservation depend upon it.

Appropriating existing photos for my collages allows me to examine the way in which images behave and look at their connection to the truth. The use of photography becomes less about memory and more about prophecy. The digital collages that I’ve created grapple with what it means to exist in a body that is routinely dissected and scrutinised; what it means to be aware of your body as a woman, and as a woman of colour – how the intersections of race and gender can police and further add to the politics of your body.

The collages are not only a hybrid of photographic material but they also combine literature from other writers of colour who have awareness of their own bodies and the ways in which history has allowed them to occupy the space they are in. Fundamentally, America and European nations are invested in not knowing what the body politic knows. Routinely asking questions about the intersections of race, gender and sexuality and challenging what we collectively know to be true is resistance. Critical thinking is needed more than ever now, and I want to remain here and present. 

Lauren Davis has just graduated from Oslo National Academy of Arts.

DAMIR AVDAGIC

Subjektiv part II, invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. As a warm up, we'll share some statements here. Damir Avdagic: ‘The subjective as artistic strategy’ primarily brings two things to mind. The first is the use of material gathered from subjects, such as voices and gestures that are circumscribed by larger social, political or historical events and conditions. The second is the ‘subjective’ as the starting point from which all my research and production originates.

During my time as a student at The University of California, a key question we addressed was what it means for an artist to have a ‘project’. Commonly one understands this idea as the ‘red thread’ that runs throughout and unifies an artist's works, the underlying theme that connects them. But more specifically, a ‘project’ is an interrogation of an event, whether part of civil life, a political movement, a historical event, a social condition etc. An artist's area of inquiry isn't chosen on a whim or at random, but is constituted by impactful events and experiences from his or her past. My practice is informed by fleeing the conflict in Yugoslavia to Norway with my family in 1993. 

My own practice is not about the experience itself in a direct way, but rather is informed by that experience. My work is about the negative space around the experience. For me, the experience itself brought about a variety of questions about the experience's aftereffects, questions that my practice attempts to interrogate further. How did this disruptive event affect the lives of those who were children when it happened? Why does the parental generation often refuse to talk about the conflict, while its offspring — namely, me and my generation — are often eager to ask questions about it? Why does my generation idealise the republic of Yugoslavia, a place in which few of them even remember having lived?

My whole project is rooted in a subjective experience. This isn’t to say that it literally deals with my childhood as it unfolded in the 1990s, but rather that the experience of fleeing a war changed me in such a way that I am compelled to interrogate its continuing effects in the present, not only on myself, but on the community that went through it as a whole. This approach to making art touches on the question of ‘contribution’ — in the larger sense. What can I contribute to the world? What aspect of my subjective experience makes my interrogation imperative? What experience was so meaningful that it has led me to dedicate my time to investigating its effects and sharing that investigation publicly?

In my work Reenactment/Process from 2016, I worked with three other participants in their early-to-late twenties who all shared the history of fleeing the conflict in Yugoslavia with their families when they were children. The piece includes a series of spontaneous conversations, focusing mainly on their parent’s generation – their relationship to the conflict and the affect that these attitudes have had on their children. This investigation continues with the piece Untitled in 2017, in which I work with four participants from the parent’s generation. In the video they perform a transcript of the conversation from Reenactment/Process and react to the material throughout the reading; they disagree, elaborate on the content and respond in various ways to what the younger generation talked about. Together, the two works identify a post-war condition, where trans-generational transmission of war-related traumas plays an important role and where the history of the conflict in Yugoslavia lingers intersubjectively in the present.

I like to think of my practice as a kind of archaeology where I excavate the kind of historical material stored inside living bodies. I believe that this content can offer an alternative to institutionalised forms of historical documentation, bring to light narratives that are either forgotten or institutionally and culturally repressed, and/or offer a new and different view of history itself. Then perhaps we can inspire new ways of processing past traumas in ourselves and in those who experience our work.

LUKE WILLIS THOMPSON

Luke Willis Thompson, autoportrait, (2017). Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery 2017. Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and produced in partnership with Create. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.

Our forthcoming issue, Subjektiv part II, invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. As a warm up, we'll share some statements here. Ida Mellbye Andenæs: 

D I A M O N D - on the exhibition autoportrait by Luke Willis Thompson. 

The condition of black life is one of mourning - Claudia Rankine

On the 6th July 2016, Philando Castile is pulled over by police in Minnesota for the 52nd time. Castile opens the car window for the police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, and after 40 seconds Yanez fires seven shots at him. Five strike Castile: one in the heart, four in the arm. One shot nearly hits his four-year-old stepdaughter sitting in the backseat. Castile was searching for his licence and registration, and had informed Yanez that he was carrying a gun for which he had a licence. “Don’t pull it out,” says Yanez. “I’m not pulling it out,” Castile replies. “Don’t pull it out,” repeats Yanez, after the seven shots. Philando is lying immobile in his seat, hovering between life and death. Forty seconds has passed since Yanez started a conversation with him.

Immediately after, Diamond Reynolds starts a video on Facebook Live with her iPhone. She films the police officer still standing outside the car window with his gun raised for several minutes. His movements are nervous, he yells “fuck” with the sound of a lump in his throat. She films Philando who lies slumped in the driver’s seat with blood all over his white T-shirt, the daughter who is utterly calm and quiet in the backseat, and her own face, as, in a distressed but extremely composed manner, she explains what has just happened. She knows it is going to be her word against theirs, this is her statement. She says ‘sir’ every time she speaks to Yanez. “Fuck!” Yanez cries again. “Please, officer, don’t tell me that you just did this to him. You just shot four bullets into him, sir.”

Police car footage of the incident. Photograph: AP

A couple of minutes into the video we see three policemen outside the car with their guns raised. They get Diamond down on her knees and handcuff her. The phone drops to the ground, and for a couple of minutes only the overhead power lines are visible, where signals flow, and the blue sky. The ambulance comes for Philando, Diamond is placed in the police car with her daughter, without the chance of saying goodbye.

A police recording from inside the patrol car was shared on YouTube in May 2017. The space that Diamond and her daughter are sitting in is tight and confined. She’s in handcuffs, despite the fact that they have just killed her boyfriend. She still can’t know for certain if he’s dead. Diamond screams a little in the beginning, her body writhing. The daughter says several times like an adult that Diamond shouldn’t scream, because she could get shot, and that she wished there wasn’t so much crime in the city. The roles have been turned upside down. The keeper of the law is the culprit, still in control. The victims, and witnesses of the murder victim, are in the place of the criminal. The child is turned into the parent. Diamond’s dignity and self-composure have been made impossible. She screams.

In November 2016, the New Zealand artist Luke Willis Thompson reaches out to Diamond. He had been researching riots and amateur videos of violent clashes with police in the course of an artist residency at Chisenhale Gallery in east London. When he sees Diamond’s video, he finally eyes an opportunity for a project. After several discussions and meetings where Diamond’s lawyer is also present, they reach an agreement. Thompson’s work is to be a “sister image” to Diamond’s live video, a silent one. He portrays Diamond seated in front of the camera, with minimal movements and gestures, the focus is on the face. She has decided the lighting, the angle and the frame. Compared with the confusing and noisy media coverage around her story, and her own live stream, autoportrait is a controlled, beautiful response. Thompson says in an interview with Tavia Nyong'o in Social Text that the difference in the work (to Diamond) is not to be found in race, class, geography: “I think the difference in the work is how hard Diamond’s experience of living, day-to-day, second-to-second, can be.” And that the attempt to relate, to establish a form of connection with her is central: “I’ve been interested in a quality that runs frequently in the black art tradition, where collectivity can exist even with a single member, (or dead members, or members who don’t necessarily agree to their membership).”

The Rodney King video was on Thompson’s mind while working on Diamond’s film. In the trial against the four policemen who brutally beat Rodney King, the video was played without sound and frame by frame, so that what had actually happened was distorted and used as affirmative proof for the defence. The video, which was shot by George Holiday as he saw what was happening outside his window in 1991, was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1993. Still today, these video proofs don’t get the desired effect in a courtroom. Similar to Thompson’s other projects revolving around minorities, injustices and matters of race, he doesn’t take full control over his works, but lets someone else “finish” the project. In Eventually they introduced me to the people I immediately recognized as those who would take me out anyway (2015) at the New Museum in New York, he let other people, all African American, lead the visitors out of the museum to several points in Manhattan. All the points were clearly or more obscurely connected to historic or contemporary events and themes regarding the reality of the African American experience. Nothing was said during the walk, and the visitors had to make the connections themselves, and register their own reactions and sense of place and shifting subjectivity in it. Another work by Thompson, untitled (2012), shows the three garage doors that the Maori teenager Pihema Cameron tagged, whereby he was pursued  and stabbed by the house owner. 

Luke Willis Thompson, Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, 2016, a still, Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne.

In Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries (2016), Thompson made two 16mm films of two young British black men, Graeme and Brandon. Graeme is the son of Joy Gardner, who suffered brain damage while she was detained by police during a raid on her home for her deportation in 1993. Brandon is the grandson of Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce, who was shot in her home, an event that led to the Brixton riots in 1985. Neither of the two officers was convicted. As well as giving an image of living history, the films are an homage to, but also a critique of Andy Warhol’s Screen Test films, where almost all of the portrayed were white. Only 3 or 5 of 472 were black, depending on the definitions used. Andy Warhol’s technique was inspired by mug shots. Mug, slang for ‘face’ but also ‘criminal’ and ‘steal’. Screen tests are also about who is suitable, or not. Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries is similar to autoportrait in execution, and also in the way in which those portrayed seem unafraid of the camera, challenging it, open and closed to it at the same time. The camera can’t catch them entirely.

In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine puts collective fantasies and representations, internal and external, in the spotlight. How these lead to the deaths of young black men in particular, and how small everyday incidents affect and form the reality and self-perceptions of African Americans. It is because of these imaginaries around the black subject that the gun gets fired so quickly. Because white men can’t/ police their imagination/ black men are dying. Silence can be healing, a space where something can be processed without disturbing noise. But it can also symbolize resignation, or discouragement. Three days before the exhibition opened, it became clear that Diamond’s live video and all she had tried to convey in it, wasn’t enough. Jeronimo Yanez was found not guilty. A silence follows. The portrait of Diamond is about strength and vulnerability, both on a personal and a collective level. The need for something to change, the sentiment that something is fundamentally wrong, has been amplified recently, in particular after the American elections, and with developments all over Europe. The word ‘woke’ has been widely used in the wake of the election. It is a rich, suggestive and beautiful word if you look into its roots, meanings and differing uses. Democracy is about more than just a vote: What is visible, what can be heard, and why. Who are we, alone, and together, how much agency is to be found, where, and in whom? For political and social systems to change, minds must change, with changed perspectives, other(s’) eyes on one’s own and others’ selves. The self (autos) isn’t made by itself (natural, native, not made), of oneself (independently); it creates and is created, is pushed and pulled, while pushing and pulling. In Greek, auto was also used a prefix: Autodiamond, Diamond herself.

Luke Willis Thompson, autoportrait, (2017). Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery 2017. Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and produced in partnership with Create. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.

autoportrait, Luke Willis Thompson, Chisenhale Gallery, 23. June – 27. August 2017

CORA FISHER

Panoramic view of Dispatches exhibition. From left: Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched By Police Yesterday; Danny Wilcox-Frazier & Ron Haviv, commissioned work Fault Lines; Sheryl Oring, I Wish To Say; iO Tillett-Wright, Self-Evident Truths; Damon Davis, #CanonizeTheKids; Rossella Biscotti, Aquired Nationality; Hasan Elahi, Orb v.2. Photo courtesy Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.

Our forthcoming issue, Subjektiv part II, invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. As a warm up, we'll share some statements here. Cora Fisher, curator: Too much space is wasted on the-man-I-refuse-to-name. With the current hijacking of news by an attention-monger turned US President, it is far too easy to nurse a state of constant hyper-vigilance toward the next fresh disaster. In August, wehad a brief, two-day respite from coverage of him with news of epic floods in Texas and Louisiana due to Hurricane Harvey. So much for climate change being fake news. By launching such propagandist claims about reality, a simple lie within a large-scale regime of distraction, we are maddeningly baited to argue with insanity, even when irrefutable evidence is before us. But such a monopoly of psychic, political, and media space against global citizenry has only clarified the longstanding murkiness faced by democracy in the US. The situation is, more optimistically, the impetus for us to clarify what we desire of democracy and to organize our lives in that direction. 

Last year, on the cusp of the 2016 US Presidential election, I mounted an exhibition called Dispatches at the Southeastern Centre for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I asked artists and collectives to respond to some of the pressing issues ricocheting off news media interfaces: the drama of the US Presidential campaign and election, ecological racism, post-9/11 realities of surveillance and technology, mass migrations and border struggles, new mobilizations of activism for social equity. Amid the din of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the exhibition generated its own piercing responses to the news and social media, with artists doing what they do best: advancing counter-narratives to hegemonic ones and reflecting on current realities while imagining other futures. With Dispatches I wanted to generate the “counter-news” of ethical witnessing and subjective reverie at a slow trickle. By organizing responses to these issues—given our attention-diluted condition and within the thoroughly saturated social media space—I hoped the participants would summon our capacities for skepticism, reflection, humor, and empathy. In my opinion, the artists, photojournalists, documentarians, and new-media activists involved did just that. 

Commissioned video work by Tomas Van Houtryve, Traces of Exile, 2016, which debuted in Dispatches. The video follows migrants physically, and virtually in social media, as they move, often with difficulty, through Europe. Photo courtesy Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.

Artist Mel Chin’s film Arctic Is brought Inuit ambassadors from Greenland and a surreal vision of a sled drawn by poodles to the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. His project was derailed when terror attacks at the Bataclan took place, but the filming ultimately spawned a new investigation of the intersection of climate change and terrorism. Photographer Tomas van Houtryve debuted an augmented-reality video, called Traces of Exile (2016–17), that follows Europe’s migrant trail through the social media feeds of refugees, simultaneously tracing mass movement and individual experiences. Some of his subjects posted relatable updates to Facebook and Instagram, countering expectations by de-emphasizing suffering.

The President was elected while the exhibition was on view. We engaged this unfolding situation by inviting comments via social media and through participatory artworks, such as a piece by For Freedoms, the first artist-run Super PAC. New artworks were added, artists and thinkers gave talks, and the forum continued to take shape. Whatever the outcome, the project showed me that, despite the current political and ecological climate, the value and the stakes of subjectivity, as wielded by artists and documentarians, are higher than ever. Personal voices can be a call to sanity and can help cultivate a conscientious, active citizenry. 

Has the populace migrated its voice to social media, where from moment to moment we can muse about what meal we ate or what shared posts we’ve been consuming? Have we raised our voices in an echo chamber? Is the attention economy finally tuning us out? 

Dispatches exhibition, view of Tomas Van Houtryve's photo series, Blue Sky Days, 2015, (Left) and a commissioned video work by Doug Ashford, Bunker, (clippings 1982 to 2016, Group 1), 2016, HD Video animation with sound, 5:40, (Right). Photo courtesy Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.

The problem is not that we are overwhelmed by too many subjectivities on these platforms, for we all want to be heard. The problem of democracy is that economic elites have more impact on public policy than citizens do, raising the question of how we will organize our voices into effectual and inclusive forms of mutual regard and interest.

So many are doing real, valuable work. Its visibility is tangential to mainstream media, quieter, differently locatable. When you can’t shout louder than the reality-TV drama playing out in the White House, talking more softly and soberly might have the most impact. Artists do their own thing. In doing so, unapologetically, they show us that subjectivity can be a visionary organizing principle. Their idiosyncratic projects, meandering research, and unabashedly personal representations of life signal the importance of seeing what you didn’t see before—and being empowered by these visions of alterity. Curators in turn can help editorialize and re-orient conversations to the important perspectives of artists, thinkers, and activists. In the exchange, if we can absorb so many subjective realities, they will point us back again towards that ethical, inclusive space—what we too wistfully call a public.

Ecological Justice: Installation view of Sarker Protick, Of River and Lost Lands, video installation with music composed by the photojournalist. Photo courtesy Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.

ROGER BALLEN

Roger Ballen, Head Below Wires, 1999

Our forthcoming issue, Subjektiv part II, invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. As a warm up, we'll share some statements here. Roger Ballen: I do not see myself as a political photographer; rather, I see myself as a psychological one.  It’s my opinion that in order to have lasting political transformations, there must be corresponding psychological ones.  If my photographs are able to alter the inner psyches of those who view them, then there is a possibility that I might have altered their political consciousness.  If there is a politics, it goes back to R.D. Laing – the politics of the self.  It is all about getting one part of the mind to speak to the other parts; to discover the other parts of the mind.

The goal of my images has been to help viewers make peace with their inner selves.  In other words, I am hopeful that my photographs can break through layers of mental repression and allow different sides of people’s minds to communicate with each other.  It is my strong belief that unless a substantial proportion of humanity is able to unshackle mental repression, the condition of the species will not substantially improve.

I have tried to define a practice that is wholly mine. It’s a matter of the way I organize reality.  My images are essentially transformed photographic realities, created by the interaction between my mind and the location I’m working in. Today, people want everything packaged.  Someone can package an artwork in a way that will make a potential buyer feel comfortable.  That’s the work that usually sells well in today’s world.  It’s got to be packaged.  Think of the meat one finds in supermarkets: if consumers had to kill those same animals themselves, it would be a whole different story.  The economics forces out there are so sophisticated that they have twisted everybody’s mind.  But I’m fortunate; maybe it’s the way I grew up.  I’m fortunate to have grown up in the counterculture, in a pre-computer age.  Unfortunately, people today cannot separate the slogans from reality.

Roger Ballen is an American photographer. Lives and works in South Africa. Exhibiting here and here this week in Oslo. See his video Ballenesque  here !

Roger Ballen, Place of the Upside Down, 2004

SCOTT HOCKING

Scott Hocking, DETROIT NIGHTS, ongoing project.

Our forthcoming issue, Subjektiv part II, invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. As a warm up, we'll share some statements here. Scott Hocking: As I write this, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake has struck near Mexico City. Unbelievably, it has struck on the exact same date of the magnitude 8.0 earthquake that leveled Mexico City in 1985, killing more than ten thousand people and destroying much of the city. Today’s earthquake comes just two weeks after a magnitude 8.2 quake struck off the coast of Oaxaca. In the meantime, Hurricane Maria barrels through the Caribbean Islands as a Category 5 storm, on the heels of Hurricanes Jose, Irma, Katia, and others. The 2017 Atlantic Ocean hurricane season is quickly becoming historical—not only in quantity, but in the intensity of each storm. Many scientists point to warming ocean waters and climate change as the culprit. Severe rains, landslides, and flooding in Bangladesh, China, Colombia, the Congo, India, Nepal, Peru, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Zimbabwe have killed thousands this year, and additional recent disasters include avalanches in Afghanistan, drought in Somalia, wildfires in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and record heat waves on three continents. The list of natural disasters seems never-ending, and yet this is only one aspect of the many trials and tribulations we humans are currently dealing with.

I was in Brazil when Donald Trump won the United States presidency last November. The bar patrons were watching a soccer game on the television, oblivious to US politics. I was nervously refreshing the live feeds on my phone, watching the Guardian’s little animated Trump and Clinton figures dance when one or the other won the electoral votes of a given state. My state, Michigan, a perennial swing state, was too close to call. The entire US map was turning red. A surreality set in. The impossible was happening. A reality-television star whose fame hinged upon his bombastic, arrogant personality, his extreme wealth, and his ridiculous hair was winning the Electoral College. I was incredulous. As the night wore on, I continued to check my phone for errors: there had to be a mistake, one of these news websites was going to report the mistake. Alas, it was true. Clinton conceded, CNN posted the most demonic red-tinged image of Trump they could find, and I fell into a state of shock. In the bar, nothing had changed. If anything, more people had crowded in to watch the football match. The island of Itaparica felt the same. The city of Salvador felt the same. I imagine the majority of Brazil felt the same.

As I spoke to Brazilians about how devastated I was—and how fearful for the world—I began to hear a similar refrain regarding Brazilian politics. Corruption upon corruption, scandal upon scandal, militant police who do what they want, drugs and money influencing everything. Having a rich, bullshitting figurehead as president was nothing new to Brazilians. “Welcome to our world,” they would say. In the coming months, I would visit Mexico as well. The sentiment was similar. Here I was, a US citizen who had never felt this before, discovering this circumstance was common for Mexicans and Brazilians. A Mexican acquaintance listed the US and Canada as the only countries in North and South America to have avoided having some kind of megalomaniacal dictatorship. She said we have been lucky, but implied that we have actually been spoiled. In her eyes, we have finally received our comeuppance. “Welcome to America,” she said. Welcome to America, indeed.

Humans have repeatedly believed that their particular time was the “end time.”Additionally, we have a tendency to think we’ve evolved far beyond the “primitives”—that somehow we know more, understand things better, and live in an advanced age compared to the antiquated past. I call bullshit. Nearly every indigenous tribe or people has its own creation and destruction mythologies. Nearly every religion has its branch of eschatology. Whether through man-made means, natural disasters, angry gods, or other factors, the idea that the world as we know it will end during our lifetimes is as old as mankind. Just a few days after the Mexican quake, a Christian-based prophesy targeted September 23, 2017 as the beginning of the end, when a hidden planet (known as Planet X or Nibiru) would appear from its elliptical orbit and wreak havoc on the Earth’s gravitational field. (This did not happen.) In 2012, I made an installation based on ideas of how and when the world would end - from the scientific to the spiritual - aligning the exhibition with the end date of the Mayan calendar. The Mayans, like the Aztecs, Hopis, and others, believed that humans had been nearly wiped out several times before and that it would likely happen again. Prophets saw this calendar end date as a sign of the next cataclysm. (This did not happen.) Interestingly, the word Maya has another meaning in Hindu mysticism: that this world is an illusion. I wondered, how can the world end if it doesn’t exist?

When I was a teenager, I came across a nineteenth-century book titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I still think of this book, which compiled many unfulfilled prophesies and illusions, as a reminder of how often humans mistakenly think they know what will happen. It’s an attempt at understanding the world we live in, I suppose, at having some knowledge or control over the complete unknown. Alas, one certainty is that we have no fucking clue where we came from, nor when, if ever, the human race will come to an end. We don’t know. But we worry. And we guess.

And here we are, seemingly at another precipice. The Earth appears to be bucking and blowing and spitting fire—like an animal trying to shake off insects that keep landing on its back. And on the human scale, we have Trump, pushing us ever closer to a potential world war with his narcissistic counterpart in North Korea. The threat of atomic destruction is once again a headline, as it has been periodically throughout my entire life. The threat of planetary chaos and destruction looms heavily in the air. Yet, has it ever been different? Haven’t we always felt this way? It might be the most consistent of human conditions: to repeat the same horrible errors, always thinking we’re somehow different from those morons in the past. I’m not sure. Who knows? Disaster and suffering are inescapable, but perhaps the world is actually coming to an end this time. After all, this is definitely a different scenario because we live in the most important, most advanced time, and we are so much smarter and better than those fools in the past… right? Welcome to America.

Scott Hocking, THE END OF THE WORLD, 2012. An installation of over 200 books covering destruction mythologies, eschatologies, transformations, and ideas of end times. Based on archetypal and alchemical imagery, Brueghel's Towers of Babel, and the use of the word Maya as both an ancient Mesoamerican civilization and the Hindu word meaning illusion. Along with the book mountain, the installation is accompanied by a 400 page End of the World Compendium

MARIUS MOLDVÆR

Our forthcoming issue, Subjektiv part II, invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. As a warm up, we'll share some statements here. Norwegian artist Marius Moldvær: The introduction of the character the Rock Biter in the 1984 film The NeverEnding Story is a dramatic one: at first we only see and hear the smashing of great trees, then the creaking sound of something big, threatening, and perhaps evil approaching us through the forest. As he appears on his gigantic bike made of rock, he speaks with a soft voice, telling us of the mission he is on: to save Fantasia from the Nothingness that is devouring his home. When he speaks, rocks fall with his every word and move, and this image lingers with me after the film has ended: The disturbing image of a creature both mineral and man-like that is intimately connected to our present time and the idea of the subject/subjective and object/objective relation. 

The Rock Biter is a creature made of rock, who eats rocks, makes all his tools out of the same material, and speaks with the voice of a human being. Why is this creature so weird, unfamiliar, and scary? Besides the obvious–that he is a great rock that can speak–it is because there is no separation between the object and the subject within the character. We recognise the ‘I’ while simultaneously recognising the ‘it,’ ‘other,’ and ‘thing’ within the same bodily entity, and we are disturbed because the logic of how we understand and differentiate between them is missing. 

For an ‘I’ there is always an ‘other’, for a ‘subject’ there is an ‘object’ and to be able to speak subjectively there has to be at least an idea of an objective truth. This is what we are taught to believe, how we understand the dealings of the world, and ourselves in relation to it; that the world only makes sense if every spread in the encyclopedia presents a dichotomy, a contras of man on one page versus rock on the other. This is a simplification of course, but it also lays the foundation for the separation between subject and object, the living and the un-living, truth and lie. This idea, which might seem simple and basic at first, not only creates borders and demarcation lines between ideas, but makes it possible to utilise this dichotomy for one’s own gain, to create borders and walls where one sees fit, and even create a situation where something or someone can be seen in contrast to ‘us’. 

As subjective musings are turned into objective truths the «I» and «other» is created at personal will—and gain, people become the object, and a group of people become not a collection of subjects in need, but objects, the others, things, that place them far from us as breathing, living I's. And perhaps we do not understand the magnitude of the pen we are wielding. If it is too big, its value is exchanged with that of a weapon, and its intent becomes to harm and dislocate rather than inform and challenge individuals. Ours is a time of immediacy, where any single subject’s word – from heads of states to extremists on all fronts – can reach a global audience within seconds and be the bearer of an objective truth. But what if the object were you, always erasing the line between you and it, as within the Rock Biter; always reminding you that as easily as you can be ‘I’, you can be the ‘other’; that the distinction between the I and the other is frail, that it can be false, that you must think, that you must be careful, because the lines that seemed so clear yesterday have changed today.

In this world, the artist can fill the role of the Rock Biter, campaigning for the encyclopedia to be continually rewritten and reveal a world that is much more complex than the I vs. the other. The artist is a subject that creates objects, from the ephemeral to the everlasting; objects that are subjects, that speak of other ‘I’s, other places, and other thoughts. When you see a work of art you see an object, but also a subject’s hands and mind in perfect unison, and in this respect the artist is the Rock Biter. An artwork can be fantastical, disturbing, funny, uncanny because it breaks the dichotomy, breaks the separation between the I and the other, and disturbs you – like the Rock Biter – leaving you with a feeling of uneasiness that the world is not, and never was, what you thought it was.

All images are from The construction of Christopher McCandless by Marius Moldvær.

DOCUMENTA 14 KASSEL

Roee Rosen, still from The Dust Channel, 2016, video, 23 minutes

Some highlights from Lucas Blalock

Just before arriving in Kassel I had watched a documentary on the Grateful Dead produced by Amazon. In it, the band’s manager Sam Cutler, who is English, talks about how American artists are caught up in a tradition of trying to both find and define America in their work as the screen flashes images of paintings by Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg and Warhol. He goes on to say that this activity is elementally American and that it just wouldn’t make any sense in his native England – to go out into the countryside in search of the England. The endeavor would be “preposterous.” This may be the case for the individual nations of Europe (I don’t deign to stretch this proposition any further than Cutler himself does) but it does not seem at all out of character for artists dealing with a collective Europe, particularly a Europe as tenuously held together and uncertain of its future as the one we are in now. And these questions of collectivity – European collectivity particularly – headline the Kassel edition of Documenta 14. Even the decision to bridge Germany and Greece with an exhibition speaks to this desire to attend to an imaginary body in a state of distress.

One of the best works in the Kassel show, Roee Rosen’s The Dust Channel (2016), uses just this sort of body doubling (body corpus and body politic) to imagine an extra-European situation in Palestine. Rosen’s video is equal parts operatic exchange, domestic situation, commodity history, and real politic. It does a lot to earn the viewer’s attention. Another work, Irina Haiduk’s Seductive Exacting Realism (2015 – ongoing), also uses the body as a political signifier and centers around an interview with political activist and consultant Sadja Popovic. The conversation explores the relationship between the kind of imaginative thinking (and efficacy) performed in art compared with that of real politic. Haiduk brings to the table her ongoing project Yugoexport where she has restarted the manufacture of the Borosana – an orthopedic women’s shoe designed in the 1960’s that was mandatory for a time for women working in Yugoslavia’s public sector, and when exhibited, the shoes become “the official work shoe of the host institution.” The label on the show box concludes that the shoe “extends the architecture of labor and provides the wearers with a distinction between labor time and leisure time.”

Other standouts from the show also employ the body – at various distance to metaphor; the body of the Contemporary Art Museum Athens staged in the Fridericianum, the presentation of artist Lorenza Böttner who was deprived of both arms to the shoulder in a childhood accident, Christos Papoulias' corporeal architectural models, Maria Hasabi’s power clashing performances in slow-motion, and Artur Żmijewski’s film cycle Realism (2017) which shows lower limb amputees performing everyday movements for the camera.

Though, of course, not all of the strong work in the show centers around the body. It would indeed be impossible to describe a show as diverse and sprawling as documenta through any one lens. A personal favorite that does not pick up these concerns was the inclusion of a mid-fifteenth century Giovanni Guidi painting, one of two that take up the subject of Saint Anthony fleeing a mound of gold, in the opening room of the Neue Galerie. In a show that can often feel freighted with the state of the world this 500 year old painting finds a way to address contemporary conditions in a drier and more comic register.

Artur Żmijewski, Realism, 2017, six channel video, Installation, Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost), Kassel, documenta 14, Photo: Mathias Völzke

WOLFGANG TILLMANS

Juan Pablo & Karl, Chingaza, 2012, © Wolfgang Tillmans

If, in 2017, one thing matters, then everything matters. 

Personal reflections on Wolfgang Tillmans’ 2017 at Tate Modern, by Morten Andenæs

In the autobiographical Barthes on Barthes, Roland Barthes writes that it is not polysemy (multiplicity of meaning) that is praised and sought out; it is amphibology (ambiguous construction): the fantasy is not to hear anything, or even everything, but to hear something else. In short, we’d rather bask in our closed circuits of unattainable fantasies where things are not quite what they seem than be confronted with the unruly, destabilising and potentially castrating ‘anything’. 

My relationship to photography – with its excess of meaning and array of conflicting emotions stubbornly existing side by side that mirrors the condition of the world in 2017 – has never been straightforward. It has always been marked, even marred, by a deep ambivalence: anything and everything. My relation to the works of Wolfgang Tillmans is no exception.

Any relatively young artist working with photography in the last twenty years would be hard pressed not to acknowledge how his or her mode of thinking or their work itself is in some way related, if not directly indebted, to the work of Tillmans. And yet, what does this relationship consist of, and how is it being manifested in 2017? For me, there is a relation, a problematic affinity, I admit, though with a barely audible hint of hesitation. At my BFA exhibition in 2002 I made a spread of photographs on the wall, some mounted and others simply taped up; a few were framed and some were laid around the room. In one end of the exhibition space was a book made specifically for the show, laid within a vitrine and thus not to be touched or flipped through by visitors. The nod to Tillmans was unequivocally there, present both in the presentation and in the pictures themselves, mostly re-photographed images sourced from newspapers, fashion magazines, family albums etc.

I’ve often found myself vacillating between desperate attempts at symbiotic identification with others, and a stubborn resistance to their influence. There’s a constant fear of my work sharing similarities with that of other aritsts, a fear of my picking things up unwittingly, as if there were a kind of porousness in my being sucking up everything in my way, churning it around until the source is forgotten and the thing, the trait, the gesture, the thought has become my own. This fear is bound up with the dread that someone will come along to confront me with a likeness here, a relationship there, affinities and common ground that, when mentioned, might cause me initially to lash out like a threatened animal. ()I would feel stripped naked and embarrassed, as if the very notion that the world (and with it other artists) has an effect on me that subsequently becomes visible in my work or my thinking is somehow akin to plagiarism or inauthenticity, a fundamental wrongdoing that in turn renders me little more than a pale copy. And I sometimes wonder how much this state of affairs has influenced the way I read Tillmans.

Dusty vehicle, 2012, © Wolfgang Tillmans

Tillmans is not your typical ‘good’ photographer. Or rather, he is probably that as well, but what he releases and presents to us in 2017 is not what you’d go looking for if you wished to spend an afternoon being blown away by the kind of stunning and seductive imagery you’d expect from a Thomas Demand, a Thomas Struth or a Taryn Simon. Neither is Tillmans work rife with symbolism (no amphibology or duplicity). In fact, quite the contrary: for lack of a better word, Tillmans work is highly photographic, pointing to this or that in order to show us simply this or that and its relation to other things like this or that. This puts me in mind of Alain Robbe-Grillet, who remarked that the most remarkable thing about the world is that it exists.  And yet, Tillmans is no strict conceptualist either, no Hans Peter Feldman or even an early Ed Ruscha. There is no tongue in cheek. If you come to this exhibition to have your catalogue of obscure references – whether philosophical, art-historical, musicological or pop-cultural – challenged or reinforced so that you can spend the rest of your day gloating about your alleged understanding of this young master, you’ll be disappointed. Technically, there’s nothing fancy about the work, nor about the presentation. The pictures hung on the wall are sometimes small and framed, or large – huge even – and hung up with functional clamps. They have nothing like the overwhelming presence of a Jeff Wall lightbox. The lighting within the photographs themselves depends on whatever was available at the time: a heavenly illumination peeping through the clouds and landing on the surface of the sea, either emanating from the sun or from a rescue helicopter patrolling the Mediterranean for aliens; the greenish overhead fluorescents of the studio; the choreographed, ever-pulsating lighting of some underground nightclub; the mixed light of Sunset Boulevard at night – the list goes on and on. And like the modern metropolis that figures as the subject or backdrop of so many of these photographs, the subject matter itself is sprawling. 

It is 6 June 2017. My birthday. We get out at the wrong Tube stop, which means that in order to reach Tate Modern, we have to cross Blackfriars Bridge. The wind throws itself at us as we venture across. A police boat is patrolling the brown water of the Thames, searching for the last missing person from the 3 June attacks on London Bridge. And I recall a moment a decade earlier, at Tate again, in the bookshop, when I read on the cover of a Tillmans book, If one thing matters, everything matters. I remember I was stunned. Just hours previously, I’d been talking to someone about Tillmans, an artist of an older generation who complained that he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about: Tillmans dabbled in portraiture, landscapes, still-lifes, photographs of technological processes but wasn’t committed to any of them, and nor was he committed to blowing us away with overwhelming beauty, disharmony, destructive chaos or shattering truths. ‘Sure’, the old man said, ‘more than a few of his pictures were interesting, taken by themselves, but as a whole…’ As many readers will know, Tillmans must be viewed through a different set of lenses entirely. His criterion is perfectly summed up by the title of his abovementioned book and its content: if one thing matters, everything matters (did I say he was no strict conceptualist?) – a book comprised of hundreds of photographs arranged similarly on every page, eight photographs per page, with captions. It is an array of the beautiful and the not so pretty, the mundane and the extraordinary, series and individual shots, the politically challenging and the consensual, asses, blue skies, horizon lines and pubic hair. This meeting between the imposing reductive system and each image’s resistance to being subsumed by the whole, to becoming anything other than singular within a larger framework of other similarly singular images, speaks to the heart of Tillmans project then as now, and most likely, to the core of my own mixed feelings towards it. 

The State We’re In, A 2015, © Wolfgang Tillmans

John Berger wrote that photographs, as opposed to paintings or drawings for instance, ‘quote from appearance’. The exposure of the light-sensitive material happens all at once and as such leaves us with a non-hierarchical space; if one thing matters, everything matters. This democratic ideal is fundamental to the photographic process. A decade ago, when I first read Tillmans’ title, I sensed its importance to photography and to my own burgeoning understanding of the medium, but perhaps its implications in relation to a broader range of issues eluded me. If one thing matters, everything matters. This statement reaches far beyond photographic theory, far beyond simple or complex logic, far beyond being yet another clever remark about photography and meaning. If one thing matters, everything matters is a way of being in the world, of how to be in the world and engage, and it is here that 2017 invites us in and leaves me treading water. 

2017 is no retrospective we’re told. And yet, it does feel that way, mostly in the sense that it recalibrates my view of Tillmans’ work. It is a retrospective not so much as a survey, but as an exhibition that brings to the forefront how we are to read his mode of working, how the present – as he notes – is always the history of tomorrow. Or was it John Berger who said that?

I have often thought that at its most basic, art attempts to see how things “really are”. Underlying most artistic endeavours there is a desire to see the world anew, a distrust of the way in which we’re accustomed to seeing it. And Tillmans is no exception. How is the world made manifest to us through pictures, and even, what do pictures in fact really look like? This last questions seems almost tautological, but it occurs to me upon writing this that part of what interests Tillmans is not only how pictures function or what they point to, but what they look like – a strangely compelling and simple idea that speaks volumes about how natural photographic representation has become for us. 

paper drop Prinzessinnenstrasse,2014 © Wolfgang Tillmans

In 2017, there is a sound-piece, the playback room – a space designed for listening to a studio recording of three tracks by a British band from the 1980s. In this tailored room, sparsely designed with advanced audio playback equipment, we are given the opportunity to hear a studio recording at optimal quality rather than the low-grade ‘jpeg’ version that our mobile devices play back for us. Here, Tillmans’ immense curiosity leads him to ask salient questions about the limits of technology and consequently what we could learn, understand, see and hear if only we were given all the information, so to speak. If technology is the main lens through which the world reaches us, then do we not need a sufficiently sharp, clear and undistorted lens in order to make fully informed choices about our collective futures?

2017 is a set of responses and reflections upon the present, and in keeping with this thought, my writing here can be nothing more than responses and reflections. To wander the rooms created by Tillmans is to confront numerous issues that face us each and every day, particularly those relating to the abundance of pictures and information, and our subsequent ability (or inability) to generate any sort of meaning from this cacophony of visual information. By handing us room upon room of information, Tillmans has gathered, either by photographing it or collecting it from various media outlets, images relating to how technology and capitalism shape our view of the world and subsequently our sense of identity, of subjectivity, of exclusion and inclusion. Tillmans is handing us a re-presentation of the world and sufficiently distancing himself as a curator to relieve us of the sense that we are being force fed. And it is here, in this state of beneficial uncertainty, to borrow a phrase from psychiatry, that my defences come creeping up.  

CLC 800, dismantled, 2011, © Wolfgang Tillmans

To confront the open-ended structure of Tillmans work, with its anything and everything (its polysemy), is to confront the very conditions upon which my sense of self rests; ultimately I come face to face with the overwhelming question of freedom. My first impulse is to get as far away as possible. Many destructive behaviours are misconstrued articulations and responses to the prospect of freedom, because it requires of us that we act without thought for the ‘correct’ or accepted response. We desperately want to hand over control and let go of the wheel, to be told what to think, do, or feel. Interestingly, freedom in this scenario is no longer a given; it becomes an on-going, necessary struggle bound up with one’s identity – freedom ‘from’ something or someone, rather than just freedom. When everything matters, my initial reaction (read: defence-mechanism) is to infer that inversely nothing at all really matters. Seeing, in order to be effective requires a certain kind of judgment, I hear myself thinking (validating my own plea, freeing myself from the artist), to make sense of the world visually. Whether in the forest avoiding predators or in the relative safety of the museum, apprehension requires that we create hierarchies: this and that, here and there, you and I. No more being a drop of water returning to the sea as I sometimes sense is the ideal of Tillmans’ procedure.

Responding to Tillmans work, I am reminded of what I face every day, of how incredibly self-conscious I am in any given situation. I am reminded of how nice it would be to be free of the little voice at the back of my head telling me time and again to rethink everything I do or say; the little voice that orders me to be someone, something – someone and something more than who I am, than what I am; the little voice that commands me to be an object, a something that can be acted upon and in turn act upon others; the little voice that tells me not to trust others, that instils in me a sense of others’ ill-will towards me; the little voice that demands I compete and the next moment makes me shy away in shame at this competitive edge, since in this profession of ours, the guiding light should be unity and cooperation. And still, the prospect of that little voice of duality fading away terrifies me! I am deathly afraid that without it, I won’t even notice I’m alive. Walking through 2017 I am reminded how devastatingly fraught with obstacles the whole notion of personal freedom is to me as a subject of the early twenty-first century, where we are overwhelmed by vindictiveness and power struggles, of endless competition and limited resources, of misinformation and extreme inequality. And my position within this framework is problematic, untenable even, and I wonder, having left the Tate behind and stepped out into the pouring rain, whether this work of Tillmans is almost tailor-made for someone like me or if this is just another one of my delusions of grandeur.

Standing outside as the rain pours down over my broken umbrella, it occurs to me that for the first time in forever, an exhibition has called into question the edifice of my being. And yet, as the clouds lift and I draw away from the museum, my prejudices and survival mechanisms in slight disarray, I remember that it is the first day of my 38th year on this planet – middle-aged nearly, no longer a child. A barely audible whisper from the nape of my neck reminds me that I should take another look at the mixed feelings that crept up at intervals throughout the exhibition, and as the sun peers through the clouds I make a note to ask what seems the most pressing question I am left with, namely what is it the artist himself, in 2017, if anything, is risking?

Italian Coastal Guard Flying Rescue Mission off Lampedusa, 2008, © Wolfgang Tillmans

STAN DOUGLAS

Reviewed by Travis Diehl

At metro pcs in Los Angeles this August Stan Douglas’s Monodramas looped on a vintage Sony television monitor placed, per the artist’s instructions, on a low table—and while in the context of an art gallery viewers could enjoy the pieces’ often stunning videography, their evocative mini-narratives, and prickling social satire without the distracting expectation of a sales pitch, this setup nonetheless emphasized exactly what is missing.

When the 30-, and 60-second videos Douglas calls Monodramas first appeared on Vancouver television in 1991, perplexed viewers called the station to ask what the ads were selling. No word on how the stations replied. It’s telling, though, that folks would spend the effort to follow up. How empty they must have felt, denied the affirming closure of a commercial’s pavlovian plot. It was only partly for the economy’s sake that George W. Bush infamously told Americans to “go shopping” after 9/11. Products comfort us (or so commercials would have us believe) by telling us who we are, who we should be, and that we exist. As Barbara Kruger sloganeered in 1987, “I shop, therefore I am.”

Television ad-time, formatted into 30- and 60-second slots, structures the expectation of exactly one product, service, or brand every 30 or 60 seconds. In the Monodramas, there are exactly none. Nor do Douglas’s videos provide the satisfying release of narrative conclusion which, in an ad, the brand promises to provide. Instead, the short spots prompt only the uncomfortable relief of the end of a bout of hiccups

This ache is no accident. Many of the Monodramas center on chance encounters of the sort that, in a typical ad, would unfurl into romance. A 2007 spot for Axe cologne opens on two young strangers waking up in bed. The camera follows as they retrace their steps outside, across a freeway, through a shipping yard, and into a supermarket, all the while collecting clothing passionately tossed off the night before. The narrative flows backwards to the pair’s two shopping carts in the meat aisle: the start of the plot, and the narrative’s conclusion: the double fulfillment offered by a whiff of Axe. The Monodramas, though, present a double lack—not only a lack of product, but a lack of resolution. In one scene, a man in business attire rants and stalks through a deserted back lot. He has had a bad day. As he exits the compound, an orange light strikes him, and he stops. Turning, he sees a pair of women sitting in lawn chairs beside a camper. His rants must have been audible for some time. The camera switches to a shot of the man beautifully lit and framed by the unfocused outlines of the women. In a beer commercial they’d offer him a cold one, and his day would take a turn for the better. In Douglas’s video, though, this tableau is our reward. The man’s hair flutters, he turns and keeps walking. The women aren’t even drinking beer.

In another segment, a middle-aged black man is falsely hailed by a passerby: “Hi, Gary!” He stops and turns. “How’s it going?” The camera takes in another careful, evenly lit shot of the man as he frowns and delivers his line with actorly gravitas: “I’m not Gary.” The segment ends. Again the chance encounter disappoints, again people go their separate ways. We learn, perhaps, a little about the banality of racism, but mostly that the man is “not Gary.” His refusal to indulge a stranger figures the refusal of Douglas’s videos to be commercials.

Such impotent encounters follow one after the other; each holds out desire for something more. In another video, a school bus takes a turn too sharply and nearly collides with a sedan. Both vehicles skid to a halt—no damage is done, no horns, no yelling, no metal on metal—the only sounds are the low clattering of machinery and crunching roadway. And then, almost endearingly, before they drive away, both start and stop once more. The false start and second braking seemingly prolongs the moment’s fleeting suspense. The second, small near-miss is an aftershock of truncated meaning, an intimation of the life-changing contact promised again and again by short videos on TV. Yet the Monodramas resemble life in that this is all we get. The bus and car drive off. The mirrored windows of a nearby building reflect a passing train.

By the late 80s, when Douglas made a similar series of even less eventful anti-ads called the Television Spots (1987/88), many ads had moved beyond pitching the merits of products, and instead wove brands into narratives of lack and fulfillment. A Levis commercial from 1991, the year Douglas broadcast his Monodramas, stars Brad Pitt as a photographer who, for salacious reasons we can only infer, has just been freed from a desert prison, but has no pants. Outside the gates a model in a miniskirt leans against a convertible. She tosses him a pair of Levis jeans. Shot, reverse-shot, the insinuations of eye contact between beautiful people—there is no dialogue, the shot/reverse-shots of cinema stud the plot with the innuendo of significant glances—but this is enough to suggest, as much as Douglas does, the idea of narrative. (Is it coincidence that many of Douglas’s actors also wear form-fitting denim?) Therein the narrative ambiguity that allows consumers to imagine themselves in whatever situation, with whatever product.

In this sense, the Monodramas are not the pure antidote of ads (our threshold for weird commercials is always being pushed), but instead amplify the expansiveness of ads by recuperating their techniques. We accept, more or less, the Monodramas’ strangeness—until the very end, when we are denied the sell. And yet all it would take would be a logo, a slogan, the slightest hint of a brand, and the Monodramas would transform into bona fide advertisements.

But something is missing. What’s missing is the promise of the self. One Monodrama shows a man in a modern apartment walking out onto his balcony. It’s dusk, the skyline glows behind him. The television is tuned to a black and white monster movie, and crackling string music provides a diegetic soundtrack-in-soundtrack. Looking down, he sees a figure staring into a ravine; shot, reverse-shot, the man is gone from the balcony, the man goes outside. But the figure is gone. Another pair of shots shows the man looking up at his own balcony, then the empty balcony. Now he is the unknown figure, absent to himself. What product could correct this condition? But the video ends; the hoped-for encounter dissolves into another lonely night with the TV on. Yet Douglas does his viewers a favor. The Monodramas preempt the unfulfillment of desire that would persist even after whatever product was bought. Emptiness, indeed, is free.