I would be very interested to know if people have references to a
subject one could loosely call the "poetics of debt"-- a colleague and I
are trying to assemble a panel for a conf next year.
On 11/26/12 11:59 PM, paulina aroch wrote:
_Art, Representation, Communication_
For this week's discussion of risk on /empyre_soft_skinned_space/, we
would like to pose some questions about the relationship between risk,
representation and communication. Is it possible to aesthetically
represent risk, understood either as a foreseeable and thus
anticipated event or, conversely, as a more abstract, imagined
scenario? And, if so, what are the potential implications and
responsibilities that such a representation might bear, whether
political, social, ethical, or otherwise? Insofar as risk corresponds
to a future tense (something will or will not happen), and
representation, by definition, adheres to a logic of "afterness"---are
the terms themselves conceptually and categorically incompatible?
Conversely, precisely because risk depends on imagining something that
has yet to come, in what ways could we say that it always needs a
system of representation to make such an imagining legible and
meaningful? In other words, in what ways might risk, in order to be
understood, depend on representational systems? Reciprocally, what
might representation, understood as an "after-the-fact" practice bring
to bear on contemporary conceptions of risk?
In what ways might representation serve as a constructive tool for
bridging---rather than widening--- the divide between risks that
remain in the sphere of potentiality and those effectively realized?
Thinking of new communication and transportation technologies as the
condition of possibility for neoliberalism, and communication itself
as both a valued commodity and a hyper-inflated trope in today's
world, what is the relation between representation and communication
in art? And how is the communication/representation of risk modified
by those conditions?
The images presented here (see attachments) gesture toward not an
anticipation of an event, but rather the time of ongoing risk
(revolution) and the time of aftermath (disaster). We offer readings
of two different images by two different artists, operating in
different mediums, cultural contexts, and geographies. The first, a
photograph of graffiti images, features an intriguing arrangement of
artistic responses to social protest and political turmoil in a shared
space in Cairo ("Tank vs. Biker"); the second, an image from a
photographic series of graffiti texts written by victims of a common
natural disaster in New Orleans("Destroy this Memory").
*1. "Tank vs. Biker"*
"Tank vs. Biker" is a graffiti piece sprayed on a street of Cairo in
the context of the Arab Spring; while some hold it to be anonymous,
other sources attribute it to Ganzeer. I first came across the image
at a lecture that another Egyptian street artist, Bahia Shehab, gave
on September 22, 2012 at Cornell. Shehab showed a chronological
photographic account of how this wall had been successively occupied
by a series of different artists, mostly anonymous to each other yet
in dialogue through the public space of this wall. The authorities
also participated in the dialogue, by selectively black-spraying some
of the elements that were successively incorporated into this virtual
public landscape. (The image you see in attachment is at the earliest
stages of the graffiti interaction, which Ganzeer inaugurated. For a
video account of the wall's posterior stages see Shehab's TED lecture
at http://www.ted.com/talks/bahia_shehab_a_thousand_times_no.html)
Shehab's account of the risks involved for graffiti artists under the
present conditions in Egypt is twofold. On the one hand, there is the
risk of getting caught in the act and being arrested by the police. On
the other hand, there is, at least for Shehab herself, the persistent
risk of publicly recognizing her art as hers, of claiming authority
over the illegal action in Western public forums. The risk might be
worth taking since only by acknowledging the position from where she
speaks can Shehab communicate the information that concerns her and
which is also a major public concern. Yet there is a second reason:
authorial claim is perhaps the sine qua non for art to be able to
participate in the circuits of aesthetic and economic value production
in the global art market. Shehab needs to own her art if she is to
make a living as an artist.
The catachrestic encounter between superimposed values in the same act
of authorship calls for considering the question of how risk might be
configured differently from the perspective of the global periphery.
Furthermore, I wonder how we can understand risk from the "periphery,"
not only in the sense established by world-systems theory, but also in
the disciplinary sense. In what ways do these graffiti artists
question academic imaginations of risk? Against what kind of concept
is risk being defined in the social sciences? And in the arts? What
notions of stability unfold? How does stability -- as a condition of
understanding or as a desire -- mark the narratives of the core
geographical and disciplinary areas from where risk itself is imagined?
Since early on risk was imagined as a thing of the sea. We can think
of Gaspar Mairal's ongoing investigation into the word's first
appearance in maritime insurance contracts in the Mediterranean and
its dissemination in association with the overseas realities of the
New World. Risk as belonging to a seascape is an image that takes a
strong hold over the Elizabethan imagination: think of the role and
meaning of the sea and particularly of ships in Shakespearean plays
such as /The Merchant of Venice/. But if the ship is paradigmatic
figure of risk for a mercantilist society whose (imagination of)
wealth pivots around the colonies, what trope organizes our
imagination of risk in neoliberal times? What is the paradigmatic
transportation/communication technology evoking a mode of capitalist
accumulation with a logic and an aesthetics entirely different from
that of mercantilism? Ganzeer portrays a tank and a bicycle,
represented on a one to one scale, face to face. Can we imagine the
tank as the mode of transportation that is to open a new horizon for
capital in the very particular ways it has done so, at the global
periphery, since Santiago de Chile, 1973? In other words, is the tank
to neoliberalism what the ship was to the mercantilist world? And can
we think of the realistic mode of representation of this graffiti art
as risking exile from the global circuits of aesthetic value
production? What is the risk involved for art when its aim -- distant
from both the "the means is the message" precept that characterizes
modernism and the hyperinflation of the means as such that
characterizes postmodernism -- seems to be simply the message?
Paulina Aroch p.ar...@cornell.edu <mailto:p.ar...@cornell.edu>
*2. "Destroy this Memory"
*
To say that Hurricane Katrina was a tremendous disaster, the effects
of which are still largely unfathomable and the response to which is
still largely unconscionable, is an understatement. Interestingly, it
is perhaps the word "failure"---and not "risk"---that first comes to
mind when remembering the devastation caused by Katrina along the Gulf
Coast in August 2005. There were basic infrastructure failures
resulting in the collapse of multiple floodwalls and levees
surrounding New Orleans, where the greatest damage occurred,
submerging over 80% of the city under water. There were rescue and
response failures, state and government support failures, evacuation
failures, and perhaps at the root of all these, there were systems and
communication failures. In fact, few disagree that regarding
communication, the Bush administration's response---both with
preparations beforehand and relief efforts after the storm hit--- was
unequivocally a double failure of public health and public affairs.
Much of the news coverage of the disaster offered images that evoked
the feeling of failure as well. Many of us likely remember the
dramatic scenes of the overcrowded Superdome, the mesmerizing aerial
shots of the fallen levees, listless in their watery graves, or
pictures of residential wreckage---uprooted trees, toppled cars, and
ravaged houses. In the weeks after the hurricane, internationally
acclaimed photojournalist, Richard Misrach (/Desert Cantos, Cancer
Alley, Petrochemical America/) traveled to New Orleans, where he began
taking photographs of Katrina's aftermath. In this process, he took
"field notes" with a small point-and-shoot camera, the contents of
which would later prove to contain dozens of hidden treasures that
would become a project all on their own. Hundreds of the locations
that he shot as a note-taking strategy for mapping both the disaster's
pathways and his own photographic trajectory contained textual traces
of human survival. These traces took the form of writing. Graffiti
messages became testimonials indicating the number of dead or alive,
phone numbers, and an array of emotional expressions: rage, fear,
love, and sadness. As he developed these photos, Misrach realized that
the messaging pattern shifted from practical information (i.e. names
of those who had been abandoned or rescued) to larger existential
questions centered on trauma, memory, and survival (i.e. "what now?").
Some victims wrote messages of faith and recovery, such as the textual
inscription on the plywood scraps featured in the photograph included
here, small fragments of hope among the trashed landscape. The
accumulation of these graffiti messages by Misrach meant that they
would become art, eventually published in a book and exhibited in
museums. But many of the messages had a much simpler purpose: they
were meant to inform their future readers of who had survived and who
had not. As a response to a catastrophic event, these texts
communicated something visceral and real that was being threatened to
disappear as the floodwaters remained: "I am here." Equally moving
were those messages that indicated that no one was present (either due
to death or evacuation), yet nonetheless promised a return harbored in
messages of belief and solidarity: "we will rebuild."
If Rene Magritte's paradigmatic representation of a pipe entitled
"This is not a Pipe" played, through intermediality, with
representation as such, then how might we think of Misrach's project,
where intermediality traces the impossible yet actual transition from
representation as communication to representation as art? Does the
photographic register risk the erasure of the pragmatic dimension of
the primordial semiotic act in the face of trauma and, with it, the
erasure of trauma itself? Does this artistic act succeed in turning
trauma---understood as that which cannot be put into words---into a
dialogic counterpoint? Or does it foreclose that possibility by
emptying communication out of the picture, transforming the message
into a referentless trace and allowing trauma, as the direct impact of
the real, unmediated by the symbolic, to take over the space of
representation as a whole? When natural disaster strikes the social
order in the form of trauma, when risk control fails, is communication
itself at risk of erasure?
Patty Keller pkel...@cornell.edu <mailto:pkel...@cornell.edu>
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
