An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of the Ethnographer

anthonydowney 2009, Essays, Publications

September 2009

Renzo Martens, Episode III, 2008, colour video, sound, duration 88 minutes. English subtitles, courtesy of Wilkinson Gallery London

The conditions under which contemporary art is produced, disseminated, displayed and exchanged have undergone significant changes, if not radical transformations, in the last three decades. In a broad sense, this period has been concomitant with a series of incremental shifts from object-based to context-based practices to, more recently, artworks that primarily utilise forms of collaboration and participation – or so-called socially engaged artworks. I am, of course, abbreviating a highly complex system here and it would not be very difficult to find a number of conceptual holes in such a schema. I should also note that I am not promoting a teleological reading to such developments. Participation and collaboration, for example, could be dated from the period covering Dada onwards, in particular the spectacle of audiences participating, willingly or not, in the Dada Season in Paris in April 1921. To this we could add the collaborative gambits of Situationism in the mid- to late 1950s and the participatory improvisations employed by Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clarke throughout the 1960s. Moreover, if we were to broaden the scope of contemporary art to include theatre we could also cite Bertolt Brecht’s ambition to ‘re-function’ it to a new and more collaborative form of social participation and political engagement.[1] Nevertheless, and putting to one side my own truncated account of the possible pitfalls inherent in my opening statement, the fact of collaborative and participative-based practices in contemporary art has certainly become more notable of late, and with this other more immediate concerns have emerged too, not least the sense that contemporary critical discourses are struggling to both criticise and, indeed, support such practices. (more…)

At the Limits of the Image: Torture and its Re-Presentation in Popular Culture

anthonydowney 2009, Essays, Publications

Spring 2009

On April 28, 2004, a series of images from Abu Ghraib prison were aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes II. This was the first time that these photographs would be seen in public and they counted amongst their number an image that was to become instantly iconic. A man, in a penitential shroud, stands aloft a box with a hood on his head and what appears to be electric wires attached to his fingertips. The image is poorly taken, stark, and under-lit but, in all its purgatorial undertones and abject hopelessness, it would sear its way on to television screens and the front pages of newspapers worldwide; its iconographic wretchedness acting as a lightening rod for both anti-American and anti-war protestors alike.[1] And yet, for all the opprobrium and shock directed towards both this image and the perpetrators of this ghastly scenario, I have to admit that I did not find this image shocking as such. More images would follow this one, some more disturbing in their content, some obviously depicting torture, others showing a dead and obviously abused Iraqi—later identified as Manadel al-Jamadi—packed in ice and wrapped in cellophane. A significant number of images depicted forced acts of prisoner-on-prisoner fellation and masturbation; prisoners in enforced stress positions with women’s underwear draped on their heads; and prisoners stacked one upon another in a grotesque human pyramid. Others showed a man with a leash around his neck being led naked from a cell and a faeces-besmeared man standing forlornly with his arms akimbo in the face of his gun-toting tormentor. Amidst this abecedarium of abuse, specific images stood out, none more so than a petrified prisoner with a snarling dog inches from his face. But none of these photographs were as redolent as the hooded man standing on the box. This was surely, in all its casual arbitrariness and yet methodical application, the brute fact of what Giorgio Agamben has termed “bare life”: the application of a brute sovereign form of power upon that most vulnerable of entities: the rightless and thereafter forsaken subject. (more…)

What Was Lost: Manifesta 7 and the Soul of Modernity

anthonydowney 2008, Essays, Publications

November 2008

Stefano Graziani, The Museum for Franco Basaglia, 2008. Photos © Wolfgang Träger.

Following on from the faddishness surrounding the critical uses and abuses of the term ‘postmodern’ in the 1980s and 1990s, a singular and somewhat disconcerting question came to light, one less involved with the apparent ‘post’ of modernity as it was with finding out whether we were indeed modern or, perhaps more gnomically, whether we were even premodern. A significant part of this project found purchase by enquiring into that which modernity had elided along the way, namely, the disavowed alter-modernities that consistently threatened to usurp any univocal global claim to postmodernity. It was with these and other issues in mind that Manifesta 7, with a firm eye on the so-called ‘residues’ of modernity, set out its latest curatorial stall. Taking place over four different locations, all in the shadow of the South Tyrol Dolomites in Northern Italy, and employing three curatorial teams (made up, in turn, of six curators), Manifesta 7 included over 200 artists and collaborators, not to mention 100 off-site projects. It was, in fine, ambitious. Travelling north to south, the first venue on the itinerary was Fortezza, an impressive fort which is also known locally as Franzensfeste, the latter being its original Austrian name. Since its completion in 1838, the only forces to have breached its defences are a road, two railway lines and a motorway. There is certainly a moral to be had in this tale and the curators, all three groups in this instance, set out to exploit it: a fort that had never been overrun subsequently becoming a white elephant of sorts and eventually a venue for an international exhibition of contemporary art – that had to be worth a curatorial gambit or two. However, and despite the size and the uniqueness of the location and its legacy, this section of Manifesta, entitled ‘Scenarios’, was the least interesting, and not only because there was so little to actually see. (more…)

Towards a Politics of (Relational) Aesthetics

anthonydowney 2007, Essays, Publications

May 2007

The aesthetic criteria used to interpret art as a practice have changed radically since the 1960s. To note as much is to observe a truism: the idea (or should that be the ideal) of a universalist aesthetic point of reference, or even the notion of aesthetics as a nominal interpretive baseline, has been discursively displaced by identitarian, theoretical, political, economic, ethical and social interventions. And yet aesthetics as a topic, far from fading into a minor role, has become something of a notional cornerstone in recent discussions about contemporary art.[1] Putting to one side the pre-eminence of performance and installation art in debates about aesthetic form, one of the more prominent statements on the matter has come from Nicolas Bourriaud’s influential volume Relational Aesthetics (2002), a book that has attracted much by way of both criticism and support.[2] Stemming from essays published from 1995 onwards in Documents sur l’art – a journal jointly edited by Bourriaud and Eric Troncy – and in part from the 1996 show ‘Traffic’, curated by Bourriaud for CAPC Bordeaux, Relational Aesthetics was first published in France in 1998 before being published in English in 2002.[3] For a relatively short series of essays the book has attracted a considerable amount of interest; a consequence, no doubt, of Bourriaud’s rather grand claim that he has not only isolated a new aesthetic ‘movement’ in contemporary art (albeit one that is formally diverse and based on loose rather than close associations), but also a critical language within which to discuss this development. (more…)

Yto Barrada A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project

anthonydowney 2006, Essays, Publications 0 Comments

September 2006

On first viewing, the image appears to be an eccentric map of an uncharted world. The filigree-like coastlines of these unfamiliar islands are realistically defined and clearly delineated, whilst the land mass – albeit in a reversal of traditional maps – is a clear-blue aquamarine. Study the picture further, however, and this inverted map resolves into something other than it first appeared to be. As to what that something else is, there is still some doubt until we read the accompanying title: Container 1 – Rust holes in the top of a shipping container – Tangiers (2003). The blue of these ‘regions’ is in fact the colour of a sky seen from the inside of a rusting shipping container; a corralled sky not so much boundless as claustrophobic. The photograph, now less visually ambiguous, becomes an illustration of confinement and restriction rather than exploration or travel. And it is between these two often reciprocal poles – stasis and movement – that Yto Barrada’s photographs address the state of conditional ennui that pervades Tangiers, a city both the nodal point for the illegal passage of Africans entering Europe and stagnation for those who remain there. (more…)

Miniatures

anthonydowney 2006, Essays, Publications

Steve McQueen, ‘Once Upon a Time’, South London Gallery, 17 September–7 November 2004

April 2006

Steve McQueen, Once Upon a Time, 77 of 116, 2002. Supermarket. Photo: Herman Eckermann, NAIC Staff Photographer. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York & Paris and Thomas Dane, London.

In 1977, NASA sent 115 images – the so-called ‘Golden Record’ – into space on board the Voyager space probe. They also included greetings in 55 different languages and a number of audio clips, including (amongst others) Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night. Projected onto a double-sided, cinema-sized screen, these images – but not the audio clips – are the basis of Steve McQueen’s solo show ‘Once Upon a Time’. The images range from photographs of children being born to family portraits, the monumental (Jupiter) to the miniature (a leaf), and the poetic (a sunset with birds) to the mechanical (a calibration circle). There are ordnance photographs of the Sinai Peninsula and an intimate portrait of a nursing mother. Ethnographic portraits, perhaps inevitably, feature too and, despite the generally auspicious and upbeat tone of the Golden Record, there are also premonitions of more immediate concerns: a picture of rush- hour traffic in India, for example, and a so-called (and curiously empty) ‘modern highway’. Each of these images in ‘Once Upon a Time’ slowly dissolves into the other, giving an effect that is both nostalgic and reminiscent of a time when such images were indeed seen by some as ‘representative’ of life on earth – not to mention a time when images dissolving into one another seemed the height of technology. (more…)