The Falling Man: The unpredictable photograph If he were not falling, he might be flying, or awaiting his cue to deploy a life-saving parachute. If one rotates him sideways, he could be reclining, relaxed against a surreal linear backdrop. He appears serene, graceful and comfortable in the grip of inconceivable motion. His arms are by his side, his left leg bent casually at the knee and his clothing is still intact and clinging to his body. He is perfectly vertical and in accordance with the lines of the building behind him; his trajectory a perfect bisection of the North and South Towers. Nothing in the image communicates his imminent destruction. At the moment this picture is taken he is accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second, soon to reach 150 miles per hour.   In the three hours in which the world witnessed the accumulative devastation of the World Trade Centre attacks, an estimated 200 people jumped from the Towers. They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower and they kept jumping until the tower fell: ‘They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died’ [Junod 2003]. The Jumpers - as America diffidently termed them - were escapees from the otherwise physically contained disaster of the attacks. Whether they threw themselves out, fell, blindly leapt or were blown out, they were a visible indication of the horror of the conditions inside; of what the world could not directly witness. It took a significant amount of time before it could no longer be ignored that the large masses falling from the North Tower were people, not debris, or confetti. This attempt to blind oneself to the truth was quickly established when one woman on the streets, whispered to her child the ultimate, reassuring lie: ‘Maybe they’re just birds, honey’ [Junod 2003].   In the majority of the images taken that day the jumpers appear to be struggling against vast disparities of scale; the verticality of the enormous buildings engulfs them. Some are captured holding hands, some with their limbs outstretched, arms like whirlwinds, clothes and shoes ripped from bodies. One woman is suspended with her legs curved backwards over her head, as though practising a graceful mid-air somersault, hovering above a swimming pool, about to make her watery entrance. At variance with this, The Falling Man immediately became such a contentious image for his supposed nonchalance towards his fate. The image was first published on September 12 in hundreds of newspapers all over the world, and was met with unequivocal rage. In most American newspapers, the photograph, taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, ran once and never again. It was deemed exploitative, voyeuristic, invasive, and guilty of turning tragedy into ‘leering pornography’ [Junod 2003].   Additionally, the clear aesthetic elements of the image, that the camera so perfectly encapsulated the vertical alignment of man and building, has contributed to an image which is unbelievable both in its truth and its photographic achievement. Thus the immediate response of horror was twofold: one was faced with a man who chose to jump to his death (officially, the New York Medical Examiner’s Office refuse to term it ‘jumping’, but rather claim that they were ‘forced out, or blown out’) which necessitated a consideration of the conditions in the tower site above impact, and an image that was beautiful, perfectly composed, simultaneously ambiguous and yet unmistakeable.   To catch a death as it unravels and embalm it for all time is something that only a camera can do. Recalling the war photographers Robert Capra and Eddie Adams, The Falling Man demonstrates photography’s unmatched capacity to distil a single, historic moment. The Falling Man is shocking in reality and in its existence as a photograph. In reality, the man fell, and kept falling until he disappeared. In the photograph, he is suspended forever, frozen, a certificate of his own presence, but not quite reaching his own demise. Here, photography did not simply transform the horrific into the beautiful; it captured the unbelievable, the unimaginable, and the unpredictable. American writer Tom Junod observed in his 2003 article, which details his search to find the identity of the falling man: ‘In a nation of voyeurs, the desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism, as though the jumpers’ experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best forgotten’ [Junod 2003]. In a day of tragedy designed and executed as a spectacle, The Falling Man photograph was this ‘sideshow’: the pensive, terrifying, beautiful and repellent image, which not even the terrorists could have predicted.   The idea of the unpredictable photograph is epitomised by Drew’s Falling Man. It is a photograph that cannot be controlled, envisioned, or predicted by its captor or its audience. It is an image that returns oneself to the notion of the photographic shock. However, it also entails an unstable beauty; one that could only exist in photography, and never in reality. That is, in the sense that there was nothing beautiful about September 11 2001 when “the jumpers” revealed themselves to the world. The ‘unpredictable’ also necessitates Barthes’ punctum: that which rises from the scene, shoots out of it and pierces. While the punctum is necessarily a subjective notion; one which cannot be universally felt, the unpredictable photograph relies on its presence. It’s unpredictability and its subsequent unpredictable beauty is, in essence, its punctum.     It is important to note that the authenticity of this photograph was never questioned, despite its radical and unpredictable nature. This is because people believe - even after forty years of post-modern theory and two decades of photoshop - that photographs record something that happened. In 1960, Yves Klein, dressed formally in two-piece suit, hurled himself into the air from a window ledge of a house somewhere in France. The photographic record of this enactment, entitled Leap into the Void, shows the artist caught at the zenith of his trajectory, despite his upward glance suggesting the naïve assumption that he still might manage to fly. However Klein’s leaping photograph is faked, through the device of montage, created as proof of an event which preceded the image, when Klein believed he had in fact successfully levitated.   Since 2007 Susan Hiller, taking this image as her starting point, has compiled an extensive bank of internet imagery which documents subjects who depict themselves levitating or flying. Hiller’s Homage to Yves Klein is a delicate balance between criticism and celebration: arguing that we are less gullible than we were when photography was new, Hiller does not attempt to deride the sometimes-ludicrous levitation images, but instead suggests they express ‘a collective aspiration for a revised version of human being - poetic, imaginative and powerful, with as-yet unrealised abilities and potentials’ [Hiller 2008, 3].   The levitation images of Hiller and Klein communicate an optimistic view of human capabilities rather than those of photography. The images employed by Hiller are not realistically convincing in their composite nature; the upwards nature of the levitating people are a complete antithesis to Drew’s Falling Man. With regards to Klein’s image, Michael Wetzel considers it ‘triumphant;’ it demonstrates that ‘in photography one does not see the ruins, one always sees the triumph, the triumph of fantasy’ [Derrida 2010, 4]. Indeed The Falling Man does contain a sort of phantasmagoria; it has an oneiric nature which mirrors Klein’s invented, fantastical image. However, one cannot escape that Klein is artificially caught (in reality twelve judo club members are beneath him, holding a tarpaulin, ready to catch his leaping body) whilst The Falling Man is simply falling, photographically suspended, but ultimately hopeless.   Although The Falling Man photograph is not faked or staged, as Klein and Hiller’s imagery certifiably is, it is, in its own way, a lie. The photograph is part of a sequence of eleven which Drew captured in the estimated ten seconds it took the man to fall from one hell to another. In the other ten photographs he is not augmented by aesthetics; he falls awkwardly, inelegantly, panicking, entirely human. In truth, the man fell like all the others. In Drew’s own words: ‘It was the luck of the camera. If it was a fraction of a second later that picture wouldn’t be the same … I just held my finger on the button’ [Chicago Sun Times, September 6 2011]. It is the luck of the camera that captured the second of beauty which is devoid in the remaining photographs, none of which have been published. The unpredictable beauty of The Falling Man photograph and the awareness of distinction between photographer and photographed that it evokes, produces an image which encroaches on the impossibility of – to reference Barthes - a universal punctum. Because of its inadvertent aesthetic qualities and because it was tragic in content, it created uproar. This is the power of the unpredictable photograph: it hits you right in the stomach, but it’s beautiful nonetheless.     Kathryn Lloyd Derrida, Jacques 2010. Copy, archive, signature: a conversation on photography (Stanford University Press, California)    Hiller, Susan 2008. Auras: Homage to Marcel Duchamp; Levitations: Homage to Yves Klein (ICA Book Works, London)   Junod, Tom 2003. ‘The Falling Man’ Esquire [27/12/11], (http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0903-SEP_FALLINGMAN)

The Falling Man: The unpredictable photograph

If he were not falling, he might be flying, or awaiting his cue to deploy a life-saving parachute. If one rotates him sideways, he could be reclining, relaxed against a surreal linear backdrop. He appears serene, graceful and comfortable in the grip of inconceivable motion. His arms are by his side, his left leg bent casually at the knee and his clothing is still intact and clinging to his body. He is perfectly vertical and in accordance with the lines of the building behind him; his trajectory a perfect bisection of the North and South Towers. Nothing in the image communicates his imminent destruction. At the moment this picture is taken he is accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second, soon to reach 150 miles per hour.

 

In the three hours in which the world witnessed the accumulative devastation of the World Trade Centre attacks, an estimated 200 people jumped from the Towers. They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower and they kept jumping until the tower fell: ‘They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died’ [Junod 2003]. The Jumpers - as America diffidently termed them - were escapees from the otherwise physically contained disaster of the attacks. Whether they threw themselves out, fell, blindly leapt or were blown out, they were a visible indication of the horror of the conditions inside; of what the world could not directly witness. It took a significant amount of time before it could no longer be ignored that the large masses falling from the North Tower were people, not debris, or confetti. This attempt to blind oneself to the truth was quickly established when one woman on the streets, whispered to her child the ultimate, reassuring lie: ‘Maybe they’re just birds, honey’ [Junod 2003].

 

In the majority of the images taken that day the jumpers appear to be struggling against vast disparities of scale; the verticality of the enormous buildings engulfs them. Some are captured holding hands, some with their limbs outstretched, arms like whirlwinds, clothes and shoes ripped from bodies. One woman is suspended with her legs curved backwards over her head, as though practising a graceful mid-air somersault, hovering above a swimming pool, about to make her watery entrance. At variance with this, The Falling Man immediately became such a contentious image for his supposed nonchalance towards his fate. The image was first published on September 12 in hundreds of newspapers all over the world, and was met with unequivocal rage. In most American newspapers, the photograph, taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, ran once and never again. It was deemed exploitative, voyeuristic, invasive, and guilty of turning tragedy into ‘leering pornography’ [Junod 2003].

 

Additionally, the clear aesthetic elements of the image, that the camera so perfectly encapsulated the vertical alignment of man and building, has contributed to an image which is unbelievable both in its truth and its photographic achievement. Thus the immediate response of horror was twofold: one was faced with a man who chose to jump to his death (officially, the New York Medical Examiner’s Office refuse to term it ‘jumping’, but rather claim that they were ‘forced out, or blown out’) which necessitated a consideration of the conditions in the tower site above impact, and an image that was beautiful, perfectly composed, simultaneously ambiguous and yet unmistakeable.

 

To catch a death as it unravels and embalm it for all time is something that only a camera can do. Recalling the war photographers Robert Capra and Eddie Adams, The Falling Man demonstrates photography’s unmatched capacity to distil a single, historic moment. The Falling Man is shocking in reality and in its existence as a photograph. In reality, the man fell, and kept falling until he disappeared. In the photograph, he is suspended forever, frozen, a certificate of his own presence, but not quite reaching his own demise. Here, photography did not simply transform the horrific into the beautiful; it captured the unbelievable, the unimaginable, and the unpredictable. American writer Tom Junod observed in his 2003 article, which details his search to find the identity of the falling man: ‘In a nation of voyeurs, the desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism, as though the jumpers’ experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best forgotten’ [Junod 2003]. In a day of tragedy designed and executed as a spectacle, The Falling Man photograph was this ‘sideshow’: the pensive, terrifying, beautiful and repellent image, which not even the terrorists could have predicted.

 

The idea of the unpredictable photograph is epitomised by Drew’s Falling Man. It is a photograph that cannot be controlled, envisioned, or predicted by its captor or its audience. It is an image that returns oneself to the notion of the photographic shock. However, it also entails an unstable beauty; one that could only exist in photography, and never in reality. That is, in the sense that there was nothing beautiful about September 11 2001 when “the jumpers” revealed themselves to the world. The ‘unpredictable’ also necessitates Barthes’ punctum: that which rises from the scene, shoots out of it and pierces. While the punctum is necessarily a subjective notion; one which cannot be universally felt, the unpredictable photograph relies on its presence. It’s unpredictability and its subsequent unpredictable beauty is, in essence, its punctum.  

 

It is important to note that the authenticity of this photograph was never questioned, despite its radical and unpredictable nature. This is because people believe - even after forty years of post-modern theory and two decades of photoshop - that photographs record something that happened. In 1960, Yves Klein, dressed formally in two-piece suit, hurled himself into the air from a window ledge of a house somewhere in France. The photographic record of this enactment, entitled Leap into the Void, shows the artist caught at the zenith of his trajectory, despite his upward glance suggesting the naïve assumption that he still might manage to fly. However Klein’s leaping photograph is faked, through the device of montage, created as proof of an event which preceded the image, when Klein believed he had in fact successfully levitated.

 

Since 2007 Susan Hiller, taking this image as her starting point, has compiled an extensive bank of internet imagery which documents subjects who depict themselves levitating or flying. Hiller’s Homage to Yves Klein is a delicate balance between criticism and celebration: arguing that we are less gullible than we were when photography was new, Hiller does not attempt to deride the sometimes-ludicrous levitation images, but instead suggests they express ‘a collective aspiration for a revised version of human being - poetic, imaginative and powerful, with as-yet unrealised abilities and potentials’ [Hiller 2008, 3].

 

The levitation images of Hiller and Klein communicate an optimistic view of human capabilities rather than those of photography. The images employed by Hiller are not realistically convincing in their composite nature; the upwards nature of the levitating people are a complete antithesis to Drew’s Falling Man. With regards to Klein’s image, Michael Wetzel considers it ‘triumphant;’ it demonstrates that ‘in photography one does not see the ruins, one always sees the triumph, the triumph of fantasy’ [Derrida 2010, 4]. Indeed The Falling Man does contain a sort of phantasmagoria; it has an oneiric nature which mirrors Klein’s invented, fantastical image. However, one cannot escape that Klein is artificially caught (in reality twelve judo club members are beneath him, holding a tarpaulin, ready to catch his leaping body) whilst The Falling Man is simply falling, photographically suspended, but ultimately hopeless.

 

Although The Falling Man photograph is not faked or staged, as Klein and Hiller’s imagery certifiably is, it is, in its own way, a lie. The photograph is part of a sequence of eleven which Drew captured in the estimated ten seconds it took the man to fall from one hell to another. In the other ten photographs he is not augmented by aesthetics; he falls awkwardly, inelegantly, panicking, entirely human. In truth, the man fell like all the others. In Drew’s own words: ‘It was the luck of the camera. If it was a fraction of a second later that picture wouldn’t be the same … I just held my finger on the button’ [Chicago Sun Times, September 6 2011]. It is the luck of the camera that captured the second of beauty which is devoid in the remaining photographs, none of which have been published. The unpredictable beauty of The Falling Man photograph and the awareness of distinction between photographer and photographed that it evokes, produces an image which encroaches on the impossibility of – to reference Barthes - a universal punctum. Because of its inadvertent aesthetic qualities and because it was tragic in content, it created uproar. This is the power of the unpredictable photograph: it hits you right in the stomach, but it’s beautiful nonetheless.

 

 

Kathryn Lloyd

Derrida, Jacques 2010. Copy, archive, signature: a conversation on photography (Stanford University Press, California) 

 

Hiller, Susan 2008. Auras: Homage to Marcel Duchamp; Levitations: Homage to Yves Klein (ICA Book Works, London)

 

Junod, Tom 2003. ‘The Falling Man’ Esquire [27/12/11], (http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0903-SEP_FALLINGMAN)

Confronting The Other: Translating Manet’s Olympia   Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura appropriates himself into well-known icons of Western art, portraying both male and female figures.  In his 1988 photographic recapitulation of Edouard Manet’s Olympia he appears in the place of the voluptuous pale-skinned female who sparked such uproar at the Salon of 1865.  Donning a blonde wig and a beauty spot, Morimura lies seductively upon the famous divan, wearing nothing but a strategically-placed hand and a pair of gold-heeled pink mules. Manet’s Olympia has been parodied and reproduced countless times.  However, it is Morimura’s encounter with Olympia and Larry Rivers’ I Like Olympia in Black Face which stand out particularly.  Rivers, in Rabelaisian style, inverts Manet’s Olympia by foregrounding a black female nude alongside a white maid and cat.  Unlike Morimura, Rivers retains a version of the original white female nude, black maid and black cat, but pushes it into the background of his work so that what we see is something akin to Olympia in negative. Both Morimura and Rivers are sympathetic to the spirit of the original Olympia:  by placing Manet’s Olympia into the long tradition of nudes in European painting it becomes obvious that the agenda here is not to idealise, like Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Ingres’ Grande Odalisque.  Manet - unlike the forefathers of the genre - does not eulogise the bodily attributes of his nude; her earthly form is in no way removed from its social circumstance or promoted to a higher aesthetic plane.  Instead Olympia is explicitly grounded within her time and place; she confronts us – or her viewer/voyeur/client - and in her defiant reality she simultaneously alienates and entices us. Both Rivers and Morimura translate Manet’s confrontation with the tradition of the nude, yet they do not imitate Manet.  A text or an image rendered literally through translation becomes a substitute; a proxy that aims at reaching transparency or equivalence of meaning. However such transparency can only be illusory, as the translator will necessarily be working in a different manner, time or place to the original.  The Latin root of translation - to bear, carry, or bring - confirms that translation is an act of movement and a voyage for meaning. It is an act that creates a model of difference as opposed to one of imitation: rather than merely replicating, a translation can become an independent work in its own right. The central tenet of Manet’s painting, which is translated by Rivers and Morimura, is ‘Otherness’.  In Olympia this is found operating on several levels: the female as Other, the foreign black maid as Other and, more broadly, what Edward Said calls ‘the Orient’ as Other.  Such inventions of Otherness form a nexus of knowledge and power, with the Other conventionally represented through and contained by the dominating framework: Western and male.  As Edward Said writes - specifically referring to the Orient - the Other is ‘invented’.  If we extend this to male/female structures the same applies, in Said’s terms: that the Other is established as a cultural contestant; a deep and recurring image of the unintelligible which shores up the primacy of the familiar.  By staging a confrontation with the Other, Rivers and Morimura reinvent it; they translate and redefine the terms of Manet’s Olympia.  As Manet magnifies the female body in a typically ‘low’ situation, Rivers shifts racial and sexual power relations to the fore and Morimura, more specifically, places himself - a gay man and representative of the Japanese Orient - in the position of a female prostitute, realigning gender, power and race relations. Morimura’s work correlates with Manet’s as he conflates male and female body types, placing himself in Olympia’s original position.  Morimura constructs a visual regime which updates Manet’s project. Drawing upon stereotypes of the Other and the Orient as a female entity to be dominated, he also contextualizes modern preoccupations with homosexuality by placing himself, a gay artist, at the work’s centre.  Jean Paul Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness that the Other ‘is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other.’ It is this that both Rivers and Morimura acknowledge and confront; trouble occurs for the Other when he or she discovers that they have become, in another’s prolix gaze, an object.  The Other is then faced by the severe realisation that their own subjectivity makes no contribution whatsoever in another’s eyes to the character of that object. Manet, Rivers and Morimura play upon this realisation by translating and transposing convention.  By forcing the viewer in the position of a client in the gaze of their provider (whether the original Olympia, Olympia in Black Face, or Olympia as gay Japanese male) each artist compels them to pass judgement upon his/herself as an object, for, as Sartre wrote, ‘it is as an object that [we] appear to the Other.’ This recognition resonates throughout each translation of Olympia.  Consider the one thing that remains consistent throughout her different incarnations: the black ribbon tied around her neck.  This ribbon restricts. It serves as a cut off point - a reminder that it is the body on offer here, only up to the neck. This encounter is not advertised as a matter of the mind; it belongs to the realm of objectivity and not subjectivity. And yet, each work’s ability to confront the viewer lies in its relocation of the subject, in a reversal of Otherness.  In the end conventional power relations are deconstructed, they are laid bare, and it is we the viewer who become Other.  The gaze is turned in, upon ourselves, and we are obliged to examine the conventions by which we see and live. Victoria Spratt Image:Larry Rivers, I Like Olympia in Black Face, 1970, Mixed Material,  182 X 194 X 100 cm, Centre Pompidou, Paris

Confronting The Other: Translating Manet’s Olympia

 

Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura appropriates himself into well-known icons of Western art, portraying both male and female figures.  In his 1988 photographic recapitulation of Edouard Manet’s Olympia he appears in the place of the voluptuous pale-skinned female who sparked such uproar at the Salon of 1865.  Donning a blonde wig and a beauty spot, Morimura lies seductively upon the famous divan, wearing nothing but a strategically-placed hand and a pair of gold-heeled pink mules.

Manet’s Olympia has been parodied and reproduced countless times.  However, it is Morimura’s encounter with Olympia and Larry Rivers’ I Like Olympia in Black Face which stand out particularly.  Rivers, in Rabelaisian style, inverts Manet’s Olympia by foregrounding a black female nude alongside a white maid and cat.  Unlike Morimura, Rivers retains a version of the original white female nude, black maid and black cat, but pushes it into the background of his work so that what we see is something akin to Olympia in negative.

Both Morimura and Rivers are sympathetic to the spirit of the original Olympia:  by placing Manet’s Olympia into the long tradition of nudes in European painting it becomes obvious that the agenda here is not to idealise, like Titian’s Venus of Urbino or Ingres’ Grande Odalisque.  Manet - unlike the forefathers of the genre - does not eulogise the bodily attributes of his nude; her earthly form is in no way removed from its social circumstance or promoted to a higher aesthetic plane.  Instead Olympia is explicitly grounded within her time and place; she confronts us – or her viewer/voyeur/client - and in her defiant reality she simultaneously alienates and entices us.

Both Rivers and Morimura translate Manet’s confrontation with the tradition of the nude, yet they do not imitate Manet.  A text or an image rendered literally through translation becomes a substitute; a proxy that aims at reaching transparency or equivalence of meaning. However such transparency can only be illusory, as the translator will necessarily be working in a different manner, time or place to the original.  The Latin root of translation - to bear, carry, or bring - confirms that translation is an act of movement and a voyage for meaning. It is an act that creates a model of difference as opposed to one of imitation: rather than merely replicating, a translation can become an independent work in its own right.

The central tenet of Manet’s painting, which is translated by Rivers and Morimura, is ‘Otherness’.  In Olympia this is found operating on several levels: the female as Other, the foreign black maid as Other and, more broadly, what Edward Said calls ‘the Orient’ as Other.  Such inventions of Otherness form a nexus of knowledge and power, with the Other conventionally represented through and contained by the dominating framework: Western and male.  As Edward Said writes - specifically referring to the Orient - the Other is ‘invented’.  If we extend this to male/female structures the same applies, in Said’s terms: that the Other is established as a cultural contestant; a deep and recurring image of the unintelligible which shores up the primacy of the familiar. 

By staging a confrontation with the Other, Rivers and Morimura reinvent it; they translate and redefine the terms of Manet’s Olympia.  As Manet magnifies the female body in a typically ‘low’ situation, Rivers shifts racial and sexual power relations to the fore and Morimura, more specifically, places himself - a gay man and representative of the Japanese Orient - in the position of a female prostitute, realigning gender, power and race relations. Morimura’s work correlates with Manet’s as he conflates male and female body types, placing himself in Olympia’s original position.  Morimura constructs a visual regime which updates Manet’s project. Drawing upon stereotypes of the Other and the Orient as a female entity to be dominated, he also contextualizes modern preoccupations with homosexuality by placing himself, a gay artist, at the work’s centre. 

Jean Paul Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness that the Other ‘is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other.’ It is this that both Rivers and Morimura acknowledge and confront; trouble occurs for the Other when he or she discovers that they have become, in another’s prolix gaze, an object.  The Other is then faced by the severe realisation that their own subjectivity makes no contribution whatsoever in another’s eyes to the character of that object. Manet, Rivers and Morimura play upon this realisation by translating and transposing convention.  By forcing the viewer in the position of a client in the gaze of their provider (whether the original Olympia, Olympia in Black Face, or Olympia as gay Japanese male) each artist compels them to pass judgement upon his/herself as an object, for, as Sartre wrote, ‘it is as an object that [we] appear to the Other.’

This recognition resonates throughout each translation of Olympia.  Consider the one thing that remains consistent throughout her different incarnations: the black ribbon tied around her neck.  This ribbon restricts. It serves as a cut off point - a reminder that it is the body on offer here, only up to the neck. This encounter is not advertised as a matter of the mind; it belongs to the realm of objectivity and not subjectivity. And yet, each work’s ability to confront the viewer lies in its relocation of the subject, in a reversal of Otherness.  In the end conventional power relations are deconstructed, they are laid bare, and it is we the viewer who become Other.  The gaze is turned in, upon ourselves, and we are obliged to examine the conventions by which we see and live.

Victoria Spratt

Image:Larry Rivers, I Like Olympia in Black Face, 1970, Mixed Material,  182 X 194 X 100 cm, Centre Pompidou, Paris

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THE DEATH OF THE ICON   The modern era of the printing-press subsequently produced the iconic photograph. Its stature as iconic was reached through heightened reproduction, exceeding that of all other images. Subsequently, the icon has permeated public culture, shaped collective memory and as such, has been successful in subtly propelling certain ideologies above the rest. Naturally then, as the era of print increasingly gives way to the new communications environment opened up by digital technology, the iconic photograph is in a state of decline.   The current cultural climate is one hostile to the iconic image. The allegiances the iconic photograph has often made to the state, due to its former dominance over images in public life, are now as defunct as its presence in an age shaped by a proliferation of images produced and disseminated by a heterogeneous community of photographers and spectators. Struggling to emerge and to maintain what has previously been a sealed, beautiful image, stable in meaning and detached from the realities it traces or discussions around its depiction, the icon’s fate is now terminal.   MUTE STATE ICONS   The Canadian cultural theorist Louis Kaplan observed, ‘in the modern period – the period when both the nation state and the medium of photography have been instituted and have flourished – photographic images have externalised and realised how we imagine community’. A study of the celebratory exuberance of V-J Day, Times Square (1945), by Alfred Eisenstaedt supports Kaplan’s point. This iconic image commemorates an idealised, key moment in American history, which seeks to reify citizenship based on territories and national identity, simultaneously perpetuating the norm.   In No Caption Needed, Hariman and Lucaites take Eisenstaedt’s photograph as a case study and re-imagine the image to depict a black sailor kissing a white nurse. ‘What could be more beautiful than his dark uniform against her white uniform and, her white skin against his black skin?’ they ask. Their point is that somewhere in America a black sailor may have kissed a white nurse on V-J Day, but it was not displayed in the national media as a symbol of celebration - instead a white couple were selected. The modern icon has served to mark the societal limitations of public culture at a given time, as much through its blind spots as its actual content.   Both the sailor and the nurse in Eisenstaedt’s image are identifiable as such through their uniforms. These outfits signify their support for the state’s part in the war whilst their embrace symbolises their ecstasy for the victory to which they have contributed. The image is beautiful, romanticised and easy to detach from the brutal realities of war. It is also easy to separate from the actual event itself: through the onslaught of time this photograph has become just as symbolic for love, romance, New York City and other military campaigns. The modern icon is excellent at shirking the facts and specifics of its content, becoming instead an empty referent.   The Israeli cultural theorist, Ariella Azoulay, focuses on Micha Pari’s Ink Flag from the occupation of Um Rashrash in 1949 in the text Declaring a State: Declaring a State of War and reveals further how malleable the meaning of an iconic image is. The event captured by Pari at Um Rashrash was nothing more than the raising of a flag and the thrusting of a flagpole into an abandoned police building. ‘Two IDF companies entered an empty hamlet that consisted of some huts along the beach. No battle took place. Instead, the idea of a battle was added to the event—after the fact—as the necessary ground for the planting of the flag- pole,’ according to Azoulay. The realities of this image emerge from the testimonies of fighters in the two companies who were on their way to occupy Um Rashrash. They did not fight an enemy but rather raced each other to the target in order to hoist the flag.   Every photograph requires the spectator to participate in the reconstruction of the photographic statement in order to give the image meaning. However, concealing this fact has clearly been part of the monopolisation of meaning symptomatic of the modern icon. This control over the meaning of the image is twinned with the state’s formerly-dominant control over its channels of dissemination. This is why the iconic image of Um Rashrash signified a battle, even though the testimonies of soldiers revealed that to be fictitious. The era of print could muffle the soldier’s claims, whereas in the current communications climate a new, unregulated realm has opened up, allowing for a more democratic plane. The realities of a photograph are now much more likely to emerge as what it depicts is frequently discussed.   The communications era now offers the possibility to interact with photographs; to re-address their captions, their presentation, format, size or saturation. Blogs, comment boxes and social media sites encourage such interaction and operate on the understanding that the meaning of an image is unstable.   As the world becomes increasingly deterritorialised, our identities dissolving further into the alternative virtual realm in which most images reside, the nature of the iconic image is visibly changing. The typically positive significations of the iconic photograph, such as patriotism and consensus are increasingly usurped by a type that is generally negative – articulating protest and fragmentation.   THE ICON OF ABU GHRAIB   Eisenstaedt or Peri’s images are diametrically opposed to Ron Haeberle’s image, My Lai Massacre and Nick Ut’s image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, which significantly turned public opinion against the state during the Vietnam War. This subversive turn has continued through to the iconic image of the Electric Man, known as ‘Gilligan,’ from Abu Ghraib. This is one of the most recent ‘iconic’ images in circulation.   However, unlike Ut or Haeberle’s photographs, Gilligan signifies a move even further away from what is traditionally viewed as ‘iconic’. Gilligan sheds all claims of artistry in its form, something the subversive precedents retained. Instead, Gilligan is a decidedly ugly image. Secondly, it signals a collapse between public and private imagery that - in microcosm - articulates a breakdown symptomatic of the voyeuristic structure of the web and digital communication at large.   Photographs of personal events are frequently uploaded onto the web for an indeterminate audience and constantly we find ourselves imparting formerly private information onto the most exposed domain possible. Gilligan is an image not taken at a distance, but a pornographic photograph; trophy footage that has ‘leaked’ onto the unregulated domain of the web and reached iconic, public stature through alternative channels. It was not created for public life, but has become a prescient part of it.   Ex–US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld avowed that he was sure he was not the only member of the committee ‘more outraged by the outrage’ over the photographs than by what the photographs show at Abu Ghraib. ‘These prisoners,’ Senator Inhofe explained, ‘you know they’re not there for traffic violations. If they’re in Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents.’ But, despite his best attempts to re-write the photograph’s ‘caption’, they garnered hostility towards American foreign policy and continue to do so today.   Finally, Gilligan represents a specific situation and this outweighs any symbolic meaning that could be attached to it. Hariman and Lucaites described an iconic image as one in which ‘social knowledge is fused with a paradigmatic scene, say poverty or war.’ They add that from their research, ‘it became obvious that people don’t know a great many circumstantial details regarding any iconic photograph such as its date, specific location, names of the participants,’ and so on. However, this is not the case with Gilligan. The image is iconic because of its production at Abu Ghraib and its emergence from a war that was contested widely in the public realm. The life-stories of the photographers frequently annotate the image, thanks to a rigorous media frenzy following their publication. The very public trial of photographer’s that ensued only revealed more information to attach to it. The ‘iconic’ image now is measured by the activity produced rather than the passivity induced.     THE ICON OF THE ARAB SPRING?   Frequently, many other photographs from Abu Ghraib accompany images of Gilligan. It is unlikely that a spectator will be familiar with the Gilligan image but never have seen Sabrina Harman’s ‘thumbs up’ amongst the torture victims, for example. The digital age reduces the limitations of how many photographs can be taken and also how many images can be stored. The World Wide Web is a huge, seemingly infinite archive for visual documents whilst the increasing accessibility of cameras is bringing more and more photographs into existence. Paradoxically, as the channels of production and dissemination widen in their possibilities, the potential for a single iconic image to emerge is reduced.   The ‘Arab Spring’ is one of the most pertinent examples of revolutionary political action to arise out of the twenty-first century following the Iraq War. It is the type of political scenario one would expect an iconic image to emerge out of. But where is it? Our historical proximity to the revolutions across North Africa is too close for us to say with any real certainty that there will be no definite iconic photograph to emerge. However, this is a possibility more likely now than ever before.   If we dissect the Arab Spring further, looking at key individual moments, such as the death of Gaddafi, it is possible to trace the visual turn we are in the midst of. First of all, it was not professional photographers who captured the death of the fallen Libyan leader, but amateurs. Like Gilligan, the pixellated ‘poor’ image fed both capitalist assembly lines and alternative channels. It is the blurry, noisy image of Gaddafi that is now associated with his death, but there is no single image to emerge out of the archive above the rest. The archive is what now defines public life in visual terms.   Visual documents are important aids for the remembrance of political moments and whilst the death of the iconic image may pose a threat to the traditions of collective public memory, the archive that could potentially replace it is more expansive and informative. The archive turns every image into part of a series and undermines an image’s potentially iconic status by inserting it into a mental and political discourse. This transforms the photograph into a visual document that the spectator is called on to read, or rather to examine.   The Arab Spring will not slip out of our minds as it is indelibly marked there, but these marks are multifarious and complex. In short, there is a large and heterogeneous visual trail of the revolutions across North Africa that is appropriate, given the complex situation it documents.   For too long we have seen the modern iconic image but been blind to what it contains. The digital communications era has opened a new visual field, one that is usurping the last and informing us along the way. It is hard to romanticise, to manipulate or to propagate an image in this environment. By presenting us with an archive of images, it may help us to see, to discuss, to remember and maybe even start to understand the type of world that is unfolding around us.   Rachael Cloughton View high resolution

THE DEATH OF THE ICON

 

The modern era of the printing-press subsequently produced the iconic photograph. Its stature as iconic was reached through heightened reproduction, exceeding that of all other images. Subsequently, the icon has permeated public culture, shaped collective memory and as such, has been successful in subtly propelling certain ideologies above the rest. Naturally then, as the era of print increasingly gives way to the new communications environment opened up by digital technology, the iconic photograph is in a state of decline.

 

The current cultural climate is one hostile to the iconic image. The allegiances the iconic photograph has often made to the state, due to its former dominance over images in public life, are now as defunct as its presence in an age shaped by a proliferation of images produced and disseminated by a heterogeneous community of photographers and spectators. Struggling to emerge and to maintain what has previously been a sealed, beautiful image, stable in meaning and detached from the realities it traces or discussions around its depiction, the icon’s fate is now terminal.

 

MUTE STATE ICONS

 

The Canadian cultural theorist Louis Kaplan observed, ‘in the modern period – the period when both the nation state and the medium of photography have been instituted and have flourished – photographic images have externalised and realised how we imagine community’. A study of the celebratory exuberance of V-J Day, Times Square (1945), by Alfred Eisenstaedt supports Kaplan’s point. This iconic image commemorates an idealised, key moment in American history, which seeks to reify citizenship based on territories and national identity, simultaneously perpetuating the norm.

 

In No Caption Needed, Hariman and Lucaites take Eisenstaedt’s photograph as a case study and re-imagine the image to depict a black sailor kissing a white nurse. ‘What could be more beautiful than his dark uniform against her white uniform and, her white skin against his black skin?’ they ask. Their point is that somewhere in America a black sailor may have kissed a white nurse on V-J Day, but it was not displayed in the national media as a symbol of celebration - instead a white couple were selected. The modern icon has served to mark the societal limitations of public culture at a given time, as much through its blind spots as its actual content.

 

Both the sailor and the nurse in Eisenstaedt’s image are identifiable as such through their uniforms. These outfits signify their support for the state’s part in the war whilst their embrace symbolises their ecstasy for the victory to which they have contributed. The image is beautiful, romanticised and easy to detach from the brutal realities of war. It is also easy to separate from the actual event itself: through the onslaught of time this photograph has become just as symbolic for love, romance, New York City and other military campaigns. The modern icon is excellent at shirking the facts and specifics of its content, becoming instead an empty referent.

 

The Israeli cultural theorist, Ariella Azoulay, focuses on Micha Pari’s Ink Flag from the occupation of Um Rashrash in 1949 in the text Declaring a State: Declaring a State of War and reveals further how malleable the meaning of an iconic image is. The event captured by Pari at Um Rashrash was nothing more than the raising of a flag and the thrusting of a flagpole into an abandoned police building. ‘Two IDF companies entered an empty hamlet that consisted of some huts along the beach. No battle took place. Instead, the idea of a battle was added to the event—after the fact—as the necessary ground for the planting of the flag- pole,’ according to Azoulay. The realities of this image emerge from the testimonies of fighters in the two companies who were on their way to occupy Um Rashrash. They did not fight an enemy but rather raced each other to the target in order to hoist the flag.

 

Every photograph requires the spectator to participate in the reconstruction of the photographic statement in order to give the image meaning. However, concealing this fact has clearly been part of the monopolisation of meaning symptomatic of the modern icon. This control over the meaning of the image is twinned with the state’s formerly-dominant control over its channels of dissemination. This is why the iconic image of Um Rashrash signified a battle, even though the testimonies of soldiers revealed that to be fictitious. The era of print could muffle the soldier’s claims, whereas in the current communications climate a new, unregulated realm has opened up, allowing for a more democratic plane. The realities of a photograph are now much more likely to emerge as what it depicts is frequently discussed.

 

The communications era now offers the possibility to interact with photographs; to re-address their captions, their presentation, format, size or saturation. Blogs, comment boxes and social media sites encourage such interaction and operate on the understanding that the meaning of an image is unstable.

 

As the world becomes increasingly deterritorialised, our identities dissolving further into the alternative virtual realm in which most images reside, the nature of the iconic image is visibly changing. The typically positive significations of the iconic photograph, such as patriotism and consensus are increasingly usurped by a type that is generally negative – articulating protest and fragmentation.

 

THE ICON OF ABU GHRAIB

 

Eisenstaedt or Peri’s images are diametrically opposed to Ron Haeberle’s image, My Lai Massacre and Nick Ut’s image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, which significantly turned public opinion against the state during the Vietnam War. This subversive turn has continued through to the iconic image of the Electric Man, known as ‘Gilligan,’ from Abu Ghraib. This is one of the most recent ‘iconic’ images in circulation.

 

However, unlike Ut or Haeberle’s photographs, Gilligan signifies a move even further away from what is traditionally viewed as ‘iconic’. Gilligan sheds all claims of artistry in its form, something the subversive precedents retained. Instead, Gilligan is a decidedly ugly image. Secondly, it signals a collapse between public and private imagery that - in microcosm - articulates a breakdown symptomatic of the voyeuristic structure of the web and digital communication at large.

 

Photographs of personal events are frequently uploaded onto the web for an indeterminate audience and constantly we find ourselves imparting formerly private information onto the most exposed domain possible. Gilligan is an image not taken at a distance, but a pornographic photograph; trophy footage that has ‘leaked’ onto the unregulated domain of the web and reached iconic, public stature through alternative channels. It was not created for public life, but has become a prescient part of it.

 

Ex–US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld avowed that he was sure he was not the only member of the committee ‘more outraged by the outrage’ over the photographs than by what the photographs show at Abu Ghraib. ‘These prisoners,’ Senator Inhofe explained, ‘you know they’re not there for traffic violations. If they’re in Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents.’ But, despite his best attempts to re-write the photograph’s ‘caption’, they garnered hostility towards American foreign policy and continue to do so today.

 

Finally, Gilligan represents a specific situation and this outweighs any symbolic meaning that could be attached to it. Hariman and Lucaites described an iconic image as one in which ‘social knowledge is fused with a paradigmatic scene, say poverty or war.’ They add that from their research, ‘it became obvious that people don’t know a great many circumstantial details regarding any iconic photograph such as its date, specific location, names of the participants,’ and so on. However, this is not the case with Gilligan. The image is iconic because of its production at Abu Ghraib and its emergence from a war that was contested widely in the public realm. The life-stories of the photographers frequently annotate the image, thanks to a rigorous media frenzy following their publication. The very public trial of photographer’s that ensued only revealed more information to attach to it. The ‘iconic’ image now is measured by the activity produced rather than the passivity induced.

 

 

THE ICON OF THE ARAB SPRING?

 

Frequently, many other photographs from Abu Ghraib accompany images of Gilligan. It is unlikely that a spectator will be familiar with the Gilligan image but never have seen Sabrina Harman’s ‘thumbs up’ amongst the torture victims, for example. The digital age reduces the limitations of how many photographs can be taken and also how many images can be stored. The World Wide Web is a huge, seemingly infinite archive for visual documents whilst the increasing accessibility of cameras is bringing more and more photographs into existence. Paradoxically, as the channels of production and dissemination widen in their possibilities, the potential for a single iconic image to emerge is reduced.

 

The ‘Arab Spring’ is one of the most pertinent examples of revolutionary political action to arise out of the twenty-first century following the Iraq War. It is the type of political scenario one would expect an iconic image to emerge out of. But where is it? Our historical proximity to the revolutions across North Africa is too close for us to say with any real certainty that there will be no definite iconic photograph to emerge. However, this is a possibility more likely now than ever before.

 

If we dissect the Arab Spring further, looking at key individual moments, such as the death of Gaddafi, it is possible to trace the visual turn we are in the midst of. First of all, it was not professional photographers who captured the death of the fallen Libyan leader, but amateurs. Like Gilligan, the pixellated ‘poor’ image fed both capitalist assembly lines and alternative channels. It is the blurry, noisy image of Gaddafi that is now associated with his death, but there is no single image to emerge out of the archive above the rest. The archive is what now defines public life in visual terms.

 

Visual documents are important aids for the remembrance of political moments and whilst the death of the iconic image may pose a threat to the traditions of collective public memory, the archive that could potentially replace it is more expansive and informative. The archive turns every image into part of a series and undermines an image’s potentially iconic status by inserting it into a mental and political discourse. This transforms the photograph into a visual document that the spectator is called on to read, or rather to examine.

 

The Arab Spring will not slip out of our minds as it is indelibly marked there, but these marks are multifarious and complex. In short, there is a large and heterogeneous visual trail of the revolutions across North Africa that is appropriate, given the complex situation it documents.

 

For too long we have seen the modern iconic image but been blind to what it contains. The digital communications era has opened a new visual field, one that is usurping the last and informing us along the way. It is hard to romanticise, to manipulate or to propagate an image in this environment. By presenting us with an archive of images, it may help us to see, to discuss, to remember and maybe even start to understand the type of world that is unfolding around us.

 

Rachael Cloughton

Translating the Real and the Symbolic in the Age of Instantaneity   It’s difficult not to be reminded of Jean Baudrillard in our contemporary moment, particularly in the context of war. In his essay, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), the French theorist argues that the style of warfare used in the Gulf War was far removed from traditional methods involving actual hand-to-hand combat, and instead it existed as images on radar and TV screens relating distant conflicts and consequences. As such, most of the decisions made were based on perceived intelligence as oppose to actual seen-with-the-eye intelligence.   This dichotomy of perception also connects with Baudrillard’s distinction between two different types of reality in his essay Simulacra and Simulation written a decade earlier. Here he claims that our contemporary or post-modern society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, such that human experience becomes a simulation of reality. These simulacra are the significations of culture and media that construct out perceived reality. Ultimately Baudrillard believes that our lives have become so saturated by simulacra that meaning has been rendered meaningless due to it being infinitely mutable. The real real has been translated into and usurped by a symbolic real.   Baudrillard has always outraged with his ideas, especially when he voices them through the context of war; the reality of human suffering being a touchy subject. However after moving forward another ten years to a more recent conflict – the War in Iraq – his words seem now so uncannily accurate.   The Chicago-based artist, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, affirms this contemporary connection through his work Phantom Truck (2007). Originally made for Documenta 12 but revived early last year at The Power Plant in Toronto, the work is a full-scale steel construction of a mobile truck. It is a silent and static installation, barely discernible within a near-blacked out room. Four red light boxes are placed at each corner of the room and, like a photograph developing in a dark-room, our eyes adjust to the structure in front of us.   Phantom Truck is a physical manifestation of the digitally rendered image that the then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, showed to the UN during his notorious speech in February 2003. In this image were coherent and convincing depictions of mobile trucks in Iraq, which Powell posited as containing biological weapons. As he said in his speech, ‘we have diagrammed what our sources reported about these mobile facilities. The description our sources gave us of the technical features required by such facilities is highly detailed and extremely accurate.’[1]   Phantom Truck exists in a condition of post-event where the truth is now known: Powell’s source was found to be inaccurate. The trucks that he had speculated upon had nothing to do with biological weapons and were in fact – as the Iraqis had claimed - for the production of hydrogen-filled weather balloons that were used to direct artillery shelling.   In light of this truth Manglano-Ovalle gives Powell’s fiction a palpable form. His giant truck occupies the entire space and towers above its viewer as they move around its exterior. The installation disallows passive spectatorship and instead pushes the viewer into a process of discovery that is reliant upon both sight and touch. With hyperaware eyes the truck is visible only via the sparse light source; it is seen in fragments like a hologram coming in and out of focus. The ephemeral is sharply countered by the cold physicality of the structure, which viewers are encouraged to touch as they guide themselves around the space. Manglano-Ovalle sets up a dichotomy between representation and reality and refuses to close the gap in between.   This tension between what we see and what we touch echoes the role that both fact and fiction have to play in Phantom Truck. Manglano-Ovalle paradoxically affirms Baudrillard’s thesis by inverting it: he translates the symbolic real of Powell’s digitised image into the real real. He gives physical form to something that only ever existed as a simulacrum. It is by touching the steel frame of the truck and being made aware of its tactility that we are reminded of the very concrete repercussions that this fictional image has had: war and death.   The danger that Manglano-Ovalle sees arising out of Baudrillard’s simulacra is it embroilment with politics, power and authority. When it is the sources in which we trust who disseminate these images, how can we reconcile what we know and what we are told? How can we translate the symbolic real back into the real real? By questioning the point at which fiction meets fact, Manglano-Ovalle creates an aesthetic object that encompasses this dilemma. Within its isolated space, Phantom Truck allows for these binaries to exist together; it is the spectator who must try and fill in the gaps.   In our age of instantaneity Baudrillard’s past claims should set our contemporary alarm bells ringing. Although many refute his assertion that the Gulf War did not take place or indeed that the Iraq war did not take place, if we extend his words to more recent times, such accusations miss the point entirely. Baudrillard did not intend a general denial of war’s reality; people have died and political maps have been altered. His is a critique of our passive consumption of images - be they real or digital - via technological mediums. Manglano-Ovalle reinforces this substitution of the real with the symbolic by expressing and inciting an awareness of the danger of these symbols, or images, being inverted and used as justification for actions that have very real consequences.    Joseph Constable  Image : thepowerplant.org   [1] Powell, Colin. “Full text of Colin Powell’s speech.” The Guardian. 5 February, 2003

Translating the Real and the Symbolic in the Age of Instantaneity

 

It’s difficult not to be reminded of Jean Baudrillard in our contemporary moment, particularly in the context of war. In his essay, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), the French theorist argues that the style of warfare used in the Gulf War was far removed from traditional methods involving actual hand-to-hand combat, and instead it existed as images on radar and TV screens relating distant conflicts and consequences. As such, most of the decisions made were based on perceived intelligence as oppose to actual seen-with-the-eye intelligence.

 

This dichotomy of perception also connects with Baudrillard’s distinction between two different types of reality in his essay Simulacra and Simulation written a decade earlier. Here he claims that our contemporary or post-modern society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, such that human experience becomes a simulation of reality. These simulacra are the significations of culture and media that construct out perceived reality. Ultimately Baudrillard believes that our lives have become so saturated by simulacra that meaning has been rendered meaningless due to it being infinitely mutable. The real real has been translated into and usurped by a symbolic real.

 

Baudrillard has always outraged with his ideas, especially when he voices them through the context of war; the reality of human suffering being a touchy subject. However after moving forward another ten years to a more recent conflict – the War in Iraq – his words seem now so uncannily accurate.

 

The Chicago-based artist, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, affirms this contemporary connection through his work Phantom Truck (2007). Originally made for Documenta 12 but revived early last year at The Power Plant in Toronto, the work is a full-scale steel construction of a mobile truck. It is a silent and static installation, barely discernible within a near-blacked out room. Four red light boxes are placed at each corner of the room and, like a photograph developing in a dark-room, our eyes adjust to the structure in front of us.

 

Phantom Truck is a physical manifestation of the digitally rendered image that the then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, showed to the UN during his notorious speech in February 2003. In this image were coherent and convincing depictions of mobile trucks in Iraq, which Powell posited as containing biological weapons. As he said in his speech, ‘we have diagrammed what our sources reported about these mobile facilities. The description our sources gave us of the technical features required by such facilities is highly detailed and extremely accurate.’[1]

 

Phantom Truck exists in a condition of post-event where the truth is now known: Powell’s source was found to be inaccurate. The trucks that he had speculated upon had nothing to do with biological weapons and were in fact – as the Iraqis had claimed - for the production of hydrogen-filled weather balloons that were used to direct artillery shelling.

 

In light of this truth Manglano-Ovalle gives Powell’s fiction a palpable form. His giant truck occupies the entire space and towers above its viewer as they move around its exterior. The installation disallows passive spectatorship and instead pushes the viewer into a process of discovery that is reliant upon both sight and touch. With hyperaware eyes the truck is visible only via the sparse light source; it is seen in fragments like a hologram coming in and out of focus. The ephemeral is sharply countered by the cold physicality of the structure, which viewers are encouraged to touch as they guide themselves around the space. Manglano-Ovalle sets up a dichotomy between representation and reality and refuses to close the gap in between.

 

This tension between what we see and what we touch echoes the role that both fact and fiction have to play in Phantom Truck. Manglano-Ovalle paradoxically affirms Baudrillard’s thesis by inverting it: he translates the symbolic real of Powell’s digitised image into the real real. He gives physical form to something that only ever existed as a simulacrum. It is by touching the steel frame of the truck and being made aware of its tactility that we are reminded of the very concrete repercussions that this fictional image has had: war and death.

 

The danger that Manglano-Ovalle sees arising out of Baudrillard’s simulacra is it embroilment with politics, power and authority. When it is the sources in which we trust who disseminate these images, how can we reconcile what we know and what we are told? How can we translate the symbolic real back into the real real? By questioning the point at which fiction meets fact, Manglano-Ovalle creates an aesthetic object that encompasses this dilemma. Within its isolated space, Phantom Truck allows for these binaries to exist together; it is the spectator who must try and fill in the gaps.

 

In our age of instantaneity Baudrillard’s past claims should set our contemporary alarm bells ringing. Although many refute his assertion that the Gulf War did not take place or indeed that the Iraq war did not take place, if we extend his words to more recent times, such accusations miss the point entirely. Baudrillard did not intend a general denial of war’s reality; people have died and political maps have been altered. His is a critique of our passive consumption of images - be they real or digital - via technological mediums. Manglano-Ovalle reinforces this substitution of the real with the symbolic by expressing and inciting an awareness of the danger of these symbols, or images, being inverted and used as justification for actions that have very real consequences.

 

 Joseph Constable

 Image : thepowerplant.org

 


[1] Powell, Colin. “Full text of Colin Powell’s speech.” The Guardian. 5 February, 2003

Images courtesy of the Hayward Gallery, photographed by Linda Nylind View high resolution

Images courtesy of the Hayward Gallery, photographed by Linda Nylind

Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage Hayward Gallery, Wednesday 28th Sep - Sunday 8th Jan 2012 Pipilotti Rist’s 30-year retrospective is one of the most intriguing, discombobulating and pleasing exhibitions recently on display at the Hayward Gallery. Strings of underwear greet the audience, hanging between the gallery and the numerous lamps on the South Bank concourse. Whilst Nothing, a machine that emits what Rist calls ‘bubbles, peace bombs or farts within trousers’ sits unnoticed on the roof. These are harbingers to the exuberant, surprising and at times, laugh-out-loud funny retrospective inside, which illustrates well why this Swiss artist is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. Eyeball Massage is Rist’s first major public survey show in the UK, presenting videos, sculptures and installations, bringing together over 30 works spanning her career from the 1980s to today. Highly accomplished technically and rich in dazzling colour, Rist’s practice fuses sensual images, music, and the occasional text to create mesmerising works.  Continually, the art of installation is reinvented; films are presented in diverse and imaginative ways from simple single screen video to environments conceived for particular space. A hanging chandelier festooned with white underwear opens the show. Overlaying it is a flickering video projection that slowly reveals itself to be footage of travelling along a tube; a nod towards the bodily functions enacted by the area of the body contained within underwear - birth, sexual pleasure and defecation. Rist’s fascination with the human body – its strangeness, its sensuousness and its manipulation through media – is apparent as the exhibition unfolds further. In Suburb Brain, the viewer towers over a miniature suburban bungalow reminiscent of Rist’s childhood home, and is surrounded by videos of Rist ruminating on the failures of marriage and family life. On the mezzanine, body-shaped cushions litter the floor beneath a labyrinth of diaphanous curtains in Administering Eternity. Though soothing when lying down, they are also unsettling with the continual eerie music throughout the gallery space. In Lobe of the Lung, 2009, one is completely immersed by the video, drowsily lying on cushions as green strawberries bob in pink water and tulips shine in microscopic close-ups against a vivid blue sky. Throughout the exhibition there is a strong sense of an all-encompassing and limitless female sexuality, highlighted in the Freudian trope video images half-hidden inside velvet-lined handbags and curving conch shells. You can completely lose yourself in these works, deliriously drifting from space to space, from one pleasure piece to the next. The exhibition feels like entering into someone’s dreams or waking visions, until we return to the harsh realities of life, and it is then that one can reflect on the truly mesmerising work of Pipilotti Rist.   Review by Emily Burke Images courtesy of the Hayward Gallery, photographed by Linda Nylind View high resolution

Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage

Hayward Gallery, Wednesday 28th Sep - Sunday 8th Jan 2012

Pipilotti Rist’s 30-year retrospective is one of the most intriguing, discombobulating and pleasing exhibitions recently on display at the Hayward Gallery. Strings of underwear greet the audience, hanging between the gallery and the numerous lamps on the South Bank concourse. Whilst Nothing, a machine that emits what Rist calls ‘bubbles, peace bombs or farts within trousers’ sits unnoticed on the roof. These are harbingers to the exuberant, surprising and at times, laugh-out-loud funny retrospective inside, which illustrates well why this Swiss artist is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists.

Eyeball Massage is Rist’s first major public survey show in the UK, presenting videos, sculptures and installations, bringing together over 30 works spanning her career from the 1980s to today. Highly accomplished technically and rich in dazzling colour, Rist’s practice fuses sensual images, music, and the occasional text to create mesmerising works.  Continually, the art of installation is reinvented; films are presented in diverse and imaginative ways from simple single screen video to environments conceived for particular space.

A hanging chandelier festooned with white underwear opens the show. Overlaying it is a flickering video projection that slowly reveals itself to be footage of travelling along a tube; a nod towards the bodily functions enacted by the area of the body contained within underwear - birth, sexual pleasure and defecation. Rist’s fascination with the human body – its strangeness, its sensuousness and its manipulation through media – is apparent as the exhibition unfolds further.

In Suburb Brain, the viewer towers over a miniature suburban bungalow reminiscent of Rist’s childhood home, and is surrounded by videos of Rist ruminating on the failures of marriage and family life. On the mezzanine, body-shaped cushions litter the floor beneath a labyrinth of diaphanous curtains in Administering Eternity. Though soothing when lying down, they are also unsettling with the continual eerie music throughout the gallery space. In Lobe of the Lung, 2009, one is completely immersed by the video, drowsily lying on cushions as green strawberries bob in pink water and tulips shine in microscopic close-ups against a vivid blue sky.

Throughout the exhibition there is a strong sense of an all-encompassing and limitless female sexuality, highlighted in the Freudian trope video images half-hidden inside velvet-lined handbags and curving conch shells. You can completely lose yourself in these works, deliriously drifting from space to space, from one pleasure piece to the next. The exhibition feels like entering into someone’s dreams or waking visions, until we return to the harsh realities of life, and it is then that one can reflect on the truly mesmerising work of Pipilotti Rist.

 

Review by Emily Burke

Images courtesy of the Hayward Gallery, photographed by Linda Nylind

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An interview with Jonathan Owen in his studio in Edinburgh.

Travelling gallery and collaboration, new work and techniques explained.

Interviewed by Piotr Skibinski

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Ian Davenport Interview after Lineage exhibition at the Edinburgh Printmakers,

Interviewed by Piotr Skibinski for Line Magazine after the Edinburgh Art festival 2011

Review Hiroshi Sugimoto: Lightning Fields, Photographic Drawing Scottish National Galleries of Modern Art While Nathan Coley’s ‘There Will Be No Miracles Here’ still proudly welcomes the visitors to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, its current temporary exhibition refutes this claim; indeed, ironically, it is centred around scientific miracles. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s mythical work illustrates the invisible and resurrects the dead. This exhibition sees Sugimoto play the role of an artist, a photographer, a scientist, an explorer, a magician and a conceptual thinker, travelling back to the very origins of photography. The show consists of two parts, both of which cradle the neglected infants of photographic experimentation brought to life by Henry Fox Talbot: The first part, Lightning Fields, is an impressive outcome of Fox Talbot’s early experiments with static electricity produced using a Van der Graaff generator to induce violent electrical discharges onto photographic film. The resulting images reveal the extraordinary effect of light particles, not visible to the human eye, forming dramatic bolt shapes striking from the darkness of the massive prints’ background and darting across the picture plane. These images capture split seconds of light and freeze them in time; they play with the notion of seizing the invisible, the elusive and the obscure.   In another series, Photographic Drawing, Sugimoto breathes life into the 160-year-old souls of original, possibly never developed, negatives by Henry Fox Talbot. These beautifully dark, phantom-like, lacy, fragile Victorian images reveal forgotten moments in time, now transmitted through old shadows, which haunt the rooms of the Gallery of Modern Art. Seemingly tranquil, these photographs carry a certain evocative power. Extreme risk was involved in using the ancient negatives as they were in great danger of changing if exposed to even the slightest source of light. Sugimoto takes the risk and returns to the very origins of photography in order to finally see the positive images of some of the first negatives ever made. However different in terms of aesthetics and the created ambience, conceptually. both halves of the show go hand in hand. Sugimoto penetrates the subconscious and praises the obscured, the ignored and the seemingly non-existant. Both parts of the show not only capture the moment in time, but enhance its importance and uniqueness. In addition, they magnify the power of exhilaration, fear and excitement related to risk of exploring the enigma. The uncertainty dabbled in in creating the images from Fox Talbot’s original negatives is comparable with that of waiting for a message from Delphi’s Oracle. The ambiguity of the revealed messages echo across the gallery. Perhaps it might have benefitted the viewer, however, to see these two different discoveries, these messages (represented by the splitting of the aesthetic of the show into two halves) displayed within two distinct spheres. Mixing the results of two different experiments by installing them in a cross-channelling way results in an emotional and aesthetic rivalry between the dynamics of the first impression and novelty of Lighting Fields and the tranquillity of resurrecting the dead in Photographic Drawing; but then again who are we to dictate as to the order we see miracles caught in. ____ Agnes Gryczkowska 

Review

Hiroshi Sugimoto:

Lightning Fields, Photographic Drawing

Scottish National Galleries of Modern Art

While Nathan Coley’s ‘There Will Be No Miracles Here’ still proudly welcomes the visitors to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, its current temporary exhibition refutes this claim; indeed, ironically, it is centred around scientific miracles. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s mythical work illustrates the invisible and resurrects the dead.

This exhibition sees Sugimoto play the role of an artist, a photographer, a scientist, an explorer, a magician and a conceptual thinker, travelling back to the very origins of photography. The show consists of two parts, both of which cradle the neglected infants of photographic experimentation brought to life by Henry Fox Talbot: The first part, Lightning Fields, is an impressive outcome of Fox Talbot’s early experiments with static electricity produced using a Van der Graaff generator to induce violent electrical discharges onto photographic film. The resulting images reveal the extraordinary effect of light particles, not visible to the human eye, forming dramatic bolt shapes striking from the darkness of the massive prints’ background and darting across the picture plane. These images capture split seconds of light and freeze them in time; they play with the notion of seizing the invisible, the elusive and the obscure.  

In another series, Photographic Drawing, Sugimoto breathes life into the 160-year-old souls of original, possibly never developed, negatives by Henry Fox Talbot. These beautifully dark, phantom-like, lacy, fragile Victorian images reveal forgotten moments in time, now transmitted through old shadows, which haunt the rooms of the Gallery of Modern Art. Seemingly tranquil, these photographs carry a certain evocative power. Extreme risk was involved in using the ancient negatives as they were in great danger of changing if exposed to even the slightest source of light. Sugimoto takes the risk and returns to the very origins of photography in order to finally see the positive images of some of the first negatives ever made.

However different in terms of aesthetics and the created ambience, conceptually. both halves of the show go hand in hand. Sugimoto penetrates the subconscious and praises the obscured, the ignored and the seemingly non-existant. Both parts of the show not only capture the moment in time, but enhance its importance and uniqueness. In addition, they magnify the power of exhilaration, fear and excitement related to risk of exploring the enigma. The uncertainty dabbled in in creating the images from Fox Talbot’s original negatives is comparable with that of waiting for a message from Delphi’s Oracle. The ambiguity of the revealed messages echo across the gallery.

Perhaps it might have benefitted the viewer, however, to see these two different discoveries, these messages (represented by the splitting of the aesthetic of the show into two halves) displayed within two distinct spheres. Mixing the results of two different experiments by installing them in a cross-channelling way results in an emotional and aesthetic rivalry between the dynamics of the first impression and novelty of Lighting Fields and the tranquillity of resurrecting the dead in Photographic Drawing; but then again who are we to dictate as to the order we see miracles caught in.

____

Agnes Gryczkowska