Alan Gilbert: "Startling and Effective": Writing Art and Politics after 9/11

[Here's a short essay by Alan Gilbert I ripped from the Pores website.]

This past summer, as I was sitting in one of Anthology Film Archives' movie theaters waiting for the documentary film Gaza Strip (Longley 2002) to begin, I overheard snippets of conversation coming from a group of six or seven women and men from different backgrounds and in their mid-twenties sitting in the row directly in front of me. One of them was providing some context for the film they were about to watch (it was produced by an American filmmaker who planned to spend a couple weeks in the Gaza Strip making a documentary about the current intifada, but ended up staying three months and filming everyday life under its harsh conditions); another person was talking about films she'd recently seen at Anthology (run by Jonas Mekas, Anthology Film Archives remains one of the few places in New York City, and the United States as a whole, that shows avant-garde and experimental films on a daily basis; even the films of old-school experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage are screened monthly); another member of the group was talking about her new job. Then suddenly, or so it seemed to me because I hadn't heard any of the particular conversation leading up to it, someone in the group said: “It'll be twenty years before anyone makes an avant-garde film again.” Intrigued as I was to hear any responses to such a claim, or further clarifications from the person who uttered it, I couldn't catch much else, and the movie started soon after.

Gaza Strip is a mostly conventional documentary that nevertheless eschews a number of conventional documentary techniques: no solemn voice-over, a certain amount of non-linear narrative and editing, and a sprinkling of digital effects that are meant to enhance moments of emergency and danger. Its organizing conceit is to follow around a Palestinian boy named Mohammed Hejazi as he throws rocks at Israeli tanks, sells newspapers, visits his young friends after they've been shot by Israeli soldiers, and joins funerals. But plenty of other aspects of life for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are also represented: bulldozed houses, snipers firing on schoolyards, rockets fired into houses, and poisonous gas attacks; in other words, the film has everything except, as J. Hoberman pointed out in his Village Voice review, footage of the horrific carnage inflicted on Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers (2002). But Gaza Strip isn't blatantly biased, nor is it overly didactic. Simply filming the Israeli army terrorizing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is damning enough, especially when a soldier in one of its tanks rolls what looks like a metal toy toward a group of Palestinian children playing, only to have one of the kids discover after he picks it up that it's actually a small bomb which then blows most of his abdomen away.

The 100th issue of the journal October is a special anniversary volume somewhat ironically dedicated to the topic of “Obsolescence.” A number of artists responded to a questionnaire dealing with the concept, and two roundtables addressed it in relation to contemporary art criticism and “American avant-garde film,” respectively. Both roundtables returned again and again to the idea of institutionality—in relation to visual art and the discourses surrounding it. In the roundtable on art criticism, institutionality was seen as a potential danger to art and art criticism, while, at the same time, all of the participants generally agreed on the difficulties of working, or even conceiving themselves, outside the art world system. Andrea Fraser, whose renowned brand of institutional critique receives ongoing institutional support, was perhaps the most representative roundtable member in this regard. In contrast, the roundtable on “American avant-garde film” mostly embraced institutionality as the only way in which this film practice could continue to reach an audience beyond a very select few, the majority of whom are fellow avant-garde filmmakers.

The lone exception, experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, espoused a do-it-yourself 1960s—later punk, later Internet—fuck the system outsider stance in which artmaking isn't dependent upon institutional support for its vitality. He also fell back on what might be seen as a relatively separate strand of vanguardist innovation:

[Ken] Jacobs: . . . But then you have things that uphold the idea of the avant-garde, which is to forage and get out there into new territory, to think completely freshly, come up with whole other ways of putting things together, unexpected things to go for. New things have been made all through these years. New things are being made now.

[Paul] Arthur: I'm sure that's true, but I find this aspect of the cultural ideology somewhat suspect, even obsolescent. This idea of constant innovation, of stretching the envelope of what's possible in cinema . . . I find that a problematic notion at this point.

[Annette] Michelson: Why?

Arthur: Because I don't see that much stretching these days, but I do see a very strongly institutionalized movement, and for me, that's the essential definition. (2002: 117)

Here, film critic Paul Arthur is referring less to institutionality as a network of support encompassing the production, distribution, and screening of experimental film, and more to a codified, and even ossified, vanguardist aesthetics. If the notion of vanguardism is conceptually derived from the militaristic scouting forays made by the lead part of an advancing army, then maybe after a century of the worst warfare in human history and plenty of avant-garde experiments (many of them ending up in some dubious political affiliations), it's time for the avant-garde to drop back a little, not in order to march shoulder-to-shoulder with this army (as ethicist Emmanual Levinas once described Martin Heidegger's booted march toward Being [1987: 40-41, 93-94]), but to meet it face-to-face. Semantically, at least, the avant-garde would no longer be an avant-garde; but, then, maybe the army would no longer be an army.

After the feelings of shock, sadness, and anger I experienced in the hours following the attacks on the World Trade Center, and when more information began to filter in about exactly what happened, my two initial thoughts were: 1) this will seriously damage the Palestinian cause, since sentiment in mainstream US media and society had finally begun to shift toward a less one-sided understanding of Israeli-Palestinian relations; and 2) this is partly the responsibility of the US auto industry—in collaboration with the major oil companies—for refusing to develop serious alternatives to the gas combustion engine. These may appear odd first thoughts; but one can imagine what it was like to be in New York City on the evening of September 11, 2001, watching the smoke rising from southern Manhattan's enormous scar billow against a spectacular sunset, rendered, it may sound grotesque to say (although people in Los Angeles experience this all the time), even more spectacular by the pollutants in the atmosphere. Everyone in New York City that day and in the following days was breathing in the cremated remains of thousands of people, though absolutely no one could say it—then, or even now. Instantly, what seemed like millions of flyers of missing persons with photographs and contact information for relatives and friends covered every available surface. Spontaneous public spaces were established in parks and open areas around the city; and while some writers exaggerated the level of civic discourse and debate in these temporary public spheres, they nevertheless were places where people congregated and dialogued freely and with a certain degree of self-allowed autonomy.

This made the authorities nervous, but the level of grief was so intense that even then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani—who was pleased to be able to finally run the city like the police state he always dreamed of, and who did a good job of it, if efficiently running a police state is something one can be complimented on or take pride in—couldn't tear down the flyers or break up the gatherings. But within a couple weeks he did, and suddenly the flyers were gone, as if overnight, and people no longer congregated in public spaces. The attacks also meant the Bush administration finally had an objective other than to loot everything in sight; and just as it's easy to forget how low Giuliani had sunk in the general opinion of New Yorker's before 9/11 (the second fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American man by his police corps was one of the final straws), to the point of excusing himself from his Senate race against Hillary Clinton, so, too, is it difficult to remember exactly what the Bush administration was up to before its attentions were turned toward Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike the Reagan administration, which at least formulated a pernicious ideology of trickle-down economics to justify its greed, Bush, Jr., and his recycled Reagan/Bush père cronies were/are only after one thing: wealth, and the most massive redistribution of it in the US since the latter half of the 19th century.

Exploiting contradictions is one strategy art, writing, and the larger cultural sphere might explore in the wake of 9/11. Focusing in on contradiction, exposing it without necessarily adding explicit commentary and/or a heavy-handed narrative structure, is a dialogic process, one that can be politicized without in turn being made demagogic. But an attention to contradiction is as much a strategy of reading as it is a mode of cultural production. In a so-called “Information Age” of media monopolies, with their consolidations and restrictions of available information, it's increasingly essential to read this information against the grain. It's also crucial to cultivate alternative sources of information, which are in wild proliferation, whether in print or on the Internet. Both attitudes toward information are summarized in Marshall McLuhan's declaration: “When information is brushed against information . . . the results are startling and effective” (1967: 76,78). There's no reason why art can't be “startling” and “effective,” even though the two categories have frequently been kept separate: the former associated with formal innovation and extravagance, the latter with dry political utility and pedagogy.

It's important that an approach to cultural production and reading which brushes information against information have a wide range of applications. For instance, I wouldn't be the first to point to the contradictions at the heart of David LaChapelle's photography, and its very voguish attempt to blur the distinctions between fashion and art (2002, 1999, 1996). On the surface, LaChapelle's work is among the most effusive celebrations of celebrity culture currently produced today. It makes gushing television shows such as Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, which also push celebrity culture and its products, downright dull in comparison. But perhaps LaChapelle's work is more complex than this. Perhaps Jeff Koons isn't Warhol's most immediate Pop offspring—LaChapelle is (after all, he got his start photographing for Warhol's Interview magazine). Like Warhol, the image factory and its resultant celebrity goods—and vice versa—is LaChapelle's world. Similar to Warhol's work as discussed by Hal Foster in The Return of the Real, specifically his '60s silkscreens of car crashes, criminals, and even celebrities (1996: 130-136), there's a sense of violence and death in LaChapelle's depictions of the commonplace-as-incongruous and the incongruous-as-commonplace in mass culture. Celebrities may strive to transcend mortality in both Warhol and LaChapelle (and in this their art subscribes to one of the most conventional of aesthetic notions), but death and the intrinsic, never-resolved contradiction it brings is always sniffing at the edges of the frame.

At one level, Warhol and LaChapelle's projects couldn't make much more clear—without, that is, becoming purely “effective”—the primary relationship between consumption and death. To this I would add the relationship in capitalist societies between consumption, death, and war. But this connection is also a contradiction: to consume is to try to elude death, and to consume is also supposed to negate war, as Thomas Friedman famously remarked when he said that two countries with a McDonald's in them would never go to war (rather quickly disproved when the US bombed Serbia, to which Friedman responded that this exception actually proved his rule [1999]). In their most complex work, Warhol and LaChapelle bypass irony (the easiest of critical gestures) for contradiction. The very excessiveness of LaChapelle's depiction of celebrity and riches practically begs the viewer to read back critically into the constructed image and to understand that too much is literally too much. Of course, this begging is also a sign of the work's complicity, and one should be careful not to exaggerate the critical aspect of LaChapelle's images. The contradictions I'm pointing to in LaChapelle's photography may serve as a reading of resistance, but the key is to link up this reading with larger social, political, and cultural formations and movements. And for that, a globalized view is necessary, an awareness that's becoming more widespread, if the unexpected strong-selling success of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire is any indication (2000)—though Empire might do a better job of reminding its readers that without robustly functioning nation-states, transnational capitalism would collapse within months, if not weeks.

If any contemporary photographer could be considered the polar opposite of David LaChapelle it might be Allan Sekula. Sekula's epic Fish Story was shown in its entirety at this year's Documenta. In his installation of the work and book of the same title (1995), Sekula documents global shipping routes and ports of transnational trade. If, on first glance, LaChapelle's work is “startling,” Sekula's work might be considered “effective.” Yet there's a rigorous attention to formal concerns in Sekula's photographs. Sekula may work in a somewhat traditional documentary mode, but unlike documentary that tries to capture an entire span of intellectual and emotional response within a single frame or film or video, a Sekula photograph is incomprehensible without the context he creates for it with accompanying images and text, which in turn comment directly on larger socio-economic conditions. The failure of traditional documentary is that it trusts the immediate impact of its images, and remains satisfied with these direct representations. This distinction between different documentary methods is cited by critic and curator Matthew Higgs: “Writing elsewhere on documentary photography, British artist Liam Gillick has described the kind of work that seeks meaning in the apparent profundity of its subject matter in lieu of offering a 'constructed critique' as a 'stunned mirror'” (Higgs 2002: 167). Sekula's quick movement in Fish Story between the macro and the micro, his constant historicizing as well as his attention to the smallest details, are the result of a complex formal and critical process. What at first glance makes Sekula's work appear the product of a classical documentary lineage turns out to be his refusal to accept consumption as the fundamental social and economic reality. Even in a world full of simulacra, most commodities still have to be produced and transported before they can be consumed. In a manner that's the complete opposite of LaChapelle, Sekula's work seeks to strip the commodity of its fetishistic dimension. This forces a reading of resistance to be read back, in turn, into a capitalist economy and social organization that uses an ideology of consumption—of goods and images—to camouflage inherent structural contradictions.

Unfortunately, not much has changed, in art or otherwise, after 9/11. At the same time, a quote such as, “It'll be twenty years before anyone makes an avant-garde film again,” however off-hand, however unsubstantiated, however unjustified, perhaps could only have been made after 9/11. But has anything changed? A space has opened up within political discourse and artistic practice in the US, a space partially and metaphorically vacated by the Twin Towers, in which contradictions have the potential to become more evident. Yet if one of the main challenges of various forms of cultural production is to expose contradictions in dominant ideologies, then they must also learn to expose contradictions within themselves. Without serious self-critique, art slowly loses its capacity for anything more than shallow institutional critique. For the avant-garde in particular (or what's left of it), self-critique may allow it to step back—though not so far as to become a rearguard—and engage with the progressive cultural populism it needs in order to rejuvenate itself and again function as a radical project.

Alan Gilbert

 

Bibliography

Arthur, Paul; Frye, Brian; Iles, Chrissie; Jacobs, Ken; Michelson, Annette; Turvey, Malcolm (2002) “Round Table: Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film.” In October. No. 100 (Spring 2002): 115-132.

Foster, Hal (1996) The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. The MIT Press, Cambridge and London.

Friedman, Thomas L. (1999) “The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.” In The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. Anchor Books, New York. 248-275.

Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio (2000) Empire. Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London.

Higgs, Matthew (2002) “Same Old Same Old.” In Artforum. Vol. XLI, No. 1 (September 2002): 166-167.

Hoberman, J. (2002) “Crime Scenes.” In The Village Voice. Vol. XLVII, No. 31 (July 31-August 6, 2002): 103.

LaChapelle, David (2002) Photographs. Museums Betriebsgesellschaft mbH, Wien.

------ (1999) Hotel LaChapelle. Bulfinch Press, Boston, New York, and London.

------ (1996) LaChapelle Land. Simon & Schuster, New York.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1987) Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh.

Longley, James (2002) Gaza Strip. Directed by James Longley. Produced by James Longley.

McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin (1967) The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Gingko Press, Corte Madera, CA.

Sekula, Allan (1995) Fish Story. Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf.

Posted by Brian Stefans at February 03, 2003 12:43 PM