After Caravaggio brought together no fewer than forty-nine paintings (including works by Guido Reni, Orazio and Artemisia Gentilischi, Jusepe de Ribera, Mattia Preti, Georges de La Tour and six by Caravaggio). My general impression was that there is something distinctive about Caravaggio which few of his followers could really understand. Caravaggismo becomes more theatrical, an imitation of his maniera or style, creating a scene within a narrative and emphasizing it. What is lost in translation? His sense of time. His sense of urgency which de es time and forces upon the viewer his invented present. That is what I witnessed.

 
In The Taking of Christ (1602) Caravaggio depicts the very moment Judas has betrayed Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Judas is singling him out with a kiss. Here too, emotion and stillness coexist. The gure on the far left marks the moment after the moment: calling out to spread the news. A sense of emotional compression is created by the cramped composition in which the gures crowd the shallow space. The description of objects creates a juxtaposition of the metallic sheen of the anonymous soldiers’ armour with the light skin tones of the other gures – visually emphasising the psychological contrast by reducing it at one level to a routine military procedure. There’s sound and agitation in the silence of the painted surface.

 
Among the many other works viewed in the esh, so to speak, was Artemisia Gentileschi’s moving Susanna and the Elders (1622), a portrayal of the Old Testament story of ogling old men scheming to seduce the young, married Susanna, who refuses their advances, despite their threats. Gentileschi’s Susanna is trapped. The presence of the male gaze (the ogling men) breaks the illusion of the ‘civilized’ tradition of the nude. The internal dynamic of male and female gazes produces a powerful scene. Her posture suggests a classical Venus, but with a hint of the iconography of the martyr Saint Sebastian, as she looks up to Heaven. There is something profoundly unsettling about the way her naked body is depicted, which confronts most of the Venus iconography with a portrayal of fear – something like Aby Warburg’s pathos formel, an element of the classical ideal rejected by Wincklemann’s and Lessing’s eighteenth century canons of beauty.

 
Her father’s The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c. 1620) could not be more different. Orazio Gentileschi’s large painting of the Holy Family as refugees on the run is a studio painting in which the life-drawn gures don’t break out of their separate worlds. Gentileschi achieves only bathos. So much of the canvas is taken up by a ruined wall parallel to the picture plane, acting as a backdrop. An unfair comparison would be Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1596-1597), not included in the exhibition, with its clever articulation of space, established by an angel standing in the middle of the canvas with his back to us, playing the violin to a music score held by Joseph, with Mary and Child resting in the background. Caravaggio’s poetry trans gures a refugee scene, while Gentileschi’s prose has the opposite effect.

 
Georges De La Tour’s Dice Players (c. 1650- 1651) is also stunning mimēsis, a trans guration of the gure using lighting, composition and colour, somehow creating an otherworldy effect. The game is everything. More signi cantly, the players’ absorption is what matters. One can also see how Northern artists transferred absorption and Caravaggio’s gravitas to scenes of everyday life in The Concert (c. 1626), by one of the Utrecht Caravaggists, by Hendrick ter Brugghen.

 
Especially in Caravaggio, history is reduced to an epiphanic event, rescued from the ow of time by Caravaggio’s choices. The heroic gures of epic painting are replaced by ordinary-looking people, and it was this dimension ‘of the event’, rather than a transferable style of tenebrismo, (which went viral across Europe) which truly captures the imagination. Few of Caravaggio’s followers seem to have learned this lesson.

 
In Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting, it is precisely this same element, distilled, borrowed, or re-invented as it may have been, which is mesmerizing in Vermeer, while in his contemporaries it is not. It is organized around shared themes and shared iconographies – writing love letters, playing and listening to music, gazing out of a window, etc. The paradox is that these closely observed objects depicted in the minutest detail in these paintings belie the ction, the assemblage that is each painting, creating a private, autonomous world in which there is no poverty, no disease or death, only what appear to me as ghosts, idealized gures whose almost physical presence and facticity de es my judgement.

 
But what is it that draws my gaze back to Vermeer? It can’t be the rendering of silk, fur or satin. Is it the subtle way he constructs lighting?

 
Or is it the strangeness of his figures, who seem not to belong to the interiors they inhabit? Consider, for example, Vermeer’s Lady Writing (1665-1667) which owes much to Gabriel Metsu’s Woman Writing a Letter (c. 1662-1664). However, while Metsu’s creation is someone who is depicted as seen to be writing, as if she has been caught in a moment of surprise by the viewer whom she beckons with her gaze, Vermeer conjures up a ghostly presence, and an emotion. His gure is enigmatic, her glance poised and absent from her surroundings, as suggested by the sharp de nition of the chair back and table as opposed to the soft brushwork of her features. It is as if she were an outsider, an absentee in her own domestic space. Her painted likeness or corporeality is de ed by this ethereal presence. He has depicted absence. Instead of direct address, one is faced with an invitation to imagine. In Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664), it is the gure’s absorption in the moment in time, chosen by the painter as worthy of contemplation which I, the unintended posthumous viewer, nd trans xing, not the allegory conveyed by the act of measuring and by the Last Judgement of the background. By comparison, Pieter de Hooch’s Woman Weighing Coins (c. 1664), however masterfully rendered, draws attention to its constituent parts and the mercantile element of both remains such.

 
Michael Fried has written a great deal about the contemplative streak in the history of painting, and the works of Caravaggio and Vermeer (see The Moment of Caravaggio [2010], for instance) gure prominently in this writing. Fried points out that absorption is conveyed by a particular moment in time, in which the activity of the mind is exposed to the viewer – a moment of cognition, of awareness, of realization. But I think that he has, in this way, limited himself to an exercise in art historical naming. One wonders if there is more to absorption than a visual rhetoric, in binary opposition to theatricality, for instance. The activity, of contemplating, thinking, etc., is not the point, it is what is suggested by its depiction that enthrals the viewer. In Caravaggio it is not mysterious, but part of a narrative – stilled, slowed down to the instant of climax – which is clear from knowing the religious context. In Vermeer, it is raised to a major theme, xing the viewer’s attention on attention itself and thus intensifying the experience of looking. The devotion to a moment in time does not equate with timelessness. Absorption invites a different kind of participation. The absorbative is an autonomous world. It resists us at the very same time as it ignores us. But of course, both are equally fictitious.

 
Beyond Caravaggio and Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting were both exhibited at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin 11 February 2017 – 14 May 2017 and 17 June- 17 September 2017, respectively.

While still only in his early thirties, Richard Mosse has exhibited his work internationally, from Tate Modern to Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and Kunsthalle, Munich. His work has already been collected by several museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne. He is representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2013 with The Enclave, an immersive multimedia installation projected onto several screens, and composed of footage shot last year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo using an Arri and 16mm infrared film (transferred to HD), with a soundscape recorded on location. To coincide with the Biennale, Aperture has published his second monograph.

Infra, comprising twelve large-scale photographs (each over 2x2m), taken by Mosse in the Congo in 2010 and 2011, was shown at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, Ireland, last August, These monumental images depict a place on earth in which, despite the chaos of civil war, the export of precious raw materials to the affluent Northern hemisphere continues undisturbed. The year before he began Infra, Mosse expressed his intention in an interview with Hans Michaud: ‘I’m hoping to take a long boat ride up the Congo with my wooden camera, shooting the landscape with colour infrared film so that the green jungle turns red.’ Adventurous? No less than his earlier work: war zones, simulated fires, airplane crash wrecks. He explained to Geoff Manaugh: ‘these photos are the result of months of online research, skimming forums, YouTube videos, Google Earth, Flickr, emailing wreck chasers, and cold-calling bush pilots. I’d even surf the web for jpegs of plane wrecks […]. I was searching for accidents so disintegrated and remote to civilization that they only really exist in the virtual imagination of transient and anonymous online communities.’¹ A photograph from his Nomads series (2010) features the burnt-out shell of a Grand Voyager riddled with bullet holes. The ordinary vehicle looks extraordinary, as if Iraq were part of another planet, not ours.

Unlike these earlier works, Infra does not chart a quest for a single inspiring image. The first impression of seeing these very large photographs taken in Kivu, Eastern Congo, and hung in thick light grey steel frames, is that you are looking at paintings. What strengthens that impression is their unnatural colour. The reviews describe it as ‘spectacular’, since it shrouds the Congo Mosse has witnessed in an eerie light which creates a spectacle of light and colour in the gallery space. It is close to Swinging Sixties’ ‘shocking pink’ decorating psychedelic 1960s LP record covers, designed to cloud over the real world with a sense of estrangement, suggesting the altered states of being induced by LSD. Mosse’s photograph Ruby Tuesday is an explicit reference to a Rolling Stones song, a pop reference that becomes immediately problematic when the image itself refers to a jungle patrol of fighters carrying rocket launchers and other weapons.

The other constant of these images is the backdrop, the Congolese landscape of rolling hills, lines of trees, jungle, sky, clouds, snaking river streams, and open fields hugging the contours of the land, where people are dwarfed by the scale of their surroundings, as in Men of Good Fortune, or in the aerial shots, for example Lava Floe, showing the higgledy-piggledy shapes of mountains and sparsely populated townships criss-crossed by dirt tracks.

Such a restricted colour palette locks the gaze onto anonymous human beings. In Vintage Violence the battle dress camouflage of the militia soldiers, originally designed to blend the body into the background and prevent from becoming a target, does the opposite. The title abstracts from real human beings, whereas the senior commander in General Février poses for a formal portrait standing in a bridle path in full, vulnerable view. Here too colour contributes to the estrangement effect, as does the ‘sitter’s’ martial expression and posture. One suspects that a desire for showing off status through representation contributes to what, through the boomerang effect of the colour reversal process, translates into something not anticipated by the subject: rather ludicrous, clashing with the soldier’s self-perception, and ultimately surreal. Then there are the crowd scenes. In Tutsi Town a whole village faces the camera, a sea of heads below corrugated tin rooftops. The eye wanders across the eyes and the expressions to the armed soldier. Is this his village? Are the villagers afraid of him? There’s no way of knowing. Colonel Soleil’s Boys features another crowd scene of a row of combatants who form a line snaking across the field, defined in space by the track, the sky and the sweep of the hill; another image of an alien everyday moment.

What is significant? The combination of human beings and landscape? The fact that people who spend most of their time in hiding, camouflaged by a complicit landscape are willing to be portrayed in the open? The colour? All these photographs are tinged with pink, but La Vie En Rose explicitly draws attention to this aspect in its title which associates a 1950s Edith Piaf song to its odd pigmentation. Omitted from the Cobh installation was Untitled, a portrait of a young man whose face has been mutilated by a machete, such that his teeth protrude outwards. Here the war comes traumatically close to the surface. We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful features two friends embracing in one of many undramatic moments, where strangeness of what is foreign is overshadowed by the familiarity of camaraderie, which is not.

2. Framing the frame

Infra does not relate to the documentary image by suggesting iconographic comparisons, unlike Sans titre (1999-2000), by Pascal Convert, a wax monochrome sculpture based on a three-dimensional version of a press photograph from the Balkans’ war by Georges Mérillon, Veillée funèbre au Kosovo (1990). Sans titre combined art with tragedy (summoning the Renaissance iconography of grief and mourning, Donatello’s reliefs or Mantegna’s paintings). Sebastião Salgado’s black and white photographs were also disturbing for documenting the effects of war and exploitation in artful compositions, such as In The Hellhole (1987) which gave evidence of slave-labour exploitation by multinationals of miners in Brazil, and was the first of many such works on tour in art galleries.²

Nevertheless, when you look at the landscape of Infra, you are also looking at an unspoken contemporary discursive landscape which includes Convert and Salgado, but excludes the problematic of the virtual of much art photography of the 1980s and 1990s or ‘direct address’ didacticism.³ Infra’s reverberations, its conceptual and affective afterimages, suggest, rather, alterity, complexity, visual ambiguity. It invites questions. What happens to the aesthetic when it is faced with the imperative to witness the suffering of others? How can we remain within the realms of the aesthetic, when we are faced with the confrontation of the real and the tensions set up by the limits of representation? What are the consequences of this contact with the real of the Congo? What happens to the (human) subject in the image?

Such questions require an ordering principle. Photography’s mimetic quality – so close to the real world as to mirror it exactly – risks reducing the interpretation of a photograph to a recognition of content, seen through its Albertian window frame. John Berger provides one based on the distinction between two kinds of uses of photography, one linear, the other radial.4 A linear interpretation is limited to illustrating an argument or demonstrating something. But memory is not linear; it works through associations all connected in some way to the (photographic) event. Berger’s alternative is to construct a context for the photograph with words and other photographs, thus locating the photograph in a broader visual narrative which combines with the viewer’s pre-existing memory bank: ‘A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.’5.

Infra’s strident combination of beauty and suffering is troubling. We need to seek elsewhere what the image suggests, thinking, imagining, even, the kind of space described by Roland Barthes as ‘the great labyrinth’, a spatial metaphor which suggests a journey of interpretation, a quest, a puzzle.6. The labyrinth transcends the frame-outside-the-frame of war photography, by virtue of forming a broader repository of knowledge and reference. Umberto Eco develops a similar analogy referring to ‘the encyclopaedia’ of symbols; always potentially active in our visual field.7. Eco’s encyclopaedia can be adapted as an iconology of remembered or half-forgotten imagery. Photography too has its encyclopaedia; it is no different in this sense from literature or even cinema, and the visual encyclopaedias of both are what art historians resort to for their strategies of interpretation. The advantage of Berger’s radial schema is that it can serve to establish a dynamic use of the encyclopaedia. Berger defines it in this way: ‘A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.’8. In more than one sense, Berger is transposing Walter Benjamin’s concept of history as constellation, such that the present can encapsulate the past, its memory.9.

Susan Sontag observes that ‘to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude’.10. Literally, framing can mean embellishing a painting with a border or cropping a photograph. Metaphorically speaking, to interpret, as Trinh T. Minh-ha notes, we need to frame the frame.11. Judith Butler explains this dynamic well: ‘to call the frame into question is to show that the frame never quite contained the scene it was meant to limn, that something was already outside, which made the very sense of the inside possible, recognizable.’12 Part of the real is always excluded in representation. ‘Something exceeds the frame that troubles our sense of reality; in other words, something occurs that does not conform to our established understanding of things.’13

If we are faced with the representation of suffering, then the question is how is suffering presented and how does that presentation impact on our responsiveness?14 The limitation of Butler’s framing is its reductive interpretation of conflict imagery as ethical dichotomy of inclusion versus exclusion. Berger asks bigger questions: what is at stake? What other images are so closely related that they cannot be ignored? Pool at Uday’s Palace (2009), one of Mosse’s earlier photographs, lends itself to this mode of analysis: a photograph of a destroyed swimming pool, once belonging to Saddam Hussein’s son; an unremarkable image from an aesthetic point of view, but one which stands out from Mosse’s work for other reasons. No American patriot would have a problem with the photograph. But what is concealed, visually absent, yet present in memory around these ruins of opulence? What does it not say about Iraq, a military intervention which was primarily justified by doctored photos of chemical plants supposedly producing WMDs? Haunting any photograph of Iraq since 2004 is the photographic scoop on Abu Ghraib, thanks to Seymour Hersch, also responsible for the scoop on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.15

Moreover, Abu Ghraib is discussed by Sontag and Butler, not only for overcoming censorship and ‘embeddedness’, but also for the cultural impact of the digital revolution, and the use of photography as torture to fabricate false images of the Other and help impose a cultural order dialectically opposed to Islam.16

3. Mapping Infra

Infra’s most interesting aspect is its referentiality. What I mean by this is the way it draws in knowledge and associations from far beyond the photograph’s literal frame. Its interpretation requires us to return the image to the context of experience, social experience and social memory. In other words, the isolated image is not isolated at all; it belongs. It stands out for its discursive nature, creating its own relational space, as theorised by political geographer David Harvey. Briefly, absolute space is our norm (mapping, Euclidean geometry, urban grids); whereas relative space takes us into referentiality, applicable to text, image or both: a problematic space of non-Euclidean geometries in which the point of view is unstable. Relational space maps out the relationship between the object and the influences bearing upon it. A photograph of Ground Zero or Tienamen Square, for example, evokes other spaces, and the connotations proliferate.17 Berger’s radial model is relational in drawing the mind outwards, regardless of Mosse’s personal views on the matter. In what follows, Berger’s radial serves to identify Infra’s most significant elements.

Colour. All the reviews have noted Mosse’s striking colour palette. Infra’s dreamy colour effect is not the result of colour printing process. His ‘shocking pink’ is the outcome of a very unusual choice of Kodak Aerochrome with ominous connotations: (infrared) film stock was used by the American Air Force during the Vietnam War to make bombing sprees more deadly. Aerochrome brings out astonishing combinations of colour which appeal to the eye, while also making us question this pleasure, in the face of blatant suffering. The infrared filtering substitutes natural colour for painterly effect. It is also a conceptualist move, because it weakens the descriptive and mimetic nature of photography which functions by a matching exercise of fact and artefact, and provokes mental associations. Thus, what might appear as nothing more than a technical detail is a deliberate aesthetic choice, making Infra discursive. For one cannot ignore that the original function of this film stock was to aid surveillance, reconnaissance, bombing, in areas covered by dense vegetation, not the consequences of the bombing: 46 millions of litres of Agent Orange (napalm) dropped on to 20,000 villages, affecting 5 million civilians in Vietnam.18 Thus the troubling clash of colourful creativity and the cultural memory of wilful destruction.

Box camera. The choice of a large format camera extends from its technical advantage (negative size) to symbolic connotations: namely, the renewal of pictorialism and rejection of the digital. Mosse is not the only artist working with photography who opts for large format cameras. Pictorialism, and the large format limited edition print and has its legacy, sits well in the gallery and museum, with its reconstituted aura of the unique, stretching from Jeff Wall and his framing of the everyday (drawing on Charles Baudelaire’s idea of the ‘modern painter’ whose dandy does nothing but contemplate the world with ‘an air of coldness which comes from an unshakeable determination not to be moved’), to Gregory Crewdson (small town histories), to landscape photographer Ansel Adams (landscape photographs of the Rockies), to Dorothea Lange, famously, Migrant Mother (1936), and 19th century pioneer Roger Fenton.19 To reiterate, the choice of the large-scale format and retro technology is to seek out photographic aura and make claims about craft.

Trace or Self-expression? The two-sidedness of photography was pointed out in the 1970s: its being both image and trace, an image which provides an extraordinary semblance of the world as well as one which is its direct imprint or index (‘directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask’).20 After Photography (2009) marks the digital revolution that has taken place since.21 In the wake of debates over the impact of the digital revolution on photography, the status of the photographic fact was questioned by the enthusiasts of manipulation, CGI, digital media, and the virtual who challenged photography’s mimetic aspect, the medium’s ability to leave a trace of the real, an imprint and tangible document of it.22 There are two camps: in one, those, such as Joel Snyder, for whom the work of artist-photographers like Jeff Wall is equated with photography, who dismiss the photograph’s indexicality altogether, arguing that photographs depart from what was photographed.23 In the other, Rosalind Krauss stands out for rejecting as simplistic the recent belittling of the index. In ‘Notes on the Index’ (1977) she applied semiotics to frame 1970s art practice, as characterised by a concern with the indexical or the actual traces of the real.24 For Hilde Van Gelder, it is a question of choice, extrapolating the chosen model from the divergent photographic practice of Jeff Wall or Allan Sekula whose practice Van Gelder calls ‘interventive’.25 What counts for Van Gelder is how an image obtains meaning through the process of interpretation, something which always involves specific cultural and ideological contexts. However, an image’s indexicality remains crucial in supporting the image’s ability to signify in a practice which is also a method that researches reality.26 Van Gelder has a point: in Infra the index remains stubborn: you cannot ignore the tangible traces of the real, the landscape, the effects of the civil war (blatantly in the machete disfigured portrait of unknown of Untitled).

Civil war and aesthetic cleansing. Undeniably, to photograph a place like the Congo is to make an intervention. Facing the camera with its reality is the Congo, a country characterised by what Guy Arnold dubs the ‘neo-imperialism of the twenty-first century’, in which conflict has been fuelled since 1999 by the mineral coltan.27 How does one reconcile Mosse’s Congo in shocking pink placed in a lush gallery setting with the Congo which has claimed 3.5 million lives in five years, ignored by the world since 1960?28 In this respect, is Infra a form of aesthetic cleansing? Is the reader faced with the whiter than white space of the aesthetics of the White Cube which collects and reifies everything? I think so.

Ineffable Congo? Integral to Infra is Mosse’s own, highly articulate, gloss about the work, for example:I originally chose the Congo because I wished to find a place in the world, and in my own imagination, where every step I took I would be reminded of the limits of my own articulation, of my own inadequate capacity for representation. On my travels in eastern Congo I encountered a beautiful landscape touched by appalling human tragedy, a people locked in an endlessly recurring nightmare. Their situation lies well beyond my powers of communication, yet I felt compelled to attempt to describe it. My photography there was a personal struggle with the disparity between my own limited powers of representation and the unspeakable world that confronted me.29

Mosse’s words and his pictorial Pop Art Congo remind us of Joseph Conrad’s subtler creation. Mosse’s touching inadequacy sets up a dialectical tension between ‘the limits of articulation’ and the ethical urge ‘to attempt to describe the unspeakable world’. Like documentary photography, Heart of Darkness also justifies itself as a witnessing, but qualified by claiming its inadequacy. Repeatedly, Mosse’s interviews mention Conrad’s novella, juxtaposing Conrad’s Congo to the post-genocidal country of today:

I knew ahead of time that my subject would elude me. Rather like Conrad’s Marlow on the steamer, I was pursuing something essentially ineffable, something so trenchantly real that it verges on the abstract. […] The decision to use colour infrared film forms a dialogue with these specifics. The poetic associations carried by the pink and red palette are a by-product of this conceptual framework, but a very fertile one. It’s an allegorical landscape – La Vie En Rose – steeped in a kind of magical realism.30

The association with Conrad triggers another relational space, colouring the viewer’s perception of the landscape and the Congolese people into an imaginary and historic dimension of the place and its tragic history, both cultural and political, in a play or dynamic of visual cross-referencing which Berger’s radial model helps chart. Conrad’s Marlow seeks out the enigmatic figure of Kurtz, ‘the apostle of light’ who exports his darkness from Europe, while Mosse seeks to paint the Congo in shocking pink, but fails to expose it to view.31 Quite independently of artistic intentions, Infra contains trace and cultural memory by virtue of the radial constellation in which Heart of Darkness coexists with Infra’s surprising, even spectacular, photography, resonating with these cultural connotations for the Western viewer.

Infra is framed by a reading of Conrad which has more affinity with Apocalypse Now as metaphor of unknowable evil than with Conrad’s subtle denunciation in what passes off as fiction, but is rooted in experience: his Congo Diary. Heart of Darkness is the literary trace of a real journey into the Congo of nineteenth-century imperialism. If Conrad constantly shifts the viewpoint, he does so by problematizing the narrative with ‘the posture of uncertainty and doubt’.32 But it is a posture which suggests to his readers, through epistemological doubting, unpalatable interpretations of the colonial world offering hints and clues to aid the understanding of a controversial contradiction: the eloquent heights of Victorian moralism glossing over unspeakable depths of exploitation. Conrad’s resistance to European imperialism takes the form of Marlow’s oblique narrative, mediating between author, the imaginative faculty, and the real. But the imagination has an ethical purpose: to provoke thought and do so by expressing epistemological doubts about mainstream views. In a Victorian context, the objective state of affairs of British and Belgian colonial greed can only be signalled by Conrad, through delayed decoding.33

The ineffable refers to a philosophical term with roots in Romanticism and the aesthetic of the sublime. Jacques Rancière argues that today’s understanding of the sublime in contemporary art derives from Jean-François Lyotard’s misreading of Kant in The Inhuman (1991), for whom the inability of the faculty of the imagination to picture or fathom what it has been shown gives way to the moral imperative to understand through the higher faculty of reason.34

Ethical frames. Infra forces questions: what does it mean to witness suffering and aestheticize it? Can an artist cease to be an observer? Have I been framed, implicated, and how? Such ethical discomfort is tackled by Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2004) which cites the contrasting of beauty and suffering in Susan Meislas’s and Gilles Perres’s photographs of the World Trade Center and Eugene Smith’s Minemata. True, Minemata cannot but remind us of a Renaissance Pietà, however tragic its real context.35 Michelangelo’s Pietà is integral to the Western gaze as a collective visual memory. Sontag’s journey ends with what she admires most: Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk (1992), exemplary in her view for its thoughtfulness as a response to suffering.36 Ultimately Sontag settles for the rhetoric of parody as final solution.

The denunciation of documenting spectacles has a long history, from Tertullian to Debord.37 Luc Boltanski’s Distant Suffering (1992) argues instead that while the media contributes to pacification and apathy, we can respond in several ways, one being the silent wonder of the sublime. But the sublime involves a suppression of pity, resulting in a transformation of feeling through ‘sublimation.’38 Boltanski singles out and historicises our modern concept of viewer, as one which equates with passivity, conveyed by the ‘spectator’ metaphor (Debord, Baudrillard, Virilio). By contrast, Boltanski recovers a range of responses to suffering, ranging from nihilism and relativism, to a critique of the hypocrisy of the world, an emphasis on its illusory nature, a comparison of its unreality to the authentic reality of the next, a distancing effect, or detachment.39 Suffering can be perceived as touching, sublime or even plainly unjust.40 This latter reaction, within a public sphere, enables a critical response of indignation leading to an impetus toward remedial action.41

What Boltanski’s analysis exposes is Sontag’s determinism. Free will is an option. One example is Nick Ut who took the iconic photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc trying to escape the rain of napalm dropping onto her body from the sky on 8 June 1972 in Vietnam. He took the child to a hospital and looked after her.42 Magnum photographer Philip Jones-Griffiths was also exceptional because he photographed the Vietnam war at his own expense and on his own terms, learning Vietnamese to understand and empathise. His anti-Vietnam war book, Vietnam Inc. (1971) homes in on the tragic everyday: for example, a housewife washes her front yard stained with human blood; an American soldier gazing at his future victim who is cradling her baby; a man takes a rest after burning down a village. The caption reads: ‘EXHAUSTED GI overcome by the heat (it was over 100 degrees and hotter still for the ‘Zippo’ squads), takes time off from burning homes for a smoke while a wounded girl, one of the few casualties during the operation, awaits medical help.’43

Jones-Griffiths used irony as a weapon to undermine the horror with cutting wit. Out of solidarity with the subject, he ceased to be a voyeur of suffering and became the Same, by learning the language the Other.44 Thus, Sontag’s argument (voyeurism and the media spectacle) falls prey to determinism which Boltanski counters with free will.

Alternative paradigms. Renzo Martens highlights how suffering in the Congo and elsewhere is exploited by photography and film.45 In his debut treatment of filming in a war zone, Episode 1 (2003) made illegally in Chechnya, Martens played the part of a TV viewer, interviewing refugees, UN employees and freedom fighters about their feelings, asking them if they are happy and thereby showing how media reporting brings news home.46 His question referenced the ground-breaking cinema verité film Chronique d’un eté (1961) by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in which a Holocaust survivor asked Parisians the same question. Episode 3 (2008) could not be further removed from Mosse’s work – imagine providing the Congolese with cameras to film their own atrocities, in exchange of payment by the press and art galleries. A crowd in a Congolese village sings and chants while Martens sets up a large neon sign: ‘enjoy poverty’. He then interviews a villager who says he knows perfectly well he is oppressed by the West and that he is providing a spectacle of his reification for the camera. His symbolic interventions are reminiscent of eighteenth century humour, in the sharp irony of Swift’s essay A Modest Proposal (1729) or the sarcasm of Voltaire’s picareque novel Candide (1759). Instead of claiming the Congo to be sublime and ineffable, Martens employs a performative strategy to expose behind-the-scenes Western duplicity of photographers and journalists cashing in on the pain of others.

Closer to Mosse’s Infra is Congo Democratic (2006), by white South African Guy Tillim, and made before the country’s first free elections since 1960. Exhibited at Documenta 12, Tillim’s eighteen photographs might be mistaken for photo-journalism, if there were more to coincide with its fundamental aesthetic (Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive’ moment).47 For example, in Jean-Pierre Bemba, presidential candidate, enters a stadium in central Kinshasa flanked by his bodyguards, the candidate is just about to address the crowd. The play of gazes says it all: look ahead to the elections, but watch your back.

The postmodern aesthetic of the ineffable and the sublime of the real is rejected by Alfredo Jaar’s photographic installations about Rwanda. Jaar tackles the problem of the trace of the naked image and what to do with it, when it is the documentary basis for art. Real Pictures (1995-2007) is an installation of black boxes each containing a photograph of a murdered Tutsi, which we are barred from viewing. Such work disrupts what Rancière calls ‘the ordinary regime’ (the typical viewing of photographs of suffering and death).48 Jaar conceptualises visually the ethical problem of bearing witness, whilst avoiding voyeurism. He alludes indirectly to that which, for ethical reasons, cannot be directly represented.49 His intervention advances our knowledge because it redistributes the sensible.50

Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1999), years in the making, functions through an aesthetics of delay and research.51 The association between labyrinth, encyclopaedia and images is made explicit, exploring people’s lives and the impact of global capitalism in multiple ways. What’s lacking in Infra can be found in Fish Story and Waiting for Teargas (1999): empathy.52 ‘I was fully aware that the work demanded time and effort from its audience, not the sort of at-a-glance reading that we associate with the advertising model. In fact both the theme and the structure of the work are very much dedicated to a slower notion of time’.53 Sekula prefers to Mosse’s ‘ineffable’ an aesthetic practice of getting to know people over time. That’s ethical, political even.

4. Conclusion

Infra presents itself as an immersive exhibition, drawing one’s attention inward, by means of a powerful sensorial experience. It is fascinating for how it attempts to (an)aestheticise the Congolese everyday into a spectacle to be enjoyed in the gallery. Its colour manipulation triggers cultural memory: other alien jungles, other eras. It produces estrangement by drawing the gaze away from the literal tragedy of civil war, towards a dreamy subjective fiction, one which overlaps with layers of the West’s own cultural history and an appropriation of Conrad’s Congo, assimilated into visual culture via Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), where Heart of Darkness overlaps with Vietnam, and the denunciation of Europe’s rapacity towards ‘black Africa’ is replaced by a generic denunciation of madness and evil, obscuring genocide and Vietnamese victory against all odds.

In an interview about Infra, Mosse describes his work as allegorical, a concept as laden with its literary and philosophical legacy as the ineffable.54 But allegory is a sustained narrative and hardly applicable to Infra which glosses over harsh reality with its pink patina, resulting in an unresolved ambiguity which is allegory’s opposite. On reflection, this clash of colour and feeling remains troubling; the oxymoron of art where no art belongs; the lingering discomfort within gallery space; framing pain in expensive books. What sticks is the stubborn visual fact, the trace of the real in its dramatic presence peering at us despite the aesthetic varnish.

The immersive pink hides, constrains, and glosses over, but fails to prevent our own encyclopaedia from being evoked. Infra marks a conflictual, relational space, allusive – not allegorical – playing on the metonymic strategies of antithesis, oxymoron and of catechresis or incongruity. When Infra is placed in context, the impact of its shocking pink and the sensuous appeal of the sea of artificially tinted landscapes, anonymous crowds and individuals set against an indifferent backdrop of Congolese war, dwindle markedly.55

Notes
1. Geoff Manaugh, ‘Leviathan: An interview with Richard Mosse’, BLDG BLOG, 21 December 2009, <http://www.richardmosse.com/textpress>, accessed 26 November 2011.
2. Mary Panzer, Things As They Are. Photojournalism in Context since 1955, World Press Photo, 2006, p. 243.
3. Barbara Kruger, in Karen Raney (ed.), Art in Question, London and New York: Continuum, 2003, p. 118.
4. John Berger, ‘Uses of Photography’ in Berger, About Looking, London: Bloomsbury, 2009, pp. 52-67.
5. Berger, ‘Uses of Photography’, p. 67
6. ‘The great labyrinth of all the photographs in the world’. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, London: Vintage Classics, 2000, p. 73.
7. Umberto Eco, Semiotica e Filosofia del Linguaggio, Turin: Einaudi, 1997.
8. Berger, ‘Uses of Photography’, p. 67.
9. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Benjamin, Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn, London: Harper Collins, 1992, pp. 245-255
10. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin Books, 2004, p. 41.
11. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Framer Framed, New York: Routledge, 1992, cited in Judith Butler, Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2010, p. 8.
12. Butler, Frames of War, p. 9.
13. Butler, Frames of War, p. 9.
14. Butler, Frames of War, p. 63.
15. A detailed account of the press’s resistance to publishing Haeberle’s photographs in Seymour M. Hersch, ‘The Massacre at My Lai’ in John Pilger (ed.), Tell Me No Lies. Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, London: Jonathan Cape, 2004, pp. 85-119.
16. Butler, Frames of War, p. 130.
17. David Harvey, Social Justice and The City, London: Edward Arnold 1973, p. 13. More recently, cf. Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. David Harvey, Social Justice and The City, London: Edward Arnold 1973, p. 13. More recently, cf. Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
18. Philip Jones Griffiths, Agent Orange. ‘Collateral Damage’ in Viet nam, London: Trolley Ltd, 2003, p. 4.
19. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, cited in Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics, Graham Burchell trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004, p. 117. Cf. Jeff Wall, Selected Essays and Interviews, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007, p. 283.
20. Sontag, On Photography, London: Penguin Books, 2002, p. 154; pp. 122; 123.
21. Fred Ritchin, After Photography, 2009, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.
22. See W.J.T Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992 and objections: Lev Manovich, ‘The Paradoxes of Digital Photography,’ Photography After Photography , Hubertus v. Amelunxen, Stefan Iglhaut, Florian, Rötzer (eds), G+B Arts, 1996, pp. 57-65. For simulacrum, cf. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’ in The Logic of Sense, Mark Lester trans., London and New York: Continuum, 2004, pp. 291-320.
23. Joel Snyder ‘The Art Seminar’ in James Elkins (ed.) Photography Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 134.
24. Joel Snyder ‘The Art Seminar’ in James Elkins (ed.) Photography Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 134.
25. Hilde Van Gelder, ‘The Theorization of Photography Today: Two Models’ in Elkins, Photography Theory, pp. 299-304.
26. Van Gelder, ‘The Theorization of Photography Today’, p. 303.
27. Guy Arnold, Africa. A Modern History, London: Atlantic Books, 2005, p. 901.
28. Arnold, Africa, p. 901.
29. Richard Mosse, Infra, New York: Aperture, 2011, pp. 129-133.
30. Joerg Colberg, ‘A Conversation with Richard Mosse’, GUP Magazine, Issue 128
(2012). See also: Jessica Loudis, ‘Richard Mosse’s Infra’, Bookforum (April-May) 2012 and Christian Viveros-Faune, ‘The New Realism’, Art in America (June) 2012; Aaron Schuman, ‘Sublime Proximity: In Conversation with Richard Mosse’, Aperture Magazine, 203 (Summer) 2012.
31. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Congo Diary, Robert Hampson ed., London: Penguin, 2007, p. 28.
32. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. xxvi and Ian Watts, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980, pp. 276 and 279.
33. Watts, ibidem, pp. 276 and 279. Edward Said rescued Heart of Darkness from being instrumentalised as a trope for the ineffable and alterity. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, New York: Vintage Books, 1994; Abdirahman
A. Hussein, Edward Said. Criticism and Society, London and New York: Verso, 2002. 34. Jacques Rancière, ‘Lyotard and the Aesthetics of the Sublime: a Counter-reading of Kant’, in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Cambridge and Malden MA: Polity, 2009, p. 88-105.
35. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 67.
36. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 111.
37 Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics, Graham Burchell trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 22.
38. Boltanski, Distant Suffering, p.115.
39. Boltanski, Distant Suffering, p. 26.
40. Boltanski, Distant Suffering, p. 114.
41. Boltanski, Distant Suffering, p. 81.
42. Denise Chong, The Girl in The Picture. The Story of Kim Phuc the Photograph and the Vietnam War, London and New York: Penguin, 2001, p. 69.
43. Philip Jones-Griffiths, Vietnam Inc., London: Phaidon, 2001, p. 71. The village was later wiped out by US bombing.
44. For the Same in opposition to Levinasian Other, see Alain Badiou, ‘Return to the Same’ in Ethics. Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London and New York: Verso, 2012, pp. 25-27.
45. ‘I find it a very hypocritical situation. Not because journalists and photographers would be just a gang of profiteers exploiting others’ poverty by turning it into attractive or impressive images and making piles of money, but because none of the profits that these images generate return to the people that deliver the raw material: the poor allowing themselves to be filmed. This makes the exploitation of filmed and photographed poverty a perfect double (analogy) for rubber, coltan or slave labour’. Els Roelandt, ‘Renzo Martens’ Episode 3: Analysis of a Film Process in Three Conversations’, A Prior Magazine No. 16, February 2008, www.aprior.org.
46. Roelandt, ibidem.
47. Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.
48. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso, 2009, pp. 83-105; p. 96
49. Rancière, The Future of The Image, London and New York: Verso, 2007, p. 137. 50 Rancière, ‘The Distribution of The Sensible’ in The Politics of Aesthetics, London and New York: Continuum 2008, pp. 12-19: ‘The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle.’ Ibidem, p. 63.
51. See Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second. Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books 2004, pp. 123-143. Mulvey’s delay builds on Neorealist aesthetics.
52. Allan Sekula, Waiting for Teargas. White Globe to Black in Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, 5 Days That Shook the World. Seattle and Beyond, Photographs by Allan Sekula, London and New York: Verso, 2000,p. 122.
53. Sekula, in ‘In Conversation with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’, in Sekula, Performance Under Working Conditions, Sabine Breitweiser (ed.), Vienna: Hatje Cantz, 2003, p. 46.
54. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Trans. John Osborne, London and New York: Verso, 2003. Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse’ in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900-2000. An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford and Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp. 1025-1032.
55. Berger, ‘Uses of Photography’, p. 67.

artists no longer search the way to a rupture, and how could they? They seek a path that leads to a state of equilibrium between irony and cynicism that allows them to suspend the execution, at least for the moment.’ (‘(T)error and Poetry’, 2008)

Bifo’s book title ‘frames’ this first biennial eva; but unless you are an autonomist follower of Toni Negri or John Holloway, it is unlikely that you will have heard of him, so it might come as a surprise that his outlook has been chosen to make sense of the chaos of a biennial. Biennals tend to be sprawling, over-ambitious, institutionalised encampments, such as the excessive Dublin Contemporary, and they find it hard to compete with the creativity of the recent Occupy movement and the ‘back to the real’ attitude of the 99%, from 15 Mayo in Madrid to Tahrir Square. Then again, perhaps you have been following the end-game permutations of bankrupt postmodernism in academic circles and witnessed the anxiety of out-of-touch intellectuals looking for a place for art in our troubled times.
 
The rest of Bifo’s eva line reads: ‘we will sing to the infinity of the present and abandon the illusion of a future’. Really? In our contemporary context, how are we to understand this? It helps to know that Bifo was once at the cultural epicentre of the Movimento del Settantasette – ‘a strange movement of strange students’ – as the April issue of Ombre Rosse (1977) called it. During that second wave of Italian protest Bifo’s independent Radio Alice tempered the seriousness of ’68 with the playfulness of creative protest. Bakhtin would have loved Italian indiani metropolitan: waves of clever student marches masquerading in Red Indians’ headgear and war paint that captured the imaginations of exhausted new left socialists, feminists and all those too young to identify with the extraparliamentary left. This was before the riflusso, the inward-looking retreat from the street into privatized space and the witch hunts of the 1980s.
 
So, thirty years on, such internationalist ‘framing’ of eva 2012 is more than a thought-provoking gesture. Bifo’s A/traverso – the magazine he founded –  anticipated Punk design with its wry humour presented in strong neo-Dada typography. ‘Don’t worry about your future’, it told the student readers of Bologna, ‘you don’t have one’. A witty remark which rings just as true today in the harsh world of contemporary Ireland, with its Thatcherite policies at any cost, as it did for Italian undergraduates and graduates with no hope of finding a job back then. Unlike the autonomists who splintered away from Potere Operaio to join Rosso, Senza Tregua or the new social centres, Bifo left for a more creative rebellion. So it is amusing that validation should be sought from the same person who had the nerve to claim in June 1977, ‘the revolution is over we have won’. I suspect that it is because, like so many other 1970s anarchist libertarians, being a follower of Deleuze and Guattari’s inspiring Anti Oedipus (1972), Bifo has meantime succumbed to the vitalist charm of Deleuze. In Logics of Worlds Alain Badiou concludes that what matters most for Deleuze is the immanent intensification of a limitless becoming (a Bergsonian synthesis of past and future) and the pure becoming of sense (which of course takes us back to the eva slogan). Badiou masterfully improves upon Deleuze’s aphorism (‘there are only bodies and languages’) by reasserting the materialist dialectic, understood as ‘the critique of every critique’, thus: ‘there are bodies and languages, except there are also truths’ (Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 2010). He ‘overturns’ Deleze, in other words, by understanding truth as an exception to what there is. Now isn’t art a part of that exception?
 
Eva is mostly housed in LCGA, the Belltable, what looks like a NAMA unfinished building from Ireland’s speculative property bubble era on O’Connell Street, and the top floor of Riverpoint where José Carlos Martinat’s Vandalized Monuments: Power Abstraction 4 (2012) invites you to add marks with a paint brush to his large sculptural work. Grouped together as ‘fringe’, are the art galleries and associations which have cropped up in Limerick thanks to Lisanne Sheehan who works for the much-maligned public sector. Among these, Aaron Lawless, Marie Connole and Caelan Bristow of Faber Studios were selected for Re-possession (2012), a work in progress in Faber. No sign of art-speak. Their studio looked more like a friendly charity shop than a high art gallery or the formal eva exhibition. Marie explained in just a few words: their two-way project records people’s private stories of loss, collecting objects sourced from lost and found departments, and imagining a new purpose for them. Faber has been turned into a workshop, challenging the pernicious principle of surplus value by replacing it with a humane one of practical use, and suggesting, paradoxically, that art, intended as the exercise of the imagination, can also have a purchase on the way we live.
 
The new international version of eva emulates the recent practice of ‘platforms’ with additional events, such as Bifo’s keynote lecture, off-site projects and seminars. It took me two visits to get a sense of things, the first with Brendan, a Dublin museum curator. We went to LCGA and to the first of three exhibitions in the Belltable, showcasing work belonging to The Israeli Centre for Digital Art, Holon Video Archive, including one by Yael Bartana, sadly, not the brilliant Summer Camp (a replica of the State of Israel’s 1940s assembly hall, complete with Jewish songs about the desire to construct a homeland, accompanying a documentation of the work of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions). Her Belltable sequence – wrapped in ambiguity, a dream-like documentation of motorists stopped while cruising down a coastal road intercut with sounds of shooting and ominous loudspeakers – was the best. The worst was the ghastly ‘intervention’ worthy of Murdoch’s Sun, inviting Israelis in the street to record a message for after their death at the hands of terrorists. The sensitively filmed piece, inviting you to think of barriers and ghettos, with young Orthodox Jews putting up road barriers in the city on the Sabbath, brought to mind the words of filmmaker Elias Suleiman commenting on the opening sequence of Simone Bitton’s Wall (2004) (‘the weight of the cement. The weight of time’); the real wall segregating Arabs from Jews in the Palestinian territories; the new concrete barrier forcibly dividing the land and increasing division between Israelis and Palestinians; its ontological and symbolic denial of space.
 
Provided you have learned ‘how we speak about the political in art’, you might enjoy Sarah Pierce’s work on one of the other sites: It’s time, man. It feels imminent, 24 minutes of sound interviews from academic symposia with Mary Kelly, Dave Beech, Liam Gillick and Adrian Rifkin. Intriguing, but the ‘we’ is definitely an artworld ‘we’, tragically and poststructurally only for viewers familiar with the theory. For Bifo’s sake (perhaps), we are reassured the title ‘does not signify an organization’, since Pierce’s cultural work is ‘characterised as a way to play with shared neuroses of place’. I almost forgot to mention the parcel paper stencilled posters with old slogans in the white cube.
 

‘That’s Alexander Sokurov’, said Padraig the student, pointing to a talking head on a TV set on the floor. Famously, Sokurov made Russian Ark (2002) the longest single sequence of ninety minutes, an entire film without a single cut, a first in film history. His interview was part of Fergus Daly’s and Katherine Waugh’s A Laboratory of Perpetual Flux (2012), a piece scattered around the NAMA gallery and LCGA, comprising interviews with Vito Acconci and others. It was lacking some level of mediation with the raw material other than its atomised display in a gallery setting and at first came across as an alienating Babylon-effect of overlapping babble. Nothing could be more different than Gavin Murphy’s Something New Under The Sun (2012), a beautifully installed and photographed architectural documentary about an Irish Modernist building narrated by a Dublin 4 Voice-of-God. It didn’t come across as didactic as Zanny Begg’s and Oliver Ressler’s The Bull Laid Bear (2012). Strangely, both works recall the legacy of traditional Grierson-style British documentary; yet both also add to that sense of a new engagement or passion for the real, as the most exciting emerging feature of the contemporary. But I found The Bull Laid Bear visually captivating with its combination of animation, charts, graphs and filmed interviews, explaining very clearly neoliberal capitalism’s new wave of attacks against living standards since the failure of its policies.

 
Søren Thilo Funder’s Disastrous Dialogue (2010-2011) is part of an on-going project to integrate critical theory and the cinematic image for a critical perspective on today’s world. Does Funder succeed in portraying ‘a collective dimension of being or what it might mean to be or become a subject’? Could a viewer get a sense of how power works, through eight characters telling stories? And how might ‘counter-memory’ really be involved? Eight non-professional actors in Cairo appear in close-up and full frontal static shots in empty interiors, only for a few seconds at a time. An elderly man begins: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we all knew this day would come. But never imagined it would come this soon’. ‘The world as we know it is coming to an end’, says a man in a corridor. Cut to CGI-style disaster-movie apocalyptic devastation. Words borrowed from the screenplay of a Hollywood genre film, uttered in a deadpan voice by an Egyptian: ‘we lost communication with the White House, sir’. ‘You predicted it would happen’. ‘Yes, but not in our lifetime,’ replies a lady in a bhurka.
 
Funder’s combined moving image/text narrative borrows the much-exploited escapist spectacle of catastrophe, to suggest that we are living through a real one. It brings to mind the clean break of the Danish Dogme 95 Manifesto calling for a rejection of the spectacle with a return to the real in filmmaking. There is something shocking about the real of these people in HD. Perhaps it had something to do with the unspoken beyond the rehearsed and constructed disaster text, with the Arab Spring, perhaps: I saw their serious looks, I could imagine their lives and memories, despite the sublime of Funder’s script.
 
The clash pits make-believe disaster movie against real Egyptian witnesses, between the ‘there’ of Empire and the ‘here’ of real Middle Eastern locations and bodies, the indexical proximity of lived lives that are out of synch with their words and appropriated image. Real people in a borrowed narrative somehow resist the role, retaining expressions, dignity, posture, Muslim veil. The work proves less didactic than its wordy label.
 
Looking back, previous editions of eva were already international in scope; the noticeable difference with 2012 seems to be the presence of what this Biennial edition calls ‘the fringe’. Would integrating the fringe within the main project be more desirable, I wonder? Could its local presence be part of curation and display, thus acknowledging this new production of space? Secondly, ‘the separate platforms’ scheduled for different periods are unwittingly exclusive; the assumption being that viewers are local. Finally, I felt that the strongest theme to emerge was connected to the social dimension. Both in terms of national and international work, what was most striking was the work of visual artists exploring the potential of the moving image in different ways, beyond canonical video installations (what you might as well call ‘painting’), towards an overlap with experimental, engaged, alternative and documentary filmmaking, with the critical real emerging more strongly now than the postmodernist virtual.
 
 
eva International was on view, 19 May-12 August 2012.

What was once the church of the Convent of the Good Shepherd is now used as an art gallery hosting temporary shows. The change of function has led to large partitions obscuring the apse and the altars. An Altar to Lethe interrupts the current function with a digital projection of the spiral staircase onto a large screen, obliterating the former altar, a ghostly grey tracing of a spiral staircase, several feet high, reaching up almost in a gesture of transcendence, a tragic Borrominian-type baroque movement, monumental, if temporary. Consigned to the Attic is the title of a pencil drawing to scale of a spiral staircase, exhibited along the wall of the Victorian tiled corridor, coinciding with the spot where a staircase was once located which served to connect the ground floor to the sleeping quarters. It was only a few months ago that those empty rooms, out of bounds from the college, were cleared out.

 
Here is an instance in which an artistic intervention succeeds in crossing the border between life and art, breaking the silence of aesthetics and its ivory tower autonomy, shattering postmodern approaches to the past as one of several ‘master narratives’ or reducing it to small-scale minor histories. Although the legacy of the Magdalene Laundry is silence as far as the Limerick Institute of Technology is concerned (faced with the challenge of reconciling a place in which today creative minds are nurtured with what was once a women’s workhouse), elsewhere its history has attracted researchers and film-makers, and a playwright, each in his or her own way bearing witness and breaking the silence. The artist writes that ‘bearing witness to the Magdalene laundries asks that we bear a burden. It requires that we own a history that was prepared to incarcerate thousands of women to lives of punishment, atonement and hard labour that forcibly separated mothers from their children; that took women’s identities from them in life and buried them in unmarked graves on their deaths.’
 
Those words – bearing witness – bring to mind Primo Levi’s contribution to Shoah literature and to philosophy, from If This is a Man to The Drowned and The Saved, an impassioned plea to remember, witness, and document. Since the 1990s, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has thought about Hannah Arendt’s claim that the very conception of human rights as a project is severely undermined in the face of how human life was treated in the camp. (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1995). Since the 1990s, Agamben has made the association between the inhumanity of the Holocaust and the many crimes against humanity which have occurred since. He argues that in today’s world the state of exception (in which human rights are temporarily suspended) has become the rule. In State of Exception (2003), he adopts Walter Benjamin’s idea that what characterises our society is the state of exception. This juridical concept of a situation in which democracy is suspended by means of exceptional measures, was extended by Benjamin to a routine technique of governance. Consider not only Guantanamo Bay, martial law and emergency powers, but also the negation of the referendum as a democratic right when decisions and choices for which there is no electoral mandate are imminent. In Means Without End (1996), Agamben states that the camp is not an anomaly, but the name of the political space we still inhabit. The camp is ‘the space which opens when the state of exception becomes the norm’. The camp as model of social life is today regarded with horror, but the argument is that it can be identified in a variety of contexts, including, I would argue, the incarceration and forced labour of the Magdalenes.
 
Breaking The Silence begs the question as to what the ethical and political consequences would be of not attending to the spectrality of the past. Fintan O’Toole’s article evokes how Ireland’s past tends to haunt it. O’Toole observes that we owe the resurrection of the Magdalen story to artists, not to politicians or journalists which ‘makes it all the more ironic that an art institution should be literally built on the occlusion of the Magdalens’ (Irish Times, 29 October 2011). In Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993) haunting takes on a new cultural and political meaning. A spectre (even in the form of an overlooked or forgotten concept) haunts by continuing to exist and operate in the present. At the same time, as heirs of our past, we have to deal with it. What matters most about memorialisation is the central role of witnessing events, of attending to history and histories; bearing witness to what has been ignored.
 
 
Breaking the Silence was on view 20 – 28 October 2011.

‘The Eternal City’ is the eternal nightmare for anyone trying to build in Rome, unless you are Mussolini, tearing up the housing between Colosseum and Piazza Venezia to make space for your triumphalist military parades, or flattening the huddle of medieval dwellings around St. Peter’s to make way for a road to symbolise reconciliation between Catholicism and Fascism and spoil Bernini’s Baroque surprise: the embrace of his twin colonnades suddenly opening out from crowded buildings.

 
Building anything in Rome is a challenge because the city is a palimpsest of overlapping cities, like an ancient manuscript with layers and layers of inscriptions scratched off its skin, written over or crowded with marginal notes made by different scribes in different centuries. Just imagine: baroque façades, Egyptian obelisks, Renaissance domes, early Christian mosaics, post-unification palazzi and the chaos of noisy traffic everywhere. If you have been to the basilica of San Clemente you will have seen a twelfth-century church built over a fourth-century basilica, above a Roman domus and Mythraic temple at street level, ending abruptly at the edge of the excavation where, many feet below ground level, a wall of rubble at the end of a barrel vault denies the view of the rest of the second century city.
 
‘New’ often spells an arbitrary intervention in the existing cityscape. This is true of Meier’s design which rejects its surroundings outright; the new outer piazza is a scar, cutting across the sight line of two Renaissance façades in Via Ripetta. But aerial views of the Maxxi show how well this building fits into its urban grid (actually an awkward L-shape) where once rows and rows of boxy army barracks stood. One glance at the blueprint makes this quite clear. Then, when you look at it in its urban context, the Maxxi is a light grey concrete construction which does not offend the Pompeian reds, desaturated yellows and terracottas that surround it. What is so striking from the outside is not the new building’s ghosted colour, but its sinuous design that rejects both the earnest engineering look of much British architecture, for example, Stirling’s, and the many postmodern parodies of recent memory, showing how here, as in all her work, Zaha Hadid has opted for a celebration of contour, of the craft itself, and for extending technical possibilities. At the heart of it all is the foundation: drawing, disegno.
 
In the Maxxi strange shapes billow out of their controlled grids to spill and sway, somehow seeming to resist the solid constraints of hard building materials at every turn. These soft, opaque surfaces look so very different from the textured concrete that ages so badly which Rayner Banham once championed. At first glance, I thought they were stuccoed. Overhanging the façade is a box, a gallery on the upper storey that brings to mind playful Surrealist biomorphism in how this structure seems to flop over the wall below and ‘look’ outward, mask-like. Once inside, you enter another world, structured around the fluidity of sculptured space, curvilinear shapes defying Cartesian coordinates and geometrical symmetry. Instead, slim black staircases swoop down seemingly with no support, breaking into the hues of whites and greys on walls and floor. You get the sense of being in multiple buildings, never the feeling of being in a fixed space, in a boxy room defined by sharp verticals and horizontals. And when you look up, what you see is a ceiling in the plural. Skylights filter the southern light with vertical rows of slim blades stretching the full length of the curvilinear walls. Hadid herself thinks of this interior in terms of a flow, rather than of a solid object: the walls give rise to what she calls major and minor “streams”. The major streams are the galleries, flexible open spaces. These are flanked by bridges and long suspended ramps (the minor streams) which are fixed, but seem fluid in the way they connect and intersect space. From the ground floor, ramps reach up, smashing orthogonal planes into diagonal cuts, dark grey against the pale greys of walls, floors and muted light let through by thin blades of metal. Space extends in all directions, seemingly defying units of measurement; a multiplicity of lines, planes, diagonals, curvilinear, linear, concave, convex, hollow, full, hard set, soft light, harsh, smooth, rough, opaque, transparent, limited, limitless.
 
Much of this architecture would have not been possible without the engineering research. Technical innovation has always played an important role in Hadid’s work. Here it includes self-compacting concrete; casts made on site; entire walls cast in fifty metre lengths; newly designed concrete mixes and laying techniques that result in surfaces as smooth as stucco. When the artworld speaks of its galleries it refers ironically to the white cube. But here the underlying conception of space is challenged by a shape of thought that opposes unicity with multiplicity, the One with the Many. You have to set aside residual visual hierarchies of (classical) architectural orders or of symmetry, because the Maxxi bursts the solidity of boxed white spaces into dynamic flows. Instead of a closed off cube, what you experience is more like a temporary assemblage, a building conceived as a paradox of ordered chaos.
 
Maybe one can define surprise as what happens when there is no pre-existing cognitive map; in the place of demarcation, the hesitancy of endless possibility. When we are taken by surprise, perhaps it is because what we perceive does not quite make sense; we have to think again, discard what we already know. This building seems on the verge of collapsing in on itself, unstable, forever becoming.
 
Yet, there is no doubt that it serves its purpose; I could not say that it distracts from the works that are on show, but it is far from an invisible shell. Maybe the best way to convey this experience is the mental conception of the rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987): the rhizome ‘operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots’. I tried to square this idea of multiplicity applied to Hadid’s architecture with the oneness of a built structure. After all, I thought, in the end what she calls the major and minor flows are contained by a perimeter, a plot of land, so what happens to Deleuze’s rhizome? Then it occurred to me that in his book Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Alain Badiou argues quite convincingly that ultimately multiplicity in Deleuze ‘adds up’ (to unicity), taking us back from the Many to the ontological One of being. Badiou calls it provocatively ‘the triumph of the One’. Maybe Badiou is right.

Also  in  the  same  concrete,  unfinished  offices  (a  Creative Limerick space at the centre of this EV+A) with  their  Banham-­style  Brutalism,  Loretto  Cooney’s  delicate oil paintings (Did you mean fir tree), their imagery  sifted  from  the  Web,  echoed  the  desaturated  hues of Simon English’s Klee-­sized Untitled Scenes from a Journey.

 
Actually,  the  entire  Catherine  Street  and  Faber  Studios (another new Limerick art space run by graduates) were at the centre of many events organized by Spiritstore’s  Culture  Dig  Weekend  which  transformed  an anonymous street into relationships between people,  with  flamenco,  astronomy  talks,  ghost  walks,  poetry readings, street theatre, film shorts, and an Art in The Making  do,  where  Limerick  and  Crawford  art  students met for Kevin Flanagan’s talk ‘Copyleft and Creative Commons’ and to plan ahead.
 
Finally,  the  LSAD  Church  Gallery  exhibited  Shin Egashira’s Beauty of Our Pain, a set of wooden sculptures  whose  ancient  craft  shuns  screws  or  nails.  Monumental objects that would look more in a place at  a  siege  than  at  a  work-­out,  these  full-­size  fitness  machines were complemented by a video showing them in use in a real fitness centre next to modern day contraptions.  The  accompanying  isometric  drawings  take the medieval association further, suggesting that what  people  accept  in  trying  to  conform  to  contemporary norms of alienated beauty is tantamount to torture.
 
 
Surplus Value
Occupy Space, Limerick
David Brancaleone
 
Curated  by  Michelle  Horrigan,  Surplus  Value  was  hosted by Occupy Space, one of the many new art spaces  in  empty  shops  and  offices,  made  available  thanks to Creative Limerick. Technically, surplus value is what is left over after the worker has been paid her wage in the capitalist mode of production, in which labour power becomes a commodity with an exchange value. To me, the phrase ‘surplus value’ brings to mind the  consequences  today  of  the  logic  of  profit:  for  instance, the madness of tough-love capitalism and a thirty-­year headlong plunge into financialization (speculation  on  derivatives,  hedge  funds,  and  profiteering  from interest on debt). In today’s context (economic meltdown),  only  the  risk  of  impending  bankruptcy  makes imaginable that privately owned banks can be purchased by public funds (and somehow, it is All Our Fault).
 
Playful irony issues from Sean Lynch’s The Bandits Live Comfortably  in  the  Ruin  (2006),  which  appropriates  vintage footage of the failed demolition of a Limerick mill  in  the  1980s  –  and  puts  it  on  a  loop.  So  it  keeps  failing. The value of Hayek’s and then Friedman’s Chicago  School  neoliberal  economics  are  also  on  a  loop and keep failing; meantime, speculation replaces production  (here)  and  exploitation  of  manual  labour  has mostly shifted to where we cannot see it (the Majority  World).  In  the  West,  following  the  downsizing, restructuring and collapse of manufacturing, white collar surplus value is extracted increasingly  (but  not  exclusively)  from  social  communication or ‘immaterial labour’. Its exploitation is much harder to measure, because it always exceeds the working day.
 
As for exploitation, Mike Fitzpatrick’s  Dealer  Ties  (1996-­97), a rack of sixty white ties, each sporting the photograph  of  a  New  York  art  dealer,  brings  to  mind  greedy gallery takings and Anglo Saxon ‘club ties’, thus conjuring  up  the  intimate  atmosphere  of  the  art  market – with an exception, a homeless woman slightly set apart. Perhaps what the clique excludes is her  value.  That  concept  of  ‘exclusion’  was  a  (moral)  fallback position in the 1990s, after any notion of (social  and  political)  emancipation  had  been  abandoned. For The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), the  ‘artistic  critique’  of  capitalism  has  always  hinged  on consumption and alienation, but Surplus Value draws  my  attention  to  the  ‘social  critique’  also  discussed by Boltanski and Chiapello, aimed at production, labour and exploitation.
 
Angela  Fulcher’s  Hurry  On  Sundown  is  an  afterthought on such matters. It hangs from above, making a second ceiling out of what looked like a large multi coloured kite, stretching from white wall to white wall, stitched together from after‐the‐event tents, leftovers from  a  music  festival.  Some  circa  ’68  music  festivals  reclaimed public space, but then business got in on the act and something bigger than just the show was suppressed. An afterthought. In many ways, theory is also  just  that:  an  afterthought,  a  fidelity;  what  still  needs to be said (and done) after the event. It thinks again,  suggesting  the  possibility  of  intervention,  not  nostalgia.
 
 
Surplus Value was on view 7 May–7 June 2010.

Laura Poitras, filmmaker and journalist, is on her way to the Mira Hotel, reading an encrypted email from Edward Snowden which he sent in January 2013. This darkness is symbolic, but that atmosphere of danger is real enough, and equally dramatic for being so very recent. But by the time Citizenfour was screened last October, the season of hot debate was over. No fictional reconstruction, Citizenfour chooses not to spell out endless complexities which are left to the viewer to figure out, presenting instead the turning point in a lifetime. White out of black screen emails remind us that we live in two worlds, especially since Web 2. But pace Jean Baudrilliard, Snowden’s disclosures demonstrate how real the virtual world is. Citizenfour is one big understatement, its screen-world devoid of action or plot. Instead, the everyday is exceptional: we are made party to terse conversations interspersed with anxiety and waiting, while Snowden’s pauses get longer and longer. He is between actions; looking out of the window, waiting to be kidnapped, fearful of arrest.

We also meet the spies, the journalists, the whistle-blowers: William Binney, former analyst working for the US National Security Agency who made publicly known the illegal activities of the Bush War on Terror and, after trying to protest through official channels, was hounded like a medieval Cathar. Greenwald, the lawyer, investigative journalist and blogger. The spies: we watch top brass brazenly deceptive under oath, during a congressional hearing in May 2013 (Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency). Was government collecting data on millions of Americans? In the filmed conversations over the eight days, Snowden sums up the hard evidence trickling out to The Guardian and The Washington Post since 5 June: that the US processes twenty billion communications worldwide every day; that since 2006, nine major internet companies have been providing the NSA with access to every US citizen’s calls, texts, emails, and documents stored in the Cloud; that GCHQ taps the UK’s forty transatlantic fibre optic cables and has access to Ireland’s too.

Citizenfour is a cinematic version of a Cartier Bresson ‘decisive moment’, filmed in real time. The rules of American storytelling, with its satisfying climax, are flouted. Instead, you get pieces of a puzzle which document some of the background, but no conclusion. Paradoxically, the culmination occurs in the middle, when, on 9 June 2013, Snowden reveals his identity in a twelve-minute filmed interview that was immediately uploaded onto The Guardian online. That’s the only event, the only ‘action’ to speak of, in the hotel where Poitras and Glenn Greenwald finally match the codename with a person who defies the disparaging media representations: a gauche young guy, taking a momentous step from an easy life in Hawaii to the challenging world of decision-making. We watch him reveal his identity to the world and hear him explaining that the reason why he has released secrets of state is to allow the journalists to select and provide context and commentary on the million and a half documents. He speaks to Poitras’s camera, saying quite simply: ‘All this is not about me, it’s about what’s been happening’.

In the final scene, in some dacha outside Moscow, we are in the company of Snowden (and Poitras) and of Greenwald who scribbles the name of the latest person to make secrets public. Viewers can only wonder what they might mean and accept or reject the unspoken invitation to begin the slow activity of interpretation.

I’m reminded of the critical documentary tradition of the 1960s and even earlier – before Jean-Luc Godard’s showy Brechtian interruptions – a tradition with roots in what film theorist and writer Cesare Zavattini termed ‘shadowing’ the real (pedinamento). Poitras’s camera too is ‘with people, in real time, confronting life decisions’, as she has put it. The filming conveys the same kind of excitement of being in the present as Albert Maysles’ shots of JFK walking through the crowds in Primary (1960). But though the Maysles brothers may well be among her models, Poitras’ relation to her subject is different: more like Chris Marker’s Cinéma Direct in Le Joli Mai (1963) than American Direct Cinema. For Poitras is directly implicated in the events and definitely on Snowden’s side.

The film’s title was Snowden’s code name before going public: a private person becomes a citizen, acting as a subject, by going beyond the personal sphere. “Things are not OK,” Poitras told a journalist. Rather than hector the viewer through interventionist approaches, such as Michael Moore’s or Errol Morris’s confrontational interviewing, Citizenfour raises the question of statesmanship obliquely: what happens when civil society questions the workings of parliamentary democracy? In theory, for Jürgen Habermas, the informal contexts of debate he calls lifeworld, should neatly and as a matter of course fix the contradictions of democracy by communicative action. In practice though, the underlying suggestion that haunts this film is that it takes great courage to elicit real dialogue.

Patriot or traitor? That’s the lingering question in the film. The dichotomy is between national security and human rights. Decades ago, photographs were smuggled out of Vietnam and given to Seymour Hersch. He got the My Lai story out, and acquainted the world with a run-of-the-mill genocide by the US military. Then David Ellsberg made public the Pentagon Papers, demonstrating how the Johnson Administration had lied to both the public and Congress (he only narrowly escaped prosecution on a technicality). In recent years, Hersch, once again, published damning photographic evidence of the Abu Ghraib prison torture of Iraqis. But if you are not a journalist, the US Whistleblower Protection Act (1998) offers you no protection for revealing information; nor is there any provision in the UK or Europe for a critique of government that works by making evidence available. Essentially, for the State and the States, Snowden is a criminal. Sadly history repeats itself: when Thomas Drake leaked to the Baltimore Sun in 2005, he was rewarded with years of legal proceedings against him. Chelsea Manning has been condemned to thirty-five years’ imprisonment. But how else would the public find out about wiretapping, torture and renditions?

Since the Snowden revelations, a review board appointed by Obama has found that collecting data from millions of Americans’ emails and texting was wrong and US Congress has introduced thirty bills to restrict NSA surveillance. Furthermore, Nils Muižnieks, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe, has just condemned ‘secret, massive and indiscriminate’ surveillance. Even so, Snowden was charged with espionage and his passport revoked. ‘Citizen Four’ became a non-citizen. But too late. WikiLeaks got him out of Hong Kong on 21 June and eventually Russia granted him asylum, temporary at first, then extended for three years.

Awareness of this political and legal context makes Citizenfour resonate and shifts its workings into the territory of ‘new documentary’, that is, of art. Let’s hijack Michael Fried’s ‘absorption’ category, to refer instead to the enthralling atmosphere of danger and impending arrest that permeates a transitory, empty space, transforming a hotel room into an agora, part of the public sphere. This is a dimension mostly shut out by the unsubtleties of mass media and direct address documentaries. In this contemporary allegory, cinema no longer coincides with shots and cuts, or where to begin and end a shot. Instead, beyond the micro-history of current affairs, the particulars of contingency point to the universals of history.