Staging Disorder – curation of exhibition and accompanying publication jointly curated with Dr. Esther Teichmann
The exhibition and publication considered the contemporary representation of the real in relation to photography, architecture and conflict. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication of the same title and the exhibition included seven bodies of work including that of US based An-My Lê (MacArthur Fellow recipient 2012), Richard Mosse (Deutsche Börse Photography Award 2014 winner) and Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin (Deutsche Börse Photography Award winners 2013) and the publication featured specially commissioned essays by Professor Howard Caygill, Dr Alexandra Stara, David Campany, Dr. Jennifer Good, ourselves and others. As part of the exhibition, works were commissioned from the University of the Arts London Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) artists Professor Cathy Lane, Professor Angus Carlyle, Professor David Toop and Peter Cussack. We commissioned exhibition design by Studio Hato who are active in exhibition design for the Wellcome Trust, Hayward, British Council and others.
Introductory essay by Christopher Stewart
Staging Disorder: Architecture, War and Photography
To photograph what exists on the verge of catastrophe entails one’s presence at the onset of a catastrophe, looking for its eventuation, that is, being able to see it as an event that is about to occur.
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography1
Architecture
The spaces depicted in Staging Disorder are approximations of ordinary spaces – domestic, urban and familiar. With the end of the Cold War and the lessening of the threat of conventional warfare, in either its battlefield or mutually assured destruction guises, the flavour of war became dictated by the complicated reality of asymmetric warfare2, where two forces of significantly unequal military strength confront one another. Confront, in this context though, is more metaphorical than actual as the force with inferior military strength relies on a lack of confrontation to achieve its victory. Insurgent and guerilla warfare is where this avoidance of confrontation becomes an almost existential art form. The fox-holes and tunnels of the South-East Asian wars were one version of this nightmare for more conventional military forces and the improvised electronic device, another more recent iteration of a deadly threat that hides in plain sight.
The constructed and disordered interior and exterior rooms, houses and whole fake cities documented by the artists here are part of a military-industrial architecture that simulates the familiar of the domestic as unhomely (unheimlich) space. Anthony Vidler, in his seminal text The Architectural Uncanny, reminds us that “the uncanny arose, as Freud demonstrated, from the transformation of something that once seemed homely into something decidedly not so, from the heimlich, that is, into the unheimlich”.3 These are mostly crude spaces, approximations of the comfortably familiar, but all encompass an aesthetic vision of domestic space that allows for a crooked version of that space to take hold in the minds of the protagonists training in and around them. These are acclimatising sites for combat personnel whose contemporary battlefields will be as urban and domestic as the towns and cities they grew up in, and will come back to, after their tours of service are over. These are spaces that have been artfully staged to mimic a disordered reality - a unique form of architecture where form is predicated on learning to fear the familiar and for the familiar to be transformed into something that cannot be trusted. In their anticipation, these structures are deeply disturbing. Vidler, continues – “Lacan himself tied anxiety directly to the experience of the uncanny, claiming, indeed, that it was through the very structure of the unheimlich that anxiety might be theorized. The “field of anxiety” is framed by the uncanny, so to speak…”The horrible, the suspicious, the uncanny…situates for us the field of anxiety””. Vidler suggests that the uncanny is:
“Architecturally an outgrowth of the Burkean sublime, a domesticated version of absolute terror…It’s favorite motif was precisely the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence; on a psychological level, its play was one of doubling, where the other is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self, all the more fearsome because apparently the same”.5
In the contemporary fairy-tale Coraline6, Neil Gaiman’s novel for children, he perfectly evokes the domestic uncanny as a doubling. After discovering a corridor behind a small door in the drawing room of a sub-divided old house that her family have recently moved in to, Coraline crawls through the passageway from her own domestic familiarity into a space that first appears to be identical to her own home that she has just crawled away from. It is here that she encounters her other parents. As the novel plays out, Coraline gradually loses her connection to her real home and parents and becomes trapped in the gathering nightmare of this terrifying mirrored space. What was at first intriguing becomes a seemingly inescapable trap, one that she herself was at least partly responsible in choosing over the comfort of her own familiar home and parents. Of all the novels that I ever read to my daughter in her first ten years, it is this one that by far and away fascinated and frightened her (and me) the most.
In many ways though, these spaces of military and civilian training represent the first step in a circuitous route that goes beyond just doubling. The combat personnel who go on to encounter the doubled spaces at the actual sites of conflict that they have trained for also bring their experience back home again. These spaces, and by extension the photographs of these spaces, are a warning to us that we are at risk of recreating a third iteration of this dystopian aesthetic, not just in the over there of a foreign conflict, but in our own familiar domestic and city spaces as well. The increasing militarisation of our police forces in the service of managing both the threat of civil unrest and the constant threat of terrorism that has accompanied the aftermath of both the global financial crisis and the war-on-terror, along with the reality of our now thoroughly surveilled society, means that we may also look at these photographs as a reference point, as documents that will allow for the comparison of what has been anticipated to what is, now.
But how do these ‘dark’ and unfinished spaces fit within a broader conception of a history of architecture, predicated as it has been on a narrative of Enlightenment progression and transparency and whose seemingly perfect iteration, in Foucauldian terms, is the ubiquity of ultimate transparency in the form of surveillance? Indeed, in writing about ‘dark space’, Vidler raises a question mark against a set of familiar theoretical assumptions and how we might conduct a “theorization of spatial conditions after Foucault” by contextualizing Bentham’s idea of universal transparency and reminding us that:
“such a spatial paradigm was, as Foucault pointed out, constructed out of an initial fear, the fear of Enlightenment in the face of “darkened spaces, of the pall of gloom which prevents the full visibility of things, men and truths.” It was this very fear of the dark that led, in the late eighteenth century, to the fascination with those same shadowy areas – the “fantasy-world of stone walls, darkness, hideouts and dungeons” – the precise “negative of the transparency and visibility which it is aimed to establish.” The moment that saw the creation of the first “considered politics of spaces ”based on scientific concepts of light and infinity also saw, and within the same epistemology, the invention of a spatial phenomenology of darkness”.7
Vidler suggests that eighteenth-century architects, and here he cites the architect Etienne-Louis Boullée, were completely aware of this “double vision” and went on to develop a conception of architecture and spatial juxtaposition that incorporated this “absolute light” and “absolute darkness” as the most powerful instrument to induce that state of fundamental terror claimed by Burke as the instigator of the sublime”8 and that during his exile from the political sublime of the French Revolution’s Great Terror, itself predicated on a narrative of transparency through confrontation with death, “Boullée formed a notion of an architecture that would speak of death”.9 Here, Vidler describes in detail examples of Boullée’s architectural designs that pitted light against dark in perpetual allegorical struggle. Perhaps then, it is the contrast of these contingently rough and often dungeon-like spaces against the penetrative gaze of the near universal surveillance society that we have imposed upon ourselves in the name of security and safety, that evokes our contemporary spatial sublime:
“Here the limits of Foucault’s interpretation of Enlightenment space become evident. Still tied to the Enlightenment’s own phenomenology of light and dark, clear and obscure, his insistence of the operation of power through transparency, the panoptic principle, resists exploration of the extent to which the passing of transparency and obscurity is essential for power to operate. For it is in the intimate associations of the two, their uncanny ability to slip from one to the other, that the sublime as instrument of fear retains its hold”.”10
War
The history of the representation of war necessarily takes two distinctive and essential forms - the one that exclaims the truth by showing directly its disasters and the one that attempts a symbolic truth by recourse to allegory. There is a temporal element here also – as in the first plate of The Disasters of War11 where Goya’s the Sad presentiments of what must come to pass (Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer), shows a man disembodied from his surroundings kneeling with arms outstretched in anticipation of the catastrophe to come; and then with a later image in the series - I saw this (Yo lo vi) - that shows the ravaged aftermath of battle on body and landscape. Symbolic truth and witnessed truth, anticipation and aftermath. It is in war that the desire for a currency of truth and the real are at their height and yet in no other place that the currency of both have been so powerfully contested. And it is with the photography of war that we really want truth, but where truth has been most sorely manipulated.
The earliest known photographic depictions of war are the surviving fifty one Daguerreotypes photographed by an unknown photographer during the Mexican-American War12 that were made in 1847 and which set the scene for the complicated relationship between photography, conflict and truth. In one, a General leads a column of mounted soldiers through a street. The photograph is by necessity set up, as the technology would have made it impossible for the men and horses to have been as still as they are. In another in this series we see an amputation in progress – but it is more reminiscent of a tableau painting where all of the protagonists are strategically placed for their clear objectification. The truth is aesthetically represented but the reality is absent. These scenes are staged for the camera. And again include anticipation and aftermath. More complicated is Robert Capa’s long contested Spanish Civil War photograph Death of a Loyalist Soldier, Spain (1936), which unlike the purportedly manipulated aftermath photographs of both Roger Fenton’s Crimea War photograph Shadow of the Valley of Death (1855) and Alexander Gardner’s American Civil War photograph Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg (1863), depicts, although long disputed, the I saw this of death.
Flawed as the photography of war has been, in both its photojournalistic and more self-consciously constructed forms, we know that these depictions of conflict are preferable than the alternative cleansed version that was fed to us in the first Gulf War by a US military machine that managed its image as tightly as any corporate entity would, and that had fallen out of love, particularly after the Vietnam War, with the more liberal access previously given to war photographers and journalists. Jean Baudrillard described this, in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, as a war that “along with the fake and presumptive warriors, generals, experts and television presenters we see speculating about it all through the day, watched itself in a mirror”.13 For Baudrillard, this was a symptom of a new control where we had come to “prefer the exile of the virtual […] to the catastrophe of the real”.14
Photography
The images in Staging Disorder are unashamedly documentary photographs, in that they belong to a tradition of photographing that sees the photographers recognising a set of social and cultural conditions and then responding by negotiating access to closed worlds, traveling to those worlds and coming away with images that are in some way evidential. Whilst ideas of truth and the real are certainly to the fore here, the approach that these artists have taken stands in contrast to the more self-consciously constructed photography that until recently, and for nearly three decades, dominated critical art historical narratives relating to the photographic.
Broadly speaking, these other more explicitly non-documentary practices played their part in the necessary dissection of photography’s complicated relationship to truth, by essentially rejecting the ‘real-world’ outside of the studio along with any idea that the real was somehow autonomous. Emerging out of a critique of the foundational tenets of documentary photography and its indexical relationship to the real, the turn to the photographic studio heightened engagement with illusion and artifice and with the idea of the photograph as an image rather than as a record of some external event. Subsequently, the possibility of documentary as an essentially progressive and innovative force was effectively and necessarily marginalised within wider critical art discourses. It was photography’s time, again, to tell stories through recourse to the image as allegory and in the form of the orchestrated tableaux. Photography as an art form at this time migrated from its peripheral status in relation to other art forms to a place right at the center of the museum and the market. In contrast, many documentary photographic practices were perceived to be suffering from a form-fatigue that often resisted the self-referential or any overt notion that the photographic real was in itself an ideological construct.
These are well-rehearsed narratives now and ones that usually include reference to a range of work that embraced a wholesale rejection of the obviously evidential in photography. In 1978 Jeff Wall produced his first large-scale light box piece, The Destroyed Room, his reworking of Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (1827). Wall says of his work of that time that he wanted to make something that was “anti-documentary, blatantly artificial […] photography not to necessarily record a passing event”.15 Referring to The Destroyed Room he says ‘Through the door you can see that it’s only a set held up by supports, that this is not a real space, this is no-one’s house’.16 The large-scale cinematic photographs of Wall and others were preceded by numerous examples of photographic works, such as Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974/1975) that were crucial in laying the ground for how the document could be used as both a conceptual and political tool17 whilst at the same time rejecting documentary photography’s tendentious naturalism. That these works were accompanied by the arrival of a literature that challenged the currency of the photographic document, such as Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977), further pushed documentary photography to the very far margins and away from critical relevancy. Other literature set the scene for photography’s inclusion in wider art historical narratives and prompted the exit of photography from what could be seen as its medium-specific ghetto into wider art historical narratives as in Craig Owens’s two-part essay The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism (1980). Here, the real, and by extension the documentary real, was obliquely problematised within a broader critique of the modernist work of art:
“Modernist theory presupposes that mimesis, the adequation of an image to a referent, can be bracketed or suspended, and that the art object can be substituted (metaphorically) for its referent […] When the postmodernist work speaks of itself, it is no longer to proclaim its autonomy, its self-sufficiency, its transcendence: rather, it is to narrate its own contingency, insufficiency, lack of transcendence. It tells of a desire that must be perpetually frustrated, an ambition that must be perpetually deferred”.18
The influence of Brecht, through the Weimar era writings of Walter Benjamin at this time, become crucially important for art historians such as Owens. Indeed, for Benjamin as well as his contemporary Siegfried Kracauer, the apparent struggle with the contradictions of a seemingly autonomous documentary reportage finds its resolution, in their writing at least, with the incorporation of the photographic document as a fragment. In an echo of Benjamin’s more familiar narrative in a Little History of Photography where he quotes Brecht on the need to construct something more from a “photograph of the Krupp works or AEG”19, Kracauer can be seen wrestling with the common contradiction of needing to show the world in order to make it strange:
“A hundred reports from a factory do not add up to the reality of a factory, but remain for all eternity a hundred views of a factory. Reality is a construction. Certainly life must be observed if reality is to appear. Yet reality is by no means contained in the more or less random observational results of reportage; rather, it is to be found solely in the mosaic that is assembled from individual observations on the basis of comprehension of their import. Reportage photographs life; such a mosaic would be its image”.20
Owens acknowledges that “Allegory is consistently attracted to the fragmentary, the imperfect, the incomplete - an affinity which finds its most comprehensive expression in the ruin, which Benjamin identified as the allegorical emblem par excellence”.21 Undoubtedly, the works collected together in Staging Disorder articulate the condition of a ruin, but it is an anticipatory ruin - a ruin before ruin.
The works in Staging Disorder are deeply indebted to these more overtly postmodern practices and the critical milieu from which they emerged. They are a type of post-illusion realism, a documentary in light of the postmodern, whose existence is predicated on an earlier wholesale critique of documentary photography. In capturing an already and overtly fabricated reality - the images represented here are ostensibly documentary photographs of something real that has in itself been artfully staged to mimic a disordered reality – the seven bodies of work, all made in the first decade of the new millennium, are by artists who have recognised and responded to a phenomenon of staging that already exists in the world. These photographs are documents as well as allegories of anticipation. In many ways these photographs mark a series of moments in that decade, where practitioners in different parts of the world acknowledged both the ontological and aesthetic complexity of photograph’s relationship to reality, whilst noticing and responding to, through recourse to a straight observational mode of photographing, a phenomenon out there in the world that was in itself an overtly contorted and ideological construction of reality.
1. A. Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, Zone Books, New York, 2008, pp. 289
2. A. Mack, Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict, World Politics, Vol. 27, No. 2, January 1975, pp. 175–200.
3. A. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1992, pp. 6
4. ibid., pp. 11
5. ibid., pp. 3
6. N. Gaiman, Coraline, Bloomsbury Publishing London, 2002
7. Vidler, op. cit., pp. 168
8. ibid., pp. 169
9. ibid., pp. 170
10. ibid., pp. 172
11. Francisco Goya - The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra), 1810 – 1820
12. M. W. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, Laurence King Publishing, London, 2002, pp. 47-49
13. J, Baudrillard – The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Indiana University Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1995 (Translated by Paul Patton), pp. 31
14. ibid., pp. 28
15. Jeff Wall in discussion with Isobel Crombie, National Gallery of Victoria, Channel, The Destroyed Room, 2012, 2014, http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/multimedia/view/?mediaid=581794
16. Jeff Wall, Tate, Jeff Wall: room guide, room 1, The Destroyed Room 1978, 2005, 2014, http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/jeff-wall/room-guide/jeff-wall-room-1
17. S. Edwards, Photography out of Conceptual Art in Chapter Four in Themes in Contemporary Art, edited by Gill Perry and Paul Wood, Yale University Press in association with The Open University, London and Milton Keynes, 2004. Pp. 149
18. C. Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, pp. 85
19. W. Benjamin, Little History of Photography, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2 1927 – 1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, 1999, pp. 526
20. S. Kracauer, in Steve Giles Making Visible, Making Strange: Photography and Representation in Kracauer, Brecht and Benjamin in Kracauer, New Formations 61, Summer, 2007, pp. 72
21. Owens, op. cit., pp. 55