Art History in Its Image War

REVIEW ESSAY Art History in Its Image War Mikkel Bolt: En anden verden: Små kritiske epistler om de seneste årtiers antikapitalistiske satsninger i kunst og politik og forsøgene på at udradere dem. Copenhagen: Forlaget Nebula, 2011. 263 pp. isbn 978-87-993651-4-2 Mikkel Bolt: Krise til Opstand: Noter om det igangværende sammenbrud. Aarhus: Antipyrine, 2013. 192 pp. isbn 978-87-93108-01-1 Jonathan Crary: 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London and New York: Verso, 2013. 144 pp. isbn 978-1-78168-093-3 Stephen F. Eisenman: The Abu Ghraib Effect. London: Reaktion Books, 2007. 142 pp. isbn 978-1-86189-309-3 Stephen F. Eisenman: The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights. London: Reaktion Books, 2013. 309 pp. isbn 978-1-78023-195-2 Nicholas Mirzoeff: The Right to Look: A Counter History of Visuality. Dur- ham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. 408 pp. isbn 978-0-8223- 4918-1 W. J. T. Mitchell: Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 209 pp. isbn 978-0-226- 53260-8 W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt and Michael Taussig: Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 168 pp. isbn 978-0-226-04274-9 Iain A. Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts: Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. London and New York: Verso, 2005. 217 pp. isbn 978-1-84467-031-4 O. K. Werckmeister: Der MedusaEffekt: Politische Bildstrategien seit dem 11. September 2001. Berlin: Form + Zweck, 2005. 120 pp. isbn 978-3- 935053-04-4 The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics No. 48 (2014), pp. 74–91 Review Essay The analysis presented here does not lack for sophistication. It would, however, be hard to tell what one was supposed to do after examining it. –Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look (305) Nicholas Mirzoeff introduces his ‘critical genealogy for the resistance to the society of the spectacle and the image wars of recent decades’ with Stephan Dedalus walking along Sandymount Strand in James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses, and Joyce might easily be seen as an an- swer to an age of immediately available images, at least in the Western image culture that Mirzoeff is working within.1 The Right to Look is rich with examples of the power of images in ordering the world (from the plantations up to today’s counter-insurgency), which counter-images have resisted. Picture making has been applied with different degrees of intensity throughout history, with the general effect of depriving people of the ability to shape their world. Plantation owners, colonial powers and the spin-doctors of today’s empire have harnessed images to naturalise separation and oppression. Colonising visuality has devel- oped from the punishment of ‘reckless eyeballing’ in North America, in which blacks were forbidden to so much as look at their white mas- ters, to the orders ‘Don’t eyeball me!’ yelled in the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib. In an article published in 2011 (the year the Right to Look was published too), Mirzoeff suggests that a clash of visualization and counter-insurgency has replaced the image wars of the Global War on Terror. Be this as it may – and recent transmissions from ISIS point to greater continuity in the war of images, as might pictures coming from Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring (the Moriseen collective come to mind), or pictures and videos posted online during the on-going civil war in Syria – picture making can be said to be an integral part of an authoritarian division of what may and may not be seen.2 If this history of visuality is ‘magisterial’ (this is how W. J. T. Mitchell describes The Right to Look on its blurb, and the description seems right enough, though double-edged given the book’s strong emphasis on decolonial argument), Mirzoeff’s vision of counterhistory is less persuasive, too much in step with this ruling order’s tune. Of course this is too cursory a dismissal of a rightly acclaimed study, and as we’ll see The Right to Look is helpful when developing an understanding of the possibility for art historical intervention that works counter to the repressive visuality that Mirzoeff describes so well. Despite this qualification the criticism stands that The Right to Look takes its seat as a spectator in the war of images it describes, watching on expertly, but in the end only 75 James Day watching. Although it is decolonising in theory, the worry is that it’s too bound up in colonial forms of knowledge production to offer very effec- tive resistance to the on-going neo-colonisation of what’s often called the developing world. This is unfortunate given the apparent urgency of such a counterhistory in asserting the right to look ‘in this moment of paradoxical emergency for authoritarian visuality’.3 Questions of image war and spectacle have proliferated since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington D.C., with several art historians and cultural critics concerning themselves with the broader political use and abuse of images in the Global War on Terror and in recent, widespread civil unrest, especially uprisings, riots, strikes and occupa- tions following the 2008 financial collapse. Language and picture making are seen as embroiled within image war, suggesting perhaps that the weapons of criticism are bent back upon themselves. (The use of the likes of Deleuze and Guattari by the Israeli Defense Forces would be just one instance of this highly complex problem in a battle over the means by which critique is produced and consumed.)4 The covering over of the tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica at the request of US officials in 2003 (though weirdly Mirzoeff has it as 2002) has become emblematic of American power’s bungling attempts at image control. However much Jean Baudrillard might be wrong about the attacks on the World Trade Centre being all about globalization battling itself, his observation that: ‘The whole play of history and power is disrupted by this event, but so, too, are the conditions of analysis’ seems worthy of more attention, especially so if criticism is still believed to be able to do harm to spectacle – and theories of image war suggest that it is, though not in its current form.5 Art historians and historians of visual culture seem well placed to intervene within image war, given their complex understanding of the evolution of image and power throughout modernity. The entanglement of the art world with its outside takes on more than an academic im- portance within image war, because images are seen as matters of life and death, or lifelessness. Artwork that tries to document the interrela- tionship between different visual technology and the military-industrial complex suggests just this crossover between images and global conflict. One of Lisa Barnard’s photographs from her Virtual Iraq project shows a series of scents used during the treatment of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress. The scents are displayed in small, labelled jars with a logo, telephone number and web address and names like IRAQ: Rubber Burning. The apparent closeness between sweet-scented cosmetics and 76 Review Essay hellish war are tied up in this image, and treatment for post-traumatic stress is conjoined with the wish fulfilment work asked of the commodity. Photography’s role here is dubious, trapped between critical observation and the shop window. Of course the commodity form is not all explanatory for the interlacing of warfare, primitive accumulation and pacification; in the photograph it is its alienating allure entwined with virtual life in military training and medical recovery that holds attention. A different conjunction can be seen in the PowerPoint slide Mirzoeff reproduces in The Right to Look, with the uniform, dark heads of ‘insur- gents’ holding the smaller, irregular and lighter heads of the ‘good Iraqis’. Here the ‘dumb down’ effect of this kind of bullet point presentation shows the incorporation of technology designed to simplify a sales pitch in the visual economy of the American military imagination.6 When Jon- athan Crary points to the contradictions in the use of sleep deprivation as a means of torture by the US military in parallel with their research into ways of reducing the need to sleep for soldiers, and then for work- ers too, he points to ‘some of the paradoxes of the expanding, non-stop life-world of twenty-first-century capitalism’.7 As art becomes on the one hand more and more separated from daily, lived experience and on the other fully incorporated into industries of culture and entertainment it also makes more sense to think about how, if at all, it’s able to resist the society it takes part in. The art world then can be seen as an insulated environment in which different forms of critique can be tried out in false isolation from the cir- cumstances of its production and display. (It therefore often enlarges the compass of spectacle, instead of contributing to its overturning through the creation of counter-images.) Much artwork is carried out with an acute consciousness of its limitations however, and despite these prom- ises some breathing space, as well as inspiration for future struggle. Sev- eral exhibitions have reflected upon and tested themselves against what are now well-recognised limits, while others present important work that might not otherwise get seen and thereby speaks back to power.8 Art- ists have reflected upon the often-unfavourable conditions in which they work far more consistently than art historians, who rely for the most part on rather staid forms of critique despite their intricate understanding of avant-garde work that has, at times, troubled the colonial image world.

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