© 2017 SUNHEE JANG All Rights Reserved

CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE SEARCH FOR HISTORY —THE EMERGENCE OF THE ARTIST-HISTORIAN—

SUNHEE JANG

DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017

Urbana, Illinois

Doctoral Committee:

Associate Professor Terri Weissman, Chair Associate Professor David O’Brien Assistant Professor Sandy Prita Meier Associate Professor Kevin Hamilton

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the concept of the artist-as-historian, this dissertation examines the work of four contemporary artists in a transnational context. In chapter one, I examine the representations of economic inequality and globalization (Allan Sekula, the United States); in chapter two, the racial memory and remnants of colonialism (Santu Mofokeng, South Africa); and in chapter three, the trauma of civil war and subsequent conflicts (Akram Zaatari, Lebanon and Chan- kyong Park, South Korea). My focus is on photographic projects—a photobook (Sekula), a private album (Mofokeng), and archives and films (Zaatari and Park)—that address key issues of underrepresented history at the end of the twentieth century. Chapter one concentrates on how to make sense of the complex structure of Sekula’s Fish Story (1995) and suggests the concept of surface reading as an alternative to traditional, symptomatic reading and posits that some historical truths can be found by closely examining the surface of events or images. In Fish Story, photographs represent the surface of our globe, while the text reveals the narratives that have been complicated beneath that surface. I then analyze how three types of text—caption, description, and essay—interact with images. Chapter two problematizes the historical position of the African subjects represented in Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 (1997). I discuss the fluidity of identity and how that fluidity intersects with the process of modernization and historical experience of colonization in South Africans near the beginning of the twentieth century. As I focus on the mnemonic role of the textual components of the project, which evokes the sense of presence for the photographic figures, I also investigate the meaning of the term ambivalence and question how it is connected to Mofokeng’s means of “doing history.” Chapter three begins with by investigating the terms parafiction and truthiness, and then discusses those terms—from hoax to plausibility, from less true to truer—in the context of Zaatari’s and Park’s works. To contextualize the fictional narratives employed by the two artists, I use the terms docu-fiction (for Zaatari) and imaginary-documenting (for Park) to designate the unique ways that the artists unite documenting and fiction. Ultimately, I investigate how their works evince that fiction—when coupled with a genealogical method and affect elements—can emancipate a history from its locally specified knowledge to engage with a wide range of international audience.

Throughout the dissertation, I assert that each artist discussed sheds light on the others by engaging different geographical boundaries (between the global, local, and regional), as well as creating different conceptual spaces (between the amnesic, mnemonic, and virtual spaces), where they can pursue history. Finally, throughout this dissertation, I look to Foucault as the theoretical armature for my own work, yet I am as much concerned with the limitations of his theory as I am with his insights. In this vein, the artists that I investigate here reveal in productive ways how we might think about history beyond Foucault’s relativism, skepticism, and cynicism.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

For the many years it took me to complete this dissertation, I owed many debts of gratitude. First and foremost, I must recognize my advisor, Terri Weissman and express my appreciation for her continuous encouragement and generosity, as well as incisive comments and questions throughout my research and writing. The years I spent at Illinois with her have shaped not only this project but my scholarship and teaching methodology. She has inspired me through the way in which she as a scholar in the humanities practices her philosophy through actual life. The numerous conversations we shared will be the treasure for my future academic profession. I wish to thank the committee members. I am grateful to David O’Brien for his practical support, as well as intellectual feedback over my graduate studies. He has guided me to be rigorous in my theoretical framework for this project and my further research. Sandy Prita Meier has also provided me critical comments on my insight of contemporary African art and its mode of representation. Kevin Hamilton has been invaluable to this project, from the beginning of the proposal, bringing creative ways of thinking on the artistic projects that I investigated. In addition to the committee members, I wish to thank the entire faculty of Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I was lucky to have been a part of such a critically engaged and genuinely friendly intellectual community. My special thanks go to Oscar Vázquez, Lisa Rosenthal, Jennifer Burns, Anne Burkus Chasson, and Kristen Romberg, who generously supported me and encouraged me to complete this project. Although they left the campus, Anne D. Hedeman, Jennifer Greenhill, Irene Small, and Suzanne Hudson also provided me with invaluable insights on my major and minor studies. Ellen de Waard, Marsha Biddle, and Jane Goldberg have helped me with their wisdom and kindness. I also thank the professors of Art History and Theory at Hong-ik University who grounded my study and profession. This dissertation was funded through the numerous fellowships and grants from the Art History Department, the School of Art and Design, and the Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am also grateful to the curators and librarians at the Museum of Modern Art and the Walther Collection in New York, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Tate Modern in London, the Artsonje Center in Seoul, the Santu Mofokeng Foundation in Johannesburg, and the Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut, for assisting me in locating materials that have been vital to this project.

My memories of Illinois will inform, I am sure, much of my future life. I must mention all of my great colleagues of SAHA and deliver my appreciation to them. In particular, I thank Carmen Ripollés and Margaret Ewing for their warm welcoming of me into the department and continuing friendship. I cannot imagine my life on campus without Miriam Kienle and Adam Thomas with whom I spent much time, and I appreciate their sharing of a deep friendship, as well as serving as excellent role models. Rachel White and Maria Dorofeeva have similarly supported me with their friendship and feedback. Lastly, I deliver my thanks to the editors of this project, Alex Morris and Jess Park, the Korean friends of Logos & Philos on campus, and the faculty colleagues of the University of Nevada, Reno. An international graduate student often struggles with the intense homesickness. I could endure my times by virtue of the friends who are now living far. I appreciate Yeonjoo Kim and Bora Kim, my best friends and colleagues of Art History and Theory at Hong-ik, for their everlasting friendship, emotional support, and intellectual conversation. Sahyang Kim, a big sister of Gadium at Hong-ik, has guided me on how to manage my studying abroad and provided me a great role model. My biggest thank goes to my brother and sister-in-law, Yoonseok Jang and Jiyoung Lee, for their constant love and care. I dedicate this dissertation to my parents, Jung-hak Augustine Jang and Jung-ae Savina Jung. Their extraordinary love has taught me how to love my life, continue my study, and share my knowledge.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………….…...…vii

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………1

CHAPTER 1: Reading the History of Globalization from the Surface: Allan Sekula’s Fish Story………………………………………………………..……...... 16

CHAPTER 2: Ambivalent Bodies at Gray Zone: Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950……………..………81

CHAPTER 3: Documenting, Fiction, and Genealogies: Historicizing Local Wars in a Global Context……………………………………...... 139

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………….195

FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………………..202

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………….272

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 43: Photographed in the Port of Rotterdam, 1993)

Fig. 2: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 73: Photographed in Veracruz, Mexico, March 1994)

Fig. 3: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 74: Photographed in Veracruz, Mexico, March 1994)

Fig. 4: Allan Sekula, Installation View of Fish Story Chapter 1at Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014 (Black panel on left is a caption page; White panel is a description page)

Fig. 5: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 28: Photographed in the Mid-Atlantic, 1993)

Fig. 6: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 10: Photographed in Minturno, Italy, June 1992)

Fig. 7: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 54: Photographed in Ilsan Village, Ulsan, South Korea in September 1993)

Fig. 8: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 55: Photographed in Ilsan Village, Ulsan, South Korea in September 1993)

Fig. 9: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 12: Photographed in Los Angeles, California, June 1992)

Fig. 10: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 79: Photographed in Veracruz, Mexico, March 1994)

Fig. 11: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 80: Photographed in Veracruz, Mexico, March 1994)

Fig. 12: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 19: Photographed in San Diego, California, August 1990)

Fig. 13: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 21: Photographed in Poland, November 1990)

Fig. 14: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 22: Photographed in Poland, November 1990)

Fig. 15: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 49: Photographed in Ulsan, South Korea, September 1993)

Fig. 16: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 50: Photographed in Ulsan, South Korea, September 1993)

Fig. 17: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 14: Photographed in Koreatown, Los Angeles, April 1992)

Fig. 18: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 4: Photographed in the San Diego Harbor, August 1991)

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Fig. 19: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 5: Photographed in the San Diego Harbor, August 1991)

Fig. 20: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 6: Photographed in the Closing Los Angeles Harbor, July 1991)

Fig. 21: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 58: Photographed in Insa-dong, Seoul, South Korea in September 1993)

Fig. 22: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 59: Photographed in Insa-dong, Seoul, South Korea in September 1993)

Fig. 23: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 45: Photographed in Ulsan, South Korea, September 1993)

Fig. 24: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 46: Photographed in Ulsan, South Korea, September 1993)

Fig. 25: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 51: Photographed in Ulsan, South Korea, September 1993)

Fig. 26: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 57: Photographed in Ulsan, South Korea, September 1993)

Fig. 27: Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 (Plate 60: Photographed in Yeoi-do, Seoul, South Korea in September 1993)

Fig. 28: J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842, Oil on Canvas, 914 x 1219 mm, Tate, London

Fig. 29: Constantin Meunier, The Docker in Antwerp, ca. 1890, Bronze, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

Fig. 30: Allan Sekula, Installation View of Constantin Meunier’s The Docker in Antwerp at The Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum

Fig. 31: Allan Sekula, Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black), 1999–2000, Cut from Slide Projection

Fig. 32: Allan Sekula, Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black), 1999–2000, Cut from Slide Projection

Fig. 33: Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, San Woman of the Naron Tribe, 1936, Photographed at Oliphant’s Kloof, Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana), Silver Gelatin Print, 20. 5 x 15 cm

Fig. 34: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 8, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 35: Santu Mofokeng, Police with Sjambok. Plein Street, Johannesburg, ca. 1986, Silver Gelatin Print

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Fig. 36: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 41, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 37: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 43, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 38: Unknown Photographer, ca. 1900, South Africa, Vintage Albumen Photograph

Fig. 39: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 21, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 40: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 22, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 41: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 19, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 42: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 32, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 43: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 50, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 44: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 62, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 45: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 9, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 46: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 14, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 47: Santu Mofokeng, Buddhist Retreat Near Pietermaritzburg Kwazulu Natal, 2003 from the Project of Chasing Shadows (1996–2008), Silver Gelatin Print

Fig. 48: Santu Mofokeng, Church of God Motouleng, 1996 from the Project of Chasing Shadows (1996– 2008), Silver Gelatin Print

Fig. 49: Santu Mofokeng, South Beach, Replacing of the Sand Washed Away During the Floods and Wave Action, Durban, 2007 from the Project of Climate Change (2007), Silver Gelatin Print

Fig. 50: Santu Mofokeng, Eyes-Wide-Shut, Motouleng Cave, Clarens, 2004 from the Project of Ishmael (2004), Silver Gelatin Print

Fig. 51: Santu Mofokeng, Moth’osele Maine, Bloemhof, 1994 from the Project of Bloemhof (1988–1994), Silver Gelatin Print

Fig. 52: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 3, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 53: Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 33, 1997, Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

Fig. 54: Santu Mofokeng, Self-portrait, at KZ1–Auschwitz, 1997–8 from the Project of Landscapes of Trauma (1997–2000), Silver Gelatin Print

Fig. 55: The Cover of Time Magazine, Issued in July 21, 2003

Fig. 56: Stephen Colbert at the Debut Episode of The Colbert Report in October 17, 2005

Fig. 57: Michael Blum, Tribute to Safiye Behar, 2005, Installation at an Apartment in Istanbul

Fig. 58: The Atlas Group, Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (#17 and #31)_English Version, 2000, Video Projection, 16 Minutes 17 Seconds

Fig. 59: Akram Zaatari (Co-founder), The Arab Image Foundation, 1997, The Front Page of the Web Archive

Fig. 60: Akram Zaatari (Co-founder), The Arab Image Foundation, 1997, The Organization Page of the Web Archive

Fig. 61: Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad, Mapping Sitting: On Portraitures and Photography, 2002, Installation of Photographs on the Wall

Fig. 62: Akram Zaatari, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013, Film and Video Installation

Fig. 63: Akram Zaatari, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013, A View of the Main Film, 34 Minutes

Fig. 64: Akram Zaatari, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013, Still Cut from the Main Film, 34 Minutes

Fig. 65: Akram Zaatari, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013, Still Cut from the Main Film, 34 Minutes

Fig. 66: Akram Zaatari, Saida June 6, 1982, 2005, Composite Digital Images, Lamda Print, 127 x 250 cm

Fig. 67: Akram Zaatari, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013, Video Installation and a Chair

Fig. 68: Chan-kyong Park, Sets, 2000, 160 Photo (35mm) on the Slide Projection, 15 Minutes

Fig. 69: Chan-kyong Park, Sets, 2000, Still Cut from the Slide Projection

Fig. 70: Chan-kyong Park, Sets, 2000, Still Cut from the Slide Projection

Fig. 71: Chan-kyong Park, Power Passage, 2004–2007, 2 Channel Video Projections, Books and Documents in Vitrines, Images and Text on the Wall

Fig. 72: Chan-kyong Park, Power Passage, 2004–2007, 2 Channel Video Projections, Books and Documents in Vitrines, Images and Text on the Wall

Fig. 73: Chan-kyong Park, Power Passage, 2004–2007, Still Cut from the Main Video Projection

Fig. 74: Chan-kyong Park, Power Passage, 2004–2007, Still Cut from the Main Video Projection

Fig. 75: Chan-kyong Park, Power Passage, 2004–2007, Still Cut from the Main Video Projection

Fig. 76: Chan-kyong Park, Power Passage, 2004–2007, Continuous Cuts from the Main Video Projection

Fig. 77: Chan-kyong Park, Power Passage, 2004–2007, Still Cut from the Main Video Projection

Fig. 78: Chan-kyong Park, Power Passage, 2004–2007, Still Cut from the Main Video Projection

Fig. 79: Akram Zaatari, Twenty Eight Nights: Endnote, 2014, Film Projection

Fig. 80: Chan-kyong Park, Flying, 2005, Video Projection and Sound, 13 Minutes, Still Cuts from the Video Projection

Fig. 81: Chan-kyong Park, Flying, 2005, Video Projection and Sound, 13 Minutes, Still Cuts from the Video Projection

Fig. 82: Chan-kyong Park, Flying, 2005, Video Projection and Sound, 13 Minutes, Still Cuts from the Video Projection

xi INTRODUCTION

This dissertation focuses on the concept of the artist-as-historian and examines four artists from different countries in a transnational context. I analyze their interventions in history through their photographic projects—a photobook, a private album, and archives and films—as viewed through the lens of Foucault’s ideas and practices of history. In this dissertation, I discuss the ways in which the four artists’ projects address the key issues of underrepresented history at the end of the twentieth century. In chapter one, I examine the representations of economic inequality and globalization (Allan Sekula, the United States); in chapter two, the racial memory and remnants of colonialism (Santu Mofokeng, South Africa); and in chapter three, the trauma of civil war and subsequent conflicts (Akram Zaatari, Lebanon and Chan- kyong Park, South Korea).

I have selected these artists in part because their works engage the history and politics of a range of geographical locations, including the United States, South Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, and the global space of international waters. However, I focus on the artists’ major concerns as they align with my research interests—interests that I began to develop in the late 1990s, at the start of my professional career.

Although I was born and have lived in Seoul, South Korea, the prefix international, as it applies to my curatorial, student, and scholarly work, has granted me agency outside a strictly national context. Similarly, near the end of the twentieth century in South

Korea, not only art exhibitions, but also corporate marketing schemes began incorporating the term global into their branding. This occurred during the most severe

1 financial crisis the populace had ever faced.1 Informed by my international position— as a participant in the ISCP (International Studio & Curator Program) in New York as an international curator with a grant from the Korean Culture & Arts Foundation, as an exhibition team director organizing Asian contemporary art at ZKM, Karlsruhe,

Germany in 2006, and as a graduate student and faculty member in the United States— and by my critical observation of my home country, I began searching for how contemporary artists have historicized the neglected, forgotten, or erased local narratives as a response to the rapid changes caused by globalization.

During my graduate studies in the United States, I didn’t feel like an insider or an outsider of South Korean society. In South Korea, the resistance against the U.S.–

Korea FTA (Free Trade Agreement) continued for one hundred days in the spring and summer of 2008, inciting one million citizens to protest on June 10.2 The issue of

1 South Korea was one of the last countries hit by the Asian financial crisis beginning in July of 1997, but it did not escape the most severe economic damage. The crisis is often called the IMF (International Monetary Fund) crisis in South Korea (note that the crisis was not caused by the IMF; rather, the IMF bailed out the economy). The economic status of South Korea had been growing continuously since the middle of the twentieth century and, for this reason, South Korea was called the Asian Tiger. The South Korean financial crisis in 1997 was one of the first—and certainly the most severe—economic hardships that South Korea faced. Large members of small shops and medium-sized corporations went out of business. The South Korean financial crisis stemmed from the nation’s failure to manage an appropriate level of foreign exchange debt and its inability to smoothly transition from the regulated foreign currency reserve to free market competition. The South Korean financial crisis appeared widely in international news including The New York Times. See: Andrew Pollack, “Crisis in South Korea: The Bailout; Package of Loans Worth $55 Billion Is Set for South Korea,” The New York Times, December 4, 1997. 2 “More than 10,000 people rallied in central Seoul on Saturday night to protest beef imports from the United States.” Sang-hun Choe, “South Korea and U.S. Reach Deal on Beef Imports,” The New York Times, June 22, 2008.

2 globalization as presented in South Korean news at the time was virtually unknown to my American colleagues on campus; nevertheless, it was representative of the serious political struggles felt in that country. In a sense, my observation of my home country from such a great distance helped me research Sekula’s projects, which analyze the geographical tensions that globalization exerts upon global and local spaces. Through the image and text of Fish Story (1995), I examine how Sekula’s critical stance represents the continuously changing globe, as well as its influences on local areas, such as a shipyard-centric city in South Korea, a coastline off the Gulf of Mexico, and a declining fishing village in Spain. In addition, via Sekula’s work, Waiting for Tear

Gas (1999–2000), I discuss his unique artistic strategies, which deliver the actual experiences of anti-globalization protest organized in Seattle in 1999.

My chapter on Mofokeng’s projects investigates whether a specific country’s traumatic history is negotiable, or to what degree, its traumatic experience is understood within a rapidly changing society. Via numerous photographic projects, including The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 (1997), Mofokeng explores South African history by addressing the issues of colonialism and racism, and historical trauma and redemption within the context of international exhibitions.

However, his Landscapes of Trauma (1997–2000) demonstrates that his historical

“The government of President Myungbak Lee sealed off major rallying points in central Seoul on Sunday after hundreds of citizens and police officers were injured during a protest against the United States beef imports. Police buses cordoned off plazas and intersections where large crowds have gathered almost daily since early May to demand that the government renegotiate the deal. Police officers blocked subway entrances and alleys leading to those rallying points.” Sang-hun Choe, “Beef Protest Turns Violent in South,” The New York Times, June 30, 2008.

3 concern is not only about South Africa, but also other ethnic groups’ traumatic experiences, such as those created by the Holocaust. Similar to the experiences of many South Africans, Koreans suffered through a harsh colonial period of Japanese occupation between 1910 and 1945.3 With that era in mind, I began examining how

Mofokeng speaks to the controversial historical issues raised in a formerly colonized country. The Treaty on Basic Relations between the Republic of Korea and Japan was signed in 1965; however, crucial issues linger.4 For example, the reclamation of the colonial past (in particular, the issue of comfort women) is still unresolved;5 the liquidation of colonial vestiges (including pro-Japanese historical positions) remains

3 Japan’s occupation of Korea was set up through the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1910, which was never actually signed by the King of Korea (the Emperor of Chosun Dynasty), Gojong, and ended in 1945, when American and Soviet forces took the Korean peninsula. The Japanese government’s major policies and practices for colonization of Korea included Japanese migration and land ownership (more than fifty percent of Korean land were taken by Japanese); the removal of Korean history, art, and culture (a range of Korean historical materials and records were manipulated, stole, or destroyed); the deportation of forced labor (Korean men were drafted for Japanese military service or construction work in Japan, and Korean women for a sexual slaves for Japanese soldiers); the formation of Imperial citizen (Koreans were forced to change their names to Japanese and taught in Japanese language); and the censorship of publication (the Japanese government prevented publication of Korean new papers). 4 The treaty was signed by President Junghee Park, a military dictator (1963–1979). Through the normalization treaty of 1965, South Korea lost its redemption rights for artifacts and historical evidences stolen or destroyed by Japan during the colonial period. Park received US$300,000,000 from Japan as a loan to facilitate Korean industrial development. 5 The term Japanese comfort women is a euphemism for the sexual slaves who worked for the Japanese military during the occupation of Japanese imperialists. The women—usually childbearing ages between twelve and thirty—were forced to work for Japanese men. They collected the women from numerous Asian countries, often from Korea first. The total number of Japanese comfort women was near two- hundred-thousand, but the registered number of such women is far lower due to the taboo nature of the subject. Regardless, the Japanese military’s violent treatment of these women is a well-known tragedy, and the South Korean government has asked the Japanese government for an official apology. Japan has not yet complied with this request. See also: The Korea Herald Staff, “Obama Urged Japan to Resolve Sexual Slavery Issue: Aide,” The Korea Herald, January 6, 2016.

4 extremely politicized, especially in terms of writing history; and the United States often intervenes in negotiations between South Korea and Japan.6 However, I have thought that it is very difficult to communicate Korean people’s colonial experience with others although the politics of memory and the writing of history have been always at stake in South Korea because of the colonial period. In this vein, I investigate how Mofokeng’s projects communicate South Africans’ traumatic experience caused by colonialism and racism and engage with a wide range of international audiences.

In chapter three, my analysis of Zaatari and Park directly connects to my position with the term international. Because I am from South Korea, I am periodically asked to share knowledge about my homeland in professional endeavors.

Very often, Americans categorize my nationality as East Asian or Asian in the United

States, an identity that is likely beneficial when I participate in international conferences or curatorial works. Nevertheless, the historical and political reality of my home country demands an explanation that exceeds such simplicity. For instance, I often find that the interpretation of the Korean War (1950–1953) or the ongoing confrontational situation between South Korea and North Korea depends upon each country’s political interest rather than historical truth. For this reason, I have searched for artists with non-European and non-North American backgrounds and examined

6 For instance, President Barack Obama visited Hiroshima, Japan, in 2016. His trip produced antagonism in South Korea because many Koreans who were forced to work on construction in Hiroshima were also killed during the fateful bombing, yet Japan has denied this fact. Motoko Rich, “President Obama Visits Hiroshima,” The New York Times, May 27, 2016.

5 how they resolve their double binds: making local narratives locally specific and internationally legible by adapting to international art systems; in other words, keeping local narratives local even when they enter globally oriented art museums or exhibitions. Zaatari and Park utilize fiction to represent their local histories while reimagining the past and possible futures. Through my research, I demonstrate that their fictional narratives provide a more adequate experience of history beyond the postmodernists’ limited definition of relative truth.

Indeed, for the last twenty years, the neoliberal idea of postnationalism or transnationalism has pushed our historical consciousness to crisis by removing the centrality of historical representation. On the one hand, globalized capitalist culture is increasingly amnesiac, focusing on newer markets and products; but on the other hand, that culture produces ever more spectacular and romantic representations of the past.

Mark Godfrey was among the first to discuss the concept of the artist-as-historian and how many contemporary artists, in response to rapid and pervasive globalization, began to take history as their subject matter.7 As Godfrey describes it; however, history, as engaged by contemporary artists, is not intended to glorify the past as shown in traditional history paintings, for example, nor is it meant to look back with nostalgic or sentimental retrospection as in postmodern art. Indeed, the artists that I research and write about in this dissertation seek fuller experiences with a critical view

7 Mark Godfrey notes that the artistic practice of the artist-as-historian is one of the important tendencies in contemporary art. Mark Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” October, Vol. 120 (Spring, 2007): pp. 140–172.

6 of how the past lingers in and continues to affect our present.8

In each chapter, I aim to demonstrate how each artist sheds light on the others by engaging different geographical boundaries, including the global, local, and regional. As I have mentioned, Sekula deals with the tension between global and local shipping industries, and how globalization has intensified that tension; Mofokeng focuses on a specific local’s traumatic experience; and Zaatari and Park address how the geopolitical situations of the Middle East and East Asia have influenced their home countries, Lebanon and South Korea.

In addition, I aim to create different conceptual spaces, including the amnesic, mnemonic, and virtual. In Sekula’s Fish Story, the sea is conceptualized as a nearly forgotten space in the face of contemporary air travel, modern transportation, and electronic communication despite its importance to the global capitalist’s arena.

Mofokeng’s collection of old portraits, The Black Photo Album, works as a mnemonic medium for viewers to communicate with black South Africans’ ancestors and question their historical position. In Zaatari’s work, Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013), he reimagines his boyhood experience of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1991) and redirects the historical event. Finally, in Park’s video, Power Passage (2004–2007), he explores the space in which the two Koreas can achieve an imaginary reunification.

8 In response to postmodernists’ nostalgic representation of the past, especially in film, Fredric Jameson diagnosed this cultural disposition as a pathological symptom of society in the late capitalism. For him, the disposition came from the subject’s inability to grasp coherently its present and future as parts of a historical process. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writing on the Postmodern (London and New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 9–10.

7 Foucault’s Idea and Practice of History

As I have demonstrated, the selected artists investigate the current breadth and far-reaching concerns about the ways in which the past affects and reemerges in our globalized societies. Although the term history is enormously broad, I organize each chapter by engaging Foucault’s ideas and practices of history.9 I employ Foucault’s idea not merely because he has influenced the formation of current historical discourse as a practice that crosses the disciplinary borders of sociology, economics, politics, and culture studies; but rather, because his main idea of history—viewing history as an intertwined form of knowledge and power—is invaluable to discuss the fact that the artists I investigate structure much of their works around the desire to obtain the power to write history.10

Sekula seeks to show how the invisible power of global capitalism has been exercised on the sea and obscured the narratives of the powerless maritime laborers’

9 Although there have been many debates about whether we can view Foucault as a historian, his lifelong work has had a tremendous impact on history—he wrote a half dozen books about aspects of Europe’s past: Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963), The Order of Things (1966), The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), and The History of Sexuality (1976). Further, he held a chair in history (History of the Systems of Thought) at the Collège de France. Christopher A. Kent, “Michel Foucault: Doing History, or Undoing It?,” Canadian Journal of History XXI (December, 1986): 393–394. Hayden White, who led New Historicism, called Foucault an “anti-historical historian” who wrote history in order to destroy it as a discipline, as a mode of consciousness, and as a mode of social existence. Hayden V. White, “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground,” History and Theory 12 (1973): 26, 28, 29, 38, 49. 10 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); Benjamin C. Sax, “Foucault, Nietzsche, History: Two Modes of the Genealogical Method,” History of European Ideas, Vol. 11 (1989): 772–773.

8 working and living environments. Mofokeng questions the historical erasure of black

South Africans who lived during European colonization and attempts to uncover their complicated historical position—not a white, ruling class or a black, subaltern class.

And Zaatari and Park reimagine the past in order to obtain the power to write local narratives in a global context with the aim of subverting the preexisting hegemonies in the current realm of history.

In this dissertation, I employ three concepts from Foucault’s historical research to organize each chapter: his formation of a knowledge-power dyad; the concept of episteme; and the genealogical method as an effective means of writing history.11 The knowledge-power dyad functions as the conceptual framework of Foucault’s historical research. That is, he seeks to inferior, dismissed, or rejected knowledge and reveals how multiple forces of power-systems have influenced on our knowledge production.12

For the concept of episteme, Foucault, describes it as a research apparatus of a particular time—detached from a historical continuity—that defines the conditions of

11 These three concepts are discussed in numerous writings, including Mark Poster’s “Foucault and History,” Social Research, Vol. 49, No. 1, Modern Masters (Spring, 1982): 135. 12 Foucault studied the knowledge of or about criminals, lunatics, and homosexuals. His focus on social deviants enlarged the scope of research subjects. The Annales School remains one of the most representative schools influenced by his methodology. Drek Hook, “Genealogy, Discourse, ‘Effective History’: Foucault and the Work of Critique,” Qualitative Research in Psychology, Vol. 2, Issue. 1 (2005): pp. 5–6. “Knowledge and power” are deeply connected, and their configuration constitutes an imposing presence over advanced industrial society and extends to the most intimate recesses of everyday life. One of the criticisms about Foucault’s knowledge-power relation is that he did not theorize the concept of power; rather, he just used the term in historical descriptions. Therefore, he did not provide a tactical way to resist existing power. Also, his position in relation to the concept of power is neutral—not completely negative or positive. Benjamin C. Sax, “Foucault, Nietzsche, History: Two Modes of the Genealogical Method”: 773–774; Mark Poster, “Foucault and History”: 122, 138–142.

9 possibility of knowledge and legitimation of the time. By using the term, he demonstrates how the absurdity or foreignness of the time reveals the limited nature of that time’s system of thinking.13 Finally, Foucault’s genealogical method enables the possibility to produce a different history because it allows counter-narratives that have been excluded or subjugated by the prevailing powers of the time to emerge. Here, such a history is the outcome of contingencies rather than inevitable origins or progressive schemes.14

13 Through the concept of “discontinuity,” Foucault focused on a particular (micro) rather than a general (macro) history with the intention to reveal the absurdity, foreignness, or problematic nature of that particular time’s system of thoughts—its “episteme.” Also, he unmasked the traditional and modern historians’ notions about the traces of causality or origins and their abuse of history for ideological aims. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. 140–145; Mark Poster, “Foucault and History”: 119–122. Considering Foucauldian history as the (almost) purely epistemological mode, Michale Clifford made analyses between the Foucauldian and the Hegelian methodologies. He compared three terms, Chronos, Logos, and Mythos (all of which originate from Greek terms relating to history), and he argued that Foucauldian history, like Hegelian history, is certainly based on Logos—the pure Logos without Man. That is, such historical theory is characterized by Logos (rather than Chronos), objectivity (rather than subjectivity), recorded time (rather than real time), and memory of events (rather than events). Clearly, Foucault’s history is closer to Logos than Chronos, yet it also involves the features of Mythos (history as the construction of myths). Michael Clifford, “Hegel and Foucault: Toward a History without Man,” Clio, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Fall, 1999): 15; Drek Hook, “Genealogy, Discourse, ‘Effective History’: Foucault and the Work of Critique”: 8–11. 14 “Genealogy” implies the political function in which history is the reversal of a relationship of forces, whereas “archaeology” denotes a level of the analysis of discourses that grasps their rules of formation without reference to the subject. Foucault discussed the two historical methods; however, in his later work, the emphasis was shifted to genealogy. Mark Poster, “Foucault and History”: 134; Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. 160–164. Benjamin C. Sax summarized the three modes that “Genealogy is parodic, directed against reality and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition; it is dissociative, directed against identity and opposes history understood as continuity or the representative of a tradition; finally, it is sacrificial, directed against truth and opposes history as a body of knowledge.” Benjamin C. Sax, “Foucault, Nietzsche, History: Two Modes of the Genealogical Method”: 769.

10 Although each chapter addresses one of these three conceptual terms— knowledge/power, episteme, genealogy—they of course overlap and are intertwined.

Moreover, despite the influence of Foucault on my thinking about history, I do not wholeheartedly embrace his theorization of history in this dissertation. Rather, I am as much concerned with the limitations of Foucault’s ideas and practices of history as I am with his insights, and I believe that the artists’ works investigated here reveal this tension in productive ways. For instance, in chapter one, I analyze how Sekula structures the viewing process such that spectators gain access to invisible operations of power and become the subject of knowledge rather than being submerged as a mere vehicle of power. In chapter two, I discuss Mofokeng’s projects using the term esthema—a particular time’s system of feeling—to supplement the concept of episteme, a purely epistemological mode. In chapter three, I theorize how fictional and affective modes of representation employed by Zaatari and Park combine with the genealogical method to construct a creative yet reliable history. In these ways, I analyze how the four artists mobilize and redirect counter-narratives of history beyond Foucault’s relativism, skepticism, and cynicism.15

15 There are a lot of criticisms about Foucauldian history. For example, Jürgen Habermas argued that post-structuralism, especially Foucault’s theory, evinces the loss of truth claim. Therefore, Habermas criticized Foucault’s philosophy of history as functionalism, historicism, presentism, relativism, and cryptonormativism. Some major concerns about relativism in Foucault’s theory stem from his view that power is always situational and flexible, that the exercise of power is relational and produces relative truths. Also, because Foucault describes (without explaining) the structural relationships of power and knowledge, focusing on how they were developed and changed rather than why, and because he does not articulate how the relationships should go further providing solution, Foucauldian history encourages, according to Habermas, political noncommitment and conservatism. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), pp. 268–290.

11 Chapter Organization

Chapter one investigates the ways in which Sekula’s photobook, Fish Story, constructs maritime history via photography and text. Based on his seven-year-long course of research and multiple journeys to a variety of international seaports, the project speaks to the rise and fall of maritime industries and the circulation of laborers and capital. Today’s air travel, modern transportation, and electronic communication have eclipsed much of the sea. Nevertheless, Sekula claims that capitalist power is still in operation in the briny deep by visualizing the obscurity and complexity of the power relations on the sea. Though it is difficult to trace these relations, Sekula does so by juxtaposing photographs and three different types of text—caption, description, and essay—a structure that invites viewers to change their habitual reading and thus recognize the exercise of global capitalist power.

With this in mind, I focus first on how to make sense of the complex structure of Fish Story and suggest the concept of surface reading as an alternative to traditional, symptomatic reading because surface reading posits that a history or a truth is found on the surface rather than hidden in depth. In Fish Story, photographs represent the surface of our globe, while the text reveals the narratives that have been tangled

In addition, Foucault wrote, “I would like to do genealogy of problems. […] My point is not everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous. […] So my position leads not apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.” In response to this idea, Jean Baudrillard criticized Foucault’s genealogy for its tendency to reinforce the circulation of existing power and knowledge. Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotexte, 1987), pp. 9–10; Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rainbow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 231–232; Bo Isenberg, “Habermas on Foucault Critical Remarks,” ActaSociologica, Vol. 34, No. 4 (1991): 301.

12 beneath that surface. I then analyze how three types of text—caption, description, and essay—interact with images. I argue that Sekula’s arrangement of text enables the viewer’s dynamic approach to the photobook—physically and intellectually moving back and forth during reading—and eventually asks the viewer to resist globalization by seeking the sites of resistance.

Chapter two examines Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album, which consists of eighty slides that display photographic portraits of black South Africans and pieces of text. As an ongoing research project, The Black Photo Album involves many of the artist’s practices, including collecting, restoring, and recontextualizing processes of image and text. Different from widely circulated Africans’ images produced for the purpose of ethnographic research at the turn of the twentieth century, the photographic figures presented in the portraits appear as educated, middle-class subjects wearing

Victorian-style dresses inside European-style studio settings and mimicking European bourgeoisie culture. Nevertheless, black South Africans at that time were considered natives, a discrete group of individuals who were able to claim only partial citizenship.

The chapter problematizes the historical position of the African subjects represented in the project. I discuss their fluid identities and the conflicts that arose for the process of modernization and colonization of black South Africans near the beginning of the twentieth century. As I focus on the mnemonic role of the textual components of the project, which evokes the sense of presence for the photographic figures, I also investigate the meaning of the term ambivalence and question how it is connected to Mofokeng’s means of “doing history.” I argue that his representation of

13 ambivalence historicizes how South Africa’s traumatic past persists into the present in troubles with the current lands and people’s lives. Ultimately, I discuss how his projects function to communicate South Africans’ traumatic memories and draw a range of viewers’ emotional engagement with the history of others.

Chapter three focuses on how Zaatari and Park represent their contested national histories in a global context. Zaatari’s projects, including Mapping Sitting: On

Portraitures and Photography (2002; co-created with Walid Raad) and Letter to a

Refusing Pilot, explore the traumatic experience of the Lebanese Civil War and its aftermath. Likewise, a significant portion of Park’s oeuvre, including Sets (2000) and

Power Passage, investigates the ongoing ceasefire situation between South Korea and

North Korea after the Korean War. Although the geographical contexts that the two artists deal with are different, their major projects uniquely combine documenting practices with fiction in pursuit of historical truths that run deeper than those expressed in traditional accounts of wars.

I begin the chapter with the investigation of two terms parafiction and truthiness and discuss them with contemporary artists’ use of fiction and the varied range of truth—from hoax to plausibility, from less true to truer—represented in their historical representations. To contextualize the fictional narratives employed by

Zaatari and Park, I use the terms docu-fiction (for Zaatari) and imaginary-documenting

(for Park) to designate the unique ways that the artists unite documenting and fiction.

Ultimately, I develop my argument further to illustrate how their works evince that fiction—when coupled with a genealogical method and affect elements—can

14 emancipate a history from its locally specified knowledge to engage with a wide range of international audience.

15 CHAPTER 1 Reading the History of Globalization from the Surface: Allan Sekula’s Fish Story

Introduction

Allan Sekula (1951–2013, United States) began his artistic career in the early

1970s, working as a photographer, filmmaker, theorist, critic, and historian of photography. Grounded in a radical-left perspective, his projects address the socioeconomic consequences of late capitalism and the function of documentary photography. Sekula’s photographic practice had been characterized as critical realism, which is informed by Marxism, documentary photography, and conceptual art. In his later works, he discussed critical realism as means of a recovery of realism from postmodernism’s simulacra or hyper-reality, from the pervasive condition of the loss of the real.16 According to Sekula, “Critical representational art […] that points openly to the social world and to possibilities of social transformation” works for the critical engagement in capitalistic world, as well as the counter situation in which “the old myth that photographs tell the truth has been replaced by the new myth that they lie.”17

Although Sekula’s principal medium was photography—and he used his camera to create exhibitions, books, and films—he resisted the modernist division of labor, and worked as a practitioner as well as critic and essayist. As such, his idea

16 Bill Roberts, “Production in View: Allan Sekula’s Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism,” Tate Paper, Issue 18 (October, 2012). 17 Allan Sekula and Debra Disberg, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)” in Allan Sekula: Dismal Science: Photoworks 1972–1996 (Normal: Illinois State University Press, 1999), p.120, 239.

16 about critical realism is found not only in photographs but in text. He began mixing his photographic series with long written texts in an early work titled Aerospace Folktales

(1973), which focuses on the social world of the aerospace industry. More recently, he focused on globalization and completed another project of image and text, Fish Story between 1989 and 1995. This chapter investigates the ways in which Fish Story demonstrates his idea about critical realism, as a response to global capitalism and its influence on the maritime space.

Fish Story consists of the seven chapters and includes around one hundred photographs, textual descriptions, and two essays written by Sekula.18 Sekula created

Fish Story based on a seven-year-long research that involved extensive travel and an investigation of international seaports. Therefore, the photography in Fish Story documents a range of seaport locations, including Rotterdam, Netherlands; New York,

Los Angeles, and San Diego in the United States; and port cities in South Korea,

18 The careful juxtaposition of the photographs and text of Fish Story has been presented not only in the book, but also in the exhibition. When exhibiting, partition walls have served to demarcate the different chapters in gallery spaces by allowing a degree of variation in the spatial arrangement between image and text. Successive chapters of Fish Story were shown individually in various locations, but two chapters were shown at the 1993 Whitney Biennial in New York, which drew the considerable attention to the project from the outset. Later, in 1993, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Allan Sekula contributed “Message in a Bottle,” a fifth chapter of Fish Story that showed the decline of Spanish fishing. In its complete version, Fish Story was shown first in 1995–1996 in port cities, including Rotterdam, Stockholm, Glasgow, and Calais. At that time, Fish Story consisted of 105 color photographs organized into seven chapters with twenty-six text panels that spanned a number of rooms. Two slide projections were added to the exhibition, but those were never included in the actual book. Each slide consisted of around eighty transparencies that were shown at fifteen-seconds intervals in a separate projection room. The whole ensemble was later exhibited at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, in 1999, and then at Documenta 11 in 2002, which was curated by Okwui Enwezor. Bill Roberts, “Production in View: Allan Sekula’s Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism.”

17 Poland, Mexico, Spain, and Hong Kong. Dealing with such a vast geographical range,

Fish Story speaks to global capitalism’s influences on the sea—especially in relation to the rise and fall of maritime industries and the circulation of laborers and capital.

Sekula once said, “I am very interested in dialectical maneuvers [and] the port appeared to me. Ports are interstitial […] a sheer hybridity that challenges a reductive and dogmatic periodization of modernity and postmodernity.”19 For Sekula, port spaces are uniquely positioned to communicate history because they present multiple layers of temporality intersected by numerous contingent events amid unchanged as well as transitional capitalist affairs. Thus, a view from a seaport provides a picture of how contemporary globalization has expanded through diverse scales and speeds to the far reaches of the earth.

Fish Story demonstrates how the sea has been territorialized as a global capitalist’s arena, even though it exists as a nearly forgotten space. Unless one lives by the coast, the sea is absent from one’s daily life and seems to have less value than air travel, transportation, or electronic communication. However, Sekula asserts that capitalist power is still in operation in the briny deep, despite working via invisible ways such as international trade agreements, maritime commerce, subsistence fishing, and naval campaigns. In fact, Fish Story asks viewers to trace these invisible operations of power, but this is not an easy task. So this chapter examines the ways in which three different types of text in Fish Story—caption, description, and essay—

19 Allan Sekula and Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen, “Interview with Allan Sekula: Los Angeles, California, October 26, 2002,” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 66, New Approach to Global Labor History (Fall, 2005): 158.

18 speak to the histories of global capitalism through their interaction with images.

In the first section, I discuss how Fish Story engages the theme of globalization, as well as how each sort of photographs and text functions to expand viewers’ understanding of the globalized world. At this time, photographs represent the surface of our globe, while the text reveals the narratives that have been convoluted for a while beneath that surface. Throughout this discussion, I examine how to position

Fish Story within the genre of photobooks. After that, I argue that surface reading, as an alternative reading for traditional symptomatic reading, provides the key to unraveling the complicated structure of Fish Story.

The second section analyzes how captions function in Fish Story. First, I focus on their placement: isolated from the photographs and listed after the last page of images in each chapter. I argue that this placement forces the viewer to move back and forth through Fish Story and activates his or her physical, as well as intellectual self, and more, that this physicality eventually brings to the surface the marginalized lives of maritime labors. Finally, I examine how the captions attract viewers’ synchronic and diachronic approach to globalization by illustrating a dynamic territorial tension between the global and the local.

The third section investigates the one-to-four page descriptions that appear in each chapter function in Fish Story. The descriptions help viewers to make sense of the history of certain local areas affected by globalization. For instance, in Fish Story’s fifth chapter, which is about Spain, I focus on how Sekula’s descriptions enhance the narrative quality through a science fiction novel. Also, when Sekula addresses South

19 Korea, I examine the interaction of his text with the Korean characters captured in some photographs and reveal the obscured workings of power in that country.

In the fourth section, I examine how the two essays in Fish Story historicize global capitalist forces on the sea while training viewers to claim visibility—the ability of parsing the obscured power. Through such training, viewers come to see what is most often invisible: the constructed and naturalized hegemonic power structures in our capitalist world. Based on Foucault’s contextual dyad of power and knowledge, I claim that gaining visibility in this context means obtaining the potential power and becoming the subject of knowledge (as opposed to being the object of others’ rule).

Through the analysis of the three types of text in Fish Story, I argue that Fish Story enables viewers to understand the complicated history of globalization, as well as to resist globalization by seeking the sites of resistance.

Reading Globalization from the Surface: The Structural Complexity of Image and Text

Upon first look, one may find it difficult to understand the organization of the seven chapters of Fish Story. All of the images in the photobook seem to emphasize geography rather than history although my primary focus is history. However, in many ways, this project is about geography, as Sekula states, because geographical locations determine the order of the photobook.20 The first chapter starts in New York, moves to

Los Angeles, travels through the North American Atlantic and North Pacific areas, and

20 Ibid., 156.

20 eventually reaches Rotterdam, engaging with a number of international seaports along the way. It aims to draw a viewer’s attention away from the current locus of the power of globalization (American seaports) and toward the early capitalist’s trade center (the old port in Rotterdam), as well as some peripheral port areas. Fish Story’s second chapter considers port cities in Poland and Spain, including an unemployment office in a port area of Poland before returning to Rotterdam. Fish Story’s third chapter focuses on the thousands of container boxes in American and Rotterdam seaports—we do not know what is contained in the container boxes or where the ships are headed. The next three chapters illustrate the local port cities in South Korea, Spain, and Mexico. And the last chapter shows a return to the port in Los Angeles, via Hong Kong, not New

York.

Reading such a range of geography presented in the photobook, this section provides an overview of Fish Story to make sense of its complex structure—the overview includes the theories of globalization, the visual rhetoric of images and their interaction with text, and the position of Fish Story in the genre of the photobook.

Then I discuss surface reading which supports the idea that Sekula’s photobook speaks to something more than the geographical sum of scattered locations.

Although Fish Story deals with a vast geographic space, the photographs represent a relatively short historical period of about five years, from 1990 to 1994, which disregards chronology.21 Sekula completed his research for Fish Story between

21 One photograph, Plate 9, presents an exception to this rule. It is a scene from Frank Gehry’s installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art at Los Angeles, photographed in 1988.

21 1989 and 1995, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution the Soviet Union.

The decline of socialism certainly encouraged Sekula to describe global capitalism’s economic systems, which began to operate during that time with less transparency and greater influence than ever before. Fish Story is the final version of Sekula’s trilogy of geographical research projects. The first one, Sketch for a Geography Lesson (1983), analyzes West Germany in relation to American military aggression fueled by the Cold

War ideology during President Reagan’s regime; the second one, Geography Lesson:

Canadian Notes (1986), examines the iconography found in varied images around a

Canadian mine and bank, and seeks to reveal the dark side of Canada’s economic wealth.22 Compared to those previous projects, Fish Story covers a wider swath of geography and entails more historical research into how global capitalism emerged and expanded—and the role of port areas in this expansion.

When Sekula conducted research for Fish Story, the term globalization was being celebrated enthusiastically by those who claimed that the world had adopted a postnational democratic consensus, international economic equality, and social mobility. Such supporters included the Reagan-era policy maker Francis Fukuyama,

22 Sekula wrote the following in “A Note on the Work” at the end of Fish Story, “Fish Story is the third in a cycle of works on the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world.” Sketch for a Geography Lesson was first shown in 1983, and it was later included in Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973–1983, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984); Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes was first shown in 1986, and it was later published as an individual book with the same title, Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997).

22 and later, a free-market proponent, Thomas Friedman.23 In fact, on the one hand, globalization secured a position of prominence throughout the world in the minds of conservative ideologues during the 1990s. But on the other hand, for left-wing theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, globalization was seriously debated and criticized. Hardt and Negri argued that globalization was irreversible and would bring an extreme politico-economic polarity, and the only way to resist it was to organize global-level resistance movements through global-level networks.24 However, all of them agreed with the idea that globalization would bring a huge difference in human experiences of a vast territory—global events would occur anywhere and everywhere in the world simultaneously.25 David Harvey, for instance, insisted that, as a result of such territorial experiences, distance was “annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than our immense city.”26 In this vein, I focus on the fact that certain concomitant events

23 See: Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992); and Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century (London: Allen Lane, 2005). T. J. Demos mentioned the two authors’ conservative positions in his article, “Moving Images of Globalization,” Grey Room, No. 37 (Fall, 2009): 7–8. 24 See: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Another example comes from a postcolonial anthropologist, Arjun Appadurai’s positive attitude toward the egalitarian potential of “diasporic public spheres,” which might be achievable through new technologies such as “mass mobility and mass mediation.” Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 25 Jan Aart Scholete, “Beyond the Buzzword: Towards a Critical Theory of Globalization” in Globalization: Theory and Practice, eds. Kofman and Gillians Young (London: Pinter, 1996), p. 45. 26 David Harvey, Justice, Nature, & the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 242. Jan Aart Scholete and David Harvey are not the only ones who have explored differing human experiences of territory. Indeed, Marshall McLuhan uses the term global village, which is an environment generated by social acceleration at all levels of human organization. McLuhan believes the

23 influenced by globalization might have collapsed on themselves and become unseen or ignored on the virtually diminished globe. Considering Fish Story as a shrunken globe,

I question how Sekula’s deployment of image and text effectively discloses such unseen or ignored global events by critically engaging globalization.

Much like Frederic Jameson, Sekula regards globalism’s effects of laborers as one of its most critical aspects. For Jameson, the fall of socialism necessitated the complete loss of the modernists’ utopian dream for the working class, as the dream in a sense relates to accelerating globalization. According to him, with globalization, the cultural collapses into the economic, and the economic into the cultural; and because globalization has taken on these new meanings, it is hard to avoid of its adverse effects on daily life.27 Still, he notes clearly that it is the laborers whose lives have been most devastated by the transnational corporations that grew out of global capitalist developments since the 1970s. These types of corporations have become supranational giants that lord over national governments. Jameson argues, for instance, that one of the most “worrying feature[s] of the new global corporate structure is their capacity to devastate national labor markets by transferring their operations to cheaper locations overseas.”28

global village is the centerpiece of an anxiety-ridden analysis of new media technologies in the 1960s. See: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964). 27 Fredric Jameson, “Globalization and Political Strategy,” New Left View, No. 4 (July–August, 2000): 53, 67. 28 Ibid., 55.

24 As such, the photographs and text in Fish Story trace the maritime laborers’ working and living environments, which have been marginalized by global capitals and markets. Indeed, the laborers represented in the book live far from the conveniences and benefits touted by proponents of globalization. One photograph in the third chapter, for instance, presents a laborer who turns his back from the viewer and leans on the wall of a phone box [Fig. 1]. The caption notes that he calls his wife, but that probably occurs only when he reaches the land. Similarly, one description in the same chapter emphasizes the isolation and alienation of the sailor David Brown by indicating that he spends most of his times inside a floating ship. Sekula writes,

“Brown works twelve hours a day […] overtime payment allows him to earn ‘just enough to make the trip worthwhile’ […] Brown turns abruptly to the case of a hypothetical worker who loses his job to automation.”29 Indeed, each photograph and piece of text in Fish Story functions both individually and in relation to other images, for matters of the maritime laborers’ harsh lives.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh characterizes the visual rhetoric of photography in

Fish Story as realist montage. He emphasizes the influence of the Soviet photo-file—a loosely organized archive, or a somewhat coherent accumulation of snapshots relating to and documenting one particular subject.30 According to Buchloh, Sekula’s strategy produces a dialectic schema between contingency and contextuality, narrative

29 Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Rotterdam: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art; Düsseldorf: Richer Verlag, 1995), p. 77. 30 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allan Sekula: Photography between Discourse and Document” in Fish Story (Rotterdam: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art; Düsseldorf: Richer Verlag), pp. 197–198.

25 sequences and random encounters. Buchloh further points to how Sekula creates tension between the deskilling of the photographic image and the commitment to an ideal of photographic truth.31 However, in Fish Story, there also exists a tension between the panoramic and microscopic, and between the motionless and continuous—a series of oppositions that positions Sekula’s visual representation between painting and film. In addition, the inclusions of both the dried and saturated and the focused and blurred scenes evoke the viewer’s realistic as well as nostalgic approach around the main theme. The complexity of Sekula’s visual language cannot be separated from his critical realism. Sekula demonstrated his photographic approach to documenting the world. He wrote:

I wanted to construct works from within concrete life situations, situations within which there was either an overt or active clash of interests and representations. Any interests that I had in artifice and constructed dialogue was part of a search for a certain “realism,” a realism not of appearances or social facts but of everyday experience in and against the grip of advanced capitalism [...] Against the photo-essayistic promise of “life” caught by the camera, I sought to work from within a world already replete with signs.32

However, in what ways does Sekula capture this “world replete with signs,” especially when it comes to matters of ongoing globalization and its influences on the sea?33

31 Ibid., 197–198. 32 Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973–1983, p. x. 33 Alexandra Oliver summarized how the complexity of Sekula’s works has been defined by critics’ terminology—montage principle (Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder, 2005); concatenation (Claude Gintz, 2003); hybrid (Kaja Silverman, 2004); assemblage (Robert Bill, 2010); heterogeneity (Stefan Römer, 2001), and ensemble (Grant Kester, 1987). By using Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of

26 In most of the scenes I examine in the following sections, Sekula’s photographs appear to be taken by a camera placed in a stable position. The intention of capturing the scene’s ongoing events seems evident, and the photographer’s further intervention such as editing or distortion does not take place after that initial installation of the camera. In this sense, the captured scene appears to validate the photographer’s neutral, objective position, but the intrinsic nature of the documented events seems to demonstrate a certain statement for their own being. Two photographs—one featuring a man operating a surveying equipment to search for a new container storage area, and another with the surveying device by itself—parallel this unique camera usage [Fig. 2–3]. The first scene depicts a man wearing a worker’s uniform and peering through the lens. The instrument on the tripod could be a recorder or a telescope, and it points toward a land seemingly devoid of development though it is not known where it is exactly pointing. In the next scene, the man is missing but the instrument on the tripod remains the image’s focal point. However, upon closer inspection, the tripod in the second image has been shifted to the right and back slightly. At this time, the combination of the instrument and the legs of the tripod create a symbolic, cross-shape in the center of the image, enhancing the technical device’s ontological meaning. These two photographs demonstrate how Sekula’s photographic rhetoric questions the line between the subjective and objective—that is, the instrumental vision and human eyes. Here, the two images epitomize Sekula’s

constellation, Oliver discussed Sekula’s Aerospace Folktales (1973) and Fish Story and focused on how the objective and subjective attitudes intersect to enable Sekula’s unique realism. Alexandra Oliver, “Critical Realism in Contemporary Art,” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Pittsburg, 2014): 111.

27 unique stance in Fish Story by reminding me of the cameraman’s supra-position in a

Russian film by Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), in which there is an overseer upon a surveyor’s surveillant eyes.34 Despite the critical poignancy of the images in Fish Story, such photographic rhetoric becomes even more potent via the addition of text.

Analyses of Fish Story have focused mainly on photographs or, in a limited fashion, on their interactions with the text. The textual portions in Fish Story; however, lend a great deal to the further analyses of the photobook. Most importantly, all of the text in the main chapters is written by Sekula,35 which marks a significant departure from the many photobooks and the documentary tradition of American photographers’ collaborations with the writers in the 1930s and 1940s.36 On the one hand, Fish Story

34 Benjamin Young also mentioned about the Man with a Movie Camera by DzigaVertov in terms of Sekula’s photography. Benjamin J. Young, “Arresting Figures,” Grey Room, No. 55 (Spring, 2014): 89. 35 Except Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s essay, “Allan Sekula: Photography between Discourse and Document,” which appears at the end of Fish Story, all of text is written by Sekula. After Buchloh’s essay, Sekula includes a note about the project, acknowledgments, credits, and resources—all of which provide a little information about how he collaborated with the local people during his research trip, for example. 36 Examples of such collaborations include Dorothea Lange’s An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939) which featured the writing of a social scientist, Paul Schuster Taylor; and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) which featured the text of a journalist and film critic, James Agee. Sekula often mentioned Lange’s and Evans’s influences on his documentary practice. In fact, part of the essay in Fish Story discusses Evans’s representation of sailors, South Street, which was taken in 1932 in New York and was included in American Photographs. In the 1920s and 1930s, the photobook became an essential tool of the documentary movements in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union. Often, photobooks were used to disseminate information or propaganda. Especially in the United States, from 1935 to 1942, Roy E. Stryker, the head of the photographic section of the FSA (The Farm Security Administration) and the RA (Resettlement Administration), called the Historical Section, employed documentary photographers such as Lange,

28 follows in the tradition of the early photobooks by emphasizing contemporary experiences—witnessing, documenting, and constructing recent histories captured by a camera. On the other hand, combined with Sekula’s own layout design, ordering, sequencing, and structuring, his text lends a more auteurist quality to the photobook.

Thus, the artist’s subjectivity embedded in Fish Story demonstrates an individual voice; however, it is not a unified voice. That is, Sekula’s text includes diversity in attitudes, styles, and rhetoric like his photographs, while interacting with images and creating a complex level of intertextuality.37 According to Graham Allen, intertextuality provides a new vision of meaning between authorship and readership.38 As such, the interaction between image and text in Fish Story challenges the traditional reading of photobooks, which I discuss in the following sections through three different types of text. Allen also argues that intertextuality breaks down the boundaries between inside and outside,

Evans, and Russell Lee, and it sponsored their photobooks for the general public in order to establish a more authoritative witness to the struggles of Depression-era America through carefully edited photographs and writings. Andrea Jeannette Nelson, “Reading Photobooks: Narrative Montage and the Construction of Modem Visual Literacy,” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2007): 184–188. 37 The theoretical basis of intertextuality traces back to Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1915) in which he focused on how the systemic characteristics of language led the relational nature of meaning. Also Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination (first published as a whole in 1975) created the term dialogism and indicated how language was used in specific social and cultural situations. Julia Kristeva employed the term intertextuality in her essays, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” (1966) and “The Bounded Text” (1966–7) in the attempt to combine the theories of Saussure and Bakhtin. The concept of intertextuality that she promoted proposed that the text was a dynamic site in which relational processes and practices were the focus of analysis instead of static structures and products. María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, “Intertextuality: Origins and Development of the Concept,” Atlantis XVIII (1996): 268. 38 Graham Allen, Intertextuality (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1–7; Andrea Jeannette Nelson discussed Allen’s explanation about intertextuality in relation to the history of photobooks. Andrea Jeannette Nelson, “Reading Photobooks: Narrative Montage and the Construction of Modem Visual Literacy”: 178–179.

29 between the autonomous work and social fabric.39 One way this applies to Fish Story is that Sekula made the work available for free online, reflecting Sekula’s critique of capitalisms and skepticism toward art markets.40 In other words, the photobook crosses the border between the imagined and real world by creating a space where one can actually resist the capitalist logic and avoid of typical distribution and circulation.41

When discussing his lifelong research interests—the relationships among photography, labor, and capital—Sekula wrote, “Meaning is always directed by layout, caption, text, and site and mode of presentation […] photographic books frequently cannot help but reproduce these rudimentary ordering schemes.”42 Sekula’s statement emphasizes the importance of a structural analysis of Fish Story, or an examination of the ways in which he structures photographs and writing with the book form. At first glance, the photobook may elicit frustration in viewers, not only because of the esoteric text, snapshot-like photographs, but also because of the structural complexity of the book form. However, a keen look enables viewers to take on a dynamic approach—activation (caption), reasoning (description), and historicization (essay)—

39 Graham Allen, pp. 1–7. 40 Oliver argued, “Sekula also effectively killed any chance at substantial commercial success [from the sale of his works].” In fact, very few institutions obtained the full set of Fish Story. It was not until 2013 that MoMA finally acquired complete work. Alexandra Oliver, “Critical Realism in Contemporary Art”: 128. 41 Fish Story has become a collector’s item, and fetches up to $400 per copy on Amazon. For those who do not desire a physical copy, the entire version is available to download at http://monoskop.org/images/8/86/Sekula_Allan_Fish_Story.pdf. 42 Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 445–446.

30 to the sea, and eventually to make sense of maritime history. Indeed, Sekula calculates the ordering of image and text carefully through the three types of text in Fish Story in order to make the unseen or ignored global events visible by changing viewers’ habit of reading. This is, in fact, a revolutionary invention of a representational form among photobooks as a genre because, prior to its existence, it seemed hardly possible to represent the exercise of globalization across such a vast geographical range.

But how are the ranges of geography dealt with and described via historical accounts? While discussing surface reading as an alternative interpretation of Marxist or Freudian symptomatic reading, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus claim:

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, so much seems to be on the surface. “If everything were transparent, then no ideology would be possible, and no domination either,” wrote Fredric Jameson in 1981, explaining why interpretation could never operate on the assumption that “the text means just what it says.” The assumption that domination can only do its work when veiled, which may once have sounded almost paranoid, now has a nostalgic, even utopian ring to it.43

Indeed, Sekula’s text in Fish Story assists viewers to seek out what may have happened on the sea by interacting with the photographs, which presents the geographical surface filled with signs. According to Best and Marcus, surface reading focuses on

43 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representation, Vol. 108 (Fall, 2009): 2; Recite, Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 61.

31 bringing to the surface a history or a truth.44 They argue that, for the surface reader, things have been available and already there, not absent, latent, or repressed. That is, the history or the truth, which has been considered as it existed in depth, is now found from surface by focusing on the perceptible and apprehensible.45 Best and Marcus also explain that one can practice surface reading by moving from text to context; to look at rather than see through the things by parsing the material conditions of the text that structures our perception; and to accept or defer the text rather than mastering or using it.46 As I discuss in the following sections, for instance, Sekula compels viewers to contextualize Korean maritime history within a global perspective, especially through two kinds of text, caption and description, which span several chapters in Fish Story.

Still, he contends that the task is to seek what is presented in photographs, not what is absent, latent, or repressed. Also in the essay, he asks viewers to reflect on what is seen, and then he teaches us how to dismantle the visual elements, which construct and naturalize the hegemonic power structures in our capitalist world. Indeed, Sekula’s representation of globalization resonates with the tendency to scan only superficially our contemporary world. Foucault claims that he seeks “to define the relationship on the very surface of discourse […] and to make visible what is invisible only because it

44 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus discussed that, after the meta-languages of Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism were widely accepted, so-called, symptomatic reading has occupied the most realms of interpretation by focusing on the absent than the present, the manifest than the latent, and the depth than the surface. That is to say, interpretation has meant to reveal something veiled, such as Freud’s unconsciousness or Marx’s ideology or commodification; however, Best and Marcus provided a different approach to interpret contemporary literature. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus: 1–9. 45 Ibid., 11. 46 Ibid., 9–13.

32 is too much on the surface of things.”47 In this regard, in the following sections, I focus on how the three types of text in Fish Story interact with photographs and impel viewers’ keen look to seek the history of global capitalist influences on the sea.

Caption: Revealing the Maritime Laborers to the Surface

Fish Story contains nearly one hundred photographs taken in various locations around international seaports. Viewers must peruse these photographs without any captions because the captions all appear together on a single page after the last image in each chapter. When Fish Story is shown in a gallery space, one caption page of one chapter—white letters on a black surface—is framed as a panel and displayed with the chapter’s images [Fig. 4]. This requires viewers to move between the caption panel and photographs in order to make sense of the information of the image. In this section, first, I examine how some information of the captions function to connect global events, especially in terms of marine laborers’ marginalized living and working conditions. Then I discuss how the captions in Fish Story function as a relational threshold that enables viewers to understand the effects of globalization by navigating different geographical locales between the global, the diasporic, and the local.

The placement of the captions activates the viewer to turn pages until they find the caption page, but the viewer’s first encounter with each photograph is not shaped by a title or any text that explains where or when the shot was taken. The photobook

47 Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Interview, 1961–84, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotexte, 1989), pp. 57–58.

33 contains a number of photographs that are characterized by a deskilled, snapshot-like method and a third-person, indifferent stance to the subjects. In such photographs,

Sekula’s subjects appear commonplace but not banal. That is, scenes feature objects found in many seaports, yet the photographs highlight qualities we do not often notice.

Nothing is spectacular or sensational, and even a spectacular scene captured via a birds-eye view does not seem astonishing to the viewer. One of the most beautiful yet enigmatic photographs in Fish Story, which is also used for the cover of the photobook, depicts the panoramic scene taken from atop Sea-Land Quality, a huge container ship

[Fig. 5]. The deep blue water and dramatic sky meet at the horizon, while the colored surfaces of container boxes congregate at the center. Sekula once termed container boxes “coffins of remote labor-power.”48 These words, borrowed from David Harvey, suggest that the container boxes serve processes of deindustrialization that removes industries from major cities of advanced countries like London and introduces cheap imports from China and other emerging economies.49 Although the container boxes presented in the picture have such important meanings, we do not usually perceive them in this way. Further, the viewer does not regard even the image as spectacle because container boxes appear often in Sekula’s work—fourteen times in total. So the viewer likely recognizes such symbolic objects as a commonplace one, as the meaning of container boxes aboard any seaports.

48 Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, “Notes on the Forgotten Space,” (2010), accessed February 18, 2017, http://www.theforgottenspace.net/static/notes.html 49 David Harvey, “Globalization and Deindustrialization: A City Abandoned,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall, 1996): 175–191.

34 Likewise, his photographic subjects are simultaneously ubiquitous (and therefore utterly knowable) and without distinction (and therefore easily forgettable).

Among the scenes of such subjects, one photograph portrays a harbor in Minturno,

Italy; and one diptych shows a fishing village in Ulsan, South Korea [Fig. 6, 7–8].

However, in these pictures, it is nearly impossible to identify whether a marine area is taken from a European seaport or a South Korean. These images consist of similar, three-layered backgrounds—from the sky to the horizontal surfaces of water and sand.

In the distance, a couple of people are seen, albeit somewhat faintly. Although the first scene depicts a broken bank in the center and the second depicts several small boats, the soft lights of both pictures make the harbor and the fishing village seems inactive in terms of commercial trades. Beside the information about these locations at the captions—the caption of the first image reads, “Remnants of a Roman harbor near

Minturno, Italy. June 1992”; and of the second, “Doomed fishing village of Ilsan”— the viewer learns that the bank is a “remnant” and the fishing village is “doomed.” In this way, “the caption rescues the photographic image from the ravage of modishness, gives it a revolutionary use value, and recasts a literary form from which new forms will be cast,” as Walter Benjamin once said.50 In other words, such old, calm, and peaceful marine areas could be found anywhere. Nevertheless, the words remnant and doomed in the captions grant an ontological meaning to the presented scenes in the

50 Walter Benjamin discussed the function of the caption for a photograph when he criticized new objectivity, a straight form of photographic documentary brought from Weimar, Germany. Different from Dadaist photomontage, Benjamin argued that the captions of new objectivity naturalized the relationship between a photographed image and a commercial good rather than breaking it down. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer (1934),” New Left Review, I/62 (July–August, 1970): 90–93.

35 context of the history of sea—the Italian harbor and the South Korean fishing village have been presumably abandoned by contemporary maritime industries. The viewer can, of course, get a sense of their deterioration by flipping the pages and contextualizing the images with other ones.51 However, Sekula demands more from the viewer—he asks the viewer to discover the world’s significant, larger changes by offering a few prompts in the captions.

While some captions in Fish Story provide some historical knowledge, most simply denote the title, date, and location. Thus, the longer captions carry additional weight—these captions seem to ask the viewer to return to the photograph described, and to seek out complex relationships among the images in each chapter and across multiple chapters. For instance, in the first chapter, one photograph depicts a discarded moving-house that would offer insufficient shelter for maritime workers [Fig. 9]. It is not built soundly, and the interior seems cramped. Furthermore, the bathroom, the most private space, is demolished and so exposed to the public. The corresponding caption—“Shipyard-workers’ housing, built during the Second World War, being moved from San Pedro to Los Angeles, California. May 1990”—indicates that the house was “built for shipyard workers during the Second World War” and “later moved” from San Pedro to Los Angeles, California. Much later, in the sixth chapter, another

51 Next to the harbor in Minturno, Italy, a huge hammerhead crane moves container boxes (Plate 11). By contrasting the scene with the developed, automatic systems of the Asian port, the inactivity of the Italian harbor is emphasized. And prior to the fishing village of Ilsan in Ulsan, South Korea, a vertical diptych presents a billboard that illustrates a plan to set an amusement park on the site of the village. One can also see a fisherman, who works in the Hyundai factory (Plate 52, 53). Combined with the scene of the fishing village, the diptych demonstrates that the area is declining.

36 maritime living space appears [Fig. 10–11]. The diptych presents a rusty shipping container that was converted into a two-story house. On the left, a Hispanic man wearing only shorts appears, and on the right, a wooden table sits outside. Dirty pots, plates, and bowls are piled up on the table, and curiously, some flowers beautify those rudimentary kitchen objects. The caption—“Waterfront vendors living in containers”—indicates that the shipping container has been “repurposed as housing for waterfront vendors” in San Juan de Ulua, Mexico. Together, these sets of photographs and their captions help the viewer understand how global capital has functioned historically—that is, such an inhumane living space has not changed from the Second

World War to the present—and how such continuity has endured through the transformation of the types of living boxes. Indeed, through the captions, the viewer can see that the maritime laborers have lived inhumane for a long time, and that inhumanity continues to spread to far-flung geographical areas.

Because the experience of production and the conditions surrounding industrial labor have been exported to geopolitical peripheries and removed from our modernist visual culture,52 representation of industries and labor has become largely neglected. In writing about the relationship between photography, labor, and capital,

52 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh traced how representation of labor has been obscured from the modernist visual culture by focusing on the writing of Théophile Gautier, a French art and literary critic (composed in 1834). Buchloh stated, “At the core of modernist thought since its emergence in the 1830s […] he (Gautier) laid the groundwork for aesthetic arguments that reverberate up to the present day, notably the aforementioned prohibition on the representation of the conditions of production and labor, the acknowledgement of bodily and economic needs, and the disqualification of an aesthetic of utilitarian functions.” Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allan Sekula: Photography between Discourse and Document,” p. 191.

37 Sekula asked in Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital (2003),

“How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships?

[…] How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted, and obliterated by photography?”53 As if answering these questions, a number of photographs show Sekula’s complex research interests—the historical representation of labor bound up with capitalist power—via the photographs that address the unsafe working environments of welders and steel cutters around shipyards. In the second chapter, some photographs depict the National Steel and Shipping Company in San

Diego [Fig. 12] and the former Lenin Shipyard in Poland [Fig. 13–14]; the fourth chapter features the Hyundai Shipyard in South Korea [Fig. 15–16]. The laborers’ clothing and goggles seem insufficient to keep their bodies safe from sparks, and some of them are working on narrow rails. Indeed, throughout Fish Story, Sekula captures similar subjects, which allows the viewer to infer that the shipyard workers around the world endure poor working conditions. However, one of the captions for the Lenin

Shipyard—“Welders working in the privatized section of the former Lenin Shipyard.

Gdańsk, Poland. November 1990”—indicates that it is now “privatized,” emphasizing the fact that the formerly communist, Eastern bloc shipyard is now part of the privatized global capital sectors. Via interaction between those images and the corresponding captions, the viewer might question whether advanced capitalist societies such as the United States and South Korea will provide a picture of Poland’s

53 Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital,”443–444.

38 future. Regardless of the answer, it seems that the unsafe working conditions for the welders and steel cutters will persist.

Regarding the function of captions in documentary photographs, W. J. T.

Mitchell describes how an artist’s words—though they may not always appear in the caption—interact with the incompleteness of images. Mitchell used Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) to explain his point. As Riis wrote, his flash powder almost set a tenement on fire, and consequently, the powerless subjects appeared dazed and passive under the harsh illumination. According to Mitchell, a resistant interpretation arises from the image and text—that is, the text incites viewers to question whether such violence can be justified for shock value alone. Mitchell noted that the fact is, Riis’s documents focused more on surveillance than social work.54

Similar to Riis’s photographic subject, the maritime laborers that Sekula captures represent the contemporary powerless people who have been socially and economically marginalized, almost to the point of losing their revolutionary power.

However, Riis’s work and Sekula’s text differ greatly in terms of the documentary ethics they employ to bring these obscured subjects to the surface. Whereas Riis’s captions tend to depict the powerless subjects as the lethargic and underserving poor, the captions in Fish Story help viewers trace the long-standing marginalization of the powerless subjects and the social factors responsible for such dehumanization.55

54 W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 284–287. 55 In addition to W. J. T. Mitchell, Susan Sontag discusses the last section of War Against War (1924), a book in which Ernst Friedrich presented photographs of severely wounded soldiers’ faces in the First

39 As I have already argued, the captions in Fish Story are demanding as they ask the viewer to perform the physical and intellectual labor of moving backward and forward to identify an image’s caption and unravel the complex relationships among similar subjects that appear repeatedly in the photobook. One result of this process is that the captions ask the viewer to think about globalization in both a synchronic and diachronic manner. Written words sometimes provide the knowledge about a specific event that happened in a specific time and place, while other times they point to how the relational events have been expanded in distanced areas. A photograph of

Koreatown taken during the 1992 Los Angeles riots exemplifies this point [Fig. 17]. In this image, a burning storefront appears in the middle of the chapter without providing any direct interpretation of it in the text. Fragments of glass are scattered in front of a shop, and the toppled billboard on the roof points to the gloomy sky. One firefighter attempts to extinguish the fires, but his effort seems futile. Although the photograph was taken in April of 1992 in Koreatown during the Los Angeles riots,56 the caption

World War. According to Sontag, Friedrich translated the caption into four languages (German, French, Dutch, and English) in order to ensure that his criticism of German militarists’ ideologies and brutality could be understood internationally. Like Mitchell, Sontag takes a critical position regarding the fact that the text adds to the images capacity to present the powerless victims as mere spectacle. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 13–16. 56 Los Angeles officially designated Koreatown as a community in 1980, but the area has been a magnet for Korean businesses since a number of Koreans moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s in response to a new immigration law. The town is loosely bound by Pico Boulevard to the south, Crenshaw Avenue to the west, Hoover Street to the east, and Beverly Boulevard to the north, but all attempts to instate distinct boundaries on the area remain impossible. Yong Mok Kim, “The Korean American Community in Southern California” in Community in Crisis: The Korean American Community After the Los Angeles Civil Unrest of April 1992, eds. George O. Totten III and H. Eric Schockman (Los Angeles: Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies, University of Southern California), p. 6.

40 does not provide that context; instead, only the place and year are mentioned—

“Koreatown, Los Angeles, April, 1992.”57 Explaining the image, Sekula said, “I wanted to introduce the question to an astute viewer: Why this photo is in this context

[in the first chapter]? Then, of course, later Korea appears and brings up questions regarding the relationship between the United States and South Korea [in the third and fourth chapters].”58 In fact, the third chapter states briefly that the Sea-Land Quality was first built by a Korean company, Daewoo, after being commissioned by the now- defunct United States Lines of Malcom McLean, the trucking executive who initiated the containerized cargo movement in 1956.59 And the entire fourth chapter focuses on the shipyard industry of a global Korean company, Hyundai, including the discussion

Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson said that, in the case of Koreatown, the riots impacted a space that had been transformed into highly specified and culturally charged places by Korean Americans, Latinos, and African Americans, all of whom lived and worked in close proximity to one another. According to them, the challenge to the claims of these groups’ rights to define these places accordingly echoed the following questions: “Who has the power to declare spaces for certain communities? Who contests these declarations? What is at stake?” These questions undergirded the basis of the riots. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond Culture: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7 (February, 1992): 11. 57 Twenty years after the riots, The Los Angeles Times summarized the event as follows: “On the afternoon of April 29, 1992, a jury in Ventura County acquitted four LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) officers of beating Rodney G. King. The incident, caught on amateur videotape, had sparked national debate about police brutality and racial injustice. The verdict stunned Los Angeles, where angry crowds gathered on street corners across the city. The flash point was a single intersection in South L.A., but it was a scene eerily repeated in many parts of the city in the hours that followed.” The Los Angeles Times Staff, “The L. A. Riot: 20 Years Later,” The Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2012. The riots in Los Angeles are also known as the Rodney King riots; the South Central riots; the 1992 Los Angeles civil disturbance; the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest; and the Los Angeles uprising. It was the largest riot seen in the United States since the Detroit riot of 1967, and it was the largest in Los Angeles since the Watts riot of 1965. Fifty-three people died and more than ten thousand were injured. 58 Allan Sekula and Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen, “Interview with Allan Sekula: Los Angeles, California, October 26, 2002”: 158. 59 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, p. 74.

41 of the triangular relationship among South Korea, North Korea, and the United States.

Significantly, viewers might not see the short caption for the Koreatown image due to its placement at the end of the chapter’s images, and very few viewers are likely to make the intellectual connection between the first chapter’s image and the third and the fourth chapters’ focal points in the absence of outside assistance.

However, ten pages before the Koreatown scene, two adjacent photographs present three men of color—an African, an Asian, and a Hispanic workers [Fig. 18–19].

In an interview, Sekula stated, “[They are] working alongside each other in their incredibly claustrophobic engine-room space, fitting it out. I was hoping that there might be a resonance for people, moving from that image to the Koreatown image.”60

In this way, Sekula’s setting of those three workers and the Koreatown images in the first chapter—plus his discussions about the Korean shipyard industry in the third and fourth chapters—demonstrates a structural complexity that parallels the interconnected nature of globalization. A viewer of Sekula’s work might begin by seeking out the place and year of the Koreatown scene during or after browsing the first chapter. From that point, he or she might recall a visual memory of three men of color and mentally connect them with the burning store image and the caption’s words. After that, he or she could speculate about the L. A. riots, which happened as a consequence of complex racial conflicts among diverse ethnic groups living in Los Angeles. In fact, one of the reasons that Koreatown incurred so much destruction during the riots stems

60 Allan Sekula and Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen, “Interview with Allan Sekula: Los Angeles, California, October 26, 2002”: 160.

42 from the rocky relationship between the Korean immigrants who owned their shops and quickly accumulated wealth and the African Americans who resented those

Korean Americans.61 The riots started after a jury acquitted the white police officers who used excessive violence on Rodeny King, and as the violence spread, Koreatown became a target of the resentful mob.62 The New York Times wrote:

The nation’s largest Korean-American community is grim, armed and determined to repel racial violence in its riot-scarred corner of the city […] Lawrence Aubry, a member of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, said Korean merchants had become a lightning rod for the discontent of some black residents. Many blacks in Los Angeles have remained poor as, one after another, immigrant groups have arrived and climbed past them to prosperity. “It’s illogical, but it’s convenient to target the Koreans.”63

61 The conflicts between Korean immigrants and African Americans were quite complicated. In response to one of the core reasons African Americans felt resentful of Korean immigrants, The New York Times explained an incident that happened one year before the riots and wrote, “The Koreans have become the focus of black resentment since the videotaped fatal shooting by a Korean grocer of a 15•year•old black girl, Latasha Harlins, last year. The resentment boiled over last November when a judge declined to send the grocer, Soon Ja Du, to prison after she was convicted of manslaughter.” Seth Mydans, “Riot in Los Angeles: Pocket of Tension; A Target of Rioters, Koreatown Is Bitter, Armed and Determined,” The New York Times, May 3, 1992. 62 Nancy Abelmann and John Lie provided a historical and sociological evaluation of Koreans in America and southern California with the ethnographic exploration of the effects of the riots on Korean Americans drawn from a broad generational and class spectrum in the greater Los Angeles area. According to them, “The complexities/confusions of Korean American politics refract the major political and ideological struggles of our time: the persisting divides of ethnicity and class, the meaning and morality of community, and the conflicts over gender and multiculturalism.” Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 185. 63 This quote is from Seth Mydans’s interview with Lawrence Aubry, a member of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, Seth Mydans, “Riot in Los Angeles: Pocket of Tension; A Target of Rioters, Koreatown Is Bitter, Armed and Determined.”

This kind of news was reported internationally, so some viewers might remember what happened in Koreatown during the riots. And Korean-ness might come to mind when those viewers reach the third and the fourth chapters.

As The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times reported on the attacks in

Koreatown, they also attributed many common features to Korean immigrants living in

Los Angeles. For example, Korean immigrants were described as ethnocentric, hard- working, economically successful people who valued solidarity.64 As I discuss in the

64 By focusing on how Korean immigrants gathered together to help each other defend themselves during the riots, The Los Angeles Times wrote, “From the rooftop of his supermarket, a group of Koreans armed with shotguns and automatic weapons peered onto the smoky streets. Scores of others, carrying steel pipes, pistols and automatic rifles, paced through the darkened parking lot in anticipation of an assault by looters […] For some Koreans, the violence has sparked a renewed call for conciliation between the races. But for others, the world has become framed in a blind and vindictive anger […] Koreans from throughout the area have rushed to Koreatown, spearheaded by a small group of elite Korean marine veterans, heeding a call put out on Korean-language radio stations for volunteer security guards.” Ashley Dunn, “King Case Aftermath: A City in Crisis: Looters, Merchants Put Koreatown Under the Gun: Violence: Lacking Confidence in the Police, Employees and Others Armed Themselves to Protect Minimall,” The Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1992. The New York Times also explained how Korean immigrants’ feelings about their hard work, wealth, and racial prejudice against African Americans. In an interview with some Korean Americans, the paper stated, “‘I think the black people are jealous of the Koreans,’ he said, voicing a gut feeling that many Korean residents express privately but are too careful to state in public. ‘They’re lazy; we are working hard. They’re not making money; we are making money’ […] ‘I am working, working, working. I work 10, 12, 15 hours a day, hard working. My whole family is working.” Seth Mydans, “Riot in Los Angeles: Pocket of Tension; A Target of Rioters, Koreatown Is Bitter, Armed and Determined.” The Los Angeles Times wrote about the massive peace march organized by Korean immigrants after the riots. Emphasizing the collectivity of Korean people and their solidarity, the paper wrote, “An estimated 30,000 people—some wearing white headbands of mourning, some carrying brooms and plastic garbage bags—marched through Los Angeles’ Koreatown on Saturday in a massive show of support for beleaguered merchants […] The marchers, many of whom were not directly affected by the violence, came from such outlying areas as San Diego, Laguna Niguel, Santa Monica and the South Bay in response to appeals from a Korean-language radio station that they gather in Ardmore Park in

44 next section, these characteristics (hard-working, successful, etc.) also appear in the fourth chapter, when Sekula shows how Hyundai, a Korean company, became one of the multinational conglomerates that fuel economic inequality among different races and ethnic groups across the globe. Most of the scenes in the fourth chapter depict

Ulsan, South Korea, where the world’s largest shipyard, Hyundai Heavy Industries, resides. The text in that chapter also provides some historical anecdotes about Hyundai and the Korean War. In this regard, the function of the accompanying caption with the

Koreatown image is pivotal as it reveals relationships between the images which then enable the viewer to solve Sekula’s juxtaposition of Korea-related globalization and its effects. First, the word Koreatown in the caption calls attention to the dynamic territorial tension in the conceptualization of Korea. This tension is carried out via the context of the global (the Korean company, Hyundai), the diasporic (the Korea immigrants in Los Angeles), and the local (the city of Ulsan). Second, the act of searching for the caption helps the viewer see not only societal matters in the present, but also historical concerns. After all, the viewer will encounter the Koreatown image and later the anecdote about Hyundai, which explains how the company became an

Koreatown […] A black youth waved a South Korean flag from a curb and thrust a fist into the air in a gesture of solidarity. The marchers, most of whom were Korean American, cheered.” Irene Chang and Greg Krikorian, “A City in Crisis: 30,000 Show Support in Koreatown March: Demonstration: Various Ethnic Groups Gather. They Call for Peace: ‘We want no more fighting,’” The Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1992. Concerning how the peace march expressed Korean traditional performance and music, see: Timothy R. Tangherliini, “Remapping Koreatown: Folklore, Narrative and the Los Angeles Riots,” Western Folklore, Vol. 58 (Winter, January, 1999): 155–157.

45 international force during the Korean and Vietnam Wars.65 Indeed, here I argue that, as

Best and Marcus suggest, the surface reader could use the data presented in the captions (with photography) to investigate history more thoroughly. Fish Story asks the viewer via the captions to explore the images to contextualize their contents properly.

The captions in Fish Story activate the viewer to remap the information contained within the photographs, which present a range of geographical locales, and then to recontextualize globalization’s effects given the new understanding of the local histories.

Fish Story does not point to the origins of specific events or provide linear time lines. Still, Sekula’s unique juxtaposition of images, corresponding captions, and structuring of the chapters speaks to historical accounts. Regarding the historical perspective of the development of capitalism, Fernand Braudel argued that temporal plurality could be understood through temporalities of long and very long durations, slowly evolving and less slowly evolving situations, rapid and virtually instantaneous deviations. The quickest, he asserts, is the easiest to detect.66 Similarly, Sekula’s interests in representing temporality—the ways in which time exists within multiple layers in advancing global capitalism—is observed in a variety of ways in Fish Story.

One photograph shows a wrench that has been moved from its position on a dusty table [Fig. 20]. As a result of being moved long after the welder’s booth closed, the

65 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, p. 102. 66 Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism: The Fifteenth Century to the Eighteenth Century, The Perspective of the World, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), pp. 21–44.

46 viewer sees an outline in the dust where the wrench once rested. The vestige of the wrench implies a slowly changing situation in which the once-busy seaport declined and eventually closed. Another scene presents a diptych that captures a girl’s sequential yet temporally distorted movement near a white car [Fig. 21–22]. Astute viewers would notice that the obscured brand of the car is Hyundai. Here, Sekula crystallizes the moments of the girl’s quick movements that occur over a long period of time, which mirrors Hyundai’s domination of the transportation industry in South

Korea. Regarding the representation of globalization’s effects, the contingent moments that Sekula photographed introduce the concrete life events that happened around the sea. Meanwhile, the captions serve to keep the crucial concept of globalization’s hegemonic power by activating the viewer to move back and forth between international waters and local areas. In this way, the viewer comes to contextualize the diverse scales and speeds of globalization’s effects.67 Indeed, this is the way in which

Fish Story achieves the nearly impossible task of representing the history of globalization in an international context.

67 This idea came from the following passage: “Photographs do not choose the subjects whose significance has been established outside the frame […] they record whatever might happen […] Contingency introduces the element of life […] but too much contingency threatens the crucial representational concept of totality, wholeness.” Mary Ann Doan, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 11.

47 Description: Searching for the Obscured Exercises of Power in Local Histories

Sekula stated that Fish Story is “a sort of triangulated space bounded by literature, film, and painting.”68 Whereas the previous section discusses how the captions assist the viewer to connect multiple contingent moments involving similar subjects crossing the vast geographical surface, this section discusses how the descriptions draw the viewer’s reasoning to make sense of a specific, local area in the expanded temporal landscape. The descriptions appear on one to four pages in each chapter, and each page of description is framed and displayed with the images in a gallery space with the images of each chapter [Fig. 4]. The descriptions demonstrate diverse types of writings. The first chapter, for instance, begins with Sekula’s memory—how he spent most of his childhood in a harbor and how his curiosity about marine space developed from there. The second chapter describes an interesting rumor that proposes weapon trades between the United States and Iraq or Iran have taken place secretly on the sea. The third chapter is constructed with collected notes from a bulletin board of a workers’ room inside a ship—this part explains how sailors and crew members spend twenty-four hours on the ship. The fourth and the sixth chapter provide a critical depiction of Ulsan, South Korea, and Veracruz, Mexico. The fifth chapter discusses Jules Verne’s novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, in terms of its relation to fishery in Spain. Finally, the seventh chapter expounds upon the

68 Allan Sekula and Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen, “Interview with Allan Sekula: Los Angeles, California, October 26, 2002”: 164.

48 fact that the ship has been an imaginary place for riots, and at the same time, functioned as a prison or an engine of escape throughout history.

Discussing the blurred division between fact and fiction in the writing of history, Jacques Rancière has argued:

[One of the problems about the phantom of a historical reality] concerns the idea of fiction and the relationship between fictional rationality and the modes of explanation used for historical and social reality, the relationship between the logic of fiction and the logic of facts […] The clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible.69

Here, Rancière emphasizes that fictional rationality is not about falsity; rather, it is an unavoidable element used to make sense of the rational logic of history. Similarly,

Sekula described Fish Story in an interview as “a sort of experimental essay in words and pictures that sometimes reads like fiction, sometimes like an essay, sometimes journalism, sometimes prose-poetry.”70 More precisely, regarding the descriptions in each chapter, Sekula said, “A series of chapters in Fish Story which is a combination of image and texts is a novella—a pictorial and textual novella leads a kind of relay from one to the next.”71 Although Sekula is a documentarian, the fictional elements are important for Sekula to illustrate the qualified historical and social reality. Throughout each chapter’s descriptions, the voice, tone, rhetoric, resource, and even genre shift

69 Jacques Rancière, “Is History a Form of Fiction?” in The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), pp. 35–36. 70 Sukhdev Sandhu, “Review: ARTS: Life on the oceans: Allan Sekula’s New Film, about Global Maritime Trade,” The Guardian, April 21, 2012. 71 Allan Sekula and Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen, “Interview with Allan Sekula: Los Angeles, California, October 26, 2002”: 156.

49 occasionally. In particular, the fifth chapter’s descriptions focus intently on Jules

Verne’s science fiction novel, which interacts interestingly with the photographs taken in Vigo, Spain.

In the descriptions of the fifth chapter, Sekula calls attention to some portions of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Written by a French novelist, Jules

Gabriel Verne in 1870, the book has achieved lasting high acclaim from its release to the present as one of the best adventure novels involving marine space. Sekula notes that the protagonist, Captain Nemo, linked the economies of the land and the sea in

Vigo in order to accumulate wealth. His submarine, Nautilus, was well ahead of its time in terms of the technology it employs according to Verne. Indeed, Nemo and his submarine embody the secret idealism of all science fiction that centers on the sea.

However, in the last paragraph of the description for this chapter, Sekula writes, “On the Praza de Compostela one can buy inexpensive paperback editions […] but the book is nowhere to be found […] The indifference of Verne and his hero Nemo is […] a function of an economic attitude: the distrust borne toward submarines by those who work the surface of the sea.”72 Sekula embodies this notion in the photographic mood of the fifth chapter, which differs substantially from the onetime hero, Nemo’s economic success. The photographs present contemporary fishermen in Spain who are on strike to protest governmental cutbacks in unemployment benefits and the economic setbacks caused by global fish markets. Through the geographical link of

Vigo and the fictional protagonist, Nemo, who lacks a definitive nationality in the

72 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, p. 141.

50 novel, the descriptions substantiate the fact that Nemo’s success in no way echoes contemporary, Spanish maritime industries.73 In this way, the novel conveys a contrast between the past and the present ideas about the sea.

According to Rancière, fiction is not a matter of semblance and artifice; instead, it originates from the Latin fingere, meaning to “forge” but not “to feign”— that is, “to construct a system of represented actions, assembled forms, and internally coherent signs.”74 Additionally, he argued that fictional rationality is “no longer identified with the Aristotelian causal sequence of actions according to necessity and plausibility [but with] an arrangement of signs […] inscribed in the general aspect of a place, a group, a wall, an article of clothing, a face.”75 Rancière identifies how to construct signs and enhance narrative quality. As such, the descriptions in the fifth chapter deal with fictional elements in order to show how the ideas about the sea, as well as Spanish maritime industries have been transformed. However, some descriptions and accompanying images in other chapters feature a variety of signs more directly connected to construction of a local history, which imparts a rational logic of history. For example, the fourth chapter, “Seventy in Seven,” concentrates on a

Korean company, Hyundai, and its shipyard industry in Ulsan, South Korea. The photographs are filled with the signs inscribed in the local city—the company’s shipyard and workers, the city’s streets and citizens, and the work uniforms and

73 About Nemo’s characters, see: Swati Dasgupta, “Jules Verne Re-discovered,” India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Summer, 2005): 87–106. 74 Jacques Rancière, “Documentary Fiction: Maker and the Fiction of Memory” in Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 2006), p. 158. 75 Jacques Rancière, “Is History a Form of Fiction?” pp. 36–37.

51 residential areas. The first line of the description reads, “Seventy years in Europe is equal to seven years in Korea, said by the left-wing South Korean intellectuals.”76

This sentence points to the fact that the South Korean economy has grown rapidly after the Second World War—the fact has caused some historians to point to the Korean

“miracle.”77 The fourth chapter demonstrates how the historical knowledge about

Korean maritime industries and laborers is viewed through a compressed time—seven years instead of seventy years.

Many Korean words appear throughout the fourth chapter among the photographic signs despite the fact that Fish Story was originally designed for English readers. English and Spanish words rarely appear, even though those languages are more likely to be understood by viewers.78 On the one hand, the Korean words

76 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, p. 101. 77 Bruce Cumings discussed the “miracle” of economic growth in Asia, especially in Japan and South Korea. He attributed this success, which began in the mid of the 1960s, to America’s political and economic engagement. He stated that South Korea became one of the wealthiest countries in Asia and was often symbolized as the “tiger of Asia,” or the “miracle of the Han River. South Korea was governed by the military government from the 1960s to the 1980s. During this time, two dictators, Junghee Park (1963–1979) and Doo-hwan Jeon (1980–1988), became the president as a result of the military revolution. During their regimes, the slogans such as “fastest and the most effective” were used as a means of achieving national economic growth. Plus, the enlightening project of agricultural villages was expanded to the factory’s laborers and civic workers. Bruce Cumings, “The Korean Crisis and the End of ‘Late’ Development,” New Left Review I/231 (September–October, 1998): 43–72. 78 The English and Spanish words do not appear often in the photographs of Fish Story, except the logos and names printed on ships, container boxes, and other objects. However, some words appear in three photographs, all of which seem to be captured intentionally. In contrast to the billboard of a casino building, the viewer sees a statue of man holding a book inscribed with the names Marx, Engels, and Lenin (Plate 23, Poland); “I cannot be fired. Slaves are sold” is written on an engine room wiper’s ear protection (Plate 37, on the ship, Sea-Land Quality); and on a shop window, a piece of paper notes, “Nos Deben 18 Sueldos,” which is a response to the fact that the shop has been occupied for eighteen months

52 enhance the localism of Ulsan as a place located far from the capital, Seoul. Ulsan, the seventh largest city of South Korea, functions as an industrial powerhouse for the country, but it is not cosmopolitan. On the other hand, the Korean words render certain portions of the photobook illegible and indecipherable for most viewers despite their highly symbolic nature. The corresponding descriptions employ diverse resources, such as Sekula’s speculation about and observation of the city, Korean novels, anecdotes, and rumors—all of which contain fictional elements. Here, by interacting with the Korean words captured on photography and the descriptions, viewers construct a system of actions, forms, and signs, as Rancière argued, to make sense of present-day Korea—that is, how South Korea achieved modernization, industrialization, and economic growth for a short time. More precisely, the illegible and indecipherable Korean words function like an unreadable signifier, which is at the core of present-day South Korea despite being neglected in history as a result of the swiftness of globalization. In other words, Sekula’s display of Korean words renders the unseen or ignored in history visible—here, it is to seek for what is presented yet unreadable on the photographic surface, not for what is absent, latent, or repressed as I have discussed in Best and Marcus’s surface reading. And if the viewer remembers the

Koreatown image or Koreans in general, he or she will likely comprehend the tension between globalism and localism and recontextualize Korea with a larger perspective.

due to a payment dispute (Plate 65, Spain). Thus, Sekula’s inclusion of multiple Korean words is relatively exceptional and may be intentional.

53 The descriptions in the fourth chapter begin with Sekula’s paranoid observation of the Ulsan city. He writes:

In Ulsan […] it is possible to stay in a Hyundai-owned hotel, schedule appointments by Hyundai cellular telephone, shop […] at the Hyundai department store, and travel in a Hyundai automobile to meeting with the officials for the world’s largest shipyard, a division of Hyundai Heavy Industries.79

According to Sekula, Hyundai, one of South Korea’s chaebols is an entity of hyper- capitalism and family-dynastic Stalinism.80 It has fueled globalists’ profits on one hand, and devastated socioeconomic ecosystems on the other.81 About chaebols,

Jameson writes:

All of these so-called “modernities”—the kinship capitalism [such as] chaebol in Korea, all presuppose specific, and pre-existing, forms of social organization, based on the order of the family—whether as clan, extended network, or in the more conventional sense. In this respect, the resistance to the global free market is finally not cultural […] but ultimately social in nature.82

79 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, p. 101. 80 Ibid., 103. 81 A chaebol (the word consists of two parts, chae, which means wealth or property, and bol, which means faction or clan) is a South Korean form of a business conglomerate. The South Korean chaebols are typically global or multinational organizations that own numerous international enterprises and family-run organizations. The chaebol has influenced South Korean politics significantly. In 1988, a member of a chaebol family, Mong-jun Chung, the president of Hyundai Heavy Industries, successfully ran for the National Assembly of South Korea. 82 Fredric Jameson, “Globalization and Political Strategy”: 61.

54 Jameson argues that it is nearly impossible to resist this preexisting form of a global market, chaebol, because different societies suffered different modernization processes that established a socially intrinsic quality into the free market and its global expansion.

Actually, the word Hyundai, which occupies Ulsan and invades the citizens’ daily lives and mental states, appears multiple times in the photographs. However, the term

Hyundai has two different meanings in Korean. As a proper noun, Hyundai is widely known as the Korean conglomerate, but the word’s original meaning as a noun or adjective is modern. There is no comment about how this word parallels the rapid modernization that preoccupied South Korean society after the end of the Korean War in 1953. Instead, the first photograph of the chapter shows a ship featuring the words,

“Hyundai Utopia” in Korean and English [Fig. 23], which effectively opens the chapter with a critical question.83 What does “Hyundai Utopia” mean? Is Ulsan a utopian city occupied by Hyundai, or is Hyundai the modernists’ idea of a dreamy utopia?

Amid such rapid modernization within this compressed time period, it might be unavoidable that some parts of history have become neglected. This fact is demonstrated in the second photograph of the chapter, which depicts the model of

Admiral Yi Sun-Sin’s “turtle-ship” at the headquarters of the Hyundai building [Fig.

24]. The ship model’s unusual head looks like a lion rather than a turtle, but its turtle- back deck seems solid enough to defend itself against any attacks. Virtually all Korean

83 Interestingly, the Korean, English, and Chinese characters are written on three lines. The Korean and English texts are written next to “Hyundai Utopia,” but the Chinese text is written by “Korea Hyundai.”

55 people are familiar with the turtle-ship, and it is a symbol of the advanced ship-making skills and the Korean victory against the Japanese invasion in 1592. Around the ship model, two explanatory signs present Korean sentences. The first line of the rear sign states, “‘The Hyundai Spirit’  ‘The Scholarization of the Turtle Ship’ → ‘The Launch of the Hyundai Heavy Industry.’” And the front sign states, “Our ancestors were the great people (the ethnic group).” These two sentences illustrate Hyundai’s propensity for propaganda via the cursory link with the turtle-ship. Without any explanation about what “The Hyundai Spirit” is, the company forges its identity by Korean nationalism, patriotism, and ethnocentrism through the words “turtle-ship” and “the great people.”84

And then, in order to link the presented words, the rear sign uses the marks “” and

“→” as if the company intends to cram as much historical education as they can into the visible text. Rather than explaining such absurd sentences one by one, Sekula writes, “The overt appearance of a purely ‘national’ industry obscures more complicated lineages and patterns of investment. Hyundai propaganda strives to keep the story simple.” And then, in addition to the short note about the turtle-ship, he mentions historical resources such as the Paleolithic fishing people in Korea, the transition from wooden to iron ships in the nineteenth-century Britain, and the formal similarity between the ship and the Guggenheim in Bilbao.85 By criticizing the

84 Because of the brutal occupation of Korea by Japan from 1910 to 1945, the two countries’ relationship has been antagonistic for a long time. The reference of the turtle-ship unconsciously incites Korean nationalism and patriotism, which has been constructed for a long time as emotional resentment of the Japanese. The story of Admiral Yi Sun-Sin and his turtle-ship has been represented and reproduced in numerous ways within Korean culture, including textbooks, novels, dramas, and movies. 85 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, p. 101.

56 simplification of Korean maritime history and providing more resources to expand a historical perspective, the descriptions expound upon the unreadable Korean words via historical accounts.

The two sets of photographs in the middle of the chapter demonstrate how the descriptions play with a Korean word in order to make a statement about the neglected history of Korean female labor. A diptych illustrates a female shipyard worker handling heavy steel with an electronic saw on a dangerous rail [Fig. 15–16]. The images capture two moments of the woman at work, and the second seems to occur immediately after the first. The next image shows a mother and her baby surrounded by an old fishing village [Fig. 25]. Here, the viewer receives an interesting clue regarding the baby’s sex. A truck appears behind them with the name of a brand of spicy ramen, go-choo. That Korean word happens to mean pepper or penis, which implies that the baby is probably male. Unlike other photographs, Sekula does not mention anything about the mother and son. Instead, he discusses the Hyundai apartment buildings decorated with a drawing resembling the style of the eighteenth- century genre painter, Sin Yun-Bok. The drawing features a traditional Korean housewife weaving textiles [Fig. 26]. Connecting the shipyard worker and the weaver,

Sekula writes:

Nonetheless, the name Hyundai is given […] to the building […] The reassuring domestic diligence of the pictured women suggests a comforting

I assert a direct relationship between the descriptions and images presented in the fourth chapter only when the sentence exactly denotes the specific objects or scenes presented in the photographs.

57 barrier between the factory and the home, while masking the fact that it is women who also perform the most menial jobs in the shipyard.86

Placed between the scenes of a female factory worker and a weaving woman, the

Korean word go-choo in the image with the mother and son serves to indicate how the socioeconomic hierarchy between two kinds of women’s jobs was formed by a Korean patriarchal system. Indeed, Korean factory workers, in particular female workers, have been largely disdained and designated gong-soon-yi, despite the fact that their labor formed the basis of South Korean industrial growth and exportation in the 1960s and

1970s.87 Conversely, housewives’ feminized positions and domestic endeavors have been socio-politically and culturally protected.88 Although Sekula’s descriptions do

86 Ibid., 101. 87 Regarding gong-soon-yi, gong comes from the first part of the word for factory (gong-jang), and soon-yi stems from one of the most common yet old-fashioned names for Korean women in the 1960s and 1970s. 88 Seungsook Moon discussed the gender politics (including how they applied to housewives and factory workers) in South Korea from 1963 to 1992 with a historical perspective. According to Moon, the militarized political state in South Korea had contributed to the recomposition of masculine dominance through the feminizing policies directed at women during the process of economic development. She found that the root of the feminizing policies came from Confucianism in Korea and its gender ideology, which is deeply ingrained in the Korean collective psyche and everyday speech. The ideology emphasizes normative femininity centered on women’s reproduction and domestic jobs, and it limits the roles of women to mothers, wives, and daughters-in-law. According to Moon, on the one hand, the military authoritarian state (from 1963 through the dictatorship of Junghee Park) was conscious of the utility of women as mothers and wives since its inception, and it established numerous institutions, workshops, and clubs to prepare women for their roles as household managers and family planners. On the other hand, she argued that, despite the quantitative expansion of female factory workers and their crucial role in the export-driven economy during South Korean industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s, the female factory workers’ productive and public identities had been extremely marginalized. Their labor was centered on feminized, manual industries such as the creation of textiles or wigs, whereas highly technical work was given to men. And because of the female factory workers’ minimal education, they were underpaid. According to Moon, the military authoritarian

58 not explicit comment on Korean patriarchy, his cynical stance and the photographic context invites the viewer to the question Korean people’s collective psychological bias regarding gender roles, and the Korean word go-choo alludes to this bias.

After investigating the simplification and neglect of Korean maritime and labor history, it is important to contextualize Korea within the scope of international relations. One photograph depicts a street scene in Seoul with a model of an American

B-29 bomber and two sign boards [Fig. 27]. One sign board reads, “Peace Keeping” in

Chinese, which most Korean people can read easily, and the other reads, “World Peace” in English. With the latter, one drawing illustrates how the B-29 packs and carries bombs. Though it occupies the center of the photograph, the plane seems neglected by passersby, as if the history of the B-29 has been forgotten. In fact, the B-29 was used during the Korean War and remains infamous for its role in the American bombing of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the end of the Second World War. The image reminds the viewer of the division between South Korea and North Korea—a division enforced by the United States and the Soviet Union, the twentieth-century’s superpowers. However, instead of interpreting the Chinese words or explaining the significance of the B-29, Sekula writes:

Can chaebol reunite the exchange of the most deadly token of “peaceful” development potlatch: the nuclear reactor […] What will the abyss of North Korea wages do to the momentary Fordist prosperity of South Korea’s

state has utilized varying degrees of repressive labor control as a means of guaranteeing the supply of cheap and docile female labor since the 1960s. Seungsook Moon, “Economic development and gender politics in South Korea (1963–1992),” (Ph. D dissertation, Brandeis University, 1994): 182–303.

59 chaebol employees? The whole affair is coached and prodded by anxious American diplomats and military commanders afraid of losing their grip on Asia, who understand the condition of permanent war to be the primary engine of economic development.89

Combined with Sekula’s strong criticism and sarcasm of chaebol in South Korea and

American interventionism in Korea, the Chinese and English words promote a syntactical relationship that asks the viewer to question who is keeping world peace and for what purpose. In this context, the illegible and indecipherable Chinese word highlights what is obscured, behind which the American force manages two of Koreas’ fragile relationships in order to maintain world peace or engine economic development.

The next photograph displays a blurred object—an oil-tank truck speeding down the highway. Near the end of the fourth chapter, the truck seems to epitomize what has been forgotten in South Korea as a result of the compression of time—seventy in seven.

That is, the fourth chapter’s reductive treatment of the complex narratives of the

Korean War, the division of South Korea and North Korea, and American interventionism in Korea implies a profound historical amnesia.

89 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, p. 103. Cumings claimed that Americans have always sought unimpeded access to the East Asian region and have sought native governments strong enough to maintain independence “but not strong enough to throw off Western capital.” Regarding South Korea, he focused on the U.S. forces in South Korea and the National Security Law, which were established in 1948 to assist the Americans in the Cold War. He argued that South Korea has spent a great deal of money, which is extracted from the Korean citizens, in order to keep massive armies, including U.S. forces, in South Korea. Given such immense expenses, outside funding, mostly in the form of American aid, has been necessary. Consequently, South Korea is simultaneously strong and weak. Bruce Cumings, “The Korean Crisis and the End of ‘Late’ Development”: 43–72.

60 Because of Sekula’s snapshot-like approach to taking pictures, the Korean words that appear seem accidental or chance-based. Nevertheless, the text invariably references South Korean society.90 Via interaction with the chapter’s descriptions and photographed signs, each of the words functions as an unreadable signifier that denotes a specific power system in South Korea. That is, the Korean sentences surrounding the turtle-ship are connected to the nationalistic, patriotic, and ethnocentric propaganda of chaebol in South Korea; the word go-choo functions to allude to a Korean patriarchal system; and the Chinese word for Peace Keeping references America’s interventionism in Korea. Indeed, all of these power systems—chaebol, patriarchy, and American interventionism in Korea—have been blamed for the present sociopolitical issues in

South Korean society. In addition, the illegibility and indecipherability of those words point to the invisibility of the power exercises that the various power systems enforce.

According to John Tomilinson, despite an exclusive focus on territorial compression in regards to globalization, the majority of human activity remains tied to concrete geographical locations; thus, globalization deals with the ways in which distant forces impact local endeavors.91 As such, the visible Korean words captured on photography symbolize dualistic faces of the obscured power systems—concurrently ensuring

South Korea’s rapid economic growth and impairing its socioeconomic ecosystems.

And the corresponding descriptions engage the viewer’s reasoning so he or she can

90 Sekula uses the term unavoidable social referentiality when he explains his idea about the photographic medium and his realist position. Allan Sekula, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973–1983, p. ix. 91 John Tomilinson, Globalization and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 9.

61 make sense of how such complex power relations have operated with the tension between the global and the local.

Essay: Historicizing the Modes of Visibility

Fish Story is replete with complex references—historical allusions and anecdotes explore transformations within the maritime world from the early to the late periods of global capitalism. In particular, two essays, Dismal Science: Part 1 and

Dismal Science: Part 2, which are placed after the second and the fourth chapters, offer more aesthetic approaches to the sea by drawing upon a vast range of artistic and theoretical legacies.92 For Sekula, the essay is an important genre: he once defined his film The Forgotten Space (2010; in collaboration with Noël Burch) as essay-film.93

Sekula said, “What we’re struggling with here [in the film] is the big story, and no one thinks they can tell the big story anymore.”94 For Sekula, the big story means understanding and representing the present via the history of advanced, neoliberal, and global capitalism, and the essay form is the an essential part of disussing such big stories. On the one hand, the combined genre of essay and film in The Forgotten Space

92 Using the same titles of these two essays, Sekula published a book, Allan Sekula: Dismal Science: Photoworks 1972–1996 (Normal: Illinois State University Press, 1999). The book represents a definitive edition of seven photographic projects made by Sekula, and it also includes a number of critical essays by Sekula about contemporary photography. The book was published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the University Galleries of Illinois State University that traveled to eight venues from 1996 to 1998, including the Netherlands Foto Iinstitute, Rotterdam; the Munich Kunstverein in München, Germany; and John Curtin Gallery, Perth, Australia. 93 Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, “Notes on the Forgotten Space,” (2010). 94 “Forgotten Spaces” (Panel discussion with Allan Sekula, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, David Harvey), The Cooper Union, Rose Auditorium, New York, NY, May 15, 2011.

62 involves dismantling the narratives of globalization; and on the other, it provides a view of history—at this time from the end of the world wars to the present—that goes beyond a simple interpretation. All of these things are achieved by viewers’ cognitive processes via text and multiple audio-visual resources in the essay-film.95

Sekula’s emphases on the historicization of capitalism and the dynamic layouts are demonstrated well in the essays of Fish Story either. The two essays investigate the histories of painting, literature, and film, and employ the works of

Engels, Marx, Brecht, Benjamin, Foucault, and other notable theorists.96 In so doing,

Sekula’s essays seek to explain how the representational systems of the sea have changed over time—that is, how the sea has been perceived and conceptualized in art and literature. Sekula’s deployment of the three types of text in Fish Story presents a carefully calculated decision. I have discussed, for instance, how the captions activate the viewer’s physical, as well intellectual labor to elucidate how long and where maritime laborers have been marginalized by globalization. I have also analyzed how the descriptions encourage the development of the viewer’s reasoning to make sense of complex power relations by searching for the illegible and indecipherable Korean words. In this section, I examine each essay’s discussion of the representational systems, by which viewers/readers can historicize the multiple modes of visibility that penetrate the dynamic operations of power on the sea.

95 Talia Shabtay, “The Art and the Politics of The Forgotten Space,” Oxford Art Journal, 38:2 (2015): 275–276. 96 Jill Glessing, “Light in Dark Spaces: a Review of Allan Sekula and Noel Burch’s Film Essay: The Forgotten Space (2010),” CineAction 88 (Jun 22, 2012): 58.

63 The first essay, Dismal Science: Part 1, focuses on how the sea has been isolated from the land and completely removed from our vision. The second essay,

Dismal Science: Part 2, explains how marine space has functioned as a heterotopia—a non-hegemonic space of otherness where naval wars, munities, and class struggles can occur. The first essay consists of two parts, “Red Passenger” and “Forgetting the Sea.”

The former explores industrial capitalism, whereas the latter discusses today’s transnational capitalism. Near the beginning “Red Passenger,” Sekula discusses

Engels’s perception of the flows of capital on the deck of a ship in 1844. At that time,

Engels observed the growing industrialization that created an unequal development of crucial techniques and unbalanced social relations between sea and land. Until

Engels’s life time, the sea was often considered to be a space with abundant treasures hidden in its vast and boundless natural resources. At the same time, the sea was thought to be a space suitable for the romantic representation of the sublime.

Discussing Engels’s writings, Sekula notes, “The city, at this juncture, is more primitive than the river.”97

After reviewing Engels’s work, Sekula shifts his viewpoint to a panoramic representation of the sea, which implies a tension between sea and land—a tension founded in the desire to exceed a given frame via expansion and by the threat of counter-expansion. Presenting one of the best examples of a maritime panorama,

Sekula provides a drawing by a seventeenth-century Dutch painter, Willem van de

Velde the Elder. The elongated drawing—the 2:9 ratio of the vertical to the horizontal

97 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, p. 42.

64 is quite unusual—is titled The English Fleet at Anchor off Den Helder (1653). The drawing shows British warships densely lined up between the island of Texel and the

Netherlands mainland. Sekula asserts, “Here the imperium implicit in the Dutch panorama meets its mirror image.”98 In other words, the painted British warships reflect the image of Dutch imperialists, all of whom desired territorial expansion.

Sekula introduces another Dutch painting by Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom, View of Hoorn

(1622), which depicts several boats near the shore and a city in the distance. In response to this image, Sekula states, “The viewer is invited to look back toward the city with the peculiar longings characteristic of approaches and departures” by focusing on the economic link between sea and land via the ship.99

Through the two Dutch paintings, Sekula demonstrates the link between sea and land in the seventeenth century. That is, the sea was considered important in conjunction with the land during the burgeoning of industrialization, and people from that time emphasized imperialist wars and economic trades that centered on the sea. At this point, Sekula bifurcates sea and land. To emphasize this point, he presents J. M. W.

Turner’s painting, Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842) [Fig. 28].

The painting shows a ship in the throes of a perilous whirlwind. Here, the borders of the ship, sea, and sky appear completely blurred as a result of the amalgamation of steam and wind. Regarding this painting, Sekula states, “It is true that steam travel by sea developed from steam travel by land, and thus was a step forward in the increasing

98 Ibid., 47. 99 Ibid., 47.

65 domination of the land over the sea.”100 And with this, he points to the moment when the former hierarchical relationship of sea over land changed. Referencing Engels’s writing and other literary sources once again, Sekula ends the early part of the first essay by saying, “The economic function of the ship loses the positive value […] the ship becomes the lost and wandering daughter of the land.”101

Sekula focuses, throughout “Red Passenger,” on “how to see” the transformative relationship between the sea, land, and a ship. He remarks upon the modes of visibility capable of penetrating the embedded values in paintings like

Vroom’s View of Hoorn or Turner’s Snow Storm, which present the different developmental stages from preindustrial capitalism to advanced-industrial capitalism.

In this context, the concept visibility relates to Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms, visuality and countervisuality. According to Mirzoeff, visuality is a set of mechanisms that order or organize the chaotic world and naturalize the underlying power structures that are reproduced and proliferated by transforming the real. Countervisuality, he asserts, represents an antidote to visuality by dismantling the visual strategies of the hegemonic system.102 Adding the meaning of “being able to” make visible to Mirzoeff’s term

100 Ibid., 45. 101 Ibid., 48. 102 Nicholas Mirzoeff explains that visuality has functioned in three different states. First, he discusses plantation slavery (1660–1860), in which visuality functioned as a way of reordering the colonial reality through management techniques of “visualized surveillance.” Second, he focuses on imperialism (1860– 1945), in which visuality was used to describe a new system of governance of the overseas empire, mainly through the actions of “great men.” (Mirzoeff used the term hero). Third, he remarks upon the military-industrial complex (1945–present), in which visuality has been reinterpreted in terms of the panopticon. (But according to the Benthamian version of the panopticon, the guard wants to be seen by the prisoners, not the inverse, and he tries to detect all possible insurgents without being seen by them).

66 countervisuality, I propose a word visibility, which allows one to analyze invisibility which constructs and naturalizes the hegemonic power structures. Indeed, alongside the paintings of van de Velde, Vroom, and Turner, Sekula adapts a somewhat didactic attitude by which to inform his viewers/readers about visibility—the ability of penetrating the power structures to which we have become acclimated and thus unable to conceive or see. For instance, one of the most accessible, well-known interpretations of Turner’s Snow Storm entails seeing the steam-driven ship as a symbol of humankind’s endless efforts to combat the forces of nature.103 By contrast, Sekula analyzes Snow Storm in relation to the power structures that removed the sea from sight. As such, when examining Turner’s painting and Engels’s writing, which he published three years after Turner completed Snow Storm, Sekula concludes “Red

Passenger,” by writing, “One measure of Engels’ radicality was his ability to break with the fatalism of this emerging romance of the sea’s isolation, and to step from the deck of the ship onto the streets of the city at the center of the global circle of power.”104

Following the discussion of how the sea has been separated from the land in

“Red Passenger,” “Forgetting the Sea” examines how the sea has been forgotten and

Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring, 2011): 473–496; Jan Baetens, “The Right to Look: a Counterhistory of Visuality by Nicholas Mirzoeff,” Leonardo, Vol. 46, Issue 1 (2013): 95–96. 103 For instance, the Tate Modern introduces the work by saying, “Turner painted many pictures exploring the effects of an elemental vortex. Here, there is a steam-boat at the heart of the vortex. In this context the vessel can be interpreted as a symbol of mankind’s futile efforts to combat the forces of nature.” http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-snow-storm-steam-boat-off-a-harbours-mouth-n00530. 104 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, p. 48.

67 disavowed in the twentieth century. This portion of the text is more straightforward than “Red Passenger.”105 That is to say, he often uses the terms elites and intellectuals, and criticizes their blindness regarding the sea. He writes:

In effect, I am arguing for the continued importance of maritime space in order to counter the exaggerated importance attached to that largely metaphysical construct, “cyberspace,” and the corollary myth of “instantaneous” contact between distant spaces. I am often struck by the ignorance of intellectuals in this respect.106

The sea is in many respects less comprehensive to today’s elites than it was before 1945 […] elites become incapable of recognizing their own, outside of narrow specialist circles.107

By using the language such as the ignorance of intellectuals, less comprehensive to today’s elites, and elites become incapable of recognizing, Sekula highlights the fact that, even for today’s elite groups—although Sekula might not think that today’s elites are smarter than ordinary people—it is nearly impossible to grasp the circulation of transnational capital. How can we, for instance, articulate every single joint of a fluctuating web of global economic connections? Can we understand how shoes made one month in Taiwan are suddenly made a month later in Guangdong at a greatly

105 For instance, few viewers/readers are likely to notice that Sekula’s comments about Engels at the beginning and end illustrate his interest in the declination of socialism as the inversed power structures of industrial capitalism that he seeks continuously in the paintings. In the beginning of the second part of the first essay, Sekula writes, “I am performing a grotesque juggling at a triple funeral: a memorial service for painting, socialism, and the sea.” Ibid., 48. 106 Ibid., 50. 107 Ibid., 54.

68 reduced price, which then, simultaneously, appear in London, New York, and Hong

Kong?108

In light of this critical account, Sekula asks the viewer/reader to historicize visibility to see what has been unseen or ignored from our global surface in order to dismantle the invisible power structures. For example, Sekula examines the containerization of cargo movements during the 1950s and the 1960s, a process which obscured our vision by in part concealing the items held in container boxes and their destinations.109 He also mentions the ship schedules listed in The New York Times and discusses how this information disappeared by the 1970s and 1980s.110 In so doing,

Sekula helps the viewer/reader envision the things that have been far from us—such as the containerization or the ship schedules—in order to re-visualize the sea. In this context, the sea is an almost forgotten space that seems to be replaced by commercial air transportation and instantaneous communication. Yet the sea is still controlled by capitalist power through international trade agreements, such as NAFTA and GATT, international labor market systems such as “flag of convenience,”111 and maritime commerce, subsistence fishing, and naval campaigns. Indeed, the two parts of the first essay historicize the ways in which we have conceived the sea—from a space filled

108 Ibid., 48–49. 109 Ibid., 49. 110 Ibid., 53. 111 Sekula mentions the “flag of convenience” several times in Fish Story. It is a business practice of registering merchant ships differently from the ship owners’ nationalities. Registered under the flag of convenience, a ship owner reduces operating costs or avoids of the regulations of the owner's country; however, the owner also fuels the circulation of international maritime laborers who are forced to work cheaply.

69 with treasures and natural resources to an amnesic space in which ubiquitous power took control of it.

If in the first essay, Dismal Science: Part 1, the viewer/reader receives a panoramic perspective that incites him or her to re-visualize marine space, the second essay, Dismal Science: Part 2, encourages the viewer/reader to seek out the details— what actually happened in this space. In a sense, the second essay is concerned with the slums at the bottom of the maritime world. Dismal Science: Part 2 consists of three parts—“From the Panorama to the Detail,” “Phantom Mutiny,” and “Boxed In.” Each part focuses on the naval wars on the surface of and under the water; the ships as sites of mutinies or class struggles; and the unemployed sailors around seaports. “From the

Panorama to the Detail” continues to invite the viewer/reader to historicize the modes of visibility as they relate to the sea in the context of the accounts of naval intelligence developed during the two world wars. For example, Sekula introduces a typological index of warships included in Fred Jane’s book, All the World’s Fighting Ships (1898), in which around one hundred warships were classified according to the types of ship funnels. In relation to the index, Sekula notes, “It was no longer important to picture war syntagmatically, but only pragmatically […] in modern cybernated war games.”112

Another instance is Edouard Riou’s illustration taken from Jules Verne’s novel, Twenty

Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870). The illustration shows a whale jumping into the sea—its head has plunged into the oceanic deep and its tail sticks out of the water while the whole body is visible through the transparent water. By discussing the

112 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, pp. 109–110.

70 invention of submarines and periscopes, Sekula states, “[It is] the prestige of visual empiricism in an age increasingly committed to the positivism of statistics and quantitative abstraction.”113

Through those two pictures, Sekula shows the modernists’ perspective regarding the details with which the analytic and statistical, as well as the positivistic and imaginary visual mechanisms were specified and developed. According to Sekula, naval power and commercial power developed together from the end of the nineteenth century.114 Thus, the visual mechanisms presented in those two pictures indicate the entanglement of power chains—that is, for instance, how the maritime capitals were controlled by naval forces. However, visibility as the ability to dismantle the complicated power chains in this context induces phenomenological impossibility— how can one grasp a hundred kinds of warships at a glance or integrate the view from the surface to the inside of water? At this point, Sekula alludes to a supra power operating beyond any keen visibility; however, he also trains the viewer/reader to totalize the fragmentations of the visual mechanisms and unveil their contradictions.115

Concluding “From the Panorama to the Detail,” Sekula argues that Jane’s book and

Verne’s novel naturalize imperialist optimism in the wake of the horrors of the First

113 Ibid., 111. 114 Ibid., 109. 115 Foucault distinguishes between a specific intellectual and a general intellectual. According to Foucault, a specific intellectual is a creation of the twentieth century, which, for example, never adopts a general perspective toward history or a utopian project and considers such questions naive. Of course, Foucault was very critical for such shallow intellectuality, and he positioned himself as a general intellectual. Mark Poster, “Foucault and History,” Social Research, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring, 1982): 138– 142.

71 World War. Then, the other two parts of the first essay presents another sides of maritime affairs by dealing with how ships functioned for proletarians around the

1920s and 1930s (“Phantom Mutiny”);116 and by focusing on how unemployed sailors were represented through Walker Evans and August Sander (“Boxed In”). Indeed,

Dismal Science: Part 2 prods the viewer/reader to perceive and conceptualize the sea as a site for the battlefields where multiple chains of forces are crushed under the twentieth century’s two power axes, capitalism and socialism.117 Dismal Science: Part

2 finishes in the 1930s when, as Sekula notes, the triumphs of fascism and Stalinism were achieved.118

The visual mechanisms entangled with the multiple power chains that I focus on throughout this section align with Foucault’s conceptual dyad of power and knowledge. Foucault did not clearly define the concept of power, but the term is commonly understood as a relationship among multiple forces.119 Many scholars consider his concept ambiguous because, first, power is ubiquitous beyond any visible

116 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, pp. 111–112. 117 The second part of the second essay includes Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph, The Steerage (1907) and Sergei Eisenstein’s film, Battleship Potemkin (1925). It discusses how ships have functioned as sites for mutinies or class struggles. The third part of the second essay brings up the image of the animated character, Popeye, who represented the anthropomorphized engine of the capitalist ship during the1930s and became popular in the American context. As a counterpart to Popeye, the essay discusses the photographs of unemployed sailors of the 1930s by Walker Evans and August Sander. 118 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, p 133. 119 Neve Gordon, “On Visibility and Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault,” Human Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2002): 128; Benjamin C. Sax, “Foucault, Nietzsche, History: Two Modes of the Genealogical Method,” History of European Ideas, Vol. 11 (1989): 773–774; Mark Poster, “Foucault and History”: 122, 138–142.

72 sites such as sovereigns, governments, or dominant classes according to his theory;120 and second, his position toward power is neutral, not negative or positive, and in a sense, he provides no means to resist power.121 According to Foucault, insofar as anything can be produced or reproduced by operations of power, all modes of thought, critique, and action become the effects of power. In other words, an intricate, controlling mechanism that produces our norms consists of our interests, shapes our behaviors, and can be manufactured—even rationality is saturated with power.122

Foucault argued that the most effective controlling technique centers on the role of visibility—in this context, the term means the sense of being seen and heard as noted in his panopticon model. He stated:

120 This criticism was voiced by many scholars, such as Fraser (1981), Said (1986), and Taylor (1986). Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusion,” Praxis International (1981): 272–287; Edward Said, “Foucault and the Imagination of Power” in The Critical Foucault, ed. D. Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Basil Blackwel, 1986); Charles Taylor, “Foucault on Freedom and Truth” in The Critical Foucault. 121 Benjamin C. Sax, “Foucault, Nietzsche, History: Two Modes of the Genealogical Method”: 773–774; Mark Poster, “Foucault and History”: 122, 138–142. There are a lot of criticisms for Foucauldian history. For example, Jürgen Habermas considered that post-structuralism, especially Foucault’s theory evinces the loss of truth claim, and because of this reason, Habermas criticized Foucault’s philosophy of history as functionalism, historicism, presentism, relativism, and cryptonormativism. The major issue of relativism in Foucault’s theory is, in his view, power is always situational and flexible, and the exercise of power is relational and leads relative truths. Also, since Foucault describes (not explains) the structural relationships of power and knowledge focusing on “how” they were developed and changed rather than “why,” and since he does not articulate how the relationships should go further providing solution, Foucauldian history encourages, according to Habermas, political non-commitment and conservatism. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), 1990, pp. 268–290. 122 Neve Gordon, “On Visibility and Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault”: 125.

73 There is no need for arms, physical violence, or material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze with which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer.123

If a subject gazes upon the overseer—the other who can see the subject—visibility becomes not only an effect of power, but also a condition of the possibility of power.124

Here, the relationship between power and visibility is dialectical—visibility is obtained by power, and the inverse is true as well. In this regard, when I described visibility— which references the ability to dismantle the invisibility that constructs and naturalizes power structures—it is concerned with the means of obtaining the potential power that emancipates our critical intellectuality from any effects of power, from any thought, critique, or rationality saturated with existing power. Here, I claim that the reason why

Sekula’s two essays provide and analyze numerous historical resources stems from his intension to nourish the visibility of the viewer/reader, which penetrates the overseer’s visual mechanisms and further historicizes them. Visibility is a means of resisting existing power.

According to Foucault, power and knowledge are deeply connected, and their configuration constitutes an imposing presence over advanced society and extends into

123 This statement is related to his discussion about surveillance within a disciplinary society and of the panopticon, in which perpetual visibility is sufficient to render most people docile in the face of unseen power. Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 155. 124 According to Neve Gordon, Foucault does not articulate the condition of the possibility of power. However, Foucault shows that the different modes of visibility are an effect of power despite the fact that his writings suggest that power is dependent upon visibility. Thus, he posits a circular or dialectical relationship between power and visibility. Neve Gordon, “On Visibility and Power: An Arendtian Corrective of Foucault”: 132, 137.

74 the most intimate recesses of everyday life. He also argued that knowledge continuously creates, shapes, and forms a relationship among multiple forces, but at the same time, manifests power capable of exclusion and repression.125 Moreover, for

Foucault, individuals are the vehicles of power, not the points of application.126 In this sense, Sekula’s two essays ask the viewer/reader to be the subject of knowledge rather than being submerged as a mere vehicle of power and to bring to the surface how the powerful subject has controlled the powerless subject that has been excluded or repressed. Sekula’s critical voice directed at the viewer exists within the three types of text in Fish Story. As I have discussed, the viewer’s process of identifying the captions and searching for maritime laborers parallels the process of rescuing the neglected knowledge about the laborers. Also, when the viewer encounters the illegible or indecipherable signifiers and fills those parts with the descriptions about a local city,

Ulsan, South Korea, he or she obtains the knowledge about what the obscured entities that operate globalist power are—Korean chaebol, patriarchy, and America’s interventionism. Finally, through the two essays and accompanying visual resources, the viewer/reader is trained to historicize how the powerful subject’s knowledge has constructed and naturalized the visual mechanisms of the capitalist world.

Influenced by Foucault, Sekula’s landmark article, The Body and the Archive

(1986), illustrates how photographs of the early twentieth century have been used as a means of social control to differentiate criminals or racially inferior types and to

125 Mark Poster, “Foucault and History”: 122. 126 Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 101.

75 regulate social deviances under the dubious scientific or positivistic principles.127

Although Sekula has demonstrated his interests in Foucault’s concepts of power and knowledge since his early career, he does not mention them in Fish Story. Instead, in

“Phantom Mutiny,” he discusses Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. One of the reasons that Sekula brings in Foucault’s Of Other Spaces (1967) stems from the fact that this piece focuses directly on a ship at the very end of the last sentence: “The ship is heterotopia par excellence. In civilization without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”128 For Sekula’s interpretation of Foucault, the term heterotopia means “relations between sites as a revolutionary network.”129 After all, in Sergei Eisenstein’s film, Battleship Potemkin

(1925), which Sekula refers to in part of the essay, the ship functions as heterotopia, a site for revolution. However, Sekula seems skeptical to see heterotopia as a site where one can resist contemporary globalization because he concludes the essay with his skepticism about the radical artists’ blindness toward the changing world.130

Nevertheless, Sekula does invite his viewers to take a journey via Fish Story and find other sites from which to resist global capitalism’s devastating nature.

127 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, Vol. 39 (Winter, 1986): 3–64. 128 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1, trans. Jay Miskowiec (Spring, 1986): 24. When Sekula transfers the quotation to Fish Story, he excludes the sentence, “The ship is heterotopia par excellence.” 129 Allan Sekula, Fish Story, p. 118. 130 Sekula asserts that the increasing ubiquity of container boxes were not a crucial subject matter despite, for example, many artist’s representation of them including Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966) and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964). Ibid., 134–137.

76 Sekula’s connection between a ship and a heterotopia also appears in subsequent projects.131 Dedicated to maritime laborers and their solidarity, The Ship of

Fools/The Dockers’ Museum (2010–2013), focuses on the MV Global Mariner, a museum on a retrofitted cargo ship. Organized by the International Transport Workers

Federation, the MV Global Mariner carried an agitprop exhibition about harsh working conditions at sea by sailing to international ports for 18 month from 1998 to 2000. The

Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum consists of numerous collections including

Sekula’s photographs and text, as well as the items that he purchased through antiquarian stores, flea markets, and online stores (in particular, via eBay).132 Among the items is a sculpture entitled The Docker in Antwerp (1890) by Constantin Meunier, a Belgian sculptor [Fig. 29–30]. Although the overarching theme of the project reflects

Sekula’s skepticism of deadly labor systems at sea, the docker—the statue in a pose of an upright, proud stance—observes what is going on around him and the world. In this context, the project is a contemporary interpretation of Foucault’s “Ship of Fool” described in his Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

(1961). Foucault alludes to the idea that “only a mad man reveals the truth in a mad

131 All of the projects including the photographic sequences of TITANIC’s wake (1998–2000) and Shipwreck and Workers (2005–2007), the film of The Forgotten Space (2010), and the exhibition complex of The Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum (2010–2013) were developed via investigation for Fish Story. 132 The Ship of Fools consists of thirty-three photographs and two slide projections by Sekula; and The Dockers’ Museum is filled with the artist’s collection of more than one thousand graphic images, photographs, postcards, art works, and daily objects. The combination of the two projects was accompanied by Sekula’s text in a gallery space, and he identified himself as a curator of The Docker’s Museum. For The Docker’s Museum, Sekula purchased all items in antiquarian stores, flea markets, souvenir shops, or online (in particular, via eBay). Hilde Van Gelder, “Allan Sekula’s Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum,” Grey Room, No. 55 (Spring, 2014): 142.

77 world” via the description, “What does it presage, this wisdom of fools? […] The Ship of Fools sails through a landscape of delights […] since here man no longer knows either suffering or need.”133 Likewise, only someone who knows the globalist mad world is likely able to escape from it.

Conclusion

As I have discussed, Fish Story demands a lot from its viewers—it even seems to ask viewers to take part in Sekula’s critical realism toward globalization. According to Mitchell, when Lukács coined the term critical realism, he wishes to designate a historically informed representation based on an independent point of view, from which a middle position is setup to see reality.134 Indeed, by maintaining the middle position—not entirely subjective or objective—Sekula’s Fish Story enables viewers to expose the conditions of people and society influenced by globalization.135 Hilde Van

Gelder and Jan Baetens argue that realism concerns the productive rather than the reproductive (mechanical replica), and the locus of realism has been shifted from the art object to the spectator’s attitude.136 Thus, Sekula’s critical realism does not

133 Michael Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 22. 134 Georg Lukács, “Critical Realism and Socialist Realism” in Realism in Our Time; Literature and Class Struggle (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 93–135; W. J. T. Mitchell, “Realism and the Digital Image” in Critical Realism in Contemporary Art—Around Allan Sekula’s Photography, eds. Hilde Van Gelder and Jan Baetens (Leuven, Belgium: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2006), p. 24. 135 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Realism and the Digital Image,” p. 24. 136 Hilde Van Gelder and Jan Baetens, “A Note on Critical Realism Today” in Critical Realism in Contemporary Art—Around Allan Sekula’s Photography, pp. 7–8.

78 represent an artistic style, but rather a research method that is dialectically generated through the paradoxes of reality.137

In 1999, four years after publishing Fish Story, Sekula joined in the anti- globalization protests against the WTO (World Trade Organization) now known as the

Battle in Seattle. At the protest, he took photographs that eventually became a project titled Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black) (1999–2000), which engages in and represents the reality of corporate globalization more directly than Fish Story via eighty-one collected scenes in total. The protesters, streets, policemen are all captured—one woman is heading her face to heaven and rubbing her tearing eyes, and one man, surrounded by police, is holding a board written “WTO, It doesn’t work”

[Fig. 31–32]. Taken from the actual crowd’s position, the absence of autofocus and the lack of flash allow the viewer to immerse more fully into the actual experiences of the protest.138

One of the interesting facts about the project is how Sekula made a guiding principle: “To move with the flow of protest, from dawn to 3 a.m. if need be, taking in the lulls, the waiting and the margins of events.”139 Here, the terms, lulls and margins remind me of his reference of heterotopia in Fish Story. Those terms seem to describe how he sought—through delay (lulls)—a seemingly unnoticeable place (margin), a site

137 Ibid., 9–10. 138 Steve Edwards, “Commons and Crowds: Figuring Photography from Above and Below,” Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 4 (July, 2009): 455. 139 Allan Sekula in 5 Days that Shook the World: The Battle for Seattle and Beyond, eds. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair (London: Verso, 2000), n.p. For this book, Sekula served the photography and Cockburn and Clair provided the text.

79 for revolution during the protest.140 However, through Sekula’s simultaneous actions of representation and enactment of the protest, something else is present too—that is, his photographs might be considered as effectively illustrating the future unknown.141

In fact, the project displays a rhizomic sequence—it is impossible to articulate the beginning and the end of the protest—as if reflecting the unknown potential to disrupt the complicated power chains of globalization.142 Indeed, while Fish Story changes the viewer’s habit of reading, Waiting for Tear Gas transmits the immediate experiences, all of which show that Sekula engages in and represents the reality of globalization. In so doing, in both cases, Sekula asks the viewer to puncture our ordinary vision toward our living world more thoroughly and critically, and to seek for human conditions under globalization’s power structures.

140 Terri Weissman discusses how the lulls were presented in content as well as exhibit form. Terri Weissman, “Freedom’s Just Another Word” in Contemporary Art—1989 to the Present, eds. Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 312–313. 141 Weissman explains the event situation and its representation in relation to Alain Badiou’s concept about an event (an event prior unintelligibility). Terri Weissman, “This is What Democracy Looks Like” in In Focus: Waiting for Tear Gas 1999–2000 by Allan Sekula, ed. Stephanie Schwartz, Tate Research Publication, 2016. 142 Zanny Begg, “Recasting Subjectivity: Globalization and the Photography of Andrea Gursky and Allan Sekula,” Third Text, Vol. 19, Issue 6 (November, 2005): 629.

80 CHAPTER 2 Ambivalent Bodies at Gray Zone: Santu Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950

Introduction

Santu Mofokeng (b. 1956, South Africa) began his career as a street photographer in Soweto in the early 1980s and has continued working as a photographer for more than thirty years in Johannesburg. While establishing himself as an independent, freelancer photographer from 1985, Mofokeng joined the Afrapix

Collective, which was organized in 1982 by amateur and professional photographers who resisted apartheid and aimed to document and report life in society under the apartheid regime during the 1980s. As one of the Afrapix’s most active members until its dissolution in 1991, Mofokeng also worked for a short time, from 1987 to 1988, as a photojournalist for an alternative, local newspaper, New Nations.

In this chapter, I examine Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album—Look at Me:

1890–1950 (1997), a project which consists of African people’s photographic portraits and text. From 1988 to 1998, Mofokeng worked as a documentary photographer and researcher at the Institute for Advanced Social Research at the University of

Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His research during that period enabled him to collect old portraits of black South Africans, which he used in his work. Here, I investigate the historical position of the African subjects represented in The Black Photo Album; the mnemonic role of the project’s textual components; Mofokeng’s representation of

81 ambivalence (which is also found in a range of his projects); and the ways in which the project draws viewers’ emotional engagement in the other’s traumatic history.

I begin my analysis by examining how The Black Photo Album breaks the dichotomy of black and white in racial discourses in South Africa. Watching the slide progression of one image after another, viewers do not perceive a white, ruling class or a black, subaltern class but rather confront those represented as individuals revealed through their portraits. I further analyze how the project decenters the spectator’s subjectivity and assists them to seek for the conflict or paradox around the different races emerged at the turn of the twentieth century.

This chapter’s second section deals with the textual components of The Black

Photo Album. I look at how formal imperfections—such as incorrect spellings, changes of sizes and styles of text, and coloring—creates a sense of vernacular language, voice, touch, and memory. This artistic strategy even conjures a kind of actual presence of someone who remembers the pictured figures and further helps the viewer to feel their erased existence. Then I argue that Mofokeng’s purposeful mistakes in text provide a form of opposition to the finely mechanized and commoditized ones and thus resist efforts to sanitize the memories

The third section explores a certain type of ambivalence found in a range of

Mofokeng’s photographic projects. I investigate how Mofokeng both exposes and conceals his photographic subjects and how such a partial visibility, partial invisibility works as a means of “doing history.” I argue that his representation of ambivalence historicizes the enduring, past effects on the South African present. Also I analyze his

82 representation of ambivalence in relation to the medium specificity of black-and-white photography and racial discourses.

The fourth section situates The Black Photo Album in relation to South

Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was established with the aim of relieving and restoring South Africans’ traumatic memories. By discussing the institution’s limited functions, I bring a concept esthema—the way in which a system of feeling is shaped in a specific time. Then, based on the concept, I address how

Mofokeng’s project helps viewers feel the traumatic experience of South African people beyond a historical or territorial border.

Ambiguous Bodies, Reciprocal Gazes, and Decentered Subjectivity

The Black Photo Album is an ongoing, research-based project. It is exhibited through a slide projection which consists of eighty slides in total—thirty-five photographic portraits of black South Africans and forty-five pieces of text. Diverging from his typical photographic work, for The Black Photo Album, Mofokeng collects, restores, and recontextualizes old portraits, and adds text. According to Mofokeng, most portraits have been hidden in families’ neglected cardboard boxes or plastic bags,143 while some have been hung on walls and coveted as treasures that help families construct their identity, family history, and lineage.144 Mofokeng obtained

143 James T. Campbell, “African Subjects” in The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 (Göttingen: Steidl; New York: The Walther Collection, 2013), pp. 1–2. 144 Santu Mofokeng, “The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 (1997)” in The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 (Göttingen: Steidl; New York: The Walther Collection, 2013), p. i.

83 most portraits, which typically depict urban black middle- and working-class subjects, from Soweto, a Free State called Bethlehem, and a relocated settlement in the former

Republic of Bophuthatswana.145 Different from widely circulated images of Africans via postcards, souvenirs, or carte-de-visite from the end of the nineteenth century, the photographed figures in The Black Photo Album are clearly from an educated class of black South Africans. Most men and women illustrate a modern dandy look wearing outfits such as a tuxedo or a lady’s suit.146

Most images of Africans from this period that are familiar to western eyes are typically ethnographic photographs, which were used to study anthropometric variances in pseudo-science. Such photographs utilized the dichotomy of black and white to make reductive claims about how black Africans and white Europeans were incomparable races: one is black, backward, and benighted; the other is white, progressive, and civilized. The African subjects in those ethnographic images don straight faces or are viewed in profile to emphasize their physiognomy and expose their specific costumes and coiffures with the idea that such records would denote their specific tribes. In some instances, female subjects are photographed nude to reveal their breasts or hips.147 One standing female nude taken in 1936 by Alfred Martin

Duggan-Cronin, an Irish-born South African photographer illustrates such physiognomic and tribal features well [Fig. 33]. At the date of the most recent portrait

145 Ibid., i. 146 Despite the project title indicates the years of 1890–1950, the ranges of the denoted years on the text slides for the portraits are from the 1890s to the 1920s.. 147 James T. Campbell, “African Subjects,” pp. 1–2.

84 in The Black Photo Album is 1927, so Duggan-Cronin’s photograph belongs roughly to the period of the portraits that Mofokeng collected.148

Mofokeng was aware of Duggan-Cronin’s photographs and other ethnographic images when he researched The Black Photo Album. In his field trip report of

December 4, 1992, Mofokeng wrote:

We left for Kimberley around lunch. I spent some time at the A. M. Duggan-Cronin Bantu Gallery looking at photographs. Some extraordinary portraits. I looked at the albums on different ethnic groups—from these I gleaned a style and a pattern of the photograph. Duggan-Croinin’s technique is prosaic and static. His photographic subjects are his collections, he uses the camera like a measuring instrument—in some portraits he has his subjects stand looking front, side and back in an attempt to show a specimen of the type of tribe. One can discern his directorial hand in all the pictures. His subjects appear as photographic captives.149

Here, Mofokeng is critical about the way in which Duggan-Cronin used his camera as a tool to objectify African subjects and measure their bodies. Different from Duggan-

Cronin’s photograph, Mofokeng’s project disregards ethnographic approaches. Instead, he shows people wearing European clothing, inside European-style studio settings with

148 Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin was born in 1874 in Ireland. He was educated at Mount St. Mary’s College, Derbyshire, England and then came to South Africa in 1897. A significant number of his photographs were published in The Bantu Tribes of South Africa: Reproductions of Photographic Studies by A.M. Duggan-Cronin (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell & Co., Ltd; Kimberly: Alexander McGregor Memorial Museum, 1928). 149 Arthur Walther and Tamar Garb, “A Conversation” in Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, ed. Tamar Gard (Göttingen: Steidl; New York: The Walther Collection, 2013), p. 15. Duggan-Cronin’s works and Mofokeng’s project were exhibited together at the Part I of the exhibition, Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive in 2012.

85 self-sufficiency. The basic information about the portraits—such as the exact dates, occasions for the photographs, and the photographers—is sometimes obscured.

Nevertheless, the viewer can ascertain most of the names of the people in images because the photographs are all commissioned portraits.150 This sort of self- commission defies the stereotypical portraiture of African people who, in many cases, were classified by Westerns according to tribe affiliation, remained nameless, and never saw how they appeared in the final products. By contrast, the photographs of The

Black Photo Album could be shared privately with the individuals’ husbands and wives, parents and children, and siblings and friends through a form of private albums for the purpose of their own satisfaction.

The photographic figures in The Black Photo Album are all displayed using the conventions of late-Victorian or Edwardian studio photography, and they wear fancy suits, Victorian-style dresses and shoes, fedoras, hoods, and hair bands—the paraphernalia of the European bourgeoisie,151 and in so doing, disrupt racist or colonialist perceptions of Africans as timeless tribal people. These portraits thus incite

150 Santu Mofokeng, “The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950,” p. i. 151 According to James T. Campbell, all of the photographs were taken not in rural homesteads or courts, but in cities and towns, mostly in photography studios (at the turn of the century, South Africa boasted more than four hundred studios). Judging from imprints on some of the images, most were taken in white-owned studios, but there is no question that some of them were taken by black assistants and apprentices. James T. Campbell, “African Subjects,” p. 4. Similarly, according to Jennifer Bajorek, the photographers, whose names have been documented, seem to have been of European descent. The only exception is A. M. Makhubu, whose studio stamp appears on the frame of the photograph of Margaret Monkoe with her grandchildren in Ventersdorp in 1927. The studios for which addresses and locations are given were actually located in commercial districts associated with European settlement. Jennifer Bajorek, “Then and Now: Santu Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album” in Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, pp. 218–219.

86 a number of questions: Did these subjects self-consciously want to emancipate themselves from a colonized’s position and adopt a quasi-colonizer’s position? Or, as one text slide critically asks, are these images evidence of mental colonization?

Mofokeng stated, “There is no evidence of coercion […] We see these images in the terms determined by the subjects themselves.”152 Mofokeng further noted that, when these photographs were created, the government designated black South Africans as

“Natives: a discrete group who were considered in a sense citizens, but not altogether citizens […] informed by social Darwinism.”153 In this way, the African subjects presented in The Black Photo Album create a chasm between how they imagined themselves and how they were considered.

Mofokeng wrote, “At the turn of the twentieth century and even earlier, there were black people who […] challenged the government’s racist policies [and] considered themselves ‘civilized.’”154 However, a critical suspicion arises: as one text slide asks, “Are these images evidence of mental colonization?,” are some of the figures presented in The Black Photo Album a kind of informers who assisted in maintaining white rule in order to ensure their own fortunes? Mofokeng asserted that those photographic figures were taking a model from colonial officials and settlers, especially the British.155 Some of the portraits date from the 1890s, less than a decade from the 1884 Berlin Conference in which seven European countries achieved legal

152 Santu Mofokeng, “The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950,” p. i. 153 Ibid., ii. 154 Ibid., ii. 155 Ibid., ii.

87 ownerships of lands across the African continent, a fact that adds to complexity to the question of how to interpret these well-dressed subjects.

However, European colonization in South Africa was even more complicated than other cases in Africa. The opening of diamond fields in Kimberley in 1869 and the subsequent discovery of gold in Witwatersrand in 1886 led the British to annex the

Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic, territories which had been ruled by the

Boers (Dutch settlers; Afrikaners). Such conflicts between European powers led to the two Anglo-Boer Wars (First: 1880–1881; Second: 1899–1902), and as a result, the

British obtained the entire states of South Africa. South Africa suffered throughout the

1890s due to the European colonizers’ competitive expansion, and brutal practices surrounding industrialization, especially for the discovery of minerals. The 1913

Natives Land Act brought further suffering to black South Africans. That is, for black

South Africans, the Act prohibited from buying or hiring land in ninety-three percent of South Africa. Consequently, the Act eliminated black tenants and replaced their land with white areas in which black servants or laborers would no longer be allowed to lease land. Indeed, the Act was the first major piece of legislation for racial segregation and the cornerstone of South Africa’s notorious migrant laboring system—most black

South Africans should endure a hard work for low wages.

Given this context, how can we understand the historical position of those black South Africans who were willing to take portraits that mimicked the European colonial officials and settlers around the time, from the 1890s to the 1920s? If some of them helped the European force to control their national territory in order to fulfill

88 their own bourgeois aspirations, how might their offspring judge them? Would black

South Africans historicize these ancestors as informers, or in a different way, a more modernized group of people? According to Tamar Garb, around the 1870s in

Kimberley, many Africans dressed in traditional clothes, yet others began to wear

European dresses. That is, identification was fluid during this time so people were capable of moving from one self-construction to another, from traditional African to

“modern” European. Garb further argues that black and white laborers competed against each other, and that westernized African men were seen to present a particular threat to Europeans.156 About the colonial subject Homi Bhabha also writes:

Ambivalence [shaped by the colonized subject’s mimicry of the colonizer] is transformed into uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a partial presence […] The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace.157

156 Tamar Garb, “Colonialism’s Corpus: Kimberley and the Case of the Cartes de Visite” in Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, p. 68. To understand how the well-dressed black South Africans provoked a kind of uneasy feeling and anxiety at that time, see: Zine Magubane, “Mines, Minstrels, and Masculinity: Race, Class, Gender, and the Formation of the South African Working Class, 1870–1900,” Journal of Men’s Studies, Vol. 10 (Spring, 2002): 271–289. . 157 In one chapter of The Location of Culture (1994), Of Mimicry and Man, Homi Bhabha argued that mimicry is one of the basic concepts that colonizers use to create a group of colonized people. According to Bhabha, the colonized mimic the colonizer’s identity, and yet they never become true colonizers themselves. Between the similarities and differences among the colonizer and the colonized—that is, between the mother culture and its bastards, between the self and hybridity—the colonial relationship is constructed and reproduced. Via this interstitial space, the colonized get guidance and aid from the colonizer, but they become controllable by the colonizer at the same time. In this way, the reciprocal desires manifest. Homi Bhabha, “An Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October, Vol. 28 (Spring, 1984):125–127.

89 Here, Bhabha argues that the colonized entails a partial presence of the colonizer, so the colonized demonstrates an ambivalent subjectivity. It is difficult to judge the historical position of the subjects presented in The Black Photo Album. However, Garb and Bhabha support the assumption that the photographic subjects might be conceived as the entities of the partial presence of the colonizer, so a kind of hostile subject by other black compatriots.

The question of how to view the African subjects’ historical position in The

Black Photo Album extends to the viewer by virtue of Mofokeng’s artistic strategies.

Many portraits are the near life-size images, projected on the wall, and create a bodily interaction between the spectator and the photographic subjects.158 And because the projected images face the viewer, a reciprocal gaze between them and the viewer is established. Their gazes are, in many cases, staring the viewer by representing a means of communication. The text slides, which ask questions such as, “Who is this man?” or

“What was the occasion?” further encourage a sense of communicative interaction between viewers and subjects. On the one hand, the work asks the spectator to participate in a virtual conversation. But on the other, the ambiguous positions that the photographic subjects express prevent the viewer from fully understanding the subjects.

158 The project, The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 has been exhibited in numerous locations since the first exhibition in 1995, including South Africa, Germany, France, Spain, and the United States. The projection size varies depending upon the exhibition space. One of the best exhibitions of this project occurred in 2013 at Tate Modern, London. There, the projection was relatively large, the room was painted gray, and there was only one entrance, which provided an intimate viewing experience. The projected image at Tate Modern was 277 x 370 cm (3:4), meaning that some of the portraits’ figures were life-size. This information was obtained via e-mail correspondence with the curators at Tate Modern in London and the Walther Collection in New York City in March of 2015.

90 The viewer thus oscillates between a sense of connection to and an estrangement from the photographed subjects. Moreover, amid this oscillation, the viewer is asked to analyze the African subjects’ historical position with questions such as “Who were these people?” or “What are their aspirations?”

For instance, one slide projects two unidentified black women standing side by side in an outdoor corridor [Fig. 34]. The left balustrade and the right wall extend toward a vantage point via diagonal lines, with the women placed in the center. The figure on the left wears a long dress and holds a parasol that touches the balustrade; the woman on the right wears a white blouse with a long skirt and clasps a flower that touches the wall—it is a highly composed scene. The leather belts and bracelets that adorn both women indicate that they are presumably from middle-class. Yet the way that they stand seems strained, their arms hang awkwardly, and their gazes and furrowed brows might make some viewers uncomfortable. In a sense, they have never been in front of a camera or performed their identity in such a manner. The frame seems to confine the women to the past and inscribed at the bottom of the frame are the words, “With the Best Wishes.” The next slide poses the question, “Who is gazing?,” which points out that the figures are gazing at the viewer just as the viewer gazes at them. Despite such a provocative question, the women do not appear aggressive or interested in subverting the viewer’s position. Their rigid bodies, stoic facial expressions, and strong gazes portray a subtle sense of anxiety. Ultimately, the mix of visual and textual elements establishes a kind of border between the viewer and the projected women.

91 Mofokeng’s photograph, Police with Sjambok. Plein Street, Johannesburg, ca.

1986 reveals the interest—a decade before working on The Black Photo Album—in playing with the exchange of gazes between those photographed and those viewing the photograph [Fig. 35]. After becoming a member of the Afrapix in 1985, Mofokeng observed how the photographic economy operated within the strictures of apartheid, especially during the 1980s. He wrote that “international viewers [at that time] sought scenes with white police officers beating black youths.”159 The more brutal the scene, the more success the photograph enjoyed. However, Mofokeng sought to produce images that resisted such spectacular violence, and Police with Sjambok offers a much less sensational view. At first glance, the work depicts a group of around thirty white policemen armed with sjamboks (whips), weapons associated with apartheid by South

Africans and related to the history of slavery. Logically, it can be surmised that these officers face at a group of young black anti-apartheid protestors on the other side of the street—the work seeming to capture the police in a moment before violent conflict.

That is, their action is posed and delayed, though the viewer knows that such confrontation will mostly end in brutality. Upon closer inspection; however, the viewer can pick up some details of the scene—such as the presence of a few black policemen, wearing more conventional uniforms, situated behind their white counterparts. Such a divergence in dress may indicate that the black officers hold a different position of authority than other black compatriots.

159 Patricia Hayes, “Santu Mofokeng, Photographs: ‘the Violence is in the Knowing,’” History and Theory, Vol. 48 (2009): 40.

92 The two photographs that I have discussed thus far play with the gaze and its relation to the spectator’s position, but one can observe slight differences between those works. The viewer of Police with Sjambok assumes a position on the same level with the unseen anti-apartheid protestors, yet the viewer in The Black Photo Album is situated to face to face with the two black women. To wit, the viewer of the former can be considered as an insider, part of the anti-apartheid protestors, but the viewer of the latter seems to be an outsider to the scene. Nevertheless, both cases manifest a certain degree of ambiguity in regards to the viewer’s positioning and races. For instance, can we assume that black policemen made their living by working for racial segregation, and if necessary, would use violence against other black South Africans?

The black police officers appear to be allied with the white policemen, and the scene was taken in South Africa in the mid of the 1980s, the peak of uprising against apartheid. A number of international newspapers dealt with the conflicts among blacks

South Africans at that time.160 In 1985, The Gazette, Montreal wrote:

As a policeman, he [Templeton Sibaca] has become an enemy to his people […] The South African police force has 20,000 blacks, almost half the force […] The youth say that the black policemen are informers who tell the white

160 The conflicts among black South Africans were also dealt in some major newspapers in the United States. See: Alan Cowell, “For 2 Black Men in South Africa, Differing Loyalties, Similar Fates,” The New York Times, August 3, 1985; Michael Parks, “Black Police Caught in Web of S. African Strife: Rejected by Whites, Burned Out by Their Own People; Few Quit,” The Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1985.

93 policemen whom to shoot […] The youth say they will kill the black policemen.161

As such, in the context of Police with Sjambok, the binary line between insiders and outsiders, black and white, and protesters and colonizers becomes ambiguous.

Similarly, in The Black Photo Album, the question through the text slide,

“Who is gazing?” asks the viewer directly to consider notions of control, desire, and appropriation.162 Because the two black women were photographed around the late

1890s or early 1900s, during the European colonization of South Africa,163 the question challenges the period’s colonial eyes in which African subjects mostly remained the objects of the gaze rather being the subjects of it. Further via the aid of the text slide, the two women seem to reclaim their own gaze—as I have discussed, the question points to the fact that the figures might gaze at the viewer just as the viewer gazes at them—so that they could see what happened in their land. In short, both works break the binaries of black and white, the powerless and powerful, and the

161 The Gazette Montreal Staff, “Black Police: Apartheid’s Outcast,” The Gazette, Montreal, July 22, 1985. 162 Although I do not discuss the theory of gaze here, there is a broad range of literature that deals with the formation of the gaze in relation to race, gender, and cultural identity. Discussion of the complex relations between individuals, including their awareness and the distance that arises between subjects, became a common mode of analysis, especially after the post-structuralist, Jacques Lacan added his theoretical perspective to the concept in his writings, Écrits (1966). Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007). 163 Most of the photographs supply information about the subjects, including their names, approximate dates they were photographed, and the photographer’s name. Even though Mofokeng does not offer any information about the two black females, it is possible to assume that they were photographed in the 1890 or 1900 since majority of the photographs are dated at that time.

94 colonized and colonizer. And in so doing, both demonstrate the idea that South African history as we know it has been simplified—it is incomplete.

Several of Mofokeng’s artistic strategies further highlight that this historical incompleteness of history is likely filled by the viewer. First, both photographs picture their subjects from the middle distance—all of the subjects, whether they are black or white, occupy the center of the frames, eschewing close-up or distant, or any exaggerated or distorted views. As a result, both works express conceptual neutrality toward the subjects by exploring between revealed parts of racial history in South

Africa and uncertain parts while creating a space to discuss a broader relationship with the viewer beyond the insider versus outsider dichotomy.164 Second, the two works play with duration in order to provide a buffer so the viewer can situate him or herself in the given context. Police with Sjambok suggests for the viewer to see a postponement of violence and the potential for a plethora of final scenes to develop.

And because The Black Photo Album changes slides every five seconds, the viewer is continuously prodded to recontextualize his or her relationship with each of the photographed subjects. In sum, based on these strategies—the middle distance position that breaks the binaries of human relationships; and the buffer required to

164 While discussing Berenice Abbott’s documentary photograph, Terri Weissman used the term middle distance, which refers to a position fundamental to the artist’s visual language at that time. According to Weissman, the middle distance as a representational process is important to capture the artist’s visual component of realism; that is, the middle distance demonstrates that the artist’s images were representational, but they still allowed the artist to exploit the tension between knowable representation and uncertain fragmentation. Terri Weissman, “Berenice Abbott, Elizabeth McCausland, and the ‘Great Democratic Book’” in American Modern—Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke- White (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), pp. 15–16.

95 decontextualize and recontextualize the viewer’s own position—both works decenter the viewer’s subjectivity.

When I use the phrase “decentered subjectivity,” I am referring to the conception of a subject without a fully present center that continuously gets constructed, dispersed, and slides away,165 and that is applied for the presented figures as well as the viewer. As the viewer in both works is asked to reposition him or herself in terms of the presented subjects’ decentered subjectivity, she or he is also decentered and made to transgress the binary border. That is, especially for The Black Photo

Album, the viewer comes to see—as Garb noted—the fluid identities among some black South Africans who lived at the turn of the twentieth century. However, since the chasm between how they identified themselves and how they were considered is knowable—especially via Mofokeng’s questions in the text slides—the viewer’s interaction with the presented subjects help him or her to reimagine a conflict, division, or instability among the different races. Then, through such an entire process, a conflict or paradox around the different races is extrapolated and questioned rather than negotiated and subsumed in The Black Photo Album.

165 The model of a decentered subjectivity explores Karl Marx’s ideas through the lenses of Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and Jacque Lacan’s theory of subjectivity as the split or the deconstructed. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe discuss this model in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985). In the field of contemporary art, Claire Bishop conceptualized this model using the theme of relational antagonism in order to criticize Nicolas Bourriaud’s optimism that he presents in two of his books: Relational Aesthetics (1998) and Post Production (2001). Bishop criticized his return to artistic intentionality (rather than to participatory reception), his ambiguous criteria for politico-ethical measurement (beyond aesthetic judgment) of open-ended works, his claim of together-ness, and his claims regarding negotiable attitudes. See: Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, Vol. 110 (Fall, 2004): 51–79.

96 Given the fact that Mofokeng’s work proposes a decentered subjectivity for the viewer alongside with the presented figures’ decentered subjectivity, it is necessary to examine who the subjects of The Black Photo Album actually were. According to

James T. Campbell, since the first British occupation of the Cape in 1803, converts introduced to Africans new forms of identity—mimicking Europeans, new consumption practices, and new patterns of enterprise and stratification. Additionally, associated with the liberal paradigm of the nineteenth century, merchant and mining capitals that Europeans owned in South Africa began producing more varied social strata among Africans—a servant for the missionary or colonial government, or a manual laborer for white owners.166 However, after the Natives Land Act passed in

1913, segments of the South African population began resisting the new racial regime by running their own churches, schools, and political organizations, such as the South

African Native National Congress, which is known today as the African National

Congress.167

Thus, some photographic figures in The Black Photo Album, such as the two portraits of Jacobus Gilead Xaba, picture cultural elites. Xaba, a son of Christian converts, led the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church,168 and grew up in a prosperous and ethnically diverse community. But after a conflict with his white

166 James T. Campbell, “African Subjects,” pp. 6–7. 167 Ibid., 8–9. 168 In the end of the nineteenth century, African ministers and converts broke away to form independent churches, which were dubbed Ethiopian churches, and many of them found their way into the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, a black American mission church that entered South Africa in 1896.

97 superintendents, he went to the United States and devoted his time translating an

African hymnbook.169 The first image of Xaba is a black couple’s wedding anniversary photograph in which he seems to act as a witness for the couple’s marriage

[Fig. 36]. Here, all of the participants wear Western style suits or bridesmaids’ dresses.

Dated to the 1890s, the second image portrays Xaba’s family [Fig. 37]. Between the seated mother and the standing father, one daughter holds the mother’s hand while the other is guarded by the father. Drawing a hierarchical composition between the husband and wife, this photograph imitates the image of a typical European family.

But, according to Campbell, “Educated Africans became the objects of ridicule and contempt, pretenders to a status they could never own, children preening in their parents’ clothes.”170 It means, the Western lifestyle of Xaba or other African subjects who appear in The Black Photo Album might be the objects of people’s criticism at the turn of the twentieth century. Here, I suggest Foucault’s term episteme to discuss the decentered subjectivity presented in The Black Photo Album. About episteme, Foucault wrote:

I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements [...] The episteme is the “apparatus” which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterized as scientific.171

169 James T. Campbell, “African Subjects,” pp. 11–12. 170 Ibid., 7. 171 Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 197.

98 In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.172

Foucault, as first, describes episteme as a research apparatus that separates the thing from any pre-given contexts; and at second, suggests it as an apparatus that defines the conditions of possibility of knowledge in a specific time. By using the term, he discussed how knowledge and legitimation in a specific time was formed, and also studied how the absurdity or foreignness of the time revealed the limited nature of that time’s system of thinking.173 Although parts of Africans’ Western style wearing became somewhat popular at that time, it entails the somewhat absurd or foreign elements, which were not fully naturalized to the eyes of contemporariness as

Campbell wrote.

In this context, the decentered viewer via The Black Photo Album— reimagining the antagonism among different races—searches for why the absurdity or foreignness is created at the particular time, when people experienced the conflicts between being colonized and modernized. Bhabha once said, the configuration of the

172 Foucault developed the concept about episteme in Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1952). Michael Foucault, Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), p. 168. 173 Via his concept of discontinuity, Foucault focused on a particular (micro) history rather than a general (macro) history, and he sought to reveal the absurdity, foreignness, or shortcomings of that particular time’s system of thinking—episteme. Also, he unmasked the traditional/modern historians’ traces of causality or an origin and their abuse of history for ideological purposes. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 140–145; Mark Poster, “Foucault and History,” Social Research, Vol. 49, No. 1, Modern Masters (Spring, 1982): pp. 119–122.

99 postcolonial countries’ past must always mediate the teleology of progress that falls into the timeless discourse of irrationality and the archaic ambivalence that informs the time of modernity.174 As such, the absurdity or foreignness that the decentered viewer seeks for likely stems from black South Africans’ complex internal struggles— resisting the European colonizers’ designation of natives, yet as a way of overcoming it, adapting their cultural mentality—at the influx of the Western centric modernization in the colonized territory. Here, Mofokeng does not make a judgment for those black ancestors’ historical position. Instead by presenting the project for the first time in

1997 at the Johannesburg Biennale, he experimented how such an issue of colonial subjects might be extended into international viewers.175

Intended Imperfection: Textual Elements as Instruments for Looking and Feeling

Mofokeng’s representation of ambiguity regarding black South Africans’ historical position might be more complicated in The Black Photo Album than in

Police with Sjambok because with the former, he addresses the ancestors about whom he was never taught. According to Mofokeng, “These solemn images of middle- and working-class black families […] portray a class of black people which, according to my education, did not exist at the time that they were made.”176 The history he

174 Homi Bahbah, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 142. 175 The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 has been displayed since its first version was created in 1995. However, in October of 1997, at first, it was shown through a slideshow installation for international viewers at the second Johannesburg Biennale, which was directed by Okwui Enwezor. 176 Santu Mofokeng, “Trajectory of a Street Photographer,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 11/12 (2000): 40–47.

100 unearthed in his research for The Black Photo Album has been largely obscured for his generation. Differing from his other works, The Black Photo Album is a project of collection as much as of creation: Mofokeng gathers and re-photographs the old portraits, and then reorders them with accompanying text. In this way, the project speaks to the life of South Africans whom Mofokeng never met before.

But Mofokeng also once said, “I like ambiguity which comes from a position of the helplessness, not authority [in representation of South Africa].”177 But what does helpless mean to Mofokeng here? What position does he take for himself when conceptualizing those ancestors’ positions in South African history? In what ways does he imbue his own feeling of ambiguity into the project? These questions will be addressed in the later of this section; however, Patricia Hayes argued:

Mofokeng’s oeuvre poses a second implicit critique of Marxism and of the social history paradigms that took hold in South Africa especially in the 1980s. In all the histories of workers, histories of resistance, and histories “from below,” nothing prepared Mofokeng for the bourgeois aspirations of the ancestors that he found in old photographs for The Black Photo Album series.178

177 “While Goldblatt (David Goldblatt is another South African artist whose main medium is photography) stated that ‘I am excited by the existence of things,’ Mofokeng said that ‘I like ambiguity which comes from a position of the helplessness, not authority.’” Patricia Hayes, “Poisoned Landscapes” in Chasing Shadows, Santu Mofokeng, Thirty Years of Photographic Essays, ed. Corinne Diserens (Munich, London, and New York: Prestel Publishing, 2011), p. 203. 178 Patricia Hayes, “Santu Mofokeng, Photographs: ‘the Violence is in the Knowing’”: 51.

101 As Mofokeng assumed a historian-like position in his work for The Black Photo Album, he was confronted with an unexpected part of South African history, as Hayes argued, without preparing for that discovery, as his researching and archiving evolved from his initial findings.

Mofokeng’s retouching processes for The Black Photo Album mostly entails restoring original photographs, a process which positions Mofokeng as a diligent historian whose work revitalizes lost histories and memories. The original photographs are scanned, enhanced, and retouched through Adobe Photoshop, and then transferred onto 200-line-per-inch screen negatives. Then the contact prints are produced to normal photographic printings.179 Mofokeng as a highly skilled, professional artist utilizes contemporary techniques in order to bring an unvarnished effect into the restored images. Regarding his acts of retouching, Okwui Enwezor wrote, “Rather than aesthetic interventions on the images to prove a point as author, Mofokeng has instead, except for restoring the images, left the photographs as they are.”180 Enwezor’s viewpoint is correct when it comes to the images of The Black Photo Album; however, the case of the text slides is different.

In a sense, the images function as evidence of Mofokeng’s historical research while the text slides demonstrate his interpretative intervention. As I have discussed,

179 Santu Mofokeng, “Refrain” in The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950 (Göttingen: Steidl; New York: The Walther Collection, 2013), p. iii. 180 Enwezor compared Mofokeng’s restoring processes with the works of Penny Siopis, Wayne Barker, Peet Pienaar, and Günther Herbst, who are working with old photographs of South Africa’s colonial period. Okwui Enwezor, “Reframing the Black Subject: Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation,” Third Text, Vol. 11 (1997): 30.

102 Mofokeng recontextualizes the found portraits by adding text slides, which mostly consist of his critical questions. In addition to making the questions, Mofokeng inserts formal imperfections—incorrect spellings, changes of sizes and styles of text, and coloring—into the text slides that signify his desire to restore a more complete picture of the past. While his restoring processes show his prudence, the formal imperfections in text, at first glance, appear like mistakes. At this time, the relationship between image and text suggests for ambivalence more than ambiguity because such contradicted attitudes—simultaneously working diligently for truth-telling and producing purposeful mistakes—in dealing of history evokes opposition in tandem.

And such opposition seems to arise from Mofokeng’s denial to make a judgment of the ancestors’ historical position, which configures their life stories as half-graspable and half-ungraspable.

The portrait of Elliot Phakane and the following text slide exhibits this ambivalence. Unlike many of the images in The Black Photo Album, the frame for

Elliot’s portrait is cut off from the original image [Fig. 38], leaving only the photographic figure in the background of the projection [Fig. 39]. The portrait displays a young man wearing a nice suit who looks elegant as he leans on a banister with his right arm, crosses his legs, and places his left hand in a his pocket. On the left side of the back wall, there is a painted window and curtain that connects to a column of the banister, which provides a stable composition for the scene. The following text slide offers a sentence that begins with, “At the back of this image is written.” And then, in the next text slide, his name and the date, “c. 1900s” appear. From the original image,

103 Mofokeng cleaned the major stains and spots in order to restore the portrait, enhancing the quality of the image. In addition, Mofokeng seemed to readjust the brightness by emphasizing the shadow of the column and the whiteness of the back wall, which serve to make the image more vital. Upon the diagonals created by his crossed legs, jacket, and curtain—as well as the interplay of shadow and light—Jennifer Bajorek remarked, “Each element refers to the others with such perfect symmetry and balance

[…] Not by accident, we suspect, the impression of formal perfection affects our impression of the young man’s character.”181 As if the viewer could envision the young man, Mofokeng’s refurbishment of Elliot’s portrait demonstrates an impression of perfect restoration.

In contrast to the almost perfectly restored portrait of Elliot, the following text slide seems to indicate how Mofokeng reveals some parts of Elliot’s life [Fig. 40].

Mofokeng noted that the sentences were written on the back of the original portrait, and they begin with, “My brother Elliot Phakane, Bethlehem Location, O. F. S. Stand

No. 1161 …january, fEByaRiE, MaRich, APRiL, may, june, july, auGust, Septembur, octoBer, NovemBer, BecemBer.” Here, it is impossible to determine the source of the ellipsis between the number 1161 and the word january because Mofokeng might have employed the punctuation to reduce the length of the original text for his own purposes.

Yet there doesn’t seem to be any interference on Mofokeng’s part in terms of transferring the spellings of the twelve months as they were written originally. Even a

181 Jennifer Bajorek, “Then and Now: Santu Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album,” p. 224. The Italic font is made by me.

104 quick glance reveals the fact that many of the months are spelled or styled in nonstandard including many mistakes such as misspellings and mishmash of upper and lower characters. The next sentence begins in Afrikaans, “Aan M.V. Jooste van die persooneel van Die Vaderland.” Mofokeng then informs the viewer that the sentence was on the box in which Elliot’s portrait was found. In the dissonance that arises when shifting from English to Afrikaans, the mistakes in the spellings of the twelve months may evoke in the viewer the sense of black South Africans’ mimicry of European language. Furthermore, in the last sentence, Mofokeng wrote that sixty-eight images, including Eliot’s portrait, were kept in the same box, and one of them was of “Their most Gracious Majesties, Edward VII and Queen Alexandria–In their robes of State.”

Mofokeng seems to attribute these words to Elliot’s brother, who aspired to follow

British royal culture yet could not hide his genuine identity due to the spelling mistakes. Such mistakes play an important role in unearthing the identity of Elliot or more precisely, that of his brother who remembered Elliot and might live in a similar manner with him.

In The Black Photo Album, Mofokeng’s imagery works to make the depicted subjects appear present,182 and the feeling of the presence becomes even more

182 The idea that photography functions as a certificate of the presence is from Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflection on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 87. Influenced by Barthes, Michael S. Roth asserted that “Photography amplifies the rim of ontological uncertainty by raising questions of presence and temporal disjunction in a mnemonic context of desire and absence. The photographic image calls one to the past, while reminding one that the object one beholds is just an image. The tension between the indexical lure of presence and the representation reminders of absence intensifies the photograph’s affective and cognitive value for the beholder.”

105 compelling via the textual elements of the project. By transferring the writer’s mistakes without correction, the formal imperfections in the text transmit, in a sense, a more vivid presence of Elliot. Here, the contradicting effects—the carefully restored image versus the imperfectly ordered impression from the text—also produce the two oppositional mode of ambivalence that helps the viewer to reconfigure Elliot, who constructed his identity according to European culture yet could not be a European man.183 In this context, it can be said that the mistakes in the text slide stems from

Mofokeng’s intentional refusal to correct, and such intention is comparable with his prudence shown in restoration of the image. In this way, both image and text about

Elliot indicate Mofokeng’s strong attachment to envision a memory of a man and the time and place that the man actually lived—around the 1900s in South Africa.

As seen from the textual components to Elliot’s portrait, Mofokeng’s formal imperfections are observed in many other text slides. The text of The Black Photo

Album is categorized into three types: captions, which identify the figures’ names, dates, and places; informative sentences, which provide supporting information about the presented figures and consist of explanatory sentences, citations (for example,

“Inboekseling means forced juvenile apprenticeship in agriculture, a euphemism for enslavement” [Fig. 41], or quotations (collected words about the photographic subjects from his or her family members or the artist’s research); and critical comments, such as

Michael S. Roth, “Photographic Ambivalence and Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory, Vol. 48, No. 4 (December, 2009): 91. 183 Among the collected portraits, some torn ones are included, and it is hard to say that the entire portraits of the project were perfectly restored.

106 “Who is gazing?,” “What was the occasion,” or “Are these images evidence of mental colonization?”184

The text slide related to Elliot’s portrait is in the informative sentences category. However, within that category, the variations of the sizes and styles of the sentences differ, especially when reviewing quotations. For example, when Mofokeng includes a quotation from Dodgey Ramela about his grandfather, Tokelo Nkole, the size of the sentence is equal to the other text presented, ending with the speaker’s name

[Fig. 42]. But in the text slide that follows the portrait of the Moatshe, the words from the daughter, “This is not my father! […]” appear emphatically in the center of the projected scene without the daughter’s name; and the sentence about the daughter,

“Information according to the daughter, who confessed that she had died and was resurrected after six days” is presented at the bottom with a reduced size [Fig. 43].

Similarly, the son of Seipati Martha Motingoe mentioned his mother’s job, “a washerwoman,” and the size of the text is much smaller than any other pieces of text

[Fig. 44]. The varied sizes and styles create a mood akin to oral communication which entails different vocal volumes and inflections. In the case of Motingoe’s text, for instance, “a washerwoman,” the audience may infer that the words are whispered due to the diminutive size of the text. In fact, as the spelling mistakes and the odd capitalization found in Elliot’s text transmit a sense of who wrote the twelve months,

184 Bajorek categorized the text of Mofokeng’s project but in a bit different way. Jennifer Bajorek, “Then and Now: Santu Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album,” p. 220.

107 the varied sizes and styles found in the words by Moatshe’s daughter or Motingoe have a similar effect, delivering a sense of an individual speaker.

The formal imperfections in text slides also appear for two key questions of the project, “Who is gazing?” and “What was the occasion?” As opposed to all of the other text slides which are written in white on a plain-black background, the two key questions emphasize the act of misprinting on a gradational background: just above the sentence, “Who is gazing?,” another question, “What was the occasion?” faintly appears [Fig. 45]. On this slide, the question looks like the trace of an erased phrase.

But the phrase, “What was the occasion?” appears again, clearly at this time just five slides later. And the sentence is presented on a faded background with a pronounced crease, which creates a visceral sense of flipping from one page to the next—here, the text slide delivers a sense of touch [Fig. 46].185 Indeed, Mofokeng’s inclusion of the formal imperfections in text produces diverse sensorial affects: vernacular language, stimulation from imprinted memories, and an awareness of voice and touch. Further, all of these textual elements suggest the presence of a writer or speaker who remembered the photographic figures and thus evoke the viewer’s phenomenological engagement with those remembered figures.

According to Eelco Runia, presence entails being in touch with people, things, events, and feelings that made us into the person we are, so a sense of presence—being in touch with reality—begins constituting the base of historical research.186 As such,

185 The two questions appear on the text slide again in the Slide 68. 186 Eelco Runia, “Presence,” History and Theory, Vol. 45 (February, 2006): 5.

108 Mofokeng’s text contributes to a sense of presence, which helps the viewer to be in touch with the people who were demised and to seek for their life via South African history. However, as Mofokeng once said, “Apartheid was a roof. And under this roof, life was difficult, many aspects of life were concealed, proscribed,”187 we should acknowledge the fact that much of black South Africans’ life stories were forcefully removed from South African history during the violent regime. Presumably, it is the reason why the life stories of the photographic figures of The Black Photo Album do not exist in South African education for a long time. In this context, the textual elements of The Black Photo Album allow the viewer to get even closer, or at least feel closer, to the depicted subjects via the linguistic custom, sensorial effects, and politics of memory. The viewer thus comes to feel rather than just see the figures represented.

Indeed, the textual elements in The Black Photo Album primarily function to deliver the written information. But their imperfect ordering, varied sizes, styling, and coloring make the photographic figures’ erased existence felt rather than examined or judged.

The eighty slides presented in The Black Photo Album consist of a mix of well restored portraits, like Eliot’s picture, torn ones, and written information. All emerge out of Mofokeng’s archival research, and the process of archiving historical material is central to the project. However, for Mofokeng, it is impossible to completely restore photographic memories or people’s words because history is always uncertain, a

187 Santu Mofokeng, “Invoice (The curatorial text, originally written in 2007 in Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg)” in Chasing Shadows, Santu Mofokeng, Thirty Years of Photographic Essays, p. 7.

109 photograph is made of fragile material, and our words are fleeting.188 Here, such impossibility to complete the picture of the past becomes an engine that generates

Mofokeng’s archive. But at the same time, Mofokeng is aware of the fact that a complete archive is not achievable. The text slides such as “Who isthirtgazing?” or

“What was the occasion?” he inserted demonstrate that his archive is incomplete. In this sense, The Black Photo Album mirrors the structure of an archive—the unceasing quest for the full body of histories and memories indicates the fact that they are always already lost for the seeker.189

However, Mofokeng’s archive is alive, not dead in the sense that his research has led him to discover kinships among those pictured and current offspring.190 Based on theories about archives,191 Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe writes about

188 Roth discussed a fetish as a drive from the fragile nature of photographs and photographic memory. Michael S. Roth, “Photographic Ambivalence and Historical Consciousness”: 87. 189 Ethan Kleinberg, “Presence in Abstentia,” Storia della Storiograhia, Vol. 55 (2009): 43–59. 190 Ivan Vladislavic ed., “Santu Mofokeng in Conversation with Corinne Diserens, Part 1” in Chasing Shadows, Santu Mofokeng, Thirty Years of Photographic Essays, p. 16. 191 According to Foucault, an archive as a system for forming and transforming statements, has neither the weight of tradition nor the lightness of complete oblivion and rather always resides between tradition and oblivion. Additionally, an archive cannot be described in its totality but is submerged in fragments, regions, and levels that belong to archaeology. Based on these characters of an archive, Foucault argued that an archive is a discursive field, and the historical a priori of the archive frees a condition of reality for statements rather than a condition of validity for judgments. In this context, an archive becomes the field in which existing power relationships might be reversed. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 130–131. However, Derrida further complicated the notion of an archive as the place where a desire for power of legitimization resides. For Derrida, an archive represents from the very beginning a desire for ontological alternativeness, nomolohgical authority, and hermeneutic right. The Greek root of archive, arkhé, unites two impulses: the impulse, according to nature and history, to commence, and the impulse,

110 the paradoxical relationship between death, archives, and the ways in which we remember historical debt. He writes:

The archive imposes a qualitative difference between co-ownership of dead time (the past) and living time, that is, the immediate present […] It is rooted in death […] On the one hand, there is no state without archives— without its archives. On the other hand, the very existence of the archive constitutes a constant threat to the state. The reason is simple. More than on its ability to recall, the power of the state rests on its ability to consume time, that is, to abolish the archive and anaesthetize the past […] It is a radical act because consuming the past makes it possible to be free from all debt.192

Mbembe criticizes the fact that contemporary archives tend to take the form of places for commemoration (like museums) in which any subversive forces of history are removed. In such archives, any debris of death is quickly consumed under politics of forgetting, not remembering.193 In this sense, Mofokeng’s project seems to resists this kind of archive and becomes instead a kind of radical anarchive through his intervening in interpreting the portraits through the text.194 The text parts of The Black

according to the laws of men and gods, to command. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 1–4. 192 Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits” in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Springer, 2002), p. 23. 193 Ibid, 24. 194 The term anarchive was used by Tom McDonough. He argued that the title of Jacques Derrida’s 1994 lecture (and later book), “Mal d’archive,” might more accurately translate to archive sickness rather than archive fever. He stated that, “For Derrida, the nature of that sickness is ambiguous, being both a malady within the archive, affecting its ability to construct social memory, and an affliction suffered by those who are denied access to its store of information. Derrida usefully points to the wider social parameters of our fascination with this domain: it could be seen as a response to what he calls a

111 Photo Album help the viewer to remember the photographed subjects. For instance, the repetitive projection of the critical questions helps the viewer to recontextualize the portrait’s subjects with text in South African history. Further, Mofokeng’s purposeful mistakes in text oppose to the finely mechanized and commoditize forms that disturb immediate consumption of the images. More importantly, the text parts of The Black

Photo Album help the viewer to feel the erased existence of the pictured subjects. In this way, The Black Photo Album resist sanitizing the memories, which fosters people being freed from the historical debt—as Mbembe used the term—for the presented figures who once lived in South Africa yet were erased in South African history.

Photographic Ambivalence as a Means of Doing History

Mofokeng’s work frequently represents an ambivalent view. In The Black

Photo Album, the idea ambivalence connects to the ancestors’ half-graspable and half- ungraspable life stories; whereas, for his other projects, it is expanded to his many other representational subjects via his stance to South African history, adherence to black-and-white photography, artistic strategies, and analog technology, all of which I examine through a conceptual framework in this section. As I have mentioned, ambivalence entails contradictory, oppositional attitudes or feelings. However, Michael

‘trouble de l’archive,’ the trouble of secrets, of plots, of clandestineness, of half-private, half-public conjurations, always between the family, the society, and the state.” However, according to McDonough, the anarchive as a radical archive functions to question how the power of constructing archives and granting the accessibility to those archives works. Tom McDonough, “Photography: The Anarchive,” Art in America, 96 (May, 2008): 77.

112 Roth argues that photographs provide an ambivalent sense when the scene delivers an impression of the past but cannot satisfy the desire for its full presence.195 The Black

Photo Album, then, should be thought of as partial exposure and partial concealment— the viewer sees the subjects whose existence, historically, has been hidden from view, and yet this new visibility points to further moments of obstruction or veiled vision.

Similarly, Mofokeng, in numerous projects, emphasizes this ultimate unknowability and plays with the ambivalent tension between the seen and the unseen.

For instance, Mofokeng’s Chasing Shadows (1996–2008) project, which traces his journey to uncover a South African traditional religious practice, includes such play between partial exposure and partial concealment. One of the photographs from the project, Buddhist Retreat Near Pietermaritzburg Kwazulu Natal (2003), depicts a horse in a foggy forest [Fig. 47]. The animal bends down to the ground, a gesture which results in its head being shielded by weeds. Unlike the head, its ribs are visible under the skin and catch the viewer’s anatomical look. For another image,

Church of God Motouleng (1996), Mofokeng captures the movement of a person passing in front of a rocky cave that hosts religious services [Fig. 48]. The passenger’s moving body is blurred, but all of the materiality on the rocky surface, such as rough textures, patterns, and some crude writings are clearly presented. In both images, these contrasting effects render the spectator’s view ambivalent.

Mofokeng’s representation of ambivalence—partial exposure and partial concealment—points to his own attitudes and feelings about the photographic subjects.

195 Michael S. Roth, “Photographic Ambivalence and Historical Consciousness”: 89.

113 That is, he researches and contemplates the photographic subjects without judgment and instead, opens a destined interpretation of the subject. Mofokeng seems to surrender such a final step to the viewer’s own engagement. About ambivalence, Harry

Frankfurt writes:

Ambivalence is constituted by conflicting volitional movements or tendencies […] He [the subject or agency] is inclined in one direction, and he is inclined in the contrary direction as well; and his attitude toward these inclinations is unsettled […]196

If there is an unresolved conflict among someone […] he is in danger of having no second-order volition […] no preference concerning which of his first-order desires is to be his will [...]197

The person is not merely in conflict with forces “outside” him; rather, he himself is divided.198

Here, Frankfurt emphasizes the fact that ambivalence is from inner conflicts, “in” the subject’s mind, not “outside” of it. That is, ambivalence is brought up when the subject has to know where he himself stands and what he wants.199 So, if this idea is concerning Mofokeng’s photographs, his unsettled, unresolved relationship with the

196 Harry Frankfurt, “The Fainted Passion” in Necessity, Volition, and Love (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 99–100. 197 Harry Frankfurt, “Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person” in The Importance of What We Care About: The Philosophical Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 21. 198 Harry Frankfurt, “Identification and Wholeheartedness” in The Importance of What We Care About: The Philosophical Essays, p. 165. 199 J. S. Swell, “Ambivalence,” Philosophical Explorations, Vol. 13, No. 1 (March, 2010): 24.

114 photographic subjects—or his complicated stance in which he perceives and engages in the photographic subjects—constitutes ambivalence in view.

In some ways, ambivalence characterizes most of Mofokeng’s work, including his landscapes—the genre that makes up the majority of his projects. I have already discussed ambivalence in the Chasing Shadows photographs, but such images elicit further questions. For instance, how does he feel the land that once was a Promised

Land designated for whites only and is now called his? And how does he perceive and engages in the land as his homeland and trace the scars of South African history?200

The artist’s stance to the South African landscapes is similar with his stance to the country’s history. In fact, the history of the land is inseparable from that of the country, as I have discussed the 1913 Natives Land Act that outlawed black people’s ownership of the land. Similar to the right of the land, the right of writing history was once deprived from him and now should be sought by him, as his ancestors’ life stories were not allowed to access for a long time. So Mofokeng’s representation of the country’s history is viewed from his landscape. However, the idea of the land for him is a place where people have been forced to leave and more recently, where people still experience troubles of a new plague and acid mine drainage. All of these disappointments have created a psychic rupture for Mofokeng and affected on his stance to the photographic subjects including his home and family in the land.201

200 Sabine Vogel, “On a Wing and a Prayer” in Chasing Shadows, Santu Mofokeng, Thirty Years of Photographic Essays, p. 140. 201 Ibid., 141.

115 Here are Mofokeng’s works that demonstrate such kinds of photographic subjects. Mofokeng’s project about post-apartheid landscapes, Climate Change (2007), includes a photograph, South Beach, Replacing of the Sand Washed Away During the

Floods and Wave Action, Durban [Fig. 49]. The scene portrays a seascape obscured by flying sand, which replaces the existing sand around the seashore that has been poisoned by lengthy mining operations that occurred even before apartheid.202 At this point, the presented seashore is no longer a habitable place for home. Another project,

Ishmael (2004), traces the journey of his brother, Ishmael, as he sought a comfortable place before AIDS claimed his life. One picture depicts Ishmael’s closed-up, dying face with his closed eyes [Fig. 50], while passing people behind him are blurred.

Ishmael worked as a healer—a sangoma—in South Africa, and Mofokeng titled it,

Eyes Wide Shut delivering a dualistic, bitter sense.203 That is, Ishmael did not see his own body healing while working for other people.204 Ishmael cannot belong to

Mofokeng’s beloved family anymore.

202 For Mofokeng’s post-apartheid landscapes, Patricia Hayes writes, “Nowadays’ acid mine drainage (AMD), which is elsewhere called acid rock drainage (ARD) because of the more generalized conditions in which it occurs, is one of the most important issues in South Africa […] The experts go back to the pre-mining landscape in order to explain the violations of modern deep-level mining, and the trauma signifies in the post-mining landscape with groundwater refilling the pumped-out voids of mine shafts and the chemical processes producing acid […] Mofokeng’s work suggests that we have moved from broken landscapes to poisoned landscapes.” Patricia Hayes, “Poisoned Landscapes,” p. 204. 203 Adam Ashforth, “Serious Laughter: The Twisted Humour of Santu Mofokeng” in Chasing Shadows, Santu Mofokeng, Thirty Years of Photographic Essays, pp. 228–229. 204 About the threat of HIV/AIDS in post-apartheid South Africa, Hayes argues, “Under the first industrial (We are looking at the ravage of these economies of scale in the South African mining landscape) decide the worker is stunted, thanks to the decision of labor that gives rise to ‘men whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operation.’ Under the second (New mining in South Africa took place under the condition that a restructuring of capitalism characterized by decentralized

116 Both Frankfurt’s and Roth’s understandings of ambivalence apply to

Mofokeng’s work. For the base of Mofokeng’s representation of ambivalence, I have discussed Frankfurt’s emphasis on a conflicting stance to the photographic subjects; and Roth’s focus on an unsatisfied desire for seeking the full past. In this context,

Mofokeng’s ambivalent sense viewed from the obscured seascape, Ishmael’s shut eyes, or blurred people behind him demonstrates, on the one hand, his uneasy stance to those photographic subjects, and on the other, his continuous seeking for the past. So it can be asked if such a conflicting stance to the photographic subjects regards his idea of the past. And this in turn points to his ongoing capturing of inhabitable lands or dying people, which demonstrate that for Mofokeng, the past is irreversible and so still troubles as if the past claims a loss of habitable land and his brother. Indeed,

Mofokeng’s stance to South Africa’s past seems never to have been settled or fully resolved. At this point, I argue that Mofokeng’s representation of ambivalence works as a means of doing history—it suggests how South Africa’s traumatic past persists into the present in troubles with the current lands and people’s lives.

According to Enwezor, Mofokeng’s photographs inhabit two complementary zones of expression—one about the straightforward scenes of social rituals that demonstrate emblematic, quotidian life, and the other about the artist’s detachment

production and changed technologies of flexible specialization; high unemployment, impoverishment dislocation, alienation, and violence in a time of HIV/Aids, and its own generation of orphans), the worker is discarded. Socially and politically, the effect is a move from repression to forgetting.” Patricia Hayes, “Poisoned Landscapes,” pp. 206–207.

117 from the apartheid state and social activism.205 In other words, the artist’s stance regarding the South African state is dualistic, simultaneously straightforward and detached, which creates a contradicting effect—a sense of ambivalence. Enwezor states:

Mofokeng appears to take an ambivalent role, staying just a slight remove from the subjects […] Such a withdrawal into using his camera as an analytical instrument makes it seem as if he is intent on unlinking himself from a purely emotional identification with black life. This emotional restraint […] represents a critical awareness that the task of the photograph is not to plead for the spectator’s attention, but to invite her or him to engage in the image […] to explore the formal tactics that informed its making and the aesthetic qualities.206

Enwezor claims that ambivalence functions to expand the viewer’s engagement in the presented scenes. So again, Mofokeng’s representation of ambivalence is more than a documenting of South Africa—it helps Mofokeng’s projects historicize South Africa’s enduring past, as well as expand the viewer’s engagement in it. In fact, Mofokeng once mentioned, “I am disillusioned by my work as a journalist and documentary photographer […] I have questions on the efficacy of photography making

205 Okwui Enwezor, “Images of Radical Will, Santu Mofokeng’s Photographic Ambivalence” in Chasing Shadows, Santu Mofokeng, Thirty Years of Photographic Essays, pp. 38–41. 206 Enwezor also states, “Despite the attention he paid to the struggle, Mofokeng’s photographic stance towards his photographic subjects remains largely ambivalence […] A survey of his work reveals this psychological distance […] However, ambivalence here does not in any way suggest disengagement. If anything, it is a ploy used to penetrate the subject, to dig beneath the flabby skin of exhibitionist spectacle, to reach the other side beyond the degraded life.” Ibid., 38. The Italic font is made by me.

118 interventions and mobilizing people around issues.”207 If the efficacy of photography works, Mofokeng’s representation of ambivalence can be said to have a potential to mobilize people—a potential to redirect the enduring past of South Africa.

When asked about his artistic strategy, Mofokeng stated, “I know aesthetics

[…] It’s not an accident. I learned technique not to rebel against it, but to try and do photography that was different. I wanted control. And then I wanted to be different.”208

Here, he argues that his aesthetical method is produced by intention, not improvisation or mistake, as seen in his inclusion of pictorial technique of smoke or mist in many landscapes or his insertion of formal imperfections in The Black Photo Album.

Mofokeng also said, “When assigned a particular theme, I make the rubric large,” and this statement reminds me of why he seeks to capture spanned time when picturing subjects—again, seeking the past from the present and considering the present from the past. Mofokeng’s ability to represent spanned time—for instance, as I have discussed, his capturing of a current seascape poisoned by lengthy mining operations that occurred from earlier before apartheid—makes it possible for him to unearth more complex causalities or human interventions that endure the past effects on the present in South Africa.209 In this way, Mofokeng’s representation of ambivalence aligns with his perspective on South African history.

207 Ibid., 39. 208 Santu Mofokeng, The artist’s presentation for postgraduates in his class, Visual History, at the University of Western Capes, Sep. 20, 2006; Recited, Patricia Hayes, “Santu Mofokeng, Photographs: ‘the Violence is in the Knowing’”: 43. 209 Patricia Hayes, “Poisoned Landscapes,” p. 208.

119 Another way to think about Mofokeng’s representation of ambivalence is in relation to the discourses of documentary and essay. Mofokeng once said,

“Documentary is about telling the truth, but certain truths are actually elided from the story. The only way I could show both the good and the bad was in an essay. It allowed for—not balance, but complexity.”210 For Mofokeng, then, the written word combined with photographs allows for complexity in truth-telling, particularly in relation to the history of South Africa. In Mofokeng’s career, he became interested in the photographic-essays when he worked for documenting parts of South Africa’s vanishing rural culture in the 1980s. In fact, that work, Oral Documentation Project, which researched the transformation of rural under apartheid, was commissioned by a social historian and critic of Afrikaner nationalism, Charles van Onselen.211 Ultimately, through his entire career, photography accompanies much of his written text, which raises a question of what the relationship between photography and essays is in his artistic projects.

W. J. T. Mitchell has argued that the relationship between photography and written essay came from traditional pairings such as history paintings and epics or landscapes and poems. According to him, the specific word essay—rather than text or narrative—lends a nonfictional, informal, personal, and incomplete sense. He argued that since photography might function both, straightforwardly or emotionally, it is impossible to capture everything in a single frame. Here, in order to articulate the two

210 Ivan Vladislavic ed., “Santu Mofokeng in Conversation with Corinne Diserens, Part 1,” pp. 15–16. 211 Patricia Hayes, “Santu Mofokeng, Photographs: ‘the Violence is in the Knowing’”: 39.

120 genres’ similarities and differences, Mitchell questioned the dialectics that manifest within the exchanges between photography and language, for instance, whether

“reading the photograph” or “seeing the essay” is possible.212 But in Mofokeng’s photographic-essays, such an exact dialectical relationship is rarely found. Although his essays reveal complicated thoughts and provide background information, his photographs can stand independently as conveyers of numerous messages without essay. However, I question if Mofokeng’s black-and-white photography satisfies a readable mode. The impact of the two colors—more exactly, the two extremities in tones—of black and white conjure up a sense of oldness, historical reading, and traditional printing; but on the other hand, the varying spectrums of tonal effects— from white to light and dark gray to black—invites a subtle nuance and rhetoric akin a readable mode.

Mofokeng’s Moth’osele Maine, Bloemhof (1994) from the project of Bloemhof

(1988–1994) demonstrates such kinds of tonal effects that deliver a subtle nuance and rhetoric [Fig. 51]. The black-and-white photograph captures a seated man seen from a glass. The tones produce a man’s gray shadow on the back and also configure a white, radiating reflection at the center, in which the entire scene is rendered to lacking sharpness or extraneous details. The man’s face is darkened by a strong black tone, and thus his identity is obscured, which delivers his mysterious characters.213 Amid this mood, the radiating reflection functions to create an aura around the subject. The essay

212 W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 281–289. 213 Okwui Enwezor, “Images of Radical Will, Santu Mofokeng’s Photographic Ambivalence,” p. 38.

121 Mofokeng composed to accompany this image concentrates on the contradicting emotions felt in the small town of Bloemhof around the upcoming 1994 election—the historical moment when Nelson Mandela would become the first black president in

South Africa. Mofokeng wrote:

In April 1994, I went to Bloemhof to observe and record the elections and the ushering-in of democracy […] What struck me on this visit was the mixture of confidence and apprehension […] An uneasy sense of euphoria pervaded the atmosphere; a combination of anticipation and dread, excitement and anxiety—of something about to happen, of an election of things going awfully wrong.214

However, such an uneasy sense of the specific moment that he wrote is readable not only in his essay but also in the photographed man’s face and gesture by the interplay of black and white. From the white aura, his face appears mostly darkened, yet the subtle differences of black tones indicate that his lips are tightened and his eyes are blazing, all of which eventually deliver the uneasy, complicated moments charged with anticipation and anxiety, the moments of something about to happen. In fact,

Mofokeng’s adherent use of black-and-white photography is critical to his representation of ambivalence, which crosses the border of readable and the seeable modes to seeking for complex truths around South African history. Importantly,

Mofokeng’s readable image in turn functions as a counter-part of the textual elements presented in The Black Photo Album. That is, as I have discussed in the previous

214 Santu Mofokeng, “Rumours/The Bloemhof Portfolio” in Chasing Shadows, Santu Mofokeng, Thirty Years of Photographic Essays, p. 46. The Italic font is made by me.

122 section, some text slides evoke the viewer’s mode of looking and feeling than that of reading.

In a sense, Mofokeng’s black-and-white images work for the antithesis to the large, colorful, and spectacular images that often pervade contemporary art exhibitions.215 In order to relay what he seeks for, Mofokeng spends a long time on the photographic process216—he maintains the handcrafted gelatin-silver process conducted in the darkroom and stainless-steel washing tray that many of his colleagues in South Africa abandoned long ago. He does not depend on color much, and similarly, he hesitates to use a digital camera. He prefers slow, analog workmanship to create his work.217 In so doing, his work resists a quick, mechanical production process, as well as a touristic consumption of exotic or sensational images. According to Hayes, “For a variety of reasons, some socioeconomic, he has sometimes used exhausted chemicals to achieve certain effects. The closer we get to the routine of Mofokeng, the more the darkroom appears to be outside.”218 This statement reveals the fact that the viewer’s careful observation is required to see certain effects produced in the artist’s working process. The effects might be a possible mode of reading images (as seen from

Moth’osele Maine, Bloemhof) or that of looking or feeling text (as examined in The

Black Photo Album).

215 Okwui Enwezor, “Images of Radical Will, Santu Mofokeng’s Photographic Ambivalence,” p. 42. 216 Patricia Hayes, “Santu Mofokeng, Photographs: ‘the Violence is in the Knowing’”: 36. 217 Sabine Vogel, “On a Wing and a Prayer,” p. 141. 218 Patricia Hayes, “Santu Mofokeng, Photographs: ‘the Violence is in the Knowing’”: 35.

123 However, Mofokeng’s use of black and white is even more emblematic in The

Black Photo Album than his other works. The slide following the title page states,

“With the so called civilized workers, almost without exception, their civilization was only skin deep”219 [Fig. 52]. Here, the white letters on the black background directs the viewer to the main topic at hand—racial oppression in South Africa. In opposition to the straightforwardness of this black and white inscription, the black subjects, whose skin color consists of varied grays on the photographic surface, seem to occupy a space between black and white, a certain gray zone. Focusing on the white letters of skin deep on the black background, I would summarize this section with Franz Fanon’s statement excerpted from Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Fanon said:

For these individuals [who achieved their elite position by negotiating with the colonizers’ educational and economic systems], the demand for the national culture and the affirmation of the existence of such culture represent a special battle-field […] While the politicians situate their action in present- day event, men of culture take their stand in the field of history […] [in order to prevent] a kind of perverted logic that colonization turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.220

Fanon argued that postcolonial subjects should maintain a historical consciousness as a way to resist the past colonial states. Regarding historical consciousness, Mofokeng once said that The Black Photo Album was actually conducted as a social research

219 And then he states the following: “O. Pirow, quoting prime minister J. B. M. Hertzog.” 220 Franz Fanon, “The Negro and the Recognition” in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Groove Press, 1967), pp. 168–169.

124 project, more than as a work of art.221 In fact, his research project was designed to provide a history lesson for audience. However, the repetition of the black subjects— whose skin exhibits varied tones from the gray—Mofokeng questions in which zone of skin colors we are standing for and in what ways we are to challenge the current racial discourses.

Esthema: Emotional Engagement in the Traumatic History of Others

As I have discussed, The Black Photo Album creates reciprocal gazes, incites bodily engagement, and provokes virtual conversation—all of which serves to facilitate an affinity between the viewer and the subjects. And the inclusion of vernacular language or a sense of voice and touch on the text slides further delivers a feeling that those represented are somehow present. The tactical strategy of the project stimulates the viewer’s mnemonic process—first, to get closer to those presented subjects, and then to remember their death. In this way, Mofokeng’s practice represents complicated internal struggles—both from the colonial past and in the current moment—on the surface. Mofokeng’s sensitivity to ambivalence for both of those represented and of those looking points to the ways in which South Africa’s traumatic past has never been entirely settled or resolved. This section investigates the ways in which those from other states—other countries or cultures—are able to emotionally engage in South Africa’s history via Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album.

221 Ivan Vladislavic ed., “Santu Mofokeng in Conversation with Corinne Diserens, Part 1,” p. 15.

125 Discussing the varying nature of memory, history, and collective memory,

Pierre Nora argues that memory, as a raw material for constructing history, is blind to all but the group to which it is bound. History, however, belongs to everybody and yet belongs to nobody since it claims a universal authority. Collective memory, though mostly remains abstract and ambiguous, functions as a means of producing history that belongs to a political field.222 Influenced by Walter Benjamin,223 However, what I want to discuss is the ways in which memory is transferred into a more expanded discourse of history. That is, The Black Photo Album is more than a collection of photographic memory. The combination of image and text of the project adds a kind of truer memory—which is equated with something felt (via text slides) or a sense of partial visibility and invisibility (via ambivalence)—to South African history. In this sense, Mofokeng’s collected portraits and text function as an alternative archive that retrieves South Africans’ memories for constructing history.

222 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring, 1989): 7–24. 223 Walter Benjamin discusses the relationship between memory and history as follows, “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was (Ranke)’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain the image of the past which unexpectedly appears to a man singled out by history at a moment of danger.” Also, regarding memory and truth, he states, “He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance advances from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier.” Walter Benjmain, “Theses on the Philosophy of History (originally written in 1940)” in Illumination: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 253–264.

126 As if mirroring the urgency to reconstruct a national history, South Africa established the national archive, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1995.

The TRC was designed to collect the evidence of the nature, causes, and extent of gross violations of human rights committed during the apartheid era. The establishment occurred soon after Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as country’s first black president; and it was two years before Mofokeng began exhibiting The Black

Photo Album. Suffering the colonial regime and continued apartheid era, South Africa was truly the country where any kind of collective memory had been torn into a multitude of pieces.224 As such, the most important role of the TRC at the transitional moments leading to democratic nation building was collecting memories and acknowledging people’s traumatic experiences in order to move toward a new regime.225 By collecting people’s accounts of violence and human rights violations, the TRC defined the four distinct notions of truth:

First, factual or forensic truth based on legal and scientific notions of impartiality and objective procedures; second, personal or narrative truth based on subjective stories and multilayered sets of experiences; third, social and dialogic truth constructed through debate and the collective discussion of facts; and fourth, healing and restorative truth that places facts in context and acknowledges individuals experiences.226

224 Kenneth Christie, The South African Truth Commission (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 8. 225 The roles of the TRC included compensating victims of gross crimes, encouraging various sub- institutions to incorporate local-level experiences, etc. Cheryl McEwan, “Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa,” Journal of South African Studies, Vol. 29 (September, 2003): 744–747. 226 The final report of the institution defined four distinct notions of truth. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report (Oxford:

127 These goals are extraordinarily admirable but how much did the TRC fully function to heal and restore people’s traumatic experiences? As I have discussed in the second section, the archiving practice has always gone through a selection process,227 and power relations always determine what is remembered or forgotten by whom and to what end.228 The TRC is not exempt from such patterns. For instance, one of the criticisms about the TRC is that the institution has a limited definition of violence and reduces people’s narratives from memories to testimonies used to ascertain whether or not a legal violation occurred.229

Moreover, one of the widely accepted criticisms about the TRC is the institutional mechanism of reconciliation between victims and perpetrators, which is based upon the process of confession and forgiveness. According to Richard A. Wilson, the claim of reconciliation with the aim of national healing has continuously distorted reality at the local-level and occluded the multiple voices calling for a retributive justice approach.230 Wilson’s argument shows the importance of the emotional aspects

Macmillian Reference, 1998), pp. 29–55; Recited, Cheryl McEwan, “Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa”: 745. 227 James L. Gibson, “Does Truth Lead to Reconciliation? Testing the Casual Assumptions of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Process,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 48 (April, 2004): 204. 228 John R. Gills, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 3. 229 Cheryl McEwan, “Building a Postcolonial Archive? Building a Postcolonial Archive? Gender, Collective Memory and Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa”: 753–756; Erin Mosely, “Visualizing Apartheid: Contemporary Art and Collective Memory during South Africa’s Transition to Democracy,” Antipoda (July–December, 2007): 114. 230 Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post- Apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 97.

128 of the traumatic history: when reconciliation is forced, how is one’s compulsion to repress recurring memories expressed? Mofokeng talked explicitly about the horrors of everyday life such as being necklaced (burning people with tires and gasoline), which could not be forgotten by reconciliation.231 He also stated, “White people will get their comeuppance in the next life […] We will find justice. Maybe through the ancestors, maybe through Jesus.”232 This kind of statement about a retributive justice is referred to continuously in South Africa because the emotional residues of the traumatic history can never be cleaned up completely. The TRC’s reconciliatory process is thus, on the one hand, supposed to heal people’s traumatic experiences and propel South Africa’s global progress beyond post-colonialism.233 Yet on the other, it has repressed people’s retributive impulse toward perpetrators. Here, I question, in what ways, does The Black

Photo Album mark the difficulty inherent in negotiating the past?

In order to consider the question in a theoretical frame, I would discuss the term emotionology coined by Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns. Differentiating emotionology from emotion, they wrote:

Emotionology: the attitudes or standards that a society or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotion and their appropriate

231 Patricia Hayes, “Santu Mofokeng, Photographs: ‘the violence is in the knowing’”: 39, 42. 232 Santu Mofokeng, Invoice Exhibition Walkabout, South Africa National Gallery, April 25, 2007; Recited, Patricia Hayes, “Santu Mofokeng, Photographs: ‘the Violence is in the Knowing’”: 39. 233 John C. Hawley, “Archaic Ambivalence: the Case of South Africa” in The Conscience of Humankind: Literature and Traumatic Experiences, ed. Elrud Ibsch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 67–71.

129 expression; ways that institutions reflect and encourage these attitudes in human conduct.234

The forced reconciliation promoted by the TRC is herein a critical case to think about emotionology. That is, when the reconciliation is executed as an attitude or standard in society, a range of traumatic memories of South Africans is able to be largely ignored in constructing history. Further, since emotionology effects on formulating collective experiences than individual ones, such a forced attitude or standard is able to influence on legitimation of people’s trauma.235 In this sense, it is not difficult to assume that in the process of redefining South Africans’ identity for a newly established democratic society, people’s retributive impulse toward perpetrators, for instance, should be discarded from legalization. Although there might not be any contemporary society which legalizes a retributive justice, it is hardly possible to say that the TRC fully functioned to relieve people’s traumatic experiences. This criticism in turn points to the fact that the institution failed to register South Africans’ painful memories into history, and as a result, a lingering issue of how to contextualize and compensate their traumatic experiences has unavoidably and continuously emerged in their writing of history.

After the TRC was established in 1995, a large number of South African artists engaged in collecting people’s memories and beginning the healing process

234 Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 90 (October, 1985): 813. 235 Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns discuss emotionology and legitimation. Ibid., 813–821.

130 through their artistic projects.236 Even some theorists insisted that it was the artists’ ethical obligation to take a participatory role in helping people look back and unpack national history—not only to understand the past, but also to aid in moving forward during a time of social change.237 However, Mofokeng avoided such direct, sociopolitical involvement. Instead, he has helped the viewer to look back a more complicated reality embedded in the colonial memories via The Black Photo Album.

The project archives and presents the black South Africans who did not belong to the white ruling class or to the black subaltern class, and he has explored ways of viewing their contradictory life. In fact, they elucidate a shard of history that is not archivable into the TRC, and Mofokeng rescues their erased life. One question presented in a text slide poignantly asks: “Are these mere solemn relics of disrupted narratives or are these images expressive of the general human predicament?” [Fig. 53]. Does

Mofokeng’s question enlarge a discursive field for the general experience of the colonial state beyond a historical or territorial border? Or, does the question point to the fact that the vast territories of Asia and Africa have suffered from colonial periods and still struggle to remove colonial vestiges?

Similar to emotionology, another concept—esthema—is useful to think about in relational to the emotional dimension of history. Focusing on Foucault’s episteme, which is derived from the Greek word for the empirically grounded knowledge,

236 Erin Mosely, “Visualizing Apartheid: Contemporary Art and Collective Memory During South Africa’s Transition to Democracy”: 97–117. 237 Erin Mosely introduces several critics who argued strongly that artists’ participation was obligatory, especially in the case of Gael Neke’s writings. Ibid., 108.

131 Johann Louw and Willem van Hoorn coined the term esthema, which is rooted from the Greek word meaning the emotions of lived experiences.238 Central to the term episteme is the notion of epistemological fields that shape the base of knowledge and set the limits within which human beings are able to think and act. Foucault, through the term, illustrates how the condition of knowledge and legitimation of a specific period is formed.239 Influenced by Foucault’s idea, the term esthema indicates the base of emotions in historical discontinuities within which human beings are able to feel and act.240 If comparing the two terms, Foucault’s episteme addresses how the system of thinking is constructed in a specific time whereas esthema focuses on how the system of feeling is shaped in a specific time.241 In fact, The Black Photo Album certainly addresses the emotional field, as I have discussed the ways in which the presented figure’s erased existence is likely felt rather than being examined or judged.

Further, if focusing on Mofokeng’s statement of “the general human predicament,”

238 Paying attention to the extraordinary changes about knowledge constitution that have manifested over the last four hundred years, Foucault suggests the term episteme. According to him, episteme follows each successive displacement, despite the abrupt shifts from one episteme to another that occurs in some situations. Foucault developed the episteme notion in one of his books: Michel Foucault, Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 239 Johann Louw and Willem van Hoorn, “Historical—Psychological Reflections on Emotion and Human Subjectivity,” South African Journal of Psychology, Vol. 22 (2) (2014): 212. 240 Ibid., 201–215. For more information about the theoretical framework, see: Adrian Brock, Johann Louw, and Willem van Hoorn, eds, Rediscovering the History of Psychology: Essays Inspired by the Work of Kurt Danziger—History and Philosophy of Psychology Series (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2004). 241 The assumption of esthema follows in the footsteps of Foucault, as well as Lucien Febvre and members of the Annales School, who researched emotion as a counterpart of rationality used to construct the human mentality. Johann Louw and Willem van Hoorn, “Historical—Psychological Reflections on Emotion and Human Subjectivity”: 212; Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standard”: 816.

132 The Black Photo Album can be said to present esthema that expands the lived experiences of colonial states into the general “us.”242 In this way, Mofokeng’s project denies an easy process to negotiating the past.

In relation to the concepts around colonialism and post-colonialism, Paul

Tiyambe Zeleza points out the discursive limitations—that is, the ways in which our discourses have been institutionalized and thus limited—of the last half of the century.

He wrote:

The fragmentations, ambivalences, contingencies, hybridities, and multiplicities associated with the “posts” [such as postmodernism or postcolonialism], as conceptions and conditions, were articulated and experienced, with unsettling urgency and persistence, from the bloody dawn of colonial conquest and the violent negations.243

In the statement, the word ambivalence is used as an agency to construct the conception and condition of the prefix, “post-,” whose ambiguity has widely forced people to negotiate the colonial past under the period’s ideological frame. Indeed, the statement discusses esthema within which ranges of people have collectively experienced, felt, and reacted to the colonial past in the last half of the century but could not successfully remove the colonial vestiges. In this sense, the forced reconciliation by the TRC might not be limited to South Africa’s case. Zeleza, by

242 According to Johann Louw and Willem van Hoorn, esthema can be regarded as a real change in people’s collective experience, and it is a useful addition to episteme when reflecting on a historical specificity. Johann Louw and Willem van Hoorn, “Historical—Psychological Reflections on Emotion and Human Subjectivity”: 212. 243 Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The Troubled Encounter between Post-colonialism and African History,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Vol. 17 (2006): 98.

133 criticizing the fact that African and Indian scholars have remained largely ambivalent when it comes to postcolonial discourses, also argues that those scholars should look at the current reality—ranges of territories were ravaged by the legacies of colonialism and further have been devastated by neocolonialists. Therefore, the prefix, “post-,” does not imply “after” or “end” of colonialism.244 Conversely, Mofokeng’s Black

Photo Album crosses over dualistic temporalities—colonialism and its aftermath—by projecting the old, photographed subjects in the present. In so doing, Mofokeng asks why such a partial colonized and partial colonizing subject has been reproduced, and also asks to what degree, we can reflect on our present selves via such a subject.

Combined with Mofokeng’s tactical spectatorship and the international showcase of the project, his project eventually demands international viewers to look at the prolonged colonial states and seek for how the decolonized states can be searched for.

When Mofokeng was invited to exhibit in the German pavilion in the 55th

Venice Biennale in 2013, he showed parts of The Black Photo Album in the pavilion and expressed his complicated feelings about the black ancestors of the portraits via the exhibition catalog. The exhibition aimed to dismantle the concept of a homogeneous nation, and four foreign artists who had engaged in the German art scene received invitations.245 Mofokeng wrote the following in the catalog:

The Chinese say that our body is the memory of our ancestors. This is an ominous proposition since apartheid is an impossible ancestor, inappropriate

244 Ibid., 98–113. 245 Elke Aus Dem Moore, Leonhard Emmerling, and George Fahrenschon, “Preface” in Fabrik: Venice Biennale German Pavilion 2015 (Köln: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015), pp. 48–51.

134 and unsuitable. Whenever we come under threat we remember who we are and where we come from, and we respond accordingly.246

In the quote, he discusses two impossible situations—either remembering or forgetting of the black ancestors, who existed despite being denied in the writing of history, is impossible for South Africans. Mofokeng also wrote:

You are nothing without a past, or that you are not “together” without belonging […] The word, “remember’” needs elaboration. Re/member is a process by which we restore to the body forgotten memories. The body in this case is the landscape—on whose skin and belly histories and myths are projected—which is central to forging national identity.247

Essentially, he expresses two contradictory feelings about his ontological self—a negation of the self who has no history and a desire for belonging to a history that he remembers and shares. In both statements, Mofokeng alludes to the difficulty of having a sense of common history in South Africa. Because of competing national, cultural, and ethnic aspirations and identities shaped via history, South African people never imagined their nationhood. Further in the transitional moments leading to a democratic nation building in South Africa, postcolonial discourses have rendered historical narratives simplistic and limited the knowledge production of history.248

Indeed, through exhibiting The Black Photo Album in the foreign pavilion in Venice,

246 Santu Mofokeng, “Ancestors/Fearing the Shadows” in Fabrik: Venice Biennale German Pavilion 2015, pp. 138–139. 247 Ibid., 138–139. 248 Morgan Ndlovu, “Mobilizing History for Nation-Building in South Africa: A De-colonial Perspective,” Yesterday and Today (The South African Society for History Teaching), Vol. 9 (July, 2013): 1–10.

135 Mofokeng experiments to what degree, international viewers engage in the historical specificity of South Africa, and then contextualize such other’s traumatic history into the wider ranges of historical discourses.

Conclusion

As Mofokeng evokes international viewers’ engagement in South African history, he questions the degree to which he can feel other’s traumatic history by placing himself in another traumatic context.249 Mofokeng made numerous journeys to foreign countries including Japan, Vietnam, and Germany, all of which prompted him to see a dark side of their histories and work for his photographic projects. He once said that “I was looking […] how other countries were coping with memories of events filled with traumas similar to our own.”250 One of Mofokeng’s projects, Landscapes of

Trauma (1997–2000), captures the historical remnants of the Auschwitz concentration camp. It consists of fifteen photographs, most of which demonstrate gloomy atmosphere, including a torture cell with a rack and a whip, a train rail upon which

Jewish were transported, and a thorny fence around the camp. The series of photographs show Mofokeng’s itinerary around the camp; however, all of the places are obviously empty. These empty, historical places seem to demonstrate that they are now nowhere for one’s belonging.

249 Sarat Maharaj, “‘Hungry Clouds Swag on Deep’: Santu Mofokeng at Kassel 2002 Looked at through Jotting from 1994 and Beyond” in Chasing Shadows, Santu Mofokeng, Thirty Years of Photographic Essays, p. 163. 250 Santu Mofokeng, “Man/Nature: A Case History of Pathology” in Chasing Shadows, Santu Mofokeng, Thirty Years of Photographic Essays, p. 148.

136 Mofokeng said that “I don’t think I exaggerate when I say the Holocaust and

Apartheid are the two most memorable evils which hypnotized the world in the twentieth century.”251 These two traumatic histories are also examined in In the

Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt. Arendt compared racism of

South African with anti-Semitism—though they were oriented from the different locale—in order to grapple the mentality that spawned in apartheid and the holocaust.

Seeking the origin of the global history of modern racism from imperialism, she argued that “People could be converted into races and how, simply by taking the initiative in this process, one might push one’s own people into the position of the master race.”252 Here, she criticizes how imperialism was easily combined with colonialism and used as imperialists’ political tool. Further through the direct comparisons of different racisms happened in the twentieth centuries, she argued that combined with imperialists’ racism, a prolonged colonialism—that is, a postcolonial situation—have been found elsewhere in contemporary states such as the Israel-

Palestine case.253

Mofokeng and Arendt share the common claim to consider the traumatic histories as “our” history. In the project of Landscapes of Trauma, the last photograph,

Self-portrait, at KZ1–Auschwitz (1997–8), depicts Mofokeng himself captured on a

251 Ibid., 149. 252 Hannah Arendt discusses the South African case in the sections of “Race Thinking Before Racism” and “Race and Bureaucracy” in In the Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1994), p. 206. 253 Christopher J. Lee, “Locating Hannah Arendt within Postcolonial Thought: A Prospectus,” College Literature, Vol. 38 (Winter, 2001): 104.

137 glass [Fig. 54]. The surface of a brick-building found in Auschwitz is seen behind a glass, on which his face and interior of another building are reflected. Mofokeng’s face appears as a completely black shadow, and the shadow in turn stands in front of the white building like a massive historical monument. Now in this no one’s place, the monument-like shadow seems to stand for the remembrance of the tortured history of

Auschwitz. Indeed, by projecting himself into the historical site, Mofokeng’s Self- portrait urges us, from today’s vantage point, to rethinking not only our colonial or imperial past, but also current colonial conditions of our beings.

138 CHAPTER 3 Documenting, Fiction, and Genealogies: Historicizing Local Wars in a Global Context

Introduction

Akram Zaatari (b. 1966, Lebanon) and Chan-kyong Park (b. 1965, South

Korea) are both veterans of the international art scene, producing works as artists, filmmakers, writers, and curators. Zaatari and Park hail from two, very different geopolitical contexts but share an interest in the postwar conditions of their native countries. A range of Zaatari’s projects, for instance, explore the traumatic experience of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1991) and its aftermath, and a significant portion of

Park’s oeuvre investigates the ongoing ceasefire between South Korea and North

Korea after the Korean War (1950–1953). Zaatari and Park are further linked by their method of artistic production: both combine a documentary practice with fictional components in pursuit of historical truths that run deeper than those expressed in traditional accounts of wars.

In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), Foucault described genealogy as a method of writing history that allowed counter-narratives that have been excluded or subjugated by the prevailing powers of the time to emerge.254 In contrast to a teleological historical approach, Foucault’s genealogy does not search for origin, descent, or continuity, and it often reverses the existing power relations among

254 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 139– 164.

139 conflicting forces in the realm of history.255 This chapter outlines the complex genealogical framework of Zaatari’s and Park’s major projects to detail the prismatic impact that their description of histories have on both international and local audiences.

The chapter’s first section problematizes Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s concept of parafiction—the untrue which tends to be experienced and believed as true—with the term truthiness in order to establish the stakes of the various ways contemporary artists use fiction to write history. I then examine a fraudulent museum by Michael Blum (b.

1966, Israel) and a simulated documentary by Walid Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon). In their work, fictionalized history refers to imagined worlds and calls into question the validity of empirical evidence when pursuing truth in the writing of history.

Throughout the rest of the chapter, I compare Blum and Raad to Zaatari and Park.

The second section investigates Zaatari’s Mapping Sitting: On Portraitures and Photography (2002; co-created with Raad) and Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013). I demonstrate how Zaatari’s multifaceted historicization of the postwar situation in

Lebanon aligns with Foucault’s rules for establishing genealogy. Then, in the third section, I delineate how Park’s Sets (2000) and Power Passage (2004–2007) problematizes the division of the Korean peninsula in accordance with the modalities of genealogy. Throughout my discussion, I use the terms docu-fiction (for Zaatari) and imaginary-documenting (for Park) to designate the unique ways that the artists combine documenting and fiction in order to mobilize pre-existing narratives of their

255 Foucault argued that the effective writing of history (effective history) describes the reversals the relations among conflicting forces through genealogical methods. Ibid., pp. 152–157.

140 national wars.

The last section explores the relations between the two major strategies that operationalize Zaatari’s and Park’s projects: fictionalization in the writing of history and the genealogical method. I pinpoint where the two methodologies intersect to reveal that fiction actually plays a fundamental role in Foucault’s genealogy. Zaatari’s and Park’s works furthermore evince that fiction—when coupled with affect elements—can emancipate a history from its locally specified knowledge to engage a wider audience. At the same time, this pairing overcomes the local conditions of writing history that opens up the possibility for the historical subject to deliver its truer narratives.

From Parafiction to Parafact: Critical Fictionalization of History by Michael Blum and Walid Raad

Carrie Lambert-Beatty coined the term parafiction to theorize one of the major trends in contemporary art. “A parafiction,” she writes:

[…] is related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literature and drama. […] It has one foot in the field of the real. Unlike historical fiction’s fact-based but imagined world, in parafiction real and/or imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived. Post-simulacral, parafictional strategies are oriented less toward the disappearance of the real than toward the pragmatics of trust. […] These fictions are experienced as fact.256

256 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make–Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,” October, Vol. 129 (Summer, 2009): 54.

141 Here, she describes parafiction as something performed through art that is untrue but tends to be experienced and believed as true. But Lambert-Beatty’s awareness of parafiction parallels her critical observation of contemporary society. For instance, in the essay, she alludes to “Untruth and Consequences”—the cover headline of the July

21, 2003 issue of Time—to illuminate how untruths have had catastrophic effects on the first decade of the twenty-first century [Fig. 55]. This issue featured the Bush administration’s statements justifying the United States’ 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, which were distrusted by many American and international audiences at that time and have since been proven false.257 Hence, parafiction can also be described as another kind of lie, one that reacts or responds to contemporary politics. Even though she, to some degree, characterizes the concept as a lie, deception, or hoax, Lambert-

Beatty’s rhetoric on parafiction reads neutrally. She admittedly avoids evaluating parafiction against ethical criteria. In fact, other controversies surrounding Lambert-

Beatty’s article, which was published in October in the summer of 2009, have

Carrie Lambert-Beatty wrote in a footnote that the term “parafiction” was influenced by the way Rosalind Krauss’ essay “Poststructuralism and the Paraliterary” in Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths mobilized the term paraliterary in the early 1980s to designate a category of writing which “‘cannot be called criticism,’ but also cannot ‘be called not-criticism.’” Krauss was referring specifically to the writings of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, which blurred the distinction between literature and criticism. Rosalind Krauss, “Poststructuralism and the Paraliterary” in Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 291–295. Although the issues at stake here are somewhat different, Lambert-Beatty’s model is particularly useful for describing Michael Blum’s paraﬁctional art: it’s not history, but can’t be called not-history, which I discuss further. 257 Lambert-Beatty mentioned the July 21, 2013 issue of Time, which criticized the Bush administration’s untrue statements about Iraq’s nuclear threat. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make–Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility”: 57.

142 subsequently prompted several related symposia and exhibitions.258

One of those exhibitions was More Real?: Art in the Age of Truthiness (2012–

2013) organized by the Site Santa Fe and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Problematizing the term truthiness, curator Elizabeth Armstrong wrote in the catalogue,

“[The selected works of] art propose that we live in an age of truthiness, a time when our understanding of truth may not be bound to empirical evidence.”259 In fact, the term truthiness came from Stephen Colbert’s satirical news program The Colbert

Report (2005–2015)—a spinoff of John Stewart’s The Daily Show (1999–2015) [Fig.

56]. Underscoring one’s position as a subject as well as the premise that judgment is a self-seeking pursuit, Colbert observed, “Truthiness is not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.”260 After Colbert introduced the term on his show, truthiness was so widely discussed in the media that it was selected as the word of the year by the American

Dialectic Society in 2005,261 and then by Merriam-Webster in 2006.262 Merriam-

258 The session “Para-Fiction and Para-Fact: The Space Between” at the 2013 Southeastern College Art Conference dealt with the subject of parafiction. The exhibition Parafacts & Parafictions: Helguera, and Blachly & Shaw likewise ran from February 10 to March 13, 2010 at the Elizabeth Foundation for Art in New York City. Furthermore, More Real?: Art in the Age of Truthiness was held at the Site Santa Fe from July 8, 2012 to January 6, 2013 and at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts from March 21 to June 9, 2013. 259 Elizabeth Armstrong, “On the Border of the Real” in More Real—Art in the Age of Truthiness (New York: Prestel, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Del Monica Books, 2013), p. 34. Lambert-Beatty also mentioned the term truthiness on the page 57 in her essay. 260 Nathan Rabin, “Stephen Colbert,” The A.V. Club, Jan 25, 2006. 261 American Dialect Society, “Truthiness Voted 2005 Word of the Year,” accessed May 19, 2016, http://www.americandialect.org/truthiness_voted_2005_word_of_the_year

143 Webster defines truthiness as “the quality by which a person claims to know something intuitively, instinctively, or ‘from the gut’ without regard to evidence, logic, or intellectual examination.” The dictionary further defines it as “the quality of stating what one wishes or feels to be true instead of what is actually true.”263 The phrase

“wishes or feels to be true” is particularly interesting to me. On the one hand, it hints at the widespread cultural tendency to distrust what is already known to be true. As the

Bush administration’s statements have shown, people have gotten used to seeing how politico-economic powers create or manipulate truths in cahoots with the mainstream media.264 On the other hand, the phrase, “wishes or feels to be true” suggests that people expect in their mind to see something happen, ultimately confirming the validity of an ethical, value-laden concept of truth.

Far from the notion of art for art’s sake, parafictional art expresses the potential to have a real impact on our political and social lives. This effect, in many cases, involves what we feel or wish to be true. For example, Michael Blum’s (b. 1966,

Israel) site-specific Tribute to Safiye Behar, which was exhibited at the 9th International

Istanbul Biennale in 2005, consists of a faux-museum honoring Safiye Behar, a faux- legendary figure and personage created by Blum. The “museum” is located inside an apartment and is comprised of staged private spaces filled with letters, diaries,

262 Merriam-Webster, “Truthiness as 2006 Word of the Year,” accessed May 19, 2016, http://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-year/2006-word-of-the-year.htm 263 Merriam-Webster, “Truthiness,” accessed May 19, 2016, http://nws.merriam- webster.com/opendictionary/newword_search.php?word=truthiness 264 Lambert-Beatty probed in her essay the work of the Yes Men to evince how contemporary mainstream media has created or manipulated sociopolitical truth.

144 photographs, and books [Fig. 57].265 Blum imagined Behar as a Turkish-Jewish woman, a pioneer in the fields of political activism and feminist theory.266 On Blum’s museum project, Lambert-Beatty noted, “It is not history but it can’t be called not- history.”267 Her description of the liminal space in which Tribute operates privileges the effect of trusting the project as nonfictional over the fictional elements inscribed in the museum. Likewise, one progressive Turkish newspaper exalted Behar as a real historical figure, which presumably led many readers to believe that she was an actually lived person.268 It is in this context that I want to emphasize the fact that

265 Various materials from nominal historical archives were on display including a video of Behar’s grandson, Chicago-based Architect Melikv Tutuncu, talking about the 1966 traffic accident that took the lives of all his family members. About the implication of Tutuncu’s interview, see: Elena Crippa, “Michael Blum, A tribute to Safiye Behar, 2005, The 9th Istanbul Biennial,” http://www.e- cart.ro/7/elena/uk/g/elena_uk.html 266 According to Blum, Behar was a Turkish-Jewish woman who was born in 1890 to a lower- middleclass family. She was self-taught as a child and later worked as a teacher, translator, leftist political activist, and feminist leader until her death in 1965. Behar spent her later years in Chicago where she devoted her life to helping the neglected. Indeed, she was one of the most intelligent pioneers in the fight against prejudice and discrimination during the early twentieth century. In fact, her progressive theories on women’s rights appeared much earlier than those of French feminists. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make–Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility”: 51–52. 267 Ibid., 54; Blum once in an interview expressed the potential discovery of an unrevealed person’s life by asking, “Can oral history, when passed from one generation to the next but never written or record, mean that reality is forgotten? Or does it undermine the known reality and open up other possible interpretations? Maybe the stories are unreliable in themselves, as verbal anecdotes within a closed circle of people, could they be exaggerated or entirely made up?” Esra Sarigedik, 9th Istanbul Biennale Catalogue (Istanbul: Istanbul Biennale, 2005), pp. 42–43. 268 Without mentioning the connection between Behar and Blum, the articles, as Lambert-Beatty noted, appeared on May 16, 2008 in the newspapers Vakit Haber and Bugün (over the byline of Irfan Dumlu), as well as the online news outlet Haber 7. The biennale’s co-curators Vasif Kortum and Charles Esche said they tended to present the story as fact. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make–Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility”: 53–54.

145 Blum’s project points to what people wish or feel to be true,269 particularly when constructing and/or understanding a local history in a global context. To elaborate,

Behar’s constructed life embedded in her house and biography is trustworthy enough to break down the stereotypes about Turkish culture. For instance, it might be a highly valuable discovery that there has been a woman who fought against racist and sexist policies at the turn of the twentieth century in Turkey. And such a discovery in turn reflects what many people have desired to seek in our history. Here, a parafictional work might be deceptive yet worthy to invent an alternative lens to mobilize the hegemony of history, and in this context, how do we have to conceptualize such a work in terms of contemporary artists’ interventionism in the writing of history?

Parafictional art emerged as a worldwide phenomenon, often inciting controversial issues rooted in the global versus local dichotomy.270 Among those issues, I wish to consider the writing of local histories within a global context.

Specifically, how do contemporary artists intervene in the writing of history, which affects international and local audiences differently? According to Brian Holmes’ article Liar’s Poker (2003), many art institutions as well as politically-engaged artists from across the globe play bluffing games, hoping their pretenses circulate as

269 In relation to my focus that parafictional art plays with our willingness to believe, Blum once said, “My project is about the fabric of history and myths and the use of documents and our willingness to believe the stories we are being told.” Nusret Polat, “Interview with Michael Blum,” PLATO # 2 (Nov– Dec, 2005), pp. 72–75. 270 Lambert-Beatty organized her essay according to the cities that numerous projects represented. Those cities included Istanbul, Vienna, Sydney, New Heaven, etc. Furthermore, the 28 participating artists in More Real?: Art in the Age of Truthiness were selected from diverse regions including East Asia, South America, and the Middle East, etc.

146 catalyzing truths within the international political sphere.271 When artists adopt this kind of subterfuge as a method of writing history, how does winning (deploying a successful ruse) in art beget winning in politics? Blum’s credible presentation of Behar as a historical figure whose cosmopolitan and progressive viewpoints preceded those of her European counterparts could be viewed as an international bluffing game— especially since an international biennale served as the venue for this work. By dismantling the Westernized prejudices against Turkish culture, Behar’s life story might be immediately trusted to be and disseminated as a real history.272 This outcome might be said a win in art. The phenomenon of winning in politics; however, is not as easy to delimit, since its effects vary across target audiences. At the time of the biennale, the debate over whether Turkey should be included in the European Union was ongoing, and foreign spectators of Blum’s project might well have interpreted

Tribute as a plea to support Turkey’s position on the world stage. Local audiences, by contrast, might view the work as a threshold to reflect on their country’s Muslim- oriented ethnocentrism. This is because Behar, a woman of Jewish descent, assisted the first President of Turkey Mustafa Kemal in reforming the nation. In both cases, Blum’s manufactured history helps viewers re-conceptualize Turkey’s actual past within a

271 Brian Holmes, “Liar’s Poker: Representation of Politics/Politics of Representation,” Springeren, Vol. 1 (2003). See: http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1276&lang=en 272 Esche discussed how Blum’s numerous works have criticized the expansion of multinational companies and globalization. Charles Esche, “Michael Blum” in Cream 3 (London: Phaidon Press, 2003), pp. 68–72.

147 global context.273

It is from this vantage point that I further investigate how contemporary artists—especially those from non-European and non-North American regions— fictionalize histories to catapult local perspectives onto the international art scene.

Focusing on varied degrees and functions presented in fictional narratives, I also aim to explicate the manifold ways in which fiction foregrounds doubt to unearth historical truths. Here, I recall that parafiction regards to our troubling experiences with the value-laden concept of truth. Histories invented by parafictional artists consequently conceive of truth as a spectrum that runs the gamut of the less true to the truer. If

Blum’s Tribute is an absolute fake, then the Atlas Group’s 2000 video work Hostage:

The Bachar Tapes (#17 and #31) _English Version exemplifies a simulated version of reality [Fig. 58]. Although both works entail fictitious elements, the Atlas Group’s project is truer than Blum’s, because it is based on an actual historical event. To appreciate the cultural significance of this discordant state of mind, it is important to mention here, how the traumatic experience of the Lebanese Civil War gave rise to a particular epistemic moment for local people. Censorship and unreliable sources of information made documenting the war virtually impossible. Further destabilizing the lives of the Lebanese was the protracted warfare involving multiple combatant groups.

Hence, it is under these difficult conditions that the Lebanese write their own, true

273 Lambert-Beatty provided a similar argument. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make–Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility”: 53–54

148 history.274

The Atlas Group (1989–2004) is an imaginary organization founded by Walid

Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon) for the purposes of researching and documenting the contemporary history of Lebanon.275 The organization’s video represents the Lebanese hostage-taking crisis through the testimony of one fictional survivor, Souheil

Bachar.276 Bachar, who is performed by a professional actor, recounts in Arabic his experience of being kidnapped by Islamic militants. His grave demeanor, convincing storylines, and the film’s home-video quality make the project seem like an authentic documentary. Unlike Blum’s Tribute, the Atlas Group’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes not only adopts the conventions of credibility but also employs devices that raise doubt.

For example, the truthiness of Bachar’s narrative is disrupted when, upon Bachar’s own command, the color of the screen changes from black to blue. This effect also occurs when the same scene of a plane flying is repeated. Even more compelling is the video’s handling of language. Bachar’s Arabic is dubbed in English by a female voice with an American accent whose words sometimes express exactly the opposite thought

274 The ways Hostage: The Bachar Tapes speaks to the particularly Lebanese epistemic condition constructed by the traumatic experience of the civil war have been discussed by Paolo Magagnoli, “A Method in Madness Historical Truth in Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes,” Third Text, Vol. 25 (May, 2011): 315–322; Emily Wroczynski, “Walid Raad and the Atlas Group: Mapping Catastrophe and the Architecture of Destruction,” Third Text, Vol. 25 (November, 2011): 763–773. 275 The Atlas Group is briefly dealt with in Lambert-Beatty’s writing, and the fake organization also participated in More Real?: Art in the Age of Truthiness. 276 The Lebanese hostage-taking crisis refers to the kidnapping of 104 foreign hostages between 1982 and 1992, when the Lebanese Civil War was at its height. Although 21 national origins were represented among the hostages, most of them were from the United States and Western Europe. At least, eight hostages died in captivity; some were murdered while others died from a lack of adequate medical attention.

149 of what Bachar narrates. Only viewers who understand both languages can detect the gap between the protagonist’s words and the interpreted ones. Those who do not fully understand both Arabic and English are simply fooled or placed in a conflicted state of half-trust and half-doubt.277

Now that the formal differences between Blum’s faux museum and the Atlas

Group’s simulated documentary have been clearly demarcated, I would like to take a closer look at how these two works utilize similar tactics to gain public trust while paradoxically arousing the suspicion of local observers. Both projects introduce fiction into the writing of history without clarifying the borders of fact and fiction. The two narratives also sensationalize their stories as a way to facilitate their widespread dispersion. Blum’s story of President Kemal’s love affair with a Jewish woman is deemed hardly acceptable in Turkey’s public arena—especially since Kemal, venerated

Father of the Turks, is credited with establishing a new, fully independent Muslim country. Likewise, Bachar’s account of his fellow hostages’ gay experiences is considered taboo in Lebanese culture. Thus, sex scandals function to instigate titillating rumors that encourage audiences to share these projects’ narratives with others. More importantly, Tribute and Hostage: The Bachar Tapes also incorporate an archival practice in order to appear authoritative. Imitating a historic house museum,

Blum built Tribute where Behar was said to have lived and collected what was said to

277 Paolo Magagnoli, “A Method in Madness: Historical Truth in Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes”: 315–322.

150 be her belongings.278 The Atlas Group’s extensive collection of files, which includes

Bachar’s testimony, similarly mimics the complex structure of a forensic archive.279

The organization’s name additionally intimates the existence of the collective of largely unidentified individuals (actually, Raad is the only known member, yet this is not made explicit) who operate the surveillance system in the archive.280 Here, the archival component of both works exists to lend an air of reliability to the projects’ contents, falsely yet effectively assuring viewers that the presented information is factual.

However, a more crucial similarity between the spurious museum and the quasi-documentary is that the closer the viewer is to the work (either physically or culturally), the less credible it appears. Despite their bilingualism and the internationalism they convey through their respective settings (an international biennale and the Internet), both projects actually thwart access to authentic knowledge about the locales—or the locally specific knowledge—they represent. The vitrines

278 In the interview with me, Blum said that “the criteria of the archival materials and narratives for Behar’s museum are exactly like building a film set—translating facts and feelings into props.” Interview with the artist via the e-mail. April 29, 2010. 279 The archive is organized according to three main categories: Type A (attributed to an identified individual), Type FD (found documents), and Type AGP (attributed to the Atlas Group). These files relate the conditions of living through the civil war. Some of the files reveal the experience of being held hostage (Hostage: The Bachar Tapes, 2000) and surveilled (I Only Wish that I Could Weep, [Operator 17], 2002). Others speak to the unsolved disappearance of citizens portrayed as family members (Secret in the Open Sea, [Anonymous], 2002) or operate as a taxonomy of the charred remains of car engines that were found after car bombings (My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair, 2004). Suzanne Cotter, “The Documentary Turn: Surpassing Tradition in the Work of Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari” in Contemporary Art in the Middle East: Artworld, ed. Nadine Monem (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2009), p. 50. 280 Ibid., 53.

151 protecting the artifacts attributed to the Turkish-Jewish feminist, for instance, preclude close examination by which onlookers would notice that the printing of Behar’s name in her translated books has been blurred.281 Also, as I have discussed, it is impossible for viewers who are unfamiliar with the Arabic language to catch Raad’s wit as expressed through the chasm between Bachar’s and his interpreter’s words.282 Here, I argue that Blum’s museum and the Atlas Group’s video problematize the very idea of internationalism. Both projects reveal how abstract our understanding of faraway events really is. This in turn illuminates the reality that it is somewhat impossible to gauge a local history’s degree of veracity or falsehood. By utilizing fictions that range from fraud and somewhat true narratives to simulated and truer narratives, both Tribute and Hostage: The Bachar Tapes, on the one hand, can be said to contribute to expanding our experiences of histories more adequately than ever before. But on the other hand, both projects can be said to experiment with the extent to which localized subjects and related conditions of historical writing are understood through the euphemistic term internationalism, which has been pervasive in the art world for the last two decades.

281 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Make–Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility”: 53. 282 Expounding on Raad’s use of language, Suzanne Cotter wrote, “In response to the idea that his work might extend the possibilities of Conceptual art’s tenets from the perspective of twenty-first century Lebanon, Raad proposes instead that his work represents its negative. If Raad’s work contributes to an expanded terrain for a history of Western experimental culture, he aligns it, more crucially, to an emergent artistic language capable of communicating the complexities of living in a country affected by war. For Raad, it is precisely the impossibility of the conditions that allowed for Conceptual art to flourish in Europe and North America in a context such as that of Lebanon, where the very act of photographing is regarded as a suspicious act and the validity of photographic document itself is regarded with skepticism.” Suzanne Cotter, “The Documentary Turn: Surpassing Tradition in the Work of Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari,” p. 53.

152 With this ambiguous understanding of internationalism in mind, the following sections will examine the ways that Zaatari and Park deal with geopolitical situations

(the Lebanese Civil War and the ongoing Cold War between the two Koreas) that feature prominently in their corresponding local histories. Like Blum and Raad,

Zaatari and Park are concerned with contested, national histories and reconstruct their counter-narratives by utilizing fiction. However, Zaatari’s and Park’s use of fictional elements diverge from the strategies that typically characterize parafictional art.

Opposing Lambert-Beatty’s position, T. J. Demos once wrote that “‘make–believe’ or

‘parafiction’ that […] temporarily confounds the relation between truth and fiction in order to foster critical doubt […] presupposes the ability to separate the true and the false.”283 He further argues that “Raad’s project works [by] contributing to the invention of an entirely new episteme, where [‘fact’ and ‘fiction’] cannot be so clearly differentiated.”284 So, to investigate Zaatari’s and Park’s projects, I consider here another possibility which can be termed parafact. In contrast to parafiction, whose effects operate in the not-quite-real-yet-plausible-zone, parafact is grounded in the real but yields stories that are so imaginative, dubious, or implausible that they call into a question the truthfulness of those anecdotes.285 Parafact can therefore be said to operate in the partially-fictional-yet-authentic-zone. By combining the practice of archiving myriad materials with an invented tale, Zaatari and Park demonstrate a

283 T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 191. 284 Ibid., 191. 285 My definition of “parafact” has been influenced by the aforementioned exhibition, Parafacts & Parafictions: Helguera, and Blachly & Shaw.

153 strong desire to rewrite their local histories that redress the internationally misunderstood or unacknowledged parts. These imagined histories can nonetheless be interpreted as attempts to seek more reliable, truer narratives. Accordingly, the following sections deploy Foucault’s genealogical method to examine how those artists speak to their nation’s contested histories.

Akram Zaatari’s Docu-fiction: Evidential yet Subjective Experiences

Akram Zaatari (b. 1966, Lebanon) co-founded the Arab Image Foundation

(AIF, 1997)—a nonprofit institution dedicated to collecting, preserving, and studying photographs of the Arab world—with Walid Raad. The organization is administered by a group of artists, architects, film directors, historians, and writers [Fig. 59]. Zaatari currently serves as the president of the foundation’s Board of Directors, and Raad is an associate member. To date, the AIF has acquired approximately six-hundred-thousand photographs related to the histories of Lebanon, as well as of other Arab countries and diaspora. Any institution or individual may access and use these photographs for research, publication, or artistic purposes. Unlike the archives built by Blum and Raad, the AIF’s extensive holdings constitute an actual archive.286 The organization’s website displays the mission statement; copyright license; board members (including a lawyer and a financial manager); and a list of patrons and partners that verify the

286 Daniel Baird’s study classified the AIF’s archive as real and the Atlas Group’s archive as fictitious. Daniel Baird, “Radical Politics: Walid Raad,” Border Crossing, Vol. 24 (May, 2005): 40.

154 archive’s authentic quality [Fig. 60].287 Setting up a dichotomy of fake versus real to discuss the archive would nevertheless, as art historian Hannah Feldman has argued, miss the point.288 More important is their shared desire to intervene in the institutional authority that constructs and legitimizes history.289 In the last section, Blum and Raad demonstrate that an archive’s power itself to produce history is fictional while Zaatari configures and reconfigures numerous ways to probe and contest precisely that authorial power. By appropriating or reordering its images, any user can access the

AIF’s collection to create his or her own account of history. The archive thereby

287 Cotter’s comparison of the AIF’s archive to the Atlas Group’s one explored the semantics of the term archive. Unlike Radd, for whom “archive” describes a format, Zaatari prefers to define his artistic practice as “filed work.” Zaatari aims to reinvent the unique conditions of image-making in Lebanon and has developed an extensive practice in which his roles have diversified to include that of a collector, researcher, and curator. For him, archival materials are “objects of study,” and his habit of recording his daily life (even during wartime) began in his adolescent years. Suzanne Cotter, “The Documentary Turn: Surpassing Tradition in the Work of Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari,” p. 54. 288 Hannah Feldman argued that Baird’s black-and-white perspective misunderstood Radd’s work. She contended that Raad’s project makes its most serious intervention into the structures of authority that construct and legitimize history. According to her, both archival projects (the AIF’s archive and the Atlas Group’s one) suggest different experiential approaches to history, neither of which is fictional nor real. Feldman primarily focused on the relationship between an archive and its institutional power. According to her, the two artists’ archives function as anti-archives, expounding on how Raad and Zaatari reveal the fictive nature of writing history. Hannah Feldman, “Excavating Images on the Border,” Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue. 3 (May, 2009): 312–315. 289 According to Jacques Derrida, an archive always entails the desire to transform memories or alternate histories into legitimate subjects. Zaatari’s archiving practice; however, solely realizes that desire. As the artist explained, “I would say the archive of the AIF is not a source but an outcome of a research project. […] I do not use existing archives as sources for developing work. I would like to be precise [in saying] that […] my work generates collections […].” Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Eva Respini and Ana Janevski, “Email Interview with Akram Zaatari for the Projects 100: Akram Zaatari,” which took place in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from May 11 to September 29, 2013. See: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/projects/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Interview-Akram- Zaatari1.pdf

155 always possesses the potential to challenge its own legitimacy in governing an official history.290 Hence, although the AIF constitutes a more traditional or “legitimate” archive than that made by Blum or Raad, the fact that Zaatari’s handling of the AIF’s photos is grounded in the real does not eradicate the distinction between fact and fiction.

Although parts of the AIF’s images derive from magazines, posters, and unknown photographers, most of them stem from what Feldman would characterize as

Zaatari’s “archaeologist” quests.291 In search of the archive’s acquisitions, Zaatari travels to cities throughout Lebanon (Beirut, Saida, and Tripoli, and so on) visiting photo studios that were once prosperous but are now in danger of closing.292 He then donates the photographs he collects during these trips to the AIF without offering any specific context. Feldman, who analogized Zaatari’s work to the excavation of fossils, defines fossil as a discovered object that has maintained “both its original integrity and its transformation over time.”293 To me, her uses of the words, archaeologist,

290 The official history in this context denotes the history confirmed by the government and used in public education. Stuart Macintyre, “Official history” in The Oxford Companion to Australian History, eds. Graeme Davison, John Hirst, and Stuart Macintyre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). See: http://www.oxfordreference.com 291 Hannah Feldman, “Excavating Images on the Border”: 311, 315–316, 319. 292 Among those studios, Studio Shehrazade founded by Photographer Hashem el Madani has become one of Zaatari’s most important sources of raw images. Madani’s photos have been so instrumental to many of Zaatari’s own projects that the AIF published the book, Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices to showcase Madani’s prolific oeuvre. See: Lisa Le Feuvre and Akram Zaatari, Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices (Beirut, Lebanon: Arab Image Foundation and Mind the Gap, 2004). 293 Hannah Feldman, “Excavating Images on the Border”: 311, 317; Hannah Feldman and Akram Zaatari, “Mining War: Fragments from a Conversation Already Passed,” Art Journal, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Summer, 2007): 51.

156 excavation, and fossil to characterize Zaatari’s works resonate deeply with Foucault’s two historical methods. According to Foucault, an archaeological method presents a model of studying historical objects beyond any systems of thoughts or rules which govern discursive formations regardless of the objects’ grammar or logics; however, a genealogical method gives a possibility to produce a different history which is upon contingences rather than inevitable origins or progressive schemes.294 Here, I problematize how Zaatari’s tactic of reorganizing such an archaeologist’s things, in particular, establishes a history according to a genealogical method.

Zaatari and Raad’s Mapping Sitting: On Portraitures and Photography (2002) shows how the artistic project made via the AIF can works with an archaeological method and a genealogical one. That is, Mapping Sitting recontextualizes the AIF’s images in a way that is completely diverged from the original context of each image and then establishes an entirely new narrative [Fig. 61]. To create the exhibition and its

Zaatari himself also frequently has used the term fossil to designate the objects of his artistic pursuits. Stuart Comer, “Interview with Akram Zaatari” in Uneasy Subject (León, Spain: CHARTA/MUAC/MUSAC, 2011), p. 172. In an interview, Zaatari expressed his abstract understanding of an archaeologist’s excavating materials (fossils) which constitute an archive: “The earth is the ultimate archive. It presumably contains unlimited data, waiting to be decoded. In fields such as anthropology, geography, and geology, the landscape represents the archive that carries such data. I do not think we will ever be able to decode everything, and this is why I did portraits of landscapes, as portraits of enigmatic traces of history.” Chad Elias, “The Libidinal Archive: A Conversation with Akram Zaatari,” Tate Papers, No.19 (Spring, 2013): 21. 294 “Archaeology” denotes a level of the analysis of discourses which grasps their rules of formation without reference to the subject; “Genealogy” implies the political function in which history is the reversal of a relationship of forces. Mark Poster, “Foucault and History,” Social Research, Vol. 49, No. 1, Modern Masters (Spring, 1982): 134; Benjamin C. Sax, “Foucault, Nietzsche, History: Two Modes of the Genealogical Method,” History of European Ideas, Vol. 11 (1989): 769.

157 accompanying catalogue, the two artists culled an assortment of images from the AIF’s archive, which they classified into four groups: identity, group, itinerant, and surprise.295 Zaatari and Raad then expanded each group of images with thousands of other AIF photographs. All the portraits that make up the identity category, for example, were taken at Studio Anouchian in Tripoli from1935 to 1970 for the purposes of creating passports or other official documents. Exceeding 3,600 headshots in all, each portrait was pinned to a wall to form a massive grid. This typological installation enabled viewers to study each face and ponder the two artists’ somewhat curious subgroupings of individuals. Classifications such as men with mustaches, women in scarves, men with necklaces, and men in printed shirts dictate the arrangement of the grid. This seemingly arbitrary order underscores the unexpected relations among the photos instead of their shared origin, ultimately ascertaining a genealogical method.

It is in this sense that I elucidate the ways Zaatari’s Letter to a Refusing Pilot

(2013), which was inspired by a rumor that circulated after Israel’s 1982 invasion in

Lebanon, outlines genealogy. The rumor was about an Israeli Air Force fighter pilot,

Hagai Tamir, who had been ordered to bomb a building on the outskirts of Saida. He refused to obey the order knowing that his target was a school for boys located near a refugee camp. The pilot therefore dropped the bombs into the Mediterranean Sea instead. Zaatari likely found this legendary tale to be particularly galvanizing, because

295 Mapping Sittings: On Portraitures and Photography was exhibited in numerous cities from 2002 to 2005 and was published as a book in 2005. Karl Bassil, Zeina Maasri, Akram Zaatari, and Walid Raad, Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography (Beirut, Lebanon: Mind the Gap, 2005). Also, see: Hannah Feldman and Akram Zaatari, “Mining War: Fragments from a Conversation Already Passed”: 53–57.

158 the artist was born in Saida and his father was the director of that very school for thirty years. Zaatari then later found out that the rumor was not a fiction but a true story.296

The pilot’s refusal to carry out his mission remained a secret for almost twenty years until Tamir himself felt it necessary to speak up in the debate over Israeli military campaigns and the killing of innocent people. Accompanying Letter to a Refusing Pilot, this whole story is written on a gallery wall. The work itself encompasses three related parts displayed together. The main component is a thirty-four minute long HD film that interweaves Zaatari’s personal documents with staged scenes that allude to Tamir’s story—the film depicts aerial views of South Lebanon, bombs dropping into the sea,

Israeli news footage of the invasion, teenage boys throwing paper planes off at a rooftop in Saida, etc; a small monitor that loops the silent bombing of the Saida hillside; and a red, velvet chair facing the small monitor and several stools for visitors constitute the rest of the installation [Fig. 62].297

296 The process by which the rumor was verified to be a factual consisted of many layers. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie wrote, “Decades later, during a public conversation in a Paris suburb with the Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi, Zaatari retold the pilot’s story in his own words, turning it into a fable and perhaps a truthful fiction. After the transcript of the talk was published in a small orange book, he discovered it wasn’t a rumor. The pilot was real.” Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “The Archaeology of Rumor,” Nafas (August, 2013). After Zaatari found out the story was true, he met with the pilot, Hagai Tamir. Chronicling the encounter, Negar Azimi wrote, “Thanks to the circulation of the transcript of that talk in book form, Zaatari learned that the pilot at the center of the rumor was not only real, but still alive and living in Haifa. He arranged to meet the man, whose name was Hagai Tamir, in a bar in Rome (the mutual non•recognition of Israel and Lebanon having prevented them from meeting in either of their home countries).” Negar Azimi, “A Pilot’s Refusal, Reimagined,” The New York Review, June 26, 2013. 297 This description of Letter to a Refusing Pilot is based on my visit of Zaatari’s solo exhibition Akram Zaatari—Unfolding, which was held at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm from March 7, 2015 to

159 Letter to a Refusing Pilot’s main film repeatedly shows the protracted shots of a boy’s hands. The boy represents the artist at sixteen when he witnessed the 1982 invasion [Fig. 63]. The hands embody Zaatari’s own genealogical approach, emphasizing the action of “making/crafting” to assemble a different order of history.298

This film, unlike Zaatari’s other projects, does not include narration, conversation, or any explanatory text. Instead, the boy’s hands propel the project’s narratives, which traverse the complicated zones of experienced fact and imagined fiction to unfurl the complexities, ambiguities, and consequences of the pilot’s refusal. Here, the hands are shown sorting out/rearranging archival materials including Zaatari’s family photographs and diaries.299 They also flip the pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Le

Petit Prince (1943) and turn on Françoise Hardy’s French pop song “Comment Te Dire

Adieu (How to Say Goodbye).” There are plentiful references here, all of which continuously intertwine Zaatari’s teenage memories with the historical event. In addition to evoking the imaginative play of childhood, Saint-Exupery’s book, for example, recalls Tamir’s story: the author himself was a famous wartime aviator who disappeared in 1944 during his last mission over the Mediterranean. Likewise, Hardy’s

August 16, 2015. The basic setting of the work is nonetheless the same regardless of the venue. Letter to a Refusing Pilot debuted in 2013 at the Lebanese Pavilion, 55th La Biennale di Venezia. 298 In Zaatari’s two-channel video, On Photography, People and Modern Times (2010), one screen projects a pair of hands carefully laying out photographs from an archive, while the other screen displays interviews with people who are connected to the subjects of the pictures. This work unveils the stories behind those images, which are now in the collection of the AIF. Letter to Samir (2008), another work by Zaatari, likewise shows Nabih Awada’s hands reenacting how prisoners communicate among themselves in writing. 299 The diaries contain lengthy descriptions of some of the worst days of the war during 1982. They also enumerate the titles of the films that Zaatari watched on those days, reference the weather, and include a note about a special friend who visited him at home. Negar Azimi, “A Pilot’s Refusal, Reimagined.”

160 song, which was released six months after May 1968, mourns a break with the past so that conjures up the glory of Beirut’s heyday during the mid of the 1970s. Back then, when the city was prosperous, it was called “the Paris of the Middle East.”

Foucault discussed how the genealogical method creates an effective history in the beginning of his writing, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” He wrote:

Record[ing] the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality […]; seek[ing] them in the most unpromising places […]; be[ing] sensitive to their recurrence […] to differentiate each scene […]; and defin[ing] the absent, the moment when they remained unrealized.300

Here, the boy’s hands connect not only to the idea of “making/crafting” history but also to the first two restraints that define Foucault’s genealogy that I have mentioned: to “record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality”; and to “seek those events in the most unpromising places.” For the first point, in the film’s final scene, the most symbolic iteration of the boy’s handiwork—drawing and folding a paper plane that flies into the distance—lends the narrative an enigmatic air [Fig. 64–

65]. Because the final destination of the plane is unknown, this scene could symbolize

Tamir’s dream of becoming a bird or Zaatari’s letter to the pilot, as the title of the work suggests.301 For the second point, the violent setting of the boy’s handiwork (Israel’s invasion of Lebanon) is connected to the unpromising place. By handling the

300 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. 139–140. 301 The pilot, Tamir talked to Zaatari that he had never really cared for planes as war machines; he had joined the Israeli air force because, ever since he was a kid, he had wanted desperately to feel what it would be like to be a bird. Negar Azimi, “A Pilot’s Refusal, Reimagined.”

161 fragmentary materials—photographs, notes, sounds, etc. that Zaatari claimed he habitually and aimlessly collected as a teenager—the boy’s hands reiterate the artist’s adolescent proclivity to seek and record the events which happened in the most unpromising, war situation.302

Zaatari’s propensity for revisiting the same subjects or materials corresponds with Foucault’s third and fourth points for establishing genealogy that I have mentioned: the third is, to “be sensitive to the recurrence of those events to differentiate each scene.”303 Kaelen Wilson-Goldie mentioned that Letter to a

302 In addition to Letter to a Refusing Pilot, Zaatari incorporated his own records of his everyday life during the Lebanese Civil War into many other works including This Day (2003). He developed his affinity for documenting and archiving while witnessing a fifteen-year-long war unfold in parallel with his formative years. The artist himself explained that life as a student nurtured his habit of taking notes and photographs and making radio recordings of events. Chad Elias, “The Libidinal Archive: A Conversation with Akram Zaatari”: 4. 303 Cotter briefly pointed out Zaatari’s tendency to revisit the same materials and subjects but did not develop an argument around this point. The artist’s fondness for revisiting a topic multiple times is best exemplified by his projects about the former prisoner Nabih Awada (nicknamed Neruda). These works compile and recontextualize the letters written and received by Awada who had been detained in Israel for ten years since the age of sixteen. The poetic missives that Awada penned to his mother while in prison became a part of All is Well on the Border (1997). Letters from Askalan/Letters from Family and Friends (2007) similarly consists of Awada’s correspondences with family members and friends. Unlike All is Well on the Border; however, these exchanges took place outside of prison. 48 Portraits of Prisoners Dedicated to Nabih Awada (2008) features pictures and notes written to Awada by his fellow inmates. The 1993 prisoner hunger strikes over the right of inmates to have their picture inspired the creation of these documents. Finally, in the video Letter to Samir (2008), Awada writes to Samir al- Quintar, Israel’s longest-held Lebanese prisoner, ultimately reenacting the secretive way prisoners avoid censorship and communicate freely with each other. This clandestine process includes handwriting a letter, folding the tiny page, and wrapping it in plastic multiple times to form a capsule. One prisoner then swallows the letter; defecates and cleans it; and passes it on to a second prisoner. Suzanne Cotter, “The Documentary Turn: Surpassing Tradition in the Work of Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari,” p. 56; Judith Rodenbeck, “‘How’s Life in Lebanon? Especially…’: On Akram Zaatari’s Missives” in All is Well—Akram Zaatari (Kingston, Canada: The Agnes Etherington Art Center; Ottawa, Canada: Carleton University Art Gallery, 2015), pp. 15–16.

162 Refusing Pilot is a different version of Zaatari’s Saida, June 6, 1982 (2005), which connects to that point.304 In fact, the artist deals with his experience of the same event—Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982—through two different types of documents. To create Saida, Zaatari digitally sliced and recombined six photographs of the occupation, which he shot from the balcony of his childhood home in Saida [Fig.

66]. In Letter to a Refusing Pilot; however, those same photographs were transferred onto 16 mm film and shown on a small monitor [Fig. 67]. Here, Zaatari’s experience is interpreted at least twice, ultimately transforming into a docu-fiction.305

I use the term docu-fiction as a method of representing evidential yet deeply subjective experiences of an historical event. Through the use of a camera, Saida imparts somewhat objective, factual evidence. Yet the way the pictures have captured the incompatibility of static and dynamic movements conjures up a sense of uneasiness.306 In Saida, the depicted hillside trees stand upright without trembling

304 Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “The Archaeology of Rumor.” 305 Feldman has used the term docu-fictional to discuss art from Beirut that dates back to the 1990s. She claimed that docu-fictional works expand the field of representation to include psychological or individual truths, which official histories fail to consider. Hannah Feldman, “Excavating Images on the Border”: 311, 312–315; Hannah Feldman and Akram Zaatari, “Mining War: Fragments from a Conversation Already Passed”: 51. 306 The definitions of the terms stasis and movement (non-stasis) used here were influenced by George Baker’s essay “Photography in the Expanded Field” (2005). Reclaiming the legacy of Rosalind Krauss’ “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979), Baker investigated how contemporary artists deal with cinematic and photographic media to create new forms. Krauss’s article famously demarcated the cultural possibilities of the postmodern era through newly observed artistic forms. She structured her argument around the complex dichotomy of landscape/architecture and non-landscape/non-architecture. Baker, in contrast, formulated four new terms to designate the two categories that bolster his theory: (cinematic) narrativity/ (photographic) stasis, non-narrativity/non-stasis. See: George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October, Vol. 114 (Autumn, 2005): 120–140.

163 even though the explosion in the background appears extremely, almost exaggeratedly, powerful. These photographs form a panorama that transmits how a sixteen-year-old boy, Zaatari, actually experienced the event. Zaatari’s digital retouching certainly makes the pictures less objective and thus less factual, yet these manipulations are necessary to convey his personal feelings in a way that is truer than the original snapshots could. Likewise, in Letter to a Refusing Pilot, Zaatari obscures the explosion scene by infusing the frame with sepia. The melancholic brown tones suggest how, in hindsight, the pilot might have felt about his failed project: another pilot and colleague of Tamir’s eventually destroyed the boys’ school despite Tamir’s objections.

The failed project in turn indicates the fourth point of Foucault’s establishing genealogy: to “define the absent, the moment when they remained unrealized.” That is, the empty chair facing the small monitor is intended for the lamenting pilot and his unrealized dream to save the boys’ school. It honors Tamir’s compassion and recognizes that he is worthy of being remembered even though his wish to preclude the killing of innocent boys and refugees was not realized. Indeed, the two works, Saida and Letter to a Refusing Pilot, demonstrate how revisiting the same documents can reveal diverse perspectives on the same event. Furthermore, Zaatari’s appropriation and reordering of those documents cross the border between fact and fiction to deliver a truthful individualized account of history. Both works therefore successfully ascertain genealogical readings of history: again, they are sensitive to the recurrences of an event by differentiating each scene and delimit absent moments while they are unrealized.

164 Zaatari’s unique representation of wartime experiences cannot be separated from the Lebanese reality of representing and historicizing the civil war. Suzanne

Cotter wrote:

In Lebanon, the very question of how one might engage with the image as a medium of expression drives intellectual and artistic sensibilities. […] the very production of image-making, let alone its credibility within the highly contested zones of public discourse, is called into question. […] We remove from the primacy of the visual to the concept of the image as footnote, a malleable point of reference in a stream of contested histories competing for a place to be written.307

Because Zaatari’s works capture extremely localized wartime ethnographies, it is hard for those whom are not familiar with the complicated national relations in the Middle

East to make sense of them fully. So the complex narratives underpinning Letter to a

Refusing Pilot would hardly be understood by international viewers if the long, accompanying wall text were not provided. This difficulty accessing local knowledge is the result of the Lebanese Civil War itself and its aftermath. Mirroring the byzantine narratives upholding Zaatari’s dual take on the war, the war itself encompassed serial occupations by Israel and Syria as well as struggles among multiple religions, ideological factions, and influxes of refugees. As Cotter wrote, the prohibition and sanitization of the public discourses that uphold “image-making” or history-writing are

307 Suzanne Cotter, “The Documentary Turn: Surpassing Tradition in the Work of Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari,” p. 50.

165 similarly strained, as the region remains geopolitically tense due to the war’s lack of a clear winner and loser.308

In a sense, Zaatari’s genealogical method might have been inevitable, as it probably was and remains the only way to circumvent the government’s censorship of any records historicizing the civil war. As such, the visual artifacts that Zaatari employs to tell the contested, local history of Lebanon have been, as Cotter pointed out, transformed into conceptual artifacts that exist like “footnotes.” The genealogical method thereby illustrates, as Letter to a Refusing Pilot evinces, the re- contextualization of such footnotes—they might be photographic, textual, or aural— that tangentially recount wartime events through a mixture of fact and fiction. Indeed,

Zaatari’s genealogical method exemplifies Foucault’s insurrection of subjugated knowledge, which, as Jose Medina succinctly put it, entails “forms of experiencing and

308 Vicky Moufawad-Paul, “All is Well” in All is Well—Akram Zaatari (Kingston, ON, Canada: The Agnes Etherington Art Center; Ottawa, ON, Canada: Carleton University Art Gallery, 2015), pp. 9–10. Judith Rodenbeck’s concise history of Lebanon evinces how invasions by multiple groups continue to plague the nation: “The strategic value of the patch of land that is now Lebanon has led to its perpetual invasion and administration, first by Phoenicians, then Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottoman Turks, and, until its independence in 1943, by the French. Beirut, its capital, is one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities and has been a hub of international trade for at least five- thousand years. In modern times it served as the banking center of the Eastern Mediterranean—in the flush 1960s Beirut was known as the ‘Paris of the Middle East.’ But contemporary Lebanon is a weak state, resulting in part from this intensive capitalization. It has struggled to build a functioning infrastructure, becoming prey to a variety of outside influences, from the recent serial occupations by Syria and Israel to the highly problematic precedent set by the United Nations Security Council for extra-national judicial interference in its investigation of ex-prime minister Rafic Hariri’s assassination in early 2005. Internally, the confessional lines of demarcation along which Lebanon’s political system doles out power among government offices effectively reinforce the atomizing and weaponized dynamics of a sectarianism which, in turn, is lined to ugly regional proxy wars.” Judith Rodenbeck, “‘How’s Life in Lebanon? Especially…’: On Akram Zaatari’s Missives,” p. 48.

166 remembering that are pushed to the margins and rendered unqualified and unworthy of epistemic respect by prevailing and hegemonic discourses.”309 In other words, as a

Lebanese artist, Zaatari’s homage to Tamir, an Israeli man, in Letter to a Refusing Pilot breaks down the nationalism and ethnocentrism that prevails in most international representations of the Middle East. It further reevaluates the pilot’s failed mission outside of the hegemonic relations underpinning international conflicts. As Zaatari once said, “The importance of the story is that it gives the pilot a human face,”310

Tamir’s act of treason against Israelis is reconsidered by revealing his humanity.

Chan-kyong Park’s Imaginary-Documenting: Impossibility of Documenting and Border-Crossing

Chan-kyong Park (b. 1965, South Korea) has surveyed Korea’s modern and contemporary history, as well as its folktales, almost for thirty years. Much of his oeuvre addresses the ideological confrontation between South and North Koreas.311 If

309 José Medina, “Toward a Foucauldian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism,” Foucault Studies, Vol. 12 (October, 2011): 11. 310 In the interview, Zaatari said, “It gives what he is about to bomb, which is considered terrorist ground; it also gives that a human face. I think it’s important to remember in times of war that everyone is a human being. Taking it to this level humanizes it completely, and we’re not used to this at all.” Nina Siegal, “Lebanese Artist Explores ‘Human Face’ of Conflict,” The New York Time, June 19, 2013. 311 In the early stages of Park’s career (1995–2007), many of his works explored the Korean people’s traumatic memories of the Korean War and the continuing conflict between South and North Koreas (Black Box: Memory of the Cold War Images, 1997; Set, 2000; Power Passage, 2004; Flying, 2005). Through these works, Park problematized the localized version of the Cold War’s ideology and its effects in South Korea. His more recent works (2008–2015), in contrast, have taken an anthropological turn. Films such as Sindoan (2008) and Manshin: The Thousand Spirits (2013) document the artist’s interview with shamans and their ritual performances. These works investigate how Korean shamanism has persisted despite the country’s rapid modernization and economic growth. The films narrate the

167 Zaatari’s approach to image-making imparts evidential yet deeply subjective experiences of the Lebanese Civil War, Park’s praxis speaks to the dichotomous episteme that emerged from the local Cold War between the two Koreas. Like the artists I have discussed in the previous sections, Park sometimes integrates an archiving practice into his works. One such work is Sets (2000), a fifteen-minute long slideshow that projects one-hundred-sixty photographs of simulated environments one at a time [Fig. 68].312 Park exhibits these pictures, which were taken in both South

Korea (by Park) and North Korea (by Jong-jin Im), in concert with succinct narrative texts. The photographs fall into three categories based on where they were shot. One set features the Chosun Movie Studio in North Korea, which was constructed to simulate the buildings and streets of Seoul;313 another group of images offers a glimpse into the Seoul Movie Studio Complex in South Korea—this film studio served as the set of a South Korean film, JSA (Joint Security Area; released in 2000)314 and

ways that Koreans have overcome the traumas induced by Japanese colonization and the Korean War. They also portray how Koreans have maintained the hope that the two Koreas will eventually unify. 312 The slideshow was originally developed to be shown through a carousel projector but was later converted into video. Reminding viewers of the antiquated technology, the video has nonetheless maintained the clicking sound that a slide projector makes when moving from one image to the next. Also, the work’s mechanical equipments including the monitor, video player, and speakers are all concealed in a black box. Only the frameless monitor is visible in the dark gallery. 313 “Chosun” (also spelled “Joseon”) designates the last Korean kingdom, which existed from 1392 to 1897. North Koreans call South Korea and North Korea “South Chosun” and “North Chosun.” 314 Released in 2000, JSA is a South Korean thriller movie directed by Chan-wook Park, Chan-kyong’s brother. The film is based on the novel DMZ (1996) by Sang-yeon Park. Chan-wook’s work emblematizes the current relationship between South and North Koreas. The film investigates the circumstances surrounding a fatal shooting at the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone). It was awarded Best Film at both the 2000 Blue Dragon Film Awards and the 2001 Grand Bell Awards in South Korea. It has also received accolades from several international film festivals including the International Seattle Film

168 thereby contains a replica of Panmunjom, the tiny village where the 1953 Korean

Armistice Agreement was signed; and the remaining photos portray the South Korean army bases that host military exercises. Thereby, all the photographs in Sets feature empty buildings and streets. These structures were not built for everyday use but instead mimic real life and events. That is, all the theaters, department stores, hair salons, banks, and subway entrances are actually sets intended for shooting movies or conducting military training. Hence, while Raad exposes the fictive nature of an archive’s authority and Zaatari experiments with the countless ways an archive can produce history, Park’s archival practice captures how the two Koreas have imagined

Festival and the Deuville Asian Film Festival. JSA was released in New York, Moscow, and many other international cities. In the artist’s statement for Sets, Park wrote, “These sets have been constructed for producing mass experience through movies (or at least group experience since military training is obligatory in both Koreas), and giving influence mainly on their historical memory. Like what we find in movies on historical events, we are getting to realize that history deploys itself in part by intensely fictionalized, militarized and deeply masculinized narrative. In this aspect, the sets could become an emblem of the modern Koreas’ nation-state as absurd invention, as a theatre.” See: http://www.parkchankyong.com/sets Analogous to Park’s perspective on how the relationship between South and North Koreas has become a popular subject in movies that shape the collective memory of South Koreans, Young Min Moon wrote: “In the aftermath of Japanese colonialism and the Korean War, the autocratic regimes enforced the project of nation-building in South Korea through nationalism and anti-communism. The demise of the military regimes in the early 1990s resulted in a belated urgency and an excessive collectivization of memory, especially in the form of blockbuster action films that supposedly commemorate the painful past. The reality is that the traumatic past has lapsed into a major source for the entertainment industry, which has seized onto the public’s explosive responses. Such unprecedented enthusiasm for films like Shiri and JSA may have largely to do with the more relaxed review standards established under the democratically elected government, which now tolerates representation of the North-South relationship. Yet it is also indicative of the extent of repression by the government and thoroughly internalized self- censorship on the part of the citizens.” Young Min Moon, “Park Chan-kyong: From the Memories of the Cold War to the Sublime” in Symposium Pamphlet of Image Clash: Contemporary Video Art from South Korea (Boulder: University of Colorado Boulder Museum of Art, 2012).

169 each other, which in turn critically points to the impossibility of documenting and border-crossing.

Indeed, traveling, trading, or documenting across the border is prohibited by law in both countries.315 The North and South accordingly conceive of each other as an un-documentable entity whose representation is necessarily and thus always combined with imagination. As such, the images of Seoul taken at the Chosun Movie

Studio look bizarre to South Koreans. The formal differences between the studio’s copy of a South Korean food company logo and the actual logo [Fig. 69] as well as the appearance of North Korean orthography on a signboard evinces the gap between reality and mimicry [Fig. 70]. In his artist’s statement for the work, Park wrote:

[In Sets], one could see the ghosts of enemy, the “living dead” from the Cold War whose absence is identical in the New World Order. These sets have been constructed for […] giving influence mainly on the historical memory. […] In a sense, 50 years of both Koreas are filled with sets. [...] The dilemma resides in double condition between the World now and the local Cold War.316

Here, Park is critical of both the politics of memory and the writing of the two Koreas’ geopolitical context into history. His first sentence asks whether North Korea is the

315 Travel between South and North Koreas is highly restricted. However, in 2002, a treaty designating the scenic area around North Korea’s Mount Kumgang, a special tourist destination passed, allowing South Koreans to visit. Unfortunately, this mountain became the site of a suspicious shooting of a South Korean visitor, banning South Korean citizens from traveling to the area. Other foreign tourists may travel to North Korea, but the places they may visit are very limited. Moreover, photographing and interacting with local people is tightly controlled. 316 http://www.parkchankyong.com/sets

170 enemy of South Korea or vice versa. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Korean peninsula lingers as almost the only section of the globe where the Cold War’s policies are still in place. This is because the two countries never declared the end of the Korean War but instead agreed to a ceasefire in 1953, which continues to this day. However, this localized reality cannot be separated from the power politics of international relations—a fact that Park emphasizes in his artist’s statement by capitalizing “New World Order.” The “New

World Order” refers to the politico-economic antagonism between the US and China, which has replaced the ideological polarity between the US and what was the USSR.

All three superpowers were in the Korean War and have subsequently affected on the current tensions between the two Koreas.317 In this geopolitical context, “50 years of both Koreas are filled with sets” describes the unavoidable reality that each side of

Korea has thoroughly demonized its other half since combat during the Korean War ceased, despite the two Koreas having been one nation for thousands of years.

Akin to Sets, Park’s Power Passage (2004–2007) illustrates the history of

Korea’s involvement in the Cold War. The central part of Power Passage is a two- channel, thirteen-minute long video. (The main screen is titled Power Passage and the

317 The Korean War (1950–1953) was fought between South Korea and North Korea. The United Nations, with the US as its leading force, supported the South while China and the Soviet Union came to the aid of the North. The diplomatic alliances that formed during this war (South Korea and the US versus North Korea and China) continue to work together to establish important international policies that affect the Korean peninsula. For instance, recently, the South Korean government discussed with the US about the possibility of deploying THAAD as a defense to the North Korean building of a nuclear missile. China strongly opposed this defense strategy. See: Sang-hun Choe, “South Korea Tells China Not to Intervene in Missile-Defense System Talks,” The New York Time, February 24, 2016.

171 subsidiary screen is Special Passage Effect). In a gallery setting, books, documents, and photographs displayed in vitrines complement the video [Fig. 71–72]. Unlike

Zaatari, whose “archaeological excavations” uncovered original artifacts, Park collects media reproductions of images, sounds, and texts.318 Power Passage weaves together those fragments with strands of imagined experiences—what I call, imaginary- documenting—overcoming the impossibility of either Korea to document its neighbor and cross its border. For this reason, Park’s archival materials—film clips, news footages, blueprints, diagrams, and philosophical quotations—seem at first glance to narrate a fictional story rather than an actual history. When combined with his explanatory texts; however, the entire work’s narrative scrutinizes and contests

Korea’s history of the Cold War. In fact, four sets of binaries complicate the structure of Power Passage: (1) the US and the USSR, versus South Korea and North Korea; (2) the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) versus the discovery of an underground tunnel linking the two Koreas; (3) the two superpowers’ actual, cooperative venture in space versus the imaginary reunification of the Korean peninsula in space; (4) and the

318 Zaatari expressly stated that his archiving practice, including his works with the AIF, centers on collecting photographic artifacts rather than photographs that have been published. Eva Respini and Ana Janevski, “Email Interview with Akram Zaatari for the Projects 100: Akram Zaatari.” Although this dissertation interprets Park’s works through the lens of Foucault’s theory of history, Park informed me, at a casual meeting in December, 2013, that Power Passage ascertains history in accordance with Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Discussing the relationship between memory and history, Benjamin contends: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was (Leopold von Ranke).’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain the image of the past which unexpectedly appears to a man singled out by history at a moment of danger.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History (originally written in 1940)” in Illumination: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 253–264.

172 science-fiction films that accurately predicted the future versus the reality of an unrealized future. To reconsider the localized Cold War in an international context, the viewer is expected to make sense of these pairs in a complicated chronological order.

Here, I want to examine how Foucault’s three modalities of producing genealogy for constructing counter-narratives work according to Power Passage.

Foucault wrote:

The first is parodic, directed against reality and opposes history constructed by reminiscence or recognition […]; the second is dissociative, directed against identity and opposes history understood through continuity or representative tradition […]; and the third is sacrificial, directed against truth and opposes history as knowledge.319

For the first genealogical modality (parodic), I focus on how in Power Passage, filmic history intersects its social counterpart to reclaim Korean reunification. The video on the main screen opens with the statement, “The United States and the Soviet Union succeeded in a manned space docking eighteen years after the launch of the first satellite.” Neither the name of the satellite nor the years in which the two events occurred (1957, 1975) are mentioned. It is nevertheless clear that the first satellite refers to Sputnik, which the Soviet Union launched in 1957. The central screen then shows excerpts from three US films: 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984),

Countdown (1968), and Marooned (1969). All three deal with the space race between

319 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. 160–164; Benjamin C. Sax, “Foucault, Nietzsche, History: Two Modes of the Genealogical Method,” History of European Ideas, Vol. 11 (1989): 769.

173 the US and the USSR. These stills accompany texts that highlight, among other things, instances of when science fiction accurately foretold the future. As one of statements points out, Marooned imagined an orbital partnership between the US and the USSR in

1969—twelve years after the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, as well as six years before the genuine success of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) in 1975.

The last statement of Power Passage thusly declares, “The film about the space rendezvous between the two Koreas will be produced in 2010.” Here, Park predicts the

Korean version of Marooned will appear—twelve years after North Korea’s launch of its first satellite, Kwangmyungsung, in 1998—to anticipate the imaginary triumph of the two Koreas’ joint space mission. Mirroring the interval between the flights of

Sputnik and Apollo-Soyuz, Park’s video declares that the two Koreas’ first manned journey into space will transpire in 2016. Reiterating this correspondence between the

Korean peninsula and the two superpowers’ actual and cinematic space race, an image of the North Korean stamp celebrating its maiden satellite appears next to the Soviet

Union’s stamp of Sputnik [Fig. 73–74]. However, in the course of narrating the imaginary future of the two Koreas, Park inserts an animated PowerPoint slide in which “2010” occupies the top left corner of the screen [Fig. 75]. Here, the artist emphasizes the year of the film’s production by which someone’s imagination accelerates the two Koreas’ reunification in space.320 Thus, by combining cinematic imagination with key historical moments, Park seeks a relational change between the

320 Power Passage was first produced in 2004 and later revised in 2010 to amend a few details. Clips from 2010: The Year We Make Contact, for instance, supplanted those from 2001: A Space Odyssey. My discussion about the work is based on the revised version.

174 two Koreas that parallels the two twentieth century superpowers. This passage, which illuminates the ways that genealogy effectuates a history that voices subjugated knowledge, resonates with the complex web of binaries that frame Power Passage.

While explaining the parodic modality of genealogy, Foucault demanded a

“new historian”—namely, a “genealogist” to pursue “metamorphic origins” and different versions of “monumental history.”321 Indeed, Park seems to fulfill Foucault’s request of the genealogical modality: the artist turns to filmic imagination instead of political reality in order to explore the multiple origins which occurred the national division and to seek the reunion of the peninsula which points to Korean people’s historic mission. In other words, Park delimits this imaginary reunification as the monumental moment, rehabilitating Korea’s history as one nation that was divided by the US and the USSR.322

For the second genealogical modality (dissociative), I want to focus on how analogical/oppositional pairs in Power Passage are complicated to make a criticism about international politics. Within the axis that intertwines cinematic and social history is another axis defined by two different kinds of Cold War histories (the two

321 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. 160–161. 322 The 1945 Allied Victory in the Second World War ended Imperial Japan’s 35-year-long colonial rule of Korea but divided the peninsula. The Soviet Union agreed to oversee the Japanese surrender of north of the 38th parallel (latitude 38 degrees North) while the US assumed the same responsibility for the Japanese forces located south of that border. However, because of the Cold War (1947–1991), the negotiations between the US and the Soviet Union failed—the negotiation to promote an independent, unified Korea. In 1948, an election supervised by the United Nations and held only in the US-occupied area led to the establishment of South Korea. The establishment of North Korea promptly followed. Hence, the US supported the South, and the Soviet Union supported the North, and each government claimed sovereignty over the whole Korean peninsula. The ensuing Korean War, a proxy war during the Cold War, left the two Koreas permanently separated by the Korean Demilitarized Zone.

175 superpowers versus the two Koreas). Upon closer inspection, the point where the two axes cross reveals a few other binaries that draw the audience’s dialectical perception.

For instance, the South Korean news footage in Power Passage features an underground tunnel between the two Koreas. Here, the underground tunnel means the spies’ product—whether the digging began from North Korea or South Korea—during the Cold War era. Park’s accompanying statement explains that the tunnel was discovered in South Korea just four months before the ASTP’s success. Then, clips of the tunnel’s interior suddenly overlap with the images of the docking passage that connected the US spacecraft to the USSR’s [Fig. 76]. This sequence underscores the irony between the local and international takes on the Cold War. That is, the docking passage denotes the two superpowers’ boundless expansion into space while the tunnel embodies the two Koreas’ regression into the ground.323 Then, the next sequence in the video unfolds along the tunnel and the docking passage and begins by introducing

Rockwell International—the company that manufactured both the ASPT’s spaceship and the nuclear bomber B1-B [Fig. 77]. Park writes, “The B1-B [nuclear bomber] will fly over the Korean peninsula during an emergency.” The video immediately cuts to a satellite picture of North Korea, and then a photograph of a missile launching appears from the bottom of the screen to replace the previous image. Then, the statement following the image of the missile reads, “Rockwell recently formed a joint company called Rockwell-Samsung Automation.” In this context, after establishing the thesis-

323 When the video’s text alludes to the underground tunnel, it is referring to the Cu Chi tunnels found in Vietnam as well. This double meaning emphasizes the two superpowers’ influence on distant, localized cold wars (the proxy wars).

176 versus-antithesis relation between the docking passage (the international Cold War) and the tunnel (the local proxy war), his quasi-montage aesthetic thoroughly engages the viewer in the dialectical sum of the Rockwell-Samsung relation. In this way, Park critically speaks about how the Korean multinational company, Samsung functions to prolong the two Koreas’ ceasefire state in collaboration with an American supra power rather than to assist the two Koreas’ reunification.

Throughout these sequences, Park demonstrates the dissociative modality of

Foucault’s genealogy, which opposes history understood through continuity. Foucault wrote that genealogy is a complex system of “heterogeneous” elements that “unable to be mastered by the powers of synthesis.”324 As such, those dialectical sequences seek something more than a synthesis of power. And one instance of that thing is the byproduct of the local Cold War—for instance, the Rockwell-Samsung relation—that has on the enduring conflict between the nowadays relationship between the two

Koreas.325

Lastly, for the third genealogical modality (sacrificial), I would discuss how

Power Passage’s text-image relations (main screen) and sensorial effects (subsidiary screen) evoke diverse facets of the Korean War. The main screen is, in a sense, a collection of the artist’s historical writing. Throughout the video, the written

324 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp.161–162. 325 Park’s views on the partnership between Rockwell and Samsung correspond with the first chapter of this dissertation. That chapter’s third section explores Allan Sekula’s documentation of Ulsan, South Korea and the Hyundai Heavy Industry. It also expounds on Sekula’s and Fredric Jameson’s criticisms of chaebol—a South Korean business structure in which a multinational conglomerate is owned and managed by members of a singular family.

177 statements in many times precede their visual counterparts. Keywords, such as “ASTP,”

“Rockwell-Samsung,” or film titles, are in red and displayed first. Emphasizing the red keywords, the rest of the words appear in white by filling in the blanks from left to right [Fig. 78]. Much of the video’s imagery is also oriented toward reading rather than seeing. The majority of the images on the main screen does not illustrate movement but are instead still frames that designate monumental moments. Some of these stills, which were compiled in PowerPoint, nevertheless spin or appear one by one on the same screen to complement highly explanatory, somewhat didactic statements. These texts demand that the viewer carefully reads the work’s images before the slide advances to the next.326 However, contrasting the main screen, the ancillary screen kindles the audience’s senses and emotions. It features a dialogue between a man and a woman presented in “Han River” (1947), a traditional Korean opera.327 In the beginning, the screen only emits the sound of the woman weeping as she remembers being separated from her husband who, at the end of the Korean War, could not cross the border. The conversation ends with the man consoling the woman, advising her to forget her husband. Emblematizing the uniquely Korean concept of han, the melancholic voice, tone, and diction of the dialogue tug at the listener’s emotions. Han is the culmination of the peninsula’s history of successive invasions by foreign powers; and it is understood as a collective sense of unresolved resentment against injustice.

326 The main video was originally created in PowerPoint and then transferred to a video format. 327 The subsidiary screen also displays excerpts of the same US films as the main screen. However, the main screen shows film stills while the secondary screen plays some parts of unedited clips. The subsidiary screen first plays “Han River,” then the clips of the three US films, and then “Han River” again. Spectators consequently experience the same series of films in two different modes.

178 This cultural trait speaks to Korea’s collective memory of the fated national division caused by the two superpowers.

Here, what I want to emphasize is the fact that Power Passage’s two different screens of representation—the explanatory and the sensory/affective—reflect

Foucault’s discussion on the sacrificial modality of genealogy, which opposes history as knowledge and truth. According to Foucault, a genealogist must resist the will to knowledge that seeks a mastery of universal truth. So we as genealogists should instead ceaselessly propagate the “risks” that dismantle the “illusory de-fences” of a unified subject and knowledge.328 Park’s principal screen accordingly enables spectators to read about the ways international politics have impacted a local history through an explanatory mode of representation while his auxiliary screen allows them to share in the Korean people’s collective memory of, as well as their inability to forget, the events that led to the national division through a much more emotional mode of representation.

In sum, Power Passage thus exposes viewers to different modes of genealogy to help them reconsider a local history through multiple sorts of dichotomies—the two axes of Power Passage (film versus social history; and the two superpowers versus the two Koreas), their dialectical unfolding, and the work’s two different modes of representation all transmit the manifold consequences of the ongoing ceasefire between the two Koreas. This enduring conflict has given rise to a uniquely South

Korean episteme—a dichotomous system of thinking by which South Koreans

328 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. 162–164.

179 perceive and conceptualize sociopolitical phenomena. Nak-chung Paik’s theory of the division system throws light on how the split of the Korean peninsula has shaped the lives of the South Korean people.329 He wrote:

The division of the peninsula was consolidated into a kind of system with considerable powers of self-reproduction when the Korean War ended in a stalemate in 1953. […] The division is commonly viewed in terms of the opposition between two states, between ideologies of socialism and capitalism [yet] the discourse calls for a people-oriented, rather than a state- or ideology-oriented. […] We talk of the division system in order only to acquire a more systematic understanding of such peninsula-wide reality. […] such as social and economic polarization, environmental destruction, gender discrimination, and pervasive violence; all these are problems presented anywhere in the capitalist world-system and are by no means restricted to Korea. And yet, [...] when such problems of the world-system become manifest in Korea, they are further refracted and in many cases aggravated by the additional variable.330

In the same vein, the production of historical knowledge by left-wing intellectuals during the Cold War had come under the attack of censorship.331 Similarly echoing

329 As one of the best known South Korean left-wing intellectuals, Paik has researched the ways the two Koreas could reunify and has published numerous writings in the US. 330 Nak-chung Paik, “South Korean Democracy and Korea’s Division System,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2013):156–169. 331 The censorship has been exercised by the National Security Act. As a byproduct of both the Cold War and the split of the Korean peninsula, the Act was enacted in 1948 to protect South Korea against the military threat of its northern neighbor. This law, which is still in force today, suppresses free speech by criminalizing communist, pro-North Korean, and anti-government activities. It was meant to be a temporary but instead has been used with increasing regularity over the past few decades. The Human Rights Watch, “South Korea: Cold War Relic Law Criminalizes Criticism,” accessed May 28, 2015, see: https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/05/28/south-korea-cold-war-relic-law-criminalizes- criticism.

180 the era of the military dictatorship, the polemical issue of writing history textbooks has recently resurfaced to ignite major clashes between intellectuals on the Right and

Left.332 For this reason, South Korea has, to some degree, internalized resistance to censorship, mirroring its superpower ally. The totality of Power Passage correspondingly shows how the Cold War’s ideological dichotomy has been reproduced and transformed in Korea while demonstrating the potential of imagination to reclaim Korean reunification beyond any preexisting hegemony amid national or international relations. This twist furthermore resonates with the primary purpose of

Foucault’s genealogy: to seek counter-narratives in which the relations among diverse forces are reversed.

332 The Korea Herald reported, “Plans for the South Korean government to monopolize the publication of history textbooks for secondary schools—which the officials say is essential to eradicate the left- leaning bias of current privately published books—has sparked dispute nationwide, especially in education circles.” Min-sik Yoon, “Korea Kicks off State History Textbook Publication Process,” The Korea Herald, October 20, 2015. Conflicts between the Right and Left have persisted for a long time in the field of writing Korean history. Yoon’s article demonstrates that the two sides in South Korea still struggle to agree on how to describe the ideology of the Cold War. The conservative political party successfully passed a bill to adopt a state-published history textbook to combat what it perceived as the leftist ideology of privately published textbooks. Most history professors at South Korean universities opposed the bill and organized a widespread demonstration to resist passing the bill. For a discussion of the controversy involving the writing of modern Korean history in the context of international relations, see: Sang-hun Choe, “Park Geun-hye of South Korea Defends Move to Issue State History Textbooks,” The New York Times, October 13, 2015.

181 Genealogy and Fiction: Methods for Writing Locally Specific but Internationally Legible Histories

In the previous two sections, I have examined Zaatari’s Letter to a Refusing

Pilot and Park’s Power Passage in accordance with the rules and modalities of

Foucault’s genealogical method. I have employed Foucault’s philosophy of history to analyze how both works unveil the counter-narratives of their respective country’s contested civil war histories (the Lebanese Civil War for Zaatari and, for Park, the ongoing Cold War between the two Koreas). The two projects demonstrate several common features.

First, in dealing with a localized war and its aftermath, both artists create a unique order of historical events by edging fact up against fiction. Their use of fiction is necessary to communicate the truth and the real. Zaatari’s docu-fiction depicts the artist’s subjective experience of wartime trauma, conveying the truth of his personal feelings in a way that a documentary lacks the capacity to capture. Park’s imaginary- documenting surmounts the very impossibility of either Korea to cross the border and document its other half. Second, the ways the two projects structure their narratives parallel the local conditions of the histories they write. Zaatari’s Letter to a Refusing

Pilot recontextualizes the complex footnote-like references of the Lebanese Civil War.

These references reflect the war’s multiple layers, which were complicated by clashing religions, ideological factions, and the influx of refugees into Lebanon. Parks’ Power

Passage unpacks the multiple polarities that framed both the Cold War and its proxy war in Korea. These binaries transmit South Korea’s dichotomous system of thinking,

182 which has been constructed through the enduring ceasefire situation in Korea. I also have argued that, due to the nation’s widespread censorship, Zaatari’s genealogical approach to writing history might be the only way to narrate the Lebanese Civil War.

Similarly grappling with the issue of censorship, Park’s complicated set of binaries refracts the national polarization that emerges when writing history in South Korea—a country where policies from the Cold War are still in force. Third, both works adhere to the political function of Foucault’s genealogy, which describes how power relations among diverse forces have been formed or are potentially reversed. Zaatari’s homage to Tamir breaks down the nationalism and ethnocentrism that permeate most international representations of the Middle East while Park’ allusion to Rockwell-

Samsung Automation visualizes how the conflicting ideologies of the twentieth- century’s two superpowers have been reproduced and transformed in South Korea.

But how would the mainstream art criticism likely interpret the ways the two artists have historicized their native country’s wars? To ascertain the art world’s response to the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, October created and distributed a questionnaire that inspired droves of art historians and scholars to submit their answers. One question problematized the demise of contemporary art’s critical and effective engagement with wars by comparing today’s inactive response to the Iraq

War with the 1960s’ artists-organized movement against the Vietnam War.333

333 The second among six, the threefold question asked: “Are there examples of an active counter-public sphere in which protest against the war in Iraq is conducted with intensity comparable to the protests organized during the era of the Vietnam War? What, if anything, demotivates the current generation of academics and artists from assuming positions of public critique and opposition against the barbarous

183 Assessing the survey’s responses, Lambert-Beatty argued that “the most daring and exciting efforts of the last decade have not been ‘protest art’ at all. […] Their means are less expressive than administrative [and] characterized by compromise and controversy.”334 Demos’ evaluation, in contrast, deploys the concept of “military neoliberalism” to illustrate how artists’ protests have been transformed in accordance with the global restructuring of war itself.335 He avers that since today’s war situations are much more complicated than before, contemporary artistic engagement requires an equally nuanced form that reconfigures what Jacques Rancière calls the term the sensible—the possible modes of perception by which roles and modes of participation in a common world are determined.336 Demos then outlines the criteria for assessing this new artistic form. One benchmark is how it aligns with the modes of “dis- identification,” which aims to counter the limited range of characters produced in mainstream media.337

Demos’ description of the new artistic form for engaging with wars aligns with

Zaatari’s docu-fiction and Park’s imaginary-documenting. Both the Lebanese Civil

acts committed by the government of the United States against a foreign country? Do you consider the absence of the draft the sole significant factor?” “Questionnaire,” October, Vol. 123 (Winter, 2008): p. 9. 334 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “Questionnaire: Lambert-Beatty,” October, Vol. 123 (Winter, 2008): 94–96. 335 T. J. Demos, “Questionnaire: Demos,” October, Vol. 123 (Winter, 2008): 33. 336 Here, his use of the word sensible is from Jacques Rancière’s book The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). Demos wrote, “My allusion to the theoretical project of Jacques Rancière is intentional: one useful feature of his writing on art is the reconceptualization of art’s autonomy as a potential zone of the political beyond the determinations of governmental policy or activist tactics, one that supersedes as well autonomy’s traditional associations with isolationist escapism and artistic essentialism.” T. J. Demos, “Questionnaire: Demos”: 35. 337 T. J. Demos, “Questionnaire: Demos”: 35–36.

184 War and the ongoing Cold War in Korea tend to be absent from or distorted in today’s mainstream media. The way that popular media in the US represents North Korea as a ridiculous axis of evil is one example of this distortion. This is because the vestigial

Cold War power relations that continue to brace the West compounded and transformed the conflicts among the religious sects in Lebanon; and such relations that continue to affect the local ideological factions divided the Korean peninsula.338 The vestigial Cold War power relations exacerbate not only the media representation of the localized wars in Lebanon and South Korea but also the conditions of writing history.

Now, recall that the censorship in Lebanon bars history textbooks from mentioning the traumatic experience of the civil war and that the contents of South Korean textbooks polarize the nation whenever the ruling party changes.339 As I have mentioned, the polemical issue of writing history textbooks has brought up and created clashes between right and left intellectuals in South Korea in 2015. Likewise, about the

Lebanese case, CNN journalist Rima Maktabi reported in 2012:

Home to contesting political groups representing 18 religious communities […] To avoid inﬂaming old hostilities, Lebanese history textbooks stop in 1943, the year the country gained independence […] “We have a vacant hole in our history books,” said independent scholar Dr. Maha Yahya, adding that

338 During the Cold War, Lebanon became so disintegrated and polarized that the Maronites’ support for the West (the US) versus the leftist, pan-Arab groups’ stance in favor of the Soviet-aligned Arab countries became the seed for the civil war. The enduring Cold War policies affecting the Korean peninsula, as well as the reproduction and transformation of South Korea’s dichotomous system of thinking, likewise prompted the ongoing ceasefire situation. 339 Dina Al-Kassim, “Crisis of the Unseen: Unearthing the Political Aesthetics of Hysteria in the Archaeology and Arts of the New Beirut,” Parachute, Vol. 108 (Winter, 2002): 146–163.

185 this absence from the textbooks reﬂected society’s broader silence regarding the conﬂict.340

In this context, the two artists’ affective modes of history—Zaatari’s docu-fiction and

Park’s imaginary-documenting—can be said to be forms of artistic protest that confront the overwhelming difficulty of reaching consensus when writing the official history of a war. By unleashing subjective or imagined experiences against the politics of writing history, Zaatari and Park provide a different channel for representing their localized wars.

How then does the genealogical framework of Zaatari’s docu-fiction and

Park’s imaginary-documenting correspond to its respective fictional elements? Martin

Saar distinguishes three different conceptual levels that intertwine within Foucault’s genealogy: history (method), critique (value), and writing or genre (style).341 The first level (genealogy as history) describes the genealogical method’s primary purpose, which is to uncover excluded narratives from our present history. Zaatari (via the rules governing genealogy) and Park (via the modalities of genealogy) fulfill this objective by pursuing the veiled aspects of their native countries’ war histories.342 The second level (genealogy as critique) adopts the viewpoint of a foreigner to prompt self-

340 Rima Maktabi, “Lebanon's Missing History: Why School Books Ignore the Past,” CNN, June 8, 2012. 341 Martin Saar, “Genealogy and Subjectivity,” European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 10 (December, 2002): 231–232. 342 Martin Saar, “Genealogy and Subjectivity”: 232–234.

186 reflection on the prevailing norms of one’s culture.343 The two artists accomplish this by revealing the historical conditions or politics that limits their own locally specific writing of history. However, the third level (genealogy as writing or genre) is a rhetorical and irreducible stylistic problem that leverages hyperbolic, manipulative, catastrophic, and nostalgic flourishes to achieve effectiveness and plausibility in the writing of history.344 The following paragraph elaborates on how Zaatari’s and Park’s works exemplify this genre, connecting their use of fiction with Foucault’s approach to ascertaining history. Saar wrote:

The “truth” of genealogy is not one pertaining to the truth of its statements and set of propositions alone; the “truth effect” only materializes the fusion of certain historical hypotheses and a drastic and dramatizing mode of representation. […] Genealogies’ rhetorical-narratives tools are: hyperbole and exaggerating gesture, theatrical effect […] and the contrastive and often surprising periodization.345

Here, hypotheses, dramatization, hyperbole, exaggeration, and theatricality can all be classified as types of fiction. Saar therefore claims that the genealogical method takes fictionalization for granted, since it is indispensable to making sense of genealogy’s truth. Hence, Zaatari and Park do not infuse their genealogical histories with fiction.

Rather, fiction is already a constitutive element of genealogy that operates as a platform for truth-telling.

343 Ibid., 234–237. He explained the second level of genealogy through the lenses of post-structuralism and anthropology. 344 Ibid., 238. 345 Ibid., 238–239.

187 But what I want to bring into the question is, how does the fiction deployed by

Zaatari and Park problematize locally subjugated knowledges to release them from their local specificities? Foucault argued that the “game of truth” (searching for truth) problematizes or “unearth[s] how and why certain things became problems.”346 In archaeology, his initial approach to problematization evolves into genealogy, that genealogy demarcates the particular discursive formations that function in the game of truth.347 Both methods nevertheless involve local discursivities. Foucault wrote:

Archeology is the method specific to the analysis of local discursivities, and genealogy is the tactic which, once it has described these local discursivities, brings into play the de-subjugated knowledges that have been released from them. That just about sums up the overall project.348

Thus, the genealogical method problematizes things to unearth the truth, and those things are the locally subjugated knowledges that should be freed from the local specificities that bind them. Here, I bring into the discussion of Zaatari’s Twenty Eight

Nights: Endnote (2014) and Park’s Flying (2005), both of which were produced after the works that I have discussed: Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013) and Power Passage

(2004–2007). By rendering invisible parts of the things they record, Zaatari’s Endnote and Park’s Flying carve out spaces for the viewer’s imagination or remembrance of the

346 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2001), p. 171. 347 R. E. McKerrow, “Foucault’s Relationship to Rhetoric,” Review of Communication, Vol. 11 (October, 2011): 262–264. 348 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lecture at the College de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 1997), pp. 10–11.

188 localized subjects to be subsumed by the works. Zaatari and Park additionally emphasize the local components of these works more so than in previous projects.

Zaatari’s Endnote is a video of Hashem el Madani and Zaatari himself intently watching something on an Apple Macbook [Fig. 79]. Madani is a symbolic figure for

Zaatari: Madani began taking photographs in 1948 and was the first person to own a

35 mm camera in Zaatari’s native city of Saida; and Madani’s Studio Shehrazade, which reached the height of its popularity in the 1960s and 70s, has also furnished the

AIF with countless images via Zaatari’s excavation projects. However, all the way through Endnote, the two men are seated facing the audience. What they are watching on the Macbook is consequently never shown. The laptop thereby delimits the space to be filled by the viewer’s imagination. The work’s sounds and strobe light effects, in contrast, extend into and permeate the realm of the viewer.349 Played repeatedly at high volumes, an addictive Arabic pop-song emanates from the video, cultivating an exotic atmosphere in the gallery. The intense, flashes of colorful lights behind the two men similarly spills into the screen’s surrounding vicinity and contribute to the unusual ambiance of the gallery.

Here, I want to bring in Demos’ theorization of fiction in relation to memory and affect. Differentiating affect from emotion, he wrote:

Fiction facilitates memory by linking representation with affect. […] It is useful to understand affect’s difference from “emotion.” With affect, “content” and “effect” are unlinked, defining affect’s “autonomy” as an

349 This description is based on my visit of Zaatari’s solo exhibition Akram Zaatari—Unfolding, which was on view from March 7, 2015 to August 16, 2015 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

189 intensified sensation coming from without the subject that is embodied and distinct from the subjective encoding and cultural structuring of emotion.350

Endnote’s affective music and lighting problematize the contextualization of the entire work by encouraging the spectator’s imagination to occupy the unseen computer screen. The exotic sensation that derives from the video’s sounds and flashes of light concurrently earmarks locally specified knowledge and stimulates the viewer’s imagination. But, also at the same time, the intensity of the sensation is so strong that it dissolves the constraints of local specificities to induce anyone, regardless of whether he or she is knowledgeable about Arab culture, to participate in solving the riddle of the laptop’s unknown contents.

Similar to Zaatari’s Endnote, Park’s Flying also espouses both unknowable and affect elements. Consisting mainly of footage that Park obtained from a television station, the video shows aerial views of Pyongyang and other areas in North Korea.

These shots were taken during the first direct inter-Korean flight, which enabled the inaugural North-South Korean Summit in 2000. The plane’s window frame and wings, which obscure slivers of the depicted landscape, embody the Korean people’s unfulfilled desire to cross the border and document what was once a part of them [Fig.

80]. The plane’s blind spots additionally and simultaneously demarcate Flying’s repository for fiction and evoke the stuffiness of barriers by which the viewer can problematize the current division of the Korean peninsula. Here, Isang Yun’s 1977

350 T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, pp. 194–196.

190 composition “Double Concerto” plays as the soundtrack for the duration of the video.

“Double Concerto” was inspired by the Korean fable of Gyeonu and Jiknyeo, and all of the composer and the myth typify very specific knowledge about Korean history and culture. For instance, a pro-North Korean activist, Yun was exiled to Germany and never returned to South Korea.351 Corresponding Yun’s exiled body from the native country, the myth delivers how Gyeonu and Jiknyeo were separated by the King of

Heaven as punishment. Gyeonu was exiled to the east star and Jiknyeo to the west star; however, the King nonetheless allowed the couple to meet once a year on July 7. The textual component of the video accordingly notes, “Yun compared the myth to North-

South relations. The encounter of Gyeonu and Jiknyeo symbolizes reunification.” Here, the specific knowledge pertaining to both Yun and the myth may question the possible reunification of the two Koreas to the viewer.

In this context, Flying’s soundtrack opens up the process of remembering the

Korean War by affecting the viewer’s sensibility. An unexpected, high-pitched tearing sound accompanies the visual transition from aerial views of North Korea to scenes of the US bombing of North Korea during the Korean War [Fig. 81]. The soundtrack shifts again near the end of the video to emit a spine-tingling eeriness. The final

351 After studying composition in West Berlin, Yun moved to Cologne in 1959. In 1964, he was awarded a grant from the Ford Foundation and moved with his family back to West Berlin. In the year prior, he traveled to North Korea. His visit to North Korea was scandalized in South Korea where the relic polices of the Cold War are still in force. Consequently, in 1967, he was kidnapped and taken to Seoul where he was condemned to life in prison for committing treason. The international community of artists responded to this event by presenting a petition, which was organized by German and French composers and performers. The petition was signed by more than 200 people and successfully begot Yun’s release in 1969.

191 sequence of the video shows North Korean citizens welcoming the South Korean delegation. The North Korean people; however, have been blurred and faded out to resemble ghosts [Fig. 82].352 These apparitions represent the tendency of memories to pop up out of the blue and then vanish as soon as they appeared. Indeed, the affect elements such as the kaleidoscope of sounds and screens invite anyone, even those whom are unfamiliar with Yun or the folktale of Gyeonu and Jiknyeo, to remember the

Korean War.

Conclusion

I have examined how Zaatari’s Endnote and Park’s Flying problematize their locally specific knowledges by combining fiction with affect elements that stimulate the viewer’s imagination or memory. The two works’ exotic sounds, lighting, and poignant soundtrack break down local specificities to enable anyone, regardless of whether he or she is familiar with Arab culture or Korean history, to engage in the process of imagining or remembering. The viewer’s imagination or memory in turn becomes the works’ fictional parts. Demos stated, “Fiction doesn’t obscure reality; rather, as a hybrid formation of documents and imaginary scenarios, it elicits its

352 As mentioned in an earlier footnote, Park’s works are heavily influenced by Benjamin’s writings. The exhibition brochure for one of his more recent exhibition observed, “Ghosts, as recently noted by Park, are like Walter Benjamin’s idea of an angel of history, caught between the past and the future. But ghosts are always around us, and their presence is obliquely felt in the body of the beholder or through the shaman.” Here, the angel denotes an Angelus Novus described in Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” See: http://ckr.weai.columbia.edu/may-6-colonial-unheimlich/

192 deepest truths.”353 By catalyzing the viewer’s imagination or remembrance, the fictions employed by Zaatari and Park seem to search for something truer or realistic than what traditional narratives offer. More precisely, they hope the viewer’s psychological process of imagining or remembering produces his or her own order of events of genealogy. Such genealogies are subjective yet still pursue truths that are deeper than any other version of history—especially in light of the local conditions of writing history. Moreover, the affect elements employed by Zaatari and Park transmit each of their local cultures through alluring sensations, inviting even those who are unfamiliar with the artists’ countries to participate in producing their genealogies. In this sense, the specificities of the local narratives become accessible and urge the viewer to recontextualize them.

Zaatari’s docu-fiction and Park’s imaginary-documenting have always entailed affects that meld with fiction. Recall the uneasiness created by the incompatibility of static and dynamic moments in Zaatari’s Saida. Similarly, the North Korean representations of South Korea in Park’s Sets confound South Korean observers while

Power Passage continuously exploits the intersection between filmic imagination and historical moments. The two artists’ unique documentary practices, which convey local postwar narratives, point to the fact that the search for truth exceeds purely empirical accounts in our transnational world. Also, by switching the roles of fact and fiction, their practices can be said to open up new possibilities amid the local conditions of writing history: Zaatari’s representation of Tamir recontextualizes a treasonous act as a

353 T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, p. 191.

193 heroic one whereas Park’s Power Passage replaces the superpower’s enduring effect with the imaginary reunification of the two Koreas. In this way, Zaatari’s and Park’s historical accounts convey their extremely localized subjects and their corresponding conditions of writing history while being critical of internationalism, which does not have the capacity to appreciate fully the deeper truth of the local population.

194 CONCLUSION

Focusing on the concept of the artist-as-historian in this dissertation, I analyzed the work of four contemporary artists in a transnational context. In chapter one, I examined the representations of economic inequality and globalization (Allan

Sekula, the United States); in chapter two, the racial memory and remnants of colonialism (Santu Mofokeng, South Africa); and in chapter three, the trauma of civil war and subsequent conflicts (Akram Zaatari, Lebanon and Chan-kyong Park, South

Korea). My focus was on their photographic projects—a photobook (Sekula), a private album (Mofokeng), and archives and films (Zaatari and Park)—that address key issues of underrepresented history at the end of the twentieth century. Within each chapter, I discussed the key concepts of Foucault’s philosophy of history.

In chapter one, I analyze Sekula’s photobook, Fish Story (1995). My primary focus is on how Sekula’s idea of critical realism intersects with the concept of surface reading, which closely examines the surface of events or images, by visualizing the complicated processes of globalization and its influences on locals. Visualizing globalization seems like a nearly impossible task because it requires dealing with a range of geopolitical and socioeconomic relations and consequences. However,

Sekula’s careful structuring of the photobook—combined with his unique mode of visual representation and intellectual text—assists viewers in perceiving the varied effects of globalization on the sea. In order to make sense of the entire structure of Fish

Story, I examine the three types of text—caption, description, and essay—and their interactions with images, which change one’s habit of reading, physically and

195 intellectually. Although I deal with each type of text in a different section, the entire photobook appears to be a flexible, elastic entity filled with rich materials: one in which all of the materials—image and text and their intertextuality, their layout design, ordering, and sequencing that speak to a range of geographical locations and plentiful narratives—are separated, connected and, at the same time, remediated in order to demonstrate a mastering of maritime history of globalization.

My main argument details the ways in which Fish Story helps viewers awaken from blindness, from the loss of vision related to social realities within global capitalism. These realities include marginalization of laborers or unequal development between the current globalist locus and locals. In the chapter, I discuss Fish Story in relation to Foucault’s idea of knowledge and power. In Foucault’s theory, it is nearly impossible to resist the exercise of power because power, combined with knowledge, configures a magnificent yet invisible presence that extends into every facet of our daily lives. By training viewers to seek an astute vision of reality that allows them to dismantle the hegemonic power structures via the project’s unique structure, Fish Story asks viewers to be the subject of knowledge and engage in critical discourses about the power of global capitalism. In this sense, Fish Story provides a certain way of overcoming Foucault’s skeptical perspective on the power exercised in our society. In addition to Fish Story, Sekula’s subsequent project, Waiting for Tear Gas (1999–2000), shows people’s protest against globalization. Presumably, such a protest is one of the ways in which we seek a place for ourselves: heterotopia, a non-hegemonic, relational space between sites as a revolutionary network.

196 In chapter two, I analyze Mofokeng’s The Black Photo Album—Look at Me:

1890–1950 (1997). The figures presented in the portraits are black South Africans who once existed in middle-class, colonial society at the turn of the twentieth century. They commissioned their portraits according to European styles and settings for their own satisfaction. One of the main questions addressed in the chapter is: how do Mofokeng’s subjects simultaneously present a colonial and modernized subject? I tackle this question by showing how the images decenter subjectivity, thereby revealing many of the conflicts raised in the processes of colonization and modernization. One such conflict relates to how history gets written. In this regard, my argument about

Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album is that the textual components take on a mnemonic role for viewers while demonstrating that current South African history is incomplete, still veiled. Related to this, I also ask how the enduring historical traumas of others are seen and addressed. Mofokeng’s representation of ambivalence as a means of “doing history” deals with spanned time, and I argue, presents a model of coping with traumatic histories. To this last point, I ask if the current institutions or discourses can be said to enable the decolonizing processes, and I also contextualize Mofokeng’s project with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and criticize the institution’s reconciliatory process.

One of the most challenging research questions of the chapter involves demonstrating the importance of viewers’ emotional engagement in the other’s traumatic history. Mofokeng’s photographic practice is straightforward without any distorted or sensational scenes. Nevertheless, his documenting practice delivers

197 ambivalence in light of two contradicting values, somewhat dualistic sensibility— simultaneously desiring for and detached from the history of his native country—that concerns a difficulty of negotiating the past. However, I also discuss the term ambivalence in the context of limited, ambivalent function of systems such as postcolonialism and the TRC. Here, South Africans’ uneasy process to negotiate the past conflicts with the current systems that have forced them to move toward the future.

The current systems in turn parallel the modernization processes that the figures captured on the portrait experienced. Indeed, once colonized, decolonization comes hard to achieve and further, South Africans’ emotional residue of traumatic experiences thereby remain without fully being healed or restored. To discuss this enduring issue, I examine the term esthema, which supplements Foucault’s notion of episteme, in order to expand our historical discussion from an epistemological field to an emotional one.

With the term, I also discuss how Mofokeng’s Landscapes of Trauma (1997–2000), which captures the historical remnants of the Auschwitz concentration camp, experiments with the degree to which, the artist himself can engage in the other’s traumatic history while asking us the current colonial conditions of our beings.

In chapter three, I focus primarily on the ways in which contemporary artists construct their contested national histories by employing fiction. I begin the chapter with the investigation of the concepts parafiction and truthiness, both of which point to something less true or untrue, yet plausible enough to mobilize people to believe it is true. When I discuss the concepts, I explore a fraudulent museum created by Michael

Blum and a simulated documentary by Walid Raad in order to show contemporary

198 artists’ intervention within the writing of history. Each project speaks to Turkish and

Lebanese histories for international viewers, yet their narratives are parafictional; that is, for those who are unfamiliar with Turkish history or Arabic language, it is nearly impossible to gauge whether their narratives are true or not. Afterward, I problematize the idea of internationalism because contemporary artists are, to some degree, under the pressure to present their locality as a way to distinguish their works from other ones in globally oriented art systems; however, understanding local narratives in depth often results in failure. With this in mind, I examine the projects by Zaatari and Park and focus on how they represent local histories within the international context.

In the chapter, I examine how Zaatari and Park represent their contested national histories: Zaatari’s Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013) explores the traumatic experience of the Lebanese Civil War, and Park’s Power Passage (2004–2007) investigates the ongoing ceasefire situation between South Korea and North Korea following the Korean War. By utilizing fiction to construct local histories, both artists reimagine the past and redirect the future. In the chapter, I discuss their works in view of Foucault’s genealogy—as an effective way of constructing history, genealogy rejects searching for an origin, descent, or continuity while implying a political function to reverse the power relations among conflicting forces in the realm of history.

To contextualize both artists’ project with Foucault’s genealogical method, I use the terms docu-fiction (for Zaatari) and imaginary-documenting (for Park) to designate the unique ways in which the artists combine documenting and fiction in the construction of histories. Finally, I develop my argument further to illustrate how their works

199 evince that fiction—especially when coupled with affective elements such as local music or folktales—and engage in a wider, international audience without compromising the quality of local specificities.

This dissertation centers on the ways in which four contemporary artists attempt to affect or change viewers’ awareness of history. As such, each chapter raises the question of how our understanding of history has changed or is changing now. Via postmodern discourses, scholars have agreed that history has been less universal and more uncertain, and their historical research have focused on contingency rather than continuity. In each chapter, I demonstrate how the artists under investigation respond to such changes after the postmodern and aftermath.

If the postmodern representation was toward the disappearance of the real, contemporary post-simulacra are more toward the pragmatics of trust. As I have discussed, contemporary social media often manipulates fact, for instance, via fake news which, as we have recently seen, widely circulates over the world. Moreover, representational technologies such as smartphone cameras and applications or auto drawing tools too often provide us what we want to see rather than what we see.354

Sekula is aware of the pervasive condition of the loss of reality in the global capitalism while Zaatari and Park are concerned with the loss of the empirical truth. In a sense, all three of these artists demonstrate a shared concern about the loss of our vision and consciousness: Sekula asks us to carefully examine the surface of events or

354 Hito Steyerl, “Politics of Post-Representation: In conversation with Marvin Jordan,” Dis Magazine (2017).

200 images, and Zaatari and Park utilize fiction and affect elements to deliver a truer representation rather than a parafictional or truthy one. And of course, their endeavor for recovering our vision and consciousness is deeply connected to make more senses of where we are and where we are going to. However, still, how our history today is changing is far less certain, and Mofokeng’s representation of ambivalence runs counter to such fast changes by demonstrating the difficulty of negotiating the past.

201 FIGURES

[Fig. 1] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 43: Photographed in the Port of Rotterdam, 1993

202

[Fig. 2–3] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 73–74: Photographed in Veracruz, Mexico, March 1994

203

[Fig. 4] Allan Sekula Installation View of Fish Story Chapter 1 at Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014 (Black panel on left is a caption page; White panel is a description page)

204

[Fig. 5] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 28: Photographed in the Mid-Atlantic, 1993

205

[Fig. 6] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 10: Photographed in Minturno, Italy, June 1992

206

[Fig. 7–8] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 54–55: Photographed in Ilsan Village, Ulsan, South Korea in September 1993

207

[Fig. 9] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 12: Photographed in Los Angeles, California, June 1992

208

[Fig. 10–11] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 79–80: Photographed in Veracruz, Mexico, March 1994

209

[Fig. 12] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 19: Photographed in San Diego, California, August 1990

210

[Fig. 13] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 21: Photographed in Poland, November 1990

211

[Fig. 14] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 22: Photographed in Poland, November 1990

212

[Fig. 15–16] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 49–50: Photographed in Ulsan, South Korea, September 1993

213

[Fig. 17] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 14: Photographed in Koreatown, Los Angeles, April 1992

214

[Fig. 18] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 4: Photographed in the San Diego Harbor, August 1991

215

[Fig. 19] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 5: Photographed in the San Diego Harbor, August 1991

216

[Fig. 20] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 6: Photographed in the Closing Los Angeles Harbor, July 1991

217

[Fig. 21–22] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 58–59: Photographed in Insa-dong, Seoul, South Korea in September 1993

218

[Fig. 23] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 45: Photographed in Ulsan, South Korea, September 1993

219

[Fig. 24] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 46: Photographed in Ulsan, South Korea, September 1993

220

[Fig. 25] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 51: Photographed in Ulsan, South Korea, September 1993

221

[Fig. 26] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 57: Photographed in Ulsan, South Korea, September 1993

222

[Fig. 27] Allan Sekula Fish Story, Photo Book, 1995 Plate 60: Photographed in Yeoi-do, Seoul, South Korea in September 1993

223

[Fig. 28] J. M. W. Turner Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842 Oil on Canvas, 914 x 1219 mm, Tate, London

224

[Fig. 29] Constantin Meunier, The Docker in Antwerp, ca. 1890 Bronze, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

225

[Fig. 30] Allan Sekula Installation View of Constantin Meunier’s The Docker in Antwerp at The Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum

226

[Fig. 31–32] Allan Sekula Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black), 1999–2000 Cut from Slide Projection

227

[Fig. 33] Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin San Woman of the Naron Tribe, 1936 Photographed at Oliphant’s Kloof, Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) Silver Gelatin Print, 20. 5 x 15 cm

228

[Fig. 34] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 8, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

229

[Fig. 35] Santu Mofokeng Police with Sjambok. Plein Street, Johannesburg, ca. 1986 Silver Gelatin Print

230

[Fig. 36] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 41, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

231

[Fig. 37] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 43, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

232

[Fig. 38] Unknown Photographer ca. 1900, South Africa Vintage Albumen Photograph

233

[Fig. 39] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 21, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

234

[Fig. 40] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 22, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

235

[Fig. 41] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 19, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

236

[Fig. 42] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 32, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

237

[Fig. 43] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 50, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

238

[Fig. 44] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 62, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

239

[Fig. 45] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 9, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

240

[Fig. 46] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 14, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

241

[Fig. 47] Santu Mofokeng Buddhist Retreat Near Pietermaritzburg Kwazulu Natal, 2003 from the Project of Chasing Shadows (1996–2008) Silver Gelatin Print

242

[Fig. 48] Santu Mofokeng Church of God Motouleng, 1996 from the Project of Chasing Shadows (1996–2008) Silver Gelatin Print

243

[Fig. 49] Santu Mofokeng South Beach, Replacing of the Sand Washed Away During the Floods and Wave Action, Durban, 2007 from the Project of Climate Change (2007) Silver Gelatin Print

244

[Fig. 50] Santu Mofokeng Eyes-Wide-Shut, Motouleng Cave, Clarens, 2004 from the Project of Ishmael (2004) Silver Gelatin Print

245

[Fig. 51] Santu Mofokeng Moth’osele Maine, Bloemhof, 1994 from the Project of Bloemhof (1988–1994) Silver Gelatin Print

246

[Fig. 52] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 3, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

247

[Fig. 53] Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album—Look at Me: 1890–1950, Slide No. 33, 1997 Black and White Photograph, Slide Projection, Varied Size

248

[Fig. 54] Santu Mofokeng Self-portrait, at KZ1–Auschwitz, 1997–8 from the Project of Landscapes of Trauma (1997–2000) Silver Gelatin Print

249

[Fig. 55] The Cover of Time Magazine, Issued in July 21, 2003

250

[Fig. 56] Stephen Colbert at the Debut Episode of The Colbert Report in October 17, 2005

251

[Fig. 57] Michael Blum Tribute to Safiye Behar, 2005 Installation at an Apartment in Istanbul

252

[Fig. 58] The Atlas Group Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (#17 and #31)_English Version, 2000 Video Projection, 16 Minutes 17 Seconds

253

[Fig. 59] Akram Zaatari (Co-founder) The Arab Image Foundation, 1997 The Front Page of the Web Archive (Accessed in March 1, 2016)

[Fig. 60] Akram Zaatari (Co-founder) The Arab Image Foundation, 1997 The Organization Page of the Web Archive (Accessed in March 1, 2016)

254

[Fig. 61] Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad Mapping Sitting: On Portraitures and Photography, 2002 Installation of Photographs on the Wall

255

[Fig. 62] Akram Zaatari Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013 Film and Video Installation

256

[Fig. 63] Akram Zaatari Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013 A View of the Main Film, 34 Minutes

257

[Fig. 64–65] Akram Zaatari Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013 Still Cuts from the Main Film, 34 Minutes

258

[Fig. 66] Akram Zaatari Saida June 6, 1982, 2005 Composite Digital Images, Lamda Print, 127 x 250 cm

259

[Fig. 67] Akram Zaatari Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013 Video Installation and a Chair

260

[Fig. 68] Chan-kyong Park Sets, 2000 160 Photo (35mm) on the Slide Projection, 15 Minutes

261

[Fig. 69, 70] Chan-kyong Park Sets, 2000 Still Cuts from the Slide Projection

262

[Fig. 71–72] Chan-kyong Park Power Passage, 2004–2007 2 Channel Video Projections, Books and Documents in Vitrines, Images and Text on the Wall

263

[Fig. 73–74] Chan-kyong Park Power Passage, 2004–2007 Still Cuts from the Main Video Projection

264

[Fig. 75] Chan-kyong Park Power Passage, 2004–2007 Still Cut from the Main Video Projection

265

[Fig. 76] Chan-kyong Park Power Passage, 2004–2007 Continuous Cuts from the Main Video Projection

266

[Fig. 77, 78] Chan-kyong Park Power Passage, 2004–2007 Still Cuts from the Main Video Projection

267

[Fig. 79] Akram Zaatari Twenty Eight Nights: Endnote, 2014 Film Projection

268

[Fig. 80] Chan-kyong Park Flying, 2005 Video Projection and Sound, 13 Minutes Still Cuts from the Video Projection

269

[Fig. 81] Chan-kyong Park Flying, 2005 Video Projection and Sound, 13 Minutes Still Cuts from the Video Projection

270

[Fig. 82] Chan-kyong Park Flying, 2005 Video Projection and Sound, 13 Minutes Still Cuts from the Video Projection

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