Vision in Ruins by Michelle Yap Dizon a Dissertation Submitted in Partial
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Vision in Ruins By Michelle Yap Dizon A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Film and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chair Professor Kaja Silverman Professor Colleen Lye Fall 2011 Abstract Vision in Ruins By Michelle Yap Dizon Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Film and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality University of Calfiornia, Berkeley Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chair Vision in Ruins explores the practice of art, video, and visuality in an era of globalization. In contrast to past writings on video beholden to its mechanisms and the legacy of western modernism, my inquiry approaches video from a philosophical, postcolonial, and feminist perspective. Sourced to its Latin root, the word video translates as "I see," a statement that illuminates how video encloses a sense of vision that is not only solely bound with the eyes, but is more broadly entwined with the transparency of a subject, its sight, and its presence. Video (I see) is the understanding of vision as an open field, one that is coupled with power and that I relate to both the visualities of modern warfare and liberal thought as it pervades the discourses of art and human rights. Against such understanding of vision as an open field, my dissertation approaches vision as a restricted site. With each assertion of video, I suggest that a boundary is drawn. My dissertation approaches video from the other side of this boundary, from the position of subjects displaced by the political histories of global war, migration and exile, and describes their attempt to rework the field of vision. Rather than treat video as an object, I treat video is as a lens onto the themes of vision, aperture, passage, opacity, disappearance, calling, and ruins. Vision in Ruins problematizes the openness of vision and seeks to write a different story of video. It reworks the visual as one attuned to the conditions of invisibility and unspeakability that often become elided in favor of 'appearance' in the forms of liberal thought. It suggests that when one works from the ruins, one invites a renewal of politicized practice, where appearance is not an object but a modality and where each appearance is also, always, a disappearance. The orientation is not to the 'appearance' of alterity but rather, but to the invisible, the unspeakable, and to the temporality of 1 other life worlds. In order to rethink visuality in an era of globalization, I suggest we must learn to work in a gap between visuality and alterity. It is a gap that shifts art's relation to the cinematic, to war, to human rights, and to conceptions of the global-- all of which I reconsider in light of a visuality of relation that works in a space where what remains invisible and unspeakable might direct us toward a different sense of world and how we see it. 2 Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iv List of Figures v Introduction vii Chapter 1 Video as Vision 1 Chapter 2 Video as Aperture 11 Chapter 3 Video as Passage 26 Chapter 4 Video as Border 42 Chapter 5 Video as Layer 53 Chapter 6 Video as Calling 68 Chapter 7 Video as Ruins 80 Endnotes 93 Bibliography 110 i para sa inyo, mahal na mahal kong magulang, Remedios Yap Dizon & Liberato Rosario Dizon ii In memory of my father Liberato Rosario Dizon August 17, 1926- November 10, 2011 iii Acknowledgements My profound thanks go to the chair of my dissertation committee, Trinh T. Minh-ha, who has been an exemplary teacher and mentor to me in every way. It was she who first gave me the tools to navigate the realms of theory and practice and she who continues to inspire my sense of what is possible in the world. Her films, art, writing, and her poetic, luminous presence have been a vital force in my life. From my first days at UC Berkeley as an undergraduate, Colleen Lye has been a true source of inspiration. Her generosity has been a constant throughout my education. It was her junior seminar on Asian American Literature that first sparked my critical passion and her example that taught me what brilliant scholarship and committed pedagogy looks like. While still completing my coursework, Kaja Silverman created a space for practice in her classes and supported my first endeavors to expand beyond academia to enter the visual arts. I thank her for her encouragement during these years without which I would not have developed an artistic practice. The abiding friendship of Alice Kim, Spencer Lee, Jiha Lee, Ralph Meneghetti, Angelica Lu, Wendy Cheng, Gina Osterloh, Elvan Zabunyan, Manilee Bagheritari, Jennifer Hayashida, Dont Rhine, Emily Roysdon, and Ashley Hunt has seen me through many phases. Thank you for the enduring care and inspiration you offer me. My father passed away soon after I completed a near final draft of this dissertation. It was his dream to see the day when I would earn this doctorate. His passing leaves an infinite silence in my life. In the vastness of this silence is also my gratitude for all that he has given me and for his memory which continues to sustain me. Each day, my mother teaches me the meaning of love. I stand in awe of her person and the strength, courage, intelligence, and generosity that she shares with all those around her. I thank her for the very ground beneath my feet and a way of walking in this world. It is with Camilo Ontiveros that I think, make, dream, and hope. I am grateful for the radiance of our life together. His passionate spirit and deep integrity move me in more ways than he could ever possibly know. iv List of Figures Figure 1, "Jacqueline" from UNICEF's "Can you See Me?" Campaign, 2011 2 Figure 2, UNICEF Germany, 2007 6 Figure 3,"Anonymous" from UNICEF's "Can you See Me?" Campaign, 2011 9 Figure 4, Videofreex, Women's Liberation Demonstration, New York City,1970 13 Figure 5, Videofreex, Interview with Fred Hampton, 1969 13 Figure 6, Nam June Paik, The Chase Video Matrix, 1992 15 Figure 7, Nam June Paik with his televisions, 1991 15 Figure 8, Vito Acconci, Centers, 1971 17 Figure 9, Adrian Piper, Cornered, 1988 19 Figure 10, Richard Serra and Nancy Holt, Boomerang, 1974 20 Figure 11, Shigeko Kubota, Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky, 1973 24 Figure 12, On Kawara, Title, 1965 27 Figure 13, On Kawara, Today Series, 1966 29 Figure 14, On Kawara, Boxes for Today Series, 1991 30 Figure 15, Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Blast, August 9, 1945 32 Figure 16, Cave painting of a bison, Altamira, Spain, Credit: Pedro A. Saura/AP 34 Figure 17 Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du Cinema, 1988 36 Figure 18, Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du Cinema, 1988 36 Figure 19, Mary Lucier, Dawn Burn, 1975, Installation as SF MOMA, 1993 38 Figure 20, Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Fourth Dimension, 2001 40 Figure 21, Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Fourth Dimension, 2001 40 Figure 22, Krzysztof Wodczko, The Hiroshima Project, 1999 48 Figure 23, Tran T. Kim Trang, Operculum, from The Blindness Series, 1993 55 Figure 24, Yong Soon Min, Defining Moments, 1992 58 Figure 25, Yong Soon Min, Defining Moments, 1992 60 Figure 26, Yong Soon Min, Make Me, 1992 62 Figure 27, Yong Soon Min, Make Me, 1992 63 Figure 28, Lorna Simpson, You're Fine, You're Hired, 1988 65 Figure 29, Alfredo Jaar, The Silence of Nduwayezu, 1997 77 Figure 30, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Vidéoème, 1976 84 Figure 31, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mouth to Mouth, 1975 85 Figure 32, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, White Dust for Magnolia (unfinished film), 1980 87 Figure 33, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, White Dust From Magnolia (unfinished film), 1980 88 Figure 34, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Chronology, 1977 90 v Introduction This dissertation began for me with Civil Society, a three-channel video installation that I started working on in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina and the revolts on the outskirts of Paris happened within a month of each other. As these events reached me through the television, I had just moved back to Los Angeles, the city where I was born and raised. Both Katrina and the revolts in France revealed something important about the idea of race, which was that far from being essentialized in the body, race and racism was more clearly what the scholar and prison abolitionist Ruthie Gilmore has described as ‘‘the state-sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies."1 For Gilmore race is not housed in the skin, but produced by powers that subject individuals to lives of precarity. Race is the question of who is more likely to die young. Just as this constellation of occurrences between Katrina and the revolts threw the operations of race, racism, and racialization into relief, they also raised an awareness in me that the city in which I was living, the city to which I had returned, had also been the site of an event with much resonance, the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising. But even as I was born and raised in Los Angeles to parents from the Philippine diaspora, and even as I was a teenager at the time of the 1992 Uprising, when I tried to remember anything about the event I found, nothing.