I am in touch with someone from The Forum, which describes itself as "an innovative weblog featuring reviews, previews, opinion pieces and interviews from independent arts writers." She has sent me four questions which have actually been very timely in prompting me to write about aspects of my own responses to Hirschhorn's Incommensurable Banner. I have decided to post these (rather lengthy) entries in this and the following posts. The first question began on post no. 64.
2. What kind of audience reactions have you noticed?
The range of audience reactions has been broad: from deciding not to look at all to an apparent laughing enjoyment of an overt and hungry looking at them. (Though I would question what such laughter is and where it comes from. Laughter can often be a very effective way of releasing fear, embarrassment and anxiety, for example.) To describe all degrees in between these two poles would amount to another long passage. But generally, as regards my own perception of these responses I would have to say that I have remained very open to what others’ responses might been. More open than usual perhaps as a result of the extended process of observing the vacillations in my own developing responses. I feel I would not want to condemn any kind of response but rather take them all on board as interesting and necessary to try to understand or at least to discuss. I find it slightly hard to understand those who will not look at all because I don’t understand how you can know you don’t want to look at something if you don’t even try. But perhaps I am just judging others against my own, very strong, curiosity?
For an introduction to this post see introduction to entry 64.
What I am currently thinking about most in relation to Hirschhorn’s banner is the psycho-sexual dimension within looking that relates to the connection between desire and violence. From thinking about this work over time and going through a range of responses I now feel drawn into asking a set of troubling yet, I think, hugely important questions concerning the impulse for violence itself. It comes across to me very clearly from Hirschhorn’s piece that he is addressing these questions. He talks about this himself in the interview he gave to Fiacre Gibbons in the summer, a recording of which is playing in Fabrica. He talks about the eye looking for the red. He doesn’t explain this he just comments on it as something that he has observed when watching viewers looking at other works he had made which contained images like those in the Incommensurable Banner. What I really like about the banner is how it forces the viewer to interrogate themselves. It puts the viewer in the position of victim (by identifying with the dead) and of perpetrator (by finding oneself in the place of the photographer who may have been someone responsible for the violence done to the victim shown). In a sense it forces us to take a stand, to claim or declare our own position. I use the word ‘force’ advisably because really there is no escape from the work, except, perhaps in not looking at it at all.
Interestingly, I have not used my blog as a way to record these various stages of my response to Hirschhorn’s piece. Instead I think I have had more a tendency to write about developments in my practice directly. It is only now that I am asked the specific question about my own responses that I have given myself the opportunity to record and reflect upon these. I am reminded with this of a talk I went to yesterday by Julian Stallabrass, the curator of the Photo Biennial. Expecting some kind of declaration of a position on his part I came away disappointed by his descriptive approach to talking about the contents of the various exhibitions that make up the Biennial. This, in conjunction with his repeated encouragements to the audience to record their responses on the biennial blog highlighted to me rather sharply a similar approach in myself: to withhold my own opinion whilst urging others to give theirs*. Cushioned within the diversity of opinions of others one can retain a kind of neutral stance as relayer of what other people think without ever having to acknowledge one’s own standpoint.
* Of course, his very curation of the Biennial exhibitions is, in itself, a declaration of a position in that they are based on his choices and selection.
Around this Bachmann phase of my response to the Hirschhorn banner I think some kind of shift happened in my understanding of my own relationship to looking. This, I have often thought, has been rather troubled. I do not have the kind of confident relationship to looking that Hirschhorn demonstrates when he stresses for example the fact that he is a visual artist. I have sometimes made sound pieces or found ways to avoid the visual even while attempting to make ‘visual art’. As if the ‘visual’ part of ‘visual art’ to me is more to do with the viewer looking than about the object itself being particularly visible. But lately I think I have been looking more, perhaps because I have talked myself through the doubts I have had about looking at the images on the banner and accepted that there is a desire in me just to look. Wherever that desire comes from, whether it is part of an animal instinct for survival that makes us want to look at pictures of dead and destroyed bodies in order to try to understand what has happened to these people (so as, perhaps, to avoid something similar happening to ourselves) or whether it is purer than that, less instrumental and more for its own sake, as desire per se, I think I have become more willing and accepting of that. This is very exciting for my own practice where I have been concentrating on what it means to put flat, photographic images on fabric backgrounds, to what effect and with whichever consequences for image and ground.
For an introduction to this post see introduction to entry 64.
For a while I felt myself identifying very strongly with my femaleness in relation to the work. I got interested in thinking again about the work of the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann, whose incredible writing and ability to articulate the experience of being on the receiving end of oppression as a woman, made her into something of a heroine to feminists. She is also (furthermore) one of the (few) women whose name Hirschhorn cites amongst his roll call of writers and philosophers whom he admires. Specifically, I made a new piece of work which was a scanned image of the front of her novel, Malina, which incorporates a smiling photo of Bachmann herself on it, transferred onto a white pocket handkerchief. This is currently on show hanging on the wall outside my studio at APEC as part of our Open Studios exhibition for the Brighton Photo Biennial Photofringe. I also wrote some entries for my blog which were suggestive of the link between masculinity and violence, as evidenced, for example, in some observations I had made about the behaviour of young boys in the streets around where I live. Even whilst indulging in this position alongside some kind of female imaginary victim, I knew I was sidestepping my own complicity in the perpetration of the violence for which we are all responsible, by the very fact of us belonging to a nation that wages illegal wars using dishonest reasons as excuses for them. Somehow making the handkerchief/Bachmann piece, which I called I.B. (for Ingeborg Bachmann, but which also co-incidentally stands for ‘Incommensurable Banner’) freed me from the need to take up the victim role. Not that Bachmann was a victim, you understand, rather that the main, female, character in the novel ‘Malina’ disappears at the end of the novel into a crack in the wall and leaves you, the reader, not knowing whether she has ever existed at all or whether she has perhaps been murdered.
For an introduction to this post see post no. 64
Another day, which was one of my timetabled gallery sessions, I noticed that I had not gone anywhere near the work or even so much as looked at it and had spent the whole afternoon with my back to it. I remember this quite clearly. I just didn’t want to think about it – about war, about death, about the awfulness of it all. It was a lovely sunny Brighton day outside and I wanted to be out there, with the throng, enjoying the sunshine – we had so little this summer, who can blame me? – so instead of engaging in any way with the work directly I realised that I was chatting happily to the Fabrica volunteers who were there. And then of course, having that feeling, that so many have talked about in relation to this work, that one’s cheerfulness is inappropriate in the vicinity of the work. But of course, even this was a form of engagement with the work. Even wanting not to see is a response. It is all valid. I have learnt to understand much more about one’s response to an artwork over time: that it shifts and changes depending on so many factors. I read recently about a new book by T.J.Clark about his viewing of two works by Poussin: “Clark's 'experiment' is essentially a diary that tells the story of his engagement with two masterpieces by Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake and Landscape with a Calm, that hang face-to-face in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The resulting book is unusual in that it treats the act of looking as a process that occurs in time.” (London Review of Books)
I might have thought this change of response over time to be an obvious way of describing how one’s looking develops were it not for the use of the word ‘unusual’ in this blurb about Clark’s book.
