- Venue
- Derby QUAD
- Location
NB It is important to point out that this review was written during the show’s run this summer past and is being posted now for archival purposes.
The exhibition currently occupying the gallery space at Quad, Derby’s mutli-million pound centre for art, film and media is certainly ambitious in scope. Over two months a revolving curatorial policy will see the exploration of three different themes: The Speaker, The Image and The Militant. These ‘subgroups’ will address key concerns from co-curator Alfredo Cramerotti’s book Aesthetic Journalism: a detailed and well referenced exploration, analysis and attempted mapping of the adoption of journalistic methodology into artistic practice. Both he and fellow curator Simon Sheikh posit the contentious view that art and journalism are ‘two sides of a unique activity’ namely ‘the production and distribution of images and information’ and contend the term ‘Aesthetic Journalism’ is not as contradictory as might first appear. They highlight the fact that ‘traditional’ journalism operates strict formats, which are ‘the results of very precise and finely tuned aesthetic choices’ – so what becomes of that which does not fit the ever narrowing, entertainment orientated framework of today’s commercially driven mass media? For them, subject matter ignored by contemporary media outlets for reasons temporal, economic and ideological is increasingly becoming the focus of contemporary artists.
The first section of the exhibition and focus of this review concerns itself with the politics of truth and draws upon Foucaultian ideas of parrhésiah and the truth-sayer. As the curators point out ‘both the journalistic and the artistic make claims for the truth’ but self-reflexivity and transparency are vital conditions of the parrhesiastes and herein lies the proposed strength of the works on show; art’s capacity for self-reflection as opposed to journalism’s implied status (however fallacious) as purveyor of objective truth, enables a ‘view on the view’ and in turn promotes questions concerning the production of truth.
Throughout the rather austere and dimly lit space one encounters diverse approaches to addressing the problematic notion of truth, from Corrections and Clarifications; an ongoing project cataloguing print media errors and revisions to a series of filmed interviews with news anchors examining the language of the newsroom and the methods through which the anchor’s individual position is obscured. The two pieces that really stand out though are Eric Baudelaire’s The Dreadful Details and Renzo Martens’ Episode 1.
The first is a technically infectious photographic diptych. This huge image of slaughter in Iraq is awash with ambiguity and immediately ascertaining whether it is a fantastic example of reportage photography or a painstaking construction proves difficult. After a little deliberation one is moved towards the latter as conclusion; the scale of it, the diptych split and the complexity of implied narrative all indicate artistic construction – it transpires this is a reconstruction based on eyewitness accounts from an actual event – but this initial uncertainty provokes important meditation upon how experience of conflict is mediated through journalistic imagery and its own inherent subjectivity. It also strikes another chord; how does one reconcile the (potentially pleasurable) experience of viewing such an image in a space so readily associated with urban leisure? Confronted with our own complicity in the commodification of war we are asked to reflect upon the uncomfortable dynamic of this relationship.
Martens’ work also interrogates the role of the viewer; in the film, shot in Chechnya in 2002 during the Russian invasion, he portrays typical documentary scenes of war-torn areas, but adopting the role of the viewer he unusually asks his subjects what they think of him, occasionally turning the camera on himself. In one instance he asks ‘do you think just by looking at this building with a camera we can understand how you feel?’ This device, although obviously problematic, allows Martens to question the role of the camera and the complex power relations between the watcher and the watched.
It is hard to criticise The Speaker as the works on show successfully reinforce the ideas behind its genesis but despite Cramerotti’s acknowledgment of diffuse potential outcomes, it does feel as though the acutely political subject matter necessitates a more radical approach to the problems of representation. Graziela Kunsch’s The Muritao Project goes some way towards this. Eschewing the documentary paradigm of totality and presenting her continually expanding archive of ‘A.N.T.I cinema excerpts’ of political activism as means to generate participatory debate, she ruptures the traditional artist/spectator hierarchy enabling participants to collectively imagine the route from self-reflection and understanding to action – something that is vital if politicised art practices are to break free from a ‘representational continuum’ and achieve genuine political agency.
