- Venue
- The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery
- Location
- Yorkshire
Re-Staging the Disaster:
The photographic work of Joe Mawson*
Disaster imagery has faded into the vernacular of daily life in many parts of the world, reflecting Guy Debord’s theory of a separate ‘pseudo-world’ that can only be looked at, and never actually experienced. The current mass distribution of imagery of violence and destruction has settled into a steady hum, making Warhol’s 1963 Death and Disaster series seem tame in the face of current news footage. His early paintings of car crashes and impaled drivers have become emblematic of our desensitisation to violence through the repetition of imagery, an acknowledgement of the power of photojournalism to dull the senses and falsify reality. Since the art world began asking the question of whether we should look, the more contentious question has closely followed: what compels us to want to see reproductions of violence, death and catastrophe?
If it is an innate human impulse to gawp at the horror around us, reproduced images provide the means to return to the scene again and again, filtering the fear and repulsion of real trauma through layers of mechanical reproduction. The journalist’s photograph mechanically frames an aspect of the event, the newspaper prints a pixelated image with text caption, and the reader interprets the story in line with current views over a morning cup of coffee. Whatever the visceral, sensory or psychological affect, the repeated exposure to a facsimile of violence blurs the distinction between experienced reality and its representation. Visual artists have long been concerned with this phenomenon, forcing the boundaries of imagery to assault, challenge and awaken viewers to the artifice of the photograph.
Joe Mawson presents us with a different sort of disaster series. His photographs of miniature wreckages evoke a variety of responses, not least of all a sense of childlike wonder and whimsy. At the same time, these scenes are reminiscent of traumatic and violent events that made media headlines at the time of their occurrence. The images relocate corporeal violence and death within the detail of brightly-lit scenes, staged using model sets and re-shot through the photographic lens. Mawson’s process involves the layering of already mediated formats, creating vignettes from the debris borrowed from ‘googled’ imagery, industry magazines and rail regulator's reports. From these he presents an assemblage of visual referents, reminding his viewer that the ‘real’ disaster remains forever outside mediated time and space. The actual events exist in a separate realm that the photograph can only reference through illusion and automated mimesis.
The Heck series recalls the 2001 'Selby Rail Crash’, when a Land Rover and its trailer swerved off the motorway onto a railway track and were struck by a GNER express train at 120mph. The early morning accident caused the death of 10 people, including both drivers, while another 82 passengers suffered injuries. The crash happened near the village of Great Heck, North Yorkshire, a place name that for many has become synonymous with the event. Similarly, Mawson’s video work, Clipper Maid of the Seas, refers to the terrorist bombing of the 747 PanAm aircraft of the same name that was destroyed over Lockerbie in December 1988. The total death toll of 270 included all passengers and crew, and 11 Lockerbie citizens who were killed when the plane crashed in the small Scottish village. The controversial prosecution of former Libyan intelligence agent, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, is still being contested, as there is little evidence to prove that he was responsible for what has been referred to as 'the biggest ever terrorist attack on UK soil'.
Both the Great Heck and Lockerbie disasters occurred prior to 9/11, predating the era of terrorist imagery that would come to saturate the early twenty-first century. Furthermore, Mawson’s Heck series is based on photographs taken during the media frenzy over the investigation of the Land Rover driver’s sleep-deprived condition at the time of the crash (he was later convicted of 10 counts of causing death by dangerous driving). The site near Great Heck became a minefield of evidence as investigators scrambled to explain the senseless and unfortunate series of events that led to the disaster. Mawson’s juxtaposition of the train wreckage with the Lockerbie crash demonstrates the exchangeable nature of disaster imagery, reversing the fixation on gruesome details to uncover ‘the truth’ in each case by excluding human presence. The twisted plastic and vacuous interiors of the artist's models refer to their absent victims, the objects themselves acting as personifications of violence.
Vibrant colour and careful attention to the edges of form lend Mawson’s photographs a hyper-unreal quality; they describe a situation while questioning its construction. In both the Heck series and Clipper Maid, the soft lines of the model wreckages against calm backgrounds offer an eerily still setting, devoid of ambulances, police tape, investigators, journalists, and of course ourselves, the ogling public. Upon closer inspection, the detailing of synthetic grass and mock-painterly sky reveal the tenuous seams of the staged display, scenes cobbled together for a studio photo shoot and then digitally ‘touched-up’ by the artist’s hand. The fragmentation of each image denies the sweeping panoramic shot we have come to expect from photojournalism, or the bird’s-eye view provided by police helicopters, offering instead a series of intimate portraits of destruction at a close and obfuscating range.
In the case of Clipper Maid, the arduously slow movement of the image from side to side asks for the viewer's sustained commitment, a close engagement with the object and the event that it signifies. The delicate white eggshell of the outer hull speaks of irreversible breakage and the still remnants of aftermath. The abject fragment of the jet asks the location of the remaining pieces of the airliner, its singularity amplified by its central positioning within the surrounding field, which we know to be Lockerbie only through the context of the news story. There is something about this absence that draws attention to the desire to see what is not there, to be arrested by the horrible details of disaster through the multiple lenses of mediated imagery. Deprived of these features, we are left only to ponder the nature of our own voyeuristic impulse.
The objectification of the disaster (whether senseless or premeditated), highlights our fascination with spectacle and a desire to visually process the inconceivable. The compulsion to re-contextualise horrific events can be seen as a defence mechanism against a barrage of unsettling imagery, which continuously refers to an increasingly dystopic reality. This is a recurring theme throughout Mawson’s work, reflected in his child-like re-imagining of post-industrial landscapes, and continued in his more recent work based on the spectacular 'non-events' of urban development in the wake of the global financial crisis. His recent appropriation of Alex Hartley's work, Downfall, saw Mawson construct a disused urban space in model form from the artist's photograph, and re-photograph the image as a separate work entitled Downfall, 2007. His interest in the empty and abandoned spaces of cities and industrial sites reflects the melancholic climate of an era that has fallen short of its own expectations.
Through a process of re-envisioning, Mawson’s disaster works explore the imaginative medium of staged photography and tableaux. His careful destruction and placement of model vehicles in crudely minimal surroundings can be seen as performances of distanced repetition. The artist’s relationship to the events he explores is developed through a constant process of re-imagining, consciously moving further away from what might constitute an authentic experience with each added layer of representation. Through this process, Mawson makes more unreal the events depicted in the media, thus prompting his audience to be aware of their own responses to the saturation of disaster imagery. Ultimately, we are left with a series of fabrications that seduce the eye while calling into question the pictorial mechanics of the spectacle.
*This essay focuses on the work of Joe Mawson as part of a larger exhibition entitled The Object of Photography. The full catalogue is available from the gallery and features additional essays.
