Images Familiar Yet Foreign

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Images Familiar yet Foreign.

War as spectacle for the distant, privileged viewer has been a pervasive constant

throughout histories of art practise. This distance that I equate with privilege is both

spatial and temporal, but explicitly it functions as the prerequisite for considering war, and

its subsequent images of trauma as spectacle. As Susan Sontag proclaims in the opening

pages of her work Regarding the Pain of Others, “Who are the ‘we’ as whom such shock-

pictures are aimed? That ‘we’ would include not just the sympathisers of a smallish nation

or a stateless people fighting for life, but - a far larger constituency - those only nominally

concerned about some nasty war taking place in another country.” That she is considering 1

photographs over paintings does little to effect the legitimacy of my opening statement - all

depictions of war have been envisioned, modelled and produced by some driving force or

another. Thus, rather than place these two mediums of exposition into a dichotomy, I

intend to investigate instances in which the painterly and photographic image inform both

each other and the spectator’s process of relation to a traumatic scene.

In his study Guernica by Picasso, Eberhard Fisch states “The twentieth century has been

shaped by wars.” Sontag however delineates a more accurate representation of events in 2

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003) p. 71

Eberhard Fisch, Guernica by Picasso (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1988) p. 232

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her work On Photography, commenting that: “War and photography now seem

inseparable.” What she is referring to is the proliferation of access to images of trauma 3

outside the privileged spectator’s own lived experience, through different forms of media

exposure or creative documentation.

Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in a select number of

wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally in

the form that is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many

people, and fades from view… Creating a perch for a particular

conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from

everywhere requires the daily diffusion and rediffusion of snippets of

footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people

who have not experienced war is not chiefly a product of the impact

of these images. 4

As Karen J. Hall points out in her essay, “False Witness: Combat Entertainment and

Citizen Training in the United States”, “… a relatively small number of citizens today gain

actual combat experience and, for those soldiers who do, there are cultural as well as

personal prohibitions against sharing these experiences upon returning home. Therefore,

media representations are the main place in which citizens learn about war.” This 5

circumstance marks the dividing line between representations of war indoctrinated into

Fisch’s “…theme of [the] century” - i.e. those that reflect the impact of freely circulating

Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2002) p. 1673

Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others. pp. 20-214

Karen J. Hall, “False Witness: Combat Entertainment and Citizen Training in the United States” 5

in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007) p. 99

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images - and works such as Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War (see fig. 1 & 2). 6

Created between 1810 and 1820, these etchings “…[depict] the atrocities perpetrated by

Napoleon’s soldiers who invaded Spain in 1808 to quell the insurrection against French

rule.” Sontag goes on to maintain that “That the atrocities perpetrated by the French 7

soldiers in Spain didn’t happen exactly as pictured… hardly disqualifies The Disasters of

War. Goya’s images are synthesis. They claim: things like this happened. In contrast, a

single photograph or film strip claims to represent exactly what was before the camera’s

lens… That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. But

evidence of what?” From this perspective, it is a privilege of the painterly image to evoke 8

rather than expose; to wear its subjectivity on its sleeve.

In an interview concerning Gerhard Richter's 18 October 1977 cycle, Jan Thorn-Prikker,

when discussing the artist's use of press photography as inspiration for paintings of the

deceased, comments “I often wonder whether the editors realise they're redefining our

Fisch, Guernica by Picasso. p. 236

Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others. p. 447

Ibid. p. 478

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fig. 1 & 2

Francisco de Goya - The Disasters of War (1810-1820)

No. 37 No. 39

relationships with death through these stories.” A work emblematic of this concern is 9

Guernica (see fig. 3), painted by Pablo Picasso two years before the commencement of

World War II. John Berger states that Guernica “...is thought of as a continuous protest

against the brutality of facism in particular and modern war in general” in his treatise The

Success and Failure of Picasso. He counters this by arguing that instead, Guernica is a 10

transposition of how Picasso imagines suffering: in actuality Picasso wasn't in Spain at the

time of the catastrophic Nazi bombing, with even the original context for the mural being

separate from the event - a commission for a world exhibition in Paris. While Fisch 11

analyses the development of Guernica's final scene through Picasso's utilisation of classical

motifs, even referencing Goya**** an important aspect to mention is his complete reliance

on secondary sources like news journals for his information on the barbarism taking place

in his home country.

Gerhard Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn-Prikker concerning the 18 October 1977 cycle, 9

1989” Gerhard Richter: Text, Writings, Interviews, and Letters 1961-2007 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009) p. 229

John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (London: Granta Books, 1992) p. 16510

Fisch, Guernica by Picasso. pp. 18-1911

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fig. 3 Pablo Picasso - Guernica (1937)

I use barbarism here in a nod to Sontag, who argues that photographs typically thought to

show what war ’does’, instead “…show a particular way of waging war… routinely described

as ‘barbaric’, in which civilians are the target.” With this in mind, the work of Iraqi 12

painter Ahmed Alsoudani can be argued as a contemporary projection of Picasso’s context.

Forced into exile from Baghdad through fear of persecution for an adolescent prank,

Alsoudani first fled to Syria before being granted asylum to study in the United States. As 13

Shamim M. Monin outlines in his essay accompanying Ahmed Alsoudani, “He had only

just settled in when the September 11th attacks happened… The ensuing war with Iraq, and

Alsoudani’s particular experience of both intimacy with and distancing from it, have

created the sociopolitical complexities of his multi-faceted life, thereby generating his

peculiarly piercing but bizarrely nonpartisan canvases.” 14

It is this nonpartisanship that leads me to describe Alsoudani as a contemporary projection

of Picasso rather than a protege or disciple. Where Guernica depicts the chaos and horror

of Franco’s attack on the unsuspecting village, simultaneously evoking within the viewer

sorrow for the victim and resentment for the aggressor, Alsoudani’s allays binary

oppositions of this nature through his presentation of what could be described as the

plurality of war and its victims. Monin, when discussing Baghdad I (see fig. 4), suggests

that

While the forms are quite abstracted, they are characteristically

organic - partially recognisable, partially deformed, morphing from


Shamim M. Monin, “On Ahmed Alsoudani” in Ahmed Alsoudani (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 13

2009) p. 7

Ibid. 14

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one interpretation to the next. The most definable character is the

roosterlike form that begins this motion, one which is hard not to

read as a symbol of America and the arrogant manner in which it

undertook the invasion and ‘correction’ of Iraq. The rooster is

presented, however, as both constrained and injured - a notion that

recurs in many of the works, in which no individual has a singular

interpretation; all are complex, compromised, human. 15

In Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, Ariella Azoulay argues that

typical modes of encountering images of trauma expunge the plurality of these scenes by

virtue of their very nature. “The expulsion or denial inherent in the conventional templates

[of viewing] is what makes possible the restriction of this plurality and its subordination to

the logic of the orienting or the professional gaze.” The author goes on to outline an 16

alternative model for spectatorship: “The third form of the gaze, not beholden to any

Monin, “On Ahmed Alsoudani.” p. 815

Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso, 2012) 16

p. 72!6

fig. 4 Ahmed Alsoudani - Baghdad I (2008)

professional habitus, enables the spectator to realise the civil potential that the photograph

makes possible and to activate a civil gaze that refrains from dominating the visible and

that resists the attempts of others who might seek to erase this space of plurality.” When 17

evoking the civil gaze, the spectator - or creator in Alsoudani’s case “…seeks to encompass

a citizenry, a plurality of humans who are partners in concrete communities, having certain

forms of knowledge and professional competence. No single characterisation of this sort

can exhaust their plurality, or the plurality of others who simultaneously share the world in

it physical and virtual manifestations.” 18

The need for this civil gaze is ultimately verified by Hall’s exposition of ‘last stand

narratives’ in US combat entertainment, and the subsequent creation of false witnesses:

Whereas bearing witness is conventionally understood to allow the

traumatised victim to work through the experience of the trauma, US

war entertainment shapes the consumer audience as the traumatised

victim primed for a vengeful acting out… The design of false witness

guarantees the continuation of militarised violence and the

consensus of the US citizen body. Subjects are trained to remember

moments of violence - often of mythic proportion, such as the Alamo,

Pearl Harbour and 9/11 - but remain ignorant of the complex set of

actions and relations that instigated these events… History is reduced

to a series of iconic images. 19

Azoulay, Civil Imagination. p. 7217

Ibid. p. 7318

Hall, “False Witness.” p. 10119

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Within this context, spectators process imagery of the enemy as a personal affront and

react to it as such, rather than committing all subjects - those rendered both present and

absent - into “… [the] plurality of humans who are partnered in concrete communities”, as

advocated by Azoulay. That this manipulation works to exacerbate patriotism and loyalty 20

to the state posits US combat entertainment in direct relation with historical depictions of

war, focused on monumentalising victory and conquest - a tradition Monin suggests Goya’s

images were intrinsic to dispelling.

Goya’s war is one utterly lacking in glory, a point of view which was

extreme and dangerously subversive position in his day. Rather than

celebrate individual ‘heroes’ who represented a unified, nationalistic

front as earlier historical paintings did, his subjects tended toward

the more often anonymous victims of battle, thus focusing on war’s

impact on the individual human being. Also remarkable at the time,

Goya presented the tragedies of war occurring on both sides of the

conflict. 21

This interpretation of Goya’s work contrasts with Sontag’s declarations of the atrocities

perpetrated by the French soldiers, but what the discrepancy does highlight is Sontag’s

assertion that, “To those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on

the other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed by

whom.” Thus, to consider the traumatic image outside of these territories, the civil gaze 22

does not judge the moral or ethical authority within an image, but rather “…investigates


Monin, “On Ahmed Alsoudani.” p. 921


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the context within which the [image] was taken and tries to reconstruct it.” In 23

Alsoudani’s work, we see the civil gaze present as a mechanism for first accessing, then

relaying individual and collective trauma; containing both victor and vanquished, without

blanketing the nuances of political circumstance into a generic image/victim of war - as

was, Sontag describes, antiwar polemicists like Goya’s predilection: “…the case against war

does not rely on information about who and when and where; the arbitrariness of the

relentless slaughter is evidence enough.” 24

In order to emphasise the difference between the antiwar agitprop imbued in Goya’s

depictions of trauma with Alsoudani’s civil constructions, I will return to Guernica. There

is an argument to be made that through Guernica Picasso advocates precisely the one-

dimensional narrative we have found cause for eliminating, but what I would suggest

differs in this case specifically is the historical context of the event. As Sontag points out, it

is marked as the first strike of “…air attacks on cities and villages, for the sole purpose of

destroying them completely, being used as a weapon of war” in Europe - preempting the

“legitimate”, or officially sanctioned barbarism of WWII military tactics. With this in 25

mind, Picasso has utilised a civil gaze to represent through absence an accurate impression

of what would become the subject of glory or revulsion in the atypical image of war - the

victor. It can be easily understood why he would depict this act of warfare as a scene not in

the process of becoming but foreshadowed; there were no enemy forces to depict amongst

the civilian dead.

Berger argues that rather than objectivity, it is the introspective nature of this piece that



Ibid. p. 3025

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bestows power on the work: “Picasso did not try to imagine the actual event... Just as [he]

abstracts sex from society and returns it to nature, so here he abstracts pain and fear from

history and returns them to a protesting nature.” I would argue that this ambition lies at 26

the centre of most creative works that use images of trauma as their genus. Unlike Goya,

whose series has been argued as resistant to narrative and spectacular trappings, Guernica

and Baghdad 1 are reconfigurations of exact representations; always at a remove from a

primary source, these works aim to abstract the resonance of a traumatic image from its

constructed history and return it to a more diverse nature. 27

When discussing representation within Critical Terms for Art History, David Summers

maintains that “...in order to serve their purposes images cannot be doubles. Images are

also substitutes, which means that they are always placed and located in spaces of human

use.” This analogy of the image seems particularly pertinent in relation to the newspaper 28

image or press photograph: never able to double the actual event, as Francis Guerin and

Roger Hallas highlight in their introduction to The Image and the Witness: Trauma,

Memory and Visual Culture, they consequently become globally ingested substitutes,

irrevocably fused with the subjectivities articulated around them in print. Considering 29

the implications of such bindings, Azoulay demarcates two degrees of citizenship under the

condition of what she terms ‘regime-made disaster’:

The central right pertaining to the privileged segment of the

population consists in the right to view disaster - to be its spectator…

Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso. p. 16926


David Summers, “Representation” in Critical Terms For Art History, (Chicago: University of 28

Chicago Press, 2003) p. 16

Francis Guerin & Roger Hallas, The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual 29

Culture. ( London: Wallflower Press, 2007) p. 6!10

to observe the disaster from comparable safety, whereas those whom

they observe belong to a different category of the governed, that is to

say, people who can have disaster inflicted upon them and who then

can be viewed subsisting in their state of disaster. 30

She goes on to suggest that “…the first step in the evolution of a civil discourse lies in the

act of refusing to identify disaster with the population upon whom it is afflicted. It consists

in the refusal to see the disaster as a defining feature, precisely, of this population.” This 31

sentiment echoes Sontag’s protestations against the non-specific use of images of suffering

to aid antiwar rhetoric, so it seems pertinent to ask of it the same question; what does this

mean when considering the roles of oppressed/oppressor? In Frames of War: When is Life

Grievable? Judith Butler (referred to hereafter as J. Butler) asks which frames permit for

the representability of the human. “I propose to consider a way in which suffering is

presented to us, and how that presentation affects out responsiveness. In particular, I want

to understand how the frames that allocate the recognisability of certain figures of the

human are themselves linked with broader norms that determine what will and will not be

a grievable life.” 32

A work that epitomises J. Butler’s investigation into what constitutes a grievable life is

Marlene Dumas’ The Look-Alike (see fig. 5). Outlined by Cornelia Butler (referred to

hereafter as C. Butler) in her essay “Painter as Witness” as “…a composite of Moroccan

actor and Palestinian martyr, whose visage was lifted from a poster, The Look Alike stares

blankly at the viewer, and yet his face seems familiar. The tension in this work lies in the

Azoulay, Civil Imagination. pp. 1-230

Ibid. p. 231

Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009) pp. 63-6432

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unsettling combination of the individual and the stereotype.” It is this same 33

amalgamation that dilutes the privileged spectator’s ability to “…respond effectively to

suffering at a distance”; the subject is written into cliches such as ‘refugee’, ‘terrorist’ or 34

‘freedom fighter’ by nature of his or her visually translatable context/press package.

For Dumas to create a hybrid representation of two figures occupying polar opposite ends

of the media circuit is thus a telling act of resistance against foreclosed narratives such as

the ones outlined above. An artist simultaneously highlighting the importance of

contextualised portraits and the pejorative nature of

racial profiling, C. Butler suggests that the concept of the

portrait within Dumas’ oeuvre “…cannot be understood

outside of her relationship to issues of identity. Her idea

to ‘look in the mirror and talk to Al-Qaeda’ is a genuine

plea for humility and vigilance regarding our own

political positions and constructions of self.” This plea 35

articulates exactly what Azoulay asks of her reader when

advocating for the right of peoples who have disaster

inflicted upon them to have a space of cultural agency

separate from that scene; that we be aware of how our perceptions from a site of privilege

construct the rights and limitations of what will be recognised as grievable.

Taking this into consideration, the relationships between oppressed and oppressor in these

visual fields are delineated less by the number of battles won or casualties lost, but rather

Cornelia Butler, “Painter as Witness” in Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave (Los 33

Angeles: D.A.P./The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008) p. 46

J. Butler, Frames of War. p. 6334

C. Butler, “Painter as Witness.” p. 7335

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fig. 5 Marlene Dumas - The Look-

Alike (2005)

what ‘norms’ legitimise admittance into the recognisably human - thus orchestrating how

an event will subsequently be retold. As J. Butler argues, “…how we formulate moral

criticisms, how we articulate political analyses, depends upon a certain field of perceptible

reality having already been established… one in which the notion of the recognisable

human is formed and maintained over and against what cannot be named or regarded as

human - a figure of the non-human that negatively determines and potentially unsettles

the recognisably human.” Consequently, it is this field of perceptible reality that has 36

allowed for the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib no only to be enacted, on incalculable

occasions, but to be witnessed, documented and disseminated with free license under the

exonerating banner of work.

As Leo Steinberg comments in his collection Other Criteria: Confrontations with

Twentieth Century Art when discussing war crimes in the twentieth century, “...to be

workman like is an absolute good, Efficiency is self-justifying: it exonerates any activity

whatsoever It is the active man’s formalism - a value independent of content. As the

marine captain said after a battle near Con Thien in South Vietnam, ‘It was definitely a

good night’s work. I don’t know how many gooks we got but we got plenty.” Where 37

Steinberg attributes such rhetoric to “…an etiquette of tough he-man talk” the 38

contemporary climate of instantly accessible media, sprouting the idea of the ‘soldier as

tourist’ as outlined by Sontag in her essay “Regarding the Torture of Others”, would

suggest that instead, these scenarios have been engineered towards the anecdote. 39

J. Butler, Frames of War. p. 6436

Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art (Oxford: Oxford 37

University Press, 1972) p. 60

Ibid.38

Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others” (accessed Jan 2015) http://www.nytimes.com/39

2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-of-others.html p. 5!13

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-of-others.html

The events are in part designed to be photographed. The grin is a grin

for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking

the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them… for the meaning

of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that

their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything

wrong in what the pictures show. 40

These images of torture have a particular resonance with images of lynched African-

Americans, as discussed in James Polchin’s essay “Not Looking at Lynching Photographs”.

As crimes committed by Americans under the impression of superior humanity, these two

circumstances of torture, both decidedly present in the visual consciousness of

contemporary society, work to actively reinforce the estimation that dehumanising

narratives are not employed in the field of war to vindicate necessary conflict, but to

legitimise the rationale of ‘our boys blowing off steam’: “To ‘stack naked men' is like a

college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of

Americans who listen to his radio show… ‘Exactly!’ he exclaimed. ‘Exactly my point…and

we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and

then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.’ 41

The actions of these American servicemen and women have been legally sanctioned by

their government while flouting global structures put in place to determine the ethical

treatment of fellow human beings, so what thus becomes critical to our context within

these sets of events as privileged, Western spectator, is that “…if we are witness, we look

Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others.” p. 340

Ibid.41

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through a complicit lens.” Polchin argues that in such scenarios, “The photographer may 42

be the most apparent and troubling witness for he or she is not simply recording the act

but constructing a way of memorialising the violence of white supremacy, complicit in the

act of violence through the image’s objectification.” 43

The privileged spectator designated within Azoulay’s discourse is thus afforded the luxury

of ‘photographer’ - never encompassed by the scene but always an agent of its

construction. However, what is perhaps more disturbing about my effort to configure such

events with Azoulay’s concepts is that in the case of the Abu Ghraib prisoners, the

perpetrators of the torture are released from their culpability by a perversion of their

citizenship in regime-made disaster. In their capacity of operatives of war these officials

are viewed by their sympathisers as subsisting within a state of disaster that works to

disengage all requirements of political and civic duty to the prisoners; as subjects they are

composed as inseparable from their circumstance, thus bound not only by different judicial

constraints but different qualifications of what can be constituted as explicable behaviour.

That regime-made disaster, as I believe US occupation of foreign soil can unquestionably

be termed, can implement such galling attacks on civil liberty while analogous retribution

is time and again transcribed under the marker of terrorism is by no means a product of

contemporary culture, but I would argue that the efficacy of media manipulation within

contemporary culture is pivotal when regarding post-war documentation of trauma in

relation to proceeding narratives. By manipulation I do not mean the doctoring of images,

but rather placement and context; as Sontag highlights, an images intended position

within an archive speaks volumes on what will subsequently be asked of it. While war

James Polchin, “Not Looking at Lynching Photographs” in The Image and the Witness: 42

Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture. ( London: Wallflower Press, 2007) p. 210

Ibid.43

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photography, at its advent, was typically a sole inquiry of newspapers, “…large-circulation

weekly magazines arrived… that were entirely devoted to pictures entirely devoted to

pictures (accompanied by brief texts keyed to the photos.)” 44

In the age of the internet competition between images has only become more fierce, thus

it is a morbid achievement of lynching photographs or the images of torture from Abu-

Ghraib that stands in their capacity to hold firm as records of traumatising acts, against the

slip stream of media engineered in favour of US action. But worse would be to consider

these acts solely through their framing as ‘shock-images’; such events are not isolated in

circumstance, nor in their construction as documents to be archived privately by official

sanctions - they are simply the ones that have slipped through the net.

“There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist,” [Secretary

of Defence, Donald] Rumsfeld acknowledged in his testimony. “If

these are released to the public, obviously, it's going to make matters

worse.” Worse for the administration and its programs, presumably…

The real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come

from the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover up

our misrule in Iraq - to identify “outrage” over the photographs with

a campaign to undermine American military might and the purposes

it currently serves… it will increasingly be thought unpatriotic to

disseminate the new photographs and further tarnish the image of

America. 45



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Taking Sontag’s theories into consideration, the question becomes not how these images

will compete or, more aptly, be construed within the visual field, but more what the

dissemination or storage of said images in private, official archives indicates of their initial

prerogatives. As the author suggests,

The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose

participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the

pictures from Abu Ghraib. The lynching pictures were in the nature

of photographs as trophies - taken by a photographer in order to be

collected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken by

American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in the use

made of pictures - less objects to be saved than messages to be

disseminated, circulated. 46

What then does this mean for the death portraits of the incarcerated Baader-Meinhof

Group? Taken by the Stammheim prison officers after each respective suicide/murder of

the Red Army Faction activists-turned-terrorists, these images, as Frances Guerin outlines

in an essay titled “The Grey Space Between: Gerhard Richter’s 18. Oktober 1977”, attest to

the insufficiency of narratives that consecrate a hero/villain, or even lawful/unlawful

dialectic when used in conjunction with photography.

In a gesture of fear and simultaneous fascination with the power of

the photograph’s presumed potential for anarchy, thanks to both its

potent subject and its inherent reproducibility, the police-

commissioned photographs of the RAF were carefully archived out of


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public sight. The Baader-Meinhof members wereWi subject to the

same process of possession, domination and de-individualisation that

has been the fat of all modern social deviants when they were

photographed for identification purposes. In turn, the photographs

were themselves sorted and classified in an attempt to stymie their

desire to cause social unrest. 47

Guerin thus highlights a preliminary version of what Sontag identifies within campaigns by

US government to restrict civilian access to uncensored images of war; for the safety and

security of the nation state, have faith that we will show you what’s necessary. What makes

this assertion even harder to take seriously, ignoring the years of psychological torture and

physical deprivation Andreas Badder, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins and Ulrike Meinhof

were subjected to, or the highly suspect circumstances surrounding their deaths, is that the

Baader-Meinhof Group grew into a militant or terrorist organisation precisely because of a

mistrust of the nation state. As Thorn-Prikker maintains, “The RAF began as a resistance

movement against the war in Vietnam. It all ended in crimes committed by the RAF, [i.e.

bombing, kidnapping] but it started as a struggle against the crime of war.” Robert Storr 48

discusses a particular incident of concern to the RAF in his writings for October 18, 1977:

In addition to widespread resistance to reexamining National

Socialism [throughout early post-war Germany] there was a quiet

reassertion of power by former members of its elite… It was not just a

matter of demobilised soldiers or lower-echelon serrants of Hitler’s

regime being called back to rebuild their country but, rather, of the

Frances Guerin, “The Grey Space Between: Gerhard Richter’s 18. Oktober 1977” in The Image 47

and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture. ( London: Wallflower Press, 2007) p. 122

Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn-Prikker.” p.23748

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return to prominence of many who had been intimately involved in

the Nazi project. 49

With this in mind, as Thorn-Prikker suggests, *** the RAF can be construed as a

movement attempting to break with the idea of passive complicity p. 237 *** Such an

assertion seems particularly pertinent in relation to the images from Abu-Ghraib, and our

duty to acknowledge their presence in our attendant actions as witness regardless of socio-

political admonishments; as C. Butler asks on behalf of Dumas, to act with “…humility and

vigilance [when] regarding our own political positions and constructions of self. How do

we recognise one another and understand the reality of what it means to live - and die - in

our own bodies?” 50

From here we turn again to what constitutes a grievable life. In an essay titled “The

Meaning of Working Through the Past” Theodore Adorno addresses the concept of guilt in

relation to the post-war German consciousness:

Again and again one hears of the so-called guilt-complex, often with

the association that it was actually first created by the construction of

a German collective guilt… However, talk of a guilt complex has

something untruthful to it… The word ‘complex’ is used to give the

impression that the guilt, which so many ward off, abreact, and

distort through the silliest of rationalisations, is actually no guilt at all

but rather exists in them, in their psychological disposition: the

terribly real past is trivialised into merely a figment of the

Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter, October 18. 1977 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2000) 49

pp. 43-44

C. Butler, “Painter as Witness.” p. 7350

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imagination of those who are affected by it… The murdered are

cheated out of the single remaining thing that our powerlessness can

offer them: remembrance. 51

Guilt, in this framework, thus tries to impede the memorialisation of its trigger - working

in complete opposition to J. Butler’s assertion that for a life to be grievable it must be

publicly acknowledged and accounted for. Polchin suggests in relation to images of

lynching that “Our horror has the effect of distancing us from these photographs and

situating them within a stream of shocking images that stand in for truthfulness.” As 52

such, rather than averting our gaze, as Sontag suggests Virginia Woolf would see us do (for

“…not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them… would be the reactions of a

moral monster.” ) it is our duty as privileged spectators to both witness and remember 53

images of trauma; to integrate them into a civil discourse that may be opposed or

suppressed by regimes involved in conflict, in order to affirm the subjects life as both

human and grievable.

But how does the act of witnessing differ when the image under discussion is not a

photograph, but a painterly depiction of a photograph? Gerhard Richter’s 18. Oktober

1977 cycle forces its viewer to engage with such questions, as Guerin presents in relation to

Hanged (see fig. 6): “Hanged is concerned to reopen the historical record, to revive the

event in its various forms of representation… [it] does more than repeat the coldness of the

photographic representation in the popular press.” The coldness associated with the 54

Theodore Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” in Critical Models: Interventions 51

and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) pp. 90-91

Polchin, “Not Looking at Lynching Photographs.” p. 21752


Guerin, “The Grey Space Between: Gerhard Richter’s 18. Oktober 1977.” p. 11954

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photograph is a product of its configuration as an isolated moment; the partial imprint of a

lived reality. Sontag theorises that “Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single

image. In an era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of

apprehending something and a compact form of memorialising it. The photograph is like a

quotation.” 55

Discussing his cycle with Thorn-Prikker, Richter argues that when considering his

paintings in relation to the police photographs, “I’d say the photograph provokes horror,

and the painting - with the same motif - something more like grief.” In aligning his 56

objective with the process of grieving and away from the

distance of horror, Richter harnesses his work as

memorial, in lieu of the photograph as record or trophy.

Storr maintains that “In photographs we can see death

with a nakedness no other medium affords. But

photography does not allow us to contemplate death. In

order to do that, duration must re-enter the equation.” 57

With this concept of duration in mind, Richter’s Tote:

Dead and Dumas’ Stern (see fig. 7 & fig. 8) could be

c o n s i d e r e d a s p r i m e e x a m p l e s o f t e m p o r a l

representation in the painterly field in light of their respective willingness to advocate the

distance between their work and their subject matter, through what Guerin describes as

three-fold appropriation .


Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn-Prikker.” p. 22956

Storr, Gerhard Richter, October 18. 1977. p. 10357

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fig. 6 Gerhard Richter - Hanged

(1988)

Given 18. Oktober 1977’s formulation as an offshoot from Richter’s previous archive piece

Atlas, Guerin maintains that these works are abstracted “…first in pre-production from the

official public discourse, second in production from the photographic medium into

painting, and third, for the purposes of exhibition they are appropriated from Atlas.” 58

Likewise in an essay on Dumas titled “Less Dead”, Richard Shiff highlights the artist’s

distance from her original source, by considering Stern as modelled from MoMA’s

reproduction of Richter’s representation of the original police image published in “Stern” -

the magazine from which her piece gained its name. In using this title Dumas 59

automatically associates her work with its historical lineage, in the same way that

“Richter’s archival processes plunge his works into yet another grey space of ineffability.

They are practices for classifying and containing the aleatory events of history in all its

guises… [yet] his work always stops short of containing, thus exercising control over the

images it accommodates.” 60

It is the stasis continuously equated with the photograph that authorises the state-

sanctioned dismissal of images like those from Abu-Ghraib and Stammheim from archives

of documentation and official procedure. The passage of time - concerned with both the

subject’s exposure to torture and the distance between said subject and his or her witness -

remains unacknowledged within the frame, thus cementing its malleability when coupled

with a leading narrative. Shiff seems to maintain a distaste for the photograph in

comments made relating to a Dumas quote - “‘I also wanted to see with Stern if I could

take Richter’s source out of its blur.’ Richter blurred his images, mimicking a type of


Richard Shiff, “Less Dead” in Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, (Los Angeles: 59

D.A.P./The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008) p. 155


!22

photographic filmic look: a distancing quality, an emotional fade. In contrast, Dumas’

version is more graphic, more immediate; she’a made the image of death less dead.” 61

The lessening of death that he establishes is not a comment on Dumas’ contemporary

resurrection of the image, nor a dig at Richter’s own interpretation - it is instead an

observation of discrepancies between what he terms ‘I’ and ‘Me’ within visual language.

The problem of speaking from the position of the I lies in its distance

from the Me; the I, isolated and untouched, creates a :ixed self-‐image,

like a photographic pose. It repeats itself, becoming unreceptive to

changing conditions, insisting on acting its character. The Me is less like

an image (dead), more like a mark (less dead). It has its own character

but is forever affected by the marks surrounding it. 62

Shiff, “Less Dead.” p. 15561

Ibid. p. 17162

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fig. 7 Gerhard Richter - Tote: Dead (1988)

fig. 8 Marlene Dumas - Stern (2004)

Whereas Dumas for Shiff embodies and I becoming a Me, through Richter’s insistence on

replicating the photographic effect it would seem that the author considers him :irmly located

within the I. To consider this ourselves however requires a critical enquiry into how legitimate

such categories are. Shiff regards the I as photographic: unreceptive and resistant to

interpretation, but J. Butler would argue that to consider interpretation as an action reserved

solely for the subjective mark over the representational image is to limit it.

Interpretation takes place by virtue of the structuring constraints of

genre and form on the communicability of affect -‐ and so sometimes

takes place against one’s will or, indeed, in spite of oneself. Thus, it is

not just that the photographer and/or the viewer actively and

deliberately interpret, but that the photograph itself becomes a

structuring scene of interpretation -‐ and one that may unsettle both

maker and viewer in turn. It would not be quite right to reverse the

formulation completely and say that the photograph interprets us… and

yet, photographs do act on us. 63

Thus, for J. Butler, a photograph’s agency or ability to mutate is not withheld through its status

as a ‘quotation’ -‐ this is just a constraint of the image’s particular form. Likewise, Shiff

resolutely maintains that the mark holds receptiveness within itself, “…it can move and

change, responding to contingencies” -‐ but how does this transpose onto marks that aim to

distance and isolate, like those performed by Jake and Dinos Chapman in their Insult to Injury

series? (see :igs. 8 & 9) Where Dumas and Richter’s con:igurations work alongside the 64

ancestry of their subject matter, the Chapman brothers essentially orphan the Goya etchings

J. Butler, Frames of War. pp. 67-6863

Shiff, “Less Dead.” p. 15564

!24

they utilise by bulldozing over the commemorative function they initially served. Through

their caricature additions the artists void any potential for plasticity, as they con:ine the image

to the moment of their interception; creating a snapshot out of a memory.

Considering this, I would argue that it is not the medium that designates the ef:icacy or agency

of an traumatic image, but instead its potential for interaction with and the expansion of a

spectator’s :ield of perceptible reality. As Guerin suggests in relation to Hanged, “…the painting

asks the viewer to acknowledge representation (both photographic and painted) as a

transgression of the space of an individual’s death.” Thus, for an image of trauma to 65

accomplish more than just transgression, it is a case of memory rather than mark.


!25

figs. 8 & 9

Jake and Dinos Chapman - Insult to Injury (2003)

“This is Worse”

“Great deeds - against the dead!”

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Butler, J. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.

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http://www.marlenedumas.nl/texts/

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-of-others.html

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