“Mexican Suitcase” at the International Center of Photography:  “Mexican Suitcase” was a marvel of an exhibition that filled gaps of our knowledge about photojournalists Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim (David Seymour). The mere existence of the Mexican Suitcase is a virtual miracle.  The Suitcase, which contained some 126 rolls of film, went missing in 1939 when Capa was fleeing from the invasion of Europe, and remained missing until 2007 when the ICP (founded by Capa’s brother Cornell) finally found them.  The exhibition is a textured look at the Spanish Civil War and Capa, Taro and Chim’s innovative approaches to photojournalism.   

Zadie Smith’s “Generation Why?” in New York Review of Books:  Ostensibly a review of Aaron Sorkin’s film The Social Network and Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. Smith delves into the effects that social digitalization have on us and on the performance of culture.  If you haven’t already read it, you can do so here.

“Playing with Pictures: The Art of the Victorian Photocollage” at the Art Institute of Chicago: An “art historians” exhibition, “Playing with Pictures” was a charming yet vigorously researched exhibition which proposed that collage—a form usually associated with the early twentieth-century avant-gardism of Picasso and Georges Braque—was an important part of Victorian visual culture.  Born of the drawing-rooms of upper-class British women who delighted in cutting up family photographs and repurposing them into artistic albums, the practice resulted in bizarre juxtapositions and collages that would make Andre Breton envious (definitely not your mother’s idea of scrapbooking). “Playing with Pictures,” and its accompanying catalogue, was the smartest look at Victorian Britain I’ve seen in a long time.   

John Brandon’s Citrus County:  Brandon’s second novel was silently subversive: part a coming of age novel and part crime novel, he plays tribute while undermining expectations of both genres.  His stripped-down prose and his unflinching look at the devastated inner life of his characters are so unerring that it’s hard to put Brandon’s book down.  

Participatory art’s big comeback: Recessions are always boomtime for performance art.  It was true in the 1970s and 80s when participatory artists pushed their way into the mainstream: Chris Burden, Carolee Schneemann, and Gordon Matta-Clark all pioneered works which compelled the viewer to perform with the artist.  The “Great Recession” of the aughts was no different. Marina Abramović re-performed The Artist is Present.  The Starns Brothers extended their assembly technique to engineer an enormous, scaffolding-like bamboo playground, Big Bamú, which seemed to grow from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s roof garden. Christian Marclay at the Whitney had visitors write musical notes (and scribbles and whatnots) for pianist to improvise from. 

Emma Donoghue’s Room:  Undoubtedly the creepiest novel of the year, Donoghue’s Room is told from the perspective of Jack, a young boy whose life is lived, with his mother, in a locked room.  Donoghue completely immerses herself into her protagonist (five-year-old Jack) who witnesses a series of disturbing events.  As with her earlier novel Slammerkin, the realism of her characters’ voices—if not their situations—makes for a startling effect. 

Caravaggio: It was a big year for Caravaggio.  The seventeenth century Italian painter celebrated his 400^th anniversary and he was gifted with a hoard of new books—most notably one by Michael Fried—delving into everything from his aesthetics to his sexuality.   The Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome organized a major exhibition of the artist and even his followers, the Caravaggesti, got in on the action. Most importantly, some Italian “researchers” possibly found Caravaggio’s missing bones, perhaps answering the long-standing mystery of how he died: sunstroke.  You’re welcome. 

“William Kentridge: Five Themes” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:  Kentridge’s work has had an indelible mark on the contemporary art scene and his expansive show at the SFMoMA reminded me how smart his work is.  Kentridge’s dreamlike charcoal drawings and stop-animation film are often self-deprecating, funny and always ambivalent. His works, however, are politically engaged, silently referencing apartheid and colonialism of his native South Africa. 

Reexamining Sculpture:  I’ve always thought of sculpture as the unwanted, red-headed step-child of art history.  But this year, two exhibitions changed my mind:  the Turner Prize exhibition and the MoMA exhibit “The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today.”  While neither of these exhibitions were solely about sculpture, they both explored its intersections with other artistic media.  Turner Prize winner Susan Philllipsz expanded the field of sculpture with her sound art and the MoMA’s exhibition fleshed out the close relationship between photography and sculpture, particularly their reproducibility.  

Phillipsz was honored for her installation Lowlands. It was created last spring for the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, where the recordings of Phillipsz singing an old Scottish tune, “Lowlands Away” -- a lament about a drowned sweetheart who haunts a lover’s dreams -- were played beneath three bridges in Glasgow.  Lowlands has been generally well-received by Britain’s art critics.  Adrian Searle, critic for The Guardian, wrote that, “[Phillipsz’s] sense of place, and space memory and presence reminds me, weirdly of the sculptor Richard Serra at his best.  Her art makes you think of your place in the world and opens you up to your feelings.”

Searle is right: Phillipsz’s work engages with the long history of landscape painting in Britain (the Turner Prize is named after landscape painter J.M.W Turner). It does this by teasing out the poetics of emotion which, for viewers, are often bound to landscape itself.  But, like Serra, Phillipsz also amplifies (visually and aurally) the definition of sculpture a concept which, as Rosalind Krauss observed in “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” is entwined with the visual project of post-modernism.  

 Take a listen for yourself.

Wojnarowicz’s video is a response to the AIDS epidemic that swept through America in the 1980s, and was made in honor of Wojnarowicz’s partner, artist Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS complications in 1987 (Wojnarowicz himself died of AIDS in 1992).  Fire in My Belly is a meandering, stream-of-consciousness work which uses the iconography of the crucifixion, circuitously commenting on the suffering of marginalization. According to the Catholic League, the video is “hate speech... designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians.” 

What’s so offensive? The eleven seconds during which ants crawl across a crucifix.  There is, of course, some irony in the Catholic League criticizing a work deeply indebted to the very long iconographic tradition of the Man of Sorrows – an irony, which in most cases, would be laughable. But this time, ignorance had some very real consequences. 

House Speaker-Elect John Boehner (R-Ohio) called the exhibition a misuse of taxpayer money. Boehner’s spokesman, Kevin Smith, said in a statement that “American families have a right to expect better for recipients of taxpayer funds in a tough economy.” Smith then clarified with a threat: “Smithsonian officials should either acknowledge the mistake and correct it, or be prepared to face tough scrutiny beginning in January."  Both Boehner and Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) demanded that the entire exhibition be pulled because Wojnarowicz’s installation is “an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season.

So, added up, that's homosexuals, Christmas, and lefty artists - the GOP’s favorite trifecta.  Though Boehner and Cantor are hiding behind the thinly veiled excuses of the Catholic League, this is not about images which are offensive to Christians — museums all over the world are filled with grotesque images of Christ’s suffering (seventeenth-century Spanish artists were enthralled with the gory details of the crucifixion). Nor is it about Christmas. It’s about the representation of homosexuality in American culture.  “Hide/Seek” is an exhibition that’s long overdue, and The Smithsonian was wrong to cower to the demands of the so-called culture warriors. 

Twenty-one years ago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, under similar pressure, took a huge hit to its credibility when it canceled an exhibition of new works by the gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Ten-plus years later, I worked for the very talented curator who was fired over the cancellation, a decision she deeply regretted making and from which her reputation still suffered.  She didn’t regret the decision solely because of the impact it had on her career, but rather because she had violated what curators are fundamentally charged to do: decide on, and contextualize, the expressions they think matter most.  Curators should be committed to the ideas that art reflects, however controversial or unpopular they may be. It’s the audiences’ job to decide on the merits of a curator’s arguments and judge those choices for itself.  In that regard, the Transformer Gallery in D.C. should be celebrated for immediately installing Wojnarowicz’s video (it began screening on Thursday).

Cantor has said that taxpayer-funded museums should reflect “common standards of decency.”  But, as I’ve expressed here many times, I doubt such “common standards” exist now.  Homosexuality is a not only part of American culture. It has and continues to play a sizeable role in the production and reception of art.  To leave out subjective experiences of identity would be to deny the realities of the lives of artists, and would elide majors contributions to the history of art (Leonardo, Caravaggio, Andy Warhol, etc.).  And to those who express offense over the expression of lived experiences, I suggest following Blake Gopnick’s advice: “vote with [your] feet, and avoid the art [you] don’t like.” 

Two members of the club are already dead: Ken Oosterbroek died in South Africa and Kevin Carter committed suicide, in part, because of the criticisms of a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph he took in the Sudan. Surviving members Silva and Marinovich have now both sustained serious injuries while snapping what would become our fractured, mental, slideshow—what the mind sees when it summon a visual accompaniment for “war.”  

It’s a photojournalistic narrative that's perhaps all too familiar: young, intrepid believers searching for truth through a lens—hoping not just to capture, but to change as well.  In 2009, Silva told the New York Times’s Lens Blog that “If you’ve changed one single person’s mind, I think you’ve accomplished something.”  If there seems something romantically earnest about the Bang-Bang Club, it’s because the names Silva, Carter, Oosterbroek and Marinovich are often mentioned in the same breath as Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour.  The latter three were pioneers of the kind of wartime journalism which embedded photographers in the center of the chaos, using then new rapid-fire camera technology to capture the minutiae of conflict - pioneers of the very type of photojournalism the Bang-Bang Club utilized to often disturbing ends. 

Capa, Taro and Seymour are the subject of “Mexican Suitcase,” an exhibition at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan.  The three met in Paris during the 1930s, each of them from somewhere else: Capa started life in Hungary as Endre Friedmann; Taro as Gerta Pohorylle in Germany; Seymour as Dawid Szymin in Poland.  Political leftists, they traveled to Spain and documented the civil war. No one had ever seen the kind of war photography they were producing, active rather than the passive photographs of, say, Matthew Brady some seventy years prior. Their images were eagerly consumed by readers of European magazines, many of which are included in the ICP’s exhibition.  Capa became a star and, with Henri Cartier-Bresson, eventually founded Magnum Photos, the cooperative which still represents many photojournalists (including Saman).  

While the story of Capa, Taro and Seymour is, like the Bang-Bang Club, heroic in its own way, it’s also tragic.  In July of 1937, Taro was killed near Madrid.  Capa travelled to China and then back to Spain to witness the Republican defeat.  In 1939, he and Seymour travelled separately to photograph refugees pouring into France.  That’s when Capa and Seymour, both Jews with left-wing histories, saw the writing on the wall. They knew they had to leave Europe.  Seymour left for the U.S. before the outbreak of the war. Capa waited until the last minute.  He packed three boxes of film, rolled and cut, and gave them to a friend, asking him to send them to New York, where Capa was headed. 

They were never sent. The boxes ended up in Mexico with the Mexican ambassador to the Vichy government, and in 2007 the boxes, now appropriately called “The Mexican Suitcase”, eventually ended up at the International Center of Photography, which was founded by Capa’s brother, Cornell.  The Suitcase had over 4,500 negatives, many of them taken by Taro. In many regards they epitomize the work of each of the photographers. Taro and Seymour are somber and Capa is, well, Capa: fearless and epic.  But the Mexican Suitcase is also a reminder of the perils of photojournalism, when Capa forwarded it. Taro was already dead, killed in a jeep accident at the Battle of Brunete.  Capa was killed by a landmine in Indochina in 1954. Seymour would be severely wounded by a sniper in Egypt two years later. 

In 2009, Silva told the Lens Blog, “The camera is not a fortress.” The old cliché comes to mind: war is hell, but apparently so is photojournalism.  Maybe that’s why war and photography share so much linguistically: to shoot, rapid-fire, capture.  Silva’s injuries, the fate of the Bang-Bang club, and the ICP’s exhibition are certain reminders of that. 

Doss spoke with me about her project.   

Camera Obscura: You’ve been working on the book for awhile and looking over your CV, it’s clear that you have an interest in memory and American culture. Did anything in particular drive you to write this book? Were there any particular events that struck a motivating chord? 

Doss: I’ve been working on public art and public culture for sometime – reading about and following increasing number of monuments. Some of this was observation from walking around and looking at the monuments themselves.  I didn’t want to do it not another book about public art controversy since I’ve already written about that.  I was more interested in how memorials are redefining American forms of democracy.  I had the title first and I was essentially working from the title, trying to figure out what I meant by that, taking apart the concept of “mania.”  I don’t use the term to imply a crazy dimension but to argue consideration of public culture in terms of public feeling.  The title may be spectacular but the book considers dynamics of public feeling.

I looked at memorials specifically to get a handle on a project, and then furthered the discussion from memorials themselves by discussing memory versus history. I really see the development of a “memorial industry,” and that’s what I wanted to explore.    

CO: You found some really… interesting memorials (I was struck by the absurdity of the Victims of Communism Memorial).  You make the convincing case that since 1995 we’ve been collectively engaged in a frenzy of building memorials. Could you explain to readers why this need has reemerged within the American discourse?

Doss: I think that we need to think historically: statuemania in both Europe and the United States has historical precedence.  There are, of course, differences.  Statuemania is about nationalism (for example, France’s Third Republic used statues to unify the French public), something similar happened in the United States, after the Civil War, etc.  It’s part of assimilation of the diversity of Americans.  By contrast Memorial Mania willingly engaged in complicated look at American history.  That history is not always a succession of victories . I’m thinking about memorials to people of colour and to loss. The construction of those memorials is essentially a citizenship claim.  The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial will be dedicated this summer, and I think it says a lot about who we need to include as Americans worthy of being memorialized on the National Mall.  Memorials are a way of claiming citizenship status, a part of the historical construction of citizenship which is a continual debate.

I enjoyed the diversity of the project and was astonished by how much is out there and how much continues to be built.  Even now, there’s a controversy in Indianapolis over a proposed [Emancipation] memorial by Fred Wilson because the memorial is a figure of dissent -  it’s not heroic.  There is no public agreement about the nature of history, i.e. dissent vs. heroic.  [Note: Since speaking to Doss, the proposed Wilson memorial has been suspended].

CO: In Memorial Mania you argue that memorial culture in America today is particularly “excessive, frenzied, and extreme,” and you focus on the affective investment in the contemporary debate over public space.  Do you see our contemporary debate as a rupture from past practices?  Do you think Jurgen Habermas’s vision of rational debate ever existed, or do you see it more as an utopian (ideal) destination that's no longer plausible?

Doss: No, I think Habermas’s theory is a theory.  But, I think there are moments in the ebb and flow of American history where we’re more interested in rational discussions about history and memory.  For example, the 1970s when there was so much chaos that people were willing to come to some point of unity and solidarity. There have been democratic moments, but nothing recently.  James Young documents the more rational debate in Berlin on the making of the Holocaust Memorial. 

I’d like to see this idea of rational debate as realistic, but now I don’t think we can get around the table anymore.  This is an excessively angry period.  Ground Zero is an example of that, the continuing public anger and rancor.

CO: The debates over public sites today are, as you argue, particularly fraught (especially the 9/11 Memorial, Park51, etc.).  Do you think this particularly rancorous “debate” is central to our political moment?  I’m thinking that there’s no small coincidence between the anger displayed by Park51 protesters (and certain 9/11 family members) and the debate that we’re having over American citizenship. 

Doss: It’s a different country from what it was nine years ago. People are still angry.  There is a really small group of people who drive the debate and who can manipulate media and mass culture. I don’t want to discount the horror of 9/11, but anger is not a productive emotion in the memorialisation of the 3,000 people who died on 9/11.  Our country needs constructive and creative ideas.  The debate is incredibly affective and the media made more of a spectacle by refusing to understand that this isn’t a shrine but a diverse center.  Public art has always been the fall guy of whatever political or economic argument it can be put into. 

CO: There seems to be a radical political divide among Americans today, and as you argue, that’s one of many reasons the framing of commemoration is so central to debates over identity and the politics of representation.  You discuss that pretty thoroughly in your book, touching on the various kinds of memorials we construct (i.e. gratitude memorials, shame memorials, etc.). Could you comment on the relationship between political identity and the “kinds” of memorials it produces?

Doss: Certainly, the emotional conditions are incredibly important and this could have been a much longer book. I could have written a chapter on pleasure or joy memorials.  Gratitude and shame seem to be the overwhelming emotions.  War memorials are a way to say “thank you”. Gratitude is part of how we feel in public, or how we’re expected to feel.  Shame memorials are not necessarily about guilt and the shaming discourse, but rather about “shameful” moments in our history—monuments dedicated to racial terrorism and the ongoing legacy of race contradictions fit into the shame category. 

I constructed the book as groups of memorials situated within particular aspects and conditions.  I wanted Memorial Mania to be a stepping-stone, to invite readers to have a dialogue with the book and do their own work.  I encourage readers to think about memorial culture and the affective conditions that inform it.  Public feeling is crucial when thinking about this.  How do audiences shape what they make?

CO: On a lighter note, I understand you’re currently working on a new book – can you tell us about it? 

Doss: I’m always working on a book! Right now, I’m working on two projects.  I’m thinking about the divide between religion and modernism in twentieth century America and I’m interested also in cultural vandalism – memorial destruction – which I reference in the book.  I want to think about moments of vandalism in memorial history, to somehow theorize destruction. 

I couldn’t disagree more with Lewis. His understanding of the medium of photography - how it’s viewed and engaged with - is not only limited, it's obtuse.  Since Fox Talbot, photography has continually been in flux. Unlike the other plastic arts, it’s harder to pin down a definition of the photograph since its uses and appeal are so varied – high brow, low brow, documentary, scientific, artistic, etc.  What has tied together this diverse medium is its reproducibility. Lewis denies even this, writing: “The negative, or perhaps the original print, is the actual artwork, but mostly what we see are reproduction and reprints.”   Huh?  So only the negative or the first print the photographer produces is valued as art? Are digital photographs inherently denied artistic status?

Photography is intrinsically about reproduction: It reproduces reality and it reproduces itself.  Certainly Lewis’s misunderstanding of photography affects his overarching argument, which is ostensibly about the poor quality of reproduction in digital viewing (ie. on a screen).  He actually has a point, albeit a limited one.  He writes:

It matters even more for art. A decade or two ago, students learning about, say, Stephen Shore, would head to the library and find a book, or perhaps see some slides projected in a classroom. Now, they sit at a computer and call up some images, which is much worse; because what they're looking at is only a very rough approximation of what the photographer actually intended. The colors are wrong, the details are missing, the subtleties have vanished. In the absence of those qualities, one tends to focus on content—on what the picture is of or about— effectively rendering all photography a species of photojournalism.

Yes, reproduction changes a work – the orange tones Picasso’s Demoisellles d’Avignon are more vibrant in a photograph and Malevich’s squares look far more painterly in person than they do in photographs – and yes, it is a “rough approximation.” But, at least in terms of painting, the problem isn’t an e-text, it’s the photograph itself. Susan Sontag once called it “a slice…an effect.”  But this is really the only valid point Lewis has to make, and anyone who has visited an art museum knows that. 

More importantly, Lewis is privileging not only a particular kind of photograph, but also a particular kind of looking. Neither of these is monolithic.   His examples give him away: Ansel Adams, Man Ray, William Eggleston, all of whom were photographers who reveled in the ability to create sleek, mechanically reproduced worlds (Eggleston is one of the earliest color photographers and Adams and Man Ray experimented with lighting and the technical limitations of the medium).  They were also photographers who were very engaged with the substance of their work.  Lewis dismisses “content” and “photojournalism” and in doing so disregards one of the most active forms of the photograph and a large portion of photography’s history (like, the whole nineteenth century).  Looking at photography is not just about enjoying the lush qualities of the print – it’s an engagement with the real world photographically reproduced, and the technology which enables that interaction. 

More importantly, Lewis’s assertion that “looking at photographs on electronic media will be at best misleading, and at worst miserable,” make me wonder whether he’s even aware of the invention of the digital photograph.  Most photographers no longer capture images in the traditional way, which is meant for negative/positive reproduction. They choose images on a computer screen.  So, when one views them on a computer screen, an iPad, or a Kindle, that mode of looking in more in tune with “what the photographer actually intended.”  Indeed, one would see the photograph as the photographer herself saw it.  Perhaps Lewis doesn’t know, but one of his great photo book champions, William Eggleston, now only works in digital.  

Alphonse Bertillon, Frontispiece of Identification anthropométrique, 1893, demonstrating how to take measurements for his identification system.
Image: Wikimedia CommonsThat’s where EvoFIT comes in.  The software, developed by Charlie Frowd at the University of Central Lancashire and Peter Hancock at the University of Stirling, works on the premise that the mind is better at recall than it at actual recognition.  Instead of asking witnesses to select individual facial features, EvoFIT, presents them with a grid of 18 randomly generated faces that match the race, gender, and shape of the suspect.  From these 18, the witness is then asked to select the two images that most resemble the suspect.  EvoFIT then takes these two images and “breeds” them, mixing them together and producing 18 new “children.”  The process is then multiplied until it produces an accurate digital likeness of the suspect.  The strapline on EvoFIT’s website is “evolving the face of a criminal," the software has been adapted by 11 police forces in Britain, and Frowd and Hancock are also working with Boston police. 

This story piqued my interests because as Margaret Atwood recently claimed, new technologies are nothing more than “modernizations of things that already existed earlier in some other form.” The historian in me trembled.  EvoFIT technology is new, but it is deeply invested in a visual history of identifying the criminal body. 

Our current approach to criminal identification relies on the description and selection of individual parts of the body and their photographic documentation - the ubiquitous mugshots that flash across television screens and decorate the off-white walls of every American post office.  The system dates from the end of the nineteenth century. In 1882 Alphonse Bertillon, an employee of the Prefecture of Police in Paris, developed what he termed “criminal anthropometry.” Bertillon’s anthropometry is essentially a speaking portrait – one which attempts to document every inch of the criminal body – height, weight, marks, scars, even the shape of the ears and nose.  American journalist Ida B. Tarbell described the Bertillon process in a McClure’s article in 1894:

[T]he photograph is made simply to be recognized. The poses chosen are: A perfect profile, since that gives a sort of anatomical cut of the face; then a full face view, since there one has the habitual expression and the pose of the head. The picture is never retouched, since scars, moles, and spots are such infallible means of identification. Absolute uniformity is sought in the size, form, and style of the different photographs. In order that the distance may be invariable, the chair and camera are screwed to the floor, and there is a perfect system of adjustment. The result is hard on the subject. One does not care to display his judicial photograph, but for the purpose they are admirably, brutally exact.

Alphonse Bertillon, Bertillon Card of Francis Galton, 1893
Image: Wikimedia CommonsSo, basically Bertillon used photography in its very literal and documentary sense. Photographs document reality, and the mugshot - originally called a Bertillon Card - is documentary evidence of a criminal’s appearance.  The foundation of Bertillon’s method is physical evidence of the individual.

EvoFIT inverts this long standing paradigm.  Instead of producing an image of an actual person, it creates an image which has, literally, no reference to reality – it isn’t a representation of a specific person but rather a generic impression of an idealized type. EvoFIT isn't interested in the specific measurements and marks which map the individual body. Instead, it treats the criminal as abstraction and reversed engineers the individual from it.  EvoFIT might seem like a purely modern technology, something that only the internet age with its love of algorithms and predictability could create. But it isn't.

Around the same time that Bertillon was developing his system a British scientist - the inventor of fingerprint identification, Darwin cousin, and eugenicist Francis Galton, was working on another method for identifying criminals.  Instead of relying on the documentary quality of the photograph, as Bertillon did, Galton turned to the burgeoning technology of composite photography (the use of multiple negatives to create one positive) to create a general likeness, or impression, of the criminal.  Galton was a pioneer of eugenics  - it’s to him that we owe the phrase “nurture versus nature”) and he used photography to verify and illustrate his study of heredity.  What better way to prove, then, that criminality was a genetic trait then to expose an arbitrary number of criminal mugshots on a photographic plate? EvoFIT results are strikingly similar to the ones produced by Galton more than a century years ago.  

Francis Galton, Composite photographs of criminals from Inquiries into Human Faculty, 1883
Image: Wikimedia CommonsThe overlapping images caused criminals’ individual physiognomic qualities to vanish and accentuated the characteristics thought to be common to criminals.  The results were slightly blurred and almost artistic in appearance. Galton described them, in his 1883 book Inquiries Into Human Faculty, as portraying “ no specific type of person, but rather an imaginary figure endowed with the average characteristics of a specific group of people…[This] represents the portrait of a type and not an individual.”

I’m not suggesting that one can draw a straight line from Galton's eugenics to EvoFIT’s system of facial composites. What I am suggesting is that both approaches increase the separation between photography and the real.  In doing so, they both elevate the symbolic or abstract trace of the body. Even though methods of representing the criminal body have changed - aided, of course, by new technologies - the methodologies have remained quite static.  

Statue of Eadweard Muybridge in San Francisco's Presidio.
Image: Stassa Edwards

Muybridge’s photography was a radical investigation into both the limits of the medium, and the limitations of human vision. “Eadweard Muybridge”, currently at the Tate Britain, uses photographs from the entirety of Muybridge’s career and places his works within the context of his experiments: from his early stereoscopic photographs of the American West, to locomotion studies of horses and other mammals, to his invention of the zoopraxiscope (a precursor of film, the zoopraxiscope is considered the first movie projector) and finally his panorama of San Francisco.  The exhibition highlights Muybridge’s remarkable importance to later artists who were invested in the dissection of locomotion – from the Italian Futurists to Marcel Duchamp and Francis Bacon. 

The Tate Britain’s exhibition, like the Corcoran’s earlier this year, is an important reclaiming of Muybridge’s central place in the canon of artistic modernity.  As is the case with claiming “scientific photography” as the sole province of art and art history, there is a tendency to overlook the incredible role that Muybridge played in the histories of naturalism, perception, and vision.  Like most photographers of the time, he was frustrated by the constraints of long exposure photography, which edited out movement. He experimented with composition printing, a method in which one positive is made from multiple negatives, inserting clouds into landscapes to make the scene appear more natural.  Muybridge also understood the technological capacity of photography.  Like many 19^th century photographers, he understood that a photograph was by no means realistic or natural.  Rather, he saw it as a machine enhancement of human vision. This ideology is what drove his experiments for Stanford, as well as later experiments he conducted at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Muybridge understood photography’s specific role in what the University of Chicago's Joel Snyder has called “Picturing the Invisible” – showing us what we do not or cannot see (rapid motion, the behavior of matter, the ordinary and everyday).  Photography of this sort might be better understood as a device for translating the unseen or unseeable into something that looks like a picture of something we could never see.  When Muybridge captured a horse in motion, he was using high-speed film at exposures as fast as 1/2000^th of a second – faster, of course, than the speed at which human beings stop being able to consciously differentiate visual stimuli. 

Pointing out Muybridge’s photography of the invisible might seem a rather pedestrian. But Snyder (riffing off Walter Benjamin) argues that "If photographs are about ‘the real world’… then in what sense is a picture that shows us something unseeable still to be thought of as about ‘the visible world’? We are left in the unusual predicament of maintaining at one and the same time photographs show us facts about ‘the visible world’ that have no counterparts in our world outside…of photographs. Thus, photography challenges our traditional notions of what constitutes our world, our reality."

Muybridge didn’t just take pictures of horses. His photographs opened up a realm of photographic possibility that forever changed our modern perceptions of the real.  We understand our world photographically – it's our visual point of departure when we define "real" or "natural". The technological witness trumps physical witnessing. This is certainly evident not only in documentary photographs that define our understanding of foreign cultures. It extends to photographs of the planets, weather patterns, x-rays, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), among other things.  We know what Earth looks like not because we’ve see it, but because we’ve seen photographs of it.

We take these terms for granted; photography has a way of quickly rewriting the flexible definition of naturalism.  Perhaps in reviving Muybridge’s reputation, Tate Britain’s exhibition can also restore an awareness of photography’s central role in our perceptions of reality.  Muybridge’s studies of mammal locomotion are part and parcel of our visual history of naturalism — of reality — a history which should grant the importance of the technological apparatus. 

When Muybridge debuted his zoopraxisope in London, he projected the now iconic galloping horse.  The Photographic News heralded his work and exclaimed “A new world of sights and wonders was, indeed, opened by photography, which was not less astounding because it was truth itself.”  Muybridge opened the door, and photographic "truth itself" still floods our comprehension of our world.  

Legal jargon over fair use and copyright infringement ensued. This was followed by claims that Damien Hirst - British art star, embellisher of skulls, and embalmer of adorable mammals - is a plagiarist.  The latest claims of Hirst’s plagiarism count no less than fifteen works he "borrowed" from his colleagues. Charles Thomson, artist and co-founder of the retrograde group Stuckists, compiled the number of plagiarism claims about Hirst’s work and published them in the latest issue of the art magazine Jackdaw (the exhaustive inventory can be found here).  Thomson told The Guardian: "Hirst puts himself forward as a great artist, but a lot of his works exists only because other artists have come up with original ideals which he has stolen.  Hirst is a plagiarist in a way that would be totally unacceptable in science or literature."

Thomson, if you can get past the unfortunate artistic program he and his group are trying to promote, raises an interesting point.  Thomson, like many, values originality as the foundation of great art and its masterpieces, and since art (like science and literature) is an intellectual engagement, it should thus be subject to the ideal standards of science and literature. Let's set aside for a moment legal, moral and aesthetic judgments of Hirst and Fairey (neither of whom particularly impressed me) and ask ourselves if the visual arts are or should be subject to the same standards as either their sister art - literature - or the sciences.  Certainly, the public wants to believe in the unsullied, enduring and contemporary ideal of the masterpiece. At art museums, visitors throw around terms like “masterpiece,” “originality,” “great artist” - descriptions more nostalgic than accurate.  This is, in part, because plagiarism and copying are part and parcel of the modern artistic discourse.

Plagiarism of words is a conspicuous transgression (hello, Tony Blair) and is almost universally condemned - though that great blogging convention, the cross-post, continues to flaunt the limits of copyright and ethical behaviour. In the visual arts, copying and appropriation have a long and respected history. In the Renaissance it was called imitatio: copying the work of another artist, which was seen as a declaration of one’s admiration, and a display of the level of skill achieved by a young artist under the tutelage of a "master". Peter Paul Rubens copied Titian, Nicolas Poussin copied Annibale Carrracci, and so on.

By the nineteenth-century, copying was considered pastiche – a form of parody – and it was no longer meant as admiration, but rather a witty critique of the production of art itself.  Indeed, art under what Walter Benjamin called, “the machine age” or “the age of mechanical reproduction” was perpetually defined, like the photograph, by its reproducibility.   Édouard Manet made that bold declaration throughout the 1860s.  In the twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp selected readymades (as did Andy Warhol).  By the 1980s Richard Prince was pastiching print advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes and Sherrie Levine was re-photographing the work of iconic American photographers and exhibiting the results as her own work (usually with titles like After Walker Evans and After Edward Weston).

In Benjamin’s terms, modernity was solely about the death of the original; the aura killed by the copy. Levine and Prince are, in many regards, the supreme practitioners of Benjaminian modernity. By putting the very notion of artistic originality in doubt they upped the ante on Duchamp and Warhol.  The so-called plagiarism practiced by Hirst and Fairey should, therefore, come as no surprise: they are the inheritors of Prince and Levine, however impoverished. Hirst’s and Fairey’s works don’t demand a radical reading of pastiche as parody. There’s little if any irony to be sought in embalmed sharks and Andre the Giant posters.  There is, however, plenty of posturing, which doesn't add up to much more than a weak understanding of the potential power of pastiche and appropriation – particularly in the digital era. 

Art in the modern era, be it high brow or low brow, is defined by the copy.  You only need to look at the comics, fashion, Web design, and music sampling to see how incredibly entrenched pastiche is in our construction and consumption of culture.  To expect “Art” to be resistant to the digitization of culture is naïve. And indeed, it seems downright Renaissance to be looking for "originality".  Art has always been subject to technology and the expectations that new technologies cultivate.

As Beck spoke about the “scars,” that will “crush us or redeem us,” he seemed to miss the irony of that particular metaphor for the seemingly reparative acts of Tea Party politics  (a point made by LA Times art critic Christopher Knight). Indeed, Beck extolling our ability to ignore the scar and see only “what it stands for” signalled a public act of forgetting of a kind the VVM was meant to prevent.  Lin had envisioned the VVM as a V-shaped gash in which two black granite walls, placed below grade, would meet at an apex signifying the chronological closure of the Vietnam conflict.  Lin: “I had an impulse to cut open the earth…an initial violence that in time would heal.”  The VVM is antiheroic, a trace of violence suffered, not victory brandished in a heroic cause. It was meant to materialize a shared wound that will never heal, a scar that will never fade. The wound it represents is the process of memory – but the visitors captured by TNR’s camera were, in essence, rewriting space and history by reinscribing American imperialism. In doing so, they resisted the very function of the VVM itself and the uncivil discourse into which it was born. 

When Lin’s design was first unveiled, critics condemned it for politicizing the shame of an unvictorious war.  They called it the “black gash of shame,” a “degrading ditch,” a “black spot in American history,” a “memorial for Jane Fonda,” and a “wailing wall for draft dodgers and New Lefters of the future.” The VVM’s design became a locus of political discord. Though six years had passed since the end of the war, a cohesive narrative had yet to emerge in which to frame the memorial and its expectations.  Thus, the VVM and Lin herself became the focus of widespread fears about the state of the nation and equally emotional narratives about social stability, civil unity, and national security.

The framing of the Vietnam conflict was important to Cold Warriors, and they did their best to undermine Lin and her design.  Pat Buchanan worked hard to derail the project. So did William F. Buckley Jr., Rep. Henry Hyde, Jim Webb and President Reagan himself (who refused to attend the dedication ceremony).  Each had his own reasons but all seemed to agree on one thing: the VVM should be an American monument - designed by an American, not a young Asian woman. Lin was born and raised in the US, but that part of her identity was swept under the rug in the effort to rejig America's post-Vietnam narrative.  Her design too was deemed foreign – Communist, Vietnamese, anti-heroic.  Though Lin endured jingoism and unwanted additions to her design, the monument was, of course, ultimately built, becoming a postscript of the narrative frame of the Vietnam conflict itself. 

I bring up the VVM because its creation story is similar in many ways to the current debate about Ground Zero. Marita Sturken, author of Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism From Oklahoma City to Ground Zero, suggested that Vietnam ruptured our perception of war.  Beck's rally, and similar incidents in New York, are desperate attempts to conceal and suture the rupture, and to redefine our engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Public art is inseparable from what Jügen Habermas called, “the liberal model of the public sphere” – an idealized space in which disinterested citizens could contemplate a transparent emblem of their own inclusiveness and deliberate on values.  It seems, however, that we are far from the Habermasian vision of a public sphere in which rational citizens can exchange ideas and come together in progressive actions.  Instead,"space" and "history" are highly contested terms and their frames seems especially marked by irrational appeal and affective investment.

Like the VVM, Ground Zero is a place in which space and construction are politicized because they are still symbolic, because we recognize that whatever is built on or around Ground Zero will be part and parcel of the future narrative of 9/11, foreign wars, and nationalism. It’s a narrative worth fighting over.