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ABSTRACT
This article examines the power of invisibility to provoke and unsettle in two of the Wilson’s installations: Stasi City (1997) and A Free and Anonymous Monument (2003). The two installations are distinct, and by no means repeat their claims. Nevertheless, their juxtaposition gives insight into some of the different guises of invisibility threaded through two of the Wilson’s most visible installations. Through an exposure of the invisible, I argue that the Wilson sisters’ experimental images and installations are involved in a complex multi-layered critique of otherwise secret political and ideological structures, structures and systems that are in every way off-limits. The two installations do not just make visible what is invisible – state crimes, personal violation, abandonment, social neglect – they probe this invisibility and find what it is not permissible to visualize.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Frances Guerin is an academic and a writer. She holds a doctorate in Cinema Studies from New York University, as well as a Master of Arts in Art History from the University of Melbourne, in Australia. She currently teaches both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in film and visual culture at the University of Kent, UK, and conducts research that explores the intersection of aesthetics and social politics in film, photography, painting, and other twentieth-century visual media. Her ongoing projects concern the role of the image within cultural and historical modernity, the image as a witness to traumatic historical events, practices of looking, and the image as an agent in the formation of cultural identity. Frances lives in Paris.
Notes
1 This celebration of the photographic and film camera was begun by Walter Benjamin in his ‘A Short History of Photography’, and critics such as Siegfried Kracauer, ‘On Photography’, and taken up by contemporary critics of modernism such as Rosalind Krauss in The Optical Unconscious. See Benjamin (Citation1972); Kracauer (Citation1993); Krauss (Citation1993).
2 This was also one of the most exciting aspects of early photography and was explored from the beginning. One thinks of the photographs of Edweard Muybridge and Étienne Marey. For more on this see, Smith (Citation2013). On the use of photography in science and magic, see Keller (Citation2008).
3 Critics such as Smith are concerned to identify the possibilities of invisibility of the photograph. Thus, while her book focuses on how photography makes visible what is literally and culturally invisible, she also questions what is left out or remains invisible thanks to the discourse on visibility. In distinction, my concern here is to retain invisibility for its power to unsettle and disrupt the discourses that are given visibility. Invisibility in this sense is key. See Smith, At the Edge of Sight.
4 For an elaboration on this argument, see Guerin and Hallas (Citation2007).
5 This notion that critique of vision began with the formal disruption to the image was first most articulately theorized by feminist film in the 1960s and 1970s. See, Blaetz (Citation2007). I discuss the connection between the troubling of the experience of the image and the political intention of the installation below.
6 Stasi City was the first work to be bought by major museums such as the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
7 The same could be said of more recent works such as Atomgrad series, 2012 Toxic Camera. Blind Landing Lab, 2010–12, and Face Scripting. What Did the Building See? 2011.
8 I use this term ironically. ‘States of Emergency’ increasingly called by governments in their frustration or powerlessness in the face of extremist violence or civil unrest. The declaration effectively allows government to circumvent legislation and/or judiciary, thus giving them unfettered power. Of course, art does not have any equivalent power, but if it can be said to call for ‘points of emergency’ the possibility of disruption is infinite, if only conceptually.
9 I think here of the use of the photographic image for identity documentation by police and other authorities from the fin-de-siècle onwards. This capturing of criminals, miscreants and other socially stigmatized people reaches its most destructive level with the Nazi photographing of prisoners at Auschwitz. For the canonical work on this, see Tagg (Citation1988).
10 For example, buildings in Lichtenberg were decommissioned in 1989 with the collapse of the GDR that they became visible, open to the public. On the long discussion that took place before the site was turned into a museum, see Hollersen (Citation2010)
11 I am thinking here of the industrialscape in and around Newcastle and Tyneside where the Wilsons were born and raised. This has become a whole area of scholarly investigation in recent years, and the references are numerous. For a recent work on the phenomenon, see Thompson (Citation2015).
12 Sociologists have written about the effects of ruination on local communities, drawing various conclusions, all of which are pessimistic. See, for example, Mah (Citation2010). There is a wealth of literature on specific sites that addresses these issues. For another example, see Crinson and Tyler (Citation2005).
13 The spaces are not only forgotten about for the convenience of the governments that decommissioned or abandoned them, but also by the local communities who are facing new challenges and very real uncertainty as a result of regeneration. Sociologists have made substantial research studies into these communities to show the problems of regeneration. See, for example, Mah, ‘Memory, Uncertainty and Industrial Ruination’.
14 Jane and Louise Wilson, quoted in Matthai (Citation2015). This is also the argument made by Giuliana Bruno in the catalogue for the Baltic Arts Centre installation of A Free and Anonymous Monument. See Bruno (Citation2004).
15 This is the Foucauldian notion of surveillance in which, it’s not that the subjects of East German surveillance were always being watched, it was that they because self-surveillant incase they were. It’s also because surveillance is not always about looking, in fact, it is often about not looking, but writing, reading, speaking and hearing. For a different perspective on Foucault’s use of the panopticon to investigate the surveillance visualized in Stasi City, see Walsh (Citation2011).
16 I argue elsewhere that even when other forms of surveillance claim to make visible, they may well produce images, but they rarely see what they claim to. See Guerin (Citation2015).
17 In an ironic development, the offices are now being used to house asylum seekers and refugees from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/12012075/Berlin-turns-Stasi-headquarters-into-refugee-shelter.html
18 The Wilsons explore this kind of political invisibility in their images of the poisons that enter the body at the nuclear testing plant in Chernobyl in Atomgrad (2010). Other artists have worked at similar sites and addressed similar issues, particularly through production processes of restaging. The distinction of the Wilsons’ work lies in the imbrication of the viewer-visitor’s corporeal experience of the space as it is represented in and recreated through the moving images. Moreover, this experience as a new form of vision is not found in the work of other artists. In addition to the photographs of Thomas Demand on representations of German history, films such as Persistence (1997), by Daniel Eisenberg engage the double-entendres of fiction and documentary for a critique of the invisible past. Thanks to Christian Mieves for pointing out the similarities between Demand’s photographs and the Wilsons’ moving images.
19 Wilson and Wilson (Citation2000, 43). Many critics talk about the doubling as a reflection of their twinhood. See, for example, Leris (Citation2014).
20 In a further layer of the mise-en-abîme, Stasi City was exhibited together with Parliament at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The significance of the reflection is obvious, but it also serves to illustrate the further confusion. The doubling and juxtapositions give new value to the mechanisms of power that the respective spaces are known for - where the Houses of Parliament become linked to the Stasi spaces, that’s disturbing, troubling because those occupying the UK’s seat of government are the publicly elected, voice of the people.
21 This point is raised by the artists when they say the doubling is designed to establish the ‘one-to-one relationship in terms of scale with the viewer, a physical encounter, from the perspective in which the images were created’. Wilson and Wilson (Citation1999, 7). See also, Fullerton (Citation2014).
22 Corrin, ‘Stereoscopic Vision’, 10.
23 The carpark is perhaps the most visible of all the sites shown in A Free and Anonymous Monument because, as every critic mentions, it features in Mike Hodge’s 1971 film, Get Carter. It was designed in 1962 in the style of Brutalism.
24 On the history of the controversial Pavilion and its significance to Peterlee, see Farmer and Pendlebury (Citation2013).
25 Farmer and Pendlebury (Citation2013).
26 On the unauthorized and socially unacceptable forms of defacement of the Pavilion as an exposure social dysfunction, see Loeffler (Citation2013).
27 The car park is empty in A Free and Anonymous Monument, although the Pavilion is saved. The car park in Trinity Square, Newcastle was demolished in 2010 by a property developer.
28 And those who have not, have engaged in other activities: arson, vandalism, climbing cranes, as well as alcohol and drug use.
29 This is only one (polemical) perspective of the renovation. For an analysis of the differing values attributed to the project in 2010, see Farmer and Pendlebury (Citation2013).
30 Bruno makes much of the form of the film projections, both in their content, as well as their projection onto thirteen different screens and two mirrors. This fragmentation through montage is an echo of the world that is presented – the mechanical world in pieces. See Bruno, ‘Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaeologies’.
31 Schjeldahl (Citation1999, 5).
32 Foucault (Citation1984). He says, these spaces ‘have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect’. (46).