Frame, value, and (in)visibility: Vik Muniz’s Deslocamentos and the political economy of images

Abstract

This article analyses the 1995 series Deslocamentos [Displacements] by Brazilian visual artist Vik Muniz. In this work, the artist presents several photographs of press images that appear to show nothing at all. Here, Muniz prints empty squares and rectangles, adds captions and then manipulates them in order to give a sensation of ‘wear and tear.’ The article proposes that by ‘blocking’ the image’s content, and by emulating the way the media presents visual material, Deslocamentos underscores the emptying of the image’s value through specific forms of framing. By presenting this series of ‘empty images,’ Deslocamentos invites the spectator to think of how images appear or are distributed in regimes of visibility. The article puts forward the concept of the political economy of images as a framework to think of Muniz’s gesture and, more generally, the ways in which images accrue value in any given space of visibility. Images are reproducible, itinerant, entities, and given their contemporary profusion and the accelerated pace with which they circulate, any analysis of them should articulate singularity and difference to seriality and repetition. The concept of the political economy of images is provided to think through this articulation and to underscore the inextricable relation between frame, singularity, repetition and value.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] Mitchell (2005) asks a similar question at the beginning of an enlightening text on the subject. As will become clear, my answer follows a different path. Mitchell’s option of adjudicating images a sort of desiring subjectivity tries to move the problem from questions of power to questions of desire. As the critic argues, ‘Images are certainly not powerless, but they may be a lot weaker than we think. The problem is to refine and complicate our estimate of their power and the way it works. That is why I shift the question from what pictures do to what they want, from power to desire, from the model of the dominant power to be opposed, to the model of the subaltern to be interrogated or (better) to be invited to speak’ (Mitchell 2005, 33). Beyond the theoretical-political problem that ‘inviting the subaltern to speak’ entails – an assertion that in spite its good intentions seems to leave the power structure of enunciation intact – what my economic framework attempts to do is find a way that does not give images autonomy, nor transform them into mere instruments of power. Images can always reterritorialize, or, as I’ll argue following Jacques Derrida, there is no context that can enclose their meaning and value. Power and desire are not to be found in images by themselves but exist in the constellations in which they are inserted in each of their iterations.

[2] I am using here the distinction between intermediary and mediator proposed by Actor Network Theory. See Latour (2007).

[3] Muniz is both a renowned and prolific artist whose work intervenes hegemonic ways of seeing by citing, re-using, reproducing iconic images and formats of representation. For the reader interested in exploring his works, two excellent catalogues are Vik Muniz: Obra incompleta. Incomplete Works (2004) and Vik Muniz: Catalogue Raisonné. Everything So Far. Tudo até agora, 1987–2015 (2015).

[4] As I hope will become clear, I think this is the case for any image, whether artistic or not. What I think Muniz and other art practitioners do is make this determination more visible. What Muniz’s work makes even clearer – as can be seen in series like Pictures of Chocolate (1997), Pictures of Air (2000) and Pictures of Ink (2000), among many others – is the relationship between his series (and the genealogical work that goes into each one of them) and others from the past and from different platforms of visibility. Craig Owens has emphasised how there is a sort of art, epitomised for him by Cindy Sherman’s oeuvre, which cannot be understood without resorting to the series: ‘Until recently, Sherman appeared in all of her own photographs, but always as a different character; the shifts of identity that constitute the sense of her work are legible, however, only at the level of the series. To exhibit one Cindy Sherman photograph makes no sense, although her work is often exhibited in this way’ (1992, 124). I completely agree with Owens, but I believe we must expand this consideration to every image, which, as I will argue, is always part of a (potential) series, always enmeshed inside a political economy.

[5] Roland Barthes puts it in this way when talking about press images: ‘Naturally, several photographs can come together to form a sequence (this is commonly the case in illustrated magazines); the signifier of connotation is then no longer to be found at the level of any one of the fragments of the sequence but at that – what the linguists would call the suprasegmental level – of the concatenation’ (1977, 24).

[6] By emphasising the itinerancy of the image, I am closely following Eduardo Cadava’s propositions in relation to photography: ‘How can we begin to describe the afterlife of photographs as they get circulated and inserted into different contexts? What do these questions about influence suggest about a practice of citationality within photography that has its counterpart in textual practices, and how do visual and other linguistic languages relate to, or differ from, one another?’ (2013, 33).

[7] This opening of the structure that the framework of iterability enables can be related to what Butler asserts in relation to ‘sex.’ ‘“Sex,”’ Butler argues, ‘is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialise “sex” and achieve this materialisation through a forcible reiteration of those norms. That this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialisation is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialisation is impelled. Indeed, it is the instabilities, the possibilities for rematerialisation, opened up by this process that mark one domain in which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulation that call into question the hegemonic force of that very regulatory law’ (1993, 2; emphasis added).

[8] In her groundbreaking Vision, Race and Modernity, Deborah Poole also attempts to lay out an economic framework to analyse photography, its valuation and circulation. Although I share many of her views, Poole seems to ascribe the exchange-value of the photographic image mainly to its commodification: ‘When we consider such social uses of photographic objects or commodities, it becomes clear that the value of images is not limited to the worth they accrue as representation seen (or consumed) by individual viewers. Instead, images also accrue value through the social processes of accumulation, possession, circulation, and exchange’ (1997, 10–11). Even if images have acquired an economic determination, that is to say, even if most images go through the process of subsumption under the capitalist mode of production, I refer to exchange-value as a sort of symbolic exchange (repetition/itinerancy) of the image, beyond its market exchange.

[9] In her The Civil Contract of Photography, Ariella Azoulay proposes: ‘The photograph is out there, an object in the world, and anyone, always (at least in principle), can pull at one of its threads and trace in it in such a way as to reopen the image and renegotiate what it shows, possibly even completely overturning what was seen in it before’ (2008, 13). I completely agree with Azoulay on this point and what I want to underline is that that an image is always articulated with other images and that spectators are not external agents that ‘make sense’ of an image but that they are internal to its constellation in frameworks of exchange, value and meaning.

[10] So, this difference in value can be foreclosed (or repressed), but will always be there. As Jean Laplanche argues, in order for something to be foreclosed or disavowed there must be some kind of inscription: ‘In order to disavow or foreclose, for all the somewhat too easy declaration that “he wishes to know nothing about it,” our subject… must indeed know or at least apprehend something of what he is going to expel, however radical that expulsion is supposed to be’ (1999, 134).

[11] There are countless examples of his recurrent resource to displacement. In many of his works, Muniz takes one image and makes it pass through several processes of mediation. The general recognisability of the first image is which allows the displacement to be seen and pondered by the spectator. One example is the series Aftermath, in which ‘the subjects are street children in Brazil: extremely vulnerable children with whom the artist established a relationship of trust and collaboration. In this instance he invited them to find images they identified with in books on art history, then asked them to pose in the position of the principal figure in the selected painting. This was the starting point for a lengthy series of displacements.’ Taken from Muniz’s website. http://vikmuniz.net/gallery/liverpool.

[12] We can consider Life magazine as one of the most important repositories of the contemporary Western archive and, thus, of image exchange-values. The title of this archive, Life, just like that, without any predication, shows the degree in which the production of a particular social gaze is naturalised. Alfredo Jaar’s Searching for Africa in LIFE is another interesting form of visual critique to the Western-white social gaze created by these media apparatuses. Exhibited at the New School University Centre’s Arnhold Forum Seventh Floor Reading Room, this work is a collection of 2,128 covers of the all-photographic news magazine between 1936 and 1996 illuminated by a massive lightbox.

[13] For a detailed account of this episode and the centrality of the photographic field during the dictatorial years in Chile see The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices Under Chile’s Dictatorship (2020).

[14] This is a subject that has been explored from different perspectives and disciplines. In the field of photography, two works that contribute important points to the discussion are Phu (2017); and Azoulay (2008).

[15] In her The Cruel Radiance, Susie Lindfield proposes that ‘Every image of suffering says not only, ‘This is so,’ but also, by implication: ‘This must not be’; not only, ‘This goes on,’ but also, by implication: ‘This must stop,’ Documents of suffering are documents of protest: they show us what happens when we unmake the world (2012, 33). I agree with Linfield in principle that there is potential in an image for it to be used in different (even opposing) ways to the ways in which they are hegemonically used; what is less clear to me is, first, if these ‘images of suffering’ imply a reading that goes against the grain, second, if this potential dissidence is possible when an image is already inserted in the series ‘images of suffering’, and third, the conditions of exhibition that make this dissidence possible. That is why I believe the question of iterability and exchange, that is, of a political economy, is necessary.

[16] This argument is similar to Gérard Wajcman’s in his discussion with Georges Didi-Huberman in relation to the images of the Nazi camps. See Didi-Huberman (2008).

[17] In Social Death (2012), Lisa Marie Cacho reference a case in which a photograph of a black man and a picture of a white heterosexual couple reproduced in the media in the context of Hurricane Katrina were presented as scenes of ‘looting’ and ‘resourcefulness’ respectively. Her analysis shows how racialisation informs our ways of seeing and of placing value on subjects and communities through a structure of recognisability. Part of my argument here is that the placement and the forms of reproduction and framing of these sorts of image have an important role in producing these racialised gazes.

[18] Ahmed starts her article on the subject with this eloquent and beautiful passage: ‘How do you recognise a stranger? To ask such a question, is to challenge the assumption that the stranger is the one we simply fail to recognise, that the stranger is simply any-body who we do not know. It is to suggest that the stranger is some-body whom we have already recognised in the very moment in which they are “seen” or “faced” as a stranger. The figure of the stranger is far from simply being strange; it is a figure that is painfully familiar in that very strange(r)ness. The stranger has already come too close; the stranger is “in my face”. The stranger then is not simply the one whom we have not yet encountered but the one whom we have already encountered, or already faced. The stranger comes to be faced as a form of recognition: we recognise somebody as a stranger, rather than simply failing to recognise them’ (2000, 21).

[19] As Derrida argues: ‘Always a form on a ground, the parergon is nevertheless a form which has traditionally been determined not by distinguishing itself, but by disappearing, sinking in, obliterating itself, dissolving just as it expends its greatest energy’ (1979, 24–26).

[20] Again, this is a lens we can use to read, if not all, a big part of Muniz oeuvre. What Deslocamentos does particularly well is go to the extreme of disappearance to comment on the way images circulate and acquire value.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

César Barros A.

César Barros A. is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, and in the Latin American & Caribbean Studies Programme at SUNY New Paltz. His current research focuses on the different iterative, itinerant and framing practices by which an image acquires its social efficacy and position in a system of visibility, specifically in the context of contemporary Latin America. He has published articles on Latin American literature, film, visual arts and aesthetic theory. His most recent work has appeared in Vazantes, Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista de Estudios Hispanicos, Lafuga Revista de Cine, Artishock, Potlatch and Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America: Mediatised Sensibilities in a Globalised Era. He is the author of the book Escenas y obscenas del consumo (Cuarto Propio, 2013).