The Image: Disaffect in the theatre of representation

ABSTRACT

This essay addresses the image as it appears in current contemporary art practice, principally through an examination of the work of Turner Prize nominees, The Otolith Group, as well as Hito Steyerl, Rabih Mroué, Gail Pickering and Tom Nicholson. Following an interest in the possibility of an image without a dependency upon a relationship with a human subject or viewer, the essay explores the consequences of the proposition that an image ‘has a life’ beyond representation. This question is addressed through the three parts suggested by the essay's title — first, the status of the image as being beyond representation but instead characterized by its operation and by its relationship to the event; second, the image as presence and the question of theatre as a process of intensification of the image's presentation and the accompanying experience of the image within the affective field; and finally to the question of disaffect. The essay ends with the proposition of disaffect as the reinsertion of the interval — the gap that is lost through the smooth space of affect. Disaffect is here a strategy for the curatorial to approach the question of the unbinding, the unraveling of the centrality of the subject within the representative order. And by contrasting Alain Badiou's notion of the event with that Gilles Deleuze, the question of the ‘outside’ is reintroduced as is, the essay argues, the subsequent unbinding of the centrality of experience to the curatorial project, therefore offering instead a focus on structure and on methodology rather than on the binding (of subject with experience, of experience with knowledge and so on) of affective processes.

KEYWORDS:

• image
• affect
• disaffect
• representation
• participation
• subject
• human
• presence
• body
• Jacques Ranciére
• Gilles Deleuze