Guest Editors’ introduction

This Special Section of the journal Visual Studies bears the title Visual intervention and the (re)enactment of democracy. A series of images produced by the Canadian artist Stan Douglas for the Venice-Biennale in 2022 (Tompkins 2022)¹ serves as an entry point into a discussion on what we allude to with this title. This work consists of four large-format, composite digital images that hint at political events of public gathering and revolt that took place scattered across the globe in different cities over the course of a year – 2011 – each developing its own visual presence and vital energy. With the wording 2011 ≠ 1848, the title refers to historical parallels, but also to differences. ‘1848’ refers to the revolutions that spread throughout Europe in that year. Their historical significance lay in the fact that they demanded the abolition of monarchical rule and establishment of a democratic form of governance. Through various political initiatives, a public, potentially republican or democratic space of appearance (Arendt 1981, 265) – marked by multiple setbacks – was gradually imposed, and a stage of politics in the narrower sense, consisting of parliaments and parties, was institutionalised (Schober 2019, 64).

One of these four composite images, designed in the style of historical paintings, refers to the early events of what would later be called the ‘Arab Spring’: small groups of protesters are seen standing on a wide street in Tunis, gathered around candles or sitting in the middle of a circle of rugs spread on the ground. Douglas gives the date 23 January 2011, when such gatherings began, after the self-immolation of vegetable trader Mohamed Bouazizi, who took a stand against corruption, repression, and poverty.

The second image shows an event in Hackney, London, on 9 August 2011, which was a reaction to the death of Mark Duggan, a black youth. It shows burning cars and rubbish and a bird’s-eye view of clashes between police and protesters. This protest was viewed with ambivalence in contemporary public debate: some saw it as an expression of destructiveness without motive, others as a legitimate response to injustice (Balsom 2022, 122). A third image shows protesters from the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York being arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on 10 October 2011 ‒ here an assembly, this time in the context of law enforcement intervention, comes into the picture. The fourth image, Vancouver, 15 June 2011, on the other hand, shows hockey fans rioting after losing a game: they are shouting, while here, too, a car is on fire and a pall of black smoke hangs over the scene.

With this series, Stan Douglas refers to uprisings and social problem zones that have become visible across the globe in the recent past and which oscillate between political presence building and expressions of social tension. The image Tunis shows that in 2011 such protests shifted towards the south. Contrary to a first impression that makes them appear photorealistic, these images are not detailed reproductions of historical events that took place exactly as depicted. Rather, Stan Douglas creates digitally composed stagings of such uprisings, using elements from a variety of press images, reports and film footage, while also incorporating footage of re-enactments that the artist himself staged during the production of a video that is also part of this body of work.

For the creation of these composite images Stan Douglas worked with documentary photographs such as this one: Tunisians light candles during a nighttime vigil in downtown Tunis after protesters, emboldened by their overthrow of the president, took to the streets Saturday. January 22, 2011. © FINBARR O'REILLY/REUTERS/picturedesk.com.

Within a pictorial frame and the narrative context suggested in the title of the series, various micro-narratives thus coexist. In this way, as Balsom (2022, 118) pointed out in the catalogue of the work for the Biennale, these images are reminiscent of the work of Peter Bruegel, who also depicted the peasantry in the form of popular scenes through which events are brought into close proximity to one another, even if at the same time there is a certain disconnect between them. The tension between apparent realism and the composite character of the images, as well as their enormous size, makes the individual pictures appear timeless and distant.

These four images point in different political and social directions: the scene in Tunis represents an anti-totalitarian initiative; the event in New York brings into focus the reaction of the police to new social movements and their often unusual forms of protest; the two events in Hackney and Vancouver oscillate more sharply, and each in its own way, between political initiative and the anarchic activity of the crowd, driven by emotions such as enthusiasm and fanaticism, desire and resentment. In this way, this series creates a contradictory image of assembly and visual public presence-gaining in contemporary times.

Such phenomena in the current globalised society and the public sphere, and the potential inherent within them, which can develop in the direction of both democratising initiatives and totalitarian closure, as well as the above-mentioned ambivalence related to re-enactments of the body of the ‘people’ and the use of visual media for political purposes, have motivated this special section. It is thus based on the initial hypothesis that pictorial and visual interventions have become central to how tensions, identities, political attitudes and values are staged and negotiated in contemporary societies. Visual media and visual performances, but also acts of iconoclasm trigger crises or deepen existing situations of conflict today, in a similar and nevertheless transformed way as they did in the past. Representations in visual media, performance, and visual arts, however, can also have a socially and politically mediating or transforming effect, can be integrated into solidary action and, in this way, constitute community spirit. Artistic expression and the creation of a visual presence on the street, in institutions and in traditional (newspapers, TV, radio, etc.) and social media also serve to generate demands and highlight mistrust and expertise in order to denounce grievances and undesirable developments. In this way, (moving) images and visual artistic interventions are able to invigorate democracy and thus expand our sense of reality. In addition, images and visual productions can also make visible the aspects, moods, fears and desires in society that would otherwise remain unarticulated in what is explicitly sayable and showable in public.

Since the revolutions of the 16th-18th centuries, a reservoir of images and protest stagings has emerged that are repeatedly re-enacted, but also appear transformed and commented upon. Iconographic traditions of representation and modes of re-enactment of the ‘sovereign people’ emerged (Schober 2019), whereby the respective stagings always refer equally to concrete, historical actors and a fictionalised, mythical ‘people’ (Canovan 2005, 132). Both left-wing social movements and right-wing political actors, including Trumpism in the USA, have drawn on a reservoir of images and protest stagings re-enacting ‘the sovereign people’ (Schober 2021), in varying and differentiated ways (Doerr 2017; 2021; Milman and Doerr 2023). This reservoir of iconological traditions and performance modalities includes figurations of addressing the audience, such as those that aim to appeal to as large an audience as possible through a staging of faces and bodies, while negotiating difference, i.e. simultaneously publicising a universal address and particular features of group-identities (Schober 2019). New forms of protest, such as whistleblowing, currently in areas of political activism such as anti-corruption, represent both a disruption of such traditions (de Lagasnerie 2017) and also revive lines of tradition that have so far lain dormant in the background.

This presence of the iconic and the visual in social and political life goes hand in hand with technological, mass-media and (pop-) cultural transformations, as well as a re-valuation of political institutions and parties. It is thus both a symptom and a motor of a comprehensive socio-cultural change, which is characterised by the fact that politics and mass-media entertainment appear more closely intermingled on a structural level ‒ which is also made clear by the term ‘politainment’ (Diehl 2019, 42; Dörner 2001). At the same time, political debate is currently strongly ‘culturalised’ (Schober and Langenohl 2016), with a ‘clash’ as well as a ‘dialogue of cultures’ becoming publicly manifest, especially through the presence of images and visual stagings.

This interweaving of political representation with visual culture and (popular) arts, which characterises the present, however, is still frequently contrasted with research methods that draw sharp divides between politics and culture and neglect or even completely hide the cultural dimensions of the political. In recent times, it is true that various scholars have shown it is necessary to consider how a symbolic and imaginary dimension of the political is lived (Buck-Morss 2011; Diehl 2022; Klonk 2021; Schober 2009). In political participation studies, scholars have advanced a visual theory and methods perspective for research on social movements, digital media, storytelling and political mobilisation (Doerr, Mattoni, and Teune 2013; Schober 2013). In this tradition, sociologists and political scientists have also advanced a visual methods perspective drawing on art historians, gender, and critical, multimodal discourse theorists (Doerr and Milman 2014). Media scholars and political and cultural sociologists have studied conflicts about democracy as contentious visual politics, for example, in the field of gay rights (Safaian and Teune 2022), far-right political mobilisation (Awad, Doerr, and Nissen 2022), racial justice, gender, and migration (Milman and Doerr 2023). In parallel, a growing number of political philosophers and theorists (Habermas 2001; Mendonça, Ercan, and Asenbaum 2022; Rancière 2013) have set out to include considerations of the visual and aesthetic in general in the analysis of political processes. However, they often continue to neglect the empirical dimension of visual practices and pictorial action, and continue to leave out the obstinacy of images (Hessler and Mersch 2009) and its effects on political activity ‒ among other things, these include the stating, tendentially affirmative role of the pictorial, the creation of connections at a glance and of patterns associated with it, and the difficulties of weighing arguments in pictorial representations. At the same time, the concept of the political imaginary (Wulf 2014, 51–67) as a whole also frequently continues to be left out, and the symbolic is not included in the concept of political representation – a point that Diehl (2019, 51–53) elaborates on.

However, desiderata can also be identified in the way the political is dealt with in the studies of visual culture and in ‘Bildwissenschaften’. In recent years, there have been increasing attempts to productively link political theory and political and social science approaches with visual culture studies (Cambre 2014; Klonk 2017; Maase, Mayerhauser, and Reneggli 2006; Schneider and Nocke 2014; Schober 2019). Nevertheless, the political often remains highly under-theorised and art historians and visual studies scholars still frequently proceed from isolated works of art and do not take into account the fact that images tend to generate public effects by being positioned in relation to each other. They are always used to respond to other visual settings in public space, which means that pictorial settings can aesthetically and politically challenge or reject representations of other artworks or visual interventions, or they can connect with yet others and confirm their aesthetic-political formulations (Schober 2020). This Special Section of the journal Visual Studies addresses these desiderata in political science and political sociology, as well as in visual culture studies and ‘Bildwissenschaften’ ‒ it sets out with the claim to subject these disciplines to greater discussion, inspiration, and mutual questioning.

Using works by the artist collective GCC, Daniel Berndt explores the possibility of expressing implicit critique in contemporary authoritarian societies, such as the Gulf States, which makes it possible to circumvent censorship and move ‘diplomatically’ between a local and an international public sphere. This collective re-enacts diplomatic rituals and bureaucratic processes of these states and especially the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which are often characterised by a rhetoric of positivity, prosperity and happiness, and combines these re-enactments with appropriation, abstraction and humour. The aesthetic language of GCC is discussed in relation to official visual political campaigns, like the one launched by the UAE in connection with its ‘Vision 2021’ agenda, in which everyday symbols are used to publicly exhibit authority, promote national identity and practice self-glorification. The article also provides an insight into the emergence of a contemporary art scene in the Arab Gulf States and its patronage, based for example in Kuwait. Furthermore, Berndt explores differences in the reception of these works in the Gulf States, and in Europe or the US. In this context, he points out that the work of the collective also confronts phenomena associated with the internet, such as images going viral, branding and advertising campaigns linked to references to contemporary post-human discourses with the above-mentioned aesthetics of subversive mimicry, and over-identification, which resonates especially in the Western art world.

Another article, by Ana Cristina Mendes, also deals with a re-enactment. It centres on the re-enactment of the pose of the Syrian refugee child Alan Kurdi, who washed ashore dead on a Bodrum beach in Turkey in September 2015 (photographed by the Turkish journalist Nilüfer Demir), by the well-known Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. In 2015, in the middle of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, Nilüfer Demir’s picture had already triggered debates and produced controversial discourses. Ai Weiwei's re-enactment took place in 2016 on the beach in Lesbos and was performed by a well-known celebrity artist and public intellectual who through this act physically exposed himself to an audience. It was captured in the form of a black-and-white photograph by Rohit Chawla, to be featured on the cover of the news magazine India Today and in the accompanying exhibition at the India Art Fair, and also provoked a fierce controversy, which Mendes traces in her article. She deals at length with what is often missing in the linkages between methods of political sociology and studies of visual culture, focusing in particular on the fact that the level of imagination is usually left out, especially in the context of contemporary crises. In this context, she makes concepts such as ‘civic imagination’ and ‘civic creativity’ fruitful for a discussion of Ai Weiwei’s re-enactment and its circulation in the form of a black-and-white photo, alongside Michel Foucault’s ‘parrēsia’ (speaking truth) and Roland Barthes’ ‘punctum’ and ‘studium’. This leads her to argue that the re-enactment and the controversy it provokes also gives the precursor image a different valence of signification, updating its punctum and studium in relation to two interconnected crises of the present: the refugee crisis and the inadequate European response to it, and a crisis of modern democracy, as respect for human rights is integral to contemporary manifestations of democratic governance.

Tehila Sade’s contribution also deals with political art, more specifically with the extensive photo series by the Polish artist Łukasz Baksik and the Israeli artist Simcha Shirmanin. Both use photography to address the expression of memory in public space through gravestones and their use or appropriation. In her broad discussion of these works, the author is not concerned with deconstructing grand narratives and social structures, but her interest also starts with the political and visual imagination that is set in motion by such works. Her thesis is that these works are an intervention in ways of seeing. The thematisation of graves and gravestones as sites of memory opens a democratic space within which histories can be conceived and expressed in ways that differ from dominant historical narratives. Thus, the political dimension of these works, in her reading, is that they change the place and status assigned to a particular memory, from the invisible to a visible re-anchoring of identity that oscillates between belonging and foreignness and is characterised by ambivalences.

A more explicitly cultural-sociological and empirical approach is taken by Jaworsky, Rétiová and Binder, who also deal with the topic of refugee photography in their essay. In their analysis, they refer in detail to the theory of the ‘civil sphere’ developed by Alexander (2006) and combine it with the symbolic boundaries theory of Lamont and Molnar (2002). These authors also indicate in detail the blind fields that exist in relation to the visuality of social life in these two theories. They argue that these approaches are unable to recognise and account for visibility as a fundamental and inescapable dimension of modern societies. To address this, they present a selection of press photographs related to migration, and the perceptions of migrants in the Czech Republic, between about 2015 and 2020, of a larger number of Czech citizens from five selected localities or cities. In the interviews with this group on their assessments, views and perceptions of migration, they included the questioning method of photo-elicitation at the end of each interview. The authors, therefore, did not analyse the photos themselves or address their aesthetics, but rather what was associated with them in the interviews and how they were interpreted. The thesis developed by the authors is that photo elicitation provides insight into processes of meaning production, especially when the research participants are invited not only to describe photographs but also to interpret them and to reflect self-observations and reflections.

The contribution by Anwesha Chakraborty and Alice Mattoni also argues from an explicitly sociological and empirical perspective. As a contribution that extends research on visual re-enactments of democracy toward social movements and digital media in the Global South, the authors study three bottom-up civil society organisations and collective actors in India and their use of visuals (images, cartoons, graphic layout) to advocate for greater transparency and the curbing of corruption and to communicate their mission to an audience. Chakraborty and Mattoni focus on visuals shared by these civil society initiatives on their Facebook pages, showing how images and visual graphics that the groups are working on are particularly important for the framing of public understandings of the anti-corruption issues at stake. The contribution of the authors advances and extends visual frame analysis toward a broader and deeper analysis of visual culture. Their argument is that the intricate network of power relations in which activists are positioned shapes their visual framing of anti-corruption politics. Visual creations such as cartoons make negotiations between local power holders and other actors in respect to corruption, for example, somehow visible to a broader public of social media platforms, and thus contributes to stirring a debate about these issues.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole Doerr

Nicole Doerr is an associate professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. Doerr's work focuses on visual and critical discursive approaches to democracy, far-right political mobilization, gender, and digital storytelling, and on the politics of translation in social movements working on questions of democracy, climate change, migration, and social justice.

Anna Schober

Anna Schober is professor of Visual Culture at the Department of Cultural Analysis at Klagenfurt University. Schober's work uses visual studies, discourse analysis and political iconology approaches to investigate the history and aesthetics of the public sphere, political cinema and art movements, populism, popularisation practices in relation to climate change, contemporary political art and the picturing of gender and ethnicity.

Notes

1 https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/in-the-spotlight/stan-douglas-at-the-venice-biennale-2011-1848 (last accessed August 29 2023).