NOTES
- Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT P, 1983) 185.
- Emmanuel Levinas, “Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other” Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia UP, 1998) 221.
- See Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon” Collected Essays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, vol. 1, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988) 23–38.
- Irit Rogoff, “Art/Theory/Elsewhere,” “Dossier on Documenta 11,” Texte zur Kunst (August, 2002).
- Okwui Enwezor, “At Home in the World: African Writers and Artists in ‘Ex-Ile’,” Kunst-Welten in Dialog: Von Gauguin zur Globalen Gegenwart, ed. Marc Scheps, Yilmaz Dziewior and Barbara M. Thiemann (Koln: Dumont, 1999) 330–6.
- Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone P, 2000) 33.
- I borrow the notion of indiscipline from Barbara Vanderlinden and Jens Hoffman's curatorial project “Indiscipline” where they, along with a multifaceted group of practitioners, explored the nature of creative agency in the face of the breakdown between disciplines and forms of art in Brussels in 2000. See Barbara Vanderlinden and Jens Hoffman, Indiscipline (Brussels: Roomade, 2000) unpaginated brochure.
- ibid.
- See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd Ed, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998). Arendt's discussion of Vita Adiva, in which she identifies three forms of human activity—labor, work, and action—as the fundamental condition of life, as that which invests positive content in all human life, is important in the context of the idea of bio-politics. See also Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 267. Foucault comments that in the discourse of bio-politics “what we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more than the law that became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning rights. The ‘right’ to life, to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienations,’ the ‘right'—which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending—was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty”.
- In his humanist-oriented essay The Three Ecologies, Guattari spells out an interesting program of thought that reiterates the debate on the human in what he calls Ecosophy. In this philosophy, in which he deals with the disastrous consequences for the present ecological system based on man-made changes, there is a triangulation of what he calls an “ethico-political articulation… between the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity…” Guattari, The Three Ecologies 28. He brings these three intersecting questions to rest on the “ecosophic problematic… of the production of human existence itself in new historical contexts”. Ibid 34.
- For the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights see www.un.org/Overview/rights
- Michel Foucault, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vinceno Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000) 7.
- Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003). Lucid and mesmerizing, Sontag attacks the pervasive contemporary apperception of images of violence, the blind stare which detaches itself from the “Pain of Others” through recourse to absurd rationalisations.
- See Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1998) for a scrupulous and moving account of the convergence of two positions of the victim in the historic debate on the politics of dispossession.
- Jean Baudrillard pushed this form of argument to a new level of absurdity in his book The Gulf War did not Happen. Baudrillard s canard deploys his familiar theory of the simulacrum in which all representation disappears into the image, with mass media serving as the screen (both in the literal sense and in the sense of concealment) through which we perceive reality, in order to insist that what the first Gulf War amounted to was nothing more than a media spectacle, a virtualization of the image of war that distorts the actuality of that war. While one can certainly agree that the American prosecution of the war gave the impression of the war as an electronic video screen in the early days of the war, subsequent documentary footage of bombed out Baghdad and the infamous “highway of death” refutes the excitation of over theorization provided by his analysis. Sontag's point is that all too often, we shy away from the terrible suffering because we search for an enlightened response that absolves us from seeing what lies immediately before our field of perception.
- Ariella Azoulay, Death's Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy, trans. Ruvik Danieli (Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 2001) 4.
- For Kant's aesthetic theory from which much debate on the question of the aesthetic in art draws see his 1764 essay “The Sense of the Beautiful and of the Sublime” in Philosophy of Immannuel Kant: Immanuel Kant's Moral and Political Writings, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: The Modern Library, 1949).
- WB. Yeats, “Easter 1916,” The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, ed. Richard Finneran (New York: MacMillan, 1989).
- For a full account of Kein Mensch ist Illegal's work see Florian Schneider/Kein Mensch ist Illegal, “New Rules of the New Actonomy 3.0,” Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11—Platform 1, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Sarat Maharaj, et al. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002)179-93; see also http://new.actonomy.org for further development of its work.
- Sarat Maharaj's essay in Education, Information, Entertainment. Current Approaches on Higher Artistic Education, ed. Ute Meta Bauer (Vienna: Edition Selene, 2001).
- Ruth Wodak, “Inequality, Democracy and Parliamentary Discourses,” Democracy Unrealized, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, Octavio Zaya (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002) 151–68.
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego and New York: Harcourt, 1968). For a particularly thorough analysis of the development of the concept of race as justification for, and incitement to, dispossession of civil and human rights see the chapter “Race and Bureaucracy” 185–221.
- In Europe in the last decade there has been a particularly intense upsurge of racist far right and neo-Nazi political parties such as Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in France, Jorg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria, Filip Dewinter's Vlaams Blok in Belgium, Pim Fortuyn ‘s Lijst Pim Fortuyn in Holland, the election of the nationalist right wing ruling party in Denmark, amongst others entering into the political mainstream. The spectacular results achieved by Le Pen and Haider in recent elections makes clear that these developments are part of the mainstreaming of racial discourse in the affirmative populist politics and culture, especially in Europe. See for example Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Crisis,” Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstcin, Racism, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London:Verso, 1991) 217–27.
- See W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989) first published in 1903. Dubois was perhaps the first thinker to draw our attention to the question of race in modernity. In “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” the second section of his classic treatment of race and the American experience, he writes: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men [sic] in Asia and Africa, in America and Islands of the sea.” One hundred years after Dubois's treatise, Paul Gilroy in a recent work Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap/Havard UP, 2000) has taken up and extended this theme in a powerful anti-clerical critique of the persistence of racial discourse in contemporary culture.
- More than any other group of thinkers it is revolutionary third-world, anti-colonial intellectuals who foregrounded bio-politics more than class as the founding principle of all political and cultural struggles. See for example Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markham (New York: Grove Press, 1967) particularly the chapter “The Negro and Recognition.” The concluding passage of the chapter sketches the degree to which the struggle for the conception of the human has been made the object of all ethical and political considerations of otherness. Fanon writes in this passage: “I said in my introduction that man is a yes. I will never stop reiterating that. Yes to Life. Yes to love. to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom”.
- For a full treatment of this subject see Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudieez (NewYork, Columbia UP, 1991).
- Recent anti-globalization battles in Seattle, Prague, Montreal Genoa, Guadalajara are instances of the kind “unbounded” and “undisciplined” work being taken up by certain forms of political art. There is now a recognition, even in such insular clubs as the Davos Economic Summit in Switzerland, of the importance of culture as an instrument of economic policy discussion. The organizers of Davos have since began inviting “cultural producers” to its discussions on global governance.
- For a fruitful reading of the task of the artist operating under the understanding of a political commitment, see Walter Benjamin's essay “The Author as Producer,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schoken, 1978) 220–38; see also Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988) for his elaboration of the notion of committed literature.
- Alfredo Jaar, It is Difficult: Ten Years and Let There be Light: The Rwanda Project, 1994–1998 (Barcelona: Actar, 1998).
- A particularly disconcerted view of the exhibition could be read in the alarmed review of Blake Gopnik the art critic of The Washington Post whose article drew out of thin air the bizarre notion that the exhibition was anti-American. See Blake Gopnik, “Fully Freighted Art: At Documenta 11, A Bumpy Ride for Art World's Avant-Garde,” Washington Post (June 16, 2002). Another view of the evangelical, puritanical attitude of the exhibition was offered by Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, in his article, “Global Art Show With an Agenda,” The New York Times (June 18,2002).
- Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (NewYork: New Press, 1997) 111.
- Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001) 42.
- ibid 44.
- See Boris Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation,” for a highly nuanced discussion of the relationship between reality and representation of life as a social fact within certain forms of artistic practice in Documenta 11_Platform5: Exhibition, ed. Okwui Enwezor et al. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002) 108–14.
- See Kim Levin, “Art in an International State of Emergency: The CNN Documenta,” The Village Voice (July 3–9, 2002).
- See Linda Nochlin, “Documented Success,” Artforum (September 2002): 159–63
- A more apt term might be the distinction made by Walker Evans between the “documentary style” and the documentary as a form.
- From its earliest invention television has in one form or other experimented with a visual sensorium directed at the recording and experience of reality in its most direct, unedited aspect. From early incarnations such as Candid Camera (a not so subtle allusion to the truthfulness of the camera) to the mushrooming variations on the theme of “Reality Television,” this fascination with “real” life is brought to a new level. What's impressive about this turn is how “Reality Television” combines techniques of surveillance and spectacle, thereby putting into question the claim of a documented reality. The tradition of the documentary however goes back to the very beginning of cinema in films by the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison and has remained impressively strong despite increasing misgivings about its accuracy, first in ethnographic films (one thinks of the controversy that continues to plague Flaherty's seminal ethno-documentary film Nanook of the North) and today in the news media.
- For a magisterial treatment of anti-ocularcentrism see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994)
- The circumstance of suicide has not been fully clarified. It's unclear therefore whether the suicide was a result of the commotion caused by this particular picture or due to other problems. Any inference of a connection to the publicity surrounding this image and his death is not intended here.
- See Benjamin Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117–45
- See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1994).
- Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller- Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999) 12.
- See Matthew Higgs, “Same Old Same Old,” Artforum (September 2002): 166–7
- See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982) 126–31.
- Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1994).
- Sontag makes this point in Regarding the Pain of Others.
- See Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982)194–210:
- See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1974).
- Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000) 2–3.
- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 27–8.
- W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995) 281.
- Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes 18.