> In "In Plato's Cave," Susan Sontag recounts a parable of
> photographic appropriation in Jean-Luc Godard's "Les Carabiniers." The
> main characters of the story, Michel-Ange and Ulysse, open suticases of
> loot only to find them full of postcards ("Monuments, Departments
> Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art,
> and other clasified treasures from around the globe"). This is a classic
> junction of pictures (as a visual component of image-making) with the
> urban. Paris is the Eiffel Tower. San Francisco is the Golden Gate
> Bridge (or TransAmerica). Berlin is... NOT the TV-Tower, because it was
> built by the Socialists. Kassel is the documenta, or at least its logo.
> Where the logo seeks to divert
> its role and capacity to serve as an index of possession, it is easily
> subject to reappropriation within its host system (consumption, art
> tourism,
> urban-festival-economy). Where one seeks to produce against and
> yet within a system of capital production, using that system's tools
> with ambiguity, then it is open to being corrected by that system. Put
> bluntly, the logo seems to have sought to problematize one aspect of
> image making in documenta's urbanistic program. But just as there are
> many limits to the urban networks of the event itself , so is it also
> true of the image-component. Where the "real" documenta poster poses a
> problem, the souvenir complex has a quick solution.
This analysis is fascinating. I'd like to bring it into the image/urban
thread for discussion, because it provides a perfect case study. I
follow with some initial comments, with hopefully more to come.
I like the idea of the picture as a 'visual component of image-making.'
We can see 'the image' in a larger context of image-making procedures,
and the pictures as the visual components that it locates. So, for
example, we have the image of Paris, and a picture of the Eiffel Tower.
What does the picture do? It serves to appropriate the public space in
a commodifiable form, to generate a place for its viewer, and to enforce
a way of seeing. It substitutes, and it does this so effectively that
we take these substitutes 'for' Paris. It would follow that we could
locate architectural substitutes: for example, the mini-France at the
World Showcase at Disney World and the condensed New York in Las Vegas.
These are not urban structures per se, or images, but simply visuals.
However they are visuals that have flipped over into the realm of the
urban, substituting for it, and increasingly overcoming it. Mike Davis
and others have discussed how the emerging shopping structures have gone
beyond malls into ersatz streets, fake urban places that have now become
more real than 'the urban.' And from this it follows that visuals
always involve some sort of policing mechanism. In the ersatz urban
streets that are built entirely for shopping (which is the emerging
default condition of travel, of movement itself), this is in the form of
a surveillance and security system, which evacuates from the public
space all of the danger of real urbanity, in the guise of personal
safety. We welcome this policing because we deem the streets 'unsafe,'
largely because of the perception created by the media, in whose
interest it is (for very many reasons) to create a siege condition. The
flat visual, too, involves a policing mechanism, because it enforces a
normative viewing, often employing perspectival representations in the
senses we discussed early on in this forum, and in the sense of
providing 'visuals to think with' - visuals that provide convenient maps
to all the right places, in the preferred modes of transport.
The visual, then, could be a symbolic or 3d structure that is built in
order to position an embodied subject and pull it along in a trajectory
whose navigation condition is that of shopping, but which we often
register as travel. Not satisfied to simply annex the urban, it must
recreate it with all the wrinkles ironed out. And the urban becomes
'messier' than ever before, because it has come to terms with the visual
such that its discourse no longer calls for a separation between the
authentic and the inauthentic. To sort through it, we must articulate
modalities, complexes, and networks, and locate unconventional actors
(for example, products have become social actors, and soon we will have
to contend with chips in everything, uploading data into the network and
therefore speaking, performing, even if it seems 'primitive') in terms
of image-strategies.
The image, then, is the ground of contestation. The battle for the
terms of the public imagination; the struggle for that which counts, for
that which 'matters.' We know when we are in the realm of the image when
we realize there is something missing, something unspoken, some 'gap.'
It is in this highly political realm that the documenta is positioning
image-strategies as *structural* interventions, not in the sense of the
content-oriented strategies of earlier 'political art.' It wants to
give art practices a political purpose entirely different from the
reductive sense of the political as funneled through the discourses of
multiculturalism. It has to map the 'long view' and provide historical
connections, references, parallels, in order to position contemporary
practices in the globalized context of today.
What are the different forms that the image takes today (as and/dept. of
public works asks)? How does it engage and mobilize its agents? How
does it prompt materializations? If the ground of operations of the
visual is the visual faculty, then what is the operational 'ground' of
the image?
As Brian points out, deCerteau's tactics are no longer adequate. As
Margaret Morse writes, "De Certeau's vision of liberation via
enunciative practices bears the marks of its conception in another time
and place, that is, in a premall, prefreeway, and largely
print-literate, pretelevisual world. In the meantime, in the United
States at least, the very nature of the street and pedestrian activity
as well as the predominant modes and media for linguistic communication
has changed. However, the notion of praxis as enunciation, be it
linguistic, pedestrian, or other, which evades predetermined paths and
escapes from literal reality into an *elsewhere* and to other levels of
consciousness is…one fully contingent with the operation of malls, or
for that matter, freeways and television. Indeed, *distraction* is
based upon the representation of *space* within *place* (in which…space
becomes displaced, a nonspace) and the inclusion of (for de Certeau,
liberating) *elsewheres* and *elsewhens* in the here and now." Morse
then points out that "de Certeau's very means of escape are now designed
into the geometries of everyday life, and his figurative practices of
enunciation ('making do,' 'walking in the city,' or 'reading as
poaching') are modeled in representation itself. Could de Certeau have
imagined, as he wrote on walking as an evasive strategy of
self-empowerment, that there would one day be videocassettes that
demonstrate how to 'power' walk?"
This given, Brian calls for a critical tactic akin to walking (in de
Certeau's sense). Could this critical tactic be located in the
operational 'ground' of the image? Perhaps, given the discussion in the
"Rhythms" thread, we might position a kind of rhythmic realm - one of
routine, frequency, patterned and internalized signal. We can speak of
this as a mode of in/habiting. And here and's questions come to the
fore: "where do these images reside? How do we inhabit them?… What
(different kinds of) movements between evidence, memory, and the
imagination are provoked within processes of image formation,
recollection, and response? How to describe - in terms of both subject
and world - the mutations that arise out of these complex negotiations
and interplay between 'internal' and 'external'?"
Does the relation between images, imagination-activation, and the urban
come down to a struggle in the field of *attention*?
.
-------------------------------------------------------------
a forum on spatial articulations, perspectives, and procedures
texts are the property of individual authors
for information, email majordomo@forum.documenta.de with
the following line in the message body: info blast
archive at http://www.documenta.de/english/blasta.htm
or http://www.documenta.de/deutsch/blasta.htm
documenta X Kassel and http://www.documenta.de 1997
-------------------------------------------------------------