I'd been in bed since I arrived and was coughing incessantly. Dr. Marissa, a Filipino general practitioner, said that it was a good sign. It meant that I was still alive. "You're allergic to the dust—to the dirt," which filled the air and always would. I asked her what I should do. She told me to go home, to leave the country. I said I couldn't. She asked me why, and I had no answer. I must have looked scared. Dr.Marissa smiled. She'd been away from home for 16 years. She told me that "the heart wants, what the heart wants," and that my body would adjust. It did.
I've always been interested in political science and particular ideas around the "development" of the South. I have lived in countries with corrupt governments backed by the IMF (International Monetary Fund), and authoritarian leaders accidentally appointed by the UN (United Nations). In the realm of political science, I can discern the interrelationships of labour rights, the withholding of medical treatments, political prisoners, forced displacement and food insecurity. I understand the unknowables: the language, the rethinking, the strategies, the history, the colonialism in which we now put the prefix "neo". And in all of this, or perhaps despite it, where is the art and how do we know what it looks like? When most urgently needed, it can feel like the answers do not exist.
In Cambodia, 2012, the re-emerging art community faced barriers that didn't fully allow for that dialogue. "The fear of [galleries] shut[ing] down at random, of threats against artists — one was recently told he'd have his hands cut off — terrifies me. People here just disappear. It's not about the law, it's about what goes unsaid. That's why self-censorship is so rampant”.[1] It can be challenging to see from the inside, but there is resilience and resistance even when we must conform to the things that oppress us.
This is an example of what makes the nattering of is art political? or should it be? or what ought to be the role of the artist, lazy questions. They are questions looking for resolve, of which we have none. The relationships between image-making, violence and censorship are complex. The camera has long been a tool of war— propaganda, documentation, information dissemination. Although Walter Benjamin was highly critical of the photographic enterprise, he "understood the subjective power of the photograph—its spooky ability to make us want to enter the world it depicts and even, sometimes, change it. Indeed, it is this potential spur to identification and action that so distinguishes photography from painting. For Benjamin, the photograph wasn't a fixed, dead thing. On the contrary, it could embrace past, present, and future: the photograph was a document of history and possibility".[2] With the pedestrian use of cameras almost from the beginning, the availability to create digital photographs has further democratized and transformed the speed in which images are disseminated. The photographic genre of people about to be murdered is not new or exclusive. One can quickly think about the fanatic image-making during Nazi Germany and the portraits taken by the Khmer Rouge (see fig 1). Guantánamo Bay has brought not only still images but a plethora of digital videos celebrating both state directive and individually initiated "enhanced interrogation techniques"—systematic torture. Al-Qaeda's taken it further and lets us watch executions live-streamed.
Fig.1. Some of the 6,000 recovered portraits of victims at S-21, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Education First Cambodia, 9, Dec. 2019, www.educationfirstcambodia.org
We have been conditioned to hear about or see representations of violence through popular media, most commonly delivered in a journalistic style, where reality and spectacle are delivered with conditioned detachment.[3]There are discomforts and contusions about how these images should exist in the world and our relationship to them. Where should these photographs be kept, and who is the keeper of them? Should we look at these pictures, and what does it mean if we do, or if we don't?
“There are many who say we should not. In fact, it is images of the Holocaust that provoke the angriest objections to the very existence of so-called atrocity photographs and to the activity of viewing them. To look at such pictures, some critics argue, is to place ourselves—not just physically but morally, too—in the position of the original photographer, which is to say a killer. Once we look at such photographs, we too wear coats and ties and fedoras while others are stripped of their clothes, their dignity, their lives; we too have neither pity nor decency; we too watch in smug safety while others crumple in fear. These critics, who might be called the "rejectionists," claim that such photographs—taken, obviously, without the victims' consent and designed to degrade—are not just documentations of cruelty but are the acting-out of cruelty. In this they are surely right. What makes their stance problematic, however, is their further insistence that to look at such photographs, as opposed to taking them, can only revictimize the victims and recreate the original crimes. In their view, we are all Nazis now—or will be if . . . we dare to look backwards at things we shouldn't”.[4]
And that is the question, isn't it? Do we dare to look back? By its very nature, trauma is an unnameable entity defying language and instead exists in memories. In the equation of art + politics + trauma, what we can agree on is that the responsibility of the viewer is important. The viewer has obligations. These responsibilities are not given a pass when images and objects transcend explicit political accounting and become "art". The artist is often the caretaker in the aftermath, playing more than a supporting role. Visual art can provide a complex language for communicating the many dimensions of historical and collective trauma and beyond that create the potential to "disrupt the experience of viewing traumatic images and create the possibility for multifaceted empathic reactions in the viewer".[5]
Betty Goodwin’s drawings and paintings are successful at eliciting this empathy. In her works, both large scale and intimately sized, there is a longing, unmistakable loneliness and an unnameable loss. In the Red Sea, a drawing with two figurative forms, one floating in a wash of oranges and reds with the head cropped (see fig.2). The other figure capsized, hangs back to back with their arm extended downward in muddier waves of green and red and an exposition of violent light extruding from their chest. The source image for Goodwin was “a press photograph of the bodies of two Dutch journalists murdered by a right-wing death squad in El Salvador. But in Goodwin's hands, the horror becomes more generalized, less a specific event than part of the human condition”.[6]
Fig.2. Goodwin, Betty. Red Sea. 1984. Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Oil pastel, dry pastel, oil and charcoal on velum paper, 304.8 × 213.3 cm.
Doris Salcedo is consumed. Guided by political violence, her work points back to the individual—to the loved one. When the elevator doors opened on the 4th floor of The Art Institute of Chicago, I felt like I had been shot. I couldn't breathe—none of us could—no one spoke. Pairs of inverted wooden tables with a layer of soil between them filled the room and mimicked that of a graveyard. You could taste the dust. Poking through was the occasional blade of grass. They were unexpected, and I emotionally and grievously clung to them without knowing why. It felt like a mother's desperation. Plegaria Muda (Silent Prayer) came from Salcedo's research of gang-related shootings in south-central Los Angeles (see fig.3). The work's physical repetition underscores the continuum of violence. It can quickly cross different cultural contexts, and we can be led to think about the young people in impoverished rural areas being murdered by members of the Colombian Army. The reverberations of gun violence are united, and this work viscerally reminds us of the ease in which we can forget the suffering of others.
Fig.3. Salcedo, Doris. Plegaria Muda. 2008-2010. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Teresa Margolles works with marginalized people who are openly assaulted—trans-people, sex-trade workers, women and Indigenous communities in Mexico. Her work too transcends geography and cultural context. La Busqueda (The Search) is a three-glass panel installation (see fig.4). Each piece of glass stands independently in a wooden frame. The glass is thick with dirt and finger marks. These objects have been directly transferred from the center of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The graffiti on them is forgettable, but the Xerox copies of women’s faces and personal details wheat-pasted onto the glass is not (see fig.5). All the women are missing. The installation vibrates with the frequency of a train passing by. This work feels dark, and it is angry; it’s heart-wrenching. These missing women and girls could be our sisters. It is the same women and girls and trans-people who are missing in Colombia, and they are the same persons who are missing across Canada. They are the ones we try to build community around to keep safe, but systems of political power and neglect still rapes and leaves them for dead.
Fig.4. Margolles, Teresa. Doris. La Busqueda. 2014. Venice Biennale installation. Intervention with sound frequency. Three glass panels with wood frame, 181 x 286 x 120; 96.5 x 286 x 120; 132.5 x 286 x 120 cm.
In particular, Margolles installation works are "strengthened by the temporal quality of storytelling . . . and the overall importance of the object as it is inserted into that narrative. In this way, the object becomes integral evidence to the narrative's status as testimony".[7] Objects in this way can relate to a "larger history of trauma and how the construction of narrative is used to bring self-awareness to the viewer's sense of mortality and collective experience".[8]
Fig. 5 (detail). Margolles, Teresa. Doris. La Busqueda. 2014. Venice Biennale installation.