positively protest aesthetics revisited simon sheik

7/27/2019 Positively Protest Aesthetics Revisited Simon Sheik

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Simon Sheikh

PositivelyProtest

AestheticsRevisited

The relationship between picturing andpoliticking has long been a concern of politicalmovements, as well as of politically mindedartists. And so both asked: how to makerepresentations political without being caughtup in the politics of representation? How to bepolitically ÒcorrectÓ in oneÕs production ofimages? These were, famously, the problemsposed by Walter BenjaminÕs essay on the artist

as producer, a text that Hito Steyerl deliberatelymirrors, if not quotes, in her polemical essayÒThe Articulation of Protest.Ó Her text also gainednotoriety almost instantaneously when it wasfirst published on the by-now-legendaryrepublicart website shortly after the WTOprotests in Seattle in 1999, an event Ð mostcrucially, one that was broadcasted throughIndymedia Ð that became one of the twoexamples employed by Steyerl in herinvestigation of two terms: articulation andmontage.1

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe first term, articulation, stems frompolitical theory, and the second, montage, fromfilmmaking, and together as well as apart theyare put into play by Steyerl in connection withpolitical action. And this is exactly where thepolemics and controversy lie: how does onedepict a political movement, and how does amovement visualize itself? If there is anaesthetics of protest Ð as suggested by theIndymedia film production Showdown in Seattle,as well as the historical example Steyerlcontrasts it with, Godard and MievilleÕs Here andElsewhere Ð is there also a set of imagesproduced by the protest itself, and not onlythrough representations of it? In other words,Steyerl asks if a movement organizes itselfaround a sequence of images, around what shecalls a montage:

How are different protest movementsmediated with one another? Are theyplaced next to one another, in other wordssimply added together, or related to oneanother in some other way?

Although both examples are used as just that, asexamples of political imagery, it is clear thatSteyerl has more sympathy for Godard andMievilleÕs agonizing over possible juxtapositionsof images than for IndymediaÕs journalisticclaims of authenticity, which have obviouslyirked many media activists and Indymediaassociates alike.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhat is at stake is the very nature of theassemblage Ð whether images are placed next toeach other on a single visual plane orsequentially, as the famous minimalist dictum

would have it. Steyerl suggests that this is not sosimple an operation, not politically, aesthetically,

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Sergei Eisenstein, filmstill from Bezhin Meadow, 1937.

or, for that matter, political-aesthetically, sinceimages in a montage always follow each other ina particular sequence, an order that formsmeaning and discourse, that produces thesubject of politics. So the order of the sequenceconstitutes the movementÕs articulation, not itsexpression: with montage articulation alwaysbecomes narration through the decision toinclude this image and not that one, to place this

image before that one, or this image after thatone, and so forth. And this is precisely where thedispute over image production resides. I havemet several media activists who read no furtherthan SteyerlÕs opening gambit, not because ofthe essayÕs level of abstraction, but due to theimplications for political imaging as politicalaction.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊOr, to put it more concretely: the cameraÕsplacement in the field of action during actualprotests, as well as how, and how quickly, thecaptured images are edited and distributed,

mean that action, and presence within the fieldand temporality of action, dictate how the imageis produced, and thus how a protest isrepresented rather than any predeterminedaesthetic program. SteyerlÕs critics havefrequently made the counter-argument thatthere is no time for aesthetic reflection in the

very moment, the very act, of filming during aprotest, and that camera placement, and thusangles and frames, are purely pragmatic andcircumstantial. The sort of stylistic awarenessfound in Godard and MievilleÕs film is a luxury onesimply cannot afford on the front lines of battle:the camera needs to be right here, right now, inorder to capture as much of the truth aspossible. It is a matter of truth production, of

having as many images as possible to counterthe propaganda of the news media, shot by shot,frame by frame. And it obviously suggests anidea of the struggle over images rather unlike theone proposed by Godard and Mieville in theirwork, and by Steyerl as well. Without disputingthe realities of being and filming in the middle ofa demonstration, perhaps we can say that thevery decision to place the camera and oneÕs ownbody between police and protesters constitutesnot only a political, but also an aestheticdecision: filmmaker as reporter as much as artist

as producer? The placement of the camera andfilmmaker thus not only assumes a certainnotion of the factual, but also produces it, andsuch filmmaking tactics always privilege certainevents and produce certain sequences.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWithin such a discourse and visual regime,the production of images is placed in a montage

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of elements that is temporal, not so much interms of sequence (how one image followsanother), but rather in terms of velocity, in termsof speed and politics. There is no time forslowing down the image, for recomposing it, butonly for the belief in capturing the image in themoment and of the moment, which is why editingneeds to be fast and even minimal, in order todistribute the message as quickly as possible,

preferably live. While the newscast style of a filmlike Showdown in Seattle was meant as acounterpoint to mainstream news media,applying the same sequentiality to other,presumably more truthful images than are widelyavailable, there are in this also implications thatgo beyond film and speak to the verycomposition of the political movement itself,articulated through a montage of signs, images,and texts. Montage here becomes the form thatarticulates not only a chain of equivalence interms of struggles Ð in the sense given to the

term by the principal political theorist ofarticulation, Ernesto Laclau Ð but also anequivalence with even the images meant to becounterattacked. The images produced in thisparticular war of information, then, are notcontested, and thus no antagonism is produced.This is what Steyerl problematizes as a politicsof the Òand,Ó of accumulative montage:

Is this a simple case of the principle ofunproblematic addition, a blind Òand,Ó thatpresumes that if sufficient numbers ofdifferent interests are added up, at somepoint the sum will be the people?

A sobering question indeed.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn place of the flattening tendencies ofaddition and equivalence, Steyerl proposesexponentiation as another principle of montage.The example here is Godard and MievilleÕs Hereand Elsewhere, which was itself a reframing of anunfinished film about Palestine that Godard hadshot with Gorin in 1970. But rather than use extrafootage or narration to complete the film, Godardand Mieville chose to make a film about the

unfinished film, questioning its basic features ofcomposition and/or politics. The very notion ofthe ÒandÓ and its politics of addition wassupplanted by an Òor,Ó in which images andideologies cancel each other out and stand inconflictual relation as much as they establishequivalences. The war of information is renderedas an image war, suggesting that images cannotmerely exist side-by-side in the formation ofpolitical movements, but must also sometimeserase one another, creating depresentations aswell as representations.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊWhat is most striking about SteyerlÕs text,however, is not only how it deals with images and

the politics of image-making, but how it showsthe importance of images in forming politicalidentities. Whereas (political) theory is oftenemployed in writings on art and culture foranalytical or critical purposes, Steyerl turns thisequation around and instead uses theory as amethod taken from artistic production itself Ðfrom the use of montage Ð and turns it towardspolitics, not analyzing aesthetics using politics,

but analyzing politics using aesthetics. Althoughspeaking from a different position than, say,Deep Dish TV, Steyerl nonetheless speaks fromthe trenches, as well as from a practice Ð namelythat of a filmmaker, who is thus engaged in a warof position with regard to images. In many ways,her essay can be seen as a companion piece toher contemporaneous film November Ð itself anessay on the montage-like relationship betweenimages and politics. In this way, an ideologicalcritique of images must pass through theproduction of images, with the critic as producer.

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Simon Sheikh is a curator and critic. He is currentlyassistant professor of art theory and coordinator ofthe Critical Studies program at the Malmš ArtAcademy in Sweden. He was the director of theOvergaden Institute for Contemporary Art inCopenhagen from 1999 to 2002 and a curator at NIFCA,Helsinki, from 2003 to 2004. He was editor of themagazine ¯jeblikket from 1996 to 2000 and a memberof the project group GLOBE from 1993 to 2000.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ1Hito Steyerl, ÒThe Articulation ofProtest,Ó republicart (September2002),http://www.republicart.net/disc/mundial/steyerl02_en.htm .

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positively protest aesthetics revisited simon sheik

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