the swimmers - withtank.commedia.withtank.com/a92c76e94c/swimmers.pdfwe shall not cease from...

CARLA LIESCHING

THE SWIMMERS

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

– T.S. Eliot, from Little Gidding, last of The Four Quartets, 1942

Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world...

Martin Heidegger, from A Letter on Humanism, 1947

Identity means, or connotes, the process of identification, of saying that this here is the same as

that, or we are the same together, in this respect. But something we have learnt from the whole

discussion of identification, in feminism and psychoanalysis, is the degree to which that structure

of identification is always constructed through ambivalence. Always constructed through splitting.

Splitting between that which one is, and that which is the other. The attempt to expel the other

to the other side of the universe is always compounded by the relationships of love and desire.

This is a different language from the language of, as it were, the Others who are completely

different from oneself.

This is the other that belongs inside one. This is the other that one can only know from the

place from which one stands. This is the self as it is inscribed in the gaze of the other. And this

notion which breaks down the boundaries, between outside and inside, between those who

belong and those who do not…That the unspoken silence in between that which can be

spoken is the only way to reach for the whole history. There is no other history except to take

the absences and the silences along with what can be spoken. Every thing that can be spoken is

on the ground of the the enormous voices that have not, or cannot yet be heard…

The notion that identity in that sense could be told as two histories, one over here and one over

there, never having spoken to one another, never having anything to do with one another, when

translated from the psychoanalytic to the historical terrain, is simply not tenable any longer in

an increasingly globalized world. It is just not tenable any longer.”

Stuart Hall, from “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities”, 2000

Andrew

2010Giclée print on archival paper100 x 100cmEdition size: 3 + 2AP

Ann吳安榮


Antonia


Benjamin


Candice


Daniel


Dylan


Ed


Furanku彭郁仁


Goitsione


Jasmin陳采欣


Jason


Jerry


Joanna王韻晴


Joni


Kate


Lourika


Martin


Mmakgosi


Mpho


Musa


Navarre


Sonja


Thabiso


Xanthe


A longing to belong, a striving to find oneself in the world, is both the originator and the result of each wave of colonisation – ideological colonisation included – and the foundation of the post-colonial head space. In historical periods before ours, this impulse has been satisfied by a confidence in structures of power – be that the authority of teachers, the trustworthiness of policemen or the righteousness of our gender and racial groups. Our age, bent towards quick, easily-accessible infor-mation in vast quantities, has suffered from disillusionment in each and every one of the power structures that have been put into place to govern our lives.

Our sense of instability is heightened by the nature of the contemporary family1 which, whether the result of wilful curiosity or necessary acts of survival, is invariably dispersed across continents, with imaginary lines dividing them and ‘the sea …a splendid marker.’2 In our digital age, seemingly borderless electronic communications networks, fast-changing economies and the ease of world travel has increased the flow of migrants around the world. This, in turn, has intensified demographic diversity in every country and triggered a weakening of national identities – as some will even assert, the weakening of a belief in the nation state itself.3 Ironically, this has resulted in a further lock down on security policies

The Swimmers is an on-going series, presented here as an archive of 25 large, limited edition photographs, depicting almost-life-size figures, standing alone in various urban and natural land-scapes. Liesching uses her swimmers to explore the link between space and identity and how we think of home. The work has grown out of a state of being that is a defining trait of Liesching’s generation: a sense of displacement, an awareness of foreignness and a search for belonging that cannot be tied to one fixed geographical or ideological place.

1. I use the word “family” in a broad sense to refer to groupings of people, whether biological, national, racial or ethnic.

2. J. M. Roberts. 1985. The Triumph Of The West. London: British Broadcasting Association.

3. Gabriel asserts, in his “Globalisation, ethnic identities and the Media” (in Whitewash: Racialized politics and the media. 1998. London: Routledge), that a necessary distinction should be made between the terms “nation-state” and “nationalism”. While “nationalism” may be on its last legs, the ideological death of the “nation state” has been contested on the grounds that ‘the world economy, for all its transnational links, remains an inter(national) system.

Project Statement

between international borders. Add to that the isolating tendencies of the mass media and the politicisation of most aspects of individual lives and we have a magnificent recipe for an identity lost within this maelstrom which we can, at the risk of reductionism, call “globalisation”.

Within the context of contemporary identity theory (and in the wake of Marx, Freud, Lacan, Saussure) it goes without saying that “identity” can be viewed as a fiction: a series of instances, narrating something that we believe to be an integrated self. This applies not only to individual or personal identity but also to the collective identities of various social and ethnic groupings of people on a global level. In seeking an understanding of the ways that identities have been formed before, I have found Stuart Hall’s comments useful, ‘[T]he great collective social identities which we thought of as large-scale, all-encompassing, homogeneous [and] unified…which indeed positioned, stabilised, and allowed us to understand and read, almost as a code, the imperatives of the individual self…These collective identities were formed in…the huge, long-range historical processes which have produced the modern world.’4 It is inevitable that with the unravelling of the ‘modern world’, comes the destabilising – even obliteration – of an “authentic” identity which is static and rooted.

The Swimmers positions itself within this discourse. Although the photographs may be considered “portraits”, they do not attempt to accomplish the traditional5 aim of the genre – that being to capture and portray some sense of the sitter’s personality. The people in the images act as signs, pointing to a possible imaginary portrait of the collective psyche, as impacted by progress.

The practice of photographic portraiture has long been embroiled in the quest to define human identity, and one might even accuse the medium of assisting in the production

4. S. Hall. 2000. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities”. In L. Back & J. Solomos (eds.). Theories of Race and Rascism: A Reader. London: Routledge

5. By “traditional” I refer to the dominant belief at the time of invention of the first photographic process, the daguerreotype in 1839. This came about at the height of what was called a physiognomic culture, dominated by the belief that a person’s face could reveal their true nature or “essence.” Photographs were thought to capture this “essence,” a belief that is, astonishingly, still wide- spread today

of the belief that people can be grouped into static onto-logical/anthropological types. For instance, in the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century, when the supposed objectivity of the photograph lent the visual studies a sense of authoritative scientific grounding, portrait photography undeniably assisted in the popularisation of the imperialist desire to categorise humanity into its various physiognomic categories. By the late 19th century photographers were traveling the globe in search of ethnographic subjects, creating human archives in the same way a botanist might put together an archive of flora. A classic example is Thomas H. Huxley’s system of 1869, for which the ‘various races of men’ were photographed naked, full- and bust-length, and adjacent to a ruler. Another is anthropologist John H. Lamprey’s use of a metrological grid against which subjects were photo-graphed facing front and profile.6

The Swimmers – with their repeated full-body, frontal pose and blank expression – echo and parody this early use of photography, and I sometimes imagine them to be a mock archive of a certain “type” or a whimsical “documentation” of a newly evolved breed. Perhaps they are swimmers because the world is an ocean, or perhaps they are in fact displaced, as fish out of water. Either way, they are a collection of solitary characters exploring unknown territory. They are wanderers above the sea.

This unknown territory – be it increasingly unstable social and political circumstances, constantly shifting unknowable selves or ever-more complex spaces between fixed points of “reason” and “imagination” – alludes to the notion of the Romantic, or Kantian, Sublime. The sublime, according to McEvilley, is something ‘other than the ordered universe in which separate individuals live in societies together; it is vast, untamed, irrational and overpowering.’7 One’s experience of this unknown territory – or void – certainly incites both terror

6. F. Spencer. 1992. Anthropology and Photography 1860 – 1920. E. Edwards(ed). New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press

7. T. McEvilly. 1996. “Seeking the Primal through Paint: The monochrome icon”. In S Ostrow (ed). Capacity, History, the World, the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism. Amsterdam: OPA (Overseas Publishers Association)

and delight. Many contemporary theorists have linked the notion of the sublime to the socio-political realm, noting that through man’s inability to truly comprehend and represent things-in-themselves, we can look at history critically. Here, the sublime creates the sublime. The Swimmers, a band of lone figures, extend themselves beyond melancholic horizons, hopeful in a ‘universe turned upside down and torn apart.’8

Again, I think of Stuart Hall and a pivotal question he poses: ‘Is there a general politics of the local to bring to bear against the great, over-riding, powerful, technologically-based, massively-invested unrolling of global processes? No, there is no general politics. It may be that all we have…is a lot of little local politics.’ We can no longer find ourselves in one singular narrative, but in many (sometimes conflicting) narratives. We exist in between debates, in between meanings, in between abstract binary opposites and perhaps we even revel in this. Hall follows his question with a request: ‘Well, I am going to tell you a story, and ask you to tell one about yourself.’9

Long before embarking on this series, I experienced an uncontrollable desire to stand at the shoreline; to look outwards on the dissolving of limits that separate me from those I love. This literal struggle – with the seeming impossibility of departures, arrivals or re-unions – turned into the driving force for these images. If the ocean is both the barrier and the passage, The Swimmers are those caught in that liminal space, where borders are constantly erased and redrawn.

8. Psuedo-Longinus, as quoted in McEvilley’s “Seeking the Primal through Paint: The monochrome icon”.

9. From Hall’s “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities”.

Carla Liesching (b.1985) is a photographer and visual artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a BFA from Rhodes University, specialising in photography and video, with undergraduate credits in theatre. Her involvement in performance arts has greatly influenced her approach to photography and her work is often narrative-based, revealing an acute understanding of dramaturgical composition.

Liesching has been involved in various exhibitions, performances and installations and her photographic work has been shown both locally and internationally. In 2010, some of The Swimmers were shown at South Africa’s largest biennale of contemporary art, Spier Contemporary, as well as the noteworthy UK show, I am solitary I am an army. Beers.Lambert, the international curatorial initiative that coordinated the exhibition, described the show as a “celebration of some of the very best emergent art from around the world.” Part of the series is also included in the upcoming exhibition, Lens: fractions of contemporary photography and video in South Africa, which focuses on “Utopian/Dystopian qualities of the lens.”

Liesching is also involved in arts education, having run workshops for the South African National Children’s Arts Festival, assistant lecturing under Brent Meistre at Rhodes University and, most recently, teaching analogue photography at the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg.

She has spent time living and working in Taipei, and will be relocating to New York in May 2011.

acknowledgements

The artist would like to thank all the swimmers that made this series possible. Also, thank you to Navarre for his invaluable assistance in matters of language.

CATALOGUE NO. 9 April 2011This catalogue has been produced to accompany the exhibition

of the same name, at iArt Gallery, 30 March – 27 April 2011.

ISBN 978-0-620-50108-8

iART GALLERY71 Loop Street, Cape Town, South Africa

+27 (0) 21 424 5150 / [email protected] / www.iart.co.za

EDITOR, DESIGN AND LAYOUT Jacqueline NurseIMAGE REPRO Carla Liesching

PRINTING Hansa Print, Cape Town

the swimmers - withtank.commedia.withtank.com/a92c76e94c/swimmers.pdfwe shall not cease from...

Documents