Images! Images!
Images!
As we well know,
there is a very deliberate “putting-to-work of the image”. That at least is the
phrase Derrida uses to explain the psychological and ‘politico-economical
situation’ through which iconic images are perpetuated for one reason or
another. We need only turn to Hans-Peter Feldman’s 9/12 Front-Page (2001), a collection of over 100
hundred newspapers from around the globe which played host to the transitive function of Al Qaeda’s
spectacle to realise the coercive dimension all images potentially take on. As
Okwui Enwezor suggests, Feldman’s collection teases out the economy through
which the global media apparatus circulates the trauma of ‘public memory’ as an
actual object engaged in a circuit of meaning.[1]
This is precisely what Derrida means when he suggests that such ‘technical
reproducibility… does not come along after the fact… but conditions its very
putting-to-work’.[2] Indeed, it is this same putting-to-work that
ignited the brat-pack enthusiasm of Damien Hirst to christen 9/11,
‘the greatest work of art ever’,[3] a
disposition that is in many ways preceded by Don DeLillo’s musings on terrorism’s spectacle in
Mao II.[4]
In
reiterating the above I merely want to point to the political context through
which the circulation of images belongs.
Something I want to pay close attention to as I pace through Paul Johns’
exhibition, Mum (2013) within the
overarching rhetoric of the Adam’s All
There Is. I mention this because
whilst from a rather blunt angle, the Adam’s triptych of shows reads as a critical
exegesis on disaster voyeurism,[5]
such strictures concern me less, the more I am interested in how we might
situate Johns’ show in the context of what I will call, following Terry Smith, the
‘iconomy’ through which images proliferate meaning.[6] After all, think how easy it would be to
write of a show that simple perpetuates the entropic energy of an earthquake’s
aftermath, so that it merely bears witness to a cloying representation of so
much rubble, so much heartbreak, and of course the pioneering spirit of a
rebuild. I say cloying because what could be worse than the humanistic rubric
of a poeticised redemption in which the actual force of the earthquake is lost
in the subjective vice of a human story, allowing such anthropocentric conceits
to overshadow the economic and political situation we, in Christchurch
understand all too well. That is, there is a much larger and much more coercive
function to this afterlife and circulation of the images of this disaster, one
that is conveniently packaged into bite-size morsels, so that it may be
trundled out whenever the current ideological paradigm deems necessary. What then,
if anything might an artist possible do in this situation, especially when we
suffer from a very real fatigue of earthquake imagery so that one no longer
takes stock of the political and economic consequences these images uphold, if
not generate.
There is then a very real affront generated by images that circulate through our media
apparatus. Think of the quantifying scenes that proliferated around last
winter’s storm cycle, in which we found images of fish thrown up onto the
southern shoreline of Wellington, or buildings tumbling over into landslips, or
homes with no power connection. All of these are just momentary piercings that always
seem suddenly important and then what.
The houses in the Wellington suburb of Kingston are still poised precariously
over their slip. These actual physical
objects remain and yet those sensational images have slipped back into the
stream through which they once functioned. It is though they are designed to
fade away, to vanish into the ether not of a forgetting but of a perpetuating
cycle. Which is to say that it is not that we no longer care about such imagery,
but that we remain indifferent to such images, that they are after all mere
representations, representations we almost expect to encounter. Which of course
is the power of images, to nullify themselves, to slip into banality as merely images, when in fact they are
entirely transitive; that is they generate content. How easily we might say this of the images
that follow in the wake of Christchurch’s earthquakes, in which this putting-to-work
of the image turns this event into an appellation, not just of the quake
itself, but it also the “killer-quake” (to use one example), which like the
recent hysteria in Wellington following the Seddon earthquakes generates a
secondary shock, so that what we really experience are two earthquakes, one a
physical-kinetic event and the second its mediation. Both are no less real.
Their repercussions are equally felt. In fact the psychological damage of the
second, mediated quake are perhaps more disturbing, for like Derrida’s comments
on 9/11 they pose the problem of much more terrible events to come, a deliberation
that filters through into our real world fears, into our dreams and
apprehensions. Which is to say that this
putting-to-work of the image, this dissemination of the mediated quake is a discursive strand that permeates
our world, making of the immaterial, something all too tangibly real.
But
enough of this framing! This skeleton in which we say images circulate an
economy. One that is both physically real and psychologically real. Both are equally
disturbing, both are equally generative.
No! Let us delve into the depths of the show. Let us take our lead from
the artist himself:
My work
evolved around 4 old newspaper cuttings and one testimonial from 1936 that I
was able to salvage from my “place”. My
original idea being an empty gallery and the sound of tap dancing — I think I have said this before to you…the
world ends…the arcade music continues — however, I felt that I would have been
considered a smart arse with no concern for the future, for “all there was”. I really did not want to respond to the earth
quake...but that was an essential prerequisite that I was obliged to respond
to.[7]
You can
see then that even the artist has a reluctance to deal with the earthquake. To
become a testimonial figure.[8]
A poetic actant placing the interruptive agency of Raumoko in an all-too-human
perspective. Such putting-to-work has
its place, but why be put-to-work in such a straight forward fashion. Anyone
with even the slightest apprehension of what it means to live and work in a
city being re-built knows the meaning of such exploitation. And yet, here we
are, stuck within this framework. Within
a reiterative device through which we do have a poetic, subjective overload, as
though the humanism of a redemptive confrontation with a disaster grants us, by
proxy the abiding dignity of a solidarity, even re-claimed pioneer spirit of
our “settler” forebears.[9] Which is baloney really. I mean come on, this
narrative hardly fractures reality at all, let alone suturing raw wounds through
the piece meal stoicism of a life lived with fragments. No what we’re left
examining is indeed the pure circulation of images, the cyclic flow of a
disaster’s representation. Which makes
it all the more impressive that Johns could intervene within this narrow
spectrum, recouping this obligation as an opportunity through which to parse an
entirely different narrative, one to do with memory and a cyclic experience of
history, all the while without
slipping over into the poetic miasma of a humanistic redemption in which we
find the stoicism of a human spirit somehow confirmed by a son’s gratitude to
his mother! Instead what we get is a kind of detective story, in which Johns
retraces his mother’s 1930s performances in a “Modern” revue at the Odeon
theatre so that what we witness is indeed the opening of another kind of
archive, one that threads an older Christchurch onto the newly emergent, even
rhapsodic city of the self-perpetuating future-to-come. In doing so, what we
follow is an entirely new desire, even derivation, so that the iconomy of a
disaster actually means something, and not simply because it shows the faith
and certainty of human élan, but rather because it overlays entirely different
historical periods, so that we experience the past in the future, walking
backwards into a story that links not only a child to its mother, but also an early
20th century “modernising” city with an equally emergent and yet
no-less “modernising” city-to-come. So
yes, why avoid this locution of history, this dissembling of one period’s
collapse only to uncover a historicised period as a template for tomorrow’s
city. Such a story shows not only the
failure the stoicism of “all there is”, but turns history itself into a quasi-subject,
a sort of dense mobile force we un-layer like Michel Serres’ use of the game of
pass the parcel.[10] But enough of this. Let me return to the economy
of images, to their discursive iconomy and what this might mean in relation to
John’s show.
Iconomies
According
to David Joselit images are typically taken to occupy one of three categories.
Either they are seen as derivative, so that they are understood to relate to a
certain context and are therefore read as merely an illustration of a
particular idea or historical moment.
Alternatively, images are presumed to be dumb, to be intuitive even naïve
objects that are incapable of generating formal knowledge. Finally, images are
often assumed to be documents, witnesses that verify a certain moment in time.[11] Of course, Joselit only marks these regimes
because he wants to differentiate a new definition of the image, one less
concerned with its artistic production or relation to its genesis in a socio-political
context in favour of examining an image’s after-life in circulation.
Consequently Joselit comes to define an image, less by its physical visual
representation than the immaterial content that only ever momentarily
consolidates as a pictorial virtuality. Such a definition inevitably redefines
the very medium itself,[12]
so that an image is no longer confined to its static representational
abstractions but becomes instead a ‘quantum of visual content’, what we might
refer to as a potent energy stream that can ‘assume a variety of formats’,
whether that’s as a digital file, a piece of software or an actual print
(though on a potentially endless array of surfaces and scales). Better then to think as Joselit suggests, of
an image today as ‘a visual byte, vulnerable to virtually infinite
re-mediation’.[13]
In Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan digital imaging technology makes the notion of
authenticity mute, which given the veracity of simulation makes black-mail and
extortion nearly impossible to undertake.
Of course like Joeslit’s redefinition of the image, such preoccupation underscores
the representational limit of a definition dependent on production, preferring
to read an image only in relation to its site of genesis. Which means of course that when Ellis’
protagonist, Spider Jerusalem tracks and traces the genetic code-sequences of
certain actants what we witness is precisely a logging of the immaterial potential
of images, something he is able to achieve because he is less concerned with
representing such information, the more he is interested in confining it within
a portable format. Veracity in this case
is less a visual image, the more it is a piece of code so that we do have a
picture of intent, of authenticity that makes blackmail once again possible
given that certain actors are no longer immune to the proficiency of too many
representations, trapped as they are by the certainty of this new genetic
track-and-trace routine. Which is to say that such logic is premised on the
flow of information coursing through registers and objects, collapsing the
scale of visual bytes so that this logging of a genetic-mapping is precisely
the same impulse that the private detective has always relied upon. That is,
this very deliberate tracing of our movements has merely re-logged the negative
of a primitive photo-process in favour of a piece of code, so that “images” as
we might say can take on the form of any object. Why a rock might as well be
simply an image,[14]that
is if it is a signal’s output, if it carries the weave through which our
ingenious detective has put-to-work the image.
As we have heard (unless of course you have trouble
with the veracity of my authenticity tag) the artist was compelled to tackle
the representation of the earthquake. In fact, you might say it was the show’s stipulation.[15] In an odd piece of text Bruce Andrews writes:
‘ahahahahahahahahahahah on white mezzotint
stirrup’. [16]
How I love this piece of language, how the onomatopoeia of ‘ahahaha…’ mirrors the precise reproducibility
of a mezzotint print and of the
holding of a stirrup, so that this idea of the boot being encased by this
bracket of metal instantly carries with it not only the thrill of a ride but also
the delicate holding of the foot, so that the slurp or gauge of language becomes
like the very thing it describes. It is as though Andrews has hit entirely upon
the sheer viscosity of life itself so that we might call this small phrase a
sheer moment of realism, perhaps even to adapt Roland Barthes’ lexicon, a
punctum, in which the referent is no longer merely derivative of its
socio-political context but is the ‘thing itself’. [17]
I mention this because there is the same palpable moment of realism in relation
to the lacunae at the centre of Paul Johns’ show, perhaps even more so, given that this absence
is not only addressed by the show itself, but that it is indeed only produced by
the works held within the show. I refer here, of course to Johns’ forensic
codification of the Odeon theatre, once a bastion of the Edwardian city but
more recently a run-down piece of urban blight and now of course, a dormant
ruin (mirroring so many other contemporary Christchurch “ruins”). So whilst on
one hand we are simply presented with the stereotypical image of this earthquake’s
aftermath, that of the terra nullius through which the human élan of a pioneer
town might re-build itself, we also get photos directly intervening in the iconomy
through which these representations perpetuate the most blatant narrative of a disaster’s
aftermath. Consequently what Johns seemingly endless photo-graphing of the
Odeon achieves is precisely a psychic doubling of the building’s absence so
that what we witness is not just the profane ground of a city’s reclamation of
a disaster, but rather a brutish absence, even hollow ground. More so because
surrounded on one side by containers, this absence is entirely bracketed, so
that it carries the sound of its framing, which is why we bear witness to its
very contingency, so that we might think there is less a question of neglect
the more it might merely be the pose
of reverence. Perhaps even more so, given the fact that the
Odeon theatre had long fallen into disrepute, first as a movie theatre in the
‘60s then as a faith healing church in the millennial time-code.
Which is
to say, we never needed the
earthquake to render this theatre banal, to cause it to become the kitsch
artefact in need of redemption. No, what is palpable in this context, and it is
why I suggest that this very absence is caused by the show itself, is the
notion that we quite possible suffer from a collective inability to see the theatre at all. Which would mean
that the Odeon’s absence is really just a discursive production, operating in
the same sort of way as ‘the most photographed barn in America’ functions in
DeLillo’s novel White Noise.[18]
Now I know no one will take that seriously (that
that the Odeon theatre is still standing) but geographical absences play significant
roles in complex eco-systems,[19]
gaps in memory no less so. According to
Jacky Bowring we no longer have the capacity to enjoy a landscape of
melancholia. In fact she goes so far as to suggest we live in a delusional
context that denies suffering, that prefers the artifice of a perpetual arcadia,
so much so that we might correct this imbalance through a type of ‘lacunae of
the mind’.[20] “Too bad”, Timothy Morton might retort given his comments on the ‘noir’ characteristics
of contemporary life as a suitable register of ‘an ecological
situation in which the worst has already happened and in which we find
ourselves…already fully implicated’. [21] Which is to say that Bowring isn’t wrong to
suggest that we suffer from a contemporary inability to indulge in landscapes
of melancholia, it’s just that she’s looking in the wrong place. Indeed, rather
than chastise a preference for the delusional arcadia of an unsullied
“artifice” of suburbia as something that fails to be human, she is better
shifting attention to the noir characteristics of this hyper-real life. Which is to say, that in melancholia’s
absence we find its return, so that in many ways its absence is indeed its very
foundation. Thus, instead of becoming less-than-human because we deny the ‘full
spectrum of human emotions’, melancholia’s characteristics have simply taken on
a para-situational context, becoming something less overtly displayed the more
it is entwined with the Arcadian
artifice of contemporary life. That at least might explain the profusion
of paradoxical situations one encounters, like say save nature signs of the
back of s.u.v.s, or anti-fracking logos on single passenger commuter cars. Such
instances are then more explainable as moments of rupture in which the sheer
cynicism of this entwined context comes into sharp relief, demonstrating how
credible Morton’s “noir” characterisation might be, something no less evident
in the profusion of zombie films as a metaphor for contemporary society. In fact as Dominic Pettman suggests, these
films give credence to the idea that the sheer technological apparatus that
encloses our human “lifestyles” is often read as the melancholic undercurrent
in which human autonomy is rendered inert, if not forsaken by the disciplining
of this ornamental privilege, so that whilst the future anthropologist of the
suburban milieu might ‘find plenty of TVs and cars and cell phones’ there will
be very little evidence of actual ‘life to speak of’.[22]
We can see then that the absence so
evidently on display by Johns’ photo-graphing of the Odeon theatre is a
productive locus not for simply the iconomy of a disaster’s aftermath but the
sheer melancholic terror we suffuse within our contemporary lives. Thus Johns’ pose
of neglect, his reclamation of the theatre as absence, as a collective
conjuring also poses this fundamental entwining of the contemporary era, which
far from denying melancholia simply carries it around in the internal pockets
of the often hyper-real artifice through which our lifestyles proliferate. Given
this juncture it is worth taking a cue here from Dan Arps’ mobilisation of the
architectural drawings of the Price Waterhouse building,[23]
once one of the centre-pieces of Christchurch’s modest high-rise urbanism of
the late 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed,
collected and exhibited in a variety of contexts long before the possibility of a Christchurch
earthquake was even being mapped, Arps’ motely dissemination of this
speculative draughtsmanship captures something of the dispiriting realism
today’s rebuild imagery similarly conveys in their invocations of a
future-to-come. Which is to say, in Arps laconic resurrection of this document
as kitsch we witness not just the productive iconomy of images to generate
content but also the melancholic infusion of the hyper-real with what Barthes
calls ‘future anteriority’.[24] Consequently, anyone looking at the rebuilds’
images of tomorrow ought to remember just how fragile such projections are,
something no less worrying given the short period of time in which the eastern
frames’ green-corridor has been dramatically cut down to a more commercially
friendly size.[25]
And yet, surely such realism concerns us less, the more it is a general
undercurrent in which we might understand the spectral overtones of Johns’
forensic preoccupation with the Odeon theatre.
Histories
I
have been hyphenating photo-graphing largely to induce a sense to which Johns’
show is less about representation the more it is about topography. That is, it
is less a show interested in the discursive representation of an earthquake’s
aftermath the more it is a reclamation and stamping out of an entire history
that only happens to begin from this momentary absence. Which is why at this
stage it is entirely appropriate to conjure something of the descriptive matrix
through which the show comes together, so that what we witness is not just the melancholic
rendition of a former theatre as civic institution, but instead a
socio-collective history garnered through the testimonial élan of the artist’s
mother. As such, whilst the obsessive photo-graphing of the Odeon theatre lines
up down one side of the large rectangular dead-end room, across the aisle, Johns’
presents an ethno-salvage of historical artefacts, so that clippings from
newspapers, a 21st key, oral history and telegrams conjure up
something not just of another time but the very threads through which the
Odeon’s absence begins to take on the melancholic realism of time itself.
Mum’s the word that occupies the end
wall that adjoins this arranged marriage of artefacts and photo-graphy. This is
after all the gasping neon sign that hinges so unapologetically these two
threads, these two aisles. It is like the minister or the priest, the
officiating mechanism that joins these two suitors, the historical testimony
that relays a mother’s early forays into the job market, into amateur theatre
and the a series of photographs obsessed with absence, with the very material liquidation
of an actual building. No wonder then,
that there is something more than just serendipity to these clippings in which
the play undertaken by the mother is dubbed “Modern Times”, so that what we might
garner is precisely the recurrent poses of futurity through which we have
always marshalled our anticipation of a time-to-come. So much so that one might
find in this latency a type of occupation, a residual thread that marks out,
indeed even over-shadows our own preoccupations. Nothing seems to exemplify this more than the
harlequin-like costumes the performers don in their momentary clipping from the
newspaper. There is in such acuity the mark of a comedy, of hubris, but it is
also a padding out, a swathe of detail that adjoins this “modern” revue to our
contemporary periodization of the modern. Not simply as a style to adorn but
also, because the recurrent phrasing in which the term “modern” to mark
progress is so overloaded, there is, invariably an ominous force to this anticipation
of a time to come, so that the very word undercuts all our aspirations to believe
that we might allow our buildings, our edifices, even ourselves, to become
safer, smarter, more modern. It is in
such moments of comedy that we realise that what we are really dealing with is
not just a stylisation but an accentuation we too easily acquiesce to. No
wonder mum’s the word.
One shouldn’t miss-read the play on
words that is happening here. The solemnity through which this show is
orchestrated. Perhaps it becomes more apparent if we throw it against the plethora
of works in which we witness a conjuring of the mother-child relation, whether
that’s Campbell Patterson’s video work in which he hoists his mother in a
moment of comedic, sentimental endurance (Lifting
My Mother For as Long as I Can, 2006-),
or the oratory of Sophie Calle’s reading of her mother’s diary as both a
confirmation and confrontation with her death (Rachel, Monique, Palais de Tokyo, 2010). In contrast to such threads, in which the
mother plays a supporting role, one that is confronted, albeit in either
comedic or melancholic tones, Paul Johns throws the mother in the mix as a
testimonial figure. It matters that she performed at the Odeon and not simply
because she becomes a touchstone bridging two historical periods. Moreover, it
is not simply that she becomes a figural relation, a lieutenant we have simply
farmed out this micro-history, so that she plays testament to a minor
ethno-poetic that redeems the over-representation of a disaster’s spectacle.
No. To get a better bearing on what I mean, we need to turn instead to the very
act of oral history and its rather elliptical treatment of the viewer. To quote from the text in its entirety:
Mr Bell he sure could dance the orchestra
played the wrong music we were all wrong most of those girls are dead now the
boss was an old battle axe a bad tempered old thing Wilcox I would make frocks
for her she would rip the whole thing off
She wrote you a
good testimonial
I went to Fashion
House
You were 21
I never liked
dancing very much I would rather go hiking
Where was the
Frascati
Don’t be
difficult
You
see, there are a million gaps, lacunas in this text and yet one can thread most
of it together, so that we might instead refer to it as a teasing of
information, a stylisation of facts. This is best reflected in the reticence of
that last turn of phrase, ‘Don’t be difficult’. It’s here that this notion of
mum, this secrecy really comes into play. What would, recalling our lessons
from Joselit, our detective make of such threads, embedded as they are into the
very images at work within this show. Indeed that this ethno-salvage is so
crucial to the very images on display, that they cohere only through the
arranged marriage of this poeticised reminisce, one underwritten by reticence
and yet also a certain pride so that we might recognise just how much this
recall is steeped in the hubris of one witnessing their future anteriority
unwinding at an different pace, if not trajectory.
There are, as I mentioned before,
productive means through which gaps operate. Not that they are leaking meaning.
That would be too simple an approximation, one that would again impose a
representational register on precisely what this solemn reticence is attempting
to avoid. That is, there is purpose to this elliptical voice, this threading
together of a narrative from gaps. It is not merely mimicking the memory
retention of the elderly. It is lightly staying mum, so to speak. As I said, we
should not underestimate just how much this reticence is at work here,
especially given the economical-political import to which the circulation of a
disaster’s images belong. But it’s not
enough to leave it at that, to say that the reticence of the show bolsters its
topography, that it allows space for alterity. Sure, such a gambit works a nice
symmetry to the obsessive photo-graphing of the Oden theatre, so that the emotional
ethno-salvage pairs with the 360 degree observation of the obliterated cultural
edifice. Perhaps that might lend us a
thickening of the narrative, precisely the gambit Calle plays out when she
reads from her mother’s diary; to bring the private into the public sphere. And yet such logic seems far too simple,
especially when we consider the melancholic thread it has already uncovered.
What then might this reticence actually pose in light of the politico-economical
considerations the mobility of images generate. To stay mum in the face of such
considerations is at least not to add ones’ voice to the myriad of exploitation
strategies that have turned opportunistically to disaster’s spectacle.
Let us turn then to the reflective neon
sign that is caught in the glass framing of the Odeon’s photo-graphing. What does it mean for this ethno-salvage to
have crossed the aisle, to mark out the very site to which it refers? And of
what warrant is the doubled coding of the x, so that it, the cross, acts as
both a mark of demarcation and as sign of erasure. Perhaps even more so given that
the x itself that Johns fashions out of neon is taken from the cross on the
newspaper clipping which marks out his mother in the roll call of Modern Times’
harlequins. Notably then, this x that denotes, that crosses the aisle, marks both the former site
of the Odeon and at the same time acquiesces to its obliteration, to its
erasure. Such ebullience is hardly staying mum, but literally intruding, taking
up the generation of meaning. Which is
to say that this elliptical demarcation, one that marks and yet obscures
becomes a textured hole, a lacunae drenched in meaning, one that folds our
attention to the concurrent histories being played out, so that what we notice
is precisely the overlap between the history we are living (especially under
the complicit duress of disaster’s spectacle) and the testimonial forbearance of the historicised mother. Which is why, standing in this elliptical tear,
staring at the neon sign’s demarcation of the Odeon, we also become attuned to
the merging of the soundtracks which have been playing from different ends of
the room, so that we hear, not only the sound of tap dancing with which the
room meets us, but also its reversal, its syncopated retreat. Which is to say
that here, at this moment in which Johns’ neon sign crosses the room, we are further
attuned to Barthes’ anterior future, neither here nor there, but in between,
glimpsing the future in our past, so much so, that it makes perfect sense to be
caught up between these soundtracks of tap-dancing, one going forward the other
backwards, but both of them, ultimately, only making sense together.
This crossing, both of the soundtracks
and the neon sign marks our entrance as participants within the show. It is incredulous to suggest we do not occupy
a position and not merely one of connoisseurship. Each of us has been affronted by the
onslaught of disasters’ spectacle. Each is manipulated, equally tuned and made
bored by the proliferation of images, by their ethico-political import and by their banality. To turn to one last work within the show, we
might think of this duress in relation to the embedded inscriptions upon the
little wooden 21st key. Inscribed with well-wishes, these markings
are discrete, entirely personal refrains that conjure up the very real world
through which a particularly life is lived. And yet, these inscriptions, embedded
as they are upon this ritualistic key, are entirely generic, so much so that
they do slip into banality, they could be seen anywhere, on any greeting,
farewell, or birthday card. Which is also to say it is less about the generic
quality of these expressions of kinship, of solidarity, of endearment, the more
we might recognise this object as a totem of the common-place. As such, the key itself, is entirely that
vague object, which as Kathleen Stewart points out, is less a deficiency, the
more it is a ‘resource’ through which the everyday might be productively lived
and imagined.[26]
Consequently, we can sense in these
well-wishes, the same deepening imprint we meet in the shows’ marriage of a
tumbled edifice and personal memoir. That is, what we bear witness to is the
same resourceful demarcation of the everyday, not as a nostalgic backwater we
might momentarily wallow in, but rather a welcoming chasm that opens onto the melancholic
realism of our continuous walk into a future that is enabled by our past.
[1] Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in
Contemporary Art (Göttingen, Steidl; London :
Thames & Hudson, 2008); 28.
[2] Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign (Trans.
Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press 2009); 64.
[3] For a recap see,
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/sep/11/arts.september11 Accessed 30
November 2013.
[4] Don DeLillo, Mao
II (New York: Viking, 1991).
[6] Terry Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 2006).
[7] Personal
Correspondence 6–10 October 2013.
[8] Indeed a month
later this same hesitancy returned, though in a different voice: “I felt very appreciative of
the invitation from Tina [Barton] to do something....I do not want to appear
ungrateful. I decided that it was a good time for me to respond to a
request...you know...just like school...when you are asked about “what did you
do in the weekend”.....and you think about the things that might be of some
interest to another person ... Or show that you understood what was expected of
you… So despite my reluctance to connect with my city
at one time... 22 February, 2010... I did want to come up with something that
was pertinent to me from this current time’, Personal Correspondence 22
November 2013.
[9] I say settler
here because this “commonality” between Euro and Maori ancestors is too often
used as a flattening device though which we might inhabit a post-colonial
(separated and moved on from) rather than postcolonial (on-going and still
being dealt with) society.
[10] Michel Serres, The Parasite (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007); 225–227.
[11] David Joselit After Art, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2012); xiii-xii
[12] I should point
out here that Joselit has very little time for the term, medium, preferring
instead the designation format, medium slipping to much back into the stream of
production to be useful in an analysis of the circulation of images
[13] Joselit, op cit,
xv
[14] In fact if we
turn to Jimmy Durham’s work we do indeed find rocks that are images, formats
that carry code we can read.
[15]How we might make fun of such
language, how we might turn on this stip-u-lation, like some sort of automated
process… “I head down to the stip-u-lator”
so that perhaps it is like a per diem, a structured flow. Let us though avoid this disciplining of the
artist and instead turn to how we might structure our response.
[16] Bruce Andrews, Swoon Noir (Tucson: Chax Press, 2007).
[17] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill
and Wang, 1997); 45
[18] This is worth
reading in full but here’s a brief extract: ‘[The visiting scholar] Murray
asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in
America. We drove twenty-two miles… We counted five signs before we reached the
site… We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for
viewing and photographing… Murray maintained a prolonged silence… “No one sees
the barn”, he said finally… “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it
becomes impossible to see … We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to
maintain one… We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception”’. Don
DeLillo, White Noise (London:
Picador, 1994);12.
[19] As Steve
Hinchliffe points out, absences and gaps function as a ‘means to imagine ways
of allowing a space for alterity’ so that one might ‘open analyses to those
aspects of landscaping and other norms of ordering that are not so managerial
and totalizing and which demonstrate awareness of the non-presences as well as
the presences’. See, ‘Inhabiting —
Landscapes and Natures’, Handbook of
Cultural Geography (Eds. Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel
Thrift, London, Sage, 2003); 218.
[20] See, Jacky
Bowring, ‘Eternal Sunshine: The Search for Spotless Landscapes’, Beyond the Scene: Landscape and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand (Eds. Janet
Stephenson, Mick Abbott and Jacinta Ruru, Dunedin: Otago University Press,
2010); 77–91.
[21] Timothy Morton Ecology without Nature: Rethinking
Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2007);
75–76.
[22] Dominic Pettman, Human
Error, Species-Being and Media Machines (Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011); 167.
[23] This work was
exhibited in a variety of contexts, notably in Arps’ solo
show, A Winter Garden at The Physics
Room in 2001 and in the collaborative show Office
Space with Douglas Kelaher at The Blue Oyster Gallery, also in 2001.
[24] Op Cit,, 96.
[25] See, http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/the-rebuild/9144599/Owners-riled-by-eastern-frame-plan Accessed 30
November 2013.
[26] Kathleen
Stewart, Ordinary Affects (London,
Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); 127.
