The group exhibition Talkin’ Loud and Saying Something! focuses on the positively controversial and challenging theme of visual artist research. This event is the first comprehensive contemporary art show that deliberately and openly seeks to combine artistic expression with research means and methods, and which also aims at effecting a productive and thought-provoking collision. The exhibition consists of four artistic research projects in and through each particular practice. The participating artists represent a wide variety of artistic strategies and have also worked coherently and consistently with research aims and methods.Of the participating artists, Sopawan Boonnimitra (film maker, film activist and researcher at Chulalongkorn university, Bangkok) was among the first three to be awarded a PhD in Art from the University of Lund in 2006. Jacqueline Donachie, who graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990’s has spent 5 years working with a Professor of Human Genetics from the University of Glasgow, mapping a story of how certain genetic diseases worsen from generation to generation. Heli Rekula, one of Finland's most distinguished photographic artists, is currently doing her PhD project at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, and Annica Karlsson Rixon, one of Sweden's most interesting photo- based artists of the last decade, is currently part of the PhD program at the School of Photography at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg. She is working on this project with Anna Viola Hallberg, artist with an MA in International Museum Studies from the University of Gothenburg. The catalogue, which consists of a programmatic essay by curator Prof. Mika Hannula, individual statements made by the artists/researchers, and important visual documentation, will also constitute the basic material for the deliberations of this symposium.At the Gothenborg Centre for Contemporary Art (Konsthall), which is situated next to the Göteborg Museum of Art, there will be another exhibition on artistic research produced as an independent curatorial project. The diverging perspectives of these two exhibitions will certainly enliven the conference symposium Talking loud and saying something?
further info: http://www.konstmuseum.goteborg.se/
My Essay for Talkin' Loud:
The Time Storage
Sopawan Boonnimitra
August, 2008
1
The cinema (like photography) has a privileged relation to time, preserving the moment at which the image is registered, inscribing an unprecedented reality into its representation of the past. This, as it were, storage function may be compared to the memory left in the unconscious by an incident lost to consciousness. Both have the attributes of the indexical sign, the mark of trauma or the mark of light, and both need to be deciphered retrospectively across delayed time.
Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, 2006, p. 9.
Unlike space, where one can see physical or material boundaries, time is in constant movement and abstraction. Photography enables us to freeze time, and its stillness becomes an index of the past time. The cinematic image provides an index where time moves from one point to another and the ability to constantly move back and forth in time. Through the digital media particularly, where time can be stopped, rewound or fast-forwarded, as well as technology such as close-circuit television or the internet, we come to experience time in the most non-linear way, and it also alters our experience of seeing both photograph and cinematic image. We experience what could be called ‘delayed time’, and cinema perhaps best demonstrates that experience as Mulvey suggests on the idea of ‘delayed cinema’, that in one aspect, referring to “the delay in time during which some detail has lain dormant, as it were, waiting to be noticed”.[i]
In a similar manner, Gilles Deleuze’s (1989) idea of ‘time-image’ offers us a way to see movements as subordinated to time. Time-image, according to Deleuze, is where the aberrant movement does not take place in a unified time-space but in direct images of time where the aberrant movement becomes the norm, which may cause many undecidable moments that cannot easily be identified or understood.[ii] Following Deleuze’s ‘time-image’, Daniel Frampton further suggests that “the time image, in its ‘aberration of movement’, is not of our perception or thought being a furtherance or parallel thinking. This suspension of the world gives the visible to thought in that it replaces our regular vision (thought) of the world with a different view.”[iii]
It is through these lines of thought that Memory of the Last Supper and The Missing Trilogy are to be viewed, comprehended, and experienced. It is in the moment that has been opened up through ‘time-image’ or ‘delayed cinema’ that we begin to see the construction of home in its ‘temporality’ instead of ‘spatiality’. It is also in this moment where the ‘indexical sign, the mark of trauma’ or the ‘mark of light’ in film and photography, as Mulvey suggests, could arrive at some kind of meaning. They are moments of in-between states that are yet unsettled, where one could re-imagine an identity and a home. In such a moment, the notion of ‘home’ is no longer a static point of reference in time and space for the identity to be mapped out, but it is when the notion of ‘home’ could be understood through what I suggest as lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd (sometimes closed-sometimes open). Through Memory of the Last Supper and The Missing Trilogy, the notion of home that is unsettled through space, and particularly through time, will be explored in relation to the figure of immigrants/migrants, a visible body of the other in a ‘home’ whose physical and mental constructions, meanings and ideologies have been destabilized in our contemporary society.[iv] The two works are interdependent in terms of subject, theme, context, as well as the way in which time is related.
2
With images of war-torn countries and acts of terrorism shown side by side, many Western countries have aimed to tighten their borders and security measures from fear of foreigners/the others. The host countries have developed hard-line policies towards immigrants, including long application processes and the strengthened security of many detention centres. It is in this in-between home, be it a detention centre, a refugee centre or a temporary shelter, while awaiting the result of their application, that the immigrants face the uncertainty of being rejected or accepted. It is this uncertain state or moment of becoming a citizen, in a in-between home, that I want to capture in Memory of the Last Supper.
By asking them about the memory of their last supper, they have the choice of going back, recollecting the past and bringing that moment of taking photographs into the now, or being in the present state of here and now. It is a moment of now that mirrors their situation, in which they are unable to move forward or backwards, of being in between both space and time. It is what makes possible the gap or the pause in time, to be able to look back into the past, and possibly into the future. According to Roland Barthes, in photography “time’s immobilization assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged”.[v] This engorgement of time makes it possible for Memory of the Last Supper to create a delayed image through the aesthetics of delay between the real event of the last supper and the re-imagined one, the past and present home, the present and future home, reality and representation, and between the surface and the subtext.
In this delayed image is where ‘the mark of trauma’ could resurface. It is where the memories of the immigrants’ last suppers are usually traumatic, marking the moment of departure from family and homeland. Here one could borrow Mulvey’s argument in pointing to the correlation between the delay aesthetics and the relationship between trauma and exegesis in psychoanalysis, as she writes:
“Lacan’s category of ‘the Real’ refers to the actuality of a traumatic event, persona or historical. The mind searches for words or images that might translate and convey that reality. But its translation into ‘Symbolic’ form and into consciousness separates the two, just as an account of a dream is separated from the time of dreaming and loses its original feeling.”[vi]
The images stand for something of that ‘untranslatability’ of the fleeting moment, unsettling the notion of ‘home’. It is also an attempt to inscribe the multiple layers of those moments between the ‘traumatic past’ and the ‘uncertain future’, between the banality of the question and the mythical, religious-laden symbolism of the last supper, between the past and future. These delayed moments allow us to take a mental journey back in time and try to make some sense of them through temporality.
3
While Memory of the Last Supper is an attempt to make a mental journey back in time, The Missing Trilogy is an attempt to make a mental journey forward in space in order to construct a home. The wedding that is supposed to be a happy ending in the conventional narrative becomes the beginning of the end, the point of departure. Instead of beginning to build a home together, physically and metaphorically, ‘home’ for the new couple is to be delayed into the unknown future.
The two illegal immigrants decide to get married when the woman is allocated to the third country, in the hope that this will make it possible to reunite. Instead, the man’s attempt to join his wife is denied, as the marriage is not initially believed by the authorities, who see it as a fraud, a fake intimacy without meaning. The narrative then comes to a pause and its progress is delayed. He is engulfed in the moment of uncertainty, of waiting. Time seems to stand still. It is in this delay of the narrative that Deleuze’s idea of ‘time-image’ comes through. Instead of movements or actions to move the narrative forward, the film stares back in time. The passage of time is felt as the husband waits for the reunion in what seems like an eternity.
The different temporal orders between each of the three screens creates the tension between present time, time of the past, and possibly time in the future, disrupting the flow of conventional narrative time and opening up possible multi-narratives that play off each other, where the wedding could either be the happy ending to the traumatic past or it could only be possible in the imagination, and so on. Each of the screens provides a missing link to the narrative that may never be completed because of the lost origins. One always desires to fill in the gap of those lost beginnings.
The two works, Memory of the Last Supper and The Missing Trilogy, are to be seen in conjunction, interacting and interrelated in time, in a way that “the flow of the image at 24 frames a second tends to assert a ‘now-ness’ to the picture, [and] stillness allows access to the time of the film’s registration, its ‘then-ness’”.[vii] It is in the gap created from the juxtaposition of two different natures, between the ‘nowness’ and ‘thenness’, ‘still’ and ‘moving’, that perhaps one could understand the dynamic of the notion of ‘home’ experienced by the immigrants through this lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd of time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Response to Memory of the Last Supper:
Sarat Maharaj:
During the presentation it occurred to me the ways in which the singularity of Boonnimitra’s viewpoint as a researcher comes through. This question, “What memory do you have of your last supper?,” is not a question that a sociologist would have asked. The question that would be asked by the gentle bureaucratic order would be: what was your last point of departure? Or what was your last nationality? What was your last set of support systems as it were? The very particularity of this question is that it asks such a doggedly mundane thing; it is a very ordinary experience you have been asking these people to recall. But the memory of the last supper has of course in itself, as a phrase, a very powerful symbolic load to it. That interested me straight away, that is, the promise or the possibility or the potential for some transformation such as one understands the last supper. Because it is that moment of transfiguration that is promised in that supper if one goes down that road of the symbolic order. But if you go down the road of the mundane, these are ordinary people and you’re asking them to recall a very personal, lived memory. I find it extremely interesting that we have these two orders rubbing up against each other. And it is precisely in showing the unsquarability of these two orders that you begin to pry open the space in the inquiry that will not be captured at all by someone carrying out sociological research or anthropological research or research into the legal status of these transients. So for me that is extremely interesting. What I am getting at is the question of if there is a particular standpoint from which an artist can begin an inquiry that is different from the narrative and analytical standpoints, the standpoint of inquisition, taken up by other disciplines? So I think what one is trying to argue here is that there are some specific issues that fall through the net of academic thinking, of disciplinary thinking, of established departmental thinking, which can be picked up by art practitioners. The point is that the madness or craziness of the question might be the interesting bit, because we’re seeing two or three other issues at play here.
One of them has to do with the production of illegality, now the dominant element in the executive sphere of contemporary society. There is a whole terminology—“illegal,” “clandestine,” “sans-papiers”—used to capture the identity of the individuals like those in Samut Sakhon[JW1] . But it is not identity that Boonnimitra seems to be interested in. That, I found, was a new element in her thinking and a very interesting and encouraging one. She looked backwards in her sources to Michel Foucault, but I was thinking that perhaps the concept of “the exodus” in Paolo Virno’s work comes closer to the notion of becoming that Boonnimitra is dealing with. What is that moment in the condition of movement from A to B where one is totally in a state of uprootedness? When one has left something, but hasn’t arrived, between departure and arrival . . . before one develops some sort of identity and thus becomes part of the structures of normality.
But in that moment of illegality lies the uncertainty, the sense of being neither one thing nor the other and that’s where the concept of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd comes through, in describing this in-between condition of being neither one thing or the other. I really wanted to search for a non-western concept through which one might interrogate and explore this situation. And I am thinking of the Buddha himself, when asked: then what all is this consciousness you talk about? What is the state of critical consciousness that you’re referring to? Is it this? Is it that? And the Buddha replies, “neti, neti, neti,” meaning “not this, not that, not the other,” therefore pointing to a condition of indeterminacy. And it is this indeterminacy, which refuses to settle into any actual formed position and therefore refuses to take up an identity that becomes the interesting point of that particular expression.
I don’t want to repeat the word “indeterminate” too much, though. Because the minute we do, these words themselves begin to become rather fixed conceptual furniture. This traps us in the world of conceptualization, discourse, language and thinking through “what is ready-made in language?” and therefore there is always a moment when you have to go beyond that network in which we are trapped, that network of language. So again, becoming indeterminate, let’s us then, because we have to use words for today, but we constantly have to move beyond that. And that beyond for me is precisely the visual elements that are explored and gathered by Boonnimitra in her work. This is not visual to illustrate. This is not visual to simply back up the concept. But this is the visual again, like the phrase “memory of the last supper,” which rubs up against the linguistic and shows that it is unsquarable. That there is something doggedly that remains, which cannot be brought into language and will always be in excess of that particular linguistic formulation. And that is where it seems to me that she as a practitioner, as an artist, is bringing something new to this field of knowledge production, knowledge acquisition. If we say that the visual arts today, contemporary art, is a modality of knowledge production then we are asked the second question: what sort of knowledge? We have to unpack what the visual actually enables in the situation.
Perhaps the last point I would like to make is that Hannah Arendt indicated that the figure of the refugee would be the figure of the twentieth century. We understand the century through the image of the refugee, a person in exodus, who has left but not arrived. But of course we know that the majority of immigrants we talk about are very keen to get there. They want to arrive. We need to keep those markers in our mind and then try to understand that there are many different journeys that refugees make and not pack them all in one highly romantic idea and derive from it a critique only of the limitations of our society. We must look at it also from the point of view of the aspirations and desires of the refugees themselves and often all they want is passage from A to B. That is the mundane dimension of the question “memory of the last supper.” Are we romanticizing then the image of that moment of becoming? Are we deriving so much meaning out of it that we are talking louder than the experience of the refugee him/herself? That’s a question I want to ask. In the refugee we have begun to see all the ideals that have been missed or failed in the political sphere as we lived it as proper citizens. As if it is in the failed citizen, the refused citizen, in the non-citizen that there resides a body of values that we want somehow to recuperate. I think that would be a rather simplistic way of thinking of this set of issues. Instead, I ask how could we seek out the powerful ultimate horizon opened up by the presence of difference? I think that’s why we have to shift roles and find a way of stripping our own identities bare and learn to listen. I am quoting a friend of mine, Gayatri Spivak, who says: learn to listen from below the line of the NGO, I guess, below the line of visibility. And I heard her giving this lecture and I asked her: “Gayatri, I always wondered what sort of posture is the body in when you are actually exactly listening below this line of visibility? Are we kneeling? Are we crouching? Are we flat on our back? How are we listening to the other refugee when we shut up and we try to listen to what refugee is actually desiring?” My way of putting it is in not in terms of posture, which I think is a fantastic way in which she somehow imagines the relationship with difference in our midst. My way of putting it is just to make sure that we are not talking louder than the refugee. And in that sense, that we not over-interpreting, deriving such a powerful derivation out of the situation of refugees that we leave them high and dry and their aspirations, their day-to-day needs for security, for education, for comfort, for friendship, for society, whatever their ideas may be… And that’s what I mean by the unsquarability of these positions in which we find ourselves.
And what I am thinking is that beyond Hannah Ahrendt’s observation, the figure of our time is no longer the figure of the refugee, but the figure of the terrorist. The terrorist too is not able to live with difference. The terrorist says: become like me or I blast you and myself up. And that refusal or the incapacity to deal with difference is the one we have to struggle with. I am not saying that this is uncontroversial, but I think this is the kind of perspective that is mapping out at the moment. That figure of the terrorist must define that moment of non-communicable communication, that moment when something is being communicated, but there is refusal to use language, it is a refusal to live. There is in fact only negation that is offered. That one blast of nothingness must be contrasted to the negation of “neti, neti, neti,” which is a negation of a different order. I speak of a creative negation against nihilism, in which we are able to invoke difference, to see how things are different.
And don’t forget the art dimension. This is not just simply critical discursive thinking and analytical thinking that we are concerned with but we’re also concerned with perception and intensities. We’re forced to use language to describe what we are concerned with and the visual. But as you know one of the exercises I’ve done with a class in Sweden, in particular, is to give students the footnotes to Deleuze’s Rhizome essay, since it is so much discussed. Everyone explains the world through the Rhizome model; we see migration through the Rhizome network. We try to understand the indeterminate through the Rhizome. So I said to this class: “Do not read this essay. Cut it out and put the body of the essay in one box and then cut out the footnotes out of the essay and cut each footnote out into a strip in the way that someone like Daniel Spoerri would have done. Mix it up and then drop it and then use the strips. Paste them together in an order that you like and then reconstruct the essay by extrapolating from the footnotes.” Of course people do come up with a lot of rubbish, but nevertheless, the interesting thing is that it undermines and destabilizes the ready-made reading with which one is going to approach that particular text. It undermines the set of preconceptions within an inquiry.
And that’s another thing Boonnimitra is really concerned with. In mapping what is possible in the Netherlands, you find that, of course there is a network of NGOs already, but that the NGOs are to some extent a little bit uneasy that they form a very neat counter universe to the governmental organizations. And it is this neatness that seems to worry us and therefore you have to begin other ways of understanding. You have to cut out the footnotes, mix them up, throw them together. Footnotes suggest scholarship, they suggest an ordered mind, they suggest a methodology of procedure and so on. But they never reclaim the lived experience, the actual contributions of those who might have contributed to the making of a world of knowledge. I am constantly trying to get back to this is research and what is the nature of this research? That is a question that I am hoping that maybe you want to ask and want to discuss a little bit now. Because what we are seeing across Europe is a standardization of the art education system. We see through the Bologna process the introduction of BA, MA and PhD as a model for art education and the career of the making of the artist. And that is a thing that is not odd to us, coming from the other side of the English Channel, but then we are semi-detached from Europe and so for us it’s been a thirteen- year history of doing research in PhDs in visual arts practice. There is simply no question of that anymore in the academic world or the non-academic world is it possible to be a researcher through visual art? Are you trying to pretend you’re a scientist? All these questions that are still being debated in parts of Europe. The issue here is something you might want to explore, even with Boonnimitra herself since she is one of the first people to have done a PhD under the Bologna rules. And the idea of why should an artist feel that he or she can induct an inquiry that can produce new knowledge and what is the status of that knowledge vis-à-vis other disciplines? I think that’s the issue that comes out of this, if I may institutionalize the question a bit or put it back into the politics of the institutions of education since so much of the other commentary I made was on the philosophical and more theoretical level.
In fact I think the point that the presentation began with, that in asking what the systems of knowledge do not ask, one is opening space for new knowledge and in the production of that new knowledge, there you see the role of the artist-researcher. And this is why it could be so important not to see art research as simply translating philosophy back into the world of art. It would not be right to simply see it as importing theoretical concepts from all the other disciplines and as some people have felt, intellectualizing the artist. That would be a complete mistake. In a funny way, Duchamp’s famous statement that I will try to make it so that nobody will ever be able to say “as stupid as an artist.” Maybe today we have to reclaim that stupidity that he was so keen to dispense, because the journey out of that stupidity has possibly led us to a possible over-intellectualization of an external kind or that’s the tendency in our institutions. How can we revalidate the activity of art itself and see the activity itself as a probe and into the production of knowledge and new knowledge. And the example I give is precisely the question that Boonnimitra poses about the refugees. Elsewhere she might well use, in an eclectic way, in a very messy way, the questionnaires, the facts and figures gathered by the United Nation, by the Euro-bureaucracies of statistic knowledge that is gathered in Brussels. We could well use that. There’s no harm in that. That’s one way of thinking the world, one way of mapping. But there are other questions that need to be asked and in bringing in something like that I think you begin to question the processes of validation of what is knowledge. So for me that is one of the key issues in framing the disciplinary validity of art practice. It is not an add-on to the disciplines, nor on the other hand is a solution that art should be academicized in order to look respectable to the other disciplines. It is finding in art itself a mode of thinking, thinking in, with and through art practice. How could that be done? I don’t know; there are many instances of it. I find the minute you try to establish it as a philosophy in law, you have contradicted yourself in a way. That there is something in art itself that allows us to make very limited, very modest claims out of it and I think we must hold on to that modesty. And not attempt to establish a whole new discipline called, we use the phrase art research, but there is language again and its trap.
[i] Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2006, p. 8.
[ii] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The time-image, London: Athlone Press, 1989, p. xii.
[iii] Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy, London: Wallflower Press, 2006, pp. 69-70.
[iv] The concept of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd is extensively explored in the thesis. Further information can be found on the website http://www.leavetoremain.com/.
[v] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucinda, New York: Hill and Wang, 1980, p. 91.
[vi] Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2006, p. 128.
[vii] Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2006, p. 102
[JW1]Same question as in Note 1
Sopawan Boonnimitra
August, 2008
1
The cinema (like photography) has a privileged relation to time, preserving the moment at which the image is registered, inscribing an unprecedented reality into its representation of the past. This, as it were, storage function may be compared to the memory left in the unconscious by an incident lost to consciousness. Both have the attributes of the indexical sign, the mark of trauma or the mark of light, and both need to be deciphered retrospectively across delayed time.
Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, 2006, p. 9.
Unlike space, where one can see physical or material boundaries, time is in constant movement and abstraction. Photography enables us to freeze time, and its stillness becomes an index of the past time. The cinematic image provides an index where time moves from one point to another and the ability to constantly move back and forth in time. Through the digital media particularly, where time can be stopped, rewound or fast-forwarded, as well as technology such as close-circuit television or the internet, we come to experience time in the most non-linear way, and it also alters our experience of seeing both photograph and cinematic image. We experience what could be called ‘delayed time’, and cinema perhaps best demonstrates that experience as Mulvey suggests on the idea of ‘delayed cinema’, that in one aspect, referring to “the delay in time during which some detail has lain dormant, as it were, waiting to be noticed”.[i]
In a similar manner, Gilles Deleuze’s (1989) idea of ‘time-image’ offers us a way to see movements as subordinated to time. Time-image, according to Deleuze, is where the aberrant movement does not take place in a unified time-space but in direct images of time where the aberrant movement becomes the norm, which may cause many undecidable moments that cannot easily be identified or understood.[ii] Following Deleuze’s ‘time-image’, Daniel Frampton further suggests that “the time image, in its ‘aberration of movement’, is not of our perception or thought being a furtherance or parallel thinking. This suspension of the world gives the visible to thought in that it replaces our regular vision (thought) of the world with a different view.”[iii]
It is through these lines of thought that Memory of the Last Supper and The Missing Trilogy are to be viewed, comprehended, and experienced. It is in the moment that has been opened up through ‘time-image’ or ‘delayed cinema’ that we begin to see the construction of home in its ‘temporality’ instead of ‘spatiality’. It is also in this moment where the ‘indexical sign, the mark of trauma’ or the ‘mark of light’ in film and photography, as Mulvey suggests, could arrive at some kind of meaning. They are moments of in-between states that are yet unsettled, where one could re-imagine an identity and a home. In such a moment, the notion of ‘home’ is no longer a static point of reference in time and space for the identity to be mapped out, but it is when the notion of ‘home’ could be understood through what I suggest as lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd (sometimes closed-sometimes open). Through Memory of the Last Supper and The Missing Trilogy, the notion of home that is unsettled through space, and particularly through time, will be explored in relation to the figure of immigrants/migrants, a visible body of the other in a ‘home’ whose physical and mental constructions, meanings and ideologies have been destabilized in our contemporary society.[iv] The two works are interdependent in terms of subject, theme, context, as well as the way in which time is related.
2
With images of war-torn countries and acts of terrorism shown side by side, many Western countries have aimed to tighten their borders and security measures from fear of foreigners/the others. The host countries have developed hard-line policies towards immigrants, including long application processes and the strengthened security of many detention centres. It is in this in-between home, be it a detention centre, a refugee centre or a temporary shelter, while awaiting the result of their application, that the immigrants face the uncertainty of being rejected or accepted. It is this uncertain state or moment of becoming a citizen, in a in-between home, that I want to capture in Memory of the Last Supper.
By asking them about the memory of their last supper, they have the choice of going back, recollecting the past and bringing that moment of taking photographs into the now, or being in the present state of here and now. It is a moment of now that mirrors their situation, in which they are unable to move forward or backwards, of being in between both space and time. It is what makes possible the gap or the pause in time, to be able to look back into the past, and possibly into the future. According to Roland Barthes, in photography “time’s immobilization assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged”.[v] This engorgement of time makes it possible for Memory of the Last Supper to create a delayed image through the aesthetics of delay between the real event of the last supper and the re-imagined one, the past and present home, the present and future home, reality and representation, and between the surface and the subtext.
In this delayed image is where ‘the mark of trauma’ could resurface. It is where the memories of the immigrants’ last suppers are usually traumatic, marking the moment of departure from family and homeland. Here one could borrow Mulvey’s argument in pointing to the correlation between the delay aesthetics and the relationship between trauma and exegesis in psychoanalysis, as she writes:
“Lacan’s category of ‘the Real’ refers to the actuality of a traumatic event, persona or historical. The mind searches for words or images that might translate and convey that reality. But its translation into ‘Symbolic’ form and into consciousness separates the two, just as an account of a dream is separated from the time of dreaming and loses its original feeling.”[vi]
The images stand for something of that ‘untranslatability’ of the fleeting moment, unsettling the notion of ‘home’. It is also an attempt to inscribe the multiple layers of those moments between the ‘traumatic past’ and the ‘uncertain future’, between the banality of the question and the mythical, religious-laden symbolism of the last supper, between the past and future. These delayed moments allow us to take a mental journey back in time and try to make some sense of them through temporality.
3
While Memory of the Last Supper is an attempt to make a mental journey back in time, The Missing Trilogy is an attempt to make a mental journey forward in space in order to construct a home. The wedding that is supposed to be a happy ending in the conventional narrative becomes the beginning of the end, the point of departure. Instead of beginning to build a home together, physically and metaphorically, ‘home’ for the new couple is to be delayed into the unknown future.
The two illegal immigrants decide to get married when the woman is allocated to the third country, in the hope that this will make it possible to reunite. Instead, the man’s attempt to join his wife is denied, as the marriage is not initially believed by the authorities, who see it as a fraud, a fake intimacy without meaning. The narrative then comes to a pause and its progress is delayed. He is engulfed in the moment of uncertainty, of waiting. Time seems to stand still. It is in this delay of the narrative that Deleuze’s idea of ‘time-image’ comes through. Instead of movements or actions to move the narrative forward, the film stares back in time. The passage of time is felt as the husband waits for the reunion in what seems like an eternity.
The different temporal orders between each of the three screens creates the tension between present time, time of the past, and possibly time in the future, disrupting the flow of conventional narrative time and opening up possible multi-narratives that play off each other, where the wedding could either be the happy ending to the traumatic past or it could only be possible in the imagination, and so on. Each of the screens provides a missing link to the narrative that may never be completed because of the lost origins. One always desires to fill in the gap of those lost beginnings.
The two works, Memory of the Last Supper and The Missing Trilogy, are to be seen in conjunction, interacting and interrelated in time, in a way that “the flow of the image at 24 frames a second tends to assert a ‘now-ness’ to the picture, [and] stillness allows access to the time of the film’s registration, its ‘then-ness’”.[vii] It is in the gap created from the juxtaposition of two different natures, between the ‘nowness’ and ‘thenness’, ‘still’ and ‘moving’, that perhaps one could understand the dynamic of the notion of ‘home’ experienced by the immigrants through this lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd of time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Response to Memory of the Last Supper:
Sarat Maharaj:
During the presentation it occurred to me the ways in which the singularity of Boonnimitra’s viewpoint as a researcher comes through. This question, “What memory do you have of your last supper?,” is not a question that a sociologist would have asked. The question that would be asked by the gentle bureaucratic order would be: what was your last point of departure? Or what was your last nationality? What was your last set of support systems as it were? The very particularity of this question is that it asks such a doggedly mundane thing; it is a very ordinary experience you have been asking these people to recall. But the memory of the last supper has of course in itself, as a phrase, a very powerful symbolic load to it. That interested me straight away, that is, the promise or the possibility or the potential for some transformation such as one understands the last supper. Because it is that moment of transfiguration that is promised in that supper if one goes down that road of the symbolic order. But if you go down the road of the mundane, these are ordinary people and you’re asking them to recall a very personal, lived memory. I find it extremely interesting that we have these two orders rubbing up against each other. And it is precisely in showing the unsquarability of these two orders that you begin to pry open the space in the inquiry that will not be captured at all by someone carrying out sociological research or anthropological research or research into the legal status of these transients. So for me that is extremely interesting. What I am getting at is the question of if there is a particular standpoint from which an artist can begin an inquiry that is different from the narrative and analytical standpoints, the standpoint of inquisition, taken up by other disciplines? So I think what one is trying to argue here is that there are some specific issues that fall through the net of academic thinking, of disciplinary thinking, of established departmental thinking, which can be picked up by art practitioners. The point is that the madness or craziness of the question might be the interesting bit, because we’re seeing two or three other issues at play here.
One of them has to do with the production of illegality, now the dominant element in the executive sphere of contemporary society. There is a whole terminology—“illegal,” “clandestine,” “sans-papiers”—used to capture the identity of the individuals like those in Samut Sakhon[JW1] . But it is not identity that Boonnimitra seems to be interested in. That, I found, was a new element in her thinking and a very interesting and encouraging one. She looked backwards in her sources to Michel Foucault, but I was thinking that perhaps the concept of “the exodus” in Paolo Virno’s work comes closer to the notion of becoming that Boonnimitra is dealing with. What is that moment in the condition of movement from A to B where one is totally in a state of uprootedness? When one has left something, but hasn’t arrived, between departure and arrival . . . before one develops some sort of identity and thus becomes part of the structures of normality.
But in that moment of illegality lies the uncertainty, the sense of being neither one thing nor the other and that’s where the concept of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd comes through, in describing this in-between condition of being neither one thing or the other. I really wanted to search for a non-western concept through which one might interrogate and explore this situation. And I am thinking of the Buddha himself, when asked: then what all is this consciousness you talk about? What is the state of critical consciousness that you’re referring to? Is it this? Is it that? And the Buddha replies, “neti, neti, neti,” meaning “not this, not that, not the other,” therefore pointing to a condition of indeterminacy. And it is this indeterminacy, which refuses to settle into any actual formed position and therefore refuses to take up an identity that becomes the interesting point of that particular expression.
I don’t want to repeat the word “indeterminate” too much, though. Because the minute we do, these words themselves begin to become rather fixed conceptual furniture. This traps us in the world of conceptualization, discourse, language and thinking through “what is ready-made in language?” and therefore there is always a moment when you have to go beyond that network in which we are trapped, that network of language. So again, becoming indeterminate, let’s us then, because we have to use words for today, but we constantly have to move beyond that. And that beyond for me is precisely the visual elements that are explored and gathered by Boonnimitra in her work. This is not visual to illustrate. This is not visual to simply back up the concept. But this is the visual again, like the phrase “memory of the last supper,” which rubs up against the linguistic and shows that it is unsquarable. That there is something doggedly that remains, which cannot be brought into language and will always be in excess of that particular linguistic formulation. And that is where it seems to me that she as a practitioner, as an artist, is bringing something new to this field of knowledge production, knowledge acquisition. If we say that the visual arts today, contemporary art, is a modality of knowledge production then we are asked the second question: what sort of knowledge? We have to unpack what the visual actually enables in the situation.
Perhaps the last point I would like to make is that Hannah Arendt indicated that the figure of the refugee would be the figure of the twentieth century. We understand the century through the image of the refugee, a person in exodus, who has left but not arrived. But of course we know that the majority of immigrants we talk about are very keen to get there. They want to arrive. We need to keep those markers in our mind and then try to understand that there are many different journeys that refugees make and not pack them all in one highly romantic idea and derive from it a critique only of the limitations of our society. We must look at it also from the point of view of the aspirations and desires of the refugees themselves and often all they want is passage from A to B. That is the mundane dimension of the question “memory of the last supper.” Are we romanticizing then the image of that moment of becoming? Are we deriving so much meaning out of it that we are talking louder than the experience of the refugee him/herself? That’s a question I want to ask. In the refugee we have begun to see all the ideals that have been missed or failed in the political sphere as we lived it as proper citizens. As if it is in the failed citizen, the refused citizen, in the non-citizen that there resides a body of values that we want somehow to recuperate. I think that would be a rather simplistic way of thinking of this set of issues. Instead, I ask how could we seek out the powerful ultimate horizon opened up by the presence of difference? I think that’s why we have to shift roles and find a way of stripping our own identities bare and learn to listen. I am quoting a friend of mine, Gayatri Spivak, who says: learn to listen from below the line of the NGO, I guess, below the line of visibility. And I heard her giving this lecture and I asked her: “Gayatri, I always wondered what sort of posture is the body in when you are actually exactly listening below this line of visibility? Are we kneeling? Are we crouching? Are we flat on our back? How are we listening to the other refugee when we shut up and we try to listen to what refugee is actually desiring?” My way of putting it is in not in terms of posture, which I think is a fantastic way in which she somehow imagines the relationship with difference in our midst. My way of putting it is just to make sure that we are not talking louder than the refugee. And in that sense, that we not over-interpreting, deriving such a powerful derivation out of the situation of refugees that we leave them high and dry and their aspirations, their day-to-day needs for security, for education, for comfort, for friendship, for society, whatever their ideas may be… And that’s what I mean by the unsquarability of these positions in which we find ourselves.
And what I am thinking is that beyond Hannah Ahrendt’s observation, the figure of our time is no longer the figure of the refugee, but the figure of the terrorist. The terrorist too is not able to live with difference. The terrorist says: become like me or I blast you and myself up. And that refusal or the incapacity to deal with difference is the one we have to struggle with. I am not saying that this is uncontroversial, but I think this is the kind of perspective that is mapping out at the moment. That figure of the terrorist must define that moment of non-communicable communication, that moment when something is being communicated, but there is refusal to use language, it is a refusal to live. There is in fact only negation that is offered. That one blast of nothingness must be contrasted to the negation of “neti, neti, neti,” which is a negation of a different order. I speak of a creative negation against nihilism, in which we are able to invoke difference, to see how things are different.
And don’t forget the art dimension. This is not just simply critical discursive thinking and analytical thinking that we are concerned with but we’re also concerned with perception and intensities. We’re forced to use language to describe what we are concerned with and the visual. But as you know one of the exercises I’ve done with a class in Sweden, in particular, is to give students the footnotes to Deleuze’s Rhizome essay, since it is so much discussed. Everyone explains the world through the Rhizome model; we see migration through the Rhizome network. We try to understand the indeterminate through the Rhizome. So I said to this class: “Do not read this essay. Cut it out and put the body of the essay in one box and then cut out the footnotes out of the essay and cut each footnote out into a strip in the way that someone like Daniel Spoerri would have done. Mix it up and then drop it and then use the strips. Paste them together in an order that you like and then reconstruct the essay by extrapolating from the footnotes.” Of course people do come up with a lot of rubbish, but nevertheless, the interesting thing is that it undermines and destabilizes the ready-made reading with which one is going to approach that particular text. It undermines the set of preconceptions within an inquiry.
And that’s another thing Boonnimitra is really concerned with. In mapping what is possible in the Netherlands, you find that, of course there is a network of NGOs already, but that the NGOs are to some extent a little bit uneasy that they form a very neat counter universe to the governmental organizations. And it is this neatness that seems to worry us and therefore you have to begin other ways of understanding. You have to cut out the footnotes, mix them up, throw them together. Footnotes suggest scholarship, they suggest an ordered mind, they suggest a methodology of procedure and so on. But they never reclaim the lived experience, the actual contributions of those who might have contributed to the making of a world of knowledge. I am constantly trying to get back to this is research and what is the nature of this research? That is a question that I am hoping that maybe you want to ask and want to discuss a little bit now. Because what we are seeing across Europe is a standardization of the art education system. We see through the Bologna process the introduction of BA, MA and PhD as a model for art education and the career of the making of the artist. And that is a thing that is not odd to us, coming from the other side of the English Channel, but then we are semi-detached from Europe and so for us it’s been a thirteen- year history of doing research in PhDs in visual arts practice. There is simply no question of that anymore in the academic world or the non-academic world is it possible to be a researcher through visual art? Are you trying to pretend you’re a scientist? All these questions that are still being debated in parts of Europe. The issue here is something you might want to explore, even with Boonnimitra herself since she is one of the first people to have done a PhD under the Bologna rules. And the idea of why should an artist feel that he or she can induct an inquiry that can produce new knowledge and what is the status of that knowledge vis-à-vis other disciplines? I think that’s the issue that comes out of this, if I may institutionalize the question a bit or put it back into the politics of the institutions of education since so much of the other commentary I made was on the philosophical and more theoretical level.
In fact I think the point that the presentation began with, that in asking what the systems of knowledge do not ask, one is opening space for new knowledge and in the production of that new knowledge, there you see the role of the artist-researcher. And this is why it could be so important not to see art research as simply translating philosophy back into the world of art. It would not be right to simply see it as importing theoretical concepts from all the other disciplines and as some people have felt, intellectualizing the artist. That would be a complete mistake. In a funny way, Duchamp’s famous statement that I will try to make it so that nobody will ever be able to say “as stupid as an artist.” Maybe today we have to reclaim that stupidity that he was so keen to dispense, because the journey out of that stupidity has possibly led us to a possible over-intellectualization of an external kind or that’s the tendency in our institutions. How can we revalidate the activity of art itself and see the activity itself as a probe and into the production of knowledge and new knowledge. And the example I give is precisely the question that Boonnimitra poses about the refugees. Elsewhere she might well use, in an eclectic way, in a very messy way, the questionnaires, the facts and figures gathered by the United Nation, by the Euro-bureaucracies of statistic knowledge that is gathered in Brussels. We could well use that. There’s no harm in that. That’s one way of thinking the world, one way of mapping. But there are other questions that need to be asked and in bringing in something like that I think you begin to question the processes of validation of what is knowledge. So for me that is one of the key issues in framing the disciplinary validity of art practice. It is not an add-on to the disciplines, nor on the other hand is a solution that art should be academicized in order to look respectable to the other disciplines. It is finding in art itself a mode of thinking, thinking in, with and through art practice. How could that be done? I don’t know; there are many instances of it. I find the minute you try to establish it as a philosophy in law, you have contradicted yourself in a way. That there is something in art itself that allows us to make very limited, very modest claims out of it and I think we must hold on to that modesty. And not attempt to establish a whole new discipline called, we use the phrase art research, but there is language again and its trap.
[i] Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2006, p. 8.
[ii] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The time-image, London: Athlone Press, 1989, p. xii.
[iii] Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy, London: Wallflower Press, 2006, pp. 69-70.
[iv] The concept of lak-ka-pid-lak-ka-perd is extensively explored in the thesis. Further information can be found on the website http://www.leavetoremain.com/.
[v] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucinda, New York: Hill and Wang, 1980, p. 91.
[vi] Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2006, p. 128.
[vii] Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2006, p. 102
[JW1]Same question as in Note 1
such a great videos na
ReplyDelete5555