Bare Life: A Critical Analysis of Richard Mosse’s Incoming (2016)

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This tendency towards totalitarianism, the imminent and yet spectral crisis at the heart of liberal democracy, threatens to strip each of us of our political life.

Richard Mosse, ‘Transmigration of the Souls’[1]

ABSTRACT:

In 2017 the Barbican Curve Gallery opened its doors to a new work by the Irish conceptual documentary photographer Richard Mosse. Created in 2016 and titled Incoming, the exhibition included a series of still prints, a large video installation projected across three 8-metre-wide screens with an accompanying soundtrack, and several smaller assemblages of black and white television screens with audio-visual content. The subject of Mosse’s work was the contemporary refugee crisis. Using a powerful heat-sensitive military camera, able to detect human bodies from over 30km and identity specific individuals from 6.3km, Mosse filmed as refugees journeyed from the East, hiking through the Persian Gulf and across the Turkish border, and from the West, trekking through the Saharan Desert to the Libyan coastline—each fleeing from war, persecution and fear with the hope of finding refuge in Western Europe. Analogous to the work’s visceral impact and affectivity, Incoming explores important questions of contemporary biopolitics, surveillance and citizenship—issues I shall explore in the work of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben—at its core, questioning the very foundations that our current political modernity rests upon. Furthermore, Mosse’s position as a European artist provokes questions raised in Hal Foster’s seminal essay of 1996, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’—a polemic against the projection of ideological patronage in post-colonial struggles—a text best unpacked with reference to the earlier work of Indian literary theorist Gayatri Spivak and her famous work ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988). Through these two conversations I will present a critical analysis of Incoming, exploring the complex political landscape it seeks to address whilst highlighting the potential difficulties of this as an aesthetic project. 

Introduction 

Richard Mosse is conceptual photographer in search of what he dubs ‘the impossible image.’ By this he means the hidden, intangible and opaque tragedies that occur throughout the world: photographs that are not meant to be seen. Throughout his career Mosse has used cutting-edge techniques to document wars and crises across the globe. Born in Ireland in 1980, he has exhibited works internationally, from the Kunsthalle, Munich to Tate Modern, and represented Ireland at the 2013 Venice Biennale. His previous works have ranged from Kosovo (2004)—a photographic series looking at damaged Serbian Orthodox churches after the civil war; Breach (2009)—images documenting the imperial palaces of Saddam Hussein converted into temporary accommodation for the U.S. Military; and Infra (2011)/Enclave (2013)—two works which employ discontinued 16mm infrared film developed by the military in the 1940s (Kodak Aerochrome) to transform the green landscapes of the Democratic Republic of Congo into a surreal landscape of lucid and vivid pinks. A continual question at the heart of Mosse’s practice has been the liminal space between documentary and art. Echoing the provocations of Manon Slome’s essay, ‘The Aesthetics of Terror’ (2009), each work explores the notion that through this contextual jump, can “violence retain its power to inspire fear, or does this contextual transposition fetishize violence, stripping it of meaning through aestheticization?”[2]

Incoming, Mosse’s most recent major work, is no exception to this trajectory. Developed by a multinational defence and security corporation, the thermal camera used by Mosse is sanctioned as a weapon under international law. Appropriating its inhuman gaze, Mosse has set himself the task of representing the unpresentable: the contemporary refugee crisis, as seen through the eyes of the governments and multi-national agencies such as Frontex—The European Border and Coast Guard Agency, tasked with controlling the borders of the European Schengan Area—which increasingly determine the fate of their lives. The rich textuality of the camera renders its world in a brutal monochrome tonality; a corporeal patina of black and white shades which discloses not light and dark but hot and cold—the difference between life and death. In one scene, the lingering residue of black heat from a rescue worker’s hands is captured on the clear white body of a child, a victim of hypothermia after a boat had sunk just off the port of Molyvos, Lesvos. In others, the colour is inverted and collections of white bodies are surveilled moving through rough hilltops, camps and across deserts; the same military night vision used by Apache helicopters to indiscriminately kill Iraqi civilians, as was revealed in the WikiLeaks footage of 2007, now firmly engrained in the popular unconscious. It is a wholly dehumanizing aesthetic: humans appear radically inhuman, stripped of everything but their fundamental biochemical processes: respiration, blood flow and metabolism. “Even at close range, the camera is unable to perceive [a single] vehicle of emotional communication,” Mosse writes. Our most intimate tool of empathy, the human eye, shown simply as a “viscous black jelly.”[3] Under the retina of the camera, the refugees become what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls, ‘bare life’. 

Drawing from a Post-Foucauldian analysis of political biopower, Agamben’s political theory reconfigures the notion through a historical distinction traced from antiquity to the ancien régime, to the emergence of the nation-state and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The demarcation lies between two forms of life: zoē and bios. Taken from classical Greece and the writing of Aristotle and Plato, the former represents “merely reproductive life”, whilst the latter signifies a “politically qualified life.”[4] Tracing the aforementioned genealogy of what he would later call the ‘state of exception’, Agamben analyses the dependency of sovereign power on different forms of politically defined life. In doing so, Agamben pays particular attention to the work of Hannah Ardent, who in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) had already begun to question the intimate relationship between ‘the rights of man’ and the nation-state, articulated through the “very figure who should have embodied the rights of man par excellence—the refugee.”[5] Sovereignty is shown to rely fundamentally on a juridical power over life: the means to name it, provide it and take it away. The political figure of the refugee highlights this inherent paradox—both the conceptual limit of universal rights and the emblematic victim of the nation-state’s structural biopolitical violence. Mosse makes no pretence to hide this influence. He is candid and transparent in his political motivation, placing his work within the ‘spectral crisis at the heart of liberal democracy’. 

How though, to render such a political and technological apparatus within an aesthetic regime which does not simply valorise its intended target? In 1996, art critic Hal Foster wrote the essay ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’—a short chapter in his larger anthology of works, The Return of the Real. In this text, Foster’s critiques the rise of neo-avant-garde aesthetics, and in particular, what Foster dubs the ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary art. Tracing its emergence from the 1960s onward, this “quasi-anthropological paradigm”[6] constituted a new politics of alterity within institutionalised art forms, passing from the urban proletariat to its new place in the post-colonial subject. A move which, if lacking in critical self-reflexivity, threatened to rearticulate modernist claims of authenticity and construct an imagined subaltern Other for Western projection; a process likely to alienate and comprise the intended subject of representation. Theorist Gayatri Spivak is similarly concerned by this process of ideological patronage and appropriation. Her seminal text, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, draws from and critiques the work of French post-structuralism to elaborate her conception of ‘epistemic violence’, highlighting the contradictions and issues with Western attempts to represent subaltern voices—be this intellectually or artistically. Combining these critiques with reference to Incoming and its technological and political tutelage, I hope to demonstrate that the aesthetic ground on which it’s analysis rests remains a highly contested space. 

[1] Richard Mosse, ‘Transmigration of the Souls,’ in Incoming (London: MACK, 2017). 

[2] Manon Slome, ‘The Aesthetics of Terror,’ in The Aesthetics of Terror, eds. M. Slome & J. Simon (Milano: Edizioni, 2009) pp. 12. 

[3] Mosse. 

[4] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, California: California University Press, 1998) pp. 2. 

[5] Giorgio Agamben, ‘Biopolitics and the Rights of Man,’ in Incoming. 

[6] Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?,’ in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Massachusettes: The MIT Press, 1999) pp. 177.

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Spotlight: Sam Bailey and The HIX Award 2018

Surreptitiously housed down the winding staircase of the Tramshed Restaurant, Shoreditch, HIX ART Gallery has slowly but surely established itself as a forward-thinking hub of contemporary art in London’s lively East End. Known formerly as the Cock ‘n’ Bull Gallery—named after the eponymous sculpture of Damien Hirst, elevated in monumental style above the diners upstairs—the gallery was inaugurated back in 2012 with a succinct manifesto for progressive and exciting art exhibitions that drew from established voices to the very best of London’s up-and-coming.

Occupying the cosy basement area of the restaurant and fuelled by the passion of its founder Mark Hix—friend to many of the YBAs and himself a dedicated art enthusiast—the gallery is currently curated by the talented Sophie Harriott, turning around a series of six-weekly shows that engage with a plethora of artistic styles and concepts.

In the last year alone, they have exhibited infamous illusionist and oxymoron aficionado Patrick Hughes—accompanied by all 12 of his studio assistants; the pop-expressionist social vignettes of Philipp Rudolf Humm; the celebratory yet subversive all-female Brains & Lip Takeover show; and numerous solo-presentations of nascent artistic careers, including the Matisse-come-Perry still lifes of Jacob Yarwood, the quasi-exotic surrealism of Joshua Raz or the prosaic yet heroic figures of Ben Edge’s intimate outsider portraits.

Launched soon after its opening, in 2013, was The HIX Award. Confronting the irksome limbo that exists between graduation and going-pro, the Award aims to foster a breadth of young artists teetering on the proverbial knife-edge of their gesso stained palettes. Since its inception, the Award has garnered a national reputation for its accessibility and success. Nominated artists take part in a curated group exhibition at HIX, with a generous cash prize and solo-show presented to the winner.

Shortlisted by Hix himself, each year’s finalists are judged by a new cohort of esteemed visual artists, the panel having included the likes of Stephen Webster and Dylan Jones, as well some of Britain’s favourite enfant terribles, the YBA’s Tracey Emin and Gavin Turk. The unique addition of a People’s Choice Award provides a direct link between the artists and public; a germane and novel dialogue for artists at such an early stage of their career.

The HIX Gallery’s earnest manifesto is ratified by its Award’s talented alumni. It’s first winner, Nicholas Permain, selected for the prestigious FBA Futures in 2015; its second, Felix Treadwell, named GQ’s ‘British Artist to Watch’ in 2017; and its third, Ally McIntyre, a print of her HIX Award-winning painting, Moon Cries for Ferdinand, now a part of the V&A’s permanent collection. Sam Bailey, the most recent of which, busy grinding away in his studio in advance of his solo-show with HIX in November. 



Graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2017, Bailey’s works are a series of mnemonic whispers. Layering watercolour and gouache on archival newsprint, anonymous and lurid apparitions are laced with a subtle melancholy. Both aesthetic and haptic, the material substance of his work echoes the DIY ethos of his subjects: images of activists from various protests in the 1980s, such as the Women Peace Camps of Greenham Common, the subject of his winning piece, Smoker 3 (2017).

A nauseous blend of mustard green and hollow grey, the self-effacing figure oscillates from recognition to neglect; the loose splatters and stains evoking a warm and quasi-nostalgic dotage. The materiality of his portraits—Baconesque phantoms that beleaguer the histories of protest, media and affect—are indeed concerned with questions of time and physicality during the crossover from Fordist to Post-Fordist modes of production and consumption. However, their very inability to be grasped—like memories themselves—reflects the cognitive dissonance of an age; stretched from nostalgia to futurism, paranoia to anaesthesia.

Whilst Smoker 3 exudes a plaintive disposition, Bailey’s works equally turn to the fiercely existential. Whilst his palette seamlessly shifts from darker hues to the ethereal, his characters’ consistent lack of a graspable identity is tantamount. His work, Beanie Test (2018), reminiscent of the supreme alienation one would find in Giacometti’s Annette (1952), the mix of muddied flesh and vertiginous black souls a rapturous expression of the modern self.

Ahead of his upcoming solo-show this November at HIX, I spoke with him about the Award, his work, and the ambivalence of digital life.

Smoker 3 (2017) (left) and Beanie Test (2018) (right)

So, Sam, how did you hear about the HIX Award?

There was a card left by my work at the St Martins degree show and then a few days later Sophie Harriot from the gallery emailed me suggesting I apply. I’d had a few emails asking for applications for various opportunities but Sophie’s was noticeably more personable. It’s been an incredibly generous and friendly experience from the beginning. 

How was your experience of the Award?

It was great, it was very exciting to get shortlisted and to be given the opportunity to show work alongside, and meet, so many talented artists. It was a real boost after graduating.

How has winning the HIX Award contributed to your practice?

Most importantly being able to focus on making artwork, there’s no way I would have been able to spend so much time in the studio without winning the prize. Also, the added confidence it gives you after graduating to push the work further.

Was there a favourite moment for you?

Probably being high fived by the artist Sue Webster at the after party, on the night of the award, it topped what had already been such an overwhelming and surreal evening.

Let’s talk about about your work, Smoker 3, which won the prize.

Where does the image come from?

This series depicts images of activists and protestors based on archival photographs. The activist shown is from a protest at Greenham Common, smoking in one of the Peace Camps, taking time to pause and think, but also achieving something at the same time by the very nature of being present, in occupation.

Do you always work on newspaper print?

I wouldn’t say always, I had a time when I focused on it more than other surfaces but now it’s one of a few. It came about from using whatever paper was at hand for testing ideas and I liked the effects I was getting with it, slightly blurred imagery, the paint bleeds into it much more than thicker paper. I wanted to use it for a project and it felt right when researching activists from the eighties, as a reference to pre-digital information exchange.

Is there a nostalgia at play here? For this pre-digital age?

There is an aspect of that in some recent work as it’s an age I grew up in but I’m not looking to make artwork that’s sentimental, or prescriptively saying the past was better than the present. I do have mixed feelings about the internet, it’s a great tool creatively, for research and learning, but the way it is with us all the time on mobile devices, meaning we’re essentially on call 24/7 is not so healthy. There seems to be much more time pressure today, to constantly be productive and quicker.

Protesting, of a kind, has also started to inhabit that space in a questionable one click fashion on social media. I wanted to look at protests in the UK when people didn’t have those tools, how committed they were and how for them time and their physical presence over long periods through occupation, were their weapons.

So, you work is an attempt to wrestle with these ideas of contemporary protest?

Not overtly, but it’s certainly been a contributing factor to my interest in the theme of historic protest. It’s hard to imagine that some aspects of ‘online activism’ will have a significant impact, particularly in the echo chamber scenario where likeminded people share their views and support for causes. But the internet has also been a great tool in raising awareness of positive action successfully, such as the Women’s March on London last year.

Is your emphasis on the importance time, materiality and physical presence, best understood in opposition to the hyperactivity of the internet?

Yes, it is. I’m really not very prolific when it comes to painting because I like to spend so much time looking at my work before I take the next step, building up layers and seeing where the work takes me, it’s a slow process. And yes, it has been a reactionary way of making work, I want to make artwork where the hand is evident and escapes the general homogenization of experience through slick digital media.

When I was studying there was a lot of work being made digitally, taking on our current malaise by using the same technology, there were some really impressive artworks being produced. But for me when I used something digital to make artwork it felt like I knew the end product before I got there, it felt too planned. I wanted to go back to making work where the outcome wasn’t so clear and human error, and the materials I used, created their own unexpected results.

Opening this November, Bailey’s upcoming show will continue in this earnest, painterly vein. Reflecting the confidence the success of the Award has given him, expect a series of works which push Bailey’s use of colour and scale to new heights. Continuing to work from used photographs, his new series will hone in on the perpetual twilight of our current 24/7 malaise of non-stop connectivity. Citing the work of painters such as Pierre Bonnard and Sterling Ruby, the show is likely to push its audience to the affective limit, combining historical sense with intuitive sensibility. To quote one of his favourite authors, Jonathan Crary, Bailey’s works are “a dark prospectus of human life in the absence of community or civil society.” One he renders, nonetheless, in a dazzling beauty.