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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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