Negative Capability: Documentary and Political Withdrawal

<p>This thesis thinks with, alongside, and against several theories of political withdrawal that have emerged during the past three decades as they have been taken up by artists working with documentary video. Political withdrawal here refers to a set of tactics that position themselves in opposition to existing models of belonging, civic engagement, and contestation. The context in which this study takes place is one in which qualifying for citizenship in the liberal western state increasingly requires one remain transparent, docile, and willing to acquiesce to whatever demands for information the state may make. In response to these conditions, the theories and artworks examined in this thesis all propose arguments in favour of anonymity, opacity, and indeterminacy. Situating itself, sometimes uncomfortably, within the archives of feminist, queer, and anarchist thought, this thesis engages with selected video works by Martha Rosler, Bernadette Corporation, Hito Steyerl, and Zach Blas in order to understand the ways in which withdrawal may constitute a generative framework for enabling meaningful social change. These video works are here described as documentary, but not in the conventional sense that they are objective or transparent attempts to capture or record actual fact. Rather the term is understood as a historically pedagogical genre — notably deployed in the service of both oppressive regimes and oppositional movements — that provides a means through which to engage with, and creatively reimagine, political languages. The artists in this study take a critical approach to troubling times. Suspending the truth claims historically associated with documentary, they offer a range of ways to think through how complaint might be articulated and commitment sustained.</p>

Negative Capability: Documentary and Political Withdrawal

<p>This thesis thinks with, alongside, and against several theories of political withdrawal that have emerged during the past three decades as they have been taken up by artists working with documentary video. Political withdrawal here refers to a set of tactics that position themselves in opposition to existing models of belonging, civic engagement, and contestation. The context in which this study takes place is one in which qualifying for citizenship in the liberal western state increasingly requires one remain transparent, docile, and willing to acquiesce to whatever demands for information the state may make. In response to these conditions, the theories and artworks examined in this thesis all propose arguments in favour of anonymity, opacity, and indeterminacy. Situating itself, sometimes uncomfortably, within the archives of feminist, queer, and anarchist thought, this thesis engages with selected video works by Martha Rosler, Bernadette Corporation, Hito Steyerl, and Zach Blas in order to understand the ways in which withdrawal may constitute a generative framework for enabling meaningful social change. These video works are here described as documentary, but not in the conventional sense that they are objective or transparent attempts to capture or record actual fact. Rather the term is understood as a historically pedagogical genre — notably deployed in the service of both oppressive regimes and oppositional movements — that provides a means through which to engage with, and creatively reimagine, political languages. The artists in this study take a critical approach to troubling times. Suspending the truth claims historically associated with documentary, they offer a range of ways to think through how complaint might be articulated and commitment sustained.</p>

Art Writing and Allegory in the Anthropocene

This essay traces the emergence of a rich and densely layered field of art writing within the Anthropocene. We ask: If the Anthropocene is all around us, where is it in art writing? We identify the emergence of Anthropocenic art writing: writing that is not art writing about the Anthropocene per se but rather art writing that takes its cue from the operations and outcomes of the Anthropocene itself, including its flagrant disregard for boundaries (disciplinary and otherwise), and its agency. We find such strategies already at work, particularly, in writing by artists such as Hito Steyerl, Martha Rosler, and Chris Kraus, as well as in writing that is polyphonic either through the collaboration of multiple writers or through collage. We map art writing's strata (its past and present delineations, some of its cardinal points) in order to identify sites of resistance to the accelerations of the contemporary era, which is to say places where deceleration and deliberation may be possible. Anthropocenic art writing claims such modes as its own. While for scientists the Anthropocene has been marked by the contestation of golden spikes, in art writing these proxy signals go far beyond employing “nature” and the environment as a theme or topic, taking the Anthropocene as an allegorical mode itself.

Counter-realities and conflicted place: Gee Vaucher’s The Feeding of the Five Thousand in the punk art tradition

This article celebrates and critically examines Gee Vaucher’s artwork for the Crass album The Feeding of the Five Thousand (1978), drawing upon the enduring fascination that the work retains. Vaucher’s work is complex, disconcerting and mesmeric, and my intention is to pin down the facets of the work that achieve these qualities. The work sits in a tradition of collage and montage taken up in British punk and post-punk scenes, and I examine a selection of classic punk artworks in comparison to Dada artworks that represent the origins of radical montage art. Whilst acknowledging the established mode of interpreting this work through indexical context of elements and the force of juxtaposition (e.g. Linder Stirling’s punk work), I argue that Vaucher’s work achieves something more and requires additional methods of analysis. By developing a formalist approach of illusionistic harmony and integrity, I consider the space of the picture plane, as a traditional art concept and the space and place of the depicted behind the picture plane. Vaucher’s work offers an enduring feeling of a conflicted, disrupted and corrupted space – you feel you can step into a real space within the picture but prefer to hover on the safe side of the picture plane. This property embodies what the author Mark Fisher calls the ‘weird and the eerie’. I then examine a number of artworks from within and around the canon of art – Alison and Peter Smithson, Martha Rosler and Tish Murtha – finding images that I feel have a strong resonance with Vaucher’s work in terms of the spaces they construct and the mode of construction. These canonical works offer some developed critical dialogue to bring to bear on Vaucher’s work in order to fully understand the power of this iconic record sleeve.

Martha Rosler’s Protest

This essay reconsiders the photomontages that Martha Rosler began making in the late 1960s to protest the war in Vietnam. Typically understood as a means of protest against the spatial mechanics of domination—against the mediated production of the difference between the home front and the war front or the “here” and “there” that drives modern warfare—the photomontages, this essay argues, also engage the temporal politics of protest. The problem of how to be “in time,” “to be present,” the problem that frames street photography and its critical history, is at the center of this essay and, it contends, Rosler’s protest. By drawing out this critical framework, this essay addresses the still-urgent questions that Rosler’s photomontages pose: When is the time of protest? Does protest happen now? Is there still time for protest?

Composing Collaborationist Collages about Commercial Security

This article is an argument about why it is worth taking the trouble to work with feminist, new materialist approaches inspired by Haraway, Mol, Stengers and others, when studying IR questions. It introduces and exemplifies one specific analytical strategy for doing so, namely one of “composing collaborationist collages”, focusing first on the main building blocks of the approach and then on the (dis-)advantages of working with it. In terms of the building blocks, I underline that composing makes it possible to join the heterogeneous and unlikely, that collaging accentuates the scope for playing with heterogeneity and that collaborating is a necessary part of this process as a well as a helpful check on one’s positionality. I then proceed by focusing on the (dis-)advantages of composing collaborationist collages, making the arguments that this research strategy directs attention to (dis-)connections and to the temporal politics of emergence. It also requires a willingness to face the uncertainties associated with creative academic work. The article introduces composing collaborationist collages as a research strategy. It does so working with material from feminist new materialism, practice theories, the exhibition War Games featuring installations by Hito Steyerl and Martha Rosler and my own work on the politics of commercial security.

After the Fact

In “After the Fact: Postwar Dissent and the Art of Documentary,” Sara Blair analyzes the redirection of photo-documentary practice by visual artists Richard Avedon and Martha Rosler. Specifically, the chapter emphasizes the self-consciousness with which postwar figures represent and conduct their labor for a context of urgent social crisis and dissent. Both photographers experiment with the properties and forms of documentary imaging, wrested from its familiar contexts: Avedon in an evolving series of portraits of New Left leaders, activists, war prosecutors, and dissidents made in the United States and on the ground in Vietnam, Rosler in projects focusing on the role of photojournalism, documentary, and the media itself in perpetuating both a fog of war and a set of presumptions about documentary as a form of knowledge and power.