So I'm back in essay mode and this time the topic is Jacques Ranciere's essay 'The Intolerable Image'. Ranciere asks what makes an image intolerable? Is it the content? Or the conclusions drawn from that content by an implictaed viewer? His essay concentrates on war photography and mainly examples of the representation of war in art work. From Martha Rosler's violent juxtaposition of Vietnamese victims in pristine American homes to Alfredo Jaar's object approach to showing and concealing. His essay deals with the problem of representing through the medium of photography. Rolling out the old dialogue, on the one hand the photograph is a direct imprint of reality on the other an always-composed snippet of one distinct viewpoint removed from any kind of reality. My summing up will be left there (the essay isn't written yet!)
My tutor suggested I look to the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial which was entitled Memory of Fire; War Images and Images of War in which (another tutor) Julian Stallabrass curated 8 sites on the South coast along the theme of war images. The exhibitions were diverse and multiplicitous, a gesture which Stallabrass hoped would lead to more clarity, no doubt through questions proposed rather than answers given. Reviews describe the breadth of exhibition; the positivity of showing images from sides, the inclusion of media from photojournalism, amateur and anonymous photography and art works, the time-span from World War 2, to Vietnam and Iraq. Yet they also tiptoe around the precarious subject of content. Should images of war be put on display in an exhibition?
Ok so back to Ranciere to answer that question? I'll argue that in my essay. Right now it has made me question exhibtions in general. How do we look, when we visit exhibitions. What are we looking for? Do we go with open eyes? Or those loaded with expectation? Unanswerable questions. But it begs the question, especially with the rise of the big institutions such as Tate, should art exhibitions be relegated to realm of leisure activity? Should we go looking at war photography on a Sunday afternoon for pleasure? No and this is not imply that art can or should not be enjoyed or that it requires immense thought and critical analysis but when faced with the photograph of a face blown apart on the fields of Somme, the question becomes pertinent.
In this year (or three) or government cuts to the arts we must rescue our instutions and museums from being solely leisure facilities dependent on visitor numbers into interrogative and challenging, educational and economical places. These images must have space to be shown outside the context of the media circus in order for questions of viewing and representation to be asked. We have to be brave enough to face upto these images yet also to realise when an image is one too far (as Stallabrass and photographer Simon Norfolk did in one of the Biennials exhibitions), a good exhibition, like that in 2008, should allow us to do so.
Link to 2008 biennial website:
http://2008.bpb.org.uk/2008/
Image: Simon Norfolk
