Animal Rites - Gee Vaucher

I read about Gee Vaucher's book 'Animal Rites' recently. Vaucher tears and combines old photographs to make collages that reference the relationship between humans and animals - and what that says about us as a species that has undergone 'familial and social conditioning'. The phrase is one used by psychiatrist R.D. Laing who proposes that our socialisation denies us of our own 'subjective reality or free self'. (Binns, 2016). Vaucher has claimed that Laing's theories is an influence on her work in Animal Rites. The tearing and replacing with parts of human faces blurs the boundaries between the two subjects creating a touching but also disturbing dynamic that hints at patriarchy, political hegemony, and the power that humans hold over each other and the rest of the animal kingdom. 'Vaucher has consistently maintained her commitment to animal rights as part of a wider critique of societal power imbalances.' (Binn, 2016).

I've only seen the images online and would really like to see this book in more detail. The work looks very effective and is inspiring to me. The tearing of photographs to make collage is an aspect of art photography that I would like to explore more of. This technique could well be a way to move forward from prop making in my own practice as the staged work with props is not too dissimilar to staged digital or analogue collages. There are also conceptual similarities to Vaucher's exploration of 'societal power imbalances' with my 'Target Practice' work. Whilst primarily a hidden history my body of work does has an overarching theme that references the hetero-normative abuse of power against minorities and less advantaged groups.












References:

Binns, R. (2016). Source. issue 88, Winter 2016.

Andre Serrano - Torture

http://andresserrano.org/series/torture


Andre Serrano's 'Torture' series is a collection of staged tableaux depicting hooded men in often degrading positions. The images are stylised representations of torture that have taken place in many situations like the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, and in Northern Ireland. The work, produced in an old iron foundry, provides a dark and ominous backdrop to the subjects, some of them posed with hessian sacks to partly cover their naked bodies. Their heads are mostly covered by paper or plastic bags depriving or limiting their vision; there is a sense of waiting in the images - time spent contemplating pain, hunger, and fear.

The images are lit in the chiaroscuro style and are dramatic. Serrano uses light to denote a Christian sensibility that references the depiction of saints in Western art. The images are highly aesthetic. This for me is problematic. There is a beauty in the images that almost crosses over into glossy advertising. The foundry backdrop with its depth of detail could easily be used for a fashion shoot and the dramatic lighting builds on this feeling. My impression is that Serrano has made work that emulates the long tradition of art painting. The images are so well crafted that it almost seems that it is possible to empathise with the victims in these situations and to be drawn in to these lifelike simulations. But they are not real. The reality can never really be understood even when viewing documentary photographs.

My own work that I made for 'Target Practice' has also used models with props in an attempt to denote torture. During the creative process I quickly moved away from trying to represent actual places and situations as this felt, for me, facile and unethical. The process led me to folding my images to 'fracture' my simulations and thereby limiting the sense of attempting to portray an impossible to understand reality.

How can people that have not experienced the degradations and tortures but, at the same time, been exposed to very vivid first-hand accounts make art about these experiences? The theoretical reading that I've done surrounding the photographic portrayal of atrocities discusses the concept of post-memory photography; that the work needs to incorporate a metaphorical barrier of some kind that denotes that the work is one step removed from attempts to portray realities that have not been directly experienced. I have alluded to the concept of post-memory in my own work by using an anonymous woodland setting for my Target Practice series. The work also uses this un-named backdrop in another sense; in that it can be understood as situated within the recent tradition of uncovering hidden LGBTQ histories, not part of the mainstream historical narrative and far removed from documentary practise.

Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Postwar Europe - Nancy Wood

This book looks at the discourse around memory and how it is interpreted and contested by different social and political groups in the debate around identity politics. Wood considers 'collective memory' as opposed to individual to be 'performative'.

'Collective, national and public memory [ ] only comes into existence at a given time and place through specific kinds of memorial activity'. (Wood, 1999).

These could be through historical TV programmes, film, commemorations, historical narratives or political debates. Wood uses the term 'vectors' to describe these memorial conduits. The proposed narrative is then absorbed into the national psyche and collectively adopted as part of an accepted historical narrative. Furthermore, Wood states that:

public memory testifies to a will or desire on the part of some social group or disposition of power to select and organise representations of the past so that these will be embraced by individuals on their own. If particular representations of the past have permeated the public domain, it is because they embody an intentionality - social, political, institutional and so on - that promotes or authorises their entry. (Wood, 1999).

Throughout the book Wood examines a number of public debates in the post-modern era that have contested established historical narratives. One of these debates was around two books that recounted the perpetrator testimony of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 during WWII. This battalion committed atrocities in Poland under orders from the Nazi regime. Although the two books used the same primary sources, different theories were elicited regarding the intent of the perpetrators when rounding up and murdering thousands of Jews in Poland. 'Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust' by Daniel J Goldhagen contends that the officers of Reserve Police Battalion 101 held anti-semitic beliefs that were inculcated into themselves and the general German population as a whole; and that these beliefs were the central causal agent of the Holocaust; that the general population sincerely believed they were carrying out Nazi ideology for the good of the German race and were happy to commit even genocide to achieve Nazi goals. This theory is usually referred to as eliminationist anti-semitism.

Christopher R Browning's book 'Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland' takes a different approach. The emphasis on Browning's account is on the 'capacity of human beings to act in a dehumanised and brutal way when subjected to a specific set of circumstances that induce conformist as a defensive - but all too human - reaction.' This view takes a functionalist approach that regards anti-semitism as just one aspect of the conditions that coalesce into the Holocaust.

'The "German" Holocaust memory thus tends to foreground the circumstances leading to the crime; the "Jewish" memory is concerned with the motives that informed it. Likewise, researchers who lack any direct or indirect affiliation to the collectives involved with the crime tend to universalise its meaning.' (Wood, 1999).

It is clear that LGBTQ hidden histories exist because of the lack of political leverage that a minority group holds in a mostly patriarchal and heteronormative society. All attempts to bring historical accuracy regarding LGBTQ events in history are gradually worn down and disappear. This starts on a fairly innocuous level but over time gay history is regarded less and less until it virtually disappears.
Historians are frequently dismissive that the sexuality of a historical figure has any bearing on their actions. This for a LGBTQ person is patently not true when their very sexuality has been criminalised or oppressed. What historians fail to understand is that to be 'queer' in a heteronormative society is to be fundamentally at odds with 'default' behaviour. For a LGBTQ person it is not just about differences of sexual activity; every aspect of society, be that social, political, or judicial, has to be navigated and interpolated as 'Other'.

This aspect of 'Other' is frequently misunderstood by historians. As part of the power battle for the collective social memory of a society, a minority group will always struggle to make itself heard. I reference this lack of agency in my 'Target Practice' work. I have deliberately placed my installation pieces in an anonymous woodland setting; it stands alone from any attempt to see the work as 'documentary' and placing it as part of the collective social memory of WWII. This approach is a conceptual one that I have chosen and although it may be viewed as problematic this is where I currently am with the work. I do not have any answers to these problems of inclusiveness in the historical narrative; all I can do is note them and try to include some the issues into my thinking and hope that it comes out in the work. Ultimately by foregrounding issues of minority exclusion I am in some small way keeping these histories alive.

  






References:

Wood, N. (1999). Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe. New York: Berg.