International Politics and Performance

Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice

Jenny Edkins, Adrian Kear

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415706230
• eBook ISBN: 9781134664603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years we have witnessed an increasing convergence of work in International Politics and Performance Studies around the troubled, and often troubling, relationship between politics and aesthetics. Whilst examination of political aesthetics, aesthetic politics, and politics of aesthetic practice has been central to research in both disciplines for some time, the emergence of a distinctive 'performative turn' in International Politics and a critical return to the centrality of politics and the concept of 'the political' in Performance Studies highlights the importance of investigating the productivity of bringing the methods and approaches of the two fields of enquiry into dialogue and mutual relation.

Exploring a wide range of issues including rioting, youth-driven protests, border security practices and the significance of cultural awareness in war, this text provides an accessible and cutting edge survey of the intersection of international politics and performance examining issues surrounding the politics of appearance, image, event and place; and discusses the development and deployment of innovative critical and creative research methods, from auto-ethnography to site-specific theatre-making, from philosophical aesthetics to the aesthetic thought of new securities scenario-planning.

The book's focus throughout is on the materiality of performance practices—on the politics of making, spectating, and participating in a variety of modes as political actors and audiences—whilst also seeking to explicate the performative dynamics of creative and critical thinking. Structured thematically and framed by a detailed introduction and conclusion, the focus is on producing a dialogue between contributors and providing an essential reference point in this developing field.

This work is essential reading for students of politics and performance and will be of great interest to students and scholars of IR, performance studies and cultural studies.

Part I

Logics of staging

1 Traces of presence

Adrian Kear

The fundamental problem that now arises is that of the trace, or of the visibility of the visible … Are there traces of the act? How can we isolate the act from its result without resorting to the ineluctably sacred form of the work?

(Alain Badiou¹)

This does not mean that there is no theatre … But theatre, here, means the scene of representation: it means the extreme edge of this scene, the dividing line where singular beings are exposed to one another.

(Jean-Luc Nancy²)

Presence and representation

January 2009, and I’m walking through three feet of snow to get to what I hope is the entrance to Hangar Bicocca on the outskirts of Milan in order to see an exhibition of works by the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar. It is Difficult, the title on the exhibition poster tells me—which is also what the taxi driver had said as he dropped me off some way from the venue. I think to myself ‘it certainly is’ as I try to find the way into the building, recalling as I move the remainder of the enigmatic quotation from William Carlos Williams: ‘It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.’³ Eventually a doorway presents itself and I stumble into the cavernous space of the gallery with Williams’s curious inversion of the troubled relationship between art and politics reverberating in my head. I’m struck by two things on entering: it seems inhospitably empty, the emptiness echoing the space’s post-industrial enormity, testament to the scale of the economic apparatus once housed here and now traced, associatively, by the art-producing machine; and it’s cold—colder, if that’s possible, than the snow-encrusted city outside. However, I’m here now, and the cold draws attention to my being there as an ontological experience. It runs through my body as an index of my own presence, a marker of my exposure, and of exposure as a locus of being opened up to the relational experience of others.

As I move round It is Difficult, I’m aware that my viewing of the exhibition is conditioned as much by my relation to the cold as by my relation to the works themselves; yet in spite of this, or perhaps because of it—because it draws attention to my being located geopolitically in a privileged Northern hemispheric context—I’m conscious that the images with which I’m being presented are less a set of artworks as objects than the effective traces of a number of inter-related artistic acts with representational outcomes that record the co-presence of the artist in a series of places, relations and situations that would otherwise not be made visible, would not otherwise be made available to be seen. The institutional frame and representational context of exhibition is thereby to be regarded as an essential co-determinant of the ‘visibility of the visible’ set into play by the artistic act, creating a space of encounter between the spectator and the visible trace of another’s material presence as an essentially theatrical exposure of relational ontology. Without this gesture towards the spectator’s co-appearance in the scene, to my relational co-presence with what is seen, the image itself would not be given to be seen. Put simply, the conditions of the appearance of the image provide the very ground for the recognition of the politics of the image, drawing attention to the theatrical politics of spectatorship as a relational exposure of—and to—political ontology. Watching scenes of others being exposed to excessive heat and extreme exploitation thereby seemed, in the context of the bitterly cold environment of the gallery, to act as a reminder that what was being rendered visible in these images could not be encountered with the dispassionate detachment of the expert observer but rather sought to invoke the relational co-presence and ethical implication of the critically and creatively engaged spectator.

The earliest piece in the retrospective seems to demonstrate the continuity of Jaar’s commitment to examining the relational dynamics of exposure through interrogating the material interdependence of the form, content and context of the image’s exhibition and staging. Introduction to a Distant World (1985) is a 9 minute 30 second digital video projection, installed in the Hangar in large-screen format and presented in a face-to-face audience relation. It depicts an extraordinary scene—or, more precisely, it presents an ordinary scene ‘extraordinarily’ by bringing it to visibility and allowing it to be seen. Jaar’s video camera captures an open-cast goldmine in the northeastern Amazonian rainforest, populated by some of the 40,000 or more gold prospectors in the Serra Pelada. It starts with an extreme wide-angle shot of the physical landscape of the site itself, showing the precarious network of ladders, rock-hewn steps and rudimentary irrigation system that form the ‘infrastructure’ of the excavation. The miners are visible only in their multitude, navigating the treacherous slopes as they carry bags of slurry up and out of the site before descending to continue their Sisyphean labour. The spatial and temporal rhythm of Introduction to a Distant World becomes established by the camera angle narrowing to focus inward on the mine, revealing in mid-shot a seemingly chaotic and self-evidently dangerous mining ‘machine’ with human bodies as its essential element. The framing of the image becomes more and more concerned with the materiality of the environment, with the bodies of the miners, arms and legs exposed, as they carry sodden sacks of earth on their shoulders up the slippery pathway in intensely close proximity, with others passing them on the way back down. They walk together, always looking down, conjoined by their work and interdependent on each other’s material presence, their inescapable being there together. Jaar’s camera zooms in on the movement of the miners’ feet and legs, mud-splattered and exposed to the immanent disaster of a slip, whilst the continuous pace of the editing resonates with the ineluctable rhythm of the machine. Thigh, knee, calf, ankle, foot—the artistic apparatus seems designed to present nothing short of the presence of the people in this place as the very ground of their aesthetic co-appearance; as the material substance which would otherwise not be brought to appearance. The project of the video would therefore seem to be the presentation of ontological co-presence, or at least the presentation of its trace in the work of representation. For in the editing and framing of the image, in the manual labour of constructing the work of art as such as well as in the material trace of its making, we see the coexistence of presence and representation, material relations and mediation. The artist’s work is dependent on the miner’s labour, mediation remains dependent on the stuff of matter, and the point is not lost on the engaged spectator.

In fact, and in order to make clear the political relations at stake in the work of art and their imbrications in the co-compositional processes of making and spectating, Introduction to a Distant World incorporates the implication of the spectator in the scene through an explicit moment of recognition. At the end of the piece, in a marked interruption of the camera’s focus on the rhythm of feet and the materiality of bodies, a miner looks up and returns the artist’s/spectator’s gaze. The suddenness of the gesture, its startling instantaneity, is accentuated affectively by the introduction of a soft freeze and then fading of the image. The theatricality of the moment seems to insist on the appearance of the miner as subject, staged as a face-to-face confrontation, when in fact it serves more as an index of the presence of the artist and, by extension, the anticipated context of the spectatorial relation. In other words, the moment of interruption instantiates the appearance of subjectivity as produced by the anthropological machine of the artistic apparatus rather than the appearance of a singular subject as such. If anything, it is the spectator who comes into being at this point as witness to a highly orchestrated disruption of the ‘visibility of the visible’ as an event of—and in—representation. As Badiou writes:

It is of the very essence of the event to be both what irrupts and what solely exists and organizes subjects in the form of traces which are immediately difficult to read. One could then say that performance takes place precisely between the active force of what emerges and its enigmatic dissemination.⁴

The ‘performance’ taking place here, then, in the artistic space of presenting co-presence and disseminating it through the economic and political relations of the gallery, tends to organize the spectator as subject or, rather, as the aesthetic subject of an ethical and political address. If Introduction to a Distant World makes apparent part of the contemporary world that would otherwise not be seen, it does so with a knowingness by which the making and viewing of the artwork is itself structured and implicated in that world and is built upon fundamental global inequality. What is at stake in looking at these images in this context? What is the nature of the difficult performance of relation unfolded through watching them? These are, of course, Jaar’s questions, to which I would add: what difference does it make if the people presented in the work of representation are aware of themselves performing? What if the labour of making art is conceived as a shared act rather than one built on another kind of work, another kind of labour? What are the ethical, political and aesthetic implications of recognizing the co-presence of performer, maker and spectator as being in the world—this world—together?

It is Difficult seems resolutely determined to draw attention to the politics of these questions and to trace the co-dependency of presence and representation through a series of inter-related aesthetic inquiries and investigations. The exhibition includes one of several variations of the Serra Pelada materials which extend the video work’s focus on the dynamics of the image’s framing and the ontological relations at stake in its theatrical staging. Out of Balance (1989), is a series of six rectangular light-boxes (45 x 244 x 13cm) in which the dimensions of the frame greatly exceeds the singular image of a miner’s face illuminated by it. Each colour transparency is located at the edge of the frame, drawing attention to the excess of the mechanism of double exposure utilized to capture and then reproduce it. As such, this display of light is simultaneously reflective of the ontology of photography, at least in its analogue state, as the product of the capture of light in the form of its negative imprint and the re-animation of its material trace, and of the political aesthetics of an ideology that designates the appearance of the visual ‘as the realm of what manifests itself’.⁵ At the same time, the radiance of the face contained within its aperture designates the materiality of the political ontology simultaneously in play in the image’s locus of appearance and affective articulation of itself as a virtual trace of presence. For this is someone; someone whose sometime appearance in front of Jaar’s camera is once again made manifest in the spectator’s confrontation with the ‘facingness’ of the image illuminated and installed in the exhibition space. Here the details of environment and activity are excluded so that, as Rancière explains, the spectatorial encounter with ‘the obtuse presence that interrupts … becomes the luminous power of a face-to-face’ through which ‘presence opens out into presentation of presence’ and ‘the obtuse power of the image … becomes the radiance of a face’.⁶ However, as the title of the work, Out of Balance, suggests, the geopolitical conditions governing the relations of presence and representation are themselves inexorably over-determining of the nature of the co-appearance being made manifest. Jaar’s concern is therefore not simply with facilitating the appearance of the image as such, but with making...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Logics of staging
• PART II Aesthetic thought and the politics of practice
• PART III Ontological and ethnographic co-performance
• PART IV Bodies politic and performative
• PART V Dramaturgies of scenario and security
• Select bibliography
• Index