|
|
|
|
Steve McQueen, Running Thunder, © the artist, Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Marian Goodman, New York, Paris. |
|
Steve McQueen, Eschewing the Clichéd Image of Conflict |
Baltic Centre Steve McQueen presents two recent works that transform Baltic’s level 3 gallery into an immersive and disorienting experience for the viewer. Together the two works combine architecture and film to create a visual and aural kaleidoscope. In Pursuit of the Image — Guy Debord Steve McQueen’s work speaks to and from the catastrophe of the image in our contemporary societies. This does not mean, strictly speaking, the image of catastrophe, although our experience of the work provokes such an hallucination: for instance, the sensation in Pursuit of being engulfed in a ‘theatre of war’; or the unease in Running Thunder of witnessing the decomposing corpse of a horse, which may be due less to the image of death than to the fact that, in the image, death lies exposed and unattended — a matter of indifference. As such, it resonates uncomfortably with the over-familiar image of the slain, dehumanised other relayed to our TV screens from distant conflicts. And yet shadowing these associations, the catastrophe to which the works themselves seem to allude is, rather, the dissociation of mediated images from the experience of daily life that Debord attributes to the society of the spectacle. McQueen’s projected images prompt us to consider whether this alienation of self from itself and self from others produces an irretrievable disaffection where life and death become interchangeable, and where whatever may be said to distinguish the human is reduced to the naked existence deprived of political representation into which increasing numbers of the world’s population are being driven. Images of catastrophe are relevant here insofar as they act as a disturbing counterpoint to the fake-real of mediated “reality,” not least because they come across as cruel substitutes for an incommunicable “real life.” As Susan Sontag points out, leaving aside Debord, for the majority of people in the world reality is far from being an illusion. Although at heart we “know” this reality is not an illusion, we do not know how to inhabit this knowledge; we do not, as Sontag suggests, know “how to respond to images of the suffering of others” — perhaps, as Debord might say, because we no longer recognise our own reality? Moreover, as Sontag says of graphic images of catastrophe, shock value has become a common but perhaps redundant currency: “The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence.” More poignantly, she suggests that it is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs, which eclipses other forms of understanding and remembering; the photograph can do no more than haunt us. If the image of catastrophe haunts our response to McQueen’s work it is perhaps because the artist recognises the untransmissibility of “limit experiences” themselves, since, as Paul Ricoeur says, they presents an inhumanity with no common measure with the experience of the average person. But to say untransmissible is not to say inexpressible. For an art to produce affect it must touch a chord in our own experience; it must restore the language of lived life that Debord claims is dismissed by the spectacle. |
Queen and Country, 2007, would seem to present just such a gesture of bringing this haunting home to critical understanding. Appointed as official war artist to Iraq by the Imperial War Museum’s Art Commissions Committee, McQueen eschewed the clichéd image of conflict and instead produced a set of commemorative postage stamps of portraits donated by the families of almost a hundred named service personnel who had lost their lives. Denied their proposed role as actual postage — as personalised vectors of communication connecting individuals across public and private spheres — the sheets of stamps remain in sliding panels housed, symbolically, in an oak cabinet. These multiple portraits, mostly smiling, are indeed haunting, as are also the empty panels “waiting” to be filled; but Queen and Country is shocking in its provocation of a sense of impotence against powers that conceal themselves behind the rhetoric of national identity to the impoverishment of personal narratives of sacrifice and loss. It is proposed that this is the field of action of McQueen’s work; that it ambushes the spectacularised image from the inside, as it were, seeking out those contradictions that might disclose how it holds us hostage to the workings of power. Our first encounter with Pursuit is profoundly disorientating and immobilising. It is only after some moments that we realise we are virtually inside a projection whose black and white images are diffracted 360 degrees from a central screen around a space dissolved into a mirroring infinity. Now amoeboid, now reticular, these seemingly abstract images sparkle, cohere, dehisce and reconfigure in constant flux. On the projection screen the forms seem like molecular particles; in the reflections they appear like lights of distant cities at night, or — as already mentioned — the traces of bullets and bombs in a conflict zone. This rhythmic oscillation between proximity and distance, the microscopic and the macroscopic, is echoed in the soundtrack: between deep everberating sounds imagined as distant firing or an intimate rustling like leaves underfoot, all punctuated by moments of intense silence. Like the soundtrack, the mobility of light and dark forms induces a perceptual confusion between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’, ‘figure’ and “ground,” “surface,” and “depth” but never coalesces into any definable identity. As soon as a form begins to take shape it dissolves, mutates, like the elusive figure in the forest in Predator — a movement that lures the gaze but lingers at the limit of the camera/eye’s capacity to capture it. It is not that the image in itself lacks referentiality (as in many of McQueen’s works, it is photographically generated from quite ordinary sources), but that its presentation situates us in a zone of indeterminacy between the imaginary and the real, the virtual and the actual, memory and a sensuous physicality that brings us to our senses. Running Thunder seems the reverse of Pursuit: rather than projecting the image throughout the space, it presents a distilled image on the wall, comparable to a modest-sized painting; rather than ‘inside’ the projected image we are ‘outside’ it, but nonetheless enframed in the entire installation alongside the film projector. This means, however, that our gaze is oblique; we cannot take up a centred position without effacing the image, complementing our own effacement by Pursuit’s surrounding images. Running Thunder projects a silent film — perhaps an “animated painting” — in a continuous looped sequence depicting the close-up body of a horse lying in a meadow. There is no movement save the darting of flies, the flicker of grass caught in a light breeze, and the persistent click of the projector marking mechanical time. We are captured in anticipation that something might “happen;” but we encounter only the enigmatic stillness of death — the deepened shadows of the corpse where, invisibly, hollowed out from within, it collapses in on itself, without, however, ever reaching a fully entropic endpoint. It is the death deferred in the painting of a Stubbs racehorse, a portrait of a ‘fallen hero’ and as such is the forbidden image of Queen and Country. |
As in Pursuit, time passes but feels curiously immobile, a continuous motion of becoming where meaning never arrives insofar as there is no determinable “position” that the viewer could territorialise as the illusory sovereign subject of the spectacle. If this is what we vainly seek, what McQueen’s work otherwise induces is a deterritorialisation that discloses the shadow of death cast by the mediated, projected image of the spectacle – the ‘screen’ of already constituted meanings behind which, as Debord says, the spectator’s life is ‘deported’ — much as the anamorphic skull interrupts the coherent pictorial reality of Holbein’s Ambassadors. McQueen’s spectacle is not, however, the negativity of the vanitas since the impulse is less towards what we experience than how we experience, which resituates us in the affective duration of a life-affirming embodied experience. It induces astonishment; it gives pause for thought, or the pause from which a new thought arises. Is this the interval in which the catastrophe of the image, its incapacity to communicate a “truth” of existence, is nonetheless opened up to what Dominic LaCapra identifies as the ‘structural’ (or existential) trauma that afflicts all human beings? Significantly, this is never an individual experience: “Trauma stems from the interrelations with others and affects others.” Whilst the singularity of another’s suffering may be untransmissible in words or images, what is expressible is our shared experience as subjects traumatically separated from an unknowable origin and destiny by the very operations of language. If it is the work of power to conceal this separation in unifying myths and illusions that lull us into a “generalised autism” (Debord), McQueen’s work exposes it, not by, impossibly, displacing the spectacularised image, but, through its manipulation, awakening the spectator to its situatedness as sensate being: a release into our proper dwelling in what Merleau-Ponty called the “flesh of the world.” As McQueen himself has suggested, this may be experienced by disclosing the extraordinary in ordinary life. — Jean Fisher, August 2008 Steve McQueen McQueen is represented by Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman, New York and Paris. Jean Fisher |
Steve McQueen Pursuit, 2005, © the artist. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan. Photo: Attilio Maranzano. All images © The Artist. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. |
|
