The Future of War: Panel - 7:00-9:30pm, May 2 2003
Aesthetics + Politics of Technologized Warfare
Joy Garnett
I'd like to discuss several thorny issues that haunt me,
in light of the direction of some of my
recent work, and that have to do with different uses of
the image in our culture--specifically,
in this instance, self-reflexive images of civil and
global upheaval, of war, or of natural and
man-made disasters and urban trauma; such images as we
can't help but see every day. I
would like to discuss the connection between what I do as
a painter of these kinds of images,
and the amazingly resilient myth of the photograph as
"proof," since it underscores our
perception and understanding of all media images. I also
want to talk a little about different
forms of mediation, some of which are not apparent or
which are purposefully hidden; some
of which are mechanical as a lens, and some of which is
socially engendered by governments
and policies.
Rocket
Science series of paintings (Index)
1) Autonomic
Much of what artists do relies on the understanding that
all images are constructs. This is a
given. Photographs are constructed, but we tend to forget
this. We still like to think of them as
a record of reality, proof that something has
occurred--or, according to the old saw, that they
how us a "trace," a "slice of life."
We still need to remind ourselves, despite what we know
about digital and other kinds of technical manipulation
and despite all that has been and still
gets written on the subject, that the camera is not
"neutral," that there is either someone
holding it, or steering it remotely, or else downloading
and contextualizing the contents of its
transmission so it may be interpreted and if need be,
acted upon.
2) Kill Box
There is always someone behind the something that produces
or publishes or transmits the
image, that loads it into another machine--either
literally or metaphorically--that recontextualizes
it, re-frames it, and spins it according to an agenda or
with a technical protocol in mind. One
doesn't have to doctor or digitally manipulate an image in
order to manipulate its meaning.
Images, we know, are wild things. We've been warned of
this since antiquity. Some have felt
that images need to be framed, pinned down, defined,
explained. And once detached from their
original context, once they are set loose, what we once
took to be their transparent, inherent
meanings--dissolve. The image becomes, once again,
open-ended and ambiguous, apparently,
perhaps even dangerous.
7) Smart Painting (triptych): 1, 2, 3
8) Firing Up
9) Stealth
10) Cluster
Let me give you some background to my own thoughts on
this. For a time my painterly sources
consisted of scientific and technical publications. I was
drawn to the fact that more than almost
any other type of photograph, the science photograph
relies heavily on our acceptance of the
notion of the photograph as evidence. We tend to
take the "truth" of science photographs for
granted despite the fact that they are often the most
complex of constructions, sometimes quite
openly so. Perhaps
we wish to feel comfortable in thinking we know what the invisible looks like,
nor do we have any way of ascertaining independently of
science the "truth" of what most science
photographs depict: phenomena invisible or else spatially
remote from the naked eye, that which
can only be perceived through some kind of mediation,
either by a lens or some more advanced
technological extension of the lens, and whose
"appearance" we eventually have to take on faith.
11) Launch
12) Disaster (3)
13) Disaster (2)
14) Disaster (1)
15) Flame-out
16) Eject
I found it increasingly difficult to not follow science
into technoscientific and military terrain; it
began to dawn on me how deeply and intricately these
realms are entwined. But my first departure
from the relatively sedate world of science--photo
microscopy and space photography--came when
I became preoccupied with other, less purely optical forms
of mediation that are in play throughout
our culture: the hyperbole and oversimplification of the
news media; government secrecy; and there
are also personal filtering mechanisms we may unconsciously
deploy to head off that information
which, though available, is actually too dismaying to
contemplate. So we can probably add to the
list of mediated information, the secrets we manage to
keep from ourselves for whatever reason.
17) Crash
18) Concorde
19) Speed of Sound
20) Firing Up (2)
21) Ex Trails
More
Recent Work: 2001-2002 (Index)
22) Direct Hit
23) Rainbow Bomb
25) Smoke Screen
26) Desert
Screen
27) Mazar-e-Sharif
[etc.]
But let’s go back to government secrecy as a form of
mediation, (because that’s my favorite).
Earlier today I presented a web resource I’ve been
developing over the years which is called
The Bomb Project, and in which I touched upon
Cold War era government secrecy. I’ll briefly
show you the web site:
The Bomb Project is a
cumulative online resource and information hub for nuclear issues,
contextualized for artists. It grew out of image research
I was doing in 1997 for a series of
paintings of nuclear tests that led me into scientific and
military terrain I never knew existed,
and which very much changed my working method and my
relationship to images in the media.
Test Shots:
1) Trinity
2) Hiroshima
3) Nagasaki
4) Baker
5) Operation
Buster-Jangle: Dog
7) Castle Bravo
8) Castle Romeo
9) [Guinea] Pig, Nevada Proving Grounds
10) Castle Union
11) Met
12) Hood
I finished that presentation with several questions I’d
like to return to, regarding the possible
effect that government secrecy might have on our
perception of declassified imagery: How did
nearly half a decade of secrecy about government policy,
and particularly the images that
demonstrate that policy, influence how we think about
these issues now? How has the fact that
miles of film footage and still imagery were hidden from
the public eye for decades, affect how
we may look at these images now?
What I'm really asking then, is what is the effect of
declassification, and how does secrecy
function as a mode of mediation? And the next question
then would be: do certain kinds of
creative practice offer us—both the practitioners and the
consumers of art—an alternative in the
way we access and internalize these events?
Does the aesthetic and emotional distancing that exists
between most of us and the reality of
post-Cold War dangers make for a collective denial of
ongoing and escalating dangers? This is
what Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, scholar and activist refers to
as "psychic numbing." Have we become
a viewing public that only craves and thrills in real-time
transmission, including the real-time
transmission of disaster and horror and war? In view of
that possibility, how are we to internalize
the significance of declassified images from 20 years
worth of clandestine weapons tests, whose
toxic effects on populations we are only just now
officially assessing? It is as though the images
themselves were felt to be as dangerous as the radioactive
isotopes that produced them.
This is the crux, I believe, of this particular construct
of the declassified photograph. Here are
images that have yet another layer of mediation. Because
something contradictory is taking place:
the affect had on us of photographs of nuclear test shots
is a protracted one—they seem somehow
unreal—unbelievable really—less like evidence, more like
artifice. This is partly because they are
remote from us in time, and partly
Hi-res
image of Baneberry Venting (DOE Photo Library)
because the location of these tests in geographically
barren, remote areas makes them appear
sublime, an act of Nature, and not the result of the hand
of government policy. But the fact is,
that the events that they correspond to, (for most
people), seem more fictional than real,
because they were conducted in secret. Hence these secret
photographs, unlike almost all other
historical photographs, do not resonate with anyone’s
personal memories. They seem more like
spectacular fabrications that have occurred out of time
and out of place.
Of course, we are living out the post Cold War legacy. Our
government is as secretive as ever,
but more apt to release and deploy a greater array of
imagery in the public domain, with seeming
promiscuity. This seeming over-abundance too is an act of
mediation, if a subtler one, a clever
slight of hand.
More recent work:
2) Night Vision
3) Riot Squad
4) Target
There are many more recent, if perhaps less extravagant
instances of the declassification effect:
We perhaps had the sense during the First Gulf War—the CNN
War—that we were being given an
amazingly intimate eye on the war, as it flashed in greens
and whites across our screens. Years
later, other, less triumphalist, less distanced footage of
the 1st Gulf War—really gruesome footage—
was released into the public domain, to little fanfare; we
weren't really looking for it anymore. Well,
actually, I was looking, which is how I found it. But
anyone can find those images now, really. You
can either Google "Basra, Highway of Death," or
else you can order a video from the Discovery
Channel. But the point is: the meaning it would have had
for us at the time would have been quite
different from now, viewed as it is so long after the
fact.
So what I have to offer in response to all this is my
belief that by re-appropriating as raw material
for creative endeavor, images that have been mediated in
various ways and according to untold
agendas, we stand a chance of internalizing the events
they depict—or the kinds of events they
depict, and so we may have a chance of reclaiming them.
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