The Epistemology of Visibility

On contemporary political imagination

"All art is subject to political manipulation, except for that which speaks the language of this same manipulation" Laibach, 10 Items of the Convenant, 1982

A situation is a set of certain matters held in a certain position. A position that demands inculcation – no matter how long – of those matters. The political imagination is the one that can set the inculcation in motion, change it, and turn it dynamic. The situation I will refer to is made up of matters concerning politics, aesthetics, social, economical, national, and the common fields we operate in. The space in which we operate is always dividable, when the division cements the differences and the similarities simultaneously. Ranciere termed this process “The Distribution of the Sensible”. It encapsulates all visual symbols regardless of their field of ‘expertise’ (advertisements and boards as well as artworks), and examines the conscious and hierarchical division as an event. Ranciere ties the aesthetic with the political, and points at the meaning of what we see (and what we don’t see) while perceiving the space around us.

There are artists who are responsible for the representation of the excluded in that space, such as Santiago Sierra in his work 133 Persons Paid To Have Their Hair Died Blond, which was exhibited at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Sierra paid 133 dark-skinned foreign workers to die their hair platinum blond. The actual dying process was a turned into a mass performance during the Previews, while a video of it was exhibited at the exhibition itself. The act of dying the hair blonde accentuated the participants’ visibility of the participants, who are usually excluded from our visual/social space. The work made them simply visible, and therefore present in the public sphere. Additionally, the work exposed the barter and the capitalist mechanism that characterizes most interactions with foreign and migrant workers.

Other artists create ad-hoc communal phenomena in the hope they will catch on and turn a utopian community into a real one. Thomas Hirschhorn for example, built a temporary museum (Musee Precaire Albinet) in a suburb with a very dubious reputation, outside of Paris. The local school kids took part in building it; they drilled walls, hung paintings, put sculptures on pedestals and together created a youth-centre looking museum. Its aesthetics, opposite to the usual alienating museum aesthetics, was familiar and inviting for them. The idea was to turn the museum into a permanent structure with the local community taking an active part in the artistic activities, but that fell through eventually.

Such actions suppose a direct relationship between the visual object we perceive and the possibilities for its mental processing; when Pierre Huyghe gathers a community around a certain idea he works from the assumption that an alternative future can be perceived as a viable option for this particular group of people. Streamside Day (2003) is one of his projects, set in a young communal village in America, made of middle class people who gathered together around ecological communal initiatives. The locals complained about them being a separate community, atomized, lacking communal and social relationships.
Huyghe, together with the city council, set up a local festival, a community celebration around an ecological initiative. The event was filmed and later some of it was screened as a part of an installation Huyghe created. In the installation, the walls around the wall that the work was being projected onto were moved to close in on the audience, demarcate a territory, a clear physical space. The overall work lay a foundation for the existence of a social structure within the communal village, and suggested the event that as taking place as the first holiday of the group living in the communal village.

By creating an artwork that concretizes the existence of a certain community together, he supposes, hopes, and mainly allows the perception of the possibility of the event as well as its continuation. It creates epistemology. It plants seeds for a social infrastructure, for the possibility that for the young rebel, or even for the everyday man - an idea which seems utopian, may come true; it’s visible, it allows pondering, imagining, thinking up a different reality.

Plato excluded artists and actors from the state (Police) exactly for that reason (Politeia, 2nd book) – the instigative abilities of the visible image can create various doxas that don’t necessarily encourage the values a particular state would like to promote. Acting is based on mimetic qualities, meaning on the ability to imagine a certain situation and imitate it. In the Stanislavski method an actor is required to imagine, and even assimilate himself/herself in the imagination of the character, to imitate it. Therefore, the best performance will be achieved when the imitation will be done in the most authentic way.  The performance is a false misrepresentation, an illusion based on mimesis, on a congruent representation. In the performance, of course, we are the spectators, and opposite to the other senses, eyesight is a kind of certainty, one that will most certainly not be arguable; when we see – we know. It’s on the basis of this perception that the assumptions regarding the visibility of epistemology lie: the ability to deem something sustainable as a result of its visual manifestation.

Alternative healing techniques use guided meditation as a tool for treating the ‘self’. In fact, performance does a similar thing; only it transposes the imagination from the personal to the collective experience; from the personal fantasy to the theatre of public images, from passing thoughts to a concrete possibility, even if imagined. But the moment an attempt is made to create the image in the world rather than the dream, one must deal with the questions around the manufacturing of the image as well as the conditions for its existence in reality. Consequently, the final product provides a reliable image, which offers a practical solution for problems with which we wouldn’t deal with in our absolute imagination. If we choose, as audience, to adopt that image, it will become a part of our private arsenal of possibilities, and we would be able to use it, whether it’s for the sake of an internal confrontation with painful subject matters in our consciousness, as happens in guided meditation, or for the sake of imagining an alternative future or an alternative history, or the actual possibility of pondering over what seemed up until that moment impossible.

In his book¹, anthropologist Michael Taussig explains how mimetic abilities work in the context of politics. According to Taussig, a traditional mimetic conception of imitation and representation constitutes the state’s main source of strength. The state blurs the differentiation between the original and the replication, and appropriates the social and cultural reproduction to the point of expulsion, banishing it from the act of representation as well as from its independent potency. The ways of operating in the cultural sphere were adopted by the political hegemony, pushing the cultural sphere back, placing it secondary; the only real is the Political - this is the foundation - the state comes first in the symbolic order, it’s the source of the norm from which everything is derived. The described action is termed by Laussig “second nature”, appropriated by the state.

In order to understand the use of the term “second nature” we must distinguish between two ways of using the mimetic skill, or rather between two ways to perceive it: the first, as an object, a distinct construct, whilst it’s possible to distinguish between the actor and the acting (when it’s artificial and not natural for example). In such case we can isolate, in our perception, the imitation as an object, an independent skill, an adjective given to something. Brecht for example, uses the technique of “estrangement” in order to awaken the audiences’ awareness to the fact that the actors are acting, reading a given text and carry out actions that are not ‘real’.
The second way will be, naturally, the one where we cannot trace the ‘acting’. For example, when an actor is so good, that we can’t tell if he’s actually acting, when the acting is natural, unnoticeable, as in the case of a particularly good application of the Stanislavski method. While “estrangement” is a move taken in order to make the audiences aware of the form of the play and the making of the performance, the way “second nature” works is reversed – instead of emphasizing the “acting” it begs to entirely embed the mechanism. So it’s almost a case of fraud, since we don’t know if the person standing before us is pretending – to us it seems authentic, real. That’s exactly the “second nature”, which Taussig argues to be the secret to the success of the state in ruling its citizens, when it puts on the best show in town. The political power of the imitation is hidden in using it as a naturalistic, natural, unnoticeable act, when the establishment adopts it in that way. When onlookers don’t perceive the mimetic ability as a noticeable act, its power as a controlling mechanism soars, whilst at the same time an opportunity arises – to use it in revolutionary ways.  

In order to create such epistemology of visibility we will need actors who will play for us the ideal possibilities we would like to imagine or even realize. The actor, said Foucault, is the most profound outlaw of the modern state. Potentially, according to Foucault, an actor is far more dangerous from a primitive person, or even an insane person, since it cannot be diagnosed or classified as one. The appropriation of the transformative mimetic by the actor cannot be pathologically diagnosed, and can therefore not be debunked. Based on this assumption, adopting the standard set of rules yet acting them out in an abnormal way creates change in the perception of the existing political structure. Such change can occur when a transgression happens, or internal shifts away if you will, in the way in which the diplomatic rules-of-the-game are being used: by adopting normative means, by implementing them, and by betraying them. Betrayal in the normative ways of action, if done by an actor who adopted those rules, holds within it many political possibilities. It paves the way for change to occur. By adopting the rules of the hegemony, the actor uses social norms as well as the recognition of the audience in the ways of life we all share. But once the actor commits an internal betrayal, a transgression, a deviation of meanings, he points at the ways in which we, as a communal, social, or economic body, can exist and behave differently. Representations derived from the hegemonic culture turn into emblems of power, and when they mediate the new and the bad (as opposed to the good and the old), they contain revolutionary, transformative, mind altering abilities. We see the other possibilities. The moment we recognize the possibility it becomes real, often already validated, often sustainable. It joins our pool of visual knowledge, of what we saw, of what is available. It’s epistemology. It’s what we can know.

In their essay "Guided Meditation"², Adi Ophir and Ariella Azoulay explain that political imagination can become a practical tool for political change in a republic. In order create a different regime, the two suggest we have to mentally overcome three distinct characteristics of modern democracy: the idea of state as a hermetic, sealed off entity, a closed off authority which determines its political boundaries and maintains contacts with similar entities in the international arena; the idea of state as a republic measured by its army, through which it can gain further power and use it to secure its survival; the functioning of the state as a backyard for the legally marginalized, the refugees and migrants, where ad-hoc solution are created for those who are excluded, and where they are brought to turn on each other.

Once these beliefs are liberated, we will be able to imagine the state as a fertile ground for struggles and dynamic relationships, as an open space that exists to contain all its inhabitances, a political approach likened to that of Hannah Arendt³. We must imagine ourselves as the governors, the state is ours, it’s open and dynamic, and can therefore change according to the needs of all its inhabitants, not just some of them.
The imagination Ophir and Azoulay ask to assume is a political one. They do it by drawing little scenarios – in schools, in public spaces, in mainstream media – where the story is handled and told differently. It’s the story of those whose voice isn’t heard, the lesson that teaches the silenced narrative, the artistic line-up that was chosen by the participants and the spectators, not the stakeholders. These are liminal spaces where daily structures are turned upside down, conversational priorities change. All those imaginary moves make use of the everyday patterns we are so familiar with in our everyday lives, but each one begs for an act of deviation, an internal move, or transgression. Such deviation, for example, can be found in the works of The Yes Men ensemble, who published a NY Times issue with the ideal news we all hope to read on the magazine cover.

It’s a group of actors – impersonators who adopted the hegemonic, normative, agreed and familiar voice, in order to offer a utopian morning - a newspaper with utopian news articles in it. Today, more and more initiatives in various field of practice adopt the mimetic skill in a hope of changing an existing situation. Whether it’s the Syrian Blogger, The Yes Men ensemble mentioned above, or the Clown’s Party, due to run for parliament next elections. Another example could be the works of Lebanese artist Walid Raad, who founded The Atlas Group. It’s a fictitious group whose aim is to collect imaginary testimonials about the civil war in Lebanon. As part of the group’s activities include building archives, shooting films, publishing books, etc, Raad created the series of films “Bachar Tapes”, documenting reports and experiences by Souheil Bachar (a fictitious character), who had been taken hostage during the civil war. The character is played by a well-known Lebanese comedian, who is known locally but not to viewers outside of Lebanon. Watching the tapes spurred a deep sense of empathy with the Arab man who had been kidnapped by his own people. Raad’s research intends to cast doubt on the nature of documentation and the historiography of the collective national memory, as those done by the state, and create a unified national narrative, that stands in contrast to how things really are in reality. His fictitious characters document the Lebanese history in all the usual media, when, at least when visible, the objects of documentation are identical to governmental documented objects. In actual fact, they of course don’t. Raad seeks to examine the way n which we write history, as well as the ways in which we imagine it. He challenges the notion of a single truth, and his works points at the possibility of an alternative perception of history and nationality. An extensive interview with Raad can be found here.
Practice of political imagining can be found in Yael Bartana’s work as well. In her last trilogy, Bartana uses real characters: in Mary Koszmary, the first film in the trilogy, Polish theorist and philosopher Slawomir Sierakowski appears, and in And Europe Will Be Stunned, the trilogy’s final part which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Yaron London appears. The participants receive the state of affairs on a particular issue, and ask to respond to it independently. London, for example, reads a eulogy for the leader of the renaissance movement calling for the return of the Jews to Poland. The fact the eulogy London reads was also written by him, adds a dimension of honesty to the work and creates a sense of authenticity and trustworthiness. Such an action is parallel to the appropriation of power by the state, what Taussig termed “second nature”. Bartana creates for us a visibility of an alternative history is the form of “real” events, mediated by real people who are deeply embedded in our cultural memory. The viewers process the images they see and adopt them into their personal arsenal of possibilities. Perhaps that is why the Minister for Culture’s response was hesitant, to say the least, since Bartana’s works are, in her mind, “anti Zionist”, and deal with “the return of the Jews to Poland”. And that despite the fact you cannot judge Bartana’s work in such an ontological manner, which goes far beyond it clearly being a performative act.

NSK is a controversial political art collective that, similarly to Bartana, uses role reversals, doubling up, contradictions, paradoxes and inversions. The Slovenian collective declared itself “a state in time”, as oppose to a state, which exists in a physical, territorial space. This declaration turned the collective into an ephemeral body, scary and worrisome in its invisibility. Additionally, the collective’s impersonation as a fanatic, totalitarian body is confusing and embarrassing for the real state. The humorous and ambivalent way in which the collective conducts itself in the public sphere was termed by philosopher Slavoj Žižek "over identifying". Žižek argues that direct criticism of the regime isn’t as effective as the act of masquerading, which highlights the values of the hegemony, of the centre, whilst planting aesthetic and ideological mines.
Being ‘more diplomatic than the state’, is, therefore, a more radical act than directly criticizing it, since the radicalization reveals the ‘hidden inversions’, meaning the naked, real truth, which stands behind the ideological cover, the transgression which isn’t discussed publicly but is allowed as a social norm⁴.
 
A link to the collective’s official website can be found here.

Recipes for cooking and concocting political imagination can be found in the wonderful book A Cook Book For Political Imagination (Eds Galit Eilat and Sebastian Cichocki, Sternberg press 2011). The book is available for purchase at Zommer Gallery, Tel Aviv.

English translation by Sivan Gabrielovich - Gal

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¹Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A particular history of the senses, London Routledge, 1993.
²See: Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, "Guided Imagination", in A Cook Book for Political Imagination, Eds Galit Eilat and Sebastian Cichocki. pp 88-91, Sternberg press, 2011.
³Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958
⁴http://www.digitalartlab.org.il/ExhibitionPageHeb.asp?id=459&path=level_1