For an introduction to this post see introduction to entry 64.
What I am currently thinking about most in relation to Hirschhorn’s banner is the psycho-sexual dimension within looking that relates to the connection between desire and violence. From thinking about this work over time and going through a range of responses I now feel drawn into asking a set of troubling yet, I think, hugely important questions concerning the impulse for violence itself. It comes across to me very clearly from Hirschhorn’s piece that he is addressing these questions. He talks about this himself in the interview he gave to Fiacre Gibbons in the summer, a recording of which is playing in Fabrica. He talks about the eye looking for the red. He doesn’t explain this he just comments on it as something that he has observed when watching viewers looking at other works he had made which contained images like those in the Incommensurable Banner. What I really like about the banner is how it forces the viewer to interrogate themselves. It puts the viewer in the position of victim (by identifying with the dead) and of perpetrator (by finding oneself in the place of the photographer who may have been someone responsible for the violence done to the victim shown). In a sense it forces us to take a stand, to claim or declare our own position. I use the word ‘force’ advisably because really there is no escape from the work, except, perhaps in not looking at it at all.
Interestingly, I have not used my blog as a way to record these various stages of my response to Hirschhorn’s piece. Instead I think I have had more a tendency to write about developments in my practice directly. It is only now that I am asked the specific question about my own responses that I have given myself the opportunity to record and reflect upon these. I am reminded with this of a talk I went to yesterday by Julian Stallabrass, the curator of the Photo Biennial. Expecting some kind of declaration of a position on his part I came away disappointed by his descriptive approach to talking about the contents of the various exhibitions that make up the Biennial. This, in conjunction with his repeated encouragements to the audience to record their responses on the biennial blog highlighted to me rather sharply a similar approach in myself: to withhold my own opinion whilst urging others to give theirs*. Cushioned within the diversity of opinions of others one can retain a kind of neutral stance as relayer of what other people think without ever having to acknowledge one’s own standpoint.
* Of course, his very curation of the Biennial exhibitions is, in itself, a declaration of a position in that they are based on his choices and selection.
