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Rationale and Research Context
Zones of Conflict: Rethinking Contemporary Art During Global Crisis
will consider how recent geopolitical crises have impacted visual
culture and artistic practice. Comprising four research workshops, the
series will assemble an international grouping of interdisciplinary
participants-including artists, architects, curators, art historians and
cultural theorists-in order to consider pressing questions concerning
the intersections between contemporary art and war, statelessness,
uneven geographies, and transnational communities. Organized by TJ Demos of UCL's History of Art Department,
the four events will be held in London at four partner institutions:
the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva), Tate Modern, Tate
Britain, and UCL's History of Art Department (in cooperation with its
recently inaugurated Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art). The series is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and will run between October 2008 and February 2009.
Zones of Conflict takes as its point of
departure the concept of "permanent war," which designates a new
condition of conflict without geographical or temporal limit (Hardt and
Negri, 2004). For the last six years, the US has claimed to wage a
battle against terrorism worldwide, and military conflict has expanded
beyond the historical boundaries of localizable national geographies;
meanwhile, terrorist agents of transnational organizations threaten to
strike at any time, anywhere. Beyond the immediate effects of fear,
violence, and the destruction of human life, the result has included the
creation of multitudes of refugees, driven away from both warfare and
the economic poverty increasingly concentrated in urban areas of the
developing world (Davis, 2006). For Giorgio Agamben, these conditions
have inaugurated a new era of state power, against which stateless
subjects have no recourse to legal protections-whether national or
transnational-because human rights have proven unenforceable outside of
citizenship (Agamben, 1998). Ironically, military occupation has
initiated a cycle of displacement, economic hardship, and cultural
alienation that creates the conditions for new waves of extremism and
repressive regimes (Balibar, 2003). Globalisation has entered into
crisis, in sharp contrast to its earlier celebrations as an era of
democratization and technological connectivity facilitated by the
liberalization of markets worldwide.
The representation of war, refugees, uneven
geographies, and diasporic social conditions has become an urgent
subject of interdisciplinary examination in recent years-from art
history, cultural geography, cultural studies, and architectural theory
(Henry and Love, 2000; Rogoff, 2000; Biesenbach, 2003; Franke, 2005;
Retort, 2005; Demos, 2006). It is equally a matter of urgent concern
within contemporary artistic practice, as evidenced by several recent
large-scale exhibitions, such as Documenta 11 (2002), the 9th Istanbul
Biennial (2005), and the 2nd Seville Biennial (2006). Moreover, the
question of bare life has formed a point of investigation for Documenta
12 (2007), which has initiated a major research project carried out by
an international selection of participating magazines. This workshop
series intends to consider and critically build on these recent
achievements.
Of particular interest is how military, social,
political, and economic conflicts relate to rifts within representation,
which operates in four interrelated ways. First, whereas modernist
artists frequently processed violent conflict through the shocking
tactics of montage, today representational disjunctions tend to blur the
boundaries between fact and fiction, reflecting and creatively
reinventing the media-processed reality of war (Enwezor, 2005; Retort,
2005). Second, as artists increasingly turn their attention to the
representation of "bare life," they have reinvented documentary
techniques by avoiding the problematic assumptions of neutrality,
objectivity, and the transmission of fact, which have discredited
photojournalism in the past (Demos, 2006). Third, for artists who
investigate transnational spaces, digitization and internet-based
distribution have facilitated the creation of new heterogeneous and
uprooted representational structures. And fourth, artists have taken up
socially-engaged collaborative practices in order to form communities
that challenge the alienation of diaspora, but that also attempt to
create social forms that enable democracy's antagonistic basis (Bishop,
2004).
In summary, these four subjects-image wars, bare life,
uneven geographies, and transnational social space-intersect in three
distinct ways: first, these concepts offer opportunities to develop a
more nuanced cultural understanding of globalisation's crisis via its
critical and interdisciplinary artistic negotiations; second, these
subjects form alternative ways to comprehend the contemporary trauma of
representation in the face of conflict and social displacement, offering
potential insight into the modes by which art differs from the
sensationalism and propaganda of mass media and governmental publicity;
and third, these topics provoke questions about the status of the
subject in the current era of global war, ranging from the
representation of its traumatic experience to its social conditions
across boundaries of nation, class, and race.
Select Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. D. Heller-Roazen, trans. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Balibar, Étienne. 2003. We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. J. Swenson, trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Biesenbach, Klaus, ed. 2003. Territories: Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia. Berlin: KW-Institute for Contemporary Art and Buchhandlung Walther König.
Bishop, Claire, 2004. "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," October 110 (Fall 2004).
Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso.
Demos, T.J. 2006. "Life Full of Holes," Grey Room, no. 24 (Fall 2006), pp. 72-88.
Deutsche, Rosalyn. 1996. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Enwezor, Okwui. 2005. "Documentary/Verité: The Figure of 'Truth' in Contemporary Art," Experiments with Truth. M. Nash, ed. Philadelphia: The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
Franke, Anselm, ed. 2005. B-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond. Berlin: Kunst-Werke.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude. New York: Penguin.
Henry and Love, ed. 2000. War Zones. North Vancouver, B.C.: Presentation House Gallery.
Retort, 2005. Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. New York: Verso.
Rogoff, Irit, 2000. Terra Infirma: Geography's Visual Culture. London: Routledge.
Virilio, Paul, 2008. Pure War: Twenty-Five Years Later, trans. M. Polizzotti.
Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
*Image: Sam Durant, detail of Proposal
for Iraq War Memorial (Symbolic Transposition of effects of war in Iraq
to the U.S. and England - 10 Downing St - Parliament - U.S. Capitol and
the White House), 2007 (courtesy: the artist)