Digital Disassociation

It’s inevitable that before reading the article “The Woman At Abu Ghraib” in the March 24, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, one flips ahead to look at the photographs accompanying it. There are five in all, one full page portrait of the woman in question, Specialist Sabrina Harman, shot especially for the magazine, and four smaller ones that run across the next two pages, from Harman’s personal photo album of her deployment in Iraq. The images’ origin as part of a “personal photo album” is a bit strange, given that they eventually saturated the global media, shocking documentation of one of the most derisive episodes in an extraordinarily unpopular war. But the photographs were initially meant for Harman’s private collection. The evidence of that can be seen in the difference between her pose in the photographs she owns and the portrait commissioned for the magazine. In the latter, she is not smiling from ear to ear and giving the thumbs-up sign; in the former, even in one where she leans over a dead body, with, as the article’s authors, Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, describe it, “her sun-flushed cheek inches from [a corpse’s] crusted eye socket”, she is. Her jarring joviality says it all—those photographs weren’t meant to be public.

More than anything, this article is a fascinating glimpse into the psyche of a young soldier who, like many of her generation, soldier or civilian, relies heavily on digital photographs to record her experiences, and also, more interestingly, to disassociate from them. Her story hints at the incredibly rich role digital photography plays in society and illustrates Abu Ghraib’s significance in the timeline of photographic history. It is photography’s first scandal that is a direct result, in many ways, of its digitalization.

This is the first American war where digital imagery and its venues (email, social networking sites, flickr, YouTube, etc) have played a dominant role. No longer are there one or two photographically-minded soldiers with cameras and a few rolls of hard-won film, now all of them, no matter how recreationally, can document their daily experience in the theatre of war. Many of the younger soldiers serving in Iraq came of age in a society where images have longed trumped words, and photography has a new, wonderfully fast turnaround. As one soldier put it, “Everyone…has a digital camera. Everyone was taking pictures of everything, from detainees to death.” Whereas photographs taken in past wars were kept in self-contained (and degradable) photo albums and only circulated by hand, the digital images taken in Iraq fly (so fast there might not be time to judge the implications of the subject matter) over the Internet, landing on blogs, on myspace, on photo-sharing sites. Even ones that are emailed privately to family members are vulnerable to public consumption because they are easily reproduced and exist in the public ether of the World Wide Web. Because shooting digital images is easy, there are thousands of them; because sharing them is easy, they can never be truly erased.

And because the ease and immediacy of digital photographs is so gratifying, how big of a role did that play in the torture of Abu Ghraib’s prisoners? If the soldiers hadn’t been able to instantly review their photographs, how many instances of this gruesome performance art would not have happened? Gourevitch and Morris describe the setup of the “shoot” that produced the iconic photographs of the hooded prisoner standing on a box with electrical wires attached to his fingers as nothing less than fully art-directed: “…the whole mock-electrocution business had not lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes—just long enough for a photo session...[the prisoner was instructed to] hold his arms straight out from the sides, like wings.” Harman was there, snapping pictures, and in one of them, “[Staff Sergeant Chip] Frederick appears in the foreground, studying on the display screen of his camera the picture he’s just taken.” Waiting to send a roll of film off to be developed is far more boring and would make for a sticky situation at the Wal-Mart photo lab. The soldiers, participants in an excruciating and lawless situation, were able to instantly disassociate themselves from it with this new technology, this hard entertainment. They could place a screen between themselves and their reality. Instead of looking directly at the torture in front of them, they could view it from a remove, on the backs of their cameras.

"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up"

House party in Williamsburg, eight years ago: the entry way is clogged with piles of spilled magazines; they slip and slide underfoot as I walk towards the living room, where a pretty, twenty-something-year-old boy sporting self-conscious clothes and hair crouches over a keyboard, pressing out long, laborious notes. A mangy dog wanders past him, towards another boy seated in the corner. Having beckoned the dog over, the boy then leans into its face to shotgun the animal with a plume of marijuana smoke. In the kitchen, a third boy concocts something in a large blender. He’s pouring in every ingredient he can find from the cabinets and refrigerator—soy sauce, raw eggs, maple syrup—and once they’re blended, he gleefully drinks the murky liquid out of the side, proclaiming, “This is what I eat every day!” Over his shoulder, out in the backyard, the fourth inhabitant of the house is busy setting a mattress on fire.

Add a reporter from New York Magazine to this mix, or Patrick McMullan and his camera crew, and any of these guys might be the next Dash Snow. They have a lot in common with Snow, the heavily stylized “downtown” artist whose works (newspaper clippings sprayed with ejaculate) sell in various galleries around the world. Like Snow, they are upper middle class white guys who decamped to New York from various assorted suburbs to be artists. But they’ve skipped the actual art part in favor of developing a cult of personality. Any art they make is, at best, an accessory for their constructed persona. They live their lives with an eye to some grand, future memoir in the sky, one that will feature memorable lines like, “Those are spit circles. I was sick and I’d just wake up with a chest full of phlegm and spit all over the paper and make circles, you know?” or “I’m going to do a come-shot series on the faces of the skulls, but after I come on them, I’ll throw glitter on them to make it pretty.”

I first read about Snow in the article “Chasing Dash Snow” (from which the above quotes are taken) by Ariel Levy, which appeared in the January 7, 2007 issue of New York Magazine. Besides the lyrics to Pulp’s song 'Common People', two major essays came to mind when I read her piece: Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”. The former essay because it was obvious Snow and his friends Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen were slumming it, adopting the trappings of the poor and downtrodden (shoplifting rap sheets, bum’s beards, and, most appallingly, proudly won bruises from police beatings—even though Mailer’s essay is a little dated, these guys were indeed “urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts”), and the latter essay because their lifestyle was unequivocally “life as theater”.

Plenty of other artists and aesthetes fancied themselves protagonists in their own little movies. The magazine’s cover proclaimed Snow, McGinley, and Colen “Warhol’s Children”, and Warhol was constantly mythologizing himself. But he was also devoting just as much time to the creation of sublime artwork that held equal importance to any of his happenings. To quote Sontag, “One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp is usually less satisfying”.

Okay, so maybe Warhol wasn’t exactly naïve. But he was marginally innocent to his own image in a way that Snow and his ilk never will be. If there is one reason to not completely detest Snow, it’s that our post-post-post-modernist world doesn’t allow for naïveté when it comes to representing yourself anymore. In a way, then, he can't help himself. McGinley gained fame by photographing his friends, including Snow, in the impressionistic, hedonistic tradition of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, but his portraits can never be as honest because his subjects are aware of the work of Goldin and Clark (even Goldin herself can’t take truly candid photographs of young people anymore). They are complicit in their own depiction, and it gives any cavorting for the camera an inescapable performative quality. Mailer wrote, “Hip is a special language that cannot really be taught.” That no longer holds true.

“Camp…incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content’, ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality’, of ‘irony’ over ‘tragedy’”, says Sontag, and this is in evidence with Snow. His cynical dalliance with art is unfortunately common in today’s art scene, enabled by the likes of Jeffrey Deitch, star-fucking curators and over-the-top art festivals. There is no craft, no heart, nothing but cold-eyed cynicism and empty signifiers. The art dealers who love Snow get a thrill rubbing up against him; he’s just the right mix of the Other (a petty criminal! a graffiti artist! maybe he’ll do a bump right here in my office!) and the safe (he is a De Menil, after all). They are desperate to find that “magic flash of insanity, framed and for sale”, and Snow knows just how to deliver it. His sexy beast persona is so calculated you can almost hear him mulling the semiotics over in his head: “Saddam Hussein tattoo, check. Crackpipe, check. Shoplifted birdhouse, check.” Snow embodies “...the oldest dream of power, the gold fountain of youth where the gold is in the orgasm” (in Snow’s case, literally). Even more prescient than Mailer, Sontag neatly sums up Snow's career and the landscape it romps in: “[Camp is] a feat goaded on by the threat of boredom. The relation between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence”.

Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art

The recent article “Picturing Auschwitz” (The New Yorker, March 17, 2008), came to mind during a visit to the International Center of Photography’s current show Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, an exhibition dedicated to the forms and interpretations of archives. The article described the chance discovery of two important photo albums containing pictures of Auschwitz. Each album is a time capsule of potent images that has hurtled through the ether of history: one was recently unearthed from a suburban basement in Virginia, over sixty years after the end of World War II; the other was discovered at Dora-Mittelbau by a prisoner named Lili Jacob on the day her camp was liberated. While each album brings to light a wealth of historical information about Auschwitz, their fortuitous emergence also tells an incredibly romantic tale worthy of any fiction.

Archive Fever inhabits those same two spheres—the hard world of information and the ephemeral realm of remembrance. In fact, archives themselves are a paradox—memories and transitory occurrences arranged into formal systems. Their quixotic nature is echoed in the physical layout of Archive Fever, which unfolds mysteriously while remaining unabashedly academic. The overall experience of the show is akin to exploring a dimly lit vault; every turn of a corner is a slow reveal. One of the strongest aspects of the show is how the curator, Okwui Enwezor, has utilized the relatively small space. He has arranged intelligent groupings that, with lesser pieces, or a different sequence, would swallow the individual works. That doesn’t happen here; each work fully envelops the viewer while maintaining its elegant alliances.

The beginning of the show is the most demanding, challenging the viewer to dedicate time to the exhibition right from the start with a myriad of videos and films dealing with socio-political themes (Communism, Soviet ideology, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Romanian Revolution all make an appearance). All of the works turn the preconception of the archive as a static form on its head, but Anria Sala’s Intervista (1998), does so the most gracefully. The film jumps back and forth between found 16mm footage of Sala’s mother from 1970s Communist Albania to a present-day videotaped conversation between him and his mother about the footage. This deceptively simple setup thus becomes “an archive existing alongside a running commentary on its status as an historical object” (very meta).

Nearby are dreamier works, like Vivan Sundaram’s Four black boxes for the family (1995-97), in which portraits recalling the aesthetic of Julia Margaret Cameron flicker to the surface of dark vitrines, and Floh (2000), Tacita Dean’s impressionistic collection of vernacular photographs. But it is in the final room that the head surrenders to the gut. One reason is the countless eyes that follow the viewer around this room, peering out from works that emphasize how people themselves can be reduced to archival data.

In Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (Death by Gun) (1990), stacked lithographs act as a de facto “monument” to the gun-violence victims they depict. Gonzales-Torres has emphasized the dead as statistics by positioning their faces in rows. Their grainy visages echo those of the missing children in Ilan Lieberman’s Nino Perdido (2006-7), which hangs on a nearby wall. Lieberman meticulously reproduced newspaper portraits of each child, “enlist[ing] the archive as a form of commemoration”, while also “alert[ing] us to the wide-ranging deployment of the photographic portrait as an index of memory”. More identification-type pictures can be seen in The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan (1997), by Fazal Sheikh. But this time, the photographs are not arranged in rows; instead they appear carefully cupped in the hands of relatives. The portraits, while just as artless, have become talismans in this context. All of these pieces make the viewer zoom in and out; they can stand back and observe the archive as a whole, all the faces (data) bleeding together, or they can hone in on a specific person. This room further underlines how an archive is a collection of individual stories.

The piece in Archive Fever that most effectively illustrates the archive’s dual nature, however, is Hans-Peter Feldman’s 9/12 Front Page (2001), an installation that makes its debut here. It inhabits one of the first rooms of the show, but it’s best-viewed last, after circling around the space. In a brilliant display of less-is-more, Feldman has covered four walls with a collection of front pages from international newspapers dated September 12, 2001. At first, an anthropological impulse prevails—it’s endlessly fascinating to note which images of 9/11 editors from Chile, London, Berlin, China, Egypt, and so on chose to print, how the layouts were designed (some are very spare and graphic, others juxtapose images of the smoking towers with mundane advertisements or celebrity snaps), and the headlines penned by wildly different cultures all covering the same event. But the safety net of intellectual curiosity gives way to the cumulative effect of these repetitive images, evoking visceral memories of the attack. Newspapers are the most common, daily form an archive can take, and Feldman cleverly doubles that once over by taking a part of these self-contained systems and combining them into a whole new one, one which emphasizes the deceptive banality of information. 9/12 Front Page is therefore the quintessential piece in a show where every archive is a dam holding back an abyss.