Photography in 2003: encompassing globalization, … irenic and helpless

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Bruno Chalifour

As 2003 is coming to a close, it is time to share and assess this year's various events on the visual arts scene. Since 9/11, most of the works that have had any impact, besides numerous historical retrospectives (Adams, Cartier-Bresson, Lartigue, Siskind, Weston, etc. ...), embrace issues regarding the new world order. For the past 3 years this order has been defined by the Bush administration, the G 8 or now G 20, the growing emergence of the Asian world, and, of course, the constant development of economic globalization whose consequences directly or indirectly affect every one of us. This latter phenomenon is not limited to transgenic organisms and a pseudo-freedom of trade--the various formats of DVDs throughout the world, preventing international circulation, are a perfect, mild but obvious illustration of the case. While the exports of most non-service industries from first to second, third and fourth world countries gain momentum, globalization reaches far into the production, distribution and consumption of images, from photographs to videos and films.

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Beyond the human tragedy and the trauma experienced by a whole city and nation after the fall of the World Trade Center towers, which soon extended to the whole western world (2), the unnoticed consequences of the event have ranged from the end of political correctness to a move away from a kind of endemic navel-gazing both in political and cultural lives. The renewed Manichean and over-simplistic concept of "the Axis of Evil" threw us back into the darker years of the modernist era and the Cold War. The target had changed, but the rhetoric was the same. Being an "anti-American" US citizen was possible again. Following a historical strategy where the only way to look good is to demonize someone else (the eternal "other"), TV channels in the US, with the exception of PBS, orchestrated a national paranoia and boosted the sale of flags. Suddenly for many people there was, again, a treacherous world beyond the US borders, MTV and "reality television." It allowed some new caricatural developments in paranoia and jingoism, those precious smoke screens that were used to conceal and implement ambitions of economical and geo-political control of the Middle East.

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On the opposite end of the social and cultural spectrum, the realization of how fragile our situation was, linked to and dependent on the rest of the world, turned many a member of the art community away from some of the self-reflective, sometimes repetitive and self-indulgent, preoccupations of the 1990s (the latest works by some of these prodigal children such as Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and William Wegman, can be quoted here to confirm this evolution), which found some spectacular extension in irrelevance in the recent Matthew Barney circus "after-show" at the Guggenheim this spring. In Canada, Europe, Israel, and the United States, artists and curators raised their heads and tried to understand what they had overlooked, what responsibility the art scene had had in the current devastated landscape of the planet. How could they participate in an effort that could defend their values, advocate more opening, more understanding, a better and wider vision of the world, and counteract the ongoing self-protective and reactionary state of minds?

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Numerous institutions, museums, and art festivals are now investing in inter-cultural, international exchanges with renewed interest. Asian art from Japan to China has been the object of numerous shows from the History of Japanese Photography (3) curated by, among others, Anne Wilkes Tucker, to the inclusion of the works by Chinese photographers in various festivals and group shows in Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the USA. An international photography festival was created in China (4), bringing works from the "west" to Chinese audiences and providing exhibition spaces for the local production. In Jerusalem, Nissan Perez, the curator of photography at the Israel Museum, astutely revisited Christian iconography to produce Revelation: Representations of Christ in Photography, a show that was on display early in 2003 at the Mission du Patrimoine Photographique in Paris, and from May 22 to September 6 at the Israel Museum. A catalogue/book was published by Merrell with an essay by Perez investigating how art, from an act of faith, has evolved toward a means to express doubt and criticism regarding religion, or, at least, its usages. Unfortunately so far, the American museums approached to travel the show have not responded. Some explanations might lie in the fact that they are either too busy with their one hundredth Ansel Adams. Weston, or National Geographic shows, or have been the indirect victims of the current policies regarding reduced financing of the arts and education (but not waging war), or are being over-cautious. Opening a visual discussion on Christian representation is not adequate in today's crusading climate--the conclusion being that, beyond innocent populations, art and (public) education are the real victims of the times, which also means that civilian populations pay the price twice. One has to remember that they also have to finance weapons of mass destruction, wherever they live. Iconoclastic terrorism (what else happened on 9/11 in the perpetrators' minds besides the targeting of images/symbols, from the World Trade Center to the Pentagon) has had the result of pushing or encouraging reactionary and backward thinking, a mind-set that goes back to the crusades and the Holy Inquisition. However, this year, exhibitions organized by major institutions seem to have aimed at a more thoughtful level of production, leaving aside the sometimes superficially spectacular qualities of some of the works of the 1990s, as well as its free for all approach, in favor of more comprehensive and sometimes didactic venues.