Dear Georges,

I wanted to thank you for sending me one of your latest books, Passer, quoi qu’il en coûte (a rough translation would be ‘Making it across at all costs’), which you co-wrote with Niki Giannari. As I’ve told you before, I do a lot of my reading at airports and stations, on planes and trains, which take up all too much of my time while, paradoxically, allowing me to take time out. Marc Augé aptly dubbed them “non-places”, but for me, they have become sites where I can legitimately, and justifiably, disconnect from my phone and the online . It’s funny, because I see a lot of other people sitting in all manner of nooks and crannies at airports, just so that they can plug in their laptops… whereas I switch off and go over to the dark side, among the ranks of those who engross themselves in reading on paper.

So it was that I read your book and Niki Giannari’s during the journey from Paris to Madrid. And so moved was I by what I read, that I decided to use it as the starting point for our correspondence because – as you yourself have told me – I am, in a sense, part of its story.

Giannari’s poem, Des spectres hantent l’Europe (Spectres Are Haunting Europe), which introduces the book, is painfully precise and vivid. Together with the filmmaker Maria Kourkouta, with whom she made a superb film of the same name, Giannari bears powerless witness to the lines of refugees hoping to cross the Greece-Macedonia border at Idomeni. One of the passages reads as follows:

se posent ici,

attendent et ne demandent rien

seulement passer

[they come here,

wait and ask for nothing,

except to make it across]

For the last three years, you have been working with me and my team on the production of the exhibition Soulèvements (Uprisings), which you curated. An excerpt from Kourkouta’s film, produced by the Jeu de Paume, concludes the current version of the show, to which we have made periodic tweaks ahead of its runs in Paris, Barcelona and Buenos Aires – where it has been held so far, as of September 2017 – and its forthcoming visits to São Paulo, Mexico and Montreal.

Portrait filmé de l’exposition « Soulèvements »

Reading your book last week, I couldn’t help but recall when a colleague at the Jeu de Paume confessed to me that she had been unable to hold back tears the first time that she had seen Maria Kourkouta’s film, during the preparation of the exhibition and its catalogue. I know for a fact that she was far from the only person to have reacted this way.

What conscious or unconscious mechanisms are at work when people like us, Parisians with a home, a job and a future – and faced with an overload of news images that all too rarely stir our emotions – cry in front of a series of images projected in a museum gallery, in which we see women, men and children shuffle along a muddy path, braving the elements as they seek to cross a border “at all costs”?

https://vimeo.com/234870167

Maria Kourkouta, Idomeni, 14 mars 2016. Frontière gréco-macédonienne, 2016 (extrait)

“Could this instant of silence speak the truth more powerfully than its direct representation?”

Personally, what most struck me about the film was its silence. Despite the stark murmur of the refugees’ footsteps as they make their way along treacherous trails, it seemed to me that a sense of silence inexorably took hold of the viewer, like in the moments immediately following an accident or a crash, when we struggle to grasp that what we have seen has really happened. Could this instant of silence speak the truth more powerfully than its direct representation?

Do you remember the artist Esther Shalev-Gerz‘s video installation Between Telling and Listening? In 2005, to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Shalev-Gerz recorded the testimonies of 60 survivors living in Paris. Each survivor described their experiences of the camps and their lives before, during and after internment. Footage from these interviews was projected on to three screens hanging side by side, but with a twist: the artist chose to show only images of the respondents’ faces during moments of silence, which were staggered across the screens with a seven-second time lapse.

https://vimeo.com/234836283

Esther Shalev-Gerz, Between Listening and Telling, Last Witnesses, Auschwitz 1945-2005 (extrait)

“The silent subjects lift their gaze, as if searching for something amid their words or memories; their eyes often well up slightly or display a whole range of shimmering tones that speak volumes in their own right.”

Through this distinctly poetic montage of silences – those instants when the interviewees gathered their emotions and memories before answering a question – the artist shifted the viewer’s attention towards elements of the footage that otherwise would have gone completely unnoticed.

The silent subjects lift their gaze, as if searching for something amid their words or memories; their eyes often well up slightly or display a whole range of shimmering tones that speak volumes in their own right. This project’s acute emotional impact most probably stems from its ability to produce empathy through the way it handles times and memories that viewers know about but did not live through.

Talking to the Foto Colectania team, who have so kindly invited us to participate in their Correspondence blog, they suggested that we explore the theme “In print/Online” in some shape or form. The projects by Maria Kourkouta and Esther Shalev-Gerz that I’ve mentioned cannot be categorised as one or the other, but rather partake of both at the same time, since they involve moving images that are designed to be projected; in other words, they are imprinted (“in print”) but are intangible, just like “online” images.

We could continue our conversation along these lines, since this subject also formed part of our discussions about the Uprisings project. However, I believe that the volatile nature of projected , these evanescent spectres, infuses them with powerful poetic, emotional and political charge – precisely, perhaps, because they are suspended in the air, a sort of “non-place”, a limbo where these images await the moment when they will make their appearance without becoming apparent (since, to quote the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, “appearance degrades apparition”[2]).

Speaking of evanescent images, I met up with the artist Ismaïl Bahri yesterday and we chatted in front of one of his works, Revers (2017).

https://vimeo.com/216695395

Ismaïl Bahri, Revers, 2017 (extrait)

“any image – whether photographic or cinematic – is evanescent, spectral, even when it has been printed: ultimately, it is but dust. Just like our lives and their organic immortality”

As you know, it is a video focusing on a simple gesture – like his entire oeuvre, which is replete with metaphors relating to photography, printing and exposure. In this instance, the artist repeatedly crumples and smoothes out illustrated pages from a magazine. Along the way, the ink from the pictures comes loose, turning into dust that floats in the air and is transferred to his hands. My sense is that this process is the reverse of the images poised to take shape and appear through projection, but the result is the same; any image – whether photographic or cinematic – is evanescent, spectral, even when it has been printed: ultimately, it is but dust. Just like our lives and their organic immortality, “for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19).

You write in Passer, quoi qu’il en coûte that the images in Maria Kourkouta’s film are recorded with respect for those who are there only to pass through, and that they are “fleeting, yet surviving images about the rightful desire to cross over”. I wonder whether, rather than merely ‘surviving’, these images, like the crumpled pages of Ismaïl Bahri’s video or the faces in Esther Shalev-Gerz’s installation, in fact undergo a transformation or even a migration through ‘brushing up’ against the walls of the gallery or the projection room, rising into the air as they wait to fuse with the tears in the eyes of the people who see them. In this way they, too, can get across.

Warm regards ,

Marta

[1] DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. GIANNARI, Niki. Passer, quoi qu’il en coûte. Éditions de Minuit. Paris, 2017

[2] NANCY, Jean-Luc y LÈBRE, Jérôme. « Signaux Sensibles. Entretien à propos des arts », page 74. Bayard Editions, 2017

LETTERS TO MARTA

1

At once precise and vivid

Dear Marta,

I wasn’t expecting such a swift and fervent reaction when I sent you Passer, quoi qu’il en coûte, that short book which, fittingly, is tantamount to an exchange of ‘letters’ with the writer Niki Giannari. I didn’t send it to you as a gesture of courtesy between colleagues but rather because, back in April 2016, while we were preparing the exhibition Uprisings together, you immediately grasped the power of Maria Kourkouta‘s images, which I was pitching to you. I found your letter highly touching and, above all, courageous. It takes courage to allow yourself to be moved and humbled by a simple poem like Niki Giannari’s. I, too, was moved and – I hope – humble in the face of the poem. But, since I don’t run a major cultural institution like you do, it is doubtless easier for me to acknowledge it publicly. The issue that this raises – and which I will return to in due course – is what place is left for emotion in the discourse and institutions of contemporary art and photography, and the wider world of images.

“the poem in question reflects on the way that people running away from a civil war are being denied passage at a time when we – and images, for that matter – are able to traverse boundaries so easily”

Every time I’ve gone to the Jeu de Paume to work with you, I’ve seen you in ‘online’ mode, if I may say so. There you were in front of your computer screen, masterfully navigating the sites of the artists we were discussing for the exhibition. Broadly speaking, I almost certainly operate ‘in print’ more than you. I make notes on bits of paper, I handwrite everything before typing up my texts on my computer, I spend lots of time at the National Library, and I come up with my exhibition montages by scattering on the ground dozens or even hundreds of sheets of paper featuring printouts of my images. Hence, it is interesting to me that you systematically take advantage of the ‘non-places’ that you frequent – airports and railway stations – in order to revert to the special state of concentration entailed by holding a book in your hands and opening it, with no immediate invitation to switch your attention elsewhere. You engage with poetry at the very moment when you are in geographical movement or crossing borders. This is not poles apart from our underlying subject, because the poem in question reflects on the way that people running away from a civil war are being denied passage at a time when we – and images, for that matter – are able to traverse boundaries so easily. As it happens, I’m writing this on a train from Germany and in less than three hours, I’ll have imperceptibly crossed two national borders.

You describe Niki Giannari’s poem Des spectres hantent l’Europe (Spectres Are Haunting Europe) – and I was struck by the verb atormentar (‘torment’) in your Spanish translation, which more powerfully conveys the notion of anguish and pain than the French hantent – as “painfully precise and vivid”. Moreover, you mention one of the people you work with at the Jeu de Paume, who was unable to hold back tears upon seeing a shot from Maria Kourkouta’s film. This, my dear Marta, epitomises your courage. Because you strive in your work to offer to the public a world of images that eschews the usual hotchpotches and confront them with something that is at once precise and vivid.

“images are often divided into those that seek only to provoke pathos, […] and those that aim only for precision, distinction, rigour, and believe they achieve as much by erasing even the faintest trace of emotion.”

These days, images are often divided into those that seek only to provoke pathos, with no precision – this is one way of simplifying life, albeit it actually succeeds only in giving rise to a state of aesthetic, ethical or political confusion – and those that aim only for precision, distinction, rigour, and believe they achieve as much by erasing even the faintest trace of emotion. This is another form of simplification, one that mistakes (Brechtian) distancing for coldness (yet Brecht never said anything against emotion! He criticised identification, which is a quite different matter). I remember that one day some years ago, during my time in New York, I opened the magazine Artforum International and came across the following statement by the art critic Hal Foster: “When I hear the word affect, I reach for my Taser.” As if he needed to hyperbolically paraphrase Goebbels to make it clear how vulgar, kitsch, ideological and alien he found emotion. He may have felt he had drawn such a lesson from Roland Barthes‘ Mythologies, but if so, clearly he had totally missed the point.

“Print is no more conducive to emotion than online is to different forms. Or vice versa. Emotion seeks a fitting form, as can be the case for the simplest gestures in life. Forms also seek emotion, as this is a way of avoiding being static”

Print is no more conducive to emotion than online is to different forms. Or vice versa. Emotion seeks a fitting form, as can be the case for the simplest gestures in life. Forms also seek emotion, as this is a way of avoiding being static (after all, ‘motion’ is movement) and even of transcending their own confines (after all, ‘e-motion’ is movement beyond oneself). In the excellent example that you cite, Esther Shalev-Gerz‘s Between Telling and Listening, the silence that emerges from words, which disrupts and overturns them, becomes the subject of a study of form consisting of a montage of silences strung together (incidentally, one of these days I must send you another short book of mine, Blancs soucis, which was largely inspired by the aforementioned work by Esther). Your reference to Ismaïl Bahri’s Revers is equally rich with resonance: I fully agree with you that ‘spectral evanescence’ characterises all images to a certain extent. It must also be noted that these spectres’ dwelling – the medium they inhabit and pass through, coming and going – is none other than our own body and psyche.

Whether they are in print or online, images always come back to our body. If they are precise and vivid, they will touch us, get through to us and stay with us. Ultimately, we are the material upon which they leave their mark – and their operating system, too. That is why the notion among a cohort of people working in art and photography that there is such a thing as a ‘world of images’ – one that is more or less independent, cut off – is a highly reductive idea. I would even go as far as to say that it is an ethical and political misdemeanour to act as if such a world really existed. The fact that images circulate so quickly and seamlessly, that they are readily exchanged and command such high prices, all of this commotion overshadows the obvious truth that images are first and foremost an anthropological phenomenon, over and beyond their status as commodities whose value is constantly being compared and showcased at the likes of biennials and art fairs, which are essentially beauty pageants. One of the reasons why I was so drawn to Aby Warburg was his full awareness of this anthropological weight of images – whether they are ingenious or modest, new or old – which he notably evidenced in his remarkable concept of the Pathosformel, which tellingly brings together the intensity of emotion and the precision of form.

“Culture – and we must once again think back to Goebbels’ quote, albeit the original version – at once encompasses the highest heights and deepest recesses, the most precise and most vivid elements of a society.”

This anthropological perspective can help a great deal, I believe, in shedding light on our use of the totemic word par excellence in the wealthy societies of the West – that is to say, the term ‘culture’. Culture may be the grandest of beauty pageants, but artists’ rising and falling stock, luxury products for VIPs, mass entertainment for the rest, and the ‘ministry’ that is responsible for overseeing the lot – none of that is what we’re concerned with here. Or, at any rate, that is not our aim. Culture – and we must once again think back to Goebbels’ quote, albeit the original version – at once encompasses the highest heights and deepest recesses, the most precise and most vivid elements of a society. So, when we try to devise exhibitions, we too should look to be at once precise and vivid. With a view to creating the sort of ‘non-places’ that you mention: where someone can concentrate on an image – receptive to the precision and vividness of a piece – as you did when you opened a simple, short book featuring a poem that depicts a present-day trauma (and, since our friends at the Fundació Foto Colectania have asked us for some images, I hereby propose that Niki Giannari’s poem should be read as a photograph).

Dear Georges,

You say in your letter that the world of contemporary images is often boiled down to a division between images that seek to produce pathos and others that eliminate any trace of emotion.

However, I’ve been reading Hito Steyerl’s wonderful book The Wretched of the Screen, in which the artist floats the interesting concept of the ‘poor image’. This represents another category of images that you would probably include in your panorama, and whose hallmark is their compression and rapid spreadability. To quote Steyerl, “The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.”[1]

Social media is teeming with such images, produced by anonymous authors and received by audiences scattered all over the world. Most of these images herald themselves as ‘testimonies’, sometimes striking a self-hagiographic tone (‘Look at me lying on the beach during this gorgeous sunset in Acapulco,’ for instance) and on other occasions serving to document an event (an accident, say, or a police charge, an earthquake, a political speech or a fancy-dress party, to name but a few variegated examples); many others still become ‘memes’, a type of unit referring both to the content in question and its transmission. In a meme, content and form merge into a single structure that feeds into and distributes a series of redundant, generic snippets of knowledge with the underlying aim of bypassing the centralised structures that control what is accepted as ‘the truth’.

You say that images are first and foremost an anthropological phenomenon rather than objects of value (in reference to their status as commodities exchanged in the art world). I agree, but I’d add that they can also be viewed as archaeological artefacts. Nevertheless, these ‘poor images’ are of no value as objects or, I’m fairly certain, archaeologically (though perhaps they may have a sociological or political value?). Moreover, archaeological quality is expressed in layers, in depth, which make it possible (should one so desire) to conduct a detailed, layer-by-layer analysis in order to unearth what is concealed beneath an image’s social, historical and political backdrop.

” The ‘poor image’, for its part, does not sediment, but rather circulates, travelling across networks and on to computers and mobile phones, unable to carry along any substrate other than immediacy and, thus, reflexive improvidence.”

The ‘poor image’, for its part, does not sediment, but rather circulates, travelling across networks and on to computers and mobile phones, unable to carry along any substrate other than immediacy and, thus, reflexive improvidence. These ‘poor images’ stir emotions, bolster vacuum-packed ideologies and create mass movements that propel themselves on, like a fine layer of words whipped up into fruitless odes. The same images can be used to affirm or deny, to acclaim or to vilify, to speak out against both sides of an issue. They are transparent owing to their spontaneity, but opaque because they block mature reflection. Yet, due to their horizontal, universal distribution, they unleash fury and rally people.

We are accustomed to the notion that the traditional images (‘rich images?’ – I’m not so sure I’d call them that!) of advertising and propaganda, those of an informative nature and even artistic ones, flow vertically, from the top down, through the conventional distribution channels of our capitalist system. Whether persuading, seducing, evoking, introducing an idea, creating a need or informing, we see them everywhere we go (on modes of transport, on billboards, in newspapers, on television, at museums and when surfing the web). But I get the impression that ‘poor images’ are going through a complete reversal and taking on a vertical magnitude, in turn – paradoxically – fuelling the fervour of the very system they set out to overcome, or in opposition to which they presented themselves as purveyors of alternative truths.

” ‘Poor images’ initially had legitimate aspirations of supplanting ‘rich images’ and establishing themselves as guarantors of an untainted truth, thereby offering a representation of reality in the here and now, one having eluded the filters and the apparatus of traditional image distribution. “

This leads us back to the matter of the representation of reality. ‘Poor images’ initially had legitimate aspirations of supplanting ‘rich images’ and establishing themselves as guarantors of an untainted truth, thereby offering a representation of reality in the here and now, one having eluded the filters and the apparatus of traditional image distribution. But their sudden shift into a media mainstay calls into question their supposedly unimpeachable ties with reality – a process previously undergone by traditional photography. So, then, we are arguably no longer dealing with images that circulate horizontally, but rather images that have reached a breaking point, which can no longer contend with the complexity of the system that has swallowed them up and centralised them within its vertical structure.

As I’ve said, this state of affairs has long been taken on board pretty much throughout traditional photography. But perhaps now the time has come for us to accept that ‘poor images’ are not heroic truth-tellers either and that, sadly, their fragility renders them ripe for the promotion of poor discourses and to be manipulated and ripped off by vertical, dominant ideologies, regardless of which side these are located on.

Elsewhere in her book, Steyerl quotes the lyrics from a song by British band The Stranglers, which seem to me to fit just as aptly here:

Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?

He got an ice pick, that made his ears burn.

Whatever happened to dear old Lenny?

The great Elmyra, and Sancho Panza?

Whatever happened to the heroes?

Whatever happened to all the heroes?

All the Shakespearoes?

They watched their Rome burn.

Whatever happened to the heroes?

No more heroes anymore

No more heroes, The Stranglers. 1977

Warm regards,

Marta

Paris, 6 October 2017

[1] STEYERL, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. P32. Sternberg Press. Berlin, 2012

LETTERS TO MARTA

2

Both poor and surviving

Dear Marta,

At the place I am writing to you from now, I am unfortunately unable to get hold of Hito Steyerl’s book, The Wretched of the Screen, which you were inspired by in your second letter. So, I’m going to indulge myself in a few associations of ideas based on what you say about this book, and even following the exact order in which you discuss it.

“What is survival in the very broad order of culture?”

The world of images has always been full of all kinds of contradictions, and continues to be today. There is no doubt about that. So, based on Hito Steyerl, you introduce a new divide between ‘poor images’ and… what exactly? ‘Rich images’? You yourself say that you’re not sure about this opposition. So, for the moment, let’s just stick with this poverty. The quote you give—which describes the ‘poor image’ as an image of poor quality, a ‘copy in motion’, a ‘ghost of an image’—irresistibly conjures up the notion of survival that I often talked to you about in the context of our work at the Jeu de Paume. What is survival in the very broad order of culture? It is something that normally should have disappeared over the course of a certain historical evolution, but which is still there, albeit in a minor, displaced, underground, transformed mode. For example, no one wages war with a bow and arrow any more; but bows and arrows are widely used in other areas of culture, notably in sport and children’s games where these tools still survive ‘poorly’. Or, when you sneeze and I say ‘Bless you’, I am using a formula that represents a belief that is no longer held in the West; in other words the belief that when you sneeze your soul can separate from your body…

In the past I wrote a lot about wax sculpture, considered a minor form in art history: here—in São Paulo—wax ex-votos, ‘poor images’ par excellence, can be bought for next to nothing. However, in ancient times, during the Middle Ages and under the old regime, it was a prerogative of kings or powerful people, as in the case of the royal wax effigies in Westminster Abbey, and it should also be noted that Louis 14th had his own appointed ‘wax sculptor’. And, when the kings’ heads were chopped off, the wax sculptors were ‘impoverished’, in other words they suffered a social decline. But no, they did not disappear: in order to survive, they set up shop on popular boulevards, and this would then give rise to the Grévin Wax Museum. I also remember writing an article to pay tribute to the great Hellenistic anthropologist, Nicole Loraux, in which I speculated about whether the very short, poor ‘Ay’ chanted at the start of Andalusian gypsy songs was perhaps a derivative of the exclamation Ai! (similar in meaning to ‘oh’ and expressing pain or sorrow) that is found at the start of many verses in Greek tragedies, where they utter this exclamation before they start to speak (the name of the tragedy Ajax refers to the man who laments, the man who says Ai!). I often think that one of the peoples best at ‘surviving’ in our part of the world, one of the most culturally tenacious peoples, is also one of the poorest: I am referring to the Romani people, the gypsies.

“survival involves things, gestures, linguistic expressions or images that are poor, tenuous, discreet, and of no consequence. But whose poverty itself is a sign of a certain degree of tenacity over time”

In all these examples, the key is that survival involves things, gestures, linguistic expressions or images that are poor, tenuous, discreet, and of no consequence. But whose poverty itself is a sign of a certain degree of tenacity over time. Religions can disappear, but ‘Bless you’ still survives despite this disappearance. The temple collapses but the ‘Greek key’ motif survives, even in the decoration of proletarian kitchens. Since we are speaking about subjects in print and online, I would like to stress something that often strikes me and which struck me again in the questions that I was asked recently by young researchers and artists from São Paulo, where the fourth installation—or version—of the ‘Soulèvements’ [‘Uprisings’] exhibition was presented. We often have the impression that new digital, networking and other techniques have completely transformed the status of images. That is true, of course, but only partially so. Poor images have always existed. Leonardo da Vinci had to make images in pasteboard for his patrons: they undoubtedly disappeared in a few weeks (but a few erratically survive in his sketches). Ghirlandaio [garland maker] was given his name because his father made garland-like headdresses that were worn by young Florentine girls for a single feast day. After that, the garlands were thrown away, but they still live on in the details of his paintings… These too can be qualified as poor images. Art history, if it accepts its anthropological purpose—and not just its monumental, museum-based mission for amassing cultural riches—must constantly bear in mind the countless images that have been created only to be seen for a moment and then to disappear like the ghosts of an image Hito Steyerl talks about.

Thus, I don’t agree—and, dear Marta, it is very rare for me to disagree with you!—that poor images cannot settle in our minds. Sediments are not thick layers of rock that persist for a long time, lying in a stable position one on top of another: they consist of millions of grains of sand, of slag, of crumbly and thus mobile materials, which are also jumbled together and last precisely because of their very lightness. You yourself provide a very important argument in favour of the survival of these poor images: you say that poor images are a preferred vehicle for emotions. Ah, we’ve returned to the previous discussion now… So, could we not say that if poor images make emotions circulate, it is precisely a sign of their greater tenacity? What is older than the human body? What is harder to destroy than emotions?

“Poverty is thus not a purely technical consequence of the medium: it is also an aesthetic choice aimed at giving greater freedom to something other than the ‘quality’ normally required of images”

On the subject of poverty, I would just like to add that we need to make sure that poverty is not just associated with the pure and simple deprivation of something. There have always been people who seek poverty as a quality of being and not of having (in the past Franciscans and certain mystics, for example). I remember that in his masterly text on flamenco singing, García Lorca explained how La Niña de los Peines managed to sing with duende by agreeing to ‘impoverish’ (impobrecer) her own virtuosity. Poverty is thus not a purely technical consequence of the medium: it is also an aesthetic choice aimed at giving greater freedom to something other than the ‘quality’ normally required of images. Moreover, I am certain that it is possible to invent images with an extraordinary aesthetic quality by using technical impoverishment processes. It is quite possible that the professional photographers in Man Ray’s day said to themselves that solarisation ‘impoverished’ the quality of their images.

“new techniques are not found in electrical devices but rather in our psyche. So, before we change our smartphones, we should change our minds”

It is not the technique as such that determines the fate of ‘rich’ or ‘poor’ images. It is more what it is used for—or what one does not want to do—with a given technique. I always find it unsatisfying in current debates on images to talk about technique as if ontologically speaking it implied a specific use. Yesterday, a television journalist came to speak to me whilst I was standing in front of the display walls of the ‘Uprisings’ exhibition. He filmed me with a mobile phone in order to duplicate the use of the large video camera operated by his TV technician, and also to imitate the poor images that demonstrators in the streets take with their small tools… I said to him: OK, but what exactly are you doing with your ‘new technique’? You ask me to stand still in front of the gallery wall, and to sum up my exhibition… So, you ask me to pose as if you were making a bas-relief. You certainly have a new technical tool with great potential for making ‘poor images’, but you use it whilst continuing to ask yourself conventional, very old questions about framing an ‘author’ in front of their work… Like back in the days of the daguerreotype! It is a way of telling them that new techniques are not found in electrical devices but rather in our psyche. So, before we change our smartphones, we should change our minds.

Georges Didi-Huberman, Three Brazilian ex-votos, October 2017, Gelatin Silver prints.

Letter 3, from Marta to Georges

Dear Georges,

Indeed, it is not the technique that determines the destination of the images, but rather what we do with them. I totally agree with you. And that is why I rarely organise projects in which the main thrust is technical experimentation (unless this technique, as occurs very frequently in fact, revolutionises the ways of seeing and, therefore, getting to know the world).

In fact, my reflections try to express my doubts about the impact that the infinitely exponential speed at which images and words circulate on social media, and online in general, has on our thoughts and emotions. I don’t have the answer, since, as I mentioned in my first letter about your book with Niki Giannari, my work consists in that both ‘stay, in order to pass on later’. I have the feeling that social media in particular often tend to become their own object of consumption: the faster they work and the more people they reach, the better. They are viral. It is not a value judgment, although we also call them ‘poor’. It is a working hypothesis. I wonder whether this supersonic exchange of images might not be classified as more sensory than ‘sensitive’, following Jacques Rancière.

“You spoke about ‘pathos’… I remembered that you wrote about the invention of hysteria.”

Why did Charcot photograph hysteria? Why did he produce these images showing women’s bodies making provocative, distorted or compulsive gestures?

Indeed, I think that at that time you really wondered why Charcot photographed these women. Did he not cause these symptoms himself or at least exacerbate them? Did he not build the concept of hysteria himself through a premeditated staging to illustrate it? And, incidentally, but even more importantly: was it not also a crude subterfuge in order to advocate once again the emotional vulnerability and intellectual fragility of women compared to men? I think it is crucial to bear in mind this apparently hidden agenda, conscious or unconscious. Today, this plan may appear particularly clumsy, but it has fuelled many of the gender biases in several generations of ‘male scientists’ (if not men in general). In my opinion, Charcot abused his position of power. Science has very often acted as an instrument to dominate gender, race or social class.

“Digital technologies are also an instrument of power.”

However, in the last few years, their adoption by groups of citizens demanding political, social or cultural change has allowed for the free and unlimited circulation of content of all types, also transforming the notion of space and time. With just a few clicks, a profusion of images and words appear, representing a new appetite for change, which is disseminated in a question of seconds towards other bodies.

When we presented the exhibition ‘Uprisings’ in the Jeu de Paume in Paris, we wanted to focus on some collective works by artists or activists who used the Internet and social media as forums for protests, resistance and disobedience. You’ll find a compilation of some of these sites and pages made by journalist Marie Lechner at the following website:

http://soulevements.jeudepaume.org/resistances-numeriques/

I don’t know whether today we are facing phenomena of social and political exacerbation through the dramatic display of images that illustrate certain slogans or mottos. It is true that activist and propaganda images have always existed. However, do you see any ‘hystericised or hystericising’ element caused by the speed of the viral circulation of images from one body to another? The French scholar, Évelyne Grossman, writes[1] that hysteria has two bodies. One eroticised that stretches out its tentacles towards other bodies; and another, anaesthetised and distant, that rejects all carnal contact. What happens when the eroticism of change circulates from one virtual body to another? What happens when, finally, a multitude of bodies are called to parade with a single spasm, with a common and unstoppable desire for action against the invisible forces that are opposed to this change?

I don’t have the answer, but instead more questions about this mise-en-scène that favours binary emotions, such as action/reaction or stimulus/response, friend/enemy, local/foreign… while at the same time responding to a frustration or a broad-spectrum sense of having been uprooted.

“To experience intensely the extreme vulnerability of the world that surrounds us. To open up to new views that modify the visible and the perceptible.”

I began my first letter by writing about Maria Kourkouta’s film and Niki Giannari’s poem, which you talk about in your latest book. I said that these images and these words move people. They are not gratuitous. They are the result of deep, generous reflection on the relationship between words and images, between thought and art. There is no question of them being neurasthenic or apologetic images, neither are they pessimistic or victimised. Neither do they attempt to change the world but rather changer la tête—change the mind, as you advocate in your second letter. These images and words favour the connection between the brain and the heart, which my grandmother used to tell us was located in the soul, this place with no precise geolocation, like the faith that she processed unquestioningly.

To experience intensely the extreme vulnerability of the world that surrounds us. To open up to new views that modify the visible and the perceptible. These are some of the personal mottos that I pursue in my work with images, words and people. With regard to ‘online’ life, however, perhaps it needs a predisposition that is not only emotional and intellectual but also generational. When I discuss these ‘digital’ issues with young people, their judgment is overwhelming: you are too old to understand the subtleties of the digital world. That’s probably true. I’m not a nostalgic person; I don’t think that ‘in print’ is better than ‘online’, for example. I just think that, in both cases, critical thinking is essential. And that, as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in Terminator II stated sardonically: ‘I’m old, but I’m not obsolete’!

Best wishes,

Marta

[1] See Evelyne Grossman. Éloge de l’hypersensible. Les Éditions de Minuit. Paris, 2017

LETTERS TO MARTA

3

Fast and slow at the same time

Dear Marta,

Like many people, you quite rightly wonder about the question of the relationship between the ‘exponential speed of the circulation of images’ and how our thoughts, our emotions, can respond to that. I find it interesting that, in your comments, you return to the example of hysteria and its ‘photographic iconography’ in the 19th century. Studying this production of images, in the past I was struck by the alienation imposed on these suffering women, an alienation that meant the absolute pre-eminence of a ‘master’s discourse’: images had to be created at all costs, because photographic images at that time were considered like the ‘wise man’s retina’ and that the wise man, wisdom, was never questioned, as he was considered to be the absolute good, the very figure of ‘progress’. Michel Foucault’s analyses—but also the psychoanalytic understanding of the link between perversion and hysteria, according to Freud—had allowed us to understand why, finally, all that worked so well. The reply to that question could perhaps tell us something about the way in which online images work so effectively in our psychic economy and our bulimic consumption of images and information.

By making his patients real ‘stars’ for his ‘Tuesday lessons’, which the Parisian high society of the day attended in droves—it was therefore a cultural phenomenon: an ‘exhibition’ or a ‘performance’, in the cruellest sense of these words, Charcot offered them an extraordinary advantage. Do you suffer from spasms, contractures, the anguish of rape, the most varied of symptoms? I’m going to treat you but, first, I’m going to re-enact on stage, experimentally, in front of my public or my camera, all your ills, all your suffering. On the one hand, therefore, the curse of the production of images: the image ‘over-hystericised’ the hysterical symptom, since it reproduced it at will. It is a way of confirming or of locking these suffering women up in their suffering itself. On the other hand, the blessing or benefit of the successful image, of the accomplished performance: the suffering woman could very well accept this repetition or this aggravation of her pain, because she became the heroine of a drama and an iconography. All in all, the star of a ‘(learned) society of the spectacle’. This status, which was founded on charm and eroticism, on passivity and passion, also gave hysterical women an imaginary advantage and, at the same time, imposed a very real alienation on them.

“Let’s return to our current ‘circulation of images’ online. As you suggest, there might well be a certain analogy with hysteria.”

The imaginary advantage is enormous: you are offered far more images—and sounds and information—than you can ever absorb. It’s Ali Baba’s cave. You yourself can make copies, reassemblies, and disseminate them all around the world. You become a ‘star’ for a number of quantifiable spectators. It’s exhilarating, even intoxicating because it goes very, very quickly. It’s an addiction to speed. Where, then, should the alienation effect that this very advantage entails be situated? First of all, ultra-fast channels act exactly like motorways: moving very effectively, in fact, but in a space imposed by the ‘channel’. On a motorway, cars can move very fast, which is a good thing, but shepherds during transhumance, or stags and does can no longer cross the road. That means that rapid, vectorised, extremely fluid circulation stops all other kinds of circulation. It only creates the freedom to circulate in a space that it has laid down in advance, even if it is extremely arborescent. That means that, on both sides of the road, there are walls that cannot be crossed. And that, therefore, the advantage (the sensation of going fast in one direction) created an alienation (blockage of all truly transverse circulation). Besides, my own use of these circulations often leaves me with an impression of both exaltation (It’s so efficient! It’s so fast!) and frustration (intellectually speaking, there is nothing worse, for example, than the ‘Google images’ search engine).

“How, with these technical possibilities given to the images, can one find values of usage capable of allowing us to take our time?“

The advantage is therefore ‘sensorial’, with alienation involving ‘sensitive’ things just as much as intelligible things. The essential point is perhaps this: sensitive things take time; it is an experience of suspension where the question of knowing how to ‘save’ this time is never asked. You rightly speak of emotions somehow alienated by their very speed, but also by their corresponding binary operation matrix: action-reaction, stimulus-response, friend-enemy, domestic-international, etc. However, an emotion generated by this kind of binary operation is an emotion deprived of the essential, in other words its own temporality, its possible ambiguity, its progressive metamorphosis into an object of thought. I do not miss a time where emotion would have been more ‘authentic’, no. Neither am I nostalgic. However, the question remains, always the same one: how, with these technical possibilities given to the images, can one find values of usage capable of allowing us to take our time, capable in other words of opening us up without hysteria to the time of images and of taking us towards this critical thinking that Goya, this contemporary of Kant, already called for?

In other words, the technical speed must allow for changes of pace, dialectic developments: mere efficiency is of no use if we have not made the necessary decisions to orient ourselves in thinking. So, perhaps we need to return to the ancient wisdom expressed in the adage Festina lente, ‘make haste slowly’, which Mantegna and his school represented so superbly in a fresco in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua… In other words: to use speed whilst cultivating slowness. To know when one has to go fast and when to slow down at all costs (‘Road works ahead. Please slow down’, like the signs you see on motorways).

“Today, online is no longer what in print was in the past.”

You know, dear Marta, that I often use the category of anachronism to express the fact that the most interesting images make us access heterogeneous temporalities that are dialectically linked in the same configuration. This also applies to the technique. Today, online is no longer what in print was in the past. The works that interest me most often are those in which I perceive this complexity of time where the now criticises the past and vice versa. In a magnificent book on the history of techniques, entitled, Éloge du mixte: matériaux nouveaux et philosophie ancienne [In praise of the mix: new materials and old philosophy] (Paris, Hachette Littératures, 1998), the philosopher Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent showed how the implementation of ‘new materials’ such as these composite materials used to build supersonic aeroplanes would require a return to the very history of techniques: thus, in order to give a composite material the pointed shape of the plane’s nose, technicians understood that the best method was to return to the expertise of the 18th-century milliners, as we can see illustrated on the plates of the Encyclopédie by Diderot and d’Alembert…

The same thing applies to art images. In order to ‘go beyond’ painting, Marcel Duchamp simply returned to a technique far older than oil painting, and I am referring to the stained-glass window (Le Grand Verre [The Large Glass] technically speaking is a stained-glass window in the strictest sense of the term, notably due to the use of lead wire). I remember an exciting experience linked to this at the time of the Fables du lieu exhibition that I designed in 2001, as a dialogue to resume with certain artists I had already worked on. The work with Simon Hantaï was, from this point of view, exemplary: he proposed returning to certain paintings from the 1970s, starting off again from a technical approach based on the digitisation and reprocessing of photographs of these paintings. This produced a mixture of temporalities where electronic speed was applied to slow down history…So, let us make haste slowly. Let us replace each step forward in the present or the future within the perspective of an outdated reflection on history.