Panel Discussion: Strategies of Representation and Access
Candice Breitz, Sabine Bitter / Helmut Weber, Oliver Ressler, moderated by Jeff Derksen
Introduction:
Today, on the occasion of the Tonga.online project room which is an element of the “Tracing the Rainbow” exhibition, we have a discussion amongst artists who have different, specific, yet ultimately related approaches to representation. Broadly, this discussion is meant to engage with representation as a strategy that is central to both artistic and cultural practices and to museums’ practice. A key and recurring question in the debate on representation is the question of power, a question that is central to all forms of cultural practice and communication. How does representation negotiate the tricky politics and aesthetics between those who are represented and those who do the representing. This debate has moved through a number of disciplines and discourses in the last 70 years; linguistics, painting, photography, literature, film, feminism, “multiculturalism,” and – significantly – anthropology. With the ability of culture to circulate more widely and more quickly – a circulation that is enhanced by technological changes in communication and the greater “flows” and networks in globalism – representation is given a new position in what is sometimes called “cross-cultural understanding.” However, even in that benevolent sounding phrase, issues of power are central. So, within debates of culture and globalism today, issues of access are again key: literally, who has the tools to produce representations, particularly across cultures and, again, literally, who does the representing and who is represented and how. The tonga.online project room is based on these issues of representation and access.
[Issues of representation are also issues of space in globalization, and the relationship to space and time. Cultures can be represented as being, literally, in the past, as not having entered into modernity. The so-called developing world is represented as being several steps behind the developed world and therefore as eagerly awaiting participation in the present. A show such as “Tracing the Rainbow” shows very little engagement with modernity; the only two items on display that require any form of power are a BMW and the computers in the Tonga.online project room. So, in terms of the management of time, African culture is portrayed as being located in the past – an anthropological object locked in the amber of another’s gaze]
The forum today will begin with short statements from the artists on their own representational strategies, then will move into a discussion amongst the artists in order to provide a context and topics in the open discussion with the audience. I will give a brief overview of each artists’ practice in order to give us a little more shared context.
Oliver Ressler’s artistic strategies counter dominant representational modes. While on the surface Ressler’s works deal with representation in a straight forward or transparent manner, they do so in order to address the central question of power in relation to representation. His works such as The Global 500 and Sustainable Propaganda are informational, but the information they provide challenges and counters mainstream or popular accounts of large social and economic issues – from globalization to its effects such as renewed border enforcement. In the case of Border Crossing Services – which he collaborated on with Martin Krenn – he has appropriated the representational modes of a mass-circulated magazine, but filled it with other “content.” It is not primarily representation itself that is challenged in Ressler’s work, but rather the ends toward which representation is used. These works deploy representation against itself in a battle for content and contexts.
The collaborative projects of Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber take an extremely subtle yet aggressive approach to representation. I use this two contradictory terms – subtle and aggressive – not to portray their practice as erratic or discordant, but to point to a kind of effective finesse in their work. This finesse is achieved through a working and reworking of representational techniques. In a number of their projects, representation is taken apart, mediated by computer software, and then reconfigured. Representation is neither attacked nor rejected but rather is mediated so that it carries or delivers information additional to its original form. Often this extra information is both subtly contradictory and supplementary to the image. These movements between text and context in their work and the movement between architecture, social space and society which runs throughout their projects broaden representation outside of the image itself.
Candice Breitz’s work as well deploys representation against itself. But unlike Ressler’s work which leaves the representational surface intact – for Ressler does not seek to use the poetic method of “roughening up” or disturbing the surface of representation – Breitz’s work purposely opens the surface, seams, joins and borders of images in order to reveal the construction of representation and the ideology of the images. In her photo work two approaches are visible: montage and alteration to construct an image and “disfigurement” to alter an existing image. Like Bitter and Weber’s work, Breitz brings determining contexts to the representational surface.
I chose the words “surface, seams, joins and borders” in order to give some sense of the escalation – or scale – of Breitz’s projects. For, as critics have pointed out, her work moves from the surface of the images to the textures and effects of capitalism in its role in the construction of national subjects and identities; but Breitz resolutely locates these subjects within structures of globalism and its manifestations of culture. Like Ressler’s pointed work, and like the sweep and volume of Bitter and Weber’s collaborative projects, Breitz’s interventions, “surface attacks” and shifts in scale always bring the connection of ideology and representation into visibility. If the transparency of ideology is the chief representational strategy of the present form of globalism, these artists here today complicate and counter that strategy in effective and varied ways.
Jeff Derksen
Summary of Presentations and Debate
Participants