oh rise up my darling and come with me
May 19, 2008
I’ve been searching long and hard for a true definition of ‘folk music’. Does a folk song need to be old and played on traditional instruments? Is it required to be of humble or unselfconscious origins, authored by an unschooled, isolated or in some way native person? Is it possible to find a communal identity in the textures, rhythms and poetry of certain songs? What is the music that defines us?
I’ve begun to believe that a song that is universally loved and understood will endure the test of time and become folk music because it has made itself useful to so many of us . . . Some are well-weathered and others relatively new . . . What they all share in common is that they remind us of our humanity, of what we share.
Sadly these are the songs that have been gradually slipping away from us. Since the abandonment of agrarian for urban life, the swift death of regionalism and the advent of recorded music, we have left many of these songs behind as relics in printed anthologies and the field recordings of musicologists.
Natalie Merchant, sleeve notes from The House Carpenter’s Daughter
*****
Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.
Banksy, from an ADbusters interview
Here’s a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he’s often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that’ll do.
Charlie Brooker, the Guardian, September 2006
The other day the BBC used some footage of this graffiti to end a report about another calamitous day for Gordon Brown. It’s a very BBC sort of image I thought. The kind of glib graphic they routinely knock up and shove into the six o’clock news (or The BBC News at Six, as it’s now rebranded) for George Alagiah to stand in front of and deliver Third World disaster with his customary profound inanity. It’s the visual equivalent of the puns that BBC correspondent gowks like Robert Hall are unable to help themselves tossing into reports where they are inappropriate - like, say, those about poverty or environmental catastrophe - or reports where they add nothing to our understanding or experience of the story - like, say, all the other reports. Or perhaps it’s also bit like the facile way any report about the internet is nothing to the BBC but an irresistible opportunity to frame interviews in a YouTube screen or quotes in an email template.
But the image wasn’t made by the monkeys in the BBC graphics basement; it’s actual art, lest you hadn’t noticed. I know this because it was in an exhibition: last week’s ‘Cans Festival’ of ‘Street Art’ in a tunnel in London. They called it ‘Cans’ because street art is (almost always) done with spray cans, and it ran concurrent to the Cannes Film Festival. In fact it might not’ve been concurrent to Cannes, but it was a bit like the same time and, God, it was probably just too much of an opportunity to be witty or clever or whatever it is that it is. The show was oragnised by stencil/graffiti artist and street prefect Banksy, whose publications have included - wait for it - ‘Existencilism’ and ‘Wall and Piece’. Crikey! Strangely these works haven’t been received with a groan, but with the critical intelligentsia collectively smirking and reading sententious Alagiahistic proclamations of genius from the autocue. Perhaps Cans was a joke on the perceived importance and Cristal-soaked prestige of Cannes; a sort of good ol’ fashioned kickin’ against elitism. There’s the haves in Cannes and the have nots in Cans - those who are downtrodden, gritty, and ‘4 real’. The joke is a bit like those puns the BBC use on their graphics - prima facie it perhaps connotes a wry cleverness and sparkling perceptive wit; do more than glance at it though and it turns out to be a load of bosh.
That’s possibly reasonably denotive of the weakness of street art. The premise of the movement (I suppose they’d consider ‘school’ a bit elitist; “we’re edgy self-taught mavericks from outside The System, man” they’d harp) is that it’s the voice of the people - that it is art that speaks cogently for those marginalised by society or not represented by other, less inclusive, art. By the people; for the people. It’s an ‘outsider art’ movement high on rhetoric and propaganda keen to promote its politically-engaged agenda and anti-establishment ethos as the key tenets of its drive for social change. It’s therefore a particularly debilitating problem that the art itself is so impoverished of anything politically cogent, sapient, vital or interesting. When D*Face paints a sticking-out tongue onto the queen and scribbles guff on No Entry signs it is the kind of anti-establishment drivel that adolescent boys sometimes absently-mindedly piddle on their pencil cases when they’re bored in a GCSE history lesson. If this is the voice of the people then it’s no wonder Gordon Brown thought he could steal a few grand off them by rescinding the 10p tax rate. He probably took a peek at Nick Walker’s ‘Moona Lisa’ and saw that the proles were too busy mirthfully snickering at hopeless pictures of bums to care about anything. And even if they did care then they’d not have an articulate voice for their dissent; they’d probably just do some puerile doodles in a tunnel and then get back down the factories where they belong.
Its proponents see street art as a sort of folk art for the ‘urban generation’. Not just folk art that provides a light and momentary aesthetic relief from the drudgery of life, but a folk art that aspires to profoundly engage with our times, express current universal human truths and emotions, and embolden a politicised counter-culture uprising. “Look at the hope it gives the oppressed” they weasel. “Our art can be vehicle for social change, man. We’re gonna rise up and transform this fucking country!” they holler. But although it could conceivably be a powerful medium for expression, and even be a voice which contributes to political change, the art - even with the lofty rhetoric - has no substance. The rebellion is not propulsive, dynamic, witty or coherent. Calling it a rebellion is probably already overstretching it. The annunciation is callow and dumb. It doesn’t lock rigorously into anything vital or expansive, and it doesn’t even meekly suggest transformatism in a meek cowardly disembodied voice cloaked in seductive clothing. It’s a movement characterised by dilettantes basking in a perceived image of themselves as subversive sods scourging London with stenciled rats. It’s a bit teenage, like an emo kid cocking a snook from behind a sofa in Starbucks by sticking a finger up at a policeman outside while all his friends guffaw into their espressos and feel naughty and eye up the some girls wearing Topshop the Clash T-shirts.
Street art don Banksy and his mob of simpering coat-tailers would probably chunter something about art affecting social change from within - that they are using The System to break The System. Leaving aside for a second the question of whether the art is any good, there is first the question of whether it’s feasible to be part of the system - by which I suppose we basically mean capitalism, and it’s attendant asperities - and also stand apart from it and oppose it. Today everything is co-opted by commerce - the radicalism of the 60s was a packaged product in the 70s, and so on. Everything which has appreciated value - artistic value, emotional value, intellectual value, whatever value - quickly accrues economical value. If a street artist is valued on an artistic scale then it follows that they’ll also be valued on an economic one. (Or it can even work the other way round.) That’s problematic for all art, but particularly art which is founded on an antithetical ideology. Opposition is now virtually untenable or unsustainable. Whatever opposition there is quickly becomes co-opted and assimilated and ceases to be opposition. The market economy society doesn’t accommodate opposition; it eats it up and regurgitates it as another product of The System.
Oppositional politics have been chewed up and digested into single issue politics. Politics doesn’t offer alternative structures or ideologies, just ways to manage the one we have. Campaign to have some windfarms, if you like; or campaign not to have them. Lobby for a congestion charge; or be against it. Protest at the fuel price rises or don’t. But whatever issues are politicked it’s all within a system. This system accommodates simple art on single issues. The innocuous anti-capitalist cartoons of Banksy and his crew are accommodated by capitalism. In fact capitalism finds them rather useful. They’re not threatening; they won’t undermine society’s fabric, and they can be alchemised into something which has all manner of economic malleability. They’re not seversive or dangerous, but they appropriate the look of it effectively. The government are unlikely to be coerced into giving Banksy a tunnel to fill with propaganda if it was threatening to the Western order. They wouldn’t, for instance, let al Qaeda have the tunnel for a festival. Or even the BNP.
It’s not that an art that has the qualities and role of what we term folk art couldn’t exist today in urban Westernisation. It needn’t even necessarily be characterised by its oppositionality, though it’d perhaps be difficult for it not to encompass it. There is no reason too why it couldn’t use media that reflect the times. Technology like mobile communications and the internet have fundamentally altered our relationships to each other and to the world, and changed society and culture. Folk art reflects day-to-day life. It’s not that graffiti and internet-circulated stencils, digital tools and propaganda couldn’t be used in a meaningfully progressive, genuinely witty or artistic way. But it seems a bit like graffiti has suffered in some of the ways that other forms of art and expression have. It feels less cogent; more superficial, inconsequential and diluted. Perhaps there is a correlation between the development of a commercial art market for graffiti and the general dissipation of its content. Maybe this is just nostalgia. There’s always been vacuous infantile nonsense daubed on walls. But I think a reasonable argument could be made that the stuff that has now become seen as art - the marketable and the stuff that copies it, most of which it’s indistinguishable from - represents less diversity of ideas and aesthetics than it did in even in the 80s.
This is perhaps indicative of a loss regionalism, or the flattening out of culture. People who consider themselves graffiti artists or street artists are now more likely to stencil a symbol they found on the internet than mural a locality from their day-to-day lives. Dialects are abandoned and a broader idiom - often American - is used. Likewise there is less visual vernacular - a stencilled Banksy rat in Waterloo can look just like a rat stencilled by a kid in Sunderland. It was quite possibly even made by the same stencil - reproduced and held by another pair of hands and sprayed in the same way on the side of a different Starbucks in a different city. It’s not a wry comment on the homogenisation of culture, it is the homogenisation of culture.
‘The stencil [is] fast, it’s the speed of now, it’s the speed of music and TV channel hopping’ says Paul Jones, owner of Street Art gallery Elms Lester. Perhaps Street Art is just a consequence of its time, but - unlike a true folk art - it doesn’t engage with the vicissitudes of this time. It may well be a product of the time - in two senses of the word - but it isn’t necessarily an art. It doesn’t have a dialectical or didactic relationship to people, society or culture; it doesn’t aid the construction of individual or communal identities. The identities of the individual and the community are the same - far from militating against this, Street Art is just another facet of it; just another gable end to the same building reproduced throughout the urbanised West.
These ‘guerrilla’ stencils on gable ends increasingly look not like the propaganda of a militant bunch of agit-artist government-botherers, but like adverts for the canvassed versions on sale for a few grand in Bonhams or Sotherby’s. Banksy and his peeps are driving around - possibly literally - in capitalism’s signifiers wittering about their radical movement in the same way that the BBC pries through Amy Winehouse’s curtains and squeals about drugs, before scurrying away making a ‘Wino’ pun and retiring of an evening to get smashed at a cocaine party round George Alagiah’s gaff. Any sense of art is inconsequential when there’s money to be made in reductionist tittle-tattling about what goes on behind artist’s curtains and pictures of bums to be sprayed on walls.
The Cans Festival wasn’t much like the counter-culture festival or exhibition of folk art that it proclaimed itself; it was more like a theme park. A little local goverment bank holiday charade where refreshments were sold and people milled around thinking about investments in a brightly coloured tunnel while their kids ran around excitedly. Or a zoo: where wild animals are domesticated, penned up and captivated and trinkets or images of them are sold in the gift shop. The artists themselves insisted on anonymity. They truculently faced away from the camera for TV interviews, repeating the street art anti-establishment manifesto in a collective lip synch with hooded heads bowed. Banksy has always been anonymous, and since he became famous other street artists began replicating this paradoxical quirk. Identity was lost already though. Their work is reproduced by stencils. Their slogans are appropriated. Their signatures are stencilled brand names.
What does stencilling a ten pence piece with Brown’s chops on it say? What does doing it in a council-approved place say? What does using it in a BBC political report say? Perhaps it’s really a problem with context. Had I noticed the graffiti on a bridge as I was walking through town then I probably would’ve smiled as I glanced at it while continuing with my life. It would’ve elicited a response consistent with its qualities, and I would’ve forgotten it as instantly as I forgot the billboard advertising a new mineral water. But the roles that it has been given - of art, of social voice and conscience, of political agitator, of serious critically-engaged work - are ones that it is doesn’t have the substance to support. That it is being used in such roles, and that it is seen as commensurate with folk arts of the past, is perhaps indicative of the problem. It may be the way in which it is mediated - by the BBC, by galleries, by Sunday supplements. These contexts ask it to support all sorts of meanings and ask us to apprehend it entirely differently than if we had spotted it on an underpass while were stuck in a traffic jam on our way to work.
It’s not that Banksy’s work is bad. I shrug my shoulders aphateically a bit if you call it art, but it’s ok; and his aims seem reasonably laudable. But even he himself has become representative a creative and critical malaise which inflects art now. His hangers on and copyists have stymied the movement, and its patrons have held it up as radicalism and inflated its significance in line not with its quality or content but with its ubiquity. When it is posited as the principal form of expression and visual language of Western urbanisation then it looks as depressingly vapid and apathetic as the society that it targets. The voice of the people is only represented by the odd glib pun or cheap visual snark and the issues it seeks to raise and communicate - like the change to the ten pence tax rate - are quickly forgotten or whitewashed over. There’ll be no lasting artistic legacy, even to issues with far wider-reaching humanitarian implications than that. If there’s any art to engage us with ourselves and the complex interweave of society, culture and humanity, than it probably isn’t street art. If there’s an art which accurately stands for - represents, or is indicative of - the homogenisation and the subjugation of expression by capitalist artifice then street art is probably significantly more eloquent.
*****
‘Bold Jamie’ sounds like a traditional song, but was in fact written a couple of years ago by young Irish folk singer Cara Dillon. It tells the story of a young girl who elopes with a mysterious man. Her rich father catches up to them, brings his daughter home and wants the man killed for stealing his daughter and the family’s riches. It’s a typical folk tale of misunderstood identity and class suspicion replete with an ‘individual fancy vs. the judge and jailer of societal establishment’ motif. A complex and more intangible or immeasurable value - in this case love - is subjugated by economic value, or conflated with it. The girl finds emotional wealth but this is taken away from her by father. He wants her be happy and human and fulfilled but those expressions must be within his bejewelled estate of avarice.
The studio version Dillon did for the record is slightly less convincing than this rather brilliant and lucent live version. On record she sounds a bit too like some other people. Yes, that’s not necessarily a problem in folk music. But it probably is if those other people are the ones heard on the Starbucks stereo. When Starbucks goes kerching for the final time, the internet goes caput, the online repository of ‘live’ singing goes kapow, and humanity dies out in a technology-induced global warming meltdown, it’ll be the CD version that earth’s new life-forms will find. That’ll be a shame. But the record - imposition of the apparatus of commercial expedience upon human expression that it is - will at least allow the new colonisers of the planet to get to grips with the complex interweave of nature, culture, and society that humanity was subject to. They can conveniently pass the record around and burn new copies. Obviously all this presupposes that the new life-forms speak English, have CD players and copiers, and indeed that they can hear or hear in the same way as us and have a societal structure that they can relate ours to.
It may be a blessing if they only have the CD and not this internet film, because they then won’t have an opportunity to snigger and snark at humanity’s inability to correctly reproduce the aspect ratio or synch the singer’s precisely to the audio while copying a video onto YouTube, even though it’s a medium and operating system that humanity itself invented.
past tense
May 14, 2008
In 1994 the noted Dutch photographer Hans Aarsman gave up photography. For many years he’d produced exhibitions and books of photographs of some renown. But at the beginning of 90s he began to struggle with the increasing ‘artification’ of the medium, and the proliferation of art images in commercial applications. He felt the very qualities that made a photograph unique were in fact antithetical to its use as art. This was exacerbated and made profoundly evident to him by the critically-disengaged discourse surrounding the use of photography in art. He began to see art as a recision of the qualities which constitute the particularity of photography. He argued that the reproducibility of images, as well as the ease in which they can be created without any specialist knowledge or skills, were not only difficult to assimilate with art, but the utilitarianism of the camera and photography was also threatened or obscured by the increasing encroachment of art into photography. The photographic image had become conflated with the material art object, but the photograph wasn’t a unique object.
Aarsman also worked as a photojournalist, but found himself restricted and frustrated by the use of his photographs. ‘Newspaper photos insist on presenting a simplistic dichotomy’, he said, ‘that perpetual thinking in terms of pros and cons, in good and evil, the oppressed and the oppressor, left and right . . . I was searching for a way to capture the ambiguity of life’. After he quit photojournalism, he travelled Holland searching not just for a new photographic aesthetic, but for a new way to use the camera. He felt that the camera somehow always came between himself and his experience of the visible world. ‘Not for a single instant was my gaze disinterested, [it was] always accompanied by questioning oneself . . . you’re a colonist of the visual world’ he said. He began to think that the camera and the resultant image were untenable with the unfettered and truthful experience of self and visual reality that he was pursuing; they militated against his apprehension of the visual world and his experience of his self within it. The images were almost narcissistic; he was only repeatedly looking at the world as he had been conditioned to see it by his photographic eye. And that eye was only a small part of him and his visual experience.
He gave up all forms of photography when he couldn’t find a way to resolve this dissatisfaction. He felt he had no use for the medium after the co-opting of the photographic image by art, by journalistic expedience, and by commerce and advertising. He sold his cameras and focused his attention on writing visual-critiques and plays about photography.
Early this century Aarsman began using a digital camera to document the capricious and transient desires consumerism aroused in him. His mother died in 2000, and not long after Aarsman moved house. As he was attempting to reduce his possessions in preparation for the move, he came across some figurines his mother had made and given him when he was younger. His new house was small and he would have no room to accommodate trinkets and things of no use. He thought it silly to have a sentimental value for clay gnomes and teddy bears, but still he felt throwing them out was a betrayal of his mother’s memory and had to retrieve them from the bin. Once he’d made a photographic record of them though, he was surprised at the emotional ease with which he was able to throw the objects away. He wondered if the objects of his consumerist desire could be similarly divested of their emotional lure if he photographed them. Consumerist lust is propagated by images, so perhaps he’d be sated by making an image of the object of his desire. He looked around his house at all the things he’d excitedly bought and never used; objects that he’d been desperate to own but had immediately been superseded by a new allure in a shop window somewhere. The moment was gone and all that remained were monuments - or perhaps souvenirs: useless bits of ornery tush - to his caprice and ephemeral desires. He thought that maybe the act of photographing could be commensurate with the consumerist’s consummation of purchasing. Could it be a sort of Freudean relief valve for desire? It’d certainly save him a lot of money and space if it could.
Aarsman went about his day-to-day business as before, but every time his consumer desire was piqued by an object in a shop window - or on a car forecourt, or by a ‘for sale’ sign on a property - he took out the digital camera he carried on trips through town and photographed the object which had aroused his consumer lust. By doing this he hoped he could head off the desire before it turned into an obsession and a purchase.
He did this for the first few years of the century - and may even still be doing it. At some point he collected the photographs and made an exhibition: ‘Photography as Antidote to Consumerism’. Though he hadn’t intended it, Aarsman was suddenly an artist and a photographer again. In an accompanying essay he fleshed out his ideology and made a call to arms:
Let us provide some resistance. Let art stop acting as a vehicle for commercial interests. And if art is incapable of doing so, because its interests are too closely tied to those of commerce, then we’ll do it ourselves. After all, everybody has a camera in their phone these days.
*****
In America there are now companies offering to stalk people going about their day-to-day business and photograph them like they’re famous. People pay the company, tell them what they’ll be wearing and where they’ll be, and then the photographer will diligently paparazzo them for an afternoon of shopping. The resultant portfolio of photographs will capture the faux-famous browsing organic pretzels in the delicatessen, emerging from Barneys laden with boutique paper carrier bags, or whatever other commercial diversions they make of an afternoon. The photos will depict the act of shopping; the act of consumerist consummation will be recorded and the images will attest to the visual performance of the act. The burgeoning popularity of this charade has itself created a lucrative market.
Whether the boutique paper bags contain anything is probably a moot point now. The image stands in place of the object that was once the monument (in this case it’s probably a monument rather than a souvenir, since they’re shopping at Barneys) to the fiasco. Those monuments - in Aarsman’s world they’re leather swivel chairs, chromed espresso machines - were only expensive stage dressings - follies, or props - to the act, and likewise the exact content of the paper bags is almost incidental to the narrative being played out. Who knows what’s inside the paper bags draped over Insidious Lassitude’s regular English actress muse Sienna Miller as she promenades down Madison Avenue, or as she ambulates in Primrose Hill? And who cares? It wouldn’t add to the meaning of the images. The locations may change; the contents of the bags may change and never be disclosed, but the image is the same: Sienna is shopping; she is on a trip to buy. And equally importantly: she looks bloody fabulous as she does it too.
Paying to be papped is apparently proving almost as addictive as shopping to Americans. This isn’t surprising because, like shopping, it is an act that must be repeated and repeated: because it is an act - a process, a Sisyphean endeavour - once it is completed it must be commenced again. The self that is given identity by it must be reiterated; the image must be reproduced. It’s a bit like those scenes in ‘Back to the Future’ where Michael J. Fox holds a photo of himself and watches his image disappear when his identity is threatened by not acting out his role properly. In the image of shopping the lines that depict and delineate the self must be constantly gone over lest they fade away. In that way it is maybe a bit analogous to fame itself. Or even fashion, to both of which it is inexplicably linked - once an image of Sienna has been made of her garbing around New York in Boho-chic, then she must create another image to bring to the idiot Americans so they can name it something reductionist and commercially workable like ‘Factory Metallic’, and then sell it in Barneys. They’ll copy it, act it out, appropriate it, reproduce it, and make an image ‘in the style of’ the fashion.
The throwaway nature of today’s culture requires that meaning is in need of constant re-inferrment so that the self is always reinstated before Michael J. Fox’s photograph turns blank. Like shopping; like fashion; like fame; once the moment’s gone all that’s left is the paper bag and an image of a moment that was gone is the click of an exposure. The move to digital processes has only sped this process up. The gulf between object and image is even wider now than when Aarsman turned his back on photography. The image has less physical substance than ever, yet it has assumed more importance as an object. Now the image is the thing, as Jean Baudrillard once noted and Insidious Lassitude is wont to often re-quote and muse upon.
The internet is part of that substance-less materiality too, and the popularity of ‘social-networking’ sites like Facebook has added impetus to the pseudo-pap business. Apparently people use these photos on their Facebook pages. It’s hard to imagine anything more depressing, but the faux-fame photos are at least entirely congruent with the often desperate and false projections of self-image that are prevalent in such ‘places’. According to Izaz Rony, who runs a pseudo-pap business (though I don’t suppose that’s what he calls it), ‘[people are] concerned about the image they project of themselves. [By using pseudo-pap photos] they have something that is real - it’s the window they open for others to look through. They want to create the lives they want to live’. Or, as they aren’t living them, create them by appropriating the look of them, because, really, it’s the same.
Rony explains that by being pseudo-papped people ‘aren’t self-conscious anymore’, so they have this ‘real’ image to paste all over their personal Facebook billboards. Alongside the images of the individual themselves, these billboards also advertise an identity by showing images of the individual’s ‘friends’. The friends are displayed like the souvenirs of shopping are, and the number of friends is totted up for each person and displayed. Of course, almost all these friends are people the individual hasn’t spoken to in years, or are people they spoke to once in a bar to ask them where they bought their fabulous Andy Warhol metallic sweater. Most of the time only a tiny percentage of this list are actually friends (in the old-fashioned pre-consumerist sense of the word), the others are a bit like the unknown contents of the paper bag - only an incidental collection of unused objects. Or in fact images of objects, since they’re often more-or-less unknown and only garnered for image-based identity-constitution. Of course, these images - of unknown friends, plastered over a digital billboard - could in fact be images made by pseudo-paps. So, there are images of people being friends with images of other unknown people; and all the images were made by people who nobody knows because they spend their time hiding behind bins outside Barneys. It’s a vaguely nightmarish scenario.
And in a further dysfunctional twist, people pay to have themselves tyrannised and defined by consumerism and its imagery. The irony is that while people are desperately trying to appropriate the image of ‘the life they want to lead’, the image of Sienna Miller’s life is one she spends all her time trying to escape. Despairing of her deplorable paparazzi shadow and images of herself, she has court orders against photographers and is so damaged that she regularly launches berserk quasi-psychotic physical attacks on them. Which, of course, are photographed and somehow packaged up not as a woman in desperate anguish, but as aspirational imagery. I suppose it is only a matter of time before the pseudo-paps start offering faux-fights as part of their service to their faux-famous clients.
*****
Human relationships are now subject to the same image-based accumulation vector as consumerist shopping. The appearance of personal growth and progress is mediated socially through the image. The only value which is valid is economic, and all things on this scale are inferred by the visual. Social status, identity, self-validation, and personal value are inflected by the same set of visual signifiers and acts. The realms of human relationships and commerce have merged and are co-dependent, and mutually dependent on the image to hold the whole thing together. But the image is now less dependable than ever with its unfixed and contested meanings, its immateriality, erasability and throwaway nature. Hans Aarsman initially turned his back on photography because he felt it was an unsatisfactory representation of his visual reality; that it represented his self too overtly and in a way that was too simplistic. Today the photograph has become more utilitarian just as he hoped it would. But as a corollary of that it has also - in some of the ways he feared it would - meshed with consumerism and colonised or tyrannised our visual world and commodified the ways in which we understand ourselves.
The photograph at the top of this post of Miller besieged and embattled by photographers speaks eloquently of the depressing, dysfunctional and unsustainable plight that consumerism and its attendant imagery has led Western society and relationships into. Of course, although it depicts from the outside the hellish reality of a life being stalked by paparazzi, it was itself taken by a pap who contributed to the ruckus.
I rather like too the photograph underneath of Miller attacking a photographer with her handbag. The handbag, it must be said, is doubtless by Chloé or some similarly high-ranking fashion house, so - official Insidious Lassitude muse or not - it’s worth pointing out that Sienna perhaps isn’t exactly an oppositional figure to consumerism. The photograph was apparently taken the other day when she arrived at Los Angeles airport. It may possibly have been taken by a paparazzo, but it looks more like it was taken by a passer-by on the digital camera that Hans Aarsman pointed out that everyone now has with them at all times. Though by selling the picture to newspapers, the photographer has rather undermined Aarsman’s call to arms to use that camera to reclaim imagery from commerce and redeem the camera’s utilitarianism. Still, it didn’t look half as good before I cropped and Photoshopped it and plonked it underneath some high-falutin’ text about visual signifiers, so perhaps with my ‘artification’ interventions I’ve reclaimed it as a photograph. Maybe if I expressed that some that the reasons I like it are genuinely artistic then it’ll be redeemed from the clutches of The Daily Mail and the sundry other internet-world ‘places’ it was probably reproduced in.
I think I like it most because Miller is attacking the photographer not with her fists, or with a knife or a gun, but she is instead swinging her handbag manically. It’s like she has just stepped off a plane from the past, a time of greater certainty where disputes are simple, and meanings uncontested. The swinging of a handbag signifies disgust and antipathy, but it is also strangely charming and endearing. Nobody ever died from being clouted with a handbag. Like she’s a quaint English Rose from a distant land of rolling green hills and scone bakers, Sienna’s loopy handbag assault represents a polite and restrained, and ever-so-slightly eccentric English expression of displeasure. In a world of multi-national corporations, global communications, homogenised or Americanised culture, and instantly-transmitted images, the delightful swing of a handbag seems to connote a comforting residue of Englishness. Thus the photograph itself - captured on a lump of consumerist plastic, sold as a digital file, and transmitted around the world instantly - seems to say something terse but articulate about the tensions of multi-national consumerism and the threat to identity mediated by imagery.
a lamb’s eyes
May 12, 2008
I was watching something on TV a week or two ago - it may’ve been Crimewatch, or it was a show a bit like that - where the police were revealing the techniques they’d used to solve a particularly grim rape case. Down at the station the show’s presenter cast his critical eye over several dusty bin liners of vital case evidence, while a tubby detective and his officer tossed bad syntax and malapropism around with milk and two sugars in an effort to sound at once like men of the people and a little bit brilliantly perspicacious too.
Like a Chocolate Digestive-fingered Fagin, the head detective proudly directed his lackey to show the presenter the photo-fit image that they’d circulated and a photograph of the man they subsequently convicted because - they said - of the success of the photo-fit. The officer dutifully scurried to the filing cabinet and emerged with the images. The presenter swooned in what appeared to be genuine amazement. “Look at the eyes; the same eyes!” he cooed, “That’s as-ton-ishing, he has the same look in his eyes!” “Evil!!” he squealed. After much smug vindictive nodding from the grubby detective and his simpering gamin, the presenter made a further contribution to the annals of rigorous journalism by noting both images had mouths and noses. Seriously. He drew his index finger over the facial features as if tracing letters carved into an antique Ouija board: “…e…v…i…l…” he mouthed. You could see his eyes widening as he traced each of the letters; then there was a second or two of perplexed blinking while he engaged the full force of his BBC journalist acuity to turn the letters into a word. Then suddenly, mind besieged by something profound and ineffable, there was a paroxysmal thrust of the photos on to the Formica desk, like he daren’t look at the nefandous face any longer lest he himself be raped right there and then. “Despicable bastard, int he?” spat the detective between sups of tea.
Of course, the photo-fit and the photograph looked nothing alike. Absolutely nothing, save the presence of the aforementioned mouths and noses, and ears and foreheads and the other requisite Homo sapien features. And though there were eyes too, neither of the people depicted in the images looked ‘evil’ (whatever that is).
Photo-fits only ever get made in certain circumstances; they are for people who can’t be photographed, who are unknown, or who can’t be found - in almost all cases it is criminals that they represent. The photo-fit stands as a sort of placeholder for a real identity until such time as the real person is found, or the identity fixed and a photograph is discovered. They also provide a receptacle for an emotional response; a part of the identity is created by the viewer’s feelings toward the subject - the same goes for any photograph. Some facets of identity are relational, not absolute, and are dependent not on the person themselves, but on those who perceive them. The BBC sees evil; I see a man who did a rape. (Which is not to say it wasn’t an extremely severe and awful crime; the man is clearly very troubled, but not evil.) His identity is not inherent: not in real life, not in a photograph, and certainly not in a photo-fit. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, as they (seldom) say. Because they’re only made for those who are absent, the photo-fit comes with a set of implications, narratives, or connotations. In most cases the person depicted is a criminal, in most cases they’re ‘on the run’. They’re a marginal identity, no name, no location; not even any photographs of them.
It is then, unlikely that ol’ jerky-knees from the BBC will perceive the photo-fit sympathetically. It’s an image of identity that virtually comes captioned: ‘Marginal Character. Probably not human. Likely evil. Smells like the man that murdered Jill Dando likely did’. He’ll see exactly what he expects to see. And he won’t construct anything from the physical evidence of the image; unless he’s high on a phrenology-like hokum then it’s doubtful whether much can be gleaned from appearance anyway. He’ll see exactly what he feels about the man. Those eyes aren’t evil; they only look evil because they’re the eyes of a criminal seen through the eyes of someone who constructs things in terms which encompass the notion of evil. If the photo-fit artist had slotted in Ghandi’s eyes, or those of a felicitous lamb, then they would still have looked evil to yer BBC correspondent because he would still be looking at them through the veils of knowledge that this is a criminal and the veil of his own opinions on criminals. Similarly, if I looked at this new photo-fit I’d be no more or less likely to think the lamb-eyed man wasn’t evil. Though I may be moved to muse on the advantages 290 degree lamb-vision may afford a criminal.
*****
After the news and before the shows about buying property, is the BBC’s new daytime ‘Missing Live’ series. It’s a live Crimewatch-like show about missing people; instead of being contractually obliged to be spooked by evil, the presenters remain solemn and painfully reverent throughout.
The other day they featured a story about Katrice Lee. She was abducted from a supermarket on a British army base in Germany when she was two years old. The police initially reckoned she may not’ve been snatched, but may’ve run out of the shop and fallen (”plunged”, the emotionally restrained BBC said) into the river behind (which at the time was a “swollen white-water torrent”) and been swept away (”carried to a freezing death”). The family didn’t think this was likely and, convinced she was kidnapped, 25 years later they still believe her to be alive and continue to campaign to keep the story publicised. Because Lee was only two when she disappeared, her appearance would have changed very quickly. And now, as she approaches 30, she’ll obviously look very different than in the last photograph of her. A couple of years ago there was a lot of publicity surrounding the unveiling of a ‘digital impression’ of how she may look now. On TV last week Lee’s father talked movingly about the relationship he has with this image; how thankful he is for it, how it is all he has of his daughter, how he talks to it and projects narratives on to it, how it is very dear to him and he’s glad of it yet at the same time it only serves as a reminder of what he hasn’t got - how he can’t hold the photo like he imagines holding his daughter, how her identity is only what he makes it, it is a one-way relationship.
Despite all the hoopla about the digital impression and how it’s indicative of the colonisation of some previously unimaginable intergalactic outpost of science, the image looked staggeringly rudimentary and simplistic to me. It looks reasonable enough when it’s plonked - as it habitually is - next to the photo of the two year old Lee, but when it’s viewed alongside her parents then it is revealed to be rather less sophisticated. Far from looking like it’s at the forefront of ‘identity imaging technology’ (whatever that is), it looks like it was cobbled together on a Commodore 64 graphics program while Pac-Man was loading. The methodology seems to have involved cutting out her father’s eyes, her mother’s nose and mouth, and then whacking them onto a photo of her sister’s face. It looks a little like an image constructed for the children’s board game ‘Guess Who’: “Does the person have the same mouth as her mother? Is everyone consanguine to the person represented by a facial feature? Ah hah! Is the person Katrice Lee?!” Nuanced and subtle it isn’t.
It seems a little unfair and insensitive to be flippant about an image in which so much profound love, loss, and grief are invested, but it is perhaps a testament to the desperate strength of those feelings that the family are able to forge such complex and enduring relationships with such a strikingly implausible image. Of course, listening to her father talk it is hard not to imagine the emotional complexities he may experience should Katrice turn up and look nothing like this image he’s been conducting an intense relationship with and foisting narratives upon for the past few years.
Although it is hopelessly simplistic and likely wildly inaccurate, the digital impression does at least look human. What is most striking about photo-fit images is that they invariably look like they were made by a GCSE art student who can’t draw people. It seems this is a deliberate ploy to avoid giving the criminal any recognisable humanity; “he has the features”, the image seems to say, “but they’re odd and peculiar, not like normal folks’. Not like ours”. Lee’s digital impression, on the other hand, has been rendered with enough kindness that journalists have been moved to comment on her ‘caring eyes’ that are wistful and hunted, and her melancholy air. They’re certainly just projecting characteristics onto the image in the light of the accompanying narrative, but it is worth noting that the that the image has been drawn with enough sophistication to accomodate such a generous and postitive reading of Lee’s personality. Still, stick the image above a story of murder -or rape - and the same jounalists would probably draw her character a little less sympathetically. Context is likely the principal visual difference between ‘caring’ and ‘evil’.
Photo-fit image identities don’t look evil, or indeed like bad people, but it notable that they do all have a particular appearance. Cold, paradoxically-indistinct, refusing to engage, lacking any trace of emotion: these are depictions of people shorn of the things which would normally construct identity. They are rendered as a mutation of the human species; the same, but different. What’s left in this identity-vacuum is a space that needs to be rushed by the viewer’s opinion. The vacant look photo-fit identities wear is perhaps a vacancy designed to be easily filled by the emotions stirred by the attendant ‘Marginal character. Probably not human . . .’ caption.
Although Lee’s digital impression was made by a Commodore 64 and not a child who can’t draw, the main difference is in the intended use. Lee’s image is intended to invoke humanity; ‘Marginal character’ photo-fits are intended to invoke inhumanity. They need to be receptacles for different emotions. This is made clear by the way in which photo-fits made for reasons other than hunting down fugitives are drawn in a much more emotionally sophisticated way. Curiously, the student seems only to be unable to draw criminals.
