Madame B (the film, various installations)

Doris Salcedo: Palimpsesto

Introduction: The Point of Affect

This chapter scrutinises a concept that suspends the centrality of representation, and foregrounds, instead, art's solicitation of viewers’ engagement through affect. It focuses analysis on the resulting interactivity between artworks and their viewers. Instead of taking what is there to be seen, affect analysis establishes a relationship between that sight and what it does to the people looking at it and, precisely, being affected by it. While detailed affect-oriented analysis of artworks may seem more difficult to achieve than, say, a form-based analysis of the artwork only, such analysis is called for to account for the cultural processes in which art functions.

Whether or not the term ‘affect’ is explicitly used, the affect-oriented perspective is not new. Here are three long-term recognisable examples. Discussions of pornography have always been focused on what pornographic images might do to its audience. Does porn entice people to act upon the desires aroused by the images? Such a question already presupposes that the image has the function to arouse; it is performative. The sexual arousal is not ‘in’ the image but happens in the wake of someone seeing it. Second, censorship responds to the image or text ‘accused’ of corrupting its receivers. If, soon after the publication and smashing success of his 1856 novel Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert was taken to court, the prosecution was motivated by the sense that the novel was doing something to the culture of the day – it was addressing the present. They seemed to panic about the welfare of that culture. The sentence that reversed the generally accepted morality, and became a key target of the prosecution, was considered dangerous because it was taken to entice people, especially women, to indulge in adultery.

This sentence in FID, ‘Oh yes, if only … before the filth of marriage and the disillusions of adultery’ (II, 15; emphasis added) uttered by the narrator and clearly – but perhaps, dangerously, not exclusively – focalised by Emma, hurt the prosecution's sense of propriety. That discomfort is the affective consequence of a performative sentence. The ‘danger’ is literature's performative power.

Material Image-Thinking

The scene titled ‘Narrative Stuttering’ from my 2019 video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances shows Don Quijote alone on a dark theatrical stage. For most of the eight-minute episode, Sancho Panza is sitting on a chair on the side, holding the script, helping him when needed, as a prompter. The knight is trying desperately to tell his story – the adventures, his opinions, whatever happened to him and those around him – but he is unable to act effectively as a narrator. At the end, he bursts into tears and, as you see in Figure 1.1, Sancho holds him in order to comfort him, demonstrating, by physical touch, that he is not entirely alone. This physicality is a primary point this ending of the episode is to make. But there is much more happening here; and all of that participates in the artwork, its effectivity as affective, and its status as an imaginative presentation of a very sad story.

First, these two figures can do what they do because they have a space in which to do it. That space is a stage; hence, a fictional and visual one. The darkness of the stage deprives the space of perspectival depth, at times making Don Quijote almost seem floating. The stage isolates him and, at the same time, gives him an audience. In line with this brief description, I consider the theatrical setting as a material ‘theoretical fiction’. It is material, built as a theatre. And, once the figures are acting in it, it is a fiction – one that helps our thinking about, in this case, the social issue of empathy. Freud came up with the term ‘theoretical fiction’ to justify his fanciful story, in his 1913 book Totem and Taboo, of the sons who kill and eat their tyrannical father. A fiction indeed. But elaborating the story led him to, then helped him with, the discovery and elaboration of the Oedipus complex, a theoretical advance in his thinking. In that case, the fiction consisted of a narrative. The concept of ‘theoretical fiction’ is a broader version of this. From 2008 on, Michelle Williams Gamaker and I have deployed that notion in a variety of films and video installations.

2MOVE (the exhibition)

Heringa/van Kalsbeek, Untitled

Marclay, The Clock

It's About Time! Reflections on Urgency

Introducing Time's Thought-Image: An Octopus

Having resisted attempts to define concepts discussed so far, it is not with time, or temporality, that I am going to start saying what it is. We all know, or think we know, live in, are subjected to, the self-evident dimension of life we call time. But in spite of George Kubler's brave 1962 attempt to argue for the contrary, time has no form, no shape; it is not a thing. It can leave shapes, in the sense of historically specific styles, which is more in line with Kubler's essay, but time itself is formless. It can be used in rhythm, which can sometimes create the impression or feeling of form, something we take from music and rhythmic poetry. But it is not time that has that form; it is the music, verse, or even the rhythmic breathing that has a form.

Formlessness does not entail invisibility, however. The choice is not to either see fully shaped forms or to see nothing, but, as Silverman puts it, to learn to practise a ‘visual habitus’ that enables us to see what, by lack of recognisable form, seems invisible (see the introduction to her 1996 book). Although she proposes this not in the context of time but of an ‘ethics of vision’, the idea of a visual habitus can be brought to bear on time. In general, as the time passing in the everyday, ‘all the time’, time is so self-evident that one would not wonder about its potential form. It only accedes to awareness when its apparent flow is interrupted. This can be due to nature or man-made disasters, traumatogenic events, which change the course of time, in one way or another, or to an exceptionally intense experience.

Formless as it is, time is culturally ubiquitous. And it exerts great power over society and individual lives. Therefore, I give it a (metaphorical) form, to make it concrete in a thought-image. Traditionally, time is represented as an arrow, going in one direction. This metaphor is burdened with simplifying consequences: briefly, a one-liner, unidirectional. Narrative could easily be considered such an arrowsubjected cultural form. And so could film.

Access Denied, A Long History of Madness, Reasonable Doubt

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where is Where?

Introduction: Meandering Through Memory Thought

At the heart of this book is memory. This is why I refrain from writing a conclusion. In the end, art is a form of remembering. Since I am insatiably curious, over the forty-some years of my career, my work has been one long journey, going from discipline to discipline to establish connections (‘inter-ships’) between them, turning corners without cutting them, and looking for ever-new ways of testing my ideas in ever-new relationships with others: artists, friends, students, colleagues, actors, cinematographers, photographers. As a result, I have encountered and temporarily journeyed with too many companions to count. The relationship between thinking about memory and remembering companions has been particularly intense, manifold and inspirational. When, twenty or so years ago, I first began to work on memory, it was at the request of other people. Although I had written on memorialists such as Proust, memory had not been a concept that preoccupied me particularly. But when two professors at Dartmouth College, Leo Spitzer and Jonathan Crewe, invited me to work with them to conduct a six-week seminar on ‘cultural memory and the present’, their title immediately made me think about each of its terms. These two colleagues, and the other participants – among whom were noted memory scholars such as Marianne Hirsch, Ernst van Alphen, Marita Sturken and Susan Brison, to name but a few whose work has inspired me especially – became, thus, my first companions. The resulting publication, Acts of Memory, appeared in 1999. Another result of this initial and initiating experience was that I proposed the title ‘Cultural Memory in the Present’ (note the change from conjunction to preposition; from juxtaposition to embedding) for a book series I was invited to co-edit with Hent de Vries for Stanford University Press. This was undertaken within the framework of the institute for cultural analysis (ASCA) Hent and I had then-recently co-founded, and of which I was the academic director and Hent the chair.

Along the way, interacting with students whose critical enthusiasm also greatly helped my thinking, I had embarked on the project that resulted in the book Travelling Concepts in the Humanities.

Nothing is Missing (the installation)

Bertien van Manen

Introduction: Facing Migration

All over the world, and in your own living room: are we able to consider, experience and value these two locations and the ensuing positions at the same time? As I began working on this chapter, Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen (1942–) had an exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Her answer was a loud and clear yes! Van Manen is known for her radical documentary photography in which she combines intimacy with the people in the image with an awareness of their specific situation – visual diaries that travel the world. And although mostly she is herself not in the image, her presence in the depicted situation, her relationship of the people whose languages she even learnt, and her respect for them are strongly visible. Proximity and respect for their differences. She shows the possibility of intimacy in a globalised situation. The question of that possibility brings us back to the question of universality (Chapter 3).

Here I will zoom in on an issue that challenges attempts to impose as well as to discard universalisms, for it is easier criticised than avoided. One of the most tenacious instances of universalism – the belief in the universality of something, a phenomenon and its value for human life – is motherhood. This is also, doubtless, the most intimate, hence, local of relationships. The current state of the allegedly globalised world makes this universalism both urgently necessary and deeply problematic. This chapter is inspired by this ambivalence. I focus on the concept of facing in order to develop a vision of art that foregrounds both the global and the local, the universal and the intimate.

First of all, we must shed the problematic binary between universalism and relativism that has so long dominated our thinking about intercultural issues. Thinking of motherhood as a universal usefully counters a problematic relativising. For example, relativising the horror of losing a child by alleging that, in some severely underprivileged countries, losing a child to illness, hunger or violence occurs so frequently that it is ‘normal’, would be a dreadful condescendence and a scandalous acceptance of the unacceptable.

Don Quijote: Sad Countenances

A Long History of Madness

Looking at Photographs

Trauma, the common insight stipulates, cannot be represented. Nafiseh Mousavi intensely enacts the role of the captive young woman as traumatised in all the senses relevant in this chapter. Looking at this photograph (Figure 6.1), which was made on the set of the scene ‘She Too’ of Don Quijote: Sad Countenances, we can see both the intense longing and the frustration of the young woman whose face is shown here. This photograph by the young Swedish artist Ebba Sund entirely adequately presents both the difficulty and the necessity of showing trauma.

Sund's photography successfully avoids the traps of representation: the appeal to voyeurism, with immodesty; the censorship that is its counterpart; the sentimentality that would function as a ‘tear-jerker’ and even as an incentive to ‘trauma envy’, the wish to appropriate the suffering of others; the sense of repetition (trauma fatigue), ‘here we go again’; and the narrative thrust that would overrule the image with its content: what happened to her? The details are both expressive and subtle. The half-open mouth of the young woman does not suggest screaming. The grain of the skin that almost merges with the thin hairs in front of her ear compels a close looking at the image. Her face turned slightly upwards, but not dramatically, expresses a relationship to the outside that is not narratively explicit.

I will be looking closely at Sund's work, especially in this chapter. My goals in such looking are multiple. First, I want to make the case for the difficulty, even impossibility, of showing trauma, yet the need to do so; the need, that is, to foreground and pay attention to, bestow empathy on, something that cannot be represented. Sund's photographs do this very adequately. This also entails, secondly, an appeal to, or task for the viewers. For, if they remain unaffected by the image, it cannot do its work. I am hoping that this chapter will yield an ‘apprenticeship’ in the kind of looking that trauma, and other vital cultural concerns, require.

A Long History of Madness

Nalini Malani, Remembering Mad Meg

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Mad Meg

Introduction: Beginning Becomes Entrance

This chapter concerns the condition of the viewer or visitor of exhibitions who is, literally, ‘placed’. Time yields its priority to space. The timebased art of cinema is also inevitably space-bound. In the project discussed here, the spatialisation of film is at stake in two different ways. On the one hand, the installation form makes film a spatial art. This will be demonstrated in a reflection on installation, compared to theatre film. On the other hand, once we are alerted to that spatial aspect and the transformation it makes for the viewer, we become sensitised to the spatial aspects of and in the films themselves. The places where the films are set become activated through that reflection. They end up being almost characters in their own right. Moreover, such a space becomes a miniature version of the social world.

The central image-thought work is a film I have made with British artist Michelle Williams Gamaker, A Long History of Madness (abbreviated as ALHoM, from 2011). This was the first fiction film we made, started in 2009. We decided to make ALHoM for a variety of motivations; primarily to get closer to ourselves. Having made many documentaries on issues of migration and identity, we felt the issues that came up in those did not leave us aloof. ALHoM concerns something that is, in fact, very ‘popular’: madness. It stages, performs, enacts and critiques (ideas about) madness and its cultural history. Given that subject, making a documentary was impossible, ethically as well as epistemologically, since the ‘mad’ cannot give informed consent. This was the reason we shifted to fiction. But there was also an occasion, something that made this shift plausible. This was the experience of making, in 2008, the documentary Becoming Vera. This film, the last documentary I made with Michelle, triggered our thinking about the thought-value of fiction. Although I made three more documentaries after this one, Vera stuck in my mind, admonishing me to believe more in the creative and socially productive yield of fiction.

Mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days)

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the Rain

Introduction: Subject, Source, Speaker

The question ‘who speaks?’ is central in narrative theory, in spite of recent attempts to dismiss it. These cannot quite succeed, because of the implied question of narrative responsibility. Where does a presentation, opinion or vision come from, who are their target audiences, and what is the ‘force’, in Lyotard's concept of language as the figural, that makes sense? This question is always pertinent, in all cultural texts. Speaking is generally assumed to be a linguistic act, but in film, where an explicit narrative voice is more the exception than the rule, the narrative emerges from different sources; from the figures who appear in the filmic world to begin with. I argue in this chapter that this makes the question more rather than less relevant. The medium helps us probe the complexities of narration precisely because it cannot be personified in a ‘voice’. The question is of crucial importance, especially in documentaries where ‘who speaks?’ becomes ‘whose truth?’ I have experimented with a solution to the conundrum that seems to produce an opposition between the issue of responsibility and the logical and linguistic convictions of some theories. My ethical, political and aesthetic commitments to the genre compel me to make the documentary films, hence, do the telling with, rather than about, people. Therefore, we cannot ignore the question of the subject or source.

This question is even more acutely relevant when the people, whom I consider interlocutors or participants rather than ‘subjects’, come from a culture different from that of the filmmakers, and all concerned are thereby steeped in what has become an essentialising idea, ‘cultural difference’. This cultural difference requires reflecting on, and dealing with, the ethical as well as the epistemological aspect of a genre that easily becomes intrusive, manipulative, exoticising and voyeuristic, resulting in a disempowering effect. The film I will analyse in these respects is the first full-length film I (co-)made; the first film that made me acutely aware of the rich yield of insight to be gained from making images as a form of analysis.

This book emerged from a practice of intellectual restlessness; of always, as I phrase it, ‘looking around the corner’. The title of this book series, ‘Refractions’, is, therefore, very apt for my temperament as well as my writing style. With persistent curiosity and a reluctance to obey boundaries, my work is interdisciplinary. For the past twenty years, it has also been intermedial. Making video art is not changing fields. I will explain what it is instead: a practice I have termed image-thinking. True: something changed when I was compelled – for personal/social reasons – to buy a camera and start making videos. But that change was not an abandonment of my previous interests. On the contrary; these became enriched and deepened by the addition of – refractions through – audiovisual sources for my thinking to the printed materials in libraries; the indispensable collaboration with others; the liveness and contemporaneity of what I studied. The fact that I never stopped writing, lecturing and publishing proves my case. The present book is motivated by the aspiration to put my experience of the process of making and thinking as inextricably intertwined at the disposal of others. Not for imitation, but for inspiration.

Many people have had a great impact on this book, and I cannot possibly mention them all. Rather than risking forgetting some of them, I refrain from writing the traditional list, which would bore my readers anyway. Moreover, it is simply impossible, for I would have to include my students, of all academic levels, who have always inspired, challenged and triggered my thinking; all the artists whose work has been an ongoing stimulation and motivation; and the colleagues whose kind support and invitations all over the world have kept me going – including literally. As I have frequently argued, writing, only seemingly an isolated activity, is as social as thinking is. And so is artmaking, hence, the making about which this book reflects. Just think of the many participants, mostly volunteers, in all the projects discussed. And the few professional actors and cinematographers who were so crucial for the fiction films deserve huge gratitude not only for their terrific, brilliant work but also for their unpretentious, collaborative attitudes that helped the volunteering participants to learn and surpass themselves. Without the innumerable people who have been there for me when I needed them, this book would not exist.

Becoming Vera

Reasonable Doubt

Various works of contemporary art

Introduction: Think Again!

When three-year-old Vera sits on the knees of her father Germain and tells him a story of witches she had seen, Daddy answers: ‘Oh, like Snow White’. This happens in the kingdom of Bamun, a traditional nation within the modern republic of Cameroon. What is Snow White doing there? Vera is silent for a few seconds, looks sideways, and then she sets her father straight (Figure 5.1). This is the literal dialogue, entirely improvised by the two figures:

This is the moment, in making the documentary film Becoming Vera, that Michelle and I realised the power of fiction. It happened during the editing, and it was a decisive realisation. The child had set not only her father but also Michelle and me straight. Germain had too quickly counted on the children's canon of Western fairy tales; we had counted on documentary as the film genre to image-think in, reckoning its truthfulness was what mattered most. So, let's think again. To end this first part on general concepts of major importance for image-thinking, and for intermediality, the interaction between words and images leading up to the figural, I return to thinking in images but now explicitly beyond the truth–fiction binary. For, the primary topic of this chapter is a circling back to the beginning, this time with fiction taken in the literal sense of making. The Latin verb fingere means shaping and contriving. The imagination as the primary tool of that making cannot be over-estimated.

For some time, I have doubted the common conception of thinking. Forget the study, the books and the armchair.