Project topics and materials
Considering truth and justice
If Platform 1 contextualised problems with the democratic public sphere due to globalisation, Platform 230 centred on what could be done to address demands for social justice where public spheres had been violated. What was being explored was an expanding global ethic, and more specifically, an engagement with, what the curators (Documenta 11_Platform 2… 2002:13) described as, an emerging category in the humanities “that is dedicated to the study of memory and its ethical and aesthetic implications within representation”. Approaching the global sphere not as an inflated super-public sphere but as transnational space of accountability, Documenta 11 raised questions about the social responsibility of artists in their own localities and about artworks as instruments of representation, narration and commemoration in the public sphere. The wide scope of Platform 2 will in this section be limited to a discussion of the connection between notions of justice, truth, memory and memorial with specific reference to South African contributions in this regard.
Multiplying definitions
For each notion of justice, ranging from the juridical to personal, corresponding concepts of truth and levels of proof govern the experience of fair dealing by the multiplicity of voices who make up the public sphere. In South Africa, besides juridical, ontological, narrative and experiental truth, two new approaches to truth emerged during the ground-braking Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): performative and dialogical truth. Curator Rory Bester (2002:168) referred to the testimony of Jeffrey Benzien – a former investigator with the SA security police demonstrating the ‘wet bag’ method of interrogation and torture of prisoners – as an example of performative truth that visualises history and marks the body of the performer. The idea of dialogical truth was coined by justice of the South African Constitutional Court, Albie Sachs (2002:53), who posed this form of truth-inprocess “assumes and thrives on the notion of a community of many voices and multiple perspectives”.32 Truth thus appears on shifting ground, as multiplying in its re-enactments and with no definitive narration. The domain of truth is bound to be ambiguous because of what psychoanalyst Geneviève Morel (2002:82) posits as the gap, even opposition, between truth and the real: “Truth has to do with speech and language, in other words with the register of the symbolic; the real is excluded from this”. If, as Morel (2002:83) claims, “the imaginary reveals itself with affinity to the real that the symbolic does not have”, artworks are posed to reveal elements of truth and function as witnesses in the social sphere. Even if truth is uncovered as fragile, incomplete and tenuous, it does not diminish the function of telling of truth, which on an ethical level, according to Tunisian law professor Yadh Ben Achour (2002:127), opens up a space in which “a reestablishment of the moral order takes place” through the reversal of the roles of offender and offended, suppressed and suppressor, dominator and dominated.
The political order, served by interests very different from the moral order, value truth in the form of the memory of truth highly, because of its legitimising potential in historical narratives. In this regard Documenta 11 aligned itself with the “search for an ethical space of historical narration” (Documenta 11_Platform 2… 2002:17), with, what social philosopher Lolle Nauta (2002:337) terms, the democratising of collective memory: Approaching historical narratives in a global democratic sphere would accordingly assist the writing of competing histories and would, above all, question hegemonic constructions of the truth. For Documenta 11 this meant examining Western ethical claims: “If Western humanism and rationality always rest upon some agency of exclusion, what are the limits of their application to contemporary crimes against humanity?” (Documenta 11_Platform 2… 2002: 17). In the political, as in the artistic sphere, Documenta 11 aimed to reassess what the ethics and instrumetalisation of memory could mean. Artists dealing with memory and the witnessing of crimes against humanity in their work could be strategising to access the global marketplace. In this regard Enwezor (2004:33) poses that “bearing witness to the memory of the dim years of apartheid became de rigueur for work seeking admittance into exhibition possibilities” for South African artists in the 1990s.33 The artworks selected for discussion in the next section seem to pass muster with the curators of Documenta 11, since each work could be considered to multiply definitions and to reveal aporias in specific historical discourses – unresolved ethical issues in particular public spheres – around the globe.
Collective memory and amnesia
Filmmaker Eyal Sivan, whose childhood in Israel sensitised his approach to memory and politics, explores the instrumentalisation of particularly victims’ testimony and the manipulation of archives. In his presentation for Platform 2 about Adolf Eichmann’s trial, Sivan (2002:287) delineated how filming during hearings of crimes against humanity is skewed towards “representation of the victims and the creation of a linear collective memory”, while the testimony of perpetrators are dehumanised and obscured in the realm of myth. Collective remembrance can consequently function as a one-dimensional narrative of ‘victims’ and ‘monsters’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’. The initial camera frame is further manipulated when a selective compilation of images
become code-like “illustrations for commemorative discourses” (Sivan 2002:287) without the power to stimulate reflection on both the horrors of the past and present. Itsembatsemba – Rwanda: one genocide later (1996) (Figure 11), his work for Documenta 11 in collaboration with photographer Alexis Cordesse, could be regarded as an attempt to counter one-dimensional framing of the genocide in Rwanda and reenergise contemplation about its meaning in the present. This work does not present the banalised international media-images of, what Diawara (2002:33) terms the “pornography of violence”, used to portray the systematic massacre of more than 700 000 Tsutsi in 100 days. Instead, Sivan and Cordesse contrast images taken in April 1996, two years after the start of the massacre, with an incendiary soundtrack of radio broadcasts by Radio Télevision Mille Collines (RTLM) from April to June 1994 during the height of the atrocities. The documentary focus is not only switched from victim to perpetrator, but the time shifts also create a viewing space between the sense of impending doom and the aftermath of slaughter that connects the work to the present. The work thus achieves what Sivan aims for with his own manipulation of the archive: to “give these materials a ‘status of truth’ that will allow us to renew the tradition of what can be called political art” (Sivan 2002:288).
Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (Figure 12) shares Sivan’s commitment to art production in an ethical space, but she approaches collective memory in a dysfunctional public sphere where dialogical truth, or any other kind of truth for that matter, is denied. Her work displayed at Documenta 11 bears mute testimony to the siege fiasco in 1985 in the Bogota Palace of Justice. On 6 November guerrillas from movement M-19 stormed the Supreme Court, demanding that then president Belisario Betancur stands trial. During the 27- hour siege the police and army destroyed the building and more than 100 people were killed, including 11 judges. Because criminal files were destroyed in a fire during the siege, the events were officially blamed on the influence of druglords trying to escape impending trials. Many questions remain unanswered about the chain of events and the trail of missing and charred bodies.34 For her works Noviembre 6 (November 6) (2001) and THOU-LESS, 2001-2002, Salcedo sculpted chairs of steel, wood, resin and lead with parts missing or melted together. Scattered like loose ends over the gallery floor, these mutilated chairs act as metonimical substitutes for absent, amputated and disappeared bodies. In a second enclosed space, constructed with a portal and inner sanctum, the elongated limbs of chairs form diagonally crossed spars that obstruct access. This work, Tenebrae Noviembre 7, 1985 (Darkness, November 7, 1985) (1999-2000), is a metaphor for the barricaded official sphere that remains out of bounds. Seen together, these works of Salcedo speak unmistakeably to the disavowal of justice.
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND AND AIMS
1.2 MOTIVATION FOR THE STUDY
1.3 LITERATURE REVIEW
1.4 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY
1.5 OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS
CHAPTER 2: CONSTRUCTING A SPECTACULARLY DIFFERENT DOCUMENTA
2.1 OPENING OUT THE AESTHETIC SPHERE
2.2 INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE: MORE OF THE SAME?
2.3 CREATING ETHICAL AGENCY
2.4 REDEFINING THE DOCUMENTARY
2.5 CONCLUSION
CHAPTER 3: ON EXPANDING PUBLIC SPHERES
3.1 POSTCOLONIAL PUBLIC SPHERES
3.2 GLOBALISING THE DISCOURSE
3.3 AIDING THE ENEMY
3.4 CONCLUSION
CHAPTER 4: CURATING GLOBALITY/ PRODUCING LOCALITY
4.1 GLOBAL ASPIRATIONS
4.2 PROVINCIALISING THE GLOBAL
4.3 PRODUCTION OF LOCALITY
4.4. TRANSLOCAL CURATING
4.5. CONCLUSION
CHAPTER 5: MIN(D)ING THE GAP
5.1 IN-BETWEEN: HOMELESSNESS AS DESTINATION
5.2 RECONSIDERING THE ARCHIVE
5.3 CULTURAL TRANSLATION
5.4 CURATING AS LITTORAL PRACTICE
5.5 CONCLUSION
CHAPTER 6: TOWARDS A THRESHOLD AESTHETIC OF THE TRICKSTER
6.1 TRICKSTER AS PROTOTYPE OF THE ARTIST
6.2 TRICKSTER IN THE GLOBAL SPHERE
6.3 APPROACHING AN ADVERSARIAL AGENDA
6.4 INDIGESTIBLE THIRDNESS
6.5 CONCLUSION
CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION
7.1 SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS
7.2 CONTRIBUTION OF STUDY
7.3 LIMITATIONS OF STUDY
7.4 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
SOURCES CONSULTED
