PUBLIC 49: Trauma by PUBLIC Journal: Art Culture Ideas

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Contents 4

Paula M. Gardner and Charles Reeve

INTRODUCTION: BLACK HOLES IN THE SCIENCES: Trauma, Culture, Aesthetics

Francis Frascina

FRAMES OF ATROCITY: Resistance and Left Melancholy

PROJECT

Deanna Bowen KU KLUX KLAN OF CANADA IMPERIAL DECREE, OPENING CEREMONY

Lynn Crosbie

ANGEL, POEM 1:14

Paula M. Gardner

THE LIVED AESTHETICS OF TRAUMA

PROJECT

Blake Fitzpatrick and Vid Ingelevics GIFT HORSE

Florence Duchemin-Pelletier

CATHARSIS IN INUIT ART: A Way to Heal Wounds

Lloyd C. McCracken

“FOR YOU THE WAR IS OVER”: An Airman Remembers

110

Charles Reeve

THE SINCEREST FORM OF IRONY: Fun and Games in a Post-September 11 World

COLUMN 126

Ian Balfour

Drama Trauma

REVIEWS 128

Ellyn Walker

“Critical Dialogues: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Curating and Artistic Practice,” Toronto, 2013

131

Miha Colner

Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images, Edited by Julian Stallabrass

133

Stephen Broomer

Explosion in the Movie Machine, Edited by Chris Gehman

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CONTRIBUTORS

INTRODUCTION

BLACK HOLES IN THE SCIENCES Trauma, Culture, Aesthetics PA U L A M . G A R D N E R A N D C H A R L E S R E E V E

WHEN ART RESPONDS TO TRAUMA, it seems self-evident that three mechanisms are involved: the event, the trauma it provokes, and the cultural response to that trauma. We propose, however, that rather than the trauma producing the cultural response, perhaps it’s the other way around— perhaps trauma is itself a cultural production, borne of a need for societies to see themselves as traumatized. Two key texts inform this hypothesis. One is Hal Foster’s “The Return of the Real,” which argues in part that, in the repetition compulsion (as evidenced, for example, in the work of Andy Warhol), the repetition might produce the trauma rather than the reverse.1 The other is Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s masterful historical study The Culture of Defeat, which shows that societies defeated in war, far from repressing that national trauma, instead embrace it as evidence of their moral superiority over their victors.2 The United States’ ideological response to the September 11 attacks is a case in point. The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US showed that we mediate trauma collectively, just as we do individually. In the event’s immediate aftermath, Mark Schuster and his colleagues found that half of all Americans—most of whom had viewed the events live or minutes later on television— experienced symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.3 Following on this work, a study led by John Updegraff showed that a collective experience of trauma swept the US, illustrated by fears of future attacks and insecurity.4 The authors found that individuals healed when they could resolve the dismantling of what Ronnie Janoff-Bulman calls our “assumptive worlds”—beliefs that we are safe, that humans are benevolent, and so on—by making meaning of the (incomprehensible) events.5 In the end, according to the Undegraff study, healing consists of returning to our previously held beliefs in the world as benevolent, predictable, and meaningful. The first longitudinal assessment of collective cultural trauma, the Updegraff study, in its social science design, homogenizes populations according to their response to trauma; indeed, minorities and youth tended to drop out of the study, making the sample less diverse than the authors had intended. The study uses the mental disorder tag PTSD as a reasonable tool for assuaging symptoms and our overcoming of them, oddly, by embracing a personal vision that the world is— somehow —safe again.

trauma

GARDNER + REEVE

FIG. 1 Regina Jos茅 Galindo, video still from Confesi贸n (Confession), 2007, video, 2 minutes 20 seconds. Commissioned and produced by La Caja Blanca, Palma de Mallorca. Image courtesy the artist and prometeogallery di Ida Pisani, Milan and Lucca.

trauma

FRASCINA

FRANCIS FRASCINA

FRAMES OF ATROCITY Resistance and Left Melancholy

ARTISTS AND CRITICS WHO DESIRE to respond to contemporary violence, trauma, and atrocity free of any melancholic attachment to past politics and ideals—a failed or lost campaign or struggle—are placed in a dilemma. Mourning a loss—to live unburdened by a melancholic attachment to the object of one’s loss in the present—may also “lure people into forgetting precisely what it is vital for them to remember.”1 These last words are from Arthur Miller whose play, The Crucible (1952), was an innovative leftist response to Cold War America, McCarthyism, and contemporary parallels to the “Spectral Evidence” that characterized the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692.2 In his conclusion to “The Crucible in History” (1999), he notes that: Salem village, that pious, devout settlement at the very edge of white civilization, had displayed—three centuries before the Russo-American rivalry and the issues it raised—what can only be called a kind of built-in pestilence nestled in the human mind, a fatality forever awaiting the right conditions for its always unique, forever unprecedented outbreak of distrust, alarm, suspicion and murder.3 The Crucible has had a renewed relevance since 1999: a vivid representation of a “kind of builtin pestilence nestled in the human mind” that connects the Salem Court in 1692, the US House Committees in the 1950s, and the first decade of the new millennium. In Act 3 of Miller’s play, Deputy Governor Judge Thomas Danforth insists all must understand “that a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there is no road between.”4 In his speech to a Joint Session of Congress on 20 September 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” that polarized the world in a new demonstration of American military authority: “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”5 Such Manichean insistence presented artists with an early twenty-first century crucible. How to respond to the severe tests of the present unburdened by a melancholic attachment to past politics and ideals?

Feminism, Bodies and Terror For Confesión (September 2007) (FIG. 1), Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo hired a local bouncer in Palma de Mallorca to force her head underwater for seven seconds, seven times.6 9

FIG. 2 Michael Najjar, Embedded, 2003, (one image of six from Information and Apocalypse), hybrid photography, lightjet-print, aludibond, diasec. Image courtesy the artist and Carroll/Fletcher.

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FRASCINA

or history painting, and high definition photography employed by artists crossing between conventions of advertising and pornography. The first of the six large photographs is titled “Embedded” (FIG. 2), a well-known adjective to describe war reporters attached to frontline military units in Iraq under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s Embedded Media Programme, approved in February 2003. Before joining their battalions, embedded journalists signed a contract defining when and what they could report. Clearly there are problematic issues of impartiality in such a programme. Najjar’s image is made specific by the US Army uniform on the right hand side, and a Fox News Press Pass on the bottom left. Thus, the fictive space is given the particular context of postSeptember 11, in the midst of the invasion of Iraq and its compromised relationship between military activity and media reports. Najjar configures the soldier and the reporter in such a way that the title “embedded” is a sexual pun and, overall, the image suggests an agenda that is open to incisive gender critique. It might be argued, too, that the seeming reference to Christian narratives of “the temptation of Christ” is locked into particular gender assumptions. In “Soldier Viewing Himself on the Battlefield,” there are further Christian analogies, most obviously to the New Testament story of the anointing of Christ’s feet (John, 12) by Mary of Bethany in thanks for the raising of her brother Lazarus from the dead. Could the image be read as a parallel to the neo-liberal belief in military action as justified in raising Iraq from the dead? It might be argued that such readings are consistent with Bush’s description of the “War on Terror” as a “crusade” and its connection to Samuel Huntington’s hotly disputed The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).35 These parallels are not far fetched. For example, in Seeing Witness, Blocker considers some problems in US Culture where Christian fundamentalism dominates and theological discourse is generally immanent in representation. Another example, reported after Blocker’s book was published, is closer to the US government. In June 2009 GQ magazine ran an illustrated feature on Rumsfeld’s 2003 Pentagon briefings for the White House. Each had covers of colour photos of the Iraq war effort accompanied by biblical Crusade-like quotations.36 These representations are visual manifestations of the Bush administration’s ideology of invisible witnesses, agents legitimating testimonies that created the White House’s own neo-liberal reality. For “Soldier Viewing Himself on the Battlefield” did Najjar find materials in numerous examples of US heroic military self-image and narcissism? Is the camouflaged TV a negative symbol of embedded journalists and the media as covert agent of state actions? Given Deutsche’s views on left melancholy, and preference for the work of Silvia Kolbowski, Leslie Thornton, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, she would probably regard Najjar’s Information and Apocalypse as too fixed in its form of address: didactic, stuck in an agenda of past struggles and identities. However, such views and preferences would need to guard against overlooking ambivalence in Najjar’s representations, insensitivity to the impact of absolutist interpretations, and inflexibility about the difficulties of working through issues in art practice. Was Deutsche suffering from her own left melancholy, disavowing in abstract terms art practices that did not conform to her preferred responses to the horrors of the present? I want now to examine particular contemporary artworks and contexts where engagements with issues of trauma, conflict, and memory are unburdened by a melancholic attachment to past politics and ideals. These examples were exhibited in the same year that Deutsche’s book was published, but demonstrate concerns “about the problem of war” and “subjectivities” that are different from her definitions.

DEANNA BOWEN

KU KLUX KLAN OF CANADA IMPERIAL DECREE, OPENING CEREMONY from Ku Klux Klan of Kanada Kloran: K-UNO, KARACTER, Honor, Duty. Toronto, Canada, 1925

LY N N C R O S B I E

ANGEL, POEM 1:14

Congratulations on your pool boy You are a 45 in a clean, white sleeve, signed “The Whole Soul Train.” The song that scratches: you would call this “the way that the aesthetic is slammed by memory.” You are the little record clamped in place with a red adaptor, Baring your chest to the needle coming down, pulling away To land at the part where you say “Turn around,” in my hallway and I make a half a donut And where you bite my neck, where my neck likes that and turn me all the way around. And, holding my face in your hand, in a move I recognize as Charlie Sheen’s, you kiss me Into elegance: the loose threads and dog hair vanish from my opaque black dress, >The dress is abstruse and a C-, tops< The bells on my pink Indian slippers tinkle and the sound

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CROSBIE

PA U L A M . G A R D N E R

THE LIVED AESTHETICS OF TRAUMA

25 JANUARY 2011 I am explaining events occurring in Tahrir Square, Cairo, to my fourteen-year old son. Egyptian pro-democracy demonstrators, I tell him, have been sprayed with tear gas. The canisters are marked “Made in the USA.” Having been sprayed, the crowd wipes their eyes, return their gaze to the canons, and walk onward into them. SNAP. A hazy picture, fourteen years earlier, my infant son presented to me, chest and breathing

tubes puncturing his chest, and encased in incubator— my only look at him before they whisk him away to the trauma level hospital. We are not alone. The windows to the OR, I vaguely note, are filled with the gazing eyes of the entire birthing ward team. “Four times, four times,” I tell my son, “the protestors wipe and turn back into the tear gas.” “It is,” I explain, “democratic action, drive, determination...” My voice cracks, and tears well up. My son eyes me, knowingly, with wisdom surpassing his fourteen years. His memory doesn’t contain this image but he can see how memory sits heavily on my heart. And how it somehow frames the Tahrir Square image. And causes the picture to erratically escape my hidden shrine to trauma. The Free Dictionary: Trauma. 1. A serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident. BOOK JACKET. From late Susan Sontag’s book, Regarding the Pain of Others…: “Modern life supplies countless opportunities for regarding, at a distance (through the medium of photography), horrors taking place throughout the world.”1 Sontag asks, are viewers inured or incited to violence by the depiction of cruelty? 6 JANUARY 2011, CBC RADIO. Stories of young girls raped in Haitian camps, others displaced by the typhoon, and cholera in the hills. My friend Joyce and I had worked together twenty-five years ago for a feminist human rights group at the United Nations. We routinely hosted visitors who trekked to Geneva in the hopes of testifying to the Human Rights Commission to compel us to believe their otherwise inconceivable stories. Rigoberta Menchu witnessed her village and family being massacred in Guatemala. Ulysses represented fellow indigenous Peruvian peoples whose land had been

raised by multinational companies. Too poor to travel to Geneva, the crises of East Timor refugees brutalized by occupiers were recounted by human rights workers like Anna, a survivor of Pinochet’s torture program. A man approached me, one day, at the UN coffee shop, bearing graphic photos of children burned by US-made chemical weapons that he had smuggled out of Iraq. He asked for our slot to speak to the Commission. Menchu inquired politely whether there was space for her story. The Commission was an endless stream of narrative injustice. Survivors only occasionally got the microphone, and settled for reciting their stories in corridors to anyone who would listen. They sought justice, not solace. Today Joyce works in a Haitian UNESCO camp far from her fourteen-year old son who remains back home in Ghana. Young Haitian girls routinely flee rural homes for these urban camps, seeking the protection of their walls. Joyce cheerfully reconciles hardship with service. I e-mail to inquire of her safety and write again to a mutual colleague, despaired by my comfort, my service to those living in safety. The Free Dictionary: Trauma. 3. An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption. 15 JANUARY 2011 Preparing a paper for a colloquium on trauma as cultural phenomena, I revisit my old PhD exam files on theories of trauma. Bessel VanderKolk (1996)2: irreconcilable experiences for which we are unprepared. Life destroying. Black holes of memory. A moral crisis—victims suffer rage and pain that the world wants to forget. Cathy Caruth (1995),3 Deworlding. Unrepresentable. Then, differently: traumatic memory is unruly, much like “normal” memory. The mind cannot store space in coherent time. VanderKolk: Trauma is stored in somatic memory. 30 JANUARY 2011 The tenth anniversary of the painful two-day death of my father from cancer. SNAP. Images of his distress, followed by relief brought from ample morphine. We gave it to him, gratefully, imploringly. Days, hours…time turns to the moment of passing. Calm. “It’s time to go,” he tells his three daughters. “Go, Dad, for God’s sake, go.” Every inch of our beings wants it to end despite knowing this passage will become a fragment in the endless trudge of memory.

The Free Dictionary: Trauma . 2. An emotional wound or shock that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person…. 25 JANUARY 2011 A 60-year old woman with dementia wanders off in the snowstorm; she is found dead due to cold exposure. 10 JANUARY 2011 An eight-year old girl killed by gunfire during assassination attempt against Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, in Arizona. 1 FEBRUARY 2011 Police discover a mass grave of sled dogs disposed of after their service to tourists visiting the Vancouver Olympics.

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GARDNER

B L A K E F I T Z PAT R I C K A N D V I D I N G E L E V I C S

GIFT HORSE

THE HISTORY OF THE BERLIN WALL and its fall on 9 November 1989 is well documented. However, the history of the afterlife of the Wall as a continuously transforming object with shifting symbolic value and power is largely unknown. Because of its symbolic weight, the breached 1989 Wall did not disappear but was largely dismantled and pieces—large and small—were scattered, gifted, and sold around the world. The project Freedom Rocks by Blake Fitzpatrick and Vid Ingelevics traces the Berlin Wall as a now stateless and mobile ruin to locations in North America post-1989 as well as to storage and commemorative sites in Berlin itself. No longer activated by Cold War associations of fear and dread, the project depicts the everyday life of the Berlin Wall in a contemporary post-Cold War context and challenges an assumption that the history of the Wall ended with the Cold War. The most visible forms of the Berlin Wall are the enormous “trophy” slabs—full top-to-bottom sections of the Wall still bearing their original graffiti. A quick search on the Internet will locate many of these prized slabs in North America and point to a correlation between the Berlin Wall and the Presidential Libraries and Museums of former Republican presidents—the symbolic and highly rhetorical territory of the Cold War “victors.” For example, one may find Berlin Wall trophy slabs at the Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and the George Bush Presidential Library and Museums. George H.W. Bush’s four-year term of office as President of the United States (20 January 1989 - 20 January 1993) brackets the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. The Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas, celebrates this coincidence with a Berlin Wall exhibit, the centerpiece being a full section of the authentic wall donated by the Axel-Springer Publishing House and the Krone Corporation of Germany in 1993. In addition, Veryl Goodnight’s The Day the Wall Came Down, a thirty-foot long public sculpture weighing several tons, is a focal point on the exterior grounds of the museum. Unveiled in 1997, the sculpture depicts one stallion and four mares, each 1.25 times life size, trampling over the rubble of the Berlin Wall. The sculpture is complete with simulated graffiti messages that pay homage to notions of peace and freedom. Ideologically located in the conservative precinct of the Bush Presidential Library and Museum, the allegory of the horses escaping to freedom may be said to strike a sadly ironic note in Texas, a state that is actively building new walls along its border with Mexico. In a gesture that reciprocates the gifting of the Wall slab to the Bush Presidential Library and Museum, a sister cast of the sculpture was produced and unveiled in Berlin in 1998 as a gift from the United States to Germany. The photographs that accompany this text depict these nearly identical sculptures in two locations, radically distinct in their lived histories of the Cold War. The horses, so clearly drawn from the mythologies of the “wild west,” seem to want to jump over those differences in a gesture that posits a profoundly ideological concept of “freedom” as their common denominator. Caught in mid stride as if from a Frederic Remington study, these iconic horses are as frozen as the static, if not petrified narrative of freedom that they are meant to represent—a narrative that collapses geographical and historical context into the sameness of the victor’s vantage point. While commenting upon Cold War history, the sculpture’s function is not to heal traumas or wounds variously internalized so much as it is to tame or redirect them to a gift from the West that functions to trample over the site-specific context of place.

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FITZPATRICK + INGELEVICS

Veryl Goodnight, The Day the Wall Came Down, College Station, Texas, 2013

Charles Gimpel, â&#x20AC;?Iyola Kingwatsiak preparing the stone for a print at the Eskimo Craft Centre,â&#x20AC;? 1962. Charles Gimpel fonds, PA-210894, Library and Archives Canada.

FLORENCE DUCHEMIN-PELLETIER

CATHARSIS IN INUIT ART A Way to Heal Wounds

WESTERN CRITICS have long been challenged by contemporary Inuit art. Since its beginnings, at the end of the 1940s, it has been argued that it was either too folkloric and naive, or too commercial and inauthentic to be considered as part of the upper-crust art world, something which also requires an appropriate response to a series of questions and demands dating mostly from the nineteenth century. Among these one can bring up the myth of the accursed artist, characterized by an absolute selflessness and an inability to be distracted from oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own vision. As sociologist of art Nathalie Heinich observes, a sincere artist is believed to only accept material profits (money) or (immaterial) acclaim as recognition for his work and never as a primary source of motivation.1 It is thus not surprising to see how ill-treated contemporary Inuit art has been when one considers it was initially developed as an industry both capable of sustaining the Inuit and answering the demands of the Southern market, in terms of its style and themes. Authors such as George Swinton, Charles A. Martijn, and Nelson H. H. Graburn strived to describe and analyze the mechanisms that surround the production of Inuit art. They aimed at putting an end to an excessive romantic vision as well as revealing how ethnocentrism could impede the real understanding of underlying stakes.2 Nevertheless, debates over the classification of contemporary Inuit art are still topical today outside of Canada where gallery owners still struggle to show it in contemporary art fairs and have contributed to leaving aside the social history of the Inuit.3 In this essay, I wish to suggest a reassessment of the trajectories usually attached to Inuit art. Far from solely following a commercial and material North-South line, or, in other words, being exclusively addressed to a Western audience, Inuit works are anchored in local reality. Not only does the artistic practice acquire a meaning for the artist him or herself, but it also has a subsequent impact on the community. In order to examine the social importance of art among the Inuit, I will first consider the political context of the postwar years and the traumas experienced by the Inuit. I will then turn to artists who took an autobiographical approach: How can trauma be exteriorized? Which course may the process follow? Do difficulties and impossibilities emerge? Finally, I will argue that works, once they have acquired a certain success in the South, come back to the North and, thanks to their new prestige, act as a collective catharsis, tracing a â&#x20AC;&#x153;return trajectory.â&#x20AC;?

her husband, a powerful fulmar who was creating a storm at sea. This way, she could no longer hold on to her boat and would drown. Interestingly, though Tuckatuck usually gives small explanations about his carvings on his personal website, he kept mostly silent for this one. All he did was recount the myth; the meaning behind the work was not explicitly shared. Lastly is Abraham Anghik Ruben’s work. The carver made several works in clear relation with his experience in residential schools, such as The Last Goodbye (2001) and Wrestling with My Demons (2001). But he never worked on a full corpus and chances are that he also found indirect ways to express his feelings through shamanistic imagery. However, at the beginning of the 1990s, he did find an interesting way to expel his pain. He became so interested in the book of Holocaust survivor Leon Khan, No Time to Mourn: The True Story of a Partisan Fighter (1978), that he requested to meet him. What he had in mind was to carve his story. Kahn accepted the offer and both worked together with Rabbi Marvin Hier, so Anghik Ruben would accurately understand the historical facts. The carving that resulted from this work is complex. In Their Memory (1990-1992) certainly does not settle for a representation of concentration camps: through many layers, it also tells the story of the Jewish people from their symbolic beginnings to the memorial process and the founding of Israel. Kahn decided to keep it and it remained in his office until his death in 2003. Anghik Ruben reports that the sculpture had a cathartic effect on Kahn: it eased some of his pain “so he could continue on with his life.”32 But what is most important thing is the sharing of two different traumatic experiences. Anghik Ruben could relate with Kahn’s story: trauma of imprisonment, destruction of a people, and negation of humanity were also part of the experience of residential schools. The project probably intended to also release some of the artist’s own pain. The nine months Anghik Ruben spent on the carving were grueling, punctuated with nightmares and periods of depression. Once again, the backlash effect has to be questioned. In this case, the cathartic moment of creation might have been affected by the extensive period of time it took to produce the work.

Loosening Tongues “We don’t talk about our problems. We simply look at each other and we know. We don’t want to bring the pain back,” explains Aksatungua Ashoona, granddaughter of Inuit historian Peter Pitseolak, concerning how collective traumas are seldom if ever shared among members of Inuit communities. Words are often oppressive and difficult, and people are ashamed to speak them, requiring “orality” to be expressed in another way than with words. Art became a favoured means, as it allowed distance and indirect communication. Even though very few Inuit buy artworks and exhibits in the Arctic are scarce, inhabitants usually know who is an artist and what kinds of works and ideas each may represent—especially when the artist starts receiving outside recognition. So when an artist deals with a difficult topic, his or her work does not fail to elicit a response. Even without seeing the work in question, knowing that things have been “told” is enough to begin the healing process. In traditional Inuit society things should not be left unsaid; words that are kept silent may cause illnesses and troubles. Moreover, every healing process is supposed to start with the expulsion of the pain out of the body.33 Artist Annie Pootoogook has frequently expressed this discharge of her suffering onto the paper: “It really heals my life.… It makes me feel better after. No more bad thinking.” Pootoogook has even recurrently forced a collective cathartic process when, in her drawings, without the consent of those concerned, she told tragic local stories, not always to the whole community’s liking. And it remains that the healing process is often thought as a collecAlec Lawson Tuckatuck, Facing Forgiveness, 2009, serpentine, musk ox horn. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.

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McCRACKEN

LLOYD C. McCRACKEN

“FOR YOU THE WAR IS OVER” An Airman Remembers

Lloyd C. McCracken grew up in a rural community on Canada’s east coast. As a teenager, with the Second World War entering its peak, he volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force. Initially, he took courses in wireless operation and shorthand, intending to avoid battle. However, the news that two of his brothers had joined the army and shipped overseas prompted him to remuster as a tail gunner. While the job of bomber was dangerous, tail gunners faced, as we known, extreme hazards. Fifty years later, in 1992, McCracken attended a reunion. This experience inspired him to produce, with the help of his daughter, Holly, this remembrance of his time in the Air Force—his training, hair-raising sorties over Germany and, especially, two years he spent as a POW in a German prisoners of war camp. After his death, his son Greg put this text together with some associated documents and photographs and circulated it within his family. We were introduced to this text by one of the family members, Lisa Deanne Smith. For us, this text, of necessity, raises more questions than it answers. Why did he wait fifty years to write this? More broadly, his story reveals a human phenomenon that we nevertheless fail to understand—our uncanny ability to adjust to the inconceivable. Our ability to hold it, live in it, relay it. As his story recounts, McCracken had plenty of traumatic experiences—he narrowly escapes death at least four times, and he witnesses death far more times than that. Yet, McCracken’s descriptions of these experiences expose details without registering their effects. Nor does the letter to McCracken’s parents reporting that he’s missing in action. For readers, comprehension of the emotional happens elsewhere—above and around the words—in envisioning the effect of these experiences on McCracken, of the military’s letter on his parents. Understanding is only discoverable in the text’s resignation, its absences, its restraint. The following text abridges McCracken’s original. Minor edits are silent; excisions of a sentence or longer are indicated by an ellipsis. The section titles are McCracken’s, as are the footnotes. Our thanks to Lisa Deanne Smith for suggesting this opportunity and facilitating it, and Greg McCracken and Holly Blaikie for their assistance, and for their permission to reproduce their father’s remembrance. —The Editors.

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SIGNING UP I cannot remember how I felt on that day, September 10, when we learned that Canada was at war. However, I can recall everyone rushing around talking of food shortages. […] I was beginning to notice that fellows in uniforms received more attention from girls than the average guy. This made the Air Force look quite appealing, so on the 16th of April, 1940, at the age of seventeen, I completed forms on my personal history, education, parents, and work experiences for W.G. Cook, Flying Officer. On June 10th, 1940, I boarded the train for Moncton; really my first time away from home on my own. After arriving, I remember asking where you go to enlist. The building was handy and there were other fellows signing up as well. I was told I needed a letter of recommendation and the only person I knew in Moncton was Doug Ball. […] He seemed very busy, gave me his address and asked me to drop by his home later and pick up the letter. I did that and was quite pleased at what he had done for me. More forms were filled out including a Medical Form indicating I had a scar on my leg (from sharpening a knife as a young fellow). […] The next day we were off to Ottawa. […] We were young and green but we did know that we were supposed to salute officers. We got off the train and saw the Parliament Buildings. On going into a hotel, we noticed a man standing in a uniform with a hat, so we saluted. He never responded, except to give us a funny look. That was our introduction to a doorman. INITIAL TRAINING SCHOOL On the first morning names were called to report to various messes. I worked in the kitchen slicing bacon, setting tables, washing dishes — I enjoyed the dishwasher, and peeling potatoes. They had large bins that would hold 100 lbs. of potatoes. It went around and around, and as it did it took off the skins. I thought that was pretty slick! The purpose of this was to experience service life while waiting for space at Initial Training School. While here, we also learned how to march, went on parade, and attended church. This period lasted for two or three months. My R.C.A.F. number was R64681, which I have remembered all my life, even after I became an officer and was issued a new number J96264. Barrack life was quite different from what we were used to. However, we did have a lot of fun horsing around. After my first visit to a wet canteen I was feeling pretty good and I swung at a guy to scare him and hit the wall. My fist went through the wall and I covered the hole with an Air Force crest I had bought. We received our inoculations here. We lined up in the fields and stood so long waiting that some guys fainted from the thought of all those needles.

Joseph Peragine, 9/11/01 (detail), 2001, video animation. Courtesy of the artist and Marcia Woods Gallery.

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CHARLES REEVE

THE SINCEREST FORM OF IRONY Fun and Games in a Post-September 11 World

FEARING THAT THE COLLAPSE of the World Trade Center has destroyed his daughter's school, the protagonist in Art Spiegelman’s cartoon In the Shadow of No Towers runs towards the devastation against the fleeing crowd. As it turns out, Nadja is safe, but this discovery brings with it a second— unanticipated—revelation: nothing revives irony like disaster. For, as he rounds a corner from which he normally can see the school, Spiegelman’s character finds his view blocked by a billboard for the then-forthcoming Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Collateral Damage (Andrew Davis, 2002), a film about a firefighter who hunts down the guerrillas who killed his family in a bomb attack on American soil. “Oddly,” Spiegelman observes in the running commentary of this semi-autobiographical comic, “in the aftermath of September 11, some pundits insisted Irony was Dead.”1 The notion that irony ended on September 11, 2001 belongs to a constellation of claims that the terrorist attacks—disastrously and catastrophically—ushered in a new era. There were three sites of catastrophe that day: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Yet the first of these stays with us much more than the other two, and not only because of its much higher number of casualties and far greater physical and economic damage. Ponder what intention lies behind titling a cluster of buildings the “World Trade Center” rather than the “New York Stock Exchange,” even though world trade likely centres on the latter much more than the former. The sheer audacity of the Twin Towers’ name and size gives them an extraordinary symbolic value, which, as Susan Buck-Morss notes, made the attacks on them a staged, global spectacle of violence: The staging of violence as a global spectacle separates September 11 from previous acts of terror. The dialectic of power, the fact that power produces its own vulnerability, was itself the message. This distinguishes [the September 11 attacks] decisively from radical social movements that aim to accomplish specific social and political goals.2 Buck-Morss calls the disaster “staged” because it addressed a specific audience, and labels it as a “global spectacle” because it would find that audience around the world—a destiny that the television networks couldn’t help themselves from ensuring as (again and again and again) they played the horrific footage of the planes slamming into the Trade Center.

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FIG. 2b Langlands & Bell with V/SpaceLAB, The House of Osama bin Laden, 2003, interactive computer animation/data projection. Courtesy of Langlands & Bell.

large, interactive projection of bin Laden's erstwhile home and the surrounding landscape.12 Viewers use a plinth-mounted joystick to maneuver through a self-guided virtual tour of the house and the promontory on which it stands. By manipulating the handle, viewers move from outside to inside and from inappropriateness to impotence (FIG. 3). For the robotic motion of the whirling landscape and rustic interior recall the look and feel of computer-driven shoot-em-up games like Doom, but the buttons on the joystick don’t launch anything; and there’s nothing to shoot at anyway since bin Laden’s long gone. Where Spiegelman and Peragine reduced post-September 11 trauma to fodder for childish cartoons, Langlands & Bell turn the War on Terror into an adolescent’s video game—one which, moreover, is somewhat obsolete in the whirring clunkiness of its graphics and which, lacking a target, took a step closer to reality when the Bush Administration officially conceded that Iraq had neither weapons of mass destruction nor a program to produce them.13 The intersection between Langlands & Bel’s Afghanistan project and the “serious” world of diplomacy, military intervention and international justice was pointed to most directly, though, by a projected text that appeared in the same room as The House at the Tate Britain during the Turner Prize show of 2004. This projection informed museum visitors that “this work” had been removed

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FIG. 3 Langlands & Bell with V/SpaceLAB, The House of Osama bin Laden, 2003, interactive computer animation/data projection. Courtesy of Langlands & Bell.

following legal advice due to the trial of Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, then in process at the Old Bailey. In a move guaranteed to provoke curiosity, the text explained nothing about the missing work or its removal (or why the removal notice was a projection rather than a wall-mounted sign). The websites of the Tate and Langlands & Bell were even more reticent, saying that the work had been withdrawn due to legal advice but not mentioning the trial. Fortunately, the Imperial War Museum seemed not to have received the memo to hush up the piece, so its website explained that the video was called Zardad's Dog and that it “was a short film edited from live footage that the artists shot at the trial of a notorious war commander in the Supreme Court in Kabul.” An article in the Guardian explained that the defense at the Old Bailey worried that the film of the Kabul trial might prejudice the London proceedings because the accused in the two cases allegedly had close ties (“M'lud, I find this work of art to be in contempt,” the headline chuckled).14 Regardless of whether Zardad’s Dog would have prejudiced Zardad’s trial, Langlands & Bell clearly intended to trivialize the hunt for Osama bin Laden by recreating it as an outdated video game that, beyond being pointless (what video game isn’t?), lacks even the fabricated target characteristic of those toys. The comparison that Langlands & Bell want to make is ridiculous, given that war isn’t a game. But how else to represent a military operation that, unable to find its quarry, changed its mind about what it was after and then couldn’t find its second target either?15 Moreover, the suppression of Zardad’s Dog shows that, as with Spiegelman and Peragine, the conun-

VIEWS AND REVIEWS

COLUMN: IAN BALFOUR York University Drama Trauma

A story is not compulsory. —Samuel Beckett, “Text for Nothing”

WHAT SHAPES do traumas come in and what are the shapes of the responses that work with it, through it, on it? For a long time in the literary history of the west, tragedy was one of the preeminent modes where traumas, public and otherwise—it’s not clear that anything was really “private” prior to modernity and capitalism— were confronted and displayed. Oedipus the King is only the most charged, endlessly rippling example. No other genre so resolutely took up the matter in sustained fashion, directly and indirectly. But it did so in a very particular way. Nietzsche contends that Dionysus was the secret, masked hero (I’m paraphrasing) of every tragedy. The one play actually foregrounding the Greek (but also somewhat “oriental”) god the most, Euripides’s The Baccchae, was arguably the least Dionysian, the least orgiastic. But this (quasi-) embodiment of excess and mania and loss of self in tragedy in general always took shape in what Friedrich Hölderlin called, in his “Notes on the Antigone” a “form of reason,” a Vernunftform. Aristotle stressed the desideratum of logical form in plots, for which tragedy was the clear paradigm. For all of its excesses (incest, murder, plague, war) and its coming up against even the unspeakable, tragedy had to make (logical) sense. Athenian tragedy (all “Greek” tragedies were Athenian ones) staged a crisis or trauma for the city to the city: the polis watched itself, its citizens, undergoing some version of what traumas did or could happen to it. That crisis or trauma was

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typically ancient (the characters were all, more or less safely, in a mythic past long before the fifth century B.C.E.) but re-enacted in the moment of its performance before huge Athenian audiences with tens of thousands of people. The crisis, the trauma, was also now. This is not quite to say that Oedipus’s trauma is ours. Even Freud is very equivocal about the relation of Oedipus’s story to our own, twice underscoring that Oedipus’s scenario is perhaps ours. But, as Brecht well knew, classic(al) theatre provided the groundwork and the framework for a certain identification with tragic heroines and heroes, even over the gulf of class differences (the most pertinent, I think) and ones of gender and race. But the main thing is that tragedy, against quite a few odds, is intent on making sense, beginning with making sense from within, with a detectivelike hero such as Oedipus or a communal chorus on stage that asks big questions and answers some of them. Or both. Renaissance and Baroque tragedy (Shakespeare, Racine, Marlowe) might be more enigmatic and less preoccupied with being completely intelligible. But there too prevails an impulse, especially in the closing moments of some Shakespearean tragedies, where the carnage on the stage does not prevent the survivors from looking forward and beyond, overcoming, in some measure, the horrors that have just unfolded. Whether or not it makes sense to do so, tragedy makes sense. But then things case in where tragedy can scarcely be written any longer.

CONFERENCE REVIEW: ELLYN WALKER, OCAD University

CRITICAL DIALOGUES: CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON CURATING AND ARTISTIC PRACTICE ORGANIZED BY THE ONTARIO ARTS COUNCIL IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE ONTARIO ASSOCIATION OF ART GALLERIES, BRAM AND BLUMA APPEL SALON, TORONTO REFERENCE LIBRARY, TORONTO, 18 MARCH 2013 The Ontario Arts Council’s professional symposium, “Critical Dialogues: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Curating and Artistic Practice,” brought together an array of critical, multifaceted voices for a day of intercultural exchange. It included one keynote speech, two moderated sessions, and eleven different speakers, all of whom happened to be women. The symposium’s invited and attending participants—many whom represent local, regional, and provincial cultural workers— engaged in an overarching dialogue about cultural diversity, and how institutions and publics can respond to diverse kinds of artistic and curatorial practices. The inspiration for “Critical Dialogues” emerged from the OAC’s consultations with artists and curators from diverse communities over the past few years, where the lack of access to funding still exists for many. Black, Aboriginal, immigrant, and other transcultural voices were brought into play, each contributing to a diverse

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range of artistic and curatorial practices that alternatively shape institutions and their audiences. Markedly, the symposium’s timing paralleled numerous exhibitions and curatorial programming in its host city (Toronto) that explored similar topics of race, democracy, and the cultural politics of representation. For a city that prides itself on diversity, this confluence was reflective of an increased urgency to speak across constructed notions of “difference.”1 Principle moderator Betty Julian introduced the day with a reminder from renowned cultural theorist bell hooks: the function of art is to do more than simply to reflect the present reality, it is to imagine what can be possible. With a diverse and notable background as independent curator of contemporary art, educator and psychotherapist, Julian’s multidisciplinary work has engaged critical issues of representation for the past twenty-five years, with a specialization in

Dibosa advises taking accountability for one’s knowings and unknowings, and to collectively and individually create conditions for more insightful dialogue, such as through collaboration. His post-critical museology focuses on the role publics and their experiences with art objects in relation to varied cultural meanings, which leads to another important question: does the art object hold up to the rhetoric of race with aesthetic quality? Is the artwork strong enough to represent the polemic? “Critical Dialogues: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Curating and Artistic Practice” shared insight, strategies, and testimonials of intercultural practices from various stakeholders within its communities. The dialogues that emerged from the day demonstrate the ongoing relevance of intercultural conversations within artistic and curatorial practices as ones that are varied, subjective, and highly political. However, the symposium’s dialogical space left little room for the audience, reflective of a need for another symposium that considers the role of publics and their diverse cross-cultural perspectives. NOTES 1 Happening simultaneously were the following exhibitions: Deanna Bowen: Invisible Empire at the Art Gallery of York University; Human Rights Human Wrongs at the Ryerson Image Centre; and Gita Hashemi: Time Lapsed at A Space Gallery. 2

Interestingly, these two major exhibitions took place at the institution of the symposium’s other co-moderator, Gaetane Verna, the director of the Power Plant.

This was further confirmed by the recent Symposium on Decolonial Aesthetics from the Americas organized by e-fagia in collaboration with FUSE, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery/Hart House, and Unpack Studio, October 2013.

Marcia Crosby, ”Constructing the Imaginary Indian,” in Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1989).

This sentiment was originally cited in the curatorial/directorial work of Anthony Huberman at the New York Artist’s Institute, a CUNY–Hunter College project on the Lower East Side that presents intimate and rigorous programming based on the work of a different contemporary artist each semester.

Andrew Dewdney, David Dibosa and Victoria Walsh, Post-Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (London: Routledge, 2012).

BOOK REVIEW: MIHA COLNER, Ljubljana, Slovenia

JULIAN STALLABRASS, Ed. Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images (London: Photoworks, 2013), 224 pages In 2008, Julian Stallabrass conceived of a book meant to accompany the exhibition catalogue for that year’s Brighton Photo Biennial. This Biennial was divided into several exhibitions and events, and sought to examine different perspectives on war imagery: press images, artistic projects, and personal photographs of people involved in or trapped by armed conflicts. Furthermore, it strove to analyze how the conditions in which war imagery is produced affect audience perception. Memory of Fire analyzes the representational politics of war imagery in the 2000s—the period marked by a new concept of warfare, the war on terror—by comparing it to past developments in documentary and fine art photography. The

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“the US has engaged in the kidnapping, torture and murder of those it has chosen as its opponents […]. [T]hese are tactics worthy of the Nazis, yet they pass with little comment through the democratic press” (pp. 44-46). The images from Abu Ghraib prison taken by soldiers themselves, for example, were included in the book to offset the sublime aftermath landscapes by Simon Norfolk, press photographs by Ashley Gilbertson and Rita Leistner, staged public actions by Coco Fusco, and short stories by Eduardo Galeano. In general, the ubiquity of war imagery reveals the representational supremacy and hypocrisy of the West. While it is strictly prohibited to display photographs of the bodies of dead US or British soldiers, the visual representation of ‘inferior’ second and third world citizens’ corpses is not in any respect problematic for the West. This ideological distinction was proved by the uncensored circulation of the images of Muammar Qaddafi’s and Saddam Hussein’s deaths, as pointed out in Stallabrass’s insightful introductory essay. Overall, Memory of Fire offers an alternative interpretation of the skilfully manipulated mainstream media imagery of war, as well as highlighting the contributions by novelists, performers, theorists, artists, and engaged citizens to challenge such ideological uses of photography. NOTE 1

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2004).

BOOK REVIEW: STEPHEN BROOMER, Ryerson University

CHRIS GEHMAN, Ed. Explosion in the Movie Machine (Toronto: The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto and the Images Festival, 2013), 231 pages Toronto has been the dominant site of Canada’s avant-garde film community since the late 1960s. Situated between the rich cultural centres of Montreal to the east and New York City to the south, Toronto held a relative placelessness that would benefit its young artists as they adopted the external cultural influences of Dada and American modernism. In 1967, Toronto became a focal point for the North American underground with the Cinecity Cinethon, a weekend-long festival of experimental film unrivalled elsewhere. It was an event that, while primarily showcasing the work of American third-wave avant-garde filmmakers, would inform the directions that

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The Retreat Edited by Sarah Blacker, Imre Szeman, and Heather Zwicker This issue of PUBLIC collects contributions produced during and in conjunction with “The Retreat,” an event organized jointly by Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) and dOCUMENTA (13).

CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE: Heather Anderson Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi Raymond Boisjoly Bruno Bosteels Joanne Bristol David Butler Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Nico Dockx Jason Gomez Emma Howes

Alice Jim Ivan Jurakic & Tor Lukasik-Foss Kate Lawless Catherine Malabou Brad Necyk Carrie Smith-Prei Franziska Stenglin Imre Szeman Maria Whiteman & Andrew Pendakis

Cover by Ciber Lab at Simon Fraser University in collaboration with Christine Davis.

LAUNCHING FALL 2014 www.publicjournal.ca