Projects, Brisbane
[28]Plate 12: Richard Bell, Uz vs Them 2006, Single-channel digital video, edition 2/5, duration 0:2:20. Collection of The University of Queensland, Gift of Richard Bell through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2009. Reproduced courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
[29]Plate 13: Wij/Zij. Detonator and wires. (Photo by Theatre Bronks)
[30]Plate 14: Richard Misrach: Norco Cumulus Cloud, Shell Oil Refinery, Norco, Louisiana, 1998 © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles
[31]Plate 15: Rafiki Ubaldo, Clearly visible on this ID are the terms Hutu, Tutsi, Twa and Naturalisé. Having a Tutsi marked ID meant death. This ID card is kept in a glass cupboard in the underground section of Nyamata Church Genocide Memorial. The Memorial is located in the Bugesera region, Eastern Province, about 35 kilometres outside Kigali, the capital. Courtesy the artist
[32]Plate 16: Pieter Hugo, SITE OF A ROADBLOCK.GATYAZO. GIKONGORO. Reproduced courtesy of the Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town-Johannesburg / Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
[33]1. Witnessing in Contemporary Art and Politics
Kia Lindroos and Frank Möller
In this book, we are exploring the practice of bearing witness to politics through art. The contributors to this volume reflect on the concept of art and selected aspects of understanding the role of art and different artistic genres in connection with political witnessing. While exploring art as political witness, the contributors focus on art or politics or witnessing or a combination of the above but, essentially, all of them utilise – implicitly or explicitly – concepts of witnessing. They acknowledge, discuss and build upon the existing literature in light of their individual subject matter, regarded from different disciplinary angles including art history and political science. They elaborate on the politicalness of artistic witnessing and explore the concept of witnessing as a form of political activity. The book addresses both conceptual and theoretical questions and presents theoretically reflected case studies, including selected artistic works.
The contributors to this volume explore the work of both professional artists and non-artists’ use of artistic forms of expression when witnessing politics. The chapters reflect the current interest in the humanities and social sciences in the idea – or the question – of being a witness. They address this idea by interrogating and expanding concepts of witnessing and their uses in artistic, historical and political practice. In the present chapter, we review the existing literature on the concept of being a witness and correlate it with the following chapters.
Being a Witness
A witness is someone who is “present as a spectator or auditor”.1 If this someone is the only one who can testify from personal observation, and if material evidence with which to support this testimony is lacking, then testimony appears to be especially important because it reveals things we would otherwise not be aware of. Such testimony, however, “relies on an act of faith: we must choose whether we believe the witness or nor” (Korhonen 2008: 115).
[34]Traditionally defined, a witness is someone “who is or was present and is able to testify from personal observation”.2 In the criminal justice system, as well as in the social sciences and humanities, this understanding of being a witness – especially an eyewitness – has been widely applied to testimony to violent, tragic and traumatic events such as the Holocaust. This approach to witnessing is a rather narrow one: in order to qualify as a witness, you have to see something with your own eyes at the exact point in time when this something happens. As the following discussion will show, much of the emerging literature on witnessing is interested in expanding our understanding of what it means to be a witness.
To be able to be a witness includes some form of visual and/or bodily connection to the matters witnessed. For example, Gideon Hausner, the Attorney General of the State of Israel and chief prosecutor at the Eichmann trial, wanted “people who would tell what they had seen with their own eyes and what they had experienced on their own bodies” (quoted in Wieviorka 2006: 70). Hausner adds to the eye-witness who testifies from personal observation the body-witness who testifies on the basis of what he or she experienced on their own body. Indeed, observation – being a spectator – is often deemed insufficient in order for a person to qualify as witness. As David Simpson notes, the “person who simply notices but does not act” – the spectator, the bystander, the onlooker, the voyeur – “has been deemed most intolerable” (Simpson 2006: 3; for a defence of the voyeur in the context of witnessing people in pain, see Ledbetter 2012: 3–14). Simpson couples two words – simply and notices – the connection between which should be carefully reflected upon (Möller 2013: 47): is noticing simple, and who simply notices? In any case, reflecting scepticism about the moral position of the spectator, Diana Taylor (2003: 243) defines the “role of witness” more ambitiously “as responsible, ethical, participant rather than spectator to crisis”. Building on Taylor’s approach, the participant witness has been introduced into the literature as someone who (self-)critically engages with the conditions depicted in an image, including his or her own subject positions in connection with these conditions (Möller 2013: 36–55). Thus, in order to be considered a witness some form of engagement beyond being present and being able to testify from personal observation is often deemed necessary.
With regard to the 1970s and early 1980s, Annette Wieviorka (2006: 96) writes compellingly about the era of the witness characterized by “the systematic collection of audiovisual testimonies” as regards Holocaust experiences and memories of experiences. Both terms are important here – era and witness: witness as understood in Hausner’s sense as above (eye and body), and era because the issue at that time was not only one of people testifying on the basis of their own[35] experience, but also one of general interest in their testimonies among a wider audience. Such interest had largely been absent during the first period after the Holocaust. It was during the Eichmann trial and thus before the era of the witness that “[f]or the first time since the end of the war, the witnesses had the feeling that they were being heard” (ibid.: 84). The trial helped transform witnesses into survivors, recognized by society “as such” (ibid.: 88).
However, Primo Levi (1989: 83–84) notes that “we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses”. He specifies:
We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the ‘Muslims,’ the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.
The survivors can testify to certain events based on their own experience but their testimony is “a discourse ‘on behalf of third parties,’ the story of things seen at close hand, not experienced personally” (Levi 1989: 84). Giorgio Agamben, when discussing Levi’s writings, comments that “[w]hoever assumes the charge of bearing witness in their name” – that is, in the name of Levi’s “complete witness” – “knows that he or she must bear witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness” (Agamben 2002: 34).