art retains its power to challenge the preexisting theories, be they political, philosophical, or literary” (Hyvärinen and Lisa Muszynski 2008: 20). Thus, witnessing politics through art is always an ongoing project.
To resume our explication of Margalit’s conceptualization we would like to stress that being a moral witness is linked to hope – hope “that in another place or another time there exists, or will exist, a moral community that will listen to their testimony” (Margalit 2004: 155). Applied to the artist as moralist, Alex Danchev (2009: 3) specifies that the artist hopes “that there is, or will be, an audience of sentient spectators, viewers, readers, absorbed in the work: a community, a moral community, for whom it stands up and who will stand up for it”. Witnessing without a receptive audience appears futile.
[39]Time Witnesses
A receptive audience is one that combines different temporalities of events, memories and experience. The question of the temporality of the witnessing poses the dilemma, whether or not the position of witnessing an event and artistically documenting it, for instance in war photography or other forms of witnessing violent activities, carries on throughout time, and how different temporalities of events, memories and experience are merged in the spectator. Kia Lindroos, in chapter 4, sees the manner of cinematic witness as closely related to bearing witness of controversial images of the historical and contemporary political world. The chapter discusses Chris Marker’s work through selected examples of his films such as Les Statues meurent aussi, Sans Soleil and Le Tombeau d’Alexandre. Marker’s aesthetic work is not only intertwined with rethinking cinematic political history and the philosophy of time. He also experiments with new technologies, with reproducing different aesthetic modes in order to narrate political and historical events. Marker’s cinema has taken the form of personal essays, combined with the genre of documentary. Thus, as much as being an artist who documents different aspects of political history from the 1950s to the end of the millennium, he is also a personal witness of these times. His films are a combination of visual imagery with philosophical speculation and erudition. The commentaries he creates to accompany the filmimages come close to streams of consciousness and they can be very poetic. The poetry of the text combines with rather subjective seeing and hearing experiences. Besides the documentary film on Alexander Medvedkin (Le Tombeau d’Alexandre) that is discussed in this chapter, Marker has made several cinematic portraits, for instance on Akira Kurasawa, Christo, Andrei Tarkovsky and Simone Signoret.
Different temporalities of witnessing and the inter-connection among the artistic, the historical and the political are also thematised in Sally Butler and Roland Bleiker’s contribution on indigenous art in Australia (chapter 5). Indigenous art is used worldwide to promote Australia; at the same time, however, its creators are politically, economically and socially marginalized in Australia, continually exposed to stigma and exclusion. This exclusion is also reflected in the extent to which the political dimension of indigenous art, including its emphasis on indigenous rights, self-determination and social equality, is often disregarded when this art is incorporated into mainstream culture and the art market. In the chapter, Butler and Bleiker direct our attention to performance and analyse the political witnessing function of performative role-playing aspects of art, utilised by indigenous artists in their fight against the colonial legacy, or, to use Derek Gregory’s (2004) apt term, the colonial present. The authors’ focus on embodiment and performance helps divert[40] our attention from the visual ingredients of artistic witnessing to the body’s full sensory network (see Bacci and Melcher 2013). Indeed, the visuality of witnessing cannot be reduced to that which can be seen but always involves the whole body, and this involvement transforms the eyewitness necessarily into the body-witness. Art employing the body – the body as art; the body as witness – testifies to the human condition under duress and influences the viewer’s perception by means of subconscious sensory stimulations.
A recent popular British TV series (Silent Witness) helped popularize the silent, post-mortem witness.6 Roland Barthes (2000), too, identifies as the essence (or ‘horror’, as he notes) of the photograph that it certifies that the corpse is alive. Thus, the witnessing momentum here is that it maintains the memory, trace or images of the people who have passed away: this connects the historical witness to contemporary experience. Cynthia Milton, in her contribution to this volume, pays attention to art after loss (chapter 6). Milton analyses post-conflict representations of the violence visited upon Peru, especially its indigenous population, in connection with the conflict between state security forces and Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in the 1980s and 1990s. She engages with art’s capability of contesting large-scale violence and restoring the humanity of citizens who suffered – and in case of traumatic memories, continue to suffer – from this violence. Milton not only explores the connection between art and affect; she also critically discusses the notion of art as historical evidence, noting that art can contradict official histories and represent individual and group memories that deviate from such histories. Importantly, Milton notes that “art is not bound to truth”, i.e. the issue is not – or not primarily or exclusively – one of verisimilitude in the sense of being true or real. Rather, art interrogates competing narratives of the past, acknowledging both that each narrative may be true from the perspective of the narrator (as people remember the same event differently) and that no narrative is true (in the sense of historically accurate). Memory is always exposed to and influenced by narrative structures of other memories; and all memories evolve, especially when narrated in form of a story (see also Levi 1989: 24).
Post-mortem witnesses also appear in connection with forensic photography (see Dufour 2015) in such contexts as the (reappearance of the) desaparecidos – the disappeared (Sánchez 2011a and 2011b). The dead are not “required to make sense of their deaths”, as Jim Crace (2000: 192) poignantly writes, but their remains can help others explain and, to some extent, cope with these deaths – bones are “the most reliable witnesses to atrocity” (Danchev 2009: 41). Forensic photography may not be capable of providing closure (Sánchez 2012:[41] 192). In contrast to other forms of photography,7 however, it may provide assurance.
The post-factum witness depicts “the space in which [the trauma] occurred” after it occurred (Lowe 2014: 228). Aftermath photographs and photographers, thus, are post-factum witnesses. This photography and these photographers focus either on people experiencing and suffering from trauma even when the event that caused the trauma in the first place seems to be over (e.g. Torgovnik 2009) or on landscapes, built environment and ruins within which trauma-causing events occurred and which testify to such events (Lisle 2011). Aftermath artists may engage with an event that occurred before they were born – in which case they may be referred to as secondary witnesses (Apel 2002) or post-witnesses (Popescu and Schult 2015), a term derived from Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory8 – or they may recreate an event they witnessed personally but did not artistically engage with at the time it happened.
A photographer can be a convincing witness if he or she uses “lenses that approximate the breadth and magnification of average human vision” so as to “neutralize our skepticism” (Adams 1994: 147) and thwart allegations of manipulation which are omnipresent in the digital age. However, photography can also appear to be convincing if it operates fundamentally differently. Referring to the satellite images then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell used in his testimony before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, Jane Blocker introduces the invisible witness. According to Blocker, such a witness is a core character in current cultural configurations because “the godlike invisibility of this witness lends it a legitimacy and authority that allow it to control in alarming ways what we understand ‘the real’ to be” (Blocker 2009: xvi). Powell, however, seems to have been more sceptical about the power of this witness. In connection with selected images, he explicitly referred to “a human source” corroborating the visual evidence seemingly provided by the images: “So it’s not just the photo, and it’s not an individual seeing the photo. It’s the photo and then the knowledge of an individual being brought together to make the case”.9 One might ask: what case? Indeed, by combining image and eye-witness, Powell combined two notoriously unreliable sources. It is arguable that he did so in order to illustrate the US administration’s pre-existing beliefs[42] on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a country