by utilizing all of the above – and many other – understandings of and approaches to being a witness. They are not the only ones. For example, “the role of the photographer as witness” is regularly referenced in the literature, especially in connection with photo-journalistic representations of wars and violent conflicts (Kennedy 2014: 46). Louie Palu’s contribution to this volume (chapter 2) shows why it is appropriate to refer to photojournalists as witnesses. Such photojournalists as Palu himself are eyewitnesses; they exemplify contemporaneity by being on location when something happens; and they take risks. Their work also follows strict ethical standards. They do not normally belong to the group of people originally targeted by the regime; however, as Palu’s contribution shows, they become targets in their capacity as photographers, testifying visually to gruesome events for some future use. In his chapter, Palu also raises the important question of image control. Witnessing through art and visual culture reflects practices of control and selection. Palu asks: “Who controls what you see?” Who controls what you bear witness to? That witnessing through images is not always possible does not imply impossibility of witnessing through art, as several contributions to this volume show.
It is more intriguing, perhaps, that even soldiers are referred to as witnesses documenting, by means of smart phones, their own involvement in the politics of violence (Allan 2014: 187; see also Kennedy 2009 and Struck 2011). These witnesses document, perhaps, their own suffering but they also document the suffering they inflict on others. Can perpetrators be witnesses?
The Artist as Witness
Why does this book specifically engage with artists? After all, in many cases artists represent other people’s experiences without having been invited or asked to do so; their work is not commissioned by those who it is meant to reference. Why, then, should artists be expected to be capable of representing other people’s experiences adequately? Often they tell the story of things not “seen at close hand” (Levi) but from afar – temporally and spatially, lacking “knowledge-by-acquaintance of suffering” (Margalit). Why, then, do artists believe that they have the right to represent other people’s experiences in the first place? And who can judge the appropriateness of artistic representations beyond aesthetic judgments? Some commentators insist that what matters is not the truth of the artist but, rather, “the truth of the ‘victim’” (Roberts 2014: 150)[43] but is there any guarantee that artists are capable of grasping the victim’s truth? If not, do they exert violence upon the victims by disregarding their, the victims’, truth? Aesthetic judgments would ultimately be of only secondary importance in the context of art as a political witness where judgments have to be political, not aesthetic, ones.
For example, a purely aesthetic judgment of the photographs Dorothea Lange and other photographers produced while on assignment with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) would be misleading. As Jay Prosser notes, underlying their photographic work was a political mission, disguised to some extent by the seemingly documentary character of the photographs. While appearing to be a documentary “mode of witnessing”, this photography “did not portray victims …; it created them” so as to help gain support for the US administration’s resettlement policy (Prosser 2005: 90; italics added). The photographer’s “non-neutrality” (ibid.) may explain the success of their photographs but their work cannot adequately be grasped with exclusive reference to being a witness.
This photography can also be referenced to illustrate the occasionally rather problematic relationship between artists and subjects, much discussed in the existing literature. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites report that one of the subjects of one of the most famous photographs produced in connection with the work of the FSA, Florence Thompson, later complained about the “commodification of her image that completely divorced the woman in the photograph from the living Thompson” (Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 62) and her reduction in public perception to a Migrant Mother. We note the publisher’s striking insensitivity when reproducing this very photograph on the cover of the book, thus contributing to the very same commodification and exploitation Hariman and Lucaites so eloquently describe in their book.
If we follow Walter Benjamin’s notion in discussing the complexity of artistic representations, we would notify that beauty, thus the aesthetic value per se, is included in the secrecy (Geheimnis) of the work, but not necessarily in its presentation. Beauty includes the possibility that it be recovered in the moment of critique (Benjamin 1991 [1922]: 196). In the moment at which the illusion that the aura represents is becoming transparent the work might also appear differently in its perception. Benjamin positions himself in relation to the Platonic idea of art as illumination and Heidegger’s idea of beauty that is connected to being and truth.10 In his Work of Art essay, originally from the year 1936, Benjamin plays with the double meaning of illumination, as it is formed from the illusion towards presentation. Here, Benjamin also emphasises the[44] aesthetic polarity of the concepts of play and illumination (Spiel und Schein) in which the idea of the origin as truth has already disappeared.
For Benjamin, play and illumination are both included in the concept of mimesis (Benjamin 1991 [1936]: 668). The decay of the ancient idea of creation is to be found in the mimesis itself, which is understood as the original phenomenon of all artistic creation. What the imitation (the work of art) does to the subject imitated occurs only in an illusory way, like in a play (ibid.: 368). Benjamin suggests that the definition of art should find a balance between these two extreme ways of interpretation; Schiller stresses the importance of play (Spiel), Goethe stresses illumination in aesthetics (ibid.: 667). It is possible that a balance between these two could be found. The rethinking of art in the modern era allows the work of art to be conceived of in a way in which play (Spiel) and illumination are brought together, and in which art not only imitates the surrounding world, but also begins to imitate itself as copies are reproduced. This viewpoint also has its effects when we think in more contemporary terms, about how and in what ways art can be a witness. Thus, what is art actually witnessing in these terms? Is it the play of, illumination of or mimetic experiences of the events and their witness?
For instance, Martin Seel remarks upon the importance of Benjamin’s idea in overcoming traditional philosophies of aesthetics (Seel 1993: 771–773). The idea to which Benjamin’s thought leads is that here, art is not conceived of as the presentation of something else, such as ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, but is understood as the presentation itself. Here, presentation is actually the idea that connects to the witness: art has (or might have) the capacity to be a witness in the very act of its presentation.
Wieviorka (2006: 101) notes, in connection with the television mini-series Holocaust, anxiety among survivors that they might be “dispossessed of [their own] history by someone outside the experience who claims to be telling it”. This someone could be, and often is, an artist. And Jill Bennett reminds us that the experience of violence – or, for that matter, the experience of anything else – “is fundamentally owned by someone” (Bennett 2005: 3; italics added). Artists’ attempts to speak on someone’s behalf and to represent someone’s experiences – someone marginalized, someone silenced, someone misrepresented in official discourse or mass culture, someone victimized, even someone killed11 – might amount to expropriation of such ownership and dispossession of survivors’ intimate stories and memories. If artists engage with someone else’s experience from the outside by, for example, showing up on location after the event, they[45] enter the “event-as-aftermath” (Roberts 2014: 107), thus contributing to its discursive reconstruction (see below). In other cases, artists are themselves survivors. Rather than engaging with someone else’s experience from the outside, they are themselves inside the experience they engage with. Like Edilberto Jiménez in Milton’s chapter and Chris Marker in Lindroos’s chapter, they are artists and they are eyewitnesses.
Representation necessarily transforms. It may give voice to people whose voice would otherwise remain inaudible. Indeed, the question of “who gets heard” is, “fundamentally, a political question” (Couldry 2000: 57). Furthermore, giving voice does not necessarily result in getting heard in any substantial sense. Often, however, it is the artist’s voice we hear, not the voice of the people the artist claims to represent. This problem can be observed not only in connection