Burning Image, Chilling Memory—Embers of War in Contemporary Time-based Art
Shuman Wang | November 20, 2024
Chen Chieh-jen, Lingchi—Echoes of a Historical Photograph, 2002
Three-channel video, 21 min 4 sec
Courtesy the artist and Long March Space
“…people returned from the front in silence… not richer but poorer in communica- ble experience”[1]
—Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 1933
On February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old serviceman of the United States Air Force set himself on fire outside the front gate of the Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C., protesting the United States’ continuous support for Israel in the war. Bushnell live-streamed the act and declared, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide.” The video went viral online. At the time, I was already living somewhere without “the great firewall,” but it was a day later that the video appeared on my feed. Amidst the heated discussions, the “burning” image was broken down into fragmented information: a real hero, a conscientious man, a martyr of the left… It didn’t take long for the footage of Bushnell’s self-immolation to vanish from the top search results. An individual’s image that tries to prove that “history exists” remains in opposition to the state’s image that wants to cancel history (sans durée)[2]. In the end, it wasn’t granted the right to be remembered.[3]
Susan Sontag has noted that Georges Bataille always kept on his desk a photograph of a prisoner during execution. The camera captured the moment of the man’s flesh being separated from his body, immediately before his death. These written descriptions alone exemplify the extremity of the image. In The Tears of Eros,[4] Bataille referred to the significance of this photo to his life. He was “obsessed with this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.”[5] To him, it wasn’t about the transfiguration from pain to pleasure, but rather a way of imagining extreme pains within a religious context: the image of suffering and sacrifice appear at once, giving rise to a power that could be used to combat numbness and weakness—the most common emotional reactions in our contemporary experiences. The artist Chen Chieh-jen recreated this image with computer graphics in 1996 and went on to create a three-channel video Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph in 2002. The work attempts to bypass the collective subconscious memory of “cruel torture” and access the personal history of the tortured man being captured.
Jim Campbell, Hallucination, 1988–1990
Black and white video camera, 50” rear projection enclosed video monitor, 2 laserdisc players, custom electronics. Dimensions Variable.
Courtesy the artist and Fisher Collection
Yet through the camera, with the aid of graphics technologies, what do we see from the tortured man’s history? In Hallucination (1988—1990), an interactive video installation created by the artist Jim Campbell, custom electronics processed live images of the viewer; approaching the mirroring screen, the viewer would see themself caught on fire, accompanied by a virtual woman in the reflection.[6] Scholar Janine Marchessault pointed out that “the illusion of interactivity in television according to Campbell, depends not on eliding the spectator but on masking her invisibility with another invisibility. Hallucination enacts this process through the presence of one more viewer.”[7] This procedure provides a different scenario from earlier film theories. For instance, according to the Suture Theory, the violence of cinematic apparatus is reflected in the illusionary psychic mechanism that it set up in advance. It allows viewers to acquire the position of “subject” through their own imaginations carefully guided by an “ideology.” (This also goes back to Althusser, for whom cinema is “the ventriloquist of ideology.” It is to occupy an imaginary “subject” position through constant backtracking, hence completing the ventriloquism of the ideology.)[8] However, does it mean the current graphics technologies have ceded power to the viewers for them to identify their “subject,” no longer tools in service of ideologies? Or, can we say the graphics-based interactive technologies have already enabled the automatic reproduction of a fantasy mechanism, with real-time capturing, setting and image-generation based on each participant’s distinct physical and psychological characteristics?
Meiro Koizumi, Prometheus the Fire-Bringer (stills), 2023, VR installation
Courtesy the artist, Annet Gelink gallery (Amsterdam), and MUJIN-TO Production (Tokyo)
Prometheus the Fire-Bringer (2023), the third chapter of the artist Meiro Kozumi’s VR series “Prometheus Trilogy,” borrows ancient myths to show how “fire,” an emblem of technology, begins with one’s limb and spreads to the entire body, thus blurring the figure. VR technology is able to transmit the image and the sensation of heat with audio and visual signals to the participant’s nerve-endings, tricking one’s brain into believing that they live in a collective body that consists of “other bodies.” In the second chapter of the trilogy, Kozumi builds an illusionary scene that is more specific: Vietnamese laborers are confined in an enclosed space during the pandemic, their faces blurry, and their spirits attempt to free themselves from the physical suffering. Floating, the spirits’ images intersect with the viewers’ perspectives; they sometimes rest next to the bodies, sometimes cross into the bodies, integrating with the participants. In ancient Greek myths, the seed of fire, which represented cosmic life, was stolen from above, signifying a power shift. Nonetheless, did the shift begin with Prometheus’s passing or with the transgression of human desire? Having obtained the fire, mankind was able to live, reproduce, and further extend their power; while at the same time, the moment when humans took over the fire, the curse of “burning” became embedded in the power to live.
Kei Ito (artist) and Andrew Paul Keiper (sound artist)
Afterimage Requiem (2018–2019) is a large-scale visual and sound installation composed of 108 human-scale photograms, created by the artist Kei Ito in collaboration with the sound artist Andrew Paul Keiper. The project was based on memories of the Hiroshima atomic bombing from the grandfathers of the two artists. The negatives of 108 naked bodies, exposed to the strong light in the darkroom, revealed figures that were instantly burned, referring to the moment when the atomic bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki—hotter than the sun, the explosive heat vaporized and annihilated the bodies, turning them into shadows and residues. Ito and Keipor conducted field recordings at the atomic testing sites in New Mexico and Chicago. These audio recordings made up for what couldn’t be seen in the “blinding heat,” that is, how the weapons of fire were made, preserved, and transported. This echoes Harun Farocki’s film Inextinguishable Fire (1969) where he visually analyzed the industrial production line of Dow Chemical, the former napalm manufacturer that produced bombs for the U.S Army in the Vietnam War: with the “intensified division of labor,” each worker along the production line was an ignorant part of “a set of building blocks” in this weapon-making chain—no one knew if they were making a weapon of mass destruction or a household vacuum cleaner. And yet, the critical meaning of the film goes beyond this. By the end of each section of the film, there is a clip of different workers watching the broadcast of the Vietnam War. In the work, Farocki seemed to be questioning the notion of “ignorance”: is the truth really being hidden or is it a form of “sticky humanism,” in which one chooses what to see or unsee.
Rachel Rose, Palisades in Palisades, 2014
HD Video, 10 min 29 sec
Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery
Ito and Keiper didn’t just visit the atomic bomb testing sites to uncover the industrial chain of the weapon. They intended to juxtapose history with reality—the origin of the weapon (history) with the genetically mutated survivors (reality). The heat of the exploding bombs turned lives into ashes, while radiation infiltrated the skin, blood and bones, becoming engraved into the genes of the survivors and their posterities. As Ito says, we are made into images through bodies simultaneously “captured” by time and history. Works that illustrate the impact of wars and revolutions by comparing the past and the present are not uncommon. Rachel Rose’s Palisades in Palisades (2014) traverses Palisades State Park in New Jersey, the site of the Battle of Fort Lee, weaving together the park’s history and reality; in Song for Dying (2021), Korakrit Arunanondchai brings back the spirits at the Thai protests in 2020 as well as those sacrificed during the 1948 Jeju uprising. These two works are exemplary of the two methodologies artists tend to use when processing materials in regard with wars, revolutions and violence: breaking up time with the camera language and stitching it back with apparitions. The former to some degree follows the concept and development of the “line of sight.” In Rose’s work, the camera, a tool for investigating, tracking and aiming in wartime photography, takes on the view of a sparking bullet, traveling through different historical layers. This shift in the line of sight provides footnote for Paul Virilio’s “linge de foi” (a way of technically aligning ocular perception along an imaginary axis; it starts with the eye, passes through the peep-hole and the sight and on to the target object): detached from the human eye, its perspective transcends its objective existences, accomplishing an expression of subjectivity in the process of tearing space and time apart. [9] On the other hand, Arunanondchai uses ghostly fires and shaman rituals to summon the historical moments that are constantly alienated, till almost dissipated and unreachable, stitching them into a spacetime that has no specific historical references. Everything of this spacetime appears as apparitions—not living, nor dead, but “victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence…, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.”[10] Here, the interpretation of the “burning image” shifts from the external visual level to an internal perceptual level—the velocity of burning, along with the specters dissolving and entangling within the graphic narratives, reconstructs a view of time that is non-linear, activating the collective and the personal memories that have been frozen and concealed.
Forever Informed, LED Screen, 2024
The Cyprus Pavilion, Venice Art Biennale 2024
Photo: Ugo Carmeni
In this year’s Venice Biennale, the Cyprus Pavilion reimagines the idea of ghosts as a paradoxical act of withdrawal and persistence.[11] On one hand, the invisibility and the immortality of ghosts, as well as their ability to traverse time and space, provide creators a path to reveal the truth of history; yet on the other hand, as ghosts appear like the spontaneous combustion of the will-o’-the-wisp, “the truth” is masked beneath hallucinations, the viewers’ attention becomes diverted. This year’s Polish Pavilion also attempts to respond to the specters—the Ukrainian art group Open Call juxtaposes videos taken from 2022 and 2024 [12], inviting the audience to listen to the sounds of war, reminding us that the ghosts from war still hover over our reality. However, can we really see and hear them—these ghosts humming in the fire, lingering over the past and the present, between history and reality?
Red Candle Games, Detention (game stills), 2017
Courtesy Red Candle Games
Back in 2016, Detention, a video game set in the 1960s Taiwan under martial law released its beta version on Stream.[13] While alluding to the reenactment of the Cold War, instead of designing multiple characters with historical references, the game establishes a surrogate character (fictional, anonymous, nonessential to the historical period), and asks players to uncover the myth of their identity through traces and fragments of everyday life. The game integrates elements of history, religion, authoritarianism, folklore, and ghost stories, yet its visual remains bleak, even the occasional flow of blood doesn’t alter the color tone.[14] How we live our lives today is closely related to the legacy of the Cold War. While the Cold War seems to have been fixed by linear history at the end of the last century, as scholar Stephen Whitfield points out, “the end of the Cold War as a social order is a slow process of decomposition.” [15] Much like the intermediate stage when a body decomposes, wherein the death of the flesh coexists with a symbolic force of life, the “decomposition” of the Cold War seems to be in a perpetually restless state: the living reality has never been truly freed from its past, nor has it reintegrated the past into the present as a past history. This “decomposition” therefore has always carried a ghostly presence, which lingers till this day and envelops the flames that are still burning, hiding the fact that “war is nothing but the continuation of policy by other means” (i.e., violence)[16] and advances into a split New World. The game Detention has two written endings: either the player continues to burn, stuck in the same place, or they freeze their memories and become free.
The night before this article is completed, another Israeli airstrike hit the tent camps in the Gazan city of Rafah. Once taken as the shelter of the Palestinian people, the city is once again engulfed in fire and death.
“at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.” [17]
Notes:
1 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2 Part 2 (1931 – 1934), ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Belknap Press, 2005), 732.
2 Harun Farocki, “Risquer sa vie. Images de Holger Meins,” 1998, Reconnaître et Poursuivre, Textes réunis et introduits par Christa Blümlinger, suivis d’une filmographie commentée, (Théâtre Typographique: 2002): 21-22.
3 Aaron Bushnell’s act reminded me of Adel Abdessemed’s work Je suis innocent (2012) where the artist sets himself on fire in response to the uprisings of the Arab Spring, and the civil war in Syria. – Author’s note
4 Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 1989. 5 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003.
6 The installation is made up of a 50 inch rear projection video monitor, laser disc players, and custom electronics. – Author’s note
7 Janine Marchessault, “Incorporating the Gaze,” (Parachute, no 65, January, February, March 1992): 26.
10 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, 1993, xix
11 2024 The Cyprus Pavilion: “On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare…” – Author’s note
12 Repeat after Me I(2022) was shot in a camp for “domestic refugees” outside of Lviv. Repeat after Me II(2024) was created outside of Ukraine, in locations that were safe for the participants.
13 Detention’s beta was released a month after Taiwan’s presidential election. The game was said to be based on the 1949 National Keelung Senior High School Incident.
14 Thanks to the artist Cao Shu who shared his gaming experience on Detention. – Author’s note
15 Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2010), 33. 16 A frequently quoted “maxim” by Prussian general and military theorist Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz from his book, On War. – Author’s note
17 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2 Part 2 (1931 – 1934), ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Belknap Press, 2005), 732.
Translated by Yun Qin Wang
Wang Shuman, a curator and writer born in Nanjing, China, is currently based in Hong Kong and an associate curator at Tai Kwun. From 2017 to 2023, she served as the supervisor of the Exhibition Department at OCAT Shanghai.
