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Cet article se propose de revenir sur la pensée et l’œuvre du photographe et théoricien Allan Sekula. Disparu en 2013, Sekula laisse une œuvre dense et engagée. Marqué par Walter Benjamin, il a cherché à relire l’histoire de la photographie dans une perspective matérialiste, où le sens de l’image dépend de l’usage qui en est fait et des discours qui la sous-tendent. Une telle histoire doit montrer les rapports de production et les conflits d’intérêts dans les représentations du travail, comme le montre bien son essai La Photographie, entre travail et capital (1983), centré sur le développement croisé de la photographie et du capitalisme industriel, à partir des images de la mine en particulier. Conscient des forces et des lacunes de son médium, Sekula ne cessera de composer des œuvres jouant sur la fragmentation : fragmentation des corps sous l’effet du management moderne ; fragmentation des espaces de transit des marchandises dans un capitalisme maritime et mondialisé ; fragmentation des œuvres elles-mêmes, jouant des liens entre texte et images, pour faire affleurer les rapports de domination, mais aussi les échanges entre l’artiste et son sujet, invisibles et pourtant essentiels à la fabrication de l’image. Gone in 2013, Allan Sekula is a theorist and a photographer, with a strong and political work. Under the influence of Walter Benjamin, he wanted to write an history of photography in a materialist perspective. He defends the idea that the sense of a picture depends on the discursive and social context, not in the picture itself. Such a history emphasizes relations of production and conflicts of interest in labor’s representations. Sekula’s essay, Photography, Between Labor and Capital (1983), returns to the evolutions of photography and industrial capitalism, with a focus on the pictures of coal mine. With a keen awareness of strength and weakness of his medium, Sekula used a fragmentary aesthetic: workers’ bodies are divided by the modern management; the globalisation scattered in strategic and unequal spaces around the world. And by the addition of text in order to reveal a possible ideological domination, or the exchanges between the artist and his subject, his own work shows at last a fragmented reality. Often invisible, these relations are essential in the process of making pictures.

In the 1970s, Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy made visceral performances which appealed to audiences’ innermost feelings of disgust and revulsion. Using everyday materials – notably, consumable foodstuffs – such as hot dogs, ground meat, ketchup, chocolate syrup, mustard and mayonnaise, he enacted performances of consumerism in which he both ingested and expelled this potent mixture of materials. McCarthy succeeds in relaying this nausea to his audiences, both in the live moment of performance and whilst watching performance recordings. In this proposed article I consider vomiting in McCarthy’s performances, and the sense of nausea felt by his audience, as an act of resistance against unthinking consumers who swallow culture whole. In other words, McCarthy employs tactics of bad taste – typically, invoking 'low culture' and bodily excretions – as a critical tool for activating audiences. Looking at a number of McCarthy's performances – such as Hot Dog (1974), Meat Cake (1974), and Tubbing (1975) – this article looks at the urge to vomit and the will to prevent it, as a way of both alienating audiences and becoming more intimate with them. Artist Barbara Smith recalls from her experience of McCarthy’s live performance Hot Dog, the sense of nausea she felt when watching him stuff numerous hot dogs into his mouth. She considered it kinder to leave the room to vomit than to do so in front of the artist, for fear that he would do the same and risk choking. In my own reflections on McCarthy’s video performance Tubbing, I read his struggle to chew and digest raw meat not only as a struggle with his own body, but as indicative of his career-long interest in the politics of cultural critique; breaking it up, destroying it, or reconfiguring it into something less palatable. McCarthy's choice of consumables used in his performances perform as selected icons of American consumer culture – particularly ground hamburger meat – has been aligned with mass consumerism and the working class (Levine 2013: 121). In this article I look to situate McCarthy's performances within a larger trend of US artists using meat in performance and action-based art in the 1960s and 1970s, as a device for critiquing class, taste, and consumerism. Notably: Carolee Schneemann's performance Meat Joy (1964) explores the eroticism and alignment of bodies – both animal and human – as a celebration of sexual liberation; and Allan Sekula's Meat Mass (1972), a series of actions in which the artist stole pieces of high quality meat from supermarkets and were then photographed having been 'exposed to the destructive forces of heavy traffic on a busy expressway', sought to interrupt 'the capitalist circulation of luxury goods through robbery and waste' (Generali). In these performances, meat is used as an artistic material but also acts as a surrogate for the artist's body. For McCarthy's performances in particular, the alignment and interchangeability of meat and flesh – most powerfully represented in the ingestion and excretion of materials – is perhaps one of the most tasteless, and yet politically evocative elements of his work.

The text considers recirculation as a process through which both visual and cultural imagery are put in motion over and over again in the current information age, especially in the context of post-Internet art. Hito Steyerl’s writings and thoughts on the ‘poor image’, namely the low-resolution digital image bound to a perpetual wandering or ‘circulationism’, here serve as major reference points for the development of the argument. Cristina Baldacci, ‘Recirculation: The Wandering of Digital Images in Post-Internet Art’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 25-33

This volume takes as a point of departure Allan Sekula’s productive approach of “disassembling” elements in order to reassemble them in alternative constellations. A wide range of experts investigates some of the most pressing issues of our time, such as human labor in a globalized economy or the claim for radical democracy. Addressing a variety of artworks, both by Sekula and by other artists, the essays focus on three crucial aspects within recent politically engaged art: collecting as a tool for representing folly and madness; confronting the maritime space of ecological disasters and geopolitical processes with alternative models of solidarity; exploring Sekula’s “critical realism” as a reflective method in search of new social agencies and creative freedom. A text-image portfolio by Marco Poloni completes this profound reflection on Sekula’s influential legacy within contemporary visual art making ispartof: "Disassembled" Images. Allan Sekula and Contemporary Art pages:175-188 edition:first ispartof: Lieven Gevaert Series vol:27 pages:175-188 edition:first ispartof: "Disassembled Images": Contemporary Art After Allan Sekula location:Antwerp, M HKA and Fotomuseum date:2 Mar - 4 Mar 2017 edition: first status: published

This volume takes as a point of departure Allan Sekula’s productive approach of “disassembling” elements in order to reassemble them in alternative constellations. A wide range of experts investigates some of the most pressing issues of our time, such as human labor in a globalized economy or the claim for radical democracy. Addressing a variety of artworks, both by Sekula and by other artists, the essays focus on three crucial aspects within recent politically engaged art: collecting as a tool for representing folly and madness; confronting the maritime space of ecological disasters and geopolitical processes with alternative models of solidarity; exploring Sekula’s “critical realism” as a reflective method in search of new social agencies and creative freedom. A text-image portfolio by Marco Poloni completes this profound reflection on Sekula’s influential legacy within contemporary visual art making. ispartof: "Disassembled" Images. Allan Sekula and Contemporary Art pages:9-19 ispartof: Lieven Gevaert Series vol:27 pages:9-19 ispartof: "Disassembled Images": Contemporary Art after Allan Sekula location:Antwerp, M HKA and Fotomuseum date:2 Mar - 4 Mar 2017 status: published

The text considers recirculation as a process through which both visual and cultural imagery are put in motion over and over again in the current information age, especially in the context of post-Internet art. Hito Steyerl’s writings and thoughts on the ‘poor image’, namely the low-resolution digital image bound to a perpetual wandering or ‘circulationism’, here serve as major reference points for the development of the argument., Re-: An Errant Glossary, Cultural Inquiry 15, 25-33, Cristina Baldacci, ‘Recirculation: The Wandering of Digital Images in Post-Internet Art’, in /Re-: An Errant Glossary/, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 25–33 >

French economist and philosopher Frédéric Lordon renews our comprehension of marxist structures by his interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy. He showed that capitalism had to shape desires, affects and imaginary of working class to expand its own influence and catch the labour power. We will analyze three "affective strategies", using pictures and stagings of work, at three historical periods of capitalism development. The first chapter will be devoted to the Encyclopédie and its plates of "Mechanical Crafts". Based on this exemplary work of the Enlightenment, this chapter will evoke the beginnings of utopian capitalism and its faith in division of labour, illustrated by the plates which give some ideal vision. Then, we will address the Second Paris International Exposition of 1867 : it displays merchandises, industrial devicesand workshops. It rewards too different contemporary experience of paternalism. Finally, the collection La France travaille, ethnographical survey illustrated by François Kollar's photographs, shows a nationalist and conservative panoramic view of French working class in 1930's. These books try to reassure readers faced with the financial crisis and fear of mechanization. Each studied object shines a light on labor under the eye of capital and covers the experience of worker. We will remind the experience through accounts and writings of working people.; En adaptant la philosophie de Spinoza aux analyses de Marx, Frédéric Lordon a montré comment le capitalisme s'est développé en modelant les désirs, les affects et les imaginaires des travailleurs, afin d'en capter efficacement la force de travail. Partant de ces postulats, on se propose d'analyser trois stratégies affectives, mobilisant des images et des mises en scène du travail, à trois phases historiques distinctes du capitalisme. La première partie sera consacrée à l'Encyclopédie des Lumières et à ses planches des "Arts mécaniques". Nous évoquerons les premiers pas d'un capitalisme utopique découvrant les bienfaits de la division du travail, dont les gravures donnent un aperçu idéalisé. Nous aborderons ensuite l'Exposition Universelle parisienne de 1867, qui présente l'intérêt de multiplier les mises en scène spectaculaires des marchandises, des machines et des "petits métiers", autant que les perspectives théoriques de domination, allant du fétichisme des biens matériels à l'apologie du paternalisme. Enfin, la collection La France travaille, enquête ethnographique agrémentée de photographiques de François Kollar, offre un panorama nationaliste et conservateur des classes laborieuses à l'orée des années 1930, s'efforçant de rassurer devant les incertitudes de la mécanisation et de la crise économique. Nous montrerons que chacun de ces objets, vision du travail sous l'oeil du capital, entend recouvrir de son voile la réalité de l'ouvrier. Nous réfléchirons aux formes politiques susceptibles de lever ce voile et de représenter le vécu du travail et à leur efficacité.

French economist and philosopher Frédéric Lordon renews our comprehension of marxist structures by his interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy. He showed that capitalism had to shape desires, affects and imaginary of working class to expand its own influence and catch the labour power. We will analyze three "affective strategies", using pictures and stagings of work, at three historical periods of capitalism development. The first chapter will be devoted to the Encyclopédie and its plates of "Mechanical Crafts". Based on this exemplary work of the Enlightenment, this chapter will evoke the beginnings of utopian capitalism and its faith in division of labour, illustrated by the plates which give some ideal vision. Then, we will address the Second Paris International Exposition of 1867 : it displays merchandises, industrial devicesand workshops. It rewards too different contemporary experience of paternalism. Finally, the collection La France travaille, ethnographical survey illustrated by François Kollar's photographs, shows a nationalist and conservative panoramic view of French working class in 1930's. These books try to reassure readers faced with the financial crisis and fear of mechanization. Each studied object shines a light on labor under the eye of capital and covers the experience of worker. We will remind the experience through accounts and writings of working people.; En adaptant la philosophie de Spinoza aux analyses de Marx, Frédéric Lordon a montré comment le capitalisme s'est développé en modelant les désirs, les affects et les imaginaires des travailleurs, afin d'en capter efficacement la force de travail. Partant de ces postulats, on se propose d'analyser trois stratégies affectives, mobilisant des images et des mises en scène du travail, à trois phases historiques distinctes du capitalisme. La première partie sera consacrée à l'Encyclopédie des Lumières et à ses planches des "Arts mécaniques". Nous évoquerons les premiers pas d'un capitalisme utopique découvrant les bienfaits de la division du travail, dont les gravures donnent un aperçu idéalisé. Nous aborderons ensuite l'Exposition Universelle parisienne de 1867, qui présente l'intérêt de multiplier les mises en scène spectaculaires des marchandises, des machines et des "petits métiers", autant que les perspectives théoriques de domination, allant du fétichisme des biens matériels à l'apologie du paternalisme. Enfin, la collection La France travaille, enquête ethnographique agrémentée de photographiques de François Kollar, offre un panorama nationaliste et conservateur des classes laborieuses à l'orée des années 1930, s'efforçant de rassurer devant les incertitudes de la mécanisation et de la crise économique. Nous montrerons que chacun de ces objets, vision du travail sous l'oeil du capital, entend recouvrir de son voile la réalité de l'ouvrier. Nous réfléchirons aux formes politiques susceptibles de lever ce voile et de représenter le vécu du travail et à leur efficacité.

“Pietro Debenedetti Lecture 2018”, organized by CIM. Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca sulla Morfologia “Francesco Moiso” (Turin, March 16, 2018)., CoSMo | Comparative Studies in Modernism, N. 13 (2018): Borders of the Visible - I: Intersections between Literature and Photography

Der amerikanische Dokumentarfotograf Allan Sekula (1951–2013) versteht Fotografie als radikale kulturelle Praxis. Die Kombination aus Fotografie und Text stellt eine neue Form der sozialen Dokumentation dar, die als kritischer Realismus bezeichnet wird. Seit den 1990er Jahren interessiert sich Sekula für die maritime Ökonomie, also für den Handel auf den Weltmeeren und die Containerlogistik in den Häfen weltweit. Sekula fotografiert die Rationalisierung des Transports durch die Erfindung des Containers, der die Globalisierung der Volkswirtschaften auf den See- und Landwegen vorangetrieben hat., Medienimpulse, Bd. 54 Nr. 1 (2016): 1/2016 - Printmedien in Österreich

Interpretations of the Politics of Fictive Landscapes in Context: A Comparison of Allan Sekula's Sketch on a Geography Lesson and Martha Rosler's In the Place of the Public Airport Series Throughout this thesis project I examine the geopolitical context(s) of the photographs featured in Martha Rosler's 'In the Place of the Public Airport Series' (1983) and Allan Sekula's series, 'Sketch on a Geography Lesson' (1982). I investigate the manner in which they question the legitimacy of the genre of documentary photography within the post-modern age by emphasizing the documentation of an actual physical place, presenting an alternative to the post-modern notion of photograph merely as another component of simulacra, or the intentional creation of an image without meaning or origin. By looking at photographs that Rosler and Sekula made during the burgeoning stages of post-modern theory, presents a broader interpretation of the development of Marxist documentary photography from the early 1980's to today. One way in which I dialogue with the discourse surrounding documentary photography in the 1980's is to focus on Rosler's and Sekula's intentional choice of material that emphasizes the political dialogue rather than concepts that are abstract and maintain no reference to real life. Furthermore, the period of the 1980's is considered a point in contemporary art history when the political fervor of the 1960's and early 1970's diminished greatly. Departing from this trend, Rosler's and Sekula's work continues to address political ideas throughout the 1980's, creating a bridge to today's photographers, such as Edward Burtynsky and Andreas Gursky who consider aesthetics from a socio-political perspective.