Search

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

“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