by Jon Lackman | 3 August 2010 | Books, Contemporary
Rosalyn Deutsche’s new book Hiroshima after Iraq (based on her Wellek Library Lectures) examines three contemporary video works whose subject is the 1945 nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Its press release announces that Deutsche “reveals the passive collusion between leftist critique and dominant discourse in which personal dimensions of war are denied.” In her introduction, she writes:
Two years ago … the journal October … asked: “What, if anything, demotivates the current generation of academics and artists from assuming positions of public critique and opposition against the barbarous acts committed by the government of the United States against a foreign country?” … October’s impatience with current antiwar activity in art – and its paternal demand that younger generations identify with a supposedly authentic antiwar politics – is symptomatic of a more longstanding mood in art criticism, a mood that emerged in the late 1970s and that I have elsewhere called, following Walter Benjamin, left melancholy … [M]elancholic antiwar criticism tries to divide the subjective and the material, the public and the private, and the social and the psychic as though war has nothing to do with mental life, as though there is no work of the psyche in the waging of war. In this, antiwar criticism mimics dominant discourse about the war.
Deutsche has identified three works that she believes represent “the power of contemporary art to criticize subjectivity as well as war”:
[B]ecause contemporary art, especially since the 1980s, has stressed that work of art is not a discrete entity but, rather, a term in a relationship with viewers; because, in so doing, art has developed strategies for what Theodor Adorno called turning toward the subject; and because these strategies question the rigid forms of identity and triumphalist fantasies whose maintenance helps cause war, there is, I think, a convergence between contemporary art and psychoanalysis … I want to use these essays to explore art’s ability to combine a concern for subjectivity with a concern about the problem of war and therefore to resist both dominant and left melancholic discourses.
According to Deutsche, After Hiroshima mon amour, by Silvia Kolbowski, “challenges the myth of pure identity – individual, racial, ethnic, and national … [T]he multiplicity and uncertainty of the characters’ identities … block spectatorial identification and disidentification, which work to fix identity.”
OfLet Me Count the Ways, by Leslie Thornton, Deutsche says:
[A]s Jacqueline Rose writes about [Sylvia] Plath, Thornton, too … ‘forces the viewer to enter into something which she or he is often willing to consider only on condition of seeing it as something in which psychically no less than historically, she or he plays absolutely no part.’ In the case of Let Me Count the Ways, this disavowed something has to do with group behavior, from which no individual is immune’ …it is [an] important function of the group to shield individuals from guilt feelings by sanctioning aggressive impulses.
She turns finally to Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Hiroshima Projection:
Insisting on inadequate vision, the Hiroshima Projection belongs within a feminist practice of contemporary art that produces what have been called critical images, images that undo the viewing subject’s narcissistic fantasies, fantasies that blind us to otherness, either rejecting it or assimilating it to the knowing ego or the Same .. [C]ritical images trouble the visual field, promoting non-indifferent vision and contributing to the transformation not only of the blind eye but also of the deaf ear. Wodiczko’s Hiroshima Projection increases this transformative potential by engaging viewers in a kind of seeing – and listening – known as witnessing, an act that is crucial in our time of collective, human-inflicted, traumas, such as war and torture, that call out for witnesses … [It] also facilitates the emergence of a public sphere in which the appearance of others is prized because, questioning the social order, it keeps democracy from disappearing.
I find myself buoyed by the subtlety of her analysis, the breadth of her erudition, and the optimism of her vision. I wonder if there’s any chance that these artworks will actually do the things that she imagines they can. I wonder if her (and my and October’s) hopes – that art could stand for something, do something, make itself useful – are misplaced. It’s not that I believe that “poetry makes nothing happen” or in “art for art’s sake.” It’s that I am perpetually reminded how slippery, unpredictable, and chameleon-like artworks are. How easily the pacifist’s emblem become the tyrant’s trophy. Perhaps that doesn’t matter, perhaps it’s enough that I enjoyed the book, that it could “teach the free man how to praise.”
Thank you for your review of this text. I’m currently researching Deutsche’s work with regard to the public and private experience of wearable art and found your presentation of her latest text very interesting.