The rock: points of view in Bart De Clercq's painting

Images are of the order of monsters. They are beautiful in the same way that they are shocking to the eye. In Édouard Manet’s own words: “Un des plus beaux, des plus curieux, et des plus terribles spectacles que l’on puisse voir, c’est une course de taureaux. J’espère, à mon retour, mettre sur la toile l’aspect brillant, papillotant et en même temps dramatique de la corrida à laquelle j’ai assisté.” In the bullfighting occurring at the moment of looking at images (any image), the fight between the beholder’s eye and the painting’s gaze, in Lacan’s sense, is won by the latter. The toreros, the embodiment of modern warriors for the bourgeois spectators in the second half of the European XIX century, are always destined to symbolic death: the power of the (self-) annihilating gaze of the picture itself wins over the eye in the ritual of exchange between subjects and objects of looking, whose roles mingle, interchange and constantly shift during the realistic and also hallucinatory act of seeing images

A man, burning : communicative suffering and the ethics of images

This paper assumes a relationship among life, death and power in order to underline the following: under certain conditions, self-sacrifice—or the form of death broadly associated with self-immolation—has the power to mobilise political life. This hypothesis has been theoretically supported by Biggs’ and Bradatan’s work on self-immolation at large, as well as Murray’s work on thanatopolitics and Mbembe’s thesis on necropolitics. On these grounds I argue that photographic imagery of people who set themselves on fire can perform a political function; such a performance is feasible insofar as the visibility of their ‘communicative suffering’ in the process, and not death itself, relies upon some constructive (‘positive’) instead of merely destructive (‘negative’) aspects of human mortality. Whether a desired (or sometimes undesired) transformation may occur depends upon the ethics of images: their capacity to implicate viewers into a common cause must invoke a ‘responsive gaze’: not only in terms of survivors’ sense of empathy but, first and foremost, guilt.peer-reviewe

On colonial blind spots, ego-politics of knowledge and 'Universal Reason'

This paper examines the notion of death as a philosophical and counter-hegemonic subject ‘erased’ from the imperialist cartography of knowledge. It revolves around three main points: the ‘loss’ of death from the imperialist epistemology of the global North, its subservient position towards the dominance of life in biopolitical discourses, and the instrumentality of death under the ongoing matrix of colonial/capitalist power. The paper challenges the hegemonic rationality of biopolitical discourses while proposing counter-hegemonic alternatives: they are hereby mainly situated in the critique of sovereignty exemplified by Achille Mbembe’s groundbreaking work on the politics of death. In what serves as an attempt to avert our gaze from the dominant viewpoint of epistemic imperialism, the paper invites us to ‘unlearn’ what we are supposed to be proud of. As a way to engage in the decolonizing processes, it pleads for self-liberation from the forms of knowledge that, in their claim to be ‘universal’, continue to pertain to the imperialist reason and its hegemonic matrix of power

An unclouded view: compulsory ontology, clinical episteme, and gendering dissidence of suicide

This paper is but one part of a broader study that examines the gender-specific position of contemporary death and of suicide in particular. As a point of departure, it takes a set of arguments around discourses on suicide as hegemonic, accumulated around the sovereign domain of medical and scientific knowledge and in charge of a compulsory ontology of suicide. I understand this situation, together with Katrina Jaworski and Ian Marsh, in the first place to be highly problematic and lacking constructive counter-proposals. A major task to be undertaken is twofold: first, to scrutinize the centre of the hegemonic (clinical) episteme by penetrating its dynamics of power; then, to offer alternatives to its ‘regimes of truth’ within the plurality of epistemic models, approaches, and rationalities. To underline the extent to which the gendering process occurs therein is tantamount to this task. Accordingly, I want to argue that the dominant ontology and epistemology of suicide produce a discursively polluted and clouded backdrop where pathological and patriarchal principles still prevail. This paper thus aims at interrogating suicidology further, across its canonic strands of thought and politics of representation. Moreover, it will introduce some unexplored dissident perspectives into an existent counter-hegemonic agenda for an overall liberation from Western scientific epistemicide – the gendering of suicide being no exception to that

Curating the invisible: contemporary art practices and the production of meaning in Eastern Europe.

Previously in the University eprints HAIRST pilot service at http://eprints.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/00000394/Article 6 of 6 in an issue devoted to the visual culture of South Eastern EuropeThis article addresses the system of art and the issue of contemporary art curatorship in the area known as ‘Eastern Europe’, with a particular emphasis on the status of curatorial practices in the postsocialist condition. The problems explored are focused firstly around the issues of the representation of Eastern Europe and contemporary Eastern European art, in terms of organizing exhibitions in the context of globalisation, and secondly the role of a contemporary art curator as compared to the role performed by a contemporary cultural manager. The question to be raised is related to ‘The Image of Eastern Europe’ within the functioning of global cultural imperialism, i.e. how do the models of contemporary artistic and especially curatorial practices respond to the up-to-date demands of cultural policy issues related to the area of the former communist/socialist countries in Eastern Europe?Postprin

Communicatief lijden en de ethiek van het beeld : een essay

From a sociological viewpoint, suffering can be a source of power in at least two significant ways: by conveying information and by evoking emotions. Accordingly, social theories of protest as ‘communicative suffering’ distinguish dying with a cause from the one without a cause – unless the latter is related to some kind of ‘pathology’. In light of this perspective, ‘protest by suicide’ confronts normative (medico-juridical) viewpoints on self-destruction as the pathological form of suffering. Vision and visuality have an important role to play in this context. Although images of self-immolation as communicative suffering are known for exerting strong visual and emotional impact on viewers, normative discourses on self-inflicted death have rarely devoted due attention to exploring its image-based properties. This article focuses on the gap thus provoked and aims at contributing to a greater comprehension of the issue. In trying to understand the emotional and political power of visual records of self-sacrificial death in contemporary society, I have selected one iconic example: Malcolm Browne’s photograph of a monk who burned himself to death in 1963 in Saigon. I will focus on the visibility of mortality in strategically staged public dramas where human suffering –through self-sacrifice by fire– becomes an important conveyor of social, political and ethical messages via emotional impulses

Ekstravagantna samoubojstva? Slike starenja, patnje i odluka o okončanju života

The paper centers on the overexposed practice of (assisted) suicide in documentary filmmaking and public media broadcasting, i.e. on suffering and what it communicates visually in the context of assisted voluntary death. The main argument is that visually and publicly communicated images of agony aim to do something: to mobilize spectators in order to achieve goals of social and political change. By defending their own rights - to present themselves while speaking in first person (instead of being re-presented by others) and to have themselves observed even at the moment of their actual death – the suffering subjects invite post-mortem the global community of onlookers to act. Acting here means inviting spectators to engage in defending their rights publicly, including the right to die by having its current status reconsidered, especially in contexts where assisted suicide is still illegal and impermissible. With this argument in mind, addressing the end-of-life decision making is here theoretically framed by the ethics of images and “displays of suffering as formative phenomena of our experience of the visual world” (Gronstad and Gustafsson, Ethics and Images of Pain, Routledge 2012: xv). The overall aim is to highlight the role of a spectator in this context while having the issue reconsidered not through so-called ethics of killing (McMahan 2002) but rather through “the ethical phenomenology of images of agony” and the dilemma to-look-or-not-to-look

Pikselizirana revolucija

The text foregrounds the relationship between three main elements: gaze, image and violence. Framed by the theoretical propositions in the selected texts by Marie-José Mondzain and Jean-Luc Nancy, this relationship is considered in the context of the current socio-political realities in the Middle East (Syria) but also in the broader, global sense. I take contemporary visual practice as my starting point and consider “The Pixelated Revolution” (the project by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué) as exemplary in this context in order to engage with the following phenomenon - recording one’s own death in the revolutionary and wartime conditions, at a level that connects several key elements of the debate: the visual character of mobile (phone) technology, image-producing operations, the concept of self-sacrifice, and the mobilization of communities towards radical transformations. The purpose of this text is to encourage future reflections about the role images perform nowadays (in particular those created under the conditions of lethal threat and violence) and about the implications of an external observer in this process, when looking at such images in the exhibition context from a ‘lateral’ (i.e., supposedly safe and neutral) perspective

Curating the invisible: contemporary art practices and the production of meaning in Eastern Europe

This article addresses the system of art and the issue of contemporary art curatorship in the area known as ‘Eastern Europe’, with a particular emphasis on the status of curatorial practices in the postsocialist condition. The problems explored are focused firstly around the issues of the representation of Eastern Europe and contemporary Eastern European art, in terms of organizing exhibitions in the context of globalisation, and secondly the role of a contemporary art curator as compared to the role performed by a contemporary cultural manager. The question to be raised is related to ‘The Image of Eastern Europe’ within the functioning of global cultural imperialism, i.e. how do the models of contemporary artistic and especially curatorial practices respond to the up-to-date demands of cultural policy issues related to the area of the former communist/socialist countries in Eastern Europe