Terry Atkinson - jamie wagg

TABOO

Questions as to how a taboo subject gets constructed are, it seems, never very far from the centre of history work. Matters of what ought, if anything, to be censored and what ought not to be pepper the history of history work.

I have made work on the history of Britain–Ireland relations, and it has sometimes been suggested, to me at least, that this is an inappropriate subject for contemporary history work. One persistent suggestion being that people should not make money out of other people’s troubles (I’ve sold quite a few of the Irish works). Another has been, perhaps not quite so persistent, that to comment upon such troublesome topics from the relative immunity of the artist’s studio is a dubious privilege and refuge. These two views are often interlinked. Take the example of a war correspondent as a means of trying to fill out the above points.

The strict logical outcome of the “making money out of other people’s troubles” argument is that war correspondents should offer their services free. This seems though, in the social rather than the logical sense, to be counterintuitive. To the contrary, the opposite case may be argued: that, since war correspondents put themselves in danger, their monetary reward should reflect this. It would be interesting to know if war correspondents get paid compensatory bonuses for placing themselves at risk—a kind of danger money. Thus monetary reward is linked to a notion of risk shared with the people upon and about which the correspondent is reporting. The second point above, the “relative safety of the artist’s studio” argument, joins the monetary reward equation.

The equivalent to the correspondent then, according to this logic, would be a war artist who was, say, humping it to Goose Green with 2 Para, exposed to the Argentinian guns. Thus she, the artist, would be justifiably earning her money.

However, it is perfectly obvious that an history artist may, say, paint about war without being an official war artist. Conversely, and sometimes it may amount to the same thing, a war artist may paint about war without being at the event she depicts (David Bomberg was not with the Canadians when they stormed Vimy Ridge in 1917), or even without showing up at, say, the front at all. An officially appointed war artist painting only from sources brought to her via the media, or painting from imagination, or from staged sets, may seem an historically absurd figure, but she is not a logically absurd figure. I guess though the distinction I am trying to draw here turns on one held between, on the one hand, a war artist, and on the other, an artist who works on the subject of war.

But if the argument is strictly maintained that artists should not make money out of other people’s troubles then, for example, Goya should not have made money out of painting The Shootings of the Third of May—maybe he didn’t?!! Of course, in this picture the Spanish peasants being shot by the French occupying forces are probably nameless, a generalised peasantry. A problem with a photograph of a person is that it may perhaps be recognised as of who it is of. Nevertheless, the execution depicted by Goya is a brutal and unforgiving event, and in no matter how distilled and abstracted form is a depiction of someone’s troubles. But it was conducted within some framework, no matter how extended, of “war” (an expansively hyperbolic and euphemistic term if ever there was one—as the present use of the term war criminal in the old Yugoslavia is daily proving).

It is within this sense of “war” that I made the works on the history of Britain–Ireland relations; that is, I presumed, perhaps rashly, that work of this kind could be housed within this expansive framework of “war”, or at least “war-like”. The Provisional IRA (hereafter PIRA) says it is at war with Britain; the British are then, to all intents and purposes, compelled to conduct something that looks like limited war with PIRA. Inside the framework of this expanded term “war”, a term such as “hostilities” may be one of its hyperbolic, euphemistic derivations. But no matter what it is called—and Goya, for example, called it The Disasters of War—people’s troubles may be uniformly atrocious.

Inevitably, inside the framework of a term like “war”, many stretchings and twistings of ethical terms seem to take place.¹² The depiction of “war-like” events is a hard place to be for relatives and friends of the depicted victims of such events.¹³ But it is often an implicitly agreed sense of hard place which forms the basis of some kind of a consensus of what it is permissible to depict—take the implicit agreements of such matters, say, around a term such as “enemy”.

Even in the grotesque atrocities depicted in Goya’s Disasters of War, this publicness somehow, in respect of some notion perhaps of the spectacle of… war? cruelty? etc., seems to mobilise around some further notion of the limits of public conscience (which often seems a very abstract and inconsistent notion, as we shall see), allowing some kind of even alleviation of atrociousness of subject. Here, for example, is Marcuse writing of The Disasters of War:

“…The result is most evident in those works which are the uncompromisingly ‘direct’ accusation of reality. The artist indicts—but the indictment anaesthetises the terror. Thus the brutality, stupidity, horror of war, are all there in the work of Goya, but as ‘pictures’ they are caught up in the dynamic of aesthetic transfiguration—they can be admired, side by side, with the portraits of the King who presided over the horror. The form contradicts the content and triumphs over the content—at the price of anaesthetisation. The immediate unsublimated (physiological and psychological) response, vomiting, crying, fury, gives way to the aesthetic experience: germane response to the work of art…”¹⁴

There are quite a number of things, I think, which are arguable in the above passage. But here I only raise briefly the kind of brute matter of aesthetic transfiguration, which is a big enough topic anyway.

Specifically, the matter of Marcuse’s characterisation of it as the triumph of form over content. This, it seems to me, won’t quite do. For what Goya pictures is content, and some of the content is the content of form. The complexities of picturing are raised right there! The notion of aesthetic transfiguration itself seems to me to be an issue of representation, and form and content cannot be separated, one as somehow representing and the other as somehow represented. This is carving the world of representation at the joints of aesthetic ideology—not a very productive way of carving.

In any case, there may be subjects, at any given time, which are taboo to the extent that even in the case of devoted believers in aesthetic transfiguration, such as Marcuse apparently was, they are, so to write, past the pale of being capable of being transfigured. Of course, Marcuse, who was a smart guy, could turn the term “aesthetic transfiguration” into a bucket term which catches something like the phrase, “if it’s good, it’s good.”

Aesthetic transfiguration though I am taking to mean something like “an atrocious scene beautifully depicted”, which, obviously, presumes such a scene can be depicted—this is the logic of it. But there are claims made about events such that the events should not be depicted—I imagine they were made, especially retrospectively, about Goya’s Disasters of War. And a “should not” is not a “cannot”.

The arguments about the depiction of events in the Bulger murder took this form. This seemed strange insofar as the claim was made in respect of two art objects which comprised images which the media, TV and newspapers, had freely used for weeks on end, without hardly a murmur of protest. Indeed, protests over the art depictions of the Bulger murder were formulated in, and often came from, a media industry which had saturated some of its coverage with the very same images that Jamie Wagg used in the pictures in the Whitechapel Open.

So seemingly, the conversion to art status was a significant factor in this chain of what seems hypocritical moral self-righteousness. The equation art = money was one of the main players in this crusade; it goes without saying, I suppose, but I’ll say it anyway. Such issues seem locked into, in a particularly dramatic way, the publicly agreed notion of the “public” and the publicly agreed notion of the “private”. Such matters stay, at least in these remarks, at the centre of the concerns here.

Just some last points bearing upon an acceptable subject/taboo subject in respect of the factors of temporal and geographical distance.

¹¹ In passing, it perhaps should be noted that the Brit Art show I made in 1987 (Air Gallery, Gimpel Fils, London), was constituted of works which I called Goya 1 and Goya 2 series. This was a nominal attempt to acknowledge Goya’s high visibility in my practice, or at least in the phantasmagoria of my practice.

¹² It has been noted, no doubt, that the various ideological postures of Kitson, Howson and Keane are not without some marked symptoms of a methodological solipsism—this may be more revealing than some people realise and, for all I know, more revealing than the artists realise.

¹³ Two primary examples of photographs hitting this hard place last year: (1) War or “war”, the photograph of the Bosnian woman who hung herself from a tree (the photograph received wide exposure). (2) Not-war or “not-war”, the photographs of the dead child being carried by the fireman from the devastation of the Oklahoma bombing. This latter comprised two different but similar sets of photographs by different amateur photographers, one who refused and one who took money for the photographs. The one who took money, as a result, lost his job with the Oklahoma Gas Company.

¹⁴ Herbert Marcuse, “Art as a Form of Reality”.

In the WWI works I made (1974–81), temporal distance was probably a significant factor in defining whatever leeway there was in their depictive space. In any case, the WWI works were, as I have mentioned already, concerned with historical transmission per se, not simply depictions of WWI events, and this may have widened the depictive space.

(In respect of an institutional, historical transmitting instrument such as the Imperial War Museum, the 50-year security ruling is perhaps always a censorial shadow.)¹⁵

¹⁵ The shadow of a secure transmission is one cast a long way into the organisation of a place such as the IWM. Cf. 3, above.

The Irish work I made did not, though, enjoy the luxury of such temporal distance. Nor did works I made depicting events in Vietnam, Beirut and the Falklands. In the case of the latter two, the productions of the works were temporally a few weeks at most, sometimes more or less within a couple of days, very close to the events they depicted.

For a Brit artist, depicting events in the Falklands was probably the one likely to be most immediately touchy, as, obviously, the Brit-centred point of production at home was in the midst of, so to write, the xenophobic maelstrom. But in these kinds of respects, the production of the Irish works was perhaps the most precarious and contentious, if only because the Falklands were held within the euphemistic solipsisms of “war”.¹⁶

The Irish works enjoyed neither temporal nor geographical distance, and were likely to head into the recurrent psychologically traumatic condition of the PIRA continuing to bomb and shoot their grim presence in both Northern Ireland and mainland Britain. The business of publicly intruding upon matters which are publicly considered to belong to the realm of the private (grief, for example), is always not too far away for anyone taking a chance on depicting events from the Britain–Ireland historical scenario.

¹⁶ Cf. 12 above.

But there is apparently—the Birmingham pub bombings and Enniskillen, for example, notwithstanding—territory here which is equally, if not more, touchy. The depiction of violent events, or events which are intimately connected to violent events, but which violence is a kind which crosses some line into a notion of privacy, maybe a notion of privacy which is thought to transcend the idea of any kind of publicly acceptable scrutiny of it.

At any rate, the kind of violence I am writing of here is that kind for which there is, seemingly, no publicly accepted code, such as “war”, within which it can take place. A cover term might be something like “mindless violence”. It is here within a kind of civic body politic where the idea of family emotions being strung out, grotesquely exposed to the public gaze into the publicly established notion of the “private”, is such a loaded, and manipulative, field of history.

And, of course, even events covered by the extended version of something like “war” frequently move into this field as well. There is no clear boundary between the edge of, on the one hand, mindful violence (say “war”) and mindless violence (say “murder”), on the other.¹⁷

Events in the recent Britain–Ireland confrontation seem permanently to work in this murky edge (the Hunger Strikes in the H-Blocks in 1981 spotlighted the murky edge; that is to say, the edge remained murky but brilliantly focussed as murky. The prisoners struck for political status; the British government maintained they were common criminals).

Thus common murder, that is murder done by common criminals, is at the top of the hysterical pile. Any artist, no matter how well meaning, attempting to depict a contemporary murder risks public obloquy by intruding on the publicly perceived notion of the private.

¹⁷ Richter’s soft-focus paintings of the photographs of the scenes of the (alleged) suicides of the Baader–Meinhof members seem to function in this kind of area. They are soft focus too in the ideological sense.

The weight of the history of painting registers heavily in these paintings. It may help to defocus the starkness of the questions that someone like Gudrun Ensslin or Ulrike Meinhof posed. Such an ideological defocussing is the invite to the history party of the aesthetic transfigurers, where history is, monovocally and platitudinously, forced back on a notion of the history of painting as the “history”.

And the fermenting centre of such public rage appears to be directed at attempts to depict what itself appears to be the most gratuitous murder. Or, as we shall see, so it seems. Events which, ostensibly, have no attachment at all to such a socially defined thing as “war”, even in its most distended and distracted sense, such as we may hold events in Bosnia to have been.

When Jamie Wagg depicted events from the sequence leading up to the Bulger murder, he provoked this raging centre. At first look, this rage was provoked by the two main points of focus I have mentioned already. First, that an event such as the Bulger murder is unworthy of being depicted as art (this might have been the get-out for TV and press images—in fact often the same images as the ones used by Wagg—that press visuals are not art!), and second, that the artist had the possibility of making money out of his depictions (this did not single him out from the media at all).

The Bulger murder conforms to one of society’s worst nightmares: not just the murder of a child, but the murder of a child by a child. (The only thing I can think of which would have added to the grotesque horror of the scenario was if something like cannibalism had been involved.) The murder of a child by a child seemingly transgresses, in the most devastating way, our notion of childhood innocence.

It should be perhaps remembered though that the world of art objects is replete with the depictions of events like these. What is perhaps special about Jamie Wagg’s depictions is that they are literally images from a recording of part of the event.

Whilst temporal or geographical distance may relieve the psychological trauma of the vilest forms of murder (say the events at Auschwitz fifty years ago—temporal distance—or the genocide in Ruanda last year—geographical distance, and probably racial distance too), the Bulger murder offended some of the tenderest and dearly held of aspirations of Western society. It was in this offence that it was psychologically intimate and traumatic—not only the offence of a child violently killed, but the notion of a child violently killing a child.

So the first way Wagg offended was by selecting the event.

A second way that Wagg was seen to have transgressed was in using the images in the way he did use them. This move presses into art judgements, or at least judgements about art, and maybe into some such ground as aesthetic transfiguration: the formal qualities (a shaky characterisation at the best of times) of the works.

Wagg’s depictions were relatively “flat”, relatively uninflected by an overt moral stance, much in the way Warhol presented images from traffic accidents. This seemed to suggest to some people, I guess, that Wagg was putting himself forward as a kind of mere carrier of an horrific historical event, someone who lacked a sense of proper tragedy and outrage. At the extreme end, maybe not even having an opinion on the matter.

This may, at least in the short term, be Wagg putting himself in a no-win situation. On the one hand, to those who hold such an event as the Bulger murder to be unworthy of depiction and/or unworthy of a commercial dimension, Wagg immediately gives offence, as he has found out. And on the other hand, in flatly presenting a photographic image (shall we call it here the formal resources of the depiction), he may invite the critical opprobrium of, say, the devotees of aesthetic transfiguration; he may have found this out too.

But clearly, Wagg, in one way or another, hit a social nerve, because the Bulger murder did not only happen to society, it happened in society. It happened in the sense of it being done to one of us by one of us, and both were children.

The further images it raises might people Goya’s worst nightmares. That of a society where not only the adults are murderers, hedged about them by all kinds of legal solipsisms for committing murder and having murder committed in their name (“war”), but their children are murderers before their time, and, worst of all, of each other. Before they even achieve adulthood, they commit the acts of adults at their worst.

It is in the way that Wagg’s work sidles up to these issues that it may turn out to be heavy calibre history work. And it may turn out to be a good deal more articulate about the aporias of the society from which it comes than it is being given credit for.

None of us like this side of our species’ performance. We had much rather we had never heard of the Bulger murder; we wish it had never happened, much as we wish Auschwitz or Ruanda had never happened. But once it has happened, and once we know it has happened, then Goya’s history dogs emerge, once again, howling from their traps.