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Ballen Blues |
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This talk was given at an exhibition of Roger Ballen’s photography, “Brutal, Tender, Human, Animal”, at the Monash Gallery of Art (since 2023, the Museum of Australian Photography – MAPh) in Wheelers Hill Library, Melbourne, 24 October 2009. As the date for this event too-rapidly approached, I wondered what more I could have to say, on the appointed day, about the nominated topic of surrealism and photography in relation to the work of American artist Roger Ballen – once my esteemed co-panellists had already addressed the subject before me. I’m happy to report that surrealism itself – the surrealist unconscious – came to my rescue. Because I had the essential surrealist experience of this event: a feverish dream, arriving before the deadline, gripped me. And this dream, plus its analysis, provided me with the content of my little talk today. I assure you: this is no literary/performative conceit! It really happened that way. I am a firm believer in the principle that your unconscious knows more than you do about what you really, deep down, think and feel on any given subject. (The poet Alice Notley agrees with that, by the way.) So, here we go on a dream-ride. Before we get to the dream itself, some preliminaries. Being a film critic by trade, my dreams are generally very cinematic, complete (sometimes) with opening and/or closing credits, music scores and montage sequences. Not to mention a voice-over narration, which precisely provides an interpretation of the dream as it unfolds – an interpretation (usually) no less surreal or loopy than the dream itself. It, too, demands interpretation! Here's the dream. We three speakers for this panel are inside a rectangular, closed-off gallery space. Ballen’s powerful images are all around us on the walls, shutting us in. The room has no windows or doors! This is the situation we are in: we must present our talks over and over, on the hour – for 12 hours, with no breaks in-between. All this time, buses are arriving, and tourists are filing through the room (how did they get in?), gawking at us as if we are animated sculptures with a vocal soundtrack attached. (Footnote. I recognise that this situation/action is an amalgam of two things: the premise of Luis Buñuel’s surreal classic The Exterminating Angel [1962], for which I had done a DVD audio commentary in 2006; and an anecdote told to me by Meaghan Morris, who said that lecturing at an art college in Sydney in the early 1980s meant that students came and went at any time and circled her like she was a performance-art piece.) Then there are cinematic superimpositions upon the event – oneiric overlays of images, or <8this is the only way I can describe them) image-thoughts. Some of these overlays are derived from the words on the poster advertising this exhibition: “Brutal/Tender? – Human/Animal?” Suddenly in the dream I see this gallery poster with two other words plastered on top of it: OVERSTATED and OVERSOLD. Don’t jump to any hasty interpretation of these words, and their place in my psyche, just yet! Linger with them a while. My dream-narration is pointing out to me, for instance, that OVERSOLD has something to do with a DVD I had just bought but not yet viewed: Stuart Cooper’s British war film Overlord (1975). My dream-narrations sometimes suggest odd, seemingly irrelevant associations and extrapolations. But are they irrelevant, really? What’s even more striking at this point of the dream is its soundtrack: it’s Jeanne Balibar singing the theme song from another classic film, Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) – a performance I had recently witnessed and enjoyed in Pedro Costa’s music documentary Ne change rien (2009), ‘change nothing’. These are the lyrics Jeanne B. sings: Whether you go, whether you stay, And my dream-narration informs me: “Johnny Guitar” is a sadomasochistic blues song. However badly you treat me (the blues singer proclaims), I’m caught in this bind, and I’m here to stay, imprisoned. I had this dream about two weeks ago, and then – this is typical for me – a process of accumulation, or what I call constellation began: I kept serendipitously stumbling across various things that attached themselves like magnets to the core-memory I held of the dream. And these attachments were, invariably, uncanny. Like this email that I received, a ‘call for papers’ on the topic On Not Looking: We increasingly don’t look at images – we look, but don’t really see – although images are treated as documentary, visible evidence – we don’t trust them, and we continually go back to the written words as a way of understanding and confirming what we have seen. We are directed to listen where we might want to look: in museums and art galleries, institutions apparently devoted to the idolatry of images, we are continually coaxed away from looking – we are enticed into following the audio guide, reading the texts on the wall, believing the written catalogue at the bookstore.* In other words, we look for the truth of the image elsewhere than in the image itself! What this suggests to me is that the words with which we surround images serve to tame them, ‘castrate’ them (if you can bear that metaphor). In my dream, the other speakers and I are literally the audio guides, the ‘living texts’ that ‘manage’ (by taming) the shock of Ballen’s images on the walls. Whereas these images, in themselves, are notable for their stark, unplaced/unplaceable look, always-the-same (against a bare wall, interchangeable …), as opposed to the ‘facts and figures’ of the accompanying texts, captions, catalogue, background information of all sorts … Thus, I interpret the duo overstated/oversold as signifying that we – the experts, the critics, the teachers – cushion the impact of the work with our words. I was struck by Robert Nelson’s review of this exhibition in the (Australian) newspaper The Age (23 October 2009), when he writes with salutary, disconcerting directness: “You seem to look into a cell where modern slaves are imprisoned who suffer the delirium of their own madness”. So: brutal/tender, animal/human. These are the ‘nets’ provided by this exhibition to go fishing in Ballen’s images. I’d like to now offer a few observations about these terms. First, Ballen belongs to a very particular tradition: the art of the odd, the weird, the freaky … The work is Gothic, but at the same time highly realistic – a general characteristic of surrealist photography. For surrealism zeroes in on the point where ‘the real’, reality itself, becomes hallucinatory, deformed. This is a tradition that runs from Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin to David Lynch and Harmony Korine … via certain lesser-known progenitors, such as photographer-cinematographer Eli Lotar, Buñuel’s collaborator on the pioneering ‘weird reality’ documentary, Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread, 1933). Strange, poetic universes, very personal to each artist, but often also connected by uncannily recurring motifs … such as people wearing masks. Another item that came my way while pondering all this: an article by curator-critic Dennis Lim (a Lynch expert) in the Canadian magazine Cinema Scope. He pointedly references: … the old exploitation-versus-empathy debate that insistently circles, without ever quite illuminating, the work of so-called provocateurs from Diane Arbus to [Austrian film director] Urich Seidl. To circle without ever quite illuminating: how many so-called ‘conversations’ in arts criticism go exactly like that, forever ‘fondling the articulations’ (as my friend George Alexander would say) between terms (like exploitation/empathy, brutal/tender, animal/human … ) placed in stark, structural opposition, and then suspending the discussion in an open note of ambivalence or uncertainty. You can bat any artwork between those flagpoles and still not manage to say anything concrete. We’ve all written junk like that, at some time in our professional lives! On the one hand … and on the other … and who, finally, can say?? In art criticism specifically, I have noticed since the dawn of the 1980s the temptation, in the discussion of provocative art, to snuggle into the cosy frisson of intimating the existence of a dark side – just so long as that abyss never swallows you whole, all the way. It’s a very curious affective economy in contemporary art: to be vicariously and pleasurably ‘disturbed’ by extreme content from the ‘other side of life’ – or, at any rate, the other side of your life! More to the point: whenever the empathy line gets pushed (over and above the ‘dark side’ thrill) – as in: the artist really feels for his or her subjects, identifies with them, loves them, wants to express their plight, he’s not just taking advantage of them exploitatively! – I am overcome with suspicion. Because there is always an imbalance, a dissymmetry, an unequal exchange in the relation between artist and subject. Just look at Ballen’s photographs in this light, or watch Dennis O’Rourke’s ‘intimate documentary’, The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991). I think of how, for instance, Pedro Costa – a director I rate very highly – devotes his filmic art to a peripatetic underclass of Portugal that populates his work, turns them into veritable heroes and heroines of a certain lofty conception of cinema today … But is Costa then travelling the world with these folk, showing them off at film festivals and art events, chatting with them for DVD bonus extras? No; I suspect that he, at some level, needs them to stay enclosed in their little world, to stay exactly as they are in every psychological and economic sense, to keep living their ‘harsh reality’ for his camera … Why, he can’t risk them becoming movie stars, ‘professional’ actors even, for anybody else! (In Good Woman of Bangkok, the lofty gesture of the filmmaker finally buying his prostitute-subject-lover a rice farm registers as a pathetic bit of posturing ‘decolonisation’.) On a 2009 festival jury in Jeonju, the filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun said something to me that has stuck. We jury members had just been discussing a film that we eventually gave (not without some friction) our highest prize, Imburnal or Sewer (2008) by an emerging Philippine director, Sherad Anthony Sanchez. It is a bleak but formally dazzling portrait of kids as young as 10 or 11 living in dire poverty (literally in a large sewer) – and also smoking drugs, having a lot of sex (yes, already), grabbing whatever enjoyment they can in the midst of material misery. It is at once a fiction and a documentary, three-and-a-half hours long, with a lot of ‘raw reality’ captured by Sanchez’s digital camera. It’s subsequently been called “a lyrical, contemplative and audacious 21st century masterpiece”. What Haroun said about it was, as I reconstitute it in memory, this: You can make a film like this. You can go to the poorest people in the poorest part of the world with your camera. These people will not turn you away when you announce that you want to make a film with them and about them. In fact, quite the opposite: they will love and trust you, they will give you everything – even their lives. For them, it’s an incredible adventure, it’s work (maybe you pay them a little), and it’s a vindication of their lives. Somebody, at last, is interested in them! But what you give them in return will never even slightly equal what they give to you and invest in you. You’ll go to festivals, you’ll travel the world showing your film, getting awards, having highbrow discussions with intellectuals about film and reality … and they’ll stay in that sewer until they die. They might be dead already, utterly without a trace, by the time you’ve finished editing in your suite in Berlin or Melbourne or Paris. You won’t even hear about that. You’ve got their images, their voices on tape; that’s all you need for your career, for your art. In fact, even if the human subject of such cinema achieves a measure of ‘fame’, that too may end up devastating them: look at Linda Manz, for instance, in Korine’s Gummo (1997), who gives every indication, on screen, of ‘suffering the delirium of her own madness’ – and giving it all away for the sake of another ‘cult’ film role. It’s Animated Arbus. Artists coin people into images: it’s a deep, and sometimes very dark, aspect of cinema’s legacy – its apparatus, even. The critic-filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli has long reflected on this diabolical process: cinema ‘captures’ reality ontologically, but then necessarily grinds it through an elaborate machine of filters, framing devices, deformations … All in service of, ultimately, offering up a spectacle that seems to illuminate a spark of reality – a face, a gesture, a word, an object in nature – once it is projected in motion. Cinema, like still photography, freezes, kills, and then resurrects its subjects. That process, too, is part of the grand history of surrealism as an art movement – don’t presume it’s all love, revolution and vitalism! Sometimes, it’s the positive, empathic aspect of art that’s being relentlessly overstated and oversold. I also remember, as we reach the end of this associative dream-analysis of mine, the insight of German filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky in his epic (though modest and artisanal) work, The Cinema and the Wind and Photography: Seven Chapters About Documentary Films (1991). He is addressing – literally addressing the film reference books and TV monitors arranged in a mobile fashion around him – Las Hurdes. What was Buñuel’s relation, he asks, to the ‘backward’, astonishingly deprived people that he filmed? Hartmut’s reply: he didn’t really want to save them like a social worker, but to “push them further back into their poverty”. Buñuel even annotates the coldness of his mechanism of representation: we look at someone on screen, and the voice-over informs us they were “dead two days later”. There’s “no humanism” here, Hartmut warns. Is Ballen an overlord of this type, poised between reality and the image? A master-photographer who not only dominates his subjects, but also dominates us by unveiling something that petrifies, imprisons us in the hellish, airless chamber of his multiply-staged gaze? Pleasantville riffs on ‘dark side’ tantalisation won’t help us much in this vacuum. If this is a sadomasochistic blues song, we are in the position of the chanteuse who, in order to cope and keep on going, murmurs to Johnny Guitar: whether you stay, whether you go, I love you … This oscillation between empathy and exploitation, the brutal and the tender, the human-animal and the animal-human, is not a genteel game of art-crit ping-pong, but a fully-fledged contradiction that grips us, “repelled and fascinated” as my colleague has said today. If you are cruel, you can be kind, I know: that’s the infernal Ballen Blues.
© Adrian Martin October 2009 |
