Session 5 – Pensive Images 2

Florian Goettke
Research and Writing With Images

In my recently finished my PhD, I investigate the peculiar practice of hanging and burning effigies as a form of political protest, based on thousands of photographs of such protests collected on the internet. Ordering and combining these images according to different criteria into a series of assemblages directed the research into the fields of anthropology, history, art history, performance studies, visual and cultural studies, and political philosophy.
In this paper I will unpack the process of of researching and writing with and alongside images on the example of chapter 7 “Resemblance and the Grotesque,” which investigates the effects of the performances’ aesthetics on social and political relations. Combining a close reading of key images with distant reading of a large number of images, the images were arranged to form argumentative assemblages that construct and make apparent the relationships between images. Based on the argumentative structures of the assemblages, the text was written, narrating a “route” through the assemblages—which become a kind of map. In a continuous back and forth, both image assemblages and text take their final form. Finally, arranged parallel with the text, these assemblages have become part of the dissertation. 
Given that the experience of images and text, as Tom Mitchell puts it, are in a “dialectic of exchange and resistance,” I will investigate more closely how images and text interact. Building on James Elkins’s list of “Five Interesting Ways that Images Interact with Narrative in Nonfiction” that he put forward in his online book project “Writing With Images,” I will consider forms of research and writing that incorporate images as data, images as evidence, images that move the argument forward, images as theories, images that comment on text, and images that introduce complexity and slow down the argument.

Florian Göttke is a visual artist and researcher based in Amsterdam. He investigates the functioning of public images and their relationship to social memory and politics, combining visual modes of research (collecting, close reading, and image montage) with academic research. His book Toppled about the fallen statues of Saddam Hussein, is a critical study of image practices of appropriation and manipulation in contemporary media society.
Recently Göttke finished his PhD at the University of Amsterdam and the Dutch Art Institute about the peculiar practice to hang or burn effigies—scarecrow-like puppets representing politicians—as a form of political protest. His dissertation entitled “Burning Images: Performing Effigies as Political Protest” combines two discursive narratives: a linear text and a parallel assemblage of images. Image narrative and text are like the two voices in a musical composition, each in turn taking the lead to introduce themes, structure the work, direct the reader, set tempo and rhythm, halt the attention or accelerate the flow.

Francesca Verga
Working With Images: Documentary Photography for Mike Kelly and W.G.Sebald

Departing from W.G. Sebald’s use of photography and image (‘writing with images’) in Austerlitz (2001), this paper focuses on Kelley’s use of photography in relation to memories and fictional identities in the artist’s work Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (A Domestic Scene), and the implicit analogy between fact and fiction. Austerlitz – in the persona of Jacques Austerlitz, architectural historian in Britain that he is told nothing about his identity nor original name and goes to search his lost past – is a Sebald’s book composed of 87 images (in 415 pages) and a photograph on the cover, which tends to prove Austerlitz’s existence. On the other hand, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction was created by Mike Kelley in 2000 as a monumental work, supposed to be composed of 365-parts ending in a 24-hours play. The premises for the construction of the installation work EAPR were mainly ambiguous photographs of ‘extracurricular activities’ that Kelley found in high school yearbooks in America, main source for documentation material, and basement for building a new imagery, re-staged in video by actors.
In line with a culture for which ways of representing the world have become partial, distorted and selective – the two works by Kelley and Sebald develop a pseudo-narrative flow reconstituted as fictional experience from found real decontextualized and uncaptioned images, providing an additional level of documentary “evidence”. But how much derives from their own experiences and documents and how much is largely imagined? How much is a fictionalized version of the author / artist? This paper tries to reveal the two works marked by hybrid fiction and memoir, and it tends to unlock a second step into image practice on memory.

Francesca Verga is Curatorial Coordinator at Manifesta 13, Marseille (2020), and was General Coordinator at Manifesta 12, the nomadic biennial for contemporary arts and culture held in Palermo (Sicily) in 2018. She is PhD candidate at the Department of Arts and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, supervised by Prof. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (University of Amsterdam), Prof. Rob van deer Laarse (University of Amsterdam), Prof. John C. Welchman (University of California, San Diego). Her PhD focuses on the conceptual reconstruction of memories in early performances and video works produced by Mike Kelley between the 1970s and the late 1980s and in later works such as Educational Complex (1995) and Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (2000-2011). Francesca holds a Master Degree in Arts Management with a focus on Museum Management and Exhibitions from the Università Cattolica in Milan, Italy.

Christian Mieves
Illegible Signs and the Critique of the Image: Contemporary Artistic Practices and Notions of History

The breakdown of the image in the beginning of the 21^st century, as has been argued, is a result of the oversaturation of visual information (Alliez 2011, 67). It also demonstrates, as Doane points out, that images stand for an excess in itself by showing a spatial continuum and temporalities associated with ‘assault, acceleration and speed’ (1996, 314). Despite the general function of the art work to preserve time, the apparent excess of information results in the collapse of the representation and its illegibility. Claims of transparency and completeness become unattainable, yet artists strive precisely for the illegibility and non- differentiation. The conscious limiting of legibility appears as a critique of the ‘over-automatization’ of perception.
American artist David Schutter appears to disentangle the image from an increased media consumption. His work encourages viewers to decelerate their perception, while putting a particular focus on the marks, gestures and the notion of history. In his recent work Spolia (2016) Schutter employs a series of complex strategies questioning notions of syntax and authorship: he reuses, reframes and re-contextualizes art historical references by negotiating the detachment of the sign, and the distancing of the image from the original source.
In this paper, I wish to explore the collapse of representation where the ‘illegible’ drawing critiques assumptions of the transparent, coherent image and notions of history. I wish to explore the paradoxical relationship between distance and proximity, visibility and blindness in contemporary artistic practice.  Artistic practices, I wish to argue, create a suspension between the overtness of the sign and instability of form.

Dr. Christian Mieves is Lecturer in Fine Art at Newcastle University, UK. Research themes in Mieves’ work to date have included themes such as erosion and illegibility of images. Recent publications include journal articles on David Schutter, Luc Tuymans, Dana Schutz and Peter Doig. He is editor of the special issue of the Journal of Visual Art Practice on ‘Erosion and Illegibility of Images’(2018). He is also co-editor of the book Wonder in Contemporary Artistic Practice (Routledge, 2017) and a recently published interview with artist David Schutter (Journal of Contemporary Painting, 2018, 4:2).