INTRODUCTION
Hilde Van Gelder & Helen Westgeest

This book is the outcome of a very fruitful one-day long discussion between all of its authors. The debate was held on the occasion of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians, which took place at the University of Ulster in Belfast (12-14 April 2007). Bearing the general title Contestations, the conference was motivated by the specific “post-conflict” situation of Northern Ireland. Belfast, for instance, is a city in which both material traces and representations of competing historical formations are strikingly evident in everyday life. At a global level, contestation defines the present situation in which manifold interests, intentions and investments clash and grapple with each other. Art historians, artists, theorists, cultural and media analysts are invited to think about the idea of contestation: How do we experience it? What are its processes? How do we understand it in our various areas of activity? Our academic session addressed these pressing issues from the perspective of photography. Dedicated to ‘Photography between Poetry and Politics: The Critical Position of the Photographic Medium in Contemporary Art.’ it examined a recurrent question in recent literature on the use of the photographic medium in contemporary art. It was concerned with the multiformity of ways the photograph manifests itself in diverse artistic practices today and with the consequences of this situation for photography’s critical potential. Central to the discussion was the nowadays heavily debated question of the post-medium condition of photography. Does photography today have a hybrid or chameleonic character because it can be part of entirely different mixed-media works of art or should it rather be understood as a medium-specific, well-defined way of making contemporary works of art? Highly complex issues were raised during the presentations and in the animated debates that followed them. Questions were addressed such as what is the impact of the fact that the photo-image nowadays often serves as a useful tool to make a renewed kind of ‘tableaux’? From the papers and subsequent discussions in Belfast, it turned out that a certain consensus existed that the message many ‘tableau’-like images send into the world, can be described as ‘poetic.’ This concept of the ‘poetic’ that now circulates in theoretical debates concerning photography’s position in contemporary art practices, needs some further clarification. Generally spoken, poetry can contain a highly political potential. But in the context of contemporary photographic art, that is not exactly what is meant. The use of
the term ‘poetry’ in this field, appears double: there is a larger and a more narrow
interpretation of the term. The wider employment of the notion indicates an autonomous art, a photography that is foremostly engaged in art - or an artistic tradition - itself without so much aspiring to take up a socially engaged or critical position. The more specific reading of the term ‘poetry’ hints at an art which uses photography in order to create a visual imagery that is marked by its epic dimension and which is so politically freestanding that it becomes extremely difficult to understand how such images position themselves in the world at all. The photo-tableau appears to be the example by excellence of such a more narrow interpretation of ‘poetic’ uses of photography today. Such pictures, as David Green has argued on another occasion while discussing the work of Andreas Gursky, are frequently marked by a rather noncommittal or at least ambiguous visual imagery: ‘this type of work [...]
is simply too open to fetch any meaning,’ Green states (Van Gelder and Baetens,
2006, 124). Jean-François Chevrier has described this phenomenon - the employment of the term ‘poetic’ in the context of contemporary visual works of art - as a very complex ‘language game,’ borrowing that notion from Masao Miyoshi’s contribution
to Cynthia Davidson’s edited collection, called Anywise of 1996. Chevrier clarifies
that he is not describing a language game in the strict sense of the term - ‘as arbitrarily composed, rule-governed sets’ - but ‘a complex play with language.’ Calling
to mind the example of Marcel Broodthaers’ landmark piece Carte du monde poétique (1968), he rightly points out the thin line one is walking when employing the work ‘poetic’ in relationship to visual works of art:
‘[Broodthaers] writes Map of the Political World, with the li crossed out and replaced by Map of the Poetical World. What we should understand, think, is that when he crosses out the li it is not an erasure: the l and the i always remain visible, you just have the e as a plus. Maybe poetic language is what allows us to make the political visible, to produce it. It became necessary, in the late sixties and early seventies, to somehow get around the univocal nature of the political imperative, to poeticize politics.’ (Spivak,
Chevrier and Joly, 1997, 767)
As we pointed out previously, no doubt the poetic can open our eyes to political issues in a metaphoric and deeply moving way. But what remains open to discussion, is when exactly does the poetic reach the point that it gags the political, amounting to ‘open-ended nothingness,’ as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts forward on the same occasion (Spivak, Chevrier and Joly, 1997, 768). However, one needs to continue wondering to what extent art could be political at all. When photographic practices aim at raising a critical debate on the internal workings of the artistic system itself or on broader social problems, is the photograph then able to distinguish itself from a merely ‘political’ statement or a pamphlet? What distinguishes art from the political, if not the poetic, metaphorical component that inhabits it?

The contributors to this book deal with the above-described theme in various ways. Some have worked through a thematic approach and other authors depart from a specific casestudy. The book is structured on the basis of three different perspectives on the theme. Each sub-theme consists of three articles. The essays in the first section concern the way in which the combination of photography and another medium is used to reflect on political or philosophical issues. One of the core questions is if photography becomes more or less poetical and/or political in the context of multimedia artworks.

The essay ‘The Changeability of Photography in Multimedia Artworks’ by Helen Westgeest functions as an introductory essay to the first sub-theme. It addresses the question if the variable nature of photography results in its visual disappearance in the context of other media, like a chameleon. Or does this inherent plurality make rearticulating of the medium possible in various ways, and does the multimedia context change photography’s position between poetry and politics? In answering these questions the essay addresses Rosalind Krauss’ critical view on reinventing versus dismantling a medium.
The next paper, entitled ‘The Medium as Ghost: Politics and Poetics in Peter Kennedy’s Work’ by Anne Marsh also addresses Krauss’ view on mediums, especially the conundrum of the post-medium condition, and draws on aspects of theories of Walter Benjamin in relation to politics and memory. The objects of research are artworks by Peter Kennedy, an Australian installation artist whose practice incorporates photography, video, light-writing in neon, photo media and sculpture. As an artist Kennedy draws on the political theories of the left but his work is eclectic and poetic at the same time. Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History recurs in several photo media works, but Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky are also present as ghosts. In Kennedy’s work photography is both a medium and an idea which is embedded to create a ghosting in history. In the third essay the metaphor of the ghost is exchanged for the metaphor of the rebus. ‘‘The Ambiguous Multiple-entendre’ (Baldessari) – Multimedia Art as Rebus’, an article by Alexander Streitberger, proposes the concept of the ‘media
rebus’ as a suitable theoretic model to analyze and comprehend hybrid art forms that mingle photography and film, moving and still images in their structural and psychic dimensions. Therefore psychological and spatial aspects of existing rebus theories (Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida) are stressed and extended to a staticodynamic model. Focusing on works by Marcel Broodthaers, John Baldessari and Victor Burgin, the theoretical categories of the ‘palimpsestic creation’, the ‘reversible off-screen’ and the ‘displaced peripeteia’ are revealed as three fundamental processes which are inherent to image-structures standing on the threshold of photographic and filmic logic. From this point of view, the critical potential of photography emanates from the interaction with film in order to disclose crucial functions of the perception and the recollection of images.

The second perspective in this book provides insight in processes of (re)construction,
(re)production, and (re)presentation in photography and the consequences of these processes for issues like reception and (historical) memory. Two of the three essays in this part of the book literally address transformations: from performance to photograph and back to performance again, and from photograph to spatial model back to photograph. The third text, positioned between these two, deals with this kind of processes in a more theoretical way, by analyzing photographs on the basis of the characteristics of different media and comparisons with cinema and performance.
The first paper in this part of the book is ‘Can Photographs Make It So? Several Outbreaks of VALIE EXPORT’S Genital Panic 1969-2005’ by Mechtild Widrich. The essay addresses the status of the documentation of performances – mostly photographs and films – and especially how it has challenged the meaning of the term ‘presence’ in its dual significance of unmediatedness and ‘having to be in the right place at the right time.’ While some dismiss documentation as commodification of an originally irreproducible encounter between the performer’s and the audience’s bodily presence, others have concluded that the document is an equal or even a privileged shuttle between the performer and the public. Simultaneously, artists have begun to destabilize the one-time experience of performance art by reenacting their own or their colleagues’ works. In the casestudy, an ‘action’ by VALIE EXPORT from 1969 that was re-performed by Marina Abramovic in 2005, Widrich neither advocates ‘presentness,’ nor attempts to efface all differences between mediated and unmediated modes of interaction. Rather, she will show how ephemeral art practices create more than just one performative moment.
Cliff Lauson also confronts photography and performance in ‘Jeff Wall’s Cinematography and the Proximity of the Photograph,’ but especially as theoretical sparring partners, as tools to provide insights in the position of photography between
artistic construction and documentation. Jeff Wall, the protagonist in this essay, is widely recognized as both one of the pioneers of large-scale photographs and the inventor of the transparency in lightbox format. Working subtly between opposing modes of photography, the snapshot and the elaborately constructed set, Wall restages everyday events and narrative scenes into ‘near-documentary’ tableaux. Lauson’s paper provides a comparative study of one of Wall’s cinematographic images with a number of performance-based happenings that share an overlapping concern with the pictorial. Written and performed by Claes Oldenburg and others, these practices elucidate the nature of the event in Wall’s photographs through their own concern with the photographic in relation to performance. They highlight ontological aspects of Wall’s pictures often suppressed by critical studies linking his work to historical paintings. Whereas Lauson’s contribution is mainly related to Widrich’s paper in the comparative research of photography and time based arts like performance or cinema
and in its focus on ‘restaging,’ the essay ‘What Photographs Don’t Know’ by Susan Laxton links up with Widrich’s text in the reversal from one medium to another and back again in a different way, and emphasizes on reconstruction and historical memory. The construction of historical memory has been a central issue for photography since the medium’s emergence as a method of mass reproduction and dissemination. Photojournalism particularly depends on the transparency of the photographic medium to fulfill its task of making the world almost immediately available. German photographer Thomas Demand’s work directly addresses the question of veracity that remains at the heart of photography’s role in shaping history, through a unique two-stage process that transports its politically charged subjects from mass-produced photographic image to sculptural installation and then back again to a final life-scaled photograph. That he takes on photography’s contested relation to material reality now, at a moment when the cultural field is being shaped by the increased and increasingly invisible use of electronic representation, gives his work the valence of a critical interrogation of one of the central issues of our time: the politics of representation in a digitally destabilized and hypermediatized world.

The third sub theme in the book focuses on photography’s position in-between art and society. Simon Faulkner considers in ‘Picturing the Oslo Process: Photography, Painting and the Belated Occupation’ differences between art practice and press photography in relation to the representation of the ‘Tunnel War’ of September 1996. The aim of the discussion is to consider how art might contribute to understandings of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians during the 1990s known as the Oslo processthat work against the dominant framing of Oslo as a ‘Peace Process.’ It is argued that the paintings based on photographs of the ‘Tunnel War’ produced by the Israeli artist David Reeb offered greater potential than related press photographs for the development of connotations congruent with an alternative framing of Oslo as a form of ‘belated occupation.’ The essay ‘Recognizing the Unrecognized: The Photographs of Ahlam Shibli’ by T.J. Demos addresses the complex understanding of photography and its position between aesthetics and documentation by means of an analysis of two photographs by the Palestinian photographer Ahlam Shibli. It is the tension between these two images, which counterpose visibility and invisibility, the representation of politics and the politics of representation that runs right through the center of Shibli’s project. But more than merely setting up an antagonism that nonetheless remains central to photographic practice today--the tension between aesthetics and politics, between photography’s autonomy and its relation to life--Shibli mobilizes its complexities to overcome both the shortcomings of traditional social
documentary and the limitations of the recent post-documentary repositioning of the photographic image as a fictional construct. Shibli thereby reinvents a model of photography that refuses to sever its ties to lived experience, even while she engages the representational complexities of her medium.
Whereas Demos and Faulkner illuminate photography’s position between poetry and politics by stressing the role of context and analyzing how their objects of research communicate about social and political issues, Alexandra Moschovi addresses in her essay ‘Changing Places: The Rebranding of Photography as Contemporary Art’ the results of the position in-between poetry and politics for the acceptance of photography in the art museum. Long neglected as a second-rate art, photography as such was fully accommodated in the art museum in the late 1970s, a development that coincided, chronologically and ontologically, with the structural changes the museum itself was undergoing at the time. By the late 1980s, the modernist construct of (art) photography, singularly defined by the qualities unique to the medium itself, was overshadowed by an expanded lens-media field, now widely termed ‘the photographic.’ Moving from the medium-specific photograph to the indexical, still or moving image, this novel category embraces, under the same conceptual umbrella, for the first time an array of media, genres, and practices. But is this fusion really a rupture in photography’s ontological premises, a turn to a ‘post-medium’ condition, or simply the profile of institutionalized
photography? This analysis is pursued through a cross-examination of contrasting definitions of photographic practices as contemporary art.

References
¬ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jean-François Chevrier and Françoise Joly, ‘Of Poetics
and Politics,’ in C. David and J.-F. Chevrier (eds), Politics-Poetics. Documenta
X - the book (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 1997), 760-769.
¬ Hilde Van Gelder and Jan Baetens, ‘A Debate on Critical Realism Today,’ in
J. Baetens and H. Van Gelder (eds), Critical Realism in Contemporary Art. Around
Allan Sekula’s Photography, Lieven Gevaert Series, vol. 4 (Leuven: University Press
Leuven, 2006), 120-137.