April 15 – June 3, 2011    Oak Cliff Cultural Center

The exhibition XXI: Conflicts in a New Century, co-curated by Charles Dee Mitchell and Cynthia Mulcahy, examines conflicts in the first decadeof the 21st century including wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Congo, and Ivory Coast through photographs by many of the most notable artists, documentary photographers and photojournalists working today including Americans Stephanie Sinclair, James Nachtwey, Chris Anderson, Jamel Shabazz, Eugene Richards, Christopher Morris, Lori Grinker, Rania Matar and Oak Cliff-based independent photographers Kael Alford and Thorne Anderson; British photographers Lisa Barnard, Tim Hetherington and Gary Knight; Middle East photojournalist Natan Dvir; and African photographers Akintunde Akinleye (Nigeria), Guy Tillim (South Africa) and Fatagoma Silue (Ivory Coast), among others.

Nota Bene: The exhibition will be accompanied by a free public film screening in May of the documentary Restrepo at the newly restored Texas Theatre, located directly next door to the cultural center. A free panel discussion with Oak Cliff-based independent photographers Kael Alford and Thorne Anderson is also scheduled during the run of the exhibition.

Group show to be shown at LOOK2011 photography festival in Liverpool.  With images by Simon Norfolk, Tim Hetherington, Zijah Gafic, Paul Lowe, Edmund Clark, Lisa Barnard,  Ashley Gilbertson, Brett Van Ort, Mishka Henner, Adam broomberg and Olivier Chanarin

Images of atrocity are deeply problematic, in that they potentially create a tension between form and content and are often accused of re-victimisation, aesthetisation of suffering, compassion fatigue and exploitation. As an alternative, therefore, there is considerable potential in examining images associated with atrocity that do not depict the actual act of violence or the victim itself, but rather depict the circumstances around which such acts occurred. Such images of the absence of visible violence can lead the viewer into an imaginative engagement with the nature of atrocity, and the nature of those who perpetrate it. In exploring this absence, Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ (1963), can be taken to mean that the spaces in which atrocities take place are often nondescript, everyday and banal, and that the people who commit them may appear on the surface to be so as well, even if their interior motivations and rationales are far more complex than that they were simply following orders. Photography, with its optical -mechanical process, is adept at recording such banal facts of the scene, and by inviting the viewer to scan the image for minute details, often generates a tension between such mundanites and the audiences’ knowledge of the potential import of the situation garnered via a caption. This strategy of the aesthetics of the banal has become a common one in contemporary photographic practice, however, the idea that an image that appears on the surface to be of an ordinary scene or person, but which the viewer then discovers contains another, deeper and more imaginative reading, is one that has long been effective.

The media coverage of conflict, disasters and human suffering is full of ethical problems, and the risk of victimisation or exploitation of the subject’s distress is real and present.  Whilst such claims are disputable, as an alternative to graphic images of violence an approach to documentary photography has emerged that focuses on the traces of war rather than its direct effects on the human body. Photographers such as turn their attention to the landscapes of war, and to the objects and detritus it produces. By photographing these ‘still lives’ they deal with the complex issues of the ethics of representation whilst simultaneously opening up an imaginative space in which the viewer is invited to engage in a performative interaction with the situation. They also explore alternative vehicles for the dissemination of their work, including books, exhibitions and the web. By exploiting the presence of absence in objects and places, they offer an alternative and powerful route to the documentation of violence.

From left to right. Ben Burbridge, Gordon Macdonald, Lisa Barnard and Anna

These images form part of Lisa Barnard’s project 32 Smith Square, arising out of her
ongoing documentation of the former Conservative Central Office, commissioned by
the building’s current architects, Pringle Brandon. Like an archaeologist excavating
the remains of Thatcherism, Barnard has examined the building – unoccupied since
the Tories left in 2004 – twice each month since August 2009. Some of her images
picture the building’s strange, decrepit corporate blue spaces, stained carpets and
cracked plasterboard; others its surreal wasteland of diplomatic gifts, dishevelled
election posters, rosettes and un-blown-up balloons. But it is the portraits of Thatcher,
unearthed in an old cupboard, which bring together these works and define the
project. Her iconic image is synonymous with the twisted moralities of the free
market, the capricious exploits of buccaneer capitalism, privatisation, the debtor
economy and age of banking that has defined Britain’s politics and reconfigured its
culture since the 1970s.

Barnard’s fascination with the found portraits hinges on their disturbing combination
of beauty and terror. Re-photographing the official images, and cropping out the
various international dignitaries with whom Thatcher had originally posed, Barnard
exposes the photographs’ corrupted state -– an ode to the impermanence and
instability of colour photosensitive materials. Like Thatcher’s vision of politics, the
portraits’ aged and slightly bleached surfaces are diluted and distorted in their present
form. Deteriorating at different rates, the yellow, magenta and cyan dyes have reacted
to time, humidity and damp, resembling the psychedelic chemical colour swirls of
oil slicks. Their tones match the artificial dyed chestnut of Thatcher’s regimented
bouffant hair. Her nacreous skin appears brittle, as shell-like and luminescent as the
signature pearls clipped to her ears and strung around her throat. A yuppie’s Queen
Elizabeth, styled by a TV producer, scripted by a playwright, and marketed by ad
men.

Not a documentary photographer content with simply being present, Barnard’s
practice engages with and respects the small revelations involved in the viewing
process. Her project relates to the tradition of photography’s discursive critique of
politics established with Gary Winogrand’s photographs of JFK at the Democratic
National Convention of 1960, or Paul Hosefros’s images of Reagan’s 1984 address to
the Republican Convention via closed-circuit TV. Yet the work is not only concerned
with the theatre of politics and its always mediated nature. Barnard’s practice,
from Polska Postcards to Virtual Iraq, has sought to negotiate the difficult places
where politics, psychology and aesthetics meet. With 32 Smith Square, this involves
working through the complexities and absurdities of British politics past and present,
reflecting upon the political processes of fetishisation, aestheticisation and reification,
as well as the complexities of political temporalities and the peculiarities of historical
memory.

Creeping up Thatcher’s body, the warped form of each photograph transforms the
appliquéd blue fabric of her jacket into that of a velvet dressing gown. Thatcher is
aging, suffering from dementia, being domesticated right in front of us. Yet Barnard’s
timely project makes explicitly clear that the lady is still not for turning. Despite
having recently witnessed the collapse of banking, financial meltdown and gargantuan
public bailouts, staggeringly we have ushered in a blue Britain once again. This time
around, the Tory Central Office where David Cameron’s Conservatives celebrated
their ‘victory’ was in the same Millbank Tower where Tony Blair rang in his 1997
triumph. Indeed, although Barnard’s project might appear to document the end and
aftermath of a certain kind of British politics, these found portraits make the point
explicitly: Thatcher’s warped ideology lives on, and the past continues to shape the
future.
As Terry Eagleton reminds us in his 1981 book, Walter Benjamin believed that how
we act in the present has the potential to change the meaning of the past, in the sense
that the past doesn’ t literally exist (any more than the future), but lives on in its
consequences. Benjamin was not afraid of nostalgia, and believed that with the benefit
of hindsight we have the possibility to make more sense of the past than we could
hope to at the time of its unfolding. More than this, he believed that with this privilege
comes the power to correct the future. Thatcher also looked into the past and sought to
project it into the future. Her version of the past, however – the once ‘ great’ Empire
also sought by Churchill – was a skewed and selective version of British history. It
was a vision that played a fundamental part in her election. Under the slogan ‘ Britain
is going backwards’ , the Saatchis’ 1978 political broadcast for the Tories showed
black and white film of Stephenson’ s Rocket steaming backwards, jetliners landing in
reverse, and Big Ben’ s hand’ s winding anticlockwise. Yet arguably no less terrifying
is Blair and Cameron’ s apparent fear of history, their desire to make it, and the future,
blank. If Benjamin rejected this kind of philistinism, it was because he recognised,
too, that those who obliterate the past risk abolishing the future.

Barnard’s portraits also bring the past into the future, and ask us what we have learnt
from our position of hindsight. What we should have learnt is that Thatcherism was
built upon a reckless and often illogical commitment to privatisation, influenced by
figures such as the accountant and investor Jim Slater, who pioneered the hostile
take-overs and asset stripping – known as corporate raids – of public companies. Yet
the lesson, too often overlooked, is that privatisation didn’t actually work. It didn’t
result in increased productivity, instead producing short-term financial gain through
mass redundancies; ruthless, often illogical restructuring, which in turn led to social
disintegration and despair. Before Thatcher even came to power, during the banking
crisis of 1975, Slater received state support. Following the subsequent takeover of his
company by the Bank of England, 15 charges were brought against him for allegedly
misusing more than £4,000,000 of company funds in share deals. The case was
thrown out in 1977.

Today, in the aftermath of the most serious global financial crisis since the 1929
Wall Street Crash, privatisation and corruption continues unabashed, and appallingly
big city bonuses are still being justified. The lesson of Barnard’s work is profound,
and one well known by Benjamin: that true power means sovereignty over what has
already happened, not simply the capacity to determine what happens next.

The theatre, located at 32 Smith Square, London, is presently between productions. The final curtain for the last show came down in July 2004, though its glory days ended seven years earlier on 01 May 1997, though some would say the precise date of its demise was 28 November 1990, when its leading lady, one Margaret Hilda Thatcher, announced she would no longer take the stage.

It will be evident by now that this now empty building was once the Conservative Party headquarters. A famously squalid building on the inside ( a state encouraged by the party’s then treasurer Lord McAlpine to attract benevolent benefactors) it was the setting for 50 years of Tory election victories, as well as the site where party faithful learnt of the memorable loss of Michael Portillo’s Enfield seat to Labour’s Stephen Twigg that fateful May night.

For many photographers, the chance to make a project in a building so redolent with recent political history would be a gift. But for one with a critical practice (anyone who saw Barnard’s Virtual Iraq at the Brighton Photo Biennial in 2008 will know that her work engages with the political), to perpetuate photography’s passionate affair with disused spaces would have been an opportunity wasted. Barnard has brought something else to the frame; an eye that doesn’t linger over the aesthetics of decay, but rather draws the observer’s attention to the poetics of space. With her cool blue interior shots, she creates the necessary distance for abstraction, moving through this new register of perception to a different spatio-temporal plane where the political and the performative, and the past and the future collapse into each other.

It is as though Barnard is using documentary photography to take the observer beyond the real. Although on the one hand she is simply documenting the last vestiges of an old regime, yet in the same frame she is offering up the possibility that what she is documenting is not real, was never real, just a political chimera, all surface, no depth. To paraphrase Roth, the smallness of politics is crushing. So many doors offer the promise of a way out, yet all the time the observer feels claustrophobic, hemmed in by walls and industrial pipes, waiting for the low polystyrene ceiling to bear down at any moment. Thus trapped, we are invited to consider not just the space/the stage but its lost objects, its props, and the sense of disquiet they engender.

A folk doll is photographed, along with other recovered oddments, almost as a fetish object, as though for a rather surreal catalogue. It  (she?)  is so pitifully abject, the smallest of capitalism’s useless commodities; a diplomatic gift, perhaps, from an eastern European country. Two disembodied arms hold what the police might term  ‘Tory paraphernalia’  – a flag and a scarf of the variety worn by the UK’s first female Prime Minister  -  literally at arm’s length. The inclusion of a silver spoon carries with it the unpalatable taste of privilege. Barnard has photographed these objects in a style reminiscent of her earlier body of work Care Packages, a project devised by the Blue Star Moms of America, as a kind of grief kit for bereaved parents of dead soldiers. Removed from their original context, these objects, like the Nestle mini marshmallows or Hershey kisses, are rendered absurd, unfathomable, redundant. These are the props of Conservative politicians, who, after 13 years off Broadway, are now waiting fractiously in the wings to take centre, or should that be centre right, stage in May 2010.

Barnard has been commissioned to photograph the building by Pringle Brandon, the architects working for the new owners, and these photographs will comprise part of the final exhibition, which will take place when it opens in its new guise. Though we see evidence of a ‘seemingly fraught’  relationship with the US in the scratched out BUSH sign, or a tiny door tag that reads Washington, there is no sign of the infamous Vive Le Quid posters, or the Keep Britain Out of Europe slogans that characterized the Conservative Party’s loathing of the EU (formerly the EEC) at that time. Which makes it all the more ironic that these same rooms will soon house offices of the European Parliament and the European Commission. As Churchill said: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”