some thoughts of Didi and Rancière (in Alfredo Jaar catalogue)

The problematic of the black cube, its doubleness is the question to know if it is a subject or an object. This is what you expressed once:

Am I alone in the room watching a black cube?

or

Am I in the room with a black cube?

There is surely an acception of what art is in the choice of the more relevant question. It is not a surprise to read that Didi makes a similar differentiation. Not about a piece of art but about the viewer.  He speaks of a “double distance” from which we should see things, being at the same time distanced and concerned. He speaks of viewers as rope walkers “confronting the dangerous space involvment where we move gingerly, risking falling  at every step (into belief, into identification); remaining in balance with our own body as an instrument assisted by the balancing pole of explanation (criticism, analysis, comparison, editing). Explanation and involvment no doubt contradict one another, as the straightness of the balancing pole contradicts the improbability of the air. But it is solely up to us to use them together by turning each into a way ot revealing what has not been thought by the other.” This is actually the same as what I was saying in The consequence of infinite Endings with the couple fascination/critical distance. The problem of the gaze (on images of war and disasters) is precisely that it is always problematic.

If I watch I place myself in the position of the passive spectator who (with an esthetical pleasure or not) watches the pain of others.
It I don’t watch I withdraw from the world and play the ignorant.

Rancière in his article writes about images and their capacity to evoke compassion. He states that we don’t like this anymore. We don’t like photographers to appeal to our sentiments and pity “even less when it is in large expensive formats on the walls of museums and galleries”. “Compassion, he states, is not the pity for the unfortunate, it is the capacity to feel with them. The classical war photography has lost this power.
Conceptualism in that sense (the conceptualism of Alfredo Jaar, for example) is the construction of a sensory arrangement that restores the power of attention itself. “Conceptualism” and “compassion” are the two faces of the same attitude.

Since Debord it is clear to us that the media are the instruments of the power, bombarding us with with too many images and destroying the power of the image as such. Rancière speaks against what has become a cliché and gives examples where it is not the too big amount of images that has constituted the abuse of power but the contrary the liquidation of images, the withdrawal of images from the public eye (for example the images of the first Gulf War). It is not the amount of images that counts but the way they are contextualized, the way they are “staged”. Alfredo Jaar speaks of “giving to images their context”.