Alfredo Jaar’s cosmopolitan challenge to institutionalised indifference

By Paul Gilroy

Europe’s modernity was made and maintained by violence. Its initial energy came from the conquest of people pronounced alien and inferior. Its dynamism would be sustained by the consolidation of colonies and empires. Gradually, Capital ordered that divided and precarious arrangement into a system of national states and trans-national markets. Today, it is neither polite nor fashionable to point out that the idea of race was a fundamental factor in making those arbitrary divisions appear natural and historical as well as scientific and inevitable.

Now, the circuitry of power is shifting away from the Atlantic. We all face environmental and political catastrophes that do not respect national borders. Those changes place us under new obligations. We have to find new ways of understanding our predicament as a planetary phenomenon. We must assemble the social and ethical tools which we will need if we are to dwell peacefully with each other in a sustainable manner that recognizes global interdependence and admits the force of our common claims upon the imperiled earth. Our humanity is at stake.

The suffering born from that destructive and exploitative system has been given a voice and a face not by government but in cultural creativity. An urgent conversation about the future of our world is being led by artists rather than by politicians, journalists and academics. Everyday cultural spaces—by no means only powerful museums and galleries-are places where new imaginative habits are being acquired, affirmed and refined. The pleasures of being exposed to difference can be discovered in art’s precious, convivial corona. That contact with alterity need not mean loss and jeopardy even in circumstances where security is imagined to derive from absolute sameness. Freed from the pressure to encounter ethnic and racialised difference as exotica, we can face up to the ordinariness of plurality. Hopefully, that emancipatory contact will help to cultivate the cosmopolitan virtues of attentiveness, perspective and proportionality.

After the Nazi genocide was acknowledged as an epochal event, artists began to ask what varieties of creative practice would comprise an appropriate response to the scale and character of its horrors. They struggled to answer the ethical demands that were imposed by a commitment to preventing the recurrence of mass murder and related crimes against humanity. Those problems-and the various mid-twentieth century answers offered to them-redefined the imaginative boundaries of European culture which was in need of repair. The ethical and aesthetic dilemmas involved generated a battle of ideas which was swiftly recognized as part of a larger political, philosophical and moral problem. They were connected to debates over theodicy, over the complicity of European civilisation with racism and fascism, over the role of technology and debased, instrumental reason, over the timeliness of lyric poetry, indeed over the validity and shifting character of western culture. In the shadow of catastrophe and trauma, survivor testimony and contested memory, art had to be salvaged and made anew. In novel, perhaps in redemptive forms, it would contribute to a revised definition of what Europe was and what it would become in the future. Art alone could reacquaint Europe with the humanity from which it had been estranged.

The post-1945 reaction against fascism fostered the emergence of a new moral language centered on the idea of universal human rights. These innovations combined to ensure that the legacy of humanism and the category of the human were pending in Europe’s reflections. However, the bloody history of colonial rule and of the bitter wars of decolonization that followed it were never registered in the same deep manner. Mid-century Europe’s reflexive exercises were certainly well-intentioned but they stopped a long way short of a properly cosmopolitan commitment to understanding the history of the Nazi period in the context of earlier encounters with the peoples that Europe had conquered, sold, exploited and sometimes sought to eradicate.

The historical continuity between those histories of suffering was ignored and dismissed. Similarly, the broad, human significance of the awful events proved difficult to grasp. But the continuity between those two extended phases of terror, one temperately European, the other torridly colonial, has become fundamental in our postcolonial time. Perhaps Europe cannot remember its imperial and colonial history without learning too many painful and uncomfortable things about itself and about the uneven development of its civilisation. The prosecution of colonial wars allowed no distinction between civilian and soldier. The Geneva conventions did not apply and weapons of mass destruction could be used upon primitive people without any great objection.

Western culture remains disoriented by troubling news of the comprehensive manner in which its civilisational claims were compromised. To make matters worse, postcolonial peoples began to appear inside Europe’s fortifications. Their presence revealed that Europe was unable–just as Aimé Césaire had prophesied long ago–to resolve the two great, interrelated difficulties to which its modern history had given rise: the colonial problem and the problem of class hierarchy. Post-colonial settlers who came to clean up and reinvigorate Europe after the anti-Nazi war have gradually had their rights of citizenship circumscribed and withdrawn. Refugees, asylum-seekers, undocumented and unwanted denizens now comprise a newer caste of infra-human beings who have found the conspicuous benefits of loudly-trumpeted human rights hard to access. Those people are certainly here, mostly because Europe was once where they came from, but the door to recognition and belonging is being firmly blocked off. They experience not just racism and xenophobia but a mode of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion which confines them to a twilight life of rightslessness.

Cosmopolitan, contemporary art like Jaar’s has offered a welcome therapeutic response. Firstly, this oppositional art says that the idea that European development bears a precious and unique telos cannot be sustained any longer. Secondly, it suggests that the old view in which Africa was outside of history and devoid of historicality, has crumpled before the postcolonial challenges of simultaneity and accountability. Thirdly, it says that those who dwell inside the grimy citadels of overdevelopment must acknowledge the way their fates are connected to the lives of people in the global South whose misery and insecurity conditions post-scarcity plenitude and security. This focus on the inter-relational does not generate another Manichaean script. Pockets of that desperate South are now lodged inside the North and vice versa. This is no longer a black and white world.

Somehow, North and South, overdeveloped, developing and developmentally arrested worlds must be made part of the same present. Living sustainably and with minimal conflict, means being prepared to be accountable to one another. Jaar rises to this challenge and his interventions exemplify what might be called a responsible worldliness. They are tacitly premised upon a critique of the indifference to the suffering of others which has been institutionalized in the overdeveloped countries. He does not approach that suffering as if it were the exclusive cultural or experiential property of its victims. He boldly takes the responsibility to acknowledge these wrongs on to his own shoulders and invites us to do likewise. His hostility to institutionalized indifference is profound enough to invite a daring return to the disreputable problem of common humanity. This is no rerun of the old cosmopolitanism based upon extending hospitality. National states are hemorrhaging. They leak people, ideas, technology and resources into each other. A restorative re-engagement with the notion of common humanity may help to stabilize this situation. However, it can only succeed if is conducted in explicit opposition to racial hierarchies, civilisationist conceits and neo-imperial exploitation.

For some time now, Jaar’s tricontinental projects have endeavoured provocatively to place Asia, Africa and Europe’s first colony, Latin America in the official world picture. It is not only that he has indicted the malign unevenness of official media coverage and challenged its implicit geography. He has moved beyond the basic problems of omission and restorative inclusion and towards a different kind of inquiry altogether. This aspect of his work is aimed at the forms of power that flow from the control of images and from their eventful, contested reception by anxious viewers who want to know how to respond to the terrible things they can see, but do not know how, or what to do. They are not assisted in their quest for ethical probity by a media culture and a consumer mood that promote collusion and dignify a culture of indifference which is fatal both for its abject objects and its disoriented receivers.

Jaar’s pieces return to these fundamental themes of controlling images and responding honestly to disturbing and demanding information in impossible situations. He has integrated an oblique but bitter commentary on these features of post- and neo-colonial power with a series of blunt enquiries into the responsibilities of artists as well as the plight of willfully innocent gatherers and transmitters of information. He promotes reexamining the rules and codes that govern the recognition and representation of the Others whose presence secures the border around us. Their appearance in our news-scapes, on our screens should not boil down to a choice between trivialization and betrayal. The artist’s efforts to assimilate and humanize these mutes might, he suggests, become both honest and authentic. That difficult prospect involves breaking up the dyad of victim and perpetrator and supplementing those narrow roles with a spectrum of other possibilities: denier, bystander, witness and perhaps in certain limited circumstances even saviour. This imaginative expansion requires ethical effort and it does not remain the artist’s singular responsibility for long. In Jaar’s hands, it opens slowly into a necessarily painful consideration of where witnesses, spectators and audiences stand in relation to the traumatic and depressing events that now compose the agenda of global news as it tracks our planet’s commercial and political upheavals. The Rwandan tragedy which has occupied him so consistently, dropped out of that dubious programme for a number of the reasons outlined above. The clouds passing over a place of memory become a transient marker not only of the space of death but of the ambivalent conundrum of honest shock and human shame.

The growing inequality between the overdeveloped world and the rest threatens to compromise the ground on which a resurgent understanding of common humanity will eventually have to be erected. Other deeply uncomfortable words like “accountability” and “responsibility” help to specify Jaar’s humble engagement with the humanity of the other people who have been locked out of the promises and pathologies of overdevelopment. He offers compelling elements of a countermedia that might connect their everyday life to ours.

Filtered pseudo-news flows ceaselessly from the frontlines. The media is saturated by the strategic outpourings of a burgeoning PR machinery. In the process, politics and public culture have acquired an unrelenting tempo which is not conducive to any open engagement with suffering, immediate or remote. Jaar applies the same humanising tactics wherever he is. They start from a refusal of complicity with existing patterns of seeing and being seen. He will show you neither the homeless of Montreal nor the charnel houses of Rwanda. Yet the presence of both is publicly marked, announced in other more demanding ways that break the polarity between those who chose to communicate horror and suffering in ways that will never be sufficient and those who refuse that task, opting instead to shock and to interrupt. That modernist dilemma is re-staged repeatedly but it is now accompanied by a distinctive commitment to working through the constraints of the colonial past. It is that resolution which breaks the melancholic spell cast all over Europe by the desire for a return to the greatness that vanished with departed imperial prestige. It is there too that Jaar extends Fanon’s famous invitation to the sometime beneficiaries of colonial domination “wake up, put on (your) thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of sleeping beauty.” There is no kiss bestowed here. The flashes of light and flame are his inducements to that belated awakening.

This article is an edited extract of an essay in SCARDI, Gabi and PIETROMARCHI, Bartolomeo (eds) (2008) Alfredo Jaar: It Is Difficult, Vol. 2, Mantua, Italy: Edizioni Corraini

With thanks to the publisher and Paul Gilroy

© Paul Gilroy