kit wise
Disaster

Artist’s Statement

This exhibition represents a survey of works completed over the last two years, which together attempt to address our responses to the mediation of disaster.

Fire (Kuwait, 1992) was commissioned by Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts and first presented in Melbourne in May 2010. The video footage used is open source archive material freely available on the internet. The visual footage is as found at source. It shows a ‘nightshot’ view from an airplane of the burning oilfields in Kuwait in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War 1990 -1991, commonly known as Desert Storm. The work aims to explore the representation of disaster in contemporary culture. Events such as those depicted here are experienced via the media rather than in reality for the vast majority. However well intended, this ‘mediation’ of disaster unavoidably embeds political and aesthetic agendas within their depiction – serving to construct such events as a form of ‘spectacle’ within the wider context of consumerism, rather than a reality. Artists similarly encounter this dilemma when working with such material. This work does not attempt a solution, but rather asks the viewer to question their responses to the ‘sublime’ image and to raise their awareness of the quality and implications of their witnessing.

In the Explosion series (2010-2011), two primary sources were used, both freely available from open source web-based video archives: ‘Operation Cue’, a 1955 documentary (revised 1964) of a series of nuclear bomb test explosions in the Nevada desert, produced to educate the general population about the effects of nuclear blasts; and, ‘Project Dugout’, a film produced by the University of California in 1960 presenting research into the effects of underground explosions on various types of landscape. In both cases, buildings were constructed as subjects for the tests, to examine the effects of the blasts on domestic and industrial architecture. Both shot in the American landscapes familiar to viewers of Wild West movies, it is ironic that John Wayne is thought to have died from exposure to the radioactive fallout from the Operation Cue tests.1

As well as open source archive material, commercially produced time lapse footage depicting a geranium and a peony similarly ‘exploding’ into flower was purchased from Getty Images. The online repositories used are seen as opportunities to sample visual material from ‘the world’ as a mediated phenomenon2. This mediation of the world and its subsequent consumption by the viewer is a well known condition of contemporary culture, but one that is perhaps entering a new age with the growth of information technologies based around the internet.3

The work again acknowledges a fascination with the ‘sublime’ qualities of explosions, and by extension other scenes of disaster we witness on a daily basis in the media, whether as news, entertainment or a fusion of the two. In this series, a particular focus is the landscape as a site for disaster. Forces of nature and natural forms – such as atomic fusion or the dispersion of dust particles – are given centre stage, understood as something overwhelming yet also to be mastered, in both a technological (militaristic) as well as a visual (mediated) sense.4 This simultaneous seduction and fear is also found in the temporally manipulated blossomings, a visualisation of a natural process only made possible by the mediation of technology (HD time lapse digital video); and therefore in a sense a technologised (micro) ‘landscape’ as much as the (macro) desert test sites, where the bursting into bloom, another form of ‘explosion’, similarly becomes at once exquisite and violent. The interplay between the mediation and manipulation of nature as disaster by technology, and the operation of desire within this, is at the core of these works.

Finally, I cannot see it (2011) uses Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the witness to critically explore the roles of both artist and viewer of the representation of disaster. In theorising this relationship, Agamben uses the example of the author and holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s account of the Muselmann. These were the inmates of Auschwitz who experienced the most extreme horrors and therefore witnessed the truth of the camps, yet who, by definition, perished as a consequence of their hardships and were thus unable to testify, other than through Levi. As Agamben suggests:

The survivor and the Muselmann, like the tutor and the incapable person and the creator and his material, are inseparable; their unity-difference alone constitutes testimony.5

The burden of testimony is shared through a ‘unity-difference’ of the artist and the witness; and is consequently communicated to the viewer of the artwork. The work of art acts as a necessary catalyst, in fact a crucial vehicle for attempting to comprehend what has gone before, in order that it not be repeated.

I cannot see it uses the well-known audio commentary by Herbert Morrison, an eyewitness account of the Hindenburg disaster of May 1937. Morrison was a professional news reporter assigned to cover the arrival of the spectacular LZ 129 Hindenburg at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey, after its first transatlantic passenger flight of the year, from Germany to America, in what was only its second year of operation. Of the 97 people on board, 35 died when the Zeppelin caught fire, for reasons that remain unclear. The audio record of the event has become one of the most famous examples of its kind.

The work uses the spoken testimony as recorded live on phonographic disks, prior to its artificial synthesis with vision in cinema news reports. Morrison’s account moves from mundane observations about the weather to overwhelming horror at the speed and scale of the loss of life – famously captured in Morrison’s “Oh, the Humanity!” The viewer of the artwork is forced into a karaoke-like engagement with the commentary, reading each word as it is spoken, before it disappears as the next word is spoken, tracing the quotation as transcribed to fit a side of A4 paper. The viewer hears and also internally narrates the account by Morrison, ‘hearing’ both his and their own voice. They briefly experience a ‘unitary-difference’ with the text, becoming the author of testimony; yet are also made aware of the failure of the archive to fully account for the original source, through the lapses in transcription where recognition of the words is impossible, as well as the somewhat ridiculous attempts to record the intense emotions expressed through gasps and sighs, as words. The status of the eyewitness of disaster and our engagement with their testimony is made both intimate and impossible.

1 ‘Among the 220 or so cast and crew who filmed the 1956 film, The Conqueror, on location near St. George, Utah, 91 developed cancer, with an unheard of 41 percent morbidity rate, including stars Wayne, Susan Hayward, and Agnes Moorehead. The film was shot in Southwestern Utah, east of and generally downwind from where the U.S. Government had tested nuclear weapons in Southeastern Nevada, and many contend that radioactive fallout from these tests contaminated the film location and poisoned the film crew working there.’en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne

2 This position is clearly indebted to Thomas Ruff’s jpeg series, amongst others.

3 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994).

4 The point at which the militaristic and the scopic overlap is perhaps best explored in: Paul Virilio, War and Cinema : The Logistics of Perception (London; New York: Verso, 1989).

5 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz : The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 150.