On a cork board outside the enclosed gallery built solely for showcasing the four 2018 Turner Prize nominations at Tate Britain, visitors were invited to opine on the four and a half hour-long video pieces they had just witnessed. Scribbled on A6 paper embellished with the words “Visibility” and “Power”, printed in the same cyan-blue that binds the Tate ecosystem, comments veered towards disdain: “Disappointed. Please give us a bit more painting,” “Art can be more than just paint on canvas… but sitting watching thirty minute documentaries is boring asf :),” “What a waste of money. Might as well watch documentaries on T.V.,” and a short but sweet note that read, “It was horrible!”
According to the Turner Prize, all of the shortlisted artists this year were chosen because they were “tackling pressing issues in society today.1 Two of the four artists were directly addressing the pain and suffering of others—Luke Willis Thompson’s piece dealt with the traumatic lived experience of “racial and social inequality and institutional violence”2 in three floor-to-ceiling film projections, and Forensic Architecture investigated the Israeli state’s culpability in the death of a Bedouin man, Musa Abu Al Qi’an, at the hands of Israeli police. What happened in the mind of the viewer between walking out of these artists' sectioned off dark rooms to writing down their hastily-formed thoughts and pinning them to the walls of Tate Britain’s polished marble walls?
In Susan Sontag’s seminal essay, Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), Sontag contemplates the history of war photography - how it has evolved, how it is politicized, how it is interpreted, and how it is consumed. As if leading us blindfolded on an audio tour through an archive of war photography, Sontag describes to us a curated selection of war memorabilia, starting with Roger Fenton’s The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855). Documented during the Crimean War in 1855, Fenton’s piece immortalizes the cannonball and rock-riddled plain above Balaklava where 600 British soldiers had been ambushed. Swiftly moving us along, Sontag recalls the photographs of Felice Beato, specifically one taken in the courtyard of Sikandarbagh Palace, Lucknow, India, which was “gutted by the British bombardment and strewn with rebels’ bones.”3 The last stop on the tour are the American Civil War photographs of Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan, who were lauded for their ability to capture the agonized faces of “dead Union and Confederate soldiers lying on the blasted ground of Gettysburg and Antietam.”4
As we remove our blindfolds, grasping tightly to the societally accepted belief that “photographs are not an argument, they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye,”5 Sontag reveals that each of these photographs was staged—Fenton oversaw the scattering of cannonballs on the road, Beato arranged his subject matter meticulously, and Gardner and O’Sullivan moved and displaced some of the recently dead.6 It was not until 1972, when television became the defining medium for the transmittal of images during the Vietnam War, that we could be certain none of the photographs we were seeing were set-ups.7 Despite this move towards television as a primary source for indulging our morbid impulses, Sontag argues that this “[did] not mean that the capacity to think about the suffering of people far away [was] significantly larger. In a modern life... it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad.”8 Perhaps this was the sentiment shared by the visitors of the 2018 Turner Prize Nominations. Indeed, what is the appropriate reaction when invited to gaze upon a highly contrasted black-and-white video portrait of Diamond Reynolds, an African-American woman who live-streamed the death of her African-American partner, Philando Castille, at the hands of a Minnesota cop in 2016. And what of the deafening reminder of Musa Abu Al Qi’an, whose body lay pressed against the car horn in the driver’s seat after having been shot by Israeli state police, memorialized in Forensic Architecture’s small, temporary enclosure.
What happens when the visual dissemination of suffering extends beyond the newspapers and television screens we are accustomed to, and bleeds into the white walls (or black in this case) of the voyeuristic gallery space? For viewers who had previously been inclined to close a tab on their browser or quickly scroll past an image, the spectacle of death in a gallery space in London—far removed from the realities of living as a Black man in America, or that of a Bedouin man claiming his right to live on land that Israel does not recognize—is just as easy to turn away from as changing the channel. Distracted by other videos in closed-off spaces, and encouraged, not to act, but to comment on the pain of others on small scraps of white paper, Sontag reminds us that the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees.9
1 Tate. (2019). Turner Prize 2018 – Exhibition at Tate Britain | Tate. [online] Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/turner-prize-2018 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2019].
2 Tate. (2019). Turner Prize 2018 – Exhibition at Tate Britain | Tate. [online] Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/turner-prize-2018 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2019].
3 Susan, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, p.46.
4 Susan, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, p.46.
5 Susan, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, p.23.
6 Susan, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, p.49.
7 Susan, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, p.51.
8 Susan, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, p.104.
9 Susan, S. (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books, p.65.