[-empyre-] introductory questions

[Selmin Kara]

Hi Chaya, Owen, and Matthew,

Many thanks for this week's posts; there is a wealth of material in there
and I keep going from one point to another in my mind, trying to respond to
the issues raised with different answers each time.

What a dialogue among people from different disciplines and practices on a
topic like this shows is that we all have reservations about different
parts of the equation. Matthew's point about the value of political art
reminded me of Grant Kester's critique of the conventional notions of
aesthetic autonomy and the skepticism towards socially engaged practices in
the art world in his book on participatory art, *The One and the Many, for
example. *In a section titled "Autonomy, Antagonism, and the Aesthetic,"
Kester talks about how the art world has always been suspicious about
socially engaged works that had a politics, seeing the avant-garde (which
opened up space for thinking politically in a subtle way rather than
endorsing a political view) as the only truly transformative/viable option.
That view comes into question in an era where collaborative and
participatory art project gain valence again. I find Kester's critique
poignant in that being a documentary film scholar, my own disciplinary
training taught me to be skeptical of propaganda and the inevitably
ideological framework behind political, social, or activist documentaries.
That training unfortunately gives me no tools to understand the
contemporary documentary practices which proudly engage with art activism
despite the awareness of its shortcomings. It is for this reason that I'll
respond to the question of the value of political art or
aesthetically-driven politics in a personal way: it is valuable because
art's withdrawal from politics is (has always been) a political choice
itself and the increasing use of art activism by the global masses in
social justice movements attest to the rise of a counter-discourse, which
implies the possibility of rethinking the relations between the two in the
age of networks (of dissent or "without a cause" as Lovink puts it).

As for documentation, there have been different histories of that as well.
Micha's reminder of the disciplinary and power structures framing
documentary discourses is quite important. Yet, as the traditions like the
essay film, feminist video activism, participatory or performative
documentary show, approaches to documentary have not been monolithic or
merely representational (therefore being easily categorizable in terms of
their discourses). Owen's example of the drone footage from the Istanbul
protests is great in that it troubles the common associations of drone
imagery with panoptic or surveillance mechanisms. The holders of power
might have the better means to produce and regulate images but culture
jamming gurus (including netizens in front of their computers or a citizen
journalist controlling a consumer-grade drone) are quite effective in
distorting, emptying, and countering their messages these days. In the
Istanbul protests, we have witnessed the war of images between two
political ideologies and in the end, the question wasn't which side was
more truthful (hoaxes and disinformation were rampant in fact). Rather,
documentation (artivist, activist, and propaganda) opened up space for the
proliferation and circulation of diverse political voices, which itself is
a democratic gain in my opinion.

This is not to provide a definitive answer to any of the issues raised. I
am trying to work through my own points as I write them and hope we can
continue the conversation for that reason.
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