All that Fits: The Aesthetics of Journalism

Nottingham based writer and critic, Will McCrory, took the Red Arrow bus to Derby to see a new exhibition looking at the veracity of news media imagery.

All That Fits: The Aesthetics of Journalism, is an exhibition curated by Alfredo Cramerotti and Simon Sheikh, currently being held at QUAD in Derby.  It has been divided into three sections, The Speaker (28 May - 19 June), The Image (22 June -10 July) and The Militant (13 July - 10 July). The exhibition reflects the curatorial, art theoretical and philosophical interests of Cramerotti and Sheikh. This is because it self-reflexively focuses on the themes of the merger of aesthetic and journalistic practices, Michel Foucault’s writings on the politics of truth and the notion that the contemporary art institute is a legitimate site for such reflection.

The exhibition investigates some of the central points of Cramerotti’s book Aesthetic Journalism. He argues that when journalism began it held a social project to objectively represent the truth to the literate public, but now it is produced with considerable time constraints and problematic power relations. As the title of the exhibition All That Fits suggests, some journalism does not fit within the framework of commercially driven mass media. Cramerotti and Sheikh suggest that subject matter ignored by mainstream mass media is increasingly becoming the subject matter of contemporary artists. 

They also contend that because artistic practitioners have more time than journalists to carry out their investigations they can self-reflect on their means of production, which serves to provide a ‘view of the view’. This ability for aesthetic practices to self-reflect on their means of production brings into play Foucault’s writings on parrhesia and the role of the truth-sayer. As Sheikh and Cramerotti explain in their exhibition catalogue, the ability ‘speak the truth is also the ability to speak the truth about oneself and one’s act of speaking’.  I would like to now consider the exhibition’s insights on the construction, content, and consumption of information.

The Atlas Group’s No Illness In Neither Nor There (1976-1999)isa photographic installation credited to Dr. Fadl Fakhouri. The piece seems anomalous to the exhibitions investigation because it is merely a collection of photographs taken of signs outside doctor and dentist’s surgeries. However, when one learns that the Atlas Group is fictional and the creation of Walid Raad, it de-stabilises the objectivity of the piece and highlights the interplay between fact and fiction inherent to reportage photography.

Eric Baudelaire’s photographic diptych The Dreadful Details (2006) continues this line of investigation and also highlights the osmosis between aesthetic and journalistic practices. The piece presents a scene of slaughter in Iraq and can be characterised by its ambiguity. Is it a well-constructed piece of reportage photography or a staged reconstruction? It is technically amazing and compositionally excellent. The dynamic between the American soldiers, the recently bereaved Iraqi citizens and the tension that effervesces from the image connotes considerable narrative complexity. One cannot determine if a journalist importing an aesthetic sensibility into their practice has created the image, or an artist performing the reverse operation. Scrutiny of the image reveals its true identity. The soldiers on the far left of the left appear to be in a state of antagonism with an unknown party outside of the picture plane, and presumably just yards from where the image would have been taken. It is hard to believe that a photographer would have stood shoulder to shoulder with armed insurgents. It is a staged reconstruction, but this uncertainty leads one to reflect on how our experiences of conflicts are mediated through constructed journalistic imagery. The piece poignantly suggests their potential fiction.

The role of the viewer is explored by Renzo Martens’ Episode 1 (2003).  The artist enters the Chechnya war zone taking on the role of the television viewer. Martens’ asks a group of Chechens their feelings about the journalists that film their plight without offering to help. A woman exclaims ‘They keep coming but they do nothing’, ‘you make pictures but what for’, Martens tells them ‘I’m not going to help either’. Cramerotti states, “It is very problematic that an artist is going to Chechnya to untangle his own moral issues in the middle of what is going on… But I do think he one of the very few artists that is taking this position of the viewer… that it is not just about him… you are watching it too”. We are watching these Chechens and are also unlikely to help them. This process of self-reflection certainly obscures a genuine political issue- the Russian invasion of Chechnya- but importantly highlights the viewers own political passivity and that we experience the hardship of others as a form of infotainment.

Both Cramerotti consider the political outcome of this self-reflexivity to be diffuse, neither anticipating pre-determined outcomes. The exhibition thus sidesteps criticisms recently made about lens-based geo-political art exemplified by Ranciere’s chapter The Paradoxes of Political Art from his book Dissensus. Ranciere criticises politicised exhibitions that subscribe to the notion that information has some sort of innately politicising quality and the idea that awareness of a phenomenon will lead to action upon it.

This non-didactic or critical pedagogical element of All That Fits is exemplified by Brazilian artist/activist Graziela Kunsch and her piece The Mutirao Project (2007-Present), which forms an archive of her practice as an activist. We see police raid in a Brazilian favela, interventions into the fabric of the city, a successful critical mass and other forms of direct action. Thus we encounter a polarised vision of what it is to take opposition to the state, the successes, the methodologies and the risks. However, the presentation is non-dictatorial and without presumption.

The exhibition operates with a modest appraisal of what displaying politicised artistic practices can do, however I would hope that through the events organised in relation to the exhibition, that participants are able to collectively imagine how to translate this self-reflection into action. If not, given the overtly political subject matter of the exhibits, the exhibition would be problematically diffuse.