In the moment of shock and fear following the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11th 2001 the US Patriot Act was passed, stripping citizens, let alone non-citizens, of many civil liberties, and giving the government unprecedented access to private information and secrecy. On March 12th, 2002, the US government unveiled what it claimed was a "clear and easy to understand" way to communicate to the public, the level of threat posed by terrorist attacks to the country. "The advisory system [was] based on five threat conditions or five different alerts: low, guarded, elevated, high and severe" and they were to be "represented by five colors: green, blue, yellow, orange and red." Since the implementation of this system the "threat level" in the US has remained between “elevated” and “high,” occasionally rising to “severe.”
Here we are presented with a government that has kept its citizens continuously in a state of fear by manipulating an unknown quantity – “Threat.” Furthermore the public is warned that anyone can be a terrorist and hence citizens become either spies or suspects. When the “enemy”, the “other,” becomes a diffuse, unidentifiable entity always nearby and always a threat, the citizens reconcile themselves to the role of the victim, always under attack. In this state of “infinite threat” the public relinquishes all control to the State and the public sphere crumbles. In the absence of politics, democracy becomes ineffectual.
For those of us who resist this state of exception, this indefinite state of emergency, another problem is equally pressing. In this state of political manipulation where does one locate “truth”? After all in order to create a counter-hegemonic movement we must also locate ourselves within an ideology. How do we go about doing this if our skepticism deconstructs every ground for truth? The challenge posed to the left therefore is to protect against an “Infinite regress.” How do we escape this labyrinth of mirrors where the self collapses on both sides without recourse to agency? How can we locate and collect around contingent truths while still remaining self-reflexive?
“Remarks by Governor Ridge at Announcement of Homeland Security Advisory System" March 12, 2002; http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020312-11.html
Chronology of Changes to the Homeland Security Advisory System
March 12, 2002 – Introduction of Homeland Security Advisory System At Yellow; September 10, 2002 – Raised from Yellow to Orange; September 24, 2002 – Lowered from Orange to Yellow; February 7, 2003 – Raised from Yellow to Orange; February 27, 2003 – Lowered from Orange to Yellow; March 17, 2003 – Raised from Yellow to Orange; April 16, 2003 – Lowered from Orange to Yellow; May 20, 2003 – Raised from Yellow to Orange; May 30, 2003 – Lowered from Orange to Yellow; December 21, 2003 – Raised from Yellow to Orange; January 9, 2004 – Lowered from Orange to Yellow; August 1, 2004 – Raised from Yellow to Orange; November 10, 2004 – Lowered from Orange to Yellow; July 7, 2005 – Raised from Yellow to Orange for mass transit; August 12, 2005 – Lowered from Orange to Yellow for mass transit; August 10, 2006 – Raised from Yellow to Red for flights originating in the United Kingdom bound for the United States; raised to Orange for all commercial aviation operating in or destined for the United States.; August 13, 2006 – Lowered from Red to Orange for flights originating in the United Kingdom bound for the United States; remains at Orange for all domestic and international flights.; July 3, 2008 — The United States government's national threat level is Elevated, or Yellow. (http://www.dhs.gov/xabout/history/editorial_0844.shtm)
“Infinite regress” in optics is the formation of an infinite series of receding images created in two parallel facing mirrors.
“Infinite regress” in philosophy refers to one of the three parts of Agrippa’s Trilemma which states that all truth claims need proofs, and since all proofs need further proof ad infinitum it is impossible to prove any certain truth.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Freedom of the Seas
Freedom of the Seas…is 237 feet tall and 1,112 feet long with 15 passenger decks. A three-level dining room seats 2,140. There are more than 2,000 deck chairs and an ice-skating rink. The fitness center measures 9,700 square feet and includes a boxing ring. The spa provides luxuries from teeth whitening to massages and a 13th-floor deck offers a rock climbing wall and a big wave pool with simulated surfing… This ship, more than any other ship out there, represents the on-land resort experience. There's so much to do you really don't have to get off,".... - Janet Frankston, AP
Vessels from five European Union nations have launched sea patrols in an attempt to combat illegal immigration. The operation, codenamed Ulysses, is aimed at stopping the gangs that bring immigrants on dangerous sea voyages from Africa.
"Today we are surely seeing the birth of a common police force for the European Union to protect our borders," Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes said on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. - BBC
The cruise ship is a strange case of the special sovereignty afforded to non-national commercial territory. It fuses the safety, self-segregation and control of a suburban, gated community (or the well-policed borders of wealthy nations) with the duty free desires of global capitalism. To those who are allowed the privilege of cruising, the world becomes a theme park, as they sail from port to port across nations, taking in the spectacle: Ethnic food is served up for sampling, native goods are sold as souvenirs, local people and local scenes are photographed to share online, to post on travel blogs, and to illustrate memoirs on self-discovery and authentic experience. To the global, neo-liberal Flâneur the world offers itself up as a spectacle for consumption. The analogy, noted by Hegel, between eating and imbibing knowledge is literalized in the rhetoric of the global Flâneur.
It is impossible however to ignore the fact that the spectacle of globalization can only be viewed as a success from the safe distance of the self-enclosed, economically privileged bubble of the metaphorical "cruise ship". We only have to look at the case of immigrants fleeing various African nations, who perish on their sea route to the tightly guarded borders of the European Union to comprehend the one-sidedness of this view.
This one-sided world-view is, however, concretized by the ubiquity of travel photography found online: from the totalizing view of Google Earth, which is seamlessly interfaced with sites such as Panoramio and Flickr, allowing you to "explore the world" and "show your favorite places," to personal travel albums offered up by members of social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace.
In a world awash in (constructed by?) photographic representation, how is one to investigate the photographic image? How is one to engage the tourist photograph when one's very tools of engagement are self-reflexively encoded? Is the matrix of representation totalizing or are there modes of rupture that allow for the "real" to emerge or invade it?
Vessels from five European Union nations have launched sea patrols in an attempt to combat illegal immigration. The operation, codenamed Ulysses, is aimed at stopping the gangs that bring immigrants on dangerous sea voyages from Africa.
"Today we are surely seeing the birth of a common police force for the European Union to protect our borders," Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes said on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. - BBC
The cruise ship is a strange case of the special sovereignty afforded to non-national commercial territory. It fuses the safety, self-segregation and control of a suburban, gated community (or the well-policed borders of wealthy nations) with the duty free desires of global capitalism. To those who are allowed the privilege of cruising, the world becomes a theme park, as they sail from port to port across nations, taking in the spectacle: Ethnic food is served up for sampling, native goods are sold as souvenirs, local people and local scenes are photographed to share online, to post on travel blogs, and to illustrate memoirs on self-discovery and authentic experience. To the global, neo-liberal Flâneur the world offers itself up as a spectacle for consumption. The analogy, noted by Hegel, between eating and imbibing knowledge is literalized in the rhetoric of the global Flâneur.
It is impossible however to ignore the fact that the spectacle of globalization can only be viewed as a success from the safe distance of the self-enclosed, economically privileged bubble of the metaphorical "cruise ship". We only have to look at the case of immigrants fleeing various African nations, who perish on their sea route to the tightly guarded borders of the European Union to comprehend the one-sidedness of this view.
This one-sided world-view is, however, concretized by the ubiquity of travel photography found online: from the totalizing view of Google Earth, which is seamlessly interfaced with sites such as Panoramio and Flickr, allowing you to "explore the world" and "show your favorite places," to personal travel albums offered up by members of social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace.
In a world awash in (constructed by?) photographic representation, how is one to investigate the photographic image? How is one to engage the tourist photograph when one's very tools of engagement are self-reflexively encoded? Is the matrix of representation totalizing or are there modes of rupture that allow for the "real" to emerge or invade it?
Contraband
Bangalore is often called “the garden city of India” because of the several gardens and greenhouses that date back to its early days of colonization. The city’s cool temperature, dryness and the abundance of water allowed the British to use it as a midway point in the dissemination of plants around India. The plants and trees brought from Britain would first arrive in Bangalore to be acclimatized and then sent to other parts of the country. Small landscapes like this were being uprooted and moved in boxes from one country to another in order to make the colonizers’ assumed home seem closer to their original home.
Consider the great contemporary controversy surrounding Intellectual Property Rights wherein large western agricultural and pharmaceutical companies are trying to patent plant and animal genes that have been traditionally used in third world countries for millennia. This time natural resources of distant social groups are being hijacked by a few large corporations for their own economic gains.
It is in examining this strange trafficking of nature and the fixing of its ownership that I am interested. This landscape “in transit” serves as a kind of island that is neither here nor there, a space of ambiguity where ownership is as yet undecided.
Consider the great contemporary controversy surrounding Intellectual Property Rights wherein large western agricultural and pharmaceutical companies are trying to patent plant and animal genes that have been traditionally used in third world countries for millennia. This time natural resources of distant social groups are being hijacked by a few large corporations for their own economic gains.
It is in examining this strange trafficking of nature and the fixing of its ownership that I am interested. This landscape “in transit” serves as a kind of island that is neither here nor there, a space of ambiguity where ownership is as yet undecided.
Phantom Moon
"In a few years pictures of the earth's orb as seen from distant space will become commonplace ... But today, little more than 24 hours after Lunar Orbiter transmitted its historic first view of the world totally suspended in space, a sense of wonder touches our access to a phenomenon denied to all previous generations." NYT, Pg 22, Aug 27 1966.
In "Phantom Moon," the first photograph of the earth as seen from the moon is transformed into a 'seascape' of Halftone dots as a camera scans over it. This disorienting video is juxtaposed with a slide projection as a camera circumambulates the model blue whale displayed at the New York Natural History Museum. In addition to these visual elements, audio scripts (taken from news reports, documentaries and written by the artist) simultaneously play like echoes or dreams and keep reframing this juxtaposition.
Four and a half billion years ago the shattered fragments of the earth recombined to form the moon. Circling us, it appears night after night, affecting the cycles of the body and mind. The compounds found on the surface of the moon fully correspond to those found on earth, and yet Neil Armstrong described its dead surface as grey and powdery, like ash. The moon is the obsession of the romantic, it symbolizes the virgin and is seen as the archetypal object of desire, but when we reach its surface we find that it is barren.
It was from the vantage of this floating 'phantom limb' of the earth that we first saw an image of our own planet in its entirety. As predicted by an op-ed column from 1966, this image has become ubiquitous in our time, as if it were an obvious fact we had seen with our own eyes. We have accepted the eye of the camera as our own and the photograph as the fixed perspective of reality. While, in our daily lives we experience this infinitely fascinating and contradictory earth only in glimpses, we simultaneously imagine it - project it - in its entirety.
In László Krasznahorkai's novel "The Melancholy of Resistance" we are presented with the protagonist who encounters the body of a Whale. One of the audio tracks describes this encounter. As he circumambulates this enormous being he realizes that "seeing the whale did not mean he could grasp the full meaning of the sight", since to comprehend all its parts itself "appeared a singularly hopeless task." What fascinates him most is his inability to understand the very fact that this creature "had witnessed the wonders of an infinitely strange and infinitely distant world."
A central contradiction of our reality is the fact that our intimate experiences in the world are of a fleeting, fragmentary, ambiguous nature, whereas our knowledge (understanding) of situations appears to be all-encompassing. If the function of photographs is to attempt to - pretend to - collapse the distance between "our" reality and the camera's ahistoric eye, then maybe the photograph has to be destroyed or unraveled to reveal the irreconcilability of this reality. One of the audio scripts voices this contrary desire to fracture rather than conflate, through the admissions of a man who desires an amputation. Here one in invited to contemplate this desire to fracture what is presented as whole and to attempt to see the entirety of that which is experienced as fragmentary and contingent. Is it not in the vacillating field of this irreconcilability that our perceptions lie?
In "Phantom Moon," the first photograph of the earth as seen from the moon is transformed into a 'seascape' of Halftone dots as a camera scans over it. This disorienting video is juxtaposed with a slide projection as a camera circumambulates the model blue whale displayed at the New York Natural History Museum. In addition to these visual elements, audio scripts (taken from news reports, documentaries and written by the artist) simultaneously play like echoes or dreams and keep reframing this juxtaposition.
Four and a half billion years ago the shattered fragments of the earth recombined to form the moon. Circling us, it appears night after night, affecting the cycles of the body and mind. The compounds found on the surface of the moon fully correspond to those found on earth, and yet Neil Armstrong described its dead surface as grey and powdery, like ash. The moon is the obsession of the romantic, it symbolizes the virgin and is seen as the archetypal object of desire, but when we reach its surface we find that it is barren.
It was from the vantage of this floating 'phantom limb' of the earth that we first saw an image of our own planet in its entirety. As predicted by an op-ed column from 1966, this image has become ubiquitous in our time, as if it were an obvious fact we had seen with our own eyes. We have accepted the eye of the camera as our own and the photograph as the fixed perspective of reality. While, in our daily lives we experience this infinitely fascinating and contradictory earth only in glimpses, we simultaneously imagine it - project it - in its entirety.
In László Krasznahorkai's novel "The Melancholy of Resistance" we are presented with the protagonist who encounters the body of a Whale. One of the audio tracks describes this encounter. As he circumambulates this enormous being he realizes that "seeing the whale did not mean he could grasp the full meaning of the sight", since to comprehend all its parts itself "appeared a singularly hopeless task." What fascinates him most is his inability to understand the very fact that this creature "had witnessed the wonders of an infinitely strange and infinitely distant world."
A central contradiction of our reality is the fact that our intimate experiences in the world are of a fleeting, fragmentary, ambiguous nature, whereas our knowledge (understanding) of situations appears to be all-encompassing. If the function of photographs is to attempt to - pretend to - collapse the distance between "our" reality and the camera's ahistoric eye, then maybe the photograph has to be destroyed or unraveled to reveal the irreconcilability of this reality. One of the audio scripts voices this contrary desire to fracture rather than conflate, through the admissions of a man who desires an amputation. Here one in invited to contemplate this desire to fracture what is presented as whole and to attempt to see the entirety of that which is experienced as fragmentary and contingent. Is it not in the vacillating field of this irreconcilability that our perceptions lie?
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Transparent White
"Milk is not opaque because it is white, - as if white were something opaque.
If 'white' is a concept which only refers to a visual surface, why isn't there a colour concept related to 'white' that refers to transparent things?"
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Remarks on Colour"
Things that can be imagined but not seen. Things that can be seen but not named. Things that can be imagined but not articulated, nor seen. Things that can be said but not seen or imagined. I think "Transparent White" belongs to the last of these categories.
Of course, I use words loosely here.
But imagine, for instance, contemplating a picture of a Martian landscape. We imagine a place, like a red desert. We look toward its hazy horizon as if we could actually see it. In a way, we imagine the object - the target of our gaze - knowing that we do not (cannot) actually stand on Mars. In fact the only way we can access the object is by seeing it in terms that are imaginable. We look from the wrong context, we are displaced, yet we transpose our horizon onto the picture's and we see a desert. Desolate but nameable.
Can a word mean without representing something? Or can a word be understood if we do not know or have not seen what it represents?
Shifter's 9th issue Ruin|Monument focussed on the way in which the empty ruin signifies. Like a vacuum it absorbs everything. Like a mirror it reflects back our pointing fingers. The Monument, it was proposed, is the past (memory) embodied, hurtling backwards towards the future.
If the Ruin is an absence, which is transformed into object by our projections, then Transparent White is fully formed language which does not stick to an object. In a way they are mirror images of each other. While the Monument like the ruin exists physically (it occupies space, we can walk around it, we can photograph it), Transparent White occupies a conceptual site of contention. One is not sure if/ what it could represent. Yet one can imagine using the phrase "Transparent White", in a poem for instance, and meaning something.
Shifter's 10th issue "Transparent White" will attempt to engage this untethering of utterances from straightforward representation.
Submissions may be visual and/or textual. The only criterion is that they be static in order to exist on a printable page. Please email submissions to shiftermail@gmail.com
The deadline is March 1st. For ideas that are likely to take longer to actualize, please send a proposal to the editor or let us know what you are thinking about.
Submissions can be jpegs, pdfs, word files or illustrator files. If you are unsure if we can use a particular format please email us to find out.
Please visit the site www.shifter-magazine.com to read previous issues of the magazine.
A Ruin Destroyed
1
Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up. Hence, to decode texts is to discover the images signified by them. The intention of texts is to explain images, while that of concepts is to make ideas comprehensible. In this way texts are a metacode for images.1
On March 12th 2001 Taliban officials announced that the destruction of two colossal statues of Buddha, in Bamian, Afghanistan, was complete. The international community, horrified by the prospect of this eventuality, had tried to negotiate other options with the Taliban. The Metropolitan Museum and UNESCO had suggested boarding up the 175 and 120 foot idols, thus hiding what fundamentalist Islam deemed idolatrous and hence forbidden2. No compromise could be negotiated.
When Quintin Craufurd wrote his Researches in 1817, these statues were already in a state of ruin. After Genghis Khan and his Mongol army ransacked Bamian in the early thirteenth century the statues were mutilated further by Aurangzeb's army with canon fire in the seventeenth century. This must have continued well into the nineteenth century, since Craufurd, speaking of the statues mentions that "the Musulmãns never march that way with cannon without firing two or three shots at them"3. In light of this history the Taliban's actions were hardly aberrant; surely, if the Khan or Aurangzeb had been able to fully destroy these idols, they would have.
After a history of invasions and destructions, the city, Bamian, has begun to mirror the monument's demise. Where there was a figure there is now a gigantic niche speckled with catacombs; where monks once lived, live the wandering poor, the militants4. It is through the historical representation of the monument that we can approach the city. A written history beginning, as far as we know, with Alexander in 330 BCE (before the monument was built), continues to this day as various governments and organizations attempt to rebuild the monument and fill the empty niche. For now, however, Bamian has reclaimed its Tartarian appellation - Mu-baligh, or the "city of desolation"5, a name given to it upon its destruction by Genghis Khan in 1221.
Ecphrasis or ekphrasis (from Greek ek out + phrasis speaking, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name) A vivid literary description of a work of art, which allows the reader to imagine it.
Lassen claims that in 330 BCE "Alexander passed over the plateau of Bamian, which lies at an elevation of about 8500 feet, and in which men supposed they had found the cave of Prometheus"6. Despite the refutation of this historical claim as far back as the second century BCE by Eratosthenes [who in his lost book is said to have argued that "the Macedonians saw this cave and on the strength of some local legend (which they well may have invented) put it about that it was the cave where Prometheus was hung in chains when the eagle used to come to feed on his guts, and that Heracles came thither to kill the eagle and set Prometheus free; so that by means of this tale the Macedonians transferred Mount Caucasus from Pontus to the far east, fixing it in India in the country of the Parapamisidae, and gave the name Caucasus to flatter Alexander by the inference that he had crossed Caucasus7"] both Huan Tsiang in the 7th century and Craufurd in the 19th century actually locate and place this site "near the pass of Sheibar, between Ghor-band and Bamiyan." At this site which marked the end of Alexander's reign, a monument had been imagined.
After Alexander's defeat, the rise of the Maurya Dynasty saw an embrace of Buddhism more than a century after the Buddha's death. By the third century BCE Bamian had become the center of the trade routes that connected Rome, India and China. In this context, despite the rise and fall of dynasties, this center of trade became the center of Buddhist pilgrimage. In this context alone can we comprehend the function of such gigantic monuments. After all, the Silk Road functioned as the main conduit for the spread of Buddhism.
The statues are thought to have been completed by the sixth century. The first record of these statues is to be found in Huan Tsiang's seventh century Travelogue:
On the declivity of a hill to the north-east of the capital is a standing image of Buddha made of stone, 140 or 150 feet high, of a brilliant golden color and resplendent with ornamentation of precious substances. To the east of it is a Buddhist monastery built by a former king of the country. East of this is a standing image of Sakyamuni Buddha above 100 feet high, made of t'u-shih (probably 'bronze'), the pieces of which have been cast separately and then welded together into one figure8.
Strangely enough, after Huan Tsiang's record, for eight centuries we find no descriptions of the statues (not even by Marco Polo in the thirteenth century) until the sixteenth century when Akbar's Vizier, Abul Fazel writes:
In the heart of the mountain of Bamian, are twelve thousand cavities or grottoes cut into rock, with ornaments and mouldings in stucco. They were used by the natives of the country for an asylum in winter, and are called Summij (caves): enormous figures are found in them, as of a man eighty ells in height, a woman fifty and a child fifteen. In one of these grottoes you may see an embalmed corpse (or mummy), whose origin is unknown to the natives and they hold it in high honour9.
It seems that during the span of eight centuries the specific significance of these idols has been completely lost. This marks the first disappearance of the Buddhas, from the time of the expulsion of Buddhists from Bamian in the thirteenth century until the re-inscription/description of the statues by the Orientalists in the nineteenth century.
The nineteenth century saw an influx of amateur archaeologists, who included medical doctors, military personnel, government agents and the occasional traveler.
In 1817, an employee of the East India Company, Quintin Craufurd writes10:
But what never fails to attract the notice of travelers, are two colossal statues, which are seen at a great distance. They are erect, and adhere to the mountain, from which they were cut out. They are in niches, the depth of which is equal to the thickness of the statues. It is said in the Ayeen Akbary11, that the largest is eighty ells high, and the other only fifty. These dimensions are greatly exaggerated; according to the opinion of all travellers I have seen, the disproportion is not so great between the two. According to the author of the Pharangh-Jehanghiri cited by Dr. Hyde12, they are said to be only fifty cubits high; which appears to be the true dimensions. At some distance from these statues is another of smaller size, being about fifteen cubits high. Native and Persian authors who have mentioned them, agree neither about their sex, nor their names. The few Hindus who live in these countries, say, that they represent Bhim and his consort: the followers of Buddha affirm that they are the statues of Sháhámá, and his disciple Sálsálá. The Musalmãns insist, that they are the statues of Key-Umursh and his consort, that is to say Adam and Eve; and that the third is intended for Seish or Seth, their son; whose tomb, or at least the place where it stood formerly, is shewn near Bahlac. These statues are so much defaced by the effects of time, and the intolerant zeal of the Musalmáns, that I believe it is difficult to ascertain their sex. Travellers do, however, agree that one of them at least, is a beardless youth: some more particularly insist that the swelling of the breasts is remarkably obvious, and that both look towards the east; so that when the sun rises they seem to smile, but look gloomy in the evening. These statues were visited, at least ten or twelve different times, by a famous traveler, called Meyan-Asod-Shah, who is a man highly respected, both on account of his descent from Mohammed, and also for his personal character. He informed me lately, that these two statues are in two different niches and about forty spaces from each other. That the drapery is covered with embroidery and figured work; which formerly was painted of different colors, traces of which are still visible. That certainly represents a female, from the beauty and smoothness of her features, and the swelling of her breasts: the head being so much elevated is secure from injury from those below, and is also protected from weather by the projection above. The statue of their supposed son is nearly half a mile distant, and about twenty-five feet high. One of the feet of the male figure is much broken; for the Musulmãns never march that way with cannon without firing two or three shots at them… As to their being hollow, I believe, it is an idle tale: at least the travelers, I have consulted, knew nothing of it. Between the legs of the male figure, is a door leading into a most spacious temple; the size of which, they could not describe otherwise, than by saying, that it could easily hold the camp-equipage and baggage of Zemaun-Shah, and of his whole army.
In 1825 Moorcroft and Trebeck write:
Of the two colossal idols cut out of rock, opposite to the hill on which stood the city, one larger than the other is called Sang-sal, or Rang-sal, and is said to represent a male; the smaller, called Shah-muma, is considered to be female; but the general appearance and costume of both are essentially the same, and indicate no difference of sex… Both figures have been mutilated, by order, it is said, of Aurangzeb. The faces and forearms of both were knocked off, and a thigh of the larger was broken. They are both clad in long loose robes, descending below the knee. The height of the smaller figure was one hundred and seventeen feet; that of the larger we could not measure, but it must have been about one-third more.
They finally conjecture:
My own conviction, from the character of the buildings, of the caves, paintings, and sculptures, is, that Bamian, whatever its ancient appellation, was the residence of the great Lama, bearing the same relation to the Lamaism of the west, as Lhassa does now to that of the east. The name of the smaller idol, Shah-muma, is evidently only a corruption of Shak-muni…13
There are other writings from the early nineteenth century, including Fred. H. Fisher's which at best restate the above opinions. After his 1839 book Travels Into Bokhara, Alexander Burnes, a Lieutenant in the East India Company, became the authority on the Bamian colossi. Importantly, Burnes was one of the first people who made observational drawings, which became the template for several lithographs and prints of the statues through the early twentieth century.
There are no relics of Asiatic antiquity which have roused the curiosity of the learned more than the gigantic idols of Bameean. It is fortunately in my power to present a drawing of these images. They consist of two figures, a male and a female; the one named Silsal, the other Shahmama. The figures are cut in alto relievo on the face of the hill, and represent two colossal images. The male is the larger of the two, and about 120 feet high. It occupies a front of 70 feet; and the niche in which it is excavated, extends about that depth into the hill. This idol is mutilated; both legs having been fractured by cannon; and the countenance above the mouth is destroyed. The lips are very large; the ears long an pendent; and there appears to have been a tiara on the head. The figure is covered by a mantle, which hangs over it in all parts, and has been formed of a kind of plaster; the image having been studded with wooden pins in various places, to assist in fixing it. The figure itself is without symmetry, nor is there much elegance in the drapery. The hands which held out the mantle, have been both broken. The female figure is more perfect than the male, and has been dressed in the same manner. It is cut in the same hill, at about 200 yards, and is about half the size. It was not be to be discovered whether the smaller idol was a brother or the son of colossus, but from the information of the natives. The sketch, which I attached will convey better notions of these idols than a more elaborate description. The square and arched apertures which appear in the plate represent the entrance of the different caves or excavations; and through these there is a road that leads to the summit of both images. In the lower caves the caravans to and from Cabool generally halt; and the upper ones are used as granaries by the community.
I have to now note the most remarkable curiosity in the idols of Bameean. The niches of both have at one time been plastered, and ornamented with paintings of human figures, which have disappeared from all parts but that immediately above the heads of the idols. Here the colors are vivid, and the paintings are distant as in the Egyptian tombs. There is little variety in the design of these figures; which represent the bust of a woman with a knob of hair on the head, and a plaid thrown half over the chest; the whole surrounded by a halo. In one part, I could trace a groupe of three female figures following each other. The execution of the work was indifferent, and not superior to the pictures the Chinese make in imitation of an European artist.
The traditions of the people regarding the idols of Bameean are vague and unsatisfactory. It is stated that they were excavated about the Christian era, by a tribe of Kaffirs (infidels), to represent a king, named Silsal, and his wife, who ruled in a distant country, and was worshipped for his greatness. The Hindoos assert that they were excavated by the Pandoos, and that they are mentioned in the great epic poem of the Mahaburat… I am aware that a conjecture attributes these images to the Boodhists; and the long ears of the great figure render this surmise probable… I judge the figures to be female; but they are very rude; though the colors in which they are sketched are bright and beautiful. There is nothing in the images of Bameean to evince any great advancement in the arts, or what the most common people might not have easily executed… I find in the history of Timourlane [14th century], that both the idols and excavations of Bameean are described by Sharif o deen, his historian. The idols are there stated to be so high that none of the archers could strike the head. They are called Lat and Munat; two celebrated idols which are mentioned in the Koran… It is by no means improbable that we owe the idols of Bameean to the caprice of some person of rank, who resided in the cave digging neighborhood, and sought for an immortality in the colossal images which we have now described.14
After Samuel Beal's 1884 translation of Huan Tsiang's Si Yu Ki, it became clear to historians that the attribution of the statues to the Buddhists was indeed accurate and the mystery surrounding the statues seemed to have been almost fully dispelled. An exception to this post-Beal shift in perception is evidenced in Helena Blavatsky's treatise The Bamian Statues: Their Mysterious Origin from her Secret Doctrine15:
Who cut the Bamian statues, the tallest and the most gigantic in the whole world? Burnes, and several learned Jesuits who have visited the place, speak of a mountain "all honeycombed with gigantic cells," with two immense giants cut in the same rock. They are referred to as the modern Miaotse [in Chinese legend, an antediluvian race of giants. -- Eds.], the last surviving witnesses of the Miaotse who had "troubled the earth"; the Jesuits are right, and the Archaeologists, who see Buddhas in the largest of these statues, are mistaken. For all those numberless gigantic ruins discovered one after the other in our day, are the work of the Cyclopes, the true and actual Giants of old.
…The Buddhist monks, who turned the grottos of the Miaotse into Viharas and cells, came into Central Asia about or in the first century of the Christian era. Therefore Hsuan-tsang, speaking of the colossal statue, says that "the shining of the gold ornamentation that overlaid the statue" in his day "dazzled one's eyes," but of such gilding there remains not a vestige in modern times. The very drapery, in contrast to the figure itself, cut out in the standing rock, is made of plaster and modelled over the stone image. Talbot, who has made the most careful examination, found that this drapery belonged to a far later epoch. The statue itself has therefore to be assigned to a far earlier period than Buddhism. Whom does it represent in such case, it may be asked?
Once more tradition, corroborated by written records, answers the query, and explains the mystery. The Buddhist Arhats and Ascetics found the five statues, and many more, now crumbled down to dust, and as the three were found by them in colossal niches at the entrance of their future abode, they covered the figures with plaster, and, over the old, modelled new statues made to represent Lord Tathagata. The interior walls of the niches are covered to this day with bright paintings of human figures, and the sacred image of Buddha is repeated in every group. These frescoes and ornaments -- which remind one of the Byzantine style of painting -- are all due to the piety of the monk-ascetics, as are some other minor figures and rock-cut ornamentations. But the five statues belong to the handiwork of the Initiates of the Fourth Race, who sought refuge, after the submersion of their continent, in the fastnesses and on the summits of the Central Asian mountain chains. Moreover, the five statues are an imperishable record of the esoteric teaching about the gradual evolution of the races.
The largest is made to represent the First Race of mankind, its ethereal body being commemorated in hard, everlasting stone, for the instruction of future generations, as its remembrance would otherwise never have survived the Atlantean Deluge. The second -- 120 feet high -- represents the sweat-born [second root-race]; and the third -- measuring 60 feet -- immortalizes the race that fell, and thereby inaugurated the first physical race, born of father and mother, the last descendants of which are represented in the Statues found on Easter Isle; but they were only from 20 to 25 feet in stature at the epoch when Lemuria was submerged, after it had been nearly destroyed by volcanic fires. The Fourth Race was still smaller, though gigantic in comparison with our present Fifth Race, and the series culminated finally in the latter.
These are, then, the "Giants" of antiquity, the ante- and postdiluvian Gibborim of the Bible. They lived and flourished one million rather than between three and four thousand years ago. The Anakim of Joshua, whose hosts were as "grasshoppers" in comparison with them, are thus a piece of Israelite fancy, unless indeed the people of Israel change the millenniums of their chronology into millions of years16.
In the 1920s, with John Marshall heading the Archeological Survey of India, trained archeologists, rather than travelers, enthusiasts or petty officers finally took up the study of monuments. However the Bamian statues were still remote enough that they continued to be described only by travel writers.
In one of the largest selling travel books of this period, Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana (1934), it becomes clear that there is a shift in the way the Bamian statues are described. There is no residue of doubt in the writer's mind that the statues in question depict Buddha.
I should not like to stay long in Bamian. Its art is unfresh. When Huan Tsang came here the Buddha's were gilded to resemble bronze, and 5,000 monks swarmed in the labyrinths beside them. That was in 632; Mohammed died the same year, and the Arabs reached bamian before the end of the century. But it was not until 150 years later that the monks were finally extirpated. One can imagine how the Arabs felt about them and their idols in this blood-red valley. Nadir Shah must have felt the same 1,000 years later when he broke the legs of the larger Buddha.
that Buddha 174 feet high, and the smaller 115; they stand a quarter of a mile apart. The larger bears traces of plaster veneer, which was painted red, presumably as a groundwork for the gilt. Neither has any artistic value. But one could bear that; it is their negation of sense, the lack of any pride in their monstrous flaccid bulk that sickens. Even their material is unbeautiful, for the cliff is made not of stone but of compressed gravel. A lot of monastic navies were given picks and told to copy some frightful semi-Hellenistic image from India or China. The result has not even the dignity of labour.
The canopies of the two niches which contain the two figures are plastered and painted. In the smaller hangs a triumph scene, red, yellow and blue, in which Hackkin, Herzfeld and others have distinguished a Sasanian influence; but the clue to the idea comes from Masson, who saw a Pahlevi inscription here a hundred years ago…
The [style] suggest[s] that Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Hellenistic ideas all met in Bamian in the fifth and sixth centuries. It is interesting to have a record of this meeting. But the fruit of it is not pleasant17.
It is important to observe that all the descriptions we have of these statues were written by foreigners as they traveled through Afghanistan. The first and most obvious reason may be that a textual representation of an object is most useful to those who cannot experience the object first hand. The second reason maybe that Afghanistan has for centuries been an Islamic state and the acknowledgement of idolatry let alone any kind of participation in it through the description of idols would have been condemned. However, by destroying the idol do they not themselves reaffirm their faith in that other idol the Text - the Koran. Flusser says, Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up. Can we reverse this statement thus: The torn up image cannot signify, except through text. The destruction of the idol has released its descriptions, whether it is possible to translate the text back into an image we are yet to find out.
Death of a Zombie
In 2001, reacting to the destruction of the WTC and the Buddha's, Muschamp asks "does destruction capture the imagination more than building?18" The answer is obvious: once an object is built it need not be imagined.
What is strange is this: that what was destroyed could only be imagined through the descriptions which preceded its destruction. This history of representations is viewed from a fixed vantage point an imagined moment of crises, a historic moment. The destruction of the statues was seen as singular and final, as though the statues had until then stood undisturbed. The rhetoric which framed the "destructive rampage"19 of the Taliban could be exemplified in the romanticized image of a previously tolerant religion which, "for a better part of two thousand years, [allowed] the Buddha's of Bamiyan [to keep] watch over the midpoint of what was once the Silk Road."20
When Karen Armstrong attests that the "Koran says that all morally guided religions come from God" 21 she is clearly stretching her point. After all, the most fundamental monotheist principle that there is only one God whose Word is True. Religions cannot be considered different unless they worship different Gods.
What then is the motivation for the contemporary politically correct liberal who pretends to respect the fundamentalist other - especially the farther away he (the other) is? What then is the complex network of blind spots which frame the attitudes of the nineteenth century orientalist in relation to the contemporary (early twenty first century) liberal? The key to this may lie in the relationship between the following statements by two theorists:
In 1979 Edward Said said:
The Oriental, is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). The point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks.22
In conjunction with this description of the relation of the Orientalist to the Oriental, we must read Zizek's more recent examination of fetish as the new ideological structure:
The doxa today, which you have to obey is the following one I claim:
Freud opposed the normal mourning, the successful acceptance of the loss, to the pathological melancholy, the subject insists on his or her narcissistic identification with the lost object. That is to say Freud's idea was when someone dear to you passes away, the proper thing to do is to come to terms with this loss through the loss of symbolization or internalization. You renounce the real object but gain his or her or it's meaning. Melancholy is then conceived of as a failed mourning. You remain attached to the particular object and you are unable to perform the sublation of the immediate reality of the object into it's, his or her meaning.
In contrast today's doxa is to the reverse the terms and to claim that mourning is the betrayal of the fidelity to the object... so, in other words, melancholy is the truly ethical stance of fidelity. The one who accomplishes the work of mourning is the traitor. Of course, this story can be given a multitude of twists from the queer one to the post-colonial ethnic one...
I claim that this reassertion of melancholy is not only politically wrong - although it renders perfectly the ideal structure of subjectivity of today's so-called post-modern, global subjectivity - but that its also theoretically wrong.
Georgio Agamben emphasizes how in contrast to mourning, melancholy is not only the failure of the work of mourning, the persistence to the attachment to the real of the object, it also offers the paradox of an intention to mourn which precedes and anticipates the loss of the object. What's strange about mourning is that even though the object is still there it is already treated like it is lost... The melancholic is not the one who loses the object of desire, he has the object, but has lost the cause of desire.
… [In order to understand the disavowal which allows this reversal we must discuss the structure of today's ideology] The predominant structure of ideology today is no longer that of the symptom (the return of the repressed truth within the global field of the lie), but rather the fetish, which is the particular lie, which enables you to endure the truth. The pragmatic solution of the fetishist when confronted with a traumatic fact is that they organize their universe so that they can very well survive in a cynically realist way, because the fetish enables them to maintain a necessary distance23.
This distancing, which Zizek speaks of, is demonstrated in a concrete way in UNESCO's proposal to board up the Bamian statues, thus hiding that which is blasphemous to the Taliban, to prevent their destruction - a disavowal, specifically different from that of the Taliban whose impulse was to erase all evidence of religious history predating Islam in Afghanistan.
Zizek has said in regard to the Bamian bombings:
Recall the outrage when, three years ago, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan dynamited the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan: although none of us, enlightened Westerners, believed in the divinity of Buddha, we were so outraged because the Taliban Muslims did not show the appropriate respect for the "cultural heritage" of their own country and the entire humanity. Instead of believing through the other like all people of culture, they really believed in their own religion and thus had no great sensitivity for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions — for them, the Buddha statues were just fake idols, not "cultural treasures." (And, incidentally, is this outrage not the same as that of today's enlightened anti-Semite who, although he does not believe in Christ's divinity, nonetheless blames Jews for killing our Lord Jesus? Or as the typical secular Jew who, although he does not believe in Jehova and Moses as his prophet, nonetheless thinks that Jews have a divine right to the land of Israel?)24
What is specifically interesting about the Western academic's (both the Orientalist and the New Liberal) relationship to the archeological ruin is that it functions like a fetish. If the trauma of the "Western" subject is his discovery that the "Eastern" other is no better or worse than herself, then this trauma is kept in check through the fetish. In the case of Bamian, it is specifically the ruin, in its zombie state of the living dead, which mutely allows the western subject to project upon it. It is an empty space of reverie, which through the deflection of intention allows the subject to maintain a belief in his ethically moral position while simultaneously subjugating the other. It is imperative for the politically-correct liberal to focus his attention on preserving the ruin in order for him to ignore the ruination of a nation, which has resulted from the political action of his country. It is the powerlessness of the neo-liberal that is embodied in the disavowal of reality and preoccupation with the ruin.
The destruction of the fetish is therefore by far the most traumatic event. The immediate response to such a trauma is the desire to reconstruct the fetish and fill the void. What better way to reconstruct the fetish than from the very history of its representations? In fact, wouldn’t the perfect ruin be the reconstruction of a ruin from its descriptions - a monument to the dying?
Alexander's historians may have been right to conjure up the image of Prometheus, as punishment for who's deeds Zeus devised for humanity "such evil… that they shall desire death rather than life." Prometheus tied in a cave to be eaten by vultures was this very monument; the body held in a state of the living- dead.
And who can forget the greatest example of the ruin|monument - Christ on the Crucifix.
Reconstructing a Ruin
Here, given a limited history of representations we are presented with three proposals (all being carried out) for the construction of a monument in place of the destroyed Bamian statues:
1 But now one of the Buddhas is rising again, except this time in western China, where a team of workmen are carving a replica figure into a cliff-face in Sichuan. As more than 300 stonemasons chip away at the rock, the giant figure is gradually emerging into view. The sandstone cliff near Leshan, in the lush green hills of Western China, is redder than the more golden sandstone near Bamiyan. Nonetheless, the Chinese project aims to recreate the Afghan Buddha the way it used to be, before erosion and intolerance destroyed its face and dynamite reduced it to a heap of rubble.
The figure will be 37m high - the same as the smaller of the two Afghan statues. It is being carved by hand with mallets and chisels, just like the original figures25.
This effort relies loosely upon Huan Tsiang's description of the Bamian Buddhas in his Si-Yu-Ki. However given the fact that research26 has shown that the Buddhas were only crudely carved out of the sandstone cliffs - all the details and features having been layered on top of the crude rock carvings with plaster and bronze - the claim of authenticity (endorsed by the BBC) is at best questionable.
2 The artist, Hiro Yamagata, 58, from Torrance, Calif., would use 14 laser systems, powered by solar panels and windmills, to project 140 overlapping faceless "statues," 125 to 175 feet tall, across four miles of the Bamiyan cliffs, about 80 miles west of Kabul, in neon shades of green, pink, orange and blue, continuously changing color and pattern, for four hours every Sunday night. "I'm doing a fine-art piece," said Mr. Yamagata, whose work was recently displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. "That's my purpose - not for human rights, or for supporting religion or a political statement."27
Yamagata's project seems to embrace the Western Buddhist/ New Age notion asserted by Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer (or the gears of a cycle transmission) as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower28. Stating the ironic contradictions of this philosophy is only redundant as he has himself asserted them in his quoted statements - statements which characterize the contradictions of the neo-liberal.
3 ETH Zu¨rich has volunteered to perform the computer reconstruction, which can serve as a basis for the physical reconstruction. In fact, using a computer model, a statue at 1/10 of the original size will first be built and displayed in the Afghanistan Museum in Bubendorf, Switzerland. But the most recent developments actually call for the placement of this model into the National Museum of Kabul, Afghanistan… The physical reconstruction will be based on a 3D computer model derived from three metric images. These images were acquired in Bamiyan in 1970 by Professor Kostka, Technical University of Graz (Kostka, 1974). They form the basis for a very precise, reliable and detailed reconstruction with an accuracy of 1 to 2 cm in relative position and with an object resolution of about 5 cm. Manual image measurements had to be applied in order to achieve these values.29
The description of this last project must be regarded as a conclusion to this essay. It is after all the description of that perfect ruin spoken of before - the reconstruction of a ruin from its image. Like the Christian memento mori, the reconstructed ruin will no longer stand for the monument, which once was, but instead for the death of the monument. It will not fill the void of the missing ruin; rather, it will articulate the ruin's absence.
Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up. Hence, to decode texts is to discover the images signified by them. The intention of texts is to explain images, while that of concepts is to make ideas comprehensible. In this way texts are a metacode for images.1
On March 12th 2001 Taliban officials announced that the destruction of two colossal statues of Buddha, in Bamian, Afghanistan, was complete. The international community, horrified by the prospect of this eventuality, had tried to negotiate other options with the Taliban. The Metropolitan Museum and UNESCO had suggested boarding up the 175 and 120 foot idols, thus hiding what fundamentalist Islam deemed idolatrous and hence forbidden2. No compromise could be negotiated.
When Quintin Craufurd wrote his Researches in 1817, these statues were already in a state of ruin. After Genghis Khan and his Mongol army ransacked Bamian in the early thirteenth century the statues were mutilated further by Aurangzeb's army with canon fire in the seventeenth century. This must have continued well into the nineteenth century, since Craufurd, speaking of the statues mentions that "the Musulmãns never march that way with cannon without firing two or three shots at them"3. In light of this history the Taliban's actions were hardly aberrant; surely, if the Khan or Aurangzeb had been able to fully destroy these idols, they would have.
After a history of invasions and destructions, the city, Bamian, has begun to mirror the monument's demise. Where there was a figure there is now a gigantic niche speckled with catacombs; where monks once lived, live the wandering poor, the militants4. It is through the historical representation of the monument that we can approach the city. A written history beginning, as far as we know, with Alexander in 330 BCE (before the monument was built), continues to this day as various governments and organizations attempt to rebuild the monument and fill the empty niche. For now, however, Bamian has reclaimed its Tartarian appellation - Mu-baligh, or the "city of desolation"5, a name given to it upon its destruction by Genghis Khan in 1221.
Ecphrasis or ekphrasis (from Greek ek out + phrasis speaking, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name) A vivid literary description of a work of art, which allows the reader to imagine it.
Lassen claims that in 330 BCE "Alexander passed over the plateau of Bamian, which lies at an elevation of about 8500 feet, and in which men supposed they had found the cave of Prometheus"6. Despite the refutation of this historical claim as far back as the second century BCE by Eratosthenes [who in his lost book is said to have argued that "the Macedonians saw this cave and on the strength of some local legend (which they well may have invented) put it about that it was the cave where Prometheus was hung in chains when the eagle used to come to feed on his guts, and that Heracles came thither to kill the eagle and set Prometheus free; so that by means of this tale the Macedonians transferred Mount Caucasus from Pontus to the far east, fixing it in India in the country of the Parapamisidae, and gave the name Caucasus to flatter Alexander by the inference that he had crossed Caucasus7"] both Huan Tsiang in the 7th century and Craufurd in the 19th century actually locate and place this site "near the pass of Sheibar, between Ghor-band and Bamiyan." At this site which marked the end of Alexander's reign, a monument had been imagined.
After Alexander's defeat, the rise of the Maurya Dynasty saw an embrace of Buddhism more than a century after the Buddha's death. By the third century BCE Bamian had become the center of the trade routes that connected Rome, India and China. In this context, despite the rise and fall of dynasties, this center of trade became the center of Buddhist pilgrimage. In this context alone can we comprehend the function of such gigantic monuments. After all, the Silk Road functioned as the main conduit for the spread of Buddhism.
The statues are thought to have been completed by the sixth century. The first record of these statues is to be found in Huan Tsiang's seventh century Travelogue:
On the declivity of a hill to the north-east of the capital is a standing image of Buddha made of stone, 140 or 150 feet high, of a brilliant golden color and resplendent with ornamentation of precious substances. To the east of it is a Buddhist monastery built by a former king of the country. East of this is a standing image of Sakyamuni Buddha above 100 feet high, made of t'u-shih (probably 'bronze'), the pieces of which have been cast separately and then welded together into one figure8.
Strangely enough, after Huan Tsiang's record, for eight centuries we find no descriptions of the statues (not even by Marco Polo in the thirteenth century) until the sixteenth century when Akbar's Vizier, Abul Fazel writes:
In the heart of the mountain of Bamian, are twelve thousand cavities or grottoes cut into rock, with ornaments and mouldings in stucco. They were used by the natives of the country for an asylum in winter, and are called Summij (caves): enormous figures are found in them, as of a man eighty ells in height, a woman fifty and a child fifteen. In one of these grottoes you may see an embalmed corpse (or mummy), whose origin is unknown to the natives and they hold it in high honour9.
It seems that during the span of eight centuries the specific significance of these idols has been completely lost. This marks the first disappearance of the Buddhas, from the time of the expulsion of Buddhists from Bamian in the thirteenth century until the re-inscription/description of the statues by the Orientalists in the nineteenth century.
The nineteenth century saw an influx of amateur archaeologists, who included medical doctors, military personnel, government agents and the occasional traveler.
In 1817, an employee of the East India Company, Quintin Craufurd writes10:
But what never fails to attract the notice of travelers, are two colossal statues, which are seen at a great distance. They are erect, and adhere to the mountain, from which they were cut out. They are in niches, the depth of which is equal to the thickness of the statues. It is said in the Ayeen Akbary11, that the largest is eighty ells high, and the other only fifty. These dimensions are greatly exaggerated; according to the opinion of all travellers I have seen, the disproportion is not so great between the two. According to the author of the Pharangh-Jehanghiri cited by Dr. Hyde12, they are said to be only fifty cubits high; which appears to be the true dimensions. At some distance from these statues is another of smaller size, being about fifteen cubits high. Native and Persian authors who have mentioned them, agree neither about their sex, nor their names. The few Hindus who live in these countries, say, that they represent Bhim and his consort: the followers of Buddha affirm that they are the statues of Sháhámá, and his disciple Sálsálá. The Musalmãns insist, that they are the statues of Key-Umursh and his consort, that is to say Adam and Eve; and that the third is intended for Seish or Seth, their son; whose tomb, or at least the place where it stood formerly, is shewn near Bahlac. These statues are so much defaced by the effects of time, and the intolerant zeal of the Musalmáns, that I believe it is difficult to ascertain their sex. Travellers do, however, agree that one of them at least, is a beardless youth: some more particularly insist that the swelling of the breasts is remarkably obvious, and that both look towards the east; so that when the sun rises they seem to smile, but look gloomy in the evening. These statues were visited, at least ten or twelve different times, by a famous traveler, called Meyan-Asod-Shah, who is a man highly respected, both on account of his descent from Mohammed, and also for his personal character. He informed me lately, that these two statues are in two different niches and about forty spaces from each other. That the drapery is covered with embroidery and figured work; which formerly was painted of different colors, traces of which are still visible. That certainly represents a female, from the beauty and smoothness of her features, and the swelling of her breasts: the head being so much elevated is secure from injury from those below, and is also protected from weather by the projection above. The statue of their supposed son is nearly half a mile distant, and about twenty-five feet high. One of the feet of the male figure is much broken; for the Musulmãns never march that way with cannon without firing two or three shots at them… As to their being hollow, I believe, it is an idle tale: at least the travelers, I have consulted, knew nothing of it. Between the legs of the male figure, is a door leading into a most spacious temple; the size of which, they could not describe otherwise, than by saying, that it could easily hold the camp-equipage and baggage of Zemaun-Shah, and of his whole army.
In 1825 Moorcroft and Trebeck write:
Of the two colossal idols cut out of rock, opposite to the hill on which stood the city, one larger than the other is called Sang-sal, or Rang-sal, and is said to represent a male; the smaller, called Shah-muma, is considered to be female; but the general appearance and costume of both are essentially the same, and indicate no difference of sex… Both figures have been mutilated, by order, it is said, of Aurangzeb. The faces and forearms of both were knocked off, and a thigh of the larger was broken. They are both clad in long loose robes, descending below the knee. The height of the smaller figure was one hundred and seventeen feet; that of the larger we could not measure, but it must have been about one-third more.
They finally conjecture:
My own conviction, from the character of the buildings, of the caves, paintings, and sculptures, is, that Bamian, whatever its ancient appellation, was the residence of the great Lama, bearing the same relation to the Lamaism of the west, as Lhassa does now to that of the east. The name of the smaller idol, Shah-muma, is evidently only a corruption of Shak-muni…13
There are other writings from the early nineteenth century, including Fred. H. Fisher's which at best restate the above opinions. After his 1839 book Travels Into Bokhara, Alexander Burnes, a Lieutenant in the East India Company, became the authority on the Bamian colossi. Importantly, Burnes was one of the first people who made observational drawings, which became the template for several lithographs and prints of the statues through the early twentieth century.
There are no relics of Asiatic antiquity which have roused the curiosity of the learned more than the gigantic idols of Bameean. It is fortunately in my power to present a drawing of these images. They consist of two figures, a male and a female; the one named Silsal, the other Shahmama. The figures are cut in alto relievo on the face of the hill, and represent two colossal images. The male is the larger of the two, and about 120 feet high. It occupies a front of 70 feet; and the niche in which it is excavated, extends about that depth into the hill. This idol is mutilated; both legs having been fractured by cannon; and the countenance above the mouth is destroyed. The lips are very large; the ears long an pendent; and there appears to have been a tiara on the head. The figure is covered by a mantle, which hangs over it in all parts, and has been formed of a kind of plaster; the image having been studded with wooden pins in various places, to assist in fixing it. The figure itself is without symmetry, nor is there much elegance in the drapery. The hands which held out the mantle, have been both broken. The female figure is more perfect than the male, and has been dressed in the same manner. It is cut in the same hill, at about 200 yards, and is about half the size. It was not be to be discovered whether the smaller idol was a brother or the son of colossus, but from the information of the natives. The sketch, which I attached will convey better notions of these idols than a more elaborate description. The square and arched apertures which appear in the plate represent the entrance of the different caves or excavations; and through these there is a road that leads to the summit of both images. In the lower caves the caravans to and from Cabool generally halt; and the upper ones are used as granaries by the community.
I have to now note the most remarkable curiosity in the idols of Bameean. The niches of both have at one time been plastered, and ornamented with paintings of human figures, which have disappeared from all parts but that immediately above the heads of the idols. Here the colors are vivid, and the paintings are distant as in the Egyptian tombs. There is little variety in the design of these figures; which represent the bust of a woman with a knob of hair on the head, and a plaid thrown half over the chest; the whole surrounded by a halo. In one part, I could trace a groupe of three female figures following each other. The execution of the work was indifferent, and not superior to the pictures the Chinese make in imitation of an European artist.
The traditions of the people regarding the idols of Bameean are vague and unsatisfactory. It is stated that they were excavated about the Christian era, by a tribe of Kaffirs (infidels), to represent a king, named Silsal, and his wife, who ruled in a distant country, and was worshipped for his greatness. The Hindoos assert that they were excavated by the Pandoos, and that they are mentioned in the great epic poem of the Mahaburat… I am aware that a conjecture attributes these images to the Boodhists; and the long ears of the great figure render this surmise probable… I judge the figures to be female; but they are very rude; though the colors in which they are sketched are bright and beautiful. There is nothing in the images of Bameean to evince any great advancement in the arts, or what the most common people might not have easily executed… I find in the history of Timourlane [14th century], that both the idols and excavations of Bameean are described by Sharif o deen, his historian. The idols are there stated to be so high that none of the archers could strike the head. They are called Lat and Munat; two celebrated idols which are mentioned in the Koran… It is by no means improbable that we owe the idols of Bameean to the caprice of some person of rank, who resided in the cave digging neighborhood, and sought for an immortality in the colossal images which we have now described.14
After Samuel Beal's 1884 translation of Huan Tsiang's Si Yu Ki, it became clear to historians that the attribution of the statues to the Buddhists was indeed accurate and the mystery surrounding the statues seemed to have been almost fully dispelled. An exception to this post-Beal shift in perception is evidenced in Helena Blavatsky's treatise The Bamian Statues: Their Mysterious Origin from her Secret Doctrine15:
Who cut the Bamian statues, the tallest and the most gigantic in the whole world? Burnes, and several learned Jesuits who have visited the place, speak of a mountain "all honeycombed with gigantic cells," with two immense giants cut in the same rock. They are referred to as the modern Miaotse [in Chinese legend, an antediluvian race of giants. -- Eds.], the last surviving witnesses of the Miaotse who had "troubled the earth"; the Jesuits are right, and the Archaeologists, who see Buddhas in the largest of these statues, are mistaken. For all those numberless gigantic ruins discovered one after the other in our day, are the work of the Cyclopes, the true and actual Giants of old.
…The Buddhist monks, who turned the grottos of the Miaotse into Viharas and cells, came into Central Asia about or in the first century of the Christian era. Therefore Hsuan-tsang, speaking of the colossal statue, says that "the shining of the gold ornamentation that overlaid the statue" in his day "dazzled one's eyes," but of such gilding there remains not a vestige in modern times. The very drapery, in contrast to the figure itself, cut out in the standing rock, is made of plaster and modelled over the stone image. Talbot, who has made the most careful examination, found that this drapery belonged to a far later epoch. The statue itself has therefore to be assigned to a far earlier period than Buddhism. Whom does it represent in such case, it may be asked?
Once more tradition, corroborated by written records, answers the query, and explains the mystery. The Buddhist Arhats and Ascetics found the five statues, and many more, now crumbled down to dust, and as the three were found by them in colossal niches at the entrance of their future abode, they covered the figures with plaster, and, over the old, modelled new statues made to represent Lord Tathagata. The interior walls of the niches are covered to this day with bright paintings of human figures, and the sacred image of Buddha is repeated in every group. These frescoes and ornaments -- which remind one of the Byzantine style of painting -- are all due to the piety of the monk-ascetics, as are some other minor figures and rock-cut ornamentations. But the five statues belong to the handiwork of the Initiates of the Fourth Race, who sought refuge, after the submersion of their continent, in the fastnesses and on the summits of the Central Asian mountain chains. Moreover, the five statues are an imperishable record of the esoteric teaching about the gradual evolution of the races.
The largest is made to represent the First Race of mankind, its ethereal body being commemorated in hard, everlasting stone, for the instruction of future generations, as its remembrance would otherwise never have survived the Atlantean Deluge. The second -- 120 feet high -- represents the sweat-born [second root-race]; and the third -- measuring 60 feet -- immortalizes the race that fell, and thereby inaugurated the first physical race, born of father and mother, the last descendants of which are represented in the Statues found on Easter Isle; but they were only from 20 to 25 feet in stature at the epoch when Lemuria was submerged, after it had been nearly destroyed by volcanic fires. The Fourth Race was still smaller, though gigantic in comparison with our present Fifth Race, and the series culminated finally in the latter.
These are, then, the "Giants" of antiquity, the ante- and postdiluvian Gibborim of the Bible. They lived and flourished one million rather than between three and four thousand years ago. The Anakim of Joshua, whose hosts were as "grasshoppers" in comparison with them, are thus a piece of Israelite fancy, unless indeed the people of Israel change the millenniums of their chronology into millions of years16.
In the 1920s, with John Marshall heading the Archeological Survey of India, trained archeologists, rather than travelers, enthusiasts or petty officers finally took up the study of monuments. However the Bamian statues were still remote enough that they continued to be described only by travel writers.
In one of the largest selling travel books of this period, Robert Byron's Road to Oxiana (1934), it becomes clear that there is a shift in the way the Bamian statues are described. There is no residue of doubt in the writer's mind that the statues in question depict Buddha.
I should not like to stay long in Bamian. Its art is unfresh. When Huan Tsang came here the Buddha's were gilded to resemble bronze, and 5,000 monks swarmed in the labyrinths beside them. That was in 632; Mohammed died the same year, and the Arabs reached bamian before the end of the century. But it was not until 150 years later that the monks were finally extirpated. One can imagine how the Arabs felt about them and their idols in this blood-red valley. Nadir Shah must have felt the same 1,000 years later when he broke the legs of the larger Buddha.
that Buddha 174 feet high, and the smaller 115; they stand a quarter of a mile apart. The larger bears traces of plaster veneer, which was painted red, presumably as a groundwork for the gilt. Neither has any artistic value. But one could bear that; it is their negation of sense, the lack of any pride in their monstrous flaccid bulk that sickens. Even their material is unbeautiful, for the cliff is made not of stone but of compressed gravel. A lot of monastic navies were given picks and told to copy some frightful semi-Hellenistic image from India or China. The result has not even the dignity of labour.
The canopies of the two niches which contain the two figures are plastered and painted. In the smaller hangs a triumph scene, red, yellow and blue, in which Hackkin, Herzfeld and others have distinguished a Sasanian influence; but the clue to the idea comes from Masson, who saw a Pahlevi inscription here a hundred years ago…
The [style] suggest[s] that Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Hellenistic ideas all met in Bamian in the fifth and sixth centuries. It is interesting to have a record of this meeting. But the fruit of it is not pleasant17.
It is important to observe that all the descriptions we have of these statues were written by foreigners as they traveled through Afghanistan. The first and most obvious reason may be that a textual representation of an object is most useful to those who cannot experience the object first hand. The second reason maybe that Afghanistan has for centuries been an Islamic state and the acknowledgement of idolatry let alone any kind of participation in it through the description of idols would have been condemned. However, by destroying the idol do they not themselves reaffirm their faith in that other idol the Text - the Koran. Flusser says, Texts do not signify the world; they signify the images they tear up. Can we reverse this statement thus: The torn up image cannot signify, except through text. The destruction of the idol has released its descriptions, whether it is possible to translate the text back into an image we are yet to find out.
Death of a Zombie
In 2001, reacting to the destruction of the WTC and the Buddha's, Muschamp asks "does destruction capture the imagination more than building?18" The answer is obvious: once an object is built it need not be imagined.
What is strange is this: that what was destroyed could only be imagined through the descriptions which preceded its destruction. This history of representations is viewed from a fixed vantage point an imagined moment of crises, a historic moment. The destruction of the statues was seen as singular and final, as though the statues had until then stood undisturbed. The rhetoric which framed the "destructive rampage"19 of the Taliban could be exemplified in the romanticized image of a previously tolerant religion which, "for a better part of two thousand years, [allowed] the Buddha's of Bamiyan [to keep] watch over the midpoint of what was once the Silk Road."20
When Karen Armstrong attests that the "Koran says that all morally guided religions come from God" 21 she is clearly stretching her point. After all, the most fundamental monotheist principle that there is only one God whose Word is True. Religions cannot be considered different unless they worship different Gods.
What then is the motivation for the contemporary politically correct liberal who pretends to respect the fundamentalist other - especially the farther away he (the other) is? What then is the complex network of blind spots which frame the attitudes of the nineteenth century orientalist in relation to the contemporary (early twenty first century) liberal? The key to this may lie in the relationship between the following statements by two theorists:
In 1979 Edward Said said:
The Oriental, is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). The point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks.22
In conjunction with this description of the relation of the Orientalist to the Oriental, we must read Zizek's more recent examination of fetish as the new ideological structure:
The doxa today, which you have to obey is the following one I claim:
Freud opposed the normal mourning, the successful acceptance of the loss, to the pathological melancholy, the subject insists on his or her narcissistic identification with the lost object. That is to say Freud's idea was when someone dear to you passes away, the proper thing to do is to come to terms with this loss through the loss of symbolization or internalization. You renounce the real object but gain his or her or it's meaning. Melancholy is then conceived of as a failed mourning. You remain attached to the particular object and you are unable to perform the sublation of the immediate reality of the object into it's, his or her meaning.
In contrast today's doxa is to the reverse the terms and to claim that mourning is the betrayal of the fidelity to the object... so, in other words, melancholy is the truly ethical stance of fidelity. The one who accomplishes the work of mourning is the traitor. Of course, this story can be given a multitude of twists from the queer one to the post-colonial ethnic one...
I claim that this reassertion of melancholy is not only politically wrong - although it renders perfectly the ideal structure of subjectivity of today's so-called post-modern, global subjectivity - but that its also theoretically wrong.
Georgio Agamben emphasizes how in contrast to mourning, melancholy is not only the failure of the work of mourning, the persistence to the attachment to the real of the object, it also offers the paradox of an intention to mourn which precedes and anticipates the loss of the object. What's strange about mourning is that even though the object is still there it is already treated like it is lost... The melancholic is not the one who loses the object of desire, he has the object, but has lost the cause of desire.
… [In order to understand the disavowal which allows this reversal we must discuss the structure of today's ideology] The predominant structure of ideology today is no longer that of the symptom (the return of the repressed truth within the global field of the lie), but rather the fetish, which is the particular lie, which enables you to endure the truth. The pragmatic solution of the fetishist when confronted with a traumatic fact is that they organize their universe so that they can very well survive in a cynically realist way, because the fetish enables them to maintain a necessary distance23.
This distancing, which Zizek speaks of, is demonstrated in a concrete way in UNESCO's proposal to board up the Bamian statues, thus hiding that which is blasphemous to the Taliban, to prevent their destruction - a disavowal, specifically different from that of the Taliban whose impulse was to erase all evidence of religious history predating Islam in Afghanistan.
Zizek has said in regard to the Bamian bombings:
Recall the outrage when, three years ago, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan dynamited the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan: although none of us, enlightened Westerners, believed in the divinity of Buddha, we were so outraged because the Taliban Muslims did not show the appropriate respect for the "cultural heritage" of their own country and the entire humanity. Instead of believing through the other like all people of culture, they really believed in their own religion and thus had no great sensitivity for the cultural value of the monuments of other religions — for them, the Buddha statues were just fake idols, not "cultural treasures." (And, incidentally, is this outrage not the same as that of today's enlightened anti-Semite who, although he does not believe in Christ's divinity, nonetheless blames Jews for killing our Lord Jesus? Or as the typical secular Jew who, although he does not believe in Jehova and Moses as his prophet, nonetheless thinks that Jews have a divine right to the land of Israel?)24
What is specifically interesting about the Western academic's (both the Orientalist and the New Liberal) relationship to the archeological ruin is that it functions like a fetish. If the trauma of the "Western" subject is his discovery that the "Eastern" other is no better or worse than herself, then this trauma is kept in check through the fetish. In the case of Bamian, it is specifically the ruin, in its zombie state of the living dead, which mutely allows the western subject to project upon it. It is an empty space of reverie, which through the deflection of intention allows the subject to maintain a belief in his ethically moral position while simultaneously subjugating the other. It is imperative for the politically-correct liberal to focus his attention on preserving the ruin in order for him to ignore the ruination of a nation, which has resulted from the political action of his country. It is the powerlessness of the neo-liberal that is embodied in the disavowal of reality and preoccupation with the ruin.
The destruction of the fetish is therefore by far the most traumatic event. The immediate response to such a trauma is the desire to reconstruct the fetish and fill the void. What better way to reconstruct the fetish than from the very history of its representations? In fact, wouldn’t the perfect ruin be the reconstruction of a ruin from its descriptions - a monument to the dying?
Alexander's historians may have been right to conjure up the image of Prometheus, as punishment for who's deeds Zeus devised for humanity "such evil… that they shall desire death rather than life." Prometheus tied in a cave to be eaten by vultures was this very monument; the body held in a state of the living- dead.
And who can forget the greatest example of the ruin|monument - Christ on the Crucifix.
Reconstructing a Ruin
Here, given a limited history of representations we are presented with three proposals (all being carried out) for the construction of a monument in place of the destroyed Bamian statues:
1 But now one of the Buddhas is rising again, except this time in western China, where a team of workmen are carving a replica figure into a cliff-face in Sichuan. As more than 300 stonemasons chip away at the rock, the giant figure is gradually emerging into view. The sandstone cliff near Leshan, in the lush green hills of Western China, is redder than the more golden sandstone near Bamiyan. Nonetheless, the Chinese project aims to recreate the Afghan Buddha the way it used to be, before erosion and intolerance destroyed its face and dynamite reduced it to a heap of rubble.
The figure will be 37m high - the same as the smaller of the two Afghan statues. It is being carved by hand with mallets and chisels, just like the original figures25.
This effort relies loosely upon Huan Tsiang's description of the Bamian Buddhas in his Si-Yu-Ki. However given the fact that research26 has shown that the Buddhas were only crudely carved out of the sandstone cliffs - all the details and features having been layered on top of the crude rock carvings with plaster and bronze - the claim of authenticity (endorsed by the BBC) is at best questionable.
2 The artist, Hiro Yamagata, 58, from Torrance, Calif., would use 14 laser systems, powered by solar panels and windmills, to project 140 overlapping faceless "statues," 125 to 175 feet tall, across four miles of the Bamiyan cliffs, about 80 miles west of Kabul, in neon shades of green, pink, orange and blue, continuously changing color and pattern, for four hours every Sunday night. "I'm doing a fine-art piece," said Mr. Yamagata, whose work was recently displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. "That's my purpose - not for human rights, or for supporting religion or a political statement."27
Yamagata's project seems to embrace the Western Buddhist/ New Age notion asserted by Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer (or the gears of a cycle transmission) as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower28. Stating the ironic contradictions of this philosophy is only redundant as he has himself asserted them in his quoted statements - statements which characterize the contradictions of the neo-liberal.
3 ETH Zu¨rich has volunteered to perform the computer reconstruction, which can serve as a basis for the physical reconstruction. In fact, using a computer model, a statue at 1/10 of the original size will first be built and displayed in the Afghanistan Museum in Bubendorf, Switzerland. But the most recent developments actually call for the placement of this model into the National Museum of Kabul, Afghanistan… The physical reconstruction will be based on a 3D computer model derived from three metric images. These images were acquired in Bamiyan in 1970 by Professor Kostka, Technical University of Graz (Kostka, 1974). They form the basis for a very precise, reliable and detailed reconstruction with an accuracy of 1 to 2 cm in relative position and with an object resolution of about 5 cm. Manual image measurements had to be applied in order to achieve these values.29
The description of this last project must be regarded as a conclusion to this essay. It is after all the description of that perfect ruin spoken of before - the reconstruction of a ruin from its image. Like the Christian memento mori, the reconstructed ruin will no longer stand for the monument, which once was, but instead for the death of the monument. It will not fill the void of the missing ruin; rather, it will articulate the ruin's absence.
1 Flusser, Vilém; Toward a Philosophy of Photography; London; 2000
2 Shirk (idolatry)
Islam forbids idolatry and polytheism. Most sects of Islam forbid any artistic depictions of human figures, even those of Muhammad, this being shirk, which originally means "partnership": the sin of associating some other being with the one God, Allah, a sin that is considered akin to idolatry, if not idolatry outright. Furthermore, images of God are even banned outright in most sects of Islam, reinforcing absolute monotheism in Islam and attempting to eliminate any and all forms of idolatry. This position is not unique to Islam; The Decalogue, the root of the Semitic religions, states: "You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments." (RSV Exodus 20:3-6).
3 Q. Craufurd; Researches Concerning The laws, Theology, Learning, Commerce, Etc. of Ancient and Modern India. (Vol. 1); London; 1817
4 Allen, Charles; The Search for the Buddha; Carrol & Graf; NY; 2003
5 The Travels of Marco Polo; John Masefield Ed.; E. P. Dutton & Co. NY; 1914
6 Humboldt, Alexander Von; Cosmos: A Sketch of A Physical Description of the Universe, Vol II; London; 1871
7 Arrian of Nicomedia; Anabasis. Section 5.3.1-2; Translation by Aubrey de Sélincourt
8 Tsiang, Huen; Si-Yu-Ki, Buddhist Records of the Western World; Trans: Samuel Beal; 1983
9 Adams, W. 1`cH. Davenport; Famous Caves and Catacombs: described and Illustrated; 1886
10 Craufurd, Quintin; Researches Concerning The Laws, Theology, Learning, Commerce, Etc. of Ancient and Modern India; Strand: London; 1817
11 Abul Fazel's description is quoted in pg. 1
12 Hyde, Thomas; De Ludis Orientalibus; London; 1694
13 Moorcroft, William and George Trebeck; Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab; in Ladakh and Kashmir; and Bokhara; John Murray; London; 1825
14 Burnes, Alexander; Travels Into Bokhara, Vol III; London: John Murray; 1834
15 Blavatsky, Helena; The Secret Doctrine; Theosophical University Press; 1888
16 Blavatsky, Helena; The Secret Doctrine; Theosophical University Press; 1888
17 Byron, Robert; The Road to Oxiana; New York: Oxford University Press; 1934
18 Muschamp, Herbert; Filling The Void; NYT, September 30, 2001
19 Romney, Kristin M.; Cultural Terrorism; Archeology; May/Jun 2001
20 Hertzberg, Hendrick; In the Ruins; The New Yorker; March 19, 2001
21 Armstrong, Karen; Breaking the Sacred; NYT; March 11, 2001.
22 Said, Edward; Orientalism; pg 40; 1979; Penguin
23 Slavoj Zizek. "Zizek's Plea for Fundamentalism." Slought Foundation Online Content.
[11 September 2004; Accessed 1 October 2006]. <http://slought.org/content/11236/>.
24 Slavoj Zizek. "Passion In The Era of Decaffeinated Belief." Lacan.com. <http://www.lacan.com/passion.htm>.
25 BBC Asia-Pacific; Buddha Rises Again; 10/5/2001
26 Grun Armin, et al; Photogrammetric Reconstruction of the Great Buddha of Bamiyan, Afghanistan; The Photogrammetric Record Vol. 19 No. 107; September 2004
27 New York Times; Arts Briefly; 8/10/2005
28 Robert Pirsig; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; W. Morrow & Company; London; 1974
29 Grun Armin, et al; Photogrammetric Reconstruction of the Great Buddha of Bamiyan, Afghanistan; The Photogrammetric Record Vol. 19 No. 107; September 2004
Saturday, July 22, 2006
The Ruin
In order to better understand the possibility of a linguistic element which carries some cultural and political weight as a site of history production and image projection, while still remaining a physical fact (material, visible) - a thing in relation to my body as thing - I began to look at the ruin.
In "KCAPUT" (read with the C crossed out), I use the two colossal statues of the Buddha at Bamian, Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 as the central motif. I present the viewer with the empty niche in which the statue stood, alongside historical descriptions of these statues dating back to the 6th century. Here I try to draw our attention to two kinds of projection. One of an instant in time after the destruction of the statues, that will be held as a constant within the fractured temporality of the photograph and another extended anachronous temporality of travel writing, each competing with the other.
Vilém Flusser has said that there were two fundamental turning points in human culture - The first, "the invention of linear writing", the second, "the invention of technical images". Both function in very abstract ways suppressing the phenomenological recognition of the reading/ viewing subject's physical presence (anachronistic, distanced) and confusing and constructing the object with description. Can this missing subject be reconstituted through the intervention of spatial and material procedures? For instance, can a photograph, which is painted upon come untethered (or at least loosened) from the signified object. Can the material interference of the surface force a bodily self-recognition in the subject?
Or as Chomsky would have it, is there a universal grammatical structure, which preconditions our perceptions so that all viewing is mediated through language. No space of "truth" outside language, not even Lacan's pre-lingual state.
In KCAPUT I force a juxtaposition, a slippage. Caput in Latin means head, Kaput in German means destroyed, over, broken. A kind of verbal decapitation signaled by the crossing of the C is explored by the painted diptych in the installation. Both paintings are derived from press photos, one of Al Zarquawi holding Nick Berg's decapitated head in his fist, the other, a more recent image of US officers holding a framed photograph of Al Zarquawi's dead visage. A strange reversal has occurred here. The US press has deployed the very rhetoric it chastises, by anesthetizing its decapitation through photographic cropping and framing. Can converting these images into paintings slow down the viewers consumption of these images. Is the act of slowing down the process of image absortion and projection itself a political gesture?
Further, this decapitation is juxtaposed with the motif of the erased Bamian colossi. It is in the phenomenological fracturing and reconstitution of the body of the viewer (triggered by slippages and juxtapositions) that the body becomes implicated in the process of meaning production.
Also observe the refugee-tent-like painting, which becomes a specific topographical landscape in relation to the image taped to the slice of wall place next to it; The block of floor which holds down the tent; The drawing of the empty niche hidden under the tent/ topography and its contact C-Print presented in full view, etc. There is a doubling a displacement.
In "KCAPUT" (read with the C crossed out), I use the two colossal statues of the Buddha at Bamian, Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 as the central motif. I present the viewer with the empty niche in which the statue stood, alongside historical descriptions of these statues dating back to the 6th century. Here I try to draw our attention to two kinds of projection. One of an instant in time after the destruction of the statues, that will be held as a constant within the fractured temporality of the photograph and another extended anachronous temporality of travel writing, each competing with the other.
Vilém Flusser has said that there were two fundamental turning points in human culture - The first, "the invention of linear writing", the second, "the invention of technical images". Both function in very abstract ways suppressing the phenomenological recognition of the reading/ viewing subject's physical presence (anachronistic, distanced) and confusing and constructing the object with description. Can this missing subject be reconstituted through the intervention of spatial and material procedures? For instance, can a photograph, which is painted upon come untethered (or at least loosened) from the signified object. Can the material interference of the surface force a bodily self-recognition in the subject?
Or as Chomsky would have it, is there a universal grammatical structure, which preconditions our perceptions so that all viewing is mediated through language. No space of "truth" outside language, not even Lacan's pre-lingual state.
In KCAPUT I force a juxtaposition, a slippage. Caput in Latin means head, Kaput in German means destroyed, over, broken. A kind of verbal decapitation signaled by the crossing of the C is explored by the painted diptych in the installation. Both paintings are derived from press photos, one of Al Zarquawi holding Nick Berg's decapitated head in his fist, the other, a more recent image of US officers holding a framed photograph of Al Zarquawi's dead visage. A strange reversal has occurred here. The US press has deployed the very rhetoric it chastises, by anesthetizing its decapitation through photographic cropping and framing. Can converting these images into paintings slow down the viewers consumption of these images. Is the act of slowing down the process of image absortion and projection itself a political gesture?
Further, this decapitation is juxtaposed with the motif of the erased Bamian colossi. It is in the phenomenological fracturing and reconstitution of the body of the viewer (triggered by slippages and juxtapositions) that the body becomes implicated in the process of meaning production.
Also observe the refugee-tent-like painting, which becomes a specific topographical landscape in relation to the image taped to the slice of wall place next to it; The block of floor which holds down the tent; The drawing of the empty niche hidden under the tent/ topography and its contact C-Print presented in full view, etc. There is a doubling a displacement.
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