A Series of Formulations

# Profaned Monumentality

In his book On the New, Boris Groys argues that an “artwork looks really new and alive only if it resembles, in a certain sense, every other ordinary, profane thing, or every other ordinary product of popular culture”.¹ Likewise, he describes the museum as a confined controllable space in which it is possible to stage, perform, and envision the world hors les murs, as “splendid, infinite, ecstatic”. The museum dictates this “out-of-bounds infinity”; it delineates this exceptionality wherein things are the same but at the same time different, allowing us to imagine its outside as “infinite”.²

Today, the condition of polarity is globally manifested and accentuated in both the physical and virtual/cybernetic realms. For many, virtuality has taken over matter. But life holds in reserve the sorts of unexpected twists that rip manifestos to one million pieces, and the tank, as Hito Steyerl has remarked, is driven off its public pedestal to be redeployed to the battle.³ What is the last remaining affirmation and condition for Groys—the walls of the museum—collapse. 

The rupture is violent; it is not just about a concrete wall, but about the art collection existentially reforged into an arsenal of war. Battle and destruction invade the museum. Performed repeatedly, they impound its artworks and canonise the right to destroy.

This idea of displaced and profaned monumentality tantalises me. But rather than the tank, what haunts me is the image of its decrepit and empty pedestal. It is not the first time we witness it. Thirty years ago, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, many tanks rumbled back to war. Back then, everyone, and not just Francis Fukuyama,⁴ was predicting the end of history.

Three decades later, history hasn’t, in fact, gone anywhere and rather than cease or vanish, I would describe its current condition as being one of fatigue. If, “in the mid-nineteenth century, museums and memorials were created to accommodate and institutionalise the yearning for the past”,⁵ now, in an era of cybernetic flow, what they shelter is the exhaustion from pretending that there are historical events to pay tribute to and a past to long for.

The displacement of the tank from its pedestal helps unmask the violence that has lain there dormant but veracious. As Ariella Azoulay puts it, statues do not just die, they are murdered.⁶ With the exceptionality they bestow through their taxonomies (collections and exhibitions), museums exercise sovereign power over the bodies of their artworks. From a radical angle, their “state of exception” could be seen as similar to that of the camp. Walter Benjamin was more than right in his brilliant insight: “There is no document of civilisation, which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”.

# Fatigue

The association of photography with fatigue and a profaned, deposed monumentality is a hypothesis that intrigues me when it comes to developing a new agenda for the medium’s future musealisation. To my eyes, photography’s fatigue emanates not from what images can or cannot tell us, but from the medium’s intrinsic self-referentiality which, at times, leads it toward an excessive self-indulgence. I am tired of the anachronistic deployment of the term ‘photography’, and of the persistent quest for a ‘museum of photography’ as an avenue toward legitimisation. I am tired of outdated redundant theory; of the medium’s naive visual purism, which alleges that an image is equivalent to one thousand words; and of its gushing over transgression while its narrative modes and exchange values still operate within a more or less conventional frame. Lastly, I am weary of our lack of humbleness when it comes to acknowledging photography’s limitations. What is truly unlimited is the photographic, and it can be found everywhere, not just on photography’s patch.

As far as profaned monumentality is concerned, photography is a promising field. For many years, its status within the museum was questionable—the veneration of reproducibility, the document, and the archive was still due to arrive. And yet, within the industrial era’s epic nostalgia of loss, photography and museums go hand in hand. Both have solidified as institutions of social, cultural, and emotional reform. Both have been wielded as “imperial devices of control”, “non-accountability”, and “expropriation”.⁷ In both cases, walls are currently in a state of collapse. Their public and private sovereignty is subjected to a temporal and spatial fluidity regulated by digital technology.

In point of fact, photography’s walls were never meant to be firm. Photography, writes Andrew Dewdney, has never been “a single technical entity nor a unified philosophic vision”. It is “a hybrid of related technical apparatuses, social values, cultural codes, media forms and contexts of reception”,⁸ and as much so as the museum. For its part, the physical museum, as a complex performing cell of material and visual culture, has no less a role to play in the realm of visuality and its discourses than photography.

I envision photography’s institutional future, and my sight becomes flooded with the manifestations of a lens and algorithm-based culture. From traditional cameras to camera phones, from fine-art prints to digital online curating, and from the still to the moving image and their intermediate constellations, I see photographic images, the same as any other artwork, as precious collectible entities and, simultaneously, as immaterial operational metadata, with their autonomous aura fluctuating between uniqueness and banality. I see them as mutable associative laps that circulate from one narrative to the next; as devices of power; and as receptors and transmitters of gazes. I see images of artworks, and artworks themselves, as mental images in the viewer’s mind. I see a museum, with or without walls, as a physical or virtual condition that crystallises as an image of itself.

Amidst an ecosystem of “accelerated capitalism and its computational logic”,⁹ museums are here to rethink the world by, in part, un-thinking photography as it has been heretofore formulated. To un-think photography means to reveal it as a “paradoxical sum of its technological apparatuses and cultural organisation, rather than simply the ascendency of representation”.¹⁰ It also means to determinedly defy its predominant, simplistic implementation as an axiom by anachronistic modes of visual storytelling and curation.

I dream of a “museal pedagogy of emancipation” ¹¹ that confronts us with the ways in which both physical and virtual images condition our gaze and our terms of engagement with representations, wilfully challenging the chasm between prevailing cultural codes of visuality, computational codes, and hegemonic taxonomies. I dream of a museum that, overcoming the medium’s claustrophobia, rethinks photography’s boundaries with other cultural agents, society, and technology—even at the risk of allowing in discordant noise—so that we are no longer asked to curate photography collections or photography exhibitions, but, simply, collections/exhibitions of material and mental dialogues. In this space of re-readings, or even battles, photography should be regarded as what it primarily is: a relational apparatus, in a ceaseless process of re-contextualisation and de-contextualisation, that has the ability to dismantle the ideological and monumental structures of the past, the present, and the future.

# Profane Collisions and Revolutionary Illuminations

To paraphrase Boris Groys’ words at the beginning of this essay, it is precisely because of photography’s absolute resemblance to “every other ordinary, profane thing” to be found beyond the walls of the museum that the medium can project a vital freshness. Photography is a fascinating but, a priori, exhausted heterotopia. Its critical and empirical capabilities lie outside the frame, in the assumption of identity as a relation. There are still many of us who search for answers upon the opaque surface of the image, but the latter catapults them out of its domain toward an archipelago of misrecognition. For every photograph implies an eminently self-reflective, radical unmasking of hegemonic dichotomies that potentially carries within it the possibility of innovation. Be aware, nevertheless, this revolt may also involve profanation, conflict, and destruction. And battle. I envision the museum hovering spread-winged above this scenery of battle, like Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, described by Benjamin as the “angel of history” in one of his most brilliant essays. Behind him, a “catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”. In front of him,“the future”.¹² I do not see the pile of debris from here, but I do see an empty, decrepit pedestal bearing the ghostly imprint of the hauled-away monument. A photographic image, scratched, creased, and begrimed, lies upon it, to be shared, co-created, and transmitted with and by all of us. The photograph as a means to enter a new horizon of world dialectics based on an equality of access, knowledge, and experience. A record sufficient for the apprehension of destruction and loss, entailed through the rediscovery of identity.