<nettime> Paolo Cirio: Evidentiary Realism

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

[This is Paolo Cirio's essay from last year, introducing the show
"Evidentiary Realism" [1], which he curated. He basically formulates a
program for art that calls for the development of a new aesthetic for a
world that has increasingly become hard to see and perceive. In this, he
follows an argument developed by Eyal Weizman with this notion of
forensics, but ties to less to a criminal investigation and court room
context, but turns it into a more general call, to develop new ways of
seeing, an aesthetic in the etymological sense as making available to
sense perception. There are a lot of things in this essay that one could
write more succinctly or differently, but as contribution to thinking
about what art can, and cannot do, at this particular historical
juncture, I think it's quite useful.]


[1] http://www.evidentiaryrealism.net/


“Naturally, in the struggle with falsehood we must write the truth, and
this truth must not be a lofty and ambiguous generality [but] something
practical, factual, undeniable, something to the point [..] taking away
from these words their rotten, mystical implications”. Bertolt Brecht,
Writing the Truth, Five Difficulties, 1935.

https://paolocirio.net/press/texts/evidentiary-realism.php


__ Realism is out of sight

The real is present and concrete, yet complexity, scale, speed, and
opacity hide it from sight. The contemporary features of the social
landscape are unintelligible at first glance. Although we see the
shocking results of our social reality, we are nonetheless often unable
to see the systems and processes that generate such conditions. Realism
in art returns through intersecting documentary, forensic, and
investigative practices that contemporary realist artists utilize to
bring to light the unseeble beneath the formation of our society.

Realism traditionally portrays social oppression, visually illustrating
people and situations truthfully and accurately. In the visual arts, it
has primarily been expressed through figurative painting, photography,
and film. Thus, realism today can be conceptualized as an expansion of
ways of seeing and portraying contemporary social complexities, while
maintaining the concern of presenting subject matter factually within
the aesthetics of visual language. However, this particular realism
looks beyond visible social conditions. Evidentiary Realism examines the
underpinning economic, political, legal, linguistic, and cultural
structures that impact society at large. These evolving social fields
are highly interconnected and often too complex and high-speed to grasp
- if not secret, imperceptible, opaque, or manipulated by advanced
rhetorical devices. Reality today can only be fully apprehended by
pointing at evidence from the language, programs, infrastructures,
relations, data, and technology that power structures control,
manipulate, and hide. This contemporary postvisual condition is
introduced by Trevor Paglen, commenting on the work of Harun Farocki,
“wars are being waged through systems that are simply postvisual, or
more accurately, systems whose imaging capacities exceed those of human
eyes to the point of being invisible to them.”[1]

Since the late sixties, artists have responded to increasingly tangled
socio-political and technological developments. Representations of the
modern reality of systemic complexity were initially questioned by Jack
Burnham and Hans Haacke, who argued, “easel art can no longer convey the
subtleties and complexities of the international business world...If you
make protest paintings you are likely to stay below the sophistication
of the apparatus.”[2] Inherent limitations of objectivity and the
representation of complex social issues were addressed by Martha Rosler
as “inadequate descriptive systems”[3] for addressing evidence of
intentions and contexts of reception as disguising devices, which Roland
Barthes initially discussed as the “overconstruction”[4] of photography.
These reflections brought to maturity the documentary category and, as
Hal Foster noted recently, “this critique of the document is largely
assimilated, and many artists have passed from a posture of
deconstruction to one of reconstruction.”[5] The tendency of evidentiary
realist artists to show evidence is in effect about the impulse and
urgency of reassembling fragments from our entangled and opaque reality
and in doing so it reconciles with the original legacy of realism and
documentary practices. As Rosalyn Deutsche noted, “today critical
practices claiming the legacy of realism [..] explore the mediation of
consciousness by representation and investigate the conditions of
possibility of what is perceived to be ‘real’ at a given historical
moment.”[6]

In turn, the epistemological critique of the document is integrated with
an investigation of the factual aspects of the subject matter.
Evidentiary Realism considers the contexts of the sociopolitical,
technical, and cultural infrastructures of complex systems that
influence the perception and validation of truth and reality in an
explicit empiricism of epistemic inquiry. The real can be seen only by
simultaneously accounting for the multiple infrastructural signals,
referents, relations, and processes of the various parameters that
produce reality. It’s with Evidentiary Realism that artistic research
into systemic and structural apparatuses pushes the boundaries of what
can be seen beyond sight.

__ Realism is enhanced

Beside the assimilation of epistemological examination, today realism in
art is also enhanced by advancing technological and cognitive
capability, which allows artists to capture, access, and process reality
as never before. The technologies of detection and presentation provide
easier, faster, and cheaper means to render, represent, and share
relevant information. The relentless “technological turning point”[7] in
media and science introduces novel forms of evidence to be used and
discussed, while “the current wave of interactive and telematic
technologies [..] enables users to access previously inaccessible data
about complex (and often hidden) social relationships.”[8] Artists can
investigate and decode complexity through a wide range of material and
techniques, ranging from high-resolution photo cameras, scanners, and
satellite images to data-mining, hacking, leaks, social media content,
open source intelligence, and archival or instant news items. These
materials can now be computed on relational timelines and in databases
correlated with geographic, architectural, biological, and financial
data. Even the most complex black boxes are interrogated by counter
black boxes programmed to illuminate the obscure artificial
intelligence, high-frequency algorithms, and big data of our
computational society. The asymmetry of the power of vision and
knowledge is bound to be a pursuit of the technological field that will
keep leveling itself.

The forums of presentation and legitimization have also expanded. Both
evidence and artworks are shared over networks, and, in turn, are
collectively discussed and verified. Citizen journalism, research, and
criticism complement institutional and mainstream outlets in validating
evidence-based work, while a broad audience acknowledges such evidence
through a variety of distribution networks. As Eyal Weizman noted, “the
protocols and languages of the forum will be reorganized around new
aesthetic, material, and systemic demands. Forums are immanent,
contingent, diffused, and networked; they appear, they expand and
contract.”[9]

Quantifiable, computable, and shareable documentary forms provide a
sense of amplified realism. An unseeable reality appears to us as
sharper evidence once it is intercepted and decoded in all its
complexity. Enhanced realism in documentary art can be conceptualized as
“forensic information,” which here is broadly interpreted as in-depth
analysis of media and content gathered from a variety of sources and
techniques and combined with “forensics linguistics” to analyze modes of
rhetoric, representation, and reception. Yet, the enhancement of realism
in art goes beyond the use of tools, material, and knowledge available
today. Realism can be archived only with independent studies and
critiques of the social, economic, legal, and political contexts of
institutional power. As Weizman stated, “forensis is forensics where
there is no law, beyond State law.”[10] The autonomy of the research is
also inflected on the results of the works; “The outcomes of
‘investigatory art,’ like those of investigative journalism, have no
legal authority but can act as an agent for change by creating public
awareness that instigates action.”[11]

Such politics of representation and presentation of evidence come into
relation with the field of aesthetics. Giving significant artistic form
to evidence is about articulating the intentions, outcomes, and contexts
of the artworks; this is how evidentiary realist artists address the
circumstances that produce their artworks - and truly enhance realism.

__ Realism of evidentiary aesthetics

Evidentiary works explore the aesthetics of secrecy, complexity,
rhetoric, and the control of social, economic, and technological
systems. The evidence is presented through a variety of artistic
strategies: juxtapositions, ready-mades, reconstructions, abstractions,
and compositions that reveal networks of relations, languages,
operations, and infrastructures. Beyond the visual presentation,
evidence is articulated with dialectical reflection and discourse on the
subject matter and its representation. Yet evidentiary artworks do not
make use of slogans or refer to the artist’s subjectivity - the evidence
presented is meant to speak for itself.

The aesthetics of Evidentiary Realism is often “post-spectacular,”
defined as “imagery characterized by its forensic look at the evidence
of violence, which comes to stand in for what we don’t see.”[12] The
process of investigation, the nature of the material, and the
sensibility of the artists eventually transform the evidence into highly
aesthetic visual works. However, this aesthetization of evidence differs
from traditional documentary art. It can instead synthesize complex
systems and make them accessible, catalyzing responses from the
audience, who otherwise would not sense the evidence emotionally and
visually - similar to how Laura Poitras describes her projects which,
“both create an aesthetic experience and reveal information that evokes
an emotional response.”[13] Composing aesthetic and stylistic forms from
evidence prompts the viewer to intimately sense the emotive elements
invoked by the artists.

With formal visual language and mediums, evidentiary realists
intelligently engage with the formal qualities of the documentary
tradition. As such, the artists are invested in how to convey evidence
through abstraction, figuration, or commentary. Unseeable, fabricated,
or bare evidence is portrayed within specific aesthetics, forms, and
conceptual frameworks of visual art. For instance, “visual perspective
and the spatial representation of complex systems”[14] were implemented
in diagrammatic drawings by Mark Lombardi as a rigorous aspect and
technique of visual art. The formal mediums of photography, film,
drawing, painting, and sculpture used in evidentiary artworks provide a
captivating means to transform the material of the investigation into
evidence. The materialization of the intellectual, emotive, and
intuitive artistic process creates physical evidence akin to the notion
of “real evidence” in the legal field. Such “material evidence” are
objects brought to court to perform proof and where the aesthetics for
sensing, mediating, narrating, and presenting evidence play a judicial
role. Similarly, physical artifacts, compositions, and installations
assembled by evidentiary realist artists are objects articulating proof
in the form of artworks.

Investigative aesthetics is an interdisciplinary artistic practice
characterized by research and field work in human rights, war crimes,
ecocide, political collusions, legal, and financial inequalities.
Artistic research looks at the fabric of associations and chains of
actions between people, environments, events, and things. Interrogating,
seeking, finding, connecting, and inquiring into leaked and discovered
evidence fuels the artistic process of making evidentiary artworks,
which are created from the artist's sensibility, curiosity, and
intuition. The artists often unveil realities already fully present in
the world, as open secrets, or “leaks” from systems that are too complex
and large to be completely hidden and undecodable. However, the
detectable evidence might be still at threshold of visibility or
disguised by secrecy and complexity. In all these cases, evidentiary
works present the unintelligibility of evidence, or the connections
among decoded hints, or refined details available to expose their
meaning. Evidentiary realists purposefully challenge the detectability
of complex systems to illuminate and enhance what can’t be seen at plain
sight and qualify as evidence.

Despite its agenda to expose the concealed real, Evidentiary Realism is
not necessarily political art in classical terms. Its social function is
inscribed in its own right. It questions the fundamental politics of
representation itself with profound philosophical questions on
art-making and its audience, role, and use in society. Evidentiary
Realism enhances the tradition of the historical realisms in art, with
artworks becoming advanced learning tools to build in-depth social
knowledge and inquiry.

__ Realism returns

The return of reality prevails in an advanced capitalist society that
increasingly pushes the planet to extreme social crises. The shift in
the perception of the real-world and impulse toward realism in art can
be exemplified at a time when nobody dares to openly deny climate change
philosophically and scientifically. This return of reality has already
been marked in several social crises, provoking the popular demand for
truth and social justice. The opposition to the Iraq War, Occupy Wall
Street, Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, the Panama Papers, Climate March,
Black Lives Matter, and the recent resistance to Donald J. Trump and
Brexit are among only the most evident signs of an intensification in
acknowledging critical social issues and in valuing the exposure of the
truth.

In art, this time of crisis is reflected through the expansion of the
aesthetics of social engagement, socio-critical and protest art,
interventionism, institutional critique, and Evidentiary Realism
outlined here. Through a historical perspective, we can notice that the
return of realist aesthetics naturally reflects times of social and
economic crises. In fact, realism in art can be traced back to France in
the aftermath of the nineteenth century revolutions, which compelled
artists to reject Romanticism for realist depictions of famine, labor,
and political turmoil. After this initial wave of realism, Impressionism
emerged and elevated the personal over the social. This pattern of waves
of aesthetics oscillating between prioritizing social or subjective
reality emerged and it cycled again during the economic recession of
1930s, the post-war period, and the social unrest of the sixties and the
seventies. We can infer that we are now moving through a new wave of
realism in art after the last decades of the twentieth century, which
were characterized by pop art, nihilism, and postmodernism. It is with
the beginning of the twenty-first century that the social sphere and its
representations are again pushed to the forefront of social inquiry.

Rooted in the critique of globalization, neoliberalism, and ecological
destruction, the return of reality and the impulse towards realism in
art can be traced to the aftermath of September 11, 2001. As Julian
Stallabrass also noted, “the reawakening of documentary has been a
product of the over-reach of neoliberal power, particularly [...] the
launching of controversial wars, starkly dividing the globe into allies
and enemies, and the violating democratic principles, thrust documentary
in a renewed prominence.”[15] The collapse of the Twin Towers signalled
the decline of subjectivism in postmodernist and poststructuralist
philosophies that prevailed from the late seventies to the nineties. The
duplicity of reality, which Jean Baudrillard coincidentally identified
in the Twin Towers,[16] turned into a monolithic reality as a harsh
response to the attacks. In this time of history, the postmodern
relativity of the real is gradually losing discursive influence, while
the urgency of economic, social, and ecological crises has become
dramatically concrete. Even in the so-called post-factual era, truth
seems to be manufactured in unsophisticated modes: blatant falsehoods
seem to be lauded as power of denial of evident facts. In post-truth,
reality is denied by opposing it with authoritarian voices, which
ultimately responds to the popular fear of the return of reality.

While the manifestation and mystification of political rhetoric has
renewed its violence in different forms over the centuries, it is the
popular peril of false information propagating online that makes
fact-checking a common activity for most people. Nevertheless, humanity
is approaching a critical stage of global crisis with climate change,
neglected war crimes, mass surveillance, civil rights, and the freedom
of speech, bringing a new theoretical revaluation of documentary art and
the roles it plays within this social and political context. Similar to
how the French Realists moved away from Romanticism, we now see the
exhaustion of postmodernist relativism and its paradigm losing its
representational relevance. At its apex, realist aesthetics may want to
refuse subjectivity, ambiguity, allegory, and spectacle. Susan Sontag
reminded us in 2002, “real wars are not metaphors.”[17] As such,
Evidentiary Realism reckons with a framework for a profound portrayal of
contemporary times.

By Paolo Cirio, 2017.

[1] Trevor Paglen, "Trevor Paglen on Harun Farocki,” Artforum, Feb 2015.
https://www.artforum.com/passages/id=50135

[2] Jack Burnham, Recent Works: Hans Haacke, exhibition catalog
(Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1979).
http://www.renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/296/hans-haacke-recent-works/

[3] Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems,
1974-1979.

[4] Roland Barthes, “Shock-Photos,” 1969.

[5] Hal Foster, “Real Fictions: Alternatives to Alternative Facts,”
Artforum, April 2017.
https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=201704&id=67192

[6] Rosalyn Deutsche, Hans Haacke, October Files 18, MIT Press, 2015.

[7] Thomas Keenan, Eyal Weizman; Mengele's Skull: The Advent of a
Forensic Aesthetics (Berlin: Sternberg, 2012).

[8] Edward A. Shanken, “Investigatory art: Real-time systems and network
culture”; November 22, 2012.

[9] Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums,
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012).

[10] Eyal Weizman, “Forensis Is Forensics Where There Is No Law,”
MetaMute, Dec 16, 2014.
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/forensis-forensics-where-there-no-law

[11] Edward A. Shanken, op cit.

[12] Christy Lange, “The Limitations of Photojournalism and the Ethics
of Artistic Representation,” Frieze, June 2010.
https://frieze.com/article/shooting-gallery

[13] Laura Poitras, Laura Poitras: Astro Noise, (New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, 2016).

[14] Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Mark Lombardi, (dOCUMENTA (13)
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013).

[15] Julian Stallabrass, Documentary, Whitechapel: Documents of
Contemporary Art, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).

[16] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 1983).

[17] Susan Sontag, “Real Battles and Empty Metaphors,” New York Times,
September 10, 2002.

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