To commission is to entrust authority to someone, to delegate it. Etymologically, the word combines the Latin for ‘with’ (com) and mittere, the action of ‘throwing, releasing, letting go’). The Lithuanian for commission, užsakymas, is more to do with ‘speaking for’ rather than ‘letting go with’ somebody or something. Nonetheless, it is left unclear if one is speaking for the other or for the reward granted by the other? So, to do a commission is an ambiguous act. It marks a tension between the transactional (‘you do this for me, I’ll do this for you’) and mutually entrusting (‘what you let go of is what I let go of, we take the plunge together’). Typically I am not one for the dissection of words to find their ‘origins’. However, as I was kindly asked for or rather entrusted with the task of thinking through the exhibition of two Alphonso Lingis’ photographs at Montos Tattoo by its co-founders as a way to dwell with the larger itinerary of their activities, this friction between ‘speaking for’ and ‘letting go with’ becomes a guide or a maquette.
Alphonso Lingis, an American philosopher of Lithuanian ‘origin’, is responsible for the English-language translations of many now-classic texts of 20th-century continental thought, such as Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and Invisible. Against the heavyweight backdrop of a philosophical tradition that Lingis himself studied and furthered, Montos Tattoo exhibits two modest, unframed colour photographs; one he took in Rio de Janeiro, one in Marrakech. Both are from Contact (Baltos Lankos, 2010), a photo book tracing his travels across the planet with photographs of disparate places and people accompanied by the author’s short texts, companions to the images themselves.
Today, in this strangest of summers (alas, it is 2020), Lingis’ photographs are housed in a modest room in a long corridor of similar rooms, on the fourth floor of the National Labour Inspectorate building. The room still betrays its beginnings as an office in 1982. Upon entrance, their arrangement on the opposite walls introduces a syncope between the photographs. A rhythmic promise – that durations traverse through images to move bodies, and perhaps for bodies to move each other – brings them together.
Folk acrobats perform in Marrakech, a group of four, two men and two boys, suspended in a tense, almost sculptural formation. The sun blazes straight into their eyes and those of the spectators. The length of the shadow suggests early morning, the beginning of festivities. A dancer sits down in an empty canteen after a long day in the Rio de Janeiro carnaval. A syncope! The photographs do not face each other, so do not their protagonists. This spatial juxtaposition is the lightest touch of curatorial decision-making in form. And yet, form can be significant. In one image, a collective body is in extreme tension yet oblivious to the spectators. In the other, sweat marks the end of a day of dancing and the release of physical fatigue. Instead is a sense of vigilance, a meeting of gazes between the photographer and the photographed mediated and obstructed by the camera lens.
Yet, both photographs are not just souvenirs from a travelogue and are not exhibited as such. The asymmetry in space points to their incommensurability, the two photographs mark not a sequence of encounters, but modalities of contact which were rendered different through these particular photographic events. The affective intensity of a beginning of a celebration differs from its end, not in degrees, but entirely. The propulsion into a temporality separate from clock time feels incomparable to the gradual return to an awareness of its ticking. The market festivities in Marrakech and the Rio Carnaval cannot be generalised under the rubric of the rite, as circumstances specific to a place change significantly the ritual itself. The relations between bodies (including that of the photographer), between temporalities and places flood the exhibition space through that one gentle syncope as if to unsettle the photographic humanist idea ‘that all live and die in the same way’[1] [1] independently of their social, political, historical and, in this case, embodied circumstance and the asymmetries or, indeed, conflicts they produce. This spatial, that is, formal syncope between the pictures in the exhibition space begins to manifest itself in ethical, if not political light, that of asymmetry of vision in the encounter. Particularly, in the photographic encounter between the globetrotting philosopher-cum-amateur-photographer and its subjects localised – simply put, stuck in one place. Is this fixedness a socio-economically conditioned reality or the persuasion (reality-effect) of photographs that bind a place and a person together?
Exhibition view: Ona Kvintaitė, Gediminas G. Akstinas
Here Lingis tries to enact what many a philosopher from the French tradition failed to do.[2] [2] He attempts to draw contours of his thought from and through the artwork rather than merely applying a theory at his disposal. The artwork’s own thought here pricks the problems at the crux of phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty) and ethical (Levinas) questions that are equally pressing today: what does encountering another (not necessarily a human subject) do? Taking a photograph refines the question further: can I make contact with an unfamiliar person or place ethically through acts of photographing, through acts of looking?
As a not fully formed thought this question and all its uneasy repercussions have been occupying my mind for the better part of 2020, after all, it is 2021 as I am writing this, gradually reassuring me about a couple of intuitions. At first, it reminded me soothingly that the encounter with an artwork is often a fundamentally non-immediate process, prolonged in the mind of the viewer who dwells with artworks long after the act of physically seeing them.[3] [3] This set of questions, now seemingly pivotal to the exhibition, needed distance in time to appear, their newly found urgency brushing against everyday lived experience, art history, current politics and theory. In turn, this affirmed the still vibrant potentiality of the artwork within the much-maligned exhibition format. The culprit, allegedly, in that it keeps art at bay, preventing it from pouring outside its boundaries, advocating for that kind of art which is not politically or socially engaged enough according to the calls to arms of many discursive knowledge-based art events or the contemporary art social media. The format appears there as almost a bothersome nuisance, a relic that nonetheless requires scrupulous documentation and as wide and as fast a circulation as possible.
If I were to relate Lingis’ project to the bad object par excellence for critical theory (following Barthes, Sontag and many others after), namely, the 1955 ‘The Family of Man’ exhibition, a number of shorthands (‘white male gaze’, ‘the post-colonial gaze’, ‘the tourist gaze’) could come in handy to read the way the photographer engaged with his subjects. If the Barthesian argument still stands, the photographs are an outcome of incorrectly chosen proximity, either idealising others, over-identifying with them (i.e., as victims of injustice or as bearers of some lost ancestral knowledge) or disidentifying, in each case, reaffirming a sense of one’s own superiority (self-righteousness being one form of that).[4] [4] Although, in the last few years the ultimate shorthand in international art seems to be the charge of the problematic object, both indicating that something is not quite resolved about the issue at hand and yet hinting that the conversation should now end. In the light of all this, why undertake a series of such risky projects; taking these photographs, exhibiting them years later, writing through them today?
Exhibition view: Ona Kvintaitė, Gediminas G. Akstinas
The exhibition senses an undeniable tension between ‘speaking for’ and ‘releasing with’, and Lingis, I am quite certain, has been very well aware of it as his own thought is deeply engaged with the Levinasian infinite responsibility towards the Other that comes about through the face-to-face encounter[5] [5] and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the intertwining, the inter-corporeality of the touching and the touched, the seeing and the seen.[6] [6] As Lingis himself beautifully elaborates on the scene he witnessed in Marrakech, ‘the inner diagram of the body of each man and boy extends in all the others, senses the diagram of force in the others and is sensed in them’.[7] [7]
While contact beyond one’s own intimate circle can often become problematic, the infinite responsibility towards the other is not simply one that shackles and suffocates, it also suggests that an encounter never begins from a position of ethical purity.[8] [8] Infinite responsibility towards another being, means that I can never truly live up to it, I am complicit in this collective failing. The attempt at contact, reaching out feeling it might not work out, can backfire; attempting to find the right proximity is the difficult bit. These trajectories of critique and paranoid ways of reading, I had at the ready did not sit well with me.[9] [9] How to read an artwork in a manner that is not foreclosed, not yet knowing if I will manage to find a way to make contact; if it’ll touch me or I’ll touch it in writing? This attempt at unforeclosure of possibility is the condition of ethical relation, yet risks everything, it risks misunderstandings, it risks unintended damage to the artwork or another person. ‘Is it not that every vision pulls the one overtaken by it into a great risk? The visions of the ones imagining blind, dazzle, wound’, writes Lingis.[10] [10] Relation conditioned by morality, that is, a predetermined set of social rules is an antidote; but let’s not forget that this ruleset, what Lacan called the symbolic order, itself hinges on predetermined violence unequally distributed. This sort of morality asks for transparency and symmetry – universality that erases the particular, that makes it difficult for syncopes to appear and play themselves out. I feel I can’t simply sit down and write all the shorthands due to the intimate intertwining of the two: the commission that delegated me the responsibility to ‘speak for’ Montos Tattoo and caring for what this exhibition does. This responsibility nudges me to take the risk of trying to open up the work and yet I can only open it up if I am open to its problematic. Can let myself trust for a moment that it was not just an old privileged white dude enacting soft violence,[11] [11] as Sontag called photography, for his enjoyment? What I am getting at is that perhaps the art world got bored of artworks and exhibitions because it too eagerly deadened artworks as ‘objects’. They are neither mere objects nor are objects entirely dead. What if we did not yet close their potential to sense reality differently and give, if ever so lightly, a sense of a different reality as possible?
If the most one expects from an artwork is speaking for equated to speaking about, it is not that difficult to get bored by the lingo rehearsed over and over – to get used to speaking and listening about artworks, solidarity, care (etc.) but not with care, not with the artworks themselves. Is there not a certain solipsism and narcissism lurking in the project of art writing rendered as such: ‘I refuse to dwell with the exhibition, the event, the artwork, in the end, it is about me and my experience’. What the exhibition at Montos Tattoo then does, it dwells with Lingis’ attempt, taking the risk of contact alongside him, and, in doing so, Lingis’ and Montos’ collective leap reverberates even more powerfully. This keeps returning to me, it does not let me not care. It does not let me apply knowledge of a certain critical discourse to the exhibition as if one size fits all.
What modes of contact might these photographs attest to? At a glance, the two boys in Marrakech almost levitate in the breezy summer air. The stillness of the scene promptly evaporates if one looks at the young man in a deep-sea blue coloured t-shirt which in capital letters reads ‘freedom of choice, do what you want’. The tension in his arms, tightly locked lips and furrowed forehead shakes time up putting it back in motion. The perceived lightness of two bodies is interdependent on extreme tension of another. As the young man in blue stands on the other’s shoulders slightly askew, his body makes the other bodies respond and adjust, rippling through and affecting the overall ‘abstract’ shape. As the rehearsed ‘sculpture’ endures, alive and corporeal, now inseparable with the embodied possibilities and limitations, it is no longer just a form. This tension is palpable especially when a photograph is felt as taking place in duration, not only through the event of the acrobatic performance but also that of viewing the photograph, or the event of writing that comes from a body that not only perceives but also senses and desires.[12] [12] In the field of what is visible (‘merely a beautiful form’, ‘merely a tourist’s photographic gaze’ etc.) the muscle tension gives rise to a corporeal response to the bodies one never knew and will not know, an internal bodily relation beneath the skin surface. Deferred in time, their relationship cannot be symmetrical, it will not be commensurable or entirely virtuous. The act of looking is desiring and I’m not aware of desire entirely virtuous. From within this complicity, could we sketch an ethics and poetics of relation otherwise?
Exhibition view: Ona Kvintaitė, Gediminas G. Akstinas
The photographs think through theory. A shadow of a figure with hands crossed casts itself on the robe of a man it blinds. Together they engender a tangible albeit not entirely visible form, the encircling audience. Not everyone is interested, some backs turned, others glance briefly before getting back to the goods on sale. Presence, often critiqued as the holy grail to phenomenology, in the Marrakech photograph is syncopated, rendered uneven by different intensities of looking, bodies tensing and the everyday hustle and bustle. Even the sun is interrupting. The Self, inevitably the privileged subject of a theoretical face-to-face encounter with the abstract Other in the photographs has to be particular. Lingis has to address and respond to the circumstance he is in. This circumstance and the act of taking a photograph makes Lingis expose himself as someone who attempts to make contact, to think ethics through photography, but also as a Western tourist, fascinated by the places and people he encounters, perhaps troublingly idealising what he is witnessing: ‘[during the Rio Carnaval] people come out into the streets to listen and dance with anyone, with everyone. How joyous and how beautiful humans can be together’.[13] [13] If Lingis would not have implicated himself as both attempting to be ethical and complicit in possibly failing to do so, the problems of ‘speaking for’ but also the tiniest possibility to ‘let go together with’ would not have come about.
Exhibition view: Ona Kvintaitė, Gediminas G. Akstinas
Even the portrait of the dancer at the end of a day in Rio is not an exaltation of presence or a literalisation of the face-to-face encounter. The abundance of Pepsi chairs trailing off the shot, akin to the boy’s black Terminator t-shirt in the other photograph, infiltrate the event. They deny any phantasms of encounters occurring in pure vacuums void of economic and political marking. Perhaps even more important than the obvious traces of globalisation that disturbs the eye-to-eye (in truth, the eye-to-camera-to-eye), is what the photograph and the person portrayed withhold. The plushy pink flourishes he wears, carefully painted glistening black eyelashes and the sweat reflecting the light all give away the end of the day of celebrations at the Carnaval, while the slightly hunched posture might speak of tiredness. Even if the man is almost completely naked, one cannot ‘read’, ‘identify’, ‘describe’ him or his emotions without resorting to silly assumptions. Is he resting, vigilant, gently smiling or downright indifferent to the camera? His portrait remains opaque to the gaze, difficult to grasp, eat up, assimilate.[14] [14] It is not a psychological portrait from which one could think he or she has gained an understanding of the other’s difference.[15] [15] Not Lingis’ intentions, not the photographic apparatus or the sitter’s gaze, but the contact itself as it is part shaped and part traced through the image is what brings about this aporia. The photograph, as far as it depicts the dancer, tries to represent him a certain way – perhaps as vulnerable? Crucially, to represent, to speak for and about him, the photograph has to plunge with him as the exposed photo paper soaks up the body and the environment. What emerges again is more opaque than transparent. If the image attempts to speak for another, the words that come out do not quite translate to us.
The exhibition felt like an echo to the larger gambit of Montos Tattoo’s activities. An attempt to open up a space for an artwork to breathe, to sense. And for us, those onlookers, it is an invitation to try and sense what the artworks had sensed and are still giving sense to, over time. The non-immediacy of contact and judgement becomes a way to care for artworks and through them, caring for those things that, in this case, two photographs, gently extend to. This mode of contact implies a politics of unforeclosure of difficulty, a displacement of the haven of knowledge as morality and morality as knowledge. A difficulty that asks to ‘stay with the trouble’.[16] [16] Yet to stay with the trouble, two unframed colour photographs remind me, is to not disavow that one is complicit with the trouble.
To speak for it, the exhibition asked to stick with what is there regardless, what artworks hold in tension and words try to resolve.
Commissioned by Montos Tattoo
Exhibition view: Ona Kvintaitė, Gediminas G. Akstinas
[1] [17] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), p. 100.
[2] [18] ‘Of the massive “poststructuralist” Kunstliteratur, only Barthes’s texts seemed to us genuinely unaltered by the kind of arrogance we saw everywhere else. He himself was a “Sunday painter” and was thus aware of the difficulties lying behind the very act of painting, furthermore, he always stressed his lack of qualifications on the matter, his amateurism, and never pontificated.’ in Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), p. 260.
[3] [19] Briony Fer, ‘Eva Hesse and Color’, October, 1.119 (2007), 21–36 (p. 26).
[4] [20] Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), p. 214.
[5] [21] Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), pp. 204–5.
[6] [22] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 139.
[7] [23] Exhibition text by Alphonso Lingis, 2020. [24]
[8] [25] Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 4–5.
[9] [26] ‘For the mainstream of New Historicist, deconstructive, feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic criticism, to apply a hermeneutics of suspicion is, I believe, widely understood as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities.’ in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 126.
[10] [27] Alphonso Lingis, Contact (Vilnius: Baltos Lankos, 2010), p. 160.
[11] [28] Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Rosetta Books, 2005), p. 10.
[12] [29] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 197.
[13] [30] Exhibition text by Alphonso Lingis, 2020.
[14] [31] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), p. 190.
[15] [32] Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013), p. 144.
[16] [33] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 28–29.