Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

194 — 195
Adam Budak
70 Renzo Martens, in: http://www.
modernedition.com/art-articles/
contemporary-dutch-art/dutchcontemporary-artists.html.
71 Rancière, The Emancipated
Spectator, op. cit., pp. 83-107.
asking the most simple however unexpected question: “What do you think of me?” The
perspective is reversed now: the (media) image is produced by a victim and pointed
towards the Western world. “What is your theme? Why are you here? Why do you need
somebody else to tell you where your place is? Why do you film this?” - such accusative
and hostile questions bounce back, while the camera is penetrating the artist’s
face, challenging his shamelss exhibitionism. The scene is embarrassing and mutually
humiliating; the sense of unease and despair is devastating: “Who is responsible for
this? How can we understand each other?” As irritating as it is deeply moving, the
artist’s gesture investigates the possibility of an empathy and studies the perception
of the “Other”: “I made Episode 1 as a delegate of the viewing public, an audience that
is mostly interested in themselves. So I didn’t ask the people how they felt now their
legs had been amputated and those kinds of questions. But I asked them how they
thought I felt. If they thought I was handsome or how I should seduce my girlfriend
back in Brussels. ...I turned it around because in reality it’s much more about how we
feel and less about how they feel.”70 Although Martens’ footage seemingly features
the usual portrait of any war (with images of devastated cities in ruins, refugee camps
with endless rows of tents, heavily armed soldiers of a border patrol, suffering civilians,
starving for food supplies, NGO employees, elaborating help programmes, journalists,
hunting for images of terror and disaster), the artist’s concern is rather focused on how
moral and ethical faculties operate in such extreme situations of territories under fire.
Martens uncovers the hypocrysy of the global media system and the collapse of any
humantarian aid efforts to relieve the tragedy of the inhabitants of a war zone. In fact,
Episode 1 is a study of abuse and exploitation. “I want tears,” responds an NGO worker,
while unveiling the mechanisms of humanitarian help, determined by the presence of
the cameras and media coverage. Martens further manipulates the equilibrium of the
spectator’s moral agency: immersed within the tissue of the film’s quasi journalistic
narrative, and recalling the genre of a diary or love letter, the artist’s personal feeling
towards his girlfriend, Marie, addressed with declarations of love directly to the camera
lens in crucial, most dramatic moments of the film (“It’s me darling. It’s about time you
love me”) punctuates the artist’s voyage through hell and acts as Brechtian alienation
effect, interrupting our stereotypical view and strengthening the sense of truth and
sincerity. Balancing on the thin line of ethical correctness, Martens’ provocative film
is both, artist’s self-analysis as well as his political, profoundly human intervention
into the fabrics of precarious life where love affair and atrocities of war participate in a
necessary and urgent act of communal and individual catharsis.
Episode 3 marks the artist’s further step in investigating the “pain of Others” via the
analysis of mechanisms of global politics and economy. This time, Martens embarks on
a Dantesque expedition into the interior of Congo and witnesses a society, tormented
by war, extreme misery and injustice. Here too, the narrative is double-layered and
it includes a self-reflexive component which addresses the politics of image production,
and in particular, the ethics and economics that constitute the representation
of post-colonial suffering. “What makes an image intolerable?” asks Martens after
Rancière, touching in a provocative way upon the regime of visibility and tracing shift
from the intolerable in the image to the intolerability of the image, which, according
to Rancière, has found itself at the heart of the tensions affecting political art.71
The artist’s critique of Western photojournalism points towards the abuse of human
misery and poverty, considered as a “packaged” commodity, destined for the perception
of Western world. Martens boldly addresses the overwhelming poverty and suffering
of a nation driven by violence and calamity that were turned by media into an
image-industry and fascinating spectacle, echoing Susan Sontag’s reflection upon the
psychology of disaster images and evil, when she asks: “Is there an antidote to the