Human Condition - Universalmuseum Joanneum

72 Susan Sontag, Regarding
the Pain of the Others, New York:
Picador, 2003, p. 122.
73 Ibid., p. 97.
74 Martens confesses in an e-mail
conversation with the author,
May 2010: “’Episode 1 and Episode
3 are the outer panels of a triptych,
portraying images of poverty,
war and historical devastation as
commodities. They show earthly
narratives, with rebels, priests,
judges, greed and cameras, and
representation itself as part of the
confusion. Like in medieval altar
pieces, the middle panel, Episode
2, will, one day, transcend this
all.” I do hope so, I can’t wait for
Episode 2 to appear!
75 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of
the Others, p. 105.
76 Idib., p. 8.
perennial seductiveness of war?”72 and points out the almost obsessive human interest
in them, already studied by Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757): “There is no spectacle we so
eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity.”73 Martens unveils
the masks of pseudo-humanitarian international aid agencies and their ruthless exploitation
of human tragedy, and, against the grain, he searches for alternative solutions:
the artist’s proposal is as surprising and desperate as it might sound ironic and cynical
– “enjoy please the poverty” is Martens’ subversive slogan of his emancipatory course,
launched for the Congolese amateur photographers, an academy of survival and a
school of their own misery’s management, a controversial “enlightenment” lesson. “I
teach them how to deal with life,” so the artist comments upon his idea of providing
the local inhabitants with a kind of educational package of know how according to
which the misfortune can become a source of income. Instructed by Martens, they
begin copying Western photojournalists by taking images of war, rape and poverty
that haunt and surround them instead of images of festivities and family events that
belong to the joys of their everyday life but whose market value is incomparably lower
than the benefit received from the sensational and drastic imagery: documents of suffering,
cruelty and evil.
Martens’ is a particular unique genre, a brave mode of meta-speech oscillating
between (performative) documentary, docu-drama, performance, an emancipated traveloque
that combines a subjective narrative with a critical approach to the registered
material. The artist/narrator is practicing a kind of travesty too: in Episode 1 he takes
on the role of a Western journalist-amateur whereas in Episode 3 he rather acts as a
utopist, a naïve and uninitiated activist, a cynical coach, bringing know how to endangered
areas in crisis. Between detachment and engagement, accusation and protest,
the artist’s chameleonic and heterotopic character is one of many: a cool observer and
merciless intrudor, a passionate preacher and messiah, a witness and martyr, narcissistic
adventurer and alien, and, last but not least, a metteur-en-scène, staging his grandious
Herzogesque “Enjoy Please the Poverty” anti-Broadway show! Narrating in a first
person and bringing himself into a frame, Martens foregrounds his own position and
an address: “the artist is present.” In fact, we deal with a genre of extreme radical sefportraiture
– an artistic act as a higest form of responsibility and ethical awareness.
Renzo Martens’ Episodes are studies of hope and hopelessness. Despair and resignation
contribute also to the vulnerability and frailty of humanity in a state of emergency.
The artist’s oeuvre, planned as a triptych 74, is an essay on suffering, and as such it
bears an almost religious quality in approaching ethical matters, especially the nature
of compassion. Martens’ critique of the mediatised world leads towards the diagnosis
of a society, unable to empathise. Thus, once more the artist evokes Susan Sontag’s
observation of the contemporary politics of images and media: “In a world saturated,
no, hyper-saturated with images, those that should matter have a diminishing effect:
we become callous. In the end, such images just make us a little less able to feel, to
have our conscience pricked.”75 Analysing Virginia Woolf’s reflection upon war images,
Sontag states: “Not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to
strive to abolish what causes this havoc, this carnage – these, for Woolf, would be the
reactions of a moral monster. And, she is saying, we are not monsters, we members
of the educated class. Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed
to hold this reality in mind.”76 The empathy in crisis seems to be the most important
and precious theme of Renzo Martens’ oeuvre, but simultaneously, it seems that this
oeuvre’s most ambitious challenge, conducted in the shadow of a neon light “enjoy
please the poverty,” is the urge to overcome the human suffering with the mobilizing
and miraculous power of compassion and sublimation. Julia Kristeva articulates