Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

CLEARING THE SPACE: ART AS TRANSPORT-
STATION AND THE ARTIST AS SITE OF
TRANSMISSION
But by muting the woman’s voice in her video, did
Bamadhaj silence her? Did she not allow her to speak?
Or was this the artist’s way of saying: “It is not for me—a
woman artist, a public intellectual and a foreigner—
to give this woman a voice, but to clear the space—
perhaps by eliminating all distractions like sound - to
allow her to speak.” This space becomes what the Israeli
artist Barbara Ettinger (Pollock, 2005) describes as a
transport-station of trauma. It is “more than a place but
a space that allows for certain occasions of occurrence
and encounter.” Memory and trauma are unrepresentable,
and attempts to re-enact and re-present only serve to
re-inflict the violence, especially if the remembering is
staged melodramatically (as in war memorials like the
Hiroshima Peace Park and films like Schindler’s List)
and ahistorically framed within totalizing assumptions
about what constitutes history, the nation and Asian
identity. (Landy, 1996) Art as a transport-station “Does
not promise that the passage of trauma will actually take
place in it; it only supplies the space for the occasion.” It
is a space and occasion for a trans-subjective and humanizing
aesthetic encounter, one that is fundamentally and ethical
one. (Pollock, 2005)
The artist here is not the expressive source of the
experience being offered and art here is not an expression
of an individual’s authentic interior—as in for instance,
Van Gogh’s suffering genius expressing a most private,
tortured but nonetheless exalted vision of humanity.
Instead, the artist is the site of transmission, whose radar
receives the “trauma of the world, her world and that
of unknown others, but also because as an ethical being
in the world opened to the other she cannot but share
their trauma and both transmit and in transmitting
transform its autistic solitariness into connectivity…”
(Pollock, 2005)
Although Bamadhaj had almost no direct experience
of the traumas of 1965—except perhaps indirectly
through the death of her brother—she attempted to
make possible an encounter with trauma that is shared
from a trans-subjective ground (one that encompasses
various subjectivities, whether male, female,
heterosexual, homosexual, among others) that allows
her to connect with others. Although a consensus is
impossible to reach, her art at least provides us with the
occasion for “encountering the pressure and haunting
of that unsayable and unknowable pain of damage to
human subjectivity and sociality”. (Pollock, 2005)
ENGAGING MODERNITY: RELIGION, GENDER, AND ART 113
As Japanese artist Shimada Yoshiko puts it very simply:
Art “makes the viewer anxious” (taking her cue from
Korean cinema director Byon Yong-Ju) and that it is this
“anxiety that brings about the possibility of a change of
point of views”—not as propaganda, but as “something
that make viewers re-think their own existence.” (Shimada,
1998, all quotes from Shimada from this source. Page
numbers not available)
MOURNING AND REMEMBERING AS ACTS
OF RESISTANCE
Like Bamadhaj, Shimada chooses to work on a subject
that many Japanese would rather forget, ignore and
avoid: images of women in the Second World War
sourced from newspaper photographs. She feels this is
a theme that must be confronted, not only because “in
order to know who I am (an Asian, a Japanese, a woman),
examining the recent past history of Japan and the role
of women and what we have done to the people of Asia
is unavoidable.”
In her installations and in some of her prints, one
recurrent image is that of a woman in a white apron,
a symbol of motherhood and domesticity, but also a
uniform of Dai Nippon Fujinkai, a women’s organization
formed in support of the war. “After this group adopted
aprons as their uniform, the participation of lower and
lower-middle class women increased. The apron gave
them a false idea of equality among women, and its
positive associations (love, devotion, motherhood) hid
the fascism and militarism behind its façade.” In the print
Shooting Lessons, 1992, we see these apron-wearing
women taking target lessons directed, Shimada relates,
at the natives of Korea, one of Imperial Japan’s former
colonies. “I realized that Japanese women were not entirely
voiceless victims of the male dominant militarism. Many
of them were enthusiastic fascists and willing to sacrifice
themselves and to victimize others in the name of the
Emperor. But after the war, their activities were never
questioned and war responsibility was never discussed.
So the system remains the same. Without realizing this,
we (Japanese women) cannot reach a true understanding
of ourselves or others and we will be manipulated again
and again.”
In other words, it is not only men who were co-opted
into the Japanese expansionist project, but also women,
who became the cipher for nationalistic motherhood,
and as such has no existence outside her family, a
metonym for the nation-as-family and one of the many
branches of the Imperial household—the main house.
While the Imperial household is patrilineal, the figure
of the Emperor—within the peculiarly Japanese encod-
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows