The Aesthetics of Obliteration

    For many, war is an event experienced vicariously, grasped only from significant spatial, geographic and psychological removes. For those who live in parts of the world unmolested by the directly tangible affects of armed conflict, war is but merely a tragic spectacle transmitted by means of an increasingly globalized media. Of course, it is always preferable to consume war as a mediated abstraction than be confronted by it as an immediate, tangible reality - knocking on the front door of one's domicile.

    Most of us in the West now only experience the relatively unthreatening, minor traumas inflicted by wartime violence. Modes of communication such as documentary film, television, newspapers and magazines may project war into our daily lives, but such projections comprise just one set of visual phenomena in the image-rich, highly distracting territory of contemporary media culture. War is essentially re-created through pictorialized information and the traditional codes of journalistic and literary-based narrative-- for purposes of either entertainment (i.e., "infotainment"), or political propaganda (e.g., the cozy relationship between the Pentagon and the TV networks during the Gulf War). On only rare occasions, such as the unfolding of the Vietnam conflict (the first truly televised war), the effects of television reportage have become anti-propagandistic, eventually turning public opinion against the American involvement. Yet with Bosnia, it is possible to suggest that television numbed us to a complex tragedy: just as the regularly broadcast images functioned to reveal the insanity of ethnic cleansing, they also served to reinforce the sense of paralysis engendered by an ambivalent Europe and a skittish United States. In a sense, the effect of immediacy suggested by television create an opposite affect: specifically, the interrelated conditions of distancing and abstraction.

    In Tim White's recent video and photographic works, the question of the relationship between war and its' mediation through the filter of image-reproduction is central. Utilizing original documentary film footage of battles from W.W.II, White then subjects these first-level (re)presentations of actual warfare to subsequent degrees of manipulation. In the video project - and related photographic series -- entitled "Presence," a specific temporal duration of a vintage film showing the effects of tracer bullets illuminating a night sky has been compressed dramatically through video manipulation. White has reduced action that might have taken 30 seconds to unfold in the original film, to a mere two seconds in his video (re)appropriation. The resultant abstracted images are gorgeous-- twinkling particles of light, continuously mutating against a blue-black night sky. A milky way of destruction, at once seductive and repellent, dream-like yet brutally incontestable. White's technical act of compression is also an allegorical gesture, suggesting that our putative connection to a distant historical past can only be reclaimed through the salvaging of a representation. Yet this is a representation that no longer has the power to "reference" anything other than a layering of its own historical and temporal mediations. In a sense, White produces a sensuous tautology, a circularity of origin (a putative moment in history) and destination (the reception of the past through the framework of the present). The video and photo works that comprise "Presence" may be traces of a military episode which can no longer be directly accessed through individual or collective memory, and so indicate a level of literal and symbolic abstraction that teeters on the verge of pure artifice. But it is the beautiful artifice of war filtered through the linked yet distinct technologies of film and video which is so haunting: perhaps the only access to a supposed "real" is through the gateway of the imagination.

    On a certain level, White's method of appropriation is straightforward, as it continues a process of cultural abstraction (from the "Real") already inaugurated within the "original" documentary footage. Transferring film onto video, and video into photography, suggests that processes of mediation are, potentially, infinite. But the further we move from the actual referent in historical time and space, the closer we may come to the psychological "truth" of that event; the paradox is real. In other words, that we can only grasp history through the filter of subjective experience, since history itself is a construction -- whether textual or photographic -- built upon layers and layers of recollection that are as subjective as "factual." What is the fate of real history? This is a question once asked by the cultural theorist Fredric Jameson: the fate of real history is that history is experienced as a spatial phenomenon, as opposed to a linear event, suggesting a compression (or collapse) of the traditional notion of distance or gap between present and past. Perhaps it is this symbolic gap which is articulated in White's project.

    White's video "Presence" may suggest that we can only experience the violence of historical war as a contemporary aesthetic phenomenon-- that, in a sense, we have no other means of coming to terms with the violence of the past except as fiction and artifice. Mediation is preferable to death, although for some, mediation in and of itself suggests a (theoretical) condition of death. It could be argued, for instance, that Walter Benjamin was concerned precisely with the "death" of a certain ritual connection to the object-world (i.e., the notion of aura), due to the influence of photography and film. In Benjamin's discourse, mediation suggests a metaphoric demise of "direct" experience. And the only means of experiencing the "object" of war would be to exist inside of war itself, and that is a fate that not even Benjamin would have wished on anyone. So, it is preferable to maintain a vicarious connection to war via images of war, which means that we tend to develop symbolic links to a Real that may exist beyond the parameters of our "lived" experiences. As history attests, during the 1940s, the American public maintained a connection to the war by watching newsreels in movie houses, which were screened just prior to the main Hollywood flicks. But even these documentary and propagandistic newsreels could only establish an abstract, mediated relationship to the graphic actuality of warfare-- suggesting that the newsreel itself might be absorbed, perhaps subliminally, as a form of spectacular entertainment.

    As Jean Baudrillard suggested in his 1991 book, The Gulf War did not take place, the Iraq-Kuwait conflict was already resolved before it was ever fought: the triumph of the simulacrum over the Real, with the Allied victory a foregone conclusion. From Baudrillard's somewhat radical perspective, actual war became a rehearsal for a television reality-- a "Tele-reality" virtually indistinguishable from fantasy. More so than film, television constitutes its own reality, and does not merely produce "reality-effects" or affect a homological and/or morphological relationship to the putative "real." States Baudrillard: "At the desired place (the Gulf), nothing took place, non-war. At the desired place (TV, information), nothing took place, no images, nothing but filler." In this view, television can no longer produce information about the war-as-event, since the war has already always taken place on television; the only thing left for television to do is to re-produce information about itself. To become nothing more or less than itself, in effect. Here, television serves as a demonstration of systematized tautology-- again, the medium becomes acutely self-reflexive (mirroring itself, mirroring life, mirroring itself....). Television estranges everything, and then naturalizes everything it has estranged; that's why there will always be a profound confusion between "facts" and "truth" inside the space of television.

    Utilizing a fleeting moment from an historical documentary film of a battle in Northern Africa during W.W. II, White's video installation (and related photographs) entitled "The Runner," presents the silhouetted image of a soldier appearing and then disappearing from view. The original footage offers, apparently, evidence of a soldiers' obliteration by an explosion, suggesting that White's gesture of re-appropriation is a haunting commemoration of the violently ephemeral nature of life during wartime-- and a reflection upon film's ability to capture that sacred instant of corporeal passing. With video technology, White achieves a synthesis of filmic time and Tele-visual space. A collapsing together, perhaps, of film's "slow" materiality and television's "fast" immaterial immediacy, and a linking of film's affect and TV's anti-affect. The soldier in "The Runner" becomes a trace of simultaneous presence and absence, a specter of recorded history's contradictory status-- at once real and unreal, tangible and remote. White's images are deliberately fugitive, emblematic of a lost moment in time that can only be reclaimed through a sensuous artificiality.