Restaging the anxiety of the image
Adrian Kear
---The phenomenon of anxiety is the sudden appearance of the Heimliche within the frame ... (Lacan
2014: 76)
---The image is re-presentation, which is ultimately to say resurrection (Barthes, 1977: 32)
We’ve seen this image before; we’ve seen this image repeatedly. It features a solitary male
figure, head covered with a makeshift black hood and wearing a threadbare smock, standing
precariously on a cardboard box with arms partially elevated and hands upturned so as to be
positioned partway between entreaty and crucifix, the electrodes affixed to his outstretched fingers
seemingly attached to a power source which would be activated if he were to fall or slip. We all
know the photograph, known as ‘The Hooded Man’ but officially entitled ‘Gilligan on a Box’, and
instantly associate it with the name it announces and incarnates: Abu Ghraib. The name itself
continues to resound and reverberate across the registers of place, institution and event; echoing
and reduplicating the cultural logics situating Abu Ghraib as an event of the image; re-calling the
production and circulation of the images themselves as a global cultural-political event.
I’ve written about this image before, in an article entitled ‘The Anxiety of the Image’ (Kear
2005). This earlier piece, written at the time of the event’s unfolding, attempted to capture and
critique something of the mood of anxiety associated with the image’s publication and reception. It
argued that the explicit ‘staging’ of the image as a scene of ‘mock’ torture, as self-evidently
aesthetically constructed as the theatrical image of suffering composed by the stage-director in
Beckett’s Catastrophe (1984: 297—301), should be regarded as intrinsic to its ideological operation.
Rather than enabling its dismissal on the grounds of its ambiguous status as an apparent mimesis of
the ‘real thing’, or facilitating its correlative reification as an ‘image’ pure and simple by effacing the
material conditions of its production, the identification of the theatricality of the image serves to
foreground how ‘the image as such appears to contribute to the anxiety governing its reception by
its very nature as representation’ (Kear 2005: 115). In other words, the cultural anxiety concerning
this image specifically—along with the other images of ‘prisoner abuse’ and the spectacle-oriented
practices of torture at Abu Ghraib prison with which it is metonymically linked—might be seen to
dovetail with a more generalised anxiety about the dubious ontological and political status of the
image per se.
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As argued previously, the anxiety of the image sui generis appeared to be attenuated to the
governmentality of the war on terror and the neo-liberal production of precarity, the subjectivating
effects of which are made manifest and felt in the experiential transfer of anxiety. The anxiety
produced by the presentational quality of the photographic image—its disruptive revelation of an
otherwise occluded reality—was recuperated politically by accentuating the image’s
representational ontology and attendant ambivalence and ambiguity. The correlative
reconfiguration of the photograph as dependent on the dynamics of ‘theatrical’ representation
served to facilitate the disgust and disavowal of liberal and conservative spectators alike—‘capturing
the traumatic encounter with the other within the frame of a structured distance’—and at the same
time to mitigate the disruptive moment of the ‘irruption of anxiety’ by accommodating and
stabilizing its temporal operation (Kear 2005: 115).
Yet, since the moment it first came into view, the image of ‘The Hooded Man’ has never
really gone away, repeating endlessly and returning insistently in the visual fabric of the
contemporary. Why, if neutralized and recuperated ideologically as merely an image, does it keep
repeating, mimetically reproducing itself and re-inscribing its effects? How is the anxiety of the
image mobilised over time, orchestrated and heightened through repetition? To what extent does
this image—and its incarnation of the politics of representation embodied in the image as such—
remain a site of aesthetic-political contestation? Described by W. J. T. Mitchell ‘as an icon that
captures the structure of feeling of an epoch’ (2011: 166), ‘The Hooded Man’ image operates not
only as a visual manifestation of the primary dynamics of the moment itself but as ‘a secondary,
reflexive image of images’ and their productive function in the construction of the historical social
formation (Mitchell 2006: 10). Whilst the image’s initial moment anxious revelation’ may have been
experienced as a temporary ‘interruption of the continuity of the present’, making visible something
which otherwise would not have been seen (Kear 2005: 113), it has since appeared as all too
familiar, uncannily encoding a densely intertextual repertoire that gives the impression of alwaysalready having been. At the same time, its constant repetition seems to have rendered the image an
‘empty signifier’, hollowing out its significance as a signifying event by situating it within the
continuous circulation of images as such (Mitchell 2011: 119). Something of the initial power of the
image—relying at least in part on the ontological dynamics of the photograph to ‘ratify what it
represents’ (Barthes 1982: 32)—is thereby abstracted and erased. The image’s constant circulation,
in other words, seems to confirm and complete its aesthetic reification and gesture of withdrawal
from the world, its reproduction cutting across the specificity and singularity of the moment
captured by its frame to re-inscribe its iconic representational claim.
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So we’ve seen this image before, repeatedly. Can we see this image again? We look and look
away, reactivating the dynamics of desire and disavowal that characterised, and continue to
reproduce, the anxiety of the image. Can we make an anxious return to scene of its staging? Can we
look again at the image, long after the events represented, after the event which it continues to
represent, seeking to reanimate its historicity and account for its affect? Can we keep on looking,
and looking away, knowing that looking again risks re-opening and extending the humiliation and
suffering re-presented in the image, reproducing its foreclosure with an aestheticizing gaze? The
insistence of these questions suggest a continued anxiety about revisiting the spectacle of suffering
as an aesthetic-political event, as well as the need to continue to analyse the temporal formation of
the event itself and its role in the production of anxiety as a key dynamic of neo-liberalism’s
ideological apparatus of political subjectification. Does the re-animation of anxiety in and through
aesthetic experience offer a means of addressing its political recuperation, or serve as an extension
of its governmental operation? What is the relationship between the anxiety governing the
encounter with the image and the anxiety it condenses and encodes?
Adriana Cavarero has pointed out that the specificity and ‘blood-curdling peculiarity of the
events at Abu Ghraib has precisely to do with the anomalous overlap between spectacle and
torture’; their inter-animation and inter-dependency in constructing a theatre of spectatorial
aversion and fascination (2009: 106). Citing Foucault’s analysis of the theatricality of the rite of the
supplice (1977: 49—55), she demonstrates how the spectacle of suffering makes ‘public and visible’
the performative power of ‘the violence that precedes it’, whose ‘secret work’ it continues and
concludes in an exhibition that both masks and displays ‘the torture of which it is the outcome’
(107—108). Whilst recognising that the acts of torture perpetrated in Abu Ghraib took place in ‘a
secret room’, and only came to public view through the ‘accident’ of press publication, Cavarero
argues that they were nonetheless ‘programmatically aimed, as regards both ends and means, at the
realm of the eye’ (109), their viral circulation on the internet and through the media accomplishing
‘a caricature of the supplice’ as a mode of subjectification and manifestation of sovereign power
(113). Jon McKenzie likewise locates the performative operation of the Abu Ghraib images in the recreation of an atavistic ‘spectacle of the scaffold’ that has the effect of re-inscribing sovereign power
through the ‘political theatricality’ of a ‘visual regime’ which links the violence of the image and the
suffering it represents to the production of contemporary global subjects (2009: 340). The structural
inter-penetration of the violence of suffering and the production of the image of suffering therefore
not only suggests ‘an orchestrated use of the camera as an integral element of the scenes’ depicted,
an incorporation of the photographic act and medium into the torture apparatus as such (Kear 2005:
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113), but a deliberate staging of that production so that ‘the photograph can be said to reiterate and
continue the event’ it captures (Butler 2010: 83), repeating and reduplicating its ideological effects.
The staging of the image of ‘The Hooded Man’ seems self-evidently central to both its
immediate composition and its construction of an ideological dispositif operating across a split
temporal scene. What the image configures in its raw form as a photograph, in its visual capture of
an actual instant that appears as ‘literally an emanation of the referent’, is something like the
material trace of the visible presence of the people and objects within it, seemingly ‘given without
mediation’ and ‘established without method’ as an eyewitness to the sheer facticity of ‘what has
been’ (Barthes 1982: 80). According to Barthes, the photograph ‘is not a question of exactitude, but
of reality’, primarily constituting a documentary record of presence through its mode of representation, establishing an unassailable visual testimony to ‘the certainty such and thing had
existed’. The photograph’s affective power, Barthes claims, derives directly from its indexical
relation to the lived experience of history: ‘From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations
which ultimately touch me, who am here,’ thereby creating an encounter with, and across, the
frame of the image’s historicity (1982: 80). In this configuration, the moment of the spectator’s
encounter with the photographic image serves to re-animate the moment of the event itself, albeit
at a representational remove; to allow the moment of viewing to open up and renew its disjunctive
presence within the ‘now time’ of historical memory even as it repeats the codification of the
relations which have ‘seared the subject’ with the historical index of its materiality (Benjamin 1979:
243). The temporality of the image as such is thereby doubled and split: continuing the event it
appears to capture ‘at the very moment of its accomplishment’ into the future, keeping it open for a
spectator to come; at the same time as repeating and re-inscribing its historicity, foreclosing its
disruptive potentiality by ‘encrypting’ and archiving its appearance within the frame of the image
itself (Butler 2010: 83, 75).
Perhaps the ambivalence and uncertainty of this temporal structure, augmented in the
digital circulation of the ‘Hooded Man’ in a continuous present seemingly cutting across the grain of
a specific conjuncture, accounts at least in part for the generation of cultural anxiety concerning its
endless repetition and reduplication. At its simplest, this might be understood as an apprehension of
the effects of the image’s mediation—and re-mediation—of the primary scene of suffering as
representing a diminution of its significance, confirming the image as a vicarious substitute for the
event it represents rather than the site of its material index. Far from seeing the image and the
event as mutually co-constituting—both in their original production and continued reproduction—
such logic articulates an age-old anti-theatrical anxiety about the image’s mimetic operation as the
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ground of the ‘loss of reality’ through its rendering in representation. It thereby repeats the
suspicion that ‘the image, which is supposed to deliver reality, in fact withdraws reality from
perception’ (Butler 2010: 75), becoming subject to the aestheticizing effects of its own formalisation.
Whilst the event it represents can only ever appear through the form that enables its presentation
to others, seemingly constituting it retroactively through its evidentiary trace, the anxiety remains
that the image inevitably substitutes for and covers over the empirical reality of the event. This
viewpoint is accentuated further by the endless reduplication and instant availability of the ‘Hooded
Man’ image in the virtual world of the digital, its very repetition appearing to evacuate and erase the
contextual specificity and concrete materiality of its production through torture, pain and suffering.
This anti-theatrical logic is, for example, at the core of Sontag’s argument in Regarding the
Pain of Others (2004a). She traces the problem of the aestheticization of suffering in the indelibly
mimetic operation of photography, treating it as a ‘species of alchemy’ which seemingly renders
reality visible and at the same time subsumes it within the image’s repertoire of visual reality-effects
(72). She identifies images of atrocity as functioning in this way in particular, with the photograph
offering both the retrospective evidence of the event having happened and the performative
context for retroactively naming and constituting it as an event (74). Her concern here appears
twofold: that the salience of the notion of atrocity would seem to be dependent on the indexical,
evidential quality of the photograph, suggesting on the one hand that its ‘illustrative function’ serves
to secure the material status of the event it represents, whilst on the other that its visual fixation
obscures numerous other events without images that remain undocumented, unnoticed or unable
to be made to appear as ‘events’ (75); and also that the image’s indelibly iconic configuration
ensures that the atrocity photograph becomes the mere effigy of the event, petrifying and
eventually mortifying the specificity and complexity of its occurrence, rendering it an objectified,
sensationalised and essentially overly-familiarised obstacle to historical thought. For Sontag, the
condensing of the event in the photographic image ‘forestalls thinking’ by enabling sentiment to
crystallize around it rather than the event represented (Butler 2010: 71), structuring historical
memory through the ideological archiving of ‘representative images’ and reducing the critical
capacity of the viewer’s gaze to the self-reflexive reproduction of the consolatory sentiment of pity
(Sontag 2004a: 76—77).
The key problem with the dramaturgy of the image, in other words, is not only that it
repeats the logic of mimesis—reproducing reality as representation and thereby reinforcing the
ideological reality of representation—but that in so doing it re-inscribes the illusory proximity and
indelible distance of the vicarious, compensatory form of theatrical spectatorship. This appears to
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make the continuous repetition of the image of suffering function as a perceptual framework
through which to regulate and reproduce what Judith Butler calls ‘the visual modes of participation
linked with the occupation of a position and, indeed, a certain disposition of the subject itself’ (2010:
65). Like Sontag, Butler does not regard spectatorship as something brought to the image from the
outside, occurring only after the event, but as a central constituent of its representational ‘frame’.
Accordingly, the aesthetic-political dynamics of spectatorship should be seen as producing as well as
being produced by the image-making apparatus—operating within as well as through the
‘equivocation’ between the temporality of the event and the temporality of the image—repeating
and continuing the event of the image as an intrinsically spectatorial event (84). This is perhaps
made most visible in the public exhibition of images of suffering which, whilst doubtless contributing
to the ‘infinite circulability of the image’ that ‘allows the event to continue to happen’ and makes
apparent that in this form at least it ‘has not stopped happening’ (86), at the same time seems to
interrupt this process in order to stage, and thereby draw attention to and explicate, its spectatorial
dynamics.
As Butler notes in her discussion of Sontag and the photographs of Abu Ghraib, it was the
publication of the images in the public domain that brought them to visibility and exposed those
who took them as a being ‘actively involved in the perspective of the war’, demonstrating their ‘clear
complicity’ in both the scenes represented and in ‘crafting, commending and validating a point of
view’ (65, 95). Because the act of spectatorship was already structured into the image—not only
were the images themselves explicitly ‘staged’ for the camera, constructed and composed as a
mimetic stand-in for the torturous ‘real thing’ they were at the same time alternating between and
visually creating (Kear 2005: 113), they also invariably included grotesque affirmative gestures of onlooking such as the notorious ‘thumbs up’ over the body of a dead Iraqi, the animated gesticulation
at a prisoner’s exposed penis, the derogating look down across the trajectory of an improvised leash
and the compulsive cradling of a second camera deliberately cropped from ‘The Hooded Man’ miseen-scène—public exhibition might provide the strangely appropriate context in which to
demonstrate and deconstruct how ‘the display of these pictures makes us spectators too’ (Sontag
2004a: 82), intervening into their aesthetic co-composition through a calculated re-staging of the
event of the image and its self-reflexive repetition. It is in this vein that Butler reminds us that when
the International Center for Photography chose to exhibit the Abu Ghraib images, the curator
decided to credit the news agencies who first published them with their authorship rather than the
photographer as such in order to foreground the image-maker’s structural implication in the scene
depicted (2010: 95). This sought to maintain the spectator’s focus on the event of the images’
publication and reception—their appearance in front of a public audience—as the governing
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condition of production rather than the original ‘private’ context of their ‘staging’ as such, thereby
reduplicating a logic of displacement and disavowal which anxiously attempted to eschew the
amateur theatrical gaze encoded within the images themselves. In this respect, their exhibition
attempted to re-open the representational gap between the event of the appearance of the image
and its manifest content, enabling the spectator to continue to dis-identify with what they showed—
the enactment of torture as mimetic act—whilst effectively re-identifying the political problem of
their appearance as images in which the act of torture is rendered and repeated in the spectacle of
its mimetic acting-out. This interplay of dis- and re- identification has a curiously confirmatory effect,
doubling both the structure of the supplice and its inversion, enabling the spectator to both see the
operation of sovereign power and to distance themselves from its effects, relocating the very ground
of its performative subjectification to the anxious repetition of aesthetic distance and disavowal.
Recognising that the ambivalence structuring the role of spectatorship in the subjectivating
apparatus is central to the image’s ideological operation and political instrumentalisation perhaps
enables a reconsideration of Sontag’s most notorious claim in respect of the Abu Ghraib images:
that, ‘considered in this light, the photographs are us’ (2004b). This does not necessarily entail an
acceptance of the shameful depersonalisation and humiliation of the other whose subjectivity is
effaced and annulled within the objectifying set-up of the image-apparatus itself—repeating the
sublimation of the other’s suffering into the self-regarding constitution of the spectator as agent of
the gaze—but perhaps serves as an acknowledgement of the need to interrogate of the dynamics of
spectatorship as a crucial locus of aesthetic-political subjectification. Perhaps Sontag’s claim is, as
Butler suggests, that ‘in seeing the photos, we see ourselves seeing’ (2010: 99). This might entail not
only seeing as the image-makers chose to see, or being positioned as seeing through their
ideological frames, but rather in coming to see the theatrical condition of spectatorship as seeing
exposed to the inter-mediation of anxiety. Here, then, anxiety might reappear as operating against
the grain of ideology, at the limit point of representation, returning to its primary mode as ‘that
which deceives not’ (Lacan 2014: 76). For Lacan, anxiety is not ‘without object’ but rather operates
as a counter-point to the structuration of the object by signification and perceptual orchestration, an
affective ‘cut’ resisting yet enabling the representational scaffolding which its presence precedes
and ‘whose essential characteristic is that therein it’s possible to deceive’. Anxiety is thereby
accredited as the affective presentiment of meaning and given priority over ‘the first appearance of
a feeling’ in that it provides the fertile ground for signification’s dissemination across a ‘network of
traces’. In this mode, anxiety is ‘the clean cut without which the presence of the signifier, its
functioning, its furrow in the real, is unthinkable’; it operates as ‘the cut that opens up, affording a
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view of what now you can hear better’ (2014: 76)—a theatrical anti-theatricality grounding the
possibility of the spectatorial and semiological structuring of feeling.
In ‘The Anxiety of the Image’, I argued that the explicit staging of the Abu Ghraib images—
their self-evidently theatrical configuration as well as ideological instrumentalisation as dispositif—
needed to be examined in order to account for the way in which ‘the disruptive capacity of the
image is constrained by its performative mediation, producing in the process a mimetic
orchestration that both anticipates and accommodates anxiety’s otherwise futural orientation’. It is
insufficient to regard the encounter with the image as simply exposing the spectator to the antimimetic real of anxiety, for that encounter is always-already mediated by the reality of
representation and its retroactive performative operation: ‘the reconfiguration of the image as
representation in this way covers over its significance as a site of ethical revelation; the ideological
disturbance it promises to effect is masked once more by the resurgence of affect’ (Kear 2005: 115).
Looking back, the affect induced could be seen as being at least in part mimetically produced. If the
power of the image resides in its aesthetic remediation of ‘the traumatic encounter with the other’,
its formal manifestation of ‘the inherent tension between the ethical irruption of anxiety and its
ideological instrumentalization’ (115), then the anxiety surrounding the specific conditions of its
appearance also draws upon generalised anxiety about mimesis, about the inability of the real to be
made manifest outside of a form of representation and mode of relation which ‘presents it to the
gaze of others’ (Didi-Huberman 2007: 60). Put simply, anxiety might be seen as intrinsic to the
appearance of the image, an essential part of its medium and mode of operation, adhering to the
materiality of the mediated encounter that sets mimesis into motion rather than solely emerging as
its displaced effect. As the affective ‘cut’ that opens up the presentational ground of representation,
anxiety repeats, and is repeated, in the very form of the image and the theatrical structure of the
aesthetic relation.
The repetition of images of suffering therefore entails the repetition—the repeated
repetition—of both the suffering presented within them and the representational anxiety attendant
on the aesthetic structures of feeling enabling their viewing. If, as Sontag suggests, we should ‘let
the atrocious images haunt us’ (2004a: 102), their envisaged return should be seen to encompass
both a ghostly reanimation of a past event—perhaps even of the people constructed and
constrained by it, appearing once again to contest the representational frame—and of the uncannily
familiar experience of anxiety as the medium and representational ground of spectatorship itself. In
this respect, it seems clear that whilst utilising the public stage as a rejoinder to the production and
circulation of the images of torture created by the obscene private theatricals at Abu Ghraib might
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provide some critical purchase on exposing the role of spectatorship within them—assuming the restaging of the images themselves would be sufficient to enable the spectator’s deconstruction of
their staging if not the entire apparatus of representation—it also risks repeating and further
perpetuating the exposure, exploitation and humiliation of the victim. As a strategy, it seems akin to
attempting to exorcise and expose the reality of their mimetic ‘set-up’ by means of its mimetic
repetition, anxiously reconfirming the image as the primary locus of both the event and the
torturous relation. Auto-affirmatory as much as auto-deconstructive, the simple exhibition of the
images does little to investigate or ameliorate the persistence of ideological affect in their reiteration.
In contrast to this demonstrative mode of restaging, in which the Abu Ghraib images appear
to have been left alone to rehearse and re-enact the violent repetition of the obscene scene of their
own making, and to explicate the seemingly self-evident cruelty of their quasi-theatrical representation, numerous exhibitions and installations have since sought to explore them as potential
sites of aesthetic intervention and resources for further image-making. For example, Susan Crile’s
Abu Ghraib: Abuse of Power (2007) sought to re-establish something of the fragile humanity of the
victims objectified by the original photographs by re-drawing the contours and lines of their bodies
in soft chalk, staying within the compositional frame of the image whilst subtly altering their
materiality as having already been touched by, and so appearing to touch upon, the presence of an
empathetic spectator’s point of view (Ireland 2011). Likewise, Abdel Karim Khalil’s sculpture, We Are
Living in an American Democracy (2008), shows a hooded figure appearing to look back at the
viewer, acknowledging and anticipating the gaze whilst giving the impression of ‘seeing without
being seen’, as though deflecting the projective space of possibility by remaining fundamentally
veiled (Mitchell 2011: 101). Hans Haacke’s Star Gazing (2004) also references ‘The Hooded Man’
image directly, whilst at the same time appearing to literalize Sontag’s assertion that ‘the
photographs are us’—assuming we are all Americans now, obviously—by shrouding its subject as
putative spectator with a star-spangled banner pulled tightly over his head, its opacity preventing
him from either seeing or being seen. This image—remarkable for its glossily produced
professionalism, in contrast to the grainy ‘snaps’ from Abu Ghraib—at the same time references
obliquely the flag-draped coffins of dead servicemen and women returning from Iraq, indexing the
‘public secret’ of the war’s otherwise unseen other scene (Taussig 1999: 236—64). In this respect, it
is one of a number artworks that could be considered as a critical protest against the ideological
fixing of the event of the Abu Ghraib images’ publication as bolstering the political resilience of US
national identity, alongside, for example, Guy Caldwell’s The Abuse (2004), which reconfigures ‘The
Hooded Man’ as a triptych of virtually identical naked hooded men, forcibly staged as hearing,
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seeing, and speaking no evil by leering uniformed figures wearing the insignia of the US flag and
compulsorily witnessed by a blindfolded female spectator figure located at the picture’s vanishing
point (Mitchell 2011: 107). Produced at the time of the event, in its political context, these artworks,
like Richard Serra’s Stop Bush (2004) and Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib (2005) paintings, register
and condense something of the political urgency and ethical depravity of the Abu Ghraib events,
critiquing and seeking to resist the War on Terror’s instrumental, anticipatory logic in attenuating
the futural orientation of anxiety to the compulsive repetition and ‘continual representation of the
present as a moment of historical “crisis”’ (Kear 2005: 110). Whilst such interventions can be seen to
make sense in the context of seeking to repudiate and contest the crude governmentality of the
Bush administration’s simultaneous fermenting and foreclosure of temporal indeterminacy by
insisting on the inevitability of repeatability—the continuous reproduction of anxiety in the
retroactively performative form of terrorism ‘to come’ cast as seemingly co-extensive with that
which ‘has been’, allowing the ‘character of having been’ to appear to emerge ‘from the future’ and
for the future to be ‘released’ from the present as it comes ‘towards itself’ in the form of its own
‘repetition’ (Heidegger 1962: 373—4; 394—5)—what does it mean for the artistic intervention to
return to the event long afterwards, to reanimate the anxiety of the image as aesthetic event?
This question seemed to smoulder throughout British artist Tim Shaw’s recent installation,
Black Smoke Rising (Aberystwyth Arts Centre and MAC, Birmingham, 2014), the experience of which
prompted my own re-visiting of the question of the anxiety of the image. Consisting of three
separate but thematically inter-related artworks, the show appeared to return to the ground of the
Iraq War in order to investigate the political significance and affective insistence of its repertoire of
images and their continued resonance. The central, dominating exhibition piece is a seventeen foot
sculpture, Casting a Dark Democracy (2008), which reincarnates in imposingly monumental scale the
overly-familiar figure of ‘Gilligan on a Box’, seemingly repeating and extending the tortuous
rendering of ‘The Hooded Man’ of Abu Ghraib as an image par excellence. Visibly eviscerated, as
though reduced to the material form of its composition—wood, wire, plastic, light—the figure
appears as a hollowed-out body emptied of the fleshy, precarious humanity its anthropomorphic
shape nonetheless continues to configure and to visually represent. Here the ubiquitous image of
torture inflicted on a human being, of suffering rendered visible on the body as material form, is
aesthetically resuscitated as further image-material by emphasising the materiality of the image as
presentational as well as representational form. On the one hand, the sculpture offers a mimetic
image of the image, representing its dehumanising effects by demonstrating the reduction of the
human figure to ‘a purely instrumental and commodified condition’ as a mannequin modelling the
assumption of bare life—a kind of ‘garbage human’ formed out of an assemblage of black plastic
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sacks not unlike that covering the hooded torso of Paul McCarthy’s Clone (2004) (Mitchell 2011:
37—38). On the other, it puts the image’s role in the torture apparatus back into play, reanimating
its ‘uncanny vitality’ as ‘a living image of a living thing’, reproducing its reified operation in the visual
economy of perpetual circulation as a ghostly revenant that has never really gone away and which
‘keeps returning with an almost cyclical predictability’ (Mitchell 2011: 104—111). In this way, the
image seems to reflect back on itself endlessly, referencing the mimetic capacity for productive
reproducibility as the source of its hauntingly familiar display.
The scenographic set-up of the statue seems to confirm this mirroring of image and effect,
as it stands in front of a rectangular pool of viscous, oil-like black liquid which reflects the image of
the towering figure across its darkening surface and throws its shadowy form back upon itself. The
floor surrounding the reflecting pool is covered with yellow sand, extending to the corners of the
white cube save for a boarded walkway leading the spectator up to a face-to-faceless encounter
with the monstrously elevated sculpture and its superficially flattened image below. The material
construction of the installation—its fabrication from sand, oil, wood, electrical wire, petrochemical
black plastics and the embedded presence of an anticipated spectatorship—seems to ground the
work referentially in the materiality of the Iraq War, whilst at the same time suggesting that material
substance of the image exceeds its representational frame. For the exhibition reanimates the image
of ‘The Hooded Man’, bringing it to life again whilst reiterating the life it has had, and continues to
have, as an image with demonstrable effects in the material domain. Importantly, this reanimation is
effected by the spectator looking again at the materiality of the image, recognising in the dark
opacity of the reflecting pool its composition from other images—not only the iconic photograph
taken at Abu Ghraib but the repertoire of other images of torture and suffering that it already
referenced and drew upon; ‘“citations” from the best-known images from the modern history of
horror’ which form part of its ideological condensation, association and operation (Cavarero 2009:
110)—resurrecting the moment of the negative subjectification that Didi-Huberman characterises as
the camera’s functioning in the torture apparatus, its rending as image ‘that invisible torture that
makes bodies always more visible, that adequately renders their suffering; and, for this purpose,
more or less visibly dismembers them’ (2003: 273), repeating and reinforcing its figurative emptying
in the form of visual display and exhibition. This mimetic extension of the image in the materiality of
the act of looking not only reanimates but effectively proliferates the violence of its making, placing
spectatorship at the heart of the twists and turns and reduplications of the apparatus of torture’s
de- and re- subjectivating operation. Accordingly, the photographic image is reconfigured in the
sculpture as a wood, wire and plastic-covered mannequin, an embodiment of the seemingly empty
space of representation inhabited only by the anthropological machine’s torturously mimetic activity
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of self-replication: a simulacrum, no less, of the ancient wicker simulacra in which ‘carefully selected
victims were imprisoned’, turned upside down and twisted around until being rendered into an
image by being ‘burned alive’ (273). Didi-Huberman elsewhere suggests that such a conflagration
remains essential to the ontology of the image as such and to its temporal illumination, searing the
image not only with the time from which it was drawn and from which it draws its affect, but with
the intensification of the temporalities it puts into play. He writes: ‘the image is burning. It is burning
with the reality it has at one moment drawn near to… It is burning with the desire that animates it…
It is burning with the glow, the visual potential opened up by its very burning … It is burning with the
pain from which it comes and will cause …’ and goes on burning in its ‘vocation for survival’ (2007:
63), in its continued repetition not only of itself but of the regime of representation it embodies and
implicates, searing the spectator with the historical index of its subjectivating effects. Try as we
might, it is not so easy to extinguish its energy, not so simple as to stop looking, to turn our backs
and walk away as we ourselves are forged in the furnace of its burning.
Something of the image’s inescapability—manifested in the anxious fascination that ‘ruins
but renews our desire to see’, in the incandescent continuation of looking evinced in the gesture of
looking away, in the hauntingly familiar aversion of the eyes that ensures ‘our gaze is devastated,
but holds on, resists, returns’ (Didi-Huberman 2003: 278)—is rendered visible in the installation
through the juxtaposition of the sculpture Casting a Dark Democracy with another figural work, Man
on Fire (2008). Situated diagonally opposite the giant simulacrum of the Hooded Man, almost
emerging from the end of the oily, rectangular reflective pool, this sculpture depicts another quasihuman figure toppling precariously forward, arms outstretched, desperately trying to run away. As
his hands reach forward and down, his torso, neck and limbs are engulfed by fire, its intensity
appearing to lift him upwards and back, rendering flame indistinguishable from flaying skin. The
body seems charred and eviscerated, internally combusted, made of the same petrochemical
material as the blackened plumes extending from it. Doubtless the source of the inferno is to be
located in its material substance as well—the struggle over oil in the living hell of the war in Iraq—
but its placement in the dramaturgy of the exhibition suggests a further association with the war’s
defining image. Man on Fire could be seen to configure the spectator burnt by the iconicity of the
image before it, from which it is trying to escape, impossibly caught up in the mimetic repetition,
extension and intensification of image and affect that burns into memory and, still burning, sears the
subject with its imprint. The work itself thereby seems to draw attention to the structural function of
spectatorship in the subjectivating apparatus, incorporating the viewer into the ideological
deployment of the opening afforded by the anxiety of the image.
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The relation between the two sculptures is also made apparent by their triangulation in the
actual spectator’s phenomenological encounter with the exhibition, enabling seeing—and notseeing—not only to be seen but also to be felt. This is perhaps inimical to the aesthetic experience of
anxiety as being haunted by the memory of possibility, exposed to the uncanny recognition of the
frame of the visual as demonstrating ‘both the silence of the event and the cry left by its trace’ (DidiHuberman 2007: 67). In Black Smoke Rising, the visual is augmented and underscored by a sonorous
reverberation resonating across the space. The continuous thump and thud of its heavy bass,
produced by amplifying the sound of oil dripping into a drum, creates a menacingly foreboding
atmosphere in the darkened gallery. This doubled heartbeat echoes through the space and the
spectator somatically, viscerally affecting and accentuating the emotional experience of viewing. The
sound’s a-rhythmic repetition serves to conjoin the presence of the spectator and the presence of
the sculpted images, articulating their relation and inter-animation, bringing them to life so to speak.
This anxious revelation might be registered at a number of levels: the recognition that the images
represent life, lives captured and yet violently dismembered in the mode of presentation; the
realisation that the images have a life, producing and reproducing the proliferation of visual
representation; the imagination that the images might yet burst into life, moving through and
mediating their own personification, irrupting into and exploding the stage that would contain them,
burning the spectator in the intensity of their appearing. Something in these speculative possibilities
would seem to testify not only to the ‘social life’ of images—how they operate within and
consolidate a social formation, ‘reproducing themselves over time’ (Mitchell 2006: 93)—but to the
necessity of putting ‘the relationality of the image and beholder’ into question, interrogating the
constitutive role of ‘the spectator position’ (49) in animating and reanimating the anxiety of the
image.
The third and final work in Shaw’s installation, Soul Snatcher Possession (2012), directly
stages the spectator’s animation of the theatrical apparatus and subjective implication in the
constitution of anxiety as the image’s compositional medium. The work is set-up in an eerily
constructed ‘secret’ room, reminiscent of a basement dungeon or ancient cell, separated from the
main exhibition space yet nonetheless clearly related to its thematic and material concerns. Entering
via a decrepit wooden doorway, the spectator is confronted by a series of slightly larger than life
maquette figures, standing at seven to eight foot tall. Made from scraps of old textiles and other
refashioned fabrics to form both substance and surface, body and clothing, these uncanny doubles
appear engaged in all too familiar scenes of torture, re-staging ‘grotesque mimes from a gallery of
infamy’ (Cavarero 2009: 111). In the centre of the miserable, dirty room a hooded/blindfolded figure
is surrounded by three apparently uniformed others: one with arms outstretched, framing the
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enforced proximity with a gesture of both crucifixion and embrace; one intruding inwards, hands
reaching up and out to ‘touch’ the recoiling figure’s chest; one stood behind, arms to the side, with a
visage revealing the mimetic torturer’s signature giveaway grin. Behind this group, to the right, a
textile mannequin ‘woman’ lies diagonally stretched and pinned backwards to the wall, the fabric of
her body ripped open to expose her breasts and sex, the latter partially covered by her fingers. Her
face is contorted, looking away from the male assailant opposite, shrouded by the hosiery mask
nailing her to the wall. The male figure’s sex is also exposed, further indicating that the woman has
been—is being—brutally raped. To her right, at the far side of the wall, a cowering masked ‘gimp’ is
turned to the wall to look away, crossing his arms protectively over his ‘face’; at the other end of the
room, directly opposite the entrance, a rotund non-uniformed ‘blind-man’ stands holding a white
stick. Whilst these last two figures seem to serve to incorporate the role of the spectator into the
mise-en-scène—suggesting that looking repeatedly fails to see, unable to acknowledge the blindspot of the gaze’s collusive compulsion to repeat; and looking away merely inverts its desiring
machinery, perpetuating the visible logic of the disconcealed scene—the spectator position is not
simply that of an onlooker on a pre-configured image but an integral component of the
compositional scenography. As the spectator walks into and across the room, the weight and
pressure of their footsteps on the boarded floor causes the mannequins to slightly ‘move’, uncannily
animating these inanimate figures as the representational effect of our own presence. The
experience is slightly disconcerting—reactivating the image’s ambivalent vitality in bringing to life of
a lifeless thing, its aesthetic capacity ‘to mortify and to resurrect in the same gesture’ (Mitchell 2006:
53)—but nonetheless clarifying: we are implicated in the scene as a constitutive co-presence,
making it happen, and making it happen again, as the material effect of spectatorship.
The calculated re-staging of the spectator’s encounter with these ‘personified citations of
horror’ (Cavarero 2009: 111) in Black Smoke Rising—whether viewed as directly re-enacting the
caricatured repertoire of the torture rooms of Abu Ghraib, or acting-out the gendered violence of
countless unnamed sites of quotidian terror, or referencing their interpenetration in and through
the endless circulation of the banalities of the pornographic imagination—is therefore not merely a
matter of composing the consolatory familiarity of an uncanny recognition, situating the spectator as
having seen all these images before without ever fully confronting them. Rather, it entails the
construction of their theatrical staging as the material ground for realising that the representational
‘medium does not lie between sender and receiver; it includes and constitutes them’ (Mitchell 2006:
204). Put simply, the spectator’s encounter with the iconic simulacrum of Casting a Dark Democracy
and the material doppelgangers of Soul Snatcher Possession, and the experience of anxiety felt in
seeing ourselves responsible for their inter-animation, partially strips away the normative distance
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and figurative deception of mimetic representation to reveal the veiled reality of co-presence
underlying its ideological operation. At the same time, however, the reality of re-presentation clicks
back in to recover and reclaim this presentational space as always-already-representation,
reconfirming and reproducing it in the dizzying interplay and proliferation of images. What comes to
the fore, therefore, in the moment of establishing the visual apparatus as de-representing what it
appears to represent, is the experience of anxiety not as a mere ghosting of presence or an uncanny
aesthetic affect, but as the very medium constituting and recuperating the mode of its appearance:
the inescapable, constantly repeating, anxiety of the image as such.
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