The exhibition at the Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland, in February 2009 also includes the video documentation of News (Govett-Brewster-Gallery, New Plymouth, on invitation from Charlotte Huddleston on 16 September 2006), a performance which Jim Allen first staged in 1976 (as with Poetry for Chainsaws) under the title Newspaper at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide. Since then he has repeated it several times. Jim Allen sits on an ordinary chair holding a daily newspaper in front of him leafing through the pages. With a sudden impetuousness and intense vehemence he crumples the newspaper to a paper ball. Then he unfolds it again und starts reading again, before he crumples it up again as if taken by a new outburst of rage. More and more paper shreds reel to the ground, the newspaper deteriorates more and more and in the end is all but a rag whose leftovers curl around Allen’s feet.

The video documentation shows only a camera-man (Peter Wareing) sitting on a trolley which is slowly pushed towards the artist who is outside the screen and not visible. One can only hear the noise caused by him when he crumples the paper and unfolds it again. The video recording ends at exactly the moment when he would become visible.

A further display from Jim Allen in the exhibition involves four sculptures. Above wooden pedestals ‘hover’ four little works from thin wooden sticks: a gauze bandage dyed red; a small strip of paper with the sentence: ‘The mouth which is transformed into a language of itself to the bite of rage’; a strand of hair; a used, stiff rag. At the entrance to the gallery is a larger-than-life photo of a collage printed on canvas. The collage shows a central upright figure in front of a background of cut-out and pasted cartoon pictures and newspaper scraps. Next to this figure, presented upside-down, is a small print-out of the photo which has become the epitome of the Abu Ghraib scandal: the barefoot man dressed in a black caftan and standing on a cardboard box with a hood over his head, arms stretched out to the side and electric wires attached to his fingers.

Related to this picture, is a photo of a boy in a hospital bed, also printed off the internet. The boy’s open mouth is enormously contorted as it is viewed through the
plastic shell of the breathing mask he is wearing. His eyes are closed. A tube leads from his upper right arm to the mask, tubes are attached to the fingers of his left hand, and tubes are visible on the wall behind him. His lower arms, the right one resting on the left, are lying on a colourfully patterned cushion.

On the end wall of the gallery is the enlarged photocopy of a passage from a course book on cybernetics with the definition of the term ‘programme’:
[A PROGRAMME P, a PAIR of TESTS (T, T’)
(respectively an initial test system and a final
test T) and a COLLECTIVE K are called in the
same order: E-PROGRAMME, E-PAIR of
TESTS and E-COLLECITVE, if the EFFECT
E EXISTS respecting P, (T, T’) and K.]

The element of the exhibition which is possibly the most remarkable is the print of the photographed collage, because of its so obviously anachronistic style. To describe it briefly, it shows a male figure with wings on the ankles and shoulders. He is standing on a black, vaulted area with tree stumps. The black area continues upward between the figure’s thighs while to the left and right cartoon pictures and newspaper scraps pasted on top of each other fill the whole area of the picture to the margins. In front of his genitals the figure is holding the model of a temple in whose interior a candle is burning. His right hand is holding the model above which his left hand curves protectively. Above the torso is the man’s head looking to the left. It appears to have been taken from an anatomical text book and shows the subcutaneous arrangement of the facial muscles. The man’s eyes are twisted upwards in the style of a baroque sufferer. Behind the man’s head is a nimbus with the inscription ‘Saboteur’. A further inscription can be seen running the length of his lower right leg: ‘passion play stitch on’.

The theme described in this exhibition by Jim Allen’s works may be interpreted as suffering. Whatever the strand of hair, the gauze bandage, the small strip of paper, and the rag actually refer to, they can be formally understood as exponents of fragmentariness. How to further interpret these forms, whether as memorabilia, votive gifts, memories of past affections and injuries, or promises of healing, can remain open. The sculptures refer to non-specific individual suffering and grief, while the two prints of photos evoke suffering related to contemporary history: the Middle East conflict and the war in Iraq.

The wings on the ankles of the ‘Saboteur’ refer to Mercury/Hermes, the messenger and ancient god of trade, while the wings on the shoulders are reminiscent of Christian angels. The man is holding a candle over his genitals, in phallic substitution, the light relating to the symbolism prevailing in the West not just as a metaphor of faith and hope, but also referring to the rationalistic enlightenment. Finally, behind the skinless head the nimbus which characterises him as the saint of sabotage; his home is a burnt, ravaged earth, he is surrounded by images of a commercial illusory world which has been mediated umpteen times.

Of course the Hermes figure is to be seen in relation to the News performance and to the images downloaded from the mass medium internet, which again refer to political history versus individual history as represented by the sculptures. The ravaged earth from which the suffering Hermes rises, skinned like Laurence, and eyes twisting like Lucretia when she thrusts the dagger into her body for virtue’s sake, suggests a connection to the mass garbage against whose background the figure of Hermes stands out, being light and bringing light, another angel of history, a saintly fool of sabotage (‘Read and destroy everything you read in books, read and destroy everything you read in the press. The word for that: Sabotage.’). He protects his light of hope, the flame of reason, just as he shamefully hides it.

The strip of paper with the typed line ‘The mouth which is transformed into a language of itself to the bite of rage’ refers to the picture of the injured boy whose mouth is optically so distorted by the plastic mask that it takes up half of his face. This mouth, a wound, open and mute all the same, accuses in the language of suffering. But how does this picture (together with the pictures of the saboteur and the torture victim of Abu Ghraib) relate to the rage which is the focus of the passage?

It would not be correct to assume that the iconography of suffering and grief, of wounding and inhumanity, affirms the condition which it depicts. Not that anyone would do this. The mantle of humanism can be assumed as easily as an opinion. A whole branch of the art industry feeds off opinions and the obsession with deploring injustices without anybody lifting a finger. Humanism is mainstream. To hate the media which exploit the suffering of others, is that kind of basic moralism which anybody is capable of without having to think any further, and with the help of which one is able to fade out the system in which one is entangled all the same (in one way or the other, but inescapable).

At this point it might make sense to return to the problem of re-enactments, in this case News. In 1976, the performance included the action of reading and crumpling the paper until there was nothing left of it. This performance was documented through photography. In the re-enactment in the Govett-Brewster-Gallery the setting was expanded in a way that a camera, which approached the artist very slowly and continuously, filmed him while a second camera filmed the first one. Through this doubling of the mediality of the representation a doubling of the fictionality of the performance was created in a very simple way. At the exhibition in Auckland this doubling effect will be reduced on the one hand by showing just the take of the filming camera. On the other hand the element of mediality will be enforced by showing only the one take of the one filming device, which records something we can’t see.

Through the support of a dialectic volte it is possible to see this latest version of News as a criticism of the media society and its strategies which is trying to suffocate the media users with garbage such as simulacra, fakes, cretinism, manipulations, dirty impositions, and indiscreet hoggishness instead of providing information. This might be accurate but does not go far enough, because Jim Allen empties the re-enactment of News of the semantics identifiable in the former enactment. What happens on the semantic level (‘read and destroy everything you read in the press’) must now be known and therefore no longer needs to be represented. The documentation of the filming of a lost action takes the place of ‘meaning’. He no longer provides the option of identifying with the rage which motivated his fierce attacks, but rather he condemns us to observe the observation of a process and the medial mediation in a mediating medium, as if there was nothing real any more which might be able to elude the symbolisation and become accessible outside of the universal state of being mediated.

The reduction of News to a setting which renders the observer as an observer of an observation is similar to the reduction of the heroic confrontation of artist and chainsaws in the declamation of a poem (‘Art’) in Poetry for Chainsaws. The opportunity to state a positive truth is denied, the fictionality of the fictional reality of art is exposed by enforcing the state of being mediated. It is just as impossible to expel contingency from art as it is to expel construction from a world to which art claims to refer to.

If art is not a medium of truth, because truth is not immanent in it, but this truth is extrinsically standardised, then the self-representation of the artist as an exemplary sufferer, as a proclaimer of truth and as Heros, is no longer valid: He does not have a privileged view of the world. The creation of a fictional reality occurs within the world as an instrumentation of the world, not outside of this world.

V.
This lack of heroism is what differentiates Jim Allen’s performance from practices which have developed since the mid-nineties of the previous century into mainstream art under the slowly fading label of relational aesthetics. These try to establish art as a model for social practice by building houses for single mothers, laying out gardens, cooking meals, conducting interviews, collecting statistics, drawing diagrams, forcing people into insufferable situations, opening second-hand shops and shoot-up rooms, staging fake riots, and shoveling sand dunes. All this is done with the best intentions and is accompanied by rhetoric which lectures the sheep-like observer of art in the tiresome phraseology of community courses that power structures must be laid open, conventions must be overcome and habits broken. There is constant revelation and exposure as if everybody, apart from the artists of course, were entangled in the context of blindness: involvement as a method of not getting involved. Their exceptional position resembles the position of a prophet, their project is enlightenment, the object of their efforts is the dull community of the dumb who are subjected to endless education. Even if one takes into account the injured narcissism regarding one’s own cognitive abilities and intelligence this assumed heroism can only be characterised as ‘false consciousness’: the ignoring of one’s own subjection to the contradictions of the blinding context. The language of the privileged prophet must do without any dialectics out of necessity and suddenly the same prophet turns out to be a Pharisee who detests any ambiguity. His rhetoric is in the tradition of avant-garde modernism and fits smoothly into the work which complies with Habermas’s verdict: ‘nonsense experiments’, just like its futuristic, surrealistic and younger predecessors in the service of blending art and life and the expansion of the concept of art.

This is just one side of the coin. The other side however is no less desolate, if the references to Badiou’s ethics mentioned above mean anything at all. It is the evocation of a shape, a visibility and the unshakeable belief in the possession of a truth without powerlessness which connects art pompousness, pepped up through all sorts of arbitrary ideologies, with terror.

Finally, what is the role of militancy? At first sight it is not consistent with dialectics and, if an ethic based on the Subject reckons with its restricted validity, it is not based on universal norms or values which justify the execution of power. But if art is not a medium of truth, how can we speak of militancy and which truth would it be based on?

Obviously it is not about militancy in the service of a truth. It is about the militancy, not to let go of the truth, even if the web which is interwoven by the truth, the web of opinions, which bears the Subject and is induced by the truth remains. Opinions do not have anything in common with the truth, because they are self-serving and lead to instances of individual interests. But ‘a truth is the same for all.’ At the same time ‘the only genuine ethics is of truths in the plural – or, more precisely, the only ethics is of processes of truth, of the labour that brings some truths into the world.’
It seems that nothing can protect a truth from vanishing in the web of opinions. There is no guarantee that it is not robbed of its dualism by certain interests and replaced with substance and given shape. For this reason Badiou insists on the process, on the labour that produces truth, this is the meaning of Jim Allen’s re-enactments. The militancy is to resist the disappearance of the truth in the web of opinions in the knowledge that the work of art can never be really true, but truthful all the same.

Leonhard Emmerling