Hand over fist: a chronicle of Cold War photography (original) (raw)

Group Material's Timeline: The Chronicle of US Invention in Latin and Central America (1984) at P.S.1's Center for Contemporary Art explored the framing devices of installation art and photography in tandem, as a means of reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible at the height of the Cold War. In response to escalating crisis (including continuous Central Intelligence Agency operations being carried out in Nicaragua and El Salvador), this activist project employed postmodern strategies such as appropriation, pastiche and a resistance to conclusiveness in order to suggest provocative and unexpected dialogues between disparate artworks and artefacts across time and geopolitical difference. Artists ranging from Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger to John Heartfield, Tina Modotti and Arellano Bolivar, among others, come together as signs of political and aesthetic conflict, as networks of visual culture that complicate dominant narratives of spatial and temporal reality during the Cold War era. Closer analysis of such works reveals historical ruptures alongside continuities, relayed by official government policy, mass media and the art world more broadly. By excavating a long-standing history of conflict, Timeline addresses the stakes of the ownership of meaning itself in the mid-1980s, with implications regarding art production and politics for generations to come. Rather than ask, 'What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?' I should like to ask, 'What is its position in them?' Walter Benjamin ([1938] 1978) Imagining and imaging the reconfiguration of perceptual forms is a political act. In theorist Jacques Rancière's (2009, 25) formulation, politics itself 'consists in reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible'. Moreover, since '[p]olitics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent [la qualité] to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time' (Rancière 2004, 13), visual culture and discourse compose deeply connected and fraught political terrain. For Rancière (2009, 59), 'the dream of a suitable political work of art' then 'is […] the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable'. Such an act entwines politics with poetics, creating the possibility of rethinking crucial relationships between space, time and people. Between 1979 and 1996, Group Material produced more than forty-five projects linking political and artistic issues, and provocatively reformulating aesthetico-political relations. 1 This New York-based collaboration of young artist activists repeatedly insisted on exposing the complicity of the culture of capitalism, as embedded in daily life in the United States, with atrocities abroad, as well as making visible the collapsed spaces between public and private realms. Throughout the Cold War, Group Material attempted to unsettle oversimplified binaries (democracy versus socialism, capitalism versus communism, radical versus conservative) and demystify the commercial and aesthetic guises of capitalism, by complicating and clarifying the connections between photographic alignments and political alliances. In other words, in highlighting the instrumental role of visual culture in that system, Group Material raised awareness of the exploitative relationship between the United States and Latin and Central America. Timeline: The Chronicle of US Invention in Latin and Central America presents a compelling example of Group Material's focus on social interaction and collaboration. Installed in a single room of P.S.1's Center for Contemporary Art in Queens from 22 January to 18 March 1984, Group Material desired 'to illustrate the crucial issues of the Central and Latin American-US relationship', through the installation of 'disparate objects, artworks, commodities and historical documents' (Ault 2010, 83). 2 Staged within a publicschool-turned-modern-art-gallery, the institutional choice for this ephemeral project appropriately underscored the artists' pedagogical impetus. Group Material's assembled mélange of art, artefact, commodities and mass culture confused aesthetic expectations by exceeding the traditional categories of 'art'. By combining a range of visual forms, Timeline positioned the viewer in an interrogatory space, as an active agent. Moving through the space, one was