Infra

Richard Mosse

The Devil You Know Resistance and the sublime in Richard Mosse’s Photographs

How do you capture hell on earth? If you're Richard Mosse, you do so by developing a sublime aesthetics of life in death.

An artist who has made repeated trips to the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo - a vast killing field that has claimed more than 5 million lives since 1998 - Mosse has chosen to return again and again to depict one of the world's cruelest conflict zones in hot pinks, lurid reds, and raw fuchsias. Spectacular and shocking, his palette infuses otherwise straightforward images of child soldiers, grass covered battlefields, and human skulls with a toxic neon glow. Think of the blood, sweat, and tears of the Congo turned scarlet in the glare of Times Square.

Mosse's photographs and his new six-channel video, "The Enclave" - developed for the Irish Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennial - picture a fever dream of violence made appallingly real. Shot with disused military surveillance film, Mosse's material of choice registers an in visible spectrum of infrared light, tipping the war zone's naturalistic greens and browns into searingly sensational psychedelia. Mosse's pictures also reveal an equally ghostly (infrared?) fear lurking among the Congo's rolling savannahs and thatch roofed-villages – one that largely evades detection by most "straight" photography. To borrow language from the 18th century aesthetic and political philosopher Edmund Burke, this photographer's lushly gorgeous prints describe nothing less than "terror" - that ghastly element which constitutes "in all cases whatsoever… the ruling principle of the sublime."

Starting with Mosse's highly praised 2011 series "Infra," his first set of works to use infrared film, the artist's blistering purple-and-magenta-hued portraits and landscapes have questioned photography's standard documentary role, as well as the postmodern cultural politics that insistently Balkanize issues of authenticity, exoticism, and representation. The fact that Mosse, a white Irishman, has chosen to "artificially" heighten images depicting Africa's World War - the conflict has involved nine nations over some twelve years -invariably sends up territorial alarms about exactly who gets to tell the continent's urgent genocide story. Yet Mosse, a risk-taking exemplar of 21st century humanism, remains more than up to the challenge. If his pictures inhabit their livid artifice like pink flamingos do their plumage, they do so chiefly to spectacularize the collusion between certain first world interlocutors (Mosse), their crucial third world subjects (mass murder in the Congo), and the world's increasingly passive viewers (you, me, and everyone we know).

Besides provoking unsettling reactions from a public inured by 24/7 news coverage to images of faraway suffering, Mosse's still and moving pictures also touch on what the artist has called "the limits of perception." His crimson-tainted pictures claim the following: What you see when a photographer exposes the often abstract nature of protracted war to the camera's lens is never unvarnished fact or truth - it's just a light-tinged impression. Or as the artist put in a written commentary on his photographs published in the pages of The New Yorker"The conflict in the Congo is like a palimpsest of different wars - by turns tribal, territorial, national and international - layering each other in obscure and unusual ways. I wanted to try and bring these two very different things - infrared military surveillance film and the Congo's suffering - together, to brush against the grain."

Not merely a way to upend the conventions of mass-media reporting, Mosse's blatant aestheticization of war and its real world effects also represents a direct challenge to how large-scale contemporary narratives continue to be constructed. Rather than relaying a conventional shrink-wrapped tale about the essentially unreachable experience of the Other, Mosse has embarked on a more defiant path. After making the decision - to paraphrase Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Zizek - to embrace his symptoms as a Western interloper in Africa, the artist has seen fit to marshal tainted photographic technology on his art's behalf. The Other, a terminally hamstrung liberal Western social construct, no longer applies in this brutally frank face-off-the substantial Subject does. No wonder the human beings pictured in Mosse's photos and film stare down the lens of the camera straight back at the public. By doing so they not only make the viewer aware of the complicated stakes at play in framing the author's gaze, they also expose their own savage scrutiny - as victims, perpetrators, and just plain bystanders to a vast litany of unspeakable crimes.

To quote the critic Terry Eagleton, cultural theory - of which a great deal of late 20th century contemporary art operates merely as a subdivision - once promised to grapple with peoples' most important problems but failed miserably: "It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution; largely silent about evil; reticent about death and suffering; dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness.” Substitute the word art for cultural theory and you've just described a parallel universe of enervated, anodyne, and frankly commercial stuff that regularly fills contemporary galleries and museums from New York to Johannesburg. It's a wonder it has taken so long for an emerging critical and artistic consensus to call out such theory-laden, academically-sanctioned, essentially parochial visual production for what it truly is – art as rote escapism.

While rafts of visual artists still flock to shiny market-ready art and conventionally p.c. subject matter like "the emancipatory possibilite of Jay-Z's praxis, artists like Richard Mosse stand committed to tackle what were once called "grand narratives" - fundamentally intractable stories about how regular people deal with pain, suffering, violence, and ongoing crisis around the globe. Neither relativizing nor canonically engagé, this artist's oeuvre has pioneered a daringly universal approach that deliberately seeks out capitalized Meaning. Frankly aesthetic impressions that push vital content while problematizing photography, the Irishman's pictures use the medium's falsehoods (the pink hue of anti-camo film) to visualize what otherwise remains unrepresentable to the camera (those pastoral-looking landscapes actually hide blood and bone underfoot).

Mosse's photographs constitute a sublimely rendered visual proposition to ditch the politically correct devils we know. But their emergency color-coding also carries another message: Bigger, real-life demons await that desperately need facing.

CHRISTIAN VIVEROS-FAUNÉ

Brooklyn, New York

(Portuguese translation: Juliana Steil)



Richard Mosse (b. 1980) lives and works in New York and Ireland. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Barbican Art Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Recent group exhibitions include Kunstmuseum Basel; ICA Boston; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Akademie der Kunst, Berlin; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Denver Art Museum; Salaam Kivu International Film Festival, Goma; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. He is a recipient of the Prix Pictet, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shifting Foundation Grant, the Yale Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, the Frankfurt Biennial B3 Award, a grant from the VIA Art Production Fund, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. Mosse represented Ireland at the 55th Venice Art Biennale. Mosse has published six books. His latest monograph, The Castle, published by MACK, was selected as one of the New York Times Magazine top ten Photobooks of 2018. Mosse earned an MFA in Photography from Yale University, a PG Dip in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London, an MRes in Cultural Studies from the London Consortium, and a First-Class BA Honours degree in English Literature from King’s College London. The Castle, lançada pela MACK, foi apontada pela New York Times Magazine como um dos dez melhores fotolivros de 2018. Mosse tem mestrado em Fotografia pela Universidade de Yale, especialização em Belas Artes pela Goldsmiths, Londres, mestrado pelo Consórcio de Londres, e um bacharelado com distinção em Literatura Inglesa pelo King’s College de Londres.

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