Josh Mehler
ENG 5933: Visual Rhetoric
Project One: Documenting the Decade
The image I chose is of Venezuelan artist Javier Tellez in the midst of his 2005 performance “One Flew Over the Void.” For his performance, Tellez used a cannon to project himself across the U.S./Mexican border fence from San Diego into Tijuana. That I’ve ended up with this image is still somewhat surprising to me—but I’m pleased by this surprise.
This project involved a process of continual (re)interrogation of my choices in a way that I didn’t expect. Admittedly, this project was more complex than it seemed—at a higher level of sophistication than the previous blog assignment of “choose your favourite image and provide a rational and some questions about it.” By expanding the scope of our inquiry with this assignment in terms of scale (personal, national, international, and over the span of ten very complex years), many new issues arose that I found interesting. Because of all these issues, I really had fun with this assignment.
When I first began thinking about how I would respond to this assignment, my initial instinct was to use a photograph of September 11th. My rationale was this: if I am to “document the decade”--which I translated as teasing out the most crucial thread of the whole ten years—wouldn’t it make sense to use an image of an event that was central to the majority of subsequent events of the rest of the decade? Didn’t the events of September 11th determine the particular sets of values (often very visibly and violently conflicting) that were at stake for this decade? In this way, my first image aimed at capturing the zeitgeist of ten years--and what more effective way to do so than to display a brutally concrete example of it?
But then I began to wonder: “documenting” the decade? What might that mean? For whom? Of whom? Although September 11th sparked a whole slew of new international relationships, it was, at heart, an American event. How can I document an entire global decade with an American event? Who is left out of the narrative that this choice suggests? I began to think about a Canadian decade and how the image might be different (perhaps of Canadians protesting the proroguing of Parliament by Prime Minister Harper). Then I started to wonder about scale—shouldn’t the image that ultimately “documents” the decade be a personal image? What about me and my experiences within the past decade? What might that image be? Maybe a photo of me on graduation day receiving my Bachelor’s Degree or my Master’s degree? How do images on such grand scales stifle the narratives of individual experiences?
Ultimately, my question came down to: how can an entire decade on this complex, multidimensional, massively populated planet be documented by a single image? What, I wondered, could be the criteria by which I can possibly respond to this assignment? Recognizing the impossibility of a more literal, one-to-one relationship between “decade” and a corresponding “image”, I decided on a metaphorical framework instead. I began looking at images of art work of the past decade: maps, assemblage-like sculptures and network structures as a way to talk about what I saw as the central theme of the decade: a physical intermingling of people, both in a viscerally physical sense and also a technological sense (“convergence”, I realized, is perhaps the most key word of the past decade). I came upon this image of an artist I encountered last spring, and it seemed to crystallize all the thinking I had done up to that point.
Tellez’s work here is representative of my idea of a convergence of people. The abstract “border” between the two countries is embodied in a physical fence constructed to keep people on their appropriate side. Here it is being critiqued by Tellez in a comically absurd way, but, ultimately, questions of convergence that I find central to this decade were also predicated on such concrete formations of “borders”. I also find Tellez’s choice of vehicle appropriate: since, in my review of the decade via images, so much of I found was of violence, Telez’s choice to use a cannon (a tool of violence) is representative of a decade of great bloodshed between people on different sides of “fences.” There are, of course, specific details behind this image—Tellez’s actual intentions, the roles of the various participants in this performance, the specifics of the actual border site—but what I think is most effective about this final choice is that it represents a decade as a whole via metonym. In this way, I think the image I chose comes close to working “dialectically”. Berger claims that such a photograph “preserves the particularity of the event recorded and it chooses an instant when the correspondences of those particular appearances articulate a general idea” (122). Is my image approaching this? Is, then, metaphor/metonym crucial to our understanding of the language of images?