exhibition of recent photographs by JEAN BAUDRILLARD

Opening 6 pm Tues 27 March 2001, College of Fine Arts Gallery

Every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leaves the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which becomes an impenetrable enigma .... Jean Baudrillard (2000)
Exhibition to be launched by Professor Ian Howard, Dean College of Fine Arts. The Murder of the Image is presented in conjunction with The Violence of the Image symposium

THE VIOLENCE OF THE IMAGE
Symposium + keynote lecture
 

KEYNOTE LECTURE - JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Violence of the Image, Violence to the Image
Three types of violence: physical violence, historical violence, violence of information technologies and media (where we find the violence of the image). Violence of images as content, violence of the image as medium. Violence done to the real by the image but also violence done to the image by the real (moral, political, ideological and aesthetic violence, and more recently, technological and numerical violence). The photo as possible exception to this double violence - of the image and to the image - as an exception to the spread of the image and as restitution of its power.

SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS
Nicholas Zurbrugg
Hyper-Hybridity, Hyper-Violence or Hyper-Silence? Virilio, Foucault and Baudrillard and the Photographic "Event"
How do Foucault’s, Virilio’s and Baudrillard’s most recent texts on art and photography discuss the photographic ‘event’? At one extreme, Foucault’s discussion of French artist Gérard Fromanger’s painterly and photographic hybrids emphasises photography’s capacity to release a rhizomic plurality of images, which apparently dissipate all ‘depth’ and stability. For Foucault, such works offer welcome alternatives to what he characterises as the ‘austerity’ of early C20th imaging. At the other extreme, Virilio’s recent discussions of multimedia imaging condemn its seemingly omnipresent gratuitous hyperviolence. For Virilio, the ‘Sensation’ exhibition typifies a new kind of commercial ‘realism’ nurtured upon advertising hype. The superficiality of this ‘Silence of the Lambs’ imaging, Virilio suggests, lacks any trace of the cruel profundity of Otto Dix’s early C20th expressionism or of the Viennese Actionists’ mid-century imaging. Surprisingly, Baudrillard’s most recent writings offer far more positive diagnoses of contemporary imaging. Baudrillard shares Foucault’s enthusiasm for the multidimensional photographic ‘event’ repeatedly echoing Virilio’s attacks upon the vacuity of commercial imaging, and teasingly equates late C20th art as a whole with the vacuity of Warhol. Baudrillard’s recent writings develop two key hypotheses. Firstly, they suggest that late C20th images refine precisely the kinds of depth, stability and illumination that Foucault and Virilio find virtually incompatible with the late C20th art. Secondly, they challenge many of his most influential earlier claims, contending that contemporary photography can ‘rediscover’ the kind of ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin considered incompatible with mechanical reproduction. 
Professor Nicholas Zurbrugg is the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

Rex Butler
Jean Baudrillard : Photographing Ethics
One of the most difficult and yet least discussed passages of Roland Barthes' well-known 'Camera Lucida' is the following: "The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and the object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive". What is the nature of these strange "dualities" in photography? Why can we conceive but not perceive them? How, that is, does each turn into the other? We will attempt to answer these questions by looking at the photography of Jean Baudrillard - and we will come to a surprising conclusion: that Baudrillard's photography is nothing less than the attempt to image that same moral law analysed by Kant ("Du kannst, denn du sollst!", "You can because you must!"). Or, to put this another way, how is Baudrillard's notion of seduction, which is at stake in his photographs, in fact profoundly ethical, another version of Kant's moral law? 
Dr Rex Butler is Senior Lecturer of Art History in the Department of English, Media Studies & Ancient History at the University of Queensland.

Alan Cholodenko
APOCALYPTIC ANIMATION: In the Wake of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Godzilla and Baudrillard
An examination after Baudrillard of the post-World War II animation of Japan in terms of the nature, history and destiny of animation, film, war and nation. In this speculation on Apocalyptic Anime—anime in the wake of The Bomb—and on the animatic thinking of Baudrillard, Akira will feature prominently. 
Alan Cholodenko is Senior Lecturer in Film & Animation Studies in the Department of Art History and Theory, The University of Sydney.

Edward Scheer
Abreacting the impossible again. Baudrillard's photographic acts
Kracauer: 'Those things once clung to us like our skin, and this is how our property still clings to us today. We are contained in nothing and photography assembles fragments around a nothing.' (1927) We can be drawn so deeply into the image, out of our own histories and into another's in a way which prefigures our own mortality, 'an awareness of a history that does not include us'. Barthes' and Benjamin's writings on photography also resonate with this curiously benign sense of death as the great blindspot that gives shape and meaning to our images and our histories. But now that photography itself is dead where can this absence, this sense of loss be registered? Enter Baudrillard the philosopher of the end of the photograph? In his essay, 'C'est l'objet qui nous pense' (1998,1999) Baudrillard describes the photograph itself in its 'happier moments' as an 'acting out on the world, a way of grasping the world by expelling it,… (a)n 'abreacting of the world.' Here the image gaily expels the demons of the world, merrily discharges the affects associated with the trauma of living. But now that the photograph has its own problems, its own crisis, Baudrillard takes up his camera to assist in the abreaction of the image. 
Dr. Edward Scheer lectures in the School of Theatre Film & Dance, UNSW.

Anna Munster
Digital Violence: Images at the Cutting Edge
Over 20 years ago Eysenck was publishing his studies to support the hypothesis that violent media images lead to an increase in violent and aggressive behaviour in viewers. Although Eysenck was attentive to some aspects of the transmission of media images, for example, repetition and saturation, his main concern was with violence as media representation. And yet digital images typically are said to carry less information and operate purely at the level of information/communications. On what affective level then can the digital be said to operate? Do digital images carry less violence than media such as analogue photography? To what extent can digitality be said to bypass representation but still register corporeally? 
Dr. Anna Munster is a digital artist who teaches Digital Media in the Dep’t of Art History & Theory, College of Fine Arts, UNSW.

Robyn Ferrell
The Body of the Photographer
'We must therefore stop wondering how and why red signifies effort or violence, green restfulness and peace; we must rediscover how to live these colours as our body does, that is, as peace or violence in concrete form ... red, by its texture as followed and adhered to by our gaze, is already the amplification of our motor being.' In this consideration of sensation, Merleau-Ponty describes a situation that brings about intellection, but which must also be different from it, since it can only appear as opaque to intellection. The mind/body distinction confronts intellection as a symptom of its inability to think its basis in the body in the way it thinks its other objects. And this turns out to be the crux of the opacity, for the perceptual body is before the object - before the subject, too - and makes the subject and object for intellection through its habits of synthesis. These habits, being not propositional but experiential and specific to the body's possible orientation, exceed intellection, precede it and even contradict it, while also manufacturing it. Body-attitude is not itself another truth about the world, but a preparation for it. 
Robyn Ferrel is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University