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DIVINE VIOLENCE
Walter Guadagnini
"With the installation Divine Violence, an extension in exhibition form of the volume Holy Bible, Broomberg and Chanarin are definitively affirming their central role in the world of contemporary art. It is an ambitious work, in size and, above all, intention, that takes on one of the most influential and most debated texts in human history, and uses it as an angle for tackling a series of questions of extreme relevance today, connected primarily to the use of the image in contemporary society. In order to do this, the artists used an extraordinary archive, the Archive of Modern Conflict, a vast collection of photographic images (and other kinds of material) all linked to a single but very broad theme, that of conflict, understood in all of its variants and interpretations.
The first thing to emerge from the analysis of the objects realised and tools adopted is that the artists decided to work exclusively with pre-existing material, to express their own artistic position through a process of identifying, selecting and arranging texts and images conceived and realised by others. On the other hand, in the case of both the Holy Bible and the Archive, it is a matter of a volume and a place that are collective in nature; neither has a single author but rather are the fruit of the work of many different hands and minds, which found over time a unitary form that made them into a book and an archive. Broomberg and Chanarin’s decision to work on archival material is relatively recent. It can be traced to the cycles Afterlife and People in Trouble (also based on an archive, that of ‘Belfast Exposed’) and found its most complete expression in War Primer 2, a volume inspired by Bertolt Brecht and his relationship with images and, more generally, the world of communication. Realised in 2011, War Primer 2 can be considered to have been almost a proving ground or complex introduction to the themes and models of Holy Bible and Divine Violence. It is perhaps not accidental that the choice, radical from every point of view, to completely abandon taking the shot as well as the decision to frame a certain portion of the world and return it through photography came immediately after the realisation of the series The Day Nobody Died in 2008, when the artists—facing the reality of a war in progress—decided to abandon the recognisable image, that form of documentation that, even if placed in question on multiple levels, had been a central part of their work up to that moment. The Day Nobody Died seems today like a kind of turning point, which was followed by another work at least formally definable as abstract, American Landscapes, as if it were a tabula rasa from which to start fresh on a new path, having recognised the impossibility, or perhaps the pointlessness, of continuing on the one that had been followed up until that point. It is clear that this is not so much a matter of questioning the role of the author— which in any case Broomberg and Chanarin lay claim to through their very strong and highly recognisable presence in the editing of their volumes and installations, as exemplarily demonstrated by War Primer 2 and the diptych Holy Bible/Divine Violence—and not even that of the producer of images, whether professional or amateur, as it is a matter of the management of images and their use within the system of producing and circulating information in this post-photographic and, above all, post-capitalist world.
In order to understand the reasons for the sometimes even unbearable violence that appears on the pages of Holy Bible and in the frames of Divine Violence, we need to turn again to the Afghan war and the decision to not take any photographs in that circumstance: a decision that seems like a conscious refusal to participate in the mechanisms of what was by then definitively embedded information, not only from the physical perspective but also, and above all, from the mental one. It was at first the experience of conflict that demanded a kind of break from images, and then the need to face the theme of violence at its roots, on a plane different from that of the news, but capable of working on current events through the presentation of material of unquestionable communicative power.
And it is precisely in reflection on the model of communication that passes through the texts of the Bible that this project finds its origin, in fact with a text by the philosopher Adi Ophir, Two Essays on God and Disaster, guiding the artists’ interpretation and selection of images to insert in the text. Multiple scenarios open up here, the first of which is related to the extract from Ophir’s essay
published at the end of the volume, not at the beginning, as if Broomberg and Chanarin wanted to avoid supplying an indication of how to interpret their work, thus maintaining the fundamental ambiguity of the images, which is their primary and inescapable characteristic. It is a blunt, biased text, on the verge of provocation in its reading of divine presence as essentially destructive and vindictive, bordering on farcical, and removing all mention of the parts in which God manifests himself as love. But this bias is explained when Ophir transforms his reading of specific sections of the Bible into an angle for interpreting the actions of the contemporary state: ‘States that tend to imitate God benefit from disasters for the same reason, even when they cannot claim to be their authors, because any such disaster may serve as a pretext for declaring a state of emergency, thus reclaiming and reproducing the state’s total authority’. And this is also the preferential interpretation—certainly not the only one—of the images selected by the artists to accompany each page of the text. At this point, we should emphasise another characteristic of this work: the enormous quantity of material that has been used—and an even greater amount viewed—by the artists. Page after page, Holy Bible transforms into a narrative told through images, in a kind of journey through the most diverse means of incarnation, not only of violence—which, however, has a primary role—but also more generally of madness and inexplicability (sometimes even extremely entertaining), of the way of the world, of history and of taking pictures. It might be going out on limb, but the feeling one sometimes gets looking through these pages is one of finding oneself before a definitive answer—cruel and highly lucid—to that monument of twentieth-century documentary photography and reportage, that exhibition deliberately conceived to seem like a magazine: The Family of Man of 1955. It is as if all of the rhetoric permeating that clearly propagandistic project, mirror of the rhetoric that prevailed in the pages of Life and Look, were revealed not through words—as numerous readers had already done at the time—but precisely through an equal and opposite use of images (based on the approach taken by Brecht in his War Primer of 1955—the same year as The Family of Man —where he had questioned the use of images in the press at the time through a process of substitution and reversal of meaning). After all, the MoMA exhibition told the story of humankind from birth to death, inserting it into a frame between the historian and the mystic—a frame and a tonality that it would be no stretch to define as Biblical. Regarding this comparison it is also worth mentioning Broomberg and Chanarin’s ability to slip from the book project to the exhibition project, conceiving them in their specificity, for which the installation of Divine Violence is a true visual shock, where the richness— numeric and semantic— of the images strikes the viewer at first like a monolithic body, and then reveals itself in its individual aspects. The relationship between the part and the whole is for that matter a fundamental element in the reading of this work: the images are in fact always linked to a specific word or phrase in the text, which means that the reader and visitor find themselves always trying to figure out the relationship between the two, the continuities and the occasional natures, in short they get involved in a non-linear process of interpretation, made up of returns and abandonments, recognitions and wrong steps (it would be impossible to interpret such a mass of images and ideas point by point in the present essay, but it is worth noting the recurrence of the ambiguous connection between the phrase ‘it came to pass’ and images of sleights-of-hand and magic).
In the same way, the correspondences between words and images are sometimes clear and other times so mysterious as to seem incomprehensible. Once again, Broomberg and Chanarin give the reader/viewer the task (and privilege) of retracing an intellectual process that will lead him or her closer to the artists, if one thinks that they themselves operated by way of selection within a pre- existing body of material, the Archive of Modern Conflict. If it is true that, in recent decades, the practice of doing archival research and using archival material is among the most frequently used in a considerable proportion of artistic investigation (and in particular photography), it is just as true that Broomberg and Chanarin’s approach finds its specificity in the desire to reactivate the process of communicating the image, in the attempt—as ambitious as they come, considering that it deals with a text like the Bible—to again confer meaning to the image in relation to the word: not limiting themselves to the presentation of found material, nor relying on the clear involuntary fascination of the ready-made, but using mechanisms dominant in the means and processes of contemporary communication as an angle for reflection. “