<videovortex> W.J.T. Mitchell - biopictorial turn

[Vera Tollmann]

Hi,
this is a short summary of W.J.T. Mitchells lecture yesterday at documenta Halle. 
Best,
Vera


What is the meaning of a string of DNA code on the back of a dinosaur? This still, taken from the Hollywood blockbuster “Jurassic Park“, furnishes an example of the digital images which the art historian W.J.T. Mitchell has termed “living replicas.“ The advent of such digital iconology is, in Mitchell’s view, forging a new type of image, the “biopic“, which, in turn, is spawning new forms of life, such as clones and terrorists. In his lecture “Ecce Homo Sacer. Bare Life, Modernity and the Image“, he introduced the concept of the “biopictorial turn“ to denote the rapid proliferation of such images. It is based on his term “pictorial turn“, which he coined in 1994 to describe a paradigm shift – the convergence of digital technologies and biology within our visual culture. 
In order to analyse the political significance of these images, Mitchell has identified two central contemporary problems: the repercussions of 9/11 and climate change. He links both to the metaphorical question of the ”political and military temperature of the world“. Quoting the political scientist Fredric Jameson, Mitchell claims that it is easier for him to imagine the end of humanity than the end of Capitalism, concluding that the contemporary image of the world is a “biopic“; with images proliferating like micro-organisms in a petri-dish. Modernism, in contrast, produced a mechanical world image.
Devoted to exploring the politics of the image is the documenta artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle. His installation “Phantom Truck“ in the documenta-Halle is a real-scale reconstruction of the very same mobile biological weapons labs cited by the former US Secretary of State Colin Powell in his address to the UN Security Council in February 2003 to justify the US invasion of Iraq. For Mitchell, the work constitutes an example of “useful art” as demonstrated by the artist Tania Bruguera. 
Images which have entered the global pictorial repertoire, such as those showing the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s statue or the torture of prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib detention centre, are described by Mitchell as “secondary images”. Spreading like “viruses”, these images resurface as recycled “found footage” in activist street art and artistic works. Their critical application, as in Manglano-Ovalles case can, in his opinion, change the attitudes and political actions of the individual which has prompted Mitchell to call for more "useful art” that, for example, analyses the images surrounding us in our everyday lives.


 
A transcription of the lecture will be published shortly.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Professor of History and Art History and editor-in-chief of the theoretical journal Critical Inquiry, is writing a book to be published under the title of “Cloning Terror”.

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