Jonathan GilhoolyAffronting Images and the Spectacle of Dissent

UK Uncut activists glue their hands to the window of Topshop in protest of corporate tax evasion by billionaire Sir Philip Green and the Arcadia Group. Western Road, 2010. ©The Argus

The readymade image thus created was clearly an affront to the shop staff who, in due course, began taping over the window from the outside with sheets of paper and plastic carrier bags, gradually obscuring the bodies and faces of the protesters. In photographic documentation of the event, the elision of the image of protesters, their hands raised in supplication, with that of shop-window mannequins is striking. In fact the protesters positioned themselves in front of the resident mannequins, replacing them and making them redundant; this new spectacle was clearly deemed to be the ‘wrong sort of display’ by the store’s management, precipitating its occlusion—the covering up of the image—with ‘Topshop’ printed bags and paper.

UK Uncut protesters at Topshop in Brighton, Western Road, © Jonathan Gilhooly

Much has been written about iconoclasm, the deliberate rejection or destruction of images. W.J.T. Mitchell contends: “People are afraid of images. Images make us anxious. We fight over them, destroy them, and blame them for our own bad behaviour, as when we blame ‘the media’ for encouraging moral decay and outbreaks of violence.”[1] Mitchell is himself expanding upon David Freedberg’s 1989 publication The Power of Images, the originality of which lies in its author’s insistence on treating images democratically, rather than the aesthetic privileging of works of art that has commonly been the preserve of traditional art historical surveys. Artworks might be deemed to be images with a particular psychological saliency, but then so might many other sorts of images—advertisements, for example—and in fact it is not as easy as one might imagine to conjure up examples of ‘dumb’ or ‘neutral’ images. Of course the ‘Topshop eight’ were not claiming to have created a work of art, but nevertheless the reaction to the image they produced, on the part of both Topshop staff and the police, was similar to that sometimes reserved for the treatment of artworks that are deemed offensive in some way. Freedberg deals with just this phenomenon in a chapter entitled ‘Idolatry and Iconoclasm’, in which he targets the propensity for those offended by images to treat them as if they were actually the person or thing represented. In 1986, following the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, an angry group of EDSA revolutionaries used sticks and cudgels to attack a portrait of the former president. The press photograph of the demonstration encapsulates the uncanny lifelikeness of Marcos’s image as he stares back and points accusingly at his detractors: “No wonder the iconoclast gestures with peculiar fierceness and hatred. It is no longer a picture; it is the imperious president present.”[2]

Mitchell takes Freedberg’s ideas a step further, by providing a taxonomy of iconoclasm: from partial destruction, defacement, dismemberment and disfigurement, to ‘disappearance’—occlusion, concealment or burial. It is this covering up of the image that features in Mitchell’s account of Dennis Heiner’s defacement of Chris Ofili’s 1995 painting, ‘The Holy Virgin Mary’. Whilst on display at the Brooklyn Museum in New York—as part of ‘Sensation, an exhibition of works by contemporary British artists—Heiner, a devout Catholic, squirted white paint onto the picture and smeared it across the surface of the canvas with his hands. In a sense, this was an act of purging as well as of effacement (or veiling)—the white paint intended to purify the perceived defilement done to the Holy Virgin by Ofili’s characteristic use of elephant dung.[3] This spectacular act was ‘fortuitously’ captured on film by the eminent photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths, the resulting image adding fuel to an already heated public debate over the exhibition.

The spirit of Guy Debord is of course also evoked by the Topshop protest, in the form of his concept of the Society of the Spectacle. The modern city is configured almost purely in terms of commerce and of continuous motion, motion which itself eases the flow and instantiation of commerce. In modern cities almost all public space has vanished or been marginalized, controlled and commandeered; shopping centres (‘malls’ in the US) are de facto private spaces masquerading as public, where limited forms of behaviours and actions are tolerated (again, conforming to the facilitation of commerce). Debord’s own response was to employ derive, or passive drifting, and detournement—the capturing of a spectacular image and presenting it anew, in order to subvert the authority of the sign and of the significations it sets in order. We are used to images being ‘attached’ to artefacts (as in the examples by Mitchell and Freedberg, above), but since the 1960s the genre of performance art has often transformed artists themselves (or other participants) into images. Such works constitute a reversal of the traditional fascination with images/artworks of the mimetic variety: instead of the concept of ‘lifelikeness’ signifying a marker of aesthetic and technical virtuosity, it is the notion of ‘aliveness’ that fascinates—the incongruity of the performer as both representation and living presence.[4] The Topshop protest brought together these two elements—the performative transformation of the body and the detournement of the image—in productively dissonant fashion. But there is more: in merging with their dummy counterparts, the Topshop

protesters, through their enactment, became ‘social others’ who simultaneously revealed the homologous enactment of onlookers: as ‘shoppers’ and consumers. In regarding the image of this tableau vivant of living mannequins on the other side of the glass, we are seeing reflected back at us so to speak—the image of ourselves.

The image created by the Topshop protesters was without doubt, in Freedberg’s sense of the word, powerful—more so than its proponents possibly anticipated or intended. By displacing the shop mannequins, one kind of desire was also displaced by another: the libidinous desire for commodities (and its concomitant ‘commodification of desire’) by the moral desire for equality and fairness. The desperate and feeble manner in which both shop staff and police endeavoured to conceal this from public view was testament to its power, and itself produced yet another, unintended image: one of pathos and of an incomprehension as to how to deal with a situation in which the images of commercial advertising are being subverted and deployed against the very structures they are intended to serve. Such images are therefore not only powerful in and of themselves, but are potentially useful ‘weapons of spectacle’ in the armoury of protest groups such as UK Uncut. In his book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, Stephen Duncombe underlines the importance for the progressive left to learn to speak through the aesthetics of consumer culture:

Jonathan Gilhooly (2011)

Jonathan Gilhooly is an artist and lecturer based in Brighton, UK. www.jonathangilhooly.com

[1] W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 141-142.

[2] David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp.413-414.

[3] Interestingly, Mitchell fails to comment on the fact that Ofili’s Mary is evidently a black Virgin, and that Heiner’s gesture can therefore also be seen as an act of racial purification.

[4] An example of this are ‘living statues’ - immobile performers who occupy city squares, and at whom passers-by stop and stare, searching—in unconscious mimicry—for the faintest evidence of movement and of life.

[5] Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (London, The New Press, 2007), p. 17.

Originally published by Interface