Justice, terror and the keepers of collective memory

Pat Hoffie
October 13, 2005
The Australian

NOBEL prize-winning author J.M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians follows the critical journey of a magistrate in a tiny outpost of an unnamed empire. The journey is personal and historical: it follows the cataclysms of a disintegrating empire and the associated crises of conscience of the central character.

Both the time and the place are uncertain: the protagonist is a civilised man living in regulated comfort in an outlying settlement populated by a few natives. The narrative seems eerily to be the harbinger of a coming age. With a little interpretive licence, it is possible to read the responses of the magistrate as metaphors for our ethical dilemmas.

Coetzee's unflinching description of the violence that engulfs the magistrate's orderly life was written in 1980, but it seems as if the author had been delivered the details of the scenes of terror that haunt us today.

Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940 and educated in apartheid-torn South Africa and in the US. His experiences provided him with more than enough material to enable him to re-create a persuasive fictional world.

As Robert Storr, curator of Interesting Times, the exhibition of political art showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, writes in his catalogue essay: "The willingness to believe that terrorism is a total aberration is an [act] of voluntary forgetfulness in the hope of restoring a sense of security and of a simple ignorance of history. In the last century and a half, terrorism has in fact been frequent and nearly universal."

Memory and history have become rare commodities. The war on terror is presented by the media as a specific US-led response to the events of September 11, 2001. In other countries, however, terror has existed as part of the citizens' daily lives for much longer.

It was not 9/11 but the bombing of two nightclubs in Bali on October 12, 2002, that brought home to Australians the contingency of world events. Eighty-eight of the 202 deaths were Australian; almost overnight, Australians lost their sense of distance from the hotbeds of ongoing global violence. And Australians were encouraged, by the Government and the media, to think of themselves as continuing targets of unspecified violence.

In the earliest pages of Coetzee's novels, the magistrate is brought face to face with the realisation that the order of his world can no longer hold together. But the shattering of his world does not come through acts performed on him personally. Rather, he brings about the complete and irreversible change in his world view. His epiphany comes when he recognises the links between the smallest details of his everyday life to the lives -- and deaths -- of those around him.

He will never, he realises, be released from this knowledge. And he is immediately aware of the price of this knowledge which, once understood, automatically excludes him from the possibility of any Eden-like gardens of comfort or complacency.

Artists such as those represented in this exhibition are driven to respond to this knowledge by creating illusions of connectedness that make new relationships seem possible. They make the effort to imagine new ways of responding to the world. As with the magistrate, their sense of interconnectedness with the world is a blessing and a curse.

SOME critics believe that art can offer no critical response to cultures of violence, that the business of art lies elsewhere. Paul Virilio quotes German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who famously said that no art was possible after Auschwitz.

That view, he points out, has been overtaken by the defence of freedom of expression. But freedom of expression, Virilio continues, has at least one limit: the call to murder or torture. Yet he continues rhetorically: "Remember the media of hate in the ex-Yugoslavia of Slobodan Milosevic? Remember the 'Thousand Hills radio' of the great lakes region of Africa, calling Rwandans to inter-ethnic genocide?"

In describing the transgressions that abound in recent world politics, Virilio suggests that our understanding of terms such as freedom of expression have become terrifyingly transmogrified into scripted enactments of events such as those he lists. It is as if art's will to heedlessly transgress moral boundaries has been transferred to real life.

The need of governments to keep the enemy faceless and nameless is essential to fostering a state of terror. In Coetzee's novel, the barbarians who wait on the fringes of the empire, threatening to destroy order and civility, are an invisible force. They are as much imagined as they are real. When one or two are captured, tortured and abandoned to their fate, they seem very far from those semi-human entities that keep the civilised world awake at night. Up close, they seem all too vulnerable, all too human, similar to the men imprisoned at Abu Ghraib.

In Australia, the faces and names of asylum-seekers placed under mandatory detention are kept secret, as are the terms of their sentences. The names of the people who died in the Siev X maritime tragedy in 2001 are withheld. Signs of the humanity of those we most fear is denied. Similarly, the links between those barbarians and the civilisations of the past are denied. The more formless and unknowable the barbarians are, the more efficiently fear of them can be maintained and escalated.

The media is saturated with representations of the atrocities of war. What should be the response of art? Why, in a world almost inured to the violence of representation, would we need more such imagery?

Storr analyses the reception of a series of 15 paintings by German artist Gerhard Richter called October 18, 1977. The title was the date four members of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof group were found dead or dying in the high-security Stammheim prison near Stuttgart. Controversy dogged the deaths, which deeply divided Germany.

The series was first exhibited in 1989. Richter was aware that the choice of such a radical subject by an established artist would seem an irony intended to court controversy. Some critics did think that: the series was painted so long after the event, they thought, it could do little more than evoke a dark sentimentality. Others thought the work redemptive, bringing out a piece of history that had been repressed by the state.

Critic Peter Schjeldhal had the most interesting response. He identified the tension coming from a "head-on collision of irresistible aesthetics and immovable moralism, the fire of the voyeur and the ice of the puritan". The works were exhibited across Europe and the US until they were bought by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Richter mostly deflected debate towards the cooler subject of painting. He did, however, say at one point: "There's something else that puts an additional fear into people, namely that they themselves are terrorists ... So this terrorism is inside all of us, that's what generates the rage and fear, and that's what I don't want any more than I want the policeman inside me. There's never just one side to us. We're always both: the state and the terrorist."

Violence and fear have always provided subject matter for artists. The earliest images on cave walls gave form and face to fear in the attempt to placate and master it.

Yet war rages on and terrorism continues. Why do artists continue to address this subject when their efforts are clearly futile?

Coetzee's magistrate is an arbiter of justice. "We are fallen creatures," he says. "All we can do is uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade." It is artists who take responsibility for keeping memories of justice alive: memories of justice and of compassion, and memories of the price of war and terror. Artists allow us brief glimpses of who we may be; they dare to unsettle our understanding of who we are. They remind us that we are all capable of terror and of hope.

Pat Hoffie is deputy director of research and postgraduate studies at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. This is an edited version of her catalogue essay for the exhibition Security and Human Rights, held there. Interesting Times is at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, until November 27.

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