a class project about digimodernism: what happens when the public can interfere with iconic images? essay below the demo images.
UNMEDIATED IMAGE
MEDIATED IMAGE, ZOOMED
My original motivation for this work emerged from my fascination with activism and the narratives that activists fight for. My father held a brief tenure as a student activist; Tiananmen was perhaps the most famous protest he attended. I remember him describing the protest before the killing began as joyful, colourful, and communal. The first image I ever saw of June 4, 1989 was Tank Man , scrolling through a Buzzfeed-esque list of “Top 10 Most Iconic Images of All Time”. My ten year old self was brought to tears by this seeming martyr, despite the image’s narrative being a stark contrast to my father’s stories. I had three main questions to answer in my artist statement. How does remediation of an iconic image influence its political messaging? At what extremes are both raw icons and publicly remediated icons historically problematic? How do these answers intertwine with the ethos and thesis of digimodernism? I also aim to briefly contextualize the project, with its additional proposed functionalities, within the body of reappropriated art that has been inspired by Tank Man.
Iconic images permeate public consciousness due to intentional distribution by corporate and government press as well as their accessible, oversimplified messaging. Their political and artistic implications are intertwined; aesthetic interference and modification implies political interference and modification. The political bias, widespread distribution, and artistic restriction of icons make them problematic as cultural objects; their representations of history are often biased and oversimplified. Tank Man is easily readable for a Western viewer; its representation of the events at Tiananmen is simplified and concentrated onto the individual rebellion of this single man. The protest was not an individual stand for democracy, but a million-strong cry against nepotism, high unemployment, and state interference (Hariman and Lucaites, 2011). The erasure of the masses of protesters and the main political motivations at Tiananmen is problematic. Iconic images also forward the narratives held so dear by modernism and mental models of citizenship and heroism. Tank Man cleanly fits into Western narratives of democracy, namely individual citizen resistance and expression.
Iconic images also often forward certain political narratives due to their modernist nature. This image in particular is a Western-centric obfuscation rather than a clarification of the historical activist protest at Tiananmen. Tank Man is a vehicle for Western civilization’s conceptualization of China’s past as a totalitarian state and its future as a Westernized liberal democracy. This tension between China’s past and its Western liberal future is constructed perfectly in the composition of the photo; the modern, liberated individual stands for democracy against symbols of brute state force. The single force vector of man versus tanks is clean and linear; the war between past and present concepts of China is personified simplistically and legibly to the Western eye (Hariman and Lucaites, 223). It is interesting to note here that the photograph has been largely censored in China; this photo holds political power and meaning primarily for the Western public (Hillenbrand, 6). Originally, at the time of the attacks, the image was circulated within China to demonstrate the humanity of the state in refraining from killing the man. This long term state suppression of a representative of collective memory raises further questions of the role of digimodernist, ephemeral artworks such as this one as fugitive attempts to mediate public histories. Although the original iconic image itself is not self-reflexive, many parodies and subsidiary works reflect on the limitations of the photo’s construction of June 4th, 1989. Although the unmediated, modern iconic photo is problematic, I do not believe that simply modifying images to be more accurate is less problematic. I do believe that there is certain value in allowing the public to partially reclaim their own histories through critical remediation of iconic images.
Thus, my project allows the public to modify the iconic image Tank Man. The function I thought most important was the ability to populate the picture with clones of the original figure. Since the narrative the unaltered icon conveys is individualistic, population of the photo allows the public to fundamentally alter the Western encoding and projection of Western democracy onto a Chinese historical event. The digital nature of the project allows for a sort of ultra-publicity; all Internet users could theoretically access and mediate the iconic image. Different mediations impact the political coding in different, and significant, ways. For example, after replacing the Tank Man with a female citizen, the public square would no longer be completely masculine. If the force line was disturbed, either by distributing the tanks or Chinese citizens perpendicular to the current line, the aesthetic and political composition of the photo would not lead to such a simplistic narrative. If I had more time to explore this project, I would create a linked platform so that users could view other modified versions of the image, as well as clone them so as to modify them further. This sort of co-creation exemplifies the spirit of digimodernism. I would also add the ability to clone and drop other objects in the photo, such as the tank and the bus, as well as add the ability to superimpose quotes. The addition of quotes Jennifer Hubbert (2014) states that “reappropriations of iconic photographs have the potential to mobilize collective memory and political imaginations to new ends”. Her conclusion is that 21st century reappropriations of Tank Man question the lack of liberalism in the US instead of in China, and posit that the United States does not automatically occupy an absolute level of power in comparison to China. Parodies such as those found in political cartoons occupy a different critical space than the one I aim to fill by empowering the public to fashion their own critique of Tank Man through individualized remediation, especially since I have purposely chosen to pre-set more serious draggable objects. Interestingly, Hillenbrand states that “ [r]emakes dramatically enhance the searchability of a cultural artifact, creating a matrix of linked items that Google can crawl” (1). Through my project, the public could interfere with modes of modernity, which carries in the instance of this photo appropriative, state-managed narratives. Iconic photos are a tool for civic education, and thus the modification of such images poses yet another interesting question: to what extent should the public be allowed, even encouraged, to engage with and shape civic history and of their own civic education through the mediation of iconic images of their collective past? I view allowing public interference with state-managed (alien or native) as a sort of digimodernist activism, as well as a reclaiming of narratives of civic identity and societal betterment.
With the advent of digital technologies, remediation becomes accessible to a larger public. The questions I raise with this project are not easily answerable. In this project, modernist metanarratives, postmodern skepticism towards metanarratives, and digimodernism are offered to viewers as different modes through with to engage with public histories.
REFERENCES Hariman, Robert, and John Lucaites. No caption needed: iconic photographs, public culture, and liberal democracy. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2011. Print. Hillenbrand, Margaret. Remaking Tank Man, in China. Journal of Visual Culture (2016). Web. Hubbert, Jennifer. "Appropriating Iconicity: Why Tank Man Still Matters." Visual Anthropology Review 30.2 (2014): 114-26. Web.