| Mireille Astore |
Tampa as sculpture
“Tampa” was a site-specific performance, sculpture, photography and
web-based artwork about the plight of recent refugees in Australia. It took
place between 30 October 2003 and 16 November 2003 as part of the “Sculpture
by the Sea” exhibition in Sydney. The sculpture and performance acted as
a dichotomy between the sense of freedom and grandeur the individual experiences
at the seashore and the imprisonment refugees faced as a result of their trust
in the most basic form of human rights. The Tampa ship signified the beginning
of how the seashore turned refugees in Australia into prisoners of inhumanity.
This incident was of particular interest because of the definite schism it created
in Australia’s perception of itself. The term asylum seekers and refugees
entered the vocabulary of everyday and with it, unease about nationhood and
a crisis about who the Other really is.
The prison like structure was built as a 10:1 scaled version of the Tampa ship.
Lloyds Register shows the Tampa to be 246.41m x 32.36m breadth x 21.01m depth.
Therefore the Tampa cell was 24.6 m long, 3.2m wide and 2.1 m high. The bars
were spaced approximately 15cm apart with barely visible wires connecting the
bars. The bamboo sculpture created and confined space in order to give the performance
a context. The permeability of the prison walls signified both conflict and
fragility – a reference to the osmotic relationship between the viewer
and the performer through the inversion of the gaze process, more on that later.
Tampa as performance
The performance consisted of myself dressed in black waiting for my release
for the duration of the exhibition. My possessions and daily needs were contained
in an old leather suitcase. I would arrive each morning at 10 am, enter the
prison and stay there without exiting at any time, until 6pm. Throughout the
18 day performance, endurance and claustrophobia were to be presented with the
relentless process of daily imprisonment, including sitting through an electric
storm, scorching temperatures, sand blasting from gale force winds as well as
public apathy and antagonism. Symbolism of suffering as experienced by the refugees
on the Tampa ship and the subsequent process of forced and unjust incarceration
were primary objectives. Otherness, caging and display were the underlying themes,
and Coco Fusco & Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Two Undiscovered
Amerindians Visit Sydney performance in 1992 provided a thematic comparison.
In the latter, Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s sat in a cell at the
Australian Museum posing as exhibits of two newly discovered savages from an
island in the Gulf of New Mexico. This performance intersected with Gómez-Peña’s
comments on contemporary “cultimulturalism”.1
An essential part
of the Tampa performance was the obsessive documentation of the process of imprisonment.
Each day photographs were taken from within the cage and four were posted on
the website at the end of the day. In
his essay on "Ethnic Caging" Ghassan Hage says, "Most vivid in
my consciousness are intimations of caging practices: people behind fences,
hands clutching wires, guards. I’ve seen the films and the photos, and
listened to and read reports of governments officials justifying the way they
‘handle’ the situation. Of course, in the well-established traditional
pattern of knowledge dissemination, the ‘point of view’ of the caged,
from the budgie to the prisoner, is seldom or never heard."3
This ‘point of view’ of the caged was one of the critical issues examined
through the performance. Who the subject really was through photographing from
within the cage, was played out against a backdrop of an audience unused to
being confronted by an observing Other acting out a gazing process. Austerity,
aversion to discourse and silence were the methods deployed to reinforce the
walls of the bamboo shell. Holding a camera in my hand acted as a witness to
possible crimes, keeping intruders and aggressive behaviour at bay.
Tampa as Photography - The inverted gaze
Inverting the gaze through the act of photographing from within the cage was
an attempt at subverting the gaze of the subject. In his essay “The Artwork
in the Era of its Technical Reproducibility” on the role of photography,
Walter Benjamin says, "For the first time in world history, technical reproducibility
emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual…
Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice
– politics"4. In Tampa, photography as a technically
reproducible device, together with politics laid the ground for redefining the
direction and static nature of the gaze. Peter Hutchings 5
in his essay on Benjamin examines David Octavius Hill’s Newhaven fishwife
photographic portrait where Benjamin identifies the notion of the gaze through
the fishwife’s photographed averted eyes. He finds it difficult to engage
with her eyes and therefore is driven to wonder about her real identity. He
says, "In Hill’s Newhaven Fishwife,…there remains something that
goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art, something that cannot
be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was."6
Benjamin’s
definitive declaration that “the desire of contemporary masses to bring
things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly” suggests that the exchange
which takes place between the gazer and the gazee is an intimate process of
identification. ‘Bringing things closer’ therefore sets out the ground
for a process of reaching a closer proximity, physically, mentally as well as
metaphorically to that, which cannot be reached through ordinary means.
In Tampa, the performance of photographing from within the cage then placing
the images on a website during the course of the performance was an attempt
at “bringing even closer” the viewer to the subject or vice versa.
In effect, through this process, the distance between the subject and the viewer’s
eyes had become so infinitesimal that the identity of the gazee and the gazer
were caught in an oscillating and intense continuum. The fusion of two spatial
and temporal processes through the act of photographing from within created
a tension, which had at its core a conflict of identity. The relationship initiated
and executed as I photographed onlookers then boldly circulated their images
through the Internet stood in sharp contrast to the assumed refugee status I
employed. As the performance progressed over time and viewers became aware of
the virtual concept of the Tampa performance, an unease about being photographed
and then of being dispersed on the Internet began to emerge as highlighted by
some of the comments and questions received
and documented . Hence a mirroring and an escalation of roles set out to question
the function of photography in defining the identity of the viewer and their
object. The intended dissolution of meaning of words such as “refugee”
and “migrant” was played out in a highly charged terrain with no visible
fields or dimensions. As the subject’s role disappeared, an attempt was
made to create an amorphous form of identification that slowly emerged over
the time scale of the performance. It was hoped that in its place the notion
of caging itself was impossibly dissolved.
The Australian government's multicultural policies, which set out to enhance
the image of an ideal Australian society, sit in a bizarre state of tension
with the practice of caging ethnics and their children. The merger of identities
between gazer and gazee was an attempt at highlighting this tension.The issue
of national border and identity as played out during this refugee crisis highlighted
how a person branded as a migrant and economic asset in the past, can become
a threat and a tool of national violation in the present, through no fault of
their own. Inverting the gaze through photography therefore set out to rearrange
not only the subject but also their histories. Many first, second and third
generation Australians who arrived here as refugees fleeing wars, famine and
persecution did identify with the performance and the mirroring process of inverting
the gaze.
Conclusion
Viewer’s relationship to the caging process and in particular to the Tampa
performance no doubt created tensions and stresses as illustrated in the comments.
These manifested themselves primarily through expressions of recognition or
shame as well as through a distancing process. Inversion
of the gaze through photography therefore was a tool of empowerment and an exploration
into role reversals. In some instances the notion that an imprisoned person
was photographing may have invited people to question assumptions about an imprisoned
person’s powerlessness. Consequently, photographing from within, was an
attempt at illustrating that the watched and the caged are in indeed watching.
Mireille Astore © 2004
1. Green, Charles. Peripheral vision : Contemporary Australian Art, 1970-1994 Roseville East, N.S.W. : Craftsman House, 1995. p. 12
2. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998. p. 138.
4.Benjamin, Walter. Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction In Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968
5. Hutchings, Peter J. “Through a Fishwife’s Eye: Between Benjamin and Deleuze on the Timely Image,” In Terry Smith (ed.), Impossible Presence:Surface and Screen in the Photogenic Era. Sydney/Chicago: Power Publications/Chicago University Press, 2001, pp. 101–123.
6. Benjamin, Walter. A Small History of Photography In One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: New Left Books, 1979. p. 243