History, memory, and the politics of programming : the video work of Richard Fung

Richard Fung, a Toronto-based video artist and cultural critic, was born in Trinidad in 1954, and attended school in Ireland before immigrating to Canada to study at the University of Toronto. Richard Fung has taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and has been a visiting professor in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York in Buffalo. He is currently the coordinator of the Centre for Media and Culture in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

Memory, photography, and the politics of abuse : the ambiguous nature of photography

Critical commentary on Australian artist Bill Henson’s work including the series Untitled 1994-1995 which represented Australia at the Venice Biennale is frequently framed within the discourse of the ‘white cube’. Its contextualisation in predominantly art historical and formalist perspectives tends to operate as a mechanism that denies affective and embodied dimensions of meaning making. Much the same could be said of the work of Marian Drew who uses road kill in her photographic still life works. However, the ‘distancing’ in these works is also achieved through historical allusion, which at the same time reactivates the fl ow of emotional empathy and desire. In this paper, I ask the question: “What distinguishes the work of these two artists with media images of torture?”

My attempt to address this question will involve a narrative re-reading of selected works of Henson and Drew incorporating notions of affect, identification, memory and desire as processes which operate non-discursively, but which are inseparable from memory and lived experiences. This will permit a double exposure of the work of these artists. Within a psychoanalytical context, my re-reading will be used to extend an understanding of the now familiar press and Internet images of the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

As a metaphor for desire and ideology, photography operates within manifest and latent registers. I will argue that certain forms of photographic practice may be understood in terms of a politics of abuse — instantiating an uneven differentiation of power between actants, the winning (forcefully or otherwise) of consent or complicity, the silencing of refusal of resistance and/or the incriminating of the ‘victim’ — whilst at the same time upholding the claim of verisimilitude and aesthetic or ethical intent. Critical engagement with such practices is crucial to an understanding of the relationship between institutional discourses, trauma and abuse in contemporary society.

The Dresden firebombing : memory and the politics of commemorating destruction

The firebombing of Dresden marks the terrible apex of the European bombing war. In just over two days in February 1945, over 1,300 heavy bombers from the RAF and the USAAF dropped nearly 4,000 tonnes of explosives on Dresden's civilian centre.Since the end of World War II, both the death toll and the motivation for the attack have become fierce historical battlegrounds, as German feelings of victimhood complete with those of guilt and loss. The Dresden bombing was used by East Germany as a propaganda tool, and has been re-appropriated by the neo-Nazi far right. Meanwhile the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche- the city's sumptuous eighteenth-century church destroyed in the raid-became central to German identity, while in London, a statue of the Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, has attracted protests. In this book, Tony Joel focuses on the historical battle to re-appropriate Dresden, and on how World War II continues to shape British and German identity today.

Dresden as Opferstadt? : the politics of commemorating destruction, 1985-2005

Using public remembrance of the controversial WWII firebombing of Dresden as its case study, the thesis probes the politics of war memory and commemoration. It argues that before, during, and after Germany's reunification, Dresden was portrayed as a, if not the, leading paradigm of German wartime loss and suffering.

How style came to matter : do we need to move beyond the politics of representation?

In response to the increasing difficulties facing museums that attempt to work within a pluralist framework as a strategy for representing cultural diversity, this essay argues for the need to move beyond a characterisation of museum work as either progressive or conservative, pluralist or consensual. Central to my arguments is an attempt to extend our understanding of possible narrative structures in museums by focusing on questions of style as much as of content. I do this by looking back at two case studies in which questions around the political intent of narrative structures were determined as much by the form of the exhibition as by its content. This focus enables are cognition that fragmentary narrative styles are not by definition associated with alack of strong narratives. Quite the contrary. An alternative approach to exhibition making might therefore lie in an approach that moves away from eclecticism but does so not by returning to progressive, chronological narratives but by privileging an understanding of 'shared experience'. I attempt to open up what I mean by this term towards the end of the essay.

Scientists and the cultural politics of academic disciplines in late 19th-century Germany: Emil Du Bois-Reymond and the controversy over the role of the cultural sciences

This article is concerned with interactions between the natural and the human sciences. It examines a specific late 19th-century episode in their relationship and argues that the schism between the two branches of knowledge was due to cognitive factors, but consolidated through the social dynamics of institutionalized disciplines. It contends that the assignment of a social function to the human sciences to compensate for the self-destructive tendencies inherent in the technological society was expressed even by those, at the end of the 19th century, who were fervent advocates of a science- and technology-driven modernization.