The aesthetics and politics of representation

“ARE some things unrepresentable?” is the questioning heading of the fifth and last chapter of the slim but profound book The Future of the Image by Jacques Ranciere. He is aware that the question covers the gamut from the religious ban on representation, through the challenge of pure artistic representation like Kazimir Malevich’s “White Square on White Background”, through the problematic of performing Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex mainly because of the messy matter of Oedipus’ gouged-out eyes, to the Holocaust which was an exercise as meticulous as it was criminal of double erasure—that of the genocide of about 11 million people, including six million Jews, and that of the massive operation to obliterate the evidence of this mammoth obliteration. Political expediency dictates and subverts representation, as we have come to learn only too well from the collusion of silence or understatement on, or sanitised and disinformational accounts and artistic re-renderings of, the nearly 250,000 people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were put to such miserable deaths by incineration when the United States dropped atomic bombs on these two cities, and that after the war was practically over and won by the Allies; of anywhere between twice and five times that number of people—children, women and men who can be called, if that is any comfort, “collateral victims”—killed in the war against Iraq between 2003 and 2011, which often, weirdly, resembled a video game-like aerial bombardment of that country, enabling refined Western sensibilities to be clinically distanced and emotionally detached from the blood and the gore and the havoc on the ground. Then there is art ab initio that summons up or deploys imagery outside of reality, which is autonomous rather than representing, but which can be as devastative, shocking and inflicting—like the surreal image of an eye with lids open being slashed horizontally across with a blade in the short film Un Chien Andalou created jointly by Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali; or the traumatic self-reflexivity enforced on the central character and gang leader, Alex, of the diabolic youth squad in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, when he is strapped to a chair and his eyes are forcibly kept open with pincers to watch scene after unremitting scene of violence on video so that he is gazing and screaming helplessly. A recent documentary creating ripples in the international festival circuit has a rare quality of artistic brinkmanship as it seeks to probe and represent the mental makeup and acumen along with the personal traits and individual contexts of a group of teenaged blind Indian chess players and their older mentor-promoter, himself blind, who come together in an ambitious bid to scale heights of accomplishment in the game that will, they hope, one day enable them to compete on a par with the masters in the field gifted with sight.