{"id":547153,"date":"2010-04-29T14:48:50","date_gmt":"2010-04-29T18:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=45272"},"modified":"2010-04-29T14:48:50","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T18:48:50","slug":"the-nature-of-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/547153","title":{"rendered":"The nature of reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

A panel discussion with photographer\/artist\/essayist Allan Sekula<\/a> quickly turned into a discourse on the nature of reality, a direction that fazed neither those presenting the conversation nor those listening in Emerson Hall.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Sekula, who explores questions of capitalism, globalization, and social reality in a variety of media, characterized his approach as \u201crealism in a time of lies\u201d during a conversation April 28 with Homi Bhabha<\/a>, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and director of the Humanities Center, and Benjamin Buchloh<\/a>, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art.<\/p>\n

As part of \u201cThe Church of What\u2019s Happening Now\u201d event sponsored by the Humanities Center<\/a> and the Harvard Art Museum<\/a>, Sekula showed clips from a film-in-process and discussed his seminal works such as \u201cFish Story,\u201d an exhibit and book exploring maritime issues, \u201cWaiting for Tear Gas,\u201d about the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization, and \u201cThis Ain\u2019t China,\u201d a riff on factory work.<\/p>\n

Sekula\u2019s work \u201cresists nostalgia and heroism in an attempt to portray the quotidian horror of what it takes simply to survive,\u201d Bhabha said.<\/p>\n

In his remarks, Sekula noted with horrified glee the President George W. Bush-era attacks on the so-called \u201creality-based community.\u201d He asked, \u201cWhat does it mean that we live in a culture that thinks it can bomb peasants into modernity?\u201d<\/p>\n

Reality is even an issue within art world. \u201cOne of the problems of the latest in modernism is the suppression of realism,\u201d Sekula said. \u201cAnd yet there is another reading of modernism which allows us to see realism as a kind of marginalized and potentially subversive strand within modernism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now based at the California Institute of the Arts<\/a>, Sekula, the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship<\/a>, began his artistic career within the conceptual art movement, which is now much derided.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs much as you attack, contest, criticize, and denigrate that legacy, I think it is still interesting for us to think about that exchange moment from which you emerged in the late 1970s,\u201d Buchloh said. Sekula, he noted, was among those who \u201credefined the history of photography in terms of our thinking on photographic representation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buchloh particularly cited the artistic performance by Sekula in which he threw stolen raw steaks onto a busy California freeway. Also, Bhabha told Sekula that raw meat or rawness \u201cseems to be a real motif of your work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sekula seemed to regard the meat incident as an act of juvenile exuberance, an effort to create a \u201cprofane act.\u201d But, he added, he recently saw the movie \u201cThe Wrestler,\u201d and was struck with how the broken-down fighter played by Mickey Rourke said, \u201cI\u2019m just a used-up hunk of meat. The film is really about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seeing in the audience Robin Kelsey<\/a>, the Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography and director of graduate studies in the History of Art and Architecture Department<\/a>, Bhabha invited him onto the stage. Kelsey asked Sekula why he moved away from still photography into filmmaking.<\/p>\n

Sekula said that he had to switch to film to capture what he was witnessing. He found that he could not, for example, capture the frenetic nature of a particular Japanese fish market with still photos. \u201cI borrowed a camera and read the manual at 1 in the morning, and I started filming at 3 in the morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

An audience member, Coco Segaller, a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts<\/a> in Boston, asked Sekula to distinguish reality from among his work\u2019s social, artistic, and political narratives.<\/p>\n

Sekula, only half joking, responded, \u201cYou want an objective definition of reality?\u201d<\/p>\n

Segaller tried again: \u201cWhat is the reality in the realm of conflicting narratives?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOne way to answer is to say what the lies are,\u201d Sekula said. \u201cYou can only make your own story. You can only make your own external truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, he added, turning serious, \u201cThe biggest lie is the lie of marketization \u2014 that everything can be marketized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bhabha singled out Sekula\u2019s 2006 movie \u201cA Short Film for Laos,\u201d in which \u201cvery simple acts of survival, even transitional moments, are always so central.\u201d Sekula\u2019s work can be interpreted as metaphor on many levels, \u201cyet somehow when you talk, people feel that it is much more object-driven or content-driven,\u201d Bhabha said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, you should never trust what an artist says,\u201d Sekula replied, to great laughter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A panel discussion with photographer\/artist\/essayist Allan Sekula quickly turned into a discourse on the nature of reality, a direction that fazed neither those presenting the conversation nor those listening in Emerson Hall. Indeed, Sekula, who explores questions of capitalism, globalization, and social reality in a variety of media, characterized his approach as \u201crealism in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}