Hiroji Kubota Japanese, b. I believe this to be one of the most complex, original and important exhibitions of Unlike the earlier posting, Intersections: Photographs and Videos from the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, where I noted that the self-contained themes of that exhibition seemed purely illusory, here the themes are active and engaging, fluid in meaning and representation the choice of laterally aligned art works to the themes β dust breeding, waves, sea concertos, banners and capes, red tape, montages, posters etcβ¦ , which emphasis resistance, the raising up, the uprising as a desirous and joyful act, one that is performative hence the wonderful video elements in the exhibition and transgressive.
Photographs, as people do, cross borders: they are transnational and multidisciplinary. The latter confers on the rebels a particular aura, passing thus from figures of guilty to those of martyrs. Their monstration [the act of demonstrating; proof] β the insurgents act of demonstrating; the photograph as an act of demonstrating their death for judicial purposes; and also a certain monstration proof that these mostly young, skinny men died for a belief in a better world β is an evidentiary act of transubstantiation.
Is the camera looking down on these bodies in cheap coffins from above, or are the coffins propped up against a wall? He lies prostrate on the ground, arm outstretched, hand curled, his body and clothes spattered with his own blood his eyes, open, staring at the now invisible sky. Bits of dust and earth are still stuck to his arm through the viscosity of his blood. Earlier, he had dressed for the day in a white singlet, put on his trousers and fastened them with an embossed belt, then put on a crisp, stripped shirt and neatly rolled up the sleeves to his elbows.
He might have had breakfast before heading of to a meeting outside where he worked. This day he died, protesting his rights β striking worker, assassinated! Assassinated β executed, eliminated, liquidated to which the congealing blood attests β¦ slaughtered.
For his right to strike, to protest, the conditions of his being. And, mortally, I comment on that one photograph, that one evidence of human beings transcending their own lives knowing they were going to die for the greater good β the anonymous photograph taken by members of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp that documents AS PROOF of the reality of the Final Solution: Women pushed towards the gas chamber of crematorium V of Birkenau , below.
