Article: Face-to-Face with History

Abstract

Face-to-Face with History Stephen Bann (bio) I Toward the beginning of his remarkable memoir of a “political education,” Régis Debray speaks of the “image of glory” which dominated his schooldays: “a prison courtyard at six in the morning, with an execution post and the commander of the squad who does me the honours before ordering ‘Fire!’” The future companion in arms of Chè Guevara judges in retrospect that this image was generated by “two superimposed photographs.” In one of them, which is French and dates from 1944, a maquisard, bare-headed and with a smile on his lips, stands before a line of soldiers. In the other, taken in Mexico in 1917 by Casasola, the execution of Fortino Samano is shown: with “a broad-brimmed felt hat pulled down over his eyes, and a cigar between his teeth . . . the anarchist throws a mocking grin at his uniformed riflemen, out of frame.” 1 The memoir writer and media expert Debray has become half a century later hastens to tell us that both of these powerful photographs were not what they seemed to be. The smiling French martyr turned out, on further enquiry, to be a young militia man executed for war crimes at the time of the Liberation. The gripping image produced by Agustin Victor Casasola, who founded the first photographic agency to operate in Mexico, was a professional piece of work, and showed the celebrated Samano posing before his execution. The line of riflemen, out of frame, was supplied by the viewer’s imagination, just as (in Barthes’s well-known example) the Tricolor was the inevitable object of the young black soldier’s salute. 2 This essay, however, is not going to be yet another piece on the photograph’s capacity to lie, or on the fascinating iconographic heritage of the image of the firing squad, from Goya through Manet to Jean Renoir. 3 What I want to do is relate the existential dimension Debray evokes to the undoubted currency, in the present period, of exhibitions of visual art that seek to place us, in one way or another, in the presence of history. Face à l’histoire—face-to-face with history—was the title of a vast and disorderly rag-bag of twentieth-century works that occupied large areas of the Centre Pompidou in 1996–97, and it can serve as an [End Page 235] epitome of the necessary failure of such a project. If all these heterogeneous art objects notionally shared a common historical period, their mode of reference was either so elliptical as to compress the event into nothingness or so replete with iconography as to raise, inevitably, the question of conscious staging, of “posing.” On Kawara’s meticulous panels inscribed with a date, a month and year made history auto-referential, despite the newspapers of the same date metonymically annexed to their display. On the other hand, the light boxes of Jeff Wall revived the issue of “history painting” not as a privileged condensation of past events (the nineteenth-century aspiration) but as an Albertian project of copious and well-articulated narrative. It is arguable that the concept of being “face-to-face with history” depends radically on that of being “face-to-face” with a work of art, in the precise circumstances in which the culture of images has been transformed, over the past century and a half, to accommodate a new kind of spectator. In other words, the issue of historical reference, in the literal sense, takes second place to the fact that we are spectators schooled in a new type of empathetic relationship to the pictorial image, involving the experience of instant access to its otherness. Wolfgang Kemp has astutely reinterpreted the notion of reception theory to fit a new kind of disposition of space in nineteenth-century painting, which arguably begins with Paul Delaroche’s Assassination of the Duc de Guise (1834) and finds its mature expression in his pupil Gérôme’s Death of Marshal Ney (1868). In relation to the foreshortened corpse of the dead marshal, as Kemp puts it, the spectator’s position “is that of the eyewitness. . . . He is someone who comes upon...