MUSEUMS OF HUMAN BODIES

HANNA MUSIOL
Capture and captivation lis] a type of discourse... that derives from the
imposition of power on bodies and the attachment of bodies to power ...At
the same time, capture and captivation constitute a critical response, how-
ever untimely, to the disconmctdn^ of identification as a perceptual mode, a
disconmctdng^ that underlines many examples of modernist art and theory.
... Can the trap be thought of as a special part, both in the foreff>ing medial
terms and in terms of Rndere specific seme of partage, which pertains both
to sharing and to distribution?
Rey Chow, Entanglements
Paletting various skin tones into an ambient mix ...is like fiower arranging
... Too much color and it begins looking crass. .
Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker
Where am I to be classified? Or, if you prefer, tucked away?
Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin completed his now-iconic reflection on the corre-
lation between technological innovation, cultural transformations, and changes
of perception, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility"
(2002, 101-33).' He argued that "just as the entire mode of existence of human
collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of percep-
tion" (2002,104), insisting that modes of representation as well as technological
developments and "Technik" affect social, collective seeing, and perception.' In
this view, seeing and being seen, their technologies and modesin the Holocaust
era and beforehave always depended on historical, technological, and political,
V
COLLEGE LITERATUREr A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 40.3 Summer 1013
Prim ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1541-4186
West Chester University 1013
Hanna Musiol | ESSAYS 157
rather than purely physical, processes (2002, 104). In the context of the radi-
cal technological developments of the last century, Benjamin's thought is often
invoked to highlight the radically different outcomes of premodern and mecha-
nized modes of reproducibility: the "aura" of a work of art on the one hand, and
the alienating power of new visual technologies, such as photography or film, on
the other.3 Interestingly, the rich archive Benjamin left behind reveals not only
an astute theorist who wrote about premodern modes of display as employed in
the museum as well as the perils of new technologies in the era of new means of
reproducibility, but also a committed collector who amassed, rearranged, and
decontextualized premodern and modern cultural ephemeranewspaper scraps,
dolls, poetry and prose excerpts, postcards, photographs, incongruous lists, and
textual collections.'' Benjamin saw the archive and its Technik, its collection and
display technologies and modes, as radical meaning-making practices. Deeply
concerned about the impact of technologized forms of perception, evaluation,
and arrangement not only on artifacts but also on humans in the light of the
ethnic cleansing sweeping Europe, Benjamin was both wary of and drawn to the
transformative power of the archive. He was fascinated by the design of new
systems of filing, by new "constellations" (Marx et al. 2007, 231), and by new
arrangement of artifacts, images, ideas, and people that new and (paradoxically)
traditional technics enabled.'
This essay accepts Benjamin's invitation to reflect on contemporary collective
and technologized perception, and specifically on aesthetics and display, in the
context of human rights.* While some may feel that Benjamin's work is most
appropriate to the analysis of the radically new violent seizures and alienating
effects enabled by the modern visual technologies deployed in contemporary cor-
porate and military theaters, I would like to turn both to modern visual technol-
ogies and modes of perception and to the representation technics of the museum,
the archive, and display in the context of human rights. Nearly a century after
Benjamin's theoretical intervention, all areas of human activity are transformed,
mediatized by new visual technologies, and the capacity to see others and to con-
trol one's visibility has a profound impact on one's "access to the human" (Butler
2004, 30). Not surprisingly, the violence engendered by surveillance and mili-
tary technologies and the liberatory potential of human rights photography and
film are now central concerns of human rights scholarship. However, museum
arrangement and display practices that demonstrate how human bodies acquire
or lose rights and how the "exhibition value" affects their "aura" within the realm
of museum culture and, more importantly, outside of it are not (Benjamin 2002,
106; 103-104).'
I argue that analyzing human rights through the lens of arrangement and
display practices enables a comparative look at multiple spheres of social activity
where human bodies are staged and made legible: war zones, residential envi-
rons, and the art world and its galleries. Thus, my essay combines an emphasis
on technologies and modes of perception and arrangement in sites of militarized,
violent surveillance, which may be both creative and destructive, as well as in
158 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 40.3 Summer 2013
sites of artistic production in a more traditional sense, such as the gallery and
the museum. This dual focus allows me not only to explore important intercon-
nections between military and artistic practices but also to demonstrate the
indispensable role that aesthetic evaluation, or "exhibition value," plays in human
rights contexts.
In their manifesto, Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi (2012) suggest that,
especially in the Western tradition of the last two hundred years, a "museum is
fundamentally a mode of staging and making palpable... preferred relationships
while endeavoring to manage how these are to be received" (143). They argue that
in a museum,
things are framed, contained, and stage-managed so that their preferred legibility
may be palpably visible. The stagecraft is the meaning and the index of a dra-
maturgy linked to explicit or unspoken political, social, cultural, religious, and
economic histories, a dramaturgy we pantomime and perform in the choreography
of our visiting. (Farago and Preziosi 2012,143)
In such an articulation, a museum appears to be an organizational system that
rests on "stagecraft," the visual display and arrangement of the human or the
inanimate. As such, it is invested in producing "preferred legibilities" of things
and human subjects (2012,143). In this context official museums and their ideo-
logical armsart history and aestheticshave played a profound classificatory
role in supporting diverse nationalist and colonialist/imperialist enterprises
(Preziosi 2003,116-26). Yet, when Farago and Preziosi ask, "if anything might be
content for a museum, could anything then serve as a museum?" (2012,142), they
suggest the potential for the interdisciplinary application of museum theory to
human rights. I want to entertain this provocative premisethat anything can
serve as a museumto reflect on how military and artistic renditions of visual
vulnerability and empowerment intertwine in multiple types of'museum' exhib-
its: in drones' aerial visual intelligence; in visual profiling on the ground in an
American suburb; and in projects by three visual artists, namely Vik Muniz's
human-refuse portraits, Kara Walker's ghostly silhouettes, and Ursula Biemann's
visual noise theory of geobodies.
At first sight, these examples might not seem to belong in the same 'gallery.'
However, if we invoke the understanding ofthe world as curatorial project sug-
gested by Farago and Preziosi and recall the Benjaminian emphasis on technolo-
gized perception and on technics of archival and curatorial arrangement, then we
might be able to see the realm of aesthetics and visuality as inseparable from the
processes of socialization and legal and cultural personification that all human
bodies undergo.^ Such processes are relevant whether in the Afghanistan coun-
tryside, in Sao Paulo, New York, Gyumri, Seoul, or Bamako art galleries and
institutes, in a YouTube-circulated human rights video, or on the streets of any
metropolis or suburb in the world. The "stagecraft" employed by such museum
sites condition the "legibility" and aesthetic perception of bodies and so define
who is classified as human with rights, who is classified as a human artifact, and
who is considered waste (Farago and Preziosi 2012,143). In other words, the aim
Hanna Musiol | ESSAYS 159
here is not to see the museum and high arts as privileged sites for debates about
aesthetics and human rights. Rather, like Benjamin, Preziosi, and Farago, it is to
consider the realm of aesthetics and display outside of disciplinary distinctions,
and to explore the role that technologized and pre-mechanized visual and exhibit
technologies and techniques play in the making, socializing, and destroying of
human bodies.
HOW DOES A DRONE SEE?
As noted in a Congressional Research Service report written a decade ago,
drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), were initially "used as Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance/Target Acquisition (ISR/TA) assets" and had
only "recently broadened . . . into . . . armed reconnaissance" (Bone and Bolkcom
2003, 19). Newer drones such as the Predator and the Reaper "add the strike
mission to {their} repertoire" and as of 2013 are frequently employed in more-or-
less-covert military operations.' While all modern drones "provide commanders
with imagery intelligence, electronic intelligence, and streaming video," accord-
ing to this background paper, "UAVs in the future will likely be lethal by design"
(2003, 19). We now live in the future anticipated by this report a decade ago.
Although drone strikes are often described as "clinical and carefully targeted,"
many people, including those who journeyed in October 2012 from Islamabad to
South Waziristan to protest drone deployments by American forces, have pro-
vided harrowing accounts of civilian losses and of family members and friends
killed or crippled in the attacks (Reeves 2012). Used by "different entities," nota-
bly the military and the CIA, drones now have "different kill lists" (quoted in
NPR StaflF, 2012), and their violent and nonviolent "seeing" is more and more
common (Wald 2013).
The extensive utilization of UAVs epitomizes the powerful fusion of seeing
and violence in unmanned weapons used in the contemporary global "art" of the
war on terror. One of the crucial developments in post-World War II seeing,
then, is the disconnection of human vision from technological seeing and the
removal of human judgmenteven if some would like to say human errorfrom
the sights and sites of violence on contemporary military and cultural battle-
fields (see Bishop and Phillips 2002, 157-58). The simultaneous removal of the
human eye from the spaces of military violence is accompanied by the visual
but not spatial proximity of human targets, the hyper-precision of techno-vision,
and the removal of feelings. Together, these developments affect the decision-
making process that leads to the visual and physical capture of human beings and
becomes a reason to lament the technological takeover of war and of state and
military violence. Yet drones do not perceive and kill on their own, and although
they are unmanned in the air, the 'success' of their missions depends on how they
are piloted from the ground (Bone and Bolkcom 2003, 22). Piloting a Predator
involves, among other things, first arranging human subjects on the "kill list"
canvas of the world. Moreover, the physical distance between a pilot stationed at
i6o COLLEGE LITERATURE | 40.3 Summer 2013
the Creech airbase in Nevada, for example, and his or her target in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, or Yemen certainly virtualizes the lethal action. Yet such lethal recon-
naissance can also be understood as a morbid curatorial project for human bodies,
conducted as it is on a transnational scale. In other words, the enhanced visual
technologies offer new and astounding possibilities for the creative destruction of
those human bodies whose legibility is predetermined as "enemy" (in this case, of
Western political interests). Drones are thus tools of the museum-like rearrange-
ment of observable bodies, arranged in a planetary museum of human persons
to be preserved or destroyed. Thus, the new UAV-enhanced global rearrange-
ments of humans in fact sustain the asymmetries in global aesthetic assessment
and human-rights protection processes. This is analogous to the ways in which
pre-digital museum display techniques brought together and arranged disparate
artifacts from around the world in order to partition its material and human heri-
tage. Such carefully ordered exhibitions empowered Western subjects to become
meaning-makers of non-Western bodies and objects a century or two earlier.
VISUAL PROFILING
Paradoxically, on domestic battlefields of the twenty-first century, visual assess-
ments of human bodies take place without the help of new high-tech visual
equipment and are often violent, if on a smaller scale. For instance, on February
26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American teenager, was shot to
death by George Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch volunteer in Retreat at
Twin Lakes, a gated community in Sanford, Florida (Hajela 2012). While the
accounts of what exactly happened on that night vary, what is certain is that
Martin, armed only with a bag of candy and a bottle of iced tea, was shot while
walking away from a convenience store. The police recording of the 911 call Zim-
merman placed fifteen minutes before he killed Martin reveal that the young
man appeared to Zimmerman to be "up to no good," "really suspicious," and out
of place in the gated community Zimmerman was voluntarily patrolling ("Zim-
merman 911 Call" 2012). In the weeks after Martin's death, the debate about the
cause of the shooting intensified. While some interpreted it as accidental, others
pointed out the possibility that the fatality may have arisen from Zimmerman's
racial bias and tied it to the epidemic of racial profiling in the United States.'
Still others, including Geraldo Rivera, attributed the violence to the look of
Martin's clotheswhich are also racialized in the American contextclaiming
that Martin's "gangsta-style clothing" was "as much responsible for [his] death as
George Zimmerman" (Rivera 2012)."
A widely held suspicion is that Martin's skin color and fashion choices made
him a suspect and a threat in the eyes of many spectatorsif not in those of his
shooter, then of countless consumers of the media accounts of the Sanford trag-
edy." Registered visually, the "style" or form of a human body and clothing may
impinge on one's right to live; in the aftermath of Martin's death, commentators
of color shared their own distressing childhood experiences of having to learn
Hanna Musiol | ESSAYS i6i
how to "walk while being black": how to look, appear, and arrange themselves in
public spaces, in order to live (Dade 2012; Capehart 2012; Scott 2012). Judith But-
ler and Sunaura Taylor recount parallel instances of discrimination of impaired
bodies and violence against sexual and gender minorities. Butler points out that
it "very often comes down to how people walk, how they use their hips, arid
what they do with their body parts" (Examined Life 2010). This is a crucial point
that further demonstrates the degree to which practices of display and evaluation
that we may associate primarily with museum culture are in fact integrated into
our most basic behaviors, such as walking. According to Butler, our "human-
ness," understood here in its simplest sense as the right to live, depends, in other
words, on whether we manage to stage and curate our bodies appropriately for
spectators of our daily lives and whether we can resist others' curatorial initia-
tives because "somebody's gait, somebody's style of walking" can and often does
"engender the desire to kill that person" (ExaminedLife 2010).
AESTHETICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS
Seeing and being seen, as activities and technologies, bear on a human being's
right to "live a livable life" (Butler 2004, 8,12,3^).'^ The range of visual forms and
surfacesfirom human surfaces such as skins, to body scans, to satellite surveil-
lance to visual artare involved in how international, state, and local human-
rights norms translate into actual lived or unlivable experiences. Sharon Sliwinski
argues that turning our focus away from the "textual trail"that is, legal texts
defining the human rightsand toward the "picture trail," or photos of human
rights abuses, "generates a strikingly different narrative about the development of
universal human rights" (2011,19). She contends that in such a revised narrative
of "how human beings become human . . . the spectator has a starring role" (20;
emphasis in original). In other words, humanization is a collective, performative
process (Butler 2004,17-39), and the aesthetic evaluation is its indispensable tool
because one's humanness must be first performed and evaluated as legible for
translation into rights. The interaction between the object of the gaze and the
spectator is also crucial because it is constitutive for both: it produces the social,
"human" identity ofthe watched object and the spectator at the same time."
The vignettes abovea drone strike and a deadly visual profiling episode
demonstrate the ubiquity of complex visual forms, technologies, and modes of
seeing and appearing that are bound to the performance of human rights. In
contemporary times, "sight machines" routinely used in UAVs and corporate
technology dominate the military and economic battlegrounds and allow seeing
to be conducted semi-robotically and remotely across vast distances and in "poor
lighting conditions" (Virilio 1989, 2, 3). Such "prosthetically" enhanced visibility
and rearrangement (Bishop and Phillips 2002,158) quite literally "traps" humans
(Foucault 1977,200), reordering human assemblages in ways analogous to artifact
collections in the museum context: according to "tendencies" of "one or another
master narrative in [political} fashion at a given place or time" (Preziosi 2003,
i62 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 40.3 Summer 2013
24-25). This in turn solidifies the presence of "counterlaw," a military and corpo-
rate system that "supports, reinforces, [and] multiplies the asymmetry of power"
(Foucault 1977, 222, 223). Low-tech profiling demonstrates that human bodies are
also constantly aesthetically evaluated, spatially redistributed, and humanized
and dehumanized in the process. The geo-spatial arrangement of bodies in the
'right* bathroom (or bedroom, neighborhood, or country) and the aesthetic evalu-
ation of the style of one's racial, sexual, or class identity performance ultimately
translates into tangible gains or losses of rights. Such visual and spatial "entangle-
ments" or "enmeshments" (Chow 2012, i) may lead to human rights infringements
and abuses. However, other visual "entanglements" of bodies, visual display
practices, and power render visibility and visuality a more ambiguous force, and
I would like to refocus on the ways in which visual profiling, drones' "eyeless
vision" (Virilio 1989, 2), and visual arts projects also paradoxically go hand in
hand. Visible and registerable bodies can become more vulnerable, as targets of
UAVs or visual profilers' "kill lists" for instance, or more juridically empowered
through the process of visual rearrangement, display, and evaluation. In other
words, visual technologies, display practices, and regimes of aesthetic assessment
provide conditions that enable or disable our humanity, that imbue the body
with rights and privileges, or that remove the body from the sphere of juridical
or political oversight.
Thus, while visual arts as traditionally understood may seem removed from
direct political and juridical impacts, understanding visual arts within an inter-
disciplinary frameworkincluding both explicitly violent (military) and non-
violent artsdemonstrates how aesthetics always contributes to the "staging" of
humans as either mere waste, bodies, or legal persons.'* In this light, the "exhibi-
tion value" Benjamin discusses in the context of artifacts has much to do with
"human value" (2002,106). Military and artistic visual practices both curate and
rearrange human bodies and their "preferred legibility" (Preziosi and Farago
2012, 143) and the boundary between one form of visual practice and another
is intimate, often invisible. I suggest we take a closer look at precisely those
instances when military and artistic strategies and technologies are identical, but
their human rights outcomes are not.
Visual artists Kara Walker, Vik Muniz, and Ursula Biemann each manipu-
late the "exhibition value" of human bodies (Benjamin 2002, 106). In doing so,
they mobilize traditional and contemporary modes of display and arrangement to
address perceptual practices of visual/racial profiling, surveillance technologies
and their informational noise, and the visual data-mining strategies prevalent in
state, military, and corporate information economies. Using strategies common
to technologically enhanced seeing, their curatorial gestures expose the potential
violence involved in visual "stagecraft" and the "legibility" of human bodies (Far-
ago and Preziosi 2012, 143). Prying themselves from disciplinary confinement,
their works enter the terrain of legal discourse and human rights theory, becom-
ing catalysts for a reflection on the role that aesthetics and display practices play
in human rights. Avoiding the simplistic equation of technology and violence.
Hanna Musiol | ESSAYS 163
visibility and captivity, they search for what Rey Chow calls "possible lines of
flight into the contemporary discursive terrain of image-capturing and redemp-
tion" (2012, j).
HUMAN GARBAGE, HUMAN ARTIFACT
Vik Muniz is a Brazilian-born visual artist known for his photographic recre-
ations of Western masterpieces using nontraditional materials. Between 2007
and 2010, he decided to travel to what was then the world's largest landfill, Jardim
Gramacho, a vast sea of garbage, both material and human, in order to photo-
graph the catadores, pickers of recyclable material. His aim was to "change the
lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day" {Waste Land
2010). In Waste Land (2010), a documentary film about the making of these por-
traits, Muniz expressed his discomfort with his profession's failure to engage in
the most pressing world problems: the aftermath of colonization, hunger, class
inequality, and exploitation. Muniz's artistic process was simple but ingenious.
From a huge army of underpaid laborers who toiled in the most unimaginable
working conditions while performing the invaluable economic and environmen-
tal social objective of recycling, he selected only a handfulTia, Zumbi, Suelem,
Isis, Irma, Valter, and Magnaand engaged them in a process of art creation
in order to humanize them in the eyes of metropolitan consumers of the arts.
The pickers posed for Muniz, contributed stories that became the basis for their
own portraits, collected recyclable material that was later used to recreate their
portraits, and, finally, arranged the material on the floor of a studio that served
as the canvas for Muniz's large-scale installations. Muniz, in turn, photographed
the catadores, projected their images over large-scale spaces, and reconstructed
the images as mosaic portraits created from the very recyclable material the cata-
dores collect and segregate on a daily basis. He photographed these large-scale
installations-portraits, and then sold them at art auctions around the world.
Muniz's endeavor was an artistic and commercial success: the photographs
were auctioned off and the proceeds helped several pickers transition into more
secure employment. The Association of Recycling Pickers of Jardim Gramacho
received money to provide more services to the catadores and the documentary of
the entire process met with great critical acclaim worldwide. At the same time,
Muniz used visual arts as a vehicle for human rights, engaging the very forces
that make the art and corporate world so "exclusive" and "restrictive" {Waste
Land 2010). His portraits blurred the boundaries between their human and mate-
rial subjects, toying with the comparison between the mass of disenfranchised
humans, the "waste" of Brazilian society, and the mass of post-consumer debris.
In Jardim Gramacho, proximity to material waste and the dirty labor one had
to perform in the dump demoted a person to the social status of trash. Muniz
collectively restaged his portraits in the context of the surrounding grime and
filth as adaptations of classics of Western art that museum-goers were likely to
recognize: Jean-Franois Millet's The Sower, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of
COLLEGE LITERATURE | 40.3 Summer 2013
Marat, and an image of a Madonna with children reminiscent of Renaissance
portraiture. This maneuver was paramount, since the catadores' lives were "not
considered lives" precisely "because they [didn't} fit [al dominant frame for the
human" (Butler 2004, 25). Muniz understood that in order to make his catadores
legible he had to transform them into aesthetic objects to restore their "aura"
(Benjamin 2002,105). By first staging and literally framing them, he constructed
them as objects of another's aesthetic scrutiny, enabling them to 'earn' the look
of empathy or approval associated with legal personhood.
Muniz's artistic renditions of the catadores'^ortT^its made of recyclable mate-
rial reflect the perversity of such a 'humanizing' aestheticization, in which the
proximity to artwork, the "clean" object of high culture, 'humanizes' the human
waste and elevates it to the level of legal persons."* In fact, Muniz demonstrates
that being 'human' is an empty category in the context of the Brazilian garbage
dump that strips humans of rights and reduces them to "waste" (Bauman 2004)
or "bare life" (Agamben 1998).'' But while Muniz might be critical of the incre-
mental humanization one must undergo to become a legal person, he utilizes
the very same strategy of "incremental aesthetic humanization" for his subjects;
the documentary painstakingly records this heartbreaking process. To gener-
ate recognition and empathy and then, in turn, to gain rights, the pickers must
first transform from human refuse into beautiful things. They must be selected,
arranged, and displayed, juSt as artifacts are, and not accumulated into an indis-
tinguishable pile, as trash is. The objects with which pickers create relation-
ships (alternatively trash and artworks) allow them to assume the objects' social
identity and mode of display: chaos and disregard in the case of refuse; order
and care in the case of artworks. The success of Muniz's human rights museol-
ogy rests precisely on his ability to create a different spatial and visual arrange-
ment of things and people, to reify and petrify his human subjects into portrait
replicas, and on his access to art institutions that traffic in artifacts and imbue
them with cultural value and meaning. By moving objects and humans from one
exhibition category (the dump) to another (the museum), Muniz renders "bare
life" legible and human again to consumers of art (Agamben 1998).
EMPOWERED CARICATURES AND CAPTIVE SPECTATORS
If Muniz's project rests on a visual aestheticization of his human subjects, on
curating them to make them legible to political power brokers and enfranchised
consumers of high arts, on making illegible humans accessible to new publics,
Kara Walker's seems to adopt the opposite approach. Her caricatures of human
subjects remain static, but it is the empowered audiences who are transformed
into captive objects. In her artistic career. Walker has consistently worked with
clichs, paper cutouts, and silhouettesthat is, with the non-mechanical visual
commonplaceto redraw and estrange the traumatic history of race relations
in the US and its disturbing visual tradition. For instance, in her projects col-
lected in Narrative of a Negress, Walker uses the most familiar and racist textual
Hanna Musiol | ESSAYS 165
and visual figurations and silhouettes, borrowing from sentimental writing,
popular romances, slave narratives, and the abundant archive of minstrel rheto-
ric from previous centuries (Berry et al. 2003).'' The watercolors of her Negress
Notes Series feature extreme images of sadomasochistic black slave/white mas-
ter sex, pedophilia, zoophilia, abuse, defecation, menstruation, and ejaculation,
all displayed in the context of great power inequality (2003, 23-35). Nearly every
scene is populated with images of sexual orgies, excrement, blood, and violence
and is accompanied by ungrammatical writing reminiscent of minstrel shows. In
her cut-paper silhouette projectsVir^nia Lynch Mob (Berry et al. 2003, O-51),
Emancipation Approximation (65-66), Darky town Rebellion (78-79), 2ind For the Benefit
of All the Races of Mankind (Mos'Specially Master One, Boss) (83-84)Walker places
deceptively simple black cut-paper images, often much larger than the human
body, over the walls of museum rooms and stages them in a context reminiscent
of Uncle Tom's Cabin-like narratives, complete with generic props such as slaves,
masters, and slave-catchers, concubines and pickaninnies, guns and whipsthat
is, human subjects and tools of torture and enslavement. She then uses a projector
to superimpose faintly colored ghostly apparitions on the walls and the silhou-
etted cutouts. In the exhibition context, the museum spectators who venture
into the exhibit room to view her work inadvertently block the projector's stream
of light. As a result, their own shadows are also absorbed into Walker's haunting
landscapes of sexual and racial pandemonium, adding a dimensionality missing
in the silhouettes themselves.
Reflecting on her later work, Kara Walker explains that she adopted simple
visual forms because she wanted "to separate and estrange the figure" and "to
work with language in a way that would reflect art's tenuous relationship with the
physical world of political injustice and injury" (2008, 4). Cut-paper silhouettes
lack dimension and depth of field, but it is their sharp contours and their blunt
and shameless gestures, their exaggerated grins and grimaces of sexual pleasure,
joy, surprise, and pain, that produce the visual theater of shame.' Interestingly,
just as vigilantes and police racially profile human subjects and just as legal norms
depend on normative standards of legibility. Walker visually profiles her charac-
ters: shade and color gradation are absent and individual features of characters,
objects, or landscapes are often obscured. But then she also lets her artifacts
loose. Since her silhouettes are not framed like paintingsthey loom larger than
life, usurping the entire space of museum roomsthey create not only a wallpa-
per of sorts but a multidimensional sensorium of cross-racial pleasure and tor-
ture. Here is where the roles reverse between things and people, spectators and
artifacts, privileged watchers and objects of the evaluative gaze.
While the profiled cutouts are spatially liberated, the spectators are captured.
The visual seizure Walker performs is deliberate. She wants to "make work that
would surround the viewer, to place the viewer in an uncomfortable relationship
to a type of imagery that undermines all our fine-tuned, well-adjusted cultural
beliefs" (K. Walker 2002), and the museum of bodies and shadows she produces
certainly achieves this goal. The unwilling viewer is forced to become a charac-
66 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 40.3 Summer 2013
ter, if not a participant, in the violent and orgiastic spectacle. Stuck in the middle
of a museum display room among the half-naked blood-, semen-, and excrement-
dripping figures engaging in sex and torture, observing one's own shadow among
the cutouts, the spectator must recognize his or her place among the stock char-
acters of American history and visual and literary cultures. If in Muniz's work,
generic conventions of Western art are comforting, in Walker's projects they
are not. Walker shows that the art's "aura," uniqueness, and "embeddedness in
the context of [American historical] tradition" are closely tied to the atrocities
of slavery and its aftermath (Benjamin 2002,105). As such it does not render the
exhibition of torture and sexual violence more legible. But covering the museum's
walls, the oversized silhouettes are freed from the laws of gravity as well as the
laws of Western art exhibition that, according to Walker, invariably point, across
time, to the visual display ofthe slave auction block; they shame and pleasure the
viewer into admitting familiarity with racist visual languages and the difliculty
of resisting their pornographic allure.
If anything can perform the role of a museum, as Farago and Preziosi (2012)
would have it. Walker shows that every museum can be an auction block or
lynching scene. Bringing into conversation the diverse practices of display, from
the human exhibition of the auction block through the spectacle of lynching
photographs (see Allen et al. 2000) to art gallery shows. Walker indicates that
they all draw on practices of aesthetic evaluation and violent forms of display and
the capture of non-white bodies. Paradoxically, disempowering and dehumaniz-
ing the spectator, who ceases being an embodied person and is transformed into
a shadow representation, allows Walker to visualize the violent contradictions
of US legal norms (the US Constitution, fugitive slave laws, Jim Crow legislation,
poll taxes, and so on) and international definitions of human rights, which make
it impossible for some raced and gendered bodies to become human or legal.'
Most interesting, however, she demonstrates that the very practices of depriving
raced, gendered, and migrant social subjects "access to the human" (Butler 2004,
30) are based on the same display arrangements and "epidermal" (Fanon 1967,112)
technics of aesthetic evaluation that are embodied and celebrated in the museum
context. Whether conducted with little use of new visual technologies (as in an
intimate encounter, in a museum, or in a slave-auction display) or via a drone
across national borders, aesthetic evaluation and the "stagecraft" of human bod-
ies underpin the application of human rights norms (Farago and Preziosi 2012,
143). More explicitly than in other artists' projects, then, the traditions of human
display invoked by Walker demonstrate the troubling parallels between the ways
in which states, vigilantes, and museums stage bodies and imbue them with or
deprive them of humanity.
VISUAL NOISE. BODY THEORY
Like Walker and Muniz, Ursula Biemann borrows heavily from non-high-art
conventions of display and visual registration in her curatorial practice and in her
Hanna Musiol | ESSAYS 167
video essay series, Geobodies." Specifically, she weaves current military and cor-
porate surveillance tools and the visual subjectivities they engender into the very
fabric of her video essays, curatorial projects, books, and exhibits." Each install-
ment of Geobodies narrates transnational migration and labor in different sites of
legal deregulation: the borderlands within South Asia or Europe and between
Mexico and the United States, the transnational space of the Sahara, and refugee
camps in the Middle East. She first traces the routes of capital, natural resources,
and information flows across national borders, which in turn direct the transna-
tional flow of human bodies laboring in different geopolitical locations.
Black Sea Files, for example, traces "oil geography" in the Black and Caspian
Seas region and is composed of several visual "files," which Biemann refers to
ominously as her "visual intelligence" (2ooj).'3 In one of her files, Biemann nar-
rates the developments in the region over a split-screen frame, one featuring foot-
age from Azerbaijan and the other, Georgia. Biemann's voice-over commentary
provides some contextual explanation of the impact of oil culture, but the screen
still remains uncomfortably partitioned and disorients the viewer. Nor is the text
superimposed over the images easily accessible. In file 2, when Biemann inter-
views a displaced Kazakh family, they are in fact first introduced not by their
names but by Biemann's own catalogue metadata, the white text that organizes
both visuals and humans in a specific place of her own archive:
VIDEO 3'32"
[FIELD RECORD] KASAKH [sic] FAMILY
[RE:] PAN-TURKIST MOVEMENT
[SITE] ZEYTINBURNU/ISTA {Black Sea Files, 2005)
Underneath the texts we see an old, crumpled document, generating a thick
layering of visual material that competes for our attention and is Biemann's
signature method. The document seems to hold tremendous significance for
the Kazakh family yet covers most of the screen, pushing the Kazakh family
out of the frame, so to speak. Later, we find that they are Muslim refugees from
Turkmenistan who escaped the Communist persecutions and settled in Turkey.
While in Turkey, they still treasure the document, a contract in Arabic and Chi-
nese for land that was confiscated from them, hoping to reclaim the property
one day. However, in the initial several frames, the visual archive or catalogue
Biemann displays (the old contract, the patterned carpets, bedcovers, pants, and
shoes), all vie for our attention and their odd visual arrangement complicates what
could be an easy process of interpretation. It is not clear which visual element is
background and which is visual subject, what is visual clutter and what is the
framework that enables the human subjects to be and speak in their own right.
The legibility of Biemann's file is constantly compromised, just as the legibility
of visually conveyed information compromises the self-identification of human
subjects seized by competing geographical, political, and economic forces. This
sense of narrative alienation and displacement is magnified in the experience of
public exhibition: the film plays in a loop in exhibition spaces, where viewers
might watch only fragments of the video, often in non-chronological order.
i68 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 40.3 Summer 2013
Biemann edits, curates, and displays informational noisemilitary surveil-
lance data, fiight records, satellite maps, body-size information and scans, the
web page, the intertitle or subtitle commentary, and more traditional footage
of the landscapein a way that points out the complexity and arbitrariness of
the violent production and extraction ofthe sociality of human bodies. Biemann
deploys new technologies in her work, but not to reinforce their rhetoric of
objectivity, efficiency, and clarity. Working against industrial paradigms of user-
friendliness and transparency, she does not manufacture what Lauren Berlant
calls the "cruel optimism"'* that visual technologies and popular documentary
forms often enable (2011).'^ Instead, like Benjamin's conception of collecting, Bie-
mann radicalizes the process of arranging, editing, and cataloguing material and
human data. Here, her curatorial project articulates visually a theory of bodies
and aesthetics.^*
Working through visual imagery, which scholars such as Sliwinski consider
the "picture trail" of human rights (2011, 19), Biemann demonstrates that the
aesthetics of the global distribution of bodies undermines the universalist fic-
tions of international human-rights documents such as the Universal Declara-
tion of Human Rights (UDHR) in light of national boundaries and state or local
laws. In her videos, the same subject is often introduced in one scene or frame
through mutually cancelling frameworks. For example, as a Mauritanian citizen
with rights, and simultaneously as a illegal migrant with no rights; or as a Mexi-
can citizen and empowered consumer and as a disempowered female worker in a
transnational corporation that suspends her rights; as a breadwinner and head of
household and as a prostitute exposed to horrific violence. In such video install-
ments, Biemann reveals the disturbing irrelevance of universal human rights
norms to the lives of migrant bodies, where physical movement across borders
makes people the objects of more or less violent information-collection appara-
tuses but not subjects of protective national or international legal frameworks.
Visual imaging, stagecraft, and evaluation are constitutive forces that social-
ize human bodies, personifying or de-personifying them. Yet they are also power-
ful narrative tools that allow Biemann to revise abstract theories ofthe human as
"geobody." Geobodies, human bodies shaped by their geopolitical situation and
relation to other bodies and material objects, rarely benefit from human-rights
legal frameworks; they nonetheless respond to their circumstances in creative,
ad-hoc ways to usurp some benefits of legal personhood. Biemann brings atten-
tion to human bodies who inhabit zones of juridical "exception" and "emergency"
(Benjamin 1968, 247; Agamben 2005): transnational borderlands, outsourced
factories, illegal sex-labor markets, refugee camps, and so forth. She does so in
a way that visually disposes of the universal term 'human.* Reclaiming modern
visual technologies and cataloguing techniques, she narratively empowers "bare
life," the body ofthe transnational migrant laboring in sites distinguished by the
arbitrary suspension of human rights.
If for human bodies there is no way out of the empire of the visual, Biemann
shows that the force of curatorial practices of selection, arrangement and display.
Hanna Musiol | ESSAYS 169
technological surveillance, and the new perceptual modes they engender (remote
seeing, distracted looking, visual and conceptual confusion) can be redirected
to work toward exposing the social crises surrounding human bodies. Deploy-
ing the discomforting, menacing 'visual growl' that forecloses the possibility of
reciprocal seeing and humanization, Biemann joins the ranks of interactive and
speculative design theorists like Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who see the
new technology-human body estrangement as a vehicle for a radical critique.
Anthony Dunne muses that "'poeticizing' the distance between people and
electronic objects," for instance, "through 'estrangement' and 'alienation' {and}
interactivity between transparency and opaqueness" can unsettle the habitual
human-object interactions and offer "new behavioral opportunities" (2008, 22,
69). Biemann's work moves toward this poetics of illegibility by engaging tradi-
tional exhibition practices, new alienating technologies, and de-habituated legal
and cultural norms. In the process, the Geobodies series illuminates the potential
of radical museum curation to turn into human rights theory.
EPILOGUE
The art institutions in any global city, the transnational sites of military action,
and locally bound practices of visual profiling all curate, display, and evaluate the
aesthetics of bodies. Written texts, from international treaties to national con-
stitutions to civil and human rights legislation to workplace regulations, provide
juridical frameworks for human rights; but the technics of aesthetic evaluation
and performance define how written scripts are applied and modified in specific
geopolitical contexts. Legal human rights norms simply do not reflect the vio-
lent social mutations that bodies constantly undergo, often adopting multiple
roles in their lives: as "illegible body," as "human waste" (Bauman 2004), as "bare
life" (Agamben 1998), as "illegal alien" on the one hand or as a "legal person," a
juridically empowered "claimant" of justice on the other (Fraser 2010, 2). Nor do
these norms respond quickly enough to human rights crises. Thus, the aesthetic
evaluation and arrangement of bodies is fundamental to the processes of empow-
erment and disempowerment that alternately allow humans to claim or prevent
them from claiming the protections of "legal personhood." Advanced visual tech-
nologies and their aesthetic repertoires enhance the capabilities of sight, often
in separation from other senses, and manipulate spectators' affective response.
In the context of military surveillance, the job of these technologies is to locate
and arrange human targets with great precision across physical distance, but not
to transmit the scent of burning flesh or to amplify screams of pain. At the same
time, non-technologically mediated visual policing strives to process visual data
most efficiently in order to interpret and display the visual forms of marginalized
others by "interpreting" the genre of skin, body, gender/sexuality. Yet radical
curatorial projects utilize these very same visual and display techniques for pre-
cisely opposite purposes: to re-aestheticize and re-curate bodies' social and cul-
tural legibility, to reposition them spatially, and to estrange or alienate normat-
170 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 40.3 Summer 2013
ive guidelines for humanness in order for human bodies to gain, not lose, legal
and political rights.
Muniz, Walker, and Biemann demonstrate the transformative de- and re-
humanizing power of museum stagecraft and evaluation. They do not deny that
the "visual traps us," as Michael Foucault warns (1977, 200), but show that it can
also expand our human rights vocabulary and render its abstract language less
"hollow" (Butler 2004, 30). Muniz, Walker, and Biemann queer human-rights
paradigms of legibility to uncover the "carpentry" or "stagecraft" of diverse muse-
ums of human bodies (Preziosi 2003, 117; Farago and Preziosi 2012, 143). Visual
"entanglements" can unsettle the ways in which display techniques and visual
technologies have been used to apprehend and assimilate the human body. How-
ever, nearly a century after Walter Benjamin's curatorial experiments, Muniz,
Walker, and Biemann show us the power of visual "capture" need not only trap
but may also liberate or "activate reality" (Chow 2012, 166). Muniz, Walker, and
Biemann interrogate this power in ways that challenge the existing "distribution
of the perceptible," of what is considered deliberate and accidental, natural and
artificial, "visible and invisible," normative and possible in human rights (Ran-
cire 2011, 4). As such, their artistic endeavors carve an important space in the
realm of political activity. They engage in redefining the tenuous relationship
between human rights and "exhibition value," "aura," and alienation (Benjamin
2002,103-7), questioning the "preferred legibility" (Farago and Preziosi 2012,143)
of the human body in different human rights contexts.
NOTES
I thank the organizers of the 2011 ACLA Human Rights and Cultural Forms panel,
Elizabeth Goldberg, Greg Mullins, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, and my fellow par-
ticipants for their intellectual generosity and illuminating conversations. I am also
indebted to Krystyna Mazur for introducing me to Kara Walker's work; to Greg Mul-
lins, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, and the anonymous College Literature reviewers for
their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this project; and to Kristen Ebert-Wagner
for her editorial help.
Benjamin produced three versions of the essay; I use the extended second version, which
was retranslated and republished in 2002.
' I am indebted here to Graham MacPhee's discussion of Benjamin's use of the word
"Technik" (2006, 69-72). He borrows from Julian Roberts's (1982,157) and Howard Cay-
gill's (1997, no) analyses to emphasize the term's two meanings: as describing physical
apparatuses, such as a camera, and as designating "the organization of experience" itself
(MacPhee 2006,70).
3 To Benjamin, the artifact's "aura" depends on its non-replication and an exhibition his-
tory that preserves its "unique existence... that bears the mark of the history to which
the work has been subject" (2002,103); it is compromised or destroyed by new reproduc-
tion and distribution technologies.
< See samples of Benjamin's previously unpublished archival experiments in Walter Ben-
jamin's Archive, edited by Ursula Marx et al. (2007). For Benjamin's essay on collecting,
see Benjamin (1975).
Hanna Musiol | ESSAYS 171
' In fact, Marx et al. (2007) argue that the carefully arranged contents ofthe briefcase with
which Benjamin escaped France (7-8), his "magazine chest" and "manuscript cupboard"
(9), the postcards and photo collections (both fairly new media themselves) that he
hoped would represent him to posterity (171-96), the very minutiae of textual arrange-
ment of the page over which he obsessed (231), and his mescaline-induced experiments
with visualizing ideas on paper (232; 239), all suggest that Benjamin saw traditional and
modern kinds of arrangement and display as modes of radical spatial and intellectual
remaking.
* In this essay human rights are understood in their multiple and often conflicting itera-
tions: both as abstract juridical norms and as actual performances that remove bodies
from or elevate them to the empowered status of "legal person" through intricate pro-
cesses of aesthetic seeing and display.
' Although Benjamin's essay focuses on museum art, international World's Fairs and exhi-
bitions in his time routinely featured human 'exhibits' of predominantly non-European
and non-white persons.
' See Sliwinski's (2011) and Azoulay's (2008) discussions of this process in the context of
human rights photography.
' The names of various drone models are telling: Pointer, Shadow, Pioneer, Global Hawk,
Eagle Eye, Scan Eagle, Dragon Warrior, and Reaper.
' For a contemporary account of racial profiling and human rights violations in the United
States, see Alexander (2011,123-39).
" In the aftermath of Martin's death, many cities hosted vigils and marches where march-
ers wore hooded sweatshirts, or "hoodies." The hoodie suddenly came to symboUze
human rights abuses prevalent in the United States; see Hajela (2012).
" This tragedy garnered intense media attention; hundreds of thousands of people com-
mented on Martin's racial identity, choice of clothing, and violence in newspapers and
on media-outlet blogs. See, for example, Hajela (2012), Rivera (2012), Capehart (2012),
and Dade (2012).
' According to Butler (2004), for human life to be bearable, mere biological existence is
not suflicient. Human rights norms should, but fail to, support people's right to "a live-
able life," which, in Butler's view, means to "live a life politically" in its diverse iterations
(39).
'* For a discussion of spectators producing white and black identities in the age of lynch-
ing, see Shawn Michelle Smith's "Spectacles of Whiteness" (2004,113-46). For a discus-
sion of spectatorship in the production of transnational "citizenship of disaster," see
Azoulay (2008).
'' It instructive here to note that for Benjamin, fascism's popular appeal depended equally
on the incorporation of new technologies and on providing aesthetic "expression to the
masses" while depriving them of rights (2002, 120-21). War in his view is an art-for-
art's-sake experiment through which people "can experience {their} own annihilation
as a supreme aesthetic pleasure" (122). See Slaughter (2007) for a discussion of "legal
personhood" in the context of fictions of human rights discourse.
"' Catadores were considered social waste because they are spatially arranged in an area
"where everything not good goes" (Waste Land 2010). Failing the aesthetic/spatial
human-rights test resulted in denial ofthe political privileges of Brazilian citizenship.
' In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben (1998) discusses the difference
between the legally empowered human subject and a "bare life," that is, a human body
yet to be transformed into a political being. ^
172 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 40.3 Summer 2013
'^ In 1984, William Rubin curated a most controversial retrospective, "Primitivism"in 20th
Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modem. The title of Walker's subsequent show
in 200<), Kara Walker: American Primitive, seems to be a gesture of mock self-offering to
museum spectators, alluding to Rubin's exhibit.
' ' See Hamza Walker's discussion of shame and prohibition in Kara Walker's work (H.
Walker 2000, no).
" Catharine MacKinnon asks a similar question in her Are Women Human Tet? (2006).
" For an overview of her entire series, summaries of each installment, and stills and clips
from her video work, see Ursula Biemann's Geobodies website at: http://geobodies.org.
" Relevant video essays include: Egyptian Chemistry (2012), Deep Weather (2012), X-Mission
(2008), Sahara Chronicle (2006-7), The Black Sea Files (2005), Contained Mobility (2004),
Buroplex (2003), Remote Sensing (2001), Writing Desire (2000), and Performing the Border
(1999). Relevant curatorial projects include: Supply Lines (2012), Designing Civic Encounter
(2011), Extraterritoriality in the Middle East (2010), ArtTerritories (2010), The Maghreb Con-
neaion (2006), Geography and the Politics of Mobility (zooj). Just Watch (1997), and Kultur
(1996).
*' This video essay circulates in many different formats: as DVDs, looped projections at
museum and galleries, and, most recently, as YouTube clips.
** Berlant (2011, i) says that "cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually
an obstacle to your flourishing. It might {be} food . . love . . . a fantasy of the good life,
or a political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit." Here, I
am particularly drawn to her discussion of habits and conventions.
** The most recent viral mass human rights campaign, a YouTube video called KONT
2012 which encourages Western military intervention against the alleged Ugandan war
criminal Joseph Kony, reached 50 million views in a single week in March 2012 (Kron
and Goodman 2012). Its director, Jason Russell, wanted his initiative to become "the
Pixar of human rights stories," noting widespread lack of interest in another "boring
documentary on Africa" (quoted in Kron and Goodman 2012, Ai). KONT 2012's use
of social media and the legible narrative of "white rescue," familiar to consumers of
humanitarian campaign ads providing "solutions" to "African problems," was instru-
mental to its mass appeal.
*^ For a discussion of aesthetics as labor theory in Biemann, see Musiol (2012); for a critical
assessment of Biemann's visual strategies, see Hesford (2011,139-50).
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HANNA MUSIOL is Lecturer in English at Northeastern University and in Ameri-
can Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the associate edi-
tor of Cultural Studies: An Anthology (2008) and the author of several articles on
literary and visual aesthetics and human rights.