jacket catalog.indd 1 25/02/2012 17:03

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ENTER GHOST, EXIT GHOST

Editor: Gordon Hon

Curator: Gordon Hon

Essays: Prof. Ryan Bishop, Prof. Jonathan Harris, Gordon Hon

Project manager: Ray Yang

Research and co-­ordination: Dr August Jordan Davis and Ray Yang

Design: Ray Yang

All images are courtesy of the artist unless otherwise mentioned in captions. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the artists and authors.

Printed by Shandong Aomeiya Printing Co. Ltd. ChinaFirst Published in 2012, China© Bashir Makhoul and authors

ISBN: 978-­981-­07-­1606-­6

Yang Gallery

Tanglin Shopping Centre #02-­41, 19 Tanglin Road, Singapore 247909Tel: +65 6721 8888spore@yanggallery.com.sg

3rd Taoci Street, 798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015Tel: +86 10 5762 3020beijing@yanggallery.infowww.yanggallery.com.sg

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ago when we were students together at Liverpool, and we have been colleagues and collaborators

emerged from a lengthy interview I conducted

national exhibition in the UK. That initial show, from

the Intifada uprisings of the late 1980s and early 1990s against Israeli occupation. This protracted

conditions, saw a great deal of intra-­Palesenian violence. The show proved to be critical of all sides

oblique imagery. Just as Intifada was a shaking off of constraints, so Makhoul was shaking off his status as a local artist, becoming gaining national and international attention for addressing through is

It was a departure for Makhoul along a two-­decade journey of politically active artistic production, one that arrives at the current show: an installation that returns again to very similar concerns and the historical arc and long duration of current political

engagement has a trajectory, but it is one that covers much of the same ground again and again from different angles. His work is always a return that looks like an arrival.

ENTER GHOST, EXIT GHOST

GORDON HON to be a departure for both the artist and myself:

a collaborator commenting on, working with and shaping the artwork. The dialogical and

expanded for the new work, leading the artist and myself to assemble a team to produce this large-­scale piece and develop along the lines of theoretical, production and technical perspectives. The technical and production sides of the operation were furthered by Ray Yang and Summer Lin, working closely with the Yang Gallery in Beijing, while the theoretical elements are supplemented by contributions from Professor Ryan Bishop and Professor Jonathan Harris. Articles by Bishop and Harris are contained in this catalogue.

The team members, especially those that pertain to production and technical development, played

vision for this large-­scale installation. It has two components: a full-­sized, interior maze and a large cardboard model of an Arab town or refugee camp. The walls of the maze are 2.4m high and have a total combined length of over 100m. They are clad in lenticular micro-­lens panels depicting walls, windows, doors and various architectural details. The images appear to move, changing

maze. Images are repeated on different panels to deliberately add to the disorientating effect. At the end of the maze there is a large open space (approx. 15m x 7m) revealing a model consisting of hundreds of cardboard boxes apparently stacked randomly against the gallery walls and around the

boxes to create rudimentary model houses. The lenticular images are made from photographs of

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buildings and streets in East Jerusalem, Hebron and some of the larger Palestinian refugee

of the cardboard model. This does not become apparent until the viewer successfully makes their way through the maze to the model. The project raises questions about the kinds of spaces that

margins of globalization. Central to the project

created between the virtual and the real such as mock cities built for training in urban warfare, the spectral, parallel world of surveillance, CAD inspired urban developments and the interactions and confusions between the virtual and the real in the urbanization of global capitalism and

relationship with these kinds of spaces in which the pleasures and thrill of the maze are partly depend upon disorientation and fear.

(2007) at the Shenzhen Museum of Art China that provided the most direct catalyst. For this show, Makhoul was interested in the idea of return as a philosophical and political problem and felt that the lenticular, with its strange, indeterminate status within the regime of the image was the perfect medium. It does not carry the historical baggage of photography, painting or cinema, nor has it

and optical technologies. For most people it is associated with advertising rather than art. More

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hovered, quite literally, between the still and moving

created temporal and spatial interference within the image that was analogous to the idea of return as a form of historical and territorial interference.

was the extent to which the work affected

conversations with the artist while I was working on a catalogue essay for the Return exhibition it became apparent that Makhoul, who had been preoccupied by the temporal nature of the work during its production, had become increasingly excited by its spatial potential during its installation. It occurred to him that it would be possible to

peculiar effect created by the movement of the viewer. This has lead to the development of the current project;; Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost.

and disappearances in Hamlet. It was these stage directions that Derrida used in Spectres of Marx to demonstrate the necessity of repetition and return in the indeterminate ontology of the ghost and in which it is always a “question of repetition: a spectre is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.” Derrida creates an ontological maze or, rather, an hauntological maze that resonates strongly with the status of the image and is particularly apparent in the unstable pictorial space of the lenticular. At the same time the stage directions draw attention to the ghost as a technical problem which is necessarily solved by technology whether it is the ropes and trapdoors of renaissance theatre or the CGI of contemporary cinema. Theatre is a technology of illusion and the

ghost in Hamlet is in part born from that technology – was written because of the ropes and trapdoors. Like that other theatrical trick;; the play within the play, the ghost is the illusion within the illusion and draws our attention to the stage as a machine for

and electronic technologies the illusion moved into a different register and these new machines produced different kinds of ghosts. Perhaps most

Although the cinema could create the illusion of

without the stage, and the sets were sometimes as huge in reality as the illusory world on the screen.

spaces that cannot be entered, the illusion depends upon it. However a gallery is sense of physically entering a set that Makhoul is using in Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost. There is no attempt to create an illusion of a real space, in fact quite the opposite;; he is creating an illusory space in reality. The walls are clad with images of other walls that are constantly shifting as we move through it, emphasising the fact that we are entering the unreliable domain of the image and in which spatial and architectural integrity is undermined. The space and the image collaborate to disorientate us;; leading us back on ourselves to pass through the same space, which, approached from a different direction, have

spaces and architectural details but because they are repeated throughout the installation we cannot even rely upon our memories.

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This sense of confusion combined with the alienating effects of being in a space which is also a picture of a space and the pleasure we are also being invited to take in moving through it invoke the ambivalent experiences of the hyper-­modern spaces of transit and consumption such as airports, shopping malls and corporate plazas. These spaces are designed with the movement of people

movement while at the same time producing a shifting architectural spectacle. Static structures are effectively animated by the movement of people, museum exhibition layouts are designed to produce narratives through the movement of the viewers. Meanwhile urban space can produce indeterminate visual narratives or the effect of subjective point-­of-­view camera angles in imaginary movies. In new building developments and ‘public

also increasingly feels like a computer game. The new urban spaces of late capitalism blur the virtual and the real that can in turns be thrilling or alienating and disturbing. To enter a these spaces is to allow oneself to become a part of them;; our spectral likenesses detained on the hard drives of elaborate surveillance systems. Makhoul is using our ambivalent relationships to these spaces, which are similar to the strange pleasures of a maze – a pleasure touched by the sense of panic that comes with being lost. Once we have made our way through this spectral maze we arrive at an abrubt shift of scale and material in the form of a cardboard model of an Arab town. Again there is no attempt at realism;; we are clearly looking at

haphazardly stacked cardboard boxes but it is also impossible not to see it as a town or refugee camp crowded on a hillside. Cardboard unlike the active, depthless surface of the maze is inert and rather than the spectral insubstantiality of the image it is simply an insubstantial material – the material of the homeless. This could be the unregulated

parts of Ramallah but it also evokes the Favelas of Brazil or the erased Kowloon walled city of Hong Kong. These places are also the inspiration for the dystopias of many video games and most disturbingly the models for military training.

In the Negev the Israeli army has built an entire Arab town in which to train its soldiers in what the Pentagon calls MOUT (Military Operations on Urban Terrain). The United States is also building many of these ghost towns in its own deserts to simulate the urban environments of Iraq and

of the developing world. In fact it was the Israeli model, which is known as “Chicago,” that was the

removed from the squalid reality and unimaginable suffering produced by actual urban warfare. It is the gap between the virtual and the real that is most sinister and the less distance there appears to be between them the more disturbing it becomes.

gap, Makhoul wants to widen it – to reveal the

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perverse pleasures of the military imagination where training and playing are merged with killing. He does this by indulging his and our childish pleasure in the maze and the model but it is not

confusion is exposed. This installation raises the question of who and what is produced by the merging of virtual and real worlds;; of the kinds of spaces we are making and what these spaces are making of us.

through textual description, or even through photographs of it, because its overall effect

through the artwork. The lenticular surfaces contain movement and stasis but require the observer to activate them through his or her mobility. The departure of the maze followed by the eventual arrival at the cardboard city turns out to be a return to a world of agonism and resistance at every level of daily life. Despite the limitations of textual consideration of the work, the articles by Bishop and Harris that follow nonetheless provide frames and critical engagements with that which cannot truly be framed: the installation ‘Enter Ghost, Exit

experience, to supplement rather than supplant or substitute for moving bodily through the maze and arriving at the cardboard city. They are a departure for those who have not yet experienced the show, an arrival for those who have, and a return for those

installation.

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‘VISIBLE BUT UNVERIFIABLE’1: SPECTACLES OF POWER AND PALESTINE IN ENTER GHOST, EXIT GHOST

JONATHAN HARRIS

“可见但不可证明”:“幽灵现，幽灵隐”中的权力景观及巴勒斯坦

乔纳森·哈里斯

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THE SCENE, SEENEntering the maze of Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost we know we might feel lost, but we know we are not really. For this construction is, from its beginning to its end, an artwork, an installation, in a gallery space – all familiar and actually quite safe things.2 But the work is asking us to consider the possibility of entertaining radical doubt regarding

Consider some of the historical and current meanings of disposition: ‘The action of getting rid

arrangement;; relative position, esp. of constituent

the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost seeks to divert us, then, but not only for the purpose of entertainment. It wishes us to consider our position.

The term maze in middle English usage referred to a mental state of ‘delirium, delusion,

a physical structure of paths and passages

traditional Japanese machizukuri warren of urban passageways – might be an unintended outcome of human construction practices, rather than one conceived from the outset as a form of diversion.3

accrued the exacerbated senses of ‘Overwhelming

journey through Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost consider

of related but different states. Note, too, their occupation of the extremities of human reactions: overwhelming wonder, astonishment, fear and apprehension – suggesting a consciousness, a position, turned upside down.

Human consciousness and self-­consciousness is inherently situated, or seated, in material existence.

remains intractable, it does not and cannot exist outside of the physical body and brain.4the organs of sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell consciousness can exist – sense-­deprived or sense-­bereft patients are sometimes kept alive through intensive care procedures – but individual humans could not survive independently in the world. Perception abilities and consciousness, therefore, are bound up together in practical life. The information gained through these senses informs, and helps to form, consciousness and self-­consciousness: our sense of who, what, where and why we are in the world. Practical in this sense

and should not be opposed to notions of theoretical or speculative activity. Our senses of why we exist, in certain places at certain times – for instance, what the value and meaning of our lives are – are inherently bound up with the nature of those

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up the walls of the maze that is Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost manifestly create the sense of ‘a

Though we continue to know we remain in an installation, an artwork, in a gallery, these panels – projecting a series of photographic images as we walk pass them – exhibit images that appear, then disappear, and sometimes seem eerily to co-­exist in our perception of them. Because the images change as we move past each panel, we become highly aware that perception, and acts of consciousness and self-­consciousness sequentially related to these perceptions, are inseparable from our own physical and bodily disposition. The term

usage, where it referred to a lens-­like shape. The

– a small rounded seed cultivated for food in Mediterranean countries. A lens was a transparent substance, such as a piece of glass, with one or more surfaces ‘curved or otherwise shaped to cause regular convergence or divergence of light

Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost, even before we begin to interrogate the kinds of imagery projected through its panels, asks us to consider, then, the nature

relation to consciousness and self-­consciousness. How do we see the world and why do we see it that way? These are two of the most basic questions ever to have been asked by philosophers. To the duality and dialectic of human mind ‘perception-­

be added: perspectival understanding. Having

particular place or position and implies a recognition that, from that place or position, some things will be/can be seen and other things will not/cannot be seen. Place or position in this sense, it should be clear, means not simply a physical or spatial

location affording a view (thought it necessarily is that), but also a correctible hypothesis, or, alternatively, a principle or belief that is held to be

or that ‘the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews

would be that if you moved to the left of your current position you would see something that is currently not visible, or that lack of fresh water creates the conditions for disease. These two propositions are what philosophers have called heuristicclaims are subject to trial and error revision based on the accumulation of further evidence which

research is generally thought to proceed through such empirical procedure or testing. In contrast, statements of belief are sometimes also called ineffable, from Latin, meaning ‘too great to be

and motor link between human consciousness, expression through language and discovery in

the maze of Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost by making heuristic claims about where one is and has been – to avoid, for instance, endlessly revisiting the same place. The claims can be tested through movement and then further reconsideration. Of course, the purpose of a maze built to confuse is precisely to confound such rational and heuristic action – to defeat consciousness and self-­consciousness. The other course of action, however – moving through ineffable principle – suggests lack of communication between those trapped in the maze and a belief that divine will is guiding them.

Seeing images mutate in Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost as we move through the maze, correcting or

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are, or have been, or want to be, is constantly a

perhaps help with the direction we want to go in?

some of my thinking and moves so far seemed obtuse? In this maze what images can we see, or remember, or think we remember seeing, from a plane angle greater than 90 degrees and less than 180 degrees? Are the problems of movement and resolution in the maze bordering on the acute?

The ghost of an image suggests we have returned, unwittingly, to a position we had occupied before, with no sense of a real way forward: the route is obscured, the light bad, although the lenticular panels project more images, more ghosts of a past, present or even future moment in movement.

Is it worth reconsidering our position by looking up at the sky? Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost alludes to

Hamlet and the dramatic-­symbolic vehicle the spectral image in the play constitutes, but it also brings to mind another of the metaphors

and servant to King Claudius – the man who Hamlet suspects has killed his own father and married his mother – Hamlet facetiously debates the shape of a cloud, which seems to resemble, they agree, a camel, then perhaps a weasel, and, yet again, rather a whale.6 But Hamlet becomes as disoriented by this exchange as he had hoped Polonius would be;; his state of mind is fearful, full

of apprehension, and possibly delirious. There is, in meteorology, the genus of the lenticular cloud: lens-­shaped, occasionally iridescent, and glittering

as the observer moves.

The maze that is Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost stands some comparison with the architecture of checkpoints and border crossings that both link together and divide Israel and the Palestinian Authority territories. This shift in focus makes sense now because the shifting photographic images in this artwork, this installation in the gallery space, depict past and present moments in the cities and towns of the Palestinian Authority and in the nation-­state of Israel. They represent the presence, within these imbricated territories, of another people whose own nation, Palestine, once existed, but whose images and symbols are also now a matter of ellipses, shifting shapes, places, meanings, peoples and plans.7 Take the Qalandia crossing between Jerusalem and Ramallah in the

stages in the circulation of its temporary occupants. These channels link iron turnstiles, x-­ray gates, more turnstiles, inspection booths, and then x-­ray machines for bags. Palestinians negotiating this structure are hailed by the Israeli guards and other security personnel by loudspeaker and move through its locks controlled by remote controlled gates. The glass panels enabling Israeli surveillance and operation of the crossing are so thick that they prevent the Palestinians seeing the humans responsible for their transit through or detention in it. The architecture of this structure instructively embodies the hieratic architecture of visibilities and invisibilities that the Israeli state has

dealings with the Palestinians.8 Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost is both a meditation upon, and a simulation

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its connections to power and Palestine.

Ariel Sharon, Israeli soldier-­hero from the 1967 war, later minister for new settlements and then Likud prime minister, once indicated the conditions and relations that should pertain, he believed,

declared, ‘should see Jewish lights every night 9 The settlements he conceived

and planned were designed to institute a visual

were to be an inveterate reminder of Jewish presubarchitecture of the Israeli state, its physical and legal structures, is essentially asymmetrical: rules of engagement issued to the occupying forces at the end of 2003, for instance, in the wake of the Second Intifada, or uprising, stipulate that soldiers may shoot to kill any Palestinian caught observing settlements with binoculars or in any

10 The act of looking, with the implication of the licit or illicitness of what can or might be seen by a particular individual or group, has thus itself been deemed a crime punishable by summary death.

Looking, seeing and representing are interactive processes – in legal, political and artistic practices. Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost as an artefact itself articulates all these processes through its serial lenticular imagery and its bewildering maze of paths leading to the seeming opacities of the cardboard

seen is dependent on where you are, but also on who you are and how your own perspective has

history. John Constable, the English landscape painter, depicted the working people of East Anglia as only marginally visible in his great paintings of Suffolk – their represented size, such as the mother nursing a baby in Dedham Valesense of their background relative in

Dome of the Reichstag Building, Berlin The air intake showing the ground floor at the Reichstag dome, German Parliament Building, Berlin, Germany Foster + Partners, 1990’s Glass cupola (Rodgers and Associates) Reichstag building in Berlin (1994) © David Clapp/Oxford Scientific/Getty Images

within the countryside he both loved and owned.11 Visibility is a part-­synonym for the notion of transparency: the clarity associated with candour in social and democratic political life. The glass cupola built above and into the debating chamber at the Reichstag building in Berlin after it once again

after 1994 was designed literally to embody and

to democratic discourse – as if democracy could, or should, actually be seen to be happening.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial,

rhetoric of visibility in another direction. Consisting of a long rising black marble wall containing the names of all the American soldiers killed in that

viewer the visibility of their own image looking at

the names of their loved ones carved in the stone in front of them. The wall functions as a kind of

that was lost in 1975, and against which a majority in the USA eventually emerged. Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost, though focussed on Israel and the Palestinians, actually connects to this longer and

implicated. The maze of these interconnections is political and ideological, but also cultural and aesthetic.

John Constable, The Vale of Dedham (1828) Oil on canvas

122.00 x 144.50 cm (framed: 163.20 x 184.80 x 14.00 cm) National Galleries of Scotland, Permanent Collection

Purchased with the aid of The Cowan Smith Bequest and the Art Fund 1944 Reproduced Courtesy of the Scottish National Gallery. Purchased with the aid of The

Cowan Smith Bequest and the Art Fund 1944

Maya Ying Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington D.C. (1982) Wikipedia Crea-tive Commons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_flag_reflexion_on_Vietnam_Veterans_Memo-rial_12_2011_000124.JPG

© Creative Commons/Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortizz)

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IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI / WE GO ROUND AND ROUND IN THE NIGHT AND ARE CONSUMED BY FIRE 12

This palindromic sentence – in Latin the letters from both beginning to end and from end to beginning spell the same words – was a favourite of Guy

Society of the Spectacle, 13 This book sought to

describe and explain the direction society had taken in the world since the mid-­1920s, when forms of spectacular diversion (in cinema – with the advent of synchronized sound-­imagery – advertising, urban development, and in culture and the arts generally) began to become integral to the social orders of both the western democratic capitalist societies and the Soviet eastern European state-­communist countries. For Debord, the stand-­off between these two power blocs had in fact, by the 1950s, generated a form of deadly coexistence and mutual

competition with each other through the alliances

these two power blocs had effectively carved up

the world and its resources of people and land into

from East Germany crossing into the zones of the city controlled by the Americans and their allies,

of Berlin and Germany within the superpower

collaborator Jeanne-­Claude erected his own Iron Curtain – Wall of Oil Barrelspermission, in the Rue Visconti in Paris a year later, in what was an early artistic commentary

temporary, division of a street by a high stack of oil barrels both roughly imitated and yet might be

itself – though the meaning of the action in blocking the Paris street for a number of hours overnight still resists any simple or singular reading. The structure the artists built, however, focused upon an act and situation elsewhere – the construction

practical, ideological, social and emotive effects, within that city and its population, divided Germany,

Iron Curtain worked

separated – physically dividing the street in Paris – and drew attention, metaphorically, to the

verfremdungeffekt 14 Enter Ghost, Exit

Ghost performs a congruent action, leading us to reconsider the socio-­political meanings of

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wall of Oil Barrels – Iron Curtain – Rue Visconti, Paris (1961-62)

Photo: Harry Shunk/Wolfgang Volz. Copyright: Christo 1961-2005

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prompt critical thought, referencing and utilizing –

spectaculars and CGI technologies – the evolved machinery of spectacle to achieve its own effect.

with twentieth century avant-­garde artistic practice included juxtaposition and dissonance in compositional (ordering) strategies. The lenticular panels central to the experience of Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost materialize this principle, combining as they do historically disparate and opposed images – pasts and presents of Palestinian life held visually together within acts of vision which themselves mutate as the spectator moves along the walls that channel their progression through the maze. The

and to the history of the Palestinians since their own 1948 Nakbah, as it does to the actual warrens of paths in their towns and their playful-­yet-­serious

We go round and round in the night and are consumed by .

At its most basic level, the modern spectacle was that of what Debord calls ‘the autocratic reign of the

guaranteed this, and which stripped people of their personal autonomy and sovereignty.15 People thus

human natures and abilities, and from their true

system and totality of exploitative social relations enacts this real alienation, it also produces what Debord called a life ‘presented as an immense accumulation of spectaclesa totality, then, the spectacle is not ‘a mere visual

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relationship between people that is mediated 16 Though lodged in an organization

of actual social relations of production and consumption between people, and between people and the material world, the created spectacle

Debord observed that ‘reality emerges within the

alienated both in relation to this image of the world the spectacle creates and in their daily life activities producing and consuming the commodities which comprise the spectacle.17

and in their allotted and resisting contiguous territories – the Palestinian Authority areas, Gaza, and the highly fragmented places and spaces of the

superordinately

Palestinians below.18formalized physical and, as we have noted, visual and visible demarcation. The so-­called ‘separation

by the Israeli government since 2000 – labour undertaken by Palestinian workers in the main – is only the most obvious symbolic and literal trace of this politico-­territorial division. At the Allenby Bridge (also known as the King Hussein Bridge) crossing between Jordan and the Palestinian Authority town of Jericho in the

because the Israelis have overriding control over its use – Israeli security personnel stand hidden behind a one-­way mirror, monitoring both the Palestinian border police before them and those

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wishing to cross through. This false or ‘prosthetic

it, fools very few who know that the 1993 Oslo Accords agreed to by the Palestinians under Yasser

general subordination to the Israeli state in terms of territory, citizenship, and access to resources.19

Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost by stressing the visual and the directional – while at the same time

they are seeing – alludes to the separations, in reality and in its imagery, that really constitute the state of Israel and its dis/connection from/to the Palestinians and their places of labour and living within this radically striated socio-­spatial order.

elsewhere that were devised by Sharon from the later 1970s onwards enacted a militarization of territory and social life designed to create a singular form of security for the Israeli nation-­state. This strategy had, in turn, been a reaction against the loss of territory to Egypt following the 1973 war in

the twenty metre sand wall defence of the Bar Lev line erected on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal. The perceived trauma and humiliation of this defeat by Egypt (a country at the time armed by

US) helped bring the Likud party into existence and then to power in Israel. The 1973 war also led to

its oil prices by 70% with the demand that unless Israel withdrew from all the occupied territories

worldwide recession lasting ten years ensued.

US (following its defeat in Vietnam) began to look

to Sharon and the Israeli military for a model of how to conduct new kinds of urban warfare – and

have become a kind of laboratory for Israel and its chief allies in which to observe and experiment

control.20\

In a way, too, Enter Ghost, Exist Ghost is a kind of laboratory – of an aesthetic-­sensory kind. Like

20:50 – a metal gangway into a gallery room, surrounded on all

smelly illusion of bottomless depth and an image

images and pathways holds under erasure (that is, forces into radical reconsideration) received

orchestrated verfremdungeffekt mirrors, in turn, the tactics of the Israeli state with its military mock-­ups of towns in which to practice counter-­insurgency

of a re-­conception of the city as the actual material of warfare against Palestinian resisters in their towns and refugee camps across the territories Israel variously owns, controls or manipulates through Palestinian Authority security agencies.21 These pathways, serially blasted through the interior walls of whole streets of houses in order to enable Israeli troops to avoid becoming visible targets themselves, constitute a form of military maze-­construction, with their crudely daubed

for other soldiers to follow or to warn of danger

wide roads, cleared by army bulldozers through the maze of alleys in the refugee camps and towns

Richard Wilson, 20:50 (1987), Used sump oil, steel, Dimensions variableImage reproduced courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London

© Richard Wilson, 1987

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like Jenin in order to afford easier access to Israeli tanks and personnel carriers.22

In alluding to these realities in Israel, Palestinian Authority areas and the occupied territories, Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost thus turns its lenticular pictures into windows of a kind. These throw light on the state and the land, while its maze of misleading routes to the cardboard city alludes to the wall

of Israel has erected in order to maintain its own seemingly coherent image of selfhood, position and place. On the one hand, this ideological

depiction of its outside, that which lies beyond and against it. These entities have been both alien/enemy lands and states – for instance, the Suez Canal zone and Egypt to the west, in 1973. The Bar Lev Line of sand had been intended to act as a physical and visual barrier against the Egyptian

and actions, with both tactical and ideological meanings. But when the Egyptians crossed the Canal and blasted through a part of the Line using high pressure water-­canons, the incursion was read as a defeat for the idea of Israel being limited by demarcated physical and spatial boundaries potentially vulnerable to penetration. Instead,

matter and a heterogeneous material of depth subject to comprehensive internal-­disciplinary

23 Imagine the construction of the Bar Lev Line and its effective demolition during the 1973 war, then,

Double Negative land art de/construction from 1971. His south-­eastern Nevada desert mesa location is exchanged for the Sinai peninsula, themes of industrial land exploitation

and reclamation exchanged for state-­territorial advantage and identity, and the will and conception of artists replaced by the will of military rulers in the prosecution of nation-­state building. Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost

the mesa rock, works critically to re-­aestheticize the architecture of the Israeli state, turning the mundane realities of its own forms of domination back into interrogative metaphor.

Michael Heizer, Double Negative (1969)240,000 displacement in rhyolite and sandstone

1,500’ x 50’ x 30’Location: Mormon Mesa, Overton, Nevada

Reproduced Courtesy of Michael Heizer © Triple Aught Foundation 2011. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Gift of Virginia Dwan

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‘OPTICAL URBANISM’24, THE MAZE AND THE WEST BANK Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost works, then, to defamiliarize our sense of image and direction: the lenticular panel walls of the maze offer visibility but

power networks Michel Foucault claimed replaced older societal orders rooted in the physical torture and destruction of resisting individual and social bodies.25settlements and road systems function effectively as barriers, dividing as well as swallowing the Palestinian population, a new totality of temporal-­spatial relations, above and below as well as on the ground, has emerged. In effect, this is nothing more or less than a local expression and form of globalizationDebord had noted, ‘all time and space become foreignhe observed, ‘is the map of this new world, a map

26 Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost is readable as a version of such a map – a remote means through which to trace literal and metaphoric realities in and of the ‘Land of

asymmetrical relations of visibility and invisibility centred on checkpoints, one-­way surveillance mirrors and summary death for Palestinians looking too intently at settlements, (the dream of) a perfected system of control would be one that was fully automatic and self-­regulating. The

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Palestinians, that is, should so internalize their subordination as to never question or act on a sense of entitlement beyond what they have been given by the Israelis in terms of resources such as water, waste disposal, energy, space, goods or work.27 the Israelis actually means not limiting their sense of what they can take if they really want it enough.

build fences around your settlements. If you put up

should place the fences around the Palestinians

Qdumim settlement remarked that fences ‘project

28 Instead, the design and layout of settlements, their

the greatest security.

Lost in the maze that is Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost a loss of sense of direction is or at least can be enjoyable, even exhilarating. Much contemporary

are already and feeds our persisting appetites. In contrast, real insecurities of place and position in art, as in a social order, can be deeply threatening.

Performance Corridor, Live-­Taped Video Corridor, and Touch and Sound Walls (all 1969), like

but effective architecture tightly regulating the movement of spectators allied to a specular regime

an adopted physical disposition of attentiveness

we dress and wish to appear, look, to others).

ability – there are things, that is, we (and the Israeli state, of course) believe simply should not be seen.

up self-­awareness of both looking and seeing oneself being looked at, as well as being exposed

others (the video time-­delays added to these disturbing confusions of place, position, identity and appearance).

In Enter Ghost, Exit Ghostcongruent stress on revolving movement, with the sense of a mechanical ghost possibly mobile across the stage on a track or wheels – we are in danger of losing a sense of the presumed connection between direction and orientation (‘The placing or arrangement of something to face the

point of a complex maze as a form of entertaining

forget, or to become unsure, about our absolute as opposed to our relative position. But are our senses

can or has been done? Such a practical relativism seems to lie at the heart of the ethos of settlement

Bank and Jerusalem. This jars, however, with the theocratic absolutism of the claims the state makes

This epithet articulates not an actual place but rather a vision and a sense of an entitlement – the biblical landscape believed to have been as

Bruce Nauman, Changing Light Corridor with Rooms (1971)Accession no. AR00044, Medium Wallboard, 200 watt white light bulbs, timer

Size 304.80 x 12192.00 x 76.20 cmReproduced Courtesy of the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. Acquired jointly through The d’O!ay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial

Fund and the Art Fund 2008; Bruce Nauman © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2012

48 49

an unalienable gift from God to the Jews. The myth, then, but in the

and a visualisation that assigns partial order and

effects. 29 The operation of myth is this sense

of verfremdungeffekt described earlier. If Enter Ghost, Exit Ghostnature of image and imagery and to problematize the relations between vision, visibility, knowledge, consciousness, self-­consciousness and position,

naturalize, suppress and hide its active productions

aspects of the way the state of Israel represents

tourist destination for westerners and in the visual and culinary clichés of Israeli-­ness which Makhoul has both made art and written about in the past. (A critical question here is: should the Palestinians simply adopt a mirroring procedure – identifying themselves, like the Israelis, as homogeneous, traditional and rooted in a singular vision of their land and nature – or behave differently, inventing pluralities of Palestinian-­ness both inside Palestine and in the world beyond?) 30

irreversibly concatenated (connected ‘as by a

lenticular panels combining two or more images – fuses and confuses a series of sights, looks, positions, perspectives and possible directions. The

the remaining stone houses of the Palestinians, their work in the olive terraces, the meandering dust roads. But this vista is the systemic object

50 51

and laboratory of Israeli military and settler control. The regime, that is, actually produces this mythic scenariounder occupation – the very people whom the settlers, however, wish continually to displace. Scenography, according to the German art historian Erwin Panofsky writing in the 1920s, was the ‘study of how to compensate for the apparent distortions of works of art displayed in high places or meant

of the role of architecture in relation both to Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost and the modern day material

goal of the architect, Panofsky continues,is to make his construction well-­proportioned in its impression and to discover remedies for the

the monumental sculptor, who gives the proportion

modern vanishing-­point construction distorts all widths, depths and heights in constant proportion,

of any object, the size corresponding to its actual magnitude and its position with respect to the

the late Middle Ages when this construction was revived in many parts of Europe, such awkward discrepancies were concealed by an escutcheon, a festoon, a bit of drapery or some other perspectival

31

in Russia and Pablo Picasso in France had turned naturalistic representation on its head, demonstrating how techniques and forms of composition construct familiar images of the world, Panofsky was well aware that the technology of perspective – in the hands of compliant artists and architects – was a systematizing device that

helped to create social as well as aesthetic order. It disguised its own operation, he notes here, by covering up some of its ordering lines that betrayed a too mechanistic place and position. Modern artists, and later some architects and planners, developed visual strategies designed instead precisely to reveal the workings of such naturalized visual and social orders. Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost belongs in this tradition, along with, for instance, Jan Dibbets, whose photographs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as Perspective Corrections (Square with Two Diagonals) (1968), showed the illusory effects of perspective. 32 Architects and artists have long been enlisted into the work of producing contemporary Israel as scene/scenario/seen and place. Sharon, for instance, worked on settlement design with the internationally known

his role in developing a system of dance notation, which enabled choreographers to encode a dance on paper, like a musical score. 33 Position, then, but also mobility and mutability have been the watchwords in creating the regime of Israeli security

of an urban warfare town designed for innovating

seen its form and function mutate as fashions in military strategy and wars/occupations around the world have changed over the years. Originally built in the 1980s to simulate a Lebanese village, then to train Israeli soldiers who tried but failed to assassinate Saddam Hussein in the Iraqi town

multi-­purpose revolving theatre in which changing scenarios of battle have been orchestrated, with military advisors and observers from the US and

52 53

Britain in regular attendance as the lessons learned here were thought to have real life applications in the mazes Afghanistan and Iraq came to represent. In neither of these cases to date, however, has a

out of the mazes these wars and occupations have become for the western powers involved.

familiar disabling professional trait of architects, planners, self-­appointed state-­builders, needing-­to-­be-­re-­elected politicians and military experts – has continued to meet the more dogged resistance and seemingly endless numbers of inhabitants who resist to live and live to resist, eventually turning against their invaders all the techniques and materials of state-­sponsored counter-­insurgency.

boxes at the end of the maze that is Enter Ghost, Exist Ghost it is this seeming reality that is perhaps most striking. For in such actual provisional, ‘Jerry

surviving Palestinian towns, villages and now

Jabalya, Rafah and Shati, the life of resistance goes on, despite their demolition and temporary occupation at will by Israeli troops and their vehicles over the years and decades. After the shape-­shifting images of the lenticular panels

end, the crude matter-­of-­factness and stacking of the boxes made from recycled cardboard may come as something of a relief – though not really as the recognition of a simple truth, or as

For Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost as a whole prompts

and underlines the disturbing realization – the consciousness and self-­consciousness – that all materials and forms can mean or represent something, but then, in another situation, can come to mean or represent something else, perhaps even its opposite. The recycling process can be productive or wasteful, for what might be created –

form of the same thing that was useless and In Girum Imus

Nocte et Consumimur Igni.

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NOTES

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso: London, 2007). For his own discussion of the

For an interesting discussion of literally dangerous artworks, see Anna Chave ‘Minimalism and the

Frascina and Jonathan Harris (eds.) Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts (Phaidon: London, 1992): 264-­281.

See Carola Hein ‘Toshikeikaku and Machizukuri in Jahrbuch des

DIJ (Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien), no. 13 (2001): 221-­52.

Maze-­like centres constructed in Japanese cities were purpose-­built to resist foreign occupation. See Yoshinobu Ashihara The Hidden Order (Kodansha International: New York, 1989)

See, e.g., Stephen Pinker How the Mind Works

Mind and Cognition: A Reader (Blackwell: Oxford, 1990).

in Jonathan Harris (ed.) Globalization and Contemporary Art253-­264.

Hamlet: act 3, scene II.See, e.g., Neil Asher Silberman Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East (Holt: New York, 1989) and Nadia Abu El-­Haj Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial

Self-­Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2001).See Hollow Land: 151-­2.

Ha’aretz, 30 December 2006.

Amoz Harel ‘Soldiers can kill Gazans spying on Ha’aretz, 5 November 2003.

See John Barrell The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-­1840 (Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1980).

See Guy Debord Panegyric (Verso: London, 2004) and Libero Andreotti ‘Play-­tactics of the

October2000: 37-­58). Note the palindrome, according to Andreotti, was an ancient ‘playform that, like the riddle and the conundrum, “cuts clean across any possible distinction between play and

Guy Debord Society of the Spectacle trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Zone: New York, 1995) and trans. Ken Knabb (Rebel Press: London, n.d.).

See Ernst Bloch, ‘Enfremdung, Verfremdung:

Darko Suvin, The Drama Review vol. 15, no.1

Guy Debord Comments on the Society of the Spectacle trans. Malcolm Imrie (Verso: London, 1990): 2.

Debord, Theses 1 and 4-­5, The Society of the Spectacle trans. Knabb: 7.

Debord, Theses 5 and 8, The Society of the

Spectacle trans. Knabb: 7-­9.

See Hollow Land: particularly chapters 1, 3 and 6.

Gaza-­Jericho Agreement, Annex I: Protocol

and Security Arrangements, Article X: Passages, http//telaviv.usembassy.gov/publish/peace/gjannex1 and Azmi Bishara Checkpoints: Fragments of a Story (Babel Press: Tel Aviv, 2006).

See Shimon Naveh In Pursuit of Military Excellence: The Evolution of Operational Theory (Frank Cass: New York, 2004).

See Stephen Graham ‘Cities as Strategic

Stephen Graham (ed.) Cities, War and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Blackwell: Oxford,

121-­132.

See Hollow Land: 201-­3, 205.The Crossing of the

Canal (San Francisco: American Mideast Research, 2003): and Hollow Land: chapter 2.Hollow Land:130-­133.

Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (Penguin: London, 1977).

Debord, The Society of the Spectacle trans. Knabb, Thesis 31: 16 and Thesis 42: 21.

See Hollow Land: 143.See Hollow Land: 133 n62.

Roland Barthes Mythologies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: London, 1972).

See, e.g., Gordon Hon and Bashir Makhoul ‘Found

and Gordon Hon on Identity Theft in the Context of Palestinian-­Israeli

Identity Theft: The Cultural Colonization of Contemporary Art (Liverpool University Press / Tate Liverpool: Liverpool: 2008): 29-­50, Gordon Hon and Bashir Makhoul The Origin of Palestinian Art (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming) and Jason Forbus Art of the Palestinian Diaspora: The Voice of a Generation (Lulu.com: London, 2011).

Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form

98-­99, 40.

Tom McDonough (ed.), Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Texts and Documents (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

See Hollow Land: 80.

56 57

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SPECTRES OF PERCEPTION, OR THE ILLUSION OF HAVING THE TIME TO SEE: THE GEOPOLITICS OF OBJECTS, APPREHENSION AND MOVEMENT IN BASHIR MAKHOUL’S “ENTER GHOST, EXIT GHOST”

RYAN BISHOP

感知幽灵，抑或幻想还来得及看见：柏谢尔 ·玛库“幽灵现，幽灵隐”中客体、理解和运动的地缘政治学 瑞恩 ·毕晓普

60 61

Art of the Motor, p. 61)

‘Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!/Be thou

airs from heaven or blasts from hell,/Be thy intents wicked or charitable,/Though comest in such a

‘The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

You must ask what you really want.

People are going back and forth across the doorsillwhere the two worlds touch.The door is round and open.

‘Six mirrors stare at each other unblinking

Self-­Dismembered Man 49)

INTRODUCTION

The artwork by Bashir Makhoul ‘Enter Ghost, Exit Ghostdirections found in the opening act and scene of Hamlet. The directions for the spectral apparition

The movements indicate a return, a turn and a re-­turn, that owes a debt to the Greek stage. The chorus in Greek drama moves and speaks -­-­ the strophe, anti-­strophe, and epode -­-­ which follows an almost dialectic movement of both thought and bodies on the stage, but one without resolution. The chorus sings a stanza and moves in one direction (strophe), provides another, sometimes contradictory statement, moving in the opposite

stanza while stationary near its original spot (epode). The choral dance allows a return that is not a return, a dialectic resolution that leaves the

of the drama at play, though now with additional emotional and psychological weight that comes

Greek drama is also the citizenry, the voice and commentary of the people, lends it an especial power, one driven by circumstances beyond their

a commentary on fate, as well as the illusion of agency, movement and progress.

The installation ‘Enter Ghost, Exit Ghosttwo sections, one comprised of a maze and the other a cardboard replica of an Arab town or refugee encampment. According to the curatorial brochure for the work, the walls of the maze are 2.4 meters high, with the entire length of the maze running about 100 meters. The walls of the

wall with lenticular images that move as viewers

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move through the maze. The images themselves show buildings and streets from East Jerusalem, Hebron and a few of the larger refugee camps, as well as being interspersed with images of the cardboard city. The number of images is limited to less than a dozen, and they are repeated over and over in a non-­sequential fashion to add to the confusion of the maze, generating a sense of familiarity and disorientation. Gordon Hon, writing about the micro-­lens lenticular surfaces in an earlier work by Makhoul, states that ‘each image is given an equal portion of the surface. Rather than multiple exposures the various images are split into thousands of strips, which are then equally

art usefully places an Einsteinian relativity of

of visualizing technologies and image production. However, his discussions in The Art of the Motor (1995) (which perhaps might be more accurately translated as the motor of art) often privileges the viewing subject in this equation, with the speed of the viewing subject in relation to the object taking precedent in the status of the image produced from it or even in the status of the object itself: the viewing subject and her/his speed in relation to the viewed object is almost completely deterministic. For example, Virilio often uses an example of a tree perceived when he is walking past it as opposed to seeing it when riding on the TGV, and he asks which is the real tree. This in turn leads to a consideration of the movement of the perceiving/

64 65

representing medium from paint to photography to cinema. In each instantiation the viewing subject or apparatus is moving, not the viewed object.

viewed object, the speed of the landscape, the speed of the built environment, the speed of objects and most importantly the light from them back into the relative relation of perception, apprehension, and art. The reciprocity of moving

provocation regarding the motors of perception, image, and subjectivity/objecthood, I suggest, provide a useful entry point for reading elements

phenomenological installation. ‘Enter Ghost, Exit Ghostmanner issues of urbanization, warfare, and the militarization of daily life, as well as the relationship between surfaces and interiors, and perception. Further, the title prompts

hauntings as they pertain to larger historical and structural forces at play within a given site and their connection to temporality. By keeping this entire range of resonant elements operative at the

relation between speed, perception, image and observer to argue for a more complex relativity of knowledge production and epistemology than that suggested by many of his writings.

66 67

68 69

ENTER GHOST, OR THE ILLUSION OF MOVEMENTSTROPHE.

human experience, including metaphysics and perception, e.g. time, space, time-­space and

43) and how it pertains to the acceleration and deceleration of appearances. Dromoscopy also reveals a great deal about our perception of reality and of the status of the image as a mode of representation that may or may not pertain to

relation between phenomena accounting for the status of a perceived object, of its empirical status, dromoscopy provides an important means for considering the status of the image. This is especially the case with ‘Enter Ghost, Exit GhostThe rapidity with images appear and disappear

speed, which might seem an incongruous element in most works of art, central to this installation.

The speed of the viewer moving through the maze and into the cardboard village is just one aspect of speed addressed in the work. The physical movement of the viewer through the maze is

but not regarding speed (and thus time). The time-­space of the images is partially determined by this relative speed of the viewer. However another aspect of speed addressed by the work,

perhaps the more important one, can be found in the movement and speed of the images clad to the walls of the maze, towering over the viewers. The images are photographs and thus (apparently) still images;; however due to the lenticular surface, the

not the eyes but of their heads or bodies. Speed, as Einstein reminds us, is not a phenomenon but rather a relationship between phenomena. The speed of viewing subject is no longer the

own paradoxical relationship to speed, how it is to be engaged. Even though the images stop if we do in the maze, they move in response to the

frozen in the installation and also reinserted here while remaining in constant motion, or at least potentially so.

plastic arts will come to immobilize movement, thereby offering the illusion of seeing, of having

temporality in the constitution of the subject as a viewing subject. The subject becomes a subject through its engagement with and against objects that determine the subject through negative

the objects with which it interacts). The role of speed in relation to vision speaks to the heart

object seems to change as the relative speed apprehension adjusts. The further effect is that the viewing subject too is changed through seeing the object in a different manner. However we see

70 71

no better or no worse when mobile as opposed to immobile;; we merely see differently. This is

difference of quality.

More importantly we also believe we have the time to see: this belief is what static art affords

of visibility, stasis, mobility, temporality and consciousness by ensuring that the assumed fundamental relationships between the viewer and the visible remain constantly and consistently unstable. The static images that supposedly yield us the time to see that is found in the embossed

as we move, and barely remain still even if we are. The time for seeing, the time of the visible,

of seeing that emerges from static art, e.g. still photography, is revealed for the illusion it is because the image in this installation is both static and kinetic. The plastic art of photography has

point, static art always would have failed us because all it can offer is the illusion of the visible. The ineluctable movement of bodies and time, and of course bodies in time, that provides the essence of speed, blinds us.

The images, static or otherwise, lack the corporeality of the viewers moving through the maze but to say so is to state the obvious, for the incorporeal image is redundant. The

image is always ghostly, taking advantage of the sleight-­of-­hand with regard to presence and absence essential to representation. The tensions operative within representation can be articulated

Ground of the Image, claims ‘The re-­ of the word representation is not repetitive but intensive (to be more precise, the initially iterative value of the

(35) Nancy is correct, of course, but only partially

the troublesome mimetic act of representation is both repetitive and intensive, qualitative and quantitative, imitative and innovative. That is, representation is always too little and too much at the same time: imitative (and thus repetitive) and productive (and thus generative).

The mimetic power of mechanical reproduction holds a special place in the history of representation. The imitative powers of photography, its mimicry, seem singular but should actually be understood as operating in a continuum from perspectival painting to

technology in the trajectory likely belongs to photography and the illusion of unmediated access to the original with analog photography. Roland Barthes famously argues that the illusion of unmediated access can be found in what he

the utopian character of denotation in language, that is the meaning of a given term is obvious in and of itself and resides in the term, as it were, clearly and equally accessible to all who speak the language to which the term belongs. (Rhetoric

72 73

74 75

76 77

of the Image) The denotated image achieves the ideal of transparent representation through the photograph, in which the relationship between

the medium of photography. ‘The denoted image

of photography, so the analogic story goes,

at the moment of representation. Analogical representation therefore equals two simultaneous temporal moments: here-­now and there-­then, which is the power of all representation: to re-­present what was present (or pre-­sent, or given). So image technology ‘helps mask the constructed meaning under the appearance of the

well as cinema, digital representation, simulations)

the image.

Yet, all of this, as Derrida and many others have noted, depends ineluctably on absence, which makes the presence of representation possible

of the medium, the absent object emerges as if present, incapable of existence other than through the act and medium of representation. The history of representation in all of its guises and manifestations, therefore, is ‘thus traversed

it into the absence of the thing (problematic of its reproduction) and the absence within the

(Nancy 37, emphases in original) The status

of the represented object becomes attenuated by the media of representation, as well as by representation itself. Thus the hoped-­for purity of representation of the Real becomes but a dream, and yet the logic of the analog image and its reliance on presence, as well as the verity of its likeness, keeps the dream alive. In the process, the object and the status of the image undergo change, and thus so does the viewing subject.

The incorporeality of the image brings us back to the ghost, or rather our old combination of the image and the ghost as well as the image as ghost. The images in this installation recall the 19th century stage trick (one likely used

Ghost. This bit of visual trickery, of illusionism that enables viewers to believe in what was never there as being there, was generated by plate glass, mirrors and a skilful combination of illuminated and dark space, thus making it possible to project into space, especially the stage, the illusion of objects or people appearing and disappearing in ghostly semi-­corporeal form. The body is there, or apparently so, but in an incorporeal manner: our hands would pass right through it. A precursor to the hologram, the

the ghostly images trapped in an illusion of three dimensional overlay of images superimposed on one another, so that our hands would appear to be able to pass right through them. However the very

The ghosts are squeezed into a thinner layer than their 19th century brethren yet maintain the rapidity of appearance and disappearance found in the earlier form.

78 79

Apparently the major rhetorical device of the installation -­-­ through its images, its incorporeality, its frustrated sense of progress, its plays with the temporality and visibility/blindness, its ghosts, its insistent refrain of absence – seems to be the apostrophe. The viewers grope through the

to re-­turn the turn, away, and address the absent, the dead, the holes in words (which is what the apostrophe does and indicates). Apostrophes mark absence, holes, and possession. They indicate and are the topoi of possibility: still stand the waters;; delusions of progress and narrative are routed back, away. Like discourse (this

and forth. But we are essentially seeing and witnessing – by moving through -­-­ an address to the dead. The ethics of movement, the ethics of vision and blindness, and the insubstantiality and incorporeality of the image returns (as ghosts always do and begin) us to our corporeality through having it removed, for a second, in the

photograph provides the illusion of seeing though we will only ever see an incorporeality. And the it provides us the illusion of having the time to see though the speed compressed into the surface of having passed.

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EXIT GHOST, OR THE FITNA THAT IS THE SURFACEANTI-­STROPHE.A maze evokes ideas of inside/outside, depth/surface, and the thin membrane of the lenticular surface is the site at which all the transformations take place. The actual surface of the display walls, of the cladding of the piece, manifests evanescence, transformation, illusion, process,

immateriality. This surface is constructed with a manipulation of material that invokes immateriality and transience. So at the most

the materiality and affect of surfaces: the surface on the walls and the walls as surfaces too. The surface of the installation, the surface of the cladded images as well as the cardboard surfaces of the Arab village, embodies and evokes

diverse but interrelated meanings including trial, tribulation, chaos, a state of extreme psychological stress and turmoil (almost as a test from God), lust or seduction, a fascination or bedazzlement, suffering, temptation by the materiality of the

intertwined meanings, and is a productive term

installation. In the surface of the image and the

the repetition of images that provide the illusion of progress that reveals itself as an unachievable stasis. The images are lovely, almost too much

so for the content and context, rendering them seductive and fascinating, leading the viewer to engage the chaos of the sites depicted as distanced and unreal. But as the viewer moves more deeply into the maze, moves beyond the initial surface of the installation as it were, the

depth reveal the trial the surface embodies and foists on the viewer: the ethics of vision, the impossibility of seeing, and the tele-­ or distanced

or representational power can bridge.

The surface as a site of contestation has emerged somewhat recently in the work of the architect

his previously conceived trope about the politics of verticality and concentrated all of its evocative and actual power to the few centimetres above and below ground level, a surface that can be extended to other surfaces as well: the surface

sites pictured in the photos of the installation and

argues that the struggles for power in urban sites, of economic and inhabited contention, the

and long-­standing dwelling spaces can be found

to think of the surface as the site of symbolic and actual contestation also achieves the trick of reading the vertical and the horizontal at the same time;; it provides access to both surface and depth simultaneously. The lenticular surface of the exhibition evokes just such an understanding of surfaces as it reveals depth through layered views of palimpsest-­like images of other surfaces (walls, houses, buildings) and

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is itself but a few centimetres thick stuck to the walls. The lenticular cladding on the walls of the

caught in the urban or village surface at ground

installation and the site of dwelling.

The formal construction of the installation (lenticular cladding) reminds us that cladding is not only an architectural term, but also one

strand that seals the light into the core. As such it provides the viewer a useful play of terminology,

is sealed into the maze and the multiple images on the lenticular surface: stuck, frozen in that space but moving through and within the images. Further resonance is found in yet another usage

production, in which cladding seals in radioactive fragments to prevent them from contaminating the coolant for the fuel rods. Cladding serves as the outer layer of the fuel rod, the border between the contaminated fuel and the coolant. Thus the lenticular cladding, as with other cladding, serves to encase, to entrap, to protect and to seal in light as well as unstable power sources that can potentially contaminate anything with which they come into contact: a latent potentiality of force hewn into the horizontal lines of alternating imagery. The lenticular cladding attached to the walls of the maze provide a literalization of the

computer from viruses and invasion. However little protection occurs here, except perhaps for the

distanced viewers who will not be able to access the issues and sites, the materials and people, the buildings and the surfaces of the images displayed except through the images – even if they were to stand in the streets of a village.

As we see, the lenticular surface/image traps two moments in one, two images in one, sealing them together inextricably. Two images, two stories, two sites, two moments, two of X permanently bonded, oscillating with each other, inextricably intertwined, occupying the same space, time and frame/parergon. Jean-­Luc Nancy writes in The Ground of the Image about the Greek term oscillum, which designates a small mouth and thus becomes a metonym of the face. But oscillum is also a mask of Bacchus hung amongst the grape vines to act as a scarecrow, a mask that moves back and forth in the wind providing a kind of oscillation, the

to scare away the marauding and thieving birds. Nancy says of the mask that its wind-­tossed oscillation is between seeing and speaking (eyes and mouth), between reception and production, so the apparent conjoining of eyes and mouth into a face is actually forever an oscillation between one

of coming together. (73-­4) Neither wins, neither loses, but both are caught in the constant of their oscillation, one yielding to the other only to have the other yield yet again – no resolution, only ‘the

This improbable union of the two inextricably intertwined repeats itself over and over as one

images of a single plane of lenticular surface, the viewer and the object, here and there, movement and stasis, presence and absence, the living and the dead, the corporeal and the spectral, self and other, us and them, space and temporality, vision and blindness, the maze and the village.

conjoining while remaining separate, linked by the relationship between disparate phenomena, is articulated in the thin surface of embossed plastic cladding. The surface provides a kaleidoscope of

of human relations within a spatially-­delimited geopolitical frame that can only ever oscillate.

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ENTER GHOST, AS BEFORE, OR THE OSCILLATION OF THE DOUBLE OTHER THAT IS USEPODE.An epode. A return that is not really a return. A maze that is really not a maze. A village that is but a cardboard model of one, not built on any scale or of any true relation to the maze.

The maze is actually a maze-­like structure – more like a labyrinth than a maze. In a maze, one

provided, the thread. In this installation, though, there is very little chance of getting caught in an eddy of the static/moving images. As a kind of playful maze, or a mirage of a maze, the construct has a teleology of sorts that leads to the cardboard

get lost in the repetition of the images but not in the maze per se. The repetition of images adds to the frustration of the maze while providing both a variation on a set of themes and (more importantly) the illusion of movement – the illusion of progress as well as the illusion of truly seeing

cannot get beyond these surfaces and yet we also

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exit the maze as there is only one way through, and we must enter the village. Once in the village, the surfaces have actual three-­dimensional depth and can be peered into and behind, each house uniquely crafted but still homogenous with the others, as village houses are. The scale is meant to overwhelm for each miniature house implies a miniature family but with metonymic expansion, to a whole village, which itself would be only one of thousands. The power of the representation is an engagement with representation itself: a maze that is not a maze, a village that is not a village, but both present through their absence, which we must experience and consider.

Ghosts, like representations, as we have noted, work the liminal terrain between presence and

interest in the return that is not really a return. Derrida makes a nice point about ghosts in his book Spectres of Marx when he says that all ghosts begin by returning. A ghost can only be a ghost through a return to the earthly sphere. Those experiencing the installation have a return (epode) of sorts when they emerge from the maze into the cardboard box city for they arrive in a village they know (through endless representations) and yet which is uncanny in its sense of being a a return to a past that is not their own. Derrida continues, though in a later

spectre and the one of communism Marx invokes

traditional role of a past haunting a present while

be made real in a futural living present: it must be made to materialize in a manner it only vaguely hints at currently (at the moment that Marx is writing the manifesto). These temporalities for

the two spectres seem antithetical when keeping

the present to the future;; however the spectre

undoes this metaphysical linearity and apparent stability by being all temporal tenses at the same time – past, present and future piled up simultaneously in the image. Hence its endless cycling between entering and exiting (presence and absence) becomes mobility and stasis together at the same time, rather as in a play by

continue to include “Exit Ghost” a second time, providing an oscillation of presence and absence that suggests a pattern to be repeated (perhaps

profound and cheeky because the absence is

of the presence. That is, the presence upon which absence structurally depends, insofar as ghosts or spectres are concerned, is in doubt from the outset. Ghosts are both immaterial and material, so their presence is insubstantial and perhaps not even acknowledgable as presence at all. Thus the absence also wobbles under inspection for a thing not really there cannot really disappear either.

The second point about ghosts is that at the larger metaphysical level, we all enter (as) ghost and exit (as) ghost. This is the fate of us all, and part of what haunts the installation is its explicit role as memento mori. The thin line between presence and absence demarcated by ghosts speaks to our existential condition, a commentary furthered by the cardboard houses of this installation in that hey signify unoccupied homes in what is often called occupied territory. That the images themselves make ghostly visions of sites in

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which much of the military technology used in these locales has created many ghosts (some even premature ghosts, if we can assume such temporal and existential claims) reminds of us this shared fate, this shared human bond found in spectres. Also a portion of what haunts us with the unoccupied cardboard village is the sense of its rather explicit vulnerability for towns were formed for protection.

Virilio, in Speed and Politics, argues that from the outset the city has always been the continuation of the defensive gathering that it was in antiquity. An agglomeration of people, structures and systems emerges out of the forces and vectors of movement along rivers, roads, and takes its character by taking advantage from and protecting itself against the forces it encounters on those

visible forms of defence but the rationale of the city as opposed to the settlement or the camp is one of security and strength in numbers against external and even unknown dangers that outweigh the potential threats from those contained within the polis. Even laid bare as settlements, the Arab villages that the installation models would be built of concrete, somewhat permanent but

Eastern village, the surface and material is no longer concrete but cardboard. The plasticity and strength of concrete (which so fascinated that great urban planner and architect with a military bent: Le Corbusier) transforms into the ephemerality of cardboard. The metonym for

renders this city in all of its explicit vulnerability and exposure: the city as target, but not the kind you aim for, only rather the kind you shoot at.

And that is exactly what these villages are: cities to be shot at. The village in the installation

villages that are occupied but unlived in. Steve Graham documents the burgeoning neo-­urban phenomenon that he calls “the theme park archipelago” combining elements of military planning with entertainment industry and video game immersive experience in actual urbanized sites for urban warfare training, a skill on the

the emergence of the war on terror. These sites combine all the special effects of cinema but in this instance not made into theme parks. These sites are often collaborative endeavours between the military and major studios skilled at such metamorphoses, including Universal Studios. They include centrally-­monitored interactive special effects so that soldiers experience sights, sounds and smells associated with urban warfare. The nexus of interested parties involved in these

leads us to expand our nomenclature of linkages from the military-­industrial complex to what I have called ‘the military-­industrial-­entertainment-­

sites, according to Graham is a co-­operative effort between the US and Israeli militaries: the $40

The generic Arab city is actually a mini-­Palestinian town, intended to help regularize and imporve military movements and actions in such villages, when encountered outside their video-­game immersive and modelled virtual reality.

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The cardboard city is reminiscent of a Potemkin village or the sham version of Paris partially built on the outskirts of the city intending to fool

when explosives were dropped manually from the air by pilots in open cockpits, this attempt at subterfuge – an urban decoy – with fake industry, railway station, populace, etc. was meant to lure the Germans to destroy the model as opposed to the actual city where innocent civilians lived.

impress otherwise ignorant dignitaries, such as a Potemkin village, nor is it meant to be a defensive measure against an enemy army, nor is it a site for military training for urban warfare

operates as a negative version of all of these, the opposite goals of those put forward by these other

display of opulence, none of these are at play in

attention to the very objects veiled or hidden, what is masked.

The cardboard village, paradoxically empty and occupied, evokes villages in the Middle East but further appears within a larger historical trajectory of geopolitics. It serves as a metonym

motor 10) or the rendering of the global city as global by virtue of its having been targeted for nuclear destruction (Bishop and Clancey). Yet it is

perhaps more evocative of the moments when the geopolitical global strategy became more intimate,

of ethnic-­cleansing in the Balkans, tribal targeting of villages in sub-­Saharan Africa, the horrors of the Iran-­Iraq war, the house-­to-­house attacks in

21st century with cross-­border dread and terror, including the celebrated uprisings in Egypt and Libya. The nearly porcelain fragility of cardboard is offset by its cheapness, its lack of value, its inherent transience. As with those houses and villages and dwellers similarly removed, relocated,

one of a presence marked by absence: a model,

with any representation, is only possible through absence. The cardboard surfaces, just as the lenticular surfaces, carry the mark of that absence found in the terrible intimacy of geopolitical struggle: the mark of the apostrophe.

As we emerge from the maze and as we leave the cardboard village, the spectre of the images and the meditation on surfaces unavoidably spark

the lenticular surfaces of the cladded walls, across

into the street, and into the city, the village, the simulated theme-­park urban formations of military training, through the suburbs, up the walls and cladding of high-­rise buildings, along the street outside, and into our homes. And trapped in this

of the inextricably intertwined doppelganger Other along with us, and that is us.

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References:

Bishop, Ryan and Gregory Clancey. ‘The City as

Terrorism. Malden MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004

Theory Culture & Society,

Demarcations (ed. Michael Sprinker). London: Verso, 2008

Bishop, Gregory Clancey and John Phillips (eds.) The City as Target. London and NY: Routledge, 2011.

Nancy, Jean-­Luc. The Ground of the Image (trans. Jeff Fort). NY: Fordham UP, 2005

Pandolfo, Stefania. The Impasse of Angels:Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory. U of Chicago P, 1998

Rumi, Jelal al-­Din. The Essential Rumi (trans. Coleman Banks). San Francisco: HarperOne, 2004

Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics (trans. Mark Polizzoti). NY: Semiotext(e), 1986

Virilio, Paul. The Art of the Motor (trans. Julie Rose). Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995

Virilio, Paul. Open Sky (trans. Julie Rose). London: Verso, 1997

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PROJECT TEAM

Artist: Bashir MakhoulBashir Makhoul is a Palestinian artist born (1963) in Galilee. He has been based in the United Kingdom for the past 21 years. During this time he has produced a body of work based on repeated motifs which can be characterised by their power of aesthetic seduction. Once drawn into the work however,

complicated than beautiful patterns. Economics, nationalism, war and torture are frequently woven into the layers of

more seductive the surface.

Makhoul completed his PhD in 1995 at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. He has exhibited his work widely in Britain and internationally, including the Hayward Gallery, London, Tate Liverpool, Harris Museum, Preston, Arnolni Gallery, Bristol, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, the Liverpool Biennial, The Herzilya Museum, Israel, Jordan National Museum, NCA Gallery Lahore Pakistan, the Florence Biennal, Haus am Lutzowplatz Berlin, UTS Gallery, Sydney, Australia,

Suzhou Art Museum, Shenzhen Art Museum in China and many others. He has received several prestigious awards from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Arts Council England, the

He is the co-­author/editor contributer to several books/ publications including Identity Theft , published by Liverpool University Press;; Return, published by Deebipublishing;; Ibrahim Noubani, Outside the Camp, published by The Israel

New York.

He was the founding Head of School of Media Art and Design at the University of Bedfordshire. He is currently the Head of

part of the University of Southampton.

Curated By: Gordon Hon Gordon Hon is an artist and writer based in London. His

and Northern Ireland (editor) Multi-­Exposure, London (2004), Return and the Spectres of Occupation in Return: Bashir Makhoul (ed John Gillett) IssueArts New York (2007), Found

in Identity Theft: Cultural Colonization and Contemporary Art (ed) Jonathan Harris, University of Liverpool Press and Tate Publishing (2008). He produced a series of 12 radio programmes called Daily Subversions for Resonance FM in 2011 and is currently completing a book on Palestinian art co-­authored by Bashir Makhoul which will be published in 2012 by the University of Liverpool Press.

Exhibition Producer: Ray YangRay Yang is a digital artist specializes in computer graphics, photography and motion graphics and is currently a lecturer at

Design from the University of Southampton and 2006 completed his BA in Graphic Design at the University of Bedfordshire. Prior to his arrival to the UK he studied Fashion Design at Dalian University Polytechnic (northern China) . He has worked for several companies, both in China and the UK, as a graphic consultant, producing a variety of work including web design and book design as well as advertising materials. He has also produced several exhibitions for international venues including: Return by Makhoul for Suzhou Museum and

studio in Beijing for the production of the “Enter Ghost, Exit Ghost” project.

Project Manager Beijing: Summer Lin (Lin Xia) Xia Lin (林夏University of Southampton. She attained her Masters degree

in 2010. Her Bachelor of Arts degree had been received in 2008 from the School of Architecture, Tianjin University in China.

She is an architecture designer, landscape designer and interior designer. Xia specializes in theory associated with research into the spatial relationship between traditional Chinese architecture and contemporary globalized architectural space. She has accomplished several projects in both residential restaurants and entertainment as well as museums, combining aesthetics with function.

She has received several awards including 2006-­2007 School of Architecture, student excellence award, Tianjin University. She has participated in major international projects in a variety of roles, including a project for the Protection of the National Culture Heritage and Ancient Buildings in 2007, the 5th and 6th “From Lausanne to Beijing” International Fiber Art Biennale, and is a team member of the organizers of the International Fiber Art Symposium in 2008 and 2010. She has also organized international lectures and events at the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University in collaboration with University of Southampton. Xia currently works as the project

Exit Ghost” project.

Photographic Assistant: Bashar Alhroub Bashar Alhroub is a Palestinian artist born (1978) in Jerusalem,

School of Art -­ University of Southampton in the UK. He has produced a body of work directly dealt with the polemics of the complexity of a place, He asserts his identity as essentially part of and an outsider of those places. In his work he utilizes deferent media including painting, Photography, Video, Installation and mixed media. He has exhibited his work in Palestine and internationally, including the Eli and EdytheBroad Museum-­ Michigan Stat University-­ USA, Center for Contemporary Art “Lazania “, Gdansk, Poland, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE, Birzeit Ethnographic and Art Museum – Palestine, Instants Vidéo festival 24th”, Marseille – France and many others in UAE, Sweden, Lebanon, Morocco, France, Oman, Algeria, Syria, Japan, Jordan, France, Scotland, Norway, USA, and the UK.

Critic: Jonathan Harris Jonathan Harris has a BA in art history from the University of Sussex and a PhD from what is now Middlesex University. He has taught at Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, Leeds, Keele, and Liverpool universities He has lectured widely around the world, in the US at Harvard, UCLA, The Clark Art Institute, The

Institute and the universities of Copenhagen, St Petersburg

He is Professor in Global Art & Design Studies and Director

His most recent publication is ‘Globalization and Contemporary

than a dozen other books,

several in collaboration with Tate Liverpool where he edited

include modern and contemporary art, art historiography, social art history, the state and cultural production, cultural globalization and critical criting on art.

Critic: Ryan Bishop Ryan received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Rice University in 1992, where he worked with Stephen Tyler, George Marcus and Michael Fischer. Prior to coming to

of English at the National University of Singapore. He has been a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Yugoslavia, Thailand and Singapore. In addition to co-­editing with John Armitage and Doug Kellner the journal Cultural Politics (Duke University Press), he also co-­edits with John Phillips the Annual Review of Theory, Culture & Society and is an editorial board member of that journal. He also edits the book series “Theory Now” for Polity Press. His books include Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film (forthcoming 2012, Edinburgh University Press), The City as Target (co-­edited with Greg Clancey and John Phillips, Routledge, November 2011), Modernist Avant-­Garde Aesthetics and Contemporary Military Technology (co-­authored with John Phillips, Edinburgh University Press, 2010), Baudrillard Now (Polity Press, 2009), Postcolonial

Routledge 2006) and Night Market (co-­authored with Lillian S. Robinson, Routledge, 1997). His research areas include critical theory, critical cultural studies, literary studies, visual culture, urbanism, aesthetics, critical military studies, STS (science, technology and society) studies, architecture, sensory perception and knowledge formation, and international sex tourism

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PROJECT TEAM

Bashir Makhoul

Gordon Hon

Bashar Alhroub Jonathan Harris

Ryan Bishop

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Yang Gallery would like to acknowledge the following individuals and institutions for their encouragement, assistance, support and contribution for the realisation of this project:

Bashir Makhoul for his inspiring art practice.

Hon, Annie Makhoul, Tim Metcalf, Ray Yang, Summer Lin, Bashar Alhroub, Alick Cotterill, Chirtopher Carter, Andy Brook, Lin Le Cheng, Liu Xiao, Alnoor Mitha, Bryan Biggs .

of paintings and other works, which are courtesy of:

National Galleries of Scotland;; Getty Images;;

Saatchi Gallery;; Michael Heizer and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;; Bruce Nauman and National Galleries of Scotland and

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