10.54103/ai/19939
The paper focuses on exhibition practice, taking exhibitions as the key to contemporaneity. I will make a strong plea for the mutuality between past and present, the encouragement of visitors becoming participants through soliciting affective empathic attitude, and the accommodation to make this possible thanks to the enticement of durational looking. I will do this through the theoretical analysis of what exhibiting means and does, and through a consideration of my recent video installation Don Quijote: Sad Countenances. One episode of this project will be the hook on which to hang my view of art-making as, not an illustration of but a method of cultural analysis.
application/pdf
2785-7433
19939
I
en
Mieke Bal
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Artistic process
Con-Temporary: Thinking and Feeling Together
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon
2
Thematic Section
2023-12-28
2023-03-14
2023-12-28
2024-02-23
AN-ICON
Mieke Bal
2023/12/28
10.54103/ai/19939
ASCA
2785-7433
I
Artistic process
en
Vellodi, K., “Thought Beyond Research: A Deleuzian Critique of Artistic Research,” in P. de Assis, P. Giudici, eds., Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2, (Leuven: Leuven University Press 2019): 215-33.
Con-Temporary: Thinking and Feeling Together
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/19939/20019
2
                  Con-Temporary:
                  Thinking and
FeelingExhibition
        Together
by Mieke Bal
               Video essay
               Don Quijote
               Political art
               Artistic process




                      Issue №1                Year 2023
                      → Immersions and Dives: From
                      the Environment to Virtual Reality
                      Edited by Roberto P. Malaspina,
                      Elisabetta Modena, and Sofia Pirandello
Con-Temporary: Thinking
and Feeling Together
MIEKE BAL, ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) – https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5483-3218
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19939



Abstract                      The paper focuses on exhibition practice, tak-
                 ing exhibitions as the key to contemporaneity. I will make a
                 strong plea for the mutuality between past and present, the
                 encouragement of visitors becoming participants through
                 soliciting affective empathic attitude, and the accommo-
                 dation to make this possible thanks to the enticement of
                 durational looking. I will do this through the theoretical anal-
                 ysis of what exhibiting means and does, and through a
                 consideration of my recent video installation Don Quijote:
                 Sad Countenances. One episode of this project will be the
                 hook on which to hang my view of art-making as, not an
                 illustration of but a method of cultural analysis.




Keywords         Exhibition                      Video essay                       Don Quijote
                 Political art                   Artistic process
To quote this essay: M. Bal, “Con-Temporary: Thinking and Feeling Together,” AN-ICON. Studies in
Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2, no. 1 (2023): 11-28, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19939.
MIEKE BAL                                        11                                        AN-ICON
                            In this article I am particularly keen to explore
             the implications of the preposition “con-” as a guideline
             for immersive art. With the qualifier “immersive” I aim to
             suggest that art can offer insights into the process of art,
             rather than the aesthetic, intellectual qualities, objecthood,
             or history of particular artworks. The process is what in-
             volves people, social issues and contexts, and what is “live”
            – dynamic, unstoppably moving, and never stable – about
             art. Art is not a “thing;” we, as its viewers or users, are
             inside it. In particular, I would like to argue how making
             audio-visual installations can be a terrific resource for the
             integration of “academic” reflection and scholarship with art
             processing through immersion. The making aspect enables
             me to reflect on and create situations where the relationship
             with visual art can become a social route while remaining
             artistically relevant. For this to happen, contemporaneity is
             key: immersion can only happen in the present.
                           The integration of approaches I have termed
            “cultural analysis:” the detailed analysis of cultural objects or
             artefacts, not in isolation but in their live, social and political
             context, as artistic and aesthetic, intertwined with intellectu-
             al reflection. The two approaches of detailed, close analysis
             and framing in context are not in contradiction: this is my
             starting point. More than 25 years ago I have co-founded
             an institute at the University of Amsterdam, called ASCA:
             Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Its goal was and is
             to promote an approach wherein the socio-political and the
             contemporary are not in contradiction, only in a productive
             tension with detailed analysis and lessons in looking; nor
             is the contemporariness in tension with history. When, in
             2002, by chance I found myself in a situation where I had to
             make a film as a witness statement, witnessing the police
             injustice against immigration, I bought a small video camera
             and started filming. It concerned the life of my neighbour –
             an immigrant “sans papiers.” Meeting him in the courtyard,

MIEKE BAL                             12                                AN-ICON
              by chance, seeing his arm was in a cast, I asked him what
              happened, invited him in, and our conversation about his
              situation led to an enduring friendship – given the need for
              mutual trust, this is the a priori condition of making a doc-
              umentary. With a small group of friends, under the heading
              of Cinema Suitcase we made a documentary, A Thousand
              And One Days, obviously alluding to the Arabic classic, and
              inspired by the name of the collective, a number of doc-
              umentaries and performance films followed, focusing on
             “migrimages,” to borrow a term from a research project at
              the University of Granada indicating visual presentations
              of situations of migration.1
                           This was the moment I discovered how deeply
              making an artwork helps intellectual thinking. But also, how
              intellectual thinking is never alone. In the book that has
              appeared in 2022, titled Image-Thinking: Art Making as Cul-
              tural Analysis I explain in detail how making the films I have
              since then made, have helped me immensely to deepen
              my thinking. That is what I have termed “image-thinking,”
              in an attempt to come up with a term for integration of the
              different activities of which my work consists. Of course,
              in a short article I can only briefly touch upon the import-
              ant questions this endeavour brings up. To make it work, I
              would like to count on you having seen, or going to see, the
              episode 6, of 8 minutes, of my installation from 2019, Don
              Quijote: Tristes figuras, based on fragments from (mostly)
              the first part of the novel by Cervantes (from 1605). Hard
              as that decision was, I declined to make a feature film, as
              I had done with my other projects based on the cultural
              heritage of fiction. This seemed unacceptable, because

      1 For more information about the resulting documentary: https://www.miekebal.org/films/
      mille-et-un-jours-(1001-days), accessed July 15, 2023, and M. Bal, “A Thousand and One
      Voices,” in M. Anders Baggesgaard, J. Ladegaard, eds., Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics
      and Politics under the Sign of Globalisation (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011): 269-
      304. The third chapter of my book Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis (Edinburgh:
      Edinburgh University Press, 2022): 90-130 is devoted to the question of “who speaks?” in
      documentaries, with this film as the example. The term “migrimages” was invented by literary
      theorist Domingo Sánchez-Mesa Martínez.

MIEKE BAL                                      13                                         AN-ICON
              turning that novel into a linear, coherent narrative film would
              be a betrayal of the most crucial aspect of the novel: its
              non-linearity, even incoherence. Instead, an immersive in-
              stallation, as you can see in the documentation, where we
              showed its installations done immediately after finishing
              the project.2
                           Take the scene Narrative Stuttering, which I
              hope you have watched or will do so. This scene shows
              Don Quijote alone on a dark theatrical stage. Sancho
              Panza is sitting on a chair on the side, helping him when
              needed, as a prompter. The knight is desperately trying
              to tell his story, the adventures, his opinions, whatever
              happened to him, but he is unable to act effectively as a
              narrator. At the end, he bursts into tears and Sancho holds
              him in order to comfort him, demonstrating, by physical
              touch, that he is not entirely alone. See the photograph
              on the web page, second column. The appeal to empa-
              thy is a key aspect of what we tried to achieve with this
              installation. Sancho is giving the example; the visitors can
              follow his lead (imaginatively).
                           The darkness of the stage deprives the space
              of perspectival depth. The dark stage isolates him and,
              at the same time, gives him an audience. The theatrical
              setting is a material “theoretical fiction” that explores how
              theatricality can perhaps help to enable the narratively dis-
              abled. My commitment to addressing the issue of narrative

      2 See https://www.miekebal.org/film-projects-1, accessed July 16, 2023. http://miekebal.
      withtank.com/artworks/installations/don-quijote-sad-countenances/episode-6-narrative-
      stuttering. For a book on the installation, see M. Bal, Don Quijote: Sad Countenances
      (Växjö: Trolltrumma, 2019), also in bilingual English-Spanish edition as Don Quijote: Tristes
      figuras / Don Quijote: Sad Countenances (Murcia: Cendeac, 2020). The installation has been
      exhibited at a World première in Småland Museum / Kulturparken, Växjö, Sweden (October
      31, 2019), then at Usina Cultural, Villa María, Argentina, VIII Congreso (April 26 to May 6,
      2022), the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK), as part of the congress of the Deutsche
      Gesellschaft für Ästhetik (German Society for Aesthetics) Ästhetik und Erkenntnis (July 13-15,
      2021). Installed in the Aktionsraum of Toni-Areal (July 13-21, 2021), in the exhibition Art out
      of Necessity, video installations by Mieke Bal at the Museum Jan Cunen, Oss, Netherlands
      (October 3, 2020 - January 31, 2021), interrupted mid-December by the second corona
      lockdown); in the Leeds Arts University Gallery a.k.a. The Blenheim Walk (January 7 - February
      14, 2020). Curator: Catriona McAra, and in the Sala de exposiciones, Universidad de Murcia,
      Facultad de Bellas Artes (November 14, 2019 - January 18, 2020), curated by Jesús Segura.

MIEKE BAL                                      14                                          AN-ICON
              disablement through trauma has been nourished especially
              when I made, with British artist Michelle Williams Gamak-
              er, and with the participation of psychoanalyst of trauma
              Françoise Davoine, the theoretical fiction film A Long Histo-
              ry of Madness (2011) and installations derived from it. This
              film is “about” madness, but it also stages, performs, en-
              acts, and critiques ideas about madness and their cultural
              history. Based on the 1998 book Mère Folle by Davoine, the
              film stages the question and practice of the psychoanalytic
              treatment of people diagnosed as “psychotic” and whom,
              to avoid narrowing diagnostic discourse, we call “mad.”3
                            The film raises the art-historical question
              whether we can say there is an “iconography of madness.”
              Most of the actors play “madness.” None of them are mad.
              Davoine’s book, written as a fiction, theorizes this question.
              In that sense it is a “theoretical fiction.” That term comes
              from Sigmund Freud. He came up with it to defend his
              quite crazy story of the sons who kill and eat their tyrannical
              father. Freud made up a fiction, not simply to explain his
              theoretical finding of the Oedipus complex, but primarily to
              develop it through immersion in fiction, which he needed
              to understand and articulate what he had been intuitively
              groping toward. This is thinking in, through and with fiction-
              al characters and events. My book title “Image-Thinking”
              was derived from Freud’s concept.
                            When, later, I showed my film Reasonable
              Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina of Sweden,
              to an artist friend, she complimented me on the “theatrical”
              quality of the film. Then I understood why theatricality had,
              in fact, always been an important aspect of my fiction films.
              The theatricality helps to do what I have called “exhibiting

      3 On this issue of madness as a consequence of trauma, the book by Françoise Davoine
      Mère folle: Récit (Paris: Hypothèses Arcanes, 1998) is crucial. Our film A Long History of
      Madness came out in 2011 (directed by Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker). For
      more information: https://www.miekebal.org/films/a-long-history-of-madness, accessed
      July 16, 2023. See also the special issue on the book and the film: E. Landa, ed., “Cinéma et
      psychanalyse,” Le Coq-héron 4, no. 211 (2012).

MIEKE BAL                                       15                                          AN-ICON
               ideas.” In the video project based on Don Quijote, this the-
               atricality is even more prominent, not only in the acting, but
               in the exhibition itself. The exhibition as installed is, then,
               itself a “theoretical fiction.”
                              Theatre scholar Kati Röttger considers theatricality

a specific mode of perception, a central figure of representation,
and an analytic model of crises of representation that can be
traced back to changes in the material basis of linguistic behaviour,
cultures of perception, and modes of thinking.4
                             The multi-tentacled description gives theatrical-
               ity many functions, and foregrounds its inherent intermedial-
               ity. In addition, and more specifically for our project, theatre
               and performance scholar Maaike Bleeker gives theatricality
               the critical edge that the exhibition seeks to achieve when
               she calls it “a critical vision machine.”5 These two defini-
               tions together already show that theatricality can offer a
               critical perspective on the images and ideas that circulate,
               in this case, in the exhibition that is as mad as the main
               figure of Cervantes’s novel is generally assumed to be. A
               madness in which the visitor is immersed.
                              For this need of the narratively incapacitated
               figure an empathic audience is indispensable. It is the task
               of the artwork to solicit such an audience. This requires a
               form of display that changes the traditional museal display,
               which keeps audience members at a distance and is quite
               hard on the audience’s physical condition. But it is primarily
               an artistic issue. This governs the temporality of looking.
               In the theatre, in contrast to traditional display, visitors can
               sit, relax, and concentrate. If the display is nearby and

      4 K. Röttger, “The Mystery of the In-Between: A Methodological Approach to Intermedial
      Performance Analysis,” Forum Modernes Theater 28, no. 2 (2018): 105-16,
      https://doi.org/10.1353/fmt.2013.0014.
      5 M. Bleeker, “Being Angela Merkel,” in E. van Alphen, M. Bal C. Smith, eds. The Rhetoric of
      Sincerity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009): 247-62. See also Bleeker, Visuality in the
      Theatre: The Locus of Looking (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

MIEKE BAL                                        16                                           AN-ICON
              accessible, and visiting can consist of quietly sitting, the
              museum can become such a theatre. You see people sitting
              down, and as a result, talking together about the painting
              that is in front of them, low-hung, on eye-level. The Don
              Quijote exhibition seeks to produce such material comfort,
              and thus will facilitate affective engagement in visitors. The
              consequence is a radically different temporality of viewing.
              And time, thus, turns out to be a condition of an immersion
              that effectively affects. If affect is a vibrant communication
              between people, or between people and artwork, then they
              must be given the time, the physical comfort this requires.
              This imagining, testing, and reasoning regarding the affec-
              tive effectivity of museum display shows how this project
              pertains to what is currently called “artistic research” – a
              search through analysis through artmaking.6
                           That concept is deeply problematic. It main-
              tains the hierarchy between academic and artistic research,
              suggesting that artists can earn academic diplomas if they
              can explain and articulate how their works came to be. The
              risk is an over-intellectualizing of art. The linearity built into
              the concept is deceptive; this is not how art-making hap-
              pens. As Kamini Vellodi warns us in her Deleuzian critique
              of the concept of “artistic research:” “it is difficult to deny
              that a major impetus of artistic research has been econom-
              ic, policy-driven, and managerial.”7 With these words she
              invokes the curse that is destroying universities word-wide
              as we speak. Both art and thought are thus being dam-
              aged. When thinking is subjected to methods, it becomes




      6 I have strongly argued for the relevance of seating in exhibitions in a show I curated at the
      Munch Museum (Oslo) in 2017 (with a book publication).
      7 K. Vellodi, “Thought Beyond Research: A Deleuzian Critique of Artistic Research, ” in P. de
      Assis, P. Giudici, eds., Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2 (Leuven: Leuven
      University Press, 2019): 215-33, 216.

MIEKE BAL                                       17                                           AN-ICON
               re-productive. In a Deleuzian view, thought, instead, ought
               to be the production of the new.
                            This thinking is congenial to art-making, but just
               as much to academic work. The integration of these two
               creative activities is explained in my book Thinking in Film
               from 2013, on the video art by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahti-
               la. But the search is not for direct academic answers. The
               concept of “image-thinking,” in the form of a verb, renders
               the interaction between thinking and imaging more forceful.
               To foreground this, we titled an exhibition of my video work
               in 2019 in Murcia, Spain, Contaminations: Reading, Imag-
               ining, Imaging. The noun “contaminations” suggests that
               the art is inevitably in process and “contagious,” having
               an affective impact, as I said above. The verb “imagining”
               was my attempt to foreground the way the imagination
               creates images. The collaboration with Hernández made
               these issues clearer and the neologisms more productive.8
                            The fourfold challenge to make a video proj-
               ect based on Don Quijote engage its troubled relationship
               between content and form, and between the narrative and
               visual aspects involved. The research part was, firstly, to
               decide which aspects of the novel are crucial to make a
               video work that has a point. Secondly, that point had to
               connect artistic and social issues, and to improve our un-
               derstanding of how these two domains can go together,
               in the contemporary, with the collaboration of the past in
               what we call “cultural heritage” – here, Cervantes’ novel.
               The importance of the past for the present, and vice versa,
               how our present changes the past as we can see it, must
               be foregrounded on the basis of non-chronological, mutual
               relations. The fourth chapter of my new book, Multi-Tenta-
               cled Time: Contemporaneity, Heterochrony, Anachronism
               for Pre-posterous History analyses time in its multiplicity.

       8 That exhibition was curated by Miguel Ángel Hernández. A collective volume, edited by
       Hernández, was published in 2020.

MIEKE BAL                                      18                                        AN-ICON
              This is also a central concern both in narrative theory and
              in film.9
                            In my academic work I have a controversial
              reputation as someone who does not take chronology for
              granted. After publishing Reading “Rembrandt” (1991) I
              was blamed for being ahistorical, which, although not true,
              was a stimulating incentive to think harder about histori-
              cal time. That led to my book Quoting Caravaggio (1999),
              in which I addressed that critique, and developed a new
              sense of history in relation to time. But it was when, already
              filmmaking, I was working with Miguel Ángel Hernández
              Navarro on a large collective video exhibition devoted to
              the connections between the movement of images and the
              movement of people, in other words, video and migration
              (not on migration), that my thinking about temporality took
              another turn. 2MOVE (the exhibition), was shown in four
              countries, with in each a local artist added.
                            The last concept in the chapter’s title, “pre-pos-
              terous history,” is presented again through my latest, 2020
              short “essay film” It’s About Time! This film, the title of which
              is as ambiguous as the concept of “pre-posterous history”
              with its self-ironic wink, addresses the world’s self-destruc-
              tive impulse. It does this through the voice of Christa Wolf’s
              character Cassandra. She was the prophetess from antiquity,
              who will see and know the future, as a gift with the purpose
              of seduction from the god Apollo. But when she refused to
              sleep with her employer, he punished her: she was doomed
              never be believed. An antique case of #MeToo.
                            In that fourth chapter I discuss the different is-
              sues of time that, in narrative theory, are usually divided
              into order, rhythm, and duration. I complicate that tripartite


      9 M. Bal, Image-Thinking: 131-74. I have first developed this neologism, “pre-posterous
      history,” in my book on Caravaggio in its mutual relationship with contemporary art Quoting
      Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press,
      1999). “Multi-tentacled” stands for the plurality of temporal relationships, for which I chose the
      octopus as a symbol.

MIEKE BAL                                        19                                           AN-ICON
            theory by adding the experiential aspect (heterochrony) and
            the categories of the historical disciplines. This rethinking
            of chronology has an important impact on how we see our-
            selves in history. For the first time I have taken a biograph-
            ical fact on the novel’s author on board. This “fact” is the
            five-and-a-half years Cervantes spent as a slave in Algiers,
            without knowing he would ever get out. If we take this on,
            all the adventures, the madness, the violence that colour the
            adventures of the Knight Errant, get a different shade. On
            my reading, the issue that rules the novel’s aesthetic is the
            difficulty of story-telling due to the horror encountered. This
            is now called “post-traumatic stress disorder” – except that,
            as usual, the preposition “post-” perverts the connections
            between past and present. The traumatized subject is “dis-
            ordered” because, precisely, the trauma doesn’t go away.
                          There is nothing “post-” possible for the trau-
            matized. The insights the novel generates connect to other
            experiences of war, violence, and captivity: contemporary
            ones. You can see succinctly what the consequences of
            traumatization tend to be, according to a very lucid article
            by Ernst van Alphen. The author analyses the experiential
            handicaps resulting from trauma as well as the narrative
            ones. To sum it up succinctly: as a failed experience, trau-
            ma leads to semiotic incapacitation, unavailable forms of
            representation, the stalling of the discursive process, which
            would be needed for having experiences. Specifically, in
            narrative terms, ambiguous actantial position, the negation
            of subjectivity, the lack of meaning-giving plot, and unac-
            ceptable frames. But a well-thought-through immersive
            video project can explore and transgress the limits of what




MIEKE BAL                          20                              AN-ICON
              can be seen, shown, narrated, and empathically witnessed,
              in relation to notoriously un-representable trauma.10
                            Full of incongruous events and repetitive sto-
              ries, maddening implausibility, lengthy interruptions of the
              story-line, inserted poems and novellas, and at the same
              time, anchored in a harrowing reality, while also making
              readers laugh out loud, this novel, in form and content,
              challenges reading itself. This requires interdisciplinarity,
              in all meanings of that preposition “inter-.” I have termed it
             “intership.” The similarity to the word “internship” suggests
              that this, too, concerns learning, as a practice of mutuality.
                            Film seems the least apt to do justice to the
              novel’s turbulent incoherence, repetitiveness, and incon-
              gruous adventures told in the novel. Talking about it with
              actor Mathieu Montanier, who came up with the idea of
              making a Don Quijote video work, we decided that an im-
              mersive video installation consisting of different, non-linear
              episodes presented with seating would be more effective in
              showing, rather than representing, not the moment trauma
              occurs but enduring violence-generated traumatic states.
              The importance of showing is to enable witnessing as an
              engaged activity against the indifference of the world, our
              worst opponent. The ambition was to make a work the
              theatricality of which in immersive display helps to turn
              onlookers and voyeurs into activated, empathic witnesses.
                           This artwork must yield “thought-images” or
              Denkbilder, created by means of “image-thinking.” The small
              iconic texts that Adorno, Benjamin, Kracauer wrote, were
              texts only. What did the word Bilder do there, then? This is
              where “image-thinking” can meet, and yield, “thought-im-
              ages.” In a study of the genre, US-based scholar of German



      10 E. v. Alphen, “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, Trauma,” in M Bal, J. Crewe,
      L. Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover NH: University of New
      England Press, 1999): 24-38.

MIEKE BAL                                       21                                         AN-ICON
              Gerhard Richter begins his description with a whole range
              of negativities.
                           Indeed, a programmatic treatise would be
              something like a political pamphlet, as opposed to histor-
              ical objectivations – an opposition that audio-visual art is
              devoted to questioning. This is an important point in con-
              nection to attempts to separate political art or scholarship
              from propaganda. The difference is important: propagan-
              da dictates, as in dictators, which is close to imposing;
              whereas political art and scholarship expose and propose,
              but leave the freedom of the addressees intact; as long as
              they are immersed, so that they are enticed to respond to
              the art they see. What Richter disparagingly calls “fanciful
              fiction” stands opposed to an equally dismissed “mere
              reflections of reality.” “Rather,” Richter continues, “the min-
              iatures of the Denkbild can be understood as conceptual
              engagements with the aesthetic and as aesthetic engage-
              ments with the conceptual, hovering between philosophical
              critique and aesthetic production.”11 The word “engage-
              ment” is crucial; it requires contemporaneity. This matches
              Benjamin’s fifth thesis on images of the past, which has
              been a guideline for my work on art between history and
              anachronism: “Every image of the past that is not recog-
              nized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens
              to disappear irretrievably.”12 This warning is one of the main
              motors of immersive projects and needs endorsement of
              their contemporariness. For, the cultural heritage from the




      11 G. Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections on Damaged Life
      (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007): 2.
      12 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn
      (London: The Bodley Head, 2015): 245-55, 247.

MIEKE BAL                                       22                                         AN-ICON
               past matters for today’s world. But only if we manage to
               bring it to bear on the present.13
                            Richter further describes the thought-image
               thus: “The Denkbild encodes a poetic form of condensed,
               epigrammatic writing in textual snapshots, flashing up as
               poignant meditations that typically fasten upon a seemingly
               peripheral detail or marginal topic.”14 The word “flashes
               up” suggests the quick flash that Benjamin urges us to
               preserve by means of recognition in the first sentences of
               that thesis V from which I now quote a later sentence: “The
               true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only
               as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be
               recognized and is never seen again.”15 This also connects
               to the question of historical truth, at stake in the scene
              “Who is Don Quijote?”16
                            In this regard, in his Aesthetic Theory Adorno writes:

What cannot be proved in the customary style and yet is com-
pelling — that is to spur on the spontaneity and energy of thought
and, without being taken literally, to strike sparks through a kind of
intellectual short-circuiting that casts a sudden light on the familiar
and perhaps sets it on fire.17
                              As in Benjamin’s thesis, as well as Lyotard’s fig-
               urality, the language here is again both visual and shock-ori-
               ented, with “sparks,” “short-circuiting,” “sudden light” and
              “sets it on fire.” This is thought alive, living thought, here-now,
       13 On this necessary contemporaneity I have published the short book Exhibition-ism:
       Temporal Togetherness in the series The Contemporary Condition (Berlin: Sternberg
       Press, 2020), requested by the author of a fabulous later book on contemporariness: J.
       Lund, The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in the Time of
       Contemporaneity (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2022). My point was the idea that exhibitions are
       the most precise “model” for the contemporary.
       14 G. Richter, Thought-Images: 2.
       15 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History:” 247.
       16 See for this scene, http://miekebal.withtank.com/artworks/installations/don-quijote-
       sad-countenances/episode-4-who-is-don-quijote/. This scene also suggests that the actor,
       Mathieu Montanier, bears a striking resemblance to the (totally imaginative and imaged) figure
       who never existed historically, but of whom we have a clear image.
       17 T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form” (1954-58), in Notes to Literature, trans. S. Weber
       Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991): vol.1, 3-23.

MIEKE BAL                                       23                                          AN-ICON
             and this living thought has agency; it is capable of engag-
             ing viewers in a dialogic relationship. And it is visual. For
             such sparks to happen, thought needs a formal innovation
             that shocks, and time to make immersion in it, possible.
             Thus, it can gain new energy and life, involve people, and
             make thought a collective process rather than the kind of
             still images we call clichés. Our attempt to achieve such
            “sparking,” shocking innovation can be glimpsed in this
             photograph by Ebba Sund: the frame is both blurred, since
             the escaping slave leaves it behind, and foregrounded, in
             the large proportions the iron bars have compared to the
             fleeing man (Fig. 1).




                                                    Fig. 1. Mieke Bal, The Captive
                                                          escapes, photograph by
                                                        Ebba Sund. An epsiode of
                                                    the 16-screen installation Don
                                                      Quijote: Sad Countenances,
                                                  2019, video, color, Dolby sound,
                                                    8 minutes. Courtesy the artist.


                        In the videos, such sparks lay in the combina-
            tion of material, practical changes of the mode of display
            as immersive, short-circuiting the anachronistic bond be-
            tween present and past, the confusion of languages and
            other categories we tend to take for granted as homoge-
            neous, and the intermediality of the audio-visualization of
            a literary masterpiece. In view of the need for witnessing,
            such a messy “thinking” form enables and activates view-
            ers to construct their own story, and connect it to what
            they have seen around them; on the condition that they

MIEKE BAL                           24                                   AN-ICON
            are immersed through being given time. Thus, we aimed
            to turn the hysteria of endless story-telling into a reflection
            on communication, as it can breach, and reach beyond,
            the boundaries that madness draws around its captive
            subjects, and instead, open up their subjectivity. Here, in
            the brilliant photograph also by Ebba Sund, the Captive
            cannot speak; his mouth is visually muzzled. But his eyes
            do speak, to us – if we are given the time, through seating,
            to respond (Fig. 2).




                                                      Fig. 2. Mieke Bal, episode 6 of
                                                      the 16-screen installation Don
                                                        Quijote: Sad Countenances,
                                                    2019, video, color, Dolby sound,
                                                      8 minutes. Courtesy the artist.


                         To give insight into the stagnation that char-
            acterises the adventures, these scenes are predominantly
            descriptive. Any attempt at narrative is “stuttering,” without
            development. The scene Narrative Stuttering I recommend-
            ed you watch before reading this essay, shows both the in-
            capacitation to narrate and the frustration this causes. The
            theatrical setting is meant to draw visitors’ attention to the
            way they are themselves situated: inside a theatre, sitting on
            the stage, rather than in front of it, where they can fall asleep
            or get excited, identify or not, and possibly remain indiffer-
            ent. Here, such indifference is hard to sustain, because the
            viewers’ freedom to determine themselves how long they
            wish to stay with a scene makes falling asleep contradictory.

MIEKE BAL                           25                                     AN-ICON
            This is the tentative design of the installation I made be-
            forehand, suggesting the total arbitrariness of the lay-out.
            The different installations follow this design roughly (Fig. 3).




                                                      Fig. 3. Mieke Bal, project for
                                                       the design of the 16-screen
                                                      installation Don Quijote: Sad
                                                              Countenances, 2019.
                                                                 Courtesy the artist.


                          What Françoise Davoine calls, citing histori-
            an Fernand Braudel: “poussières d’événements” (literally,
            dust of events) is the motto of this work’s form: sprinkling
            situations, moments, throughout the gallery space. This is
            adequate to the state of trauma presented in the pieces
            and in the juxtapositions among them. The disorderly dis-
            play gives a shape, however unreadable and unclear, to
            the trauma-induced madness of the novel’s form.
                          Cervantes, I presume, was one of those “mad”
            ones. The trauma incurred by Cervantes after being held in
            captivity as a slave, has been beautifully traced in his writ-
            ings and those of contemporary witnesses by Colombian
            literary historian María Antonia Garcés, a must-read book
            for anyone interested in Cervantes, Don Quijote, or slavery,
            then and now. Con-temporary. As it happens, Garcés was
            held captive by the FARC terrorist guerillos for five months.
            This contemporaneity is incompatible with the ridiculing
            representation of the “mad Knight Errant” that is so routine,
            both in cinematic representations and in much of the schol-
            arship. Supported by Garcés’s well-documented analysis, I

MIEKE BAL                           26                                    AN-ICON
            see a haunting autobiographical spirit in the three chapters
            on the Captive (pp. 39-41 of part I). But the shape of the
            theatrical display does not “re-present” the madness. It
            hints at it, makes us reflect on it.
                          The Denkbild is in the form, so that a contem-
            porary aesthetic can reach out to, and touch, a situation
            of long ago that, as befits the stilled temporality of trau-
            ma, persists in the present. Through experimenting with
            possible forms of the art of video, we attempted to invent
            new forms for the formlessness of trauma. By means of
            image-thinking this installation had to answer to the para-
            doxical concept, or thought-image, of the shape of form-
            lessness. Here, theatricality returns: ostensibly acting is
            the form that does not overrule the history, the violence,
            or the traumatic state. Acting, these videos suggest, is a
            social role. Acting, and making videos, exhibiting them in
            a thought-through immersive mode, is an attempt to give
            the formlessness of society a form. This is an attempt to
            do just that: to shape formlessness as the form of the trau-
            matic state, by designing a display that is both theatrical,
            in that it appeals to empathy, and turns “live,” that primary
            characteristic of theatre, into “life,” which concerns the
            social reality we live in and are responsible to sustain; and
            the knowledge acquired through the integration of making,
            analysing, reflecting, and boldly proposing new insights.
                          Filmmaking begins with casting. In the case of
            Don Quijote, the actor cast himself; knowing he was the
            spitting image of the character as we know, or think we
            know him. An earlier significant casting decision occurred
            when Michelle Williams Gamaker and I decided to cast the
            three men in Emma’s life, in Madame B, in the same actor,
            suggesting the woman was in love with love and its prom-
            ises of excitement, not with any man in particular.
                          I have made many films and installation pieces,
            over the last twenty years, and I guarantee you, there is

MIEKE BAL                          27                            AN-ICON
            no more effective mode of doing research and developing
            ideas than integrating these two activities. You can learn
            more about these films on the relevant page of my web-
            site. So, let me end on my personal motto, already cited,
            which demands the remedy of immersion: “Every image of
            the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its
            own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” This is
            pre-posterous history. The past without present is pointless.
            The present without past is empty. But as soon as we try
            to fix either one, the future disappears.




MIEKE BAL                          28                            AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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