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EDITORIAL Rosa Olivares
With violence, as with sensuality, the less you see the more exciting it is, the more you want to move closer, to look, to lift up the skirt, to open the curtains. Every day of our lives we witness an act of violence, a crime. We almost always see it th1ough a photographic image, a film or video. The news on television and radio, newspapers and films are the three sources through which we are fed the habitual dose of terror and violence. Sometimes words are sufficient, or the crime is so atrocious that there is a desire to conceal it behind words. Other times there is simply nothing left to see. We do not know which is worse, or when our imagination feels more enlivened. Balzac, through the main character in one of his novels, a grey and obscure civil servant who used to turn into an artist and writer at night, said that the reason why someone would want to become an artist is because he himself, and that strange social class, were rewarded for doing things which other people would get taken straight to prison for, or would suffer social rejection for. In the pages that follow we shall find reasons for agreeing with Balzac's theory. But crimes, misdemeanours and horror are all real. When a child disappears and his photograph is printed in the newspapers, his happy face and best clothes are not enough to stop us imagining and reconstructing in our minds some of the things which may be happening at that very moment: savage images of torture and depravity. One does not need to see anything real, we have enough images in our own personal mental records to be able to reconstruct any savagery. Nevertheless, sometimes, very often in fact, the media do not help us. Other times artists aid us in re-nurturing these imaginings of horror and survival in which we sometimes play the role of the dead man and other times that of the hangman. But we always end up feeling guilty.
Photography and crime have a relationship which is as old as photography itself and, certainly, no art has dealt with crime, misdeeds, delinquents and victims to such a disproportionate extent as the cinema, which has made it into a genre, a cliché. With the birth of photography, however, criminal investigation gained invaluable assistance and a major form of support for its work which, even today, with finger prints being bettered by DNA recording, is absolutely essential. Originally, following Lombroso's theory, a photograph of the culprit or suspect was taken in order to prove that his face bore physical characteristics which betrayed him as a murderer. Over time, these photographs have now become only a way of recognising, recording and storing the face of the delinquent in a file of portraits for possible later recognition; a file of portraits which may bear a resemblance to a family photo album. Where there is a crime, there is a photograph, sometimes even before the police arrive, as we shall see in Weegee's works. In Spain we had a paradigmatic example of this type of action: the newspaper "El Caso", which was exclusively devoted to all types of crimes occurring in a Spain which was focussing upon its own darkest side. And if not all press photographers become artists like Weegee, other artists make that other grey, daily job into art, as Christian Boltanski has done with the images which "El Caso" published for years. The images we have brought together in this first issue may at times appear excessively documentary, or journalistic, and at other times unnecessarily hard and violent. Those who think so should perhaps be reminded that this society, of which art is only a reflection, is excessively tough and violent and that some of these images are merely a reconstruction, a staging, for the purposes of art. They should also remember that reality is always worse than its representation and that we do not wish to be a catalogue of photographs of acts violence and humiliation which is merely abandoned on the coffee table as a symbol of cultural status, forgetting what is inside. We would like to serve a greater purpose, to think about the thousand images of violence nowadays, the daily crimes which, since they are habitual, nobody is surprised by, and to trace an almost invisible line which takes us from the misdemeanour - something minimal but humiliating, something which is not covered in the penal code of any country - to crime, understanding this always as an offence committed against another person, an imposition, an act of violence or humiliation to someone who generally has no chance of defending themselves: abuse of children, violence in the home, women and children being beaten up, uncontrolled violence amongst young people, rape... We do not include crimes or misdemeanours committed against humanity or against oneself, such as wars, political violence, or cases involving drugs or sex: the former because they are too obvious and the latter due to the consideration that one's body is a sphere of total freedom. Art and information, photography and document. Must art be beautiful, over and above any other characteristic? Today the answer is clearly no. In past times the answer was so obviously no that no-one even thought of asking the question. The beauty of a work of art is, above all, mystery. And the attraction which it produces in us, is sometimes a fatal attraction which induces us to lean out over a cliff which is too dangerous. This happens with many of the images which can be seen in the following pages. We are not talking here of real documents, although some are, indeed, real. Art can make a man being brutally beaten up into an art gallery exhibit by capturing it on video camera. It is the alchemy of art which can change mud into gold.
Anonymous objects become the main characters of stories where life and death, blood and fear, are present and waiting for the moment to jump on us. Faces and bodies twisted in pain tell us at first hand of horror and suffering. But there is also irony, a look which denounces and questions a situation which really exists in society, which artistic creation is not foreign to, from Johan Grimonprez's air hijackings to Hiroshi Sugimoto's images of the Wax Museum, without forgetting the violence of Daniel Tisdale or the skilled symbolism of Baldessari, Richard Avedon or García Alix. Real or false, truth or lie, once again it is a mistaken dialogue when we place it in the terrain of the photographic image. Today the interests of video, cinema or photography, are above their own actual truthfulness. In the case of this magazine, it is above and beyond the reality of the cases it reflects, transporting us to a world of symbols where the subject is all of us and the particular is universal. Victim, culprit and witness make up, we make up, a triangle whose sides and corners are inseparable. One is justified by and exists because of the other, and the third, with its almost always silent observation and presence, defines the existence of the other two. That witness is the artist, the photographer, he who observes and makes all of us look through his eyes, his observation. Those objects, those scenes, those situations seen or imagined make all these works into sociological documents on a specific type of behaviour, and they structure a whole broad and complicated network of relationships between those who observe and those who are observed, between criminals and victims, and between both these and witnesses, questioning at times the very nature of misdemeanour and crime in terms of social conventions. Horror does not always come from the hand of a dead body, or a
criminal. Sometimes a simple object, a blood stain, becomes the
key to a world of terror, a moment at which fate comes true and
history is transformed. The work of Milagros de la Torre is a paradigmatic
example of this narrative strategy, that way of putting ourselves
right at the scene of the crime in all its complex significance,
with the inevitable presence of the victim and his murderer, using
the same things. Like each and every one of the artists who make
up this gallery of misdemeanours and crimes through which we walk
in search of evidence and witnesses, always remembering the dead
body of the crime, without really knowing whether we are guilty
or we are just dead and now safe. Finally, being dead is the only
way we can still be sure that we are not guilty of all that horror
but rather are the victims of it.
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