Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea

(Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs)

ALLAN SEKULA
Part 1: Dear Bill
My subtitle recaJJ an essay f wrote more than twent)' years ago. in an effort to
unde rs tand the long-he ld belief tha t photography is a "universal language,"
a language legible, as one enthusiastic early American pre report on the daguerreo-
type put it , "in the courts of civilization and the hut of the savage."' The wording
here was quaint , even for its time, as the white- euler republk drove relentlessly west-
ward, indifferent to the way a renegade Seminole, hiding out in the swamp of
Florida, might have responded to the grim-faced daguerreotype portrait of the aged
Indian-fighte r Andrew J ackson. With the advent of neocolonialism, the la nguage
became less quaint, but the naive optimism persisted unabashed. Edward Steichen
recaJled the "rapt auention" \\ri tb which Guatemalan peasants gazed at his traveling
exhibition 'fhP Family of Man, not long after th e 1954 ClA-backed coup 1 hat overthrew
the democraticall y elected government of j acobo Arbenz: "The people in the
audience looked at the pictures and the people in the picLUres looked back at them.
They recognized each other."2
This conceit, that the globalized pictorial archive benignly conscripts ubj ects
as members of a met aphoric "human fami ly,'' now seem quaint in its tw,1. It is
hard (for many Americans, at least} not to look at 11Le Famil)' of '"(em today wil hout a
tinge of nostalgia for an exhau ted liberalism. And ye t isn't this notion of mutual
recognition, or global connectedness and legibility, at the heart of the promise of
t he Internet? This promise gives a humani t glos to the archival collecting or
demographic data, much as Carl andburg did when he ThP Family of
M.an a a " multiplication tab le of living breathing human faces.":l
Communications technologies-photographic reproduction, linked computers-
provide strong tools for the inst rume n raJ channeling of human desire. This
1. All an Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs," in IJholoJ.,nafih)' t\gainst thP Gmin: 1<:.\MLJ.< and Photo
Worh 1973-1983 (Hali fax: Press or the Nova Scotia Colleg( or Art and Design. 1984), pp. 76- 101.
Originally published in Art.Jounwl. Sp1ing t 981.
2. t:dward Steichen, A Uje h1 Photography (New York: Dottblcday. 19G2). n.p.
3. Carl "Prologue." in The l''nmil)' of Man (New York: Simon and SchusteJ". 1955), p. 3.
OC .. TO/JER 102, Fall 2002, PJI. 3-H. 2002 Alltw .'>Pkulfl.
4 OCTOBER
instrumentalism can and indeed must be disguised as a benign expansion of the
field of human inLimacy. This is more true of communication technologies than it
is of other technical forces, since, prenatal maternity excepted, contact between
humans begins with the exchange of signs.
In the age of the Internet, the liberalism of Steichen's humanist credo-
however nawed and compromised at the time-has been deleted, but a socially
atomized version of the old idea remains. As middle-dass American teenagers of
the mid-1960s might have sat around sipping cheap jug wine and listening to Joan
Baez records while perusing the photographs of love, childbirth, and peasants in
the best-selling photographic book of all time, so today they retreat. usually in
solitude, to t heir bedrooms, and log on to the vVorld Wide Web, or to whatevt-r
virtual microcosm eli cits their curi osity.
This brings me up against my title. Recently I wrote a letter to man who
embodies the new paradigm of the global archivist, the facilitator of the new vinual
and disembodied famil)' of man, He's no Steichen, since he refuses the role of the
grand patemalistic editor, preferring in a more veiled manner to manage the global
archive and retrieval system from which any number of pictorial statements might be
constructed. In ellect, he allows his clients LO play in the privacy of their homes the
role of minj-Steichen, perusing vast quantities of images from around the world,
culling freelr-but for a price-with meaning in mjnd.
r made a pojm of typing the letter on an old manual typewriter, and of sending
it anonymously: both neo-Luddirc gestures of sorts. The first gesrure befits a world of
slower communications. In the old da)'S, messages contended with the weather, with
"rain and snow and heat" as the old slogan of the U.S. Post Office would have it.
you can sec, my old-fashioned letter is appended to a documented action that pushes
to an extreme tl1is idea of meteorological resistance to communication:
Novembfr JO, 1999
Dear Bill CatPs,
1 swam past )'Our dream housP the other day, but didn't stop to !tnoth. Franhl)', your
undPrwalPr smsors had me wmried. I would havr lihrd to take a looh al
Lost on the Grand Banks. ft 's a great painting, but, speaking as a friend rwd fellow
citizen, at $JO million )'Ott jJaid too much.
1 II CHEST PRICE i'.VER PAiD FOR AN AMERICAN PAiNTING.'!.'
So why are yo11 so iuterestPd in a picture of two pom lost dory jishemum, momentari!J
high on a swPll, peering into a wall of fog? They are about as high as thry'rr ever going to be,
u111Rss the sea gets uglin Thry art> going to die, you/mow, and it won 'tiJP a pntty rfpath.
And asf01you. Bill, when you'1-e on Llze Net, arl' you lost? Orfonnrl?
/ I nrl thP 1'f!St <1 us-lost orfound-are we on it, or in it?
Yourfrimd
Allan Sellula. Dear Bill
Gates (triptych). 1999. All
images Allan Sekula
unless othenui1e allnbutrti.
6
OCTOBER
The date of the letter, possibly suspcCL in light of evidence yet to be introduced,
underscores the neo-Luddite resort to the manual typewriter, since it marks the
vet; day of show-stopping mass protests ag-ainst the World Trade Organization in
Seattle, the hometown and current residence of Mr. Bill Gates.
A befuddled and sl ightly hysterical New Yorll Times tried to minimize the
significance of this new movement of resistance lo corporate globalization,
suggesting that the WTO talks themselves were inconsequential. The article
had a revealing title, in Seattle":
The administration chose a spectacularly bad moment to pick this
particular fight. With the exception of agriculture, few American
industries have a clear agenda for trade talks now, and many no longer
believe that these long, endless 'rounds" of negotiation are useful
anymore. They involve too many countries, rich and poor, with radically
dilferem interests. In an agf of e-mail, they moue like an aging cmgo ship. The
co-chainnan of the Seattle host commiuee for the talks, Bill Gates, barely
even showed up-and his office is only 12 miles away. [emphasis added)4
In other words, the smart people, who also happen to be the rich people
from the richest country, sailed safely just outside the proverbial twelve mile limit,
unperturbed by the rusting hulk that had lammed unexpectedly into the
Seattle waterfront.
Throughout that week, many among the disobedient crowds in the streets,
indulging in this fool's theater of maritime anachronism, sought to protect their
eyes from tear gas with swim goggles like those worn by the anonymous swimmer
in the photograph. As someone observed, it was a veritable fash ion how, a parade
of rain gear, a liquid circus.
4. David E. Sanger, "Shipwreck in ScaLLle." Nnu lf1rk TiiiU'l, Decem her 5, 1999 .
'11-Jwln. From Waiting for
Tear Gas (slide fJrojection).
{ 999-2000.
BetwePn the Net and the Deep Blue Sea
7
ln an age t hat denies the veq' existence of ociety, to insist on the candal of
the world's increasingly grotesque "connectedness," the hidden merciless gr inding
away beneath the slick superfi cial liquidity of ma.rke ts, is akin to putt ing one elf in
the position of the ocean swimmer, timing one's suoke to the well , turning one's
ubmerged ear with every breath to the deep rumble of stones rolling on the bottom
far below. To insist on t he social is simply tO practice purposeful immersion.
The re on to tear gas serves not only to "control the crowd," that is, to prevent
t he radi cal rede finiti on o f the use-value o f cit y streets, but a lso to produce
thro ugh che mi cal means the exaggerated liquid symptoms of human empathy
and gri ef. This chemically induced parody of extreme human emotion is in itself
a n assert ion of robot ic powe r. The harsh d iscipline of tears, mucus. sudden
asthma leads the citizenry back to the dry regimen of the everyday. Only the markets
are allowed to be fluid.
Meanwhile, while all this is going on, the "citi zen and friend" i e ithe r on the
verge of drowning or about to descend for a desperate commando attack. treadi ng
water with a good kick in the cold dusk a couple of hundred yards from a guarded
sho re, waiting for an answer from the captain of disembodi ed industry. A brie f
self-portrait of t he wimmer: a chilled Kilroy wink at the winking semi ubmerged
eye of t he camera.
inside the gigantic Big House on the shore. it is d ry, watertight, befi tti ng a
highly computerized environment, invisibly robotic in the effi ciency of its hospitality.
There is no need to greet the guest at the door. The butler now resides in the data
bank, programmed for the visitor' taste in music and drink, turning off the light
i n the gue t's wa ke, like the grandmo the rly a tte nda nts in da nk Romania n
museums. Our host, the Disembodi ed Industriali st, waits otistage, a misanthrope
or recluse eith er theatrically timing or neurotically delaying his appearance, like
Captai n Nemo.
Thi time, leaving Jules Verne behind in the old leather-bound library of
industrialism, it's no longer a ma tte r o f the submar ine as the fully appoin ted
home of an exiled band of rebels, but of the private mansion as submarine: the
villa-Nautilus. Verne imagi ned the subma rine as rogue vessel, but the submari ne
now offers itself as one poten tial conference center for t he powerful plotters who
have been driven from the cities by the angr y ci tizens of t he shore. The plotters
lur k like piratesj ust beyond and below the horizon. What minimum safe distance
will the e offi cials from t he rich nati on ta ke from t he polis? Twenty thousand
leagues? Remote orbi t? Perhaps, as they were forced to do in Genoa, they resort to
less drasti c measures a nd retire to a luxury cnlisc ship ancho red in a baiTicacled
port, protec ted from the eyes and shout of the ci tizenry behind hasti ly erected
wall s of cargo containers. Nothing could be more instr uctive than this imp rovised
meta l barrier, fo r it is th ese mundan e and o mni-mobile boxes that make the
global factor-y possible. The esoteric .l ogos of the shipping compani es painted on
the cor-rugated steel bespeak a hidden history of disguised extraterritor ial owner-
ship and bogus na ti ona l sove re ignty, t he ve r y pro to t ype fo r contemporar y
8 OCTOBER
capitalism in general. Behind the me tal curtain. frogme n inspect hull s for
improbable limpet mines, and police provocateurs prepare their costumes. Thi
stage business clears the way for the unfolding of the drama of repression: the
of le thal weapons against protestors, illegal searches and confiscations. brutal
beatings. At this juncture, Jules Verne yields to J oseph Conrad . It's The Secret rlgmt
we should be reading.
Power is now defined as the ability to contai n real and imagi ned E\cn
rliscwsive challenges lO power are reducible to the model of the terror ist threat. ff
the stealth of submarines has served the mili tary, it can also serve the poli ce,
especially as the line blurs between the two. An expen in terror, Nemo sailed outside
the network of communication. signaling to the world onl) through \' iolent collision.
The sophisticated modem submarine is always tuned to low-frequency radio signals
from underground terrestrial comma nd centers, gifted with the remote eyes of
satellites and drones, ever poised to launch cruise missiles against rogue cities, down
t he factory chimney, into the hotel lobby. Out of sigh/, but in /ouch and in llze know: the
very model of the secret agent. Smart, not at all the mere mechanical equi\'alent of a
\engefuJ whal e. That key difference the old rebellious submarine and thf' new
villa-Naut ilus are both refuges from the often angry surface of the sea.
The well-heeled guests, taking a cruise off Hawaii. arc lulled imo complacency
by the smooth and silent underwater functioning of the machine. Awed b) the
impressive display of tluir tax dollars at work, they are shocked by the violence of the
breaking of the surface, the brutal and sudden encounte r wi th boats, swimmers.
denizens of the upper waters, and t he dwellers of the shore. Socicty- L/!i' of
man-suddenly exists again, on the bmrh, in all its fragility. The anguished commander
confesses to his laxity at the periscope: "Oh my God. We've hit- we've hit some kids."
Elaborate and careful and heartfelt apologies must be made, rsjmia/1) lo our friends and
all this without compromising the exonerating ftmction of ofi-iciaJ inquiries.6
Accidents are the price of preparedness. In compensation, our fr iends, whn
were once our nzemie:,, receive special invita tions to t he premiere of the next big
military spectacle fi lm, which weavel> an insipid romantic triangle a round their
long-ago surprise attack on our navy. A few months later the same entertainment
company will , in further compensation, open a second amusement park in their
country, this one devo ted to the romance of the sea:
J apa n, long infalllated with American culture and Hollywood, is ground
uro fo r the globali zati on of the theme park industry ... [emphasis
added] Disney chose to build its first sea-theme park because of the
Japanese affinity for the ocean and marine life. and the site is surrounded
by water.?
5. essay wa$ completed in late August 200 I.
6. "( :ollisio n at Sea: The Commander Speaks: DaulitltJ, NBC News, Apr il 2:1, 200 I.
7. Richard Venier and Ma rk Magni('r, "Dim('\ Sea I> Joi ning W<l\C ur Parks Rull iug
Abroad." / .o1 Angele Tum1. juh 30, 2001.
Betrueen the Net and the Deep Blue Sea 9
Anyone who has wimessed the final scene of Shohei Imamura's 1998 film Kn11zo
Sensei ( D1: Alwgi) will under stand something different about this unthinking
connection between "ground zero'' and the "affinity for the ocean." I will be polite
rnough not to give away thP del nils.
Meanwhile, off PParl Harbor, the re latives of the vict ims are fe1Ti ed by the
solicitous Americans to the site of the inking. They peer disconsolately into the
blue tropical water, their grief photographed at a "respectful " distance with tele-
photo lenses. All of thi official concern i consistent with a geopolitical object ive,
the lifting of constitLJtional restrictions on the f'om1er enemy' discreet but powerful
war machine. While apologizing, don' t fail to remind the J apanese that for now
lhf'ir SI'CU1-ily is in our hands. But in the long term, Japan will function yet again as a
military power in the Pacifi c, agai nst the v a ~ t new-old Chinese e nemy to the EasL A
not-so-secret key to this diplomacy is that neither ally feel compelled to apologize
for the atrocities committed in the last war, neither for
1
anjing nor for Hiroshima.
And the submarines of the other more recent old enemy, do they still lurlt?
(The newest and most advanced Russi an model has proven to be disastrously
unreli able. Here also, grieving rel atives arc photographed peering down into the
waves, a colder and darker arctic sea this time, the photographers close and
intrusive, lilte fnrnil)') Are most of thei r submarine merely rotting radi oactive
hulks, maybe rented out from Lime to t ime by cash-starved officers for the filming
of pornographic movies? Or, even more frightening for the Americans. arc
unemployed Russian naval architects ecretly working for criminal cartels, building
an undcrwater drug-smuggling fl eet, as suggested by a strange discovery in a
no ndescript warehouse outside of Bogota? Refusing to di vulge the top-secret
answers to these questi ons, npon whirlt so murh rongrP.uional ji.mrling dejmuls, a n
American sonar pecialistlaments, "]loved the Cold War. I didn't want it to end."
Far fro m the ea and undergro und, the documents acc umul ate. The
overwhelming desire fo r dryness extends to the Disembodied Industrial ist's recem
acquisiti on of a salt mine in Pennsylvania to function a reposiLOry for all the
world's important photographs, a category that includes, for a few months at least ,
the piclltres of the grievi ng relatives. There, deep inside a mountai n, is the new
tomb for older and less popul ar photographs of anonymous citizens of the last two
centuri es, photographs that , not having been deemed worthy of digital rescue
from the moldy or brittle materiality of paper, are not offered fo r downloadable
sale on the Internet. The selection proceeds slowly and par imoniously, according
to a logic of fame, celebri ty, candal, and greatest hits. Some pictures sell , and others
do n ' L A picwre may be important enough to pre erve, but that doesn ' t mean
anyone gets to ce it.
This much can be said of some of the photographs that can be conjured up
e lectronically, the 2.1 mill ion of the larger inert archive of 65 million. Many depict
submarines and submarine acti ons, including a surprising number of pictures of
torpedoed ships taken through periscopes. But overall, the submarine archive i.
weak on history; there i a reproduction of one of Leonardo' drawings (attributed
10 OCTOBER
to "da Vinci ") and a few pictures of nineteenth-century prototypes and early U-
boats. The bulk of the material is taken from the copious files of contemporary
military-industri al stock photographers. Under "transportation," the subcategory
"most popular" offers a low-aerial head-on view of an American nuclear submarine
breaking the surface of the sea. This picturC' can be purchased for "personal usc"
and sent as an electronic greeting card to friends. which suggests something of
the moral economy of military Keynesian ism. Pictures of whales are also popular.
This may be no more than an apparent antithesis, since the archive is, by its very
nature, undialectical. As the web page advises, with cheerful techno-economic
optimism: 'jump start your creat ivity wi th pictures."
The o rders pour in from the website, resurrecting over and over the joll}'
submarines that leap like happy fish and the scanned picture or mighty swinging Babe
Ruth launching only one or his many home rnns. Other gestures, workaday gestures
ofless famous individuals, the anonymous histOJ)' of the times. are sal ted a\\".:1)' in filing
cabinets in the diml y lit corridors of the mine, tended by a skeleton crew. These
piCLures wait like slabs of dried cod for the revivifYing water of the gaze, for the laser
beam of the scanner. Their rediscovery is unlikely. Researchers arc forbidden to enter.
Specialists in conservation applaud the care and thoroughness of the operation.
And ye t, during a long drought in the usually rainy Pacific Northwest , the
Disembodied Industrialist a nd hi s family and household retainers arc-one
hopes-embarrassed by reports in the local press that their water consumpti on
exceeds that of any other household in the state of Washington. h is hard to
escape the liquid requirements of the human organism. And indeed it is hard. in
the city of Seattle, taking a taxi from t he airport for example, not to hear stories
from ex-gamblers who have taken their chances on the go-lor-broke halibut boats,
or aboard monster trawlers in the Bering Sea. In the lull of a traffic jam, one hand
gestures with mock indifference at the fishhook scar in the palm of the other.
Does a memory of this remote everyday world. this !>ally Sralllc, surfacing from
the good old days when he used to take taxis, come to the Disembodied Industrialist
as he communicates with his curators o n t he Ooor of the aucti on house?
Part 2: !national f..xuberance
Thinking back to the landscapes and seascapes of a cent.ury ago, wi th
Winslow Homer we see a profound American turn toward the sea, consistent with
a burgeoning imperial but also with American restlessness and idealism,
with the earlier literary examples of Herman Me lville and Richard Henry Dana.R
Consider D. H. Lawrence's assessment from 1923, looking back at those two seafarer
writers of the "AI11eT ican renaissance" of the 1840s and '50s. For Lawrence,
American writing lacked any tradition-bound sense of blood and soil. thus avoiding
8. An earl ier version of this erl iou wa> lirst presented as pan of 1he Third Annual !an Bum
Memorial L-ecture, a11lw Art Gallen of New South Wales. S'clncy. Australia, Ma} 1998.
Between the Net and the /)ePfJ Bluf Sea
J J
the oppressive legacy of feudal land right and 1 he mire of European nationalism.
(Having ch osen wri ters whose major works were writlen befo re the slaughter of
the Civil War, Lawrence avoided comrary evidence, though his argument allowed
impli citly for an Ame ri ca n capacity to go to war over abstract principl es.)
Lawrence's insight into American writing and the sea \ \lru echoed later by Gi ll es
Dcleuze and Feli x Gmutari, who spoke of the sea's offering of a l inf of flight to
Melville, just as Lawre nce, a romantic of a n earlie r late-romantic generation, aw
in the passion for the sea an expressio n of democratic ideali m, a utopian longi ng
for a perfect Lawrence. a secret aristocrat, mocked Dana' o utrage at the
flogging of seafarers. It took another American writer, t he poet Charl es Olson, to
come up with a coun ter-reading of t he sea's connection to American business
civiliza tion, and to see Melville as t he critical prophet of that connenion:
o if you want to know why Melvill e nailed us in t\-loby-Dich, consider
whal ing. Consider whali ng as FRO TIER, and I D STRY A product
wanted, men got il: big businc s. The Pacific sweatshop.to
This was Olson writing in 1947, looking back a century to revive Melville's radicalism
wit h a ren ewed prescience, for the capitalist line of progress had not yet been
traced from the Pacific sweat hops of the whale hip and copra plantation to the
lines of the computer and apparel and toy industries, or the modernized
indentured ser vi tude aboard the containerized vessels that bring the e produCLs
to market.
But what can Winslow Homer 's mode rn but not ye t modernist painting
mean for Mr. Bill Gates of Mi crosoft , and for the faceless virtual power that he
extols? The who le point of the information highwa)' is that o ne is never lost.
Techni cal command r equires const ant orientation within the global matrix of
information fl ows. Through his Corbis agenC)' founded in 1989, Gates want to
coll ect. through reproducti on, all of the images in the world. This is a proprietary
and profit-hungry ambition; he wams to conLrol the t raffi c in images, and for this
rights to reproducti ons are sufftcicnt. He wants to own certain images as originals,
however. What is the status of these select paintings, with the ir aura of uniqueness,
their direct connection to the artist's hand, to the larger archive of this cyber-
iconographic omnivore?
A recent visit to the Corbis website, sear ching under the heading "Winslow
Homer," yielded the following results: flfty-t hree pictures for "personal use" and
nine ty-seven for "professional " or licen eel usc. The maj ority arc marine paintings.
F'or $3.95, the home customer can download a watercolor, West Indian Divers, say,
9. D. H. Lawrence, Studirf 111 Amtn-ican l.ilrmlw'l' [ 1923] (New York: PcngLLi n, 1977).
Oelcu1.e and Felix Cuauari, A 7/wuwnd l'taiPrltll": Capit alism and Sfhi:t.ofJhrenifl, trans. Brian Massumi
(Miuncapolis: UnivcriL}' of MinnesoLa, 1987) , pp. 186-89.
10. Charles Olson, C:o/1 Mt I shmael f 1947) in CoiiPrtrd Prose of Clwrl1 Obou. ed. Donald Allen and
Beruamin Friedlander (Bcrkclc}: Univcrsi Ly of California Press, 1997), p. 26.
12
OCl' OBER
for use as a greeting card, a pictorial gift for the friend about to embark on a
Caribbean cruise. Indeed, the entire area of t he website devoted to personal
picture-shopping treats the consumerist work of purchasing and downloading
images as if it were a seaside vacation, a fishing trip, or boating excursion:
Choose your dream yacht and experience t he joy of sailing all-year-
round .... Reel in one of our favorite fishing prints .... Transport yourself
with a colorful, calming print of one of our scenic lakes.''
The archi ve, wit h its presumably watertight bulkheads between iconic categories,
is offered up as a space of vicarious liquid immersion, dry-land two-dimensional
thalassa therap)'
For a ll that, Lost on thP Orand Banks is nowhere to be found. Despite the
communi tarian promises o f the Web-the archive of evnything for everybody-
unalienable private property asserts itself in t he last insta nce. Rodchenko's
revoluti onary call "Soviet ci tizens, photograph and be photographed!" can now be
updated: "Everyone a picture resem-cher, but keep off the grass!"
But the Seaule cabdriver with the fishhook-scarred hand is never far away.
And the semantic bulkheads leak, seriously, especially if one is careless about limiting
the terms of one's search. A look under the heading 'Jackson Pollock" in the
professional archives yields over five results. There are over two hundred
piCLures of Andrew Jackson, including the daguerreotwe by Matthew Brady with
which we began our s1ory (H-J 024498). The image trail leads yet again to a nuclear
submarine, the USS Andrew]achso11, missile-launch technicians poised at the controls
( RK 001223). There are 744 pictures of Michael .Jackson, before and after his
remarkable change of face, and a whole host of other Jacksons from the worlds of
sports. entertainment, politics. For all the global pretensions, the selection has a
parochial American fl avor. more or less like a file of picture clippings from high
school history textbooks and PeojJle magazine. A mere twelve are reproductions or
installation views of paintings by Jackson Pollock, six are depictions of the actor
Ed Harris, who portrayed Pollock in a recent film, two arc images of two very
different fishes, polutchius fwllnchius and gmlus pollachius, and a full forty-nine make
up a bracing reportage on factory trawlers fishing in the Bering Sea for one of the
two, commonly known as pollack, the not-so-secret raw material for what the seafood
industry labels as "imi tation crab." The website visitor is assured by the digital
archivists at Corbis that the Seattle cabdriver's former comrades, clad in bright
orange rough-weather gear-the beuer to be spotted should they be swept over-
board in icy '"'<Hers-have all signed model releases, thus allowing them to grace
the pages of c01-porate reports or advertisements for sundry commodities likely to
be associated with the rigors of fishing on the high sea<;.
Every image appears o n the compute1 screen overlaid wi th the antitheft
protection of the Corbis "watermark," which resembles nothing so much as a
1.1 . hLtp: / / www.corbis.com
Be/ween lhr NPI and lhf' Deep BluP Sea
13
satellite-radar view of a hurri cane . We are ente ring the terriLOry of Borgesian
delirium here, and it is only the narrow instrumentalism of the picture re earcher,
targeted like a crui e missile on this ot- tha t category, that prevents a dive t hrough
the eye of the storm into the abyss, lhf' deejJ, f ull Jalhomfive.
Winslow Homer was working on a pecifi c equence of image on the orth
At lanti c fi she r y o f the la te ninet eenth cenwry, painting about work. In a n
exhibition o riginating at the Nati o nal Calle r y of Art in Washingto n, Ni colai
Cikovsky and Frankli n Kelly reconstruct a narrative sequence, moving from the
inshore hening neet LO the deep-sea hali blll and cod rtsheries on the t reacherous
Grand Banks of Newfoundland, and from tranquil , product ive waters to looming
disaster on the high seas. l2
The three pictures, The HnTing Nel, The Fog Warning, and Lost on the Grand Bnnks
were all painted at the same ize in 1885, and they were shown together at the 1893
World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. You can see the matching of the volLUne
occupied by the dories, despite their shifting orientation on the waves. The impUcit
triptych is a taxono mic series-the omnivorous and plea ing seriality of the fi sh
market, with herring displayed here, nounder over there, and at the next tall, big
green codfish, jaw agape, wait ing for the baking pan: the p eudo-di clo ure of the
agora. But it is also at the same time a narrative equc ncc, in \,hich the hidden
brutality of work on and against the sea is revealed. The narrative of doomed work
tugs tragically downwat-d on at the buoyant illustrative productivism oF the series.
12. Nicolai a ncl Fn 111klin Ke ll y, IVi 11slow I fomer (New I Iaven: Yale Universit y Press, 1995),
pp. 226-30.
Winslow 1-/omer: Lost on Lhe Craud Banks. 1885.
14
OCTOBER
Being lost in a dot-yon lhc Grand Banks was the dangerous outcome of specific
organization of extractive industry in hazardous waters. The lostncss depicted
becomes purely metaphysical in its passage into Gates's possession. He llnds the
painting in order to lose its specificity: the depiction of lostness stands now as
the antithesis of his instrumemal program or total global connectedness. This is
the otherness, and nonidentity, that makes the painting into a privileged aestheti c
in Gates's hands, into uuly fnivate property. If 1 were tempted to connect this
to a larger self-consciousness of contemporary eli tes, the finding of' the painting of
losmess in order to aesthetically isolate losmess from the tyrannical of
connectedness is consistent with a number ofways in which Lhe sea retun1s, in both
romantic and gothic guise, to late modernity. The promotion of cntise ships. the
making of films like Watenuorlrl (1995) anrl Titanic (1997), Bill Gates's purchase of
Lost on the Grand Banh:,: these are all related. We are all invited to fose ounelves at sea.
For most of us, this amounts to chump change in the supermarket of imaginary
danger. But my guess is that members of financial elites, especially those investing
in the intangibles of the "new economy; imagine themselves in a special way to be
venturing forth on stormy seas, lifted high by the irrational exuberance of the swells,
only to risk being dashed down, disastrously, beneath the waves. In their bunkered
isolation from the rest of us. lhc image of the solo sailor is paramount. And to the
exrcnt thai broad sectors of the middle classes are being asked to partake on a
lesser scale in the same risks, that image of the isofato is paradoxically rationed out
for mass consumption. Market Ideology demands that everyone sail alone.
This much can be said about the visual field of rhe ocean S\vimmer, or the
rower in a small boat upon the open sea: in moderate to heavy seas, one is either
low in the trough of the wave, or high on the bank of the swel l. On the moving.
folding surface then, fluctuati ng conditions of seeing, vertiginous, lhen enveloped,
closed in by a shifting, sliding slope of water. Winslow Homer gives us this vantage
point: not omnisciently above the waves, but high on the swell, as if sitt ing in
another dory like the one we see in the foreground, better able to see what the
fishermen in the boats depicted are straining to see, rhe moving haven of the
schooner in the fog-sh rouded distance. Nonetheless, we sec effortlessly. in a state
of temporal suspension, what they see only n cet ingly, what wi ll be obscured
momentarily. We sec their danger. And it is theirs, not ours, since they are at sea,
and we are looking at a painting with our feet planted on the ground. T he
sympathetic bond imagined is one of civic concern, a queasy, morally trOllbling
challenge to gustatory automatism.
There is a line, then, that connects Homer's painting with the social documen-
tary photography of Lewis Hine, two decades later, and even with contemporary
documentar-y writers like Sebastian Junger, whose book The Perfect Storm (1997)
narrates the conte mporary working-class world of a New England fishing port and
the loss with all hands of the swordfishing boat Andrea. Gail on the same Grand
Banks in 1991. Junger appropriately begins his talc with an epigram from Walter
Scott: "It's no fish ye're buying, it 's men's lives."
Between thf' Nf'f and the Df'tp Bluf' Sea 15
Whm I wrote these l ines, Junger 's book had not yet been t ran lated into a
t utgid a nd over wr o ugh t cine ma ti c pa ta bl c o n the cri sis of ma le ide n t ity.
directed by Ubootmeister Wolfgang Peter e n. To unde rst and some thing of the
way the sea "returns" as pure media simul atio n, li ste n to this recollcCLio n by
J ohn calc. the film' director of photogr aphy:
I decided that we would probabl y go to Ca pe Town , olllh Afri ca,
grab a couple of look-a-like lo ng-liners, wrap the came ras in ga rbage
bags and get out thee amongst iL. They looked at me Li ke L was on
drugs and . aid, "No, my hoy-think Stage 16 a t Warner Bro the rs.'' I :{
So instead of re nt ing out the fri ghteningly decrepit Chinese fi shing boats t hat
can be seen taking on pr ovi sions n ext to Cape Town 's pe r versely gentrifi ed
water front, one of the world's largest ound-, tage filming tanks had tO be excavated
in the Burbank studio fl oor. Above the ta nk, a verti cal blucscreen allowed for
uperimposi ti o n of the di gital storm. This Oz-like curtain of df'PjJ digit al bl ue was
larger than a football fi eld. Despi te the DP's rueful lamcm for lost low-budget
opportunities in the no tori ous seas off the Cape of Good r lope, expensive artifi ce
is discussed in t he film industry pre . as if it were an autocht honous triumph of
the technological sublime, unrelated to nature as suc h. As the DP' stoq tells
u , Holl r wood isn't rea lly interested in pursuing the chall e nge posed by fi ct io n
ftl ms actually hot on rough eas , such a Pi erre Schoendoerffer's lament for
French impe ri alis m, Le Crabe Tambour ( 1976), phoLOgraphed by Raoul Coutard .
And ye t it' uot as if brilli ant lilms about the sea have not been sh ot e nt ire ly on
soundst ages: think of Hi tchcock's Lifeboat ( 1944). But the simple claustrophobi c
fra udule nce o r Hitch cock's approach is also beyond t h e compre he nsion o f
today's mega-directo r s.
Thf' Petfect Storm is ympLOmatic i n mo re ways th a n o ne , a nd li ke a
hypochondriac, it bor rows its symptoms from o ther films. The blueprint fo r its
expensive simula ti on of the sea is t aken from .Ja mes Cameron's e make of the
Titrmir story, a film of na rrative triviality and d ry fraudul ence bolste red n ot
only by the painstaking aucti on- house amhen t icity of Edwardian conspicuous
consumpti on , but the director's her oic desren t to th f' wrf'rk in a hired Russian
submcr ibl e. The po int-of-vi ew of the film is ultima te ly t hat of the treasure
hunt, cleverly disavowed in the film's final gesture of tossing the world s bigge t
diamond back into the deep. Thus Tit anic is about nothing but the bracing discipline
of t he box-ojfire, whi ch bespeaks the d espera te institutional nar cissism of the
cm c rtainmc nt industry, its inabil it y to speak o r a nythi ng but the econo mi c
conditi ons of its own existence, in what amounts to an unconscious parody of
modernist Love, rebellion, death, and the sea are mere pretext
The sea is emptied or meaning. Or is it?
13. Quou::d iu Pauli ne Rogers, "Hell and High Wa1e r," l nlt'mfJi ional Cinrmalogmplwr; GuiU/ Mogra.inP.
J ul r 2000. p. 21.
16 OCTOBER
Pnrt 3: TITANIC's wake
Early in J 997, I photographed the Mexican film set for Titanic, as part of an
earlier prqject called Dead Letter Ofjirl' ( 1998), a titl e owed obliquely to I Iem1an
Mcville's Barlleby lhl' Srrivener (1853). Banleby'. myste rious refusal to work may
have begun with the psychic trauma of hi job as a clerk sorti ng
undeliverable mail. Rereading the story, I suddenly imagined that it was difficult
and even spiritually chall enging to send a simple letter the short distance from
Tijuana to San Diego, even if Hollywood movie-making. a much more cxpcn.siye
way of sending a message, had already crossed the border.
Seeking to profit from lower Mexican wages, Twentieth Cemury Fox buil t th<'
seL next to the poor fishing vi llage of Popotla, on the Baja California coast about fort}
miles south of the U.S. border. This explains the long list of Mexican names that
rapidly by in small type during the film's final credits. The production faci lity
featured t.he largest freshwater filming tank in the world, bigger even than the one
built later in Burbank to film The Pf'lfrrt Stonn, Mexican extras Ooated for many hours
in the chilly playing the parts of anonymous pao;sengers on theit wa} to
an icy grave. The neighboring village, just to the south of t he walls and guard
towers of the set, has no running water. Efnux from the filming tanks lowered
the salini ty of the coastal tide pools, damaging the tradi tional mussel-gathering
livelihood of the villagers. and giving rise to vociferous and sustained protests b )'
1t bot'l' nnd rixhl: Stlwla. Tilamoet and
Popotla (diptych). From Dead Lettct Office. /997.
Belwt>en the Nt>l mlll thJ> Deep Blue Sea
17
the fisherme n and their families. A portion of the ct has now been convened
into a t heme park devo ted to the making of the Titanic tory. I haven't visited,
but presumably the waJls between the set and the fi shing village ar e sti ll topped
with shards of broken glass.
The lugubr ious arrogan ce of Titanic intrigues me. Is it a symptom of
some thing la rger? We peer morbidly into the vortex of industrialism's early
nosedive into the abyss. The film absolves us of any obligation to remember the
that foll owed. Quick as a wink, cartoon-like, the angel of history is flattened
between a wall of steel and a wall of ice. It's an easy, premature way to mourn a
bloody century.
Or maybe, mo re in nocently, the movie is a bellwether of good-hearted
American neoliberalism. When J ames Cameron accepted the fir t of his Academy
Awards for the film, he thrust his Oscar statuette into the overheated air above the
podium and bellowed out a line from the rilm: '"King of the world." (Later, looking
slightly abashed after receiving what seemed to be a scathing glance From his wife,
he asked for a moment of silence for the long-dead pa<>sengers and crew. ) Curiously,
Cameron borrowed his triumphal line from Benjamin Bri tten's 1951 opera based
on Melville's novell a Billy Budd. Budd innocently exul ts, even as he is shanghaied
and set upon a path that leads to the yardarm. Could it be that Cameron secretly
w.tnted to remake Billry Budd, or that he thinks of him elf as the "handsome sailor"
even more than he identifi e with the cocky young anist played by Leonardo
Above and right: Sekuw. Bilbao (difJtycli).
From TITANIC's wake. 1998-1999.
DiCaprio? ft's a strange thought: Melville's (and Britten's) bleak, womenless, and
covertly homoerotic parable-a tale of goodness flawed, evil intractable, a guilt-
ridden captain-reworked to attract a repeat audience ofprepubescenL girls.
Five or ten years ago, I was coufident that the sea had disappeared from the
cognitive horizon of contemporary elit.es.t1 Now I'm not so sure. The sea returns,
often in gothic guise, remembered and forgouen at the same time, always linked
to death, but in a strangely rlisembodied way. One can no longer be as direct as
Jules Michelet was in his 1861 book La MPr, which begins with a blunt recognition
of the sea's hostility, its essential being for humans as the "clement of asphyxia."
And yet Bill Gate buys Winslow Homer's morbid Lost on the Grand Banks [or more
money than anyone has ever paid for an American painting. Frank Cchry builds a
glistening titanium museum that resembles both a fish and a ship on the derelict
site of a shipyard driven into bankruptcy by Spanish government policy, launching
a new touristic future in the capital of one of the world's oldest maritime cultures.
It was the Basques, after all, who probably discovered America, but they preferred
to keep a secret and return without competition to the rich cod-fishing grounds or
the North Atlantic.
I ..f. Sec Allan Sekula. Full .\tory (Dusseldorf: Richter \'erlag. 1995).
Frank Cehry's Guggenheim Muse um for Bi lbao is <1 Los Angeles export
product, a leviathan of California postmodcrnity beached on the derelict riverfrom
of the economicall y depressed maritime-industrial capital of the Basques. A5 such,
it marks the first move in a proj ected campaign of economi c "revitalization," tied,
as one might expect , to land specuJation and tourist promotion. Kurt Forster. who
is Cehry's biggest defe nder, and who has stressed the protean, vitaJist aspect or the
architect's fi h-buildings, has gone to some length to exempt Cehry's project from
t hese sort of nil gar and dismaJ economic associations:
[Beginning] with his buildings of the 1980s Frank Cehry returned to
an architecture po e ed of powerful corporeal quaJities. He does not
think of t he volumes of his buildings within the confines of abstract
space (which is also the space of economic ); rathe r, he engages these
volumes in imimate relationships with one anOLher.lfi
The bad o bj ects here arc legion: abstractio n, economics, and by implica tion,
bureauc racy a nd mod e rnism. The crypto-baroqu e promise of redemptive
15. Kun Forstt:r. "11)e Museum a' Civic C'..atalyst ," in Fr(mk 0 . Gehry: M usro Gnggmheim Bi Umo (Sillllj:,'<trl:
Edition Axel Menge,, 1998), p. 10.
20
OC'TOBER
embodiment-"corporeal qualities and "intimate relationships"-is not unlike
that ofrered by the 'irtual world of the Internet.
One can of course travel a short distance along the Bilbao riverfront to the big
city fish market, and see there evidence of the prodigious Spanish appetite for the
creatures of the sea. Here the corporeal qualities of the fish that inspire Gehry are
depressingly linked to the abstract space of economics: boxes of mnlta.a, previously
caught in great quantity off the Iberian coast, now imported from Namibia.
But like James Cameron making sure that the diamond is tossed back into
the drink, Forster wants to disa,ow and affirm the economic at the same time:
Cehr y "anci his coll aborators made use of programs that were originatly developed
for the design of airplane fuselagcs."IG The fish is also an airplane, as the frequent
references found throughout recent writing on Gehry to titanium as an "aerospace
material" attest. The implied association of titanium cladding with the skin of
advanced aircraft is somewhat inaccurate. since titanium is typically used internally,
alloyed with steel for jet-turbine blades that must both be lightweight and capable
high temperatures. In fact , the most radical inno\'ations in aircraft
skin design have come through plastic-polymer composites, which are crucial to
so-called "stealth" technology. In fact, titanium has become a nutametal, a metal
that reft>rs to high technology metallurgy, especially in luxury consumer products
like German-designed. high-end auLOfocus cameras.
For Forster, as for Cehry, the main breakthrough at the level of architectural
practice is the collapse of the laborious mediation between drawing and executed
design. On this point, Forster waxes utopian: "The age-old distinction between the
hands that desigu and the instmments that execute has been overcome."li I would
be delighted to see him deliver this argument with a straight lace to the construction
engineers and iron workers who painstakingly translate the plan into the skewed
geometry of the steel structure that is ultimate)) obscured beneath the glistening
convoluted surface. Forster b) lauding the Guggenheim Bilbao as "a
monumem to the productive capacities that are now at our disposal.''lil In other
words: a monument to the absolute hegemony of intellectual labor afrordcd by
con 1 pu ter-based manufacturing.
IIaving photographed Gehr) 's building, I wan! to venture another sort of
reading. For all of its acclaimed "\'italism,'' its primal links to the doomed carp
sMmming in Cehry 's grandmother's bathtub in Toronto, the Guggenheim Bilbao is
more accurately likened to a gigamic light modulator. It introduces a new level of
specular reflectivity into a rather drab cityscape previously restricted to tertiary hues.
In effect, what it imports to Bilbao is an a<"sthetical ly controlled. prismaticalh
concentrated ver<;ion of the high specularity characteristic of the Los Angeles
cit)SCapc, the random and ubiquitous presence of shiny sut faces, glass and metal
ricocheting sunl ight in an inhuman, migraine-inducing glare. For this benign and
16. Ibid .. p. I I.
17. Ibid.
ll't lhicl.
Between the Net and tlte Veep Blue Sm 21
restrained ver ion of American aerospatial enlightenment , for thi lighthouse and
control tower far upriver from the sea, the Basques, who pay a the bills for the
museum, arc entitl ed to feel grateful. Thus fa r, there a r e no Guggenheims
planned for Hanoi. Belgrade. Baghdad, or Basra. For insight into the less-restrained
\'er sion o f Amer ican aerospat ia l enli ghte nment , L advi c tlt c read er to sec
Hartmut Bitomsky's new fi lm B-52 (200 I), about the venerable gray workhor e of
the Pentagon.
By coincidence. one notices a certain corrosive potentiaL Ln the contai ner
transfer terminal on the downriver flank of the museum it large cyli nde rs of
hydrofluoric acid, the extremely nasty agent used to dissolve and etch titanium and
i ts a ll oys. This powerful oxi dant is always a handy chemical for the aerospace
industry, since it can cat away at metal without causing the heat fa tigue associated
wi th traditio nal machining. The touristic postcard i smudged mmewhat by this
reminder of Bil bao's lingering indu tr ial kin hip with e\'eso and Bhopal. But there
is no need to entertain apocalyptic scenarios: much to the a rchitect' dismay, the
Guggenheim's titanium cladding is aJ rcady beginning to tain and darken from
exposure to the relentless marine atmosphere of the Bay of Bi scay. Up clo e, the
buil ding is beginning to resemble the wreck of an old bomber, stained with the
greasy residue ofbumt kerosene fuel.
Given this protean litany of resemblances, we can revise another old slogan,
this one from a staple of 1950s American children's television: "ll's a bird, it's a
p lane, it 's . .. Supermuseum!"
Part 4: Refloating The Family of Man
So maybe we should be looking back, not to The Family of Man, but to Edward
Steichen 's earli er wartime project for the U.S. Navy, Power in the Pacific, with its
intense concentration on the cacophonous batt le-platform of the aircraft carrier.
Given what has already been suggested about t he military-Keynesian proclivities of
the Corbis collection, this would make ense. A seriou. reminder of the wartime work
also brushes agai nst the current tendency to resurrect teichen as a celebrity and
fashion photOgrapher, which subordinates his global humanism and his patriotic
propaganda to a more contemporary and "fashionable" idea of the proper mission of
aesthetically ambitious photography. This fashion idea i pervasive in the art world,
and indeed can blithely take in even the most cutthroat and coven fonns of military
cxpcrti e, as evidenced by Vanessa Beecroft 's recent performance pieces featuri ng
U.S. Navy EAL commandos standing at attention in the ir dress whites.
Nonetheless, The Fami(v ofMan is more germane, since its humanism provides a
prototype for the new post-Cold War "human rights" rationale for military
intervention. The exhibition, wi th its claims to globality, its libe ral humanism, its
utopian aspirat ions for world peace through world law, can be reread n ow in the
context of the contemporar y discour se of "globalization," the discourse being
advan ced by the promoters of an integrated global capitalist economic system. The
22
OCTOBER
official American perspective on this system is that it requires lhe continued
vigilance and command of a single global polit ico-military superpower, which
always acts in the healthy interests of the system at large and is thus itself more or
less exempt from any overarching concept of world law. In effect, the American
state claims for itself the same operational freedom in world affairs as that
demanded by multinational corporations. This is an inherentl y unstable and
even illogical discourse. For example, the old Dutch corporate doctrine of 1he
"freedom of the seas," so crucial to the development of mercantile capitalism, is
quickly invoked by U.S. State and Defense Department planners when the supposed
threat of the Chinese navy is being countered, even though the low-wage Chinese
economy is crucial to the global factory system, and much of Chinese export
production is capitalit.ed through Taiwan. considered to be the principal target
o[ the Chinese threat. A scenario in which American carrier ba ule groups,
assisted by the Japanese, protect Chinese-crewed container ships bearing
Chinese-made goods from torpedoes launched by Chinese submarines-a perverse
replay of the Battle of the North ALiantic-would strain the imagination of a
Tom Clancy, but I confess to not being up on my reading of that proli1ic and
wildly imaginative writer of geopolitical airport novels.
Speaking only of the discursive level. it is clear that economic questions arc
now paramount in the way that political questions were paramount in the 1950s.
When I wrote about Thf' Family of Man twenty years ago, my O\'erall aim was to
locate universal language claims for photography within the historical context o[
universalized commodit)' exchange. Indeed, the homology between the function
o[ t he photograph as a universally exchangeable "abstract equivalent" of its
worldly referent and the circulation function of paper currency had already been
recognized in the 1850s by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Today, the all-encompassing
ngime of the market , the global imperium of the d i s ~ r w l scienre, seems all the
more pertinent to the discussion of archi,es and culture. As Margaret Thatcher so
cynically and triumphantly put it , "There is no alternative."
On looking back again at The Family of Man, I was reminded that I had
seen and noted but not yet fulJy comprehended that the exhibition and book
are rife wi t h images of aquatic immersion: "The final photograph in the book
is quite literally a depiction of the oceanic state, a picture . .. of churning surf."
But at the same rime an image is offered of a world territorialized and exploited
on strictly terrestrial lines. The Farnily of Man gives us an earthbound workaday
world, so that even fishermen are depicted not as voyagers upon the high seas but
as peasants afloat, seemingly never far from the litloral spaces of the shore. For
example, consider the striking absence of the remarkable work of the French
photographer Anita Conti, an absence as striking as the fact of its current
rediscovery by African scholars. There is no comparison between the rigor and
intimacy and sensitivity to violence of her views of Senegalese shark fishermen, or
of French cod fishers working the Newfoundland Banks, and the easy Alfred
Eisenstaedt photO of Gold CoasL boatmen chosen by Steichen. ll1e key to her best
Detail of frrmlispim
jJhoto [,y Pol ErtKii.\h
for The lca mil)' of
Man. 19;5.
work is her discovery of a poim-of-view closer to the fi sh than to t he fishennen. By
contrast, Thf Family of i\lan reserves the image of immer ion for homo ludms and for
the ultimate utopian telos of the stot-)' of humanity. HI
The exhibiti on toured the world, thanks to sponsorship b)' the United tate
Informa ti o n Agency and corporate cosponsors such as Coca-Cola. For all its
globe-trotti ng. Tltf Family of Nfnn failed to register the acLUal dias pori c movement
of populations-largely via crowded maritime transport-in the decade after the
end of World War Tl . Think or the mass migrat ion of ro rrne r British colonial
s ubjects from Indi a and t he Caribbean to Britain in search or livelihood. The
invisibility of these migrants is all the more st arlling when one realizes that the sfa
of ltumanil)' depicted on the endpapers of the deluxe clothbound edit ion or the
book is in tact an apparently aU-white, all-English crowd witncssi g the coronati on
of Elizabeth II , a ritual not exact!)' linked to human progres or to concepts of
cit izen hip. This is the family of man, not the rights of man. Tlte invisible short
people in this crowd , noating beneath the surface of this sea, co,1ld be immigrant
children. But how can we know? All we can sec are their handmade periscope ,
searching ror a submarine view of the young queen.
Leo Lionni 's ah tract design for the cloth cover of the same edition bespeaks
an even more programmatic adherence to earthly :md racial boundaries: a more or
le constructivist maplike an-ay of embossed metallic pigmcntatiott am pies. ranging
from black to silver white through an intermediary zone of golds, and grays,
all floating in a sea of blue, as iJ the world were one contiguous continental land-
and each race its own nation, stepping fonh into the globaJ marketplace of
neocoloni a li sm with its own coinage. Li o nni gives us the prototype of the
postlite rate, unive rsally legible transnational corporate logos that would emerge
19. Sec Auila Crmli: / .(1 driiiiPrifl(/ mrr. wit h text' b)' Anita Con ti .md l.alllcnl Cojcun (Paris: Editions
Revue :-loire. 200 I ).
24 OCTOBER
more than twemy years later. Il is no accident that Lionni was the chief graphic
designer for Fortune magazine in the 1950s, where precisely Lhis fusion of de-radical-
ized constructivism and the businessman's imperative had a lineage suetching back
to the 1930s. Hi an-ay of rectangles and u-apezoids also gives us an absu-acted image
of the mode of installation of the exhibition itself, of the comparative and contigtt-
ous visual en emble derived from a process of archival selection. By implication, the
archi ve itself is t reated as a kind of earthly, mineral resource, to be mined for
meaning, pointing the way to Lhe Corbis salt mine in the mountai ns of Pennsylvania.
The hidden lelos of The Family of Mcm is t.o escape t he dry compartmentalization
of the archive, to imagine an erotic and utopian return to t he sea, a solitary quest
conducted in the name of humanity. Th e model for this can be found in Alfred
Stieglitz's retrospective remark on that monument of photographic modernism The
RP-in5lallnlion oj'The
Family of Man,
Ouilt'all de Cleroau x,
Luxembourg. 2000.
teerage (1907), a photograph that has come to stand out from all the rest as the very
exempl ar of the antiarchival image. Mixing tropes of modernism, the pastoral.
oceanic tapture, and bourgeois self-loathing, Stieglitz's spoke of his 'new vision ... of
people, tJ1e common people, the feeling of ship and ocean and ky, and the feeling
of release that I was away from the mob called the rich."20
1n The Fwnily of Man, a small Ootilla of image breaks loose from the filing
cabi ne ts o n t he shor e. Gary Winograncl gives us a phoLO of lovers froli cking
among bathe rs in the shallows, Steichen himself offer s a god's-eye view of a naked
child belly-Oopping with a j oyful splash, and Ewing Kainin p ortrays a blond naiad
bursting to the surface, her ecstatic smile and closed eyes half-visible tJ1rough a
20. Alfred Sliegliu. "Four Happenings." Yl'flr, nos. 8-9 ( 1942), p. 128.
Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea 25
cascading veil of water. And the re is the la rge phowgraph by Nell Dorr of a Venus
emerging from the waves, garlanded with hibiscus f1owcrs. The r egr essive longing
for immersion comes at us recurrently as we move through the exhibition. It is
perhap consistent with the pan-denominat ional reli giosity of The Famif)' of Man,
reinforced by text editor Dorothy onnan 's p redil ection for pithy bards of
timc les wisdom extracted from a wide range of sacred texts. Or as Steichen
himself put it, "Photographs conce rned with the religious rather than religions."
The notion of the "oceanic feeling"-of an undiffcremiated ego restored to
a primal sense of one ness with the \Vorld-cnter s psychoanalytic discourse in the
late l 920s, in an exchange of letters between Romaine Rolla 11d and Sigmund
Freud. Freud rccapiwl ates the exchange in the first chapter of Civilization and its
Discontents, crediting Rolland with the idea, but demuning at Rolland's suggestion,
provoked by reading The Future of an lffusion, that la sensation ocPaniquP lay at the
or igi n of al l reli gi ous sentime nt. Deepl y e ngaged in the study of the Indian
nineteenth-century my ti c saint Ramakrishna, Rolland was certa inly familiar wi th
a range of metaphors for immersion and di ssoluti on of the self, particularly those
centered on the mother-goddess Ka li , creator and destroyc1 of life. Freud 's
intcllecLUa! bias toward the psychi c logic of monotheism led him w a different
noti on of religious origin . Re ligi ous faith followed from the ego's encounter with
a hostile world, and religion was the search for a protective, "enormously exalted"
father. Steichen' overhead photograph of the diving naked child can be said to be
poi ed between these two contrary views of religi on: one mo notheistic and the
other polytheisti c and "oceanic." The photographer-ediwr is the ''exalted father,"
but he longs to b ecome again the child merging with the liqu id eleme nt. (In
Lacanian terms, Rolland's "oceani c feeling" corr esponds to the d omain of the
imaginary, whi le Freud's "exalted father" tanci on the side of tlw ymbolic.)21
Freud's earthbo und predil ecti ons made him skeptical about tran cendent
claims for oceank immersion. He conclude the first chapter of Civilization rmd I L ~
Discontents with a line from Friedrich Schiller's early romantic po<'m "Der Taucher"
("The Diver," 1797). The poem is based on the fable of a Sicilian t..ing who, otfeti ng
his daughter as a prize, commands a youth to make a second dive into the abys .
Having triumphed once over the terrors of the deep, the diver lamems before his
second, fatal plunge: "Let him rejoice who lives up her e in roseate light." Freud, like
jule Michelet, understood that the sea, before it was anything else. was "the element
of asphyxia," the archetype of the ho t ile world, although Michelet was more ensitivc
to the mu-nrre provided by the oceans. Freud's meditation on the oceanic feeling led
him, yet again, to the death instinct, already explored in Beyond lhl' Pleasure Plinciple.
But this intellectual ground had also been traversed by Freud's di ciple Sandor
Ferenczi, in a remarkable book called Thalassa: A Themy of &nitn.lity, published in
2 1. igmund Freud , Civili:.otion and Its Oi.5rontrnt.> [ 1930]. trans. Jamc\ Strndwy (New York: Norton,
196J ), pp. ll -20. Sec also J. Moussaie!J Masson. Th1' Omwir FPI'l i11Jf 'n1r Origms t{ FU!tgiou.s Sentimml in
tlnrimt l ndill ( Dordrecln. cthcrlands: Kluwer Acade mic Publishets, 1980).
26 OCTOBER
1923 but dating back to interupted speculations developed during his service as an
army doctor during World War I, speculatio ns with which Freud was fami li ar.
Ferenczi's basic argument derives primaril} from the biologist Ernst Haeckel's
erroneous theory that ontogeny-the development of the individual organism from
the germ cell-is a recapitulation of phylogeny-or evolutionary history. Secondly,
FerenCLi, like Freud, draws from the thermodynamic concept of entropy. From these
source ideas the psychoanalyst, seeking the key to the formation of genital drives,
intuits that the intrauterine experience of land mammals recapitulates their aquatic
evolutionary prehistory. For male mammals, coitus is the expression of a regressive
longing lor an en tropic return not onJy lO the inert noating passivity of the prenatal
stale, but to the liquid origins of the species. The last scmence of the book sums it
up, although along the way Ferenczi is forced by his own logic to admit that female
psyche and sexuality are more complex, less "primitive" than that of the male:
The male member and its function appears as the organic spnbol of the
restoration-albeit only partial-of the fe tal-infantile state of union
wilh the mother and at the same time with the geological prototype
thereof, existence in the sea. [Emphasis in originaJl2:!
Thus can be discovered a key to the Schillerian "i nfant bliss'' at the heart of
The Family of Alan. As I put it long ago without having fully developed the argument,
"the exhibition moves from the celebration of patri archal authority-which finds
its highest embodiment in the United Nations-to the final constructi on of an
imaginary utopi a that resembles nothing so much as a protracted staLe of infantile.
pre-Oedipal bliss." This infantilism is consistent with the demise of political subjects
in the classical enlightenment sense, and the emergence of new consumer subjects.
For this reason, TIU' Family of Man was received with great interest on Madison
Avenue, even though it portrayed a world in which Fordist consumerism was largel}
invisible. The ecstatic bathers of The Fcunily of Man were recruited as shills for
menthol cigarettes and beer. The path that opened here has led fifty years later to
Corbis.com and the nonjudgmental fun of shopping for pirtures and taking a mtisP
without an "enormously exalted father" leading the way.
Part 5: Anti-Titanic
Titanic, Waterworld, and 17u PPrfect Storm tell an old story: men sacrifice them-
selves at sea so that women can nurture civilized values, or even revive civilization
itself. The instincts, which are assigned no gender by psychoanalytic theory, are
22. Sandor r en:ncti. Thalassa: A ThMt) (London: Karnac, 1989), p. 107. Set! aho
ChristOiJhcr L. Connery, "The Oceanic Feeling ami t ile:: Regional Imaginar y." in Rob Wilson and Wimal
Dbsan.ayake. eels., Global/ Local: Cultural Production tmd the hnaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, J99G), pp. 284-31 1. Responding to .. P<tcific Rim discourse," Connery has de,eloped a
compe lling argument linking Olson 's idea of t he Pacific -world ocean." Anglo-Amc:ncan
impea ial ambitions, and a Fcrcne1ian pS) Choanalytic readi ng of the c:ult ofwimrning.
Hetween the Net and the Deep Blue Sea
27
ubo rdina ted in these films to the traditi o na l sexual di visiou of labo r. (Thi
traditionalism cuts deeper than the supe rfi cial feminism fo und in Titanir and
Pnfert Stonn, which all ows bomgeois women to seek love freely anc. 10 be out poken
a nd prophetic patrons of Lhe avant-ga.rde and permits working-class women to be
fi shing-boat skippers.) These melodramas pretend that the ma e,. death inst inct
serves the "fe male" life instinct, as if in optimistic rej oinder to Freud's pessimisli c
conclusion to Civifizatiou and Its Disronten/.1. It goes almost without saying that this
traditi onal vi ew, whi ch can never be hones t about the fact that its "morality"
instrumentali zes the instinctual level or the psyche, has served as one of the principal
ideological justificati ons for war, for organi zed aggressio n o n a grand scale.
Consider the motl ey crew of 'smokers" in \"laterworld, ensconced as postapocalyptic
galley slaves and pirates aboard the rotting hulk o r the Exxon Valdez under the
command of a maniacal Dennis Hopper. On the one hand, we can be sure t hat
this is an intenti onally self-parodic proj ecti on onto the l mnpm jJrolPlarial of the
pet r ol e um-cons umpti o n patte rns o f your ave rage ucces ful SUV-dr i\' ing
Hollywood screenwriter. But the smoker also epiLOmize the bad habits that qualify a
socie ty fo r rog11e nat in11 status, for elevation to the targetli t fo r tl e next barrage of
cruise missile . In the film the '' bad'' death instinct of the smc-kers can only be
thwan ed (or, more precisely, gratified) b}' the "good" death instinct of the lhalnssally
regre.ssed mutant IIsh-man Kevin Costner, who is by vinue of his en'1anced swimming
ability a kind of' human torpedo. lt would be absurd for me to ;ay that the e are
"militarist" films, but the ir the rapeutic and homeostatic approach to the problem
of human destructi ve e nergie puts them in line with the new rhetoric of sta le
viol e nce, which is always viole nce exe rcised in the inHresl or abs1ract human
rights, or, more concrete ly, f or I hi' future of the children.
Not long ago I was able to see the recent ly restored traveling exhibiti on
ve rsion of' The Family of Man a t its permane nt home, the Cha teau de Clervaux in
Luxembourg, near the site of the Battl e o f the Arde nnes. An old U.S. Army
She rma n tank, presumably a re lic of tha t ba ul e, welcomes 1 he visito r at the
entrance to the cast le. What was most striking abotll the mel iculc us reconstruct ion
undertaken by Steichen 's natal country is 1 hal now one can see how modest anrl
slow-jxufd the spect acle-culture of the 1950s was by contrast wi 1 h the Hollywood
bl ockbuste rs, mega-exhibitio ns, and di gital image-st reams o f :oday. By current
standards, the cale of the photogr aphs is fa r from superhuman, and I saw a group
of German high chool students slipping into a kind of solemn, auentive rever ie as
they moved patiently amoug the monochromatic panels, as if this were very dilferem
from their experi ence of going 1.0 1he movies, playing a computer game, or cl icking
on a web link. Perhap. this i the ultimate museological de ti ny of The Family of
Man: to become the immobilized reli c of a global road show 1 ha t provided t he
model for the traveling museum blockbuste rs of torlay. Does the very obsolescnw' of
17u' Family of Man open up a plethora of possibilities?
.J ust for a momenl , imagine that the r estored Fnmily of J\!frm had been inst alled
inslead aboard a ship, and that the ship sajled aro und the wor.ld, ,.isiting all the pon
28 OCTOBER
citi es that had originally taken the exhibition, from ew York to Cape Town to
.Jakarta, and maybe a few others that weren't on the original itinerary. In some cities,
a rich menu of compe ting c ultural cho ices combine d with general urban
indifference to the watetfront would bring few vi itors: maybe no more t han fifty
people in 'ew York, despite the free admission. In others cities, maybe in Karachi,
the ship would be o wamped with visitors that it would almost heel over and capsize
at the dock: an audience of thiny thousand in one day. In the richer countries, caps
and T-shirts would be sold; in poor countries these would give way to free sou-
venirs. It would be a simpl e no-frills cargo ship, so there would be none of the
connotatio ns of protected luxury that accrue to a chateau or to the cruise vessel
commandeered in Genoa by the frightened leaders of the rich nations. In many
cities, dissident and human-rights group would be invited to convene public fonuns
in a conference room built into one of the holds. These same groups would provide
ho pitality for the crew. A website would track the vessel's progress. The hip would
ll y the flag of landl ocked Luxembourg, or maybe that of the nited Nations, or
perhaps an unrecognizable flag, unrelated to any known sovereign entitl', perhaps
bearing a portrai t of Steichen's mother holding a freshly bakC'd apple pie. 1t would
not fly the fl ag of the United States, nor would it display the ensign of the Museum of
Modern An, and there would be no Sherman tank lashed to the hatch covers.
This would be the ghost ship imagined b}' the Nerv York Times. thP aging mrgo
ship in the age of P-mail. Wnat I am de cribing he re, taking only mode t license, is
the 1998-2000 circumnavigation of the Global Mm-inPr, an 18,000-deadwcight-ton
general cargo ve sel carTying in its converted holds a re markable exhibition about
working conditions at sea, and-in a broader sense-about the hidden ocial costs
a nd probabl e conseq uences of corpora te g lobalization. ponsored by the
lmemational Transport Workers Federation, a London-based umbrella organit.ation
of over 450 transport-workers ' uni ons around the world, the ship wa actually the
bra inchild of a group of German and Briti h eafarer activists who also happened
to be di affected ve le rans of Green peace, interested in the problem of an inter-
national linkage of labor and environmental struggles. Their primary concern
was the system of flag of ronveniencP shipping, a lawyerly J-use invented by American
hippers in the mid-] 940s that allows wealthy ship owners to register their vessels
in poor nations oiTering what is often termed pajJer sovereignty: a fl ag for a fee. The
system is rife with abuses, and indeed its very purpose is abuse: shielding exploitative
labor conditions and ubstandard vessels behind a bewildering legal maze. The
JTF has been waging a campaign against this system for {ifty years, trying to
enforce minimum standard of pay and safety for seafarers.
The solution of the ITF act ivists was to connect this venerable and not always
very successful fight to the broader campaign against corporate globali iation.
Here it is worth noting that since 1995 key working-class resistances to neolibcral
policies-reduced social security, casua lization of work in the name of "fl exibility,"
union-busting. and privatization of public infrastructure-have come from
workers in the transport sec1or : railway workers in France, dockers in Australia,
Between the Net oncl tltP DePp BluP SPa 29
Chil e, and Brazil , bus dri vers and airline crew in Mexico, a nd delivery dri\'e rs
in the United t ates. These battles against the doctrine o f tl e untramme led
market predate Seattle.
The Global Mariner wa a floating ver ion of the agit-train, reconceived in the
context of an eclecti c a nd decidedly post-Bolshevik left-wi ng pl)litics. (The lTF
had its origins in solidarity actions linking Dutch and British dockers and seafarers
at the end of the nineteenth ce ntury, and remained cl ose to the traditi ons of the
old socialist Second Internat ional for much of its history.) The quixot ic agit-ship
was no nct he less indebted to the expe riments of radical productivist art in the
oung Soviet Union, and also to the pho tomontages of john 1-kartfield and the
workers' theater o[ Erwin Piscator. Remember that teichen had already borrowed
fr o m the big-scale presentational techniques o f Russ ian d esi g n ers and
photographers of the J 920s tor his thematic photo exhibitions of tlte 1940s and '50s:
there a re gho t ly shadows of El Lissitsky and Rodchenko in Tiu Family of Man.
Having willlcssed the absorption of these once-radical devices into the tool kit of
corporate liberalism and advertising, one could ay that now the cJlobal Mariner has
reappropriated this traditio n to forge a new-old weapon again t the neoliberali m
or the twemy-fir t century.
But before the exhibition, with it bi g computer-generated photomurals and
its eerie post- tockhausen there is the fact of the shif and the voyage in
and or themselve , readymad e-like in the subtl et y of their a mbi guous status as
aheady existing object and context.
The Lnrly Rebrrrn. (as "she" had been christened two decades before o n the
North ea coast of Britain). had gone through five names, a series of superimposed
reinscript.ions of bow and ste rn, each prior name an increasingly obscure trace
beneat h t he bri ght white paint announcing the new ide ntity The calculated
amnesia of the world of international hipping offers a lesson to those who celebrate
the po u11odern nux of identity. One of the stranger stories of thi common practice:
in mid-passage a captain receives a telex noting that the ship Ius been sold and
mu t be renamed. The captain polite ly asks the new name and is told to send a
crewman over the side-risky business when under way-to paint out every other
lette r or the old name. vVhat would Mallarme make of this? The concrete poeuy
of the contemporary maritime world, the nominative magic worked out between
the telex machine and the paint locker: here we return to Melvi lle's Bmito Cereno
( 1856), but confront not the ambiguities or insurrection and mutiny but a ma ter r
t hat di sguise itse lf. Whose ship? Whi ch ship? A palimpsest Jf" disguises a nd
deceits, a de liberate muddying of the waters.
Nearing the end or it s/ her working life, the ship Jormerly known as the Lad_v
lvbPrm entered a state of dangerous decrepitude, owned by a Ho11g Kong shipping
company, fl agged, I believe, to Panama, crewed by Fi li pinos, and fin:1lly- at the literal
end of her ropes-moored at offshore anch orage in the bust ling pon of Pusan, on
the southeast coast or Korea, wai ting. For what? A shady buyer willi 1g to squeeze out
the last bit of profit from the laborious and plodding and dangerous journeys of an
30 OCTOBER
aging vessel, a death ship in the making. the owner makes rhe finaJ blunt decision,
almost that of a fam1er in its frank brutality, though less intimate than one based on
veterinary observation, si nce this is a decision made at a distance-in Hong Kong or
London or Zurich-\v:ithout poking at the rust breeding on the ladders and the
hatch coaming, or poking at the cracks in the hull, or reacting the engine room log
with its depressing catalogue of failing valves and pumps. From the pasture of the
anchorage, the ship embarks on the long voyage to the rendering plant. Send "her"
to the gently sloping beaches of India, to be run ashore at high tide by a skeleton
crew: engines full ahead onto the oily sand, to be broken by the sledges and cutting
torches of vast crews of gaunt laborers, the abattoir of the maritime world, the ship re-
manned for the last time by t.he last toiling victims in the cycle of oceanic e":ploitation.
Then miraculously- -although here other me taphors, those of rescue and
redemption, are also to be used as if this were fiction-the ship \'o'aS purchased by the
lntcmationaJ Transport Workers Federation in the summer of 1998, reflagged to
Bri tain, and arduously re filled at the Mipo dockyards of Hyundai , just north of
Pusan, and then sailed by a Croatian crew to the German port of Bremerhaven,
where it was further fitted out with the exhibition, and then, only a few months after
the initiaJ purchase-aJl this was done at breakneck pace-it embarked with a new
name on a twenty-month circumnavigation, setting out to visit eighty-three cit ies
around the world. The crew was a polyglot mix: English, German, Icelandic, Filipino,
Burmese, Scottish, Croatian, New Zealander, Ukrainian, Russian, J apanese. Dutch,
and Irish.
Depending on the political siLUation of the local unions who invited the ship,
the visits could be militant and combative. For example. the crew joined the dockers
of Valparaiso in their fight against Chi lean government plans for port privatization,
demonstrated alongside exi led Burmese seafarers and other democracy campaigners
outside the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok, and stagerl a protest in support of striking
American shipyard workers in New Orleans. Two fast launches were stowed on top
of the rear hatch and these allowed for rapid, Greenpeace-style actions. In
other instances, the ship was isolated from publi c contact by unsympathetic
governments, happened in Hong Kong, a city whose crypto-"market-Stalinist"
chief executive happens to be the former head of an international conrainer-
shipping line. An invitati on to Greece schedul ed for the very last day of the
millennium was rescinded at the el eventh hour by a seafar!'rs' union unwilling to
challenge powerful Greek shipowners. Farawa>' pol iticaJ events coul.d change the
tenor of the ship's reception, as happened in Istanbul a few weeks after the Seattle
protests against the World Trade Organization. For the first time, the ship was
greeted a t the dock by workers bearing banners speci fi call y d e n ou ncing
globalization. And indeed the ship's visit to Seattle in the spring of 1999 had been
one of a number oflocaJ events leading up to the November protests.23
Tlw dsi1 of the Glnlml Mminrr w Scaule was 'ponsorcd lw tlw West Coast union,
tlw ll.'vV\.1, and b} a number of01 her rnaritinw union,. Til(' IL\VL! al>o the Sc<Ullc exhibition
lnlfrrtalional
TmnsfJort Worke1:5
FedPralion. Po.lfrard
oflheGlobal
Mar iner. 1998.
If, as Mi c hel Foucau lt has suggested , ship a rc the v r y exemplar of
heterowpias (real spaces that call other space into question), the Global Marinrr
was the heterotopia of heterowpias. Or if you want, this was a nU!fcd1ip, representing
and figuring within itself, within the exhibitio n that was its only cargo, all the
other invisible, ignored, and silent hips of the world. The Global ,\1ariner had to be
a real hip functioning in an exempla ry way, to be the Good Ship that social justice
demanded other ships should and could be, but it was also an em(Jty VPSsel carrying
nothing but ballast and a message. This "empt iness" may ha;e provoked the
host il e captain o r one substandard vessel targeted by the ITF to refer to the Global
Mariner as a loy shifJ, as if i t had been de-realized by the absence of heavy cargo.
And yet this was a vessel of old-fashi oned elf-snCikiency, equipped with onboard
cranes that a ll owed it lO load and discharge cargo at terminals without dockside
equipme nt, the sort of ves el commo nly seen trading in more remote third-world
port . The Global Mwiner functioned in marked contrast to the specialized contai ner
and bulk ship of toclay's sh ipping world, which only work by being integrated into
a larger mac hine e nsemble of dockside crane and conveyors. Its f uncti onal
a utonomy and ver atility allowed the Global Mariner lO become a la rge mobile art
space that could effi ciently install, transport. and di play its exhibiti on.
of my /-Ish Stflry at the l lenrr An Galler)', in conjunction wit h the Labor Cemer at the
or Washing-wn. an unusual occunence in Americ:1n museum practice, given the hegemony
of corporate patronage.>. Betwee n February and May of J 999. Fi;/t Story became a f)cal point for a serie>
of meeting> and events-includi ng the GIIJI)(II Mminels vi>it- addres.ing Seattle 's militant labor history
ami problems or working-class respo nses to g- lobalizatjon. The IL\VU shut down all pons on the West
Coast and in Hawaii during the subsequent vVTO meetings. and rank-ami-file dockworkers-men and
womcn-tuok a big role in the ; lreet demonstrations. t hus earning the scom of apologists for global-
it_ation, such as Thoma.' Fl"i cdman of l.he Nrw York Ti nll's. I first visited the Global Warinerwhen it made
pon in Los Angeles o n way up 1he Pacific coast, and subsequently sailed with L from San Francisco
to Portland, from Durban to Cape Town, and rro rn the McditcnaiWan up th1ou j h I he Black Sea and
back down to the AdriaLic. On the Seattle protestS, sec Alexander St. Clair, and Allan
Sekula. Fivt Day. tlua Sltr)f)k tltf World: Seattle ami Beyond (London: Verso, 2000).
32
OCTOBER
The Gwbal Mariner was also embarked on what can only be seen <L'i an ironic
counterenaclmem of an older proj ect dating back to the very origins of modern
imperial dominion, namely the first circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan. This
W'<LS Magellan in rroerse. Indeed, the ritual significance of circumnavigation cannot be
under-emphasized. These epochal voyages were first reenacted in the epoch of high
imperialism. serving as thearical assenions of a naval power's emergence on the
world stage, as was the case with the circumnavigation of Admiral Dewey's "White
Fleet" after the decisive American victory over Spain in Manila Bay in 1898. In the
American case, the grand, global naval parade, shuwing thr flag, in naval parlance, put
the muscle behind the geostrategic ambition expressed by the naval theorist Alfred
Thayer Mahan.
In the later twentieth century, the solo circumnavigator ritually revitalizes the
individualist ttnderpinnings of the capitalist spirit of adventure, while simultaneously
obscuring-through the drama of solitary endeavor and extreme self-sufficiency-
the industrial and social dimension of the world-spanning project. The fascination
with such voyages, manifested in the tragically ill-fated work of Bas Jan Ader. or more
recently in a number of intriguing by Tacita De<m, is entirely consistent
a return to a seemingly exhausted romanticism, and an effort to divorce adventure
from its historical linkage with plunder and conquest. That romamicism should only
seck its survival in oceanic immersion, hypersolitude, and the extreme extnuerritori-
ality of the middle passage is a sign of the desperation encountered in its rescue from
generalized cultural debasemenl. Today this postmodcrn, quasiromantic "return" tO
the sea must be tmderstood as fundamentally different from its Byronic precedent.
since it contends with a sea that is both de ple ted of resources and sublimely
threatening in a new '"ay with the advent of global warming, a sea d1at kills and is
being killed, a sea that is also subj ect-in the developed world-to a ubiquitous
variety of hyper-real representations, from aquatic theme parks to the species-rich
aquariums that have become a fixture of every mban waterfrom lcisurc complex.
The Globallvfatiner insisted, on the conu-ary, in its plodding ordinary way on the
retum to social questions. Speaking with the caution of a Cold War liberal, Steichen
had claimed that The Family of Nlan was abom "human consciousness, not social
consciousness.'':.! I The great strength of the Global Mariner experiment was to raise the
question of society from the very space that is imagined to be beyond society.
Nothing special: a ship like many others, so ordinary that one Seattle resident, sel:' ing
the ship being ceremoniously welcomed by the fireboats of that strong union city,
wondered what the fuss was all about. ln other words, h ere was the son of welcome
one would expect for an aircraft carrier or the QE2, but not for an old 'twfen
presumably carrying coffee or pulp paper, or some other anonymous bulk commodi ty.
It is all the more profound that this ship should seek to represent the workings
of empire at a time when the global economy is assumed to be entirely virtual in its
connectedness, magically independent of the slow maJitime movement of heavy
21. Edward Steichen, "Introduction," Tht Fmlll/_V of Man, p. 5.
lnstallal.ion viws
of the lower holds of
thf Global
Mariner. 1999.
thing . The arrogant conceit of the cyber-economy, for that mauer of the very idea of
the postirulustlial era, is that we disavow our dim but naggi ng awareness that nearly all
energy-whether converted to electricity or derived from direct cor bustion-comes
from oi l or other hydrocarbo n fossil fuels, or from fi ionable uran um refined from
yellow-cake ore: olids, liquids, and gases that are extracted from th! earth and trans-
pan ed in bulk. The very slowness of the C/,obal Mariner' voyage, the twenty months of
its circumnavigation, reminds us of the duration of early-modern -eafaring under
sail , and also of the contemporary persistence of slow, heavy t ransport fl ows.
This was the anti-Tit anic. The Glaswegian quartermaster aboard the Global
Mariner, a wiry ve te r an seafarer by the name of Jimmy McCauley, mad e the
poim ve r y succinctly, refe rring to the steady aggregate loss of life at sea, cr ews
of twemy at a time on bulk ore ca1Tiers that mysteriously break in half, sometimes in
calm seas, or the myriad Filipino pas engers cr ammed onto decrepit fe rries that
capsize or burn in the Sulu Sea: "A Tit anic happens every year, hut no one hea rs
34 OCTOBER
about it." The exhibition itself brought this home Y.<ith a narrative program that took
the visitor from a happy and optimistic view of seafaring-a mix of shipping industry
propaganda and tourist fantasy-to a n increasingly dark and dismal view of
calamities and dangers at sea, culminating in a meticulous model of the ill-fated
Swerlish fe rry Estonia underwater in a fi sh-tank vitrine. This last amounted to a
mo rbid seafarers' j oke on the display techniques of maritime museums. As one
descended from upper to lower holds, and moved forward toward the bow of the
ship, the usc of archival images-depicting seafarers and atrocious living
conditions, depicting shipwrecks, fires, and oil spills-became more and more insis-
tent , until one climbed to the upper hold dedicated to public and debate.
Many o f the photographs used were taken by the lTF's .ship inspectors in ports
around the world, who are themselves dockers and seafarers. This documen tary
imperative brings openness to an industry tradi tionally veiled in secrecy. In fact, the
current tendency to extend forensic investigati ons to nonmilitary shipwrecks, using
deep submersibles when necessary, is largely traceable to precedents set by the ITF.
Miren del Olmo, chief ma te aboard the Global Mariner, told me a story. A
Basque from a poor fishing village on the outskirts of Bilbao, daughter of a retired
shipyard worker; she recalled having crossed the Nervi6n River on her way to English
class one Saturday in the late 1980s, preparing for the lingua franca of a life at sea.
Hearing commotion in the distance, she glanced back at the bridge, just next to the
soon-to-be-cl osed shipyard that would te n years la ter provide the site for Frank
Gchry's Guggenheim. The roadway and pylons suddenly disappeared in a fog of tear
gas. Displaced welders and shipwrights-her father's comrades-were battling with
the riot squads of the National Police. She told the story as she stood watch late one
December night on another son of bridge, as the Global Mariner made its way west
across the Black Sea. It occurred to me that we were doubtless crossing the course
taken almost a cenrury earlier by the mutinous battleship Potemkin, as it zigzagged
from Odessa to Constanza seeking shelter from the czarist fl eet.
The ship shuddered through heavy winter swells, seemingly going nowhere.
After a long silence, broken only by the intermittent crackle of radio voices speaking
the terse and variably accented English of t he sea lanes, Miren remarked that she
had yet to spend enough time at home in Bilbao to be able to visit the new museum.
But in her unprofessional opinion, speaking frankl y to an Amer ican, it looked li ke it
had been built "from every can of Coke drunk in Bilbao."
As Melville::'s Bartlcbr. broken by the post office, put it to his boss: "I would
prefer not to." On August 3, 2000, having completed its mission as a good ship, an
exemplary ship, a ship representing all the other invisible ships of the world, the
Global Mariner, bearing a cargo of steel coil, was rammed and sunk at the mouth of
the Orinoco River in Venezue la, not lar from the fi ctional refuge of Robinson
Crusoe, a shipwrecked isolate from an earlier mercamile era. Thanks to Bill Gates and
his minions, I received this news by e-mail , but not in writing. Instead, without
warning, a startling picture rolled downward on the screen of my computer: a ship l
knew lvell, sinking, photographed from a lifeboat by one of the crew.