Fish Story is an exhibition at the Walker Art Center displaying work made by Allan Sekula in 1995. (Sekula is now deceased.) The show is large, occupying about four capacious gallery-rooms, ambitious, and challenging. Furthermore, the manner in which the photographs and explanatory panels are hung seriously complicates the viewer's enjoyment (and understanding) of artist's work. Individual photographs and essay text are all aligned to comprise a single work -- in other words, the pictures and writings are meant to cohere into an argument. (The work, notwithstanding the word "story" in the title, is aggressively non-narrative -- there's no plot here and no progression discernible between the pictures on show. Rather the work is intended to comprise a polemical essay, something on the order of Friedrich Engels' 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in London, a text that Sekula cites on several occasions. Sekula's intent is to illumine certain aspects of Capitalism using as his paradigm case the fate of the world's great harbors. Unfortunately, Sekula seems to be proceeding under the shadow of Walter Benjamin, the German Marxist critic who committed suicide (he was Jewish) at the outset of World War Two. Benjamin is greatly admired now and Sekula's homage to the writer embodied in this show would have been pioneering in 1995. Unfortunately, Benjamin is very obscure and neither a clear nor persuasive writer -- he has flashes of genius but these moments of illumination are embedded in a matrix of extremely vague and abstract prose. (Benjamin is one of those German writers, influenced by Hegel, who uses abstractions in arguments that yield nothing more than higher-level abstractions even more remote from the circumstances they are meant to describe.) Sekula conceives his photographs as illustrating his prose or vice-versa and each room contains one or two essays, comprising probably about 750 words neatly presented in black type on white poster-boards. The texts don't directly explain the photographs and, so, the relationship between the writing and the large, color photographs mostly comprising the show is unclear and ambiguous. Some of Sekula's writing is quite colorful and he's not nearly as obscurantist as Benjamin, but, nevertheless, his points are either extremely simple-minded or, to the contrary so densely allusive as to be illegible. (The format of the show seems to me to be derived from Benjamin's unfinished Arcades project, a work that was supposed to develop a Marxist understanding of "Paris as the capital of the 19th century" -- this huge work contains photographs, allusions to contemporary literature, advertising, architectural diagrams and the like. In theory, it is interesting but, in actuality, the vast collage of texts is virtually unreadable --and only rarely can the reader discern what Benjamin is trying to express.) Sekula's thesis seems to be that the old harbors in the world filled with reeking, half-sinking cargo ships have been supplanted by enormous iron container ships in which freight is concealed in uniformly fungible metal boxes -- these new mechanized harbors represent a development that materializes or makes visible modern capitalism's cruel efficiency in displacing workers or creating wholly alienated industrial armies who don't even know the nature of the cargo that they are moving. Fundamental to late capitalism, Sekula seems to argue, is a rationalization controlling "flows" (here Sekula sounds like the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari) -- these flows can be distributed with mathematical precision around the world without regard to what constitutes the actual commodities at issue (they can be molasses, computer parts, or armaments, in some cases weapons in the same huge container vessel flowing to opposing armies.) Sekula seems to regard workers caught up in this system as exploited and mistreated by their mercantile bosses. However, he doesn't appear to regard this work force as united by any common cause -- Marx and Engels thought that the uniformity of modern industrialized labor would create an industrial army disciplined into a cohesive force that could, at some stage, rise in concert against their masters. Sekula seems to show the work force as reduced to atoms caught in a vast machine, the isolated remnants of labor that may once have been numerous and cohesive, but are now fragmented and helpless.
The show contains 102 photographs most of which are decidedly quotidian and documentary. Sekula appears to think that beauty or any esthetic quality in the photographs would detract from their documentary force. Some of the pictures are quite compelling and seem to be "accidentally" artistic -- but conventional photo-art has no place in this show. Indeed, the most compelling pictures have little or nothing to do with the harbors (and their workers) central to the artist's argument. For instance, a picture of a fire in Koreatown is spectacular and memorable --but this doesn't have much to do with the pictures of ships, hoists, and containers that comprise most of the imagery in the show. The most "poetic" images, as it were, show the wreckage of the old harbors, now literally rusting away, an infrastructure made obsolete by the containers and the vessels that carry them -- there's some striking imagery of abandoned worker's barracks, an indelible image of a wrench left in one position so long in a shuttered welding shop that it has left its imprint on the work bench, and some good shots of scavengers harvesting remnant metals or bricks from the ruins of the harbors. Some interesting pictures show harbor workers in Gdansk, many of them left unemployed, it seems, by the mechanization of their work place. Sekula investigated harbors at Vera Cruz in Mexico, Seoul, Los Angeles as well as other places -- it all looks more or less the same as you would expect. Nine out of ten of the pictures are uninteresting even if you look at them very closely. The wall texts are, often, fascinating, full of anecdotes about wars and poverty and exploitation -- but they don't really correlate in any meaningful way with the pictures. Adding to the chaos is that the labels explaining the pictures are limited to black posters about one per room -- the pictures are numbered, but, bafflingly, in a non-consecutive manner. If you want to know what a picture means from a materialist, documentary perspective, you have to memorize the number or write it down and, then, compare it to the label poster in which the images (and their provenience) are briefly described The result is that you have to keep crossing and recrossing the gallery to see what the pictures that you have seen are supposed to show. The wall-texts, worth reading, are, however, difficult to study in this environment -- to read the texts closely, you would have to stand in front of the writing for a long time, probably seven or eight minutes, blocking people around you who are also desirous of reading the text. (The print is too small to be read from across the room or obliquely at an angle to the poster -- you have to stand about four feet from the display to read it.) For a show that is all about the rationalization of "flows" and processing of material, Sekula's Fish Story is decidedly irrational in its presentation and the viewer's perception of the material doesn't imply any sort of argument. An argument has a syllogistic structure, if X and Y are true, then, Z must follow; but Sekula seems to regard this kind of argumentation as specious and, instead, wants you to approach the issue from all possible perspective at the same time. But this doesn't work and so the viewer is left in a state of irritated confusion.
Fish Story is deeply flawed. I saw the exhibition on a mid-day mid-week with only a sparse group of museum-goers at the show. If the galleries had been more congested with viewers, the effect would have been disastrous -- I would have had almost no idea what I was supposed to be seeing because it would have been impossible to read the texts. The texts don't really speak for themselves nor do the pictures -- you have to try to hold both information sets in your mind and, given the complexity of the economic and historical arguments in play, this is difficult. The gallery-goer's perception of the undertaking is further complicated by the fact that Sekula characterizes his points with chapter headings (for instance, "Loaves and Fishes" or "Message in a Bottle"); however, the materials presented under these titles don't cohere into any discernible pattern -- so the "chapter headings" seem completely arbitrary. Further, the viewer's understanding of the show isn't helped by an initial sign that concedes, as it were, that no rational argument can be made from the materials and that you can just wander around at will in the galleries.
But...but... Fish Story is very interesting and produces in the viewer a desire to know more precisely what Sekula is trying to communicate. You can't grasp the project in real time and, so, I bought the book, a fat volume that reproduces the pictures and wall-texts and, also, provides several densely argued supplementary essays as well. The measure of an art work's excellence is that it induces in its spectators a desire to know more about what is portrayed. Sekula's Fish Story, therefore, is a success, at least as far as I am concerned, in that I am now reading his book, thinking about it, and trying to parse how the pictures and the writings fit together.
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