Awhile the trial for the assassination of Samuel Paty is underway, that January 7 will mark the 10th anniversary of the attack against Charlie Hebdowith its procession of killed cartoonists, around ten art historians and a few students worked on Tuesday, November 26, at Sciences Po Paris, around a question: what to do with “unbearable images”? How to define them, what do they say, how to show them and make them accepted? We were there.
The theme is magnificent and tragic, at the intersection of art and information. These images are disturbing, disgusting, repulsive, traumatizing. With tears in her eyes, Nathalie Bondil, director of the museum and exhibitions of the Arab World Institute, showed the photo that went around the world of the Iranian student walking down the street in her underwear to denounce the diet. “I don’t know what to do with this unbearable image. »
The question of how the world is represented is at stake – at university, in museums, in the media. What is shown sometimes has a universal scope – tortured body, mutilated face. In other cases, it is the spectator, with his culture and his convictions, his struggles too, who conveys an unbearable image.
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Because the field has a strong tendency to expand, to be more linked to the viewer than to the subject, Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, professor of art history at Sciences Po and president of the National Foundation of Political Sciences, took a solemn tone: “The history of art is full of terrible stories. It’s not Mickey. Artists are courageous and fascinated by subjects that are not pleasant. They appropriate all kinds of harsh images, particularly current ones. So I’m going to put my foot down. Can we still show images that some people find unbearable? Do we agree to face what humanity has experienced since the dawn of time? Yes or no? »
Winned by modesty
Silence in the room. To ask the question is to answer it. “Prejudices are on the rise”recognizes Nathalie Bondil. A way of saying that distancing from a harsh image crumbles in favor of personal feelings. Offense trumps analysis.
Added to this is an observation, made by Christine Vidal, co-director of the Le Bal art center, in Paris: why many young people, saturated with violent images on the Internet, find the sweet photograph of a topless woman unbearable exhibited in a museum? Why does modesty win over them?
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