Steve McQueen’s Visceral

Aesthetics and Ambiguous

Interpretations

Catherine Lacroix

Catherine Lacroix is a second year student pursuing a B.F.A.

in Art History after having completed a B.A. in Psychology

at McGill University. Her relentless striving for excellence

motivates her as well to volunteer at the gallery Dravet Art as

a project assistant intern, at the McCord Museum and with the

organizational committee of Museomix MTL. She will be ap-

plying for grad school in London at UCL and at The Courtauld

next fall, for she has always cherished the dream of moving

there. Her studies at Concordia are ultimately a stepping stone

to higher education.

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Steve McQueen’s Visceral

Aesthetics and Ambiguous

Interpretations

Catherine Lacroix

In his twenty-four minutes long video installation Western Deep (2002), Steve McQueen takes viewers into the deepest

goldmine in the world, located in South Africa. While the film depicts a hellish and oppressive vision of exploitation, no context is given for the miner’s hor-rendous working conditions. Instead, through the use of extreme darkness and brutal sound, McQueen chooses to communicate this information percep-tually, leaving it up to the audience to interpret what they have seen. Within the installation, viewers are surround-ed by scenes of the miners performing physical exercises to maintain their health and breathing capacity, in a scene disturbingly similar to apartheid era medical examinations. McQueen finally releases viewers from this dehu-manized environment by casting a final unflinching gaze at the perils of global-ization with the parting shot of a dead-eyed lone miner. By merging together the projected images and the exhibi-tion space, Western Deep expresses qualities, which both adhere to, and challenge, the writings of John Dew-

ey and Nicolas Bourriaud. McQueen’s approach ultimately facilitates social exchanges within the audience with re-gards to those living at the very bottom of the neoliberal economy.

Firstly the film documents the sphere of human relations and offers viewers a viscerally emotional experi-ence through McQueen’s creation of an ambiguous audiovisual environment approximating reality. The artist’s film takes place after the collapse of apart-heid in the emerging “new geography of resource extraction”, which left most South Africans in an even worse finan-cial situation “owing directly to the im-position of neoliberal reforms” as the art historian T. J. Demos has argued.1 McQueen’s manipulation of the visual material and the textures of sound with-in Western Deep invites viewers into a sensory form of participation. The audi-ence’s journey begins as a disorienting sequence in the mine’s natural dark-ness, which is eventually interrupted by flickering headlamps. Only after several minutes does the screen finally brighten with fluorescent violet shades from an artificial light, illuminating the outline of

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figures standing in front of a metal grill. McQueen draws the audience in “by using visual lacuna to stress our envel-opment by sound.”2 The metal grate of the elevator shaft facing the shrouded figures in darkness is thrown open af-ter six uncomfortable minutes and only then, do we finally understand that this introductory sequence was a seemingly endless descent into the depths of the mine. McQueen therefore skillfully jux-taposes overwhelming darkness with

flickers of light during the beginning of the film in order to elicit an experience of claustrophobia in the audience. The work’s “conspicuous refusal to repre-sent in the visual register” thus enables McQueen to initially draw in the audi-ence by auditory means instead of vi-sual ones.3

The artwork could be character-ized as being almost non-aesthetic, in accordance with Dewey’s assertions, since the film is “a loose succession

Fig. 1: Steve McQueen, detail of the step exercise from Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep as shown on the Tate website, 2002, video

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and Ambiguous Interpretations

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that does not begin at any particular place” and involves “arrest, constric-tion, proceeding from parts having only a mechanical connection with one another”.4 McQueen intentionally un-settles viewers by offering them only ambiguous visuals without any clear narrative in this “never-ending unfold-ing of desultory passages”.5 Although never explicitly addressed, McQueen deals with an emotively and politically charged discourse. The artist has no intention to coddle his audience, but rather prefers to have them “make their own minds up” about the projected ma-terial.6 At the seventeen-minute mark, for instance, as we witness two miners with headlights walking towards us in eerie silence, the grainy and elusive im-ages are abruptly replaced with a row of sitting miners dressed in blue shorts as a buzzer blares in the distance. The camera then pans out showing them performing a step exercise guided by the siren-driven regime dictating their every movement (Fig. 1). No expla-nation is provided with regards to the significance of this physical activity, but viewers are inescapably pulled into the

dynamic visuals. McQueen remains concerned with documenting a har-rowing representation of “the ongoing regimentation of black bodies” by the predominantly white elite who governs the neoliberal economy in this particu-lar sequence.7

Furthermore, when minutes later the blaring buzzers are silenced, our perception of the regimented sequence becomes exclusively visual. The move-ments on screen now appear jerky, owing to McQueen’s fast-forwarding of this sequence to further alienate the audience from a mere passive viewing experience. The artist’s work falls in line with Bourriaud’s description of a work of art, since he demonstrates an “ability to produce a sense of human existence […] within this chaos called reality.”8 The filming eventually shifts from a high-angle shot, and from this elevated position McQueen further problematiz-es the power relations at play between

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the dehumanized black bodies moving like automatons and the single man in a white coat holding a clipboard who examines them like cattle. Neither the physical activity nor the presence of the examiners is ever contextualized, leaving viewers to form their own con-clusions. These scenes of oppression inevitably recall apartheid era medical examinations, which subjected “min-ers to exhausting exercise regimens to determine their health and stamina, in order to maximize their capacity to work” and simultaneously enrich cor-porations as surmised by T. J. Demos who is committed to exploring the asso-ciation between art and politics.9 Such references occur as a result of losing ourselves to “the intensity of the image itself” and its “capacity to trigger a col-lapse of the image of the present with the thought of the past”.10

Ultimately, through these disturbing images, McQueen gives viewers a vi-carious experience within the TauTona gold mine by refusing to glorify “exci-tations that in themselves are tempta-tions to diversion, into a movement to-ward an inclusive and fulfilling close”.11

The parting shot of a dejected miner, with his face appearing in a close-up shot through a metal grill, brings the au-dience both visually and metaphorically close to his exploitation (Fig. 2). Mc-Queen urges viewers to “approach the other by becoming the other” and thus to empathize with the miners through his uncompromising editing practice.12

Secondly, while McQueen withholds certain visual information, he never-theless still strategically juxtaposes an immersive auditory landscape to long stretches of silence that ultimately en-ables viewers to have a physical en-counter with the moving images within the gallery space. At the beginning of the film, the reverberating noise, which sounds as if we had suddenly found ourselves “within the grinding internal organs of some industrial machinery”, is the only element guiding our initial perception.13 The “piercing mechanical screeches and metallic low-pitch knock-ings” not only “reverberate throughout the visitor’s body”, but also cause the exhibition space to vibrate in unison.14

McQueen, by producing this pervasive auditory experience, which blurs the

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distance before and within the project-ed images, thus stimulates viewers into acknowledging their own physicality within the space. The British artist rev-olutionizes the domain of contemporary video installation with his “conspicuous refusal to represent in the visual reg-ister,” 15 preferring instead to captivate his audience “with intense aural sensa-tion”. 16 The omnipresent darkness and the jarring soundscape encountered within the first few minutes introduce the audience to the existence of a “sin-gle quality that pervades the entire ex-perience in spite of the variations of its constituent parts”.17 This claustropho-bic audiovisual experience thus alerts viewers to the ensuing viewing expe-rience that will prove disconcerting in both form and tone.

As the elevator reaches the bow-els of the mine, the clamorous sounds of the machinery suddenly stop, leav-ing the audience to focus instead on the content being communicated through the low threshold of visibility. McQueen’s phenomenological sound, reminiscent of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s critique of

objective thought, makes many unpre-dictable disappearances for minutes at a time and powerful reappearances throughout the film with loud drilling activities resonating within the entire gallery. During the silent scenes, view-ers become acutely aware of their own physical existence, since their breath-ing provides the video installation with a soundtrack. McQueen leaves the audi-ence oscillating “between embodiment before the image and inclusion within it” as they “create their own sounds for a film that they themselves partially realize.”18 In such moments, the artist succeeds in merging together the exhi-bition space, the projected images and the viewers standing on the other side of the screen.

During his shots of the step exer-cise, McQueen edits in post-production the piercing sound of the buzzer, trans-forming the scene into a cacophony of disjointed noise in order to transform

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the passivity of the viewers into an ac-tive form of engagement with the mate-rial presented. McQueen thus intention-ally unmoors the series of movements “from chronological time, industrial rep-etition, and mechanical reproduction”.19

As the images and sounds become dis-connected from one another, the view-ers are simultaneously released from

“the regimentation of spectatorship”.20 The step exercise, when considered as a whole, remains a fundamentally disquieting experience, serving to high-light McQueen’s refusal to minimize the uncomfortable reality of a situation in order to pander to an audience’s ex-pectations. The film therefore challeng-es Dewey’s assumption that for art to

Fig. 2: Detail of a lone miner in the parting shot of the video of Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep, 2002, video

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be truly artistic it must also be aesthetic and “framed for enjoyed receptive per-ception.”21

In this “multisensory mimicry of the brutal experience within a mine”, McQueen raises the political-affective awareness of the museum visitors, who predominantly benefit from a relatively privileged social position, by confront-ing them with the nightmarish daily lives of the South African miners of the Tau-Tona gold mine. 22 By constantly isolat-ing one sensory modality over another, before unexpectedly uniting them once again, McQueen’s unique editing prac-tice functions both as a trigger for social experiences and for sensorial participa-tion.

Finally, by refusing to adopt a di-dactic approach in his immersive pre-sentation of mining labour, the artist therefore compels his audience to ac-tively engage with the interpretation of the material. In his video installation, which received critical acclaim when it was unveiled at Documenta XI amidst other politically provocative works, Mc-Queen eclipses the traditional model of documentary by reinvigorating “a

contentious dialogue concerning art’s effectiveness as a medium for social transformation”.23 The artist intentional-ly leaves the work open to multiple in-terpretations, creating an indeterminate space between the exhibition space and the projected images. As Bourri-aud has stated, post-industrial soci-eties after all are concerned with “the freeing-up of inter-human communica-tions”. 24 Furthermore, contemporary art practices have reinvented cinemat-ic conventions with greater emphasis now being placed “on the collective and social dimensions of reception”.25 McQueen, adhering to these principles, engages viewers through their senses in a compelling, but never moralizing, dialogue and consequently enables them to “feel and think through layers of meanings not overtly stated”.26

McQueen, by making an uncon-ventional documentary devoid of any authoritative or contextual information,

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opens up his work to the viewers’ sub-jective interpretation. The artist refuses to impede their different interpretations by dictating how they should perceive or respond to his artwork. However, de-spite not adopting the traditional frame-work of documentaries, McQueen nev-ertheless still abides by the pioneering Scottish film producer John Grierson’s standards of documentary realism, which should employ “dramatic editing techniques” for only then can it lead to “the creative treatment of actuality”.27 Furthermore, because a work of art “has no a priori useful function […] it is devoted, right away to the world of ex-change and communication”.28 The au-dience is therefore required to actively participate in the interpretation of West-ern Deep, since the elusive significance cannot be easily grasped from the sur-face images alone. Viewers, as a result, inevitably find themselves absorbed “in a power relation with the artist” where he challenges their understanding, for it is not in McQueen’s interest to com-pletely spell everything out for them.29

By withholding the political and economical contexts of the gold mine,

McQueen pries open “meaningful pos-sibilities for the interpretation of the film’s aural and visual sensations […] not bound to pedantic or information-al forms of framing”.30 As an artist, he remains fundamentally concerned with how the complex relationship between the projected images and the physical space of galleries may challenge both the perception and the interpretation of his work, once reduced to its essential elements. Western Deep thus ultimate-ly subscribes to Bourriaud’s definition of a successful work of art, which “will be open to dialogue, discussion, and that form of inter-human negotiation.”31

McQueen’s video installation was presented in two widely different gallery settings, compelling audience mem-bers to participate in the interpretation of an artwork that denies a sense of cathartic relief. Western Deep was ini-tially commissioned for the Documenta XI exhibition presented in Kassel, seek-ing to “undertake the representation of nearness as the dominant mode of understanding the present condition of globalization”.32 In 2012, the galleries at The Art Institute of Chicago were dark-

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ened to the pitch-blackness of a theater for a retrospective of McQueen’s career with only a brief lights-up allowing new visitors to shuffle in before the unre-lieved darkness enveloped them once again. His insistence on projecting his works on the entire walls of the gal-leries facilitates “a heightened aware-ness of the physical experience of the space of projection”.33 By challenging the “liminal area of its representational boundaries”, McQueen unsettles view-ers from their role as passive specta-tors and incites them instead into active participation.34 By adopting this meth-od of projection, the artist consciously gives his video installations “this kind of blanket effect” placing viewers “into a situation where they are sensitive to themselves watching the piece”.35 The gripping viewing experience, ow-ing to his unrelenting approach to the subject matter, belongs to the realm of Dewey’s emotional experiences, since the emotions elicited in its viewers “are qualities, when they are significant, of a complex experience that moves and changes”.36

The second retrospective present-

ed at the Schaulager in Basel in 2013, upon following the British artist’s precise instructions, instead displayed Western Deep on large LED panels located on the façade of the institution in order for “the moving pictures [to] communicate directly with the environment.”37 Rather than have viewers in a typical darkened gallery, losing all sense of time and space, the museum released the art-work from such confinement and gave it a much further reaching exposure. With such a mode of display, McQueen extended viewers’ engagement with his artwork by having not only museum vis-itors, but also unsuspecting passers-by walking by the Schaulager, become politically engaged with the interpreta-tion of the visual material. He therefore opened the dialogue on the topic of la-bour exploitation within neoliberal glo-balization to a wider variety of perspec-tives and criticisms by adopting this presentation technique. The exhibition,

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which celebrated McQueen as an artist who resists definition, ultimately fell in line with relational aesthetic practices residing “in the invention of relations between consciousness” as well as in “a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations”.38

Ultimately, this Turner Prize winning artist presented in Western Deep an unflinching portrait of the pitfalls of glo-balization for those living and working at the bottom of the neoliberal econo-my while adhering to, but nevertheless still challenging, the writings of John Dewey and Nicolas Bourriaud. The dehumanized environment presented, not only elicits sensory participation with the ambiguous audiovisual land-scape designed by McQueen, but most importantly incites the viewing com-munity into socially participating in the interpretation of the unsettling material. McQueen was and remains to this day fundamentally motivated to hold up a mirror in which the general public may perceive their own reflection and hope-fully, as a result, gain a better under-standing of themselves and of the world in which they live.

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Endnotes1. T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2013), 42. 2. T. J. Demos, “The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen,” October 114 (2005): 61, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397625.3. Ibid.4. John Dewey, “Having an Experience,” in Art as Experience (New York: Penguin Group, First published in 1934, 2005), 41. 5. Demos, The Art of Darkness, 82.6. Martin Herbert, “[Steve McQueen],” Art Review 33 (2009): 77, http://0-search.ebscohost.com.mercury.concordia.ca/login.aspx?direct=true&d-b=aft&AN=505443225&site=ehost-live.7. Demos, The Art of Darkness, 86.8. Nicolas Bourriaud, “Joint Presence and Avail-ability: The Theoretical Legacy of Felix Gonza-lez-Torres,” trans., Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 1998), 53.9. Demos, The Migrant Image, 45.10. Steve McQueen and Jean Fisher, Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep (London: Artangel, 2002) 120-121.11. Dewey, “Having an Experience,” 58.12. Demos, The Art of Darkness, 88.13. Ibid., 61.14. Ibid.15. Ibid.16. Demos, The Migrant Image, 34.17. Dewey, “Having an Experience,” 38.18. Demos, The Art of Darkness, 86.19. Ibid., 84.20. Ibid.21. Dewey, “Having an Experience,” 49.22. Demos, The Art of Darkness, 61.23. Derek Conrad Murray, “Obscene Jou-issance: The Visual Poetics of Labour Ex-

ploitation,” Third Text 21, no. 1 (2007): 32. 10.1080/09528820601138238. 24. Bourriaud, “Joint Presence and Availability,” 60.25. Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Bristol; Chicago: Intel-lect, 2009) 10.26. McQueen and Fisher, Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep, 123.27. Gary Evans, John Grierson: Trailblazer of Documentary Film (Lantzville: XYZ Publishing, 2005) 66. http://0-site.ebrary.com.mercury.concordia.ca/lib/concordia/detail.action?do-cID=10203318.28. Nicolas Bourriaud, “Space-Time Exchange Factors,” trans., Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 1998), 42.29. Herbert, “[Steve McQueen]”, 78.30. Demos, The Migrant Image, 43.31. Bourriaud, “Space-Time Exchange Factors,” 41.32. Demos, The Art of Darkness, 63.33. Ibid., 69.34. Ibid.35. Patricia Bickers, “Let’s Get Physical,” Art Monthly 202 (1996): n.p. http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/steve-mcqueen-inter-viewed-by-patricia-bickers-dec-jan-96-97.36. Dewey, “Having an Experience,” 43.37. “Introduction,” Schaulager, accessed April 6, 2015. http://www.schaulager.org/smq/en/exhibi-tion/introduction.html. 38. Nicolas Bourriaud, “Relational Form,” trans., Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 1998), 22.

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Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Relational Form.”; “Space-Time Exchange Factors.” ; “Joint Presence and Availability: The Theoretical Legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.” Trans. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. 1998.

Connolly, Maeve. The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen. Bristol; Chicago: Intellect, 2009.

Demos, T. J. “The Art Of Darkness: On Steve McQueen.” October 114 (2005): 61-89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397625.

─. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2013.

Dewey, John. “Having an Experience.” Art as Experience. New York: Penguin Group. First pub. in 1934, 2005.

Evans, Gary. John Grierson: Trailblazer of Documentary Film. Lantzville: XYZ Publishing, 2005. http://0-site.ebrary.com.mercury.concordia.ca/lib/concordia/detail.action?docID=10203318.

Herbert, Martin. “[Steve McQueen].” Art Review 33 (2009): 74-79. http://0-search.ebscohost.com.mercury.concordia.ca/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=505443225&site=ehost-live.

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Catherine Lacroix

McQueen, Steve, and Jean Fisher. Steve McQueen: Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep. London: Artangel, 2002.

Murray, Derek Conrad. “Obscene Jouissance: The Visual Poetics of Labour Exploitation.” Third Text 21 (2007): 31-39. 10.1080/09528820601138238.

Schaulager. “Introduction.” Accessed April 6, 2015. http://www.schaulager.org/smq/en/exhibition/introduction.html.