How can we look at difficult images with accountability? This question, recently shared in the Blackwood’s Index, anticipates and accompanies artworks being installed for Lightbox Cycle 2 (October 25, 2023 – January 8, 2024) in public spaces on the UTM campus as part of GUT_BRAIN 1: Destructive Desires and Other Destinies of Excess. Some viewers may find one or more of these images challenging or difficult to look at. The full set of four images can be seen on the exhibition page, which also includes a resource list of support services for viewers.
Some of these works enact what queer theorist, art critic, and professor Jennifer Doyle refers to as “difficult art” which mediates a range of complex emotions whereby viewers may feel interpellated by the subject matter. In her book Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, Doyle poses questions about works of art that cannot be easily described, that bring complicated personal and political subject matter to the fore, and that often evoke strong emotional reactions in the audiences that view them. She writes: “The work is hard because it forces us to keep company with vulnerability, intimacy, and desire”1—and urges us to embrace the social responsibility within ourselves.
Throughout the book, Doyle performs the challenging and intricate task of addressing works of art that have left her (and others) pained, unsettled, or fraught. She proposes that we experience this art by shifting our gaze to the complex social spaces that surround it. Doyle demands, “One actually must look away, and look around.”2 Not to refuse the work, but to contextualize it. In the artworks being presented in GUT_BRAIN 1, the “complex social spaces” surrounding the artwork include territories across the Americas indelibly shaped by forces of colonialism, resource extraction, militarism, and gender-based violence.
One such image is Rebecca Belmore’s Fringe. Of this work, Belmore states,
"As an Indigenous woman, my female body speaks for itself. Some people interpret the image of this reclining figure as a cadaver. However, to me it is a wound that is on the mend. It wasn’t self-inflicted, but nonetheless, it is bearable. She can sustain it. So it is a very simple scenario: she will get up and go on, but she will carry that mark with her. She will turn her back on the atrocities inflicted upon her body and find resilience in the future. The Indigenous female body is the politicized body, the historical body. It’s the body that doesn’t disappear.”3
In line with Belmore’s call for visibility, a key curatorial methodology in GUT_BRAIN 1 is giving art the agency to do its work by providing the necessary space and resources to be seen in a relevant and engaged context. In doing so, curators Christine Shaw and Irmgard Emmelhainz grapple with additional questions that unspool from curating difficult art: What are the ethics of curating emotion? How can we give art the agency to do its work? What are the ethical complications of looking, or not looking, at these artworks now?
Another strategy for giving artworks their proper context is by encouraging slow looking for our audiences. Curator Kim Simon writes “advocating for practices of slow looking offer[s] a way of thinking about visual literacy—particularly when it comes to images of others—taking the time to see images and their stories and how they are given to us to be seen.”4 In GUT_BRAIN 1, what is “given to us to be seen” often emerges from artists’ lived experience, or that of their communities, who reckon with gender-based violence, marginalization, bodily sovereignty, and resilience.
How can we look at difficult images with accountability? We can thus return to the initial question with some answers: sharing resources; examining the complex social spaces of an artwork; understanding the artists’ agency and lived experience; and looking slowly. These strategies will not encompass all reactions to the artworks but by examining collectively, we commit to maintaining an ongoing and transparent dialogue, holding ourselves and one another responsible.