22: Spring break research essay
Who owns, Who Owns the Trauma Blanket?
After signing up for academia.edu some years ago, I was drawn into an algorithmic slipstream. Daily, I’d receive emails regarding papers pertaining to the intersection of shamanism and contemporary art. A small, unthinking search of the academic database at the outset of my exploration cast me away to a rather strange and specific island of inquiry. As a corrective measure I searched a few scholars I was interested in around the same time, like Claire Bishop and Clémentine Deliss, and my recommended papers began to diversify. In addition to the shamanic nudges, and updates from Bishop and Deliss, I received a suggestion for a paper called Who Owns the Trauma Blanket? by Megan C. MacDonald. The abstract raised some questions about the artist Kader Attia’s lawsuit against French rappers Dosseh and Nekfeu, who had used imagery of refugees in trauma blankets in their music video for “Putain d’epoque” that resembled an art installation Attia had previously exhibited. Yikes, I thought to myself, this seems like a lot to unpack.
Around the same time I heard Attia on an e-flux podcast describing his new bar and cultural center La Colonie in Paris and attended an artist talk he gave at the Berkeley Art Museum for an exhibition called j’accuse. I came away with ambivalent feelings toward his projects and I also remember some of the sensational images of his installation at Documenta 13, which made a strong impression at the time and grew more complicated, perhaps in relation to the volume of post-colonial theory I was reading.
A short google search revealed a statement on the lawsuit where Attia offered, ‘The value of an artwork is above all intimate, symbolic, personal. Seeing it plagiarized like this makes an artist suffer, until he decides to stand up and say no to this exploitation.’ (Sutton, 2016) And then went on to accuse another artist who criticized him publicly, of endeavoring to use the event to draw attention to themself. He declared that he wasn’t suing the rappers but rather ‘suing universal’ which struck me as a possibility for an alternate title to this essay.
The question of who owns the trauma blanket? suggests a hierarchy of commodified grief and consequentially, an infinite regress of contestation. The contestation or claim can take the form of attentional currency (potentially convertible into other currencies) while often capitulating to structurally inequitable, attention-incentivized media environments. There is a post-ethical, post-truth condition endemic to these milieux, where the imperatives of attention capture has become so internalized, that much of what comes into being in the semiopolitical sphere might be better understood according to these logics. Put another way, the answer to the question, why are we looking at this right now? Can often be answered by, because it captures attention. Instead of, ostensibly, because it is significant, helpful, just, etc.
Furthermore, creative works with socioecological concerns often calibrate themselves towards sensational valences to compete in these attentional economies. This happens to the detriment of subtlety, nuance and rigor—and even assuming these are good faith sensational provocations to catalyze discourse, it nonetheless becomes difficult to sustain one’s attention, to anything really, amid so many sensational explosions going off all at once. If it is advantageous at times to claim the trauma of a larger group, as in Spivak's notion of strategic essentialism, this begets the questions of strategic sensationalism and even strategic intellectual property rights.
I decided to go beyond the abstract, to learn more about who owns the trauma blanket and arrived at a paywall. The salience of being barred access to a paper analyzing the commodification of trauma was not lost on me. I bookmarked it for later and resolved to write an essay along the lines of Who Owns, Who Owns the Trauma Blanket? that would wander around colliding into the barriers and paywalls erected by the gatekeeping structures mediating access to research. This seemed like a worthwhile essay and also a bit daunting in the clamorous and constantly changing mediascape of the internet. It also felt to me like the art I’ve come to associate with what Sianne Ngai describes as the becoming-ergon of the parergonal discourse of evaluation. (Ngai, 2020)
The conventions of the internet have largely normalized the expectation that any content and the corresponding data produced by the unaffiliated is worth little-to-nothing, while the vectoralist class (Wark, 2019) that provides the infrastructure for dissemination is to be wildly remunerated in billion and trillion dollar company valuations—as they develop increasingly sophisticated means to exploit and manipulate their now monopoly-beholden user-base. For institutionally-affiliated creative producers, like certain artists and scholars, the rules or access seems to vary with different institutional conventions, and could very well lead to the kinds of situations like the one I found myself in; stopped at a paywall for a critical inquiry into the stakes of a lawsuit by one artist against another, for using imagery of people praying in trauma blankets. I’m going to back away here from the kind of identity opportunism I often observe, in and beyond the difficult to delineate precincts of Art.
About a year into pandemic lockdown I got a newsletter from a major art publication suggesting a screening of Renzo Martens’ White Cube, a film in a series of works intervening in, and perhaps also compounding, colonial relations between Europe and the Democratic Republic of Congo. After a previous project where Martens taught poor rural villagers how to commodify their poverty, he followed up by instigating the construction of an OMA-designed ‘white cube’ gallery on a former Unilever plantation. There appears to be an unresolved antinomic reflexivity at the core of the work, though it’s increasingly difficult to locate something like a ‘core’ primary ambition or intention. It certainly feels saturated with irony and paradox. Works like this force questions of property and ownership in culture markets that use commodified or monetized conditions of unevenly distributed trauma to remunerate particular individuals, with varying and contestable degrees of equity.
Within the pandemic lockdown as well, I found myself watching for the manyeth time, Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the message is Death. The film is pieced together with images of Black trauma and triumph, drawn from across the spectrum of moving image production and scored by Kayne West’s Ultralight Beam. Several institutions, including MoMA, streamed the work on their website for a short duration. I remember the complicated feeling of seeing historic footage of civil rights leaders, watermarked by Getty Images, watermarked again by MoMA and thinking about the strange coterie of Arthur Jafa, Gavin Brown, and a small group of collectors and institutions that determine how and when these images are shown. The dictates and contradictions produced by the art market, and in particular the construction of artificial scarcity, seems at odds with a subject that has broad social concerns, uses images that circulate promiscuously online, and in this case partially originates from individuals “shared” lives and “public” social media accounts. The work also exists in a variety of unsanctioned versions. At the time of writing this, it’s not difficult to find a low resolution recording-of-a-recording of this canonical work on popular media platforms.
When I emailed the author of Who Owns the Trauma Blanket? Megan C. Macdonald, she warmly shared a copy with me. And when I emailed the Berkeley Art Museum, the archivist replied back an hour later with an audio recording of the Attia talk I had attended, but struggled to remember the details of. I’m thankful that over the course of my unaffiliated study I’ve been able to consult many of the artists and scholars I admire, without too much difficulty accessing them, their work, and the parergonal discourse. And at the institutional level there are many accommodating administrators and noteworthy practices of publicly and accessibly archiving cultural holdings. And despite the many infrastructures of privatization, there are other, let’s say undercommons (Moten, Harney et al., 2013) where one can access large repositories of cultural production. Sites and shadow libraries like memoryoftheworld, libgen, aaaargh, and ubuweb come to mind with regard to the specific precincts of academic texts and esoteric artworks, and sites like Wikipedia demonstrate the ethos of a public knowledge commons more broadly.
Now that I am attending a university, especially one like Goldsmiths, I have access to many more repositories of research, both legitimately and through the unauthorized circulation of my peers. I also find other institutionally affiliated individuals more accommodating to my requests. I’ve deleted my paid academia.edu account and find myself even more overwhelmed—by better quality information—than before. I have misgivings about this position of privilege, and while I’m enjoying it in some ways, it’s upsetting because I see more clearly how unaffiliated people get excluded from access to certain forms of knowledge. These forms of exclusion are compounded by the insidiousness of tailored, targeted and monetized search algorithms. And while outside the scope of this essay, these concerns pertain to scientific and medical research as well.
MacDonald’s piece opens;
French artist Kader Attia (1970–) was born in France, grew up between Algeria and the suburbs of Paris, and now works and lives in Berlin and Algiers. In November 2016, he accused the French rappers and producers Dosseh (1985–) and Nekfeu (1990–) of plagiarizing his 2007 installation piece Ghost in their 2016 video “Putain d’epoque” (“These Fucking Times”). This article will examine the stakes of this plagiarism case and argue that the foil ‘trauma blanket’ (also known in English as a ‘survival blanket,’ ‘foil wrapper,’ ‘emergency blanket,’ ‘HeatSheet,’ or ‘Mylar blanket’; and in French as a ‘couverture de survie’) is not subject to copyright. In other words, it cannot be plagiarized. (MacDonald, 2018)
I agree with Macdonald’s thesis and wonder how much further it could be applied. It’s hard to determine where’s an appropriate place to settle on a spectrum of commodified experience and trauma. First, we are asked to presuppose that some level of creative ownership of experience is natural or normal. This is already a questionable idea. To extend this reasoning further along intellectual / creative / visual / affective / symbolic private property moves us towards what I understand to be the driving impulse behind blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFT’s and Web3. That is, the total financialization of everything, with an unrelenting and massively ecologically-detrimental ledger of all transactions and records of ownership. As algorithmic logic departs from, and builds upon preexisting axioms, it is very consequential for us to evaluate which axiomatic trajectories we consent and commit to. Many of these axiomatic trajectories are hardly novel, and they predictably organize the extant spaces and emerging frontiers (digital, extraterrestrial) according to capitalist, colonial logics.
If this seems like a reductive schematic, I offer it because its perhaps it's helpful to trace a continuum from private property towards this grim horizon of virtualized speculative capital that's approaching rapidly, so we can consider what other kinds of trajectories we might consider committing to, and to better situate artworks and lawsuits like the ones mentioned here. The aforementioned examples, with their representation of themes like refugee blankets or Black suffering seem illustrative of breakage points that reveal and indict the structures that give rise to them culturally, only to enclose and commodify them immediately.
I’m concerned questions around representation often lead to a light reforming of fundamentally inequitable power relations, while much of the ostensibly critical work is paradoxically affirmative to the markets that sustain it. It appears the preexisting power structures require co-optable representatives of marginal positions to maintain their legitimacy and continued capital, attention and power accumulation. It’s often these institutions and the opportunistic Artist that own the trauma blanket.
References
Harney, S., Moten, F., & Halberstam, J. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions.
MacDonald, M. C. (2018). Who Owns the Trauma Blanket? Tracing Kader Attia's Ghost and the “couverture de survie” in Transit. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. 10.1080/17409292.2018.1475366
Ngai, S. (2020). Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Harvard University Press.
Sutton, B. (2016). Artist Kader Attia Files Plagiarism Lawsuit over French Rap Video. Hyperallergic. https://hyperallergic.com/343573/artist-kader-attia-files-plagiarism-lawsuit-over-french-rap-video/
Wark, M. (2019). Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Verso Books.