The Dead Body in Graphic Limbo
1.
Graphic limbo is an ambiguous presentational space, normally somewhere in-between the diagrammatic and the pictorial, where a contradictory suspension of disbelief occurs. Take this image, an example of a typical, mid-twentieth century promotional postcard produced by an American airline. Passengers appear to be enjoying their flight in spacious luxury. Nobody looks at such an image in horror. The familiar diagrammatic device of the “cutaway” illustration effectively placates any unconscious, pictorial interpretation of the scene. No, this device reassures the viewer, of course that’s not a passenger aircraft in flight with a gaping hole in its side! And behind it, beneath it, that’s absolutely not the blackness of night over some remote wilderness! In graphic limbo, the pretence of information moderates affect.
2.
Graphic limbo might be a byproduct of historically divergent attitudes toward abstraction in the statistical depiction of the human body. During the cholera outbreak that ravaged London’s Soho in 1854, the disease was mistakenly believed to be spread through airborne transmission. An anesthetist, John Snow, suspected otherwise. By taking the official list of the dead, organised chronologically, and plotting each death spatially onto a map of the area, Snow was able to first identify that the epicenter of the outbreak was the water pump on Broad Street, and subsequently to establish that bacteria were passed not through the air but from the drinking water. On Snow’s map, dead bodies are represented as uniform black rectangles. These marks are deathly, and subtly anthropomorphic, particularly as they stack up in the vicinity of the pump, but their visual rhetoric is typically explained quite differently. Snow’s map is a canonical example of the production of knowledge through visual practices. In the history of data journalism, its black marks are resolutely statistical, not human bodies. It was the dispassionate abstraction of these forms, and the emphasis on their spatial plotting that—rhetorically—enabled Snow’s discovery.
3.
In 1936, the Austrian political economist Otto Neurath formulated a set of basic principles for the visual communication of information, an “international picture language,” that later became known as the ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education) method. According to Neurath’s method, where quantitative measurements are concerned, the repetition of representative forms is preferable to the enlargement of singular, abstract and totalising forms: “a sign is representative of a certain amount of things; a greater number of signs is representative of a greater number of things.”1
The human body has a number of basic forms in Isotype, differing according to the granularity of the information presented. In one example, unemployed workers are given a forlorn demeanor, hands in pockets and shoulders slumped. In charts representing more complex demographics, or even entire societies, minimally detailed figures are used, according to the logic that “the sign ‘man’ is not to give the idea of a special person with the name XY, but to be representative of the animal ‘man’.”2
Isotype’s systematic approach sometimes veers into a graphic limbo in which a large group of bodies lose their statistical character, unintentionally becoming another kind of political object altogether: a crowd. This particularly depersonalised horde, originally used to represent a government constituency, huddles together like a military troop, a wall of bodies whose uniformity suggests a hint of menace.
4.
In contemporary media, graphic limbo is occasionally used to communicative effect. It is customary in newspaper publishing, at least since the mainstream transition to colour printing, to reserve the use of full-page photographic images on the front page for a rare category of truly momentous global events. On September 12, 2001, for example, The Times in London—at the time printed on a broadsheet format—gave over its entire front and back pages to a single photograph of lower Manhattan engulfed in dust and debris, shortly after the second World Trade Center tower had collapsed.
What to do then, in the art department of The New York Times, when the terrifying early spread of the Covid-19 pandemic seemed to warrant such treatment, yet also defied the metonymic potential of any single photograph? On April 8, 2020, the front page of the NYT was given over to a set of four maps of the USA, on which an array of red vertical spikes was used to chart the deaths in major cities between March 17 and April 6. On the final, uppermost map, to show that deaths in New York had risen from 20 to 4,786 in these three weeks alone, one red spike extended completely beyond the edges of the chart, transgressing the NYT’s iconic nameplate (apparently for the first time in its history), and entering a graphic limbo that threatens to exceed the page itself. In a moment whose global significance confounded the photographic, what could be more alarming than the message that death is off the charts?
5.
Abstraction can produce a form of graphic limbo that operates even in the photographic image. Barbara Kopple’s 1976 film Harlan County, USA documents a violent coal miner’s strike over pay and working conditions at the Brookside Mine in Kentucky. The film follows several miners who are afflicted with black lung disease, a debilitating deterioration of the lungs resulting from prolonged exposure to coal dust. In one scene, at a public meeting organised by the miners, a doctor performatively handles a fragment of the damaged lung from a deceased victim. As its brittle tissue crumbles from his hand, the blackened lung establishes itself as an object, a visceral prop in a graphic limbo which circumvents the contravention of any journalistic ethics around the reproduction of images of dead bodies.
6.
The “die-in” is a form of protest closely related to the “sit-in,” the strategy of occupying institutional spaces frequently used in the counter-cultural movements of the late 1950s and 1960s. During a die-in, a group of protesters play dead, typically in public space. In June 2019, the international climate activism organisation Extinction Rebellion (XR) staged a site-specific die-in, occupying the vast Hintze Hall of London’s Natural History Museum. This action was taken in protest against the museum’s hosting an awards dinner for the Petroleum Group of the Geological Society. Claiming this event was inconsistent with the museum’s stated aim “to inspire better care of our planet,” several hundred XR protesters lay down dead beneath the museum’s center-piece blue whale skeleton—symbolically entering into the presence of its collection of extinct species, in a graphic limbo photo opportunity conceived to foreshadow death.
7.
In 1973, French journalist Michel Tauriac staged an extraordinary piece of televised political activism, a die-in on another scale entirely. During the previous year, an unprecedented 16,500 people had been killed in road traffic accidents in France. While preparing to report on this grave statistic for national television news, Tauriac realised that the number could believably be the population of an entire small town. Research led him to just such a town, Mazamet, in the southern region of Tarn, and following long negotiations with the mayor, local businesses and newspapers, at 2:30 p.m. on May 17, a siren sounded and the people of Mazamet lay on the ground pretending to be dead. Television cameras recorded the eerie scene from moving cars and a helicopter above.
Tauriac’s media event conforms to art historian Claire Bishop’s notion of a “delegated performance,” whereby professional performers are replaced by ordinary people who “perform their own socio-economic category,”3 in this case quite literally, by corresponding to the demographic of a single—and therefore unquestionably relatable—French town. Even knowledge of the artifice of the resulting images cannot completely extinguish their visceral affect. They conjure a graphic limbo in which a deeply unsettling form of power, as described in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power can be vicariously experienced:
the sight of large numbers of prostrate and lifeless bodies has a terrible effect on anyone who experiences it: he comes to feel as though he himself had struck them all down and his sense of power increases rapidly and uncontrollably.4
8.
In a media landscape where facts and misinformation openly compete for attention, graphic limbo is no longer a curiosity, and it could even describe a default condition. In such a fraught context, a new genre of data journalism, informed by digital OSINT (open-source intelligence), actively works to disambiguate and disaggregate its information content. Reporting on civilian harm in the currently ongoing Russian military invasion of Ukraine, Bellingcat (using the Forensic Architecture collective’s TimeMap software) explicitly separates the diagrammatic from the pictorial. The reader accesses this material primarily via an online, open-source map, on which incidents are marked with purple circles (neither gratuitous red, nor anodyne grey). Any interaction with one of these incident markers immediately brings into view a feed of primary documentary material, scraped from social media, whose relevance and credibility are determined both automatically, using metrics such as geotags and timestamps, and by content moderators. In this mode, the viewer encounters uncensored photographs of dead bodies (selectively edited only to establish that the identity of any individual is not visible). Short captions describe the incident and signal Bellingcat’s editorial oversight of this material: “9 March, 2022. Mariupol. Several buildings damaged in explosions. One civilian casualty lying dead on the street.”5
Only by such explicit disaggregation—the simultaneous presentation of maximum abstraction in the map view, and maximum disclosure in the incident view—can a mediated representation of a dead body establish any solemn credibility in 2022.
Aspects of this article are elaborated in a forthcoming issue of the HfG print magazine MAS (Materialien zu Ausstellungsdesign und Szenografie).
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Published on 2022-04-14 06:00