Animating Space: Tracing the Construction of the Political in Ariella Azoulay’s Civil Imagination

Eyes closed, yet in motion, soft light outlines one half of her face, only to conceal the other. She and the child she cradles are flattened into the dull gray background in front of which they are posed, yet in this muteness there is a distinct crispness to the contours of her hijab. In her arms, her son beams with light, as every groove of his face and every fold in the blanket he is swaddled in reflect his overexposure. The piece is a beautifully choreographed image that instantly hails a multiplicity of picturesque stagings that signal back to the Renaissance Madonnas. This 1988 photograph by Micha Kirshner graces the cover of Ariella Azoulay’s latest book, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography and, as she states, “is the overt and covert interlocutor of this book” (ci, I). Yet, as the book proceeds, the photograph seems less like an interlocutor and more like a specter that haunts the book, much like the initial debate that catalyzes Azoulay’s investigation of the encounter between the political and the photographic.

Since Walter Benjamin’s polemic pronouncement in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” distinguishing art that is political from that which is aesthetic, all “human rights art” has been forced through this separator. Azoulay begins her discussion of photography by taking Kirshner’s image and refusing its placement within these parameters. As in her previous work, the political landscape of construction and destruction within Israel and Palestine remains a potent undercurrent, illustrating her more general concept of the political ontology of photography, as she braids together political and aesthetic theory. Relying heavily on Arendt’s notion of action, Azoulay’s primary project in this book is to reconceive the photographic space as a political space that continuously asserts itself. She does this in steps: first, she (re)moves the frame of the photographic event; then, she exposes it to a very particular political theorist, who enacts critique first as a name—Arendt—then through her work; and, finally, she opens up this new political/aesthetic space by developing her concept within the very particular political experience of Israel and Palestine. This synthesis of the aesthetic and political at once constitutes an absolutely necessary intervention into both fields while it also sets the stage in her work for an extension of the very problem in the history of visual studies that Azoulay outlines at the outset. If the demand that Benjamin makes, which begins Azoulay’s book, represents the third demand placed on art by the history of visual studies—from Kant, through Duchamp, to Benjamin—then while Azoulay overcomes the Benjaminian demand, she might find herself articulating a fourth judgment of art. Could performing a reading with Arendt in fact be limiting and reassert this lineage? While Azoulay collapses the binary between politics and aesthetics, she folds it into the political. Reading solely with and through Arendt may have set Azoulay up to reenact a history that she means to quickly rehearse and abandon.

Kirshner’s photograph, “Aisha al-Kurd and her son Yassir,” and many of his other photographs, have, at times, been the source of debate. As an Israeli artist who takes very carefully arranged photographs in a studio space, it often has been asked whether he is attempting to aestheticize the political. It is with this question that Azoulay also begins. Picking up the prompt from the epilogue of what is now one of Benjamin’s most famous essays, she asserts that art now lives in the divide between the aestheticization of the political or the politicization of art.¹ The desire to fix and label Kirshner’s project cannot be read outside of Benjamin’s legacy and his dictum regarding the obligation to distinguish between the good and bad art object. While we now take both this injunction and such a reading to be false (as we have...