Counter-Memory , Heterochronia , and “ History Painting ” ( After Géricault ) Dierk Schmidt ’ s SIEV-X — On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics

This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as represented by Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics (20012005). It analyses how the aesthetics of heterochronoia—multiple temporalities—play a crucial role in the development of a new understanding of the politics of “history painting.” As Schmidt’s work reveals, a radical conception of history exists outside the “singular moment,” and in dialogue with heterogenous visual cultures (news media, art history, advertising). In attempting to understand the import of Schmidt’s work, this essay considers his methodologies for creating a heterochronous mode of history painting, particularly his anachronistic engagement with the work of Theodore Géricault and the iconic history painting, The Raft of the Medusa. Unlike previous critical responses to Schmidt’s work, this paper argues that (after Géricault) the artist’s use of investigative “journalistic” methodologies for SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics do not generate an aesthetics of exposé but rather an aesthetics of “fictionalization.” This aesthetic is defined by the recalibration of documentary and speculative data as a means to reconceive the landscape of the perceptual. The findings of this research demonstrate that the use of disparate fragments—or data—to visualize otherwise diminishing historical events underpins contemporary history painting’s capacity for advancing a distinct economy of affect that circumvents the limitations of the news media and its “monopoly on reality.”

The events of SIEV-X would recall the nineteenth century maritime disaster involving the frigate Medusa.In 1816, the Medusa ran aground in shallow waters near the West African coast before reaching its destination: the new French colony of Senegal.Government officials onboard attempted to save themselves by departing in the available lifeboats, briefly towing 150 French citizens on a makeshift raft, before cutting the ropes.Banished out to sea, over a period of two weeks, the rafters were subjected to the violence of the sea, murder, and cannibalism before a passing ship rescued the sole 10 survivors.The French government unsuccessfully attempted to prevent news of the catastrophe reaching Paris.But a frustrated government representative leaked a survivor's account of the disaster to the anti-Government broadsheet Journal de débats.The survivor account, written by the surgeon Jean Baptiste Henri Savigny, evoked a disturbing image of the Government and its conduct and brought to the fore the traumatizing and brutal events of the raft.The government was quick to challenge Savigny's account, in particular his claim that the captain had cut the ropes towing the raft. 6In an attempt to discredit the surgeon, it emphasized Savigny's role in leading the rafters to commit murder and cannibalism.But with Alexandre Corréard, another survivor of the raft, Savigny would eventually produce an independent account of his and Corréard's experiences and version of events in the book Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal (1818).
Upon his encounter with the article in Journal de débats in 1816 Géricault immediately began work on constructing an image-a history painting-which reflected the survivors' reports.Over two years, Géricault researched every minute detail of the shipwreck of the Medusa, interviewing Savigny and Corréard, becoming involved in the anti-slavery movement tied to the authors' bookshop, attending hospitals to study dying men and severed limbs and heads, visiting the ocean to study the waves, and commissioning a reconstruction of the raft to be built in his studio based on survivor accounts.Via his extensive fieldwork, Schmidt observes: The effect, as Schmidt saw it, was the production of a critical mode of history paintingsomething akin to counter-memory-capable of addressing the "excess" of homogenous historical narratives.The Raft completely excised the sovereign as its subject and stressed the survival of the disenfranchised.In the Raft, argues Schmidt, the rescuing ship appears no larger than a "butterfly" in the large-scale image.It de-emphasizes Government action and the rescue operation.8Instead, it stresses the "state of emergency" that was opened up by way of the sinking of the frigate Medusa and its commander's actions, whereby the castaways came to occupy the status of "bare life." 9 The Raft, in other words, proposes a dialectic between the ruled and rulers, the victors and the vanquished, allowing for a critical tension between the two groups.If the image produces "the non-existence of the government in the 'government painting,'" or history painting, it also acts as a means to catalyze conflicting priorities and vantage points.10For Schmidt, The Raft represented a means to make manifest the politics of memory-who is remembered and why-under the conditions of government repression, a timely project in light of the events of SIEV-X.
For some critics, Schmidt's work would intervene in how history recorded SIEV-X, generating an exposé of the Australian Government's misconduct.Analyzing Xenophobe-Shipwreck Scene (fig.1)-widely considered to be the most important of all the images in the cycle-Hilde Van Gelder argues: "Painting reconstructs something that really happened but that was not registered in any way at all by a photographic nor filmic camera."11Similarly, Angela Lampe states: Dierk Schmidt is trying to find a contemporary language for a vivid disclosure of manipulated realities with the means of painting.This is preceded by arduous years of research-as in the case of the Australian refugee tragedy-until finally bit-by-bit the cover-ups and involvements of the Australian government came to light, which had made helpless people hostages of a refugee policy based on deterrence.12Schmidt's supposed commitment to an aesthetics of exposé was hinged, such critics argued, on his adaptation of Géricault's "investigative-like" methods.As Lars Bang Larsen argued: In his publication, we see [Schmidt working] as an investigative reporter doggedly browsing archives, comparing sources and pursuing witnesses and experts through interviews and text production . . . the people he talks to and the facts he amasses, the texts he writes, the analyses he provides and the travels he undertakes-this is the work that must be done in order to get within reach of the real. 13rtainly, in a publication Schmidt released in 2005 entitled SIEV-X: On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics, he would emphasize the vigor of his research (as a means of aligning his practice with Géricault's).In order to "come to new findings" on SIEV-X, argued Schmidt, he would initiate conversations and interview personnel from the Australian embassy in Germany and the UNHRC in Geneva. 14In the same publication he would also reproduce some of his archival research (for example, sketches of the SIEV-X boat he drafted based on survivor accounts, photographic sources of survivors from CNN and BBC reports) juxtaposing it with Géricault's research and sketches for The Raft of the Medusa (fig. 2).Such juxtapositions would certainly have influenced critics' perceptions that, after Géricault, Schmidt had adopted "investigatory" methods for his work on SIEV-X, and that, after Géricault, he could expose "the cover-ups and involvements of the Australian government."But Schmidt's research was far from being an exposé of any kind.Although barely acknowledge by critics, his attempts to contact the UNHRC and the Australian embassy produced no new information. 15In fact, his attempts to gather more information with regard to SIEV-X were generally unsuccesful.Self-reflexive about the limited information that structure the public's knowledge of SIEV-X, the artist argued: It was not my aim to achieve a "reconstruction" [of the sinking of the SIEV-X] in the sense of an illusionistic TV news image.Whereby it was remarkable that a boat accident of this dimensionrecorded as the one with the most deaths off the coast of Australia as far as the news media reaches back-didn't make it to a TV image. 16ile the rise of "history painting" in contemporary art may well be aligned with a resistance toward government control of information, it is important to emphasize that artists such as Schmidt do not intend to provide informational correctives to government misconduct. 17Instead, drawing on the poetic and affective capacities of art and aesthetics, they evoke a far more ambiguous and elusive sense of what has been.In this light, Schmidt's work-which is, by the artist's own admission, based on limited, mostly Internetbased research and his own speculations about the events of SIEV-X-is not intended to generate an evidentiary or straightforward version of events. 18Rather, it brings to the fore 14 Schmidt, "Introduction," in SIEV-X: On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics, 5. Within the publication SIEV-X: On a case of intensified refugee politics, there are also numerous interviews with refugee activists such as Tony Kevin, Carolin Emcke and Paolo Cuttina.However, it's crucial to observe that these interviews took place during mid 2004, almost three years after the sinking of SIEV-X and the commencement of Schmidt's corresponding project, and a year after Schmidt's final painting for the image-cycle.As such these interviews were a means to elaborate on the project's concept, rather than a means for the artist to "gather information" for the image-cycle. 15Schmidt, "One Cannot Maintain This Sort of Policy While Continuing to Be A Democracy," 12; Schmidt, "What I Am Theoretically Interested in Is the Connection between Violence, Traumatization and the Loss of Speech," 55; and Clemens Krümmel, "The Raft of the Historical Image: Dierk Schmidt's Painting against Painting," in SIEV-X -On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics, 83. 16Schmidt, "What I Am Theoretically Interested in Is the Connection between Violence, Traumatization and the Loss of Speech," 55.It is not quite true that SIEV-X "didn't make it to a TV image" because video reports of the survivors were documented and disseminated by the global news agencies BBC and CNN (of which the artists was well aware).Moreover, footage of the SIEV-X survivors and their families were broadly disseminated in Australia.Thus when Schmidt refers to the lack of television images for SIEV-X he is referring to the dearth of documentation related to the shipwreck, and the victims of this tragedy. 17 the contingencies of his imagery of SIEV-X, while exploring the possibilities of an ambiguous and thoroughly fragmented history. 19 was not the artist's intention to create an "illusionistic" or photographic-like image for an event marked by a lack of imagery and information. 20Instead, he would thematize this "lack" by using black pond sheeting as the "ground" for Xenophobe-Shipwreck Scene (fig.1). 21A difficult medium to paint on, it would take several coats before any image began to appear on this ground. 22Sparsely painted white lines would appear wherever Schmidt could source witness statements and compare information (sourced from the Internet) in order to, for example, estimate the shape of the boat, or to draw outlines of Indonesian police officers carrying machine guns forcing refugees onto SIEV-X, as mentioned in survivor statements. 23lor would only be applied where photographic material could be located, such as portraits of some of the survivors that the artist sourced from a CNN and BBC online video report on SIEV-X. 24But even these images are schematically painted in Xenophobe-Shipwreck Scene in a manner that emphasizes and exaggerates the pixelated, low-resolution, and mass distributed digital images from which the artist was working. 25By all accounts, while attempting to contest the void of information that marked SIEV-X, Schmidt's image of this event was self-reflexively incomplete and marked by absences.
What is more, Schmidt's work is an explicit composite of multiple sources.In Xenophobe-Shipwreck Scene, Schmidt combines and visualizes found data in order to create an otherwise unavailable image of SIEV-X: an image that photography itself could not produce and which bears critical differences to photography.Unlike photography, Schmidt's "history painting" condenses multiple temporalities that go, in the artist's words, "beyond the snapshot." 26Such work refuses the singular moment and a synthetic analysis of information.
Its fragmentation renders the image an incomplete and open-ended surface. 27The rough 19 It is worth observing that Schmidt intended to critically reflect on the limitations of his research.What would be the implications of Schmidt's engagement with Internet-based research and subsequent construction of a history painting from the geographical distance of Germany?As Schmidt stated: "What does it mean to deal with the reconstruction of an event in the Indian Ocean from such a great distanceseen from Europe, exactly the opposite side of the globe?What does it mean to deal from here in Europe with a boat accident that could have been prevented and with the tightened Australian refugee policy?Instead of Christmas Island, it could have been Lampedusa in the Mediterranean.Completely different site-related research work would have been possible and necessary . . .Can a spatial distance also bring advantages with it?"See Schmidt, "Introduction," 5. 20 Schmidt, "What I Am Theoretically Interested in Is the Connection between Violence, Traumatization and the Loss of Speech," 55. 21"This black picture ground", argued Schmidt, "principally translates and forms the ground of the 'lack' [of knowledge] as a theme, as the motivation to replace with an image a situation where there was no image, where its existence was prevented."Schmidt, "What I Am Theoretically Interested in Is the Connection between Violence, Traumatization and the Loss of Speech," 55. 22 Dierk Schmidt, interview by author, Berlin, July 20, 2009, audio and transcript on file with author. 23Schmidt, "What I Am Theoretically Interested in Is the Connection between Violence, Traumatization and the Loss of Speech," 55. 24 Ibid. 25Accordingly, Sabine Vogel has claimed that there "is something sketch like about [Schmidt's] paintings" of SIEV-X.Vogel, "Dierk Schmidt," 182. 26 brushstrokes that structure the painting expose the seams that bind these sundry citations together.

Schmidt would intensify the aesthetics of fragmentation in On A Case of Intensified
Politics by juxtaposing numerous, and at times incongruous, citations throughout the image cycle (fig.2).We see, for example, schematic portraits of the then Australian Prime Minister John Howard, news reports on other Australian refugee histories, and Impressionist-like seascapes referencing the site of the SIEV-X disaster.Manifesting as a series of film stills, when hung on the gallery wall the cycle reflects a spatial arrangement not dissimilar to that found in the montages of experimental video historiographies such as Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989-98).If in Histoire(s) we see a "chains of pictures" flowing not sequentially but projected simultaneously to produce a series of resonances and analogiesconcatenations-then this aesthetic effect would be similarly embodied by Schmidt's nineteen-part "history painting." 28rough its montaging of disparate sources, Schmidt's fragmentary work reflects a nonlinear, experimental conception of a contested historical event: a strategy which resonates with the aesthetics of counter-memory. 29As Michel Foucault has argued, counter-memory offers a differential conception of time/history that brings together repressed archives and documents that correlate with power. 30As a dialectical structure, counter-memory critiques teleological notions of history, the notion of the singular monument born of a single origin.It maps our existence amongst myriad forgotten events, as opposed to a distinct "landmark," splintering the monolithic into a thousand fragments.
The fragmentary and heterogeneous notion of time that underpins Foucault's conception of counter-memory has largely been overlooked in visual culture studies.Critics tend to reduce the notion of counter-memory down to a conflictual arrangement of dominant and marginalized historical narratives, with little attendance to concepts of fragmented time associated with this notion. 31In contrast, Schmidt's work reveals that the stakes and politics of counter-memory are contingent not only on a willingness to memorialize diminishing histories, but also on heterochronia, that is, the invocation of multiple, layered temporalities (or temporal fragments) as a means of refusing homogeneous, synthetic readings of the historical event. 32 28 O Godard see Hito Steyerl, "The Articulation of Protest," in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Stenberg Press, 2012), 87. 29 Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971)," in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology ed.James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 1998), 369-392.Also published in: Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).Also see C. Colwell, "Deleuze and Foucault: Series, Event, Genealogy," Theory & Event 1, no.2 (1997): 1-9. 30Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971)," 369-392.The aesthetics of heterochronia (fragmented shards of time) that underpin Schmidt's work is a condition of the era out of which the work emerges.Contemporaneity, argues Terry Smith, is marked by a disruption to beliefs in teleological time in the face of a range of antinomies: competing colonial and postcolonial discourses, narratives of modernity and counter-modernity, and narratives of globalization and counter-globalization. 33The sense that we are living with "many times" rather than "a time" is further intensified through asynchronous, often traumatic, historical events that occupy screen media, manifesting an unprecedented consciousness of the past in the present. 34With this in mind, it is perhaps no surprise that the by now deeply outmoded genre of history painting has seen a return in contemporary art practices. 35This is seen, for example, in the work of Isaac Julien, who, like Schmidt, also adopts an experimental, heterochronous conception of time.Julien's ninechannel video installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010) juxtaposes police search-and-rescue footage of Chinese refugees missing at sea near the UK's Morecambe Bay, documentary images of the rural landscapes of Guangxi province, the urban-scapes of Shanghai, archival footage from Chinese cinematic history, and fictionalized images of a sixteenth-century Chinese fable in which the goddess Mazu saves fishermen in distress, leading them to the mythical island of Yishan.Like Schmidt, Julien does not visualize the historical event as a singular decisive moment, but rather as a network of intermingling temporalities and as a series of flows.
We see two crucial precedents for the nexus of heterochronia and history painting in the work of Warhol and Richter.Warhol memorializes the 1963 Birmingham Civil Rights riots in Red Race Riots (1963), invoking the aesthetics of the time-lapse by showing the climactic moment and the scenes both before and after to represent a pivotal historical era for American race relations. 36Richter deploys the aesthetics of the image-cycle in October 18,   1977 (1988) to represent a series of interconnected fragments bound to the controversial events of and surrounding the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof group while in the custody of the German state. 37Here, as in Schmidt's work, history appears as a field of fragments.
However, the work of Warhol and Richter needs to be differentiated from the work of Schmidt (and more broadly from contemporary artists engaged in historical representation) in one crucial way.Hal Foster has argued that in their engagement with experimental forms of history painting and archival processes, artists such as Warhol and Richter dwelled on the inevitable "anomie" of memory-making systems and the loss of affect in the era of mass media. 38In contrast, the contemporary history painter, or in Foster's terms archival artist, is 33   in the Salon Care between the festively clad ladies and gents of the high society, the court, the crowd of critics.But when he heard the cries of dismay in face of the rough, unconcealed attacks against all tradition, when he saw how they were startled by this stark despair and heard the derogatory comments […] he was filled with satisfaction and pride. 43flecting on the (much mythologized) impact of Géricault's work in the Salon, Schmidt argued that Xenophobe-Shipwreck Scene would "take up" the place of The Raft and intervene in public perceptions of a contemporary maritime disaster. 44It would do so, he would suggest, by placing this image within the Australian Parliament (rather than the Salon): a notion he simply gestures to by schematically painting a border around Xenophobe-Shipwreck Scene, which references the wooden paneling found in the offices of the Australian Parliament. 45Aware of the shifting roles of history painting between the nineteenth century and today, Schmidt's strategies suggest that the politics of this genre rests on its capacity to fictionalize.That is, to draw unexpected flows between visual cultures as means to re-think the politics and aesthetics of art today.
We may better understand the politics of fictionalization that underpin Schmidt's work by further considering contemporary art's (heterochronous) relationship to outmoded and current visual and knowledge regimes.Whereas in previous eras artists played a pivotal role in representing contemporary moral dilemmas and historical events, today the global news media is by far the more pervasive image and knowledge system.We do not wait for the heroic gestures of a Géricault in order to moves us to witness acts of terror and government malaise. 46But we do wait for the artist to offer a different sense of reality, to open up new perspectives on political events, and map an alternative set of possibilities (however seemingly unthinkable).Fictionalizing, in other words, offers something that is simultanouesly distinct from and in dialogue with a factual report on the state of events.
In this light, the work of Dierk Schmidt, which emerges some two hundred years after Géricault, must be seen as a vital turning point in discussions of the relevance of "history painting" to contemporary art.The conditions of government censorship and control of information today, alongside the circulation of alternative modes of information through the Internet, have given rise to a particular dialectic.Whereas the mass media and governments may repress or ignore contested historical narratives, the digital era is marked by resilient curiosity and a desire to counter and intervene in dominant visual and knowledge regimes.It does so, however, through fragmented images that reveal their contingency and limitations, and that embrace their schematic aberrations.At the same time, history, as the work of Schmidt reveals, cannot be delimited to a singular event, a climactic and definitive moment, but is rather susceptible to a process of flows.Contemporaneity, after all, is marked by heterochronia, by the sense that we live with "many times" (and engage with diverse visual cultures).This is why, as Schmidt's work suggests, contemporary modes of "history painting" may best be formulated as a series of fragments that overlap, clash and loop into each other, reflecting the relentless unfolding of past, present, and future temporalities and forms of knowledge that mark our current era.But the aesthetics of heterochronia in Schmidt's work bears another, crucial effect, too.It presents an innovative mode of counter-memory.
More than just a means to contest eroded histories, counter-memory conjures multiple, dialogical temporalities and visual cultures which refuse a singular perspective of the past and open up the possibility of fictions-unexpected connections between disparate citationsas a means to contest any monopoly on reality.

Figure 1
Figure 1 Dierk Schmidt, Xenophobe-Shipwreck Scene, Dedicated to the 353 Drowned Asylum Seekers That Died in the Indian Ocean on the Morning of October 19, 2001, 2001-2002.From the series SIEV-X-On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics, 2001-2005.Oil on PVC, 176 x 229.6 cm.Copyright VG Bild Kunst, courtesy the artist and Städel Museum, Frankfurt/Main.

Figure 2
Figure 2 Installation view: Dierk Schmidt, SIEV-X-On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics, 2001-2005, the artist's studio, circa 2005.Photograph by Dierk Schmidt.Copyright VG Bild Kunst, courtesy the artist.

V
e r o n i c a T e l l o Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture http://contemporaneity.pitt.eduVol 3, No 1 (2014) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2014.106 See T. J. Demos, "Moving Images of Globalization," Grey Room 37 (Fall, 2009): 10; Carrie Lambert-Beatty, "Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility."October 129 (Summer, 2009): 51-84; and Jill Bennett, Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11 (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2012), 33. 18See Schmidt, "What I Am Theoretically Interested in Is the Connection between Violence, Traumatization and the Loss of Speech," 46-55; and Clemens Krümmel, "The Raft of the Historical Image: Dierk Schmidt's Painting against Painting," 83.C o u n t e r -M e m o r y , H e t e r o c h r o n i a , a n d " H i s t o r y P a i n t i n g " ( A f t e r G é r i c a u l t ) Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture http://contemporaneity.pitt.eduVol 3, No 1 (2014) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2014.106 Schmidt, "What I Am Theoretically Interested in Is the Connection between Violence, Traumatization and the Loss of Speech," 56. 27Ibid.V e r o n i c a T e l l o Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture http://contemporaneity.pitt.eduVol 3, No 1 (2014) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2014.106

31
See for example: Joan Gibbons, "Revisions: The Reassembling of 'History'," in Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London and New York: I.B.Tauris 2009), 52-72; Maria Sturken, "The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions," in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed.Michael Renov and Erica Suderburg, (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1996), 1-12; Katherine Dieckmann, "Godard's Counter-Memory," Art in America 81 (October, 1993): 65-67.3 0 C o u n t e r -M e m o r y , H e t e r o c h r o n i a , a n d " H i s t o r y P a i n t i n g " ( A f t e r G é r i c a u l t ) Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture http://contemporaneity.pitt.eduVol 3, No 1 (2014) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp.2014.106
Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5-7.Also see David Green, "From History Painting to the History of Painting and Back Again: Reflections on the Work of Gerhard Richter," in History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art, eds.David Green and Peter Seddon, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 31-49.