On imagining without images
Rationalising late 18th Century colonialism meant developing new ways of seeing. It was one thing to register, on the retina, a world of impressions; quite another to bring this into the focus of desire. Only as objects of desire, differentiated as a preliminary to commodification, could indigenous peoples and their products- not to mention their environments- be made signifiers. As signifiers, by definition, depart from their signified, a desire is opened up in the difference. New techniques of visualisation were critical to this process: to see one's surroundings through a telescope or a Claude glass was to frame and structure phenomena. The Port Jackson painter regularly depicted Aborigines and their implements inside a tondo, as if viewing them through a spyglass. Selective seeing, of this kind, rationalising the world as an inventory of signs, classified by their edges, transforms the sprawl of existence into transportable intellectual cargo; under the aegis of visualisation emergent capitalism disguises its project of enslavement and assimilation. Under the provocative sign of difference, carefully produced by its machines of optical manipulation, imperial interests disguise their hunger to wipe out difference's last vestiges- which, in this situation, will be an array of know ledges, of site-specific cultural practices, that are strictly invisible.
One strand of contemporary installation practice, where Fiona Macdonald's work locates itself, can be said to engage directly with the nexus between visualism and colonialism. To place her secular Ka'aba in our holy Mecca, the art gallery, is to register a substantial blindspot at the heart of our seeing of others; it is physically to interrupt the smooth pageant of indigenous portraits, colonial landscapes, and discreetly arranged Nineteenth Century furniture tom out of the native... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline