Making It Visible: On the Powers of Representation

For what is finally at stake is not so much how “to make visible the invisible” as how to produce the conditions of visibility for a different social subject.

Teresa de Lauretis¹

The binary between the power of visibility and the importance of invisibility is falsifying. There is real power in remaining unmarked; and there are serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal. Visibility is a trap […]; it summons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession.

Peggy Phelan²

We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone.

Édouard Glissant³

In her 2008 book Ambivalenzen der Sichtbarkeit [Ambivalences of Visibility], Johanna Schaffer asks in hindsight of the ongoing discussion about political representation within the field of visual studies, “How might minoritized subject positions be represented visually in a manner that avoids the perpetuation of the marginalization inherent in the very form of their representation?”⁴ In her analysis of queer and migrant representations within exhibitions, artworks, and movies, Schaffer challenges the prevailing dichotomy between invisible powerlessness and powerful visibility, citing an established link between activism and the arts which positions visibility in close proximity to political power. This link connects an “unconditional affirmation of the idea of visibility in anti-racist, feminist, and lesbian/gay contexts.”⁵

In this article, we aim to re-examine these ambivalences of visibility in the context of the ongoing debate surrounding identity politics. We will analyze the identitarian logics of in/visibilities from an intersectional perspective, using the examples of two exhibitions: Queer British Art 1861-1967, which took place at the Tate Britain in London in 2017, and Gastarbajteri, held at the Wien Museum in Vienna in 2004. These share the distinction of being the inaugural exhibitions in their respective institutional and national contexts to showcase the marginalized positions of queer art and guest workers in institutional settings. Moreover, the titles of both exhibitions indicate that the works on display represent queer artists and guest workers. Given the close connection between the history of museums and the history of citizenship, with its exclusive visual representations, our contribution aims to revisit the ambivalent hopes associated with the representation of minoritized groups from an intersectional perspective.

Introductory thoughts

When Johanna Schaffer points to the ambivalent connections between visibility and political representation within the arts and visual culture studies, she backs her analysis with an existing body of feminist media studies, art history, and subaltern studies. Regarding the political power of visibility, performance philosopher Peggy Phelan concluded in the 1990s that, “If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked, young white women should be running Western Culture. The ubiquity of their image, however, has hardly brought them political or economic power.”⁶ With this insight, she follows Teresa de Lauretis, who, almost a decade earlier, analyzed from a feminist perspective the complex power relations embedded in the visualization processes of women in film. In her essay collection Alice Doesn’t (1984), she critically reviews the demand for more visibility within then-existing conditions. Therein, she determines that knowledge and representation are always situated, always take a position, and are never absolute. Instead of following the claim of “making visible the invisible,” she suggests reviewing the conditions of representation, in which “another social subject” could be made visible.⁷ Accordingly, Phelan questions the practice of making someone visible as a problematic means of representation, because political power and the existence of an identifiable subject are always connected. Concerning the surveillance of migration and border regimes, for example, Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vassilis Tsianos formulate the thesis that, “Becoming imperceptible is an immanent act of resistance because it makes it impossible to identify migration as process which consists of fixed collective subjects. Becoming imperceptible is the most precise and effective tool migrants employ to oppose the individualizing, quantifying, and representational pressures of the settled, constituted geopolitical power.” ⁸ In contrast to identitarian politics of subjectivation, a right to imperceptibility would counter certain forms of surveillance, and thus hegemonic and normative forms of visibility, or their refusal.⁹

Moreover, if visibility is placed in the vicinity of inclusion, as Schaffer argues, “the representation-critical impulse towards imperceptibility can be understood as not being included in this way, not in this manner and under these conditions”¹⁰ – a refusal that, according to Schaffer, also contains “a resistance to the prevailing parameters of legibility.”¹¹ What is considered readable/unreadable is also a question of the context or situation. This is further complicated by the example of Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man, which shows that making oneself invisible can be the procedure of a dominant order of representation, which secures power, when he has his protagonist say: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”¹² Being made invisible can, therefore, be considered a process of violence that leaves traces.

Regarding these discussions, Édouard Glissant takes another position, when he argues against the ambivalent strategies of existing regimes of power/knowledge and representation, linking visibility as a form of transparency to surveillance, imperialism, and fetishism. He criticizes claims for transparency as a basis for comparison and judgement, which first of all provide occasions for subjectification and discrimination. At the same time, he acknowledges the idea of the theory of difference, which made possible the “rightful entitlement to recognition of the minorities swarming throughout the world and the defense of their status.”¹³ It is against the background of these ambivalences of possession and objectification that Glissant warned against the plea for transparency, and developed his demand for the right to opacity from a postcolonial perspective. In his book Poetics of Relation (1990) he progresses the thesis that, through definition and clarification, transparency ignores the aspects of oneself that are difficult to grasp – a notion that was not only fruitful regarding postcolonial theory or minority studies, but also queer theory, since he argues against the stabilizing conditions in visual culture, philosophy, law, and social studies. Moreover, he claims that a right to opacity could open up a political scope for action that is not bound to absolute truths or identities.

Since national museums such as Tate Britain or the Wien Museum represent national ideas of belonging that are strictly linked to identitarian representations, we want to ask in the following how and if the curators of Queer British Art and Gastarbajteri worked around such ambivalences of in/visibilities within their exhibition concepts.

The exhibition Queer British Art 1861-1967 at Tate Britain

The history of museums is closely linked to the exclusive formation of citizenship, its ideas of belonging and identity, a fact that brings to mind Tate Britain, which opened its London doors for the first time in 1897 to make art visible to a predominantly white, middle-class audience. Given this logic, in which representation is connected to civic identity formation and inclusion, the euphoria within queer communities about an exhibition of queer artists and the representation of their works within the Queer British Art exhibition was understandable. The Tate Britain website stated “Presenting the first exhibition to focus on queer British art”; accordingly, the exhibition was about representing queer works and their artists within the existing canon of British art, if not creating a new canon of queer art. The question that therefore arises is what becomes visible when showing queer British art. The fact that this exhibition was the first to bring together queer artists at Tate Britain was due to the commitment of curator Clare Barlow. Against all opposition, she managed to show works by queer artists and portraits of queer people in London to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the repeal of the Labouchère Amendment.

The exhibition’s full title, Queer British Art 1861-1967, refers to the long-lasting criminalization of male homosexuality in Britain. More precisely, it refers to a period marked by two changes in the law. First, in Britain’s queer history, 1861 is associated with the abolition of the death penalty. An amendment to the law replaced it with a prison sentence for fornication, although this still ranged from ten years to life imprisonment, and was not reduced for more than eighty years: it was not until 1967 that the so-called “Labouchère Amendment” to the penal code was repealed. The amendment did not altogether abolish the previous “offense of gross indecency between men,” but rather homosexuality between men was now permitted in private if the people lived in Wales or England, were aged over twenty-one, and served neither in the armed forces nor the merchant navy. Accordingly, as its catalog states, the exhibition celebrates “the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalization of male homosexuality in England.” In addition, however, “works of art from the years 1861-1967 [are shown] that deal with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) identities.” The exhibition aims to explore “how artists expressed themselves at a time before established assumptions about gender and sexuality were challenged and changing […]. Together they reveal a remarkable range of identities and histories, from the playful to the political and from the erotic to the domestic.” For curator Clare Barlow, the word “queer” means a liberation from imposed categorization, pre-existing meanings, homosexual or gender transgression, and heteronormative assumptions. Works of art earlier shown mainly in so-called “private cabinets” were unveiled: paintings, drawings, personal photographs, and films from artists such as John Singer Sargent, Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant, and David Hockney. Above all, these are portraits of double lives, codes, distractions, and indiscretions.

The aim of showing a “range of queer identities” in an exhibition whose very name purports to define what constitutes queer British art of a specific era recalls the concept of additive historiography, with which the art historian Linda Nochlin criticized canonization in her 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In her institutional critique, Nochlin questions the link between representation and the power of women in the art world from an art-historical perspective. She reflects on how art and its history are told, and points to the patriarchal structures that made it impossible for women to study art and made them invisible as artists in the art system. With the focus on female art, Nochlin then problematizes efforts for visibility and the “rediscovery” of female positions, as “this practice of additive historiography reproduces and stabilizes a white, patriarchal implication.”¹⁴ The mere addition of a female artist to the canon does not challenge any of the predominantly male ideals in art history.

In the exhibition’s accompanying catalog, queer theorist Jack Halberstam therefore states that the following queer aesthetic strategies, which also address the field of visual structures, need to be discussed, far removed from the identity-logical label of queer art. Halberstam writes: “An intriguing queer aesthetic that runs throughout the book concerns studies of interiors, still life, flowers, and landscape. The covert glances at bodies constitute an obvious and manifest thread; the casting of queerness as a relation to furniture, flower arranging, dance, night, journeying, war, and solitude offers a more nuanced account of queer-looking, queer presence and absence, and queer relations to nature and culture.”¹⁵ Here, Halberstam points to Nochlin – who analyzed the exclusionist mechanisms of marginalized positions and the “choice” of genres – in stating that “The collecting of these artists under the heading of ‘queer art’ requires us to look closely at the frame – both the framing of British art that has often excluded these artists or at least omitted the fuller stories of who they are and were, but also the framing of queer art itself.”¹⁶

One could therefore argue, with Nochlin, that the exhibition reproduces the reification of difference by using the term “queer” to read artistic positions exclusively in terms of an “and/or” logic of identity, marking works as such and making them visible due to their “queer” content. The exhibition concept could also be criticized as a form of visibility whose revelatory character conceals precisely that which is not clear, with reference to Glissant’s critique¹⁷ of the idea of transparency, because works that represent non-heteronormative embodiments and politics of desire are consequently presented as “queer” and inscribed into existing representational structures. “Queer” thus presents itself more as a genre or label added to the Western, white canon. In this sense, the show is additive historiography, making visible marginal positions and integrating them into the Western art canon. As queer subjects seem to be bound to the category of the invisible subject, it is interesting that the term “queer” seems to force visibility in this context. That it is not only the dichotomous construction of visibility/invisibility which forces a problematization is made clear in the theoretical work of philosopher and queer theorist Antke Engel. Nevertheless, Engel demonstrates the necessity of challenging the concept of visibility understood as a form of inclusion, due to its potential to exert a stabilizing influence on the system. This outcome has also been demonstrated in the context of Queer British Art.

In contrast to the reification of difference, we propose that queering should be conceptualized as follows: Engel posits¹⁸ that queering can be theorized as a practice of ambiguity, a political force, and an attitude that resists neoliberal insertion into established regimes of power and knowledge. It creates unrest, and has the potential to destabilize, question, and change existing hierarchical structures. Consequently, the term “queer” is best understood as a multifaceted concept. Its capacity to evoke numerous meanings arises from its refusal to align with any singular object or referent, and its rejection of an a- or supra-historical claim to universality. Furthermore, its usage does not adhere to arbitrarily applicable conventions, nor does it aspire to such limitations. In the light of these considerations, it seems pertinent to reflect on the political dimensions of the concept of becoming imperceptible in the arts, as elucidated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It may be posited that invisibility is a privilege that artists must first be able to afford.¹⁹Accordingly, we suggest that our review may have given the impression that queer communities in London and beyond did not celebrate the visualization of LGBTQ artists in Queer British Art. As a follow-up project, the Queerate Tate format was first launched during the COVID pandemic, with the aim of inviting queer communities to browse the collection and curate a digital exhibition from a queer perspective (for those who are interested, the online exhibition is still accessible). Another noteworthy initiative was the Queer and Now festival, which took place at the Tate in June 2023. This offered guided tours, such as “Queering the Collection,” which were very well received. In conclusion, it seems that the dominant paradigm of visualizing in the Queer British Art exhibition is additive and stabilizes existing structures. However, it is encouraging to observe a movement that also interrogates official representations of belonging.

The exhibition Gastarbajteri at the Wien Museum

Gastarbajteri, at the Wien Museum in Vienna in 2004, similarly addresses legal questions of belonging and exclusion, albeit using alternative forms of representation. The exhibition focuses on the issue of the recruitment agreements that were concluded in the 1950s in the wake of World War II. These constituted bilateral treaties, the objective of which was to regulate the temporary immigration or emigration of labor between countries. In German-speaking countries, the term “guest workers” is used to refer to the individuals who were recruited to work temporarily in them at that time. The “Gastarbeiter” migrant workers were specifically recruited to Germany, the former GDR, Switzerland, and Austria in the 1950s and 1960s in order to compensate for the post-war labor shortage. However, the term only pertains to the temporal aspect of the stay, with the host’s obligations to migrants remaining unaddressed. This topic has been the subject of considerable discussion and criticism from a post-migrant perspective in recent years, with notable examples including the film Liebe, D-Mark und Tod – Aşk, Mark ve Ölüm (dir. Cem Kaya, 2022) and the exhibition Gastarbeiter 2.0 (ngbk Berlin, 2024). As the title Gastarbajteri implies, the exhibition primarily adopted a post-Yugoslavian perspective. Regarding the hostility, the exclusion of migrant workers, and the structural and physical violence they suffered, the members of the Minderheiten Initiative [Minorities Initiative], the non-profit founded in 1991 that created the exhibition, state they want to make visible “the invisibilization of the history of migration [that] is attributed to different political and social strategies.” In order to fulfil the aforementioned task, the Gastarbajteri exhibition could draw on the Archive of Migration established by Minderheiten Initiative members – namely Arif Akkilic, Vida Bakondy, and Ljubomir Bratic.²⁰ The establishment of the archive was prompted by the observation that, at the time, no collection of artefacts on the subject of migration existed in Austria, nor were there any established contacts dealing with the topic within state institutions. In consequence, the creators themselves brought together a range of objects that made an anti-racist history of migration visible from the perspective of the “extra-parliamentary political field.”²¹ Concurrently, the Minorities Initiative served as both collector and curator of Gastarbajteri, which narrated the story of labor migration across a span of four decades. Accordingly, this exhibition was conceived as an intervention-in-solidarity, with the objective of visualizing and contextualizing the “democratic ideas of freedom and equality” in a historically sound manner.²² In contrast to Queer British Art, the focus was not on portraits, but on eleven exemplary locations and moments in time, representing diverse geographical areas, socio-political conditions, and bureaucratic restrictions. The rationale behind this decision is outlined in the catalog as follows:

[T]hese are places where parts of this history were written: the recruitment center in Istanbul, which was established by the Austrian Chamber of Commerce in 1964, the “guest worker route,” the Walddörfl workers’ settlement in Ternitz or the Warhanek fish factory, which offered one of the first legal employment opportunities for migrant women due to its precarious working conditions. Adatepe, a small village in the Marmara region of Turkey, from which more than half of the inhabitants emigrated to Austria and to which the first pensioners returned in 1994, Mexikoplatz, the Egyptian Club, Naschmarkt and the Muslim cemetery in Vienna are also places of this history, as are the aliens police at Hernalser Gürtel, or the meeting place in front of the opera in Vienna, where various migrant groups demonstrated against the Residence Act in 1993.²³

Starting with the biographical memories of individual people, this approach puts the places and the reconstruction of their history at the center, and thereby tries to work against the paradigm of subjectification. Therefore, the exhibition presents neither success stories nor images of systematic oppression; rather, it reveals these places not as constituted by individual fates alone but by socio-political conditions and structures, which, like the memories, are in themselves untransparent. In doing so, Gastarbajteri points to the fact that not only are the objects of migration made invisible within museums, but also the migrant subject positions themselves.

This lack of visibility has concrete consequences for historiography, in which specific knowledge of migrant positions within society achieves little representation, and is not therefore memorized. Accordingly, Matti Bunzl, director of the Wien Museum, comments in a book published in 2016 by Arbeitskreis Archiv der Migration:

Within the hegemonic narratives of recent history, migrant communities often do not appear at all or only as an insignificant appendix. The exhibition, therefore, aims to make the contradictions to the nation-states’ narrative of advocacy visible. Here, the material heritage of so-called “guest workers” is not a “supplement” but the result of the collection project. Objects like the one here mentioned are “centerpieces” of any nation-state narrative of the late 20th century. They are constitutive objects of the city’s history and therefore understood not as objects that narrate the lives of migrants, but as things that represent Austria’s culture as such.²⁴

In the exhibition’s context, the problem of domination occurs in the production of visibilities when essentializing migrants within the status of guest workers. Even if making migrant objects visible in museums remains a solidary, interventionist practice, the collection’s exhibition recalls the ambiguity between naturalization as migrants and the need to make their history visible. Nevertheless, the project demonstrates that if there is to be a different historiography of the “guest workers,” it can also be discovered from documents and objects. Against this background, a claim for migration museums, for example, does not appear to be a potent corrective, as it would perpetuate the dichotomous construction which presents the history of migrants as Other. In contrast to Queer British Art, the Gastarbajteri exhibition does not focus on portraits. This decision to show objects instead of bodies can be understood as a critique of the prevailing regime of representation. Instead of showing migrant bodies and thus enabling the stereotyping and subjectivization of “migrants,” the exhibition focuses on objects and the practices associated with them. Nevertheless, it is necessary to clarify whether the utilization of objects, which subsequently function as a medium of identification, paves the way for the phenomenon of opacity, as Glissant proposes. In light of the aforementioned limitations of additive historiography,²⁵ which reproduces a form of Othering with regard to museums housing migrant collections, the question arises as to what extent the representation of minoritarian groups can be presented as something “hard to grasp,” rather than offering transparent subjects of migrant and queer identities, which are then subject to judgement.

Against essentialization and naturalization

Regarding Johanna Schaffer’s plea that, in order to analyze the repercussions of “connections between visibility, invisibility, and political power and on what relations of visibility and invisibility have to do with the production of social inequalities, appropriations, and exclusions, they must be interested in the ambivalences of visibility,”²⁶ Queer British Art, instead of showing or pointing to these ambivalences, ties the practice of queering closely back to identity logics, while Gastarbajteri makes clear the extent to which the visibility of minorities must struggle with the problem of their essentialization.

In criticizing this identity-logical and neoliberal systematization, we want to suggest thinking further within the context of the queer and anti-racial theories of Édouard Glissant. Since the term “queer” can be considered multifaceted, its power derives not least from the fact that it refuses both the object/referent and an a- or supra-historical claim to universality, but is nevertheless by no means arbitrary or arbitrarily applicable – or indeed wants to be. Since “queer” does not claim any materiality or positivity of its own, its demarcation from that which it differs is necessarily relational and not oppositional. At the intersection of sexuality/gender with patterns of racialization and ethnicization, queer theory finds signs that a queer project of denaturalization is also expanding along lines of identification other than sex and gender. Consequently, we want to close our contribution with a plea for the concept of “disidentification” and also with Glissant’s aforementioned theory of opacity. Both theories struggle against ideas of visibility as identity-logical projects and essentializations. The concept of disidentification goes back to the philosopher Michel Pêcheux, and was taken up and further developed by the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz in his monograph Disidentifications, published in 1999. At the center of Muñoz’s discussion is a questioning of spaces of possibility and the survival of marginalized subjects – especially the positions of queer people and those of color. He writes: “Instead of bowing to the pressure of the dominant ideology (identification) or attempting to free oneself from its inescapable sphere (counter identification), this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that attempts to change a cultural logic from within, always endeavoring to bring about lasting structural change and at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance.”²⁷ In contrast to an identity-logical movement, disidentification strategies suggest working with and against culturally constructed stereotypes – also in the field of invisibilities. Following Muñoz, this means reacting to cultural codes of existing power/knowledge and representation regimes and partly appropriating them. To strengthen one’s position, criticizing and undermining hegemonic norms is a result of productive disidentification – the strategic option of creating spaces of possibility and survival. However, Muñoz also critically notes that the strategy of disidentification is a practice of resistance. Depending on situational conditions, it may be necessary to become invisible or, conversely, to become (made) visible in order to fight for agency and forms of subjectivation. As an answer to the ambivalence of visibility, Muñoz pleads for the use of different strategies. He states that it is not a question of playing one against another; there are manifold potentialities and practices of resistance that lie in-between. Glissant’s notion of opacity further complicates naturalizing and essentialist projects in claiming a “right for opacity” – for, as he might put it, the choice to remain un/visible is the responsibility of hegemonic power but not of marginalized groups. His concept of opacity is understood as a strategy within the ambivalences of invisibility and invisibility, to counteract the violence of standardization, hierarchization, and classification. In short, opacity is a term that, like flickering, shimmering, and glittering, describes a state of representation that eludes unambiguous categories. The dichotomy of visibility and invisibility appears productive insofar as opacity eludes a static description, and instead pleads for a way of thinking that allows different invisible representations to be viewed differently, depending on the situation. Renate Lorenz emphasizes the potential of opacity as follows: “Strategies of opacity are perhaps particularly successful when not seamlessly translated into ‘reading’ or ‘knowledge’ – even from a ‘minoritarian’ perspective […] The strategy of opacity takes on the paradox of wanting to visualize something whose history of visualization is primarily determined by violence or normalization.”²⁸

Outlook

In our contribution, we have looked from a curatorial perspective within an intersectional point of view to a paradigm that “glorifies the complex processes that occur in the field of visuality between giving something to see, seeing, and being seen,”²⁹ by formulating a dichotomy between invisible powerlessness and powerful visibility. To conclude, against the background of two exhibitions dealing with the historicization of queer and migrant subjects within hegemonic structures, we would like to emphasize a productive combination of the concept of opacity with that of dis/identification and, following Schaffer, of “un_form.” As she writes: “For queer-feminist anti-racist positions, disidentification [includes], for all the desire for recognition and all the desire for images of an affirmative existence, always also a tendency towards non-identification, non-idealization, non-recognition, non-visibility and thus towards un_form […].”³⁰ Like the active power of opacity, un_form is the potential not to be fixed, but to oscillate back and forth within the ambivalence of the un/visible and the political – wafting, shimmering, briefly flashing, creating a form of productive unrest. The concept of opacity, which includes certain forms of permeability and materiality, practices, and figures of becoming (in)visible is complicated, Thus, the pressure of normalization and the associated logic of stabilization may be escaped. Let’s stumble into the opaque in-between – between the ambivalences of visibility and invisibility.