YALE UNION

The Forgotten Space
USA, 2010, video, 112 min.

A Screening as Part of THE DEVIL,…
Friday, January 24, 7pm at NWFC

Thom Andersen will introduce the film.

In 2010, the late Allan Sekula and Noël Burch released The Forgotten Space, a critique of the global supply chain, its disastrous impact on the environment and workers’ rights, and the standardization of a capitalist world economy. The film follows container cargo aboard barges, trains, and trucks, as well as the individuals involved in—and marginalized by—the global transport system. It jumps out of Allan Sekula’s earlier photography book Fish Story, and while it looks to understand contemporary maritime culture in relation to symbolic or allegorical ideas of the sea, its main focus is containerization, the obscuring box and the acme of order.

During a panel discussion following a screening of The Forgotten Space at Cooper Union, Sekula said, “What we’re struggling with here is the big story, and no one thinks they can tell the big story anymore, everyone’s given up; they’re feeling hopeless about their ability to tell this story. Maybe in economics it’s similar to the turn to microeconomics, away from macroeconomics, you know, tending your own little garden while the whole earth is trembling.”[1]

Sekula’s contribution to art has been, among many things, a run against the prejudices that grew out of modernism. His work is an “alternative to the overly specialized, esoteric, and self-referential discourse of late modernism,”[2] which had, to offer only one crude example, nothing much to say about labor. The art historian Benjamin Buchloh, a longtime advocate of Sekula’s, has added, “As a whole we can say that labor has been absent from the representational field of Modernism and Allan Sekula is one of the first artists… who has broken this prohibition and made it evident that labor is of course the central condition of human self constitution and self definition.”[3]

AN INTRODUCTION
by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch

Our film, The Forgotten Space, is about globalization and the sea, the “forgotten space” of our modernity. First and foremost, globalization is the penetration of the multinational corporate economy into every nook and cranny of human life. It is the latest incarnation of an imperative that has long been accepted as vital necessity, even before economics could claim the status of a science. The first law of proto-capitalism: markets must multiply through foreign trade or they will stagnate and die. As the most sophisticated of the 17th century defenders of mercantilism, William Petty, put it: “There is much more to be gained by Manufacture than Husbandry, and by Merchandize than Manufacture. A Seaman is in effect three Husbandmen.” (Political Arithmetick, 1690).

The contemporary vision of an integrated, globalized, self-regulating capitalist world economy can be traced back to some of these axioms of the capitalist “spirit of adventure.” And yet what is largely missing from the current picture is any sense of material resistance to the expansion of the market imperative. Investment flows intangibly, through the ether, as if by magic. Money begets money. Wealth is weightless. Sea trade, when it is remembered at all, is a relic of an older and obsolete economy, a world of decrepitude, rust, and creaking cables, of the slow movement of heavy things. If Petty’s old fable held that a seafarer was worth three peasants, neither count for much in the even more fabulous new equation. And yet we would all die without the toil of farmers and seafarers.

Those of us who travel by air, or who “go surfing” on the Web, scarcely think of the sea as a space of transport any more. We live instead in the age of cyberspace, of instantaneous electronic contact between everywhere and everywhere else.

In this fantasy world the very concept of distance is abolished. More than 90% of the world’s cargo moves by sea, and yet educated people in the developed world believe that material goods travel as they do, by air, and that money, traveling in the blink of an eye, is the abstract source of all wealth.

Our premise is that the sea remains the crucial space of globalization. Nowhere else is the disorientation, violence, and alienation of contemporary capitalism more manifest, but this truth is not self-evident, and must be approached as a puzzle, or mystery, a problem to be solved.

The factory system is no longer concentrated in the developed world but has become mobile and dispersed. As ships become more like buildings, the giant floating warehouses of the “just-in-time” system of distribution, factories begin to resemble ships, stealing away stealthily in the night, restlessly searching for ever cheaper labor. A garment factory in Los Angeles or Hong Kong closes, the work benches and sewing machines reappear in the suburbs of Guangzhou or Dacca. In the automobile industry, for example, the function of the ship is akin to that of conveyor systems within the old integrated car factory: parts span the world on their journey to the final assembly line.

The function of sea trade is no longer a separate, mercantilist enterprise, but has become an integral component of the world-industrial system. We are distracted from the full implications of this insight by two powerful myths, which stifle curiosity. The first myth is that the sea nothing more than a residual mercantilist space, a reservoir of cultural and economic anachronisms. The second myth is that we live in a post-industrial society, that cybernetic systems and the service economy have radically marginalized the “old economy” of heavy material fabrication and processing . Thus the fiction of obsolescence mobilizes vast reserves of sentimental longing for things which are not really dead.

Our response to these myths is that the sea is the key to understanding globalized industrialism. Without a thoroughly modern and sophisticated “revolution” in ocean-going cargo-handling technology, the global factory would not exist, and globalization would not be a burning issue.

What began in the mid-1950s as a modest American improvement in cargo logistics, an effort to achieve new efficiencies within a particular industry, has now taken on world historic importance. The cargo container, a standardized metal box, capable of being quickly transferred from ship to highway lorry to railroad train, has radically transformed the space and time of port cities and ocean passages.

There have been enormous increases in economies of scale. Older transport links, such as the Panama Canal, slide toward obsolescence as ships become more and more gargantuan. Super-ports, pushed far out from the metropolitan center, require vast level tracts for the storage and sorting of containers. The old sheltering deepwater port, with its steep hillsides and its panoramic vistas, is less suited to these new spatial demands than low delta planes that must nonetheless be continually dredged to allow safe passage for the deeper and deeper draft of the new super-ships.

Ships are loaded and unloaded in as little as twelve hours, compared to the laborious cargo storage practices of fifty years ago. The old waterfront culture of sailor bars, flophouses, brothels, and ship chandlers gives way either to a depopulated terrain vague or – blessed with the energies of real-estate speculators – to a new artificial maritime space of theme restaurants, aestheticized nautical relics and expensive ocean-view condominiums. As the class character of the port cities changes, the memory of mutiny and rebellion, of intense class struggle by dockers, seafarers, fishermen, and shipyard workers-struggles that were fundamental to the formation of the institutions of social democracy and free trade-unionism-fades from public awareness. What tourist in today’s Amsterdam is drawn to the old monument commemorating dock-workers’ heroic but futile strike to prevent the Nazi deportation of the Dutch Jews?

If the cargo container represents one instrument of maritime transformation, the companion instrument is not logistical but legal. This is the flag of convenience system of ship registry. Here again, the Americans were in the lead, seeking to break powerful maritime unions in the wake of the second world war. If globalization is understood by many in the world today as Americanization , the maritime world gives us, then, these two examples of the revolutionary and often brutal ingenuity of American business practices. The flag of convenience system allows for ships owned in rich countries to be registered in poor countries. It was created to obscure legal responsibility for safety and fair labor practices. Today’s seafaring crews are drawn for the old and new Third Worlds: Filipinos, Chinese, Indonesians, Ukranians, Russians. The conditions they endure are not unlike those experienced by the lascars of the 18th century.

A consequence of the global production-distribution system is that links between port and hinterland become all the more important. It is not just the port that is transformed, but the highway and rail system, the very transport infrastructure of a country or a continent, as evidenced by the Betuwe line in Holland or the dangerous saturation of truck traffic in Alpine tunnels.

The boxes are everywhere, mobile and anonymous, their contents hidden from view. One could say that these containers are “coffins of remote labor-power” carrying goods manufactured somewhere else, by invisible workers on the other side of the globe. We are told by the apologists of globalization that this accelerated flow is indispensable for our continued prosperity and for the deferred future prosperity of those who labor so far away. But perhaps, this is a case for Pandora, or for her more clairvoyant sister, Cassandra.

Our film moves between four port cities: Bilbao, Rotterdam, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. It visits the industrial hinterland in south China, and the transport hinterland in the heart of Holland. Of the four port cities, three can be classed as “super-ports,” the largest in the world. Here we encounter functional hypertrophy. Bilbao, a fading port with a brave maritime history, has become the site of radical symbolic transformation of derelict maritime space. In Bilbao, functional atrophy coexists with symbolic hypertrophy, a delirium of neo-baroque maritime nostalgia wedded to the equally delirious promise of the “new economy.”

Noël Burch was born in San Francisco in 1932. Burch has been living in France since 1951. While primarily known for his theoretical writings, he has always positioned himself as a filmmaker and has directed over twenty titles, mostly documentaries. His first and best known book is Theory of Film Practice (1973). From 1967 to 1972, he collaborated with Janine Bazin and André S. Labarthe for the celebrated series Cinéastes de Notre Temps, and directed seven programs which are considered to have renewed the “film-maker portrait” in the heroic years of French public television. It was during that same period that Burch was co-founder and director of the Institut de Formation Cinématographique, an alternative film school.

Thom Andersen was in born 1943 in Chicago. He is a filmmaker, film critic, and teacher. He currently teaches in the Film and Video program at the California Institute of the Arts. He was a close friend of Allan’s.

Allan Sekula was born in 1951 and died in Los Angeles on August 10, 2013 during the planning of this program, which would not be possible without his example.

ALLAN SEKULA’S OBITUARY
by Sally Stein

Allan Sekula was born on January 15, 1951, in Erie, PA, the first of five children of Evelyn Shepard Sekula, a homemaker, and Ignace Sekula, a chemical engineer who worked most of his life in the aerospace industry and the USAF. He died in Los Angeles on August 10, 2013, after contending with advanced gastric-esophageal cancer during the previous two years.

Before his teens, his family relocated to San Pedro, CA, the port of Los Angeles, where Sekula continued to live until college and where he grew to love the sea and the rich culture, both social and maritime, of the harbor.

He enrolled at UC San Diego with undergraduate plans to study marine biology but after a few art courses with John Baldessari, he switched majors to visual arts; after receiving a BA, he continued at UCSD in the MFA program, working intensively with writer and performance art teacher David Antin at the same time as he formed a network with socially committed left photographers Martha Rosler, Fred Lonidier, and Phel Steinmetz. Shortly after receiving his MFA degree in 1974, he began publishing widely-read articles offering critiques of the social uses of photography and its anodyne embrace by the art world in Artforum.

After briefly teaching at NYU in the School of Cinema Studies, Sekula taught for five years in Ohio State University’s Department of Photography and Cinema, before returning in 1985 to Los Angeles to join the faculty of California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) where he taught for nearly three decades.

In East of Borneo, Thomas Lawson, Dean of CalArts School of Art remembers his colleague, “Allan had a remarkable, indomitable spirit. For over two years, from the first word that his body could not be repaired, he fought against the inevitable with inner strength and grace. At first he continued to travel for his work, then his many collaborators traveled to him so that several projects could move forward. He lost weight and he lost energy, but he never lost that keen eye and sharp mind that saw so clearly what was wrong with this world.”

The essays collected in Sekula’s first book, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–83 (1984), significantly altered the way in which the documentary function of photography was conceptualized. His more recent volumes mobilize us through his visual art and writing to carefully consider the effects of capitalism, globalization, information formats, and the dematerialization of image and word. Since the early 1970s, his works with photographic sequences, written texts, slide shows, and sound recordings have traveled a path close to cinema. At times, they refer to specific films. In other instances, such as his 1973 work Aerospace Folktales, they operate like a “disassembled movie” while resisting the “dictatorship of the projector.”

Sekula’s books, in addition to Photography against the Grain, include Fish Story, 1995; Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes, 1996; Dismal Science, 1999; Performance Under Working Conditions, 2003; TITANIC’s Wake, 2003; and Polonia and Other Fables, 2009. These works range thematically from critical investigations of the history of photography to studies of family life in the grip of the military-industrial complex, branching out into explorations of myths of national identity.

Allan Sekula is survived by his mother, Evelyn, and his siblings Stefan, Brian, Victoria and Michelle, along with his wife, Sally Stein.

1 Panel discussion with Allan Sekula, Benjamin Buchloh, and David Harvey at Cooper Union, New York, May 15, 2011.

2 Allan Sekula. Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983. Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984.

3 Panel discussion with Allan Sekula, Benjamin Buchloh, and David Harvey at Cooper Union, New York, May 15, 2011.