Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images

Abstract

ed as ‘videodeath’, Smith wends his way only partly towards the images of executions for dissemination via video, like those used by Islamic terror organisations to shock and instil fear in their audience-enemies. The 17-year-old woman who filmed the police killing of Floyd, for nine unflinching minutes, was perhaps unwittingly participating in the structure of our spectacle culture that not only incites but in some sense always produces more violence. George Holliday, who used his Handycam to video LAPD officers beating Rodney King in 1991, and who died of COVID-19 on 21 September 2021, was in some ways responsible—or perhaps more pointedly, the video camcorder he used was responsible— for the 63 deaths that followed the trial of the officers, in the rioting that occurred when they were acquitted of wrongdoing in their arrest of King. (King himself died tragically in 2012 at age 47 after years of addiction and violence following the 1991 event that made him a globally famous victim of police brutality.) Yet even as Smith considers these possibilities (113–17), he skirts the existing arguments about media and violence already made so well by contemporary commentators such as Groys (‘we all know bin Laden as a video artist first and foremost’), in preference for the vague idea of ambient images as the more suitable vector for establishing the effectiveness of these recorded killings within the iconomy. The reader is left asking: why? This incongruence leads to a question that Smith seems reluctant to ask: what is it that mediates what he has gathered here in the section titled ‘Iconoclash’? As the central part of the text, there remains a very demanding debate to be had about the so-called ‘image-complex’ attributed to Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (61)—one that recapitulates the arguments against the medieval bans on the use of images made by the iconophile Nikephoros (via Mondzain’s thesis arguing for its contemporary significance). Is the answer to the question of iconoclash too much for Smith to bear? When the French philosopher Alain Badiou intervened into this question of the clash of contemporary images in a lecture from 2013 titled ‘Images of the Present Time’ (translated and published as The Pornographic Age), he argued, typically provocative, that ‘the emblem of the present age, its fetish, which covers with a false image naked power without image, is the word “democracy”’. What we have in reality is the unsolicited distribution of images by market-based, algorithmic, and visual regimes. In revealing the political contents Smith is aiming at, the anarchic solution that appears seems too difficult to fathom. Enter Donald Trump, the eventually successful presidential candidate announcing his campaign in 2015, initially as an independent, and initially distinct from the GOP. Trump’s interest in, and most often successful interventions into the media-sphere as a montage of attractions is closer to Soviet-style propaganda than the d eclass e liberal media strategies preferred by the art world, but Trump’s self-image bordered on the uncanny for its media literacy during this time. The palpable disdain Smith feels for Trump and his followers throughout the book makes the bias of his inquiry too pronounced, however (99). Even so, now that President Biden is in charge, his casting as the architect of ‘the dawn of a genuinely equitable mode of governance’ shows that what Smith has feted him to be Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 23, no. 1