Susik 14(Abigail Susik 2014

Convergence Zone: The Aesthetics and Politics of the Ocean in Contemporary Art
and Photography Assistant Professor of Art History at Willamette University. Her interdisciplinary work traces
metahistorical shifts and transference across material, textual and visual cultures in European and American contexts in
between the 19th and 21st centuries.)
One of the primary themes of twentieth-century art concerned the various structures of capitalism, and surely it was the
first two stages of this cycle of commerce that received the most attention, from dada, to surrealism to pop and beyond:
namely, industrial production and mass consumption. It is telling, however, that contemporary art of today instead
resoundingly invests the most interest in the last stage of the production cycle, that of discard and waste. A significant
amount of critical literature has emerged regarding this theme, and several critical terms such as informe, the abject and
base, the outmoded, and others touch upon this constellation of meanings. Various twentieth-century mediums such as
the readymade, the assemblage, the found object, the accumulation, etc., confront our culture of detritus head on.[6] In
addition, an intermediary step in that cycle, namely the packaging and transportation of

goods, also appears to be gaining in significance for artists in the last three decades. While the
planets oceans are certainly also sites of production (oil, power, etc.) and consumption
(seafood, tourism, leisure sports, etc.), contemporary artists have proven to be significantly drawn to contemplate
oceans as sites of commercial dissemination and excess. In my mind, this is arguably a partial result of the
former symbolic and formal associations of the ocean in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. While
the deconstruction of ideology that postmodernism has achieved is undoubtedly a cause for celebration, the
breakdown of mythologies linked to the ocean carries with it an invariably tragic ethical
message. Whether we like it or not, the ocean is no longer a signifier of boundlessness and selfreflexive emptiness because, like everything else within our reach, we have made full-use of the
ocean as just another standing-reserve for the prowess of techne, to put it in Heideggarian terms.
[7] Although oceans have arguably been a key site for anthropological exploits of all kinds
throughout the evolution of humankind, the current state of total infiltration of the human
and the oceanic, the near-complete acculturation of the ocean so to speak, has taken on
unmatched, super- or sur- natural proportions. To bolster this point, I will address a selection of works
that focus on the oceans role as a mega-highway for global capitalism, its role in the incessant transport of
commodities. The American artist Allan Sekula and the Canadian Photographer Edward Burtynsky offer two
prominent examples of a documentary concern with the shipping industry, wherein gargantuan cargo vessels
become the international sentinels of the blue expanse, dramatically transforming global waterways
and the many ports that shelter them. Between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s Sekula worked on a remarkable
documentary project entitled Fish Story, which took form as large-format color photographs, a continuous slide show of
still color photographs, an installation, a book with a long essay by Sekula, and a series of lectures.[8] Sekula continues
to work on an extended version of the project and has made two documentary films in the last decade, Tsukiji and The
Lottery of the Sea, and one film essay entitled The Forgotten Space (2010) with Nol Burch. One the one hand, for
Sekula, Fish Story was a politically-motivated reportage project in which he studied firsthand the impact of maritime
economics upon working classes and port towns across the globe. As part of the project, Sekula travelled
internationally capturing photographs and video of ships, goods, sailors, ports and markets, even crossing the Atlantic
in a cargo ship laden with containers. On the other hand, Fish Story had explicit art historical and sociological
implications for Sekula in that he viewed the massive scale of the worldwide shipping industry to be

indicative of a shift from a human understanding of the ocean as spatially panoramic,

unable to be encompassed, to a view of the ocean as full of atomized details, securely
enframed (Fig. 5). On a macrocosmic level, global shipping industries enframe and contain
the vast reaches of the ocean through the constant mapping that occurs via crisscrossing
routes between different national ports. These routes palpably impact the shifting waters around them, to
the extent that the interrupt animal migration patterns and even whale sonar. On a microcosmic level, this
containment is epitomized by the standardization of commercial exchange, from the
multicolored hues of shipping container boxes to prefabricated product packaging.Oddly
enough, this blunt formal awareness has a direct correlate in an ethical message, hence the distinctly composite nature
of documentary-based photography related to the ocean today: aesthetic formality is often intermingled with implicit or
explicit political critique, as I have already touched upon. Such technical means combined with pointed ideological

ends have certainly been witnessed before in various developments of twentieth-century art beyond the propagandistic,
as merely a straightforward mode of sound visual rhetoric that convincingly persuades the viewer. The novel approach
of Sekulas work, however, has more to do with the direct, one-to-one relationship of the formal and the political in the
current capitalist culture of most of the world. What begins with an impression of the sheer sensorial and formal
fascination of capitalist structures flips over in the next moment of reception to the stark awareness of the social and
environmental ramifications of this economic system, hence producing a powerful kind of self-criticism and even
paranoia in the viewer. Sekula therefore presents an ominous breed of beauty in his project, which quite stealthily
inculpates the viewer as consumer. The sharp eye of the documentary camera effortlessly records the

decorative nature of patterning that results from the systematized nature of commercial
shipping. This formal play readily computes to the trained eye of the viewer as the
language of art and the language of commercial design, creating an atmosphere of visual
pleasure. That these means have once again fooled the viewer into reading beauty where disgust instead might lay
upon second and third glance, drives home the psychological effect of the amalgam of formal and political all the more
stringently