Activist Pedagogies Through Rancière’s Aesthetic Lens

This chapter considers two video installations by the contemporary German photographer, Beate Gtschow, the full titles of which are R#1 and R#2. It focuses on Gtschow’s R#1 and R#2, emphasizing the complex interplay between representation and time that threads its way through Gtschow’s recasting of van Ruisdael’s The Jewish Cemetery. The chapter explores the major landscape photographs and their uncanny depiction of classical landscape iconography and shows raise important questions about the categories which Fried has come to invest in contemporary art photography. As Laura Mulvey has noted in a recent book, the photographic image is heavily marked by its temporality that is to say both the moment and duration of its inscription. For Jean-Franois Chevrier, the widespread restitution of the tableau format within contemporary art photography has had the aim of restoring the distance to the object-image necessary for the confrontational experience.