McLeer, B., 2024.

The Triumph of Crowds

This research project explores how (representational) images can act, and be participated in, politically. It is part of my broader artistic research enquiry into art as a catalyst for new forms of political appearance, drawing on Hannah Arendt's ideas of the 'space of appearance'. (Arendt, 1998)
While Arendtian appearance is brought about through people acting and speaking together in public, this project asks what role certain images could have in this space of speech and action. It does so through the form of an experimental performance-lecture ('play') written in response to an image: Nicolas Poussin's painting The Triumph of David (1631).
 
By activating Poussin's painting performatively and conceptually in relation to recent public assemblies such as Occupy or the Movement of the Squares, the research tests out in real terms the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman's arguments around the 'surviving image'. Didi-Huberman (drawing on the iconological research of Aby Warburg) writes "a surviving image is an image that, having lost its original use value and meaning, nonetheless comes back, like a ghost, at a particular historical moment: a moment of "crisis", a moment when it demonstrates its latency, its tenacity, its vivacity, and its "anthropological adhesion" so to speak." (Didi-Huberman, 2005, p.xxii) This research proposes Poussin's 'Triumph of David' to be such a 'surviving image' and explores its 'anthropological adhesion' in the context of our own contemporary crises in which the political (the people) is so consistently and violently foreclosed.
 
Located between art practice, political theory, philosophy, writing, performance and activism and in the context of recent experiments in creative-discursive forms, the research has been internationally recognised for its significance. It won the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers, 2016. It was staged in New York in 2017 and published in book form by Litmus Press, New York in 2019.