Steve McQueen

‘A rat done bit my sister Nell,’ chanted Gil Scott-Heron in 1970, ‘and Whitey’s on the moon.’ Seven years later NASA changed tactics and sent out the crewless Voyager in place of astronauts. In it were images intended to provide a visual record of life on earth for the consumption of aliens. In the work Once upon a Time (2004) McQueen presents a slide show of 116 of these images installed to make them seem to float in space: about two-thirds of the way to the back of a very dark room a large screen is suspended from the ceiling, but without touching the floor. The projector is behind the screen and is set to show each slide for around half a minute before dissolving it into the next. The cycle of images lasts 70 minutes and the installation includes sound.
McQueen’s title immediately asks us to think about narrative and, although these images aren’t ordered as one continuous story, there are several mini-tales in the cycle. A sequence of slides shows the beginning stages of human life, from a sperm fertilizing an egg to a woman breast-feeding. (There’s no equivalent ‘death’ sequence.) Another shows an autumnal scene followed by a winter one. Interestingly, another sequence undoes the logic of the commodity fetish, which relies on you forgetting its origin in human labour. This passage illustrates the movement from production to consumption. In one slide a sweaty, earthy farmer holds up his harvest of grapes; in the next a young woman purchases the fruit in a supermarket. We become aware that we are making the slides tell a story by providing links not in but between the images. A very different ‘between space’ exists during the moments of dissolve, where two images occupy the screen simultaneously. The dissolve period is relatively long, and during these moments we don’t so much bring previous knowledge to bear on the images as indulge ourselves imagining totally new forms.
But of course the title Once upon a Time mainly works to remind us what a fairy story all this is. NASA’s images present the most unbelievably Edenic representation of the planet. Famine, poverty, natural disaster and war – that is to say, the subjects of the most famous photographs of the 20th-century – are nowhere seen. The earth yields up food. Humans are kind to nature. All races live in peace. One image shows schoolchildren of different colours playing with a globe. A Chinese family enjoys a feast; Thai women dance in traditional dress; there are even Native Americans grazing goats in Monument Valley! Towards the end of the cycle there’s a photograph of the UN building, standing proud in New York City. McQueen’s is really the most eloquent, silent act of détournement. At a moment when the US ignores the UN to expand its control of the world he simply projects an archive of images projected by a rocket and in so doing reminds us that this was an earlier moment of US expansionism. Just as the US now falsely presents itself as bringer of democracy, so then NASA represented its world as a peaceful paradise. Pity the poor, beguiled alien arriving on earth to see our images now. And pity those who might have benefited from the money spent on Voyager back then. There’s no picture of sister Nell, for instance, or her rat-infested house.
Yet to read McQueen’s work purely against the backdrop of recent aggressive American foreign policy is to miss part of its wider interest. For instance, the slide show tells us much about Western society’s faith in images. NASA’s visual presentation of life on Earth is based on the monumental presumption that aliens would understand visual images more than sounds, smells or tastes. This ‘projection’ says far more about 20th-century Westerners than the falsely promising pictures. But the work also witnesses an anxiety about photography. How could an alien understand that the same-sized photograph can depict a microscopic cell or the largest planet in a galaxy? How could they understand perspective – that an object in an image might be further away from a camera than others, and therefore not as small as it seems? Sometimes there is a sequence in which a diagram attempts to explain the photograph that follows it. And many of the images are annotated with measurements.
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of the exhibition was the role played by sound. The slide show is accompanied ‘glossolalia’ – recordings of people ‘speaking in tongues’. The voices – which alternate randomly between old and young, male and female – aren’t speaking in a language but in a space outside language. Although it can sound like incantation, glossolalia is a mode of unconscious uttering – the oral equivalent of automatic writing. It is often associated with the attempt to communicate with spirits and gods. Possibly the collection of recordings is meant to be considered as an alterative archive, one not organized around empirical knowledge and global representation but around the unknowable; yet this contrast did not really play out. It was more the case that the soundtrack provided a lulling, meditative sonic environment in which to contemplate the slide show.
Two images in the cycle show NASA’s version of ‘art’ in 1977: a South-East Asian man carves an elephant figure in wood; a European or American paints a landscape while his wife relaxes by the fire. The idea that an artist might do little more than re-present existing images was clearly not in NASA’s thinking. That same year was also, however, the year of Douglas Crimp’s exhibition ‘Pictures’, which launched a critical discussion about appropriation and photography. In this moment of the export and abuse of images, McQueen’s work showed that appropriation still has critical force.