Investigative Aesthetics by Matthew Fuller & Eyal Weizman

Author:Matthew Fuller & Eyal Weizman [Fuller, Matthew & Weizman, Eyal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788739085
Publisher: Verso Books

10

The Ear and the Eye

A strange coincidence connected the Cat and the work of the historian Carlo Ginzburg. It concerns an ear. Bellingcat’s most famous discovery to date was the identity of the Russian secret service or GRU agents to whom the 2018 Novichok nerve agent attack in Salisbury has been attributed. Cross-referencing three photographs found online with data from a leaked passport database allowed the organisation to confirm the agents’ identity. When Bellingcat’s founder, Elliot Higgins, was asked about a breakthrough moment in identifying one of the suspects named Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, he responded, ‘As strange as it sounds, it’s when I saw his ear shape in all three photographs we had of him. It’s difficult to be 100% sure on facial matches, but something like the shape of the ears is very useful for confirming an ID, so that was as much … a Eureka moment as anything else.’1

Why look at ears? Faces age, light conditions change; on an imaging device, focal point length shifts, context and resolution changes; men shave or do not. Our faces change throughout our lives, smiling or stress pulls our skin in different ways. The ears, however, age differently, slower perhaps. They can stretch, yet whatever the facial expression, they are little affected. One may wear sunglasses, don a wig, tuck gum under lips or cheeks, wear make-up. One will also not necessarily mask an ear because it seems very insignificant. Who remembers to care about the ears?

This interest in ears has a precedent in one of Carlo Ginzburg’s most important essays.2 In ‘Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method’, Ginzburg discusses the significance of details in the context of another media history, that of painting.3 One of the biggest problems that preoccupied nineteenth-century art historians was the correct attribution of old master paintings. These were frequently unsigned, painted over or covered by soot, and sometimes kept in a state of neglect. Further, there was a pressing need for the identification of the forgery of old paintings – something of a prodigious industry in itself. The way identification was often performed was through the high connoisseurship of experts tuned to composition, themes and colour. But such sensibility paid little attention to details.

Ginzburg’s essay tracks another route. He draws on Sigmund Freud’s reading of the work of an art historian – an interesting character who originally wrote under a double mask, the pseudonymous name of a translator of an author writing under a pen name – who eventually revealed himself to be Giovanni Morelli. Museums, Morelli thought, are full of wrongly attributed paintings – indeed assigning them correctly is often difficult, and distinguishing copies from originals is also very hard. Morelli’s method of attribution introduced the idea of the technical analysis of details to the examination of paintings. His work, jarring with the then dominant forms of scholarship, led to the discovery of numerous fake paintings and the reattribution of many works.

To attribute or to identify, Morelli thought, one must leave behind

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