Is this the life we really want?
constructing narratives of disappearance
Disappear as a transitive verb came to the fore with the 1973 Pinochet coup d’état, where protesters, opposition leaders, poets, writers and anyone in opposition to a totalitarian regime were disappeared. As in, they were here but now aren’t. They didn’t just intransitively disappear, which might have been an unreported accident, but they were disappeared; a deliberate act.
In the middle of the night a couple of days ago, between World Service segments, the CBC overnight programmer played Roger Waters’ Is this the life we really want, from 2017, a long passionate and poetic rant against the new regime that 2016 ushered in. New to me, I looked it up and found the rest of the album which has this cover:
Waters and Columbia Records were sued by Emilio Isgrò, an Italian conceptual artist who has worked with deletions since the mid-1960s, from books, maps, newspapers, bibles, constitutions:
Isgrò is a visual artist, so the works are fairly beautiful as visual patterns, something which co-exists with the un-beautiful, sometimes questionable narratives they attack.
At the other extreme of textual removals are those now done by AI and photoshop (which in the early days of the Epstein files reveal, had unexpectedly had been saved unflattened, allowing the redaction layers to be removed and hidden text revealed). No sight of the human hand, or even human intelligence, just an algorithmic instruction to mechanically block certain words and letters, names and acts. These pages are quite ugly, nothing relieves the fact that words, actions, attestations, codes, jokes, avowals, have been disappeared.
But unlike Chilean poets thrown from airplanes into the sea, redacted files only appear to have been disappeared. All we are seeing are copies blacked out. The originals still exist in supposedly high security cloisters accessible only according to law, or lack of law; we are, after all, still in the age of mechanical reproduction where authenticity of a work seems to be a fact at some level, but not the level at which we operate. We trust photocopies. We trust high-resolution images of original works. Their mere appearance is enough.
The act of redaction is performative, a paper form of knocking down Saddam’s statue. What is being assailed is not the object, but the information the object inadvertently carries. Redaction disturbs because it is clear we are being told an edited narrative. Reporters have always held that they are unaligned, they report the facts. Increasingly they are fact-checkers of a barrage of narratives and lies.
American environmental artist, Mel Chin, in the 1990s looked at American paper money, which visually narrates a story of American progress. He erased most of the elements of this story leaving things that are minor, near invisible pieces of the powerful historical narrative that is the USA.
Last September, 2025, Banksy sprayed a mural protesting the UK government’s ban of Palestine Action by listing it as a terrorist group. Banksy’s authentication factor is an image posted on Instagram; the mural is composed of paint soaking into its substrate, in this case the limestone of the Royal Courts of Justice. The mural was promptly removed, leaving a stain of the original much more frightening — the stuff of nightmares. The redaction reveals more than the original did.
This is how we must view redaction, as by its very nature revealing truths hidden away on original documents. Redactions do not give any details, but reveal the shape of the crime. Imagination takes over.
Jenny Holzer has a large body of redaction paintings from the 2000s that examine redacted government documents from the War on Terror. Joshua Craze, a one-time On Site review contributor, wrote (not for us) about how Holzer’s work on these documents reveals the ‘negative equation’ between state power and the processes that sustain that power. These processes are concrete, material, embodied practices that produce, literally, tons of paper: typeset, typed, hand-written, crossed out, stamped, okayed, dated, scribbled over, folded, torn and filed.
Another Zelensky, another time: Isaac Zelensky, a loyal Bolshevik apparatchik in Uzbekistan, was shot in 1938 and subsequently, forcefully erased from all pictures. Alexander Rodchenko, artist, photographer, poet, complied with a messy blob of black paint, less disturbing perhaps than the total erasure of Nikolai Yezhov, People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs in 1939, from all pictures of him.
David King, in his 2014 book The Commissar Vanishes: the falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, quotes Hannah Arendt on the vulnerability of factual truth, using the example of ‘the role during the Russian Revolution of Leon Trotsky, who appears in none of the Soviet Russian history books’. In the famous 1919 photograph of Lenin leaning into the headwinds on the second anniversary of the October Revolution, Trotsky was standing just in front of Lenin. By 1967 when the photograph was published, Trotsky had been airbrushed away, disappeared.
This is redaction in action, the narration of alternative truths.
Had always thought fondly of Rodchenko, who made this photograph of the famously beautiful writer, Lily Brik, lover of Vladimir Mayakovsky, wife of Osip Brik and central participant of the Russian avant-garde which existed roughly from 1910-1930. Passion and commitment inspires such fear in power that it has to be disappeared. It is an old story.
Artists are always aestheticizing stuff, which is interesting for sure but not to be confused with actual resistance, imho. Love the dollar bills though. Also the Holzer. And Trotsky, poor Trotsky.
We should remember that some redaction is defensive, e.g. protecting individual privacy.
If there is a lesson to be learned from censorship today, it is that the left has to let everyone speak freely. The left is becoming very authoritarian, ends justifying means, which is where atrocity begins.
We’re swamped with redactions here now.