Victorian Visual Culture

Last week I happened upon a webcomic called Fisheye Placebo, a cyberpunk story that explores technology, surveillance, censorship, and the power of art as a tool for resistance. Though it’s still ongoing, I’d totally recommend reading it in its current entirety (as it is not too long and I could probably write for pages about this scene, cross-dressing photojournalism, politically satirical guerrilla art, and other subjects which occur in the comic); however, here I’ll just be talking about Chapter 2, Part 9. I’ve selected a panel from the comic which I think is particularly important, and I’ve put a link just below that.

Two university students walk past a brick wall they have passed many times before. A figure with a black beanie hat has been painted on the wall, cross-legged, holding a sign that reads: KEEP YOUR COINS. I WANT CHANGE. Below it rests a single flower in a dried spatter of blood. Not long ago, a man sat in its place holding the same sign. A police officer is painting over the figure on the wall. Soon, the whole scene will be a white smear.

Link to chapter/part; content warning for depiction of police violence: www.yuumeiart.com/fisheye-placebo-chapters#/ch-2-part-9/

This image and the scene as a whole hold a very emotionally charged tension between authoritarian violence and artistic resistance, and they make some acute arguments about whom we sympathize with, whom we empathize with, and what propels us to seek change. In a lot of Victorian-era photography (John Thomson’s work comes to mind), sympathy seems to come from a one-directional connection to a victimized subject. The subject may or may not be seen as a victim of a larger problem, and they may or may not have their history told, but in large part their direct perspective is unimportant. They tend to become objects in snapshots, with history but no will. The onlooker is not implicated in a larger social project; they never empathize, and in fact they sympathize by realizing the difference between themself and the victimized subject. Sympathy seems to be manufactured by alienating the onlooker from the subject, and forcing the onlooker to imagine themself in the subject’s place, as if the subject themself is a vessel for self-reflection.

In this scene, though, the subject of sympathy has a clear message, and he shares it with all who pass by. Even after the man’s disappearance and possible death, an artist has preserved that message, if only briefly before the police white it out. Vance, the university student in red, pays more attention each time he passes the scene, and only fully absorbs the message once the man’s story is ended, retold, and erased. It isn’t just imagination he has to work with here; all he needs to do is see and comprehend the reality being erased and retold in story and erased again before him, a reality and story which substantiates the need for the sitting man’s message. That message, and the sitting man’s will (i.e. desire), become like a last will (i.e. and testament), though the bequeathing here rather takes the form of a responsibility. The image I included above indicates the additive power of simultaneously seeing multiple layers of systemic violence and marginalization, not just as a scene of sympathy, but as a story of a will violently deprived.

At the end of the scene, the normally very selfish Vance literally takes the sitting man’s place. The scene frames sympathy and empathy as components of a transformative transfer of will from the victimized subject to the implicated onlooker. If I wanted to text-hop my way into a logical anachronism, I would suggest that this scene offers an answer to the question in my previous blog post about Bleak House, the question of what, beyond just sympathy, we can trust when viewing sympathetic subjects: perhaps what we can trust is a will and a story. Perhaps we can trust the story enough that we can shoulder its protagonist’s will, and perhaps we can trust that will, when fulfilled, to put give that story a proper resolution and not an erasure.

Finally, circling back to the explicitly Victorian, this scene also compels me to consider the way in which Victorian images convey a story when they deal with violence, tragedy, and sympathetic figures, and where those images situate external onlookers in relation to that story. Intentional or no, the presence or lack of an onlooker in visual art is a constructed effect, and I think it’s important to spend time considering how Victorian art treats those people and scenes made unseen. And, perhaps, in line with the argument I’ve tried to trace here, if an image can be read as suggesting a replacement of a figure with the viewer, how does such a replacement transform the figure and the viewer, and what is the ideology behind those transformations?

Works Cited
Yan, Wenqing. “Chapter 2: Mutable: Part 9.” Fisheye Placebo, 2021. Yuumei Art, http://www.yuumeiart.com.