ABSTRACT
Contemporary artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen’s elegiac Western Deep, not unlike The Stonebreakers, images underclass politics in an effort to redefine labour as viewed in the twenty-first century. Both works explore the visual poetics of labour exploitation through the articulation of social victimage and Otherness. However, instead of rural France, McQueen takes us to the gold mines of South Africa. Theorist Steven Shaviro configures jouissance as a ‘sadomasochistic model of spectatorial identification’ in which the spectacle of suffering is used as a means to garner power. In this instance, obscene jouissance is a game whereby the minority artist is charged with a sadomasochistic offering-up of his/her otherness as both a site of viewing pleasure and as an indictor of oppressive systems – if not also as a conductor of liberal guilt that is vaguely transgressive.
