Rudd on the floor on the Vann wagon

What I object to is Rudd's claim to freedom of expression based on some objective reality. Any representation of the 'facts' of world politics is necessarily altered by the way in which they are presented. This applies as much to the scholar as it does the artist.

A useful illustration of this dilemma is neatly captured in the practice of war photography. Commissioned by the British to document the "reality" of the Crimean War, one of Robert Fenton's most lasting images is that of spent cannonballs, strewn along a road. Yet in fact, as art historian Ulrich Keller argued nearly 150 years later in The Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War, the photograph entitled The Valley of the Shadow of Death was staged; Fenton is known to have taken a second shot of precisely the same scene, albeit with piles of cannonballs clustered by the roadside, and the road cleared. As Keller argues, the cannonballs were either carefully placed on the road to give an immediacy to Fenton's image that it would otherwise have lacked, or Fenton took a second exposure after the cannonballs were removed so that his cart could continue on just behind the battle.

Fenton's image is useful, therefore, not as evidence of what really happened during the Crimean War, but as an aesthetic object, and as a document of how one photographer chose to represent it.

It is how the gap between reality and representation is treated that gives artworks the potential to enhance our understanding of world politics. Most scholars of international relations pursue a mimetic representation of reality by employing the methods and interests of the sciences whereas aesthetic politics brings a reflective understanding to its many conflicts and dilemmas by presenting itself as a form of representation.

Van Rudd's work and statements tend more towards the former than the latter - they offer little in the way of reflective understanding, and instead demanding validity based on the "facts" of world politics. Such "facts" of world politics must be used cautiously by artists. To put it more crudely: visual activism must have enough value as art to cover any political liability; otherwise it's just bad politics.