Hasbun’s photograph of an X-ray is deeply laden with meaning and tragedy.
Muriel Hasbun, X post facto (6.7), 2009–13, archival pigment print, 101.6 x 78.4 cm (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) © Muriel Hasbun. Speakers: Dr. Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Dr. Steven Zucker
0:00:05.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re at the Whitney Museum of American Art, looking at a large photograph by an artist, Muriel Hasbun. This is part of the series called X post facto.
0:00:15.2 Dr. Marcela Guerrero: I think it’s a work that when you see it, you might think I see a screw, or it could be a rocket or a missile, there might be a landscape in the background. The contours of the photograph might make you think that it could be early photography, but upon further inspection, it’s actually an enlarged X-ray, and there’s a background to this. So Muriel’s father was a dentist, but also an amateur photographer, and during the Salvadoran Civil War that happened between 1979 and 1992, the government would ask Muriel’s father and many other dentists, I assume, to identify the bodies of casualties of the war through X-rays. And so when Muriel’s father died in 2004, so many years after the end of the Civil War, Muriel was taking care of his belongings and found many of these X-rays that he had taken when he was a dentist. She then took 32 of these that make up this series, X post facto, and re-photographed them and enlarged them. And so that is what we’re standing in front of.
0:01:28.2 Dr. Zucker: So we have an image that was taken as part of the artist’s father’s practice, but it has since then accrued deeply personal meaning to the artist, this was part of her father’s world. But it has also accrued a broader political meaning.
0:01:42.6 Dr. Guerrero: I think it’s interesting that Muriel decided to title this series X post facto, which means retroactively, but changing the ex, E-X to just an X. Bodies that were not identified would be given an X. So in a way, she’s saying these bodies that were killed during the Civil War, they’d still belong to someone, so in a way, they are portraits of the rebels who died during the Civil War. Muriel was born in El Salvador. She left in 1980, so right at the beginning of the Civil War. This makes me think of trying to find a connection to those who weren’t able to leave El Salvador and to carry on with their lives.
0:02:26.2 Dr. Zucker: That X signifying a kind of anonymity of the disappeared, but also an anonymity of the subjects of these dental records. These are disassociated from the names of the people that her father treated. These have become purely formal statements in one way, but also deeply laden with meaning and with tragedy.
0:02:50.1 Dr. Guerrero: The way the state would use these X-rays to identify people, it’s because they’re almost like our thumbprints. They make us who we are, they give us a very specific identity. So in these X-rays we might see not only teeth, but gums or tooth decay or dental fixtures. Things that make us the particular people that we are. Muriel was born to a Palestinian Christian family. That’s on her father’s side. Her mother was Polish, Jewish, so she has this unique background. So these are things that are deep into the core of who she is, and by photographing or re-photographing these X-rays, she’s talking about finding that connection to what makes us who we are at the core.
0:03:38.2 Dr. Zucker: Photography has this ability to document, but we generally think of the documenting of faces, of bodies. Here, the recognizable has been obscured. We’re at a level where identity is forensic.
0:03:51.0 Dr. Guerrero: I like the idea that has been written about Muriel’s work of the counter forensic. The counter forensic being a term coined and thought about by Allan Sekula of using the tools of the state to give them back humanity, a sense of connection to other people.
0:04:11.3 Dr. Zucker: And unexpectedly, she’s retrieving a kind of beauty from something that was utilitarian and then laden with tragedy.
0:04:18.4 Dr. Guerrero: I think that the reason why this photograph is so conceptually and formally successful is precisely because Muriel is using the apparatus of the X-ray machine, and by enlarging it, then she’s pulling out those aesthetic highlights. The graininess of it also makes it so abstract. After you learn that is the X-ray of a tooth that you can identify as being the bone or the gum, but by enlarging it, you think of kind of an underwater sea grass, beautiful watery scene.
0:04:54.4 Dr. Zucker: And she doesn’t hide its original form. In the black frame, we’re seeing the way in which the X-ray would have been held. The mount. The ragged white edges. All of it is authentic, even if it is utterly transformed.
