| The curators of Documenta 12 claimed to have solved the problem of exhibiting film within an art context by “sending it to the cinema”. How do you see films fitting within an art context?
On the one hand the rhetoric of sending films where they belong, sounds a bit like a call for deportation. Or a desperate attempt of functionaries to regain hegemony over the realm of the audiovisual, which has been extremely fragmented, but also gained at lot of autonomy through the digital revolution.
On the other hand I don’t mind showing films in a cinema. In terms of projection quality it is usually a good place. But intellectually, socially and economically, the cinema has been starved for decades. The cinema is an empty shell, and hopelessly fetishises high resolution over anything else. Non-aligned films cannot be produced within this context anymore. It has almost totally surrendered to either market logics or the logics of national representation. Films, which do not fit in either of these paradigms are in fact expelled from the cinema on a daily base. So sending those films back to the cinema sounds rather like a joke. What cinema? Where?
In Journal No. 1 – An Artist’s impression (shown in the Schlachtof at Documenta 12) you attempt to uncover a lost film archive destroyed in the war. Is truth the first casualty of war?
It is one casualty of war. But usually you don’t even need a war for truth to be scarified. But to have any standard of truth, as constructed or artificial it might be, is the precondition of any political sphere which deserves this name. As Hannah Arendt pointed out truth is indispensable in political terms. She didn’t mean absolute truth, but simply an agreement about material facts. If this is jeopardised, in her example Trotsky is purged from the history of the October Revolution, then we have a huge
political problem. Nowadays we see this problem in the guise of postmodernist revisionism, for example Holocaust denial in the name of a “resistance to metanarratives“.
I am interested in your approach to documentary films within an art context. Between Documenta 11 and 12 there was a marked decline in the number of documentary films included within the exhibition – do you see a loss of interest in documentary forms which aim for an indexical relationship to reality?
Yes. There has been a tremendous conservative backlash in parts of the art world, aimed a socially engaged art, which was subsumed under the derogatory identifier “documentary“ as opposed to “art“. These people have no idea of documentary whatsoever, of its history and tradition and this backlash made it much more difficult for documentary works to be included in art shows. I agree, that mainstream documentaries should not be discussed as art, because there is no formal contestation at all or no experimentation on the level of performance. But the resentment against documentary goes much deeper than that. It means many people in the art mainstream think, that there were enough women, Africans and other weird people around and that they try to get rid of them, by trying to exclude them from the canon.
In an article "Documentary Uncertainty" you set up a contradiction between two approaches to documentary theory – one which sees reality as existing as a form of truth which we can capture and one which see it as a construction which we can only reflect – how do you try and negotiate between these two poles in your work?
In the text you mention, I go on to say that both understandings - realism as well as constructivism - are unsatisfactory. In theory, I would uphold that social reality, the conditions of production and representation, are expressed within the form of the documentary, but not necessarily represented.
Social reality expresses itself through form – form being the totality of social relations around a certain production as well as the material and aesthetic choices. This statement about realism and constructivism is supposed to refer to the deadlock of documentary theory in its relation to representation, and to try to think through documentary through the perspective of expression instead. How this relates to my work has to be explained by somebody else. I try not to see my films as a product of my writing. Apart from that I consistently fail in my practice to live up to anything I would think on a theoretical level. But this disjunction between practice and theory is probably normal, and anybody working with images will have noticed their strong resistance and autonomy. It is very
difficult to impose ones own theoretical views on material, without killing its own peculiar energy, which would be a pity, and completely besides the point.
Does the concept of realism still have any appeal? The Statue of the Union of Soviet Writer wrote in 1934: the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of political transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism. Can we think like this today?
I prefer the concept of realism expressed by Malevich’s monochrome: Red Square, the visual realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions (1915). It shows an asymmetrical red square on a white ground. My interpretation is that in order to give a realist impression of a peasant woman, you have to resort to abstraction. Because this abstraction expresses the difference between the individual and the group she is supposed to represent. Malevich assumes a subtractive perspective, which insists, that the only thing that could truthfully and realistically be recorded is the difference, the nonidentity between collective and individual. That impossibility of representation is real, and this is what any realism has to acknowledge.
In the article “Documentary Uncertainty” you also write that the relationship between politics and art is being configured beyond representation – what do you mean by this? What does this mean for political art? For your work?
This stems from a very simple observation: the more “real“, “authentic“ and “genuine“ documentary representations seem to be, the less there is to see on these pictures. They are shaky and blurred, they look like abstract expressionist paintings. They target the level of affect, not any discursive
level mediated by representation. In that sense those images point beyond representation – even though they obviously are representations. This “crisis of representation“ could obviously also be observed in contemporary politics. The concept of liberal representative democracy is mostly neither representative and in some cases not even democratic. Needless to say how it rests on the exclusion of parts of the population. Now moving beyond representation is seen by some as some sort of liberation from discourse, from the restriction of the law, the confinement of signification. But I am afraid, that at the moment this territory is not any sort of autonomous zone, but on the contrary a space where the law of the strongest and a Hobbesian “state of nature“ rule. This space is comparable to the Atlantic and Mediterrenean seas in which thousands of refugees drown each year, because nobody represents their interests. So to move beyond representation is on the one hand a reality, on the other hand it does not for the moment present any emancipatory political perspective. Hopefully not yet.
In terms of my work, I have started to experiment with abstract documentarism in the work “Red Alert“ which again refers to a famous constructivist work, three monochromes by Aleksandr Rodchenko, Pure Red color, Pure Yellow color, Pure Blue color. In 1921 he wrote, that this work represented the end of leftist painting, because painting couldn’t be taken any further than that. Red Alert translates this work into video, the assumption being, that of these three primary colors only the red one is
left. This red is actually based on the color used by the US Homeland Security office for their highest alert level. It is, if you like, the color of contemporary fear itself. On the other hand, this work also shows the limit of video, since the moving image has to be frozen in order to translate it into a painting format. And video or concrete representation of reality reaches its limit in the end of constant online transmissions which convey just abstract fear as such, with a minimum of concrete mediation.
You develop bondage as a universal metaphor in Lovely Andrea (shown in the Fridericianum at Documenta). Can you explain how you see this as descriptive of the contemporary human condition?
It is not a metaphor, rather an allegory. In 1930 Siegfried Kracauer wrote a text called The Ornament of Mass . He described a show performance by the so-called Tiller girls, a group of showgirls, presumably a typical example of titillating trash popular culture of the time. The Tiller girls would
brandish their legs as if they were being massproduced on an assembly line and Kracauer was fascinated. He made a point of choosing a humble, if not outright silly and over-commodified example from mass culture, and to interpret it as a reflex of the dominant conditions of production of this time, of Taylorism and industrial production. At a time when nobody talked about affective labour, or considered it important, he put it at the center of his thinking about the political economy. But he didn’t stop at that. He understood, that one shouldn’t complain about this type of culture, but move right through it. The total abstraction from organicity, origin and nature, that was obvious for him within the human ornament of the Tiller girls was something which had to be amplified, and extended, not shied away from. The total abstraction of disconnected limbs was not only a machine in the sense of an assembly line, but also presented a way beyond the fateful implications of the “natural body“, which became horribly explicit in national-socialist race policies shortly after. It could not just be read as an allegory of economic bondage, but also the first announcement of its overcoming.
I see the “self-suspension“ performance, which the main protagonist of Lovely Andrea developed, in a similar way. First of all, it is a reflex of an economical situation of self-entrepreneurship, in which we have internalised authority to a point to incorporate both “master and slave“ within the same individual. One motivates oneself, pushes oneself to work to the point of self-exploitation. But on the other hand this performance doesn’t stop at visualising this practice, but utilises the same tools, that would normally used for bondage and submission, in order to create something completely different. Actually, this performance is much more about flying and floating, about overcoming gravity than about captivity and passivity. So this performance goes right through bondage into a different direction.
In 1972 Godard made the important observation that our task is not so much to make "political films" but to "make films politically". What does it mean to make films politically in today's framework?
There seem to be more and more possibilities in making films, which are more and more specific. But there is one extremely important political task which should be tackled: the organisation of large copyright free archives in order to enable anonymous collective production. I think that the question of
copyright is crucial in future production.
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