Texte zur Kunst no. 77: Harun Farocki

Issue no. 77 of Texte zur Kunst contains my review of the Harun Farocki exhibitions in Cologne and London (English version pp. 155-158, German version 233-239). Here are the opening paragraphs:

"Two simultaneous exhibitions of Harun Farocki’s video installations, at Raven Row in London and Museum Ludwig in Cologne, amount to two variations of a small-scale retrospective of this body of work. One show is, as it were, a replay of the other, swapping some elements for others and establishing a somewhat different constellation of works – creating a different diagram of Farocki’s pieces for art spaces. Both exhibitions are accompanied by screenings of Farocki’s films for the cinema and television, but the shows themselves focus almost exclusively on the gallery pieces he started making in 1995, in response both to the worsening conditions for independent film production and distribution and to specific possibilities offered by exhibition spaces. With a few exceptions, most of these gallery works consist of two or more channels (either projected or on monitors).

"The Raven Row exhibition is accompanied by a solid publication, with a number of insightful texts both by Farocki and others, that will remain a benchmark for some time to come. By contrast, the Cologne show comes with by a small cahier containing the German translation of an autobiographical text by Farocki from the British volume, with a fold-out poster that (on one of its sides) sports a diagram which can also be found on a wall in the museum. This diagram contains titles and images of the works in the Ludwig show plus the titles (but no images) of non-gallery films that are shown in the screenings. Most of these elements are connected by arrows pointing either in one or in two directions, though sometimes pieces are placed in each other’s vicinity without any such physical contact. Sometimes these connections are very direct: a gallery piece such as Auge/Maschine III/Eye/Machine III (2000), shown at the Ludwig, uses some of the same material, and covers similar ground to, the single-channel film Erkennen und Verfolgen/War at a Distance (2003).

In a less direct way, the recent double projection “Immersion”, which shows a demonstration of a computer program with which traumatized US soldiers can relive their experiences, is connected both to the documenta 12 installation “Deep Play” and to non-exhibition films such as Die Schulung (1987) and Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten (2001). With the former, they share the investigation of technology, with the latter, the element of the rehearsal of roles and the “programming” of behavior. The connections in this diagram do of course represent a choice, and thus a reduction; they make visible certain connections by obscuring others. A text analyzing the Farocki shows cannot help functioning in a similar way."

http://www.textezurkunst.de

Image: wall diagram at the Ludwig.

Chronovision

Until June 6, the MUMOK in Vienna is showing Changing Channels, an exhibition (curated by Matthias Michalka) that investigates the different ways in which artists have used and reflected on television, from the 1960s to the 1980s. The catalogue contains essays by Manuela Ammer, Tom Holert, Christian Höller, David Joselit, Pamela Lee, Matthias Michalka and myself. My text is called "Chronovision", and it investigates television as a time machine.

"Television is video, video is television; they are part of the same technological dispositif. What is a video artist if not a television producer without a station at his disposal? The formal characteristics of much video art are hardly compatible with the dominant regime in TV programming, video art has developed its own modes of distribution, mostly based on tapes or DVDs sold in limited editions. However, television remained an object of fascination for artists—both abject other and ideal to be aspired to. If, as Martha Rosler has argued, video art was accompanied by myths revolving around its resistance to corporate TV, with an artist like Nam June Paik functioning as a mythical hero who '[freed] video from the domination of corporate TV,' and who 'has done all the bad and disrespectful things to television that the art world’s collective imaginary might wish to do,' it is equally true that there is a history of attempted rapprochements between video art and television that reads like an extended tragicomedy. In the collective imaginary of the video art world, television was both bad and good object, a tainted ideal to be rescued from its fallen state.

"In the 1970s, René Berger distinguished between macro TV (broadcast television), meso TV (local cable), and micro TV (video); at most, some artists managed to infiltrate and utilize the meso level of local cable TV, whose democratic potential was never fully realized. Some managed to establish a foothold in public television; Paik worked with American PBS affiliates such as WNET and WGBH, and Gerry Schum produced some programs for German television. However, in a symptomatic move Shum eventually retreated from macro to micro distribution, moving from the Fernsehgalerei Gerry Schum to the videogalerie schum. Even Warhol struggled for years to get his work on television, finally getting his own MTV show in the 1980s, in a format that hardly lived up to the promise of some of Warhol’s unbroadcast 1970s television projects. But whether it took place on a micro, meso, or macro scale, video art at its best pushed the logic of television to a point where the medium’s potential and its failings, its complexity and its contradictions are illuminated.

"In this text, the writing of history is not conceived as the amassing of positive facts, but rather as the tracing of failed acts, unrealized potentials, missed encounters—the reconstruction of what never took on the positive solidity of an unavoidable historical fact. This essay deals with some episodes in the hesitant history that is the dialogue between (video) art and television, and it does so precisely by focusing on the time-based nature of video and television. Television is the first medium that presented a potentially uninterrupted flow of images into people’s homes (and other places), penetrating daily life much more thoroughly than film had done. Television has often been analysed primarily as a spatial network, or in terms of a dialectic of network and object (the TV set as commodity), and when the temporality of television is theorized, the focus is often on real time and liveness—or on the ideology of liveness. This was already a crucial factor in Rudolf Arnheim’s 1935 essay on the new medium, in which he argued that TV can give us a feeling 'for what happens simultaneously in different places. For the first time in the history of mans striving for understanding, simultaneity can be experienced as such, not merely translated into a succession in time. Our slow bodies and near-sighted eyes no longer hamper us. We come to recognize the place where we are located as one among many: we become more modest, less egocentric.' Here, the focus is on the simultaneity that live transmission creates between different places, and the temporal dimension of this live connection is hardly considered; liveness and the resultant simultaneity are spatialized."

http://www.mumok.at

Art and Thingness, Part 1

E-flux journal is publishing my essay Art and Thingness as a three-part serial. The first part, titled "Breton's Ball and Duchamp's Carrot," is online now, as part of the February issue. Because the March issue is a special thematic edition, part 2 will appear in April. These are the opening paragraphs of part 1:

"In modern art, the increasing resemblance of art objects to everyday objects raised the threat of eroding of any real difference between works of art and other things. Barnett Newman railed against both Duchamp’s readymades and 'Bauhaus screwdriver designers' who were elevated to the ranks of artists by the Museum of Modern Art’s doctrine of 'Good Design.' The danger for art was the same in both cases: the dissolving of the dividing line between works of art and everyday objects. Just as ancient art proper should never be confused with the craft of 'women basket weavers,' modern art should never be confused with a screwdriver or urinal. In the 1960s, Clement Greenberg would also worry that a blank sheet of paper or a table would become readable as art, that the boundary between artworks and 'arbitrary objects' was eroding. While not evincing any Modernist anxieties about readymades, Paul Chan’s recent assertion that “a work of art is both more and less than a thing” shows renewed concerns regarding such an assimilation—in a context marked, until quite recently, by an unprecedented market boom in which works of art seemed to be situated in a continuum of luxury goods spanning from Prada bags to luxury yachts.

"But what does it mean to say that an artwork is both more and less than a thing? The notion of the thing is prominent in contemporary theory, and one might say that the thing has emerged as something that is both more and less than an object. In W. J. T. Mitchell’s words:

'Things' are no longer passively waiting for a concept, theory, or sovereign subject to arrange them in ordered ranks of objecthood. 'The Thing' rears its head—a rough beast or sci-fi monster, a repressed returnee, an obdurate materiality, a stumbling block, and an object lesson.

"Rather than building a wall between art and thingness, the work of art should be analyzed as just such a sci-fi monster. If objects are named and categorized, part of a system of objects, thingness is resistant to such ordered objecthood. If we grant that a work of art is both more and less than other types of things, this should not be regarded as an incentive to exacerbate and fetishize those differences, but rather as a point of departure for analyzing the complex interrelationships of artworks with these other things—and for examining certain works of art as problematizing and transforming this very relationship."

http://e-flux.com/journal/view/112

Image: André Breton's crystal ball.

End of year roundup: book reviews, book in progress

Reviews of Idols of the Market have recently been published in Metropolis M, Open, and Texte zur Kunst. Meanwhile, aside from a grant application for a big project, I’m working on another book called, tentatively, History in Motion. This quotation from a film by Harun Farocki gives an idea of its point of departure: “Camera and event. Since its invention, film has seemed destined to make history visible. It has been able to portray the past and to stage the present. We have seen Napoleon on horseback and Lenin on the train. Film was possible because there was history. Almost imperceptibly, like moving forward on a Moebius strip, the side was flipped. We look on, and have to think: if film is possible then history, too, is possible.”

Which consequences did the rise of moving images (film and video) have for the representation and the production of history? If film was destined to “portray the past and to stage the present”, as Harun Farocki states, History in Motion wants to focus on the interconnection between these two activities—not only in relation to film, but also in relation to other time-based media, including live performance and its afterimages. If it was traditionally a fleeting presence, the stuff of elusive memories, in modernity the moving image became storable. How does this influence the relation between representation and event, between the time of the image and historical time, and between past history and the history-in-progress of a contested present?

The book’s analysis is mainly aimed at the past few decades, at the post-Fordist phase and its temporal specificities: flexibility, the erosion of the distinction between work and leisure, permanent media presence. However, the temporal transformations of society and culture associated with post-Fordism, dominated by the permanent presence of television and then the internet, but haunted by the afterlife of cinema, will be related back to earlier shifts, in particular to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century capitalism—the early years of film.

This probably gives a highly inadequate impression. Analog, concrete thinker that I am, I’m notoriously bad at giving a priori summaries of what work in progress will end up being like. Although I’ve already done a lot of groundwork with various articles—tagged "history in motion" on this blog—things crystallize, dissolve and coalesce during the (re)writing process, and if I knew beforehand what I would end up with, I couldn’t muster the energy to actually do it. Admittedly, this is something of a handicap in a society in which you rarely get credit on the basis of your history – only on the basis of meticulously drafted, carefully planned futures.

Image: Stan Douglas, Overture, 1986, installed at Witte de With in 1994.

A Few Quotations for the Holidays

When I was rereading Debord and Sanguinetti's 1972 Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time shortly after the meltdown of the Copenhagen climate conference, I came across some passages that simply demanded to be posted:

"The recent appearance in the spectacle of a flood of moralizing speeches and pledges of retail solutions to what governments and their mass media call pollution, seeks to hide, at the same time that it must reveal, this obvious fact: capitalism has finally delivered proof that it cannot develop productive forces any further. It is not however quantitatively, as many people thought it necessary to understand, that capitalism will have proved incapable of pursuing this development, but qualitatively."

"The society that has every technical means to modify the biological foundations of the whole of life on earth is also the society that, thanks to the same separate technical and scientific development, has every means of control and of mathematically incontrovertible forecasting to measure in advance exactly what the growth in alienated productive forces of class society can lead to - with dates, according to a best- or worst-case scenario - in terms of the catastrophic break-up of the human environment."

"Pollution and the proletariat are today the two concrete aspects of the critique of political economy."

Oh yes, and happy holidays.

Return of Religion Reader

The final installment of the three-part project I did at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht: the publication of The Return of Religion and Other Myths: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, co-edited with Maria Hlavajova and Jill Winder.

Co-published by BAK and post editions, Rotterdam, the reader contains contributions by Jan Assmann, Christina von Braun, Paul Chan, Boris Groys (an interview by Maria Hlavajova), Arnoud Holleman, Marc De Kesel, Kenan Malik, Maria Pask, Dieter Roelstraete and Jorinde Seijdel.

As well as completing the BAK project, which also included a lecture series and my exhibition The Art of Iconoclasm, this publication can also be seen as a companion piece to my recent book Idols of the Market.

http://www.bak-utrecht.nl
http://www.post-editions.com

Bug report: It seems that at some point, someone decided to turn the title of Arnoud Holleman's text from "On ne touche pas" into "On ne touché pas." It's French, so there should be plenty of accents, oui? My apologies to Arnoud for this faux-pas.

Attending to Things Online

The group Chto delat has put online a PDF of my article "Attending to Abstract Things" from New Left Review no. 54 (November/December 2008), making it available for those who don't have a NLR subscription. Here it is:

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=694%3Asven-luetticken-attending-to-abstract-things&catid=203%3Amagazine&Itemid=300&lang=en

The site also contains the contents of various issues of the Chto delat newspaper. The discussion in issue 01-25 in particular resonates with some of my present and nascent concerns, but there's more stuff that is well worth checking out - including texts by Peio Aguirre, Gene Ray and others on dialectical method in issue 03-27.