Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Introduction
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art
Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl 8
Documentary/Vérité
Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
Okwui Enwezor 60
The Documentary
Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries
Vít Havránek 126
Negatives of Europe
Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies
Carles Guerra 142
A Language of Practice
Hito Steyerl 220
Contributors 228
Credits 234
“The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contempo-
rary Art” is a long-term research project on “the documentary.” The
Foreword
project aims at situating these contemporary documentary practices
within current cultural production and at exploring their role within
mainstream media and activism. It also aims at investigating the heri-
tage of documentary practices in contemporary art, in relation to the
history of film, documentary photography, and television as well as
to video art.
“The Greenroom” is a collaboration between Maria Lind, the
director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies,
Bard College (CCS Bard) and the artist, writer, and theoretician Hito
Steyerl. A reference group, consisting of the artists Petra Bauer,
Matthew Buckingham, Carles Guerra, Walid Raad, and Hito Steyerl
has contributed to the research project in various ways. The research
project will run for approximately three years, having started in
March 2008. Its first public event, the exhibition “The Greenroom:
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (Part I),”
will take place 27 September 2008–1 February 2009 at the Hessel
Museum, at CCS Bard.
In many ways, “The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documenta-
ry and Contemporary Art” is a “greenroom for documentary practic-
es,” not unlike a greenroom at a television station, where staff and
guests meet before and after filming and engage in discussions
which often differ from those in the limelight. Thereby the “just be-
fore” and the “right after,” moments of less scripted performances
and unexpected encounters, are taken seriously. “The Greenroom:
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (Part II)” is
scheduled for Fall 2010.
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College is a unique
exhibition, education, and research center dedicated to the study of
art and curatorial practices from the 1960s to the present day. With
the arrival of Maria Lind as our director of the graduate program in
2008, we have increasingly sought out new ways to integrate the
activities of a public institution in ways that provide new teaching,
research, and public programming opportunities. “The Greenroom:
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art,” is the most
Tom Eccles
ambitious of many recent initiatives at the center, one that we hope
provides an experimental model for future programs.
Tom Eccles
Executive Director, CCS Bard
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art
11
The double bind is strong: on the one hand documentary images
Introduction
are more powerful than ever. On the other hand, we have less and
less trust in documentary representations. This is the case at a
time when documentary visual material is a part of contemporary
affective economies, supporting everything from humanitarian aid
to a sustained politics of fear.01 Without it something like globalized
media would look entirely different, and the course of events in,
for example, world politics would be completely different. Docu-
mentary media images also pervade the most intimate of spheres
through mobile phones, youtube, and other interfaces; they have
not only entered collective imagination but have also profoundly
transformed it.
In this light, it should come as no surprise that documentary
practices have made up one of the most significant tendencies wi-
thin art during the last two decades. Traditional documentary photo-
graphy and film have been reinvented and reinvigorated by merging
with traditions such as video, performance, and conceptual art. Re-
cent documentary works attest to a new diversity and complexity of
forms, ranging from conceptual mockumentaries to reflexive photo
essays via split-screen slide shows, found footage video reporta-
ges, reenacted printed matter, and archaeological collages. Its field
of reference ranges from traditional documentary art forms and
conventional reportage to Third Cinema, essay and avant-garde
film, and from reality TV to performance and interventionist art. Al-
though such innovative documentary art forms abound, and a large
number of exhibitions and other projects dealing with documentary
practices and contemporary art have been organized in various
01 See Hito Steyerl, “Die dokumentarische Unschärferelation,” in Die Farbe der Wahrheit (Vienna: Turia und Kant,
2008), 13.
02 A few selected examples include: “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art,” International
Center of Photography, New York 2008; “No More Reality,” BELEF, Belgrade 2006; “Slowly Learning to Survive
the Desire to Simplify: A Symposium on Critical Documents,” Iaspis, Stockholm 2006; “The Need to Document,”
various locations, 2005; “After the Fact,” Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin 2005; “Experiments with Truth,” The Fabric
Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia 2004–05; “True Stories,” Witte de With, Rotterdam, January–March 2003;
“Ficcions documentals,” Fundació “la Caixa”, Barcelona 2003; “It’s Hard to Touch the Real,” Kunstverein München
2002–04; After the News—Post-Media Documentary Practices at the CCCB in Barcelona, 2003. This list repre-
sents merely a sample from a much larger pool of shows, which have addressed documentary modes in art
since 2000.
parts of the world,02 the discussion of the phenomenon is still mostly which around 1925—the year Benjamin wrote these aphorisms—
12
13
confined to scattered texts in various catalogues and journals. This displayed a fascinating degree of sophistication. Throughout the
Introduction
anthology seeks to overcome this dispersion and offer new per- 1920s, heated debates about the documentary and its transforma-
spectives on this crucial theme. tion of art and reality occurred in the circles of the Soviet avant-
garde, whose members discussed the construction of facticity and
Document vs. Art? the politics of perception05 with a depth of insight that contempora-
Historically, the documentary is a form that emerges in a state of ry debates are struggling to achieve. Benjamin’s text “The Author
crisis: it is no coincidence that many documentary art works remind as Producer,”06 written in 1934, captures some of these debates
us of quests for suitable forms and provide methods for the discus- and presents a much more articulate view of the documentary
sion of social content. They often aim to mirror the effects of past and its relations of production. It also conveys a glimpse of the
or recent political and economic upheaval. Their inclusion into the documentary’s fraught relationship with the state apparatus. Only in
art field historically marks a moment of social and political crisis, the period between both world wars does the notion of documenta-
as was the case with the early years of Soviet communism with its ry transcend local contexts; it coalesces into a set of practices and
debates about productivism and factography, the Great Depression develops a certain self-awareness.07
of the 1930s in the US and reformist documentary photography, Since then, the repeated appearance of documentary forms
anti-colonial movements and the birth of the film essay, the counter- within the art field (as well as its subsequent marginalization in
hegemonial movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, and nouvelle vague times of conservative rollback) is accompanied by disagreements
documentary as well as conceptualist documentation. about its status as art. Its alleged non-artistic nature was even stra-
Yet the inclusion of documentary modes in the art field has tegically exploited by some early conceptualists in order to distance
also always been strongly contested. In the wake of modernist art themselves from worn-out aesthetic standards.08 In this era, docu-
history, documentary practices have traditionally been understood mentary practices have become an updated example of various
as the opposite of art, its alter ego.03 This reading also affects con- primitivisms constructed from within the art field serve to renew Missing word, “…and
temporary articulations of the documentary, where its status as art it,
09
by tapping into its self-imagined “Other.” From the late 1960s serve…”?
remains as disputed as ever. until today, the incursion of documentary modes into performance
An unlikely precursor of modernist art historian Clement and conceptual art has also marked the period during which we
Greenberg’s well-known contempt for the documentary is Walter have witnessed the impact of mass media and the information age
Benjamin, who in a little noted passage of “Einbahnstraße” (One-way on the art field, and documentary practices negotiate an unstable
street), juxtaposes art and document as two oppositions. Benjamin, 04
relationship between the two. Information has become an impor-
for all his usual sophistication, goes so far as to describe the docu- tant concern of critical art practices: it is understood as a form of
ment as the preoccupation of “primitive man.” He probably wrote this
05 For an overview of some of these debates see October 118, “Soviet Factography—A Special Issue” (Fall 2006).
in ignorance of the Soviet discussions about documentary practices, 06 Walter Benjamin: “The Author as Producer,” in New Left Review I/62 (July/August 1970).
07 See Olivier Lugon pp. 26–35 in this volume.
08 See Lucy Soutter, “The Photographic Idea: Reconsidering Conceptual Photography,” in Afterimage (March–
03 One of these recent debates around the inclusion of documentary into documenta 11 is traced in detail in Okwui April 1999).
Enwezor’s text. 09 See John Roberts, “Photography, Iconophobia and the Ruins of Conceptual Art,” in The Impossible Document:
04 Walter Benjamin: “13 Theses against Snobs,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966-1976, ed. John Roberts (London: Camerawork, 1997), 7–46.
Press, 2000), 459. I owe this hint to Sophie Hamacher, who analyzed Benjamin’s text in detail in an unpublished 10 See Sabeth Buchmann, “Under the Sign of Labor,” in Art after Conceptual Art, ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth
masters thesis at the Whitney Program: “Art, Document, Witness,” 2004. Buchmann (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 179–196.
critique and a site of intervention.10 Artists working in the wake of paradox leads to the successive inclusion and exclusion of docu-
14
15
representational critique, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic film mentary forms from the field of art and opens up a zone of conflict
Introduction
theory later challenged the idea of information as critique: starting in which different ideas of art (and its relation to life) clash and
in the 1970s and especially from the 1990s onwards, postconceptu- transform each other. This conflict reflects the tension between
alist and essayistic documentary art practices tended to instead the two different tendencies inherent in documentary creation: the
emphasize the critique of information and offer skeptical and sub- desire to both let the subject express itself without much inter-
Lugon revised his text,
versive readings of documentary jargons of authenticity. ference and yet on the aesthetic level to “turn it into something
this quote is no longer
The era of neoliberal globalization after 1989 with its enormous unique.”18 But this tension also creates the drive of a documentary part of it.
upheavals has spawned its own range of documentary modes, quest for ever more authentic representations of the real.
which despite their huge formal differences attest to a shared
desire to “touch the real”11 and to create arenas of debate within an True Life
increasingly privatized and fragmented global environment.12 Notions of the real or true life have haunted documentary expres-
The recent fragmentation of the social also impacts the site of sion since its early days. In the early 1920s, Dziga Vertov triumphant-
documentary production itself. The massive transformations within ly exclaimed: “Long live life, as it is!”19 While this slogan seems to
the multiple modes of the documentary are intrinsically connected be underlining the importance of the real and authentic life, it also
to the ambivalent transitions of globalization.13 Due to the increa- paradoxically introduces doubts about its nature. Why does Vertov
sing privatization of media and cuts in public funding, experimen- have to reassure us this life is really “as it is”? Vertov’s exclamation,
tal documentary production has again been increasingly pushed as assertive as it sounds, also informs us about the suspicion that
into the art field.14 The art field has become a laboratory for the haunts the notion of real life. Could there be another life as well,
development of new documentary expressions. According to Bill one which is essentially alienated, corrupted, and treacherous? Or
Nichols, this is a function it has held since the inception of docu- does Vertov’s slogan rather embody what Alain Badiou called the
mentary film: the formal experiments of the artistic avant-gardes set “passion of the real”20 during the 20th century: a violent desire to
the standards for representation of reality by mass media. 15
unmask the truth and to cleanse reality from all appearances? As
Historically, the overlap between documentary practices and Badiou has shown, this desire is intrinsically paranoid: it realizes
the art field has produced heated debate. As Olivier Lugon co- itself as a politics of suspicion. The passion for the real calls for a
gently remarks in his introductory text “Documentary: Authority and renewed purge of reality from all things deemed inauthentic, a desire
Ambiguities,”16 historical documentary modes were primarily forged which spills over into reality and catalyses purges and a politics
within the art field, but repeatedly denied any part in it. They were of “cleansing.” The myth of documentary authenticity is thus am-
perceived as being “beyond art, yet very much a part of it.”17 This bivalent; while, on the one hand, it testifies to a certain fidelity to
the material world, it also projects profound anxieties about its own
11 “It’s hard to touch the real” is a quote by documentary filmmaker Johan van der Keuken. It was also used as motto status onto the Other. Modernity, whose offspring is documentary
for a show at Kunstverein München in 2004, continued at Kunstverein Graz in 2006.
12 See Jan Erik Lundström, “After the Fact,” in After the Fact, catalogue, 1st Berlin Photography Festival, 2005, 11.
13 See Okwui Enwezor pages 60–81 in this volume.
14 See Hito Steyerl pages 222–229 in this volume. 18 See Lugon on last page of his text in this volume.
15 See Stefan Jonsson pages 144–165 in this volume. 19 For an extended discussion about Vertov and the documentary’s relation to life, see Hito Steyerl “Kunst oder
16 Ibid. Leben,” in Die Farbe der Wahrheit (Vienna: Turia und Kant, 2008), 93–100.
17 Ibid. 20 Alain Badiou, Das Jahrhundert (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2006), 70ff.
expression, appears Janus-faced in the prism of its documentary Communicating Vessels
16
17
reflection: if documentary works are historically imbued with the spir- This publication, containing ten essays written between 2003 and
Introduction
it of progress, enlightenment, and education, they not only record 2007, engages with the contested field of desires and anxieties to
but sometimes also actively contribute to the catastrophic failure in touch the real; it sits in the middle of needs to investigate the docu-
realizing those ideals. mentary’s role in the construction of our present. Having been pub-
The crisis of modernity also impacts on the documentary’s tra- lished in such diverse contexts as an art magazine from Holland, an
ditional truth claims. While the notion of a document is historically online periodical and a scholarly journal from New Zealand among
tied to ideas of certitude and confirmation and is primarily used in other places, this collection of texts forms the most extensive an-
the legal realm, this certitude has all but vanished from contempo- thology on contemporary art and documentary practices to date.
rary consciousness. The experiences of the 20th century, its large- The authors are equally diverse in their professional backgrounds,
scale enterprises of propaganda and disinformation, have created which include writing and art production, curating, art history teach-
an attitude, which could be called habitual distrust as well as advan- ing, literary critique, editing daily newspapers and mainstream art
ced media literacy. Documentary modes still appeal to institutional magazines, or running a well-known documentary film festival. This
modes of power/knowledge and cite their authority, but the effect is yet another sign of how concerns about documentary practices
is rather a perpetual doubt; a blurred and agitated documentary un- not only permeate the world of contemporary art but are also intrin-
certainty, which paradoxically is extremely pertinent as an image of sically interdisciplinary.
our times.21 It is precisely the failure of the documentary to fulfill its The first three texts explore the various impasse of documenta-
pretense to certainty, which ultimately does justice to an intranspa- ry representation and its conflictual relation to various definitions of
rent and dubious contemporary reality.22 The same lack of certainty art. In the first text of this volume, Olivier Lugon gives us a historical
applies to theoretical definitions of the “documentary.” 23
At the same perspective on the connection between documentary practices and
time, this vagueness has actually contributed to the success and to theories and the art field. While the meaning of “documentary” has
the dissemination of documentary practices. Instead of denying this shifted historically, the art field’s reaction has also turned out to be
uncertainty, one should instead acknowledge its productive effects. 24
unstable, torn as it was between rejection and embrace. But docu-
Perhaps this uncertainty has also made documentary practices one mentary practices are also filled with internal contradictions. The ba-
of the most innovative forms of contemporary art. The documentary’s sic tension within documentary forms is the conflict between artifice
ambivalent nature, hovering between art and non-art, has contribut- and authenticity. On the one hand, documentary practices express
ed to creating new zones of entanglement between the aesthetic the desire to get rid of the author or creator. On the other, this desire
and the ethic, 25
between artifice and authenticity, between fiction can create—as in the work of Walker Evans—an even stronger
and fact, between documentary power and documentary potential, aesthetic impact, because the resulting images seem stripped from
and between art and its social, political, and economic conditions. any formal affectation. This paradox cannot be reconciled; it defines
the dynamic nature of documentary representation.
21
See Hito Steyerl, “Die dokumentarische Unschärferelation,” in Die Farbe der Wahrheit (Vienna: Turia und Kant,
2008), 15.
In Jean-Pierre Rehm’s text, “The Plays of the Witnesses,”26 the
22 Ibid.
23 See Lugon page 26 in this volume. paradoxes of documentary representation are further explored. At
24 Ibid.
25 See Okwui Enwezor pages 60–81 in this volume. 26 See Jean-Pierre Rehm pages 36–45 in this volume.
its core are a bundle of permanent discrepancies: although the pragmatic theory of truth reached by communication and consensus,
18
19
documentary often parades as a mere reflection of reality, it obeys he argues for a dialectical movement between both. By analyzing the
Introduction
and carefully executes coded narrative systems. 27
To simply view different logics of enunciation in Mandarin Ducks, Heiser highlights
documentary forms as transparent rip-offs of reality means denying each model’s failures but emphasizes that moments of truth still
that they “only contain opacity and thickness and that they are in emerge between both. More generally, he explores the question of
themselves objects of study, document among documents, link in truth in the realm of art. Could we call it beauty, a quality produced
a process of interpretation offered to the political freedom of the by a sustained contradiction?
spectator.” 28
Quoting Michel Foucault, Rehm elucidates the function
of documentary information: to identify, to report what is known and Global Documentary
convenient, to report the past and the future in a desired present The next section locates concerns about the documentary and art
without consequence or consistency, in order to obtain a confirma- in the contemporary political and social context: the massive politi-
tion of all initial hypotheses. Conventional information is thus a pro- cal and economic upheavals caused by the contradictory drifts of
cess of subjection and coerced obedience. A documentary critique globalization. In his essay “Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Hu-
of this information could consist in the documentary production of man Rights, and the Figure of ‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art,” Okwui
reality rather than its mimetic or naturalistic reproduction: an enti- Enwezor firmly anchors most of the traditional concerns about the
rely manufactured process, which blends fiction and documentary. relation of art and documentary in the present; he analyzes the
Thus, documentary practices are characterized by risk, the risk of contemporary condition of documentary forms within the aporias
moving in-between and beyond the sterile opposition of simultane- of globalization. Crafted as a response to the criticism of the docu-
ously recording and making up reality. mentary character of documenta 11, his text is a reflection on the
A completely different approach is taken by Jörg Heiser, who general dimension of the documentary in a world characterized by
explores the link between fact, truth, and fiction. His close reading two alternate endings of modernism: 1989 and 9/11.
of the work Mandarin Ducks by artists Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de According to Enwezor, documentary art works condense a
Rooij poses the question of the documentary from the perspective contemporary political and social constellation characterized by
of its supposed Other: fiction. According to Heiser, this piece points the “unhomeliness” of globalization, migration, and mobility, as well
to the core of the documentary problem precisely because it is as by the catastrophic consequences of these processes. This
entirely fictional: it begs the question of truth. Heiser expresses configuration gives rise to a new relation of ethics and aesthetics
his dissatisfaction with constructivist models of documentary truth. mediated by a specific articulation of the documentary, which En-
He grounds his debate in the ethic necessity to distinguish facts wezor calls vérité (in contrast to the more conventional mode of
from fiction or to disentangle historical events from their revisionist “documentary”). The mode of vérité doesn’t confront the specta-
distortion and describes Foucault’s often-cited model of a politics tor with non-negotiable facts, as more conventional documentary
of truth as a tautology in which power and truth are simply equated does. Instead, it creates a possible space for an ethical encounter
with each other. By contrasting this model with Jürgen Habermas’ between the spectator and the other, a space in which truth is not
an abstracted mot d’ordre, but instead, as Alain Badiou proposes,
27 See page 37 of the text.
28 See pages 37–38 of the text. a truth process. As vérité, the documentary is not only mimetic but
also analytic. It is not truth, but the fidelity to truth, that the docu- holes, and fissures within documentary representation. Absence is
21
mentary ceaselessly constructs and deconstructs. This version of the only way to depict the realities of fragmented global spaces and
Introduction
documentary, embodied by works from authors like Allan Sekula, to portray the fates of people who end up being swallowed by the
Chantal Akerman, Walid Raad, or the Black Audio Film Collective, chasms in between them. But paradoxically, dispersion and disfigu-
combines reflexivity with an ethical stance. It is also firmly located ration can also free the subject from the confines of documentary
within the ethical necessities of the present: How do we look at the representation, as in Pursuit by Steve McQueen, which challenges
pain of the other without lapsing into voyeurism? Why do we still notions of the spectators’ bodily integrity and creates a space of
have to answer to his or her gaze? How do we imagine a global uncertainty and indeterminacy open to experiment and becoming.
public sphere when there are no democratic institutions to back it? Vít Havránek points out a different consequence of the most
Enwezor insists on the importance of the term “human rights” to recent effects of capitalist globalization on documentary preoccup-
enable such communication and create a common ground within ations. For Havránek, recent documentary art practices in Eastern
an unevenly globalizing world. However, as he notes, this term is European countries during so-called “transition” represent a reac-
also fraught with ambivalence. tion to the total reorganization of reality after 1989. The ethical va-
This ambivalence is further explored in T. J. Demos’ essay cuum produced in this period bears the visual stamp of advertising.
“A Life Full of Holes.” The failure of the promises of human rights In contrast to this economically very potent yet vacuous form of
necessitates a fundamental revision of the relation between politics the public, the documentary is always grounded in the social posi-
and representation. It is no coincidence that the bearer of “human tions of its subject matter. Form and content cannot be separated
rights,” the refugee deprived of any political representation, came from each other—an ethical relation between both is established.
to metaphorically embody the vicissitudes of globalization. He or This relation is often probed in relation to the social and econo-
she is the one who inhabits the fissures and gaps between states mic context of documentary production itself—the art field. In Hans
and corporations, and is left to the precariousness of a deregulated Haacke’s or Andrea Fraser’s work, documents map out the rela-
global sphere unbound by any rule of law. But if this subject is tions of production within the art field or its institutions. The same
not representable in terms of classical political representation, how can be said about works by Roman Ondák, Deimantas Narkevičius,
does it figure in artistic representation? and Pawel Althamer. At the same time, the historical space in some
Demos argues that the structural absence of bare life from of- transitional countries has to be reappropriated because it has fallen
ficial representation can nevertheless be captured by documentary prey to a widespread amnesia (or one might add, to privatization
expression. The uncertain status of its subject troubles the image and new national imaginaries). Works such as IRWIN’s East Art Map
and creates holes, blurs, and lacunae within the visual field. Docu- reappropriate the space of writing art history, while others focus on
mentary forms are thus suspended between being an instrument of the subjective aspect of writing history. The necessity to develop a
power and surveillance—not only representing but even constituting documentary methodology, which more often than not incorporates
bare life such as in the pictures from Abu Ghraib—and on the other other research methods, enables documentary forms to trespass
hand undermining the same structures it serves to uphold. Taking not only into other disciplines but also to transcend a local per-
Yto Barrada’s and Emily Jacir’s work as examples, Demos shows spective and to open up a space characterized by mobility and
how the representation of bare life proceeds within the ruptures, nomadism.
In Carles Guerra’s essay “Negatives of Europe,” questions of how the arts, during certain historical periods, channel information
23
mobility are explored further. Using the example of media reports and experiences, which have no other place in the public debate.
Introduction
word missing? focusing on the cut-off of the old from Russia to Belarus in 2007, In contemporary society, globalized media is the main public arena,
he encourages us to ask what happens behind the “trompe l’oeil” and we have to ask what is allowed there. What is considered
information that the media offers us. In order to examine this he newsworthy? According to Jonsson, parochial news is coded as
argues that a “collective pedagogy” is necessary, a pedagogy in universally applicable to humankind but only as long as they follow
which information and opinion intermingle. The essayist works by “a universal equivalent.” This universal equivalent, or leveler, is a
Ursula Biemann and Angela Melitopoulos are quoted as prime exa- well-known figure: it is based on experiences of Western men, of
mples of how artists might successfully deal with current conditions the owning classes, and it excludes other local characteristics. The
of globalization. In The Black Sea Files and Corridor X the artists universal equivalent is furthermore the key component of cultural
investigate transport and communication infrastructure—both the globalization.
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the highway route stretching Today both art and journalism are part of the historical process
from Greece through ex-Yugoslavia to Germany—through an intri- called “globalization of culture,” in which Jonsson identifies three
cate play of the visible and the invisible, the total and the partial. Not tendencies: the triumph of American mass culture, the integration
unlike montage in film, they are not documenting reality but rather of Western high culture in lifestyles beyond the West, and the re-
organising complexity. According to Guerra, this approach can be sistance of certain local traditions. Politics, in the sense of mirroring
seen in light of a general revival of interest in educational models in opinions and following the rituals of day-to-day political affairs, is
contemporary art, with work that moves comfortably between the nowadays catered to by journalism. At the same time “the political,”
academic department and the exhibition space. At the same time meaning the underlying principles and consequences of political
he understands it as a critique of photojournalism and its prefe- and economic policies—and the ways people can represent them-
rence for single images and iconic power. Instead, this type of work selves and their interest in a public sphere—are explored by art.
allows for new cognitive possibilities and ways of managing radical This leads to a situation where pluritopic interpretations can now
plurality. And more importantly, these practices produce their own be found almost exclusively in the “public sphere of inbetween-
events—they do not have to wait for them to happen. ness” produced by aesthetics and cultural theory rather than in
journalism. This public sphere of inbetweenness is, in Jonsson’s
Media and the Archive understanding, a fourth tendency, which deals with the conflictual
The relation between media and documentary art is the focus of relationships between the commercialized mass culture, standar-
the following section. The literary critic Stefan Jonsson discusses dized elite culture, and local resistance. At the core of its pluritopic
the glaring conformism of global mass media in contrast to the interpretations lies a much-needed ambition to challenge worn-out
simultaneous politicization of contemporary art (including literature, representational modes.
film, and music) of the last decade and a half. He sees the two as In his essay Jan Verwoert takes a closer look at the logic of
communicating vessels. Art compensates for the blind spots of the archive, particularly within the context of art. Moving from the
journalism, not unlike the claims in the theoretical work of late 19th- “sublime archive” in the work of Christian Boltanski and Hanne
century Marxists Karl Kautsky and Franz Mehring. They showed Darboven, in which history is encountered in its totality, to the de-
institutionalized and subjective archive in the work of Renée Green, where consumption means belonging to a world, he claims that the
25
he asks how a record becomes a document. The “respectless” con- way signs, images, and statements function in contemporary econ-
Introduction
tact, which is fostered between the work and the viewer in Green’s omies instead contribute to the emergence of the possible as well
Import/Export Funk Office, for example, is according to Verwoert as to its realization. A documentary image therefore becomes a
also present in the essayistic installations of Dorit Margreiter. As catalyst for a different reality instead of being its representation. He
with Adorno’s definition of the literary essay, the essayist installation is inspired by events in Seattle and collective demonstrations else-
privileges associatively arranged statements, filtering them through where, and to him the slogan of the protesters—“a different world
subjective experience rather than promoting linear progress and is possible”—signifies entry to a different intellectual atmosphere,
rational arguments. This spatio-temporal experience can also take with different conceptual constellations. To replace the outdated
place in a video such as Gitte Villesen’s Willy as DJ, where the artist subject-work relationship, which is the basis of a representational
and her collaborator perform in front of the camera in relation to paradigm, he proposes the event-multiplicity bind. One advantage
available material. Using the filmic work of Deimantas Narkevičius is that the event is an encounter with two aspects: soul and body.
as an example, he suggests that cinematic montage can create It is both intellectual-emotional and performed, literally. As opposed
gaps in the archive, which allow for refined attempts at making to the classical representational paradigm this does not reflect
research available. Verwoert concludes by arguing, as is the case backwards but projects ahead and creates “possible worlds.”
with a number of the other authors here, that documentary practi- By addressing the contemporary conditions of production within
ces in contemporary art are neither tied to a genre nor to a me- documentary practice, Hito Steyerl seeks to establish a political per-
dium. They are both expanding and diversifying. And yet, there is spective on the documentary that is not only constituted by concerns
a common denominator to the multiplicity of practices: a critical with representation but also by addressing shared practice. In her
sensibility, which acknowledges the urgency to represent specific view, experimental contemporary documentary practice not only
realities at the same time as it confesses to an awareness of the serves to create works, but also links and connections between
ideologies and apparatuses governing them. dispersed digital workers. The space of contemporary experimen-
tal documentary production is peopled by freelancers and embed-
Documentary Power and Potential ded into global databases, p2p networks, and other file sharing
How does documentary theory align itself with contemporary theo- platforms. This opens up reflections on the conditions of digital
ries of information capitalism and the cultural industries? How is production as well as on the question of copyright and intellectual
the documentary embedded in its social conditions, and how can property. But the volatile networks of experimental documentary
it work on transforming them? The last two texts address urgent producers could also become new nodes of a public sphere, which
questions concerning the material conditions of the documentary. has emancipated itself from the control of both nation and capital.
In his analysis of the expression of contemporary protest move- In the environment of digital capitalism (and very often also
ments, Maurizio Lazzarato breaks with the age-old paradigm of national fragmentation and “ethnic” strife), the documentary relation
representation—whether in politics or artistic modes of expression. to reality shifts as well. As archives becomes fluid and more and
Referring to a cultural condition in which corporations and their ad- more information is available online, conflicts about the intellectual
vertisements produce a world in which objects and subjects exist, property of documentary images and sounds increase. The docu-
mentary becomes further implicated in processes of Othering and
27
social disintegration. But contemporary documentary production
Introduction
has to face these conditions. They do not represent reality. They
are the reality.
Olivier Lugon 30
31
using photography to arouse public awareness, to denounce urban reform of Hine (photographs to bring about change), and the more
Olivier Lugon 32
Olivier Lugon 34
05 Beaumont Newhall, “Documentary Approach to Photography,” Parnassus 10, no. 3 (March 1938): 2–6.
04 See William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 06 Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), 11, 78.
This ambivalence of the documentary vis-à-vis art—should the subject—another form of self-abnegation vis-à-vis the world. In
Olivier Lugon 36
Jean-Pierre Rehm 40
41
which marks the end of fluidity, we are given a firm invitation: to summary narrative resolution in fiction. Documentaries would not
Jean-Pierre Rehm 42
Jean-Pierre Rehm 44
Jean-Pierre Rehm 46
Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth 49
Mead and Gregory Batsen, the famous husband-and-wife anthro-
pologists. The two of them discussed the pros and cons of static
camera shots in ethnographic documentary films.
01 Stewart Brand, conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, CoEvolution Quarterly, no. 10 (June 1976):
32–44, see also: http://www.oikos.org/forgod.htm.
top of a garbage dump on the edge of Jakarta; and Untitled (2001) However, the new work shown in Venice, Mandarin Ducks
Jörg Heiser 50
51
shows a cemetery located in the middle of the same city. These (2005), turned out to have been conceived as a scripted film with
Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth
works bring up questions, both in content and form, that also turn actors, a chamber piece employing devices from the auteur film.
up in discussions of film in visual anthropology—despite the fun- Did that put an end to the documentary question? In one respect,
damental differences in regard to context, and the importance de Rijke/de Rooij have already settled it: their work has never been
de Rijke/de Rooij place on the artistic staging of display in the White “documentary,” in the sense of being purely informative, visual evi-
Cube. The first parallel is to the old debate about the usefulness dence of a factual topic, following its etymological root, the Latin
of the static camera in the anthropological film—a topic Margaret word documantum, meaning lesson or proof. The two artists have
Mead and Gregory Batsen play on in the dialogue quoted above. The never been concerned with what there is to see, but rather, with
second parallel has to do with a more recent discussion in ethno- how to see it—an aesthetic operation involving abstraction and pre-
graphic film: of how, in the light of an increased awareness of the sentation. Yet ironically enough, at the same time, thanks to its ob-
camera’s presence evoking and influencing events in a problematic vious dramatic, staged character, this most recent work is perfectly
way, this apparent weakness could be turned into a strength. In this suited (virtually through its emphatic denial of the issue) to confront
context, Tobias Rees discussed the concept of evocation. “Evoca- the actual crux of the documentary: the issue of truth.
tion,” according to Rees, “comes from the Latin evocare and means Now, we know that the concept of truth is an extraordinarily
something along the lines of ‘to call up something.’ So evocation is difficult one, and so before I turn to Mandarin Ducks specifically, I
commonly understood to be the awakening of experience by look- should be allowed to sound off a little more about it. It has become
ing at a work of art, and it is precisely within this framework that the routine to expound upon the difficulty or impossibility of differen-
ethnographic film has to operate. Yet the process cannot be about tiating between the fictional and the real, by employing what has
evoking the supposed actual reality of a place.” Alluding to Emanuel become an almost knee-jerk reference to the social, cultural, and
Lévinas’ concept of the Other, he continues: “to experience” does psychological construction of all representations. Why has this be-
not mean “that I experience the person foreign to me, but rather, come dissatisfactory? Because it seems to imply that the fact that
that I can experience the fact that I cannot experience the person something is constructed means it is entirely relative, which in turn
foreign to me.”02 This should not be misinterpreted as the accep- seems to disavow indirectly the issue of whether a representation
tance of irreconcilable cultural differences, but rather, it should be is true or not: if there is no such thing as objective reality, how can
understood on a general existential level, as an acknowledgement there be any objective truth, or even verifiable truth? However, even
of the fact that some things cannot be represented, which also if we assume that what has “always been” a construct contains an
polemically opposes a type of “representational ethnography … as inherent “experiential reality”—regardless of whether or not it is the
a kind of colonial slide show.”03 Moreover, this is the only way to “experiential reality” of the delusionary, or dreams, or media fan-
describe the viewer’s relationship to the protagonists of the three tasies—it does not relieve us of the necessity of inquiring into the
de Rijke/de Rooij films mentioned above. plausibility, the truth, and the verifiability of what is being presented.
Unless, of course, we renounce the issue entirely—either naively
02 Tobias Rees, “Writing Culture – Filming Culture. It was Real: Unendlichkeit versus Repräsentation,” lecture given
at the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde (October 5–10, 1997, Frankfurt am Main), held or cynically, or both.
on October 10, 1997, http://www.iwf.de/easa/brd/.
03 Ibid.
To clarify immediately: I am not concerned about returning to their technological distribution and mediation, so that it once again
Jörg Heiser 52
Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth 53
a classic, universal concept of truth (meaning, the sort of truth that becomes possible to work with them. And then we can ask: what
is transcendently inferred through logical reasoning, or is materially is the “lived” reality of clichés and ideologies? What happens if
and empirically deduced through observation, and is considered events taking place in front of the camera are essentially “steered”
universally valid). Rather, I am, in general, interested in looking for by whomever records them? How exactly does the reciprocal rela-
a concept of truth that can be applied to the process of viewing tionship between psychic and media realities function in the field of
art. How can something like this be salvaged? Since everything corporeal, verbal performance? And how exactly can art be made
we see, hear, think, or feel is reinforced—or numbed—by media, in the process? At this point, many texts will refer—almost auto-
then we are bound to inquire if there is indeed a concept of truth matically, now, it seems to me—to Michel Foucault’s concept of the
that can be preserved despite the mélange of social, technological, “politics of truth.” The better examples of these texts are wary of
and economic elements and filters. If cultural expression is to be a platitudinous, relativistic interpretation, such as “there are many
more than arbitrary (or at best, pretty or shocking), then it needs to subjective truths and therefore nothing is generally valid”—and cer-
develop a kind of truth that can be tested in other contexts. Other- tainly Foucault cannot be accused of saying this.04 Still, if we look at
wise, it does not “live.” the definition he has provided, we can see that it contains a contra-
It might be unsatisfactory, but it is imperative to point out that diction in logic. Foucault says that he does not consider truth to be
the answer is merely contextual and can only be given as each “an ensemble of veracities that have to be discovered or accepted,”
case arises. Even though they usually do not regard “truth” as a but instead, “the ensemble of rules according to which the true is
category, critics and the public still judge works of art according to separated from the false, and the true is endowed with specific, con-
how coherently they are constructed in relation to the rest of the sequential powers.”05 Without delving into his definition any further,
world and to other art. Or, to put it differently, a work of art is judged he basically introduces two concepts of truth: first, the truth as an
according to how “truthful” it is in relation to the world and to art “ensemble of rules” (the ensemble that separates and endows); and
(regardless of whether or not it is in the form of a coquettish lie). second, truth as the product of this ensemble (the object that has
It is as if we are constantly measuring what we receive against a been separated or endowed). Truth bears itself. Splitting hairs, we
kind of catalogue of unfulfilled desires and anticipated knowledge: could say that there is yet another level: the critique or identification
does the work summarize all of these references and abide by of this “ensemble of rules” (elsewhere, Foucault calls this episteme,
them; does it permit these desires without sacrificing knowledge or cognitive order). With a little bit of effort, this criticism can still
to them, even when they contradict each other? If the contradiction be warded off, since Foucault would certainly not have hesitated to
is withstood, then truth can blaze up in between. And one name consider his own statement an example of what he is describing
for the form that artistic treatment of desire and knowledge takes (that is, as an operation that separates the true from the false and
along the way would be “beauty.” (Therefore, if the ideal for this endows it with “specific, consequential powers”—in this case, his
is compaction into the smallest space imaginable, the artistic and own intellectual authority). Ultimately, however, Foucault’s definition
scientific concepts of beauty converge.) seems primarily an attempt to differentiate his own approach from
Beauty, truth: solemn concepts surrounded by an aura of the 04 Among the better texts is Hito Steyerl’s “Politik der Wahrheit – Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld,” in: The Need to
Document, ed. Vít Havránek, Sabine Schaschl–Cooper, and Bettina Steinbrügge (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2005), 53–64.
eternal, which have to be submerged in the cold, sparkling flow of 05 Michel Foucault, Dispositive der Macht. Über Sexualität, Wissen und Wahrheit (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1978), 53.
the Frankfurt School’s critique of ideology (although later, Foucault allegory of crossing bridges (regardless of its knowledge of skeptical
Jörg Heiser 54
Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth 55
tended to be willing to accept their close relation). For what is the objections—even an objection to the purely formal anticipation of an
examination of the ensemble of rules according to which the true objective reference to the world) will be disappointed right away, as
is separated from the false and endowed with power but critique soon as we imagine the imponderabilities involved in constructing
of ideology? bridges. A good example of this, taken from reality, is Sir Norman
The crux of the matter remains the issue of who is speaking, Foster’s Millennium Bridge in London: when it was first built, and
and with what authority, and how one could communicate at all on before it was improved, people did not want to cross it, because
the basis of an unsettled presupposition, even if it only concerns there were doubts about its engineering. Isn’t this example more in
truths, not the truth. If we proceed with Foucault’s idea, then we accordance with the reality of the everyday, pragmatic concept of
are confronted with the dilemma that all truths—whether they are truth? Within the context of actions, doesn’t it have more to do with
an “ensemble of rules” or the product of these rules—are only ap- improbable, undecided situations, rather than with “more decisive”
parently substantiated by the power with which they ultimately, ar- certainties and authentic habit (such as crossing a bridge that has
bitrarily endow themselves. The now classic model opposing this is already been crossed many times)? At the same time, it seems as if
Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action: truth is consen- a pragmatic trust in “intuitive truth” is mixed up with a Nietzschean
sus; truth is something that can ultimately only be salvaged through “necessary illusion”—that is, an assumption that ultimately cannot
argument. Yet Habermas’ theory produces plenty of contradictions, be tested and is probably false, but which makes it possible for us
too, especially this one: how does one constitute the space where to act (to adhere to the image, imagine an adventure film scenario
these arguments occur, and who determines its—back to Foucault in which a bridge has to be crossed in order to get to the safe side,
again—“ensemble of rules”? Who or what decides which positions assuming it is still stable—before it finally collapses).
are even going to be allowed to contribute to this process of building So if we compare Foucault’s line of argument with Habermas’,
consensus? It would be naïve to reply, “the better argument.” As has then we might be able to look for a useful concept of truth—simply
often been stated, the fact is that Habermas’ term herrschaftsfreier put—in a constant dialectic movement, that could also be read
Diskurs (translated as non-hierarchical or illocutionary discourse) as a blueprint for de Rijke/de Rooij’s latest filmic paradigm shift.
conjures up a way out of the dilemma, rather than actually using This dialectic movement is between a “pragmatic assumption of
argument to reveal the path. In recent years Habermas has also an objective world”—which, with the help of an imaginary common
striven for a kind of sophistication of what could be called “intuitive standard (such as universal human rights, for example) illuminates
truth.” To elucidate this “formal assumption of an objective world,” the possibility of agreement beyond particularities—and the skepti-
06
which makes us able to agree and act, Habermas states: “We do cism toward the actual realization of just this pragmatic assumption
not cross any bridge whose stability we doubt. Everyday realism cor- within the terms of precisely this particularity. Unfortunately, truth
responds to a—admittedly only performatively concurrent—concept cannot get any simpler. Mandarin Ducks is a drama, in which the
of unconditional truth, a truth without any sort of epistemological “pragmatic assumption of an objective world” is thrown into the
index.”07 Here, the problem is that the basic optimism implied in this bonfire of the vanities. Is understanding and communication pos-
sible? Yes, but only in the form of mean, sarcastic, sneaky attacks
06 Jürgen Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 208.
07 Ibid., 52. upon each other. Can we live together? Yes, but only so that we
can keep badgering each other. To put it concretely: first, we are an unashamedly racist manner about the migrant taxi driver: “It’s a
Jörg Heiser 56
Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth 57
in the seemingly idyllic, relaxed company of a visibly upper-middle- mystery—how these immigrants can take a job, driving hard-work-
class group of big-city types. The camera moves slowly from left to ing people around their own city, without knowing the bloody way,”
right, filming the protagonists sitting comfortably on the sofa, look- and his daughter answers, “Thank you for sharing your wonderful
ing like hills in a romantic landscape. Sexual and ethnic boundaries post-imperialistic philosophy with us.” She wears a dark pageboy
seem fluid, grapes are eaten, faces and hands are seen making wig, and delivers her biting statement while looking straight into the
silent exchanges, indistinct bits of decadent small talk (“high from camera, like a voguing drag queen exaggeratedly imitating wom-
nail varnish”) and the languorous clink of champagne glasses are en’s poses—in this case, poses of domination. Still, there is no way
heard: in short, this is a Mount Olympus of cultivated relaxation. to break out of the space.
However, drives and aggressions soon push their way into this This approach already has an obvious parallel to Rainer Wer-
supposed harmony. Carlito, a trim man with the smile of a shark, ner Fassbinder: while his films show the proletariat, lower-middle-
believes he has to own up to the seemingly docile Sabine that he is class protagonists living in small, claustrophobic homes, he dis-
doing her a favor by not taking her “invitation for abuse.” He is “an plays the upper-class as if they were “exotic fish in an aquarium,”
animal, a hunter.” “Fact is, I’m doing every person in this room a fa- as Wilfried Wiegand writes. “He gave the rooms in many of his
vor by not creating this situation of poor little Sabine being brutally films this effect by using house plants and decorative flowers.”08
raped.” However, his virile verbal triumph quickly collapses. “That Mandarin Ducks also creates a similar impression: here is a colorful
is such a desperate statement, Carly,” Sabine replies, “if there is window with Islamic motifs, a Japanese vanity with kaleidoscopically
anyone in this room who needs a loving pair of arms, it’s you.” And mirrored glass, calfskin with a zebra pattern, a Japanese screen
things get worse. A well-modulated and fatherly off-screen voice with a couple of mandarin ducks as a motif, and last, but not least,
is heard saying, “Carlito, before you respond to my daughter’s il- an illusionary horizon with an artificial glow, which evoke these as-
luminating remark, just remember, there is strength in restraint,” sociations.
followed by a patronizing, therapeutic: “It would be my pleasure Language fails, ultimately. A longer sequence is introduced
to help you come to grips with any …” In the uncanny presence of by a close-up of a crystal glass falling to the floor; it features father,
the father of his intended victim, the brutal hunter becomes a pitiful mother, and aunt engaged in long orgies of laughter, as if they
emotional cripple. What at first looked like a scene from an ancient were actors doing screen tests—oscillating between being ridicu-
symposium—a philosophical chat in pleasant company, a non-hi- lously drunk, obscene, insincere, and aggressive. Distorted mouths,
erarchical discourse—turns out to be a dramatic constellation: the bared teeth, crow’s feet, and laugh lines garishly lit from the side,
clearly theatrical space is like a prison that forces the protagonists’ looking as if they are etched in stone. Another character, also on
antagonism toward each other to become painfully visible. “Parole” a futile search for love and fulfillment, says, “I feel like I’m stuck in
is only permitted for shopping or doing business. Echoing a scene a babushka of realities,” before, finally, a silent sequence of frosty
at Southfork Ranch, the mean daddy pours himself a drink (he
is called, of all things, Man Ray—perhaps an artistic variation on 08
Wilfried Wiegand, “Die Puppe in der Puppe. Beobachtungen zu Fassbinders Filmen,” in Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Reihe Film 2, ed. Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte (Munich: Hanser, 1985), 29–62, 39. It is interesting that
Wiegand uses the image of the (Russian) nesting dolls in the Fassbinder title, since this idea also
J.R.?—and looks a little bit like Rem Koolhaas), while poisonous appears in Mandarin Ducks: “I feel like I’m stuck in a babushka of realities,” says one of the characters. In this
image, the notion of being imprisoned converges in a constrained context with the perpetual obligation to perform
attacks are exchanged with the defiant daughter. He complains in as oneself.
looks and whiny tears finishes up the pathetic scene. Everyone static long shot—had possessed a kind of privileged access to the
Jörg Heiser 58
Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth 59
present is a Mandarin Duck: privileged animals, trapped in chilly production of truth in the image. Now, with Mandarin Ducks—in the
love relationship. vain of the Hamlet play-within-a-play—it is the exaggerated pose in
It becomes very clear that the truth, which this is about, is not an artificial setting, where truth, or at least something like the truth,
an “external reality” that remains as uninfluenced as possible by suddenly flashes—although not inevitably so. The irony just hap-
the filming process. However, it is also not the truth that is elicited pens to be (and this was the “craft” of a director like Fassbinder,
in an argumentative or therapeutic exchange. For example, in Carli- who, after all, came from the theater) that the actors have to forget
to’s encounter with the effeminately gay son, his virile heterosexual their “craft,” to allow the pose to be recognized as a pose, in order
pose manifests as more ambivalent than it was after the “therapeu- to disclose something about their characters. Shifting from a static
tic conversation” with Sabine and her father. In this deliberately ar- sequence of images to an edited sequence, from something that
tificial pose, in the theatrical game on display, the truth is glimpsed seemed to be mostly documenting human behaviour to something
suddenly and briefly, as if it were a flash in a mirror: the truth of that is obviously rehearsed, from atmospheric sound to scripted
desire. This technique has a famous predecessor: the play within a speech, is also like shifting from “passive” to “active” representa-
play in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The frequently fragmented layering tion. To pick up on Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan, one might
of different types of presentational forms (in Mandarin Ducks, we even say—without intending to pathologize the comparison—that it
have the auteur film, theater, voguing, and television soap operas) moves away from the obsessive-compulsive to the hysterical. The
initiates a discussion about truth. In Shakespeare, the question is obsessive-compulsive tells lies shaped like the truth; the accuracy
whether or not the king has killed his brother; in Mandarin Ducks, it of his facts (here: the apparently neutral, accurate presentation of
is about the relationship between possession and cruelty. an external visual reality) only contains an encrypted form of his
To return to truth as a philosophical question: Foucault’s “en- desire. The hysteric, on the other hand, tells the truth in the guise of
semble of rules, according to which the true is separated from the a lie: desire is revealed in the distortions of factual accuracy (here:
false, and what is true is given specific, consequential powers,” is the clearly staged presentation of behavioral roles).09
entirely robbed of its voluntaristic undertone, because those who This move from the “obsessive-compulsive” to the “hysterical”
seem to benefit so confidently from being given “specific, conse- mode of producing images entails risks: one gradually surrenders
quential powers” seem to be trapped at the same time by the con- abstraction and distance (although abstraction as such is not simply
tradictions that this produces. Meanwhile, Habermas’ notion of an given up), lunges into the middle of a complicated production of truth,
argumentative exchange that can lead to a consensual truth seems inevitably and suddenly starts to compete, also in terms of craft, with
to be its exact opposite: an altercation that induces collapse. How- others who publicly make statements (in this case, even if the artists
ever, in this complementarity, the notion still appears once again do not suddenly start seeing themselves as “filmmakers,” but con-
as a lost ideal. tinue to think of their work in the context of art, not cinema: the great
It becomes clear that de Rijke/de Rooij permit the camera to auteur films by directors from Godard to Fassbinder—very tough
actively influence what happens in front of it, not least in order to competition). At the same time, one discloses that even before, one
counteract the illusion that their frequently shown recent works—the was never completely uninvolved. To vary Margaret Mead’s and
ones mentioned at the beginning, when they were working with a 09 Slavoj Žižek, “Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge,” 1997, http://www.gsa.buffalo.edu/lacan/slavvy.html.
Gregory Batsen’s image quoted above, the goal is, to some extent,
Jörg Heiser 60
to film the way the protagonist scratches his back, while simply al-
lowing us to realize that he is kicking the cat under the table. Not
easy.
The only relation to art that can be sanctioned in a reality that stands
63
under the constant threat of catastrophe is one that treats works of art
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
with the same deadly seriousness that characterizes the world today.
Theodor W. Adorno01
Prologue
This essay invites two analogous and complementary readings
of ethics and aesthetics in contemporary art. The first part seeks
to understand the relationship between the ideas of ethics and
aesthetics that frame current debates in what is otherwise called
political art. The second part is concerned with types of artistic
practice that straddle the realm of art and documentary, and the
problems they pose to our comprehension of reality in the context
of art works, media images, and exhibitions of contemporary art.
In the first, I shall analyze reasons for the remarkable transformation
of the concept of the political in contemporary art, especially as
it concerns both the subject and content of such art, that make
secondary the formal means of the work. Secondly, the exhibition
documenta 11 provides the exemplary notice as a specific case
study for how to read the disfigured tradition of the documentary
as it converges with a surprisingly conservative notion of the disin-
terestedness of art in its relations with social life.
01 Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1983), 185.
02 Emmanuel Levinas, “Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other,” in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B.
Smith and Barbara Harshav (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1998), 221.
the strange disarticulation of criticality in recent art which above all Today we are more or less witnessing the complete dissolution
Okwui Enwezor 64
65
else values an over-metabolized formalism by means of a strong and evaporation of a kind of politically-driven art practice based on
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
return to abstraction in the advanced sectors of the art economy. some notion of the critique of the commodity form and the struggle
To the degree that the art economy of the gallery system puts a over the ownership of the means of production, determinations
high premium on commodity objects, the return to formalism and coterminous with a Marxian model of class struggle. If class forma-
abstraction heralds a return to a kind of conservatism that all but tions no longer animate the modes of political art today, the other
abjures the kind of art which continuously registers a sense of what side of this development is the return of formalism as nothing but a
Sartre would have called engagement. What I am calling abstraction great emptying out and banishment of the concept of the political in
here should be understood not just in the sense of metaphysics. artistic matters, as if this would provide a cure for the anxiety of mo-
Modernist abstraction, especially, unfolds out of mechanistic, formal, dernity. There is a novel idea behind this anxiousness surrounding
and stylistic devices that constitute its representational frame—with the modern today, at the root of which is the crisis of the political in
a tendency towards the transcendental and the universal, on the current artistic practice. Recent elaborations on modernity hold that
part of Abstract Expressionism, and the metaphysical, in the case of within the space of less than two decades we have passed through
geometric abstraction. In contemporary art, however, all these have two endings of modernity: first, with the collapse of communism
become sublated, thereby pushing the concept of abstraction more and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we bore witness to the demise of a
in the direction of the opacity evident in recent abstract art’s artful Marxist vision of modernity; and secondly, after September 11, 2001,
contentlessness. In spite of this deflation, a visible schism exists to- came the dissolution of its liberal counterpoint. It would be tempt-
day between the aesthetes of formalism and those practitioners with ing indeed to embrace the tenets of these grand conclusions, were
political leanings, who—with dim memories of the institutional take- it not for the inconclusiveness of history itself. No doubt, the archi-
over of historical consciousness hovering over them—nevertheless tectural metaphor that accompanied both downfalls of two of the
insist on art’s engagement with social life. What should be noticed most significant political traditions of the modern era helps frame
in the current context, however, is how distanced works of art that them both in time and image; modernity as a specter that hangs
evince a political stance are, on the one hand, from the old two-part over the global collective consciousness.
model of Marxist critique of the commodity form and bourgeois soci- What has emerged, however, is different from this and is not
ety, and on the other, abstraction’s interiorization of artistic vision as insignificant for cultural politics. The schism masks a deeper anxi-
a uniquely and internally coherent world in which individual enact- ety about the period we can call global modernity. This anxiety is
ment takes precedence over that of the collective or social. The latter manifest in an emerging battle within the critical comprehension,
view purges the external world from the space of art, wishing for it reception, and discussion of contemporary art, namely the oppo-
a state of purity, a state which not only rejects illusionism, but also sition between ethics and aesthetics, or the conjunction of both.
asserts that the full meaning of any art is to be found in its specific Recently, discussions of the relation between ethics and aesthetics,
medium. This is the story of a particular view of art overseen by a or politics and poetics in contemporary art have proliferated. The
brand of modernism famously argued for by Clement Greenberg.03 current upsurge in linking the ethical and the aesthetic—or the more
familiar conjunction of art and politics—perhaps, owes something
03 See Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Collected Essays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgments,
1939–1944, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23–38. to what Irit Rogoff has described as the nature of “‘unbounded’ or
‘undisciplined’ work” common to both artistic practice and its multiple parallel registers.”08 There is a recognition—by a surprising number
Okwui Enwezor 66
67
locations today.04 This unboundedness, which I have designated of practices of contemporary art that assume activist and political practitioners?
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
elsewhere as the condition of unhomeliness, is partly the result of modes of position-taking in the critical analysis of culture—that the
a widescale global modernity of peoples, goods, and ideas perma- dispersal of the discourses of art as it was once organized by post-
nently on the move, in constant circulation, reconfiguration, tessel- modernism has now reached a watershed moment. The effect of
lation. 05
The condition of unhomeliness could also be interpreted in this dispersal is that there is no singular location of culture or con-
another way: in the alienation of our subjective development from temporary art. While artistic practices of the kind described above
the forces of domination and totalization, namely the ideology of un- often appear in exhibitions and institutions of contemporary art, their
checked capitalist triumphalism that seeks to sever alternative social destination and target extend well beyond those fora into the larger
models and relations of exchange not already bound exclusively to domain of the global public sphere. In a sense, the global public
consumption and consumerism. This alienation, or simply the with- sphere is both the destination of such art and its target as well, for
drawal from the homogenizing tyranny of global capitalism, discloses increasingly the kinds of contemporary art that assume an activist
new subjectivities on the verge of transforming what Felix Guattari and political position have tended to be transnational in their strategy
calls the “mass-media subjectivity” proper to the discourse of total- and tactically concerned with the location of art in the condition of
ization. 06
In contemporary art this is being felt in the rejection of the the unhomely, that is, in the present.
singularity of the art object, image, or the cultural system that seem-
ingly holds art together in a unified and universalized conception of The Human as a Limit Case of Modernity: Neo-Political Realism
artistic subjectivity. In Rogoff’s idea of unbounded and undisciplined and the Twilight of Class in Artistic Practice
work there arises something no longer notional: artists’ withdrawal If we are, indeed, witnessing not just a structural antinomy but also
from the institutionalized (musealized) model of art. Rather, for sever- a shift in the ideals of modern culture and its images, we do so to
al decades now we have witnessed the inexorable attempt by artists the degree that class struggle, which once heralded the promise of
to break with this totalization. Such attempts reveal a structured and a grand social realignment of international civil society in economic
self-conscious “indiscipline” against the conservative institutional and political terms, no longer defines the relationship between dif-
idealization of art.07 ferent actors in the political and cultural arena. Rather it is “Human
For contemporary art and other cultural practices, indisciplinar- Rights” that provides the ethical compass for our interaction with
ity and unhomeliness is not just being out of tune with the established the world and one another. I will argue that the kinds of political
order nor the feeling and consciousness of being elsewhere, in exile, realism in artistic practices often associated with social reality, and
dislocated, displaced or rootless, but the contemplation in art that “cul- which to a great extent are also engaged with ethical consideration
ture operates metonymically, always simultaneously at separate but for human subjects, owe a great deal to the discovery by contem-
porary art of the importance of the idea of “bio-politics”: a politics
Soll es Exile, 04
05
Irit Rogoff, “Art/Theory/Elsewhere,” “Dossier on documenta 11,” Texte zur Kunst (August 2002).
Okwui Enwezor, “At Home in the World: African Writers and Artists in ‘Ex-Ile’,” in Kunst-Welten im Dialog: Von grounded in explorations of the meaning of life and the ethico-ju-
Ex-ile oder Ex-Ile Gauguin zur globalen Gegenwart, ed. Marc Scheps, Yilmaz Dziewior, and Barbara M. Thiemann (Cologne: DuMont,
1999), 330–6.
ridical sanctity of the human within current global realignments of
sein? 06
07
Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 33.
I borrow the notion of indiscipline from Barbara Vanderlinden and Jens Hoffmann’s curatorial project “Indiscipline”,
where they, along with a multifaceted group of practitioners, explored the nature of creative agency in the face of
the breakdown between disciplines and forms of art in Brussels in 2000. See Barbara Vanderlinden and Jens
Hoffmann, Indiscipline (Brussels: Roomade, 2000), unpaginated brochure. 08 Ibid.
political, economic, and cultural formations.09,10 In the former third temporary artists’ concern with the ethical. Both the preamble and
Okwui Enwezor 68
69
world colonies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, Article 3 of the declaration spell it out. In the first two paragraphs of
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
liberation and decolonization movements were at the vanguard of the preamble the rationale is established:
this political and cultural reorientation. In the former second world Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of
the struggle against communist control of all social and cultural all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in
the world,
Komma am Schluß
forces gave great impetus to the search for new political alterna-
tives to the socialist utopia disfigured by Stalinism. In the first world Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts
which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which
of the West, the third and second world positions pointed to above human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and
were linked up with struggles occurring in areas such as civil rights, want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
the feminist movement, the gay movement, and anti-racist, anti-war
and anti-nuclear movements. The combination of all three interpre- Article 3 reiterates the preamble unequivocally: Everyone has the
tations of freedom (what could also be called a politics of rights) is right to life, liberty and security of person.11
at the heart of a new kind of political order to which contemporary Human rights craft thus began with the idea of the human as a wortwahl: human rights craft
art responds. The organizing instrument is “Human Rights” both in limit case under overwhelming coercive force. Therefore, if human klingt wie „witchcraft“...ich
the narrow sense articulated by the Universal Declaration of Rights rights were constructed for human beings, it would logically follow weiss nicht, was er genau
and in the broad sense of ethical filiation to the very structure of that human rights as such are regimes crafted to accede to and meint, aber vielleicht etwas
existence. While philosophy has engaged this question for a long intercede on behalf of the human. Such rights then, can only be wie „The crafting of human
rights....“
time, its encapsulation in cultural and artistic terms is recent. In accorded to life and therefore only to the living, hence the impor-
fact, it is worth emphasizing that the radical codification of bio-poli- tance of bio-politics. We know the immediate historical context that
tics as the stress in the ethical relationship between a person and attended and supported this juridical commandment, and it has an
the state is specifically the issue taken up by the Universal Declara- image: Auschwitz. Auschwitz was based on the evidence of the
tion of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly, on overwhelming industrial manufacture of death. Photographs and
December 10, 1948. Though it does not spell out contemporary art- documentary footage of the liberated camps confronted the world
ists’ concern with the ethical in a specific sense, in a more general with an ethical question, namely, if the Nazis murdered their victims
sense this text is particularly illuminating when one attends to con- by first reducing them to the legal category of the non-human, how
„lessen its lesson“ ist ko-
09 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Arendt’s
can the enlightened laws of the post war international system re- misch, es sei den diese
discussion of Vita Activa, in which she identifies three forms of human activity—labor, work, and action—as the
fundamental condition of life, as that which invests positive content in all human life, is important in the context
store such rights? Thus the Holocaust has come to represent the Wortwahl war mit absicht.
of the idea of bio-politics. See also Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (NewYork: Pantheon, 1984), 267. Foucault comments that in the discourse of bio-politics
exemplary test for the question of the human. More than fifty years
“what we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at
face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more than the law have not lessened its lesson, if anything it has intensified the ques- diminished?
that became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning
rights. The ‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the tions it raises. Even as Foucault claimed that “what is at stake today
oppressions or ‘alienations,’ the ‘right’—which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehend-
ing—was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the is life,” it would appear that despite the frequency of wholesale
traditional right of sovereignty.”
10
In his humanist-oriented essay The Three Ecologies, Guattari spells out an interesting program of thought that
reiterates the debate on the human in what he calls Ecosophy. In this philosophy, in which he deals with the
slaughters taking place today, we have become more inured than
disastrous consequences for the present ecological system based on man-made changes, there is a triangulation
of what he calls an “ethico-political articulation... between the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity...” ever to what Susan Sontag calls “the pain of others,” while human
Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 28. He brings these three intersecting questions to rest on the “ecosophic problematic...
of the production of human existence itself in new historical contexts.” Ibid., 34. 11 For the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights see www.un.org/Overview/rights.
rights discourse has grown even more.12,13 The helplessness of the Despite her passionate, trenchant argument—persuasive both
Okwui Enwezor 70
71
Palestinian struggle and quest for self-determination and a home- in its substance and in its analytical insight about photography bal-
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
land illustrates this. This helplessness is made all the more hope- lasted by numerous historical examples—suspicions of the ideo-
less when given an image: the Intifada, which has been sometimes logical machinations that surround the kind of images she offers
described as the struggle between two categories of victims and in her examples remain quite entrenched within visual art. In visual
dispossessed: the Arab and the Jew. 14
art, a hole in vision, a blindspot, the blank stare, a halating gaze,
have been developed as the essential prophylaxis proper to the
Being for the Other and the Ethics of Looking documentary form. To wit, there is often a moralization in the name
In this regard, Sontag’s analysis and defense of photographic or of critical questioning of the morality of the documentary that has
filmic representations that draw our attention to catastrophes initi- consistently degraded its efficacy unless it is treated allegorically, à
ated by violence is striking, especially since it goes against the la Warhol. This paradoxical situation corrodes the peculiar position
grain of the treatment of images of violation as merely a media taken by art that stakes a territory within the tension between ethics
window into banal spectacle, as a worrying pornography of victim- and aesthetics, or politics and poetics.
ization and violation.15 She argues forcefully against such reduc- The question of paying attention to the “pain of others” espe-
tive reasoning about the meaning of images in public discourse; cially as it is registered and indexed in representation (be it photo-
instead she made a plea for what could be called an “ethics of graphic, filmic, or archival) arises purely as a consequence of the
looking” in our confrontations with the pain of other people. The development of human rights. Yet others have argued, precisely,
eye as an ethical apparatus, more than a prophylactic membrane against this identification of the documentary. To purists, documen-
to ward off the unseemly, the evil eye of death, locates the visual tary’s “noble” tradition abjures those kinds of images of the mass
field as the site “for an unfinished work of mourning.” 16
For the anonymous others often caught unawares or dead in the sooty, ich kann das nicht entziffern: fo
which temporary guilt industries
most part, Sontag’s excursus was concerned with documentary grainy newsprint of the global news industry. It also refuses the
images that court unrestrained
photography and photojournalism and their ability to touch a part aestheticized horror pictures stylized for quick uncritical consump- witness bearing...
of the spectator’s humane feeling, in short, the concern for another tion as redemptive “truth,” as evidence or tokens for which con-
human being. temporary guilt industries (Amnesty International, Doctors Without es gibt zu viel aufeinanderfol-
Borders, etc.) images that court unrestrained witness bearing. Thus gende Nomen... es fehlt vielleic
12
Michel Foucault, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vinceno Binetti and
Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 7. the claim of a double kind of violence being visited upon the figures ein Paar Kommas, und am End
13
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (NewYork: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003). Lucid and mesmerizing,
Sontag attacks the pervasive contemporary apperception of images of violence, the blind stare which detaches of the violated by the mere repetition of the tabular index of horror. soll es viellicht „witness-bearing
itself from the “Pain of Others” through recourse to absurd rationalizations.
heissen.
14 See Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University This begs the question: why have contemporary artists re-
of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) for a scrupulous and moving account of the convergence of two positions of the
victim in the historic debate on the politics of dispossession.
das ist auch kein Satz...es fehlt
sponded to human rights or concern for the other as the ethical
15
Jean Baudrillard pushed this form of argument to a new level of absurdity in his book The Gulf War Did Not Take
Place. Baudrillard’s canard deploys his familiar theory of the simulacrum in which all representation disappears
ein Verb... vielleicht: Thus, the
into the image, with mass media serving as the screen (both in the literal sense and in the sense of concealment) limit of any engagement with the world? One suspects that modern claim of a duplicity of violence i
through which we perceive reality, in order to insist that what the first Gulf War amounted to was nothing more
than a media spectacle, a virtualization of the image of war that distorts the actuality of that war. While one can
certainly agree that the American prosecution of the war gave the impression of the war as an electronic video
traumatography abetted by the machinery of media technologies being VISITED UPON ??? (was
screen in the early days of the war, subsequent documentary footage of bombed out Baghdad and the infamous
“highway of death” refutes the excitation of over theorization provided by his analysis. Sontag’s point is that all
has much to answer for here. The frequency with which a large ist das?!) the figures...
too often, we shy away from the terrible suffering because we search for an enlightened response that absolves
us from seeing what lies immediately before our field of perception. group of artists such as Fazal Sheikh, Alfredo Jaar, Kendell Geers,
16 Ariella Azoulay, Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy, trans. Ruvik Danieli (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 4. William Kentridge, amongst others, take-up such positions in their
work may then lead one to conclude, though not unqualifiedly, that Kein Mensch ist illegal, a collective of activists, artists, and tactical
Okwui Enwezor 72
73
images of the mass phenomenon of displaced people, the carnage media groups working around issues of immigration, and on behalf
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
of war, genocidal massacres, crimes against humanity, the devasta- of refugees, sans papiers, and in raising awareness around the
tion of famine, manmade ecological disasters, and natural disasters often violent deportation of illegal immigrants from European coun-
in the media have been contributing factors. Also, radical art, like tries. Kein Mensch ist illegal, both in its work and its configuration,
radical politics, has a natural response to power that gives a certain has moved beyond the traditional framework of being purely an
frisson to the Faustian relationship between ethics and aesthetics, artistic or activist group. It is neither one nor the other. Put another
politics and poetics. But if the ethical is a test for our commitment way, it is consciously hybridized, which means it is both an activist
to each other’s being, qua existence, how do we square this test and artistic group simultaneously. This allows a degree of flexibility
with the aesthetic, which in Kantian fashion is concerned with the in its tactical formations, along with the tools of its work, which
“lofty” ideal of the sublime, the sensation of the beautiful?17 When adopt and adapt the instruments of art, propaganda, media, and
W. B. Yeats writes about a terrible beauty being born, is this not the social protest as make-shift swerving speculums, probing and test-
ground of the ethical and aesthetic (which now is being cheaply ing the resilience of the system’s attempt to contain disobedience.
merchandised as a special kind of political effect in contemporary While its activities are grounded in the struggles for rights of those
art) heaving before us? 18
Are singularized affects of denunciation spectral, shadowy communities comprising immigrants, refugees,
effective artistic arguments against complex political realities? Or and sans papiers, Kein Mensch ist illegal disavows any interest in
might this concern be more in line with Levinas’ moral philosophy charity or humanitarian work. Rather its principal focus is on the
of an ethical relationship between two people, grounded in the question of rights. This stance is also the source of its name: based
cognitive embodiment of the other’s existence? on the juridical idea that “no one is illegal.” For Kein Mensch ist illegal,
to declare a class of people as illegal is to refute the very foundation
Activism and Counter-Power of human rights; a negation, which it suggests, questions the very
I will now try to explore the general topography of politically oriented category of the human, specifically the non-European other as a
art and its roots in current discussions of power and rights, which foreigner, the unwelcomed stranger.19
elucidates some of the issues I have been tracing. I should also
make clear that I am using human rights here in a strictly narrow Xenophobia, Xenophilia, Racism, and the Human
sense: in its manifestation in politically oriented art, and the puta- As Sarat Maharaj has shown and as can be seen in the work of
tively ethical weight it gives such art. One of the central principles Ruth Wodak, there is an intense correlation between xenophobia
of contemporary art that unambiguously effects a political stance is and xenophilia in the discourse of racism.20,21,22 Xenophobia and
its engagement with bio-politics. The second principle is that its ac-
19 For a full account of Kein Mensch ist illegal’s work see Florian Schneider/Kein Mensch ist illegal, “New Rules
tions seek to mediate the relationship between national and trans- of the New Actonomy 3.0,” in Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11_Platform 1, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo,
Sarat Maharaj, et al. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 179–93; see also http://new.actonomy.org for further development
national domains of rights. A typical example is the German-based of its work.
20 See Sarat Maharaj’s essay in Education, Information, Entertainment: Current Approaches on Higher Artistic
Education, ed. Ute Meta Bauer (Vienna: edition selene, 2001).
17 For Kant’s aesthetic theory from which much debate on the question of the aesthetic in art draws see his 1764 21 Ruth Wodak, “Inequality, Democracy and Parliamentary Discourses,” in Democracy Unrealized, ed. Okwui Enwezor,
essay “The Sense of the Beautiful and of the Sublime” in The Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel Kant’s Moral and Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, et al. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 151–68.
Political Writings, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: The Modern Library, 1949). 22 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego and NewYork: Harcourt, 1968). For a particularly thorough
18 W. B. Yeats, “Easter 1916,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, ed. Richard Finneran (New York: MacMillan, analysis of the development of the concept of race as justification for, and incitement to, dispossession of civil
1989). and human rights see the chapter “Race and Bureaucracy,” 185–221.
xenophilia manifest assumptions in their understanding of race in unrecognized by the regimes of invisibility that otherwise surround
74
75
their excessive non-recognition and recognition of the other. The and veil her in public discourse. Such a human presence disturbs,
Okwui Enwezor
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
fundamental ethical lapse in both is the manner in which each, in agitates, and discomfits the visual field in which her presence is
its own way, elides the complex assumptions which undergird the both registered and so to speak extirpated. This appearance—which
politics of race in contemporary culture. It is not a coincidence that is always anticipated with anxiety, for it is the impossible visibility of
the discourse of multiculturalism and certain digestible acknowl- an apparition, the immanence of the stranger—has been described
edgments of difference have suffered in the context of art and by Julia Kristeva in speaking of the stranger amongst us as that
culture due to this ambiguity. Furthermore, xenophobia and xeno- which disturbs identity, order, legality.25,26 The human as a ghostly
philia underline an uneasiness and a false intimacy with the subject presence, as more than a metaphor for illegality, as a shadow be-
of racism. Both can be irrational either in its phobic response to fore the law, marks the separation between those identified as
the other or in its obsessive enthusiasm for all things different. In legal, and therefore properly human (Europeans, white men) and
cultural and artistic discourse this schism cannot be emphasized those (Africans, Arabs, Roma, Asians, women, gays, and lesbians,
enough. This negation which is both the source of xenophobia and etc.) who must seek the status of normalcy for their inclusion into
racism is apparent the recent rise of far right parties which run on the human family by first exorcizing their strangeness, foreignness,
anti-immigrant political planks and are often unambiguously racist otherness.
in their discourse.23 The late Pim Fortuyn, who made the non-Euro- Thus, while it has spotlighted violations by the German gov-
pean immigrant the antithesis of a sustainable ideal of multicultural ernment of European Union human rights laws concerning the re-
Netherlands, designed his entire party manifesto around what he patriation and deportation of refugees and asylum seekers, Kein
called Livable Netherlands, a quality of life program advocating the Mensch ist illegal works against the German immigration law in the
expulsion of immigrants from the Netherlands. Racism, as such, is name of a larger universal ethical principle, one that repudiates the
demonstrably an example of the human as a limit case, for it con- illegalization of desperate immigrants. The given doxa of classical
ceives of the other on the basis of a defect, as the pure manifesta- political art is that it intervenes within the means of production and
tion of a negation. 24
Therefore, to make the other or the “victim” the in the cracks between the tectonic plates of class formations. It was
subject of art, as the image of a critical recall that stands between not until the rise of fascism that it became clear that the subject
the artist and the spectator, before the institution and the law brings of political art was about to be transformed. It never recognized,
her contingent status in representation to a level of visibility hitherto however, the importance of otherness and its potent political reality
within the visual field. Careful appraisal of artistic formations today
23 In Europe in the last decade there has been a particularly intense upsurge of racist far right and neo-Nazi political
parties such as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France, Jörg Haider’s FPÖ (Freedom Party) in Austria, Filip
Dewinter’s Vlaams Blok in Belgium, Pim Fortuyn’s Lijst Pim Fortuyn in Holland, the election of the nationalist right
makes it clear that they deviate from classical ideas of political art,
wing ruling party in Denmark, amongst others entering into the political mainstream. The spectacular results
achieved by Le Pen and Haider in recent elections makes clear that these developments are part of the main at least in one respect. The target of this art is not simply systemic,
streaming of racial discourse in the affirmative populist politics and culture, especially in Europe. See for example
Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Crisis,” Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous 25 More than any other group of thinkers it is revolutionary third-world, anti-colonial intellectuals who foregrounded
Identities (London:Verso, 1991), 217–27. bio-politics more than class as the founding principle of all political and cultural struggles. See for example Frantz
24 See W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989), first published in 1903. Dubois was Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markham (New York: Grove Press, 1967) particularly the
perhaps the first thinker to draw our attention to the question of race in modernity. In “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” chapter “The Negro and Recognition.” The concluding passage of the chapter sketches the degree to which the
the second section of his classic treatment of race and the American experience, he writes: “The problem of struggle for the conception of the human has been made the object of all ethical and political considerations
the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men [sic] of otherness. Fanon writes in this passage: “I said in my introduction that man is a yes. I will never stop reiterating
in Asia and Africa, in America and Islands of the sea.” One hundred years after Dubois’s treatise, Paul Gilroy in that. Yes to Life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of
a recent work Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.”
University Press, 2000) has taken up and extended this theme in a powerful anti-clerical critique of the persistence 26 For a full treatment of this subject see Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (NewYork,
of racial discourse in contemporary culture. Columbia University Press, 1991).
centered on the political entity of the state, its ideology, apparatus, worker’s rule through the power of a peasant revolution. Or in the
Okwui Enwezor 76
77
agents. Rather, it involves a perhaps surprising principle of the uni- Resistance Art model in South Africa where art under apartheid
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
versalization of the concept of the human evoked by human rights. harnessed its energy to the overthrow of a totalitarian and racist
It is on behalf of such a universal principle that institutions and or- regime.
gans of global multinational and transnational business and policy Partly because of the revolution in communication technolo-
bodies—such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, or gies, art and politics are now much more broadly concerned with
Nike, Shell, Exxon—have also become targets of attack. The meth- conditions of social life: the environment, human rights, globaliza-
ods, employed in the name of art, to address some of these issues tion, racism, nationalism, and social justice. In their combination
consequently have had to change, both in their form and orienta- they identify and interact with disciplinary formations that distend
tion. It is in this sense that Rogoff’s notion of the unbounded and the formal boundaries of official artistic discourse. Nevertheless,
undisciplined work is a brilliantly novel conceptualization of what the surprising, and some would argue troubling, aspect of this kind
many think of as the conjunction between politics and art or ethics of work is its tendency to transform ethical concerns into aesthetic
and aesthetics. 27
Such work, in my view, neither sensationalizes devices and vice versa. To the degree that artists editorialize on the
aesthetics nor spectacularizes the ethical. nature of social life today, the critical ability of such actions to effect
change remains, thus far, in remand. But what interests me in this
The Deterritorialized Site of Art and Politics: Contemporary Art development is not whether activist or politically invested artists
in a Time of Crisis express the “correct position” with the correct forms, instead I am alternativ: perpetu-
ally stated interest
A distinguishing feature of the ethical and aesthetical in current interested in their always-stated interest in an ethics rooted in the
practice is its deterritorialized nature. As I have been arguing, this conception of bio-politics.28
kind of work is Janus-faced: it is conscious of its form and right as Thus, when we attempt to grasp the conjunction of ethics and
an artistic intervention while imbricating its relation to the conditions aesthetics, or politics and poetics, we must in effect recognize the
and topographies of reception beyond the traditional boundaries of importance and global dimension of the discourse of human rights.
art. It should also be noted that this kind of work is distinctly dif- Consequently, even when what artists spotlight may be local—such
ferent from the old political art of the European avant-garde which as Alfredo Jaar’s work on Rwanda and the Union Carbide disaster
regarded fascism as the enemy and whose politics were based in Bhopal, India—the tactical public is always global.29 Throughout
on the solidarity of working class struggles, which it hoped would his career Jaar has made the critique of predatory capitalism and
lead to the relation of the utopia of proletarian rule and culture. The human rights violations signature issues in his work. In Let There
productivist model of the Russian avant-garde in the Soviet Union Be Light: The Rwanda Project, 1994–1998 Jaar was one of first (and
after 1917 was inspired by this utopianism. The same was the case, remains one of the few) artists to respond to the mass killings that
for instance, in Mexico where revolutionary artists such as Diego took place over a period of one hundred days in the summer of
Rivera and other Muralists were concerned with the relation of a 1994. Artists like Jaar, (here the art of Hans Haacke is crucial) work
27 Recent anti-globalization battles in Seattle, Prague, Montreal, Genoa, Guadalajara are instances of the kind 28 For a fruitful reading of the task of the artist operating under the understanding of a political commitment, see
“unbounded” and “undisciplined” work being taken up by certain forms of political art. There is now a recognition, Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings,
even in such insular clubs as the Davos Economic Summit in Switzerland, of the importance of culture as an ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1978), 220–38; see also Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? and Other
instrument of economic policy discussion. The organizers of Davos have since began inviting “cultural producers” Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) for his elaboration of the notion of committed literature.
to its discussions on global governance. 29 Alfredo Jaar, It is Difficult: Ten Years and Let There Be Light: The Rwanda Project, 1994–1998 (Barcelona: Actar, 1998).
at disclosing the complex transnational web that illuminates not such frames the relationship between the producer and receiver.
Okwui Enwezor 78
79
only their project but also the interests of multinational formations. Artists, such as Leon Golub, have made resistance to the con-
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
Take, for example, Haacke’s sculpture U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, stant threat of disappearance of public memory a test for the stress
1983, a cube of plywood that evokes the claustrophobia of confine- between the ethical and aesthetic. Golub’s unrealistically painted
ment and imprisonment made in the aftermath of the US invasion realist paintings are conceived specifically as counterpaintings to
of Grenada. Whether in Jaar’s or Haacke’s work, what we witness the opacity of formalist abstraction in which the specificity of the
is a new kind of thinking that has inverted and transformed the old human form had been annulled. For four decades he has demon-
maxim: “all politics is local” to “all local politics is now global.” The strated his commitment to indexing and re-elaborating in his un-
universal umbrella of human rights offers a peculiar sort of protec- settled, agitated paintings media images that represent in extremis
tion to local causes once they are reframed in a global context. the precariousness of the human body under violent state repres-
Notice, for instance, that many grassroots social movements and sion. In such key series of works as Vietnam (1972–74), Mercenar-
Non-Governmental Organizations may have their specific contexts ies (1979–87), Interrogations (1981–86) and White Squads (1982–87),
in local conditions, but often appeal to the global public sphere in we are confronted by a panoply of fragmented and isolated im-
order to make effective their individual projects. Sub-commandante ages projected against the backdrop of neutral surroundings, all
Marcos and his Zapatista’s in Mexico, the AIDS activists’ campaign of them specific to and concerned with the deracination of human
against pharmaceuticals in South Africa, the late Ken Saro Wiwa’s life. It is as if both naked power and naked life are simultaneously
Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) in Nigeria isolated in the ghostly outlines of his sparsely painted, distressed,
are recent examples of this transformation. Even the most odious cleaved canvasses. Likewise, Stopforth’s mortuary drawings—a set
of these interests, Al Qaeda, uses the appeal of various local anti- of reductive drawings of fragments of Steve Biko’s mutilated body
modern Islamic fundamentalisms to export its universalizing ethos after his death through torture—play a similarly mnemonic role as
of terror and spiritual redemption. Golub’s and are no less powerful for their overt political claim to
Where political or ethical considerations are specifically fore- representing violations of the body. Similar concerns are the frame
grounded in an artist’s work—for example: in the work of the realist around which Camnitzer’s From the Uruguayan Torture Series is
painter Leon Golub; Paul Stopforth’s graphite drawings during his defined. In each of these artistic positions, what stands out are in-
years in South Africa; Luis Camnitzer’s investigations of torture in dividual responses to naked power and naked life in representation.
Uruguay during that country’s dictatorship; Willie Doherty’s videos The ethical questions posed by much recent art are never about
and photographs detailing the sectarian conflict in Northern Ire- the question of the aesthetic merit of the work alone. Nor is it just
land; Martha Rosler’s reworking of images of the Vietnam War as about linking the content of the work to the moral claim of the art.
a measured critique of American neo-colonial offensive in South- Even if the empirical grounding of such content is never literalized
east Asia; Chris Burden’s Vietnam War counter-memorial; William so as to assume unmitigated claims of truth, the appearance of
Kentridge’s drawings for projection, which focus on the legacy of such content in visual representation always represents a risk for
apartheid; the solemn performance of the activist group Mothers of both the art and artist, institution and spectator.
Plaza de Mayo’s daily vigil in Buenos Aires in behalf of their disap-
peared children during Argentina’s “dirty war”—human rights as
and discourses of contemporary art recognize these categories as
Okwui Enwezor 80
81
Identity Politics and the Rediscovery of the Human in Contem- legitimate artistic strategies, the more human rights will ever remain
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
porary Art both the silent narrative and specter that haunts the ethical and
I have argued throughout this text that the location of the ethical aesthetic in contemporary art.
in contemporary art, or the opposition of the ethical and aesthetic,
arises precisely from the legacy of human rights insofar as the Documenta 11 and the Documentary as a Form of Unraveling d?
category of the human is what is at stake. I want to offer further ex- Truth
amples for consideration in this discussion. When we frame certain I now wish to consider the effect of these questions as it bears on
types of artistic practice around issues of identity—be it cultural, the reception of documenta 11, for which I served as the artistic
gender-based, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality—we are ba- director between 1998 and 2002. To many observers, documenta 11
sically witnessing the serious force given each of these domains by was the culmination of a development in contemporary art in which
human rights and its evolution in the last fifty years. Each of these increasingly the documentary form became the dominant artistic
domains defines itself around and against principles of power and language, particularly in photographic, film, and video work repre-
rights. Consider, for instance certain activities of artists, such as sented in its fifth platform: the exhibition. The surplus of modes of
Group Material, who take up methods of advocacy around political the “documentary,” whether materialist or indexical, the “over com-
subjectivity, education and health in their work, or activist groups pensation” in the exhibition of works with a “political agenda,” and
such as ACT UP, who work on the basis of enlightened self-interest the “overwhelming” relationship to social life were read as ethical
in matters concerning the AIDS crisis that ravaged the gay commu- messages by the exhibition organizers to a jaded global leftist pub-
nity in the 1980s, or Claude Lanzmann’s epic film on the Holocaust, lic. Moreover, such messages were held to reveal the ideological
Shoah. Even Hollywood films such as Schindler’s List, which took proclivities of the organizers rather than their interest in traditional
on the role of bearing witness on behalf of victims of the Holocaust notions of art. In fact, the exhibition was perceived as that moment
was founded upon identity discourses and the shroud of human when the global left’s “evangelical” zeal and concern with human
rights that envelopes each of them. The destabilizing and subver- rights led to severe reduction in the aesthetic nature of the art and
sive rapture often associated with the work of Félix González-Torres thus promoted a certain political pleading by the many documen-
(one of the most thorough and complex convergences of the ten- taries of a view of the world shaped by politics more than art.30 In
sion surrounding ethics and aesthetics); the ghostly monologues this account, the documentary not only trumps art, it subordinates
on race and identity in Glen Ligon’s coal dust and stenciled paint- it so completely that any relation to art is vitiated by the curatorial
ings; the ambiguous and lugubrious archives that make up Chris- agenda. Understood so tendentiously, the bliss of the autonomy of
tian Boltanski’s work are caught in this tension. Generalized images art freed from any socio-political regulation ends precisely at that
that appeal to our sense of “humanity” or categorically reinvests the moment when the opposition between ethics and aesthetics is es-
condition of the human with contingency, works that take up the
excursus of trauma: a flash of the tumescent flesh of the wounded 30
A particularly disconcerted view of the exhibition could be read in the alarmed review of Blake Gopnik, the art
critic of The Washington Post, whose article drew out of thin air the bizarre notion that the exhibition was
anti-American. See Blake Gopnik, “Fully Freighted Art: At Documenta 11. A Bumpy Ride for Art World’s Avant-Garde,”
body or the wordless scream of the witness before a catastrophe are Washington Post (June 16, 2002). Another view of the evangelical, puritanical attitude of the exhibition was offered
by Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, in his article, “Global Art Show With an Agenda,”
just as equally implicated in this account. Thus, the more practices The New York Times, June 18, 2002.
tablished, thus forcing viewers to take sides. Of course, this account with the other, what Foucault calls, in a non-adversarial exchange,
Okwui Enwezor 82
83
has little resemblance either to the exhibition that my colleagues “reciprocal elucidations.”31 This relation to the other has often been
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
and I curated, or to the one I witnessed along with hundreds of explored in connection with the concept of truth. I am thinking
thousands of visitors to Kassel. of truth here as akin to how Alain Badiou uses it as: “the real
Some time has passed since the final segment; the fifth plat- process of a fidelity to an event: that which this fidelity produces
form of documenta 11 opened in Kassel in June, 2002. It now [original italics] in the situation.”32 The amanuensis of this truth is
appears possible to revisit some of the points made by its crit- the other, evoked by Levinasian ethics in our identification with the
ics. Returning to the idea of the “unbounded” and “undisciplined” other, the other as a figure to whom we owe the possibility of this
work, as a framework around which to articulate the general vicis- absolute fidelity. The central concern for the other, the being-for-
situde and unhomely condition of contemporary art, the project the-other of which Levinas speaks, is the ground for the principle
of documenta 11 was to probe specific instances of this change. of the intersubjective that governs the communicative principle of
Most of you will remember that the fifth platform was designated an exchange between two people. Therefore, the concept of truth
as the locus of the exhibition, part of the broad visual field of requires first that the other exists in every intersubjective, reciprocal
documenta 11’s project. You might also remember that the logic exchange. This is a recognition of the basis of power relations. I do
of the documenta 11 platforms was partly based on a set of dis- not use the other here in an ethnographical sense. Rather, in the
cursive relationships between sites of theoretical practice and sense of the recognition of one’s own limits in relation to another
nutzung von „accrue“ those of visual practice, each site elaborating on questions and subjectivized position, be it a text, an artwork, a spoken exchange.
kommt mir komisch ideas proper to its own field of discourse, but also interrogating We initiate each of our interactions in this regard with a fund of trust
vor...something can
assumptions accruing to the other fields. Another element of the in the integrity of the subjectivized position. The other, then, exists
accrue from something,
discursive is the pursuit in the exhibition, to present and argue for neither as an aberration nor as an opposition. It exists, always, in
or you can accrue as-
sets, but I don‘t know works with an awareness of their own intelligibility in the social dialectical relation to multiple modes of subjectivization.
how you accrue to context of today’s world. The discursive was however, not based Let us return to Badiou. According to what he terms the ethic
something... on the relativization of art and politics, the cultural and the social, of a truth, the relationship to the other,
or even the ethical and the aesthetic. Neither was it based on the
is the principle that enables the continuation of a truth-process ... that which lends
usual opposition between the center and margin. The discursive consistency to the presence of some-one in the composition of the subject induced by
was a term employed to delineate the correspondence between the process of this truth.
Okwui Enwezor 84
85
ferent practitioners and publics shared responsibility, sometimes work of art is relative to social reality.
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
in mutual intelligibility and sometimes not. Such a shared zone of A simple tour of the exhibition venues confirms the curatorial
responsibility is the zone of subjectivized practices. cornerstone of our project, namely to generate in a comprehensive,
systematic, taxonomic, and typological fashion and to demonstrate
Reality Effect and the Representation of Social Life 34
through a number of complex morphologies the ways through which
Now that documenta 11 has become historical, in the sense that its the logic of the archive and document suffuse and penetrate activi-
evaluation belongs both to the past and the present, we can look ties of art and procedures of image production in the last 40 years.
back to all its constitutive parts and begin the task of unraveling The disparate and oftentimes antagonistic procedures—such as
both its proposals and its public reception. When the exhibition first one finds in Allan Sekula’s Fish Story; Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Proj- auch in Schrägschrift?
opened—to almost universal perplexity with regard to its temporal ect; Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Half-Timbered Houses of the Siegen
and spatial density—a common idea came to define the nature of Industrial Zone; Jef Geys’s Day and Night and Day...; Zarina Bhimji’s
the project, the idea that it was invested in what Barthes termed “the Out of Blue, Fiona Tan’s Countenance; Igloolik Isuma Productions’s
reality effect” in its attunement to the representation of social life in Nunavut (Our Land); Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth’s
multiple works. Kim Levin, the critic of the New York Village Voice, Song—are not reducible to documentary as such.
proclaimed the exhibition the CNN Documenta.35 Linda Nochlin who A brief excursion into the formal and scopic conception of each
offered a careful reading of works in the exhibition, saw images in of the works cited above provides a fascinating map and disorients
the exhibition as supported by various and expanded accounts of the reading of the term “documentary” as a specific mode of photo-
the documentary. She correctly noted the degree to which many graphic or filmic articulation of reality. In fact, there are many more
works functioned at the level of the relationship between images works in the exhibition that even further complicate the documenta-
and social reality.36 Despite these, the critical misappraisal and mis- rist thrust. For example, Isaac Julien’s probing film on paradise and
apprehension of the structural and critical intent of the exhibition to loss in Paradise Omeros; Steve McQueen’s double meditation on
elaborate on the reasons why artists and other image-makers had history, labor, and exile in Western Deep and Carib’s Leap, Ulrike
become obsessed with reality as such and the representation of Ottinger’s Südostpassage (South East Passage), a melancholic tra-
everyday life, along with their effects on contemporary conscious- versal of the anonymous, abandoned, yet thriving and alive corners
ness, was noteworthy in this sense. Not only was the problematic of old cities in the second world; Amar Kanwar’s A Season Outside,
of the documentary elided as more than an account of the political a wrenching cinematic tone poem on partition blues acted out daily
subjectivity of its makers, the exhibition’s multiple organization of at the border crossing that separates India and Pakistan at Wagah,
images, forms, practices, and discursive fields was only able to be the result of the last colonial act at remapping postcolonial spaces;
perceived through the rubric of the documentary mode precisely Eyal Sivan’s The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem and Itsembat-
semba: Rwanda One Genocide Later. Might one be consoled to
33
34
Ibid, 44.
See Boris Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation,” for a highly nuanced discussion
learn that all these disparate works—while surely “documentary”
of the relationship between reality and representation of life as a social fact within certain forms of artistic practice
in Documental 11_Platform5: Exhibition, ed. Okwui Enwezor et al. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 108–14. in the limited sense applied to them by inattentive critics—do not
35 See Kim Levin, “The CNN Documenta: Art in an International State of Emergency,” The Village Voice, July 2, 2002.
36 See Linda Nochlin, “Documented Success,” Artforum (September 2002): 159–63. as a rule share in the devalued image machine we often ascribe
when using the epithet “photojournalism,” especially in the preda- types of images directed at, and drawn from, the “real” world. The
Okwui Enwezor 86
87
tory form of stalking sensational pictures as a hunter would stalk general dispensation of such techniques, and the purloined “reality”
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
game? 37
In fact, an artist like Touhami Ennadre, who presented in they embalm as images, are commonly understood to be distinctly
the exhibition a study of the grief and mourning surrounding the organized to interact with and comment directly on that “reality.”
destruction of the World Trade Center, vigorously disputes any at- This type of work generally is typified by an attitude of commisera-
tempt to associate his work with such an epithet. Even the more tion with the subject of the documentary, and where violence or
benign term “documentary” does not satisfy him in terms of what catastrophe is present with the pain of the subject, that is, to the
he believes to be the purpose of his photographic work: to make real. Such work as largely found in the media is said to refer to real
singular photographic work that speaks to the authenticity of each things or events in the world—that is, as evidence of unvarnished
given situation to the degree that the photograph can no longer be truth of the real. But today, with “reality television” ascendant, the
read as just mere information. Yet Chantal Akerman embraces the scope of its affective simultaneity makes the documentary mode
contradiction with the documentary inherent in film firmly in her cin- appear somehow quaint in comparison, in some cases even out-
ematic practice in which the image serves both a heuristic purpose moded due to the delay in its transmission.38
and an aesthetic one. She, who is herself the child of Holocaust However, what haunts the documentary most is the charge of
survivors, makes no secret of her identification with victims, which maudlin moralism directed at its products. Let us dwell a little on
oftentimes is perceived as part of the ideological baggage much this idea of documentary, which despite its susceptibility to moral
documentary work carries. Her film D’Est, which tracks the end- relativism and appeal to a false consciousness of which its critics
lessness of the vast emptiness that attended the dissolution of the accuse it, has a very rich and distinguished tradition. Almost all the
Soviet empire, is remarkable not only for its oneiric quality, but also important photographers of the modern era—Eugène Atget, Walker
for its gritty realism. Watching the blue haze that coats the mood Evans, August Sander, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, David Gold-
of the film, one literally has the feeling of watching dusk settling on blatt, Bernd and Hilla Becher—have worked within the documentary
the after-life of the second world. The film can therefore be read as mode, if we understand the nature of the documentary mode as si-
a kind of summa of that after-life. multaneously analytic and mimetic. As such, the documentary has
the unique position of being caught in a tautological game, which
Vérité, Reality, Affect is to both document and analyze, to show and define and to do so
peculiar (ko-
So far I have been commenting on one peculiar terminology: the with both aesthetic means and also to be oblivious of aesthetic. For
misch) oder
particular word “documentary” which was recurrent in most commentaries some, it is a matter of taste: the rawer the image the more authentic
(bestimmte)? about images in documenta 11. Now what I wish to do is to intro- the structure of feeling it supposedly evokes. For others, the more
duce a second term: the French word vérité. I propose that we discreet and anti-spectacular the image, the more correspondingly
explore the questions raised by the term documentary by interpel- 38 From its earliest invention television has in one form or other experimented with a visual sensorium directed
at the recording and experience of reality in its most direct, unedited aspect. From early incarnations such as
lating it with vérité. Candid Camera (a not so subtle allusion to the truthfulness of the camera) to the mushrooming variations on the
theme of “Reality Television,” this fascination with “real” life is brought to a new level. What’s impressive about
The term documentary often refers to a set of techniques and
this turn is how “Reality Television” combines techniques of surveillance and spectacle, thereby putting into
question the claim of a documented reality. The tradition of the documentary however goes back to the very
beginning of cinema in films by the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison and has remained impressively strong
despite increasing misgivings about its accuracy, first in ethnographic films (one thinks of the controversy that
37 A more apt term might be the distinction made by Walker Evans between the “documentary style” and the continues to plague Robert J. Flaherty’s seminal ethno-documentary film Nanook of the North) and today in the
documentary as a form. news media.
distanced it is from its subject, the greater its putative objectivity. not, however, wish to recuperate the documentary form with all
Okwui Enwezor 88
89
But even if the most refined aesthetic procedures were employed its unresolved anomalies within what many would believe to be a
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
in a work, because of the tendency to categorize the documen- more superior aesthetic system. For me, the documentary as such
tary as a mode of practice consistently prepared to show and ask has its own integrity, even if its claims of truth remain dubious.
moral questions around what it documents, it is the documentary The documentary is also dominated by a view that it is a kind
as a massive body of evidence we end up most seeing. To certain of testimony which, on the one hand, produces a moral imperative
catholic tastes, the more the ethical confronts the documentary, in the telltale details of the real, and on the other, asserts truth in the
the more distance from aestheticization it must assume. For such manner in which it conveys and conducts its judgment of events
spectators, to aestheticize human suffering is an obscenity. This and depictions of people, things, objects. Even if the documentary is
accusation is often directed against the work of a photographer like never incontrovertibly called to present a moral judgment but to doc-
Sebastião Salgado; less so for Gilles Peress, and it becomes quite ument, to record, to archive, or simply to present, the overwhelming
controversial in the case of Susan Meiselas. ethical ground it claims often subtends more nuanced positions.
Yet when we look at the softcore pictures of distress and The documentary admits diverse structures of reference into its
poverty by the likes of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and other methods: for example, evidence, testimony, bearing witness. Above
photographers who documented the American depression in the all it is mnemonic. The documentary’s relationship to its subject, in
1930s, there is little moral outrage in the reduction of poverty to cer- spite of its bold assertions of truth claims, is an ambiguous one.
tain social types by urbane, middle class photographers roughing One of the most shocking pictures I have ever encountered in the
it amongst the dejected mass of tenant farmers in drought-blighted media was reproduced almost a decade ago on the front page of
tenant farms of the South or the tenements of the large cities. Even The New York Times. The picture, taken by Kevin Carter, a South
Jacob Riis’ late nineteenth century moral crusades in his study of African photographer, shows a young, exhausted Sudanese refu-
the squalor and appalling living conditions in overcrowded tene- gee child bent over on his hands and knees. The chilling image,
ments of New York’s Lower East Side in How the Other Half Lives which I can only now conjure from memory, is a tightly composed
is a product of a different type of moral imperative. Perhaps this is picture, in which the circularity of the camera cuts to a diagonal
so because these images, which were mostly from before 1940, so as to align the looming frame of the child, with that of a vulture
precede the period of the discourse of victims. The opposition be- standing behind him, observing, waiting. Two things come back
tween the ethical and aesthetic or the political and poetic, as I have to me from that decade-old experience of the photograph and my
been attempting to demonstrate, has a long running history. But the feeling as a spectator of the image: the remoteness and ambiguity
vehemence of this opposition today in documentary forms of work of the photographer from the scene and my own haunted curiosity
is informed mostly by the rise of discourse of victims scattered all of the ultimate fate of the child. The latter is what the documentary
over the global peripheries that saturate the media today. And with never discloses: the aftermath. The reception of this picture across
this rise of victims a peculiar form of scopophobia, an antiocular- the world was spectacular. It raised a range of ethical issues, the
centric vision has settled over the field of the documentary.39 I do most obvious of which was: what, if anything, did the photographer
do to save the vulnerable abandoned child. Moral outrage at the
39 For a magisterial treatment of anti-ocularcentrism see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). picture and at the photographer was mingled with dumb admiration
of the photographer’s courage in recording such a harrowing ary career images assume outside of their context as reference,
Okwui Enwezor 90
91
scene, for rescuing the child, if only as image, from the anonymity as memento mori? Such memento mori is registered in the early
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
of his fate. Of course, the photographer won all kinds of awards for beginning of this ambitious historical project. In panels 16, 17, and
his effort. Carter was overwhelmed by the attention and the debate 18, Richter shows us newspaper images of Nazi soldiers publically
surrounding the picture. He committed suicide shortly thereafter.40 humiliating their victims and of the liberated Nazi camps, which
depict emaciated survivors amid jumbled piles of bleached corpses
Memento Mori: The Archive as a Site of Mourning of those who did not survive. And years later in panels 470, 471, 472,
I have used this example to raise the unanswerable question of the and 473, images of the Baader-Meinhof gang join the roll-call of the
documentary’s ambiguity to its subject and to pose the question memorialized. Panel 471 is in fact a reproduction of Richter’s paint-
whether it makes any sense to collapse ethics and aesthetics in a ing from a newspaper reproduction of Ulrike Meinhof’s suicide.
single discussion of art’s relationship to its subject. Here, I want to The temporal lag between the Nazi camp images and that of the
call attention to Christian Boltanski’s blurry pictures of “Holocaust” terrorist gang does nothing to alleviate the context of the historical
children and parts of Gerhard Richter’s exhaustive archive Atlas. 41
space from which this comparatively benign investigation is being
Boltanski’s massive reorganization of photographs of anonymous conducted. As if to foreground what Hannah Arendt identified as
children, which blurs and exposes the faces of innocence, comes the banality of evil, Richter intersperses throughout the breadth of
closest to the use of the documentary as a method of bearing his magnum opus images of domestic tranquility, his studio, holiday
witness and a tool of memorialization: the archive as mnemonic pictures, pictures of his own work, etc.42
machine. Richter’s Atlas evinces a different relationship to this ma-
chine in that he deliberately collapses the borders between the Blindspot, Blank Stare, Scopophobia, and the Hole in Vision
private and public, the personal and political, the quotidian and How are we to read the images and historical accounts both Boltanski
banal with the profound. His is an atlas of “perpetual commentary” and Richter seek to reindex? Surely, to see Richter’s Herculean ef-
on the subject of looking and the function of images in constitut- fort at structural collectivization of private and public, personal and
ing social memory in the aftermath of Nazism and within modern political histories as disinterested and merely ambiguous is to be
culture. Atlas is an inventory of massive, inexhaustible potential blind to it. Such a reaction exemplifies a consistent aporia in con-
that either forecloses meaning due to its unwieldy heterogeneity temporary art’s approach to the documentary. A remarkable body of
or manipulates the scales and legibility of what is represented, literature has been developed around this question. The Italian phi-
thereby actively reading them, a priori, as nothing but an arbitrary losopher Giorgio Agamben makes a crucial point about Auschwitz
juxtaposition of meaningless images. But is Atlas, in its obsessive in this context. He writes that “[t]he aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed,
documentary attempt at collectivization of personal and public the very aporia of historical knowledge; a non-coincidence between
dieser Satz memory, truly arbitrary? Or does its effect of distance, not a critical fact and truth, between verification and comprehension.”43
macht so keinen
attempt to bring to bear a great degree of complexity in the second-
Sinn...“does its
effect assume out-
side...as reference?
40 The circumstance of suicide has not been fully clarified. It’s unclear therefore whether the suicide was a result of
the commotion caused by this particular picture or due to other problems. Any inference of a connection to the 42 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1994).
publicity surrounding this image and his death is not intended here. 43 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York:
41 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117–45. Zone, 1999), 12.
Perhaps, then, this crisis, this confusion between fact and truth, Let us return to conventional documentary images, more spe-
Okwui Enwezor 92
93
verification and comprehension linked to the documentary may cifically photographic and cinematic (as well as video) images that
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
have its source at the level in which the documentary confronts the capture slices of what some call “the real world.” The root of the
monstrous, the absolute, indissoluble reduction of human suffering term “documentary” is the document. In its literal term it is a re-
to abject status and spectacle. It was Foucault who wrote vocifer- cord or evidence of something that proves the existence or the
ously about the indignity of speaking for others. This poses the fol- occurrence of that which the document records, hence the claim
lowing question to Sontag’s fascinating and coruscating self-reflex- of “truth” often imputed to the documentary. But to document is
ive analysis of documentary pictures in her recent book Regarding never to make immanent a singular overwhelming truth. It is simply
the Pain of Others: whence does one open oneself up to another’s to collect in different forms a series of statements (what Foucault
pain, a process which again recalls Levinas’ ethics of being-for- calls “statement events” as the enunciative function of the archive)
the-other? If the documentary is a testimony, as Sontag argues, to leading to the interpretation of historical events or facts.45 The doc-
a calamity, a record of an event, a representation of an actuality, umentary as such is never outrightly a claim of truth, namely, that
it is exegetic and seemingly eidetic. Yet it is neither mastery nor this happened; therefore, it is true. In its relentless singularization,
totality. As such, it can only communicate as a fragment. How do in the guise of bearing witness to that which is part of our reality,
we trust or question that which the documentary presents beyond even if it may be outside our immediate experience, the documentary
blind acceptance of its ethical correctness or obdurate distrust of claims for itself the burden of truth in that it directs itself to what it
its politics? The neutralizing assumption of a spectatorship, which sees as recordable reality.
averts its gaze and turns askance from the documentary because it To document is to offer statements that stand for evidence of
deeply distrusts it as a moral accusation, cannot at the same time something: a truth, a testimony to some truth. It is impossible for
judge it. To avert one’s eyes, to look askance, is equally an ethical any image to fully disclose the reality that hangs like a pall over
stance; it is to ask not to be accused; not to be contaminated, not the extended field in which all images exist irrespective of Guy
to exist purely for the other, to be cleansed from the guilt of looking Debord’s claim that we all now live in a world of appearances
at human misery, relieved from the burden of being-for-the-other. where all social relationships have disappeared into the screen of
Yet there is a level at which this disavowal, when excessively in- mediation.46 Let’s take any ”documentary” image, say a war scene
terpreted in the direction of the non-western other (as a critic, like in Afghanistan and, as a rule of thumb, test its veracity. On the one
Matthew Higgs did in relation to images in documenta 11) registers hand, one can look at scenes of the war’s carnage: ruined streets,
at a deeper level two kinds of disavowal: a scopophobic inattention piled-up corpses, disconsolate populace and come away with the
to the specificity of the image and a reflexive xenophobia unable to reasonable belief that what the scenes show is the misery of war.
imagine the other as properly human.44 This turning away, this hole At the same time, the same image can never fully support whatever
in vision, as I have argued earlier in this text, perhaps has its basis the rationale that supports the war, such as the moral correctness
not in any superior moral vision, but is precisely a prophylactic to of rooting out terrorists. What do we see when we behold the
the obscenity of the human ruin. prone, dead corpse of a Taliban soldier: evidence of “here is a
45 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 126–31.
44 See Matthew Higgs, “Same Old Same Old,” Artforum (September 2002): 166–7. 46 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (NewYork: Zone, 1994).
dead terrorist” or “here is an Islamic martyr”? The abeyance into a documentarist. A famous example of some such transformation of
Okwui Enwezor 94
95
which such an image is cast is no longer merely semantic or simply the documentary genre by whoever possesses a camera is George
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
ideological. 47
The photograph is not at any rate a codeless message Holliday’s video record of Rodney King being beaten by a group
or a messageless code.48 In a sort of contradiction, despite the per- of Los Angeles police officers. But does the mere possession of
sistence of the eye to see into and through such a scene, no read- a camera and shooting the real world imbue us immediately with
ing of it would ever prove adequate nor summarize the import of its authority as modern day truth tellers?
message. Literally, such scenes induce a kind of blindness, excavate This was the dilemma of Holliday as a witness, with his me-
a hole in vision. Because of the vast extended visual field in which chanical eye. He was too busy filming the scene of the assault to
such images exist, it appears quite the case that a documentary bother seeing it with his own eyes. Instead the camera came to
can record something that is true but fail to reveal the truth of that replace his vision, literally his capacity to see. To move then from
something, in the sense that it may actually misrepresent the subject the passive position of the one who watches, who gazes at such a
in question. This is the given paradox of the documentary, namely scene, or as the receiver of its images on screen to a producer of
its lack of self-evidence. This was, I suspect, part of the antipathy to- those images is to shift into a remarkable position of responsibility.
wards the documentary mode critics associated with documenta 11. Such responsibility is what made Holliday not just a proper witness
but also a double witness whose two sets of vision must be cor-
The Documentary and the Scriptible roborated according to the mysterious workings of the law.
ich weiss nicht, It is already difficult enough that professional documentarists con- The position of the double witness, I believe, is what sets up
wie der 2. Hälfe tinuously work a thin line between compromise and heroism, that the opposition between art and documentary heard quite frequently
dieses Satzes sein to add to the cache of images produced by them with the vast during the days of the opening of documenta 11; and afterwards, the
soll...“that“ passt quantity of amateur images frays the truthfulness and the facticity idea that the collection of images, which critics had organized under
nicht, und ich weiss, of the documentary. The advent of technological ability has meant the rubric of documentary are essentially two things: (1) they are
nicht, was hier die the wide availability of cameras to casual users. As such, the docu- “scriptible,” meaning that anyone with a camera can also record
Aussage ist. viel-
mentary, as Barthes says of certain forms of writing, is “scriptible,” images of atrocities or poverty, but not everyone can be an artist in
leicht „in order to
add...“, aber ich bin because it turns the reader into a kind of writer, that is it makes a convincing way. In a sense this is a denigration of the technical
mir nicht sicher. the reader wish to carry further the act of writing, encouraging the facility which mechanical reproduction promotes; (2) this scriptibil-
imitation of the act of writing.49 The documentary could also be per- ity of the documentary, especially ist mimetic proclivities, removes
ceived as scriptible in that it increasingly turns the casual spectator it from the realm of art. But for some critics what actually grates is
into an expert witness. It encourages all kinds of acts of wanting to not simply the provincial art versus documentary argument, but the
further the work of documenting, creating new narratives of the real audacity of any image to designate a reality to which viewers have
world, adding, as it were, to the vast body of evidence. In a sense, limited and oftentimes no experience of at all. The documentary for
everyone who possesses a camera could, by definition function as such people relates only to a shallow kind of truth, due to its depen-
dence on causality. Art, so the argument goes, evidences a deeper
47 Sontag makes this point in Regarding the Pain of Others.
48 See Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and kind of truth, for it is not dependent on any external determinant
Wang, 1982), 194–210.
49 See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (NewYork: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1974). other than its own internal reality. This kind of argument is familiar
to many of us who at one time or another have been confronted Bio-politics, then, is both the conceptual envelope and the phil-
Okwui Enwezor 96
97
with the opposition between art as something specific and unique osophical determinant for how the loose term “documentary” came
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
and documentary as something that manifests only a kind of social to inhabit such a palpable space in the galleries of the exhibition.
concern with limited creative purchase. The hinge for the examination of naked or bare life is the vérité/
I cannot wholly dismiss the argument that many works in docu- documentary space. So, on the one hand, in the idea of vérité we
menta 11 can be confused with the documentary mode. Some of the confront the conditionalities of “truth” as a process of unraveling,
works can be thought as such insofar as the devices, the stringing exploring, questioning, probing, analyzing, diagnosing, a search for
and sequencing of images or the narrative procedures of certain truth or, shall we say, veracity. For the documentary mode, on the
analytical or conceptual frames of certain works, use material drawn other hand, there is a purposive, forensic inclination concerned es-
directly from the social world at large. Herein lies my own distinction: sentially with the recording of dry facts to be submitted to the vérité
rather than accepting exclusively the term “documentary” as a way committee. It is here that the pure relationship between documen-
to understand the manner in which the exhibition purportedly privi- tary and vérité become clearer, for they each define the relation-
leged the documentation of the real world or the analysis of social ship between the spectator and the image—what in Camera Lucida
reality, I wish to address the documentary versus art issue by insert- Barthes defined as the studium—the interplay between fact and
ing into the field of documenta 11’s vision the concept of vérité. truth. Comprehension and verification is the agitated field of the
Vérité has been defined as: truth. But also it refers to lifelike- studium, for “to recognise the studium is inevitably to encounter
ness, a trueness to life. In the latter definition, it is predisposed the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to
towards mimeticism. For example, in French, vérité also means to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand them, to
strive to be true to life in art: s’efforcer a la vérité en art. Similarly vé- argue with them within myself, for culture (from which the studium
rité refers to realism to real life, naturalism, authenticity, pragmatism, derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers.”51
verisimilitude. In the documentary mode we are presently reviewing, This is what governs the relationship between the documentary
vérité involves also the kind of documentary practice born in France and vérité, since there is nothing inherently true or factual in the
in 1960s known as cinéma vérité, which blurs the line between real- documented image if the purpose of such a documentation does
ity and simulated reality. not further ask the viewer to approach such documentation as not
The meaning of the term “documentary” that was of philosophi- only just a fact of something real in the world, but also something
cal interest to our main purpose—and I believe this was demonstrated true in the social condition of that world which is difficult to support
throughout the entire length and breadth of the project, in all the plat- in a single film frame or photographic image.
forms, publications, symposia, workshops, etc.—refers to Agamben’s If this holds true, perhaps then the response to the documen-
idea of bare life or naked life. Bare life or naked life, as such, is con- tary mode in documenta 11 may lead us to assume that the re-
nected to that dimension of experience, which he defines as a form- cursive persistence of what many came to see as documentary
of-life, “a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which in the exhibition already points to an exhaustion of the mode, an
it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.”50 exhaustion that not only complicates the viewer’s relationship to
50 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans.Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: 51 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (NewYork: Hill and Wang,
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 2–3. 1981), 27–28.
the particular social world being examined, but in fact explodes documentary image in exhibitions of contemporary art (in my view
Okwui Enwezor 98
99
that social world as nothing but a body of excess. Thus to recoil a highly dubious denial in an already prolix world of images and
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
from the documentary is to return to doubts we each harbor about usage), the broad category of images in documenta 11 neverthe-
the nature of its representations of events or the world as real and less surpass the documentary reflex. The complex variety of ap-
therefore true. This apprehension is even more acute in the con- proaches to be found in the genre in itself points to the importance
text of the general control and regulation of the media by powerful of adjusting the reductive prejudices that strip images down to only
interests. To disbelieve what is presented as the truth about the their functionalist format.
world may in fact lend itself to distrust of the messenger rather This was precisely what we found in the lengthy research and
than the message. The less that documentary exposes truth about communications with artists, theorists, activists, architects, institu-
the world in favor of an excess of reality over which we have little tions—across cultures and continents, disciplines and communities,
control and even less of a choice of full comprehension, the more institutions and networks (formal and informal): There are no fixed
it seems that spectators turn from it. messages that attach to the designation documentary. We worked
with artists and thinkers producing ideas and images on an un-
Epilogue derstanding of their practice within the broader parameters of the
In conclusion, it might be important to restate the view that the role changing relationship between artist and audience, discourse and
often assigned documentary forms exists in the tension between language, addressing questions that were far less predicated on
their aesthetic intention and ethical position vis-à-vis the subject of predetermined meanings, but open to interpellation to other ac-
the documentary. The second point about the documentary form tivities, actions, events, and discourses. When an artist group like
concerns its mnemonic function in relation to the archive that brings Huit Facettes emerges in Senegal to question the efficacy of the
into visibility the relationship between images, documents, and sys- individual artist’s relation to his context of production and public,
tems of meaning. But it also involves a struggle between two irre- what does their alliance with the rural community of Hamdallaye
solvable positions in our news-saturated, mediated world. W. J. T. in Senegal mean, and how does it show this complex relations of
Mitchell in his essay, The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies, power? And by what means does Le Groupe Amos in the Demo-
began his searching assessment of the photographic medium and cratic Republic of Congo communicate to their audience the work
language by positing the idea that “[t]he relation of photography it produces in the name of acting on behalf of Congolese civil soci-
and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in ety: organizing public manifestations; producing documentary films
contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where im- on gender and sexual relationship, economic production, and flows
ages and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and of labor and capital; conducting clinics on democracy and develop-
ethical identity.” The question could be asked: when do images ment; teaching workshops on gender equality; leading workshops
lose their “conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity?” 52
This on tolerance as the first condition of a democratic society; or partici-
is a question that does not have any answers that are not unhelp- pating as observers in the peace negotiations between the different
fully speculative. In spite of attempts to discredit the place of the factions of rebel movements that have made Democratic Republic
of the Congo ungovernable? How do we apprehend the important
52 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), 281. proposals of Park Fiction working in the suburbs of Hamburg in a
long-running project to mobilize the marginalized community of St. the struggle for control of the archival memory of the civil war in
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art 101
Pauli against the gentrification of their neighborhood by speculative order to penetrate the larger “truth” of that civil conflict. These are
real estate ventures, proposing instead a park rather than another just some of many examples. Each of these artists in documenta
bland modernist architecture that weakens the link between social 11 employs the tools of the documentary and the function of the
relationships and community identity? In the same affiliative spirit archive as procedures for inducting new flows and transactions
of urban and territorial analysis, we find the important project of Fa- between images, texts, narratives, documents, statements, events,
reed Armaly: From/To, working in collaboration with the filmmaker communities, institutions, audiences. And each confounds the role
Rashid Masharawi on a reading of the scattered trajectories of Pal- of the documentary in establishing a hierarchy between images
estinian dispersion and fragmentation into multiple communities of and artistic forms, between ethics and aesthetics, politics and poet-
exile and diaspora. Or the Italian group Multiplicity in a provocative ics, truth and fiction. In fact, in each of the individual positions and
attempt to retrace and reconstruct the tragedy and lives of migrants works mentioned throughout this text, what stands out the most
and refugees whose illegal smuggling ship sank and disappeared is the remarkable consistency of concern with social life that is a
during one night of tempest in the Clandestini basin of the Mediter- mixture of political interest (Armaly, Sekula, Jaar); sociological (Raqs
ranean sea in Solid Sea. From Alejandra Riera and Doina Petrescu’s Media Collective, Multiplicity, Black Audio Film Collective, Ottinger,
L’Association (des pas) which concerns the political and cultural Igloolik Isuma Productions); aesthetic (McQueen, Julien); and archi-
subjectivity of the Kurdish community in Turkey, rendered as a poet- val (Jef Geys). Above all, it is the concern with the other, the fidelity
ics of social and political analysis of representation to Raqs Media to a truth that the documentary ceaselessly constructs and decon-
Collective’s installation on the Coordinates of Everyday Life in Del- structs. Let me end with Martin Jay’s eloquent and succinct remark
hi, which abjures the ideological territorialization of marginality im- in which he cautions that “[t]here is ‘no view from nowhere’ for
posed by the state on urban forms; to Black Audio Film Collective’s even the most scrupulously ‘detached’ observer.”53 And so it is with
probing documentary film, which investigates the causes of black all of us who at one time or another survey the ruin of modernity:
urban riots during Margaret Thatcher’s rule in Handsworth Songs; There is no here from which to view disinterestedly that elsewhere
to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film, a meditation on slow time and cultural that purportedly is the province of the documentary. Vision, whether
spaces thriving outside the totalizing gaze of globalization in Naked blind or seeing is always invested with a function of apprehending
„Is“ gross? Spaces: Living Is Round; to Allan Sekula in Fish Story, tracing the the visual in a manner far more extensive and complex than what
containerized motor of global labor flows; to sonic and visual fields the eye ultimately sees. And what truths can images tell us when
which act as mnemonic triggers in Craigie Horsfield’s El Hierro they are drowning in the continental drift set up by modern media
project; Thomas Hirschhorn in Bataille Monument; a materialized industries?
documentary dedicated to the life and work of the French philoso- I would like to extend a note of thanks to Terry Smith, Barbara Vanderlinden for their
pher; or the discourse of an African claim to modernity enacted astute comments and to Tom Keenan for his careful reading of the essay.
in the Library and Museum Shop sections of Meshac Gaba’s Mu-
seum for Contemporary African Art; or Walid Raad/Atlas Group’s
documentary fictions in Missing Lebanese Wars which preys on
the manipulation between the warring factions of Lebanon, and 53 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes, 18.
In her recent series of photographs, Yto Barrada glimpses at life
01 In a text that accompanies her recent series of photographs, Barrada writes, “Before 1991 any Moroccan with
a passport could travel freely to Europe. But since the European Union’s (EU) Schengen Agreement, visiting
rights have become unilateral across what is now legally a one-way strait.” Yto Barrada, A Life Full of Holes: The
Strait Project (London: Autograph ABP, 2005), 57.
memories of an intimately familiar place irrevocably lost. In the (and, in fact, the presupposition that must never come to light as
02 Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights” (1993), in Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and
C. Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 22. 03 Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” 21.
wherein absence becomes its melancholy sign and promise at
04 Okwui Enwezor, “Documentary/Vérité: The Figure of ‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art,” in Experiments with Truth, ed.
Mark Nash (Philadelphia, PA: The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 2005), 101.
05 Enwezor, “Documentary/Vérité,” 101. He continues, “The hinge for the examination of naked or bare life is the
vérité/documentary space.”
otherwise anachronistic positioning of photography as unmediated the state—to identify, to recognize, to know, to control—according
Profit or Morality?
The rise of spectacularity and the “entertainment industry” in Eastern
Europe was facilitated by film distribution, the creation of commercial
television stations, advertising, and marketing. For example, the en-
try of advertising into the public space was the most striking. Until
1989, there was virtually no advertising in these countries. Nor was
there a statute of public space, as we know it today. If you go from
the Bucharest airport into the center today, or if you are driving and technology. The decision to devote oneself to documentary is
Site-Specificity
In her texts, Marina Gržini casts doubt on the “enterprised-up” ge-
Image taken on the way from the Otepeni Bucarest Airport Zbyněk Baladrán, Jano Mančuška, Vide, 2003, 30 minutes
nealogy, the practice of large (and probably also small) exhibitions to the City Center, 2004. video, still from the videofilm.
cloning works from the second or third world into the international reaction to the social amnesia, artists have begun to revoke the
Ontology
I have chosen the term “ontology” to label this relationship because
of one of the leading forms of skepticism of recent times, which
might be referred to as a mistrust of instrumental conceptualism.
Post-structuralism reconsidered the relationship between systems
of consciousness and systems of power. However, post-structural-
ist contributions to thought have themselves become institutional-
ized and dehumanized. If contemporary thought and art want to
take them up again, they must do so on the basis of fresh reconsid-
erations. In this connection, Roland Barthes seems to me to be the
liveliest reference. Instrumental conceptualism is undergoing scru-
tiny by means of subjectivization and the application of conceptual
practices on the testimony and experiences of the individual—not
a universal individual, but a wholly concrete, singular individual
(friends, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and
their destinies as projected onto the coordinates of history). The va-
lidity of the conceptual is borne out by the experiences of individuals,
A quick glance at the newspapers gives us an immediate index to
01 An interpretation of this news story was later produced for the supplement Cultura/s in La Vanguardia.
Carles Guerra, “Lo que nos preocupa,” January 24, 2007.
02 This characterization goes as far back as to Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
this other reality. What is needed is what—to employ, perhaps, a to do with that formula, confined to the printed page, but invades
03 Ibid., 125. 05 See Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (London: Blackwell
04 Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 35. Publishing, 2000).
Authors like Susan Buck-Morss have reinvented the political philo- Arjun Appadurai, we might say that a vast number of images are
28 See Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960).
29 Pilar Bonet, “El presidente Putin considera ‘interesante’ la idea de crear una OPEP del gas,” El País, February 2,
2007.
In this essay I wish to address a problem that has received little
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 165
attention in mass media research to date, while it has also been
largely neglected in cultural studies and visual studies.01 It has to
do with the relationship between mass-media journalism and art,
literature and film, or, in a broader sense, the relation of journalism
and aesthetics. I should like to start with two examples.
“Why all these full-page spreads from Sydney?” The question
was raised by veteran newspaper correspondent Sven Öste in a
column in Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm) in the early 1990s. Öste
was one of the generation of foreign correspondents who in the
1950s and 1960s brought the world beyond Europe within sight
for Swedish readers. The object of his question was the tremen-
dous energy and resources West-European media spent covering
brushfires in New South Wales. The fires had claimed four lives
and destroyed 191 homes. During the same period, the rest of the
world was not exactly serene, Öste noted: “A gas explosion in
China killed 70 workers. It got ten lines. Floods rendered 150,000
people in Sri Lanka homeless. Eight lines.” When an earthquake in
Maharashtra killed roughly 10,000 Indians, the media lost interest
after a day or two.02
Why are brushfires that kill four Australians in suburban Sydney
accorded greater news value than an earthquake in India that kills
thousands? It is fairly clear that Western news reporting values a
white Australian who sees his home go up in flames much higher
than a poor Indian who dies in an earthquake. The difference in
news value reflects a difference in the value ascribed to the two
persons as human beings. And this difference is so obvious and
self-evident that we don’t even reflect on it, Öste wrote.
There would be no cause for concern if our news institutions
had no greater pretensions than to promote our sense of com-
munity and to confirm our own culturally bound worldview. It is
01 This essay is based on a lecture given at the 16th Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research
in Kristiansand, Norway, August 2003. It was subsequently published in Nordicom Review 25, no. 1/2 (September
2004).
02 Sven Öste, “Varför alla dessa helsidor från Sydney?” [Why all these full-page spreads from Sydney], Dagens
Nyheter, January 14, 1994.
hardly surprising if people in Stockholm find it easier to identify purpose of war). For Alfredo Jaar, every frontier—geographical, po-
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 167
with people whose lives and lifestyle resemble their own than to litical, economic, or cultural—represents a crime against humanity.
relate to peasants in rural India. To bemoan that would be as silly In 1986, he rented the advertising space at the Spring Street subway
as to criticize a local newspaper for carrying local news. station on Manhattan. Spring Street is the stop where Wall Street’s
But, in an age in which media are becoming ever more global- stock brokers end and start their daily commute. Gold up $1.80!
ized, Öste’s question becomes urgent. With global concentration Jaar’s ads declared. Alongside this encouraging piece of news Jaar
of the media, the global media conglomerates of the West make displayed photos of the gold-diggers, or garimpeiros, of Serra Pelada,
a claim, whether explicitly or implicitly, to universal validity. We are the largest open-pit mine in Brazil. At the time Jaar took his photos,
presented with a situation in which a given cultural community, with more than 40,000 migrant laborers were working the mine, each
its parochial concept of newsworthiness, is convinced that its values digging his own shaft toward the center of the Earth. In the photos,
apply universally to Humankind. As a culturally bounded definition the mine looks like a giant’s footprint in an anthill. Tiny creatures
of newsworthiness—along with the relative valuation of human be- covered with mud are scrambling over each other. With their one
ings in different parts of the world that the definition reflects—is hand on the ladder and the other on their sack of up to one hundred
adopted as a world standard, other culturally bounded ideas about pounds of gold-bearing mud, they climb toward daylight.
what is important and who is important will be marginalized. The In Jaar’s images, the wretched workers of Serra Pelada haunt
result is the kind of bias that Sven Öste criticized: the globalized us like figures in a geopolitical nightmare. Jaar shows us the faces
media system codes a resident of suburban Sydney and a resi- and bodies of people whose existence is denied in price quotations,
dent of the Maharashtra hinterland in such a way that readers and the media, or economic development programs. To be sure, Jaar’s
viewers will identify with the fate of the former, whereas the latter art is political, even didactic. It gives faces to the faceless ones. But
remains out of view. The result is paradoxical, for are we not often the real point of his work is a different one. With minimalistic preci-
told that globalization is broadening our horizons? sion, he frames his photos in such a way that the depicted persons
Now, to my second example. Some years ago I saw an ex- always appear to be fading away or falling outside the visual plane.
hibition of the work of the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar. 03
Instead of Sometimes, he veils his subjects’ faces or dilutes and distorts them
the customary brochure or catalogue, visitors were furnished with by letting them appear as reflections in water or ingeniously placed
a passport and what appeared to be a map. Unfolding the map, mirrors. Or he hangs his pictures face-to-wall, so that the spectator
I found instead a collection of large poster-size photographs of can only guess the motif on the basis of the caption.
people in Nigeria, Brazil, and a refugee camp outside Hong Kong. I Furthest in, in a sort of sanctum sanctorum in the exhibition
seemed to hear a whisper: “Look closely! This is what we look like, hall, Jaar confronted the visitor with a broad image, illuminated from
the people on the other side of the border!” behind, showing seven men in Lagos, Nigeria. They are standing
Then their Faces Vanished. next to or leaning against a stack of rusty barrels of toxic waste,
Inscribed on Jaar’s map was a single sentence: “La Géographie, imports from Europe. This picture was followed by four similarly
ça sert d’abord à faire la guerre.” (Geography above all serves the illuminated close-up portraits of garimpeiros encrusted in mud; the
03 Alfredo Jaar, Two or Three Things I Imagine About Them, Kunstnerernes hus, Oslo, 1993. The exhibition was figures were tightly cropped, with their point of gravity just outside
shown in original format at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, 1992. I discuss Jaar’s work in more depth in my
A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). the frame.
The passport had no spaces for entry and exit stamps. In- politicization of art are interacting processes, somewhat like com-
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 169
stead, each page showed a picture of a frontier marked by barbed municating vessels. Indeed, I would venture even further and posit
wire and illuminated by glaring searchlights. And across each page that the conformism of media journalism and the politicization of art
a phrase, in flaming red letters, was repeated in several languages: are two facets of the same historical process, which we might term
“Abriendo nuevas puertas,” “Es öffnen sich neue Tore,” “Opening new the globalization of culture.
doors.” To put it a bit drastically: On the one hand we have a trend to-
Such is the ultimate interpretation of Jaar’s work: it opens ward uniformity; the world-view represented in journalism increas-
doors to the worlds that have been marginalized in Western media. ingly coincides with a perspective that is characteristic of a specific
But his work also has another effect. It makes the spectator aware subject position: white, male, Western and of the owning classes.
of the political barriers and mental inhibitions that prevent us from This subject position constitutes the implicit narrator as well as the
seeing the world’s lower classes. The Wretched of the Earth await implicit listener of the mass media that today address a global audi-
us just beyond the pale of our perception. Jaar lets the viewer see ence.05 In most media narratives, this subject functions as a general
that he or she does not see the Other. model of the human. Those who take interest in these narratives are
On the basis of these two examples I should like to formulate asked to emulate this model, which for the majority of the world’s
an hypothesis. The first example speaks of the increasing conform- population means that they must renounce those culturally specific
ism of global mass media. An ever greater share of the media world- identities that do not conform with the model. The result of this pro-
wide are governed by a norm that dictates what is worth knowing cess is a divide that is by now well known in contemporary cultural
and looking at, what to enjoy and what to mourn, what counts as analysis. A conflict arises between a Western dominant that claims
happiness, justice, goodness, and love. The norm is confining in to represent the general interst—which may be coded in cultural
that it suppresses other, alternative ideas about these values. terms (enlightenment, secularization, traditional humanist educa-
The second example speaks of the increasing politicization of tion), in political terms (democracy, parliamentarism, etc.) and/or
art. By politicization I mean the process that brings what we might economic terms (market economy, free trade, capitalism)—and a
call “the political”—as opposed to “politics”—to light. 04
The politi- series of subordinate tendencies that are assumed to represent
cal signifies the fundaments and underlying principles of politics, various minority interests and are often coded in ethnic, religious,
namely, people’s ability to represent themselves and their interests cultural, or national terms.
in the public sphere—a public sphere, moreover, that has become On the other hand we see a number of politicizing currents in
global. Alfredo Jaar calls attention to the political in the sense that contemporary literature, film, art and music. They call attention to
his art evokes the mechanisms that exclude some of humanity from experiences, histories, bodies, and identities that have long been
the public sphere, thereby denying them political representation. homeless in the Western public sector, and they do so with an
My hypothesis concerns the links between these two pro- energy and innovative creativity that has put them at the center
cesses. I propose that the conformism of media journalism and the of the aesthetic discussion in the West. The work of Alfredo Jaar
04 The distinction is based on a discussion among French political theorists of the relationship between “le politique” 05 See News in a Globalized Society, ed. Stig Hjarvard (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2002); Edward S. Herman and Robert
(politics) and “la politique” (the political). See Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique (Paris: Seuil, 1985); Claude W. McChesney, The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (London and Washington:
Lefort, “La question de la démocratie,” in Le Retrait du politique: Travaux du Centre de Recherches Philosophiques Cassell, 1997); and Journalism and the New World Order: Gulf War, National News Discourses and Globalization,
sur le Politique (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1983), 71–88. ed. Stig Arne Nohrstedt and Rune Ottosen (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2000).
is an example of this tendency which, broadly speaking, might be these societies, prohibited opinions and knowledge were rechan-
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 171
labelled “postcolonial.” The documenta 11 exhibition in Kassel in neled to literature and the arts. The aesthetic form allowed the
2002 presented a comprehensive inventory of this movement within communication and discussion of banned themes and ideas in en-
the visual arts. Contemporary literature presents a good number of crypted form. As a consequence, social-political discourse moved
other examples, and here it suffices to list some of the recent Nobel to the theater stage, to novels, and to the visual arts, in short, to
laureates, such as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, aesthetic genres that could speak at once multivocally and equivo-
Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. They cally, thereby evading—for the most part—the censors.
differ greatly, to be sure. Yet, what they have in common is a desire One should be cautious about drawing parallels between to-
to express stories and existential experience from the dark and day’s conformism in mainstream journalism and the kind of thought
repressed side of Western civilization. control exercised in societies under totalitarian and absolutist rule.
It would appear, then, that the course of developments in jour- Yet, in much of contemporary journalism the forms of presentation,
nalism and aesthetic genres are tending in opposite directions. One the modes of public address, and the verbal and narrative regis-
might even say that the Arts are compensating for the “blind spots” ters have become so constrained that they effectively prevent the
of journalism. How might we characterize the relationship between expression of certain kinds of knowledge and experience. Most
these two trends? The question is theoretical: what interpretive extreme in this regard is television journalism, where strict formats
models help us understand the relation of journalism to aesthetics? and limited air time often rule out background analysis and the
The question is also practical and methodological: by comparing exposition of causal explanation altogether. Such elements flee to
these simultaneous but contrary processes in the arts and journalism, public media that are at once more narrow and more generous:
respectively, we may further our understanding of both. book-length reportage, journal essays, installation art, the novel,
The interplay between different levels in the cultural super- and documentary film genres that traditionally have presupposed a
structure is a central theme in classical Marxist theory. In the last will to aesthetic form and a mode of address or perspective that is
decades of the nineteenth century, Karl Kautsky and Franz Mehring subjective and personal.
both showed how literature and the arts in certain historical peri- The above-mentioned documenta 11 offered a veritable cata-
ods are politicized, in the sense that it becomes one of their main logue of such expressions. Chantal Akerman’s film and video in-
functions to channel information, ideas, and experiences that are stallation, From the Other Side, treated the plight of migrants cross-
otherwise excluded from public cultural and political debate.06 For ing the border between Mexico and the U.S. Fareed Armaly invited
instance, there are societies in which direct or indirect censorship visitors to draw their own mental maps of Palestine. For the pur-
has prevented the media from carrying an open discussion and poses of the exhibition Maria Eichhorn founded a public company,
publishing opinions that are crtitical of the existing power. Such the sole purpose of which was to preserve the company’s equity
was the case in the Soviet Union (as in Russia under the czars), in without accumulating profit or interest; her “venture” demonstrated
France under absolutist rule, in Germany under the rule of despotic the nature of capitalism and the art market more poignantly than
princes, but also under absolutist rule in Sweden around 1800. In most business journalists are able to do. With his suite of docu-
mentary photos of commercial shipping Allan Sekula showed the
06 Karl Kautsky, Die Klassengegensätze von 1789 (Stuttgart, NN, 1889); Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende (Berlin:
Dietz, 1967 [1894]). infrastructure of the global market, the flows of goods from one
part of the world to another. The Italian artist collective Multiplicity with both a sense of urgency and commitment and, what is more,
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 173
presented the results of investigative journalism in its best sense with the kind of creativity that is strikingly absent in contemporary
through a dramatization of an event that both media and authorities journalism testifies to the kind of role-switching that I am talking
had suppressed. The day after Christmas 1996, a fishing boat sank about. It is a shift within the ideological superstructure much like
between Malta and Sicily. All on board—283 Pakistanis, Indians and those Mehring and Kautsky analyzed in their time. In a situation
Lankese—drowned, without anyone being held responsible, and where the forms and content of journalism have become standard-
even without any investigation of the disaster.07 ized to the point of censorship, it has fallen upon the arts to inspire
The themes these artists elaborate are roughly the same as discussions of the future of society. This is why it is increasingly the
the ones we encounter daily in our news media. They all have task of the arts to give expression to “the political,” that is to say,
something to do with the globalization process and the conflicts the implicit preconditions and consequences of the political and
and confusion that arise in its wake, particularly the mass migra- economic policies that dominate in the world, whereas mainstream
tions of people from poorer to wealthier regions of the world. What journalism increasingly serves “politics”; it is content to mirror the
distinguishes artistic approaches to these themes from journalistic rituals of institutionalized power and to convey the various opinions
approaches is not mainly their subjective commitment, nor their that bear the “stamp of approval” of the dominating authorities.
eagerness to experiment with visual, cinematographic and verbal When journalism is reduced to little more than a mirror for princes,
forms; above all, it is their sensitivity to suppressed aspects of on- the arts assume the role of journalism in its original sense: a running
going political and cultural processes. The arts often render events, chronicle that elucidates social events.
problems, and structures that cast Western society in a critical light, I suggested earlier that these shifts represent two sides of the
or even hold Western society responsible for preserving the privi- globalization of culture. In the age of globalization we can identify
leges it enjoys, at the cost of the rest of the world. three distinct tendencies in the cultural sector. First, American mass
Artist Felix Gonzales-Torres once derided heavy-handed politi- culture continues its triumphal tour across the globe—under the ban-
cizing tendencies of art. Slightly travestied, he phrased his question ners of Nike, McDonald’s, Walt Disney, and Coca-Cola. Second, the
as follows: Do we really need an art gallery to find out what we can “high culture” of the West is becoming part of elite lifestyles not only
read in the paper or watch on CNN?08 The point of the art that I am in Paris and Washington, but in Beijing and Buenos Aires, as well.
discussing here, however, is that it gives us a sense of aspects of From each and every metropole in the world there now emanates a
the political that we cannot read about in the newspaper or watch sponsored noise of Pavarotti, Bach, and Eric Satie, and in just about
on CNN. whatever city you visit you will find a major exhibit of Hieronymus
It is not a given, that art should tackle such subjects, much Bosch, Russian icons, Vincent van Gogh, or Andy Warhol. A growing
less that it should constitute itself as a political or ethical tribunal. number of artists and writers consciously cater to the tastes of the
On the contrary, this is the role that traditionally has been assumed world’s upper classes. There is a journalistic equivalent of this kind
by journalism. That the arts increasingly tend to assume this role of globalized culture in the press, most clearly articulated in papers
like USA Today and International Herald Tribune—the former for the
07 The project is described briefly in the exhibition catalogue, Documenta 11—Platform 5: Exhibition (Ostfildern-Ruit:
Hatje Cantz, 2002). middle classes, the latter for the air-bound upper classes, but both
08 Anthony Downey comments on Gonzales-Torres’ critique in “The Spectacular Diffference of documenta XI,” Third
Text 62 17:1 (March 2003): 91. tailored to suit all in their target group and not to furrow any brows.
Dominating these two tendencies are a handful of media groups: news values worldwide. An event cannot become a “story” unless
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 175
Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, Sony, Seagram, Rupert Murdoch’s it conforms to the CNN mold. In the world of digital communication
News Corporation, AT&T, General Electric, and Bertelsmann. 09
The the Windows operating systems represent another strong factor
tendencies lead us to the motor behind the globalization of culture: of global equivalence. Nothing has emotive, aesthetic, cognitive,
the establishment of universal equivalents, or “value-forms,” which political, or communicative value, nothing is good or bad, beautiful
make it possible to judge and rank the “value” of different news or ugly, good or evil, real or unreal until it has been processed by
stories, cultural products, works of art, knowledge, events, ethical television or Microsoft systems. Theirs are the value forms that de-
behavior, and political systems, regardless of their cultural origin limit our world-view, that present selected portions of the world to
and contexts. us, in ready-made frames. Yet another of these universal equating
Let me explain this in more detail. Political values, ethical val- mechanisms is the English language itself, which has spread to the
ues, existential values, news values, aesthetic values, and human point that we now have a global lingua franca that artists, entertainers,
values were long culture-specific, bound to cultural origins and lo- politicians and scientists must have a command of if they and their
cal traditions. They could not be measured on the yardsticks sup- work are to be taken seriously by the dominant institutions in their
plied by other cultures. Traditionally, the only value that could be respective fields.
exchanged without difficulty across cultural boundaries internation- Out of the reactions to this standardization of elite and popular
ally was monetary value. Today, however, everything is subject to culture, a third tendency has emerged. It consists of all the local,
measure and judgment according to yardsticks that are alleged to ethnic or national movements having the aim to resist the global-
have universal validity. This is not to say that the phenomena mea- ization of culture. Every now and then, someone out in the periph-
sured are reduced to monetary value, only that they are subjected ery vandalizes a McDonald’s. French culturati express their out-
to the same kind of logic that applies to the exchange of monetary rage when the USA tries to force European governments to cease
values: immaterial fruits of human endeavor—education, news re- supporting European film production on the grounds that it gives
porting, goodness, poetry, patriotic feeling, or anything else—are European film-makers an unfair competitive advantage on the world
now increasingly valued in relation to a universal equivalent. The market. In the USA, Latino and Asian students demand that cur-
standardizations of all kinds of value effected by such universal ricula include their peoples’ history and traditions alongside those
equivalents is, in my view, the most appropriate analytical definition of Anglos, Blacks, and Native Americans. The president of Ma-
of cultural globalization. laysia accuses the USA of propagating an individualistic ideology
Consider, for example, motion pictures, where the so-called with respect to human rights as a means of securing international
Hollywood narrative has superseded alternative modes of cinemat- dominance. I have yet to mention terrorism, the most desperate
ographic story-telling. A film is hardly recognized as a film (but is response of the periphery to the processes of centralization and
automatically smacked with an “art film” label) unless it follows globalization. Face to face with the new, global norms, people—be
the conventions of Hollywood. Or, consider news reporting, where they Persian or Québecois—are “discovering” that they have a cultural
over the past decade CNN has become a mirror and measure for identity and that it is under threat and needs to be defended. They
are returning to their cultural roots, ethnic origins, confessional values
09 Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1999). or blood kin, maintaining that their values cannot be uprooted from
their cultural context and equivalized according to some universal geoculture, transculture, postcolonial culture, interculture, multiculture,
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 177
standard. and world culture. This zone is already present in most places. One
All artistic, intellectual, and journalistic work today is carried might call it “the public sphere of inbetweenness,” a place where
out in a field of tension between these three tendencies—standard- the contradictions and potentialities of globalization, the never-end-
ized elite culture, commercialized mass culture, and local traditions ing struggle over who should be included and who left out of “the
of stubborn resistance. But most important is that all three are inter- international community,” are debated.
woven and simultaneously present in every country, every locality, It should be noted that the culture of inbetweenness is no
every work of art, indeed, in every life. Yesterday, culture could be new phenomenon; it has always been there, although it has been
located on the map and defined as “domestic” or “foreign”, accord- described in many different terms. In 1907, for example, Otto Bauer,
ing to national frontiers. That is no longer possible. Anyone who Marxist theorist and chairman of the Socialist Party in Austria, de-
tries to identify and define, say, Swedish or American culture has scribed what happens when an individual straddles different na-
either to invoke some supposed national character—thereby verging tional cultures: “For the individual who is affected by the culture of
on cultural racism—or else admit that every culture is subject to the two or more nations, whose character becomes equally strongly
forces of globalization, tugging at once in several different directions. influenced by different cultures, does not simply unite the character
Therefore, I should like to postulate a fourth tendency, one traits of two nations but possesses a wholly new character. [The]
that specifically deals with the conflicts and power relationships mixture of cultural elements creates a new character.”11 That is why
between the three poles in contemporary cultural life: global mass the child of many cultures is often greeted with mistrust, in times of
culture, the elite’s “culture of cultural events,” and miscellaneous, strife even as a traitor, Bauer adds. Bauer himself lived through the
more or less nationalistic cultural projects. The most striking mani- last years of the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed numerous
festation of this fourth tendency to date was, precisely, the docu- minority cultures without any dominating majority, and in which it
menta exhibit in Kassel, which gathered a good number of intel- was necessary to invent a model of humanness and citizenship that
lectuals, writers, artists and institutions, all of whom operate in the rose above the nationalist conflicts—“a wholly new character.”
interface between “domestic” and “foreign” and strive to express The point of the notion of a “public sphere of inbetweenness”
and give form to “the political,” that is to say, the very preconditions is that it reveals the relativity and dynamism in all distinctions be-
for and limits to participation in contemporary public spheres of tween center and periphery, and in all the polarities—culture and
politics and culture. barbarism, “us” and “them”, civilization and savagery—that can be
Many attempts have been made to define this zone, where derived from it. What might be called a monotopic interpretation of
cultural influences mix, giving rise to new cultural identities. Cultural the world is here replaced by a pluritopic interpretation, or what
theorist Homi Bhabha calls it “the third space”; Mexican anthropol- Edward Said referred to as a “contrapuntal interpretation,” that is
ogist García Canclini speaks of “hybrid culture,” and artist Guillermo sensitive to actions and texts that have broken away from, or been
Goméz Peña of “border culture.”10 Other terms in currency are
11 Otto Bauer, “The Nation,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996), 54f; Die Nation-
10 Homi Babha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 35–39; Néstor García Canclini, alitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie, rev. ed. 1924 (Glashütten im Taunus: Detlev Auvermann, 1971), 117. For a
“Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity”, trans. Christopher L Chiappari and Silvia L more extensive discussion of Bauer’s standpoint in relation to the views of his time with regard to the culture of
López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 1–11, 206–263: Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Warrior for inbetweenness see Stefan Jonsson, Subject Without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity
Gringostroika: Essays, Performance Texts and Poetry (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1993), 43–44. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 263–270.
devastated by the dominant tradition.12 The pluritopic interpretation of a battle of Light versus Darkness. Intellectuals having roots in the
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 179
is rooted in thinking that does not refer to a certain ground or a giv- Muslim world—like Naguib Mahfouz, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdelrah-
en tradition, but rather moves between different cultural horizons. man Munif, Tariq Ali, Edward Said, Sherif Hetata, and Khalid Du-
Thus, it resists every attempt to assign any given tradition, event or ran—were, by contrast, convinced that the war would only worsen
place to any single truth, identity, origin, spirit, or character. A pluri- existing problems and create new ones.14
topic interpretation instead posits that every history and geographic How are we to explain the diametrical difference between the
place is a collection of interacting identities.13 It has no place for respective views of Western intellectuals and their Arab-Muslim
majorities or minorities, for Norwegian, Swedish, Nordic, or foreign. colleagues? Before the war, both groups belonged to the same
All such categories are undone once we realize that every cultural international league of secularized intellectuals who adhered to the
identity is shot through by strands from numberless other places same ideals of democracy, human rights, and enlightenment. After
on the planet. the war, both profess the same values. And yet they have been
The fourth tendency arising out of the globalization of culture divided along precisely the cultural lines that both groups claim to
is apparent in the realm of aesthetics and in contemporary cultural have risen above.
theory. But not in journalism. Mainstream journalism and news re- It may be that the two groups read and interpreted the war
porting remain dependent on a worldview of the kind Sven Öste in two distinctly different contexts. For the war on terror can be
criticized. Events and people are measured and valued in relation understood and explained against the background of several dif-
to a presumed center, national or global, an allegedly objective van- ferent narratives. One explanatory narrative is about the efforts of
tage point, from which an allegedly impartial observer surveys and democracy and open societies to defend themselves against en-
catalogues the course of humanity and the changes of the world. emies that are not above murdering innocent people en masse.
Perhaps the demonstrated weakness of journalism when it Another is about the most recent phase in the USA’s buttressing
comes to documenting the political processes of globalization is of the country’s imperial hegemony. A third concerns the ultimate
due to the fact that it is still bound to such an objectivist and posi- consequences of globalization, and a fourth the dialectic between
tivist epistemology. Perhaps the key to the greater achievements religious faith and secularization in the Muslim world. This multiplicity
of the arts in this regard is that their vantage point lies precisely in of perspectives is cause for thought. Which of the narratives that
the intersection of the contradictory processes of globalization. Let influences one’s interpretation of the war obviously has to do with
me offer another example and make a new distinction that clarifies one’s position in the field of tension of world politics—whether one
the difference. is Arab or European, for example.
The example is the so-called war on terror, more precisely its Still, or at least at this time around 2002–03, opinion leaders and
initial phase, the attack on the Talibans in Afghanistan. Most opinion mainstream media in the West believed, and would have everyone
leaders in Europe and North America started with the assumption
that the war was a both justified and appropriate response. Main- 14 This, of course, is a generalization. As media researcher Elisabeth Eide, who has extensive knowledge of
Afghanistan, pointed out to me after the first presentation of this paper, a number of Western media, particularly
stream Western journalism cast the war in a narrative reminiscent
in Norway and the rest of Scandinavia, have made great efforts to publish views on the war from the Muslim
world. But these, I would say, are only the exceptions that prove the rule. That some media consider it important
to include commentary and analysis from Afghans and others in the Muslim world is a welcome deviation from
12 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 32, 50–72. the norm, a norm that presumes that Western media can, on their own, give their readers and viewers an
13 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: The adequate and impartial interpretation of the world. But that these more progressive media have to make such
University of Michigan Press, 1995), 11–25. efforts to include others’ voices demonstrates just how strong the norm is.
believe, that their particular interpretation were the only valid and history is more than a twine of meanings or a flow of information.
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 181
possible one. When they ignored all the other possible contexts in It is a physical force that intrudes upon the body and transforms
which the war may be understood, they were turning a blind eye to one’s space of existence. To take an example: Gumbrecht noted
the world around them. Historian of literature, Hans-Ulrich Gumbre- that Muslims take offense to the stationing of American fighter
cht, at one point saw this blindness as a case of what he called planes near Mecca; their presence provokes frustration and rage.
“complexity reduction.” He considered the Western reaction—and,
15
Meanwhile, leaders and spokespersons in the West seem alto-
by extension, Western media coverage—typical of a modernity that gether to lack the sensorium needed to comprehend how such
has embraced what he calls a “subject culture,” Subjektkultur, that geopolitical measures can be perceived as a humiliating act of
is, an attitude to the world in which the observer of world events encroachment.
is taken to be placeless, disembodied, omniscient, and impartial. Media coverage of world politics suffers from the same dis-
“The world” is something the observer approaches with conceptual ability. History is observed from the comfort of loge seats. The
tools, not a place where he or she lives in or through which he or arts, however, inevitably relate to concrete human experience. Even
she is formed. A precondition for this attitude or position is that the Hegel noted that art cannot be alienated from sensory experience,
individual in question has attained a measure of wealth and secu- from the representation of how life and society look, sound, feel,
rity that shelters him or her from the material pressures of history; taste—even how they smell. Here we have yet another reason why
he or she is no longer immediately involved in history, but can view art today is able to give us some idea of the political repercussions
it from above. This attitude is so deeply imbued in the culture of of globalization, far closer to reality than the general overviews pro-
modernity that even Western concepts of knowledge and morals vided by journalists and statisticians.
are predicated on it; the world is here seen as an image, separate The contrast I am describing here could be summed up as
from the observer, or as a “world picture,” as Heidegger once put the difference between experience and overview, where the arts
it.16 Western journalists, reporters, and opinion leaders tend to as- remain true to their mission of representing concrete human expe-
sume this position of withdrawn superiority; indeed, this position is rience—here, the experience of living in the “battle zones” of glo-
a prerequisite to being able to say anything about the world or the balization—whereas journalism and the media provide “structure”
war on terrorism. and overview. The contrast between the two would appear to have
The elevation of this position to an absolute, Gumbrecht argued, been driven to an extreme these days. Cultural theorist Fredric
is the reason why Western journalists and intellectuals are poorly Jameson has given the classical formulation of this problem, or
equipped to understand that less privileged places are still charac- double-bind: We have today, he writes, “a situation in which we can
terized not only by the “subject culture” of modernity, but also by say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true;
what he calls a “culture of presence” (Präsenz-Kultur), a state in and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is
which the individual conceives of himself as being bound to a spe- true, then it escapes individual experience.”17
cific body and a specific place—a presence. To such an individual, By extension, Jameson’s reasoning would imply that artistic
attempts to express authentic experiences of contemporary politi-
15 Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, “In eine Zukunft gestoßen; Nach dem 11. September 2001,” Merkur 55 (November 2001):
1048–1054.
16 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 17 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press,
trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 115–154. 1991), 411.
cal events can never claim to be true, whereas journalistic attempts screening of moving pictures and an astounded audience could
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 183
to tell the truth about reality seldom or never say anything about see moving pictures of workers leaving their factory and a train pull-
the authentic experiences which, ultimately, steer the course of ing into a station, film has been assumed to be directly related to
history. authentic reality. All film is—by birth and definition—documentary,
The dichotomy is drastic. As we all know, a good share of a kind of journalism, an imprint of reality. When in the 1920s “docu-
contemporary art and literature claims to reveal truths about hidden mentary film” was introduced as a concept, it was—as accepted
political and historical structures; at the same time, the best journal- historiography would have it—nothing new, but only a new name
ism leans toward concrete human experience. Thus, the best work for what moving pictures always had been: documentations of reality.
of both strive to achieve what Jameson calls a “cognitive mapping” Thus, historians have invented a mythical ancestry for the docu-
of the world as totality: to make global processes accessible to our mentary, Nichols comments. The documentary film is portrayed
senses and our experience.18 as a necessary consequence of the realism of film as a medium:
Both make the effort, but it seems that the aesthetic genres it offers us a window on reality and the naked truth. In short, the
are always one step ahead of the renditions of reality presented in documentary would appear to demonstrate the very essence of the
mass media. Why is this? One might put it this way: Art, literature reality-revealing function of journalism.
and film invent the forms of representation that are subsequently Nichols rejects this reasoning out of hand. The first films, he
institutionalized and applied in journalism and the media. There are argues, were not at all received as documented reality, but as magi-
numerous interesting examples of how journalistic genres have bor- cal spectacles. And, if all film is essentially documentary, why did
rowed from literature, art and film: nineteenth-century realism and the genre not appear until 1928? If the accepted history holds, the
naturalism in literature presage documentary reportage in the daily genre should have appeared much earlier, Nichols reasons. Further-
press; avant–garde film developed editing techniques that subse- more, documentary film is much more than a matter of recording
quently became the norm in television; dialogic patterns developed reality. In addition to cinematographic techniques, there are three
in drama and philosophical novels have enriched the journalistic additional elements: a particular narrative style, developed in early
interview; photo journalism has borrowed from the iconography of films of the genre; a social mission, a desire to inform and arouse
painting; investigative reporting in both print and broadcast media ap- the public that appeared first in the interwar period; and, finally,
plies the fluid narrative perspective developed in modernist novels. the montage techniques by which avant–garde films of the 1920s
The historiography of documentary film offers another illustrative achieved both defamiliarization and revelation of reality. Nichols is
example. Film historian Bill Nichols has recently published what particularly interested in this third aspect and demonstrates how
many might call a “revisionist” history of the genre. His analysis is 19
the documentary and, for that matter, all journalistic use of moving
of general applicability to the question of the relationship between pictures are indebted to the film experiments of Walter Ruttman,
journalism and aesthetics. Film historians have long maintained Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Man Ray and Luis Buñuel, that is
that documentarism represents the essence of cinematography. to say the modernist avant−garde.
Ever since 1895, when the Lumière brothers arranged the first public So reasons Nichols, and I think the point is clear: A docu-
mentary genre that strives to fulfill all the journalistic criteria of
18 Jameson, Postmodernism, 51–54.
19 Bill Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 580–610. truth and factuality has its origins in avant–garde film-makers’ free
experimentation with images and narratives. Why is this legacy so
20 I am referring to an article by Timothy Garton Ash, “Välkommen till Matrix!” [Welcome to Matrix] that appeared
in Swedish translation in Dagens Nyheter, June 17, 2003.
How does a text become a document? It has to be certified as a
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 187
valuable piece of information. Something worth reading and keeping.
Many documents are produced in offices. Others are generated in
and for archives. Even offices cannot do without archives. If a text
is qualified as worth reading and keeping it is in the archive that it
is kept to allow for it to be read if need be. And since there cannot
be an archive with just one document in it there is also never just
one document but always many. Consequently, if a text is certified
as a document it is thereby also implied that this text has become
part of a larger pool of texts collected in an archive. There is always
more than one document. This is why documents are organized in
files. A text becomes a document when it is incorporated into a
system of information management.
Reading a document always implies a moment of choice. You
choose to select one document from the many files available in the
archive. To do so you must know the reference under which the
document is filed—and you must have some reason for selecting
this particular one. In a world filled with ever-expanding real and
virtual archives brimful of documents, you simply have to have a
reason for picking out a particular document to get some orienta-
tion. It follows that reading a document requires having an interest
in doing so (providing you are not working at an office and your job
forces you to “take notice” of certain documents). But what is a text
before it becomes a document? Maybe you could call the text in
this raw state “material.” This in turn implies another process of se-
lection: Not every text material can become a document. Choices
have to be made. Some material has to be selected, other material
discarded. Then it has to be decided under which reference the
document is to be filed. Again this process of selection follows in-
terests. Without a stake in the matter, you would neither know what
material to transform into documents nor which reference to relate
01 This essay is the outcome of a seminar held at the Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå. I am indebted to the students for their
comments and contributions. I also thank the Kunstverein Düsseldorf for giving me the opportunity to try out a
first draft of the paper as a talk, members of the audience including Andrea Knobloch, Vitus H. Weh, and Tom
Holert for their criticism, and Greg Neuerer for his patience in waiting for the final draft.
it to. So in different ways, our relationship towards documents, as Upon entering a grand traditional library you will be overpowered
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 189
producers or readers, takes on the form of a performance of selection by the sublime sensation of encountering history in its totality. A
guided by specific interests. totality that demands to but never can be fully grasped by the in-
Moreover, the certification of a text as a document is based dividual, as one lifetime will not suffice to study the entirety of all
on authority. If you read a document, you know it has been au- available documents. This is why the moment you put a foot inside
thorized as a document by someone with the authority to do so the sublime archive you know that the archive has already survived
(usually indicated by a seal or signature). Otherwise it would not you. You are as good as dead. Your life is outmeasured by the life
have been filed in the archive and subsequently not be available of the archive and the totality of all lives that have been invested
to you as a reader. Who has the authority to produce documents? in the process of producing the documents it holds. This feeling of
The authority of the producer is generated by the nature of the ar- vertigo in the face of a historical totality beyond the grasp of the
chive he or she contributes to just as, vice versa, the nature of its individual mind is comparable to the experience that installations
founder determines the authority of the archive. A document filed by Boltanski or Darboven confront you with. When Darboven, for in-
in the institutional library of the Vatican will speak to you with the stance, fills the walls of an exhibition space with countless framed
authoritative voice of the church even more so because the name documents of the same A4 format, she stages her production of
of the individual who filed it will have been obscured by the history a sublime archive—an archive which testifies to the attempt of an
of the institution. Anonymity boosts institutional authority. By con- individual to move towards creating a historic totality by invest-
trast if you look at an early issue of Silver Surfer filed in the archive ing a lifetime of work into the relentless production of documents.
of a marvel comics fan, this document will speak to you with the Darboven’s archive originates in personal obsession. Yet, as she
authority of personal obsession. Embodied individuality secularizes writes down potentially endless variations of mathematic calculi
authority. Apart from authority a question that is inevitably raised (like Bismarckzeit, 1978) or transcribes verse after verse of an epic
by the archive is the problem of capacity. How many documents text like the Odyssey (in Homer, Odyssee, 1971–1974), it becomes
can or should an archive hold? And: will the user of the archive be clear that Darboven seeks to transcend the personal. Infinity and
capable of accessing the documents? The main capacities, which totality become the destiny of the work. The recipient understands
the user has to have are interest and time. The archive asks for an in an instant that not only will the time of an exhibition visit never
investment on behalf of its users. They have to invest interest and be sufficient to read all the documents on display, but also that the
spend time in the archive. process of reception will never catch up with the process of produc-
tion. Darboven is always one step ahead on her road to eternity.
The Sublime Archive Moreover, the claim to totality generates authority—even more
It seems that in the art discourse of the late 1980s and early 1990s so if the document you are facing is a transcription of the Odyssey,
the concept of the archive was strongly associated with a debate a text which is an institution in itself in as much as it is considered
about the aesthetics of the sublime and the critique of the subject. to provide a universal explanation of the world and as such is
In the discussion of works by artists such as Christian Boltanski or treated as a part of the universal knowledge (or cultural history) of
Hanne Darboven, the archive was projected as a site of history and mankind. Facing documents of such universal value, the recipient
intertextuality that calls the powers of the individual into question. is bound to experience a feeling of inadequacy. You realize that
you do not know all of the text. But you know you should. It could irrepresentable). So if by proceeding with the universal it becomes
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 191
be argued that Boltanski goes even one step further. In his instal- impossible to focus on the particular, this might be the only, or rath-
lation archives at documenta 8 (1987), he presented a vast number er, the best option if you seek to reformulate a possible relationship
of vintage black and white photographs of unknown individuals on to history. It seems that this was precisely the conclusion that a
display walls made from steel grating, illuminated only by a series series of artists emerging in the early 1990s drew by de-institution-
of small spotlights. You get a clear idea of the impossibility of re- alizing the archive and founding it not on principles of universality
constructing the lives of the anonymous individuals whose photos and totality but on particularity and subjectivity.
are on display. You can not even say if they are dead or alive. Their In this context, the definition of practical archives based on
lives are lost—at least for you. Together these lost lives accumulate specific research projects, which Renée Green has proposed in her
to form the totality of history irretrievably lost. What is more, the work, stands out in terms of the way in which it replaces an aesthet-
anonymity of the material on display is boosted by the fact that ics of the sublime with what could be called a pragmatism of the
the maker of the archive remains anonymous to a degree. Unlike personal. Take for instance Green’s installation Import/Export Funk
Darboven, Boltanski leaves no traces in the archive. The interest he Office (1993). In this work Green documents a particular instance of
has in compiling the archive is nowhere articulated. This anonymity intercultural mediation in the form of a research archive based on
amplifies the impression that the installation stages history as a a case study. The case at hand is the specific form in which Afro-
universal institution with authority. In the face of this institution the American hip-hop music has been received by German cultural critic
recipient is left with a feeling of inadequacy. You know you should Diedrich Diederichsen. The research archive comprises various
know these people, but you know with equal clarity that it is im- “documents” taken from the critic’s personal archive and restaged
possible. You gaze into the abyss of history. A sublime experience in the installation. Four simple metal shelving units are linked to form
associated with a sense of vertigo and powerlessness. a cubicle which visitors can enter to help themselves to various me-
dia on display including books, video- and audiocassettes. On two
Towards a Pragmatism of the Personal TV monitors, videos including interview footage with Diederichsen
This discourse around the historical sublime was certainly justi- and Afro-American hip hop performers can be viewed. The library
fied to a certain degree because it disencouraged the fantasy that is surrounded by other facilities for accessing research materials.
universal mastery of history as a totality was possible (through the There are now (at least) three different aspects in regard to which
paradoxical manoeuvre of invoking the ideas of universality and Green’s installation could be described as defining a pragmatism of
totality only to frustrate the viewer by placing them beyond his or the personal. Firstly, the work portrays the making of history as an
her grasp.) The individual is made aware of the limitations of the embodied practice. It needs people to write history. It is through the
subjective consciousness in the face of history. The problem is that mediation of specific individuals that the history of hip-hop music is
once this point is made it can only be reiterated. You can certainly written (on both sides of the Atlantic). Secondly, the mode in which
fresh up the sublime experience of inadequacy in relation to history the work addresses the viewer may be described as both per-
by gazing into the abyss from time to time. But where does that take sonal and pragmatic. It is personal in the sense that the installation
you in the long run? Any discourse that invokes the universal stops simulates a moment of intersubjective communication. As a viewer
once the universal is invoked (be it a successful representation of the you enter the personal universe of a private collection, maybe to
find the collector himself addressing you in the video interview. describes this participatory mobility as a way of occupying space
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 193
It is pragmatic in the sense that the viewer is transformed into a which is not “sadistic” in the sense that the work does not seek to
user of the work. The documents on display are intended to be control the viewer like a teacher would want to submit his pupil to his
studied. Unlike Darboven or Boltanski, Green does not ask for the lessons. Since both producer and recipient invest interest, the basis
impossible. Since the work focuses on the particular, concentrating upon which information is passed on is that of a shared personal
on particular elements of the work seems adequate. You make a experience. The viewers “tune in” to the research process.
proper use of the archive even if your interaction remains within the The personal emerges as a principle of mediation and coher-
limits of what is pragmatically possible, i.e. read one or two articles ence. The diverse media, materials and documents assembled in
or browse through a book. Getting into greater depth is an option the installation are connected through personal interest in three
but not a prerequisite, since totality is not an issue in the work. 02
different ways: The interest of the critic Diederichsen who emerges
Thirdly and finally, the personal is introduced as a pragmatic motive as a prototypical mediator between cultural discourses. The inter-
for the making of the work. It is not veiled what stake Green has in est Green invests as a mediator between Diederichsen’s collection
the matter. As an Afro-American artist living in Germany, she has an and the public. And finally the interest of the viewer participants
interest in finding out how other Afro-American cultural producers who become mediators in their own right as they establish con-
were seen in this country—an interest facilitated through her per- nections between the materials on display. The subject as mediator
sonal exchange with Diederichsen. emerges as the common thread that establishes the coherence
This emphasis on the personal and pragmatic humanizes the of the work on every level. It is interesting to see how Green has
archive and relativizes its authority. While the sublime archive de- expanded this method in subsequent works by introducing ele-
mands respect for its authority by staging history as an impersonal ments of narrative. In Partially Buried (1996), for instance, the depar-
universal institution, the personal archive allows for a more respect- ture point for the research is a moment where her biography inter-
less contact. You are always free to say you are not interested and sects with America’s recent political history. Green’s mother was a
walk out. If you stay, however, you have to invest interest. By choos- student at Kent State University, Ohio, present on the campus on
ing to interact with the research archive the viewers become interest- May 4, 1970 when during a rally against the US invasion in Cam-
ed users of history. The installation then could be said to manifest a bodia four students were shot by the National Guard. In reaction
politics of articulated interests. Green makes it perfectly clear that her to the event, the date of the rally was later scrawled onto the front
research is motivated by specific interests. The users either return of the work Partially Buried Woodshed by Robert Smithson situ-
this interest or they do not. In any case, the relation between pro- ated on the university campus. The work had been finished only
ducer and recipient is a decidedly unhierarchical encounter between month before the incident and consisted of an old shed onto which one month
interested individuals. It is a situation of give and take. Green her- enough mud had been piled to break its roof as a way to forcefully
self has termed this form of interaction “participatory mobility.” 03
She accelerate the process of its decay. The graffiti transformed the
function of Smithson’s piece from a general reflection on entropy
02
Beatrice von Bismarck has pointed out that in contrast to previous interpretations of the archive Green’s conception
can be understood as a “demand for particularity.” She elaborates: “Unlike in the work of Kabakov, Green
into a specific commemoration of the violent end of a peace rally
produces ‘spaces’ which, according to Michel de Certeau, are defined in contrast to ‘places’ by actions—or more
generally—through a network of mobile elements.” [my translation]. Beatrice von Bismarck, “Arena Archiv,” in (which together with the disaster at the festival of Altamont the
interarchive, Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2002), 118.
03 Renée Green, “Site-Specificity Unbound,” in Springerin IV, no. 1 (1998). same year has subsequently come to symbolize the disillusion of
the hopes of the 1960s). Green’s research resulted primarily in a The Essayistic Installation
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 195
series of videos comprising interviews, essayistic reflections, and Other artists have continued to explore and expand the method of
found footage material. The videos were shown on four monitors in using the installation space as a (both pragmatic and personal) site
a room installation defined by selected elements of 1970s design. for the display of research materials. One interesting example is the
The walls were painted orange, cushions with floral prints, wool installation Short Hills (1999) by Austrian artist Dorit Margreiter. The
carpets, wall hangings with slogans and organically molded plastic work is based on research that Margreiter conducted on the TV view-
chairs were distributed around the room. This obviously constructed ing habits of her Asian-American relatives in New Jersey, the Chang
stage–like scenario nevertheless produced a cozy and comfortable family. The work takes its cue from the fact that the Changs recently
atmosphere inviting visitors to stay, watch the videos or go through built an annex to their house, which serves as a room to watch TV.
a small archive with magazines and (music) records of the time. With the help of partition walls and wooden scaffoldings, Margreiter
Three narratives overlap in the work: personal biography, art constructs a lifesize model of the TV room in the installation. Thus,
history, and collective political history. Many different stories are seeing the work implies entering a model private space. On one
told. The form in which these narratives are organized is not linear wall we find a generic photograph of the Hong Kong skyline. Most
sequence but rather spatial proximity and personal association. It of the installation, however, is taken up by a model landscape with
is the atmosphere, or the mood, generated by the theatrical setting two green plains separated by a river, which is propped up on two
of the installation that creates a moment of coherence by defining sawhorses. A video recorder and beamer as well as a DVD player
the limits of the display. What is in the space is what is available are arranged on this landscape. The films screened on these units
for reflection. All of the props that the viewer needs in order to include interview-footage with Margreiter’s middle-aged aunt, Sandra
engage with the work are on stage. There is no backstage. The Chang, who speaks about the Chinese soap opera that she watches
biographical investment of the artist suggests that connections ex- daily in order to keep some kind of contact with her home country.
ist between the materials on display. The nature of this connection Other interview materials show the teenage cousin, Melissa Chang,
is subject to the viewer’s own investigations. Interestingly, the bi- who elaborates in detail why she prefers the series “Buffy, the Vam-
ography of the artist only serves as a formal guarantee that con- pire Slayer” to “Dawson’s Creek.” Excerpts from the different TV
necting phenomena through personal association and experience programs are on display as well.
is indeed a viable method for gaining historical insights. As a first The work shares certain traits with a sociological research
person narrator who tells a story of her mother, of the massacre at project into the viewing habits of television audiences. It focuses
Kent State, and of the transformation of a work by Smithson, Green on how members of a particular audience (characterized by their
simply relates historic events to the realm of lived experience. The gender and ethnicity) negotiate their own identity in relation to the cli-
perspective of the first person narrator subsequently serves as an chéd identities that daily mainstream soaps and series have to offer
empty form, a vacant position, which the viewers are asked to take. to them. Similar issues might be addressed in an essay in the field of
In the role of the narrator, the viewers have to ask themselves: How 04 In her much quoted essay “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” in October, no. 80 (Spring 1997):
85–110, Miwon Kwon comments on Green’s work and reflects on the role of the artist as narrator-protagonist
would I tell this story? What would my stake in the matter be? The
in general. She suggests that “In some cases, this renewed focus on the artist leads to a hermetic implosion of
(auto)biographical and subjectivist indulgences, and myopic narcissism is misrepresented as self-reflexivity.”
(p. 104). While this is obviously true in general, Kwon does not recognize the potential of a strategy based on
writing of history is progressively personalized and particularized personal identification as a means to criticize both universalist and authoritatively didactic accounts of history
by situating the viewer in a particular position and endowing him or her with a personal responsibility for the writing
as Green puts the viewers in her place and past.04 of history in the case at hand.
cultural studies. So where is the difference between the way in which as it risks error and lack of legitimation. Secondly, Adorno claims
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 197
this sociological issue of identity politics might be processed in an that the essay opposes the logic of continuity ensured by scientific
academic paper and the way in which it is handled in Margreiter’s method by embracing discontinuity. The order in which arguments
installation? First of all, Margreiter follows Green in openly basing and thoughts are presented in an essay is self-consciously contin-
her research on personal interests. Consequently, the legitimation of gent. There is no proposition or conclusion, no deduction or induc-
the work differs fundamentally from that of an academic paper which tion. The essay could potentially end at any given point or continue
(at least pro forma) justifies its claims for truth with recourse to scien- beyond its actual end. It is fascinating to see that Adorno describes
tific objectivity. What is gained by this approach has been described this logic of discontinuity in spatial metaphors. The work of the
above as a stronger involvement of the audience through a politics essayist is to create configuration of related terms. It is not as a
of articulated interests. (The personal mode of address invites view- sequence in time but as a “constructed coexistence” in space, as
ers to invest interest and take on responsibility. At the same time the a “force field” or “mosaic.” As a text, the essay produces insights
authority of the work is relativized, since the encounter between pro- by means of the “interferences between its concepts in the process
ducer and recipient is one between particular individuals.) Secondly, of mental experience” (“durch die Wechselwirkung seiner Begriffe
the linear logic of the scientific paper is broken up. By spreading im Prozess geistiger Erfahrung”).06 Experience becomes the ground
reference material in a space, the installation can be discursive with- upon which the mediation between different elements in a com-
out having to follow the consecutive structure of academic reasoning plex constellation becomes possible. This form of mediation in turn
in which propositions are followed by arguments which lead up to avoids the objectification and commodification brought about by
conclusions. Rather, Margreiter’s installation works like a network of scientific rationality. If you follow this definition of the essay it could
cross-references. Coherence is determined by their configuration in be said to sum up quite clearly what is at stake in the epistemologi-
space and by the atmosphere this space creates. As a viewer, you cal politics of the essayistic installations by Green and Margreiter.
do not follow the steps of a given argumentation. Rather, you enter
the space and tune in to the atmosphere and then move from cross- From Space to Time: Documentary Film and Video in the Art
reference to cross-reference in circular motions. Context
So if the research-based installation contradicts the linear logic Given that a key motive for the spatial display of research material
of the scientific text, could it still be likened to the format of the in installations was the attempt to criticize and find an alternative to
essay? Interestingly, in his essay “Der Essay als Form” Theodor sequential organization and subsequent commodification of history
W. Adorno defines the essay as a medium that does not obey the in linear narratives07, it came as some surprise that in the course
laws of scientific methodology in various regards. 05
First of all, the of the 1990s the documentary video began to enjoy more and more
essay makes no claim to objectivity, since the relationship between 06 Ibid., 18.
07 Philip Rosen argues in his essay “Document and Documentary” (in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov,
the author and the object of reflection is “emphatic”: It is charac- [New York and London: Routledge, 1993], 58–89) that most conventional documentary films are in line with a
hegemonial understanding of Western historiography, since they share the same basic principle of constructing
terized by personal interest articulated in the guise of libidinous history. Rosen argues that this principle is the making of historical meaning through an act of arranging individual
records of particular events (single documents or visual chronicles such as news-images) in a sequential order to
curiosity. Adorno argues that the essay can reveal surprising truths
charge them with meaning: “If shots as indexical traces of past reality may be treated as documents in the
broad sense, documentary can be treated as a conversion from the document. This conversion involves a
synthesizing knowledge claim, by virtue of a sequence that sublates an undoubtable referential field of pastness
into meaning.” (ibid, 71) If the sequence is identified as the key to the conventional logic of historic interpretation,
05 Theodor W. Adorno, “Der Essay als Form,” in Philosophie und Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 5–32. I am it follows that a fundamental critique of the status quo of historiography has to be directed against the principle
indebted to Søren Grammel for pointing this wonderful text out to me. of the sequence.
popularity in the art context as a medium for displaying research space into a space of reflection. Still they rely on its physical dimen-
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 199
results. Since video is a time-based medium, its logic of representa- sions and limits to create a moment of coherence. The diverse ma-
tion is necessarily linear to a certain degree. In the editing, informa- terials on display are linked together through the unity of place and
tion is arranged in sequences. One thing comes after another. It time created within the confines of a stage-like setting. Since video
now seems interesting to see how different artists worked with the and film do not depend on the unified space of the theater stage,
moment of linearity and sequence in the medium of video docu- it is interesting to see whether this medium can be used as a site
mentation. One example that comes to mind is Danish artist Gitte for contesting conventional notions about the space of memory. An
Villesen’s video, Willy as DJ (1995). The piece is an unashamedly interesting example got discussion in this context might be the film,
straightforward recording of the artist’s visit to the home of pension- Legend Coming True (1999, super 8mm film transferred to video, 68
er Willy, who introduces her to his record collection, tells stories he min), by the Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius. The film is an
associates with individual songs, plays some of his favorite music, attempt to address the history of the holocaust in Vilnius. Its pro-
and asks her to dance with him. Although what you see unfolds in logue starts with a black screen. An elderly woman starts speaking
time, it does not follow the laws of a logically structured sequence on the sound track in Russian with a Yiddish accent. It turns out
of organized information. Different things keep happening as we go that she has lived in Vilnius for decades and is one of the very few
along. The aspect the video focuses on is the performative dimen- who survived the elimination of the Jewish ghetto and the murder of
sion of the encounter between the artist and the collector. First the its 20,000 inhabitants. In a ceaseless flow of words, her monologue
dialogue goes back and forth between the person in front and the unfolds. Detailed memories of everyday life are interwoven with an
one behind the camera. We witness not so much an interview but a account of her struggle in the ghetto resistance movement. On the
dynamic exchange between two people in one space, which leads visual level, the film presents only four location shots: an image of
to them performing a foxtrot together. It seems that the dynamic the narrator’s childhood street, an image of her school, one of the
time of social performance replaces the sequential argumentative former ghetto, and one of the marshes where the partisans hid. All
logic of didactic documentary films. In regard to the work by Green shots are taken with a static camera set to record one frame every
or Margreiter, it could be argued that Villesen merely goes one step minute during 24 hours. As each shot begins before dawn and
further by documenting on video what a visitor would do in an in- ends after sunset, the screen lights up as the day breaks to expose
stallation archive: perform in relation to the available material. While the view of the location and darkens again when night falls. Blurry
in the installation context the viewer is transformed into a model shadows are the only trace of people passing by.
recipient exemplifying the possibility of an active engagement with Throughout the film the narrator’s face is never shown. The
particularized histories, along similar lines, Villesen stages a model images of Legend coming True are only deserted stage sets in
scenario of two individuals performing freely in a particular archive which the voice of the narrator resonates. It is somewhere in be-
founded on personal interests and investments. tween the audible narration and the visible sites that history is
A further interesting aspect of the use of documentary film as brought to life by the imagination of the viewer. The discontinuous
a means to display research material is the question of how the cin- cinematic space created through the technique of montage dis-
ematic space of video and film can be related to the space of the rupts the belief in the possibility of mapping history onto consistent
archive. The installation discussed above transforms the exhibition coordinates. Where then is the site of history? Is it in the mind
and biographical memory of the individual? Or is it engraved in as the possession of its potential owner. The ownership, however,
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 201
the factual existence of physical places, in architecture as a silent has to be enforced and ensured by other means, through legal
witness? Narkevičius’ film seems to suggest that it is neither here verdicts, brute force, or architecture, for instance.)
nor there but somewhere in between—in a third space emerging in Curiously, photographers always remain alien to the site of
the rupture between the visible and the audible, personal memory the shot. Even if they happen to own or be familiar with the place
and collective history, fact and fiction, a space that can only be (e.g. the family home), the act of taking the photograph turns them
mapped in the course of a performative effort of crossing it again into visitors, or even tourists on their own premises. No matter how
and again on different trajectories guided by different interests. It close a photograph comes to the space it records, the interaction
seems that, paradoxically, a time-based medium like documentary between the photographer and the space always resembles the act
video or film offers interesting possibilities for dissecting notions of scratching on a solid surface. On the one hand the look through
about the space of memory. It is from the cracks in the space the viewfinder corresponds to or even reinforces the position of the
of the archive opened up by the technique of cinematic montage individual on the site of the shot, since it is in accordance with his
that maybe another critically refined definition of how to display or her specific point of view from which the photograph is taken.
research may emerge. On the other hand, the look through the viewfinder alienates the
subject from the object he or she records. Paradoxically, the view
On the Site of Photography of the site of the photograph is subjectified through the choice of a
While the space of the archive forms a coherent whole and time particular perspective, while it is simultaneously objectified through
in film is organized as a structured continuum, space and time are the recording apparatus, which is put in-between the viewer and
fragmented in photography. A photograph can only show a seg- the viewed.
ment of space and a moment in time. It has to break down totalities Undoubtedly, photography owns its own time. The split second
into details. Moreover, the photograph cannot “own” the space it it captures, however, does not hold the same promise as the contin-
depicts in the same way in which the archive owns its own space uum of passing time that film can record. By virtue of this property,
by physically encompassing it. The space of the archive is inside film generates the powerful illusion that it can make change visible
its walls while the space a photograph shows always remains out- and show history in motion. Photography, on the contrary, has to
side the image. Although the photograph testifies to the physical wait for the lucky moment when history chooses to freeze in an al-
presence of the photographer (or at least the camera) on the site legorical pose. One body, one bullet, one jerky move photographed
where the photograph is taken, the claim the photograph stakes in midair by pure coincidence has to stand in for a war which
on the site is relatively weak. The photograph does not absorb the lasted years. In regard to the fragmentary nature of the time that
site, it does not “take” the space—neither in the military sense that the photograph captures, you could argue that not only the space
possession is taken of a contested site through the erection of a but also the moment photography records is outside the image. It
flag and the construction of fortifications, nor in the literal sense can only point to but never positively visualize ongoing processes
that the space or parts of it are taken, transported or dislocated to in a temporal continuum. Moreover, the conditions under which a
another place. (A photograph can be taken in preparation for such photograph is interpreted are also marked by their precarious rela-
manoeuvres. A site might be photographed in order to be identified tion to time. Basically, the photograph safeguards reality as material
that might be of possible importance. The actual evaluation of the pirical data awaiting interpretation. This is the truly radical way in
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 203
significance of the photograph, however, is put off until a later date. which photography is dispossessed of its own time. In the temporal
entweder: „under which a At the time of the recording you cannot tell whether the photo is a economy of interpretation the process in which a photograph is
photograph...“ oder „under hit or a miss. In order to find this out, you have to wait for the nega- subjected to reevaluation and recontextualization is open–ended.
which photography...“ tive to be developed. On the basis of the contact print you then This instability of meaning and unclear informational status are
have to decide again which shot to keep and develop further and what make the relation of photography to the archive precarious—
which shot to abandon. Polaroid and digital photography has short- such a photograph is not yet a document. It is a record that still has
ened the interval between the recording and the inspection to the to undergo the process of certification, which authenticates it as
few seconds it takes for the image to appear on the paper or the a document. In this process it has to be categorized and filed for
camera’s display. Yet, we still wait anxiously for the moment when future reference. To this end, a caption—and a reference—have to
it is revealed to see how the image has “come out.” This temporal be added to the image as a supplement. (Of course the caption and
logic of postponement, anticipation, and surprise seems essential reference may be wrong, or rather, might be regarded as false by
to the joy of photography. But even if you see the photograph you another archivist at a later date. Thus the cycle of certification starts
can never be entirely certain of its significance or meaning. One over again.) Since the caption cannot be inscribed onto the image
photograph is always a part of a series of many on a film. For each and the reference thus, in a sense, remains exterior to the photo-
one that is chosen (to be developed, kept, displayed, etc.) there graph, its status as an unambiguous piece of information can never
are others which are abandoned. Who knows, maybe the wrong be fully assured. To the extent in which a photograph is an empirical,
image was picked and the truly important one is still undeveloped, or if you will “indexical” recording, it always remains in need of inter-
because no one realized its significance as a negative? pretation and cannot be converted into certified data once and for
Moreover, the photograph can never say what it shows. It can all. Philip Rosen claims that this “relatively unbridled indexicality”09
never become an unambiguous piece of information, since the does indeed constitute a subversive threat to any organized form
meaning of what is shown remains open for debate. In this sense of documentary representation, even more so because of the sheer
Philip Rosen writes (in relation to the historic example of an NBC quantity of photographic and filmic material which is recorded and
news program in which the first transmission of pictures of the distributed every day without further certification. Organized forms
assassination of John F. Kennedy prompted a hectic outburst of of documentary practice, Rosen argues, seek to generate historical
commentaries by anchorman Bill Ryan): “The image emerges as meaning by imposing structure and sequence on the amorphous
insufficient in itself. It must immediately be explained, sense must mass of indexical material. A central concern of structured docu-
be made, the very shape of the image requires verbal explana- mentation can thus be understood to be the attempt to counter and
tion and pinpointing.”08 But unlike documentary film, a photograph control the “dispersive threats from the massive distributability of
cannot contain its own commentary. Interpretation can never be indexicalized ‘realities’.”10
successfully, that is conclusively, inscribed into a photograph. To On account of the intrinsic properties of the medium, photography
an extent, interpretation always remains external to the photograph paradoxically constitutes both an aid and an obstacle for the docu-
in the sense that the photograph always retains the status of em-
09 Ibid., 64.
08 Ibid., 62. 10 Ibid., 65.
mentary project to make a claim upon reality. Its capacity to produce however, Rosler’s work can equally be read as a plea for the in-
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 205
indexical evidence turns photography into a powerful tool. It can nocence of the photograph. After all, it only shows what it shows.
show what is there. At the same time, it is entirely powerless. It The interpretation which converts the image into a stereotype is
can neither take hold of a place nor fix meaning in the temporal quite obviously based on references which are external to the im-
economy of (re-)interpretation. On the one hand, the powers of the age. The captions to the image are written on a different piece of
photograph boost the promise of the documentary project to “touch paper. So once the bias has been exposed and denounced, what
the real.” On the other hand, the obvious limitations of photography remains is the laconic indexicality of the photos. They show a site.
are a constant reminder of the futility of the attempt to bridge the They document in detail what the house fronts along the Bowery
gap between representation and reality. Precisely because of this look like. Nothing more, nothing less.
ambivalence, photography offers itself as medium for a performative Rosler’s critique is performative in the sense that the disman-
critique, that is, for a practice which criticizes the logic of a medium tling of the documentary claim for truth is part of the experience of
in the process of using it. To practice a performative critique of the a documentary work. Critical reflection unfolds in the process of en-
documentary project would mean to make a statement about reality countering the work. First you see the photographs in accordance
by taking its picture and reflect on this very operation by exposing with the suggested interpretation. Then you see the interpretation
the modalities of photographic representation—in one go. It is like apart from the images and understand it as a bias. Finally you see
taking a chance and calculating your chances at the same time. the images apart from their interpretation and perceive them as
A classic example for this kind of approach would be Martha pure indices. Yet, since text and image are integral parts of one
Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1975). work, to regard one apart from the other is only possible through
The work consists of a series of location shots of the Bowery, a a temporal suspension of a perception of the work as a coherent
street in lower Manhattan, which used to be considered to be part whole. Once you look at image and text together again, however,
of a rough area. The photographs show house fronts and stretches the cycle starts all over. Criticism is not a given, but is a result of
of pavement, but no people. The photos are presented together repeatedly undergoing the experience of the work. Moreover, and
with white paper cards on which derogatory names for homeless importantly so, Rosler’s critique is performative in the sense that
people are printed, such as “alcoholic, barrelhouse bum, wino, etc.” her criticism of the documentary method is articulated in the pro-
If you read them as captions, the words name what you do not see cess of putting it to work. Her open skepticism in relation to the
but would expect to see in the photographs. The effect of the com- form of the documentation does not make her refrain from realizing
bination of photograph and caption is paradox: On the one hand this very documentation. She engages with her subject by making
the work denounces the promise of the photograph to show the a statement about the Bowery—about what it looks like and how
real by throwing into relief that you only see what your eyes want we see it. She puts the semantic instability of photography to work
to see. The image becomes an accomplice to a willful delusion. by turning the cyclical structure of reinterpretation into the core
You know the place to be dodgy. This preconception inevitably experience of the work. She approaches a site of investigation but
alters your perception. The absence of socially deprived people on does not stake out a claim on it. The subject of her work is the site
the streets makes their presence even more tangible. They fit into as the object of collective perception and prejudice, not her site,
the picture, so you add them into the picture. On the other hand, although she personally engages with it.
The Documentary Discourse as a Field of Multiple Practices of their representation in a responsible, critical, or otherwise chal-
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 207
That an essay discussing the documentary approach in the context lenging way. In this sense, the discourse on documentary practice
of art practice is bound to meander from one medium to another gains its consistence and coherence on the grounds of a shared
seems significant in itself. It shows that documentary practice in art intuition of what is at stake in a contemporary critical discussion of
is neither framed as a specific genre nor associated with one par- documentary representations. Seen from this perspective, the field
ticular medium alone. Instead, the discourse of the documentary of documentary practices in art is much more then just a contingent
approach in art encompasses a multiplicity of practices developed array of diverse artistic approaches.
in different media. The forms of documentary practice range from Based on the criteria provided by a shared critical sensibility,
archival displays and essayistic installations to photography as the multiplicity of practices can actually be understood and appreci-
well, as film and video works realized in different formats (includ- ated as a quickly evolving and highly differentiated field of discourse
ing short and full-length films or continuous loops—presented in that asks for and allows for the critical comparison of different con-
single or multi-channel projections or installations with monitor ar- ceptual aesthetics. What makes this discourse fascinating is that it
rangements). With the increased interest in this discourse in recent thrives both on the urgent desire to represent specific realities and
years, the field of documentary practice has not only expanded on a critical alertness to the power structures and ideologies that
but continually become more diverse. In the light of this diversity govern such representations. This critical awareness implies a cat-
it might seem questionable whether it is justified at all to speak of egorical analysis of these structures and ideologies. Yet, documen-
documentary practice in art as a consistent discourse or coherent tary practices take a decisive step beyond categorical criticism by
field of practice. Yet, even though the notion of genre may no lon- challenging the laws of representation in the process of producing
ger serve as a common denominator for these diverse practices, representations. In this sense the increased interest in the produc-
what in fact links these practices—and therefore allows them to be tion and discussion of documentary work in the expanded field
discussed on the grounds of one discourse—is, that the various of contemporary artistic discourse can be understood as a move
practitioners seem to share a common critical sensibility. towards a critique of representation that puts structural analysis to
Parallel to conceptual art, experimental film and critical theory practice in the process of answering to the need to address the
(i.e. media- or cultural studies) have produced since the 1960s a reality of our surroundings.
body of knowledge centered around a fundamental critique of rep- First published entitled “Research and Display: Transformations of Documentary Prac-
resentation in the media, popular culture, art, and the sciences. tice in Recent Art” as an introduction to Untitled (Experience of Place), ed. Gregor
Neuerer (London: Koenig Books, 2003), 6–22. This version was published in Site no.?,
Today, the set of criteria that this body of knowledge has provided year?
has filtered through into sensibility and intuitions of artists work-
ing within very different media. This sensibility may articulate itself
in the desire to address analogous issues concerning the prob-
lems and potentials of documentary representation. Artists who
are working in different media but who are sensitized to questions
concerning the ideological pitfalls of cultural representations may
in the end face similar problems of how to deal with the subjects
Why can the paradigm of representation not function in politics, nor
Contributors 229
is a critic and lecturer in the Department of Art History, University
College London. The author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (The
MIT Press, 2007), his essays on modern and contemporary art have
appeared in international journals such as Artforum, Grey Room,
October, and Texte zur Kunst. He is currently at work on a new
book, provisionally titled Migrations: Contemporary Art and Global-
ization, which will investigate the relationship of contemporary art to
the experience of social dislocation and political crisis.
Okwui Enwezor
is Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Fran-
cisco Art Institute and Adjunct Curator at International Center of
Photography. He is a curator, writer, and critic, and served as artis-
tic director of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, documenta 11, 2nd
Seville Biennale, and 7th Gwangju Biennale. He is the editor and
publisher of Nka. Journal of Contemporary African Art published at
Africana Studies Center, Cornell University, Ithaca.
Carles Guerra
is associate professor of Contemporary Art at the Universitat Pompeu
Fabra, Barcelona. He is also an artist and art critic. He has curated
numerous exhibits, including: Art & Language in Practice; After the
News. Postmedia Documentary Practices; The Invisible Insurrection
of One Million Minds; Situation Cinema. A Retrospective of Joaquín
Jordá’s Films; B Zone. On the Margins of Europe; Self-sufficient as
a Painter. A Retrospective of Peter Weiss’ Films; and This is not an
exhibition. He is producer of a video interview with Toni Negri, N for
Negri, is author of Allan Sekula speaks with Carles Guerra and is
editor of the Spanish translation of Art & Language’s Writings. He is
member of the editorial board of Cultura/s, the weekly supplement
published by the newspaper La Vanguardia (Barcelona).
Vít Havránek Maria Lind
Contributors 230
Contributors 231
is a theoretician and organizer based in Prague. Since 2002, he has was born in Stockholm in 1966. Since January 2008, she has been
been working as a project leader of the initiative for contemporary director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard
art tranzit (tranzit.org), and he has been director of tranzitdisplay, a College. From 2005–2007, she was the director of Iaspis in Stock-
resource center for contemporary art, since 2007. He has worked holm. She was the director of Kunstverein München from 2002–
as a curator for the Municipal Gallery and the National Gallery in 2004, where together with a curatorial team she ran a program that
Prague. He is a lecturer in contemporary art at the Academy of involved artists such as Deimantas Narkevicius, Oda Projesi, Bojan
Applied Arts, Prague. He has curated and co-curated numerous Sarcevic, Philippe Parreno, and Marion von Osten. From 1997–2001,
exhibitions, including: A CDEFGHIJK MNOP STUV Z, part of Societe she was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and in 1998, co-
Anonyme, Le Plateau, Paris; tranzit–Auditorium, Stage Backstage, curator of Manifesta 2. She has contributed widely to magazines
Frankfurter Kunstverein; I, a series of exhibitions in three acts, Se- and to numerous catalogues and other publications. She is the
cession Vienna, Futura Prague, tranzit workshops Bratislava. He has co-editor of the recent books Curating with Light Luggage and Col-
contributed to numerous catalogues and art magazines (springerin, lected Newsletter (Revolver – Archiv für aktuelle Kunst), Taking the
Artist, Flash Art) and is the editor of tranzit series (JRP Ringier) and Matter into Common Hands: Collaborative Practices in Contempo-
The Need to Document. rary Art (Blackdog Publishing), as well as the report European Cul-
tural Policies 2015. She has been teaching and lecturing at different
Stefan Jonsson art schools since the early 1990s.
is senior cultural critic at Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s major newspaper,
and associate professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University College Olivier Lugon
in Stockholm. A graduate of the Program in Literature at Duke Univer- is an art historian and professor at Lausanne University (film history
sity, he was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles department). The focus of his research is on German and American
from 1998-2000 and was visiting professor at University of Michigan photography of the inter-war years, the documentary, and exhibi-
in 2006. His most recent book is A Brief History of the Masses. Three tion design. Among his publications are La Photographie en Al-
Revolutions, 1789, 1889, 1989 (Columbia University Press, 2008). lemagne. Anthologie de textes, 1919–1939 (Nîmes 1997); Le Style
documentaire. D’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920–1945 (Paris
Maurizio Lazzarato 2002); “L’esthétique du document. Le réel sous toutes ses formes
is an independent sociologist, social theorist, and philosopher. He (1890–2000),” in L’Art de la photographie, ed. André Gunthert and
is also a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes. Michel Poivert (Paris 2007); “‘Photo-Inflation’: Image profusion in
He lives and works in Paris, where he is doing research on im- German photography,” History of Photography (Fall 2008).
material work, the explosion of the wage system, and the ontology
of work, cognitive capitalism, and “post-socialist” movements. He Jean-Pierre Rehm
also writes on cinema, video, and the new technologies for the pro- has taught film and art history in various art schools and has
duction of images. Recent publications include Videophilosophie worked for the French Ministry of Culture for several years. He is
(b_books, 2002). still in charge of the post-graduate program in Lyon National Art
School (ENBAL). As an art and film critic, he writes in many reviews,
Contributors 232
catalogues, and books. He belongs to the editorial board of Les Ca-
hiers du Cinéma. He has curated contemporary art shows in France
and abroad, and he has headed the International Documentary Film
Festival of Marseille (FIDMarseille) since 2001.
Hito Steyerl
is a filmmaker, author, and guest professor for experimental media
creation at the University of Arts, Berlin. She has exhibited in many
international shows including Manifesta 5, documenta 12, 7th
Shanghai Biennial, 3rd Berlin Biennial, and 2nd Seville Biennial and
at film festivals including Rotterdam International film festival, IDFA
Amsterdam, Hot Docs Vancouver, and Docx Copenhagen, among
others. She is the author of Die Farbe der Wahrheit–Dokumentaris-
mus im Kunstbereich (Vienna: Turia und Kant 2008).
Jan Verwoert
is an art historian and critic living in Berlin and is a contributing editor
of frieze. He writes, among others, for Afterall and Metropolis M.
He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and at the Royal
College of Art in London. His book Bas Jan Ader—In Search of the
Miraculous was published in 2006 by Afterall Books/MIT Press.
Page 35
Imprint 237
The Greenroom
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art
The Greenroom exhibition and accompanying publication have been made possi- The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) is an exhibition, edu-
ble with support from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, The Robert cation, and research center dedicated to the study of art and curatorial practices
Mapplethorpe Foundation, Marieluise Hessel, and the Patrons, Supporters, and Friends from the 1960s to the present day. In addition to the CCS Galleries and the Hessel
of the Center for Curatorial Studies. Museum of Art, CCS Bard houses the Marieluise Hessel Collection of over 2,000
contemporary works, as well as an extensive library and curatorial archive. The
Co–published by Sternberg Press and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College Center’s two-year graduate program in curatorial studies is specifically designed to
deepen students’ understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curating
© 2008 the authors, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Sternberg Press contemporary art. Exhibitions are presented year-round in the CCS Galleries and
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Hessel Museum of Art, providing students with the opportunity to work with world-
renowned artists and curators. The exhibition program and the collection also serve
Editors: Maria Lind, Hito Steyerl as the basis for a wide-range of public programs and activities exploring art and its
role in contemporary society.
Translators: Aileen Derieg (Lazzarato), Discobole (Guerra), Charly Hultén (Jonsson)
Proofreading: Penelope Eifrig Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies
Design: Surface, Berlin/Frankfurt am Main, Miriam Rech, Markus Weisbeck Marc S. Lipschultz, Chairman
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ISBN 978-1-933128-53-5 Lori Chemla
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Sternberg Press Martin Eisenberg
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www.sternberg-press.com Audrey Irmas
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