Maria Lind - Hito Steyerl - The Green Room #1 - Reconsidering The Documentary and Contemporary Art-Sternberg Press (2008)

Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1
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Foreword
Tom Eccles 6
Introduction
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art
Maria Lind and Hito Steyer! 10
"Documentary": Authority and Ambiguities

Olivier Lugon 28
The Plays of the Witnesses

Jean-Pierre Rehm 38
Kicking the Cat

On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth
Jorg Heiser 48
Documentary/Verit6
Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of "Truth" in Contemporary Art
Okwui Enwezor 62
Life Full of Holes

T. J. Demos 104
The Documentary
Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries
Vit Havranek 128
Negatives of Europe
Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies
Carles Guerra 144
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism

The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization
Stefan Jonsson 166
Research and Display

Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art
Jan Verwoert 188
Struggle, Event, Media

Maurizio Lazzarato 212
A Language of Practice
Hito Steyer! 224
Contributors and Photo Credits 232
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Digitized by Google UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
"The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contem-
porary Art" is a long-term research project on "the documentary."
The 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 heritage of documentary practices in contemporary art, in
relation to the history of film, documentary photography, and tele-
vision 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 Hite
Steyerl. A reference group, consisting of the artists Petra Bauer,
Matthew Buckingham, Carles Guerra, Walid Raad, and Hite Steyerl
has contributed to the research project in various ways. The re-
search 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 Documen-
tary and Contemporary Art" is a "greenroom for documentary
practices," 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
before" 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,
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• research, and public programming opportunities. "The Greenroom:
l! Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art," is the
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most 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
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The double bind is strong: on the one hand documentary images ..
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practices have made up one of the most significant tendencies

within art during the last two decades. Traditional documentary
photography and film have been reinvented and reinvigorated
by merging with traditions such as video, performance, and con-
ceptual art. Recent 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 reportages, 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 lV to performance and interven-
tionist art. Although 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 parts of the world, the discussion of the phenomenon is
01 See Hilo Steyen, •Die dokumentarische Unschiirferelation," in Die Fsrbe der Wshrheit (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 Yoo: 2008; "No More Reality." BELEF. Belgrade 2006; "Slowty Learning to Survive
the Desire to Simplify: A Symposium on Critical Documents." laspis, Stockholm 2006; "The Need to Document."
various locations. 2005; "After the Fact." Martin-Gropius Bau, Bertin 2005; ' Experiments with TMh." The Fabric
Worlcshop and Museum. Philadelphia 2004--05; "True Stories." Witte de With, Rotterdam, January-March 2003;
"Ficeions documentals," Fundeci6 ·1a Caixa", Barcelona 2003; ·tt·s Hard to Touch the Real." Kunstverein Miinchen
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 an
since 2000.
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still mostly confined to scattered texts in various catalogues and
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journals.02 This anthology seeks to overcome this dispersion and
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Historically, the documentary is a form that emerges in a state of
crisis: it is no coincidence that many documentary art works remind
us of quests for suitable forms and provide methods for the dis-
cussion of social content. They often aim to mirror the effects of
past or recent political and economic upheaval. Their inclusion into
the art field historically marks a moment of social and political crisis,
as was the case with the early years of Soviet communism with
its debates about productivism and factography, the Great Depres-
sion of the 1930s in the US and reformist documentary photography,
anti-colonial movements and the birth of the film essay, the counter-
hegemonial movements of the 1960s and '70s, and nouvelle vague
documentary as well as conceptualist documentation.
Yet the inclusion of documentary modes in the art field has also
always been strongly contested. In the wake of modernist art history,
documentary practices have traditionally been understood as the
opposite of art, its alter ego.03 This reading also affects contemporary
articulations of the documentary, where its status as art remains as
disputed as ever.
An unlikely precursor of modernist art historian Clement
Greenberg's well-known contempt for the documentary is Walter
Benjamin, who in a little noted passage of "EinbahnstraBe" (One-
way street), juxtaposes art and document as two oppositions.04
Benjamin, for all his usual sophistication, goes so far as to describe
the document as the preoccupation of "primitive man." He probably
wrote this in ignorance of the Soviet discussions about documentary
practices, which around 1925-the year Benjamin wrote these
03 One of these recent debates around the inclusion of documentary into documenta 11 is traced in detail in
Olcwui Enwezor's text.
04 Watter Benjamin: ·13 Theses against Snobs." in Selecred Writings. \k>I. , (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2(XX)), 469. This hint is owed to Sophie Hamacher, who analyzed Benjamin's text in detail in an unpublished
masters thesis at the Whitney Independent Study Program: "Art, Document. Witness: 2004.

aphorisms-displayed a fascinating degree of sophistication. "...
Throughout the 1920s, heated debates about the documentary and ~
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Since then, the repeated appearance of documentary forms

within the art field (as well as its subsequent marginalization in
times of conservative rollback) is accompanied by disagreements
about its status as art. Its alleged non-artistic nature was even
strategically exploited by some early conceptualists in order to
distance themselves from worn-out aesthetic standards.06 In this
era, documentary practices have become an updated example of
various primitivisms constructed from within the art field which
serve to renew it, by tapping into its self-imagined UOther."09 From
the late 1960s until today, the incursion of documentary modes
into performance and conceptual art has also marked the period
during which we have witnessed the impact of mass media and
the information age on the art field, and documentary practices
negotiate an unstable relationship between the two. Information
has become an important concern of critical art practices: it is
understood as a form of critique and a site of intervention.10 Artists
05 For an overview of some of these debates see October 118, "Soviet Factography-A Special Issue· (Fall 2006).
06 Walter Benjamin: "The Author as Producer." in New Left Review 1162 (July/August 1970).
07 See Olivier Lugon. pages 28-37 in this volume.
08 See Lucy Soutter. "The Photographic Idea: Reconsidering Conceptual Photography." in Afterimage (March-April
1999).
09 See John Roberts. "Photography, lconophobia and the Ruins of Conceptual An." in The Impossible Document:
Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966-1976, ed. John Robens (London: Camerawork. 1997), 7-46.
10 See Sabeth Buchmann. "Under the Sign of Labor." in Art after Conceprual Art. ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth
Buchmann (Gambridge, MA: The M IT Press, 2006), 179-196.
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working in the wake of representational critique, feminist theory,
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of authenticity.
The era of neoliberal globalization after 1989 with its enormous
upheavals has spawned its own range of documentary modes,
which despite their huge formal differences attest to a shared desire
to "touch the real" 11 and to create arenas of debate within an incre-
asingly privatized and fragmented global environment. 12
The recent fragmentation of the social also impacts the site of
documentary production itself. The massive transformations within
the multiple modes of the documentary are intrinsically connected
to the ambivalent transitions of globalization. 13 Due to the increasing
privatization of media and cuts in public funding, experimental
documentary production has again been increasingly pushed into
the art field. 14 The art field has become a laboratory for the develop-
ment of new documentary expressions. According to Bill Nichols,
this is a function it has held since the inception of documentary film:
the formal experiments of the artistic avant-gardes set the standards
for representation of reality by mass media.15
Historically, the overlap between documentary practices and
the art field has produced heated debate. As Olivier Lugon cogently
remarks in his introductory text "'Documentary': Authority and
Ambiguities, "18 historical documentary modes were primarily forged
within the art field, but repeatedly denied any part in it. They were
perceived as being "beyond art, yet very much a part of it." 17
11 "It's hard to touch the real" is a quote by documentary filmmaker Johan van der Keuken. It was also used by
the Kunstverein M unchen for a two year-long screening series, two festivals and an archive which traveled to a
number of venues in Europe, including Kunstverein Graz. 2006.
12 See Jan Erik Lundstrom, "After the Fact." in A~sr th8 Fact. catalogue, 1st Bertin Photography Festival, 2006. 11.
13 See Okwui Enwezor. pages 62-102 in this volume.
14 See Hito Steyer1, pages 224-231 in this volume.
15 See Stefan Jonsson, pages 166-186 in this volume.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.

This paradox leads to the successive inclusion and exclusion of ...
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documentary forms from the field of art and opens up a zone of

conflict in which different ideas of art (and its relation to life) clash
and transform each other. This conflict reflects the tension between
the two different tendencies inherent in documentary creation: the
desire to both let the subject express itself without much interference
and yet on the aesthetic level to turn it into something unique. But
this tension also creates the drive of a documentary quest for ~
ever more authentic representations of the real.

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True Life
Notions of the real or true life have haunted documentary expression
since its early days. In the early 1920s, Dziga Vertov triumphantly
exclaimed: "Long live life, as it is!" 18 While this slogan seems to be
underlining the importance of the real and authentic life, it also
paradoxically introduces doubts about its nature. Why does Vertov
have to reassure us this life is really "as it is"? Vertov's exclamation,
as assertive as it sounds, also informs us about the suspicion
that haunts the notion of real life. Could there be another life as well,
one which is essentially alienated, corrupted, and treacherous?
Or does Vertov's slogan rather embody what Alain Badiou called the
. "passion of the real" 19 during the 20th century: a violent desire to
unmask the truth and to cleanse reality from all appearances? As
Badiou has shown, this desire is intrinsically paranoid: it realizes
itself as a politics of suspicion. The passion for the real calls for a
renewed purge of reality from all things deemed inauthentic, a
desire which spills over into reality and catalyses purges and a
politics of "cleansing." The myth of documentary authenticity is
thus ambivalent; while, on the one hand, it testifies to a certain
fidelity to the material world, it also projects profound anxieties
about its own status onto the Other. Modernity, whose offspring is
documentary expression, appears Janus-faced in the prism of its
18 For an extended discussion about Vertov and the documentary's relation to life, see Hito Steyer1 "Kunst oder
Leben." in Die Farbe der Wahrheft (Vienna: Turia und Kant, 2008). 93-100.
19 Alain Badiou. The Century (Cambridge: Polity Press. 2007).

•... documentary reflection: if documentary works are historically imbued
with the spirit of progress, enlightenment, and education, they
not only record but sometimes also actively contribute to the
catastrophic failure in realizing those ideals.
The crisis of modernity also impacts on the documentary's
traditional truth claims. While the notion of a document is historically
tied to ideas of certitude and confirmation and is primarily used
in the legal realm, this certitude has all but vanished from contem-
porary consciousness. The experiences of the 20th century, its
large-scale enterprises of propaganda and disinformation, have
created an attitude, which could be called habitual distrust as
well as advanced media literacy. Documentary modes still appeal
to institutional modes of power / knowledge and cite their authority,
but the effect is rather a perpetual doubt; a blurred and agitated
documentary uncertainty, which paradoxically is extremely pertinent
as an image of our times.20 It is precisely the failure of the docu-
mentary to fulfill its pretense to certainty, which ultimately does
justice to an intransparent and dubious contemporary reality. 21 The
same lack of certainty applies to theoretical definitions of the
"documentary."22 At the same time, this vagueness has actually
contributed to the success and to the dissemination of docu-
mentary practices. Instead of denying this uncertainty, one should
instead acknowledge its productive effects.23 Perhaps this uncer-
tainty has also made documentary practices one of the most in-
novative forms of contemporary art. The documentary's ambivalent
nature, hovering between art and non-art, has contributed to creating
new zones of entanglement between the aesthetic and the ethic,
between artifice and authenticity, between fiction and fact, between
documentary power and documentary potential, and between art
and its social, political, and economic conditions.24
20 See Hito Steyer!, "Die dokumentarisc he Unscharterelation: in Die Farbe der Wahrheit (Vienna: Turia und Kant.
2008), 15.
21 Ibid.
22 See Lugon, page 29 in this volume.
23 Ibid.
24 See Okwui Enwezor, pages 62- 102 in this volume.
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Communicating Vessels .....
This publication, containing eleven essays written between 2003 and ~
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film festival. This is yet another sign of how concerns about docu-
mentary practices not only permeate the world of contemporary art
but are also intrinsically interdisciplinary.
The first three texts explore the various impasse of documentary
representation and its conflictual relation to various definitions of
art. In the first text of this volume, Olivier Lugon gives us a historical
perspective on the connection between documentary practices and
theories and the art field. While the meaning of "documentary" has
shifted historically, the art field's reaction has also turned out to be
unstable, torn as it was between rejection and embrace. But docu-
mentary practices are also tilled with internal contradictions. The
basic tension within documentary forms is the conflict between arti-
fice and authenticity. On the one hand, documentary practices ex-
press the desire to get rid of the author or creator. On the other, this
desire can create as in the work of Walker Evans an even stronger
aesthetic impact, because the resulting images seem stripped from
any formal affectation. This paradox cannot be reconciled; it defines
the dynamic nature of documentary representation.
In Jean-Pierre Rehm's text, "The Plays of the Witnesses,"25
the paradoxes of documentary representation are further explored.
25 See Jean-Pierre Rehm, pages 38-4 7 in this volume.

At its core are a bundle of permanent discrepancies: although the
documentary often parades as a mere reflection of reality, it obeys
and carefully executes coded narrative systems.28 To simply view
documentary forms as transparent rip-offs of reality means denying
that they "only contain opacity and thickness and that they are in
themselves objects of study, document among documents, link in
a process of interpretation offered to the political freedom of the
spectator."27 Quoting Michel Foucault, Rehm elucidates the function
of documentary information: to identify, to report what is known
and convenient, to report the past and the future in a desired present
without consequence or consistency, in order to obtain a confir-
mation of all initial hypotheses. Conventional information is thus a
process of subjection and coerced obedience. A documentary
critique of this information could consist in the documentary pro-
duction of reality rather than its mimetic or naturalistic reproduction:
an entirely manufactured process, which blends fiction and docu-
mentary. Thus, documentary practices are characterized by risk,
the risk of moving in-between and beyond the sterile opposition of
simultaneously recording and making up reality.
A completely different approach is taken by Jorg Heiser, who
explores the link between fact, truth, and fiction. His close reading
of the work Mandarin Ducks by artists Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de
Rooij poses the question of the documentary from the perspective
of its supposed Other: fiction. According to Heiser, this piece points
to the core of the documentary problem precisely because it is
entirely fictional: it begs the question of truth. Heiser expresses his
dissatisfaction with constructivist models of documentary truth.
He grounds his debate in the ethic necessity to distinguish facts
from fiction or to disentangle historical events from their revisionist
distortion and describes Foucault's often-cited model of a politics
of truth as a tautology in which power and truth are simply equated
with each other. By contrasting this model with Jurgen Habermas'
28 See page 40 of the text.

27 See pages 40-41 of the text.
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The next section locates concerns about the documentary and
art in the contemporary political and social context: the massive j
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Human Rights, and the Figure of 'Truth' in Contemporary Art,"
Okwui Enwezor firmly anchors most of the traditional concerns
about the relation of art and documentary in the present; he
analyzes the contemporary condition of documentary forms within
the aporias of globalization. Crafted as a response to the criticism
of the documentary character of documenta 11, his text is a reflection
on the general dimension of the documentary in a world charac-
terized by two alternate endings of modernism: 1989 and 9/ 11.
According to Enwezor, documentary art works condense a
contemporary political and social constellation characterized by the
"unhomeliness" of globalization, migration, and mobility, as well
as by the catastrophic consequences of these processes. This
configuration gives rise to a new relation of ethics and aesthetics
mediated by a specific articulation of the documentary, which
Enwezor calls verite (in contrast to the more conventional mode of
"documentary"). The mode of verite doesn't confront the spectator
with non-negotiable facts, as more conventional documentary does.
Instead, it creates a possible space for an ethical encounter
between the spectator and the other, a space in which truth is not
an abstracted mot d'ordre, but instead, as Alain Badiou proposes,
a truth process. As verite, the documentary is not only mimetic but
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also analytic. It is not truth, but the fidelity to truth, that the docu-
mentary ceaselessly constructs and deconstructs. This version of
documentary, embodied by works from authors like Allan Sekula,
Chantal Akerman, Walid Raad, or the Black Audio Film Collective,
combines reflexivity with an ethical stance. It is also firmly located
within the ethical necessities of the present: How do we look at
the pain of the other without lapsing into voyeurism? Why do we
still have to answer to his or her gaze? How do we imagine a global
public sphere when there are no democratic institutions to back
it? Enwezor insists on the importance of the term "human rights"
to enable such communication and create a common ground within
an unevenly globalizing world. However, as he notes, this term is
also fraught with ambivalence.
This ambivalence is further explored in T. J. Demos' essay
"Life Full of Holes." The failure of the promises of human rights
necessitates a fundamental revision of the relation between politics
and representation. It is no coincidence that the bearer of "human
rights," the refugee deprived of any political representation, came to
metaphorically embody the vicissitudes of globalization. He or
she is the one who inhabits the fissures and gaps between states
and corporations, and is left to the precariousness of a deregulated
global sphere unbound by any rule of law. But if this subject is not
representable in terms of classical political representation, how
does it figure in artistic representation?
Demos argues that the structural absence of bare life from
official representation can nevertheless be captured by documentary
expression. The uncertain status of its subject troubles the image
and creates holes, blurs, and lacunae within the visual field. Docu-
mentary forms are thus suspended between being an instrument
of power and surveillance not only representing but even constitu-
ting bare life such as in the pictures from Abu Ghraib-and on the
other hand undermining the same structures it serves to uphold.
Taking Yto Barrada's and Emily Jacir's work as examples, Demos
shows how the representation of bare life proceeds within the
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ruptures, holes, and fissures within documentary representation. ..
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Absence is the only way to depict the realities of fragmented global

spaces and to portray the fates of people who end up being swal-
lowed by the chasms in between them. But paradoxically, dispersion
and disfiguration can also free the subject from the confines of -0
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produced in this period bears the visual stamp of advertising. In
contrast to this economically very potent yet vacuous form of the
public, the documentary is always grounded in the social positions
of its subject matter. Form and content cannot be separated from
each other-an ethical relation between both is established. This
relation is often probed in relation to the social and economic context
of documentary production itself-the art field. In Hans Haacke's or
Andrea Fraser's work, documents map out the relations of production
within the art field or its institutions. The same can be said about
works by Roman Ondak, Deimantas Narkevicius, and Pawel Althamer.
At the same time, the historical space in some transitional countries
has to be reappropriated because it has fallen prey to a wide-
spread amnesia (or one might add, to privatization and new national
imaginaries). Works such as IRWIN's East Art Map reappropriate
the space of writing art history, while others focus on the subjective
aspect of writing history. The necessity to develop a documentary
methodology, which more often than not incorporates other research
methods, enables documentary forms to trespass not only into
other disciplines but also to transcend a local perspective and to
open up a space characterized by mobility and nomadism.

In Carles Guerra's essay "Negatives of Europe," questions of
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examine this he argues that a "collective pedagogy" is necessary,
a pedagogy in which information and opinion intermingle. The es-
sayist works by Ursula Biemann and Angela Melitopoulos are
quoted as prime examples of how artists might successfully deal
with current conditions of globalization. In The Black Sea Files
and Corridor X the artists investigate transport and communication
infrastructure both the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the
highway route stretching from Greece through ex-Yugoslavia to
Germany-through an intricate play of the visible and the invisible,
the total and the partial. Not unlike montage in film, they are not
documenting reality but rather organising complexity. According to
Guerra, this approach can be seen in light of a general revival of
interest in educational models in contemporary art, with work that
moves comfortably between the academic department and the exhi-
bition space. At the same time he understands it as a critique of
photojournalism and its preference for single images and iconic
power. Instead, this type of work allows for new cognitive possibi-
lities and ways of managing radical plurality. And more importantly,
these practices produce their own events-they do not have to
wait for them to happen.
Media and the Archive

The relation between media and documentary art is the focus of the
following section. The literary critic Stefan Jonsson discusses the
glaring conformism of global mass media in contrast to the simul-
taneous politicization of contemporary art (including literature, film,
and music) of .the last decade and a half. He sees the two as
communicating vessels. Art compensates for the blind spots of
journalism, similar to the claims in the theoretical work of late
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19th-century Marxists Karl Kautsky and Franz Mehring. They showed
how the arts, during certain historical periods, channel information ~
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and experiences, which have no other place in the public debate. In &
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contemporary society, globalized media is the main public arena, C
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and we have to ask what is allowed there. What is considered news- -0
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universal equivalent." This universal equivalent, or leveler, is a well- 0
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owning classes, and it excludes other local characteristics. The tJ)
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called "globalization of culture," in which Jonsson identities three
tendencies: the triumph of American mass culture, the integration
of Western high culture in lifestyles beyond the West, and the
resistance of certain local traditions. Politics, in the sense of mirroring
opinions and following the rituals of day-to-day political affairs, is
nowadays catered to by journalism. At the same time "the political,"
meaning the underlying principles and consequences of political
and economic policies-and the ways people can represent them-
selves and their interest in a public sphere are explored by art.
This leads to a situation where pluritopic interpretations can now
be found almost exclusively in the "public sphere of inbetweenness"
produced by aesthetics and cultural theory rather than in journalism.
This public sphere of inbetweenness is, in Jonsson's understanding,
a fourth tendency, which deals with the conflictual relationships
between the commercialized mass culture, standardized elite culture,
and local resistance. At the core of its pluritopic interpretations
lies a much-needed ambition to challenge worn-out representational
modes.
In his essay Jan Verwoert takes a closer look at the logic of the
archive, particularly within the context of art. Moving from the "subli-
me archive" in the work of Christian Boltanski and Hanne Darboven,
Original from
in which history is encountered in its totality, to the de-institutiona-
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lized and subjective archive in the work of Renee Green, he asks

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is fostered between the work and the viewer in Green's Import/
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Export Funk Offlce, for example, is according to Verwoert also
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present in the essayistic installations of Dorit Margreiter. As with
Adorne's definition of the literary essay, the essayist installation
privileges associatively arranged statements, filtering them through
subjective experience rather than promoting linear progress and
rational arguments. This spatio-temporal experience can also take
place in a video such as Gitte Villesen's Willy as DJ, where the artist
and her collaborator perform in front of the camera in relation to
available material. Using the filmic work of Deimantas Narkevicius
as an example, he suggests that cinematic montage can create
gaps in the archive, which allow for refined attempts at making re-
search available. Verwoert concludes by arguing, as is the case
with a number of the other authors here, that documentary practices
in contemporary art are neither tied to a genre nor to a medium.
They are both expanding and diversifying. And yet, there is a
common denominator to the multiplicity of practices: a critical sensi-
bility, which acknowledges the urgency to represent specific realities
at the same time as it confesses to an awareness of the ideologies
and apparatuses governing them.
Documentary PoV18r and Potential

How does documentary theory align itself with contemporary theories
of information capitalism and the cultural industries? How is the
documentary embedded in its social conditions, and how can it work
on transforming them? The last two texts address urgent questions
concerning the material conditions of the documentary. In his
analysis of the expression of contemporary protest movements,
Maurizio Lazzarato breaks with the age-old paradigm of represen-
tation-whether in politics or artistic modes of expression. Referring
to a cultural condition in which corporations and their advertisements

produce a world in which objects and subjects exist, where con-
sumption means belonging to a world, he claims that the way
signs, images, and statements function in contemporary economies
instead contribute to the emergence of the possible as well as to
its realization. A documentary image therefore becomes a catalyst
for a different reality instead of being its representation. He is in-
spired by events in Seattle and collective demonstrations elsewhere,
and to him the slogan of the protesters-"a different world is
possible"-signifies entry to a different intellectual atmosphere, with
different conceptual constellations. To replace the outdated subject-
work relationship, which is the basis of a representational paradigm,
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he proposes the event-multiplicity bind. One advantage is that the 0

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event is an encounter with two aspects: soul and body. It is both e-

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intellectual-emotional and performed, literally. As opposed to the

classical representational paradigm this does not reflect backwards
but projects ahead and creates "possible worlds."
By addressing the contemporary conditions of production within
documentary practice, Hito Steyerl seeks to establish a political
perspective on the documentary that is not only constituted by con-
cerns with representation but also by addressing shared practice.
In her view, experimental contemporary documentary practice not
only serves to create works, but also links and connections be-
tween dispersed digital workers. The space of contemporary ex-
perimental documentary production is peopled by freelancers
and embedded into global databases, p2p networks, and other tile
sharing platforms. This opens up reflections on the conditions of
digital production as well as on the question of copyright and in-
tellectual property. But the volatile networks of experimental do-
cumentary producers could also become new nodes of a public
sphere, which has emancipated itself from the control of both
nation and capital.
In the environment of digital capitalism (and very often also
national fragmentation and "ethnic" strife), the documentary relation
to reality shifts as well. As archives becomes fluid and more and
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more information is available online, conflicts about the intellectual
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social disintegration. But contemporary documentary production
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are the reality.
The Greenroom Project

This publication is part of "The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Doc-
umentary and Contemporary Art," a long-term research project on
"the documentary." The aim of the research project is to investigate
and contextualise these contemporary documentary practices within
current cultural production and to explore their role within main-
stream media and activism. It also aims at situating documentary
practices in contemporary art, in relation to the history of film, doc-
umentary photography and television as well as to video art. The
research project is a collaboration between the Center for Curatorial
Studies, Bard College, and Hito Steyerl. A reference group, con-
sisting of Petra Bauer, Matthew Buckingham, Carles Guerra, Walid
Raad, and Hito Steyerl has been invited to contribute to the research
project in various ways. The research project will run for approximat-
ely 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 from September 27,
2008-February 1, 2009 at the Hessel Museum at CCS Bard. With
all its components the research project is meant to be a "green-
room for documentary practices," comparable to greenrooms at
television stations. There, staff and guests meet before and after
broadcasting and engage in discussions, which tend to be different
from those on stage. Greenrooms are made to relax protocols and
give space to unexpected exchanges, and yet their proximity to
the limelight provides a sense of concentration and rigour. "The
Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary
Art (Part II)" is scheduled for Fall 2010.

Original from
If, today, we wish to have a better understanding of the fluid concept
of udocumentary," there is unfortunately little point in returning to
the past. The word has always encompassed varying images and
attitudes and given rise to contradictory definitions. All that a retro- 'O
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spective of this type reveals is how much the inconstancy of the
term is rooted in its history. No one has ever known with certainty
what the term "documentary" actually entails. When referring to
film, a rough definition seems possible though illusory (roughly
speaking, everything that is not fiction), but it is hard to identify
what would be the opposite of ·documentary" in photography (what
should we call fiction in photography?) and, consequently, the
exact scope of the term. However, the vagueness of the word has
by no means been a drawback. It has contributed to its success
and dissemination, since a very wide range of creators have le-
gitimately succeeded in appropriating the udocumentary." And this
freedom of use has been one reason for its impact and theoretical
efficiency for almost a century.
The one element that the countless definitions have in common
is the very general requirement to respect the subject matter, the
desire to reveal "things as they are," to provide reliable, authentic
information about them, avoiding any embellishment that might alter
the integrity of reality. From then on, viewpoints have diverged at
all levels-whether relating to how a description may adhere to
reality, which subjects are worth recording, and how to use the
gathered material. Nevertheless, three main options are clear: the
encyclopaedic/educational trend, the heritage/conservation line,
and the social/political approach-to which can be added aesthetic
considerations affecting all three, as we shall discover.
The first two options-the educational and the conservational-
most colored the term "documentary" in the first decades of the
twentieth century. At that time in France, the "film documentaire"
referred to a cultural or travel film of an edifying character. In the
field of photography, the incipient debate concerning the term related
to encyclopaedic archiving and inventorying cultural heritage. Of
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course, social reformers and charitable institutions were already
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using photography to arouse public awareness, to denounce urban
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poverty and worker exploitation; however, that usage of images
for combative purposes was not as yet primarily associated with the
category "documentary." This social and political significance came
incontestably to the forefront in the 1930s, and it continues to prevail
today. This semantic shift has been largely prompted by the Anglo-
Saxon influence. In the inter-war years, British and American authors
adopted the French word "documentaire," first in the cinema and
then in photography, turning it into "documentary." They used it to
designate work geared to the non-stage-managed contemporary
world, and social reality in particular. Accordingly, the term acquired
an extremely positive moral and political connotation associated
with the quest for truth and social commitment. Thanks to its transi-
tion into English, the word made its way into the aesthetic debate
and returned to Europe with this added moral value (admittedly con-
tinuing to have a wider connotation in German and French than
its American equivalent).
However, the other interpretations never completely disap-
peared, not even from Anglo-Saxon texts. And so, paradoxically, the
first British theoreticians of the documentary film, John Grierson
and Paul Rotha, did not select a political filmmaker such as Dziga
Vertov as the "founding father," but Robert Flaherty, a rather romantic
and nostalgic researcher.01 Similarly, in photography, it was an
archivist also focusing on the past who was the one to play the
tutelary role: Eugene Atget. The succession of names associated
from the thirties onwards with Atget, with a view for creating in retro-
spect a "documentary tradition," also covers the most irreconcilable
standpoints: Henri Le Secq, Mathew Brady, Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine,
Atget, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, the Farm Security
Administration ... The record is as arbitrary as it is illogical. What,
basically, is the connection between the conservation approach of
01 In a report on Fleherty's film Moans published in the New York Sun on February 8, 1926, John Grierson was the
first to use the term 'documentary." He w as to examine it in more detail and codify it in countless subsequent
pieces in the 1930s.
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Atget (photographs to keep old things alive), the desire for social
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literary pursuits of Evans? "ii
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Great differences also emerge in methods for ensuring a faithful ..
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subject in apparent neutrality, or is his presence necessary for the <
credibility of his evidence? Is aesthetic formalization desirable or

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reprehensible, does it reinforce or crush the documentary content ::,
of the image? Does the "true documentary" not consist of an

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accumulation of evidence that is defined entirely by its subject
matter, without necessitating the slightest creative work or signature
from the maker? Is it not, by definition, a joint project? Must the
images suffice as such or should their meaning be shaped by
editorial guidance and supporting text, serving to alter and sub-
ordinate them? This leaves so many questions, which have not as
yet been answered, but which will be briefly reviewed below in
their historical perspective.
Accordingly, what might seem to be the documentary project's
fundamental weakness-the nebulous definition, the assorted
approaches-has undoubtedly been the chief factor influencing its
viability: a propensity to keep on discussing its methods and
goals, reinventing ways of providing a faithful, correct description
of reality. That distinguishes it in particular from photojournalism,
with which it has sometimes been identified. In fact, photojournal-
ism's codes have remained unchanged for decades, and it has
exercised scarcely any self-criticism concerning the construction of
authenticity of its images and the appositeness of its procedures
(the snapshot format as the undisputed symbol of immediacy). Quite
the opposite, the documentary has proven to be permanently in
a state of flux and crisis. As soon as one group believed they had
found a descriptive formula guaranteeing veracity, another would
cast doubts on it and seek a more suitable method to do so. This
is the infinitely productive paradox of the documentary: when its
basic principle "to show things as they are"-seemed to restrict

the genre to a repetitive duplication of reality and deprive it of any
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actually gave rise to a constant exploration of new procedures and
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forms. To quote the title of a famous article by Allan Sekula: for
an entire century it has been a matter of constantly "reinventing the
documentary."02
In 1906, the first Congres international de la documentation

photographique was held in Marseille. It was the first attempt to
discuss and organize the interest in the visual document, which
was emerging in photographic circles as well as in libraries and
archives. In Marseille, the issues addressed included the very
concept of the documentary image and the "conditions which
photographic prints should meet in order to constitute a docu-
ment. "03 Even then it was difficult to come up with clear answers.
And the discussions were less about the actual images than about
their processing: preservation, registration, classification, numbering,
or indexing, with a vision for creating an international network of
image banks, eventually containing all the world's documents. The
assumption was that no single image was "documentary" as such,
neither as regards subject matter nor form, but that it became
documentary in the way it was incorporated in an effective archive
system. This framework, this ordered availability, was felt to be
what transformed an image into a document-a dormant entity,
awaiting a user who would give it its meaning, the user-and not
the producer-being the central figure in documentary work.
This archival approach, which prevailed in official photographic
circles, contrasted the view emerging concurrently in the field of
social reform. One example can be found in the work of Lewis Hine,
who in the same year embarked on his famous project with the
National Child Labor Committee. For him, a documentary photograph
02 Allan Sel(ula, ·oismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)."
( 1976/ 1978) in Photography Against rhe Grain. Essays and Photo Works 1973- 1983 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova
Scotia College of An and Design, 1984)
03 ·eongres de la documentation photographique." Bulletin de l'lnstitut international de Bibliographie 11. nos. 1-3
( 1906): 79.

was not so much an archival record as a discursive element, part of st
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it was not aimed at some hypothetical future audience, but at a con- D
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the one hand it meant slow and open dissemination-a repository ·c
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group-images which are not waiting for an audience, but address ::,
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it with a specific message through selected channels. In this way, •
according to Hine, activating the documents, organizing their contact

with the public by way of posters, publications, or projections, was
part of the documentary photographer's own prerogatives.
Apart from this contrast between archive and discourse, the
1906 congress also revealed another problematic pair regarding
the history of the documentary: the relationship between the doc-
umentary project and art, a matter that proved extremely complex
from the very start and that had never been reduced to a simple
antithesis. Oddly enough, among the organizers of the congress and
the defenders of photography as an archived item, there were some
proponents of "pictorial ism," i.e. photography merely to serve an
aesthetic purpose. For them the two fields were not contradictory.
Faced with supposed trivialization of photography brought about •
by increasingly industrialized professional practice and more frequent
domestic use, they sought to tight on two fronts to restore to the
medium its lost legitimacy and esteem-on the one hand, making
the photograph an object of pure contemplation, and on the other,
reverting to the edifying objectives of early photography, when it
was perceived as a means of universal education and knowledge.
In that context, the documentary project formed the counterpart of
photographic art-the other side of the same coin, sharing the goal
of restoring its declining legitimacy.
Since then, the frequently professed purpose of the documen-
tary has been to pursue this unchanging goal: to regenerate the
medium, to restore to the images their lost purity and authority.
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Accordingly, after the 1930s, the documentary became less of a
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denial of existing photographic or cinematographic art but, rather,
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its Aufhebung, that is, the documentary overtook those art forms,
while also serving to perpetuate them. This was a way to start
from scratch or, to paraphrase Dziga Vertov in the context of cine-
ma (though equally valid for photography), to "renew" these two
art forms time and again.
In the period between the two world wars, this project was
solidified. Only then did the idea of a documentary "genre" come
about, backed by a coherent theory, aesthetic and history, with
its lineage and great ancestors. Many of the contemporary critics
were of the impression that vague, unconscious practice had
suddenly developed self-awareness and taken on the structure of
a "school." This process was based on a combination of two
phenomena, which may appear contradictory at first glance, but
actually coincided. The first was the increasing social and political
empathy in the wake of the miseries of the Great Depression.
The second was the acknowledgement of photography and film as
legitimate art forms.
The economic crisis following the 1929 stock market crash
generated a new aspiration towards testimony and commitment in
all fields, a renewed desire to face the problems of the world and
everyday reality.04 This craving was reflected in literature, the tine
arts, and in theatre too. However, it acquired especial importance
for recording media such as film and photography, whose privileged
relationship with reality suddenly put them in a dominant position.
From the activism of the Film and Photo League in New York to
state projects like the film unit of the GPO (General Post Office) in
London, or the photographic campaign of the FSA (Farm Security
Agency) in Washington-all were striving to focus attention on
the world and its shortcomings. But if that kind of attitude was to
constitute a "school" and an accepted alternative for a certain
"state of the art," in turn it had to be part of the history it opposed:
04 See William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

only by entering the artistic discourse and institution could the
documentary give itself a legitimate means to reform such art and
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refocus it on the world. In the cinema, the non-tictional tilm (which .D
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had been around since the very start) could only appear as a genre 'O
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to John Gierson when he started viewing it in relation to the pre- -~

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vailing aesthetic of Hollywood tilms or the experimental cinema, <(
which he considered to be futile and formalistic. That also applied

in photography. In 1938, the art historian, Beaumont Newhall, could
refer to a "documentary tradition" as an alternative to photographic
art only because he had opened the art museum to it, both cate-
gories sharing now the same aesthetic space.06 Moreover, Grierson
and Newhall sought to distinguish the documentary both from
"elevated" and purely aesthetic practice, as well as from the platitu-
dinous reporting of current affairs or the banal, edifying document.
They introduced a statutory hierarchy between "lower categories"
of non-tiction (contemptible matter for rapid consumption) and a
"higher" one, the documentary as "the creative treatment of actuality,"
which, like art, was made for the long term and for a thorough
knowledge of the subjects in question.06
Therein lies the paradox of the documentary project, even today.
"Documentary" is often taken as the antonym to "artistic," yet it
stems primarily from the artistic tield-beyond art, yet very much a
part of it. Neither the theoreticians of the 19th century, who firmly
believed in photography as evidence and reflection of reality, nor
professional photographers intent on producing functional docu-
ments were concerned with drawing up a "documentary doctrine"
of any kind. Only those seeking to find their place in relation to an
artistic past and in an aesthetic debate felt that need. Consequently,
they have given the genre a double objective of regeneration: to
reform art and society simultaneously, to purify photographic and
cinematographic aesthetics, while at the same time helping to
improve the world.
05 Beaumont Newhall. "Documentary Approach to Photography." Parnassus 10. no. 3 (M arch 1938): 2-6.
06 Grierson on Documenrary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (London: Faber end Faber, 1946). 11, 78.
Original from
I This ambivalence of the documentary vis-a-vis art-should it
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stand aloof from all aesthetic expression or can it only exist as
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art-has substantially marked the history of the genre. The differ-

ences surrounding this issue led to the split in the Film and Photo
League in 1935-36, with one group of the opinion that any aesthetic
formalization weakened the documentary impact and the other
group believing it actually to be a condition for its effectiveness.
These contentions also generated considerable strain within the
FSA, where very diverse options were supposed to be reconciled:
increasing public awareness of the hardships experienced by
small farmers in the Depression, keeping records of the vernacular
American culture, and promoting first-class photographic works.
Walker Evans in particular complicated matters by upholding the
somewhat delicate position of an aesthete, although he supported
the purest of "documents," arid, impersonal images of the type often
encountered in archives or heritage surveys. His entire oeuvre is
in effect based on the paradoxical idea of a "documentary style"
whose simplicity of form, apparent neutrality, and transparency
were not only intended to serve the topic but also the image itself,
which should be all the more forceful in its own presence because
it would seem to have been stripped of any formal affectation. In
this way he has formulated a curious, self-reflective definition of the
document, suggesting that the photographer might efface himself
in favor of the subject, representing things "as they are" and yet
claiming this impersonal recording as a personal creation.
In fact, Evans' provoking paradox reflects a friction frequently
encountered in the documentary: the conflict between the creator's
desire to become subservient to the subject and his or her own
affirmation as author. The documentary project actually signifies an
ever sensitive, ever different renegotiation of the authorial position.
In the 1930s, this new equilibrium between the artist and the world
seemed to be possibly reflected in the highly regarded practice of
team work, as if the partial withdrawal of the individual into the
group were the natural consequence of his retreat in favor of the

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subject-another form of self-abnegation vis-a-vis the world. In his
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1938 article, Beaumont Newhall expressly recalled that tradition of Cl)
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collective work dating from the 19th century, ranging from the French .0
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was especially praised in leftist circles, where the primacy of the -~
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excellence-artistic creation-was expected to submit to it. In -"'
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Germany in the 1920s, some even proposed to abolish the signature ::,
from photography completely, introducing absolute anonymity, as

8•
if the author's absence were the only consistent attitude for a
documentary doctrine which truly accepted the artist's withdrawal
to the background vis-a-vis "things as they are."
This radical approach, however rational it may seem, never
caught on. On the one hand, it contradicted Hine's conception of
the documentary as a discourse, which inevitably assumed there
is a "subject" behind it, a voice, turning the idea of immediate access
to things into an illusion. But, more importantly, the approach did
not allow for the fact that the domain of documentary would remain
the domain of art and would continue to rely to a great extent on
its authorial logic. In that context, Evans' somewhat flimsy defini-
tion-of things "as they are," but bearing a signature would con-
tinue to prevail. Even today this seems to be the natural condition
of the documentary photograph and film, regardless of the debate
or questioning it generated.
Revised translation, first published in Documentary Now! Contemporary strategies in

photography, film and the visual arts (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005), 64-73.

D,g,,zedby Google
Origina/from
UN/VERsrry OF CALIFORNIA
Queens? Kings? It would seem so, for their kingdoms are numerous.
Here are more than two hundred of these multicolor feuds, taken 8l
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all around the world through the stubborn, methodical lens of a ~Q)
camera. How do we identify such architectural units? Spread -

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uniformly through the sparse green areas of our western cities with ~
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the high soaring buildings above, they send signals to each other. Q)
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.....
Their characteristic features, their prime colors, their geometric
shapes obey the rules of elementary declination required by the
genus. In these clear signs of pertaining we acknowledge that their
architects, modest craftsmen, are able to recite their modernism
by heart and are far from giving up their entire utopian program.
From here we therefore deduce that children (for are these not
the true kings and queens, our present and future sovereigns?) still
incarnate the future of a world that has so obviously given up its
perpetuation. This is, however, the vocation displayed by these
open-air enclosures: the program must be protected, the Bi/dung
perpetuated, the power of the shaping shape. Even frozen with the
colors of the silky perfumes offered to Pinocchio in the paradise
of alienation, it does seem important to preserve pedagogy. Would
not infancy, despite everything, be entitled to a minimal rationality?
That is what these fortresses of the utopia of holidays are telling
us in their silent Esperanto-as long as this rationality is secluded
in the educational space of games and their wisely ordered chro-
matic universes. Rationality is dead. Long live rationality! Its new
empty body: mini-zoos, where the diversity and exoticism of the
species count henceforth less than the spaces opened in the memo-
ry of their once dreamt of freedom . The former aspirations of art
to happiness have become reality and haved passed into public
domain. A universal vocabulary of forms and tones to resolve
the differences, to clarify and pacify souls, the dead language of the
history of art and ideas that our offspring is taught as if it were
the Latin of wise men. This is what the Playgrounds series that Peter
Friedl has patiently collected since 1995 catalogues sinisterly and
placidly.

i On this designed table where the image reader lies, the rhythm
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of which marks the end of fluidity, we are given a firm invitation:
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to find a form removed from the kindergarden, but also from what
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Do documentaries use the cinema to sketch out (and to con-

tradict in so far as the cinema is bound to the logic of utopian
projection, as Godard likes to repeat) this renewed space? This is
clearly one of the hypotheses that support the possibility of pre-
senting it in a space devoted to art. Two functions related to the
beginning of the exhibition jostle around this. The first affects
the museum function; since it is not a question of performing a late,
doubtful ennoblement, as can be seen here and there with the
cinema. Instead of a holy sanctuary open to consecration, the place
of the exhibition now choses to become a shelter. Contrary to
the lay temple and its cultural celebrations, it is opened to fragilities
left as such and never transformed into objects of intimidation.
Secondly, it is, as a result, less films or, more broadly, artworks
in their acceptance of high quality-stamped entertainment products,
than experiences, crossing journeys in course: time. The necessary
duration of the different proposals shown here remind us of this.
From the fully classical concision of the portrait of Mario Merz by
Tacita Dean to the unfolded tales of Kutlug Ataman; from the ren-
ovated epic of Allan Sekula to Avi Mograbi's interrupted tele-
phone conversation; from the unceasing standing of the Videos
des Vil/es by Santiago Reyes to the panoramic view of women's
faces filmed by Florence Lazar, etc., the elasticity of a timed account
is of less importance than the measure of each one to allow
accidents, sudden light intervals to occur. But also, particularly, to
make the patient acquisition of their constraints at hand.
Similar displacements also suppose that the very definition of
"documentary" does not remain unaffected. That is, its definition
as unequivocal truth. It is normally understood that documentaries
apply, in principle, to the categories of here and now; their inves-
tigating curiosity enables scientific rigour keep them in line, and the

desire to explain that drives them takes the place of the familiar
summary narrative resolution in fiction. Documentaries would not .
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We know that this argument withstands hardly any scrutiny.
Documentaries are expressed according to coded narrative systems;
though masked, they use identical dramatic forces and too often
make use of their added value only to shroud themselves in au-
thenticity. Now authenticity, as Serge Daney writes about the films
of Jean Rouch and more generally about "cinema verite" (a refer-
ence that weighs the ghostly weight of law on all enterprise claim-
ing the purity of the documentary genus), is identified with the work
of death, and in doing so, only manages to reject it in the end.01
To give documentary back its relevance, to enable it to develop
the barren space it represents and signifies in its variety, is to
first accept that it is not the vehicle of supposed transparency. It
means understanding that, contrary to this, documentary only
contains opacity and thickness, and that is in itself object of study,
document among documents, link in a process of interpretation
offered to the political freedom of the spectator. Therefore, when
Javier Codesal records a session of palm reading, it ironically
disqualifies all hermeneutic vague desires based on a previous
session of the stated knowledge. Far beyond a folkloric view
without bitterness of the discerning arts, it is the rough battery
sociology and its determinism that are allegorically harmed. Facing
us close up, a pair of hands stretch out in a gesture of welcome.
Behind them, a professional of the psychological or cosmic gloss
says nothing in reply to this gesture and only translates it with
agreed declarations. What does this staged frustration describe?
The mechanism of information. That is to say, as Foucault explains,
01 "Cinema-verite • la mort au travail. Du coup, cinema-verite • refoulement de la mort: in L 'Exercice a ete profitable,
Monsieur (Paris: P.0.L, 1993), 271.
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fJ far more than a strict succession of data, the prescription of con-
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To pin down the past and the future in a desired present without
consequence or consistency, which does no more than confirm the
initial hypotheses held once and for all; this is the curse entrusted
with maintaining what we call information. We will easily recognise
obedience to this deadly principle, where there is no place for
any body or desire (once more the logic of rejection), this "objective"
description of "slices of life," this effect of forced intellectual com-
plicity, this flat well-thinking denunciation. Far more than necromancy,
the model to which many documentaries are subject, is that of trial.
Once instructed, "documentaries" then only need to gather the
pieces for the case. Everything revealed here belongs to evidence.
Only tangible proof need be given of the act of accusation.
Aside from this juridical-astrological model, the model of
absolute clairvoyance, Tischel, by Victor Kossakovsky, opens wide
the angle of another focus: its recording protocol is based, on
the contrary, on a partial blindness. Nothing appears in the image
outside the window frame, where the director has filmed some
months of the show offered by the street below. No intimacy behind
this method (inspired in a famous cliche by Gustave Le Gray on
the beginnings of the history of photography): the silence of the
elements suggested by the title (meaning "silence!" in Russian)
is determined by the impossibility of an authoritarian comment. What
link can be established between the winter snow on the windows
and a brutal police arrest? What similarity is there between an old
lady calling her dog and tramps sleeping off their drink on a bench?
What story is hidden by each of the holes evenly sunk in the road
by the municipal work unit (scenes that seem taken from Camera
Buff by Kieslowski)? Although such a mosaic withstands the expected
tale, what finally makes up this mute chronicle is, however, similar
to a portrait of today's Russia, at once anecdotal and meteorological,

political and social. This portrait, in its many adjustments, must be
deciphered by the spectators and re-expressed for its dimensions
to spread far beyond a window frame. In Public, by the Chinese
director Jia Zhang Ke, is only intended, in its own way, to produce
the type of precise, respectful description where neither actors nor
spectators are outstripped by a staging that receives its resources
from the certainties and cliches of ideology: the wait in empty
places and the unending time on community transport where it is
hardly possible to find a connection, which replaces all action
and subordinates body movements. The "characters" of In Public
are no longer those of any unfortunate, interminable event, nor
those of a "view of contemporary China in 30 minutes," and do not
fidget on the thin film of a now they are meant to poorly illustrate.
On the contrary, what they indicate reveals a much broader narration
of the awareness of which they seem dispossessed. The collapse
of a history, and as a result, of a countryside that is: a country-
is the earthquake upon which this film tries to confine its gaze, and
from whose trembles it tries to shelter.
The naturalist danger sought by these kinds of obseNing films,
their tendency to be "animal documentaries," is only avoided by
the rigour of their filming and editing. The sharp cuts and the use
of comic accelerations and distancing in the work of Kossakowski
contrasted with the very slow alternation of full scenes and medium
shots in the work of Jia Zhang Ke, which raise the atmospheric
character to the dimension of a social novel. The "information" is
not gleaned under the classes of fatality; it is a series of assembled
traits that manage to produce an artificial, malleable material
within which the circulation of regard and comprehension is autho-
rized and even strongly recommended.
A similar experience is not offered by tracing an identifiable
territory limited by stable frontiers. If the documentary thus defined
leaves its limits at rest, it is because it has a different objective.
What it pursues is to bring a substance out into the light. In other
words, rather than being satisfied at collecting a so-called intact
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two introduce a manufacture of what is visible and intelligible.
This manufacture, in the case of the documentary, bears the
name of witness. What is a witness? What is exposed, even in the
power of the untrue, even in the quid pro quo, even in incredulity,
more than it imposes some truth; what is found in the movement of
releasing oneself without support rather than in the stationary state
of a decree? A necessity, far beyond what has been entrusted,
binds the witness to the absolute assumption of the risk. As is
written by Paul Celan: "Nobody bears witness for the witness."
It is this ordeal that the film by Avi Mograbi, Wait, it's the sol-
diers, I have to hang up now, crosses in its own way, describing a
brief telephone conversation. Whoever (knowing, however, that he
is a Palestinian locked in in his "own" imposed borders) talks to the
director does so from a place where word is not safeguarded and
may be interrupted at any time. Beyond what is said of the situation
in which the two main characters are enjailed and which is summed
up by an historical overview without surprises, above all, the violence
of a dissymmetry is revealed. On the one hand, the person speaking
on the telephone, whose last sentence, with a paradoxically comic
length, gives title to the film . He is never seen and is deprived, in
short, of a right of representation (isn't this exactly the political
situation in Palestine?) and turns over the story until his limited
silence becomes a much firmer witness than all his analyses. On
the other hand, camera side, Mograbi in his own private, small
working room, collecting the pictures through others (the diffuse
television of sport and the discourses of statesmen), lives in the
impotence of his comfort. Image and sound no longer coincide, and
it is this disconnection where the Israeli director and his Palestine
speaker offer their best testimony: through what is missing.
Original from
Kutlug Ataman has chosen to put the speeches of four "char-
acters· into images, very aware of this witnessing stake, inter-
twining data and what is escaping from them. In all evidence with
the ambition of presenting the complexity of the recent history of
his country, his choice of an artefact is noteworthy. Brought together
under the pretext of their respective reasons for wearing a wig, a
practice normally associated with fashion or acting performance, all
of these witnesses initially belong to the kingdom of appearance.
These are therefore witnesses that are not "subject" to image and
sequestered by it, but are rather necessarily active accomplices
in its construction, and the wig becomes a light, fertile metaphor of
all production of self-images. A former member of the resistance
obliged to disguise herself as an air hostess during the struggle
against the dictatorship; a woman suffering from cancer and forced
to undergo chemotherapy; a fervent Moslem not allowed to wear a
veil; a persecuted transvestite: four adventures with a wig described
in full detail. Four parallel stories, four experiences of contemporary
Turkey in the times of the oppression; also four ways of being a
woman, four ways of living and being worked freely as an image.
This is why, in the case of the former secret agent in her role
as a stewardess, Ataman chooses never to film her face, and the
same applies with the Moslem, where the screen prepared for
her is totally veiled in black. More still with the sick character, who
faces us in her wish to confront her illness. Or the transvestite,
who changes unashamedly before our very eyes. Here, there is no
dominant hierarchy: the promiscuousness of the screens accen-
tuates the cacophony of simultaneous experiences and refers us to
a necessary muddled reading of their contexts.
In the same way as Keren Amiran manages to turn the disused
hospital in her /SAMEC into music, as Jordi Colomer parades the ac-
cesses to Barcelona and Brasllia, a demonstrator for a lost cause
in his Anarchitekton,02 as Valerie Jouve sets up a choreography on
02 Cf. Jordi Colomer. Ouelques stars: Travaux Video 1997-2003 (Le Grand Cafe. La Galerie. Villa Arson. 2003).

the hills in the desolate surroundings of Marseilles in Grand Littoral,03
as Walid Raad constitutes and reconstitutes the files of the
Lebanese Atlas Group, Ataman makes wigs talk for Turkish history,
which has progressively become a baroque, Shakespearian scene.
It is precisely the complexity of such a muddle to which
such diverse experiences as the story of a birth, in the work of
Noelle Pujol (VAD), the story of another birth (image being linked
to writing) in the work of Jean-Claude Rousseau (Lettre a Roberto),
the alienation of the market discourse in The Avon Project by
Alexandra Sell, are scrupulously attached. The matter of translation
appears centrally and expectedly in a certain way, as indicated
by the subtitle to the film Camouflage by Jun Yang: "Look like them,
talk like them," as in Mother Tongue by Zineb Sedira. This trans-
lation can certainly be perceived with the violence of a frontier
pass: a diplomatic frontier (Crossing Kalandia by Sobhi AI-Zobaidi)
or a political-technological one in the work by Harun Farocki (Eye/
Machine).
But these different documentaries have chosen the most diffi-
cult way to bear witness in a language they do not claim to master,
no longer that of "capturing" images and sounds, and to show
this to an audience whose expectations they did not claim to know.
It is no longer a question of delivering the fruit of a translation
satisfied with moving the meanings, but rather its wanderings, its
mistakes, its difficult work in the heart of what appears as a living
substance.
At the same time, the sterile alternative between the certificate
of authenticity, on the one hand, and the refuge in fictitious
construction, on the other, fails to be pertinent. Daney sharply sums
up this false opposition: "to improvise and commemorate: the
same battle." The project thus once more comes to elude two forms
of monumentality: the one that lends its own intelligibility, its
magnificently distraught innocence to the raw event; the one that
extracts from it all chance of uprising as modern power. In both
03 Cf. Grand Littoral, ed. Ateliers de la Ville de Marseille, 2003.

cases, it is history, the translation of its historical process, according
to Marx's expression, which is violently denied, and at the same
time, all chance of emancipation. The witness and its unreserved
engulfing in the sights of others suggests a third path; this is
what is risked in each of the images and the sounds shown here.
There is only documentary practice worthy of such a name at
this price. This does not go back to establishing new rules to the
game; on the contrary, it creates a space, a play, where everyone
is free to decide by guesswork on the history of their place as
winners or losers.
First published entitled ·Toe Games of the Witnesses,· in 'Ficcions' documentals

(Barcelona: Fundaci6 ·1a Caixa·, 2004), 114- 121.
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In June 1976, Stewart Brand published an interview with Margaret
Mead and Gregory Bateson, the famous husband-and-wife anthro- -
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B: Yes.
M: And therefore you've introduced a variation into it that is unnecessary.
B: I therefore got the information out that I thought was relevant at the time.
M: That's right. And therefore what do you see later?
B: If you put the damn thing on a tripod, you don't get any relevance.
M: No, you get what happened.
B: It isn't what happened.
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the table. So that just doesn't hold as an argument.
B: Of the things that happen the camera is only going to record one percent
anyway.
M: That's right. 01
I was asked to write about Jeroen de Rijke's and Willem de Rooij's

work when it was not yet known what they were going to show in
their presentation in the Dutch pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennial.
Up until then, their work had touched regularly on documentary
modes of depiction, of registering a kind of "external" visual reality:
such as, for instance, Willem de Rooij's panel works, with their
arrangements of found press photos (Index: Riots, Protest, Mourning,
and Commemoration [ as represented in newspapers, January 2000-
Ju/y 2002]), or the duo's works in which a static camera perspective
records a social, ethnic, and ethically ambivalent place. Of Three
Men (1998) features the interior of an Amsterdam mosque, formerly
a church; Bantar Gebang (2000) documents a shantytown built on
01 Stewan Brand, conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. CoEvolution Quarterly. no. 10 (June 1976):
32-44. see also: http://www.oil(os.org/forgod.htm.

top of a garbage dump on the edge of Jakarta; and Untitled (2001)
shows a cemetery located in the middle of the same city. These
works bring up questions, both in content and form, that also turn
up in discussions of film in visual anthropology-despite the
fundamental differences in regard to context, and the importance
de Rijke/ de Rooij place on the artistic staging of display in the
White Cube. The first parallel is to the old debate about the useful-
ness of the static camera in the anthropological film-a topic
Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson play on in the dialogue quoted
above. The second parallel has to do with a more recent discussion
in ethnographic film: of how, in the light of an increased awareness
of the camera's presence evoking and influencing events in a
problematic way, this apparent weakness could be turned into a
strength. In this context, Tobias Rees discussed the concept of
evocation. "Evocation," according to Rees, "comes from the Latin
evocare and means something along the lines of 'to call up some-
thing.' So evocation is commonly understood to be the awakening
of experience by looking at a work of art, and it is precisely within
this framework that the ethnographic film has to operate. Yet the
process cannot be about evoking the supposed actual reality of a
place." Alluding to Emanuel Levinas' concept of the Other, he con-
tinues: "to experience" does not mean "that I experience the person
foreign to me, but rather, that I can experience the fact that I cannot
experience the person foreign to me."02 This should not be misinter-
preted as the acceptance of irreconcilable cultural differences, but
rather, it should be understood on a general existential level, as an
acknowledgement of the fact that some things cannot be repre-
sented, which also polemically opposes a type of "representational
ethnography ... as a kind of colonial slide show."03 Moreover, this
is the only way to describe the viewer's relationship to the protago-
nists of the three da Rijke/ de Rooij films mentioned above.
02 Tobias Rees, "Writing Culture - Filming Culture. It was Real: Unendlichkeit versus Reprilsentation," lecture given at
the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellscha~ fur V61kerkunde (October 5-10, 1997, Frankfurt am Main). held on
October 10, 1997, http:/ / www.iwf.de/easa/brd/.
03 Ibid.
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However, the new work shown in Venice, Mandarin Ducks ..
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"documentary," in the sense of being purely informative, visual "'
evidence of a factual topic, following its etymological root, the Latin
word documantum, meaning lesson or proof. The two artists
have never been concerned with what there is to see, but rather,
with how to see it-an aesthetic operation involving abstraction
and presentation. Yet ironically enough, at the same time, thanks
to its obvious dramatic, staged character, this most recent work C:
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is perfectly suited (virtually through its emphatic denial of the issue)

to confront the actual crux of the documentary: the issue of truth.
Now, we know that the concept of truth is an extraordinarily
difficult one, and so before I turn to Mandarin Ducks specifically,
I should be allowed to sound off a little more about it. It has become
routine to expound upon the difficulty or impossibility of differen-
tiating between the fictional and the real, by employing what has
become an almost knee-jerk reference to the social, cultural, and
psychological construction of all representations. Why has this be-
come dissatisfactory? Because it seems to imply that the fact that
something is constructed means it is entirely relative, which in turn
seems to disavow indirectly the issue of whether a representation
is true or not: if there is no such thing as objective reality, how can
there be any objective truth, or even verifiable truth? However,
even if we assume that what has "always been" a construct con-
tains an inherent "experiential reality" -regardless of whether or
not it is the "experiential reality" of the delusionary, or dreams, or
media fantasies-it does not relieve us of the necessity of inquiring
into the plausibility, the truth, and the verifiability of what is being
presented. Unless, of course, we renounce the issue entirely either
naively or cynically, or both.

To clarify immediately: I am not concerned about returning to a
classic, universal concept of truth (meaning, the sort of truth that
is transcendently inferred through logical reasoning, or is materially
and empirically deduced through observation, and is considered
universally valid). Rather, I am, in general, interested in looking for
a concept of truth that can be applied to the process of viewing
art. How can something like this be salvaged? Since everything we
see, hear, think, or feel is reinforce~r numbed-by media, then
we are bound to inquire if there is indeed a concept of truth that can
be preserved despite the melange of social, technological, and
economic elements and tilters. If cultural expression is to be more
than arbitrary (or at best, pretty or shocking), then it needs to
develop a kind of truth that can be tested in other contexts. Other-
wise, it does not "live."
It might be unsatisfactory, but it is imperative to point out that
the answer is merely contextual and can only be given as each
case arises. Even though they usually do not regard "truth" as a
category, critics and the public still judge works of art according
to how coherently they are constructed in relation to the rest of the
world and to other art. Or, to put it differently, a work of art is
judged according to how "truthful" it is in relation to the world and
to art (regardless of whether or not it is in the form of a coquettish
lie). It is as if we are constantly measuring what we receive
against a kind of catalogue of unfulfilled desires and anticipated
knowledge: does the work summarize all of these references and
abide by them; does it permit these desires without sacrificing
knowledge to them, even when they contradict each other? If the
contradiction is withstood, then truth can blaze up in between.
And one name for the form that artistic treatment of desire and
knowledge takes along the way would be "beauty." (Therefore, if
the ideal for this is compaction into the smallest space imaginable,
the artistic and scientific concepts of beauty converge.)
Beauty, truth: solemn concepts surrounded by an aura of the
eternal, which have to be submerged in the cold, sparkling flow of
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becomes possible to work with them. And then we can ask: =
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relationship between psychic and media realities function in the field "'
of corporeal, verbal performance? And how exactly can art be
made in the process? At this point, many texts will refer-almost
automatically, now, it seems to me to Michel Foucault's concept
of the "politics of truth." The better examples of these texts are
wary of a platitudinous, relativistic interpretation, such as "there are
many subjective truths and therefore nothing is generally valid"- C:
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look at the definition he has provided, we can see that it contains 0,
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a contradiction in logic. Foucault says that he does not consider

truth to be "an ensemble of veracities that have to be discovered
or accepted," but instead, "the ensemble of rules according to which
the true is separated from the false, and the true is endowed with
specific, consequential powers."06 Without delving into his definition
any further, he basically introduces two concepts of truth: first, the
truth as an "ensemble of rules" (the ensemble that separates and
endows); and second, truth as the product of this ensemble
(the object that has been separated or endowed). Truth bears itself.
Splitting hairs, we could say that there is yet another level: the
critique or identification of this "ensemble of rules" (elsewhere,
Foucault calls this episteme, or cognitive order). With a little bit of
effort, this criticism can still be warded off, since Foucault would
certainly not have hesitated to consider his own statement an ex-
ample of what he is describing (that is, as an operation that
separates the true from the false and endows it with "specific, con-
sequential powers"-in this case, his own intellectual authority).
Ultimately, however, Foucault's definition seems primarily an attempt
04 Among the better texts is Hilo Steyer1's · Politics of Truth-Documentarism in the An Field." in The Need to
Document, ed. Vil Havrtlnek, Sabine Schaschl-Cooper, and Bettina Steinbrugge (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2005).
05 Michel Foucault, Oispositive der M acht. Uber Sexualitlit, Wissen und Wahrhait (Bertin: Merve Verlag, 1978), 53.
Original from
to differentiate his own approach from the Frankfurt School's critique
of ideology (although later, Foucault tended to be willing to accept
their close relation). For what is the examination of the ensemble of
rules according to which the true is separated from the false and
endowed with power but critique of ideology?
The crux of the matter remains the issue of who is speaking,
and with what authority, and how one could communicate at all
on the basis of an unsettled presupposition, even if it only concerns
truths, not the truth. If we proceed with Foucault's idea, then we
are confronted with the dilemma that all truths-whether they are
an "ensemble of rules" or the product of these rules-are only
apparently substantiated by the power with which they ultimately,
arbitrarily endow themselves. The now classic model opposing
this is Jurgen Habermas' theory of communicative action: truth is
consensus; truth is something that can ultimately only be salvaged
through argument. Yet Habermas' theory produces plenty of
contradictions, too, especially this one: how does one constitute the
space where these arguments occur, and who determines its-
back to Foucault again-"ensemble of rules"? Who or what decides
which positions are even going to be allowed to contribute to this
process of building consensus? It would be na·t've to reply, "the better
argument." As has often been stated, the fact is that Habermas'
term herrschaftsfreier Diskurs (translated as non-hierarchical or
illocutionary discourse) conjures up a way out of the dilemma,
rather than actually using argument to reveal the path. In recent
years Habermas has also striven for a kind of sophistication of
what could be called "intuitive truth." To elucidate this "formal as-
sumption of an objective world," 06 which makes us able to agree
and act, Habermas states: "We do not cross any bridge whose
stability we doubt. Everyday realism corresponds to a-admittedly
only performatively concurrent-concept of unconditional truth, a
truth without any sort of epistemological index."07 Here, the problem
06 Jurgen Hebermas. Wanrheit und Rechrtertigung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999). 208.
07 Ibid., 52
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is that the basic optimism implied in this allegory of crossing bridges
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be tested and is probably false, but which makes it possible for us
to act (to adhere to the image, imagine an adventure film scenario
in which a bridge has to be crossed in order to get to the safe
side, assuming it is still stable before it finally collapses).
So if we compare Foucault's line of argument with Habermas',
then we might be able to look for a useful concept of truth-simply
put-in a constant dialectic movement, that could also be read as
a blueprint for de Rijke / de Rooij's latest filmic paradigm shift. This
dialectic movement is between a "pragmatic assumption of an
objective world"-which, with the help of an imaginary common
standard (such as universal human rights, for example) illuminates
the possibility of agreement beyond particularities and the skepticism
toward the actual realization of just this pragmatic assumption
within the terms of precisely this particularity. Unfortunately, truth
cannot get any simpler. Mandarin Ducks is a drama, in which
the "pragmatic assumption of an objective world" is thrown into the
bonfire of the vanities. Is understanding and communication
possible? Yes, but only in the form of mean, sarcastic, sneaky

I attacks 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 in the seemingly idyllic, relaxed company of a visibly upper-
middle-class group of big-city types. The camera moves slowly
from left to right, filming the protagonists sitting comfortably on the
sofa, looking like hills in a romantic landscape. Sexual and ethnic
boundaries seem fluid, grapes are eaten, faces and hands are
seen making silent exchanges, indistinct bits of decadent small talk
("high from nail varnish") and the languorous clink of champagne
glasses are heard: in short, this is a Mount Olympus of cultivated
relaxation. However, drives and aggressions soon push their way
into this supposed harmony. Carlita, a trim man with the smile of
a shark, believes he has to own up to the seemingly docile Sabine
that he is doing her a favor by not taking her "invitation for abuse."
He is "an animal, a hunter." "Fact is, I'm doing every person in this
room a favor by not creating this situation of poor little Sabine
being brutally raped." However, his virile verbal triumph quickly
collapses. "That is such a desperate statement, Carly," Sabine
replies, "if there is anyone in this room who needs a loving pair of
arms, it's you." And things get worse. A well-modulated and fatherly
off-screen voice is heard saying, "Carlito, before you respond to
my daughter's illuminating remark, just remember, there is strength
in restraint," followed by a patronizing, therapeutic: "It would be
my pleasure to help you come to grips with any ..." In the uncanny
presence of the father of his intended victim, the brutal hunter
becomes a pitiful emotional cripple. What at first looked like a scene
from an ancient symposium-a philosophical chat in pleasant
company, a non-hierarchical discourse turns out to be a dramatic
constellation: the clearly theatrical space is like a prison that forces
the protagonists' antagonism toward each other to become painfully
visible. "Parole" is only permitted for shopping or doing business.
Echoing a scene at Southfork Ranch, the mean daddy pours himself
a drink (he is called, of all things, Man Ray-perhaps an artistic
variation on J.R.?-and looks a little bit like Rem Koolhaas), while
Original from
poisonous attacks are exchanged with the defiant daughter. He
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complains in an unashamedly racist manner about the migrant taxi :5
driver: "It's a mystery-how these immigrants can take a job, -

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your wonderful post-imperialistic philosophy with us." She wears a "'
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upper-class as if they were "exotic fish in an aquarium," as Wilfried -

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Wiegand writes. "He gave the rooms in many of his films this effect
by using house plants and decorative flowers."08 Mandarin Ducks
also creates a similar impression: here is a colorful window with
Islamic motifs, a Japanese vanity with kaleidoscopically mirrored
glass, calfskin with a zebra pattern, a Japanese screen with a couple
of mandarin ducks as a motif, and last, but not least, an illusionary
horizon with an artificial glow, which evoke these associations.
Language fails, ultimately. A longer sequence is introduced by
a close-up of a crystal glass falling to the floor; it features father,
mother, and aunt engaged in long orgies of laughter, as if they were
actors doing screen tests-oscillating between being ridiculously
drunk, obscene, insincere, and aggressive. Distorted mouths, bared
teeth, crow's feet, and laugh lines garishly lit from the side,
looking as if they are etched in stone. Another character, also on
a futile search for love and fulfillment, says, "I feel like I'm stuck
in a babushka of realities," before, finally, a silent sequence of frosty
looks and whiny tears finishes up the pathetic scene. Everyone
08 Wilfried W18Q8nd, "Die Puppe in der Puppe. Beobachtungen zu Fassbinders Filmen: in Rainer ~mer Fassbinder.
Reihe Film 2. ed. Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schi.itte (M unich: 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 appears in
Mandarin Ducks: ·1 feel like I'm stuck in a babushka of realities," says one of the characters. In this image, the
notiOn of being imprisoned conll8rges in a constrained context with the perpetual obligatiOn to perform as oneself.

I present is a Mandarin Duck: privileged animals, trapped in chilly
love relationship.
It becomes very clear that the truth, which this is about, is not
an "external reality" that remains as uninfluenced as possible by
the filming process. However, it is also not the truth that is elicited
in an argumentative or therapeutic exchange. For example, in
Carlito's encounter with the effeminately gay son, his virile hetero-
sexual pose manifests as more ambivalent than it was after the
"therapeutic conversation" with Sabine and her father. In this deliber-
ately artificial pose, in the theatrical game on display, the truth is
glimpsed suddenly and briefly, as if it were a flash in a mirror: the
truth of desire. This technique has a famous predecessor: the play
within a play in Shakespeare's Hamlet. The frequently fragmented
layering of different types of presentational forms (in Mandarin
Ducks, we have the auteur film, theater, voguing, and television soap
operas) initiates a discussion about truth. In Shakespeare, the
question is whether or not the king has killed his brother; in
Mandarin Ducks, it is about the relationship between possession
and cruelty.
To return to truth as a philosophical question: Foucault's
"ensemble of rules, according to which the true is separated from
the false, and what is true is given specific, consequential powers,"
is entirely robbed of its voluntaristic undertone, because those
who seem to benefit so confidently from being given "specific,
consequential powers" seem to be trapped at the same time by
the contradictions that this produces. Meanwhile, Habermas' notion
of an argumentative exchange that can lead to a consensual truth
seems to be its exact opposite: an altercation that induces collapse.
However, in this complementarity, the notion still appears once again
as a lost ideal.
It becomes clear that de Rijke/de Rooij permit the camera to
actively influence what happens in front of it, not least in order to
counteract the illusion that their frequently shown recent works-the
ones mentioned at the beginning, when they were working with a
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static long shot-had possessed a kind of privileged access to the I
production of truth in the image. Now, with Mandarin Ducks-in i-
the vain of the Hamlet play-within-a-play-it is the exaggerated pose 0
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even say-without intending to pathologize the comparison-that >.:
it moves away from the obsessive-compulsive to the hysterical.

The obsessive-compulsive tells lies shaped like the truth; the accu-
racy of his facts (here: the apparently neutral, accurate presentation
of an external visual reality) only contains an encrypted form of
his desire. The hysteric, on the other hand, tells the truth in the guise
of a lie: desire is revealed in the distortions of factual accuracy
(here: the clearly staged presentation of behavioral roles).09
This move from the "obsessive-compulsive" to the "hysterical"
mode of producing images entails risks: one gradually surrenders
abstraction and distance (although abstraction as such is not simply
given up), lunges into the middle of a complicated production of
truth, inevitably and suddenly starts to compete, also in terms of
craft, with others who publicly make statements (in this case, even if
the artists do not suddenly start seeing themselves as "filmmakers,"
but continue to think of their work in the context of art, not cinema:
the great auteur films by directors from Godard to Fassbinder-
very tough competition). At the same time, one discloses that even
before, one was never completely uninvolved. To vary Margaret
09 Slavoj Zi~ek, "Desire: Drive • Truth: Knowledge." 1997. hnp:/ /www.gsa.buffalo.edu/lacan/ slawy.html.
Original from
Mead's and Gregory Bateson's image quoted above, the goal is,
to some extent, to film the way the protagonist scratches his
back, while simply allowing us to realize that he is kicking the cat
under the table. Not easy.
First published in German in jongHolland 21, no. 4 (2005).
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D,g t,zed by G
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"The only relation to art that can be sanctioned in a reality that I
stands under the constant threat of catastrophe is one that treats ~
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of ethics and aesthetics in contemporary art. The first part seeks :r
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aesthetics that frame current debates in what is otherwise called Q
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political art. The second part is concerned with types of artistic -

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problems they pose to our comprehension of reality in the context
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of art works, media images, and exhibitions of contemporary art. 8

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
disinterestedness of art in its relations with social life.
The Unhomely and the Anxiety of Global Modernity

A distance of nearly fifty years separates us from Adorne's state-
ment, a statement all the more remarkable for its prescience in
situating the strange disarticulation of criticality in recent art which
01 Theodor W. Adorno. "Valery Proust Museum,· in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: The
M IT Press. 1983). 185.
02 Emmanuel Levinas. "Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other," ,n Entre Nous: Thinl<:ing-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B.
Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press. 1998), 221.

above all else values an over-metabolized formalism by means of
a strong return to abstraction in the advanced sectors of the art
economy. To the degree that the art economy of the gallery system
puts a high premium on commodity objects, the return to formalism
and abstraction heralds a return to a kind of conservatism that all
but abjures the kind of art which continuously registers a sense of
what Sartre would have called engagement. What I am calling
abstraction here should be understood not just in the sense of meta-
physics. Modernist abstraction, especially, unfolds out of mecha-
nistic, formal, and stylistic devices that constitute its representa-
tional frame with a tendency towards the transcendental and the
universal, on the part of Abstract Expressionism, and the meta-
physical, in the case of geometric abstraction. In contemporary art,
however, all these have become sublated, thereby pushing the
concept of abstraction more in the direction of the opacity evident
in recent abstract art's artful contentlessness. In spite of this de-
flation , a visible schism exists today between the aesthetes of for-
malism and those practitioners with political leanings, who-with
dim memories of the institutional takeover of historical conscious-
ness hovering over them-nevertheless insist on art's engagement
with social life. What should be noticed in the current context,
however, is how distanced works of art that evince a political stance
are, on the one hand, from the old two-part model of Marxist critique
of the commodity form and bourgeois society, and on the other,
abstraction's interiorization of artistic vision as a uniquely and in-
ternally coherent world in which individual enactment takes prece-
dence over that of the collective or social. The latter view purges
the external world from the space of art, wishing for it a state of
purity, a state which not only rejects illusionism, but also asserts
that the full meaning of any art is to be found in its specific medium.
This is the story of a particular view of art overseen by a brand of
modernism famously argued for by Clement Greenberg.03
03 See Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon." in Collected Essays end Criticism: Perceptions end
Judgments. 1939-1944, vol. 1, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1988). 23-38.
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Today we are more or less witnessing the complete dissolution I
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and evaporation of a kind of politically-driven art practice based on <(
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coterminous with a Marxian model of class struggle. If class forma- C
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tions no longer animate the modes of political art today, the other .=
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a great emptying out and banishment of the concept of the political Li.
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in artistic matters, as if this would provide a cure for the anxiety of -

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modernity. There is a novel idea behind this anxiousness surround- .-
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ing the modern today, at the root of which is the crisis of the political C
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in current artistic practice. Recent elaborations on modernity hold :r
that within the space of less than two decades we have passed
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through two endings of modernity: first; with the collapse of com- .Q
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munism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we bore witness to the de-
mise of a Marxist vision of modernity; and secondly, after September
11, 2001, came the dissolution of its liberal counterpoint. It would be
tempting indeed to embrace the tenets of these grand conclusions,
were it not for the inconclusiveness of history itself. No doubt, the
architectural metaphor that accompanied both downfalls of two of
the most significant political traditions of the modern era helps frame
them both in time and image; modernity as a specter that hangs
over the global collective consciousness.
What has emerged, however, is different from this and is not
insignificant for cultural politics. The schism masks a deeper anxiety
about the period we can call global modernity. This anxiety is
manifest in an emerging battle within the critical comprehension,
reception, and discussion of contemporary art, namely the opposi-
tion between ethics and aesthetics, or the conjunction of both.
Recently, discussions of the relation between ethics and aesthetics,
or politics and poetics in contemporary art have proliferated. The
current upsurge in linking the ethical and the aesthetic-or the more
familiar conjunction of art and politics-perhaps, owes something
to what lrit Rogoff has described as the nature of '" unbounded' o r
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I 'undisciplined' work" common to both artistic practice and its
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designated elsewhere as the condition of unhomeliness, is partly the
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ideas permanently on the move, in constant circulation, reconfig-
uration, tessellation. 05 The condition of unhomeliness could also
be interpreted in another way: in the alienation of our subjective
development from the forces of domination and totalization, namely
the ideology of unchecked capitalist triumphalism that seeks to
sever alternative social models and relations of exchange not already
bound exclusively to consumption and consumerism. This alien-
ation, or simply the withdrawal from the homogenizing tyranny of
global capitalism, discloses new subjectivities on the verge of
transforming what Felix Guattari calls the "mass-media subjectivity"
proper to the discourse of totalization.06 In contemporary art this
is being felt in the rejection of the singularity of the art object, image,
or the cultural system that seemingly holds art together in a uni-
fied and universalized conception of artistic subjectivity. In Rogoff's
idea of unbounded and undisciplined work there arises something
no longer notional: artists' withdrawal from the institutionalized
(musealized) model of art. Rather, for several decades now we have
witnessed the inexorable attempt by artists to break with this
totalization. Such attempts reveal a structured and self-conscious
"indiscipline" against the conservative institutional idealization of art.07
For contemporary art and other cultural practices, indisciplinarity
and unhomeliness is not just being out of tune with the established
order nor the feeling and consciousness of being elsewhere, in
exile, dislocated, displaced or rootless, but the contemplation in
art that "culture operates metonymically, always simultaneously at
04 lrit Rogoff, "Art/Theory/Elsewhere." "Dossier on documents t t." Texte zur Kunst (August 2002).
05 Okwui Enwezor. "At Home in the Wor1d: African Writers and Artists in 'Ex-lie'." in Kunst-We/ten im Dialog: Von
Gauguin zur globs/en Gegenwart, ed. Marc Scheps. Yilmaz Dziewior, and Barbara M . Thiemann (Cologne: DuMont,
1999), 33<Hi.
06 Felix Guanari, The Three Ecologies. trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sunon (London: Athlone Press. 2000). 33.
07 I borrow the notion of indiscipline from Barbara Vander1inden and Jens Hoffmann·s curatorial project "Indiscipline· .
where they, along w~h a multifaceted group of practitioners. explored the nature of creative agency in the face
of the breakdown between disciplines and forms of an in Brussels in 2000. See Barbara Vanderlinden and Jens
Hoffmann. Indiscipline (Brussels: Roomade. 2000), unpaginated brochure.
Original from
separate but parallel registers."08 There is a recognition-by a
surprising number of practitioners of contemporary art that assume
activist and political modes of position-taking in the critical analysis
of culture that the dispersal of the discourses of art as it was
once organized by postmodernism has now reached a watershed •.c.
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moment. The effect of this dispersal is that there is no singular t=
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location of culture or contemporary art. While artistic practices of the ~
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of contemporary art, their destination and target extend well beyond -

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those fora into the larger domain of the global public sphere. In a ~
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and its target as well, for increasingly the kinds of contemporary I
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art that assume an activist and political position have tended to be
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transnational in their strategy and tactically concerned with the ID
location of art in the condition of the unhomely, that is, in the present. -
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The Human as a Umlt case of Modernity: Neo-Polltlcal Realism

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and the Twlllght of Class In Artistic Practice 8

If we are, indeed, witnessing not just a structural antinomy but also
a shift in the ideals of modern culture and its images, we do so to
the degree that class struggle, which once heralded the promise of
a grand social realignment of international civil society in economic
and political terms, no longer defines the relationship between
different actors in the political and cultural arena. Rather it is "Human
Rights" that provides the ethical compass for our interaction with
the world and one another. I will argue that the kinds of political
realism in artistic practices often associated with social reality, and
which to a great extent are also engaged with ethical consideration
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
grounded in explorations of the meaning of life and the ethico-
juridical sanctity of the human within current global realignments
08 Ibid.
Original from
I of political, economic, and cultural formations.09,10 In the former third
world colonies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America,
liberation and decolonization movements were at the vanguard of
this political and cultural reorientation. In the former second world
the struggle against communist control of all social and cultural
forces gave great impetus to the search for new political alternatives
to the socialist utopia disfigured by Stalinism. In the first world
of the West, the third and second world positions pointed to above
were linked up with struggles occurring in areas such as civil
rights, the feminist movement, the gay movement, and anti-racist,
anti-war and anti-nuclear movements. The combination of all
three interpretations of freedom (what could also be called a politics
of rights) is at the heart of a new kind of political order to which
contemporary art responds. The organizing instrument is "Human
Rights" both in the narrow sense articulated by the Universal
Declaration of Rights and in the broad sense of ethical filiation to the
very structure of existence. While philosophy has engaged this
question for a long time, its encapsulation in cultural and artistic
terms is recent. In fact, it is worth emphasizing that the radical
codification of bio-politics as the stress in the ethical relationship
between a person and the state is specifically the issue taken
up by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United
Nations General Assembly, on December 10, 1948. Though it
does not spell out contemporary artists' concern with the ethical
in a specific sense, in a more general sense this text is particularly
09 See Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998). Arendt's
discussion of Vite Active, in which she identifies three forms of human activity-labor, work. and action-as
the fundamental condition of fife. as that which invests positive content in all human fife, is imponant in the
context of the idea of bio-politics. See also Michel Foucault, "Right of Death and Power over Life," in The
Foucault Reader. ed . Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon. 1984). 267. Foucault comments that in the discourse
of bio-pofitics "what w e have seen has been a very real process of struggle; fife as a political object was in a
sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that w as bent on controlling it. It w as fife more
than the law 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 oppressions or 'alienations,' the 'right'-which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable
of comprehending-was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either,
from the 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 ca lls Ecosophy. In this philosophy, in which he deals w ith the
disastrous consequences for the present ecological system based on ma~ade changes, there is a triangulation
of what he calls an · ethico-politicaf aniculation ... between the environment. social relations. and human subjec·
tivity..." Guattari, The Thf88 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.

illuminating when one attends to contemporary artists' concern with I
the ethical. Both the preamble and Article 3 of the declaration ~
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Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts u:
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Article 3 reiterates the preamble unequivocally: Everyone has the I
right to life, liberty and security of person. 11 "'

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Human rights craft thus began with the idea of the human as a
limit case under overwhelming coercive force. Therefore, if human
rights were constructed for human beings, it would logically follow
that human rights as such are regimes crafted to accede to and
intercede on behalf of the human. Such rights then, can only be
accorded to life and therefore only to the living, hence the impor-
tance of bio-politics. We know the immediate historical context that
attended and supported this juridical commandment, and it has
an image: Auschwitz. Auschwitz was based on the evidence of the
overwhelming industrial manufacture of death. Photographs and
documentary footage of the liberated camps confronted the world
with an ethical question, namely, if the Nazis murdered their victims
by first reducing them to the legal category of the non-human,
how can the enlightened laws of the post-war international system
restore such rights? Thus the Holocaust has come to represent
the exemplary test for the question of the human. More than fifty
years have not diminished its lesson, if anything it has intensified
the questions it raises. Even as Foucault claimed that "what is at
stake today is life," it would appear that despite the frequency of
wholesale slaughters taking place today, we have become more
11 For the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights see www.un.org/Overview/rights.
Original from
inured than ever to what Susan Sontag calls "the pain of others,"
while human rights discourse has grown even more.12•13 The help-
lessness of the Palestinian struggle and quest for self-determina-
tion and a homeland illustrates this. This helplessness is made all
the more hopeless when given an image: the Intifada, which has
been sometimes described as the struggle between two categories
of victims and dispossessed: the Arab and the Jew. 14
Being for the Other and the Ethics of Looking

In this regard, Sontag's analysis and defense of photographic or
filmic representations that draw our attention to catastrophes initi-
ated by violence is striking, especially since it goes against the grain
of the treatment of images of violation as merely a media window
into banal spectacle, as a worrying pornography of victimization and
violation.16 She argues forcefully against such reductive reasoning
about the meaning of images in public discourse; instead she made
a plea for what could be called an "ethics of looking" in our con-
frontations with the pain of other people. The eye as an ethical
apparatus, more than a prophylactic membrane to ward off the
unseemly, the evil eye of death, locates the visual field as the site
"for an unfinished work of mourning." 16 For the most part, Sontag's
excursus was concerned with documentary photography and
photojournalism and their ability to touch a part of the spectator's
humane feeling, in short, the concern for another human being.
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.
13 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New Yori:: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003). Lucid and mesmerizing,
Sontag attacks the pervasive contemporary apperception of images of violence, the blind stare which detaches
itself from the · Pa in of Others· through recourse to absurd rationalizations.
14 See Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Je,,v Narrate the Palestinian Vil/sge (Philadelphia: Univeralty
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.
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
into the image, with mass media serving as the screen (both in the literal sense and in the sense of concealment)
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 vinualization of the image of w ar that distons the actuality of that w ar. While one can
cenainly agree that the American prosecution of the w ar gave the impression of the w ar as an electronic video
screen in the early days of the w ar, subsequent documentary footage of bombed out Baghdad and the infamous
"highw ay of death" refutes the excitation of over-theorization provided by his analysis. Sontag's point is that all
too often, we shy aw ay from the terrible suffering because we search for an enlightened response that absolves
us from seeing what lies immediately before our field of perception.
16 Ariella Azoulay, Death's Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy, trans. Ruvik Danieli
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 4.

Despite her passionate, trenchant argument-persuasive both
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in its substance and in its analytical insight about photography <(
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ballasted by numerous historical examples-suspicions of the ideo- 0
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logical machinations that surround the kind of images she offers C
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in her examples remain quite entrenched within visual art. In visual C
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art, a hole in vision, a blindspot, the blank stare, a halating gaze, i=
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have been developed as the essential prophylaxis proper to the [!?
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documentary form. To wit, there is often a moralization in the name u.
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of critical questioning of the morality of the documentary that has , :,
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graphic, filmic, or archival) arises purely as a consequence of 2-
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the development of human rights. Yet others have argued, precisely, E
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against this identification of the documentary. To purists, docu- 0
mentary's "noble" tradition abjures those kinds of images of the

mass anonymous others often caught unawares or dead in the
sooty, grainy newsprint of the global news industry. It also refuses
the aestheticized horror pictures stylized for quick uncritical con-
sumption as redemptive "truth," as evidence or tokens for which
contemporary guilt industries (Amnesty International, Doctors
Without Borders, etc.) produce images that court unrestrained wit-
ness bearing. Thus the claim of a double kind of violence being
visited upon the figures of the violated by the mere repetition of the
tabular index of horror.
This begs the question: why have contemporary artists re-
sponded to human rights or concern for the other as the ethical
limit of any engagement with the world? One suspects that modern
traumatography abetted by the machinery of media technologies
has much to answer for here. The frequency with which a large
group of artists such as Fazal Sheikh, Alfredo Jaar, Kendell Geers,

William Kentridge, amongst others, take up such positions in
their work may then lead one to conclude, though not unqualifiedly,
that images of the mass phenomenon of displaced people, the
carnage of war, genocidal massacres, crimes against humanity, the
devastation of famine, manmade ecological disasters, and natural
disasters in the media have been contributing factors. Also, radical
art, like radical politics, has a natural response to power that gives
a certain frisson to the Faustian relationship between ethics and
aesthetics, politics and poetics. But if the ethical is a test for our
commitment to each other's being, qua existence, how do we
square this test with the aesthetic, which in Kantian fashion is con-
cerned with the "lofty" ideal of the sublime, the sensation of the
beautiful? 11 When W. B. Yeats writes about a terrible beauty being
born, is this not the ground of the ethical and aesthetic (which
now is being cheaply merchandised as a special kind of political
effect in contemporary art) heaving before us?18 Are singularized
affects of denunciation effective artistic arguments against complex
political realities? Or might this concern be more in line with
Levinas' moral philosophy of an ethical relationship between two
people, grounded in the cognitive embodiment of the other's
existence?
Activism and Counter-Power

I will now try to explore the general topography of politically oriented
art and its roots in current discussions of power and rights, which
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
sense: in its manifestation in politically oriented art, and the puta-
tively ethical weight it gives such art. One of the central principles of
contemporary art that unambiguously effects a political stance is
17 For Kant's aesthetic theory from which much debate on the question of the aesthetic in art draws see his 1764
essay "The Sense of the Beautiful and of the Sublime· in The Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel Kant's Moral and
Political Writings, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: The Modem Library, 1949).
18 W. B. Yeats. "Easter 1916." in The Collected Worl::s of W. 8. Yeats, \IOI. 1, ed. Richard Finneran (New York: MacMillan,
1989).
Original from
its engagement with bio-politics. The second principle is that its
t:
actions seek to mediate the relationship between national and <(
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transnational domains of rights. A typical example is the German- &
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based kein mensch ist illegal, a collective of activists, artists, c

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and tactical media groups working around issues of immigration, •
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configuration, has moved beyond the traditional framework of "O
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being purely an artistic or activist group. It is neither one nor the -
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other. Put another way, it is consciously hybridized, which means C
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it is both an activist and artistic group simultaneously. This allows a I
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degree of flexibility in its tactical formations, along with the tools of

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its work, which adopt and adapt the instruments of art, propaganda, Q
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probing and testing the resilience of the system's attempt to contain ~
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disobedience. While its activities are grounded in the struggles E
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for rights of those spectral, shadowy communities comprising 0
immigrants, refugees, and sans papiers, kein mensch ist illegal

disavows any interest in charity or humanitarian work. Rather its
principal focus is on the question of rights. This stance is also the
source of its name: based 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 of human rights; a negation,
which it suggests, questions the very category of the human, spe-
cifically the non-European other as a foreigner, the unwelcomed
stranger. 19
Xenophobia, Xenophllla, Racism, and the Human

As Sarat Maharaj has shown and as can be seen in the work of
Ruth Wodak, there is an intense correlation between xenophobia
19 For a full account of kein mensch ist illegal's work see Florian Schneider/kein mensch isl illegal. "New Rules
of the New Actonomy 3.o: in Democracy Unrealized: Documenta II_Platform I. ed. Okwui Enwezor. Carlos
Basualdo. Sarat Maharaj. et al. (Stuttgan: Hatje Gantz. 2002), 179-93; see also http:/ / new.actonomy.org for funher
development of its work.
Original from
and xenophilia in the discourse of racism. 20, 21,22 Xenophobia and
xenophilia manifest assumptions in their understanding of race in
their excessive non-recognition and recognition of the other. The
fundamental ethical lapse in both is the manner in which each, in
its own way, elides the complex assumptions which undergird
the politics of race in contemporary culture. It is not a coincidence
that the discourse of multiculturalism and certain digestible ac-
knowledgments of difference have suffered in the context of art
and culture due to this ambiguity. Furthermore, xenophobia and
xenophilia underline an uneasiness and a false intimacy with the
subject of racism. Both can be irrational either in its phobic re-
sponse to the other or in its obsessive enthusiasm for all things
different. In cultural and artistic discourse this schism cannot be
emphasized enough. This negation which is both the source of
xenophobia and racism is apparent in the recent rise of far right
parties which run on anti-immigrant political planks and are often
unambiguously racist in their discourse.23 The late Pim Fortuyn,
who made the non-European immigrant the antithesis of a sustain-
able ideal of multicultural Netherlands, designed his entire party
manifesto around what he called Livable Netherlands, a quality of
life program advocating the expulsion of immigrants from the
Netherlands. Racism, as such, is demonstrably an example of the
human as a limit case, for it conceives of the other on the basis
of a defect, as the pure manifestation of a negation.24 Therefore,
to make the other or the "victim" the subject of art, as the image of
a critical recall that stands between the artist and the spectator,
20 See Sarat Maharaj's essay in Educa tion, Information, Entertainment: Current Approaches on Higher Artistic
Education, ed. Ute Meta Bauer (Vienna: edition selene, 2001 ).
21 Ruth Wodak, "I nequal ity, Democracy and Parliamentary Discourses," in Democracy Unrealized, ed . Okwui
Enwezor. Carlos Basualdo. Ute Meta Bauer, et al. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 151-68.
22 Hannah Arend1, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego and New York: Harcourt. 1968). F0< a partlcularty thorough
analysis of the development of the concept of race as justification for, and incitement to. dispossession of civil
and human rights see the chapter "Race and Bureaucracy." 185-221.
23 In Europe in the last decade there has been a particularty intense upsurge of racist far right and neo-Nazi political
parties such as Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in France, Jorg Haider's FPO (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
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
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
Identities (London: Verso. 1991), 217-27.
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before the institution and the law brings her contingent status in
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representation to a level of visibility hitherto unrecognized by the <(
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regimes of invisibility that otherwise surround and veil her in public &
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comfits the visual field in which her presence is both registered C
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Julia Kristeva in speaking of the stranger amongst us as that -g
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which disturbs identity, order, legality.25·26 The human as a ghostly ~
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presence, as more than a metaphor for illegality, as a shadow C
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before the law, marks the separation between those identified as r
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those (Africans, Arabs, Roma, Asians, women, gays, and lesbians, .Q
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the human family by first exorcizing their strangeness, foreignness, .,~
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Thus, while it has spotlighted violations by the German 8

government of European Union human rights laws concerning the
repatriation and deportation of refugees and asylum seekers, kein
mensch ist illegal works against the German immigration law in
the name of a larger universal ethical principle, one that repudiates
the illegalization of desperate immigrants. The given doxa of clas-
sical political art is that it inteNenes within the means of production
and in the cracks between the tectonic plates of class formations.
24 See W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989), first published in 1903. Dubois w as
perhaps the first thinker to draw our attention to the question of race in modernity. In "Of the Dawn of Freedom,"
the second section of his cla ssic treatment of race and the American experience, he wri1es: 'The problem of
the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line-the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men (sic)
in Asia and Africa, in America and Islands of the sea." One hundred years alter Dubois's treatise, Paul Gilroy in
a recent work Against Race: lmBgining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard
University Press, 2000) has taken up and extended this theme in a powerlul anti-clerical critique of the persistence
of racial discourse in contemporary culture.
25 More than any other group of thinkers it is revolutionary third-wor1d, anti-colonial intellectuals who foregrounded
bio-politics more than class as the founding principle of all political and cultural struggles. See for example Frantz
Fanon. Black Skin, White M ask. trans. Charles Lam Markham (New York: Grove Press. 1967) panicularty the
chapter "The Negro and Recognition.' The concluding passage of the chapter sketches the degree to which the
struggle for the co nception of the human has been made the object of all ethical and political considerations
of otherness. Fanon writes in this passage: ·1said in my introduction that man is a yes. I will never stop reiterating
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
man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.·
26 For a full treatment of this subject see Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York ,
Columbia University Press. 1991 ).

It was not until the rise of fascism that it became clear that the
~
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subject of political art was about to be transformed. It never recog-
i
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UJ nized, however, the importance of otherness and its potent political
reality within the visual field. Careful appraisal of artistic formations
today makes it clear that they deviate from classical ideas of political
art, at least in one respect. The target of this art is not simply
systemic, centered on the political entity of the state, its ideology,
apparatus, agents. Rather, it involves a perhaps surprising principle
of the universalization of the concept of the human evoked by
human rights. It is on behalf of such a universal principle that
institutions and organs of global multinational and transnational
business and policy bodies-such as the International Monetary
Fund , World Bank, or Nike, Shell, Exxon-have also become
targets of attack. The methods, employed in the name of art, to
address some of these issues consequently have had to change,
both in their form and orientation. It is in this sense that Rogoff's
notion of the unbounded and undisciplined work is a brilliantly
novel conceptualization of what many think of as the conjunction
between politics and art or ethics and aesthetics. 27 Such work,
in my view, neither sensationalizes aesthetics nor spectacularizes
the ethical.
The Detenttorlallzed Site of Art and Polltlca: Contemporary

Art In a Time of Crisis
A distinguishing feature of the ethical and aesthetical in current
practice is its deterritorialized nature. As I have been arguing,
this kind of work is Janus-faced: it is conscious of its form and right
as an artistic intervention while imbricating its relation to the con-
ditions and topographies of reception beyond the traditional bound-
aries of art. It should also be noted that this kind of work is distinctly
different from the old political art of the European avant-garde
27 Recent anti-globalization battles in Seattle, Prague, M ontreal, Genoa, Guadalajara are instances of the kind
·unbounded" and "undisciplined" worlc is being taken up by certaln forms of political an. There is now a recognitiOn,
even in such insular clubs as the Davos Economic Summit in Sw itzerland, of the imponance of culture as an
instrument of economic policy discussion. The organizers of Davos have since began inviting "cultural producers•
to its discussiOns on global governance.

which regarded fascism as the enemy and whose politics were
based on the solidarity of working class struggles, which it hoped
would lead to the relation of the utopia of proletarian rule and
culture. The productivist model of the Russian avant-garde in the
Soviet Union after 1917 was inspired by this utopianism. The
same was the case, for instance, in Mexico where revolutionary
artists such as Diego Rivera and other Muralists were concerned
with the relation of a worker's rule through the power of a peasant
revolution. Or in the Resistance Art model in South Africa where u
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art under apartheid harnessed its energy to the overthrow of a !!l
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totalitarian and racist regime. C
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Partly because of the revolution in communication technologies, I
art and politics are now much more broadly concerned with con- ·-=l'.l
ditions of social life: the environment, human rights, globalization,
racism, nationalism, and social justice. In their combination they
identify and interact with disciplinary formations that distend the
formal boundaries of official artistic discourse. Nevertheless, the
surprising, and some would argue troubling, aspect of this kind of
work is its tendency to transform ethical concerns into aesthetic
devices and vice versa. To the degree that artists editorialize on the
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 development is not whether activist or politically invested
artists express the "correct position" with the correct forms, instead
I am interested in their always-stated interest in an ethics rooted
in the conception of bio-politics.28
Thus, when we attempt to grasp the conjunction of ethics and
aesthetics, or politics and poetics, we must in effect recognize the
importance and global dimension of the discourse of human rights.
Consequently, even when what artists spotlight may be local-
such as Alfredo Jaar's work on Rwanda and the Union Carbide
28 For a fruitful reading of the task of the artist operating under the understanding of a political commitment, see
Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Author as Producer." in Reflections: EsSBys, Aphorisms. Autobiographical Writings.
ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken. 1978). 220-38; see also Jean-Paul Sartre. What is Literature? and Other
Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1988) for his elaboration of the notion of commined literature.
Original from
disaster in Bhopal, India-the tactical public is always global. 29
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Throughout his career Jaar has made the critique of predatory
I
UJ capitalism and human rights violations signature issues in his
work. In Let There Be Light: The Rwanda Project, 1994-1998 Jaar
was one of the first (and remains one of the few) artists to respond
to the mass killings that took place over a period of one hundred
days in the summer of 1994. Artists like Jaar, (here the art of Hans
Haacke is crucial) work at disclosing the complex transnational
web that illuminates not only their project but also the interests of
multinational formations. Take, for example, Haacke's sculpture
U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983, a cube of plywood that evokes
the claustrophobia of confinement and imprisonment made in
the aftermath of the US invasion of Grenada. Whether in Jaar's or
Haacke's work, what we witness is a new kind of thinking that
has inverted and transformed the old maxim: "all politics is local"
to "all local politics is now global." The universal umbrella of human
rights offers a peculiar sort of protection to local causes once
they are reframed in a global context. Notice, for instance, that many
grassroots social movements and Non-Governmental Organizations
may have their specific contexts in local conditions, but often
appeal to the global public sphere in order to make effective their
individual projects. Sub-commandante Marcos and his Zapatistas
in Mexico, the AIDS activists' campaign against pharmaceuticals
in South Africa, the late Ken Saro Wiwa's Movement for the
Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) in Nigeria are recent examples
of this transformation. Even the most odious of these interests,
Al Qaeda, uses the appeal of various local anti-modern Islamic
fundamentalisms to export its universalizing ethos of terror and
spiritual redemption.
Where political or ethical considerations are specifically fore-
grounded in an artist's work--for example: in the work of the realist
painter Leon Golub; Paul Stopforth's graphite drawings during his
years in South Africa; Luis Camnitzer's investigations of torture in
29 Alfredo Jaar, It is Difficult: Ten )Bars and Let There Be Light The Rv.end8 Project. 1994--1998 (Barcelona: Actar, 1998).
Original from
Uruguay during that country's dictatorship; Willie Doherty's videos
and photographs detailing the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland;
Martha Rosler's reworking of images of the Vietnam War as a
measured critique of American neo-colonial offensive in Southeast
Asia; Chris Burden's Vietnam War counter-memorial; William •.c.
Kentridge's drawings for projection, which focus on the legacy of ~

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apartheid; the solemn performance of the activist group Mothers ~
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of Plaza de Mayo's daily vigil in Buenos Aires in behalf of their LL
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disappeared children during Argentina's "dirty war"-human rights "O
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Artists, such as Leon Golub, have made resistance to the constant C
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threat of disappearance of public memory a test for the stress I
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between the ethical and aesthetic. Golub's unrealistically painted :e
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realist paintings are conceived specifically as counterpaintings to .Q
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tled, agitated paintings, media images that represent in extremis a
the precariousness of the human body under violent state repression.

In such key series of works as Vietnam (1972-74), Mercenaries
(1979-87), Interrogations (1981-86) and White Squads (1982-87), we
are confronted by a panoply of fragmented and isolated images
projected against the backdrop of neutral surroundings, all of them
specific to and concerned with the deracination of human life. It
is as if both naked power and naked life are simultaneously isolated
in the ghostly outlines of his sparsely painted, distressed, cleaved
canvasses. Likewise, Stopforth's mortuary drawings-a set of reduc-
tive drawings of fragments of Steve Biko's mutilated body after
his death through torture play a similarly mnemonic role as Golub's
and are no less powerful for their overt political claim to represent-
ing violations of the body. Similar concerns are the frame around
which Camnitzer's From the Uruguayan Torture Series is defined. In
each of these artistic positions, what stands out are individual
responses to naked power and naked life in representation. The
Original from
a ethical questions posed by much recent art are never about the
question of the aesthetic merit of the work alone. Nor is it just about
linking the content of the work to the moral claim of the art. Even
if the empirical grounding of such content is never literalized so
as to assume unmitigated claims of truth, the appearance of such
content in visual representation always represents a risk for both
the art and artist, institution and spectator.
Identity Polltlca and the Rediscovery of the Human In

Contemporary Art
I have argued throughout this text that the location of the ethical
in contemporary art, or the opposition of the ethical and aesthetic,
arises precisely from the legacy of human rights insofar as the
category of the human is what is at stake. I want to offer further
examples for consideration in this discussion. When we frame
certain types of artistic practice around issues of identity-be it
cultural, gender-based, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality-
we are basically witnessing the serious force given each of these
domains by human rights and its evolution in the last fifty years.
Each of these domains defines itself around and against principles
of power and rights. Consider, for instance, certain activities of
artists, such as Group Material, who take up methods of advocacy
around political subjectivity, education and health in their work, or
activist groups such as ACT UP, who work on the basis of enlight-
ened self-interest in matters concerning the AIDS crisis that ravaged
the gay community in the 1980s, or Claude Lanzmann's epic film
on the Holocaust, Shoah. Even Hollywood films such as Schindler's
List, which took on the role of bearing witness on behalf of victims
of the Holocaust was founded upon identity discourses and the
shroud of human rights that envelopes each of them. The destabi-
lizing and subversive rapture often associated with the work of
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (one of the most thorough and complex con-
vergences of the tension surrounding ethics and aesthetics); the
ghostly monologues on race and identity in Glen Ligon's coal dust
Original from
and stenciled paintings; the ambiguous and lugubrious archives
that make up Christian Boltanski's work are caught in this tension.
Generalized images that appeal to our sense of "humanity" or
categorically reinvest the condition of the human with contingency,
works that take up the excursus of trauma: a flash of the tumescent
flesh of the wounded body or the wordless scream of the witness
before a catastrophe are just as equally implicated in this account.
Thus, the more practices and discourses of contemporary art
recognize these categories as legitimate artistic strategies, the more
human rights will ever remain both the silent narrative and specter
that haunts the ethical and aesthetic in contemporary art.
Document& 11 and the Documentary as a For11, of Unravellng

Truth
I now wish to consider the effect of these questions as it bears on
the reception of documenta 11, for which I served as the artistic
director between 1998 and 2002. To many observers, documenta 11
was the culmination of a development in contemporary art in which
increasingly the documentary form became the dominant artistic
language, particularly in photographic, film, and video work repre-
sented in its fifth platform: the exhibition. The surplus of modes of
the "documentary," whether materialist or indexical, the "overcom-
pensation" in the exhibition of works with a "political agenda," and
the "overwhelming" relationship to social life were read as ethical
messages by the exhibition organizers to a jaded global leftist
public. Moreover, such messages were held to reveal the ideological
proclivities of the organizers rather than their interest in traditional
notions of art. In fact, the exhibition was perceived as that moment
when the global left's "evangelical" zeal and concern with human
rights led to severe reduction in the aesthetic nature of the art and
thus promoted a certain political pleading by the many documenta-
30 A particularty disconcerted view of the exhibition could be read in the alarmed review of Blalce Gopnilc, the art
critic of The Washington Post, whose article drew out of thin air the bizarre notion that the exhibition was
anti-American. See Blalce Gopnilc, "Fully Freighted Art: At Documents 11. A Bumpy Ride for Art World's Avant-
Garde," 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,' The New Yorlc Times, June 18, 2002.
Original from
~ ries of a view of the world shaped by politics more than art.30 In
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this account, the documentary not only trumps art, it subordinates
I
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it so completely that any relation to art is vitiated by the curatorial
agenda. Understood so tendentiously, the bliss of the autonomy of
art freed from any socio-political regulation ends precisely at that
moment when the opposition between ethics and aesthetics is es-
tablished, thus forcing viewers to take sides. Of course, this account
has little resemblance either to the exhibition that my colleagues
and I curated, or to the one I witnessed along with hundreds of
thousands of visitors to Kassel.
Some time has passed since the final segment; the fifth platform
of documenta 11 opened in Kassel in June, 2002. It now appears
possible to revisit some of the points made by its critics. Returning
to the idea of the "unbounded" and "undisciplined" work, as a
framework around which to articulate the general vicissitude and
unhomely condition of contemporary art, the project of documenta 11
was to probe specific instances of this change. Most of you will
remember that the fifth platform was designated as the locus of the
exhibition, part of the broad visual field of documenta 11 's project.
You might also remember that the logic of the documenta 11
platforms was partly based on a set of discursive relationships
between sites of theoretical practice and those of visual practice,
each site elaborating on questions and ideas proper to its own
field of discourse, but also interrogating assumptions accruing to
the other fields. Another element of the discursive is the pursuit
in the exhibition, to present and argue for works with an awareness
of their own intelligibility in the social context of today's world.
The discursive was however, not based on the relativization of art
and politics, the cultural and the social, or even the ethical and
the aesthetic. Neither was it based on the usual opposition between
the center and margin. The discursive was a term employed to
delineate the correspondence between systems of meaning; between
locations, publics, audiences, and institutions. It afforded us the
ability to be engaged with those disciplinary formations that arise
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precisely at the point where visual practice can no longer claim
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in the agonistic exchange between different interlocutors; the relation C
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"reciprocal elucidations. "31 This relation to the other has often

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is the other, evoked by Levinasian ethics in our identification with :,
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the other, the other as a figure to whom we owe the possibility :e
of this absolute fidelity. The central concern for the other, the being-
for-the-other of which Levinas speaks, is the ground for the principle
of the intersubjective that governs the communicative principle of
an exchange between two people. Therefore, the concept of truth
requires first that the other exists in every intersubjective, reciprocal
exchange. This is a recognition of the basis of power relations. I
do not use the other here in an ethnographical sense. Rather, in
the sense of the recognition of one's own limits in relation to an-
other subjectivized position, be it a text, an artwork, a spoken ex-
change. We initiate each of our interactions in this regard with a
fund of trust in the integrity of the subjectivized position. The oth-
er, then, exists neither as an aberration nor as an opposition. It
exists, always, in dialectical relation to multiple modes of subjec-
tivization.
Let us return to Badiou. According to what he terms the ethic
of a truth, the relationship to the other,
is the principle that enables the continuation of a truth-process ... that which lends
consistency to the presence of some-one in the composition of the subject induced
by the process of this truth. 33
31 Michel Foucault, 'Polemics. Politics, and Problematizations." in Ethics: Subjecti vity and Truth. Essential Works of
Foucault 1954- 1984, Vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press. 1997), 111.
32 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso. 2001). 42.
33 Ibid ., 44.
Original from
If that be the case, the grounds of the ethical as such in documenta 11
are not in the relativization of ethics and aesthetics, but in a middle
course: the composition of the subject induced by the process of
spectator and the work of art. This means that documenta 11 was,
rather, an active, entangled field of procedures for which different
practitioners and publics shared responsibility, sometimes in mutual
intelligibility and sometimes not. Such a shared zone of responsibility
is the zone of subjectivized practices.
Reality Effect and the Representation of Soclal Life 34

Now that documenta 11 has become historical, in the sense that its
evaluation belongs both to the past and the present, we can look
back to all its constitutive parts and begin the task of unraveling both
its proposals and its public reception. When the exhibition first
opened-to almost universal perplexity with regard to its temporal
and spatial density-a common idea came to define the nature
of the project, the idea that it was invested in what Barthes termed
"the reality effect" in its attunement to the representation of social
life in multiple works. Kim Levin, the critic of the New York Village
Voice, proclaimed the exhibition the CNN Documenta. 35 Linda
Nochlin who offered a careful reading of works in the exhibition, saw
images in the exhibition as supported by various and expanded
accounts of the documentary. She correctly noted the degree to
which many works functioned at the level of the relationship be-
tween images and social reality. 36 Despite these, the critical misap-
praisal and misapprehension of the structural and critical intent
of the exhibition to elaborate on the reasons why artists and other
image-makers had become obsessed with reality as such and the
representation of everyday life, along with their effects on contem-
porary consciousness, was noteworthy in this sense. Not only was
the problematic of the documentary elided as more than an account
34 See Boris Groys, "An in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artworl< to An Documentation," for a highly nuanced dis
cussion of the relationship between reality and representation of life as a social fact within certain forms of artistic
practice in Documenta 11_Platform5: Exhibition, ed. Okwui Enwezor et al. (Stuttgan: Hatje Cantz. 2002), 108--14.
35 See Kim Levin, "The CNN Documenta: An in an International State of Emergency." The Village W>K:e. July 2, 2002.
38 See Linda Nochlin, "Documented Success," Artforum (September 2002): 159-63.

of the political subjectivity of its makers, the exhibition's multiple I
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mode precisely because it clashed with the traditional understanding ~
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systematic, taxonomic, and typological fashion and to demonstrate u::
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activities of art and procedures of image production in the last 40 C
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years. The disparate and oftentimes antagonistic procedures-such :,
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as one finds in Allan Sekula's Fish Story, Alfredo Jaar's Rwanda :e<>
Project, Bernd and Hilla Becher's Half-Timbered Houses of the Siegen

Industrial Zone; Jef Geys's Day and Night and Day. .. ; Zarina Bhimji's
Out of Blue, Fiona Tan's Countenance; lgloolik lsuma Productions's
Nunavut (Our Land); Black Audio Film Collective's Handsworth's
Song-are not reducible to documentary as such.
A brief excursion into the formal and scopic conception of each
of the works cited above provides a fascinating map and disorients
the reading of the term "documentary" as a specific mode of
photographic or filmic articulation of reality. In fact, there are many
more works in the exhibition that even further complicate the
documentarist thrust. For example, Isaac Julien's probing film on
paradise and loss in Paradise Omeros; Steve McQueen's double
meditation on history, labor, and exile in Western Deep and Carib's
Leap, Ulrike Ottinger's Sildostpassage (South East Passage), a
melancholic traversal of the anonymous, abandoned, yet thriving
and alive corners of old cities in the second world; Amar Kanwar's
A Season Outside, a wrenching cinematic tone poem on partition
blues acted out daily at the border crossing that separates India and
Pakistan at Wagah, the result of the last colonial act at remapping
postcolonial spaces; Eyal Sivan's The Specialist: Eichmann in
Jerusalem and ltsembatsemba: Rwanda One Genocide Later. Might

I one be consoled to learn that all these disparate works-while surely
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"documentary" in the limited sense applied to them by inattentive

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0 often ascribe when using the epithet "photojournalism," especially
in the predatory form of stalking sensational pictures as a hunter
would stalk game?37 In fact, an artist like Touhami Ennadre, who
presented in the exhibition a study of the grief and mourning
surrounding the destruction of the World Trade Center, vigorously
disputes any attempt to associate his work with such an epithet.
Even the more benign term "documentary" does not satisfy him
in terms of what he believes to be the purpose of his photographic
work: to make singular photographic work that speaks to the
authenticity of each given situation to the degree that the photo-
graph can no longer be read as just mere information. Yet Chantal
Akerman embraces the contradiction with the documentary in-
herent in film firmly in her cinematic practice in which the image
seNes both a heuristic purpose and an aesthetic one. She, who
is herself the child of Holocaust suNivors, makes no secret of her
identification with victims, which oftentimes is perceived as part
of the ideological baggage much documentary work carries. Her
film D'Est, which tracks the endlessness of the vast emptiness
that attended the dissolution of the Soviet empire, is remarkable not
only for its oneiric quality, but also for its gritty realism. Watching
the blue haze that coats the mood of the film, one literally has the
feeling of watching dusk settling on the after-life of the second
world. The film can therefore be read as a kind of summa of that
after-life.
V6rlt6, Reality, Affect

So far I have been commenting on one peculiar terminology: the
word "documentary" which was recurrent in most commentaries
about images in documenta 11. Now what I wish to do is to introduce
37 A more apt term might be the distinction made by Walker Evans between the "documentary style" and the
documentary as a form.
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a second term: the French word verite. I propose that we explore
the questions raised by the term documentary by interpellating it ~
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types of images directed at, and drawn from , the "real" world. C:
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"reality" they embalm as images, are commonly understood to ~
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violence or catastrophe is present with the pain of the subject, C:
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that is, to the real. Such work as largely found in the media is said I
to refer to real things or events in the world-that is, as evidence

of unvarnished truth of the real. But today, with "reality television"
ascendant, the scope of its affective simultaneity makes the
documentary mode appear somehow quaint in comparison, in some
cases even outmoded due to the delay in its transmission. 38
However, what haunts the documentary most is the charge of
maudlin moralism directed at its products. Let us dwell a little on
this idea of documentary, which despite its susceptibility to moral
relativism and appeal to a false consciousness of which its critics
accuse it, has a very rich and distinguished tradition. Almost all
the important photographers of the modern era-Eugene Atget,
Walker Evans, August Sander, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus,
David Goldblatt, Bernd and Hilla Becher-have worked within the
documentary mode, if we understand the nature of the documentary
mode as simultaneously analytic and mimetic. As such, the
documentary has the unique position of being caught in a tauto-
logical game, which is to both document and analyze, to show
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
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 ·rear· life is brought to a new level. What's impressive about
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 Lumiere 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
continues to plague Roben J. Flaheny·s seminal ethno-documentary film Nanook of the Norrh) and today in the
news media.
Original from
I and define and to do so with both aesthetic means and also to be
oblivious of aesthetic. For some, it is a matter of taste: the rawer
the image the more authentic the structure of feeling it supposedly
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image, the more correspondingly distanced it is from its subject, the
greater its putative objectivity. But even if the most refined aesthetic
procedures were employed in a work, because of the tendency
to categorize the documentary as a mode of practice consistently
prepared to show and ask moral questions around what it docu-
ments, it is the documentary as a massive body of evidence we end
up most seeing. To certain catholic tastes, the more the ethical
confronts the documentary, the more distance from aestheticization
it must assume. For such spectators, to aestheticize human suf-
fering is an obscenity. This accusation is often directed against the
work of a photographer like Sebastiao Salgado; less so for Gilles
Peress, and it becomes quite controversial in the case of Susan
Meiselas.
Yet when we look at the softcore pictures of distress and
poverty by the likes of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and other
photographers who documented the American depression in
the 1930s, there is little moral outrage in the reduction of poverty
to certain social types by urbane, middle class photographers
roughing it amongst the dejected mass of tenant farmers in drought-
blighted tenant farms of the South or the tenements of the large
cities. Even Jacob Riis' late nineteenth century moral crusades in
his study of the squalor and appalling living conditions in over-
crowded tenements of New York's Lower East Side in How the Other
Half Lives is a product of a different type of moral imperative.
Perhaps this is so because these images, which were mostly from
before 1940, precede the period of the discourse of victims. The
opposition between the ethical and aesthetic or the political and
-
poetic, as I have been attempting to demonstrate, has a long
running history. But the vehemence of this opposition today in
documentary forms of work is informed mostly by the rise of
Original from
discourse of victims scattered all over the global peripheries that
saturate the media today. And with this rise of victims a peculiar
form of scopophobia, an antiocularcentric vision has settled over the
field of the documentary.39 I do not, however, wish to recuperate
the documentary form with all its unresolved anomalies within what •
many would believe to be a more superior aesthetic system. For ~

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manner in which it conveys and conducts its judgment of events :,
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and depictions of people, things, objects. Even if the documentary

is never incontrovertibly called to present a moral judgment but to
document, to record, to archive, or simply to present, the over-
whelming ethical ground it claims often subtends more nuanced
positions.
The documentary admits diverse structures of reference into its
methods: for example, evidence, testimony, bearing witness. Above
all it is mnemonic. The documentary's relationship to its subject,
in spite of its bold assertions of truth claims, is an ambiguous one.
One of the most shocking pictures I have ever encountered in
the media was reproduced almost a decade ago on the front page
of The New York Times. The picture, taken by Kevin Carter, a
South African photographer, shows a young, exhausted Sudanese
refugee child bent over on his hands and knees. The chilling image,
which I can only now conjure from memory, is a tightly composed
picture, in which the circularity of the camera cuts to a diagonal
so as to align the looming frame of the child, with that of a vulture
standing behind him, observing, waiting. Two things come back
to me from that decade-old experience of the photograph and my
feeling as a spectator of the image: the remoteness and ambiguity
39 For a magisterial treatment of anti-ocularcentrism see Manin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berlr.eley: University of California Press. 1994).

i of the photographer from the scene and my own haunted curiosity
of the ultimate fate of the child. The latter is what the documentary
never discloses: the aftermath. The reception of this picture across
the world was spectacular. It raised a range of ethical issues, the
most obvious of which was: what, if anything, did the photographer
do to save the vulnerable abandoned child. Moral outrage at the
picture and at the photographer was mingled with dumb admiration
of the photographer's courage in recording such a harrowing scene,
for rescu ing the child, if only as image, from the anonymity of his
fate. Of course, the photographer won all kinds of awards for his
effort. Carter was overwhelmed by the attention and the debate
surrounding the picture. He committed suicide shortly thereafter.40
Memento Mori: The Archive as a Site of Mourning

I have used this example to raise the unanswerable question of the
documentary's ambiguity to its subject and to pose the question
whether it makes any sense to collapse ethics and aesthetics in a
single discussion of art's relationship to its subject. Here, I want
to call attention to Christian Boltanski's blurry pictures of "Holocaust"
children and parts of Gerhard Richter's exhaustive archive Atlas.41
Boltanski's massive reorganization of photographs of anonymous
children, which blurs and exposes the faces of innocence, comes
closest to the use of the documentary as a method of bearing
witness and a tool of memorialization: the archive as mnemonic
machine. Richter's Atlas evinces a different relationship to this
machine in that he deliberately collapses the borders between the
private and public, the personal and political, the quotidian and
banal with the profound. His is an atlas of "perpetual commentary"
on the subject of looking and the function of images in constituting
social memory in the aftermath of Nazism and within modern
,
culture. Atlas is an inventory of massive, inexhaustible potential that
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 pictu re or due to other problems. Any inference of a connection to the
publicity surrounding this image and his death is not intended here.
41 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomic Archive." October 88 (Spring 1999): 117-45.

either forecloses meaning due to its unwieldy heterogeneity or ..•
manipulates the scales and legibility of what is represented, thereby Ji
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actively reading them, a priori, as nothing but an arbitrary juxta- &
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position of meaningless images. But is Atlas, in its obsessive docu- C
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attempt to bring to bear a great degree of complexity in the ~
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memento mori? Such memento mori is registered in the early i:::,
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beginning of this ambitious historical project. In panels 16, 17, and
18, Richter shows us newspaper images of Nazi soldiers publically C
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humiliating their victims and of the liberated Nazi camps, which :c
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depict emaciated survivors amid jumbled piles of bleached corpses :t:
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of those who did not survive. And years later in panels 470, 471, Q
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472, and 473, images of the Baader-Meinhof gang join the roll-call
of the memorialized. Panel 471 is in fact a reproduction of Richter's
painting from a newspaper reproduction of Ulrike Meinhof's suicide.
The temporal lag between the Nazi camp images and that of the
terrorist gang does nothing to alleviate the context of the historical
space from which this comparatively benign investigation is being
conducted. As if to foreground what Hannah Arendt identified as
the banality of evil, Richter intersperses throughout the breadth of
his magnum opus images of domestic tranquility, his studio, holiday
pictures, pictures of his own work, etc.42
Bllndapot, Blank Stare, Scopophobla, and the Hole In Vision

How are we to read the images and historical accounts both
Boltanski and Richter seek to reindex? Surely, to see Richter's
Herculean effort at structural collectivization of private and public,
personal and political histories as disinterested and merely
ambiguous is to be blind to it. Such a reaction exemplifies a
consistent aporia in contemporary art's approach to the documen-
tary. A remarkable body of literature has been developed around
42 See Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rfN. ed. (New York: Penguin. 1994).
Original from
this question. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben makes a
crucial point about Auschwitz in this context. He writes that "[t]he
aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowl-
edge; a non-coincidence between fact and truth, between verification
and comprehension."43
Perhaps, then, this crisis, this confusion between fact and

truth, verification and comprehension linked to the documentary may
have its source at the level in which the documentary confronts
the monstrous, the absolute, indissoluble reduction of human suf-
fering to abject status and spectacle. It was Foucault who wrote
vociferously about the indignity of speaking for others. This poses
the following question to Sontag's fascinating and coruscating
self-reflexive analysis of documentary pictures in her recent book
Regarding the Pain of Others: whence does one open oneself up
to another's pain, a process which again recalls Levinas' ethics of
being-for-the-other? If the documentary is a testimony, as Sontag
argues, to a calamity, a record of an event, a representation of an
actuality, it is exegetic and seemingly eidetic. Yet it is neither mastery
nor totality. As such, it can only communicate as a fragment.
How do we trust or question that which the documentary presents
beyond blind acceptance of its ethical correctness or obdurate
distrust of its politics? The neutralizing assumption of a spectator-
ship, which averts its gaze and turns askance from the documentary
because it deeply distrusts it as a moral accusation, cannot at the
same time judge it. To avert one's eyes, to look askance, is equally
an ethical stance; it is to ask not to be accused; not to be con-
taminated, not to exist purely for the other, to be cleansed from the
guilt of looking at human misery, relieved from the burden of being-
for-the-other. Yet there is a level at which this disavowal, when
excessively interpreted in the direction of the non-western other
(as a critic, like Matthew Higgs did in relation to images in
43 Giorgio Agamben. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness end the Archive. trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New Yori(:
Zone, 1999), 12.

documenta 11) registers at a deeper level two kinds of disavowal: a I
scopophobic inattention to the specificity of the image and a reflex- Ji
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the occurrence of that which the document records, hence the claim ::c
of "truth" often imputed to the documentary. But to document is 11

never to make immanent a singular overwhelming truth. It is simply
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to collect in different forms a series of statements (what Foucault

calls "statement events" as the enunciative function of the archive)
leading to the interpretation of historical events or facts.45 The
documentary as such is never outrightly a claim of truth, namely,
that this happened; therefore, it is true. In its relentless singular-
ization, in the guise of bearing witness to that which is part of our
reality, even if it may be outside our immediate experience, the
documentary claims for itself the burden of truth in that it directs
itself to what it sees as recordable reality.
To document is to offer statements that stand for evidence of
something: a truth, a testimony to some truth. It is impossible for
any image to fully disclose the reality that hangs like a pall over the
extended field in which all images exist irrespective of Guy Debord's
claim that we all now live in a world of appearances where all social
relationships have disappeared into the screen of mediation.46 Let's
take any "documentary" image, say a war scene in Afghanistan
and, as a rule of thumb, test its veracity. On the one hand, one can
4-4 See Matthew Higgs. ·same Old Same Old; Artforum (September 2002): 166-7.
45 See Michel Foucault. The A rchaeology of Knowledge snd the Discourse on Langusge. trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 126-31.
46 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectscle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone. 1994).
Original from
look at scenes of the war's carnage: ruined streets, piled-up
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corpses, disconsolate populace and come away with the reasonable

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UJ belief that what the scenes show is the misery of war. At the
same time, the same image can never fully support whatever the
rationale that supports the war, such as the moral correctness
of rooting out terrorists. What do we see when we behold the prone,
dead corpse of a Taliban soldier: evidence of "here is a dead
terrorist" or "here is an Islamic martyr"? The abeyance into which
such an image is cast is no longer merely semantic or simply
ideological.47 The photograph is not at any rate a codeless message
or a messageless code. 48 In a sort of contradiction, despite the
persistence of the eye to see into and through such a scene, no
reading of it would ever prove adequate nor summarize the import
of its message. Literally, such scenes induce a kind of blindness,
excavate a hole in vision. Because of the vast extended visual field
in which such images exist, it appears quite the case that a
documentary can record something that is true but fail to reveal the
truth of that something, in the sense that it may actually misrep-
resent the subject in question. This is the given paradox of the
documentary, namely its lack of self-evidence. This was, I suspect,
part of the antipathy towards the documentary mode critics asso-
ciated with documenta 11.
The Documentary and the Scrlptlble

It is already difficult enough that professional documentarists
continuously work a thin line between compromise and heroism,
that to add to the cache of images produced by them, the vast
quantity of amateur images frays the truthfulness and the facticity
of the documentary. The advent of technological ability has meant
the wide availability of cameras to casual users. As such, the
documentary, as Barthes says of certain forms of writing, is "scrip-
tible," because it turns the reader into a kind of writer, that is it
47 Sontag makes this point in Regarding the Pain of Others.
48 See Roland Barthes. "The Photographic Message." A Banhes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and
Wang. 1982). 194-210.
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makes the reader wish to carry further the act of writing, encourag- I
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49
ing the imitation of the act of writing. The documentary could <(
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evidence. In a sense, everyone who possesses a camera could, by ~
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mechanical eye. He was too busy filming the scene of the assault ~
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to bother seeing it with his own eyes. Instead the camera came E
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to replace his vision, literally his capacity to see. To move then from 8
the passive position of the one who watches, who gazes at such
a scene, or as the receiver of its images on screen to a producer
of those images is to shift into a remarkable position of respon-
sibility. Such responsibility is what made Holliday not just a proper
witness but also a double witness whose two sets of vision must
be corroborated according to the mysterious workings of the law.
The position of the double witness, I believe, is what sets up
the opposition between art and documentary heard quite frequently
during the days of the opening of documenta 11; and afterwards,
the idea that the collection of images, which critics had organized
under the rubric of documentary are essentially two things: ( 1) they
are "scriptible," meaning that anyone with a camera can also record
images of atrocities or poverty, but not everyone can be an artist
in a convincing way. In a sense this is a denigration of the technical
facility which mechanical reproduction promotes; (2) this scriptibility
49 See Roland Barthes, SIZ, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar. Straus, and Giroux, 1974).
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I of the documentary, especially its mimetic proclivities, removes it
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from the realm of art. But for some critics what actually grates is
not simply the provincial art versus documentary argument, but the
audacity of any image to designate a reality to which viewers have
limited and oftentimes no experience of at all. The documentary
for such people relates only to a shallow kind of truth, due to its
dependence on causality. Art, so the argument goes, evidences a
deeper kind of truth, for it is not dependent on any external deter-
minant other than its own internal reality. This kind of argument is
familiar to many of us who at one time or another have been con-
fronted with the opposition between art as something specific and
unique and documentary as something that manifests only a kind
of social concern with limited creative purchase.
I cannot wholly dismiss the argument that many works in
documenta 11 can be confused with the documentary mode. Some
of the works can be thought as such insofar as the devices, the
stringing and sequencing of images or the narrative procedures
of certain analytical or conceptual frames of certain works, use
material drawn directly from the social world at large. Herein lies my
own distinction: rather than accepting exclusively the term "docu-
mentary" as a way to understand the manner in which the exhibition
purportedly privileged the documentation of the real world or the
analysis of social reality, I wish to address the documentary versus
art issue by inserting into the field of documenta 11 's vision the
concept of verite.
Verite has been defined as truth. But also it refers to lifelikeness,
a trueness to life. In the latter definition, it is predisposed towards
mimeticism. For example, in French, verite also means to strive to
be true to life in art: s'efforcer a la verite en art. Similarly verite
refers to realism, to real life, naturalism, authenticity, pragmatism,
verisimilitude. In the documentary mode we are presently reviewing,
verite involves also the kind of documentary practice born in France
in 1960s known as cinema verite, which blurs the line between
reality and simulated reality.

The meaning of the term "documentary" that was of philosoph-
ical interest to our main purpose and I believe this was demon-
strated throughout the entire length and breadth of the project, in
all the platforms, publications, symposia, workshops, etc.-refers
to Agamben 's idea of bare life or naked life. Bare life or naked life,
as such, is connected to that dimension of experience, which he
defines as a form-of-life, "a life that can never be separated from
its form , a life in which it is never possible to isolate something
such as naked life." 50 'O
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came to inhabit such a palpable space in the galleries of the exhi- :,
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we confront the conditionalities of "truth" as a process of unraveling,

exploring, questioning, probing, analyzing, diagnosing, a search
for truth or, shall we say, veracity. For the documentary mode, on
the other hand, there is a purposive, forensic inclination con-
cerned essentially with the recording of dry facts to be submitted
to the verite committee. It is here that the pure relationship between
documentary and verite become clearer, for they each define the
relationship between the spectator and the image what in Camera
Lucida Barthes defined as the studium-the interplay between
fact and truth. Comprehension and verification is the agitated field
of the studium, for "to recognise the studium is inevitably to en-
counter the photographer's intentions, to enter into harmony with
them, to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand
them, to argue with them within myself, for culture (from which the
studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and
consumers."51 This is what governs the relationship between the
documentary and verite, since there is nothing inherently true or
50 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End. Notes on Poh1ics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. 200'.l), 2-3.
51 Roland Bartties, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1981 ). 27-28.
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I factual in the documented image if the purpose of such a docu-
mentation does not further ask the viewer to approach such
documentation as not only just a fact of something real in the
world, but also something true in the social condition of that
world which is difficult to support in a single film frame or photo-
graphic image.
If this holds true, perhaps then the response to the documen-
tary mode in documenta 11 may lead us to assume that the recur-
sive persistence of what many came to see as documentary in the
exhibition already points to an exhaustion of the mode, an ex-
haustion that not only complicates the viewer's relationship to the
particular social world being examined, but in fact explodes that
social world as nothing but a body of excess. Thus to recoil from
the documentary is to return to doubts we each harbor about the
nature of its representations of events or the world as real and
therefore true. This apprehension is even more acute in the context
of the general control and regulation of the media by powerful
interests. To disbelieve what is presented as the truth about the world
may in fact lend itself to distrust of the messenger rather than
the message. The less that documentary exposes truth about the
world in favor of an excess of reality over which we have little
control and even less of a choice of full comprehension, the more
it seems that spectators turn from it.
Epilogue
In conclusion, it might be important to restate the view that the role
often assigned to documentary forms exists in the tension between
their aesthetic intention and ethical position vis-a-vis the subject
of the documentary. The second point about the documentary form
concerns its mnemonic function in relation to the archive that
brings into visibility the relationship between images, documents,
and systems of meaning. But it also involves a struggle between
two irresolvable positions in our news-saturated, mediated world.
W. J. T. Mitchell in his essay, The Photographic Essay: Four Case
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Studies, began his searching assessment of the photographic I
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medium and language by positing the idea that "[t]he relation of <
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and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the -
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place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their C:
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aesthetic and ethical identity." The question could be asked: i:
when do images lose their "conscience, their aesthetic and ethical
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art (in my view a highly dubious denial in an already prolix world of C:
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images and usage), the broad category of images in documenta 11 ::,
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nevertheless surpass the documentary reflex. The complex variety :e
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importance of adjusting the reductive prejudices that strip images --~

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This was precisely what we found in the lengthy research and

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communications with artists, theorists, activists, architects, institu- c3

tions-across cultures and continents, disciplines and communities,
institutions and networks (formal and informal): There are no fixed
messages that attach to the designation documentary. We worked
with artists and thinkers producing ideas and images on an un-
derstanding of their practice within the broader parameters of the
changing relationship between artist and audience, discourse and
language, addressing questions that were far less predicated on
predetermined meanings, but open to interpellation to other activities,
actions, events, and discourses. When an artist group like Huit
Facettes emerges in Senegal to question the efficacy of the indi-
vidual artist's relation to his context of production and public,
what does their alliance with the rural community of Hamdallaye
in Senegal mean, and how does it show these complex relations
of power? And by what means does Le Groupe Amos in the
62 W. J. T. M itchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. 1995). 281.
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...8 Democratic Republic of Congo communicate to their audience the
work it produces in the name of acting on behalf of Congolese civil
society: organizing public manifestations; producing documentary
films on gender and sexual relationship, economic production, and
flows of labor and capital; conducting clinics on democracy and
development; teaching workshops on gender equality; leading work-
shops on tolerance as the first condition of a democratic society;
or participating as observers in the peace negotiations between the
different factions of rebel movements that have made the Demo-
cratic Republic of Congo ungovernable? How do we apprehend the
important proposals of Park Fiction working in the suburbs of
Hamburg in a long-running project to mobilize the marginalized
community of St. Pauli against the gentrification of their neighbor-
hood by speculative real estate ventures, proposing instead a
park rather than another bland modernist architecture that weakens
the link between social relationships and community identity? In
the same affiliative spirit of urban and territorial analysis, we find
the important project of Fareed Armaly: From/To, working in col-
laboration with the filmmaker Rashid Masharawi on a reading of the
scattered trajectories of Palestinian dispersion and fragmentation
into multiple communities of exile and diaspora. Or the Italian group
Multiplicity in a provocative attempt to retrace and reconstruct the
tragedy and lives of migrants and refugees whose illegal smuggling
ship sank and disappeared during one night of tempest in the
Clandestini basin of the Mediterranean sea in Solid Sea. From
Alejandra Riera and Doina Petrescu's L'Association (des pas) which
concerns the political and cultural subjectivity of the Kurdish
community in Turkey, rendered as a poetics of social and political
analysis of representation to Raqs Media Collective's installation
on the Coordinates of Everyday Life in Delhi, which abjures the
ideological territorialization of marginality imposed by the state
on urban forms; to Black Audio Film Collective's probing documen-
tary film, which investigates the causes of black urban riots during
Margaret Thatcher's rule in Handsworth Songs; to Trinh T. Minh-ha's

film, a meditation on slow time and cultural spaces thriving outside ..
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the totalizing gaze of globalization in Naked Spaces: Living Is Round; ~

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to Allan Sekula in Fish Story, tracing the containerized motor of glob- 8.
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al labor flows; to sonic and visual fields which act as mnemonic -8
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in Bataille Monument, a materialized documentary dedicated to l
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African claim to modernity enacted in the Library and Museum Shop lL
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archival memory of the civil war in order to penetrate the larger :e
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"truth" of that civil conflict. These are just some of many examples. Q
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narratives, documents, statements, events, communities, institutions, 0
audiences. And each confounds the role of the documentary in

establishing a hierarchy between images and artistic forms, between
ethics and aesthetics, politics and poetics, truth and fiction. In
fact, in each of the individual positions and works mentioned
throughout this text, what stands out the most is the remarkable
consistency of concern with social life that is a mixture of political
interest (Armaly, Sekula, Jaar); sociological (Raqs Media Collective,
Multiplicity, Black Audio Film Collective, Ottinger, lgloolik lsuma
Productions); aesthetic (McQueen, Julien); and archival (Jef Geys).
Above all, it is the concern with the other, the fidelity to a truth
that the documentary ceaselessly constructs and deconstructs. Let
me end with Martin Jay's eloquent and succinct remark in which
he cautions that "[t]here is 'no view from nowhere' for even the most
scrupulously 'detached' observer." 53 And so it is with all of us
who at one time or another survey the ruin of modernity: There is
53 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes, 18.
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I no here from which to view disinterestedly that elsewhere that
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purportedly is the province of the documentary. Vision, whether

~ blind or seeing is always invested with a function of apprehending
~ the visual in a manner far more extensive and complex than what
the eye ultimately sees. And what truths can images tell us when
they are drowning in the continental drift set up by modern media
industries?
I would like to extend a note of thanks to Terry Smith, Barbara Vanderlinden for their
astute comments and to Tom Keenan for his careful reading of the essay.
First published in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 4/5 (2003/2004): 11-42.
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In her recent series of photographs, Yto Barrada glimpses at life ...8
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nondescript but consequently generates a richness of metaphorical

play: While the pavement seems to melt into a sea across which
an old schooner sails, the street's horizontal expanse alternately
transforms into a vertical wall that bars visual passage, as if to
block escape. The image visualizes a geopolitical conflict that is
ironic. Whereas such colonial vessels once transported the glory
of European civilization to darkest Africa, their current-day avatars
suggest only an imaginary return voyage that occurs in reality
against enormous odds. The ship, actually an intricate model named
"Le Detroit," is carried across Tangier's Avenue d'Espagne by a
young man peripherally located in the corner of the image. He holds
the vessel at shoulder level, which obscures his face, removing
his visage from the camera 's visual access. This representatio nal
dislocation, the blurring of human being and boat that distances
a man from his community, is the visual effect of a figure becoming
the vanishing point of citizenship.
Barrada, a Moroccan artist based in Paris and Tangier, has for
several years concerned herself with the Strait of Gibraltar, that
contentious divide between Africa and Europe where two continents
nearly touch but mobility is strictly regulated. 01 "A Life Full of Holes:
The Strait Project" (1998-2004), shown recently at the Photographers'
Gallery in London, represents this area less as vivid geography
than as zone of imagination and desire, one split between the would-
be emigre's longing for escape, looking forward toward passage
into an idealized realm to the north (depicted in another image by
a peeling tourism poster of an idyllic Alpine landscape), and the
expatriate's homesickness, gazing back with irrepressible memories
01 In a text that accompanies her recent series of photographs. Barrada writes. ·Before t99 1 any Moroccan with
a passpon could travel freely 10 Europe. But since the European Union's (E U) Schengen Agreement. vis,11ng
rights have beco me unilateral across what is now legally a one-way strait." Yto Barrada. A Life Full of Holes:
The Strait Pro1ect (London: Autograph ABP. 2005). 57.

s.. of an intimately familiar place irrevocably lost. In the image of the
street in Tangier the turbulence between these two positions
seems to lift our vantage point to a disembodied height, the uncer-
tainty of which indicates the ungrounding of any single interpretation.
Pledged to a certain ambiguity, the scene depicts not only a drama
of displacement but the experiential conditions of the refugee
which have already seeped into everyday life. Spatial insecurity,
perceptual disorientation, and reality's substitution by reverie's
wonder appear encoded in the image itself, which favors the
imagined elsewhere over the here and now, and it leaves the viewer
too in a state of determined irresolution.
I begin with this provocative photograph because it both in-
spires and provides one answer to a question I am left with after
considering Giorgio Agamben's concept of naked life: How can one
represent artistically a life severed from representation politically?
In his essay "Beyond Human Rights," Agamben makes a star-
tling declaration: "Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal
figure, unhinges the old trinity of state-nation-territory, it deserves
instead to be regarded as the central figure of our political history."02
If so, then our understanding of subjectivity must surely change,
and with it the philosophical basis of human rights. Because the
refugee a figure Agamben comes to generalize radically-presents
the very instantiation of naked life, of life stripped of political in-
scription insofar as the refugee exists outside of the nation-state;
it exposes the "originary fiction" of national sovereignty. "The
fiction that is implicit here is that birth comes into being immediately
as nation, so that there may not be any difference between the
two moments." This idea, in fact, is embedded in the very etymology
of the term, where nativity joins nationality, thus naturalizing a
connection that is historical but by no means universal. Agamben
continues, "Rights, in other words, are attributed to the human
being only to the degree to which he or she is the immediately
02 Giorgio Agamben. "Beyond Human Rights· ( 1993). in Means without End: Notes on Polit,cs, trans. V. Bineni and
C. Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 22.
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vanishing presupposition (and, in fact, the presupposition that must i
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never come to light as such) of the citizen."03 For if this realization- 0
that human beings have no inalienable rights ever did come to -

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light, as it does precisely in the case of the refugee, so would the ~
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realization that rights are assigned arbitrarily, and thus unjustly, by
virtue of one's nationality. Whichever rights one enjoys one owes
to the luck of the draw. Mere human beings have no protections or
legal recourse, not only because no national or extranational entity
is able to guarantee them at present but also because modern
political philosophy and legislation have failed adequately to define
and institutionalize rights that transcend nationality. The subject
of "human rights" has remained an ethical discourse, not a political
realization. The figure of the refugee, when regarded as the point of
departure for the conception of a new postnational subject, demands
an answer to the question of rights "beyond human rights," which
have proved inextricably linked to the nation-state and thus inca-
pable of bearing meaningful relation to those who live outside of it.
If I seem already to be drifting from my initial concern, which is
the question of the symmetry of political and artistic representation
when it comes to the subject of naked life, it is only to prepare the
ground for that discussion. For me, moreover, these theoretical
questions are not marginal to contemporary artistic practice; indeed
they go right to its heart. They constitute the central issues that
are systematically explored by those artists whose work is currently
among the most compelling in the contemporary field. I will con-
sider here the projects of only three-Steve McQueen, Emily Jacir,
and Yto Barrada-but certainly my list is incomplete. All create
art whose material and representational conditions bear directly
on naked life, while each approaches it with distinct emphasis:
McQueen addresses the trauma and joy of its experiential condi-
tions; Jacir, the viewer's empathic identification with its transgressive
order; and Barrada, the problematization of its documentation,
03 Agamben. "Beyond Human Rights." 21.
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wherein absence becomes its melancholy sign and promise at
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12 (2007), directed by Roger Buergel; it served earlier as a central
concern of documenta 11 (2002), organized by Okwui Enwezor. The
recent documenta raised two issues in particular that deserve
further exploration: first is the relationship between naked life and
documentary representation, which suffused the exhibition; second
is the creation of bare life through artistic practice. We can only
wait to see whether the next documenta will broach these concerns,
and if it does, what further answers it will provide.
How can representation document naked life? The two terms
might appear homologous: just as naked life is life stripped bare
(severed from nationality), so, too, documentary representation is
representation reduced to its essence (shed of aestheticization).
What else can be the significance of the fact that one term finds
its meaning in the other? According to Enwezor's formulation,
"The meaning of the term 'documentary' that was of philosophical
interest to our main purpose in documenta 11-and I believe this
was demonstrated throughout the entire length and breadth of the
project, in all the platforms, publications, symposia, workshops,
et cetera-refers to Giorgio Agamben's idea of bare life or naked
life."04 There seems to be a necessary link here, such that the
existence of naked life, as an essential form of life, is somehow
its own documentary realization. Enwezor complicates this equation
by hybridizing "the documentary mode" (defined as "a purposive
forensic inclination concerned essentially with the recording of dry
facts") by joining it to "the idea of verite" ("a process of unraveling,
exploring, questioning, probing, analyzing, and diagnosing a
search for truth").05 This is important because it adds a conceptual
04 Okwui Envvezor, ·0ocumentaryNerite: The Figure of 'Truth' in Contemporary An: in Experimenrs wirh Truth, ed.
Mark Nash (Philadelphia, PA: The Fabric Workshop and Museum. 2005). 101.
05 Enwezor. ·0ocumentaryNerite." 101. He continues. "The hinge for the examination of naked or bare life is the
veriteldocumentary space:

layer to an otherwise anachronistic positioning of photography as
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j:2 cording of dry facts"). It also, in turn, qualities the notion of "truth,"
which becomes indissociable from the conventions of its explora-
tion, thus contingent and historical, and this mediation complicates
our relation to the "social world," which tigures as "an excess of
reality over which we have little control and even less of a choice
of full comprehension. "06 Still, one might question the basis of
this homology, arguing conversely that the negativity of bare life, of
life as absence within the political tield, can simply not be con-
sonant with the positivity of visual representation.
But what if to represent is to make absent? This is an old
realization for sure, but one that photography doesn't always criti-
cally put to task. Nor does it enter into Enwezor's account of the
documentary /verite mode. In the "life full of holes" that Yto Barrada
depicts, the rupture from political status brings about a troubling
of representation, which is key to her project. In another image from
"The Strait Series," there appear two children who lean up against
an advertisement light box that illuminates an enlarged photograph
of a ferry ship approaching port. While the tigures reach out to an
imaginary distance, as if attempting to grasp the ship, even board
it and depart from their reality, the backlit image reduces the
substance of their bodies to dark protiles, flattening their otherwise
detailed appearances to patches of silhouettes. The scene visual-
izes the becoming of the refugee as a process that pulls away
presence into another world, creating a hole in the visual tield that
expresses the phenomenon of dislocation as a rupture from the
grasp of the state.
"It's their political disenfranchisement that's expressed in these
characters trapped in ·a state of absence," Barrada echoes.07
Naked life is not at all a natural condition of documentary practice.
In fact documentary representation today often serves the interests
06 Enwezor. "DocumentaryNerite." 101.

07 · aarrada in conversation w ith Nadia Tazi." in Barrada, A Life Full of Holes. 60.

of the state to identify, to recognize, to know, to control-according ......
to which photography, positioned within ever new and expanding "'
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and legal validation. Indeed the documentation of naked life appears

closely aligned to the exercise of power. As an application of force
against the body of those denied political rights, this function was
revealed recently in the shocking images taken of prisoners at Abu
Ghraib prison, where photography itself was enlisted as an instru-
ment of torture, where the exposure of naked life was simultane-
ously its constitution. Conversely in Barrada's work, photography
does not operate as a technique of identification; rather it enacts
a visual subtraction of figures that is multivalent, both melancholy
in the way it allegorizes the social devastation to Moroccan culture
and promising in its liberation of life, where identification, for better
or worse, is freed from representation, and where representation
acknowledges its absences. The documentation of bare life, in other
words, can only take place negatively, that is, indicated through
the lacuna, blurs, and blind spots that mar the image, but also open
up possibility within it, which parallels the condition of the subject
stripped bare of political representation.
A further reason why the refugee deserves to be elevated to
the position of the "central figure of our political history" is because
it proposes the elemental unit of a postnational social formation.
Just as Hannah Arendt in 1943-startlingly-thought that "Refugees
driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their
peoples," insofar as "history is no longer a closed book to them and
politics is no longer the privilege of Gentiles, "08 so for Agamben
"the condition of the countryless refugee" today represents "the
paradigm of a new historical consciousness."09 The situation of
Israel becomes a case in point for Agamben to draw out the social
08 Agamben. •Beyond Human Rights." 15. Arendt's words were originally published in the essay "We Refugees·
( 1943). in Hitler's Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America, ed. Mark M. Anderson
(New York: The New Press. 1998).
09 Agamben. · Beyond Human Rights: 15-16.
Original from
ramifications of his theoretical repositioning of the refugee in terms
of a radically new conception of community:
.
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Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, it
might be possible to imagine two political communities insisting on the same region
and in a condition of exodus from each other-communities that would articulate
each other via a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities in which the guiding concept
would no longer be the ius (right) of the citizen but rather the refugium (refuge) of
the singular.10
This ultimately democratic proposal-made before the start of

the second intifada but equally compelling today-is extended in
turn to the imagined reinvention of Europe not as a unity of nations
(the European Union) but as an "aterritoriality or extraterritorial
space" in which all inhabitants would exist "in a position of exodus";
"the status of European would then mean the being-in-exodus of
the citizen." 11 This formulation, according to which naked life
signifies a revolutionary refusal of national determination and a
commitment to conceptualize anew the relationship between life
and politics within a spatiotemporal order detached from national
sovereignty or the state's territory, was subsequently adopted as
the motivating philosophical framework of documenta 11 : its im-
perative, according to Enwezor, "is to make impermanence, and
what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls 'aterritoriality,' the
principle order of today's uncertainties, instability, and insecurity."12
While this imperative was brilliantly achieved with certain of the
show's inclusions-particularly Steve McQueen's two films Western
Deep and Caribs' Leap-the call for the transvaluation of "aterrito-
riality" into a positive order is extremely complicated. It is especially
so when extended to geopolitical contexts where neocolonial
occupation drives an opposition defined by the struggle for national
independence, which is then posed as the only viable solution.
Emily Jacir's project "Where We Come From" (2001-2003) stunningly
10 Agamben. "Beyond Human Rights," 24.

11 Agamben. "Beyond Human Rights." 25.
12 Okwui Enwezor, "The Black Box: Documenta 11. Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue (Osttildern-Ruit, Germany:
Hatje Cantz. 2002). 45. The reference is to Agamben·s M eans without End.
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..."" opens up this complexity and movingly gestures toward a different
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"If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what
would it be?" With this question, Jacir solicited requests from Pal-
estinians living within or outside Israel and the Occupied Territories
but who face severe Israeli travel restrictions that prohibit movement
within the country. Jacir, Palestinian but holding an American
passport, could travel and fulfill these requests-to visit someone's
mother in Gaza, to walk the streets of Nazareth, to photograph
another's family in Lahia, to light a commemorative candle in Haifa,
and so on. A series of photographs document her performances,
each of which is paired next to a text panel in Arabic and English
that records the original pleas and offers explanation of each par-
ticipant's political circumstances. Rather than show the Palestinians
who made the requests, which would have risked grounding
them within their subjection through the very documentary process,
Jacir allegorizes their deprived political status through their visual
absence, fragmenting identity and thereby revealing representation
to be only a partial recognition of personhood. The piece, then,
dramatizes the parallel between political illegibility and representa-
tional erasure, where the existence of the exiled subject is con-
veyed only through a skeletal descriptive language reminiscent of
a depersonalized bureaucratic discourse.
One might view "Where We Come From" as dramatizing the
privation of human rights-such as the freedom of movement,
personal independence, equality, protection from discrimination and
degrading treatment, the right to nationality 13-in order to encourage
their extension to all Palestinians. The apparent solution, the support
for which this interpretation energizes, would ostensibly be nation-
alization, which would guarantee basic political protections, putting
right the wrongs suffered by those under occupation. This struggle
identities what is at stake for those commentators who privilege
13 See for instance the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the General Assembly of the United Nations.
adopted December 10. 1948, which includes these rights.

the Palestinian-ness of Jacir's work over and above its relation to -
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exile, diaspora, and mobility-terms of occasionally uncritical 0
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it to its origins in "the localized context of Palestinian artistic ex- .l!!
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pression and practice."14
To dislocate Jacir's work from its geopolitical field by ascribing
it to a fashionable category of contemporary art is tantamount to
eviscerating and depoliticizing her practice. But to argue conversely
that "Emily Jacir stands first and foremost as a Palestinian artist"
raises its own specters, the most obvious being the retrograde
resurrection of a nationalist framework to determine the meaning
and significance of her art. The belief that national sovereignty
will restore human rights, however, is questionable in fact, the
opposite appears to be more likely. The nation-state is the very
power uniquely authorized to suspend law when it sees fit, creating
a state of emergency-that zone of indeterminacy between law
and nonlaw that opens a space for extrajudicial brutality (e.g., torture
and executions)--that is now threatening to become the rule.15 In
reality Palestinians already exist in the shadow of the nation-state,
precariously inhabiting Israel's seemingly permanent state of ex-
ception. While Jacir's work certainly does bear an inextricable re-
lation to Palestinian identity, this framework cannot, in my view,
curtail the interpretation of her artwork, which holds within itself the
potential to inhabit ever new contexts of reception. More important,
the urgency of Jacir's work is that it transforms exile into a corrosive
force against the determination of nationality.
Consider Jacir's recent project Ramal/ah/ New York, 2004-05,
a 38-minute double-channel video projection that juxtaposes images
14 The critic Rasha Salli writes. "Her laudatory critics could not possibly avoid aclcnow1edging the tragic predicament
of everyday life in occupied Palestine; they have felt most comfortable enlisting Emily Jacir as a paradigmatic
·exilic' artist. whose art is 'deterritoriaHzed,' challenging 'site-specificity,' obsessively consumed with 'dislocation,'
and critical rethinking of ·movement' and 'mobility.' While all these interpretations may be adept and insightful,
surreptitiously, they dislocate Emily Jacir from the localized context of Palestinian artistic expression and practice
to the universal w orldliness of an emerging trend of 'diasporic artists,' perpetually tortured by permanent exile, who
challenge contemporary prevailing paragons of the locatedness of art production, 'territorialization and site-
speciticity' moored in the institutional and capitalist forces that frame their coming into being: Rasha Salli, "Emily
Jacir. She Lends Her Body to Others to Resurree1 an Absent Reality," Zawaya (Beirut) no. 13 (Fall 2004-Winter 2005):
n.p. I thank Rasha Salti for providing me with this source. My own earlier essay participates in this debate:
"Desire in Diaspora: Emily Jacir," An Joumal 63, no. 3 (Winter 2004): 68-78.
15 See Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. K. Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005).

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•... of everyday places in two different cities. The scenes are shot by
~ video cameras placed inconspicuously in the corners of interiors-
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tourist offices, convenience stores, shawarma shops, and hair
salons-and document banal activities. Because the viewer is de-
prived of the ability to locate any site definitively within its broader
geographical or national field-languages shift between Arabic and
English, physiognomies could be of the indigenous or the immigrant,
the images even switch sides-the piece facilitates an experience
of disorientation. When Jacir shows Palestinian figures, they appear
as unidentifiable subjects detached from the connection between
nationality and territoriality. The piece consequently proposes a
postnational basis of collective identification, one based upon the
construction of a fluid culture of belonging within shared practices
of everyday life that transcends any given location, which takes
place in both/either Ramallah and/or New York. Peering into these
spaces, the viewer can only join the piece's cycle of displacement,
experiencing the corrosive force of collective formation beyond
nationality.
Jacir's art is profoundly moving for its ability to cut through
the polarized oppositions that deadlock dialogue and perpetuate
the conflict in order to engender a humane compassion between
people. In "Where We Come From," this relation is activated by the
artist inhabiting the virtual position of another who is the subject
of privation-the one who cannot go on a date in East Jerusalem,
who cannot walk in Nazareth, and so on-but it is soon extended to
the audience. When the viewer looks at the photographs, it becomes
clear that he or she is inserted into them in the first person, as if
that were my shadow floating across the grave or me who is on a
date with this young woman whose quizzical gaze meets my own.
The photographic structure establishes an inclusive audience ad-
dress, inviting an identification with the camera 's viewpoint that is
an extension of Jacir's as she performs a given request. In that
moment of interpellation, of the viewer's virtual presence internalized
within the image's visual logic, comes an experience of connection,

as if one is swept away and projected into the negative space of ..•
another's life, to the place where the other is prohibited from "'
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encourages an empathy between viewer and subject of represen- ~
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tation on the basis of the singularity of experience, a relation estab-
lished through the compassionate identification with the depriva-
tions of the other, rather than through nationality. This approximates
the "reciprocal extraterritoriality" described by Agamben. The
challenge of this work, then, is located not so much in thinking about
how human rights might be extended to the refugee status of
Palestinian identity within the conceptual boundaries of the nation
(though this is also a possibility) but rather in considering that
figure as a "limit concept" that requires the creation of altogether
new categories. 16 Jacir's project demands a renegotiation of
one's relationship to the Middle East conflict by engendering new
virtual sites of identification beyond those determined by the
nation-state, however modest its immediate effects. Its promise is to
imagine the possibilities of relating to exile by exiling oneself and
to suggest a possible social formation that is both constitutive of
Palestinian identity and beyond the exclusionary logic of nationalism.
Jacir's practice is powerful not merely for its critical exposure
of the oppressive experience of Palestinian life under occupation
but for its exhilarating exploration of the terms of experience unde-
termined by national identity, whereby exile becomes a way of
redrawing the contours of the subject to avoid perpetuating the
political cul-de-sac where one fundamentalist position mirrors an-
other. Instead, Jacir's art elevates mobility over the territorial control
and sociopolitical determination of nationalism. This is no mere
aestheticization of politics, where art gives expression to freedom
in lieu of its realization in reality; indeed to reveal new sources of
possibility and restore hope for a future different from today's
16 We must abandon ·the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the
political (Man. the Citizen and its rights. but also the sovereign people. the worker. and so fonh) and build our
political philosophy anew staning from the one and only figure of the refugee: Agamben. ' Beyond Human
Rights." t6.
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...2 course is the very ethicopolitical force of this art. Here the future is
no longer a closed book, and politics is no longer the privilege of
the dominant order-an achievement, also, of Steve McQueen's.
In a recent show in Paris, McQueen presented two works that,
between them, explore the rush of possibility that accompanies
the release from subjection. The first, encountered as soon as one
entered the Marian Goodman Gallery, shows a series of photo-
graphic images depicting the artist with hands and feet bound by
metal shackles. Appearing one after the next in grid formation like
the repetition of proliferating posters or a patterned expanse of
wallpaper, the images invoke a long history of artistic projects that
have made plays on photography put to task by law to recapture
life, from Duchamp's Wanted: $2000 Reward (1923) to Warhol's Most
Wanted (1964). Those precedents parodied official representations
of the subject, flaunting its transgression of law to spite the
documentary return to order. In McQueen's piece the subject
appears apprehended, bound physically as much as represented
photographically. Yet the obviously posed figure of the artist, shot
against a nondescript background and appearing smartly dressed
in a neatly pressed white shirt, dark trousers, and polished black
shoes, speaks with tongue in cheek, implying that this man will not
stay caught for long. While McQueen's staged image repeats none
of the evidentiary functions of the criminological photography ap-
propriated by Warhol or earlier imitated and mocked by Duchamp,
it still shares in the pitting of representation against identity per-
formed in those artistic models. For like Duchamp's dramatization
of the ultimate dispossession of the subject that was never to be
securely found, a desired end rather than a loss to be repaired, and
like Warhol's subversion of his official source material, redirected
into the radically different thematics of gay desire, of so many
wanted men, McQueen's second piece also brings about a release
of the self from the grips of identity, which was, it turns out, signaled
by the title of the introductory work: "Portrait as an Escapologist."
Descending to the basement level, one entered a cavernous
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somewhere overhead, as if someone was trying to free himself ~
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from containment in the space above. In the few intense minutes

before one's eyes adjusted to the darkness, the void completely
defamiliarized perceptual relations by removing all visual markers
of spatial orientation. The installation effectively created a zone of
indeterminacy in which the visitor could only navigate tentatively.
This spatial confusion was accompanied by temporal disorientation:
because a clear sense of distance or proximity between geo-
graphical and architectural points was no longer possible, the ability
to judge the passage of time also became impaired, resulting in a
subtle confusion between otherwise distinct temporalities of recent
past, present, and immediate future. In some ways the environment
recalls David Hammons's recent installation Concerto in Black
and Blue (2003), in which the enormous space of Ace Gallery in
New York was thrown into a blackout and visitors, provided with
miniature pressure-activated LED lights, were invited to explore the
empty galleries, tilling them with a pulsating web of blue luminosity
(itself bringing to mind Duchamp's installation for the "Exposition
Internationale du Surrealisme" in 1938 where the artist covered the
ceiling with 1,200 coal sacks and provided viewers with flashlights
to find their way through the consequently darkened galleries). Yet
McQueen's installation was categorically distinct, as it soon became
clear that it was in fact constructed through the use of a looped
video projected simultaneously onto both sides of a single screen
hanging in the middle of a space walled with reflective surfaces.
This was rather a radical cinematic experiment, one prefigured by
Anthony McCall's films using projected light as sculptural material,
and through it McQueen created a social arena of exploratory
bodily gestures to overcome the immobility of passive viewership.
Because the reflective environment of Pursuit produced the il-
lusion of an abstract play of lights dissociated from material support

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and extended to infinity through luminous reverberations, it created
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In this immersive space of precarious mobility and bodily uncertainty,
where walking into walls, columns, and other bodies became a
probability, one was forced to navigate the room more by touch than
vision. Moreover, light itself became the sign for material presence
and was physicalized against a black void, even while the sense
of touch became a substitute for the visual scanning of space. (This
encounter between opticality and tactility McQueen also staged
thematically in Charlotte, a 16mm projection that features the tip of
an index finger intimately probing an unflinching eyeball-that of
English film actress Charlotte Rampling-a film shown on the same
occasion as Pursuit). What the installation achieved was the
disorganization of sensation, disrupting the body's habitual relation
to the world and others within it. This meant dissolving the space
of individual self-possession, upsetting the sanctity of its proprietary
territory, as one's personal space was surrendered to indeterminacy.
With the withdrawal of visual perception from even the body's area
of physical being came the blurring of the normally clear distinctions
between self and other, as well as inside and outside. Consequently,
at least for a brief period of time when defamiliarization was at its
height, one experienced precisely the aterritoriality Agamben men-
tions, "where exterior and interior indetermine each other. n 17 Faced
with this deforming situation, Pursuit compelled visitors to re-create
anew perceptual and physical relations to others, as the specific
qualities that normally construct identity-fashion, bodily appearance,
markers of class, race, gender-were stripped away from the self
by the darkness. While McQueen's work wasn't framed by an ex-
plicit thematics of denationalization, it nonetheless opened a line
of flight from determination that also eluded political inscription.
Stepping back, it becomes clear that these two projects were
thoughtfully interconnected: whereas The Escapo/ogist indicts
17 Agamben, · seyond Human Rights," 25.

documentary photography as performing the regimentation of the ..
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subject akin to a form of imprisonment, enmeshing it within its "'a,
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matrix of repetition and visibility, Pursuit catalyzes the diffusion of -

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being into a phenomenological experience of becoming. 18 It would 2
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be a mistake, however, to read McQueen's work as advancing
the viewer's virtualization and mystification within the framework of
a thoroughly institutionalized space (the commercial art gallery),
thus confusing escapology with escapism; for it rendered this arena
a conflict between the forces of capture and release. McQueen's
work acknowledged and evaded this jail of institutionalization through
multiple means, including a strategic employment of technology
whereby video is directed against its own capacity to mesmerize
and pacify its viewer; the transgression of cinematic conventions,
creating an open plan without structured seating for optimized
disorientation; and the exposure and subversion of documentary
photography's reifying functions. And rather than reinstituting the
problematic universal subjectivity that the phenomenological envi-
ronments of minimalism once constructed, preceding its encoding
with the specific characteristics of race, gender, and sexuality in the
course of a subsequent art of identity politics, Pursuit strategically
unravels such particularities as so many laces that bind a straight-
jacket of subjection.
By achieving this escape from the grips of representation,
Pursuit engenders an extreme form of "being-in-exodus" that pro-
poses an experimental social arena different from the above ex-
amples. The installation distinguishes itself from Barrada's melan-
choly gaze at the erosion of Moroccan identity in the face of
expatriation, which in mourning its loss potentially energizes its
reconstruction, and equally from Jacir's attempts to build a political
community around a sharing of the experience of exile that is
distinctly Palestinian yet beyond nationality. But like the projects of
18 For me this figures as a funher instance of the escape from regimentation that McOueen performs in Western
Deep, where he develops 1he cri11que and reinvention of documentary representation ,n the course of exploring
the brutal labor cond111ons ot migrant workers within a gold mine in South Afr ica. I explore this work at length 1n
·The Art of Darkness: On the Work of Steve McOueen: October 4 (Fall 2005): 61-89.

...IIen these other artists, Pursuit creates its own state of exception, which
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to others, figuring as a phenomenological precursor, perhaps, to the
political negotiation of social relations. As in the work of Barrada
and Jacir, naked life does not designate merely the literal condition
of being a refugee, with all it implies of existential distress and
inhumane mistreatment; rather, it opens an area of indeterminacy
between law and life encouraging the experimental re-creation of
being in the world-beyond human rights. Upon the erosion of
constituted forms of regulation, life is invited to negotiate its own
identity and relationships to others anew. What if more came to
accept this invitation? Only in such a world where "the citizen has
been able to recognize the refugee that he or she is," Agamben
writes, "is the political survival of humankind today thinkable." 19 This
recognition has now begun.
First published in Grey Room 24 (Summer 2006): 72-87. © 2006 Grey Room, Inc. and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
19 Agamben. ·Beyond Human Rights: 26.
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ogies. Imagine that you have never worked with a computer in 0
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your life. You discover computers in 2000. You learn to work with >-
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a computer, to use the internet, to receive and send emails. It is 9C
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logical that you will have contemporary technology at your disposal: i-
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Pentium, Windows 2000 and the latest version of Office. This is, E
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all in all, a banal situation. It is obvious that this kind of user (if he ~Q)
does not take up computers as his main field), will not investigate ...
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how technology arrived at its present state, how the old computers
worked, how Commodore, Atari, Dos, or Windows 98 worked. It is
as if history is fully included in the present. That is the situation in
which the societies of "Eastern Europe" found themselves in
1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We were given the then-relevant
and functioning economic, artistic, social, and moral models of
behavior. Naturally, we were already equipped with a certain type
of performative and reactive behavior and experiences from the
past. Reality, like technology, develops in jumps. The reality that we
were suddenly exposed to was governed by laws about which
we had no clue. We had experiences with a different type of reality
and from the past we had virtual ideas about that reality, which
originated in dreams dreamed in the past.
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
entry 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
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from the Bucharest airport into the center today, or if you are driving
through Czech towns or on the highways through the countryside,
even a person from the West, accustomed to advertising at home,
will be shocked at how much bigger, more visible and intense
the (unregulated) advertisements are in these new countries. Adver-
tising (like the size of shopping centers), has flooded the space
in leaps, at its present capacity. Advertising and marketing have their
own systems of rules. Their primary function is service to the
seller or producer of goods or services. The aim of advertising is
to awaken a need in a target group, which will be satisfied by
the purchase of a product. The aim of advertising is to increase the
sale of products by all possible means.
It seems that the unbridled entry of advertising into the public
space of the transforming countries in the 1990s created a
mental-visual code, the main but hidden particularity of which was
an ethical vacuum. Advertising subordinates all media-visual
means of communication and creativity to one postulate: to increase
the sale of products. Advertising has at its disposal powerful
economic means, but, aside from its position in the economic chain
of functions, it has no firm ground in the area of ethics. In a loose
polemic with the expansion of advertising, a conception of its
own position developed in the sphere of visual art, which I call the
"documentary position."
Documentarlsm In Contemporary Visual Art

In the area of photography and film, with which we have traditionally
linked the documentary approach, we will easily find definitions of
the various documentary genres. In the complex of these genres
it is rather difficult to find an essential definition of documentarism.
But a notion of the_discernable grammar of the documentary
language runs through the debate. Documentarism, in film and
photography, could be described as a genre in which the director/
artist carries out a transfer of his own or other people's knowledge,
stances, and experiences through his own articulation of the media

and technology. The decision to devote oneself to documentary is ;...
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the Not-I, other people, creators, works, social phenomena and so ~
on, at the center of the thinking and acting of the creative subject.
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operations in specific media. Aesthetic decisions and norms I-
have a social-political dimension in documentarism and vice versa.

In the documentary, it is impossible to look at form and aesthetics
isolated, unconnected to the theme, and this relationship is defined
in ethical categories. This interrelatedness of the individual com-
ponents compels the visual artist to develop an ethic of formal ap-
proaches in his works. Documentary works define an ethic of
forms. One can't speak of the subordination of aesthetics to ethics,
but what we are interested in is looking at the connection between
them and understanding how ethical views are implemented in a
specific aesthetic and vice versa. How visual art attributes an ethical
value to certain forms. Hito Steyer!, in the text "The Articulation of
Protest," compares two films, shot in different ways, about protest-
political movements. She concludes that the political message is
included in the utterances of the actors, but it is articulated, first and
foremost, in the very structure of the film. The media grammar
employed by the film director and the degree of experimentation
modify the political effectiveness of the testimony. In journalism,
the ecriture with which the journalist treats the political dimension
is analogous. The ethical responsibility of the documentary
approach also generates the retrospective application of ethical
criteria in the outlook on the history of the visual disciplines.

The Customer
In one of the first steps, which appear to be behind the above-
mentioned polarity with advertising, the documentary approach
logically turns to its own origins. It reflects on who the "customer"
is, who the initiator of a specific artwork or institution is, who the
regulator of the entire system is. For these reasons, one group of
documentary works concentrates on the business of art. On the
basis of previous investigations mapping out the vectors of power
and interests (Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser), documentarism
focuses on the subjective testimony. It analyzes the relationships
that the artist has with the producer, the administrator of the artistic
production. These works also concentrate on analysis of the
positions taken up by specific institutions of contemporary art in the
social field. The work of Pawel Althamer, Roman Ondak, Deimantas
Narkevitius, and a whole host of other artists visualizes, thematizes
and problematizes the relationship between artists and the art
business. Their operations are virtually always focused on tracing
the subjective impacts and feelings of the actors. Therefore they
often combine the documentary approach with directed actions, so
their work connects fictive and documentary approaches. Their
work was done according to scripts, but the absent public speaks
about them in terms of documentary.
" ... shooting must take place where the fllm takes place"
In the famous manifesto, "The Vow of Chastity," of the Danish col-
lective Dogma 95, one reads: "Shooting must be done on location.
... shooting must take place where the film takes place. The film
must not contain superficial action." The Dogma 95 manifesto was
reacting to the systemic-economic situation in which cinematogra-
phy found itself. It postulated (not for the first time in the history of
film) important fundamentals: the return of cinematography to
real space-time and sound, and the naturalness of the action shot.
Roman Ondak, in his work Antinomadi (Anti-nomads, 2000),
photographed portraits of his relatives and acquaintances who did

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not travel or did not like to travel. He photographed them in their
domestic settings in the rooms and apartments where they usually
spent their time. He let them choose the places where they would
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be photographed and the gestures and positions they would adopt
in the photographs. He then transferred the photographs onto
postcards. The postcards can travel around the world and many
people will see them, but they demonstrate that the real context
of physical existence is non-transferable. It is where it is. Ever-in-
creasing mobility means that it is possible to change these contexts
and create new traveling contexts, based on instant relationships.
Mobility creates, in nomads, a desire to be in all the places that they
know and that they have visited at once. In the CVs of artists and
curators we often notice that they live in several places. This is not
proof of success, but rather expresses their desire to be part of
two, three, or more contexts at once. This is possible and thanks
to email and the mobile telephone, it is even possible to constantly
exchange information with people in those places. Air travel has
singularly heightened the incongruity in the flow of time. When we
arrive in a distant foreign country after a flight of an hour and a half,
our brain takes several hours to adapt. Thanks to the popularization
of the theory of relativity, we know that time does not pass the
same way everywhere; while in an airplane, we age more slowly.
The essence of a place, the multilayered quality of its content
and function, has been an important theoretical issue for some time
now, in particular in the American milieu (historically suffering
from the "non-site" syndrome). In connection with visual art, "The
Vow of Chastity" is important in its dogmatic definition of the insep-
arability of the theme of the documentary and the language and
grammar employed by the artist-just as Hite Steyerl postulates the
ontological basis and ethical canon for this relationship.
Site-Specificity
In her texts, Marina Grzini casts doubt on the "enterprised-up" gene-
alogy, the practice of large (and probably also small) exhibitions
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,.. cloning works from the second or third world into the international
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C: arena of art. A definition of this fact is needed; Grzini, however,
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artists, sensitive to this practice, have found their point of departure
and taken a stance against the process of creating an artistic
simulacrum, flattening the work out into a limited reproduction,
creating the values of the exotic and the political correctness to
which it leads. For this reason, documentary approaches have in-
cluded the local context (on its many levels) into the corpus of
the work. The "shooting must take place where the film takes place."
The integration of real space-time, its physical and mental dimen-
sions, means to have the local situation as a starting point. That
sounds like a cliche, but in the age of nomadism, we have adopted
approaches that enable us to enter local contexts, so that we are
no longer condemned to represent the place where we were born.
The penetration of a social-cultural matrix is an experience that can
be repeated. The living, creative archaeology of context can even
be an intoxicating and, for some, addictive obsession, connected
in some way with the search for immortality.
History
In the transforming countries, the 1990s saw a fierce struggle for
"success" in the new conditions, connected with a focus on the use
and representation of success. This struggle was accompanied
by a displacement of the past, leading, in the past fifteen years, to
a kind of social amnesia. Society forced out historical memory as
a negative stigma, which was useless in the new conditions. The
past might disintegrate "market" competence and professionalism,
which were demanded of economic actors. One of the new facts
that the transforming countries have to deal with is the trend toward
the economization of the individual as an instrument of production.
Functioning in the economic structures does not guarantee that
the spiritual needs of the individual w ill be fulfilled ; this happens
secularized from the economic role. In the last few years, in reaction

to the social amnesia, artists have begun to revoke the systematic
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of historical scholarship. IRWIN, in the project East Art Map, revises ~
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horse of Eastern Europe. It is interesting to note the contrasting I-
ways in which documentarism, on the one hand, and spectacularity

and the entertainment industry, on the other, define professionalism.
Many contemporary Czech artists earn a living by working on
films. For the most part, they decorate things or apply finishing
touches to them; they are cogs in the film industry. They are
professionals who know how to touch up a freshly washed car so
it looks like it's been driven 50 miles through a desert. They are
mechanical actors in the machine of professionalism, which calls for
the implementation of exactly what has been demanded. Such a
professional, just one link in a long production chain, has no influ-
ence on the final meaning of the whole to which he has contributed.
In this connection, I've always been fascinated by the "Lynchian"
discord in the paradoxical situation of a bank clerk who hides his
tattoos and wears sadomasochistic leather underneath a beige
suit and tie or simply the banker who listens to heavy metal and
rides a chopper-that is, the plight of an individual who is, func-
tionally, fully integrated into the nexus of the neoliberal division of
labor, who only does what he believes in within his own private
sphere. The face-off between the private stance and neoliberal
professionalism was, I think, one of the fundamental and yet
unspoken tensions underlying societies in the 1990s. The thing we

...13_,, found unintelligible and frustrating in that state of affairs, as we
Ql
C understood it, was expressed by Vaclav Havel in The Power of the
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I Powerless. In it, Havel tells of the manager of a greengrocer's
who hangs a slogan board proclaiming "Proletarians of the world
unite!" in his shop window and yet the real meaning of the gesture
is not in that he believes in the slogan, but rather that he wants to
identify himself to the outside world as someone who doesn't rock
the boat, someone who just wants some peace and quiet so he
can get away at the weekend and go to his cottage that is, to do
what he enjoys doing in his own private sphere. This sharp "onto-
logical" delineation between the private and the professional spheres
was a deeply entrenched experience in socialist society; however,
the thing which came as such a shock after 1989 was the external
need to find a way to transform that deeply entrenched experience
without at the same time giving up our own experience, our hope
of making our claims under the new circumstances or our views.
On the one hand, working people were required to believe in
what they were doing, so if they really did believe in it, they ended
up bringing that belief over into the private sphere with the cynical
instrumental logic of neoliberal professionalism. On the other hand,
if they gave themselves over to the shared ontological dream of
bringing their personal views into the world of neoliberal profession-
alism, they soon came up against the limits of the system and
gradually came under pressure to surrender to the chimerical unity
of the private within the neoliberal world, which leads to that
paradoxical "Lynchian" world of obsessions lurking beyond the shiny
fa9ade of normalcy.
Depth of Focus
When we look at the work of artists winning back a lost or non-ex-
istent history, we see that this happens on the basis of emphasizing
the individual position of the artists. History is always arbitrary and
testifies to the position, the context, and situation of the individual
in history. The operation of focusing, familiar from the realms of
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photography and film, is characteristic of the documentary approach.
Focusing results in a so-called depth of focus, which is the depth
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to these media because they are fatally passive in mirroring the C:
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surroundings. The process of focusing singles out and marks what C:
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the photographer considers to be important in the totality of the 0
shot; when he singles something out, he considers it necessary to

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separate it from the background. The act of focusing is an act of -
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photographic-filmic significance. Documentarism sets a small depth i.,
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of focus. Beginning with Anri Sa la's lntervista ( 1998), we have Cl>
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art seeks and sets a small depth of focus; it is able to conquer I-
history through the personal experience of friends, family, or living

figures-that means in a biased manner, with an awareness of
the fact that bias and individualization have, as the other side of
the coin, a soft focus on events, objects and landscapes in the
background. Documentarism is characterized by a distrust of the
background, of de-subjectivized historical experience and any
kind of grand narration. Omer Fast's work, Spielberg's List (2003),
about the shooting of the film Schindler's List (1993), is a documen-
tary about fiction. Watching this documentary about the production
of a simulacrum, there are times when we do not know if an actor
is speaking about real events, such as how the Nazis treated de-
portees, or if he is describing a scene in the shooting of the film.
Fiction has, thanks to its coverage and entertaining quality, a greater
impact on reality than does a true testimony. Analysis of the
constructed nature of fiction offers the instruments to address the
question of how our individual or group awareness of events that
we have not witnessed was actually formed.
The Ontology of Scholarship

Characteristic of the documentary approach is the fact that the
artist approaches reality with an ethic of form and with a certain
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i... method. Like scholars, artists work with sources. Orientation in and
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least a basic theoretical fundament. They require an approach to a
suspended world and familiarity with the basics of scholarly meth-
odology, which is demonstrated, for example, in Zbyn~ Baladran's
text for the book Need to Document. His text is purely theoretical;
if we did not know the author, we would not be able to tell that he
was an artist. The documentarist, as he is compelled to use a
methodology in his work with sources, situates himself in a meth-
odological field , whether implicitly or explicitly. He thus creates for
himself and for his work the context in which they will be read.
One of the horizons that documentarism wants to establish itself in
is the public media discourse. Pierre Huyghe's projects in the
1990s re-introduced scripts (or more precisely protocols) and the
use of documentary in media (Mobile TV, 1995, Rue Longvic, 1994,
among others). In the transforming countries, in some of its man-
ifestations, documentarism has set itself the goal of tilling the
vacuum of subjectivity in the choice of themes and media articu-
lation of the documentary in the milieu of the mass media. The root-
edness of documentarism situates visual art in the field of the
social sciences and history. This is, it would seem, one of the rea-
sons behind the development an-d success of this approach in
contemporary art. In rich countries, contemporary art ended up
with an excess supply and solved the problem of how to defend
the quantitative and territorial expansion of its institutions in the
social debate by means of politically relevant arguments. In this
debate, socially engaged art (urbanism, the social-territorial crisis,
racism, minorities, feminism, etc.) became an instrument of argu-
mentation. In some instances, this resulted in the dangerous iden-
tification of political engagement with moral or political correctness.
In the end, or maybe right from the beginning, on the basis of our
experience, art should not fulfil a social commission; rather, it
should have the conditions to create a space in which to define its

social validity on its own. Even today the Laboratorium (laboratory)
seems like a pertinent metaphor for artistic creativity; for the needs "'
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and methods, and the fact that the documentary is situated in the "'C:
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fresh immigrants living in Torino, Italy, documented the subjective 8

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geography of the city. Big Hope decided to visualize the mix of f-
diverse materials that came out of meetings with the actors in the
form of a complex, but still amateur, spatial collage. The method of
this spatial presentation polemicizes with the conceptualist aesthetic
of the purely library or gallery form.
Dlaloctlcs of the documentary

If we return to the conception of the documentary approach as a
dialectical relationship between the artist, the themes documented
and the way they are articulated in the media, the question can
be seen to have two dimensions.
The first entails tracking the relationship between the author
and the documented subject. The contemporary documentary
approach in visual art has buried once and for all the myth of the
"uninterested" or "objective observer," a cliche ceaselessly trumpeted
by the mass media such as television, radio, and daily newspapers.
Thanks to the experiences artists have had with these media and
their strong theoretical background (from media theory to media
sociology), they define their position as "engaged." In essence, this
term simply labels the approach in which the observer's position
is established as a conscious process. The second dimension gives
rise to the following consideration: if we define the position of the

....,,_~ documentary maker as "unobjective," the subjective assessment and
Q)
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~
:I: with the documented along with the distance the documenter takes
with respect to his or her own medium (film, video, photography,
but also drawing) reveals itself as a key process. What distinguishes
documentarism, which interests us beyond the mainstream con-
ception of the documentary approach, is the solidarity of the artist
with the tradition of media criticism that perceives the medium as
a complex of power-political instruments. This tradition is manifested
in the discourses of Guy Debord, the situationists, Jean-Luc Godard,
Pierre Bourdieu, Vilem Flusser, Peter Sloterdijk, and many other
artists and intellectuals. It follows from this observation that it is the
inseparable relationship between the documented and the active
implementation of critical media studies (described by Hito Steyerl
in the text cited above) which establishes the quality of artistic
documentarism.
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-structuralist
contributions to thought have themselves become institutionalized
and dehumanized. If contemporary thought and art want to take
them up again, they must do so on the basis of fresh reconsidera-
tions. In this connection, Roland Barthes seems to me to be the
liveliest reference. Instrumental conceptualism is undergoing scrutiny
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 validity of the conceptual is borne out by the experiences of

individuals, on which the success of any social, political, or cultural ,...
concept rests. That is why the documentary approach that interests "'
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A quick glance at the newspapers gives us an immediate index to
the moments and places that have caught our attention. By joining
events here and there, a universal narrative is formed that, none-
theless, changes daily. But there are events that cause a different
impact. According to the European media, the most disturbing news 8
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that supplies Europe via Belarus. The tap on the oil pipeline was
turned off for three days while the two governments negotiated a
solution to the conflict and Europe urgently debated energy alter-
natives to prevent dependence on the Russian giant. Finally, Minsk
announced that it would not be imposing a tax on crude oil passing
through Belarus, and the Druzhba pipeline returned to normal
operation. Germany, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and
Hungary once more began to receive supplies from this pipeline,
which channels energy resources managed by Russia to Eastern
Europe.01
The incident would have had no further importance if it were
not for the fact that-thanks to this information-many Europeans
were able to gain an approximate idea of the material origin of their
wellbeing and the route, previously unknown, that energy flows
must take in order to reach their homes. It needed a crisis of this
nature to spark off an investigation into the ramifications of our
dependencies. This other reality, enormous and menacing, almost
imperceptible, 02 woven by economic and political relations, is the
less pleasant face of globalization. The regime of hyper-visibility fed
by the constant transmission of events-a flow no one can imagine
being interrupted, even in their worst nightmare seems nothing
more than information based on trompe l'oeil. Behind it lurk things
more difficult to see and understand. An enormous cognitive effort,
going beyond individual capacities, is required in order to represent
01 An interpretation of this news story was later produced for the supplement Guttural s in La Vanguardia.
Cartes 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
rather antiquated term-I should like to call collective pedagogy,
which can be accurately defined to a large extent through the
practices that authors like Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula Biemann
propose in their video essays. The documentaries they produce
tit into the weave of events that we often follow in the media.
However, rather than merely narrating events, they generate critical
knowledge about them in which information and opinion deliberately
overlap. As a result, a debate opens with regard to these and
other authors involved in contemporary documentary practices
about a hybrid between art and pedagogy. This is similar to what,
in the early-1980s, Fredric Jameson called "an aesthetic of cognitive
mapping, "03 and which, twenty years later, maintains all its validity
in the global universe.
Aware that pedagogy has been denigrated by the Modernist
ideology pervading art practice (making art's cognitive potential
seem an impoverished idea of art and more often than not inclined
towards expressive aspects of art), we now witness the revival of
pedagogy in artistic practice to make it possible to reformulate the
scope and significance achieved by work with images even more
so when the space generated by multinational capitalism places
before us an image of the world that is impossible to verify. The
more technological the development, the more the "theological"04
nature of the communication system that administers information
is accentuated. We know that images are subject to manipulation,
that they no longer prove anything and that they escape all rational
verification. Nonetheless, we have a need to continue believing in
them. We continue to use them.
Even markedly logocentric spheres are undergoing a mutation
that is making them more iconographic. In consequence, the visual
inflation of essay practices has led the genre invented by Montaigne
to go beyond traditional literary limits. The essay today has nothing
03 Ibid , 125.
04 Peter Osborne. Philosophy m Cu/rural Theory (London and New Yoo: RoU11edge, 20'.Xl). 35.
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to do with that formula, confined to the printed page, but invades
other media. This is made clear by the rise of documentary prac-
tices, whatever the support they use, expanding to unheard-of ex-
tremes. In revenge, images infect texts, and novels and cultural
critical studies assimilate the presence of iconic data more and
more. The hybrid resulting testifies, amongst other things, to a
decisive change in our literacy model: ever more visual and no
longer strictly verbal.
The essay is, today, the genre which best represents the
conditions of knowledge production. From the culture market to the
very authors who experiment with the communication of knowl-
edge, passing through university lecture halls and militant circles,
the essay offers all of them an optimal form for arguing their case.
This is supported by various arguments. Firstly, our interpretation
of the world no longer depends on our greater or lesser access
to information; rather, it depends on the relations we are capable
of establishing with the information available. Secondly, in view of
the importance the essay attaches to the co-existence of data, the
most obvious one is the one that compares data of a visual and
textual nature. Texts and images create obstacles to each other and
subject the essay to a discontinuity that has nothing to do with
scientific methods. And, thirdly-merely to make its characterization
more schematic-the new essay is freed from the pretension of
objectivity, a pretension we suffer from through the media and their
insidious policy of truth. In such a way that, as Adorno would
say, the essay can abandon itself, without inhibition to a "libidinous
curiosity."05 Ignoring the question as to whether such reformula-
tions of the essay are closer to fiction or reality, whether they are
capable of producing truths or not, what is important is their poten-
tial to put our interpretation of the world into circulation. In such
conditions, the truths that can be revealed by new forms of essay
will be nothing if not surprising and atypical.
05 See Theodor W. Adorno. "The Essay as Form: in The Adorno Reeder, ed. Brian O'Connor (London: Blackwell
Publishing, 2CXXl).

Authors like Susan Buck-Morss have reinvented the political philo-
~ sophical discourse using unusual methods such as reviving ap-
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simply, following a personal itinerary in researching a subject
blocked by the specialist literature. This methodological flexibility
produces what she herself calls an "experiment in visual culture"06
in our time. So much so that in her last book, Thinking Past Terror,
an essay on Islamic political culture, Buck-Morss suggests that if
after 9/ 11 we are the victims of a war of images (something that
often produces a general lament about their proliferation), our way
of thinking about the world can no longer do without them. On this
point, Buck-Morss has affirmed that the excess-with regard to
the number of images-is tranquilizing.07 No one image will be able
to rise up and take the place of the others.
This perspective makes the return of pedagogy more necessary
than ever. However, the aim should not be for someone to learn
at all costs. On the contrary, it is a question of being aware of the
limitations that characterize us, of learning about how we learn.
That is why, if we want to achieve a convincing description of the
world around us, we have no option but to place our trust in
those with whom we feel a certain affinity. Our capacity for com-
prehension is limited. It cannot compete with the quantitative
challenge put before us by the great information flows. We must
be ready to accept that knowledge is shared and that we learn
from each other. To do so, we will have to take into account cog-
nitive, geographic, and social concentrations, as the intelligence
is not separated from the space in which it is nurtured.
If we are not capable of accepting these conditions in a prag-
matic spirit, we will have to be ready to face the excesses of a
globalization process that, with help from no one, is already pro-
ducing a fabric of discourses and images with its own life. To
06 Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror. lslamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London and New York:
Verso. 2003), 113.
07 She funher clarifies her own essayistic methods by adding that ·The juxtaposition of images and text is meant
to produce a cognitive experience in readers, who can see the theoretical point in a cenain way, one that
surprises and illuminates. Affeel, as much as reason, is mobilized." Ibid.. 114.
Original from
paraphrase Arjun Appadurai, we might say that a vast number of
images are running loose, and that their circulation is completely
out of control. The way in which scenes from the Abu Ghraib prison
were leaked and the widespread use of mobile telephones incor-
porating mini cameras demonstrate that it is very difficult to prevent
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meaning to the images.08 That is why fabricating a narrative with
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chance to the censorship that it was not possible to exercise over
the free circulation of these images (an enterprise that the United
States government appears to have embarked on by launching the
Storytelling Centers, as they are known, with the mission of con-
trolling the meaning of images given the evident impossibility of
preventing them from circulating). Rather than developing visual
intelligence, the state departments have opted for a narrative in-
telligence that is much more likely to be absorbed by public opinion.
One thing or the other: either we view this proliferation of images
as a natural mechanism which produces a montage effect whose
results and collisions are impossible to predict; or we accept that
this is the scale that essay-writing activity faces and in which-if it
wishes to play an active role it must intervene.
As is the case with the documentary practices that occupy us
here, aesthetic practices that have an empirical relation with reality
have begun to be affected by two new problems. These problems
are geographic scale, concerning the economy of access to events,
and the heterogeneous nature of materials that results from the
different discursive, visual, and auditory orders. Tasks which might,
in turn, be summarized as managerial work: how to administer the
08 Lecture given during the debate staged on 8 September 2006 as pan of the 18th Viss pour /'imsge. lnterns tionsl
Photojoumalism Festivsl of Perpignsn.

relation between the visible and the invisible, the total and the
partial; and how to extract meaning from the multiple and diverse
nature of data that is presented chaotically, with no hierarchical
order. A host of questions that are latent in recent works by Angela
Melitopoulos and Ursula Biemann were presented under the
same umbrella a research program-Transcultural Geographies-
and an exhibition-"B-Zone. Becoming Europe and Beyond"-first
seen at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.09
This brief inventory of the problems inherent in the documentary
practices adopted by Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula Biemann
take us back to the early days of film montage a classical example
of aesthetic relationality-and to one of the great pioneers in film
making, Dziga Vertov. Then we will remember that the editing desk
was the reduced space in which such a vast territory as post-
revolutionary Russia was defined and articulated in the rough dis-
placement between poles of production and consumption, workers'
councils and nations. In Annette Michelson's view, Vertov ushered
in "a cinema that could establish indissoluble links of union, blurring
distances, dichotomies ...," 10 a cinematic logic that continues to
echo even today in the calls to arms of many digital essayists. In
one of many texts she has devoted to reflecting on the video essay
in the digital age, Ursula Biemann asserts that the essayist does
not seek to document realities but to organize complexities: "New
image and editing technologies have made it easy to stack an
almost unlimited number of audio and video tracks one on top of
another, with multiple images, titles, running texts, and a complex
sound mix competing for the attention of the audience." 11 Similarly,
for Angela Melitopoulos-an author who has developed her ideas
about the videographic medium in close co-operation with Maurizio
Lazzarato, author of Videofilosofia 12-video is closely linked to an
09 Anselm Franke, ed., B·Zone. Becoming Europe and Beyond (Barcelona: Actar: Berlin: KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, 2005).
10 Annette Michelson, "The Wings of Hypothesis. On Montage and the Theory of Interval,· in M ontage and M odem
Life 1919-1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992). 79.
11 Ursula Biemann, "The Video Essay in the Digital Age," in Stuff it. The Video Essay in the Digital Age, ed. Ursula
Biemann (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2003), 9.
12 Maurizio Lazzarato, Videofflosoffa. La percezione def tempo nel postfordismo (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996).
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say that in the context of the 1920s, the alliance between the
cinema and the railways threw down a challenge to the dominant
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concept of topography. Without the railway network, the cinema "'g,
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could never have hoped to achieve total representation of the newly-
founded USSR. From that time on, geography would also be
subjected to a political, economic, and cinematographic project. The
adaptation of this idea to world conditions today produces what
lrit Rogoff has called a "relational geography."14 That is, a geography
that eliminates any direction implicit in the relation between the
map's center and its periphery; that, in its place, establishes con-
nections, avoiding the classical perimeters of the territory; and
that takes the space of visual culture as its empirical reference point,
substituting a geography linked to hegemonic policies, which
reproduce administrative frontiers.
If we also take into account the work of such cultural critics
as George Lipsitz-who is interested in the proliferation of popular
music-we could add that relational geography explores a productive
tension between the cultural and physical spaces, undermining and
dismantling the identification that, in many cases, exists between
them. Yet relational geography cultivates observation of the networks
of economic capitalism as the basis supporting networks for the
distribution of culture. Through the music that runs in capitalism's
very veins, as Georges Lipsitz suggests, "diasporic populations
13 Angela Melitopoulos. 'Timescapes. B-Zone." in B-Zone. Becoming Europe and Beyond, ed. Anselm Franke. 140.
14 lrit Rogoff. 'Engendering Terror," in Geography and the Politics of M obility, ed. Ursula Biemann (Vienna: Generali
Foundation, 2003), 48-63.
Original from
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ID speak powerfully about realities that are all too familiar to them
~ but relatively novel to inhabitants and advanced industrialized
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countries."16 Further evidence that economic structures, frequently
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accused of sustaining the culture of capital, can harbor in their
breast revealing, instructive, and educational mechanisms.
Transport and communication infrastructure occupies a central
place in the works of Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula Biemann.
The documentary materials these two artists produce converge
in 8-Zone, a collective investigation into ongoing changes in the
geography of Europe and its margins, presented as both a political
and artistic project. Both Melitopoulos and Biemann take as their
starting point important arteries through which flow people, goods,
and other forms of concentrated capital such as energy in the form
of crude oil. Such infrastructure is usually coded as continuous,
firmly-defined lines on the map that joins Europe with the Caucasus,
Turkey, and the Balkans. However, in the hour of truth, its transit
through the territory is perceived more as a sequence of semi-au-
tonomous spaces with large intervals, pauses, and voids between
them. The two artists' contributions to the project are filmed itiner-
aries in which the final montage contains certain radical differences,
especially as regards the sense each attaches to territorial and
narrative cohesion.
The trajectory on which Angela Melitopoulos focuses is the
terrestrial corridor that joins Salzburg with Thessaloniki. The route,
which has particular significance in the artist's own life, is better
known by its technical name, Corridor X, indicating that this is one
of the great transport arteries operated under the auspices of the
European Community. Corridor X has been a priority in the pan-
European network since the Helsinki agreements were signed in
1993. The route, which stretches from Germany to Greece, runs
through parts of the former Yugoslavia, and greater urgency has
been attached to the project due to the political explosiveness of
15 George Lipsitz. Dangerous Crossrosds. Popular M usic, Postmodemism and the Poetics of Place (London and
New York: Verso, 1994), 16.
Original from
the Balkans region. The fact that Angela Melitopoulos used to follow ..13
this route on summer journeys home to her native Greece, like
so many other immigrant families, gives Corridor X an appreciable
narrative density. Over a thin groove, biographic, historic, cultural,
and political aspects difficult to separate flow out.
The results from Angela Melitopoulos's research are displayed
in a platform of work shared with different agents in Belgrade,
Athens, and Ankara. Timescapes-the title given to this complex
mesh of collaborations and contributions-does not take the form
of the video essay we are used to; rather, it has a geographically
diffuse, open-cooperation structure, held together by an archive of
images that can be reordered and rearranged. With regard to
Timescapes, Corridor X-the piece by Angela Melitopoulos with
the most personal connotations-is nothing more than one possible
itinerary, a segment taken from the plethora of events contained
within the frame provided by Timescapes. The relation between the
two titles, one collective, the other more subjective, points to the
radically uncompleted and inconclusive nature of Timescapes. It may
be that, at first sight, this unfinished nature, characterizing the
way the platform works and suspending individual appropriation
of the images, may also make it impossible to achieve a synthetic
result, which, depending on how one looks at it, devalues the aes-
thetic potential of Timescapes. However, on the other hand, it also
opens up the possibility of including other works, other discourses
and other images in the sphere of its concerns. This capacity to
work dialogically, that is to say, not dialectically, allowing alternatives
to co-exist without the need for one to eliminate the other, com-
pensates politically for an aesthetic impotence. Timescapes faces
the difficulty of articulating a whole without reducing it iconically
or distilling it into a single image. At the practical level, its dialogic
practice also invites us to consider Ursula Biemann's Black Sea
Files as a related project, one that can be included in the same
research platform. And, though Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula
Biemann follow different production logics, the two did share the
Original from
same theoretical framework, a framework resulting in Transcultural
Geographies, which also includes Lisa Parks' exploration of
communication infrastructure affected by the wars in the Balkans.
In the same way that Lisa Parks' work, Postwar Footprints,
throws light on a complex transfer of political power in Slovenia and
Croatia following the conflict-through a continuation of the war by
technological media and producing, as a result, a relocation of na-
tional sovereignty in the global communication market-with their
production forms, Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula Biemann embody
a constant transit between academic research and artistic explo-
ration. They are also involved in a transfer of authority that-despite
appearing less decisive than that described by Lisa Parks-has
consequences going beyond the purely aesthetic. In this sense, the
enthusiastic adoption of the theory that both artists subscribe to
denotes that it has ceased to be considered a threat (as was ha-
bitual with many artistic practices). On the contrary, their video
essays accept the frustrations that accompany those who practice
the theory, for which reason they are careful not to fall into a pro-
grammatically euphoric utopianism.
The new research modes that these two authors embody with
their videos pave the way to legitimizing a documentary practice
that seeks pedagogic functions. However, as we mentioned earlier,
theirs is not a pedagogy that imposes teachings; rather, it is adapted
through a social reorganization of labor that brings with it the
fabrication of representations. Many of Angela Melitopoulos and
Ursula Biemann's video essays (and the same can be said for
Lisa Parks' research) have one foot in the exhibition room and the
other in the university department. The redistribution of responsi-
bilities, often segmented between the authors, those represented in
the work, the critics, and the public, suggest an expanded re-
sponsibility. The clearest proof of this is in the explanatory diagrams
that usually accompany Timescapes. Those graphics give visual
expression to the protocol that dispossesses the agents involved
and prevents them from exercising overall control over the meaning
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of the images. If in the case of Lisa Parks it was national sovereignty
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that was placed in doubt, neutralized by the new technological .!!?
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infrastructure owned by multinationals, in that of Angela Melitopoulos 1:)
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and Ursula Biemann it is the aesthetic sovereignty that is subjected ~
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interval that absorbs the tensions caused by these production ~
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potential to embrace it all. In these severed planes, continuity of Cl
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vision suffers symptomatic interruption. The geography captured
on maps can no longer be experienced as a total form, but a sum
of fragments. This visual caesura makes evident-and eludes-
the temptation to make a fetish of the field of vision, as if this could
replace the field of the real; and makes a representation of a
conclusive nature unfeasible. In this way, the contingency of the
edited images becomes even more apparent. In the final outcome,
this resource reminds us of the anguish involved in passing from
theory to action, from texts to images, from the singular to the
multiple and vice versa.
However, despite the huge freedom of movements that
characterize the journeys undertaken by Angela Melitopoulos and
Ursula Biemann, there always appears a guiding thread. In Black
Sea Files, this takes the shape of the imposing construction of the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. This time, then, the infra-
structure is a huge pipeline, 1,762 kilometers long, which crosses
three countries and links the Caspian Sea with the Mediterranean.
Just as Angela Melitopoulos drives along Corridor X, filming through
her car windscreen, this oil pipeline is, for Ursula Biemann, the
leitmotiv that links a series of documents. Geopolitical control over
the Euro-Asian region and marginal events taking place around
this great infrastructure amplify the body of references concerning

..Ie it. The crude oil flow-always taking a westerly direction-is re-
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landowners affected by construction work on the pipeline; direct
testimony about the repression the Kurds suffer at the hands of
the Turkish forces of order; and an encounter with a group of
prostitutes of Russian origin help to give us a glimpse of the het-
erogeneous nature of situations that, like a magnet, are attracted
to the oil pipeline along its entire route.
In her work, Ursula Biemann uses sources that range consid-
erably, from the easily observable to secrets retained by corporations
and governments, interviews, figures, and satellite images. During
certain passages of Black Sea Files one has the impression that
the tourist and the researcher share something more than just a love
of traveling. Their respective access economies are comparable.
Talking to prostitutes in a town in Turkey, Ursula Biemann disguises
her real intentions by pretending to be an amateur. We hear the
voice, off-screen, of one of the pimps encouraging the sex workers
to speak freely, without inhibition. Someone says: "She's just
making a home video. She isn't a journalist." Had she introduced
herself as a journalist, Biemann might never have had the chance
to film these women. We are given to understand what we might
call her "lack of responsibility" as the artist places herself in a
position of advantage with regard to professional codes. For her to
gain access to the scene, the others needed to see her as a
woman at point nought on the code, a woman whose word does
not count (though it sounds strange to say this about an author
whose premises are strongly based on post-feminist practices).
However, as we said at the start, information or first-hand
access to an event does not produce substantially different
knowledge. What generates new knowledge are unusual relations
between known information. To dismantle the effect of the media
and the different disciplines that govern what can be related to what,
that is the objective of a collective pedagogy that moves between

images and texts. "The goal is not to tell a newly definitive history," 16 ro...
as Susan Buck-Morss says, rather it is a question of understanding
that "the constellations are not arbitrary. "11 The same data, the same
images, and the same discourses can express different ideas. It
all depends on the relations that are most emphasized. It is like
joining the dots that complete an unfinished drawing, something
whose presence is wavering on the threshold between the virtual
and the real. Or as Ursula Biemann would say, in an expression
charged with influences from Walter Benjamin, it is a question of
recomposing a form half-buried "in the rubble of history"-some-
thing that could be taken almost literally in Black Sea Files if we
bear in mind that the great oil pipeline runs underground in many
stretches.
For this reason, although the BTC oil pipeline could be kept
as the focal point of the news story guiding Black Sea Files, its
narrative dissolution generates a much more effective constellation.
When construction of the pipeline was completed in early 2005,
the journalist F. William Engdahl warned about the gee-strategic
implications caused by its existence, not only in the region but
also as regards global distribution of political influence. "It is im-
portant to take into account the two main blocks that, with regard
to energy, have emerged, above all since the former Soviet Union
broke up, enabling foreign participation, particularly by the US, in
the Central Asian oil region around the Caspian Sea, with its com-
plex political front." 18
Behind the BTC oil pipeline are an endless number of imagi-
nary lines that can transport us as far as Sakhalin Island in the
Far East. There, Russia's control of energy resources is now coming
into conflict with the large oil companies, supported by Western
governments-another point of global friction with regard to energy
sources. Given the huge implications of the infrastructure investi-
gated by Ursula Biemann, one might say that this is a filament as
16 Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Psst Teffor, 116.
17 Ibid.
16 hnp:/ / www.webislam.com
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; sensitive as a nerve. If stimulated, it lights up a network of intercon-
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nections, and its ramifications spread beyond its original strip of
('.)
gi land. The nearby and the remote lose all proportion. Any attempt to
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0 understand geography as a sum of spaces is doomed to failure.
What is inside or outside a territory also becomes relative.
But what we cannot lose sight of is that, apart from transversal
geographies, the two projects that concern us here, Timescapesl
Corridor X and Black Sea Files, constitute something like the photo-
graph negative of a Europe constituted and thick with regulations.
The infrastructure or axes that Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula
Biemann follow function as a narrative paradigm with a certain
historic weight concentrated over the route, in contrast to the volatile,
transitory, and precarious nature of Europe's affective structure
and its ever-changing margins. These artists' video essays eschew
belief in a European identity supported by administrative techniques.
Europe is nothing more than a network supported by a fabric of
psychological projections in which the artists themselves have
participated through their biographies. Some of these ideas about
what Europe is have become as generationally connoted as those
that emerged with the opportunity to travel all over the continent
in the early 1970s. This was when a railway network arrangement
enabled young people below the age of 23 to travel around all
countries except their own. As Diedrich Diederichsen suggests,
those who were then under 23 years of age went on to give shape
to a united Europe: "Their idea of Europe is based on a specific
idea which comes from these holidays in the early 1970s." 19
In Corridor X, the act of revisiting the route that formed the
great Highway of Brotherhood and Unity is tinged with nostalgia due
to the loss of an affective structure, which, like Dziga Vertov's
films in post-revolutionary Russia, generated an imaginary of
cohesion in Tito's Yugoslavia. The road was built between 1949 and
1985 in order to join the Balkan republics, running down to the
19 Diedrich Diederichsen, Personas en loop. Ensayos sabre culrurB pop (Buenos Aires: lnterzone, 2005), 73.

Greek border. Some of those whom Angela Melitopoulos inter- ...I
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viewed on the road itself ventured to define that ambitious artery as Q)
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a route whose final function might be similar to that of a public "'
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meeting space. As they drive along the motorway, one of them re- ~
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members it as follows: "Brotherhood and Unity was an international 8
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platform. Petrol stations were good places to walk to from the C
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It is ironic that this kind of spontaneous socialization took place
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in service stations, exactly where petrol pumps end the long journey "'en
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undertaken by raw energy-as if one thing took over from another,
or as if affections and engineering work could complement one
another. However, we have the example of the Druzhba oil pipeline,
the infrastructure we referred to at the beginning of this text. Despite
the worrying news that surrounded it, keeping half of Europe on
tenterhooks and confronting Russia and Belarus, its name means
"friendship." In the words of Renata Salecl, a Slovenian sociologist
who has studied the society that has emerged after socialism, "there
is no politics without fantasy. "20
However, if we are to believe Rem Koolhaas, who has been
involved in a large project aimed at producing a representation of
the history of Europe and the European Union, 21 Europe does not
produce great fantasies at this time. The failure of the initiative for
a European constitution acted as a powerful wake-up call. Imme-
diately afterwards, the imaginary-creating machine seems to have
been shut down for a while. Paradoxically, Europe's main product
at present are regulations governing the quality of food, communi-
cation, political rights, workers' rights, etc. Rem Koolhaas says he
20 Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom. Psychoanalysis end Feminism efrer the Fell of Socialism (London and
New York: Routledge, 1994). 18.
21 The project "The Image of Europe· was designed and developed by AMO, a work platform founded by Rem
Koolhaas in 1998 in parallel 10 OMA, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The exhibition 'H istory of Europe
and the European Union· was directed by Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf, commissioned by the European
Commission during the Dutch presidency in 20>4.

I is convinced that uthose rules represent the future form of power
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exchange."22 However, the truth is that there is no need to wait so
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long. It is sufficient to see another recent work by Ursula Biemann,
<3 Contained Mobility (2004), to understand what it is like to move
around Europe as an illegal immigrant. The video reconstructs the
life of Anatol Zimmermann, a man who, now over fifty years of
age, spends all his energy in asylum plea after asylum plea. He is
what is known as "legally non-existent," condemned to live in the
interstices of an absurd, asphyxiating legal context. The decision
to make Zimmermann's home in a cargo container not only gives
a feeling of claustrophobia to this portrait of him, but also highlights
the perverse effects caused by the legal definition of the European
space. Everything, including the individual, becomes closely-guarded
goods.
In any case, representing Europe is a minor problem com-
pared to what is happening on its margins. Whilst Europe's leading
institution commissions its most famous architect to effectively
communicate its history and that of the fabric of institutions that
form it, on the edges of the blue area history unwinds and loses
clarity. It can scarcely be reconstructed. The images and testimonies
are much less dense. There, few institutions offer to restore narrative
order in regions that have been victims of excesses of political
violence exported from power centers. However, even if institutions
and stakeholders existed to attempt to do this, we would perhaps
find that it is too late to do so from an empirical base. Memories,
testimonies, and proof about events in the past have all been
neutralized by successive historic interpretations.
Testimonies about the Armenian genocide have suffered such
a process. "The first massacre of modern times," as it is often
known, continues to be placed in doubt. "The events of 1915, which
saw half the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire disappear
as a result of the extermination policy enacted by the Young Turks,
22 Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The Conversation Series Vol. 4 (Cologne: Ver1ag der Buchhandlung
Walther Konig, 2007), 35.

Enver, Talat, and Djemal, leaders on the Committee of Union and ....•
Progress, in power since the 1908 revolution,"23 are still denied by O>
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modern Turkey. The battle for international recognition of the "'

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Armenian disaster continues even today against those who present ~
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it as an act of war forming part of the conflicts that took place 0
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during the First World War. Mere mention of the Armenian question C
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in Turkey is a criminal act according to Article 301 of the country's ~

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constitution. The death of the journalist Hrant Dink, murdered in the 0
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street for insisting that the genocide took place, leaves no room II>
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for doubt.24
Proving events when one was not present or no images remain
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Faced by a shortage of evidence, the essay-in the many different
forms alluded to above produces a story to make it possible for
us to refer to this event that left no trace. It seeks to till the void,
to restore causality where it has become hazy or is simply ignored.
In a video essay entitled November (2004), Hito Steyer! relates the
story of the disappearance of her teenage friend, Andrea Wolf.
Andrea disappeared in strange circumstances and is presumed to
have been murdered later by the Turkish police, but her body was
never returned. She only returned as a martyr to the Kurdish cause,
which she is believed to have joined. What Hito Steyerl underlines
in her essay is that although Andrea Wolf may have returned as
an icon, her body was never recovered. As the author says, "a
picture of war is not war." So the essay, rather than tilling a void,
continues to remind us that behind an image is an absence.
The route followed by Angela Melitopoulos's family, firstly as
Armenian refugees in Greece and later as part of the labor force
in Germany, showed clearly the difficulties that a documentary
attempting to till this type of void encounters. Passing Drama (1999),
which we could define as a forerunner of Timescapes, wove
23 Bernard Bruneteau. El siglo de los genocidios. Violencies, mesecres y procesos genocides desde Armenia e
Ruanda (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2006). 57.
24 Hrant Oink w as assassinated on January 19, 2007. Amnesty International believed that he was targeted because
of his work as a journalist who champ,one<I freedom of expression.
Original from
together an abstract document about the Armenian exodus. In the
absence of facts, the author's physical trajectory is installed within
the documentary as a virtual, dynamic, constantly-moving narrative.
The author herself defines Passing Drama as a video essay about
migration and the narrative is based on a family history. Nonethe-
less, this displacement only obtains a collection of existential data.
Neither does her return to such scenes as the Maria Lanzendorf
concentration camp in Austria, where her father was interned,
compensate with any factual information. Nothing remains at first
sight. At this point, the goal of Angela Melitopoulos's work changes
from creating a historic document to reconstructing oblivion in its
exact measure. The way memory becomes eroded is likened to a
thick mesh of digitally processed voices and images that are
distorted until they become the mere echo of the event. The result
is like a curtain whose thick material prevents us from seeing
anything through it. Intense relational activity is concentrated in the
fibers of this fabric, whose manufacture is a recurring motif
throughout the video. This would appear to be the only policy
possible to respond to the "programmed eradication of the Armenian
presence on the Anatolia Peninsula, going back a thousand years
[which] was the work of a state authority and was carried out in
the name of a global ideological project. "25 Even so, Passing Drama
is not a documentary that seeks to restore the memory of the
Armenian genocide. Far from building a consensus as to what our
feelings should be towards these events, it offers an enclave from
which to observe them. What is contained in Passing Drama is not
what we should see; the video merely indicates a possible place
from which to view the Armenian disaster.
As Felix Guattari said in an interview by Angela Melitopoulos
and Maurizio Lazzarato about the 1991 Gulf War, 26 the homogeniza-
tion of subjectivity is the main victim caused by practically obscene
access to events-such as that which, in return, the current
25 Ibid.
26 Avez-vous vu Is guerre? (1991) was produced by Canal Dechaine, a group of media activists founded in Paris
during the Gulf War in 1991.

television system exploits. However, as we have seen, this obses-
sion with capturing the event in its classical form, anchored in time, ."'
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is no longer included amongst the intentions behind the video es- co
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says discussed here. Angela Melitopoulos's and Ursula Biemann's
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an empirical and factual relation to events. C:
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There is a passage in Black Sea Files which has often been co
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photojournalism, a discipline that-to judge from what we see in ~
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the papers every day-does not eschew the single image nor the :,
iconic power that emanates from still shots. In this scene, then,
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Ursula Biemann is filming in the outskirts of Ankara, where the C,
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Kurdish population-which survives by collecting and recycling
waste materials-is being violently evicted by the Turkish forces of
order. Her reflection reminds us of the rules which the photographer
Allan Sekula set himself during the demonstrations in Seattle in 1999:
"no flash, no telephoto zoom lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus,
no press pass, and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining
image of dramatic violence."27 Nothing of all that which usually
protects the reporter. In both cases, Ursula Biemann and Allan
Sekula are trapped in the course of events, as has occurred to so
many other media professionals. The difference lies in the fact
that their reflection about the conditions in which they capture their
images no longer belongs to the order of the events. The artistic
practices they adopt open up a working space that produces its
own events, without the need to wait for them to occur somewhere,
or to emerge in the media. This places new cognitive possibilities
on the table as well as, even more importantly, the media to manage
a radical plurality. As the authors included in 8-Zone understand,
achieving an association of the different-conserving the singularity
of each image and not reaching compromises as regards the total-
ity-is what defines the paradox in which the video essay moves.
27 Allan Sekula. -Waiting for Tear Gas (1999-200:JJ: in Allsn Sekuls. Performance under Working Condilions
(Ostfildern: HatJe Cantz. 2003). 310-11.

For this reason, we should seek the main benefit from these prac-
tices in the way pedagogical aspects are juxtaposed with aesthetic
aspects. A collective pedagogy, as it has been characterized
through Angela Melitopoulos's and Ursula Biemann's experiences,
makes it possible to transform documentary practices into complex
missions whose purpose is to scrutinize the "cognitive map" 28
shared by a large number of players and to understand geography
whilst challenging what someone like Vladimir Putin calls "transit
monopolies;" 29 setting freedom of movement and gaze against the
coding and fixing of the same in one-way journeys; and delaying
the research results in order, firstly, to enable a dynamic representa-
tion combining images and facts to be produced and, secondly, to
introduce time as a decisive factor for understanding phenomena
trapped in constant change, as is the case of cultural geography. In
short, a video essay placed at the service of a collective pedagogy
has to work full out to produce the best possible propaganda of
complexity.
The original essay "Negativos de Europa. Ensayos visuales y pedagogias colectivas•

was published in Tipograffas polfticas/Political Typographies, ed. Nuria Enguita and
Carles Guerra (Barcelona: Fundaci6 Antoni Tapies, 2007).
28 See Kevin Lynch. The Image of the City (Cambridge. MA: The M IT Press. 1960).
29 Pilar Bonet. "El presidente Putin considera 'interesante· la idea de crear una OPEP del gas: El Pais, February 2.
2007.

•

UNtVERS Ong1na1 from
/TY OF CALIFORNIA
In this essay I wish to address a problem that has received little ...
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attention in mass media research to date, while it has also been 0
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largely neglected in cultural studies and visual It has to studies. 01 --~

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do with the relationship between mass-media journalism and art, -
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literature and film, or, in a broader sense, the relation of journalism t.,
and aesthetics. I should like to start with two examples. -
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"Why all these full-page spreads from Sydney?" The question ~
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was raised by veteran newspaper correspondent Sven Oste in a -
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column in Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm) in the early 1990s. Oste was -~
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and 1960s brought the world beyond Europe within sight for E
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Swedish readers. The object of his question was the tremendous
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energy and resources West-European media spent covering 0

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brushfires in New South Wales. The tires had claimed four lives -
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and destroyed 191 homes. During the same period, the rest of the C
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world was not exactly serene, Oste noted: "A gas explosion in .;
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China killed 70 workers. It got ten lines. Floods rendered 150,000

people in Sri Lanka homeless. Eight lines." When an earthquake in
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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, Oste wrote.
There would be no cause for concern if our news institutions
had no greater pretensions than to promote our sense of community
and to confirm our own culturally bound worldview. It is hardly
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. 112 (Sep1ember
2004).
02 Sven Oste. ·vartbr alla dessa helsidor frAn Sydney?" (Why all these full-page spreads from Sydney], Dagens
Nyheter. January 14, 1994.

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surprising if people in Stockholm find it easier to identify with people
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peasants in rural India. To bemoan that would be as silly as to
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en criticize a local newspaper for carrying local news.
But, in an age in which media are becoming ever more global-
ized, Oste's question becomes urgent. With global concentration
of the media, the global media conglomerates of the West make a
claim, whether explicitly or implicitly, to universal validity. We are
presented with a situation in which a given cultural community, with
its parochial concept of newsworthiness, is convinced that its
values apply universally to Humankind. As a culturally bounded
definition of newsworthiness-along with the relative valuation of
human beings in different parts of the world that the definition
reflects-is adopted as a world standard, other culturally bounded
ideas about what is important and who is important will be mar-
ginalized. The result is the kind of bias that Sven Oste criticized: the
globalized media system codes a resident of suburban Sydney
and a resident of the Maharashtra hinterland in such a way that
readers and viewers will identify with the fate of the former, whereas
the latter remains out of view. The result is paradoxical, for are we
not often told that globalization is broadening our horizons?
Now, to my second example. Some years ago I saw an exhi-
bition of the work of the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar.03 Instead of
the customary brochure or catalogue, visitors were furnished with
a passport and what appeared to be a map. Unfolding the map, I
found instead a collection of large poster-size photographs of
people in Nigeria, Brazil, and a refugee camp outside Hong Kong .
I seemed to hear a whisper: "Look closely! This is what we look
like, the people on the other side of the border!"
Then their Faces Vanished.
Inscribed on Jaar's map was a single sentence: "La Geographie,
a
9a sert d'abord faire la guerre." (Geography above all serves the
03 Alfredo Jaar. 'Two or Three Things I Imagine About Them." Kunstnerernes hus. Oslo. 1993. The exhibition w as
shown in original format at Whitechapel An Gallery in London, 1992. I discuss Jaar's work in more depth in my
A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (New Yori<: Columbia University Press. 2008).
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purpose of war). For Alfredo Jaar, every frontier-geographical, ..I
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political, economic, or cultural-represents a crime against humanity. 0
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In 1986, he rented the advertising space at the Spring Street subway 8"'
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station on Manhattan. Spring Street is the stop where Wall Street's 0
stock brokers end and start their daily commute. Gold up $1.80! ¾
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Jaar's ads declared. Alongside this encouraging piece of news Jaar C:
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displayed photos of the gold-diggers, or garimpeiros, of Serra al
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Pelada, the largest open-pit mine in Brazil. At the time Jaar took his
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photos, more than 40,000 migrant laborers were working the .9

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mine, each digging his own shaft toward the center of the Earth. In ~
the photos, the mine looks like a giant's footprint in an anthill.
Tiny creatures covered with mud are scrambling over each other.
With their one hand on the ladder and the other on their sack of
up to one hundred pounds of gold-bearing mud, they climb toward
daylight.
In Jaar's images, the wretched workers of Serra Pelada haunt
us like figures in a geopolitical nightmare. Jaar shows us the faces
and bodies of people whose existence is denied in price quotations, ~
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the media, or economic development programs. To be sure, Jaar's
art is political, even didactic. It gives faces to the faceless ones.
But the real point of his work is a different one. With minimalistic
precision, he frames his photos in such a way that the depicted
persons always appear to be fading away or falling outside the
visual plane. Sometimes, he veils his subjects' faces or dilutes
and distorts them by letting them appear as reflections in water or
ingeniously placed mirrors. Or he hangs his pictures face-to-wall,
so that the spectator can only guess the motif on the basis of the
caption.
Furthest in, in a sort of sanctum sanctorum in the exhibition
hall, Jaar confronted the visitor with a broad image, illuminated from
behind, showing seven men in Lagos, Nigeria. They are standing
next to or leaning against a stack of rusty barrels of toxic waste,
imports from Europe. This picture was followed by four similarly
illuminated close-up portraits of garimpeiros encrusted in mud; the
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figures were tightly cropped, with their point of gravity just outside
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The passport had no spaces for entry and exit stamps. Instead,
each page showed a picture of a frontier marked by barbed wire
and illuminated by glaring searchlights. And across each page a
phrase, in flaming red letters, was repeated in several languages:
"Abriendo nuevas puertas," "Es offnen sich neue Tore," "Opening
new doors."
Such is the ultimate interpretation of Jaar's work: it opens doors
to the worlds that have been marginalized in Western media. But
his work also has another effect. It makes the spectator aware of
the political barriers and mental inhibitions that prevent us from
seeing the world's lower classes. The Wretched of the Earth await
us just beyond the pale of our perception. Jaar lets the viewer see
that he or she does not see the Other.
On the basis of these two examples I should like to formulate
an hypothesis. The first example speaks of the increasing con-
formism of global mass media. An ever greater share of the media
worldwide are governed by a norm that dictates what is worth
knowing and looking at, what to enjoy and what to mourn, what
counts as happiness, justice, goodness, and love. The norm is
confining in that it suppresses other, alternative ideas about these
values.
The second example speaks of the increasing politicization of
art. By politicization I mean the process that brings what we might
call "the political"-as opposed to "politics"-to light.04 The political
signifies the fundaments and underlying principles of politics,
namely, people's ability to represent themselves and their interests
in the public sphere a public sphere, moreover, that has become
global. Alfredo Jaar calls attention to the political in the sense that
his art evokes the mechanisms that exclude some of humanity
04 The distinction is based on a discussion among French political theorists of the relationship between ·1e politiQue·
(politics) and ·1a politique· (the political). See Alain Badiou. Peur-on penser ts poli tique (Paris: Seuil, 1985); Claude
Lefort. ' La Question de la democratie." in Le Retrsir du politique: Trsvsux du Centre de Recherches Philosophiques
sur le Polirique (Paris: Editions Galilee. 1983). 71 -88.

from the public sphere, thereby denying them political represen- ...r:
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subject position: white, male, Western and of the owning classes. "'QC
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general model of the human. Those who take interest in these .t
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narratives are asked to emulate this model, which for the majority £l
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of the world 's population means that they must renounce those
culturally specific identities that do not conform with the model. The
result of this process is a divide that is by now well known in
contemporary cultural analysis. A conflict arises between a Western
dominant that claims to represent the general interest-which may
be coded in cultural terms (enlightenment, secularization, traditional
humanist education), in political terms (democracy, parliamentarism,
etc.) and / or economic terms (market economy, free trade, capital-
ism}-and a series of subordinate tendencies that are assumed to
represent various minority interests and are often coded in ethnic,
religious, cultural, or national terms.
On the other hand we see a number of politicizing currents in
contemporary literature, film, art and music. They call attention to
05 See News in a Glob8/ize<f Society, ed. Stig HjaNard (Goteborg: Nordicom. 2002): Edward S. Herman and Robert
W. McChesney, The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (London and Washington:
Cassell, 1997); and Journalism and the New World Order: Gulf War. National News Discourses and Globalization.
ed. Stig Ame Nohrstedt and Ru ne Ottosen (Goteborg: Nordicom, 2000).
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experiences, histories, bodies, and identities that have long been
homeless in the Western public sector, and they do so with an
energy and innovative creativity that has put them at the center of
the aesthetic discussion in the West. The work of Alfredo Jaar is
an example of this tendency which, broadly speaking, might be
labelled "postcolonial." The documenta 11 exhibition in Kassel in
2002 presented a comprehensive inventory of this movement within
the visual arts. Contemporary literature presents a good number
of other examples, and here it suffices to list some of the recent
Nobel laureates, such as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine
Gordimer, Wale Soyinka, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
They differ greatly, to be sure. Yet, what they have in common is
a desire to express stories and existential experience from the dark
and repressed side of Western civilization.
It would appear, then, that the course of developments in jour-
nalism and aesthetic genres are tending in opposite directions.
One might even say that the Arts are compensating for the "blind
spots" of journalism. How might we characterize the relationship
between these two trends? The question is theoretical: what inter-
pretive models help us understand the relation of journalism to
aesthetics? The question is also practical and methodological: by
comparing these simultaneous but contrary processes in the arts
and journalism, respectively, we may further our understanding of
both.
The interplay between different levels in the cultural superstruc-
ture is a central theme in classical Marxist theory. In the last
decades of the nineteenth century, Karl Kautsky and Franz Mehring
both showed how literature and the arts in certain historical periods
are politicized, in the sense that it becomes one of their main
functions to channel information, ideas, and experiences that are
otherwise excluded from public cultural and political debate.06 For
instance, there are societies in which direct or indirect censorship
06 Kar1 Kautsky, Die Klassengegensatze von 1'189 (Stungan. NN, 1889); Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende (Bertin:
Dietz. 1967 [ 1894)).

has prevented the media from carrying an open discussion and
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publishing opinions that are crtitical of the existing power. Such ,Q
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expression of certain kinds of knowledge and experience. Most
extreme in this regard is television journalism, where strict formats
and limited air time often rule out background analysis and the
exposition of causal explanation altogether. Such elements flee to
public media that are at once more narrow and more generous:
book-length reportage, journal essays, installation art, the novel, and
documentary film genres that traditionally have presupposed a
will to aesthetic form and a mode of address or perspective that
is subjective and personal.
The above-mentioned documenta 11 offered a veritable cata-
logue of such expressions. Chantal Akerman's film and video
installation, From the Other Side, treated the plight of migrants
crossing the border between Mexico and the U.S. Fareed Armaly
invited visitors to draw their own mental maps of Palestine. For the
purposes of the exhibition Maria Eichhorn founded a public
company, the sole purpose of which was to preseNe the company's
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equity without accumulating profit or interest; her "venture" demon-
strated the nature of capitalism and the art market more poignantly
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than most business journalists are able to do. With his suite of
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en documentary photos of commercial shipping Allan Sekula showed
the infrastructure of the global market, the flows of goods from
one part of the world to another. The Italian artists' collective Multi-
plicity presented the results of investigative journalism in its best
sense through a dramatization of an event that both media and
authorities had suppressed. The day after Christmas 1996, a fishing
boat sank between Malta and Sicily. All on board-283 Pakistanis,
Indians and Lankese drowned, without anyone being held
responsible, and even without any investigation of the disaster.07
The themes these artists elaborate are roughly the same as
the ones we encounter daily in our news media. They all have
something to do with the globalization process and the conflicts
and confusion that arise in its wake, particularly the mass migrations
of people from poorer to wealthier regions of the world. What
distinguishes artistic approaches to these themes from journalistic
approaches is not mainly their subjective commitment, nor their
eagerness to experiment with visual, cinematographic and verbal
forms; above all, it is their sensitivity to suppressed aspects of
ongoing political and cultural processes. The arts often render
events, problems, and structures that cast Western society in a
critical light, or even hold Western society responsible for preserving
the privileges it enjoys, at the cost of the rest of the world.
Artist Felix Gonzales-Torres once derided heavy-handed politi-
cizing tendencies of art. Slightly travestied, he phrased his question
as follows: Do we really need an art gallery to find out what we
can read in the paper or watch on CNN?08 The point of the art that
I am discussing here, however, is that it gives us a sense of as-
pects of the political that we cannot read about in the newspaper
07 The project is described brieny in the exhibition catalogue, Documenta II-Platform 5: Exhibition (Ostfildern-Ruit
Hatje Cantz, 2002).
08 Anthony Downey comments on Gonzales-Torres· critique in "The Spectacular Difference of documenta XI," Third
Text 62 17: 1 (M arch 2003): 91.
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or watch on CNN.
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that bear the "stamp of approval" of the dominating authorities.
When journalism is reduced to little more than a mirror for princes,
the arts assume the role of journalism in its original sense: a running
chronicle that elucidates social events.
I suggested earlier that these shifts represent two sides of the
globalization of culture. In the age of globalization we can identify
three distinct tendencies in the cultural sector. First, American
mass culture continues its triumphal tour across the globe under
the banners of Nike, McDonald's, Walt Disney, and Coca-Cola.
Second, the "high culture" of the West is becoming part of elite
lifestyles not only in Paris and Washington, but in Beijing and
Buenos Aires, as well. From each and every metropole in the
world there now emanates a sponsored noise of Pavarotti, Bach,
and Eric Satie, and in just about whatever city you visit you will
find a major exhibit of Hieronymus Bosch, Russian icons, Vincent
van Gogh, or Andy Warhol. A growing number of artists and

writers consciously cater to the tastes of the world's upper classes.
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in the press, most clearly articulated in papers like USA Today and
International Herald Tribune the former for the middle classes,
the latter for the air-bound upper classes, but both tailored to suit
all in their target group and not to furrow any brows.
Dominating these two tendencies are a handful of media
groups: Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, Sony, Seagram, Rupert
Murdoch's News Corporation, AT&T, General Electric, and Bertels-
mann.09 The tendencies lead us to the motor behind the globaliza-
tion of culture: the establishment of universal equivalents, or "value-
forms," which make it possible to judge and rank the "value" of
different news stories, cultural products, works of art, knowledge,
events, ethical behavior, and political systems, regardless of their
cultural origin and contexts.
Let me explain this in more detail. Political values, ethical values,
existential values, news values, aesthetic values, and human values
were long culture-specific, bound to cultural origins and local
traditions. They could not be measured on the yardsticks supplied
by other cultures. Traditionally, the only value that could be ex-
changed without difficulty across cultural boundaries internationally
was monetary value. Today, however, everything is subject to
measure and judgment according to yardsticks that are alleged to
have universal validity. This is not to say that the phenomena
measured are reduced to monetary value, only that they are sub-
jected to the same kind of logic that applies to the exchange of
monetary values: immaterial fruits of human endeavor education,
news reporting, goodness, poetry, patriotic feeling, or anything
else are now increasingly valued in relation to a universal equiv-
alent. The standardizations of all kinds of value effected by such
universal equivalents is, in my view, the most appropriate analytical
definition of cultural globalization.
09 Roben W. McCtiesney. Rich Media, Poor Democracy.· Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University
of lllino,s Press. 1999).

Consider, for example, motion pictures, where the so-called ..r::
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Hollywood narrative has superseded alternative modes of cine-
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it conforms to the CNN mold. In the world of digital communication £
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global equivalence. Nothing has emotive, aesthetic, cognitive, Cl>
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delimit our world-view, that present selected portions of the world :u.~
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they and their work are to be taken seriously by the dominant in-
stitutions in their respective fields.
Out of the reactions to this standardization of elite and popular
culture, a third tendency has emerged. It consists of all the local,
ethnic or national movements having the aim to resist the global-
ization of culture. Every now and then, someone out in the periphery
vandalizes a McDonald's. French culturati express their outrage
when the USA tries to force European governments to cease sup-
porting European film production on the grounds that it gives
European film-makers an unfair competitive advantage on the world
market. In the USA, Latino and Asian students demand that curricula
include their peoples' history and traditions alongside those of
Anglos, Blacks, and Native Americans. The president of Malaysia
accuses the USA of propagating an individualistic ideology with
respect to human rights as a means of securing international
dominance. I have yet to mention terrorism, the most desperate

response of the periphery to the processes of centralization and
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globalization. Face to face with the new, global norms, people be
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they Persian or Quebecois-are "discovering" that they have a

cultural identity and that it is under threat and needs to be defended.
They are returning to their cultural roots, ethnic origins, confessional
values or blood kin, maintaining that their values cannot be up-
rooted from their cultural context and equivalized according to some
universal standard.
All artistic, intellectual, and journalistic work today is carried out
in a field of tension between these three tendencies-standardized
elite culture, commercialized mass culture, and local traditions of
stubborn resistance. But most important is that all three are inter-
woven and simultaneously present in every country, every locality,
every work of art, indeed, in every life. Yesterday, culture could be
located on the map and defined as "domestic" or "foreign", accord-
ing to national frontiers. That is no longer possible. Anyone who
tries to identify and define, say, Swedish or American culture has
either to invoke some supposed national character-thereby
verging on cultural racism-or else admit that every culture is subject
to the forces of globalization, tugging at once in several different
directions.
Therefore, I should like to postulate a fourth tendency, one that
specifically deals with the conflicts and power relationships
between the three poles in contemporary cultural life: global mass
culture, the elite's "culture of cultural events," and miscellaneous,
more or less nationalistic cultural projects. The most striking mani-
festation of this fourth tendency to date was, precisely, the docu-
menta exhibit in Kassel, which gathered a good number of intel-
lectuals, writers, artists and institutions, all of whom operate in the
interface between "domestic" and "foreign" and strive to express
and give form to "the political," that is to say, the very preconditions
for and limits to participation in contemporary public spheres of
politics and culture.
Many attempts have been made to define this zone, where

cultural influences mix, giving rise to new cultural identities. Cultural
theorist Homi Bhabha calls it "the third space"; Mexican anthropolo-
gist Garcia Canclini speaks of "hybrid culture," and artist Guillermo
Gomez Pena of "border culture."10 Other terms in currency are
geoculture, transculture, postcolonial culture, interculture, multicul- 1
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ture, and world culture. This zone is already present in most places. -
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phenomenon; it has always been there, although it has been ~
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described in many different terms. In 1907, for example, Otto Bauer, (/)
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national cultures: "For the individual who is affected by the culture ·~

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of two or more n·ations, whose character becomes equally strongly .1l

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influenced by different cultures, does not simply unite the character tl
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traits of two nations but possesses a wholly new character. [The]

mixture of cultural elements creates a new character." 11 That is why
the child of many cultures is often greeted with mistrust, in times of
strife even as a traitor, Bauer adds. Bauer himself lived through the
last years of the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed numerous
minority cultures without any dominating majority, and in which it
was necessary to invent a model of humanness and citizenship
that rose above the nationalist conflicts-"a wholly new character."
The point of the notion of a "public sphere of inbetweenness"
is that it reveals the relativity and dynamism in all distinctions
between center and periphery, and in all the polarities-culture and
10 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Rou1ledge, 1994), 35--39; Nestor Garcia Canclini,
"Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity', trans. Christopher L Chiappari and Silvia L.
L6pez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1995). 1- 11. 206-263: Guillermo G6mez-Peila, Warrior for
Gringostroika: Essays, Performance Texts and Poetry (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1993), 43-44.
11 Otto Bauer. "The Nation ." in Mapping the Nation. ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso. 1996). 541; Die Nation-
alitiitenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie. rev. ed. 1924 (Glashi.inen im Tau nus: Detlev Auvermann. 1971), 117. For a
more extensive discussion of Bauer's standpoint in relation to the view s of his time with regard to the culture of
inbetweenness see Stefan Jonsson. Subject Without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity
(Durham: Duke University Press. 2001), 263- 270.
Original from
barbarism, "us" and "them", civilization and savagery-that can be
derived from it. What might be called a monotopic interpretation of
the world is here replaced by a pluritopic interpretation, or what
Edward Said referred to as a "contrapuntal interpretation," that is
sensitive to actions and texts that have broken away from, or been
devastated by the dominant tradition. 12 The pluritopic interpretation is
rooted in thinking that does not refer to a certain ground or a given
tradition, but rather moves between different cultural horizons. Thus, it
resists every attempt to assign any given tradition, event or place
to any single truth, identity, origin, spirit, or character. A pluritopic
interpretation instead posits that every history and geographic
place is a collection of interacting identities.13 It has no place for
majorities or minorities, for Norwegian, Swedish, Nordic, or foreign.
All such categories are undone once we realize that every cultural
identity is shot through by strands from numberless other places
on the planet.
The fourth tendency arising out of the globalization of culture
is apparent in the realm of aesthetics and in contemporary cultural
theory. But not in journalism. Mainstream journalism and news
reporting remain dependent on a worldview of the kind Sven Oste
criticized. Events and people are measured and valued in relation to
a presumed center, national or global, an allegedly objective van-
tage point, from which an allegedly impartial obseNer suNeys and
catalogues the course of humanity and the changes of the world.
Perhaps the demonstrated weakness of journalism when it
comes to documenting the political processes of globalization is due
to the fact that it is still bound to such an objectivist and positivist
epistemology. Perhaps the key to the greater achievements of the
arts in this regard is that their vantage point lies precisely in the
intersection of the contradictory processes of globalization. Let me
offer another example and make a new distinction that clarifies
the difference.
12 Edward Said, Culture snd Imperialism (New Yoo: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 32. 50-72.
13 Walter D. M ignolo, The Dsrl<er Side of the Rensisssnce: Literscy. Terrirorislity snd Colonization (Ann Arbor. The
University of M ichigan Press, 1995). 11-25.

The example is the so-called war on terror, more precisely its
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initial phase, the attack on the Talibans in Afghanistan. Most opinion .2
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stream Western journalism cast the war in a narrative reminiscent of 1

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a battle of Light versus Darkness. Intellectuals having roots in the -

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Muslim world-like Naguib Mahfouz, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdelrah- :E
man Munif, Tariq Ali, Edward Said, Sherif Hetata, and Khalid Duran- l
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were, by contrast, convinced that the war would only worsen ex- _§'
isting problems and create new ones.14 a,
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It may be that the two groups read and interpreted the war
in two distinctly different contexts. For the war on terror can be
understood and explained against the background of several
different narratives. One explanatory narrative is about the efforts
of democracy and open societies to defend themselves against
enemies that are not above murdering innocent people en masse.
Another is about the most recent phase in the USA's buttressing
of the country's imperial hegemony. A third concerns the ultimate
consequences of globalization, and a fourth the dialectic between
religious faith and secularization in the Muslim world. This multiplicity
of perspectives is cause for thought. Which of the narratives that
influences one's interpretation of the war obviously has to do with
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
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 imponant
to include commentary and analysis from Afghans and others in the Muslim world is a welcome deviation from
the norm, a norm that presumes that Western media can, on their own, give their readers and viewefs an
adequate and impanial interpretation of the world . But that these more progressive media have to make such
efforts to include others' voices demonstrates just how strong 1he norm is.

...~ one's position in the field of tension of world politics-whether one
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Still, or at least at this time around 2002-00, opinion leaders
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one believe, that their particular interpretation were the only valid
and possible one. When they ignored all the other possible contexts
in which the war may be understood, they were turning a blind
eye to the world around them. Historian of literature, Hans-Ulrich
Gumbrecht, at one point saw this blindness as a case of what
he called "complexity reduction ." 15 He considered the Western
reaction-and, by extension, Western media coverage typical of
a modernity that has embraced what he calls a "subject culture,"
Subjektkultur, that is, an attitude to the world in which the observer
of world events is taken to be placeless, disembodied, omniscient,
and impartial. "The world" is something the observer approaches
with conceptual tools, not a place where he or she lives in or
through which he or she is formed . A precondition for this attitude
or position is that the individual in question has attained a measure
of wealth and security that shelters him or her from the material
pressures of history; he or she is no longer immediately involved in
history, but can view it from above. This attitude is so deeply
imbued in the culture of modernity that even Western concepts of
knowledge and morals are predicated on it; the world is here seen
as an image, separate from the observer, or as a "world picture," as
Heidegger once put it.18 Western journalists, reporters, and opinion
leaders tend to assume this position of withdrawn superiority;
indeed, this position is a prerequisite to being able to say anything
about the world or the war on terrorism.
The elevation of this position to an absolute, Gumbrecht
argued, is the reason why Western journalists and intellectuals are
poorly equipped to understand that less privileged places are still
15 Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht. "In eine Zukunft gesto8en. Nach dem 11. Septembef 2001." ~ ur 55, no.631 (November
2001 ): 1048-1054.
16 Manin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture." in The Question Concerning Technology and Other ESSByS,
trans. WIiham Lovitt (New Yortc Harper & Row, 1977), 11~ 15-4.
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characterized not only by the "subject culture" of modernity, but also ...I
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transforms one's space of existence. To take an example: Gumbrecht al
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noted that Muslims take offense to the stationing of American "'

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tighter planes near Mecca; their presence provokes frustration and .!.?
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the representation of how life and society look, sound, feel, tast-.e- l!l
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even how they smell. Here we have yet another reason why art
today is able to give us some idea of the political repercussions
of globalization, far closer to reality than the general overviews
provided by journalists and statisticians.
The contrast I am describing here could be summed up as the
difference between experience and overview, where the arts remain
true to their mission of representing concrete human experiencH-e-
here, the experience of living in the "battle zones" of globalization-
whereas journalism and the media provide "structure" and overview.
The contrast between the two would appear to have been driven
to an extreme these days. Cultural theorist Fredric Jameson has
given the classical formulation of this problem, or double-bind:
We have today, he writes, "a situation in which we can say that if
individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that
if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then
it escapes individual experience."17
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...a By extension, Jameson's reasoning would imply that artistic
attempts to express authentic experiences of contemporary political
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events can never claim to be true, whereas journalistic attempts
ien to tell the truth about reality seldom or never say anything about the
authentic experiences which, ultimately, steer the course of history.
The dichotomy is drastic. As we all know, a good share of
contemporary art and literature claims to reveal truths about hidden
political and historical structures; at the same time, the best
journalism leans toward concrete human experience. Thus, the best
work of both strive to achieve what Jameson calls a "cognitive
mapping" of the world as totality: to make global processes acces-
sible to our senses and our experience. 18
Both make the effort, but it seems that the aesthetic genres are
always one step ahead of the renditions of reality presented in
mass media. Why is this? One might put it this way: Art, literature
and film invent the forms of representation that are subsequently
institutionalized and applied in journalism and the media. There
are numerous interesting examples of how journalistic genres have
borrowed from literature, art and film : nineteenth-century realism
and naturalism in literature presage documentary reportage in the
daily press; avant- garde film developed editing techniques that
subsequently became the norm in television; dialogic patterns de-
veloped in drama and philosophical novels have enriched the
journalistic interview; photo journalism has borrowed from the ico-
nography of painting; investigative reporting in both print and
broadcast media applies the fluid narrative perspective developed
in modernist novels.
The historiography of documentary film offers another illus-
trative example. Film historian Bill Nichols has recently published
what many might call a "revisionist" history of the genre. 19 His
analysis is of general applicability to the question of the relationship
17 Fredric Jameson. Postmoclemism. or. The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press.
1991). 411.
18 Jameson. Postmodemism. 51-54.
19 Bill Nichols, "Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde." Critical Inquiry 27. no. 4 (Summer 2001 t. 580-610.
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between journalism and aesthetics. Film historians have long ..I
maintained that documentarism represents the essence of cinema-
tography. Ever since 1895, when the Lumiere brothers arranged the
first public screening of moving pictures and an astounded audi-
ence could see moving pictures of workers leaving their factory and
a train pulling into a station, film has been assumed to be directly
related to authentic reality. All film is-by birth and definition-
documentary, a kind of journalism, an imprint of reality. When in the
1920s "documentary film" was introduced as a concept, it was-
as accepted historiography would have it-nothing new, but only
a new name for what moving pictures always had been: documen-
tations of reality. Thus, historians have invented a mythical ancestry
for the documentary, Nichols comments. The documentary film is
portrayed as a necessary consequence of the realism of film as a
medium: it offers us a window on reality and the naked truth. In
short, the documentary would appear to demonstrate the very
essence of the reality-revealing function of journalism.
Nichols rejects this reasoning out of hand. The first films, he
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argues, were not at all received as documented reality, but as
magical spectacles. And, if all film is essentially documentary, why
did the genre not appear until 1928? If the accepted history holds,
the genre should have appeared much earlier, Nichols reasons.
Furthermore, documentary film is much more than a matter of
recording reality. In addition to cinematographic techniques, there
are three additional elements: a particular narrative style, developed
in early films of the genre; a social mission, a desire to inform and
arouse the public that appeared first in the interwar period; and,
finally, the montage techniques by which avant-garde films of the
1920s achieved both defamiliarization and revelation of reality.
Nichols is particularly interested in this third aspect and demon-
strates how the documentary and, for that matter, all journalistic
use of moving pictures are indebted to the film experiments of
Walter Ruttman, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Man Ray and Luis
Bunuel, that is to say the modernist avant-garde.
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I So reasons Nichols, and I think the point is clear: A docu-
mentary genre that strives to fulfill all the journalistic criteria of truth
and factuality has its origins in avant-garde film-makers' free ex-
perimentation with images and narratives. Why is this legacy so
seldom acknowledged? Nichols' answer is that documentary film
would risk losing its credibility, were its true parentage to be known.
One would then have to admit that the way to true depictions of
reality leads through aesthetic fiction, that documentary and jour-
nalistic truth is in large part a construction.
All journalism-like any representative genre or medium that
makes claim to verifiable truth-tends to succumb to an ideological
sclerosis. It turns into an instrument, the purpose of which is to
confirm a given "world picture." Journalism can only avoid such a
fate by learning from the arts, with their demonstrated ability to
penetrate beyond stereotypes, hackneyed jargon, and worn-out
codes. In this way artistic experimentation with images and narrative
structures inspires, renews, and sharpens journalistic representation
of reality. Aesthetics would seem to be a vaccine that protects jour-
nalism from conformity and keeps it from degenerating into shallow,
if perhaps entertaining, reproduction of the gestures of power.
We are currently in the midst of this vaccination program. Art,
literature, and film are increasingly politicized; they direct our at-
tention to new zones of conflict and techniques of representation
that no doubt will characterize the journalism of tomorrow. The
process is necessary, not for the sake of the arts or of journalism,
but for the sake of society: democracy presumes the existence of
media that represent reality impartially and in a credible fashion.
And, inasmuch as we are in the midst of the process, we should
not be surprised if a good share of contemporary art seems to coin-
cide with reportage and the documentary, while a good share of con-
temporary journalism seems to coincide with soaps, crime drama,
action film or, as Tim•othy Garton Ash put it recently, "sheer fiction."20
20 I am referring to an article by Timothy Garton Ash. "Valkommen till Matrix!" [Welcome to Matrix) that appeared
in Swedish translation in Oagens Nyheter. June 17, 2003.

First published in Nordicom Review 25, no. 1/2 (September 2004).
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UNIVERsrry OF CALIFORNIA
How does a text become a document? It has to be certified as a
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 in the archive, than 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 al-
ways more than one document. This is why documents are orga-
nized 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 r~ason 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 orientation.
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
selection: 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
01 ThiS essay is the outcome of a seminar held at the Academy of Fine Arts. UmeA. I am indebted to the students
for their comments and contributions. I also thank the Kunstverein Dusseldorl for giving me the opportunity to
try out a tirst 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 tinal draft.
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a relate it to. So in different ways, our relationship towards documents,
as producers or readers, takes on the form of a performance of
selection guided by specific interests.
Moreover, the certification of a text as a document is based on
authority. If you read a document, you know it has been authorized
as a document by someone with the authority to do so (usually
indicated by a seal or signature). Otherwise it would not have been
filed in the archive and subsequently not be available to you as a
reader. Who has the authority to produce documents? The authority
of the producer is generated by the nature of the archive he or she
contributes to just as, vice versa, the nature of its founder determines
the authority of the archive. A document filed in the institutional
library of the Vatican will speak to you with the authoritative voice
of the church even more so because the name of the individual
who filed it will have been obscured by the history of the institution.
Anonymity boosts institutional authority. By contrast if you look at
an early issue of Silver Surfer filed in the archive of a marvel comics
fan, this document will speak to you with the authority of personal
obsession. Embodied individuality secularizes authority. Apart from
authority a question that is inevitably raised by the archive is the
problem of capacity. How many documents can or should an archive
hold? And: will the user of the archive be capable of accessing
the documents? The main capacities, which the user has to have
are interest and time. The archive asks for an investment on behalf
of its users. They have to invest interest and spend time in the
archive.
The Sublime Archive

It seems that in the art discourse of the late 1980s and early 1990s
the concept of the archive was strongly associated with a debate
about the aesthetics of the sublime and the critique of the subject.
In the discussion of works by artists such as Christian Boltanski or
Hanne Darboven, the archive was projected as a site of history and
intertextuality that calls the powers of the individual into question.

Upon entering a grand traditional library you will be overpowered
by the sublime sensation of encountering history in its totality. A -
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totality that demands to but never can be fully grasped by the indi- ~
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vidual, as one lifetime will not suffice to study the entirety of all a,
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available documents. This is why the moment you put a foot inside e
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you. You are as good as dead. Your life is outmeasured by the life :,
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of the archive and the totality of all lives that have been invested a,
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in the process of producing the documents it holds. This feeling of 0
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individual mind is comparable to the experience that installations by C
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Boltanski or Darboven confront you with. When Darboven, for in- >-
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documents of the same A4 format, she stages her production of "'a,C
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a sublime archive an archive which testifies to the attempt of an a,
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individual to move towards creating a historic totality by investing £
a lifetime of work into the relentless production of documents.

Darboven's archive originates in personal obsession. Yet, as she
writes down potentially endless variations of mathematic calculi
(like Bismarckzeit, 1978) or transcribes verse after verse of an epic
text like the Odyssey (in Homer, Odyssee, 1971-1974), it becomes
clear that Darboven seeks to transcend the personal. Infinity and
totality become the destiny of the work. The recipient understands
in an instant that not only will the time of an exhibition visit never
be sufficient to read all the documents on display, but also that the
process of reception will never catch up with the process of
production. Darboven is always one step ahead on her road to
eternity.
Moreover, the claim to totality generates authority even more
so if the document you are facing is a transcription of the Odyssey,
a text which is an institution in itself in as much as it is considered
to provide a universal explanation of the world and as such is
treated as a part of the universal knowledge (or cultural history) of
mankind. Facing documents of such universal value, the recip ient
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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 be
argued that Boltanski goes even one step further. In his installation
archives at documenta 8 (1987), he presented a vast number of
vintage black and white photographs of unknown individuals on
display walls made from steel grating, illuminated only by a series
of small spotlights. You get a clear idea of the impossibility of
reconstructing the lives of the anonymous individuals whose photos
are on display. You can not even say if they are dead or alive.
Their lives are lost-at least for you. Together these lost lives accu-
mulate to form the totality of history irretrievably lost. What is
more, the anonymity of the material on display is boosted by the
fact that the maker of the archive remains anonymous to a degree.
Unlike Darboven, Boltanski leaves no traces in the archive. The
interest he has in compiling the archive is nowhere articulated. This
anonymity amplifies the impression that the installation stages
history as a universal institution with authority. In the face of this
institution the recipient is left with a feeling of inadequacy. You
know you should know these people, but you know with equal clarity
that it is impossible. You gaze into the abyss of history. A sublime
experience associated with a sense of vertigo and powerlessness.
Towards a Pragmatism of the Personal

This discourse around the historical sublime was certainly justified
to a certain degree because it disencouraged the fantasy that
universal mastery of history as a totality was possible (through the
paradoxical manoeuvre of invoking the ideas of universality and
totality only to frustrate the viewer by placing them beyond his or
her grasp.) The individual is made aware of the limitations of the
subjective consciousness in the face of history. The problem is that
once this point is made it can only be reiterated. You can certainly
fresh up the sublime experience of inadequacy in relation to history
by gazing into the abyss from time to time. But where does that
take you in the long run? Any discourse that invokes the universal
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stops once the universal is invoked (be it a successful representation a
...
of the irrepresentable). So if by proceeding with the universal it
becomes impossible to focus on the particular, this might be the
only, or rather, the best option if you seek to reformulate a possible
relationship to history. It seems that this was precisely the con
clusion that a series of artists emerging in the early 1990s drew by
de-institutionalizing the archive and founding it not on principles
of universality and totality but on particularity and subjectivity.
In this context, the definition of practical archives based on
specific research projects, which Renee Green has proposed in her
work, stands out in terms of the way in which it replaces an aes-
thetics of the sublime with what could be called a pragmatism of the
personal. Take for instance Green's installation Import/Export Funk
Office (1993). In this work Green documents a particular instance
of intercultural mediation in the form of a research archive based on
a case study. The case at hand is the specific form in which
Afro-American hip-hop music has been received by German cultural
critic Diedrich Diederichsen. The research archive comprises
various "documents" taken from the critic's personal archive and
restaged in the installation. Four simple metal shelving units are
linked to form a cubicle which visitors can enter to help themselves
to various media on display including books, video- and audio-
cassettes. On two TV monitors, videos including inteNiew footage
with Diederichsen and Afro-American hip hop performers can be
viewed. The library is surrounded by other facilities for accessing
research materials. There are now (at least) three different aspects
in regard to which Green's installation could be described as de-
fining a pragmatism of the personal. Firstly, the work portrays the
making of history as an embodied practice. It needs people to
write history. It is through the mediation of specific individuals that
the history of hip-hop music is written (on both sides of the Atlantic).
Secondly, the mode in which the work addresses the viewer may
be described as both personal and pragmatic. It is personal in the
sense that the installation simulates a moment of intersubjective

i... communication. As a viewer you enter the personal universe of
a private collection, maybe to find the collector himself addressing
you in the video interview. It is pragmatic in the sense that the
viewer is transformed into a user of the work. The documents on
display are intended to be studied. Unlike Darboven or Boltanski,
Green does not ask for the impossible. Since the work focuses on
the particular, concentrating on particular elements of the work
seems adequate. You make a proper use of the archive even if your
interaction remains within the limits of what is pragmatically
possible, i.e. read one or two articles or browse through a book.
Getting into greater depth is an option but not a prerequisite,
since totality is not an issue in the work.02 Thirdly and finally, the
personal is introduced as a pragmatic motive for the making of
the work. It is not veiled what stake Green has in the matter. As
an Afro-American artist living in Germany, she has an interest in
finding out how other Afro-American cultural producers were seen
in this country an interest facilitated through her personal exchange
with Diederichsen.
This emphasis on the personal and pragmatic humanizes the
archive and relativizes its authority. While the sublime archive de-
mands respect for its authority by staging history as an impersonal
universal institution, the personal archive allows for a more respect-
less contact. You are always free to say you are not interested
and walk out. If you stay, however, you have to invest interest. By
choosing to interact with the research archive the viewers become
interested users of history. The installation then could be said to
manifest a politics of articulated interests. Green makes it perfectly
clear that her research is motivated by specific interests. The
users either return this interest or they do not. In any case, the re-
lation between producer and recipient is a decidedly unhierarchical
encounter between interested individuals. It is a situation of give
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 paniculanty." She elaborates: ·unhke in the work of Kabakov, Green
produces ·spaces· which, according to Michel de Ceneau. 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
interarchive, Kunstraum der Universitat Luneburg (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2002). 118.
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and take. Green herself has termed this form of interaction "par- I...
ticipatory mobility."03 She describes this participatory mobility_as a ~
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want to submit his pupil to his lessons. Since both producer and e
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become mediators in their own right as they establish connections a:
between the materials on display. The subject as mediator emerges

as the common thread that establishes the coherence of the
work on every level. It is interesting to see how Green has expanded
this method in subsequent works by introducing elements of
narrative. In Partially Buried (1996), for instance, the departure point
for the research is a moment where her biography intersects with
America's recent political history. Green's mother was a student at
Kent State University, Ohio, present on the campus on May 4, 1970
when during a rally against the US invasion in Cambodia four stu-
dents were shot by the National Guard. In reaction to the event,
the date of the rally was later scrawled onto the front of the work
Partially Buried Woodshed by Robert Smithson situated on the uni-
versity campus. The work had been finished only one month before
the incident and consisted of an old shed onto which enough mud
had been piled to break its roof as a way to forcefully accelerate
the process of its decay. The graffiti transformed the function of
Smithson's piece from a general reflection on entropy into a specific
03 Renee Green. Site-Speciticity Unbound," in springerin IV, no 1 (1998).
0

...I commemoration of the violent end of a peace rally (which together
with the disaster at the festival of Altamont the same year has
subsequently come to symbolize the disillusion of the hopes of the
1960s}. Green's research resulted primarily in a series of videos
comprising inteNiews, essayistic reflections, and found footage
material. The videos were shown on four monitors in a room in-
stallation defined by selected elements of 1970s design. The walls
were painted orange, cushions with floral prints, wool carpets,
wall hangings with slogans and organically molded plastic chairs
were distributed around the room. This obviously constructed
stage-like scenario nevertheless produced a cozy and comfortable
atmosphere inviting visitors to stay, watch the videos or go through
a small archive with magazines and (music) records of the time.
Three narratives overlap in the work: personal biography, art
history, and collective political history. Many different stories are
told. The form in which these narratives are organized is not linear
sequence but rather spatial proximity and personal association.
It is the atmosphere, or the mood, generated by the theatrical setting
of the installation that creates a moment of coherence by defining
the limits of the display. What is in the space is what is available for
reflection. All of the props that the viewer needs in order to engage
with the work are on stage. There is no backstage. The biographical
investment of the artist suggests that connections exist between
the materials on display. The nature of this connection is subject to
the viewer's own investigations. Interestingly, the biography of the
artist only serves as a formal guarantee that connecting phenomena
through personal association and experience is indeed a viable
method for gaining historical insights. As a first person narrator who
tells a story of her mother, of the massacre at Kent State, and of the
transformation of a work by Smithson, Green simply relates historic
events to the realm of lived experience. The perspective of the
first person narrator subsequently seNes as an empty form, a
vacant position, which the viewers are asked to take. In the role of
the narrator, the viewers have to ask themselves: How would I tell

this story? What would my stake in the matter be? The writing of .....
•
history is progressively personalized and particularized as Green
puts the viewers in her place and past.04
The Easaylstlc Installation

Other artists have continued to explore and expand the method of
using the installation space as a (both pragmatic and personal) site
for the display of research materials. One interesting example is
the installation Short Hills (1999) by Austrian artist Dorit Margreiter.
The work is based on research that Margreiter conducted on the
lV viewing habits of her Asian-American relatives in New Jersey, the
Chang family. The work takes its cue from the fact that the Changs
recently built an annex to their house, which serves as a room to
watch lV. With the help of partition walls and wooden scaffoldings,
Margreiter constructs a lifesize model of the TV room in the in-
stallation. Thus, seeing the work implies entering a model private
space. On one wall we find a generic photograph of the Hong
Kong skyline. Most of the installation, however, is taken up by a
model landscape with two green plains separated by a river, which
is propped up on two sawhorses. A video recorder and beamer as
well as a DVD player are arranged on this landscape. The films
screened on these units include interview-footage with Margreiter's
middle-aged aunt, Sandra Chang, who speaks about the Chinese
soap opera that she watches daily in order to keep some kind of
contact with her home country. Other interview materials show the
teenage cousin, Melissa Chang, who elaborates in detail why she
prefers the series "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer' to "Dawson's Creek."
Excerpts from the different lV programs are on display as well.
The work shares certain traits with a sociological research
project into the viewing habits of television audiences. It focuses
04 In her much quoted e.ssay "One Piece 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 anist as narrator-protagonist
in general. She suggests that ·1n some cases. this renewed focus on the anist 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
personal identification as a means to criticize both universalist and authoritatively didactic accounts of history
by situating the viewer in a panicular position and endowing him or her with a personal responsibility for the
writing of history in the case at hand.
Original from
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on how members of a particular audience (characterized by their
gender and ethnicity) negotiate their own identity in relation to the
cliched identities that daily mainstream soaps and series have to
offer to them. Similar issues might be addressed in an essay in the
field of cultural studies. So where is the difference between the
way in which this sociological issue of identity politics might be
processed in an academic paper and the way in which it is handled
in Margreiter's installation? First of all, Margreiter follows Green in
openly basing her research on personal interests. Consequently, the
legitimation of the work differs fundamentally from that of an
academic paper which (at least proforma) justifies its claims for
truth with recourse to scientific objectivity. What is gained by this
approach has been described above as a stronger involvement of
the audience through a politics of articulated interests. (The per-
sonal mode of address invites viewers to invest interest and take
on responsibility. At the same time the authority of the work is
relativized, since the encounter between producer and recipient is
one between particular individuals.) Secondly, the linear logic of
the scientific paper is broken up. By spreading reference material
in a space, the installation can be discursive without having to
follow the consecutive structure of academic reasoning in which
propositions are followed by arguments which lead up to con-
clusions. Rather, Margreiter's installation works like a network of
cross-references. Coherence is determined by their configuration
in space and by the atmosphere this space creates. As a viewer,
you 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-reference to cross-reference in circular motions.
So if the research-based installation contradicts the linear logic
of the scientific text, could it still be likened to the format of the
essay? Interestingly, in his essay "Der Essay als Form" Theodor
W. Adorno defines the essay as a medium that does not obey
05 Theodor W. Adorno. "Der Essay als Form.' in Philosophie und Gesellscheft (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 5-32. I am
indebted to S0ren Grammel for pointing this wonderful text out to me.

the laws of scientific methodology in various regards.05 First of all,
the essay makes no claim to objectivity, since the relationship
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between the author and the object of reflection is "emphatic": It is ~

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characterized by personal interest articulated in the guise of libidi- 2:
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nous curiosity. Adorno argues that the essay can reveal surprising 0..
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truths as it risks error and lack of legitimation. Secondly, Adorno c"'
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claims that the essay opposes the logic of continuity ensured by :,
scientific method by embracing discontinuity. The order in which

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arguments and thoughts are presented in an essay is self-con- 0
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deduction or induction. The essay could potentially end at any given C
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point or continue beyond its actual end. It is fascinating to see
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terms. It is not as a sequence in time but as a "constructed coex- e
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istence" in space, as a "force field" or "mosaic." As a text, the £"'
essay produces insights by means of the "interferences between

its concepts in the process of mental experience" ("durch die
Wechselwirkung seiner Begriffe im Prozess geistiger Erfahrung").06
Experience becomes the ground upon which the mediation between
different elements in a complex constellation becomes possible.
This form of mediation in turn avoids the objectification and com-
modification brought about by scientific rationality. If you follow
this definition of the essay it could be said to sum up quite clearly
what is at stake in the epistemological politics of the essayistic
installations by Green and Margreiter.
From Space to Time: Documentary FIim and Video In the Art

Context
Given that a key motive for the spatial display of research material
in installations was the attempt to criticize and find an alternative to
sequential organization and subsequent commodification of history
06 Ibid .. 18

in linear narratives,07 it came as some surprise that in the course of
the 1990s the documentary video began to enjoy more and more
popularity in the art context as a medium for displaying research
results. Since video is a time-based medium, its logic of repre-
sentation is necessarily linear to a certain degree. In the editing,
information is arranged in sequences. One thing comes after an-
other. It now seems interesting to see how different artists worked
with the moment of linearity and sequence in the medium of video
documentation. One example that comes to mind is Danish artist
Gitte Villesen's video, Willy as DJ ( 1995). The piece is an un-
ashamedly straightforward recording of the artist's visit to the home
of pensioner Willy, who introduces her to his record collection,
tells stories he associates with individual songs, plays some of his
favorite music, and asks her to dance with him. Although what
you see unfolds in time, it does not follow the laws of a logically
structured sequence of organized information. Different things
keep happening as we go along. The aspect the video focuses
on is the performative dimension of the encounter between the
artist and the collector. First the dialogue goes back and forth be-
tween the person in front and the one behind the camera. We
witness not so much an inteNiew but a dynamic exchange between
two people in one space, which leads to them performing a fox-
trot together. It seems that the dynamic time of social performance
replaces the sequential argumentative logic of didactic documen-
tary films. In regard to the work by Green or Margreiter, it could be
argued that Villesen merely goes one step further by documenting
on video what a visitor would do in an installation archive: perform
in relation to the available material. While in the installation context
07 Philip Rosen argues in his essay "Document and Documentary· (in Theorizing Documentary, ed. M ichael RenOII,
[New Yorlc and London: Rout1edge, 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
history. Rosen argues that this principle is the making of historical meaning through an act of arranging individual
records of panicular events (single documents or visual chronicles such as news-images) in a seQuential order to
charge them with meaning: ·11 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 vinue 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,
it follow s that a fundamental critiQue of the status Quo of historiography has to be directed against the principle
of the seQuence.
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the viewer is transformed into a model recipient exemplifying the
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possibility of an active engagement with particularized histories, <(
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along similar lines, Villesen stages a model scenario of two indi- ~
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cinematic space of video and film can be related to the space of
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the archive. The installation discussed above transforms the exhi- f/)
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dimensions and limits to create a moment of coherence. The 1n
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diverse materials on display are linked together through the unity of >,
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place and time created within the confines of a stage-like setting. "'
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theater stage, it is interesting to see whether this medium can "'
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be used as a site for contesting conventional notions about the
space of memory. An interesting example got discussion in this
context might be the film, Legend Coming True (1999, Super 8mm
film transferred to video, 68 min), by the Lithuanian artist Deimantas
Narkevitius. The film is an attempt to address the history of the
holocaust in Vilnius. Its prologue starts with a black screen. An
elderly woman starts speaking on the sound track in Russian
with a Yiddish accent. It turns out that she has lived in Vilnius for
decades and is one ·of the very few who survived the elimination
of the Jewish ghetto and the murder of its 20,000 inhabitants. In a
ceaseless flow of words, her monologue unfolds. Detailed memories
of everyday life are interwoven with an account of her struggle in
the ghetto resistance movement. On the visual level, the film pres-
ents only four location shots: an image of the narrator's childhood
street, an image of her school, one of the former ghetto, and one of
the marshes where the partisans hid. All shots are taken with a
static camera set to record one frame every minute during 24 hours.
As each shot begins before dawn and ends after sunset, the screen
lights up as the day breaks to expose the view of the location and
Original from
darkens again when night falls. Blurry shadows are the only trace
of people passing by.
Throughout the film the narrator's face is never shown. The
images of Legend Coming True are only deserted stage sets in
which the voice of the narrator resonates. It is somewhere in be-
tween the audible narration and the visible sites that history is
brought to life by the imagination of the viewer. The discontinuous
cinematic space created through the technique of montage dis-
rupts the belief in the possibility of mapping history onto consistent
coordinates. Where then is the site of history? Is it in the mind
and biographical memory of the individual? Or is it engraved in the
factual existence of physical places, in architecture as a silent
witness? Narkevitius' film seems to suggest that it is neither here
nor there but somewhere in between-in a third space emerging
in the rupture between the visible and the audible, personal memory
and collective history, fact and fiction, a space that can only be
mapped in the course of a performative effort of crossing it again
and again on different trajectories guided by different interests. It
seems that, paradoxically, a time-based medium like documentary
video or film offers interesting possibilities for dissecting notions
about the space of memory. It is from the cracks in the space of the
archive opened up by the technique of cinematic montage that
maybe another critically refined definition of how to display research
may emerge.
On the Site of Photography

While the space of the archive forms a coherent whole and time in
film is organized as a structured continuum, space and time are
fragmented in photography. A photograph can only show a segment
of space and a moment in time. It has to break down totalities
into details. Moreover, the photograph cannot "own" the space it
depicts in the same way in which the archive owns its own space
by physically encompassing it. The space of the archive is inside
its walls while the space a photograph shows always remains

outside the image. Although the photograph testifies to the physical
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where the photograph is taken, the claim the photograph stakes on &
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the site is relatively weak. The photograph does not absorb the Cl>
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site, it does not "take" the space neither in the military sense that -
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possession is taken of a contested site through the erection of a "'-
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flag and the construction of fortifications, nor in the literal sense that
the space or parts of it are taken, transported or dislocated to
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manoeuvres. A site might be photographed in order to be identified ·;:;
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as the possession of its potential owner. The ownership, however, -
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has to be enforced and ensured by other means, through legal
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verdicts, brute force, or architecture, for instance.) 6"'
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Curiously, photographers always remain alien to the site of the C
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shot. Even if they happen to own or be familiar with the place (e.g. "'Cl>
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the family home), the act of taking the photograph turns them into a:
visitors, or even tourists on their own premises. No matter how

close a photograph comes to the space it records, the interaction
between the photographer and the space always resembles the act
of scratching on a solid surface. On the one hand the look through
the viewfinder corresponds to or even reinforces the position of the
individual on the site of the shot, since it is in accordance with
his or her specific point of view from which the photograph is taken.
On the other hand, the look through the viewfinder alienates the
subject from the object he or she records. Paradoxically, the view of
the site of the photograph is subjectitied through the choice of a
particular perspective, while it is simultaneously objectified through
the recording apparatus, which is put in-between the viewer and
the viewed.
Undoubtedly, photography owns its own time. The split second
it captures, however, does not hold the same promise as the
continuum of passing time that film can record. By virtue of this
property, film generates the powerful illusion that it can make
change visible and show history in motion. Photography, on the

contrary, has to wait for the lucky moment when history chooses to
freeze in an allegorical pose. One body, one bullet, one jerky move
photographed in midair by pure coincidence has to stand in for a
war which lasted years. In regard to the fragmentary nature of the
time that the photograph captures, you could argue that not only
the space but also the moment photography records is outside the
image. It can only point to but never positively visualize ongoing
processes in a temporal continuum. Moreover, the conditions under
which a photograph is interpreted are also marked by their pre-
carious relation to time. Basically, the photograph safeguards reality
as material that might be of possible importance. The actual
evaluation of the significance of the photograph, however, is put off
until a later date. At the time of the recording you cannot tell
whether the photo is a hit or a miss. In order to find this out, you
have to wait for the negative to be developed. On the basis of the
contact print you then have to decide again which shot to keep
and develop further and which shot to abandon. Polaroid and digital
photography has shortened the interval between the recording
and the inspection to the few seconds it takes for the image to
appear on the paper or the camera's display. Yet, we still wait
anxiously for the moment when it is revealed to see how the image
has "come out." This temporal logic of postponement, anticipation,
and surprise seems essential to the joy of photography. But even
if you see the photograph you can never be entirely certain of its
significance or meaning. One photograph is always a part of a
series of many on a film. For each one that is chosen (to be devel-
oped, kept, displayed, etc.) there are others which are abandoned.
Who knows, maybe the wrong image was picked and the truly
important one is still undeveloped, because no one realized its
significance as a negative?
Moreover, the photograph can never say what it shows. It can
never become an unambiguous piece of information, since the
meaning of what is shown remains open for debate. In this sense
Philip Rosen writes (in relation to the historic example of an NBC

news program in which the first transmission of pictures of the
assassination of John F. Kennedy prompted a hectic outburst of -
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commentaries by anchorman Bill Ryan): "The image emerges as ~

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insufficient in itself. It must immediately be explained, sense must

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be made, the very shape of the image requires verbal explanation ~
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and pinpointing."08 But unlike documentary tilm, a photograph -"'
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cannot contain its own commentary. Interpretation can never be :,
successfully, that is conclusively, inscribed into a photograph. To

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an extent, interpretation always remains external to the photograph 0
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in the sense that the photograph always retains the status of ·;:,
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empirical data awaiting interpretation. This is the truly radical way en
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in which photography is dispossessed of its own time. In the >,
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graph is subjected to reevaluation and recontextualization is "'
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open-ended. "'Cl>
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This instability of meaning and unclear informational status are a:
what make the relation of photography to the archive precarious-

such a photograph is not yet a document. It is a record that still has
to undergo the process of certification, which authenticates it as
a document. In this process it has to be categorized and tiled for
future reference. To this end, a caption-and a reference have
to be added to the image as a supplement. (Of course the caption
and reference may be wrong, or rather, might be regarded as false
by another archivist at a later date. Thus the cycle of certification
starts over again.) Since the caption cannot be inscribed onto the
image and the reference thus, in a sense, remains exterior to
the photograph, its status as an unambiguous piece of information
can never be fully assured. To the extent in which a photograph
is an empirical, or if you will "indexical" recording, it always remains
in need of interpretation and cannot be converted into certified
data once and for all. Philip Rosen claims that this "relatively un-
bridled indexicality"09 does indeed constitute a subversive threat
08 Ibid., 62.
09 Ibid., 64.

I to any organized form of documentary representation, even more so
because of the sheer quantity of photographic and filmic material
which is recorded and distributed every day without further certifi-
cation. Organized forms of documentary practice, Rosen argues,
seek to generate historical meaning by imposing structure and se-
quence on the amorphous mass of indexical material. A central
concern of structured documentation can thus be understood to be
the attempt to counter and control the "dispersive threats from the
massive distributability of indexicalized 'realities'." 10
On account of the intrinsic properties of the medium, photogra-
phy paradoxically constitutes both an aid and an obstacle for the
documentary project to make a claim upon reality. Its capacity to
produce indexical evidence turns photography into a powerful tool.
It can show what is there. At the same time, it is entirely powerless.
It can neither take hold of a place nor fix meaning in the temporal
economy of (re-)interpretation. On the one hand, the powers of
the photograph boost the promise of the documentary project to
"touch the real." On the other hand, the obvious limitations of
photography are a constant reminder of the futility of the attempt to
bridge the gap between representation and reality. Precisely because
of this ambivalence, photography offers itself as medium for a
performative critique, that is, for a practice which criticizes the logic
of a medium in the process of using it. To practice a performative
critique of the documentary project would mean to make a statement
about reality by taking its picture and reflect on this very operation
by exposing the modalities of photographic representation-in
one go. It is like taking a chance and calculating your chances at
the same time.
A classic example for this kind of approach would be Martha
Roster's The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems ( 1975).
The work consists of a series of location shots of the Bowery, a
street in lower Manhattan, which used to be considered to be part
of a rough area. The photographs show house fronts and stretches
10 Ibid., 65.

of pavement, but no people. The photos are presented together 2
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with white paper cards on which derogatory names for homeless -
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people are printed, such as "alcoholic, barrelhouse bum, wino, 1

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etc." If you read them as captions, the words name what you do not <I)
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hand the work denounces the promise of the photograph to show ::,
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the real by throwing into relief that you only see what your eyes <I)
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want to see. The image becomes an accomplice to a willful delusion. 0
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You know the place to be dodgy. This preconception inevitably "'E
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alters your perception. The absence of socially deprived people on $2

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the streets makes their presence even more tangible. They fit
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into the picture, so you add them into the picture. On the other hand, u,
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however, Rosler's work can equally be read as a plea for the in- C
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nocence of the photograph. After all, it only shows what it shows. "'u,
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The interpretation which converts the image into a stereotype is a:
quite obviously based on references which are external to the image.

The captions to the image are written on a different piece of paper.
So once the bias has been exposed and denounced, what remains
is the laconic indexicality of the photos. They show a site. They
document in detail what the house fronts along the Bowery look
like. Nothing more, nothing less.
Rosler's critique is performative in the sense that the disman-
tling of the documentary claim for truth is part of the experience of
a documentary work. Critical reflection unfolds in the process of
encountering the work. First you see the photographs in accordance
with the suggested interpretation. Then you see the interpretation
apart from the images and understand it as a bias. Finally you see
the images apart from their interpretation and perceive them as
pure indices. Yet, since text and image are integral parts of one
work, to regard one apart from the other is only possible through a
temporal suspension of a perception of the work as a coherent
whole. Once you look at image and text together again, however,
the cycle starts all over. Criticism is not a given, but is a result of

repeatedly undergoing the experience of the work. Moreover, and
importantly so, Rosler's critique is performative in the sense that
her criticism of the documentary method is articulated in the process
of putting it to work. Her open skepticism in relation to the form of
the documentation does not make her refrain from realizing this very
documentation. She engages with her subject by making a state-
ment about the Bowery-about what it looks like and how we see
it. She puts the semantic instability of photography to work by
turning the cyclical structure of reinterpretation into the core expe-
rience of the work. She approaches a site of investigation but
does not stake out a claim on it. The subject of her work is the site
as the object of collective perception and prejudice, not her site,
although she personally engages with it.
The Documentary Discourse as a Field of Multiple Practices

That an essay discussing the documentary approach in the context
of art practice is bound to meander from one medium to another
seems significant in itself. It shows that documentary practice in
art is neither framed as a specific genre nor associated with one
particular medium alone. Instead, the discourse of the documentary
approach in art encompasses a multiplicity of practices developed
in different media. The forms of documentary practice range from
archival displays and essayistic installations to photography as well,
as film and video works realized in different formats (including
short and full-length films or continuous loops-presented in single
or multi-channel projections or installations with monitor arrange-
ments). With the increased interest in this discourse in recent years,
the field of documentary practice has not only expanded but
continually become more diverse. In the light of this diversity it might
seem questionable whether it is justified at all to speak of docu-
mentary practice in art as a consistent discourse or coherent field
of practice. Yet, even though the notion of genre may no longer
serve as a common denominator for these diverse practices, what
in fact links these practices-and therefore allows them to be

discussed on the grounds of one discourse is, that the various
practitioners seem to share a common critical sensibility. c.,
Parallel to conceptual art, experimental film and critical theory .,
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(i.e. media- or cultural studies) have produced since the 1960s a .,
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body of knowledge centered around a fundamental critique of rep- ~
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resentation in the media, popular culture, art, and the sciences. c.,"'
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Today, the set of criteria that this body of knowledge has provided :,
has filtered through into sensibility and intuitions of artists working

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within very different media. This sensibility may articulate itself in (/)
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the desire to address analogous issues concerning the problems E~
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and potentials of documentary representation. Artists who are C
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of their representation in a responsible, critical, or otherwise chal- .,"'
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lenging way. In this sense, the discourse on documentary practice
gains its consistence and coherence on the grounds of a shared
intuition of what is at stake in a contemporary critical discussion of
documentary representations. Seen from this perspective, the field
of documentary practices in art is much more then just a contingent
array of diverse artistic approaches.
Based on the criteria provided by a shared critical sensibility,
the multiplicity of practices can actually be understood and ap-
preciated as a quickly evolving and highly differentiated field of
discourse that asks for and allows for the critical comparison of
different conceptual aesthetics. What makes this discourse fasci-
nating is that it thrives both on the urgent desire to represent
specific realities and on a critical alertness to the power structures
and ideologies that govern such representations. This critical
awareness implies a categorical analysis of these structures and
ideologies. Yet, documentary practices take a decisive step beyond
categorical criticism by challenging the laws of representation
in the process of producing representations. In this sense the
increased interest in the production and discussion of documentary
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work in the expanded field of contemporary artistic discourse can
be understood as a move towards a critique of representation that
puts structural analysis to practice in the process of answering to
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the need to address the reality of our surroundings.

First published entitled ·Research and Display: Transformations of Documentary
Practice in Recent Art· as an introduction to Untitled (Experience of Plsce), ed.
Gregor Neuerer (London: Koenig Books, 2003). 6-22. This version was published in
Swedish entitled "Forskning och utstallning," in UNION, no. 2 (2005).
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Why can the paradigm of representation not function in politics, nor
in artistic modes of expression, and here especially in the production
of works that employ moving images?
I will attempt to answer these questions by using the paradigm
that imagines the constitution of the world from the relationship
between event and multiplicity. Representation is conversely founded
on the subject-work paradigm. In this paradigm the images, the
signs and the statements have the function of representing the
object, the world, whereas in the paradigm of the event, images,
signs, and statements contribute to allowing the world to happen.
Images, signs, and statements do not represent something, but
rather create possible worlds. I would like to explain this paradigm
using two concrete examples: the dynamic of the emergence and
the constitution of post-socialist political movements and the way
television functions, in other words, signs, images, and statements
in contemporary economy.
The days of Seattle were a political event, which-like every
event-first generated a transformation of subjectivity and its own
mode of sensibility. The motto "a different world is possible" is
symptomatic for this metamorphosis of subjectivity and its sensibility.
The difference between this and other political events of the
recently-ended century is radical. For example, the event of Seattle
no longer refers to class struggle and the necessity of taking
power. It does not mention the subject of history, the working class,
its enemy capital, or the fatal battle that they must engage in. It
restricts itself to announcing that "something possible has been
created," that there are new possibilities for living, and that it is a
matter of realizing them; that a possible world has been expressed
and that it must be brought to completion. We have entered into
a different intellectual atmosphere, a different conceptual constel-
lation.
Before Seattle, a different world was merely virtual. Now it is
actual or possible, but it is something actual, something possible that
has to be realized. The transformation of subjectivity must invent
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time-space arrangements that watch over this re-evaluation of values,
which was able to bring forth a generation that has grown up
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the period of major American
expansion, and in the New Economy. Twofold creation, twofold
individuation, twofold becoming. The signs, images and statements
play a strategic role in this twofold becoming: they contribute to
allowing the possible to emerge, and they contribute to its realization.
It is at this point that the "conflict" is confronted with the dominant
values. The implementation of new possibilities for living runs into
the existing organization of power and the established values. In
the event, one sees what is intolerable about an era and the new
possibilities for living that it contains at the same time. The mode
of the event is the problematical. The event is not the solution to a
problem, but rather opens up what is possible. For Mikhail Bakhtin,
the event reveals the nature of being as a question or as a prob-
lem-specifically in such a way that the sphere of the being of
the event is simultaneously that of "answering and questioning."
The days of Seattle involve a corporeal arrangement, a com-
bination of bodies (with their actions and passions) composed of
individual and collective singularities (multiplicity of individuals and
organizations-Marxists, ecologists, union activists, Trotskyists,
media activists, "witches," Black Bloc, etc., which practice specific
corporeal relations of co-functioning); and there is an arrangement
of statements, a regime of statements formed from a multitude of
statement regimes (the statements of the Marxists are not the same
as those of the media activists, the ecologists, or the "witches,"
etc.). The collective statement arrangements are not expressed
solely through language, but also through the technological
expression machines (Internet, telephone, television, etc.). Both
arrangements are constructed in terms of the current relationships
of power and desire.
The event turns away from historical conditions in order to
create something new: a new combination of bodies (actions and
passions, which are strung together among the demonstrators,
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for example) and that which is expressed, the verbal statement
as a result, as an effect of the corporeal combination: a different
world is possible. .,;
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What is expressed (the meaning) does not describe the bodies a;
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nor represent them. The possible world exists completely, but it does :,
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not exist outside that through which it is expressed (the slogans, the
TV reports, the Internet communications, the newspapers).
The event actualizes itself in souls in the sense that it generates
a change in sensibility (as a non-corporeal transformation), which
brings forth a new valuation: one recognizes what is intolerable
about an era and the new possibilities for living that it implies.
The possible world has already been imbued with a certain
reality through talking, through communicating, but this reality
must now be completed, it must be made by making new corporeal
arrangements.
The event constitutes the relationship between the two types
of arrangements; it is the event that distributes the subjectivities
and objectivities that will overthrow the configurations of bodies
and signs.
Everyone comes with their own corporeal machine and their
own expression machine and returns home with the necessity of
newly defining these in relation to that which is done and said. The
forms of political organization (of the co-functioning of the bodies)
and the forms of statements (the theories and statements about
capitalism, the subjects, forms of exploitation, etc.) are to be weighed
and related to the event. Even the Trotskyists are compelled to ask:
What happened? What is happening? What will happen? and to
report what they do at the event (the organization) and what they
say (the discourse they conduct).
At this point we see that the order of verbal statements is what
is problematic. All are compelled to open themselves to the event,
i.e. to open themselves up to the area of questions and answers.
Those who hold answers prepared in advance (and there are many
of those), miss the event. That is the political drama that we lived

after 1968, missing the event, because the questions already had
their predetermined answers (Maoism, Leninism, Trotskyism).
The event insists, which means it continues to have an impact, to
produce effects: the discussions about what capitalism is and
what a revolutionary subject is today are making good progress
all over the world in light of the event.
Language, signs, and images do not represent something, but
rather contribute to making it happen. Images, languages, and
signs are constitutive of reality and not of its representation.
Let us turn now to the question of how signs, images, and
statements are used by corporations in contemporary capitalism.
The corporation does not generate the object (the commodity),
but rather the world in which the object exists. Nor does it generate
the subject (worker and consumer), but rather the world in which
the subject exists.
In contemporary capitalism, we must first distinguish the en-
terprise from the factory. Two years ago, a large French multinational
corporation announced that it would part from eleven production
sites. This separation between enterprise and factory is a borderline
case, but one that is becoming increasingly frequent in contem-
porary capitalism. In the majority of cases, these two functions are
mutually integrated; we presume, however, that their separation is
symbolic of a more profound transformation of capitalist production.
What will this multinational corporation retain? What does it under-
stand as "enterprise"? All the functions, all the services, and all
the employees that allow it to create a world: marketing, service,
design, communication, etc.
The enterprise generates a service or a product. In its logic, the
service or the product exists, just like consumers and producers,
for its world, the world of the enterprise; the latter must be inter-
nalized in the souls and bodies of the workers and consumers.
In contemporary capitalism, the enterprise does not exist outside
the producers and consumers that give it expression. Its world,
its objectivity, and its reality mix with the relationships that the

enterprise, the workers, and the consumers have with one another. .....
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supply and demand has been reversed: the customers are the ::,
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pivotal point of the enterprise strategy. In reality, this definition from
political economics does not even touch the problem: the sensa-
tional rise, the strategic role played in contemporary capitalism by
the expression machine (of opinion, communication, marketing
and thus the signs, images, and statements).
Consumption is not reduced to the act of buying and carrying
out a service or a product, as political economics and its criticism
teach, but instead means, first of all, belonging to a world or a
•
universe.
Which world is this? It is enough to turn on the television or the
radio, go for a walk in a city, buy a weekly or daily newspaper, to
know that this world is constructed through a statement arrange-
ment, through a sign regime, the expression of which is called
advertising, and what is expressed (the meaning) is a prompt, a
command, representing per se a valuation, a judgment, a view
of the world, of themselves and others. What is expressed (the
meaning) is not an ideological valuation, but rather an incentive (it
gives signs), a prompt to assume a form of living, i.e. a way of
dressing, having a body, eating, communicating, residing, moving,
having a gender, speaking, etc. Television is a stream of advertising
that is regularly interrupted by films, entertainment programs, and
news programs. According to the way Jean-Luc Godard depicts it,
if you take out all the pages of a newspaper that contain advertising,
it is reduced to the editorial by the editor-in-chief. And radio is
just as much a stream of advertising and programs, in which it is
increasingly difficult to distinguish where one begins and the other
ends. Unfortunately, we must agree with Deleuze in his conviction
that the enterprise has a soul, that marketing has become its stra-
tegic center, and that advertising specialists are "creative."

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The enterprise exploits to its own advantage the dynamic of
the event and the process of constituting difference and repetition
by distorting them and making them dependent on the logic of
enhanced value.
For the enterprise, the "event" means advertising (or communi-
cation or marketing). We will analyze this particular aspect of en-
terprise strategy in relation to the constitution of the consumers, its
customers. Enterprises now invest up to 40% of their turnover in
marketing, advertising, styling, design, etc. These investments in the
expression machine can far surpass investments in "labor."
Advertising-like every "event"-tirst distributes modes of
perception in order to prompt ways of living; it actualizes modes of
affecting and being affected in souls, in order to realize them in
bodies. With advertising and marketing, the enterprise effects in-
corporeal transformations (the slogans of advertising), which are
stated through bodies and only through bodies. The incorporeal
transformations first produce a change in sensibility (or that is
what they would like to produce), a change in our way of making
value judgments.
The incorporeal transformations have no referents, because
they are auto-referential. There are no antecedent needs, no natural
necessities that would satisfy production. The incorporeal transfor-
mations pose the valuations and their object at the same time that
they produce them. Advertising represents the spiritual dimension
of the "event," which the enterprise and the advertising agencies
invent using images, signs, and statements, and which must be
realized in bodies. The material dimension of the event, its real-
ization, is completed when the ways of living, ways of eating, of
having a body, dressing, residing, etc. are incarnated in bodies: one
lives materially among the goods and services that one buys, in
the houses, among the furniture, with the objects and services that
one has seized as "possible," in the flows of information and
communication, in which we have submerged ourselves. We go to
bed, we rush to do this and that, while that which is "expressed"
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continues to circulate (it "insists") in the hertz waves, in the telematic
networks, and in the newspapers. It doubles the world and our
existence as "something possible," which is, in fact, already a c
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command, an authoritarian slogan expressing itself through
seduction.
In which form does marketing produce actualization in the
soul? Which type of subjectivation is mobilized by advertising?
The design of an advertisement, the concatenation and rhythm
of the images, the soundtrack are organized like a kind of "ritor-
nello" or a "whirlwind." There are advertisements that reverberate
in us like a musical theme or a refrain. You have probably already
been surprised to find yourself whistling a musical theme from
advertising (it certainly happens to me, at least). The Leibnizian
distinction between actualization in souls and realization in bodies
is very important, because these two processes do not coincide
and can result in completely unpredictable effects on the subjectivity
of the monads.
The television networks recognize no national borders, no dif-
ferences in class, status, or income. Their images are received in
non-Western countries or by the poorest classes of the Western
population, who have little or no buying power.
The incorporeal transformations work well on the souls of the
television viewers (in these countries, as well as on the souls of
the poor in rich countries) by creating a new sensibility, because
something possible certainly exists, even if not outside the medium
of its expression (the television images). For what is possible, in
this sense, it is enough to be expressed through a sign in order to
have a certain reality, as Deleuze demonstrated to us.
However, the realization in bodies, the possibility of buying
and living with one's body among the services and goods that are
expressed by the signs as possible worlds, does not always follow
(and not at all for the majority of the world population), occasioning
expectations, frustrations, and rejection.
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In conjunction with the observation of this phenomenon in Brazil,
Suely Rolnik speaks of two subjective figures, which represent
two extremes, in which the variations of the soul and the body are
articulated, that are produced by the logic just described: the
glamour of "luxury subjectivity" and the misery of ''trash subjectivity."
The West is horrified by the new "Islamic" subjectivities. But it
has created this "monster" itself and specifically with the help of its
most "peaceful", most seductive techniques. What we are facing here
are not remnants of traditional societies in need of modernization,
but in fact cyborgs that conjoin the "oldest" with the "most modern."
The incorporeal transformations happen first and faster than
the corporeal transformations. Three quarters of humanity are
excluded from the latter, but they have easy access to the former
(first and foremost through television). Contemporary capitalism
does not arrive first with the factories: these follow later, if at all. It
first arrives with words, signs, and images. And specifically, these
technologies precede not only the factories today, but also the war
machine.
The event is an encounter and it is even a twofold one: one
time it meets the soul, the other the body. This twofold encounter
can make space for a twofold shift, because it is only one opening
of possibilities in the modality of the "problematical." Advertising is
only one possible world, a fold sheltering virtualities. Unfolding what
is enveloped in it, unfolding the fold, can bring forth completely
heterogeneous effects, because on the one hand they encounter
monads, which are all autonomous, independent, and virtual
singularities. On the other-as we have seen in neo-monadological
ontology-a different possible world is always virtually present.
The bifurcation of divergent series haunts contemporary capitalism.
Incompatible worlds unfold in the same world. For this reason,
the capitalist process of appropriation is never closed in itself, but
is instead always uncertain, unpredictable, open. "To exist means
to differ," and this differentiation is newly uncertain, unpredictable,
and risky each time.
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Capitalism attempts to control this bifurcation, which is virtually
always possible through variations and continuous modulation:
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the technologies of modulation, which are in turn continuously varied. -:,
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Control is expressed in Western countries not only through

modulating brains, but also through forming bodies (in prisons,
schools, and hospitals) and through life management ("workfare").
We would be doing our capitalist societies a favor, if we think that
everything happens through the continuous variation of subjects
and objects, through modulating brains, and by means of the occu-
pation of memory and attention by signs, images, and statements.
The control society integrates the "old" disciplinary dispositive. In
non-Western societies, where disciplinary institutions and "work-
fare" are weaker and less developed, control immediately means
the logic of war, even in times of "peace" (see Brazil, still).
The paradigmatic body of Western control societies is no longer
represented by the imprisoned body of the worker, the lunatic,
the ill person, but rather by the obese (full of the worlds of the
enterprise) or anorectic (rejection of this world) body, which see
the bodies of humanity scourged by hunger, violence, and thirst on
television. The paradigmatic body of our societies is no longer the
mute body molded by discipline, but rather it is the bodies and souls
marked by the signs, words, and images (company logos) that are
inscribed in us-similar to the procedure, through which the machine
in Kafka's "Penal Colony" inscribes its commands into the skin of
the condemned.
In the 1970s, Pasolini very precisely described how television
had changed the soul and the body of the Italians, how it was the
main instrument of an anthropological transformation that first and
especially affected youth. He used practically the same concept
as Tarde to describe the modalities of an effect of television at a
distance: the impact of television is due to example rather than
discipline, to imitation rather than coercio n. It is the steering of

behavior, the influence on possible activities. His film trilogy about
bodies was rejected, because it did not take up this transformation.
It still spoke of the body before the modulation of brains and, with
regard to certain aspects, even before disciplinary societies.
These incorporeal transformations that come into our heads
again and again like ritornelli, which are circulating all over the
world at the moment, penetrating into every household, and which
represent the real weapon for the conquest, the occupation, the
seizure of brains and bodies-they are simply incomprehensible
to Marxist theory and to economic theories. We face a change
of paradigms here, which we cannot grasp starting from labor, from
practice. On the contrary, it could well be that the latter supplies
a false image of what production means today, because the process
we have just described is the precondition for every organization
of labor (or non-labor).
Images, signs, and statements are thus possibilities, possible
worlds, which affect souls (brains) and must be realized in bodies.
Images, signs, and statements intervene in both the incorporeal
and the corporeal transformations. Their effect is that of the creation
and realization of what is possible, not of representation. They
contribute to the metamorphoses of subjectivity, not to their repre-
sentation.
First published on www.republicart.net (2003).

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In Jonathan Swift's novel, Gulliver, an academy plans to give up !
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human language in favor of a thing language, which is supposed to fl
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consist of the things themselves. If people wish to have a conver- -
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such. According to Swift's academy, this language has great ad- _,"'
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vantages, since it is understood everywhere and is thus useful for

commerce and general communication. We can state without ex-
aggeration that documentary languages have succeeded in taking
on the role of this thing language. Their understanding is largely
independent from national languages and cultures. Their radius of
comprehension is larger than the one of individual languages.
The documentary mode is a transnational language of practice. Its
standard narratives are recognized all over the world and its forms
are almost independent of national or cultural difference. Precisely
because they operate so closely on material reality, they are intel-
ligible wherever this reality is relevant.
This aspect was recognized as early as the 1920s, when Dziga
Vertov euphorically praised the qualities of the film of facts. In the
preface of his film, "The Man with the Movie Camera," he claimed
that documentary forms were able to organize visible facts in a
truly international absolute language, which could establish an op-
.
tical connection between the workers of the world. He imagined
a sort of communist visual adamic language, which should not only
inform or entertain, but also organize its viewers. It would not only
transmit messages, but also connect its audience to a universal
circulation of energies, which literally shoot through their nervous
systems. By articulating visible facts, Vertov wanted to short-circuit
his audience with the language of things itself, with the pulsating
drives of matter.
In a sense, his dream has become true, if only in inverted form
under the rule of global information capitalism. A transnational
documentary jargon is now connecting people within global media
networks. The standardized language of newsreels with its economy
of attention based on fear, the racing time of flexible production,
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and hysteria is as fluid and affective, as immediate and immersive
as Vertov could have imagined. It creates global public spheres
whose participants are linked almost in a physical sense by mutual
excitement and anxiety. Thus, the documentary form is now more
potent than ever; it conjures up the most spectacular aspects of the
language of things and amplifies their power.
But while Vertov aimed at unleashing the social forces, which
were congealed in things by capitalist commodification, contem-
porary documentary jargons have, on the contrary, exploited the
occult potentials of documentary expression. They short-circuit
fear and superstition with the realm of information. There is some-
times only a minimal difference between a piece of documentary
information and a stereotype, between a guide for orientation in a
complex world and wholesale judgments about whole regions
and populations. Information and disinformation, rationalism and
hysteria, sobriety and exaggeration are not clearly separated within
these networks. The border between description and confabulation
blurs, and fact and fiction fuse into ufactions". The docu-jargons of
the present immerse their public into a barrage of intense affects,
an incoherent mix of tragedy and grotesqueness, which catapults
the old curiosity of the vaudeville into the digital age. Ever more
coarse and blurry images-which show less and less content-
evoke a permanent state of crisis. These images create the norm
by reporting the exceptional, even unimaginable; they transform the
exception into the rule.
Documentary forms partake in the arousal of fear and feelings
of ubiquitous threat. They inform panicked subjects as well as
hostile and mutually suspicious collectives. In times of a presumed
war between cultures, they become active players defining those
cultures in the first place. The general uncertainty catalyzed by
recent political upheavals is channeled into simplifying cliches
about others. Those pseudo-documentary images do not represent
any reality in the first place. They tend to realize themselves instead
within the political dynamics they originally helped to unleash.
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Stereotypical assumptions about so-called cultures can catalyze ::I
dangerous social dynamics and align reality step by step to its
caricature.
But the documentary languages of the present also have a dif-
ferent function. In an age of globalization, when traditional forms
of the social are shattered and national languages are downsized
to local idioms, they offer orientation in an ever-expanding world.
Paolo Virno recently remarked that cliches or jargons were not
exclusively misleading. Rather than blatant misinformation, they may
also tum out to be just empty common-places.01 If we understand
this term literally, it also designates a site of common communica-
tion. A language based on such common-places is able to tran-
scend borders and enable a public debate across them. But the real
existing documentary public spheres are underlying severe restric-
tions. As Virno also remarked, commoditied public spheres are
not public at all.02 These public spheres remain lopsided; they speak
in a standardized industrial international jargon, but do not allow
any participation. The non-public public sphere isolates while it
connects people to each other; it locates people in the world by
fanning fears of homelessness; it communicates by simplifying; it
is affective but only insofar as it serves instincts and a feeling of
general menace.
The non-public public sphere can be fearsome. Let us be
honest, though; it can also be fun . It connects us in real-time to the
most improbable things, but prescribes the form and the speed
of these connections. It is based on effects of immediacy, on in-
nervation, the thrill of voyeurism, or the complacency of bias. The
languages of news media transport the conformism of things,
not their potential of transformation. The more extraordinary, cata-
strophic, and eccentric things behave within them, the more every-
thing else can stay the same.
01 Paolo Virno. A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext[e]. 2002).

02 Ibid.

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Private Publlc Spheres
i The formula of the general transformation of documentary forms
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under the conditions of globalization can be expressed by the notion
of privatization. From an economical perspective, documentary
production in Europe came under pressure from the privatization
of national and state-funded public spheres; from a content per-
spective, this pressure intensified the demand for private and inti-
mate subject matter. The consequence of this double privatization
is the development of an increasingly private public sphere-met-
aphorically condensed within voyeuristic docu-soaps broadcast
on private TV channels.
But there is also a very different consequence of this wide-
spread privatization for documentary practices in the present. After
digital technology trickled down to consumer good production,
access to it was extremely facilitated. The means of production of
documentaries are more accessible than ever; they can literally be
privatized and no longer exclusively belong to the tightly guarded
privilege of state-controlled organizations or large media corporations.
Throughout the 20th century, the control over the means of audiovi-
sual production was repeatedly reorganized in the wake of key ad-
vances in technology: most recently with the advent of the digital era.
The keyword for this development is: camcorder revolution. It
describes the mass circulation of audiovisual equipment as well
as the political upheavals-for example the Romanian revolution in
1989-which were ambivalently entangled with these new technol-
ogies. These optical-political transformations proceeded simulta-
neously with a general restructuring of production, to the demise of
industrial labor in the industrial centers and the emergence of new
types of flexibilized workers. The production of documentary tends
to increasingly merge with other fields of mass symbolic production
within contemporary cultural industries, which are all characterized
by creative output, freelancing, and widespread flexibilization. Even
the previously elitist and highly !imitated realm of documentary image
production was largely proletarized. Small teams of freelancers and

I-reporters replaced fully employed journalists. On the other hand
the extreme reduction of costs within digital production also created
a space for de-professionalized popular media experimentation.
Neb.vorked Production
The conditions of documentary productions within the art field are
a case in point of such ongoing de-professionalization.03 While
experimentation is possible and often even desired in this area, it
becomes possible by producing it at minimal cost. Experimental
or low-budget documentary production in the art field is often per-
formed under do-it-yourself conditions with small digital cameras
and home computers. Contracts are rare and primarily in place to
preserve the interests of institutions. Work place and private sphere
blur, just as do the functions of author, administrator, amateur
translator, and technical coordinator. But although this production
is increasingly individualized-the author is very often indeed the
producer-, it also tends to take place more and more in "common."
A rather anonymous commons located within databases. Images
are swapped, sounds downloaded, ideas shared with aliases. P2P
networks provide darkrooms for illicit archival downloads. Experi-
mental documentary production increasingly immerses itself into
malleable streams of digital data; it intercepts, appropriates, copies,
and distributes. The printing lab is replaced by ripping software.
Authorship, copyright, intellectual property are reassessed. This type
of production taps into the streams of dramas and desires that are
invisibly flowing around the world and traverse our bodies in the
form of WiFi signals. This is reality now. The new documentary does
not picture this reality, but rips off large chunks to incorporate it.
Dziga Vertov's slogan of an "optical connection" between the
workers of the world is ironically updated within these communi-
cation networks, which link volatile and geographically-dispersed
groups of people in partially common operational procedures.
03 Although there is no systematic research into these conditions as yet (and although it does not concern a low
budget productiOn either) Harun Farocki's production diary of his wor1c Deep Pl6f provides a fascinating case study.
The German version is accessible online at: http:t/ newfilmkritik.de/archiv/2007-12/ auf-zwolf-flachen-schirmen/
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! Those linkages are transitory sites of the production of commons,
} channels through which images, sounds, and ideas travel.
Production vs. Distribution

All these ambivalent transformations are contributing to the reorga-
nization of documentary practices. The very processes, which
have extended the reach of documentary articulations across the
globe have not only altered their conditions of production dra-
matically but also their channels of distribution. But while production
on the whole has rather been facilitated, distribution is becoming
more and more tricky.
The progressive privatization of European state media has led
to a rapid commercialization of their content. Formal experiments
are replaced by docutainment and serial catastrophe. This means
that experimental and reflexive documentary practices have lost
their base and have become homeless. This applies to some areas
of classical documentary film production, as well as to more ex-
perimental and artistic works. They have dispersed into a fluid and
incertain space, which is neither exclusively governed by the
claims of specific national cultures nor by any single clearly distin-
guishable market logic. This space extends from alternative public
spheres into the art field, from university auditoriums to youtube
and self-organized projections, from glamorous film festivals and
blockbuster art shows to the informal distribution of video tapes in
activist circles. This ambivalent zone is defined by various con-
flicting interests. It would be extremely exaggerated to call it a zone
of artistic freedom. It is based on the divergent effects of techno-
logical development, creativity hypes, social concerns and general
downsizing. It is a laboratory for mainstream innovation, just as it
can accommodate formal experiments and pockets of civil disobe-
dience. But it is also a potential seed for a not yet existent sphere
of common communication, which might realize Vertov's vision as
an optical connection.
Original from
Optical Connection
However, documentary expressions are not only a possible arena
of a public debate. Their production creates material arrangements, -8,
0
which organize things and humans in ever-shifting combinations "':,

0,
_,.,
C:
throughout dispersed geographical locations. They connect humans
<{
and machines, images and sounds, hard drives and desires. As

common practices or as shared operational procedures, they an-
ticipate alternative forms of social composition. To work on these
conditions means to work on reality today.
An extended version of this text was first p!Jblished in German as Chapter 11 in Hito
Steyerl, Die Farbe der Wahrheit (Vienna: Turia und Kant, 2008), 121-138.
Original from
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T. J. Demos B
f?
is a critic and lecturer in the Department of Art History, University ~
.0
College London. The author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp -
·c
C
8
(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 Globalization, which will investigate the relationship of contem-
porary art to the experience of social dislocation and political crisis.
Okwul Enwezor
is Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San
Francisco Art Institute and Adjunct Curator at International Center
of Photography. He is a curator, writer, and critic, and served as
artistic 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 exhibitions, including "Art & Language in Practice;"
"After the News. Postmedia Documentary Practices;" "The Invisible
Insurrection of One Million Minds;" "Situation Cinema. A Retro-
spective of Joaquin Jorda's Films;" "B-Zone. On the Margins of
Europe;" "Selfsufticient 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 trans-
lation of Art & Language's Writings. He is a member of the edi-
torial board of Culturals, the weekly supplement published by the
newspaper La Vanguardia (Barcelona).

Vft Havr6nek
is a theoretician and organizer based in Prague. Since 2002, he has
been working as a project leader of the initiative for contemporary
art tranzit (tranzit.org), and he has been director of tranzitdisplay, a
resource center for contemporary art, since 2007. He has worked
as a curator for the Municipal Gallery and the National Gallery in
Prague. He is a lecturer in contemporary art at the Academy of
Applied Arts, Prague. He has curated and co-curated numerous
exhibitions, including: "A CDEFGHIJK MNOP STUV Z," part of
"Societe Anonyme," Le Plateau, Paris; "tranzit-Auditorium, Stage
Backstage," Frankfurter Kunstverein; "I," a series of exhibitions
in three acts, Secession Vienna, Futura Prague, tranzit workshops
Bratislava. He has contributed to numerous catalogues and art
magazines (springerin, Artist, Flash Art) and is the editor of tranzit
series (JRP Ringier) and The Need to Document.
J6rg Helser
is co-editor of frieze magazine, writes for the national daily Sud-
deutsche Zeitung, and is a frequent contributor to art catalogues and
publications. He curated the exhibitions "Romantic Conceptualism"
(2007, Kunsthalle Nurnberg, BAWAG Foundation Vienna) and
"Funky Lessons" (2004/2005, BuroFriedrich Berlin, BAWAG Foun-
dation Vienna). His most recent book is All of a Sudden: Things
that Matter in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2008).
Stefan Jonsson
is senior cultural critic at Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's major newspa-
per, and associate professor of Aesthetics at Sodertorn University
College in Stockholm. A graduate of the Program in Literature at
Duke University, he was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute
in Los Angeles from 1998-2000 and was visiting professor at Uni-
versity of Michigan in 2006. His most recent book is A Brief History
of the Masses. Three Revolutions, 1789, 1889, 1989 (Columbia
University Press, 2008).

Maurizio Lazzartito
is an independent sociologist, social theorist, and philosopher. He is
also a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes. He
lives and works in Paris, where he is doing research on immaterial
work, the explosion of the wage system, and the ontology of work,
cognitive capitalism, and "post-socialist" movements. He also writes
on cinema, video, and the new technologies for the production of im-
ages. Recent publications include Videophilosophie (b_books, 2002).
Marla Und
was born in Stockholm in 1966. Since January 2008, she has been
director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies,
Bard College. From 2005-2007, she was the director of laspis in
Stockholm. She was the director of Kunstverein Munchen from
2002-2004, where together with a curatorial team she ran a program
that involved artists such as Deimantas Narkevicius, Oda Projesi,
Bojan Sarcevic, Philippe Parreno, and Marion von Osten. From
1997-2001, she was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and
in 1998, co-curator of Manifesta 2. She has contributed widely to
magazines and to numerous catalogues and other publications.
She is the co-editor of the recent books Curating with Light Luggage
and Collected Newsletter (Revolver - Archiv fur aktuelle Kunst),
Taking the Matter into Common Hands: Collaborative Practices in
Contemporary Art (Blackdog Publishing), as well as the report Eu-
ropean Cultural Policies 2015. She has been teaching and lectur-
ing at different art schools since the early 1990s.
Olivier Lugon
is an art historian and professor at Lausanne University (film history
department). The focus of his research is on German and American
photography of the interwar years, the documentary, and exhibi-
tion design. Among his publications are La Photographie en Alle-
magne. Anthologie de textes, 1919-1939 (Nimes 1997); Le Style
documentaire. D'August Sander a Walker Evans, 1920-194-5 (Paris
Original from
2002); "L'esthetique du document. Le reel sous toutes ses formes
(1890-2000)," in L 'Art de la photographie, ed. Andre Gunthert and
Michel Poivert (Paris 2007); '"Photo-Inflation': Image profusion in
German photography," History of Photography (Fall 2008).
Jean-Ple11e Rehm
has taught film and art history in various art schools and has worked
for the French Ministry of Culture for several years. He is 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,
catalogues, and books. He belongs to the editorial board of Les
Cahiers du Cinema. He has curated contemporary art shows in
France and abroad, and he has headed the International Documen-
tary Film Festival of Marseille (FIDMarseille) since 2001.
Hlto Steyert
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 the International Film Festival Rotterdam,
IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs Vancouver, and Docx Copenhagen,
among others. She is the author of Die Farbe der Wahrheit. Doku-
mentarismen im Kunstfeld (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.

Photo Credits
Page 35
Courtesy IRWIN.
Courtesy Little Warsaw.
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crouse!.
Page 37
Courtesy Roman Ondak.
Photo credit Vit Havranek.
Courtesy, Zbynek Baladran, Jano Mancuska.
Page 84
Courtesy Galerie Polaris, Paris.
Page 89
Courtesy the artist and Alexander and Bonin Gallery, New York.
Page 92, 93
Courtesy the artist and Alexander and Bonin Gallery, New York.
Page 98, 97
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

IN
The Greenroom:
Reconalderlng the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1
The Greenroom is published on the occasion of the exhibition "The Greenroom:

Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art" presented at the Center for
Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, September 26, 2008 -
February 1. 2009.
The Greenroom exhibition and accompanying publication have been made possible
with support from the Audrey and Sydney lrmas Charitable Foundation, The Robert
Mapplethorpe Foundation, Marieluise Hessel, and the Patrons, Supporters, and Friends
of the Center for Curatorial Studies.
Co-published by Sternberg Press and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
© 2008 the authors, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Sternberg Press
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Editors: Maria Lind, Hito Steyerl
Translators: Aileen Derieg (Lazzarato), Discobole (Guerra), Charly Hulten (Jonsson),

Allison Plath-Moseley (Heiser), Wendy van Os (Lugon)
Proofreading: Penelope Eifrig
Design: Surface, Berlin/Frankfurt am Main, Miriam Rech, Markus Weisbeck
Printing and binding: Vier TOrme GmbH- Benedict Press, MOnsterschwarzach Abtei
ISBN 978-1-933128-53-5
Sternberg Press
Caroline Schneider
Karl-Marx-Allee 78
D-10243 Berlin
www.sternberg-press.com
Center for Curatorial Studies and

Hessel Museum of Art
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
www.bard.edu/ccs
Sternber9 Press+ IIICCSBARD
Original from
About CCS Bard:
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) is an exhibition. edu-
cation, and research center dedicated to the study of an and curatorial practices
from the 1960s to the present day. In addition to the CCS Galleries and the Hessel
Museum of An, CCS Bard houses the Marieluise Hessel Collection of over 2,000
contemporary works, as well as an extensive library and curatorial archive. The
Center's two-year graduate program in curatorial studies is specifically designed to
deepen students' understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curating
contemporary an. Exhibitions are presented year-round in the CCS Galleries and
Hessel Museum of An, providing students with the opponunity to work with world-
renowned anists and curators. The exhibition program and the collection also
serve as the basis for a wide-range of public programs and activities exploring an
and its role in contemporary society.
Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Stud ies

Marc S. Lipschultz, Chairman
+Leon Botstein
Lori Chemla
Kathryn Chenault
Manin Eisenberg
Carla Emil
Marieluise Hessel, Founding Chairman
Maja Hoffmann
Audrey lrmas
Adam Lindemann
Eugenio Lopez
Melissa Schiff Soros
Richard W. Wenham Il l
+ ex officio


Maria Lind - Hito Steyerl - The Green Room #1 - Reconsidering The Documentary and Contemporary Art-Sternberg Press (2008)

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Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1

o;git;,ed by Google Original from

"Documentary": Authority and Ambiguities

The Plays of the Witnesses

Kicking the Cat

Life Full of Holes

Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism

Research and Display

Struggle, Event, Media

Contributors and Photo Credits 232

Digitized by Google Original from

to a sustained politics of fear. 01 Without it something like globalized .,2:-

not only entered collective imagination but have also profoundly £C

practices have made up one of the most significant tendencies

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facticity and the politics of perception with a depth of insight ,::,

text UThe Author as Producer, "06 written in 1934, captures some E

documentary and its relations of production. It also conveys a C J)

the notion of documentary transcend local contexts; it coalesces Q

into a set of practices and develops a certain self-awareness.07 e-

Since then, the repeated appearance of documentary forms

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documentary forms from the field of art and opens up a zone of

ever more authentic representations of the real.

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extensive anthology on contemporary art and documentary practices

backgrounds, which include writing and art production, curating, art ]

Digitized by Google Original from

28 See page 40 of the text.

political and economic upheavals caused by the contradictory 0

Absence is the only way to depict the realities of fragmented global

challenges notions of the spectators' bodily integrity and creates E

a space of uncertainty and indeterminacy open to experiment and 8

Vit Havranek points out a different consequence of the most -0

tions. For Havranek, recent documentary art practices in Eastern 0

to the total reorganization of reality after 1989. The ethical vacuum

Digitized by Google Original from

Media and the Archive

sally applicable to humankind but only as long as they follow "a E

known figure: it is based on experiences of Western men, of the C)

universal equivalent is furthermore the key component of cultural ]

lized and subjective archive in the work of Renee Green, he asks

Documentary PoV18r and Potential

Digitized by Google Original from

he proposes the event-multiplicity bind. One advantage is that the 0

event is an encounter with two aspects: soul and body. It is both e-

intellectual-emotional and performed, literally. As opposed to the

The Greenroom Project

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credibility of his evidence? Is aesthetic formalization desirable or

of the image? Does the "true documentary" not consist of an

Digitized by Google Original from

In 1906, the first Congres international de la documentation

Digitized by Google Original from

a semantic construction determined by the photographer. In addition, Q)

temporary one, whose ideas should be changed immediately. So on 'O

for material, which other people should activate at some unspecified

according to Hine, activating the documents, organizing their contact

Digitized by Google Original from

to John Gierson when he started viewing it in relation to the pre- -~

which he considered to be futile and formalistic. That also applied

art-has substantially marked the history of the genre. The differ-

Digitized by Google Original from