Becher Cooling Towers PDF

1968, Two major museums committed to the most advanced European and American art of the sixties—the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and the Stcltisches Museum Abteiberg in Mbnchengladbach—exhibit the work of Bernd and HiIla Becher, placing them at the forefront of an interest in Concep...

1968, Two major museums committed to the most advanced European and American art of the sixties—the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and the Stcltisches Museum Abteiberg in Mbnchengladbach—exhibit the work of Bernd and HiIla Becher, placing them at the forefront of an interest in Conceptual art and photography. n 1957, Bernd (1931-2007) and HiHa Becher (1934-2015) initi- (Anonymous Sculptures: A Typology of Technical Constructions) ated a photographic project that continued to preoccupy them was written by Carl Andre, the central sculptor of Minimalism. for fifty years: the systematic recording of European industrial Some of the earliest photographs the Bechers produced were architecture, which at that time was under threat of imminent composite images of mining architecture, a strangely antiquated disappearance through neglect and decay. Like many photographic type of montage that resurrects the original photographic promise archives before them, from Charles Marville's nineteenth-century to supply the greatest quantity of empirically verifiable detail in ♦topography of Parisian streets to Eugene Atget's magisterial the formation of a positivist record of the visible world. But these attempts slightly later to record the disappearance of Paris under images were problematic for the couple, for they were disturbingly 696 I--096 I. the impact of modernization, the Bechers' project was marked from reminiscent of photomontage—the menacing political "other" to the very beginning by a particular dialectic: a struggle between, the latent conservatism of Neue Sachlichkeit photography that on the one hand, an almost obsessive will for an exhaustive record, served as the Bechers' primary historical resource. Furthermore, a desire to make permanent, and, on the other, an equally deep the tradition of photomontage had recently resurfaced in the sense of loss, the melancholic insight that the spatial and temporal postwar period in an American reincarnation, namely in the work disappearance of the object can never be arrested. of Robert Rauschenberg, a reference that the Bechers would have wanted to avoid altogether at that time. This might explain why they soon replaced the composite Two photographic turns: 1928-1968 photograph with a unique combination of two modernist photo- Two other photographic projects—one central to the very graphic orders: the traditionally crafted, single-image print and history and culture from which the Bechers emerged (that is, the the principle of the sequential or the serial image. From now on photography of German Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] ); their photographs were displayed in two different formal arrange- the other from the context of reception within which their work ments: either in what the Bechers called a "typology" (generally became internationally known—should be mentioned at once. a series of nine, twelve, or fifteen images of the same type of The first is the work of the German photographer August Sander, architectural structure, such as nine different lime kilns or fifteen to whom the Bechers referred on many occasions as a key influ- different cooling towers [II), or in what they identified as a ence. Sander's best-known project, Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our "development," (Abwicklung), that is, a series of single images in Time), conceived in the first decade of the twentieth century and which one particular individual structure (for instance, a mining partially published in 1929, was an attempt to provide an exact tower or a house) is presented in a sequence of rotating views [21. and complete record of the social subjects of the Weimar The actual development of the Bechers' work over this period is Republic, a physiognomy of all its social strata, genders and ages, infinitely more complex, however, than this brief summary suggests, professions and types. inasmuch as it could be identified as one of the few artistic projects in The second "archive" was constituted by the use of photography postwar Germany to establish a historical continuity with the by American artists such as Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham, and Douglas Weimar avant-garde. This is in contradistinction to the majority of Huebler who, starting in the early to mid-sixties, resituated the the postwar West German artists, such as Gerhard Richter, who explic- photograph at the center of artistic production. In the Bechers' itly situated themselves outside the orbit of the Weimar legacy, initial reception, from the late sixties onward, the couple were establishing a link instead with the American neo-avant-garde frequently associated with these artists (and with some of them they phenomena of the fifties and sixties. In opposition, the Bechers maintained lifelong friendships). Typically, one of the first—and worked to resuscitate the legacy of Weimar Neue Sachlichkeit photog- possibly still the most important—essays on their work and their raphy by openly emulating the ideals and achievements of its canonical first book Anonyme Skulpturen: Eine Typologie technischer Bauten figures: August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and Werner Manz. 1935 1925b,1929 1935 ♦ 1967a. 1968b. 1984a 1962c 1953 1988 The Bechers 1968'1 597 696 I- -096 I- Are or room r SIONIVarah. IMINA I 31/WWW. 1011111.111111, 1111 BMSME1110 r.L orip OW, 1 Bernd and Hilla Becher, Cooling Towers, 1993 Fifteen black-and-white photographs, 173 x 239 (681/4 x 941/4) Beyond this claim of continuity with Weimar, the Bechers also both in its photographic dimension and in its use of an actual, asserted a new credibility for photography itself, which under the historical foundation as industrial archaeology to combat the impact of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of American and aestheticizing of industrial ruins. In opposition to the romantici- French painting of the fifties had been completely overshadowed zation of industrial waste and to what they perceived to be a in the reconstruction period in Germany. Quite clearly, then, they reductive understanding of the intersection between artistic were working to establish a double continuity: first with an alter- and industrial practices, the Bechers explicitly wanted to put nate Weimar culture; second with an alternate system of imaging themselves in a relation to this type of architecture that would practices as they had been fully developed within the context of recognize its historical importance, its structural and functional the "historical avant-garde." probity, and its aesthetic status. A conservationist impulse Further, it is important to recognize that in its focus on indus- therefore motivated their work to the same extent as did an artistic trial buildings, such as coal tipples, water towers, mine-entrance one. While these structures do not quite yet appear as ruins, structures, the Bechers' project also entered into an explicit they are certainly structures on the wane. Thus it is perhaps no dialogue with the rise of welded sculpture and its reception in surprise that the relatively new discipline of "industrial archae- Germany in the late fifties and early sixties. This work, by ology," in which conservationists rescue selected examples of sculptors ranging from David Smith to Jean Tinguely and based industrial architecture from their definitive disappearance, on machine parts taken as industrial debris, had become central received some of its initial impulses from the work of the Bechers. to the postwar redefinition of sculpture. By their own account, And it is not surprising either that industrial archaeologists the key figure against which the Bechers defined themselves commissioned the pair on various occasions to assist in the in the early sixties was the Swiss Nouveau llaliste Tinguely with scientific exploration and photographic documentation of indus- his junk sculpture aesthetic to which they opposed their own work trial sites to ensure their archaeological preservation. 1945, 1960a 598 1968a I The Bechers  From seriality to site-specificity In his enthusiastic response to Anonymous Sculptures, Andre read their work as though it were primarily defined by its compul- Clearly, the intersections in the work of the Bechers become yet sive attention to serial repetition. This reading, which immediately more complex as one reads them against the various historical brought the Bechers into the context of Minimalist and Post- strands on which they depended, from Sander and Renger- minimalist aesthetics, was made possible by the way the Bechers Patzsch, to Le Corbusier, who in 1928, in his journal L'Esprit arrange their images as pristine, gridlike taxonomies by which to Nouveau, had published a manifesto to launch an aesthetic based present the minute structural differences between each of their on industrial structures (such as grain silos) as examples of the examples. This emphasis on repetition, seriality, minute inspec- formal strength of anonymous engineering design. This aesthetic tion, and structural differentiation is obviously what attracted not only argued that form should be nothing more than the pure Andre's attention, engendering his Minimalist reception of the articulation of function, but also it implied an early (psycholog- work and its canonization within the context of Minimalist and ical) critique of authorship, as well as an early (sociopolitical) Postminimalist sculpture. But there were other aspects that helped emphasis on the collective participation in social production. Le to locate the Bechers within the dialogue on sculpture that was Corbusier was opposed to the auteur aesthetic of the modernist developing in the late sixties. One was their work's stress on architect on the same grounds as were the Bechers, when in Anon- anonymity, the other was its obvious foregrounding of the issues ymous Sculptures they argued that the anonymity of industrial of site. Andre in particular had developed an internal logic for design deserves to be taken as seriously as authorial claims for sculpture in which it would cease to be defined as constructed individuality. Thus at the moment of 1968, a lineage within object and would instead be understood as place, as a node at the modernism could be traced from Le Corbusier through Neue intersection of architecture and environment. Sachlichkeit to the Bechers, for which collectivity, anonymity, and Another quality that placed the Bechers within the context not functionalism are seen as key artistic values. only of Minimalism but also of emerging Conceptualism was the 696L-096L 2 Bernd and Hilla Becher, Eight Views of a House, 1962-71 Eight black-and-white photographs 1925a, 1929,1935 1962C 1965.1969 The Bechers I 1968a 599  replacement of material structures by the photographic docu- This insistence on continuity with the Weimar culture of ment, particularly as it was accumulated in their work in serial Neue Sachlichkeit, in its refusal to allow German neo-avant- alignments. From Ed Ruscha and Dan Graham onward, serial, garde production to be mediated in its entirety through postwar systematic photography figured crucially within the rise of American art, parallels Georg Baselitz's exactly contemporaneous Conceptual art. What distinguished the Bechers' work, however, attempt to resuscitate German Expressionism. Such claims for from all of Conceptual art is their emphasis on skill. If Conceptual continuity are problematic, however, on two fronts at once. photography is defined by deskilling, the Bechers' work was Insofar as artistic practices and strategies are in and of themselves focused on reskilling: they emphatically resuscitated the ambition historically circumscribed and thus perpetually surpassed and to produce the highest-quality black-and-white photography they devalorized, the idea of a valid model of "new objectivity" photog- could possibly achieve, in the same way that photographers of the raphy that could be transplanted from the twenties to the sixties Neue Sachlichkeit context, such as Sander and Renger-Patzsch, is questionable. Further, in a situation such as the German one, insisted on the highest artisanal accomplishment of the photo- the political and historical caesura of World War II blocks access graphic project. The Bechers went to great lengths to produce the to an unproblematic relation to the idea of the nation state as the right photograph, framed at the right height and taken, without basis for the subject's identity, and thus the project of trying to shadows, on the right day in order to get the right light and thereby construct artistic identity on such conventional models becomes to obtain the most minute gradations of tonal values; further, they ever more difficult. The other side of the effort to create an artistic insisted on the most immaculate presentation of the object. practice that transcends the chasm of the historical rupture Insofar as it then appears to be unmediated by any authorial opened by World War II and the Holocaust is, then, an attempt perception, this is in line with the legacy of Neue Sachlichkeit that to blind oneself to the degree to which all cultural practices the Bechers pushed to a new threshold of ambition. after 1946 were deeply affected by that caesura and would have 3 Thomas Struth, Clinton Road, London,1977 Black-and-white photograph, 66 x 84 (26 x 33) 1967a. 1968b 1968b 1929. 1935 1963 1908 600 1968 I The Bechers  had to take it into account. This is the additional dimension of the Bechers' problematic claim for historical continuity which needs to be contrasted with other practices in Germany of the same period, such as Gerhard Richter's, where no such assertion is being made. Precisely in its attempt to bypass the questions of historical mourning, the work displays the symptoms of a repressive appa- ratus; it is not accidental in that sense that the melancholia hovering over the Bechers' work is generated by the almost phobic prohibition of the subject within the photographs' exclusive focus on industrial ruins (that applies even to the category of mid-nine- teenth-century rural housing, a series that is also presented solely for the type's structural beauty, rather than for any sociological dimension). For the melancholic contemplation of the past to be effective, then, the social and historical context has to be excised from their work in order to make the architectural the undis- turbed object of attention. With the major exception of August Sander, this move to dehistoricize had, of course, been a defining characteristic of the original Neue Sachlichkeit photography as well, given its perpetual endeavor to aestheticize the object. 6961- -0961- From concepts to color The second generation of artists to emerge from the Bechers' "school"—Bernd Becher taught at the DUsseldorf Academy from the mid-sixties onward—was a group of photographer- artists that included Thomas Struth (born 1954) , Thomas Ruff (born 1958) , Candida Hofer (born 1944) , and Andreas Gursky (born 1955). All of them picked up from the Bechers' 4 Thomas Ruff, Portrait, 1989 point of departure and extended it, also extending some of Chromogenic color print, 119.6 x 57.5 (47 V x 22%) the predicaments inherent to their approach. For example, in the photographs of Struth and Ruff, the emphasis on the absence of human agency is as compulsively enacted as it is in the Bechers' foreground the question of whether and to what extent an anti- own work. modernist impulse is operative here, one that could best Beginning by photographing empty streets in Dusseldorf in be compared to the lineage of Giorgio de Chirico in painting. It is 1976, Struth replaced the pure industrial object with the pure an antimodernism that greets the present through the lens of urban, structural fabric. Yet, as had been the case with the Bechers, melancholia, that is manifestly disconnected from the model the capacity to skirt actual historical questions operates in the of an avant-garde and its necessary link with advancing scientific way Struth systematically found urban sites where the absence of and technological means of production, and that positions itself human activity allowed for a melancholic reading of the city. with regard to the question of the reconstruction of memory But with the transformation from architectural to urban archae- under the conditions of loss, a question that is important in the ology that took him on incessant travels through urban postwar period. centers—ranging from small towns in Belgium, Germany, There is a later phase of this development when color suddenly England, and the United States to large cities such as Tokyo— makes its appearance in the work of Ruff, Struth, Gursky, and Struth recorded a peculiar type of public urban space. And in HOfer as though it has been released from a prohibition. Yet this retrospect this appears as a systematic accounting of the actual introduction of color, and along with it the admission of human experience of the disappearance of public urban space in a parallel agency and social context in great quantities and detail, does not with the vanishing landscape preserved only in the photographic resolve the historical limitations of Struth's or Ruff's photographic archive the Bechers produced. practice. Quite the opposite would be true, in fact, for the large In Struth's and Ruff's early work, the insistence on black-and- and continuing series of photographic portraits that Ruff white photography—doubly obsolete in its dimension as produced from the late eighties onward, which resuscitates the material support and as vehicle of artisanal skills—brings to the traditional model of the portrait as it had been practiced in 1988 1935 1929 2001 1909, 1924 The Bechers I 1968a 601  Weimar Neue Sachlichkeit. This places Ruff at the center of a counterconceptual approach—the portrait having been the object of explicit deconstruction by the Conceptualists who regarded it as a historically obsolete model through which false claims for an accessible physiognomic depiction of subjectivity and identity were made. With Ruff's reconstitution of the genre of photographic portraiture, one such countermodernist impulse A thus reaches its apogee and points toward the radicality of photo- conceptual practices. BB FURTHER READING Alex Alherm, The Big Picture: The Art of Andreas Gursky,"Artforum, vol. 39, no.5, January 2001 Carl Andre, "A Note on Bernhard and Huila Becher,"Artforum, vol. 11, no. 5, December 1972 Douglas Eklund (ed.), Thomas Struth: 1977-2002 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2002) Peter Galassi (ed.), Andreas Gursky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001) Susanne Lange (ed.), Bernd und Hilla Becher: Festschrift. Erasmuspreis 2002 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2002) Armin Zweite (ed.), Bernd and Hilla Becher: Typologies of Industrial Buildings (Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen; and Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2004) 5 Candida Höfer, BNF Paris VII, 1998 Chromogenic color print, 85 x 85 (331/2 x 33) 6961--0961- 6 Andreas Gursky, Salerno, 1990 Chromogenic color print, 188 x 226 (74 x 89) 602 1968a I The Bechers  1988 Gerhard Richter paints October 18, 1977: German artists contemplate the possibility of the renewal of history painting. n depicting the impact of the Baader-Meinhof Group's violent attempts to overthrow capitalism, Gerhard Richter's 1988 cycle of paintings titled October 18, 1977[1, 2] concluded a long, complex succession of German artists' attempts to reposition painting as a critical reflection on German history. While most postwar visual art, certainly in Europe and the United States, had avoided refer- ences to the immediate past, whether the prewar years or the war experience itself, it was German painting from the sixties onward that specifically tried to oppose the elision of historical references that the artistic neo-avant-garde in general mandated. 0 to Within the context of German postwar art there were attempts 0 to relocate painting in relation to history from as early as 1963, with the exhibition of Georg Baselitz's Die Grosse Nacht im Eimer (and the subsequent scandal and censorship of the painting). First of all, with almost manifesto-like fervor, this type of work tried to reconstruct the site of a specifically German cultural tradition and to create some continuity for it by opposing all the standards that had been adopted in the first seven years of postwar visual culture— primarily the standards of informel painting and those imposed by the rise of American Pop art. Instead, Baselitz's work clamors to be seen as the result of a direct lineage linking it to pre- Weimar German painterly traditions, specifically to the legacies of 1 Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977: Confrontation 1 (Gegeniiberstellung 1), 1988 Lovis Corinth and of German Expressionism. It thereby set out Oil on canvas, 111.8 x 102.2 (44 x not only to skirt all postwar international avant-garde movements, but, typically and importantly, to avoid all photographically based portrait of Adolf Hitler (which he later destroyed). At the same practices that were specific to Weimar Dada, and to do so by time he began to collect the photographs that would form his huge reestablishing painting as the center of visual culture. Atlas project , in which images of private family narrative were increasingly juxtaposed with images of public German history. Over the years this resulted in the panels in which Richter collected The problem of history photographs from Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. Like Baselitz, Gerhard Richter had arrived in West Germany from It can therefore be argued that the project to make German the East German Democratic Republic, and, also like him, Richter painting assume the function of dismantling postwar historical had confronted the question of whether and how recent German repression could be credited to both Richter and Baselitz. However, history could be made the subject of visual culture. This was also the means with which those strategies were implemented were in in direct opposition to the informel abstractionists such as Winter, fact very different; the difference culminated in the late sixties in the Trier, G6tz, Hoehme—who were the teachers of Richter, Baselitz, opposition between the work of Richter and Anselm Kiefer. and their peers—and their attempt to internationalize postwar On the one hand, by continuously looking at Nouveau R6alisme German art. As early as 1962, Richter explicitly addressed the and the work of Andy Warhol—the French and American examples repressed legacy of Germany from 1933 to 1945 by painting a who served as the two poles of reference for his early work— ♦1963 1946, 1960c. 1962d, 1964b 1908 ♦ 1920,1929 ♦ 1960a, 1960c. 19649 '14 1988 I Richter and Kiefer  6261.-0261- 2. Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977: Funeral (Beerdigung), 1988 Oil on canvas, 200 x 320 (783A x 126) Richter upheld the need to situate German painting in relation to model of national identity in cultural production (in particular all the other artistic practices that emerged in the early sixties. the German one). Yet the establishment of this continuity— one On the other, Baselitz almost programmatically denounced and that obscured the actual breakdown, the ruptures, the actual denied both mass culture and photography, seeing them as condi- historical destruction that German fascism had brought about— tions that painting had to counteract. Accordingly, the underlying was inherent in the project to renationalize and reregionalize argument (operative in work from Baselitz to the younger cultural production. Thus, while painterly practices are not inher- Kiefer)—that it was possible to establish an unbroken model ently reactionary, any attempt to project a continuity of experience of national identity and regional specificity right through from outside the hiatus of fascism is necessarily both in and of itself a Corinth to Expressionism, to antimodernism, to Baselitz and reactionary fiction. Kiefer themselves—was refused by Richter, who insisted that all It is along this axis of an opposition between the claim for a visual practices are determined both by their susceptibility to mass return to historical authenticity embedded in painting and the culture and by their entanglement in the postnational identity claim for a recognition of the various moments where that claim model of global cultural production. had been dismantled—by media culture, by political transforma- Soon after 1962, Baselitz's work was seconded by numerous tions, by the critique of the very idea that a model of national followers, among them Markus Lupertz, all of whom tried to identity could be articulated by cultural production—that Richter establish a specifically West German form of painting, to serve as and Kiefer can be situated. This opposition, as it reemerged in the the regional idiom of contemporary culture. At that time, links eighties, when an international surge of interest in the fiction of a were already being made within painting between such a project return to regional and national cultures made itself felt (specifi- and the problematic attempt to set up the foundations of a cally in the American reception of German neo-Expressionism) broader German cultural identity. Even so, Baselitz and his fellow could be described as a question of mediation. First, since Kiefer's neo-Expressionists avoided confronting the question of whether work explicitly addresses the legacy of German Nazi fascism, either of these two claims—for the continuity of national identity whereas Richter's focuses on events of German political life in the on the one hand or for the model of identity in cultural produc- recent past (as in the October 18, 1977 series), the issue of media- tion on the other—were credible after fascism's destruction of any tion occurs around the actual historical events the works address. 1908, 1925b, 1937a Richter and Kiefer I 1988 715 686I- - 086 I- 3 Gerhard Richter, Atlas: Panel 9, 1962-8 Black-and-white clippings and photograph, 51.7 x 66.7 (20%, x 261/2) On that level, the question of the possibility of the representation complicated way to a prolonged reflection on the questions of of German history is already infinitely more complicated in postwar Germany. Writers on the post-1968 student movement and Richter's work than in Kiefer's since, unlike Kiefer, Richter ques- the events leading to the formation of the Baader-Meinhof Group tions even painting's access to and capacity for representing had made it clear that this rebellion against the neocapitalist German historical experience. Secondly, mediation occurs at the level of state was triggered largely by an underlying horror at both the painterly execution, since Kiefer's work claims access to German complicity of the postwar generation's participation in the history A Expressionist painting as the means of executing his own project of Nazi Germany and its insistent refusal to acknowledge this of historical representation. Richter, on the other hand, empha- complicity. Richter's reflection on the fate of the Baader-Meinhof sizes both the degree to which history, if it is accessible at all, is Group is thus part of a larger project of understanding the formation mediated by photographic images, and also how not just the of postwar German identity by addressing the second and third construction of historical memory but its very conception are generations of that historical trajectory rather than by returning to dependent on photographic representation. the actual events of the Nazi past as they were staged in Kiefer's work. Richter's October 18, 1977 cycle embodies a doubt, then, about The staging of such events emerged in Kiefer's first work, his the possibility of unmediated access to historical experience 1969 Occupations series 141, in which he placed himself in various through the means of painting just as it asserts the possibility that majestic landscapes (reminiscent of German Romantic pictorial painting could actually intervene in the process of critical, historical settings) or in monumental architectural complexes and, from a self-reflection. At the same time, the focus on the Baader-Meinhof relatively great distance, had himself photographed making the Group as the subject of recent German history leads in a much more "Heil Hitler!" salute. The fact that this series was accomplished ♦1908 716 1988 I Richter and Kiefer  photographically complicates the contradictions between Richter's and Kiefer's positions tremendously. First, Kiefer's work situates Jiirgen Habermas itself in an explicit dialogue with the photoconceptualist and performance practices of the sixties, but reorienting both of these The last of the major German philosophers to emerge within a tainted context of specific German historicity. That was from the so-called Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Jurgen Habermas, was born in the year the Frankfurt Institute the shock and the aesthetic interest of the project when it was first for Social Research was founded. At age the age of twenty-four, seen, primarily because it attempted to relocate European artistic when still a doctoral candidate, he published a forceful critique practices—under the spell of either American Minimalism or of Martin Heidegger's infamous "Introduction to Metaphysics" Conceptualism in the late sixties—within the focus of addressing (1935), which had announced that philosopher's conversion history in a specifically German context; and secondly, because the to Nazism, and which Heidegger had republished in 1953 work tried to criticize the blind spots of the perpetual renovation of without a single word of self-criticism, let alone an apology. West German cultural practices in their approach to history. In 1956 Theodor W. Adorno invited Habermas to join the However, what is crucial in Kiefer's use of the photograph in this recently reopened Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Under the tutelage of his mentor and the tradition of the series is that unlike Conceptual art's approach to documentary Institute, Habermas would develop a synthesis of empirical photography at that time, Kiefer consistently treats the photograph social research and critical theory, addressing the particular as a hybrid, as a residue, as the one tool of representation that is just conditions of postwar societies. as discredited as painting. Thus there is a deeply antiphotographic In his first groundbreaking work, The Structural impulse in Kiefer's collection of photographic remnants, as there Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Habermas is an antipainterly impulse in his use of nonpainterly materials developed a concept that would have important ramifications such as straw, earth, and other matter in the construction of his for an art-historical understanding of the museum and the paintings. Nonetheless, unlike Richter and artists of the Pop art functions of the avant-garde: the bourgeois public sphere, tracing 696I--096 I- it from its emancipatory beginnings in the eighteenth century generation, Kiefer never questions the authenticity or auratic to its imminent dissolution under the impact of late corporate originality of the painting as a singular object, or that of painting as capitalism. In Knowledge and Human Interest (1968), his second a craft that generates a unique aesthetic experience. Indeed, as far major work, and one that would bring him international as the continuous visual trope of the Occupations series is a recognition, he formulated the concepts of communicative reference to Caspar David Friedrich's German Romantic imagery reason and communicative action as normative models for (such as his Wanderer above the Mist [c. 1818] ), photography is the subjective and sociopolitical realization of a present-day asked to participate in the sublimity of experience to which enlightenment project founded in language itself. painting presumably had access in the early nineteenth century and to which neo-Expressionism assumed it could once more connect. In analyzing Kiefer, the cultural historian Eric Santner proposes Whether or not one finds the model of the "homeopathic" that Kiefer's strategies should be seen as a "homeopathic" approach approach to repression an acceptable one, Richter's work, in to the conditions of repression. He hails Kiefer's project of contrast, seems to take the inextricability of postwar German confronting the legacy of thirties and forties German history as a culture and its repression as its point of departure rather than necessary attempt to dismantle the repressive apparatus, the almost claiming that it can be remedied. It also seems to take the various phobic inhibition, that was established in postwar Germany. In layers of postwar German cultural involvement with certain forms addition to blanking out the Nazi past, this repression also blocked of internationalization, and of Americanized consumer culture any attempt by the German people actually to articulate their (e.g., an Americanized model of Pop art production) as a historical historical experience, by barring their access to the culture of the condition that cannot be undone. With this act of specifically late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well, since the disclaiming any possibility of access to German cultural history, principal figures who made up German culture in this period had Richter's project both criticizes and also perhaps—as some artists been considerably tainted by their abrogation in Nazi ideology. and critics would say—perpetuates false internationalization and In his portraits Kiefer provocatively mingled figures ranging from its intrinsic intertwinement with the act of historical repression. Heidegger to HOlderlin, from Moltke to Bismarck, paintings that Richter's paintings of the Baader-Meinhof Group members, the are seen by Santner not as a project of resuscitating the heroiciza- various scenes, the arrest, and the members' funerals, are neces- tion of a tainted history but as necessary attempts to open up the sarily from the very recent past. They represent what one could call repressive apparatus that German culture had internalized and the conclusion of the utopian aspirations of the "moment of 1968," imposed upon itself in the postwar period. Santner thereby follows in its calamitous ending with the supposed suicides of Andreas a similar logic to the one that had been developed by Hans Jurgen Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in the Stammheim Prison in 1977. Syberberg in his seventies film Hitler: A Film from Germany, which As a result of their iconography, the paintings have been widely was a similar project to open up the question of how German recognized as an elegiac expression of German doubt and skepti- cultural history could be reestablished across the historical hiatus. cism about the possibilities of utopian political transformation. 1962a, 1962b, 1968b 1965 1935, 1956, 1960c. 1962d. 1964b Richter and Kiefer I 1988 717 686 1.-086 I- 4 Anselm Kiefer, Besetzungen (Montpellier) (Occupations [Montpellier]), 1969 Eight photographs on cardboard They have also been recognized as an allegory of the life and the FURTHER READING Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "A Note on Gerhard Richter's 18.October 1977," in Gerhard Storck (ed.), history of the postwar German generation in its dual attempt to Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977 (Cologne: Walther KOnig; Krefeld: Kunstmuseum Krefeld; and dissociate itself from and reassociate itself with German history, to London: Institute of Contemporary Ms, 1989) overcome the repression of its fathers' generation and at the same Stefan Germer, "Unbidden Memories," in Gerhard Storck (ed.), Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977 (Cologne: Walther KOnig; Krefeld: Kunstmuseum Krefeld; and London: Institute of Contemporary time to develop countermodels and alternative political possibili- Arts, 1989) ties in the sixties radicalization and mobilization of leftist German Andreas Huyssen, "Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of the History, the Temptation of Myth," in Andreas thought. Richter himself has denied any aspect of these readings, Huyssen, Twilight Memones: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (Routledge, London, 1995) Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999) refusing to be associated with any political interpretation of the Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 (New York: Museum of Modern Art; and London: paintings and claiming that if there is any connection between Thames & Hudson, 2000) them and political thought, his aim was to articulate the problem- atic nature of all utopian projects. BB 718 1988 I Richter and Kiefer  1998 An exhibition of large video projections by Bill Viola tours several museums: the projected image becomes a pervasive format in contemporary art. erception in all its complexity is the principal concern of the philosophy of phenomenology, and, as such, it was of special interest to Minimalist artists like Robert Morris who moved to "take relationships out of the work and make them a function of space, light, and the viewer's field of vision." Phenomenology cast particular doubt on ideal geometries such as cubes, spheres, and regular polyhedrons, arguing that the body of the viewer interrupts the field of vision and so complicates any 666 1--0661- reading of such forms. "Even the most unalterable property, shape, does not remain constant," Morris claimed, "for with each shift in position the viewer also constantly changes the apparent shape of the work." Foregrounding the seeming variability of simple forms in their installations, the Minimalists made explicit Marcel Duchamp's notion that it is the viewer who completes the work. The art of suture If Minimalist art acknowledged the conditions of both the ambient space and the viewing subject, it did so strictly in physical and perceptual terms. For this reason its phenomenological basis was called into question in the seventies and eighties by some artists and critics who claimed that the space of art is never so neutral and that the viewer considered in an abstractly phenomenological way is likely to be male, white, and heterosexual. Practitioners informed by feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories moved to undercut these assumptions and to set up other kinds of spectatorship; this work on representation vis-a-vis identity often took the form of a critical manipulation of given images, usually in photographs. Yet other practices—Performance, video, and Installation art in 1 James Turrell, Milk Run III, 2002 particular—continued the opening to the body and its spaces inau- Light into space gurated by Minimalism, thus elaborating on its phenomenological concerns. Performance and video engaged the viewer directly, but whose exact location is almost impossible to determine for that restrictions of staging in the former and dependence on monitors very reason. A Turrell installation seems to exist as a spatial after- in the latter often kept the spectator at a distance. It was Installation image, appearing as a phantom shape projected by our own retinal that threw everything onto the experience of the viewer, and activity and nervous system rather than as a fixed object in its own nowhere more clearly than in the work of James Turrell (born right. Instead of the reflexive viewers and delineated spaces of 1943), who sets up enormous fields of colored light W. Often these Minimalism, such art tends to effect a kind of sublime experience fields are produced through a slight opening in a gallery wall in which the spectator is overwhelmed by an apparition that he or backed by an oblique plane that is brilliantly illuminated but she seems to project into being. For many viewers this free-floating ♦1965,1969 1975a, 1977b, 1987, 1989, 1994a 1977a.1980 ♦ 1973,1974 764 1998 I The projected image  aestheticism is exhilarating; for some, however, it bears a disturbing evoke extreme mental conditions: in Reasons for Knocking at an relation to dazzling forms of technological spectacle. Empty House (1982) a monitor shows a man periodically struck from A Installation artists such as Turrell complemented video artists behind (again to the accompaniment of sound bursts), while the such Peter Campus and Bruce Nauman who used the video camera viewer sits in a wood chair listening via headphones to chattering to draw the viewer directly into the field of the work, often folding voices telling of a horrible head injury. Moreover, these mental the time of perception onto the time of the video through its conditions are often analogues of spiritual experiences: in Room for capacity for immediate transmission and rapid replay. It was left to St. John of the Cross (1982) images of mountain peaks are accom- subsequent video artists like Bill Viola and Gary Hill to combine the panied by sounds of a violent storm while turbulent poems by different effects of such Installation and video art, with viewers the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic are recited. Again and again, drawn into darkened spaces punctuated by luminous projections. Viola foregrounds ritual passages and visionary states: from the Prompted by advances in projection devices in the eighties, Viola baptismal Reflecting Pool (1977-9), in which a man leaps above a and Hill transcended the limited scale of the video monitor, some- pool only to vanish, to Nantes Triptych (1992), which juxtaposes a times making the field of display the size of a museum wall, and so young woman giving birth, a clothed man suspended under water, creating an image-space that was immense yet mysterious, thor- and an old woman dying, to The Crossing l2], which shows a figure oughly mediated yet seemingly immediate. In some respects these consumed by fire on one side of the screen and a figure inundated video projections, which often include color and sound as well, with water on the other. In his most elaborate work to date, Going partake equally of the fixity of grand painting and the temporality of Forth by Day (the title is derived from the Egyptian Book of the narrative cinema. This reformatting of video transforms the terms Dead), the viewer is surrounded by five vast videos projected in of its space and its viewer alike: the former is literally obscure, and slow motion. Inspired in part by the Giotto frescoes at the Scrovegni the latter is positioned somewhere between the contemplative Chapel in Padua (c. 1303-5), the different parts of this "cinematic and the awestruck. Yet the phenomenological effects of Minimalist fresco" are titled Fire Birth—another baptism, here in waters of 666 V066I installations do not disappear altogether; in some respects they are fire and blood; The Path—a parade of people along a forest path; heightened, but in a manner that often confounds bodily perception The Deluge—the flooding of an apartment house; The Voyage—the and technological mediation. dying of an old man by a riverside; and First Light—the witnessing Of course, seductive luminosity and immense projection were already combined in Hollywood cinema, which also activates another kind of projection, a psychically charged identification of the audience with the figures presented to it as visual models or ego ideals. Film theory has analyzed the experience of such cinema as a matter of projective identification through "suture," the process by which the audience is woven into the matrix of the filmic event through its alignment with the point of view of the camera; as the camera turns to a figure within its visual field, the audience imagines itself entering the field of the narrative, thereby joining the actors and their shifting points of view as well. In this way cinema doubles psychological projection with imagistic projection. For the most part this doubling is adapted rather than rejected in large video installations by Viola, Hill, and others, for though they are far less narrative than movies, less suturing of the viewer through camera and story, they are sometimes even more enveloping, more immersive of the viewer in a total image-sound space. Even when the video screens are arrayed in different configurations, sometimes confronting the viewer and sometimes surrounding them, the space often seems even more virtualized, the medium even more dereal- ized, than in cinema. To what ends are these effects produced? In his video installations Viola has consistently sought to repre- sent, indeed to reproduce, different bodily experiences. Tranquil and agitated states often collide in the same work: in The Sleep of Reason (1988) a video monitor shows a close-up of a sleeping person; randomly, as if in a dreaming fit, the room darkens and violent images appear on the walls as roaring sounds fill the room; then 2 Bill Viola, The Crossing, 1996 the space returns to normal. Further, these bodily states frequently Video and sound installation at the Grand Central Market, Los Angeles A 1973 The projected image I 1998 765  Of course, cinema has long been similarly inclined, and it continues The spectacularization of art to strive for ever more intense effects of immediacy through ever more elaborate forms of mediation. (As Walter Benjamin remarked n the nineties architecture and design acquired a new long ago of film in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical I importance in culture at large. Although this prominence Reproduction" (1936): "the equipment-free aspect of reality here stemmed from the initial debates about postmodernism, has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has which centered on architecture, it was confirmed by the become a blue flower in the land of technology:') As with Turrell, inflation of design and display in many aspects of consumerist life—in fashion and retail, in corporate branding and urban how one feels about such illusion will guide how one feels about redevelopment, and so on. This economic emphasis on design such work: for many, this mystical experience is a genuine effect of and display has affected both curatorial practice and museum much great art; for some, it is just that—mystification. architecture as well: every large exhibition seems to be conceived as an installation piece in itself, and every new museum as a spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk or "total work of art:' To take The traumatic sublime two prominent examples, the Guggenheim Museum (1991-7) Much contemporary art of the projected image recalls the two-part designed by Frank Gehry in the Basque city of Bilbao, and Tate movement of the Sublime, as discussed by German philosopher Modern (1995-2000) renovated by Herzog and de Meuron along the Thames in London, are now tourist attractions themselves. Immanuel Kant, with a first moment in which the viewer is almost Like other mega-museums, they were designed to accommodate overwhelmed, even shattered, by an awesome sight and / or sound, the expanded field of postwar art, but in some ways they also followed by a second moment in which he or she comprehends the trump this art: they use its great scale, which was first posed experience and so recoups it intellectually, and feels a rush of power, as a challenge to the modern museum, as a pretext to inflate not of loss, for doing so. Viola privileges the second, redemptive the contemporary museum into a gigantic space-event that can moment. A partial list of other artists involved with video and film swallow any art, let alone any viewer, whole. In part the new projections who favor the first, traumatic moment might include significance granted architecture has a compensatory dimension: in some respects the celebrity architect is the latest figure of the Matthew Buckingham (born 1963), Janet Cardiff (born 1957), artist-genius of old, a mythic creator endowed with magisterial Stan Douglas (born 1960), Douglas Gordon (born 1966), Pierre vision and worldly agency that the rest of us in a mass society Huyghe (born 1962), Steve McQueen (born 1969), Tony Oursler cannot possess. (born 1957), Paul Pfeiffer (born 1966), Pipilotti Rist (born 1962), In The Society of the Spectacle (1967) Guy Debord Rosemarie Trockel (born 1952), and Gillian Wearing. Sometimes defined spectacle as "capital accumulated to such a degree these artists (who are of many different nationalities, interests, that it becomes an image." This process has become more and commitments) project images of both beauty and violence. intensive in the last four decades, to the point where media- For example, in her video diptych Ever is Over All (1997), Pipi- communications-and-entertainment conglomerates are the dominant ideological institutions in Western society. In this way lotti Rist shows a luscious field of red and yellow flowers on one the corollary of the Debordian definition has become true as screen, and a young woman in a blue dress strolling down a city well: spectacle is "an image accumulated to such a degree that street on the other, gaily smashing car windows as she does so. For it becomes capital." Such is the logic of many museums and his part Douglas Gordon focuses more strictly on the traumatic; cultural centers, as they are designed, alongside theme parks indeed, he seems obsessed with splittings of many sorts—imag- and sports complexes, to assist in the postindustrial refashioning istic, formal, thematic, and psychological. Often Gordon uses of the old industrial city—that is, in its being made safe for split screens to project his appropriated films (he has favored shopping and spectating, which often involves the displacing Hollywood auteurs from Alfred Hitchcock to Martin Scorsese), of working and unemployed classes and the furthering of "brand equity" for global corporations (including museums sometimes mirroring the extracted scenes on the two halves; like the Guggenheim). usually he deploys these devices to highlight a divided subjec- tivity. One video projection, Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1996), contains all these elements: extracts of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are projected on two screens, the one image in positive, the of a saved person by a group of exhausted rescue workers. The other in negative, as if the split personality of the protagonist New York Times described the piece as "an ambitious meditation had penetrated everything, including its re-representation here. on the epic themes of human existence—individuality, society, Gordon appears to identify with this division: Monster (1996-7) death and rebirth." This ambition suggests why Viola works to includes a double self-portrait with one photograph of his face virtualize his space and to derealize his medium: so that his expressionless and the other of his face Scotch-taped into a ahistorical vision of spiritual transcendence can be effected—that grotesque mask. (Perhaps there is a religious dimension here as is, it can come across as an effect. From the start, video art was well: he grew up in Glasgow in a Calvinist family with a Mani- prone to a technological kind of mysticism (with Nam June chean view of good and evil in the world.) His most famous work Paik it is more Zen Buddhist in flavor; here it is more Christian). appropriates the most famous movie about schizophrenia, Psycho; 1973 1935 1993b, 2003, 2009a 766 1 998 I The projected image  however, Gordon slows the Hitchcock film to a hypnotic, almost the medium (for example, those of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga catatonic pace—hence his title, 24 Hour Psycho l3]. A Vertov), the flicker-filmmakers were interested in revealing not Sometimes Gordon interrupts his appropriated films in a only the reflexes of the body but also the materiality of the manner that produces a hysterical effect of fitful starts and stops. celluloid, the apparatus of the camera and the projector, the space Hysteria is a common interest of several of these artists, especially of screening, and so on. Some contemporary artists develop these Martin Arnold and Paul Pfeiffer, both of whom also use found materialist interests; most, however, do not. Unlike their footage (Arnold tends to old Hollywood films, Pfeiffer to recent modernist predecessors, they use flicker and related effects in commercial spectacles), which they subject to compulsive repeti- order to induce an experience of bodily shock, of traumatized tions. These concerns suggest particular precedents: if one model subjectivity. And unlike their postmodernist predecessors as well, (for Gordon in particular) is the cinema of Andy Warhol, with its they seem concerned to produce image-spaces of psychological often fixed camera, prolonged shots, and split screens, another intensity more than critical reflections on given representations. model is the "flicker" films pioneered by Peter Kubelka in Vienna A and developed by Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, and others in Film as archive New York in the sixties and seventies. The flicker effect is produced through a rapid-fire alternation between clear frames of film and Along with recent advances in image technologies has come an opaque ones; this visual stutter allows the viewer actually to see the increased appreciation of outmoded devices; renewed interest in separate integers that make up the cinematic medium in the very flicker films is only one instance of this concern. Not long ago film course of its projection. On the one hand, this visual attack inter- was considered the medium of the future; now it appears as a rupts any identification based on suture; on the other, it stimulates privileged index of the recent past (perhaps it will enter the art the nervous system in specific ways. As the clear light triggers the museums as it becomes outmoded elsewhere). Early cinema in retina to project its shapes onto the visual field as afterimages in particular has emerged as an archive of historical experience, the complementary color, purple rectangles begin to dance on a repository of old sensations, private fantasies, and collective 0 the field of black, as projections of the clear frames join the hopes, and it is often treated in these terms by Buckingham, Cardiff, experience of the opaque ones; the body thus seems propelled into Tacita Dean (born 1965), Douglas, Huyghe, McQueen, and others. the field of the screen. Inspired by modernist investigations of "Both in terms of presentation and the subject matter of my work," 3 Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho, 1993 Video projection installation A 1973. 1993a ♦ 1925d 2003, 2009a The projected image I 1998 767  Stan Douglas has remarked (in a comment that might represent the others as well), "I have been preoccupied with failed utopias McLuhan, Kittler, and new media and obsolete technologies. To a large degree, my concern is not to anadian anthropologist Marshall McLuhan's Understanding redeem these past events but to reconsider them: to understand why these utopian moments did not fulfill themselves, what larger C Media (1964) was a breakthrough in the theorization of culture, generating terms such as "Gutenberg galaxy" and forces kept a local moment a minor moment: and what was valu- "the medium is the message:' For him, all media were "extensions able there—what might still be useful today." To cite only one of man" modifying or amputating some other, former extension. instance of this collective concern, Overture is a film installation The military development of gunpowder and firearms, which by Douglas that combines archival footage from the Edison led to the loss of archery skills, is one example of how new Company from 1899 and 1901 with audio text from Marcel technology makes older skills obsolete. The telephone extends Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (1913-22). The old film was the voice, even while it "amputates" penmanship. Gutenberg's shot from a camera mounted on a train engine as it passed along invention of movable type produced the new medium of the book, which resulted in a reduction of communal relations cliffs and through tunnels in British Columbia; the Proust is a since it is consumed in private. It was only television, a mass- meditation on the state of semiconsciousness that exists between consumed electronic medium, that reinstated what McLuhan sleeping and waking. There are six extracts from Proust and three termed the "global village." The "galaxy" half of "Gutenberg sections of film (with tunnel passages extended by leader film), so galaxy" reveals McLuhan's ambitions to conceive of distinct that when the footage recurs it is matched with a different text, in a historical periods, or paradigms, much like Walter Benjamin's way that tests our sense of repetition and difference, memory and "Age" in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical displacement. Overture is concerned not only with the transition Reproduction." McLuhan's 1951 book The Mechanical Bride's from sleeping to waking, with the rebirth of consciousness that is concentration on advertising's incitement of commodity desire also a return to mortality, but also with the shift in dominance situates media within the orbit of Marcel Duchamp's Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, whose Bride incites the from one kind of narrative medium (the novel) to another kind Bachelors' intense longing for her nudity. The most famous of (the film). It juxtaposes moments of rift—in subjective experience McLuhan's aphoristic phrases, "The medium is the message," as well as in cultural history—when other versions of self and does not refer to modernism's self-critical analysis of an aesthetic society are glimpsed, lost, and glimpsed again. "Obsolete forms of medium—its self-reflexive "message" being the nature of the communication," Douglas has commented, "become an index of medium itself: painting "about" painting, etc. Instead, his an understanding of the world lost to us." To recover these forms is medium is not an aesthetic tradition, but rather the condition to "address moments when history could have gone one way or of a given stage of media. The "message" here understands the another. We live in the residue of such moments, and for better or content of every new medium—or form of media—as being "about" an older one; for McLuhan, the content of writing is worse their potential is not yet spent." speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print In this way recent projections of video and film suggest a dialectic is the content of the telegraph. of advanced and outmoded techniques, of future and past possibili- Friedrich Kittler, professor of aesthetics and history of ties in media. On the one hand, more and more contemporary art media at Humboldt-University, Berlin, goes further, seeing the seems to be reworked in cinematic terms, a development aided military as the motor of new media, as in his Gramophone, Film, by the ready availability of digital cameras and editing programs Typewriter (1986). A nuclear explosion's release of high-intensity since the mid-nineties (the trajectory of a prominent artist like electromagnetic pulses that would immobilize communications Matthew Barney—from elaborate installation-performances to a networks drove the military, he said, to develop the fiber-optic channel that supports the cyber-spatial web. A product of the mammoth film cycle titled Cremaster—is telling in this regard). Bomb, then, the Internet joins the repeating rifle's enabling of the On the other hand, there is a counterimpulse to complicate media film projector, and consequently the desire for cinema. history as never before, to find new avenues of expression in surpassed modes. Why this turn to the cinematic in art? No doubt one reason is the sheer legibility of movies: "I try to use film as a common denominator," Douglas Gordon has remarked. "They FURTHER READING Russell Ferguson et al., Douglas Gordon (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001) [movies] are the icons of a common currency." Perhaps, too, these Lynne M. Herbert et al., James Turret': Space and Light (Houston: Contemporary Arts artists see the medium as best suited to treat fundamental trans- Museum, 1990) formations in experience and subjectivity in contemporary Chrissie Iles et al., Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 7964-1977 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001) society—that is, experience that is so often routed through David Ross et al., Bill Viola (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1998) imaging devices, and subjectivity that has learned not only to Chris Townsend (ed.), The Art of Bill Viola (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004) survive but even to thrive on technological shocks. RK/HF Scott Watson et al.. Stan Douglas (London: Phaidon Press, 1998) 2003 768 1998 I The projected image  cc cc CL: cc 4 Stan Douglas, Overture,1986 Black-and-white 16mm film with looping device and mono optical soundtrack, each rotation seven minutes The projected image I 1998 769  2003 With exhibits such as "Utopia Station" and "Zone of Urgency," the Venice Biennale exemplifies the informal and discursive nature of much recent artmaking and curating. n a gallery over the last decade you might have happened on one McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and of the following: a room empty except for a mound of identical Johnson), as though a documentary script were in the making or a candies wrapped in brilliant foils, the candies free for the taking. history seminar had just let out NI. Or, finally, a makeshift altar, Or, space where the office contents are dumped into the exhibition monument, or kiosk, cobbled together out of plastic, cardboard, area, and a couple of pots of Thai food are on offer to visitors, and tape, and filled, like a homemade study-shrine, with images who might be puzzled enough to linger, eat, and talk. Or an array of and texts devoted to a particular artist, writer, or philosopher abstract bulletin boards, drawing tables, and discussion platforms, (e.g., Piet Mondrian, Raymond Carver, or Georges Bataille) 121. some concerning a role player of the near past (such as Robert Such works, which exist somewhere between a public installation, 9 LOZ-0003 1 Liam Gillick, McNamara, 1994 Brionvega Algol TVC 11 R, 35mm film transferred onto appropriate format, Florence Knoll table (optional), copies of various drafts of the film McNamara, dimensions variable 1987 1989.2009a 1913. 1917a. 1930b. 1931b. 1944a 778 2003 I Archival aesthetics  O O p N.) 2 Thomas Hirschhorn, Raymond Carver Altar, 1998-9 Mixed-media installation at The Galleries at Moore, Philadelphia an obscure performance, and a private archive, can also be found made, collaboration, and installation. For example, some of these in nonart spaces, which might render them even more difficult artists treat television shows and Hollywood films as found images: to decipher in aesthetic terms; nonetheless, they can be taken to in The Third Memory (2000) Huyghe reshot parts of the 1975 indicate a distinctive turn in recent art. In play in the first two Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon with the real-life protagonist examples—works by the Cuban-American Felix Gonzalez-Torres (a reluctant bank robber) returned to the lead role , and Gordon and the Thai Rirkrit Tiravanija respectively—is a notion of art as has adapted a couple of Hitchcock films in drastic ways. For an ephemeral offering, a precarious gift; and in the second two Gordon such pieces are "time readymades," given narratives to be instances—works by the English Liam Gillick (born 1964) and the sampled in large image-projections (a pervasive medium in Swiss Thomas Hirschhorn (born 1957) respectively—a notion of contemporary art), while the French critic Nicolas Bourriaud has art as an informal probing into a specific figure or event in history championed such work under the rubric of "post-production." or politics, fiction or philosophy. There is also a utopian dimen- This term underscores the secondary manipulations (editing, sion in the first approach and an archival impulse in the second. special effects, and the like) that are almost as pronounced in this This way of working includes other prominent practitioners art as in film; it also suggests a changed status of "the work" of art in such as the Mexican Gabriel Orozco, the Scot Douglas Gordon, an age of information. However one regards this age (if it exists as a the French Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno (born 1964), and distinct epoch at all), "information" does often appear as a kind of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (born 1965), the Americans Ren6e ultimate readymade, as data to be reprocessed and sent on, and Green, Mark Dion, and Sam Durant, and the English Tacita Dean. some of these artists work accordingly "to inventory and select, to They draw on a wide range of artistic precedents such as the perform- use and download" (Bourriaud), to revise not only found images ative objects of Fluxus, the humble materials of Arte Povera, and the and texts but also given forms of exhibition and distribution. site-specific strategies of institution-critical artists like Marcel One upshot of this way of working is a "promiscuity of collabo- Broodthaers, Michael Asher, and Hans Haacke. Yet the current rations" (Gordon) in which the postmodernist complications of generation has also transformed the familiar devices of the ready- artistic originality and authorship are pushed to the limit. Consider 1987, 1989, 2009a, 2009c 1989. 1998 M1992. 1993c, 1998 1962a. 1967b, 1970. 1971. 1972a ♦ 1998 1977a, 1980, 1984b Archival aesthetics I 2003 779 g LOZ-000Z 3 Pierre Huyghe, The Third Memory,1999 Double projection, Beta digital, 4 minutes 46 seconds a collaborative work like No Ghost Just a Shell (1999-2002) led by tion is also advanced (this international group of artists finds one Huyghe and Parreno. After they learned that a Japanese animation of its preconditions there), and again there are utopian moments company wanted to sell some of its minor characters, they bought as well: for example, Tiravanija has spearheaded a "massive-scale one such person-sign, a girl named "AnnLee," and invited other artist-run space" called "The Land" in rural Thailand that is artists to deploy her in their own work. Here the art piece becomes designed as a collective "for social engagement." More modestly, a "chain" of pieces: for Huyghe and Parreno, No Ghost Just a Shell these artists aim to fashion passive viewers into temporary commu- is "a dynamic structure that produces forms that are part of it"; nities of active discussants. In this regard Hirschhorn, who once it is also "the story of a community that finds itself in an image." worked in a communist collective of graphic designers, sees his Or consider another group project that also adapts a ready-made makeshift structures dedicated to artists, writers, and philosophers product to unusual ends. Here Gonzalez-Foerster, Gillick, Tiravanija, as a species of passionate pedagogy, and they do partake a little of and others detail how to customize a coffin out of cheap furniture the agitprop kiosks of the Constructivist Gustav Klutsis as well as of from IKEA; the work is titled How to Kill Yourself Anywhere in the the obsessive constructions of the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. With World for Under $399. these works Hirschhorn seeks to "distribute ideas,""radiate energy," The tradition of ready-made objects, from Marcel Duchamp to and "liberate activity" all at once: he wants not only to familiarize ♦Damien Hirst, often mocks high art or mass culture or both; in his audience with an alternative public culture but also to charge these examples it is mordant about global capitalism as well. Never- this relationship with affect. Other figures, some of whom were theless, the prevalent sensibility of the new work tends to be trained as scientists or architects (such as the Belgian Carsten expansive, even ludic—again an offering to other people and / or an Holler [born 1961] and the Italian Stefano Boeri [born 1956] opening to other discourses. At times a benign image of globaliza- respectively), adapt a model of collaborative research and experi- ♦1914. 1986. 2007c ♦ 1989.2009a 1920, 1926 1992 780 2003 I Archival aesthetics  merit closer to the science laboratory or the design firm than the Along with the emphasis on discursivity and sociability, a traditional artist studio. "I take the word 'studio' literally," Orozco concern with the ethical and the everyday is often voiced: art remarks, "not as a space of production but as a time of knowledge." A is "a way to explore other possibilities of exchange" (Huyghe), "A promiscuity of collaborations" has also meant a promiscuity a model of "living well" (Tiravanija), a means of being "together in of installations: installation is the default format, and exhibition the everyday" (Orozco). "Henceforth," Bourriaud declares, "the the common medium, of much contemporary art. (In some group is pitted against the mass, neighborliness against propa- measure this tendency is driven by the increased importance ganda, low tech against high tech, and the tactile against the visual. of huge shows in the art world: there are now biennials and trien- And above all, the everyday now turns out to be a much more nials in Venice, Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Gwangju, Seoul, Yokohama). fertile terrain than pop culture." The possibilities of such interac- Often entire exhibitions are given over to messy juxtapositions tive aesthetics seem clear enough, but there are problems here of projects—photos and texts, images and objects, videos and as well. Sometimes radical politics are ascribed to the art by a screens—and occasionally the effects are more chaotic than shaky analogy between an open work and an inclusive society, as if communicative: in these instances legibility as art is sacrificed a desultory form might evoke a democratic community, or a non- without great gains in other kinds of literacy. Nonetheless, hierarchical installation predict an egalitarian world. Hirschhorn discursivity and sociability are central concerns of the new work, sees his projects as "never-ending construction sites," while both in its making and in its viewing. "Discussion has become an Tiravanija rejects "the need to fix a moment where everything is important moment in the constitution of a project," Huyghe complete." But one service that art can still render is to make comments, while Tiravanija aligns his art, as "a place of socializa- a stop, take a stand, in a concrete register that constellates the aes- tion," with a village market or a dance floor. thetic, the cognitive, and the critical. Moreover, formlessness in society might be a condition to contest rather than to celebrate in art—a condition to make over into form for purposes of reflection Interactive aesthetics g1-03-000 and resistance (as some modernist painters attempted to do). In this time of mega-exhibitions the artist often doubles as a The artists in question frequently cite the Situationists as a model curator. "I am the head of a team, a coach, a producer, an organizer, of critique, but the Situationists valued precise intervention and a representative, a cheerleader, a host of the party, a captain of the rigorous organization above all other things. boat," Orozco comments, "in short, an activist, an activator, an "The question," Huyghe argues, "is less 'what?' than 'to whom?' incubator." This rise of the artist-as-curator is complemented by It becomes a question of address." Bourriaud also sees art as "an the rise of the curator-as-artist; maestros of large shows have ensemble of units to be reactivated by the beholder—manipulator." become very prominent over the last decade. Often the two groups In many ways this approach is another legacy of the Ducham- share models of working as well as terms of description. For pian provocation, but when is such "reactivation" too great a example, several years ago Tiravanija, Orozco, and other artists burden to place on the viewer? As with previous attempts to A began to speak of projects as "platforms" and "stations," as "places involve the audience directly (as in some Conceptual art), there is that gather and then disperse," in order to underscore the casual a risk of illegibility, which might return the artist as the principal communities that they sought to create. In 2002, Documenta 11, figure and the primary interpreter of the work. At times, it must curated by an international team led by the Nigerian Okwui be admitted, "the death of the author" has meant not "the birth of Enwezor (born 1963), was also conceived in terms of "platforms" the reader," as Roland Barthes speculated in his 1968 essay of that of discussion, scattered around the world, on such topics as title, so much as the befuddlement of the viewer. Moreover, when "Democracy Unrealized," "Processes of Truth and Reconciliation," has art not involved discursivity and sociability, at least since the "Creolite and Creolization," and "Four African Cities"; the actual Renaissance? Such an emphasis might risk a strange situation of exhibition in Kassel, Germany, was only the final such "platform." discussion and interaction pursued for their own sakes. Collabora- And in 2003 the Venice Biennale, curated by another international tion, too, is often regarded as a good in itself: "Collaboration is the group headed by the Italian Francesco Bonami (born 1955), answer," the peripatetic curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has remarked featured sections titled "Utopia Station" and "Zone of Urgency," wryly, "but what is the question?" both of which exemplified the informal discursivity of much Perhaps discursivity and sociability are foregrounded in art recent artmaking and curating. Like "kiosk," the terms "platform" today because they appear scarce in other spheres (at least in the and "station" call up the old modernist ambition to modernize United States), and the same might hold true for the ethical and culture in accordance with industrial society (El Lissitzky spoke of the everyday: it is as if the very idea of community has taken on a his Proun designs as "way-stations between art and architecture"). utopian inflection. Even art audiences cannot be taken for granted Yet, these terms also evoke the electronic network, and many artists but must be conjured up every time, which might be one reason and curators do use the Internet rhetoric of "interactivity," though why contemporary exhibitions sometimes feel like remedial work the means applied to this end are usually far funkier and more in socialization ("come play, talk, learn with us"). Yet if participa- face-to-face than any chat room on the web. tion appears threatened in other areas of life, its privileging in art A Introduction 5 1926 ♦ 2009a 1957a 1968b, 1971, 1972b, 1984a Archival aesthetics I 2003 781  must function in part as a compensatory substitute. At one the ship, a girl is murdered on the cliffs above the harbor on the point Bourriaud almost suggests as much: "Through little services very night that Dean also spends there. Girl Stowaway is thus an A rendered, the artists fill in the cracks in the social bond." And only archive that includes the artist-as-archivist within it. "Her voyage when he is most grim is he most revealing: "The society of spec- was from Port Lincoln to Falmouth," Dean writes. "It had a begin- tacle is thus followed by the society of extras, where everyone finds ning and an end, and exists as a recorded passage of time. My own the illusion of an interactive democracy in more or less truncated journey follows no such linear narrative. It started at the moment channels of communication." The situation in the global art world I found the photograph but has meandered ever since, through would seem to be no different. uncharted research and to no obvious destination. It has become a passage into history along the line that divides fact from fiction, and is more like a journey through an underworld of chance inter- An archival impulse vention and epic encounter than any place I recognize. My story is Yet there are hopeful signs here as well, not only in the utopian aspi- about coincidence, and about what is invited and what is not." ration of this art, but also in its archival impulse, which might be In this way archival work is also an allegory of archival work. taken as a tacit paradigm in contemporary practice. This impulse, In another film-and-text piece Dean tells the story of another which has many precedents in postwar art, is manifest in a will lost-and-found figure. In 1968 one Donald Crowhurst, a failed to make historical information, often lost, marginal, or suppressed, businessman from Teignmouth, a coastal town in England hungry physical and spatial, indeed interactive, usually through found for tourist recognition, was driven to enter the Golden Globe Race images, objects, and texts arranged in installations. Like any to be the first to sail solo nonstop around the world. Yet neither archive, the materials of this art are found but also constructed, sailor not boat, a trimaran christened Teignmouth Electron, was public but also private, factual but also fictive, and often they are prepared, and Crowhurst soon faltered: he faked his logs, then put together simply for the occasion. Frequently this work also broke off all radio contact. He began to suffer from time-madness, 9 1-0Z-000 manifests a kind of archival architecture, a physical complex of with incoherent log entries that amounted to a private discourse information (as in the kiosks of Hirschhorn or the platforms on God and the Universe. Eventually Crowhurst jumped over- of Gillick), as well as a kind of archival logic, a conceptual matrix of board with his chronometer, just a few hundred miles from the citation and juxtaposition. Hirschhorn speaks of his process as one coast of Britain. of "ramification," and much of this a