»Ooh, I been dirt / And I don’t care« (The Stooges, 1970): this could almost be the motto summing up the work of filmmaker and artist Dietmar Brehm. And as a matter of fact, this piece of music – along with titles by The Velvet Underground – does play a role time and again in Brehm's works. Iggy Pop and Lou Reed also figure as twin pillar-saints in Brehm's work, which during the past 30 years has encompassed well over 100 experimental films and a steady stream of serially proliferating production in the fields of photography and painting. One might say that Iggy and Lou – and a little bit of Warhol – have stood by the artist through three decades of »pumping screens«, throbbing »murder mysteries« and grainy »death parties«.

Often, titles by the musicians cited above – in abstracted form – form a kind of tag line for the now much more frequent Brehm shows. The Austrian Film Museum, for example, showed a comprehensive exhibition of his works just last December. Accompanying the show, as the first volume of the museum's own »Projektionen« series, was the book «Party», named after a Brehm film whose title can be read as an allusion to an Iggy Pop record from 1981 or perhaps to Velvet's classic »All Tomorrow’s Parties«. »Party« is a graphically demanding but nonetheless appealing compendium of rhythmically arranged film stills, including two discussion rounds on the semiotic aspects of the artist's complete works and their place in the history of discourse. »Perfekt« – loosely based on Lou Reed's »Perfect Day« and the title of one of Brehm’s masterly film trilogies from the early eighties – was the name chosen for a scientifically oriented anthology published three years ago by Gottfried Schlemmer. And, simultaneously with the film museum show, an exhibition called »JOB« took place at the k/haus – the title a distant echo of Andy Warhol's film »Blowjob« – primarily devoted to the artist's paintings and drawings. Also included in the k/haus show were endless loops of the two 16-mm films »Roter Morgen« (Red Morning) and »Pool-2« (both from 1990), as well as a series of so-called »raffia photos«, frequently extracted by Brehm from film frames.

Brehm's cinematic, photographic and artistic production is characterized by a great deal of this kind of recycling and recombining of elements, the extent of which can often only be reconstructed by taking into account the whole extent of the various exhibition spaces in which the works unfold, such as the three cited above (cinema, art exhibition, book). »I'm sure that my 102 films [made between 1974 and 1999] are really one film,« he once remarked, and he was surely referring here not merely to the many »re-filmings« – from Super 8-mm to 16-mm – or to reconstructions of lost works. On the contrary, this method forms the general constitutive framework for all of his production, which fuses found footage – frequently in the form of anonymous pornos – with his own original material and elements filmed from the television screen to create one big prolonged »interference«. Many of his films thus give the impression of being the visual counterpart of the noise produced by overmodulated feedback, or, even more drastically, they seem to make »a hole in the cinema« (Brehm). This »hole« in the setup of the conventional cinema apparatus results from the endless (thunderous) rumbling and throbbing of bleached-out and out-of-focus film images, which do not so much dissolve referentiality as relentlessly »wash it out«. Or turn it into sound.

Brehm underlined his reliance on bootleg recordings and their frequently over- or under-modulated sound level as a personal conceptual kick, even as a working principle, in a film museum talk in December. For example, he always listens to a Stooges bootleg of »Dirt«, or recently to a Velvets bootleg of »Follow the Leader«, while he's working, not least in order to generate a kind of automatism, which subconsciously structures the films and paintings. Used in a more conscious way, the Stooges piece can be found in the film »Dirt + Venus« (1991), in which a continuously flickering white glass shot was conceived as a »reflection of MTV«, or in »Racine-1« (2000), the first part of a series created exclusively from footage edited out of his previous films.

While Iggy Pop's »Dirt«, among other things, refers to the latter's white trash origins, it takes on an almost programmatic character for Brehm. The rough and the raw, the seemingly untreated and the artificial form a central link with which Brehm connects the (abstracted) experimental film tradition and the history of Underground Rock. It's precisely these uncontrolled drones and feedback loops derived from the avant-rock environment that have often been missing from structure-loving »Viennese formalist film«. What's more, Brehm likes to use any damage to the film footage itself, often caused by the continuous screenings to which it is subjected, as a point of departure. Over and over again he simply incorporates this damage into the process of film work. The »Perfekt« trilogy (1982–84) for example, originally 75 minutes long, once came back from a projectionist mutilated and cut to pieces. Brehm simply doctored around on it a bit and soon produced an equally »perfect« 49-minute version. »Ooh I’ve been hurt / And I don’t care« can, after all, be heard two verses later in the song by the Stooges. This »godsend« in the form of irreparable damage relates to both the dissolution of the body of the film as well as the emphatic reduction of the found footage – the same way in which, in »Verdrehte Augen« (Rolling Eyes, 2000/2002) all that remains of the original porno is an erratic, endlessly reproduced exchange of glances between two characters.

This kind of counterprogram to conventional stuctural and material fetishism plays a central role in Brehm's film oeuvre, especially with regard to the recycling of originals and of odds and ends from the cutting-room floor: »The found footage material for ›Zentrale‹, a 60's porno about impotence, was so bad, that I was just thrilled. I unfocused the camera lens. This made the impotence film much better than when it was in focus.« (Brehm on »Zentrale, 2. Version«, 2002) Brehm's paintings are no less invested with his own brand of ironic anti-fetishism, featuring frequently recurring illustrations from textbooks, encyclopedias or coloring books. This results in extremely flat, often wobbly monocolor pictograms that unleash quite elementary symbols. Last but not least, Brehm even applies his program to his own personal style, conspicuous for its noir combination of dark sunglasses, dyed hair (ranging from »garish blond« to »garish black«) and lately featuring a small wig collection. «If the hair is tangled, so is the picture» according to his »Fortlaufenden Text« (Running Text), published up until now only in fragments (since 1990).

A veritable hole in the cinema is what one of Brehm's latest works aspires to be. »Black Death Filter« (2003) is named after a brand of cigarettes and consists of ten minutes of black film without sound. Supposedly designed to »allow the viewer to explore the blackness of the cinema with his eyes«, the film, in its utterly laid-back and somewhat »deflationary« way, holds the prospect of representing a kind of last of the avant-garde works. At the same time it skillfully juggles the aspects of eradication and new beginning. Supposedly, Brehm has been experimenting with video since 2000, with no works published yet to date, and one wonders what his interference procedure might produce in terms of digital technology. Forced pixel droning? A hole in the monitor? Black death network fire?

When Brehm began working with film back in the 70s, Lou Reed was just recording his »Metal Machine Music«, a manifesto comprised of unbalanced, uncompressed electronic clouds of noise. In 2003, with his piece »Fire Music«, he latched on once again to this black hole in the history of music, but in a more respectable way. Dietmar Brehm has until now viewed electronic means of production with skepticism, and we can only hope that his »Metal Machine Film«, if it comes about based on digital technology, will turn out to be just as eruptive.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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