What difference does it make, if a documentary film is shown in an art space and not in a cinema? Which benefits are expected from the change of context? Is the open form of an exploration of the possibilities and problems of documentary work different in the art context. Is it perhaps even more productive than the institutionalized discourse on the function of the documentary in the disciplines of journalism, film and cultural studies, ethnography and anthropology? Is the current interest in documentation just a trend or the result of a longer process of searching for suitable artistic means to represent social contents?
After the News
The current exhibition »Després de la Notícia - Documentals Postmèdia /After the News - Post-Media Documentary Practices« of the CCCB in Barcelona 1 seeks answers to these questions about what is specific to artistic practices of documentation. In the programmatic text on the exhibition, the curator Carles Guerra poses two theses. First he defines artistic practices of documentation in opposition to journalism: the machinery of news production reduces longer-term political developments to their topical news value, their event character and their capacity for being depicted. Mass media need stories and icons. Alternative approaches on the other hand, according to Guerra, take time to elucidate backgrounds, criticize stereotypes, and try out more complex possibilities for representation. In addition, Guerra proposes that these alternative practices of documentation create a new public sphere in the form of a radical interdisciplinary »post-media« discourse. Here Guerra seems to be thinking of the ideal of a democratic discourse, in which the meaning of a contribution is always the subject of an open debate, because it is not determined a priori by the authority of a discipline or a medium.
The most striking example of a journalism-critical approach in the exhibition is the video series »Ramallah Daily« (2003) by Article Z. During the Iraq war from March to April, the group shot a three-minute documentation of life in Ramallah every day. This was broadcast the same evening by Channel 4 during prime time. The quality of this documentary is due to the fact that when watching the pictures of everyday conflicts in Palestine, one inevitably has the spectacular images of the bombing of Baghdad in mind at the same time. Through the suggestion of this simultaneity of event and the everyday, Article Z makes us aware of what event-centered journalistic reporting has to fade out: the connection between the dramatic escalation of a crisis and the smoldering conflicts in the entire crisis region. Article Z do not work with genuinely artistic means. Through the strategic placement of their information, however, they achieve an effect that a classical form of background reporting could only have produced with far more effort.
In terms of artistic aspects, the works by Asier Mendizábal are perhaps more interesting: he captures the preparations for the Aste Naguisia celebrations in Bilbao in an untitled photo series (2002/03). One sees local people working in warehouses at night on the floats. The video made together with Iñaki Garmendia, "Goierri Konpeti" (2002), shows young people conspiratively working on their cars before a car race. The information that these are pictures from the Basque region makes these social rituals appear in a different light. The suspicion that these could be ETA activists determines the view of everything depicted. This is a phenomenon that has obviously always marked Spanish media reports of events in the Basque region. How Mendizábal succeeds in this reflection on viewing habits is ultimately based on the fact that playing with skepticism with respect to the ambivalences of visual representation has been established (since Magritte's pipe) as a method in the art context and the point it makes is comprehensible. In the cinema context, the documentation of a car race would probably have simply failed as an amateur film.
The cogency of Guerra's thesis of the "post-media" constitution of a progressive discourse on documentary practice is proven by walking through the exhibition. It shows documentations in very different formats. Yet the result is a coherent overall picture. The common denominator for the various approaches is a comparison of their methods: the question "Which kind of critique is contained in this form of documentary representation?" becomes the basis for a comparison between a photo series by the photojournalist Stanley Green on the Kursk tragedy, an essayist video installation by Ursula Biemann and Angela Sanders on the Spanish exclave Ceuta in Morocco, a film by Alan Berliner about the history of his Jewish ancestors, texts from Salam Pax' weblog about life in Baghdad during the war, and the fictional historical novels by W. G. Sebald. The point of this comparison might be summarized in this way: mainstream media are currently devaluing documentary images through their mass distribution. Criticism of this development is formulated on a similarly broad front as cross-disciplinary discourse. The foundation for this "post-media" discourse is therefore that the work of producers in various genres of documentary practice is motivated by the same sensitivity for the criticism of representation.
From the Essayist Installation to the Film
Apart from the theses of the exhibition "After the News", a more general question could be raised as to the origins of the current significance of the documentary in art. Here it seems reasonable to presume a continuity between practices of documentation in the medium of the installation and in the medium of film or video. 2 In the current debate on the representability of social reality in art, it is largely video works that are discussed. However, the foundations for this debate were already laid in the eighties by positions in the area of installation. 3 Important reference points here certainly include installations such as Group Material's "Democracy" (1988/89) or Martha Rosler's "Home Front" (1989). The methodological question that these works raised at the time continues to have a central significance for the discussion of current video works: if an artistic work builds on sociological research, how can the results of this research be suitably documented and conveyed to an audience? Rosler and Group Material developed a method of associatively staging documentary material in the installation space, which was further developed by various artists in the nineties.4
A contemporary example of this approach is found in the project "Narsarssuaq/Nuuk" (2002) by the artist Mike Bode and the culture studies scholar Staffan Schmidt. They use the format of the installation for the presentation of a case study on the post-colonial situation of Greenland. Schmidt and Bode document living conditions in the social housing complex Narsarssuaq in Nuuk and reconstruct the history of social housing construction that was pushed during Danish de-colonization (from the fifties into the seventies). The investigated material is arranged in the installation in open constellations in the space like a network of discursive cross-references. The material presented includes historical texts, in which Danish urban developers justify their plans for Nuuk, slides with exterior and interior views of Narsarssuaq, a video with interview statements from residents, and text panels with theses on the global spread of standardized forms of housing. The work does not communicate a value judgment. It remains open as to whether the housing development for the Innuit is an achievement of the modern welfare state or a continuation of colonization by other means. As viewers we are thus invited to make our own connections between the materials and personally trace the historical ambivalences. The installation does not develop its theme in the form of an argument, but rather communicates it as an experience.
It is exactly this method that Adorno in turn defined as a characteristic of the essay.5 The essay counters the linearly progressing, objectivizing thinking of science with a different form of insight, which is based on grasping associatively arranged statements through the comprehension of personal experience. In this sense, the model described of the installative display of documentary material could be called an "essayist installation". The intention of essayist documentation would therefore be to establish the degree of formal coherency needed to be able to experience the subject matter, but without reducing the complexity of the subject through the form of representation.
Yet why should a continuation of this striving for maximum heterogeneity in documentation be possible specifically in the medium of video and film? The essential feature of these media is, in fact, that they arrange their material uniformly in sequences and thus correspond to a conventional model of linear narrative. Many of the videos shown in an art context are certainly to be criticized for assuming this sequential narrative form unquestioningly. The work by the Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius, on the other hand, stands out especially for the way it subjects the form of filmic representation itself to critique. His films usually work with a strikingly disjunctive montage of image and sound, creating considerable tension by leaving it to the viewers' imagination to create a link between what is shown and what is said. Narkevicius cites as a source of inspiration the news broadcasts from the early day of Lithuanian television, where freshly filmed material was often broadcast with only rough commentaries, resulting in highly anarchic image-text combinations.
One possible example of Narkevicius' method is the 16 mm film "Kaimietis", which was first shown in late 2002 at the Kunstverein Munich. The film opens with a brief establishing shot of Vilnius. This is followed by a close-up of the bronze bust of a man in Soviet-social realism style. The voice of the sculptor is heard in the commentary. The emotionally moved voice tells the story of the partisan Jonas Zemaitis Vytautas, who fought against the Russian occupiers until his death in 1949, then the sculptor equally dramatically recounts how he was commissioned by the state to create a memorial for Vytautas and was only able to achieve a result with great effort. In the picture one meanwhile sees an academically drawn portrait of the sculptor, whose lips are animated like a cartoon. He complains about the lack of any kind of coming to terms with the past or perspectives for the future under the pressure of the current conversion to market economy. The following sequence shows an interview with a young Lithuanian woman, who lives in Amsterdam and confesses that she identifies with her origins solely because of her language, since she can only articulate her personal memories in Lithuanian. In the picture one then sees a camera pan gliding through empty backyards in Vilnius, while a passage from Wagner's "Lohengrin" rises to a thundering crescendo on the soundtrack.
Narkevicius takes as the starting point for his film the absolute absurdity of a partisan memorial created for the new Lithuania in the old Soviet style. He consequently confronts the rhetorical pathos of memorial, artist's monologue and Wagnerian music abruptly with a private discourse of personal memory and doubt. Thus he does not answer the question of the political situation and historical identity of Lithuania through documentary depictions, but rather by staging the crisis of all possible forms of representation. The emotional discourse turns out to be a historical relic itself. The private speech acknowledges the realities, but can make no purposeful statement about them. What is left is the feeling that the decisive mediation between the forms of collective and individual representation can only be achieved at this time in a negative dialectic - specifically through a precisely formulated reference to the lack of exactly this historically mediating instance.
In reference to American history, Paul Arthur argues that the development of documentary aesthetics is impelled by social crises. 6 He cites the example of the politicization of the documentary film in the thirties in conjunction with the liberal New Deal program in opposition to the proliferation of the market economy – and the emergence of Direct Cinema in the context of the unrests of the sixties. If this thesis is transferred to the European situation at the moment, then the intensified discussion of documentary practices in the art context can be traced back to the crisis of representation, to which Narkevicius refers in his work: the historical elimination of an entire vocabulary of historical representation due to the end of the Soviet Union – and the flood of private home video and reality TV formats filling this void. What therefore seems interesting at the moment are precisely the documentary practices that expose themselves to the contradictions that produce this crisis: by assuring a reality by means of indexical images and calling its representability into question by means of methodic skepticism at the same time.
Translated by Aileen Derieg
[1] July 23 to November 2, 2003.
[2] I gratefully take this thesis from Georg Schöllhammer from a discussion at the Hamburg Kunstverein in summer 2002.
[3] A precise study of these foundations is provided by Nina Möntmann: Kunst als sozialer Raum, Cologne 2002.
[4] Artists such as Renée Green, Dorit Margreiter or Sean Snyder have each expanded this method in their own ways.
[5] Theodor W. Adorno: Der Essay als Form, in: ibid.: Philosophie und Gesellschaft, Stuttgart 1984, p. 5-32. Many thanks to Søren Grammel for calling this to my attention.
[6] Paul Arthur: Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments). In: Michael Renov (Ed.): Theorizing Documentary, New York/London, 1993, p. 108-134.