Petit Journal #52: HF I RG
A for Archive I MA for Machine I MO for Montage I NV for Nonverbal These concepts/codes are signaled on the labels of the works on show, where they suggest a kind of ‘treasure hunt,’ and in the catalogue, where they are elaborated on by philosophers and theoreticians. The archive as source and resource/text and language combines with orderings suggested by the concepts of montage and the machine to throw new light on the nonverbal functioning and open-ended, polysemic nature of the image. The monogram HF|RG – the exhibition’s title – references Roland Barthes’ S/Z, one of the first books to introduce intertextuality and the Poststructuralism rendered iconic in 1970s France by its challenge to the certainties of objective knowledge. HF Harun Farocki, born in 1944 in today’s Czech Republic and now living in Berlin, draws substantially on the history of cinema in an exploration of modern image-making systems. An œuvre of over ninety films makes use of different forms – photography, drawing, documentary images – in an analysis of the convergence of war, economics and politics within the overall social framework. Since the 1990s Farocki has been creating installations revolving around the making and processing of images in both the historical and contemporary contexts, and the ‘soft montage’ effected by the viewer’s consciousness. The exhibition is accompanied by a retrospective of his films in the Jeu de Paume Auditorium. RG Rodney Graham, born in 1949 not far from Vancouver, where he now lives, studied art history and humanities as a preliminary to entering into a highly complex relationship with the history of modernity. While focusing mainly on the functioning of ideas and processes across a broad field of references – the history of photography, the visual arts, and cinema – he also takes a close interest in literature, music and psychoanalysis. He sometimes makes personal appearances in his Conceptual works, videos and photographs, exploring both the artist’s stance and the mechanisms of consciousness. Combining the conceptual and the ludic, Graham brings his very personal brand of humour to various artistic registers, as well as writing the songs he performs with the Rodney Graham Band. The two artists’ trajectories notably intersect in their use of film/video, both of them delving deep into the medium and its interaction with history. Both also appear in their own works, with each taking his own critical stance. At once distinctive and relevant, Farocki and Graham regularly come up with new strategies for honing our perception and understanding of contemporary life.
The visitor is welcomed to the exhibition by a mail coach from another era transformed into a camera obscura, that archaic form of today’s camera. With Camera Obscura Mobile Rodney Graham associates the idea of an exploratory journey with the ‘upending’ of the visible; at the entrance of the exhibition rooms he takes this notion further with photographs of trees shown upside down, in a reference to the functioning of the traditional camera. Next to the introductory Graham work, the trailer for Deep Play provides a foretaste of the installation Harun Farocki created for Documenta 12, on show in Room 3: a re-presentation of a now historic soccer match. Still in the hall, Vergleich über ein Drittes [Comparison via a Third] comprises a juxtaposition on two screens of the making of that traditional building material, the brick, in Burkina Faso, India, France and Germany. In contrast with the standard media treatment, these very different situations are all given the same status and thus trigger what Farocki calls ‘soft montage’. The common factor in all these works is their critical addressing of certain forms of contemporary representation and production. Room 1 Here we have examples of the characteristic uses made of the image by Graham and Farocki: the former’s fiction-based critical approach and the latter’s analysis of documentation and the archive. In the early 1990s Farocki began reusing images as part of an iconological programme whose starting point was the first-ever film, La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon [Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory] of 1895. Working from a film of his own made in 1995, he created in 2006 the installation on show here: Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik in elf Jahrzehnten [Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades]. With Schnittstelle [Interface] of 1995, he reconsiders the role of the creative artist, showing himself in his own workspace and outlining the intellectual process involved in the making of a film. Replacing words, gesture combines with image to form a style, a distinctive language for measuring the impact of reality. Auge/Maschine [Eye/Machine] of 2000 uses images transmitted by ‘smart’ American weapons during the Gulf War in an investigation of surveillance images and the gradual elimination of the human their use entails. Vexation Island (1997), How I Became a Ramblin’ Man (1999) and City Self/Country Self (2000) form a 35mm film trilogy featuring Graham himself as adventurer, cowboy and gentleman/country hick. The cyclical character of these brief films, the consideration of the roles of actor and artist, and the issues generated by the exploration of theatricality and self-representation add up to a message that combines the Sisyphean with the burlesque. Room 2 Rodney Graham pursues this train of thought with Loudhailer (2003): in the uniform of an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he is shown marooned on a seaplane and forced to call for help. Here the juxtaposition of two 35mm films makes play with deliberately out-of-synch visuals and sound in its portrayal of its subject’s vulnerability. With the 2005 Aufstellung [In-Formation] on the ground floor and Der Ausdruck der Hände [The Expression of the Hands] of 1997 one flight up, Harun Farocki continues the iconological project begun with Workers Leaving the Factory. The Expression of the Hands looks at the range of meanings attributed to the hands in different film sequences and becomes, by extension, a study of the cinema. In-Formation offers an analysis of the sign system and discourse underpinning the representation of the ‘foreigner,’ relying solely on its montage of educational and informational illustrations and pictograms to zero in on the binary ideology underlying the official discourse on immigration.
Farocki’s installation Deep Play was created at the invitation of Documenta 12 in 2007. Shown as a loop on twelve screens, this is a study of the media handling of the famous 2006 World Cup soccer final between France and Italy. The simultaneous presence of images taken from TV, computers, simulators and CCTV cameras testifies to the complexity of the viewer’s relationship with ‘vision machines,’ while leaving him the possibility of effecting his own montage. Room 4 Based on the dimensions of Rodney Graham’s own kitchen, Coruscating Cinnamon Granules (1996) is a small-scale experimental cinema venture in which the main actors are an electric cooking element projecting a shower of sparks and the film itself, whose complex circumvolutions can be observed through the Plexiglas structure which contains the projector. Here the references to the cosmos and the notion of eternal return echo the many other film and text loops to be found in Graham’s work. Since the early 1980s Graham has been quoting and rechannelling the work of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, Ferdinand de Saussure, Raymond Roussel and Stéphane Mallarmé, making play with mirror images so as to challenge the accepted notion of the creative artist. The resultant books are accompanied here by his Reading Machines, devices that enable variations in the ‘reading’ of works as different as a Georg Büchner novel and a Wagner opera. Graham has also embarked on an exploration of the works of Sigmund Freud: in Schema: Complications of Payment (1996) he offers a theory regarding Freud’s financial debts. His current interests also bear on the history of pop music, Mini Rotary Psycho Opticon (2008) being inspired by the set used by the group Black Sabbath for an appearance on Belgian television in 1971. Two works by Harun Farocki – one of his earliest pieces, Nicht löschbares Feuer [Inextinguishable Fire] of 1969 and his latest work, Immersion (2009) – contain direct references to contemporaneous conflicts. In the first of them Farocki presents himself as a lecturer as a means of addressing in a totally original way the issue of napalm, a chemical weapon used by the American army during the Vietnam War: to give a slight indication of the burns napalm inflicts, he stubs a cigarette out on his arm. Immersion was filmed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, a laboratory in California which uses virtual reality to treat Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Employing conditioning techniques similar to those of video games, the researchers ‘repair’ the real with the virtual.
Two of the images in this room involve ironic representations of the artist as prisoner of a psychological and a social situation. In The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962 (2007) Graham acts the part of a 1960s worthy who, aping artist Morris Louis, decides to become a painter, with his typically Modernist living room as his studio. In Dance!!!!! (2008), which harks back to the images from Abu Ghraib, he plays that Hollywood western stereotype, the man forced to dance to avoid the bullets being fired at his feet. Room 6 The images in Farocki’s installation Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen [I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts] of 2000, are taken from surveillance cameras in prisons and supermarkets, where they have replaced the panoptic design that allowed for total visual control. On show in the same room is Graham’s first video, Halcion Sleep (1994). After taking a Halcion sleeping tablet, the artist has himself transported from a suburban motel to downtown Vancouver. The car’s rear window becomes a screen reflecting the lights of the city in an association of the origins of cinema with the uncertain boundary between consciousness and the unconscious. Two other works reflect – like Schema in Room 4 – his interest in Freud: Abstracts of the Second Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1993) is a group of metallic modules reminiscent of the sculptures of Donald Judd, while Notice – Plates (1991) sets up a connection between Freud and Baudelaire who, in the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris, can be seen as anticipating some of the discoveries made by the founder of psychoanalysis. Room 7 In Rodney Graham’s Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003) an early-1960s 35mm projector shows a close-up of a 1930s German typewriter, with the noise of the projector ‘commenting on’ the ‘silent’ images of the black and white film. The typewriter, meanwhile, is gradually overlaid with white powder: a dreamlike vision of one technology burying another and an evocation of the endless shifts taking place within the visible and the invisible. |
