SITUATED

As a student I had the opportunity to participate in this study I mentioned in my previous post. An article I read for my paper and still is really appealing to me was Still a Novel by Chris Dercon. He wrote it in 2001 thinking back about the exhibition Still/A Novel he curated in Witte de With already in 1996. I didn’t find an on line link to the article so I posted it in one piece. (Sorry)

Still A Novel

The museum concept is not infititely expandable
In 1974 William Rubin, the then director of the MOMA in New York, admitted in an interview that: “The museum concept is not infinitely expandable”. He ascribed this to the rupture between the traditional esthetical categories of painting and sculpture and earthworks and conceptual art that were all the rage in those days. According to Rubin this latter group called for an entirely different museum environment and he added perhaps a different public too. In 1974 Rubin could not have the slightest inkling that 20 years later the umpteenth renovation and expansion plan for his museum would spark off a discussion which by MOMA standards was quite unusual. Not only did the slogan “these collections tell the story of modern art” come under attack, to increase the visibility of the ‘contemporary’ should be at the core of the new design, stressing the need for more experimental space. The new MOMA was going to be a heterotopic museum, a new model with lots of unprogrammed space. We art curators know by now that this can only mean lots of space for disparate things labelled as visual culture, under the guise of photography, videography, cinematography and, of lots of, as the trendy word goes, info-aesthetics. In short, a melange of practices which negate the display politics and space facilities of the conventional museum. Even for MOMA which has a memorable track record in the field of photography, cinema and video, this foregrounding of the visual virtuality of contemporary media and the attention to cultural multiplicity on a global electronic base, to name a few of the most pregnant characteristics of recent contemporary art, is something hard to digest. But nevertheless such endeavours don’t call for an entirely different museum environment nor a different public as Rubin had feared or suggested.

The solar and the lunar wing
Indeed the public admiring media-oriented displays, for instance at the time of Catherine David’s Documenta X in Kassel, is the same as always, aficionados of contemporary art rubbing shoulders with school kids and of course hordes of art tourists. Only their numbers have multiplied to such an extent as to impede the development of the exhibition activities themselves. And what about the very space wherein these projected images and info pixels, accompanied by oceanic like ambient music or rapid techno beats, consume the viewer’s time-log, to such a point that some museums have to consider to hand out return-passes? The LA County museum flyer available at the time of the Bill Viola exposition, read appropriately: “As some of the works on view may extend several hours of time, you may request a free return pass”. So what about that very space we are invited to return to? Does it not look like a modernist Greenbergian, formalistic, white cube in order to view hundreds of hours of film and video projections? Not in the least. The only difference is, that the white cube now has been transformed into a black cube. Indeed, has any of you recently visited a museum or an exhibition of contemporary art in which one or more white rooms were not darkened? Investment in the agricultural black plastic sheeting used in exhibition rooms has soared sky high. Funny enough, the architectural program of the European museum of visual culture par excellence, Le Fresnoy in Lille, designed as a Nouvelle Vague interpretation of a Hitchcock film-set, by movie freak deconstructivist architect Bernard Tschumi, did not provide enough black boxes. So the building has been entirely wrapped in black plastic, turned white by pigeon-shit! As the illuminated box office artist Jeff Wall stated: “The word ‘museum’ seems to be associated with daylight, whereas the cinema presupposes a dark room. From the beginning, however, the museum claimed to be a universal museum. Such a space has to reflect both day and night, so there need to be dark rooms in a museum. Maybe we’ll have to think of the solar and the lunar departments of the museum”. I’m curious to know if Wall will prove to be right. In any case, Herzog and Demeuron’s architectural scheme for the Kramlichs’ West coast residency and exhibition space, themselves avid collectors of film and video installations, blends in both: they created darkness out of light and vice versa, thanks to an ingenious use of spatial engineering as well as futuristic tectonic materials.

It does not fit in our collection
And I’m absolutely sure that Toyo Ito’s imagination and skills will take things even much further. But architectural statements like those, even though countless museums are being built and/or enlarged every day, are rarely heard or seen in museum circles. Instead of architectural signals which prioritise an external and internal experience of over-aesthetised space, we’ll have to come up with a museum-architecture which is time-based, preferably defined by individual time rather than collective time. Such a new museum typology needs of course thinking and lots of imagination. Given recent excellent examples of information-architecture, think for instance of new scientific museums, new libraries or archives. I guess this must be realisable. Because it does concern the question of a museum’s intention in collecting, displaying and keeping works of art in general. Omne bonum est diffusivum sui: everything good finds its own place. But what happens when these consequences are no longer effective? Museums are indeed confronted with another phenomenon which has far reaching consequences for their exhibition and collection policies. Much of the stuff nowadays labelled as new art, is not suitable for selection, acquisition, preservation and storage in a museum, at least not in the conventional ways. This development has made itself readily felt since the early sixties and going by Rubin’s remark “the Museum concept is not infinitely expandable” is now rampant. The effect on the legitimacy of our collections is gradually becoming apparent, at least if we assume that the foremost legitimation of a collection is to continue to collect, to continue to acquire from what is out there. Indeed, certain things are missing in our museum galleries and storerooms, not only ‘things’ by film pioneers Paul Sharits Bruce Connor or Michael Snow, but also ‘things’ by younger video and film makers as well as media artists. Instead of the complicated and ambitious video installations by a practitioner such as Stan Douglas, we prefer to collect his art market dictated photo-derivatives. And can we bear the consumer or commercial perversities with which those and other cultural objects are offered to our museums? Can we accept that we may purchase a copy of a film by Matthew Barney, in an edition of ten for thousands of dollars? Yet I must admit that for this and other artists their commercial instincts are the only guarantee to continue to work and to produce the next ‘movie’. But let’s forget the bank! For the majority of museum people the verdict “it does not fit in our collection” still tends to serve as an alibi for the admission “we don’t know how to live with the stuff”. Such an attitude, adopted by most museum curators and directors, is indeed tantamount to denying and excluding much of the art being produced today. What would it mean to the museum and especially to the public if the term ‘easy to preserve’ were replaced by ‘hard to reconstruct’, as has been the case for hundreds of years in theatres, opera houses and concert halls? The first presentation I initiated as director of the museum Boijmans Van Beuningen was the film installation ‘Four Rotating Walls’ by Bruce Nauman, a work the Boijmans did acquire in 1970, but had failed to preserve and to show since then. So the premiere and restoration of Nauman’s pioneering media work occurred only in 1996. Indeed, serious discussions about play and replay, and hence about an archive’s status and accessibility, are rarely heard in museum circles. Restoration remains a technical term without ideological content or context. The farthest we dare to go seem to be initiatives taken by electronic wizards to digitalize the milky images of video pioneers like Bruce Nauman, Bill Wegman and others.

Things start to move on a large scale
If we are ready to admit that the contemporary cinema, whether it be the theoretical cinema of Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Harun Farocki, the cutting edge cinema of Hal Hartley, Laus von Trier and Chris Petit, or the small films of Les Frères d’Ardennes and Pedro Costa, are just one possible outcome of cinematography, we don’t realise it yet. In comparison, many art museums have realised by now that large illuminated photo boxes, slide projections which are fading in and out, film projections running in loops, multiple video projections on automatic repeat, or interactive computers linked to internet, have liberated their exhibition spaces from the illusion of the static world. Things we generally associate with visual arts suddenly start to move on a large scale. Or should we say they suddenly have come to realise that there are static images? Because of new applications of photography, cinema and video, we can now really reflect in our museums on what stillness is. In Jeff Wall’s point of view, the stillness of still pictures has become very different, otherwise, so he states, one cannot explain the current massive fascination for still photography. In addition, it is the cinema which liberated photography from the rather highbrow orthodox theories of photography and their relation to painting. Photography has renewed itself as an art form through the reflection of, the mediation of, as an explanation of . . . cinematography. Jeff Wall goes as far to state that his photography is one of the possible outcomes from the cinema as we know it. But if movement was the project of the 20th century, there might be a next project. That project has to be growth, which is where intellectual gurus such as Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau think cinema and other cultural expressions in their purest sense as an ordering of temporal events, will be left behind. Growth is the capacity for an organism to incorporate. So we now witness the outcome of the digital information age, the beginning of the deployment of techniques of growth. In some expressions of new media technologies, and especially techniques based on interconnectivity, we can see the deployment of such techniques in full.

Antropomorphic fetishism
The moral of this is simple: the primacy of the visual in visual culture may only be apparent. Its new ordering is governed by a digital logic that melts down the logic of word and image, as the computer melted down the camera and the film projector. As theoretician Hal Foster speculated, at the end of the 20th century art cannot be purified any further, not only in terms of the optical, but also in terms of the informational, due to new developments in photography and cinematography. That is, art cannot be saved any more from its corrupt double: mass culture. Interestingly enough in the cathedral of high culture, it is the cinema which stood from the very beginning for low culture. I consider, therefore, the very presence of cinematography, photography, videography in the museum not just as a transitional step between the discursive effects of photography (art as reproduction) and the discursive effect of infography (art as data), but as a real homeopathic vaccination to guarantee the survival of autonomous images, or at least to guarantee a certain degree of autonomy for culture at large. Again it is interesting to mention in this context Fosters’ convictions, that the digital modality and especially the binary oppositions on which the database are founded, are already responsible for the recent phenomenon that art is hiding behind its antithesis: behind a kind of antropomorphic fetishism or should we say “informed bewilderment”. Indeed, it does not seem that absurd to maintain that the comparisons which sneak their way, cloaked in actuality in visual culture, backed with the notion of incorporation, are a direct consequence of the digital modes and concepts of growth: architecture and art, fashion and art, media and art, and not to forget film and art.

Secondary mimesis
The cinematographic or videographic expressions which in the past five years found their way into our museum walls, are radically different from the cinematographic expressions of the film avant-garde Anger-Connor-Deren-Sharits-Snow and the video plays of the art avant-garde of Nauman-Hill-Viola. The cinema, photographic, videographic and infographic expressions by young artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, Marijke van Warmerdam, Sharon Lockhart, Pierre Bismuth, Mark Lewis, Georgina Starr or Pippilotti Rist are in the first place imitations of The cinema, imitations of the theoretical cinema by Jean-Luc Godard and the others imitations of audio-visual sensations, created by David Lynch and David Croonenberg or imitations of the mode of production of cinema at large. These works consume, as the Austrian critic Alexander Horvath puts it, le tout de cinema: they do not divert ‘high and low’ nor do they have to do with cinephelia. My comments are not meant as a way to devaluate those and other new forms of cinematography. On the contrary, because of the strategies of imitation which are inherent to the way young artists from all around the globe produce art, the video and cinema of those artists demonstrates a strong secondary form of mimesis. They imitate a broad range of western pictorial expressions, avant-garde strategies and thus also The cinema. They look for disciplines, which are broadly and readily available for anybody anywhere. And it is The cinema which functions before the other arts as a real global medium. The cinema did not and does not seem to be bound by different cultural characteristics and art was looking for that. It is interesting to note that a lot of the young artists are responding to existing forms of mimesis in cinema itself. In doing so, they furthermore recognise the flawed visual and linguistic competence of their own discipline, definitely flowed in comparison with the real ‘cinema’ or real ‘media’. So they reinforce their profession as visual artists, since cinema enables an immensely technical control and undeniably provides much more production value. Moreover the crisis of the visual art audience is rectified somewhat because those creators can at least invent and position a physically present, sympathizing and participating audience as real spectators. And also here secondary mimesis plays a role. Four chairs imitate a movie theater in order to reinvent the position of the public.

Where is film?
But there is more. Just as television, after the end of the cinematheque, preserved the memory of old films, the video recorder guarantees now a way to preserve the memory of the cinema of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. The video recorder makes itself felt like a botanique de la mort, just like the film documentaries by André Labarthe, Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki and Chris Petit, or the third world cinema of for instance Cyclo by Tran Anh Huy, which recaptures Ladri di bicicletti by De Sica as well as many other western histories of cinema. But video, as French film critic Dominique Paini, says is also responsible for the “mise-en-ruine” of the cinema, i.e. fragments of a movie culture scattered around and gleaned together again. The fragmented way of looking has influenced cinema in such a way that a new kind of cinema evolved. Artist Mark Lewis prefers to call this, following Antonin Artaud, a kind of tertiary cinema. It is neither experimental nor classic. It is a cinema which, remarkably enough, should be heaped together in the notion of “everybody wants to make a movie and to be part of making a movie”.
So in general the question famous film theoretician André Bazin asked: “qu’est ce que c’est le cinema” seems now less relevant than the question “where is film?”. The answer is: everywhere and also in the art museum of course. And maybe the art museum shows a way to bring cinema into the next step. Not for what is been showing but also how things can be shown. That is, film as a performing situation, with lots of projectors, t.v. screens, computer monitors, cameras, editing units, communication networks, set in highly diversified spaces, obliging the users to restructure the conventional space of the movie theatre. Imagine, as Hartmut Bitomsky dreams of, a huge black box where many different things can move in, where things can be altered and exchanged both in real and diverted time.

Histoires du Cinéma
The main question will be, who then is providing the primary source. I can imagine many primary sources, such as theatre, literature, music and so forth, but I will never be able to imagine that the primary source could be those hours of aimless, endless, frameless recordings of digital video-cameras. Nor can I imagine that the fetishlike antropomorphisms or the interactions which the new technologies are professing, can offer those primary truths. The cinema is still there to proclaim an autonomous strategy in view of a technological fallacy, whereby new machines project their digital modalities into the subject. Maybe the art museum which is not an archive yet, where images are not entirely presented as texts yet, which still presents the pictorial as an autonomous force, maybe that’s what Jean-Luc Godard looked for, when signing up all his histories of cinema with the art of painting in Histoires du Cinéma. As filmbuff Edwin Carels reminds us of: rather than seeking the best sanctuary for cinema, we must first ask ourselves whether it still makes sense to preserve it all. Because what is the most important thing that remains, the images or a way of looking?”

The art of projection
It is again Jean-Luc Godard who is firmly convinced that cinema is the greatest of all arts because it is the art of projection. Cinema has brought the night into the museum and the light of the projection has become part of the museum. The camera obscura and the magic lantern have been fully adopted by the museum. Perhaps that is what we become aware of when seeing those miniaturized series of movement by artists such as Fiona Tan, Marijke van Warmerdam and Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij. Their work reminds us also of the fact that there is no real movement in cinema -–it is a succession of photo’s or as the late film critic Serge Daney suggested – the trick of cinema consists in holding on a photo not quite long enough. Paradoxically enough movies, such as the ones by Douglas Gordon and Pipilotti Rist, seem to bring the image to a stop. Their work requires above all a renewed attention for an archeology of time. Not surprisingly, these movies become related again to the perception of painting, because, as the English film critic Michael O’Pray points out, their temporal frame does not, in fact, differ so much from the spatial frame of painting. These film projections are not organised entities, but only a constellation of margins, where beginning and end are not conditioned, but merely randomly given. The transformation of the film projector into the videobeam causes the projected image to slowly turning into a a real, flat plane just like the painting. I guess this might be one of the reasons that Bill Viola’s work fits so well into our pictures galleries and isn’t the public’s fascination with Viola just a fascination with perception of time.

Still A Novel?
These phenomenons strengthen the notion that first of all cinema is more a dramatic medium than a narrative dictatorship underscored by the soundtrack’s imperative music or dialogue. What we want to see are so-called pure images. Perhaps that is also how one could explain cinema’s fascination for “other” – often more exotic – worlds and movies coming out of Iran or Asia. Perhaps their filmmakers still deliver pure images. What belongs to the same realm of our desire for pure images is our easy rejection of the soundtrack, dialogue and even acceptance of the fact that film does not need to be projected in entirely darkened spaces. As Jeff Wall states: we now need a certain kind of emptiness and we want to structure that emptiness ourselves, and if need be, we would even give up our chairs, the soundtrack and the darkness. Therefore, one could say that cinema today is exhibited, just like photographs.

Is cinema still a novel?
This essay is based on lectures in the Film Museum in Brussels in December 1998 and the University of Amsterdam in October 1999. I’m greatly indebted to the comments in my documentary Still A Novel made by Jeff Wall, Hartmut Bitomsky, Raymond Bellour and others, produced by VPRO, Hilversum in 1996. Furthermore, thought provoking inspiration was provided by Hal Foster, the Archive without the Museum, October No. 77, 1996; Alexander Horvath and others, Movie Mutations: correspondance avec et quelques enfants des années soixante in Traffic no. 24; Edwin Carels, Still A Novel, About the Un-dead, Witte de With Cahiers # 5, 1996; Michael O’Pray, Cinephilia in Art Monthly, no. 224, March 1999; Dominique Paini, Faire Violence, Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 254 and The return of the Flaneur, Art Press, 255, March 2000; Mark Lewis in conversation with Jeff Wall, transcript, vol. 03, issue 03

Chris Dercon
May 2000

Posted by kris_r on September 22nd, 2004 in: Uncategorized.