In the recent exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (NBK) a movie theatre-like darkness pervades, and scarce light is provided only by the films being shown. This is Hito Steyerl’s first solo exhibition in Germany, and it doesn’t seem a moment too late considering her rather impressive career. The Munich-born filmmaker and writer holds a PhD in philosophy and has been featured in Manifesta, Documenta and the Shanghai Biennale, she was the co-curator of the recent Green Room exhibition at Bard College, and she has been a prolific writer on the use and aspects of the “documentary” in contemporary art. At the NBK, older and often exhibited works are mixed with newer productions: the well-known and quite wonderful November (2004) and its twin film Lovely Andrea (2007) accompany recent works like After the Crash (2009) and Do you speak Spamsoc (2008).  

After the Crash (2009) functions as an allegory of the whole economic crisis while investigating its effects in a very specific area: an airplane junkyard outside Los Angeles. In this highly mediated modern wasteland our cicerone is the rough-edged and white-bearded proprietor himself, a modern cowboy whose horse has been substituted by a personal mobility vehicle. He tells us how economic downturns always produce an increase in business since airlines have to get rid of planes, and then he explains – in tightly edited lines – that the scrap worth of a plane is $3,000, but that he gets $8,000 to have his planes explode or crash in film productions. At this point in the film a sort of high speed collage takes over, showing how planes are reassembled and destroyed, with the recycled aluminum used to produce DVDs. It’s a mix of (recycled) images from Discovery Channel documentaries with a score of fast music, industrial sounds, and a constant flow of phrases like “Aluminum is incredibly stable,” “used again and again,” “price falls,” “boom, there she goes,” and “there are no survivors.” After this we’re back at the junkyard where we see a portable DVD player placed on the dirt ground. It starts playing – the camera zooms in on the screen so that the film “enters” the film – and we see the typical airline security instructions transform into feature film images of plane crashes and explosions. And with this short film in the film and its dramatic crashes, the seven minute loop starts again, with white letters on the black screen saying “After the Crash” and “On a small airport in the desert.”

Do you speak Spamsoc (2008) is another high speed video collage and installation which mediates the haphazard and cut-up-like use of English words, sentences and letters on the back on Chinese pirate DVD covers. On the wall next to the film, there is a sign of the kind I believe one can find in American movie theatres, black with backlit white letters, saying, among other things: “Languager: Japanese/Spamsoc/French”. The video is a compilation of filmed DVD covers and shows how the English language is used as a very approximate thing: as a kind of decoration, or, indeed, as material. One of the many DVD covers, probably a romcom, has the blurb “the set HAVE BLOOD, contain fleshy war epic”.

These works are interconnected on several levels, and though they make important claims, I would say that they both come off as a bit two-dimensional. After the Crash does so because it ultimately – through appropriated “uncritical” images – repeats the standard off the cuff critique of modern society: the wheels are spinning too fast and we will crash. The attempt to investigate the relation between base and superstructure or, in other words, between aircraft industry and The Discovery Channel, seems to create a circle from which there is no way out. The actual recycling of airplane aluminum for DVDs, as well as the more symbolic “recycling” of airplanes to be blown up in films, are both constituting cycles that are destined to produce crashes, but that seem to spin too fast to allow for any resistance, comprehension or critical intervention. In this sketch of relations between global economy and film, we see used documentary material, used feature film material, used instruction film material, even a 1960s song from an American TV show. But despite the varied collage and the nice casting of our cicerone, the crystal clear clichéd images of desert and airplanes never really take off.

Perhaps one can put the problem in Steyerl’s own terms, which she put forth so eloquently in her essay “Documentarism as a Politics of Truth“, and say that the “documentality” – understood as the documentary’s “complicity with dominant forms of a politics of truth” – remains unchallenged. This notion of documentality refers  to Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, a concept of shifting meanings that most schematically can be described as the rationality of modern government regarding the population as a whole and in terms of security.* Perhaps, however, one can say with Jacques Rancière that After the Crash doesn’t break with any given aesthetic regimes or with any given representational rationality. It doesn’t seem to produce any reconfiguration of the division of the sensible, i.e. what is visible, sayable, doable, and thinkable, or, for that matter, what is documentable.

In a similar fashion of letting the artist be his or her own critic (which might seem both overly respectful and overly critical and meticulous – it is, however, hard to express admiration and refusal at the same time), one can read Do you speak Spamsoc (2008) according to Steyerl’s notes on realism as a sort of pixelmania. Here she gave the example of an embedded CNN journalist entering Iraq with the invading forces, filming the desert with his cell phone camera from the armored vehicle, thereby producing the most “real” images. “Due to the low resolution, the only things seen were green and brown blotches, slowly moving over the screen. [...] It points at a deeper characteristic of many contemporary documentary pictures: the more immediate they become, the less there is to see. The closer to reality we get, the less intelligible it becomes.” But this sensibility for the smallest material components of images is not transferred to Do you speak Spamsoc where language and text would be the material, and where the analysis would have to perform the closest of literal readings to provoke a new intelligibility. Due to the properties of the medium, the camera panning of the DVD covers remains at a certain distance, and it never enters the space between the letters. In other words, it never enters the strange world of nonsense language, never interferes with it, but can only point at it with a “Look!” It is a work on language that in a sense remains outside language.

Instead I would suggest that the older works remain the strongest pieces of the exhibition. Lovely Andrea (2007) documents the search for an image of Japanese pornographic bondage that Steyerl made under the name Andrea in 1987. Rummaging through the archives of certain subgenres of rope bondage in Tokyo, the surprisingly casual and helpful all male personnel start to recount methods of tricking models into jobs and not paying them, while the film mixes images of rope bondage with images of Spiderman and women working with needle and thread in sweatshops. Both by its imagery and its cinema verité approach, the film alters the traditional view of objects and subjects in bondage situations and of master and slave relations. What actually happens in the interaction with the archive personnel and the producers of nawa-shibari is there for the viewer to figure out for him- or herself while watching, which is not really the case for a work that seems to be a continuation of Lovely Andrea, namely In/dependence (2008). This double projection of a bondage artist, hanging tied up from the ceiling in a dark room, features the interpreter from Lovely Andrea, in which she had talked about the paradoxes of being tied up as a way to feel free. But the paradox/dichotomy is present already in the title, and the suspension is manifold in the highly aestheticized images and its double screens.

The Building (2009), on the other hand, which is presented in a separate part of the Kunstverein, has the viewer go through the documentation of an architectural intervention in the city of Linz. Here, the post-war Austrian ostrich is directly confronted with her own history, when the Nazi past of a certain building is revealed through methodical destruction of the walls, drawing patterns of crimes on it, like a spatial and brutalist kind of historiography. In a way, perhaps, this at once symbolic, violent and problematic act of chopping away plaster from a building is similar to the lovely rage and perennial fighting of November: similar to the intricate and open-ended conflation of acting, fighting, remembering, demonstrating, and filming that Steyerl performed there. November (2004) is the oldest piece in the exhibition, but in my view still the most intriguing. By itself it makes the show well worth visiting. It is a film about resistance, or perhaps about violence and the will to resistance, about post-revolutionary confusion, and about the shifting nature of political struggles when represented in governmental terminology, popular manifestations and media. But it is also a visually irresistible film, with its amazing scenes of Steyerl’s own old exploitation-style, homemade super-8 films of feminist martial arts, with its feature film material is turning into documents of a missing person, and with its subtle voice-over recounting the unbelievable story of a German-Kurdish martyr.

NEUER BERLINER KUNSTVEREIN

Chausseestrasse 128 -129
September 20-October 18

Every day e-flux reaches 50,000 people around the world with three or four emails announcing exhibitions, publications, discussions and events related to contemporary art. But this enormous announcement digest – with an online archive stretching back to its inception in 1999 – is just a part of the story. In a symbiotic operation, e-flux manages a number of special projects for art and publications, both online and at two physical locations in New York and Berlin. Karl Lydén visited the e-flux office on Essex Street in New York to talk with its founder, Anton Vidokle.

What are the objectives of e-flux?

e-flux is an independent, self-financed artist run project. The ambition is to develop a space for art outside certain power structures related to funding or reasons of legitimation. The idea is to use this space for ourselves as artists and also share it with others. Independent spaces for art are shrinking. For example, a few years ago I applied for funding for the unitednationsplaza project in Berlin, and from the questions on the application form it was pretty obvious that the main function of the funding organization was to create local jobs. These are economic/political interests that don’t have much to do with art, but when they are imposed on a project they do affect its formation. While e-flux was started largely accidently, it was soon evident that its emerging structure was creating new conditions for production and circulation of art that were a bit less alienating than existing models. So I wanted to develop this as much as I could.

And how did it take its current form?

The email announcements started in 1999 and since 2001 we have developed and produced numerous projects. At first the projects appeared on the website – like the Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist or the Utopia Station poster project – and later on they appeared at various physical locations, like the e-flux video rental from 2004, a collection of over 700 film and video works freely available to publics to view at home. The project circulated and visited places like Frankfurt, Seoul, Istanbul, Canary Islands, and Austin, Texas, as a free art video screening and rental. Most recently, the e-flux journal was started as both a discursive space and a site for actual art production.

So, the emails are the economic engine, right? How does the selection of the announcements work? Are there any criteria?

We prioritize public institutions, museums, biennials, publications and non-profit spaces. Art fairs are also included for their significance as international gathering spaces. But we are also selective within this public category. There are no official criteria; basically it has to be relevant in terms of our artistic interests and the interests of our readers. The process is simple: you contact us when you want to announce a new exhibition, lecture or a publication, and if we think it’s interesting, we include it in the e-flux announcements for a fee.

How much is the fee?

The fees are different for public, corporate and commercial institutions. If you have a specific project you want to disseminate through our network, you should email us with a description of what it is. If we decide to work with you, we will send you all the pertinent information.

How many people work for e-flux?

Seven.

How big is e-flux in economical terms? What is the approximate yearly turnover?

Are you kidding me?

No. I’m from Sweden, a country where all information like that is public.

But I guess you’re talking about public institutions; e-flux is a private entity.

Actually, it’s all public information. But we’re in the United States, so I don’t blame you for not answering.

But would you ask that question when interviewing an artist, say Seth Price?

Probably not, since he is a single person… well, he probably has a lot of assistants and a…

Exactly. He or any – I don’t mean to single out Seth – commercially successful artist probably makes as much or more money than e-flux. But if he only made $50,000 a year, some people in the art world wouldn’t take him very seriously, while if he was making $5 million, others would think he became too commercial. Similarly, if I give you a specific number now, some will think it’s too little while others will think it’s too much – it will not clarify anything. Big public corporations release their revenue figures and profits because they want to attract shareholders to increase their capital and grow bigger – that’s capitalism in a nutshell. On the other hand, for us the only thing that is financially important is that we can pay our rent, receive basic salaries and medical insurance, and have something left to develop and produce projects, which so far we have been able to do.

Of course. But I’m not asking to gossip or even to know how much money you make per se. Rather, since the self-financing aspects of e-flux appear to be of fundamental significance – to a point where the political, economical and artistic seem impossible to distinguish – I think asking just how independent you are, and how much you’re actually able to do are relevant questions.

But then you just have to look at what we are actually doing. What does it cost to publish a monthly journal? What does it cost to rent and renovate a small space like this or to produce a book? You see, if you really want to know, it’s all right there.

Actually, that sort of speculative counting only makes me more curious. But of course I’m aware that exact figures are very delicate things. We can move on.

No, it is an interesting question, and this is an interesting discussion. I don’t think simple dollar figures explain much – independence is largely contingent on your needs: the specifics of what you want to do. For us the point is to maintain an independent, self-financed space for art that is not shaped by national interests or market agendas. This means not depending on private or public patrons and not being involved in the art market. You know, how you do things matters. We have seen non-profit and artist-run spaces reproduce structures identical to those of commercial galleries or big institutions: creating boards of wealthy trustees who are usually collectors or others buying and selling art, local politicians, government bureaucrats, etc.; producing editions and marketing them; having all sorts of sales and auctions. Naturally this affects everything they do, since they can’t exist outside this economic network, which is the frame that shapes all of their activities. So they might be non-profit, but they don’t provide a very different model to the existing ones. We try to do things differently and at least try to gain some autonomy from these mechanisms.

Is e-flux a work of art? Is it a company?

Everything can be a work of art, including a company: in its totality, e-flux is a work of art that uses circulation both as form and content. I would not claim sole authorship. I suppose I started it, but I do not see myself as the author in a traditional sense – it has always been a collaboration, a series of collaborations with a very large group of people. Julieta Aranda shaped a lot of what e-flux is, and now Brian Kuan Wood is further re-shaping it through the journal. So it’s not some object you can display in a museum alongside a wall label with my name and date – it’s a very different model of an artwork.

Not many of your senders use the email format in any specific way. The only example I can think of was an announcement for a Jan Verwoert talk at unitednationsplaza, which made use of the temporality of the inbox for a pun: the subject field asked “Why are conceptual artists painting again?”, and the first line of the email answered “Because they think it’s a good idea.”

What can I say? Jan Verwoert is one funny guy…

He certainly is. Have you ever…

Announced imaginary events? Yes, once. It was when Albert Heta announced the “Kosovar Pavilion at Venice Pavilion 2005,” a non-existent national pavilion (Kosovo was not a state then and did not have a pavilion) at the Venice Biennale. At the time we felt it was an interesting project designed specifically for e-flux as medium.

When I started to think about e-flux as an archive, I realized that all your projects could be seen as archival practices. The video rental, the online instructions for conceptual artworks in DO iT, the Martha Rosler Library… you collect information and you archive it.

Yes, I realized that too at some point. Of course one can think of it like that. But it wasn’t something that we actively tried to achieve. Personally I do not like archives and the kind of logic they represent. Archives are tools of power and while they always seem to start in a fairly benign fashion, they inevitable relegate everything outside the archive to the status of unimportant or irrelevant. I also particularly don’t like the aestheticized archives as artworks of which there seems to be more and more everyday.

I think archives are interesting. They seem like the perfect analogy for so many things: memory, knowledge, discourse… In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida says that every archive shapes its content. Would you say this is true for e-flux in any way?

Yes, to some extent. We try to be careful not to develop an oppressive, authoritative presence. Rather, we want to provide something useful and educational. Exhibitions of art are some of the most ephemeral of situations in which groups of people and objects are brought together for a short period of time only to disperse forever. Most exhibitions are not documented by a book or anything, so it’s important to have some place to look at what others have done. Nevertheless, when it comes to curatorial practice, you can notice a certain normative effect in this archive of ours: people copy each other. They use the same concepts, themes, titles or entire lineups of artists. I guess this is inevitable.

Has anybody tried to copy e-flux?

Yes. A lot of people have, and for reasons that don’t make much sense to me, psychologically, economically or otherwise. Sadly, these people always miss the whole point: e-flux is interesting and effective because we did not borrow an existing model, but tried to develop a new one. We have been working on it from scratch for a decade now, figuring things out as we go along, improvising. That’s the real pleasure of it.

Note: This interview was made in connection to an essay entitled “E-flux, Derrida and the Archive” published in SITE Magazine, issue 25.

After a two-hour drive from downtown LA and arriving slightly late, we entered the dark and crowded locale in Riverside that had probably once been a restaurant, but now had black plastic sheets covering the windows. On the old bar, an oiled-up bodybuilder was standing and trembling in a miniscule swimsuit and a splash of light. She was trembling, I guess, because she held the poses so hard and long. Heather Cassils, artist, stuntman and bodybuilder, uses Fluxus and guerrilla theatre in her work, but in the elevated and living object-like aspects of Study of Power, something else was in play. Through its relations between dark and light, between stillness and movement (where the trembling was produced by the ambition to be very still, or very still and very hard), an intense photographic or filmic effect was produced. The toning of the body, the complete absence of fat, and the accentuated muscles seemed like an analogy of photographic sharpness, as well as an efficient way of mixing a critique of the gendered body with a very specific form of biopolitics, an intense examination of spectatorship and power, and a way of presenting the artwork as process (or physical process of the body proper). The attention, thick in the room, was in no way fading as Cassils was helped down from the bar and led backstage, and there was hardly time for the applause to die out before we, the audience, were being ushered to the next room and the next performance.

Resonate/Obliterate I.E., a one night program (Saturday 21 Feb 2009) curated by the legendary performance artist Ron Athey, was the last act in You Belong to Me, a two week series of events curated by Jennifer Doyle, Associate Professor of English at University of California, Riverside. In a compelling insistence on not only performance but on the whole event as a time-based genre, the four performances of the night all followed each others’ heels. After Cassils, Julie Tolentino gave a dance-like performance, with a rope wrapped around her head being untwined. When the rope eventually disappeared from her head and the moaning body stopped spinning, Ron Athey entered the performance in a grey business suit but without a shirt, tie, shoes, or socks – as an exaggerated symbol of masculinity – and started to lift, drag and abuse Tolentino.

Next, the audience was led back to the first room where Zackary Drucker was lying on a podium with his face covered, but like Cassils almost naked and in bright light in a dark room. A voice-over (presumably Drucker’s own) described the male body and its efforts to attain female features, mocking the “deformed breasts”, the vanity of the project, and the cruelty of biology – all this while the spectators were urged to grab one of the many tweezers and help remove the not yet fully grown back hair on the chest, stomach and legs. Drucker was motionless despite the pain. I felt straight, stupid and horribly privileged as Drucker eloquently refused to inflict pain on himself – a pain he would experience only from being transgendered – and instead left that part to us, the audience, the spectators, or, perhaps, the larger society.

At last, then, the grand finale. In Ron Athey’s Self-Obliteration #1, Ecstatic and Julie Tolentino’s The Sky Remains the Same: Julie Tolentino Archives Athey’s Self-Obliteration, Ecstatic, Athey and Tolentino sat on their knees, naked except for huge blond wigs, on two wooden constructions that looked like abnormally high tables. One after another (Athey first, then Tolentino, “archiving” it), they started brushing their hair, theatrically, apparently in pain. Then, by lifting the wigs a little and releasing a number of large needles from their temple veins, they let blood drip or even pour onto two big glass panes, which finally were stuck together to create one huge blood sample each. The amount of blood was overwhelming: some people left the room, others screamed out loud when it was over; I caught myself waiting for a smell of blood that never came. To some extent, this was of course an experience of Athey’s work on religious iconography, self-flagellation and physical suffering (which a part of me can’t help but see as a little old-fashioned, along with the piercing, the tattoos, the nakedness, and the Barbie doll drag: like a transgression that needs its boundaries a little too much, or like an old notion of the avant-garde that assumes too much of a connection between social/physical transgression and artistic transgression.) But in this performance, it was perhaps not the overwhelming part that overwhelmed. In relation to both Athey’s and Tolentino’s previous work on HIV/AIDS, the act of self-mutilation and bleeding seemed fully inferior to the status of the blood. In a quite distinct figure, the oversized blood test overwrote the image of the bleeding artist with meanings of bigoted fear, stigmatization, discrimination, as well as protest, pride, and collective strength. And as the taut, anonymous soundtrack of the self-obliteration ended, so did a very interesting night of performance.