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

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*M Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, Gallimard/Seuil, Paris, 2004, p. 111; see also Michel Senellart’s comment in his afterword: op. cit. p. 405