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page 2 Ingmar Bergman in

the Museum? Thresholds, Limits, Conditions Costa’s In Vanda’s Room, wheretheseeminglydi- West Pedro discussesthepoliticaldimensionof cinema mightleadtoadifferentafterlife. Kim in mediainfrastructure, wherethedeathof on “post-cinema,” bothaddresssuch ashift Pantenburg, recentexhibitions onaseriesof Elsaesser, onIngmarBergman, and Volker alter theirsignificance. Thomas Theessaysof storagethatnecessarily consigned toformsof in allpossiblesenses, enterintoourarchives, printed matter, footage, images, “information” understood asmorethanspatialconditions: retroactive authenticity.) more thanadecadeoldtobeginshimmerwith even shortertoday:industrialruinsneednotbe this.sure signof cycleseemstohave become (The memoryasspectacle, isa commodification of space turnedexhibitionspace, withitsstrategic thesecondmachine ageindustrial ubiquity of even instrumentalizingthiscondition, andthe by nomeansrefrainedfromexploitingand theresidual.on thesideof Art institutionshave contestationseemstohave been the passionof geologyandentropy,descent intothetimeof History”Philosophy of toRobertSmithson’s timeinthe onthe angelic inversionof “Theses against thegrain. From Walter Benjamin’s ing differently, atemporalfabricbrushed of progress, think theyradiateavirtualpowerof technological apparently seemlessnarrativeof modernity,flipsides of crevicesopenedupinthe with aromanticanddisruptiveenergy:as Residual spacesalways seemtobeinvested of Possibility Residuals and left-overs must of coursebe mustof Residuals andleft-overs By Thomas Elsaesser

page 4 “Post Cinema?” Movies, Museums, Mutations By Volker Pantenburg

page 6 Man with the Mini-DV Camera By Kim West

page 6 The Possibility - of a World By Alexandre and and thepresentmoment Corneille’sof Rome, text, theantiquesettingof Torino Biennale, reviewedbySinzianaRavini, Similarly, therecent melancholy isthetopicof whether itcanrefocusourperspectiveonhistory. simply producesmelancholy andacceptance, or theapocalypse erwise thanthroughthelenseof bility toimaginearadicallydifferentfutureoth- Nature, andaskswhetherourseemingimpossi- Kinklediscussesanotherexhibition,Jeff After metalcanplayapartinartisticcreation.of Gilbert Simondon, theway inwhich thehistory Collective, and, drawing onthetheoriesof an oldaluminumplantbyRaqsMedia of re-use inspirationforthisissue, anddiscussesthe of Manifesta exhibition, which hasbeenthesource post-colonization.” writes, “seem tohave becomethelaboratoriesof ects createacertainloopintime, and, theartist brought intotheFrench banlieues. These proj- was inflectedinthe Algeriancontext, andthen modernistarchitecture howthelanguageof of architecture asanendlessprocess,tion of and another future. a capacitytoshatterthepresentandopenup a sibility of “breach,” thatinveststhepastwith of differenttemporalities of and Jean-MarieStraub, Othon, wheretheoverlay Costanzo investigatesaworkbyDanielleHuillet Danieland own,Alexandre whereastheessayof their are investedwithaprideanddignityof Fontainhas Lisbon lapidated areasof outsideof

Residuals Daniel Costanzo Janina Pedan directlyaddressestherecent Kadier Attia’s projectdealswithreappropria-

pages 8–9 site Project: Untitled By Kader Attia

page 10

— Traces of Metal — produce thepos-

the classicaldiction By Janina Pedan

page 11 The Desire Called Apocolypse By Jeff Kinkle

page 12 The 50 Moons to itsoutside reasonalways residesinanopening the powerof logos willalways remainintertwined, andthat mythosandtheof end, thatthelogosof in ahistoricalbecomingwithoutbeginningand that theresidualandemergentarelooped “savage” andthe “modern” mind, andtoprove this centurytoerasethedifferencebetween kinship, hehasdonemorethananyoneelsein mythand differences tohisstructuralanalysesof cultural choly reflections onthedisappearanceof Olov Wallenstein’s essay. Fromhisearlymelan- birthday onNovember28,Sven- isthetopicof concept. in thisage-old who charts the various possibilitiesstilllodged graphic andtextualinformation. the printer, thusaffectingtheverysupportof randomselectiondecidedby on aprocessof means thateach copyisslightlydifferent, based issue hasbeenprintedonrecycledpaper, which site integrated intothefabricof any cogito. more profoundthanthesimpleinteriorityof the editors of Saturn: Claude Lévi-Strauss, whocelebratedhis100th The idea of theresidualhasfinallybeen The ideaof the Second Torino Triennale By Sinziana Ravini —

which thereby becomesaninside page 14 The Insides and Outsides of Reason: Lévi-Strauss at 100 By Sven-Olov itself. This • Wallenstein • site • 24.2008

Ingmar Bergman in the Museum? Thresholds, Limits, Conditions of Possibility

Thomas Elsaesser

“Cinema is part of contemporary life; there is no “public memory, privatized” and as “designs for an assertion may seem paradoxical, since from Found Object: Ingmar Bergman, barrier between them. But this dialogue between living”, they advertise if not always the moral Duchamp’s urinal, Warhol’s soup cans and Carl the Great Artist visual forms of representation, this new relation- life, then the good life, for everyone: cinema André’s bricks, to Damien Hirst’s shark, Tracy Feature films, I argued, no less than found foot- ship between the cinema and the museum, this the democratic art. Let the afterlife of films and Emin’s unmade bed and Chris Ofili’s elephant age enter the museum as ready-mades, carrying is a problem for me.” filmmakers, if it cannot be the big screen, be tele- dung, it seems that nothing is being excluded with them the cultural use-values or junk-status Victor Erice vision, the Internet, every medium and on any from the museum. But this would be to overlook of cinema. Once we decided that Bergman should platform, including the ever more readily avail- the extent to which the fine arts in the 20th centu- not (yet) be given the Hitchcock-Pompidou treat- “The cinema is dead—long live the cinema able DVDs, with their bonuses, extras and other ry, and the institutions that serve them, have been ment, there still remained the fact that he was (in the museum)” enticements to consumption! Cynics (or realists) relentlessly meta-discursive and self-referential. and is a “great artist”. So in what sense can the For several decades now, the cinema’s demise has will conclude that the mineralization of the Faced with the anti-art onslaught of successive great artist be a ready-made? Major tributes to been presented as a fact: at first, television took cinema suits both parties. It adds cultural capital avant-gardes, the modern museum has rein- Bergman’s fame are the parodies his films have away the family audience, then the video recorder to the cinematic heritage and redeems its lowly vented itself, by marking—in a myriad of subtle inspired, especially The Seventh Seal (by Woody killed off the neighborhood cinemas, and now origins in popular entertainment, but it also ways—its spaces as deceptively open and fiercely Allen, French & Saunders), Wild Strawberries digitization has broken the indexicality of the adds new audiences to the museum, where the bounded, which is to say, as both liminal and ter- (“The Düve/The Dove”), but also Persona and The photographic image, undermining its “docu- video monitor and the moving image—market- ritorial: to be crossed and entered only by guarded Silence. Bergman was hyper-conscious of the dan- mentary” value by replacing the optico-chemical research proves it—retain the visitors’ attention acts of negotiation and agreed terms of mutual ger of falling into self-parody, and chided both link to physical reality with numerical code. News several seconds longer than the framed painting interference. This liminality and what it implies is Bunuel and Welles for succumbing to the vice. At of the cinema’s death is thus no longer new, and or the free-standing, static sculpture. And it a valuable gift the museum can make the cinema, the same time, his films are replete with artists: some will say that it is greatly exaggerated: the puts the intellectual and financial resources of in the sense that it forces it to double itself, and in would-be artists and con-artists, tormented art- hegemonic might of Hollywood movies reigns a century-old institution (usually supported by the process, also divest, divide or subtract itself. ists and sensitive souls, artists as recluses and art- unabated, but young auteurs continue to emerge the State) behind something as fragile and per- As a “natural” space of reflexivity and recursive- ists as priapic satyrs, artists as humiliated clowns in Asian countries, Latin America and the Middle- ishable as celluloid, when the industry is at best ness, the museum obliges everything that enters, and pitiful buffoons, artists as prostitutes and East, and a myriad of festivals show new films prepared to digitally re-master the cult classics, however banal or precious, to be perceived against artists as pimps, pompous artists and heartless from all over the world—even from “old” Europe and thus falsifies not only the historic record, but a double horizon: that of its unique physical cynics: self-portraits or self-parodies, products —to crowded venues. in the rush for returns, obliterates the material presence, and the special significance attached to of self-loathing or self-idealization? Both, of Yet clearly, a certain cinema is no more: the traces of an otherwise irrecoverable “time past, the fact that its placement (in the here-and-now) course, and neither, and therefore constituting great masters of the European art cinema of stored”, more than ever in urgent need to be re- is also a dis-placement. Every act and every object the clichés of the post-romantic repertoire of art. the post-war period are either dead or fell silent stored, rather than re-packaged. is both itself and its own statement, and thus the And yet: a compilation across some twenty films long ago: Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini; Hitchcock, So, when the cinema enters the museum, museum, as it were, for this reason alone, knows tracing the artist—from introvert boy or “liar” Welles, Bunuel; Fassbinder, Pasolini, Kieslowski, matters are not straightforward. Different actor- the cinema better than the cinema knows itself, or (The Silence, Fanny and Alexander) to the sarcastic, and now Antonioni and Bergman have passed agents, power-relations and policy agendas, rather: the museum forces the cinema to be itself, but worldly-wise church painter Albertus Pic- away. Only in France do Alain Resnais, Eric different competences, egos and sensibilities, by becoming more like itself. tor (in The Seventh Seal) via the aspiring young Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Marie Straub and different elements of the complex puzzle that is One can summarize these turns or acts of dis- dramatist and his burnt-out writer-father (in Jean-Luc Godard still occasionally make films, the contemporary art world and its commercial placement under a more general heading, by Through A Glass Darkly), the homicidal-suicidal yet they are among the ones most eloquently counterpart come into play. Other considerations claiming that the museum arrests and suspends Johan (in Hour of the Wolf) and the serene actress melancholy about the “death” of cinema. are also pertinent: for today’s practicing artists, the moving image—in both senses of these Emilie Ekdahl (Fanny and Alexander), playing Should one revive this heroic past, not just photography, film, video, the digital media words: with respect to motion and stillness, the her role as mother and grandmother just as at retrospectives in cinematheques­ and within are the paint, pencil, clay or bronze of their moment and motility, and in the legal sense of professionally as she once did Hedda Gabler or university film courses? Open the fine arts predecessors—in other words, their primary suspending a license, an agreement, of suspend- Ophelia—would both confound any sense of museums? No contemporary exhibition can do materials and natural tools of the trade. And like ing someone in his functions or even of giving Bergman’s artists journeying to eventual “ma- without the moving image, either in the form artists before them, they consider these predeces- someone a suspended sentence. If the museum turity”, and confirm that the director’s view of of video and installation art, or serving as edu- sors fair game: to appropriate, re-use, parody, rescues the cinema, it does so at the price of the artist never changed. As the ready-mades of cational-informative support; so why not make plunder, plagiarize or pay homage to. Such is taking it, as it were, into protective custody. In bourgeois anti-bourgeois revolt, these “portraits museums the permanent home of cinema? Some especially the case for the cinematic heritage, short, it is a holding operation and an ambigu- of the artist” hold in suspense and arrest the cinephiles will say that this is how it should which belongs to everyone. If Surrealism, Dada, ous one at that. common trope of Bergman baring his soul, and be. Cinema, which finally came of age as the art Pop art and Fluxus have demonstrated how to What, then, in the case of Bergman’s cinema, Bergman as he bares his soul, sharply observing form of the 20th century, has earned the right recycle the materials and commodities of the would be the particular forms of arrest, suspen- everyone’s reaction. to enter into the traditional temple of the arts. first industrial age as found objects, ready-mades sion, and displacement—understood, in a pre- The “death of cinema” actually makes it easier. and junk, to be dis-placed and re-coded as both liminary sense, as synonyms for stripping of con- The Work: Fragment and Totality We now know who the masters are and which art and anti-art, then moving images of the first text, for abstracting from the commodity-form, Bergman has left an oeuvre of such extraordinary are the canonical masterpieces. We can begin to hundred years of cinema, as they enter the muse- and for subtracting from film culture? The move depth and epic proportions, so consistent in its study them afresh, with the eyes of art historians um, are necessarily also found footage, whatever to the museum would, for instance, subtracts recurring motifs and repeated deployment of or “image-anthropologists”. The archive and their provenance: anonymous or authored, from from Bergman’s cinema not only narrative and key actors, yet so diverse in mood, tone, as well as the museum can and must take over from the a well-known classic or a home movie. anecdote, but also psychology (and thus drama): setting, that any ambition other than a complete film studio, the distributor and the exhibitor, to the very life-blood of his films, one might say. retrospective would seem a strangely perverse save, restore, preserve and valorize: as art-works The Film Historian as Curator? Put differently, Bergman’s cinema enters the act of homage. Indeed, rather than showing as well as heritage and cultural patrimony. Not With these considerations in mind, I want to intro- museum not as a story-telling medium, nor as individual films, according to period or genre, unlike in previous periods of civilization, when duce an initiative that a group of scholars and stu- a collection of personal themes and obsessions preference or popularity, 24-hour Bergman might the (primary economic) use-value of an object is dents in Stockholm, Yale and Amsterdam under- (such as childhood and family, the marital couple, be the best way to use the museum’s modulated exhausted, a film, after its commercial run has took, in order to bring Bergman to the attention religion or art), but as its own double, arresting but not strictly segmented time regime, in ended, can enter into different cycles of the value of the art world in a new kind of encounter and the medium, its history and specificity, in an order to test the fine line between homage and chain, moving from “commerce” to “culture” event. First of all, the teams I assembled, whatever extended moment or enduring snapshot, and sacrilege. Re-thinking the technical processes and “art”. It can become part of a collection, their background or ambitions as filmmakers or thereby exposing, once more, the cinema’s own of montage, assemblage and collage, we tried to acquire aesthetic status as a unique artifact, or installation artists, are working on this project as archaeology and ontology. Respecting the limi- examine their different meanings in the cinema attain the aura of a personal work, thanks to the film historians and media theorists, and despite nality and conditions of possibility discussed and in modern art. Surprisingly enough, as we auteur’s stylistic signature. Others will argue that the fact that both cinema and museum are in flux, above, the different thresholds to be negotiated looked for extracts and scenes, our renewed these very moves constitute an act of betrayal, or the protocols to be observed in each case are no could be grouped under the following catego- attention to moment and instant, to interval even theft. The cinema was made for the people, less strict. Thus, one of the important features of ries: ready-mades and fragments, reflexivity as and intermittence, to seriality and succession, to and belongs to the people; films are products the museum today is not so much what it lets in, archaeology and reflexivity as ontology, mini- random distraction and free association, became of an industry and their commodity-status is as the thresholds, limits and conditions of pos- malist relationality and the dispositifs of mutual of immense value for looking closer at the filmsand an essential part of their historical meaning. As sibility it—(visibly and invisibly—(im)poses. Such interference. for appreciating their many levels of interlacing

2 site • 24.2008

� Persona Copyright 1966 AB Svensk Filmindustri

internal architectures. Yet the experience of of pioneers and entrepreneurs of spectacle and with minimal variation, but becoming ever more cadences with which his actors (de)live(r) their selecting and putting together these extracts has vision machines, and they want to emphasize intense. A thought to make one dream, but one lines, to give illusions of familiarity and intimacy, proved another point, and produced another the element of craft, the practical skills and that needs a screen as big as a Tintoretto altar- possibly more to non-Swedish ears. We have surprise. Bergman is like an earthworm: wher- sheer technical know-how that goes with being piece, or Holbein’s The Ambassadors. chosen “Skin and Stone”, “Cries and Whispers” ever you cut him, and into however many pieces a filmmaker. But they also emphasize what (Bergman himself obliges with the title) and he is chopped, each fragment is viable, and in the the museum tends to exclude: the white (and Dispositifs of Mutual Interference “Mind and Brain” to highlight ways in which that end, makes itself whole again. occasionally black) magic of entertainment and Perhaps the most challenging assumption to heightened awareness of the body in the museum showmanship, professing Bergman’s affinity come under scrutiny, when a filmmaker like might benefit one’s attentiveness to Bergman’s Reflexivity as Ontology with the “low arts” practiced by the performers, Bergman enters the museum, is the cinema’s re- special genius as a filmmaker. What cinema shares with the fine arts, and in par- strolling players, manipulators and tricksters lation to the body, and especially its engagement ticular with painting, is a common conception of who people his films and whose lives of hard with the senses other than vision. Traditionally, Threshold, Transgression, Potential Presence vision, inherited from Renaissance perspective: work—despite the ironic or sarcastic tone—he the cinema has been regarded as the triumph We do not want to minimize the transgressive that a rectangle of color and light, framed against seems to salute for their popular touch, as much of the disembodied gaze. It arose, a little over nature of what we are proposing. A filmmaker a wall, can connote an “open window on the as he recognizes their bodily appetites (The a hundred years ago, when there was no aerial has the right to the integrity of his oeuvre, world”. In the face of such an inherently improb- Seventh Seal, Sawdust and Tinsel, The Rite). transport via planes, no private motorcars, this being usually defined by the autonomy of able, but deeply held idea (and the sweeping Perhaps the most important function of these and the only available mechanized means of his individual films as coherent and complete changes that the digital media are rapidly bring- magic lanterns, puppet-theatres, mechanical transportation was the railway. Well into the works, to be shown exactly as intended. We ing to such assumptions), some of the differences toys and illusionist contraptions, for our present 20th century, then, cinema was a mobile eye: have no disagreement with such a position. Our often noted between cinema and museum, such as project at least, is that they are a useful reminder an organ to see and to explore the world with, argument is as simple as might appear simple- mobile spectator/fixed image, versus fixed specta- of an alternative genealogy for the cinema itself, an eye no longer tied to the body. It could roam minded. We do believe that there lie hidden in tor/moving image, diminish in consequence. A not dependent on (bourgeois, museum-friendly) freely, make itself invisible, and penetrate into Bergman’s films certain layers of potential (not compilation that concentrates on Bergman’s use Renaissance perspective and the conceit of the places that were either forbidden, barred or meaning, but) presence that can be actualized and of windows—especially when combined with window on the world. Instead—while also de- physically out of reach. The disembodied eye was literally brought to the films’ sensory surface, mirrors, frames and doorways—can bring out the rived from the camera obscura—they lead via 18th celebrated as a potent intimation of power and when making the dispositifs of cinema and painterly composition of many of his scenes, and century phantasmagorias, “Pepper’s Ghost”, fog omniscience. Voyeurism, that primary motive of museum less converge with each other, than lead to productive comparisons between theatri- pictures, stereoscopy, apparition photographs assisted vision, is also intimately connected with mutually interfere with each other, as they do cal staging in depth, pictorial conventions of mul- and spiritist séances, to the wilder shores of a form of disembodiment: who could resist the in the form of installations and compilations. tiple planes of action, and cinematic deep space. the special effects of today, to 3-D graphics and idea of not having to take responsibility for one’s The encounter becomes an event, precisely to But it also shows how restrictive and conventional the immersive spectacles promised by the new bodily presence in a given space or at a given the degree that the tensions can still be felt, and the window as master trope of human vision media, not bounded by the picture frame, nor time, while still enjoying its intimacy? By con- the seemingly incompatible properties of each actually is, and how adversely it can affect human predicated on the calibrated parameters of trast, visiting the museum, we are inescapably medium oblige curators to make choices rather interchange and communication. More generally, distance and proximity typical of painting and present with our bodies, indeed this is the special than to compromise. Without wishing to claim the idea of the cinema as a window on the world museum display, they instead envelop us in the pleasure and privilege of being in a museum: that somehow this reveals, say, the “optical un- is also known as the realist ontology, itself one of permanent, ambient ether of fantasy. sharing the same space with a unique work of conscious” of a director’s work, or even assume the key definitions of “what is cinema”, and thus art, experiencing the tactility and vibrancy of that we have been able to distil Bergman’s ars an affirmation of its specificity as an art form. Minimalism as Relational Aesthetics paint, feeling the urge to touch the curves or poetica, it does, we believe, teach us something That Bergman cites the window so often is a sign There would seem to be little that is minimalist surfaces of a sculpture. about the cinema—after the death of cinema. For of his classicism, and yet—as a montage of similar about Bergman’s work, all on the side of baroque Framed within these expectations, Bergman’s besides giving a new generation the opportunity scenes readily proves—much more happens when exuberance, or haunted by an equally baroque films are especially responsive. Not only was he to learn to look at films closely (that is, with all one focuses on his half-open or half-closed doors, melancholia and sense of memento-mori. Here, a master in teasing out tactile sensations from their senses) by doing the kind of patient, labor- his full-length or hand-held mirrors, the mo- too, the limits and constraints of the museum black-and-white photography, and able to flood intensive and time-consuming work that such ments of a character crossing the threshold from can lead to new discoveries and a re-appraisal. the screen with saturated color—just think of compilations and installations require, this—in one space into another, or when peering into one As part of the subtractive turn, the compilation the almost unbearably intense reds in Cries and every sense, labor of love—in the idiom of today space through the doorway of another. Repeti- format divests the cinema of narrative telos, and Whispers. One of the paradoxical effects of the (sampling, compiling, appropriating, re-mixing) tion here creates a degree of reflexivity, also with generates instead a different kind of linearity, digital image having become the norm is that constitutes both a new form of cinephilia and a regards to spectatorship: it re-asserts the cinema’s based on repetition, where a concatenation of film scholars, too, have been paying more at- new hermeneutics of close reading. unique architecture of looks, in rooms that often moments, taken from their context, can be re- tention to embodied forms of vision. They now Finally, beyond these pedagogical uses, impor- simulate the domestic interiors of bourgeois life, inserted into a different scheme: the more obvi- speak of the skin of the film (the way that Roland tant though they may be for museums as much while threatening at any moment to collapse into ous and simple the rules, the more enig­matic Barthes spoke of the grain of the voice), noting as for film scholars, the exercise does allow new a claustrophobic hall of mirrors, doubling up on the content can become. But also: the more a new materiality in video and digital media, questions to emerge and thus helps us ask afresh themselves, and giving the spectator no place minimal the perceptual perturbations, the more which leads to a more haptic mode of perception the question of “what is cinema?”, as it enters/ from which to retain a firm footing, nor to sustain demands are made on the spectator to experi- and reception on the side of the viewer. If com- when it enters that public space of reflexivity, by the illusion that she might be safely on the out- ence a work, in the productive act of giving pared to the cinema’s disembodied look, the gal- which I have defined the museum. Our hope for side, merely looking in. meaning to perception itself. As gallery artists lery’s default value is embodied perception, then Ingmar Bergman’s 90th birthday is that around increasingly rely on works in series, mimetically all manner of aesthetic parameters—I am think- his work, the avant-garde, the archive and the Reflexivity as Archaeology or intuitively reproducing the defilé of cinema, ing of relations of size, scale, and detail—call for academy might collectively and in mutual inter- Bending to the time-constraints and spatial ar- they also impose the severest of self-restrictions: re-investigation and a deeper understanding. dependence—and even mutual interference— rangements of the museum as white cube rather minute variations, almost imperceptible to the A further negotiated disruption or transgres- preserve and present what we still have every than black box also produces another kind of untrained eye, challenge the notion of the dis- sion is implied by the entry of sound, and of reason to call, without historical qualifications reflexivity. The invention of new forms, such as crete image, while nonetheless eschewing move- sound-spaces into the museum, traditionally a or technical specifications, the cinema.• short films, montage-sequences, and above all ment, thereby focusing attention on the rule site of silence and stillness in both senses of the loops and Moebius strips, allowing for repetition for generating the work, while highlighting the word. Here too, Bergman can be seen to have been within duration, turns out to be the re-invention, rule’s inability by itself to structure the viewer’s at the forefront of developments he may not have Thomas Elsaesser is Emeritus Professor of as meta-cinema, of early film-forms, from the experience. What would it mean, we wondered, intended nor even condoned. His carefully com- Film and Television Studies at the Univer- time of cinema’s origins: museum reflexivity to have Bergman restrict himself to one tonality, posed sound, usually integra­ted into narrative sity of Amsterdam and since 2005 Visiting becomes media archaeology. Signaled clearly in one face, one gesture—the way, say, Jasper Johns and fictional space, can—isolated in the museum Professor at Yale University. His most recent the title of his autobiography The Magic Lantern, in the late 1950s painted only in shades of grey— and concatenated in the form of a compilation- books include Terror und Trauma (2007; Bergman makes frequent allusions in his films to but to do so, ad infinitum? Ten minutes of Liv montage—be appreciated for the special way English edition forthcoming); Filmtheorie: pre- and proto-cinematic devices (The Magician, Ullmann’s face, for instance, from all the films it affects the spectator bodily, touches the skin, zur Einführung (2007, with Malte Hagener; Persona, Fanny and Alexander). They serve several she made with Bergman, or Max von Sydow, grates on one’s (mental) epidermis, or brings on a English edition and Italian translation functions: they inscribe him into a genealogy looking straight at the camera, from film to film, shiver of pleasure, anticipating the richly musical forthcoming) and Hollywood Heute (2008).

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“Post Cinema?” Movies, Museums, Mutations

Volker Pantenburg

i. Expand / Resist I would like to discuss two opposing approaches of the art scene, it becomes possible, not to say that gallery-goers are often forced to bring to Two years ago, the independent section of the to negotiate the differences and deal with the con- necessary, to redefine the cinema beyond the exhibitions showing video and installation art. Berlin Film Festival, Berlinale (International flicts that appear whenever moving images are experimental conditions which governed it in Yang Fudong’s 260 minute-piece at the Venice Forum of New Cinema), launched a new initia- exhibited in art spaces, particularly those tradi- the 20th century—that is to say, no longer from biennial in 2007,11 David Claerbout’s Bordeaux tive called Forum expanded. Updating and ter- tionally connected with the cinema as a mode the limited viewpoint of film history, but, at the Piece (2004) that evolves and mutates slowly over minologically modifying the “expanded cinema” of presentation. The first is the comprehensive crossroads of live spectacle and visual art, from a a period of thirteen hours; Douglas Gordon’s movement of the sixties, Forum Expanded tried exhibition Le Mouvement des Images, shown viewpoint expanded to encompass a general his- appropriation of The Searchers that stretches to fathom the possibilities of what one of its throughout the year 2006 at the Centre Pompidou tory of representations.”8 Michaud’s diagnosis John Ford’s classic to the five years that the film curators described as “Showing different films in Paris, curated by Philippe-Alain Michaud.6 is typical: it combines a general reference to the narrates: there are countless examples for instal- differently”.1 Installation work by filmmakers The second proposition was made by Alexander “digital revolution” with the demand for dif- lation work that deliberately overstrains the and other cinema-related artworks were to be Horwath who was responsible for the cinema ferent forms of distribution and presentation. capacities of every visitor and thus entangles her shown at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art program at documenta 12 in Kassel, the world’s In line with notions of “visual culture” and the in an awkward struggle for attention and con- as well as at the Arsenal cinema, which tradition- biggest exhibition of contemporary art that academic habit to speak of images rather than of centration.12 The challenge of being confronted ally hosts the Forum. At the same time, a “black takes place every five years. It is significant that specific image-regimes like cinema, photography with movies that are far too long to be watched box” was installed at the cinema to complement both approaches have been made within art or painting, Michaud opts for a general notion in their entirety can evoke two opposing reac- the two existing conventional movie theaters. contexts rather than within the discourse of the of the image. What is at stake is an assimilation tions: you are either annoyed and frustrated to The aim was an alliance of different spaces and cinema. of cinema to both Mitchell’s “pictorial turn” and glimpse just a short extract of “the whole thing”. different forms of presentation, a combination the “performative turn” of the visual arts. No matter when you leave the installation, you of differing concepts of time and space. ii. Le mouvement des Images, Yet the advantage of matching cinematic ex- will always have the impression that it was the This way of adjusting cinema to a specific Centre Pompidou, 2006 pression with other forms of image production wrong moment. Or else the sheer length of the challenge is one of the various modes of reacting One way of tracing the tensions and various en- has its flipside. One of the potential problems piece makes you abandon the concept of integ- to the contradictory, flexible and yet unclear counters between cinema and museum would revealed itself right from the start when entering rity and you can start to stroll freely without “battle of the images” that Raymond Bellour has be by attempting a historiography of crucial in- the exhibition, which was subdivided into four caring too much about the length. This attitude described and analyzed on numerous occasions stitutions and individual curators, as well as the sections: Unwinding, Projection, Narrative, of flexibility and deciding for oneself is often during the last two decades.2 Depending on your rise of the curator as such. During the last fifteen and Montage. In the Montage section, Len Lye’s associated with a deliverance from the static and set of assumptions and on how you understand to twenty years, the Centre Pompidou has been film Rhythm (to be more precise: its DVD-loop- rigid experience of cinema. the rhetoric of “expansion”, Forum Expanded paramount in developing strategies to exhibit version) was shown face-to-face with Matthias One of the backgrounds for this is the tenden- can be interpreted as a signal of compromise, a and theorize the various transfers between dif- Müller’s Home stories; Fernand Léger’s Ballet cy to privilege the multiple over the single, the sign of defeat or a straightforward attempt to ferent image-systems. More recently, Hitchock mécanique provided a bridge between the two. plural over the singular, the in-between over the not let the art world take over discussions and et l’art. Coincidences fatales (2001), the Godard- No doubt that these examples of repetition central, difference over identity. “The method presentation of cutting-edge film practice. exhibition Voyage(s) en utopie (2006), and the and alternation allowed for a smooth passage of our time is to use not a single but multiple To give an impression of the variety of the field, recent Erice/Kiarostami. Correspondances (2007) between Montage and Narration. Yet to do this, models for exploration”, McLuhan propagated let me just name some of the artists and film- show that the project of the Centre comprises the Len Lye’s film (as most of the works displayed) as early as 1967.13 In a slight but remarkable makers involved in the Forum Expanded section adaptation of classic cinema positions, as well as had to remain silent. Its sound (which in this generalization, the multiplication of screens that has since become an integral part of the a broader perspective of moving images. case really makes up the structural backbone) becomes the multiplication of models and Festival: Michael Snow, Harun Farocki, Morgan 1991’s Passages de l’image, curated by Ray- found itself exiled to ridiculously small speakers. opinions, thus implicitly creating an analogy Fisher, Hollis Frampton, Isabella Rossellini, mond Bellour, Christine Van Assche and Cath- Emphasizing the image-part of cinema at the between multiple screens and the democratic Yvonne Rainer, Sharon Lockhart, Tony Conrad, erine David, is one of the exhibitions that will same time means neglecting or ignoring the model of an emancipated spectator. A dominant Olaf Nicolai, Steven Dwoskin. The list shows retrospectively be remembered as a potential prominence that sound and sound design have interpretation today, mainly expressed by art how parts of the heritage of experimental cine- starting point for a genealogy of canonical exhi- always had, especially as they have become more curators, takes up this idea and isolates it from ma that has recently resurfaced in contemporary bitions. It displayed work by Jeff Wall, Bill Viola, and more important since the seventies. In a its historical context. While the single screen- art spaces try to be “recuperated” by this cinema- Gary Hill, Thierry Kuntzel, amongst others, and broader perspective, this hints at the problem of model of cinema represents an authoritarian based initiative. As luck would have it, Matthew put them into a broader perspective of image “noisebleed” that affects all sorts of sonic instal- model of command and passive reception, the Barney, an emblematic figure for the opposite transfers. In Bellour’s introduction to the cata- lations, with or without moving images.9 The multi-screen model confronts the spectator movement by visual artists who start producing logue, “The Double Helix,” video has the uto- desire to establish a simultaneous interaction with “freedom of choice” both in temporal and blockbuster art-movies, was a member of the pian potential of embodying the “betweenness” between different artworks and to make the visi- spatial respect. It is probably the argument most Berlinale-jury that same year and a documentary that characterizes the field of what Bellour bap- tor part of that interaction involuntarily means often put forth that the viewer of an installation on his Drawing Restraint 9 was shown in one of tised “entre-image”: the intermedia-mixtures, privileging the loudest, or else it forces the cura- is not forced to endure the film in its entirety the other sections of the festival.3 migrating forms between photography, cinema, tor to reestablish the unloved cinema-principle but can enter and leave the black box at his own The year 2006, or, a little more generally, the visual arts and text.7 via the black box. will. Nor is she constricted to sit still in her seat, middle of the present decade, is a good vantage Fifteen years later, Le mouvement des Images The second problem was that the choice of as she can wander through the exhibition space point to inspect the field somewhat clumsily de- looks like a sequel to Passages de l’Image. Some works implied a kind of re-canonization of and modify her spatial relation to the screen. As scribed by the words art and cinema. Even if we changes, however, can be grasped from its title: modern experimental and auteur-cinema. Not Chrissie Iles, curator at the Whitney Museum consider only its latest stage with DVD or video- the specific “passage” has become a generalized a trace of high-concept films, comedies, block- puts it: “The cinema becomes a cocoon, inside based multi-screen projections and “cinemato- “movement,” the idea of a coherent concept of busters, etc., let alone TV-series that have had a which a crowd of relaxed, idle bodies is fixed, graphic installations”4—which means: the time an “Image” has turned into the plurality of major impact on movie aesthetics over the last hypnotized by simulations of reality projected since the “narrative turn” of video art—we are “Images”. Yet the argument remains more or decade. Even more problematic: the exhibition onto a single screen. This model is broken apart looking at a history of nearly two decades that less the same, as curator Philippe-Alain Michaud did not even include one single feature film, when the dark space of cinema is folded into the justifies some historiography.5 Moreover, the last writes in the catalogue: “Nowadays, at the dawn which made the Cahiers du cinéma speculate that white cube of the gallery.”14 And she goes on to few years have seen several interesting and diver- of the 21st century, while we are witnessing a the move from cinema to the museum was only say that “[t]he darkened gallery’s space invites gent suggestions as to how to conceptualize the massive migration of images in motion from possible at the price of making it disappear.10 participation, movement, the sharing of mul- forces at work. Each of these suggestions implies screening rooms to exhibition spaces, a migra- tiple viewpoints, the dismantling of the single a certain ideology of cinema and art, and each tion borne along by the digital revolution and iii. What spectator? frontal screen, and an analytical, distanced form of them is involved in questions of production, prepared by a twofold phenomenon of demate- The privileging of short formats was surely of viewing. The spectator’s attention turns from distribution and the consumption of movies. rialization of works plus a return to theatricality a reaction to the exhaustive time-budgets the illusion on the screen to the surrounding

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� � � � Spectators of Amie Siegel’s installation Berlin Remake Installation view from Le Mouvement Des Images Installation view from Arsenale, Venice Biennale, 2007. The Gloria Kino in Kassel. Venue of the documenta 12 at Musée National d’art Moderne, 2007. Photo: durga_akv (flickr.com) Film programme curated by Alexander Horwat. Copyright Centre Pompidou Photo: VivaUltra (flickr.com)

space, and to the physical mechanisms and prop- iv. Documenta 12, 2007 experience. If you think of films as structural arti- Notes erties of the moving image.”15 Roger Buergel, the artistic director of documenta facts evolving in time and implying a beginning, 1. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus: “Showing different films On the one hand, this may sound like an 12, has hinted at a possible objection to what I middle and end, the supposedly rigorous ar- differently. Cinema as a Result of Cinematic Think- ing” in The Moving Image 4.1. (2004) xii, p. 1–16. accurate account of some of the hopes that would call “emancipation theories” of the mov- rangement of fixed starting times and screening 2. Cf. Raymond Bellour: “La querelle des dispositifs / made artists and experimental filmmakers ing image. In an article from 2001, he associated schedules may rather trigger a certain concentra- The Battle of the Images” in Art Press no 262, Nov. leave the movie theater for gallery spaces in the flexibility of the spectator strolling through tion. In this respect, Portuguese filmmaker Pedro 2000. the seventies. Cinema and its (mostly male) the galleries of the museum with the Foucaul- Costa has recalled a very simple argument: “I’m 3. For an evaluation of Matthew Barneys “Neo-Avant- Garde Blockbusters” see Alexandra Keller and spectator had been criticized both in theoretical dian subject internalizing ideas of power and not a video artist, I am a filmmaker and film is a Frazer Ward: “Matthew Barney and the Paradox and practical respect as passive and lacking control rather than having to deal with imposed construction. Pieces are made to fit together, if of the Neo-Avant-Garde Blockbuster” in Cinema participation. On the other hand, the paradigm power structures. In his account, the museum they don’t the whole thing will collapse, or worse, Journal 45, No. 2, Winter 2006, p. 3–16. of the manipulating and patronizing cinematic is an adequate dispositif for a new form of gov- will lack movement and tension. Every shot or 4. This is Juliane Rebentisch’s term in her book Ästhetik der Installation. Cf. Rebentisch, Ästhetik der apparatus, which had strong polemical force ernmentality: “The ethical concept of redefining scene I do depends on the one that comes before Installation, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2003, pp. in the theories at that time, tends to survive as individual behaviour follows the ethics of neolib- and on the one that will come after.”20 179–207. an ahistorical given in the art critical debates eral politics: individual choice, autonomous act- This insistence on a certain structure and ar- 5. Cf. Söke Dinkla “Virtuelle Narrationen. Von der of the nineties and into the present. This bears ing, governance of your own fate, self-initiative chitecture that relies on notions of “before” and Krise des Erzählens zur neuen Narration als men- tales Möglichkeitsfeld” in medienkunstnetz several ironies: first of all, it does not take into and self-determined living. The museum seems “after”, and of “beginning” and “end” holds true (www.medienkunstnetz.de). account that the question of diverging “view- to be designed to provide this framework.”18 not only for narrative cinema; it is also crucial 6. “Le mouvement des images”, Centre Pompidou, ing positions” has been one of the crucial issues When Buergel and his partner Ruth Noack were to experience films by James Benning, Sharon Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création of film theory in the last decades. Early cinema designated as the directors of documenta 12, Lockhart and a whole tradition of structural industrielle, April 9, 2006 to January 29, 2007. 7. Published in English in Electronic Culture: Technology studies and new film history, feminist and parts of this critique were applied to the concept filmmaking. This brings us back full circle to the and Visual Representation , ed. by Timothy Druckrey, phenomenological film theory have all helped of the exhibition. One of the most obvious—and early seventies, when a constellation of “mixed New York: Apterture 1996. to elaborate historical and analytical frame- provocative—gestures was the one dissociating media”, “expanded cinema” and television 8. Philippe Alain Michaud “The Movement of Images” works to adequately describe the complexities rather than mixing art and cinema. Documenta was already at stake. Horwath’s provocative in Le mouvement des images, Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou 2006, p. 15–29: 16. of different historical spectator-subjects.16 Art 11 in 2002 had included a vast number of black gesture was to show and stress what he called 9. Cf. Tom Holert: “Noisebleed” in Texte zur Kunst 15. critical accounts hardly take this into account boxes, video installations, and multi-screen “normal case of cinema”, a term that might echo Jahrgang Heft 60 (Dezember 2005), p. 146–154. and often promote a simplistic, monolithic projections that presented a challenge to the Raymond Bellour’s description of the “other cin- 10. Cf. Antoine Thirion “Le cinéma transforme le concept of “the specator”. Secondly, the concept visitors’ time management. In clear opposition ema” encountered in the museums and galleries. musée“ in Cahiers du cinéma 611 (april 2006), p. 22. 11. Yang Fudong, Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, of “illusion”, which was so harshly attacked to this, Alexander Horwath, the curator of the It is therefore interesting that Horwath’s ap- Parts I to V (2003 to 2007). in critical accounts from the seventies, has documenta film program, promoted a strong proach resembles ideas of his predecessor in the 12. Cf. Dominique Paini’s concept “Le temps exposé”. recently been reconsidered as a central element concept of cinema. His approach was based on Austrian Film Museum, Peter Kubelka. Interest- 13. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore: The Medium of aesthetic experience. Even the most ordinary a premise that looks anachronistic at first sight. ingly, Kubelka promoted and realized his concept is the Message, New York: Simon and Schuster 1967, p. 68. cinema-going experience depends on a willing Rather than putting forward yet another sug- of an “invisible cinema” stripped down to its 14. Chrissie Iles, “Beween the Still and Moving Image” suspension of disbelief and implies a reflective gestion to mix and blend moving images and central functions of isolating the senses of seeing in Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art, knowledge of the fictional status of the world the gallery space, Horwath preferred keeping and hearing in New York in 1970. His diagnosis 1964–1977, p. 33. displayed on screen. It is therefore no use op- the two presentational practices separated from is structurally similar to the one Bellour and 15. Ibid. 16. Cf. Linda Williams (ed.): Viewing Positions. Ways of posing “illusion” and “reflection” the way it one another. To be more precise, he reactualized Michaud make, yet the consequences he draws are Seeing Film, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP 1994. is often conceptualized in discussions about the historical differences between cinema and the exact opposite: “it is of utmost importance, 17. Cf. Gertrud Koch/Christiane Voss (eds.): ... kraft der installation art vs. cinema.17 In its bluntest museum.19 Even if there were some installations especially now that television exists and that Illusion, München: Fink 2006. version, this ignorance leads to the emphatic sporadically spread throughout the exhibition, expanded cinema and mixed media performances 18. Roger M. Buergel, “Arbeit an den Grenzen des Realen” in Texte zur Kunst, 11. Jahrgang, Heft 43 model of the gallery space as a free, post-ideo- their number was significantly reduced. flourish, to create the proper conditions for clas- (September 2001), p. 66–75: 68 (my translation, VP). logical space that has overcome the restraints So instead of proposing a curatorial, synchro- sical, one screen, one sound-cinema presentation. 19. For more context on this see Horwath’s position of cinema. To me, it seems as if just the oppo- nous “montage” of visual arts and cinemato- This has to crystallize now if it is going to survive. in a panel discussion with Chrissie Iles, Vanessa site might hold true: it would be worth testing graphic practice, Horwath incorporated the whole And this holds true particularly for the conserva- Joan Müller and Marysia Lewandowska: “Does the Museum Fail? Podium Discussion at the 53rd the thought that the black box is part of an setting of cinema into the exhibition without tive film industry. They should throw out the easy International Short Film Festival Oberhausen”, ideological framework similar to the one that adapting or altering its parameters: one screen- chairs and the flambeaux; they should create a Kinomuseum. Towards an Artists’ Cinema, ed. Mike Brian O’Doherty has described for the suppos- ing a day, one specific theater, a little more than decent cinema. In such a movie theater, the situa- Sperlinger and Ian White (Cologne: Walther König, edly neutral “White Cube” in the seventies. fifty programs by ninety four filmmakers/artists. tion will change because the sensual pleasure will 2008): 115–155. 20. Jan van Eyck Video Weekend. “From black box to So rather than opposing museum and gallery In Horwath’s words: “The location of film at be raised incredibly, so that people will again start white cube”—Round Table with Pedro Costa, Cath- presentations to a mythological “standard” documenta 12 is the movie theater. This is a very to go to the cinema.”21 erine David, Chris Dercon (moderator), Saturday, 26 cinema-situation, it might be helpful to align simple answer to the recent debates on how to There is no doubt that there are a lot of forms May 2007. them with the commodification that film adequately present moving images in the context that demand being shown in museums and gal- 21. Peter Kubelka, Interview in the TV-magazine Apro- pos Film (ORF). Helmuth Dimko/Peter Hajek: Peter experience has undergone during the last thirty of art.” Horwath features cinema as “a strong leries: loops, multi-projections, image environ- Kubelka. Das Unsichtbare Kino (Apropos Film, years. Today, as Anne Friedberg has shown, the presentation format and strong social space,” ments or videos projected on objects. These are 13.10.1970). “multiple”, fragmented way of being confronted adding that “[t]his format and this space are based not the forms that Horwath or Kubelka’s critique with several windows and image frames, is on the physical and technical characteristics of aims at. Their point is that the supposed “post something familiar to us from computers, televi- the medium. They allow film to be perceived on cinema” condition sensitizes us for the capacities sion and our everyday life. And where else than a specific level of intensity to which it owes its of the “normal case of cinema”. So when blend- at home with my DVD-player or computer could historical success.” ing, mixing and difference have become the Volker Pantenburg is a Berlin based film I be more in charge of deciding autonomously This is not the place to elaborate Horwaths museum’s norm and the strolling spectator its theorist and researcher, currently engaged what to see and for how long? different arguments that went hand in hand commonplace protagonist, it might be interest- in a project about post-cinema at Freie It was along these lines that last summer’s with documenta 12’s critique of the art market ing to reconsider the varieties of aesthetic experi- Universität Berlin.Author of Film als Theorie. documenta 12 decided to follow a different path in proposing cinematic experience as a mode of ence within the paradigm of classical cinema.• Bildforschung bei Harun Farocki und Jean-Luc and advocate the traditional movie theater as a aesthetic experience that resists commodification. Godard (2006), co-editor of 93 Minutentexte. strong form of presentation. What I want to stress, however, is the emphasis on This text was originally presented at the The Night of the Hunter (together with the specific structure of movies and of cinematic SCMS-conference, Philadelphia, March 2008. Michael Baute, 2006).

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tion to a certain place and time, and to the people her continuous arguing with her sister and her an army of technicians, assistants, actors, etc, who inhabit it, live in it: all of these are charac- sickly coughing attacks, the hard, long-haired, in order to transform a place into the scene for teristics which together make In Vanda’s room and androgynous Vanda appears as an almost a film during a short, intensive period. Instead, a unique work. The film constitutes a portrait stoic character, an indomitable figure who is Costa strove to adjust himself to the rhythm of Man with of the slum of Fontainhas on the outskirts of subjected to her conditions yet at the same time the place, the neighborhood, attempting to work Lisbon, of its inhabitants and specifically of the can consider them with a distanced, even critical when others worked, eat when others ate, to two sisters Vanda and Zita Duarte, who spend calm. The intimacy of this portrait is also due spend the amount of time in the place necessary the Mini-DV most of their time smoking heroin in Vanda’s to the physical tangibility of the images and the to create an image of its reality. The distance room. Through the intimate filming of these sounds of Vanda, of her sister, of their heroin, between the seven, ten, or twelve weeks of hys- people over a period of two years, Costa creates their lighters, the flame, the tin foil, the inhala- terical expenses and frenetic work of traditional Camera an image of a world of outcasts and immigrants, tion, their room, the very air. The digital camera fictional film production, and In Vanda’s room, of poverty, drugs, misery, and desperation. eye registers Vanda’s room with an attention where shooting consisted of two years of slow, The dimension of realism and social critique is that is, if not inhuman, then beyond the human, methodic, laborious attention, is not just a dif- highly present and active in Costa’s film, and he more human than human. ference in time and money, it is a measure of the takes his place in a tradition of filmmakers and “In Vanda’s room comes a lot from music, radicality of the cinematographic model Costa photographers for whom the image of reality, that is, from this profound belief in an energy creates: In Vanda’s room points out a possible the image that reveals the conditions of exis- according to which, for me, when I was 20, Sex path for a future film art which claims its place Kim West tence of the poor, is a political instrument, from Pistols and Wire were as important as Straub and in a large film-historical tradition and retains Jacob Riis and Walker Evans to John Grierson Godard, or Ford and Tourneur, the classics.”2 the highest of artistic ambitions, while attaining and the Groupe Medvedkine. But Costa does not What is perhaps the least evident and the most a significant independence from a heavy and One of the first sequences in Pedro Costa’s 2h 51 only show la misère du monde. Without diminish- telling in Costa’s discussion about his influences conservative production system. min In Vanda’s room (2000) accounts for a number ing the gravity of the social situation, In Vanda’s and references in the long interview—and With all its punk references, its undermining of the film’s characteristic traits. The fixed frame room is also the portrait of a group of people, a what places him at a safe distance from the “art of narrative conventions and genre codes, and its shows people in a run-down, dilapidated room. population that, since it lacks access to riches film” à la Kieslowski, with its obligatory noble dismissal of traditional models of production, The light in the room comes from an open door and reasonable means of life, is forced to design soundtrack—is his relation to punk rock, to In Vanda’s room finally remains above all a real- and a window in the wall facing the camera, two another existence in the margins of the normal Wire and The Clash, to John Lydon’s Sex Pistols istic portrait of a place, a time, certain people; a bodies are outlined in direct light. The sequence, world, outside of the social order’s securities, and Public Image Limited (and one can note relentlessly honest depiction of a slum and its like the film as a whole, is shot in digital video, rules, responsibilities, laws. It is a portrait of that the English title of Costa’s latest film, from everyday life, of a Lisbon suburb and its social, and the conditions of light in the space force the people who should be disconsolate, who should 2006, also shot on digital video in Fontainhas, political situation. In the film everything else technology to reveal its proper qualities and be victims of their miserable life conditions, but is borrowed from Young Marble Giants’ 1980 is secondary to this realistic portrait. In Vanda’s limitations: colors are flat, contrasts are sharp who, in their misery, in their drug addiction and debut album, Colossal Youth). Costa discusses room tells no clear story, but lets the spectator around the sources of the strong light, pixels dissolution, at the same time defy these condi- this in terms of the relation to a place, a room. follow Fontainhas and some of its inhabitants flicker where the image resolution cannot tions and design a different, dignified existence, Punk rock, he says, is energy, adolescence, the during a specific period of time. The only devel- master the nuances, etc. In the beginning of the with a sort of alternative, dark pride. outgrown boy’s or girl’s room and the desire opment which runs through the extension of the sequence two people are located to the left in the film is the gradual destruction of the dilapidated room, one man is in the process of showering dwellings in Vanda’s neighborhood, which by � another with a hose. When the naked man has Young Marble Giants, the inhabitants is met, not with protests, but rubbed himself in the hot water he moves to the Colossal Youth, rather with an oblique antipathy, a sort of inert other side of the room, but slips and falls to the Rough Trade,1980 calm: they do not seem to oppose that their ground among buckets and trash, then regains homes are being demolished and that they are his balance in an abrupt and peculiar choreog- being relocated, but they persist in trying to save raphy. The tense body fumes with steam in the their broken furniture, their shoddy tables, their direct light. The beauty of the composition is rubble from the ravishes of the bulldozers, their blinding, without being artificial and painterly. resignation at the same time conferring value, It does not aestheticize; it reinforces the impres- significance, a certain pride upon that which by sion of the reality—the events, the time, the all standards should be considered worthless.• place—that the image registers: the fragility and the materiality of a body when it is confronted Pedro Costa, Dans la chambre de Vanda with external elements, when it is showered DVD in Portuguese with French subtitles in heated water, when it hits and braces itself Book by Pedro Costa, Cyril Neyrat, Andy against walls and floor in a tenement in a slum Rector. Capricci, collection “Que fabriquent outside of Lisbon. les cinéastes”, 2008 The sequence also shows something else. The camera registers a reality that takes place before Notes its eye, within its frame. The images are “docu- 1. Cf. Jacques Rancière, “La fiction documentaire: Marker mentary”. However, the sequence is not filmed in et la fiction de mémoire”, in La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), p. 202. one shot. We see the man who is being showered 2. Pedro Costa, Dans la chambre de Vanda. Conversation avec with a hose. At the same time as this man washes Pedro Costa (Nantes: Capricci, 2008), 10f. himself another man stands by the window to 3. Ibid, 108. the right in the room manipulating a tool. In the sequence this is demonstrated by a cut to a close- The book—not the booklet, the book—that ac- for a destruction of all orders. This unreasonable up of the man by the window, followed by a cut companies the recently published, extraordinary politics, which despite its naivety and romanti- to a wider shot of the room, where we see the French DVD edition of In Vanda’s room consists cism gives rise to something different, to other naked man move, slip, etc. The scene must have mainly of a long conversation between the direc- forms/forces, is what Costa finds in punk rock been filmed in at least three shots. The “docu- tor and the editor, the film critic Cyril Neyrat. and then finds again in Vanda’s room, in the form mentary” images, therefore, have been obtained In the 200-page interview Costa discusses a of a self-destructing and all-consuming desire through a recording technique traditionally as- series of his influences. Among the names that for drugs which is at the same time a refusal, an The sociated with fictional film, with repetitions and figure one finds apparent predecessors such as act of resistance against the dreams and fantasies different camera positions and angles. And they Huillet-Straub, whose programmatic idea about of established culture. The fundamental tone of are edited analytically, interconnected according the director’s absolute responsibility and duty Costa’s film is a mix of the aggression of punk Possibility to a classical narrative model, established at towards a place’s visual and sonoric qualities rock and a melancholic indifference: it shows least since Griffith, where the plot is propelled directly informs Costa’s work in Fontainhas a world that is almost completely deprived of forward through an interplay between close-ups (although the disciple is unruly and ameliorates sexual desires. of a World and long shots. Yet what Costa’s film does is not the soundtrack in postproduction). The origin The punk aesthetic is also present in In Vanda’s simply disrupt the borders between the “docu- of the film, Costa explains, was simply his love room in a more concrete, direct fashion. “It’s a mentary” and the “fictional film”. What it does is for this place and these people, which he got to film made with video cassettes, many packages rather reveal the insufficiency of the distinction know during the shooting of his previous film, of cigarettes, and a bouquet of flowers”, Costa between them. In a text about Chris Marker’s the more classically shot and edited Bones (1997). explains, which is of course an exaggeration, but The Last Bolshevik, Jacques Rancière points out In this sense In Vanda’s room is an advanced and probably not that far from the truth.3 During that the documentary film and the fictional film serious attempt at creating a cinematography most of the shooting of In Vanda’s room, the film Alexandre and are not each other’s opposites. On the contrary, for our historical, ideological and technological team consisted of one person: Pedro Costa. With he argues, the documentary film represents situation, an attempt to inscribe a political and his Panasonic DVX 100 mini-DV camera, it was Daniel Costanzo the highest possibility of the fictional film: its social reality onto the support of a contemporary he himself who took care of the camera work, possibility to liberate itself from what one erro- media technology with its specific qualities and sound recording, lights (with a found mirror and neously takes to be its task—the production limitations. Costa shows that there is a future for homemade reflectors, no lamps) and directing. of illusions—and instead to concentrate properly the dream of an ambitious film art created with During a later part of the shooting he was aided One year ago the publication of the DVD edi- on its essence: to assemble the images of reality cheap and readily available technology, that the by a sound engineer and for postproduction he tion of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s into stories, to “cut a story into sequences”, light, mobile, yet aesthetically difficult to master was able to raise money for a professional editor collected works began in France, two volumes “to connect and to separate voices and bodies, digital video can in fact be used to create a radi- (Dominique Auvray, who worked on a number of of which are available today. Everyone who has sounds and images, to stretch or to compress cally different cinema. Duras’ late 70s films: Le Camion, Le Navire Night, not had the opportunity to see their remarkable time”.1 Costa’s film is an example of the richness Costa also mentions other less apparent but etc), sound mix, etc. But the production costs work now has the chance to discover it. It is of possibilities that is to be found in such a con- at closer inspection evident references, such as were minimal—according to the standards of the without a doubt the most overwhelming body ception of “documentary fiction”. Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. Even though film world probably even inexistent—and essen- of work since the 1960s, within which there has The fixed frame; the intimate room with its the distance between Fontainhas and the Factory tially it is a film made by a man with a video never been renouncement nor betrayal. external sources of light; the fragility, material- may seem vast, there are clear analogies between camera and a local population of collaborators/ A boy refuses to go to school because they ity, and resistance of the human body; the acute Warhol’s patient fascination for his protagonist, actors/protagonists. Costa speaks of this Do-It- only teach him things he does not know, and awareness of the qualities and the limitations for how she hangs about, passes time, dwells in a Yourself aesthetic as a process of “devaloriza- he himself ascertains how to use power against of the mechanical camera eye and the thorough space in a film such as Kitchen, and Costa’s long, tion” of the artistic work. That is, it was an the establishment: learning through repeating, exploitation of the technology’s possibilities; the meticulous shots detailing Vanda’s destructive attempt to liberate himself from the idea of film this will be the principle of his power, his line way the shooting and the narrative structure un- existence in her dimly lit bedroom with its green, production and shooting according to which of flight and his path towards emancipation dermine the distinction between documentary soiled walls. In all her misery, in her compulsive the director shows up from another world with (En rachâchant). A young woman refuses to marry and fiction; the passionate devotion and atten- scraping for leftovers from yesterday’s heroin, in trucks filled with electronics, equipment and a German during the Prussian occupation of

6 site • 24.2008

Lorraine, saying that all she knows is that she phili, and it takes place on the terraces of Mount In sum, thwarting the sensible space is about However, all of this Jean-Marie Straub himself cannot become German (Lothringen!). A stranger Palatin, where the remains of the palaces of the awakening meanings and attention. The appara- has formulated in an exemplary fashion: drives the streets of Rome, searching for a ancient Rome they invoke sit. And between the tus Huillet and Straub construct aims, in the banker, among others, and history lessons. Inside two sites there are the popular habitations, the sensible operation of an “and” and a “with” the But the spoken text, the words, are no more of him an anger grows progressively as he gains people—a “people that is missing” we would say division, to destroy the order of signification in important than the different rhythms and knowledge about the reality of the world—what with Deleuze, but by which we understand the order to hollow out something else inside it. It timing of the actors, with their accents […]; he previously did not see—and the streets of noise which rises like a mute mumbling. The is quite simply a question of learning to see and no more important than their particular Rome therefore trace the contemporary contours lines from Corneille and the dressed-up bodies hear. To see, for example, the class struggle out- voices, seized in the instant and which and murmurs of one and the same story, that of of the protagonists are confronted with the noise lining itself in the meeting between the words struggle against the noise, the air, the space, the class struggle (Leçons d’Histoire). A woman of circulating cars and the mumbling of the from above and the noise of the circulation from the sun and the wind; no more important defends herself before the Choir of Citizens and contemporary city. And these three temporali- below. They destroy the signification on which than their involuntary sighs or than all the the madness of Creon’s power, irreconcilable, ties are entangled, shattering the order of the the order of the world rests. That is to say, they other surprises of life registered at the same and gives her life in fidelity to the dead, the representation, against the background of the destroy this world in order to render something time, as particular noises which suddenly justice of the Gods, and a certain idea of man buzzing of the “here and now”. The temporality else sensible, and they tell us something like: acquire a meaning; no more important than (Antigone). Infuriated men scream and, from the of the piece itself, the temporality of the ruins begin by seeing and by hearing what there is the effort, the work the actors do, and the bottom of their hole, revolt against the world in which bodies circulate and speak among an before your eyes and your ears. Because that risks they run, as tightrope walkers, from which humiliates them and against the feeble abundance of light and sounds, among the which is, is simply the words and the things, the one end to the other of long fragments of a enchantresses of the present that shatter their traffic of automobiles, the song of the cicadas words and the noises, noises which have as much difficult text; no more important than the ways of life (Umiliati). and the lapping of the water of a fountain, the importance as the meaning of the words. And frame in which the actors are enclosed; or There is one principle that determines the sparkles of light and the howling of the wind. these noises tell us that there is a suppressed than their movements or their positions work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. In short, the filmed scene holds together all class struggle, which appears as it can—it is inside this frame, or than the background in It can be stated, with Serge Daney, as follows: these contradictions as something natural, there, suspended in a “maybe”. These noises tell front of which they find themselves; or than if there is no revolt, it does not exist. In other which produces the affect of a strangeness that us above all that there is something else than the the changes and the shifts of light and color; words, only that which revolts exists—the can be grasped along Brechtian lines: times din and the intestinal passions of the great and no more important than cuts, image chang- places, the gestures, the words, the bodies, the coexist in an unresolved unrest and the lines of the less great of this world; there is the earth, the es, shots. If one keeps one’s eyes and ears reality of a revolt deciding another relation to verse and the bodies are equally confronted with wind, insects and light, there is everything that open for all of this at each instant, one could the world—and it is this buried or vanished the materiality and the veracity of things, of the is with us, and this too has been suppressed. And even find the film captivating, and remark breach, which appears here and there, that they ruins, the wind, the light, the noises. What de- these noises tell us, finally, that emancipation that everything here is information—even give themselves the task of making visible and fines the style of the Straubs is this singular tem- begins there, somewhere with them, in this ca- the purely sensual reality of the space, which audible. A breach which one finds in the encoun- porality that merges with a topic, a temporality pacity to see and to hear: to pay attention to what the actors leave empty at the end of each ter between a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé and marked with patience: the patience of the shot. one sees and what one hears, and consequently act: how wonderful it would be without the the distant mumbling of the dead of the Paris What was necessary was time, to take time to see, to what one says and what one wants to say, what tragedy of cynicism, oppression, imperial- Commune (Toute révolution est un coup de dés), in to hear and to feel the things and the world. one does and wants to do. That is where politics ism, exploitation—the world; liberate it! a woman who is faithful to her experiences, a Moreover, the alexandrines are pronounced by begins, in assuming a point of view and not in boy that refuses and resists the reasonable order In these few words, these two sentences, Straub of the world, a community that sees its work, its summarizes the political, ethical and aesthetic � pains and its joys humiliated by the chanting Danièle principles of the work, and he proceeds from of principles foreign to them... A clenching fist, Huillet and the litany of a “no more important”. “No more downcast eyes, a raging gaze, in this interval Jean-Marie important”, that would be the formula: the lines the injunction of this work is that of power, and Straub, En from Corneille are no more important than the rachâchant, there is no other power than that of learning to 1982 bodies and the voices of those who speak them, open one’s eyes to see and one’s ears to hear, and their sighs and their accents, their gestures or this makes it possible to assert something like even the shots, the space, the places, the light, the the possibility of a world. air or the insects. “No more important”, which means that everything is important, everything Let us look closer at one film in particular: there is, in a very concrete fashion: the effort of Othon (1969). It is a film that Danièle Huillet the actors, the shots, the noises… In other words, said many years ago was particularly close to her it is about paying attention to everything, there heart, assuming a purified violence. The film is no other power, and this is where emancipa- opens with a view of Rome. After a few moments tion begins: in an attention directed towards the the camera begins a panoramic movement to the things and life, it begins there and it can con- left, allowing housing constructions to appear, tinue through the violence of a revolt, starting soon replaced with trees and ruins. There the from the moment when it becomes a question camera encounters a vertical in the form of a of sweeping away the specters, of liberating an fractured wall, which enforces a new movement. earth from cynicism and oppression—an earth The camera ascends to follow the upper edge of which could then keep its promises. “The world this obstacle, and we discover a tree on top of a is habitable”, that is the idea of the Straubs, of hill. Uniting with the curves of this landscape as actors with different accents and the language is understanding too well what one sees and what the gaze directed towards the things, and it it follows its ascension towards the treetop, the itself declined with a rapidity which neutralizes one does not see, rather in hearing and seeing intervenes in the floating interval of the splitting camera then descends to its left where one dis- the literality and morphs into a monotonous badly now in order to hear and to see better later. of the perception that combines with a “maybe”, covers cliffs and the ruins on the hill. Then the language, as if the meanings of the words were This is how this takes place, starting from the or in this space left for reflection in the patience camera zooms in towards these cliffs and ruins, equally important as the conventional lyricism first shots of the film, which opens in the un- of the shot. finally approaching a hole and disappearing into of the lines, words which are above all the busi- resolved unrest of noise, of the strangeness of There is thus something like a breach, a hole the darkness, which becomes the paradoxical ness of the leaders of this world among them- these costumes, of these alexandrines and these between the words and the things where one is background for the title: Les yeux ne veulent pas selves, words which struggle against all there voices with foreign accents. The film confronts borne out by the Two. A hole which sends us back en tout temps se fermer, or Peut-être qu’un jour Rome is: the wind, the light, the cicadas and the noise the lines of Corneille and the costumed bodies to the cave with which the film opened, at the se permettra de choisir à son tour [“The eyes do not of the cars. The result is that the struggle is not with the reality of the ruined places in which foot of Mount Palatin where, during the latest always want to close” or “Perhaps one day Rome only the struggle between Roman families for the dramaturgy inscribes them, between the war, soldiers of the resistance used to hide their will allow itself to choose in its turn”]. The film power; it is a struggle between words and noise, old, absent Rome and the contemporary Rome weapons during the day so they could use them replays Corneille’s Othon on Mount Palatin a clash between words and things. This growl where the wind, the light and the mumbling during the night. And if there is this chasm ex- and in the garden of the villa Doria Pamphili, of industrial society is also something like the circulate. In this way there is a great conflict perienced in the parasiting of the senses, if there exhibiting in the plain decadence of Rome after inflection of the loud and suppressed accents of between the bodies, the words, the places and the is such a hole or such an interval, it is necessarily the fall of Nero what is the principle of each a class struggle that rises entangled or confused situation, the disagreements and the distortions in order that something should throw itself into government. Between the turnstile of interests with the voices. In other words, in the language of struggles which hold up like a structure. And it, and this something is a possibility. Because in and the intestinal passions, we are witness to already troubled by the mechanics of different the consequence of all this is that one enters the floating of an interval one could discern the the beautiful words of the leaders of this world, rhythms that shatter the conventional lyricism, with difficulty, adjusting as one can one’s ears Two of the class struggle at the boundaries of tearing each other apart over power, far from there is something like a division at work. One and eyes, carefully, lingering on the draping of a the parasitings, one could construct the space of the people and behind their backs. The power could say that the “one” of language, the “one costume, the charm or the sensuality of a body, a new attention or one could, in this disorder of that in its intrigues devours the torments of love divides itself into two”. First of all in the words, the plausibility or the implausibility of the scene the senses, find the sensible equation of a lost or is identified with this “comedy”: abjection and in the words and the noise: words and noise com- bathing in a sort of disorder, and one continues coming body. But this something is first of all the cowardice join state affairs, just as the small af- pose together in a sort of struggle. The “people” by clinging on to the unwinding of the language fleeing inscription of a possibility born by the fairs of everyone, finally, and this is what must be is that whose words are muted, overwhelmed uttered as a mechanism, to the dramaturgy… earth and the bodies, the possibility of a world.• swept away with violence. All of this is therefore or split in two by the mumbling—that which With the din of the cars one hears with difficulty suspended in a Mallarmean throw of the die for is there, here and now, disrupting the world. It what is said, the attention of the ears and the Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub the “maybe” of the revolution: “perhaps one day is because the people is something that begins eyes struggles painfully, oscillating and swerving Volumes 1 & 2, DVD Rome will allow itself to choose in its turn”. This in the ruin between what one hears and what in a sensible unrest. In short one hears badly and Éditions Montparnasse, collection “Le geste “maybe” signifies that the people must no longer one does not want to hear, between what one one sees badly, the language and the senses begin cinématographique”, 2007 let those who govern them permit or not permit, sees and does not want to see. What one hears: to limp, and if they limp it is also in order to find the people must choose, and choose not only the parasiting of words, the mumbling that ac- the formula for an attention and, why not, a new those who will govern, but permit themselves companies and tears the meaning, the buzzing body, the atrophy of whose senses one would to govern themselves, choose and choose them- of cars here or that of insects there, the lapping somehow already have begun to treat. A body, selves rather than closing their eyes to the grand of the water, the rustling of the wind. What one in short, the sensibility of whose organs one comedy of power. And this takes place within sees: the air, the light experiencing the bodies would have awakened: the word and the gaze. the vertigo between the “eyes that do not always and the landscapes, all that which is outside of One hears badly and sees badly at first, in order want to close” and a “maybe”: open the eyes and the intrigues of men, and yet with which one to see and hear better later—that is the “politics” assume the safekeeping of this “maybe”—this is must compose, an outside constraining the of the work. And what one sees is the Two. The apparently the claim of this work, its ethics and established order of a certain point of view. Two of the class struggle buried between the Alexandre and Daniel Costanzo are philoso- its politics. One divides into two, which means that the words and the things, the Two of a splitting of phers, based in Paris. They are founding edi- Thus Straub and Huillet immerse the piece in people raises and rumbles as a mumbling threat- the gaze and of hearing, covering themselves in tors of the magazine Failles and contribute an architecture that claims to be contemporane- ening the space of words: the word is a word the affect of a strangeness, a Two tied together regularly topublications such as Lignes and ous with the literary seventeenth century of which experiences the division, it is with the in division. Multitudes. Alexandre Costanzo is a PhD Corneille, the gardens of the villa Doria Pam- buzzing, tied and untied. student at Université Paris 8.

7 My project for site is halfway between a state- workforce, even easier to exploit than during the a closer look at Le Corbusier‘s life will soon see aesthetic has been strongly dispossessed by the ment and an artwork. As always in my work, colonial period. Indeed, since they are no longer the importance of his trip in Algeria in the early Genius of Le Corbusier and quickly readapted I talk about what I know and what I have lived French, they are “not at home anymore”, and are 1930s, and particularly the shock he felt when and spread through the world. Let’s remember in order to take an analytical look at my experi- thus less particular about their living conditions. discovering the Mzab architectures of Ghardaia that between 1933 and 1936, Le Corbusier met the ences. I continue, for several years, to develop All the more so in France, where these people in the middle of the Algerian desert. The prin- Mexican architect Luis Barragán in Paris. He will a single thought—this reappropriation is an went from shanty towns—like Nanterre or ciples of the Mzab houses strongly influenced his be the purest reproducer of the first modernist endless cultural process between human beings, Juvisy—to concrete blocks. “Athens Charter”. Some elements of the rules of houses in Latin America, exporting an aesthetic because it is rooted in my cultural History. This It is an endless story, but in France no one talks this charter—like the “terrace roof“ or the “free that is nine centuries old from the desert to the History is the one that binds as much as it sepa- about it. Everyone knows the extent to which facade”—are indeed already present in these 11th hacienda environment. In fact it follows the rates the Algerian mountains and the postmod- Algeria is an “official taboo” in French History. century architectures. colonialist Spanish architecture culture in this ernist concrete buildings of the banlieues. This social architecture of “housing for all” is The big issue for me is to know whether, country, which is strongly influenced by the Reappropriation is an important notion for in fact an instrument of power. It is a tool to con- beyond these historical facts, the artists who designs of the Arabian-Andalusian houses, with me, especially when talking about the postco- trol the “natives”. By moving them from a rural work within the space between these perimeters the importance of the interior garden courtyard, lonialist modernist architectural theories that environment, where they had spaces to exist and of modernist culture—between their origins and with a fountain in the center of the patio sur- were first experimented with in Algeria, and to rebel (as in the case of the first significant riots the notion of “order rather than emotions”— rounded by arcades. then implemented in the French banlieues, in Sétif in 1945), to a gridded urban environ- interpret these influences, interrogate their time, A year ago I met an Arab philosopher who told before being spread all around the world. Several ment, where, gathered in blocks and assimilated and reappropriate their space. me that Islam could not have been founded and social modernist architectures created in Algeria to an anonymous perimeter—to which they In several of my works, I seek to show the developed outside of the desert; Islam is a reli- by Fernand Pouillon, for example, prefigured have to adapt (not the contrary)—they become natural instinct of people to readapt to their gion of the desert. I think that coming from the the ones built on a massive scale during the easier to control because they become weaker. environment. They reappropriate it through desert, with a natural fascination with elements 1960s and 1970s in France. There is something By having them pass from “houses” to “hous- found materials, which are not products of their like Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, Muslims have premonitory in the energy hurriedly expended ing”, modernism pretends to improve their lives, culture but brought from the outside (corru- invented a modern way of thinking in-between before independence to complete these Algerian but in reality it makes them weak by dissolving gated steel, plastic cans and bags, etc.). This has Asia and the Occident. But whereas the Occident building sites. These projects, conceived about their identity and any desire to exist as individu- always existed (for example, the strange heads has always seen them as Iconoclastic, they were ten years before independence, seem to have als, which is diluted in “la masse”. which support some columns in the Istanbul actually practicing a modern language of visual been the laboratories of post-colonization social What I am talking about here is History‘s cistern site or the objects in Africa that have been art. As Edward Said used to say in his theses on control via housing. They anticipate the massive cynicism. In addition to the pictures of Pouil- repaired with found material). Orientalism, the Occident has orientalized the constructions of the dormitory towns, intended lon’s buildings I have taken on both sides of I speak of the necessity of reappropriation be- Orient to synthesize and control it. to gather the streams of economic immigrants the Mediterranean Sea, I have done research cause I am thinking of the people who have been from the “future former colonies”: a cheap into what influenced them. Anyone that takes dispossessed by the Occidental mind. The Mzab Kader Attia � Vernacular M’zab Architectur, city of Ghardaia, Algeria Ronchamp Cathedrale, France Djenne, Mali

� Cité Pouillon, Algiers 2008 site • 24.2008

Traces of Metal

Janina Pedan

“Thought is born more from metal than from stone.” self-ordering capabilities of materials. It separates lective Bodies exhibition, centers on the work of and speed that provided the sugar rush for the Deleuze the technological operation into two halves where the modernist French architect Jean Prouvé. Like Futurists, the parodic Alumino-Manifesto suggests the middle, the energy exchange between form the Futurists, Prouvé was fascinated and excited a different sort of agitation: “A great sweep of The European biennial Manifesta is unique and matter, remains hidden. Ignoring the mutual by cars and airplanes and the possibilities of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and among biennials in that each year it takes place at dependence, we conceive matter as just passing machines to change the modern way of life, but drove us on through issue crawlers, webpages, a different European location, but just like any between successive thresholds that have a given he was less interested in the symbolical meaning audio patches and deep technical details of other major art event, it becomes an attractor for order. Deleuze explains that “we can proceed a bit of aluminium than in its actual material possibili- network surveillance.” The sort of movement transnational flows that brings with them a cer- as if each operation is determinable between two ties. Originally trained as a blacksmith, Prouvé that is implied is not the movement of bodies in tain capacity for regeneration. For the seventh edi- thresholds: an infra-threshold which defines the was inspired by the application of aluminium in cars or airplanes, but the movement of an issue tion of Manifesta, some of this capacity has been matter prepared for this operation, and a supra- the car and aero-industry and so opened up his crawler across the free space of Internet. It is less used to transform a series of disused industrial threshold which is defined by the form that you’re own workshop 1931 where he experimented with aluminium’s material singularity of lightness buildings into exhibition venues scattered across going to communicate to this prepared matter.” 2 this new metal using the latest technology. He compared to its tensile strength that is invoked, the Trentino-South Tyrol region in northern Italy. What is unique with metal is that it does not thought that it would be possible to construct but rather its conductivity. The happy marriage between derelict industrial easily fit into this ordering. The relation between houses and furniture in much the same way that It is actually this aspect of metal that Simondon architecture and art is well known by now, but form and matter has to be constantly negotiated cars are mass-produced at assembly lines. Since is drawn to the most. He only mentions metal- unlike the several other ex-industrial-buildings in a way that works across the thresholds. The the military demand for aluminium had faded lurgy in a few lines, but as Deleuze confirms that have been remade to host the biennial, the primary matter itself has to pass through a series after the World War II and the civilian consump- “what will really interest him is the point where curators for the show in the town of Bolzano/ of states before it can receive any form, but even tion of the material was still insignificant, the operations of modulation, of continuous varia- Bozen chose to concentrate on this kind of after it has received its form it has to pass through industry made great attempts to find new uses tion are going to become not only obvious, but are takeover more specifically. Instead of turning the stages that exceed the thresholds in, for example, and markets for the metal. In 1949 Prouvé was going to become the nomos itself, the normal state factory into another blank art-space, the media the alloying, forging and quenching of the metal. commissioned by Studal, the French national of matter, namely electronics.”5 Modulation is es- collective Raqs (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula Simondon explains: “[W]e cannot strictly distin- aluminum company, to design pre-fabricated mo- sentially the possibility of converting information and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) developed their guish the taking of form from the quantitative bile metal houses whose parts could be produced into signals that can be successfully sent through curatorial outline around the metaphors that transformation. The forging and the quenching in France and then shipped to the colonies. Al- a medium. The shift from mold (homogenized could be drawn from the industrial history of the of steel are respectively prior to and posterior to though Prouvé was commissioned to make thou- matter submitted to the mold) to modulation building—a former aluminium factory—and its what could be termed the taking of form proper. sands of units of the “Tropical House”, in the end (matter as in continuous movement) is not only subsequent abandonment. Forging and quenching are nevertheless constitu- only three prototypes were built and installed. lurking in the materiality of aluminium, but By working with the residual character of the tions of objects.”3 It would be more proper to de- The production-process proved too expensive and Deleuze also uses it to describe a general shift in place and the kind of melancholia that envelops scribe the process as one of modulation: molding the unique design of the houses was too cutting- society. In “Postscript on Control Societies” he such locations, Raqs hoped to confront “Europe’s and re-molding in a continuous manner. edge for the French bureaucrats. sees the factory as a mold, a site of confinement unwillingness to come to terms with its own dif- Since experimentation with aluminium started Ferreira deals with what happened when the aimed at production where “man produced ficult path into, and through, the 20th century”. relatively recently (compared to other common houses fell into oblivion for fifty years and then energy in discreet amounts”, while the present Declaring the factory a “monument to its resi- metals like steel or copper), it had to go through a got rediscovered recently and “extracted” as valu- day modulating man of our control societies con- due”, they say that the vacated building becomes phase where it was constantly balancing between able design objects by Western art-dealers. The stantly “undulates, moving among a continuous a provocation for considering what is “left behind the unfolding of its true material possibilities work consists of both documentary photographs range of different orbits”. Deleuze knew that this when value is extracted from life, time and la- and a utopian investment that it did not always of the original installation locations of the houses mutation of capitalism is widely recognized and bour.” The factory serves as an excellent platform manage to live up to. When aluminium could in Congo and Niger and a sculptural rendering can be summed up as no longer being directed to- for the convergence of Raqs’ longstanding interest first be produced in small amounts, it was more of the house itself in its transportable “flat pack wards production but towards meta-production. in the web of relations and networks that consti- valuable than gold and was at once glorified as the mode”. Of course Ferreira deals to a great extent The takeover of an old industrial building by an tutes the postindustrial society, with the interest “metal of the future”. Even though it is the most with colonialism and its legacy, but it is also a international, nomadic biennale comfortably fits in the vestiges of the industrial era. For the show, abundant metal in the earth’s crust, it is never work about the failure of the modernist dream: into this picture, but it would be erroneous to which is called The Rest of Now, Raqs invited found in pure form and has to be extracted from a not only did Prouvé’s hopes for the industrially just let the relation fall into the old dichotomy of artists and various other cultural practitioners to reddish clay-like mineral called bauxite through produced home remain unrealized, in the end he material/immaterial labor. When Raqs state that deal with these questions. a process that requires enormous amounts of also lost control over his factory to the aluminium “Manifesta 7 enters the building in this moment In principle any kind of disused industrial electricity. This was only possible with the rise of company that once supported his experiments of pause, stealing in between the downtime of building would have sufficed to ask questions industrialization and it was not until the period —crushing for Prouvé since he always advocated industrial abandonment in the core of Europe about production, residue and postindustrial life, between the two World Wars that it really became an integrated production-process. In line with and the overture of global capitals next move”, but the interesting thing about this building in available on a mass-scale. It was during this time Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of the hylomor- it is maybe more correct to say that Manifesta is particular is how the material that was produced that the factory in Bolzano/Bozen was built by a phic model, he refused to see materials as just already a part of capital’s next move. But it has in the factory is related to the history of the 20th fascist regime that hailed aluminium as the metal blank matter to be formed according to the will to be recognized that this appropriation is no century. Since aluminium has only been commer- that would accompany Italy in its leap towards a of the designer and so it was necessary for him less material than the industrial power that once cially available for the past one hundred and fifty new modern society. Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo to be able to follow the objects throughout the inhabited the factory. It is worth remembering years, its history is coextensive in many ways with remarked that “just like the nineteenth century whole line of production in order to bring out that what Simondon tried to do was to add to the that of modernity. As a product of modern science was the century of iron, heavy metals, and carbon, the potentialities of the materials he was working matter-form duality the forgotten middle: energy. it was invested with all sorts of symbolical mean- so the twentieth century should be the century with. Although Prouvé’s ideas did not catch on To be more precise, while it was once the power- ings and expectations, something that Raqs do not of light metals, electricity, and petroleum.”4 This much during his time, the unique application hungry aluminium plants that placed themselves neglect to engage with in their curatorial work. kind of utopian rhetoric and aluminium’s wide of sheeted metal did make him a pioneer in the near hydroelectric sources, it is now companies Deleuze and Guattari give metal a unique role application in the booming aero and automobile construction of nomadic architecture. It is these that process supposedly “immaterial” informa- among materials for its ability to reveal some- industry was also one of the reasons why the qualities of mobility that are emphasized in Fer- tion like Google that do so in order to acquire the thing about the production-process that is other- metal was a favorite of the Italian Futurists. Their reira’s sculpture, which is presented as something enormous amount of electricity they need to run wise easily overlooked or ignored: “It is as if metal founding manifesto, written ninety-nine years that is stuck in a kind of intermediary mode be- and cool down their servers. The movement of and metallurgy imposed upon and raised to con- ago by F.T Marinetti, expresses the intoxication tween a house and a transportable unit, evoking electrons through an aluminium capacitor in a sciousness something that is only hidden or bur- they felt in the face of the rapid technological de- a permanent state of transit. wireless computer is just as physical as the heat ied in other matters and operations.”1 Drawing on velopments. They wanted to distance themselves Graham Harwood also plays with aluminium’s that turns red clay into a silvery metal.• the ideas of Gilbert Simondon, they explain how from Italy’s agricultural past and its graveyard link to the utopian dream of modernism in his metal brings to sensible intuition the insufficien- of cultural antiques in favor of cars, airplanes, Alumino-Manifesto (2008), which was made for 1. Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. cy of the hylomorphic model. The model is not machines and violence of a new technological age: The Rest of Now. The book is a parody of the Brian Massumi (UK: Continuum, 2004), p. 453. only a basic way of conceiving of production, but “We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been Futurist manifesto of sorts, mocking the blind 2. Deleuze, “Cours Vincennes: 27/02/1979, Metal, metallurgy, music, Husserl, Simondon” also has political significance in that it “reflects enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.” belief in technological progress that obsessed the (www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html) a social representation of labor” according to Airplanes and cars would uproot the body from avant garde group. It was made by using an algo- 3. Cited in ibid. Simondon. More specifically, this way of thinking a fixed location, from a space of confinement, rithmic sequence and consists of image cells that 4. Jeffrey T Schnapp, “The Romance of Caffeine and about production relates to the kind of political, whether it was cultural or geographical. are derived from promotional films made by the Aluminum,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1, Things (Autumn, 2001), pp. 244–269 cultural and economical transitions that Raqs ad- This utopian belief in aluminium as a sign of aluminium industry during the 1960s. The im- 5. Deleuze, “Cours Vincennes”. dress in the Rest of Now show. The hylomorphic progress and its close symbolic interlace with ages, which instead of showing individual frames, model is a schema that defines the relation be- modernity and physical movement is also clearly record the blurry transition between them, are tween matter and form in the production process visible in a work in Bolzano/Bozen that is not accompanied by captions assembled out of sen- where the form (morphe) is imprinted upon matter actually a part of the Rest of Now show, but can tences that contain the word “aluminium”. These (hyle). Simondon criticizes this model because it be found at Bolzano’s newly reopened Museion. were collected from the Internet by an issue crawl presupposes matter as inert, passively receiving Angela Ferreira’s work Maison Tropicale (2007), program and ordered according to the algorithm. Janina Pedan is an artist, theorist, and the command of the form, and thus ignoring the which showed at the Peripheral Vision and Col- Instead of the intensity of a physical movement mineral enthusiast based in London.

10 site • 24.2008

� Pawel Althamer, Pawel and Monika 2002. Straw, hemp fiber, animal intestine, wax and hair. Collection of Tony and Daniel Holtz. Photo by Benoit Pailley The Desire Called Apocalypse

Jeff Kinkle

“No one is waiting any more for the revolution, including the aforementioned films. Even many buildings. The plant, which can grow at the rate an ideology that “thought fit to assign to the only the accident, the breakdown, that will reduce of the prints inserted between the pages of the of thirty cm, a day, has spread exponentially in working class the role of the redeemer of future this unbearable chatter to silence.” book are of works not even included in the show the US south since having been introduced from generations”—“made the working class forget Paul Virilio, Art and Fear and in the space, many works were compliment- Japan in the late 19th century and is nicknamed both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both ed by a small text under their label: for example, “the vine that ate the south”. are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors There is an oft-cited observation by Fredric a paragraph under Diego Perrone’s photo series The most prominent piece on the third floor rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”8 Jameson that in the present period it is easier of holes is the opening paragraph of Henry is Robert Kusmirowski’s replica of Ted Kaczyn- This temporal prism is also in opposition to a to imagine the end of the world than the end of David Thoreau’s essay “Walking”.4 These quotes ski’s cabin. Better known by the moniker “The work that I immediately thought of while at capitalism. This comment was made as a series of are not attributed however and contribute to Unabomber”, Kaczynski carried out a series of After Nature, Gerald Byrne’s captivating video apocalyptic blockbusters were streaming out of the feeling that the show is tapping into a much bombings, primarily via the mail, for a period work 1984 and Beyond (2005–7), a re-enactment Hollywood—Independence Day (1996), Armageddon larger body of work: Cormac McCarthey’s novel of seventeen years before being turned in by his of a series of conversations between a group of (1998), Deep Impact (1998), etc.—and coincided The Road is also quoted on a label and mentioned brother. His actual cabin is currently on display sci-fi writers that took place in 1963. The writers, with fears about the approaching millennium as an inspiration for example. The huge amounts at the Newseum (Museum of News, not to be including Arthur C. Clark, Isaac Asminov, Ray generated by the prospect of everything from a of texts, films, and artworks dealing with the confused with the New Museum), in Washing- Bradbury, and Theodore Sturegeon, discuss and looming computing meltdown to the Rapture. themes of the end of the world, disaster, and ton, D.C. and Kaczynski has bizarrely sent a let- speculate on the future of the space race, lunar These films by and large created a scenario in dystopia looms behind the show, but their mass ter to the US Court of Appeals claiming that the colonization, and the Cold War in a manner that which an external threat—often literally from does not so much as overshadow the works on publicity the exhibition is likely to create shows feels unimaginable today. Their discussion is outside of this solar system: aliens, asteroids— display as much as it vitalizes them. The works a lack of sensitivity towards his victims’ families. so obviously taking place within a discourse of forces humanity, nations, families, or romantic stick to the general theme just enough, and even Berlinde De Bruyckere’s sculpture, housed in a development that sees history moving relatively couples to unite to overcome the challenge to the works that do not necessarily make sense to casket-like glass case on a plinth, looks like the linearly with steady historical and technological their very existence and/or realize an important me in relation to the theme of the show—like fossilized remains of the shape-shifting alien in progress. There seems to be a common assump- lesson about life before being vaporized by aliens Tino Seghal’s living sculptures writhing around John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).6 Eugene Von tion that humanity will respond ingeniously and or engulfed by a gigantic tidal wave.1 Recently, in slow motion on the floor or Roberto Coughi’s Bruenchenhein’s finger paintings of nuclear admirably to any and all challenges, whether it a second series of end-of-the-world films has maps of so-called rogue states—are compelling. Armageddon from the 1950s both remind us be in space exploration or feeding the world. In emerged: The Day After Tomorrow, The Happening, The show, the curator reveals, is inspired that the fear of apocalypse is not unique to the After Nature we are faced with a reverse scenario The Mist, Children of Men, I am Legend, Cloverfield, by Werner Herzog’s film from 1992, Lessons of present and lead one to think about a huge body to the one diagnosed by Benjamin, in which we War of the Worlds, WALL•E, etc. Without really Darkness. The film features Herzog’s poetic of work inspired by the fear of nuclear weapons. imagine ourselves enslaved, or at least miserable, going into any schematic depth we can say that narration over footage of workers attempting While it was once geopolitical maneuvering and oppressed, or constrained, in the future, look- while similar to the disaster films from the nine- to douse the hundreds of burning oil wells the international conflict that was going to bring ing back upon our present, liberated existence. ties in some respects, they are clearly colored by Iraqi army ignited throughout Kuwait during about the Armageddon, now it is humanity’s Despite the curator’s intentions, this ambitious, either the events of 9.11 and their aftermath or their retreat during the first Gulf War. In the inability to collectively find a way of living that perhaps impossible, aim of casting a backwards the growing consciousness of the climate crisis, wake of Saddam’s scorched-earth petrodollar doesn’t destroy the earth. Von Bruenchenhein’s glance upon the present is precisely what the often both.2 Rather than positing some external, potlatch, we see lakes of oil, the rusting shells of Gold Tower, thought to have been made during show is unable to accomplish—to its benefit. otherworldly threat to which humanity can re- heavy machinery, and plumes of smoke darken- the seventies, reminds one of a cross between In the past, a dystopian scenario was often set spond heroically, the threat is often man-made,3 ing the cloudless sky. The landscape should be Tatlin’s Tower and the Tower of Babylon done so far in the future that the work could serve as and following events like the American state’s immediately familiar, especially as we are still in in gold-painted chicken and turkey bones. a warning of what could happen if humanity abject failure before, during, and following the midst of the second Gulf War, but Herzog’s Natalie Djurberg’s My Name is Mud, in which an did not change its ways. What is striking about Hurricane Katrina, little hope is offered in our poetic narration, detached from the war’s geopo- anthropomorphic mud whose ‘appetite knows the current crop of works is that the collapse ability to emerge victorious. Even when the end- litical reality and without mention of the ongo- no bounds’ engulphs a village, felt particularly has either already begun or is imminent and ing in these films is arguably “happy”—the hero ing human suffering, helps give the landscape relevant as what was left of the same tropical inevitable. It is the palpable inability of everyone makes it out alive—it is only after a tremendous an other-worldly feel, heightened by the sublime storm that caused lethal mudslides in Haiti was involved—artists, curator, spectator—to even amount of suffering has occurred and the world horror of the footage and the fact that all the oil hitting New York while I was at the exhibition. imagine a future, let alone reflect back on the has been destroyed to such an extent that nor- workers are wearing masks. The fourth floor is the sparsest and this ampli- present from this imaginary space, that gives the mality cannot possibly return. The show’s first floor is the most densely fies the effect of Zoe Leonard’s dead tree, held up show its power and relevance. This ubiquitous cultural vision of impending packed with works. Both times I visited a par- by steel cables and wooden crutches, and Mau- The inability to think the future seems doom was the focus, or perhaps one should say ticularly bombastic bit of Wagner’s Götterdäm- rizio Cattelan’s horse hanging several meters intimately tied to an inability to understand the was in focus, this past summer at After Nature, a merung, part of the soundtrack to Herzog’s film, in the air with its head seemingly buried in the present. To paraphrase Guy Debord, all usurpers show curated by Massimiliano Gioni at the New was playing as the elevator doors opened. The wall. Strindberg’s Celestographs present perhaps do everything in their power to make us forget Museum in New York and featuring twenty-six main space is dominated by Pawel Althamer’s the most literal attempt to make an image after that they have just arrived. But it seems trite to artists over the museum’s three main floors. sculptural portraits and various artifacts. The nature in the entire show. Strindberg left photo- point out that capitalism, and particularly its While the majority of the works came from pale, relatively gaunt bodies appear chiseled by graphic paper under the stars at night, hoping present hegemonic form, is not going to be with contemporary artists, there were also works from a combination of food scarcity and hard labor, to perfectly capture the night sky. The results us forever, that there have been and will be other August Strindberg, some early films from Nancy and one can imagine them slowly wandering the were impressive and Strindberg apparently sent economic systems and forms of government in Graves, and so-called outsider artists Eugene Von ash-covered highways in McCarthey’s novel. On documentation of his discovery to the leading as- the future. As Fredric Jameson has pointed out, Bruenchenhein and Reverend Howard Finster. this floor we are also introduced to two prevalent tronomers of his time only to later discover that “Most of human history has unfolded in situa- In the introductory text the curator, together themes in apocalyptic narratives: desertification the patterns, which do actually look like images tions of general impotence and powerlessness, with assistant Jarrett Gregory, describes the show and junglefication. In Lessons of Darkness or The of outer space, were actually formed by dust and when this or that system of state power is firmly as “a cabinet of curiosities that pieces together Road humans unleash their destructive capa- drops of dew.7 in place, and no revolts seem even conceivable, a fragmented encyclopedia.” After Nature takes bilities to block the sun, barren the landscape, Of the show the curator Gioni writes: “The let alone possible or imminent. Those stretches its title from the three part, book-length, prose destroy life.5 In the opposing narrative—present exhibition can be read as a visual novel, a story of human history are for the most part passed in poem by W.G. Sebald of the same name, and the to varying degrees in films like The Happening, of nature after a trauma, a retelling colored by utterly non-utopian conditions, in which none exhibition catalogue is actually nothing but the I am Legend, 12 Monkeys—nature reclaims the mythology, religion, and distress. Temporally of the images of the future or of radical differ- Modern Library edition of the book with a new surface of the planet, thriving as our presence detached from any point of orientation, the ex- ence peculiar to utopias ever reach the surface.”9 dust jacket and postcards of some of the works is minimized. Vegetation pokes through the hibition emerges as a study of the present from a John Gray has argued that the re-emergence of inserted between the pages like bookmarks. I asphalt and animals graze in the streets. The de- place in the future: a feverish examination of an the belief in imminent apocalypse in contem- found this disappointing at first when I picked sertification of the American landscape from The extinct world that seems to be our own.” In his porary culture is connected to the death of these it up in the bookshop, but when one conceives Road, quoted on a label beside Bill Morris’ photo “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Walter utopian visions.10 The consequences of this re- of the show as a fragmented encyclopedia one of New Orleans post-Katrina, is opposed by the Benjamin argues that the Social Democrats’ emergence are greater than just the dominance of its most rewarding elements is the way that it photographs of William Christenberry that adoption of a teleological conception of history of a moribund outlook as religious Millenialists opened up onto a larger body of cultural works, depict junglefication as kudzu overtakes derelict that focuses on a progressively better world— have emerged as an active force in American

11 site • 24.2008

The 50 Moons of Saturn: the Second

� Zoe Leonard, Tree, 1997. Wood, steel, and steel cables. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Torino Triennale Installation view, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

politics, influencing America’s stance on the there seems to be a danger that the ubiquity of Israel-Palestine conflict, the war on terror, and apocalyptic fantasies acts as a replacement for even climate change.11 As Gray makes clear, any serious engagement with the problems of apocalypse here is not simply opposed to utopia: the present and the possibilities for real change, Sinziana Ravini “In common speech ‘apocalyptic’ denotes a cata- which would likely involve a tremendous strophic event, but in biblical terms it derives amount of work, or that they allow the post- from the Greek word for unveiling—an apoca- historical subject to maintain a degree of excite- lypse is a revelation in which mysteries that are ment following the end of history, a period—as written in heaven are revealed at the end of time, Fukuyama originally claimed—that is “a very and for the Elect this means not catastrophe but sad time”. After all, the end of the world would salvation.” In this sense apocalyptic fantasies are probably be considered by most to be the biggest more utopian than they might first appear. event since the start of the world. To end on a According to the curator, “After Nature more optimistic note however, and one closer surveys a landscape of wilderness and ruins, to the feeling I actually had at After Nature, the darkened by uncertain catastrophe. It is a story current mood is not dominated by resignation, The tragedy of Western thought can possibly thus offering glimpses of a both comfortable and of abandonment, regression, and rapture—an but a melancholic acceptance of the world we be reduced to one single moment—Faust gazing uncomfortable Weltschmerz. epic of humanity and nature coming apart under have inherited and are still creating. The damage at the diagram of macrocosm and realizing that the pressure of obscure forces and not-so-distant that has already been done and the dangers faced he cannot penetrate into the mysteries of the Saturnalia and saturation environmental disasters.” In Rosa Luxembourg’s are palpable, but a fascination remains. Like the universe, that his metaphysical speculations are The planet Saturn has a large number of moons famous Janius pamphlet, written in 1915, there giddy octopus dancing in the polluted waters of in vain. The more Faust wants to know, the more that are difficult to descern, since it’s almost is only one hope for humanity: socialism. It is Marseille referenced by Felix Guattari, there is his melancholy intensifies. He has sacrificed a impossible to draw a distinction between a large class struggle and the socialist movement that a need to immerse oneself in this degraded uto- lifetime in exchange for nothing—for knowing ring particle and a tiny moon. The moons thus can save the world from barbarism, from the pia.13 “Men resemble their times more than their that he cannot know. Faust sees no other exit out come “to life” through the act of name-giving—a horrors provoked by the domination of capital fathers” as the proverb has it, and just as the of this docta ignorantia than suicide. But before perfect allegory of the curator and fifty identified and its crises. The enemy was clearly established octopus shriveled up and died within seconds of it’s too late, Mephisto arrives and gives him an artists turning around his orbit. Traditionally, and the remedy, while arguably vague, could be being placed in a tank of clean seawater, any at- offer he can’t refuse: the knowledge of the world most of Saturn’s moons have been named after envisioned. In May, 1843 Marx famously wrote to tempt to return to a less despoiled perspective by through the senses, youth, love, and unlimited the Titans of Greek mythology, which fits very Arnold Ruge, “You won’t say that I hold the pres- artists, activists, or theorists would be pathetic. pleasure. The alchemical drama begins and Faust well with the romantic notion of the artist as ent time in too much esteem; and yet if I don’t By focusing on our enthrallment with the end, passes all the spheres of human existence—from a demiurge, a genius who both negates the despair of it, it’s on account of its own desperate shows like After Nature allow us to start to think the darkest to the lightest—in a rite of initiation creation of God by creating out of nothing, who situation, which fills me with hope”. It is pre- about what might come next.• in the mysteries of human life. The only thing is refusing mimesis, and continues the divine cisely this feeling that things are getting so bad he has to fear is satisfaction. The moment he will creation by adding to it, ameliorating, revolu- that a positive change must be imminent which After Nature feel like saying to the passing moment, “stay a tionizing its old structures. When it comes to is exactly what seems to be missing from the con- Organized by Massimiliano Gioni while, you are so beautiful”, will be the moment Saturn—the Roman God of Agriculture, equated temporary imagination. It seems as though in New Museum, New York he will have to surrender his soul to the devil. by the God Uranus that devoured his children in “the degraded utopia of the present”, a moment 17.7.2008–5.10.2008 The desire for the suspension of time becomes an act of despair and was later toppled by Zeus— when the choice of socialism or barbarism has thus the greatest sin of all, something that the we are dealing with a revolutionary figure. In already been made, with utopia impossible, the Notes devil, the symbol of progress and dissatisfaction, the roman Saturnalias, during the celebrations contemporary culture has difficulty imagining 1. Zizek’s observation that in the majority of Hol- cannot handle. in the temple of Saturn, the order of things were anything other than oblivion. Jameson has said lywood disaster film’s the disaster serves to unite a The suspension of time, introspection, melan- reversed for a day, during which the slaves were family or romantic couple is relatively trite, perhaps that this is to be expected in a period in which with the exception of Deep Impact, where that cholia, the desire for knowledge, as well as the served by the masters. As a result the slaves could a given power structure is firmly in place, but romantic couple is a father/daughter. That being desire for desire, are all central elements in the criticize their masters for being enslaved by their what is strange about the present mood is that said there is something odd, both incestuous and Torino Triennale curated by Daniel Birnbaum passions, pretending thus that they would give our times are in fact relatively tumultuous. The homoerotic, about the Ben Affleck, Bruce Willis, Liv and entitled The 50 Moons of Saturn. The away some of their most precious possessions. Tyler triangle in Armageddon, which during the same “end of history” thesis has been passé for well lecture was said to be one of Alain Badiou’s favorite exhibition is assembling artists that are under Saturn functioned in other words as the incite- over a decade, and I am writing this during the films. Zizek Masterclass, Birkbeck College, London, the cosmic influence of Saturn, the star of melan- ment to generosity, fearlessness, and forces of greatest financial crisis since 1929. If this crisis Feb. 20th, 2008. choly. But as Birnbaum declares in the catalogue reversal. The saturnine aspects of Birnbaum’s is not likely to destroy capitalism (or Integrated 2. In the underrated The Happening (2008), what is text the saturnine mind is not only gloomy show have everything to do with those aspects, initially suspected to be a terror attack turns out to World Capitalism, or Empire), it could poten- have actually been perpetrated by nature itself. and depressed but also rebellious and highly with generosity of means, with cultural can- tially be the final death knell of its neo-liberal 3. Even when it is alien (Cloverfield, War of the Worlds), productive, giving the feeling that “a radical nibalization and myth dissemination. One has variant and signal the death of the current it stands for fears created by decidedly planetary transformation is possible despite everything. It only to look at Benjamin Saurer’s carnivalesque hegemony of the world system, as Immanuel antagonisms. is the state of mind of inspiration.” In this sense, paintings of hermetic rituals of sadism and can- 4. The quote is unattributed. I was interested in where Wallerstein has argued.12 it came from so I googled it afterwards. Birnbaum has created a show in a Neoplatonic nibalism. For Freud, the melancholic is orally Returning to After Nature, the question of 5. For more on desertification, particularly in relation sense that sees the saturnine, dark forces of the obsessed—a cannibal who tries to symbolically course is whether or not the forces that are to Jihad, see Reza Negarestani, “Petrodicy: A Petro- mind as something entirely positive, as the very devour the lost object to the extent of identifying making humanity and nature come apart are punk Dialogue”, site 20. 2007. condition of artistic activity. The show can also with it. Anna Galtaross’ remote controlled belly 6. The Thing is first film in Carpenter’s Apocalypse indeed obscure. While the causes behind capital- Trilogy. be seen as a coincidentia oppositoria of Birnbaum’s dancing mountain or Pascale Marthine Tayou’s ism’s latest crisis are undoubtedly complex, 7. See Douglas Feuk, “The Celestographs of August latest books: Chronology and As a Weasel Sucks cultural reconstructivism play both on the the situation is not inexplicable. And even if Strindberg,” Cabinet, 3, 2001. Eggs: An Essay on Melancholy and Cannibalism, strings of identification and cultural assimila- there are people like Sarah Palin who refuse to 8. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, written with the Swedish literary historian An- tion. Also Gert & Uwe Tobias’ synthetization of Illuminations (Schocken, 1969), p. 260. acknowledge the sources of climate change, the 9. Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia”, New Left ders Olsson. The links between curiosity, hunger, Romanian folklore and Russian constructivism, rest of us do not find it particularly mysterious. Review. 25. 2004, p. 45. desire, insanity, and melancholy are elegantly naivism and futurism, has a reconstructivist What is additionally relevant about the current 10. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the woven since they all deal with the loss of the touch to it. This cannibalization of cultural fe- crisis is that, despite its severity, no one is really Death of Utopia, New York: Farrar, Straus and Gir- mean—with the malicious, slippery object of de- tishes, which wrenches items from their cultural oux, 2007. demanding systematic change. The only people 11. See Gray, pp. 107–45. sire, whether it’s a time, a place, a human being, origin and casts them into a post-cultural limbo that seem to think this means the end of capital- 12. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Depression: A Long- an object, or a memory. The exhibition is orga- of forms, a wrenching that is both a dismantling ism are rightwing libertarians who see the semi- Term View”. (www.binghamton.edu/fbc/243en.htm) nized as the landscape of a labyrinthine mind, and leveling of cultural hierarchies, is neverthe- nationalization of banks, buying up of mortgages, See also Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of with long curtains, grayish walls, shortcuts, less a saturnine reversal of the social order of American Power (WW Norton & Company, 2003). and the election of Obama as the first steps 13. Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar passages, and long corridors, displaying forms aesthetics forms. What they all have in common towards communism. Viewed most cynically, and Paul Sutton (Continuum, 2008), p. 28–9. that have broken both with time and rationality, is the production of saturated images, heavily

12 site • 24.2008

� Guido van der Werve, I don’t want to be a part of this, videostill, 2005

loaded with signs and symbols, eating and Hölderlin spent several decades and structuring the external cosmic laws of the universe, Chan contemporary artist’s relation to time. Some are shitting forms at the same time, like Rabelais’ the entire film as a neural constellation of the offers a contemplation of the internal laws of time-essentialists and other time-deconstruc- gargantuan bodies. poet’s mind, of his dreams and fears. Here there society. It is micro versus macro from both sides: tivists. So if there is such a thing as a turn in is no glimpse of irony, just a beautiful reenact- from both sides of the same coin, one could contemporary art, it is not so much a historical as Lamentation and desire ment of a state of mind. The desire for desire is even go as far as saying the same world, but that a temporal turn, where artists navigate through Another theme in the show is the sometimes perhaps best captured in Karen Cytter’s video wouldn’t be right. If there is something that the different temporalities and narrations instead ironic, sometimes sincere lamentation over lost The Devil’s Drivel, which unifies contemplation show manifests, it is the plurality of inhabitable of geographical areas. But even here there are times that manifests itself through an anachro- and masturbation. Here the merging with the worlds, both real and unreal ones, desired and illusionists of time, those that give the illusion nistic play with old formats and ideas, personal other is explored in a somehow funny and bitter- non-desired. that an exodus out of modernity—not to pre- or and collective memories. As Victor Hugo once sweet narcissism à deux. postmodern but to a-modern times is possible. said, melancholia is the happiness of being sad. The melancholic turn The big question remains—how can one make This light form of melancholia can be found Contemplation How then is this melancholic turn to be conceived a distinction between regressive and progressive in Ragnar Kjartansson’s dashing song Sorrow Another theme in the show is the contemplation in a broader sense? For Benjamin Buchloch it is nostalgia? Does irony and mimicry secure the conquers happiness that shows the artist in a suit, of the relation between micro and macro, of showing the importance of being obsolete: the necessary distance that a progressive nostalgia surrounded by an orchestra and pink velvet both seen and alluded to objects, a time that has melancholic might seem introverted but it is presupposes? Or is it more progressive to be curtains, looking as if he was coming straight turned on itself, curtains that hide, and faces that only her way to say no to the simplistic notion entirely regressive, to look back instead of for- from a studio set from the fifties, battling with look away. Annika von Hausswolf and Ulla von of progress. Melancholy is in other words a form ward, when everything else is accelerating, when sorrow. His repetition of the same words during Brandenburg are pivotal artists here, the former of resistance. Can it lead to any social change? everyone thinks that cultural roots are to be cut an hour that feels like an eternity, strikes a cord dealing with an aesthetics of withdrawal and the As Anatole France puts it: “All changes, even the in favor of a cosmopolitan ubiquity? Nostalgia with the orthodox liturgical ceremonies that are reification of the human being, the latter with most longed for, have their melancholy; for what literally means homesickness—composed out of supposed to abolish time and reunite the com- an aesthetics of anticipation with her red curtain we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must nostos (return home) and algos (pain). For Novalis munity with the holy domains they once lost. that functions like a reversible rite de passage, die to one life before we can enter another.” One philosophy as such is a form of homesickness, it Repetition becomes thus not only an abolition enabling fluctuations both ways. Whereas Lara should therefore skip the language of communi- is an urge to be at home everywhere. Seen from of time, but also a way to seduce and hypnotize Favaretto’s dervish-like sculptures that spin in ty-based art and collaborative art practices that that point of view nostalgia is a exceedingly the audience. seemingly endless loops look like self-devouring see social change as a special affect and instead visionary and explorative practice. It’s the ulti- The seduction of the audience is also something objects that want both to vanish and to persist. talk about the mental change that an artwork mate negation of the given and the affirmation that Guido van der Werve masters in his exotism Also Giuseppe Pietroniro creates an abyss of can produce. The mental change can never be ob- of the possible. As Tennyson’s Ulysses says to of the romantic artist, clinging to his piano. I don’t reflection with his mise en abyme of theatrical dé- served nor analyzed. As André Breton said, you his sailor comrades: “It’s never to late to seek a want to be a part of this, where Werve is playing cors. Not to mention Tatiana Trouvé’s alienating cannot make a social revolution without making newer world”. piano on a raft in a lake, has affinities with both architecture of bureaucracy that metaphysically a mental revolution. The melancholic turn can Another question is how these nostalgic or romantic conceptualism and micro-macro theo- alludes to a world beyond, creating an infinite perhaps lead to that mental change that the sur- melancholic practices are to be understood in ries of German idealism where the man is con- illusion of repetition. Contemplation turns here realists and Dadaists where so keen to realize. relation to the postmodern deconstruction of the fronted with his great minitude in front of the into a loss of physical and conceptual parameters. But melancholia is and remains double-bound: notion of history and the so-called “unified sub- devouring magnitude of the world. The only dif- But there are also less discomfiting contempla- it generates a desire for desire as well as a desire ject”? Perhaps as a commentary on postmodern ference between his and Caspar David Friedrich’s tive works. Olafur Eliasson’s cosmologic visions for the non-fulfillment of desire. According to microutopias, a shift in scale from the micro- lonesome wanderers is the humoristic touch. inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s architectural Susan Stewart, nostalgia is the melancholia of utopia of communities and neighborhoods, to Also Jordan Wolfson’s Untitled false document philosophy, the man that transformed his de- time, not so much a mourning of a loved object the utopia of the self? An egotopia—the autono- showing an attractive and enigmatic woman pression into a restless Faustian will to change as it is the case in the classic accounts of melan- mous artistic space par excellence.• standing on a small boat, casting images of fruits the world, offers the ultimate sight—the look at cholia, but the mourning of a loss of an epoch. Is in the wind like Bob Dylan in his Subterranean the universe from a godlike point of view. The there a risk that nostalgic and melancholic artis- Second Torino Triennale Homesick Blues, has a touch of poetic sadness. The scenery of spheres rotating around a central light tic attitudes fall in regression, that the object of Curator: Daniel Birnbaum conceptual narcissism, the incapacity of grasping source are not only reconciling the alchemic art becomes retrogardistic attempt to restore a Various venues the object of desire, and the robot-like stream of division between micro and macro, man and lost time? For Svetlana Boym nostalgia can also 6.11.2008–1.2.2009 consciousness voiceover that recites a poem on universe, but also the huge still existing one— mean the insight in the impossibility of a regres- loss, on lies transformed to truths and truths to namely between art and science. While Eliasson sive return and the exodus of a history recycling objects, turns the video into a invigorating ride in some ways recreates a cosmic time, Paul Chan postmodernism, in other words a “reflective on the old French new waves. tries to abolish the linear time of history, in- nostalgia” that opposes itself to a “restorative As Arto Lindsay claims in one of the catalogue spired by Charles Fourier’s socialist utopias, but nostalgia” that doesn’t recognize itself as nostal- texts, “Melancholy is not sorrow but thinking turning them into different kind of dystopias. gia but rather as truth and tradition. One could of sorrow—It’s the sate of insight over the vast In his latest work—Untitled (after Lacan’s laugh) make an analogy to Schillers differentiation of abyss that divides ideals and reality.” Hölderlin the language of pornography is revealed as the the naive and the sentimental artist. The naive captured this abyss very elegantly by saying: Esperanto of our time, as an utterly globalized artist thinks that he can be one with nature. “Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar and demystified phenomenon where there The sentimental artist knows that his bound to when he thinks.” Meris Angioletti is recreating are no more boundaries to transgress. Accord- nature is forever lost or that the bound has never Hölderlin’s paranoiac visions and mental ing to Chan we already live in the 120 days of existed, that nature is only a part of a play that Sinziana Ravini is an art critic, lecturer nomadisms, filming from the same town where Sodom. If Eliasson offers a contemplation of he has produced. The same can be said about and curator.

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The Insides and Outsides of Reason: Lévi-Strauss at 100

Sven-Olov Wallenstein

i. Beginnings and trajectories structuralism, but is has not been torn out of the ii. From kinship to myth houses.”3 For Lévi-Strauss, the disappearance of Today Claude Lévi-Strauss celebrates his 100th book of our recent intellectual history.1 Lévi-Strauss’ public career began in 1948, when cultural differences is the great tragedy of mo- birthday, and even though the secondary Born in 1908 to a cultivated Jewish family (his he published his primary thesis, defended at the dernity, and the project of ethnographic reason literature on his work could fill a small library, father was an artist, his grandfather a rabbi), Sorbonne the year before, The Elementary Struc- is indeed, just as unwillingly as unavoidably, an any definitive assessment of his position within Lévi-Strauss began his academic training tures of Kinship, together with the more empirical accomplice: the project of rescuing the residual modern culture would be premature. Ranging studying law and philosophy without much and descriptive secondary thesis, The Family cannot but inscribe it into the discourse of a sci- from technical issues in anthropology and the enthusiasm, and eventually refrained from and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians, which ence within which it will survive as an object of analysis of myth to philosophical speculations entering the career path of the grands écoles. In gained him international scientific recognition. Western theory. on the human mind and the universal structure 1934 he was uprooted from the tranquility of his The analysis of kinship, which forms the nucleus The work that was to launch the idea of of culture, from detailed analyses of kinship sys- teaching post in a provincial lycée by the call of of Lévi-Strauss’s early work, proposes that family “structuralism,” Structural Anthropology, followed tems to comments on Wagner’s music, painting, Célestin Bouglé, the director of École Normale ties are organized by linguistic and logical struc- in 1958, bringing together articles and scattered and literature, his polymorphous oeuvre maps Supérieure, who invited him to become part of tures rather than by any natural physical con- essays from the preceding decade. Here we find out many of the essential shifts and tendencies teaching team that was to build up the recently tent, and that they always involved a question of the first sketches for a structural analysis of myth within the intellectual life of the second half of founded university in São Paolo. It was here, in alliance between families produced by marriage, (the first famous analysis of the Oedipus myth, the 20th century, on the level of both personal his first physical dépaysement, that Lévi-Strauss i.e., a question of exchange, organized accord- dates from 1955), as well as an outline of a theory biography and theoretical substance. From the developed his intellectual passion for ethnogra- ing to a linguistic analogy. The application of of society that breaks with earlier “functionalist” Surrealism of André Breton to the linguistic phy, and during the Brazilian period he made a Saussure’s idea of linguistic “value” (that which as well as “historicist” explanations of customs theories of Roman Jakobson, from the study of series of summer excursions to the Mato Grosso gives units their substance is differences and in- and institutions. Similar institutions and indigenous cultures of Brazil to the academic region and the Amazon Rainforest, where he terrelations) allowed him to open up the nuclear practices exist in different cultures, Lévi-Strauss milieus of New York and Paris, Lévi-Strauss’s started amassing empirical material on local family towards what had been previously con- notes, and yet they perform completely different path traverses geographical as well as philosoph- customs and languages (later he would come sidered as a secondary space of relations, and to tasks, which means that the functional explana- ical continents, although always on the basis of back for a year-long trip: these two were in fact show that kinship is a system that allows for the tion, either on the collective or the individual a certain sense of dépaysement, an estrangement the only fieldwork that he ever undertook). In simplification of empirical data into variations level, in fact says nothing. In many ways he from a contemporary world the deep underlying 1939 he returned to France, but a year later, due of underlying systems. The basic unit of kinship, continues a line from Durkheim, where the structures of which he nevertheless has spent his to the Second World War and the French capitu- Lévi-Strauss proposes, is a set of four relations— totality of society transcends the point of view of entire life unraveling. The gaze he has directed lation, he once again found himself in exile, brother, sister, father, son—that all relate back to the individuals themselves, which demands that onto the world has always come from afar, to this time in New York, where the encounter the incest taboo (which here functions as a kind the sociologist should adopt a distance, a “regard paraphrase the title of one of his books, Le regard with the anthropology of Franz Boas, but above of transcendental condition of possibility, as we éloigné,” with respect to the consciousness of his éloigné (1983)—a gaze that looks at humanity all Roman Jakobson and structural linguistics, will see), i.e., the requirement that marriages objects of study. On the other hand Lévi-Strauss from a certain distance, and discerns crystalline were decisive events that provided the aspiring must occur outside of the family, but also makes rejected the Durkheimian idea of social facts as structures, logical permutations, and inversions ethnologist with a set of conceptual tools with it possible for families to establish a peaceful “things” and the concomitant organicist idea that underlie the intentions and conscious which he could organize his earlier youthful and relation by exchanging women. (Whether this is of society, and his first thesis on the elementary projects of the agent themselves. The general “spontaneous structuralism,” as he would later a sexist position or simply a description of a state kinship structures is a fundamental revision of phenomenon “structuralism” was obviously call it. After returning to France at the end of the of affairs that could and ought to be changed Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. itself highly composite, ranging from technical war, he had one more interlude in the USA as a —what is exchanged is indeed women reduced For Durkheim the “socialization of affectivity” research in linguistics, kinship analysis, and even cultural attaché in Washington, but then finally to the state of “signifiers”—has remained an that occurs in primitive societies was the step out the foundations of mathematics, as in the case settled down in France and began teaching at open question. Simone de Beauvoir famously of nature; for Lévi-Strauss, who draws on Marcel of the Bourbaki group, to the kind of popular the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he took the second position in her review of the Mauss, it is intelligence rather than affectivity cultural phenomenon out of which cartoons can eventually succeeded Marcel Mauss as the work in Les Temps Modernes; others have been that characterizes these societies, an intelligence be made, such as the famous “breakfast of the director of the section of comparative religion. less conciliatory.) that above all transpires in their classificatory structuralists,” by Maurice Henry in La Quinzaine A string of publications would follow, and in In 1955 these two works were followed by activities. For Mauss these are based on the Litteraire, 1966, and one should be wary of any 1959 he was elected to the Collège de France (a Tristes tropiques, a literary account of his travels need to overcome social divisions and conflicts, simplistic formulas, which are normally pro- position he held until his retirement in 1982). and intellectual development during the pre-war and his classic 1925 essay The Gift analyzes one posed simply to foreclose historical understand- Shortly after his election he initiated the Labora- period, but which also branches out into a gen- way of solving this, by establishing structures ing. And even though the structuralist vogue in tory for Social Anthropology with the intent of eral philosophy of culture in a somewhat melan- of reciprocity; for Lévi-Strauss this was still to its more shallow aspects, as it became publicly laying the institutional foundations the new choly key, and that made his fame in the general much of a concession to a thing-like idea of the visible in the early 1960s, with its heavy depen- discipline, and in 1961 he founded the journal, intellectual world.2 The opening of the book, social. Rather than seeing a continuity between dence on certain idealized models of language, l’Homme, which was to become an intellectual one of the most famous postwar texts on voyages the natural and the social, Lévi-Strauss stresses may have been a passing fashion, the perspective venue for scholarly publications in the field. and explorers, has become famous: Je hais les the autonomy of the social as a signifying order it opened in establishing a space for dialog More publications would follow, but in a certain voyages et les explorateurs, “I hate traveling and ex- with respect to the given physical world, which between cultures and between layers within a sense his aim was now set, and the ensuing work plorers.” Georges Bataille, in some respects close for him is a consequence of its fundamentally singular culture—a certain desubstantialization can be seen as gradual fulfillment of the initial to Lévi-Strauss, although the latter always found linguistic nature. of received cultural values, an attentiveness to promise: to create a science of Man, in the most his musings on anthropology and his poetic use But at the same time this linguistic structuring the constitutive play of oppositions in work universal sense of the word, that would neither of ethnographic material appallingly amateur- should be seen as an unconscious activity, which is within identity—remains valid and relevant, succumb to the abstract necessities of philoso- ish, captured something of the tone of the book exerted on the level of a “mind” inaccessible to even though the scientist fantasies of the 1960s phy nor the empirical contingencies of history, in his review: “The newness of the book stands individuals, and Lévi-Strauss sometimes sees this have been happily dispelled. With respect to but integrate both in a new type of analysis, opposed to any form of brooding, it corresponds as analogous to psychoanalysis—which, together Lévi-Strauss himself, one could cite Marcel although one whose name, “anthropology,” in to a need for more encompassing and poetic val- with geology and Marxism, was one of his three Hénaff, the author of one of the most lucid fact would become a fundamental questioning ues, such as horror and tenderness on the level of early “mistresses,” as he says in Tristes Tropiques, recent syntheses of his work: the page may have of the inherited definitions of man. history and of the universe, it tears us away from since the both lead us away from the visible been turned with respect to the specific claims of the poverty of our streets and our apartment towards that which conditions it. This analogy

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� Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes. Cartoon by Maurice Henry, published in La Quinzaine Litteraire, 1 July 1967

with Freud must be said to remain at a superfi- Partly due to the polemic against Sartre’s views build vast conceptual structures on the basis of provocative thrust of the book lies in the final cial level in Lévi-Strauss’ own comments (which of historical agency that concludes The Savage selective material, which translates into his part, where Foucault investigates the emergence does not preclude, as we will see later on, another Mind, Lévi-Strauss found himself to be the desire to grasp nothing less than the universal of man as a fold of finitude, whose structure type of encounter that takes place via the theory founding father of a new movement called structures of the human mind, while still insist- gradually appears in the new discourses of of the Symbolic in Lacan, who, like Lévi-Strauss, “structuralism,” a position from which he how- ing that his research is highly specialized and biology, political economy, and philology, and took his cues from the linguistics of Saussure ever immediately retreated in order to immerse only makes sense in a technical context. On the whose philosophical underpinnings lie in the and Jakobson). Something similar may be said himself into the major work that was to occupy one hand, Lévi-Strauss always claims that his Copernican revolution of Kant, in which the about his positive references to Marx: the lin- him for the following decade, Mythologiques work had nothing to do with philosophy, on the question “What is man?” displaces the question guistic structuring of the world in Lévi-Strauss (published in four volumes between 1964 and other hand that his project is to displace philoso- of Rationalism, “What is God?”5 Through the is not an “ideology” that would somehow veil or 1971). Basing himself on a single myth from phy. The responses to such claims could not fail new understanding of finitude that emerges in distort a “real” infrastructure, and consciousness South America, whose transformations he then to come, and in the following I will look at two, Kant, where it is no longer a limitation on our as understood in structural anthropology cannot follows throughout all of the Americas up to both of which claim to prolong and radicalize knowledge, but its very condition of possibility, be taken as “false” in the sense of the famous Arctic circle, he details a vast transformational Lévi-Strauss’s insights, and in this they undoubt- Man emerges in a constant relation to a series camera obscura analogy. Conditioned as they may scheme that is supposed to underlie the actual edly step outside of the sphere of legitimacy of doubles: he is both and empirical being and be by the intellectual conjunctures of the French narrative content of particular myths, and in claimed by the discourse of anthropology—in a transcendental source of the empirical, both 1950s and 1960s, these generous remarks in fact this way the thousands of pages of these four fact, both of them claim to diagnose the age of a cogito and a sphere of the unthought against seem to disfigure Lévi-Strauss’s theories (which volumes constitute the actual working out of anthropology as finite, although the conclusions which the cogito must attempt to retrieve does not mean that they cannot be developed in the theoretical program outlined in The Savage they draw from this will be opposed. itself, both an origin of historical practices and another direction, as is shown for instance in the Mind. The particular myths are simply instances someone who is subjected to a history he has work of Maurice Godelier). of mythic speech, a “parole” behind which a iii. The outside and the inside not made, an origin that retreats and returns. In 1962 he published two more theoretically “langue” can be formulated, and eventually all Stepping outside—has this not been the secret de- The human sciences, in Foucault’s reading, are seminal works, Totemism and The Savage Mind. types of myths can be reduced to such a universal sire of philosophy ever since Kant, in the Critique constructed on the basis of these “doubles,” and In the first he expanded the analyses of kinship language of all languages. The singular myths of Pure Reason, claimed to have attained “the sure the fact that we today can begin to identify the to encompass a whole set of systems of clas- are made up of small buildings blocks, the path of science,” or even since Descartes in his formative rules of the game means that it is sification, and showed that a phenomenon like “mythemes” (which should be seen as analogous Discourse on Method proposed to nullify the entire nearing its end, and that the figure of Man will “totemism” did not imply any kind of mystic to the phonemes in language) that can be com- tradition and finally establish the unshakable soon be erased. connection to nature, once more rebutting the bined or “bundled” into larger compounds. In foundation of knowledge? And yet, what such In this dramatic narrative, psychoanalysis and idea that the “primitive mind” would somehow this sense, there is no original or privileged ver- an outside amounts to is far from clear: is it no ethnology (Foucault’s extremely dense text pro- be too engaged in survival to attain the distance sion of the story, and the reference myth chosen longer philosophy but something else, or finally vide no names or explicit references, but it is to the physical surroundings necessary for at the outset of the first volume of Mythologiques philosophy, a discourse that could cease to be in fairly obvious that Lacan and Lévi-Strauss are the abstraction of science; in fact, Lévi-Strauss is only a technical convenience to get the permu- love with wisdom since it is in possession of it? intended) occupy a privileged limit position, not argued, totemism is just abstract and remote tational logic going. Or is it more like the dispelling of a dream, the because they finally would have attained the sta- from the natural environment as any modern But notwithstanding their varying content, farewell to the dream of rigorous science—a tus of true human science, but precisely because classificatory system. Classifying is a profound and all the possible permutations, myths in farewell that Husserl surely never proclaimed they form “counter-sciences” that point to the and universal need, although the principles for general share a fundamental feature that Lévi- in his last work, The Crisis of the Human Sciences, limit of the modernist-humanist idea of Man, doing it do differ: what has been understood as Strauss believed to have discovered early on in but still saw as imminent threat, emanating both and function as “criticism and contestation” (373) the “primitive” or “pre-logical” mind (to use the his celebrated analyses of the Oedipus story, from the successes of the mathematical sciences within the episteme of modernity. Psychoanaly- term of Lévy-Bruhl) is in fact a method of clas- which is that they work with binary oppositions and the corresponding rejection of them from sis advances toward that fundamental region sifying that makes use of concrete and sensible in an attempt to resolve them into fictitious the recent philosophies of life, with their em- that the other human sciences only approach characteristics, which survives in our modern unity by associating irreconcilable oppositions phasis on finite cultural totalities, within which indirectly, not in order to render it explicit, but art, and the human mind is fundamentally the with more easily manageable ones, or by finding he may or may not have included the Heidegger to encounter it as a “text closed in upon itself” same. The Savage Mind proposes that we should mediating terms (for instance the “trickster,” as who had just published Being and Time? (374). This, Foucault suggests, is the primordial see a continuity, rather than a qualitative break in the case of the raven or coyote, who through Such a vision of a radical break is what we find articulation of finitude that transcends the Something similar holds of what is perhaps a complex scheme that passes through the posi- in Foucault’s The Order of Things (Les mots et les dimension of representation, and where we find the most famous distinctions elaborated by tions of agriculture and hunting, herbivore and choses, 1966),4 which undertakes the project of the three figures of Death, Desire, and the Law. Lévi-Strauss, i.e., the difference between “bri- predator, come to act as a bridge between life writing an “archeology of the human sciences,” For philosophy this appears a kind of mythology, coleur” and “engineer” developed in The Savage and death in many Native American myths). In i.e., of unearthing those rules of formation that but in Foucault’s reading these limit-figures had Mind. The bricoleur is someone who uses what- this sense, it is the mythical structure, endowed have made it possible to speak of life, language, to appear, and their mythological status is in fact ever comes handy, who develops an improvised with a certain necessity, which thinks behind and labor in a particular way that is centered due to the fact that they circumscribe, from the craft on the basis of already existing things, our back in the different and seemingly fantastic around the concept of “Man.” Foucault con- outside, the representational space of the human whereas the engineer works on the basis of a and erratic stories we tell, and at the beginning structs a grand historical narrative that links sciences. And, Foucault continues, ethnology comprehensive plan. In this sense, the bricoleur of The Raw and the Cooked Lévi-Strauss speaks of together—or rather disjoints, since he proposes undertakes the same transition in the sphere of is like the “savage,” whose world is closed and his attempt to reduce this seeming profusion of that we should see them as fundamentally historicity (and here we can see Lévi-Strauss’s finite, whereas the engineer is the outcome of motifs in order to “attain a level at which a kind discontinuous—a series of epistemic formations, polemic against Sartre in the background), and modern science, and has the capacity to conceive of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the the Renaissance, the Classical Age, Modernity, it does so on the basis of an “absolutely singular of entirely new things. However, Lévi-Strauss illusions of liberty.” and finally a formation that appears as a glitter- event” (376), i.e., the end of the colonial phase adds, the difference between them is one of degree In this work Lévi-Strauss’s proposes a grand ing promise beyond the confines of the present. and the questioning of the Western ratio, the rather than one of kind, and we should not un- vision of a “mythologics” that has both a uni- Even though much of the focus of his investiga- acknowledgement of “finitude,” that this derstand this pair as simply a metaphor for the versal theoretic ambition and a highly limited tions lie on the classical age, of whose systems inevitably brought about. This shift brings the pair primitive-modern, but more as two univer- empirical scope, which in fact seems to be a of grammar, natural history, and exchange human sciences back to their constitution on the sally co-existing tendencies in the human mind. recurrent motif in his work: to generalize and of wealth he provides a detailed account, the archeological level, to their roots in the modern

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Hot Desking is a collaboration between Manifesta 7 and Curatorlab/Konst- Supported by Manifesta 7 and Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts fack as part of the exhibition The Rest of Now curated by Raqs Media Collec- and Design, Stockholm tive in Bolzano, 2008, which takes The Rest of Now as a point of departure for further discussions and explorations. The project consists of four broad- Curatorlab is an international postgraduate programme at Konstfack (University sheets and four discursive events in four cities—Rome, Stockholm, Paris and College of Arts, Crafts and Design) in Stockholm, directed by Renée Padt (Stockholm), Istanbul—which function as independent but related satellites of The Rest of Ronald Jones (Stockholm) and Marysia Lewandowska (London). Hot Desking is orga- Now. The broadsheets and events link ideas, themes and discussions initiated nized in collaboration with Måns Wrange, former Director of CuratorLab and newly by the exhibition in Bolzano to the local context of the four cites. appointed Rector of KKH—The Royal University College of Fine Art in Stockholm.

episteme, not in the sense that they would finally Cooked, where the project of his “mythologics” neither a mythology or a science of myths, but low from them, no matter how contradictory, pierce the enigma of man, but that they would is outlined, says that he has “sought to transcend a discourse which is itself mythomorphic, in its hesitant, and inconclusive they may be, they are uncover the stratum from out of which the idea the opposition between the sensible and the lack of center, its affirmation of the “anaclastic” however both inscribed in an interminable dia- of man emerges as something fundamentally intelligible by operating from the outset at the condition of all discourse? log with the “event” of structural anthropology contingent. In this ethnology and psychoanalysis level of the sign,” Derrida reminds us that the The two readings by Derrida and Foucault, and cannot be understood without it. This is why prepare us for a thinking beyond the space of concept of sign belongs wholly to metaphys- in their very different tonalities and aims— this page may indeed be turned, but never torn humanism, and for a thinking of language (to ics, and cannot be used to escape its founding Foucault’s being limited to a few pages at the out of the book of modern philosophy.• which contemporary linguistics is still a prelude, oppositions. In this way, the critical operation end of a long book, whereas Derrida would con- Foucault says) that would dispel the mirage can neither accept nor simply dispense with tinue his reading in a much more patient way in The above text is an edited version of a talk of man. Ethnology is the limit of humanism, this concept—any questioning of the system to Of Grammatology, where Lévi-Strauss’s theories given at Södertörn University, November it both belongs to and does not belong to the which it belongs must already presuppose it, and of writing, violence, and the origin of sociality 28, 2008, on the occasion of Claude Lévi- modern episteme, depending on how we choose this extends to “all the concepts and sentences of are resituated in what is now called “the age of Strauss’s 100th birthday. to read the “event.” metaphysics” (281). But, Derrida continues, with Rousseau”—are undoubtedly made possible 1966, the same year as the publication of The respect to the human sciences, ethnology indeed by an profound and constitutive ambivalence Order of Things, Jacques Derrida delivered the lec- has a particular privilege, since it could only be inside Lévi-Strauss own work: the project of Notes ture “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse born after a “decentering,” at the moment when retrieving that which is about to be lost in 1. Marcel Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of of the Human Sciences” at a conference at Johns “European culture—and, in consequence, the modern culture, and the acknowledgment that Structural Anthropology, trans. Mary Baker (Minneapo- Hopkins University, “Critical Languages and the history of metaphysics and of its concepts—had the “primitive” is only an ethnocentric illusion; lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). For a recent Sciences of Man.”6 At first, Derrida’s response in been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced the desire to constitute a science of myth, and overview of the entire structuralist movement, see François Dosse, History of Structuralism, trans. Deborah 1966 to the claims made by Lévi-Strauss appears to stop considering itself as the culture of refer- the acknowledgment that our sciences of man do Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota similar to Foucault’s, in that he historicizes the ence” (282). The critique of ethnocentrism is in not break with mythopoetics and mythologics, Press, 1997). “event” for which structural anthropology is this sense connected to the critique of metaphys- but perhaps bring the intertwining of mythos 2. This melancholy tone and the nostalgia for the past one particular name. The advent of structuralism ics, above all in the form developed by Heidegger, and logos to its fulfillment. Derrida summarizes: that permeates Lévi-Strauss’s work has been studied in great detail in a recent doctoral thesis at Gothenburg must for Derrida be inserted within a history, and it shares the same paradox, i.e., that all the “Turned toward the lost or impossible presence University, Christina Schmift, Nostalgisk längtan och although unlike in Foucault, this history does conceptual tools it can mobilize belong to the of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic iskallt förnuft (Institutionen för idéhistoria och veten- not follow the rhythm of sharp epistemological very discourse that is being challenged—a neces- of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, skapsteori, 2007). breaks, but it is “as old as the episteme—that is sity that no one can escape, although not all ways negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauian side of 3. Georges Bataille, “Un livre humain, un grand livre,” Critique, nr. 105, February 1956. to say, as old as Western science and Western of giving in to it are equal, as Derrida underlines, the thinking of play whose other side would 4. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences, philosophy” (278). On the other hand, it is and this double-bind becomes particularly criti- be Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous trans. anonymous (New York: Random House, 1970). indeed a break, in the sense that brings the idea cal in the case of Lévi-Strauss. affirmation of the play of the world and of the All further citations with pagination from this edition. of structure as such to the fore, and particularly Derrida takes his cues from the opposition innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a 5. The true source of The Order of Things is in fact Fou- cault’s translation of Kant’s Anthropology, and the long the idea of a center that at once opens and limits between nature and culture, which Lévi-Strauss world of signs without fault, without truth, preface to the translation that remained unpublished the “play” of elements, and where the chain of posits at the opening of his book on the struc- and without origin which is offered to an active for a long time, but which now has been released both substitutions comes to an end. This center Der- tures of kinship as at once universal (relating to interpretation” (292). The final lines of The Order in French and English. For a discussion, see my rida understands, following Heidegger, as the spontaneity and nature) and contingent (related of Things, where Foucault speculates on the pos- “Governance and Rebellion: Foucault as Reader of Kant and the Greeks,” site 22–23, 2008. determination of being as presence, which has to a particular norm), and thus something that sible undoing of the modern episteme, appear to 6. The text was subsequently published in L’écriture et received a long chain of names within the history is not “far removed from a scandal.”7 On the locate themselves squarely within this alterna- la différence(Paris: Seuil, 1967), trans. by Alan Bass as of metaphysics: eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia one hand, given the opposition of nature and tive (although Foucault would soon move on to Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, culture, it is indeed a scandal, but on the other other positions): “If those arrangements were Press, 1978). All further page references are to this edition. It could be argued that this particular text transcendentality, consciousness, God, man etc. hand, as the passage into and very condition of to disappear as they appeared, if some event of is what more than anything else produced a strange The “invasion” of language into this problematic possibility of the opposition between physis and which we can at the moment do more than sense philosophical mirage entitled “poststructuralism,” and the ensuing transformation of everything its opposites (nomos, techne, history), the incest the possibility—without knowing either what which in its turn has led many to understand the work into “discourse” was the moment when the cen- prohibition is the basis of “the whole of philo- its form will be or what it promises—were to of thinkers as diverse and in many respects completely opposed as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Deleuze, ter began to appear as a moment within a chain sophical conceptualization,” and thus precisely cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical as if they were simply a series of “anti-scientific” of such substitutions, and when the absence of that which it is “designed to leave in the domain thought once did, at the end of the eighteenth responses to the scientist claims of early structuralism. a “transcendental signified extends the domain of unthinkable” (283f). Now Lévi-Strauss does century, then one can certainly wager that man The truth of the matter is of course that their respec- and the play of signification infinitely” (280). But not question the value of his own tools, he would be erased, like a face drawn at the edge tive trajectories originated long before the quarrel of the mid ‘60s: Derrida as well as Lyotard begin in even though this “event” is undoubtedly as old does not produce a genealogy of his concepts, of the sea” (387). As Derrida notes, it cannot the early 1950’s as readers of Husserl, although they as philosophy, it has reached an acute stage in the instead he proceeds in a piecemeal fashion, in simply be a question of choosing between these read him very differently, whereas Deleuze starts of present, which Derrida circumscribes by citing fact very much in the sense of the bricolage he two options, between Rousseau and Nietzsche, with Hume and British empiricism, and Foucault the displacements operated by Freud, Nietzsche, had analyzed in The Savage Mind—and, Derrida and the rest of his philosophical trajectory was with psychopathology and existential psychoanalysis. From the point of view of philosophical substance, and Heidegger. All of them are however caught notes, this corresponds precisely to the necessity in one sense dedicated to the uncovering of the it would make much more sense to locate them all in a necessary circle, which is neither dialectical of advancing from the inside towards a possible root of this problem in the abyssal condition in within a complex dialog with phenomenology. It nor hermeneutic, but points to the strategic and outside. In this sense, the Engineer, who would of metaphysics, whereas Foucault would turn is indeed also true that their paths in different ways economic necessity of belonging to the tradition construct his discourse solely out of himself, the toward a genealogical historicizing of all such later would intersect with “structuralism,” but only in order to subsequently continue in their own tangential that one wants to dismantle, to the effect that pure Cartesian beginner, is a myth fabricated attitudes, including his own. This brief moment, directions, and the imposition of a false unity through any “step outside” (284) can only occur by a more by the bricoleur, the myth of pure reason or a in 1966, their respective trajectories came close, the rubric “poststructuralism” cannot but produce rigorous understanding of the inside. theological idea. And indeed, when Lévi-Strauss although the proximity was perhaps an illusion complete confusion (not to speak of the strange epithet It is here that Lévi-Strauss surfaces in Derrida’s himself on several occasions point to the “my- from the start. “neo-structuralism,” which makes even less sense). 7. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Bell, lecture, first as one example of many: when the thopoetic” quality of bricolage, does he not, as No matter how we finally come to judge both John von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: anthropologist, in the preface to The Raw and the Derrida suggests, describe his own “mythologic,” of these stances and all those who would fol- Beacon Press, 1969), 8.

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