Steuerzeile Titel 

Reconsidering The Documentary and Contemporary Art

Foreword
Tom Eccles 4

Introduction
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art
Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl 8

“Documentary”: Authority and Ambiguities

Olivier Lugon 26

The Plays of the Witnesses

Jean-Pierre Rehm 36

Kicking the Cat

On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth
Jörg Heiser 46

Documentary/Vérité
Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
Okwui Enwezor 60

Life Full of Holes

T. J. Demos 102

The Documentary
Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries
Vít Havránek 126

Negatives of Europe
Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies
Carles Guerra 142

Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism

The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization
Stefan Jonsson 164

Research and Display

Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art
Jan Verwoert 186

Struggle, Event, Media

Maurizio Lazzarato 208

A Language of Practice
Hito Steyerl 220

Contributors 228
Credits 234
“The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contempo-


rary Art” is a long-term research project on “the documentary.” The

Foreword
project aims at situating these contemporary documentary practices
within current cultural production and at exploring their role within
mainstream media and activism. It also aims at investigating the heri-
tage of documentary practices in contemporary art, in relation to the
history of film, documentary photography, and television as well as
to video art.
“The Greenroom” is a collaboration between Maria Lind, the
director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies,
Bard College (CCS Bard) and the artist, writer, and theoretician Hito
Steyerl. A reference group, consisting of the artists Petra Bauer,
Matthew Buckingham, Carles Guerra, Walid Raad, and Hito Steyerl
has contributed to the research project in various ways. The research
project will run for approximately three years, having started in
March 2008. Its first public event, the exhibition “The Greenroom:
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (Part I),”
will take place 27 September 2008–1 February 2009 at the Hessel
Museum, at CCS Bard.
In many ways, “The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documenta-
ry and Contemporary Art” is a “greenroom for documentary practic-
es,” not unlike a greenroom at a television station, where staff and
guests meet before and after filming and engage in discussions
which often differ from those in the limelight. Thereby the “just be-
fore” and the “right after,” moments of less scripted performances
and unexpected encounters, are taken seriously. “The Greenroom:
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (Part II)” is
scheduled for Fall 2010.
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College is a unique
exhibition, education, and research center dedicated to the study of
art and curatorial practices from the 1960s to the present day. With
the arrival of Maria Lind as our director of the graduate program in
2008, we have increasingly sought out new ways to integrate the
activities of a public institution in ways that provide new teaching,
 research, and public programming opportunities. “The Greenroom:


Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art,” is the most

Tom Eccles
ambitious of many recent initiatives at the center, one that we hope
provides an experimental model for future programs.

Tom Eccles
Executive Director, CCS Bard
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art

11
The double bind is strong: on the one hand documentary images

Introduction
are more powerful than ever. On the other hand, we have less and
less trust in documentary representations. This is the case at a
time when documentary visual material is a part of contemporary
affective economies, supporting everything from humanitarian aid
to a sustained politics of fear.01 Without it something like globalized
media would look entirely different, and the course of events in,
for example, world politics would be completely different. Docu-
mentary media images also pervade the most intimate of spheres
through mobile phones, youtube, and other interfaces; they have
not only entered collective imagination but have also profoundly
transformed it.
In this light, it should come as no surprise that documentary
practices have made up one of the most significant tendencies wi-
thin art during the last two decades. Traditional documentary photo-
graphy and film have been reinvented and reinvigorated by merging
with traditions such as video, performance, and conceptual art. Re-
cent documentary works attest to a new diversity and complexity of
forms, ranging from conceptual mockumentaries to reflexive photo
essays via split-screen slide shows, found footage video reporta-
ges, reenacted printed matter, and archaeological collages. Its field
of reference ranges from traditional documentary art forms and
conventional reportage to Third Cinema, essay and avant-garde
film, and from reality TV to performance and interventionist art. Al-
though such innovative documentary art forms abound, and a large
number of exhibitions and other projects dealing with documentary
practices and contemporary art have been organized in various

01 See Hito Steyerl, “Die dokumentarische Unschärferelation,” in Die Farbe der Wahrheit (Vienna: Turia und Kant,
2008), 13.
02 A few selected examples include: “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art,” International
Center of Photography, New York 2008; “No More Reality,” BELEF, Belgrade 2006; “Slowly Learning to Survive
the Desire to Simplify: A Symposium on Critical Documents,” Iaspis, Stockholm 2006; “The Need to Document,”
various locations, 2005; “After the Fact,” Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin 2005; “Experiments with Truth,” The Fabric
Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia 2004–05; “True Stories,” Witte de With, Rotterdam, January–March 2003;
“Ficcions documentals,” Fundació “la Caixa”, Barcelona 2003; “It’s Hard to Touch the Real,” Kunstverein München
2002–04; After the News—Post-Media Documentary Practices at the CCCB in Barcelona, 2003. This list repre-
sents merely a sample from a much larger pool of shows, which have addressed documentary modes in art
since 2000.
 parts of the world,02 the discussion of the phenomenon is still mostly
12
confined to scattered texts in various catalogues and journals. This
Maria Lind, Hito Steyerl
anthology seeks to overcome this dispersion and offer new per-
spectives on this crucial theme.
Document vs. Art?
Historically, the documentary is a form that emerges in a state of
crisis: it is no coincidence that many documentary art works remind
us of quests for suitable forms and provide methods for the discus-
sion of social content. They often aim to mirror the effects of past
or recent political and economic upheaval. Their inclusion into the
art field historically marks a moment of social and political crisis,
as was the case with the early years of Soviet communism with its
debates about productivism and factography, the Great Depression
of the 1930s in the US and reformist documentary photography,
anti-colonial movements and the birth of the film essay, the counter-
hegemonial movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, and nouvelle vague
documentary as well as conceptualist documentation.
Yet the inclusion of documentary modes in the art field has
also always been strongly contested. In the wake of modernist art
history, documentary practices have traditionally been understood
as the opposite of art, its alter ego.03 This reading also affects con-
temporary articulations of the documentary, where its status as art
remains as disputed as ever.
An unlikely precursor of modernist art historian Clement
Greenberg’s well-known contempt for the documentary is Walter
Benjamin, who in a little noted passage of “Einbahnstraße” (One-way
street), juxtaposes art and document as two oppositions. Benjamin, 04
for all his usual sophistication, goes so far as to describe the docu-
ment as the preoccupation of “primitive man.” He probably wrote this
in ignorance of the Soviet discussions about documentary practices,
03 One of these recent debates around the inclusion of documentary into documenta 11 is traced in detail in Okwui
Enwezor’s text.
04 Walter Benjamin: “13 Theses against Snobs,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000), 459. I owe this hint to Sophie Hamacher, who analyzed Benjamin’s text in detail in an unpublished
masters thesis at the Whitney Program: “Art, Document, Witness,” 2004.
which around 1925—the year Benjamin wrote these aphorisms—
13
displayed a fascinating degree of sophistication. Throughout the
Introduction
1920s, heated debates about the documentary and its transforma-
tion of art and reality occurred in the circles of the Soviet avant-
garde, whose members discussed the construction of facticity and
the politics of perception05 with a depth of insight that contempora-
ry debates are struggling to achieve. Benjamin’s text “The Author
as Producer,”06 written in 1934, captures some of these debates
and presents a much more articulate view of the documentary
and its relations of production. It also conveys a glimpse of the
documentary’s fraught relationship with the state apparatus. Only in
the period between both world wars does the notion of documenta-
ry transcend local contexts; it coalesces into a set of practices and
develops a certain self-awareness.07
Since then, the repeated appearance of documentary forms
within the art field (as well as its subsequent marginalization in
times of conservative rollback) is accompanied by disagreements
about its status as art. Its alleged non-artistic nature was even stra-
tegically exploited by some early conceptualists in order to distance
themselves from worn-out aesthetic standards.08 In this era, docu-
mentary practices have become an updated example of various
primitivisms constructed from within the art field serve to renew Missing word, “…and
it,
09
by tapping into its self-imagined “Other.” From the late 1960s serve…”?
until today, the incursion of documentary modes into performance
and conceptual art has also marked the period during which we
have witnessed the impact of mass media and the information age
on the art field, and documentary practices negotiate an unstable
relationship between the two. Information has become an impor-
tant concern of critical art practices: it is understood as a form of
05 For an overview of some of these debates see October 118, “Soviet Factography—A Special Issue” (Fall 2006).
06 Walter Benjamin: “The Author as Producer,” in New Left Review I/62 (July/August 1970).
07 See Olivier Lugon pp. 26–35 in this volume.
08 See Lucy Soutter, “The Photographic Idea: Reconsidering Conceptual Photography,” in Afterimage (March–
April 1999).
09 See John Roberts, “Photography, Iconophobia and the Ruins of Conceptual Art,” in The Impossible Document:
Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966-1976, ed. John Roberts (London: Camerawork, 1997), 7–46.
10 See Sabeth Buchmann, “Under the Sign of Labor,” in Art after Conceptual Art, ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth
Buchmann (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 179–196.
 critique and a site of intervention.10 Artists working in the wake of
14
representational critique, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic film
Maria Lind, Hito Steyerl
theory later challenged the idea of information as critique: starting
in the 1970s and especially from the 1990s onwards, postconceptu-
alist and essayistic documentary art practices tended to instead
emphasize the critique of information and offer skeptical and sub-
versive readings of documentary jargons of authenticity.
The era of neoliberal globalization after 1989 with its enormous
upheavals has spawned its own range of documentary modes,
which despite their huge formal differences attest to a shared
desire to “touch the real”11 and to create arenas of debate within an
increasingly privatized and fragmented global environment.12
The recent fragmentation of the social also impacts the site of
documentary production itself. The massive transformations within
the multiple modes of the documentary are intrinsically connected
to the ambivalent transitions of globalization.13 Due to the increa-
sing privatization of media and cuts in public funding, experimen-
tal documentary production has again been increasingly pushed
into the art field.14 The art field has become a laboratory for the
development of new documentary expressions. According to Bill
Nichols, this is a function it has held since the inception of docu-
mentary film: the formal experiments of the artistic avant-gardes set
the standards for representation of reality by mass media.
Historically, the overlap between documentary practices and
the art field has produced heated debate. As Olivier Lugon co-
gently remarks in his introductory text “Documentary: Authority and
Ambiguities,”16 historical documentary modes were primarily forged
within the art field, but repeatedly denied any part in it. They were
perceived as being “beyond art, yet very much a part of it.”17 This
11 “It’s hard to touch the real” is a quote by documentary filmmaker Johan van der Keuken. It was also used as motto
for a show at Kunstverein München in 2004, continued at Kunstverein Graz in 2006.
12 See Jan Erik Lundström, “After the Fact,” in After the Fact, catalogue, 1st Berlin Photography Festival, 2005, 11.
13 See Okwui Enwezor pages 60–81 in this volume.
14 See Hito Steyerl pages 222–229 in this volume.
15 See Stefan Jonsson pages 144–165 in this volume.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
paradox leads to the successive inclusion and exclusion of docu-
15
mentary forms from the field of art and opens up a zone of conflict
Introduction
in which different ideas of art (and its relation to life) clash and
transform each other. This conflict reflects the tension between
the two different tendencies inherent in documentary creation: the
desire to both let the subject express itself without much inter-
Lugon revised his text,
ference and yet on the aesthetic level to “turn it into something
this quote is no longer
unique.”18 But this tension also creates the drive of a documentary part of it.
quest for ever more authentic representations of the real.
True Life
Notions of the real or true life have haunted documentary expres-
sion since its early days. In the early 1920s, Dziga Vertov triumphant-
ly exclaimed: “Long live life, as it is!”19 While this slogan seems to
be underlining the importance of the real and authentic life, it also
paradoxically introduces doubts about its nature. Why does Vertov
have to reassure us this life is really “as it is”? Vertov’s exclamation,
as assertive as it sounds, also informs us about the suspicion that
haunts the notion of real life. Could there be another life as well,
one which is essentially alienated, corrupted, and treacherous? Or
does Vertov’s slogan rather embody what Alain Badiou called the
“passion of the real”20 during the 20th century: a violent desire to
15
unmask the truth and to cleanse reality from all appearances? As
Badiou has shown, this desire is intrinsically paranoid: it realizes
itself as a politics of suspicion. The passion for the real calls for a
renewed purge of reality from all things deemed inauthentic, a desire
which spills over into reality and catalyses purges and a politics
of “cleansing.” The myth of documentary authenticity is thus am-
bivalent; while, on the one hand, it testifies to a certain fidelity to
the material world, it also projects profound anxieties about its own
status onto the Other. Modernity, whose offspring is documentary
18 See Lugon on last page of his text in this volume.
19 For an extended discussion about Vertov and the documentary’s relation to life, see Hito Steyerl “Kunst oder
Leben,” in Die Farbe der Wahrheit (Vienna: Turia und Kant, 2008), 93–100.
20 Alain Badiou, Das Jahrhundert (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2006), 70ff.
 expression, appears Janus-faced in the prism of its documentary
16
reflection: if documentary works are historically imbued with the spir-
Maria Lind, Hito Steyerl
it of progress, enlightenment, and education, they not only record
but sometimes also actively contribute to the catastrophic failure in
realizing those ideals.
The crisis of modernity also impacts on the documentary’s tra-
ditional truth claims. While the notion of a document is historically
tied to ideas of certitude and confirmation and is primarily used in
the legal realm, this certitude has all but vanished from contempo-
rary consciousness. The experiences of the 20th century, its large-
scale enterprises of propaganda and disinformation, have created
an attitude, which could be called habitual distrust as well as advan-
ced media literacy. Documentary modes still appeal to institutional
modes of power/knowledge and cite their authority, but the effect
is rather a perpetual doubt; a blurred and agitated documentary un-
certainty, which paradoxically is extremely pertinent as an image of
our times.21 It is precisely the failure of the documentary to fulfill its
pretense to certainty, which ultimately does justice to an intranspa-
rent and dubious contemporary reality.22 The same lack of certainty
applies to theoretical definitions of the “documentary.”
time, this vagueness has actually contributed to the success and to
the dissemination of documentary practices. Instead of denying this
uncertainty, one should instead acknowledge its productive effects.
Perhaps this uncertainty has also made documentary practices one
of the most innovative forms of contemporary art. The documentary’s
ambivalent nature, hovering between art and non-art, has contribut-
ed to creating new zones of entanglement between the aesthetic
and the ethic, 25
between artifice and authenticity, between fiction
and fact, between documentary power and documentary potential,
and between art and its social, political, and economic conditions.
21
See Hito Steyerl, “Die dokumentarische Unschärferelation,” in Die Farbe der Wahrheit (Vienna: Turia und Kant,
2008), 15.
22 Ibid.
23 See Lugon page 26 in this volume.
24 Ibid.
25 See Okwui Enwezor pages 60–81 in this volume.
Communicating Vessels
17
This publication, containing ten essays written between 2003 and
Introduction
2007, engages with the contested field of desires and anxieties to
touch the real; it sits in the middle of needs to investigate the docu-
mentary’s role in the construction of our present. Having been pub-
lished in such diverse contexts as an art magazine from Holland, an
online periodical and a scholarly journal from New Zealand among
other places, this collection of texts forms the most extensive an-
thology on contemporary art and documentary practices to date.
The authors are equally diverse in their professional backgrounds,
which include writing and art production, curating, art history teach-
ing, literary critique, editing daily newspapers and mainstream art
magazines, or running a well-known documentary film festival. This
is yet another sign of how concerns about documentary practices
not only permeate the world of contemporary art but are also intrin-
sically interdisciplinary.
The first three texts explore the various impasse of documenta-
ry representation and its conflictual relation to various definitions of
art. In the first text of this volume, Olivier Lugon gives us a historical
23
At the same perspective on the connection between documentary practices and
theories and the art field. While the meaning of “documentary” has
shifted historically, the art field’s reaction has also turned out to be
24
unstable, torn as it was between rejection and embrace. But docu-
mentary practices are also filled with internal contradictions. The ba-
sic tension within documentary forms is the conflict between artifice
and authenticity. On the one hand, documentary practices express
the desire to get rid of the author or creator. On the other, this desire
can create—as in the work of Walker Evans—an even stronger
aesthetic impact, because the resulting images seem stripped from
any formal affectation. This paradox cannot be reconciled; it defines
the dynamic nature of documentary representation.
In Jean-Pierre Rehm’s text, “The Plays of the Witnesses,”26 the
paradoxes of documentary representation are further explored. At
26 See Jean-Pierre Rehm pages 36–45 in this volume.
 its core are a bundle of permanent discrepancies: although the
18
documentary often parades as a mere reflection of reality, it obeys
Maria Lind, Hito Steyerl
and carefully executes coded narrative systems. 27
To simply view
documentary forms as transparent rip-offs of reality means denying
that they “only contain opacity and thickness and that they are in
themselves objects of study, document among documents, link in
a process of interpretation offered to the political freedom of the
spectator.” 28
Quoting Michel Foucault, Rehm elucidates the function
of documentary information: to identify, to report what is known and
convenient, to report the past and the future in a desired present
without consequence or consistency, in order to obtain a confirma-
tion of all initial hypotheses. Conventional information is thus a pro-
cess of subjection and coerced obedience. A documentary critique
of this information could consist in the documentary production of
reality rather than its mimetic or naturalistic reproduction: an enti-
rely manufactured process, which blends fiction and documentary.
Thus, documentary practices are characterized by risk, the risk of
moving in-between and beyond the sterile opposition of simultane-
ously recording and making up reality.
A completely different approach is taken by Jörg Heiser, who
explores the link between fact, truth, and fiction. His close reading
of the work Mandarin Ducks by artists Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de
Rooij poses the question of the documentary from the perspective
of its supposed Other: fiction. According to Heiser, this piece points
to the core of the documentary problem precisely because it is
entirely fictional: it begs the question of truth. Heiser expresses
his dissatisfaction with constructivist models of documentary truth.
He grounds his debate in the ethic necessity to distinguish facts
from fiction or to disentangle historical events from their revisionist
distortion and describes Foucault’s often-cited model of a politics
of truth as a tautology in which power and truth are simply equated
with each other. By contrasting this model with Jürgen Habermas’
27 See page 37 of the text.
28 See pages 37–38 of the text.
pragmatic theory of truth reached by communication and consensus,
19
he argues for a dialectical movement between both. By analyzing the
Introduction
different logics of enunciation in Mandarin Ducks, Heiser highlights
each model’s failures but emphasizes that moments of truth still
emerge between both. More generally, he explores the question of
truth in the realm of art. Could we call it beauty, a quality produced
by a sustained contradiction?
Global Documentary
The next section locates concerns about the documentary and art
in the contemporary political and social context: the massive politi-
cal and economic upheavals caused by the contradictory drifts of
globalization. In his essay “Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Hu-
man Rights, and the Figure of ‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art,” Okwui
Enwezor firmly anchors most of the traditional concerns about the
relation of art and documentary in the present; he analyzes the
contemporary condition of documentary forms within the aporias
of globalization. Crafted as a response to the criticism of the docu-
mentary character of documenta 11, his text is a reflection on the
general dimension of the documentary in a world characterized by
two alternate endings of modernism: 1989 and 9/11.
According to Enwezor, documentary art works condense a
contemporary political and social constellation characterized by
the “unhomeliness” of globalization, migration, and mobility, as well
as by the catastrophic consequences of these processes. This
configuration gives rise to a new relation of ethics and aesthetics
mediated by a specific articulation of the documentary, which En-
wezor calls vérité (in contrast to the more conventional mode of
“documentary”). The mode of vérité doesn’t confront the specta-
tor with non-negotiable facts, as more conventional documentary
does. Instead, it creates a possible space for an ethical encounter
between the spectator and the other, a space in which truth is not
an abstracted mot d’ordre, but instead, as Alain Badiou proposes,
a truth process. As vérité, the documentary is not only mimetic but
 also analytic. It is not truth, but the fidelity to truth, that the docu-
Maria Lind, Hito Steyerl 20
mentary ceaselessly constructs and deconstructs. This version of
documentary, embodied by works from authors like Allan Sekula,
Chantal Akerman, Walid Raad, or the Black Audio Film Collective,
combines reflexivity with an ethical stance. It is also firmly located
within the ethical necessities of the present: How do we look at the
pain of the other without lapsing into voyeurism? Why do we still
have to answer to his or her gaze? How do we imagine a global
public sphere when there are no democratic institutions to back it?
Enwezor insists on the importance of the term “human rights” to
enable such communication and create a common ground within
an unevenly globalizing world. However, as he notes, this term is
also fraught with ambivalence.
This ambivalence is further explored in T. J. Demos’ essay
“A Life Full of Holes.” The failure of the promises of human rights
necessitates a fundamental revision of the relation between politics
and representation. It is no coincidence that the bearer of “human
rights,” the refugee deprived of any political representation, came
to metaphorically embody the vicissitudes of globalization. He or
she is the one who inhabits the fissures and gaps between states
and corporations, and is left to the precariousness of a deregulated
global sphere unbound by any rule of law. But if this subject is
not representable in terms of classical political representation, how
does it figure in artistic representation?
Demos argues that the structural absence of bare life from of-
ficial representation can nevertheless be captured by documentary
expression. The uncertain status of its subject troubles the image
and creates holes, blurs, and lacunae within the visual field. Docu-
mentary forms are thus suspended between being an instrument of
power and surveillance—not only representing but even constituting
bare life such as in the pictures from Abu Ghraib—and on the other
hand undermining the same structures it serves to uphold. Taking
Yto Barrada’s and Emily Jacir’s work as examples, Demos shows
how the representation of bare life proceeds within the ruptures,
holes, and fissures within documentary representation. Absence is
21
the only way to depict the realities of fragmented global spaces and
Introduction
to portray the fates of people who end up being swallowed by the
chasms in between them. But paradoxically, dispersion and disfigu-
ration can also free the subject from the confines of documentary
representation, as in Pursuit by Steve McQueen, which challenges
notions of the spectators’ bodily integrity and creates a space of
uncertainty and indeterminacy open to experiment and becoming.
Vít Havránek points out a different consequence of the most
recent effects of capitalist globalization on documentary preoccup-
ations. For Havránek, recent documentary art practices in Eastern
European countries during so-called “transition” represent a reac-
tion to the total reorganization of reality after 1989. The ethical va-
cuum produced in this period bears the visual stamp of advertising.
In contrast to this economically very potent yet vacuous form of
the public, the documentary is always grounded in the social posi-
tions of its subject matter. Form and content cannot be separated
from each other—an ethical relation between both is established.
This relation is often probed in relation to the social and econo-
mic context of documentary production itself—the art field. In Hans
Haacke’s or Andrea Fraser’s work, documents map out the rela-
tions of production within the art field or its institutions. The same
can be said about works by Roman Ondák, Deimantas Narkevičius,
and Pawel Althamer. At the same time, the historical space in some
transitional countries has to be reappropriated because it has fallen
prey to a widespread amnesia (or one might add, to privatization
and new national imaginaries). Works such as IRWIN’s East Art Map
reappropriate the space of writing art history, while others focus on
the subjective aspect of writing history. The necessity to develop a
documentary methodology, which more often than not incorporates
other research methods, enables documentary forms to trespass
not only into other disciplines but also to transcend a local per-
spective and to open up a space characterized by mobility and
nomadism.
 In Carles Guerra’s essay “Negatives of Europe,” questions of
Maria Lind, Hito Steyerl 22
mobility are explored further. Using the example of media reports
word missing? focusing on the cut-off of the old from Russia to Belarus in 2007,
he encourages us to ask what happens behind the “trompe l’oeil”
information that the media offers us. In order to examine this he
argues that a “collective pedagogy” is necessary, a pedagogy in
which information and opinion intermingle. The essayist works by
Ursula Biemann and Angela Melitopoulos are quoted as prime exa-
mples of how artists might successfully deal with current conditions
of globalization. In The Black Sea Files and Corridor X the artists
investigate transport and communication infrastructure—both the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the highway route stretching
from Greece through ex-Yugoslavia to Germany—through an intri-
cate play of the visible and the invisible, the total and the partial. Not
unlike montage in film, they are not documenting reality but rather
organising complexity. According to Guerra, this approach can be
seen in light of a general revival of interest in educational models in
contemporary art, with work that moves comfortably between the
academic department and the exhibition space. At the same time
he understands it as a critique of photojournalism and its prefe-
rence for single images and iconic power. Instead, this type of work
allows for new cognitive possibilities and ways of managing radical
plurality. And more importantly, these practices produce their own
events—they do not have to wait for them to happen.
Media and the Archive
The relation between media and documentary art is the focus of
the following section. The literary critic Stefan Jonsson discusses
the glaring conformism of global mass media in contrast to the
simultaneous politicization of contemporary art (including literature,
film, and music) of the last decade and a half. He sees the two as
communicating vessels. Art compensates for the blind spots of
journalism, not unlike the claims in the theoretical work of late 19th-
century Marxists Karl Kautsky and Franz Mehring. They showed
how the arts, during certain historical periods, channel information
23
and experiences, which have no other place in the public debate.
Introduction
In contemporary society, globalized media is the main public arena,
and we have to ask what is allowed there. What is considered
newsworthy? According to Jonsson, parochial news is coded as
universally applicable to humankind but only as long as they follow
“a universal equivalent.” This universal equivalent, or leveler, is a
well-known figure: it is based on experiences of Western men, of
the owning classes, and it excludes other local characteristics. The
universal equivalent is furthermore the key component of cultural
globalization.
Today both art and journalism are part of the historical process
called “globalization of culture,” in which Jonsson identifies three
tendencies: the triumph of American mass culture, the integration
of Western high culture in lifestyles beyond the West, and the re-
sistance of certain local traditions. Politics, in the sense of mirroring
opinions and following the rituals of day-to-day political affairs, is
nowadays catered to by journalism. At the same time “the political,”
meaning the underlying principles and consequences of political
and economic policies—and the ways people can represent them-
selves and their interest in a public sphere—are explored by art.
This leads to a situation where pluritopic interpretations can now
be found almost exclusively in the “public sphere of inbetween-
ness” produced by aesthetics and cultural theory rather than in
journalism. This public sphere of inbetweenness is, in Jonsson’s
understanding, a fourth tendency, which deals with the conflictual
relationships between the commercialized mass culture, standar-
dized elite culture, and local resistance. At the core of its pluritopic
interpretations lies a much-needed ambition to challenge worn-out
representational modes.
In his essay Jan Verwoert takes a closer look at the logic of
the archive, particularly within the context of art. Moving from the
“sublime archive” in the work of Christian Boltanski and Hanne
Darboven, in which history is encountered in its totality, to the de-
 institutionalized and subjective archive in the work of Renée Green,
Maria Lind, Hito Steyerl 24
he asks how a record becomes a document. The “respectless” con-
tact, which is fostered between the work and the viewer in Green’s
Import/Export Funk Office, for example, is according to Verwoert
also present in the essayistic installations of Dorit Margreiter. As
with Adorno’s definition of the literary essay, the essayist installation
privileges associatively arranged statements, filtering them through
subjective experience rather than promoting linear progress and
rational arguments. This spatio-temporal experience can also take
place in a video such as Gitte Villesen’s Willy as DJ, where the artist
and her collaborator perform in front of the camera in relation to
available material. Using the filmic work of Deimantas Narkevičius
as an example, he suggests that cinematic montage can create
gaps in the archive, which allow for refined attempts at making
research available. Verwoert concludes by arguing, as is the case
with a number of the other authors here, that documentary practi-
ces in contemporary art are neither tied to a genre nor to a me-
dium. They are both expanding and diversifying. And yet, there is
a common denominator to the multiplicity of practices: a critical
sensibility, which acknowledges the urgency to represent specific
realities at the same time as it confesses to an awareness of the
ideologies and apparatuses governing them.
Documentary Power and Potential
How does documentary theory align itself with contemporary theo-
ries of information capitalism and the cultural industries? How is
the documentary embedded in its social conditions, and how can
it work on transforming them? The last two texts address urgent
questions concerning the material conditions of the documentary.
In his analysis of the expression of contemporary protest move-
ments, Maurizio Lazzarato breaks with the age-old paradigm of
representation—whether in politics or artistic modes of expression.
Referring to a cultural condition in which corporations and their ad-
vertisements produce a world in which objects and subjects exist,
where consumption means belonging to a world, he claims that the
25
way signs, images, and statements function in contemporary econ-
Introduction
omies instead contribute to the emergence of the possible as well
as to its realization. A documentary image therefore becomes a
catalyst for a different reality instead of being its representation. He
is inspired by events in Seattle and collective demonstrations else-
where, and to him the slogan of the protesters—“a different world
is possible”—signifies entry to a different intellectual atmosphere,
with different conceptual constellations. To replace the outdated
subject-work relationship, which is the basis of a representational
paradigm, he proposes the event-multiplicity bind. One advantage
is that the event is an encounter with two aspects: soul and body.
It is both intellectual-emotional and performed, literally. As opposed
to the classical representational paradigm this does not reflect
backwards but projects ahead and creates “possible worlds.”
By addressing the contemporary conditions of production within
documentary practice, Hito Steyerl seeks to establish a political per-
spective on the documentary that is not only constituted by concerns
with representation but also by addressing shared practice. In her
view, experimental contemporary documentary practice not only
serves to create works, but also links and connections between
dispersed digital workers. The space of contemporary experimen-
tal documentary production is peopled by freelancers and embed-
ded into global databases, p2p networks, and other file sharing
platforms. This opens up reflections on the conditions of digital
production as well as on the question of copyright and intellectual
property. But the volatile networks of experimental documentary
producers could also become new nodes of a public sphere, which
has emancipated itself from the control of both nation and capital.
In the environment of digital capitalism (and very often also
national fragmentation and “ethnic” strife), the documentary relation
to reality shifts as well. As archives becomes fluid and more and
more information is available online, conflicts about the intellectual
property of documentary images and sounds increase. The docu-
 mentary becomes further implicated in processes of Othering and

Maria Lind, Hito Steyerl 26

27
social disintegration. But contemporary documentary production

Introduction
has to face these conditions. They do not represent reality. They
are the reality.

The Greenroom Project

This publication is part of “The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Do-
cumentary and Contemporary Art,” a long-term research project
on “the documentary.” The research project aims at situating these
contemporary documentary practices within current cultural pro-
duction and at exploring their role within mainstream media and
activism. It also aims at investigating the heritage of documentary
practices in contemporary art, in relation to the history of film, do-
cumentary photography and television as well as to video art. The
research project is a collaboration between the Center for Cura-
torial Studies, Bard College, and Hito Steyerl. A reference group,
consisting of Petra Bauer, Matthew Buckingham, Carles Guerra,
Walid Raad, and Hito Steyerl has been invited to contribute to the
research project in various ways. The research project will run for
approximately three years, having started in March 2008. Its first
public event, the exhibition “The Greenroom: Reconsidering the
Documentary and Contemporary Art (Part I),” will take place from
September 27, 2008–February 1, 2009 at the Hessel Museum, at
CCS Bard. “The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and
Contemporary Art” is a “greenroom for documentary practices,” not
unlike a greenroom at a television station, where staff and guests
meet before and after filming and engage in discussions, which
often differ from those in the limelight. Thereby the “just before”
and the “right after,” moments of less scripted performances and
unexpected encounters, are taken seriously. “The Greenroom: Re-
considering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (Part II)” is
scheduled for Fall 2010.
If, today, we wish to have a better understanding of the fluid con-

Documentary: Authority and Ambiguity 29

cept of “documentary,” there is unfortunately little point in returning
to the past. The word has always encompassed varying images
and attitudes and given rise to contradictory definitions. All that a
retrospective of this type reveals is how much the inconstancy of
the term is rooted in its history. No one has ever known with cer-
tainty what the term “documentary” actually entails. When referring
to film, a rough definition seems possible though illusory (roughly
speaking, everything that is not fiction), but it is hard to identify
what would be the opposite of “documentary” in photography (what
should we call fiction in photography?) and, consequently, the ex-
act scope of the term. However, the vagueness of the word has by
no means been a drawback, but has contributed to its success and
dissemination, since a very wide range of creators has legitimately
succeeded in appropriating the “documentary.” And this freedom of
use has been one reason for its impact and theoretical efficiency
for almost a century.
The one element that the countless definitions have in com-
mon is the very general requirement to respect the subject matter,
the desire to reveal “things as they are,” to provide reliable, authen-
tic information about them, avoiding any embellishment that might
alter the integrity of reality. From then on, viewpoints have diverged
at all levels—whether relating to how a description may adhere to
reality, which subjects are worth recording, and how to use the
gathered material. Nevertheless, three main options are clear: the
encyclopaedic/educational trend, the heritage/conservation line,
and the social/political approach—to which can be added aesthetic
considerations affecting all three, as we shall discover.
The first two options—the educational and the conservation-
al—most colored the term “documentary” in the first decades of the
twentieth century. At that time in France, the “film documentaire”
referred to a cultural or travel film of an edifying character. In the
field of photography, the incipient debate concerning the term re-
lated to encyclopaedic archiving and inventorying cultural heritage.
 Of course, social reformers and charitable institutions were already
Olivier Lugon 30
using photography to arouse public awareness, to denounce urban
poverty and worker exploitation; however, that usage of images
for combative purposes was not as yet primarily associated with
the category “documentary”. This social and political significance
came incontestably to the forefront in the 1930s, and it continues
to prevail today. This semantic shift has been largely prompted
by the Anglo-Saxon influence. In the inter-war years, British and
American authors adopted the French word “documentaire,” first in
the cinema and then in photography, turning it into “documentary.”
They used it to designate work geared to the non-stage-managed
contemporary world, and social reality in particular. Accordingly, the
term acquired an extremely positive moral and political connotation
associated with the quest for truth and social commitment. Thanks
to its transition into English, the word made its way into the aes-
thetic debate and returned to Europe with this added moral value
(admittedly continuing to have a wider connotation in German and
French than its American equivalent).
However, the other interpretations never completely disap-
peared, not even from Anglo-Saxon texts. And so, paradoxically, the
first British theoreticians of the documentary film, John Grierson and
Paul Rotha, did not select a political filmmaker such as Dziga Vertov
as the “founding father,” but Robert Flaherty, a rather romantic and
nostalgic researcher.01 Similarly, in photography, it was an archivist
also focusing on the past who was the one to play the tutelary
role: Eugène Atget. The succession of names associated from the
thirties onwards with Atget, with a view for creating in retrospect a
“documentary tradition,” also covers the most irreconcilable stand-
points: Henri Le Secq, Mathew Brady, Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, At-
get, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, the Farm Security
Administration… The record is as arbitrary as it is illogical. What,
basically, is the connection between the conservation approach of
01 In a report on Flaherty’s film Moana published in the New York Sun on February 8, 1926, John Grierson was the
first to use the term “documentary.” He was to examine it in more detail and codify it in countless subsequent
pieces in the 1930s.
Atget (photographs to keep old things alive), the desire for social
31
reform of Hine (photographs to bring about change), and the more
Documentary: Authority and Ambiguity
literary pursuits of Evans?
Great differences also emerge in methods for ensuring a faith-
ful representation of reality: Should the creator vanish behind the
subject in apparent neutrality, or is his presence necessary for the
credibility of his evidence? Is aesthetic formalization desirable or
reprehensible, does it reinforce or crush the documentary content
of the image? Does the “true documentary” not consist of an ac-
cumulation of evidence that is defined entirely by its subject matter,
without necessitating the slightest creative work or signature from
the maker? Is it not, by definition, a joint project? Must the im-
ages suffice as such or should their meaning be shaped by edito-
rial guidance and supporting text, serving to alter and subordinate
them? This leaves so many questions, which have not as yet been
answered, but which will be briefly reviewed below in their historical
perspective.
Accordingly, what might seem to be the documentary project’s
fundamental weakness—the nebulous definition, the assorted ap-
proaches—has undoubtedly been the chief factor influencing its
viability: a propensity to keep on discussing its methods and goals,
reinventing ways of providing a faithful, correct description of real-
ity. That distinguishes it in particular from photojournalism, with
which it has sometimes been identified. In fact, photojournalism’s
codes have remained unchanged for decades, and it has exercised
scarcely any self-criticism concerning the construction of authen-
ticity of its images and the appositeness of its procedures (the
snapshot format as the undisputed symbol of immediacy). Quite
the opposite, the documentary has proven to be permanently in a
state of flux and crisis. As soon as one group believed they had
found a descriptive formula guaranteeing veracity, another would
cast doubts on it and seek a more suitable method to do so. This
is the infinitely productive paradox of the documentary: when its
basic principle—“to show things as they are”—seemed to restrict
 the genre to a repetitive duplication of reality and deprive it of any
Olivier Lugon 32
opportunity for development, this very simply-formulated principle
actually gave rise to a constant exploration of new procedures and
forms. To quote the title of a famous article by Allan Sekula: for an
entire century it has been a matter of constantly “reinventing the
documentary.” 02
In 1906, the first Congrès international de la documentation
photographique was held in Marseille. It was the first attempt to
discuss and organize the interest in the visual document, which
was emerging in photographic circles as well as in libraries and ar-
chives. In Marseille, the issues addressed included the very concept
of the documentary image and the “conditions which photographic
prints should meet in order to constitute a document.”
it was difficult to come up with clear answers. And the discussions
were less about the actual images than about their processing:
preservation, registration, classification, numbering, or indexing,
with a vision for creating an international network of image banks,
eventually containing all the world’s documents. The assumption
was that no single image was “documentary” as such, neither as
regards subject matter nor form, but that it became documentary
in the way it was incorporated in an effective archive system. This
framework, this ordered availability, was felt to be what transformed
an image into a document—a dormant entity, awaiting a user who
would give it its meaning, the user—and not the producer—being
the central figure in documentary work.
This archival approach, which prevailed in official photographic
circles, contrasted the view emerging concurrently in the field of
social reform. One example can be found in the work of Lewis
Hine, who in the same year embarked on his famous project with
the National Child Labor Committee. For him, a documentary photo-
graph was not so much an archival record as a discursive element,
02 Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),”
(1976/1978) in Photography Against the Grain. Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984).
03 “Congrès de la documentation photographique,” Bulletin de l’Institut international de Bibliographie 11, nos. 1–3
(1906): 79.
part of a semantic construction determined by the photographer.
Documentary: Authority and Ambiguity 33
In addition, it was not aimed at some hypothetical future audience,
but at a contemporary one, whose ideas should be changed im-
mediately. So on the one hand it meant slow and open dissemina-
tion—a repository for material, which other people should activate
at some unspecified time; on the other hand rapid transmission
to a specific target group—images which are not waiting for an
audience, but address it with a specific message through selected
channels. In this way, according to Hine, activating the documents,
organizing their contact with the public by way of posters, publica-
tions, or projections, was part of the documentary photographer’s
own prerogatives.
03
Even then Apart from this contrast between archive and discourse, the
1906 congress also revealed another problematic pair regarding the
history of the documentary: the relationship between the documen-
tary project and art, a matter that proved extremely complex from
the very start and that had never been reduced to a simple antith-
esis. Oddly enough, among the organizers of the congress and the
defenders of photography as an archived item, there were some
proponents of “pictorialism,” i.e. photography merely to serve an
aesthetic purpose. For them the two fields were not contradictory.
Faced with supposed trivialization of photography brought about by
increasingly industrialized professional practice and more frequent
domestic use, they sought to fight on two fronts to restore to the
medium its lost legitimacy and esteem—on the one hand, making
the photograph an object of pure contemplation, and on the other,
reverting to the edifying objectives of early photography, when it
was perceived as a means of universal education and knowledge.
In that context, the documentary project formed the counterpart of
photographic art—the other side of the same coin, sharing the goal
of restoring its declining legitimacy.
Since then, the frequently professed purpose of the documen-
tary has been to pursue this unchanging goal: to regenerate the
medium, to restore to the images their lost purity and authority.
 Accordingly, after the 1930s, the documentary became less of a
Olivier Lugon 34
denial of existing photographic or cinematographic art but, rather,
its Aufhebung, that is, the documentary overtook those art forms,
while also serving to perpetuate them. This was a way to start from
scratch or, to paraphrase Dziga Vertov in the context of cinema
(though equally valid for photography), to “renew” these two art
forms time and again.
In the period between the two world wars, this project was
solidified. Only then did the idea of a documentary “genre” come
about, backed by a coherent theory, aesthetic and history, with its
lineage and great ancestors. Many of the contemporary critics were
of the impression that vague, unconscious practice had suddenly
developed self-awareness and taken on the structure of a “school.”
This process was based on a combination of two phenomena,
which may appear contradictory at first glance, but actually coincid-
ed. The first was the increasing social and political empathy in the
wake of the miseries of the Great Depression. The second was the
acknowledgement of photography and film as legitimate art forms.
The economic crisis following the 1929 stock market crash
generated a new aspiration towards testimony and commitment
in all fields, a renewed desire to face the problems of the world
and everyday reality.04 This craving was reflected in literature, the
fine arts, and in theatre too. However, it acquired especial impor-
tance for recording media such as film and photography, whose
privileged relationship with reality suddenly put them in a dominant
position. From the activism of the Film and Photo League in New
York to state projects like the film unit of the GPO (General Post
Office) in London, or the photographic campaign of the FSA (Farm
Security Agency) in Washington—all were striving to focus attention
on the world and its shortcomings. But if that kind of attitude was
to constitute a “school” and an accepted alternative for a certain
“state of the art,” in turn it had to be part of the history it opposed:
04 See William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
only by entering the artistic discourse and institution could the
Documentary: Authority and Ambiguity 35
documentary give itself a legitimate means to reform such art and
refocus it on the world. In the cinema, the non-fictional film (which
had been around since the very start) could only appear as a genre
to John Gierson when he started viewing it in relation to the prevail-
ing aesthetic of Hollywood films or the experimental cinema, which
he considered to be futile and formalistic. That also applied in pho-
tography. In 1938, the art historian, Beaumont Newhall, could refer
to a “documentary tradition” as an alternative to photographic art
only because he had opened the art museum to it, both categories
sharing now the same aesthetic space.05 Moreover, Grierson and
Newhall sought to distinguish the documentary both from “elevat-
ed” and purely aesthetic practice, as well as from the platitudinous
reporting of current affairs or the banal, edifying document. They
introduced a statutory hierarchy between “low categories” of non-
fiction (contemptible matter for rapid consumption) and a higher
one, the documentary “the creative treatment of actuality,” which,
like art, was made for the long term and for a thorough knowledge
of the subjects in question.06
Therein lies the paradox of the documentary project, even to-
day. “Documentary” is often taken as the antonym to “artistic,” yet
it stems primarily from the artistic field—beyond art, yet very much
a part of it. Neither the theoreticians of the 19th century, who firmly
believed in photography as evidence and reflection of reality, nor
professional photographers intent on producing functional docu-
ments were concerned with drawing up a “documentary doctrine”
of any kind. Only those seeking to find their place in relation to an
artistic past and in an aesthetic debate felt that need. Consequent-
ly, they have given the genre a double objective of regeneration:
to reform art and society simultaneously, to purify photographic
and cinematographic aesthetics, while at the same time helping to
improve the world.
05 Beaumont Newhall, “Documentary Approach to Photography,” Parnassus 10, no. 3 (March 1938): 2–6.
06 Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), 11, 78.
 This ambivalence of the documentary vis-à-vis art—should
Olivier Lugon 36
it stand aloof from all aesthetic expression or can it only exist
as art—has substantially marked the history of the genre. The dif-
ferences surrounding this issue led to the split in the Film and
Photo League in 1935–36, with one group of the opinion that any
aesthetic formalization weakened the documentary impact and the
other group believing it actually to be a condition for its effective-
ness. These contentions also generated considerable strain within
the FSA, where very diverse options were supposed to be recon-
ciled: increasing public awareness of the hardships experienced by
small farmers in the Depression, keeping records of the vernacular
American culture, and promoting first-class photographic works.
Walker Evans in particular complicated matters by upholding the
somewhat delicate position of an aesthete, although he supported
the purest of “documents,” arid, impersonal images of the type of-
ten encountered in archives or heritage surveys. His entire oeuvre
is in effect based on the paradoxical idea of a “documentary style”
whose simplicity of form, apparent neutrality, and transparency
were not only intended to serve the topic but also the image itself,
which should be all the more forceful in its own presence because
it would seem to have been stripped of any formal affectation. In
this way he has formulated a curious, self-reflective definition of
the document, suggesting that the photographer might efface him-
self in favor of the subject, representing things “as they are” and yet
claiming this impersonal recording as a personal creation.
In fact, Evans’ provoking paradox reflects a friction frequently
encountered in the documentary: the conflict between the creator’s
desire to become subservient to the subject and his or her own
affirmation as author. The documentary project actually signifies
an ever sensitive, ever different renegotiation of the authorial posi-
tion. In the 1930s, this new equilibrium between the artist and the
world seemed to be possibly reflected in the highly regarded prac-
tice of team work, as if the partial withdrawal of the individual into
the group were the natural consequence of his retreat in favor of
the subject—another form of self-abnegation vis-à-vis the world. In
Documentary: Authority and Ambiguity 37
his 1938 article, Beaumont Newhall expressly recalled that tradition
of collective work dating from the 19th century, ranging from the
French Mission héliographique to the explorers of the American
West. It was especially praised in leftist circles, where the primacy
of the collective prevailed and where even the individualist activity
par excellence—artistic creation—was expected to submit to it. In
Germany in the 1920s, some even proposed to abolish the signa-
ture from photography completely, introducing absolute anonymity,
as if the author’s absence were the only consistent attitude for a
documentary doctrine which truly accepted the artist’s withdrawal
to the background vis-à-vis “things as they are.”
This radical approach, however rational it may seem, never
caught on. On the one hand, it contradicted Hine’s conception of
the documentary as a discourse, which inevitably assumed there is
a “subject” behind it, a voice, turning the idea of immediate access
to things into an illusion. But, more importantly, the approach did
not allow for the fact that the domain of documentary would remain
the domain of art and would continue to rely to a great extent on
its authorial logic. In that context, Evans’ somewhat flimsy defini-
tion—of things “as they are,” but bearing a signature—would con-
tinue to prevail. Even today this seems to be the natural condition
of the documentary photograph and film, regardless of the debate
or questioning it generated.
Queens? Kings? It would seem so, for their kingdoms are numer-

The Plays of the Witnesses 39

ous. Here are more than two hundred of these multicolor feuds,
taken all around world through the stubborn, methodical lens of
a camera. How do we identify such architectural units? Spread
uniformly through the sparse green areas of our western cities with
the high soaring buildings above, they send signals to each other.
Their characteristic features, their prime colors, their geometric
shapes obey the rules of elementary declination required by the
genus. In these clear signs of pertaining we acknowledge that their
architects, modest craftsmen, are able to recite their modernism
by heart and are far from giving up their entire utopian program.
From here we therefore deduce that children (for are these not
the true kings and queens, our present and future sovereigns?)
still incarnate the future of a world that has so obviously given up
its perpetuation. This is, however, the vocation displayed by these
open-air enclosures: the program must be protected, the Bildung
perpetuated, the power of the shaping shape. Even frozen with the
colors of the silky perfumes offered to Pinocchio in the paradise
of alienation, it does seem important to preserve pedagogy. Would
not infancy, despite everything, be entitled to a minimal rationality?
That is what these fortresses of the utopia of holidays are telling
us in their silent Esperanto—as long as this rationality is secluded in
the educational space of games and their wisely ordered chromatic
universes. Rationality is dead. Long live rationality! Its new empty
body: mini-zoos, where the diversity and exoticism of the species
count henceforth less than the spaces opened in the memory of
their once dreamt of freedom. The former aspirations of art to hap-
piness have become reality and haved passed into public domain.
A universal vocabulary of forms and tones to resolve the differ-
ences, to clarify and pacify souls, the dead language of the history
of art and ideas that our offspring is taught as if it were the Latin of
wise men. This is what the Playgrounds series that Peter Friedl has
patiently collected since 1995 catalogues sinisterly and placidly.
 On this designed table where the image reader lies, the rhythm of
Jean-Pierre Rehm 40
which marks the end of fluidity, we are given a firm invitation: to
find a form removed from the kindergarden, but also from what the
kindergarden conserves as a pleasantly utopian nostalgia.
Do documentaries use the cinema to sketch out (and to contra-
dict in so far as the cinema is bound to the logic of utopian projec-
tion, as Godard likes to repeat) this renewed space? This is clearly
one of the hypotheses that support the possibility of presenting it
in a space devoted to art. Two functions related to the beginning of
the exhibition jostle around this. The first affects the museum func-
tion; since it is not a question of performing a late, doubtful ennoble-
ment, as can be seen here and there with the cinema. Instead of a
holy sanctuary open to consecration, the place of the exhibition
now choses to become a shelter. Contrary to the lay temple and
its cultural celebrations, it is opened to fragilities left as such and
never transformed into objects of intimidation.
Secondly, it is, as a result, less films or, more broadly, art-
works in their acceptance of high quality-stamped entertainment
products, than experiences, crossing journeys in course: time. The
necessary duration of the different proposals shown here remind
us of this. From the fully classical concision of the portrait of Mario
Merz by Tacita Dean to the unfolded tales of Kutlug Ataman; from
the renovated epic of Allan Sekula to Avi Mograbi’s interrupted
telephone conversation; from the unceasing standing of the Vidéos
des Villes by Santiago Reyes to the panoramic view of women’s
faces filmed by Florence Lazar, etc., the elasticity of a timed ac-
count is of less importance than the measure of each one to allow
accidents, sudden light intervals to occur. But also, particularly, to
make the patient acquisition of their constraints at hand.
Similar displacements also suppose that the very definition of
“documentary” does not remain unaffected. That is, its definition
as unequivocal truth. It is normally understood that documentaries
apply, in principle, to the categories of here and now; their investi-
gating curiosity enables scientific rigour keep them in line, and the
desire to explain that drives them takes the place of the familiar
41
summary narrative resolution in fiction. Documentaries would not
The Plays of the Witnesses
practise compromise; they would have nothing to sell, but every-
thing to develop. In short, the banner of truth would be maintained be-
fore the devilish temptations of fabling. It would in itself be cinema’s
redemption.
We know that this argument withstands hardly any scrutiny.
Documentaries are expressed according to coded narrative systems;
though masked, they use identical dramatic forces and too often
make use of their added value only to shroud themselves in authen-
ticity. Now authenticity, as Serge Daney writes about the films of
Jean Rouch and more generally about “cinéma vérité” (a reference
that weighs the ghostly weight of law on all enterprise claiming
the purity of the documentary genus), is identified with the work of
death, and in doing so, only manages to reject it in the end.01
To give documentary back its relevance, to enable it to de-
velop the barren space it represents and signifies in its variety, is
to first accept that it is not the vehicle of supposed transparency.
It means understanding that, contrary to this, documentary only
contains opacity and thickness, and that is in itself object of study,
document among documents, link in a process of interpretation of-
fered to the political freedom of the spectator. Therefore, when Javier
Codesal records a session of palm reading, it ironically disqualifies
all hermeneutic vague desires based on a previous session of the
stated knowledge. Far beyond a folkloric view without bitterness of
the discerning arts, it is the rough battery sociology and its determin-
ism that are allegorically harmed. Facing us close up, a pair of hands
stretch out in a gesture of welcome. Behind them, a professional of
the psychological or cosmic gloss says nothing in reply to this ges-
ture and only translates it with agreed declarations. What does this
staged frustrating describe? The mechanism of information. That frustration?
is to say, as Foucault explains, far more than a strict succession of
01 “Cinema-truth = dead in work. In the same way, cinema-truth = rejection of death,” in L’Exercice a été profitable,
Monsieur (Paris: P.O.L, 1993), 271.
 data, the prescription of conducts to be maintained. In substance,
Jean-Pierre Rehm 42
he says that information is not satisfied with supplying data; its role
is to identify, to report what is known and convenient, and to order
it in the final instance. To pin down the past and the future in a de-
sired present without consequence or consistency, which does no
more than confirm the initial hypotheses held once and for all; this
is the curse entrusted with maintaining what we call information.
We will easily recognise obedience to this deadly principle, where
there is no place for any body or desire (once more the logic of
rejection), this “objective” description of “slices of life,” this effect of
forced intellectual complicity, this flat well-thinking denunciation. Far
more than necromancy, the model to which many documentaries
are subject, is that of trial. Once instructed, “documentaries” then
only need gather the pieces for the case. Everything revealed here
belongs to evidence. Only tangible proof need be given of the act
of accusation.
Aside from this juridical-astrological model, the model of absolute
clairvoyance, Tische!, by Victor Kossakovsky, opens wide the angle
of another focus: its recording protocol is based, on the contrary,
on a partial blindness. Nothing appears in the image outside the
window frame, where the director has filmed some months of the
show offered by the street below. No intimacy behind this method
(inspired in a famous cliché by Gustave Le Gray on the beginnings
of the history of photography): the silence of the elements sug-
gested by the title (meaning “silence!” in Russian) is determined
by the impossibility of an authoritarian comment. What link can be
established between the winter snow on the windows and a brutal
police arrest? What similarity is there between an old lady calling
her dog and tramps sleeping off their drink on a bench? What
story is hidden by each of the holes evenly sunk in the road by the
municipal work unit (scenes that seem taken from Camera Buff by
Kieślowski)? Although such a mosaic withstands the expected tale,
what finally makes up this mute chronicle is, however, similar to a
portrait of today’s Russia, at once anecdotal and meteorological,
political and social. This portrait, in its many adjustments, must be
The Plays of the Witnesses 43
deciphered by the spectators and re-expressed for its dimensions
to spread far beyond a window frame. In Public, by the Chinese
director Jia Zhang Ke, is only intended, in its own way, to produce
the type of precise, respectful description where neither actors nor
spectators are outstripped by a staging that receives its resourc-
es from the certainties and clichés of ideology: the wait in empty
places and the unending time on community transport where it is
hardly possible to find a connection, which replaces all action and
subordinates body movements. The “characters” of In Public are
no longer those of any unfortunate, interminable event, nor those
of a “view of contemporary China in 30 minutes,” and do not fidget
on the thin film of a now they are meant to poorly illustrate. On the
contrary, what they indicate reveals a much broader narration of the
awareness of which they seem dispossessed. The collapse of a
history, and as a result, of a countryside—that is: a country—is the
earthquake upon which this film tries to confine its gaze, and from
whose trembles it tries to shelter.
The naturalist danger sought by these kinds of observing films,
their tendency to be “animal documentaries,” is only avoided by the
rigour of their filming and editing. The sharp cuts and the use of
comic accelerations and distancing in the work of Kossakowski
contrasted with the very slow alternation of full scenes and medium
shots in the work of Jia Zhang Ke, which raise the atmospheric
character to the dimension of a social novel. The “information” is
not gleaned under the classes of fatality; it is a series of assembled
traits that manage to produce an artificial, malleable material within
which the circulation of regard and comprehension is authorized
and even strongly recommended.
A similar experience is not offered by tracing an identifiable
territory limited by stable frontiers. If the documentary thus defined
leaves its limits at rest, it is because it has a different objective.
What it pursues is to bring a substance out into the light. In other
words, rather than being satisfied at collecting a so-called intact
 raw material, which, moreover, would surely have to be brought in a
Jean-Pierre Rehm 44
“pure” state from reality to its representation in images and sound,
documentaries produce the whole of this material and also the
conditions in which it appears. This is why the opposition between
fiction and documentary becomes something inoperative, as the
two introduce a manufacture of what is visible and intelligible.
This manufacture, in the case of the documentary, bears the
name of witness. What is a witness? What is exposed, even in the
quid pro quo? power of the untrue, even in the quid pro quo, even in incredulity,
more than it imposes some truth; what is found in the movement
of releasing oneself without support rather than in the stationary
state of a decree? A necessity, far beyond what has been entrusted,
binds the witness to the absolute assumption of the risk. As is writ-
ten by Paul Celan: “Nobody bears witness for the witness.”
It is this ordeal that the film by Avi Mograbi, Wait, it’s the sol-
diers, I have to hang up now, crosses in its own way, describing a
brief telephone conversation. Whoever (knowing, however, that he
is a Palestinian locked in in his “own” imposed borders) talks to
the director does so from a place where word is not safeguarded
and may be interrupted at any time. Beyond what is said of the
situation in which the two main characters are enjailed and which
is summed up by an historical overview without surprises, above
all, the violence of a dissymmetry is revealed. On the one hand,
the person speaking on the telephone, whose last sentence, with
a paradoxically comic length, gives title to the film. He is never
seen and is deprived, in short, of a right of representation (isn’t this
exactly the political situation in Palestine?) and turns over the story
until his limited silence becomes a much firmer witness than all his
analyses. On the other hand, camera side, Mograbi in his own pri-
vate, small working room, collecting the pictures through others (the
diffuse television of sport and the discourses of statesmen), lives in
the impotence of his comfort. Image and sound no longer coincide,
and it is this disconnection where the Israeli director and his Pales-
tine speaker offer their best testimony: through what is missing.
Kutlug Ataman has chosen to put the speeches of four “char-
The Plays of the Witnesses 45
acters” into images, very aware of this witnessing stake, intertwin-
ing data and what is escaping from them. In all evidence with the
ambition of presenting the complexity of the recent history of his
country, his choice of an artefact is noteworthy. Brought together
under the pretext of their respective reasons for wearing a wig, a
practice normally associated with fashion or acting performance, all
of these witnesses initially belong to the kingdom of appearance.
These are therefore witnesses that are not “subject” to image and
sequestered by it, but are rather necessarily active accomplices in
its construction, and the wig becomes a light, fertile metaphor of
all production of self-images. A former member of the resistance
obliged to disguise herself as an air hostess during the struggle
against the dictatorship; a woman suffering from cancer and forced
to undergo chemotherapy; a fervent Moslem not allowed to wear
a veil; a persecuted transvestite: four adventures with a wig de-
scribed in full detail. Four parallel stories, four experiences of con-
temporary Turkey in the times of the oppression; also four ways of
being a woman, four ways of living and being worked freely as an
image. This is why, in the case of the former secret agent in her
role as a stewardess, Ataman chooses never to film her face, and
the same applies with the Moslem, where the screen prepared for
her is totally veiled in black. More still with the sick character, who
faces us in her wish to confront her illness. Or the transvestite,
who changes unashamedly before our very eyes. Here, there is no
dominant hierarchy: the promiscuousness of the screens accentu-
ates the cacophony of simultaneous experiences and refers us to
a necessary muddled reading of their contexts.
In the same way as Keren Amiran manages to turn the disused
hospital in her ISAMEC into music, as Jordi Colomer parades the
accesses to Barcelona, Brasília, a demonstrator for a lost cause in
his Anarchitekton,02 as Valérie Jouve sets up a choreography on the
02 Cf. Jordi Colomer. Quelques stars: Travaux Vidéo 1997–2003 (Le Grand Cafe, La Galerie, Villa Arson, 2003).
03 Cf. Grand Littoral, ed. Ateliers de la Ville de Marseille, 2003.
 hills in the desolate surroundings of Marseilles in Grand Littoral,03 as chance of emancipation. The witness and its unreserved engulf-

Jean-Pierre Rehm 46

The Plays of the Witnesses 47

Walid Raad constitutes and reconstitutes the files of the Lebanese ing in the sights of others suggests a third path; this is what is
Atlas Group, Ataman makes wigs talk for Turkish history, which has risked in each of the images and the sounds shown here. There
progressively become a baroque, Shakespearian scene. is only documentary practice worthy of such a name at this price.
It is precisely the complexity of such a muddle to which such This does not go back to establishing new rules to the game; on
diverse experiences as the story of a birth, in the work of Noëlle Pujol the contrary, it creates a space, a play, where everyone is free to
(VAD), the story of another birth (image being linked to writing) in decide by guesswork on the history of their place as winners or
the work of Jean-Claude Rousseau (Lettre à Roberto), the alienation losers.
of the market discourse in The Avon Project by Alexandra Sell, are
scrupulously attached. The matter of translation appears centrally
and expectedly in a certain way, as indicated by the subtitle to the
film Camouflage by Jun Yang: “Look like them, talk like them,” as
in Mother Tongue by Zineb Sedira. This translation can certainly be
perceived with the violence of a frontier pass: a diplomatic frontier
(Crossing Kalandia by Sobhi Al-Zobaidi) or a political-technological
one in the work by Harun Farocki (Eye/Machine).
But these different documentaries have chosen the most diffi-
cult way to bear witness in a language they do not claim to master,
no longer that of “capturing” images and sounds, and to show this
to an audience whose expectations they did not claim to know.
It is no longer a question of delivering the fruit of a translation
satisfied with moving the meanings, but rather its wanderings, its
mistakes, its difficult work in the heart of what appears as a living
substance.
At the same time, the sterile alternative between the certificate
of authenticity, on the one hand, and the refuge in fictitious con-
struction, on the other, fails to be pertinent. Daney sharply sums up
this false opposition: “to improvise and commemorate: the same
battle.” The project thus once more comes to elude two forms of
monumentality: the one that lends its own intelligibility, its magnifi-
cently distraught innocence to the raw event; the one that extracts
from it all chance of uprising as modern power. In both cases, it is
history, the translation of its historical process, according to Marx’s
expression, which is violently denied, and at the same time, all
In June 1976, Stewart Brand published an interview with Margaret

Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth 49
Mead and Gregory Batsen, the famous husband-and-wife anthro-
pologists. The two of them discussed the pros and cons of static
camera shots in ethnographic documentary films.

B: ...Well, it [the camera] should be off the tripod.

M: So you run around.
B: Yes.
M: And therefore you’ve introduced a variation into it that is unnecessary.
B: I therefore got the information out that I thought was relevant at the time.
M: That’s right. And therefore what do you see later?
B: If you put the damn thing on a tripod, you don’t get any relevance.
M: No, you get what happened.
B: It isn’t what happened.
M: I don’t want people leaping around thinking that a profile at this moment would
be beautiful.
B: I wouldn’t want beautiful.
M: Well, what’s the leaping around for?
B: To get what’s happening.
M: What you think is happening.
B: If Stewart reached behind his back to scratch himself, I would like to be over
there at that moment.
M: If you were over there at that moment you wouldn’t see him kicking the cat under
the table. So that just doesn’t hold as an argument.
B: Of the things that happen the camera is only going to record one percent
anyway.
M: That’s right.01

I was asked to write about Jeroen de Rijke’s and Willem de Rooij’s

work when it was not yet known what they were going to show in
their presentation in the Dutch pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennial.
Up until then, their work had touched regularly on documentary
modes of depiction, of registering a kind of “external” visual reality:
such as, for instance, Willem de Rooij’s panel works, with their ar-
rangements of found press photos (Index: Riots, Protest, Mourning,
and Commemoration [as represented in newspapers, January 2000–
July 2002]), or the duo’s works in which a static camera perspective
records a social, ethnic, and ethically ambivalent place. Of Three
Men (1998) features the interior of an Amsterdam mosque, formerly
a church; Bantar Gebang (2000) documents a shantytown built on

01 Stewart Brand, conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, CoEvolution Quarterly, no. 10 (June 1976):
32–44, see also: http://www.oikos.org/forgod.htm.
 top of a garbage dump on the edge of Jakarta; and Untitled (2001)
Jörg Heiser 50
shows a cemetery located in the middle of the same city. These
works bring up questions, both in content and form, that also turn
up in discussions of film in visual anthropology—despite the fun-
damental differences in regard to context, and the importance
de Rijke/de Rooij place on the artistic staging of display in the White
Cube. The first parallel is to the old debate about the usefulness
of the static camera in the anthropological film—a topic Margaret
Mead and Gregory Batsen play on in the dialogue quoted above. The
second parallel has to do with a more recent discussion in ethno-
graphic film: of how, in the light of an increased awareness of the
camera’s presence evoking and influencing events in a problematic
way, this apparent weakness could be turned into a strength. In this
context, Tobias Rees discussed the concept of evocation. “Evoca-
tion,” according to Rees, “comes from the Latin evocare and means
something along the lines of ‘to call up something.’ So evocation is
commonly understood to be the awakening of experience by look-
ing at a work of art, and it is precisely within this framework that the
ethnographic film has to operate. Yet the process cannot be about
evoking the supposed actual reality of a place.” Alluding to Emanuel
Lévinas’ concept of the Other, he continues: “to experience” does
not mean “that I experience the person foreign to me, but rather,
that I can experience the fact that I cannot experience the person
foreign to me.”02 This should not be misinterpreted as the accep-
tance of irreconcilable cultural differences, but rather, it should be
understood on a general existential level, as an acknowledgement
of the fact that some things cannot be represented, which also
polemically opposes a type of “representational ethnography … as
a kind of colonial slide show.”03 Moreover, this is the only way to
describe the viewer’s relationship to the protagonists of the three
de Rijke/de Rooij films mentioned above.
02 Tobias Rees, “Writing Culture – Filming Culture. It was Real: Unendlichkeit versus Repräsentation,” lecture given
at the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde (October 5–10, 1997, Frankfurt am Main), held
on October 10, 1997, http://www.iwf.de/easa/brd/.
03 Ibid.
However, the new work shown in Venice, Mandarin Ducks
51
(2005), turned out to have been conceived as a scripted film with
Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth
actors, a chamber piece employing devices from the auteur film.
Did that put an end to the documentary question? In one respect,
de Rijke/de Rooij have already settled it: their work has never been
“documentary,” in the sense of being purely informative, visual evi-
dence of a factual topic, following its etymological root, the Latin
word documantum, meaning lesson or proof. The two artists have
never been concerned with what there is to see, but rather, with
how to see it—an aesthetic operation involving abstraction and pre-
sentation. Yet ironically enough, at the same time, thanks to its ob-
vious dramatic, staged character, this most recent work is perfectly
suited (virtually through its emphatic denial of the issue) to confront
the actual crux of the documentary: the issue of truth.
Now, we know that the concept of truth is an extraordinarily
difficult one, and so before I turn to Mandarin Ducks specifically, I
should be allowed to sound off a little more about it. It has become
routine to expound upon the difficulty or impossibility of differen-
tiating between the fictional and the real, by employing what has
become an almost knee-jerk reference to the social, cultural, and
psychological construction of all representations. Why has this be-
come dissatisfactory? Because it seems to imply that the fact that
something is constructed means it is entirely relative, which in turn
seems to disavow indirectly the issue of whether a representation
is true or not: if there is no such thing as objective reality, how can
there be any objective truth, or even verifiable truth? However, even
if we assume that what has “always been” a construct contains an
inherent “experiential reality”—regardless of whether or not it is the
“experiential reality” of the delusionary, or dreams, or media fan-
tasies—it does not relieve us of the necessity of inquiring into the
plausibility, the truth, and the verifiability of what is being presented.
Unless, of course, we renounce the issue entirely—either naively
or cynically, or both.
 To clarify immediately: I am not concerned about returning to
Jörg Heiser 52
a classic, universal concept of truth (meaning, the sort of truth that
is transcendently inferred through logical reasoning, or is materially
and empirically deduced through observation, and is considered
universally valid). Rather, I am, in general, interested in looking for
a concept of truth that can be applied to the process of viewing
art. How can something like this be salvaged? Since everything
we see, hear, think, or feel is reinforced—or numbed—by media,
then we are bound to inquire if there is indeed a concept of truth
that can be preserved despite the mélange of social, technological,
and economic elements and filters. If cultural expression is to be
more than arbitrary (or at best, pretty or shocking), then it needs to
develop a kind of truth that can be tested in other contexts. Other-
wise, it does not “live.”
It might be unsatisfactory, but it is imperative to point out that
the answer is merely contextual and can only be given as each
case arises. Even though they usually do not regard “truth” as a
category, critics and the public still judge works of art according to
how coherently they are constructed in relation to the rest of the
world and to other art. Or, to put it differently, a work of art is judged
according to how “truthful” it is in relation to the world and to art
(regardless of whether or not it is in the form of a coquettish lie).
It is as if we are constantly measuring what we receive against a
kind of catalogue of unfulfilled desires and anticipated knowledge:
does the work summarize all of these references and abide by
them; does it permit these desires without sacrificing knowledge
to them, even when they contradict each other? If the contradiction
is withstood, then truth can blaze up in between. And one name
for the form that artistic treatment of desire and knowledge takes
along the way would be “beauty.” (Therefore, if the ideal for this
is compaction into the smallest space imaginable, the artistic and
scientific concepts of beauty converge.)
Beauty, truth: solemn concepts surrounded by an aura of the
eternal, which have to be submerged in the cold, sparkling flow of
their technological distribution and mediation, so that it once again
Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth 53
becomes possible to work with them. And then we can ask: what
is the “lived” reality of clichés and ideologies? What happens if
events taking place in front of the camera are essentially “steered”
by whomever records them? How exactly does the reciprocal rela-
tionship between psychic and media realities function in the field of
corporeal, verbal performance? And how exactly can art be made
in the process? At this point, many texts will refer—almost auto-
matically, now, it seems to me—to Michel Foucault’s concept of the
“politics of truth.” The better examples of these texts are wary of
a platitudinous, relativistic interpretation, such as “there are many
subjective truths and therefore nothing is generally valid”—and cer-
tainly Foucault cannot be accused of saying this.04 Still, if we look at
the definition he has provided, we can see that it contains a contra-
diction in logic. Foucault says that he does not consider truth to be
“an ensemble of veracities that have to be discovered or accepted,”
but instead, “the ensemble of rules according to which the true is
separated from the false, and the true is endowed with specific, con-
sequential powers.”05 Without delving into his definition any further,
he basically introduces two concepts of truth: first, the truth as an
“ensemble of rules” (the ensemble that separates and endows); and
second, truth as the product of this ensemble (the object that has
been separated or endowed). Truth bears itself. Splitting hairs, we
could say that there is yet another level: the critique or identification
of this “ensemble of rules” (elsewhere, Foucault calls this episteme,
or cognitive order). With a little bit of effort, this criticism can still
be warded off, since Foucault would certainly not have hesitated to
consider his own statement an example of what he is describing
(that is, as an operation that separates the true from the false and
endows it with “specific, consequential powers”—in this case, his
own intellectual authority). Ultimately, however, Foucault’s definition
seems primarily an attempt to differentiate his own approach from
04 Among the better texts is Hito Steyerl’s “Politik der Wahrheit – Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld,” in: The Need to
Document, ed. Vít Havránek, Sabine Schaschl–Cooper, and Bettina Steinbrügge (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2005), 53–64.
05 Michel Foucault, Dispositive der Macht. Über Sexualität, Wissen und Wahrheit (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1978), 53.
 the Frankfurt School’s critique of ideology (although later, Foucault
Jörg Heiser 54
tended to be willing to accept their close relation). For what is the
examination of the ensemble of rules according to which the true
is separated from the false and endowed with power but critique
of ideology?
The crux of the matter remains the issue of who is speaking,
and with what authority, and how one could communicate at all on
the basis of an unsettled presupposition, even if it only concerns
truths, not the truth. If we proceed with Foucault’s idea, then we
are confronted with the dilemma that all truths—whether they are
an “ensemble of rules” or the product of these rules—are only ap-
parently substantiated by the power with which they ultimately, ar-
bitrarily endow themselves. The now classic model opposing this is
Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action: truth is consen-
sus; truth is something that can ultimately only be salvaged through
argument. Yet Habermas’ theory produces plenty of contradictions,
too, especially this one: how does one constitute the space where
these arguments occur, and who determines its—back to Foucault
again—“ensemble of rules”? Who or what decides which positions
are even going to be allowed to contribute to this process of building
consensus? It would be naïve to reply, “the better argument.” As has
often been stated, the fact is that Habermas’ term herrschaftsfreier
Diskurs (translated as non-hierarchical or illocutionary discourse)
conjures up a way out of the dilemma, rather than actually using
argument to reveal the path. In recent years Habermas has also
striven for a kind of sophistication of what could be called “intuitive
truth.” To elucidate this “formal assumption of an objective world,”
06
which makes us able to agree and act, Habermas states: “We do
not cross any bridge whose stability we doubt. Everyday realism cor-
responds to a—admittedly only performatively concurrent—concept
of unconditional truth, a truth without any sort of epistemological
index.”07 Here, the problem is that the basic optimism implied in this
06 Jürgen Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 208.
07 Ibid., 52.
allegory of crossing bridges (regardless of its knowledge of skeptical
Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth 55
objections—even an objection to the purely formal anticipation of an
objective reference to the world) will be disappointed right away, as
soon as we imagine the imponderabilities involved in constructing
bridges. A good example of this, taken from reality, is Sir Norman
Foster’s Millennium Bridge in London: when it was first built, and
before it was improved, people did not want to cross it, because
there were doubts about its engineering. Isn’t this example more in
accordance with the reality of the everyday, pragmatic concept of
truth? Within the context of actions, doesn’t it have more to do with
improbable, undecided situations, rather than with “more decisive”
certainties and authentic habit (such as crossing a bridge that has
already been crossed many times)? At the same time, it seems as if
a pragmatic trust in “intuitive truth” is mixed up with a Nietzschean
“necessary illusion”—that is, an assumption that ultimately cannot
be tested and is probably false, but which makes it possible for us
to act (to adhere to the image, imagine an adventure film scenario
in which a bridge has to be crossed in order to get to the safe side,
assuming it is still stable—before it finally collapses).
So if we compare Foucault’s line of argument with Habermas’,
then we might be able to look for a useful concept of truth—simply
put—in a constant dialectic movement, that could also be read
as a blueprint for de Rijke/de Rooij’s latest filmic paradigm shift.
This dialectic movement is between a “pragmatic assumption of
an objective world”—which, with the help of an imaginary common
standard (such as universal human rights, for example) illuminates
the possibility of agreement beyond particularities—and the skepti-
cism toward the actual realization of just this pragmatic assumption
within the terms of precisely this particularity. Unfortunately, truth
cannot get any simpler. Mandarin Ducks is a drama, in which the
“pragmatic assumption of an objective world” is thrown into the
bonfire of the vanities. Is understanding and communication pos-
sible? Yes, but only in the form of mean, sarcastic, sneaky attacks
upon each other. Can we live together? Yes, but only so that we
 can keep badgering each other. To put it concretely: first, we are
Jörg Heiser 56
in the seemingly idyllic, relaxed company of a visibly upper-middle-
class group of big-city types. The camera moves slowly from left to
right, filming the protagonists sitting comfortably on the sofa, look-
ing like hills in a romantic landscape. Sexual and ethnic boundaries
seem fluid, grapes are eaten, faces and hands are seen making
silent exchanges, indistinct bits of decadent small talk (“high from
nail varnish”) and the languorous clink of champagne glasses are
heard: in short, this is a Mount Olympus of cultivated relaxation.
However, drives and aggressions soon push their way into this
supposed harmony. Carlito, a trim man with the smile of a shark,
believes he has to own up to the seemingly docile Sabine that he is
doing her a favor by not taking her “invitation for abuse.” He is “an
animal, a hunter.” “Fact is, I’m doing every person in this room a fa-
vor by not creating this situation of poor little Sabine being brutally
raped.” However, his virile verbal triumph quickly collapses. “That
is such a desperate statement, Carly,” Sabine replies, “if there is
anyone in this room who needs a loving pair of arms, it’s you.” And
things get worse. A well-modulated and fatherly off-screen voice
is heard saying, “Carlito, before you respond to my daughter’s il-
luminating remark, just remember, there is strength in restraint,”
followed by a patronizing, therapeutic: “It would be my pleasure
to help you come to grips with any …” In the uncanny presence of
the father of his intended victim, the brutal hunter becomes a pitiful
emotional cripple. What at first looked like a scene from an ancient
symposium—a philosophical chat in pleasant company, a non-hi-
erarchical discourse—turns out to be a dramatic constellation: the
clearly theatrical space is like a prison that forces the protagonists’
antagonism toward each other to become painfully visible. “Parole”
is only permitted for shopping or doing business. Echoing a scene
at Southfork Ranch, the mean daddy pours himself a drink (he
is called, of all things, Man Ray—perhaps an artistic variation on
J.R.?—and looks a little bit like Rem Koolhaas), while poisonous
attacks are exchanged with the defiant daughter. He complains in
an unashamedly racist manner about the migrant taxi driver: “It’s a
Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth 57
mystery—how these immigrants can take a job, driving hard-work-
ing people around their own city, without knowing the bloody way,”
and his daughter answers, “Thank you for sharing your wonderful
post-imperialistic philosophy with us.” She wears a dark pageboy
wig, and delivers her biting statement while looking straight into the
camera, like a voguing drag queen exaggeratedly imitating wom-
en’s poses—in this case, poses of domination. Still, there is no way
to break out of the space.
This approach already has an obvious parallel to Rainer Wer-
ner Fassbinder: while his films show the proletariat, lower-middle-
class protagonists living in small, claustrophobic homes, he dis-
plays the upper-class as if they were “exotic fish in an aquarium,”
as Wilfried Wiegand writes. “He gave the rooms in many of his
films this effect by using house plants and decorative flowers.”08
Mandarin Ducks also creates a similar impression: here is a colorful
window with Islamic motifs, a Japanese vanity with kaleidoscopically
mirrored glass, calfskin with a zebra pattern, a Japanese screen
with a couple of mandarin ducks as a motif, and last, but not least,
an illusionary horizon with an artificial glow, which evoke these as-
sociations.
Language fails, ultimately. A longer sequence is introduced
by a close-up of a crystal glass falling to the floor; it features father,
mother, and aunt engaged in long orgies of laughter, as if they
were actors doing screen tests—oscillating between being ridicu-
lously drunk, obscene, insincere, and aggressive. Distorted mouths,
bared teeth, crow’s feet, and laugh lines garishly lit from the side,
looking as if they are etched in stone. Another character, also on
a futile search for love and fulfillment, says, “I feel like I’m stuck in
a babushka of realities,” before, finally, a silent sequence of frosty
08
Wilfried Wiegand, “Die Puppe in der Puppe. Beobachtungen zu Fassbinders Filmen,” in Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Reihe Film 2, ed. Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte (Munich: Hanser, 1985), 29–62, 39. It is interesting that
Wiegand uses the image of the (Russian) nesting dolls in the Fassbinder title, since this idea also
appears in Mandarin Ducks: “I feel like I’m stuck in a babushka of realities,” says one of the characters. In this
image, the notion of being imprisoned converges in a constrained context with the perpetual obligation to perform
as oneself.
 looks and whiny tears finishes up the pathetic scene. Everyone
Jörg Heiser 58
present is a Mandarin Duck: privileged animals, trapped in chilly
love relationship.
It becomes very clear that the truth, which this is about, is not
an “external reality” that remains as uninfluenced as possible by
the filming process. However, it is also not the truth that is elicited
in an argumentative or therapeutic exchange. For example, in Carli-
to’s encounter with the effeminately gay son, his virile heterosexual
pose manifests as more ambivalent than it was after the “therapeu-
tic conversation” with Sabine and her father. In this deliberately ar-
tificial pose, in the theatrical game on display, the truth is glimpsed
suddenly and briefly, as if it were a flash in a mirror: the truth of
desire. This technique has a famous predecessor: the play within a
play in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The frequently fragmented layering
of different types of presentational forms (in Mandarin Ducks, we
have the auteur film, theater, voguing, and television soap operas)
initiates a discussion about truth. In Shakespeare, the question is
whether or not the king has killed his brother; in Mandarin Ducks, it
is about the relationship between possession and cruelty.
To return to truth as a philosophical question: Foucault’s “en-
semble of rules, according to which the true is separated from the
false, and what is true is given specific, consequential powers,” is
entirely robbed of its voluntaristic undertone, because those who
seem to benefit so confidently from being given “specific, conse-
quential powers” seem to be trapped at the same time by the con-
tradictions that this produces. Meanwhile, Habermas’ notion of an
argumentative exchange that can lead to a consensual truth seems
to be its exact opposite: an altercation that induces collapse. How-
ever, in this complementarity, the notion still appears once again
as a lost ideal.
It becomes clear that de Rijke/de Rooij permit the camera to
actively influence what happens in front of it, not least in order to
counteract the illusion that their frequently shown recent works—the
ones mentioned at the beginning, when they were working with a
static long shot—had possessed a kind of privileged access to the
Kicking the Cat: On Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij and the Question of Truth 59
production of truth in the image. Now, with Mandarin Ducks—in the
vain of the Hamlet play-within-a-play—it is the exaggerated pose in
an artificial setting, where truth, or at least something like the truth,
suddenly flashes—although not inevitably so. The irony just hap-
pens to be (and this was the “craft” of a director like Fassbinder,
who, after all, came from the theater) that the actors have to forget
their “craft,” to allow the pose to be recognized as a pose, in order
to disclose something about their characters. Shifting from a static
sequence of images to an edited sequence, from something that
seemed to be mostly documenting human behaviour to something
that is obviously rehearsed, from atmospheric sound to scripted
speech, is also like shifting from “passive” to “active” representa-
tion. To pick up on Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan, one might
even say—without intending to pathologize the comparison—that it
moves away from the obsessive-compulsive to the hysterical. The
obsessive-compulsive tells lies shaped like the truth; the accuracy
of his facts (here: the apparently neutral, accurate presentation of
an external visual reality) only contains an encrypted form of his
desire. The hysteric, on the other hand, tells the truth in the guise of
a lie: desire is revealed in the distortions of factual accuracy (here:
the clearly staged presentation of behavioral roles).09
This move from the “obsessive-compulsive” to the “hysterical”
mode of producing images entails risks: one gradually surrenders
abstraction and distance (although abstraction as such is not simply
given up), lunges into the middle of a complicated production of truth,
inevitably and suddenly starts to compete, also in terms of craft, with
others who publicly make statements (in this case, even if the artists
do not suddenly start seeing themselves as “filmmakers,” but con-
tinue to think of their work in the context of art, not cinema: the great
auteur films by directors from Godard to Fassbinder—very tough
competition). At the same time, one discloses that even before, one
was never completely uninvolved. To vary Margaret Mead’s and
09 Slavoj Žižek, “Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge,” 1997, http://www.gsa.buffalo.edu/lacan/slavvy.html.
 Gregory Batsen’s image quoted above, the goal is, to some extent,

Jörg Heiser 60
to film the way the protagonist scratches his back, while simply al-
lowing us to realize that he is kicking the cat under the table. Not
easy.
The only relation to art that can be sanctioned in a reality that stands

63
under the constant threat of catastrophe is one that treats works of art

Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
with the same deadly seriousness that characterizes the world today.
Theodor W. Adorno01

We shouldn’t let ourselves be overly impressed by the false maturity

of the moderns who do not see a place for ethics—which they
denounce as moralism—in reasonable discourse.
Emmanuel Levinas02

Prologue
This essay invites two analogous and complementary readings
of ethics and aesthetics in contemporary art. The first part seeks
to understand the relationship between the ideas of ethics and
aesthetics that frame current debates in what is otherwise called
political art. The second part is concerned with types of artistic
practice that straddle the realm of art and documentary, and the
problems they pose to our comprehension of reality in the context
of art works, media images, and exhibitions of contemporary art.
In the first, I shall analyze reasons for the remarkable transformation
of the concept of the political in contemporary art, especially as
it concerns both the subject and content of such art, that make
secondary the formal means of the work. Secondly, the exhibition
documenta 11 provides the exemplary notice as a specific case
study for how to read the disfigured tradition of the documentary
as it converges with a surprisingly conservative notion of the disin-
terestedness of art in its relations with social life.

The Unhomely and the Anxiety of Global Modernity

A distance of nearly fifty years separates us from Adorno’s statement,
a statement all the more remarkable for its prescience in situating

01 Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1983), 185.
02 Emmanuel Levinas, “Dialogue on Thinking-of-the-Other,” in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B.
Smith and Barbara Harshav (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1998), 221.
 the strange disarticulation of criticality in recent art which above all
Okwui Enwezor 64
else values an over-metabolized formalism by means of a strong
return to abstraction in the advanced sectors of the art economy.
To the degree that the art economy of the gallery system puts a
high premium on commodity objects, the return to formalism and
abstraction heralds a return to a kind of conservatism that all but
abjures the kind of art which continuously registers a sense of what
Sartre would have called engagement. What I am calling abstraction
here should be understood not just in the sense of metaphysics.
Modernist abstraction, especially, unfolds out of mechanistic, formal,
and stylistic devices that constitute its representational frame—with
a tendency towards the transcendental and the universal, on the
part of Abstract Expressionism, and the metaphysical, in the case of
geometric abstraction. In contemporary art, however, all these have
become sublated, thereby pushing the concept of abstraction more
in the direction of the opacity evident in recent abstract art’s artful
contentlessness. In spite of this deflation, a visible schism exists to-
day between the aesthetes of formalism and those practitioners with
political leanings, who—with dim memories of the institutional take-
over of historical consciousness hovering over them—nevertheless
insist on art’s engagement with social life. What should be noticed
in the current context, however, is how distanced works of art that
evince a political stance are, on the one hand, from the old two-part
model of Marxist critique of the commodity form and bourgeois soci-
ety, and on the other, abstraction’s interiorization of artistic vision as
a uniquely and internally coherent world in which individual enact-
ment takes precedence over that of the collective or social. The latter
view purges the external world from the space of art, wishing for it
a state of purity, a state which not only rejects illusionism, but also
asserts that the full meaning of any art is to be found in its specific
medium. This is the story of a particular view of art overseen by a
brand of modernism famously argued for by Clement Greenberg.03
03 See Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Collected Essays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgments,
1939–1944, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23–38.
Today we are more or less witnessing the complete dissolution
65
and evaporation of a kind of politically-driven art practice based on
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
some notion of the critique of the commodity form and the struggle
over the ownership of the means of production, determinations
coterminous with a Marxian model of class struggle. If class forma-
tions no longer animate the modes of political art today, the other
side of this development is the return of formalism as nothing but a
great emptying out and banishment of the concept of the political in
artistic matters, as if this would provide a cure for the anxiety of mo-
dernity. There is a novel idea behind this anxiousness surrounding
the modern today, at the root of which is the crisis of the political in
current artistic practice. Recent elaborations on modernity hold that
within the space of less than two decades we have passed through
two endings of modernity: first, with the collapse of communism
and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we bore witness to the demise of a
Marxist vision of modernity; and secondly, after September 11, 2001,
came the dissolution of its liberal counterpoint. It would be tempt-
ing indeed to embrace the tenets of these grand conclusions, were
it not for the inconclusiveness of history itself. No doubt, the archi-
tectural metaphor that accompanied both downfalls of two of the
most significant political traditions of the modern era helps frame
them both in time and image; modernity as a specter that hangs
over the global collective consciousness.
What has emerged, however, is different from this and is not
insignificant for cultural politics. The schism masks a deeper anxi-
ety about the period we can call global modernity. This anxiety is
manifest in an emerging battle within the critical comprehension,
reception, and discussion of contemporary art, namely the oppo-
sition between ethics and aesthetics, or the conjunction of both.
Recently, discussions of the relation between ethics and aesthetics,
or politics and poetics in contemporary art have proliferated. The
current upsurge in linking the ethical and the aesthetic—or the more
familiar conjunction of art and politics—perhaps, owes something
to what Irit Rogoff has described as the nature of “‘unbounded’ or
 ‘undisciplined’ work” common to both artistic practice and its multiple
Okwui Enwezor 66
locations today.04 This unboundedness, which I have designated
elsewhere as the condition of unhomeliness, is partly the result of
a widescale global modernity of peoples, goods, and ideas perma-
nently on the move, in constant circulation, reconfiguration, tessel-
lation. 05
The condition of unhomeliness could also be interpreted in
another way: in the alienation of our subjective development from
the forces of domination and totalization, namely the ideology of un-
checked capitalist triumphalism that seeks to sever alternative social
models and relations of exchange not already bound exclusively to
consumption and consumerism. This alienation, or simply the with-
drawal from the homogenizing tyranny of global capitalism, discloses
new subjectivities on the verge of transforming what Felix Guattari
calls the “mass-media subjectivity” proper to the discourse of total-
ization. 06
In contemporary art this is being felt in the rejection of the
singularity of the art object, image, or the cultural system that seem-
ingly holds art together in a unified and universalized conception of
artistic subjectivity. In Rogoff’s idea of unbounded and undisciplined
work there arises something no longer notional: artists’ withdrawal
from the institutionalized (musealized) model of art. Rather, for sever-
al decades now we have witnessed the inexorable attempt by artists
to break with this totalization. Such attempts reveal a structured and
self-conscious “indiscipline” against the conservative institutional
idealization of art.07
For contemporary art and other cultural practices, indisciplinar-
ity and unhomeliness is not just being out of tune with the established
order nor the feeling and consciousness of being elsewhere, in exile,
dislocated, displaced or rootless, but the contemplation in art that “cul-
ture operates metonymically, always simultaneously at separate but
Soll es Exile, 04
05
Irit Rogoff, “Art/Theory/Elsewhere,” “Dossier on documenta 11,” Texte zur Kunst (August 2002).
Okwui Enwezor, “At Home in the World: African Writers and Artists in ‘Ex-Ile’,” in Kunst-Welten im Dialog: Von
Ex-ile oder Ex-Ile Gauguin zur globalen Gegenwart, ed. Marc Scheps, Yilmaz Dziewior, and Barbara M. Thiemann (Cologne: DuMont,
1999), 330–6.
sein? 06
07
Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 33.
I borrow the notion of indiscipline from Barbara Vanderlinden and Jens Hoffmann’s curatorial project “Indiscipline”,
where they, along with a multifaceted group of practitioners, explored the nature of creative agency in the face of
the breakdown between disciplines and forms of art in Brussels in 2000. See Barbara Vanderlinden and Jens
Hoffmann, Indiscipline (Brussels: Roomade, 2000), unpaginated brochure.
parallel registers.”08 There is a recognition—by a surprising number
67
of practices of contemporary art that assume activist and political practitioners?
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
modes of position-taking in the critical analysis of culture—that the
dispersal of the discourses of art as it was once organized by post-
modernism has now reached a watershed moment. The effect of
this dispersal is that there is no singular location of culture or con-
temporary art. While artistic practices of the kind described above
often appear in exhibitions and institutions of contemporary art, their
destination and target extend well beyond those fora into the larger
domain of the global public sphere. In a sense, the global public
sphere is both the destination of such art and its target as well, for
increasingly the kinds of contemporary art that assume an activist
and political position have tended to be transnational in their strategy
and tactically concerned with the location of art in the condition of
the unhomely, that is, in the present.
The Human as a Limit Case of Modernity: Neo-Political Realism
and the Twilight of Class in Artistic Practice
If we are, indeed, witnessing not just a structural antinomy but also
a shift in the ideals of modern culture and its images, we do so to
the degree that class struggle, which once heralded the promise of
a grand social realignment of international civil society in economic
and political terms, no longer defines the relationship between dif-
ferent actors in the political and cultural arena. Rather it is “Human
Rights” that provides the ethical compass for our interaction with
the world and one another. I will argue that the kinds of political
realism in artistic practices often associated with social reality, and
which to a great extent are also engaged with ethical consideration
for human subjects, owe a great deal to the discovery by contem-
porary art of the importance of the idea of “bio-politics”: a politics
grounded in explorations of the meaning of life and the ethico-ju-
ridical sanctity of the human within current global realignments of
08 Ibid.
 political, economic, and cultural formations.09,10 In the former third temporary artists’ concern with the ethical. Both the preamble and

Okwui Enwezor 68

69
world colonies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, Article 3 of the declaration spell it out. In the first two paragraphs of

Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
liberation and decolonization movements were at the vanguard of the preamble the rationale is established:
this political and cultural reorientation. In the former second world Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of
the struggle against communist control of all social and cultural all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in
the world,
Komma am Schluß
forces gave great impetus to the search for new political alterna-
tives to the socialist utopia disfigured by Stalinism. In the first world Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts
which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which
of the West, the third and second world positions pointed to above human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and
were linked up with struggles occurring in areas such as civil rights, want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
the feminist movement, the gay movement, and anti-racist, anti-war
and anti-nuclear movements. The combination of all three interpre- Article 3 reiterates the preamble unequivocally: Everyone has the
tations of freedom (what could also be called a politics of rights) is right to life, liberty and security of person.11
at the heart of a new kind of political order to which contemporary Human rights craft thus began with the idea of the human as a wortwahl: human rights craft
art responds. The organizing instrument is “Human Rights” both in limit case under overwhelming coercive force. Therefore, if human klingt wie „witchcraft“...ich
the narrow sense articulated by the Universal Declaration of Rights rights were constructed for human beings, it would logically follow weiss nicht, was er genau
and in the broad sense of ethical filiation to the very structure of that human rights as such are regimes crafted to accede to and meint, aber vielleicht etwas
existence. While philosophy has engaged this question for a long intercede on behalf of the human. Such rights then, can only be wie „The crafting of human
rights....“
time, its encapsulation in cultural and artistic terms is recent. In accorded to life and therefore only to the living, hence the impor-
fact, it is worth emphasizing that the radical codification of bio-poli- tance of bio-politics. We know the immediate historical context that
tics as the stress in the ethical relationship between a person and attended and supported this juridical commandment, and it has an
the state is specifically the issue taken up by the Universal Declara- image: Auschwitz. Auschwitz was based on the evidence of the
tion of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly, on overwhelming industrial manufacture of death. Photographs and
December 10, 1948. Though it does not spell out contemporary art- documentary footage of the liberated camps confronted the world
ists’ concern with the ethical in a specific sense, in a more general with an ethical question, namely, if the Nazis murdered their victims
sense this text is particularly illuminating when one attends to con- by first reducing them to the legal category of the non-human, how
„lessen its lesson“ ist ko-
09 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Arendt’s
can the enlightened laws of the post war international system re- misch, es sei den diese


discussion of Vita Activa, in which she identifies three forms of human activity—labor, work, and action—as the
fundamental condition of life, as that which invests positive content in all human life, is important in the context
store such rights? Thus the Holocaust has come to represent the Wortwahl war mit absicht.


of the idea of bio-politics. See also Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (NewYork: Pantheon, 1984), 267. Foucault comments that in the discourse of bio-politics
exemplary test for the question of the human. More than fifty years


“what we have seen has been a very real process of struggle; life as a political object was in a sense taken at
face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it. It was life more than the law have not lessened its lesson, if anything it has intensified the ques- diminished?
that became the issue of political struggles, even if the latter were formulated through affirmations concerning
rights. The ‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs and, beyond all the tions it raises. Even as Foucault claimed that “what is at stake today
oppressions or ‘alienations,’ the ‘right’—which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehend-
ing—was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the is life,” it would appear that despite the frequency of wholesale
traditional right of sovereignty.”
10

In his humanist-oriented essay The Three Ecologies, Guattari spells out an interesting program of thought that
reiterates the debate on the human in what he calls Ecosophy. In this philosophy, in which he deals with the
slaughters taking place today, we have become more inured than
disastrous consequences for the present ecological system based on man-made changes, there is a triangulation
of what he calls an “ethico-political articulation... between the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity...” ever to what Susan Sontag calls “the pain of others,” while human
Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 28. He brings these three intersecting questions to rest on the “ecosophic problematic...
of the production of human existence itself in new historical contexts.” Ibid., 34. 11 For the full text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights see www.un.org/Overview/rights.
 rights discourse has grown even more.12,13 The helplessness of the
Okwui Enwezor 70
Palestinian struggle and quest for self-determination and a home-
land illustrates this. This helplessness is made all the more hope-
less when given an image: the Intifada, which has been sometimes
described as the struggle between two categories of victims and
dispossessed: the Arab and the Jew. 14
Being for the Other and the Ethics of Looking
In this regard, Sontag’s analysis and defense of photographic or
filmic representations that draw our attention to catastrophes initi-
ated by violence is striking, especially since it goes against the
grain of the treatment of images of violation as merely a media
window into banal spectacle, as a worrying pornography of victim-
ization and violation.15 She argues forcefully against such reduc-
tive reasoning about the meaning of images in public discourse;
instead she made a plea for what could be called an “ethics of
looking” in our confrontations with the pain of other people. The
eye as an ethical apparatus, more than a prophylactic membrane
to ward off the unseemly, the evil eye of death, locates the visual
field as the site “for an unfinished work of mourning.” 16
For the
most part, Sontag’s excursus was concerned with documentary
photography and photojournalism and their ability to touch a part
of the spectator’s humane feeling, in short, the concern for another
human being.
12
Michel Foucault, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vinceno Binetti and
Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 7.
13
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (NewYork: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003). Lucid and mesmerizing,
Sontag attacks the pervasive contemporary apperception of images of violence, the blind stare which detaches
itself from the “Pain of Others” through recourse to absurd rationalizations.
14 See Susan Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) for a scrupulous and moving account of the convergence of two positions of the
victim in the historic debate on the politics of dispossession.
15
Jean Baudrillard pushed this form of argument to a new level of absurdity in his book The Gulf War Did Not Take
Place. Baudrillard’s canard deploys his familiar theory of the simulacrum in which all representation disappears
into the image, with mass media serving as the screen (both in the literal sense and in the sense of concealment)
through which we perceive reality, in order to insist that what the first Gulf War amounted to was nothing more
than a media spectacle, a virtualization of the image of war that distorts the actuality of that war. While one can
certainly agree that the American prosecution of the war gave the impression of the war as an electronic video
screen in the early days of the war, subsequent documentary footage of bombed out Baghdad and the infamous
“highway of death” refutes the excitation of over theorization provided by his analysis. Sontag’s point is that all
too often, we shy away from the terrible suffering because we search for an enlightened response that absolves
us from seeing what lies immediately before our field of perception.
16 Ariella Azoulay, Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy, trans. Ruvik Danieli (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 4.
Despite her passionate, trenchant argument—persuasive both
71
in its substance and in its analytical insight about photography bal-
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
lasted by numerous historical examples—suspicions of the ideo-
logical machinations that surround the kind of images she offers
in her examples remain quite entrenched within visual art. In visual
art, a hole in vision, a blindspot, the blank stare, a halating gaze,
have been developed as the essential prophylaxis proper to the
documentary form. To wit, there is often a moralization in the name
of critical questioning of the morality of the documentary that has
consistently degraded its efficacy unless it is treated allegorically, à
la Warhol. This paradoxical situation corrodes the peculiar position
taken by art that stakes a territory within the tension between ethics
and aesthetics, or politics and poetics.
The question of paying attention to the “pain of others” espe-
cially as it is registered and indexed in representation (be it photo-
graphic, filmic, or archival) arises purely as a consequence of the
development of human rights. Yet others have argued, precisely,
against this identification of the documentary. To purists, documen-
tary’s “noble” tradition abjures those kinds of images of the mass
anonymous others often caught unawares or dead in the sooty, ich kann das nicht entziffern: fo
which temporary guilt industries
grainy newsprint of the global news industry. It also refuses the
images that court unrestrained
aestheticized horror pictures stylized for quick uncritical consump- witness bearing...
tion as redemptive “truth,” as evidence or tokens for which con-
temporary guilt industries (Amnesty International, Doctors Without es gibt zu viel aufeinanderfol-
Borders, etc.) images that court unrestrained witness bearing. Thus gende Nomen... es fehlt vielleic
the claim of a double kind of violence being visited upon the figures ein Paar Kommas, und am End
of the violated by the mere repetition of the tabular index of horror. soll es viellicht „witness-bearing
heissen.
This begs the question: why have contemporary artists re-
das ist auch kein Satz...es fehlt
sponded to human rights or concern for the other as the ethical
ein Verb... vielleicht: Thus, the
limit of any engagement with the world? One suspects that modern claim of a duplicity of violence i
traumatography abetted by the machinery of media technologies being VISITED UPON ??? (was
has much to answer for here. The frequency with which a large ist das?!) the figures...
group of artists such as Fazal Sheikh, Alfredo Jaar, Kendell Geers,
William Kentridge, amongst others, take-up such positions in their
 work may then lead one to conclude, though not unqualifiedly, that
Okwui Enwezor 72
images of the mass phenomenon of displaced people, the carnage
of war, genocidal massacres, crimes against humanity, the devasta-
tion of famine, manmade ecological disasters, and natural disasters
in the media have been contributing factors. Also, radical art, like
radical politics, has a natural response to power that gives a certain
frisson to the Faustian relationship between ethics and aesthetics,
politics and poetics. But if the ethical is a test for our commitment
to each other’s being, qua existence, how do we square this test
with the aesthetic, which in Kantian fashion is concerned with the
“lofty” ideal of the sublime, the sensation of the beautiful?17 When
W. B. Yeats writes about a terrible beauty being born, is this not the
ground of the ethical and aesthetic (which now is being cheaply
merchandised as a special kind of political effect in contemporary
art) heaving before us? 18
Are singularized affects of denunciation
effective artistic arguments against complex political realities? Or
might this concern be more in line with Levinas’ moral philosophy
of an ethical relationship between two people, grounded in the
cognitive embodiment of the other’s existence?
Activism and Counter-Power
I will now try to explore the general topography of politically oriented
art and its roots in current discussions of power and rights, which
elucidates some of the issues I have been tracing. I should also
make clear that I am using human rights here in a strictly narrow
sense: in its manifestation in politically oriented art, and the puta-
tively ethical weight it gives such art. One of the central principles
of contemporary art that unambiguously effects a political stance is
its engagement with bio-politics. The second principle is that its ac-
tions seek to mediate the relationship between national and trans-
national domains of rights. A typical example is the German-based
17 For Kant’s aesthetic theory from which much debate on the question of the aesthetic in art draws see his 1764
essay “The Sense of the Beautiful and of the Sublime” in The Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel Kant’s Moral and
Political Writings, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: The Modern Library, 1949).
18 W. B. Yeats, “Easter 1916,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, ed. Richard Finneran (New York: MacMillan,
1989).
Kein Mensch ist illegal, a collective of activists, artists, and tactical
73
media groups working around issues of immigration, and on behalf
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
of refugees, sans papiers, and in raising awareness around the
often violent deportation of illegal immigrants from European coun-
tries. Kein Mensch ist illegal, both in its work and its configuration,
has moved beyond the traditional framework of being purely an
artistic or activist group. It is neither one nor the other. Put another
way, it is consciously hybridized, which means it is both an activist
and artistic group simultaneously. This allows a degree of flexibility
in its tactical formations, along with the tools of its work, which
adopt and adapt the instruments of art, propaganda, media, and
social protest as make-shift swerving speculums, probing and test-
ing the resilience of the system’s attempt to contain disobedience.
While its activities are grounded in the struggles for rights of those
spectral, shadowy communities comprising immigrants, refugees,
and sans papiers, Kein Mensch ist illegal disavows any interest in
charity or humanitarian work. Rather its principal focus is on the
question of rights. This stance is also the source of its name: based
on the juridical idea that “no one is illegal.” For Kein Mensch ist illegal,
to declare a class of people as illegal is to refute the very foundation
of human rights; a negation, which it suggests, questions the very
category of the human, specifically the non-European other as a
foreigner, the unwelcomed stranger.19
Xenophobia, Xenophilia, Racism, and the Human
As Sarat Maharaj has shown and as can be seen in the work of
Ruth Wodak, there is an intense correlation between xenophobia
and xenophilia in the discourse of racism.20,21,22 Xenophobia and
19 For a full account of Kein Mensch ist illegal’s work see Florian Schneider/Kein Mensch ist illegal, “New Rules
of the New Actonomy 3.0,” in Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11_Platform 1, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo,
Sarat Maharaj, et al. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 179–93; see also http://new.actonomy.org for further development
of its work.
20 See Sarat Maharaj’s essay in Education, Information, Entertainment: Current Approaches on Higher Artistic
Education, ed. Ute Meta Bauer (Vienna: edition selene, 2001).
21 Ruth Wodak, “Inequality, Democracy and Parliamentary Discourses,” in Democracy Unrealized, ed. Okwui Enwezor,
Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, et al. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 151–68.
22 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego and NewYork: Harcourt, 1968). For a particularly thorough
analysis of the development of the concept of race as justification for, and incitement to, dispossession of civil
and human rights see the chapter “Race and Bureaucracy,” 185–221.
 xenophilia manifest assumptions in their understanding of race in
74
their excessive non-recognition and recognition of the other. The
Okwui Enwezor
fundamental ethical lapse in both is the manner in which each, in
its own way, elides the complex assumptions which undergird the
politics of race in contemporary culture. It is not a coincidence that
the discourse of multiculturalism and certain digestible acknowl-
edgments of difference have suffered in the context of art and
culture due to this ambiguity. Furthermore, xenophobia and xeno-
philia underline an uneasiness and a false intimacy with the subject
of racism. Both can be irrational either in its phobic response to
the other or in its obsessive enthusiasm for all things different. In
cultural and artistic discourse this schism cannot be emphasized
enough. This negation which is both the source of xenophobia and
racism is apparent the recent rise of far right parties which run on
anti-immigrant political planks and are often unambiguously racist
in their discourse.23 The late Pim Fortuyn, who made the non-Euro-
pean immigrant the antithesis of a sustainable ideal of multicultural
Netherlands, designed his entire party manifesto around what he
called Livable Netherlands, a quality of life program advocating the
expulsion of immigrants from the Netherlands. Racism, as such, is
demonstrably an example of the human as a limit case, for it con-
ceives of the other on the basis of a defect, as the pure manifesta-
tion of a negation. 24
Therefore, to make the other or the “victim” the
subject of art, as the image of a critical recall that stands between
the artist and the spectator, before the institution and the law brings
her contingent status in representation to a level of visibility hitherto
23 In Europe in the last decade there has been a particularly intense upsurge of racist far right and neo-Nazi political
parties such as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France, Jörg Haider’s FPÖ (Freedom Party) in Austria, Filip
Dewinter’s Vlaams Blok in Belgium, Pim Fortuyn’s Lijst Pim Fortuyn in Holland, the election of the nationalist right
wing ruling party in Denmark, amongst others entering into the political mainstream. The spectacular results
achieved by Le Pen and Haider in recent elections makes clear that these developments are part of the main
streaming of racial discourse in the affirmative populist politics and culture, especially in Europe. See for example
Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Crisis,” Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous
Identities (London:Verso, 1991), 217–27.
24 See W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam, 1989), first published in 1903. Dubois was
perhaps the first thinker to draw our attention to the question of race in modernity. In “Of the Dawn of Freedom,”
the second section of his classic treatment of race and the American experience, he writes: “The problem of
the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men [sic]
in Asia and Africa, in America and Islands of the sea.” One hundred years after Dubois’s treatise, Paul Gilroy in
a recent work Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard
University Press, 2000) has taken up and extended this theme in a powerful anti-clerical critique of the persistence
of racial discourse in contemporary culture.
unrecognized by the regimes of invisibility that otherwise surround
75
and veil her in public discourse. Such a human presence disturbs,
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
agitates, and discomfits the visual field in which her presence is
both registered and so to speak extirpated. This appearance—which
is always anticipated with anxiety, for it is the impossible visibility of
an apparition, the immanence of the stranger—has been described
by Julia Kristeva in speaking of the stranger amongst us as that
which disturbs identity, order, legality.25,26 The human as a ghostly
presence, as more than a metaphor for illegality, as a shadow be-
fore the law, marks the separation between those identified as
legal, and therefore properly human (Europeans, white men) and
those (Africans, Arabs, Roma, Asians, women, gays, and lesbians,
etc.) who must seek the status of normalcy for their inclusion into
the human family by first exorcizing their strangeness, foreignness,
otherness.
Thus, while it has spotlighted violations by the German gov-
ernment of European Union human rights laws concerning the re-
patriation and deportation of refugees and asylum seekers, Kein
Mensch ist illegal works against the German immigration law in the
name of a larger universal ethical principle, one that repudiates the
illegalization of desperate immigrants. The given doxa of classical
political art is that it intervenes within the means of production and
in the cracks between the tectonic plates of class formations. It was
not until the rise of fascism that it became clear that the subject
of political art was about to be transformed. It never recognized,
however, the importance of otherness and its potent political reality
within the visual field. Careful appraisal of artistic formations today
makes it clear that they deviate from classical ideas of political art,
at least in one respect. The target of this art is not simply systemic,
25 More than any other group of thinkers it is revolutionary third-world, anti-colonial intellectuals who foregrounded
bio-politics more than class as the founding principle of all political and cultural struggles. See for example Frantz
Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markham (New York: Grove Press, 1967) particularly the
chapter “The Negro and Recognition.” The concluding passage of the chapter sketches the degree to which the
struggle for the conception of the human has been made the object of all ethical and political considerations
of otherness. Fanon writes in this passage: “I said in my introduction that man is a yes. I will never stop reiterating
that. Yes to Life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of
man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.”
26 For a full treatment of this subject see Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (NewYork,
Columbia University Press, 1991).
 centered on the political entity of the state, its ideology, apparatus,
Okwui Enwezor 76
agents. Rather, it involves a perhaps surprising principle of the uni-
versalization of the concept of the human evoked by human rights.
It is on behalf of such a universal principle that institutions and or-
gans of global multinational and transnational business and policy
bodies—such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, or
Nike, Shell, Exxon—have also become targets of attack. The meth-
ods, employed in the name of art, to address some of these issues
consequently have had to change, both in their form and orienta-
tion. It is in this sense that Rogoff’s notion of the unbounded and
undisciplined work is a brilliantly novel conceptualization of what
many think of as the conjunction between politics and art or ethics
and aesthetics. 27
Such work, in my view, neither sensationalizes
aesthetics nor spectacularizes the ethical.
The Deterritorialized Site of Art and Politics: Contemporary Art
in a Time of Crisis
A distinguishing feature of the ethical and aesthetical in current
practice is its deterritorialized nature. As I have been arguing, this
kind of work is Janus-faced: it is conscious of its form and right as
an artistic intervention while imbricating its relation to the conditions
and topographies of reception beyond the traditional boundaries of
art. It should also be noted that this kind of work is distinctly dif-
ferent from the old political art of the European avant-garde which
regarded fascism as the enemy and whose politics were based
on the solidarity of working class struggles, which it hoped would
lead to the relation of the utopia of proletarian rule and culture. The
productivist model of the Russian avant-garde in the Soviet Union
after 1917 was inspired by this utopianism. The same was the case,
for instance, in Mexico where revolutionary artists such as Diego
Rivera and other Muralists were concerned with the relation of a
27 Recent anti-globalization battles in Seattle, Prague, Montreal, Genoa, Guadalajara are instances of the kind
“unbounded” and “undisciplined” work being taken up by certain forms of political art. There is now a recognition,
even in such insular clubs as the Davos Economic Summit in Switzerland, of the importance of culture as an
instrument of economic policy discussion. The organizers of Davos have since began inviting “cultural producers”
to its discussions on global governance.
worker’s rule through the power of a peasant revolution. Or in the
77
Resistance Art model in South Africa where art under apartheid
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
harnessed its energy to the overthrow of a totalitarian and racist
regime.
Partly because of the revolution in communication technolo-
gies, art and politics are now much more broadly concerned with
conditions of social life: the environment, human rights, globaliza-
tion, racism, nationalism, and social justice. In their combination
they identify and interact with disciplinary formations that distend
the formal boundaries of official artistic discourse. Nevertheless,
the surprising, and some would argue troubling, aspect of this kind
of work is its tendency to transform ethical concerns into aesthetic
devices and vice versa. To the degree that artists editorialize on the
nature of social life today, the critical ability of such actions to effect
change remains, thus far, in remand. But what interests me in this
development is not whether activist or politically invested artists
express the “correct position” with the correct forms, instead I am alternativ: perpetu-
ally stated interest
interested in their always-stated interest in an ethics rooted in the
conception of bio-politics.28
Thus, when we attempt to grasp the conjunction of ethics and
aesthetics, or politics and poetics, we must in effect recognize the
importance and global dimension of the discourse of human rights.
Consequently, even when what artists spotlight may be local—such
as Alfredo Jaar’s work on Rwanda and the Union Carbide disaster
in Bhopal, India—the tactical public is always global.29 Throughout
his career Jaar has made the critique of predatory capitalism and
human rights violations signature issues in his work. In Let There
Be Light: The Rwanda Project, 1994–1998 Jaar was one of first (and
remains one of the few) artists to respond to the mass killings that
took place over a period of one hundred days in the summer of
1994. Artists like Jaar, (here the art of Hans Haacke is crucial) work
28 For a fruitful reading of the task of the artist operating under the understanding of a political commitment, see
Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings,
ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1978), 220–38; see also Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? and Other
Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) for his elaboration of the notion of committed literature.
29 Alfredo Jaar, It is Difficult: Ten Years and Let There Be Light: The Rwanda Project, 1994–1998 (Barcelona: Actar, 1998).
 at disclosing the complex transnational web that illuminates not
Okwui Enwezor 78
only their project but also the interests of multinational formations.
Take, for example, Haacke’s sculpture U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada,
1983, a cube of plywood that evokes the claustrophobia of confine-
ment and imprisonment made in the aftermath of the US invasion
of Grenada. Whether in Jaar’s or Haacke’s work, what we witness
is a new kind of thinking that has inverted and transformed the old
maxim: “all politics is local” to “all local politics is now global.” The
universal umbrella of human rights offers a peculiar sort of protec-
tion to local causes once they are reframed in a global context.
Notice, for instance, that many grassroots social movements and
Non-Governmental Organizations may have their specific contexts
in local conditions, but often appeal to the global public sphere in
order to make effective their individual projects. Sub-commandante
Marcos and his Zapatista’s in Mexico, the AIDS activists’ campaign
against pharmaceuticals in South Africa, the late Ken Saro Wiwa’s
Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) in Nigeria
are recent examples of this transformation. Even the most odious
of these interests, Al Qaeda, uses the appeal of various local anti-
modern Islamic fundamentalisms to export its universalizing ethos
of terror and spiritual redemption.
Where political or ethical considerations are specifically fore-
grounded in an artist’s work—for example: in the work of the realist
painter Leon Golub; Paul Stopforth’s graphite drawings during his
years in South Africa; Luis Camnitzer’s investigations of torture in
Uruguay during that country’s dictatorship; Willie Doherty’s videos
and photographs detailing the sectarian conflict in Northern Ire-
land; Martha Rosler’s reworking of images of the Vietnam War as
a measured critique of American neo-colonial offensive in South-
east Asia; Chris Burden’s Vietnam War counter-memorial; William
Kentridge’s drawings for projection, which focus on the legacy of
apartheid; the solemn performance of the activist group Mothers of
Plaza de Mayo’s daily vigil in Buenos Aires in behalf of their disap-
peared children during Argentina’s “dirty war”—human rights as
such frames the relationship between the producer and receiver.
79
Artists, such as Leon Golub, have made resistance to the con-
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
stant threat of disappearance of public memory a test for the stress
between the ethical and aesthetic. Golub’s unrealistically painted
realist paintings are conceived specifically as counterpaintings to
the opacity of formalist abstraction in which the specificity of the
human form had been annulled. For four decades he has demon-
strated his commitment to indexing and re-elaborating in his un-
settled, agitated paintings media images that represent in extremis
the precariousness of the human body under violent state repres-
sion. In such key series of works as Vietnam (1972–74), Mercenar-
ies (1979–87), Interrogations (1981–86) and White Squads (1982–87),
we are confronted by a panoply of fragmented and isolated im-
ages projected against the backdrop of neutral surroundings, all
of them specific to and concerned with the deracination of human
life. It is as if both naked power and naked life are simultaneously
isolated in the ghostly outlines of his sparsely painted, distressed,
cleaved canvasses. Likewise, Stopforth’s mortuary drawings—a set
of reductive drawings of fragments of Steve Biko’s mutilated body
after his death through torture—play a similarly mnemonic role as
Golub’s and are no less powerful for their overt political claim to
representing violations of the body. Similar concerns are the frame
around which Camnitzer’s From the Uruguayan Torture Series is
defined. In each of these artistic positions, what stands out are in-
dividual responses to naked power and naked life in representation.
The ethical questions posed by much recent art are never about
the question of the aesthetic merit of the work alone. Nor is it just
about linking the content of the work to the moral claim of the art.
Even if the empirical grounding of such content is never literalized
so as to assume unmitigated claims of truth, the appearance of
such content in visual representation always represents a risk for
both the art and artist, institution and spectator.

Okwui Enwezor 80
Identity Politics and the Rediscovery of the Human in Contem-
porary Art
I have argued throughout this text that the location of the ethical
in contemporary art, or the opposition of the ethical and aesthetic,
arises precisely from the legacy of human rights insofar as the
category of the human is what is at stake. I want to offer further ex-
amples for consideration in this discussion. When we frame certain
types of artistic practice around issues of identity—be it cultural,
gender-based, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality—we are ba-
sically witnessing the serious force given each of these domains by
human rights and its evolution in the last fifty years. Each of these
domains defines itself around and against principles of power and
rights. Consider, for instance certain activities of artists, such as
Group Material, who take up methods of advocacy around political
subjectivity, education and health in their work, or activist groups
such as ACT UP, who work on the basis of enlightened self-interest
in matters concerning the AIDS crisis that ravaged the gay commu-
nity in the 1980s, or Claude Lanzmann’s epic film on the Holocaust,
Shoah. Even Hollywood films such as Schindler’s List, which took
on the role of bearing witness on behalf of victims of the Holocaust
was founded upon identity discourses and the shroud of human
rights that envelopes each of them. The destabilizing and subver-
sive rapture often associated with the work of Félix González-Torres
(one of the most thorough and complex convergences of the ten-
sion surrounding ethics and aesthetics); the ghostly monologues
on race and identity in Glen Ligon’s coal dust and stenciled paint-
ings; the ambiguous and lugubrious archives that make up Chris-
tian Boltanski’s work are caught in this tension. Generalized images
that appeal to our sense of “humanity” or categorically reinvests the
condition of the human with contingency, works that take up the
excursus of trauma: a flash of the tumescent flesh of the wounded
body or the wordless scream of the witness before a catastrophe are
just as equally implicated in this account. Thus, the more practices
and discourses of contemporary art recognize these categories as
81
legitimate artistic strategies, the more human rights will ever remain
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
both the silent narrative and specter that haunts the ethical and
aesthetic in contemporary art.
Documenta 11 and the Documentary as a Form of Unraveling d?
Truth
I now wish to consider the effect of these questions as it bears on
the reception of documenta 11, for which I served as the artistic
director between 1998 and 2002. To many observers, documenta 11
was the culmination of a development in contemporary art in which
increasingly the documentary form became the dominant artistic
language, particularly in photographic, film, and video work repre-
sented in its fifth platform: the exhibition. The surplus of modes of
the “documentary,” whether materialist or indexical, the “over com-
pensation” in the exhibition of works with a “political agenda,” and
the “overwhelming” relationship to social life were read as ethical
messages by the exhibition organizers to a jaded global leftist pub-
lic. Moreover, such messages were held to reveal the ideological
proclivities of the organizers rather than their interest in traditional
notions of art. In fact, the exhibition was perceived as that moment
when the global left’s “evangelical” zeal and concern with human
rights led to severe reduction in the aesthetic nature of the art and
thus promoted a certain political pleading by the many documen-
taries of a view of the world shaped by politics more than art.30 In
this account, the documentary not only trumps art, it subordinates
it so completely that any relation to art is vitiated by the curatorial
agenda. Understood so tendentiously, the bliss of the autonomy of
art freed from any socio-political regulation ends precisely at that
moment when the opposition between ethics and aesthetics is es-
30
A particularly disconcerted view of the exhibition could be read in the alarmed review of Blake Gopnik, the art
critic of The Washington Post, whose article drew out of thin air the bizarre notion that the exhibition was
anti-American. See Blake Gopnik, “Fully Freighted Art: At Documenta 11. A Bumpy Ride for Art World’s Avant-Garde,”
Washington Post (June 16, 2002). Another view of the evangelical, puritanical attitude of the exhibition was offered
by Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of The New York Times, in his article, “Global Art Show With an Agenda,”
The New York Times, June 18, 2002.
 tablished, thus forcing viewers to take sides. Of course, this account
Okwui Enwezor 82
has little resemblance either to the exhibition that my colleagues
and I curated, or to the one I witnessed along with hundreds of
thousands of visitors to Kassel.
Some time has passed since the final segment; the fifth plat-
form of documenta 11 opened in Kassel in June, 2002. It now
appears possible to revisit some of the points made by its crit-
ics. Returning to the idea of the “unbounded” and “undisciplined”
work, as a framework around which to articulate the general vicis-
situde and unhomely condition of contemporary art, the project
of documenta 11 was to probe specific instances of this change.
Most of you will remember that the fifth platform was designated
as the locus of the exhibition, part of the broad visual field of
documenta 11’s project. You might also remember that the logic
of the documenta 11 platforms was partly based on a set of dis-
cursive relationships between sites of theoretical practice and
nutzung von „accrue“ those of visual practice, each site elaborating on questions and
kommt mir komisch ideas proper to its own field of discourse, but also interrogating
vor...something can
assumptions accruing to the other fields. Another element of the
accrue from something,
discursive is the pursuit in the exhibition, to present and argue for
or you can accrue as-
sets, but I don‘t know works with an awareness of their own intelligibility in the social
how you accrue to context of today’s world. The discursive was however, not based
something... on the relativization of art and politics, the cultural and the social,
or even the ethical and the aesthetic. Neither was it based on the
usual opposition between the center and margin. The discursive
was a term employed to delineate the correspondence between
systems of meaning; between locations, publics, audiences, and
institutions. It afforded us the ability to be engaged with those dis-
ciplinary formations that arise precisely at the point where visual
practice can no longer claim sole legitimacy for the hermeneutic
function of art.
I could perhaps say this is where the notion of the ethical may
be located in documenta 11, insofar as the ethical is concerned in
the agonistic exchange between different interlocutors; the relation
with the other, what Foucault calls, in a non-adversarial exchange,
83
“reciprocal elucidations.”31 This relation to the other has often been
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
explored in connection with the concept of truth. I am thinking
of truth here as akin to how Alain Badiou uses it as: “the real
process of a fidelity to an event: that which this fidelity produces
[original italics] in the situation.”32 The amanuensis of this truth is
the other, evoked by Levinasian ethics in our identification with the
other, the other as a figure to whom we owe the possibility of this
absolute fidelity. The central concern for the other, the being-for-
the-other of which Levinas speaks, is the ground for the principle
of the intersubjective that governs the communicative principle of
an exchange between two people. Therefore, the concept of truth
requires first that the other exists in every intersubjective, reciprocal
exchange. This is a recognition of the basis of power relations. I do
not use the other here in an ethnographical sense. Rather, in the
sense of the recognition of one’s own limits in relation to another
subjectivized position, be it a text, an artwork, a spoken exchange.
We initiate each of our interactions in this regard with a fund of trust
in the integrity of the subjectivized position. The other, then, exists
neither as an aberration nor as an opposition. It exists, always, in
dialectical relation to multiple modes of subjectivization.
Let us return to Badiou. According to what he terms the ethic
of a truth, the relationship to the other,
is the principle that enables the continuation of a truth-process ... that which lends
consistency to the presence of some-one in the composition of the subject induced by
the process of this truth.
If that be the case, the grounds of the ethical as such in documenta
11 are not in the relativization of ethics and aesthetics, but in a middle
course: the composition of the subject induced by the process of
this “truth,” what we choose to call the discursive space between
the spectator and the work of art. This means that documenta 11
31 Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of
Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 111.
32 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 42.
 was, rather, an active, entangled field of procedures for which dif-
Okwui Enwezor 84
ferent practitioners and publics shared responsibility, sometimes
in mutual intelligibility and sometimes not. Such a shared zone of
responsibility is the zone of subjectivized practices.
Reality Effect and the Representation of Social Life
Now that documenta 11 has become historical, in the sense that its
evaluation belongs both to the past and the present, we can look
back to all its constitutive parts and begin the task of unraveling
both its proposals and its public reception. When the exhibition first
opened—to almost universal perplexity with regard to its temporal
and spatial density—a common idea came to define the nature of
the project, the idea that it was invested in what Barthes termed “the
reality effect” in its attunement to the representation of social life in
multiple works. Kim Levin, the critic of the New York Village Voice,
proclaimed the exhibition the CNN Documenta.35 Linda Nochlin who
offered a careful reading of works in the exhibition, saw images in
the exhibition as supported by various and expanded accounts of
the documentary. She correctly noted the degree to which many
works functioned at the level of the relationship between images
and social reality.36 Despite these, the critical misappraisal and mis-
apprehension of the structural and critical intent of the exhibition to
elaborate on the reasons why artists and other image-makers had
become obsessed with reality as such and the representation of
everyday life, along with their effects on contemporary conscious-
ness, was noteworthy in this sense. Not only was the problematic
of the documentary elided as more than an account of the political
subjectivity of its makers, the exhibition’s multiple organization of
images, forms, practices, and discursive fields was only able to be
perceived through the rubric of the documentary mode precisely
33
34
Ibid, 44.
See Boris Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation,” for a highly nuanced discussion
of the relationship between reality and representation of life as a social fact within certain forms of artistic practice
in Documental 11_Platform5: Exhibition, ed. Okwui Enwezor et al. (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002), 108–14.
35 See Kim Levin, “The CNN Documenta: Art in an International State of Emergency,” The Village Voice, July 2, 2002.
36 See Linda Nochlin, “Documented Success,” Artforum (September 2002): 159–63.
because it clashed with the traditional understanding of what the
85
work of art is relative to social reality.
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
A simple tour of the exhibition venues confirms the curatorial
cornerstone of our project, namely to generate in a comprehensive,
systematic, taxonomic, and typological fashion and to demonstrate
34
through a number of complex morphologies the ways through which
the logic of the archive and document suffuse and penetrate activi-
ties of art and procedures of image production in the last 40 years.
The disparate and oftentimes antagonistic procedures—such as
one finds in Allan Sekula’s Fish Story; Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Proj- auch in Schrägschrift?
ect; Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Half-Timbered Houses of the Siegen
Industrial Zone; Jef Geys’s Day and Night and Day...; Zarina Bhimji’s
Out of Blue, Fiona Tan’s Countenance; Igloolik Isuma Productions’s
Nunavut (Our Land); Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth’s
Song—are not reducible to documentary as such.
A brief excursion into the formal and scopic conception of each
of the works cited above provides a fascinating map and disorients
the reading of the term “documentary” as a specific mode of photo-
graphic or filmic articulation of reality. In fact, there are many more
works in the exhibition that even further complicate the documenta-
rist thrust. For example, Isaac Julien’s probing film on paradise and
loss in Paradise Omeros; Steve McQueen’s double meditation on
history, labor, and exile in Western Deep and Carib’s Leap, Ulrike
Ottinger’s Südostpassage (South East Passage), a melancholic tra-
versal of the anonymous, abandoned, yet thriving and alive corners
of old cities in the second world; Amar Kanwar’s A Season Outside,
a wrenching cinematic tone poem on partition blues acted out daily
at the border crossing that separates India and Pakistan at Wagah,
the result of the last colonial act at remapping postcolonial spaces;
Eyal Sivan’s The Specialist: Eichmann in Jerusalem and Itsembat-
semba: Rwanda One Genocide Later. Might one be consoled to
learn that all these disparate works—while surely “documentary”
in the limited sense applied to them by inattentive critics—do not
as a rule share in the devalued image machine we often ascribe
 when using the epithet “photojournalism,” especially in the preda-
Okwui Enwezor 86
tory form of stalking sensational pictures as a hunter would stalk
game? 37
In fact, an artist like Touhami Ennadre, who presented in
the exhibition a study of the grief and mourning surrounding the
destruction of the World Trade Center, vigorously disputes any at-
tempt to associate his work with such an epithet. Even the more
benign term “documentary” does not satisfy him in terms of what
he believes to be the purpose of his photographic work: to make
singular photographic work that speaks to the authenticity of each
given situation to the degree that the photograph can no longer be
read as just mere information. Yet Chantal Akerman embraces the
contradiction with the documentary inherent in film firmly in her cin-
ematic practice in which the image serves both a heuristic purpose
and an aesthetic one. She, who is herself the child of Holocaust
survivors, makes no secret of her identification with victims, which
oftentimes is perceived as part of the ideological baggage much
documentary work carries. Her film D’Est, which tracks the end-
lessness of the vast emptiness that attended the dissolution of the
Soviet empire, is remarkable not only for its oneiric quality, but also
for its gritty realism. Watching the blue haze that coats the mood
of the film, one literally has the feeling of watching dusk settling on
the after-life of the second world. The film can therefore be read as
a kind of summa of that after-life.
Vérité, Reality, Affect
peculiar (ko-
So far I have been commenting on one peculiar terminology: the
misch) oder
particular word “documentary” which was recurrent in most commentaries
(bestimmte)? about images in documenta 11. Now what I wish to do is to intro-
duce a second term: the French word vérité. I propose that we
explore the questions raised by the term documentary by interpel-
lating it with vérité.
The term documentary often refers to a set of techniques and
37 A more apt term might be the distinction made by Walker Evans between the “documentary style” and the
documentary as a form.
types of images directed at, and drawn from, the “real” world. The
87
general dispensation of such techniques, and the purloined “reality”
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
they embalm as images, are commonly understood to be distinctly
organized to interact with and comment directly on that “reality.”
This type of work generally is typified by an attitude of commisera-
tion with the subject of the documentary, and where violence or
catastrophe is present with the pain of the subject, that is, to the
real. Such work as largely found in the media is said to refer to real
things or events in the world—that is, as evidence of unvarnished
truth of the real. But today, with “reality television” ascendant, the
scope of its affective simultaneity makes the documentary mode
appear somehow quaint in comparison, in some cases even out-
moded due to the delay in its transmission.38
However, what haunts the documentary most is the charge of
maudlin moralism directed at its products. Let us dwell a little on
this idea of documentary, which despite its susceptibility to moral
relativism and appeal to a false consciousness of which its critics
accuse it, has a very rich and distinguished tradition. Almost all the
important photographers of the modern era—Eugène Atget, Walker
Evans, August Sander, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, David Gold-
blatt, Bernd and Hilla Becher—have worked within the documentary
mode, if we understand the nature of the documentary mode as si-
multaneously analytic and mimetic. As such, the documentary has
the unique position of being caught in a tautological game, which
is to both document and analyze, to show and define and to do so
with both aesthetic means and also to be oblivious of aesthetic. For
some, it is a matter of taste: the rawer the image the more authentic
the structure of feeling it supposedly evokes. For others, the more
discreet and anti-spectacular the image, the more correspondingly
38 From its earliest invention television has in one form or other experimented with a visual sensorium directed
at the recording and experience of reality in its most direct, unedited aspect. From early incarnations such as
Candid Camera (a not so subtle allusion to the truthfulness of the camera) to the mushrooming variations on the
theme of “Reality Television,” this fascination with “real” life is brought to a new level. What’s impressive about
this turn is how “Reality Television” combines techniques of surveillance and spectacle, thereby putting into
question the claim of a documented reality. The tradition of the documentary however goes back to the very
beginning of cinema in films by the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison and has remained impressively strong
despite increasing misgivings about its accuracy, first in ethnographic films (one thinks of the controversy that
continues to plague Robert J. Flaherty’s seminal ethno-documentary film Nanook of the North) and today in the
news media.
 distanced it is from its subject, the greater its putative objectivity.
Okwui Enwezor 88
But even if the most refined aesthetic procedures were employed
in a work, because of the tendency to categorize the documen-
tary as a mode of practice consistently prepared to show and ask
moral questions around what it documents, it is the documentary
as a massive body of evidence we end up most seeing. To certain
catholic tastes, the more the ethical confronts the documentary,
the more distance from aestheticization it must assume. For such
spectators, to aestheticize human suffering is an obscenity. This
accusation is often directed against the work of a photographer like
Sebastião Salgado; less so for Gilles Peress, and it becomes quite
controversial in the case of Susan Meiselas.
Yet when we look at the softcore pictures of distress and
poverty by the likes of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and other
photographers who documented the American depression in the
1930s, there is little moral outrage in the reduction of poverty to cer-
tain social types by urbane, middle class photographers roughing
it amongst the dejected mass of tenant farmers in drought-blighted
tenant farms of the South or the tenements of the large cities. Even
Jacob Riis’ late nineteenth century moral crusades in his study of
the squalor and appalling living conditions in overcrowded tene-
ments of New York’s Lower East Side in How the Other Half Lives
is a product of a different type of moral imperative. Perhaps this is
so because these images, which were mostly from before 1940,
precede the period of the discourse of victims. The opposition be-
tween the ethical and aesthetic or the political and poetic, as I have
been attempting to demonstrate, has a long running history. But the
vehemence of this opposition today in documentary forms of work
is informed mostly by the rise of discourse of victims scattered all
over the global peripheries that saturate the media today. And with
this rise of victims a peculiar form of scopophobia, an antiocular-
centric vision has settled over the field of the documentary.39 I do
39 For a magisterial treatment of anti-ocularcentrism see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
not, however, wish to recuperate the documentary form with all
89
its unresolved anomalies within what many would believe to be a
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
more superior aesthetic system. For me, the documentary as such
has its own integrity, even if its claims of truth remain dubious.
The documentary is also dominated by a view that it is a kind
of testimony which, on the one hand, produces a moral imperative
in the telltale details of the real, and on the other, asserts truth in the
manner in which it conveys and conducts its judgment of events
and depictions of people, things, objects. Even if the documentary is
never incontrovertibly called to present a moral judgment but to doc-
ument, to record, to archive, or simply to present, the overwhelming
ethical ground it claims often subtends more nuanced positions.
The documentary admits diverse structures of reference into its
methods: for example, evidence, testimony, bearing witness. Above
all it is mnemonic. The documentary’s relationship to its subject, in
spite of its bold assertions of truth claims, is an ambiguous one.
One of the most shocking pictures I have ever encountered in the
media was reproduced almost a decade ago on the front page of
The New York Times. The picture, taken by Kevin Carter, a South
African photographer, shows a young, exhausted Sudanese refu-
gee child bent over on his hands and knees. The chilling image,
which I can only now conjure from memory, is a tightly composed
picture, in which the circularity of the camera cuts to a diagonal
so as to align the looming frame of the child, with that of a vulture
standing behind him, observing, waiting. Two things come back
to me from that decade-old experience of the photograph and my
feeling as a spectator of the image: the remoteness and ambiguity
of the photographer from the scene and my own haunted curiosity
of the ultimate fate of the child. The latter is what the documentary
never discloses: the aftermath. The reception of this picture across
the world was spectacular. It raised a range of ethical issues, the
most obvious of which was: what, if anything, did the photographer
do to save the vulnerable abandoned child. Moral outrage at the
picture and at the photographer was mingled with dumb admiration
 of the photographer’s courage in recording such a harrowing
Okwui Enwezor 90
scene, for rescuing the child, if only as image, from the anonymity
of his fate. Of course, the photographer won all kinds of awards for
his effort. Carter was overwhelmed by the attention and the debate
surrounding the picture. He committed suicide shortly thereafter.40
Memento Mori: The Archive as a Site of Mourning
I have used this example to raise the unanswerable question of the
documentary’s ambiguity to its subject and to pose the question
whether it makes any sense to collapse ethics and aesthetics in a
single discussion of art’s relationship to its subject. Here, I want to
call attention to Christian Boltanski’s blurry pictures of “Holocaust”
children and parts of Gerhard Richter’s exhaustive archive Atlas.
Boltanski’s massive reorganization of photographs of anonymous
children, which blurs and exposes the faces of innocence, comes
closest to the use of the documentary as a method of bearing
witness and a tool of memorialization: the archive as mnemonic
machine. Richter’s Atlas evinces a different relationship to this ma-
chine in that he deliberately collapses the borders between the
private and public, the personal and political, the quotidian and
banal with the profound. His is an atlas of “perpetual commentary”
on the subject of looking and the function of images in constitut-
ing social memory in the aftermath of Nazism and within modern
culture. Atlas is an inventory of massive, inexhaustible potential
that either forecloses meaning due to its unwieldy heterogeneity
or manipulates the scales and legibility of what is represented,
thereby actively reading them, a priori, as nothing but an arbitrary
juxtaposition of meaningless images. But is Atlas, in its obsessive
documentary attempt at collectivization of personal and public
dieser Satz memory, truly arbitrary? Or does its effect of distance, not a critical
macht so keinen
attempt to bring to bear a great degree of complexity in the second-
Sinn...“does its
effect assume out-
side...as reference?
40 The circumstance of suicide has not been fully clarified. It’s unclear therefore whether the suicide was a result of
the commotion caused by this particular picture or due to other problems. Any inference of a connection to the
publicity surrounding this image and his death is not intended here.
41 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117–45.
ary career images assume outside of their context as reference,
91
as memento mori? Such memento mori is registered in the early
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
beginning of this ambitious historical project. In panels 16, 17, and
18, Richter shows us newspaper images of Nazi soldiers publically
humiliating their victims and of the liberated Nazi camps, which
depict emaciated survivors amid jumbled piles of bleached corpses
of those who did not survive. And years later in panels 470, 471, 472,
and 473, images of the Baader-Meinhof gang join the roll-call of the
memorialized. Panel 471 is in fact a reproduction of Richter’s paint-
ing from a newspaper reproduction of Ulrike Meinhof’s suicide.
The temporal lag between the Nazi camp images and that of the
terrorist gang does nothing to alleviate the context of the historical
41
space from which this comparatively benign investigation is being
conducted. As if to foreground what Hannah Arendt identified as
the banality of evil, Richter intersperses throughout the breadth of
his magnum opus images of domestic tranquility, his studio, holiday
pictures, pictures of his own work, etc.42
Blindspot, Blank Stare, Scopophobia, and the Hole in Vision
How are we to read the images and historical accounts both Boltanski
and Richter seek to reindex? Surely, to see Richter’s Herculean ef-
fort at structural collectivization of private and public, personal and
political histories as disinterested and merely ambiguous is to be
blind to it. Such a reaction exemplifies a consistent aporia in con-
temporary art’s approach to the documentary. A remarkable body of
literature has been developed around this question. The Italian phi-
losopher Giorgio Agamben makes a crucial point about Auschwitz
in this context. He writes that “[t]he aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed,
the very aporia of historical knowledge; a non-coincidence between
fact and truth, between verification and comprehension.”43
42 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1994).
43 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York:
Zone, 1999), 12.
 Perhaps, then, this crisis, this confusion between fact and truth,
Okwui Enwezor 92
verification and comprehension linked to the documentary may
have its source at the level in which the documentary confronts the
monstrous, the absolute, indissoluble reduction of human suffering
to abject status and spectacle. It was Foucault who wrote vocifer-
ously about the indignity of speaking for others. This poses the fol-
lowing question to Sontag’s fascinating and coruscating self-reflex-
ive analysis of documentary pictures in her recent book Regarding
the Pain of Others: whence does one open oneself up to another’s
pain, a process which again recalls Levinas’ ethics of being-for-
the-other? If the documentary is a testimony, as Sontag argues, to
a calamity, a record of an event, a representation of an actuality,
it is exegetic and seemingly eidetic. Yet it is neither mastery nor
totality. As such, it can only communicate as a fragment. How do
we trust or question that which the documentary presents beyond
blind acceptance of its ethical correctness or obdurate distrust of
its politics? The neutralizing assumption of a spectatorship, which
averts its gaze and turns askance from the documentary because it
deeply distrusts it as a moral accusation, cannot at the same time
judge it. To avert one’s eyes, to look askance, is equally an ethical
stance; it is to ask not to be accused; not to be contaminated, not
to exist purely for the other, to be cleansed from the guilt of looking
at human misery, relieved from the burden of being-for-the-other.
Yet there is a level at which this disavowal, when excessively in-
terpreted in the direction of the non-western other (as a critic, like
Matthew Higgs did in relation to images in documenta 11) registers
at a deeper level two kinds of disavowal: a scopophobic inattention
to the specificity of the image and a reflexive xenophobia unable to
imagine the other as properly human.44 This turning away, this hole
in vision, as I have argued earlier in this text, perhaps has its basis
not in any superior moral vision, but is precisely a prophylactic to
the obscenity of the human ruin.
44 See Matthew Higgs, “Same Old Same Old,” Artforum (September 2002): 166–7.
Let us return to conventional documentary images, more spe-
93
cifically photographic and cinematic (as well as video) images that
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
capture slices of what some call “the real world.” The root of the
term “documentary” is the document. In its literal term it is a re-
cord or evidence of something that proves the existence or the
occurrence of that which the document records, hence the claim
of “truth” often imputed to the documentary. But to document is
never to make immanent a singular overwhelming truth. It is simply
to collect in different forms a series of statements (what Foucault
calls “statement events” as the enunciative function of the archive)
leading to the interpretation of historical events or facts.45 The doc-
umentary as such is never outrightly a claim of truth, namely, that
this happened; therefore, it is true. In its relentless singularization,
in the guise of bearing witness to that which is part of our reality,
even if it may be outside our immediate experience, the documentary
claims for itself the burden of truth in that it directs itself to what it
sees as recordable reality.
To document is to offer statements that stand for evidence of
something: a truth, a testimony to some truth. It is impossible for
any image to fully disclose the reality that hangs like a pall over
the extended field in which all images exist irrespective of Guy
Debord’s claim that we all now live in a world of appearances
where all social relationships have disappeared into the screen of
mediation.46 Let’s take any ”documentary” image, say a war scene
in Afghanistan and, as a rule of thumb, test its veracity. On the one
hand, one can look at scenes of the war’s carnage: ruined streets,
piled-up corpses, disconsolate populace and come away with the
reasonable belief that what the scenes show is the misery of war.
At the same time, the same image can never fully support whatever
the rationale that supports the war, such as the moral correctness
of rooting out terrorists. What do we see when we behold the
prone, dead corpse of a Taliban soldier: evidence of “here is a
45 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 126–31.
46 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (NewYork: Zone, 1994).
 dead terrorist” or “here is an Islamic martyr”? The abeyance into
Okwui Enwezor 94
which such an image is cast is no longer merely semantic or simply
ideological. 47
The photograph is not at any rate a codeless message
or a messageless code.48 In a sort of contradiction, despite the per-
sistence of the eye to see into and through such a scene, no read-
ing of it would ever prove adequate nor summarize the import of its
message. Literally, such scenes induce a kind of blindness, excavate
a hole in vision. Because of the vast extended visual field in which
such images exist, it appears quite the case that a documentary
can record something that is true but fail to reveal the truth of that
something, in the sense that it may actually misrepresent the subject
in question. This is the given paradox of the documentary, namely
its lack of self-evidence. This was, I suspect, part of the antipathy to-
wards the documentary mode critics associated with documenta 11.
The Documentary and the Scriptible
ich weiss nicht, It is already difficult enough that professional documentarists con-
wie der 2. Hälfe tinuously work a thin line between compromise and heroism, that
dieses Satzes sein to add to the cache of images produced by them with the vast
soll...“that“ passt quantity of amateur images frays the truthfulness and the facticity
nicht, und ich weiss, of the documentary. The advent of technological ability has meant
nicht, was hier die the wide availability of cameras to casual users. As such, the docu-
Aussage ist. viel-
mentary, as Barthes says of certain forms of writing, is “scriptible,”
leicht „in order to
add...“, aber ich bin because it turns the reader into a kind of writer, that is it makes
mir nicht sicher. the reader wish to carry further the act of writing, encouraging the
imitation of the act of writing.49 The documentary could also be per-
ceived as scriptible in that it increasingly turns the casual spectator
into an expert witness. It encourages all kinds of acts of wanting to
further the work of documenting, creating new narratives of the real
world, adding, as it were, to the vast body of evidence. In a sense,
everyone who possesses a camera could, by definition function as
47 Sontag makes this point in Regarding the Pain of Others.
48 See Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1982), 194–210.
49 See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (NewYork: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1974).
a documentarist. A famous example of some such transformation of
95
the documentary genre by whoever possesses a camera is George
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
Holliday’s video record of Rodney King being beaten by a group
of Los Angeles police officers. But does the mere possession of
a camera and shooting the real world imbue us immediately with
authority as modern day truth tellers?
This was the dilemma of Holliday as a witness, with his me-
chanical eye. He was too busy filming the scene of the assault to
bother seeing it with his own eyes. Instead the camera came to
replace his vision, literally his capacity to see. To move then from
the passive position of the one who watches, who gazes at such a
scene, or as the receiver of its images on screen to a producer of
those images is to shift into a remarkable position of responsibility.
Such responsibility is what made Holliday not just a proper witness
but also a double witness whose two sets of vision must be cor-
roborated according to the mysterious workings of the law.
The position of the double witness, I believe, is what sets up
the opposition between art and documentary heard quite frequently
during the days of the opening of documenta 11; and afterwards, the
idea that the collection of images, which critics had organized under
the rubric of documentary are essentially two things: (1) they are
“scriptible,” meaning that anyone with a camera can also record
images of atrocities or poverty, but not everyone can be an artist in
a convincing way. In a sense this is a denigration of the technical
facility which mechanical reproduction promotes; (2) this scriptibil-
ity of the documentary, especially ist mimetic proclivities, removes
it from the realm of art. But for some critics what actually grates is
not simply the provincial art versus documentary argument, but the
audacity of any image to designate a reality to which viewers have
limited and oftentimes no experience of at all. The documentary for
such people relates only to a shallow kind of truth, due to its depen-
dence on causality. Art, so the argument goes, evidences a deeper
kind of truth, for it is not dependent on any external determinant
other than its own internal reality. This kind of argument is familiar
 to many of us who at one time or another have been confronted
Okwui Enwezor 96
with the opposition between art as something specific and unique
and documentary as something that manifests only a kind of social
concern with limited creative purchase.
I cannot wholly dismiss the argument that many works in docu-
menta 11 can be confused with the documentary mode. Some of the
works can be thought as such insofar as the devices, the stringing
and sequencing of images or the narrative procedures of certain
analytical or conceptual frames of certain works, use material drawn
directly from the social world at large. Herein lies my own distinction:
rather than accepting exclusively the term “documentary” as a way
to understand the manner in which the exhibition purportedly privi-
leged the documentation of the real world or the analysis of social
reality, I wish to address the documentary versus art issue by insert-
ing into the field of documenta 11’s vision the concept of vérité.
Vérité has been defined as: truth. But also it refers to lifelike-
ness, a trueness to life. In the latter definition, it is predisposed
towards mimeticism. For example, in French, vérité also means to
strive to be true to life in art: s’efforcer a la vérité en art. Similarly vé-
rité refers to realism to real life, naturalism, authenticity, pragmatism,
verisimilitude. In the documentary mode we are presently reviewing,
vérité involves also the kind of documentary practice born in France
in 1960s known as cinéma vérité, which blurs the line between real-
ity and simulated reality.
The meaning of the term “documentary” that was of philosophi-
cal interest to our main purpose—and I believe this was demonstrated
throughout the entire length and breadth of the project, in all the plat-
forms, publications, symposia, workshops, etc.—refers to Agamben’s
idea of bare life or naked life. Bare life or naked life, as such, is con-
nected to that dimension of experience, which he defines as a form-
of-life, “a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which
it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.”50
50 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans.Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 2–3.
Bio-politics, then, is both the conceptual envelope and the phil-
97
osophical determinant for how the loose term “documentary” came
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
to inhabit such a palpable space in the galleries of the exhibition.
The hinge for the examination of naked or bare life is the vérité/
documentary space. So, on the one hand, in the idea of vérité we
confront the conditionalities of “truth” as a process of unraveling,
exploring, questioning, probing, analyzing, diagnosing, a search for
truth or, shall we say, veracity. For the documentary mode, on the
other hand, there is a purposive, forensic inclination concerned es-
sentially with the recording of dry facts to be submitted to the vérité
committee. It is here that the pure relationship between documen-
tary and vérité become clearer, for they each define the relation-
ship between the spectator and the image—what in Camera Lucida
Barthes defined as the studium—the interplay between fact and
truth. Comprehension and verification is the agitated field of the
studium, for “to recognise the studium is inevitably to encounter
the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to
approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand them, to
argue with them within myself, for culture (from which the studium
derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers.”51
This is what governs the relationship between the documentary
and vérité, since there is nothing inherently true or factual in the
documented image if the purpose of such a documentation does
not further ask the viewer to approach such documentation as not
only just a fact of something real in the world, but also something
true in the social condition of that world which is difficult to support
in a single film frame or photographic image.
If this holds true, perhaps then the response to the documen-
tary mode in documenta 11 may lead us to assume that the re-
cursive persistence of what many came to see as documentary
in the exhibition already points to an exhaustion of the mode, an
exhaustion that not only complicates the viewer’s relationship to
51 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (NewYork: Hill and Wang,
1981), 27–28.
 the particular social world being examined, but in fact explodes
Okwui Enwezor 98
that social world as nothing but a body of excess. Thus to recoil
from the documentary is to return to doubts we each harbor about
the nature of its representations of events or the world as real and
therefore true. This apprehension is even more acute in the con-
text of the general control and regulation of the media by powerful
interests. To disbelieve what is presented as the truth about the
world may in fact lend itself to distrust of the messenger rather
than the message. The less that documentary exposes truth about
the world in favor of an excess of reality over which we have little
control and even less of a choice of full comprehension, the more
it seems that spectators turn from it.
Epilogue
In conclusion, it might be important to restate the view that the role
often assigned documentary forms exists in the tension between
their aesthetic intention and ethical position vis-à-vis the subject of
the documentary. The second point about the documentary form
concerns its mnemonic function in relation to the archive that brings
into visibility the relationship between images, documents, and sys-
tems of meaning. But it also involves a struggle between two irre-
solvable positions in our news-saturated, mediated world. W. J. T.
Mitchell in his essay, The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies,
began his searching assessment of the photographic medium and
language by positing the idea that “[t]he relation of photography
and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in
contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where im-
ages and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and
ethical identity.” The question could be asked: when do images
lose their “conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity?”
is a question that does not have any answers that are not unhelp-
fully speculative. In spite of attempts to discredit the place of the
52 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), 281.
documentary image in exhibitions of contemporary art (in my view
99
a highly dubious denial in an already prolix world of images and
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art
usage), the broad category of images in documenta 11 neverthe-
less surpass the documentary reflex. The complex variety of ap-
proaches to be found in the genre in itself points to the importance
of adjusting the reductive prejudices that strip images down to only
their functionalist format.
This was precisely what we found in the lengthy research and
communications with artists, theorists, activists, architects, institu-
tions—across cultures and continents, disciplines and communities,
institutions and networks (formal and informal): There are no fixed
messages that attach to the designation documentary. We worked
with artists and thinkers producing ideas and images on an un-
derstanding of their practice within the broader parameters of the
changing relationship between artist and audience, discourse and
language, addressing questions that were far less predicated on
predetermined meanings, but open to interpellation to other ac-
tivities, actions, events, and discourses. When an artist group like
Huit Facettes emerges in Senegal to question the efficacy of the
individual artist’s relation to his context of production and public,
what does their alliance with the rural community of Hamdallaye
in Senegal mean, and how does it show this complex relations of
power? And by what means does Le Groupe Amos in the Demo-
cratic Republic of Congo communicate to their audience the work
it produces in the name of acting on behalf of Congolese civil soci-
ety: organizing public manifestations; producing documentary films
on gender and sexual relationship, economic production, and flows
of labor and capital; conducting clinics on democracy and develop-
ment; teaching workshops on gender equality; leading workshops
52
This on tolerance as the first condition of a democratic society; or partici-
pating as observers in the peace negotiations between the different
factions of rebel movements that have made Democratic Republic
of the Congo ungovernable? How do we apprehend the important
proposals of Park Fiction working in the suburbs of Hamburg in a
 long-running project to mobilize the marginalized community of St.
Okwui Enwezor 100
Pauli against the gentrification of their neighborhood by speculative
real estate ventures, proposing instead a park rather than another
bland modernist architecture that weakens the link between social
relationships and community identity? In the same affiliative spirit
of urban and territorial analysis, we find the important project of Fa-
reed Armaly: From/To, working in collaboration with the filmmaker
Rashid Masharawi on a reading of the scattered trajectories of Pal-
estinian dispersion and fragmentation into multiple communities of
exile and diaspora. Or the Italian group Multiplicity in a provocative
attempt to retrace and reconstruct the tragedy and lives of migrants
and refugees whose illegal smuggling ship sank and disappeared
during one night of tempest in the Clandestini basin of the Mediter-
ranean sea in Solid Sea. From Alejandra Riera and Doina Petrescu’s
L’Association (des pas) which concerns the political and cultural
subjectivity of the Kurdish community in Turkey, rendered as a poet-
ics of social and political analysis of representation to Raqs Media
Collective’s installation on the Coordinates of Everyday Life in Del-
hi, which abjures the ideological territorialization of marginality im-
posed by the state on urban forms; to Black Audio Film Collective’s
probing documentary film, which investigates the causes of black
urban riots during Margaret Thatcher’s rule in Handsworth Songs;
to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film, a meditation on slow time and cultural
spaces thriving outside the totalizing gaze of globalization in Naked
„Is“ gross? Spaces: Living Is Round; to Allan Sekula in Fish Story, tracing the
containerized motor of global labor flows; to sonic and visual fields
which act as mnemonic triggers in Craigie Horsfield’s El Hierro
project; Thomas Hirschhorn in Bataille Monument; a materialized
documentary dedicated to the life and work of the French philoso-
pher; or the discourse of an African claim to modernity enacted
in the Library and Museum Shop sections of Meshac Gaba’s Mu-
seum for Contemporary African Art; or Walid Raad/Atlas Group’s
documentary fictions in Missing Lebanese Wars which preys on
the manipulation between the warring factions of Lebanon, and
the struggle for control of the archival memory of the civil war in
Documentary/Vérité: Bio-Politics, Human Rights, and the Figure of “Truth” in Contemporary Art 101
order to penetrate the larger “truth” of that civil conflict. These are
just some of many examples. Each of these artists in documenta
11 employs the tools of the documentary and the function of the
archive as procedures for inducting new flows and transactions
between images, texts, narratives, documents, statements, events,
communities, institutions, audiences. And each confounds the role
of the documentary in establishing a hierarchy between images
and artistic forms, between ethics and aesthetics, politics and poet-
ics, truth and fiction. In fact, in each of the individual positions and
works mentioned throughout this text, what stands out the most
is the remarkable consistency of concern with social life that is a
mixture of political interest (Armaly, Sekula, Jaar); sociological (Raqs
Media Collective, Multiplicity, Black Audio Film Collective, Ottinger,
Igloolik Isuma Productions); aesthetic (McQueen, Julien); and archi-
val (Jef Geys). Above all, it is the concern with the other, the fidelity
to a truth that the documentary ceaselessly constructs and decon-
structs. Let me end with Martin Jay’s eloquent and succinct remark
in which he cautions that “[t]here is ‘no view from nowhere’ for
even the most scrupulously ‘detached’ observer.”53 And so it is with
all of us who at one time or another survey the ruin of modernity:
There is no here from which to view disinterestedly that elsewhere
that purportedly is the province of the documentary. Vision, whether
blind or seeing is always invested with a function of apprehending
the visual in a manner far more extensive and complex than what
the eye ultimately sees. And what truths can images tell us when
they are drowning in the continental drift set up by modern media
industries?
I would like to extend a note of thanks to Terry Smith, Barbara Vanderlinden for their
astute comments and to Tom Keenan for his careful reading of the essay.
53 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes, 18.
In her recent series of photographs, Yto Barrada glimpses at life

Life Full of Holes 103

slipping away from law. A street in Tangier appears in one image
from a bird’s-eye view, an angle that centers sight on the ground,
crops out the urban surrounds, and renders the space depicted
nondescript but consequently generates a richness of metaphorical
play: While the pavement seems to melt into a sea across which an
old schooner sails, the street’s horizontal expanse alternately trans-
forms into a vertical wall that bars visual passage, as if to block
escape. The image visualizes a geopolitical conflict that is ironic.
Whereas such colonial vessels once transported the glory of Eu-
ropean civilization to darkest Africa, their current-day avatars sug-
gest only an imaginary return voyage that occurs in reality against
enormous odds. The ship, actually an intricate model named “Le
Détroit,” is carried across Tangier’s Avenue d’Espagne by a young
man peripherally located in the corner of the image. He holds the
vessel at shoulder level, which obscures his face, removing his vis-
age from the camera’s visual access. This representational disloca-
tion, the blurring of human being and boat that distances a man
from his community, is the visual effect of a figure becoming the
vanishing point of citizenship.
Barrada, a Moroccan artist based in Paris and Tangier, has
for several years concerned herself with the Strait of Gibraltar, that
contentious divide between Africa and Europe where two conti-
nents nearly touch but mobility is strictly regulated.01 “A Life Full of
Holes: The Strait Project” (1998–2004), shown recently at the Pho-
tographers’ Gallery in London, represents this area less as vivid ge-
ography than as zone of imagination and desire, one split between
the would-be émigré’s longing for escape, looking forward toward
passage into an idealized realm to the north (depicted in another
image by a peeling tourism poster of an idyllic Alpine landscape),
and the expatriate’s homesickness, gazing back with irrepressible

01 In a text that accompanies her recent series of photographs, Barrada writes, “Before 1991 any Moroccan with
a passport could travel freely to Europe. But since the European Union’s (EU) Schengen Agreement, visiting
rights have become unilateral across what is now legally a one-way strait.” Yto Barrada, A Life Full of Holes: The
Strait Project (London: Autograph ABP, 2005), 57.
 memories of an intimately familiar place irrevocably lost. In the
T.J. Demos 104
image of the street in Tangier the turbulence between these two
positions seems to lift our vantage point to a disembodied height,
the uncertainty of which indicates the ungrounding of any single
interpretation. Pledged to a certain ambiguity, the scene depicts
not only a drama of displacement but the experiential conditions
of the refugee which have already seeped into everyday life. Spatial
insecurity, perceptual disorientation, and reality’s substitution by
reverie’s wonder appear encoded in the image itself, which favors
the imagined elsewhere over the here and now, and it leaves the
viewer too in a state of determined irresolution.
I begin with this provocative photograph because it both in-
spires and provides one answer to a question I am left with after
considering Giorgio Agamben’s concept of naked life: How can one
represent artistically a life severed from representation politically?
In his essay “Beyond Human Rights,” Agamben makes a startling
declaration: “Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure,
unhinges the old trinity of state-nation-territory, it deserves instead
to be regarded as the central figure of our political history.”02 If so,
then our understanding of subjectivity must surely change, and
with it the philosophical basis of human rights. Because the refu-
gee—a figure Agamben comes to generalize radically—presents the
very instantiation of naked life, of life stripped of political inscription
insofar as the refugee exists outside of the nation-state; it exposes
the “originary fiction” of national sovereignty. “The fiction that is im-
plicit here is that birth comes into being immediately as nation, so
that there may not be any difference between the two moments.”
This idea, in fact, is embedded in the very etymology of the term,
where nativity joins nationality, thus naturalizing a connection that is
historical but by no means universal. Agamben continues, “Rights,
in other words, are attributed to the human being only to the degree
to which he or she is the immediately vanishing presupposition
02 Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights” (1993), in Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti and
C. Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 22.
(and, in fact, the presupposition that must never come to light as
Life Full of Holes 105
such) of the citizen.”03 For if this realization—that human beings have
no inalienable rights—ever did come to light, as it does precisely
in the case of the refugee, so would the realization that rights are
assigned arbitrarily, and thus unjustly, by virtue of one’s nationality.
Whichever rights one enjoys one owes to the luck of the draw.
Mere human beings have no protections or legal recourse, not
only because no national or extranational entity is able to guaran-
tee them at present but also because modern political philosophy
and legislation have failed adequately to define and institutionalize
rights that transcend nationality. The subject of “human rights” has
remained an ethical discourse, not a political realization. The figure
of the refugee, when regarded as the point of departure for the
conception of a new postnational subject, demands an answer to
the question of rights “beyond human rights,” which have proved
inextricably linked to the nation-state and thus incapable of bearing
meaningful relation to those who live outside of it.
If I seem already to be drifting from my initial concern, which
is the question of the symmetry of political and artistic representa-
tion when it comes to the subject of naked life, it is only to prepare
the ground for that discussion. For me, moreover, these theoreti-
cal questions are not marginal to contemporary artistic practice;
indeed they go right to its heart. They constitute the central issues
that are systematically explored by those artists whose work is
currently among the most compelling in the contemporary field. I
will consider here the projects of only three—Steve McQueen, Emily
Jacir, and Yto Barrada—but certainly my list is incomplete. All create
art whose material and representational conditions bear directly
on naked life, while each approaches it with distinct emphasis:
McQueen addresses the trauma and joy of its experiential condi-
tions; Jacir, the viewer’s empathic identification with its transgres-
sive order; and Barrada, the problematization of its documentation,
03 Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” 21.

T.J. Demos 106
Yto Barrada Advertisement lightbox—Ferry port transit area,
Tangier, 2003. From A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project
(1998–2004).
Le Détroit—Avenue d’Espagne, Tangier, 2000. From A Life
Full of Holes: The Strait Project (1998–2004).
wherein absence becomes its melancholy sign and promise at
Life Full of Holes 107
once. The representing of naked life, of course, is not my concern
alone. Not only will this intersection between art and naked life
form a significant thematic component of the upcoming documenta
12 (2007), directed by Roger Buergel; it served earlier as a central
concern of documenta 11 (2002), organized by Okwui Enwezor. The
recent documenta raised two issues in particular that deserve fur-
ther exploration: first is the relationship between naked life and
documentary representation, which suffused the exhibition; second
is the creation of bare life through artistic practice. We can only wait
to see whether the next documenta will broach these concerns,
and if it does, what further answers it will provide.
How can representation document naked life? The two terms
might appear homologous: just as naked life is life stripped bare
(severed from nationality), so, too, documentary representation is
representation reduced to its essence (shed of aestheticization).
What else can be the significance of the fact that one term finds
its meaning in the other? According to Enwezor’s formulation, “The
meaning of the term ‘documentary’ that was of philosophical inter-
est to our main purpose in documenta 11—and I believe this was
demonstrated throughout the entire length and breadth of the proj-
ect, in all the platforms, publications, symposia, workshops, et ce-
tera—refers to Giorgio Agamben’s idea of bare life or naked life.”04
There seems to be a necessary link here, such that the existence
of naked life, as an essential form of life, is somehow its own docu-
mentary realization. Enwezor complicates this equation by hybrid-
izing “the documentary mode” (defined as “a purposive forensic
inclination concerned essentially with the recording of dry facts”)
by joining it to “the idea of vérité” (“a process of unraveling, explor-
ing, questioning, probing, analyzing, and diagnosing a search for
truth”).05 This is important because it adds a conceptual layer to an
04 Okwui Enwezor, “Documentary/Vérité: The Figure of ‘Truth’ in Contemporary Art,” in Experiments with Truth, ed.
Mark Nash (Philadelphia, PA: The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 2005), 101.
05 Enwezor, “Documentary/Vérité,” 101. He continues, “The hinge for the examination of naked or bare life is the
vérité/documentary space.”
 otherwise anachronistic positioning of photography as unmediated
T.J. Demos 108
procedure, as in the truthful doubling of life (“the recording of dry
facts”). It also, in turn, qualifies the notion of “truth,” which becomes
indissociable from the conventions of its exploration, thus contin-
gent and historical, and this mediation complicates our relation to
the “social world,” which figures as “an excess of reality over which
we have little control and even less of a choice of full comprehen-
sion.” 06
Still, one might question the basis of this homology, arguing
conversely that the negativity of bare life, of life as absence within
the political field, can simply not be consonant with the positivity of
visual representation.
But what if to represent is to make absent? This is an old
realization for sure, but one that photography doesn’t always criti-
cally put to task. Nor does it enter into Enwezor’s account of the
documentary/vérité mode. In the “life full of holes” that Yto Barrada
depicts, the rupture from political status brings about a troubling of
representation, which is key to her project. In another image from
“The Strait Series,” there appear two children who lean up against
an advertisement light box that illuminates an enlarged photograph
of a ferry ship approaching port. While the figures reach out to an
imaginary distance, as if attempting to grasp the ship, even board
it and depart from their reality, the backlit image reduces the sub-
stance of their bodies to dark profiles, flattening their otherwise
detailed appearances to patches of silhouettes. The scene visual-
izes the becoming of the refugee as a process that pulls away
presence into another world, creating a hole in the visual field that
expresses the phenomenon of dislocation as a rupture from the
grasp of the state.
“It’s their political disenfranchisement that’s expressed in these
characters trapped in a state of absence,” Barrada echoes.
life is not at all a natural condition of documentary practice. In
fact documentary representation today often serves the interests of
06 Enwezor, “Documentary/Vérité,” 101.
07 “Barrada in conversation with Nadia Tazi,” in Barrada, A Life Full of Holes, 60.
the state—to identify, to recognize, to know, to control—according
Life Full of Holes 109
to which photography, positioned within ever new and expanding
surveillance systems, operates as judicial and forensic evidence,
and “truth” and “objectivity” live on through their continued institu-
tional and legal validation. Indeed the documentation of naked life
appears closely aligned to the exercise of power. As an application
of force against the body of those denied political rights, this func-
tion was revealed recently in the shocking images taken of prison-
ers at Abu Ghraib prison, where photography itself was enlisted
as an instrument of torture, where the exposure of naked life was
simultaneously its constitution. Conversely in Barrada’s work, pho-
tography does not operate as a technique of identification; rather it
enacts a visual subtraction of figures that is multivalent, both mel-
ancholy in the way it allegorizes the social devastation to Moroccan
culture and promising in its liberation of life, where identification,
for better or worse, is freed from representation, and where repre-
sentation acknowledges its absences. The documentation of bare
life, in other words, can only take place negatively, that is, indicated
through the lacuna, blurs, and blind spots that mar the image, but
also open up possibility within it, which parallels the condition of
the subject stripped bare of political representation.
A further reason why the refugee deserves to be elevated to
the position of the “central figure of our political history” is because
it proposes the elemental unit of a postnational social formation.
Just as Hannah Arendt in 1943—startlingly—thought that “Refugees
driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peo-
ples,” insofar as “history is no longer a closed book to them and
politics is no longer the privilege of Gentiles,”08 so for Agamben
“the condition of the countryless refugee” today represents “the
07
Naked paradigm of a new historical consciousness.”09 The situation of
Israel becomes a case in point for Agamben to draw out the social
08 Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” 15. Arendt’s words were originally published in the essay “We Refugees”
(1943), in Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America, ed. Mark M. Anderson
(New York: The New Press, 1998).
09 Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” 15–16.
 ramifications of his theoretical repositioning of the refugee in terms

T.J. Demos 110

Life Full of Holes 111

of a radically new conception of community:

Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, it

might be possible to imagine two political communities insisting on the same region
and in a condition of exodus from each other—communities that would articulate each
other via a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities in which the guiding concept would no
longer be the ius (right) of the citizen but rather the refugium (refuge) of the singular.10

This ultimately democratic proposal—made before the start of

the second intifada but equally compelling today—is extended in turn
to the imagined reinvention of Europe not as a unity of nations (the
European Union) but as an “aterritoriality or extraterritorial space”
in which all inhabitants would exist “in a position of exodus”; “the
status of European would then mean the being-in-exodus of the
citizen.”11 This formulation, according to which naked life signifies
a revolutionary refusal of national determination and a commitment
to conceptualize anew the relationship between life and politics
within a spatiotemporal order detached from national sovereignty
or the state’s territory, was subsequently adopted as the motivating
philosophical framework of documenta 11: its imperative, according
to Enwezor, “is to make impermanence, and what the Italian phi-
losopher Giorgio Agamben calls ‘aterritoriality,’ the principle order
of today’s uncertainties, instability, and insecurity.”12
While this imperative was brilliantly achieved with certain of the
show’s inclusions—particularly Steve McQueen’s two films Western
Deep and Caribs’ Leap—the call for the transvaluation of “aterritoriality”
into a positive order is extremely complicated. It is especially so when
extended to geopolitical contexts where neocolonial occupation
drives an opposition defined by the struggle for national indepen-
dence, which is then posed as the only viable solution. Emily Jacir’s
project “Where We Come From” (2001–2003) stunningly opens up this
complexity and movingly gestures toward a different resolution.

10 Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” 24.

11 Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” 25.
12 Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” Documenta 11, Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Emily Jacir Munir, from Where We
Hatje Cantz, 2002), 45. The reference is to Agamben’s Means without End. Come From, 2001–2003.
 “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what
T.J. Demos 112
would it be?” With this question, Jacir solicited requests from Pal-
estinians living within or outside Israel and the Occupied Territories
but who face severe Israeli travel restrictions that prohibit move-
ment within the country. Jacir, Palestinian but holding an American
passport, could travel and fulfill these requests—to visit someone’s
mother in Gaza, to walk the streets of Nazareth, to photograph
another’s family in Lahia, to light a commemorative candle in Haifa,
and so on. A series of photographs document her performances,
each of which is paired next to a text panel in Arabic and Eng-
lish that records the original pleas and offers explanation of each
participant’s political circumstances. Rather than show the Palestin-
ians who made the requests, which would have risked grounding
them within their subjection through the very documentary process,
Jacir allegorizes their deprived political status through their visual
absence, fragmenting identity and thereby revealing representation
to be only a partial recognition of personhood. The piece, then,
dramatizes the parallel between political illegibility and represen-
tational erasure, where the existence of the exiled subject is con-
veyed only through a skeletal descriptive language reminiscent of a
depersonalized bureaucratic discourse.
One might view “Where We Come From” as dramatizing the
privation of human rights—such as the freedom of movement, per-
sonal independence, equality, protection from discrimination and
degrading treatment, the right to nationality —in order to encourage 13
their extension to all Palestinians. The apparent solution, the support
for which this interpretation energizes, would ostensibly be nation-
alization, which would guarantee basic political protections, putting
right the wrongs suffered by those under occupation. This struggle
identifies what is at stake for those commentators who privilege
the Palestinian-ness of Jacir’s work over and above its relation to
exile, diaspora, and mobility—terms of occasionally uncritical cel-
13 See for instance the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the General Assembly of the United Nations,
adopted December 10, 1948, which includes these rights.
ebration within recent art-critical discourse—and seek to return it to its
Life Full of Holes 113
origins in “the localized context of Palestinian artistic expression
and practice.”14
To dislocate Jacir’s work from its geopolitical field by ascribing
it to a fashionable category of contemporary art is tantamount to
eviscerating and depoliticizing her practice. But to argue conversely
that “Emily Jacir stands first and foremost as a Palestinian artist”
raises its own specters, the most obvious being the retrograde
resurrection of a nationalist framework to determine the meaning
and significance of her art. The belief that national sovereignty will
restore human rights, however, is questionable—in fact, the oppo-
site appears to be more likely. The nation-state is the very power
uniquely authorized to suspend law when it sees fit, creating a
state of emergency—that zone of indeterminacy between law and
nonlaw that opens a space for extrajudicial brutality (e.g., torture
and executions)—that is now threatening to become the rule.15 In
reality Palestinians already exist in the shadow of the nation-state,
precariously inhabiting Israel’s seemingly permanent state of ex-
ception. While Jacir’s work certainly does bear an inextricable re-
lation to Palestinian identity, this framework cannot, in my view,
curtail the interpretation of her artwork, which holds within itself the
potential to inhabit ever new contexts of reception. More important,
the urgency of Jacir’s work is that it transforms exile into a corrosive
force against the determination of nationality.
Consider Jacir’s recent project Ramallah/New York, 2004–05, a
38–minute double-channel video projection that juxtaposes images of
everyday places in two different cities. The scenes are shot by video
cameras placed inconspicuously in the corners of interiors—tourist
14 The critic Rasha Salti writes, “Her laudatory critics could not possibly avoid acknowledging the tragic predicament
of everyday life in occupied Palestine; they have felt most comfortable enlisting Emily Jacir as a paradigmatic
‘exilic’ artist, whose art is ‘deterritorialized,’ challenging ‘site-specificity,’ obsessively consumed with ‘dislocation,’
and critical rethinking of ‘movement’ and ‘mobility.’ While all these interpretations may be adept and insightful,
surreptitiously, they dislocate Emily Jacir from the localized context of Palestinian artistic expression and practice
to the universal worldliness of an emerging trend of ‘diasporic artists,’ perpetually tortured by permanent exile, who
challenge contemporary prevailing paragons of the locatedness of art production, ‘territorialization and site-
specificity’ moored in the institutional and capitalist forces that frame their coming into being.” Rasha Salti, “Emily
Jacir: She Lends Her Body to Others to Resurrect an Absent Reality,” Zawaya (Beirut) no. 13 (Fall 2004–Winter
2005): n.p. I thank Rasha Salti for providing me with this source. My own earlier essay participates in this debate:
“Desire in Diaspora: Emily Jacir,” Art Journal 63, no. 3 (Winter 2004): 68–78.
15 See Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. K. Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
T.J. Demos 114

Life Full of Holes 115

Emily Jacir Ramallah / New York, 2004–2005.
 offices, convenience stores, shawarma shops, and hair salons—and
T.J. Demos 116
document banal activities. Because the viewer is deprived of the
ability to locate any site definitively within its broader geographi-
cal or national field—languages shift between Arabic and English,
physiognomies could be of the indigenous or the immigrant, the
images even switch sides—he piece facilitates an experience of
disorientation. When Jacir shows Palestinian figures, they appear
as unidentifiable subjects detached from the connection between
nationality and territoriality. The piece consequently proposes a
postnational basis of collective identification, one based upon the
construction of a fluid culture of belonging within shared practices
of everyday life that transcends any given location, which takes
place in both/either Ramallah and/or New York. Peering into these
spaces, the viewer can only join the piece’s cycle of displacement,
experiencing the corrosive force of collective formation beyond na-
tionality.
Jacir’s art is profoundly moving for its ability to cut through
the polarized oppositions that deadlock dialogue and perpetuate
the conflict in order to engender a humane compassion between
people. In “Where We Come From,” this relation is activated by the
artist inhabiting the virtual position of another who is the subject
of privation—the one who cannot go on a date in East Jerusalem,
who cannot walk in Nazareth, and so on—but it is soon extended
to the audience. When the viewer looks at the photographs, it be-
comes clear that he or she is inserted into them in the first person,
as if that were my shadow floating across the grave or me who is
on a date with this young woman whose quizzical gaze meets my
own. The photographic structure establishes an inclusive audience
address, inviting an identification with the camera’s viewpoint that
is an extension of Jacir’s as she performs a given request. In that
moment of interpellation, of the viewer’s virtual presence internalized
within the image’s visual logic, comes an experience of connec-
tion, as if one is swept away and projected into the negative space
of another’s life, to the place where the other is prohibited from
appearing. This connection, achieved through mutual dislocation,
Life Full of Holes 117
encourages an empathy between viewer and subject of repre-
sentation on the basis of the singularity of experience, a relation
established through the compassionate identification with the de-
privations of the other, rather than through nationality. This approxi-
mates the “reciprocal extraterritoriality” described by Agamben.
The challenge of this work, then, is located not so much in thinking
about how human rights might be extended to the refugee status
of Palestinian identity within the conceptual boundaries of the na-
tion (though this is also a possibility) but rather in considering that
figure as a “limit concept” that requires the creation of altogether
new categories.16 Jacir’s project demands a renegotiation of one’s
relationship to the Middle East conflict by engendering new virtual
sites of identification beyond those determined by the nation-state,
however modest its immediate effects. Its promise is to imagine the
possibilities of relating to exile by exiling oneself and to suggest
a possible social formation that is both constitutive of Palestinian
identity and beyond the exclusionary logic of nationalism.
Jacir’s practice is powerful not merely for its critical exposure
of the oppressive experience of Palestinian life under occupation
but for its exhilarating exploration of the terms of experience un-
determined by national identity, whereby exile becomes a way of
redrawing the contours of the subject to avoid perpetuating the
political cul-de-sac where one fundamentalist position mirrors an-
other. Instead, Jacir’s art elevates mobility over the territorial control
and sociopolitical determination of nationalism. This is no mere
aestheticization of politics, where art gives expression to freedom
in lieu of its realization in reality; indeed to reveal new sources
of possibility and restore hope for a future different from today’s
course is the very ethicopolitical force of this art. Here the future is
no longer a closed book, and politics is no longer the privilege of
16 We must abandon “the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the
political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth) and build our
political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.” Agamben, “Beyond Human
Rights,” 16.
 the dominant order—an achievement, also, of Steve McQueen’s.
T.J. Demos 118
In a recent show in Paris, McQueen presented two works that,
between them, explore the rush of possibility that accompanies
the release from subjection. The first, encountered as soon as one
entered the Marian Goodman Gallery, shows a series of photo-
graphic images depicting the artist with hands and feet bound by
metal shackles. Appearing one after the next in grid formation like
the repetition of proliferating posters or a patterned expanse of
wallpaper, the images invoke a long history of artistic projects that
have made plays on photography put to task by law to recapture
life, from Duchamp’s Wanted: $2000 Reward (1923) to Warhol’s
Most Wanted (1964). Those precedents parodied official represen-
tations of the subject, flaunting its transgression of law to spite
the documentary return to order. In McQueen’s piece the subject
appears apprehended, bound physically as much as represented
photographically. Yet the obviously posed figure of the artist, shot
against a nondescript background and appearing smartly dressed
in a neatly pressed white shirt, dark trousers, and polished black
shoes, speaks with tongue in cheek, implying that this man will not
stay caught for long. While McQueen’s staged image repeats none
of the evidentiary functions of the criminological photography ap-
propriated by Warhol or earlier imitated and mocked by Duchamp,
it still shares in the pitting of representation against identity per-
formed in those artistic models. For like Duchamp’s dramatization
of the ultimate dispossession of the subject that was never to be
securely found, a desired end rather than a loss to be repaired, and
like Warhol’s subversion of his official source material, redirected
into the radically different thematics of gay desire, of so many want-
ed men, McQueen’s second piece also brings about a release of
the self from the grips of identity, which was, it turns out, signaled
by the title of the introductory work: “Portrait as an Escapologist.”
Descending to the basement level, one entered a cavernous
space that was completely dark. Punctuated only by flickering lights
appearing like uneven raindrops in all directions, the gallery was
filled with ambiguous sounds of rumbling and dragging heard from
Life Full of Holes 119
somewhere overhead, as if someone was trying to free himself
from containment in the space above. In the few intense minutes
before one’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, the void completely
defamiliarized perceptual relations by removing all visual markers
of spatial orientation. The installation effectively created a zone of
indeterminacy in which the visitor could only navigate tentatively.
This spatial confusion was accompanied by temporal disorien-
tation: because a clear sense of distance or proximity between
geographical and architectural points was no longer possible, the
ability to judge the passage of time also became impaired, result-
ing in a subtle confusion between otherwise distinct temporalities
of recent past, present, and immediate future. In some ways the
environment recalls David Hammons’s recent installation Concerto
in Black and Blue (2003), in which the enormous space of Ace Gal-
lery in New York was thrown into a blackout and visitors, provided
with miniature pressure-activated LED lights, were invited to ex-
plore the empty galleries, filling them with a pulsating web of blue
luminosity (itself bringing to mind Duchamp’s installation for the
“Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme” in 1938 where the artist
covered the ceiling with 1,200 coal sacks and provided viewers with
flashlights to find their way through the consequently darkened
galleries). Yet McQueen’s installation was categorically distinct, as
it soon became clear that it was in fact constructed through the
use of a looped video projected simultaneously onto both sides
of a single screen hanging in the middle of a space walled with
reflective surfaces. This was rather a radical cinematic experiment,
one prefigured by Anthony McCall’s films using projected light as
sculptural material, and through it McQueen created a social arena
of exploratory bodily gestures to overcome the immobility of pas-
sive viewership.
Because the reflective environment of Pursuit produced the il-
lusion of an abstract play of lights dissociated from material support
and extended to infinity through luminous reverberations, it created
T.J. Demos 120

Life Full of Holes 121

Steve McQueen, Pursuit, 2006.

Steve McQueen, Portrait as an Escapologist, 2006. Installation view.

 a disruption of the normal relation between tactility and opticality. In
T.J. Demos 122
this immersive space of precarious mobility and bodily uncertainty,
where walking into walls, columns, and other bodies became a
probability, one was forced to navigate the room more by touch than
vision. Moreover, light itself became the sign for material presence
and was physicalized against a black void, even while the sense of
touch became a substitute for the visual scanning of space. (This
encounter between opticality and tactility McQueen also staged
thematically in Charlotte, a 16 mm projection that features the tip
of an index finger intimately probing an unflinching eyeball—that of
English film actress Charlotte Rampling—a film shown on the same
occasion as Pursuit). What the installation achieved was the dis-
organization of sensation, disrupting the body’s habitual relation to
the world and others within it. This meant dissolving the space of
individual self-possession, upsetting the sanctity of its proprietary
territory, as one’s personal space was surrendered to indetermi-
nacy. With the withdrawal of visual perception from even the body’s
area of physical being came the blurring of the normally clear dis-
tinctions between self and other, as well as inside and outside.
Consequently, at least for a brief period of time when defamiliariza-
tion was at its height, one experienced precisely the aterritoriality
Agamben mentions, “where exterior and interior indetermine each
other.” Faced with this deforming situation, Pursuit compelled visi-
17
tors to re-create anew perceptual and physical relations to others,
as the specific qualities that normally construct identity—fashion,
bodily appearance, markers of class, race, gender—were stripped
away from the self by the darkness. While McQueen’s work wasn’t
framed by an explicit thematics of denationalization, it nonetheless
opened a line of flight from determination that also eluded political
inscription.
Stepping back, it becomes clear that these two projects were
thoughtfully interconnected: whereas The Escapologist indicts docu-
17 Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” 25.
mentary photography as performing the regimentation of the subject
Life Full of Holes 123
akin to a form of imprisonment, enmeshing it within its matrix of
repetition and visibility, Pursuit catalyzes the diffusion of being into
a phenomenological experience of becoming.18 It would be a mistake,
however, to read McQueen’s work as advancing the viewer’s vir-
tualization and mystification within the framework of a thoroughly
institutionalized space (the commercial art gallery), thus confusing
escapology with escapism; for it rendered this arena a conflict be-
tween the forces of capture and release. McQueen’s work acknowl-
edged and evaded this jail of institutionalization through multiple
means, including a strategic employment of technology whereby
video is directed against its own capacity to mesmerize and pacify
its viewer; the transgression of cinematic conventions, creating an
open plan without structured seating for optimized disorientation;
and the exposure and subversion of documentary photography’s
reifying functions. And rather than reinstituting the problematic uni-
versal subjectivity that the phenomenological environments of mini-
malism once constructed, preceding its encoding with the specific
characteristics of race, gender, and sexuality in the course of a
subsequent art of identity politics, Pursuit strategically unravels
such particularities as so many laces that bind a straightjacket of
subjection.
By achieving this escape from the grips of representation, Pursuit
engenders an extreme form of “being-in-exodus” that proposes an
experimental social arena different from the above examples. The
installation distinguishes itself from Barrada’s melancholy gaze at
the erosion of Moroccan identity in the face of expatriation, which
in mourning its loss potentially energizes its reconstruction, and
equally from Jacir’s attempts to build a political community around
a sharing of the experience of exile that is distinctly Palestinian yet
beyond nationality. But like the projects of these other artists, Pur-
18 For me this figures as a further instance of the escape from regimentation that McQueen performs in Western
Deep, where he develops the critique and reinvention of documentary representation in the course of exploring
the brutal labor conditions of migrant workers within a gold mine in South Africa. I explore this work at length in
“The Art of Darkness: On the Work of Steve McQueen,” October 4 (Fall 2005): 61–89.
 suit creates its own state of exception, which demands a creative

T.J. Demos 124

redefinition of one’s relation to the self and to others, figuring as a
phenomenological precursor, perhaps, to the political negotiation of
social relations. As in the work of Barrada and Jacir, naked life does
not designate merely the literal condition of being a refugee, with all
it implies of existential distress and inhumane mistreatment; rather,
it opens an area of indeterminacy between law and life encouraging
the experimental re-creation of being in the world—beyond human
rights. Upon the erosion of constituted forms of regulation, life is in-
vited to negotiate its own identity and relationships to others anew.
What if more came to accept this invitation? Only in such a world
where “the citizen has been able to recognize the refugee that he or
she is,” Agamben writes, “is the political survival of humankind today
thinkable.”19 This recognition has now begun.

This essay appeared in Grey Room, no. 24 (Fall 2006): 72–88.

19 Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” 26.

“... shooting must take place where the film takes place”...

The Documentary: Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries 127

The Wild East
In Central Europe, in the Balkans, in the countries undergoing a
transformation from the system of communist socialism, we have
witnessed a historical turning point. This turning point can be il-
lustrated metaphorically by the development of computer technol-
ogies. Imagine that you have never worked with a computer in
your life. You discover computers in 2000. You learn to work with a
computer, to use the internet, to receive and send emails. It is logi-
cal that you will have contemporary technology at your disposal:
Pentium, Windows 2000 and the latest version of Office. This is,
all in all, a banal situation. It is obvious that this kind of user (if he
does not take up computers as his main field), will not investigate
how technology arrived at its present state, how the old computers
worked, how Commodore, Atari, Dos, or Windows 98 worked. It is
as if history is fully included in the present. That is the situation in
which the societies of “Eastern Europe” found themselves in 1989,
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We were given the then-relevant
and functioning economic, artistic, social, and moral models of be-
havior. Naturally, we were already equipped with a certain type of
performative and reactive behavior and experiences from the past.
Reality, like technology, develops in jumps. The reality that we were
suddenly exposed to was governed by laws about which we had
no clue. We had experiences with a different type of reality and
from the past we had virtual ideas about that reality, which origi-
nated in dreams dreamed in the past.

Profit or Morality?
The rise of spectacularity and the “entertainment industry” in Eastern
Europe was facilitated by film distribution, the creation of commercial
television stations, advertising, and marketing. For example, the en-
try of advertising into the public space was the most striking. Until
1989, there was virtually no advertising in these countries. Nor was
there a statute of public space, as we know it today. If you go from
 the Bucharest airport into the center today, or if you are driving
Vít Havránek 128
through Czech towns or on the highways through the countryside,
even a person from the West, accustomed to advertising at home,
will be shocked at how much bigger, more visible and intense the
(unregulated) advertisements are in these new countries. Adver-
tising (like the size of shopping centers), has flooded the space
in leaps, at its present capacity. Advertising and marketing have
their own systems of rules. Their primary function is service to the
seller or producer of goods or services. The aim of advertising is
to awaken a need in a target group, which will be satisfied by the
purchase of a product. The aim of advertising is to increase the
sale of products by all possible means.
It seems that the unbridled entry of advertising into the public
space of the transforming countries in the 1990s created a mental-
visual code, the main but hidden particularity of which was an
ethical vacuum. Advertising subordinates all media-visual means
of communication and creativity to one postulate: to increase the
sale of products. Advertising has at its disposal powerful economic
means, but, aside from its position in the economic chain of func-
tions, it has no firm ground in the area of ethics. In a loose polemic
with the expansion of advertising, there developed, in the sphere of
visual art, a conception of its own position, which I call the “docu-
mentary position.”
Documentarism in Contemporary Visual Art
In the area of photography and film, with which we have tradition-
ally linked the documentary approach, we will easily find definitions
of the various documentary genres. In the complex of these genres
it is rather difficult to find an essential definition of documentarism.
But a notion of the discernable grammar of the documentary lan-
guage runs through the debate. Documentarism, in film and pho-
tography, could be described as a genre in which the director/art-
ist carries out a transfer of his own or other people’s knowledge,
stances, and experiences through his own articulation of the media
and technology. The decision to devote oneself to documentary is
The Documentary: Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries 129
an acceptance of the condition to define one’s creativity in direct
connection with the complexes of social-historical issues, which the
artist documents; what permits us to call a work documentary is
the relation between the documenting and the documented. Thus,
the decision to work in a documentary manner primarily situates
the Not-I, other people, creators, works, social phenomena and so
on, at the center of the thinking and acting of the creative subject.
All metaphysical horizons and aesthetic operations in documen-
tarism arise in connection with a real social-historical matrix. In the
sphere of visual art, the documentary approach creates a causal
connection between the social positions of the subject and creative
operations in specific media. Aesthetic decisions and norms have
a social-political dimension in documentarism and vice versa. In
the documentary, it is impossible to look at form and aesthetics
isolated, unconnected to the theme, and this relationship is de-
fined in ethical categories. This interrelatedness of the individual
components compels the visual artist to develop an ethic of formal
approaches in his works. Documentary works define an ethic of
forms. One can’t speak of the subordination of aesthetics to ethics,
but what we are interested in is looking at the connection between
them and understanding how ethical views are implemented in a
specific aesthetic and vice versa. How visual art attributes an ethi-
cal value to certain forms. Hito Steyerl, in the text “The Articulation
of Protest,” compares two films, shot in different ways, about pro-
test–political movements. She concludes that the political message
is included in the utterances of the actors, but it is articulated, first
and foremost, in the very structure of the film. The media grammar
employed by the film director and the degree of experimentation
modify the political effectiveness of the testimony. In journalism, the
écriture with which the journalist treats the political dimension is
analogous. The ethical responsibility of the documentary approach
also generates the retrospective application of ethical criteria in the
outlook on the history of the visual disciplines.
 The Customer

Vít Havránek 130

The Documentary: Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries 131

Little Warsaw, poster for Contra Monument Cathedral,
2005, print on paper, dimensions variable
In one of the first steps, which appear to be behind the above-men-
tioned polarity with advertising, the documentary approach logically
turns to its own origins. It reflects on who the “customer” is, who
the initiator of a specific artwork or institution is, who the regula-
tor of the entire system is. For these reasons, one group of docu-
mentary works concentrates on the business of art. On the basis
of previous investigations mapping out the vectors of power and
Anri Sala, Intervista, 1998, colour video with sound trans-
interests (Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser), documentarism focuses ferred to DVD, 26 minutes

on the subjective testimony. It analyzes the relationships that the

artist has with the producer, the administrator of the artistic produc-
tion. These works also concentrate on analysis of the positions
taken up by specific institutions of contemporary art in the so-
cial field. The work of Pawel Althamer, Roman Ondák, Deimantas
Narkevičius, and a whole host of other artists visualizes, thematizes
and problematizes the relationship between artists and the art busi-
ness. Their operations are virtually always focused on tracing the
subjective impacts and feelings of the actors. Therefore they often
combine the documentary approach with directed actions, so their
work connects fictive and documentary approaches. Their work
was done according to scripts, but the absent public speaks about
them in terms of documentary.

“… shooting must take place where the film takes place”

In the famous manifesto, “The Vow of Chastity,” of the Danish col-
lective Dogma 95, one reads: “Shooting must be done on location.
... shooting must take place where the film takes place. The film
must not contain superficial action.” The Dogma 95 manifesto was
reacting to the systemic-economic situation in which cinematog-
raphy found itself. It postulated (not for the first time in the his-
tory of film) important fundamentals: the return of cinematography
to real space-time and sound, and the naturalness of the action
shot. Roman Ondák, in his work Antinomádi (Anti-nomads, 2000),
IRWIN (Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Borut Vogelnik), East Art Map, 2002, dimensions variable, courtesy IRWIN.
photographed portraits of his relatives and acquaintances who did
 not travel or did not like to travel. He photographed them in their

Vít Havránek 132

The Documentary: Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries 133

domestic settings in the rooms and apartments where they usually
spent their time. He let them choose the places where they would
be photographed and the gestures and positions they would adopt
in the photographs. He then transferred the photographs onto post-
cards. The postcards can travel around the world and many people
will see them, but they demonstrate that the real context of physi-
Roman Ondák, Antinomads, 2000, set of 12 postcards, print on paper, 10,5×15 cm.
cal existence is non-transferable. It is where it is. Ever-increasing
mobility means that it is possible to change these contexts and
create new traveling contexts, based on instant relationships. Mo-
bility creates, in nomads, a desire to be in all the places that they
know and that they have visited at once. In the CVs of artists and
curators we often notice that they live in several places. This is not
proof of success, but rather expresses their desire to be part of
two, three, or more contexts at once. This is possible and thanks
to email and the mobile telephone, it is even possible to constantly
exchange information with people in those places. Air travel has
singularly heightened the incongruity in the flow of time. When we
arrive in a distant foreign country after a flight of an hour and a half,
our brain takes several hours to adapt. Thanks to the populariza-
tion of the theory of relativity, we know that time does not pass the
same way everywhere; while in an airplane, we age more slowly.
The essence of a place, the multilayered quality of its content and
function, has been an important theoretical issue for some time
now, in particular in the American milieu (historically suffering from
the “non-site” syndrome). In connection with visual art, “The Vow of
Chastity” is important in its dogmatic definition of the inseparability
of the theme of the documentary and the language and grammar
employed by the artist—just as Hito Steyerl postulates the ontological
basis and ethical canon for this relationship.

Site-Specificity
In her texts, Marina Gržini casts doubt on the “enterprised-up” ge-
Image taken on the way from the Otepeni Bucarest Airport Zbyněk Baladrán, Jano Mančuška, Vide, 2003, 30 minutes
nealogy, the practice of large (and probably also small) exhibitions to the City Center, 2004. video, still from the videofilm.
 cloning works from the second or third world into the international
Vít Havránek 134
arena of art. A definition of this fact is needed; Gržini, however,
does not offer any point of departure. It seems that documentary
artists, sensitive to this practice, have found their point of departure
and taken a stance against the process of creating an artistic simu-
lacrum, flattening the work out into a limited reproduction, creating
the values of the exotic and the political correctness to which it
leads. For this reason, documentary approaches have included the
local context (on its many levels) into the corpus of the work. The
“shooting must take place where the film takes place.” The integra-
tion of real space-time, its physical and mental dimensions, means
to have the local situation as a starting point. That sounds like a
cliché, but in the age of nomadism, we have adopted approaches
that enable us to enter local contexts, so that we are no longer
condemned to represent the place where we were born. The pen-
etration of a social-cultural matrix is an experience that can be
repeated. The living, creative archaeology of context can even be
an intoxicating and, for some, addictive obsession, connected in
some way with the search for immortality.
History
In the transforming countries, the 1990s saw a fierce struggle for
“success” in the new conditions, connected with a focus on the use
and representation of success. This struggle was accompanied by
a displacement of the past, leading, in the past fifteen years, to a
kind of social amnesia. Society forced out historical memory as a
negative stigma, which was useless in the new conditions. The
past might disintegrate “market” competence and professionalism,
which were demanded of economic actors. One of the new facts
that the transforming countries have to deal with is the trend toward
the economization of the individual as an instrument of produc-
tion. Functioning in the economic structures does not guarantee
that the spiritual needs of the individual will be fulfilled; this hap-
pens secularized from the economic role. In the last few years, in
reaction to the social amnesia, artists have begun to revoke the
The Documentary: Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries 135
systematic and widespread forgetting of the recent national his-
tory. Starting with Anri Sala’s Intervista, Zbyněk Baladrán’s Little
Warsaw, Deimantas Narkevičius’, SubREAL and many other artists
offer, through individual reconstruction of the group memory, their
own version of what most of their fellow citizens consider to be the
“objective” domain of historical scholarship. IRWIN, in the project
East Art Map, revises the political model of art history, based on
the secularization of Eastern art from the “history.” IRWIN gave the
term “Eastern art” an adequate content for the first time in its his-
tory. It thus carried out de facto an operation similar to that of the
Trojan horse: it inserted its own “unknown” but real history into the
originally empty political horse of Eastern Europe. It is interesting
to note the contrasting ways in which documentarism, on the one
hand, and spectacularity and the entertainment industry, on the
other, define professionalism. Many contemporary Czech artists
earn a living by working on films. For the most part, they decorate
things or apply finishing touches to them; they are cogs in the
film industry. They are professionals who know how to touch up a
freshly washed car so it looks like it’s been driven 50 miles through
a desert. They are mechanical actors in the machine of profession-
alism, which calls for the implementation of exactly what has been
demanded. Such a professional, just one link in a long production
chain, has no influence on the final meaning of the whole to which
he has contributed.
In this connection, I’ve always been fascinated by the “Lynchian”
discord in the paradoxical situation of a bank clerk who hides his
tattoos and wears sadomasochistic leather underneath a beige suit
and tie or simply the banker who listens to heavy metal and rides a
chopper—that is, the plight of an individual who is, functionally, fully
integrated into the nexus of the neoliberal division of labor, who
only does what he believes in within his own private sphere. The
face-off between the private stance and neoliberal professionalism
was, I think, one of the fundamental and yet unspoken tensions
 underlying societies in the 1990s. The thing we found unintelligible
Vít Havránek 136
and frustrating in that state of affairs, as we understood it, was
expressed by Václav Havel in “The Power of the Powerless.” In it,
Havel tells of the manager of a greengrocer’s who hangs a slogan
board proclaiming “Proletarians of the world unite!” in his shop
window and yet the real meaning of the gesture is not in that he
believes in the slogan, but rather that he wants to identify himself to
the outside world as someone who doesn't rock the boat, someone
who just wants some peace and quiet so he can get away at the
weekend and go to his cottage—that is, to do what he enjoys do-
ing in his own private sphere. This sharp “ontological” delineation
between the private and the professional spheres was a deeply en-
trenched experience in socialist society; however, the thing which
came as such a shock after 1989 was the external need to find a
way to transform that deeply entrenched experience without at the
same time giving up our own experience, our hope of making our
claims under the new circumstances or our views.
On the one hand, working people were required to believe in
what they were doing, so if they really did believe in it, they ended up
bringing that belief over into the private sphere with the cynical instru-
mental logic of neoliberal professionalism. On the other hand, if they
gave themselves over to the shared ontological dream of bringing
their personal views into the world of neoliberal professionalism, they
soon came up against the limits of the system and gradually came
under pressure to surrender to the chimerical unity of the private
within the neoliberal world, which leads to that paradoxical “Lynchian”
world of obsessions lurking beyond the shiny façade of normalcy.
Depth of Focus
When we look at the work of artists winning back a lost or non-
existent history, we see that this happens on the basis of em-
phasizing the individual position of the artists. History is always
arbitrary and testifies to the position, the context, and situation of
the individual in history. The operation of focusing, familiar from the
realms of photography and film, is characteristic of the documen-
The Documentary: Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries 137
tary approach. Focusing results in a so-called depth of focus, which
is the depth in a photograph/film shot that remains sharp (depen-
dent on the stopping down technique). The process of focusing
is fundamental to these media because they are fatally passive in
mirroring the surroundings. The process of focusing singles out
and marks what the photographer considers to be important in the
totality of the shot; when he singles something out, he considers it
necessary to separate it from the background. The act of focusing
is an act of photographic-filmic significance. Documentarism sets
a small depth of focus. Beginning with Anri Sala’s Intervista (1998),
we have witnessed the process of focusing in historical time. In
these works, art seeks and sets a small depth of focus; it is able to
conquer history through the personal experience of friends, family,
or living figures—that means in a biased manner, with an aware-
ness of the fact that bias and individualization have, as the other
side of the coin, a soft focus on events, objects and landscapes in
the background. Documentarism is characterized by a distrust of
the background, of de-subjectivized historical experience and any
kind of grand narration. Omer Fast’s work, Spielberg’s List (2003),
about the shooting of the film Schindler’s List (1993), is a documen-
tary about fiction. Watching this documentary about the production
of a simulacrum, there are times when we do not know if an ac-
tor is speaking about real events, such as how the Nazis treated
deportees, or if he is describing a scene in the shooting of the
film. Fiction has, thanks to its coverage and entertaining quality, a
greater impact on reality than does a true testimony. Analysis of the
constructed nature of fiction offers the instruments to address the
question of how our individual or group awareness of events that
we have not witnessed was actually formed.
The Ontology of Scholarship
Characteristic of the documentary approach is the fact that the artist
approaches reality with an ethic of form and with a certain method.
 Like scholars, artists work with sources. Orientation in and clas-
Vít Havránek 138
sification of the sources, the choice of methodological approaches
that cannot be avoided in work with sources, require at least a
basic theoretical fundament. They require an approach to a sus-
pended world and familiarity with the basics of scholarly methodol-
ogy, which is demonstrated, for example, in Zbyněk Baladrán’s text
for the book Need to Document. His text is purely theoretical; if we
did not know the author, we would not be able to tell that he was
an artist. The documentarist, as he is compelled to use a methodol-
ogy in his work with sources, situates himself in a methodological
field, whether implicitly or explicitly. He thus creates for himself
and for his work the context in which they will be read. One of
the horizons that documentarism wants to establish itself in is the
public media discourse. Pierre Huyghe’s projects in the 1990s re-in-
troduced scripts (or more precisely protocols) and the use of docu-
mentary in media (Mobile TV, 1995, Rue Longvic, 1994 in between
the others). In the transforming countries, in some of its manifesta-
tions, documentarism has set itself the goal of filling the vacuum
of subjectivity in the choice of themes and media articulation of the
documentary in the milieu of the mass media. The rootedness of
documentarism situates visual art in the field of the social sciences
and history. This is, it would seem, one of the reasons behind the
development and success of this approach in contemporary art. In
rich countries, contemporary art ended up with an excess supply
and solved the problem of how to defend the quantitative and ter-
ritorial expansion of its institutions in the social debate by means
of politically relevant arguments. In this debate, socially engaged art
(urbanism, the social-territorial crisis, racism, minorities, feminism,
etc.) became an instrument of argumentation. In some instances,
this resulted in the dangerous identification of political engagement
with moral or political correctness. In the end, or maybe right from
the beginning, on the basis of our experience, art should not fulfil
a social commission; rather, it should have the conditions to create
a space in which to define its social validity on its own. Even today
the Laboratorium (laboratory) seems like a pertinent metaphor for
The Documentary: Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries 139
artistic creativity; for the needs of documentarism, it should be de-
mocratized in a certain manner. The process of the ever increasing
accessibility of scientific devices and methods, and the fact that
the documentary is situated in the space of the social sciences,
transform the idea of the laboratory into a barrier-free online office,
a production office with an archive. In its openness and emphasis
on the method of classification of information, Kossuth’s model
Information Room is close to documentarism. It was institutional-
ized and de-aestheticized (Manifesta Archive, etc.). In the project
Re:route (2002), by the group Big Hope, fresh immigrants living in
Torino, Italy, documented the subjective geography of the city. Big
Hope decided to visualize the mix of diverse materials that came
out of meetings with the actors in the form of a complex, but still
amateur, spatial collage. The method of this spatial presentation
polemicizes with the conceptualist aesthetic of the purely library or
gallery form.
Dialectics of the documentary
If we return to the conception of the documentary approach as a
dialectical relationship between the artist, the themes documented
and the way they are articulated in the media, the question can be
seen to have two dimensions.
The first entails tracking the relationship between the author
and the documented subject. The contemporary documentary ap-
proach in visual art has buried once and for all the myth of the “un-
interested” or “objective observer,” a cliché ceaselessly trumpeted
by the mass media such as television, radio, and daily newspapers.
Thanks to the experiences artists have had with these media and
their strong theoretical background (from media theory to media
sociology), they define their position as “engaged.” In essence,
this term simply labels the approach in which the observer’s posi-
tion is established as a conscious process. The second dimension
gives rise to the following consideration: if we define the position
 of the documentary maker as “unobjective,” the subjective assess- on which the success of any social, political, or cultural concept

Vít Havránek 140

The Documentary: Ontology of Forms in Transforming Countries 141

ment and graduated relationship the documenter enters into (is rests. That is why the documentary approach that interests us must
it a contract?) with the documented along with the distance the be grounded in the relationship between the artist and the subject,
documenter takes with respect to his or her own medium (film, which is perceived as a bearing, enduring, and gauging the political
video, photography, but also drawing) reveals itself as a key pro- and social matrixes it is connected to or connects itself to.
cess. What distinguishes documentarism, which interests us beyond This text was originally written for the publication The Need to Document, eds. Vít
the mainstream conception of the documentary approach, is the Havránek, Sabine Schaschl-Cooper, Bettina Steinbrügge (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2005)
and was slightly revised on the occasion of this new publication.
solidarity of the artist with the tradition of media criticism that per-
ceives the medium as a complex of power-political instruments.
This tradition is manifested in the discourses of Guy Debord, the
situationists, Jean Luc Godard, Pierre Bourdieu, Vilém Flusser, Peter
Sloterdijk, and many other artists and intellectuals. It follows from
this observation that it is the inseparable relationship between the
documented and the active implementation of critical media studies
(described by Hito Steyerl in the text cited above) which establishes
the quality of artistic documentarism.

Ontology
I have chosen the term “ontology” to label this relationship because
of one of the leading forms of skepticism of recent times, which
might be referred to as a mistrust of instrumental conceptualism.
Post-structuralism reconsidered the relationship between systems
of consciousness and systems of power. However, post-structural-
ist contributions to thought have themselves become institutional-
ized and dehumanized. If contemporary thought and art want to
take them up again, they must do so on the basis of fresh reconsid-
erations. In this connection, Roland Barthes seems to me to be the
liveliest reference. Instrumental conceptualism is undergoing scru-
tiny by means of subjectivization and the application of conceptual
practices on the testimony and experiences of the individual—not
a universal individual, but a wholly concrete, singular individual
(friends, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and
their destinies as projected onto the coordinates of history). The va-
lidity of the conceptual is borne out by the experiences of individuals,
A quick glance at the newspapers gives us an immediate index to

Negatives of Europe: Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies 143

the moments and places that have caught our attention. By joining
events here and there, a universal narrative is formed that, none-
theless, changes daily. But there are events that cause a different
impact. According to the European media, the most disturbing news
in the early days of 2007 was the interruption of energy supplies
from Russia. The Minsk government cut off the flow of Russian
oil that supplies Europe via Belarus. The tap on the oil pipeline
was turned off for three days while the two governments negoti-
ated a solution to the conflict and Europe urgently debated energy
alternatives to prevent dependence on the Russian giant. Finally,
Minsk announced that it would not be imposing a tax on crude oil
passing through Belarus, and the Druzhba pipeline returned to nor-
mal operation. Germany, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and
Hungary once more began to receive supplies from this pipeline,
which channels energy resources managed by Russia to Eastern
Europe.01
The incident would have had no further importance if it were
not for the fact that—thanks to this information—many Europeans
were able to gain an approximate idea of the material origin of their
wellbeing and the route, previously unknown, that energy flows
must take in order to reach their homes. It needed a crisis of this
nature to spark off an investigation into the ramifications of our de-
pendencies. This other reality, enormous and menacing, almost im-
perceptible,02 woven by economic and political relations, is the less
pleasant face of globalization. The regime of hyper-visibility fed by
the constant transmission of events—a flow no one can imagine
being interrupted, even in their worst nightmare—seems nothing
more than information based on trompe l’oeil. Behind it lurk things
more difficult to see and understand. An enormous cognitive effort,
going beyond individual capacities, is required in order to represent

01 An interpretation of this news story was later produced for the supplement Cultura/s in La Vanguardia.
Carles Guerra, “Lo que nos preocupa,” January 24, 2007.
02 This characterization goes as far back as to Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
 this other reality. What is needed is what—to employ, perhaps, a
Carles Guerra 144
rather antiquated term—I should like to call collective pedagogy,
which can be accurately defined to a large extent through the prac-
tices that authors like Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula Biemann
propose in their video essays. The documentaries they produce fit
into the weave of events that we often follow in the media. How-
ever, rather than merely narrating events, they generate critical
knowledge about them in which information and opinion deliber-
ately overlap. As a result, a debate opens with regard to these
and other authors involved in contemporary documentary practices
about a hybrid between art and pedagogy. This is similar to what,
in the early-1980s, Fredric Jameson called “an aesthetic of cognitive
mapping,” 03
and which, twenty years later, maintains all its validity
in the global universe.
Aware that pedagogy has been denigrated by the Modern-
ist ideology pervading art practice (making art’s cognitive potential
seem an impoverished idea of art and more often than not inclined
towards expressive aspects of art), we now witness the revival of
pedagogy in artistic practice to make it possible to reformulate the
scope and significance achieved by work with images even more
so when the space generated by multinational capitalism places
before us an image of the world that is impossible to verify. The
more technological the development, the more the “theological”
nature of the communication system that administers information
is accentuated. We know that images are subject to manipulation,
that they no longer prove anything and that they escape all rational
verification. Nonetheless, we have a need to continue believing in
them. We continue to use them.
Even markedly logocentric spheres are undergoing a mutation
that is making them more iconographic. In consequence, the visual
inflation of essay practices has led the genre invented by Montaigne
to go beyond traditional literary limits. The essay today has nothing
03 Ibid., 125.
04 Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 35.
to do with that formula, confined to the printed page, but invades
Negatives of Europe: Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies 145
other media. This is made clear by the rise of documentary prac-
tices, whatever the support they use, expanding to unheard-of ex-
tremes. In revenge, images infect texts, and novels and cultural criti-
cal studies assimilate the presence of iconic data more and more.
The hybrid resulting testifies, amongst other things, to a decisive
change in our literacy model: ever more visual and no longer strictly
verbal.
The essay is, today, the genre which best represents the condi-
tions of knowledge production. From the culture market to the very
authors who experiment with the communication of knowledge,
passing through university lecture halls and militant circles, the es-
say offers an optimal form for arguing their case. This is supported
by various arguments. Firstly, our interpretation of the world no lon-
ger depends on our greater or lesser access to information; rather,
it depends on the relations we are capable of establishing with the
information available. Secondly, in view of the importance the essay
attaches to the co-existence of data, the most obvious one is the
one that compares data of a visual and textual nature. Texts and
images create obstacles to each other and subject the essay to a
discontinuity that has nothing to do with scientific methods. And,
thirdly—merely to make its characterization more schematic—the
04
new essay is freed from the pretension of objectivity, a pretension
we suffer from through the media and their insidious policy of truth.
In such a way that, as Adorno would say, the essay can aban-
don itself, without inhibition to a “libidinous curiosity.”05 Ignoring the
question as to whether such reformulations of the essay are closer
to fiction or reality, whether they are capable of producing truths
or not, what is important is their potential to put our interpretation
of the world into circulation. In such conditions, the truths that can
be revealed by new forms of essay will be nothing if not surprising
and atypical.
05 See Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (London: Blackwell
Publishing, 2000).
 Authors like Susan Buck-Morss have reinvented the political philo-
Carles Guerra 146
sophical discourse using unusual methods such as reviving ap-
parently banal images, emphasizing a novel sequence of events,
or, simply, following a personal itinerary in researching a subject
blocked by the specialist literature. This methodological flexibility
produces what she herself calls an “experiment in visual culture”
in our time. So much so that in her last book, Thinking Past Terror,
an essay on Islamic political culture, Buck-Morss suggests that if
after 9/11 we are the victims of a war of images (something that
often produces a general lament about their proliferation), our way
of thinking about the world can no longer do without them. On this
point, Buck-Morss has affirmed that the excess—with regard to the
number of images—is tranquilizing. 07
No one image will be able to
rise up and take the place of the others.
This perspective makes the return of pedagogy more neces-
sary than ever. However, the aim should not be for someone to
learn at all costs. On the contrary, it is a question of being aware of
the limitations that characterize us, of learning about how we learn.
That is why, if we want to achieve a convincing description of the
world around us, we have no option but to place our trust in those
with whom we feel a certain affinity. Our capacity for comprehen-
sion is limited. It cannot compete with the quantitative challenge
put before us by the great information flows. We must be ready to
accept that knowledge is shared and that we learn from each other.
To do so, we will have to take into account cognitive, geographic,
and social concentrations, as the intelligence is not separated from
the space in which it is nurtured.
If we are not capable of accepting these conditions in a prag-
matic spirit, we will have to be ready to face the excesses of a glo-
balization process that, with help from no one, is already producing
a fabric of discourses and images with its own life. To paraphrase
06 Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror. Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London and New York:
Verso, 2003), 113.
07 She further clarifies her own essayistic methods by adding that “The juxtaposition of images and text is meant
to produce a cognitive experience in readers, who can see the theoretical point in a certain way, one that
surprises and illuminates. Affect, as much as reason, is mobilized.” Ibid., 114.
Arjun Appadurai, we might say that a vast number of images are
Negatives of Europe: Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies 147
running loose, and that their circulation is completely out of control.
The way in which scenes from the Abu Ghraib prison were leaked
and the widespread use of mobile telephones incorporating mini
cameras demonstrate that it is very difficult to prevent images from
06
being captured and distributed from absolutely anywhere in the
world. However, as the EHESS researcher Marie-José Mondzain
warns, this is like confronting raw reality. The image alone does not
complete the signification process. In order to make the situation
legible it is necessary to weave a story that gives meaning to the
images.08 That is why fabricating a narrative with great potential for
infiltrating public opinion provides a second chance to the censor-
ship that it was not possible to exercise over the free circulation of
these images (an enterprise that the United States government ap-
pears to have embarked on by launching the Storytelling Centers,
as they are known, with the mission of controlling the meaning
of images given the evident impossibility of preventing them from
circulating). Rather than developing visual intelligence, the state de-
partments have opted for a narrative intelligence that is much more
likely to be absorbed by public opinion. One thing or the other:
either we view this proliferation of images as a natural mechanism
which produces a montage effect whose results and collisions are
impossible to predict; or we accept that this is the scale that es-
say-writing activity faces and in which—if it wishes to play an active
role—it must intervene.
As is the case with the documentary practices that occupy us
here, aesthetic practices that have an empirical relation with reality
have begun to be affected by two new problems. These problems
are geographic scale, concerning the economy of access to events,
and the heterogeneous nature of materials that results from the dif-
ferent discursive, visual, and auditory orders. Tasks which might,
in turn, be summarized as managerial work: how to administer
08 Lecture given during the debate staged on 8 September 2006 as part of the 18th Visa pour l’image. International
Photojournalism Festival of Perpignan.
 the relation between the visible and the invisible, the total and the
Carles Guerra 148
partial; and how to extract meaning from the multiple and diverse
nature of data that is presented chaotically, with no hierarchical
order. A host of questions that are latent in recent works by Angela
Melitopoulos and Ursula Biemann were presented under the same
umbrella, a research program—Transcultural Geographies—and an
exhibition—B-Zone. Becoming Europe and Beyond—first seen at
the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. 09
This brief inventory of the problems inherent in the documen-
tary practices adopted by Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula Biemann
take us back to the early days of film montage—a classical example
of aesthetic relationality—and to one of the great pioneers in film
making, Dziga Vertov. Then we will remember that the editing desk
was the reduced space in which such a vast territory as post-revo-
lutionary Russia was defined and articulated in the rough displace-
ment between poles of production and consumption, workers’
councils and nations. In Annette Michelson’s view, Vertov ushered
in “a cinema that could establish indissoluble links of union, blur-
ring distances, dichotomies…,”10 a cinematic logic that continues to
echo even today in the calls to arms of many digital essayists. In
one of many texts she has devoted to reflecting on the video essay
in the digital age, Ursula Biemann asserts that the essayist does
not seek to document realities but to organize complexities: “New
image and editing technologies have made it easy to stack an
almost unlimited number of audio and video tracks one on top of
another, with multiple images, titles, running texts, and a complex
sound mix competing for the attention of the audience.”11 Similarly,
for Angela Melitopoulos—an author who has developed her ideas
about the videographic medium in close co-operation with Maurizio
Lazzarato, author of Videofilosofia —video is closely linked to an
12
09 Anselm Franke, ed., B-Zone. Becoming Europe and Beyond (Barcelona: Actar; Berlin: KW Institute for
10
Contemporary Art, 2005).
Annette Michelson, “The Wings of Hypothesis. On Montage and the Theory of Interval,” in Montage and Modern
Life 1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 79.
11 Ursula Biemann, “The Video Essay in the Digital Age,” in Stuff it. The Video Essay in the Digital Age, ed. Ursula
Biemann (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2003), 9.
12 Maurizio Lazzarato, Videofilosofia. La percezione del tempo nel postfordismo (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996).
authentic visual intelligence. So much so that, in their case, video
Negatives of Europe: Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies 149
practice and theory about the medium are interchangeable. In their
view: “Video technology simulates the functions of human memory
and intercerebral communications, points to the agency between
images, their multiple connections and inherent streams of con-
sciousness.”13
This new technique of digital compression is, to a certain
extent, the modern expression of the spatial contraction that so
enriches Dziga Vertov’s films. For this reason, retrospectively, we
might say that in the context of the 1920s, the alliance between the
cinema and the railways threw down a challenge to the dominant
concept of topography. Without the railway network, the cinema
could never have hoped to achieve total representation of the new-
ly-founded USSR. From that time on, geography would also be sub-
jected to a political, economic, and cinematographic project. The
adaptation of this idea to world conditions today produces what Irit
Rogoff has called a “relational geography.”14 That is, a geography
that eliminates any direction implicit in the relation between the
map’s center and its periphery; that, in its place, establishes con-
nections, avoiding the classical perimeters of the territory; and that
takes the space of visual culture as its empirical reference point,
substituting a geography linked to hegemonic policies, which repro-
duce administrative frontiers.
If we also take into account the work of such cultural critics
as George Lipsitz—who is interested in the proliferation of popular
music—we could add that relational geography explores a produc-
tive tension between the cultural and physical spaces, undermin-
ing and dismantling the identification that, in many cases, exists
between them. Yet relational geography cultivates observation of
the networks of economic capitalism as the basis supporting net-
works for the distribution of culture. Through the music that runs
in capitalism’s very veins, as Georges Lipsitz suggests, “diasporic
13 Angela Melitopoulos, “Timescapes. B-Zone,” in B-Zone. Becoming Europe and Beyond, ed. Anselm Franke, 140.
14 Irit Rogoff, “Engendering Terror,” in Geography and the Politics of Mobility, ed. Ursula Biemann (Vienna: Generali
Foundation, 2003), 48–63.
 populations speak powerfully about realities that are all too familiar
Carles Guerra 150
to them but relatively novel to inhabitants and advanced industrial-
ized countries.” 15
Further evidence that economic structures, fre-
quently accused of sustaining the culture of capital, can harbor in
their breast revealing, instructive, and educational mechanisms.
Transport and communication infrastructure occupies a central
place in the works of Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula Biemann.
The documentary materials these two artists produce converge in
B-Zone, a collective investigation into ongoing changes in the ge-
ography of Europe and its margins, presented as both a political
and artistic project. Both Melitopoulos and Biemann take as their
starting point important arteries through which flow people, goods,
and other forms of concentrated capital such as energy in the form
of crude oil. Such infrastructure is usually coded as continuous,
firmly-defined lines on the map that joins Europe with the Cau-
casus, Turkey, and the Balkans. However, in the hour of truth, its
transit through the territory is perceived more as a sequence of
semi-autonomous spaces with large intervals, pauses, and voids
between them. The two artists’ contributions to the project are
filmed itineraries in which the final montage contains certain radi-
cal differences, especially as regards the sense each attaches to
territorial and narrative cohesion.
The trajectory on which Angela Melitopoulos focuses is the
terrestrial corridor that joins Salzburg with Thessaloniki. The route,
which has particular significance in the artist’s own life, is better
known by its technical name, Corridor X, indicating that this is one
of the great transport arteries operated under the auspices of the
European Community. Corridor X has been a priority in the pan-
European network since the Helsinki agreements were signed in
1993. The route, which stretches from Germany to Greece, runs
through parts of the former Yugoslavia, and greater urgency has
been attached to the project due to the political explosiveness of
15 George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads. Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (London and
New York: Verso, 1994), 16.
the Balkans region. The fact that Angela Melitopoulos used to follow
Negatives of Europe: Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies 151
this route on summer journeys home to her native Greece, like so
many other immigrant families, gives Corridor X an appreciable nar-
rative density. Over a thin groove, biographic, historic, cultural, and
political aspects difficult to separate flow out.
The results from Angela Melitopoulos’s research are displayed
in a platform of work shared with different agents in Belgrade, Ath-
ens, and Ankara. Timescapes—the title given to this complex mesh
of collaborations and contributions—does not take the form of the
video essay we are used to; rather, it has a geographically diffuse,
open-cooperation structure, held together by an archive of images
that can be reordered and rearranged. With regard to Timescapes,
Corridor X—the piece by Angela Melitopoulos with the most per-
sonal connotations—is nothing more than one possible itinerary, a
segment taken from the plethora of events contained within the
frame provided by Timescapes. The relation between the two titles,
one collective, the other more subjective, points to the radically
uncompleted and inconclusive nature of Timescapes. It may be
that, at first sight, this unfinished nature, characterizing the way
the platform works and suspending individual appropriation of the
images, may also make it impossible to achieve a synthetic result,
which, depending on how one looks at it, devalues the aesthetic
potential of Timescapes. However, on the other hand, it also opens
up the possibility of including other works, other discourses and
other images in the sphere of its concerns. This capacity to work
dialogically, that is to say, not dialectically, allowing alternatives to
co-exist without the need for one to eliminate the other, compen-
sates politically for an aesthetic impotence. Timescapes faces the
difficulty of articulating a whole without reducing it iconically or
distilling it into a single image. At the practical level, its dialogic
practice also invites us to consider Ursula Biemann’s Black Sea
Files as a related project, one that can be included in the same
research platform. And, though Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula
Biemann follow different production logics, the two did share the
 same theoretical framework, a framework resulting in Transcultural
Carles Guerra 152
Geographies, which also includes Lisa Parks’ exploration of com-
munication infrastructure affected by the wars in the Balkans.
In the same way that Lisa Parks’ work, Postwar Footprints,
throws light on a complex transfer of political power in Slovenia
and Croatia following the conflict—through a continuation of the
war by technological media and producing, as a result, a relocation
of national sovereignty in the global communication market—with
their production forms, Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula Biemann
embody a constant transit between academic research and artis-
tic exploration. They are also involved in a transfer of authority
that—despite appearing less decisive than that described by Lisa
Parks—has consequences going beyond the purely aesthetic. In
this sense, the enthusiastic adoption of the theory that both artists
subscribe to denotes that it has ceased to be considered a threat
(as was habitual with many artistic practices). On the contrary, their
video essays accept the frustrations that accompany those who
practice the theory, for which reason they are careful not to fall into
a programmatically euphoric utopianism.
The new research modes that these two authors embody with
their videos pave the way to legitimizing a documentary practice
that seeks pedagogic functions. However, as we mentioned earlier,
theirs is not a pedagogy that imposes teachings; rather, it is adapted
through a social reorganization of labor that brings with it the fabri-
cation of representations. Many of Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula
Biemann’s video essays (and the same can be said for Lisa Parks’
research) have one foot in the exhibition room and the other in the
university department. The redistribution of responsibilities, often
segmented between the authors, those represented in the work,
the critics, and the public, suggest an expanded responsibility. The
clearest proof of this is in the explanatory diagrams that usually
accompany Timescapes. Those graphics give visual expression to
the protocol that dispossesses the agents involved and prevents
them from exercising overall control over the meaning of the images.
If in the case of Lisa Parks it was national sovereignty that was
Negatives of Europe: Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies 153
placed in doubt, neutralized by the new technological infrastructure
owned by multinationals, in that of Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula
Biemann it is the aesthetic sovereignty that is subjected to the
power of the social, with decision-making processes that prevent a
closed, definitive, stable form from being attained.
The recurring use of the double screen in Timescapes/
Corridor X and Black Sea Files testifies throughout to the existence
of an interval that absorbs the tensions caused by these produc-
tion conditions and prevents the plane of the image from being
closed, or from thinking that a representation can be imbued with
the potential to embrace it all. In these severed planes, continuity
of vision suffers symptomatic interruption. The geography captured
on maps can no longer be experienced as a total form, but a sum
of fragments. This visual caesura makes evident—and eludes—the
temptation to make a fetish of the field of vision, as if this could
replace the field of the real; and makes a representation of a con-
clusive nature unfeasible. In this way, the contingency of the edited
images becomes even more apparent. In the final outcome, this
resource reminds us of the anguish involved in passing from theory
to action, from texts to images, from the singular to the multiple and
vice versa.
However, despite the huge freedom of movements that char-
acterize the journeys undertaken by Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula
Biemann, there always appears a guiding thread. In Black Sea
Files, this takes the shape of the imposing construction of the Baku-
Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. This time, then, the infrastructure
is a huge pipeline, 1,762 kilometers long, which crosses three coun-
tries and links the Caspian Sea with the Mediterranean. Just as
Angela Melitopoulos drives along Corridor X, filming through her
car windscreen, this oil pipeline is, for Ursula Biemann, the leitmo-
tiv that links a series of documents. Geopolitical control over the
Euro-Asian region and marginal events taking place around this
great infrastructure amplify the body of references concerning it.
 The crude oil flow—always taking a westerly direction—is revealed
Carles Guerra 154
as a powerful narrative line competing with a constellation of local
scenes: a visit to the Baku oil wells; conversations with landown-
ers affected by construction work on the pipeline; direct testimony
about the repression the Kurds suffer at the hands of the Turkish
forces of order; and an encounter with a group of prostitutes of
Russian origin help to give us a glimpse of the heterogeneous na-
ture of situations that, like a magnet, are attracted to the oil pipeline
along its entire route.
In her work, Ursula Biemann uses sources that range consid-
erably, from the easily observable to secrets retained by corpora-
tions and governments, interviews, figures, and satellite images.
During certain passages of Black Sea Files one has the impression
that the tourist and the researcher share something more than just
a love of traveling. Their respective access economies are com-
parable. Talking to prostitutes in a town in Turkey, Ursula Biemann
disguises her real intentions by pretending to be an amateur. We
hear the voice, off-screen, of one of the pimps encouraging the sex
workers to speak freely, without inhibition. Someone says: “She’s
just making a home video. She isn’t a journalist.” Had she intro-
duced herself as a journalist, Biemann might never have had the
chance to film these women. We are given to understand what we
might call her “lack of responsibility” as the artist places herself in
a position of advantage with regard to professional codes. For her
to gain access to the scene, the others needed to see her as a
woman at point nought on the code, a woman whose word does
not count (though it sounds strange to say this about an author
whose premises are strongly based on post-feminist practices).
However, as we said at the start, information or first-hand ac-
cess to an event does not produce substantially different knowl-
edge. What generates new knowledge are unusual relations be-
tween known information. To dismantle the effect of the media and
the different disciplines that govern what can be related to what,
that is the objective of a collective pedagogy that moves between
images and texts. “The goal is not to tell a newly definitive his-
Negatives of Europe: Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies 155
tory,”16 as Susan Buck-Morss says, rather it is a question of under-
standing that “the constellations are not arbitrary.”17 The same data,
the same images, and the same discourses can express different
ideas. It all depends on the relations that are most emphasized. It
is like joining the dots that complete an unfinished drawing, some-
thing whose presence is wavering on the threshold between the
virtual and the real. Or as Ursula Biemann would say, in an expres-
sion charged with influences from Walter Benjamin, it is a question
of recomposing a form half-buried “in the rubble of history”—some-
thing that could be taken almost literally in Black Sea Files if we
bear in mind that the great oil pipeline runs underground in many
stretches.
For this reason, although the BTC oil pipeline could be kept as
the focal point of the news story guiding Black Sea Files, its nar-
rative dissolution generates a much more effective constellation.
When construction of the pipeline was completed in early 2005, the
journalist F. William Engdahl warned about the geo-strategic impli-
cations caused by its existence, not only in the region but also as
regards global distribution of political influence. “It is important to
take into account the two main blocks that, with regard to energy,
have emerged, above all since the former Soviet Union broke up,
enabling foreign participation, particularly by the US, in the Central
Asian oil region around the Caspian Sea, with its complex political
front.”18
Behind the BTC oil pipeline are an endless number of imagi-
nary lines that can transport us as far as Sakhalin Island in the Far
East. There, Russia’s control of energy resources is now coming
into conflict with the large oil companies, supported by Western
governments—another point of global friction with regard to energy
sources. Given the huge implications of the infrastructure investi-
gated by Ursula Biemann, one might say that this is a filament as
16 Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror, 116.
17 Ibid.
18 http://www.webislam.com
 sensitive as a nerve. If stimulated, it lights up a network of intercon-
Carles Guerra 156
nections, and its ramifications spread beyond its original strip of
land. The nearby and the remote lose all proportion. Any attempt
to understand geography as a sum of spaces is doomed to failure.
What is inside or outside a territory also becomes relative.
But what we cannot lose sight of is that, apart from transversal
geographies, the two projects that concern us here, Timescapes/
Corridor X and Black Sea Files, constitute something like the pho-
tograph negative of a Europe constituted and thick with regulations.
The infrastructure or axes that Angela Melitopoulos and Ursula
Biemann follow function as a narrative paradigm with a certain
historic weight concentrated over the route, in contrast to the vola-
tile, transitory, and precarious nature of Europe’s affective struc-
ture and its ever-changing margins. These artists’ video essays
eschew belief in a European identity supported by administrative
techniques. Europe is nothing more than a network supported by a
fabric of psychological projections in which the artists themselves
have participated through their biographies. Some of these ideas
about what Europe is have become as generationally connoted as
those that emerged with the opportunity to travel all over the conti-
nent in the early 1970s. This was when a railway network arrange-
ment enabled young people below the age of 23 to travel around
all countries except their own. As Diedrich Diederichsen suggests,
those who were then under 23 years of age went on to give shape
to a united Europe: “Their idea of Europe is based on a specific
idea which comes from these holidays in the early 1970s.”19
In Corridor X, the act of revisiting the route that formed the
great Highway of Brotherhood and Unity is tinged with nostalgia
due to the loss of an affective structure, which, like Dziga Vertov’s
films in post-revolutionary Russia, generated an imaginary of cohe-
sion in Tito’s Yugoslavia. The road was built between 1949 and 1985
in order to join the Balkan republics, running down to the Greek
19 Diedrich Diederichsen, Personas en loop. Ensayos sobre cultura pop (Buenos Aires: Interzona, 2005), 73.
border. Some of those whom Angela Melitopoulos interviewed on
Negatives of Europe: Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies 157
the road itself ventured to define that ambitious artery as a route
whose final function might be similar to that of a public meeting
space. As they drive along the motorway, one of them remembers
it as follows: “Brotherhood and Unity was an international platform.
Petrol stations were good places to walk to from the town, and
sometimes to talk to people. We were just very curious and wanted
to show what we knew and learn what others knew. It was a way
of learning about others, from a very different point of view.”
It is ironic that this kind of spontaneous socialization took
place in service stations, exactly where petrol pumps end the long
journey undertaken by raw energy—as if one thing took over from
another, or as if affections and engineering work could comple-
ment one another. However, we have the example of the Druzhba
oil pipeline, the infrastructure we referred to at the beginning of
this text. Despite the worrying news that surrounded it, keeping
half of Europe on tenterhooks and confronting Russia and Belarus,
its name means “friendship.” In the words of Renata Salecl, a Slo-
venian sociologist who has studied the society that has emerged
after socialism, “there is no politics without fantasy.”20
However, if we are to believe Rem Koolhaas, who has been
involved in a large project aimed at producing a representation of
the history of Europe and the European Union,21 Europe does not
produce great fantasies at this time. The failure of the initiative for
a European constitution acted as a powerful wake-up call. Imme-
diately afterwards, the imaginary-creating machine seems to have
been shut down for a while. Paradoxically, Europe’s main product
at present are regulations governing the quality of food, communi-
cation, political rights, workers’ rights, etc. Rem Koolhaas says he
is convinced that “those rules represent the future form of power
20
Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom. Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism (London and
New York: Routledge, 1994), 18.
21 The project “The Image of Europe” was designed and developed by AMO, a work platform founded by Rem
Koolhaas in 1998 in parallel to OMA, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The exhibition “History of Europe
and the European Union” was directed by Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf, commissioned by the European
Commission during the Dutch presidency in 2004.
 exchange.”22 However, the truth is that there is no need to wait so
Carles Guerra 158
long. It is sufficient to see another recent work by Ursula Biemann,
Contained Mobility (2004), to understand what it is like to move
around Europe as an illegal immigrant. The video reconstructs the
life of Anatol Zimmermann, a man who, now over fifty years of
age, spends all his energy in asylum plea after asylum plea. He
is what is known as “legally non-existent,” condemned to live in
the interstices of an absurd, asphyxiating legal context. The deci-
sion to make Zimmermann’s home in a cargo container not only
gives a feeling of claustrophobia to this portrait of him, but also
highlights the perverse effects caused by the legal definition of
the European space. Everything, including the individual, becomes
closely-guarded goods.
In any case, representing Europe is a minor problem com-
pared to what is happening on its margins. Whilst Europe’s lead-
ing institution commissions its most famous architect to effectively
communicate its history and that of the fabric of institutions that
form it, on the edges of the blue area history unwinds and loses
clarity. It can scarcely be reconstructed. The images and testimo-
nies are much less dense. There, few institutions offer to restore
narrative order in regions that have been victims of excesses of
political violence exported from power centers. However, even if in-
stitutions and stakeholders existed to attempt to do this, we would
perhaps find that it is too late to do so from an empirical base.
Memories, testimonies, and proof about events in the past have all
been neutralized by successive historic interpretations.
Testimonies about the Armenian genocide have suffered such
a process. “The first massacre of modern times,” as it is often
known, continues to be placed in doubt. “The events of 1915, which
saw half the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire disap-
pear as a result of the extermination policy enacted by the Young
Turks, Enver, Talat, and Djemal, leaders on the Committee of Union
22 Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Conversation Series Vol. 4 (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, 2007), 35.
and Progress, in power since the 1908 revolution,”23 are still denied
Negatives of Europe: Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies 159
by modern Turkey. The battle for international recognition of the
Armenian disaster continues even today against those who pres-
ent it as an act of war forming part of the conflicts that took place
during the First World War. Mere mention of the Armenian question
in Turkey is a criminal act according to Article 301 of the country’s
constitution. The death of the journalist Hrant Dink, murdered in the
street24 for insisting that the genocide took place, leaves no room
for doubt.
Proving events when one was not present or no images remain
from it also challenges the habitual functioning of public opinion.
Faced by a shortage of evidence, the essay—in the many different
forms alluded to above—produces a story to make it possible for us
to refer to this event that left no trace. It seeks to fill the void, to re-
store causality where it has become hazy or is simply ignored. In a
video essay entitled November (2004), Hito Steyerl relates the story
of the disappearance of her teenage friend, Andrea Wolf. Andrea
disappeared in strange circumstances and is presumed to have
been murdered later by the Turkish police, but her body was never
returned. She only returned as a martyr to the Kurdish cause, which
she is believed to have joined. What Hito Steyerl underlines in her
essay is that although Andrea Wolf may have returned as an icon,
her body was never recovered. As the author says, “a picture of
war is not war.” So the essay, rather than filling a void, continues to
remind us that behind an image is an absence.
The route followed by Angela Melitopoulos’s family, firstly as
Armenian refugees in Greece and later as part of the labor force in
Germany, showed clearly the difficulties that a documentary attempt-
ing to fill this type of void encounters. Passing Drama (1999), which
we could define as a forerunner of Timescapes, wove together an
abstract document about the Armenian exodus. In the absence of
23 Bernard Bruneteau, El siglo de los genocidios. Violencias, masacres y procesos genocidas desde Armenia a
Ruanda (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2006), 57.
24 Hrant Dink was assassinated on January 19, 2007. Amnesty International believed that he was targeted because
of his work as a journalist who championed freedom of expression.
 facts, the author’s physical trajectory is installed within the documen-
Carles Guerra 160
tary as a virtual, dynamic, constantly-moving narrative. The author
herself defines Passing Drama as a video essay about migration
and the narrative is based on a family history. Nonetheless, this
displacement only obtains a collection of existential data. Neither
does her return to such scenes as the Maria Lanzendorf concen-
tration camp in Austria, where her father was interned, compensate
with any factual information. Nothing remains at first sight. At this
point, the goal of Angela Melitopoulos’s work changes from cre-
ating a historic document to reconstructing oblivion in its exact
measure. The way memory becomes eroded is likened to a thick
mesh of digitally processed voices and images that are distorted
until they become the mere echo of the event. The result is like
a curtain whose thick material prevents us from seeing anything
through it. Intense relational activity is concentrated in the fibers
of this fabric, whose manufacture is a recurring motif throughout
the video. This would appear to be the only policy possible to re-
spond to the “programmed eradication of the Armenian presence
on the Anatolia Peninsula, going back a thousand years [which]
was the work of a state authority and was carried out in the name
of a global ideological project.”25 Even so, Passing Drama is not a
documentary that seeks to restore the memory of the Armenian
genocide. Far from building a consensus as to what our feelings
should be towards these events, it offers an enclave from which to
observe them. What is contained in Passing Drama is not what we
should see; the video merely indicates a possible place from which
to view the Armenian disaster.
As Felix Guattari said in an interview by Angela Melitopoulos
and Maurizio Lazzarato about the 1991 Gulf War,26 the homogenization
of subjectivity is the main victim caused by practically obscene access
to events—such as that which, in return, the current television system
exploits. However, as we have seen, this obsession with capturing
25 Ibid.
26 Avez-vous vu la guerre? (1991) was produced by Canal Déchaîné, a group of media activists founded in Paris 27 Allan Sekula, “Waiting for Tear Gas (1999–2000),” in Allan Sekula. Performance under Working Conditions
during the Gulf War in 1991.
the event in its classical form, anchored in time, is no longer in-
Negatives of Europe: Video Essays and Collective Pedagogies 161
cluded amongst the intentions behind the video essays discussed
here. Angela Melitopoulos’s and Ursula Biemann’s documentary
practices go beyond the narrow margins that define an empirical
and factual relation to events.
There is a passage in Black Sea Files which has often been
mentioned as an example of critique of the model established by
photojournalism, a discipline that—to judge from what we see in the
papers every day—does not eschew the single image nor the iconic
power that emanates from still shots. In this scene, then, Ursula
Biemann is filming in the outskirts of Ankara, where the Kurdish
population—which survives by collecting and recycling waste ma-
terials—is being violently evicted by the Turkish forces of order. Her
reflection reminds us of the rules which the photographer Allan
Sekula set himself during the demonstrations in Seattle in 1999:
“no flash, no telephoto zoom lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus, no
press pass, and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining
image of dramatic violence.”27 Nothing of all that which usually pro-
tects the reporter. In both cases, Ursula Biemann and Allan Sekula
are trapped in the course of events, as has occurred to so many
other media professionals. The difference lies in the fact that their
reflection about the conditions in which they capture their images
no longer belongs to the order of the events. The artistic prac-
tices they adopt open up a working space that produces its own
events, without the need to wait for them to occur somewhere, or
to emerge in the media. This places new cognitive possibilities on
the table as well as, even more importantly, the media to manage
a radical plurality. As the authors included in B-Zone understand,
achieving an association of the different—conserving the singularity
of each image and not reaching compromises as regards the totality—
is what defines the paradox in which the video essay moves.
For this reason, we should seek the main benefit from these prac-
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2003), 310–11.
 tices in the way pedagogical aspects are juxtaposed with aesthetic

Carles Guerra 162

aspects. A collective pedagogy, as it has been characterized
through Angela Melitopoulos’s and Ursula Biemann’s experiences,
makes it possible to transform documentary practices into com-
plex missions whose purpose is to scrutinize the “cognitive map”28
shared by a large number of players and to understand geography
whilst challenging what someone like Vladimir Putin calls “transit
monopolies”;29 setting freedom of movement and gaze against the
coding and fixing of the same in one-way journeys; and delaying
the research results in order, firstly, to enable a dynamic represen-
tation combining images and facts to be produced and, secondly,
to introduce time as a decisive factor for understanding phenomena
trapped in constant change, as is the case of cultural geography. In
short, a video essay placed at the service of a collective pedagogy
has to work full out to produce the best possible propaganda of
complexity.

The original essay “Negativos de Europa. Ensayos visuales y pedagogías colectivas”

was published in Tipografías políticas/Political Typographies, eds. Nuria Enguita and
Carles Guerra (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2007).

28 See Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960).
29 Pilar Bonet, “El presidente Putin considera ‘interesante’ la idea de crear una OPEP del gas,” El País, February 2,
2007.
In this essay I wish to address a problem that has received little

Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 165
attention in mass media research to date, while it has also been
largely neglected in cultural studies and visual studies.01 It has to
do with the relationship between mass-media journalism and art,
literature and film, or, in a broader sense, the relation of journalism
and aesthetics. I should like to start with two examples.
“Why all these full-page spreads from Sydney?” The question
was raised by veteran newspaper correspondent Sven Öste in a
column in Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm) in the early 1990s. Öste
was one of the generation of foreign correspondents who in the
1950s and 1960s brought the world beyond Europe within sight
for Swedish readers. The object of his question was the tremen-
dous energy and resources West-European media spent covering
brushfires in New South Wales. The fires had claimed four lives
and destroyed 191 homes. During the same period, the rest of the
world was not exactly serene, Öste noted: “A gas explosion in
China killed 70 workers. It got ten lines. Floods rendered 150,000
people in Sri Lanka homeless. Eight lines.” When an earthquake in
Maharashtra killed roughly 10,000 Indians, the media lost interest
after a day or two.02
Why are brushfires that kill four Australians in suburban Sydney
accorded greater news value than an earthquake in India that kills
thousands? It is fairly clear that Western news reporting values a
white Australian who sees his home go up in flames much higher
than a poor Indian who dies in an earthquake. The difference in
news value reflects a difference in the value ascribed to the two
persons as human beings. And this difference is so obvious and
self-evident that we don’t even reflect on it, Öste wrote.
There would be no cause for concern if our news institutions
had no greater pretensions than to promote our sense of com-
munity and to confirm our own culturally bound worldview. It is
01 This essay is based on a lecture given at the 16th Nordic Conference on Media and Communication Research
in Kristiansand, Norway, August 2003. It was subsequently published in Nordicom Review 25, no. 1/2 (September
2004).
02 Sven Öste, “Varför alla dessa helsidor från Sydney?” [Why all these full-page spreads from Sydney], Dagens
Nyheter, January 14, 1994.
 hardly surprising if people in Stockholm find it easier to identify
Stefan Jonsson 166
with people whose lives and lifestyle resemble their own than to
relate to peasants in rural India. To bemoan that would be as silly
as to criticize a local newspaper for carrying local news.
But, in an age in which media are becoming ever more global-
ized, Öste’s question becomes urgent. With global concentration
of the media, the global media conglomerates of the West make
a claim, whether explicitly or implicitly, to universal validity. We are
presented with a situation in which a given cultural community, with
its parochial concept of newsworthiness, is convinced that its values
apply universally to Humankind. As a culturally bounded definition
of newsworthiness—along with the relative valuation of human be-
ings in different parts of the world that the definition reflects—is
adopted as a world standard, other culturally bounded ideas about
what is important and who is important will be marginalized. The
result is the kind of bias that Sven Öste criticized: the globalized
media system codes a resident of suburban Sydney and a resi-
dent of the Maharashtra hinterland in such a way that readers and
viewers will identify with the fate of the former, whereas the latter
remains out of view. The result is paradoxical, for are we not often
told that globalization is broadening our horizons?
Now, to my second example. Some years ago I saw an ex-
hibition of the work of the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar. 03
Instead of
the customary brochure or catalogue, visitors were furnished with
a passport and what appeared to be a map. Unfolding the map,
I found instead a collection of large poster-size photographs of
people in Nigeria, Brazil, and a refugee camp outside Hong Kong. I
seemed to hear a whisper: “Look closely! This is what we look like,
the people on the other side of the border!”
Then their Faces Vanished.
Inscribed on Jaar’s map was a single sentence: “La Géographie,
ça sert d’abord à faire la guerre.” (Geography above all serves the
03 Alfredo Jaar, Two or Three Things I Imagine About Them, Kunstnerernes hus, Oslo, 1993. The exhibition was
shown in original format at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, 1992. I discuss Jaar’s work in more depth in my
A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
purpose of war). For Alfredo Jaar, every frontier—geographical, po-
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 167
litical, economic, or cultural—represents a crime against humanity.
In 1986, he rented the advertising space at the Spring Street subway
station on Manhattan. Spring Street is the stop where Wall Street’s
stock brokers end and start their daily commute. Gold up $1.80!
Jaar’s ads declared. Alongside this encouraging piece of news Jaar
displayed photos of the gold-diggers, or garimpeiros, of Serra Pelada,
the largest open-pit mine in Brazil. At the time Jaar took his photos,
more than 40,000 migrant laborers were working the mine, each
digging his own shaft toward the center of the Earth. In the photos,
the mine looks like a giant’s footprint in an anthill. Tiny creatures
covered with mud are scrambling over each other. With their one
hand on the ladder and the other on their sack of up to one hundred
pounds of gold-bearing mud, they climb toward daylight.
In Jaar’s images, the wretched workers of Serra Pelada haunt
us like figures in a geopolitical nightmare. Jaar shows us the faces
and bodies of people whose existence is denied in price quotations,
the media, or economic development programs. To be sure, Jaar’s
art is political, even didactic. It gives faces to the faceless ones. But
the real point of his work is a different one. With minimalistic preci-
sion, he frames his photos in such a way that the depicted persons
always appear to be fading away or falling outside the visual plane.
Sometimes, he veils his subjects’ faces or dilutes and distorts them
by letting them appear as reflections in water or ingeniously placed
mirrors. Or he hangs his pictures face-to-wall, so that the spectator
can only guess the motif on the basis of the caption.
Furthest in, in a sort of sanctum sanctorum in the exhibition
hall, Jaar confronted the visitor with a broad image, illuminated from
behind, showing seven men in Lagos, Nigeria. They are standing
next to or leaning against a stack of rusty barrels of toxic waste,
imports from Europe. This picture was followed by four similarly
illuminated close-up portraits of garimpeiros encrusted in mud; the
figures were tightly cropped, with their point of gravity just outside
the frame.
 The passport had no spaces for entry and exit stamps. In-
Stefan Jonsson 168
stead, each page showed a picture of a frontier marked by barbed
wire and illuminated by glaring searchlights. And across each page
a phrase, in flaming red letters, was repeated in several languages:
“Abriendo nuevas puertas,” “Es öffnen sich neue Tore,” “Opening new
doors.”
Such is the ultimate interpretation of Jaar’s work: it opens
doors to the worlds that have been marginalized in Western media.
But his work also has another effect. It makes the spectator aware
of the political barriers and mental inhibitions that prevent us from
seeing the world’s lower classes. The Wretched of the Earth await
us just beyond the pale of our perception. Jaar lets the viewer see
that he or she does not see the Other.
On the basis of these two examples I should like to formulate
an hypothesis. The first example speaks of the increasing conform-
ism of global mass media. An ever greater share of the media world-
wide are governed by a norm that dictates what is worth knowing
and looking at, what to enjoy and what to mourn, what counts as
happiness, justice, goodness, and love. The norm is confining in
that it suppresses other, alternative ideas about these values.
The second example speaks of the increasing politicization of
art. By politicization I mean the process that brings what we might
call “the political”—as opposed to “politics”—to light.
cal signifies the fundaments and underlying principles of politics,
namely, people’s ability to represent themselves and their interests
in the public sphere—a public sphere, moreover, that has become
global. Alfredo Jaar calls attention to the political in the sense that
his art evokes the mechanisms that exclude some of humanity from
the public sphere, thereby denying them political representation.
My hypothesis concerns the links between these two pro-
cesses. I propose that the conformism of media journalism and the
04 The distinction is based on a discussion among French political theorists of the relationship between “le politique”
(politics) and “la politique” (the political). See Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique (Paris: Seuil, 1985); Claude
Lefort, “La question de la démocratie,” in Le Retrait du politique: Travaux du Centre de Recherches Philosophiques
sur le Politique (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1983), 71–88.
politicization of art are interacting processes, somewhat like com-
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 169
municating vessels. Indeed, I would venture even further and posit
that the conformism of media journalism and the politicization of art
are two facets of the same historical process, which we might term
the globalization of culture.
To put it a bit drastically: On the one hand we have a trend to-
ward uniformity; the world-view represented in journalism increas-
ingly coincides with a perspective that is characteristic of a specific
subject position: white, male, Western and of the owning classes.
This subject position constitutes the implicit narrator as well as the
implicit listener of the mass media that today address a global audi-
ence.05 In most media narratives, this subject functions as a general
model of the human. Those who take interest in these narratives are
asked to emulate this model, which for the majority of the world’s
population means that they must renounce those culturally specific
identities that do not conform with the model. The result of this pro-
cess is a divide that is by now well known in contemporary cultural
analysis. A conflict arises between a Western dominant that claims
to represent the general interst—which may be coded in cultural
terms (enlightenment, secularization, traditional humanist educa-
tion), in political terms (democracy, parliamentarism, etc.) and/or
economic terms (market economy, free trade, capitalism)—and a
04
The politi- series of subordinate tendencies that are assumed to represent
various minority interests and are often coded in ethnic, religious,
cultural, or national terms.
On the other hand we see a number of politicizing currents in
contemporary literature, film, art and music. They call attention to
experiences, histories, bodies, and identities that have long been
homeless in the Western public sector, and they do so with an
energy and innovative creativity that has put them at the center
of the aesthetic discussion in the West. The work of Alfredo Jaar
05 See News in a Globalized Society, ed. Stig Hjarvard (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2002); Edward S. Herman and Robert
W. McChesney, The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism (London and Washington:
Cassell, 1997); and Journalism and the New World Order: Gulf War, National News Discourses and Globalization,
ed. Stig Arne Nohrstedt and Rune Ottosen (Göteborg: Nordicom, 2000).
 is an example of this tendency which, broadly speaking, might be
Stefan Jonsson 170
labelled “postcolonial.” The documenta 11 exhibition in Kassel in
2002 presented a comprehensive inventory of this movement within
the visual arts. Contemporary literature presents a good number of
other examples, and here it suffices to list some of the recent Nobel
laureates, such as Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer,
Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. They
differ greatly, to be sure. Yet, what they have in common is a desire
to express stories and existential experience from the dark and
repressed side of Western civilization.
It would appear, then, that the course of developments in jour-
nalism and aesthetic genres are tending in opposite directions. One
might even say that the Arts are compensating for the “blind spots”
of journalism. How might we characterize the relationship between
these two trends? The question is theoretical: what interpretive
models help us understand the relation of journalism to aesthetics?
The question is also practical and methodological: by comparing
these simultaneous but contrary processes in the arts and journalism,
respectively, we may further our understanding of both.
The interplay between different levels in the cultural super-
structure is a central theme in classical Marxist theory. In the last
decades of the nineteenth century, Karl Kautsky and Franz Mehring
both showed how literature and the arts in certain historical peri-
ods are politicized, in the sense that it becomes one of their main
functions to channel information, ideas, and experiences that are
otherwise excluded from public cultural and political debate.06 For
instance, there are societies in which direct or indirect censorship
has prevented the media from carrying an open discussion and
publishing opinions that are crtitical of the existing power. Such
was the case in the Soviet Union (as in Russia under the czars), in
France under absolutist rule, in Germany under the rule of despotic
princes, but also under absolutist rule in Sweden around 1800. In
06 Karl Kautsky, Die Klassengegensätze von 1789 (Stuttgart, NN, 1889); Franz Mehring, Die Lessing-Legende (Berlin:
Dietz, 1967 [1894]).
these societies, prohibited opinions and knowledge were rechan-
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 171
neled to literature and the arts. The aesthetic form allowed the
communication and discussion of banned themes and ideas in en-
crypted form. As a consequence, social-political discourse moved
to the theater stage, to novels, and to the visual arts, in short, to
aesthetic genres that could speak at once multivocally and equivo-
cally, thereby evading—for the most part—the censors.
One should be cautious about drawing parallels between to-
day’s conformism in mainstream journalism and the kind of thought
control exercised in societies under totalitarian and absolutist rule.
Yet, in much of contemporary journalism the forms of presentation,
the modes of public address, and the verbal and narrative regis-
ters have become so constrained that they effectively prevent the
expression of certain kinds of knowledge and experience. Most
extreme in this regard is television journalism, where strict formats
and limited air time often rule out background analysis and the
exposition of causal explanation altogether. Such elements flee to
public media that are at once more narrow and more generous:
book-length reportage, journal essays, installation art, the novel,
and documentary film genres that traditionally have presupposed a
will to aesthetic form and a mode of address or perspective that is
subjective and personal.
The above-mentioned documenta 11 offered a veritable cata-
logue of such expressions. Chantal Akerman’s film and video in-
stallation, From the Other Side, treated the plight of migrants cross-
ing the border between Mexico and the U.S. Fareed Armaly invited
visitors to draw their own mental maps of Palestine. For the pur-
poses of the exhibition Maria Eichhorn founded a public company,
the sole purpose of which was to preserve the company’s equity
without accumulating profit or interest; her “venture” demonstrated
the nature of capitalism and the art market more poignantly than
most business journalists are able to do. With his suite of docu-
mentary photos of commercial shipping Allan Sekula showed the
infrastructure of the global market, the flows of goods from one
 part of the world to another. The Italian artist collective Multiplicity
Stefan Jonsson 172
presented the results of investigative journalism in its best sense
through a dramatization of an event that both media and authorities
had suppressed. The day after Christmas 1996, a fishing boat sank
between Malta and Sicily. All on board—283 Pakistanis, Indians and
Lankese—drowned, without anyone being held responsible, and
even without any investigation of the disaster.07
The themes these artists elaborate are roughly the same as
the ones we encounter daily in our news media. They all have
something to do with the globalization process and the conflicts
and confusion that arise in its wake, particularly the mass migra-
tions of people from poorer to wealthier regions of the world. What
distinguishes artistic approaches to these themes from journalistic
approaches is not mainly their subjective commitment, nor their
eagerness to experiment with visual, cinematographic and verbal
forms; above all, it is their sensitivity to suppressed aspects of on-
going political and cultural processes. The arts often render events,
problems, and structures that cast Western society in a critical light,
or even hold Western society responsible for preserving the privi-
leges it enjoys, at the cost of the rest of the world.
Artist Felix Gonzales-Torres once derided heavy-handed politi-
cizing tendencies of art. Slightly travestied, he phrased his question
as follows: Do we really need an art gallery to find out what we can
read in the paper or watch on CNN?08 The point of the art that I am
discussing here, however, is that it gives us a sense of aspects of
the political that we cannot read about in the newspaper or watch
on CNN.
It is not a given, that art should tackle such subjects, much
less that it should constitute itself as a political or ethical tribunal.
On the contrary, this is the role that traditionally has been assumed
by journalism. That the arts increasingly tend to assume this role
07 The project is described briefly in the exhibition catalogue, Documenta 11—Platform 5: Exhibition (Ostfildern-Ruit:
Hatje Cantz, 2002).
08 Anthony Downey comments on Gonzales-Torres’ critique in “The Spectacular Diffference of documenta XI,” Third
Text 62 17:1 (March 2003): 91.
with both a sense of urgency and commitment and, what is more,
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 173
with the kind of creativity that is strikingly absent in contemporary
journalism testifies to the kind of role-switching that I am talking
about. It is a shift within the ideological superstructure much like
those Mehring and Kautsky analyzed in their time. In a situation
where the forms and content of journalism have become standard-
ized to the point of censorship, it has fallen upon the arts to inspire
discussions of the future of society. This is why it is increasingly the
task of the arts to give expression to “the political,” that is to say,
the implicit preconditions and consequences of the political and
economic policies that dominate in the world, whereas mainstream
journalism increasingly serves “politics”; it is content to mirror the
rituals of institutionalized power and to convey the various opinions
that bear the “stamp of approval” of the dominating authorities.
When journalism is reduced to little more than a mirror for princes,
the arts assume the role of journalism in its original sense: a running
chronicle that elucidates social events.
I suggested earlier that these shifts represent two sides of the
globalization of culture. In the age of globalization we can identify
three distinct tendencies in the cultural sector. First, American mass
culture continues its triumphal tour across the globe—under the ban-
ners of Nike, McDonald’s, Walt Disney, and Coca-Cola. Second, the
“high culture” of the West is becoming part of elite lifestyles not only
in Paris and Washington, but in Beijing and Buenos Aires, as well.
From each and every metropole in the world there now emanates a
sponsored noise of Pavarotti, Bach, and Eric Satie, and in just about
whatever city you visit you will find a major exhibit of Hieronymus
Bosch, Russian icons, Vincent van Gogh, or Andy Warhol. A growing
number of artists and writers consciously cater to the tastes of the
world’s upper classes. There is a journalistic equivalent of this kind
of globalized culture in the press, most clearly articulated in papers
like USA Today and International Herald Tribune—the former for the
middle classes, the latter for the air-bound upper classes, but both
tailored to suit all in their target group and not to furrow any brows.
 Dominating these two tendencies are a handful of media groups:
Stefan Jonsson 174
Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, Sony, Seagram, Rupert Murdoch’s
News Corporation, AT&T, General Electric, and Bertelsmann.
tendencies lead us to the motor behind the globalization of culture:
the establishment of universal equivalents, or “value-forms,” which
make it possible to judge and rank the “value” of different news
stories, cultural products, works of art, knowledge, events, ethical
behavior, and political systems, regardless of their cultural origin
and contexts.
Let me explain this in more detail. Political values, ethical val-
ues, existential values, news values, aesthetic values, and human
values were long culture-specific, bound to cultural origins and lo-
cal traditions. They could not be measured on the yardsticks sup-
plied by other cultures. Traditionally, the only value that could be
exchanged without difficulty across cultural boundaries internation-
ally was monetary value. Today, however, everything is subject to
measure and judgment according to yardsticks that are alleged to
have universal validity. This is not to say that the phenomena mea-
sured are reduced to monetary value, only that they are subjected
to the same kind of logic that applies to the exchange of monetary
values: immaterial fruits of human endeavor—education, news re-
porting, goodness, poetry, patriotic feeling, or anything else—are
now increasingly valued in relation to a universal equivalent. The
standardizations of all kinds of value effected by such universal
equivalents is, in my view, the most appropriate analytical definition
of cultural globalization.
Consider, for example, motion pictures, where the so-called
Hollywood narrative has superseded alternative modes of cinemat-
ographic story-telling. A film is hardly recognized as a film (but is
automatically smacked with an “art film” label) unless it follows
the conventions of Hollywood. Or, consider news reporting, where
over the past decade CNN has become a mirror and measure for
09 Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1999).
news values worldwide. An event cannot become a “story” unless
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 175
it conforms to the CNN mold. In the world of digital communication
09
The the Windows operating systems represent another strong factor
of global equivalence. Nothing has emotive, aesthetic, cognitive,
political, or communicative value, nothing is good or bad, beautiful
or ugly, good or evil, real or unreal until it has been processed by
television or Microsoft systems. Theirs are the value forms that de-
limit our world-view, that present selected portions of the world to
us, in ready-made frames. Yet another of these universal equating
mechanisms is the English language itself, which has spread to the
point that we now have a global lingua franca that artists, entertainers,
politicians and scientists must have a command of if they and their
work are to be taken seriously by the dominant institutions in their
respective fields.
Out of the reactions to this standardization of elite and popular
culture, a third tendency has emerged. It consists of all the local,
ethnic or national movements having the aim to resist the global-
ization of culture. Every now and then, someone out in the periph-
ery vandalizes a McDonald’s. French culturati express their out-
rage when the USA tries to force European governments to cease
supporting European film production on the grounds that it gives
European film-makers an unfair competitive advantage on the world
market. In the USA, Latino and Asian students demand that cur-
ricula include their peoples’ history and traditions alongside those
of Anglos, Blacks, and Native Americans. The president of Ma-
laysia accuses the USA of propagating an individualistic ideology
with respect to human rights as a means of securing international
dominance. I have yet to mention terrorism, the most desperate
response of the periphery to the processes of centralization and
globalization. Face to face with the new, global norms, people—be
they Persian or Québecois—are “discovering” that they have a cultural
identity and that it is under threat and needs to be defended. They
are returning to their cultural roots, ethnic origins, confessional values
or blood kin, maintaining that their values cannot be uprooted from
 their cultural context and equivalized according to some universal
Stefan Jonsson 176
standard.
All artistic, intellectual, and journalistic work today is carried
out in a field of tension between these three tendencies—standard-
ized elite culture, commercialized mass culture, and local traditions
of stubborn resistance. But most important is that all three are inter-
woven and simultaneously present in every country, every locality,
every work of art, indeed, in every life. Yesterday, culture could be
located on the map and defined as “domestic” or “foreign”, accord-
ing to national frontiers. That is no longer possible. Anyone who
tries to identify and define, say, Swedish or American culture has
either to invoke some supposed national character—thereby verging
on cultural racism—or else admit that every culture is subject to the
forces of globalization, tugging at once in several different directions.
Therefore, I should like to postulate a fourth tendency, one
that specifically deals with the conflicts and power relationships
between the three poles in contemporary cultural life: global mass
culture, the elite’s “culture of cultural events,” and miscellaneous,
more or less nationalistic cultural projects. The most striking mani-
festation of this fourth tendency to date was, precisely, the docu-
menta exhibit in Kassel, which gathered a good number of intel-
lectuals, writers, artists and institutions, all of whom operate in the
interface between “domestic” and “foreign” and strive to express
and give form to “the political,” that is to say, the very preconditions
for and limits to participation in contemporary public spheres of
politics and culture.
Many attempts have been made to define this zone, where
cultural influences mix, giving rise to new cultural identities. Cultural
theorist Homi Bhabha calls it “the third space”; Mexican anthropol-
ogist García Canclini speaks of “hybrid culture,” and artist Guillermo
Goméz Peña of “border culture.”10 Other terms in currency are
10 Homi Babha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 35–39; Néstor García Canclini,
“Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity”, trans. Christopher L Chiappari and Silvia L
López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 1–11, 206–263: Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Warrior for
Gringostroika: Essays, Performance Texts and Poetry (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1993), 43–44.
geoculture, transculture, postcolonial culture, interculture, multiculture,
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 177
and world culture. This zone is already present in most places. One
might call it “the public sphere of inbetweenness,” a place where
the contradictions and potentialities of globalization, the never-end-
ing struggle over who should be included and who left out of “the
international community,” are debated.
It should be noted that the culture of inbetweenness is no
new phenomenon; it has always been there, although it has been
described in many different terms. In 1907, for example, Otto Bauer,
Marxist theorist and chairman of the Socialist Party in Austria, de-
scribed what happens when an individual straddles different na-
tional cultures: “For the individual who is affected by the culture of
two or more nations, whose character becomes equally strongly
influenced by different cultures, does not simply unite the character
traits of two nations but possesses a wholly new character. [The]
mixture of cultural elements creates a new character.”11 That is why
the child of many cultures is often greeted with mistrust, in times of
strife even as a traitor, Bauer adds. Bauer himself lived through the
last years of the Habsburg Empire, which encompassed numerous
minority cultures without any dominating majority, and in which it
was necessary to invent a model of humanness and citizenship that
rose above the nationalist conflicts—“a wholly new character.”
The point of the notion of a “public sphere of inbetweenness”
is that it reveals the relativity and dynamism in all distinctions be-
tween center and periphery, and in all the polarities—culture and
barbarism, “us” and “them”, civilization and savagery—that can be
derived from it. What might be called a monotopic interpretation of
the world is here replaced by a pluritopic interpretation, or what
Edward Said referred to as a “contrapuntal interpretation,” that is
sensitive to actions and texts that have broken away from, or been
11 Otto Bauer, “The Nation,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996), 54f; Die Nation-
alitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie, rev. ed. 1924 (Glashütten im Taunus: Detlev Auvermann, 1971), 117. For a
more extensive discussion of Bauer’s standpoint in relation to the views of his time with regard to the culture of
inbetweenness see Stefan Jonsson, Subject Without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 263–270.
 devastated by the dominant tradition.12 The pluritopic interpretation
Stefan Jonsson 178
is rooted in thinking that does not refer to a certain ground or a giv-
en tradition, but rather moves between different cultural horizons.
Thus, it resists every attempt to assign any given tradition, event or
place to any single truth, identity, origin, spirit, or character. A pluri-
topic interpretation instead posits that every history and geographic
place is a collection of interacting identities.13 It has no place for
majorities or minorities, for Norwegian, Swedish, Nordic, or foreign.
All such categories are undone once we realize that every cultural
identity is shot through by strands from numberless other places
on the planet.
The fourth tendency arising out of the globalization of culture
is apparent in the realm of aesthetics and in contemporary cultural
theory. But not in journalism. Mainstream journalism and news re-
porting remain dependent on a worldview of the kind Sven Öste
criticized. Events and people are measured and valued in relation
to a presumed center, national or global, an allegedly objective van-
tage point, from which an allegedly impartial observer surveys and
catalogues the course of humanity and the changes of the world.
Perhaps the demonstrated weakness of journalism when it
comes to documenting the political processes of globalization is
due to the fact that it is still bound to such an objectivist and posi-
tivist epistemology. Perhaps the key to the greater achievements
of the arts in this regard is that their vantage point lies precisely in
the intersection of the contradictory processes of globalization. Let
me offer another example and make a new distinction that clarifies
the difference.
The example is the so-called war on terror, more precisely its
initial phase, the attack on the Talibans in Afghanistan. Most opinion
leaders in Europe and North America started with the assumption
that the war was a both justified and appropriate response. Main-
stream Western journalism cast the war in a narrative reminiscent
12 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 32, 50–72.
13 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1995), 11–25.
of a battle of Light versus Darkness. Intellectuals having roots in the
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 179
Muslim world—like Naguib Mahfouz, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdelrah-
man Munif, Tariq Ali, Edward Said, Sherif Hetata, and Khalid Du-
ran—were, by contrast, convinced that the war would only worsen
existing problems and create new ones.14
How are we to explain the diametrical difference between the
respective views of Western intellectuals and their Arab-Muslim
colleagues? Before the war, both groups belonged to the same
international league of secularized intellectuals who adhered to the
same ideals of democracy, human rights, and enlightenment. After
the war, both profess the same values. And yet they have been
divided along precisely the cultural lines that both groups claim to
have risen above.
It may be that the two groups read and interpreted the war
in two distinctly different contexts. For the war on terror can be
understood and explained against the background of several dif-
ferent narratives. One explanatory narrative is about the efforts of
democracy and open societies to defend themselves against en-
emies that are not above murdering innocent people en masse.
Another is about the most recent phase in the USA’s buttressing
of the country’s imperial hegemony. A third concerns the ultimate
consequences of globalization, and a fourth the dialectic between
religious faith and secularization in the Muslim world. This multiplicity
of perspectives is cause for thought. Which of the narratives that
influences one’s interpretation of the war obviously has to do with
one’s position in the field of tension of world politics—whether one
is Arab or European, for example.
Still, or at least at this time around 2002–03, opinion leaders and
mainstream media in the West believed, and would have everyone
14 This, of course, is a generalization. As media researcher Elisabeth Eide, who has extensive knowledge of
Afghanistan, pointed out to me after the first presentation of this paper, a number of Western media, particularly
in Norway and the rest of Scandinavia, have made great efforts to publish views on the war from the Muslim
world. But these, I would say, are only the exceptions that prove the rule. That some media consider it important
to include commentary and analysis from Afghans and others in the Muslim world is a welcome deviation from
the norm, a norm that presumes that Western media can, on their own, give their readers and viewers an
adequate and impartial interpretation of the world. But that these more progressive media have to make such
efforts to include others’ voices demonstrates just how strong the norm is.
 believe, that their particular interpretation were the only valid and
Stefan Jonsson 180
possible one. When they ignored all the other possible contexts in
which the war may be understood, they were turning a blind eye to
the world around them. Historian of literature, Hans-Ulrich Gumbre-
cht, at one point saw this blindness as a case of what he called
“complexity reduction.” He considered the Western reaction—and,
15
by extension, Western media coverage—typical of a modernity that
has embraced what he calls a “subject culture,” Subjektkultur, that
is, an attitude to the world in which the observer of world events
is taken to be placeless, disembodied, omniscient, and impartial.
“The world” is something the observer approaches with conceptual
tools, not a place where he or she lives in or through which he or
she is formed. A precondition for this attitude or position is that the
individual in question has attained a measure of wealth and secu-
rity that shelters him or her from the material pressures of history;
he or she is no longer immediately involved in history, but can view
it from above. This attitude is so deeply imbued in the culture of
modernity that even Western concepts of knowledge and morals
are predicated on it; the world is here seen as an image, separate
from the observer, or as a “world picture,” as Heidegger once put
it.16 Western journalists, reporters, and opinion leaders tend to as-
sume this position of withdrawn superiority; indeed, this position is
a prerequisite to being able to say anything about the world or the
war on terrorism.
The elevation of this position to an absolute, Gumbrecht argued,
is the reason why Western journalists and intellectuals are poorly
equipped to understand that less privileged places are still charac-
terized not only by the “subject culture” of modernity, but also by
what he calls a “culture of presence” (Präsenz-Kultur), a state in
which the individual conceives of himself as being bound to a spe-
cific body and a specific place—a presence. To such an individual,
15 Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, “In eine Zukunft gestoßen; Nach dem 11. September 2001,” Merkur 55 (November 2001):
1048–1054.
16 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays,
trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 115–154.
history is more than a twine of meanings or a flow of information.
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 181
It is a physical force that intrudes upon the body and transforms
one’s space of existence. To take an example: Gumbrecht noted
that Muslims take offense to the stationing of American fighter
planes near Mecca; their presence provokes frustration and rage.
Meanwhile, leaders and spokespersons in the West seem alto-
gether to lack the sensorium needed to comprehend how such
geopolitical measures can be perceived as a humiliating act of
encroachment.
Media coverage of world politics suffers from the same dis-
ability. History is observed from the comfort of loge seats. The
arts, however, inevitably relate to concrete human experience. Even
Hegel noted that art cannot be alienated from sensory experience,
from the representation of how life and society look, sound, feel,
taste—even how they smell. Here we have yet another reason why
art today is able to give us some idea of the political repercussions
of globalization, far closer to reality than the general overviews pro-
vided by journalists and statisticians.
The contrast I am describing here could be summed up as
the difference between experience and overview, where the arts
remain true to their mission of representing concrete human expe-
rience—here, the experience of living in the “battle zones” of glo-
balization—whereas journalism and the media provide “structure”
and overview. The contrast between the two would appear to have
been driven to an extreme these days. Cultural theorist Fredric
Jameson has given the classical formulation of this problem, or
double-bind: We have today, he writes, “a situation in which we can
say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true;
and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is
true, then it escapes individual experience.”17
By extension, Jameson’s reasoning would imply that artistic
attempts to express authentic experiences of contemporary politi-
17 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press,
1991), 411.
 cal events can never claim to be true, whereas journalistic attempts
Stefan Jonsson 182
to tell the truth about reality seldom or never say anything about
the authentic experiences which, ultimately, steer the course of
history.
The dichotomy is drastic. As we all know, a good share of
contemporary art and literature claims to reveal truths about hidden
political and historical structures; at the same time, the best journal-
ism leans toward concrete human experience. Thus, the best work
of both strive to achieve what Jameson calls a “cognitive mapping”
of the world as totality: to make global processes accessible to our
senses and our experience.18
Both make the effort, but it seems that the aesthetic genres
are always one step ahead of the renditions of reality presented in
mass media. Why is this? One might put it this way: Art, literature
and film invent the forms of representation that are subsequently
institutionalized and applied in journalism and the media. There are
numerous interesting examples of how journalistic genres have bor-
rowed from literature, art and film: nineteenth-century realism and
naturalism in literature presage documentary reportage in the daily
press; avant–garde film developed editing techniques that subse-
quently became the norm in television; dialogic patterns developed
in drama and philosophical novels have enriched the journalistic
interview; photo journalism has borrowed from the iconography of
painting; investigative reporting in both print and broadcast media ap-
plies the fluid narrative perspective developed in modernist novels.
The historiography of documentary film offers another illustrative
example. Film historian Bill Nichols has recently published what
many might call a “revisionist” history of the genre. His analysis is
of general applicability to the question of the relationship between
journalism and aesthetics. Film historians have long maintained
that documentarism represents the essence of cinematography.
Ever since 1895, when the Lumière brothers arranged the first public
18 Jameson, Postmodernism, 51–54.
19 Bill Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 580–610.
screening of moving pictures and an astounded audience could
Facts of Aesthetics and Fictions of Journalism: The Logic of the Media in the Age of Globalization 183
see moving pictures of workers leaving their factory and a train pull-
ing into a station, film has been assumed to be directly related to
authentic reality. All film is—by birth and definition—documentary,
a kind of journalism, an imprint of reality. When in the 1920s “docu-
mentary film” was introduced as a concept, it was—as accepted
historiography would have it—nothing new, but only a new name
for what moving pictures always had been: documentations of reality.
Thus, historians have invented a mythical ancestry for the docu-
mentary, Nichols comments. The documentary film is portrayed
as a necessary consequence of the realism of film as a medium:
it offers us a window on reality and the naked truth. In short, the
documentary would appear to demonstrate the very essence of the
reality-revealing function of journalism.
Nichols rejects this reasoning out of hand. The first films, he
argues, were not at all received as documented reality, but as magi-
cal spectacles. And, if all film is essentially documentary, why did
the genre not appear until 1928? If the accepted history holds, the
genre should have appeared much earlier, Nichols reasons. Further-
more, documentary film is much more than a matter of recording
reality. In addition to cinematographic techniques, there are three
additional elements: a particular narrative style, developed in early
films of the genre; a social mission, a desire to inform and arouse
the public that appeared first in the interwar period; and, finally,
the montage techniques by which avant–garde films of the 1920s
achieved both defamiliarization and revelation of reality. Nichols is
particularly interested in this third aspect and demonstrates how
19
the documentary and, for that matter, all journalistic use of moving
pictures are indebted to the film experiments of Walter Ruttman,
Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Man Ray and Luis Buñuel, that is
to say the modernist avant−garde.
So reasons Nichols, and I think the point is clear: A docu-
mentary genre that strives to fulfill all the journalistic criteria of
truth and factuality has its origins in avant–garde film-makers’ free
 experimentation with images and narratives. Why is this legacy so

Stefan Jonsson 184

seldom acknowledged? Nichols’ answer is that documentary film
would risk losing its credibility, were its true parentage to be known.
One would then have to admit that the way to true depictions of
reality leads through aesthetic fiction, that documentary and jour-
nalistic truth is in large part a construction.
All journalism—like any representative genre or medium that
makes claim to verifiable truth—tends to succumb to an ideological
sclerosis. It turns into an instrument, the purpose of which is to
confirm a given “world picture.” Journalism can only avoid such a
fate by learning from the arts, with their demonstrated ability to pen-
etrate beyond stereotypes, hackneyed jargon, and worn-out codes.
In this way artistic experimentation with images and narrative struc-
tures inspires, renews, and sharpens journalistic representation of
reality. Aesthetics would seem to be a vaccine that protects journal-
ism from conformity and keeps it from degenerating into shallow, if
perhaps entertaining, reproduction of the gestures of power.
We are currently in the midst of this vaccination program. Art,
literature, and film are increasingly politicized; they direct our atten-
tion to new zones of conflict and techniques of representation that
no doubt will characterize the journalism of tomorrow. The process
is necessary, not for the sake of the arts or of journalism, but for the
sake of society: democracy presumes the existence of media that
represent reality impartially and in a credible fashion.
And, inasmuch as we are in the midst of the process, we
should not be surprised if a good share of contemporary art seems
to coincide with reportage and the documentary, while a good
share of contemporary journalism seems to coincide with soaps,
crime drama, action film or, as Timothy Garton Ash put it recently,
“sheer fiction.”20

20 I am referring to an article by Timothy Garton Ash, “Välkommen till Matrix!” [Welcome to Matrix] that appeared
in Swedish translation in Dagens Nyheter, June 17, 2003.
How does a text become a document? It has to be certified as a

Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 187
valuable piece of information. Something worth reading and keeping.
Many documents are produced in offices. Others are generated in
and for archives. Even offices cannot do without archives. If a text
is qualified as worth reading and keeping it is in the archive that it
is kept to allow for it to be read if need be. And since there cannot
be an archive with just one document in it there is also never just
one document but always many. Consequently, if a text is certified
as a document it is thereby also implied that this text has become
part of a larger pool of texts collected in an archive. There is always
more than one document. This is why documents are organized in
files. A text becomes a document when it is incorporated into a
system of information management.
Reading a document always implies a moment of choice. You
choose to select one document from the many files available in the
archive. To do so you must know the reference under which the
document is filed—and you must have some reason for selecting
this particular one. In a world filled with ever-expanding real and
virtual archives brimful of documents, you simply have to have a
reason for picking out a particular document to get some orienta-
tion. It follows that reading a document requires having an interest
in doing so (providing you are not working at an office and your job
forces you to “take notice” of certain documents). But what is a text
before it becomes a document? Maybe you could call the text in
this raw state “material.” This in turn implies another process of se-
lection: Not every text material can become a document. Choices
have to be made. Some material has to be selected, other material
discarded. Then it has to be decided under which reference the
document is to be filed. Again this process of selection follows in-
terests. Without a stake in the matter, you would neither know what
material to transform into documents nor which reference to relate

01 This essay is the outcome of a seminar held at the Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå. I am indebted to the students for their
comments and contributions. I also thank the Kunstverein Düsseldorf for giving me the opportunity to try out a
first draft of the paper as a talk, members of the audience including Andrea Knobloch, Vitus H. Weh, and Tom
Holert for their criticism, and Greg Neuerer for his patience in waiting for the final draft.
 it to. So in different ways, our relationship towards documents, as
Jan Verwoert 188
producers or readers, takes on the form of a performance of selection
guided by specific interests.
Moreover, the certification of a text as a document is based
on authority. If you read a document, you know it has been au-
thorized as a document by someone with the authority to do so
(usually indicated by a seal or signature). Otherwise it would not
have been filed in the archive and subsequently not be available
to you as a reader. Who has the authority to produce documents?
The authority of the producer is generated by the nature of the ar-
chive he or she contributes to just as, vice versa, the nature of its
founder determines the authority of the archive. A document filed
in the institutional library of the Vatican will speak to you with the
authoritative voice of the church even more so because the name
of the individual who filed it will have been obscured by the history
of the institution. Anonymity boosts institutional authority. By con-
trast if you look at an early issue of Silver Surfer filed in the archive
of a marvel comics fan, this document will speak to you with the
authority of personal obsession. Embodied individuality secularizes
authority. Apart from authority a question that is inevitably raised
by the archive is the problem of capacity. How many documents
can or should an archive hold? And: will the user of the archive be
capable of accessing the documents? The main capacities, which
the user has to have are interest and time. The archive asks for an
investment on behalf of its users. They have to invest interest and
spend time in the archive.
The Sublime Archive
It seems that in the art discourse of the late 1980s and early 1990s
the concept of the archive was strongly associated with a debate
about the aesthetics of the sublime and the critique of the subject.
In the discussion of works by artists such as Christian Boltanski or
Hanne Darboven, the archive was projected as a site of history and
intertextuality that calls the powers of the individual into question.
Upon entering a grand traditional library you will be overpowered
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 189
by the sublime sensation of encountering history in its totality. A
totality that demands to but never can be fully grasped by the in-
dividual, as one lifetime will not suffice to study the entirety of all
available documents. This is why the moment you put a foot inside
the sublime archive you know that the archive has already survived
you. You are as good as dead. Your life is outmeasured by the life
of the archive and the totality of all lives that have been invested
in the process of producing the documents it holds. This feeling of
vertigo in the face of a historical totality beyond the grasp of the
individual mind is comparable to the experience that installations
by Boltanski or Darboven confront you with. When Darboven, for in-
stance, fills the walls of an exhibition space with countless framed
documents of the same A4 format, she stages her production of
a sublime archive—an archive which testifies to the attempt of an
individual to move towards creating a historic totality by invest-
ing a lifetime of work into the relentless production of documents.
Darboven’s archive originates in personal obsession. Yet, as she
writes down potentially endless variations of mathematic calculi
(like Bismarckzeit, 1978) or transcribes verse after verse of an epic
text like the Odyssey (in Homer, Odyssee, 1971–1974), it becomes
clear that Darboven seeks to transcend the personal. Infinity and
totality become the destiny of the work. The recipient understands
in an instant that not only will the time of an exhibition visit never
be sufficient to read all the documents on display, but also that the
process of reception will never catch up with the process of produc-
tion. Darboven is always one step ahead on her road to eternity.
Moreover, the claim to totality generates authority—even more
so if the document you are facing is a transcription of the Odyssey,
a text which is an institution in itself in as much as it is considered
to provide a universal explanation of the world and as such is
treated as a part of the universal knowledge (or cultural history) of
mankind. Facing documents of such universal value, the recipient
is bound to experience a feeling of inadequacy. You realize that
 you do not know all of the text. But you know you should. It could
Jan Verwoert 190
be argued that Boltanski goes even one step further. In his instal-
lation archives at documenta 8 (1987), he presented a vast number
of vintage black and white photographs of unknown individuals on
display walls made from steel grating, illuminated only by a series
of small spotlights. You get a clear idea of the impossibility of re-
constructing the lives of the anonymous individuals whose photos
are on display. You can not even say if they are dead or alive. Their
lives are lost—at least for you. Together these lost lives accumulate
to form the totality of history irretrievably lost. What is more, the
anonymity of the material on display is boosted by the fact that
the maker of the archive remains anonymous to a degree. Unlike
Darboven, Boltanski leaves no traces in the archive. The interest he
has in compiling the archive is nowhere articulated. This anonymity
amplifies the impression that the installation stages history as a
universal institution with authority. In the face of this institution the
recipient is left with a feeling of inadequacy. You know you should
know these people, but you know with equal clarity that it is im-
possible. You gaze into the abyss of history. A sublime experience
associated with a sense of vertigo and powerlessness.
Towards a Pragmatism of the Personal
This discourse around the historical sublime was certainly justi-
fied to a certain degree because it disencouraged the fantasy that
universal mastery of history as a totality was possible (through the
paradoxical manoeuvre of invoking the ideas of universality and
totality only to frustrate the viewer by placing them beyond his or
her grasp.) The individual is made aware of the limitations of the
subjective consciousness in the face of history. The problem is that
once this point is made it can only be reiterated. You can certainly
fresh up the sublime experience of inadequacy in relation to history
by gazing into the abyss from time to time. But where does that take
you in the long run? Any discourse that invokes the universal stops
once the universal is invoked (be it a successful representation of the
irrepresentable). So if by proceeding with the universal it becomes
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 191
impossible to focus on the particular, this might be the only, or rath-
er, the best option if you seek to reformulate a possible relationship
to history. It seems that this was precisely the conclusion that a
series of artists emerging in the early 1990s drew by de-institution-
alizing the archive and founding it not on principles of universality
and totality but on particularity and subjectivity.
In this context, the definition of practical archives based on
specific research projects, which Renée Green has proposed in her
work, stands out in terms of the way in which it replaces an aesthet-
ics of the sublime with what could be called a pragmatism of the
personal. Take for instance Green’s installation Import/Export Funk
Office (1993). In this work Green documents a particular instance of
intercultural mediation in the form of a research archive based on
a case study. The case at hand is the specific form in which Afro-
American hip-hop music has been received by German cultural critic
Diedrich Diederichsen. The research archive comprises various
“documents” taken from the critic’s personal archive and restaged
in the installation. Four simple metal shelving units are linked to form
a cubicle which visitors can enter to help themselves to various me-
dia on display including books, video- and audiocassettes. On two
TV monitors, videos including interview footage with Diederichsen
and Afro-American hip hop performers can be viewed. The library
is surrounded by other facilities for accessing research materials.
There are now (at least) three different aspects in regard to which
Green’s installation could be described as defining a pragmatism of
the personal. Firstly, the work portrays the making of history as an
embodied practice. It needs people to write history. It is through the
mediation of specific individuals that the history of hip-hop music is
written (on both sides of the Atlantic). Secondly, the mode in which
the work addresses the viewer may be described as both per-
sonal and pragmatic. It is personal in the sense that the installation
simulates a moment of intersubjective communication. As a viewer
you enter the personal universe of a private collection, maybe to
 find the collector himself addressing you in the video interview.
Jan Verwoert 192
It is pragmatic in the sense that the viewer is transformed into a
user of the work. The documents on display are intended to be
studied. Unlike Darboven or Boltanski, Green does not ask for the
impossible. Since the work focuses on the particular, concentrating
on particular elements of the work seems adequate. You make a
proper use of the archive even if your interaction remains within the
limits of what is pragmatically possible, i.e. read one or two articles
or browse through a book. Getting into greater depth is an option
but not a prerequisite, since totality is not an issue in the work.
Thirdly and finally, the personal is introduced as a pragmatic motive
for the making of the work. It is not veiled what stake Green has in
the matter. As an Afro-American artist living in Germany, she has an
interest in finding out how other Afro-American cultural producers
were seen in this country—an interest facilitated through her per-
sonal exchange with Diederichsen.
This emphasis on the personal and pragmatic humanizes the
archive and relativizes its authority. While the sublime archive de-
mands respect for its authority by staging history as an impersonal
universal institution, the personal archive allows for a more respect-
less contact. You are always free to say you are not interested and
walk out. If you stay, however, you have to invest interest. By choos-
ing to interact with the research archive the viewers become interest-
ed users of history. The installation then could be said to manifest a
politics of articulated interests. Green makes it perfectly clear that her
research is motivated by specific interests. The users either return
this interest or they do not. In any case, the relation between pro-
ducer and recipient is a decidedly unhierarchical encounter between
interested individuals. It is a situation of give and take. Green her-
self has termed this form of interaction “participatory mobility.” 03
She
02
Beatrice von Bismarck has pointed out that in contrast to previous interpretations of the archive Green’s conception
can be understood as a “demand for particularity.” She elaborates: “Unlike in the work of Kabakov, Green
produces ‘spaces’ which, according to Michel de Certeau, are defined in contrast to ‘places’ by actions—or more
generally—through a network of mobile elements.” [my translation]. Beatrice von Bismarck, “Arena Archiv,” in
interarchive, Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2002), 118.
03 Renée Green, “Site-Specificity Unbound,” in Springerin IV, no. 1 (1998).
describes this participatory mobility as a way of occupying space
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 193
which is not “sadistic” in the sense that the work does not seek to
control the viewer like a teacher would want to submit his pupil to his
lessons. Since both producer and recipient invest interest, the basis
upon which information is passed on is that of a shared personal
experience. The viewers “tune in” to the research process.
The personal emerges as a principle of mediation and coher-
ence. The diverse media, materials and documents assembled in
the installation are connected through personal interest in three
02
different ways: The interest of the critic Diederichsen who emerges
as a prototypical mediator between cultural discourses. The inter-
est Green invests as a mediator between Diederichsen’s collection
and the public. And finally the interest of the viewer participants
who become mediators in their own right as they establish con-
nections between the materials on display. The subject as mediator
emerges as the common thread that establishes the coherence
of the work on every level. It is interesting to see how Green has
expanded this method in subsequent works by introducing ele-
ments of narrative. In Partially Buried (1996), for instance, the depar-
ture point for the research is a moment where her biography inter-
sects with America’s recent political history. Green’s mother was a
student at Kent State University, Ohio, present on the campus on
May 4, 1970 when during a rally against the US invasion in Cam-
bodia four students were shot by the National Guard. In reaction
to the event, the date of the rally was later scrawled onto the front
of the work Partially Buried Woodshed by Robert Smithson situ-
ated on the university campus. The work had been finished only
month before the incident and consisted of an old shed onto which one month
enough mud had been piled to break its roof as a way to forcefully
accelerate the process of its decay. The graffiti transformed the
function of Smithson’s piece from a general reflection on entropy
into a specific commemoration of the violent end of a peace rally
(which together with the disaster at the festival of Altamont the
same year has subsequently come to symbolize the disillusion of
 the hopes of the 1960s). Green’s research resulted primarily in a
Jan Verwoert 194
series of videos comprising interviews, essayistic reflections, and
found footage material. The videos were shown on four monitors in
a room installation defined by selected elements of 1970s design.
The walls were painted orange, cushions with floral prints, wool
carpets, wall hangings with slogans and organically molded plastic
chairs were distributed around the room. This obviously constructed
stage–like scenario nevertheless produced a cozy and comfortable
atmosphere inviting visitors to stay, watch the videos or go through
a small archive with magazines and (music) records of the time.
Three narratives overlap in the work: personal biography, art
history, and collective political history. Many different stories are
told. The form in which these narratives are organized is not linear
sequence but rather spatial proximity and personal association. It
is the atmosphere, or the mood, generated by the theatrical setting
of the installation that creates a moment of coherence by defining
the limits of the display. What is in the space is what is available
for reflection. All of the props that the viewer needs in order to
engage with the work are on stage. There is no backstage. The
biographical investment of the artist suggests that connections ex-
ist between the materials on display. The nature of this connection
is subject to the viewer’s own investigations. Interestingly, the bi-
ography of the artist only serves as a formal guarantee that con-
necting phenomena through personal association and experience
is indeed a viable method for gaining historical insights. As a first
person narrator who tells a story of her mother, of the massacre at
Kent State, and of the transformation of a work by Smithson, Green
simply relates historic events to the realm of lived experience. The
perspective of the first person narrator subsequently serves as an
empty form, a vacant position, which the viewers are asked to take.
In the role of the narrator, the viewers have to ask themselves: How
would I tell this story? What would my stake in the matter be? The
writing of history is progressively personalized and particularized
as Green puts the viewers in her place and past.04
The Essayistic Installation
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 195
Other artists have continued to explore and expand the method of
using the installation space as a (both pragmatic and personal) site
for the display of research materials. One interesting example is the
installation Short Hills (1999) by Austrian artist Dorit Margreiter. The
work is based on research that Margreiter conducted on the TV view-
ing habits of her Asian-American relatives in New Jersey, the Chang
family. The work takes its cue from the fact that the Changs recently
built an annex to their house, which serves as a room to watch TV.
With the help of partition walls and wooden scaffoldings, Margreiter
constructs a lifesize model of the TV room in the installation. Thus,
seeing the work implies entering a model private space. On one
wall we find a generic photograph of the Hong Kong skyline. Most
of the installation, however, is taken up by a model landscape with
two green plains separated by a river, which is propped up on two
sawhorses. A video recorder and beamer as well as a DVD player
are arranged on this landscape. The films screened on these units
include interview-footage with Margreiter’s middle-aged aunt, Sandra
Chang, who speaks about the Chinese soap opera that she watches
daily in order to keep some kind of contact with her home country.
Other interview materials show the teenage cousin, Melissa Chang,
who elaborates in detail why she prefers the series “Buffy, the Vam-
pire Slayer” to “Dawson’s Creek.” Excerpts from the different TV
programs are on display as well.
The work shares certain traits with a sociological research
project into the viewing habits of television audiences. It focuses
on how members of a particular audience (characterized by their
gender and ethnicity) negotiate their own identity in relation to the cli-
chéd identities that daily mainstream soaps and series have to offer
to them. Similar issues might be addressed in an essay in the field of
04 In her much quoted essay “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” in October, no. 80 (Spring 1997):
85–110, Miwon Kwon comments on Green’s work and reflects on the role of the artist as narrator-protagonist
in general. She suggests that “In some cases, this renewed focus on the artist leads to a hermetic implosion of
(auto)biographical and subjectivist indulgences, and myopic narcissism is misrepresented as self-reflexivity.”
(p. 104). While this is obviously true in general, Kwon does not recognize the potential of a strategy based on
personal identification as a means to criticize both universalist and authoritatively didactic accounts of history
by situating the viewer in a particular position and endowing him or her with a personal responsibility for the writing
of history in the case at hand.
 cultural studies. So where is the difference between the way in which
Jan Verwoert 196
this sociological issue of identity politics might be processed in an
academic paper and the way in which it is handled in Margreiter’s
installation? First of all, Margreiter follows Green in openly basing
her research on personal interests. Consequently, the legitimation of
the work differs fundamentally from that of an academic paper which
(at least pro forma) justifies its claims for truth with recourse to scien-
tific objectivity. What is gained by this approach has been described
above as a stronger involvement of the audience through a politics
of articulated interests. (The personal mode of address invites view-
ers to invest interest and take on responsibility. At the same time the
authority of the work is relativized, since the encounter between pro-
ducer and recipient is one between particular individuals.) Secondly,
the linear logic of the scientific paper is broken up. By spreading
reference material in a space, the installation can be discursive with-
out having to follow the consecutive structure of academic reasoning
in which propositions are followed by arguments which lead up to
conclusions. Rather, Margreiter’s installation works like a network of
cross-references. Coherence is determined by their configuration in
space and by the atmosphere this space creates. As a viewer, you
do not follow the steps of a given argumentation. Rather, you enter
the space and tune in to the atmosphere and then move from cross-
reference to cross-reference in circular motions.
So if the research-based installation contradicts the linear logic
of the scientific text, could it still be likened to the format of the
essay? Interestingly, in his essay “Der Essay als Form” Theodor
W. Adorno defines the essay as a medium that does not obey the
laws of scientific methodology in various regards.
essay makes no claim to objectivity, since the relationship between
the author and the object of reflection is “emphatic”: It is charac-
terized by personal interest articulated in the guise of libidinous
curiosity. Adorno argues that the essay can reveal surprising truths
05 Theodor W. Adorno, “Der Essay als Form,” in Philosophie und Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 5–32. I am
indebted to Søren Grammel for pointing this wonderful text out to me.
as it risks error and lack of legitimation. Secondly, Adorno claims
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 197
that the essay opposes the logic of continuity ensured by scientific
method by embracing discontinuity. The order in which arguments
and thoughts are presented in an essay is self-consciously contin-
gent. There is no proposition or conclusion, no deduction or induc-
tion. The essay could potentially end at any given point or continue
beyond its actual end. It is fascinating to see that Adorno describes
this logic of discontinuity in spatial metaphors. The work of the
essayist is to create configuration of related terms. It is not as a
sequence in time but as a “constructed coexistence” in space, as
a “force field” or “mosaic.” As a text, the essay produces insights
by means of the “interferences between its concepts in the process
of mental experience” (“durch die Wechselwirkung seiner Begriffe
im Prozess geistiger Erfahrung”).06 Experience becomes the ground
upon which the mediation between different elements in a com-
plex constellation becomes possible. This form of mediation in turn
avoids the objectification and commodification brought about by
scientific rationality. If you follow this definition of the essay it could
be said to sum up quite clearly what is at stake in the epistemologi-
cal politics of the essayistic installations by Green and Margreiter.
From Space to Time: Documentary Film and Video in the Art
Context
Given that a key motive for the spatial display of research material
in installations was the attempt to criticize and find an alternative to
sequential organization and subsequent commodification of history
in linear narratives07, it came as some surprise that in the course
05
First of all, the of the 1990s the documentary video began to enjoy more and more
06 Ibid., 18.
07 Philip Rosen argues in his essay “Document and Documentary” (in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov,
[New York and London: Routledge, 1993], 58–89) that most conventional documentary films are in line with a
hegemonial understanding of Western historiography, since they share the same basic principle of constructing
history. Rosen argues that this principle is the making of historical meaning through an act of arranging individual
records of particular events (single documents or visual chronicles such as news-images) in a sequential order to
charge them with meaning: “If shots as indexical traces of past reality may be treated as documents in the
broad sense, documentary can be treated as a conversion from the document. This conversion involves a
synthesizing knowledge claim, by virtue of a sequence that sublates an undoubtable referential field of pastness
into meaning.” (ibid, 71) If the sequence is identified as the key to the conventional logic of historic interpretation,
it follows that a fundamental critique of the status quo of historiography has to be directed against the principle
of the sequence.
 popularity in the art context as a medium for displaying research
Jan Verwoert 198
results. Since video is a time-based medium, its logic of representa-
tion is necessarily linear to a certain degree. In the editing, informa-
tion is arranged in sequences. One thing comes after another. It
now seems interesting to see how different artists worked with the
moment of linearity and sequence in the medium of video docu-
mentation. One example that comes to mind is Danish artist Gitte
Villesen’s video, Willy as DJ (1995). The piece is an unashamedly
straightforward recording of the artist’s visit to the home of pension-
er Willy, who introduces her to his record collection, tells stories he
associates with individual songs, plays some of his favorite music,
and asks her to dance with him. Although what you see unfolds in
time, it does not follow the laws of a logically structured sequence
of organized information. Different things keep happening as we go
along. The aspect the video focuses on is the performative dimen-
sion of the encounter between the artist and the collector. First the
dialogue goes back and forth between the person in front and the
one behind the camera. We witness not so much an interview but a
dynamic exchange between two people in one space, which leads
to them performing a foxtrot together. It seems that the dynamic
time of social performance replaces the sequential argumentative
logic of didactic documentary films. In regard to the work by Green
or Margreiter, it could be argued that Villesen merely goes one step
further by documenting on video what a visitor would do in an in-
stallation archive: perform in relation to the available material. While
in the installation context the viewer is transformed into a model
recipient exemplifying the possibility of an active engagement with
particularized histories, along similar lines, Villesen stages a model
scenario of two individuals performing freely in a particular archive
founded on personal interests and investments.
A further interesting aspect of the use of documentary film as
a means to display research material is the question of how the cin-
ematic space of video and film can be related to the space of the
archive. The installation discussed above transforms the exhibition
space into a space of reflection. Still they rely on its physical dimen-
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 199
sions and limits to create a moment of coherence. The diverse ma-
terials on display are linked together through the unity of place and
time created within the confines of a stage-like setting. Since video
and film do not depend on the unified space of the theater stage,
it is interesting to see whether this medium can be used as a site
for contesting conventional notions about the space of memory. An
interesting example got discussion in this context might be the film,
Legend Coming True (1999, super 8mm film transferred to video, 68
min), by the Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius. The film is an
attempt to address the history of the holocaust in Vilnius. Its pro-
logue starts with a black screen. An elderly woman starts speaking
on the sound track in Russian with a Yiddish accent. It turns out
that she has lived in Vilnius for decades and is one of the very few
who survived the elimination of the Jewish ghetto and the murder of
its 20,000 inhabitants. In a ceaseless flow of words, her monologue
unfolds. Detailed memories of everyday life are interwoven with an
account of her struggle in the ghetto resistance movement. On the
visual level, the film presents only four location shots: an image of
the narrator’s childhood street, an image of her school, one of the
former ghetto, and one of the marshes where the partisans hid. All
shots are taken with a static camera set to record one frame every
minute during 24 hours. As each shot begins before dawn and
ends after sunset, the screen lights up as the day breaks to expose
the view of the location and darkens again when night falls. Blurry
shadows are the only trace of people passing by.
Throughout the film the narrator’s face is never shown. The
images of Legend coming True are only deserted stage sets in
which the voice of the narrator resonates. It is somewhere in be-
tween the audible narration and the visible sites that history is
brought to life by the imagination of the viewer. The discontinuous
cinematic space created through the technique of montage dis-
rupts the belief in the possibility of mapping history onto consistent
coordinates. Where then is the site of history? Is it in the mind
 and biographical memory of the individual? Or is it engraved in
Jan Verwoert 200
the factual existence of physical places, in architecture as a silent
witness? Narkevičius’ film seems to suggest that it is neither here
nor there but somewhere in between—in a third space emerging in
the rupture between the visible and the audible, personal memory
and collective history, fact and fiction, a space that can only be
mapped in the course of a performative effort of crossing it again
and again on different trajectories guided by different interests. It
seems that, paradoxically, a time-based medium like documentary
video or film offers interesting possibilities for dissecting notions
about the space of memory. It is from the cracks in the space
of the archive opened up by the technique of cinematic montage
that maybe another critically refined definition of how to display
research may emerge.
On the Site of Photography
While the space of the archive forms a coherent whole and time
in film is organized as a structured continuum, space and time are
fragmented in photography. A photograph can only show a seg-
ment of space and a moment in time. It has to break down totalities
into details. Moreover, the photograph cannot “own” the space it
depicts in the same way in which the archive owns its own space
by physically encompassing it. The space of the archive is inside
its walls while the space a photograph shows always remains out-
side the image. Although the photograph testifies to the physical
presence of the photographer (or at least the camera) on the site
where the photograph is taken, the claim the photograph stakes
on the site is relatively weak. The photograph does not absorb the
site, it does not “take” the space—neither in the military sense that
possession is taken of a contested site through the erection of a
flag and the construction of fortifications, nor in the literal sense
that the space or parts of it are taken, transported or dislocated to
another place. (A photograph can be taken in preparation for such
manoeuvres. A site might be photographed in order to be identified
as the possession of its potential owner. The ownership, however,
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 201
has to be enforced and ensured by other means, through legal
verdicts, brute force, or architecture, for instance.)
Curiously, photographers always remain alien to the site of
the shot. Even if they happen to own or be familiar with the place
(e.g. the family home), the act of taking the photograph turns them
into visitors, or even tourists on their own premises. No matter how
close a photograph comes to the space it records, the interaction
between the photographer and the space always resembles the act
of scratching on a solid surface. On the one hand the look through
the viewfinder corresponds to or even reinforces the position of the
individual on the site of the shot, since it is in accordance with his
or her specific point of view from which the photograph is taken.
On the other hand, the look through the viewfinder alienates the
subject from the object he or she records. Paradoxically, the view
of the site of the photograph is subjectified through the choice of a
particular perspective, while it is simultaneously objectified through
the recording apparatus, which is put in-between the viewer and
the viewed.
Undoubtedly, photography owns its own time. The split second
it captures, however, does not hold the same promise as the contin-
uum of passing time that film can record. By virtue of this property,
film generates the powerful illusion that it can make change visible
and show history in motion. Photography, on the contrary, has to
wait for the lucky moment when history chooses to freeze in an al-
legorical pose. One body, one bullet, one jerky move photographed
in midair by pure coincidence has to stand in for a war which
lasted years. In regard to the fragmentary nature of the time that
the photograph captures, you could argue that not only the space
but also the moment photography records is outside the image. It
can only point to but never positively visualize ongoing processes
in a temporal continuum. Moreover, the conditions under which a
photograph is interpreted are also marked by their precarious rela-
tion to time. Basically, the photograph safeguards reality as material
 that might be of possible importance. The actual evaluation of the pirical data awaiting interpretation. This is the truly radical way in

Jan Verwoert 202

entweder: „under which a
photograph...“ oder „under
which photography...“
significance of the photograph, however, is put off until a later date.
At the time of the recording you cannot tell whether the photo is a
hit or a miss. In order to find this out, you have to wait for the nega-
tive to be developed. On the basis of the contact print you then
have to decide again which shot to keep and develop further and
which shot to abandon. Polaroid and digital photography has short-
ened the interval between the recording and the inspection to the
few seconds it takes for the image to appear on the paper or the
camera’s display. Yet, we still wait anxiously for the moment when
it is revealed to see how the image has “come out.” This temporal
logic of postponement, anticipation, and surprise seems essential
to the joy of photography. But even if you see the photograph you
can never be entirely certain of its significance or meaning. One
photograph is always a part of a series of many on a film. For each
one that is chosen (to be developed, kept, displayed, etc.) there
are others which are abandoned. Who knows, maybe the wrong
image was picked and the truly important one is still undeveloped,
because no one realized its significance as a negative?
Moreover, the photograph can never say what it shows. It can
never become an unambiguous piece of information, since the
meaning of what is shown remains open for debate. In this sense
Philip Rosen writes (in relation to the historic example of an NBC
news program in which the first transmission of pictures of the
assassination of John F. Kennedy prompted a hectic outburst of
commentaries by anchorman Bill Ryan): “The image emerges as
insufficient in itself. It must immediately be explained, sense must
be made, the very shape of the image requires verbal explana-
tion and pinpointing.”08 But unlike documentary film, a photograph
cannot contain its own commentary. Interpretation can never be
successfully, that is conclusively, inscribed into a photograph. To
an extent, interpretation always remains external to the photograph
in the sense that the photograph always retains the status of em-
08 Ibid., 62.
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 203
which photography is dispossessed of its own time. In the temporal
economy of interpretation the process in which a photograph is
subjected to reevaluation and recontextualization is open–ended.
This instability of meaning and unclear informational status are
what make the relation of photography to the archive precarious—
such a photograph is not yet a document. It is a record that still has
to undergo the process of certification, which authenticates it as
a document. In this process it has to be categorized and filed for
future reference. To this end, a caption—and a reference—have to
be added to the image as a supplement. (Of course the caption and
reference may be wrong, or rather, might be regarded as false by
another archivist at a later date. Thus the cycle of certification starts
over again.) Since the caption cannot be inscribed onto the image
and the reference thus, in a sense, remains exterior to the photo-
graph, its status as an unambiguous piece of information can never
be fully assured. To the extent in which a photograph is an empirical,
or if you will “indexical” recording, it always remains in need of inter-
pretation and cannot be converted into certified data once and for
all. Philip Rosen claims that this “relatively unbridled indexicality”09
does indeed constitute a subversive threat to any organized form
of documentary representation, even more so because of the sheer
quantity of photographic and filmic material which is recorded and
distributed every day without further certification. Organized forms
of documentary practice, Rosen argues, seek to generate historical
meaning by imposing structure and sequence on the amorphous
mass of indexical material. A central concern of structured docu-
mentation can thus be understood to be the attempt to counter and
control the “dispersive threats from the massive distributability of
indexicalized ‘realities’.”10
On account of the intrinsic properties of the medium, photography
paradoxically constitutes both an aid and an obstacle for the docu-
09 Ibid., 64.
10 Ibid., 65.
 mentary project to make a claim upon reality. Its capacity to produce
Jan Verwoert 204
indexical evidence turns photography into a powerful tool. It can
show what is there. At the same time, it is entirely powerless. It
can neither take hold of a place nor fix meaning in the temporal
economy of (re-)interpretation. On the one hand, the powers of the
photograph boost the promise of the documentary project to “touch
the real.” On the other hand, the obvious limitations of photography
are a constant reminder of the futility of the attempt to bridge the
gap between representation and reality. Precisely because of this
ambivalence, photography offers itself as medium for a performative
critique, that is, for a practice which criticizes the logic of a medium
in the process of using it. To practice a performative critique of the
documentary project would mean to make a statement about reality
by taking its picture and reflect on this very operation by exposing
the modalities of photographic representation—in one go. It is like
taking a chance and calculating your chances at the same time.
A classic example for this kind of approach would be Martha
Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1975).
The work consists of a series of location shots of the Bowery, a
street in lower Manhattan, which used to be considered to be part
of a rough area. The photographs show house fronts and stretches
of pavement, but no people. The photos are presented together
with white paper cards on which derogatory names for homeless
people are printed, such as “alcoholic, barrelhouse bum, wino, etc.”
If you read them as captions, the words name what you do not see
but would expect to see in the photographs. The effect of the com-
bination of photograph and caption is paradox: On the one hand
the work denounces the promise of the photograph to show the
real by throwing into relief that you only see what your eyes want
to see. The image becomes an accomplice to a willful delusion.
You know the place to be dodgy. This preconception inevitably
alters your perception. The absence of socially deprived people on
the streets makes their presence even more tangible. They fit into
the picture, so you add them into the picture. On the other hand,
however, Rosler’s work can equally be read as a plea for the in-
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 205
nocence of the photograph. After all, it only shows what it shows.
The interpretation which converts the image into a stereotype is
quite obviously based on references which are external to the im-
age. The captions to the image are written on a different piece of
paper. So once the bias has been exposed and denounced, what
remains is the laconic indexicality of the photos. They show a site.
They document in detail what the house fronts along the Bowery
look like. Nothing more, nothing less.
Rosler’s critique is performative in the sense that the disman-
tling of the documentary claim for truth is part of the experience of
a documentary work. Critical reflection unfolds in the process of en-
countering the work. First you see the photographs in accordance
with the suggested interpretation. Then you see the interpretation
apart from the images and understand it as a bias. Finally you see
the images apart from their interpretation and perceive them as
pure indices. Yet, since text and image are integral parts of one
work, to regard one apart from the other is only possible through
a temporal suspension of a perception of the work as a coherent
whole. Once you look at image and text together again, however,
the cycle starts all over. Criticism is not a given, but is a result of
repeatedly undergoing the experience of the work. Moreover, and
importantly so, Rosler’s critique is performative in the sense that
her criticism of the documentary method is articulated in the pro-
cess of putting it to work. Her open skepticism in relation to the
form of the documentation does not make her refrain from realizing
this very documentation. She engages with her subject by making
a statement about the Bowery—about what it looks like and how
we see it. She puts the semantic instability of photography to work
by turning the cyclical structure of reinterpretation into the core
experience of the work. She approaches a site of investigation but
does not stake out a claim on it. The subject of her work is the site
as the object of collective perception and prejudice, not her site,
although she personally engages with it.
 The Documentary Discourse as a Field of Multiple Practices
Jan Verwoert 206
That an essay discussing the documentary approach in the context
of art practice is bound to meander from one medium to another
seems significant in itself. It shows that documentary practice in art
is neither framed as a specific genre nor associated with one par-
ticular medium alone. Instead, the discourse of the documentary
approach in art encompasses a multiplicity of practices developed
in different media. The forms of documentary practice range from
archival displays and essayistic installations to photography as
well, as film and video works realized in different formats (includ-
ing short and full-length films or continuous loops—presented in
single or multi-channel projections or installations with monitor ar-
rangements). With the increased interest in this discourse in recent
years, the field of documentary practice has not only expanded
but continually become more diverse. In the light of this diversity
it might seem questionable whether it is justified at all to speak of
documentary practice in art as a consistent discourse or coherent
field of practice. Yet, even though the notion of genre may no lon-
ger serve as a common denominator for these diverse practices,
what in fact links these practices—and therefore allows them to be
discussed on the grounds of one discourse—is, that the various
practitioners seem to share a common critical sensibility.
Parallel to conceptual art, experimental film and critical theory
(i.e. media- or cultural studies) have produced since the 1960s a
body of knowledge centered around a fundamental critique of rep-
resentation in the media, popular culture, art, and the sciences.
Today, the set of criteria that this body of knowledge has provided
has filtered through into sensibility and intuitions of artists work-
ing within very different media. This sensibility may articulate itself
in the desire to address analogous issues concerning the prob-
lems and potentials of documentary representation. Artists who
are working in different media but who are sensitized to questions
concerning the ideological pitfalls of cultural representations may
in the end face similar problems of how to deal with the subjects
of their representation in a responsible, critical, or otherwise chal-
Research and Display: Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art 207
lenging way. In this sense, the discourse on documentary practice
gains its consistence and coherence on the grounds of a shared
intuition of what is at stake in a contemporary critical discussion of
documentary representations. Seen from this perspective, the field
of documentary practices in art is much more then just a contingent
array of diverse artistic approaches.
Based on the criteria provided by a shared critical sensibility,
the multiplicity of practices can actually be understood and appreci-
ated as a quickly evolving and highly differentiated field of discourse
that asks for and allows for the critical comparison of different con-
ceptual aesthetics. What makes this discourse fascinating is that it
thrives both on the urgent desire to represent specific realities and
on a critical alertness to the power structures and ideologies that
govern such representations. This critical awareness implies a cat-
egorical analysis of these structures and ideologies. Yet, documen-
tary practices take a decisive step beyond categorical criticism by
challenging the laws of representation in the process of producing
representations. In this sense the increased interest in the produc-
tion and discussion of documentary work in the expanded field
of contemporary artistic discourse can be understood as a move
towards a critique of representation that puts structural analysis to
practice in the process of answering to the need to address the
reality of our surroundings.
First published entitled “Research and Display: Transformations of Documentary Prac-
tice in Recent Art” as an introduction to Untitled (Experience of Place), ed. Gregor
Neuerer (London: Koenig Books, 2003), 6–22. This version was published in Site no.?,
year?
Why can the paradigm of representation not function in politics, nor

Struggle, Event, Media 209

in artistic modes of expression, and here especially in the produc-
tion of works that employ moving images?
I will attempt to answer these questions by using the paradigm
that imagines the constitution of the world from the relationship be-
tween event and multiplicity. Representation is conversely founded
on the subject-work paradigm. In this paradigm the images, the
signs and the statements have the function of representing the
object, the world, whereas in the paradigm of the event, images,
signs, and statements contribute to allowing the world to happen.
Images, signs, and statements do not represent something, but
rather create possible worlds. I would like to explain this paradigm
using two concrete examples: the dynamic of the emergence and
the constitution of post-socialist political movements and the way
television functions, in other words, signs, images, and statements
in contemporary economy.
The days of Seattle were a political event, which—like every
event—first generated a transformation of subjectivity and its own
mode of sensibility. The motto “a different world is possible” is symp-
tomatic for this metamorphosis of subjectivity and its sensibility.
The difference between this and other political events of the
recently-ended century is radical. For example, the event of Seattle
no longer refers to class struggle and the necessity of taking power.
It does not mention the subject of history, the working class, its en-
emy capital, or the fatal battle that they must engage in. It restricts
itself to announcing that “something possible has been created,”
that there are new possibilities for living, and that it is a matter of
realizing them; that a possible world has been expressed and that
it must be brought to completion. We have entered into a different
intellectual atmosphere, a different conceptual constellation.
Before Seattle, a different world was merely virtual. Now it is
actual or possible, but it is something actual, something possible
that has to be realized. The transformation of subjectivity must in-
vent time-space arrangements that watch over this re-evaluation of
 values, which was able to bring forth a generation that has grown
Maurizio Lazzarato 210
up after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the period of major American
expansion, and in the New Economy. Twofold creation, twofold in-
dividuation, twofold becoming. The signs, images and statements
play a strategic role in this twofold becoming: they contribute to al-
lowing the possible to emerge, and they contribute to its realization.
It is at this point that the “conflict” is confronted with the dominant
values. The implementation of new possibilities for living runs into
the existing organization of power and the established values. In
the event, one sees what is intolerable about an era and the new
possibilities for living that it contains at the same time. The mode
of the event is the problematical. The event is not the solution to a
problem, but rather opens up what is possible. For Mikhail Bakhtin,
the event reveals the nature of being as a question or as a prob-
lem—specifically in such a way that the sphere of the being of the
event is simultaneously that of “answering and questioning.”
The days of Seattle involve a corporeal arrangement, a com-
bination of bodies (with their actions and passions) composed of
individual and collective singularities (multiplicity of individuals and
organizations—Marxists, ecologists, union activists, Trotskyists,
media activists, “witches,” Black Bloc, etc., which practice specific
corporeal relations of co-functioning); and there is an arrangement
of statements, a regime of statements formed from a multitude
of statement regimes (the statements of the Marxists are not the
same as those of the media activists, the ecologists, or the “witch-
es,” etc.). The collective statement arrangements are not expressed
solely through language, but also through the technological ex-
pression machines (Internet, telephone, television, etc.). Both ar-
rangements are constructed in terms of the current relationships of
power and desire.
The event turns away from historical conditions in order to create
something new: a new combination of bodies (actions and pas-
sions, which are strung together among the demonstrators, for
example) and that which is expressed, the verbal statement as a
result, as an effect of the corporeal combination: a different world
Struggle, Event, Media 211
is possible.
What is expressed (the meaning) does not describe the bodies
nor represent them. The possible world exists completely, but it does
not exist outside that through which it is expressed (the slogans, the
TV reports, the Internet communications, the newspapers).
The event actualizes itself in souls in the sense that it gener-
ates a change in sensibility (as a non-corporeal transformation),
which brings forth a new valuation: one recognizes what is intolera-
ble about an era and the new possibilities for living that it implies.
The possible world has already been imbued with a certain
reality through talking, through communicating, but this reality must
now be completed, it must be made by making new corporeal ar-
rangements.
The event constitutes the relationship between the two types of
arrangements; it is the event that distributes the subjectivities and ob-
jectivities that will overthrow the configurations of bodies and signs.
Everyone comes with their own corporeal machine and their
own expression machine and returns home with the necessity of
newly defining these in relation to that which is done and said.
The forms of political organization (of the co-functioning of the
bodies) and the forms of statements (the theories and statements
about capitalism, the subjects, forms of exploitation, etc.) are to be
weighed and related to the event. Even the Trotskyists are com-
pelled to ask: What happened? What is happening? What will hap-
pen? and to report what they do at the event (the organization) and
what they say (the discourse they conduct).
At this point we see that the order of verbal statements is what
is problematic. All are compelled to open themselves to the event,
i.e. to open themselves up to the area of questions and answers.
Those who hold answers prepared in advance (and there are many
of those), miss the event. That is the political drama that we lived
after 1968, missing the event, because the questions already had
their predetermined answers (Maoism, Leninism, Trotskyism).
 The event insists, which means it continues to have an impact, to
Maurizio Lazzarato 212
produce effects: the discussions about what capitalism is and what
a revolutionary subject is today are making good progress all over
the world in light of the event.
Language, signs, and images do not represent something,
but rather contribute to making it happen. Images, languages, and
signs are constitutive of reality and not of its representation.
Let us turn now to the question of how signs, images, and
statements are used by corporations in contemporary capitalism.
The corporation does not generate the object (the commodity),
but rather the world in which the object exists. Nor does it generate
the subject (worker and consumer), but rather the world in which
the subject exists.
In contemporary capitalism, we must first distinguish the enter-
prise from the factory. Two years ago, a large French multinational
corporation announced that it would part from eleven production
sites. This separation between enterprise and factory is a border-
line case, but one that is becoming increasingly frequent in con-
temporary capitalism. In the majority of cases, these two functions
are mutually integrated; we presume, however, that their separation
is symbolic of a more profound transformation of capitalist produc-
tion. What will this multinational corporation retain? What does it
understand as “enterprise”? All the functions, all the services, and
all the employees that allow it to create a world: marketing, service,
design, communication, etc.
The enterprise generates a service or a product. In its logic,
the service or the product exists, just like consumers and produc-
ers, for its world, the world of the enterprise; the latter must be
internalized in the souls and bodies of the workers and consumers.
In contemporary capitalism, the enterprise does not exist outside
the producers and consumers that give it expression. Its world, its
objectivity, and its reality mix with the relationships that the enter-
prise, the workers, and the consumers have with one another.
Communication/Consumption
Struggle, Event, Media 213
Let us start with consumption, because the relationship between
supply and demand has been reversed: the customers are the pivotal
point of the enterprise strategy. In reality, this definition from political
economics does not even touch the problem: the sensational rise,
the strategic role played in contemporary capitalism by the expres-
sion machine (of opinion, communication, marketing and thus the
signs, images, and statements).
Consumption is not reduced to the act of buying and carrying
out a service or a product, as political economics and its criticism
teach, but instead means, first of all, belonging to a world or a
universe.
Which world is this? It is enough to turn on the television or
the radio, go for a walk in a city, buy a weekly or daily newspaper,
to know that this world is constructed through a statement arrange-
ment, through a sign regime, the expression of which is called
advertising, and what is expressed (the meaning) is a prompt, a
command, representing per se a valuation, a judgment, a view of
the world, of themselves and others. What is expressed (the mean-
ing) is not an ideological valuation, but rather an incentive (it gives
signs), a prompt to assume a form of living, i.e. a way of dressing,
having a body, eating, communicating, residing, moving, having a
gender, speaking, etc. Television is a stream of advertising that is
regularly interrupted by films, entertainment programs, and news
programs. According to the way Jean-Luc Godard depicts it, if you
take out all the pages of a newspaper that contain advertising, it is
reduced to the editorial by the editor-in-chief. And radio is just as
much a stream of advertising and programs, in which it is increas-
ingly difficult to distinguish where one begins and the other ends.
Unfortunately, we must agree with Deleuze in his conviction that
the enterprise has a soul, that marketing has become its strategic
center, and that advertising specialists are “creative.”
The enterprise exploits to its own advantage the dynamic of
the event and the process of constituting difference and repetition
 by distorting them and making them dependent on the logic of
Maurizio Lazzarato 214
enhanced value.
For the enterprise, the “event” means advertising (or commu-
nication or marketing). We will analyze this particular aspect of
enterprise strategy in relation to the constitution of the consumers,
its customers. Enterprises now invest up to 40% of their turnover
in marketing, advertising, styling, design, etc. These investments in
the expression machine can far surpass investments in “labor.”
Advertising—like every “event”—first distributes modes of percep-
tion in order to prompt ways of living; it actualizes modes of affecting
and being affected in souls, in order to realize them in bodies. With
advertising and marketing, the enterprise effects incorporeal trans-
formations (the slogans of advertising), which are stated through
bodies and only through bodies. The incorporeal transformations
first produce a change in sensibility (or that is what they would like
to produce), a change in our way of making value judgments.
The incorporeal transformations have no referents, because
they are auto-referential. There are no antecedent needs, no natural
necessities that would satisfy production. The incorporeal transfor-
mations pose the valuations and their object at the same time that
they produce them. Advertising represents the spiritual dimension
of the “event,” which the enterprise and the advertising agencies
invent using images, signs, and statements, and which must be
realized in bodies. The material dimension of the event, its realiza-
tion, is completed when the ways of living, ways of eating, of hav-
ing a body, dressing, residing, etc. are incarnated in bodies: one
lives materially among the goods and services that one buys, in
the houses, among the furniture, with the objects and services that
one has seized as “possible,” in the flows of information and com-
munication, in which we have submerged ourselves. We go to bed,
we rush to do this and that, while that which is “expressed” con-
tinues to circulate (it “insists”) in the hertz waves, in the telematic
networks, and in the newspapers. It doubles the world and our
existence as “something possible,” which is, in fact, already a com-
mand, an authoritarian slogan expressing itself through seduction.
Struggle, Event, Media 215
In which form does marketing produce actualization in the soul?
Which type of subjectivation is mobilized by advertising?
The design of an advertisement, the concatenation and rhythm
of the images, the soundtrack are organized like a kind of “ritor-
nello” or a “whirlwind.” There are advertisements that reverberate
in us like a musical theme or a refrain. You have probably already
been surprised to find yourself whistling a musical theme from
advertising (it certainly happens to me, at least). The Leibnizian dis-
tinction between actualization in souls and realization in bodies is
very important, because these two processes do not coincide and
can result in completely unpredictable effects on the subjectivity of
the monads.
The television networks recognize no national borders, no dif-
ferences in class, status, or income. Their images are received in
non-Western countries or by the poorest classes of the Western
population, who have little or no buying power.
The incorporeal transformations work well on the souls of the
television viewers (in these countries, as well as on the souls of
the poor in rich countries) by creating a new sensibility, because
something possible certainly exists, even if not outside the medium
of its expression (the television images). For what is possible, in
this sense, it is enough to be expressed through a sign in order to
have a certain reality, as Deleuze demonstrated to us.
However, the realization in bodies, the possibility of buying
and living with one‘s body among the services and goods that are
expressed by the signs as possible worlds, does not always follow
(and not at all for the majority of the world population), occasioning
expectations, frustrations, and rejection.
In conjunction with the observation of this phenomenon in Brazil,
Suely Rolnik speaks of two subjective figures, which represent two
extremes, in which the variations of the soul and the body are ar-
ticulated, that are produced by the logic just described: the glamour
of “luxury subjectivity” and the misery of “trash subjectivity.”
 The West is horrified by the new “Islamic” subjectivities. But it has
Maurizio Lazzarato 216
created this “monster” itself and specifically with the help of its
most “peaceful”, most seductive techniques. What we are facing
here are not remnants of traditional societies in need of modern-
ization, but in fact cyborgs that conjoin the “oldest” with the “most
modern.”
The incorporeal transformations happen first and faster than
the corporeal transformations. Three quarters of humanity are ex-
cluded from the latter, but they have easy access to the former (first
and foremost through television). Contemporary capitalism does not
arrive first with the factories: these follow later, if at all. It first arrives
with words, signs, and images. And specifically, these technologies
precede not only the factories today, but also the war machine.
The event is an encounter and it is even a twofold one: one
time it meets the soul, the other the body. This twofold encounter
can make space for a twofold shift, because it is only one opening
of possibilities in the modality of the “problematical.” Advertising
is only one possible world, a fold sheltering virtualities. Unfolding
what is enveloped in it, unfolding the fold, can bring forth complete-
ly heterogeneous effects, because on the one hand they encoun-
ter monads, which are all autonomous, independent, and virtual
singularities. On the other—as we have seen in neo-monadologi-
cal ontology—a different possible world is always virtually present.
The bifurcation of divergent series haunts contemporary capitalism.
Incompatible worlds unfold in the same world. For this reason,
the capitalist process of appropriation is never closed in itself, but
is instead always uncertain, unpredictable, open. “To exist means
to differ,” and this differentiation is newly uncertain, unpredictable,
and risky each time.
Capitalism attempts to control this bifurcation, which is virtually
always possible through variations and continuous modulation: nei-
ther the production of a subject nor the production of an object, but
rather subjects and objects in continuous variation guided by the
technologies of modulation, which are in turn continuously varied.
Control is expressed in Western countries not only through
Struggle, Event, Media 217
modulating brains, but also through forming bodies (in prisons,
schools, and hospitals) and through life management (“workfare”).
We would be doing our capitalist societies a favor, if we think that
everything happens through the continuous variation of subjects
and objects, through modulating brains, and by means of the occu-
pation of memory and attention by signs, images, and statements.
The control society integrates the “old” disciplinary dispositive. In
non-Western societies, where disciplinary institutions and “work-
fare” are weaker and less developed, control immediately means
the logic of war, even in times of “peace” (see Brazil, still).
The paradigmatic body of Western control societies is no lon-
ger represented by the imprisoned body of the worker, the lunatic,
the ill person, but rather by the obese (full of the worlds of the
enterprise) or anorectic (rejection of this world) body, which see
the bodies of humanity scourged by hunger, violence, and thirst
on television. The paradigmatic body of our societies is no longer
the mute body molded by discipline, but rather it is the bodies and
souls marked by the signs, words, and images (company logos)
that are inscribed in us—similar to the procedure, through which
the machine in Kafka’s “Penal Colony” inscribes its commands into
the skin of the condemned.
In the 1970s, Pasolini very precisely described how television
had changed the soul and the body of the Italians, how it was the
main instrument of an anthropological transformation that first and
especially affected youth. He used practically the same concept as
Tarde to describe the modalities of an effect of television at a dis-
tance: the impact of television is due to example rather than disci-
pline, to imitation rather than coercion. It is the steering of behavior,
the influence on possible activities. His film trilogy about bodies
was rejected, because it did not take up this transformation. It still
spoke of the body before the modulation of brains and, with regard
to certain aspects, even before disciplinary societies.
 These incorporeal transformations that come into our heads again

Maurizio Lazzarato 218

and again like ritornelli, which are circulating all over the world at
the moment, penetrating into every household, and which repre-
sent the real weapon for the conquest, the occupation, the seizure
of brains and bodies—they are simply incomprehensible to Marxist
theory and to economic theories. We face a change of paradigms
here, which we cannot grasp starting from labor, from practice. On
the contrary, it could well be that the latter supplies a false image
of what production means today, because the process we have
just described is the precondition for every organization of labor
(or non-labor).
Images, signs, and statements are thus possibilities, possible
worlds, which affect souls (brains) and must be realized in bodies. Im-
ages, signs, and statements intervene in both the incorporeal and
the corporeal transformations. Their effect is that of the creation and
realization of what is possible, not of representation. They contribute
to the metamorphoses of subjectivity, not to their representation.
[05_2003]

Translated by Aileen Derieg

In Jonathan Swift’s novel, Gulliver, an academy plans to give up

The Politics of Truth 221

human language in favor of a thing language, which is supposed
to consist of the things themselves. If people wish to have a con-
versation about something, they are supposed to show the thing
as such. According to Swift’s academy, this language has great
advantages, since it is understood everywhere and is thus useful
for commerce and general communication. We can state without
exaggeration that documentary languages have succeeded in tak-
ing on the role of this thing language. Their understanding is largely
independent from national languages and cultures. Their radius
of comprehension is larger than the one of individual languages.
The documentary mode is a transnational language of practice. Its
standard narratives are recognized all over the world and its forms
are almost independent of national or cultural difference. Precisely
because they operate so closely on material reality, they are intel-
ligible wherever this reality is relevant.
This aspect was recognized as early as the 1920s, when Dziga
Vertov euphorically praised the qualities of the film of facts. In the
preface of his film, “The Man with the Movie Camera,” he claimed
that documentary forms were able to organize visible facts in a
truly international absolute language, which could establish an opti-
cal connection between the workers of the world. He imagined a
sort of communist visual adamic language, which should not only
inform or entertain, but also organize its viewers. It would not only
transmit messages, but also connect its audience to a universal
circulation of energies, which literally shoot through their nervous
systems. By articulating visible facts, Vertov wanted to short-circuit
his audience with the language of things itself, with the pulsating
drives of matter.
In a sense, his dream has become true, if only in inverted
form under the rule of global information capitalism. A transnational
documentary jargon is now connecting people within global media
networks. The standardized language of newsreels with its econo-
my of attention based on fear, the racing time of flexible production,
 and hysteria is as fluid and affective, as immediate and immersive
Hito Steyerl 222
as Vertov could have imagined. It creates global public spheres
whose participants are linked almost in a physical sense by mutual
excitement and anxiety. Thus, the documentary form is now more
potent than ever; it conjures up the most spectacular aspects of the
language of things and amplifies their power.
But while Vertov aimed at unleashing the social forces, which
were congealed in things by capitalist commodification, contem-
porary documentary jargons have, on the contrary, exploited the
occult potentials of documentary expression. They short-circuit fear
and superstition with the realm of information. There is sometimes
only a minimal difference between a piece of documentary informa-
tion and a stereotype, between a guide for orientation in a complex
world and wholesale judgments about whole regions and popu-
lations. Information and disinformation, rationalism and hysteria,
sobriety and exaggeration are not clearly separated within these
networks. The border between description and confabulation blurs,
and fact and fiction fuse into “factions”. The docu-jargons of the
present immerse their public into a barrage of intense affects, an
incoherent mix of tragedy and grotesqueness, which catapults the
old curiosity of the vaudeville into the digital age. Ever more coarse
and blurry images—which show less and less content—evoke a
permanent state of crisis. These images create the norm by report-
ing the exceptional, even unimaginable; they transform the excep-
tion into the rule.
Documentary forms partake in the arousal of fear and feelings
of ubiquitous threat. They inform panicked subjects as well as hos-
tile and mutually suspicious collectives. In times of a presumed war
between cultures, they become active players defining those cul-
tures in the first place. The general uncertainty catalyzed by recent
political upheavals is channeled into simplifying clichés about oth-
ers. Those pseudo-documentary images do not represent any real-
ity in the first place. They tend to realize themselves instead within
the political dynamics they originally helped to unleash. Stereotypi-
cal assumptions about so-called cultures can catalyze dangerous
The Politics of Truth 223
social dynamics and align reality step by step to its caricature.
But the documentary languages of the present also have a
different function. In an age of globalization, when traditional forms
of the social are shattered and national languages are downsized
to local idioms, they offer orientation in an ever-expanding world.
Paolo Virno recently remarked that clichés or jargons were not ex-
clusively misleading. Rather than blatant misinformation, they may
also turn out to be just empty common-places01. If we understand
this term literally, it also designates a site of common communica-
tion. A language based on such common-places is able to tran-
scend borders and enable a public debate across them. But the
real existing documentary public spheres are underlying severe
restrictions. As Virno also remarked, commodified public spheres
are not public at all.02 These public spheres remain lopsided; they
speak in a standardized industrial international jargon, but do not
allow any participation. The non-public public sphere isolates while
it connects people to each other; it locates people in the world by
fanning fears of homelessness; it communicates by simplifying; it
is affective but only insofar as it serves instincts and a feeling of
general menace.
The non-public public sphere can be fearsome. Let us be hon-
est, though; it can also be fun. It connects us in real-time to the
most improbable things, but prescribes the form and the speed of
these connections. It is based on effects of immediacy, on innerva-
tion, the thrill of voyeurism, or the complacency of bias. The lan-
guages of news media transport the conformism of things, not their
potential of transformation. The more extraordinary, catastrophic,
and eccentric things behave within them, the more everything else
can stay the same.
01 Paolo Virno, Grammatik der Multitude (Vienna: Turia und Kant, 2006), 42ff.
02 Ibid., 51.
 Private Public Spheres
Hito Steyerl 224
The formula of the general transformation of documentary forms
under the conditions of globalization can be expressed by the no-
tion of privatization. From an economical perspective, documentary
production in Europe came under pressure from the privatization of
national and state-funded public spheres; from a content perspec-
tive, this pressure intensified the demand for private and intimate
subject matter. The consequence of this double privatization is the
development of an increasingly private public sphere—metaphori-
cally condensed within voyeuristic docu-soaps broadcast on pri-
vate TV channels.
But there is also a very different consequence of this widespread
privatization for documentary practices in the present. After digital
technology trickled down to consumer good production, access to it
was extremely facilitated. The means of production of documentaries
are more accessible than ever; they can literally be privatized and
no longer exclusively belong to the tightly guarded privilege of state-
controlled organizations or large media corporations. Throughout the
20th century, the control over the means of audiovisual production
was repeatedly reorganized in the wake of key advances in technol-
ogy: most recently with the advent of the digital era.
The keyword for this development is: camcorder revolution. It
describes the mass circulation of audiovisual equipment as well
as the political upheavals—for example the Romanian revolution in
1989—which were ambivalently entangled with these new technolo-
gies. These optical-political transformations proceeded simultane-
ously with a general restructuring of production, to the demise of
industrial labor in the industrial centers and the emergence of new
types of flexibilized workers. The production of documentary tends
to increasingly merge with other fields of mass symbolic production
within contemporary cultural industries, which are all characterized
by creative output, freelancing, and widespread flexibilization. Even
the previously elitist and highly limitated realm of documentary image
production was largely proletarized. Small teams of freelancers and
I-reporters replaced fully employed journalists. On the other hand the
The Politics of Truth 225
extreme reduction of costs within digital production also created a
space for de-professionalized popular media experimentation.
Networked Production
The conditions of documentary productions within the art field are
a case in point of such ongoing de-professionalization.03 While ex-
perimentation is possible and often even desired in this area, it
becomes possible by producing it at minimal cost. Experimental
or low-budget documentary production in the art field is often per-
formed under do-it-yourself conditions with small digital cameras
and home computers. Contracts are rare and primarily in place to
preserve the interests of institutions. Work place and private sphere
blur, just as do the functions of author, administrator, amateur trans-
lator, and technical coordinator. But although this production is in-
creasingly individualized—the author is very often indeed the pro-
ducer—, it also tends to take place more and more in “common”.
A rather anonymous commons located within databases. Images
are swapped, sounds downloaded, ideas shared with aliases. P2P
networks provide darkrooms for illicit archival downloads. Experi-
mental documentary production increasingly immerses itself into
malleable streams of digital data; it intercepts, appropriates, copies,
and distributes. The printing lab is replaced by ripping software.
Authorship, copyright, intellectual property are reassessed. This
type of production taps into the streams of dramas and desires that
are invisibly flowing around the world and traverse our bodies in
the form of WiFi signals. This is reality now. The new documentary
does not picture this reality, but rips off large chunks to incorporate it.
Dziga Vertov’s slogan of an “optical connection” between the
workers of the world is ironically updated within these communi-
cation networks, which link volatile and geographically-dispersed
groups of people in partially common operational procedures.
03 Although there is no systematic research into these conditions as yet (and although it does not concern a low budget
production either) Harun Farocki’s production diary of his work Deep Play provides a fascinating case study. The
German version is accessible online at: http://newfilmkritik.de/archiv/2007-12/auf-zwolf-flachen-schirmen/
 Those linkages are transitory sites of the production of commons, However, documentary expressions are not only a possible arena

Hito Steyerl 226

The Politics of Truth 227

channels through which images, sounds, and ideas travel. of a public debate. Their production creates material arrangements,
which organize things and humans in ever-shifting combinations
Production vs. Distribution throughout dispersed geographical locations. They connect hu-
All these ambivalent transformations are contributing to the reorgan- mans and machines, images and sounds, hard drives and desires.
ization of documentary practices. The very processes, which have As common practices or as shared operational procedures, they
extended the reach of documentary articulations across the globe anticipate alternative forms of social composition. To work on these
have not only altered their conditions of production dramatically conditions means to work on reality today.
but also their channels of distribution. But while production on the
An extended version of this text was first published in German as Chapter 11 of Hito
whole has rather been facilitated, distribution is becoming more Steyerl, Die Farbe der Wahrheit (Vienna: Turia und Kant, 2008), 121–138.
and more tricky.
The progressive privatization of European state media has led
to a rapid commercialization of their content. Formal experiments
are replaced by docutainment and serial catastrophe. This means
that experimental and reflexive documentary practices have lost
their base and have become homeless. This applies to some ar-
eas of classical documentary film production, as well as to more
experimental and artistic works. They have dispersed into a fluid
and incertain space, which is neither exclusively governed by the
claims of specific national cultures nor by any single clearly distin-
guishable market logic. This space extends from alternative public
spheres into the art field, from university auditoriums to youtube
and self-organized projections, from glamorous film festivals and
blockbuster art shows to the informal distribution of video tapes in
activist circles. This ambivalent zone is defined by various conflict-
ing interests. It would be extremely exaggerated to call it a zone
of artistic freedom. It is based on the divergent effects of techno-
logical development, creativity hypes, social concerns and general
downsizing. It is a laboratory for mainstream innovation, just as it
can accommodate formal experiments and pockets of civil disobe-
dience. But it is also a potential seed for a not yet existent sphere
of common communication, which might realize Vertov’s vision as
an optical connection.
Optical Connection
T. J. Demos

Contributors 229
is a critic and lecturer in the Department of Art History, University
College London. The author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (The
MIT Press, 2007), his essays on modern and contemporary art have
appeared in international journals such as Artforum, Grey Room,
October, and Texte zur Kunst. He is currently at work on a new
book, provisionally titled Migrations: Contemporary Art and Global-
ization, which will investigate the relationship of contemporary art to
the experience of social dislocation and political crisis.

Okwui Enwezor
is Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Fran-
cisco Art Institute and Adjunct Curator at International Center of
Photography. He is a curator, writer, and critic, and served as artis-
tic director of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, documenta 11, 2nd
Seville Biennale, and 7th Gwangju Biennale. He is the editor and
publisher of Nka. Journal of Contemporary African Art published at
Africana Studies Center, Cornell University, Ithaca.

Carles Guerra
is associate professor of Contemporary Art at the Universitat Pompeu
Fabra, Barcelona. He is also an artist and art critic. He has curated
numerous exhibits, including: Art & Language in Practice; After the
News. Postmedia Documentary Practices; The Invisible Insurrection
of One Million Minds; Situation Cinema. A Retrospective of Joaquín
Jordá’s Films; B Zone. On the Margins of Europe; Self-sufficient as
a Painter. A Retrospective of Peter Weiss’ Films; and This is not an
exhibition. He is producer of a video interview with Toni Negri, N for
Negri, is author of Allan Sekula speaks with Carles Guerra and is
editor of the Spanish translation of Art & Language’s Writings. He is
member of the editorial board of Cultura/s, the weekly supplement
published by the newspaper La Vanguardia (Barcelona).
 Vít Havránek
Contributors 230
is a theoretician and organizer based in Prague. Since 2002, he has
been working as a project leader of the initiative for contemporary
art tranzit (tranzit.org), and he has been director of tranzitdisplay, a
resource center for contemporary art, since 2007. He has worked
as a curator for the Municipal Gallery and the National Gallery in
Prague. He is a lecturer in contemporary art at the Academy of
Applied Arts, Prague. He has curated and co-curated numerous
exhibitions, including: A CDEFGHIJK MNOP STUV Z, part of Societe
Anonyme, Le Plateau, Paris; tranzit–Auditorium, Stage Backstage,
Frankfurter Kunstverein; I, a series of exhibitions in three acts, Se-
cession Vienna, Futura Prague, tranzit workshops Bratislava. He has
contributed to numerous catalogues and art magazines (springerin,
Artist, Flash Art) and is the editor of tranzit series (JRP Ringier) and
The Need to Document.
Stefan Jonsson
is senior cultural critic at Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s major newspaper,
and associate professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University College
in Stockholm. A graduate of the Program in Literature at Duke Univer-
sity, he was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles
from 1998-2000 and was visiting professor at University of Michigan
in 2006. His most recent book is A Brief History of the Masses. Three
Revolutions, 1789, 1889, 1989 (Columbia University Press, 2008).
Maurizio Lazzarato
is an independent sociologist, social theorist, and philosopher. He
is also a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes.
He lives and works in Paris, where he is doing research on im-
material work, the explosion of the wage system, and the ontology
of work, cognitive capitalism, and “post-socialist” movements. He
also writes on cinema, video, and the new technologies for the pro-
duction of images. Recent publications include Videophilosophie
(b_books, 2002).
Maria Lind
Contributors 231
was born in Stockholm in 1966. Since January 2008, she has been
director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard
College. From 2005–2007, she was the director of Iaspis in Stock-
holm. She was the director of Kunstverein München from 2002–
2004, where together with a curatorial team she ran a program that
involved artists such as Deimantas Narkevicius, Oda Projesi, Bojan
Sarcevic, Philippe Parreno, and Marion von Osten. From 1997–2001,
she was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and in 1998, co-
curator of Manifesta 2. She has contributed widely to magazines
and to numerous catalogues and other publications. She is the
co-editor of the recent books Curating with Light Luggage and Col-
lected Newsletter (Revolver – Archiv für aktuelle Kunst), Taking the
Matter into Common Hands: Collaborative Practices in Contempo-
rary Art (Blackdog Publishing), as well as the report European Cul-
tural Policies 2015. She has been teaching and lecturing at different
art schools since the early 1990s.
Olivier Lugon
is an art historian and professor at Lausanne University (film history
department). The focus of his research is on German and American
photography of the inter-war years, the documentary, and exhibi-
tion design. Among his publications are La Photographie en Al-
lemagne. Anthologie de textes, 1919–1939 (Nîmes 1997); Le Style
documentaire. D’August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920–1945 (Paris
2002); “L’esthétique du document. Le réel sous toutes ses formes
(1890–2000),” in L’Art de la photographie, ed. André Gunthert and
Michel Poivert (Paris 2007); “‘Photo-Inflation’: Image profusion in
German photography,” History of Photography (Fall 2008).
Jean-Pierre Rehm
has taught film and art history in various art schools and has
worked for the French Ministry of Culture for several years. He is
still in charge of the post-graduate program in Lyon National Art
 School (ENBAL). As an art and film critic, he writes in many reviews,

Contributors 232
catalogues, and books. He belongs to the editorial board of Les Ca-
hiers du Cinéma. He has curated contemporary art shows in France
and abroad, and he has headed the International Documentary Film
Festival of Marseille (FIDMarseille) since 2001.

Hito Steyerl
is a filmmaker, author, and guest professor for experimental media
creation at the University of Arts, Berlin. She has exhibited in many
international shows including Manifesta 5, documenta 12, 7th
Shanghai Biennial, 3rd Berlin Biennial, and 2nd Seville Biennial and
at film festivals including Rotterdam International film festival, IDFA
Amsterdam, Hot Docs Vancouver, and Docx Copenhagen, among
others. She is the author of Die Farbe der Wahrheit–Dokumentaris-
mus im Kunstbereich (Vienna: Turia und Kant 2008).

Jan Verwoert
is an art historian and critic living in Berlin and is a contributing editor
of frieze. He writes, among others, for Afterall and Metropolis M.
He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and at the Royal
College of Art in London. His book Bas Jan Ader—In Search of the
Miraculous was published in 2006 by Afterall Books/MIT Press.
Page 35

Photo Credits 235

Courtesy IRWIN.
Courtesy Little Warsaw.
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel.
Page 37
Courtesy Roman Ondák.
Photo credit Vit Havranek.
Courtesy, Zbyneˇk Baladrán, Jano Mancˇuška.
Page 84
Courtesy Galerie Polaris, Paris.
Page 89
Courtesy the artist and Alexander and Bonin Gallery, New York.
Page 92,93
Courtesy the artist and Alexander and Bonin Gallery, New York.
Page 96, 97
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
Imprint 236

Imprint 237
The Greenroom
Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art

The Greenroom is published on the occasion of the exhibition The Greenroom:

Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art presented at the Center for
Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, September 26, 2008
– February 1, 2009. About CCS Bard:

The Greenroom exhibition and accompanying publication have been made possi- The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) is an exhibition, edu-
ble with support from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, The Robert cation, and research center dedicated to the study of art and curatorial practices
Mapplethorpe Foundation, Marieluise Hessel, and the Patrons, Supporters, and Friends from the 1960s to the present day. In addition to the CCS Galleries and the Hessel
of the Center for Curatorial Studies. Museum of Art, CCS Bard houses the Marieluise Hessel Collection of over 2,000
contemporary works, as well as an extensive library and curatorial archive. The
Co–published by Sternberg Press and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College Center’s two-year graduate program in curatorial studies is specifically designed to
deepen students’ understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curating
© 2008 the authors, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Sternberg Press contemporary art. Exhibitions are presented year-round in the CCS Galleries and
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Hessel Museum of Art, providing students with the opportunity to work with world-
renowned artists and curators. The exhibition program and the collection also serve
Editors: Maria Lind, Hito Steyerl as the basis for a wide-range of public programs and activities exploring art and its
role in contemporary society.
Translators: Aileen Derieg (Lazzarato), Discobole (Guerra), Charly Hultén (Jonsson)
Proofreading: Penelope Eifrig Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies
Design: Surface, Berlin/Frankfurt am Main, Miriam Rech, Markus Weisbeck Marc S. Lipschultz, Chairman
Printing: xxxxx
Binding: xxxxx +Leon Botstein
ISBN 978-1-933128-53-5 Lori Chemla
Kathryn Chenault
Sternberg Press Martin Eisenberg
Caroline Schneider Carla Emil
Karl-Marx-Allee 78 Marieluise Hessel, Founding Chairman
D-10243 Berlin Maja Hoffmann
www.sternberg-press.com Audrey Irmas
Adam Lindemann
Center for Curatorial Studies and Eugenio Lopez
Hessel Museum of Art Melissa Schiff Soros
Bard College Richard W. Wortham III
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
www.bard.edu/ccs + ex officio