Stuff It

THE VIDEO ESSAY IN THE DIGITAL AGE | 2003

Stuff it is a illustrated collection of texts by video artists and cultural theorists who illuminate the video essay in its role as crossover and communicator between art, theory and critical practice in all its variations: from monologues of disembodyment to cartographies of diaspora experiences and transnational conditions, from the essay as the organisation of complex social shifts to its technological mutation and increasing digitalisation.

Intro

The Video Essay in the Digital Age

By Ursula Biemann

Much has happened since Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, which had marked, in the beginning of the 80s, the emergence of a post-structuralist cinematographic practice defined as film essays. The symposium ”Stuff It,” which we organized in May 2002 in cooperation with the Migros Museum and the Videoex experimental video festival Zurich, set out to map contemporary essayist video practice, which has evolved from the previous body of cinematographic experiments, in order to gain a deeper understanding of how essayism relates to the contingent digital cultural developments today. The purpose of this gathering of international video makers and theorists goes beyond presenting a survey of existing works. It is an attempt to advance and direct the discourse into the digital age.

As a video essayist, I have a personal motivation to bring this particular video practice on the agenda. For a number of reasons, the essay situates itself somewhere between documentary video and video art. And as an in-between genre, these videos often fall through given categories at art events, film festivals and activist conferences. For a documentary, they are seen as too experimental, self-reflexive and subjective, and for an art video they stand out for being socially involved or explicitly political.

Video essayists recognize the potential of this ambivalent position and continue a rich production of thoughtful and highly innovative videos. The idea of this conference, then, was to mark the field of a video practice that is at the same time artistic, theoretical and political. So that we no longer look at the essay as an odd ”strangeling” that refuses to behave properly within the designated categories, but rather recognize it as a distinct aesthetic strategy. It cannot, however, be the aim of this collection of texts to establish the essay as a genre and to crystallize it into a formula. Its strength lies in the quality of the mediator and communicator between differential cultural spaces.

The last major event dedicated to the essayist film was co-organized by Christa Blümlinger in 1991 in Vienna and centered around a German and French film discourse with strong ties to a literary tradition. Since then, art and media debates have greatly evolved in response to political, cultural and technological changes of the last decade. This prompted a discussion at the Institute for Theory around the particularities of this video practice and its ability to respond to and express the present time. Stuff It sets out to recontextualize the audio-visual essay both technologically and culturally. First of all, it is vital to look at video today within the wider development of new media, the Internet and digital image production and understand how these technologies emphasize or mutate the characteristics of the essay while opening up new possibilities for a critical engagement with them. The other fundamental shift is induced by the great geographic and cultural diversity of recent essayist video practice which drives the theoretical discussion from a German and French literary tradition to a postcolonial cultural studies perspective.

What makes the video essay so interesting to the Institute for Theory is precisely its commitment to theory. The videos discussed in this book are intensely involved in theoretical concerns and their mediation through a visual language. A theory of film should be a film, believes film critic Edward Small who refers to this audio-visual critical practice as ”direct theory.” The videos test the possibility of theory-building through visual means, not in an illustrative manner but in a wide range of artistic, poetic, humorous and sometimes rather absurd ways. Absurdity is frequently produced through the disjointed assemblage of visual associations that do not produce continuity in content. But it is exactly these more endearing humorous qualities of the essay that make up for the demanding density proposed by the simultaneous visual, sonic and textual input, which can sometimes be exhausting and frustrating.

The essay has always distinguished itself by a non-linear and non-logical movement of thought that draws on many different sources of knowledge. In the digital age, the genre experiences an even higher concentration. 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. Stuff it! Distill it! Stratify and compress it! seem to be the mottos of the digital essayist.

Film scholar Nora Alter opens the collection of texts with a short review of the literary essay to highlight the many parallels that this critical, innovative written form shares with its audiovisual counterpart. Her thorough analysis of Daniel Eisenberg’s use of historic film footage in his trilogy reveals the importance of insisting on the medium film in the 90s for its potential to pass for a document that may enter history. The use of historic film material is also being addressed in Jan Verwoert’s analysis of Anri Sala’s Intervista in which the young Albanian video artist confronts his mother with a found sequence of an interview she had given as a young communists in Albania. The mothers simultaneous distance and identification with this material is what Verwoert refers to as ”double viewing” in his text, an ambivalence that makes it possible to tell the story while at the same time critically identifying its construction. His extensive analysis of Sala’s video is representative of the lively discussion that has ignited around the appearance of documentary material in the art context in recent times. The following text by Christa Blümlinger explores the essayist approach with regard to the shift in the viewing context for video works from the cinematic setting to the art exhibition space at the example of Harun Farocki’s video and installation work. Today’s digital video production is to be seen in the context of hypertext and the Internet. One of the questions will be whether and how new technologies transform the previously analogue medium of video to become more dissociative, multi-perspective and hypertextual in the structuring of images and sounds. This approach seems to suit the essayist thought pattern much better than the linear, filmic narration that is constructed in the analogue montage. In their theory-performance based on the video Passing Drama, Maurizio Lazzarato and Angela Melitopoulos explore hypertextuality and non-linear montage with regard to the structures of memory and recollection. They are experimenting with different forms of collecting and writing history through videographic practice and digital image processing in an attempt to come closer to our perception of history and to the mechanism of memory in the machine age.

Essayist practice is highly self-reflexive in that it constantly reconsiders the act of image-making and the desire to produce meaning. It is consciously engaged in the activity of representation itself. These characteristics make the genre particularly suited to study complex relations. Essayist work doesn’t aim primarily at documenting realities but at organizing complexities. This ability is very valuable today since video has to respond not only to a changing media environment but also to an increasingly complex society, where the mere depiction of visible realities has become insufficient. The essay is good at capturing the more abstract, untangible processes of social and cultural transitions. Jörg Huber proposes a theory of transitionality, in which he traces and interprets the mediating feature of video-essayism and its ability to make the very process of perception visible. Some of the transitions addressed by the videos discussed in this volume deal with the shift from mechanical work processes to newer technologies, as in Harun Farocki’s work. They may address conceptual shifts in gender identity or concern a mutation in the cultural perception of memory and history, as in the videos by Rea Tajiri, Richard Fung, Mathilde ter Heine and Johan Grimonprez. Along these lines, my reflection on the transnational video explores the parallels between the transnational space of the global economy and the structures of essayist mental space.

A form of transition that is particularly relevant to this discussion literally relates to movements of diaspora, dislocation and migration. There are good reasons why postcolonial artists are such outstanding essayists. Their videos raise the question of how an increasingly ambivalent experience of place, nation and belonging lived by so many cultural producers today has prompted them to develop an artistic language that corresponds to the essayist voice, a voice that speaks from a position of placelessness. On the other hand, essayists are very engaged in rewriting the historical dimensions of places, as becomes evident in Walid Ra’ad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes, in which he proposes a ficticious treatment of the hostage crisis during the Lebanese civil war, and in Hito Steyerl’s The Empty Center, which draws an experimental political archeology of the strip between former East and West Berlin. Rinaldo Walcott, on the other hand, opens up an expanded space of the black digital diaspora in the North Atlantic as a video-theoretical space that enters the difficult terrain of memory, slavery and black displacement with an analysis of Isaac Julien’s The Attendant and Dana Inkster’s Welcome to Africville.

More cheerful essayist methods use humor as a discursive tool. Paul Willemsen explores Steve Reinke’s merry and greatly artistic work, which moves away from recognizable documentary practice to design a creative contemporary milieu around himself that is at the same time highly personal expression and precise social commentary. Visually sophisticated and with theoretical reference to the very act of seeing, Tran T. Kim-Trang unfolds in The Blindness Series a decade of essayist work which covers different pathologies of seeing and not-seeing and their metaphorical values. In the thorough essay Bilder der Welt, Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War) Harun Farocki pursues an ongoing fascination with the role of technology in forming our perception. His meticulous observations comment on the link between new technologies of visualisations and their role in the organisation of war, as Allan J. Thomas explains in his text.

The videos Love Hotel and Writing Desire do not comment on visual technologies from afar, they actually enter and move through the electronic terrain of digital images generated by both the electronic communications networks and the landscapes visually generated by satellite media and other visual information systems. In this instance, the simultaneity and multilayeredness of ideas are produced not through linear editing but directly on the surface of the screen. These videos make apparent how closely the virtual, phantasmatic space of the internet resembles the essayist geographies driven by analysis as much as by wild analogies.

Then there are two contributions which move along the intersection of popular drama and artistic reflection: Guillermo Gomez Peña’s Border Stasis and Steve Fagin’s video TropiCola. In an interview, Steve Fagin laces an essayist fabric of Cuban life through a discussion of popular timba music. A very subjective approach to the recurring theme of ”going places” and bringing back a bunch of disparate observations emerges in a video genre which is by definition essayist: the letter, the travel diary. Some are obsessively visual as Irit Batry’s These are not my images whereas the narrative remains fragmentary and reluctant. In other works the vocal monologue offers personal and philosophical reflexions that becomes the guiding thread through foreign places. In Birgit Hein’s Baby I will make you Sweat, the author reveals her most intimate concerns relating to sexuality and aging by taking us honestly through her sexual experiences in Jamaica. Unlike the documentary, which keeps the commentary closely linked to the image, in the essay the sound and image levels may diverge to the point of becoming completely asynchronous. In Europe from Afar by Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf, the soft female reading voice seems to belong to a multitude of speaking subjects, who continuously entangle reality and the projections of their image of Europe fabricated from far away locations. This piece, which has been conceived as a radio play and a silent video and is sometimes, but not always, shown together, radicalizes the autonomy of image and sound so characteristic to the essay and highlights the performative moment of bringing them together.

Clearly, the following pages cannot give a complete survey of the contemporary video essay. But I hope this volume succeeds in showing how eclectic essayist video practice has been in the 90s. It emerges as an aesthetic and discursive form of video making that holds great potential for contemporary digital production in the context of a transformative global culture.

Contents

Archive
* Johan Grimonprez: dial History
* Rea Tajiri: History and Memory
* Walid Ra'ad: Dead Weight of a Quarrel hangs
* Richard Fung: Sea in the Blood
* Linda Wallace: Lovehotel
* Ursula Biemann: Writing Desire
* Mathilde ter Heijne: For a Better World
* Irit Batry: These are not my Images (neither here nor there)
* Eva Meyer and Eran Schaerf: Europe from afar
* Birig Hein: Baby I will Make You Sweat
* Eric Cazdyn: Sky's the Limit
* Guillermo Gomez Peña: Border Stasis
* Author's notes
* Bibliography

Specs

A collection of texts by video artists and cultural theorists who illuminate the video essay in its role as crossover and communicator between art, theory and critical practice in all its variations. With contributions by Nora Alter, Ursula Biemann, Christa Blümlinger, Steve Fagin, Harun Farocki, Jörg Huber, Angela Melitopoulos/Maurizio Lazzarato, Walid Ra'ad, Steve Reinke, Hito Steyerl, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Jan Verwoert, Rinaldo Walcott, Paul Willemsen and a video archive.

168 pages, color ill., (= T:G series, vol. 02), CHF 43.50/EUR 27
Edition Voldemeer Zurich/ Springer Wien/New York, 2003

ISBN 3-211-20318-4