Contemporary transformations of the image-movement: from post-cinema to post-media

José Luis Brea

In 1959, Marcel Broodthaers produced a film entitled “Song of My Generation”. It was a film collage, put together from documentary fragments, some filmed by the artist himself, others collected from existing material. Evidently it was nothing but a neutral documentary and devoid of any specific artistic pretension. It was simply the recording of a time, of a period, a frozen moment of the collective experience, a sort of memorisation of subjective time, shared time, the psychological time of a community.

It was this artist’s first foray into the film medium, nor would it be his last. A few years later he was to make a perhaps better known film, “A Second of Eternity”, which was presented at Prospekt’s 1971 edition. This time the film was markedly self-reflective. On the one hand it is a film that reflects on the nature itself of the cinematographic medium and its 24 frames per second. On the other, the film also reflects on the presence of its author in the work. The 24 frames which make up the work — a film that lasts exactly one second — reconstruct the successive strokes of his signature, and the spurious promise of eternity for him that his signature’s presence there signifies. Broodthaers writes: “For Narcissus, one second is already the time of eternity. Narcissus has always respected the time of 1/24th of a second. In Narcissus the retinal after-image lasts forever. Narcissus is the inventor of film.”

“A Second of Eternity” is thus first and foremost about the enigma of the image-time, the image-movement. The artist himself in fact had this to say: “A second of eternity has a double meaning. First, it represents cinematographic time. But it also represents the sense and nonsense of the collision of two languages: the language of words and the language of film. Or, better yet, that of the relation between the static image and the moving image”.

We may at this point intuit a very good primary reason why so many of the most important artists of our time have approached film (or more recently video): the search for this “expanded time”, for this time of happening, which is written about in the world of the technical image. Consider, for instance, of “Empire”, the film Andy Warhol made of the famous building, in front of which he placed an unmoving camera for 24 hours.

It could be accurately said that the greatest event that characterises our time with respect to visual arts and the image is in fact the rise of an image-movement, of an image-time (to use the expression adopted by Gilles Deleuze). We would have to say furthermore that it is a great “event” in the more precise and rigorous sense of the term — i.e. in the metaphysical sense. It is also such an event in the sense that it refers to the beginning of devotion to the image itself, to its representation, as an event, as an occurrence, as something itself differing from difference, not as something definitively and statically given, always identical with itself.

In order to properly appreciate the importance of this fact, we have to keep in mind that this appearance of the image-time was something absolutely unprecedented, and that it signified a great novelty in the history of representation — indeed ultimately in the history itself of man. Until the arrival of film, and of this key element mentioned by Broodthaers as “the retinal persistence of 1/24th of a second”, until this moment man was not even able to conceive of the time of representing something. Or, to put it more precisely, would not have been able to conceive of the time of representation as anything but pure stasis. For representational art, duration, difference in time, the occurrence of things, and their continual change, were wholly unrepresentable. A propos of film, Henri Bergson wrote: “The first time I saw a film I understood that it was contributing something absolutely new to philosophy. It gave us the capacity to understand our way of knowing. In fact we could even go so far as to say that film is itself a model of consciousness. To go to the movies is thus an authentic philosophical experience.”

Accordingly, it is not strange that so many of the most interesting contemporary artists have undertaken to deal with this problem — which radically affects the way in which the ontological nature of representation itself is conceived. Nor is it surprising that to do this they have resorted to the image technically produced and reproduced. Only with the image technically produced and captured is it possible to produce this internal expansion of one’s own time, in the field of representation. Outside this field, outside the field of the technical image as such, it would not make sense to speak of a “time-based art”, — referring to the plastic, the visual.

With a view to understanding all that the new artistic practices can specifically contribute to the critical history of creative visual practices, it is necessary first of all to recognise their capacity to make use of the legacy of this discovery. In any case before proceeding to place what in my view constitutes its second great hereditary patrimony, I would like to mention a last example of a work that raises the very essence of this question, a work whose true meaning would be inconceivable without the desire of the contemporary artist to confront this problem in order to comprehend the generic transformations of the mode of experience. It entails the first appearance and now the establishment — through its full implantation thanks to the audio-visual industries — of an image-time, as a characteristic form of the contemporary experience of the image, once and for all no longer static, no longer the experience of the image as stasis, identical to itself.

I refer to the well-known video by Gillian Wearing, entitled “60 Minutes of Silence”. Ostensibly it is a traditional corporate “snapshot”, in this case of a group of policemen in a London neighbourhood. Nevertheless, the image is really produced by a video recording with an unmoving camera for 60 minutes, obliging the characters to remain completely immobile and silent during these 60 minutes (emulating a snapshot). Despite the proverbial British imperturbability and the incomparable sense of discipline of its police, the silence is of course broken on many occasions and the pretended absolute immobility is almost continually interrupted.

The metaphysical distance between representation and reality (where it was perfectly established in the showing of times reversed, crossed: the real was in flux and the image remained static, stopping the fleeting instant), this distance remains in this work, anew, problematic — and of course this is made possible precisely by the mediation of technique as the producer of the representation. As I have already stressed, only the development of the technical means of capturing and manipulating the image permitted the expansive germination of a time of representation, of a temporalised representation.

All Broodthaers’ work for his “museum” project is well-known, his renowned Museum of the Eagles — of which his cinematographic work is actually a “section”. We may relate this work to that of other artists — such as the small portable museum represented in “La Boite en Valisse” by Marcel Duchamp — and also of course the celebrated “Imaginary Museum” of André Malraux. Of course in none of these projects is it a matter of producing a museum as such, in the conventional sense, but quite the contrary, of critically engaging the museum as institution by means of the specific production — this itself, as a creative practice, becoming the work of art — of independent means for the public dissemination of artistic knowledge. To say it a different way: of little museums that in themselves question the institution of the museum itself, little museums that are at the same time anti-museums.

It was above all Douglas Crimp, in successive instalments of his investigation “On the Ruins of the Museum” throughout the 80’s, who showed how a spirit of radical questioning of the museum was present and ran through the principal currents of the artistic languages — the neo as well as the post-avant-garde — enriching its development with the dialectic components of immanent self-questioning that these practices inscribe in the bosom of the tradition of the avant garde — a tradition that is precisely recognised by that spirit of immanent criticism.

Sharing this mood of negation of the art institution are not only the explorations of site-specificity but also those of dematerialization of the object, displayed in the approaches characterised as conceptual art in the broadest sense, to cite a pair of significant examples of recent tradition. There is an exploration of the limits of all that which exceeds the capacity of the museum: either because of excessive size or specificity of the location (as in earthworks and land art), or on the contrary by the radically immaterial character of the work (as in many of the conceptualist works, whose immaterial subtlety made them for a long time equally inaccessible to the museum).

From the point of view that is of interest to us here — namely, setting forth a likely genealogy for the new approaches that has the most promise for being included in a territory of critical legacies — there are two essential aspects for both “adventures” which ought to interest us particularly— that of specificity of siting and that of dematerialization.

As far as the experiment with public art is concerned, that aspect is no other than the production of spaces for communicative urban interaction, starting from the Habermasian idea that what is public in contemporary societies is not given, but on the contrary stolen, made to vanish: and that its construction is therefore a “task.” From this point of view we do not call public art any monstrosity that gets installed in an urban setting — we say, absorbing the logic of the monument — but apply the term only to those artistic and cultural practices that actually have as their mission the production of a public domain — understanding by such, and following the illustrated definition reclaimed by Habermas, the production of a space in which city-dwellers may encounter each other, and discuss and decide through this process of rationally conducted dialogue the issues that concern them in common. That is: a domain of the politically active public, neither neutralised by the weight of the false sphere of the mass media, nor disempowered by being orchestrated by the smug phantasmagoria of the political spectacle — itself neutralised by the mass media.

We may propose two or three examples of this kind of approach to public art — already classics in a certain way. On the one hand, the well-known projects for public spaces by Vito Acconci, or some of the public and conversational space of Art & Language. On the other, all the practices of the situationist detournement, such as the practise of transforming daily life by bringing encounter and communication into urban spaces .

May it be, on the other hand, that the aspect that may interest us more is that of dematerialization? Obviously its medial dimension, we say — that of all those works that resolve their mode of distribution and public experience not in the specialised and objectively conditioned form of a “work” as such, but through their presence in one or the other medium of communication. Thus, for instance, the traditions of radio art, of mail art, the projects for magazines, the books about the artists or their appearances in the media of communication — press, video, or television. Finally, everything that we may call “media art”. All those works whose exhibition takes place not in the museum or gallery but through one or the other media of communication.

In this respect I would like to point out two more things: first, that analysing the tradition of media art in this way may enable us to understand that its appearance is neither capricious nor — as is so often pretended — purely instrumental, as if its use in a certain medium or other were irrelevant or anecdotal. On the contrary, it is appropriate from this perspective to affirm that the rise of media-art would be inconceivable outside of a tradition of questioning the very idea of the work of art as objectively conditioned. We should thus accept that the opening of the conceptualist tradition into media art results from the logical development of the negation of the object and the consequent contribution of the “document” that makes possible its diffusion, its public communication. As soon as this publicly disseminated and communicated document is converted into the only surviving sign of the “work”, and the only testimony in the last instance of the culturally developed practice — then we have media art. That its development should for example be so closely linked to that of performance art cannot then surprise us — and in fact we may relate this to the reflections of Rosalind Krauss on the narcissistic character that marked the birth of video art.

A second question that seems to me timely to point out: that along the same lines, we may even perhaps refine a second definition of media art, a more restrictive one. For this purpose, we would not call a practice “media-art” for the sole fact of its being produced “for” distribution via a channel that we call a “medium” — a magazine, radio, television, etc. Rather, we would only call “media-art” those practices that do more than produce objects “for” a given medium, that have as their mission and objective the production of a specific medium, an independent one, those works in which the object is itself the medium — not in agreement with but in fact contrary to McLuhan.

Obviously it is much more difficult here to offer clearly successful examples. I am sure that the approximation of the Russian avant-garde to the experience of the film. as well as the Brechtian experiment with radio, had much to do with this idea, and its utopian aspiration of developing a genuine “community of the producers of media”. Perhaps we would see something closer to having fulfilled this ideal in some of the more interesting projects of the 60’s and 70’s: projects like the video activism tied to the Situationist Internationale, the expanded-film tied on one hand to the fluxus movement and on the other to the European tradition of cine verité and the film of experience, or, finally, the related experiences with guerrilla-TV in the US and all its later legacy.

Obviously we can’t reconstruct this tradition here in detail, but it nevertheless seems important to me to point out that what we have is a direction for critical investigation defined by utopian optimism (in the sense that it aspires to the establishment of what we could call, in Habermasian terms, an ideal community of communication), but obviously not completed: but whose enunciation has not been exhausted nor institutionally absorbed either — given that it has actually defined a limit with which institutionalised Art has not known how to “negotiate”, ever eluding the final scenario of this latter: the production of an exhibitable object in a spatialised formula, aiming instead at the fashioning of an abstract means of the collectivisation of experience.

Furthermore, in this critical tradition there converge two lines that we have seized on — that of the production of a public domain, and that of the drift toward development of means of distribution. What we are claiming is that the territory thus described, in a restrictive definition of what “media-art” would be, would gather together the legacy — not yet resolved, but not deactivated either — of the most radical moments of the avant-garde tradition of contemporary art. And, at the same time we claim that the task of undertaking its historic realisation in the present epoch is the most radical challenge that a contemporary communicative approach can undertake. And therefore that it constitutes the most noble and critical genealogy that the new approaches can make their own, as its most crucial and impassioned challenge.

In any case, before outlining the contemporary map of that challenge — indicating some of the features that mark its layout — I would like to focus on a fact that is I see as crucial — which is the confluence of the two macro-problems that I have elucidated so far: on one side that of the image-movement, as a crucial ontological question of our time in all that relates to the problem of representation. And on the other side, the question of the medium, of the production of autonomous means of distribution of aesthetic knowledge — as the most radical way of using the tradition of the avant-garde’s immanent self-criticism. As I see it, it is clear that the encounter of both problems territorialises the critical topology by means of the characteristic excellence of the practices of visual communication of present societies. What is actually at stake in them is the job of transforming the meaning of the artistic in societies of technical reproducibility. Or what amounts to the same thing: the fate of transforming the meaning of the experience of the artistic in a context of mass culture, in the framework of the generalised process of diffuse aesthetisation of the contemporary world, in the historic moment of the dedication of organised spectacle in terms of the industries of consciousness. If I am not mistaken, and in accordance with the transformations in progress, the present dominant means of organising the distribution and reception of art — the spatialised means of public distribution, the museum / gallery — lack the versatility that would really be necessary to maintain much longer its indisputable hegemony, if not exclusivity, in the context of such transformations.

With this I wish to say that the resolution of a critical question, that is defined at the outset in the order of the ethics of discourse, or of the ethics of the forms and the languages if that is preferred, necessarily entails simultaneously broaching a pragmatic political question, in the sense of how to organise its public social diffusion — in the last instance, its “industry”, the form of its reception.

The first — the ethical-formal question — determines that this problematic territory constitutes the crucial crossroads of the “art” of our time, its critical definition par excellence. But it is the second question, the pragmatic one of its necessary industrial and institutional reorganisation, that makes it totally problematic and absolutely unavoidable for contemporary approaches related to visual communication.

I will attempt in what follows, and in a very sketchy manner, to place four developments that in my opinion more directly condition the present unfolding of investigation in this problematic field, offering some example that illustrate it, and conclude by an appreciation of the tensions that define the game and perhaps an attempt to make some future prediction concerning the possible incidence of this whole group of factors in the global redefinition of the modes of organisation and articulation of the aesthetic experience and the system of art itself.

As will be seen, as I enunciate these factors I will always link the development of a technical means with that of a specific problem of the emergence of languages: not so much because I believe that technology is destiny as that I believe rather that technology is language: or more precisely since I am convinced that a history of the forms would be impossible without considering the technological devices that articulate the relation between symbolic production and the real world. To put this another way: even if it is ridiculous to expect that every technical development gives rise to an artistic form, it is equally inaccurate to think that an artistic form may be born if it is not irreversibly tied to a technical development — like writing of the relation of the parts to its system, as ***language effectively spoken among themselves by the “things” that inhabit and structure the “world”.

As a small example of this influence of post-cinema within the area of contemporary artistic practices we may propose the well-known monodramas of Stan Douglas, short little pieces of approximately a minute, which construct dramatic micro-fictions out of the flat incidental language, post-cinematographic, belonging to the discourse of television and publicity. Likewise we could propose numerous examples that would demonstrate the impact of the clip and its language — all the language of club culture — in the new visual practices.

The specific potential of the technical medium used — the computer as a second shutter, as a device for post-processing of the captured image — and its capacity to unwrap the allegorical technique of recomposition and collage, mimicking dressmaking, the interstices of the avant-garde dissonance, gives as a result the effective reconstruction of a space of pictoriality — unthinkable even in the pictorial field itself — understood as organicity and structural completion of the representational space. As examples of this type of post-photographic work that develops the possibilities of a new pictorial narration in the photographic field we may adduce many of the contemporary creations of James Coleman, Phillip Lorca, di Corcia, Zhan Yuan — but above all Jeff Wall, undoubtedly the author who as done the most direct work in this field of investigation.

On the one hand we have video and digital imaging as new means of capture — we can speak now of light equipment and of a certain convergence of professionals and amateurs — and on the other the multiplication of the media channels — the proliferation of networks and systems of broadcasting and propagating, the expansive development of cable and satellite, and the proliferation of new kinds of broadcast (local TV, regional, private, independent): and finally and above all the convergence of the technologies of computerised post-production and telecommunication in the internet. All this maps out possibilities of distributing the artistic forms and approaches that we may classify as post-media, in the primary sense of characterising it as an open panorama, decentralised, hierarchy-less, in which the performances are difficult to be organised according to the organisational objectives of the regulators by consensus of the sphere of present media — in terms of the mass media, producers of large unified audiences. The appearance of “do it yourself” media technologies, almost home-made, that permit the tactical production of small micromedia devices (on the internet, but also in the context of the “old media” of radio, magazine, or television) assures a profound transformation of the space of the technologies of public distribution of knowledge and artistic practices — and permits us to imagine the development of independent methods that, given their speed and presumably strategic effectiveness, will very rapidly be in a position to reorganise the panorama of the mediations of the artistic experience — and, further on, the domain itself of the public sphere, rescuing the possibilities of working in the public sphere from the sequestration to which it finds itself surrendered at the hands of its contemporary media-isation.

In this respect it is not a matter of doing futurology, nor of giving ourselves over to a utopian fantasy — it is obvious that there isn’t any redeeming, saving, or promissory panacea around this development — but it is pointing out that in the emergence of this postmedia panorama — understanding as such the growing expansion of a group of new devices that are necessarily going to endure a radical reorganisation of the map of the media — there is taking place at least potentially a context of profound transformation of the means of producing, distributing, and receiving the artistic experience.

The greatest challenge that artistic practices have in this context, from this point of view, is not so much that of experimenting with the possibilities of material or formal production and experimentation offered by the new technologies; but rather that of experimenting with the possibilities they offer for reconfiguring the public sphere, of transforming above all the social means of distribution, with the possibilities even of changing the modes of “exposition”, of public presentation of artistic practices. To cite a couple of examples of this kind of (post) artistic practice that have given themselves the priority mission of reconfiguring the public sphere, I should mention two projects. First, that of “Hybrid Workspace” in the last Documenta — a space for encounter and debate, physical and real, but also maintained in various channels , a network of independent German and Dutch radio and TV station implemented further with an internet forum. And a second example, that likewise was presented simultaneously on the net and in a conventional exhibition space — in this case, the Australian pavilion of the Biennial of Venice — the project entitled “the immaterial labour” from the group Knowbotics Research, consisting precisely of an analytic and collective work about the possibilities of bringing about the construction of the public sphere.

In any case this has nothing to do with making here any justification of technique for its own sake, or of the new at any cost, nor of claiming that in it is found some definitive solution for all problems, neither those of art nor of the many others in our modern world. Far from it. I have only attempted to point out a region in process of profound transformation, trying to show in it something of the factors at work, some of the questions that appear to us as decisive. Be what it may, the future is totally open and undecided, and what seems most clear is that this demands our intervention, pointing out our responsibility as the makers of our collective destiny. Whatever the future is going to be, it is in our hands to decide it. The responsibility of the creative artists, of the cultural producer, as it is for each of us, is pled in the court of the future. Finally, it is the polyphony of all our joined voices which finishes giving life to “the song of our generation”. And perhaps it is not just a matter of listening to it. But now perhaps or also singing it, even “emitting it”

Acción Paralela #5, Jan00