Master of Theatre, Amsterdam - Magazine Autumn 2012

Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh 10 weeks at DasArts

CurrentEventsin thePast

Tense

As I write this editorial, we do not know who will be the new American president. By the time this magazine is distributed, strong emotions of vic-tory or disillusionment will already be extinguished by other emergencies. In Beirut, last Friday, a car bomb ex-plosion has killed the chief of secu-rity services. Will this event mark the beginning of a new phase in the pre-carious dynamics of Syrian-Lebanese relations? This week a Dutch journalist referred to an editorial in the Interna-tional Herald Tribune as “historical”, because it explicitly states that the US should get out of Afghanistan now, and not in two years’ time. I can not imagine this is the first time an opinion maker is calling for a retreat, but the word historical never theless triggered both a desire to be present and a fear of missing something; so I promptly searched for the online article and read it.

How often have we heard the argument that theatre can respond immediately to actual current events? This is often understood as a privilege of a discipline deeply struggling with its representational framework, with its credibility in the age of reality TV and its demands of an audience: to sit still and focus on the stage for more than an hour. But theatre has one unique feature: it happens in the here and now, it is live in front of you, performers are tangible, the audience at least audible. And outside the building, the world is happening.

We have indeed seen performers react to low-flying planes, or to violent rain showers that were disturbing the per-formance - sometimes creating an extra effect. These playful acknowledgments of interferences from outside have become a somehow predictable post-dramatic habit. Nowadays the whole world is in a state of crisis and emer gency, and the art world in general has dramatically lost its support within society. Artists find themselves called upon to comment on, react to and influence these states of emergency. Artistic urgency is often reduced to this. Moreover, actuality sells. It can easily become a currency in an attempt to regain a justified position within society.

In The Netherlands, this is a hot issue. That is why Frascati and De Appel are set up a programme called We Vote Back, a few weeks after the last elections. Artists are debating, creating and presenting instant work etc.

To the question ‘are you going to do something about the formation of a new government?’ Ann Demeester answered in Metropolis M: ‘It is still a subject for discussion: how can we react to it? We would have to do this in an almost journalistic form. The problem – the point – with artistic practices, is that they are not instant reactions to reality. They involve a process of re-working and transform-ing things into a different shape, and that takes time. But at the same time, we have deliberately chosen to run the festival at such an important moment and to find ways in which to react.’

Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh are from Beirut, itself a hot issue. There they make performances, write texts and create visual arts installations that

are touring the world. They designed a ten weeks Block programme for an international group of performing artists that are studying at DasArts. Their starting point for the block was the pressure and the temptation Lina and Rabih felt to go along with this loud call for artistic response to current events in their region. Entitled ‘Current Events in the Past Tense’, this programme offers time to investigate and ask questions, about immediacy and distance, about the status of actual events, the role of the messenger, the use of documents etc. What strategies can artists apply to address these issues?

With this magazine, DasArts wants to share some of the ideas, opinions and contemplations of people involved in the Block. You can read essays by Lina Saneh, Rabih Mroué, Stephen Wright and Hito Steyerl, along with inter-views and a short contribution from Alexander Karschnia. The essays have never been published before or were translated into English for the first time.

I am happy and proud that we can hereby contribute to a passionate discussion in the (performing) arts world, both in The Netherlands and abroad.

Take your time to read it. You don’t have to hurry; this magazine offers more than yesterday’s paper.

Barbara Van Lindt

DasArts Managing Director

Your Block teaching programme at DasArts revolves around the question: what is the relationship between art and current events, news stories. Why did you to choose this as a theme? Rabih: ‘My motivation is very personal. I, like some other artists have always looked at the relationship between art and current events. But since the ‘The Arab Spring’ began, the question has seemed more urgent. A lot is happening in the countries bordering Lebanon: revolutions, protest movements, wars, new ideas and rapid change. As artists we wonder: how can art deal with these current events?’ Lina: ‘Right now, like a lot of artists, we are often tempted, but also asked to produce artistic works in relation to these events: the Arab Spring, the economic crisis, Occupy Now, Fukushima, etc. But, in order to be able to reflect, ask inter-esting questions and bring new and original viewpoints, it is important to have some distance. When we were invited to design a programme for DasArts, we thought it would be an excellent place to reflect on this theme, and the many ques-tions connected with it.’

Editorial ‘Our aim is modest and pretentious at

the same time’This autumn, internationally acclaimed theatre makers

Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh – both from Beirut - are hosting a provocative programme at DasArts: Current Events in the Past Tense.

They invited a selection of international guests and lecturers to address the theme. Why this theme? And what are their own

notions of the connection between art and actuality? A double interview.

Rabih Mroué lives in Beirut.

He is an actor, director, and

playwright, and a Contribut-

ing Editor for the Lebanese

quarterly Kalamon and TDR

(New York). He is a founder and

executive board member of the

Beirut Art Center association

(BAC). His installation Double

Shoot and the lecture perfor-

mance The Pixelated Revolution

(2012) were on show at the

dOCUMENTA (13). Other works

include: Photo-Romance (2009),

The Inhabitants of Images

(2008), How Nancy Wished

That Everything Was an April

Fool’s Joke (2007), Make Me

Stop Smoking (2006), Who’s

Afraid of Representation (2005),

Looking for a Missing Employee

(2003), Biokhraphia (2002),

Three Posters (2000) and

Extension 19 (1998).

Lina Saneh was born in

and lives in Beirut. She is an

actor, author and director,

as well as a member of the

Home Workspace Curricular

Committee. Her works include

Photo-Romance (2009),

Lina Saneh Body-P-Arts Project

(a website project, 2007 and

installation, 2009), Someone

Must Have Been Telling Lies

About Me (video-installation,

2008), Appendice (2007),

I Had A Dream, Mom (video,

2006), Biokhraphia (2002),

Extrait d’Etat Civil (2000) etc.

Lina Saneh teaches at the

University of Art and Design

in Geneva. In 2009/2010 she

was artist in residence at the

International Research Center

‘Interweaving Performance

Cultures’ at Freie Universität

Berlin.

October 12, 2012Interview Lina and Rabih

October 25, 2012by Barbara Van Lindt

Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh

Barbara Van Lindt

04 Our aim is modest and pretentious at the same time

InterviewRabih Mroué and Lina Saneh A line

of poetry

Unknown photographer

Amid this terrible destruction, a clean white banner is float-ing, hanging on the remains of a shattered wall. The banner is located precisely at the centre of the photo. Written on it in Arabic is the following: ‘The Fa’our Clothing Store has moved to the Roueiss area, next to Mahfouz Stores.’ This photo was taken in the aftermath of Israel’s war on Lebanon, which took place in July 2006. It takes us to Beirut’s southern suburbs, a few metres from Hezbollah’s security zone; everything living here has been totally de-stroyed. The photo shows only rubble piled upon rubble, stones upon stones, with the banner in the centre. Here, in this devastated space, the Fa’our Clothing Store once stood. The destruction has forced it to move to another location.

In amongst the rubble are the remains of vari ous household items, dispersed here and there among the stones and debris, some visible and some buried under the wreckage: a fragment of a blue plastic bucket; a small yellow jug, pierced and empty, that once held vegetable oil; a charred mattress; blue tubing for electric wiring jutting jaggedly out of crushed concrete walls; the red plastic letters “S” and “R”, which once belonged to a child’s box of toy letters; iron cables entangled in blocks of cement; red and black plastic bags; loose pages from books and note-pads; shreds of blue and white cloth, and other things …

The news constantly feeds us disturbing images of war. What should we do with them? Block mentor Rabih Mroué slows down

time by carefully reflecting on an image from the war on Lebanon. Can we turn war news into art?

February 08, 2010Essay by Rabih Mroué

What kinds of questions?Lina: ‘It’s media who first deal with actuality. In the Block we investigate the role of the media, the specificities of its narra-tives, the way it functions. We then look at what kind of other narratives art could bring. Should we, as artists, leave current events and hot news to the media? Or should we grab hold of them? How? How do we keep the necessary distance? What kind of “distance”? How should we define or measure it? How can we avoid becoming obsessed with running after scoops, like the media does? How can we focus on the really important events that should not be forgotten? How can we look obliquely at what we observe directly? How can we look for, and see, events that are not regarded as important?’

As the title of your block you chose ‘Current Events in the Past Tense’. The title already seems to contain an answer: should art only deal with current events in retrospect, in the ‘past tense’? Lina: ‘No, the title of the block is definitely not meant as a statement, but rather as a paradox – it should be read with a question mark. The aim of our concept is not to put ourselves under pressure to examine current events as they unfold, but rather to think of actuality as a moment, or pos-sible event, from the past. If, sometimes, we give concrete examples of events that are relevant today, these are only illustrations, not the goal or core issue in itself.’Rabih: ‘For us the topic of actuality is only a pretext to work around. In this programme, we are not concerned with cur-rent events or the news of the day. Instead, we are looking at the notion of actuality; its challenges and its dangers; its relation to art and presentation; and the relation of art to the present. Actualité in French means: current events, or news. Actuality in English means something different: reality. We started out with the French meaning, but are now also investigating the relationship between the English actuality and art.’

How is your own work connected to news stories or current events?Rabih: ‘I do sometimes use images from current events. For instance, around a year ago I created a non-academic lecture entitled: The Pixelated Revolution, in which I used videos from the Syrian revolution. I didn’t choose them in order to express an opinion on what is happening there. It was strongly connected to themes I have been working on in the past ten years: image, death and its representation. The piece is not about the actuality of the Syrian revolution, but it throws up questions about the representation of death in images. I don’t draw any conclusions about the Syrian revolution, but I have opened up a debate about the role of art in current events and whether the use of images like that was “allowed”.’

In this magazine we publish Rabih’s text ‘A line of poetry’, a detailed reflection on a picture of the Beirut destruction in 2006. Can we read this as a political statement?Rabih: ‘No, I wouldn’t say so. In general, news and television, especially in Lebanon, deals with wars and revolution by showing us blood, shocking images, destruction, in such a

way as to horrify us and block us from thinking. This is where art can do something. For example, if you read the descrip-tion of the image in ‘A line of poetry’, you see clearly that I am trying to put alternative questions, such as: How to deal with destruction? How to slow down our fast reactions, look at the ruins in silence, get away from the anger that dominates the here and now? Maybe to see the poetry in these images.’

You invited four different guests, artists and theorists, to work with the participants during this block: Fadi El Abdallah, Stephen Wright, Hito Steyerl and Alexander Karschnia. How did you select these guest lecturers?Rabih: ‘We are asking ourselves: what different types of temporality are there? How do narratives in art differ from narratives in news stories and on television?’ Lina: ‘Alexander Karschnia will talk about how Brecht dealt with the notion of actuality and what is still actual today in Brecht for us. He will also talk about the actuality of Walter Benjamin’s concept of history. It is important that both artists and activists understand what must be actualised, and know how to do it.’Rabih: ‘It was also important to introduce insights into the programme from outside the artistic field. We invited Fadi El Abdallah, who is both an artist and a lawyer. Justice always deals with current events in the past tense: the events already took place before they come to court. In court there is a coexistence of two versions in one place: two viewpoints, two lines of argument – of the accused and the victim – confronting each other. Theatre is a lot like court.’ Lina: ‘Stephen Wright will be with us to work on “esca-pology”; a concept that he is still sculpting. He questions how performativity in contemporary art practice has chal-lenged the dominance of representation, thus escaping its self- imposed ontology to merge with the “real thing”. How could reacting immediately to current events open up unexplored possibilities, a new politics of art?’Rabih: ‘As for Hito, she will discuss the media and its use of images: How is the media implicated in violence? What role do digital modes of communication play in creating new political and aesthetic articulations? How do they accelerate, slow down or modify conflict, civil war and the writing of history?’

Finally, what do you aim to achieve with students during this block?Lina: ‘We don’t have answers. This is more than just a teach-ing method: for us it is very important never to use answers or conclusions in our work. Any answer or conclusion should immediately raise new questions. As an artist one should always be open to new questions. Our method is to postpone any certainty, which allows us to generate more questions. This is what we think makes art interesting.’Rabih: ‘So our aim, as we see it, is very modest and at the same time very pretentious. We, with the students, would like to shake up the norms and certitudes that we already had, and try to open up new spaces in our knowledge and ways of thinking.’

The photo gives no sense of what the buildings looked like before the attack, no indication of what once stood here. This is why the banner is important: it informs us that there used to be shops here – businesses, custom-ers, merchandise – the flurry of social and commercial exchange. The news of the Fa’our Clothing Store’s move to the Roueiss area is simply news of its survival. The news of any move is, in fact, a way of declaring that life continues. The announcement of the store’s move is a declaration that life is no longer possible here, but might be possi-ble elsewhere. The banner asks us to stop and look; its unexpected and pristine ap-pearance distracts the eye, and transmutes the choking horror and debilitating pain that grip you in the face of such mind-numbing annihilation into space for thought. It allows you, for a moment, to smile, to escape feeling, to contemplate and reflect.

The banner conceals a small portion of the wreck-age. What if all those who had previously lived and worked in this devastated area, all those who had once owned businesses here, put up small banners to announce their departure? I imagine such a scene – hundreds of banners overlapping one another so that no trace of the wreckage behind them remains; the banners hide, but don’t erase, the destruction. Quite the opposite: the absence of visible de-struction confirms its presence. For the destruction is hidden from view by the names of the people who lived and worked here. The banners replace the three-dimensional perspective of the scene with a flat, two-dimensional plane. They annul the melodramatic aspect of the spectacle of utter devasta-tion, exchanging it for a flat surface that nevertheless retains the depth and intensity of the tragedy’s significance. These banners, in their declamatory way, speak quietly, without the slightest trace of emotion; their simple message, however, implies raw violence. Indeed, for me, the violence implicit in such prosaic announcements is more significant, more devastating than the physical destruction. To move from one place to another against your will implies a violent disruption similar to death, a move from the worldly life to the afterlife. Accordingly, each banner announces the disappearance of a life. Each ruin is connected to a particular owner, a unique person – the ruin of this store to that owner, the ruin of that store to another. These ruins hold lives inside them, lives that once bustled with names, friendship and laughter, con-versations and little secrets, personal histories. Ruins are like mass graves, where the bodies of the dead lie unremarked; the banners planted there serve as headstones, transforming the rubbles into ruins and thus into a cemetery.

I believe that this banner – the banner announc-ing the Fa’our store’s move to a new district – asks us, albeit obliquely, to mourn that which is gone.1 It asks us to pause for a moment and weep for “the memory of one’s beloved and one’s home.”2 The banner is a tribute to poetry; though it fears war and death, it is the whisper of poetry – humble in the face of the obscenity of such vast destruction – and its overwhelming victory.

I half shut my eyes and look at the photo; it ap-pears to be tinted the colour of sandstone. It resembles an old photograph that has yellowed from the passage of time – a sepia-coloured picture. Opening my eyes wide and looking again, I find the sandstone tint remains, along with several small dots of red and blue. And the lettering on the banner is also red and blue. A continuity of colours, with nothing to disturb the eye.

It seems to me that the red and blue spots visible among these ruins are the remains of crushed letters. Broken letters, no longer fit for use. The sentence on the banner is nothing more than the evidentiary remains of our

destroyed language, our mangled words and crushed letters now scattered among – reduced to – rubble. Wreckage. I imagine the person who made the banner carefully re-trieving the letters that survived the destruction, assem-bling them into words to assure us that he has moved from the hell of language destroyed to another place, a place, perhaps, less damaged. He uses them to create a line of poetry about a dreadful war: ‘The Fa’our Clothing Store has moved to the Roueiss area, next to Mahfouz Stores.’

This banner – this poem – is beautiful in its sim-plicity and its bluntness. In it, I see a modest attempt to surpass the language of war with one that gives voice to life. Originally published in Prefix Photo magazine, nr. 21, 2012.

I imagine the person who made the banner carefully retrieving the letters that survived the destruction

I often hear well-intended remarks from (Lebanese or other) people who tell me that Lebanese artists are to have plenty of real, concrete problems to talk about: a sense of urgency. This leads us to believe that Lebanese artists’ work is deter-mined by the urgency of serious problems, and that these problems are an advantage. I could go further, and say that our problems are almost envied, because they are seen as positive.

Urgency as threatIs it true that the quantity, quality or urgency of problems are enough to render an artist’s work interesting, or that a prob-lem is a prerequisite for art? It seems to me that, on the con-trary, urgency can be a major threat to an artist’s work. I have experienced this threat; I have fallen into the trap in one way or another, despite taking precau-tions to avoid it. That just shows how much of a threat it is, even when you are aware of it and approach it critically.

What is the threat exactly? The danger is that urgency presses us to express our feelings immediately, turning our work into a cry of pain, a warning or a narration of the horrors around us. Our work then becomes a lament, a call for compassion. It becomes self-indulgent, moralising and presents us as victims. How else can people react to this than with hon-est compassion, or the even more honest awareness that:

The world is a horrid place; it shouldn’t be allowed. But, actually...what a great person I am to be capable of such noble feelings and thoughts.

Yet this sort of work is well received; because these works remain general and are abstractions that can mean every-thing and nothing, be everyone and nobody. These works condemn violence, but violence that resembles other violence that occurs all over the place, in all wars. They only suggest that violence is part of human nature and emphasises the notion of inevitability behind it all.

Finally, such works turn a complex experience into a trauma. We artists are seen to be traumatised by the war and civil war that we have witnessed. Yet trauma is some-

thing to which you are subjected and that you do not over-come, something you can neither understand nor explain; it is what leaves us speechless, paralysed, terror-stricken and obsessive; it is what turns us into victims, and victims cannot express themselves.

By reducing a complex social, political, economic and cultural issue to a trauma, we risk it becoming depoliti-cised. I do not believe in the cause and effect relationship between creativity and suffering. I do not contest the im-portance and political necessity of this form of expression, i.e. witness accounts, storytelling, memoirs or alarm signals, but to me, these are insufficient. Lebanese artists are more

interested in voicing their opin-ions in other ways.

The time to speak outA person who anticipates receiv-ing a blow will instinctively curl up and avoid the blow by hiding his face in his hands and turning away. Often, this reflex is accom-

panied by a cry of terror and fear. When the blow is struck, he cries again and groans in agony. If he is strong enough to do so, he will strike back and it will be the aggressor’s turn to groan. If they are equally matched, then the battle may last a while and there will be yet more cries and groans, but no speech, only curses or threats.

The expression of pain, suffering, fear, joy, pleasure and hunger is common to men and to animals. This in itself is nothing to be ashamed of; it is actually very noble. But it is not by chance, nor the natural order of things, that, politi-cally, we are reduced to expressing elementary needs, that we don’t have the right, that we don’t have any other choice but to express ourselves, that we are not allowed enough time or space to form a critical opinion, the sort that only can only be formed by taking a step back and thinking twice before speaking out.

Speech is what distinguishes us from animals, but also from our community (family, religion, nation or any other form of “us”). By speaking out we make ourselves visible as unique individuals, capable of taking action, doing something new, unexpected. This is how we suggest

October 11, 2009 Essay by Lina Saneh

It was evidently useless. Nobody had understood

anything

2. Translated here as “the memory of one’s beloved and one’s home,” Min Thikra habeebin wa manzili is a line from a renowned poem by Imru’ al-Qais bin Hujr bin al-Harith Al-Kindi, an Arabian poet of the sixth century.

1. Translated literally, Al-Boukaa ‘Alal-Atlal means “crying over ruins,” and refers to a well-known genre of ancient classical Arabic poetry.

Translated from Arabic by Ziad Nawfal. Originally published in Prefix Photo ma-gazine. Reprinted with the kind permis-sion of Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto.”

The time I do not have

‘Lebanese artists are lucky, because they have the urgency to speak of serious problems’, is an often heard remark. On the contrary, says Block mentor Lina Saneh: urgency can be a threat to art. A reflection on the time we need

to speak out.

06 A line of poetry

Essay by Rabih Mroué

and maybe - probably - change the natural order and the reigning pseudo-natural order, the one we are led to believe is natural.

‘If men were not distinct from one another [...], they would need neither to speak nor to act to be able to make themselves understood. They would only need signs and noises to communicate their desires and immediate, identical needs’, said Hannah Arendt.1

Action and speech: two political activities par excellence, two theatrical activities par excellence.There have always been people prevented from speaking out in public. Plato’s theory of ‘one thing at a time’ rejected the idea of public speaking and considered that people who out of necessity did not have the time to be elsewhere than at work, such as craftsmen, could not voice an opinion. Aristotle excluded barbarians and slaves from his definition of man: zôon logon ekhon. Yet, according to Jacques Rancière, politics start

‘when those destined to remain in the invis-ible sphere called work, who do not leave time to do anything else, take the time they do not have and de-clare themselves co-sharers of a common world [...] and make heard commonplace discussions when hitherto were heard only the sound of bodies.’ 2

Urgency is what has been invented, is invented and reinvented every day to prevent us from having the time to speak out; it reduces our impressionist expres-sions of an evil for which we are quick to blame others, to blame the enemy. For the time taken to speak out is time taken away, snatched from someone who should be concen-trating on fighting and preparing to fight, or who should be working and producing, urgently.

Taking the time to talk is not about urgency; it inherently involves us taking our time, with no regard for urgency. This is the time for people who do not have the time, but who take the time to converse with each other all the same. This is not the hurried speech urgently addressed to the community to inflame sentiments and spark primal feelings; rather it is the time to take one’s time, the better to waste it on futilities. This is the time we take to hesitate, doubt, to attempt to ask questions other than the ones that have already been asked by right-wing or left-wing politics, and above all to postpone responses and decisions. This is the time taken and wasted in wading through the time of relative truths and doubts. But let’s get back to Lebanon.

Characteristics of Lebanese modern artOne of the most visible characteristics of Lebanese modern art is its depiction of the grey area between what are gener-ally described as polar opposites, separated by impassable

boundaries, reality and fiction, truth and falsity. This is not an effort to be trendy, nor does it arise from a mischievous pleasure in mystifying the public.

Although this image has become very prominent and contributes to the grey area between reality and fiction, it is not there to decry it, or to tame it or exorcise any evil, neither is it to claim that there is no longer any reality, or to show concern for a lack of reality and an increase in hyper-reality. It is even less to illustrate a point and create a pretty storyline. If artists call the media into question, it is not so that we can claim that the truth is elsewhere.

If the notion of action, in the various meanings associated with the representative procedure in the various theatrical currents seems to no longer respond to the needs of certain directors, it is not because we prefer a direct presence, with no intermediary. If the body disappears from the stage and becomes the object of a speech, if words have become so important, it does not hail the return of text to top priority in the world of theatre. If war is sometimes present, it is not in a thera-peutic dimension faced with a trauma, even less a moralis-ing, didactic account of the horrors of war that are not to be forgotten so as not to repeat the errors of the past, or in a quest for pity and compassion for us innocent victims.

Neither do artists depict war because it is a subject that sells well. Artists are often accused of that, but I shall not even attempt to argue that point, or to justify their choices. The prickly question of writ-ing history may crop up in plenty of works, but it is not there to explain what has happened, the why and how, either to the Lebanese public, or to the “western” public. And if there is no attempt at explanation in a work,

this should not be considered a sign for “foreign” viewers that there is nothing to be understood, that the complex-ity reflects the utter absurdity of the world. Neither does the absence of explanation support the Lebanese belief in sophisticated plots between super and medium sized pow-ers against which we are helpless. Works may be dripping with political subtexts, but their intention is not to bother the public with policies; it is to bother them with politics. Documents may be a part of all works that question history and politics, but that does not mean that they are documen-taries. And so on... I could go on for a long time in this vein: it’s not this but it’s not that either, or it’s not this for such and such a reason. So what is it? And why? And how? I shan’t be answering those questions here. The answers differ from one artist to the next. We cannot generalise and then call it all “Lebanese art” or “Lebanese artists” or any other such classification, even under the pretext of looking for generic similarities in practices. That would amount to depolitici-sation. It would take away the singularity of art and each artist’s thoughts. It would prevent us from seeing references beyond the geopolitical framework or seeing the contradic-tions and differences, or even controversies within the geo-political arena.

I shall merely emphasise that the various ways of going about art, the different approaches, work strategies, the various questions and aesthetic or political choices are to be found not only in some Lebanese artists (not all) but also in artists all over the world and in different degrees in each one of us. I might add that what these artists and practices (from Lebanon or elsewhere) have in common is, amongst other things, a way of playing on urgency, of ignor-ing it, of relativising it, of seeking flaws in points of view, or making escape holes, opening up other possible or impos-sible alternative avenues.

Can art change the world?Can the effectiveness of such work be measured in concrete terms or its influence estimated? I doubt it. I remember how, after the last Israel-Lebanon conflict in August 2006 and the deep rift filled with hatred that followed it, not just between the Lebanese themselves but between intellectuals and Lebanese artists, our group of artist friends came to bemoan the work we had been producing for years. It was evidently useless. Nobody had understood any-thing. We even thought of doing an exhibition of all our work from the last ten years.

But what did we expect? That our work would change the world? (Or at least change Lebanon?) Did we expect to awaken a politi-cal conscience among the Lebanese? What conscience? The right one? That is, one that resembles our own? How pretentious! Yet another trap that we continually criticise and into which we fall nevertheless. But that was a moment where urgency caught up with us and left us speechless. We could only cry, lament, groan, curse and defy. Fortunately, we took so much time thinking about, mulling over and developing the idea that we ended up dropping it.

However, the problem, the danger, is that adopting the opposite attitude is just as problematic. That is, by telling ourselves, giving ourselves the impression or con-vincing ourselves that there is no urgency.

Artists do not depict war

because it is a subject that

sells well

Urgency is what has been invented,

is invented and reinvented every day

to prevent us from having the time to

speak out

1 Arendt, H., 1983, p.232, Condition de l’homme moderne. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.

2 Rancière, J., 2008, p.67, Le Spectateur Émancipé. Paris: La Fabrique.

08 09The timeI do not have

The timeI do not have

Essay by Lina Saneh

Essay by Lina Saneh

‘Both art and law highlight certain

problems and social categories that have always been there, but that were not visible before’

October 12, 2012Interview Fadi El Abdallah

‘Art can render what is visible,

visible’Do art and law play a similar role in society? Yes, according to

Fadi El Abdallah, a poet and artist who works in the field of law. This autumn at DasArts, he presented a three-day workshop in

which students investigated the connections between information, law and their own work.

be together, a common ground. Art participates in writing the history of a country, saying what has happened during a period. Art highlights problems and social categories that have always been there, but were not visible before. Justice and law can do the same thing. So you could say that the function of the judicial machine is in competition with the function of art: art and law play similar roles in society.’

What about the differences: law produces – based on information - conclusions and verdicts; art usually opens up discussion and questions. ‘In justice there is indeed a need for a moment of decision. But, this result of law is always partial. Why? Justice is only interested in facts that are relevant from a legal point of view. And within the ones that are relevant, only docu-mented facts can be used as evidence. So to me, the result of an investigation is always a temporary truth that is open to be further built on. It can be the starting point for a pro-cess of national reconciliation. It can be the starting point of an appeal process. It can be completed later on; the process can continue indefinitely. ’

The DasArts programme ‘Current Events in the Past Tense’ raises questions about how art can deal with information from news and current events. Do you have a viewpoint on this role?‘I have a very brief view on this: not something personal, but something you could read in Foucault and Rancière. Art can render what is visible, visible. The function of art is to al-low us to see something that lies there, but that we were not able to see before. Thus, the role of art in relation to cur-rent events should not be to duplicate what is on the news, but to raise ques-tions like: Why are we seeing this news and not something else? What are the costs of producing this news? What are the other aspects that are related to it, but that are not on the news?’

Should art therefore comment critically on current events?‘It should be critical, yes. But should it be commenting? No: commentary is merely a subjective reaction to some-thing. Art is, in my view, a way of investigating something. So it should investigate, go towards the things that are there, in order to make them visible.’

Your book Signatures with 5 x 9 aphorisms seems to combine two distinct ways of thinking: on the one hand, it has a very strong, conceptually thought-out structure, but on the other hand, the aphorisms themselves and the possible combinations are by nature ambiguous. Do you feel you combine differ-ent ways of thinking; from the field of law and the artistic field?‘Yes I have some kind of schizophrenia: I am a lawyer, or was trained as a lawyer, but I am also an artist and a poet. I like well-composed, structured art. Both in Signatures and the poetry book I published, I pay close attention to the structure so that it has a better impact on the poetic energy.

The structure allows readers to understand something more fully. Actually, the word ‘information’ comes from the Latin ‘informare’ meaning ‘giving a form to something’. You can-not pass something on to others, if you don’t have a form. You cannot separate form from content. You need a form to grasp something.’

During the workshop, you asked students to partici-pate in an interesting exercise: to read a combina-tion of five selected aphorisms, and to share new ideas or thoughts that emerged from their reading. ‘Especially with this book, but with everything I write, I always hope that someone will make use of it. It is basi-cally Nietzsche’s idea: thoughts are like arrows. A thought goes for a certain distance, and then someone picks it up, and carries it on. For me, it is important that thoughts are in use, are connected or become useful for others, for their own work. If not, I am merely stating that I am here. It was very interesting for me to see what the students, with their different personal backgrounds, did with my book. They were willing to play the game. They produced or raised some very interesting things.’

What is the theme of your workshop at DasArts?‘When Lina and Rabih asked me to be a guest in their DasArts programme about the role of art in current events and the news, I was very interested. Because when you speak about news, you speak about a certain type of infor-mation. In law we also constantly deal with certain types of

information. So what I discussed with the students was: if both information and law are important for society, how do these two things connect? What type of relationship can exist between information and law? Then we moved on to the question: how can law grasp information? Are the already accepted notions in legal theory suitable for dealing with digitized information?’

What other connections between information and law did you discuss?‘There is another interesting question: about information produced by law, information that results from the fact that the judicial machinery is work-

ing. Judicial investigation creates its own, new kind of in-formation and knowledge. This information can change the distribution of power, it can reveal hidden things; things that should be visible. It is something a society can agree upon after a war: we have this partial, composed truth, but at least we have evidence for it, so let’s agree on that, so we can start building again.’

Do you see similarities between the function of law and art in society?‘Yes, the social roles of art and law are in competition. Art offers something that can provide a basis for society to

Who is Fadi El Abdallah? Fadi El Abdallah is a Lebanese author,

published poet, and jurist. He is also

currently serving as an Associate Legal

Outreach Officer at the International Crimi-

nal Court (ICC), The Hague. El Abdallah

studied Law at Sagesse University, Furn-

El-Chebbak and the Lebanese University,

Beirut and later obtained his PhD from the

University Paris II Panthéon-Assas, Paris.

Parallel to his practice as a lawyer focus-

ing on international relations and Middle

East politics, El Abdallah’s artistic work

questions the respective places of image

and sound, as well as exploring the con-

nections between the law, time, music,

and money in today’s society. He has par-

ticipated as a solo artist in exhibitions and

festivals, and as a member of the collective

Group Tuesday (a collaboration with Bilal

Khbeiz and Walid Sadek), has exhibited

works in the 8th Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah,

2007; Out of Beirut, Modern Art Oxford,

2006; and the festival Home Works III, Beirut, 2005. El Abdallah lives and works

in The Hague.

‘With everything I write, I always

hope that someone will

make use of it’

11 ‘Art can render what is visible, visible’

InterviewFadi El Abdallah

Participants’ Events in the

Past TenseSeptember 17, 2012

Ten artists from all over the world partici-pate in the 2012 DasArts Block programme

‘Current Events in the Past Tense’. On the first day they were asked to select

one single news item from the vast stream of world news, with the aim to follow

and work with this item during 10 weeks. This is their highly personal

September 17, 2012 ‘news’ selection.

Emke Idema, The Netherlands

I decided to follow the actuality of a place that I don’t know. Just to see what would happen next. I searched for the smallest place, where people speak English (so that I could find reports in English). I ended up in Nauru, the smallest Republic in the world (only 21 km2), somewhere in the Ocean between Hawaii and Papua New Guinea. This was the first, and only news I found:

A plane carrying dozens of Sri Lankan men arrived on Nauru this morning as the airlift to transport asylum seekers from Christmas Island began. Immigration Minister Chris Bowen has confirmed a group of 30 single adult men arrived to be housed in the tent city set up by the Australian Army.The group is the first to be dealt with under the Federal Government’s new offshore processing legislation. However, Mr Bowen refused to provide details of how the group was selected and said the decision was made by his department.

First asylum seekers arrive on Nauru

Apparently an event was happening there: Australia had started to transport asylum seekers to Nauru, and was paying Nauru for this (it is even Nauru’s main source of income). In total, 1500 asylum seekers will be housed in a tent city, on an island where less than 10.000 people live. Because I don’t know the place and my only focus is on this story, it reads a bit like a parable. I am curious as to how it will continue.

13 Participants’ Events in the Past Tense

September 17,2012

PT: Um homem com cerca de 20 anos, que participava nos protestos em Aveiro contra as medidas de austeridade, imolou-se pelo fogo às 18h30 deste sábado e entrou em cha-mas no edifício do Governo Civil local. Segundo fontes dos bombeiros, sofreu queimaduras de segundo e terceiro grau, mas não corre risco de vida.

PT: De acordo com a edição de hoje do “Diário de Aveiro”, o episódio que foi noticiado como uma tentativa de imolação durante os protestos na cidade, foi originado pelo derrame de líquido inflamável quando o jovem, de 21 anos, se prepa-rava para um número circense, cuspindo fogo. As roupas incendiaram-se e o jovem terá então corrido para as antigas instalações do Governo Civil para pedir ajuda.

ENG: A man about 20 years of age, who participated in the anti-austerity protests in Aveiro, set himself on fire at 18:30, bursting into flames on the Civil Government building site. According to the fire fighters, the man suffered second and third degree burns, which were not life threatening.

ENG: According to today’s edition of the “Aveiro Diary”, the episode that was reported as an attempted immolation during protests in the city actually came about when flam-mable liquid was poured on a young man preparing himself for a circus fire-breathing act. As his clothes burned, the young man rushed inside the former premises of the Civil Government for help.

September 15, 2012

September 17, 2012

Maria Lalou (aka reaction-lalou), Greece

WHEN -

actually-

WHAT?

Do I get the news? In/from which language? It is the time specificity which delivers the significance of facts. Any language, from all places I travel to, I remember to take a newspaper. I use them to wrap my personal collection of glass objects that I often bring along on travels. Un-wrapping the glass piggy bank No.15 from the year of 2010 series; the news of that day.

a process of connecting to ‘real’ time:

a relation to the type format:

1. extract from page 16

2. turn up the volume

3. change channel

4. scroll down

LALOU, October 2012collector of newspapers of which thematic interest?

Man in flamesduring protests

Due to diverse cultural traits in the Portuguese identity - and mainly the result of a long, silencing dictatorship - it is rare to see extreme acts of violence or extremist acts of protest, although many people ask themselves whether it shouldn’t happen more, especially dur-ing this period of austerity. The news that a young man had set himself on fire as form of protest, while present on one of the biggest popular demonstra-tions in decades of democracy, focused everyone’s minds on the imminence of violence: would it be (finally) now? Nothing happened as a result of this unprecedented gesture and, two days later, it was reported that, after all, the incident was indeed an unintentional accident during a circus act. Reac-tions to this news on social networks showed incredulity, disappointment, even frustration. The idea of someone setting himself on fire is excessive to all reasonable Portuguese but, for a mo-ment, the potential of violence sparkled with a strange brightness. http://ran-domassociates.blogspot.com

Pedro Manuel, Portugal

[caption: extract from page 16_Lalou 2012]

15 Participants’ Events in the Past Tense

September 17,201214 Participants’

Events in the Past TenseSeptember 17,

2012

Jaha Koo (aka GuJAHA), South Korea

The truth of a presidential candidate

Park Keun Hye, one of the presidential candidates from the ruling party in South Korea, is the daughter of a South Korean military dictator who was in power in the 60’s and 70’s. During his tenure, her father, Park Chung Hee, created serious problems, such as human rights infringements, before being assassinated in 1979. However, no one from his party has ever apologized to the Korean people for the atrocities he committed during his rule.

His daughter, the candidate Park Keun Hye, also skirted around the issue of her father but did eventually apologise for her father’s faults at the end of September, 2012. Most Koreans do not trust her apology because they know she intends use the election for her own political ends. Korean people intends to question what her genuine take on history actually is.

Through daily news, I would like to trace her speeches during the election campaign, as an attempt to see how her image is changing in the mass media until the upcoming presidential election in December 2012.

Bojan Djordjev, Serbia

The rich haven’t always hated taxes

Topic: Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. - Actual examples of class struggle -

Mitt Romney has proclaimed, ‘I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more.’ While most Americans may not agree with his tax rate (14%), few would disagree with his sentiment. Almost no one willingly pays more taxes than required. Yet there was a time when elites willingly acknowledged that they should pay far higher rates than others. In fact, when the income tax was first regularly put into place in 1913, the well-off were the only ones required to pay it.

‘Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.’ (Franklin D. Roosevelt). Supreme Court Justice (and Boston Brahmin) Oliver Wendell Holmes told a young law clerk who complained about paying them, ‘I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.’ Yet in the 1970s, this attitude began to change. Elites began to use their increasing political power to lower their taxes, an effort that came to fruition under Ronald Reagan. Today our elites employ “the income defense industry” to greatly reduce their taxes.

The results have been successful; between 1970 and 2004 the rich cut their overall effective tax rate by more than half – from 75% to 35% – while the American average has remained at 23%. But at what cost?

From: Time magazine, September 19, 2012-10-01 http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/18/the-rich-havent-always-hated-taxes/

17 Participants’ Events in the Past Tense

September 17,201216 Participants’

Events in the Past TenseSeptember 17,

2012

Laila Soliman, Egypt

What is political voyeurism?

What makes one a political voyeur?

Am I a political voyeur?

Margo van de Linde, The Nederlands

‘Kategate wordt een fikse kwestie’

‘Kategate promises to be a heavy

issue’‘Kategate wordt een fikse kwestie’Volkskrant, 17/09/2012, Patrick van IJzendoorn

KUALA LUMPUR - ‘We zagen een spion in de bomen.’ Na een tocht door de boomtoppen in de jungle van Borneo probeerde prins William zo ontspan-nen mogelijk over te komen door een grapje te maken over een geaccrediteerde persfotograaf die, klaute-rend en wel, verslag deed van de koninklijke tour door Zuidoost-Azië. De toekom-stige Britse koning is echter ziedend over de publicatie van foto’s van zijn half-naakte vrouw Kate. Volgens The Sunday Mirror vindt hij een gevangenisstraf op zijn plaats voor de paparazzo en andere verantwoordelijken.

Terwijl William en Kate door de Oost reizen, zijn advoca-ten van het Britse Konings-huis druk in de weer om publicatie en verdere ver-spreiding van foto’s tegen te gaan. Ze waren te laat in het geval van de Ierse Daily Star, wier 64 duizend lezers zaterdag al kennis konden nemen van de koninklijke borsten.

‘Kategate promises to be a heavy issue’Volkskrant, 17/09/2012, Patrick van IJzendoorn

KUALA LUMPUR - “We saw a spy in the trees.” After a trip through the treetops in the jungle of Borneo Prince William tried to appear relaxed when he made a joke about an accredited press photographer who, clambering and well, was reporting on the royal tour of Southeast Asia. However, the future British king is furious about the publication of photos of his half-nude wife Kate. According to The Sunday Mirror he believes that a jail sentence would be appropriate for the paparazzo and others concerned.

As William and Kate continue their Eastern travels, the British Royal family’s lawyers are busy trying to stop the further publication and distribution of the photographs. In the case of the Irish Daily Star they were already too late. Some 64,000 readers were already able to view the royal breasts.

19 Participants’ Events in the Past Tense

September 17,201218 Participants’

Events in the Past TenseSeptember 17,

2012

Riina Maidre, Estonia

For the first time, scientists have peered over the edge of a colossal black hole and measured the point of no return for matter.

A black hole has a boundary called an event horizon. Anything that falls within a black hole’s event horizon – be it stars, gas, or even light – can never escape. ‘Once objects fall through the event horizon, they’re lost forever, it’s an exit door from our universe. You walk through that door, you’re not coming back,’ says Shep Doeleman, assistant director of the MIT Haystack Observatory and research associate at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

The enormous black hole in question lies at the centre of the M87 galaxy, which is about 50 million light-years from our own Milky Way. This behemoth black hole contains the mass equivalent to 6 billion suns.

Questioning actuality by shifting the scales helps me to stay focused; in order to love the things that are beyond my understanding, are too present to be true, or are ungraspable.

from: www.space.com

Mouth of Giant Black Hole Measured For First Time

Sonja Jokiniemi, Finland

Shell boss defends Alaska project as ice halts drilling

21 Participants’ Events in the Past Tense

September 17,201220 Participants’

Events in the Past TenseSeptember 17,

2012

Oil chief dismisses fears of another Gulf spill after huge floe forces drill ship to move The man at the centre of Shell’s controversial drilling program in the Arctic has said he is aware of the responsibility on his head but is convinced the Anglo-Dutch oil group is acting in a fully responsible and accountable way. Speaking after a

huge ice floe forced drilling 70 miles off the north-west coast of Alaska to be temporarily halted, Peter Slaiby, vice-president of Shell Alaska, insisted that the company had learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The Chukchi operation finally started eight days ago, on Sunday 10 September, only to be halted almost immediately by the threat of the ice floe, 30 miles long and 12 miles wide, heading towards the drill ship.

Environmentalists say a spill similar to Deepwater Horizon would be catastrophic in a pristine environment badly affected by climate change and home to threatened mammals such as polar bears, bowhead whales and walrus.

Critics have many concerns, from wider fears about new oil production fuelling global warming, to more localised worries that Shell is not as prepared as it claims. Slaiby, said the company fully understands the impact of carbon on climate change but said oil and gas are still needed to meet growing global energy demand in the near term.

From: The Guardian, Sunday 16 September 2012 17.51 BSThttp://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/16/shell-alaska-oild-drilling-resume?INTCMP=SRCH

Just a silhouette in the dark. Slowly, the contours of a giant truck parked in the corner of the hall emerge. Mysterious barrels are piled up on the load bed. Is this a camouflaged truck for smuggling? A transport of illegal immigrants? Or a monochrome version of the uncanny truck in Steven Spielberg’s debut feature film “Duel”, where a truck attempts to kill a car driver on a highway? It is none of these. It is the installation “Phantom Truck” by the artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle.

A text in the catalogue explains the context. “Phantom Truck” is the visual representation of a notorious political “document”. In 2003, then US foreign minister Colin Powell presented a drawing to the world that “proved” the existence of mobile biological weapons in Iraq. Powell presented all kinds of unsettling pseudo-documents to the World Security Council to prove Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass des-truction – thus casually obliterating the limits of documen-tary evidence. His presentation of satellite pictures marked with inscriptions blurred the lines between factual evidence and its interpretation. Vague shapes of buildings on aerial photographs were interpreted as military complexes. The strangest pieces of evidence, however, were drawings in the style of technical phantom images that were meant to prove the existence of the represented objects. Among these was the above-mentioned truck. Manglano-Ovalle translated this template into an installation that shows, above all, darkness. Its obscurity captures the current crisis of documentary representation. The fact that Powell’s artefacts could be taken for “documents” in the first place demonstrates the extent of this crisis. Traditionally, documents are the outcome of more or less clearly defined procedures. Legal, criminal, and even journalistic documents are produced in abidance with certain rules. They must refer to a number of different,

Phantom TruckThe Crisis of Documentary

Representation

The TV broadcasts of the Romanian Revolution (1989) demarcated a visual turning point between two epochs, according to Hito Steyerl, one of this year’s

guest lecturers at the DasArts Block. ‘It is the image that now causes the events.’ An example can be found in 2003 when Colin Powell presented

a drawing of mobile production facilities for biological weapons, which played a major role in legitimising the attack on Iraq. What is reality and what is real?

In this essay, Steyerl discusses the crises of documentary representation, by analysing three contemporary art installations.

October 17, 2012 Essay by Hito Steyerl

Who is Hito Steyerl? Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer. She worked as stuntwoman, bouncer and bondage model before studying camera work in Tokyo and documentary film making in Munich. Her essays and essay films look at the dilemma of truthful documentary production, and explore political unrest, spectacle and violence, as well as the political economy of contemporary media. Her work insists on a feminist perspective - although she doesn’t really know what this means - and explores the digital vernacular in its lowest and most proletarian versions. In 2008 and 2009 she participated in the Workers Punk Art School, Berlin. Her books include: The Color of Truth, 2008, Beyond Representation, 2011, and The Wretched of the Screen (forthcoming).

Tchelet Weisstub, Israel

22 Participants’ Events in the Past Tense

September 17,2012

independent sources, or they must be substantiated by scholarly research. The docu-mentary photograph, which is not strictly bound by such rules in the same way, derives its authority, among other things, both from its evident nature and the myth of tech nical objecti-vity, i.e. through photographic representation1. In Powell’s presenta-tion, almost all of these rules were suspended with remarka-ble nonchalance. The sources of information were secret; the interpretative process was not transparent. The drawings of “mobile weapons laboratories” represented a clear disrup-tion of the photographic indexical relationship between the object and its representation that we usually expect in visual documents. A phantom image was taken as factual evidence. Even Powell himself appeared to be scarcely convinced by his own arguments. Instead of factual reality, which is increasingly blurred by the mists of war, another aspect of documentary imaging came to the fore in these drawings: the traditional alignment of documents with power. Power is the flipside of classical, documentary methods of finding the truth. The archive depends on bureau-cracy, and it would be unt-hinkable to have jurispru-dence without the police; in the same way, the camera’s objective is caught up with power, and the camera lens may easily turn into an oppor-tunistic convertible lens. In his “Politics of Truth”2, Michel Foucault has defined the pro-duction of such knowledge, which is determined by po-wer and hence partial by nature, as a rather flexible system that supports the generation of “truth” as required. However, the problem with Foucault’s concept is this: if all documents are equally partial constructs – what is the difference between Powell’s fabrications and the results of serious research? How can we separate fact from fiction? Although the close ties between documents and knowledge/power are obvious, this does not necessarily mean that documents are therefore incapable of conveying an impres-sion of reality. Even if all documents are constructed, not all documents are equally biased in the same way. And even if reality can never be fully captured by documentation, some-times it is enough to put together a number of aspects to get an adequate idea of it. The documentary politics of truth is powerful indeed – but it is not omnipotent.

Direct TransmissionThe way in which the politics of truth may be articulated, crisscrossed and substituted is exemplified by Harun Farocki’s and Andrej Ujica’s film “Videograms of a Revolu-

tion” (1992), which documents the events accompanying the change of government in Romania in 1989. When the revolution started, Ceausescu’s government was still in control of the media. The dictator’s televised speech is interrupted when the crowds boo him – absurdly enough, with a red banner saying “direct transmis-sion”. The power to construct events through the media is still being monopolised – but

the first cracks in the government’s politics of truth become discernible. Despite the interruption, TV cameras continue to film the events. Simultaneously, amateur camcorders are recording, a factor which nobody takes into account at the time. By combining different perspectives, “Videograms of a Revolution” reconstructs the events in retrospect – even if some images were initially repressed. The film is an excel-lent analysis of the media-constructed politics of truth. It archives different versions and assembles divergent sources. The combination of different documents and re-cordings in Farocki and Ujica’s film questions the version(s) presented by the mass media. However, this happens only

with an assembly that takes place long after the events, and is irrelevant at the moment of takeover. Amateur camcorder recor-dings only become relevant in retrospect. Revoluti-onaries have no time for these documents. They are interested less in accurate historiography than in (the means of) making history. They focus on seizing the

monopoly of power and control over the media for themsel-ves. Especially since they know the power of the centralised, media-constructed “politics of truth”, they occupy the TV station and complete the revolution from there. One elite replaces another; one “politics of truth” is substituted with another3.

The case of the Romanian revolution is only one example of the documentary politics of truth. However, if we declare documents to be exclu sively the agents of the powers that be, we are likely to underestimate their potential. It would also mean ignoring the differences between various methods of documentation. The camcorder documentation is not identi-cal to what was broadcast live on TV, and both media taken together tell less than the complex assembly that makes “Videograms of a Revolution” look as if it had been compiled in the imaginary control room of world history.

The Document of the RealLet us return to the black truck. The question of documen-tary manipulation is secondary in “Phantom Truck”. The work is not primarily interested in political truth, but in political fiction. The installation trans-lates the templates of the fictional “document” into reality, it reali-ses fiction. A paranoid phantom image transforms into the mas-sive material reality of a 3D-mo-del of a truck. However, its real dimension remains in the twi-light zone. The “Phantom Truck” remains at the limits of percep-tion, like a nightmare continuing in the waking state. Perhaps “Phantom Truck” is not about political reality but about the politically “real”. Jaques Lacan’s enigma-tic concept of “the real” refers to a state that has a singular existence but is neither imaginary, nor can it be symbolised. Something that is indescribable and that cannot be transla-ted into the continuity of a narrative - an unsettling presence that may neither be rationalised nor repressed. Although reality is based on “the real”, the latter is strictly excluded from reality. The individual psyche, too, must strictly dif-ferentiate between the perception of reality and the real. When the separating line between the two is broken, psy-chologists speak of psychosis4. Paranoid fantasies of fear submerge the perception of reality. “Phantom Truck” docu-ments a political psychosis of the present. The fear of terror mutates into the terror of fear. “Phantom truck” demonstrates that the boundary between delusion and reality has become fragile, not only on a psychic level but also in material reality. Powell’s pre-sentation played a major role in legitimising the attack on Iraq. Even though the drawings presented by him did not represent actual reality, they undeniably created a dramatic new reality. The images left the realm of representation and started to catalyse actions. In “Phantom Truck”, this very material act of realisation is evoked: an image creates a new reality.

Acting ImagesIt is not surprising that this function of media images was first theorised immediately after the Romanian revolution, when old and new media as well as old and new world

orders brutally clashed. “It is the image that now causes the events”5, wrote Vilem Flusser early in 1990, a few months after the events. Virtually unlike any other upheaval, this one was bound up with images on television – those images documenting the occupation of state-run television after Ceausescu’s escape, and finally of the contradictory televised versions of his execution. TV no longer seemed to document events, but was pushing itself to the fore as an agent of action. Flusser was appalled by the fusion of political and mediatised events. Shattered, he declared that TV had aestheticised the events and had reduced them to happe-nings6. Flusser did not mean to say that the events had been aesthetically beautiful or sublime. He took “aesthetics”

quite literally: as a realm of sen-sual perception, as a formation of effects. The televised images were aesthetic because their confusin-gly drastic nature created an over-whelming, unsettling effect. The aesthetics of the televised images of the revolution of ’89 had nothing to do with beauty or the sublime, but with a new and intensified politics of perception. According to Flusser, these images are real, not because they represent reality, but because they trigger real and in-tense effects. They are not neces-sarily the consequence of a former reality, but are doubtless the cause of subsequent reality. They are not

real; they become real. Flusser, writing shortly after the events, did not take these images as an entry point into a post-histoire7, a condition that comes after politics and history, in which images exert a magical power like some sort of technolo-gical voodoo spell8. Now, 17 years after the events, we can see more clearly that what Flusser had described so clair-voyantly back then did indeed mark a visual turning point between two epochs, of whose effects we are only vaguely aware, even today.

Signals Without MeaningAnother installation by Manglano-Ovalle is entitled “Ra-dio”. A small, black radio is placed on the floor of an empty room. The rays of sunlight are coloured by a bright orange (plastic) foil. The mood is aggressive, surreal, intoxicating. The choice of the colour orange is probably not acciden-

4 Ibid. p143.

5 Vilém Flusser, Fernsehbild und politische Sphäre. In: Von der Bürokratie zur Telekratie. Rumänien im Fernsehen. Hg. Keiko Sei Berlin: Merve 1990. S103-114- S112.

6 Vilém Flusser, Fernsehbild und politische Sphäre. In: Von der Bürokratie zur Telekratie. Rumänien im Fernsehen. Hg. Keiko Sei Berlin: Merve 1990. S103-114- S112.

7 Ibid. p103

8 Ebd.

1 To the film theorist Andre Bazin, the most prominent quality of the photographic image is its mimetic quality. Bazin and other realists believe that the image entertains a special relationship with reality, because the mechanical nature of recording objectifies/neutralises/balances/can-cels out the subjective factor involved in the production of the image: “The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture making.” Cit. after Carroll 1988, p. 125.

2 Foucault in Pasquino /Fontana 1978, p. 51.

3 C.f. Peter Weibel „Medien als Maske: Videokratie“ In: Von der Bürokratie zur Telekratie. Rumänien im Fernsehen. Ed. Keiko Sei. Berlin: Merve 1990. pp124-149. p 134f.

Fear is not only the political emotion of the present. Fear is the LSD of the early 21st century. Fear is addictive, and we

begin to miss it when it is absent

A phantom image was taken as factual evidence.

Even Powell himself appeared to be scarcely

convinced by his own arguments

25 PhantomTruck

Essay by Hito Steyerl24 Phantom

TruckEssay by

Hito Steyerl

tal. It corresponds to the colour code of the highest terror warning level of the U.S. department of homeland security. Bright orange is a signal of extreme alarm. In the instal-lation, the colour functions as a political radiation in the background, which is hardly recognisable only because it is omnipresent. Just as in a laboratory, visitors may test the effects of the coloured light on their senses. The violent orange is disorientating: it works like a drug, distorts our perception of other colours and becomes the sole aesthetic point of reference. Signals without signification9: this is how Brian Massumi refers to the colours on the terror warning scale. Their purpose is to modulate col-lective fear. Fear is not only the political emotion of the present. Fear is the LSD of the early 21st century. Fear is addictive, and we begin to miss it when it is absent. It is intense, opulent, it multiplies, and unlike human beings it travels freely and fast. Similar to digital in-formation, its quality does not dimi-nish when it is copied, but actually improves. It may be deeply enjoyed, a paradoxical desire in disguise. Fear feels real, more than reality ever does. Paolo Virno reminds us that this penetrating and existential fear is bound up with the loss of traditional socie-ties and the emerging conditions of the multitude. It cannot be kept at bay with shared rituals or their modern equiva-lent, the communicative rational public sphere. On the con-trary: fear itself is a form of contemporary public culture.10 To Marshall McLuhan, the radio plays an important role in the distribution of fear. It acts like a tribal drum appealing directly to archaic emotions. Radio is the symptom of an electric implosion of the world, a kind of global expansion of the central nervous system.11

Signals without signification: the small radio on the floor in Manglano-Ovalle’s installation emits only noise. One could say: orange noise. It has no message: it is the message. The present day politics of truth is aesthetic, it is directed at perception and the senses. It operates less through forgery than through realising its own fictions. Politics today is not only aesthetic but also synaesthetic. Just like the colours in Manglano-Ovalle’s monochrome installations, it drowns the present in oppressive and toxic-stimulating moods.

Crisis of Representation The monochrome form has yet another meaning. It refers to a general crisis of representation. In the 20th century history of Western art, the monochrome crystallises a crisis of representation, which is ultimately accompanied by the destruction and overcoming of the traditional form of the panel painting. Artists have worked towards the liberation of colour and form, and have finally succeeded in liberating even objects from the limitations of the frame. The frame was attacked, exposed, destroyed, and finally simply abandoned.12 Even politics takes place beyond traditional

representation. It seems as if we are gradually abandoning the framework of the democratic nation state, just like we abandoned the traditional panel painting. Certain parts of the population are excluded from political representation. Democratic hybrids emerge, such as the European Union, which promote indirect forms of political representation. Representation – whether artistic or political – is in crisis. This two-fold crisis is more than visible in the production of documentary material. Nation states lose the monopoly over public images and sounds. Government radio stations are now threatened by private competition; the public turns into a market.13 Thus, the grip of gover-

nmental politics of truth is loose-ned, and along with it, traditional documentary methods of truth finding lose their validity. The film or photo document is liberated from its nexus with the apparatuses of power/knowledge embodied by bu-reaucracy, jurisdiction and science, and increasingly becomes a part of the cycles of entertainment and mobilisation. It does not neces-sarily address reason but instead targets emotions. It is circulated not only on the TV channels that are still controlled now as they were

then, but also in the deregulated rumour mill of the web. Its potentially fictional character thus increases, just like the tools to question it through comparison and observation. “Radio” and “Phantom Truck” generically perform these changes in the relationship between politics, documents and media while subject to the conditions of globalisation and war: the reduction of information to aesthetics, the transformation of sense into sensuality. The shadows obscuring “Phantom Truck”, in turn, illuminate the fact that the crisis of representation in the spheres of politics and art has also affected the notions of the documentary and the public. The crisis has shaken not only politics but also documentary images and sounds and their relation to reality. Their symptoms are extreme moods, the radical aestheticisation of politics and fiction that colonise reality. The omnipresent orange noise does not mediate a message. It does not represent reality; it is reality. Mean-while, dark phantom trucks pass through the cracks of documentary representation, crossing the line of reality.

‘It is not that the past casts its light on the present, or the present its light on the past: rather, image is that in which the ‘Then’ (das Gewesene) comes together with the ‘Now’ (Jetzt) creating a constellation like a flash of lightning. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For whilst the present’s rela-tionship to the past is a purely temporal and continuous one, that of ‘Then’ to ‘Now’ is dialectical: it is an image rather than a process, a disconnected spring (sprunghaft). Only dialectic images are true images (i.e. not archaic); and the place where we happen upon them is language.’

Walter Benjamin: ‘N (Re The theory of Knowledge, Theory of progress)’ (N, 49)

Concerning the actuality of Walter Benjamin is the title of a book I bought in a shop that was anything but dedicated to actuality: a second hand bookshop. The book was published in 1972 to mark Benjamin’s 80th birthday. This year we celebrate Benjamin’s 120th birthday, but this time around, there is to be no reprint of this book, nor has anyone written a new one about his “actuality”. But there is also less need for it than 40 years ago, when Benjamin was yet to be “rediscovered” by acade-mia and the art world.

The “afterlife” of his works – to use one of his terms – proves his theory

to be correct: there is an element of “redemption” in the interpretation of his writings, a “redeeming criticism”. Benjamin’s own idea of ‘actuality’ was rather complex: one of his key terms was “actualisation”. What can we pull out of the past into the here and now? Is there a conspiracy between the present and a moment in the past? Have we been awaited?

Benjamin’s thinking was often seen as esoteric (a term with a strongly negative connotation in German discourse), as dark and mystical. Strangely enough, he was a dear friend of a poet and drama-tist who was known for his passion for clarity, demystification, enlightenment and criticism: Bertolt Brecht. Benjamin & Brecht were an unlikely pair, and those close to both of them were deeply suspicious of their alliance. It is only in recent years that their cooperation has been studied.

They made many plans together, none of which were realised. To read what has never been written is a Benjaminian en-deavour, and thus it is tempting for those of us ‘born after’ (Nachgeborenen) to imagine what the results of their co-au-thorship might have been. If there is one legacy of the Brecht/Benjamin enterpri-se, then it is the mistrust of a superficial notion of “actuality” as a central element of the “spectacle society”. Because what is hell? According to Benjamin it is the “eternal return of the new.”

9 Brian Massumi, „Fear – the Spectrum said“. In: positions 13:1 Spring 2005. S 31-48. S32.

10 Paolo Virno. Grammatik der Multitude Wien: Turia und Kant 2005. S 37ff.

11 Marshall Mc Luhan „Radio“, In ders.: Understanding Media London/New York: Routledge 2001. S 324-335. 12 Peter Weibel, Über den Ikonoklasmus der modernen Kunst, in: http://hosting.zkm.de/icon/stories/story-Reader$33 Zitierdatum 30.06.07

13 s.a. Jay G. Blumler The new television marketplace: imperiatives, implications, issues. In: James Curran, Michael Gurevitch Mass Media and Society London/New York/Melbourne/Auckland: Edward Arnold. S 194-216. ISBN S208ff.

The crisis of representation has

shaken not only politics but also

documentary images and sounds and their

relation to reality

Who is Alexander Karschnia?Alexander Karschnia lives and works in Berlin. As well as being a theatre maker and -scientist, he is also a performer, writer and dramaturge. He writes for and about theatre, his work includes studies of Brecht, Müller, Schlingensief, Pollesch, Rimini Protokoll etc. Whilst studying at the Frankfurter Goethe Universität, he devoted himself to Heiner-Müller research. He is the co-founder of andcompany&Co. He also runs workshops, gives lectures and organises conferences, such as ZUM ZEITVERTREIB (To pass time) in Frankfurt (2004) and Na(ar) het theater - After Theatre? with Hans-Thies Lehmann in Amsterdam (2006). For both of these events, he has published accompanying books.

V (concerning the actuality of the collaboration of Walter Benjamin

& Bertolt Brecht)This year we celebrate Walter Benjamin’s 120th birthday. Theatre theoretician Alexander Karschnia, one of this year’s guest lecturers at the DasArts Block,

shares some thoughts on Benjamin’s notion of actuality.

October 3, 2012 Essay by Alexander Karschnia

26 PhantomTruck

Essay by Hito Steyerl

An increasing number of contemporary artistic practices (for example libraries, archives, symposia) don’t look like art at all. This poses a new challenge to the centuries-old question: How to distinguish art from reality? Art theoretician Stephen Wright, guest lecturer at DasArts, rereads a 1893 Lewis Carroll pas-sage on 1:1 scale maps to shed a new light on this question, and discusses six

contemporary examples of art ‘operating on the 1:1 scale.’

October 5, 2012 Essay by Stephen Wright

Operating on the 1:1 Scale

The “crisis of representation” is not something that hap-pened to representation when it got old and worn out; nor was it the scale of the moral catastrophes of the twentieth century that brought representation to the paroxysm of the “unrepresentable”. The crisis was always inherent in repre-sentation itself. It was Plato who first theorised and capita-lised on what he saw as the discontinuity -- the ontological discontinuity, a discontinuity of being and not merely of logic -- between art and reality. He famously dramatised this discontinuity in his critique of what he called “mime-sis” because, he worried, it had the capacity to conceal its own existence, at least in the eyes of the unaware: represen-tation could look, for all the world, like the real thing, which would have baneful consequences for the established order of which he was such a staunch defender. Since there is no logical way of either ensuring a correspondence, or proving a discontinuity, between art and reality, between representation and the represented, Plato fell back on the stratified social hierarchies of his world to enforce that discontinuity. In today’s terms, we

Who is Stephen Wright?Stephen Wright is a Paris-based writer and Professor of Art Theory at the European School of Visual Arts. His research and writing has focused on the use-value of art, particularly within the context of collaborative, extra-disciplinary practices, with impaired coefficients of artistic visibility. He is currently on the editorial advisory committee of the journal Third Text. A selection of his writings in English may be found on the collective blog n.e.w.s. http://northeastwestsouth.net/

might say that Plato used an “institutional argument.” The ontological difference between mimetic art and ordi-nary pieces of reality could only be upheld by an institutio-nal frame -- in Plato’s case, the famous three-tiered Now to suggest Plato used an “institutional frame” is rather provocative, because contemporary institutio-nal theory -- the hegemonic theory of art today, embodied in the conceptual architecture of the mainstream art world -- sees itself as having definitively refuted Plato’s conception of art as imitation. Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Nelson Good-man and other protagonists of insti-tutional theory have sought to develop a theory of art that accommodates the now widespread non-mimetic art practices of the twentieth-century avant-gardes as no less valid than representational works. arrangement of the cosmos (ideas of things, known only to philosophers; things themselves, built by artisans; and last as well as least, representations of things -- the lowly imita-tions made by artists). Yet, in order to do so, they have needed to distin-guish such non-mimetic works (readymades, or aided rea-dymades) from what Arthur Danto likes to call “mere real things.” And here they find themselves back at square one, in the unlikely company of Plato. For no-thing distinguishes these “artistic” prac-tices, these objects, these actions from their “real” counterparts, except the in-stitutional frame (an “art world” of sorts) that supports and validates their claim to be art. The discontinuity, then, between them and their real “other” can only be... ontological. In the absence of an institu-tionally guaranteed framing device, they would not be art at all. In this one respect at least, in-stitutional theory remains in the thrall of Platonic doctrine. Which accounts for the often-remarked insistence in the work of Arthur Danto on art’s ontological sepa-ration from the real. By this measure, the long-standing ambition of the mimetic artist to deflect the Platonic indictment of art by closing the gap between art and reality is not only misconceived, but also futile: ‘Howe-ver much a picture of something may resemble what it is depicting, Danto writes, it remains an entity of an ontolo-gically distinct order, even if what it depicts is a picture. As Danto sees it, the very possibility of art after Duchamp depends upon NOT bridging that gap, by means of either mimetic or modernist means.

Lewis Carroll’s large-scale mapOf course, Danto has no truck with Plato’s theory of art as mimesis; but if anything this only radicalises his insisten-ce on art’s ontological discontinuity from reality. He begins his book, What Philosophy Is, with a commentary on a passage about mapping he recalls from a novel by Lewis

Carroll. The characters in this philosophical tale are talking about maps; specifically, about the largest-scale map that would be useful. Once the maps they had produced reached a certain scale, approaching or even corresponding to the territory itself, Danto explains, they became useless as maps. Danto’s conclusion is this: the whole point of maps, and their use value, is to be other than what they represent;

he adds that it is not a criticism of a map to say that New York doesn’t really look like a dot. At least two things about this passage are relevant to our discus-sion. Firstly, the discontinuity here is not so much based on representation (as it has been for so much of history) as on scale. Essentially, a full-scale map is not a map at all. And secondly,

the passage that Danto “remembers” from Lewis Carroll, and to which he refers, as a framework for his own philo-sophical mapping project, simply does not exist. Danto remembers something that is nowhere to be found, except in his recollection of it... The passage from Carroll’s 1893 novel Sylvie and Bruno Concluded to which Danto is obviously (albeit mislea-dingly) referring is quite different. Although Danto’s creative reconstruction enables him to make a strategic philosophical

point, Carroll’s version makes a far more incisive and far-reaching one. Before looking at it more closely, let us also recall that it is often thought to have been Jorge Luis Borges who first introduced the paradox of the full-scale map, in his pithy one-paragraph parable, On Exactitude in Science, written in 1960. Borges’ text was surely inspired by Carroll’s, written more than a half century earlier, but stops short of what is undoubtedly Carroll’s most striking insight, which occurs in the course of an impromptu conversation between the outlandish, even otherworldly Mein Herr, and the British narrator:

‘That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,’ said Mein Herr,

‘map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?’‘About six inches to the mile.’‘Only six inches!’ exclaimed Mein Herr. ‘We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!’‘Have you used it much?’ I enquired.‘It has never been spread out, yet,’ said Mein Herr: ‘the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’

Essentially, a full-scale map

is not a map at all

29 Operating on the 1:1 scale

Essay by Stephen Wright

Colofon

Notorious for creating tales full of mesmerising warps in the fabric of space and time, here Carroll is playing with fundamental assumptions about representation: its role as surrogate, its status as an abstraction, and its use as a con-vention that references the real to which it is subordinated. The parable deserves a very close reading. Carroll’s map, re-placeable as it is by the territory it surveys, raises questions about what happens to representation when, at its limit, it resembles its subject so closely as to confound the distinc-tion between what is real and what is not. In this case, the representation not only refuses to be subordinate to its sub-ject, but is also interchangeable with, and even superior to it, as we are slyly told. The fact that the com-plaint against the mapping pro-ject came from the farmers -- from the perspective of political eco-logy, let’s say -- is also telling. Cartography tends to see itself as the ultimate outreach of the En-lightenment project, drawing at-tention to that which is suffering from a lack of it by shedding light on it. Yet as the farmers point out, this white dream of enlighten-ment has a dark side, as every representation must. Every light-shedding device will also cast a shadow; and a map (or any representation) is also a light-occluding device. Ultima-tely, though, Carroll comes to the exact opposite conclusion than that remembered by Arthur Danto: the ontological dis-continuity between map and territory disappears when the territory is made to function as its own map. This is highly important in an era where so-called “cognitive mapping” practices have become so widespread. And it is in this res-pect that Carroll’s story can shed some light on many con-temporary artistic practices that have in effect ramped up their scale to that of 1:1.

Six examples of contemporary 1:1 artistic practicesOne can scarcely have failed to notice that an increasing number of practices are now operating on the same scale as the thing with which they are grappling, both in time and in space, refusing both a representational paradigm and a reduced-scale regime. They are both what they are, and propositions of what they are. They use, as it were, the land as its own map. What do 1:1 practices look like? They look exactly the same as the thing they represent; they certainly don’t look like art. Perhaps if one were for some reason determined to continue the Platonic-institutional legacy, one might describe these practices as being positively “redundant,” as enacting a function already fulfilled by something else -- as having, in other words, a “double ontology.” Both whatever they are (libraries, archives, symposia, whatever) and artistic propositions of whatever they are. But this seems, in many instances, precisely what they are not about -- just exactly what they are seeking to escape from. Even resisting ideo-logical and institutional capture as defanged representation does not quite describe the full thrust of these projects. They seem to be seeking to escape performative and ontolo-gical capture as art altogether.

“terrorist organisations” (from FARC to ETA, Al Qaida to Touareg People’s Liberation Front...) to come and present their historical cases in a sort of league-of-nations style fo-rum for the excluded. Though an ambitious political project, which Staal carried out, it paradoxically involved using art’s exceptional ontological status as a way of circumventing censorship issues (flags which are otherwise forbidden in German public space were allowed, as they were deemed part of the colour scheme of an “artwork”). Though an imperfect example, Staal’s project seems to share something of art’s contem-porary desire for upscaling and in-viting itself into the real. One last example, one amongst so many more, that of Buenos Aires-based Hugo Vidal’s “insertions”. To fight what has rightly been called the “third dis-appearance” of activist Julio Lopez (called as a witness against perpe-trators of the genocide under the Ar-gentinian dictatorship, Lopez was “disappeared” despite an ostensible return to democracy), Vidal has made it his business to keep Lopez’s name alive until such time as his whereabouts, and his fate, are made public knowledge. Taking the well-known LOPEZ brand of wine as his support, the artist surreptitiously stamps a subtle question onto bottles on supermarket shelves. ‘Apparicion con vida de Julio’ reads the stamp, the brand name completing the demand with the surname LOPEZ. The action becomes a politically charged injection of artistic competence (in the form of an exigency) into the public sphere. Its delibera-tely impaired coefficient of artistic visibility in no way impairs its coefficient of art (as Duchamp might say) and allows it to escape from the debilitating assignment to the ontology of art.

Full-scale aesthetics, fully politicalNow institutional theory would no doubt seek to describe some of these practices as founded on “over-identification”: not so much becoming what they claim to be, as drawing

This is all rather abstract, so let’s take a handful of examples of practices or experiments on this 1:1 scale from around the world to see how they function with respect to a new politics of memory, seeking to deal with memory as a dimension of the historical present. Let’s start with Beirut-based conceptualist Walid Raad’s Atlas Group Archive. It is, as its website states, a historigraphical research institute devoted to the study of the Lebanese civil wars. Using unconventional methodolo-gies, perhaps, and particularly using fiction as an heuristic tool in a situation where access to “facts” is politically impossible and where authentic documents have been

“disappeared”, the Group investi-gates found, authored or produced documents, doing so at full scale. This is a research project, albeit one whose self-understanding is grounded in art. Or take Meschac Gaba’s wonderful, and necessary, Mu-seum of Contemporary African Art. Drawing on the work of Mar-cel Broodthaers, Philippe Thomas and others, Gaba creates a real

museum as a way of performing an unrepresentable reality: contemporary African art -- and does so as a conceptual art project. Contemporary African art, whatever it might be, is without a memory, as it is without a present. Meschac’s proposition is not the content but the frame. In one respect a fictional institution in a real landscape, Meschac creates a jarring effect as these ontological landscapes collide. Or the journal Third Text. One need never know that Third Text is conceived by founding editor Rasheed Araeen as a fully-fledged collective conceptual art work -- indeed, most of the contributors and readers have never had any reason to suppose it is, since nothing about it is the slightest bit “arty”, nor would it change in any way were it not an artistic proposition. Yet something about it changes when we learn what it is. And indeed, historically, it was a vehicle devised both to narrate the history (and create a me-mory) of excluded art practices, and to be an instantiation of those practices. Or take the Bombay-based online video archive pad.ma. It is an extensive, and extensively annotated, film archive on the internet, focusing particularly on film and video footage dealing with the Kashmiri conflict and other socio-political struggles in the Indian subcontinent. It is absolutely useful for what it is, but like these other examples, is also an artistic proposition. Not a scaled-down representation of an idea, but a full-scale, 1:1 instantiation. Forum Lentgeng’s enormous book piracy project (more than 6000 volumes, translated, copied, printed and distributed in the Indonesian language to libraries and cultural workers) or the now massive aaaaaarg.org archive are comparable examples of, as it were, using the “land as its own map”. Or the recent project of Rotterdam-based artist Jonas Staal, who in the framework of the Berlin Biennale developed a project called the New World Summit, whereby he invited members or legal representatives of all political organisations currently on the European Union’s list of

critical attention by ironically pretending to be something they are clearly not. Over-identification logic does provide insight into normalising processes, but ultimately it seeks to domesticate art’s would-be subversive power to shore up the power of the institutions with which people over-identify... Something more interesting is at work here. These projects are not afraid of representation -- indeed they have regular recourse to it. But as artis-

tic strategies, they cannot be understood under the auspices of representation. Their salient characteristic seems to be the scale on which they operate. Nor are these projects ideal instances of some sort of 1:1 aesthetics. I cite them largely because of their disparity. One could be forgiven for seeing no commonality at all between them, other than their emergence in our contemporary moment. Their respective ways of addressing memory in the histori-cal present are very different. But what I see as a common thread

is a shared desire to escape ontological capture as “just art” and a perhaps still unarticulated will to ramp up their scale of operations to the 1:1. This may be a way to re-negotiate the asymme-trical relationship between art and memory. Though both are constructs, art long focused on shaping and reshaping memory’s matrix-like status -- in other words, art stem-med from memory, yet somehow managed to scale memory down and thereby to hold it at a distance. The practices I have briefly described, and countless others today, have come to challenge this scalar bias and instead, increasin-gly, to operate on the 1:1 scale, no longer distinguishable from its object on the basis of its scale. Such full-scale aes-thetics may make it possible to force memory to the fore as a dimension of the historical present, and as such, are fully political.

Concept development and editingPetra Boers – Buro Vonkstof

InterviewsPetra Boers

DesignThonik

Editorial teamPetra Boers, Barbara Van Lindt, Wouter van Loon, Nadja van der Weide

PhotographyThomas Lenden(portraits on page: 2, 3 and 12 - 22)

English copy editingVicky Morrison

TranslationsClaudia RichterRaccourci

Text correctionsJohn Meijerink, Nadja van der Weide, Wouter van Loon

PublisherDasArts – Master of TheatreMauritskade 561092 AD AmsterdamThe Netherlandswww.dasarts.nl

Every light-shedding device will also cast

a shadow; and a map is also a light-occluding device

What do 1:1 representations look

like? They are an exact reproduction

of the area itself; they certainly

don’t look like art

3130 Operating on the 1:1 scale

Operating on the 1:1 scale

Essay by Stephen Wright

Essay by Stephen Wright

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