Melting Points

Date:	2015
Index:	writing

Context

I was invited to contribute to an edited exhibition catalog for the MUMA exhibition Technologism. I knew that I wanted to offer a counter-narrative to the idea of media art as a formal exercise in exploring the expressive limits of this or that technological artefact; and I was especially interested in building off of writing practices in general and Rabih Mroué's work in particular as the point of departure for this text.

Melting Points

In his 1968 essay ‘Systems Esthetics’, Jack Burnham wrote, ‘the significant artist strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society’.¹ Rather than paint and sculpt, artists would make use of new technologies such as television, video and computers. What Burnham was really getting at, however, was a paradigm shift from finite objects, bounded by material limits such as the picture frame, towards ‘unobjects’, systems and environments that transfer the locus of art onto ‘the relations between people and between people and the components of their environment’.² The picture frame was exploded by new demands placed on art.

But what is the distance between artistic output and the productive means of society? Can it be measured by the tools and the machines the artist uses? Thirty-four years earlier, just when Hitler had come to power, Walter Benjamin explicitly formulated the question ‘what is a work’s position vis-à-vis the production relations of its time?’ to ‘what is its position within them?’³ Working from the historical materialist conception that ‘social relations, as we know, are determined by production relations’, Benjamin placed the writer (or artist, for my purposes here) squarely within the productive means of society, where they might choose just how entangled to become.

Burnham says that ‘the most important artist’ is absolutely entangled, succeeding ‘by liquidating his position as artist vis-à-vis society’.⁴ This isn’t about proletarian solidarity but is a consequence of repudiating craft while collapsing artistic and technological decision-making. Whereas Benjamin essentially demanded writers ‘think’ about their ‘position in the production process’,⁵ Burnham, influenced by Productivism but tempered by his historical perspective of Stalinism, was simply concerned with the ‘implementation of the art impulse in an advanced technological society’.⁶ ‘Systems Esthetics’ reads like a prophecy of the aesthetic transformations that would come from the 1973 oil crisis, the overseas migration of industry, the growth of finance and the proliferation of personal, networked media.

If ‘Systems Esthetics’ introduces extrinsic language and concepts (from cybernetics, economics, and military science research) into art, one would have had no sense from the essay of the spread of civil unrest across America between 1965 and 1968. Nor would one have been able to anticipate the impact that urban and suburban music and counterculture were to have on the arts in the 1970s and ’80s. According to the terms of Benjamin’s analysis, the position within production relations that Burnham outlines is an immaterial one (‘the maker of esthetic decisions’ and not of ‘tools and images’),⁷ perhaps with progressive ideas but ultimately disconnected, situated in ‘an impossible place’.⁸

Asserting that ‘during the 1970s, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world’,⁹ Dan Graham, in Rock My Religion, simultaneously joined artistic practices to ‘a new mythology of origin fashioned from the images and sounds of working-class religious rituals’,¹⁰ to the factory, to the Industrial Revolution of eighteenth-century England. This was not an official historical argument, wrote Kodwo Eshun in his monograph on Rock My Religion (and it would have been problematic if it were for excluding black culture from history) but a heretical, hyperbolic, anti-historical provocation, the appeal of which ‘lies in its autodidacticism, its amateurism and its do-it-yourself perseverance’.¹¹

It is the form and technique as much as the content that Eshun finds noteworthy. Known primarily as a video essay, Rock My Religion was realised through multiple iterations of a written script, composed in relation to a series of essays written by Graham largely between 1979 and 1984. Eshun, recognised for his own writing on music and his essay films as part of the Otolith Group, acknowledges the encouragement Rock My Religion provides to ‘the fraction of artists who write’. He coins the term ‘scriptovisuality’, which ‘demands doubled vision and twin hearing’,¹² noting an encounter with the video involves not only viewing and listening but also reading. Specifically, the text-over enters into dialogue with voiceover and lyrics, and also the image; sometimes they are in concert, but often in they are conflict of one kind or another.

Although structures, systems and machines dominate the history of media art, there has also been a minor but significant tendency in which the timeworn technologies of writing and voice are central. At first glance this might seem a conservative, humanist reaction to an expanded technological field, but I think it is quite the opposite; it is driven by an engagement with the new media and, for Benjamin at least, a belief in the possibilities of technical innovation. A video essay such as Rock My Religion might share much with the textual essay, but Eshun notes that because it ‘inhabits the same medium as its subject, it can enact its speculations in ways that a textual essay cannot’.¹³ For one, its statements and questions are not related to their subject through reference, pointing at something outside. Rather, it has the ‘capacity of exemplification’, collapsing to some degree the apparent gap between language and the material world, such that writer, text and object of inquiry imbricate one another.

Sergey Tretyakov, Benjamin’s primary example in ‘The Author as Producer’, offers the model of the ‘operative’ writer, as distinguished from the merely ‘informative’ one. Rather than remain outside of things, content to report from a distance, an operative writer actively intervenes within his or her field of activity. This was as much a matter of technology as it was a product of attitude or motivation. Benjamin described how the Russian newspaper, as opposed to the bourgeois press, dissolved the boundaries between author and public, between genres of writing, between topics and, finally, between specialist authority and practical experience. A twenty-first-century reader can’t help but project these same words onto the internet, ‘the place where words are most debased’ but which also ‘becomes the very place where a rescue operation can be mounted’.¹⁴

If Walter Benjamin was prone to nostalgia, it was not a sentimental or reactionary nostalgia. After all, ‘The Author as Producer’ was written as a counterpoint to precisely these tendencies in fascism. Benjamin saw revolutionary potential within technology’s capacity to dismantle old hierarchies: ‘we are in the midst of a vast process in which literary forms are being melted down, a process in which many of the contrasts in terms of which we have been accustomed to think may lose their relevance’.¹⁵ (Later in the essay he points to music and photography as elements in the new blend, so this liquefication wasn’t limited to literary forms.)

A metaphor of melted-down forms comes strikingly close to the language used to depict ‘the essay’ in the tradition of that unsystematic mode of writing inaugurated by Michel de Montaigne’s Essais. O.B. Hardison says, characteristically, that ‘there is … no genre that takes so many shapes and that refuses so successfully to resolve itself, finally, into its own shape’.¹⁶ Perhaps more to Benjamin’s point, which is less about categorisation than it is about potentiality, is Réda Bensmaïa’s rejection of conceiving an essay as a mix of genres, proposing instead that it is ‘the moment of writing before the genre … the matrix of all generic possibilities’.¹⁷

Which brings me back to Eshun’s critical text on Rock My Religion, which, he concludes, ‘suspended the hierarchies that rock cultures and art worlds continually tried to resurrect – it melted them into shared states of intensity, attitudes, gestures, performances, parties, scenes and cliques’.¹⁸ Once we begin looking for this heterodox sensibility, we find it pervading Eshun’s practice, from his alchemical neologisms to his inventive music journalism to his speculative explorations of archives with Otolith Group collaborator Anjalika Sagar.

For his part, Dan Graham had integrated his writing into magazines (Homes for America, which also migrated between forms – first as a slideshow and only later as an article – included a text on suburban housing), into advertisements and into lectures (although Performer/Audience/Mirror was purportedly unrehearsed). Reflecting on Jean-Luc Godard, Graham said, ‘I like Godard, because his early films were almost like magazine page essays’;¹⁹ he was echoing Godard’s own slippery provocation from 1962, ‘I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them’.²⁰

Chris Marker’s 1958 film, Letter from Siberia, and its subsequent review by André Bazin, who emphasised its writerly nature as ‘an essay documented by film’,²¹ is a touchstone for what would become the essay film. As much as this form nominally refers to pre-cinematic, epistolary, if not literary, traditions, I think it is important to also emphasise its technological orientation. Newer, more lightweight cameras made Alexandre Astruc’s metaphor of the ‘camera-stylo’ (camera pen) possible in 1948. It is difficult to imagine the form developing as much as it has without democratisation of the tools of production and distribution that has occurred over the past seventy years. Even later in his career, Marker was deeply engaged with contemporary digital technologies in projects such as Level Five and Immemory.

A successful essay is not a message tucked into a bottle; rather, it reflects in on itself as if it were printed on the inside of the bottle. The essay and its mode of presentation are inseparable. Look at Harun Farocki’s hands in Images of the World and the Inscription of War or the way he’s filmed research materials as material. The poetic historical-theoretical voiceover so often found in his work keeps alive the forensic process initiated in the archival work and technical production of the images: ‘As a filmmaker you always see the work from different perspectives – through the viewfinder, on the editing table, in fragments …’²² In Farocki’s later projects, occurring more frequently in galleries and museums than cinemas, the screen is multiplied and scriptovisuality spatialised.

If the video installation is one means by which the written essay has been ‘translated’²³ into three dimensions, then the lecture-performance is another. For Hito Steyerl, texts, videos and lectures propel ideas and concepts between one another, with each format circulating differently through the world, at different velocities, to different audiences and demanding different kinds of attention. But these formats, of course, are not rigorously separated. Steyerl’s Is the Museum a Battlefield? has, for example, migrated between a lecture-performance, exhibited documentation of the performance and a separate video installation. Rabih Mroué has produced a series of monologues in which an actor (often Mroué himself) probes media archives. The form of mediation or representation becomes as much the object of inquiry as the explicitly stated subject is, whether that is a missing man, his brother or a revolution.

In the 1967 bestseller The Medium Is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan proposed that ‘anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide a means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly’.²⁴ In a world in which media form environments, invisible because they are everywhere and condition our very modes of perception, the artist is not an entertainer but a ‘probe’. Similarly, Jack Burnham advanced the ‘didactic function of art’²⁵ in a world in which the aesthetic impulse is divorced from productive means. But to what end?

Addressing the ‘modish’ commercialisation of photography in the 1930s – particularly that which stylised abject poverty and revolutionary struggle as objects of enjoyment – Walter Benjamin proposed this dynamic could be overcome if photographers were to write captions for their images – or ‘if we, as writers, start taking photographs ourselves’.²⁶ It was writing and technology, together, in the service of bringing down bourgeois barriers. The point wasn’t to simply supply new content but to change the system within which the content operated.

In short, Benjamin was demanding a certain kind of pedagogy. He wrote that a writer must have ‘a teacher’s attitude’, particularly for other writers – not through dogmatic explanation but by conceiving their production as a model capable of transforming the apparatus of culture. The Otolith Group, whose practice goes beyond films to curating and organising discussions, has adopted the framework of an ‘integrated practice … a term that came from the eighties which was the aspiration to not just make films but to build a distribution system and an education system … an attempt to build a new film culture’.²⁷

I’ve relied on many quotations from writers, artists who write and writers who make art (or want to). This has undoubtedly exaggerated the importance of the act of writing – so typical of a catalogue essay! I’ve done so to offer a counter-narrative to media art as a formal exercise in exploring the expressive limits of this or that technological artefact. Technical innovation in the counter-narrative isn’t a progression of more and more complex commodities, but a channel for transforming the ways in which art is produced and experienced and for transforming the role it plays in society. Anticipating some individuals may be anxious that the great artworks of the past would not be produced under such a cultural program, Benjamin wrote, ‘novels did not always exist in the past, nor must they necessarily always exist in the future’.²⁸

Published

Dockray, Sean. “Melting Points.” In Technologism. Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art, 2015.

Jack Burnham, ‘Systems Esthetics’, Artforum VII, no. 1, September 1968, p.31. ↩
ibid., all emphases in original. ↩
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Understanding Brecht, Verso, London and New York, 1998, p.87. ↩
Burnham, op. cit. ↩
Benjamin, op. cit., p.101. ↩
Burnham, op. cit. p.35. ↩
ibid. ↩
Benjamin, op. cit., p.93. ↩
Kodwo Eshun, Dan Graham: Rock My Religion, One Work, Afterall Books, London, 2012, p.95. ↩
ibid., p.7. ↩
ibid., p.6. ↩
ibid., p.10. ↩
ibid., p.8. ↩
Benjamin, op. cit., p.90. Benjamin is quoting ‘an author of the left’ who happens to be himself. ↩
ibid., p.89. ↩
O.B. Hardison Jr, ‘Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay’, The Sewanee Review, 96, no. 4, October 1988, p.611. ↩
Réda Bensmaïa, The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987, p.92. ↩
Eshun, op. cit. p.95. ↩
Ute Meta Bauer And Dan Graham, ‘From Magazines to Architecture’, Mousse Magazine. ↩
Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard: Critical Writings by Jean-Luc Godard, Da Capo Press, New York, 1986, p.171. ↩
Quoted in Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, after Marker, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011, p.45. ↩
Harun Farocki, interview by Frances Guerin, Artslant, April 2009, online at http://www.artslant.com/trn/articles/show/6740. ↩
N.M. Alter, ‘Translating the Essay into Film and Installation’, Journal of Visual Culture, 6, no. 1, April 2007), pp.44–57, online at doi:10.1177/1470412907075068. ↩
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Bantam Books, New York, 1967, p.68. ↩
Burnham, op. cit., p.31. ↩
Benjamin, op. cit., p.95. ↩
The Otolith Group, Turner Prize 10: The Otolith Group, November 29, 2010, http://www.channel4.com/news/turner-prize-10-the-otolith-group. ↩
Benjamin, op. cit., p.89. ↩