By Jorg Heiser

“The general tenor of emotional life in Moscow, thus forming a lyrical and romantic blend, still stands opposed to the dryness of officialdom,” wrote Boris Groys in his 1979 essay “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” delineating the state of contemporary artistic practice in the Soviet state. In the essay, Groys discusses the work of Lev Rubinstein, Ivan Chuikow, Francisco Infante, and the artist group Collective Actions (Kollektivnye deistviya). Founded in 1976 by Andrei Monastyrski, Georgii Kizevalter, and Nikita Alekseev (later joined by Nikolai Panitkov, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Sergei Romashko, and Sabine Hänsgen), the group devised actions that took place sometimes with and sometimes without spectators, in the countryside, the city, or private apartments. Organizing conspiratorial “trips out of town,” their initial audience was asked to attend a gathering in the woods or in a field, where they might have, for example, as if by chance, come across a ringing bell under the snow. These actions were documented in photographs and short descriptive texts, among other forms; this translation into factographic elements forms another level of the work, the only one directly accessible to any audience other than those present during the initial realization.

In 2007, I had the pleasure of including a number of these photographs in an exhibition I curated entitled Romantic Conceptualism—a title that begs the question of what “conceptualism” means here, as well as what Romanticism is. That same year, Collective Actions realized a performance—again in a winter landscape outside Moscow—entitled Deutsche Romantiker (German Romantics), which amongst other elements involved period portraits of famous Romantics such as Adelbert von Chamisso, Bettina von Arnim, and Novalis affixed to trees. I couldn’t help but think of this beautiful piece as an ironic twist on my basic premise for the Romantic Conceptualism exhibition, namely that there are some interesting parallels between the German Romantics of the early nineteenth century and artists working in the realm of international conceptualism since the 1960s.

But isn’t Romanticism the antithesis of conceptualism? Yes and no; if conceptualism is understood as dialectical—as much about what it doesn’t say as what it does, as much about “pure” information as the “impure”—then there are very interesting connections.

The first methodological characteristic of conceptual art is that it radically shifts the emphasis from representation to indexicalization (in this alone it doesn’t differ fundamentally from earlier movements of modernist abstraction); rather than reproducing or illustrating the appearance of something, that “something” is evoked through a gesture, or language, or other indexical means (including, literally, signs and measures). While this may imply a devaluation of skill (in order to index, one doesn’t necessarily need to be good at drawing from life, or even at making a photograph) and originality (if there is no virtuosic skill, there will be no detectable “style” securing the distinctive authenticity of the work), these seem to be—initially, at least—side effects rather than main objectives. The main objective is rather to move away from the visual and the phenomenological (or the retinal, as Duchamp famously put it) toward the indexical, toward pointing to things in an idea-driven way (which does not preclude the use of images as long as they are in the service of this objective).

Secondly, conceptual art usually adheres to a fairly strict, reductivist ethos of economy of means (in this alone, it does not fundamentally differ from the trajectory that leads from Malevich to Minimal art). In other words, the idea is that for indexicalization to be most effective, it needs to be realized with as many elements as are necessary but as few as possible. As with an architectural model or philosophical proposition, this is at the service of either strictly securing or “closing” the meaning or, to the contrary, of allowing the work to become a kind of springboard that, like an optional (yet precise) speculation, opens up meaning—for better or worse—to the viewer’s perceptive response and intellectual continuation. A good example of the former strategy is Joseph Kosuth; a good example of the latter is Lawrence Weiner; Sol LeWitt sits somewhere in between.

The third point follows directly from the second: whether the main aim is to achieve a clarity of meaning (Kosuth), a clarity of the artwork-viewer relationship (Weiner), or a clarity of the work’s realization (LeWitt), there is a strong tendency toward dematerialization, which does not mean simply to do away with physical objecthood but to do away with the cohesiveness of the artwork in terms of where it “resides.”¹ In other words, even if an object is involved—a chair, a piece of paper, a file cabinet, or whatever—or if the artist’s or anyone else’s body enacts a gesture or act that is documented—the production of physical residues—the work may still be constituted by neither a particular object nor a particular body. A relationship between things in the world is stated without necessitating a physical realization of that relationship to constitute the artwork. Rather, it may simply be constituted by the proposition of the artist (immaterial production); it may reside in the particular way something is situated or conveyed through, for example, its position in a space or publicized through press releases, invitation cards, catalogues, and so forth (distribution or circulation); it may reside in the way the viewers “fulfill” the work through their use of or response to it (“consumption” or reception); or, indeed, it may be a mixture of all three of these parameters of production, distribution, and consumption. The shorthand term for the specificities of this particular mixture is “context.” In other words, dematerialization has the potential not only to be the next logical step of reduction in formalist terms, but almost inevitably leads to questioning the way things are made, disseminated, and perceived—with obvious social and political implications.²

_{Cover of the first issue of the Art and Language Journal.}

The three fundamental methodologies of conceptual art are intricately connected to two ideologically opposed understandings of authorship. The first is an emphatic affirmation of authorship. Freeing artistic practice from strict representation of the complex phenomenological word and the particularities of physical materiality—with the help of indexing, reducing, and dematerializing—turns the practice into a free-floating intellectual endeavor. The artist either becomes a kind of trickster who subverts the authority of the cultural tradition by suspending the parameters by which it is perpetuated (e.g., skill, composition, preciousness of the object, and so forth), or the artist becomes an intellectual master who, much like a philosopher, successively unfolds a system of analysis that enlightens us with respect to the historical obsolescence of these traditions (Kosuth).³ Either way, authorship secures the status of these endeavors as art while making them part of a consistent, or at least organized, trajectory.

The second of the two aims is precisely the opposite: to suspend authorship. By unhinging artistic practice from representation, the phenomenological, and object-based materiality simultaneously, it is freed up (at least that’s the underlying utopian idea) toward a collective process. Weiner’s “Declaration of Intent” (1969) was the model case for this. It handed the completion of the work over to the audience (or the “receiver”), namely in the way that it replaced the common imperative of performative instruction pieces (“Do this, do that …”) with the conditional form (“The piece may be fabricated …”). A conundrum remains: the one who declares the suspension of authorship paradoxically asserts his or her authorship through that very declaration; Weiner’s declaration demonstrates that the two seemingly opposing aims of securing and suspending authorship can sometimes be found in a single artist’s oeuvre, or even in a single work.

Whether trickster or master, self-aggrandizing individualist or self-effacing collectivist, all these approaches and methodologies ultimately serve the aim to enlighten, or (less dramatically) to generate thought and to inform. This may be done through straight address, or through innuendo; it may involve propositions about art or the world; it may lean toward the declarative or the performative (even though declaration, strictly speaking, is always also performative); it may employ language as its main medium, or it may not. In any case, the task is to artistically shape the process of communication (especially if no physical or visual elements are shaped) and to somehow make sure it takes place according to a plan (even if that plan involves varying levels of contingency). However, there remains the paradox of an attempt to open up the communication by closing it down, i.e. by tightly defining its parameters. Who has the authority to define these parameters, especially if we are not talking only about a single artist’s work, but about an artistic movement?

Luis Camnitzer (a German-Jewish immigrant to Uruguay who has lived in New York since the late 1960s) suggests in the context of the exhibition project Global Conceptualism (1999) the adoption of the term “conceptualism” as opposed to “Conceptual Art.” The latter is understood to be reserved for a relatively small group of artists from Europe and North America favoring a purist understanding of the practice; the former then names a varied field of activities from around the world that share a certain reductivist attitude, activities that turn art-making into a means of communication freed from representation and material presence, and not only for formalist, but crucially also for economic and social reasons of avoiding unnecessary material expenses and labor costs.⁴

It is this broader definition that I followed in Romantic Conceptualism. But what do I mean by Romanticism? In brief, Romanticism is not synonymous with the kitsch of love and desire (in other words, the common use of the word “romantic”), but an abbreviation for the cultural techniques of emotion, as well as for ideas of the fragmentary and the open that can be traced back to the days of early—particularly German, but also English or French—Romanticism that are, I would argue, still present and in fact prevalent today. Historically, Romanticism was—at least sometimes—an explicit, intelligent critique of the kind of thinking which supplied ideological legitimization of the logic of “material constraints” and power struggles that were an essential part of the emergence of industrialization and mass society. It also built on the conclusions that Friedrich Schiller drew from the terror regime that ruled in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, expressed in his very influential series of letters from 1795, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in which he called for an aesthetic revolution premised on allowing individuals to develop their perceptive qualities—a totalization of aesthetic experience, in effect a proposal for the merging of art and life. In this sense, Romanticism is not simply an opponent of Enlightenment, but is its reflective side, an experimental and at times ironic counterpart to a systematic, rationalistic conception of reason.

Friedrich Schlegel was arguably early Romanticism’s most eminent voice. As Walter Benjamin noted in his groundbreaking study “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” Schlegel is first and foremost concerned with “reflective thinking,” which “won its special systematic importance […] by virtue of that limitless capacity by which it makes every prior reflection into the object of a subsequent reflection.”⁵ This expresses an important aspect of Romanticism, that it favors the fragmentary and the open over the systematic and the conclusive; it allows the mind to adjust to a contradictory reality instead of doing the opposite, namely making reality fit its own parameters. This is also why, in the words of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “the fragment is the romantic genre par excellence.”⁶ “Each fragment,” they argue with respect to the romanticist conception of the literary text, “stands for itself and for that from which it is detached”—from the “totality of the fragment as a plurality and its completion as the incompletion of its infinity.”⁷ This is also at the heart of Schlegel’s idea of romantic irony, that it is the humble awareness that anything we analyze and conclude is unfinishable vis-à-vis the infinite chaos of possibilities.

_{Robert Barry, A Volitional State of Mind Transmitted Telepathically, 1969-2009.}

What are the implications of all this for conceptual art? Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967) includes the following: “It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with Conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry.”⁸ Two years later, in 1969, LeWitt published his “Sentences on Conceptual Art” in the first issue of Art-Language. In a context where Marxism, linguistics, and analytic philosophy were dominant, he turned against a purely rationalistic understanding of Conceptual art. In the first of thirty-five sentences, he proclaims: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists […] they leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”⁹ This is a striking parallel to what Benjamin said about the Romantics’ notion of criticism: “To be critical meant to elevate thinking so far beyond all restrictive conditions that the knowledge of truth sprang forth magically, as it were, from insight into the falsehood of these restrictions.”¹⁰ Still, in terms of LeWitt’s statement about the necessity of emotional dryness, why should a viewer not be able to find a work “mentally interesting” and be touched by it emotionally? And how should one make sure not to be touched by the mystics’ leaps to conclusions? In an attempt to distinguish the humble, anti-monumentalist stance of Conceptual art from the sublime stance of Abstract Expressionism, LeWitt threw out the baby with the bathwater, i.e. the emotional with the expressional. As I have tried to demonstrate with my exhibition Romantic Conceptualism and its catalogue, the work not only of artists such as Bas Jan Ader and Collective Actions, but also of “core members” of Conceptual art such as Robert Barry, can be understood in terms of addressing the Romanticist complex of affect and idea and of finitude and the infinite, but only as long as one acknowledges the necessity of circumventing the self-aggrandizing tendencies of the artist.¹¹ And, in fact, early Romanticism did not necessarily promote the idea that the solitary artist-genius is the sole source of the artwork’s function and power: Friedrich Schlegel’s text “On Incomprehensibility” (1800), for example, suggests that ironic modes of writing continue to release new meanings for hundreds of years after any given author’s death.¹²

If we return to the work of Collective Actions, we find that the sublime does not reside in the solitary genius but in the collective, or rather in their actions. In any case, the two pieces I had the privilege to include in the exhibition were The Slogan (1977), which involved a red banner hung between trees on a hill in the countryside outside Moscow; the slogan read: “I do not complain about anything and I almost like it here, although I have never been here before and know nothing about this place” (a quote from Andrei Monastyrski’s book Nothing Happens). The other piece was Balloon (1977): pieces of calico—a type of cotton fabric—sewn together to form a balloon, which was stuffed with inflated toy balloons and a ringing electric bell; the object was then left to drift down the Klyazma river outside Moscow. The ephemeral character of these works brought artists and audience together in situations that hovered midway between imaginativeness and blankness, sincerity and irony.

What I’m trying to aim at is a question about the relationship between the “inwardness” of the artistic, poetic self and “outwardness”—an orientation to something beyond artistic communication—and the way in which that relationship is situated for a respective political paradigm in the public sphere. What kinds of encounters between people are really possible, what is the possibility of intimacy? In one way or another, I think all of the artists I will discuss pose the following question through their work: What is the possibility of intimacy between people?

_{Collective Actions, The Balloon, Moscow, June 15, 1977.}

But what’s the big deal with intimacy? In the age of internet dating, social networking, self-help books, reality TV shows with surveillance cameras, “I-cheated-on-my-husband” chat shows, and Paris Hilton sex tapes, the very idea of intimacy seems like a nostalgic fantasy. Intimacy is simultaneously nonexistent (in the sense of that securing actual privacy is impossible) and flooded with narcissist exaltation and public attention—intimacy turned inside-out. Feelings, affections, desires, “secrets” are on display for everyone to see. This seems to imply that during socialist times, before the advent of digital, capitalist media machineries, something like “true intimacy” existed, but I suspect the answer is not so clear-cut.

It was in 1974, when the Cold War ideological system was still securely in place, that the American sociologist Richard Sennett first published his influential book The Fall of Public Man. Remember, that was the year President Nixon was forced to resign because of the Watergate scandal, after conversations in the White House had been taped; it was also a time of economic stagnation in the USSR, when repression of anti-government activities was enacted by the KGB in order to keep Brezhnev in power.

Sennett’s position, in simplified terms, is that the delicate balance between private and public life that had been briefly maintained in Western societies during the eighteenth century, at the height of the Enlightenment, had collapsed. According to Sennett, during the Enlightenment a set of relatively strict social codes regulating distance and respect made possible truly satisfying public emotional connections, whereas the tendency in the following centuries toward a more self-indulgent, navel-gazing understanding of the individual’s psychological and emotional make-up had to be

a trap rather than a liberation. […] “Intimacy” connotes warmth, trust, and open expression of feeling. But precisely […] because so much social life which does have a meaning cannot yield these psychological rewards, the world outside, the impersonal world, seems to fail us, seems to be stale and empty. […] Western societies are moving from something like an other-directed condition to an inner-directed condition—except that in the midst of self-absorption no one can say what is inside. As a result, confusion has arisen between public and intimate life; people are working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning.¹³

_{Poster for the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers .}

Born in 1943 in Chicago, Sennett grew up in a bohemian-proletarian, radical left milieu, and McCarthyism—the surveillance of everyday life for signs of supposed communist traitors—was a part of his experience even as a schoolboy. Showing at the cinemas were films like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956), in which an alien force duplicates people and replaces them with cold, unemotional doppelgangers. This film was read allegorically either as referring to the mindless conformity of the McCarthy era or to the communist infiltration of the United States. In this sense, the McCarthyist America and Stalinist Soviet Union were indeed uncanny siblings. It is therefore not all that surprising that Sennett theorizes a complementary inversion of what he calls the “tyranny of intimacy,” the rule of narcissism and the confession of the self—namely, the “intimacy of tyranny,” the paranoid system of surveillance and denunciation that characterized both McCarthyism in the West and Stalinism in the East, though the latter was much more extreme. In the final chapter of Sennett’s book, it is Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, in her ennui, depression, and desperate desire for luxury and riches, that Sennett describes as the tragic emblem of the tyranny of intimacy, whereas the emblem of the intimacy of tyranny is “the Stalinist legend of the good little Communist who turned his parents in to the secret police.”¹⁴ Sennett’s point is that tyranny doesn’t need to take the form of brutal force; it can also work by way of seduction, which I guess is the point at which the tyranny of intimacy and the intimacy of tyranny merge. From having followed the developments in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy over the last years, with its strange combination of voyeurism and corruption, I can say that the unity of Sennett’s phrases holds there. I’m sure there are other countries where one could identify similar phenomena.

_{Filmstills from the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.}

Sennett was a student of Hannah Arendt’s, and his skepticism toward the public display of psychological matters clearly bears her influence. An insight central to all of Hannah Arendt’s philosophical work is that confession of the psychological self presents a fundamental obstacle to the political emancipation of sovereign humans in their ability to develop feelings of social interconnectedness. Hannah Arendt begins with a doubt about the reliability of the psychological self as a source of emancipation. Her deep-seated skepticism of German Romanticism—understood as a movement hailing the importance of the psychological self—is laid out already in her first major work, a biography of Rahel Varnhagen. Varnhagen was a key figure of early Romanticism, a German-Jewish writer who ran a salon in Berlin at the turn of the nineteenth century that became a meeting place for eminent figures such as the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Ludwig Tieck, to name a few. Written in Germany during the years 1929–33 and completed in exile in France in 1938, it wasn’t until 1958 that the book was published, under the title Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. (Writing during the growth of Fascist anti-Semitism, Arendt studies Varnhagen’s life and letters in relation to the difficult issue of Jewish assimilation.)

In short, Arendt claims that Romanticism offered Varnhagen a deceptive way out of pressures to negate her Jewish identity. Why? Because Romanticism, according to Arendt, severs reflection from fact and love from the object of love, while offering up the intimate as public in the form of indiscrete speculation and gossip. Reason and emotion become free-floating, all-pervasive fantasies—in short, Romanticism is portrayed not only as escapist, but as a seduction to Jewish self-abnegation. Although she makes a point of expressing respect for Varnhagen, Arendt almost sounds, at points, like an older sister ridiculing her younger sibling for being caught up with pubescent fantasies, or “Wunschphantasmagorien” (wishful phantasmagorias).¹⁵ One can sympathize with Arendt’s frustration with Varnhagen’s continual repudiation of her Jewish heritage, but the more important question is whether early Romanticism it is to blame. Varnhagen’s salon—and, one could say, Romanticism in its true sense—ends with Napoleon seizing Prussia. In that short interval of 1790–1806, Jewish salons like Varnhagen’s offered to the metropolitan intelligentsia a kind of utopian retreat from strict social orders and conventions. Arendt readily describes it this way, but holds this against the salons, saying they were merely “Lückenbüßer” (stopgaps) between “a perishing and a not yet stabilized form of conviviality.”¹⁶ This “stabilized” form would arrive as the Deutsche Tischgesellschaft (German Dinner Party), established in 1811 by Achim von Arnim (the husband of Bettina von Arnim, a friend of Varnhagen’s), among others. The Dinner Party banned women and Jews from membership and, in the wake of the edict of 1812 that granted basic civil rights to Jews in Prussia, was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. But does that mean that the world of the Jewish salons before the catastrophe of 1806 was merely “illusionist,” as Arendt states? To denounce early Romanticism for its role in the historical development toward a resurgence of patriotism and anti-Semitism in Prussia (as well as for Varnhagen’s increasing neglect of her Jewish heritage) seems a simple case of misdirected blame. Wasn’t Varnhagen’s salon an actual, consistent counterexample to the nationalist-chauvinist backlash of the Tischgesellschaft, not only with respect to the emancipation of Jewish intellectuals but also women intellectuals (a point that Arendt conspicuously and consistently ignores)? One can’t help but think that the Romanticism Arendt despises in her imagined Varnhagen is the Romanticism of her own time, the overblown Wagnerian sublime that became a tool of Nazism.

And this is where the notion of Romantic conceptualism comes into play: it has a kind of inbuilt anti-theatricality; it is interested in evoking the sublime but dismisses the self-indulgent puffery that accompanies its evocation. Precisely for the sake of saving the imaginative space that Romanticism opens up, Romantic conceptualists circumvent its tendencies to self-obsession, to locating essence in the artist’s soul. The idea of the open artwork demands this: if meaning is to be established through interaction with the viewer, then the artist must know humility. Maybe this is also why Romantic conceptualism sometimes comes across as the shy sibling of physical comedy. Both undermine magnitude, whether the magnitude of Wagnerian sublimity or Kantian moral superiority.

_{Jiri Kovanda, Untitled (On an escalator … turning around, I look into the eyes of the person standing behind me …), 3 September, 1977.}

One artist who now comes to mind, especially in light of Sennett’s terms, is Jiri Kovanda. Despite Kovanda’s insistence that he’s not a political artist, I refuse to believe that it’s purely coincidental that in the mid 1970s he located his actions in Prague’s public realm. This was the period when the counter-culture that had developed in spite of the suppression of the Prague Spring movement of 1968 came under intense state repression, which triggered the human rights initiative of Charter 77, which in turn led to even harsher reactions on the part of the regime. Against this background, it is understandable that Kovanda doesn’t want his artistic project to be confused with or absorbed by protest, a confusion that would be a one-dimensional reading of both his project and of the Charter 77 movement. But that shouldn’t preclude us from reading his work in historical context. We should do so with a view to Sennett’s very fundamental sociological observations, which resonate—albeit in different registers—with conditions on both sides of the Iron Curtain. And, incidentally, the question of the connection between intimacy and control hasn’t gone away under post-socialist conditions, it has simply migrated to a substantial extent to the fields of media and commerce.

Kovanda’s aesthetic project has always been to make these two reciprocal phenomena—tyranny of intimacy, intimacy of tyranny—silently collide. Some of Kovanda’s contemporaries in Eastern Europe may have had similar aims in this respect, artists such as Karel Miler and Petr Stembera—the former in a more restrained manner closer to Kovanda’s, the latter in a more self-mutilating way, displacing the intimacy of tyranny onto his own physical body. Some Western artists did the same, including Chris Burden and Bas Jan Ader.

_{Jiri Kovanda, Divadlo (Theatre), 1976.}

Kovanda negated any theatricality with clear and careful determination. His works are intimate, but reserved and discreet; they confront people’s “public” demeanor of numbed indifference, but in the most modest and unoppressive way. Moments of possible or actual sensuous intimacy between individuals are presented in a non-narrative and factual, rather than a confessional and psychological, manner. And while public apathy is suddenly punctured through a simple, tiny gesture—a gaze, raised arms, and so forth—this occurs precisely in the avoidance of spelling things out. Processes of normalization are made achingly apparent not through violent, symbolic acts, but through slight, gradual shifts. Kovanda’s humility is a means to achieving this, a way to circumvent the posture of the heroic artist that would otherwise get in the way of the work’s efficacy.

This touches directly on the question of the legitimacy of the artist. Kovanda didn’t study art in school, and it was a long time before he made a living from it. Not that he was an “outsider artist”—it was more like he snuck in, gradually, over several years. During 1977–95 he worked in the depository of the Czech National Gallery, but in the terms of his own practice, that job was something like living in the belly of the beast. In any case, his actions were not commissioned; they remained as discreet in status as in gesture.

_{Jiri Kovanda, Untitled, Wenceslas Square, Prague, November 19, 1976.}

Some of the actions Kovanda executed in the open, public environment of Prague are equally ephemeral, for example Theater (November 1976), which took place at Wenceslas Square. For this piece, he followed a previously written script to the letter, in which “gestures and movements have been selected so that passers-by will not suspect that they are watching a ‘performance.’” Judging from the photos, these were predominantly gestures of being at a loss: a hand to the neck, a finger to the nose, gestures that are anything but theatrical. For Untitled (November 19, 1976), which also took place at Wenceslas Square, Kovanda interacted more actively, if still in a reticent manner, with anonymous passersby: standing with outstretched arms, forcing them to give him a wide berth.

It’s obviously no coincidence that these pieces—situated in the public realm yet resistant to revelation—take place at Prague’s Wenceslas Square, the site of many historical events from the Declaration of Independence of 1918, through student Jan Palach’s self-immolation protest against the Soviet invasion of 1968, to the demonstrations of the Velvet Revolution in 1989. But Kovanda doesn’t claim that his actions are explicit political allegories. For him, the artist is his or her own audience in the first place. But Kovanda also made works that directly involved the participation of small groups of people, which brings to mind the Collective Actions Group. One of Kovanda’s best-known pieces is an action realized on January 23, 1978, which he describes in this way: “I arranged to meet a few friends … we were standing in a small group on the square, talking … suddenly, I started running; I raced across the square and disappeared into Melantrich Street …” The photograph shows a group of seven, gathered in a circle, three of them looking at a book, while the other four are gazing after Kovanda running away from them.

Italian artist Giovanni Anselmo, usually associated with the Arte Povera movement, may seem removed from conceptualism. A large number of his pieces are emphatically concerned with materiality rather than dematerialization, with physical rather than “merely” mental or indexical tensions, with intuitive approaches to handling objects and spaces rather than pronouncedly analytical approaches—all of which are qualities that would “disqualify” you from taking the label “conceptualist.”

_{Giovanni Anselmo, La mia ombra verso l’infinito dalla cima dello Stromboli durante l’alba del 16 agosto 1965, 1965. Color slides. Photo: Enrico Longo Doria.}

Yet some key works of Anselmo’s are not about the physically present, but the absent; they allude to something with a fragmentary gesture or word, rather than a physically charged object. Let’s begin with what has been described as the epiphany at the start of his artistic career. A small color photograph documents the event: the artist stands there, motionless, wearing white trousers and shoes in a steeply slanting, black lava field, while behind him are smoke and a small volcano eruption, the blue sea and the sky. The picture is accompanied by the following statement: “My shadow projected to infinity on the top of Stromboli during sunrise on 16 August 1965.” Anselmo had climbed to the top of the volcanic island that is part of the Eolic islands north of Sicily and realized that, even though the rising sunlight was hitting him at a low angle, because he was standing on a slope against the background of the sea there was no surface on which his shadow could fall.

This event marks the initiation of Anselmo into his artistic practice, the photograph and text in turn framing the moment of epiphany, which could be read to mean that neither the event nor its documentation, strictly speaking, are themselves a part of Anselmo’s oeuvre. Of course, one can see his concern with basic physical qualities and energies in this moment on top of a volcano. But there is also a counter-movement to the famous Romantic motif of Caspar David Friedrich’s solitary figure as seen from behind in nature—that figure in Anselmo’s case being the artist himself, turning towards the viewer (i.e. the viewer beholding the image), while at the same time impersonating the viewer (i.e. the viewer beholding nature). One is also tempted to point out parallels with French-German Romanticist Adelbert von Chamisso’s famous story Peter Schlemiel (1813), about the man who sold his shadow—his soul—to the devil for a sack of gold. Except that Anselmo did the opposite, suspending his shadow for the sake of a “poor” art.

Or take Anselmo’s piece Interferenza nella gravitazione universale (Effect on the gravity of the universe, 1969). The accompanying description states: “20 photos taken at intervals of twenty paces while walking towards the setting sun.” Anselmo’s set of small black-and-white photographs quite clearly set themselves apart from the kitsch residue of this Romantic trope par excellence, i.e. the tourist sunsets of countless postcards and panorama wall papers: the series of photos was taken according to a strict numerical plan (20 photos, 20 paces).

What is revealed here to be at the heart of conceptual practice, whether with Anselmo or Kovanda, is the tension associated with Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of poetry and Romantic irony:

Romantic poetry […] —more than any other form—[can] hover at midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors. […] Romantic poetry is in the arts what wit is in philosophy.¹⁷

Schlegel’s notion of Romantic poetry from 1800 resonates surprisingly with conceptual art-making of the 1960s onwards, in that both testify to a realization of a sense of disjunction between inevitably fragmentary attempts to describe the world and the infinite world itself, of a need to resolve that disjunction not by presenting an ideal of epic, synthetic unity, but by way of a scattered practice that reflects on its own character of reflection.

To give one last example from yet another political and geographical context, that of Yugoslavia in the 1960s: Tomislav Gotovac. Gotovac is an outstanding figure of experimental film, conceptualism, and performance both within and outside ex-Yugoslavia. Straight-Line (Stevens-Duke) is a 16mm film he realized in 1964: a camera is positioned in the window of a tram so that we see the long, straight tracks which run along the street in one, long static shot. We see people crossing the tracks, cars rushing by, nothing spectacular, just everyday life—but long before TV stations would adapt these kinds of mesmerizing scenes for their nighttime intermissions. In 1971, Gotovac realized Streaking, where he ran naked through the streets of Belgrade. In the following decades, he continued to make films and performances that use quotidian acts (shaving, cutting hair, begging, cleaning up) as artistic material, taking the public spaces of Titoist Yugoslavia as his conflicted stage. In more recent years, 1995–2005, Gotovac collaborated with Aelksandar Battista Ilic and Ivana Keser on the project Weekend Art: Halleluja the Hill, which, during a time of conflict in the Balkan region, took Sunday walks on the Medvenica mountain near Zagreb as performative material, documented with photographs—simultaneously fiercely ironic and touchingly idyllic.

_{Tomislav Gotovac, Showing Elle, 1962.}

Showing Elle documents a situation the artist set up in 1962 on a winter trip to the mountain of Slijeme outside Zagreb. The six black-and-white images that comprise the series (re-issued in 2005) form a mini-film: we see the artist amidst trees, partly undressed (while he wears dark trousers), with snow in the background, leafing through a French edition of Elle magazine. He holds up an image of a woman in underwear, laughs; some images show him alone, others reveal three people, friends presumably, standing in the background. Signification slips and slides: the distance between nature and consumer society—and the distance between communism and consumer society, for that matter—is bypassed comically, as is the distance between the genders, the bodies, the artist and his audience—all of that packed into a simple, wry gesture, photographically documented.

To come to a conclusion: what seems obvious here is that in many of the works I have discussed, “the public” is tested as a terrain for intimacy, precisely because intimacy is no longer protected by a strict sense of “the private.” What these artists might have in common is that they test the limits of intimacy by communicating those limits, not in confession but through acts of deviance that say: yes, I have feelings, but what precisely they are I will not reveal. I take part in the game of self-exposure, but in that very act I manifest my insistence on an autonomous sphere of thought. What remains is the gesture, the act, the communication, but not the confession of the artistic soul.

© 2011 e-flux and the author

• Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

  Preface

• Boris Groys

  Introduction—Global Conceptualism Revisited

• Ekaterina Degot

  Performing Objects, Narrating Installations: Moscow Conceptualism and the Rediscovery of the Art Object

• Terry Smith

  One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art

• Keti Chukhrov

  Soviet Material Culture and Socialist Ethics in Moscow Conceptualism

• Anton Vidokle

  Art without Work?

• Sarah Wilson

  Moscow Romantic Exceptionalism: The Suspension of Disbelief

• Claire Bishop

  Zones of Indistinguishability: Collective Actions Group and Participatory Art

• Jörg Heiser

  Moscow, Romantic, Conceptualism, and After

1 The crucial difference between dematerializing
the art object—famously suggested by Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler in
their article “The Dematerialization of Art,” first published in Art
International 12:2 (February 1968): 31–36—and working without
material basis in the first place, i.e., dealing with ideas, has already been pointed
out by Terry Atkinson of Art & Language in his response “Concerning the Article
‘The Dematerialization of Art.’” See Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), 46–58.

2 See Luis Camnitzer’s critique of a formalist
understanding of dematerialization, Conceptualism in Latin American Art:
Didactics of Liberation (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007), 29.

3 Think, for example, of Robert
Barry’s Telephatic Piece (1969), his
contribution to a group exhibition in Canada that consisted of a written
statement that he would telepathically transmit, as it was not “applicable to language
or image.”

4 Luis Camnitzer, op. cit., 22–24.

5 Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in
German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings,
Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 123.

6 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The
Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 1988), 40.

7 Ibid., 44.

8 Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5:10 (Summer 1967): 79–84. Also see Alberro, op. cit., 12.

9 Sol Lewitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” Art-Language 1:1 (May 1969): 11–13;
reprinted in Conception: Conceptual
Documents 1968–1972, ed. Catherine Moseley (Norwich, UK: Norwich
Gallery, 2001), 82.

10 Walter Benjamin, op. cit., 142.

11 Romantischer
Konzeptualismus / Romantic Conceptualism, ed. Ellen Seifermann and Jörg
Heiser (Nürnberg: Kunsthalle Nürnberg and BAWAG foundation Vienna, Kerber Verlag,
2007).

12 Friedrich Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility,”
in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics,
ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2003): 297-307.

13 Richard Sennett, The Fall of
Public Man (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1977), 5.

14 Ibid., 337.

15 Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jüdin aus der
Romantik (München: Piper, 2008),
65 (my translation).

16 Ibid., 71 (my translation).

17 Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments, no.
116,” in Friedrich Schlegel: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter
Firchow (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991): 31–32.

Jörg Heiser is co-editor of frieze, co-publisher of frieze d/e, and visiting professor at Kunstuniversität Linz, Austria. He is the author of All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2008), and curated the exhibition “Romantic Conceptualism” (Kunsthalle Nuremberg and BAWAG foundation Vienna, 2007). Jörg Heiser lives in Berlin.

311 East Broadway

New York, NY 10002, USA

All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art:

An Interview with Jörg Heiser

Allen Ruppersberg, YOU AND ME PLUS, 2007, Poster Installation, silkscreen on paper, dimensions variable. Installation shot, Romantic Conceptualism BAWAG Foundation, Vienna, 14 September – 1 December 2007. Reproduced with kind permission of BAWAG Foundation, Vienna.

Romantic Conceptualism questioned the still prevalent assertion that cool depersonalization is the precondition of an art that makes itself checkable, revisable (when the actual aim is to become unassailable, not to expose any tender spots). Funky Lessons questioned another still prevalent assertion: that Conceptualism is too didactic. And so the show brought together work that undermines authority by claiming it, wittily. The title of the exhibition was inspired by Adrian Piper’s pivotal piece Funk Lessons (1982-1984), a video based on a performance by the African-American artist teaching – a mostly white – audience of students basic and advanced dance routines of funk and soul music.

Slapstick is the missing link between those two exhibitions: it creates a connection between the humoristic strategies, and the romantically emphatic strategies, aimed at eroding heroism. Bas Jan Ader’s work is the pinnacle of this, and even when people now start to get weary of seeing his small body of work slightly over-exposed over the last couple of years, it remains so. To quote from my book, in regard to a work that was included in Romantic Conceptualism, if I may do so: ‘Broken Fall (Geometric), Westkapelle, Holland (1972) shows Ader falling sideways onto a saw horse and into the bushes. The bushes line a path that leads to the “Westkapelle” lighthouse—visible in the background—that features in an early series of paintings by Piet Mondrian. The action is reminiscent of the classic comedy gag of leaning sideways, of listing heavily like a drunk or a sailor at sea; but it refers to Mondrian’s Modernist rejection of the diagonal in favor of the rectilinear that caused a quarrel between the artist and his friend Theo van Doesburg. Where Mondrian manically abstracted from physicality, Ader brought it back into play. In this way, he exorcised modern art in general and Conceptualism in particular, driving out their poses of heroic unassailability.’ (p. 82)

Bas Jan Ader seems of key importance to both your and Jan Verwoert’s understanding of romantic conceptualism. In Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous,for example, Verwoert writes: ‘By fore-grounding [the] evocative, suggestive and open-ended quality of the conceptual gesture, Ader shows how deeply indebted conceptual art is to the aesthetics of the sublime.’[1] However, in ‘Emotional Rescue, Romantic Conceptualism’, you write: ‘Farewell to Faraway Friends suggests that the seeming incompatibility of the Conceptual and the romantic goes back to the historical roots of artistic production in Modernity at large.’[2] Is Conceptualism ‘indebted to’ and ‘incompatible’ with Romanticism at the same time?

Yes. Conceptualism is indebted to Romanticism precisely in that the latter movement already embodied, and explored, the incompatibility of trying to create ‘closed systems’ on the one hand and allowing artistic experiment to happen on the other. There was a ‘seed’ of Conceptualism in Romanticism as much as there is a ‘trace’ of the latter in the former, and in both cases the ‘official’ rhetoric often rejected or denied that connection.

In his essay, ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’ Walter Benjamin states: ‘The category under which the Romantics conceive of art is the idea.’[3] Benjamin’s assertion seems to suggest that a nascent conceptualism is imminent to Romantic aesthetics and thus romanticism and conceptualism and are not as incompatible as we might expect from a reading of Sol LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967) where he famously outlawed the ‘emotional kick’ associated with ‘Expressionist’ art. However, you argue that Romantic Conceptualism does not intend simply to redeem Romanticism and the sublime for conceptualism, nor does it intend to present a soft focus revision of conceptualism. Rather, the exhibition claims to refute any easy binary opposition or final resolution between these terms. How is this balancing act sustained in practice?

On the part of the artists? I can only guess – in the way they use contradictions and tensions between pre-existing parameters and one’s own experience of them as a motor, rather than trying to resolve these contradictions and tensions. For example Susan Hiller, for her Dedicated to the Unknown Artist (1972–76) used the pre-existing parameter of postcards of the ‘Wild Sea’ on the UK coastline, and the pre-existing parameter of sociological categorization of popular artefacts such as these postcards, and the pre-existing aesthetic parameter of using a grid for display, to fuel her own enquiry into what it means to be an artist, and what it means to be letting others – in this case the unknown artists who took these photographs, or hand coloured them – speak through one’s work.

The balancing act on the part of me as a curator was to pre-empt easy assumptions about feelgood, ‘soft focus revision’, as you aptly put it, by allowing each work a space of their own while creating tensions between works that set off the respective qualities, bringing out the stern and no-nonsense side in the one work while highlighting the latently delirious in another (say, an Allen Ruppersberg poster wall which is poppy-coloured, yet is just as conceptually driven and earnestly thought through as a black-and-white sentence by Lawrence Weiner). That said, it was also important not to become apologetic about the ‘vulnerability’ of these works, their daring leap into possible embarrassment, for the sake of lining them up with cooler, more guarded conceptual strands.

In Political Romanticism,Carl Schmitt contends that ‘romantics transform every thought into a sociable conversation and every instant into a historical moment… just as the romantic emotion moves between the compressed ego and expansion into the cosmos, so every point is a circle at the same time, and every circle a point. The community is an extended individual, the individual a concentrated community.’[4] What does romantic conceptualism contribute to questions of community (I’m thinking of the series of micro-maintenance works by Didier Courbot, for example), to the question of simultaneously ‘being-together’ and ‘being-apart,’ to borrow Rancière’s terms?

It brings to ideas of community precisely the insistence on being allowed to be a single individual. That is its contribution: not in the sense of hedonism or egoism, but in the sense of allowing the imaginary to continue being a resource for new ideas in the socio-political sphere. ‘Romantic Conceptualism’, as opposed to Romanticism per se, would however be aware of the pitfalls of romanticising – in that sense, rendering sublime – that single individuality, the ‘artist’s soul’, itself. It would, rather, use the single individual as a ‘medium’ through which the community speaks, like the unknown artists who speak through Hiller (and Hiller through them, of course). In that sense, Romantic Conceptualism is Romanticism secularized, stripped of any pretension that the artist’s soul is a medium of the otherworldly or godly (while allowing a sense of tragicomic mourning for that secularization to linger on).

According to Guy Oakes, for Schmitt ‘the favourite occupation of the political romantic is criticism. Discussion or conversation is the vehicle by which the romantic poeticizes politics.’[5] (p. xxvii) This depiction of the sociability of romanticism appears to resemble the conviviality which Nicolas Bourriaud attributes to relational art as a critical and political practice. How does Romantic Conceptualism relate to these terms of ‘critical’, ‘political’ or ‘relational’ art?

I’m sceptical of the conviviality often associated with relational art, in terms of an assumption that it is established against, rather than with, the means of mass media or the means of the ‘spectacle’. Favouring a kind of ‘direct’ exchange between artist and audience (sharing meals, or producing a film together, or whatever) over more ‘anonymous’, indirect ways of critical reception and interaction I think runs the risk of being romantic in the regressive sense (‘true’ physical exchange versus estranged electronic exchange, or none at all). I think anonymity is a very important factor in Romantic Conceptualism: ‘I’m too sad to tell you’, Bas Jan Ader’s statement of the artist weeping for the camera, includes a rejection of exchange, crucially (i.e. he doesn’t give us a reason for his sadness). If relational practice includes the right to remain silent, or to take part without having to confess, I’m all for it. That’s the irony of Romantic Conceptualism: the artists take on all the embarrassment, leaving it open whether we shall embarrass ourselves as well. It counters the imposition of having to merely fulfil one’s role as a dependable member of the community. Maybe all of this connects to the contradiction between communitarianism and individualism that became so central to the protestant movements of the US throughout the centuries, which is maybe also why Conceptualism seems so at home there.

All of that said, I don’t want to generalize too much and say that I can see full on hardcore political art with not the slightest romantic touch being of great value and importance, depending on the situation and context. I think there is a time for this, and a time for that.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy write of the ‘romantics’ that ‘Regardless of the form it takes, their literary ambition is always the result of their ambition for an entirely new social function for the writer – that writer who was, for them, a character still to come, and in the concrete form of a profession, as we read in Athenaeum fragment 20 – and consequently for a different society.’[6] Does your practice as a writer, editor, curator, researcher and musician conceal a ‘romantic’ and contradictory call for a different society? Contradictory, insomuch as such a multifaceted practice seems on the one hand to refuse to accept disciplinarity and to embrace Rancière’s concept of ‘indisciplinarity’ and on the other hand to reproduce capitalism’s de-categorization of work which exploits ‘typical characteristics of the artistic condition’ as outlined by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism.[7]

I think what is often ignored in critical discussions of artistic or ‘romantic’ role-models for artists and writers, which in turn get adopted by the larger economic sphere to justify exploitative working conditions, is to insist that what makes the difference is to what end these ways of producing are being established. It does make the deciding difference whether I work long hours for little money to create a great novel or song, or whether I do it to help a company to become richer while feeding off the illusion that I do something creative. The thing is, that sometimes the lines blur between those two states (the song may turn out to be not very creative, while the company who sells it still gets richer). Still the difference has to be asserted. In other words, I’m weary of attempts to discredit artistic ‘flexibility’ and ‘precariousness,’ etc. on the grounds that it is a blueprint for exploitation elsewhere. I’m equally weary of talk of ‘creative industries’ à la Richard Florida which gloss over the difference between genuinely creative work that, simply, put something out into the world that didn’t exist before, and merely ‘interpretative’ work that may have creative aspects in continuing a certain tradition or craft. In the current development of Capitalism, I think it is more crucial than ever to re-establish evaluation of to what ends one works or ‘self-exploits’, rather than just how. Maybe someone is underpaid and exploited, but doesn’t it make a difference whether he or she is so for an NGO fighting against landmines, for example, as opposed to say a company producing such landmines?

As much as I always ask for an emphasis on the ‘how’ of art making (the methods) rather than its ‘what’ (the subject matter), in terms of ‘work’ as such and ‘artistic disciplines’ etc., I’d rather always ask to what effect someone works the way they work.

Waiting Hall Michigan Station, Detroit, by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

Early in May 1941, the novelist and essayist Rose Macaulay was staying at the Hampshire village of Liss, attending to family arrangements following the death of her sister Margaret. On the 13th she returned to London – since the start of the war she had lived in a flat at Luxborough House, Marylebone, and worked as a voluntary ambulance driver – and discovered that her home and all her possessions had been destroyed in the bombing a few nights before. In a letter to a friend and literary collaborator, Daniel George, she wrote: “I came up last night … to find Lux House no more – bombed and burned out of existence, and nothing saved. I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with … It would have been less trouble to have been bombed myself.”

The loss of her flat, and especially the destruction of her library, had a profound effect on Macaulay: it was a decade before she completed another novel. In 1949, she lamented: “I am still haunted and troubled by ghosts, and I can still smell those acrid drifts of smouldering ashes that once were live books.” But her memory of the blitz also nurtured a fascination with destruction, decay and the ambiguous emotions conjured by the sight of buildings and entire cities reduced to rubble. In 1953 Macaulay published Pleasure of Ruins, a lively and eccentric history of the “ruin lust” that gripped European art and literature in the 18th century, reached its height in the romantic period, and had apparently declined in the first half of the 20th century in the face of wreckage that could not be turned to aesthetic or nostalgic advantage.

The story that Macaulay tells in Pleasure of Ruins is essentially a modern one: it is still alive today in photographs of post-industrial Detroit and recent responses by the likes of Iain Sinclair and Laura Oldfield Ford to the demolitions wrought in the name of the London Olympics. The taste for heroic destruction or picturesque decay cannot thrive without a sense of progress for which it fulfils the role of brooding, sometimes gleeful, unconscious. There were few if any classical or medieval enthusiasts of ruination. Even in renaissance painting, which is littered with mouldered remnants of Greco-Roman statuary and architecture, ruins are ancillary to the main pictorial event, providing a fractured backdrop to a serene madonna, or a handy bit of broken column to support a wilting St Sebastian. But by the 16th and 17th centuries, Macaulay wrote, something like the later literary and artistic obsession with ruins is in the air: Shakespeare and Marlowe inhabit “a ruined and ruinous world” of blasted heaths and crumbling castles, and there are resonant examples in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi: “I do love these ancient ruins: / We never tread upon them but we set / Our foot upon some reverend history.”

It was in the 18th century, however, that the ruin arrived centre-stage in European art, poetry, fiction, garden design and architecture itself. A cult of melancholy collapse and picturesque rot took hold, especially of the English aristocracy, for whom no estate was complete without its mock-dilapidated classical temple, executed in stone, plastered brick or even (as the garden designer Batty Langley advised in 1728) cut-price painted canvas. The craze inspired some well-known architectural absurdities: in Westmeath in 1740 Lord Belvedere built a ruined abbey to block the view of a house where his ex-wife had taken up with his brother, and in 1796 William Beckford first contrived his fantastical Fonthill Abbey, “a sort of habitable ruin”, according to Macaulay – “sort of’” because the thing kept falling down.

Alongside such follies there flourished a literature of pleasing desuetude, encompassing aesthetic theory, romantic poetry’s rubble-strewn excursions and the dank precincts of the gothic novel. In his Elements of Criticism of 1762, Lord Kames had approved ruins, real or confected, for their embodying “the triumph of time over strength, a melancholy but not unpleasant thought”. And the English romantics took to ruination with a paradoxical energy, Wordsworth uncovering his poetic self among the remnants of Tintern Abbey, Coleridge in the unfinished “Kubla Khan” deriving a whole aesthetic of the literary fragment out of his botched architectural fantasia.

If all of this seems like so much picturesque maundering, it was also evidence of a fretful modernity. It was in painting that the vexing timescale of the ruin was most accurately broached – ruins, it seemed, spoke as much of the future as of the classical or more recent past. For sure, romantic art is dominated by the sublime vistas of Caspar David Friedrich, whose lone figures look dolefully on the vacant arches of medieval abbeys. But the gaze might as easily be turned on catastrophes to come: in 1830 Sir John Soane commissioned the painter Joseph Gandy to depict his recently completed Bank of England in ruins. In France, Hubert Robert had already painted the Louvre in a state of collapse, prompting Diderot to write: “The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures.”

This sense of having lived on too late, of having survived the demolition of past dreams of the future, is what gives the ruin its specific frisson, and it still animates art and writing. But it’s historically bound up with more pressing worries about the fate of one’s own civilisation: nowhere more so than in the literary and artistic afterlife of a ruinous motif conjured by Rose Macaulay’s grand-uncle Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1840. Reviewing Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes in the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay speculates that in the distant future Catholicism “may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s”. Macaulay’s New Zealander, gazing at the wreckage of the metropolis (and by extension on the fall of the British empire), was for decades a popular image of London’s future ruin – its most notable avatar is Gustave Doré’s engraving The New Zealander.

Images of the modern city in ruins proliferated in the Victorian period – Richard Jefferies’s 1885 novel After London is the best-known example, with its vision of a city reverting to nature following some unnamed calamity – but the following century had another perspective on the now venerable and even hackneyed trope of ruin: for modernism the city, even (or especially) as it pretended to progress or novelty, was already in ruins. The Waste Land is an obvious instance, with its fragmentary vision of the unreal city. But consider too the photographs of Eugène Atget, which capture a Paris being demolished and rebuilt at the same time, or Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: a critical-historical phantasmagoria conjured from the already decaying Parisian shopping arcades of just a few decades earlier. In architectural terms, the most thoroughgoing visions of the city of the future were haunted too by ruination: Le Corbusier’s projected Ville Radieuse depended on the wholesale ruin of the existing city, and the classical kitsch that Albert Speer planned for Hitler’s future Germania was designed with its potential “ruin value” in mind.

The second world war tested the taste for ruins to its limits – such wholesale destruction was surely unsuited to melancholy thoughts of an aesthetic cast. Rose Macaulay worries at the problem in the “Note on New Ruins” that she appended to Pleasure of Ruins: the bomb sites of London, she fears, are still too jagged and raw in the memory to qualify as ruins. And yet many of the most affecting images of the depredations of total war and, especially, of the bombing of cities are clearly indebted to romantic precursors. Macaulay herself was not immune to their pleasures: in 1949 her novel The World My Wilderness hymned the Eliotic wasteland that London had become, her feral teenage protagonists running wild among gaping cellars and ruderal meadows. One thinks, too, of Cecil Beaton’s blitz photographs, or Paul Nash’s 1941 painting Totes Meer and its rhyming of wrecked aircraft with Friedrich’s Sea of Ice. In the immediate postwar period, it was cinema that frankly embraced the visual allure and import of the ruin. In Germany, an entire genre of “ruin films” arose out of the devastation caused by Allied carpet-bombing, though the signature film in terms of capturing the plight of Berlin’s orphaned Trümmerkinder, or children of the ruins, was by an Italian director: Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero of 1948.

Postwar culture is littered with images of ruins past and potentially to come, the levelled cities of Europe becoming mixed up with photographs and footage of real or anticipated nuclear destruction, the whole apocalyptic imaginary hardly alleviated by a sense that urban reconstruction was in itself a form of ruin lust: cities rising into wreckage and the earth poisoned by new industries. Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) begins with views of post-apocalyptic Paris that are clearly mocked-up from photographs of real cities in ruin in the 1940s; Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) shows the factory districts of Ravenna as a lurid, smoky hell that already looks post-industrial and decayed. And in the same decade JG Ballard began to formulate a view of ex-urban modernity — the concrete non-places of motorway flyovers and airport environs — as the landscape of a decidedly post-romantic sublime.

If Ballard is the English laureate of late-modern ruins, his influence still palpable in the writings of Iain Sinclair or the poetic dross-scape of Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley’s recent book Edgelands, the figure around whom the artistic fascination with ruins has crystallised in recent years is the artist Robert Smithson. In the years before his death in 1973 Smithson, who had certainly been reading Eliot and Ballard, combined ambitious land-art projects (his Spiral Jetty of 1970 is the best known) with a series of inventive and wry essays on the ruinous condition of the modern American landscape. Writing of his native New Jersey in 1967, in an essay titled “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic”, Smithson affected to have found, on the outskirts of a declining industrial town, the contemporary “eternal city”: an agglomeration of half-built highways and rusting factory relics to rival the architectural and artistic treasures of ancient Rome. New Jersey, writes Smithson memorably, is “a utopia minus a bottom, a place where the machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass”.

Smithson’s influence – and especially his notion of “ruins in reverse”, in which construction and dissolution cannot be told apart – is all over the ruinous turn that many artists and writers took in the last decade or so. Tacita Dean’s films are a case in point, with their frequent focus on defunct technology or architecture. Jane and Louise Wilson followed Ballard and the French urban theorist Paul Virilio in exploring the derelict remains of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall fortifications. Younger artists such as Cyprien Gaillard and collaborators Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry have continued to explore the idea of modern ruins, while Owen Hatherley’s 2011 book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain essayed a critique of the ruinous effects of recent urban planning in the UK. (Later this year Hatherley’s sequel, A New Kind of Bleak will show that process nearing its endgame, from Aberdeen to Plymouth, Croydon to Belfast.)

An obsession with ruins can risk a fall into mere sentiment or nostalgia: ruin lust was already a cliché in the 18th century, and its periodic revivals may put one in mind of Gilbert and Sullivan: “There’s a fascination frantic / In a ruin that’s romantic.” The great interest in the remarkable images of decayed Detroit – in the photographs, for example, of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, on show at the Wilmotte Gallery in London from this week – is easily understandable but seems oddly detached from analyses of the political forces that brought the city to its present sorry pass. It may be that as a cultural touchstone the idea of ruin needs to slump into the undergrowth again. But the history of ruin aesthetics tells us that it would likely resurface in time, charged again with artistic and political energy, and we’d find ourselves looking once more at blasted or burned cities with a visionary or melancholy eye, just as Rose Macaulay did in 1941, ambiguously lamenting a bombed-out house where “the stairway climbs up and up, undaunted, to the roofless summit where it meets the sky”.

Italian Neo-Realism
by Megan Ratner

Roma: città aperta (Open City, 1946)

Introduction

Before the indies and even before the French New Wave, Italian neo-realism staked out new cinematic territory. One of those blanket terms that mean all things to all people, neo-realism has few absolutes, though there are elements that set the Italian version distinctly apart. Screenwriter and poet Cesare Zavattini wrote an actual manifesto to guide these films, but their creation was just as much a result of timing, chance and fluke. Unquestionably, their greatest single influence was the anti-Fascism that marked World War II’s immediate postwar period. Key elements are an emphasis on real lives (close to but not quite documentary style), an entirely or largely non-professional cast, and a focus on collectivity rather than the individual. Solidarity is important, along with an implicit criticism of the status quo. Plot and story come about organically from these episodes and often turn on quite tiny moments. Cinematically, neo-realism pushed filmmakers out of the studio and on to the streets, the camera freed-up and more vernacular, the emphasis away from fantasy and towards reality. Despite the rather short run – 1943 to 1952 – the heavyweight films of the period and the principles that guided them put Italian cinema on the map at the time and continue to shape contemporary global filmmaking.

Origins

A little history goes a long way toward understanding Italian neo-realism. By the outbreak of World War II, the country had been under Benito Mussolini’s hefty thumb since 1924. In the regime’s 1930s heydays, swank productions set in big hotels, tony nightclubs and ocean liners made up the “white telephone” movies, the shorthand term for their decadent Deco interiors. The protagonists always found a resolution to their insipid dilemmas, the prevailing Italian style as unchallenging as blowing bubbles. There were also plenty of American imports, equally unreflective of Italian realities. Describing this time, Federico Fellini said, “For my generation, born in the 20s, movies were essentially American. American movies were more effective, more seductive. They really showed a paradise on earth, a paradise in a country they called America.”

Whether they were being shown the glories of their Roman past, their fascist future or of l’America, a country unreal outside the movie-house, what Italians rarely saw were images that reflected their lives. As early as 1935, anti-Fascist journalist Leo Longanesi urged directors to “go into the streets, into the barracks, into the train stations; only in this way can an Italian cinema be born.”

Aside from the political realities, it’s worth remembering that Italy was still in the first stages of a huge transition from agriculture to manufacturing. People struggled; the economic miracle was still more than a decade away. Yet few films showed this, the exceptions being Treno popolare (1933) by Rafaello Matarazzo and, paradoxically, in documentaries produced by LUCE institute, under complete control of the regime.

For many Italians, neo-realist films put images to the ideas of the Resistance. In the film journals Cinema and Bianco e Nero, writers called for a cinema that resembled the verismo (realism) of literature. This had begun as a 19th century literary movement which was expanded by Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese and Pier Paolo Pasolini, most of whom wrote for – or about – the movies as well. Although philosophical ideas informed Italian neo-realism, it is very much a cinematic creation. As Calvino pointed out, “neo-realists knew too well that what counted was the music and not the libretto.” The aim was not to record the social problems but to express them in an entirely new way.

Jean Renoir’s Toni (1935) and Alessandro Blassetti’s 1860 (1934) influenced neo-realism, but the movement was to a great extent a matter of 1940s practicalities: with Cinécittà (Rome’s studio complex) relegated to refugees, films had to be shot outside. Surrounded by the shambolic ruins of World War II, human and structural, filmmakers had ready-made drama even in their backdrop, the atmosphere anxiety-charged and utterly uncertain. After twenty-one years under Mussolini, all bets were off as to what direction Italy would take. In the war’s aftermath, members of the Resistance (including several of the neo-realist directors) had to come to terms those who collaborated. Though unstated, this almost civil war-like tension fuels neo-realist cinema.

So what is neo-realism? André Bazin called it a cinema of “fact” and “reconstituted reportage,” its antecedents in the anti-Fascist movement with which these directors identified. Although they owed a debt to Renoir (with whom both Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni had worked), the neo-realists “respected” the entirety of the reality they filmed. This meant occasionally showing scenes in real-time and always resisting the temptation to manipulate by editing. Scenes are shot on location, with no professional extras and often a largely unprofessional cast. Set in rural areas or working-class neighborhoods, the stories focus on everyday people, often children, with an emphasis on the unexceptional routines of ordinary life.

Cesare Zavattini, who functions as a kind of godfather of the movement, stated: “This powerful desire of the [neo-realist] cinema to see and to analyze, this hunger for reality, for truth, is a kind of concrete homage to other people, that is, to all who exist.” The aim, method and philosophy was fundamentally humanist: to show Italian life without embellishment and without artifice. Breezy fare this is not, but it did significantly alter European filmmaking and eventually cinema around the world. Neo-realism reflected a new freedom in Italy and the willingness to pose provocative questions about what movies could do. As director Giuseppe Bertolucci (Bernardo’s brother) noted: “The cinema was born with neo-realism.”

Unexpected American Influences

It’s no accident that Michael Tolkin chose neo-realism’s classic Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) to rock his studio exec’s world in The Player. Though it’s in some ways anti-Hollywood, neo-realism drew a great deal from American noir writing and films. Luchino Visconti based Ossessione (Obsession, 1942) on James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Visconti used long takes and complex shots to convey the dismal and ridiculous world of the three protagonists, the lovers (played by Massimo Girotti and Clara Calamai) and the husband they bump off (played by Juan De Landa). Visconti’s neo-realism heightens the interplay between characters and surroundings, the bleak, unforgiving interiors and street shots reflective of the lousy hand these no-hopers have been dealt.

Ossessione (Obsession, 1942)

Visconti described his own style as “anthropomorphic cinema,” declaring, “I could make a film in front of a wall if I knew how to find the data of man’s true humanity and how to express it.” Although Mussolini himself approved of the film, his son Vittorio (who ran the film journal Cinema) had a fit about its bleak Italian landscapes, the natural light, and all the shooting on location in the Po Valley.

Roberto Rossellini’s Roma: città aperta (Open City, 1946) shows most clearly neo-realism’s link with the Resistance movement. Set during the Nazi occupation of Rome, it mines the tensions of the foreign presence and the divisions among those who abetted and those who opposed. Made under duress (black market film stock, little studio shooting, rushes unexamined, sound synchronized in post-production, and, no surprise, a tiny budget), Open City has an eyewitness immediacy tempered with operatic emotion. Pragmatic realities drove the film as much as the script, co-written by Sergio Amedei and Federico Fellini. The hybrid of melodrama and actual footage was the result of Rossellini’s populist, episodic approach, the story told in bursts, intense and unsparing details of ordinary lives undone by the trauma of occupation. Veracity rather than comfort informed the narrative. As the Gestapo search for and find a key member of the Resistance, Rossellini keeps his primary focus on Pina (Anna Magnani), engaged to marry an unassuming but Partisan typesetter by whom she is already pregnant. Open City may be most cited for two unforgettable scenes – a torture scene, to which Reservoir Dogs’s lopped-ear scene bears a marked resemblance; and a sudden and dramatic death scene, a final posture evocative of painterly renditions of Christian martyrs. It also emphasizes the futility of war, its senselessness, a theme Rossellini struck throughout his war trilogy.

In Paisà (Paisan, 1946), Rossellini directly engaged the effects of the American presence in Italy, complicated by the Yankee shift from enemy to ally. In each of the six episodes, he examines the expectations and disappointments inherent in the crossing of two such different cultures and the inevitable – sometimes fatal – misapprehensions. Newsreel footage separates the vignettes and, throughout, Rossellini plays with the stereotypical images held by each side, his overall theme being that war is an equal-opportunity brutalizer.

Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1947) has a more personal feeling, influenced, no doubt, by the death of Rossellini’s eldest son in 1946. Set in the rubble of Berlin, the film has a young protagonist (rare for Rossellini), a 15-year-old who lives with his father and sister, who falls under the spell of a pedophile, eeking cash from the sale of this scammer’s Third Reich memorabilia. Potent and unbearable images make the desperation of the city clear; early on, for example, a horse lies dead in the street, hit perhaps by a tram, as people matter-of-factly carve-and-carry its meat away. Corrupted on all sides, the boy eventually resorts to the most desperate of measures.

As in Obsession, the cityscape is here used to reflect the anomie and disconnection. Open City ends horribly but with a glimmer of hope as young chidren witness an execution yet, together, return to the city; in Germany Year Zero, life is as stony as the razed city. It completes Rossellini’s World War II trilogy, strikingly ending his work from the German perspective, the devastations occasioned by Third Reich policies no easier on its own people.

La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948)

Labor Intensive

La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948) took Luchino Visconti to Aci Trezza on Sicily. Far more documentary in style than the other neo-realist films, The Earth Trembles relies on a completely nonprofessional cast. Visconti explained the day’s shooting to the villagers and used ambient sound, allowing the people to speak their dialect (necessitating subtitles even for the rest of Italy). The film is loosely based on Giovanni Verga’s novel, I Malavoglia (The House of the Medlar Tree). When an island family risks their savings to buy a boat and fish for themselves, they struggle to pay it off, fishing in bad weather until a storm destroys their boat. Classically organized – Visconti was a veteran of opera – the film allowed him to linger on a cyclical life on the verge of disappearance (Orson Welles once noted that Visconti photographed fishermen as if they were Vogue models.) He used deep focus shots, lighting only the nighttime fishing scenes, showing their lives as an organic whole, with each aspect accorded value. The extremely spare soundtrack comprises few words, several silences, sometimes only the peal of bells and little music. And yet there’s a timeless and deeply mythic quality to the film, its emphasis on the honor and dignity that had been attached to a life earned from the unpredictable sea.

Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946)

Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) begins outside Rome, in a kind of idyll of the countryside. Two shoeshine boys set aside what they’ve earned to buy a horse. Back in the narrow and unforgiving streets of Rome, they’re roped into a blackmarket deal that goes sour. Nabbed by the authorities, they’re sent to a juvenile prison, their friendship strained nearly to breaking. After an escape, one of them accidentally dies, his death blamed on his friend. De Sica kept his exposition short, detailing the boys’ existences through carefully composed scenes such as their neighboring prison cells, each one headed for a different fate. Opening and closing with the horse, De Sica shows the freedom that’s denied these two boys. His use of nonprofessionals allowed him to draw natural, seemingly improvised performances from his actors and remain, in his term, “faithful to the character.”

This is especially true of his next feature, Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), the leading roles of father and son occupied by two nonprofessionals. (David O. Selznick was willing to back the film, but only with Cary Grant as lead, an offer De Sica fortunately had the confidence to refuse.) When the bicycle he needs to do his job is stolen, the young father and son scour Rome to find it; the father is finally driven to steal a ride of his own.

De Sica orchestrated the film carefully, shooting some scenes with multiple cameras and drawing attention to its existence as fiction, not a documentary. Bazin termed it the “only valid Communist film of the whole past decade” and the film was often seen as simply a criticism of working conditions in Italy at the time, when unemployment stood at 25 percent. But unlike the clearcut moralizing of Rossellini’s films, De Sica’s works focus on a humanist sense of individual and mass. Bicycle Thieves has a mythic feel, the father ultimately forced into thievery, each moral quandary no sooner solved than De Sica poses yet another, the father sympathetic but flawed.

Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948)

Italian audiences hardly embraced these new films. To be shown their country in such stark terms made the majority very unhappy. It even became part of the law: the Andreotti Law (1949), named for its author Giullio Andreotti, offered subsidies for those who followed the neo-realist style in a manner “suitable… to the best interests of Italy,” but with the proviso that they avoid the blemishes on Italian life.

Legislation had little immediate effect on what was made, though the stories began to reflect the scramble for work and stability that defined this period. Visconti’s terrific Bellissima (1951) centers on a daughter and fanatic stage-mamma, the inimitable Magnani, eager to get her modestly talented daughter a spot in a movie. To her husband’s dismay, she squeezes every extra penny into lessons and cosmetic improvements for the little girl. Ultimately, the mother all but puts herself on the market to get the recognition she’s convinced will make life worth living. Set in a working-class Roman neighborhood, Bellissima gives rare insight into how provincial big-city life could be, each neighborhood a virtual small town, the neighbors sometimes helpful, often petty and jealous of any advantage. Though not traditionally considered a neo-realist film, Bellissima did focus on people’s lives in the wake of war, the sense of wanting to better oneself and the struggle to find a way out of the grind of poverty. It becomes yet more poignant in this context.

Umberto D.

This sense of Rome as a small town is especially acute in Umberto D. (1951), which was De Sica’s favorite film and is in many ways the masterpiece of neo-realism, an overall superb piece of work. The crisis-filled days of a pensioner, Umberto Domenico Ferrari (Carlo Battisti), and the complications of his relationship with his dog and a young maid in his apartment building become a study in the difficult drama that constitutes an ordinary life. As played by a dignified nonprofessional – a professor, who, in the event, was often subsequently taken for his character on the street – Umberto D. is stodgy, fussy, irritating and curiously sympathetic. Unlike other films of the era, this was shot nearly entirely in the Cinécittà studios. The indignities of the family-less and indigent old-age are laid out with sensitivity but not sentimentality. Umberto is vulnerable and all but invisible, barely distinguishing himself in a crowd of protesting pensioners, desperately trying to maintain his independence and self-respect. There is no real plot other than the minuscule and life-shaping crises of late-life impoverishment. Even the end strikes a melancholy note of ambiguity.

And Suddenly It Was Over

Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) was described at the time as the “last gasp of the neo-realist movement.” Like Obsession, its strongest overt influences are American films – noir and westerns and even a hint of musicals). It introduced audiences to a smoldering Sylvana Mangano, who played a rice weeder. By the hundreds they descended on the Piemonte region in the postwar years and into the 1960s. The brutally exhausting work demanded precision, suited, as the voice-over states, to the delicate “hand that rocks the cradle or threads the needle.” Mangano’s characters long to go to America, where she’s sure “everything is electric.”

In Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), De Sica kept to neo-realism’s focus on the marginalized mass, but his approach marked a break with just about every other neo-realist premise. Miracle in Milan is a kind of neo-fantasy. He showed postwar conditions and real locations – in this case, the run-down outskirts of Milan – the dreariness leavened with make-believe. When his foster mother (Emma Grammatica) gives him a white dove, Toto (Francesco Golisano) can suddenly grant the wishes of his neighbors in the periferia or shantytown where they live. De Sica jettisoned chronological time, replacing logic with magic. And yet, this has some of the grittiest urban landscapes of any of its contemporaries, the long shots of the shantytowns conveying a sense of how imprisoned the characters are. De Sica termed it a “fairy story and only intended as such,” yet the film had the unintended effect of essentially signalling neo-realism’s official end.

A Long Shadow

In general, people look backwards when talking about neo-realism, acknowledging its roots, according it artifact status. But the films stand on their own even without the movement they’ve come to represent. More important, they pointed out new directions for filmmakers in Italy and elsewhere. Both Fellini and Antonioni worked on neo-realist films and even in Fellini’s later, extremely fanciful work and Antonioni’s brooding studies of men and women, there’s a similar urge to document Italy’s social realities.

Among the filmmakers influenced by Italian neo-realism are the French New Wave, Dogme 95 and, as Images writer Chris Norton points out, the Los Angeles School of Black Independent Filmmakers (known as the L.A. School). The latter include directors such as Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima and Julie Dash, all of whom have at some level addressed the working-class experience in America with methods borrowed or inspired by neo-realism.

Even such apparent non neo-realists as Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ermanno Olmi, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Gianni Amelio and Lina Wertmüller carry over the ideas of neo-realism with their emphasis on class conflicts (the eternal north/south tension) and use of non-professional actors, particularly children, to great effect.

The last word on this goes to Fellini. He agreed in principle, he said, with the neo-realist idea of taking films from life but he redefined it for himself as “looking at reality with an honest eye – but any kind of reality; not just social reality, but also spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, anything man has inside him.” Fellini taps into the essence of neo-realism, the reason the films of that particular era still appeal and the reason they continue to inspire: they address the human condition which, despite technological advances and special effects, remains very much what it was when these filmmakers took to the streets and captured what surrounded them.

Megan Ratner is an Associate Editor at Bright Lights Film Journal. Her work has appeared in Black Book, Filmmaker, The New York Times, Senses of Cinema, and Frieze.

Truth-telling is the promise of a photograph — as if fact itself resides in the optical precision with which photography reflects the way we see the world. A photograph comes as close as we get to witnessing an authentic moment with our own eyes while not actually being there. Think of all the famous pictures that serve as both documentation and verification of historic events: Mathew Brady’s photographs of the Civil War; Lewis Hine’s chronicle of industrial growth in America; the birth of the civil rights movement documented in a picture of Rosa Parks on a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Ala. Aren’t they proof of the facts in real time, moments in history brought to the present?

Of course, just because a photograph reflects the world with perceptual accuracy doesn’t mean it is proof of what spontaneously transpires. A photographic image might look like actual reality, but gradations of truth are measured in the circumstances that led up to the moment the picture was taken.

In John Szarkowski’s seminal book, “The Photographer’s Eye,” Robert Capa is referred to as “the great war photographer.” Capa’s most famous picture, “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, Cerro Muriano, Córdoba Front, Spain, September 5, 1936,” commonly known as “The Falling Soldier,” was taken in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. Though long considered a defining war picture, its veracity has also inspired decades of debate among scholars, curators and critics. While the picture’s iconic stature rests on the precise moment captured when the Spanish soldier was shot, the possibility that it was staged undermines the historic proof it has come to signify.

New evidence reported by the Guardian has reignited the debate. José Manuel Susperregui, who teaches at the University of the Basque Country, recently published a book that includes research challenging the stated location of “The Falling Soldier.” Several previously unseen Capa pictures in the archives of the international Center of Photography, taken in the same sequence as “The Falling Soldier,” show a broader view of the landscape behind him. Mr. Susperregui uses these additional images to make a convincing case that they were taken in the Espejo countryside, some 25 miles from Cerro Muriano. This information, along with the many stories about Capa staging the picture, add to the intrigue, now rekindled in the Spanish press on the occasion of the International Center of Photography‘s traveling exhibition, “This Is War! Robert Capa at Work,” which just opened at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.

“Everyone engaged with this photograph is trying to find out the truth,” Willis Hartshorn, the director of the center, said in a phone conversation. “The new information about the landscape is compelling.” Nothing is conclusive yet, Mr. Hartshorn added “We’re all trying to build the research together,” he said.

The impulse to define, perfect, or heighten reality is manifest in a roster of iconic photographs that have come to reside in the world as “truth.” Mathew Brady, for instance, rarely set foot on a battlefield. He couldn’t bear the sight of dead bodies. In fact, most pictures of the battlefield attributed to Brady’s studio were taken by his employees Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan — both of whom were known to have moved bodies around for the purposes of composition and posterity.

In “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg, 1863,” by Gardner, the body of a dead soldier lies in perfect repose. His head is tilted in the direction of the camera, his hand on his belly, his rifle propped up vertically against the rocks. There would be no question that this was a scene the photographer happened upon, if it weren’t for another picture by Gardner of the same soldier, this time his face turned from the camera and his rifle lying on the ground.

In the Library of Congress catalog, the photograph “Dead Soldiers at Antietam, 1862,” is listed twice, under the names of both Brady and Gardner. In the image, approximately two dozen dead soldiers lie in a very neat row across the field. Could they possibly have fallen in such tidy succession? Knowing what we do about Gardner’s picture of the lone rebel soldier, the possibility lingers that he moved some of these bodies to create a better composition. Or it could be that other soldiers had lined the bodies up before digging a mass grave for burial.

Whatever circumstances led to this picture, it is at least verifiable that the Battle of Antietam took place on this field. We know that many, many soldiers were killed. Evidence of the battle remains — the soldiers that died on that date, the battlefield on which they fought, the clothes they wore, and so on. Just how much of the subject matter does the photographer have to change before fact becomes fiction, or a photograph becomes metaphor?

Lewis Hine’s 1920 photograph of a powerhouse mechanic symbolizes the work ethic that built America. The simplicity of the photograph long ago turned it into a powerful icon, all the more poignant because of its “authenticity.” But in fact, Mr. Hine — who cared about human labor in an increasingly mechanized world — posed this man in order to make the portrait. (In the first shot, the worker’s fly was open.) Does that information make the picture any less valid? Isn’t it a sad fact that the flaws in daily life should prevent reality from being the best version of how things really are? In our attempt to perfect reality, we aim for higher standards. A man with his zipper down is undignified, and so the famous icon, posed as he is, presents an idealized version of the American worker — his dignity customized, but forever intact. Still, the mechanic did work in that powerhouse and his gesture was true enough to his labor. The reality of what the image depicts is indisputable. Whether Hine maintained a fidelity to what transpired in real time may or may not be relevant to its symbolic import.

Despite its overexposure on posters and postcards, “Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville, 1950,” (“Kiss at the Hôtel de Ville”) by Robert Doisneau, has long served as an example of photography capturing the spontaneity of life. How lovely the couple is, how elegant their gesture and their clothing, how delightful this perspective from a café in Paris! What a breezy testament to the pleasure of romance! But despite the story this picture seems to tell — one of a photographer who just happened to look up from his Pernod, say, as the enchanted lovers walked by — there was no serendipity whatsoever in the moment. Mr. Doisneau had seen the man and woman days earlier, near the school at which they were studying acting. He was on assignment for Life magazine, for a story on romance in Paris, and hired the couple as models for the shot. This information was not brought to light until the early 1990s, when lawsuits demanding compensation were filed by several people who claimed to be the models in the famous picture. Does the lack of authenticity diminish the photograph? It did for me, turning its promise of romance into a beautifully crafted lie.

Ruth Orkin was in Florence in the early 1950s when she met Jinx Allen, whom she asked to be the subject of a picture Ms. Orkin wanted to submit to The Herald Tribune. “American Girl in Italy, Florence, Italy, 1951” was conceived inadvertently when Ms. Orkin noticed the Italian men on their Vespas ogling Ms. Allen as she walked down the street. Ms. Orkin asked her to walk down the street again, to be sure she had the shot. Does a second take alter the reality of the phenomenon? How do you parse the difference between Mr. Doisneau’s staged picture and Ms. Orkin’s re-creation?

The birth of the civil rights movement is often dated to a moment in 1955 when Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on a crowded city bus to a white man. Many people assume that the famous picture of Mrs. Parks sitting on a bus is a record of that historic moment. But the picture was taken Dec. 21, 1956, a year after she refused to give up her seat, and a month after the United States Supreme Court ruled Montgomery’s segregated bus system illegal. Before she died in 2005, Mrs. Parks told Douglas Brinkley, her biographer, that she posed for the picture. A reporter and two photographers from Look magazine had seated her on the bus in front of a white man. Similar photo opportunities were arranged on the same day for other civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Here is a staged document that has become a historic reference point, and a revealing parable about the relationship of history to myth.

As a witness to events, the photojournalist sets out to chronicle what happens in the world as it actually occurs. A cardinal rule of the profession is that the presence of the camera must not alter the situation being photographed. The viewer’s expectation about a picture’s veracity is largely determined by the context in which the image appears. A picture published in a newspaper is believed to be fact; an advertising image is understood to be fiction. If a newspaper image turns out to have been set up, then questions are raised about trust and authenticity. Still, somewhere between fact and fiction — or perhaps hovering slightly above either one — is the province of metaphor, where the truth is approximated in renderings of a more poetic or symbolic nature.

Mr. Pierson is part of a group of photographers known as the Boston School — David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin and Mark Morrisroe, among others. All of them knew one another in the early 1980’s and photographed their immediate circle of friends in situations that were, or appeared to be, casual or intimate. Mr. Pierson was often the subject of Mr. Morrisroe’s photographs, and the object of Mr. Morrisroe’s desire. The photographs in this self-portrait series take their cue from the template of pictures of the artist taken 20 years ago. In an attempt to establish a mythology of self, Mr. Pierson is presenting new photographs of other men in the manner of his own portrait, claiming their appearance to represent his own identity. The book is published by the Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea, where the exhibition ”Jack Pierson,” featuring other works of his, runs through Jan. 3.

”Self Portrait” is the flip side of what Cindy Sherman accomplished in her series ”Untitled Film Stills.” Dressing up to enact a wide variety of female archetypes, Ms. Sherman photographed herself in fictional scenes alluding to Hollywood films. That body of work expresses an idea about the way identity is formed by the cultural forces all around us; yet, despite Ms. Sherman’s insistence that her ”film stills” are not self-portraits, the series flirts with the very idea of identity and self-portraiture. Mr. Pierson, by eliminating his own likeness from his ”Self Portrait,” comments on the same postmodern idea about the cultural construction of the individual, but in this case the work suggests that assumed identities both define and obscure the individual in society.

The idea of the constructed identity is nothing new. In an age of cosmetic surgery and on-line communication, it’s easy to customize our appearance or hide behind an invented persona. How often do we look at a picture in a magazine and imagine ourselves with that haircut, in those sunglasses, on that beach? No matter how strong our own sense of who we are, the lust for some idealized version of ourselves is invariably summoned in the barrage of images endlessly flashing before us. Mr. Pierson’s self-portrait series attests to this, underscoring at its core his own erotic impulse to be as desirable as those he desires, to become the very object of his own attraction.

In naming his pictures of others ”Self Portrait,” Mr. Pierson also owes a nod to the Dada legacy of provocation. The catalog of ”The First Papers of Surrealism,” a 1942 group exhibition in New York organized by Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, used the self-portrait as a symbolic equivalent in photographs and drawings of completely unrelated or unknown people. Titled with the names of the participating artists, these ”ready made” portraits, or found faces, took on new meaning in place of other expected identities.

In an essay for a show of portraits at PaceWildenstein Gallery in 1976, Kirk Varnedoe wrote, ”If, in the extremes of modern portraiture, the artist sees the other almost wholly as himself, so in the self-portrait he often sees himself as somebody, or something, irrevocably ‘other.’ ”

Portraiture has always revealed as much about the artist as the subject. If you think about the difference between portraits by Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe, each photographer has a signature style. Remove the names of their subjects and you’re left with a collection of portraits that become as much a self-portrait as the artist’s own likeness. In effect, Mr. Pierson has taken that idea one step further by omitting the names of his subjects, assuming their identities and calling his collection ”Self Portrait.”

Picasso, unsatisfied with the face of his portrait of Gertrude Stein after 80 sittings, painted one based on a mask of an Iberian sculpture. When people protested that the portrait did not resemble the subject, he is said to have commented: ”Everybody thinks she is not at all like her portrait, but never mind. In the end, she will manage to look just like it.”

By PHILIP GEFTER
Published: December 18, 2003

Revisiting art’s social turn and the 1990s – the decade that has yet to end

Mocked and ridiculed, the 1980s met a pitiful end at the hands of a generation of artists who considered a market-friendly, object-based art their ideological nemesis, and punished it summarily for its false richness.

This is an exaggeration, of course, but ask around in my (Northern European) corner of the world, and I would guess that many of those who were working back then will confirm this picture of a generational showdown. By contrast, faded and forgotten as they may be, ‘the long nineties’ remain unsubverted.1 The symbolic revival of Félix Gonzáles-Torres at the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, for instance, echoed his status as a guiding star of curating and art theory of that decade.

However, during the last five years, as the historicization of the ’90s gains momentum, the jury has gradually reconvened. The case being weighed is that of art’s relationship to the social. In 2007, Ina Blom published On the Style Site: Art, Sociality and Media Culture, examining the practices of many of the prominent artists of the ’90s and after; a 2010 symposium at Tate Britain was entitled ‘Art and the Social: Exhibitions of Contemporary Art in the 1990s’; and Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship will be published by Verso in 2012. The art-historical claim of the latter is that the ‘social turn’ should be ‘positioned more accurately as a return to the social, part of an ongoing history of attempts to rethink art collectively’.2 I will proceed more sceptically – or counter-socially – by revisiting the ’90s through the social as a problematic not only for art, but also in relation to the ‘governmentality’ of our time – Michel Foucault’s term for the economics and relations of power that shape a society as a field of possible action.

Unlike the slippery ’90s, which haven’t yet found their closure, there is some certainty to be found in the ’80s. The art of that decade took distinct forms – such as appropriation or neo-expressionism – whereas ’90s positions were summed up in a single term: ‘contemporary art’. Not a new term, exactly, but indicative of a new state of connectivity and synchronicity, in which contemporary art experienced a major upgrade (or was it a paradigm shift?). Art’s markets and modes of circulation changed, as did professional and political attitudes towards it. Art became animated by biennials, magazines and art fairs; by artists who strayed from the studio and integrated their mobility into their work; and by curators who shed the historical baggage of the museum’s archive. The general activity that surrounded art – its media, infrastructure and social activity – became as prominent and energetic as art itself.

Around the same time, art’s social turn occurred. This gave visual art a new lease of life at a point when it had otherwise been declared dead (along with the avant-garde, the novel, the human being, the author, etc.). The idea of the social contradicted the demonization of reality and presence of much of the work of the ’80s. No longer something remote, academic and monumental, art became a situation or a process. A work was now a club, a bar, a meal, a cinema, a hang-out, a dance floor, a game of football or a piece of furniture: think of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s soup kitchens, Angela Bulloch’s bean-bags or Apolonija Šušteršicˇ’s public structures. The sole author and the contemplative beholder were atomized in works that called for togetherness, and were often created by collectives or self-organized entities. The art institution started to reflect on itself as a critical space, and exhibition formats opened up in turn. Art took place anywhere – in front of a video camera, on an answering machine, in the urban space. Everyday life became meaningful again, even a refuge from late capitalism.

This is how artists escaped the melancholy slipstream of Modernist painting and sculpture, and no doubt a reason why the young art scene at the time greeted the reintroduction of art’s social dimension enthusiastically. Importantly, however, the affirmation of the social indicates an ambiguity with which social space, and history itself, had become imbued. On the one hand, the artist was no longer Postmodernism’s agent, hovering above the delta of history, selecting and copying styles from all times. The artist was now down in it. On the other hand, history had ended – a claim put forward by conservative thinkers vis-à-vis the end of the Cold War, but which was also argued from a different perspective by critical minds such as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, who saw no outside to the present order.

The ‘no outside’ predicament was an attempt at reality-checking the effects of ideological conflict cancelled by Tony Blair’s and Gerhard Schröder’s ‘Third Way’ paradigm. Left and right merged, state and economy were integrated in increasingly informal ways, and politics lost its fixed points. Foucault described neo-liberalism as sociological government: in this model, the realms of the social and cultural – rather than the economy – are mobilized for competition and commerce.³ During the 1990s, a new economy began brimming with imperatives to socialize through email, mobile phones and, later, social media, and as social and economic processes were pulled closer together, both art and power became ‘sociological’. The reification of the social form became almost indistinguishable from social content. In other words, the social can also be a simulacrum: an instrumentalization of models and tastes that are already received and working in the culture at large.

Management theory expanded into art, as Richard Florida’s notion of the ‘creative class’ (2002) and James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine’s The Experience Economy (1999) submitted aesthetic concepts to socialization. In some cases – such as the UK’s New Labour government, who came to power in 1997 – cultural policies organized art around the economic centre of society in much the same terms. It wasn’t just a case of management theory colonizing aesthetic concepts, though: the art system was itself involved in rationalizing the idea of the artist as manager.

These factors contributed to art being pulled up from the underground, down from the ivory tower and in from the margins, making it part of governed reality in new ways. From the point of view of a ‘creative’ economy, aesthetic concept and artistic behaviour became models for productivity. This doesn’t turn the art that artists created into a passive symptom; but it was a development that placed high stakes on the cultural analysis inherent in the art work, if the work were to avoid melding with the manifest social needs and ends of the state, society or any other milieu.

Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio We got it!, 1993, billboard design for 40 locations in Chicago as part of ‘Culture in Action’, 1992–3

In September 2011, the exhibition ‘Spectersof the Nineties’ opened at Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht. Curated by Lisette Smits, in collaboration with Matthieu Laurette, the project proposed a reading of critical artistic practices of the ’90s, but via a materialist analysis that took the technological revolution as the cause of the change not only of society but of artistic practice itself. The organizers presented these as cases to contest both the forgetting of artistic practices of the decade and the way some of these have been dismissed as ‘affirmative of the system’ and of neo-liberalism.4 Even if one shares this materialist analysis, it looks like Smits and Laurette don’t agree with my position that the ’90s are unsubverted. But I could counter that significant artistic positions of the decade have rarely been associated directly with power the way that the works of Jeff Koons, for instance, were read as unambiguous symptoms of Reaganism.

However, I do agree that a historical look at the ’90s is relevant in light of artistic practices that dealt (or deal) with social space through meta-strategies of semiotic playfulness or forms of structural critique, such as those of Renée Green, Jens Haaning, Pierre Huyghe and Aleksandra Mir. In 1996, Haaning relocated the entire production line of a Turkish-owned textile factory in Vlissingen in the Netherlands – including immigrant workers, goods and machinery – into De Vleeshall, a Kunsthalle in neighbouring Middelburg. Self-referentially titled Middelburg Summer 1996, the work showed art and the social to be ever-changing placeholders for each other that would never coincide: it was part of the social world where it was created, and at the same time its aesthetic content set it apart from what already existed.

One could also speculate that, without Postmodernism’s keen sense of historical repetition, the ’90s was also the long decade that forgot it was part of the 20th century. Let me quote works by some of the big names: Olafur Eliasson’s Green River (1998–2001) was, apart from its locations, identical to Nicolás García Uriburu’s Coloration du Grand Canal (Dyeing the Grand Canal, 1968) in Venice; Maurizio Cattelan’s sub-letting of his allotted space at the 1993 Venice Biennale to an advertising agency in principle repeated Poul Gernes’s 1970 collaboration with Citroën and Bang & Olufsen for the Louisiana Museum’s ‘Tabernakel’ exhibition; and Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) echoes the film Fussball wie noch nie (Football as Never Before, 1970) by Hellmuth Costard, which followed George Best through an entire football match. When comparing these works, should one look for copies or coincidences? Were these artists in their own way creating a reception of postwar art that art historians had failed to write? Or did a global culture industry make it possible to reproduce the 1960s neo-avant-garde because art was now legitimated through powerful spheres of circulation (institutional, commercial and mediatic) that didn’t exist then?

One can only begin to answer these questions by acknowledging that the social signifies something fundamentally different at different historical times. The category of the social evades an understanding of historical continuity because it privileges space over time, presence over form. It is fundamentally contemporary, a concept without speed and virtuality – and this is how it may fail as a chronopolitics. At the same time, apparatuses inherent to the social sphere also synchronize by creating bubbles in time: the marketplace creates simultaneity in consumption, and because the spectacle wants art big and easy, it disregards the archive and its tedious historical perspectives. When synchronizing functions such as these pull things closer together around the existing moment, contemporary art may end up performing an eternal return to the present as a temporal effect of sociological government.

Nicolás García Uriburu Coloration du Grand Canal (Dyeing the Grand Canal), 1968, colourant, Grand Canal, Venice

In Relational Aesthetics (1998), Nicolas Bourriaud fixed the monstrosity and megalomania of the historical avant-gardes by proposing the more flexible artistic ‘micro-Utopia’.5 This was a Utopianism that didn’t resonate with Modernism’s five-year plans and personal sacrifices, but was closer to the manageable time-spaces of Foucauldian micropolitics and Hakim Bey’s idea of temporary autonomous zones. Some 20 years earlier, Roland Barthes questioned the fantasy of privileged political orders, whether micro or macro in his Sade / Fourier / Loyala (1980): ‘Can a Utopia be otherwise than domestic?’ he asked, suggesting a measure of un-freedom in the very concept.

The social sculpture of the ’90s was never really a discussion about freedom. Emancipatory thinking figured as modestly on the agenda as it had in the post-Structuralist theory that informed so much ’80s art. In the preface to his 1983 anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster proposed a ‘Postmodernism of resistance’ informed by the ‘desire to change the object and its social context’, against neo-conservative attempts at severing the cultural from the social. Ironically, however, while it re-established the political on the agenda, Foster’s notion of an ‘oppositional Postmodernism’ can be seen to have helped pave the way for what also became a retro-Modernism (including the return of Utopia). His position prefigured a tendency to conflate the aesthetic with political conservatism, thereby turning aesthetic concepts into epiphenomena. This was the case for big categories of aesthetic collateral such as spirituality and metaphysics, but also staples of form, autonomy and pleasure (for instance, what Barthes had called le plaisir du texte, or ‘the pleasure of the text’), were ditched in the social turn.

At the same time (and somewhat counter-intuitively) former keywords of artistic and social critique – conformism, alienation, negation – were likewise ejected from the vocabulary. It is difficult to escape the feeling that the highs and lows of aesthetic experience were truncated, and art lost some of what Theodor Adorno called its infinite difficulty.6 Polemically speaking, where this was the case the social turn was neither a social critique that addressed misery, exploitation and inequality, nor was it an artistic critique of risks deriving from the dominance of utilitarian thinking.7 This lack was not necessarily indicative of the art as such – after all, a video of the artist dancing can be seductive; a living unit can be a negation – but of a critical vocabulary that revolved around concreteness, a can-do attitude and art on a human scale. Aesthetic experience is compromised when aesthetic problems, and the aesthetic as a problematic, are resolved in social space.

Today, the managerial rhetoric of creativity is fading quickly with yesteryear’s economic optimism. Still, the social is hardly a cold case. The 2012 Berlin Biennial will be curated by the artist Artur Zmijewski, author of the manifesto ‘The Applied Social Arts’ (2007). Here he encourages artists to strive for ‘social impact’, arguing that ‘since the 1990s, art has been growing increasingly institutionalized [and] anodyne’. However, it remains an open question whether one can cure art with the ‘radical forms of expression’ Zmijewski recommends, seeing that the social was a constitutive theme in the decade that, in his own analysis, turned the screw of institutionalization.

As the social persists as a theme in artistic practice and art history, as well as in the ‘social practice’ programmes of art schools, it seems urgent to articulate the limit of art’s integration into society. Perhaps it is time to re-conceptualize the aesthetic as a mode of thinking in order to articulate difference, new outsides and the transcendental, understood as the condition of historical practices and that which lies at the edge of social relations. The present cannot only be changed from its inside. To regain its futurity it must be reconfigured from afar, too.

Lars Bang Larsen

teaches at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany, and at HEAD in Geneva, Switzerland, and works with Maria Lind on the exhibition project The New Model at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm, Sweden. His book, Art is Norm, will be published by Sternberg Press in 2012.

Stan Douglas talks about history and landscape, puzzles and storytelling

Nearly two decades after puzzling Canadian TV viewers with his ‘Television Spots’ (1988), originally conceived as cryptic 15- or 30-second adverts selling absolutely nothing on commercial networks, Stan Douglas has gained a reputation as an enigmatic artist; his films, videos and photographs refining an aesthetic in which meaning is provisional and migratory. It should come as no surprise that he has made a film reworking the idea behind Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece. In Klatsassin (2006) Douglas constructs a coastal rainforest Western, populated by a cast of unreliable narrators whose multiple accounts of a violent incident are as much a philosophical statement as they are episodes in a film narrative.

Douglas understands history as a string of contingencies. This recognition sets an elegiac tone for much of his work, marked by a fascination with those moments when historical events might have taken a different turn. What if the Cuban Revolution, the colonization of Vancouver Island, the political unrest in Paris in May of 1968, had turned out differently? In posing these questions he constructs lost histories in the guise of newly imagined narratives. These re-imaginings reflect on their own conditional nature, and their way of telling mirrors the tale being told. Douglas’ films and videos have no beginning and no end. As he says, ‘life is all middle’.

Before we talked at his Vancouver studio, Douglas showed me his most recent project, Vidéo (2006), which conflates two extant film sources: Samuel Beckett’s Film (1965) and Orson Welles’ The Trial (1962). Hybridizing the style and tone of his sources, he sets his story in contemporary Paris and comes up with a haunting narrative that insinuates a sense of disturbing watchfulness and past and present danger.

Robert Enright: How did you come to make Vidéo using the two sources you chose?

Stan Douglas: Early last year I was teaching in Berlin and being harassed, for odd reasons, by the university administration. One evening I was to meet two curators from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to discuss the possibility of me doing a new work for the Beckett exhibition. I had been thinking about Beckett’s Film as a kind of cinematic lipogram, in which we never see a reverse shot of the protagonist until the very end, but I didn’t really know what I would do. As I was getting ready to go to the meeting I noticed a copy of Kafka’s The Trial (1925) on a bookshelf in the apartment where I was staying and everything clicked: I remembered seeing Orson Wells’ version of The Trial, filmed in the derelict Gare D’Orsay and, what I presumed, were the then-new Paris suburbs, then I remembered that I had been staying in the same apartment while the riots were going on in Parisian banlieues during the fall of 2005. Wells actually shot his exteriors among housing projects in Zagreb but I stuck with my original inclination and used locations on the outskirts of Paris. It turned out that the place I was most interested in, La Courneuve, was the site of the most violent demonstrations in November 2005, and the tower I liked best was the fictional home of the heroine in Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1967).

RE What’s notable is the way film history is implicated in your making of a film.

SD Yes, people often say that it’s impossible to have an original idea because everything has already been thought of, or that every book is the rewriting of a book that has already been written. I try to be honest in the way I work with these source materials and admit freely and immediately what I am elaborating upon. But since these stories are very basic and shared in a certain way, it is the time, manner and matter of the telling that makes one thing unique or different.

RE Does it matter whether people are as aware as you are of the sources and references in the film? Does the viewer need to bring the same knowledge to the seeing that you bring to the making?

SD It is, and it isn’t necessary for the viewer to be as aware. At a certain point, if you can’t parse the work just by experiencing it and having everyday knowledge of television and film – if it doesn’t work from the level of a person coming at it cold, then it really isn’t successful. If you have to have an exterior text to explain what the work is, then the work isn’t complete in itself. Somebody who does know these historical references can have a more complex understanding of what’s going on, but it’s absolutely not necessary.

RE Can you ever look at a film innocently?

SD Of course, but no filmmaker is truly innocent. They’ve looked at other films in order to make their own, so they’re never pure to begin with. And being aware of other approaches helps any filmmaker break their habits, especially when they discover their own habits in the work of someone else.

RE Is your looking invariably a kind of research?

SD I can go to a film just for fun or distraction. But I do have a memory. I never imagined when I watched The Trial that I would make a film either based on it or that refers to it. But it was somewhere in the back of my mind so that I was able to make the connection when I needed it. This is how intuition works. An artist’s experience becomes a tool kit, an inventory of techniques, that can be put together in a quick fashion.

RE You may start with intuition, but you are quite serious about inquiring into every aspect of what making the film might entail.

SD Yes, but a lot of the research turns out to be of no use. I do research to a point where I know enough about a situation that I don’t have to think about it anymore. That’s what the research is for; it’s not to illustrate something you’ve researched directly, but to have an understanding of the flavour of a situation or a moment in time. This is the difference between what Marcel Proust called ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ memory.

RE Is it an inevitable development that your work gets more complicated? If I think of what happens in Overture (1986) and compare it to Inconsolable Memories (2005) or Klatsassin, I realize how much more layered these later projects are becoming.

SD They’re certainly more complicated than Overture, which was just a matter of taking the Edison Company’s pre-existing film and Proust’s pre-existing novel, chopping them up, duplicating them and then putting them together in a certain order. Now I’m writing the words and making the pictures myself, with the help of a 30- or 40-person crew. Those two pieces are certainly less complicated than a studio film, but I got a taste the kind of work that any independent filmmaker has to do in order to make a feature.

RE Do you think of yourself as an independent filmmaker?

SD Because I’m self-trained, I’m still a little uncomfortable when I’m around a real filmmaker. Neverthless something I really enjoy these days is working with actors and learning to work with their skills in maintaining a character over a period of time. A lot of what I asked actors to do before was quite technical but the recent projects have allowed me to develop dramatic situations. It took me a long time to figure out what a director’s responsibility was, but I was able to deduce it from what the cast and crew expected of me. You don’t go too far into the minutiae of your collaborators’ respective crafts, or you will just piss them off, but you have to be either extremely precise or confidently vague about what you want in order to avoid some nasty surprises. Editing is extremely important also, it’s something I like too because it is, in effect, the time when you make the final draft of your script, if there is one.

RE You spent the good portion of a year researching and working on a Beckett project, so he’s obviously been a seminal figure for you.

SD I was interested in theatre when I was in high school, and particularly in Waiting for Godot (1952). I guess teenage angst played a certain role, but then I forgot about Beckett when I went to art school. Towards the end of my studies I found a copy of Company (1979) and I realized Beckett was still alive and writing. I thought he wrote Waiting for Godot and Endgame (1957), then gave up. I was so impressed that I started reading Beckett in reverse order and discovered that his later books were much more successful than the canonical ones.

RE So he re-seduced you back into his world?

SD Exactly. For example, Not I (1972) became my favourite work of art: a voice talks about herself coming into being through language. Language is something she doesn’t really trust, but it is the only thing she has to make herself exist. That’s the fascinating tautology of the work: the writing is suspicious of itself, but it’s the only thing it has to realize itself. The thing I owe to Beckett is an understanding of the impossibility of communication as something a priori but not absolute. The received wisdom is that his work circles around an endgame and collapses into pure interiority, but I think it stages a condition of doubt and suspicion from which communication can begin.

RE You seem invariably to start from the interstitial, from the in-between.

SD Yes. Working in the form of loops with these recombinant pieces you can’t really talk about beginnings or ends, which are arbitrary and often produced by the ideological or formal requirements of a narrative form. I mean, life is all middle.

RE You’re articulating a lack of certainty inside a frame that has a certain degree of certainty about it. Isn’t that an inherent contradiction?

SD Sometimes the certainty is false. To instil confidence in the people you’re working with as a director you have to pretend to know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Sometimes you have to make leaps that allow the process to continue. You also have to allow a space for improvisation. So it’s a matter of creating a space that’s flexible enough that things can go wrong, where you can let other people contribute ideas to make the project more than you expected. If it’s not different and more than you had planned originally, it’s probably not worth doing. It should have probably remained a script. What I end up with is never what I expected and always different from what I intended. When I was developing Klatsassin, I was inspired to revisit Rashomon after walking through Stanley Park one day and seeing dappled light coming in through the trees. Kurosawa shot the trial scenes in direct sunlight and the contradictory versions of the murder under the cover of trees with only specks of light punctuating the scene. We planned to shoot our murder scenes in a similar way but the weather didn’t cooperate, it was cloudy. This meant that the visual metaphor would change. It was not what I had imagined, but it still works.

RE There is an interesting sense of layering in Klatsassin; you go to Kurosawa and you end up with a Western set in British Columbia. How did that work?

SD Kurosawa was criticized for being too Western. He often took Western narratives and applied them to his films, or people in the West would make Westerns from his Samurai stories.

RE There’s a murder that happens outside 11th-century Kyoto in Kurosawa’s film, and there’s a murder in Klatsassin as well. How much play do you allow yourself with the narrative you inherit from Kurosawa?

SD There was a lot of play. In Rashomon you have a bandit, a ronin and his wife; in Klatsassin a thief, a deputy and his prisoner. In both cases there is a scene with rain, from which the strangers who meet are seeking shelter, but the ruin of a city gate is very different from a relatively new roadhouse. In Rashomon the characters have arrived by chance, in Klatsassin they are where they are because of their different reactions to a gold rush.

RE It’s a pretty fantastic-looking cast of characters evident in the related photographic portraits you made. They seem more filmic.

SD They all have great faces, faces with peculiar kinds of experience, but they were all types. In that historical situation you would meet people and not care to know them well, but you would care about their function. Are they useful to you or will they be a problem? What is their function up here and how will it affect me? I never gave them names: they all go by their profession or function.

RE Do you always develop photographic work out of a film, either prior or afterwards? Has that become a necessary part of your practice?

SD It’s not necessary, but it’s a parallel thing. It’s often a way of understanding where I am and what I’m looking at. For the recent ‘Western’ series (2006), I followed the Gold Rush Trail up the Fraser Valley to Barkerville in order to understand the landscape. Obviously it’s not the same as it was in the 19th century, but I could at least start to imagine the situations miners were walking through. I visited a spooky ghost town at a place called Quesnelle Forks that I didn’t expect to find. But I must say that my ‘destination’ was a bit of a disappointment, when I discovered that Barkerville had been made into a theme park, with actors walking around in 19th-century clothing, speaking with English accents and doing street theatre.

RE It’s interesting that very few people appear in the photographs you made in Cuba in 2004–5. There is evidence of human activity, just not much human presence.

SD I consider those photographs to be less about absence than the stage of an action. As soon as you put in a person, it becomes theatre. We try to understand what they are doing there, what they are thinking, instead of viewing it as an architectural space or an environment with some kind of social potential.

RE You say you want to avoid theatre, but there’s a lot of theatricality in the film work you’ve been doing.

SD It’s very easy for me to do moving pictures of people, but still images I find very difficult because in a moving picture the person exceeds your expectations in some way. They’re always moving, they’re always fleeting; you can’t hold them and say ‘this is what they are, this is what they represent’. When they’re static, it imposes a certainty on their condition with which I have trouble.

RE The Cuban photographs for Inconsolable Memories (2005) seem to function differently from the ‘Nootka Sound’ photographs (1996), where you’re doing more traditional landscapes.

SD The ‘Nootka Sound’ pictures cover an area which to the untrained eye seems like a natural situation. But if you look at it carefully, you realize it’s been logged at least twice. Plus I was looking at different traces of human presence there: either swamps created by the run-off from logging, a fish trap that is 3,000 years old and still in use, a well that was built by the Spanish when they were there in the 18th century or the replica of a longhouse inside a Catholic church that was a gift from the Spanish state, perversely commemorating their conquest of the area.

RE So your engagement with a place is always implicated in its political uses?

SD In this work I was conscious of doing an anti-Group of Seven piece [A group of Canadian landscape painters from the 1920s]. Instead of being a landscape ready for exploitation because it is supposedly empty, I wanted to show a landscape that was full of people, that was full of human presence, native as well as European.

RE So in that sense it’s the same as what you call your ‘re-purposed’ places in Cuba. There is a history of political and economic use in both those places.

SD For me it was like a microcosm of the revolution itself. You re-purpose a state or a country when you have a revolution, but you still see what it was prior to that. You can’t completely revolutionize a country. In a way it’s an analogue of what was going on in a larger scale in Cuba.

RE You can’t tell from the Cuban photographs whether this is a place that is being rehabilitated or an image that traces the destruction of that place.

SD That’s exactly what it’s like. Is this going forward, is it going backward, is it in stasis? A lot of the locations in Cuba are like that.

RE Is looking for places like that your reckoning with the failure of Modernism? I guess what I’m thinking is that all places carry a similar sense of failure. The Modernist project wasn’t the only one to put forward that notion, but don’t all Utopias fail? By its very definition, Utopia is ‘no place’.

SD Or they don’t last forever. Maybe there was Utopia in Cuba for a little while and it’s not there any more. Maybe it’s working towards a future that it can never realize but that desire is the Utopia. Literacy in Cuba is higher than in the US even now, and there were probably moments in the 1960s when the revolution was functioning very well, in spite of the fact that the US was actively attempting to depose Fidel Castro. Maybe it’s just me, but there had always been something mythical about Cuba. I went to Cuba because I was curious. I’d met a lot of Cuban artists, and I wanted to see what their home was like before it changed, because it will be a very different place once gerontocracy is over.

RE So much of your work has been concerned with finding a notion of social justice and freedom inside society. Where did that come from, and why has it seemed so persistent a search in your work?

SD It would seem self-evident that these things are important. The social utility of art is that it provides a language to talk about something that is very complicated in a very condensed manner, or to experience something that you thought was familiar in a new way. In my work I am addressing things I don’t initially understand. I try to make a model of transient or mutable conditions in order to understand them. Hopefully, it will have the same use for other people.

RE People remark on the complications of your looping. You have a piece that the viewer has to look at for three days before they see all the permutations. Why not make a simpler version of that narrative?

SD It’s not a matter of seeing every possible combination, because it really doesn’t change that much after a certain point. Once you’ve seen all the elements, it’s there in your head as a possible construct. It’s just that I’m not forcing a certain narrative sequence that determines its being understood in a particular way – I’m allowing associative possibilities for an audience, depending on when they arrive and when they decide to leave the work. These aren’t linear works, there is no beginning or end, and there’s absolutely no reason to see all the permutations.

RE I’m not Gary from the ‘Monodramas’ (1991) is a very focused example of how we can thoroughly misunderstand the notion of race: maybe in a benign way, maybe in not so benign a way. How much has your being black played into your work? The question of the Other and its relation to mainstream culture seems so central to much of what you do.

SD I grew up black in Vancouver, which in my youth was a mostly white culture with a large Asian and South Asian component, but not so many people of African or Caribbean descent. So I felt quite isolated and was always in that condition of being the Other. There is an outsider figure in all of my works, who is, I suppose, a surrogate for myself. If you want to psychologize – which I don’t. In any event, the situation in I’m not Gary actually happened to me. I was walking down the street and some guy said, ‘Hi, Gary, how are you doing’, and he seemed so certain I was Gary that for a second I doubted myself.

RE You have resisted the autobiographical as a way of reading your work, haven’t you?

SD Yes. Even though I began this interview with a personal anecdote. I just don’t think that works of art should be treated as symptoms of an artist’s biography. It’s bad enough to say that a work of art is a riddle to be solved, what’s worse is to say that the artist’s personality is the key. The suggestion that a work of art is an effect of personality is highly reductive and shuts down interpretation unless, as in the case of Warhol but very few others, persona is your medium. We know very little about Shakespeare, but Shakespeare is still interesting to us.

RE Has film been the thing that has interested you the most? Why did you choose that medium as the principal focus of your practice?

SD Is that true? I guess it was always ‘film’ in quotation marks. It didn’t begin there; I began with video, and even then I wasn’t a real video artist, I made ‘video’ so I could work with television — and those videos were all shot on 16 mm film. I have used different idioms of representation – silent film, news broadcasting, musical entertainment, television programmes – working within the language and vocabulary of a pre-existing medium.

RE The ‘Television Spots’ and the ‘Monodramas’ are absolutely perplexing for a television viewer. They don’t follow through on the delivery of our conditioned expectations for the medium or the message.

SD I suspect they’re obsolete by now because we’re used to teaser ads which seem to have no apparent point. When I was first invited to do Hors-champs (1992) at the Centre Pompidou, I think I was invited to make French Television spots. But when I finally saw French television, I realized they wouldn’t work at all because the look of their TV was already heterogeneous. The strict genre rules of advertising and broadcasting that we knew in North America didn’t really exist there, and I had to look at something else.

RE The two-sided screen in Hors-champs allows you to see what’s happening off-screen. Where did the idea come from for structuring the piece in that way?

SD Good question. It had to do with the Hors-champs – the out-of-field, the thing you cannot see. I didn’t know what would happen until it was actually made in space. I just thought of un-opposing things being withheld in a certain way. But having one image surrounded by the halo of an absent image was quite powerful.

RE Do you ever set yourself a problem in making a work of art?

SD The idea of a work of art being a puzzle that has a solution is not very interesting. Why wouldn’t you simply state the problem and the solution? Why go through the process of making the thing? The ambiguities or, to put it positively, the possibilities of an image that does not have a clear-cut answer allow me to be productive in different and unexpected ways. The thing I always wait for is to be told something about a work of art that I didn’t anticipate.

RE A filmmaker like Peter Greenaway sets a problem in his films, or uses a puzzle as a point of departure. Then the film is an elaborate way of inquiring into that puzzle, as if there were a solution to it.

SD In Greenaway it’s sort of a mannerist Structuralism, where you’re taking these systematic notions and applying them to a narrative form. In my work the systems are there, but they’re not as important. The recombinant ones are typically for maximum distribution of the narrative elements so that they don’t repeat the same sequences too often. In Win, Place or Show (1998) I adopted a technique from Serialist composition and from Arnold Schoenberg, where you don’t repeat any note until you’ve played all the notes in the tone row.

RE How important are music and sound in what you’re doing?

SD Sound has become more and more important. Early on I would run out of money before I got to the sound mix, but now it plays a crucial role. Suspiria (2003) is intimately involved with being there while the music was being recorded, and then breaking it down to be reassembled by the computer system.

RE The music in Hors-champs also carries heavy political associations, in that it’s connected to May 1968, a period when France had no government for three days. This is one of those times when a revolution almost happened, when things could have turned out differently.

SD This was in the early 1990s, when Wynton Marsalis was saying that Free Jazz was a mistake, an experiment of youth. In a way the revivalists were saying this period of experimentation didn’t happen, and that they should legitimate jazz by making a new museum of its tradition. When I was in Paris doing research, I met various expatriate American musicians who felt betrayed. They had been intimately involved in the culture, and their music was an emblem for a revolutionary idea. Then, as the people who were involved in 1968 became part of the status quo, they either associated the music with a mistake, or they were reminded of revolutionary ideas they had abandoned. So on the one hand the music was being ignored in a general sense, and on the other it was being ignored in France for a very specific reason.

RE We’ve discussed the influence of Beckett, but someone else who seems to have informed your work is Bertolt Brecht. Brecht allows us to engage a work of art by being conscious of what are our choices as viewers. Your work also invites that.

SD Sure, although the alienation effect has a pretension to objectivity that I don’t really agree with. Probably more important for me were the writings on music by Theodor W. Adorno, the idea that in music, which we assume to be either the most expressionistic or formal of media, could be found very discrete social residue or indices. And in the very musical structure of the sonata or the symphonic form he could discover social content. What I found interesting were his close readings of Richard Wagner and Ludwig van Beethoven. His critique of jazz is notoriously dubious, probably because he never really heard it, but his sociology of European music is amazing. I came across his work the year after art school. Typically in art school there was an antagonism towards reading in general, so as an antidote I decided to take on some long books, including Under the Volcano (1947) by Malcolm Lowry, The Making of Americans (1925) by Gertrude Stein, and Doctor Faustus (1947) by Thomas Mann, for which Adorno was the musical adviser. I said, ‘Who’s this Adorno guy?’ and that led me to The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), In Search of Wagner (1938/52) and The Philosophy of Modern Music (1949).

RE Did you read theory because it was useful?

SD It just helped me understand things. As I said before, the function of art is to help me make a model of how the world works, or an aspect of how the world works, in order to understand it better. That’s what a theory is. In the social sciences, or in physics, theory is a proposition, ‘Maybe the world is like this,’ and then pursuing your research according to that idea. In my work I’ve said maybe globalization feels like Journey into Fear (2001).

RE You also seem to be attracted to stories that have been told filmically at least twice before. It seems like doubleness appears a lot in the work.

SD It’s a bad habit, which I hope I have kicked by now. It was something that occurred a lot early on in my work, things always had this binary structure; in Hors-champs, in Der Sandman (1995), in Nu•tka• (1996) in Win, Place or Show and in Journey Into Fear.

RE Did you feel it was a structural limitation in the way you were using it?

SD I just felt it was becoming a bad habit. It began because two is the smallest unit with which you can have conflict. But lately I have shied away from the double screens that I was using.

RE Does one piece of yours naturally lead you to the next? Is there that kind of causality in the practice? I guess what I’m asking you about is musing, about the source of inspiration.

SD I try to start from scratch with each new project, but obviously by now I have a tool kit of techniques I use and ways of working with actors and language and the camera that appear again and again. I try to make them as different as possible from each other.

RE But it seems that story is often a point of departure for you…

SD I’ll have to think about that. The stories tend to come from a place rather than from a story itself. It’s not like ‘I have a story, so let’s find a place where I can make that story’; it’s more like, ‘Here is this place – what is its story?’

RE I’m struck every time I come to Vancouver at how distinctive and pervasive a place it is.

SD I’ve noticed that people who are born here don’t like to leave. I tend to make works that alternate between something very local and something that is away, so it’s away and at home, away and at home. Klatsassin was the home story, but then Vidéo was shot in Paris. But Vancouver has been important to me, absolutely.

RE What about your role inside what is recognized within the art world as the Vancouver School?

SD I wasn’t a really a part of it. Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, Rodney Graham and Ken Lum were a group of artists who’d met every week at the bar. They’d do projects and exhibit together; they’d discuss and write about each other’s work. They developed a very productive relationship. Even though you had the Western Front being part of the Fluxus network, Ian and Ingrid Baxter as N.E. Thing Company establishing international connections within the museum world, it was those four artists who made Vancouver a go-to place for curators and critics. But it’s easier for critics to talk about the Vancouver School brand than it is to talk about the more complex conditions that really exist here. They really can’t get over the fact that so many good artists have developed in this tiny out-of-the-way place on the edge of North America called Vancouver. The really disappointing thing in this city is the general indifference to its own history and culture. Beautiful buildings get torn down all the time and are replaced by monstrosities that aren’t built to last. This neighbourhood is so unhinged because drug dealers and users have been given no-go zones elsewhere in the city. The neighbourhood has been left to go fallow, but that will change because there is only so much real estate here, with mountains on one side and the ocean on the other.

RE Are you optimistic about this area? You’ve built your studio here.

SD Yes. I always had studios in this neighbourhood, from a time when my milieu was not so much just artists as it was artists and poets. The formal and informal discussions instigated by the first incarnation of a writers’ collective here called the Kootenay School of Writing, was a fundamental influence on my practice. The level of conversation at art school wasn’t all that satisfying but the series of artist/writers talks sponsored by KSW were great, if only because there was something one didn’t understand about the other’s medium and you had to explain things that you otherwise took for granted.

RE Are you surprised by the success you’ve had?

SD Right place at the right time.

Robert Enright

When a film by the late Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni comes to mind, I think of a quiet, contemplative place full of bold, mysterious, almost overwhelming images. Not since the silent era has a director placed such dependence on the image to convey his vision. His films, in fact, indicate a clear lack of faith in words and dramaturgy, which he felt only served to conceal the truths he sought to discover. If he failed then as a “conventional” dramatist, he succeeded in so many other ways: as a photographer for his exquisite fragmented compositions, a poet for his dedication to divulging the essence of a moment, and a painter for his feeling for light and texture. But perhaps, above all else, Antonioni’s vision, like Jacque Tati, is that of an architect.

Antonioni once said, “The subject of my films is always born of a landscape, of a site, of a place I want to explore.” This sounds more like the words of an architect than a filmmaker, but then Antonioni is both. In the third film of his so-called alienation trilogy, he created his boldest and most architectural work, The Eclipse or L’Eclisse, which focuses on the Roman suburb of Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR).

EUR came as result of Italy’s miraculous economic boom in the post-WWII period when the country’s landscape was forever changed as man-made structures began to dominate, cities expanded and rural areas became suburbs. Although EUR was commissioned by Benito Mussolini in 1935, it was not completed until the 1950s. Italians found its rather odd geometric shapes and sterile surfaces inconsistent with the sensuousness of their culture. Antonioni, on the other hand, was inspired. He was curious about what psychological effects this environment could have on people.

In The Eclipse, Antonioni transforms EUR into a sci-fi-esque backdrop for the existential anguish of Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a young bourgeoisie woman and translator. For much of the film, Vittoria wanders around EUR puzzled by its apathetic residents and bland modernist architectural design. It’s as if she is living on a distant alien planet at odds with human feeling. After her miserable break-up with Riccardo (Francisco Rabal), she becomes reluctant to start a new relationship with Piero (Alain Delon), a materialistic stockbroker. She doubts whether genuine love is even possible in a place like EUR.

To address this issue, Antonioni creates a mise en scène in the form of a maze that confines and constricts the feelings of his characters. He separates Vittoria and Piero through various man-made barriers, like a large marble pillar at the stock exchange when they first meet, and, when Piero calls on Vittoria at her apartment, a steel balustrade near the sidewalk and a wooden balcony fence, which creates a large empty gap between them. They couldn’t reach each other with a ten foot pole. Furthermore, bars are utilized to signal doomed or lost love. As Riccardo tries to rekindle his relationship with Vittoria, he is framed through the bars of her apartment window. Later on after she promises to see Piero again, we now see Vittoria imprisoned through diagonally crossing bars, foreshadowing the end of their relationship.

Antonioni also isolates his characters within the geometric lines of doorways, crosswalks, curbs, and rails. This further complicates his mise en scène and, metaphorically speaking, leaves the characters emotionally dazed. It is during these instances when the future of Vittoria and Piero’s relationship is at its most uncertain. On the other hand, even when the characters are freed from these constrictions in spacious wide shots, the modernist structures of EUR overwhelm them, so that by comparison they look like little toy figures. Here Antonioni emphasizes how man has been outsized by his own creations.

The Eclipse concludes with a chilling seven minute abstract sequence that brings the incompatible relationship between Vittoria and Piero and to their surroundings full circle. After they make love and promise to see each other again that night at their meeting place, Antonioni’s camera lingers on the iconography of EUR, which he had established in the first two acts of the film – the rows of housing complexes, the mushroom-shaped water tower, the white lines of the crosswalk, a wooden stick that Vittoria put in a barrel of water, a horse-drawn carriage passing by, etc. He intersperses these images with varying angles of Vittoria and Piero’s meeting place – both from ones we have seen before and newer ones, including wide shots connecting the half-built housing project, a metaphor for the incompleteness of their relationship, with the contours of the intersection.

The difference this time is that Antonioni almost completely vacates the environment. Our focus instead turns toward its geometric lines, spaces and objects, while we contemplate the glaring absence of Vittoria and Piero, who, for some reason, have not showed up at their agreed upon time and place. In this way, Antonioni metamorphoses EUR into an architectural model to re-examine and investigate how its architectural and spatial design serves the characters. Although it may conform with Piero’s unfeeling material existence, its cold modernist rationality conspires against the earthier Vittoria. So when night falls and the blinding light of the street lamp fills the screen and fades to black, human feeling and Vittoria and Piero’s relationship have been obliterated.

Coupled with the mushroom-shaped water tower, the nuclear imagery here is quite frightening yet appropriate. The astounding advances of scientific man (i.e. the A-bomb and, in general, his modern designs) have been so great that his capacity to work out his problems on a moral level (i.e. the US and Soviet Union conflict during the Cold War) cannot measure up. Antonioni, thus, foregrounds The Eclipse’s undertones of science fiction and presents a nightmare scenario. The problem lies not with man’s designs, but with moral man. Moral man must somehow adjust to the modern environment and advance forward or he will cease to be human or, in the worst case scenario, face extinction.

>Written by d/visible contributor Kevin Hogan.