exergue - on documenta 14 (Dimitris Athiridis, 2024).
Near the end of the second chapter of Dimitris Athiridis’s exergue - on documenta 14 (all works 2024), curator Adam Szymczyk has a beer with a journalist. Szymczyk, eloquent and handsome in a bookish way, serves as a compelling center for this fourteen-hour observational documentary on his tenure as the head of one of the central events in the contemporary art world; he’s somehow charming, despite an expression that always toes the line between bemused and smug. Framed in profile, the handheld camera wobbling with a slightly upturned gaze, he’s asked how the old-fashioned idea of an exhibition as a venue for presenting images relates to his desire that, under his guidance, this edition of the quinquennial documenta will be at every turn “performative.” After offering an assurance that he has no issue with images as such—“I love painting, why not?”—he delivers one of the more useful, and direct, summaries I’ve ever heard of a certain tendency in contemporary art: “Image is a very powerful medium through which to transmit content. So I think it’s rather on the content side where I’m interested in, and not the image itself.”
It’s easy, all too easy, to take issue with the second sentence there, which might seem to explain why much recent art, no matter how serious and sophisticated, has proven so meager in terms of aesthetic satisfaction, or even aesthetic interest. As the age of the curator wanes—Szymczyk was speaking, in 2015 or 2016, at its peak—artists take on the role of curating themselves, folding the discursiveness “that encourages [the viewer] to start from the artwork but not stay there, to think with it but also away from and against it” into the work itself.1 Every era gets its academicism, and ours tends to take the term quite literally; there is nothing, it seems, that can’t be footnoted, its paths of meaning pinned down and underlined. Any worthwhile contemporary criticism can’t avoid dealing with this aspect of art, but we’re under no obligation to accept its reduction to a matter of simply agreeing or disagreeing with “the content side.” We should demand more of taste. But we shouldn’t ignore Szymczyk’s first sentence, which begs some fundamental questions, too often taken for granted: What does a powerful image, a powerful medium, look like today? What’s the arena of that power? Where in the world does it operate?
I recognize the horrifying scale of such questions; the baffled tone lurking behind those last seven words tries, in the face of inevitable failure, to capture it. Horrifying seems the only word for a situation in which whatever remnants of common sense my generation inherited from the last century about the power of images—power in terms of their political valence, which institutional art at the moment insists on—has been rendered obsolete by a year of livestreamed genocide in Gaza.2 It was impossible for me not to apply this grim frame to this year’s Currents lineup—twelve features and 28 shorts programmed outside of the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate to “trac[e] a more complete picture of contemporary cinema with an emphasis on new and innovative forms and voices,” per the official language. What do novelty and innovation amount to if they don’t in some compelling way respond to the present moment?
An All-Around Feel Good (Jordan Lord, 2024).
It’s to the program’s credit that a number of its titles took this situation as their basis. None did this more directly than Jordan Lord’s video essay An All-Around Feel Good, which strikes me, for better and worse, as something like the archetypal Currents entry. Writing on last year’s edition, I was frustrated by the number of films that layered language onto their images without finding any productive relationship between the two. Lord’s video is a fine example of how to avoid that problem: its images, spoken language, and written language play out in a dense, active tangle. Its opening employs the academic tactic of stating its thesis outright—that there exists a “relationship between images of disability and the image of violent nation states”3—and the 25 minutes that follow dwell on this specific topic.
As anyone who’s ventured into a gallery, a museum, or certain corners of the film world over the last few years will recognize, this sort of associative essay is now among the dominant modes. If Lord’s video manages to feel fresh despite its familiarity, it’s because of their formal approach, which complicates the usual match of conceptual text with illustrative images. The voice-over, spoken by Lord, folds audio descriptions of the type sometimes provided to visually impaired media consumers into its narrated thought, all of which is rendered in captions beneath the frame. In practice, this often means that Lord will begin with a verbal sketch of what is shown—a rodeo arena at the Colorado State Fair, a field of soldiers performing training exercises, a flock of geese walking on the unseen ice of a thawing pond—before modulating into lines of thoughts that depart, to varying degrees, from the image, at times modulating back to provide descriptive updates.
This formal emphasis on accessibility, of course, fits with the broader thematic range of the video; it is the content, the meaning, to the same degree that Lord’s language is. The two are inseparable, a fact that points at once to the video’s conceptual success and its aesthetic failure. Its images, shot in flat, everyday digital, seem to exist only so that they can be narrated. With the exception of the geese and a late beachside nocturne, they are almost willfully without interest as images, while the structure of the voice-over requires them to be held on screen for long stretches of time. Lord’s descriptions themselves are likewise flat and plain, a result of needing to produce language that can be read as quickly as it can be spoken; their delivery is without affect, avoiding anything that couldn’t be captured adequately in text. But brief, subtle moments—as when a pan at the state fair takes in a section of the audience and a group of cowboys milling in the distance, but Lord chooses to highlight only a woman at the very edge of the frame holding a corn dog—point toward editorial possibilities left mostly unexplored. Why, for example, must watching, listening, and reading exist in the same time, the same rhythm, the same scale? If accessibility entails acknowledging the presence of differing abilities within an audience, would it be possible to depart from that acknowledgment into a more prismatic construction, one that uses forms of accessibility to expand the range of perspectives made available by the work? Doing so might make the work less accessible in the sense of presenting an agreed-upon “content side,” but it might also arrive at even deeper questions about the nature of equality, identity, democracy.
Man Number 4 (Mirana Pennell, 2024).
Two of the program’s strongest works, Miranda Pennell’s Man Number 4 and John Smith’s Being John Smith, make similarly thorough use of language (in both cases, the voice-over is delivered by Smith). Pennell’s desktop video consists of a slow, roving zoom-out on a digital image, resolving from the abstraction of colored pixels into legible figures and then legible space. The voice-over begins by describing more than we can see; against square blocks of beige and brown, we hear, “Reddish sand and earth. An open air pit has been dug.” As the virtual camera explores the image, moving to a darker patch of pixels, Smith narrates in the second person, a form of address that hovers between Pennell’s initial encounter with it and our own experience in the moment of viewing: “You have trouble understanding what it is you’re looking at.” By the third of the video’s ten minutes, we have drawn back far enough to make out a group of soldiers standing by an armored vehicle; in its fifth minute, a row of five shirtless men, their hands bound behind their backs.
At this point, we begin to hear context: that it was posted to the website of the UK’s Channel 12, that it was taken in Beit Lahia, in the north of Gaza. The darker patch of pixels is now hundreds of bound men, crowded into the pit. Pink light, soft trees, then suddenly a reflexive distance arrives via the voice-over: “It’s cold and blustery out, you put some nice music on”—Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. A soldier stands behind a bright lamp aimed at the row of shirtless men as Smith recites the people Pennell thought of when she saw this image, all audiences to it in their own ways, from the photographer, through Netanyahu and “the rulers of your own country,” on to “the people on Facebook, looking and commenting,” and finally “you, sat here listening to gentle music as you look on.”
Smith’s delivery of Pennell’s words makes bitter use of melancholy, turning the sadness of looking in horror against itself, laying bare the fact of witness as inadequate, trying to find a way to make political, engaged art without lapsing into the consumer comforts of spectacle. In his own film, which circles the banality of his name, the voice-over is arch and wry, more given to deadpan comedy as he veers between personal history and present reflection. The former includes his own prior work, a body of films and videos whose deep irony his voice has often played a central part in articulating. The first three minutes are spent discussing his childhood and school years, after which his voice suddenly drops out, replaced by subtitles. These evince a worry that he’s making something too conventional, lacking “the idiosyncratic wit and formal inventiveness of [his] earlier work,” though he soon puts that aside: he has gotten to the age where he can “accept the commonly held opinion that an artist’s early work is often their best.” What he can’t accept, however, is the notion that people grow more conservative as they age, a train of thought he continues as his voice-over resumes, leading to a moment where he states one political position outright in-text—“Stop the genocide. Ceasefire now.”—while speaking a comic bit about his reclamation of an embarrassing childhood nickname during his time in art school. Eventually, his voice itself becomes his topic, as he admits that cancer treatment has left it displeasing to his ear. His ending, all the more moving for its embrace of convention, finally resolves this litany of lightly delivered anxieties in the crescendo of Pulp’s “Common People.”
The contrasting effects of Smith’s two vocal roles reflect a broader concern with performance running through this year’s program, from Cauleen Smith’s The Deep West Assembly, in which her collaged text is given a remarkable performance by Dionne Audain, to Danielle Dean’s Hemel, which collapses an array of genres—science fiction, personal narrative, labor documentary, dance film—around the artist’s performance as a silent inspector, to Kevin Jerome Everson’s Practice, Practice, Practice, where his usual plainspoken analytic is applied to a related pair of political and professional performances.
Direct Action (Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, 2024).
Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell’s Direct Action, a three-and-a-half-hour document of life in the ZAD, or “zone à défendre,” of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, is, in its way, a performance film as well. Nearly the whole of its runtime is given to scenes of the zadistes—inhabitants of an autonomous community occupying several thousand acres of land in opposition to the government’s development plans—as they go about their daily tasks. The film covers a period after their most famous victory, in which they defeated a planned airport in the region. We see, at length, the baking of bread and crepes, the tilling and sowing of fields, the sharpening of a chainsaw, the smithing of tools. What little conversation we hear is small talk and logistics; even as the film builds toward a final confrontation with the police, the preparatory meeting is seen to be concerned with where bases for the collective action will be located. The filmmakers’ compositions are precise but unromantic in showing the repetitive actions that go into making up a community built outside the sanctioned terms of the modern state. Whether the zadistes have reclaimed a kind of peasant life in a search for unalienated labor or found themselves in such a situation out of necessity, it remains the case that this is how they live; Cailleau and Russell’s film then can be taken as reviving the French tradition of peasant painting, finding contemporary images in the anarchist tradition of Pissarro, rather than the Catholic tradition of Millet. This, I think, explains why I found its two most spectacular sequences—a long drone shot surveying the ZAD and the culminating confrontation, whose distant perspective and wafts of teargas push the image closer to history painting—to be troublesome: they are hard to reconcile with the surrounding views of life in such firm, concentrated connection with its minor activities.
I Remember (depth of flatten cruelty) (Tolia Astakhishvili and James Ric
This brings us back to the question of powerful images. That each of the films and videos I’ve discussed above involves political content isn’t a critical choice on my part; it’s an inevitability given the 40 works comprising this program. To a degree, that inevitability stems from specific curatorial taste—the Currents programmers remain uninterested in the low-key, personal lyricism now flourishing in Europe, for example—but it also reflects the narrativizing capacity of “the curatorial” as a broader fact of our artistic culture. Faced with crises in every direction, art institutions across the globe now justify their existence as sites of urgent response. One might believe in the value of that response, or one might find it nothing more than window dressing for the symbolic comforts of liberal democracy at twilight. Either way, the presence of that justification points toward the fact that we—in the arts, in the world—lack any agreement today on what a powerful image looks like. Define “powerful” however you like, as compelling, meaningful, moving, whatever, and this remains the case.
I don’t see any reason to mourn this situation; for most of the history of art, that consensus has been imposed on culture, whether by the church or the state. Until recently, it was imposed by the joint efforts of the market and the academy, liberalism’s preferred task forces, but their authority has been dissolved by the sheer volume of images each of us sees every day. The result is a situation in which we’re constantly talking around images, piling up context, but rarely responding to them as images (across the fourteen hours of exergue, I don’t remember its dozens of art-world intellectuals sharing a single insight about an individual work).
Does the nod to Malevich in the title of Rhayne Vermette’s geometric animation A Black Screen Too mean that it’s speaking to the last moment when formal invention could understand itself as part of a revolutionary project? Does Malena Szlam’s Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya tell us about the deep time of ecology simply by layering landscapes? Do the industrial ruins of Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards’s I Remember (depth of flatten cruelty) convey something significant about post-Soviet life? Do the language games of Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me speak to queer histories just because they’re about Sappho? Maybe. I’ll wager though that the potential power of these films and videos—the possibility that they might compel an audience—depends on the quality of their construction: on the rough, textured expressiveness of Vermette’s handiwork, its lonesome, joyful idiosyncrasy; on the loud, gilded maximalism of Szlam’s 16mm photography; on the uncanny allure of Astakhishvili and Richards’s thin, rich, malleable digital textures (and on the artifice of its ruins, which are in fact installations by Astakhishvili); on the charm and wit of Piñeiro’s repetitive montage. In these cases—as in all the films I’ve highlighted—it won’t do to insist on the “content side,” on what’s simply “transmitted.” I don’t mean this as a call for a renewed formalism, an “art for art’s sake” for our century; it’s a question of finding routes through form to new kinds of content, new ways that art can reflect and clarify consciousness. Agreement might not be easy, but this is where we find ourselves.
- Writing for Artforum in 2009, Maria Lind formulates “the curatorial” as a mode, “a way of linking objects, images, processes, people, locations, histories, and discourses in physical space,” and continues: “I imagine this mode of curating to operate like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions—owing much to site-specific and context-sensitive practices and even more to various traditions of institutional critique.” ↩
- That the Israeli army goes on murdering Palestinian journalists even though the constant flow of images they’ve produced has done nothing to influence the few states with any power to change the situation—the US most of all—shows only the deranged paranoia and brutality of end-state empire. ↩
- Though no filmmakers chose to join the call to boycott the festival on account of its ties to Bloomberg Philanthropies and the New York Times, many—including myself, as an occasional contributor to Film at Lincoln Center’s house publication, Film Comment—signed an open letter stating their demands for divestment. Lord’s video now opens with a voice-over laid atop the NYFF laurels that discusses the dynamic of shared prestige between institutions and artists before moving on to a list of those demands, with the promise that this will remain a part of the work as it circulates until they are met. To date, there has been no response from the festival. ↩