The Territory of Images

Abstract

THE TERRITORY OF IMAGES Harun Farocki, Images of War at a Distance Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 29, 2011 -January 2, 2012 My first encounter with the work of Harun Farocki was a mediated representation -Jill Godmilow's What Farocki Taught (1998). The film is a shot-byshot remake of Farocki's hard-hitting Inextinguishable Fire (1969). In Godmilow's film, Farocki's systematic unpacking of the making of napalm by unwitting workers at the Dow Chemical factory presented as a direct address was remade in color, in English and with vintage, rather than contemporary, outfits. What Farocki Taught demonstrates Godmilow's admiration for Farocki's work and invokes the original film's explicit politics but it also asks questions: how do Farocki's images operate and where does the experience of documentary truth lie? The show at MoMA is a cause for celebration -not only does it give access to much of Farocki's work in a video archive, and ample space to not one, but three different bodies of installation work, but signals the fact that the museum has undertaken to collect nearly all of his work. This unprecedented opportunity to watch so many pieces side by side presents an intimidating proposition if seeking to understand how his images operate, but a welcoming one for his many ardent fans in the media art and film worlds. An Image; Videograms of a Revolution; Images of the World and the Inscription of War, How to Live in the FRG; and In Comparison are among the many films available on monitors to play on demand. Much of the work involves serious research and the collection of archival material. Farocki is particularly fond of instructional scenarios (such as a demonstration of how to facilitate the birthing of a baby with a prosthetic pelvis and a resizable vaginal opening) and documenting pedagogical role-playing (play therapy, job interview practice sessions) in which social norms and ideologies are transmitted from one party to another. Despite the sometimes slow pace and stark structure that defies a more conventional narrative arc, Farocki's dispassionate and systematic look at everyday scenarios are not without humor or emotion. These scenarios often appear themselves to be performed quite dispassionately, but signs such as the sinking facial expression of the job interviewee, the Playboy model's stoic but perceptible discomfort as she gamely holds her pose through a series of tedious adjustments, and the halting enthusiasm of die Romanian citizen negotiating control of die television station as the dust of the revolution tries to settle, reveal an unruly humanity in the subjects, while also tending to implicate the voyeuristic impulses of the unsuspecting art viewer. Farocki's work seems to be always busy 'unmaking' representations, questioning documents and re-examining rote behaviors. In one work after another, he demonstrates that if you strip away the inessential and look at something with a fixed and steady gaze, it becomes strange. And if you continue to look, systemic machinations of institutional power are rendered visible. The unmasking of images depicting individual subjects gives way to the excavation of the larger subject of the institutional apparatus - the factory, the school, the corporate work environment, the prison, the state, the media. For someone whose work more often than not reads as critical of the subjects it lays bare, Farocki seems to have exceptional access. During his talk at MoMA he revealed his method for obtaining permission to observe and document his impressive array of subjects. The simple statement: "I find it so interesting what you are doing and would like to make a film," apparently enables the "productive misunderstanding" which we enjoy while watching each systematic unmasking of a particular situation. After decades of making numerous, exemplary single-channel essay films and works of direct cinema, to be screened on television or in the film theater, Farocki has more recently turned toward multichannel installation made for museums and galleries. …