Back to reality
Since the conceptual birth of postmodernism, about a quarter century ago, the nature of our relationship to reality has been called into question in a very particular way. The power of the electronic media to shape people's perception of the world gave rise to a view of contemporary experience as necessarily mediated, and to renewed questions about the possibility of a direct encounter with the real.
In the arts, this led to a crisis of confidence in the object; artists found themselves manipulating bits of code rather than paints and many turned away from objects altogether. The need arose to put something in place of the old certainties, to find a new way back to reality. The often observed movement 'back to the real' in the art of the 1990's must, however, be approached with a certain amount of care. Which 'reality' is referred to depends on the artwork under discussion; many references are to the human body, others to everyday life or some subjective conception of contemporary social (mostly urban) reality.
The renewed interest, in the 1990's, in 1970's body art is symptomatic for the perception that physical experience, especially when it is associated with pain and deterioration, forms a kind of bottom line whose reality cannot be called into question. The trouble with this and other approaches 'back to the real' is that they are still derived from the desire to construct a reality that can be directly (i.e. without mediation) experienced by an audience - a desire that is therefore nostalgic, even romantic. Indeed, this art often depends more than 'conventional' art on the institutions of the artworld for its 'readability'.
The art of reconstructions
The process of reconstruction in art might seem to lead straight 'back to reality' in the most literal sense of the word, but, paradoxically, it yields radically different results. What emerges is an expression of the futility of the artists' attempts, highlighting, if anything, the troubled relation we have to a concept of the real. Artworks based on this kind of process often take the form of a laborious, apparently useless or hopeless undertaking, executed with great care and patience, and strictly following a predetermined set of rules or guidelines. Obsessively, and often with an almost scientific rigour, the artists subject themselves to their process, leaving the aesthetic result more or less up to fate. The works themselves are only the outcome of this kind of experimentation, and, as in good scientific practice, any temptation to make this outcome more appealing (or more expedient) is resisted.
Several of these works take the form of the reproduction of a mass-produced commodity, as if attempting to undo our alienation from the production process inherent in commodity fetishism. The implicit reference to the repetitive nature of mass-production is not coincidental. First of all, the idea of repetition is already implied in the very nature of reconstruction. What also becomes visible in these artworks, however, is the sense of futility associated with this form of repetition: an image of the assembly-line worker/artist as a modern-day Sisyphus. In this sense it is a tragic art, doomed to fail as a uniquely crafted art-object, but doomed to fail as a useful mass-produced commodity as well.
Trauma and loss
In "The Return of the Real", Hal Foster interprets repetition in art (specifically Pop art) as a form of working through trauma. Lacan famously defined trauma as "a missed encounter with the real", and, as missed, the real cannot be represented, only repeated. Indeed, it must be repeated as part of the work of mourning. This melancholy work of repetition is also evident in the process of reconstruction, but something else is going on: something is represented, though not any reality itself, but rather the drama of our separation from it. This representation becomes a self-conscious exploration of the trauma, a kind of therapy. Even if the execution often bears the rigour of a 'scientific' approximation of the facts, it also provides the artist with the immersion in a repetitive but comforting task, which can even take on the significance of a ritual, performed for its own sake.
In the logic of the reconstruction, the originary moment is irretrievably lost. But the resignation to the loss of the originary experience perhaps begins to recognize, and pay homage to, all production as an expression of loss, of the pain of separation. 'Going back to reality' suggests a desire for wholeness and immediacy which, in psychoanalytic terms, would be associated with the desire for the primal object (that which the infant is separated from by its accession into language). As such, it is an impossible desire, but then, as Lacan reminds us, the satisfaction of a drive is not in the attainment of its object, but in the pleasure of its exercise.
Lennaart van Oldenborgh, January 1998
Margherita Abbozzo
In a series of small paintings, Margherita Abbozzo depicts the positions of stellar constellations on fateful places and dates in world history: Columbus' arrival on the shores of Hispaniola, the fall of the Berlin Wall, etc. Abbozzo uses an astrolabe, a scientific instrument dating from the renaissance, to reconstruct these nightly skies.
Her execution is scetchy, schematic; clearly the research takes precedence over the visual result. As viewers, however, we are presented with an ultimately cryptic message: given the belief, which is after all persistently popular, that the position of the stars reflect, or even rule events on the earth, we should be able to decipher the significance of these particular constellations in the shorthand provided. Yet the pictures, of course, remain mute, and the fact that scientific method was used to produce them underlines that science is a form of interpretation as much as observation.
(LvO)
Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica
"Videogramme einer Revolution" (videogram of a revolution) is the result of a collaboration between German filmmaker Harun Farocki and Romanian media-theorist Andrei Ujica. In this painstakingly researched documentary, the Romanian 'television revolution' of December 1989 is reconstructed by taking the changes in camera angles as its starting point, while adhering strictly to the chronological unfolding of events.
At its first screening in Bucharest, the film was heavily criticized for cowing to the media-representation of the event as a revolution, whereas most Romanians now believe that it really was a neo-communist coup d'état led by Iliescu. The audience demanded to see this truth uncovered somehow, to see the 'missing images'. The apparent lack of interpretation by the filmmakers, however, was a direct result of their methodology.
Farocki and Ujica worked their way through 120 hours of material, shot by the various cameras that were active between the 21st and the 26th of December 1989. They used only this original material, refraining from shooting any of their own footage, such as witness accounts, etc. What emerges is a film that is firmly rooted in the media-reality of the images themselves, fatalistically resigned to the given places and moments that the cameras happened to record. According to Ujica, they "present a reconstruction based on various kinds of sources. We only pass comment on what the images may show us, not on what might have happened elsewhere." This, of course, is a far cry from any attempt to uncover the reality that may or may not lie behind the images.
(LvO)
Mark Hosking
Working from guides to 'Appropriate Technology', Mark Hosking has constructed tools such as the 'manually pushed single row seeder' and the 'animal drawn cono-puddler for wetland preparation', both on show in Reconstructions. As utilitarian tools they have an aesthetic that originates from the functional purpose that they were designed for. Conceived and exhibited as artworks, they work on several levels. They have an unexpected formal appeal that tempts us to read them as autonomous modernist works. This reading is disrupted by their appearance as agricultural tools, which we recognise to be designed to provide a living for the world's rural poor. This raises ethical and moral questions, opposing decadent art to useful machines, that could be elaborated by the politically correct. At a more fundamental level, the tools invite us to reflect on questions concerning the essence of human nature and the way we relate to the world, here represented in the emblematic form of Mother Earth. Freudian interpretations of ploughing and sowing could be elaborated to extend their significance to the deeper levels of our unconscious drives. It is at this level that art becomes a tool that enables us to reconstruct our original connection with the world.
(TP)
Aletta de Jong
A Dutch writer once remarked that there is nothing sadder than the remembrance of a house that one lived in and that does'nt exist anymore. It hurts to live with a memory of the lay-out of the building, the hight of the rooms and the particularities of the interiors; of the way the light fell through the windows, of the noises you would hear on windy nights, and never be able to visit it again.
For 'People Describing their Surroundings using Objects Close at Hand', Aletta de Jong asked a number of people to describe their personal environment. Sitting at a table, they do so, using sheets of paper, books, a bottle or a lighter, basically anything laying around, to represent walls and furniture. Even though the images speak for themselves and the language is understandable, a feeling of alienation and melancholy lingers. More painfull than the memory of the house we knew and that can't be visited anymore, is the realization that no one but yourself would have acces to the memory of it. Watching the descriptions of houses in the video, you can't do anything but wonder. Any attempt at reconstruction of the houses described provides you with another house built in the image of the houses that you carry with you.
(TP)
Emma Kay
For her series of large-scale paper prints, Emma Kay has been working from books of varying length and genre, compiling comprehensive lists of all the material objects, in order of their appearance, in the given texts. These lists were then typeset to fill exactly a rectangle of a given size within the frame of the print.
The disappearance of the object is mourned in these works by an obsessive attempt to reconstruct the 'object-world' of the given narratives. They erase the narratives themselves in the process, but fail to arrive at an actual 'picture'. It is left to the viewer to fill in the gaps, thereby necessarily relying on memory, imagination, even falsification. Yet the gaps are too great, and one could hardly imagine anyone actually reading through the entire list.
Apart form hinting at the antithetical characteristics of object and text, Kay seems to be making another, subtler point about the paradoxical nature of narrative. Doesn't, after all, any attempt at a one-to-one representation in text result in utter unreadability? Isn't it the very nature of narrative to condense, to abridge, to leave gaps?
(LvO)
Simon Starling
What is more futile than to destroy an object, only to rebuild it afterwards? This is precisely what Simon Starling did for "Work, made-ready", the one difference being that the Marin Sausalito mountain bike was remade using the metal from a Charles Eames Aluminium Group chair and vice versa.
This work raises questions about originality and authorship in a number of different ways. First of all, we are asked to consider if any mass-produced object can be considered as 'an original', whether it is associated with a high-brow designer name or with the street-credibility of a sports brand. Then we can ask the same about artworks, of course, especially if they are paraded as commodities.
The question becomes slightly more complicated when it is viewed in the light of the 'aura' of the original, as described by Walter Benjamin in "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction". Aura, after all, is bound up with the material of the original object, which bears the traces of the particular history of that object. In "Work, made-ready", the melting down and rebuilding of the objects has turned both into fakes, yet 'original' materials were used. So, even if they fail to bear the marks of that originality, the traces of their history, is some of the aura preserved in the material itself? Or has it been eclipsed, perhaps, by the aura of being the-only-Eames-chair-cast-using-the-metal-from-a-Marin-bicycle-by-Simon-Starling?
(LvO)
Annie Toop
Concerning thirteen objects which refer to a past relationship, Annie Toop wrote down memories that connect the objects with her ex-lover. Afterwards she presented her ex with photo's of the same objects and asked him to present her with a description of his memories. Although biographies exist that are based on memories of books, places, or objects, the doubling of perspective attained in "Love Story", makes us almost painfully aware of our fundamental loneliness. Based on the same objects, the two accounts of the relationship show us worlds as different as the people who inhabit them. We learn that what we can know about the world is based on the way we question it; the world is the method of its verification. If the people with whom we share our lives do not even inhabit the same world, then what is the reconstruction of our past, but the construction of ourselves?
(TP)
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