Comparison of artefacts of a performance by Axel Toepfer (artist, Basel/Leipzig) and Boedi S. Otong (artist, Jegensdorf), on 9 September 2011, during the exhibition and mediation project archiv performativ: a model in the Klingental exhibition space, Basel.
A) Synopsis of the performance Besenstudie #12
The project team invited Axel Toepfer (Toepfer) to extend his Besenstudie concept by another edition for the model archive. His original concept involved inviting the public to participate in a performative installation of supplied materials. An eleven-performance marathon took place on 30 April 2011 in Kaskadenkondensator Basel. Here, lots were drawn to determine the order of participants and each had a time limit of “what felt like 30 minutes” for their action. All the material was put back in its original position for each successive performance. In this way, the materials were performatively charged eleven times over. Toepfer made these materials available to the model archive to be displayed as artefact type ‘object/material (relic)’. This artefact type has a fluid character. Used material is not automatically a relic but becomes it later according to the context or the significance it is attributed by the relevant agents. For Besenstudie #12 Toepfer invited Indonesian artist Boedi S. Otong (Otong) to work with the same materials (relics) once again. Toepfer linked this installation with his own interest in subjective camera work and staged himself as a filming performer. The live performance consisted of Otong improvising an examination of the material with his body and voice while Toepfer moved around him with a handheld camera, filming sometimes extreme close-ups. The video made during the live performance and edited directly in the camera was subsequently screened and discussed with the audience as an independent form of performance transmission and transcription.[1]
B) Selection of artefact types
During the course of the research project it emerged that the time-based video recording, though the most common form of documentation, is the most highly disputed among users because of a perceived general lack of understanding of ‘techno images’. In his book Medienwerk, Vilem Flusser stresses the need for improving our knowledge of how technologically generated images work: “Man can only regain control of machines with a well-trained techno imagination.”[2] For this reason, I decided to examine the artefact-function of two different methods of video recording. The first was a complete rendering (termed ‘FULL FILM’ below). This is the most common type of video recording, filmed by a camera fixed on a tripod, aiming for the widest possible view and, by keeping movements to a minimum, a ‘neutral’ or comprehensive rendering. Authorship in this case is intended to be unrecognisable or unimportant. The second recording method – represented here by Toepfer’s video recording (termed ‘VIDEO’ below) – involves a moving, often handheld, hence subjective camera, creating close-up recordings using a zoom function and by the documenting person’s own movements, which can react to changes quickly and directly. Various audience perspectives are suggested by this method.
C) Similarities/differences in transmission and transcription by the two recording methods in view of the constituent aspects of the performance
Filmed from a static vantage point at a distance, the FULL FILM preserves aspects of content/form/concept of the two-part performance in front of an audience; first, the live performance by the two artists/performers and, second, the screening of the video just filmed. (An audio recording was made of the subsequent discussion). In the first part of the FULL FILM, both Otong’s body and voice use and actions and Toepfer’s body and camera use are legible. Furthermore, the development of a form of interplay between the two artists/performers is apparent in the FULL FILM, as well as the fact that the just-filmed video was projected on to the front wall to be screened in the second part. The FULL FILM also makes conceptual aspects of the installation clear, such as the performers’ assumption of different roles, which must have been arranged in advance. Moreover, the performance’s division into two parts plus discussion, as shown in the FULL FILM, reveals a curatorial intention. The VIDEO, by contrast, communicates sharply focused and blurred close-ups from various angles as well as manipulations of and movements with the camera carried out by the person filming, which translate the visual experience into a subjective visual language and give a new account of the live event.
In view of the audiovisual/affective aspects: the static camera position chosen for the FULL FILM, maintaining the same perspective throughout, did not allow the first three minutes of Otong’s action to be conveyed, because it took place at the far front on the left of the floor at the feet of the spectators in the front row. Later it becomes visible in the recording that the person documenting directs the tripod over the heads of the audience and pans round or zooms in slightly as the situation requires. Both recording methods convey the ritual-like actions carried out by Otong and his use of his voice: for example, in both we see the performer throwing a large piece of crumpled up paper like an animal skin against the wall while crying in a whiny voice. While the VIDEO conveys all Otong’s actions and voice use from the start, it does so partly in a fragmentary and distorted way. We see a lot of close-ups of Otong’s face and hands from many different angles; for example, at one point his face fills the entire frame and he can be clearly seen and heard to be hissing. Besides Otong’s voice, we hear loud noises arising mostly from the camera being manipulated, such as clicking when it is switched on or off or a setting is adjusted. This generates a rhythmic alienation from the original sounds and creates an independent audio-aesthetic. Furthermore, the sound recording in the VIDEO often runs on where Toepfer has inserted white or black surfaces, sometimes full-frame, sometimes cut off and blurred. He produced these images by panning to a white wall while the camera was still running or by holding his hand in front of the lens. The VIDEO gives a clear rendering of Toepfer’s ad hoc restructuring of the visual experience.
Both recording methods convey auditory and affective aspects of Otong’s complex voice use. Otong used foreign or nonsense words, repetitive plaintive sounds or aggressive-sounding tirades. These sound expressions triggered reactions and feelings in the audience.
In view of the temporal-spatial (ambient) aspects: Temporal structures such as the process and course of the action, the duration of the individual parts and the entire performance are comprehensively conveyed by the FULL FILM (1st part: 23:20; 2nd part: 10:00, total length: 37:20). The selective use of the camera in the VIDEO, by contrast, causes the temporal structure to be halved. The FULL FILM shows the space to be small, bright, cramped and half-filled with an audience which often blocks the camera’s view of action taking place on the floor. The VIDEO, on the other hand, hinders the viewer’s spatial orientation due to its many close-ups and the movements of the person filming. While the FULL FILM conveys an atmosphere of tension, showing Otong in a trance-like state and Toepfer as his active counterpart, the VIDEO communicates the interpretative perspective of the person filming, whose manipulations of or with the camera cause some of Otong’s actions to appear more dramatic while other actions fade into the background. In every case, they are affectively charged and appear at times more powerful than in the FULL FILM.
In view of the physical-textural aspects: Toepfer’s physicality, or his body use, is legible in the FULL FILM as a kind of dance or choreography. Both the FULL FILM and the VIDEO convey how Otong’s hands grasp the material and how he strikes himself hard and rhythmically on the forehead. While Toepfer’s entire person can be seen in the FULL FILM, in the VIDEO his presence is only indirectly conveyed by the dynamic camera movements, suggesting his physical ‘fusion’ with the camera. At one point in the VIDEO, the thumb of the person filming can be seen; at another point, his shoe, indicating his physical presence.
In view of the site-specific or political situation and audience reactions: In the FULL FILM one sees the spectators from behind, moving their heads to and fro like at a tennis match. A sense of uneasiness among the audience is also conveyed: some people slide around in their chairs and look around questioningly. Some start or give a constrained laugh when Otong makes loud noises. One person leaves the room after a few minutes; two others leave after the live part. In the VIDEO, by contrast, the spectators are seen only once, very briefly, from the front, when Toepfer filmed from a position behind Otong. Otherwise, they fade into the background visually and acoustically while the camera films close-ups. The overall context of a specialist experiment, in which an audience participates in the making of a video, a live event and a discussion, is legible in the FULL FILM. The VIDEO, on the other hand, tells the viewer nothing about the situative context, since the space, setting and audience can only be vaguely guessed at behind the images in close-up.
D) Discourse, analysis and transcription
Comparative analysis points to discourses and concepts of the documentary. How forms of the documentary reproduce reality has always been disputed. According to Hito Steyerl, the main line of conflict runs between upholders of realism and upholders of constructivism. While the former pursue a naïve, technology-trusting positivism and believe that the documentary form depicts natural facts and conveys them truthfully, which one can see with one’s own eyes, the latter view the documentary form as a construction in which even the concept of reality is seen as an expression of the prevailing ideology, which cannot be believed. In this way, constructivists contest the fact that reality can be depicted at all. The prevailing distrust of truth in images, the growth of which can be easily understood in view of the rapid development of technological media and the possibilities they present for manipulation, gives rise to a dilemma – and new forms of documentary images. “They are available around the clock; they turn duration into ‘real time’, distance into intimacy, ignorance into false knowledge.”[3] Yet the desire for truth remains. Parallels to these positions can be seen in the two examples of documentary practices in performance art described here. The FULL FILM is a documentary method often applied on the false assumption that the technological apparatus record everything ‘objectively’, realistically and truthfully. This form of documentation is highly valued by historical researchers because it is perceived as ‘neutral’ and does not appear to confront the viewer with considerations of authorship. The VIDEO is an artistic work in a documentary mode, which not only reconstructs the event by its live editing and use of different effects, it is also an example of an aesthetic which emotionalises perception. The switching on and off of the camera and the use of the ‘night shot’ function create an audio-visual staccato aesthetic which might be described as ‘video scratching’[4]. “In the age of digital reproduction documentary forms do not only have an incredibly emotionalizing effect on an individual level; they are also an important part of the contemporary economy of affect. […] As the tendency shifts from documentary seeing to documentary feeling, […] reality becomes an event.”[5] In my view, the VIDEO addresses precisely this issue. But where does this desire for authenticity, emotion, feelings and affects stem from? Marie Louise Angerer suggests describing this interest as a dispositive, “…in which philosophical, art and media theoretical discourses are fused with those of molecular biology, cybernetics and cognitive psychology into a new ‘human truth’”.[6] Since the new, transparent, digitally supervised human has become a calculable entity, the affective body is being re-discovered and re-evaluated in art and visual discourses. Axel Toepfer himself says that his subjective camera work was based on Bergsonian and Deleuzian concepts of movement-images and affection-images. Referring to Bergson, Deleuze sees the image ‘as movement’ and ‘in movement’; that is, equivalent to movement: “Every thing, that is to say every image, is indistinguishable from its actions and reactions: this is universal variation.”[7] Toepfer, too, in keeping with Deleuze, creates a subjective image of perception in his role as a documenting performer. That is to say, the whole is seen by the person filming, who is himself a part of this whole. In this process, he produces affection-images, i.e. close-ups, or ‘faces’ in the Deleuzian sense, detached from the space. Abstracted from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, they become the expression of feeling.[8] The live situation becomes the production site of a video which oscillates between documentation and the independent artistic product. In his portfolio Toepfer describes his approach as follows: “My work revolves around the central question of the intense experience of communicated images, made possible by a subjective appropriation of the image narration.”[9] The VIDEO presented immediately after the performance confronted the spectators with a reality which either completely eclipsed their own memories or layered different modes of perception – their own and Toepfer’s – over each other. At the same time, the artefact was extended by its participation in the event – with the making of the VIDEO and the cooperation between Toepfer and Otong made transparent and discussed during the event – so that the entire setting should be regarded as a transcription of Otong’s performance. In my view, the two artists/performers demonstrate a broader definition of authorship, such as Giaco Schiesser describes in his article “Barthes und Foucault revisited”. Foucault’s rewriting of the author concept, though necessary, is now outdated and being taken further by contemporary artistic practice, Schiesser says. Network societies, which challenge concepts of the work and the author and the principle of intellectual property, have in his view set more transformations in motion. Authorship and the role as artist have become phenomena of performative production. This does not devalue individual authorship but frees it from the aura of original artistic creativity.[10] Toepfer and Otong are authors (in the sense of ‘arrangers’ who take up and re-order found objects and make them newly recognisable by means of transformation) in a production entailing collaborative authorship made transparent. Furthermore, the video produced hereby is also to be regarded as a form of artistic documentarism in the field of performance art. The subjective video recording could, in combination with other artefacts, give conventional audiovisual performance documentation new impetus by demonstrating how patterns of perception are subjectively constructed.
Pascale Grau, May 2012
[1] This description is based on my knowledge of Toepfer’s written concept and my experience as a spectator at the performance in the model archive and at the subsequent discussion.
[2] Translated from the German: „Nur dank einer ausgebildeten Techno-Imagination könnten die Menschen die Apparate wieder unter ihre Herrschaft bekommen“, in: Flusser, Vilem, Medienkultur, S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 101.
[3] Translated from the German: „Sie sind rund um die Uhr verfügbar, sie verwandeln Dauer in real time, Distanz in Intimität, Ignoranz in trügerisches Bescheidwissen“, in: Steyerl, Hito, Die Farbe der Wahrheit, Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld, Turia + Kant, Vienna/Berlin 2008, p. 12.
[4] According to Wikipedia, ‘scratching’ in music is a DJ technique used to produce distinctive sounds by moving a vinyl record back and forth on a turntable.
[5] Translated from the German: „Im Zeitalter der digitalen Reproduktion wirken dokumentarische Formen nicht nur auf individueller Ebene ungeheuer emotionalisierend – sie stellen auch einen wichtigen Bestandteil zeitgenössischer Ökonomien des Affekts dar. […] In der Verschiebung von dokumentarischen Sehen zum dokumentarischen Fühlen […] wird die Realität zum Event“, in: Steyerl, op. cit., fn 3, p. 13.
[6] Translated from the German: „…in dem philosophische, kunst- und medientheoretische Diskurse mit molekularbiologischen, kybernetischen und kognitionspsychologischen zu einer neuen ‚Wahrheit des Menschen’ verlötet werden“, in: Angerer, Marie-Luise, Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt, Diaphanes, Zurich/Berlin 2007, p. 7.
[7] Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 1986, p. 58.
[8] Deleuze, op. cit. pp. 95–97.
[9] Translated from the German: „Meine Arbeit kreist um die zentrale Frage einer intensiven Erfahrung der Bildmitteilung, die durch eine subjektive Aneignung der Narration von Bildern ermöglicht wird.“
[10] Cf. Schiesser, Giaco, „Autorschaft nach dem Tod des Autors, Barthes und Foucault revisited“, in: Hans Peter Schwarz (eds.), Autorschaft in den Künsten. Konzepte – Praktiken – Medien (Zürcher Jahrbuch der Künste, Vol. 4), Museum für Gestaltung Zurich, Zurich 2007, pp. 20–30.