Kollaborate Komrades

“Every spectator is either a coward or a traitor.”[1]

Hito Steyerl works as filmmaker, videoartist and author in the area of essayist documentary film, postcolonial criticism, as producer as well as theorist. The works are located on the interface between film and fine arts. Main topics: cultural globalization, political theory, global feminism, and migration. Further activities include work as political journalist, film and art critic, catalogue and book author. The films have received international awards and are screened on TV in many countries. Steyerl has a PhD in philosophy, is a visiting Professor for Experimental Media Creation at Universitaet der Kuenste, Berlin, has had numerous lectureships at art and film schools in Vienna, Munich, Hanover.[2]

In her article, Is a Museum a Factory?,(Steyerl, Is a Museum a Factory), Steyerl mentions a work of Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production, where he makes the case that watching the screen is labour.[3] ^(Beller) This informs the piece as Steyerl follows the progress of the worker leaving the factory, becoming part of the artwork, and the audience/worker, participating and consuming themselves and the product of their own labour, in the Factory/Museum/ Art space.[4] Steyerl then goes on to describe how the cinematic work in the museum, requires a multitude as viewer, because the cinematic is now broken up into many parts which can not be consumed by one person, and that the real work might begin in the interaction of this multitude.

I think this ties in nicely with an article in two parts from the same journal by Liam Gillick called, Maybe It Would Be better if we worked in groups of three? The Discursive/ The Experimental Factory, (Gillick) where he describes a discursive art making that has become more prevalent recently. He says,” The discursive is what produces the work and, in the form of critical and impromptu exchanges, it is also the desired result.”[5] He describes how ‘the day before’ is at the heart of the discursive, but as a means of projecting it into some potential future. This makes the discursive useful for confronting a system which is bases its growth on ‘projections’: the “projection of the critical moment is the political power of the discursive”.

The ‘screen that isn’t there’ might be this discursive art. Just as people forming a new public space that resists encapsulation in societal discourse could be an escape from our incarceration within the image, discursive art is a way of projecting this space further into a revolutionary sphere.

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[1] A quote from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and quoted in the beginning of Hito Steyerl’s article, Is a Museum a Factory?

[2] http://eipcp.net/bio/steyerl

[3] The Cinematic Mode of Production remands to the reader the following idea: Cinema and its succeeding (if still simultaneous) formations, particularly television, video, computers, and the internet, are deterritorialized factories in which spectators work, that is, in which we perform value productive labour. It is in and through cinematic image and its legacy, the gossamer imaginary arising out of a matrix of socio-psycho-material relations, that we make our lives. This claim suggests that not only do we confront the image wherever we turn—imaginal functions are today imbricated in perception itself. Not only do the denizens of capital labour to maintain ourselves as image, we labour in the image. The image, which pervades all appearing, is the mise-en-scène of the new work.

[4] Without notice, the question of political cinema has been inverted. What began as a discussion of political cinema in the museum has turned into a question of cinematic politics in a factory.

[5] The use of the word discursive includes the following considerations: first (a technical definition), the movement between subjects without or beyond order; second, a set of discussions marked by their adherence to one or more notions of analytical reason. At no point does my use of the word really imply coherence with notions of “discursive democracy” as posited by Habermas and others, yet within the cultural terrain it does have some connection to the idea of melding public deliberation while retaining the notion of individual practice within the “group.”