Fionn Meade
Oh, Inverted World
Responding to a pointed question about the blurred line between fact and fiction—document and imagination—in his writing, the much-lauded yet controversial Serbian-Hungarian fiction writer Danilo Kiš responded in a 1988 interview shortly before his death that “the dividing line between the two is also so obvious to me that I take the greatest pains to make the crossover as seamless as possible. I always begin with a document and subject it to what the Russian formalists called ostranenie, defamiliarization, making what is familiar strange. Otherwise, I’d be writing an essay. I’m incapable of writing a book out of thin air. Even as a reader, I have trouble with purely imaginative fiction: I see through its artifices and am left with a mist or void. The other danger is to give the reader nothing but records or testimonials, to become a historian or memoirist. I gambol between the two perils.”1
An increasing number of contemporary film and video artists embrace documentary tactics similar to those outlined by Kiš, constructing narratives that readily shift the frame from document to fable and back with a seamlessness that perhaps signals the extent to which such patterns have become part of the social and political realities of contemporary culture. But has the process of “making strange”—so crucial to the worldview of certain artists, Kiš included, from what was often called “the other Europe” in the last century (in effect the dissident, experimental voices of the Middle East and Eastern Europe that contributed a parallel counter-history to the dominant twentieth-century ideologies of those same regions)2—effectively woven its way into the fabric of a wider contemporary aesthetic discourse? And, to continue more specifically, has the influence of crucial innovations in documentary film and video practice at the end of the Cold War—as with notable feature-length works by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s Videogramme einer Revolution (Videograms of a Revolution, 1992) and Chantal Akerman’s D’est: Au bord de la fiction (From the East: Bordering on Fiction, 1993)—truly effected what prominent curators and theorists like Okwui Enwezor, Mark Nash, and Catherine David have termed “the documentary turn” in contemporary art of the past fifteen years? If the work of such distinctive contemporary artists as Matthew Buckingham, Amar Kanwar, David Majlkovic, Rosalind Nashashibi, Deimantas Narkevicius, Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, and Artur Zmijewski—to name only a handful—is any indication, the answer would seem to be a manifold yes.
As the number of artists incorporating film and video into their practice exponentially increases and approaches to the documentary likewise multiply and fragment, distinctions between narrative, avant-garde, and documentary filmmaking are increasingly blurred. However, to consider three significant moving image works recently on exhibit is to underscore how many documentary film and video works within contemporary art contexts have come to rely on ready references to—and subsequent inversions of—such delimited documentary tropes as the in-the-field interview, eyewitness account, travelogue, and re-enactment. Recent works by Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, Yael Bartana, and Omer Fast reveal the influence of a previous generation’s expansion of the documentary frame while also demonstrating how its use within contemporary art is increasingly nuanced, sophisticated, and readily distributable.
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About this Article
Oh, Inverted World was first published in Fillip 8 in Fall 2008. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Fionn Meade is a writer and curator living in Seattle whose writing has recently appeared in Bomb Magazine, NYFA Current, and The Stranger among other venues. Nocturnes, a curatorial project exploring animation works by four artists working from their studio practice, will open at the Boise Art Museum next year. He also curates programs at the Henry Art Gallery.Notes
image: Omer Fast, production still from The Casting, 2007. 35 mm film transferred to video, color, sound. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
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