Draw the Curtains
By Jeroen van der HulstYou know, I know this [steak] doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? [Takes a bite of steak] Ignorance is bliss. - Cypher in “The Matrix” (1999) In 1910, amid the Mexican Revolution, Raoul Walsh, an American actor and director, and Hennie Aussenberg, a German cameraman, shot a biographical action-drama film about Pancho Villa, the leader of the revolutionary army. “The Life of General Villa” featured Pancho Villa as himself. They recorded real battles as well as staged scenes. For instance, when at a certain point the bulky camera equipment was not able to keep up with the swift victory of Villa in the city of Durango, Walsh decided the battle had to be redone for better cinematic value. Walsh was not alone in openly staging historical events. There are many accounts of late nineteenth- and early twentieth century war correspondents, which either planned or staged the scenes they needed to woo the public at home. This was not uncommon, as their work was preceded by the romantic images of war created throughout art history. Real battles were simply not dramatic enough for the audience back home. After deliberation with Villa’s soldiers, Walsh made sure that he got his take. Villa was coaxed into riding through Durango again, guns blazing and troops yelling. Walsh's version of what happened at Durango was perhaps the exact thing people wanted to see; not the truth but an idea of “truth”. Reality had been folded into its own fiction. In 2011 Hauser&Wirth, London, showed Christoph Büchel’s immense trompe l'œil Piccadilly Community Centre. The entire building was transformed into a functioning community centre with linoleum floors, fake partition walls, a common room with programmes such as baby-yoga and bingo, as well as political leaflets next to a flower shop for the blind. The gallery was completely eradicated. The trick of the eye created by the artist dissolves due to the fact that what you see looks like a community centre but at the same time it IS a community centre. When we perceive it we can assume it is there in front of us. There is no trick; the viewer only looks at it as a work of art. With that gaze there seems to be nothing more than an expectation of what a community centre looks like. The Picadilly Community Centre catered to that expectation and the viewer is stranded between the noumenal, the physically perceivable, and phenomenal, the more subjective cognitive interpretation, of both the community centre and the work of art. It leaves the feeling of ambiguity about what is and what is not. A similar exchange is at work in Annika Kahrs’ For Two to Play,which was shown at Kunstwerke, Berlin. The viewer enters a small waiting room with a large wooden door. Piano music can be heard from behind the door and when the viewer opens it, two pianists immediately stop their rehearsal and stare at the person intruding on them. The uncomfortable stare directed at the viewer almost breaks through the trompe l'œil of the piece. It is not a trick anymore and a shift occurs from the viewer being the subject to being the object. You are there and you are interrupting the piano music. As soon as the viewer exits the room, the piano music continues, leaving the sensation that an obscene, voyeuristic reality has just interrupted the intangible fiction that has just been witnessed. To understand the exchange, which occurs when the door opens, we must deconstruct the dynamics of the mechanism at work. The ‘interruption’ of the pianists is part of the fiction created by the artist because without it, the viewer remains listening to piano music in an empty space, looking at a door, assuming it is being produced on the other side of the door. In this room the viewer is already part of the fiction of the performance, but with a definite feeling of control; the viewer can sit and listen for as long as he or she likes. Opening the door makes the reality of the viewer collapse onto the fiction of the performance. By stopping the music as the viewer enters, the responsibility of the music being discontinued lies with the viewer, leaving the assumption that, even though we cannot see it, the two people in the room are producing the music on the condition that the viewer may never see it. For the viewer to act in the fiction means to awkwardly interrupt a rehearsal. It creates a kind of void between the reality of the viewer and the fiction of the performance. Even after the door is closed again, it is not easy to listen to the piano music without a sense of guilt. Just as with the Picadilly Community Centre the viewer is put in a gridlock between what is physically perceived and what can cognitively be discerned from it. The reality of the Self is corrupted by the basic knowledge of looking at, and being in, a fiction. The void between this physical “it-is-happening-now” reality and a more phenomenal fiction is an unstable place for either reality or fiction to really settle. Arguably someone looking at graphic new-wave horror films can experience a similar sense of disgust as when they are looking at footage of a dying Muammar Gaddafi being shuffled around and thrown into a van like a bag of sand. The screen on which both of these are being displayed is the common denominator, not the images. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing” a group of gangsters, now old men, are asked to restage the political killings they’ve committed in the sixties in Indonesia. Because they worked for the regime still in place the men have never been prosecuted or even accused of misdoings. The documentary tells the story of the men as told by them. They have an arrogant way of combining accounts of strangling victims with whimsical cha-cha dance moves. Oppenheimer gives the men space and time to work on a set and even shoot on location to recreate their “heroic” deeds for the regime. With bad acting, bad make up and bad set design the scenes show a surreal account of what had happened. Opposed to Walsh’s film about Villa, the story is so gruesome that the restaging actually works as a muffler of reality. It acts as a middleman for the audience to translate real tragedy to an understandable medium, fiction. When the men prepare to shoot a scene where they torture a victim the extra, playing said victim, approaches them on set and explains that they had murdered his stepfather during that time. He appears anxious and apologetic for even bringing it up. Then when the take starts the viewer sees a scene of real aggressors restaging their acts on a real victim. The ambiguity about what is and what is not is eradicated from the scene. Recently a notable economic study by American psychologist Barry Schwartz called “The Paradox of Choice” has become subject to criticism. The study presents the notion that consumers confronted with an overflowing amount of choice generally end up not choosing at all. This was shown by a test involving jams. One group of shoppers is offered six types of jams, while another group is offered twenty-four types of jams. While the shelf with the bigger set of options gathered more onlookers, the shelf with only six options led to ten times the amount of purchases. The theory seems plausible in a time where almost every part of life is bombarded with endless possibilities, that one has to deal with growing anxiety over whether a basic decision taken is the right one. However, in 2013 the Atlantic published an article by Derek Thompson describing the criticism on the study. Several other studies that monitored purchasing habits have shown a counter argument to Schwartz's study describing that choice actually increases satisfaction in purchasing an item. Thompson ends his article with a remarkable sentence: Sometimes, choices can paralyse us with anxiety and exhaust us. But sometimes, choices reduce anxiety by making us feel like we've searched exhaustively -- and now we're ready to buy. Here I’d like to make use of the ambiguity in the sentence and apply it to the understanding more about belief in perception. The idea of choice in believing is present in the previously described examples. The enchantment caused by all of these possibilities of what is Real is as vexing as any trompe l'oeil presented throughout art history. The ancient Greek painter Zeuxis painted a still life that was convincing enough to trick birds into thinking it was actual fruit. When he was challenged by his rival Parrhasios to judge one of his paintings, Zeuxis fell into the trap he once set for the birds. Trying to open a set of curtains to reveal Parrhasios’ painting he realized the curtains to be the painting he was trying to reveal. This tale describes the trompe l'œil as light-hearted jest. Today’s tricks of the eye are less inculpable. As we know, the beginning of the twenty-first century is riddled with political scandals. People such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have gained notoriety by challenging the common belief in security. If a “scandal” is an anomaly, are we living in an age of scandals? This question might find some explanation in the idea of political incantation as described by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacrum and Simulation. When it came out that the Republican party in the United States under President Richard Nixon had been secretly spying on the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building it caused outrage and understandably so. A political party in the ‘free world’ had been caught stealing information of a political party within national borders. Baudrillard uses the Watergate scandal to claim: “The denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law. And Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal — in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale.” He goes on by asserting that the Watergate scandal should always be denied as being a scandal because that would prove the political mechanism has worked – the public believes that the unethical gathering of information on a political party was an anomaly rather than everyday reality and will thus be veiled in the illusion. The same mechanism applies for our recent scandals of the financial crisis, and perhaps even more importantly, the invasion of privacy as conducted by governments on their people. Once the veil of a certain socio-political agreement is torn and shows the ugliness that is behind it, the desirable reaction would be to quickly close the gap so that this agreement can remain valid. An image emerges in the shape of societal tricks of the eye. The enchantment by political mechanisms that keep a veil from tearing or lifting are hardly a new development but nonetheless, it plays a big role in letting a unanimous social agreement function. It is easier to assume a state of calm belief in fiction and safety - after an incident that challenges this feeling - leaving society as a kind of Zeuxis trying to open painted curtains constantly. The screen as previously described often functions as a common denominator to flatten any nuances between the noumenal and phenomenal interpretations of what is happening in our environment. In journalism and photography, distribution of images is a vast driving force intended to enchant a broad public with would-be truths. The subject of ethical issues regarding photography recording human suffering is not a theme to introduce in this context, nor am I trying to discredit good journalism. However, the Internet is home to a vast amount of footage depicting natural, humanitarian and ethical catastrophes that were recorded in the moment of the event’s occurrence. Harrowing images are known for drawing crowds to bear witness to them and news media outlets certainly capitalize off of that. What drives someone in a traumatic situation to start filming what he or she is seeing? I would like to believe it is not directly the need to make a record for the world to see the appalling situation they are in. It seems more plausible that by looking at the atrocities through a screen can make it more bearable to witness. If the hard truth in front of you can be instantly converted to a medium that has more attributes of known fictions - the screen alienates reality - maybe then the panic does not have to set in just yet. Perhaps it is here that the daunting footage of actual tragedies, shot with telephone cameras by people in the moment can be construed as veiling truth under a fiction. A strange loop emerges between the, sometimes, atrocious reality and fiction where occurrence, staging, recording and restaging all dilute and infuse to make a cloudy image of our environment. It is now expected that catastrophes go hand in hand with heart wrenching images to look at and share online. As a kind of visual charity the word is spread and the urge to do good for those suffering around the world has been aptly put to rest. A photograph of a boy sleeping between the graves of his parents, taken by Abdul Aziz al Otaibi, was spread across the web to propagate how the conflict in Syria destroys lives. Later, it was revealed that Al-Otaibi, although depicting the tragedy of loss of life, actually intentionally staged the photo for his own photographic practice. It was not taken in Syria but in Saudi Arabia and it was not meant as a journalistic record of a conflict situation. To Al-Otaibi’s distress, his fiction apparently had all the ingredients to function as reality. It seems that it became subject to a belief that “this is what the tragedy occurring in Syria must look like.” Here again the fictitious representation of reality gives believers an answer to their assumed empathy – a reason to expect its legitimacy, without having to actually witness the events in Syria. Are we not ready to buy when we are led to believe we interrupted a piano lesson, or when we drink coffee in a community centre and not a gallery? Fact or fiction, the viewer is often put in the position where the choice in believing truth to be part of the fiction is taken away. Like staring at a supermarket shelf filled with different flavors at different prices, looking for what is real and what is fiction appears to be an exhausting process of looking for what one WANTS to believe. Context can be ever fluctuating and therefore reality is malleable. When Pancho Villa rode into Durango for the second time Raoul Walsh gave the audience what they were hoping to see as “truth”. Unintentionally, Al Otaibi’s picture operates on this same level. I’d like to paraphrase Derek Thompson again by noting that to share this fiction, in the assumption that it is real, reduces anxiety by making believers feel like they’ve searched exhaustively in effort to calm a subconscious need to help end the suffering - and they are ready to buy the fiction as truth. This is not surprising as, quite literally, the shelf with flavours seems to be continuously growing and prices always changing. To be critical enough requires to look at what is really happening means to either witness everything first hand, or to not witness it all. Both are as utopian as they sound. With so many tools and mediums to sustain a living fiction it seems painted curtains will do just as fine as actual curtains. |
Pamphlet. Magazine - 2014 -