"Old" Europe shows new media art.

EUROPEAN MEDIA ART FESTIVAL (EMAF)

OSNABRUCK, GERMANY

MAY 10-14, 2006

Peace, freedom, and self-determination were among the themes at the 19th European Media Arts Festival (EMAF), held May 10-14, 2006, in Osnabruck, Germany. This predominantly white-collar town of about 150,000, located in the country's northwest region at the intersection of the Hamburg-Cologne and Berlin-Amsterdam train lines, could hardly be a more appropriate host to media art committed to such issues. Already an important trading hub during the Middle Ages (the large cathedral and historic old town remain impressive traces), Osnabruck was one of the two original signing places of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648--a historic treaty that, because it ended the Thirty Year War, was responsible for the religious and geopolitical restructuring of post-medieval Europe and would, until the French Revolution, serve as the unofficial blueprint for the definition of European nation states. Those apt to dismiss these credentials for being too "Old Europe" may want to note that the city is also the birthplace of Erich Maria Remarque, the German novelist who wrote the mother of all antiwar stories, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), and that the city was recently selected as the seat of the German Foundation for Peace Research.

Osnabruck is also EMAF's birthplace and one of the locations that has helped (re)define media art in the age of electronic reproduction. Virtually every notable media artist has, at one point or another, exhibited at EMAF. This year, too, the festival's long, venerable tradition drew an impressive list of entries (including works by Matthew Barney and Bjork, Bjorn Melhus, Matthias Muller, and Michael Snow) across a broad spectrum of media art ranging from 16mm and 35mm short and feature films and single and multichannel video installations to mixed and expanded media environments, light and computer installations, and kinetic objects and sculptures.

There were a relatively large number of venues at EMAF, from regular movie theaters (for the festival's small feature section) to the multi-media auditorium of a cultural center (for the short films and the retrospective, this year dedicated to experimental film giant Bruce Baillie) and a gothic church converted into an art gallery (which housed most multi-media installations under the rubric "Smart Art"), reflecting the festival's size and its politics of inclusiveness. They also reveal the organizers' intent to redress as much as to record the dual exhibition history (in Germany and elsewhere) of film and video--experimental shorts and features having traditionally been shown at film festivals, cine-clubs, and in the alternative political scene, while video thrives in museums, galleries, and art shows. Among filmmakers, one senses an increased attraction to the wealthier fine arts scene, evidenced by the fact that such luminaries as Muller have ditched the black box for the white cube (which they have, however, frequently reconverted into a mini movie theater). On the other hand, the recent recovery of the long-ailing experimental short film scene, once the defining field of force of the German moving image avant-garde, shows that film has lost none of its luster as a medium of experimentation. And while the dual exhibition history has also profoundly affected critical and theoretical debate, the current surge in found footage works has led to the ascendancy of at least one phenomenon--cinephilia--that, as cultural sensibility and critical discourse, seems to appeal to film and video afficionados alike.

Though heterogeneous in form and subject matter, many festival entries evinced sociocultural and political consciousness, with artists targeting such topics as world politics after September 11, 2001, the disregard of human rights around the world, the economic and cultural impact of globalization, the dynamics of fringe group behavior, and, without diminished significance, questions of gender, race, and ethnicity. Following Roland Barthes's suggestion that the best method of subversion is the resignification of codes rather than their destruction, for much current media art a playful yet critical engagement with mass culture remains the approach of choice, more than two decades after it first superceded the rah-rah parochialism of the formalist avant-garde and the dull preachiness of realist documentaries. It can be argued that, by now, the playful subversion of existing codes is itself little more than a cliche, long seized on particularly by Marxists for what they regard as the fecklessness of ludic postmodernism. And yet, the global surge of violence increasingly perpetrated in conjunction with or directly motivated by the frenzy of visual documentation--whether at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or in American and European high schools and the ever more brazen and insidious wrapping of imperialist and militarist propaganda with pop culture, seems to vindicate media art's sustained intent to engage and subvert those "existing codes."

For example, in Melhus's most recent installation, "The Captain" (2005), pop culture is revealed as both allegory of and tool for foreign policy. Demonstrating anew the artist's long-standing love-hate relationship with American television and mass culture, and boasting the same saturated pictorialism as some of his earlier work, this piece could be described as a mini-episode of a late sixties sci-fi show--a day in the life of the Star Trek crew. The fifteen-minute loop unfolds in a darkened room on a large video screen, at times punctuated by the flashing and beeping of three monitors placed in front of it, as a drama of decision-making: a star ship captain is besieged by a sinister agent called "the liberator" to help the imperial forces wage war to solve an unnamed galactic crisis. In his agony he receives spiritual, but, ultimately, specious guidance from the princess. Played out as a staged tableau on a rocky lunar landscape, the piece, as noted by the catalog, uncannily links the manicheanism of mythology to the digital dyad that is the founding episteme of the space age. But it also suggests a more specific allegory of Germany's recent relations to the United States, in which one country initially resists another's call for war, but is eventually cajoled into joining forces by the imperial force's seemingly boyish and upright appearance and the seductive influence of its "feminine" components (read: popular culture). The princess whispers sweet, pseudo-humanist nothings to the captain and hypnotizes him with a radiating crystal. This loop should be seen more than once to appreciate the subtlety of Melhus's writing and the nuance of allegorical insight, as it ruminates on whether Germany (and other European nations) have any strength to resist American hegemony.

Melhus's installation was nicely complemented by two other entries. Peter E. Bengtsson's short film, America Punish Criminals (2005), animates a cutout paper doll of U.S. President George W. Bush and overlays his speech justifying the invasion of Iraq with MTV-style house music. Scantily clad and sashaying in front of oil derricks, Bush's dance satirically foregrounds the real motivation behind the invasion. Pascal Lievre and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay presented Patriotic (2005), a filmed performance about the Patriot Act enacted by the U.S. Congress after the attacks of 9/11. Dressed in uniform, the artists select the passage relating to the security of the U.S. and the fight against terror, which they soulfully intone to Celine Dion's song "My Heart Will Go On" (1997).

Two entries analyze the impact of capitalism, globalization, and consumerism on individual and collective behavior. Ashim Ahluwalia's feature-length documentary John & Jane (2005), which won the dialogue prize of the foreign office at EMAF, throws light on the burgeoning labor force of third-world telemarketers who, employed by multi-national companies, spend their nights selling consumer products to American customers. The director's portrait of six call agents in Bombay, India, reveals the pressures and lures of the sudden, concrete influx of first-world capital, effectively capturing the bizarre postmodern mix of assimilation and disconnect. Dishearteningly, most of them are portrayed as naive servants of global capitalism, as if they have already been subjected to the brainwashing crystal of Melhus's captain. In her documentary A Day to Remember (2005), Chinese videomaker Liu Wei takes her camcorder to Tian'anmen Square in Beijing, China, on the sixteenth anniversary of the student uprising. Her interviews with young students reveal a disturbing picture: while most of them are initially willing to be approached by someone with a camera, all but one clam up when asked what this anniversary means to them. Either abruptly terminating the interview or blithely claiming ignorance, each interviewee reveals another facet of the bizarre nature of China's "opening" to capitalism. While the availability and mundane presence of camcorders in China reflects certain aspects of this transition--a fact reflected not the least by EMAF's special showcase on Chinese video art--the subjects' fear of engaging historical truth shows that, in the absence of democracy, collective memory remains elusive.

One of the most compelling pieces was "Match" (2005), a three-part video installation, for which artist Martin Brand purchased footage sold on the Internet by German soccer hooligans that features a secretly arranged fight between two of their groups. Brand synchronized the already much copied and badly deteriorated footage, which had been taken from three camera perspectives, via the original soundtracks (heavy breathing and muffled voices), and then projected it at half speed onto large screens arranged in a tryptich format. These aesthetics highlight the deeply ritualistic nature of the fight and eventually offset the impression of hatred and fanaticism. Viewers should thus not mistake the piece for being merely another voyeuristic exploitation, with or without didactic alibi, of the excesses of modern violence. Instead, they are encountering an example of experimental ethnography about a highly transgressive subculture--not unlike the one portrayed in the Hollywood film Fight Club (1999, by David Fincher)--that has chosen to withdraw its violence from the public realm, while at the same time insisting on the right to practice violence among its own members. What makes Brand's piece so complex and challenging is his successfully executed refusal to pass judgment on these men, to raise questions rather than provide answers.

Another piece that risks inviting--and has, in fact, already fallen prey to--a knee-jerk interpretation is Melanie Manchot's video installation "Security" (2005). Manchot convinced the chief security guards of the island of Ibiza's seven biggest nightclubs to pose for a daytime video portrait in front of the gates they guard at night and, in the course of doing so, to take their clothes off in front of the camera. Predictably, certain critics have been quick to note that the installation foregrounds the tension between masculine armor and vulnerability, whereby it reveals the male physique to be a fragile house of cards that immediately crumbles when objectified in unconventional ways. Who would have guessed? Inevitable as it is, this nugget of wisdom would hardly warrant Manchot's efforts. What the artist is really after is the exploration of new forms of intimacy between her camera and its subjects--in a manner Andy Warhol first experimented with in numerous films during the 1960s. In Osnabruck, Manchot's installation first attracted viewers to its row of seven monitors, each displaying one bouncer facing the camera fully dressed. Viewers who ventured around this video wall discovered a room with a single image projected onto a large screen featuring, in sequence, the parts of each tape that show the guards stripping. The installation's interactive layout thus prompted viewers to decide for themselves whether to stay for the complete sequence, to shuttle between nude and clothed portraits, or to move on. Representative of the best of media art on display at EMAF, Manchot's piece gave viewers at least as much information about their own predilections as about its ostensible subject--and that may well be the best kind of politics in which media artists can engage.

ROY GRUNDMANN teaches experimental film and video at Boston University and is the author of Andy Warhol's Blow Job (2003).