Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

Having produced over 100 films and installations for television, cinema and art exhibitions, Harun Farocki is regarded as one of Germany’s highest-profile documentary filmmakers and media artists. A portrait and interview.

At the Kunsthaus in Bregenz in 2010, twelve flat-screen televisions were hung on the wall, showing the final of the 2006 Football World Cup between France and Italy – or rather, documenting the events taking place on and around the pitch from twelve very different perspectives. One screen focused on how the sky above the Berlin stadium slowly turned red between kick-off and penalty shoot-out, while another presented the images recorded by the surveillance cameras in the stadium. On other screens, coloured bars and figures illustrated the acceleration of players in possession of the ball or their running speeds.

In Deep Play, probably his most popular work, Harun Farocki, who was born in 1944 in Nový Jičín in what is now the Czech Republic, presents the World Cup final, otherwise a somewhat two-dimensional event, as a multi-perspective interplay of all kinds of different factors. “Defence configurations and striker formations mutate to become abstract bundles of lines, while plays become constellations”, raved the FAZ newspaper when the work was first presented at the documenta 12 in Kassel: a remark which stresses the work’s spectacular aesthetics yet says nothing about its analytical character, its essayistic openness or its ironic sense of the dreary idle state of the images.

War and games

Deep Play combines many of those elements that have shaped Farocki’s work ever since his first TV production Zwei Wege (1966) about a religious and allegorical oil painting: a critical examination of the economic, social, political and cultural rhetoric of stage-set images which are not intended merely for entertainment but increasingly for analysis and control, manipulation and strategy. In many cases, the works, some of which are created with considerable difficulty, refrain from giving any sort of offside commentary, leaving instead the images (their own or those of others) to speak for themselves: supported only by the “soft montages” of elements which are partly arranged in parallel to one another by way of comparison.

These aspects also feature in Farocki’s latest installation Serious Games which uses multiple projections in an attempt to illustrate the new relationship between warfare and simulation software. This installation was on show, together with other works by Farocki which explore the virtualization of the Iraq war, at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York until January 2012.

Harun Farocki: Serious Games (excerpts and interview)

Leaping right into the subject

Mr Farocki, on the occasion of your “Soft Montages” exhibition at the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, you quoted Adorno, claiming that an essay does not have to start with Adam and Eve, but should begin at the point of one’s own interest. Where was this point in the case of “Serious Games”?

It was the absurd experience that the US military uses the same interactive computer animations to prepare its soldiers for deployment in combat as it does later in treating traumatized soldiers who have returned home from war. That allowed me to leap right into the subject, and everything else just developed from there.

Learning about image perception

War settings have often preoccupied you: in “Between Two Wars” (1978) about the interconnection between heavy industry planning and the rise of Adolf Hitler; in “Images of the World and the Inscription of War” (1988) about non-evaluated aerial footage of concentration camps taken by American bombers; and in “Respite” (2007), in which you use historical film scenes showing everyday life of Jews at Westerbork transit camp. Why do you keep returning to certain themes?

A documentary filmmaker does not have any specific field of his own. In this sense, he tends to keep gathering together new findings in areas in which he has worked before.

Whilst researching Respite, for instance, I was appalled by the way films made by the Allies in liberated camps managed to turn the tortured or dead inmates into symbolic victims once again by portraying them as victims.

The euphemistic scenes of the “model camp” of Westerbork commissioned by the Nazis at least place the inmates in a context which makes them comparable to other people of that time.

From automation to brick production

In your case, however, it is not only wartime and its depiction that you are interested in…

… but rather the strange post-industrial types of work – for example in the area of consulting, the development of economic relationships, the omnipresence of surveillance technologies or the automation of the industrial work world which I compare in In Comparison (2009) to working methods in Africa and India using the example of brick production.

Or indeed images – in adverts, television programmes or computer games: and the bizarre transformations of the image that has increasingly become a technical image – a “work tool” as people call it these days.

The meta-view

Do any of your works no longer function from a modern point of view?

To a certain extent, everything I created before my 40th birthday is now politically obsolete. One exception is perhaps my agitprop film Inextinguishable Fire about the use of napalm during the Vietnam war; it is symptomatic of that time and is still fairly often screened, discussed and commented.

In the past, I was simply less interested in exploring the present and more interested in complicated evidence of a historical and ideological nature – back then, I was expelled, together with Holger Meins and 16 others, from the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin for political activities. What we did at the time is no longer so relevant. In that sense my goals have become more modest.

What are your goals today then?

Nowadays I am interested in an exchange with my audience: tackling a subject in such a way that it becomes productive and generates a force field via which others can continue to work on it. It is about gaining new access to things: about establishing a mode in which one not only sees something differently through the images, but sees the images themselves differently. If this meta-view is successful, a great deal has been achieved.

In the world of art

In the mid-1990s you began to show your work in museums rather than in cinemas and on the television. Why?

Firstly because television and cinema opportunities became increasingly rare. There is precisely one TV producer left who provides me with resources. What is more, my work receives far more attention in the art world. When Videograms of a Revolution about the Ceausescu story was premiered in two Berlin cinemas in 1993, just two people came to see it. The same film attracted thousands of people every day when it was shown at MOMA in 2011 and 2012.

Furthermore, one has of course much greater artistic freedom. The simultaneity of twelve screens I used in Deep Play would never have been possible in the single-channel media.

What are you working on at the moment?

Just now we are doing something about a consulting firm which is making interior design proposals for the Hafen-City in Hamburg and thus neatly links up with The Creators of the Shopping Worlds (2001) about the perfect planning of shopping malls. Only this time the focus is on modern life plans and the supervision of office work.