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READING THE END
OF THE MESSAGE
Leonda Kovac
As I leaf through the pages of this publication I respect the sequence
on its pages and allow them to determine the sequence of my notes. I
follow the representation of what its author Darko Fritz calls phases
in a project entitled End of the Message. I receive the message
at the end.
The table of contents tells me that the End of the Message prolongs
its own ending. Why? Is there a message behind that standard phrase
used in telecommunications? If there is, where does it end? In the act
of exhibiting in a public place, or in the form of this publication,
which, as a recapitulation of the stages of the end, could be called
a methodological manual of the archaeology of the message? Both of those,
or neither?
It is necessary to talk about form.
The first phase of the End of the Message exhibits original paintings
- works of art that were defined as such by the scholarly discipline
called art history, which specified and evaluated them because they
are the object of its interest. Chronologically, the paintings belong
to the last decades of centuries, and this time determinant defines
their set up in the spatial installation End of the Message, which also
takes place in the last decade of a century which is also the last decade
of a millennium. During this exposition of ends of centuries (every
picture is a metonym for the period it represents, so they represent
a liner historical sequence: 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th century, and this
periodization is one of the preconditions for evaluation) in the same
physical space (the room of the gallery) typographical pictures appear
in the form of telefax printouts that bear three messages simultaneously
transmitted from some other place. These messages are: NO VALUE, VALUE
ON, END OF THE MESSAGE. The content of each of the message is at the
same time the visible motif on the typographical picture. To what do
the messages, Le. the typographical pictures, refer? To the works of
art exhibited? To the process of their exhibiting? To the periodization
system that connotes evaluation? To themselves? Whose are these statements,
the contents of the three messages? They are unsigned, unlike the works
of art that are signed and dated. There is a distinguishing element
that sets the typographical pictures apart from the painted ones, an
element that does not come to expression at once but in the time of
exhibiting. That is to say, the texts of the telefax messages visibly
pale in the time of exhibiting, they become illegible, while the paintings
with the character of museum exhibits remain continuously legible. The
permanence of the message? Or the permanence of the work of art? The
medium establishes the difference.
The painted and the typographical pictures can be seen simultaneously
only in a convex mirror placed on the gallery ceiling. However, can
we credit what we see in this way? We know that convex mirrors distort
an image. What is the meaning of the distorted image, and why is distortion
emphasized. In this publication the author explains his work, and he
says that he was inspired by the work of Parmigiani no and Van Eyck.
I find the author's verbal explanation of his work more interesting
than discussing the function and meaning of the convex mirror, as a
motif in the period art history calls mannerism. Can the explanation
procedure be considered equivalent to painting a self-portrait in a
convex mirror? At the end of the message.
Under the mirror a security camera that constantly recorded during the
exhibition, and a video screen that showed what the camera was recording,
were placed side by side. With no time delay. In the exhibition area
a sign was placed saying that the camera was recording, made to look
like a traffic sign indicating danger. Is this traffic? What is circulating,
and where is the danger? In the explanation of his work Fritz said that
the "visitors are an important and active part of the installation.
It does not matter whether they accept this suggested re-evaluation
of the medium, or not. The electronic picture of an individual's body
in space is tele-presented in space by the security camera as it builds
the virtual memory of the installation". Is there any danger from
that virtual memory which, obviously, manipulates human bodies turning
them into a media image? Regardless of whether they accept this or do
not, the rules of the game have been set forth.
Art history, which is sometimes called a scholarly discipline, has its
own rules of the game. Its activities result in a system of inventories,
periodization, description, evaluation and so on, which is called the
history of art. Essentially, this system functions as an image of the
world built on the basis of memory. Whose memory, and furthermore, can
this memory, whose immanent imperative is to be remembered, be called
virtual?
In the second phase of the project, called the End of the Message
Security Camera, the author determines a video, i.e., a TV program,
consisting of a sixty-minute long selection of what the security camera
recorded during the exhibiting of the spatial installation End of the
Message in the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede. In this stage consumers
receive the End of the Message without the presence of a security
camera recording the process of reception. Unlike the preceding stage,
here the message is received exclusively through an electronic media
space in which condensation of time becomes possible. A question forces
itself on me here, is periodization and classification in art history
also a kind of time condensing?
As the End of the Message video tape is broadcasted by the TV transmitter
the project's system of references, which was transparent in the first
stage, becomes obscured. This does not imply that it changed. This is
the presentation of a narrowed context (the word context here means
the category of the historical), which functions as a different context.
The context of the first phase still exists somewhere, but the context
of the second phase, making the first context obscure, essentially changes
the addressee-message relationship. While in the gallery set up viewers
have the status of active participants in the generation of the work,
in the second phase they are only used as receivers. Their presence
in the time and space of the presentation does not alter the form of
the work which, as broadcasted by the television, is the message. Here
reception is reduced to passive consumption. Of what? Of something whose
original references are in the space-off, invisible on the screen of
the electronic receiver that ensures the work the status of video-art.
A category defined by the methodology of the scholarly discipline called
art history. An art medium. In the first phase the system of connotations
makes the viewers aware that they are looking at work of art, however
in the second phase they are watching a TV program. Two questions can
be asked here: does a TV program have the status of a work of art, and
is there equivalence on the relation work of art - program? To be more
precise, can every work of art be considered a program? If the answer
is yes, to what system of transmission does it belong?
The publication's table of contents informs us about the third phase
of the project called End of the Message (archives), which took
place in the form of a gallery set up of a series of photographs: video-stills
at a problem exhibition. Besides the visible frames, there are other
elements here that cannot be neglected, and whose character is not primarily
visual. They are concepts incorporated in the title and the basic data
about the work, which are called the caption or legend in the practice
of gallery-catalogue presentation. I do not intend to repeat Derrida's
discussion about the parergon [1] here to conclude that the name
of a work is its integral, even its constitutive part. I am more interested
in the extension of concepts the caption mentions: archives,
video-still and of course message.
Let us start with "archives". Dictionaries define it as the
place where public documents and the like are kept, or a collection
of historical documents about an institution or a community. The name
comes from the Greek work arkheia, meaning public documents.
Fritz's series of photographs satisfies conditions for calling something
archive material: the snapshots were made in a public place, what is
more, in an institution (in an art gallery - the location as an institution;
the act of exhibiting - the event as an institution; art - a category
as an institution), within a specific community (the gallery public),
and as documents intended for public presentation, i.e. use. The criterion
of historical authenticity is satisfied because the video recorder's
time code is visible in the bottom right-hand corner of each photograph.
The problem here is how the documents are used, to be more exact the
way and purpose of their presentation. The way history is used?
The archive concept connotes Deleuze's words calling Foucault a new
archivist.[2] "The new archivist," wrote Deleuze, "proclaimed
that he will from now on consider only statements. He will not concern
himself with what was the concern of earlier archivists in thousands
of different ways: judgments and sentences... statements cannot be divorced
from a space of rarities in which they are distributed on the principle
of avarice or even poverty. The possible or potential do not exist in
the realm of the statement, there everything is real and complete reality
is expressed: only what is formulated is important, what is here, at
this moment, and with existing vacancies and blank areas. It is obviously
possible to mutually confront statements and hierarchize them according
to levels. But in two chapters Foucault strictly shows that contradiction
between statements exists on only one positive distance, measurable
in rarefied space, and that statements are rarefied through a mobile
diagonal that makes it possible to directly encompass the same whole
at different levels in that space, but also to directly select specific
wholes on the same level, without considering other wholes that belong
to the same level (and assume a different diagonal)".
In the gallery set up at the problem exhibition Radical Images
eight photographs by Fritz, video-stills, act as a whole. As a whole,
that sequence questions the very concept of the whole on several levels.
The appearance of the work at the exhibition called Radical Images
gives the sequence of frames the attribute of radical images. What makes
them radical? The dictionary shows that the adjective radical exists
on several levels. On one it means: of the root, fundamental, basic,
far-reaching, thorough; on the other resolute, seeking complete reforms,
thoroughness in holding an opinion; there are also the grammatical,
mathematical, chemical and other levels. On which to read the radicalism
of pictures from the third phase of the End of the Message?
Let us return to the concept of the whole. Each of the eight frames
exhibited is the mediated printout of an electronic image of a detail
of part of the human body. The technique of transferring images to photographic
paper is specified by the term video-still that implies the procedure
of stopping a moving picture. Here the words of Dietmar Kamper come
to mind, about it being impossible to visually identify objects without
first bringing them to a standstill.[3] What kind of visual identification
is this? Visibility, more precisely the intelligibility of what is visible,
is proportional to distance from the lens of the security camera at
the moment of recording - surveillance. The'greater the distance, the
clearer it becomes which part of the human body is shown. And vice-versa.
In the bottom right-hand corner, where pictures that we usually call
works of art have the signature of the artist and the date, is the time
code of the video recorder. Read as a date, it shows that all the stills
were made on 5 November 1995, between 3:21:13 p.m. and 3:51:41 p.m.
These pictures present the efficiency of the security camera during
thirty minutes. If this is an archive, as the title of this stage of
the work implies, it should be possible to reconstruct the event on
the basis of documents. Let us provisionally call the event a whole.
But, what whole do the photographs indicate? A time segment of thirty
minutes as a whole; the human body as a whole; the whole in which that
body exists; the space of the work the End of the Message? Space
or spaces? The wholeness of the message?
Or levels, perhaps. On the level of authorship, the work is attributed
to cooperation between the lens of the security camera and its virtual
memory. This, too, is a whole: input - memory -printout. In the area
of the video-still neither the possible nor the potential exist, everything
is real and complete reality is expressed: only what has been registered
here is important, what is here, at this moment, and with existing vacancies
and blank areas. Foucault says that it is true that statements are
rare, but there is no need for us to be original to produce them. The
statement is always a transmission of uniqueness, of unique points distributed
in the corresponding space. The formations and transformations of these
spaces represent topological problems that are difficult to express
in the terms of creativity, beginnings or foundations.[4] Can we, therefore,
confront the expression "end of the message" by something
like "beginning of the message", which would imply not only
a chronological, but also a topological beginning? The possibility of
locating the place from which the process of transmitting the message
began.
The fourth phase of the End of the Message (archives -live!)
was in the form of a presentation with the characteristics of a spectacle.
The video tape of the End of the Message was projected in a drive-in
cinema simultaneously with the video-stills from that tape, and the
sound (recorded during the exhibiting in Enschede) was transmitted via
radio waves. The format of the moving picture frame was identical and
parallel with that of the videostills. Although both images are re-presentation
of the same event (the appearance of the End of the Message in
the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede), and were made with the same security
camera, they are different. On several levels. It is quite clear that
what we call difference, which is the basic determinant of the work
in all its phases, and of all the images that appear during the phases,
proceeded from editing. Therefore, editing is a precondition for the
existence of the wholes. Yes, of the wholes as a multitude, because
the End of the Message proves that there is no whole that could
be grammatically denoted in the singular. The video-film and video-still
construct virtual time in different ways; the videofilm by compression,
the video-still by stopping, i.e., by the cut. Compressed time and stopped
(cut) time are credible only from the perspective of history as a discipline,
not from the historical situation. The perspective of history is socially
real and legitimate, and its use is legalized. However, the drive-in
spectacle of the End of the Message shows that what is the same
is not identical. There are thus many historical perspectives, and each
gives a different picture, equally real, equally legitimate. This brings
us to the problem of identity. Whose? And at which level?
The fifth phase of the End of the Message - Security Camera is Recording
Now took place in a bank. There, in a function of decoration of
the public space, exists an original sculpture from 1917 that national
art history defined as an anthological work of art. On the floor, along
the back side of the pedestal that emphasizes the statue's status of
a monument, a video screen was placed showing the video program End
of the Message - Security Camera, the edited recording used in the
second and the fourth phases of the project. The screen, as usual in
museum and gallery presentations of works of art, had a caption with
the name of Darko Fritz, the name of the sculptor, the name and date
of the sculpture which in the bank serves as a decoration, the text
"Security Camera Recording", and the name of the video work
that was showing on the screen. The bank itself, of course, had its
own recording security camera. In this case the warning that recording
was taking place, which was addressed to the clients of the bank, in
this case also the exhibition public, was part of the legend, the caption
of the work. So what is the work, i.e. the work of art? And who is its
author? Can we speak about the identity of the author, furthermore about
the identity of what we call the work of art? Yes, if we do not consider
identity as something fixed, but something that is constituted at different
levels: spatial and temporal, where the process of constituting identity
incorporates a parallel process of deconstructing the basic concepts
of the discipline that we call art history. The concept of the work
of art, the concept of the artist, the concept of creation, the concept
of form, the concept of meaning, the concept of value, the concept of
permanence... and finally, the very concept of art.
Let us return again to the question of whether this work contains a
message, a work signed by a person whom the social inventory and classification
(of people) identifies as an artist, and which uses the standard telecommunications
phrase "end of the message" as an object (of interest) trouve
in the function of a title? At what level is the message? Perhaps in
the seventh phase that is called End of the Message (Edit Value)?
In messages printed by twenty-one telefax machines in the form of typographical
pictures, saying: NO VALUE, VALUE ON, END OF THE MESSAGE. Is choice
really possible?
Let us file this question in the total archives, too.
Zagreb, October
1996
Leonida Kovac
[1] Jacques Derrida,
La verite en peinture, Flaumarian, Paris, 1978.
[2] Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris,
1986.
[3] Dietmar Kamper, The Four Boundaries of Seeing, catalogue
to the Metropolis exhibition, Berlin, 1991.
[4] Deleuze, op.cit.
published at End of the Message - works 1995 -
1996, editor Darko Fritz, ex pose verlag Hansgert Lambers, Berlin,
1996
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