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83
31 — # 08/09 (Dezember 2006)
Das Magazin des Instituts für Theorie
der Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich (ith)
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MB The major difference between this
form of research and the writing I usually
do is the collective aspect, the teamwork.
I had to learn to relinquish mastery,
and this was both a deep pleasure
and a rich source of insight. Also, the
possibility of integrating visual with
linguistic reflection enabled a richer
and more complex form of ‹argumentation.›
I cannot compare these videos to
artists working with theory. I came
from the opposite side, and while my
knowledge of theory is more solid than
most artists’, I do not presume to rival
their artistic talents and skills. But my
theoretical skills — the capacity to
make theory work, to bring it to bear
on live art — is perhaps what I can offer
in addition.
My three films on Louise Bourgeois
— one of the ArtClips, two exhibition
films — further expand the Art-
Clips ideas. Of the many films made
about this artist, these are the only ones
that do not feature the artist in the film.
I am a bit proud of that. It makes the
point nicely, especially in the case of
this over-biographed artist. Here, the
centrality of the viewer, the importance
of the subjective engagement with the
artworks, is driven home even more
forcefully.
SL Other films you worked on deal with
transcultural and migrational issues
and can be seen as social documentaries.
Again, what is the motivation for
your personal involvement in the documentaries
as a scholar? The personal
history of the people portrayed is the
key topic in these documentaries; the
political issues shine through, but the
theoretical context is not explicit. How
important is the connection to theory
in the films for you? In your view, are
these illustrated ‹case studies› — to put
it somewhat provocatively — the coming
alive of the work on paper? How
do the language of words (theory, academic
work in the form of text) and the
language of images (films) differ? Of
course, writing is highly imaginative in
itself, and reading those writings engenders
implicit images in the reader. As
for filming, there is a more explicit dependency
on the producer and the perceiver
of the images shown. Is the
‹branding› of images in this medium a
topic you consider?
MB What one tends to call social documentaries
are a body of experiments
with the impossible but necessary task
to engage with people who are doubly
‹different›: not only do they come from
a different culture than mine, but they
live a bi-cultural life, a measure of insecurity
that in itself is a cultural context
which I cannot even begin to understand
and feel. I am more and more
disinclined to call them documentaries.
It is only because conventional thinking
about film is predicated upon the dichotomy
between fiction and documentary
that I have to call them documentaries.
I am deeply uncomfortable with that
binary, though. The films do not document
anything. All they document is
what happens when the people they
portray choose to confront the camera.
Hence it is their performance that is
documented, a bit like the documentations
of early performance art. Except
that they enact their own lives. But they
act, they perform, and they know it full
well.
The intertwinement of individual
life stories and politics — what you consider
as not explicit — is for me the
only real-life quality of politics itself.
Take the first of this series, Mille et un
jours (A Thousand and One Days). My
motivation was initially triggered by the
shameful treatment of a friend of mine,
an ‹illegal› immigrant in Paris. (But no
human being is ever illegal!) The
police interfered with his private life in
ways that cannot be excused with an
appeal to the law and the rules. So I
wanted to do something, to bear witness.
That was naïve. One cannot bear
witness. Instead, what I did was get
together a group of five artists, all young
people, to participate in the joyful outcome
of the near-disaster. We were
received like old family friends, met
with total confidence and friendship,