14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Painting Pavements
Volker Siebel
A popular specimen of the copyist is the pavement painter, still occasionally
seen today in the pedestrian zones of our cities. As a young man, Harun
Farocki started out as a pavement painter. Along with a friend, he copied in
chalk onto German pavements the works from the usual repertoire of these
true folk artists. Street painting is sustained in equal measure by the public’s
fascination with icons and the artist’s self-effacement. Street painters have to
keep to a limited canon of motifs (they may only copy easily recognisable images
so that their ability as skilful copyists can be appreciated by the crowd),
while they are condemned, in the face of the infinite possibilities of conceivable
images, to reproduce what is always already familiar. Nonetheless,
Farocki and his companion unwittingly outwitted this tradition. The more often
they reproduced a set piece, which after a while they did from memory, the
less it resembled the original. The reproductions actually ended up taking on a
character of their own. Yet such a show of individual style made them suspect
both in the eyes of their peers and the public. The suspicion was that they were
not masters of their trade (see ill. 22).
Many years later this young man can once again be found making copies of
pictures – though in the meantime, he has changed his medium to filmmaking.
Quite apart from the fact that no one would consider copying film images to be
a skill, he still does not seem to be able to comply with the reigning visual conventions.
Is he the eternal dilettante, and doomed to remain one, or has he
made some kind of progress after all?
Precipitation
In Etwas wird sichtbar (Before Your Eyes – Vietnam, 1980-1982), the street
pavement painting returns as a filmic motif: it is being washed away by the
rain. A precise metaphor for the transience of images (see ill. 7). Both pavement
painting and cinema, by their very existence, stage their own death. The
transience of the pavement picture is obvious – it is only painted ‘for the moment’.
In the case of cinema, the image is not only (mechanically) always in the
process of escaping the eye of the beholder, while the film material itself is in a