“There’s no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” — Walter Benjamin’s much-quoted aphorism seems to haunt Hito Steyerl’s dense and prodigious survey of films and detourned PowerPoint lectures, which spans Artists Space’s two locations in downtown Manhattan. The German media theorist and post-documentary filmmaker blurs fact and fantasy, swerving between barbed indictments of the “cage without walls” she calls the contemporary art world and a delirious, cybernetic sublimity that gives form to the quicksilver circulation of objects, images, and currency in our age of global network capitalism.Steyerl, whose influential writings regularly appear in the online art theory journal e-flux, operates through an elastic, associative logic, tracing a web of precarious social and economic relations where people and things are broken down and repurposed according to abstract market imperatives. Each of her films on view at Artists Space’s Greene Street location deals with a kind of career change. In “Liquidity Inc.,” an investment banker becomes a cage fighter. In “Guards,” a solider becomes a museum security guard. In “In Free Fall,” a commercial passenger jet is blown up as a movie prop, sold as scrap, and transformed into the iridescent varnish on the underside of DVDs.“Liquidity Inc.” follows an erstwhile financial advisor named Jacob Wood, a Vietnam War orphan who came to the US as an infant as part of Gerald Ford’s Operation Babylift. Laid off during the 2008 financial crisis, Wood reinvents himself as a mixed martial arts fighter. In MMA, as in finance, Wood says, stasis is “the kiss of death.” “Be formless, shapeless, be water my friend,” MMA forefather Bruce Lee tells us, echoing the advice of financial guru Douglas R. Andrew. Riffing on the finance buzzword “liquidity” — the ability to turn assets into cash, objects into abstractions — Steyerl pumps the screen with aquatic imagery: digital renderings of water, news footage of hurricanes, psychedelic clip-art versions of Hokusai’s “Great Wave off Kanagawa,” a crypto-weather report featuring a ski-mask-wearing meteorologist, and an animated gif of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” famously described by Benjamin as the “angel of history” propelled into the future by the storm of catastrophes past.“Guards,” 2012, centers on Ron Hicks and Martin Whitfield, two African-American museum security professionals with backgrounds in law enforcement and the military, respectively. While Whitfield recalls his blood-soaked experiences as a “shit magnet” police officer, Hicks “engages” and neutralizes an imaginary threat with combat tactics adapted from ancient Asian martial arts. As the guards pace through the modern and contemporary galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cy Twomblys and Eva Hesses on the walls transform into screens looping police surveillance footage. The rarefied aesthetic space of the modern art museum is underwritten by a tacit threat of paramilitary force, with the division of labor falling along race and class lines.While “Guards” insinuates a connection between art and violence, the stakes are raised in a video recording of “Is the Museum a Battlefield?” 2013, one of several of Steyerl’s lecture-performances screening at Artists Space’s “Books and Talks” annex. Steyerl stands at a podium, showing a PowerPoint slideshow of an ammunition-littered battleground in Southern Turkey, the site where her childhood best friend, Andrea Wolf, was extrajudicially executed by the Turkish army in 1998 alongside 30 other fighters in the women’s army of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PPK), a socialist Kurdish separatist group deemed a terrorist organization by the US and the European Union. Among the human bones, ammunition shells, and rocket scraps, Steyerl unearths a 20 mm ammunition case manufactured by the defense contractor General Dynamics. Following the bullet on its circuitous trajectory backwards through space and time, Steyerl ironically arrives in front of one of her video pieces installed at the Art Institute of Chicago, an institution partially supported by the largesse of General Dynamics’ founding family. Tracing a queasy feedback loop between cooperate arts philanthropy and arms manufacturing (implicating herself and several supporters of the Istanbul Biennial, where this lecture was originally given in 2013, Steyerl links Turkey’s art market boom to the explosion of big business, a coup made possible, she says, by “crushing the Communist Party, leftist organizations [such as the PPK], Kurds, Armenians, and labor unions.” “I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production,” 2013, looks at artistic production at a time when Joseph Beuys’ famous axiom — “everybody is an artist” — has metastasized into today’s thirsty, hypercompetitive 24/7 market of precarious “creative” labor. Steyerl reads a letter from a guerilla warrior pitching a sequel to his favorite novel, Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables.” She likens the lumpen subjects of Hugo’s June Rebellion to today’s proletarianized urban poor of freelancers, students, and aspiring artists, while comparing the rambling, serialized form of Hugo’s novel to her own lecture — “written on demand in response to a commission,” and admittedly “full of cliffhangers” and “excessive and incoherent plotlines.” A clip plays from Susan Boyle’s breakthrough “Britain’s Got Talent!” performance of “I Dreamed A Dream,” from the musical adaptation of “Les Mis.” Earnestly belting Fantine’s paean to unrealized desires and ambitions, the stout, middle-aged Boyle becomes an unlikely post-Fordist heroine, the patron saint of aspiring artists “waiting in the curtains to be casted, to audition, to pitch… facing judges with bleached smiles and anorexic cleavage.”If some of Steyerl’s themes — the digital proliferation of images, the terminal relationship between art and politics, the post-revolutionary malaise of neoliberal consensus – seem rather abstract, her 2007 film “November” is illuminating. It incorporates fragments of Steyerl’s first film: a grainy, unfinished Kung-Fu movie made on a stolen Super 8 about a feminist vigilante street-gang battling men in the name of justice. The aforementioned Andrea Wolf appears as the movie’s leather-clad “glamorous heroine.” In her early film, it is Hito who gets shot, Andrea who survives. She picks up the gun that killed her comrade, shoots the male perpetrator, and rides off into the sunset on a red motorcycle. In real life, as we learn in “November,” Wolf changes her name, goes underground, and is assassinated as a Kurdish terrorist. After her killing (made possible by Germany’s arming of the Turkish security forces with reclaimed East German weapons), Wolf’s image is immortalized as an icon of the Kurdish resistance, reproduced on posters and protest signs. Meanwhile, Steyerl’s image — that of the bereaved, liberal documentarian — is also instrumentalized in a television documentary, where the director drapes a Kurdish flag over her shoulders and instructs her to look “sad and meditative.” “There’s the pose of the militant hero,” Steyerl tells us in the voice-over, “but there’s another pose which is much more problematic: the pose of the tentative, contained, and understanding filmmaker who tells a personal story.”Interrupting her narrative with snippets of Bruce Lee action sequences, René Viénet’s Situationist Kung-Fu movie “Can Dialectics Break Bricks,” and the 1965 sexploitation flick “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!,” Steyerl elides the personal and the political, evading the traps of sentimentalized documentary and the ironclad truth-claims of propaganda. In her work, television, laptop, and iPhone screens are stacked within each other, matryoshka-like, highlighting the artifice of her work and its place within the promiscuous circulation of images. Steyerl updates the avant-gardist logic of montage, which Benjamin — inspired at the time by Dada photo-collage and Bretchian theater — advocated as a radical alternative to fascist spectacle and bourgeois realism. Writing in the 1930s, he believed, albeit naively, that the fragmented, disruptive effects of montage could create a productive sense of estrangement — shattering the complacency of the viewer and demystifying what we take for granted as “reality” as an ideological construct.“Autonomous art under current temporal and spatial circumstances needs to take these very spatial and temporal conditions into consideration,” the artist says in the lecture “Duty-Free Art,” a dizzy, digressive essay on the bizarro phenomena of a glutted art world riding the coattails of runaway capitalism (its object lessons include unauthorized Wikileaked emails between Rem Koolhaus and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad from 2010, and freeport storage facilities: tax-sheltered concrete castles where high net worth individuals hoard millions of dollars of crated Picassos as liquid assets). “Art’s conditions of possibility,” she continues, “are no longer just the elitist ‘ivory tower,’ but also the dictator’s contemporary art foundation, the oligarch’s or weapons manufacturer’s tax-evasion scheme, the hedge fund’s trophy, the art student’s debt bondage, leaked troves of data, aggregate spam, and the product of huge amounts of unpaid ‘voluntary’ labor…” Without making any apologies for art — least of all her own — Steyerl’s difficult, darkly funny, and rewarding work resurrects an avant-gardist position and brings it to bear on the globalized, networked, fucked up present.
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