It’s said that Theodor Adorno asked to have the walls of his lecture hall painted a certain shade of grey. Perhaps this was an allusion to Hegel’s remark in Philosophy of Right that the work of philosophy resided within that colour’s layering. “When philosophy paints its grey in grey,” he wrote, “one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known.”1 For Adorno, the training of good dialecticians would involve inhabiting the achromatic appliqué that Hegel described. Beyond emitting a sobering Hegelian aura, Adorno’s grey was also simply intended to encourage concentration among his students. This was especially urgent given the distraction of the political and social upheavals taking place in Frankfurt at the time. While the student movements of 1968 were in no small way indebted to Adorno’s insights, he himself was nearly alone in clinging to the Hegelian view that thinking ought to lag behind. This passivity would be fatefully challenged in his first lecture of the term when a group of leather-clad female students burst into the lecture hall, surrounded the aged icon, and bared their breasts to protest his hypocritical failure to support the student movements. This was his last lecture. In response to the now infamous Busenattentat (or ‘breast assassination’) Adorno fled the commotion of the lecture hall and would enter a period of illness that led to his death just a year later.
The story of Adorno’s retreat is relayed in Hito Steyerl’s Adorno’s Grey (2012), an installation piece featuring a single-channel HD video projected onto four irregularly-angled, grey-painted screens in a grey-walled gallery. The 14-minute black-and-white video, coupled with a physical timeline of the history of student protests and naked protests, follows the activities of two conservators asked by Steyerl to chip away at the layers of paint in Adorno’s old lecture room, Hörsaal VI, to solve the mystery of his mythical hue, painted over in the intervening years. The contrivance of the documentary process is laid bare: Steyerl’s voice and directives are heard off-stage while a camera on a tripod stands centred in frame, a photographic softbox illuminating the wall of the lecture room. The juxtaposition invites comparison between the archaeological task of the conservators and Steyerl’s. Just as they attempt to decipher the layers of wall paint, Steyerl’s documentary gaze attempts to unearth the contradictions within Adorno’s social theory, circling around the unresolved question of his baffling sympathy with the structures of social repression he’d ostensibly critiqued. What is at work, Steyerl wonders and has us wonder, in the theorist’s complicity with institutions of oppression? And, at what point does this complicity eclipse her capacity to imagine emancipation from them? The documentary is as much about the artist herself as it is about Adorno.
Like lecture halls, art institutions are no stranger to contradiction. Sometimes these contradictions are put into public view, as when demonstrators, protesting a chairman’s involvement in the manufacture of artillery, occupy his gallery.2 In her work both as a visual artist and as a theorist, Steyerl attempts to work from an activist’s standpoint, seeing not only how the contemporary art institution sheaths violence, but how aesthetic production and material destruction are two sides of the same globally-circulating coin. Even when institutional critique itself threatens to become institutionalised (à la Banksy et al.), Steyerl insists that we keep our eyes on the gallery wall, the pedestal, the art storage facility, the cultural centre. We should be watchful of the violent conditions through and by which contemporary art subsists, especially when its dazzling and ever-expansive value has the potential to be, well, distracting. And, especially because Steyerl often finds herself entangled in these very conditions. As an unwitting fellow traveller in the art world’s war games, Steyerl has become our resident pundit of its quagmire. With apparent exhaustion, she recently spoke out against the Serpentine’s Sackler gallery, where the exhibition of her work was tainted by its association with recent revelations regarding the Sackler family’s production of the opioid crisis: “The effect that I’m experiencing, and the arts as a whole, is its toxic leakage. I would kindly ask everyone to help to address this.”3 Just a few months later, she also rescinded her work from the same gallery’s website, due to its director’s co-ownership of a cyber weapons firm.4 The drip-drop of toxicity seems not only to affect, but maybe pollute, Steyerl’s recent body of work.
In her recently published collection of essays Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (Verso, 2017) Steyerl focuses on conditions of collusion from a less personal vantage point. She opens the book with a reflection on the stasis of the present age. For Steyerl, stasis (following the lead of Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt) means both geo-political civil war and immutability. “[A] stagnant crisis,” she writes, “is the point. It needs to be indefinite because it is an abundant source of profit: instability is a gold mine without bottom.”5 Beyond profit, the global condition of stasis produces a particular kind of time. History invades the present, a looping of time into and over itself that forecloses the imagining or imaging of the future. As we live and make art in this age of permanent global conflict, our work is both limited by and wrought from this halting of historical dialectics. Now, in our contemporary moment, ‘progressive’ time seems to have come to a standstill – it glitches, or dances in place.
It’s no accident that Steyerl’s video work often gives form to a kind of graceless, stationary boogying. The effect of our present stasis, in its coveting of profit and instability, is affective; it goes all the way down into our toes, constrains and contains a body’s movements. This is something we see visualised in Steyerl’s single-channel video installation Factory of the Sun (2015). The critical darling of the 2015 Venice Biennale, the piece tells the story of labourers who are made to create sunlight by performing dance moves in a ‘motion-capture gulag’. One segment of the video features a group of dancer-labourers in gold bodysuits, sent from a future that looks like what we thought the future would look like in the past, forced by Deutsche Bank executives to groove on the remains of a former spy base in Berlin, all in the name of profit. Another piece of the plot involves a dancer and real-life YouTube sensation, who moves tightly but fiercely in an anonymous basement while a video-game clock counts time down obliquely in the corner. Time, seen from Steyerl’s viewpoint, can be both dead and deadly.
Steyerl similarly highlights the real-world danger of temporal and spatial disjunction in Duty Free Art. She describes how an old Soviet tank gets driven off its World War II memorial pedestal and taken into war on behalf of pro-Russian separatists. Meanwhile, in Diyarbakir, the unofficial capital of Turkish Kurdistan, a 3D-video simulation erases, through the filmic effect of horizontal ‘wiping’, the city’s war-wrought destruction and replaces it with digitally-rendered alternate images of the contemporary: playgrounds, cafés, and boulevards populated by humanised pixels. Elsewhere in Turkey, a one-time municipal cultural centre in Suruç takes on a new function as a refugee camp for people fleeing ISIS attacks, and in Switzerland ancient artefacts looted from Palmyra are discovered in the Geneva Freeport, not so far from the masterpieces of the 20th-century. Steyerl’s point is that art is not just a by-product of this homogenisation of time and space – but a functional, essential part of maintaining it. The question then becomes whether art retains, in light of its concordat with the stasis of globalised civil war, any emancipatory potential. In the attempt to respond to such slippages of time and space, Steyerl’s political and artistic outlook is necessarily cross-eyed. Like her dancing figures, she works from within the murky vantage-point of our own times, with the hope that giving mimetic form to the disjunction we feel as subjects of globalised and dis-chronic time can provide a potential avenue of escape. For Steyerl, as for her collaborator Peter Osborne, the point of making contemporary art is to respond to the idea and fiction of the contemporary, or to the elision of present, past and future which global capital demands. The ‘contemporary’, as Osborne has pointed out, is precisely that, an idea. While it’s seen as synchronising and coordinating fragmentary senses of time into one comprehensive totality, this totality remains essentially speculative and feels unreal. But perhaps there’s something emancipatory, or at least negative-dialectical in this uncanniness too. Contemporaneity, and with it contemporary art, has a close relationship to self-definition, and to critique. Art grasps itself, and the moment of its making, as a problem. It is precisely the political potentiality of this problematisation that is the silver lining in Steyerl’s ambiguous and sometimes cynical work.
Steyerl’s career-long attention to the corrupted and corruptible politics of aesthetics received recognition this year in the form of a Käthe Kollwitz Prize, named for the anti-fascist German artist and activist of the early 20th century. The show (a retrospective of sorts) is something of a homecoming for Steyerl who, despite now-global name recognition, is undeniably a product of her West German generation. Born in Munich in 1966, she studied at the famous Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film in the wake of New German Cinema and its crowd of auteur filmmakers – Fassbinder, Wenders, von Trotta, Herzog – whose work was marked by a concern with ‘realism’, and presenting a workable leftist politics in the wake of fascism. Steyerl is similarly concerned with real people and places, but she has refused to see film as a neutral vessel for critiquing capitalism, bourgeois values, or authoritarianism. For Steyerl, film is inseparable from ideology. She turns the camera, and its history, against itself. The exhibition accompanying the prize underscores just how exclusively her political task has been accomplished by means of questioning the moving image. Curated in close collaboration with the artist, it is made up entirely of film and video work, from her earliest and more strictly documentary films or cine-essays of the 1990s to her newer video pieces. The difference between the early and late work is stark. Steyerl is now known as one of the preeminent representatives of an ironical post-internet, post-conceptual look, which she shares with artists like Ryan Trecartin. It’s an aesthetic we see clearly with the show’s centrepiece, and the most recent work, Hell Yeah We Fuck Die (2016) a 3-channel video installation titled after the five most popular words used in English-language songs. The video features a blaring techno soundtrack which hypes up while we watch footage of robots, brought to life to be used in conflict zones, get haphazardly kicked over and knocked down by the engineers and designers who have made them. It’s a caustic, but also comic, commentary on the relationship between the artificial and the real.
The particular challenge posed both by the show and Steyerl herself is that of reconciling her recent attention to the digitally-manufactured, video game aesthetics, and the uncanniness of artificial intelligence with the more restrained and near-journalistic bent of her early documentary filmmaking. How might the raucous and ironical style of her recent years (captured in the very title of the work listed above) be seen in light of the sincere, almost didactic, 16mm films of her student years? One such work, Babenhausen (1997), a 4:04 minute video shot on Beta SP, tells the story of the last Jewish homeowner in a small town in Hessen after the Second World War, whose house was burned down by neo-Nazis in 1993. Another, Normality 6 (2000), one part of a 10-piece series of short video essays focused on the ‘normalisation’ of violence against marginalised groups, shows footage from a neo-Nazi rally that took place in front of the “construction site” of the current-day Holocaust memorial for Jewish victims of the Holocaust in 2000. In stark contrast with the newer work, which seems to address a deracinated and anonymous cosmopolitan viewer, taking place in the virtual non-spaces of the global imaginary, her earlier pieces shown in the final rooms of exhibition reckon with the particular complicity of German history; and with what it means to be, and to make images as, a German artist.
The show suggests that global and imaginary viewpoint of Steyerl’s current concern for the conditions of contemporary art making has its roots in an older, perhaps distinctly German, mode of reckoning with the persistence of the past into the present. In this vein, the clear climax of the retrospective, installed in megatron scale in the final room, is Steyerl’s 62-minute-long thesis film from 1998 Die leere Mitte (‘The Empty Centre’), an exercise par excellence in memory and the politics of German memory. The cine-essay, drawn from 8 years worth of filming, is cut with images of Potsdamer Platz’s history beginning in the Wilhelmine era to the present day. As Steyerl tells us – through interviews with squatters, archival footage, and contemporary video clips – the area acts as physical synecdoche of Germany’s colonial, racist, and anti-Semitic roots. These roots would be unearthed once more after reunification when immigrants to West Germany were displaced by the full-scale re-construction of Potsdamer Platz, driven by the symbolic necessity of turning what was once a border-land ‘death strip’ into an eerie and pedestrian-unfriendly cultural park. That Potsdamer Platz was made into something virtuous, Steyerl explains, is a kind of virtualisation of reality, achieved via enclosure and erasure. This message bears repeating now, especially as Potsdamer Platz is home to the Berlinale each year, a number of renowned cinemas (art house and megaplex alike), the museum for German film and television, and the German Film and Television Academy. The circulation and expansion of German film has been hard-won, and has been built atop the ruins of its history.
Steyerl further highlights the complicity of filmic media in the first piece she has us encounter in the entrance of the prize exhibition, which becomes, in a sense, the frame through which we can make sense of the retrospective. The suggestively-titled Abstract (2012), an HD-video that features two adjacent screens, was made to commemorate the death of Steyerl’s childhood friend Andrea Wolf, a German-born PKK fighter who was killed in 1998 during the conflict in the Kurdish region of Turkey. On one side, we see the words “Shot” and on the other “Countershot”, and then the eminently-Farockian turn of phrase “[T]he grammar of cinema follows the grammar of battle.” The seamless crossing between time and place mimics precisely the mise en abyme-feel of ‘contemporaneity’ that Osborne is interested in. It also draws our attention to the synchronicity of cinema and war. On one screen, we see Steyerl, the woman with the movie camera (or, in this case, an iPhone), watching footage of wreckage in the region where Andrea was killed. At the next moment, she shows herself with Berlin’s Pariser Platz in the background, which houses the headquarters of Lockheed Martin, the weapons manufacturer that sold arms to Turkey. In an uncanny twist of fate, Pariser Platz is also where the Akademie der Künste is located, and thus the location of Steyerl’s prize exhibition. The video thereby implicates the viewer in the cat’s cradle of war and art. It also, by extension, implicates Steyerl herself.
Her concern for the conditions of art production places Steyerl, as an epiphenomenon of the global art institution, in an uncomfortable position, perhaps much the same position in which Adorno found himself in at the height of the student protests. The overwhelming, and sometimes heavy-handed message propelling Steyerl’s work, seems to be that the artist’s collusion with the institution is the sad and necessary condition of contemporary art. The nexus of conflict-art, conflicted-art and complicit art thereby harmonise in an ironical and perhaps immobilising key. Is there room to move in such a grey area? Or must we, like Adorno’s students, simply sit with the contradictions? While Steyerl’s newer work seems to offer a constrained version of political possibility, there’s something starry-eyed in her older work that I miss. It suggests that we might still be able to move. The end of Die leere Mitte closes with a quote from the theorist Siegfried Kracauer, just as the camera closes in on a gap in the crumbling old Berlin wall and a blinding light drenches the frame. “There are always holes in the wall we might slip through,” he wrote, “and the unexpected can sneak in.”6 If you chip away at the paint of the walls in the lecture hall, you might find that the underlayer is not grey, but shining.
1. G.W.F Hegel (tr. T. M. Knox), Philosophy of Right, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967, p.13 2. Jasmine Weber, ‘A Whitney Museum Vice Chairman Owns a Manufacturer Supplying Tear Gas at the Border’, Hyperallergic, Nov 2018 (Online) 3. ‘Hito Steyerl Urges London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery To “Divorce” From Sackler Funding, Artforum, April 2019 4. Naomi Rea, ‘Serpentine Galleries Director Yana Peel Resigns, Blaming ‘Toxic’ Allegations About Her Links to a Cyberweapons Company’, Artnet, June 2019 5. Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in an Age of Planetary Civil War, New York: Verso, 2017, p.3. 6. “There are always holes in the wall for us to evade and the improbable to slip in,” in Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995, p.8.
Mimi Howard lives in Berlin and is working on a PhD about the fragility of post-war political philosophy.
