Panel II: Deconstruction – Digital World

Mit Beiträgen von:

Virginia McBride (New York/New Brunswick):
Window/Screen: The MAGA Bomber Van, Montaged

Adam Broomberg (London/Berlin):
Afterlife

Doreen Mende (Berlin):
The Screen Shared Live

Alexander Schwarz (Munich):
Photogeneity, Cinematic Montage, Fake, Progress?

Boaz Levin (Berlin):
“The Reader as Photomonteur”: Beyond the Image as Virus

Kolja Reichert (Berlin):
Cut and Physicality: How Can We Draw on John Heartfield’s Legacy Today?

Artist’s Statement: Anda Kryeziu (Kosovo/Berlin):
CUTTING AND SCREAMING The creation of the multimedia work “co-” as homage to John Heartfield

Questions by Florian Ebner

Questions for Virginia McBride

In your essay you clearly point out the differences between the modernist photomonteur of the last century and the way the MAGA bomber Cesar Sayoc combined and used images from the internet. You contrast the decontextualising and analytical, order-challenging cut with the copy-and-paste cut of our daily praxis that reinforces existing meanings rather than bringing about a change of mind. But in its political use photomontage has conquered the right-wing sector ‒ through Cesar Sayoc and thousands of other conspiracists like him who have used it for their productions of hate. Does this right-wing use cast photomontage into another light, in terms of it being some kind of holy avant-garde practice? Is photomontage in itself a subversive form of the established order, and yet by no means immune to all sorts of stupid viruses? And, do these questions point more to a question of similarities in use rather than differences, even if Heartfield’s use was particular virtuous?

In short, yes. The medium continues to offer templates for subversive social critique across the political spectrum. Insofar as photomontage is a formally deconstructive, dialectical practice, it has lent itself to politically progressive movements and marginalised groups. But, as this question suggests, the tendency to read photomontage (and avant-garde aesthetics more broadly) as inherently virtuous is as wrongheaded today as it was in Heartfield’s time.

Right-wing applications of the medium are nothing new; photomontage has been effectively deployed by fascist regimes and corporate entities for nearly a century. Their visual strategies vary, of course, and the fragmentary, juxtapositional syntax of the avant-gardists has found less of a foothold with the political right (though it prospers in advertising, where it arguably serves those interests). Instead, conservative montage more often amalgamates ideologically consistent imagery en masse, as seen not only in Cesar Sayoc’s meme montage, but also in authoritarian precursors (among them, the vast, utopian German and Soviet photomurals of the 1930s and 1940s).

Perhaps the novelty of Sayoc’s montage ‒ and indeed, that of many conservative contemporary practitioners ‒ is its wholehearted embrace of an outsider aesthetic. The medium’s D.I.Y. ethos, predicated on scavenging and repurposing found images, has long appealed to makers excluded from the professionalised fields of the visual arts and graphic design. Fundamentally deskilled, the meme format of montage offers as effective a visual language for fringe and extremist politics as for popularly held opinions. Among American politicians, this medium has proven critically useful for leaders eager to identify a rightist agenda with the interests of a disenfranchised working class. Donald Trump’s wholehearted embrace of the meme has succeeded ‒ at least in part ‒ in distancing him from the more establishment wing of his party. As visitor design’s project shows, Sayoc’s inventive montage technique is rather exceptional. But today, as in the modernist period, the wholesale equation of montage with vernacular expression merits skepticism, not only for its populist assumptions, but for its flattening of the medium’s expressive potential.

Virginia McBride is a research assistant in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is co-curating Pictures, Revisited, an upcoming exhibition about image appropriation. She is also a PhD student in Art History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, where she studies modernist photography. Focusing on Soviet and European photomontage, she investigates interactive modes of photographic dissemination and display in the interwar period.

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Questions for Adam Broomberg

In your work “Afterlife” you are indeed cutting out elements of photographs, withdrawing them from their original context, and bleaching out elements to make their absence even more telling. Is this gesture of abstracting, of making invisible a kind of response to the overdetermination that is the rule of photojournalistic imagery, and, by the way, even more the rule for political statements in Heartfield’s photomontages?

What we did was slightly more of a mechanical analysis and less of a political gesture then the examples you speak about. We knew that the photographer Razmi had used a whole roll of film to photograph the execution. And yet through the filtering system of the media you describe we were left with such a myopic view of the event. The only image we knew was this one photograph taken at 1/125th of a second, in line with the executioners and captured at the moment the bullets were fired. I remember reading an interview with Pierre Huyghe, where he describes his perfect film: portraying Kennedy’s assassination but viewed from multiple angles. By printing out all of the images of Razmi’s roll of film we are now able to understand the photographer’s movement around the event. We understand that events like this are time-based; they unfold slowly and unevenly, and not in a perfectly-composed single instant.

But you and Oliver Chanarin are clearly adopting a kind of Heartfieldesque attitude in your seminal work War Primer 2, when you paste images from the USA’s war against Iraq onto the pages of Bertolt Brecht’s war primer[the book “Kriegsfibel”]. You are confronting, or even, updating in a certain sense, Brecht’s reflections on war-time atrocities mirrored, enhanced and broadcast through photography. Is this overloading of the images with new meaning an escape from the voyeuristic overdetermination of photography?

The act of hijacking or détournement was the most important part of the project. The project functions by echoing and amplifying Brecht’s insistence on the complexity of events and photography’s inability to cope with that. It also highlights how fast the technology of making, distributing and digesting images has changed. But the way they function politically is still so limited ‒ since they are mostly used as currency in a capitalist media machine. I think we are entering a new and very interesting phase where Heartfield’s gestures can perhaps be embedded in the technology on everyone’s mobile phone.

Adam Broomberg (b. 1970, Johannesburg, South Africa) is an artist who lives and works in London and Berlin. He is one half of a collaborative team with Oliver Chanarin (British, b. 1971), whose joint work combines journalistic, documentary photography with visual arts. Major awards include the ICP Infinity Award (2014) for Holy Bible, and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2013) for War Primer 2. Broomberg & Chanarin are the winners of the Arles Photo Text Book Award in 2018 for their paperback edition of War Primer 2, published by MACK.

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Questions for Doreen Mende

My question to you refers to an inevitable issue you raised at the end of your essay: What might possible “forms and methods of articulation” look like ‒ those offered to the many “active participants in the production of visual cultures” when the shared screen made possible by Teams and Zoom have become part of a “progressive neo-liberalisation of education” (and of work)? Is it also part of the “language of the enemy” that should be appropriated, or preferably rejected? Do we need to fill these structures with other content? Or do we need to create new structures?

I think analysing existing digital platforms and filling them with content that is discomforting to monopoly capital (a challenge in the age of platform capitalism) is just as important as creating our own practices of transcontinental networking. These strategies are not mutually exclusive. The violence of tying power to capital through technology is not only complex, it is also several centuries old. The two can only be decoupled collectively and in several different ways at once. As Angela Davis said during a talk at the Akademie der Künste in June 2018, we can assume we won’t achieve this shift in our lifetimes. This highlights the importance of intergenerational solidarities between members of different social movements. At the same time, it addresses the politics inherent in the so-called global technologies of split-screens, liked and shared images, livestreams, video conferences, teach-ins, webinars, etc. Why shouldn’t they also be tools for internationalism of the 21st century?

It’s true that despite calls for collectivisation, our infrastructures remain embedded in imperial power structures that only those who feel safe within them can afford to criticise. How would we explain these problematics to the 17-year-old student Darnella Frazier, whose smartphone documentation of the brutal murder of George Floyd by the police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020 was published on her Facebook feed and led to a worldwide revolution by the Black Lives Matter movement? How could they be made plausible to Mary Jo Laupp from Iowa, or the members and fans of the teen K-Pop band Bangtan Boys from Seoul, whose “no-show protest” on the platform TikTok ‒ as in, reserve two tickets for Donald’s campaign rally at Tulsa’s BOK Centre on 20 June 2020 using your phone number but don’t actually attend  ‒ successfully ensured that thousands of seats remained empty? How inappropriate would it be to reproach a Palestinian photojournalist affected by the 2014 bombings for speaking “the language of the enemy” when using Twitter to make her visual voice heard from her living room in Gaza by publishing images on the digital platform for mass-communication available to her? Oraib Toukan did so in her Skype-desktop essay When Things Occur (2016), partly to evade the dominant media narratives of European photo agencies. Not even the calls to collectivise Facebook confront the blindness of “techno-fetish activism” given the eco-colonial infrastructures the worldwide web (www) is based on, as Vinit Agarwal states in his contribution for the Harun Farocki Institute’s Rosa Mendes Journal #02.

Therefore, the question of critique cannot be separated from issues of class, privilege, localisation and unfinished history. In this context, the call for “selfie-communism” (Jodi Dean) could be a means of countering platform capitalism with the political power of the crowd as digital commons. However, we cannot leave it at this method, or strategy, or visual praxis alone. As Audre Lorde illustrated in her 1984 collection of essays Sister Outsider, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In other words, an either/or answer would be “a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought,” as the black, feminist and lesbian poet phrased it while also pointing out that a binary either/or believes itself morally entitled to wield subjective judgment. What’s most important is supporting and allocating any and all resources available to organisational structures that seek to connect various minorities’ struggles for social justice with one another.

Doreen Mende is a curator and theoretician. She is currently professor for Curatorial Politics and director of the CCC Master and PhD Forum at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD), Geneva, Switzerland. She has been a co-director of the Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin since 2015, together with Volker Pantenburg and Tom Holert. Mende’s current curatorial research projects include Worldmaking After Internationalism, as part of a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation for the research project Decolonizing Socalims. Entangled Internationalism, in collaboration with the University of Basel, the Kunstverein Leipzig, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and HKW Berlin.

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Questions for Alexander Schwarz

Taking Soviet film as your point of departure, you relate its montage techniques and factographic exposure to Heartfield’s similar concept that things should be exposed in a certain way. In view of the ontological crisis regarding today’s images which you mention, how might we transcend the mechanisms of contemporary image culture? How might we create a counterculture today in the spirit of Heartfield’s legacy? Or is such an attempt doomed to fail, as it will be drowned out by a sea of images? What kinds of cutting and editing tools do you think a contemporary monteur would use?

In my opinion, our fashion of capturing and manipulating images is characterised by two aspects. First, as digital cameras and smartphones are always within reach, this generates a glut of private photographs, which can swell into a public tide of images once they have been uploaded to video-sharing platforms and social networks. Technological progress is blurring the lines between the private sphere/amateurism, and the public sphere and professionalism. Images depicting real events only seem to have any weight if they are viewed by loads of people. To be noticed among all the competition for attention, the producers clearly modify, edit and comment on innumerable images with filters, layers and apps. Occasionally there are aspects that touch on Heartfield’s notions of montage.

In addition, the simplicity of being able to copy and capture images and videos off the internet and from television creates another repository of stored images. It can range from familiar pick-and-mix videos with attributes such as “Top 10”, “Best Fails”, “Most Beautiful Kissing Scenes” to clips of news broadcasts or dashcam footage, lecture recordings, etc. New ground is being broken here, as the urge to capture, relive, or emphasise what takes place, in essence becomes a quotation or motto. The authority of the presented material validates and elevates one’s own position and further strengthens it. In this repository of stored images a counterculture is sometimes generated through the fabricated nature of images or the manner in which they are presented.

The second trend in image culture, also fuelled by rapid developments in image processing, is evolving in the opposite direction. Here, too, being seen and being convincing is also important. However, instead of revealing how something was made, concealment and “alternative facts” are put to use, as Trump’s entourage aggressively demonstrates. Websites that make sweeping reference to the extensive circulation of fake news are themselves guilty of contributing fakes, with their constant decontextualisations, image manipulations and ambiguous interpretations, and they are booming. They try to generate a new mainstream of data, whose authenticity can no longer be substantiated, but merely asserted. They are deliberately persuading us to look less closely, with the argument that they are providing true counterculture against the fundamentally deceitful world of images and facts dominated by the media until now.

Attempts to oppose this demagogy and crisis of images are still somewhat paltry. You can apply digital watermarks, demand source citations, uphold the principles of ethical journalism or develop technical filters or fact-checking devices for unmasking cuts, manipulations or criminal behaviour. Given the floods of images they have to contend with, even Facebook und Google are struggling to uphold their guidelines – or to even establish any semblance of them in the first place. This is why it is more important to create more awareness among the people who produce these images, to advocate for a more mature use of images and media, to develop a healthy dose of scepticism and to make clear how incendiary fake and manipulated images can be. And to continue to stand up to the people who deliberately exploit them.

What is your favourite work by Heartfield? And what discoveries did you make in the catalogue?

A personal rediscovery is Heartfield’s montage for Franz Jung’s Die Eroberung der Maschinen. I read up on it in Hans Reimann’s essay: “His greatest accomplishment is his book cover for Jung’s Eroberung der Maschinen, where you feel the same tension as in certain scenes in Battleship Potemkin. It threatens to burst your lungs wide open, which is achieved with a Browning, a fist and a mysterious machine-puzzle, with a red triangle wedged into it. Here is someone who understands what Futurism is. And Expressionism. And agglomeration. Heartfield is truly expressionistic – with a practical background.”(1) I agree. And Jung’s novel about the March Revolution of 1921 are also worth reading.

(1) Hans Reimann, John Heartfield, in Das Stachelschwein. Berlin, 1927, p. 40. Reprinted in Roland März (ed.), John Heartfield. Der Schnitt entlang der Zeit. Selbstzeugnisse, Erinnerungen, Interpretationen. Dresden, 1981, p. 233; here in translation

Alexander Schwarz lives in Munich. He is a film historian, curator of film series, filmmaker and translator. He curated a retrospective on the Russian-German film studio Meschrabpom-Film und Prometheus for the Berlinale in 2012, as well as various programmes for the Munich Film Museum and the Goethe-Institut. He co-published the DVD Der Neue Mensch (2017) with Rainer Rother. Since 2017 Schwarz has taught film and Slavic studies at the University of Basel.

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Questions for Boaz Levin

In the first part of your essay, I am very intrigued by your research on the competition encouraging readers of the “AIZ” in 1937‒38 to become photo editors and photomonteurs. Can this example be viewed as a kind of little archaeological experiment on the participation of readers and viewers? Is photomontage a technique that is conducive, or shows a particular affinity to participation? In this light you consider the meme to be a kind of native platform for our contemporary and participative culture of “users”, but at the same time you make a clear distinction to the politically articulated use of images in Heartfield’s art practice. Is this continual morphing and evolving, constantly changing structure of the meme ‒ as you illustrate with the Hope meme ‒ a long-term enrichment of its semiotic character or a loss of original contextual meaning?

Yes, exactly. As you point out, I think what I find particularly interesting in Heartfield’s work, and more generally in the work of the AIZ and its circle, is their attempt at a realisation of something akin to a “productivist aesthetic”: their radical experimentation with the emancipatory potential of mass-media and industrial image production. In that sense, not only is photomontage shown to have a strong participatory tendency, I think it has the potential ‒ beautifully demonstrated in these two competitions ‒ to truly blur the boundary between production and consumption.

Of course, there is a certain irony in that people like Heartfield and Benjamin couldn’t possibly anticipate the ways in which such a blurring, which they saw as subversive, would end up being exploited by data-extractivist corporations and so called “social networks” in our current age. Revisiting these competitions in this little media-archaeological excursion, thus allows us to ask, what might participation look like beyond “users” and “memes”? Or, put differently, could we learn from Heartfield and AIZ how to repoliticise the meme?

As Kolja Reichet rightly shows, there are plenty of contemporary examples for the meme’s subversive potential that seem to echo Heartfield’s work, such as the recent You about to loose your job video. Yet looking back at AIZ, what’s striking is the emphasis not only on the image content and its circulation (the meme), but also on the means. “Who owns the platforms?” ‒ the means of production, or maybe, the meme’s means ‒ remains the essential question. The AIZ was a radical enterprise since it managed to wrest the power of mass-media from the hands of capital, thus the reader’s participation was used not in order to generate profit, but for explicit political ends. Part of the difficulty at the moment seems to be that there are little viable alternatives to data-extractivist platforms, so that rather than “wielding a camera like a gun”, as Heartfield suggested, these images end up playing a far more ambivalent role within an attention economy. Concerning your second question: I think perhaps the answer is that work’s such as D. H. Saur’s Hope meme question the notion of any stable sense of “original contextual meaning”. Another example, which might be worth considering in this context, is the powerful work of Forensics Architecture. I see their work as an interesting continuation of Heartfield’s tradition in that they, too, build on a rhetorical understanding of photographic meaning. Perhaps this also adds another aspect to your question, concerning the enrichment of the image’s semiotic character: in forensics, meaning is created by the careful construction of an argument. Rather than the presumption that an image carries documentary value via some sort of ontological indexical claim, here, truth is a carefully (artfully) staged construct.(1)

What is your favourite work by Heartfield?

In a way I think the competitions, which technically speaking aren’t by Heartfield, are my favourites, since they demonstrate the powerful potential of his practice to go beyond its author. Therein, it seems to me, lies its true strength. But if I had to pick one work, it might be his cover for Upton Sinclair’s book So Macht Man Dollars [Mountain City (1930)]. It shows Heartfield’s talent for slapstick along with his sharp wit; its brilliant and funny and feels like it could be a design from today, or tomorrow.

And what was a surprise for you while working on your essay or a discovery that you made in the catalogue?

It was fascinating to discover Heartfield’s work on Vietnam, as well as his stage design. His Ob schwarz, ob weiß ‒ im Kampf vereint! feels as relevant as ever. And it was great to read Kolja Reichert’s consideration of Arthur Jafa within this context.

(1) To paraphrase Thomas Keenan, who quotes artist and writer Oraib Toukan on the “staging of truth”. See Thomas Keenan, “Getting the Dead to Tell Me What Happened” in Forensis, The Architecture of Public Truth, Forensics Architecture (eds.), Berlin: Sternberg Press, p. 51

Boaz Levin is a filmmaker, writer and curator who lives and works in Berlin. He is the co-founder, together with Vera Tollmann and Hito Steyerl, of the Research Center for Proxy Politics. In 2017 Levin was co-curator of the Biennale für Aktuelle Fotografie, and is currently co-curator of the 3rd Chennai Photo Biennale, taking place in Chennai, India. Levin is editor of Cabinet Magazine’s “Kiosk” platform.

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Questions for Kolja Reichert

The three questions we have for you, which relate to John Heartfield’s relevance today, have been defined by three filters: circulation, activism and art. The one about art, concerning Arthur Jafa and cutting/editing, is very short, but concise. Perhaps Heartfield’s real lessons are grounded less in his art (a focus placing too much emphasis on instruction), but instead are more about the dissemination of images and activism?

Certainly, we could talk at length about cutting/editing in contemporary art. The singular physicality of Henrik Olesen, Kara Walker and Frida Orupabo’s radically planar collages. Simon Denny’s re-montage of aesthetic and economic contexts, a quite vivid example being his transposition of the Biblioteca Nazionale’s ceiling frescoes onto the baggage conveyor belts of Marco Polo Airport for the Venice Biennale in 2015. Then there are James Richards’ films, which edit, separate, mirror and overlay images with and against one another. The fact that I chose just one example was partly due to limited space. But yes, when asked like that, I could have cited countless other sources who use montage and “the cut”, apart from John Heartfield: from Marcel Broodthaers and Hannah Höch to Cornelis Gysbrechts’ painting on the back of a painting (The Reverse of a Framed Painting, 1670). Is John Heartfield’s work compatible with contemporary art? Most probably, if used as a particularly sharp historical lens with which some detachment is achieved to provide a clearer view of the present.

In your section on circulation, you discuss an example of a meme about the rapper Johanniqua Charles that has gone viral on the internet and has been frequently adapted and re-circulated. It exemplifies how the collective impact of resistance and popular culture can boomerang to create physically performative and compellingly powerful visual practices. This isn’t a montage in the classical sense, but you get the impression that those who were actively involved cut and re-edited the footage in a film-like style. Are such media practices a transcendence of established collage; an overcoming of stasis and entrenched political polarisations; and a means of going beyond glue and the spray gun for a transformation into something new?

Yes, what’s fascinating about this political-cultural practice is its attitude of nonchalance. To me, intuition is the driving force here: Let’s experiment, let’s edit it this way or that, and it’s good to go. The result doesn’t have to adhere to any criteria like a song or music video, quite the opposite; its appeal lies in its cursory reference to them.

Before finding a form, the material has to be understood and its potential identified. This leads to something decisive, which I believe is at the basis of meme culture and has been little explored so far. Our perception has changed since our knowledge started to be organised, and social relationships formed via the internet. It’s as if we analyse and dissect the things we observe less thoroughly, dig less deeply into them in our search for meaning, our glances merely sweeping over them as we simultaneously scan surrounding phenomena out of the corners of our eyes. This eye movement is similar to scrolling (as opposed to grabbing something) and is usually accompanied by it. Each character/ symbol/sign, and each combination of these elements, splits into infinite new, potential constellations, none of which is better or worse than the others, in principle.

The hermeneutical image of the fusion of horizons can be contrasted with that of a constantly mutating planetary system. Whereby the viewers (most of whom are inevitably already co-producers, as what they look at in turn influences how algorithms evaluate and process what they have paid attention to) are intuitively aware of the changing and provisional nature of their own position. They are also aware of being observed themselves, just like Johanniqua Charles, who recognised the potential gaze of a global audience in the lens of the camera held by the colleague of the security guard detaining her.

Indeed this video-like meme thrives on the fact that it cannot be reduced to represent a message or gratify some objective. It’s a collective concept, open to be used by many. And it owes far more to the culture of hip-hop and its use of sampling than to John Heartfield. But I find the juxtaposition intriguing. In any case, it adds some excitement to his work for me. Most of all, the historical distance becomes more tangible compared to a time where the political arena was much more polarised and much more fiery debates were held along precisely delineated boundaries.

John Heartfield used cultural strategies for political purposes. In the “You about to lose your job” meme the division of culture and politics is more complex. With a political project, the assumption is that it doesn’t need a lengthy explanation. This cultural form allows for a collective performance that is politically implicit by being embodied in front of a camera. Naturally, this is an expression of a media constellation that is radically different from that of the 1920s, 1930s, and even the 1990s.

Should you categorically reject the concept of “montage” in this case? The appeal of a meme is that sounds and images are assembled from different contexts, none of which remains unchanged. Photographs of the arresting police officers scroll upwards as Elmo dances to rap. Then there are the copycat videos on TikTok, in which users dance in front of Trump or the White House with the use of a green screen. Isn’t that montage?

Regarding Instagram, but even more soTikTok, couldn’t we be talking about extended montage – in which people are “montaging” themselves into ever new contexts? And the way in which the fruits of their labour pass before the viewers’ gaze, is characterised by maximum disruption: cut/edit, cut/edit, cut/edit. Except that these cuts/edits are the results of the unpredictable synergy of user behaviour and algorithms that can generate new trends for their part, which can be described as social games played among strangers.

What was a surprise for you, or what did you discover in the catalogue?

Boaz Levin’s examination of the competition for readers of the AIZ in 1937–38.

Kolja Reichert is the visual arts editor for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. In 2018 he was awarded the Akademie der Künste’s Will Grohmann Prize.

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