Berlin in (and out of) the Box

Nestled amongst the greenery along the western edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten lies the Akademie der Kunste, which was the host site for the 2012 International Experimental Cinema Congress, held October 10-14, 2012.  This five-day convergence of filmmakers, curators and moving image scholars has occurred twice before; both times in Toronto (1989, 2010).  Unlike the previous congress in Toronto, which was known as the Experimental Media Congress, this iteration was intent on returning cinema to the center of discourse for the duration of the five days (Think:Film was the title ascribed to the 2012 congress).

Following an opening night panel and screening of Jean Isidore Isou’s On Venom and Eternity there was a sense that the doors to the academy had been kicked open and no idea or gesture was to be seen as too radical. Panel discussions with titles like “New Footage Found,” “Theoretical Physics and Film,” and “The Edge of Narration” promised to expand on Isou’s bold manifesto for a new moving image art. However, many of the panels, despite the presence of avant-garde icons such as Michael Snow, Thom Andersen and Klaus Wyborny, failed to create a much-needed synergy amongst the guest speakers. A panel on “experimentation” in contemporary television dramas such as Breaking Bad and Oz practically threatened to upend the whole congress, with attendees decrying the impossibility of experimentation in the medium. As with any congressional gathering, dissent was in the air—upending any possibility for easy definitions or categorizations about the state of things.

Stepping outside of the spacious theater at the Akademie der Kunste I encountered Douglas Gordon’s Pretty much every film and video work from 1992 until now (1992- ) in a small gallery on the second floor. Arranged in a cluster of monitors stacked on crates and boxes, Gordon’s work functions as a kind of portable archive, scaling each piece into a bite-sized morsel that can be viewed collectively as a kind of visual stew. Gordon’s earliest performance works and cinematic appropriations fight for the viewer’s attention in what is either a chaotic jumble or an orderly assemblage of the artist’s oeuvre (depending on your definitions of “chaos” and “order”).

I saw a similar portrait of chaos and order in Paul McCarthy’s subtly ridiculous The Box (1999), recently on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies van der Rohe’s cube-like structure in central Berlin. The Box is a prepackaged replication of McCarthy’s studio and workspace housed in a large wooden crate and displayed on its side, allowing the contents to defy gravity and create a surreal set piece on the verge of collapse. Unlike McCarthy’s video and performance works, which are steeped in chaos, The Box is an eerie, ghostlike structure that gathers and celebrates the artifacts and detritus of the artistic process. Books, overhead projectors, ladders and other tools are gathered in a repository that echoes the artist’s body-centered output of the past several decades.

Gabriel Orozco’s Asterisms at the Deutsche Guggenheim is perhaps the perfect example of ordered chaos. Asterisms are groupings of stars that form images of objects or figures—The Big Dipper and Orion the Hunter are common examples. Working from two sites, a Baja California nature preserve, and a sports field in New York City, Orozco collected a vast amount of material refuse (plastic buoys, protective helmets, bottle caps, chewing gum, etc.) to assemble into a meticulously cataloged archeological installation. While the objects occupy the center of the gallery for casual inspection, Orozco has hung a series of photos that document each of the objects by category. A beguiling pseudo-scientific survey of discarded material objects, Asterisms is a haunting time capsule of an industrial society striving for order amidst chaos.