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Strategies against one's own state of mind

Video, less than a source of light - at last an anachronism, two generations before the citizen's revolutionary transfiguration. Now sharing at best the monitor with the "new media technologies" - not at all by chance? All too often misunderstood imitation of often simulated every-day confusion. The illusion regarding this leads to yet another imitation. A race for conventions.

Video, a surrogate for fear. The Fast Forward button, the only substance. The cassette, just a formalised deception of the lost idea. The concept of video, just an unbefitting manifestation of fundamentally false thought about an industrial process, arising from a lack of plausibility. Changing society, the irritation of moment and status or even just the perforation of the world, is not at anyone's disposal.

Video, a two-dimensional variant which has long ago raised one- dimensionality to a desirable goal, destroyed and manipulated from the point of view of a still not emancipated society, credibly subordinated to the dynamics of power.

Video, as an ornament against a modern society. The video "artist" as an ornamentalist, a sentimental stooge for cynical justification of petty bourgeois trivialities.

Video, not as formerly pre-thought, opening the world and making it aware, or at least offering help in the turn towards an enlightened and compassionate society. But rather, forced into experience, stupefying humankind with an enormous loss of energy, together with increasing alienation and actual impotence, which, beautified like this, is prey to the resignation of hope - when authenticity has left. Technology strengthens itself a priori. Hands and legs - the body - eyes, ears and skin - the brain, all vanish between a few hundred lines. the narrow-minded determination of pre-formulated algorithms, driven by the memory of genuine, original clarity, decays under the circular blows of old routines.

Video, really only credible and thereby consequential at the sides of those members of a society who seek only its advantages. Nothing is revealed here so totally as the dominant interest of the day. And yet so distorted and aesthetisized that it tends only to consumerism and repression rather to opposing ideas and debate. For communication and publicity not only provoke - but blind. For art, however, this is of great importance. Analysis of this technology, this production process of society, can indeed be one of the main tasks, the greatest challenges of art. What counts, therefore, is to try out untried suggestions in this regard - suggestions which neither harmlessly accept the problem level nor sacrifice at will the range of thought results, but rather attentively, critically interrupt the telecratic procedures of a given time.

In other words, artistic reflection is rare, which is to say painting is not turpentine, literature not merely cassettes - even though politics are only privilege, commerce only profit, scholarship only reality, meaning only lies, anabolics only sport, fast food only nourishment and in this way video and publicity become art. Whether this is true or false is no longer relevant and is a waste of energy considering the absence of vision and pespective. Everyday life is not spent in competition with alternatives, therefore following something like an artistic process and consequently a heuristic process methodology, can denounce a discourse which is qualitatively different - inform on it, blacken its name - a discourse which then departs from the customary models and categories.

Video - together with such things as sculpture, text, music, film - is at the same time one of the possible forms of communication which then touches something like a suggestion, in the best sense of the word, contributing to the departure of practised patterns, combined with a discussion of the greatest possible extension beyond the parameters of mediating circumstance.

Michael Haller, Professor of Media-Ecology

Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg, July 1993

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