BARBARA VANDERLINDEN

Early in my research for this exhibition, I came across the book Pandora's Hope by the French sociolologist Bruno Latour, which opens with an intriguing anecdote. Latour describes his friend taking a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket on which he had scribbled a question. The weathered note read, simply: "Do you believe in reality?" "But of course! What a question! Latour laughed, adding: "Is reality something we have to believe in? Is reality something like God, the topic of a confession reached after a long and intimate discussion? Are there people on earth who don't believe in reality?"(1) The story should have ended there and would have if the question could be so easily answered. Instead, it haunted Latour and prompted his examination of the meaning and relevance of reality, primarily through the optic of science. The question in turn prompted my own reflections because although it may sound disarmingly simple, it points to a rich and complicated set of issues - at once philosophical, ethical, sociological and political - that are reflected in some of the most engaged and interesting artistic projects being made today.

Everywhere artists are grappling with the perplexing nature of reality. As a result, many are involved in collecting, documenting, archiving and translating their observations about reality into reflective, critical, and aesthetic forms. This has inspired individual artistic practice and image-making, but also collective work, art activism, filmmaking, and installations that respond to a situation both local and international, and often straddle the realms of art and documentary. Having abandoned the idea of starting from grand principles or abstractions validated in the past, these artists see themselves as citizens of the world, whose task it is to respond to the reality that surrounds them here and now. Yet, even as they speak about their reality, they question our comprehension of the term, showing that it is not an objective, fixed entity, but something that exists in a stream of conflicting representations.

The challenge of discussing the impact of reality on contemporary art parallels that of discussing reality in general - a challenge that stems from the fact that reality is commonly thought of as absolute even as it resists clear categorization. Simple though reality sounds, debates have been taking place for centuries about how we come to know this reality and how we are to engage with it. The etymological root of the term, res, the Latin word for "thing," refers to everything that exists in the actual world and is revealed as a result of its conjunction with perception. We accept as real what we can see and therefore believe exists. Since most people assume that reality is knowable, the idea of truth is often predicated upon it. But how do we come to our understanding of reality? If the traditional mode has been through socialization - the experiences of others and their shared retelling - today, in our informational age, contemporary media occupy an overwhelming role in this socialization. Most recently, the media have monopolized the role of informing our understanding of reality, while insisting that what they present is real and thus true.

On a daily basis, images fill our living rooms and our heads at a startling rate. Despite this, most of us admit little connection or understanding between what happens in our lives and what we see on television, a situation that keeps us in a position of informed bewilderment. We find ourselves surrounded by an accumulation of real-time images of cities being bombed, of planes crashing into skyscrapers, of fleeing civilians and occupying armies, of suicide bombers and ethnic cleansing. Seen through the eyes of the media, our world appears to be a contemporary version of Dante's Inferno, in which we hurtle from one crisis to another, and from one hopeless situation to the next. But in this highly selective, crude vision, the way in which the world is represented is determined by the economic and political interests of the powerful. The forms of media that are used to make viewers believe that their reality is being truthfully portrayed by this evocation of crisis are the same that benefit from viewers seeing only a certain version of the world.

The motivation for linking reality and art comes primarily as a response to the media's allpervading authority in representing the decisive transformations in our contemporary society. To evoke reality in this exhibition is, then, to be attentive to the fact that contemporary artists are increasingly interested in creating works that document, mimic, comment on or otherwise represent reality as they see it and live it. In doing so, they avoid separating artistic practice from critical practice, actively engaging in an attempt to redefine perception and our understanding of reality. Their observations show that they are responsive to the present moment, and that they account for the multiplicity, complexity and diversity of contemporary reality.

The ambition of the documentary to present rather than to represent is not incongruous with a desire for a realism that resists the continuous feedback and instant recycling of all events and images. That situation, as the Spanish essayist Jean Sanchez Ferlosio has said, creates a "terrible form of blindness, which allows you to look at things and not see them."(2) It is thus clear that an exploration of the real might revolve around efforts to indicate the limits of representation on the one hand, and to produce new forms of experience on the other. It is in this sense that the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze identified the work of the French New Wave film directors as not only redefining cinematic form but, more essentially, redefining perception. Their purpose was to admit what he described as the "un-thought in the thought," and "the shaping of the visible, which is still invisible to the eye."(3) with this he was describing a predominantly philosophical investigation of perception where images can contribute to a philosophical but also to an imaginary and truth-seeking contemplation of the real.

This notion is manifest in the work of Agnès Varda, whose earliest films were precursors of the New Wave aesthetic. She has said of her practice of documenting reality: "In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don't want to show things, but to give people the desire to see." Her recent Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) is a documentary film in the form of a cinematic-poetic essay that heralds those who recycle the waste of a culture that consumes too much. It explores past and present practices of "gleaning," or collecting the remnants of the harvest, whilst also tracing the fate of excluded and discarded goods from consumer society and those who make use of them. The film thus emphasizes an important thread in the exhibition, which brings together a large number of documentaries that depict the other, rarely seen, side of Capitalist culture. It also underlines a brand of filmmaking that makes its critical inquiry less through the showing of things and more through making us see, achieved through a conscious recourse to the poetic and aesthetic - in other words, through a reinvention of the documentary form.

This approach is also evident in Martha Rosler's practice, which continually addresses the traditional dichotomy between the aesthetic and the critical or documentary. Her artistic work has from the late 60s accompanied reflections on the historical status and role of the documentary image. Her reading of the historical problem of the documentary image is at the center of our concerns here:

"The penalty of realism is that it is about reality and has to bother forever not about being 'beautiful but about being right." So wrote John Grierson, the man considered the "father of documentary film," the person who named the genre and helped establish documentary film in the English-speaking world. Grierson is pointing here to the dichotomies of accuracy and aesthetics, the criteria by which we have come to judge the worth of documentary imagery. The burden of truth borne by documentary has tended to shoulder aside questions of aesthetics in favor of a variety of other issues, leaving aesthetics to surface seemingly as an afterthought."(4)

If aesthetics has for too long been an afterthought to the documentary form, a generation of filmmakers and artists working with the complexity and contradictions inherent in the notion of the document introduces new modes of countering that 'burden of truth' of the document.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's thirdworld (1997) offers an interesting example. In this fragmented narrative, which blurs the line between fiction and documentary, his dream-like images have no connection with the unscripted soundtrack in which people speak about their experience of dislocation. He deploys this form in order to replicate and thus interrogate the sense of estrangement and alienation experienced by people from each other and from their sense of place in contemporary metropolitan life. Similarly, Steve McQueen's Illuminator (2001) marries filmic abstraction with a critique of our passive subjection to the media's imagery. In a long fixed shot we see the artist lying on a hotel bed as he watches a documentary on British and American troops in Afghanistan. The changes of intensity in the TV's light, and the blurring and sharpening of the image reflected on his body, render visible the brutal reality documented on the TV screen. Both these projects abandon the 'burden of truth' in favor of distinct formal conceits even as they offer records of actual situations and actual encounters with individuals and the world around them in ways that open up questions at once social and political.

The question of how to document reality is not limited to the filmic. The works of Gabriel Orozco, Maruch Sántiz-Gómez and Jean-Luc Moulène offer just a few examples of the sculptural and photographic practices that form an important part of the exhibition's commitment to showing the full range of the document. In very different ways, their collecting of objects enables us to recognize the poetic and social potential in the stuff of everyday life. Orozco's Penske Work Project (1998) transforms into sculpture the trash that he collected from New York dumpsters; in Creencias (Beliefs, 1994-2000), Sántiz Gómez records local lore through short texts accompanying photographed objects, while Moulène's trent-neuf objets de grève présentés par Jean-Luc Moulène (Thirty Nine Strike Objects Presented by Jean-Luc Moulène, 1999-2000) archives and photographs objects made by workers during moments of social conflict. These things, collected, photographed or transformed, point to other commentaries on reality. Consumption, waste and work including the economic inequalities brought about by the recent rapid transformations in contemporary society, are evoked by these and other works in the show. Jeremy Deller and Chen Chieh-jen, for example, use very different media - in Deller's The Battle of Orgreave (2001) a reconstruction of a strike after careful research; in Chen's The Factory (2003) a slow motion film made from found and new images of an abandoned factory and its former workers - to explore related questions regarding the deep social implications of work and the economic inequalities that plague contemporary life.

The impact of these issues on the master planning of the urban metropolis is the subject of works as diverse as Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, The Strip Project (1972), a ollaborative series of drawings by Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis; Martha Rosler's curatorial project if you lived here... (1989-92); and A Paper House(2001) by Jeanne van Heeswijk, Rolf Engelen, Siebe Thissen and Frans Vermeer. Spanning several decades, these drawings, archives, videos, texts, tracts, and reconstructed shelters are used to represent the inequalities of the capitalist metropolis and to explore the effect of the city on contemporary life. This includes homelessness and social alienation, the sort of division, inequality and isolation that troubles all contemporary western metropolises as well as the potential that built structure has to respond to social injustice.

In the prologue of Exodus koolhaas tells us in a form of parable of a city divided in two parts-- a good half and a bad half in which "as so often before in this history of mankind, architecture was the guilty instrument of despair..." In Koolhaas' parable "It is possible" he says "to imagine a mirror image of this terrifying architecture, a force as intense and devastating but used instead in the service of positive intentions. / Division, isolation, inequality, aggression, destruction, all the negative aspects of the Wall, could be the ingredients of a new phenomenon: architectural warfare against undesirable conditions, in this case London. This would be an immodest architecture committed not to timid improvements but to the provision of totally desirable alternatives." (5) In Koolhaas' vision, architecture – and in this case a Wall - is less shelter or passive container and instead a weapon and instigator of change. As such it is the palimpsest of contemporary reality. Architecture in this case can be a paradoxical document, residing in a past and future tense, bearing the traces of what the world around it has been and shaper of what it will be.

The works in the exhibition provoke a rupture of sorts, questioning what so often goes under the name of "reality". Ludwig Wittegenstein once suggested that when perception and representation are not the came when the image problematized a conversation must ensue. Such discussion tends to become a space of reflection. The gathering in the museum of works that selfconsciously investigate what we perceive as reality provides a space for such conversation. Unlike the kind of communication orchestrated by the media, conversation is a creative process of self-definition, of defining standpoints and perspectives. Communication, on the other hand, is a false form of conversation, because it depends on getting across a specific meaning, opinion or position through manipulative images and language. It seems that conversation, as a creative process, has lost its privileged place in society. One can think of many reasons for this, but most particularly it can be attributed to the outbreak of new communication tools such as the Internet, television, advertising, etc. It is in the space of artistic images that the conversational can rise up again on the horizon of perception and collective consciousness, and it is this space that the museum as a gathering of aesthetic works can provide.

If this provocation to conversation and reflection - in short, to revolt against what we have been given to accept, without question, as real - approaches the political, it is because reality is not a fait accompli. It also evokes potential - the possible - and therefore informs our political understanding and engagement. While actuality is merely "what there is," reality is more complex. It incorporates "what is about to be," "what can be, and even "what ought to be." It is the space of the political par excellence, because it is in a prospective reality that the question of "what is possible" can be formulated. The link between reality and the document thus comes full circle, for the "possible" is inscribed, as Hito Steyerl has suggested, in the very nature and potential of documents, which often assume the character of catalysts for actions...[the document] should be able to express what is unimaginable, unspoken, redeeming, or even monstrous-and thus create the possibility for change."(6) Thus to the complaints that the young generation of artists has abandoned the revolutionary urge of its modernist elders, one might respond that instead it engages with documenting reality ever more forcefully, and by doing so opens up a space for critical and political reflection that emerges from its own contemporaneity as it holds vital relevance to us all.

Let the conversation begin.

Notes:
1. Latour, Bruno. "Do you believe in reality?", in Pandora's Hope, Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 1-23.
2. Jean Sanchez Ferlosio as cited by Jean Baudrillard in "Integral Reality" (www.egs.edu., 1997 -04): "There is a terrible form of blindness, which allows you to look at things and not to see them. Time before, we did not look at things, we just saw them. Today all is wrapped in duplicity, no impulse is pure and direct. That is how the countryside has become a landscape, that is to say a representation of itself ... Wherever I set my eyes, I see that terrible scenery that people glorify under the name of landscape" --Jean Sanchez Ferlosio.
3. Deleuze, Gilles. "Cinema, body and brain, thought", Chapter 8,
Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: The Athlone Press, 1989).
4. Rosler, Martha. Post-Documentary? (Fanny Knapp Allen Conference, University of Rochester, 1998).
5. "Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, The Strip Project" in Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large (S,M,L,XL) (New York: The Monaceli Press, 1995).
6. Hito Steyerl, "Documentarism as Politics of Truth" (http://www. republicart.net), p. 2.