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text by Els Roelandt for the news-letter of Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam

Shades of Modernism
Els Roelandt

“Let go of the political,” “detach the real,” “an abstraction of migration” are some phrases that crystallised out of a conversation with Susanne Kriemann during the preparations for the work One Time One Million at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. On a first reading, the presence of the political in One Time One Million might escape one entirely. After all, does this work not deal with the activities of ornithologists? Is it not about observation and ordering things? Perspective, photography, collecting, modernism, utopia? Well, yes, now and then some migrants do appear in the photographs, descending on places in elegant movements, with the same grace flights of birds have. But no position is taken regarding their presence; at the most it is insinuated that their migration is decorative, but that can hardly be called a political statement. Or can it?
An original Swedish Hasselblad camera is the point of departure for the work in the installation One Time One Million. Because the camera dates from 1942, this object launched Kriemann straight back into history, just as that happened when she made another work with a numerical title for the Berlin Biënnale, 12 650 000, the weight in kilos of the Schwerbelastungskörper. This architectural construction, built in 1941 on the orders of Albert Speer who wanted to test how well the soil of Berlin would support heavy concrete buildings, bore with it the dreams of Greater Germania, and was thus politically charged, par excellence. Yet in 12 650 000 Kriemann succeeds in pushing the concrete politics that adhere to this object into the background. That gives her the room to say so much more than she would have had a chance to say in a specifically political context: she can bring clusters together in new images, make new connections, rearrange things, tinker around, and thus arrive at new insights.

The reordering of first things, and after that of facts, a new classification that leads to other insights: that is also what is going on in One Time One Million. A close-up of the camera itself, Hasselblad’s own images of birds in flight, similar photographs taken from the internet, aerial photographs of residential housing estates in Stockholm, apartments with satellite dishes, and finally images of post-war single family homes. The arrangement of images and facts creates a movement: from near by, as close-up, to aerial photographs or photographs taken from a bird’s-eye perspective. Simultaneously with the formal movement, as a viewer you are invited to engage in a substantive exercise that leads you from the dream and utopia of modernism to a concrete experience of it, and that finally carries one back to square one, to the realisation of the failure of the utopia.
Kriemann’s manner of abstracting politics in her work is subtle: it is manifestly politically charged, even at first glance, but the precise deciphering of this charge is a challenge that can only be entered into via a spatial experience of the work. And, furthermore, this is precisely where the modernism that her work goes back to lies: in the consciousness of, and creation of a sensitivity for the perspective from which one views things.

In 1968 Jean-Luc Godard declared to the critic Gene Youngblood, “We have to fight the audience.” With this, Godard was referring to the need to pry the film audience away from their habit of passive viewing, to make them more alert to, and resistant to manipulative cinematic techniques. He regarded the use of language, of words, as an important element in this. In his films Godard did not seek refuge in dazzlingly beautiful images, but saw the use of language as an expressive medium as a particularly fitting means for the rediscovery of film or video art. “TV has become the medium of those who do not want to see.”
The instinct to search and research, to show things from different perspectives and angles, is an important motif in modernism, and is also particularly perceptible in the video oeuvre of Vincent Meessen. Meessen plays games with formats, with time and space, with the distances between different codes or, to give a very concrete example, in the a-synchronous relation between image and sound. You are forced to make choices. Meessen does not provide you with a documentary narrative, pur sang, but with one that deliberately creates confusion and, especially, complexity, in that manner developing a new discourse. Ultimately his editing technique functions as a mechanism for reordering both facts and fictions. And, like Godard, Vincent Meessen likes to use language as an instrument in this.

In Dear Adviser Vincent Meessen presents a shadow, an undefinable and unreadable character who wanders around in Chandigarh, the capital of the state of Punjab, in northern India, established in 1947. Chandigarh is a modernistic city, founded by prime minister Nehru who proclaimed the city to be “Unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of the nation’s faith in the future.” From 1950 onward the French/Swiss architect Le Corbusier was called in for the design, although he preferred to present himself as the ‘adviser’ for this project rather than the architect. Numerous other architects were brought in for the individual buildings of the city but Le Corbusier nevertheless left an enormous impression on the appearance of Chandigarh, with its characteristic, expressive concrete buildings and massive apartment complexes, and it is not for nothing that the city is listed for designation as part of the UNESCO World Heritage list.
But viewed critically Chandigarh testifies to the failure of modernist ideas. Like Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, a part of its population live in adjoining slums. The stillness in the Capitol, the central section of the city with the most important government buildings, where Meessen’s film takes place, is striking. It is hardly accessible to the public any more for security concerns, because of the ethnic and religious tensions in the region. The Capitol is further characterised by an empty space at the site where the Governor’s Palace was once planned but never built, because of a further division of the state into Punjab and Haryana in 1966, with Chandigarh as the shared capitol. (At the time of the disintegration of British India, in 1947, Punjab had previously already been divided along rather arbitrarily chosen religious boarders between Islamic Pakistan and Hindu India.) Le Corbusier’s idea of building a ‘universal’ museum based on the latest visual technologies in place of the Palace was not honoured.
At the semantic level, Meessen’s film lays into the discrepancy between the modernistic plan and the reality of today – both results of the sometimes naïve political constellation under which the city was created. The characters in the video projection include not only the shade which wanders through the desolate Capitol, but also the Adviser who in called upon the in the film, the Indian voice-over, and the ghostly voices in the background, which come from the remarkable Poème électronique that Edgard Varèse composed for Le Corbusier’s Philips pavilion at the World’s Fair in Brussels in 1958 (and for which the architect himself provided the visuals). The ghostly voices are now symbolic of the missing palace/museum. In this way the mix of time, space, formats and codes becomes complete.

In Dear Adviser and One Time One Million Kriemann and Meessen look back over a specific modernist past from a contemporary perspective, but in the process they refrain from any critical statements. In their work the ‘old’ ideology and its effects reveal themselves as a sort of hermetic, mythological system, as an era from which we can distance ourselves but cannot yet leave behind us. There is still one other aspect that links the two works: the prominent place that is claimed in both Kriemann’s photographs and Meessen’s film by… birds. Hasselblad was a fanatic ornithologist; Le Corbusier derived his nom de plume as an architect from the French word corbeau (crow), and by chance Chandigarh is also home to a bird sanctuary. As a result, the bird has now become the involuntary metaphor for the romantic/nostalgic element in the process of historic re-evaluation that this exhibition opens up.

Els Roelandt is editor-in-chief of the journal A-Prior