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| Declan Clarke Bobby Buffaloe’s; Desoto DVD stills ;courtesy the artist |
The history of video art is shot-through with documentary. From Nam June Paik’s footage of the Pope to Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, documentary has had an unrivalled place within video art practices. Not all video art is informed by the documentary tradition and when it is video art tends to have a critical, unconventional or ironic relationship to that tradition, but there has certainly been a persistent and conspicuous presence of documentary within video art that reveals a deep-seated inclination of contemporary art. Declan Clarke is the latest in a long – and vital – line of artists whose video works hang their social critique on the hooks of documentary film and television.
Unlike Hollywood directors – and in contrast with that industry – video artists did not typically manufacture narratives for the camera. Many early video artists used the video camera specifically as a recording device: performances were staged specifically to be caught on camera, CCTV was set up to document events live to those engaged in them, and so on.1 Even various abstract or structural early videos, such as Joan Jonas’ Organic honey’s vertical roll, which videoed previously recorded video footage as it was played back on a TV monitor with wonky vertical hold, can be seen in the same light – using the camera as a recording device. For the most part, narrative was out. The video camera at the outset of video art tended not to record fiction. A camera will record any visible thing you put in front of it, including illusions, play acting and fantasy scenes of course, but for the most part, the video camera at the outset of video art tended not to record fiction. Unlike Hollywood directors, though, video artists did not typically manufacture narratives for the camera. This is partly due to the long-standing antagonism between art and popular culture, but it is also due to the Minimalist reconfiguration of modernist art’s critical legacy.
Minimalism prepared the way for video art’s persistent use of documentary in two ways: its choice of materials and its methodologies of organizing material. Minimalist materials tended to be prefabricated, found or otherwise not crafted, and they were arranged in lines, grids and according to systems rather than the idiosyncratic judgement of the author-artist.2 This corresponds to classic documentary’s typical preference for found or unfabricated footage, as well as its predominant attitude to editing, which is meant to be simple and straightforward to emphasise the material, not the author-director. Both aim for some level of anonymity. When domestic video cameras became available on the market in the mid- to late-60s, artists schooled in Minimalism were predisposed to favour the techniques and rationale of documentary insofar as they organize extant material rather than follow the romantic conception of the artist as someone who fashions something out of nothing. Compare Carl Andre’s brick sculptures or Donald Judd’s boxes, for instance, with the description of the Soviet filmmaker Esther Shub’s documentary method as “the juxtaposition of ‘bits of reality’.”3
At the conjunction of Minimalism and documentary, Clarke’s video works cannot be adequately accounted for in terms of one of these cultural legacies alone. Like Dan Graham’s work, which cannot be adequately understood without reference to architecture and yet is not reducible to architecture alone, Clarke’s work is rooted in the genre of documentary but does not belong to it. His early videos such as Declan’s pillar and Willingly done, were not documentary in the conventional sense but single performative video events à la Bruce Nauman. Declan’s pillar opens with a head shot of the artist, looking ordinary and at ease. After a while the camera zooms out to show that he is stood on a domestic pillar, isolated and displaced. Willingly done stares at the Wellington Memorial in Dublin until, eventually, a single green Wellington boot is planted into the ground just in front of the camera, obscuring – but seeming to engulf – the monument. Although these little set pieces are not comparable with Claude Lanzmann’sShoah and are even far from the journalistic tradition of documentary in Michael Moore and Nick Broomfield, their logic is derived from documentary. There is no fiction or acting involved, no characterization, phrasing or virtuosity, and only a minimal narrative and script, with nobody required to say anything that has been written by somebody else for them. These little videos are droplets of documentary.
The use of intertitles refers us to the early history of documentary before the arrival of cinéma vérité on the back of the emergence of magnetic film which allowed the convenient recording of sound local to the image. Prior to cinéma vérité, then, documentary was an art of montage in which separate sequences put together in the editing room and any sound, including voiceover, was typically added to the images rather than found alongside it, so to speak. Intertitles and subtitles were key elements in the montaging lexicon of documentary. Silent movies used intertitles within fiction, of course, either to include dialogue that we can't hear or as commentary, contextual information or the thoughts of the protagonists. Clarke's intertitles, like those of early documentary, do not sew the narrative together, they add further facts to be taken into account, inserting wedges into the material to bring out further associations. This is key to his work, I think: he is not opposed to the truth but nor does he regard it as a given. Clarke's videos are documentary in the spirit of the desire rather than the presence of truth: lackumentary. In Clarke's first fully-fledged documentary-style video, Metampsydoughsis, the artist-documentarist searches for the origin of the hole in the American-style ring doughnut, which is dominated by voiceover rather than intertitles, but they become more important in subsequent works including in his most recent videos, Mine are of trouble, a personal homage to both Rosa Luxemburg and the city of Berlin, and Bobby Buffaloe's Desoto, a film about car design and colonialism.
Tonight takes his younger brother as its subject, linking domestic duties with discussions about property, profit and politics. The video opens with Clarke standing by the family ironing board in the kitchen and announcing to camera that ‘tonight I am going to iron my brother-who’san- estate-agent’s shirts’. Clarke tells us in an intertitle that he jokingly called his brother a ‘capitalist property magnate’ because he had bought two homes to let for profit. His brother is reported as telling Clarke, in another intertitle, that this political labelling is irrelevant since the artist has no understanding of the market. Clarke does not develop these themes directly but supplements them with reference to anecdotal details that bear on the subject. We see a page of a magazine depicting a speed boat floating off the Bahamas pinned on the woodchip wall, which an intertitle tells us Clarke’s brother stuck up years ago. No attempt is made to explain links like these. Clarke presents them as facts or ‘bits of reality’, simply laying them out side by side like a Minimalist sculpture. There is no authoritative voiceover to make sense of these fragments. The artist is as much the subject of the documentary as his brother. The video ends with footage shot from Clarke’s bedroom window of his brother going to work in the morning cut into the shot of Clarke putting the ironing board away.
All the techniques in Clarke’s videos are taken from the documentary and news tradition. David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson, who define documentary simply as a film “presenting factual information,” give a suggestive sketch of the documentary maker’s lexicon: recording events as they actually occur, supplying charts, maps or other visual aids, staging certain events for the camera, conducting interviews, and assembling images from archival sources, newsreel footage and instructional films.4 Clarke uses stills of paintings, prints, photographs and maps to illustrate and document his videos, including portraits to illustrate references to individuals. Complex cultural references are illustrated with stock images taken from popular culture, and fixed camera footage is recorded at the scene of events long after they have taken place. From Metampsydoughsis onwards, Clarke uses the well-informed voiceover on top of a montage of images and sequences. These are the staple techniques of what Bordwell and Thompson call the “synthetic” documentary, common on cable TV and news journalism. Bobby Buffaloe’s Desoto adds to this list of documentary’s tools in Clarke’s work the use of the interview to camera and the accounts of eye-witnesses and locals.
In Bobby Buffaloe’s Desoto, Clarke combines individual testament – a blend of oral history and local rumour – with facts presented in intertitles and subtitles to trace the historical relationship between Hernando de Soto and the American city of Memphis. Typical of documentary, Clarke uses subtitles to fix footage in time and place. As a resident tells us about his technique for barbequeing pork, we read a subtitle that says “Annual World Championship Barbeque Cooking Contest Memphis, Tennessee, May 2005.” Clarke weaves an associational narrative that links colonialism with car design and myth-making. It is a story about storytelling as well as an archaeology of language use and an unravelling of historical connections. The presence of the artist-as-author is at its most inconspicuous in this video, despite the fact that the narrative journey takes us through some of Clarke’s personal loves – politics, history and classic 50s design. The only sign of Clarke’s enthusiasm is the time spent ogling every detail of the DeSoto Fireflite glistening in the sun.
In technical terms, Clarke’s videos are conventional documentary, if conspicuously cheap and homegrown. A film or video is not discounted from being a documentary merely by being subjective, taking a stance, failing to be persuasive or providing less than all the relevant facts. As Bordwell and Thompson point out, questions about the reliability of the documentary do not turn the documentary into a fiction. What distinguishes a documentary is not that it is true but that it presents evidence and documents events. “An unreliable documentary is still a documentary.”5 True stories such as Steven Spielberg’s Munich are not documentaries even when they are true, since they do not proceed by presenting evidence; all their facts are converted into scripts and dramatized for the camera. Although documentary is stereotypically considered to be – naïvely or honourably – trustworthy, Clarke’s idiosyncratic and informal videos are not outside the genre of documentary, even while they remain firmly within the post-Minimalist history of video art.
Clarke constantly invokes evidence and refers to countless facts, consistent with the history of documentary, but they never quite add up to a coherent account of the truth. In this way, Clarke reverses the polarity between cinéma vérité and earlier forms of documentary, holding off the apparent neutrality and honesty of the fly-on-the-wall documentary and recognizing the value of editing, commentary and montage in the construction of associational narratives referring exclusively to actual and historical events and relationships. Clarke’s sensibility is not dissimilar to that of Sally O’Reilly and Cathy Haynes’ Implicasphere project, an artwork in the form of a periodical which “loosely parcels cultural fragments around a theme chosen for its rich and multiple associations,” as the publicity has it. What distinguishes Clarke’s videos from mainstream or commercial documentary, therefore, is not their ‘language’ or technique but their ultimate defiance of closure. That phrase makes Clarke’s work sound postmodern, perhaps, but it is an eighteenthcentury virtue.
At the birth of modern culture and democratic politics in the eighteenth century the bourgeois public sphere was made possible with the emergence of the truly private individual emancipated from social rank by the neutral mechanisms of market forces. Public debate – in coffee houses and periodicals – could only take place between private individuals released from their social position or function because the prerequisite of public debate, social equality, was only possible outside the hierarchies of the state. Thus, the modern public citizen and the bourgeois private subject are mutually dependent – the public sphere is occupied by private subjects, while the privatization of the subject is possible only when publicness is not the proper representation of power and rank. As such, the modern concepts of neutrality and subjectivity are born as two sides of the same capitalist-inspired coin. The great age of the public sphere was therefore also the century of letter writing, of what Habermas calls “audience-oriented privacy.”6 Clarke’s videos locate themselves at precisely this social faultline, merging the factual neutrality of documentary with the charged observations of the biased individual.
Mine are of trouble, Clarke’s most complex video, interweaves every dominant trait of the modern public sphere, from political debate to amateur scholarship and the display of private feelings. Strikingly, the work is divided into two unequal parts, one characterized by Clarke’s distinctive Irish voiceover in which he traces various elements of Rosa Luxemburg’s life and death, the other by intertitles that document Clarke’s youthful experience of Berlin. When Clarke speaks we hear an impassioned, heartfelt account of Luxemburg’s struggles and accomplishments, full of intimate details about her cat Mimi, her desire for a baby and her romantic attachments. When, in the second part of the video, Clarke explores Berlin autobiographically, his voice disappears and his commentary is, instead, rendered in writing. The second section seems conspicuously, almost unnaturally silent. And yet, what is documented in this section more than anything else is a series of conversations among friends.
Private conversations have been circulated within the public sphere from the outset. It is, in a sense, what the public sphere was invented for. Tatler, the first periodical, was so named because it reported the tittle-tattle taking place within the coffee houses of London. Among other things, this is exactly what Clarke does in the second half of Mine are of trouble. Clarke enters the public sphere not merely as a public citizen – as a representative of some given position, function or role – but as an interested private subject. Unwittingly, Clarke almost systematically adheres to the eighteenth-century principle of letter writing. These letters were not meant to be ‘cold reports’ but rather should be ‘written in the heart’s blood’. Everything that Clarke tells us about Berlin and Rosa Luxemburg seems to be pinned to a private map of incidents and accidents within his own biography. We learn about Rosa’s birthplace and the events that led to her assassination by the German secret police alongside anecdotes about Clarke discussing with his girlfriend in Berlin the possibility of calling their non-existent daughter Rosa.
Mine are of trouble comes to an end with a sequence of intertitles that describe a dinner party in which Clarke tells his friends about his idea of calling a daughter Rosa, nine months after which a baby girl is born in Berlin to one of his friends. The baby is called Rosa and the video comes to a conclusion without commentary just before a final shot of Berlin taken from the roof of the Reichstag, on an extended unedited sequence of Rosa walking towards the camera, moving away from it and then returning out of curiosity, trying to see the man behind the camera. The toddler shares something important, then, with Clarke and with the viewers of Clarke’s works. The private and the personal are not to be protected from public scrutiny, they are the currency of the public sphere, and it is part of our duty as citizens – both political citizens and cultural citizens – to insert the private into the public and vice versa. We know that the personal is political, but Clarke’s videos remind us that the political gets under our skin.
1 See Alan Kaprow, ‘Video art: old wine in new bottles’, in Essays on the blurring of art and life, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993, p.148–153
2 See Mel Bochner, ‘Serial art, systems, solipsism’, Minimal Art, Gregory Battcock (ed), Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1995, p.92–102
3 Quoted in Stella Bruzzi, New documentary: a critical introduction, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, p.22
4 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film art: an introduction, New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1997, p.43–44
5 Ibid, p.44
6 Jurgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 1989, p.51
Dave Beech is an aritst and a member of the art collective freee.is an artist and a member of the art collective Freee.
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| Declan Clarke: Tonight DVD still; courtesy the artist |
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| Declan Clarke: Mine are of trouble DVD stills; courtesy the artist |
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