The Documentary Impulse
Vivian Rehberg

Vivian Rehberg is a Paris based art historian, critic and translator. She is also regular contributor to artforum.com, writes reviews for Frieze magazine, and lectures on modern and contemporary art.

'Since the early 1990s there has been a recovery of documentaries that has covered all genuses and languages, from cinema to contemporary art, from photography to literature and journalism.' 'The interest shown by film and art in social and political reality has never been as great as it is today. Filmmakers and artists observe and comment on the life around them, they raise questions, and position themselves with respect to current affairs and issues.' 'Exhibitions and events such as Manifesta 5, Documenta 11, and several Biennial shows are featuring an increasing number of documentary works, but their specific character has certainly not been studied in great detail.' 'Artists' films and videos have greatly influenced current discourse surrounding the moving image as they experiment with modes of filmmaking. Through this experimentation, the distinctions between narrative, avant-garde and documentary filmmaking have become blurred, as has the way viewers experience film and video.' 'Through diverse approaches, some of which adopt the styles of TV news reports, interviews, or home movies, concerns both personal and political are addressed. Fundamentally, these works look at how our perception of the world is informed, how we can engage with distant realities and speak to our desire to experience genuine truths on an intimate level.'1

Each of the phrases in the above paragraph has been borrowed from a press release or written introduction to one of a number of recent exhibitions treating the uses of 'documentary' in contemporary art. The paragraph is, admittedly, contrived, even tendentious. Yet, all of the texts cited make more or less the same claims and come to more or less the same conclusions and therefore seem to be more or less interchangeable, despite the differences in the works and artists selected, in the sensibilities of the guest curators, and in the host institutions. The texts note with earnest that questions of truth, reality, authenticity - and sometimes the politics or ethics purportedly linked to such concerns - have come to occupy the contemporary art world over the past fifteen years via the mediating objects of photography, film and video projections and installations. They remark on the visual artist's renewed interest in 'documentary' and the unprecedented profusion of moving image works and installations in museums, galleries and biennials. In more than one instance, the recent shows cite the landmark exhibition Documenta 11, held in 2002, which revealed the use of 'documentary' strategies, styles, and subjects in current artistic production on an unparalleled scale. The presence of further investigations into similar territory would indicate that Documenta 11 has successfully shaken off the sometimes virulent criticism of its didacticism, its indifference to aesthetics, and its heavy-handed pretense to instruct rather than entertain -similar critiques to those historically launched against documentary film and realist representation more generally.2
Curatorial consensus should not be conflated with artistic current, however, and the exact scope and nature of this 'documentary impulse' in contemporary art begs clarification. To do something on impulse means to have a sudden desire or urge to act without reflection, but it also signals a finite change in momentum-and so, in this case, the noun 'impulse' purposefully echoes the limited or bounded change in momentum signaled by the exhibitions mentioned above. Precisely whether this abrupt shift in momentum has actually taken place in art remains to be adequately determined. Nevertheless, these exhibitions would indicate that a documentary impulse has perhaps interrupted the course of some other ongoing critical/aesthetic project, perhaps in response to a more general crisis in visual culture.

Archives and documentation in the postmodern era

Following on Craig Owens's groundbreaking text 'The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism', Hal Foster has convincingly pointed to an archival impulse in contemporary art which, though not a new phenomenon, is both specific enough in its practices and wide-spread enough to be considered a 'tendency in its own right'. The archival impulse (in works by artists like Tacita Dean, Mark Dion, Thomas Hirschhorn and Sam Durant, amongst others) implies the use of such formal tactics as serialization, recuperation of images, texts, and objects, most frequently in installations but also in singular works, in an effort to 'make historical information often lost or displaced, physically present.'3 According to Foster, archival work is productive; it 'not only draws on informal archives but produces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private. Further, it often arranges these materials according to a quasi-archival logic, and presents them in a quasi-archival architecture, a complex of texts and objects (again, platforms, stations, kiosks…).'4 Importantly, Foster concludes that this productivity is perhaps indicative of a shift away from a melancholic relationship to culture and society toward a more sanguine, if not utopian, one.
Foster has laid out a useful typology for identifying the archival impulse, which he links to and differentiates from the postmodern appropriation strategies, critiques of representation, authorship and originality that were tied to engagements with identity politics and a more extensive 'deconstructive turn' during the 1980s. Postmodern theories and practices radically called into question natural and culturally determined links between appearance and essence, reality and simulation. Some asserted that we exist in a media-scape of signs whose anchors to the real are highly contestable, or which rarely reflects anything real at all. At present, much of what we know of the world comes to us through images that may or may not be trustworthy. The sheer wealth and diversity of the images that enter into our visual fields on any given day - during the vastly different experiences of reading or looking at print media, television or cinema, walking down the street, down the aisles of a supermarket, or through an exhibition - as well as all of the images we won't see, that have gone underground, have been fabricated solely for an occasion and are destined to disappear from our sight and our memories, continue to blur the boundaries between the fictions of simulation and the facts of the real.5
How can the document and the documentary - historically anchored to the real - negotiate this increasingly distorted terrain? Archives, whose fragmentary natures, elusive contents, and ephemeral structures, as Foster reminds us, are built on a dialectic of interiorization and exteriorization. Documents - which are, of course, crucial elements of archives - purport to reveal, to enunciate their truths straightforwardly, and to serve as evidence.6 Documentaries, which put documents and archives into motion, rely on and are an integral component of archives. Prompted to take stock of our vast and unwieldy visual world, all three of these practices and forms coincide and overlap and serve the varying ends of surveillance and control, memory and counter-memory, truth and speculation.7

The print of reality

Since the very beginnings of cinema at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, when the awareness of the power of film to record the world around us and to surprise, instruct and delight us became widespread, the documentary genre has had to tread the potentially conflictual boundary between reality and its representation, between artifice and truth, between the partial and the total view. This is to some extent due to the nature of the devices used to capture the image and to the basic notion that film acts a visual proof, an index of the real. Yet, while photography and film are fundamentally mimetic means of production, they do not necessarily lead to documentary forms. They contain an extraordinary inherent potential to undermine or underscore their mimetic faculty through the procedures of montage, cropping, fragmentation, and the use of different narrative structures.
Documentary photography and film, famously, and paradoxically, defined by British documentary filmmaker and champion John Grierson in 1926 as 'the creative treatment of actuality', have long exploited this potential, especially as means for influencing or educating mass consciousness.8 Historically, documentary refers to a vast category of cinematic expression united by the intent to remain factual or non-fictional. Today the sharp distinctions between fiction and nonfiction no longer hold firm, as contemporary filmmakers and video artists produce works that resist classification, such as Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's two-part exploration of brutal crime and its aftermath, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders and Robin Hood Hills (1996) and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) or Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis's Battle of Orgreave (2001), a filmed re-enactment of the violent confrontation between striking National Union mineworkers and the police in South Yorkshire, England in 1984. In turn, the popularity of docudrama, reality TV, infotainment, the public and professional consecration of documentaries like Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Farenheit 9/11 (2004) or Luc Jacquet's The March of the Penguins (2005), and the increasing interest on the part of television producers and viewers in factual programming, have radically altered our image of documentaries in the mainstream.
Art, still, remains on the margins of the mainstream and is not created for a mass audience. Given the different means of production, distribution, and circulation of art objects and documentary films, the question 'is it art or is it documentary', no matter how prosaic it may seem, no matter how creative or imaginative a documentary may be, still pertains. My aim here is not to offer a definitive, or even a confident, response to that question. Rather, I will explore a set of issues generated by the now quite-established presence of documentary strategies, modes and styles in contemporary art exhibitions in an effort to clarify its aesthetic and political implications. Instead of focusing explicitly on artworks I will consider how curators promoting the need to document, to reprocess reality or to perform experiments with truth theorize and historicize their practices.

Nanook of the North

Just like the history of art, the history of documentary film is riddled with its own mythologies, heroes, incredible discoveries, miserable failures and aesthetic breakthroughs. While authenticity and objectivity persist as a horizon of expectation for documentary practice, the greatest myth, of course, is that documentaries tell the 'truth'. It is enough to consider Robert Flaherty (1884-1951), best known for his feature length, pseudo-ethnographic Nanook of the North (1922), a highly staged and largely inaccurate view of the harshness of Inuit life seen through the trials and travails of the character Nanook (real name Allariallak). Nanook starved to death during a hunting trip a few years after the film was released, while Flaherty went on to be recognized worldwide as a founding father of documentary cinema.
From its inception with the newsreel, Flaherty's romanticized explorations and Soviet cinema pioneer Dziga Vertov's taking to the streets with his fellow Kinoks (cinema-eyes - his camera-men) in order to capture 'life caught unawares', documentary was conceived as an alternative to cinema as entertainment and was wedded to notions of social indoctrination, education, or consciousness raising. Yet, Flaherty was no dupe as to the potential entertainment value of his documentaries; he knew that the dramatization of situations would carry his messages more effectively to the public and to the critics. Vertov, whose 1929 cinematic manifesto Man with a Movie Camera remains a standard for experimental and documentary film, also constructed highly poetic versions of reality but, unlike Flaherty, he relied on swift cuts and experiments with montage that aimed to merge revolutionary ideology and material reality. He and the Kinoks sought their material in everyday life and utterly rejected staged cinema, along with its plots, props and actors.
These practices were far from neutral or objective and created a definite hierarchy of values. As Vietnamese film-maker and writer Trinh T. Minh Ha has pointed out in her key text, Documentary Is/Not a Name: 'Asserting its independence from the studio and the star system, documentary has its raison d'être in a strategic distinction. It puts the social function of film on the market. It takes real people and real problems from the real world and deals with them. It sets a value on intimate observation and assesses its worth according to how well it succeeds in capturing reality on the run "without material interference, without intermediary". Powerful living stories, infinite authentic situations. There are no retakes. The stage is no more and no less than life itself.'9 The author is indicating the contradiction at the heart of the documentary project: despite the documentary filmmaker's often sincere attempts to remain in the background and let 'real-life' speak for itself, there is no way to avoid the subjective processes of selection, framing, and observation that confer it with value for the spectator who accepts the filmmaker's authority and the fiction of an unmediated reality.
These processes are bound up with the technical procedures of documentary. Today, documentary film-makers have considerably more technical resources at their disposal than they did in the days of cameras on tri-pods and non-synchronous sound recording, but certain conventions still hold amongst the purists: lip-synchronous sound, direct interviewing, wide-shots that do not promote a partial view, minimal intervention on the part of the cameraperson or director (light-weight and hand-held cameras that can go unnoticed purportedly allow for less distortion of reality), subtle editing that highlights the subject matter without falsifying it.10

'Why are we all around this table?'

Such conventions (along with 'talking-head' and 'man on the street' interviews), which are meant to emphasize the content and aims of a documentary film, do not necessarily apply in an art context that considers authorship and invention as signs of prestige and merit.
Practitioners who identify themselves as artists or whose work is shown in the art circuits of museums, galleries, art fairs, exhibitions that have film programs, etc., are not beholden to rules defining documentary such as those mentioned above, which to a certain extent still structure many documentaries circulating in cinema circuits. The criteria for grouping an artist's work under the heading 'documentary' might include:
1. the use of the media associated with documentary-film, video and photography, multimedia installations, texts;
2. a demonstration of a desire to inform or communicate subject matter or content in a realistic manner;
3. a sense of spontaneity in the footage, and an interest in banal scenes from everyday life.
Artists whose works have been defined in documentary terms or who claim to be working within a documentary framework employ a wide variety of formats, styles, durations, and modes of figuration and presentation. Like their documentarist counterparts, they have diverse backgrounds, intellectual and artistic heritages, and social and political commitments. They include film and video practitioners probing questions of race, representation and post-coloniality, like Isaac Julien and Fiona Tan, those exploring the memories and histories of places like Zarina Bhimji, Yael Bartana, Deimantas Narkevicius and Ulrike Ottinger. Jeremy Deller and Anri Sala, whose works mediate the tangible and fugitive traces of histories and cultures, have been included in exhibitions promoting the uses of documentary strategies. Others, like Allan Sekula, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast and Martha Rosler explore the world of images with an acutely critical eye in order to reveal how the workings of representation, its modes of production and reproduction, are intimately bound up with knowledge and power, oppression and control.
This list could, and does, go on an on. It is safe to say, however, that not all of the artists mentioned are directly concerned with coming to terms with a documentary tradition or would define their works in documentary terms. According to the exhibitions mentioned above, an artist interested in documenting the real shows a concern for the 'personal and political', 'current affairs and issues', 'social and political reality' or the 'distinction between fact and fiction'. Because it is construed so broadly, this notion of documentary creates a false sense of coherence. A recent discussion about the relationship between art and documentary, organized by critics Jörg Heiser and Jan Verwoert from the art magazine Frieze, with artists Yael Bartana, Annika Eriksson, Anri Sala and Gitte Villesen concludes with Anri Sala asking: 'Why are we all around this table? Our practices our very different'. And Yael Bartana responding: 'But we have one thing in common: we are not documentary filmmakers'.11 Furthermore, despite the multitude of positions artist's adopt in relationship to politics today, documentary's traditional role as a purveyor of social description and analysis also leads to the assumption that a social or political impetus drives the works in question or, at least, overrides their aesthetic priorities.12

Curators

How do the exhibitions mentioned at the beginning of this essay try to come to terms with the field of documentary production? In the catalogue for 'Ficcions' documentals, an exhibition held at the Fundació "la Caixa" in 2004, which included works by artists as diverse as Kutlug Ataman, Tacita Dean, Peter Friedl, and Zineb Sidera, documentary filmmaker and author Hito Steyerl asserts that there are two different documentary impulses at work in contemporary art: one that aims for 'authenticity' or 'transparency' and relies on 'social realistic' formal devices in order to 'illustrate certain effects in the social field' and a more reflexive documentary that is aware that it is a construction and therefore does not pretend to depict 'the truth of the political'. Rather, she claims that it seeks to 'challenge and change the politics of truth on which the representation is based.'13 Authenticity and transparency - themselves artless constructs - are thus perceived as incompatible with more creative 'reflexive' representation which allows for the lie of documentary to seep through the cracks of the real. Nevertheless, authenticity and transparency are important elements of the compact made with the viewer of a documentary who expects from the outset to believe what she sees or at least learn from it, regardless of whether or not she leaves convinced.
As a way out of this genuine conundrum between the truth of the political and the politics of truth, Jean-Pierre Rehm, an art and film critic and head of the international documentary film festival in Marseille, who co-curated 'Ficcions' documentals, differentiates the artist as political advocate from the artist as a witness of his or her time. While there is not enough space here to explore the historical and critical implications of that claim or the complexity of witnessing as an ethico-political and juridical position in depth, it is a role frequently enough ascribed to artists working in documentary modes to warrant attention here. Rehm describes the works in his exhibition in the following terms: '…these different documentaries have chosen the most difficult way to bear witness in a language they do not claim to master, no longer that of "capturing" images and sounds, and to show this to an audience whose expectations they did not claim to know.'14 Thus, while the included artists are indeed experimenting with exterior reality, they do not wholeheartedly adopt a documentary perspective, nor do they intend to affect, convince or educate the audience. The expectations of the audience play no role in the structure of their works. For Rehm, witnessing is the 'manufacture of what is visible and intelligible' which makes the 'opposition between fiction and documentary inoperative.'15 The spectator's horizon of belief - based in the operative distinction between the real and the imaginary - which previously played a crucial role in the theorization of documentary practice, no longer figures in this conception.
In an unpublished lecture, curator Okwui Enwezor, who led the Documenta 11 team, also aligned documentary's burden of truth with the act of bearing witness to aspects of our contemporary reality, and specifically to issues of ethics and bio-politics, which Enwezor considers the key political impetus in contemporary art.16 According to Enwezor, the witness has to constantly toe the line between the universal and particular, categories that frame our understanding of human rights. Witnessing, though, is construed as an alternative position between documenting and fabricating. Unlike Rehm, however, Enwezor recognizes that the witness account only functions as such if it is verifiable; indeed the very notion of witnessing is dependent on its reception and acceptance by a third party.
Where the relationship between documentary and art is concerned, this unproblematized appropriation of witnessing as the documentary mode par excellence tends to relativize its artistic, ideological, and ethico-political potential. The acts of seeing and telling in documentary representation are theorized so generally that it has become increasingly difficult to articulate its critical force. As the Slovenian critical thinker Slavoj Zizek has argued:
'We live in the 'post-modern' era in which truth-claims as such are dismissed as an expression of hidden power mechanisms - as the reborn pseudo-Nietzscheans like to emphasize, truth is a lie which is most efficient in asserting our will to power. The very question 'Is it true?' apropos of some statement is supplanted by another question: 'Under what power conditions can this statement be uttered?' What we get instead of the universal truth is a multitude of perspectives, or, as it is fashionable to put it today, of 'narratives' - not only of literature, but also of politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully co-exist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the possibility to tell his/her story.'17

Esthetic strategies

While the pluralism advocated by the curators of documentary exhibitions has crucially enabled a vast range of voices to be accounted for and heard, and has helped to reveal power relationships that subtend representation, the current state of affairs risks neutralizing the documentary impulse, blunting its partisan edge. It's worth remembering Grierson's words: 'The penalty of realism is that it is about reality and has to bother forever not about being "beautiful" but about being right.'18
Taking the logic even further, Swiss journalist Claudia Spinelli, who curated Reprocessing Reality, welcomes the creative potential of this multitude of perspectives and of the museum specifically as a site in which they can play themselves out and provoke reflection, but not action:
'One of the most outstanding qualities of art is its constant ability to redefine itself. Against this background, there is no possibility of separating the genres from one another. We cannot be concerned with establishing which works should be classified as art and which as cinema. When documentary films enter the museum, they become elements influencing a conception that is in a constant state of change…What is foregrounded are the ways and means by which something is portrayed, how something is communicated, or maybe also perhaps omitted. The museum is not the place where we weep about the sad fate of unlucky people, but a context in which we can reflect on why something moves us, why something unnerves us, or why it leaves us quite cold.'19

Spinelli argues here against classification - of genres, of categories like art and cinema, of experiences and of intentions. In her 'anything goes' climate of the museum (which apparently welcomes fortunate people experiencing 'happy fates'), the emotional responses typically inspired by documentary - rage, compassion, sadness, horror, even happiness and resolution - or by the viewer's identification with the subject of a documentary, are elided in favor of some form of rational reflection about the means of representation that is eliciting a response, implying that if we cannot know the real, we can at least try to know ourselves.
At the other end of the spectrum, Mark Nash, whose exhibition Experiments with Truth held at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia at the beginning of 2005 takes up issues he raised when co-curating Documenta 11. Nash is deeply concerned with the specifics of museum presentation as opposed to the film and television, the dominant regimes for the presentation of documentaries. For him, space and architecture (specially designed by U.S. based architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro), play a key role in mediation and in spectator response. He refutes the commonplace equations between cinema/passive spectator and gallery/active spectator, as well as the facile presumption that the latter position is necessarily more radical than the former. He argues that the specific spaces, places and temporalities of cinema, whether screened in an art space or a movie house, set up particular discursive frameworks in which subjectivities can be mobilized in a whole variety of ways.
Whereas Spinelli and Rehm seem hardly interested in the possible effects of documentary works on their viewers - a key problematic within the traditions of documentary cinema - Nash sees critical potential in the encounter between museum and gallery goers and films by the Black Audio Film Collective, Amar Kanwar, or Igloolik Isuma Productions, whose films, which were not explicitly conceived of for a gallery setting, and those by Multiplicity, Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, who employ documentary imagery in installations adapted to museum or gallery architecture. While filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker, and Harun Farocki have long exploited the temporal and spatial potential of the gallery space in their film installations, the joint display of films (simply projected) and more complex multi-screen or multi-monitor installations, which offer quite distinct experiences to their viewers, is now commonplace. One of the less frequently mentioned reasons for the integration of documentary film into the museum is a quite pragmatic one: decreasing funds for documentary experimentation within film and television circuits has led filmmakers working around documentary traditions to seek out production assistance in museums and galleries.20
As documentary strategies come to occupy an increasingly important place in the art world, it will be important to remain vigilant as to how these exhibitions and works function within the broader economic, aesthetic and ideological coordinates of the art world and the art market. What sorts of subject matter is privileged by artists, museums and galleries? Are we dealing with a form of 'realism' that should be analyzed in relationship to its artistic and political legacy? Is censorship an issue? What, if any, aesthetic criteria dominate? Are others rejected? Without these kinds of questions today's documentary impulse can never be 'incorporated into an explicit analysis of society and at least the beginning of a program for changing it,' to cite Martha Rosler. 21 Perhaps, one may no longer expect that of art; but one might still hope for it of documentary.