What is it that makes truth concrete? It must be a specific understanding of documentary as a mode of providing access rather than evidence; it is a way of waiting for the anticipated rather than preempting prefabricated pleasure; a re-appropriation of the event, which is not owned, but owned up to.
In chemistry terms, becoming concrete relates to the process of precipitation: the formation of a solid within a solution. The hardening takes place in the spaces in between the grains and results in a formation where otherwise separate entities grow together to form a structure that may be more resistant than its hosting environment.
In this sense, documentary has to be understood precisely as the concretization of truth and not vice versa. It lets truth fall and deposit, before it can be discovered and made visible.
This would also lead to a first and basic distinction between the mode of documentary and the practice of documentation—two terms that are often confused or used in a synonymous way: documentary is the making concrete of a truth, while documentation is about the verification of concrete phenomena.
Such a distinction makes particular sense as soon as practices of documentary and documentation are situated in a context where art and activism are shortcircuited, and where domains of the esthetic and the political seem to coincide.
Over the past two decades and across all disciplines, artists and curators have responded to a radically new understanding of the world by rediscovering, reinterpreting, and reevaluating the relationship between an increasingly immaterialized world of things or abstractions, on the one hand, and their perception by the artist’s equally precarious self, on the other.
From visual arts to theater, from photography to architecture, “documentary” propagates a turn towards a more or less fragile understanding of reality through a practical critique of the concept of “document.”
While the original purpose of a document was once to produce evidence and, in doing so, to stabilize a self, today it has become subject to all sorts of manipulations that either deconstruct or reinforce its potential for generating a truth that is always past or has already been processed.
But what if the document played an entirely different role? Instead of providing a sort of evidence, which is systematically devalued and just appears as rather void, the document might emerge in a much more humble trajectory: it is supposed to grant access to secret, to discarded information or to neglected facts.
Rather than dismissing the new relevance of the documentary as playful analogies just for the sake of them, or as tautological proof of the patently obvious, its real potential lies in a kind of alternative narrative that is no longer opposed to the present reality but based on a different reading of the past.
This requires investigations into new forms of image production that allow us to reimagine the future and see it in a different way. Such a project has to start with a critical analysis of the role of the image as a document in surveillance technologies, in financial speculation, data visualization, and automatic vision. They may all be characterized as preemptive attempts to gain an advantage by impeding a future event before it is realized.
Such preemptive attempts need to be compared to anticipatory strategies prefiguring future events in order to offer alternative images that are not yet present but may potentially occur: either because of a rereading of the past (reenactments, mockumentaries, fakes, archive art) or a refusal of the disciplinary force of “realtime” (improvization, aleatory techniques, antiphotography or conceptual photography, ephemeral strategies).
A discussion about the ethics and esthetics of documentary today may have fundamental consequences for the role of art and the artist in society: it allows art to be understood as anticipating a future by reading reality against the grain.
But the relationship of documentary to reality remains rather complex: it is about the reappropriation of an event, the actualization of an event that is virtual; but, rather than being owned, it has to be owned up to. And only by being owned up to, may it begin to exist.
This means that the relationship between a document and a reality is a relationship of overseeing. We oversee the fact, which everyone knows, that the image cannot represent reality. We behave as if we could mistake an image for reality.
This oversight is not just an accidental mistake or a slip. It is a mistake that needs to happen time and again. When we oversee, we see something else, something beyond what is visible—something “transvisual.” It is a chance encounter that reveals something different, unexpectedly.
In this respect, documentary has to fail in order to become documentary—and one needs to admit this and be aware of it all the time. Such an encounter will not happen at the right moment or in realtime: it will always be too early or too late.
This perspective might offer a new and rather productive approach towards the problem of “realism”: rather than mirroring or representing, documentary provides reality. It is provision in the literal sense of the word: a vision on behalf of or instead of the visible, a performance of a reality which it is confronting. Or, as many theorists of documentary film have already noted: “The important truth any documentary captures is the performance in front of the camera.”
Documentary is about supplying a reality with different aspects, furnishing it with something new, accentuating it by alienating it from itself. It is always about looking beyond the given set of assets that may constitute a reality.
Equally, such an understanding of the performativity of truth can also be expanded towards current practices of documentation, such as data visualization and leaking, as the two extreme poles. What is at stake here is not a more correct, more exact or more comprehensible way to access an otherwise hidden truth, which then becomes subject to exposure; on the contrary, it documents nothing but the creative act of producing a new reality, which may indeed turn out to be less complex, less chaotic or less dishonest.
The verifying character of data visualization refers to the fact that, above a certain amount, any kind of data can be transformed into imaginary value. Data visualization creates an imaginary reality, which only means that one cannot distinguish any longer what is false and what is true.
Yet information leaking operates in a similar way, but in the opposite direction: the truth that is dragged to the light when secret information is published is the fact that a closed system is leaking and cannot preserve its inviolability further on. This matters much more than the actual content that gets exposed.
The information revealed does not provide evidence; it only grants access to a way of dealing with things that so far has not been supposed to be public. In this respect, it is very similar to gossip, and it comes as no surprise that the cables published by WikiLeaks in November 2010 contain merely a kind of chatter exchanged by US diplomats.
Today it is a matter of course that the public release of large quantities of formerly secret information as full text on the Internet submits it to all sorts of further processing like indexing, searching, and other forms of quantitative evaluation based on an algorithm that can be applied independently from a discussion about its legal implications and legitimacy.
But there is also a qualitative dimension: Rather than a documentation of how power operates in the shadows, it has at least the potential to reverse-engineer power and reveal its source code. But as much as it demystifies power, it remystifies it again. The truth that is revealed is both, human-readable and abstract, with a very short halflife. It is doomed to decay if it is not recompiled into another application of power.
In the end, digital technologies have only accelerated the processes of documentation; the point, however, is to claim a truth and make it concrete. The projects presented in the following chapter are dealing with these challenges in very different ways.
Gregory Sholette’s “Dark Matter” refuses documentation either consciously or unconsciously and, in doing so, gives rise to a destabilization and uncertainty that occupies both traditional institutions and their specific ways of keeping track of their own version of reality, as well as artists and activists, who experience increasing difficulties of defining themselves in opposition to the established art world.
Practices of “Reenacting,” “Militant Sound Investigation” and “Interactive Documenting” demonstrate the potential of an up-to-date empiricism in which sensory experience is expanded beyond the borders of individual perception and not limited to the reaffirmation of selfhood. “Counterimaging” and “Hip Hop” are reconstructing and reinventing social realities rather than mirroring them.
The street screenings of “Tahrir Cinema” pose the question of collective ownership in the sphere of a “social hyperreality” where all of a sudden people “enter the image.” Hans Haacke’s investigation into the ruptures and breaks of a social context are conducted through an understanding of continuity, which is as precise as it is critical—in both literal senses of the words.
A critical understanding of “Forensics” offers the possibility to emancipate the capacity of an object to narrate “multiple versions of history.” “Art leaking” is extending the subjectivity of artists, at the same time privileged and precarious, to a wider notion of art workers. On that basis it does not only state grievances, but proclaims new forms of solidarity and collective agency, inside as well as outside of institutional frameworks.
What all these practical examples may have in common is a certain drive to call into question the rules by which reality is produced and to assert a right to take this production into one’s own hands. This is exactly what constitutes the importance of documentary: generating realities that free themselves from obsessions and possessions; that resist the ways in which all forms of living—or “life off guard” as Dziga Vertov would call it—are captured and caught by technical devices.