“To make sense of what is and has been meant by documentary, we need to examine it from three perspectives. As a historical construction, it must be situated within the framework of its contemporary discourses, practices and uses … As part of a larger system of visual communication, as both a conduit and agent of ideology, purveyor of empirical evidence and visual ‘truths,’ documentary photography can be analyzed as a sign system possessed of its own accretion of visual and signifying codes determining reception and instrumentality… Last, we would want to examine the position of documentary photography within the discusive spaces of the mass media (and more recently, within the discursive spaces of the gallery and museum) in order to grasp the role it plays, the assumptions and attitudes it fosters, the belief systems of conforms.”

-Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Annika Eriksson’s Staff At Sao Paulo Biennal (video 1/5, 2002), effectively acts as the conclusion to The Greenroom: Reconsidering The Documentary And Contemporary Art at the Hessel Museum. No, better yet, it acts as the credits. The 12-minute work, projected at near life-size onto a gallery wall, occupying its own room, features [literally], in a single frontal shot, the more than thirty people who each play an integral role in the production of the art exhibition. When I say the art exhibition, however, I am not referring to Greenroom, which curator Maria Lind conceived as an attempt “to explore where the land lies for documentary practices within contemporary art.”¹ Rather, I mean, and I believe Eriksson means, the art exhibition in general, as a social, cultural, and economic product. But this is my interpretation. In fact, the people depicted, who one-by-one step into the frame and introduce themselves – their full names, and their roles in the exhibition – then step into the background, have each been employed to produce the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennal, perhaps South America’s most internationally regarded regular art event. How is it exactly, if the premise for Eriksson’s piece is ostensibly so simple and, relative to many other examples of documentary (art and not art), unmediated, that one can form such an interpretation? It is possible, naturally, because of a contemporary understanding of documentary and artistic practices and the discourses surrounding them; it is also possible because of assumptions about the mechanism of the camera, and in this case the digital video medium; further, it is fostered by the physical situation of the work within a museum exhibition and academic setting. These preconditions are loosely reflected in the three criteria for understanding documentary set forth by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and we should consider, among other things, how Annika Eriksson’s Sao Paulo engages with them. As always, we should keep in mind the triangulated tension between words, pictures, and presentation.

Broadly speaking, Maria Lind’s exhibition prompts us to reconsider the function of documentary in the 21^st century. It is important to note that embedded within this prompt is a now widely understood notion of the difficulties involved in any kind of objective documentary practice. Anikka Erikkson’s work is a minority in the exhibition in that it does not directly address these difficulties: it does not propose questions about the ontology of documentary, nor does it, though it could, comment in a Sontagian way on documentary as a power structure, a means for the powerful to narrativize history (as an extension of writing). That said, the work, upon first watch, is most recognizable as having a political subject matter. For this reason, we will first look at Solomon-Godeau’s second criterion for understanding documentary, particularly how it it acts as ‘both conduit and agent of ideology.’

As stated, in Sao Paulo the art exhibition is to be read as a product. That is to say, the work highlights the many production elements that go into putting together a large scale art event. In a sense, the cross-section of humanity that is bound together by the Sao Paulo Biennal is a microcosm for any other workplace or public space (both of which are subjects for Eriksson in other work), such as a corporation headquarters or a subway, where various social classes and types occupy the same space and are forced to engage, if only perfunctorily, and if engagement might merely mean putting up with one another. Solomon-Godeau’s words are relevant here in the sense that there are two readings of Eriksson’s intent one can derive from the piece: one can interpret a precious, almost naïve work wherein Eriksson is celebrating the vicissitudes of culture that come together in an industrious, collaborative manner to put on an art show. In this reading, the employees are portrayed in an honorific way, all given the same same platform to nobly introduce themselves. This is the only conforming instruction, and it is a humble and unmanipulative one. The order in which each person comes up is based on a random drawing of numbers; it defies social hierarchy. There is no sense of plight or condescension. This reading recalls honorific portraiture. One can contrarily make a more political reading. In this reading Eriksson’s benevolence doesn’t diminish, but the signs of class and social stature are evident simply through contrasting clothing, demeanor, and even names. Greenroom‘s catalog describes the crowd in Sao Paulo as offering “an interesting dissection of the make-up and power of an institution. Names and titles become, combined with body language and clothing; indicators of identity, heritage, and socioeconomic status. The variety of names (Tatiana, Valdemar, Ininha, Rolo, Faria, Mauricio, Emerson etc.) also becomes an indicator of Brazil’s specific mixed-ethnicity and immigration history.”² It is worth noting that Hito Steyerl, the artist and theoritician with whom CCS is collaborating on the Greenroom series, works extensively with the subject of post-colonialism. There might even be something to Eriksson’s Swedish heritage, Scandinavian culture being concerned with the dilution of a class based system, as well as indicators of class.

However, a rather elegant quality of the work, and that which keeps either reading from being deflated, is that Eriksson does not explicitly acknowledge these social differences. Solomon-Godeau, and others, would have us understand the tendency of documentary to act as an agent of ideology, perhaps multiple ideologies at once — Eriksson’s, Steyerl’s, Lind’s — and I believe that our own ideologies should be included in that list. We have expectations about the behavior and presentation of everyone from the public relations girl to the architect to the docent. Eriksson, relying on and believing in the objectivity of the video camera, truly allows reality to speak for itself. We might assume that Head Curator Alonfs Hug doesn’t spend much time with maintenance man Gimarior Leme da Silva, but we do not know. Alfons Hug comes off as slightly stressed, but any sign of sophistication or education is ambiguous at best. Arguably the most revealing part of the video is the very end, when, once the whole staff has assembled, they are all cued at once from off-screen to go their separate ways. Everyone briefly remains in place and awkwardly chats to his or her neighbors. Only two people seem shunned: the architect, a young man with long orange hair, the only one who had an antipatico attitude in his introduction; and a middle-aged, mentally challenged maintenance man of kind demeanor. Who knows what exactly these two details convey? Certainly nothing that would advertently drive at pointed political outlook. How could they, since they were totally unscripted? In the last moments, the unmediated presentation Eriksson gives us becomes more like people watching – examining social interaction and codes in a crowd scene – than documentary.

Solomon-Godeau’s first criterion for understanding documentary states that it must be understood as a historical construction framed by contemporary discourses, practices and uses. Without exploring the specific historical construction of video art, which this work roughly falls under, we can examine the work’s use in relation to some of Annika Eriksson’s other work. Eriksson’s monograph in Frieze cites Frau and Auto, a work commissioned by Volkswagen. In this piece, the employees of Volkwagen’s Autostadt headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, are subject to the same type of introduction as in Sao Paulo. However, here it is Dr. Stefanie Jauns-Sefried, the female boss to a thirteen employee team, doing the introducing. Here, there is a more conspicuous political agenda: to highlight and challenge the role of women in the male-dominated auto industry.³ The monograph reads the frontal perspective as emphasizing Frau Jans-Sefried’s clothes (stylish), haircut (short and practical), and body language (confident, commanding). In Arbeitswelt (Working World, 2003), Eriksson portrays employees at a large workplace in much the same frontal manner. Here, though, they are given the opportunity to have the space within their workplace with which they most identify, to serve as the backdrop. The Frieze monograph comments that this form of portraiture gives the employees, “a narrow space in which to transcend their confining job descriptions.”⁴ In examining Eriksson’s body of work, light is shed on the contemporary practices and uses of documentary. We begin to see variations on the themes of social interaction Eriksson is focused on, and can better determine it’s levels of ideology and subjectivity.

We finally come to Solomon-Godeau’s third criterion for understanding documentary, which is to examine its position within relevant discursive spaces, in this case the museum exhibition setting. In fact, this aspect of Sao Paulo is best approached in the context of Solomon-Godeau’s words about documentary as ‘a purveyor of empirical evidence and visual ‘truths.” This is the case because “a central property of the video medium is its ability to see in real time what the camera is recording.”⁵ Use of this property is naturally a large part of the tradition of video art. While Sao Paulo is not a work that utilizes the capabilities of live video, the fact that the art exhibition (in which it is being displayed) as an event is among its subjects suggests that its relationship to the here-and-now should nonetheless be examined.

Sao Paulo was first exhibited at the actual 2002 Sao Paulo Biennal. The museum’s lobby, which serves as the background to the video, is the very same lobby viewers must have walked through shortly before seeing the work. There is, then, an element of site-specificity to the work. There certainly must be a validating effect under the rare circumstance that a documentary image or video is actually being viewed on the same site which it is portraying. It’s not quite real-time, but it nonetheless determines reception, as Godeau states.

Considering live, or near-live video practices within the discussion of documentary can problematize much of it’s discourse. On one end of the spectrum, we have Helmut Gernsheim’s statement, which must be among the most optimistic about the indexical purview of photography; he asserts that photography, better than any ‘language’, reflects the real. Granted, his assertion is more concerned with the ability of a documentary photograph to illuminate ‘conditions’ social and political, in a manner that makes their existence unquestionable, and even, it seems he is saying, unambiguous. Most analyses of photography’s indexical nature are more critical. In the same vain as Gernsheim, Lewis Hine wrote that, “The photograph has an added realism of its own,” however he, less optimistically, is referring merely to the photograph’s power to elicit an impression among the average viewer, of the aformentioned real. Maria Lind goes further to the opposite end of the spectrum, writing that in the contemporary era, “Faithful rendering of reality in a classical documentary sense is considered impossible.”⁶ One might ask whether, if not recorded video or film, live video has some authority on reality more than photography.

Sao Paulo as we see it, within the walls of CCS, is informed by site-specificity in a different way. The Frieze monograph makes the summation about Erikkson that, “the situations she produces often bring the art world in close proximity to the so-called real world.”⁷ Here, seeing those who labored to produce a different art exhibition, separated by time and geography, we reflect on both CCS as it’s own microcosm of cultural industry, and more generally on all art exhibitions. The work itself has traveled from Sao Paulo to the Konstmuseum in Malmo, to Annandale-on-Hudson, brushing up against countless institutional hierarchies along the way. It has traveled as a cultural product to be part of a large cultural product (Greenroom). The work’s near life-size presentation further emphasizes the sense of real people being involved, and causes literal and figurative reflection – the Sao Paulo museum lobby becomes an extension of the CCS space, almost as if the projected screen were a portal one could walk through. The space of the museum also transforms the question of how political the work is into a question of whether there is an institutional critique involved, which might be commenting on the museum space as willfully detached from reality as it slickly hides the work that went into it. There isn’t, it seems, but one certainly leaves the room with an appreciation for those who put an exhibition together, admittedly most of all towards service workers. One is keenly aware of the staff when leaving the museum (in this sense I would argue that Eriksson’s work qualifies as and example of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational art), and one understands quite well why Maria Lind chose to conclude the show with this gesture, perhaps above all, of appreciation.

Bibliography:

John G. Hanhardt, “Video Art: Expanded Forms”, in Leonardo, (MIT Press), vol 23, no 4 (1990), pp 437-439

Christie Lange. www.frieze.com/issue/article/public_works, Issue 105, July 2007

Maria Lind. “The Greenroom: Introduction to the Guide, Permanent Flux and Crisis” Exhibition catalog, p 15. CCS Press, 2008.

1Lind, Maria. Introduction to the catalog, The Greenroom: Reconsidering Documentary and Contemporary Art, p 17. (CCS Press, 2008)

2Exhibition catalog, p 39.

3Lange, Christie. www.frieze.com/issue/article/public_works, Issue 105, July 2007

4Ibid.

5Hanhardt, John G., “Video Art: Expanded Forms”, in Leonardo, (MIT Press), vol 23, no 4 (1990), pp 437-439

6Lind, Maria. “The Greenroom: Introduction to the Guide, Permanent Flux and Crisis” Exhibition catalog, p 15. CCS Press, 2008.

7Lange, 2007.