Engaged observationalism: forming publics in the gallery film

ABSTRACT

Artur Zmijewski’s Democracies (2009) is a video installation (screened as a 20-channel piece at galleries across Europe and as a single-screen film at London’s Tate Modern) that brings together 20 different public assemblies – ranging from funerals to marches, protests and celebrations. The film provides a microcosm of contemporary European nationalism, exemplified in the convening of citizens in public spaces. This article analyses Democracies in order to unpack its technical approach to the bodies and spaces it documents. This involves two key points of departure. First, a phenomenological reconsideration of the observational documentary mode, which simultaneously critiques one of the foremost forms of representing reality and reignites its potential. Zmijewski’s observationalism is freshly engaged through the use of counter-intuitive framing devices and highly evocative proximity to the body throughout, encouraging the consideration of the aesthetics of assembly in contemporary Europe. Second, I turn to the site of exhibition, questioning the historical tendency to locate radical art in the museum. I situate Democracies in debates around ‘socially engaged art’, arguing that its form of engagement is one not of healing the ‘social bond’, but of immanent critique, holding to account institutional complicity as much as the producers and spectators that partake in textual meaning.

KEYWORDS:

• Nationalism
• galleries
• documentary
• assemblage
• phenomenology

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Angelos Koutsourakis, Martin Hall and attendees of the Sadler Seminar on ‘Cinema of Crisis’ at the University of Leeds. Thanks also to Artur Żmijewski and the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, for permission and access to images.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As I have previously argued in ‘On the Visual Cultures of the New Nationalisms’ (Harvey 2018a, 1–16).

2. As explained in the online accompanying notes to the Filmoteka Muzeum’s presentation of Kowalski’s work, drawing from Karol Sienkiewicz’s Obszar Wspólny, Obszar Własny/Common Space, Individual Space (2011): https://artmuseum.pl/en/filmoteka/praca/kowalski-grzegorz-kowalnia-obszar-wspolny-obszar-wlasny?age18=true.

3. Biographical information on Zmijewski and other Polish artists available from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute online database, at https://culture.pl/en/artist/artur-zmijewski.

4. I have addressed this realist commitment to the unforeseen manifested through real-time documentation in relation to Jafar Panahi’s video diary, This is Not a Film (Harvey, 2018b).

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Notes on contributors

James Harvey

James Harvey is an Independent Scholar whose research focuses on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary film and video. He is the author of Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Art Cinema (2018) and the editor of Nationalism in Contemporary Western European Cinema (2018). He also teaches Film Theory at a number of UK universities.