Vertigo of presence: Chantal Akerman’s NOW, nomadic dwelling and the ‘war machine’ within the context of contemporary moving image works

ABSTRACT

How can the heightened time–space correlation of (armed) conflict, if at all, be represented in an art context? This article explores how Chantal Akerman’s multi-channel installation NOW (2015) can be read in view of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1988) ‘war machine’, a concept suggesting a rebellious strategy defined by nomadic existence and acted out against the State and its involvement in capitalist control systems. In this context, nomadic dwelling with its enhanced sense of ‘smooth space’ offers geographical, psychological and audio-visual dimensions. Aiming to examine a range of takes on the political, economical and existential dimension of warfare within contemporary art, the discussion draws parallels with moving image works by Harun Farocki, Anri Sala, Regina José Galindo and Elizabeth Price. A mapping of the proposed theoretical framework across individual case studies allows for a rigorous examination and differentiation of audio-visual and conceptual methodologies and their phenomenological implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Nomadic
• dwelling
• moving image
• phenomenology
• war machine
• installation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andrea Thoma is an artist/researcher and a lecturer at the School of Design of the University of Leeds. She has been Programme Leader for BA Art and Design from 2015 to 2019. She holds a PhD (2013) – thesis title Thought Dwellings: Time and Place in Painting, Photography and Video. She is a member of the research network LAND2 concerned with landscape/place-oriented art practice. Her research is informed by concerns with notions of place, identity and dwelling in a contemporary art context. She is particularly interested in the juxtaposition of diverse media to reflect on aspects of image making. The phenomenological aspect of perception and its partaking in the cognitive process are a main driving force in the collation of visual material within her practice and also in her theoretical research. Thoma has published journal articles on image perception, relations between moving and still images, sound and image within art installations and durational multiplicity.

Notes

1 The author has seen both versions of NOW presented in 2015; the first encounter was at the Venice Biennale and a second viewing at Ambika P3 in London. All other works discussed have also been seen by the author in various exhibition contexts, except for Harun Farocki’s and Regina José Galindo’s installations, which were viewed online.

2 The concept of ‘nomadic dwelling’ relates to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘nomadic space’ and Heidegger’s notion of ‘nearness’ (Thoma 2006).

3 ‘[…] the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterriorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 21).

4 Akerman committed suicide a few weeks before the opening of her exibition at Ambika.

5 It might be worth noting that Allied forces heavily bombarded Kassel during World War II due to its strong links with the German arms industry.

6 See also Rose Braidotti’s theorizing of nomadic experience in ‘Nomadic Subjects’ (2011).

7 Whilst Deleuze and Guattari argue that the State is without ‘war machine’ and can only ‘appropriate one in the form of a military institution’ (1988, 355), Henri Lefebvre understands the aggressive forces of a military state as closely linked to ideas of nationhood. ‘Secondly, nationhood implies violence – the violence of a military state, be it feudal, bourgeois, imperialist, or some other variety. It implies, in other words, a political power controlling and exploiting the resources of the market or the growth of the productive forces in order to maintain and further its rule’ (Lefebvre 1991, 112).

8 Doreen Massey points out how Caren Kaplan is highly critical of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the nomad as a ‘modernist Western’ projection. Kaplan challenges their use of binaries as a strategy to lure the ‘subversive bourgeois/intellectual’ (Kaplan cited in Massey 2005, 173).

9 Author’s translation. In Akerman’s reflections (2004) on why she had not (to that date) made a film about the Middle East, she explained that she had wanted to but was not able to deal with the topic earlier (2004, 148).

10 Author’s translation.

11 D’Est (1993) was shown as installation work on 24 monitors at Ambika P3 (Cumming 2015). There is also a film version (one channel) of the same material.

12 ‘Jetztzeit – Walter Benjamin uses this term in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” to describe a notion of time that is ripe with revolutionary possibility, time that has been detached from the continuum of history. It is time at a standstill, poised, filled with energy, and ready to take what Benjamin called the “tiger’s leap” (original emphasis) into the future’ (Oxford Reference).

13 Walter Benjamin comments on history: ‘A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop’ (Benjamin and Arendt 1999, 254). See also Hannah Arendt’s footnote, ‘Benjamin says “Jetztzeit” (original emphasis) and indicates by the quotation marks that he does not simply mean an equivalent to Gegenwart, (original emphasis) that is present. He clearly is thinking of the mystical nunc stans (original emphasis)’ (1999, 253).

14 Babette Mangolte explains how the soundtrack of NOW includes a wealth of different sound elements conjuring human presence which is mapped against the void of the desert images. What the viewers experience is only in the present, ‘because the filmmaker has covered her traces and has made sure that the dense collage of sounds referring to multiple countries and cultures reveals nothing other than what is viewed and heard’ (2019, 71).

15 The first scene of the film shows a tree moving in the desert wind. Then, halfway through the film, as Akerman leaves her mother’s appartment in Bruxelles to return to her nomadic existence, fleeting images shot whilst driving through the desert are inserted – and once again, we see the desert at the end of the film just before the closing scene of her mother’s flat.

16 Akerman is known to have attended a seminar by Deleuze in late sixties Paris (Brenez 2011). However, it was later that her interest in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings came to the forefront, in particular their concept of the ‘minor’ and ‘deterritorialization’ in relation to literature (Margulies 1996, 16; Akerman 2004, 80). Influenced by these ideas, she sees her engagement with film as that of a ‘minor cinema’ understanding it as ‘an art form that consciously embraces its own marginality, rebels against the dominance of big production systems and makes exile […] from restrictive forms of belonging – one of its central themes’ (Schmid 2010, 6).

17 See Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) use of ‘milieu’. ‘It [the nomad thought] […] does not ground itself in an all-encompassing totality but is on the contrary deployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, desert, or sea’ (381). They also comment on Kenneth White’s use of ‘milieu-space’ in relation to places like ‘the Orient’ or the ‘Gobi desert’ (381).

18 See also the exhibition at Fact Liverpool MyWar: Participation in an Age of War (2010).

19 Publication date of the original French version of A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux).

20 However, both imageries, to prepare soldiers for war and to help them overcome their experiences of war, use computer animation, which could be seen as an alienation from real life war zones.

21 In contrast, Akerman’s Down there/Là-bas (2005) alludes to the dangers of war/terrorism in a more oblique way. With the main scenery showing images filmed from the interior of an apartment in Tel Aviv, we learn through Akerman’s narration that a bomb in the immediate neighbourhood has killed four people, changing her and the spectator’s perception of the apartment’s interior from a slightly claustrophobic environment to a location offering shelter from the war zone outside.

22 It is worth noting how the military’s use of virtual reality, ‘the structure of the images, of the software’ is derivative of the game industry, which in turn was influenced by military imagery (Eshun 2012, 69).

23 Non-screen space is here understood as the actual space between screens in the installation rather than the off-screen as a filmic method to imply a space that is not depicted but implied.

24 Quotations from Didi-Huberman’s Remontages du Temps Subi: L’oeil de l’Histoire, 2 (2010) are the author’s translation.

25 The author has seen the installation at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (2012), at Tate Britain for the Turner Prize exhibition (2012) and at Tate Modern (2018).

26 Price highlights the technical possibilities of digital editing within the procedure of montage (Price 2012).

27 The fatal Woolworths fire was aggravated by high flammability of furniture materials and unsafe storage (Blanchflower 2013).

28 The German term innehalten seems particularly adequate in suggesting a pausing, literally a ‘holding within’.

29 ‘[Smooth space] is a space of contact, of small tactile or manual actions of contact, rather than a visual space like Euclid’s striated space’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 371).

30 ‘The nomad distributes himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle. It is therefore false to define the nomad by movement […] Of course, the nomad moves, but while seated, and he is only seated while moving […]’ (381).

31 A feminist reading of Galindo’s performance would also comment on power relations between the tank with its phallic gun and the female protagonist as persecuted object of desire.

32 Galindo showed three performance-based works at Documenta 14 in Kassel (Matamala 2017).

33 Hito Steyerl discusses how ‘new visualities’ in the game industry, military surveillance and other digital art forms often prioritise a view from above, or a juxtaposition of different angles or viewpoints, and these modalities seem to do away with clear references to a ground. ‘In many of these new visualities, what seemed like a helpless tumble into an abyss actually turns out to be a new representational freedom. Perhaps this helps us to get over […] the idea that we need a ground in the first place’ (Steyerl 2012, 27).

34 Most of the works discussed here (by Akerman, Farocki, Galindo, Sala) were commissioned and sponsored by art institutions that receive public funding (Venice Biennale, Bienal de São Paulo, Documenta, Artangel, etc.), some also by commercial galleries. Price developed her installation during Arts Council England and British School at Rome residencies; it was included in her (winning) exhibition for the Turner prize 2012 (Blanchflower 2013).

35 Author’s translation.

36 Jaar has questioned our desensitization to (media) images in many of his politically motivated works. The author was particularly taken by his installation Lament of the Images ‘shown at Documenta XI (2002) in Kassel, [it] was presented in two adjacent exhibition spaces, one darkened showing light boxes with text referring to the political control of images, the other confronting the viewer with blinding light that wiped out any possibility of discerning an image’ (Thoma 2012).

37 Author’s translation.