- Venue
- Village Underground
- Location
The gap-year trustafarian wanders through the slum, stoned. An i-pod playing Sigur Ros replaces the clatter, car sounds and foreign shouts; a nosegay of sinus trouble holds at bay the sweltering stench. Threatening glances slip off the periphery of his vision. He smiles mildly as he sees sunlight cut across an alleyway and adumbrate the shirtless children playing there. That evening he writes an email to his parents in Kent, the description of his day provides the point of contact for his mother’s dream, she dreams Favela Descending.
More Pricks Than Kicks
Jerry Fox is a documentary-maker-turned-artist. His award-winning films have made up many a South Bank Show. For his first exhibition he was given the Zabludowicz’s new gallery in Chalk Farm to install several multi-screen projections, the centre-piece of which was Living London.
This consisted of screens in front, behind, below, above and on each side of the viewer, showing what was recorded by cameras pointing in those directions, as the cameraman moved through various London locations. While synchronized temporally, the views had in fact been filmed at different times, so that objects appearing in front did not necessarily reappear in recession at the side or behind. This broke the illusion and, quite effectively, foregrounded the faith we instinctively put in such mechanisms of representation.
These were images of tourist London: banality assured basically unproblematic relations between filmer and filmed (taking into account the clearly audible “Prick!”, off camera in another of Fox’s installations at the Zabludowicz gallery, maybe referring to this disembodied ego walking around Soho on a Friday night with his camcorder).
Relations become tricky when the process is repeated, not in London but Rio. With Favela Descending, the viewer is again positioned in a cube of screens but instead of Leicester Square or the South Bank they are taken through dusty gangland back streets. People smoke in doorways, cooly eyeing the passing cameraman. If they are speaking, God forbid, we cannot hear it. Whereas London was filled with the sound of buses and birdsong (and insults), the sound of Rio is apparently a synth-orchestral epic.
What a Beautiful World!
The problem here can be elucidated by a quick look at Walter Benjamin’s 1934 article The Author as Producer. It asserts the importance of the artist maintaining an awareness of the way the work’s technik, or technical and formal strategies, implicate it in wider networks of power.
As an example of artwork made in the absence of this awareness Benjamin takes a contemporaneous anthology of photographs by Albert Renger-Patsch, entitled A Beautiful World. For Benjamin it typifies a kind of photography that has become “ever more nuanced, ever more modern, … the result is that it can no longer depict a tenement block or a refuse heap without transfiguring it.” Such “modish” photography succeeds in “transforming even abject poverty, by recording it in a fashionably perfected manner, into an object of enjoyment. For if it is an economic function of photography to restore to mass consumption, by fashionable adaptation, subjects that had earlier withdrawn themselves from it – springtime, famous people, foreign countries – it is one of the political functions to renew from within – that is, fashionably – the world as it is.”
We can clearly level this criticism at Favela Descending. The dreamy steadicam, the soundtrack’s otherworldly bombast, the pseudo-immersive presentation: this is the work’s technik that turns the desperation of the foreign slum into a thing of mantel piece contemplation.
The purely non-diegetic music in Fox’s work is used to override both language and the symbolic sounds of the locale (whilst, ironically, having been made by sampling “only real sounds recorded in the favela itself”, according to the press release). A dumbshow is thus made of the favela’s inhabitants; simultaneously our experience of them is imprinted with a state of mail-order wonderment. Benjamin takes Brecht’s strategies of fragmentation as antidote to such false reconciliations. In Brecht’s theatre music is used to interrupt action and counteract illusion, rather than emote. The viewer is thus forced to adopt an attitude “vis-à-vis the process” of representation. They are held at arm’s length. The fragmentation of Living London, for what it was worth, has been sacrificed to the golden mist of “all-encompassing” immersion.
More Onanistic Than Oneiric
We wonder what kind of cognition, not only of what is shown on the screens but also of how things stand in the world, is the audience of Favela Descending expected to arrive at?
It is of course the artist’s prerogative to lie and dissimulate: good lies probably make for good art. But the documentary-maker should know that such a privilege needs to be balanced with responsibility to their human subject matter. Maybe this is the problem of ethnography-in-the-gallery. It has been argued (by Noel Carroll) that we cannot distinguish a documentary from a fiction film by its technik alone, in isolation from a context of intention or reception. We are surely none the wiser when that point of reception is the art gallery. If Favela Descending is documentary, it documents nothing in any significant way; if it is fiction, it parodies the type of cultural hubris of which it is an example. But there is a third possibility: that it simply provides the opportunity for an experience.
Such a contrivance, like those 19th-century panoramas of exotic urban sites (in Daguerre's version the viewer stood static while the scenery moved mechanically past them), can shrug off worries about how things stand in the world, let alone about renewing it from within – and anyway, that favela is too dangerous to go there yourself! Experience their deprivation virtually just by accepting the subjectivity constructed at the nexus of the six screens, the subjectivity of the grand tourist, and relax.
