If needed be summed up in one sentence, one could say that video artists Anja Kirschner and David Panos revisit the past in their long-form films in order to shed light on the present. But that would be too simple. What does revisiting the past entail? What knowledge is the “visit” informed by? The London based German-Greek duo collides current affairs with historical research and literary tropes in their investigations, which won them critical acclaim and, in 2011, the Jarman award. The artists work with actors as well as amateurs and collaborate with specialists from other disciplines to create filmic speculative histories that interrogate social reality. Their latest video installation “Ultimate Substance”, premiered earlier this fall at Vienna’s Secession, marks a return to the duo’s investigation of the relation between economics and culture, as well as the tension between artistic form and historical fact.
“Ultimate Substance” was filmed in and around the Numismatic Museum in Athens and in Lavreotiki, a nearby mining district, which provided the silver from which the Athenian coins were struck. The film draws on a diverse set of references including archaeology, philosophy, pedagogy and ritual and explores the ways in which monetisation and industrial labour have transformed the way we think, represent and interact with the world – drawing on the notion that monetary systems enabled abstract thought, logic, and systematic power that isn’t related to personality. Sleek spoke to Kirschner and Panos during the opening week in Vienna:
What was the initial drawing point to Ancient Greece? When we arrived in Greece we were very conscious of the difficulties in either depicting some aspect of the current crisis or in dealing with antiquity as a subject. So much of Greek nationalism is rooted in a very problematic idea of Classical Greece. That said, when we got there we started to read a lot about the history of money from the classical era, primarily in the work of Richard Seaford, and were interested in the hypothesis that the early use of silver coinage – silver mined by slaves, of course – was influential in fostering the metaphysical and idealistic mindset that still grounds so-called “Western Culture”. Of course dealing with the history of money and labour also seemed a sidelong way of reflecting on the present situation. So we ended up looking at classical Greece but from an almost inverted perspective.
How do you approach historical content? Our focus is less on historical content and more on analysing how this content has been constructed, and understanding the different power struggles behind that process. We have always been interested in the idea that history is a point of contestation for the present, or a way of opening up questions for today. An historical perspective enables you to see both the similarities and the differences between disparate moments in time. For example our film looking at the related development of finance and fiction in the 18th Century, “The Last Days of Jack Sheppard”, shows how financial crises are a consistent feature of capitalism but that their conditions, formations and expressions are radically different.
We usually create “Actualisations”, using representations of history that playfully reference genres like costume dramas or history channel documentaries rather than trying to aim for reconstructions. To our understanding, “Actualisation” involves a process of opening up the past as an active question or, as art historian Kerstin Stakemeier put it, “a process which opens up the past in recognising it as a part of the present, forming a lever to emancipate both”.
You used dancers rather than actors in the new work. Why? Working with dancers enabled us to slightly stylize and choreograph scenes – not too much so that they become ‘modern dance’, but just enough so they don’t read as mimetic reconstructions of history.
There is no way of ever approximating the conditions slaves worked under in the silver mines, as records or documents of their lives barely exist. There is also no way of depicting the hardship they would have suffered – it would have been ludicrous to even attempt to. Instead, we opted for a secondary level of references: Pasolini, history-channel reconstructions, Hollywood “swords and sandals” movies and even the erotic subtext many of the filmic depictions in this genre had.
How do you see this work playing on an emotional level? All our work has a certain ‘romantic’ content, a yearning that hopefully doesn’t resolve into melancholy but rather into an active provocation. Sometimes it felt like our films have had a rather unfashionable emotional dimension, playing with melodramatic or tragic forms but not totally recuperating them through distance or irony. Most art studiously avoids such gestures, or worse still art that attempts to provoke sentiment often seems mawkish. This has been a difficult area we’ve been interested in exploring – for example our piece about the Meisner technique has prompted polarized responses where people either identify with or totally critically reject the emotional performance on the screen – we see both responses simultaneously.
ANJA KIRSCHNER & DAVID PANOS Ultimate Substance Until November 25, 2012 Secession, Vienna