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Nothing But the Truth


Omer Fast’s video installations – which employ everything from
The Terminator to CNN footage – not only blur the distinctions
between truth and fiction but question the way we tell ourselves
stories and construct meanings ¬ Andreas Schlaegel

Images “Listen to me. I want to tell you something. Come closer. Don’t be upset and don’t get emotional.
Nostalgia Just get near me and pay attention, please. Look, I know that you’re scared. I know what you’re
2009, three-part video installaion
afraid of.You mistrust your body. Lately it has been looking more and more foreign. It’s been doing
Still from Nostalgia II, two-channel HD videos (synchronized)
strange things.You suspect that it has been keeping something from you; that knowledge of your own
with sound
death is already programmed inside it somehow; that it’s stored in a primitive organ; that in between
All images are courtesy of the artist; gb agency, Paris; Arratia
the crush of blood and digestion your appendix or spleen sits obliviously still like an overgrown traffic
Beer, Berlin; Postmasters, New York island keeping watch over a terrible secret.”
(From Omer Fast’s CNN Concatenated, 2002)
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I
think we will see a full-feature show “Death Race 2000,” curated by sculptor way Hollywood films work. Showing the Inspired by a report about a man in Arizona stopped checking. Within a year the entire
film by Omer Fast soon. It’s only Rachel Lowther and conceptual artist James simulation of the sounds made the different who had secretly copied bits of hardcore porn inventory of videocassettes at all stores was
logical, considering his ongoing Hunt. Fast had received some attention with layers of the film’s sonic landscape visible. But onto rental movies for children, Fast started replaced by DVDs.”[2]
fascination with filmmaking and a surprising video work titled Breaking in a it also proved how narrative, sound and image looking for the film he’d like to overdub.
storytelling – even though, at New Partner, his graduate project at the MFA hinge on one another – each makes the other He found “something violent, stylized, even Pop Culture Schindler
first glance, it might seem that exhibition the same year. Back then it looked convincing and vice versa. cartoonish” in The Terminator. “It was one Hollywood Films continued to hold a strong
the silver screen has little to offer this artist, like a novelty act to me. Crammed in one Fast had opened a door for the viewer to of the first films I saw after moving to the fascination for the artist – and two years
whose sophisticated multi-screen video of the derelict bathrooms of the New York slip into the film, looking not only at what States. The film is about a psychopath from later, he was at it again, this time focusing on
installations reflect the visual rhetorics of nonprofit gallery Thread Waxing Space (run constitutes it, but also at where it places the the future who takes steroids, runs around Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Schindler’s List,
film and television in a way that cinema just by Lia Gangitano), it consisted of two video viewer. For example, when the character killing people, cuts his own eye out, marries a a Hollywood-style narrative dramatization
can’t. His video pieces tap into the sensory screens: One played an outtake of Lethal played by Mel Gibson contemplates suicide Kennedy and then runs for office as governor of the Holocaust that won seven Academy
quality of moving images without investing Weapon (1987) featuring Mel Gibson as a in the solitude of a dismal trailer home and of the world’s eighth largest economy.”[1] Awards and three Golden Globes, and was
in their glamour, but instead taking them into young cop battling suicidal impulses after puts a gun to his head while sobbing onto Dubbing four short interviews on four a worldwide box office smash, in spite of
account as expressions of cultural meaning. losing his wife. Hardly noticeable at first, a photograph of his wedding, the viewer is different points of the video had a remarkable its length of more than three hours. But
Closely knit, his works reflect not only on it was shown without the original sound. simultaneously confronted with the deadpan effect. Incidents from the interviewee’s earlier Spielberg’s film also courted controversy:
the structures of the narratives being told, but In fact, it was the artist, seen on the second image of the artist’s many faces making the life, including instances of “being physically When it premiered Claude Lanzmann,
also on the multilayered signs and the refined screen, who imitated every single piece of different sounds. He shows no compassion disciplined by a parent. Nothing traumatic, the director of Shoah (1985), a nine-hour
visual tropes with which they are told. sound of the film with his voice: not only for the character’s troubles, but he also hardly just the normal stuff that happens in families documentary of collected and edited
Although he was born in Jerusalem in 1972, the lines spoken by the actors, but also the offers comic relief. It made the serious where hands, belts and a stick are used for interviews with Holocaust survivors, criticized
Fast is not a product of the Israeli art- noise of rustling fabric, the click of metal as a scenes that are particularly important for the disciplinary purposes” were described in the Spielberg for fictionalizing the Holocaust.
school system: He was educated in the U.S., bullet is inserted into a gun barrel, squeaking plot much more interesting to watch. The inserted voice-over. In scenes of extreme Lanzmann had consciously renounced any
earning his undergraduate degree at Tufts furniture, a Bugs Bunny cartoon running in original movie was still there, superficially, violence, as when Schwarzenegger rings the fictionalization, instead focusing on the
Fast’s work does not mourn University and then his MFA at Hunter the background, the sounds of cars, screeching but somehow emptied out, with a vital part doorbells of several women with the same emptiness in the landscapes and the faces
College in 2000. In a recent brief telephone breaks, doors slamming shut, gun shots, even of it removed, mimicked (and ridiculed) and name and guns them down the instant they of those struggling with their memories,
the loss of meaning, nor is it interview, Fast insisted that Hunter was an the musical score plus other sound effects. replaced, the bones of its construction laid confirm their identity, the voice of a man introducing a maxim that any discourse on
a celebration of the absurdity inviting place to study, despite being tough The perfection of the simulation sounds was bare. suddenly interrupts: “He slapped me. And then fascism would have to be one of emptiness.
for a young artist interested in working with startling. I am sure more than one visitor who he slapped me again and again.” Rather than Spielberg’s film went took an entirely
of the elaborate fake. In anything but painting or sculpture: At the didn’t look carefully never noticed this and Surviving the Terminator destroying the flow of the narrative, elements different path: While portraying events rather
allowing the images’ meanings time, the college boasted little if any video never got the point. Omer Fast produced another small piece like these introduce a separate but intimate accurately, it quite effectively reduced the
equipment and hardly any of the faculty was But what exactly was the point? Didn’t it look of work in 2000, once again appropriating layer of meaning to the film’s story, but do trauma of the Holocaust – “which defies
to blur he sharpens the equipped to prepare students for work with just like a party trick, or something one could a classic Hollywood blockbuster from the not interfere with the general plot. These human imagination as it distills a real hell from
viewer’s vision. This strategy electronic media. Still, its main attraction was see in a cheesy television show, I wondered. 1980s, this time turning to John Cameron’s personal stories smuggled into the rental tapes human evil,”[3] as Theodor Adorno famously
providing central studios for the students Hadn’t I seen several works about people who The Terminator (1984). Arnold Schwarzenegger constituted a “hidden record whose purpose put it – to what was often perceived as a
of clarifying by blurring is – and as the courses ran for three years, it was made sound effects? Yet again, the “trick” was doesn’t do much talking in the film, leaving is to communicate its content and survive.” sensationalist, kitschy fairy tale. By violating
reminiscent of Gerhard Richter much cheaper to study than rent a studio in made transparent visually; the artist himself plenty of space for violent action, but also Surviving, however, depended on the quality what Adorno and Lanzmann considered the
Manhattan. This setting was beneficial for looked anything but heroic, yet not exactly for Fast’s interference. Renting out several of the symbiosis of the artwork and the rental rules of representation of an ultimate disaster,
young artists who had already developed funny either. But there was also something VHS copies of the film from video stores, video it inhabited, and the way its audience the movie stirred up a debate on truth and
to a certain degree, and it gave them time else. First of all, there was a sense of dérive: he inserted snippets of personal narratives related and reacted to it. The artist attached representation in mainstream culture. It forced
and, more important, a space, in which to The artist had hijacked the film and, by adding in the film by overdubbing the original a little sticker with the title of the work, T3- its audience to rethink the terms in which the
concentrate on their work. something, had turned key fragments of the sound. In the midst of the action, the viewer AEON, to the tapes, so he could occasionally Holocaust could be imagined, remembered
I first met Fast in his final year at Hunter, interracial cop-buddy story of the action would suddenly hear an unexpected voice- check on them. and given historical meaning.
preparing a project for an ambitious group movie–cum–comedy into a reflection on the over recounting stories culled from real life. “In August 2001 I moved to Germany and If in T3-AEON Omer Fast effectively took

Omer Fast [1] Omer Fast in “Marc Godrey: Playing the System” at http:// [2] Ibid.
Passport still www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue14/playingthesystem.htm
[3] Theodor Adorno in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor,
Blackwell, Oxford, p. 86.
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“The German woman the soldier meets turns out to be suicidal,


and when he shoots at a car in a tense situation in Iraq, he
involuntarily kills a young man he didn’t see. What the soldier
can’t see – the young man, the woman’s state of mind – appears
to be a symbolic reflection all the things the viewer believes”
over a film as a vehicle for personal memories, shot. One of the sites is a very accurate and features, Richter erased his recognizability,
in his Spielberg’s List (2003) he shows a film detailed movie set of the concentration camp, pointing to the general fact that nearly
taking over the memories themselves. I saw built in close proximity to the site of the everyone in Germany had a photograph of a
his two-channel video Spielberg’s List in the original concentration camp near Krakow, family member wearing WWII attire in their
2007 show “History Will Repeat Itself ” at and since the set was not destroyed after photo albums. It made clear that the past was
the Kunstwerke in Berlin. It consists of a shooting the film, regular Schindler’s List not as far away as one maybe would like to
series of interviews with Polish people, who tours visit both sites. Fast combined material think, and that there is no way of pretending
appear to be discussing their experiences from both, including the extras and the not being involved. It is a question of our
of the Holocaust. What strikes the viewer tourists, to create a work that consists of a focusing, adjusting the way we look; it implied
quite soon is that some of the interviewees juxtaposition of two channels, where personal that, as we look, we contribute to the creation
are obviously much too young to have memories of the Holocaust are mixed with of history by the forces of accumulation and
experienced it firsthand. But the casual accounts of the film. This way of reflecting repression – storytelling.
sincerity is too convincing – could these historical experience as well as the relation Before I delve into more current work
be actors speaking in scripted words? Or between reality and representation renders by Fast, just a quick look at another early
are the subtitles are fake? When a woman history an unruly hodgepodge of memory work that focuses on the present tense. It
explains how she experienced the “selection and imagination, fiction and fact, where the turns to the genre of the TV news channel.
process,” it becomes obvious that she must lure of the film is as present as the historic By isolating single words as articulated by
be referring to the casting of the movie. It reality. One could say that the Hollywood the presenters and editing them to form
then becomes obvious that the subtitles are movie’s success even exceeded the concerns complete sentences, the artist chose to make
not quite sincere: On one screen they refer of Claude Lanzmann by factually turning them say something quite peculiar, in a
to either the movie production (casting) or the historic memorial into a pop-cultural fascinating staccato of images and words,
to the Holocaust (selection). But there is curiosity. (In a later work, Godville (2005), framed by the pompously reappearing
also an old man who talks about watching Fast elaborated on the idea of the tour guide, bombastic CNN theme fanfare (“This. Is
[seeing?] the “camp” on his walks, where it this time by employing the costumed guides CNN.”) that lends a basic structure to what
is not really clear if it is either the film set, who impersonate historic personalities in adds up to an increasingly paranoid rant.
the contemporary memorial of the camp or Williamsburg,Virginia, in a “living history CNN Concatenated (2002) is interrupted
possibly the concentration camp when it was museum” of Colonial America. The guides by sudden deep breaths that puncture the
operative. The viewer is required to notice the explain history as a lived experience – not as anxiety-ridden, mechanically hammered-
complexity of the situation and understand participants in one they have shared but as out words. The news presenters face the
that this piece relates to two (or maybe more) “authentic witness[es] to a representation,”[4] camera, and thereby the viewer, as if the
events simultaneously. It is not only about as Fast puts it.) news channel as a whole had something to
the bizarre shift in perception that the Polish say – a complaint about the self-absorption
extras experienced. Their stories make for The Certainty of Death and hypocrisy of the viewer. The procession
a rather heretic view of the Holocaust, but Fast’s work does not mourn the loss of of their talking heads forms something
the film about them shows history absurdly meaning, nor is it a celebration of the reminiscent of the choir in ancient Greek
shifting and retroactively confirming the absurdity of the elaborate fake. In allowing tragedies, revealing the deeper truth that,
narrative of Spielberg’s film. Or is this what the images’ meanings to blur he sharpens the in this case, is the bottom line of any news:
the experience of being an extra in a big viewer’s vision. This strategy of clarifying by the painful certainty of death. As Mark
Hollywood production does to you? blurring is reminiscent of Gerhard Richter Godfrey suggested, this could be seen as an
A by-product of Schindler’s List was an absurd and his painting of a black-and-white update of Richard Serra’s video piece on
brand of tourism catering to people who family photograph, Onkel Rudi (1965) in his the commercialism of television, Television
came specifically to see where the film was Wehrmacht uniform. By blurring the subject’s Delivers People (1973)[5].

Image [4] See Joanna Fiduccia’s interview “Omer Fast: A Multiple ‘I,’” [5] http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/making_history1/
Nostalgia Uovo, April 17, 2008, pp. 156-76.
2009, three-part video installaion
Still from Nostalgia II, two-channel HD videos (synchronized)
with sound
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“The very process of storytelling relies on two things:


First, it establishes a distance from the world the story is told in.
Second, it requires the listener to suspend his disbelief – as in
the artist’s latest and most ambitious piece so far, the three-part
video installation entitled Nostalgia”
“Look, it’s not happening at this very moment. Once again the borders of documentary the story again, and the same scene continues Nostalgia (2009), a story about a trap and on in each of the four episodes of the film. lighting the cigarette of the interrogator of
Perhaps, not as long as you listen and watch. realism and fiction are blurred, not as much with an older actor in the role of the suicide trapped people. In the first brief part we see While being interrogated by a stern African the beginning, and the story begins anew.
People don’t die in front of their televisions. In in terms of special effects, but in the way bomber. A medic comes in and performs a man building a trap in a leafy forest, while official and urged to divulge the secret routes Moving inside the different private parameters
the meantime, we could probably do something conventional forms are employed. It appears mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him. Once the voice-over – by a man with a distinctive of the refugees, a British asylum-seeker tells of the individual characters of the film,
about it together. I could tell you exactly what to as if there were several levels of reenactment the shoot is completed, we’re back with the Nigerian accent – explains the construction, the trap story in connection to his flight. the story changes – but the situation of
expect. I could explain using precise words and at play here, not only the front side of the crew breaking for lunch, as the second actor from “sticks and twine,” is made to catch When the official is at home, she again tells those telling it stays similar. They appear to
heartbreaking imagery.” installation with its double projection of playing the suicide bomber tries to chat up partridges. When the trap is put to the test, the story to her lover, as if it was proof that be trapped in their own stories, proving,
(From Omer Fast’s CNN Concatenated, 2002) pseudo-still photography (based not on details one of the extras, who was supposed to play we are suddenly inside a studio for a few she once was in Britain as an aid worker in a way, that knowing the way one trap
of the interview but on public-domain images another victim of the bombing, but was also seconds, hearing the narrator laugh at the trap (“...a proud ancient culture. They are great is constructed doesn’t help to free you
Get Your Story Straight found on the Web, and set, for example, in the fired (yet keeps hanging around the film set). snapping. dancers, and they are not...cannibals!”). from your own constraints. Nostalgia could
But let’s move on and get to a piece of casting Mojave desert), but also the interview and the They bitch about the director and the shoot, In the second part, the plot thickens. We see Then there is a night scene, when the sad be seen as a fascination that rests with a
that is closer to now. In 2007, Omer Fast artist, who may simply have been captured but, failing to make an impression, the actor a two-screen interview situation, familiar and disturbed lover, tearfully, recounts the bygone identification, one that enables
realized what has become his best-known watching the testimony on a screen. The claims to have really lost an arm. This agitates from The Casting, with two actors who trap story – to trap ghosts and ward off the imagination of a naive perspective
project to date, the four-channel video German woman the soldier meets turns out the younger suicide bomber-actor, a row play out what could be a reenactment of nightmares – to what looks like a sleeping on a hypothetical historic subject. The
installation, The Casting (2007). It is a double to be suicidal, and when he shoots at a car in ensues and the older actor is pushed to the the interview that led to the first part of child but turns out to be a bundle of fabric undercurrent of the plight of the refugee,
double-projection, with one side displaying a a tense situation in Iraq, he involuntarily kills floor. The commotion finally triggers the the piece: A Nigerian refugee (and asylum- on a bed, while his daughter looks on. And who is seeking asylum in a supposedly safe
strangely artificial scene, obviously a casting a young man he didn’t see. What the soldier woman’s interest, but then she starts giggling seeker) is interviewed by a British film
for a theatrical performance – told, however, can’t see – the young man, the woman’s state and, once again, we hear “Cut!” Back with director planning two films – one is a film
in what at first appears to be still images, of mind – appears to be a symbolic reflection the story of the suicide bombing, we hear the that shows interviews (like the one we are
but turns out to be videos of people trying of all the things the viewer believes, but can’t medic reflecting on his recollections of the seeing) with asylum-seekers; the other one
to stand still, in tableau-vivant style, yet see. What is hidden from our view? The scars bombing and his attempts at and qualms about is like “an old sci-fi film with props and
trembling, with eyes twitching as the wind on the woman’s arms are pure fabrication: Fast saving the bomber, when the shoot is again actors” (apparently not the one we already
blows, etc. doctored the tape of the interview in the same interrupted by two police officers entering the saw). Asked to talk about his childhood,
Asked to improvise by the casting director, way he manipulated the CNN video. The scene and requesting to see permits. As they the Nigerian reluctantly complies, and talks
the actor starts telling a bizarre story that sergeant never even said the word scar – the inquire about the nature of the film, the crew briefly about having been a child soldier. To
flips back and forth between two ill-fated artist composed it out of an “s” and “car.” and extras, being completely wrapped up in explain the construction of the trap seems
but not related experiences that are difficult Another recent work, again a two-channel the different stories – what happened on set, to be an escape to neutral ground from a
to keep apart: Both deal with a street and a video, even ventures into the comedic. In the actors, their roles, etc. – struggle to explain horrible story, but when he explains that finally, when his daughter is asked to give but utterly strange world, reflects on the idea
car – one a traumatic shooting of a civilian Take a Deep Breath (2008), which is based on what they are doing. One of the officers loses the trap can also be used to catch monkeys, a report in class, she tells the story of the of the truth seeking refuge in a story. In this
during the Iraq war, the second a disturbing a true story, we see the filming of a scene in interest, offering: “When you guys get your for food, he irritates the filmmaker. His trap again, while the British asylum-seeker, sense, Fast’s piece again reflects the medium
romantic encounter in Germany. As we hear a falafel restaurant that has been blown to story straight, just come down to the precinct jokes don’t help much to relieve the tension now the school’s new janitor, secretly listens of film as a storytelling device, but also on
this story in voice-over, images from the two bits. The storytelling and the realism of the and let me know, okay?” of the situation, but close the loop to the to his own story, while cleaning the waste storytelling in general.
stories appear. The backside of the projection, scene are arresting – but just as we see the beginning. bins. The episodes are framed by a story of a In its repetition, the narrative questions the
however, shows the artist interviewing a body of a man with torn-off limbs lying on Laying the Trap All this, however, doesn’t prepare us for small group of European refugees, who slip authority of the institution of the narrator,
United States Army sergeant. The process of the floor, he blinks and someone yells, “Cut!” But it’s not okay, and we know it. Straight the complex fiction of the third part, a through a derelict subway train, through a and the projection of power this invites.
sculpting the two stories into one hybrid is Cruelly yanked out of the story, the film stories don’t exist – stories are told. And the dramatization of events that slowly unravels maze of tunnels, while being hounded by More than it focuses on a dialectic concept
traceable by the editing, the changing light now centers on the film crew discussing the very process of storytelling relies on two to show an alternative world, where the racial cruel African security forces and their dogs of truth or falsehood or individual truths,
and private clothes of the soldier. On the shortcomings of the actor playing the role of things: First, it establishes a distance from the situation is inverted. Here, Great Britain is (German Shepherds). One young woman is Nostalgia reflects on historical narratives as a
second, slightly smaller screen we see the artist the suicide bomber, who is subsequently fired. world the story is told in. Second, it requires a desolate desert state, and an unspecified caught and clubbed to death, and her vomit collective construction of truth – of memory
apparently listening intently, but here, again, The indecisive director, “Omer,” has difficulty the listener to suspend his disbelief – as in African country has become the wealthy turns into large flowers and fruits. The guards as only one element in a performative
jolting editing and strange lighting remind us making up his mind and the shoot comes the artist’s latest and most ambitious piece so and safe destination for British refugees. The spill gasoline on the corpse and when one concept of storytelling. But careful, though, it
that he maybe wasn’t there at all. to a standstill. Then the narrator picks up on far, the three-part video installation entitled story of the construction of the trap is passed strikes a match, its flame turns into the flame may be a trap. ¬

Image
Take a Deep Breath
2008, two-channel video

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