circularity versus linearity · rabih mroué's almost realtime artistic processing further...

OrientInstitut Studies 2 (2013)

Lotte Laub

Circularity versus Linearity: Immediate Artistic Reactions to Periods of War and Political Upheaval

<1>

First presented in New York in early 2012, Rabih Mroué's "The Pixelated Revolution" was exhibited at

dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany. In his work, Mroué uses source material culled from YouTube

video footage of the Syrian Revolution, recorded from cell phones and uploaded by Syrian protesters.

Mroué introduces the lecture performance by stating that "the Syrian protesters are recording their

own deaths". In Mroué's work, he focuses on an 83second YouTube video he has entitled "Double

Shooting":

"One person is shooting with a [cell phone] camera and the other is shooting with a rifle.

One of them shoots for his life and the life of his citizens and the other one shoots for his life

and the life of his regime."1

The video shows the moment of eye contact between sniper and cameraman. The cameraman is

filming the sniper with his cell phone, and then the sniper takes aim and shoots at him. The cell phone

falls to the ground and the video ends.

"Suddenly the sniper sees the eye watching him. And the eyes of the two men meet. Eye

contact. Then, without the slightest hesitation, the sniper lifts his gun and aims at the eye.

He shoots and hits his target. The [cell phone] eye falls to the ground, turns upwards

towards the ceiling of the room.

[…]

We don't see the moment of death. […] We only see what comes before and after death."2

1 Rabih Mroué: The Pixelated Revolution (Lecture Performance), dOCUMENTA (13), June 9th, 2012 – September 16th, 2012.

2 See FN 1.

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"The Pixelated Revolution", Rabih Mroué, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.

<2>

Mroué's lecture performance has been widely discussed. Some reviews examine the role of the artist

in relation to the Arab revolutions; others, the role of international art institutions and their increased

interest in artistic works that engage the issue of the Arab revolutions. A particularly striking element

of Mroué's work is the instantaneity and immediacy of his artistic processing: Even as the war rages

on, he is taking the material that is documenting the conflict for artistic ends. Such instantaneity and

immediacy leads viewers of his work to moments of irritation and also moral concern. For how can

footage still so raw, and so real, be so hastily processed? Addressing this issue, Rabih Mroué, in an

interview entitled "Lost in Narration" explains his process as such:

"My work is trying not to produce new images but to find and take these images and

deconstruct them through reflection and by rereading them in a human, personalised

manner."3

3 Anthony Downey: Lost in Narration, in: Ibraaz. Contemporary Visual Culture in North Africa and the Middle East (05.01.2012), http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/11 <25.09.2012>.



http://www.ibraaz.org/interviews/11

<3>

Rabih Mroué's almost realtime artistic processing further gives rise to a critical discourse with the

viewer by his emphasis on the human aspect in the flood of images by "zooming in" on the moment of

eye contact between the protester and sniper and showing it as an endless loop. An issue addressed

here is the link between image and death. What should a human image of death look like? It should

not appease sensationalism; it should not draw a line between the viewer and the dying cameraman,

as if the viewer, in contrast to the dying cameraman, were invulnerable; but it should bring the viewer

closer to the moment of death and thus the question of meaning. This is possible through the

subjective view of the footage, as it excludes the actual moment of death. Death evades time, but

remains everpresent. The paradox of death is that it can never be experienced by the subject in real

time, but that it remains allpervasive. The technique of omitting or concealing a conclusive end can

also be found in the video works of Lebanese filmmaker and video artist Ghassan Salhab. What these

works have in common is the replacement of linear structures with circular ones. There is movement,

but there is no conclusive objective, no final target.

<4>

The immediacy of the artistic processing in the lecture performance of Rabih Mroué recalls numerous

video works produced as a response to 2006's July War in Lebanon. The first issue of Ashkal Alwan's

"Video Avril"4 in 2007 was dedicated to the July War. A special issue of the Art Journal was also

dedicated to it.5

"(Posthume)"

<5>

Ghassan Salhab's video "(Posthume)"6 was also created as a reaction to the July War in 2006; it was

first shown during the "Video Avril" video film festival in Beirut in 2007.

<6>

The video's most noticeable feature is its complexity: layers of images and sounds are overlaid until

they become unrecognisable. It includes tracking shots through the cityscape of Beirut, images of

rubble, demolition work and construction sites, pictures of damage and shots of TV news and news

reporters, as well as back shots of people listening to the news, static closeups of various people

with the sea in the background, sometimes as freezeframe or slow motion. Some sequences cite

4 Cf. http://www.ashkalalwan.org/videoworks.aspx?id=1&sid=1 <25.09.2012>.

5 Cf. Art Journal 66, 2 (2007).

6 Ghassan Salhab: (Posthume), 2007 (28 min).



http://www.ashkalalwan.org/videoworks.aspx?id=1&sid=1

images referencing famous paintings. The soundtrack is almost completely disconnected from the

picture. We hear fragments of texts, lyrical and philosophical, as well as news reports and personal

statements. Ghassan Salhab expects the audience to cope with the same stream of incoherent or

contradictory signals that flooded over the inhabitants of Beirut during the July war. The development

of his video can be described as an interweaving and disentangling, where certain recurring types of

images and groups of motifs give the work its own rhythm.

<7>

The video begins with video noise. The viewer is unsure whether this is really a technical problem

until, in dissolves and crossfades, the closeup of a man against the sea gradually emerges from the

pixel chaos. This abruptly cuts to images of the Murr Tower7 taken from different perspectives. These

are interrupted by black screens with the inserts "Ruin even before the ruins", "Even before being one

itself" and a third shot with "Witness to all our wars" written over it, introducing a firstperson

perspective into the film.

Screenshot from: "(Posthume)", Ghassan Salhab, 2007. Courtesy of the film director.

And thus for nearly the first two minutes of the film, people and city with its landmark tower are

juxtaposed as witnesses of a process leading from an undigested past into an ominous, uncertain

future. The city and its inhabitants mutually correspond. As the end of the subjective text states:

"There is a narrow difference between what happens inside us and what happens in the outside

world".

7 Cf. JensPeter Hanssen / Daniel Genberg: Beirut in Memoriam. A Kaleidoscopic Space out of Focus, in: Angelika Neuwirth / Andreas Pflitsch (Ed.): Crisis and Memory in Islamic Societies, Beiruter Texte und Studien (BTS) 77, Beirut / Würzburg 2001, 231262, here: 255.



<8>


Repeatedly recurring images, setting the rhythm of the video, show a shovel excavator and a

wrecking ball. They are matched with the corresponding noises. Each time they appear, they create

clouds of dust and obscure the view. The cut to these images also comes without any warning,

destruction conveyed directly to the viewer as a disruption of anticipated images. Matching the

destruction in the external world, a voice announces: "Today as all other days we are destroyed,

destroyed. Until The Day of Resurrection, we will not be saved from the flood." None of the people

shown in closeup are ever seen doing anything or interacting with others. They seem paralysed.



Screenshots from: "(Posthume)", Ghassan Salhab, 2007. Courtesy of the film director.

The shots are often freezeframed and, until an eyelid blinks, as still as photos of the deceased. This

would also explain the "(Posthume)" title, but paradoxically that title appears directly over the

moving lips of a news presenter. A viewer clearly watching the TV news is filmed from the back

against a black background. The news holds out the prospect of a black, deadly future, which the

recipient has already anticipated and forestalled existing between the past and future, and without a

present. One of the texts states: "Our senses were almost numb, anaesthetised. They could tear our

head off, our heart out, we would feel no hurt, no pain." People regard themselves as objects, devoid

of feeling, and when they fall, as it were, to the wrecking ball, they are like dead people watching their

own preempted death.

<9>

The news on television plays a particular role in the "(Posthume)" video. Just as the city is

bombarded, the audience of the news is also bombarded with images. As the film text says: "A torrent

of images assails our eyes". But it is not only the images that sweep over people like a waterfall, it is

also the sounds, noises, music and texts. Yet none of these perceptual objects appear in their



entirety. They are fragments, often indistinct, out of focus, hazy, too fleeting, too near, too far,

obscured, superimposed. And yet these fragments do enter into a relationship with one another. In his

2001 essay "Mélancolibanais" Raphaël Millet called such a process "l'art de construire en ruines".8

The real destruction is confronted with an artistic construction made of fragments.

<10>

The tracking shots through Beirut form another group of motifs in "(Posthume)". They carve gorges

through the urban labyrinth and, in a certain way, kickstart a circulatory system that reveals the city as

its own organism. But it is an organism constantly faltering as it meets reality, the wrecked

infrastructure that fuelled the mostrecent war.

<11>

The course of the entire video can be described as an increasing and decreasing of complexity. At

this point, it is interesting to note that the commentary ceases after twothirds of the film. On the

pattern of interior and exterior worlds, the final comments can easily be linked to the following images

as mirroring each other: "The TV is on, but there is no sound. I content myself with the image". Yet

paradoxically, these words are accompanied by a black screen. Until the end of the film, the viewer

then has to be satisfied with images without text. The final sentence of the commentary contains

another paradox: "I tell myself a lot of things, but I have nothing more to say."

<12>

In Salhab's video we find disharmony, in which the speech (or text) no longer corresponds to the

visual, but rather contradicts it. The outcome is uncertainty. The visual possesses no more

authenticity than the textual. Gilles Deleuze describes a similar phenomenon of soundimage relations

in the films of Godard: "[…] les coupures essaiment, et ne passent plus entre le sonore e le visual,

mais dans le visual, dans le sonore, et dans leur connexions multiplies".9 This description recalls the

concept of the rhizome developed by Deleuze and Félix Guattari: It is a conception of knowledge that

works against dualistic categories, binary choices, linear connections. "A rhizome has no beginning or

end; it is always in the middle, between things […]."10

8 Raphaël Millet: Mélancolibanaises. L'art de construire en ruines (Beyrouth fantôme, 1998), in: Simulacres 5 (2001), 6067.

9 Gilles Deleuze: Cinéma 2. L'imagetemps, Paris 1985, 325.

(The cuts extend, they don't run anymore between the acoustic and the visual, but within the visual, within the acoustic, and within their manifold connections [my transl.]).

10 Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, 328, here: 25, in: http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dustin/library/deleuzeguattarirhizome.pdf <25.09.2012>.



http://danm.ucsc.edu/~dustin/library/deleuzeguattarirhizome.pdf

<13>


In Salhab's video, thoughts never achieve a final conclusion, they go round in a circle; there are no

more statements, it is as though the connection has been cut. The viewer experiences something

similar with the camera movement in the last third of the film. The intense overlay of forward and

reverse tracking with stills creates the impression of a certain sticking point that can never be passed.

A ruined bridge cannot be crossed. The continuity is broken. One returns to the start again.

<14>

To conclude my analysis, I would like to give an example of another tracking shot, which is at the end

of the video. Like a coda to the credits, this shot sweeps out of Beirut and down the coast towards the

south, with a view out of the sidewindow. Now, the image gradually bleeds until the only things

remaining are horizontal layers of colour: the beige of a balustrade with the blue of the sea and sky

above it. In the end, there is just the immensity of the sky and, in front of it, a balustrade faintly

discernible, resembling an empty news banner in a TV image. The end of the video is a kind of tabula

rasa. This is not a metaphor of total senselessness; instead, it asserts the impossibility of ever

transforming patchworks and fragments into one single whole.



Screenshots from: "(Posthume)", Ghassan Salhab, 2007. Courtesy of the film director.

"Collapse and Recovery": Circularity versus Immediacy

<15>

Returning to Rabih Mroué and dOCUMENTA (13): the motto of this year's documenta was "Collapse

and Recovery"; at the beginning of my discussion, I described the time structure in Mroué's and also

Salhab's work as circular. There is movement, but the movement is without a target. Linear structure

is replaced with circular structure: there is no finality anymore as can be seen in the image of the

bridge that couldn't be crossed. Instead, the beginning resumes. In Rabih Mroué's installation, as in

the video of Ghassan Salhab, it is collapse and recovery documenta's theme which occurs

simultaneously, expanding upon itself indefinitely.

<16>

Documenta curator Carolyn ChristovBakargiev emphasized the relevance of the theme within our

present historical epoch, explaining that it was intended to interweave and interrelate with the whole

last century.11 In this way, Mroué's timely work, within the context of documenta, could be seen within

11 Cf. Carolyn ChristovBakargiev: Letter to a Friend (dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, No. 3), Ostfildern 2011, 5.



a broader historical and social context.

<17>

This diachronic perspective we find in the video of Salhab as well. We have simultaneously different

layers of time. We have moving images from the television screen and, on the other hand, stillimages

of oil paintings from throughout history. The intermedial confrontation between the flood of images on

the TV screen and the famous oil paintings opens a theologicalphilosophical dimension alongside the

quotidian journalistic and political dimension.


We can see a depiction of martyr San Sabastiano (Andrea Mantegna, c.1480); there is a fresco cycle

"La Leggenda della Vera Croce" by Piero della Francesca (Piero della Francesca, between 1453

1459); and there are two paintings of Francis Bacon: "Head I" (1948) and "Two Figures," a fusion of

two figures wrestling (Francis Bacon, 1953). The theme defining all of these paintings is injury borne

of hostility, and the image layers themselves are disturbances or injuries to pictorial perception.

The superimposition achieves an increased image complexity, lending itself at certain points in the

video to a levelling of spatial depth. Fullydimensional images appear flattened, the ghostlike

transparency eradicating the corporal quality of the figures, resulting in graphic abstraction. The focus

is less directed on the image, but rather onto its surface. Mediality itself is assuming preeminence

over the subject matter.

Lyrical narratives

<18>

This thematization of the surface leads to the discussion of the lyrical dimension of the video.

Referring to the notion of lyrical film, American avantgarde film theorist Adams Sitney speaks of the



flatness of images realized through the process of superimposition. Sitney equates this effect in lyrical

film with the flattened space of Abstract Expressionist painting:

"In that field of vision, depth and vanishing point become possible, but exceptional, options.

Through superimposition, several perspectives can occupy that space at one time [...]. [...]

the film maker working in the lyrical mode affirms the actual flatness and whiteness of the

screen, rejecting for the most part its traditional use as a window into illusion."12

<19>

At this point, I would like to discuss this special attention to the surface of images in more detail,

linking it to the process of revealing by concealing. But, before moving forward, I would like to

summarize several characteristics of the lyrical that occur in the video "(Posthume)". The lyric is

considered a genre of the subjective, conveying a heightened selfreferentiality. But the often

emphasized subjective perspective in poetry can also be misleading. In her article "In Deep Waters.

Or: What's the Difference between Drowning in Poetry and in Prose?"13 Margarete Rubik emphasizes

that although poems frequently use a firstperson point of view, they are generally not perceived as a

solipsistic view of the world, but rather one that, in some way, claims general, archetypal

significance.14 In Salhab's video "(Posthume)," archetypal significance, for example, occurs in the

pictorial citations that treat themes of violence, war, and injury.

<20>

In an earlier video work of Ghassan Salhab, "La rose de personne"/"Dhāta yaumin"15, which he

dedicates to Paul Celan, the viewer hears a quotation by Italian philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter.

This can also refer to the video "(Posthume)": "No life is ever satisfied to live in any present time,

because it is life insofar as it continues into the future." What follows is a paradox: "As soon as it

continues into the future it is probably meant: without change it lacks of life."16 But if life is without

future expectation, it would cease to be life. The moment of fulfilment for which a living human is

yearning for would be his death. Michelstaedter finds further allegories appearing in Salhab's works,

too: the climbing up of a mountain, the immersion into the sea. Never could one as he says

"possess" the mountains or sea. Always, the self is somehow apart from other beings. The fulfilment

retreats from our attainment of it. In the video "(Posthume)", Ghassan Salhab finds another allegory

12 P. Adams Sitney: Visionary Film. The American AvantGarde, New York 1974, 180.

13 Margarete Rubik: In Deep Waters. Or: What's the Difference between Drowning in Poetry and in Prose?, in: Eva MüllerZettelmann / Margarete Rubik (Ed.): Theory into Poetry. New Approaches to the Lyric, Amsterdam / New York 2005, 189205, here: 199200.

14 See FN 13, 200.

15 Ghassan Salhab: La rose de personne/Dhāta yaumin, 10 min., Leb. 2000.

16 Carlo Michelstaedter: La persuasione e la rettorica, Milan 1982 (1913), 4041: "Né alcuna vita è mai sazia di vivere in alcun presente, ché tanto è vita, quanto si continua, e si continua nel futuro, quanto manca del vivere."



for lack of fulfilment: the impossibility of passing under a bridge.

<21>

Regarding the lyrical dimension of the video, I have discussed the relation between the lyric as a

genre of the subjective and its archetypal and allegorical significance; with reference to Sitney, I have

discussed the flatness of the images that Sitney compares to Abstract Expressionist painting.

Moreover it is necessary to mention the composition and rhythm of the video, which is typical for the

genre of the lyric. In the video "(Posthume)", the diegetic world is reduced to a minimum. Temporal

and spatial references become blurred by the interruptions caused by the superimpositions. Instead,

we have repeatedly recurring images, and a specific relation between fragments of text and images

setting the rhythm of the film. In this way, fragments of images and texts from different origins and

periods of time intermingle; we might call it: "l'art de construire en ruines".17 Narration itself is focused

on the interrelation between the disparate fragments, or on the level of mediality itself.

Performativity

<22>

Coming back to Adams Sitney and the superimpositions in Salhab's video, the process of

superimpositions lead to a levelling of spatial depth and to images that appear flattened. However, we

also have images with a vanishing point: tracking shots which, in contrast to the flattened space,

regain corporality. As mentioned earlier, the tracking shots through Beirut jumpstart a circulatory

system that transforms the city into an organism. Even so, this organism is constantly faltering: in the

face of the reality of the wrecked infrastructure of the July War and, on a medial level, in the face of

the disturbances generated by image superimposition. The superimpositions conceal spatial depth,

while they also simultaneously reveal mediality itself. As mentioned previously, the focus lies more on

the surface of the image rather than beneath it. When looking into the image, through the window into

illusion, we forget the mediality. In this way, one might speak of a reciprocal process of revealing by

concealing.

<23>

Furthermore, the whole video could be described as a performative act. Taking a performative

perspective,18 we perceive an art work less as a static object, but rather as something that creates a

dynamic and ephemeral aesthetic situation. The audience is less focused on a hermeneutical search

for meaning than towards the phenomenology of the perceived. So, from a performative perspective,

17 Raphaël Millet: Mélancolibanaises.

18 Cf. Erika FischerLichte: Performativität. Eine Einführung, Bielefeld 2012.



we could perceive the video itself, with its tracking shots through the city, as an attempt to "resurrect"

(Jalal Toufic) the city, as if the tracking shots could literally repair the street. But, simultaneously, the

video reveals a deep skepticism towards the success of such a process, this window of illusion, this

medial representation and its dependence on image. This skepticism is expressed by the process of

superimposition that conceals the window into illusion. Let us now recall Rabih Mroué's description of

his own artistic process:

"My work is trying not to produce new images, but to find and take these images and

deconstruct them through reflection and by rereading them in a human, personalised

manner."

Similar to the video "(Posthume)", we could therefore also describe Rabih Mroués "The Pixelated

Revolution" as a performative attempt to emphasize the human aspect in this flood of images.

Author:

Lotte Laub is a PhD candidate at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of the Freie Universität

Berlin, where she also obtainer her Master's degree. Her PhD examines the lyrical dimension in the

work of the Lebanese film auteur Ghassan Salhab in the context of contemporary artistic practice in

Lebanon. Before starting her PhD research in 2011, Lotte worked at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin,

including on the Taswir Pictoral Mappings of Islam and Modernity exhibition. Email: lotte.laub@fu

berlin.de


mailto:[email protected]

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