Sophie Berrebi: Documentary and the Dialectical Document in Contemporary Art

Berrebi, Sophie. “Documentary and the Dialectical Document in Contemporary Art.” In Right About Now: Art and Theory Since the 1990s, edited by Margriet Schavemaker and Mischa Rakier, 109-115. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007.

Art historian, curator and lecturer in the history and theory of Photography at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), Sophie Berrebi considers the proliferation of documentaries at biennials in her four-part discussion titled, “Documentary and the Dialectical Document.” Typically made by photographers and filmmakers, the new kids on the biennial block, these representations are more concerned with showing things as they are—of indexing the real—than with formal and aesthetics issues, or so argues Berrebi in the first part of this text. Her discussion is similar to Claire Bishop’s critique of contemporary collaborative culture (also in Art Right Now) insofar as she uses “the issue of form to critically discuss the absorption of documentary forms and genres into contemporary art production” (2007, 110). Ultimately, Berrebi is concerned with differentiating documentary and art by proposing a new hybrid form: “...dialectical documents [are] works that adopt the form of documentary but simultaneously reflect on the conventions and legibility of the documentary itself” (2007, 10).

Having established “form” as the key term in her discussion, Berrebi goes on to consider the evolution of documentary conventions. She recalls that when critic and filmmaker John Grierson coined the term “documentary” in 1926 he neither spoke of “straight photography” nor clarity of image, of frontality nor “the shaky camera.” Grierson instead described a “creative treatment of actuality.” This sensibility seems more aligned with current investigations of documentary in contemporary art than with pre-photoshop/internet notions of documentary as a gere of "truth."

A Degree Zero of Form: For Berredi, the increasing absorption of the documentary conventions described above into nondocumentary genres indicates a disregard for formal concerns. Returning again to Documenta 11 (referenced periodically throughout her discussion), Berredi notes the deluge of time-based media at this event, a deluge that seemd to insinuate that information circulates without ever getting anywhere. Nicknamed the “the 400-hour Documenta,” (in reference to the time apparently necessary to view all the films included in the exhibition) it presented documentary-inflected work in three different and sometimes overlapping ways:

1. It tended to appear alongside large, apparently unfinished installations (such as those by Thomas Hirschorn), a relationship that underscored the fragmentary nature of the documentary work
2. It played off documentary’s trademark formal neutrality to engender intimacy and immediacy with the work, shifting the viewer’s viewership into something closer to spectatorship
3. The prevalence of this kind of work tended to homogenize the exhibition, raising questions about how the ubiquity of documentary might simultaneously push and picture globalization.

These modes of display challenge Berrebi to rethink documentary not in the context of filmmaking but as it appears in art historical discourse. Somewhat predictably, this discussion includes tracing the etymology of “the document” back to its emphasis as a didactic device. “It may be a text, an image; an object either found or constructed that is used for purposes of identification, education, evidence or archival record” (2007, 112).

Evidence: Berredi anticipates her subsequent discussion on dialectical documents in this section when she refers to the project Evidence as a case study for the instability of documentary as a genre of “truth.” Created by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Evidence (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1977) was a collection of photographs from archives of over 100 American governmental agencies. The project culminated in a book of black and white photographs without captions, with the selection and juxtaposition of these images prompting criticism that this documentation-cum-artwork offered a specific sociological perspective. For example, the theorist Joan Foncuberta wondered: “Evidence of what? Perhaps evidence of its own ambiguity. What remains, then, of the document?” (Berebi 2007, 113).

Dialectical Documents: What remains then of the document indeed?! Documentary forms change when they are appropriated by art. “A range of oppositions is opened by this reconfiguration, including between neutrality and subjectivity, transparency and opacity, art and non-art” (Berrebi 2007, 113). In other words, the document is expanded: it functions as a work of art while also referrencing its earlier documentary significance. Berrebi explores this point by considering various works she curated in the exhibition Documentary Evidence (Paris, 2004), a project that brought together different generations of artists to reassess the significance of documentary evidence, to reinterpret the function and circulation of the document as “proof” of something. Through reworking preexisting documents and repurposing them as art, these artists revisited the Surrealist interest in the equivocal document. At the same time this exhibition evinced the document’s rapid and inevitable obsolescence as a signifier of truth.

Significance to my research: I approached this reading with three questions in mind, none of which was sufficiently addressed by the text.

1. In what ways do the dialectical documents Berrebi proposes embody a dialectical approach?
2. In what ways to do Berredi’s dialectical documents relate to the notion of “dialogic art” currently proposed in my project?
3. Are dialectical documents appropriate records for dialogic art? In other words, does the apparesnt affinity for the back-and-forth movement of these two forms overlap or clash and to what ends?

If Berrebi’s discussion describes the increasing impossibility of documenting the real, it also identifies the need for new forms of what might be termed “non-representational representation:” traces that interrogate their very capacity/authority to trace in the first place. These vectors might show the equivocalness of their signification while also actively soliciting critical engagement that transcends bearing witness to factual fiction, i.e. constructions of the real. I make these suggestions because I sense Berrebi's approach could be pushed. Indeed, I remain unconvinced the examples she offers actually operate as dialectical documents in the way she describes. This is partly because no plates are included for consideration—aside from an image of the author herself. This absence makes determining if Berrebi’s description of the dialectical documents squares with their purported affect impossible. However ironic, her discussion does with words precisely what Evidence tried to unpick: that descriptions (be they visual, textual or both) can effectively document the real.

Nevertheless, the very proposition of a dialectical document has important methodological implications for my project. How, for example, might the framing/representation/description of the research outputs engage readers of the thesis in new and unlikely conceptual conversations? Is being overtly dialogical and dialectical an unrealistic expectation for documentaries or documentation? How is the role and purpose of the document changing with digital imaging and delivery and is this a question worth considering in relation to the thesis? At the very least, Berrebi's text clarifies the need to consider my thesis's documentation as part and parcel of larger questions around representation at stake in the project.

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comments

For me, the most important thing about this review is the idea of 'reading with questions', that you mention just over half way through. OK, I realise that this means that some things (outside the scope of your interets) might slip through your fingers but at stake is the issue of 'reading as...' i.e. 'as a researcher' 'as an artist' 'as a Martian'...

That said, I also think you well identify the issue that the text raises for your own engagement in documentary practices - the reflexive return of the dialogic at the level of the document. Unless, of course, some other 'poetics' or logic allows you to evade that reflexive imperative. I wasn't sure, though, whether your 'document' needed to be specific i.e. 'visual' or 'verbal' / still, moving - whatever. If only Berrebi were more useful on the detail!

PS I'm a bit puzzled re 'non-documentary' genres. It makes logical sense, but seems a little perverse as as concept - as if there are genres that are void of all indexicality in relation to the 'real world'. A bit like the concept of 'non-objectivity' in modernism...