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Harun Farocki & Rodney Graham: Twin Cinemas

At Jeu de Paume in Paris, on the site where Napoleon lll once enjoyed games of tennis, artists Harun Farocki and Rodney Graham came face à face in a spring retrospective of their works entitled “HF|RG.” Chantal Pontbriand’s rigorous and contemporary curation of this exhibition relinquished the linear, chronological approach of typical retrospectives for an exhibition montage that created an interplay revealing each artist’s critique on the production of images.

Rodney Graham The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962 2007 Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zurich © Rodney Graham

Berliner Harun Farocki has authored over 90 films and 10 installations, often sociological or ethnological in nature, focusing on conflict situations and the implicit control in the presentation of information. His film installations identify his preoccupations with deconstructing archives (cinema, publicity, surveillance), and reconstructing them into a montage of images that speak with repurposed meaning.

Vancouver-based artist Rodney Graham’s oeuvre riffs on minimalism and romanticism, psychedelics and psychology, delivering layered conceptual pieces in pop-culture packages. Selections of his works including film, photography, music and art objects were allowed to play off one another in the exhibition just as they do in his practice—at one point in a 1970s mod-style lounge with beanbag-attired listening stations.

Rodney Graham Loudhailer 2003 Installation view Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Zurich and Donald Young Gallery Chicago © Rodney Graham

Two installations that dominated the exhibition in size and sensory stimuli, Graham’s Loudhailer and Farocki’s Deep Play, demonstrate each artist’s examination of the image machine. In Loudhailer, two enormous projectors drown out the sound of the film they project, thus asserting their role by simultaneously enabling and disabling the projected image. Deep Play brings the work of the image machine to a crescendo as viewers, standing on a real turf floor, find their attention not only divided but multiplied across 12 screens, each with a different view—from real play to schematics of defensive positions to stadium surveillance footage—of the 2006 France-Italy World Cup final. Whether by subverting our viewing expectations or overwhelming them, each installation brings the medium to the foreground.

Harun Farocki Deep Play 2007 Video still Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg © Harun Farocki

On the surface, these artists have little in common: Farocki makes serious, dense, documentary-style works, while Graham’s works, though dense with referents, make use of satirical humour and slick production values. However, a deeper analysis finds both artists using the archive as a source and montage as an assembly method—whether the archive is cinema or art history, the montage Farocki’s double-screen film installations or Graham’s use of appropriation. Farocki and Graham also tread common ground by playing with form and reshaping media to expose unconsidered mechanisms and meanings.

Rodney Graham Dance!!!!! 2008 Courtesy Lisson Gallery London © Rodney Graham

In this layered and engaging exhibition, the artists are aligned through their interrogation of codified image-making procedures. By presenting works that resemble a popular genre—the documentary, the Hollywood film—but that don’t follow through in structure or content, they threw off the codes and rejigged production procedures. This left viewers to contemplate the image conventions they have internalized and how these affect their interpretations of the many seeming diversions in our image-based world.

Harun Farocki Auge / Maschine (Oeil / Machine — Eye / Machine) 2000 Video still Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg © Harun Farocki

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