Sex, Labor, or Videotape

Two video works provided the terms of the titular equation of On the Origins of the 21st Century or the Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. One was Jean-Luc Godard’s De l’origine du XXIe siècle (2000), usually called Origins of the 21st Century in English. Godard made the fifteen-minute fragment just after completing his epic Histoire(s) du cinéma project, reusing some of the latter’s material. Facing outward on a monitor to meet the viewer immediately upon entering the exhibition, it montages fragments of the history of cinema with pornographic material and, especially, footage of war and atrocities.

The other eponymous video was William E. Jones’s The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), a twenty-minute video constructed primarily of clips from gay pornographic videos made in Eastern Europe—Prague, Budapest and Moscow—and distributed in the US in the 1990s. During that decade, Jones notes in the voiceover, sex workers from Eastern Europe were suddenly “absorbed into the international labor market,” and production companies went there to exploit their low wages. More than half of the video shows young men being interviewed and examined in screen tests. Displayed in a curtained black box in the furthest corner of the Kunstverein’s upper floor, The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography lingered on what is hidden even in pornography’s mania for the visible: the social relations on set, the conditions and existence of the porn worker.

Where Jones’s video emphasizes production, Godard’s hyperbolizes exchange. In a structure mimicking the exchange-value of commodities, Godard abstracts the most violently diverse and diversely violent events, reducing them to the level of the image in order to compare and contrast, to test their equivalence. A comparative and contrastive gaze is also elicited across the exhibition by the “or” that separates and links the two film titles in the exhibition’s title. This “or” could be read as a more contingent version of the Godardian “and,” theorized most famously by Gilles Deleuze: Godard’s additive form of montage in which images and sounds are constantly laid one after another, always with the possibility of a further one being added. One was thus invited to see equivalences between the Jones and Godard videos, or more exactly one’s memories of them, since they were shown at opposite ends of the Kunstverein. The faces of the young men looking into the camera in screen tests for pornography or the face of Jean Seberg looking into the camera in Breathless (1960); the young man in underwear with his hands on his head in Jones’s video (used as the cover image for the exhibition booklet) or the Arab man forced against the wall with his hands above his head by white military officers in Godard’s.

On the Origins of the 21st Century or the Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography used these two videos to mark out a field whose key elements are audiovisual media, (post-)communism, labor, the body, sex, and the commodity. Within this framework, guest curators undertook a series of five distinct investigations. Each was accompanied by a substantial catalogue text, which was often necessary for grasping the stakes and significance of what was on display. Most were centered on the so-called “Former East” (the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Armenia). Most could be described as archival, either in their emphasis on paper and video materials, or in the way the selected artworks created and constituted archives. And most had an acutely historical emphasis, drawing both on the focused, microhistorical approach of Jones’s work (the artist says of the porn videos he studies that “even in an unlikely place, it is possible to find traces of recent history”), and the wide-ranging, synthetic approach of Godard, who—with his collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville—developed a radically original, constellatory approach to narrating history via non-academic means. For all the affinities between the presentations, they clearly represent independently conceived research projects or curatorial endeavors. All the same, in the space between fall and origin they resonated with one another to propose non-normative ways of making sense of the rubble of past and present.

The first presentation, “Border Thinking and Striking the Border: Migratory Aesthetics and Counter-Public Spheres in the GDR,” curated by Elisa R. Linn, took its concept of “border thinking” from the work of writers Gloria Anzaldúa and Walter Mignolo. In applying, as others have, a decolonial framework to an intra-European context, it provincialized Europe and highlighted the colonial structures existing within as well as beyond the continent. In her curatorial text, Linn cites Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe’s 1990 statement that “The (Berlin) Wall was the condom of the GDR,” a phrase that succinctly encapsulates the intersection of sexuality and governmentality the section explores. As Linn goes on to say, the metaphor was ultimately inapposite, since the border wall was porous as well as militarily controlled. The way the materials were installed here seemed to subtly enact “border thinking.” Much of the space in the middle of the gallery was inaccessible. Instead, the viewer navigated a relatively narrow path. On the wall were artworks such as Jurgen Wittdorf’s homoerotic drawings and woodcuts from the 1960s to 1990s, Annemirl Bauer’s painting on the unstretched canvas of a deckchair (1980), or Gabriele Stötzer’s photo series Transvestite (1984). Marking out the inner limit of the path was a long, rectangular table that wrapped around the gallery, housing a rich archive of materials including leaflets and posters from queer and feminist organizations of the GDR, later scholarly works to leaf through, and books by writers like Ronald M. Schernikau and Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Schernikau seems particularly emblematic of the “migratory aesthetics” at stake here—a queer communist who emigrated from the Federal Republic of Germany to the GDR in the 1980s, trespassing borders between genders and nation states. Meanwhile, in another enactment of porous demarcations, the piano sounds from the neighboring De l’origine du XXIe siècle periodically spilled their melancholy atmosphere onto the objects.

In a comparatively small side room off the same gallery was “Anna Daučiková: Surveil,” curated by Dina Akhmadeeva. On first glance it was very different from Linn’s section: a simple black-box installation of one single-channel video, 33 Situations (2015). This too, though, presented an archive of queer sexualities in the late stages of state communism—this time a personal one, drawing on Daučiková’s own experiences in Moscow from 1979 to the early 1990s and plotting small-scale intimacies rather than counter-public spheres. In the video, each “situation” is a description of a social situation in the 1980s Soviet Union, printed in Times New Roman font in tabular format on A4 paper. Each page is fixed onto a window and filmed; they are filmed scenarios, but not in the sense of being staged for the film. Instead, the paper descriptions are literally filmed, with the rest of the work made in the spectator’s imagination. Imagination exceeds the report. Focused on individual-level interactions, each situation sets in motion relations of desire, privacy, (self-)censorship, and surveillance—although, where autobiography crosses the border into fiction, fantasy, and projection is often not obvious. The situations are a series of arrangements with recurring characters and tropes, a structuralist combinatory of social life near the end of the Soviet Union. Rather than being a closed structure, however, it seems that it could go on indefinitely, finding new points of exhaustion and failure in the system. The administrative language and the report-form of each suggests the cataloguing of suspicious behavior by state bureaucracy, while their placement on windows evokes the everyday surveillance of spying neighbors peering out. At the same time, there is something simple and homemade about the printouts that is incongruous and comic in relation to these situations; and the view out of the window—somewhere else in time and space from the events described—is often strangely calm. Together these create a complex texture of everyday life, where queer sexuality is lived under repressive conditions.

Linn and Akhmadeeva’s curatorial propositions, occupying the ground floor, could be seen as working within the problematic that Christoper Chitty referred to as “sexual hegemony.” That is, dominant classes’ attempts to secure political rule through the enforcement of sexual codes and behaviors, via means ranging from direct criminalization to the organization of public space, legislative interventions in the domestic, and ideological campaigns. The first presentation on the upper floor of the Kunstverein, curated by Erika Balsom and entitled “The Secret Mirror, or, the Disappearance of A.A.A. Offresi,” was a further investigation into sexual hegemony. It too traced political fault-lines on the terrain of sexuality. Simultaneously, it marked a geopolitical shift away from the former Eastern Bloc to the spectacular society of 1980s Italy, a society that elsewhere the artist María Ruido, in her own audiovisual sexual history of the country through this period, has aptly called “pornocracy.” 

“The Secret Mirror” traced the history of A.A.A. Offresi, a 1981 film by an Italian feminist collective made with a hidden camera that recorded the interactions of a sex worker with her clients. Due to be shown in March 1981 on the Italian national television channel RAI 2, it was pulled from broadcast at the last minute. The film was confiscated by the police and has never resurfaced, while criminal charges were brought against the filmmakers (who were ultimately acquitted) for invasion of privacy and being accessories to prostitution. Symptomatically, the police labelled the tape the corpo del realto, the “body of the crime.” Given that no known copy of the film survives, Balsom’s curation instead assembled a constellation of objects marking its absence: the poster for its only public screening in February 1981 at the Berlinale Film Forum, a 1981 work made by three members of the same collective shot on the set of a hardcore porn film, salacious magazine coverage of the event, and so on. A 1981 issue of Playboy Italia on display encapsulated the dominant pornocratic response: an interview with Veronique, the sex worker in question, is advertised with the claim that she “undresses and confesses,” enacting a will to know centered on making the female body strip and admit guilt, and putting the putative reader in the position of one of Veronique’s clients. Such a will was carefully shunned by the curation, in which the film-body remained resolutely obscene—not in the moral sense, though. Balsom’s accompanying text states that most of A.A.A. Offresi showed financial transactions rather than sex and nudity. Rather, the film was obscene here in the apocryphal etymological sense of ob-scene—off-the-stage, out-of-field, hidden from sight. As with Jones’s video, what turns out to really be obscene in capitalism are those social relations centered on the purchase of labor-power, including but not limited to those of sex work. The gap in history produced by the censoring and disappearance of the film is apprehensible as a social structuring absence: the economy of sex. At the same time, the presentation provided a metacommentary on the circulation and production of sexuality through media apparatuses.

In the next gallery, Angela Harutyunyan’s “Sex Tapes: Desire of Technology and Technology of Desire” gathered a series of videos made in Armenia between 2001 and 2005 (with one exception, a music video from 2010), the years immediately following Jones’s The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography and Godard’s De l’origine du XXIe siècle. These years constitute a moment in Armenian art that Harutyunyan has described elsewhere as that of “the fragile body and the damaged subject.”1 They are bracketed in Armenian political history: First by an incident on October 27, 1999, when gunmen entered the Armenian parliament and assassinated the newly-elected Prime Minister, Vazgen Sargsyan, and seven other politicians; in the aftermath, Robert Kocharyan, the president, “usurped political power.” Then by Kocharyan’s declaration of martial law when outgoing president in 2008. In these videos, bodies, often naked, appear in dark, unspecific spaces, simultaneously vulnerable and aggressive: in Sona Abgaryan’s Untitled (2001), the artist and another performer wrestle, bite and nuzzle one another while on all fours, in gestures that are difficult to definitively categorize as either hostile or desiring; in Harout Simonian’s Untitled (2004), the artist progressively rubs a chunk of Vaseline on himself, making the floor treacherously slippery as he moves around. The visitor was also made to occupy a dark, enclosed space, between large screens on either side of the room, and to lie somewhat exposed on the floor, especially to see the works on a monitor on the ground, while another monitor faced one of the large screens. While the body and subjectivity as the ambivalent horizons of video art have been highlighted ever since the medium’s beginnings, most famously in Rosalind Krauss’s 1976 critique “The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” the videos here gave a more politicized set of connotations to the claim that video operates in “the prison of a collapsed present.”’ Krauss took video’s capacity for simultaneous recording and transmission to condition an art of the eternal present. Video was incapable of figuring the world historically. The artist was the narcissistic horizon of the apparatus, stuck in a feedback loop of mirror reflection. The videos gathered here, though, figure the reality of a post-1989 context where historicity is very perceptibly in crisis and the communist vision of collective life, however distorted, is being supplanted by the regime of the neoliberal subject. Krauss’s sense of an art “completely severed from a sense of its own past”—bracketing whether this was a fair assessment of the US practices of the 1960s and 1970s she criticized— becomes a method for miming the experience of the so-called end of history.

After already working through so much material, one stepped into the final curatorial contribution, occupying the exhibition’s biggest space: “Das Gold der Liebe II,” curated by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou. The first version of this presentation was shown at Shore Gallery in Vienna in 2022. It was evident that it didn’t directly respond to the curatorial frame in Hamburg, even if both here and in its previous iteration it included Jones’s The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography. A more straightforward and familiar avant-garde model of sexuality and transgression seemed to animate the selection and arrangement of (excellent) works, from canonical figures like Alfred Jarry and Pierre Klossowski alongside Paul McCarthy’s giant inflatable anal plug and skunks with dildos. The peak-year-2000 cyber-art-porn of Shu Lea Chang’s I.K.U., though, with its plot device of data collection through the body, provided one point of contact with the sections curated by Harutyunyan, Balsom, Akhmadeeva and Linn, its delirious aesthetic obliquely intersected with the more sober biopolitical analysis elsewhere in the exhibition. Watching I.K.U.’s mind-bending CGI sequences of the view from the inside of an orifice of the head of a penetrating penis, I could not help but think that it gave a riotously sexual, unexpected meaning to Balsom’s remark, in the text for her own section, that “film history is full of holes.”

Undoubtedly, this was an overwhelming exhibition. It would take many, many hours and ideally multiple visits to satisfyingly parse the extent of materials on display. The section curated by Mateos and Teyssou, and in particular Jones’s video in its furthest corner, probably suffer from the sheer volume somewhat, since most visitors would have reached them after already working their way through the other substantial sections. For me, the strongest moments were those that reduced information, in terms of number of artworks and amount of visual material, rather than burying the visitor in it. This allowed a reflection on the limits of vision and knowledge, and left room for surprise and enigma exceeding the mere gallery presentation of a research thesis, especially when the compelling catalogue texts, which are theoretically complex and extensively researched, already tended to strongly weight a visitor’s reading toward curatorial intention. Given the amount of time required to engage with each presentation and the sense of their independence, one could imagine them being staged instead as a series of consecutive exhibitions through time rather than simultaneously in space. Yet their co-presentation allowed a sense of the multiplicity, contingency, and proximity of histories, especially as these overdetermine the present. Indeed, viewing the exhibition underlined a sense not just of many histories but of many presents, and many ways of inhabiting the present.

At one point in Godard’s De l’origine du XXIe siècle, a voice speaks the words: “Nothing conflicts more with the image of the beloved than that of the state. The state’s rationale directly opposes the sovereign value of love.” This is a paradigmatic example of Godard’s romanticism. In contrast, I.K.U. was advertised with the tagline “This is not love. This is sex.” What the materials across On the Origins of the 21st Century or the Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography tended to show was not a romantic binary of love versus the state, but the enmeshment of desire in apparatuses of control and value extraction all the way down. But they also persuasively suggested that it is only within and across and around these same apparatuses that resistance and critique and counter-practices are possible. There is always, as the exhibition title reminds us, an “or”—another mode of reading the same material, or an antagonistic moment in the dialectic of history.

1 Angela Harutyunyan, “Performative Gestures and Limits of Resistance in Armenian Contemporary Art (1987-2008), Part III," post: notes on art in a global context, March 27, 2024, https://post.moma.org/performative-gestures-and-limits-of-resistance-in-armenian-contemporary-art-1987-2008-part-iii/.

Nicolas Helm-Grovas is a writer and academic based in Berlin. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

All images: photo: Edward Greiner