This exhibition stages an encounter between the Berlin-based experimental filmmaker Harun Farocki and the Canadian artist Rodney Graham. Rather than organizing the exhibition chronologically, the curator, Chantal Pontbriand, has instead operated along theoretical transversals, arranging works on the basis of four “code-concepts”: the archive, the machine, montage, and the nonverbal. Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970) is cited as the model for the exhibition title, or monogram, “HF | RG.” Farocki and Graham have, presumably, been paired for their similarities, most obviously their examinations of the possibilities of film and video and their relentless deconstruction of what the early Barthes called mythological codes, or gestures. But what comes across, happily, are these artists’ differences.
Graham investigates the fiction of identity; Farocki the fiction of technology. Graham is as much an old-fashioned satirist as a poststructuralist technician, and he favors role play and impersonation, as in his film and video assumption of mythic roles: the cowboy (How I Became a Ramblin’ Man, 1999), the American Color Field painter (The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962, 2007). Farocki, who edited the journal Filmkritik for a decade and collaborated with theorist Kaja Silverman on the book Speaking About Godard (1988), is ever the ice-cold detective, again and again re-presenting the history and possibilities of film. He focuses especially on the interaction of image technologies and warfare—or (analogously) team sports, as in Deep Play, 2007, which employs twelve projectors to examine the many video analyses of the 2006 World Cup final. Special mention must be made, in Farocki’s case, of his early film Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire), 1969, in which he speaks of the effects of napalm on human flesh, and of Graham’s book projects, especially White Shirt (for Mallarmé),1993, which was made with Ann Demeulemeester. Such works highlight a shared archival instinct while limning the different limits, or rhythms, of each practice: Farocki the militant historian, Graham the maker of masquerades.
