Oppositional avant-gardism is obsolescent. Its transgressive gestures will inevitably be co-opted and neutralized. Etc. If I’ve understood correctly, Documenta 11 was a concerted attempt to think outside the dialectical boxes: establishment versus transgressive avant-garde; autonomy versus commitment. Yet, discussing McQueen’s two videos here in London on October 17, Okwui Enwezor was caught red-handed using the D-word. How could he avoid it? Carib’s Leap, 2001 (filmed at Sauteurs in Grenada, the site where Carib resisters committed suicide en masse) and Western Deep, 2002 (shot in a two-and-a-half-mile-deep South African gold mine) are fundamentally dialectical in their deployment of historical-political subjects and cinematic means toward a complex and challenging synthesis. Western Deep, for example, revisits that staple motif of committed documentarism, the mine (here see the Vertov brothers’ Man With a Movie Camera or Orwell’s writing) but the film’s real topic is its ultimate inability to articulate the experience of the human subjects fixed by its lens. The significance of these works would be apparent even if you watched them on a portable telly, but here they get the full Artangel treatment: a highly evocative setting (the defunct, underground Lumière cinema, now a stripped-out concrete shell with exposed wiring and giant holes in the ceiling) and top-notch electrics (Western Deep’s sound track plays on a positively ear-wax-loosening PA system, exaggerating the impact of its transitions from silence to industrial din: perception in the form of shocks, indeed). The dialectic is dead; long live the dialectic.
