There are paintings, and then there are paintings — I’ll capitalize the latter. Anyone who has Seen a Painting will feel the Truth in this distinction, and anyone who has felt the dissatisfaction of merely seeing a mere painting — and who hasn’t? — will either suspect that such a distinction exists or turn away from the work in front of them in search of meaning elsewhere.

Last July, I was invited by Steffen Andrae, Hans Innenhof, and Günther Mailand to contribute a piece of criticism to the third edition of a series of concept shows organized by Mailand / Innenhof at Kontor 80, an experimental exhibition hall and event space in Leipzig, Germany.

The musicians’ interpretation of the song seems to combine tradition and modernity, with the brass band itself representing tradition and the adapted song representing the modern, contemporary. However, the brass orchestras appear oddly out of time, unintentionally comical. They seem to be enacting the funeral of what they represent—the postal service as a state enterprise, tradition, and society before globalization. Yet, for centuries, the postal service symbolized progress, innovation, and renewal.

If the forced collision of dramatic characters and public situations is understood as a metaphor for art, then according to Mailand / Innenhof, art’s role seems to be that of a troublemaker. However, the “theoretical and practical creation of situations,” which echoes a situationist self-understanding, doesn’t only target scientific or political events. It also aims at the so-called cultural sector, and thus at itself.

…what goes beyond the performance as surplus action becomes the real content of the film, its driving purpose. The actors don’t only play a version of themselves in Olho da Rua, they act at their acting as well and in such a way that the indications of confidence or doubt that flash across their features are never so clear. Is the feeling theirs or another’s? Is it real or feigned for the camera? Do they themselves know?

Rosenfeld’s treatment of Freimuth’s video recording, which is both poetic and critical, follows the notion of the historical materialist as presented by Brecht’s friend Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. Film as historical research does not mean recognizing “how it actually was.”

I do not like 80064. I do not like watching it over and over again for the purpose of this essay. It’s pornographic raw tape of the unmediated real deal. Bullying an old man is a lazy stand-in for the work of art. It would be better to live in in a world in which this video does not exist. But it does.

In Chu’s film, the dismantling becomes a metaphorical operation: it signifies a disassembly of reality into elements—akin to the montage character of film itself. But does this reveal the true reality of social labor? Hardly, because labor resists representation, both in its social function—as a source of surplus value—and in its everyday individual experience.

Trotsky implemented the useful metaphor that art and politics are “fellow travelers". That is, they pursue the same goal of freedom, but by different means.

That paintings are to be “looked at” seems hardly worth saying, until you go to the Museum of Modern Art and find that very few of its six-million- visitors-a-year are looking at anything, or — God forbid you should pause in front of something — you get “moved along” by the guards, who may's well be muttering “nothing to see here” while they do it, like cops at a crime scene waving gawkers on.

The composer La Monte Young remarked that if he doesn't transport his listeners to heaven, he's not doing his job. How many artists today work by such ambitious standards, let alone do their job? What do critics then do when artists go on a disorganized anti-art strike?

My entry into art was haphazard. Beyond the general presence of images of art in my home (reproductions of Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso) and now-forgotten visits to museums at an early age, my first real encounters with art occurred at the movie theater, to which my parents would take me often . . .