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.

Brass music is regarded as alternatively innocuous or intrusive entertainment music, as meaningless droning; it evokes a sense of community by referring to so-called traditions and, above all, by inviting collective marching and clapping. In doing so, it only creates the illusion of bonds between people.

Artistic montage, as discussed by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Kluge, deals with questions regarding the relationship between individual elements, especially with respect to images and scenes. In radical montage, the respective components often point beyond their specific material substrate to some sort of socio-philosophical or historical constellation.

There is a now quite famous moment in Les Blank’s documentary on the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams, in which the narrator quotes the German director as stating that, “Everyday life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.” Not a bad slogan for a modernist program . . .

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.

The first Ferris wheel, named after its inventor, the bridge builder and railroad engineer George Ferris, was built in 1893 for the World’s Fair in Chicago. Two years later, the Lumière brothers premiered the first production of their cinematograph in Paris with the short film Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.

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.

“Critique is an exploration of conditions of possibility for freedom in transformation.”