Engaged observationalism: forming publics in the gallery film

Abstract

ABSTRACTArtur Zmijewski’s Democracies (2009) is a video installation (screened as a 20-channel piece at galleries across Europe and as a single-screen film at London’s Tate Modern) that brings together 20 different public assemblies – ranging from funerals to marches, protests and celebrations. The film provides a microcosm of contemporary European nationalism, exemplified in the convening of citizens in public spaces. This article analyses Democracies in order to unpack its technical approach to the bodies and spaces it documents. This involves two key points of departure. First, a phenomenological reconsideration of the observational documentary mode, which simultaneously critiques one of the foremost forms of representing reality and reignites its potential. Zmijewski’s observationalism is freshly engaged through the use of counter-intuitive framing devices and highly evocative proximity to the body throughout, encouraging the consideration of the aesthetics of assembly in contemporary Europe. Second, I turn to the site of exhibition, questioning the historical tendency to locate radical art in the museum. I situate Democracies in debates around ‘socially engaged art’, arguing that its form of engagement is one not of healing the ‘social bond’, but of immanent critique, holding to account institutional complicity as much as the producers and spectators that partake in textual meaning.