“The psyche is like an inexhaustible resource which demands to be managed. In modern societies this task is delegated either to the individual or, in cases where the balance has dipped too far into the red, to psychiatric and other institutions.” Armin Schäfer & Cornelius Brock, Psychographien

„I speak for people who are accustomed to seeing the most horrific movement even in immobility.“ In his ‘Pathologie de la vie social’ Balzac aimed to dissect the imagery of society under the microscope, thereby eliciting the general conditions that make up the individual and releasing from the images the movement brought to a standstill, the gesture. This pathological, microscopic view of social forms and surfaces first indicated what only later becomes obvious, through the parallels between psychiatry and cinema as well as in the form taken by bio-politics today: that gestures are about social positioning, mobility, and the movement of internalized images—about ‘inner movement’ and becoming a social being—and about having to learn how to be moved again, as „people who touch nothing and are touched by nothing learn to cry again in the cinema.“ (Walter Benjamin)

What Balzac envisaged, has infiltrated everyday life today, mainly via those creativity and communication industries which exploit the countless sciences and pseudo-sciences of the soul, social convergence and the productivity of affect. Being moved and becoming other is now the essence of the product: Once the „Experience Economy“ has run its course, the „Transformations Economy“ will take over, a late 1990s business bible enthuses, the individual buyer of the transformation essentially says ‘Transform me!’ Transformation, however only within the scope of the product. Nothing is being pursued so intensively at the moment like ‘social set-theory’—behavioural research into the human being and how to get your hands on its precious properties: attention, emotion, creativity. In this hyper-pragmatic industry human beings are mostly seen as animal (body) hardware, their human software consisting of their social and psychological faculties and competences. And this leaves us at the centre of a clinic, of a pathology of gesture, because these faculties are expressed as gestures—as a means to an end, which, through internalization, it is hoped, might be normalized and naturalized. The clinic—by now a lasting state—still promises hope of normality.

Clinic - A Pathology of Gesture takes place on two evenings and treats the theatre as an exhibition space in that, alongside installations in the foyers and stages, a programme is presented in the auditorium as if following exhibition sketches. Was the bourgeois theatre itself not a clinical, symptomatical space in which people became emphatically other, which was exactly what they were unable to do in the world outside? Michael Taussig’s opening lecture looks at the mimetic faculty as the ability to copy and to grant the representation the power of the represented. His talk lays the foundation for this first evening, in the course of which short audio-visual presentations will seek to draw parallels between mimesis and imagination, the empathic faculty and the performative gesture. Sao Paulo based psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik talks about the psychopathologies of becoming a subject and of creativity; film historian Ute Holl discusses the delirious, pathological (camera) gaze in early ethnographic films; art critic Jan Verwoert discusses what the gesture of appropriation has given rise to within contemporary art—the potential for invocation, constitutive gestures calling new communities into existence. The presentations are supplemented with videos and films by Susanne Buerner, Catherine Sullivan and Jean Painleve—in whose work mimetic transformation and its relationship to pathology are central motives—and a new video by Tom Holert which addresses personality tests and the popularity of kids quiz shows in the US in the fifties.

The second evening begins with a talk by the film-maker and theoretician Gregg Bordowitz on the relationship between thought and affect, death and sexuality. The following short presentations and films revolve around underlying experiences of being positioned as a subject, and constitutive forms of invocation—from education, advertising and popular culture. Film theorist Antje Ehmann provides examples of the historical shift from gestural acting to the attempt to provoke inner emotion; Armin Schaefer explains how gestures of exhaustion become pathological; and Harun Farocki examines current forms taken by the Brechtian pathologies of the drama played out by representation and reality. In addition screenings of new videos and films by Valerie Mrejen, Erik van Lieshout and Tibor Hajas—micro-sociological studies of the pictorial connection between gesture, emotion and commentating interpretation.

On the facades, in the foyers and on the stage are installations by Liam Gillick, Harun Farocki / Antje Ehmann, a screening programme by Joerg Heiser (on the subject of ‘Slapstick’, including works by Ed Ruscha, Kirsten Pieroth, Annika Strom, Barbara Visser, Jakup Ferri among others). Barbara Kruger’s video installation Twelve forms the centre of this exhibition. In it she enfolds twelve individuals’ personal conversations about everyday situations and structures of power into one space and seeks to examine, as she puts it, ‘how we are to one another’.

The musical concept for the evening has been developed by Stefan Schneider / Mapstation. New York-based artist Tamy Ben-Tor will present a new performance on both evenings at 11 pm.

Clinic - A Pathology of Gesture

An Exhibition Programme
A project by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg
HAU1, Hebbel Am Ufer Theatre, Berlin
November 3 and 4, 2006

Friday 3 November 2006

Stumbling Block - Tom Holert (Video)

The theatre of examination starts early, and in practice never ends. The life of the individual in industrial and post-industrial societies is a relentless series of tests. The role of the examiner and candidate may be exchanged, but one thing is certain; both will always appear on stage together in the theatre of the examination. How is it possible to exercise creativity under the examiner’s beady eye? What value does the product of the tested gesture have—scientific, aesthetic, economic? A child’s hand lifts a wooden block and moves it through the air of subordination and fear of failure. Where the block lands, a pattern is supposed to emerge appearing correct to the institutional gaze and the apparatuses of the examiner. In the wrong place the block becomes the stumbling block of someone’s life.

Tom Holert is a cultural theorist and journalist living in Berlin.

Mimetic excess, or Benjamin’s Finger and the Theatre of Gesture – Michael Taussig (Lecture)

Taking the first three entries in Kafka’s diaries as its starting point, this presentation addresses essential philosophical questions of gesture and mimicry by establishing a connection between the shamanic experiences of the ‘new world’ (southern California and Columbia) and Walter Benjamin’s experiments with mescaline and hashish.

Michael Taussig is an anthropologist, and professor at Columbia University, New York.

A Notation for Movement – Jean Painlevé (Film Screening)

A relatively unknown film about the methods developed by Pierre Conté to transcribe movements in a similar way to musical notation: Pierre Conté was a choreographer, composer and frequently collaborated with Jean Painlevé. His method of transcribing movements does not limit itself to dance; it can be applied equally to gestures typical within manual work and sport, as well as to animals’ movements.

1947, 9', 16mm, b/w

Jean Painlevé (1902-1989, France) was a biologist who made documentary films about science and natural history.

The Doors of Trance – Ute Holl (Presentation)

A gesture is a caesura, an opening, the gate in a culture’s fence; however it can just as easily be slammed shut by another isolated gesture.
Early ethnological filmmakers sought access to foreign cultures by recording their gestures. What they easily forgot was that gestures are not stuck to the body; they are nomadic—in the same way that an affect clears a path for itself, crossing individuals and cultures, particularly in its alliances with the media and their self-absorbed illustration techniques. Gestures are thus the gates to trance. Gestures occupy bodies, and their journey through colonial and post-colonial histories is a story of trances, which concerns above all film-makers. They can best be observed at the cinema and again afterwards in the foyer in the behaviour of the spectators.
The lecture offers a short history of fleeting gestures, using examples taken from films by Félix Regnault, Alfred Cort Haddon, Walter Baldwin Spencer, Augustin Krämer, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Jean Rouch and Maya Deren.

Ute Holl is a documentary film-maker, and film historian at the Humboldt University, Berlin. She lives in Hamburg.

Gestures of Invocation – Jan Verwoert (Presentation)

We are surrounded by the ghosts of past regimes, utopias and dreams, and we have no option but to make contact with them. But how? We had just been led to believe that history was dead and we could raid its archives as if it were a supermarket. That was the model of appropriation, but the un-dead history of ghosts is too living to be appropriated in a controlled manner. New ceremonies must be invented for the purposes of invocation. But which? Ceremonies found communities. For a séance many are needed. Which communities do we wish to call into being through the invocation of spectres? And which not?

Jan Verwoert is an art historian and critic living in Berlin.

The Geopolitics of Pimping – Suely Rolnik (Lecture)

The theme of the lecture is the politics of subjectivization and cultural production established by the regime of what has been called cultural, cultural-informational or cognitive capitalism—names which certain theorists, particularly those associated with the journal Multitudes, use to describe the mutation of capitalism that began in the late 1970s. Under this new regime, the chief force of labour became the energy of subjective life, its potential for creation, knowledge and desire. The major focus of the lecture will be the psychopathological effects of this politics, which will be examined particularly in countries which were under dictatorships at the time the new regimes were established (this being the case with the majority of countries in South America and Eastern Europe).

Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, cultural critic, curator and professor at the Catholic University of São Paulo.

Manufrance – Valérie Mréjen (Video)

Images from a 1970s Manufrance catalogue show a perfect day in the life of a housewife. As an author and video artist, Valerie Mrejen dissects the tristesse of everyday communications in her works; her videos are micro-sociological studies of everyday situations, focusing particularly on the attempt to convey experience, often thwarted by language.

2005, 5’, Beta SP, colour

Valérie Mréjen is a film-maker, author, photographer and artist. She lives in Paris.

The Love Life of The Octopus – Jean Painlevé (Screening)

The Woman Who Embraces Tightly
Draped in her skin of changing colours, the amorous lady has closed her eyes… She has the heavy lids of a seductress, but the gaze within is always alert… Eight prehensile whips lash out, as if flung by the most deft, most dexterous cowboy… How can anything escape this repeated embrace? Each sucker, and there are hundreds of them, performs its function perfectly, even when the tentacle is severed. The crab, bound and breathless, receives a deadly kiss from the mouth of the octopus, with her terrifying, parrot-like beak, she can crack open the hardest shell. Meanwhile, the mechanics of her breathing continue undisturbed. Water is drawn in through her gills and expelled through a central tube, the siphon, which points forward. To swim, the octopus need only contract this siphon forcefully, propelling herself backward, and, because she is unable to see where she is going, may enter the gaping mouth of a conger eel… Quite a mouthful… The octopus is malleable. Her tentacles, the last to enter, hang like whiskers from the conger’s jaws. Properly prepared these tentacles are delicious with a sauce à l’américaine.
The octopus’s moods are revealed in her changing hues: she may turn red, black, purple or yellow, depending on the area of pigment she contracts. Experiments have shown that she remembers things, recognizes things, and can adapt to society. She is offended by foul-smelling eggs and will throw them back at you violently, turning white with anger.

(Taken from: Andy Masaki Bellows, Marina McDougal, Brigitte Berg: Science is fiction. The films of Jean Painlevé, MIT Press, Cambridge MA / London, England, 2000)

1967, 13', 16mm, colour. Music by Pierre Henry

Saturday 4 November 2006

Of The Passions and Art Today – Gregg Bordowitz (Lecture)

Today, waves of sensation overwhelm the individual dispossessed of any grounding framework for experience. We are awash in emotions, subject to suggestion, organized by panic, moved by anxiety. We are experiencing an unprecedented intensification of a conflict between stimulus and cognition. A resolution to this conflict seems possible: We must defeat the time-honoured oppositions between feeling and thought, sense and understanding. Is that achievable? Is that desirable? Do we have a choice?

The lecture considers work by Paul Chan, Andrea Fraser, Stephen Andrews, K8 Hardy, Ulrike Mueller, Emily Roysdon among others. Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and theology it addresses the structuring role of death underlying current aspects of daily social life. It considers how mortification in art and culture can pose a response to the fear of death repressively exercised in the name of security. How can we comprehend the collective social dimensions of the hidden constitutional ambivalence functioning at the very core of each individual's emotional life? To begin to answer that question we must consider the origins and development of sexuality—the core of the psyche's development. Sexuality is nothing less than how you touch the world and how the world touches you back. All sexualities share common origins and features, yet each sexuality is singular. The tension between loss and recovery, the continuum between pleasure and un-pleasure (Lust and Unlust), the difference between self and other—these structuring dynamics shape our capacity to choose and to act, as individuals and groups.

Gregg Bordowitz is an artist, activist, author and film-maker. He lives in Chicago

Self fashion show – Tibor Hajas (Screening)

In spite of his early death, the poet, action artist and performance artist Tibor Hajas (1946–1980) counts among the most important Hungarian artists of the second half of the twentieth century. His performances, which took place without an audience and were only documented by a photographer, strove for a holistic experience between life and death in which—like the Vienna Actionists—he explored his own physical and mental limits. Hajas’s short 35mm film Öndivatbemutató (Self fashion show), produced at Balázs Béla Filmstúdió in 1976, evokes documentary methods before questioning them. On a busy square, passers by are stopped and asked to look into the camera for one minute in a pose of their own choosing, to present themselves as ‘models of their own fates’. The vulnerability and manipulability of the persons approached becomes apparent and is highlighted by the soundtrack added later. Image and sound form a montage: the ‘protagonists’ appear as a ‘collection of beetles, an anthropological manual’ (Hajas) and are instructed by three speakers how best to present themselves.

1976, 17’, 35mm, b/w

Tibor Hajas (1946-1980, Hungary), was a performance artist, poet, photographer and film-maker.

The Capital Laughs – Harun Farocki (Visual Lecture)
Herr Schmidt, just say: Blood, blood, blood!
About twenty years ago in a training seminar for managers I watched a role-play being performed. Half the managers played managers, the other half workers. It looked like a dialectical exercise: playing yourself and also your antagonist. I reflected that where Brecht found it hard to establish himself in the theatre, and impossible in cinema, he had certainly succeeded in further education and therapy. Brecht said of his Instructive Theatre that the actors learn more than the public.
Only one word has to be exchanged; where Brecht says ‘party’, today we have to say ‘capital’. Capital is always right. We do not understand it, just as earlier we didn’t understand the ways of God. Maybe God cries when we refuse to believe in him; capital simply laughs at its non-believers.

Harun Farocki is an author and filmmaker living in Berlin.

Happiness - Erik van Lieshout (Screening)

Erik van Lieshout was invited to create a work of art at the Heimerstein psychiatric hospital. Heimerstein becomes the background against which Bart and Erik try to resolve the tensions and conflicts of the past. Bart frequently feels criticised and belittled by his elder brother, while Erik wishes that his brother could be happier. The residents of the institute participate in the events in a spontaneous and unselfconscious way and, by being ‘different’, they show life in an entirely new light.

2003, 9’, DVD, colour

Erik van Lieshout is an artist living in Rotterdam.

From the Gestural Theatre to the Facial Landscapes of Interior Movement – Antje Ehmann (Presentation)

If we were to imagine a dictionary of cinematic terms, to be constructed using the medium of moving pictures itself, it must contain an entry headed ‘Gesture, Gesticulation’. Gestology falls within the field of ‘expression theory’, which examines expressive movements. As they are a particularly suitable research object, film and theatre actors are continually drawn into these systems. One problem here is that bodily movements are difficult to categorize, despite their visibility. Even the nomenclative distinction between gesture, gesticulation, sign-language and mimicry is somewhat awkward. Tradition has however provides some categories here; in the early period of silent-film acting something corresponding to a ‘expressions canon’ existed. All beginners were drilled in it, although the grand gesture became steadily smaller while the question of the relationship between interior and exterior grew. Should a performance be ‘hot’ or ‘cold’? Should a role be build up from within or without? How can one decide at all whether a gesture is ‘authentic’ or ‘habitual’? The close-up is probably deployed as often as it is in order to escape this dualism.

Antje Ehmann is an author, film theorist and curator. She lives in Berlin.

Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land - Catherine Sullivan (Screening)
This video installation takes as its point of departure the Chechen rebel takeover of the Russian musical Nord-Ost in 2002, in which the actors and audience were held hostage for several days in a Moscow theatre. These scenes derive from Sullivan's interpretation of Veniamin Kaverin's Two Captains (1942), a classic Russian love and adventure novel about polar aviation and Russian expansion in the Arctic Sea, on which the musical Nord-Ost was based. Sullivan re-creates the ten sections of the novel in a series of forty vignettes. Each actor learned roughly fifty pantomime-like actions recalling the traditions of musical theatre and was then filmed performing them in different combinations. Primarily shot at the ‘Polish American Army Veterans Association’ in Chicago, the footage was originally presented on five screens. One larger screen shows foundational gestures of the novel, while the four smaller screens depict spin-offs in other locations, suggesting a narrative development. Using the actors' bodies as vehicles of expression and the theatre as a site for emotional transcendence, Sullivan situates the Moscow siege within the context of artistic production, resulting in a conflation of the real and the imaginary. For Clinic – A Pathology of Gesture Sullivan presents a special one-channel version of the piece. 
2003, 10“, Video, colour

What the Body Can – Armin Schäfer (Lecture)

Whatever we do or don’t do, we continually become exhausted. Around 1900 psychiatry discovered in exhaustion a condition as unavoidable as it was threatening. It attempted to draw a distinction between healthy tiredness and the pathological condition of fatigue, in which gestures go wrong, expressive movements fail, and movements’ forms go off the rails.

Armin Schäfer is a private tutor for recent German literary theory at the University of Erfurt and an academic at the media department of the Bauhaus University in Weimar.

INSTALLATIONS: (open both days from 7pm - open end)

Twelve - Barbara Kruger (4-Screen Video Installation, 12 Minutes)

Twelve is a large scale video installation of short scenes, written by Kruger, performed by actors and projected on opposite sides of the space to each other. Text scrolling along the bottom of each scene suggest the thoughts or words of the people involved. As the viewer stands in the centre of the installation going on around them, they are thrust into the middle of discussions which become increasingly hostile, feeling unease at witnessing something private yet public, violent orally/aurally but not physically.

Hearing Stations - Antje Ehmann / Harun Farocki

Hearing Stations consists of seven telephones mounted in the HAU1 foyer. Developed for the exhibition "Cinema like Never Before" (which took place in the Generali Foundation in Vienna this year), in Hearing Stations one listens to statements of well known filmmakers and -theoreticians elaborating on concepts which in the past decades have been central to film theory and practice alike.

Es una clase muy pobre de memoria que solo funciona hacia atras - Liam Gillick

"But among the sciences there are two which are still experimental and relate to observation and are extremely useful. It is because of this that they are risken so quickly. These two sciences were formally opposites, but today they are on their way to become identical because they are involved in so many identical fields of research. They are crushing to sub-atomic particles the last few problems left to solve. Their names are chemistry and psychology. Our chemists inspired perhaps by love and the nature of relationship, force their way into the inner life of molecules and show us their designs, ideas and their individual physiognomy instead of relying on a false air of conformity. While the chemists construct for us the psychology of the atom our psychologists explain to us atomic theory itself. I was going to say "sociology of self"... Thanks to the chemists we are no longer alone in the frozen world. We are conscious that the rocks are alive and animated, we are conscious that the hard metals which protect and warm us are also prolific brotherhood."
(from chapter 6: LOVE, ' Underground - Fragments of Future Histories)' Tarde/Gillick)

Slapstick - A video programme curated by Joerg Heiser

In 1900 Henri Berson wrote Laughter - An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. So what is this - the comic? Bergson suggests that it is a "certain mechanical inflexibility", the resemblance of human attitudes and gestures with regular mechanisms, on which we react with laughter. Mechanical inflexibility as the starting point of a short journey through performative films and videoworks.

Ed Ruscha, Premium, 1971, 24’, 16mm

Andy Kaufman, Live-Show with his Family, 1979, 9’, Amateurvideo

Kirsten Pieroth, Ohne Titel, 2001, 2’, dvd

Barbara Visser, Philippa, 1997, 4‘30‘‘‚ dvd

Jakup Ferri, Jakup Come Back, 2003, 1’40”, dvd

Annika Ström, All my Dreams have come true, 2004, 1’30”, dvd

Daniel Guzman, New York Groove, 2004, 4‘, dvd

Serhat Koeksal, Gegen die bridge, 2005, 6’20‘‘, dvd

Joerg Heiser, Curator, Author und Co-Editor of Frieze Magazine, lives in Berlin

PERFORMANCE

Tamy Ben-Tor will present her new performance "America Hip Hop Judensau" on both days at 11 pm.

"Aesthetically, Ben-Tor is a hair-raising fusion of Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Alex Bag, Kafka, the Yiddish theater, and Greek tragedy. Mixing the dressing-up and self-portraiture of Sherman with something more fitful, fervent, critical, and chaotic, Ben-Tor acts out the unrepentant animus of Walker, performs the hilarious bitterness and perversity of Bag, updates Kafka's primal paranoid fantasies of vengeance and acquiescence, and limns a Dostoyevskian gallery of contemporary lost souls, louts, louses, and ignoramuses—all of whom exist in a place where arrogance, ideology, bewilderment, and desperation merge."

The Village Voice

Simultaneous translation from English to German / German to English off all presentations is being provided

Clinic: A Pathology of Gesture is curated by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg and is generously supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Berlin.

HEBBEL AM UFER - HAU 1: STRESEMANN STR. 29 10963 BERLIN
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