Mike notes

Hito Steyrl - The Museum as Factory

Political films used to be shown in factories, now they have been moved to the white cube of the gallery. Factories have moved to China or have been mechanised, labourers turned to programmers who now work from home. Cinema has undergone a transformation into factories in the neoliberal age.(Political) Cinema has found a new home inside of art institutions, black boxes inside of white cubes, where the quality of presentation is often lacking. But still, audiences are still attracted to these political films and spaces.

Steryl defines a conservative response of this movement from factory to white cube (or ivory tower) as a movement away from “the real” to a cut-off elitist enclave. Instead she inverts the notion of ‘the real’ as something happening outside but rather that the white cube is a a real representation of a kind of bourgeois emptiness. Furthermore she presents the idea of the factory as now existing inside the white cube, where culture is produced instead of consumer and industrial goods, and where interns replace factory workers.

It’s a factory all right, but a different kind of factory. Political films are still shown there but it has changed in a way that makes it unrecognisable. The main change that people now spend both their leisure and work time in front of monitors.

The product of the museum-as-factory is a social product. Things still get produced there from installations to planning. The museum as factory is a mix of private and public spheres, where everyone from bloggers to the cleaning lady are made to labour within the factory. Even the spectators are made to work, their senses drafted into the production of meaning. The film strip acts like a conveyor belt, and any space that incorporates film becomes a factory.

Lumiere’s first film showed workers leaving the factory. This is used as metaphor signalling the invention of cinema as the beginning of a shift away from industrial production. She describes a work by Harun Farocki which compiles many versions of workers leaving a factory. But where are the workers going to? Apparently they went to the museum. So in a way they never left the factory. It’s a fitting then that Lumiere’s factory is now a museum.

Classical cinema and factories are confining spaces, with fixed times of entry and exit. Contemporary museums and the video installations contained within are much more diffuse, non-linear and fractured. They are multi-channel and more expansive in space.

Distraction and Dispersion

The museum and the factory are spaces that prohibit access and photography and are therefore shut off from public view. The reasons are different but the results are the same. And while the museum is technically a public space the limits on access make it more closed. There is a divided view on the public nature of these spaces. Is it a polite space where people speak in turn? Steryl argues that this is not the case, all voices speak at once and over each other in the museum space.

(It’s here that I realise that the artist is complaining about her works are being experienced)

In traditional cinema it would be considered bad form to leave before the end of the film. In the museum the whole experience is non-linear by circumstance and by design. (This reflects the anxieties regarding the nature of reading in the digital age) Everything is experienced piecemeal and viewers become “traitors of duration”

Film in these spaces is placed in a kind of protective custody. In creating installations artists attempt to assert control over the space, which could be considered as a romantic gesture of sovereignty but Steryl likens it to that of a “petty dictator.” She argues that the museum reduces “curators, spectators, artists, critics” to this dictatorial behaviour. But the presence of time-based cinematic media in the museum space confounds the ability to act as a dictator, as the view will never have enough time time experience all the media in its full form. This manifests itself as what Steryl describes as “a lack”. There are always missing pieces to the experience, each view experiencing something different.

As a result this type of cinema doesn’t produce meaning it produces a crowd.Turning the spectator into a labourer trying to piece together a fractured view. She gives the example of an exhibition where it would be physically to fully view (and therefore full understand) all the works on display. Only by coming together could multiple viewers piece together the show, but this is “multiple” and not “collective.”