Lucid Dreaming: Knowing Glances

by Beth E. Wilson and photographs by Chris Kendall, October 27, 2008

This unexpected flight into epistemology took place during the run-up to the latest Iraq war in 2002, as part of the smoke-and-mirrors play with the truth by the Bush administration to convince us that Saddam Hussein actually possessed WMDs. After all, what is scarier than “unknown unknowns”—isn’t the old saw true about preferring the devil you know over the one that you don’t know?

The trouble here isn’t so much the willful misleading of the public by the government (which is, of course, still a big issue); but, rather, the much larger reality that it highlights. Given the global echo chamber of the mass media that we now live in, how is it possible to really know (or to believe, which amounts to much the same thing) that anything that’s being presented to us is true? Is a representation of evidence the same thing as “truth”?

This crucial and very basic question propels the current exhibition on view at the Hessel Museum at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. “The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art” is the first major exhibition produced as part of a much larger, very ambitious three-year research project mounted by Maria Lind, director of the graduate program at CCS. Assembling work by more than 70 artists, including photographs from the Hessel Collection, installations, sculptures, paintings, and a number of intriguing film/video works, the show opens a window onto the sometimes rather intense discussion within the contemporary art world regarding the problematic nature of documentary practice and its relationship to both reality and aesthetics.

A two-channel video installation by Omer Fast is emblematic of the fundamental issues being explored here. Spielberg’s List presents a series of interviews with Poles who served as extras during the filming of Schindler’s List, recounting their experiences. At times the talking-head images are doubled, shown on both screens; at others, the person is paired with blurry shots from the movie, or of locations in modern-day Krakow. As the extras (who played Jews interred in the concentration camps) tell their stories, a rather surreal slippage takes place, as it becomes difficult to separate the experiences re-created for Spielberg’s film from what sounds like direct-witness testimony of the original events of the Holocaust. This slippage is amplified by the subtitles at times, when slightly different translations of the spoken statements are simultaneously offered on the two screens.