by Eva-Lotta Holm Flach

The Swedish Broadcasting Corporation recently broadcast a discussion programme dealing with documentary ‘soaps’. Numerous well-known figures from the media took part in the programme and discussed the phenomenon. They compared the genre with ordinary soap operas and with classic documentary films but most of them were of the opinion that, in comparison with these, documentary soaps are completely lacking in value. Soaps were thought to be pathetic and humiliating to all who are involved in them.

It was obvious that many of the speakers felt themselves threatened by this new form of reality. A middle-aged documentary film-maker, whose journalistic ambition was to ‘make the world a little better’, continuously pointed to the utter triviality of documentary soap operas. A young author and playwright expressed similar contempt, focusing on the lack of talent shown by the participants. He could not understand why people with no special gifts should be shown on television. According to him one ‘needs to be good at something’ and he described the programme ‘Robinson’ and the behaviour of famous figures from soap operas as humiliating media prostitution beyond all reasonable comprehensibility.
Why have these popular dramas of everyday reality become so typical of the late nineties? What relation do they bear to art and to the media?

In art this change from fiction to narratives based on reality, that we now see on television, has long been a fact. Just as in art, I think it is a matter of the traditional language of television having long been worn out and in need of radical renewal. A new reality is making itself felt requiring new forms to express itself and as a result of this people have started working with everyday reality. What may on the surface seem like a strange poking about in people’s private lives reveals a more serious problem in that a discrepancy has arisen between the old-fashioned conventions of the medium and people’s need for new and gripping portrayals.

At the same time it seems as though we have already lost our insight into the post-modernist strategies of the 1980s when artists were using sophisticated methods to investigate the language of the media. The aim then was to expand our knowledge of how different conceptions and prejudices were inherited and hidden in the codes and language of the media. The strategy was not to place oneself outside the media and criticize them but, like Roland Barthes in his penetrating analysis of photography, to enter into the linguistic structure itself.

Characteristic of the artists who made their appearance at this time, such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine, was their skilful ability to identify with the conventions of the media, to imitate the media and at the same time to expose its tacit premises. Discussion of the media today seems to have forgotten this and to have a fixation on describing the documentary soap opera from an individual psychological perspective. The focus is on people’s presumed alienation and need of confirmation rather than the wider implications of the idea behind the programme. It may therefore be interesting to draw parallels with a story that Rosalind Krauss tells about Cindy Sherman. An art critic had invited Sherman to show her famous ‘film stills’ – a series of black-and-white film noire type photographs – for a group of students. The critic reported that, along side her pictures, Sherman had shown the real originals, that is the films on which her ‘film stills’ were supposed to be based. He was annoyed by Sherman’s slavish copying of the originals and the fact that everything was so exactly repeated from the buttons on the blouse to the depth of focus in the picture.

This is a strange story because there are no originals of Sherman’s pictures. The critic had merely assumed that there were. Krauss claims that the critic’s mistake depended on two typical myths of modernism. One deals with the idea of the artist as a copier and ‘imitator’ of reality. In spite of the fact that there were no ‘originals’, the critic was misled by the pictures’ genre expression and took for granted that they were based on an existing film.

The other myth concerns our conception of the artist as a conveyor of a personal expression and temperament. The critic was annoyed at the slavish likeness and questioned the artist’s intentions. If there was no personal artistic expression to be seen what, then, was it all about? Advertising images or illustrations for a film review? But Sherman’s intention was not to ‘interpret’ the film noire genre of the 1950s but to imitate its linguistic codes. The result was such a successful imitation that it eliminated the artist’s ‘own expression and temperament’ and, therewith, the critic’s ability to interpret the connection between artist, work of art and reproduction.

A similar uncertainty with regard to the documentary soap opera found expression in the television discussion. Since it was not a matter of acting and thus not an imitation, nor – as in traditional documentaries – a matter of journalistic ‘pathos’ and commitment, it was not possible to provide an interpretation that functioned. The genre-crossing idea of the documentary soap opera was thus left without comment.

In the studio there was a female star from the Robinson programme who had an opportunity of giving her view of the situation. She opined that she was now experiencing her fifteen minutes of fame, that she was enjoying it and making money out of it but that she would soon be returning to anonymity. A ‘soap’ actress also had an opportunity of giving her view, and her relationship with the television medium was equally casual. She consciously entered into the rules of the game and enjoyed having television cameras in her bedroom. At this point the discussion could just as well have been about pornography. And just as with discussions of pornography there was a belittling attitude in the studio towards the actresses and actors. These were people who did not know what was good for them but made themselves tools of other people’s masturbatory fantasies. There was talk of people with little education and lower social status.

When reality thus appeared in the borrowed codes of fiction, this was experienced as an indication of a social bog. It was as though the reality that one so eagerly wished to interpret became too readily graspable in this cross-over genre and, therewith, threatening to an established hierarchy.

It might also be interesting to see what happens if we add to the story a code such as art. A couple of months after artist Pål Hollender had become famous throughout Sweden by taking part in the programme Expedition Robinson, he produced an exhibition on the theme of incest at Galleri Index in Stockholm. A seemingly documentary film was shown at the exhibition with a policeman telling about his sexual fantasies and assaults on children. But in order to get him to confess Pål Hollender had to seduce him and the film shows some very indiscreet scenes.

The exhibition received a great deal of attention in the media. Cultural journalists were agreed that Hollender had made an important contribution to society by drawing attention to a subject with which the media had long been concerned. Hollender’s own attitude to his action in the film was not mentioned in the analyses. Only fleetingly was it noted that Hollender was also known to the public as ‘Robinson Pål’ and thus featured almost every day in the tabloids. Nobody wanted to comment on the fact that ‘Robinson Pål’ had suddenly been transformed into ‘Artist Pål’ and was therefore treated quite differently. His intimate outspokenness was criticized when he appeared on a Saturday entertainment of a tenuous sort of reality. In another context, where he actually reached the edges of pornography and prostitution, no such complications existed any more. The same Pål Hollender but in two completely different media versions.

The fact that context is important is something that Sherrie Levine also realized when, in 1980, she showed a series of photographs After Walker Evans which caused a great stir. Her appropriation of well-known photographers’ pictures was seen as a revolt against the deeply rooted notion of a work of art’s value as an original. Levine took the pictures and gave them a new setting and, in the new exhibition context, different significances appeared. From having been praised as penetrating and well captured camera instants the genre aspects of the pictures now became apparent. What had first seemed original proved to be stereotyped and conventional. The aura of the original photo had collapsed. Levine had succeeded in making visible a new dimension of reality – a dimension that could not be portrayed by yet another instantaneous impression but only by manipulating the interpretative situation itself. Pål Hollender’s action in the media can be interpreted in similar fashion. He shows how deeply rooted our interpretations are in the media’s established system of genres; how a particular context triggers off a particular reading. This is not necessarily news but it is an insight that is all the more important for each new generation and every individual to grasp and to problematize.

In the history of art there are innumerable examples of how ‘reality’ has forced itself upon us and encouraged us to pay attention to a new focus. Take Caravaggio, for example, when in the 17th century he chose to paint the disciples of Jesus from the perspective of the soles of their dirty, and very realistically painted, feet. In his paintings he wanted to achieve a deeper and truer empathy with the ordinary visitor off the street. In the 19th century Courbet portrayed the stone-mason’s unglamorous life: dirty, ragged and bare-footed, and he made the famous remark: ‘I cannot paint angels because I have never seen one’. A discernment that had not previously been uttered aloud. The impressionists caused offence not so much because of their pointillist style but because they portrayed a completely new corner of reality. Suddenly simple people were portrayed casually walking or sitting in cafés or just resting in the grass. This was seen as decadent.

What distinguishes the 20th century from earlier centuries is the spread of the camera and photography. Now there was a technology that allowed one to portray reality just as it seemingly appeared to the eye. The possibility of reproducing images had an enormous influence and was described, by Walter Benjamin for example, as a political tool against the reactionary and bourgeois ‘aura’ of the work of art. What took place towards the end of the 1970s with the appearance of postmodernism was that the imitating code itself, whether realistic or abstract, came into the foreground of the artist's work. The intention was, according to Jean Baudrillard, to describe a new but rather inaccessible reality that was no longer based on actual objects but upon the internal signs and linguistic games of mass communication. When Barbara Kruger imitated advertising slogans it was, thus, not with a view to criticizing commercialism as a phenomenon but rather the reality that the codes and language of advertising express. Her art came to be shown at precisely those places where these linguistic games take place, on signs and walls on the streets and squares of cities.

If the 1980s used imitation as a code, during the 1990s people have started using ‘reality’ itself. They have left the theoretical structures behind them and have palpably started to develop an interest in the invisible, everyday expression which these theoretical structures made evident. This has caused art to turn yet another corner and become even more difficult to discover. I am thinking, for example, of artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija with his soup kitchen and children’s playground, Anders Boqvist and his work with school children or Elin Wikström and her social experiments. Neither as to form or content are they particularly speculative or sensational but they are effective and thought-provoking in their direct and socially committed language. Naturally there is also room for more extreme social realities, as shown by the Hungarian artist Barton Benes’s work with HIV-infected blood or Nan Goldin with her pared-down portraits. Still it is not a matter of ‘exposing’ the dark side of society but of closeness and identification.

Art’s treatment of ‘reality’ as code has not formerly given rise to the same sensational attention as now, when it turns up on television. The great exception is, perhaps, Carina Rydberg’s novel Den högsta kasten [The Highest Cast] which, with its portrayal of unrequited love based on her own life, approached the world of the documentary soap. The media suddenly discovered a competitor in literary form. Through stylistic elements such as jerky language and jolted images and with the new content in view, a reality depicts itself both in art and in the media which can seem provokingly banal, empty and lacking ideological roots. It is at once transparent, easy to drink and hard to digest and, for this reason, difficult to interpret and to appreciate. That it is seen as a threat shows that the strategy has worked. Lars von Trier’s film The Idiots is probably the clearest example of this; an apotheosis of the 1990s in which all its complications are brought to a head. If we want to understand the situation we need to be able simultaneously to see the denuded person and the theoretical structures that surround him. The theoretical epoch of deconstruction is not over yet as one critic recently declared in a newspaper supplement. It is still right in front of our eyes, expressed as a reality, but formed as a stereotype in the language of art or of the media.

Translation William Jewson