When I try to remember what has changed over the past two decades, I keep coming up with the same answer: memory itself. Of course, I have amassed 20 more years of experiences: from the joyful (a mini-pearl found in a mussel in Norway) to the tragic (two friends lost in aeroplane crashes). But I’m speaking here about collective memory, which is not to do with specific events but how we save, retrieve and share them.

Collective memory has often been divided into two categories: orality and literacy (societies without and with writing). Eric A. Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, Frances Yates and even Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), all reflected on the differences between these two modes in forging a link between the past and the present. It’s hard for us to imagine living without writing. But oral societies are not more forgetful, nor do they have poorer memories; they simply have different ways of recollecting, from telling stories to consulting elders.

A few examples may be helpful to understand not only orality and literacy but also their deep incompatibility. Storytellers in oral societies use a host of techniques – exaggeration, repetition, rhyme – to make stories easier for their listeners to recollect and to retell. An exaggerated fishing tale is more memorable than the dull facts of a modest catch; repetition drives any point home. Rhyme also helps: ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ sticks in your mind more readily than, ‘In the long run, consistent work is more productive than rushed efforts, in sewing and other tasks.’ Literacy makes such mnemonic techniques unnecessary because everything can be written down. Moreover, in a literate world, exaggerations can be errors or even lies; repetitions seen as redundancies; rhyming consigned to poetry alone.

One of the deepest incompatibilities is in the saving of past events. In orality, sharing – the telling and retelling of stories – is the key to preservation; any event taken out of circulation and stored away would be irreversibly consigned to oblivion. By contrast, literacy stores things that are supposed to last, whether in paper archives or digital ones – which brings us back to the transformation of collective memory over the last two decades. Is digitization oral or literate? When Havelock, Ong, McLuhan and Yates were writing – roughly from the 1960s to the 1980s – computers were generally understood to be an extension, if not an intensification, of literacy: more words and numbers to be stored on microchips instead of paper (although Ong glimpsed a ‘secondary orality’ in electronic technology). By the 1990s computers started to realize their full potential and developed from isolated databases into mobile handheld devices with amazing multi-tasking and communication abilities.
I believe that digitization is not only changing collective memory but also recombining orality and literacy in a new and often explosive manner. Despite their deep incompatibility, there were always traces of orality in literacy, long before computers were invented (think of jokes, which are funnier when told in person than read in a book). Orality lost its legitimacy for collective memory to literacy but never entirely disappeared. Now digitization – especially online social networking – creates novel hybrids, whereby literate elements suddenly appear in oral settings and vice versa.

For example, there is no such thing as authorship – or copyright – in orality because the tales are continually being retold by new tellers. There doesn’t seem to be much place for authorship and copyright online, where texts are continually being circulated by new users: not retold but recommended, re-tweeted or even plagiarized. The oral tales retold the most become the cornerstones of collective memory, just as the online sites with the most hits get the most attention, although the information can be as trivial as dog tricks. Oral societies don’t have the interiorized, private subjectivity proper to literacy; Facebook doesn’t either.

Such hybrids are explosive because they bring the constant circulation of orality to the eternal storage of literacy. Like orality, digitization shares; like literacy, digitization never forgets a single detail, however compromising it may come later in life. In a way online digitization subjects literacy to the rules of orality, despite the computer’s dependence on reading and writing skills. The move from typewriter-like keyboards to touchscreens may just reflect the end of literacy’s reign over orality as our primary way of saving, retrieving and sharing events.

frieze is a testimony to many changes over the last two decades, which are explored in this anniversary issue. But by hitting the news-stands at the dawn of online digitization, the magazine captures the transformation of collective memory: a seismic shift from a predominantly literate model to an infusion of orality into literacy. Just as classicists once read Homer not only for the poetry but also to grasp the shift from orality to literacy in ancient Greece, so art historians may some day read frieze not only for the art but also to grasp the impact of digitization on art writing and history. I’m no clairvoyant, but some characteristics already stand out, such as the equal value placed on a critic’s personal narrative (oral storytelling) and theory (philosophical literacy). Of course, the rest is for a columnist of the future to figure out.

The experience of visiting ‘Introspective’, Richard Hamilton’s extensive and - so he claims - final retrospective, is one of having visited the Science Museum of Pop - or a vision of how such a museum might appear in, say, 50 years time. The impact leaves you giddy for days, concussed by the sensation of having seen the modern world explained - the whole trip, from the vivacity of early Rock and Roll to the frozen, lunar stillness of a world cocooned in technology and media.

Now 81 and working on the second volume of his visual autobiography, Hamilton delivered a definition of Pop art back in 1957 that has yet to be improved on or updated - nothing less than the anatomy of Mass Age culture. His list of Pop’s defining adjectives - including ‘Transient (short-term solution)’, for instance, and ‘Expendable (easily forgotten)’ - comprise an understanding of both the symptoms and the consequences of an increasingly accelerated culture. He had already pronounced the ambient nature of the total Pop environment in his ‘Fun House’ installation created for the Independent Group’s 1956 exhibition ‘This Is Tomorrow’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, London - a work that briefs the viewer with Hamilton’s vision of the post-1946 consumer age as a kind of unyielding bombardment of slick, gaudy, eroticized signifiers - at once seductive and disruptive.

It still feels as though this is tomorrow. Hamilton’s mixed-media work seems the product of a near future age - a post-art age, perhaps - when aesthetics, science, ethnography, satire, requiem, celebration and humanism have been merged without the self-consciousness of dogma into a living, philosophical survey of humankind’s relationship with the pleasures and perils of advanced technological consumerism. Hamilton’s art describes the tension between our appetite for the compensatory pleasures of modern living - our hunger for glamour, celebrity, and the sheer aesthetic gorgeousness of a refined, product-led culture - and the ways in which our desires are duped by those same obsessions. He both celebrates the fetishized surface of Mass Age culture, and is busily at work within its contradictions - creating an epic narrative of modern experience, the principal theme of which, perhaps, is the relation of technology to desire.

You can find this in such early work as Man, Machine and Motion (1956) - with its almost Kraftwerk-like, ‘mensch maschine’, interpolation of the machine becoming one with human beings - and in Hamilton’s reconstruction and mesmeric typographical interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23) - a body of work made between 1966 and 1999. There is in Hamilton’s fascination with the taut, almost erotic relationship between a notion of robotics and human physicality - sensuality, even - the foundation of his ultra-modernity as an artist. Like several of the other founding pioneers of Mass Age culture - Marshall McLuhan and Roland Barthes to name just two - he presents an acuity and an aesthetic which seems not only to have anticipated the flamboyance of much postmodernism, but already assigned such thinking to its place in a white, chilled museum of contemporary thought and culture.

In Hamilton’s ‘Swingeing London 67’ series of oil on canvas screenprints (1968-9), for instance, we see the whole parade of celebrity and media - but as it might be reported from the 22nd century; such frozen images of modernity - his ‘Richard’-branded objects, Carafe (1978) and Ashtray (1979) share this chilled poise in relation to advertising - establish an aesthetic in Hamilton’s art in which we seem to see the present from the future. We are at once immersed in the contemporary experience of the world, and disengaged from its cultural baggage: rock stars and fashion models, hotel lobbies and domestic technology, turd-inhabited advert-style sunsets and pristine computers - they all achieve an eloquence in Hamilton’s art which speaks of the contract between our aspirations, empathy, and inner notion of an index of modern signifiers.

But Hamilton is also never still; a great artist in the classical tradition, he endlessly tests and refines his work. Even his work from the 1960s seems more modern - more in tune with tomorrow - than most of today’s ‘contemporary culture’. (His 1968 design for the sleeve of the so-called White Album by the Beatles remains one of the most aggressively modern artefacts ever produced - not unlike the music it housed.) Underpinned by the joyous intellectualism of his lifelong obsessions with James Joyce and Duchamp (pretty much the architects of Modernism) Hamilton’s career to date comprises a body of work created over 55 years that comes across as the diagrams, working models and machines that seem to define both the world we live in now and the one that we may yet live to inhabit.

It’s all there: the coming to terms with the supremacy and immediacy of surface; the conversion of the artist into an ambiguous brand; the identification of glamour as perhaps the most determined form of social energy; the usefulness of transgressive or absurd imagery, its potency increased by the meticulous punning on materials and contexts; the adaptation of technology to aesthetic purpose; the role of selective vision in a culture of information anxiety and visual stress; the rhetoric of irony; the seductions of colour and the erotics of form. Above all, Hamilton conjures with the power of absence (that which is hidden, obscured or removed) and the refined capacities of montage - a directive that may have been what led one of his former students, the singer Bryan Ferry, to remark in 1975 about his own conversion of Pop art into art Pop, ‘I am, you might say, a collagiste’.

Hamilton’s most iconic work - Interior 1 (1964) for instance, or the monolithic twin canvases of The Citizen (1982-3) - become a means of appreciating the force and generosity with which some of his lesser-known pieces become so compelling, and so articulate of the modern world, and how his ‘Lobby’ paintings from the late 1980s, as much as his ‘Fashion Plate (cosmetic study)’ series of mixed-media collages from 1969, maintain a creative chemistry that fuses the cold sheen of freshly minted machine parts with sumptuous painterly aesthetics. The dynamo of Hamilton’s art appears to be the maintained and controlled collision between the sensual and the mass-produced. As such Hamilton inhabits the pre-history of Postmodernism and convergence culture with an almost uncanny acuity, prophesying time and time again the devices and directions in which visual culture is most likely to proceed.

Ultimately, particularly through his profound relationship with the art and ideas of Duchamp Hamilton emerges as the great philosopher-scientist of the modern age: an artist inventor of undimming good humour, whose work provides the soul with strength to face a not too terrible hereafter.
 
 

Although inspired by Hugo Ball and Alexander McQueen, ‘GAGAWAKA: Making Strange’, at New Delhi’s state-run Lalit Kala Akademi, drew only modestly on Dada’s oddball antics and the late fashion designer’s Saturnine fantasies and edgy theatricality. Its self-restraint – perhaps in deference to the conservative Indian context or the result of the artist’s own inhibitions – resulted in a somewhat earnest and ambiguous statement around art, fashion, and environment.

‘GAGAWAKA: Making Strange’, comprised 45 dresses constructed from waste and ready-mades by the veteran Indian artist Vivan Sundaram, in collaboration with a New Delhi-based fashion designer, Pratima Pandey. Its fluffy title – which invoked Lady Gaga’s outré chic and the folksy globalism of Shakira’s South African World Cup Football anthem Waka Waka (2010) – was a studied, even middle-brow and populist, attempt to funk up an art show by playing down the underlying art-historicity, and the class associations and glamour of fashion shows.

Both professional models and ordinary people drawn from the artist and designer’s circle of friends and colleagues walked the ramp in a series of live performances that took place during the exhibition. The dresses were marvels of design and ingenuity. It took a second glance to realize that the sleeves of the knitted trail gown, Cleopatra (2011), were made from truck tyre-tubes or a wedding outfit for men from sanitary-pads; that a dress complete with a Dervish-like hat had been made from an orthopedic support or a jump suit created from surgical masks; a pair of yellow men’s dungarees made with discarded plastic sheets that revealed the model’s derriere through its transparent back; sleep masks sewed together into a tiered, padded-shoulder short black dress; a toga made from tampons; or a short black dress with a matching Pharaoh hat was styled from bicycle tyre-tubes. Most of these incorporated architectural elements, like Aztec Deity (2011) a sculptural dress made with loofahs. Assemblage was suggested in costumes including one built with iron mesh masking the entire upper body, head included, that recalled Dadaist Marcel Janco’s mask dresses.

During the show, models broke into a wildly expressive dance that alluded to a post-environmental-apocalyptic world like that imagined by Cormac MacCarthy in his book The Road (2006). The mood was intensified by a Constructivist-inspired stage set created from stacks of tin trunks and iron grills and frames that served as props for the performances. However, the Russian avant-garde utopian aesthetic was ironically deployed to create a dystopia where rubbish is the only raw material left – ubiquitous, abundant, yet invaluable. In the accompanying, rather jaunty, text Sundaram’s wife, Geeta Kapur, a noted art critic, describes the exercise as an ‘assault on a commoditized civilization’ and ‘the erotic entangled with death’.

‘Making Strange’ is a natural progression for Sundaram’s practice that seems to have been built around the question: what is worth keeping or throwing away? This investigation into the intrinsic value of things manifests in his art as an affinity with revaluation through recycling thereby questioning the value of the original and authorship. However, the supposed radicalism of ‘Making Strange’ lacked bite. Making clothes made from recycled material is not a new idea and designers such as McQueen, Rei Kawakubo and Martin Margiela – who Sundaram cites as inspirations – relentlessly push fashion in new directions.

The couture of Sundaram’s dresses overwhelm their status as art, making them hardly stranger or any less wearable than high fashion. They had none of the impact of similar examples by other artists who have explored the intersections of fashion and art, such as Atsuko, whose 1956 Electric Dress – an armature covered with tangle of live wires and light bulbs – imperiled the artist’s life every time she put it on. However, Sundaram did manage to create a crossover between the art and fashion worlds: collectors sat in the front row of his show taking notes like well-heeled fashionistas. Yet, these neat correspondences between fashion and art dulled the edge of Sundaram’s Dadaism that seemed to serve the very conventionality it started out to assault.

When passing pieces by Yona Friedman in group shows or permanent collections, it can be easy to pay them scant attention. Out of context, set adrift amongst the more immediately polished looking models of other artists and architects, Friedman’s maquettes – often made out of things you or I might think of throwing away: cardboard toilet rolls, random assortments of chicken wire and polystyrene – come across as tremendously unimpressive, like something knocked up by children or Blue Peter presenters. However, when they’re given a whole floor of the Ludwig Muzeum in Budapest (the city where the architect was born, in 1923), one feels a whole world of ideas emerging.

Friedman’s solo exhibition, entitled ‘Architecture Without Building’ in reference to his minimal output of actual built projects, offers a bewildering array of material, from the usual renderings and photo-collages to the aforementioned maquettes. But most striking are the great exposed scaffolds that rise out of the gallery floor into explorable steel frames. This construction, based on Friedman’s drawings and created by Philippe Rizotti Architects for this exhibition, is by way of some small illustration of one of Friedman’s most famous concepts, the ‘Ville Spatiale’: the city as a three-dimensional raised grid, with each cubic void in the lattice an extemporized dwelling space – allowing, that is, for the proper distribution of natural light and green spaces. Here, after first donning hardhats and signing a disclaimer, viewers are allowed to climb the scaffold, which is high enough to afford a peep into the other exhibitions on the upper floors. Another way to look at Friedman’s concept might be to think of its influence on such buildings as Moshe Safdie’s ‘Habitat 67’ for the Montreal Expo, or the ‘in-between’ zones of Bernard Tschumi’s Le Fresnoy Art Center in Tourcoing, France.

The real source of goggle-eyed wonder in this exhibition, however, is to be found amidst the endless display of A4 yellow sheets, practically wallpapering several rooms with cartoons and concepts. These speculative storyboards tend to begin with a seemingly trivial question – what is a house? or a roof? or such like – and proceed apparently innocuously to such baroque notions as bridge cities, Merzbau structures, and continent cities, all cutely illustrated by little smiling stick men. Within these marker pen skits – and again and again in the exhibition wall texts – we encounter a series of buzzwords that have become more and more familiar over the last decade but appear to have been germane to Friedman’s thinking for half a century.

Words like ‘networks’, ‘complexity’ and ‘open source’, along with spotted references to Buckminster Fuller and the Whole Earth Catalog, seem to draw Friedman into the ambit of cyber-Utopian thinkers like Stewart Brand, or the editors of Wired magazine. Indeed, just as Brand found his cybernetic awakening amidst the hippy communes of the early 1970s, Friedman’s architecture seems to have been similarly shaped by his experience of living on an Israeli kibbutz a quarter of a century earlier. But there is a somewhat more macabre conceptual link between the two: Many of Friedman’s Utopian ideas seem to presuppose on the one hand a great deal of open space and detritus, and on the other, an Earth with a temperature several degrees higher. You could call it an architecture for after the apocalypse – just as the Internet itself, since its RAND Corporation origins, is a design for a communication system to survive the nuclear holocaust.

Traditionally, an object is defined in relation to the subject and is seen as a reflection of what we are not. And yet, ‘The Object’ in Nathaniel Mellors’ absurdist drama series ‘Ourhouse’ (2010–ongoing) appears on the screen as a man in a white tracksuit consuming and excreting books from the library of the somewhat dysfunctional Maddox-Wilson household. To the members of the family, the appearance of The Object is not as straightforward as it may seem to us, and is in fact so puzzling it robs them of their ability to speak coherently. The different parts of the series show the changes in the relationships between the members of the family, influenced by The Object as it eats away at the family’s library.

The latest addition to this still incomplete series, ‘Ourhouse – The Nest’ (2011), is now on view at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of Mellors winning the biennially awarded Cobra Art Prize, which, in the spirit of the post-war avant-garde CoBrA movement, aims to stimulate experimental and innovative art. For this show, Mellors created a wholly new installation including a new entry in the series, already existing material from ‘Ourhouse’, and art works from the collection of the Cobra Museum. Mellors chose works by artists who, much like himself, were interested in and greatly influenced by the ‘primitive’ and the margins of rationality – specifically the relation between sculpture and language.

The installation of ‘The Nest’ displays the artist’s works as if trapped in shapeless nest-like constellations made of wood, chicken wire and newspaper. In an act of cannibalism the sculptures have apparently ‘eaten’ the works from the museum’s collection. The central sculpture, the one most resembling an animal or human-like form, is elevated on a platform and connected to the other parts of the installation by electrical wires hanging from the ceiling. In its ‘belly’ plays the ‘Ourhouse’ episode in which the family makes their acquaintance with The Object.

Although the installation gives the videos a distinctive physical presence, the exhibition as a whole is still sequenced like a movie: its starting point is a painting by Karel Appel with the beautiful title Door een daad aan het daglicht gebracht om zijn schoonheid te tonen (By an Act Brought to Light to Show its Beauty, 1961). The painting was especially made for the filming of a documentary on Appel’s work and has a large square hole in it so that the camera could film the artist while painting. In Mellors’ presentation, the visitor literally looks through this work to see, as if through a lens, a darkened room resembling a magical cave with large, strangely shaped objects and pulsating yellowish lights. The visitor is then guided by a simple floor plan from episode to episode; starting with the central figure, then ‘The Nest’ – which incidentally is the only video not incorporated in a structure but projected outward onto a screen – followed by a seven-minute loop from ‘Ourhouse – The Cure of Folly’ about an amulet resembling the Venus of Hohle Fels, the oldest human figurative sculpture ever found, and ending with another loop in which Bobby-Jobby, one of the family members, discovers the mounds of excretion from The Object and wrongly interprets them as sculptures with magical powers.

With his extremely rich and unique visual language, Mellors creates an installation that is so multi-layered it just keeps on giving. Connecting avant-garde art with contemporary and so-called primitive culture, the work objectifies man’s ever-lasting search for meaning, his inability to find it, and the objects’ role within this quest. It lays bare our deepest desire to believe in a higher purpose that we desperately try to understand and give shape to through language and art, but never quite manage successfully.

Concluding a talk in California a few years ago, the architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler issued a warning: in the early 1990s, 80 percent of architects insisted that they’d never need CAD (computer-aided design) software, with the result that the entire industry now uses CAD software it didn’t design, not because it’s good, but because it’s fast. And digital fabrication’s inevitability means this sad history will repeat itself unless architects stop their ostrich-like behaviour and connect with computer-driven construction forthwith.

‘Flight Assembled Architecture’ showcases Gramazio and Kohler’s latest engagement with this concern, which drives their architecture and their research (or, as they prefer, recherché, because it sounds less serious) at Zurich’s Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH). It is also arguably Gramazio and Kohler’s most startling exploration of these issues, even if it remains speculative for now. The idea is that large structures – here, a 600-metre-high vertical village – soon will be built by teams of computer-controlled, four-rotor helicopters called ‘quadrocopters’. Characteristically for Gramazio and Kohler, there’s nothing exotic about this project’s components: the timely delivery of prefabricated units; once-unimaginable computing power; the quadrocopters themselves. (Having first flown in the 1920s, these craft are widely available today as small drones.) What is new, and fascinating, about this exhibition is what happened when Gramazio and Kohler enlisted their colleague, Raffaello D’Andrea, professor of Dynamic Systems at ETH, to combine these components with an automated operating system that controls four quadrocopters at once.

On one level, this fascination is of the Popular Mechanics variety. The show focuses on four copters buzzing around the gallery to assemble an 18-metre-high model of the vertical village using ‘bricks’ representing prefab housing units, while a projection shows real-time visualization of how the ‘foreman’ operating programme sees things. As the craft grab the bricks, fly to their drop-off points, and return to their recharging bases, without crashing into either each other or the growing tower, it becomes clear that chaos would ensue if humans were in control. (For demonstrations of this manoeuvrability, see flyingmachinearena.org.)

However, a deeper interest supersedes this ‘gee whiz’ element, because Gramazio and Kohler don’t fetishize digital technology. Rather, their concept of ‘digital materiality’ (elaborated in their 2008 book Digital Materiality in Architecture) interrogates the interaction between construction and computers. For instance, can a computer’s processing power combine with a robot’s precision to make a familiar material do something new? In this way, ‘Flight Assembled Architecture’ develops from less ambitious (but realizable) projects, like brick walls (The Programmed Wall, 2006; Structural Oscillations, 2008) that are innovative not because of the materials – the bricks are just bricks – but because computers and robots helped to configure those walls in arrays that are visually compelling and, until now, structurally impossible.

But this latest innovation goes beyond building fancier walls. Combining recent and emerging technologies (high-efficiency solar panels, small-scale wind power generation, potable rain-water collection, smart materials) with developments that will be commercially available in five to ten years (ever more powerful computers, full-scale quadrocopters), ‘Flight Assembled Architecture’ imagines buildings that are more efficient, human-aware and visually intriguing than ever. But it also cautions that only a considerably amount of direction will ensure that we get there. Otherwise, we’ll just end up with more of the same junk we’ve already got, only cheaper – in every sense of the word.

In his essay ‘For a Metahistory of Film’ (1971), Hollis Frampton mocks the received wisdom that cinema merely ‘accelerates still photographs into motion’. On the contrary, Frampton insists, ‘a still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema.’ The various works assembled at the Centre d’art contemporain under the title ‘Les marques aveugles’ (roughly translated as ‘Blind Marks’) seek, as it were, to reconnect these isolated frames to an expanded cinema that would go beyond Hollywood’s narrative pleasures to embrace the discontinuities and lacunae of the apparatus.

A series of Levi’s factory closures in Belgium and northern France provides the absent centre around which the narrative of Dutch artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s documentary, Après la reprise, la prise (2009), circles. In this super high definition digital film, Van Oldenborgh extracts a series of stills to dissolve in and out of each other in the manner of a Powerpoint slideshow, with an edited script of the dialogue as voice-over. This mode of presentation, as well as the theme of a return to a traumatic event from the past, recalls the work that formed the starting point for this exhibition, Chris Marker’s groundbreaking film, La Jetée (1962).

Van Oldenborgh was inspired by her own memories of the extensive resistance mounted against these closures by mostly female workers in the late 1990s, to stage a kind of confrontation of her own: this time not between workers and bosses, but between the past and the future, or at least two different responses to the present change in economic circumstances. The setting is a technical school just north of Brussels, at the very moment that its textiles department is being shut down and its banks of sewing machines replaced by computers. This switch is, of course, symptomatic, as is the change in circumstances of the women, who ten years ago were marching and going on hunger strikes to save their jobs. Since then, several have become professional actors – a line of work that is in many respects the model, as the artist points out, for the new, precarious, ‘brand me’ style of labour that has largely replaced the notion of the ‘job for life’ in the West. The story unfolds elliptically at first: the opening shot is of a bare wall; somewhere in the background we hear someone singing. The characters – not just the former Levi’s workers, but a younger generation of students, who will probably never know the kind of steady factory work the older women once looked forward to – are introduced gradually, and often in reflection or partially obscured. But what Van Oldenborgh’s work reveals, alongside the explicit narrative, are two fundamentally different codes of communication: the declarative, storytelling mode of the older women, and the less self-assured, apparently more trivial, chattering of the youth (‘Is my hair alright?’ ‘Is this T-shirt too big?’).

The marks of a very different kind of trauma are the subject of Rosa Barba’s A Private Tableaux (2010). Here, a grainy 16mm film traces the white line drawings of engineers marking points of stress in the tunnels beneath the river Mersey, in a style that recalls the low-grade quality of certain video nasties: with the growling industrial sounds (recorded in situ) competing with the flicker of the projector for soundtrack, we could be entering the cannibals’ home in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). But the artist’s sans serif intertitles reframe this exploration as a mythic encounter with the ancient past. Barba finds in these markings, ‘a dense diffusion of signs […] an eagle with outstretched wings […] riders without horses’ as if these abstract drawings were being interpreted by some future anthropologist as something akin to the cave paintings at Lascaux or Chauvet. The last shot shows a white circle with the number 420 enclosed within it, now imbued with an obscure mystery, reminiscent of certain moments in David Lynch’s films. Barba’s film thus stages the erasure of brute functionality by aesthetics and the interpretive powers of historiography.

In a very different way, this tendency of the work to obliterate its own object is enacted in two drawings by last year’s Northern Art Prize winner, the Czech-born, Manchester resident Pavel Büchler. The two sketches, entitled The Shadow of its Disappearance, 30 September 2011, Sunrise/Sunset (2011), represent the latest in a ongoing series of works in which Büchler uses discarded pencils to trace their own shadows as they lengthen or shorten with the falling or rising of the sun. The continuous redrafting as he tries in vain to keep up with the changing shape of his object – and the need to keep that pencil sharp – ultimately sharpens the instrument down to nothing, and its tiny stub neatly rests upon the bottom right of the picture’s frame.

Introducing his work at the exhibition’s opening in November, Büchler mentioned that Hollis Frampton has acted as a kind of ‘spiritual mentor’ to him since his student days, and one can find in these drawings a kind of repetition of the ideas behind Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971), which occupies the far corner of the gallery space. This classic 16mm film exhibits a series of Frampton’s photographs from the beginning to the end of his photographic career – a stage in his work that was just then coming to an end – and then watches them burn. This incineration is in itself highly aesthetic, the flames seeming at first merely to dance on the surface of the photograph before, quite suddenly, the corners curl and blacken and the whole soon compounds to something like a rapidly decomposing fruit or the shifting, uneven surface of some soot-blackened planetoid.

In counterpoint to this orgy of creative immolation, we hear a wry voice apparently describing the pictures and their genesis in the first person. However, pretty soon we become aware of a certain disjuncture between what we see and what we hear. In fact, the work is doubly estranged: firstly, the voice we hear is not Frampton’s but that of his friend, the filmmaker Michael Snow, reading Frampton’s text. This creates certain ironies when Snow is forced to address himself in the third person (‘I wish I could apologize to him…’). Secondly, the voice is always one jump ahead of the viewer, describing in fact not the image before us, but its successor, thereby creating a narrative tension that is exploited in the film’s dénouement. Here, we are set up to expect an image of something so dreadful, something which fills the narrator, ‘with such fear, such utter dread and loathing, that I think I shall never dare to take another photograph’. The following image, of course, is the black screen signifying the end of the film, whose obscurity stands in for the literally unrepresentable thing in a manner analogous to the famous black pages inserted into Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767).

These black pages rear their head elsewhere on the gallery walls, in the six photographs that make up Katja Mater’s ‘Density Drawings’ (2011). This series of Polaroids tells an abstract narrative of a constructivist architectonics assembled as much in the camera itself as in the gallery space. Mater painted and assembled geometric shapes on the gallery wall in the very corner where the photographs now stand, gradually filling the frame of the shot through double exposure and successive layering until, in the third image, the frame is entirely black. The following frames then chart the work’s own erasure back to an (almost) empty white image (a small white wooden triangle remains on the floor to commemorate the ephemeral work of which it was once a part).

In an essay from 1988, ‘Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia’, feminist film theorist Constance Penley suggested that it would be impossible to remake La Jetée, as the film is rendered ‘in its very structure’ unrepeatable by the demand of popular cinema for ‘pleasure without (obvious) paradox’. Since Penley’s essay, popular cinema has proved itself more amenable to paradox than might have been suspected, by (almost) remaking La Jetée, not once but twice: in the shape of Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) and Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents (2000). Both films use Marker’s story of a man haunted by a photograph from the past to explore time-travel paradoxes and the relationship between a man from the future and a woman from the present. What both of these films miss from Marker’s original, however, is the scar of trauma – the ghost of the Second World War that looms so heavily in Marker’s film, and its imaginative transposition in the shape of the future apocalypse. In a sense, the various works collected in ‘Les Marques Aveugles’ also each seek to remake La Jetée, but instead of removing the stain of the trauma, it is precisely this aspect that must be insistently repeated, like so many black frames in the infinite cinema.

Only a privileged few people witnessed Florian Germann take a seat on the brass plate of his rudimentary vehicle, mounted on a 20-metre-long rail running through the migros museum’s gallery, dressed in the uniform of the Boy Scouts of America with his rear-end exposed after some trouser customization. He started the vehicle’s engine, the plate travelled along the rail, and must have deposited artist and machine on the ground at the far end, as the machine was not equipped with a brake. En route, as the oxidized surface of the machine’s seat demonstrates, he deposited sweat and urine, which can be seen with the vehicle mounted on a nearby wall where it continues to leak fluids, thankfully now just motor oil.

The performance and its remnants are not individually titled, but they are elements of ‘The Poltergeist Experiment Group (PEG), Applied Spirituality and Physical Spirit Manifestation’ (2011) a sprawling body of work developed for this, Germann’s first institutional show. It is the artist’s fourth major gathering of work, after ‘Ballungscenter aller Energien I&II’, (2007–8), ‘Werewolf of Vienna’ (2009) and ‘Saint Helena – Riches from the Depths of the Mountains’ in 2010. These titles alone do not do justice to the breadth of ideas that Germann brought together in each development to make unlikely alliances, and with them to write revisionary history.

In the migros exhibition he has used all of the space available as a laboratory for the creation of hybrid concoctions of filmic ghosts, the aforementioned Boy Scouts, church organs, resins, glue, blueprints, masks and small-town institutions. The key is the idea of the poltergeist, particularly as represented in film. An auditory collage of expositional dialogue from Hollywood productions offers visitors a guiding text, explaining the defining features of a poltergeist. Parapsychology links the ‘phenomenon’ to youthful excess energy, particularly male, which ties in nicely with Germann’s ongoing interest in energy and its transformative potential, not to mention his own boundless (if no longer teenage) enthusiasm that seems to bring about his sculptures.

Germann’s machines and sculptures connect unrelated objects with straight-faced earnestness, so the absurd conceptual links thus forged seem matter-of-fact. In previous works, the alchemy of metals has been a significant element, implying as it does natural resources, memes and monetary values. Here, ectoplasm, the manifestation of ghostly energy, is an additional facilitator, with hardened resin acting as an ersatz material. Germann’s assemblies and connections enjoy a flexibility not available within established structures. Collectively, they form a powerful means of malleable, open-ended storytelling. Several ideas emerge from this particular group: a portrait of America, not of its reality, but the myths of American life as presented by Hollywood cinema, where everyone can be a frontiersman and which prizes a petrified fictional idea of the historic. A place, a bit like Edward Said wrote of the Orient, which shows little resistance to the ideas projected upon it; a place with neither the personal nor the physical limitations of the real world. And then there is the portrait of the artist himself, a ringmaster who enjoys the myth-making of Joseph Beuys or the pissing bravado of Andy Warhol but who also, given his hands-on involvement in the fabrication of his works, creates follies and failures and embraces them all. His seat-less trousers, now hanging by the entrance, could as easily be the chaps of a fearless cowboy as the reluctant pilot’s garment of convenience. The artist is not heroic but human, identifying as closely with the scared youth as with the trailblazers of the avant-garde.

‘Sternenstaub, herausgehoben’ (The Dust of Stars, Accentuated) was Franz Erhard Walther’s third solo exhibition based on his sprawling series ‘Sternenstaub’ (The Dust of Stars, 2007–09), which comprises 524 pencils drawings of personal anecdotes and historical events from the artist’s life, chronologically organized from 1942 to 1973. On single sheets of A4 paper, Walther drew one or two images alongside a few brief descriptive sentences, and then assigned a year to each drawn memory sequence. ‘Sternenstaub’ traverses the realms of literature, history, and visual arts, freely borrowing from the styles of the diary, the drawn novel, and the columns or chronicles of newspapers (the poster Sternenstaub 1968, for instance, includes a drawn reproduction of an article titled ‘Duchamp Dies at 81’). This systematic but imperfect recollection process is one of the bases of Walther’s practice, as well as a common interest shared by many conceptual artists and others from the 1950s until now (think of John Baldessari, Dan Graham, On Kawara, Hanne Darboven, Anri Sala, Francis Alÿs, Tacita Dean…).

In the middle of the exhibition space at Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Walther placed three tables presenting his drawn plans for hanging the components of ‘Sternenstaub’, which he originally designed for his solo exhibition at MAMCO in Geneva in 2010 (the entire series is on view through February 2012 at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, and compiled in a book, The Dust of Stars: A Drawn Novel). The tiny, meticulously redrawn versions of each page require a reading glass to be examined. On the walls, as a counterpoint to those plans, Walther enlarged and redrew 42 drawings, as well as printing three of the original drawings as large posters. In this sense, the exhibition was a dismantling of the original ‘Sternenstaub’ grid.

Storytelling and anecdotes form the matrix of the legend of any artist, and Walther consciously participates in this process: the poster From Sternenstaub 1947–1949, for instance, depicts himself drawing as a small child. Another poster, the enlargement of a page labeled ‘1957’, illustrates Walther’s fascination for reproducing works such as Cézanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire and Monet’s Rouen Cathedral. Walther also includes his drawn representation of some of his own previous art works, such as the performance of the 1st Work Set (1963/9), consisting of 58 sewn fabric elements, thereby producing new accounts of their production and performance. This open-ended and inclusive strategy (or mise-en-abîme) has been crucial to Walther’s artistic practice. The fact that he uses his own history as fundamental source material also anticipates and emphasizes the mythologizing of his own work and of a wide range of the art of the 1960s and ’70s (which is so important for contemporary artists today).

In ‘Sternenstaub, herausgehoben’ the blown-up or close-up effects drew the viewer’s attention to the medium of drawing itself, from the composition to the texture of the pencil and paper. With these basic gestures, those formal manipulations metaphorically evoked a cosmos whose stars and their dusts had been scattered or spread out. They also revealed themselves as crucial empirical and aesthetic decisions relying on the appropriation of psychological and sociological approaches usually employed by art historians or art critics. This kind of retrospective analyzes the diverse conditions within which Walther’s inspiration came. While his historical research is autobiographical, it confronts the presupposed objectivity provided by the archival document (reports, stories or photographs) with the subjectivity and inevitable partiality of memory or history. Therefore, the nature of ‘Sternenstaub’ remains unsolved: is it an archive, an artwork or an autobiography?

How beautiful and calm our planet looks when viewed from outer space. Massive bodies of water dotted with land gently and silently pass through our field of vision. From yet a greater distance, the view is framed by a satellite’s window through which the globe looks even more abstract and otherworldly. But this is only the beginning of the latest film, Untitled (2011), by Christian Friedrich. What follows in the next half an hour is much less peaceful, as the satellite’s view (which the artist borrowed from the German Aerospace Centre), and the homemade footage of a young man playing in the ocean’s shallow waves rapidly alternate with each other as well as with their own negative, creating a strobe-like effect that forces its way into the viewer’s eye.

Friedrich’s slightly disturbing film lays bare the foundation of the moving image as a succession of still images, as well as the physical limitations of our vision. Because the eye is not adapted to seeing each image separately, an image that has already disappeared stays visible on our retina and consequently blurs with the new one being projected. Much like the visuals, the work’s loud and overpowering soundtrack (belonging to the filmed footage and edited simultaneously, creating an unsettling rhythm of computer-generated noise) resonates in your ear when it is no longer there, giving the silences in between the violent waves of sound a somewhat eerie quality. It becomes clear that what is being seen and heard is not actually there in the film at all, but rather is an afterthought of the brain, which is trying to catch up with what it has so forcefully been confronted with.

Still, there are occasional moments that show a captivating play of images, as the clouds that cover the globe seamlessly sync with the foam that floats over the wet sand of the beach. At one point, the setting suddenly changes and the camera moves up in a lift of a building that is reminiscent of an old futuristic movie. The strobe-like effect begins again as the camera moves through the water of an indoor swimming pool, the sound subdued to fit the new underwater setting. For a moment the camera rises above the water and everything seems normal. The view of a tranquil blue sky above rows of conifers makes us briefly forget the hostility of what has come before. The flashing images have stopped, the colours have returned to normal, the soundtrack is silent. The alternating images return in a final burst of visual rhythm before the film turns black.

Whereas in past solo presentations Friedrich flooded the viewer with dramatic and sexually-orientated visuals, often combining sculpture and video to create a total installation, it was a significant change that here he showed ‘just’ one untitled work. Regardless of the simplicity of this show, the artist was still able to ask some fundamental questions about our vision and the role and function of the image. Instead of making the physical world visible, he makes the boundaries of the visual physically present. Because the film cannot be seen properly without the shortcomings of the human eye, the body – and its ability to see – become both subject and object of the work, rendering obsolete one of the most basic distinctions in the history of art.