Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, France
'Farewell letter to Swiss Workers' (2009), installation view, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff
Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger’s ‘Farewell letter to Swiss Workers’ at Galerie Jocelyn Wolff consists primarily of two films. Alles wird wieder gut (Everything is Going to be Alright, 2006), takes as its model both Lenin’s address to Swiss workers (on the eve of the Russian Revolution) and Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s 1972 Tout va bien (Everything is Alright), which featured Jane Fonda in a Brechtian account of an American reporter covering a strike at a sausage factory. In Alles wird wieder gut, a group of young men and women in a present-day East German hamlet gather to rail against the hopelessness of their situation, and to dabble with alternatives, including much theorizing along classical Marxist lines but culminating in a dance party at a local bar. At the same time, their parents strike outside a long-abandoned factory. There they are met by a journalist, who later joins the younger generation for a drink, though is challenged about his role in the construction of shared socio-political fantasies. At the close of the film, Lenin’s address is recited by a boy of about ten years old; whatever direct power this performance may have is distanced by its repetition at rehearsal, including stage directions, notably the absurd solemnity of an added salute.
Alles wird wieder gut (Everything is Going to be Alright, 2006)
Alles wird wieder gut is noisy and social, highly referential and animated. Not so the second film, Donnerstag (Thursday, 2006). Instead of conversation, silence; instead of groups of people, just one young woman, going about her business, silently, in a dairy factory.
What is a viewer to make of these videos and of the installation, with its darkened walls, bales of hay and pile of what is presumably stylized, pixelated stock charts? A viewer of Godard and Gorin’s Tout va bien could take for granted certain Brechtian strategies, and assume an orthodox Marxist intent. The situation here is not so simple though; it is very hard to know how, exactly, to read these (filmed) texts, or even to fix their tone, which wavers between blasé, heroic and absurd. One could only say that certain Marxist tropes are being relentlessly performed. The characters can only be occasionally empathized with, because, as in Brecht or Godard, the films are so willfully contrived, so obviously staged. This is presumably intentional - and, if this is the case, it is certainly very well done. At the same time, however, viewers cannot help but feel that they too are part of the performance. Like one of the characters in the two films, responses are being carefully orchestrated (the point is pressed home by the fact that one sits on bales of hay). These reactions cannot be taken for granted as authentic. They too need to be examined; they too become part of the fiction.
But the very artfulness of the exhibition - the repetition of intellectually upscale prototypes, the cunning contrivance of performance and installation, the balancing of pathos and ridicule, of discourse and silence - makes it rather politically anodyne. ‘Farewell letter to Swiss Workers’ succeeds too well: having transformed a hard, materialist reality into a never-ending play of varying tropes, Moser and Schwinger leave it to the viewer, presumably, to find a way back to ‘reality’. Is there really an egress from this hall of allegorical mirrors, though? A much worse exhibition (from an artistic standpoint) might have seemed much more politically daring: it would not have offered the solace, or even the temptation, of art. But for anyone truly invested in the politics performed here - that is, for anyone whose Marxism takes precedent over aesthetics - ‘Farewell letter to Swiss Workers’ marks a pyrrhic, paradoxical triumph.
David Lewis
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