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Coming from Filmmaking, Farocki never reproduced the tropes of the art world that became receptive to him. Those artists in lineage since without exterior however often unable to transcend art’s established idioms and visual speech. If so much video essay today resembles Farocki’s, it is because Farocki’s art was itself a form or a framework, a vessel invented through which content could be made to speak of itself, taken up by any willing artist since. In the early 1969 video, Farocki’s lifelong documentary problem/premise is summarized directly; asking the question of how one would be able to depict politics without its producing an immediate reaction that itself can be reacted to (rejected, accepted, etc.), and instead prolonging depiction’s moment, postponing indefinitely a reaction and thus politics. This neutrality has since become the bread of a contemporary art often unwilling in risking any pronouncement, rendering itself in ambivalence. Farocki in his voice-over doesn’t address this endpoint as paralysis problem, but the difference is often that Farocki was risking politics and everything since was only risking art.
See too: Koki Tanaka at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle
