Episode 060 Hito Steyerl
Show Notes
For our 60th episode, we are visiting with artist, writer, filmmaker, and educator, Hito Steyerl. In addition to being able to find Hito’s work in museums, biennales, collections, and bookshelves all over the world, a good deal of her single-channel moving image work can be watched freely online, which of course is a good thing, but Hito’s work has also explored the darker side of what the global dispersion of images can entail – starting with her deeply personal pre-internet short film Lovely Andrea. Hito’s work is often deeply socially and politically engaged – taking on issues of war, labor, surveillance, climate change, and more – and this social engagement and critique extends of course to her writing. Hito is not shy about turning her lens onto corruption that exists within the art world itself, as she did in her 2017 book, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War – a book whose initial seed of inspiration was realizing that an artwork of her own had been purchased merely as an investment and shipped directly to a tax-haven Freeport art storage facility. Hito’s installations are often ambitious in scale and immersion, and are incredibly spatially away of your presence – it is quite common to find a place for yourself as a viewer to sit, rest, and enjoy the work – in a way that is very integrated with the installation itself. In our chat we cover so much ground from Hito’s origins in film-making, to going inside how she conceives of and creates her immersive installations, as well as some pretty real feelings about long-term preservation of contemporary art in the age of anthropogenic climate change and global energy crisis. This episode was made possible thanks to generous support from lovely folks at the Kramlich Art Foundation. Tune in to hear Hito’s story!
Links from the conversation with Hito
> How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013: https://www.artforum.com/video/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-be-seen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-file-2013-51651
> Lovely Andrea, 2007: https://vimeo.com/533265768
> Duty Free Art, Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2992-duty-free-art
> Radical Friends: https://www.furtherfield.org/radical-friends-book/
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. And today for our 60th episode, we are visiting with an artist who is really just one of my personal favs.
[00:00:21] Hito: My name is Hito Steyerl. I'm a filmmaker and writer and I live in Berlin.
[00:00:26] Ben: Now you may have noticed, although I referred to Hito as an artist, she didn't refer to herself as one.
[00:00:35] Hito: Sometimes, if people try to call me, an artist. I'm like, wait, are you certain this? I'm not. Maybe I never reached that point of being an artist. Maybe I'm still stuck in preparation. That's also possible.
[00:00:53] Ben: Whatever you want to call her, Hito's work can be found in museums, biennials, collections, and bookshelves all over the world. A good deal of her single channel moving image work can be watched freely online, which of course is a great thing, but Hito's work has also explored the darker side of what the global dispersion of images can entail. Starting with her deeply personal pre-internet short film Lovely Andrea. Hito's work is often, deeply, socially and politically engaged taking on issues of war, labor surveillance, climate change, and more. And this social engagement and critique extends, of course, to her writing. Hito is not shy about turning her lens onto corruption that exists within the art world itself, as she did in her 2017 book Duty-free Art Art in The Age of Planetary Civil War, a book whose initial seed of inspiration was realizing that an artwork of hers had been purchased merely as an investment and shipped directly to a tax haven Freeport art storage facility. Hito's installations are often ambitious in scale and immersion and one of the things I've always loved about her work in its installed form is how spatially aware it is. In Hito's work you'll see in museums it is quite common to find a place for yourself as a viewer to sit, rest and enjoy the work in a way that is really integrated with the installation itself, you sort of become part of the work. In our chat, we cover so much ground from Hito's origins in filmmaking to going inside how she conceives of and creates her immersive installations. As well as some pretty real and raw feelings about longterm preservation of contemporary art in the age of anthropogenic climate change and global energy crisis. Today's chat with Hito and the many more artists interviews coming your way soon was made possible thanks to the generous support from the lovely folks at the Kramlich Art Foundation. And a final bit of housekeeping before we get started. As of this week, the show will be shifting to a much more relaxed release schedule. New episodes will be dropping the first Tuesday each month. If you find you are really missing the show, remember you can always get an extra dose by joining our Patreon. The link of course is in the show notes. Hope to see you over there soon. And now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Hito Steyerl.
[00:03:38] Hito: I consider myself a failed documentary filmmaker, and I started wanting that pretty early on around when I was 16, I wanted to work in cinema. I grew up in Munich, in Bavaria. I was absorbing a lot of, B movie trash cinema, but also film history. I had a phase when I was attending daily screenings of the local film museum. So I have a pretty solid background in having seen , all sorts of different movies. Then I started trying to work in cinema and I did, internships, all this kind of things. I think the first thing I wanted to do was martial arts movies from that I shifted over to experimental martial arts film. And then the martial arts sort of receded into the background and got replaced by documentary for whatever reason. I really liked to be set in a dark room as a spectator because no one could see me. I think that was one of the main attractions to cinema. I was in a lucky position because right when I started being interested in media and in terms of production, that would mean like super eight films. That was already mid eighties. Or even early eighties. I think the earliest film I have is from around 83. It's a super eight film and then I started working with video. I think the first format was high eight, but without the high, It was just eight, not eight millimeter, but somehow eight something. Things started happening very quickly from the development of video camcorders to digital camcorders, to et cetera, et cetera. So things started moving very fast and it was just fascinating to try to follow all these developments just in terms of the media that would be accessible for usage. And it's of course way more mobile and cheap and accessible, and history starts happening around it. The coming down of the Berlin Wall, et cetera, is somehow, In my view linked to these formats. Not in terms of being a causal relation, but all of that happened around the same time. So when I think back of this period, I always see it in these high eight colors. I would try to work in professional contexts in cinema. I was basically the person blocking the road in the background for a shot, something like that. But for my own work, it was completely unprofessional. I doubt it was ever seen beyond, the group of filmmakers themselves. At a certain point I went off to film school to Japan. Paradoxically, once I got to film school, I completely stopped doing any kind of film work, and completely immersed myself into martial arts training, like up to five hours a day. And basically interrupted my education by doing that. On the one hand, it was a school that was very much steeped in the tradition of the Japanese new wave of the sixties but caught in a moment when basically the whole industry was dismantled and downsized in the documentary department. Basically we were trained to form tiny news teams of three people that would record news or something like that. That was the in. And the whole fiction film area was being restructured into idle movies. I just reacted by not participating in any of that and just practicing martial arts. After not studying film in Japan, I decided to try again, so I went to Munich to that film school. I completed this studies in the documentary film department with a essay film about the transformation of Berlin City Center after the coming down of the wall. called The Empty Center, and it was my graduation film from Munich Film School. It's not the first work, but the work for which I basically invented many of the editing techniques I'm still using. And then the next one was called November, which was about the fate of my friend Andrea Wolf, who start in an early feminist martial arts film, shot on Super eight, but then later on decided to join the Kurdish Workers Party and was killed in a military action, presumably by Turkish armed forces. This must have been in 1998, and I made that film in 2004 actually for uh, art exhibition called Manifesta, which happened in San Sebastian in 2004. this was a new direction in my work because before it was a traditional essay film genre. And November tries to follow, the routes of dissemination and circulation of images. Point in time, which is still pre YouTube, but images already start circulating across geographic boundaries. I'm trying to follow, these routes.
[00:10:06] Ben: All throughout this period, you're still, very much in a filmmaker context. When were the first moments when you, started to operate and show your work more in the contemporary art context was there kind of a moment where that started to shift for you?
[00:10:23] Hito: I think it started to shift right from the beginning, but very slowly because I noticed, or it was apparent that my films would be shown in the public programs of art exhibitions, for example. Not necessarily in film festivals, or it was evenly divided, in the beginning they were shown in the public programs, and not in the exhibitions. And very slowly that started to change. Maybe 2004 and the inclusion into manifesto was a sort of pivot point. But it was so slow that it was barely noticeable, And then I found myself in the white cube. And in a way it was a sort of asylum because definitely industry wise the kind of more experimental work that I was making was not very popular. So I found myself in this other space, which seemed to appreciate these formats a little more, I didn't know anything about art, so for me it was a steep learning curve. I've really dived deep into film history, but art history was nothing I would have considered on my own if it hadn't been for the basically opportunity to show my work in this context.
[00:11:52] Ben: Going back to maybe when you first started showing within the art context and thinking through to today building installations and thinking about space what were some of the early pieces where that began to emerge for you?
[00:12:05] Hito: That's a good question maybe around 2010 ish. Lovely Andrea and so on, that was still more or less traditional dark rooms, black boxes. But then after 2010, I really tried to think in 3D and to create environments for works. Then somehow some principle emerged some of the installation elements would be drawn from the content of the video, et cetera, but also there would. Suggestion for people to inhabit the installations, that could be either comfortable depending on the context of the work, One of my recent ones, you have to sit on gym balls. I mean, It's not really uncomfortable, but it's kind of tricky. some of the recent installations I made intentionally uncomfortable so you wouldn't be able to relax and enjoy too much, at least. Also during a lot of this period, my daughter was really small, so for installation, I also needed to have somewhere to put her to sleep when she was tired. So that ended always up being part of the installation somehow. So in that sense, many of them are quite child friendly.
[00:13:36] Ben: Your daughter, I wonder if she holds the record for most museums slept in
[00:13:42] Hito: maybe.
[00:13:44] Ben: So I'm super curious to kind of go inside your quote unquote studio practice. I've worked with very, very established artists who, you know, thriving in their careers and they have no team, you know, it's just them. and even no studio. It's just their laptop or something. but then I've, also worked with younger artists or maybe mid-career artists who have, established operation, like a factory, and kind of everything in between. So, Yeah. I'm curious for you, like, what does your practice look like? Do you work alone? Do you have assistants?
[00:14:18] Hito: So I don't have a studio. It's my laptop mostly where I do the editing, programming, et cetera. The development of all these newer media has tremendously influenced my work because I've always tried to use the latest of this media that was somehow within my reach, both financially, but also in terms of, my ability to make the work. Also technologically. So it's always. Trying to use the newest amateur media. That keeps me interested because I always have to learn new stuff. in the last two years, it was mainly trying to generate stuff with neural networks, but also game engines and learning to program and all of that. And before, of course, it was 3D technology and before that it was just, digital post production, all of that and, and so on. And. all the machinery, all the gear I was trained on that's so obsolete. Usually I go out for a shoot at some point. So the last film I shot entirely on my own. I'm very proud of that. But usually it would be a tiny team of maybe two, three people. And then for the, let's say, installation operations, I work with one person who is the technical director of building stuff. who helps me build or translate designs, taking into account gravity, for example, and, feasibility. So it's the translation into reality uh, this person performs and there is one other person I work with very often who does a lot of 3d game engine design and programming. And of course, I mean there is the stuff at the galleries that is taking care of a lot of, admin and logistics. But basically on the production side, all the rest I do myself. So I cannot scale this kind of operation. I cannot think faster than I do. Trying to create more work for more people won't work because they would just have to wait around for me all the time.
[00:16:58] Ben: I love that. You have very physical installations, and some of these are quite large and very specific down to the number of chairs. Or they have dedicated furniture that is like part of the installation and paint colors and room dimensions and screen sizes. But hearing the way you're describing your practice, it sounds like. In many of these cases, you might not see that full kind of manifestation of the work until the exhibition. Is that true or do you have a place that you can sometimes partially stage these things to get a feel for them?
[00:17:33] Hito: Yes. I think we were able to stage something one single time before actually building it. So this was basically the steepest part of the learning curve was trying to. Figure out how to, what the realization of some kind of 3D model might look like in reality, because obviously it's always different, but you need a lot of experience to be able to guess beyond that gap. I got a little better at guessing in the meantime, but usually we build it once. We build it twice, and the third time usually is when it gets to a point where we say, this is how it could remain in the future. The installations, many of them keep changing. For example, there is one called Liquidity Incorporated. It's a single screen installation which had half pipe element and. This completely got wrecked. I think after Trump got elected, I decided to wreck that part. So it's basically a wreck of a half pipe now. Yes. So that kind of thing can happen with installations. Sometimes we even find ways of improving them way after their premier, for example, the same work Liquidity Inc. Which some guys in Georgia, I mean in the Central European, Georgia, made a suggestion to show it under some sort of pier over the water, just suspending some screen. I thought it was a brilliant idea. That's even better than the way we installed it, but I wouldn't just install it as a draw for no particular reason.
[00:19:33] Ben: I'm curious if you have engaged in any of this kind of evolution of your installations after they have entered collections, or has this always been something where it's still just something that's in your possession and you're just changing it as you show it?
[00:19:53] Hito: Yes. So basically the contracts are stipulate that whenever anyone wants to show anything, they need to talk to me or us and basically come to an agreement over the form this is taking so I don't think anyone, It's probably happened, but in theory, no one could just go ahead and install something just as they please. Of course, it's a very historic. Contingent phase that we have very little control over how it will be preserved. But in the shorter term, I'm sure that the understanding of art will shift a lot and in not always predictable ways. One journalist colleague told me about recently because of the energy uncertainty in museums in Germany, there is no guarantee there will be climate control this winter, the insurance has become staggeringly expensive for these masterpiece, et cetera, to the point where it becomes basically no longer viable to even try to imagine paying that kind of insurance. These are very real factors that happen in the background that we don't really see on the surface that much as of yet, and which will no doubt contribute to the art world changing a lot, becoming much more vernacular and local and also parochial, unfortunately, I think in the next few years with a slightly reduced horizon, also backwards inclined. I think if someone cares about the work, then someone will take care of it. If no one cares, then it's maybe not worth preserving in the first. It's also very well possible that things are not worth pre preserving. Probably 98% of our artworks at the end of the day are not really valid 10 or 20 years after the day they were made. I think that's not a reason to worry. That's how it goes.
[00:22:25] Ben: Your book Duty Free Art, obviously I can guess what inspired that book, but I'm curious, did you personally have the experience of, within the context of the art market, seeing your work go into these sort of Freeport contexts in private collections? Was that book inspired through personal experience?
[00:22:46] Hito: Yes. I had, Once it went into Geneva, Freeport, I only realized because this address. Figured on one invoice and I was like, what, is this a joke? I know that these places exist in theory, come on, but it seems to be sit there one version of Factory of the Sun. So at that point in time, and that must be around maybe 2016, I guess that was an interesting model of how to explain the world in a nutshell at that point in time.
[00:23:27] Ben: We've talked a lot about the past and the history of your work and the evolution of your work and your studio. I'm curious, what is exciting you in the studio these days?
[00:23:39] Hito: Of course, the things that's on my mind is the overall energy situation. Also in conjunction with the current world, and also it's a linkage to current technology. So I'm starting to subsume many of the things I thought about, like digital technology, but also data extractivism under the more general scope of extractivism, extracting energy, extracting labor, extracting data, often in a colonial framework that's in for me these days because also the ramifications are so stark and obvious right now. I would like to plug a book that's been edited by some colleagues of mine, because I think that book is fantastic. I also have a very small text in it, but mainly I think it's just a very much needed publication Right now it's called Radical Friends, and it's about the effects of the blockchain and Web three, and specifically in the evolving field of DAOs and Art world DAOs. And the thing I very much appreciate is that it is also very thoughtful and critical of all these developments. So this is why I think that this is a must read.
[00:25:10] Ben: Hito, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was so great to chat and hear a bit about your story and your evolution of your practice, and yeah, just how you think about your work living into the future, and I just really appreciate it. So thank you so much.
[00:25:24] Hito: Yeah. Thanks a lot, Ben, for all these fantastic questions.
[00:25:27] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining me for this week's conversation with the one and only Hito Steyerl. If you want to hear more artists interviews, I could definitely use your help to ensure that we are able to equitably compensate them. You can help make that happen by joining us over at patreon.com/artobsolescence, or if you are interested in making a one-time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts you can do so at artandobsolescence.com/donate where you can also find the full episode archive, including transcripts and show notes. Until next time take care my friends. My name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.