The Allusive Eye.

Illusion, Anti-Illusion, Allusion

Peter Weibel
Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe

In 1969 an exhibition was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art with the significant
title Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, at which works of Andre, Asher, Benglis, Morris,
Nauman, Reich, Ryman, Serra, Snow, Sonnier, Tuttle and others were shown. This exhibition
summed up an important tendency of the neo-avant-garde, but especially of the avant-garde of
the media of film and video. The 1960s saw a paradigm change from illusion to anti-illusion.
All the achievements of the avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s drew on the development of
materials, not only of artistic but also of extra-artistic materials. In the 1950s Jean Dubuffet
smeared his canvasses with sand and stones. Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer went into
the countryside and created huge sculptures of earth. The inner world of materials formed the
canon, issued the directives for the development of processes. Processes of materials, whether
of lead, felt, fat, oil colors, water, ice, air, fire, earth, etc., shaped the form and non-form of
the picture or the sculpture. These processes of materials replaced the work of art as a
product, and created at least the conditions for the product. From avant-garde music, Fluxus
and happenings through Action Art, Body Art and Arte Povera to Land Art, Process Art and
Conceptual Art, artists have been testing the possibilities and options of materials, whether of
the piano, of light, of oil paints, of texts, and so forth, in order to create from these their
ephemeral works. This obsession with materials not only went along with a refusal of
illustration and representation, but was in general characterized by the gesture of the
Enlightenment and anti-illusion. Avant-garde film in particular proceeded from the conditions
and materiality of film, from the conditions of perception, of projection, of the movie theater,
the celluloid, etc., and developed from these "structural film", "material film" and "expanded
cinema" (Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Birgit and
Wilhelm Hein, Michael Snow, Peter Gidal, Ernst Schmidt Jr., etc.). Avant-garde film and
with it media art, formed, so to speak, the vanguard of this avant-garde of anti-illusion, and it
also then gained entry into the classical art forms of painting and sculpture.

The 1960s thus formed a watershed between the epoch and practice of illusion and the epoch
and practice of anti-illusion. In the 1970s, the art of anti-illusion came to an end in the public
consciousness, for in the 1980s the painting of illusion ruled the roost. Under the pressure of

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the mass media, which had developed into the central site for the generation of illusion, the
avant-garde favored all the more vehemently destruction, deconstruction and anti-illusion, the
exit from the picture. With the return of figurative and expressive painting, illusion too
returned to the realm of art. The reward was as momentous as it was astonishing: the mass
media passionately applauded this phenomenon and covered it excessively. The tabloids and
illustrated magazines thanked art that they no longer were the sole players in the theater of
illusion, and that the artist had shown himself to be a fellow actor on the same stage. Thus the
art of the 20th century can be squeezed not only into the binary oppositions of figurative and
abstract, material and non-material, representational and non-representational, but also into
that of illusion and anti-illusion, in which the avant-garde defined itself as anti-illusionary.

It was the media artists of the 1960's and 1970's (avant-garde film and video art) who were
mainly responsible for the anti-illusionary mentality, and after their bitter experience that the
return of the art of illusion in the painting of the 1980s pushed them to the sidelines,
marginalized them and in many cases even wiped them out, the younger generation of media
artists of the 1990s learned their lesson. They no longer placed themselves in the anti-
illusionary tradition of the media avant-garde, because they saw in this tradition the cause of
the avant-garde's failure, but rather directly in that of mainstream illusion, for example of
Hollywood films or music videos, which these artists then appropriated or deconstructed with
the techniques of the slowing down or acceleration of shots and sound-track, taken over from
the media avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s. The names of Pipilotti Rist and Douglas Gordon
may be named here for such tendencies. This tendency to illusion is the real cause of the
narrative trend of the media art of the 1990s, of that triumph of the eye which places itself at
the service of the storyteller. Yet instances of resorting to the avant-garde as well as to forms
of the mass entertainment industry of Hollywood and MTV are so numerous and mixed that it
would be wrong simply to assign the younger generation to the realm of the dream factory.
Precisely through the mixture of practices of narration and illusion, as we know them from the
mass media of film and television from psycho-dramas to talk shows, with the practices of
anti-illusion and anti-narration, a new practice has in the best cases (for example, Gabriel
Orozco and Anri Sala) arisen, which we would like call "allusion".

The media generation of the 1990s assumes that every viewer already has a library of visual
experiences, fed by the mass media from films to billboards, stored in his head. On this visual
conditioning their works draw directly or indirectly. They don't need to tell names, because
the viewer knows who is meant. They need only briefly suggest topics, places, subjects, and

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the viewer knows what is being spoken of. Mere hints, explicit or symbolic, elliptical or
concealed references, are sufficient to charge the images with meaning and significance. Little
is mentioned explicitly, and the story is still comprehensible. This universe of multiple
references is that of the famous post-modernism, from architecture to music, from art to film.
Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) is a classic example of these numerous references to
the visual experience of the film goer. The charm of these references is that they form a
common set of assumptions possessed by both viewer and author. Supposé is the key word of
the aesthetic of allusion. It is assumed, it is presupposed, that the viewer knows this and that.

An aesthetics of the "given", which assumes and presupposeshas become the central dogma of
a whole visual culture. In the post-modern universe of allusion it is assumed of any viewer
that he knows all the images, and the charm of the reaction lies in the reference to these
images, in the deliberate disappointment of expectation, in the deliberate parallelity and
conformity, or in the deliberate omissions and ellipses (see Pierre Huyghe's film L'Ellipse).
This allusive technique permits the Scylla and Charybdis of illusion and anti-illusion, of
narration and anti-narration, to be circumnavigated. The author can narrate, but through the
allusive techniques of not naming names, of indirect references or of covered-up identities, he
can also rupture the narrative. The author can illustrate figurative and concrete scenes, but
through the allusive technique also lend them a degree of abstraction and unreality. The
methods of allusion thus allow the artist to regulate the degree of narration and anti-narration,
of figuration and abstraction. In this way it is possible to create works animated by an
incredible pleasure in story-telling, by an excessive urge to jump into the thick of a narrative
plot, into the flesh of a story, and at the same time to make visible the bones of its structure
and the grid of its script. The techniques of allusion permit stories about the state of the world
- for example, by Gillian Wearing, Sam Taylor-Wood, Aernout Mik - that at the same time
continue the anti-illusionary and conceptual tendency of the media avant-garde.

The fifty-one media artists of the Goetz Collection presented at the ZKM exhibition take us
on a journey into the heart of the present. Most of the works come from the period of the
1990s up to today. Like no other collection, the Goetz Collection offers a survey of
contemporary media art. This survey is not only more extensive than that of any other
European museum, but it is also less arbitrary. The merit of the Goetz Collection is
deliberately to have assembled the phase of allusory art which came after the illusory and
anti-illusory phases and which has been decisive for the development of media art today. The

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Collection not only offers an insight into contemporary media art, but through this window we
can also gain an insight into the contemporary world. Not, however, the kind of insight that
we have grown used to seeing on television, in the press and in film, but one enabled by
media artists who show the mass media as a part of the world and as a part of the eye and of
the camera with which the world is viewed. The allusive eye tells of the media and of the
world, and its artists tell of the world in other ways than do the mass media. These are
dismayed views and dismayed images into the global illusion of neo-liberalism. These are
images of an art whose visual vocabulary has a high degree of complexity. This complexity is
the core of allusion. The danger of anti-illusory art was simplicity and tautology. The dangers
of allusory art are complexity and mannerism, but never the flight from the world or the flight
from the viewer. The allusive technique of narration in the visual media signifies a further
development of the literary plot and almost a break with it, with the literary structuring of a
narrative. The visual narrative does not follow the arc and path of a verbal narrative. It does
not run on rails. Nevertheless, the allusive narrative follows a script. It could be said that the
media art of the 1990s up to the present follows a script, is scripted. It does not follow the plot
of a story. A story is something other than a script. A script means rules or codes. There are
today not only dress codes, but also codes of behavior; not only an obsolete code of honor, but
above all codes of articulation. In the mass media, in politics, in TV news, we experience
daily the subtleties and finesse of the code of articulation, how something is formulated. How
something is said is more important than its content. The content is precisely how something
is said and with what words. News is scripted, behavior is scripted, the world, especially
politics, follows a script, an allusive script, where names are not mentioned, where references
are indirect, where what is most important is not explicit, where information is concealed,
where much is only assumed. This scripted world corresponds in art to the scripted method.
An aesthecis of assumption is supposed to uncover a world of assumption respectively. The
essence of allusive media art consists of offering the artist the possibility of rendering the
script of the world recognizable through his own script. Ideally, the allusive eye should make
the script of the world visible. Ideally, the allusive narrative should counter this script, or
create better, truer, profounder narratives about the world. Like no other collection of
contemporary media art, the Goetz Collection offers the opportunity for a first encounter with
this world of the allusive eye and of the world as script.