Artist Web Projects Spotlight: Ana Torfs, Approximations/Contradictions, 2004
Ana Torfs, Approximations/Contradictions (detail), 2004– . Collection of the artist, commissioned by Dia Art Foundation for the Artist Web Projects series. © Ana Torfs
By Kirsten Mairead Gill
Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Dia Art Foundation
In this series, we revisit works from Dia’s series of Artist Web Projects. Inaugurated in 1995, this series is the longest-running program of its kind in the United States, commissioning artists to create original projects for the internet. The full archive of projects is available here.
In her first work made for the internet, Ana Torfs created a multipart, cinematic rendition of German composer Hanns Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook. Written between 1942–43, the collection of brief, elegiac songs reflects on the conditions of exile and the tragedy of war. Bertolt Brecht, a collaborator of Eisler’s who also fled Germany in 1933 (the two reunited in Los Angeles nearly a decade later), wrote lyrics for a number of the songs. For Approximations/Contradictions, Torfs chose twenty-one of these melodies to work with, all featuring Brecht’s lyrics. Casting different performers for each tune, Torfs filmed three versions of the performances.
Asking the singers to first visualize, then rehearse informally before performing for the camera, Torfs makes a theater of the progression from incipient moment to culmination. The different versions of the performance speak to the artist’s continued engagement with the relativity of truths, a notion reinforced by the title of the work: each performance is an approximation of Eisler’s original intentions, and these variations may have a contradictory relationship to each other and their source.
In the first version, the singers, accompanied by piano, were asked only to visualize their performances. Closely cropped against a grey background (a format that is maintained across the three versions), the camera offers a pared-down and focused view of each singer, all dressed in white. The reduction of visual information invites us to focus on the micro-gestures of the face as the singers simply envision their future performance, invoking a spectral image that viewers are able to imagine—but only imagine—in turn.
Layers are added to the performance in subsequent versions. The songs are translated in a third screen, granting non-German speakers greater access to the emotional tenor of the music through Brecht’s lyrics. The second pairs footage of the performers, this time singing aloud, with the face of the pianist as he accompanies them. In the third and final version, the performers for the first time gaze directly into the camera as they sing, dressed in costumes of their choosing.
A series of intimate exchanges—the performer’s interiorized engagement with self and music, the dialogue between performer and pianist, and the performer’s direct address to the viewer—Approximations/Contradictions creates a hermetic cinema, meant to be viewed on the private monitor, that echoes the closed form of the performances.