Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition

22. Subjectivity Lost and Found: Bill Viola’s I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like

Chapter 22 Subjectivity Lost and Found Bill Viola’s I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like Catherine Russell To take up the Vertovian terminology, he [the ethnologist] is “cine-ethnowatching,” he “cine-ethno-observes,” he “cine-ethnothinks .” Those who confront him modify themselves similarly, oncetheyhaveplacedtheirconfidenceinthisstrangehabitualvisitor . They “ethno-show” and “ethno-talk,” and at best, they “ethnothink ,” or better yet, they have “ethno-rituals.” . . . Knowledge is no longer a stolen secret, later to be consumed in the Western temples of knowledge. Jean Rouch, “Vicissitudes of the Self” In his description of filming possession rituals, Jean Rouch reveals the ultimate goal of participatory ethnography: to transcend the divide between observer and observed. Through the possession ritual, culture is performed, and in the display empirical knowledge is seemingly displaced by a more spiritual understanding of the Other. Bill Viola articulates this desire in his videotape I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986), but he does not figure as a “participant” in the ethnographic encounter. He represents himself as another Other. The medium of video enables Viola to come closer to transcending the divide than Rouch’s cinema, but only by transforming culture into an effect of representation. The tape imagines a utopian breakdown between I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like 369 observer and observed, technology and nature, and spectator and performer . Paradoxically, this desire is articulated through an elaborate demonstration of the impossibility of transcending the barriers between subjectivities . This failure in turn is linked to the terms of power within colonial culture, terms that Viola has not yet transcended. The title of Viola’s tape, I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, halts the quest for knowledge before it even begins, announcing a kind of failure of knowledge and a quest for identity. Viola forces the question of subjectivity into the foreground of documentary representation through a gamut of technological and aesthetic devices. The tape has become a canonical example of video art, drawing not only on the ethnographic genre of documentary but equally on the structural experiments of the avant-garde film. At ninety minutes, it also borrows the narrative time of feature filmmaking . It is structured as a movement from subterranean life-forms to transcendental consciousness, a union of the cycle of life with ritual and electronic transmission. Video potentially brings to documentary an increased sense of intimacy , immediacy, and access, and thus a higher degree of participatory, non-hierarchical observation (cf. Burnett). Certainly it makes the process of documentation cheaper, faster, and potentially less intrusive, thus increasing its activist potential. Yet the “essence” of video is elusive, as its aesthetic nature varies according to its many applications—from music videos to medical technologies. Furthermore, it is important not to idealize the camcorder aesthetic as “more real” than other forms of documentation. Bill Viola’s high production values place his work at the high end of the economic -aesthetic spectrum. His videos are anything but cheap or accessible, and his work is rarely considered within a documentary frame of reference, belonging much more obviously to the art gallery. Nevertheless, the video signal in I Do Not Know is figured as having a particular indexical quality, an access to the real that is specific to video, which may be partially due to Viola’s consistent use of ambient sync sound that links audio and video signals in an existential fusion to place. The tape addresses the physical presence of the experimental artist at the source of the documentary gaze. The gaze is at once human—attached to a body in the world—and dehumanized, becoming an appendage of technology. Video may extend the operator’s body into the world seen, but it is also the instrument of surveillance. The transcendental gesture of the tape, the desire to overcome the division of representation, can be accomplished only through a critique of the power relations of the gaze. In significant ways, Viola is on the cusp of a new aesthetic and a new cultural practice we might call postmodernist and postcolonialist, 370 C A T H E R I N E R U S S E L L respectively. But he is not quite there yet: his posthumanism is produced through a modernist interrogation of the specificity of his medium. Of all the definitions and explanations of video aesthetics, it is Hollis Frampton’s that seems most...