In 1980, the fourth volume of the series »Rock Session« appeared as a Rowohlt paperback. It gave an overall picture of the status quo of the international punk and post-punk scene – and was called »80er Rock« (Eighties Rock). Instead of a preface, the editors wrote a »speculators' almanach« about the eighties: »1980: amazement everywhere that the rock music has not changed despite all theoretical contortions.«

This ironical forecast ends with the year 1989: »The official declaration of the band 1990, formed in the seventies: 'We saw it coming.' A general nodding of heads.«In his exhibition »Actualité,« Mathias Poledna has outlined a segment of pop history in a similarly speculative, though this time retrospective, manner. »Popular Experiments. Teenage Music: BACK TO '74 or FORWARD TO '84« is written on the invitation to the exhibition.

The film that forms the central exhibit in »Actualité« begins with blackness. A bass guitar breaks the silence. Percussion. Guitar, two notes, no riff. This is what bands rehearsing in a basement sound. An unfocused field emerges, comes into focus; a Marshall amplifier becomes recognizable, upon which a red cigarette lighter is shining. The camera moves to a man's head with untidily cut hair. The camera wanders on to the percussion. A woman in a blue-and-white T-shirt tries to drum a syncopated rhythm. Her top is cut away at one shoulder, and her hairstyle also indicates a particular style – New Wave. Other accessories are also New Wave: the thin tie of the guitarist, his leather jacket over a white shirt, the red-and-white striped cloth belt. The music begins again and again, then breaks off. One thinks one hears an English accent when the guitarist speaks to the bass player, who seems annoyed. These are amateurs at work at a point in history that has stuck in the memory because of its experimental openness, or – for those who didn't experience this period – has been reconstructed as such in this film sequence. It is the moment when art students, particularly the female art students, put away their brushes and reached for their guitars. After about four minutes, the film turns black again – and the fiction begins once more.

When the Viennese artist, critic (for springerin and Texte zur Kunst, among other journals), and graphic designer Mathias Poledna, who lives in Los Angeles, takes New Wave or Post-Punk as a constellation of esthetic production in his exhibition »Actualité,« it is also with a view to the historical awareness of those days. The critical discourse in the fifties, sixties or eighties called the dehistoricized continuity of rock music far more into question than is the case today, when it sees retro-discourse as a rapid downloading from CD archives. Jerry Casale from the American New Wave band Devo expressed the consciousness (of an art student) back then as follows: »I think the artists in the years from 1900 to 1920 gave us a perfect description of our century. Everything that has happened since then is only a variation on a theme and lives out the visions and predictions (!) of those days. We live in a dada-surrealistic society.« Poledna's 16mm film takes up this element of neo-avantgarde self-contemplation, the new objectivity in the style of bands like Wire or Talking Heads, and not the new (rock) authenticity as put across by Damned or the Sex Pistols. And the band that was extensively used in the above-mentioned volume of »Rock Session« as an example for the relevance of a particular sort of – experimental – music production plays an important role in Poledna's film: the formation Red Crayola, which had begun with psychedelic rock in the sixties, wrote the song fragments for the band rehearsing in the film.

[b]Historical constellations[/b]

In his works, Poledna has often been concerned with the visualization of historical constellations. During the exhibition »The Making of« (1998) at the Vienna Generali Foundation, for which he was the curator, he described his work as follows: »Generally speaking, I am interested in symbolic expressions of social change, whether they are of a concrete nature or exist only as promises. This line can be stretched from design, architectur and the media, to political resistance«. His contribution to »The Making of« was a video installation about the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who not only founded an archive on the history of the labor movement, but also actively supported the militant Left of the late sixties. He also picks out a moment of left-wing activism in Italy in another video installation, this time for the exhibition »Zonen der Ver-Störung« (steirische herbst 97). He researched the story of the radical philosopher Toni Negri, who had recently returned from Paris to Italy to serve an old jail sentence for his participation in terrorist actions in the seventies. A spotlight randomly panned newspaper cuttings pinned to the wall - as an allegory for the fluctuations of a historical awareness that is subject to the junctures and repressive mechanisms of media presentation.

In both cases, the intention was to capture political history at the moment it is archived, and to find levels of representation to make the nature of this archiving visible. At the same time, however, there was an element involving the psychology of perception. How, for the observer, can meanings be breathed into these signs from the »cemetery of history, in which room for new graves has constantly to be found« (Maurice Halbwachs); how can signatures be rendered current by history? The Germanist Siegfried J. Schmidt gave the following description of the relationship of the observer to his memory: »Memories are cognitive operations that necessarily take place in the present and appear to the consciousness like perceptions or ideas. However, they resemble a form of perception or recognition without an object, as sensory stimulations and the characteristic contexts of sensuous perception are missing.« In this sense, Poledna's installations could be described as an attempt to stimulate memories by sensory means – to give the memory a helping hand.
In the two-part video »Scan« (1996), Poledna turned to pop culture at the moment of its historicization. The event that triggered it off was the Victoria & Albert Museum's taking over of the collection of graphic designer Jamie Reid's collection. »It was important to me above all to show the transformations by which historical material can be affected,« Poledna says in an interview for the catalog of the exhibition »The Making of.« »A lot of it, such as the ?cut-and-paste? draft for the ?God Save the Queen? cover is, so to speak, pre-production material, and gains a completely different character within an archive like this. Things that were originally of a serial, mass-cultural nature suddenly seem like a dadaist collage – an extremely bibliophilic artifact.« Here, Poledna chooses an analytical approach. As in the video »Fondazione,« the camera moves over archive boxes and itself administrates a sort of historic viewpoint by means of interviews with contemporary witnesses; in short, the sensory stimulations for the viewer remain within the restrictions of a video esthetic that cannot hide its homemade construction despite all its efforts at professionality.

In his installation for the Graz Kunstverein, Poledna distances himself from these earlier attempts to represent history in a documentary, analytical fashion using simple means. He does not show an archive, but instead rerecords the material he filmed for »Scan« He shortens the film about New Wave to a four-minute sequence. To remove all traces of the shaky, handheld-camera documentary esthetic now omnipresent in art videos, he uses actors, shoots with professionals in a film studio »in Hollywood,« and builds a hermetic wooden box around the projection surface, thus refering to cinema as the machinery within which (pop) history is made. This is a variation on the artistic series »Videoinstallation«: Poledna adapts a cinema auditorium for an exhibition situation. As if in mockery at his own means of production, the only other object hanging is a gold-colored film poster with an endless series of credits in the entrance area of the Kunstverein.

Poledna thus varies the theme of the updating of (pop) history. In contrast with earlier works, he does not solely show the basic material conditions of history. By taking recourse to the »stimulating« possibilites of cinema, he devotes himself to the prospect of totality inherent in the presence of music. It is left to the viewers as to whether the fragments on display join together to form a regressive déjà-vu feeling (the retro-paradigm) in their imaginations, or whether they see in them a model for an esthetic practice (the neo-paradigm). »Poledna makes film the way the band makes music« is the self-reflective message of »Actualité.«

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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