One must never think of war in isolation from the society that produces it. This is one of the lessons from Harun Farocki’s (1944-2014) decades of preoccupation with the connections between war, capitalism and between politics, media and violence. Together with personalities such as Jean-Luc Godard and Alexander Kluge, Farocki is one of the great photo and film essayists, the “herbst” shows some of the artist’s central and some lesser-known film works.
“Harun Farocki once morest the war” is the name of the exhibition curated by Antje Ehmann, Farocki’s widow, in the Forum Stadtpark in Graz, which juxtaposes two creative phases. There is the early period, completely shaped by the countercultural spirit of the 1960s in West Germany, in which many of the works revolve around the Vietnam War. Works that almost 60 years later might be school-masterfully dismissed as historical errors, such as The Chairman’s Words from 1967. It was still dreamed that Mao’s philosophy might be used to smash the industrial-military complex in the West, while in China even the Cultural Revolution devastated intellectual and social life, claiming thousands of victims. “White Christmas” from 1968 is also read more profitably today if you do not interpret the compilation of Bing Crosby’s Schmalz song and the Vietnam War as clumsy satire, but as a painful commentary on the fact that the idea of the right life in the wrong one is absurd.
