Thomas Struth, Audience, 2004, Kunstsammlung K21, Düsseldorf

Another of Nordrhein-Westfalen’s cultural treasures are the modern art museums in Düsseldorf. Though I went to the Kunstsammlung K21 (Kunstsammlung K20 is closed through 2009 for cleaning and renovation) to see the special exhibition of Lawrence Weiner’s As Far as the Eye Can See, as often happens, a wander through the permanent collection brought many wonderful surprises.

One of which was a series of four photographs by the local, ie from Düsseldorf, photographer Thomas Struth Audience. I find his work fascinating on a number of counts, but mostly because of his fascination with looking at us looking, in photographs which then invite us to look at ourselves looking - and to self-reflect on our own commodification by the art museum. As if this is not enough, the mise-en abîme continues as we also look at our objectification of the works we look at, or don't look at. If this sounds circular and confusing, that's the point, because when we look at Struth's work, it is like looking into a mirror that simultaneously does and does not reflect our own processes of looking. On that count, he's the modern day Velasquez - either that or the tourists in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence are the modern day members of the court of Philip IV. In which case, what a disillusionment we are. At least the members of the court were watching out for the Infanta, while we watch only to see ourselves and our mirror images.

Struth took the Audience photographs in the Galleria dell'Accademia, and though it is nowhere indicated in the images, the tourists with their cameras and their guide books are all looking - or not looking - at Michelangelo's David. For some the guide book is more captivating, for others their own camera's view, and still others are mesmerized by Struth's camera - presumably not knowing they would appear in such high profile photographs as they looked into his lens. Clearly, everything about the audience in the photograph - and by extension we who look at the photograph - speaks a full immersion into the wiles of the tourism industry. Similarly, the postures, the facial expressions, the mouths agog, the utter reverence (and irreverence) shown the absent sculpture that nevertheless overwhelms these images, speaks David's cultural capital. Given the insistence with which these people look at Michelangelo's famous sculpture as an object of utter adoration, the question becomes what exactly are they looking at? Or not looking at? And then, inevitably, what exactly are we looking at? Or not looking at?

Ruhr Valley Secrets, Richard Serra's Bramme für das Ruhrgebeit

One of the richest experiences of the Ruhr Valley has to be Richard Serra’s Bramme für das Ruhrgebeit (1998) in Altenessen. Somewhat difficult to find and to get to, Serra’s 14.5 meter high, 4.2 meter wide, 67 tonne steel plate sits atop a 30m high former slag heap from the coal mines in its environs. As such, it is defined by the identity of the Ruhr, and simultaneously functions to create a site in the Ruhr landscape. So typical of Richard Serra’s sculptures, the Bramme creates a site where none previously existed, literally, on the crest of a slag heap of the past. And simultaneously, Bramme, cast in steel, erect, but slightly at an angle, in the spirit of the horizon of chimneys below, overlooks an industrial landscape that is otherwise all but a spectre. The steel plate draws us to it, we are pulled into its magnetic-like field, and then as we reach it at the top of its hill, we turn away, it deflects attention away from itself, becoming something other than it is. As we stand before it, next to it, this majestic steel sculpture is transformed into a pointer that instructs us to look outwards, away from it, over the Ruhr from a position above, but fully integrated into that which is below. Once we have moved beyond its icon-like attraction, its angled stance entices us to look at it in relationship to what sits next to it, but only as these objects appear in our line of vision. It is solitary, alone on the hill, but as soon as we see it, we put it into a visual force field in which it becomes one component in a relationship to that which surrounds it – smoke stacks, chimneys, the hulks of former steel mining glory. Thus, it draws attention to the landscape of the Ruhr as a work of art. And likewise, this landscape defines it: it is made of steel, shaped like any other steel plate, its proportions, its placement, its identity are all integral to the world surrounding it.

Again, in typical Richard Serra style, this productive conversation between the steel form and its environment is experienced through more than one of the senses. It is not a relationship that is relegated solely to visual perception and deception. Bramme sheds a blanket of silence over the region, not just Essen below, but across the whole Ruhrgetbiet. And having done this, our attention becomes drawn by the silence it casts, to the sounds in the immediate environment as they echo across the 30m slag heap: a dog barking, his owner whistling to him, a child crying, boys exploring the landscape with a pickaxe.

Like a Greek temple at the top of the hill overlooking the city, we pilgrim toward it, compelled to know it and discover it and bask in its insights. And yet, unlike the temple, once we reach the Bramme there is nothing to see inside. In fact, we are prohibited from doing so, and our senses – visual, aural, tactile — are diverted such that we begin to contemplate the world outside, the world below, around and beneath it, the world that it nevertheless binds together.

A Generation Later and Still Unrepresentable, The Baader Meinhof Complex, dir. Uli Edel

Before even seeing this film, the first obvious question is "why now?" and the second, "why in this form?"

The Baader Meinhof Complex comes at a time when "terrorism" is on the mind. So that's the simple answer to why a narrative film that follows the events of the rise and fall of the RAF in the late 60s and 70s in Germany would be made twenty years later. But this is also where the problems with the film begin. Because, as the RAF themselves insist when they are being trained in Jordan, they saw themselves as urban guerillas, with very different goals, and different actions, than the terrorist actions of the twenty-first century. It is true that the German State labelled the Baader-Meinhof group and successive generations as terrorists, but it's a term that is highly problematic in this context. And The Baader Meinhof Complex makes no attempt to address, or even reflect on this.

This kind of unself-conscious narrativization of the RAF story is typical of the film, and it's what, ultimately, makes it troubling throughout. Perhaps most problematic is the fact that it is never makes clear what the point of this film is. What is it that we can now learn from this historical moment that we have hitherto been too close to see and know? Or, to put it another way: why do we need to re-look at the RAF and its activities? Thus, at the most basic level, this film fails to do or say anything political.

Its indecision around the RAF's violent actions as a response to the political and social injustices of the West German State in particular, and the West in general is also troubling. It's true that the most admirable representations of this dark period in German history have been those with an ambivalent, undeclared stance towards the highly complicated issues of the RAF vs. the German State. See, for example, R.W. Fassbinder's contribution to Germany in Autumn, or the Andres Veiel's Black Box BRD from 2001, in which the respective filmmakers' refusal to take sides opens up the space for the spectator to take responsibility for the continued thinking about the events. But The Baader Meinhof Complex oscillates uneasily between sympathizing with the cause of the young radical extremists - usually through quotation of their philosophical and political beliefs - and horror at the bloodshed that was their response to the perceived injustices. This material is way too charged, and way to important, to spectacularize without a sustained interrogation of the issues at stake.

The film draws heavily on Stefan Aust's authoritative Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, 1985, mainly for the historical details - all of which were very accurate in the film. However, what the film doesn't manage to do, and therefore, does injustice to Aust's indispensible volume, is to convey this history with detachment. Objectivity is not "untranslatable" on the screen, but unfortunately, Edel and his team have chosen audience entertainment over responsible reflection, or dare I demand it, a polemical statement.