Documentary art in the German-speaking world: Aestheticizing politics yesterday and today
Type de matériel :
52
The dialectic between art and engagement analyzes the possibility and the means of developing an aesthetics for political and social topics. In Germany, an artistic genre explores this axis more thoroughly: documentary theater whose contemporary forms demonstrate the drastic evolution of mass media and its impact on our society. This documentary approach raises several questions around the truthfulness of facts and stated theories, of blurred boundaries between fiction and reality, and also of the pseudo-objectivity of broadcasted words. On the other hand, the entanglement between an aesthetic potential of the various media and a willingness to popularize political discourses makes for a closer association between documentary art and non-official propaganda art. This parallel questions the real motives of the playwrights involved, who seem to navigate between distant derision and manipulation of their spectators. The contemporary spectacles that were inherited from documentary theater are nowadays presented in settings that go far beyond the theater stage, taking rather the form of cross-media “projects” presented by artistic collectives such as Zentrum für politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty) or The International Institute for Political Murder, by stage director and author Milo Rau. They question the contemporary uses of media in our “society of the spectacle,” nowadays pushed to its limits, and play with the concept of fake news in order to continuously engage the audience on political and civic topics, particularly regarding the new rise of fascist movements in Europe. In this context, where can this process of making a spectacle out of political issues lead spectators to?
Réseaux sociaux