Dennis Adams: Out Take

Synopsis by Toshihiro Komatsu

Dennis Adams presented his most recent work Out Take as an interactive public arts performance piece, site specific to Germany. The starting point for this work, and presentation, was Adams fascination with the early 1970s German film Banbule. Adams was attracted to this film as a metaphor for Germany's history with authority and self-censure. In 1969, the German State television network commissioned Ulrike Meinhof, a socially conscientious journalist, to write a film that would critically address conditions in orphanages. When Meinhof was suspected of participating in the escape of Andreas Baader, a state prisoner, the film was shelved. Not until 1995 was there a first screening on German public television, at midnight.

In preparation for the performance of Out Take, Adams selected a 17-second clip in which a nun chases a young adolescent girl through the interior space of an institutional looking orphanage. Black and white prints were made from the corresponding 416 frames to be distributed as handbills on the streets of Berlin. Adams rigged a body costume to structurally support his outstretched arm and thick stack of 8 by 10 stills. He then attached a video camera to his shoulder aimed towards the stack of handbills. The camera recorded Adams free hand extending prints to the hands of passerbys seen from the waist down. The resulting piece was 2 hours and 17 minutes of video documenting each frame passed into the crowded, noisy streets of Berlin. Adams wandered in circles recording a soundtrack of disembodied music from nearby vendors, traffic and the occasional curious query (always ignored).

Discussion followed Adams presentation of the 17 seconds of footage from Banbule and a 10 minute segment from the video of his performance in Germany. For Adams, the piece was about the concept of time. He was taking a small unit of time, extending it into public space as a feature length transaction, and refilming that. This transaction between an artist and the pedestrians on the streets of Berlin was Adams attempt to address the issue of collective memory in German history. Adams spoke of this project in terms of loss. He saw this chosen snippet of cinematic history lost again into a city of people who had only recently rediscovered Banbule.

Analysis by Anja Conrad

A young, adolescent woman is combing her hair before a mirror in an orphanage while looking at a picture of her mother. A nun catches her, reprimands her, and then threatens to cut the young woman's hair off in order to teach a lesson. The young woman takes off as the nun pursues. A chase ensues.

This is a description of the 17 second clip in Ulrike Meinhof's censored documentary/film Bambule: a critical investigation into the poor state of affairs within institutionalized housing.

Dennis Adams uses these 17 seconds as subject matter for his own documentary project Out Take: an image-oriented experiment that frees a once privatized, censored, and therefore controlled expression by means of textless handbills. The handbills, and Adams himself, act as disguised "decoys" to remind contemporary culture of its own amnesia. The site-specific performance consists of Adams distributing four hundred and seventeen stills of the excerpt taken from Meinhof's film. It is documented in feature length 217 minutes. Out Take reveals and reinforces how easily a culture forgets the horrors and tragic conditions that take place throughout history.

Adams silently distributes the stills in sequence to the public, while documenting the interaction with a digital camera. By using the streets of Berlin as the setting, Adams returns the images from Bambule to its historical origins. He offers no explanation to the many passersby, only frees the images from Meinhof's film, as if losing them in the city of Berlin. Many people took the handbills, many rejected them, and some were taken to be dropped on the streets soon after. The documentation on Berlin's streets enables Out Take to achieve an incomparable, atmospheric experience. The camera, mounted to Adams' body, documents a multi-layered experience with Peruvian music, church bells, techno beats, cars, buses, scurrying feet, and voices of the German public on the streets.

Out Take is simultaneously a gain in public freedom and loss in private control. The dispersal of this linear sequence of still images onto the streets of Berlin not only extends outside the borders of film, communication, and time, but also furthers the dissection and adds to the continuous discourse over the possibility of freedom within institutionalized culture. Adams speaks of the public as a space for the "collective memory" to be penetrated by expression. But if "humans are like cattle," as Adams says in his lecture, i.e., we accept what we see accepted and/or we reject what we see rejected, then his aim is to perform within that malleable space of the public.

The response to these transactions is left unstable once unidentified fleeing objects reach hands: the exchange is consensual, and misunderstanding is given.

Adams's film captures the perception and reception of human contact and demonstrates how advertising circuits itself and its messages into a cultural unconscious. Adams does not contribute to the conventional means of infiltrating information into the public's unconscious. He uses the handbill to expose the notion of control rather than to manipulate, and turns the intention of advertising back onto itself. Historically, authority perpetuates social control and fear. Adams's project visually displays and provides exciting, yet overdetermined responses (it's too early for results). Setting free the material, which was once concealed and censored, into the public space allows Adams to experiment with the mode of manipulation which advertising implements.

Out Take is a process constantly unfolding and making new, from taking a scene from Bambule and creating stills out of it, to the distribution and documentation, Adams explores the elements of loss and gain within group contact on the social levels of politics and advertising. Time is lost in this project, as the chase continues. There is always an outstanding rebel who runs from the hot pursuit of imposed authority. Adams's choice of photographic information furthers the metaphor of chase. He seduces the chase of authority throughout history in hope of refocusing public attention on its ability to run free from the fiction of a unified whole.

Out Take defies the pretension to make and keep world order. The art of it is basically the freeing of image as it moves away from itself. Each phase of the project is another step in public movement towards multiplicity and away from institutionalized captivity.