Indeed, the “gambol between two perils” that Kiš speaks of is very much an accurate description for the recent work of Los Angeles-based artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, whose ongoing collaboration investigates specific rifts in documentary representation. Playing against the instrumentalizing tendency of conventional documentary film and video to portray locales of political turmoil and violence as capturing “history-in-the-making,” the artists recently completed a series of highly provocative works while living in Damascus, Syria that reverse and complicate the role of the witness. Both Epic (2008) and Not a matter of if but when (2007)—featured in the most recent iteration of the Whitney Biennial—offer as “records” the highly stylized storytelling of Syrian performance artist Rami Farah. Shot in the ostensibly straightforward format used when journalists question witnesses to and experts on historical events or political struggles, the series of short monologues delivered by Farah in the two videos courses between retribution and forgiveness, curse and desire with a feverish, chilling intensity; rather than providing the compliant account of a native witness interviewed by a detached, off-camera interlocutor—a scenario commonly meant to convey what is really happening in political “hot-spots”—the collaboration between the three artists unsettles our understanding of how we narrate the present by continually addressing a near future through subverted modes of conventional address.

Not a matter of if but when provides a characteristic example. Farah begins a direct address with the traditional phrase “May your life be long…” only to tack immediately to the inverse,

“so long you will live to see the destruction of your family and your loved ones.” The collaborative documents that result weave together a tumult of similarly mixed messages delivered with a compelling fierceness complicated by the performer’s virtuosity—the ease with which Farah tacks between humour and rage has a controlled remove, mixing play and threat effortlessly—leaving the viewer unsure as to what is scripted or improvised, what is said in jest and what in earnest, left to grapple instead with the emotion and aftermath of the performed event. As Walter Benjamin observes in his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” the immediate verifiable grasp of the informative is in direct opposition to the condensed, performative nature of telling enacted by Farah, in this case, where “it is half the art of storytelling to keep it free from explanation as one recounts it.” 3

Meltzer and Thorne’s unease with the purported truth value of the document or documentary is clearly stated in the subtitle given to the piece: brief records of a time in which expectations were repeatedly raised and lowered and people grew exhausted from never knowing if the moment was at hand or was still to come. Indeed, the savoir-dire of the subtitle mirrors the fitful style of Farah’s delivery—to know through saying—and recalls Michel de Certeau’s assertion regarding the spatial authority that the act of telling makes possible: “The story’s first function is to authorize, or more exactly, to found….It even has distributive power and performative force (it does what it says) when an ensemble of circumstances is brought together. Then it founds spaces.” 4

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