Serial Number - Tahi Moore

There were a few works in the graduate show engaged in documentary. Why would artists take on the inherent problems of the document, which is always mediated, something that problematises its function as presentation of facts? Certainly documentaries are able to work with this issue, but something of it always remains and must be dealt with. The mediation, the collusion of the documentary maker, involves lying as a departure from fact, in turn involving truth as a creative act; the lie of the artwork/documentary being a creation that tries to push its way into the worldview of its audience.

Donna Sarten's work involved images representing war dead. There were photographs representing dead, mounted soldiers, plates with military insignia, and photos of graveyards, and a cabinet with rows of individually arranged bullets. At the end of each row in the cabinet there was a serial number. Everything else looked like documents, and so did the serial numbers. But they seemed like fakers. They probably related to soldiers being shot or more specifically to so many soldiers having been shot and killed that death becomes abstract. However the serial numbers at the end of each row also seemed to be a flourish on the part of the artist, so that you might know there was no attempt to uncover the world, but rather the lies that might let in truth.

The machine, the camera, looks out at the world: like some alien it cannot speak to us, but it can show us how it sees. Might the documentary show a world view and the artwork try to ruin it? Perhaps it is because the clear vision, the presentation of facts that give some truth, must contain a differend, one that must be hidden if the truth of the vision is to be seen? And perhaps the artwork resides in the space of that differend, one that must be entered.