Adornos Grey

Adorno’s Grey features a single-channel video set in the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, where German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno famously taught. It shows two conservators scraping the walls of a lecture hall, looking for the legendary grey that Adorno had his classroom painted in order to promote concentration. The excavation is staged as a film set: the technical apparatus of the production is exposed and Steyerl’s directions for the excavators can be heard off camera. The video returns to an image of a camera being set up to take a photo of the lectern. Adorno’s 1969 lecture series, “An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking”, intended to consider the relation between social theory and practice. Amidst a climate of student unrest within the university, Adorno wanted to create an open forum for dialogue and invited questions from students at any time. During his first lecture on April 22, he was bombarded by a series of critical provocations from Students for a Democratic Society, including three female students who emerged from the audience to scatter flower petals and then bare their breasts to him. That “Busenattentat” (Breast Attack) incident is described and interpreted over the forensic performance. Parallel to the excavation, Steyerl uncovers a constellation of artifacts from the histories of student protests, nude protests and monochrome painting to expand and complicate the aesthetic and social significance of Adorno’s writing and biography. These threads are woven into a timeline on the wall opposite the viewing room’s entrance. In her practice, Steyerl employs riddles, puns and word play as tools for ideological critique. In Adorno’s Grey, she examines the dialectical properties of grey within philosophy, aesthetics, pedagogy and politics. Formally, the video projection is disrupted across four staggered, oblique panels painted a gradient of greys. The image’s continuity is further disjointed by Steyerl’s editing, which shuffles multiple images across shifting vertical planes. An imposing form in the gallery, the exterior of the viewing room is painted the supposed grey of Adorno’s classroom. Opaque and monochromatic, it is the central object for interrogation, confining Steyerl’s restaging of the Goethe-Universität lecture hall and the history that took place within its walls. When the on-set camera finally captures its image, the video cuts to a low-resolution digital video of a recent Book Bloc protest. In it, one student protestor holds the frontline behind a makeshift shield painted as Adorno’s book Negative Dialectics. With this final image, Steyerl exposes the continued negotiation of social relations and theory within contemporary life.