Philosophy of Contemporary Art

In his recent study on the philosophy of contemporary art, Anywhere or Not At All, published in 2013, British philosopher Peter Osborne attempts to develop a critically valid category out of the notion of the contemporary. According to Osborne, turning the contemporary into a critical category helps us to understand and evaluate the historical ontological status of contemporary art. The definition of the contemporary has changed since 1945. What the contemporary is, is historically variable and embedded, but gains a historical specificity or even necessity that can be called “ontological” for its time. With his concept of the contemporary Osborne strives to replace the notion of the postmodern as a term that has come to signify an attitude of “anything goes,” thus foreclosing any critical engagement with art works. What is contemporary about works of art thus depends upon the historical developments both of the condition under which art is produced and upon the history of the term contemporary itself. If contemporary is to refer to more than just any kind of work being produced in our present time, which would be a merely descriptive use of the term, it has to be distinguished from related terms like the modern or the avant-garde. As Osborne points out, all three terms, the modern, the avant-garde, and the contemporary, engage in temporal relations that by cutting themselves off from the past produce specific constellations of the present and the future (Osborne Reference Osborne2013, 24). The contemporary is not the modern, as the term “modern” focuses on the idea of the new, thus casting the present merely as a transitory zone to future horizons. As a radicalized modern, the avant-garde also aims at the future by producing ruptures with the past and the present. In contrast to the modern and the avant-garde, the contemporary inhabits an extended present (22). Over the past two decades with the development of a globalized economy, its ensuing geopolitical changes, and a worldwide distribution of digital media, our very notions of time and space that we may inhabit in the present have radically changed. In a global context, which brings the distant near and the forgotten back to life, the term contemporary literally designates a “con-tempus”: “a coming together not simply ‘in’ time, but of times: we do not just live or exist together ‘in time’ with our contemporaries … but rather the present is increasingly characterized by a coming together of different but equally ‘present’ temporalities or ‘times,’ a temporal unity in disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times” (17).

Can such a claim for contemporaneity be made for the work of choreographer Pina Bausch? Is Pina Bausch still our contemporary, and, what is more, has she ever been our contemporary? As Christina Thurner points out in one of her essays on Bausch, with each premiere of a new work, critics regularly commented on Bausch's belatedness; her work somehow always being too late, anchored in the past and not being of our times (Thurner Reference Thurner2018, in this issue). After Bausch's unexpected death in 2009, which left her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, without a choreographer to create new and, by implication, contemporary work with and for the company, the question has exacerbated. In 2009, the Pina Bausch Foundation was set up under the chairmanship of Bausch's son, Salomon Bausch; the task of the foundation, according to its website, is to keep “her artistic legacy alive and carrying it on into the future” (Pina Bausch Foundation). Dance critic and editor of the magazine Tanz, Arnd Wesemann, in a discussion with Salomon Bausch at the Dance Fair 2014 in Düsseldorf, fears that despite its efforts for contemporaneity, Tanztheater Wuppertal is fast becoming a museum of dance (Tanzmesse 2014).Footnote ¹ A recent international conference in Hamburg organized by dance scholar Gabriele Klein and dedicated to Pina Bausch's work, Dance Future II, tried to claim Bausch's legacy for the present and argue for its contemporaneity.Footnote ² The conference brochure locates “the global aesthetic and cultural processes of translation between Dance Theatre [that is, Tanztheater Wuppertal, G. S.] and Contemporary Dance” as the site for Bausch's ongoing importance for the field of dance. Since Tanztheater Wuppertal initiated “paradigmatic historical, contemporary and aesthetic transformations,” its claim for contemporaneity can only be made from a future perspective (Klein Reference Klein2017), looking back from the future vantage point of its influences on younger artists, hence the title of the conference Dance Future II. Bausch's work in hindsight, as Klein and her team claim, will reveal itself as always having been contemporary.

Leaving institutional concerns aside, in this essay I take up this lead and argue that in Bausch's repertoire there are already implications of a contemporaneity that meets Osborne's qualitative definition of the term as “a disjunctive unity of present times” (Reference Osborne2013, 17). Whether these implications are or were actually being played out by the company is not important for my concern here as I aim at extracting the conceptual concerns of Bausch's work that so far have received very little critical attention. For my argument, I will first consider the temporal relations articulated in Bausch's work, particularly her relation to the past that comes to define the present, exposing its claims to unity as fictional claims. Second, I will focus on the medial aspects of Bausch's work, including her 1988/89 film, Die Klage der Kaiserin (The Plaint of the Empress),Footnote ³ that hitherto have been considered as side effects of Bausch's choreographic work. By making the media aspect of Bausch's work the center of my attention, I argue that it is precisely the work's media saturation that allows for its contemporary distribution, display, and formatting. It is here that Bausch's contemporaneity can be found.

Pina Bausch as Our Contemporary

From the very beginning of the usage of the term in socialist Eastern Europe “as part of the Soviet reaction against the categories of modernity and modernism” (Osborne Reference Osborne2013, 18), the notion of the contemporary was opposed to the modern or the period of modern art. Contemporary art, as Peter Osborne explains, was art after the end of World War II. Historically, the first definition of contemporary art is “a straightforward historicist partitioning of chronological time” (Reference Osborne2013, 18). Modern art simply precedes contemporary art, which became a placeholder for all kinds of heterogeneous artistic practices and aesthetic preferences united under the banner of contemporaneity. Increasingly, however, the neat art historical division between modern art and contemporary art became undermined. Since artistic strategies such as the tendency toward abstraction or collage and montage techniques continued to exist and were also being employed by post–World War II artists, the boundaries between what was considered to be modern and contemporary art were being blurred. Even modern art was contemporary art (19). With reference to Pina Bausch, her work is contemporary not only because she lived and created the body of her fifty-three productions after 1945, but also because some of her artistic strategies point back to the time before the Second World War. Like her modernist predecessors, she continued to objectify movement, a concern that, as Susan Manning (Reference Manning1988) has underlined, unites both modern and postmodern choreographers. Bausch's movement objectivations were primarily achieved by strategies of repetition that demonstrated movement while it was being executed. Her concern with the social functions of dance and its concern to express desire and emotions may also be traced back to dance modernism and to her teacher Kurt Jooss, who used popular dances to characterize social class in pieces like Großstadt (Big City, 1932) (Stöckemann Reference Stöckemann2001, 166–67).

The second historical periodization of the contemporary that Osborne offers places contemporary dance firmly within the social and artistic upheavals of the 1960s. What was considered to be contemporary during the 1960s and 1970s marks a qualitative difference to modern dance rather than its clandestine continuation. What is at stake in this periodization of the contemporary is the medial specificity of dance that may roughly be defined as choreographed and embodied movement in time and space. Concentrating on the production, emission, and structuring of embodied movement distinguishes modern dance as a form of art from ballet, which relies on the theatrical and visual aspect of movement. Stripped of all references other than its very own conditions of being that it works through, modern dance like modern art in general becomes an exercise in purification and abstraction. The experiments of the 1960s, then, gave up the genre defining and pure medial specificity of each art form, which modernist critics like Clement Greenberg and Michel Fried had defined (Siegmund Reference Siegmund2017b, 15–36). While Bausch's later works, especially since the year 2000, are marked by a return to movement. As in Vollmond (2006), a string of dance solos and duos as a structuring device of the pieces, her work from the mid-1970s to the 1990s was an attack on received forms and dramaturgies of dance with embodied movement ceasing to be the prime object and medium of dance. Instead, language, speaking and acting, music and singing, performing in installation-like environments on the stages created by Rolf Borzik and Peter Pabst, creating a situation with the audience, performing with them rather than for them, serving them tea or bread rolls, and dancing through the aisles of the auditorium as in 1980 or in Viktor, opened up the narrowly defined borders of the genre of concert dance, forming a hybrid that was called Tanztheater. Thus, German Tanztheater, like its namesake in the United States, the Judson Dance Theater, despite their different histories and aesthetics (Manning Reference Manning1986) can be regarded as the outcome of the new medial condition of dance since the 1960s. In this second periodization of contemporary art, as Osborne says, “contemporary art deploys an open infinity of means, and operates with an institutionally- and philosophically-grounded generic conception of ‘art’ that exceeds the historically received conventions that had previously defined artistic mediums [sic]” (Reference Osborne2013, 20).

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall came down, a historic event that marked the official end of the Cold War and, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the fall of the entire Communist Eastern Bloc. On December 17, 1989, at the beginning of Pina Bausch's production Palermo, Palermo a wall came down on the stage of the opera house in Wuppertal, covering the stage in clouds of dust and leaving the dancers to stumble through the rocky debris for the rest of the performance. Since then, both Pina Bausch's work and the meaning of the concept of contemporaneity have changed significantly. The end of the Cold War set up a new context for the arts to be contemporaneous with, a context that is characterized by economic, cultural, and digital globalization. This entails the integration of erstwhile more or less autonomous and experimental art into the system of transnational art biennales and festivals up to the point of inclusion of dance into the visual arts in museums and biennales such as the one in Venice. Art has become an asset for regional development and investments that topple the hierarchy between center and periphery. Furthermore, space is being redefined as a paradoxical coexistence of regional places and deterritorialized virtual or nonspaces. Osborne claims “art must reflectively incorporate this new context into its procedures if it is to remain ‘contemporary’” (Reference Osborne2013, 21).

If we take the situation of a “global transnational” (26) to be the challenge for contemporary art today (as opposed to the 1960s), how does Pina Bausch relate to these conditions? The fact that Pina Bausch produced all her work after 1989 as international coproductions can be seen as an answer to the new situation. There is a striking coincidence between the watershed of 1989 and Bausch's decision to go global, to leave the narrow confines of the municipal theater of Wuppertal and to seek financial support and inspiration for creating her work in new environments abroad. As with the falling wall in Palermo, Palermo, it is difficult to establish causal or linear connections between world events and Bausch's work, there seems to be what historian Stephen Greenblatt calls “the circulation of social energy” between heterogeneous events that make them relate to and resonate with each other despite their obvious disconnectedness (Reference Greenblatt1988, 1–20). Although her pieces have toured extensively since the early 1980s,Footnote ⁴ the fact that she took her productions abroad did not affect the character of the pieces.Footnote ⁵ After 1989, however, subjects and topics as well as musical choices and stage elements, such as the videos of flowers and nature from the Cape Verde Islands that color Masurca Fogo (1998), take on an almost folkloristic touch fostered by intercultural encounters and travels abroad. Dance scholar Kate Elswit traces these changes back to the shift in global funding structures that account for a different way to encounter the foreign or the unknown. Whereas “vintage” Bausch (Elswit Reference Elswit2013, 217) treated the familiar as foreign, Bausch in her later “travel pieces” reversed the pattern to find the familiar in the foreign (224). In her cultural coproductions “her work shifted beyond that quintessential image of the estranged individual … towards a deeper model of interconnection” (223).

Both on the level of production and reception her pieces take place between provincial or regional Wuppertal, where the company is still based, and the world in Rome, Palermo, Hong Kong, California, or Lisbon where the works are coproduced. Although these activities surely are an indication of a globalized art situation that is mirrored in the different cultural backgrounds of the Wuppertal ensemble itself, I am not entirely convinced that coproducing work is actually enough to qualify Bausch's work as contemporary in the critical sense that Osborne gives to the concept. Bausch's productions are part of the globalized economy of dance with dance productions by big companies touring worldwide to serve different audiences from different cultural backgrounds. By doing so, they are always in danger to occlude local productions. In the case of Bausch, the danger extends to unwittingly supporting ongoing colonial economies in the sense that her pieces, fond as they are of images (I will come back to this issue later), appropriate and resell the cultural images of the countries of origin impressionistically gathered together by and filtered through a Western eye. Many modernist artists took inspiration from foreign cultures and their arts, travelling to foreign places with modern dance, as Susan Manning reminded us, being a globalized phenomenon from the very beginning of its emergence.Footnote ⁶ In this respect, the conflation of modern and contemporary dance is still ongoing. My question therefore centers on whether we need to identify more specific artistic features that would qualify Bausch's work as contemporary in the global transnational sense that Osborne offers. How could it be interpreted as being both reflective and critical of the new global situation that is transnationally rather than internationally producing its new time-space coordinates? The promise, I argue, of a more radical contemporaneity lies elsewhere in Bausch's works independent of their status as internationally touring coproductions. The contemporaneity of her works lies in their relation to the past and the specific cultural context and conformist climate of post-Nazi Germany. After 1989 as Pina Bausch's imagination left Germany seeking inspiration in the exchange with different cultures facilitated by international coproductions, this context and its specific relation to Germany's violent history was cut off. The second feature of her contemporaneity can be found in the media saturation of her work that allows for a global distribution of her idea of dance. In a dialectical paradox, Bausch was “more” contemporary when she was acting mainly locally working in Wuppertal than after she went global and reverted to ideals of the dance solo, which reconnected her to modernist concerns and their notion of dance.Footnote ⁷ In her shift from what Kate Elswit calls “from phrases to solos” (Reference Elswit2013, 227), another form of contemporaneity may, however, be detected. If the solos are not primarily considered for their intrinsic movement qualities, the serial principle of the solos holds a promise for Bausch's contemporaneity. Seen as a working principle the solos allow for multiple decontextualizations and recontextualizations across the frames of the individual pieces. In the next section I examine Bausch's relation to the past in her vintage years as a challenge to the notion of contemporaneity.

Out of Time: Engagement with the Past and the Fiction of the Contemporary

For Peter Osborne, the notion of the contemporary as an extended present is both problematic and a fiction. The contemporary is blind toward its own fictional status (Osborne Reference Osborne2013, 23). If the contemporary is based on the idea of a unified moment that combines heterogeneous times and places, a “con-tempus,” then the notion of the contemporary runs up against the problem that it suggests a uniform horizon of all mankind with all the colonial implications of this notion, which is purely hypothetical since such a unity of times and places cannot be lived by any one human subject (23). By definition, the contemporary is unable to negotiate with either past or future, which it integrates into its notion of the present. The extended present of the contemporary in contrast to the modern present as a transitory zone of nows remains cut off from any kind of future development. The contemporary has no future, which signifies, as Osborne states, a cut with any kind of politics that always implies the dimension of the future (23). The fiction of the contemporary replaces political thinking and actions with a celebration of the present as here and now, as performance theory has done, and in the sphere of politics with the replacement of politics by administration and governance as self-regulatory performative systems, which force employees and citizens to constantly assess and evaluate their performance.

One artistic strategy to deal with the problem of the contemporary, therefore, is to reveal its fictional status, to work on the fiction of the present as an extended here and now (28). Engaging critically with the contemporary implies the necessity to lay open the contingent nature of the coexisting time-spaces. For theater, dance, and performance scholars it is hard to give up the notion of an extended present because the present and the presence it allows to emerge is the time of the performance. During a performance, audiences and performers are with time, contemporaneous with the time of performance. Exposing the fictional status of the contemporaneity of performance means first of all taking the extended present as a starting point and not as the end or aim of performance. We surely do come together in time, but our coming together is always an untimely coming together. The present is paradoxically constituted by absences and untimely returns of ghosts and specters that, according to Alice Rayner (Reference Rayner2006), haunt the time of theater.

For Giorgio Agamben it is precisely the untimely element within time that marks the contemporary (Reference Agamben, Kishik and Pedatella2009, 39–54). With his leanings toward the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, Agamben primarily focuses on the past rather than the future as the temporal aspect to be renegotiated within contemporaneity. For Agamben, the contemporary or “contemporariness,” as he calls it, is synonymous with the present, which is always only a moment, a now that, as phenomenologist Edmund Husserl has shown, is always already in transition from the past to the future (Husserl Reference Husserl and Brough2008, 30–47). Because of its transitory and uninhabitable nature, the present cannot be “considered some kind of self-contained temporal receptacle for objects of experience” (Osborne Reference Osborne2013, 23). Being contemporary, therefore, inevitably means being out of time, missing one's time. Being contemporary means not being entirely of one's time. “Contemporariness is, then,” Agamben writes, “a singular relationship with one's own time, which adheres to it, and at the same time keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism” (Agamben Reference Agamben, Kishik and Pedatella2009, 41, original emphasis). Being out of time, however, holds the possibility to observe “the darkness of the epoch” (46) of what, as Benjamin (Reference Benjamin, Eiland and McLaughlin1999) said before Agamben, in the present cannot become present but refers back to the past and insists on “that part within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living” (Agamben Reference Agamben, Kishik and Pedatella2009, 51). Unmarked, lurking in the shadows waiting to fulfill its potential for an unforeseen future, this unclaimed part in Benjamin's messianic thinking will come with the seizure of the right moment (54). In line with Benjamin's thinking, Agamben's notion of the contemporary remains firmly rooted in the notion of modernity that is opposed to the philosophical concept of the contemporary as Osborne frames it. The truly contemporary sees the “archaic” in the modern and is therefore able to negotiate different times and put them in conversation with each other. Yet, Agamben's definition of the contemporary with its insistence on the past as the untimely ghost of the timely present that rifts the time out of joint can be employed as an instrument to unveil the fictional status of the contemporary as an extended present without past or future. It points in the direction of Bausch being untimely contemporary in her failure to produce a seamlessly extended present heeding the archaic in the modern.

In this context, the trope of (childhood) memories and fears that like no other trope has come to define Pina Bausch's work (Hoghe Reference Hoghe1986, 21; Schmidt Reference Schmidt1998, 19; Schulze-Reuber [2005] Reference Schulze-Reuber2008) takes on a new significance. Bausch constructs her pieces on the basis of the memories and past experiences of the dancers in her company. Dance scholar Susanne Schlicher underlines the importance of the unrequited past for Bausch's work, anticipating a possible future that holds the promise of fulfillment. “By reminding themselves and their audiences of a not-anymore, Pina Bausch's pieces retain the idea of a not-yet” (Schlicher Reference Schlicher1987, 123, my translation).Footnote ⁸ This future, however, is never staged and remains in a perpetual state of a not-yet. Instead, the presence of the performance reveals itself as highly conflictual and contingent on the past. What Schlicher implicitly also states is the undoing of the extended presence with its fiction of a unity of heterogeneous time-spaces and their subjects. What Bausch's subjects reveal is a passionate attachment to the past, that is being dragged into the open and casts the present as an opening. Bausch's temporal drag, to use Elizabeth Freeman's term with which she reformulates Walter Benjamin's notion of a discontinuous time, insists on a past that will not go away, queering time and any normative way of appropriately situating oneself in the present (Freeman Reference Freeman2010). In the 1970s and for most of the 1980s, Bausch's attachment to the past brought her out of time with postwar German society still struggling with the aftermath of World War II and the Hitler regime, which in its citizens produced an uneasy mixture of guilt, shame, and outright repression of the genocide of the Holocaust. Bausch's first long period of production falls into what memory scholar Aleida Assmann casts as the second phase in West-Germany's attempts to come to terms with the concentration camps and Auschwitz. Extending from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, this period saw at times supported and at times occluded by the students’ protest movement and the Left, an increase both in scholarly research and social debates about the past and the responsibilities it brings for the present (Assmann and Fervert Reference Assmann and Fervert1999, 144–45). It certainly was the phase when repression finally broke up and public and media events as well as judicial trials brought back memories of a past not easily integrated into a seamless life in the present.Footnote ⁹ It is interesting to note that in a particular German instance of Greenblatt's circulating social energies Bausch went global at the exact time when the West-German debates about Auschwitz settled down into a social consensus leading to an official state politics in regard to Germany's responsibility to remember Auschwitz.Footnote ¹⁰ That is to say, before 1989 it was the arts and in particular Pina Bausch's work that fulfilled a commemorative function as to the human scale of experience. Her humanistic approach both in the positive and in the negative responses it accrued resonated deeply with the West-German cultural situation of the 1970s and 1980s. The obligation to remember Germany's barbaric history from the middle of the 1980s onward became the official policy of the Federal Republic of Germany. Once this happened, Bausch's work shifted ground. Leaving behind what Johannes Birringer once called her “ineradicable Germanness” (Reference Birringer1986, 85), Bausch produced and distributed her work on a global scale seeking cultural encounters elsewhere.

By naggingly insisting on people's imperfections and the (archaic) violence inherent in human relations, Bausch's dancers and the characters they created were individuals less than perfect or heroic. They downsized the heroic (ballet) dancer to human scale with all the failures and ambiguous emotions that come with a human being. Pina Bausch mourned for Germany at a time when large parts of West-German society still could not and would not mourn the loss of the human and its capacity for empathy during and after the war.Footnote ¹¹ I hold that this is one reason why contemporary audiences reacted to Bausch's work in a hostile manner, even extending the violence onstage toward the choreographer herself who was physically attacked by irate members of the audience.Footnote ¹² Critics regularly reported of audiences protesting, shouting, and leaving the theater, slamming the door hard. However, from the middle of the 1980s on, a consensus was reached and acceptance of Tanztheater increased (Hoghe Reference Hoghe1986, 20; Schmidt Reference Schmidt1998, 42). For a long time, Bausch's work was critically out of time, yet very timely, using the stage and dance to explore the darker regions in the present by attending to the shadows of the past.

A passionate attachment to the past betrays the contemporary as a fiction and a contingent construction. Bausch's two main devices to stage the fiction as a fiction and to demonstrate its contingency are, one, her reflective use of rehearsal scenes in the performance, and two, her way of dealing with the image, which for its tendency to annihilate time has become almost synonymous with the contemporary. As I have argued elsewhere in more detail (Siegmund Reference Siegmund, Kowal, Siegmund and Martin2017a), Pina Bausch's performances are to a large extent made up of scenes from rehearsals that constantly refer back to their own constructedness by repetition. As dance scholar and critic Norbert Servos explains in regard to the piece Kontakthof (1978): “Since the seamless illusion, the final product, can no longer be realised, the process of making art is demonstrated instead” (Servos Reference Servos1996, 97, my translation). The individual episodes of the performance reveal themselves as repetitions from rehearsals that as rehearsals do not only make art but also repeat scenes from everyday life as material. Thus, the extended present is a performative repetition of older gender roles and social norms that speak of the normative social order and its failure, given the difficulties the dancers display of inhabiting these traditional forms that would allow them to behave or situate themselves appropriately in the present. The failure to inhabit the form, which is also Bausch's (highly productive) failure to inhabit any traditional dance form, is also the failure of the present to be ever present as such. Tinged by memory and anticipation, what is considered to be the present moment as a synchronized entity, turns out to be a desynchronized amalgam of heterogeneous temporal aspects.

Following on from her opening up the final product to its rehearsal process, Bausch's use of images is the second prominent strategy to unmoor time. Here, too, repetition is the core strategy to destabilize any linear temporal sequence. Thanks to the repeated gestures, the scenes on stage seem frozen in time. They create the impression of an image that stands still and transcends time while the image is set in motion by the “hysterical” repetition of gestures.Footnote ¹³ This repetition produces a stutter of and in time, a stumble of something (an action, an emotion) that will not go away but keeps coming back again and again. Thus, the one scene the viewer sees on stage is revealed as a performative construction consisting of many repetitive moments that refuse to go away, yet form the present. Unresolved, never reaching its final goal or destination, the gesture falls back upon itself, demonstrating itself, dragging the past along with it, a past that has not found its place in the present, unable to move on. Walter Benjamin defines the image as “dialectics at a standstill,” a phrase that has often been read as movement having come to a standstill, thus producing an image in a sudden flash (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, Eiland and McLaughlin1999, 462; fragment N2a, 3). By drawing on Bausch's use of images, Benjamin's phrase can be read more productively. In Bausch's work, a dialectical image is an image that generates movement within the standstill, an oscillation that is the image fraying at its seams and transcending its borders by movement from within the image itself.

Pina Bausch's Serial Materializations

“A play like Kontakthof you could play on all through the night,” said Bausch in a 1979 interview with the magazine Theater Heute (quoted in Schlicher Reference Schlicher1987, 143; Hoghe Reference Hoghe1980, 68). A durational performance before the term became fashionable, Kontakthof lends itself to be durational because its episodes can be repeated in an ongoing process of repetition and difference, enchaining a potentially open and endless series of scenes. Kontakthof, like most other of Bausch's pieces, consist of modules to be reconfigured. The elements of the performance are serial in nature although the serial aspect of their existence is, with the exception of the astonishing quote by Bausch above, rarely admitted to by either the company or the critics. As Thurner has shown, many critics conceive of Bausch's work as “a single body of work,” “’one big dance suite’” (Thurner Reference Thurner2018, in this issue), pointing to the very direction of serial repetition of scenes and concerns, migrating from piece to piece and across times, undoing time's linear trajectory. Whereas these critics conceive of this apparently self-contained and autonomous “single body of work” as a problem for Bausch's contemporaneity, I consider it to be her entry ticket into the realm of the contemporary. As Peter Osborne points out, the contemporary is not only a problem and fiction, but also an idea and a task to be achieved (Reference Osborne2013, 22). One has to “do” the contemporary. Being contemporary does not come “naturally” because, presumably, dance is always in the present. It is a moot point whether Pina Bausch actually “does” the contemporary, that is to say, whether the company actually realizes the contemporary potential of the work. Her “single body of work,” however, and this is my concern here, certainly lends itself to contemporary conceptual concerns that resonate with Osborne's definition of the contemporary as a global transnational.

“Contemporary art is postconceptual art,” states Osborne, giving his definition of contemporary art as art that takes place after the heyday of conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s (3). The temporal adverb “after” here means both coming after and following conceptual art as well as working in the vein of conceptual art under new globalized social conditions. The nonobjective and nonmedium-specific contemporary of the second periodization, which Pina Bausch's work was so strongly engaged in, can be seen to function under new conditions from that point on. What I want to suggest in this last section of this essay is that “Pina Bausch” is a concept. Pina Bausch is an idea. She is a concept and an idea that may take place in various media formats in and outside of theaters or museums. Methodologically, working with this idea of “Pina Bausch” allows me to sidestep more traditional notions that cast Bausch as the romantic genius of post–World War II dance and to think of her work in a more structural way. Doing so also entails a change of terminology, replacing more traditional terms to describe Bausch's strategies with new ones. With reference to her pieces, instead of talking about a dramaturgy of single episodes, I use the word serialization. When Norbert Servos identifies Bausch's dramaturgy as “a dramaturgy of numbers borrowed from music hall” (Servos Reference Servos1996, 96), this old format of popular entertainment may be conceptually reformulated as the serialization of episodes strung together without a narrative line. Instead of referring almost nostalgically to an old dramaturgical form that matches the nostalgia in some of Bausch's pieces, the term “serialization” focuses on a mode of production that is almost impersonal. Considering “Pina Bausch” to be a concept also opens up the possibility to conceive of authorship in a different way. Rather than referring the final pieces to the individual person Pina Bausch and her creativity, many people and especially the dancers may contribute to the concept.Footnote ¹⁴ While there may very well be an overall musical principle of composition, the open-endedness of the series implies, as in Kontakthof, that another number may be added, somewhat like a module to be reassembled. Instead of stressing that Tanztheater is a hybrid genre, I like to think of its hybridity as dance in its “post-medium condition” (Krauss Reference Krauss2000), facilitating various materializations. Instead of discussing emotions and expression as Bausch's main themes, I prefer to speak of her as a concept. In doing so, my hope is to prise an opening into the discourse on Pina Bausch that hopefully may shift our critical perspective on her achievements in another direction.

What is striking about Busch's work is that her pieces can be seen as a series of photographs strung together by filmic principles. As the large number of coffee table books full of photographs from Bausch's work testifies, her oeuvre lends itself extremely well to the photographic, so much so that its whole being seems to migrate into the photographs reproduced in books, posters, and calendars.Footnote ¹⁵ The serial structure of the pieces facilitates the isolation of episodes, the character of which may be captured by (a series of) photographs. Their dramaturgy, as Susanne Schlicher has noted before, becomes filmic working with montage: “Cross-fading of scenes, constant interruptions and fresh starts, changes in camera angles and perspective, repetition as a device to close up on things—Pina Bausch's way of directing is being led by a thinking in terms of film and montage” (Schlicher Reference Schlicher1987, 141; see also Sanchez-Colberg Reference Sanchez-Colberg, Jordan and Allen1993, 219).Footnote ¹⁶ Precisely because the performances are already highly media conscious in the very constitution of their material and materiality, they may also materialize as photographs and films. The media saturation of the performances also extends to the dancers’ bodies; framed by a TV camera as in 1980—Ein Stück von Pina Bausch, the dancers put their bodies on display reflecting their forms of appearance and ways of presentation as already framed. At the beginning of the second part of 1980—Ein Stück von Pina Bausch a TV camera is placed near the proscenium at the left side of the stage. It frames the scene on stage as being saturated by media. Under the eye of the camera the dancers participate in a competitive and degrading audition in which they are asked to present their bodies in a favorable way.

The concept “Pina Bausch,” therefore, may be instantiated in different formats and take on different materialities. Thus, the actual performance ceases to be the ultimate realization of Bausch's idea, but is only another instance in the series of formats the concept may take. Photographs and films sit next to the performance on the same horizontal plane, which may lead to the practice of films being shown not in cinemas, but in museums, galleries, and maybe even theaters independent of the performance. Rather than thinking of these materializations as translations of the original performance, I prefer to think of them as different instantiations of the concept “Pina Bausch.” A brief discussion of the reworkings of the piece Kontakthof and the remediatization of the piece Ahnen may serve as cases in point.

Kontakthof was originally produced in 1978. Since then it has seen two major reworkings. In 2000, Jo Ann Endicott, a former member of the company, staged it for Bausch with a cast of people aged over 65, and in 2008 she did it again with a cast of teenagers. Both productions were immediately turned into films: Damen und Herren ab 65 by Lilo Mangelsdorff in Reference Mangelsdorff2002 and Tanzträume – Jugendliche tanzen “Kontakthof” von Pina Bausch by Anne Linsel und Rainer Hoffmann in Reference Linsel and Hoffmann2010. The films document the rehearsal processes of the two productions from castings to early tryouts and the various rehearsal stages to the triumphant premiere. As Christina Thurner (Reference Thurner and Diekmann2014) recently pointed out in her study of the films, they translate the working process of Kontakthof into the film by working on the boundary between the private and the public, between rehearsal and performance, the off scene and the onstage, the obscene and the seen. Like Bausch in her productions, the films also turn the private fantasies and worries of the performers, their incapacities, insecurities, and moments of pleasure and triumph, into the actual topic of the films. If we take the exploration of the line between private and public as one central component of the concept “Pina Bausch,” then as a consequence it may indeed materialize in many forms without losing its specificity. As a concept, Kontakthof does not necessarily require professional dancers to materialize the work, but employs nonprofessional performers who after a year of hard work are able to perform the piece. They thereby initiate the same process of abstraction from life experience to rehearsal to professional performance that structures Bausch's performances. Kontakthof is a concept to be deployed globally in different editions and cycles. Thus, following this line of thought, the films are an integral part of the work, transferring the idea into another media condition that always already differs from itself.

My second example, the films Ahnen ahnen (Bausch Reference Bausch2014) and Die Klage der Kaiserin (The Plaint of the Empress), follows a similar logic. As the booklet of the DVD-edition of Ahnen ahnen explains, the film shot by Detlef Erler during the rehearsal process of the piece Ahnen in 1986/87 was intended as a “’test film’ showing what the results of working in Pina Bausch's way could be” (Bausch Reference Bausch2014). It came about as a test film for Bausch's first and only feature film The Plaint of the Empress, the shooting of which began after the premiere of Ahnen in October 1987. In fact, the film Ahnen ahnen replaced the script of the film for the production companies who required a script before they would agree to produce Bausch's film. However, as with all of Bausch's productions, there was no script, play, or material to work on when shooting of the film began. Ahnen ahnen documents the coming into being of the production Ahnen as a coming into being of the film, The Plaint of the Empress. Starting with early rehearsals with rough ideas being played around with, more often than not, in the rehearsal space, the camera observes the dancers waiting, slumped into a chair, tired, concentrated, distracted, or trying on costumes. The camera films the dancers’ reflection in mirrors that, propped up on movable devices together with other flats, divide the space. Erler's principle here seems to be indirect observation, the observation of an observation, the reflection of a reflection that mirrors Bausch's own mediation between private and public. During this phase, Erler takes portraits of the dancers, his camera zooming in on their faces, which appear to be in limbo between feeling unobserved and private, on the one hand, and showing an awareness of being observed and publically exposed, on the other. As time goes by, scenes emerge, the off-camera voice of Pina Bausch can be heard more often now, asking the dancers to do something again in order to find out what she liked about the playful experimentation with costumes, movements, and actions. Finally, with pieces of the original stage setting such as the cactus trees emerging in the rehearsal space, entire scenes are being repeated, and the piece is finally coming together. What then is the relation of that curious test film to both the production of Ahnen and the film The Plaint of the Empress? Does it merely document the rehearsal of Ahnen? Does it prefigure the feature film as a working document? Or is it actually Ahnen in another materialization? That is, is it the work Ahnen just like the performance of Ahnen is the work Ahnen? Characters of Ahnen, such as the punk in a skirt, reappear in The Plaint of the Empress, and a Sicilian funeral march prefigures Bausch's next piece Palermo, Palermo. The scenes and characters migrate as ready-mades between production and media formats to the point where it becomes indistinguishable to which individual production they actually belong. Because neither characters nor scenes are ever self-identical, they differ from themselves in their very constitution. Because they always differ from themselves, they may change contexts and media formats.Footnote ¹⁷ The film features scenes with Dominique Mercy as ballet master harshly criticizing his student in a manner reminiscent of the many scenes in Nelken or 1980, in which Bausch addresses the violence of normative dance formation. There is a woman in a white wedding dress doing cartwheels on the floor as in Walzer. When actress Mechthild Grossmann stands in a studio in the pouring rain addressing an invisible director asking for directions on how to actually play the scene, Plaint of Empress, too, makes use of the device to include rehearsal scenes in the actual film.

The Plaint of the Empress can be read as a translation of the working process from theater to film using the medium of film to reflect upon problems of theater. Radically speaking, the Plaint of the Empress is not a feature film, but another piece of theater in a different medium. In an interview in 1990, Pina Bausch talks about the making of The Plaint of the Empress stressing her work on the image as her main concern. “Why film? On the one hand, I've been considering this question of what an image is for many years, a living picture, but that's of course not a film yet. It belongs to the stage, which is vast in comparison, and it is of course unbelievably difficult to transpose what happens on stage to a video image, a small picture” (Bausch Reference Bausch2011, 81). She goes on to explain that she worked only with one camera in order to leave the scenes intact (85) and to be able to observe the development of an image until it flips over—a “dialectical image at a standstill”—into another. The camera here functions as an observer following, as in theater rehearsals, unpredictable developments, rather than producing material with the editing process already in mind when shooting. Near the beginning of the film, a female dancer in a short black bunny costume, long black stockings, breasts hanging out, shoes in hand, runs and stumbles across an empty field, falling, getting up, without orientation, her feet getting heavy with the brown earth dragging her down. The Plaint of the Empress translates Peter Pabst and Rolf Borzik's natural stages back into the actual cityscapes and landscapes of and around the city of Wuppertal where the film was shot. Bausch's characters escaped the theater and peopled the real world again, where with their stage costumes they all look starkly out of place.

One could claim that Bausch experimented with film, because of an unresolved problem with the image in her theater productions. Film as a medium literally consists of a series of framed images and therefore lends itself to an exploration of the nature of a single image as an inconsistent and incongruous representational device that the theater, with its vast dimensions, can only touch upon. For there is never one single image in a theater production that makes one witness the coming into being of an image and its subsequent dissolution. In return, what makes the film images Bausch creates theatrical is the fact that they are allowed to develop over time without cuts. Just like her stage productions, the film consists of a montage of such durational images. As Ana Sanchez-Colberg has pointed out in her study of the film, montage destroys the illusion of a single meaning, handing meaning production over to the audiences. Instead, it refers the film back to its mode of production, i.e., image making. “Die Klage der Kaiserin is a film about film making in much the same way that Bausch's theatrical work is about, makes reference to and questions … the process of dance making” (Sanchez-Colberg1993, 227–28).

I mean to radicalize this observation to the point where working across media challenges the very notion of “the work” as a single unity produced at a certain time and in a certain place by a defined collective of authors. It is in this challenge to “the work” that Bausch's contemporaneity can be found. Thus, The Plaint of the Empress may be read as another instantiation of Ahnen or Ahnen ahnen, the same concept taking on another distinct form. Given the current “postmedial condition” of art, which Rosalind Krauss interprets as a “reinvention of the medium” and not as a dissolution of the art form into a general everyday aesthetics (Reference Krauss2000, section 7), dance can be theater or an installation or a gallery piece, a DVD or a film, while all the time reflecting on the medium of dance, its possibilities, protocols, and strictures. Engaging with its own postmedium condition would be where the contemporaneity of Pina Bausch's work lies—her contemporaneity as a task waiting to be realized.

The Contemporary as a Working Principle

Rather than closing down the above discussion in this concluding section, I propose to open it up by suggesting some potentially fruitful lines of future direction that may be derived from viewing Pina Bausch as a contemporary artist:

Perhaps other choreographers can realise a Pina Bausch piece, instantiating her concept. Maybe there is no original production of Kontakthof, but only a series of versions that need to be seen next to each other. More versions may be added to the ones with teenagers and people over 65 already in existence. Perhaps Kontakthof really should become a durational performance that runs all night with audiences being able to enter and leave the theater or the museum at will. Maybe the episodes of Bausch's pieces can be rearranged according to certain paradigms cutting across the individual frames of the performances. Maybe, as Susan Leigh Foster has suggested during the Hamburg conference, the armless woman in the red dress at the beginning of Viktor should indeed be played by a physically challenged dancer or actress to readdress in a contemporary context the question of representation that Bausch worked on. And maybe the new generation of dancers in Tanztheater Wuppertal who have never met Pina Bausch should go back to the list of questions and directions underlying the old pieces and give their own answers instead of copying the originals and expertly learning the steps while being cut off from the past context in which the answers emerged in the first place. Maybe then there would be two equally valid versions of Nelken: the old one dating from 1982 and a new one contemporaneous with the thoughts, images, movements, and feelings of a new generation. All this would create new situations for the reception of Bausch's work without betraying her intentions. Under new medial conditions, ideas similar to those I have suggested here, would engage again with Bausch's search for truthfulness, her ethics of performing, her engagement with repetition and history as well as with her work on the image, shaping both our everyday behavior and the performing of her pieces. Then we could say that Bausch can do the contemporary.

My focused or critical approach to the contemporary borrowed from the visual arts sees the contemporary in its current historical condition as devising formats of presentation that differ from themselves while reflecting back on the medium of dance. Contemporary dance, then, develops formats that may be deployed globally by many people across institutions, media, and discourses, which in turn become integral parts of the work. If the contemporary abandons the idea of the single work of art or dance production in favor of a serial way of working, it truly shifts away from denoting a specific style or aesthetics. It turns into both a working principle and a way of working. It is not primarily what dance artists do (producing a piece), but how they do and reflect it within our contemporary globalized and media-saturated cultural situation.