Turning to Minecraft and Zoom during the pandemic was “like being stuck between a rock and a hard place,” she said with a sigh. So did Steyerl’s teaching at the Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin, where she has held a distinguished professorship since 2010. One of the biggest shows of her career, a retrospective titled “Hito Steyerl: I Will Survive,” opened at the K21 museum, in Düsseldorf, in September, 2020, but quickly pivoted online when Germany lurched into its second lockdown. “For me, it’s always more research, storytelling, maybe technological experimental. “I never got into being an artist,” she proclaimed, a rare hint of pride in her voice. Steyerl harbors no romantic illusions about her work. In the past decade, she has created several large-scale installations, such as “Is the Museum a Battlefield?” and “Drill,” that stage savage, if also playful, critiques of the museums, galleries, banks, universities, and governments that have transformed contemporary art into “a hash for all that’s opaque, unintelligible, and unfair, for top-down class war and all-out inequality.” In September, when the German government attempted to award her the Federal Cross of Merit, she declined, denouncing the country’s failure to support the arts during lockdown. In 2017, Steyerl became the first woman to top the ArtReview Power 100 list, for her “political statement-making and formal experimentation.” It is easy to imagine how squeamish she must have felt upon receiving this honor. Capital is invisible.” And although people can make themselves invisible for laughs, as Steyerl does, they can also be made invisible by the state and by capital-“annihilated, eliminated, eradicated, deleted, dispensed with, filtered, processed, selected, separated, wiped out,” the voice observes, while the camera moves through an architectural rendering of a pristine, unpeopled luxury living space. Her silent physical comedy is counterpoised by a creaking animatronic voice that announces, “Today, most important things want to remain invisible. Mov File,” in which, across five satirical lessons, she hides behind placards, places boxes over her head, and smears a green goo on her face that allows her to blend in with the satellite-resolution targets shown on the green screen behind her. Among her best-known pieces is “How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. Her work is animated by an anti-capitalist, anti-surveillance sensibility cut by a measured and mischievous sense of humor. “We don’t really know whether your face is being used to train facial-recognition algorithms or something like that.” In the digital economy, free labor tenders a self-replenishing vein of gold for capital’s pickaxe.Īt fifty-six, Steyerl, who is of German and Japanese descent, has become one of the most revered figures in the mercurial world of contemporary art, with solo exhibitions at the Armory, in New York City, the Serpentine Galleries, in London, and the Academy of Arts, in Berlin. “Many of the other platforms are quite devious,” she said. Platforms seduce their users into performing the unpaid work of content creation-uploading the texts, photographs, videos, and music that are the raw material of the digital world-while mining their metadata to create new markets for corporate and military surveillance. The game is “a very good metaphor for how platforms really work,” Steyerl told me. Kicking kittens is, I believe, usually discouraged, but in Minecraft, the sandbox video game in which players extract raw materials-water, wood, sugarcane, coal ore, gold, lapis lazuli-and use them to craft three-dimensional Legolands, the stakes of violence seem lower. When I tried to balance a puffer fish on my own blocky hand to feed the kitten, I pressed the wrong button, and kicked it instead. Suddenly, a kitten wobbled out from between her legs. “I spawned a lot of them, so they have multiplied,” she murmured. Four black cats trailed her, in place of her shadow. One minute I was alone, and the next she was there-all yellow and smooth, except for the thick black cubes of her hands and her large, impassive face. It is more accurate to say that she simply appeared while I was waiting in the atrium of the Communist Party court, under a spectacular red banner from which the faces of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin bore down on me. It would be wrong to claim that I first met the German artist Hito Steyerl on such-and-such day, in such-and-such city, where the weather was bright or blustery, and that she arrived suitably dressed for this season or the next.
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