Julian Rosefeldt’s work investigates the rituals, structures, and absurdities of everyday life. It bears witness to a rationalising view from a distance and a precise gift of observation akin to the objectifying methods of the natural sciences. The investigation is a persistent articulation and extrapolation of both unconscious and well-known stereotypes and routines of everyday life. In terms of content, the result of this rationalising investigation can be classified in two categories. For one, Rosefeldt exposes nonsensical and absurd elements in the logical and logistical processes of everyday life: he discovers irrationality within rationality. For another, he designs the opposite scenario: in authentic, irrational human expression, he emphasises the serial, mechanical and automatic elements, his work thus centres on the paradoxical image of society as an organic machine.

Julian Rosefeldt’s early work was marked by the rationalising answer to this paradoxical image. The attempt to understand society as an image machine can be summarised in the question “how does it work; what is its structure?”. It calls for an archaeology, which determines the cement between the individual devices that make up the machine: what is it that keeps the individual parts together, if it is obviously not an “inner tie”, unless God were a machine? In the academic discourse of recent years, this question has been discussed not least in the shape of visual culture criticism, in which the production of cultural meaning appears as “glue” (of the brand “meaning”, “significance” or “emotion”) between basically autonomous data, devices, technologies, and layouts. Around the turn of the millennium, there appeared indeed a sudden and unfamiliar identity between academic discourse in culture or media criticism and artistic practice, which took an archaeological approach to the media.

As in the case of a number of artists, this interest was reflected in Julian Rosefeldt’s compilation and structuring of found materials: for Global Soap (2000) he compiled hundreds of excerpts from daily soaps worldwide, which he catalogued, as in an atlas, according to topoi, solemn formulas and standardised gestures.

The result of Global Soap is not lacking in a certain humour – precisely because it exhibits the mechanical reproduction of emotions, of stereotypes. Yet this humour remains subordinate to the academic interest, which advances the compilation as an object of study and piece of evidence.

Julian Rosefeldt’s focus has hardly changed in recent years, but his artistic methods have. From an academic collector and organiser, he has developed into a director who works with characters – stereotyped social groups at first, then individual characters. These steps reflect the shift in focus within this media-archaeological postulate: it is not meaning that is the organic element in culture, the glue which fits the data and devices of the cultural machine together.

Instead, it is the mechanical element, which breaks into the dynamics of life, culture and meaning, structures them and thus gradually submits them to its regime. By reversing the critical gesture, humour has come into its own in critical discourse – humour, they say, brings a certain truth to light. The truth of humour, however, differs from the truth of critical discourse. The truth of humour is not static or unreal, but dynamic, temporary, affirmative, and invulnerable. The Latin root of the word literally means moist, liquid, and it is hardly far-fetched to set this meaning against the media-archaeological metaphor of glue.

According to Henri Bergson’s theories on the mechanical elements which encrust life, humour is to laugh about both the stereotypical and the non-conformist, and therefore asocial, behaviour of others. This postulate is confirmed by the tradition of clowns and comedians, in particular by the “kings of comedy”, by inventing characters such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. In their early films, we become witness to a repeated, mechanical ritual of bodily failure. The humour of these films originates not so much in the plot, namely a failure to come to grips with certain situations. Even before the plot begins, humour is predetermined in the characters, because the character is foiled by the basic principles of a living body in society – mobility, adaptability, the ability to follow the flow of life and society. The body of the humorous characters is un-adapted, unwieldy. It is a machine, which fails to produce “normality”, which is incapable of socially befitting behaviour. Laughing about the body is a social corrective, a punishment according to Bergson, which reproduces social norms and the balance of power; but above and beyond the humorous character, it is also laughter about forbidden knowledge, about watching society at work – an insight into social structures, which exposes their codes of conduct and institutionalised inequalities.

Humour and slapstick in Trilogy of Failure (Soundmaker, Stunned Man and The Perfectionist) are therefore a logical consequence both of Rosefeldt’s earlier work, and of the tradition and laws of humour itself: the careful observation and investigation of the mechanisms of life and everyday living reveal the sphere situated between society and the machine and dynamic life, and this sphere can only be represented in stories of failure. The mechanical element is the origin and agent of humour – this also holds true for Julian Rosefeldt’s newer work.

To the extent that Rosefeldt has de facto become a director of slapstick with his work Asylum and in particular Trilogy of Failure, the object of its focus has also shifted. The paradox of irrational and mechanical forces in everyday life is no longer a means of reflexive criticism except to illuminate the blueprint of society. Instead, every single element of the blueprint becomes a tool that produces certain actions and scenarios, which Rosefeldt now takes in a literal sense. In doing so, he creates consistent universes of images, highly metaphorical and symbolically overburdened, but also of a mechanical sobriety which insists on their precise, academic experimental arrays. The scenarios thus created no longer draw their aesthetic and dramaturgic force from ‘worldly’, discursive elements, but are complete auto-poetic systems which produce and reproduce their own elements.

The formal “framework” of the system is the stage. If a stage appears as the scene not of theatre, but of a video installation, it becomes an even more impressive metaphor, a likeness and laboratory for symbolic life-worlds: living rooms that stand for ‘accommodating yourself’, workplaces that stand for social role images. What distinguishes them from the theatre is the camera, which permits the introduction of a further level of reflection between the events on stage and the viewer, a level which the theatre does not permit in this way – the instance of observation. In Trilogy of Failure, the stage scenarios turned tableaux vivants are ultimately connected to the camera’s line of vision, creating a closed, controlled universe with an onion-like structure. It places next to the protagonist his alter ego, next to them both it adds the first-order observer in the shape of a horizontal camera, and above these a second-order observer in the shape of a vertical camera perspective. And so on. This is reminiscent of the structure of films such as The Truman Show or the first movie of the Matrix series: each universe of perception is enclosed in itself and appears as a complete reality. Yet what is purposely absent in Rosefeldt’s construct of camera realities is suspicion and desire for knowledge, an escape from Plato’s allegorical cave and the TV containers. His work embraces the principle: the system is the system is the system. By using the stage as a scene of self-reproducing systems, Rosefeldt takes the opposite road from many theatre directors and performance artists of the past decades, who repeatedly rebelled against the “fourth wall” and in doing so made suspicion, in the place of illusion, the fetish of a projective realism. Rosefeldt, in contrast, closes off the stage, seals it, turns it into an autonomous space.

In formal terms, the closed loop has been the preferred tool in the video art of the past decade to produce this effect of a metaphorical autonomous framework, its content remains built on everyday and political stereotypes which, as the external precondition of the events on stage, are yet incorporated into these events – the snake has not yet bit its tail. Instead the characters of Trilogy of Failure, the Soundmaker, the Stuntman (Stunned man) and The Perfectionist, create this state; they are the truly autonomous ‘inhabitants’ of their self-created world, a system defined by the body and the feedback if its senses (which are therefore agents of the system). Niklas Luhmann describes the process: ”The self-observer carries out what he observes, and that is his reality. There are no more external criteria.”

Absurdity is often expressed not least in amazement, amazement at the fact that something works at all, although all probability contradicts reality: the battle of the protagonists of Trilogy of Failure for and against the machine versus life is not only a clownish Sisyphus story. Beyond and above clownish humour, the work also expresses the Kafkaesque and absurd dimension of the Sisyphus myth. The familiarity of the clown and the uncanniness of the godly and the bureaucratic are in balance, so that in the end, there really is no story anymore. The stage turned autonomous system tells the mythical story of Sisyphus devoid of content, as a complete empty structure – a story of the balance of powers, the balance of the co-dependent, contradictory energies of destruction and creation. One might almost discern a hint of imported Asian philosophy. However, the story which the tableaux vivants of Trilogy of Failure are really telling as systems is no more and no less that the story of the stability of each and every system, the story of the mutually dependent antagonism of life, which wants to break out of its bounds, and the mechanical forces, which want to become a machine.