Art Monthly no. 483, February 2025 (pages 18-19)
The London-based artist, curator, author, filmmaker and provocateur challenges audiences to engage with art actively and collectively.
Here is an automated ‘out of office’ reply:
I received it on the second of January this year. The email account holder and message author: artist and filmmaker Stanley Schtinter.
British, London-based and a notorious provocateur, Schtinter’s subtle subversion of the now ubiquitous ‘away from keyboard’ convention was, though initially unexpected, entirely in keeping with the strategy of novel détournement that he brings to many of his projects. What separates his approach is that the de rigueur attitude of flat, apolitical irony or nihilistic detachment that frequently colours such interventions is sidelined in favour of a solemn, deadpan and at times chillingly forthright sincerity. Within and through the work’s chosen register comes a challenge to audience passivity. We are urged to actually take seriously the business of critical engagement, especially when it concerns forms of cultural production and socio-political action that function as ideological anchors for the perpetual mooring of neoliberal theory and practice.
In many ways today, contemporaneity is often complacency under the guise of a self-conscious, networked hyper-vigilance. For Schtinter, it is never enough (as it is with so many) just to alert audiences to our captive state. Some indication of a possible alternative future is also always present, turning our attention away from a mediascape of pure artifice to a liberatory horizon that could and should be aimed for.
Here is an example: while I prepared to write this text, Schtinter’s email intervention began to do its work of interrupting the unconscious and unquestioning flow that internet communication’s technologies seek to make so seamless and seemingly ethereal – what else is the term ‘cloud computing’ deployed for, other than to obscure the industrial heft and ecological dangers of digital information technologies? And, what is email after all? One of the key indicators of either the bureaucratisation of everyday life or the optimisation of the self as working node in a global gig economy. ‘Life admin’, as the saying goes. What, also, was the epiphany spoken of in Schtinter’s ‘out of office’ message? Was it the religious festival said to take place on 6 January? Or was he being more literal? Was he, in fact, awaiting the arrival of either a divine being or vision, a kind of Blakean experience of transcendental lucidity? All interpretations were possible, all were in play, and so the intervention spoke volumes about Schtinter’s critical mode and methodology. It did so to such a degree that it seemed to invalidate the need to speak to him in the first place. Perhaps this was an automatic, as opposed to entirely deliberate, critical sleight of hand on his part – a small gesture by a practised virtuoso of subversion. Either way, the email correspondence was no longer necessary.
Last Movies, 2023, is one of Schtinter’s best-known pieces. A publication, film programme and, according to the artist’s website, ‘multimedia work’, the project ‘remaps the century of cinema according to the final films watched by some of its cultural icons’. Essentially, Last Movies is a compendium that, through the presentation of research, brings together the last films that key cultural figures watched before they died. A kind of arch meditation on death that both flirts with the allure and problematises notions of celebrity, permanence and media immortality, Last Movies is a fitting introduction to Schtinter’s entire practice because it carries many of his hallmarks: the emphasis on extended duration (marathon screenings of the discovered last films, for example), an interest in finding uncanny points of entry into cultural discourse (fame, film as a medium, mortality), the single idea functioning as a conceptual axis point from which several formal realisations can be made (the publication, the film programme and so on).
Last Movies is also a distinct work that can be used as a key with which to interpret (or reinterpret) and understand other instances of Schtinter’s thinking through making. This seems to be the correct way to encounter his oeuvre and, to risk making a wider point about interpretation in general, it is perhaps one of the most productive ways of thinking through and about the production of contemporary art by artists working today. Instead of judging cultural producers purely on the basis of discrete and self-contained objects that are supposed to signify in complete isolation as physical (or immaterial) manifestations of a finished process, could it be more useful to consider artworks as introductions into the ways that a given artist thinks and sees the world? Would it be a richer experience if the process of viewing, understanding and evaluating was not governed by one’s potentially epiphanic encounter with a single artwork in a given space, but rather through a cumulative method, in which the artist’s point of view is articulated, deepened and expanded by a relational network that contains their entire body of work? The responsibility of bringing that knowledge of an artist’s previous activity to each new encounter rests again with an audience. This is likely why such an obvious mode of engaging with cultural production seems to be dying out. In other words, research, the business of getting to know an artist on their own terms, is often left aside in favour of the Instagrammatic instant, a quasi-phenomenological engagement with whatever is in front of the viewer. Doing so with Schtinter’s work is a risky and reductive exercise because it flattens the work’s critical scope and guts its sophistication, leaving behind what could erroneously appear as mere ‘trickster’ stunt or trollish gimmick.
Take the work Important Books (or, Manifestos Read by Children), 2021–22. In this project, first released online across one year in a weekly schedule of uploads to the Whitechapel Gallery website, Schtinter recorded children reading political and artistic manifestos by the likes of Valerie Solanas, Antonin Artaud, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Gustav Metzger. What could be read as an exercise in trite juxtaposition, bringing the cute together with the transgressive, was actually a canny response to a regressive Conservative government policy. Little known because not necessarily one of the party’s billboard nationalistic or neoliberal retractions (in the shape of reducing immigration or the public sector), the decision (as the Guardian reported in 2020) to ban English schools from using ‘resources from organisations which have expressed a desire to end capitalism’ was still a sinister and serious curb on intellectual and political freedom of thought, and an attempt to curtail (at formative source) any opposition to a market-driven status quo.
Schtinter’s newest moving-image work is Schneewittchen, 2024, a feature-length, palimpsestic retelling of Snow White. The film features almost no footage and is instead centred on an English-language audio recording of the Swiss writer Robert Walser’s titular German play (published in 1901), itself a reworking of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale (published in 1812). Schtinter’s film, with its minimal visual content composed largely of a black screen, interspersed with seemingly unrelated shots of passing clouds, is formally also a remake of the Portuguese director João César Monteiro’s feature film Branca de Neve, 2000, which performed the same feat with a Portuguese-language version of Walser’s play. A remake of a remake of a remake, then. While on the surface another puckish engagement with cultural production, Schtinter’s film nevertheless functions as both a challenge to the culture industry’s amnesiac thirst for endless remakes of commercial dross and as a kind of Brechtian confrontation with the spectacular expectations imposed on a patronised viewing public (the two are intimately bound up with each other). The project further frustrates the conventions of easy access required of moving image works, which must all now be available for dissemination in a myriad of digital forms, many of which make it at least feasible for the viewing public to watch works as isolated individuals in their own homes. Schtinter’s film will, according to the artist, “only ever show in its analogue format, so it will always be an event to travel to and never streaming or screening digitally.” For Schtinter, the political power of collective viewing is something worth fighting for.
Talk of Brechtian distanciation, critiquing the culture industry, anti-capitalist stances, anti-spectacular image making and so on connects Schtinter to a critical tradition that may, in some ways, seem classically modernist. That is to say, there is an intention behind all of the work and a belief in something better for audiences and artists alike. Of course, such impulses are not hallmarks of a given period, but their scarcity in the present can make them appear as remnants of a retrospectively more engaged past. The ultimate agenda across Schtinter’s work, it seems, is an attempt to create a form of critical awareness regarding the destruction of certain intellectual and volitional faculties that humanity has fought to preserve over centuries — namely, the autonomy of thought and action.
Morgan Quaintance is an artist, writer and the author of Ironic Resonance, Anti-sound Design and Radical Cacophony in Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu, published 2024.
The London-based artist, curator, author, filmmaker and provocateur challenges audiences to engage with art actively and collectively.
Here is an automated ‘out of office’ reply:
“In medieval England, one hundred and eleven days each year were without work: sacred holidays of abandon and merry-making. Today there are eight (almost all of which are in tribute to the bank). I am taking back my 111. I will be away from email until Epiphany. Please call if it is urgent. Thank for your understanding.”
I received it on the second of January this year. The email account holder and message author: artist and filmmaker Stanley Schtinter.
British, London-based and a notorious provocateur, Schtinter’s subtle subversion of the now ubiquitous ‘away from keyboard’ convention was, though initially unexpected, entirely in keeping with the strategy of novel détournement that he brings to many of his projects. What separates his approach is that the de rigueur attitude of flat, apolitical irony or nihilistic detachment that frequently colours such interventions is sidelined in favour of a solemn, deadpan and at times chillingly forthright sincerity. Within and through the work’s chosen register comes a challenge to audience passivity. We are urged to actually take seriously the business of critical engagement, especially when it concerns forms of cultural production and socio-political action that function as ideological anchors for the perpetual mooring of neoliberal theory and practice.
In many ways today, contemporaneity is often complacency under the guise of a self-conscious, networked hyper-vigilance. For Schtinter, it is never enough (as it is with so many) just to alert audiences to our captive state. Some indication of a possible alternative future is also always present, turning our attention away from a mediascape of pure artifice to a liberatory horizon that could and should be aimed for.
Here is an example: while I prepared to write this text, Schtinter’s email intervention began to do its work of interrupting the unconscious and unquestioning flow that internet communication’s technologies seek to make so seamless and seemingly ethereal – what else is the term ‘cloud computing’ deployed for, other than to obscure the industrial heft and ecological dangers of digital information technologies? And, what is email after all? One of the key indicators of either the bureaucratisation of everyday life or the optimisation of the self as working node in a global gig economy. ‘Life admin’, as the saying goes. What, also, was the epiphany spoken of in Schtinter’s ‘out of office’ message? Was it the religious festival said to take place on 6 January? Or was he being more literal? Was he, in fact, awaiting the arrival of either a divine being or vision, a kind of Blakean experience of transcendental lucidity? All interpretations were possible, all were in play, and so the intervention spoke volumes about Schtinter’s critical mode and methodology. It did so to such a degree that it seemed to invalidate the need to speak to him in the first place. Perhaps this was an automatic, as opposed to entirely deliberate, critical sleight of hand on his part – a small gesture by a practised virtuoso of subversion. Either way, the email correspondence was no longer necessary.
Last Movies, 2023, is one of Schtinter’s best-known pieces. A publication, film programme and, according to the artist’s website, ‘multimedia work’, the project ‘remaps the century of cinema according to the final films watched by some of its cultural icons’. Essentially, Last Movies is a compendium that, through the presentation of research, brings together the last films that key cultural figures watched before they died. A kind of arch meditation on death that both flirts with the allure and problematises notions of celebrity, permanence and media immortality, Last Movies is a fitting introduction to Schtinter’s entire practice because it carries many of his hallmarks: the emphasis on extended duration (marathon screenings of the discovered last films, for example), an interest in finding uncanny points of entry into cultural discourse (fame, film as a medium, mortality), the single idea functioning as a conceptual axis point from which several formal realisations can be made (the publication, the film programme and so on).
Last Movies is also a distinct work that can be used as a key with which to interpret (or reinterpret) and understand other instances of Schtinter’s thinking through making. This seems to be the correct way to encounter his oeuvre and, to risk making a wider point about interpretation in general, it is perhaps one of the most productive ways of thinking through and about the production of contemporary art by artists working today. Instead of judging cultural producers purely on the basis of discrete and self-contained objects that are supposed to signify in complete isolation as physical (or immaterial) manifestations of a finished process, could it be more useful to consider artworks as introductions into the ways that a given artist thinks and sees the world? Would it be a richer experience if the process of viewing, understanding and evaluating was not governed by one’s potentially epiphanic encounter with a single artwork in a given space, but rather through a cumulative method, in which the artist’s point of view is articulated, deepened and expanded by a relational network that contains their entire body of work? The responsibility of bringing that knowledge of an artist’s previous activity to each new encounter rests again with an audience. This is likely why such an obvious mode of engaging with cultural production seems to be dying out. In other words, research, the business of getting to know an artist on their own terms, is often left aside in favour of the Instagrammatic instant, a quasi-phenomenological engagement with whatever is in front of the viewer. Doing so with Schtinter’s work is a risky and reductive exercise because it flattens the work’s critical scope and guts its sophistication, leaving behind what could erroneously appear as mere ‘trickster’ stunt or trollish gimmick.
Take the work Important Books (or, Manifestos Read by Children), 2021–22. In this project, first released online across one year in a weekly schedule of uploads to the Whitechapel Gallery website, Schtinter recorded children reading political and artistic manifestos by the likes of Valerie Solanas, Antonin Artaud, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Gustav Metzger. What could be read as an exercise in trite juxtaposition, bringing the cute together with the transgressive, was actually a canny response to a regressive Conservative government policy. Little known because not necessarily one of the party’s billboard nationalistic or neoliberal retractions (in the shape of reducing immigration or the public sector), the decision (as the Guardian reported in 2020) to ban English schools from using ‘resources from organisations which have expressed a desire to end capitalism’ was still a sinister and serious curb on intellectual and political freedom of thought, and an attempt to curtail (at formative source) any opposition to a market-driven status quo.
Schtinter’s newest moving-image work is Schneewittchen, 2024, a feature-length, palimpsestic retelling of Snow White. The film features almost no footage and is instead centred on an English-language audio recording of the Swiss writer Robert Walser’s titular German play (published in 1901), itself a reworking of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale (published in 1812). Schtinter’s film, with its minimal visual content composed largely of a black screen, interspersed with seemingly unrelated shots of passing clouds, is formally also a remake of the Portuguese director João César Monteiro’s feature film Branca de Neve, 2000, which performed the same feat with a Portuguese-language version of Walser’s play. A remake of a remake of a remake, then. While on the surface another puckish engagement with cultural production, Schtinter’s film nevertheless functions as both a challenge to the culture industry’s amnesiac thirst for endless remakes of commercial dross and as a kind of Brechtian confrontation with the spectacular expectations imposed on a patronised viewing public (the two are intimately bound up with each other). The project further frustrates the conventions of easy access required of moving image works, which must all now be available for dissemination in a myriad of digital forms, many of which make it at least feasible for the viewing public to watch works as isolated individuals in their own homes. Schtinter’s film will, according to the artist, “only ever show in its analogue format, so it will always be an event to travel to and never streaming or screening digitally.” For Schtinter, the political power of collective viewing is something worth fighting for.
Talk of Brechtian distanciation, critiquing the culture industry, anti-capitalist stances, anti-spectacular image making and so on connects Schtinter to a critical tradition that may, in some ways, seem classically modernist. That is to say, there is an intention behind all of the work and a belief in something better for audiences and artists alike. Of course, such impulses are not hallmarks of a given period, but their scarcity in the present can make them appear as remnants of a retrospectively more engaged past. The ultimate agenda across Schtinter’s work, it seems, is an attempt to create a form of critical awareness regarding the destruction of certain intellectual and volitional faculties that humanity has fought to preserve over centuries — namely, the autonomy of thought and action.
Morgan Quaintance is an artist, writer and the author of Ironic Resonance, Anti-sound Design and Radical Cacophony in Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu, published 2024.