Anri Sala: “1395 Days without Red” and Other Videos

Anri Sala, one of the most gifted and accomplished visual artists of his generation, was born in Albania and lives and works in Berlin. Michael Fried first encountered Anri Sala’s video, film and installation art in 2005, through his video Long Sorrow, and has been following his work since. This collection of essays focuses on what Fried identifies as a few major and recurring themes in Sala’s work, such as the independence of the image and sound tracks, the treatment of absorption, and the overarching issues of anti-theatricality and presentness. Throughout the book, which is illustrated with numerous colour stills from Anri Sala’s videos, Fried pursues a highly personal approach of combining extremely fine-grained structural and thematic readings of individual works with philosophical and theoretical reflections often drawing on the texts of major thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition. In an essay on Sala’s video Air Cushioned Ride, for example, Fried finds analogies between the latter and certain passages in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early Notebooks, while in the essay on Sala’s Mixed Behaviour Fried turns to the eighteenth-century author and philosopher Friedrich Schiller to provide a framework for his observations. In these brief essays packed with ideas, Fried also provides unique insight into his own renowned critical and theoretical work, which has exercised such great influence in art history and criticism over the past half-century. Employing in these moments a conversational tone, speaking directly to the reader in his own voice about his own work, he reviews the genesis and development of his theories and critical constructs in light of Anri Sala’s videos, creating a highly productive back and forth between Sala and the contemporary art world on the one hand and Fried’s often more historical studies and concepts on the other. For readers of Michael Fried, the result is not only a stimulating discussion of Sala and the artistic and theoretical tradition in whose light his work can be viewed, but also a vital reflection on Fried’s own foundational ideas, how they came to be and how they are relevant today.