Friedl's second contribution to the documenta X was a short 32 second film on Betacam which played in the pedestrian underpass near Kassel's central train station, and ran day and night at the same location in a display on a television monitor. Dummy showed in a continuous loop, how a young man comes down the stairs, approaches a cigarette machine and deposits money in it. The machine jams and doesn't spit out any cigarettes whereby the man begins to shake it, unsuccessfully. When all of that doesn't help, he kicks the machine and leaves in frustration only to meet up with a junkie who is begging for money in the underpass. The man pushes the junkie aside, who then gets cocky and gives him a kick. To shoot the video, Friedl recruited a homeless man from Kassel's Friedrichsplatz, and played the young man himself. Like the two main characters, the cigarette machine was also merely called in for the shooting. The audience could easily identify the site of the showing as the scene of the film's plot; the machine, however, had disappeared. The symmetry between human and non-human actors is the structural moment of the work. The missing machine at the scene of the action makes clear that this film does not attempt to be a melodrama, no staging of an interhuman estrangement under the conditions of a two- thirds society, but rather an expressed plea for the mobility of forms clothed in the garb of socio-realism. Indeed, Friedl plays with the work premises of interventionary art which believes that its task is to compensate for a lack of social morals, however he doesn't want the aesthetic form to collapse on itself under the pressure of excessive demands, or to see it flattened to a simple illustration of the relationships. The underpass is not Plato's cave out of which the ignorant actors must first be led into the light of knowledge by a forgiving artist, but rather cinema: a reality which, because it technically recreates the imaginary, is more sufficient than human actors could ever dream. It is, in the end, the machine which intervenes because its program "money for goods" goes on strike. The presentation of amorality as technical failure, however, does not turn the young man into a soulless machine. Everyone knows that, asked for a donation, not all can be given nor can all give; rather it is up to the individual to discriminate individually. One is, in other words, always responsible and probably it is this more or less repressed insight which makes the sight of the loser so difficult to bear. [Roger M. Buergel, Peter Friedl, Verlag der Kunst: Amsterdam/Dresden 1999, pp. 80-84]

To set the scene, it is worth taking a brief look back at Friedl's contribution to documenta X (1997). For Kassel, Friedl designed an imaginary axis linking the pedestrian underpass on Treppenstrasse with the documenta hall. In the underpass was a video monitor on which one could follow a short repeating scene: the artist's unsuccessful attempt to purchase a pack of cigarettes from a cigarette machine echoed a beggar's unsuccessful attempt to bum money from the artist. Friedl struck the machine; the beggar kicked at Friedl. The film dealt with presence and absence, site-specificity and fiction-in short, it dealt with delayed acts of exchange. The site, that is, the underpass, undertook to mimic Plato's cave, the primal scene of cinematography. When one stepped out of this cave into the light, one found oneself walking toward a building with the letters KINO (cinema), which was not a cinema but Catherine David's discourse machine 100 Days-100 Guests (The Platonic light metaphor was dealt a setback by the fact that the letters glowed most intensely precisely at night.) Friedl's idiosyncratic play with ideas, terms, and formats could already be interpreted at the time as a commentary on the poetics of documenta X. This play did not conform to the genre of institutional critique, with its insistence on an outside. At the same time, however, it also did not seek to be a simple contribution to the combination of art, film, and discourse. The thrust of Friedl's imaginary axis was a pure and unvarnished attempt to frame documenta X from within and reclaim its aesthetic spirit for itself. [Roger M. Buergel, The ComingModernity in Peter Friedl: Work 1964-2006, exh. catalogue, MACBA: Barcelona 2006, pp. 268-69]