ARTPULSE MAGAZINE

Melvin Martínez: Material Sensations and the Artificial Flesh of Color

raisa — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:53:58 +0000

By Barry Schwabsky

“Each writer creates his precursor,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges. “His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future”(365). Likewise with painters. And one reason why Melvin Martínez counts as a painter is that he is showing us, in a new way, why Jackson Pollock still matters. Or perhaps it would be better to say the same thing in a different way: He is reminding us that the legacy of Jackson Pollock is still up for grabs-can still be, in Borges’s word, modified.

Melvin Martínez, Milky Way, 2011, mixed media on canvas, 80” x 83”. Courtesy of Melvin Martínez and Yvon Lambert, Paris.

From color-field painting through happenings to minimalism, a great deal of the American and international art of the last fifty years has been expressly or implicitly based on an interpretation of the consequences of Pollock’s work, particularly his all-over, poured paintings of 1947-50. By now, one would have imagined these issues to have been completely played out. “History is bunk,” declared Henry Ford, and sometimes our approach to art history can be just as shortsighted. But Pollock’s work is still alive-not yet entirely reduced to fodder for antiquarians-and the proof of it lies in the work of one of the best young painters of the moment.

Just so: Offering something substantially new in painting, Martínez at the same time shows us a new Pollock, one we may not have seen before, and therefore opens up new possibilities for painting in the future. That’s a heavy responsibility to place on the shoulders of such a young man, someone might admonish me. But it’s not my fault, would be the reply; Martínez has already taken it on himself, perhaps in all innocence, but now it’s up to him to handle it.

Melvin Martínez, El Gran Poder, 2011, 8”x10”. Museo de Arte de Ponce Collection.

For Allan Kaprow, influenced by Harold Rosenberg’s essay “The American Action Painters” and Hans Namuth’s Life magazine photographs of the painter at work, the upshot of Pollock was the performative aspect of artmaking-art as process, as event. For the critic Clement Greenberg, on the other hand, Pollock’s lesson had to do with unity and opticality, and would lead above all to the stain paintings of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis; Donald Judd followed Greenberg’s lead but substituted materiality for opticality, citing as the radical and forward-looking qualities in Pollock’s work its “large scale, wholeness and simplicity” and the fact that “the dripped paint…is dripped paint…not something else that alludes to dripped paint” (195).

BETWEEN OPTICALITY AND MATERIALITY

In their energy and (usually) their all-overness, the paintings of Martínez surely take their cues from Pollock, more than from any artist in between; but they remind us that they need not and should have to choose between Greenberg’s opticality and Judd’s materiality. For Martínez, these seemingly opposed qualities are one and the same. For it is the material density of the surface, the outrageous tactility of them, that dissolves all sense of immutable form and sets color afloat. If Martínez’s paintings possess a radiance, a refulgence that has not often been seen in painting since certain masterworks of Pollock’s, such as the aptly named Lucifer (1947), it is precisely because he sets his colors clashing against each other with a brash vibration that prevents the eye from ever pinning them down to a single spot. Here, the opticality of color is entirely congruent with the materiality of the surface, in which not only is pushed and dragged and churned-up paint exactly that, but all kinds of heterogeneous materials like glitter and artificial flowers and plastic bows are exactly and only what they are, too-all the while adding their own particular notes to the great clashing chord of the painting’s color. One has seen materials like these before, to be sure-for instance in the “Pattern and Decoration” art of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and then in certain species of East Village art that were influenced by P&D; but Martínez uses these gaudy materials in a way that is precisely not decorative, not ornamental, nor as primarily evocative of any particular subject matter. He uses them in a completely painterly way, as the artificial flesh of color. He displays them and dissolves them in one and the same gesture.

Collage # 4, 2011, mixed media on canvas, 72” x 60". Courtesy of Melvin Martínez and Yvon Lambert, Paris.

But brilliant as Martínez’s color may be in its synthesis of tactility and opticality, there is an even more original aspect to his reinterpretation of Pollock. Greenberg and Judd may have differed over opticality and materiality, but they agreed on one thing: the unity, uniformity, wholeness, and simplicity achieved in his all-over paintings. This view was certainly shared by painters like Barnett Newman or Morris Louis or Frank Stella or Brice Marden and sculptors like Judd or Tony Smith. The new art, they were all certain, would be an art of singleness and unity in which the part would be assimilated to the whole. Yet a glance at nearly any Pollock painting-at least, a glance taken after one has seen a Martínez painting-shows that his practice had nothing in common with such an approach.

Look at Pollock and you are immediately, insistently aware that you are being affected by a multitude of marks and gestures that have been woven together, a tangled web, in this marvelous unity. A Pollock is not simple, as Greenberg and Judd would have it; on the contrary, it is dauntingly complex. It is precisely this multiplicity, this microscopic level of sensation, which has been missing from most of the painting (and the sculpture) that has developed out of Pollock’s direct legacy. (Perhaps some of the performative derivates, those following from Kaprow’s branch of Pollock’s lineage, have retained something of this complexity.) Martinez brings this richness, this density, this infinitesimal level of detail back to abstract painting. Perhaps it is only through the experience of his work that we begin to realize how much we’ve been missing this pictorial opulence.

PAINTINGS TAKES A CLOSE-UP

But what about the paintings Martínez makes that use an isolated form against a more or less uninflected surround? Doesn’t this reintroduce the figure/ground dichotomy that all-over painting did away with? Well, yes and no. Because if you look at the densely painted central areas of these paintings-or painted and collaged, as in Milky Way (2011)-you won’t find a figure; that is, you won’t find a defined form. Instead you will find a concatenation of paint-events that, however they impact each other, do not combine to form a shape. Each mark retains its own identity, and never becomes part of a description of some greater whole. I notice that one of these paintings, from 2010, is called Portrait, and it is as if Martínez had decided to silhouette a segment of one of his all-over paintings in order to present a sort of portrait of his mark-making-of the kinds of painterly activity that go into the making of his all-over fields. So despite appearances, the same logic of the all-over applies here-he has merely elected to analytically separate the support in order to highlight some of the separate components of what would have been the larger field. The paint itself is taking its close-up.

Portrait, 2011, mixed media on canvas, 36” x 42”. Courtesy of Melvin Martínez and Yvon Lambert, Paris.

Because of its complexity of structure, resolved into an all-over coloristic accord, Martinez’s painting contains a complexity of feeling that has been rare in recent abstraction. Here we find sensuality and humor, tenderness and aggression, boldness and sensitivity, ardor and skepticism-each emerging from moment to moment as a distinct but transitional material sensation. The abstraction of these paintings constitutes a refusal to submit these sensations to a story with a beginning and an end. We remain at liberty to enjoy them as they come-as long as we have the stamina, for these sensations are strong. In this, Martínez has changed the past of painting and will affect its future. That’s why Martínez matters.

WORKS CITED

Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions. Ed. Eliot Weinberger. Trans. Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Judd, Donald. Complete Writings 1959-1975. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975.

Occupying Corporate Hype: The Strategic Satire of The Yes Men

raisa — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:41:06 +0000

The Yes Men: Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum.

For over a decade, The Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) have been engaged in an extended campaign of covert activism that is part performance, part satire and part fifth-column insurgency. In many cases, they do this through a sort of satire-by-agreement, posing as corporate executives and expressing ideas that are only slight exaggerations of their targets’ stated positions. In the process, they’ve managed to sell some truly ridiculous ideas to their audiences of industry insiders, including an algorithm for assessing when it’s desirable to trade human life for corporate gain (The Golden Skeleton program) and the SurvivaBall, a cumbersome portable cocoon designed to help the super-rich weather a major environmental collapse. In this interview, we spoke with Mike Bonnano of The Yes Men about their history, their thoughts on art and activism, and their current and future plans.

By Jeff Edwards

Jeff Edwards - I’ve seen you described as culture jammers, performance artists and even gonzo journalists. How do you describe yourselves and what you do?

Mike Bonanno - We’re primarily activists, but we’re also storytellers. We try to tell stories as creatively as we can, and we provide journalists with excuses to write about issues that they care about.

J.E. - You’ve been at this since 1999. How did you get started? Did you fall into being The Yes Men, or did you have a plan from the beginning?

M.B. - We fell into it; it happened to us. We put up a fake website for the World Trade Organization, and it was supposed to be a satire. To our great surprise, people thought we really were the WTO, and we got invitations to attend conferences as the WTO, so we started doing it.

J.E. - Over time, have you noticed a change in the way people and corporations respond to you after your ruse has been revealed?

M.B. - There hasn’t been a big difference over time. The usual corporate response is to very curtly say that they’re not responsible for whatever we say. They tend to try not to engage with us, because once they engage they’re dealing with us on our own terms.

The Yes Men posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC) representatives presented Vivoleum (a fictitious Exxon oil made with human flesh) to 300 oilmen at Gas and Oil Exposition, Canada's largest oil conference, held at Stampede Park in Calgary, Alberta, June 2007. Still from The Yes Men Fix the World, 2008.

J.E. - Your mix of deadpan performance and satirical imagery evokes comparisons with a pretty diverse group of artists who do institutional or cultural critique, including Andrea Fraser, The Guerrilla Girls and even Banksy. Do you ever think about your connection to such artists, and have you learned anything from watching them in action?

M.B. - We definitely are aware of what artists like that are doing. We enjoy it, and sometimes we’re inspired by it. We’ve come to realize that our practice is actually maybe even more closely aligned to theater than visual art. It’s taken us years to realize that.

J.E. - Whenever activist artists catch the art world’s attention, there’s always a danger of their being lured away from political engagement in favor of satisfying market and institutional demands. How do you feel about that, and when do you think that working with the art market becomes a betrayal of one’s political ideals and agenda?

M.B. - Well, obviously you have to figure out where you’re going to spend your time, which is limited. If we’re going to participate in art-world things, the question is: Can it subsidize some of the actions that we have planned? And if it can and if it’s worth it, then we do it. There’s a pretty crass commercial kind of logic to it. Sometimes with an art show you have to decide, what audience is it reaching, and how is it reaching them? There are many different things we do to try to do raise enough money to keep going, and some of them also generate a certain amount of exposure so that we can be evangelists for our cause.

J.E. - You’ve got an interesting relationship with the press. Media coverage of your actions is important for spreading your message to a wider audience, and my guess is that a lot of people in the news business like what you do, because it makes for good TV. How do you view your dealings with the media?

M.B. - We see what we do as collaborating, trying to feed the media good stories. For the most part, I think our relationship is pretty good. Journalists have a really hard job and a lot of work to do, and we try to make that job a little easier and give them some excuses to write the stories they want.

Halliburton SurvivaBall will save rich and corporate people from abrupt climate change. Production still from The Yes Men Fix the World, 2008.

J.E. - There’s a moment in The Yes Men Fix the World when a reporter confronts Andy after he’s posed as a HUD official in New Orleans. Andy tells him that that your subterfuge allows for ‘truth-telling where normally there would only be lies.’ What’s your response when journalists or people who have been taken in by one of your impersonations accuse you of unethical or harmful behavior?

M.B. - Well, we’ve never been accused by anyone of breaking the law, and we’ve never been charged with any crime. What we do isn’t illegal, so that’s one thing. The second thing is that it’s actually highly ethical. We immediately reveal the hoax. We assume the mantle of somebody in power so that we can have the voice that they’re normally given. They shouldn’t be given the right to that voice just by virtue of their wealth. That these established sources, these established voices are established merely because they’re from a large commercial firm is a problem. It’s a problem with the way we communicate in culture, and it’s the reason that we have a version of democracy that’s weighted so heavily toward big business. It’s not really democracy; it’s oligarchy. That’s the problem, and that’s what we’re trying to deal with.

J.E. - Based on what I saw in the film, it seems completely nerve-wracking to impersonate a corporate executive before a large and potentially hostile audience. After doing it so many times, has it become any easier?

M.B. - In some ways it is easier, because we know what’s going to happen. We know we’re not going to get arrested and won’t be subject to some kind of violent response. There are a bunch of things that we always expected in the beginning that turned out not to be true. After a while we were slapping our foreheads, thinking: ‘Of course we’re not going to be attacked. This is an environment where everybody’s wearing business suits.’ It’s really much more predictable than that.

Gilda, The Golden Skeleton. Production still from The Yes Men Fix the World, 2008.

J.E. - In The Yes Men Fix the World, you also talk a lot about how so many people have uncritically accepted Milton Friedman’s free-market gospel of greed. I’m also amazed at how posing as a trustworthy expert allows you to sell the most ridiculous ideas and images to your audiences (Gilda the Golden Skeleton and the Halliburton SurvivaBall being two great examples). Do you ever get discouraged about trying to fix the system when people seem so susceptible to the first person who comes along with a nice suit and a surplus of charisma?

M.B. - I think that kind of thing can be a challenge, but what we’re seeing now with the Occupy movement is that people are fed up, and they’re not going to take it anymore. They are rising up, and what it requires to change it is a mass movement. For a non-violent mass movement to succeed it has to have an incredible amount of support. Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy to do these things the violent way, you just need a relatively small force that’s really well trained. But that’s not what we’re interested in; we’re interested in doing this nonviolently, like they did in India to achieve independence, and like the Civil Rights movement did to change the system at the time. What we want to see out of Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement now is a way to build a new consensus that’s not founded on the idea of growth that comes with inequality.

" width="500" height="276" />

Phone Story, 2011, website screen shot. Phone Story is a game about the dark side of the smart phone industry. Created by Molleindustria in collaboration with The Yes Lab.

J.E. - Have you ever been recognized by one of your target audiences up front, before you’ve even had a chance to speak?

M.B. - We got recognized once by an audience in Calgary. One person in the audience recognized us and texted the conference organizers. They had to figure out what to do, which isn’t easy, because they had to remove their keynote speaker in the middle of the speech. It took them until we finished the speech to do it, and in the meantime it became a very funny scene, because they ended up dragging us off stage, which was great for our film. Now we actually try to make sure that they do find out, so that they can do something. If you have that intervention, it’s much more dramatic. For every story you need your protagonist and your antagonist, and if your antagonist shows up in the flesh and tries to do something against you, it’s much better.

J.E. - A few weeks ago, a stock trader named Alessio Rastani went on BBC and said that he dreams of the next recession because of the money he could make from it. A lot of people think the whole thing was a Yes Men hoax, though you’ve publicly denied it. Has your reputation led to other outrageous moments like this getting misattributed to you, and how do you think this particular incident reflects on you and what you have accomplished so far?

M.B. - We’ve definitely heard from other people who said they were inspired by what we did and who have done similar things, so we’re happy about that, and we’re inspired by other people doing amazing things. We just had a funny moment the other day where we were in a brainstorming session and Michael Moore showed up, and a bunch of the ideas we were taking about were things he did in the past, and he said, ‘Yeah, do it. This is how you do it; this is exactly the way.’ He basically said the same thing we always say, which is, ‘Yeah, rip us off.’ That’s what it’s all about. We ripped off other people so that you can rip us off. In a sense, ripping off is the wrong phrase because it’s just the way the culture’s always worked, as far as I can tell: through imitation, mimicry and repetition.

Occupy Wall Street Actions, Fall 2011 (Bullfight on Wall Street). Photo credit: Bess Adler.

J.E. - While I was preparing for this interview, the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests were constantly in my mind. You visited Zuccotti Park a week or so after the occupation started. Assuming the protests continue long enough, will you be doing any joint actions with OWS in the future?

M.B. - We’re a part of a group that’s called Occupy the Boardroom, and we’re part of working groups that are developing creative actions and creative communication. We’re part of a large, diverse group of people who are all working toward the goal of creatively communicating the messages of the movement. There are several different groups we’re working with and several different initiatives we’ve been a part of. But we don’t claim authorship of any of it; we’re just part of many people doing these things.

J.E. - With the Yes Lab, you seem to be moving into a new phase in which you’re networking with a lot of other activist groups to pool resources and ideas. How did this come about, and where to you want to go with it?

M.B. - Basically, we recognize that it’s more effective for us to work with organizations that have ongoing campaigns. Little actions that create some amount of publicity are often most effective if there’s a campaign that they tie into, so our entire effort now is in training more Yes People through this action-based training program that we call The Yes Lab. If we work with an organization to create an action that supports one of their campaigns, then the people in the organization can go on and do it again themselves. It’s sort of that ‘teach a man to fish’ kind of idea.

J.E. - Recently, I read about Phone Story, a Yes Lab iPhone game dealing with the monstrous working conditions that exist all along the consumer electronics supply chain. Apple pulled it from its app store almost immediately, and you responded by reformatting it for Android. The game pushes activism into a really new type of venue. Are you planning any other activist projects in novel settings?

M.B. - Right now we’re not really planning anything, but rather working with different organizations. In the case of Phone Story, we worked with a couple people who had the idea of putting that together and who were associated with Friends of the Congo. Primarily it was Molleindustria, the video game designer, and also one of Andy’s former students who came together with Friends of the Congo. But really what we’re doing there, and what we do in all these cases, is support campaigns that we think are good. They have to be something that helps with social or environmental justice. That’s kind of where we’re at right now.

J.E. - Do you have a vision of what you’d like the world to look like when your work is done, or do you prefer to stay focused on the specific issues you’re dealing with at any given moment?

M.B. - I think you can’t avoid having an idea of what things should look like if you’re participating in something like the Occupy Movement. Ideally, we would have a system that isn’t based on the idea of maintaining runaway growth. There are certain core principles that have to be changed in order to make this system work. One is that we can’t base everything on the idea that we can continue to grow, because there’s an endgame to that. We have to take these very basic, very simple ideas and enact them in a way that creates a fair and more just society. One version of that is anarchism, which is ground-up government. There are aspects to that kind of thing that are really viable; for example, participatory budgeting, which is in use in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and has worked incredibly well for shifting the priorities of the community. When a community actually has to vote about what they want their money to go to, typically they do support things like education and infrastructure, typically they do enact a more democratic and fairer way of distributing funds. Those sorts of steps can be taken in the right direction, but also we could do a complete overhaul. The question is the realisticness of actually doing a total ground-up restructure. It’s difficult because of all the powers that would oppose that, that have sunk costs in the existing system.

J.E. - Finally, if you were going to hang it all up tomorrow and had a chance to go for the proverbial ‘one last big score,’ who would be your dream target, and what would you like to do?

M.B. - I think right now, there’s got to be a way to tackle the problem of the influence of money over government, so in a way the dream target would be the lobbying and banking systems that are implicated with one another. The problem is that the corporate world is like a hydra. You cut off one head and it grows three more, so we’re not going to single out a corporate target. That doesn’t help fight the system. It works as a tactic, but it doesn’t work as a strategy. The dream is really to establish a different kind of system that’s more just and sustainable. There’s a scene from the Charlie Chaplin movie The Great Dictator where he plays a Jewish barber who basically steps in to Hitler’s place and makes an announcement that changes the course of history. We need an opportunity like that to come along. That sums it up right there; that’s the kind of chance we need, and we don’t really see it on the immediate horizon. I think what we can invest our hopes in right now is mobilizing as many people as possible to occupy everything, so we can turn the tide.

Interview with Santiago Sierra

raisa — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:11:29 +0000

“We as artists have to find the way how to confront the state and capitalism.”

Santiago Sierra is Spain’s most well-known international artist. To some, his work is polemic; to others, it is pertinent, but it does not leave anyone indifferent. It reflects on the contradictions and paradoxes of the capitalist system, of which the art world is just another part, albeit a sophisticated one. In this interview, we discuss NO, Global Tour, his work in progress, as well as globalization, capitalism, the art world, and its discontents.

BY PACO BARRAGÁN

Paco Barragán - Are we living in the “NO” era?

Santiago Sierra - Yes, clearly. The most ubiquitous “NO” is from the state and capitalism. It’s a “NO” written in capital letters in order to domesticate the citizen. From the perspective of those at the bottom, there is double negation: from the father to his son, and from the son to the father, which is a different kind of “NO.”

Santiago Sierra, NO Global Tour (Time Square, NY), 2010/11. Copyright Santiago Sierra / VEGAP.

P.B. - This reminds me strongly of Naomi Klein and her book, No Logo, as when you open it you see “No Choice,” “No Space,” “No Jobs,” which is a good description of what’s going on right now.

S.S. - Yes, it’s interesting that you recall it, as I recently tried writing the word “shock” in huge letters in a Sydney, Australia, port called Hungry Mile, where there were long lines of workers during the crisis of 1929. We tried to make it the biggest graffiti in the world, so Naomi Klein is appropriate.

P.B. - Let’s talk about NO, Global Tour, which started in Luca, north of Italy on July 18, 2009. It is a huge sculpture saying “NO” in Arial type font. It’s a work in progress that has visited cities like Berlin, New York, Brussels, Washington, Toronto, and Miami, and it will visit Iceland in January. How did this work come about?

S.S. - I was saying to myself that I wasn’t doing it properly, or maybe yes, but maybe it was too much work, especially when you make, for example, 12 pieces a year. And when you make a piece each time in a different country it’s not only a big effort, but also difficult to hit the nail on the head each time; and it’s also an important effort in terms of understanding a context and a reality which isn’t mine. On another term, it didn’t really reflect the life I have now, which is far more stable than before where my life was nomadic, a kind of road movie. So, a multi-contextual piece like the “NO” was the solution, as this is what came in mind when I considered the society we live in, the political system, and its whole framework. So a big “NO” was the right answer. And I also liked the “NO” because it’s the only language that you can have against power.

THE POPE AND THE ROAD MOVIE

P.B. - The NO is interesting because it’s visually very strong but semantically open. It has crossed iconical areas and regions; for example, in East Germany it went through mining and other economically depressed regions, it also passed in front of NATO headquarters, the European Parliament, Wall Street, and Times Square, and you even projected the NO on the Pope’s back in Spain. Was there a road map?

S.S. - Yes and no. There were places where it was important that the NO would go through, like the city of London, that is, spots that concentrate a huge amount of evilness. In London, you could also see the death counter: the counter of the number of deaths worldwide according to the American Institute of Statistics. So, there are spots clearly selected, like NATO, the great temple of slaughter and barbarity, and the other great temples of slaughter and barbarity: the Pentagon and Wall Street. In Germany, it was more metaphorical. I was not only interested in monuments of power, but also in places where people struggle to make ends meet because of the economic depression. In Detroit, for example, we visited General Motor’s headquarters and all the neighboring areas, which are totally empty now, like ghost towns. And the NO will travel to Iceland. And yes, last August we projected a NO on the Pope’s back in Madrid, and that was a huge pleasure for me!

Santiago Sierra, NO Global Tour (Zucotti Park, New York) November 2011. Courtesy of Team Gallery, New York.

P.B. - Iceland is an interesting example because the people carried out a ‘putsch’ against capitalism and its powers, and decided not to pay back what its bankers had squandered.

S.S. - Yes, but Iceland is a country of 300,000 people and everyone practically knows each other. In Europe, for example in France, Germany, or the United Kingdom– there are generations and generations of deeply-rooted crooks and thieves that have had control over abuse and larceny since immemorial times, actual whole lineages that you can trace to the Middle Ages. Now, the Icelandic solution is enviable, but in the rest of Europe that is unimaginable and we are heading towards a fascist dictatorship.

P.B. - This work reminds me a lot of the loud NO you did for the Spanish Pavilion at Venice in 2003, where you hid the word “Spain” from the pavilion and only people with a Spanish passport or ID could access it. A NO against nationalism, the art world, globalization…

S.S. - Yes, of course. We are talking about art and culture, but you have to treat it like your worst enemy, and this is my guideline. And why should the art world be my enemy? Because the art world is not what it claims to be. We are in front of a theater where always the same is being sublimated over and over again: plutocracy, hoarding, and the enrichment of a small group at the expense of a large majority. And the art world is part of that, and part of that surplus that we grant the collector as a connoisseur. I’m against that, and against the whole idea of “nation” and against “globalization.”

We should be very cautious, especially with “globalization,” as it looks like we’re facing a new and highly topical issue by using a new word, but in reality it’s a phenomenon that already advented with the Renaissance and the birth of Capitalism, first very slowly and now at a runaway pace.

P.B. - You also said “NO” to the National Art Prize in Spain. Why? Didn’t you have have the slightest doubt? It was after all a 30,000 euros prize.

S.S. - Well, it’s a considerable amount of money, and everyone appreciates it, especially in economic times like these. But this is also the price you pay for being able or experiencing the pleasure of expressing yourself. On the other hand, I have to say with all honesty that it wasn’t something I totally improvised. I knew people that had already been proposed for the prize, so the fantasy was already there. I mean, I already fantasized about what I was going to do in case I was given the prize.

P.B. - Let’s talk about Wall Street and, especially about Occupy Wall Street, which is connected with the 15-M “indignados” movement in Madrid. For the past 15 years there has been more political art or at least art with a political focus. I see a clear disconnect between our art world and society in general, as we can see with these above-mentioned movements. What is your opinion about it?

S.S. - No, I don’t think so. For example, I always see artists at Plaza del Sol square in Madrid in the 15-M movement. Maybe there is more political art among the younger generations. In the 90s, I was living in Latin America, in Mexico.

SELF-ORGANIZATION INSTEAD OF DEMONSTRATION

P.B. - Yes, but Latin America, and in Mexico in particular I see that art deals much more with society and urgent social and political issues, unlike the U.S. or Europe, where we work on a more formal level.

S.S. - Well, there are artists that are political, like Democracia in Spain. But having said that, I don’t like to manifest myself or participate in demonstrations, as that is a kind of secular procession in which instead of asking the Virgin for a miracle, we ask a guy with a tie to solve our problems. The guy with the tie is not there to solve anything, he is just there to maintain the status quo.

What I think is that people should not go out and manifest themselves, but start doing things for themselves– explore forms of self-organization on every level, and start breaking the ties with the state: stop working for the state, don’t let your children join their armies, overthrow the actual educational system and provide a parallel one, and so on. Basically, get out of the system. It’s about deploying an active and creative opposition in order to create a new society.

Santiago Sierra, Veterans of the Wars of Afghanistan and Iraq Facing the Corner, 2011. Copyright Santiago Sierra / VEGAP.

P.B. - In this same sense, don’t you think that what we do in the art world hardly ever has real repercussions in society?

S.S. - Well, I do think that art can be very powerful, and it depends on how you use it. As a matter of fact, art is the favorite tool of politicians, the state and capitalism; art is what the Catholic Church uses with its churches and its performative rituals, in order to fascinate the believer; and art is also all the rubbish television we see where everything is like a fantastic Hollywood script where the dead actors don’t even know they are actors.

I have this polemic with Artur Żmijewski, who is curating the Berlin Biennale, as he is insisting that I shouldn’t make a piece of art but a political action; and this is rather funny as he is a curator, and from the Berlin Biennale.

I think we shouldn’t push the envelope like that, and each one of us should be useful to society doing his or her work, and not become a problem to society. We as artists have to find the way we confront the state and capitalism, and the same should be valid with an architect, a doctor, and so on.

P.B. - Your work has given rise to controversy on many occasions. Let’s recall your action on New Street in Birmingham, England, (the city’s busiest shopping street) in 2002, titled Person Saying a Phrase, with a homeless person holding a sign which said: “My participation in this project could generate $72,000 profit. I am paid 5 pounds.” We always find in the heart of your praxis the Marxian concept of “labor as added value.”

S.S. - Time, body, and intelligence are considered as if they do not belong to us, as they are being auctioned on a market to the high bidder. That’s how the system works. And when we talk about the art world, it looks like we are talking about a golden cage, a special place, and art can be many things, but it also forms part of the capitalist system, and as such it houses the same injustices.

P.B. - Yes, these contradictions are typical of the art world. Thank you for your time.

The Paradox of Fake Revolutions

raisa — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:26:12 +0000

Nowadays political art is a fashionable label, and many practices want to present themselves as such. Art becomes a space for protest, but at the same time any critical power that it may have is co-opted in a kind of protective environment where everything can be said, but where everything is tightly controlled.

By Pablo España

There is a well-known anecdote about the Spanish dictator, Franco, who attended the inauguration of the I Bienal Hispanoamericana de Arte, which took place in Madrid in 1951. When he was about to enter the room where they were exhibiting the artists supposedly critical of his regime, he was warned: “Excellency, this is the room of the revolutionaries.” The dictator responded: “As long as they only revolt like this …” Those artists represented Spanish informalism, a movement on a par with abstract expressionism, in which the autonomy of art gutted the content of artistic expression. All of the artists passed for intellectuals in opposition to the dictatorship, and when their works started being exhibited in the United States, art critique saw only the perversion of the principles of abstract expressionism. Even though the artist’s labor was a purely aesthetic task, when this took place in a dictatorship, it could only be understood as silence and, hence, complicity. Beyond the specific context, this narrative can be construed as a metaphor of how art that wants to be political is often neutralized by the very system of art.

ARTISTS IN TROUBLE

In a recent interview¹, Alexey Plutser-Sarno, a member of Voina, the Russian collective of artists and activists, was asked if he saw similarities between that group’s situation and that of Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei, given that both are being persecuted by the authorities in their respective countries. The answer could not be more significant: “Yes, our situations are very similar. The difference is that we are making real protest art, which scares the authorities. We are stirring young people to action; we are setting an example of public resistance.” If, on the one hand, Plutser-Sarno admitted the obvious, that both his collective and Ai Weiwei are being harassed for their opposition to the power of the state, he pointed out a fundamental difference centered on artistic praxis and its political effectiveness.

Voina, The Palace Revolution, September 2010, St. Petersburg.

The Chinese artist works with critical images that circulate in art institutions and are directed at the contemporary art audience. His political problems, however, are the result of his international renown as an intellectual critical of the Chinese regime (in point of fact, officially, his detention arose from a tax issue). For its part, the Voina group works in public spaces with direct actions of frontal opposition (such as the one that consisted of overturning police cars in St. Petersburg and resulted in judicial prosecution), and its tribulations are those of an activist involved with anti-authority social resistance movements.

While for the Chinese government the problem is not the oeuvre of Ai Weiwei, but rather his declarations against the regime, for the Russian government Voina’s works, its actions are the problem. In the case of Voina, the political dimension of its discourse is inseparable from its praxis. When Alexey Plutser-Sarno speaks of the difference between Voina’s case and that of the Chinese artist, he is telling us that we would have to see if Ai Weiwei’s work, without being accompanied by his declarations, would be as inherently subversive for the authorities.

For now, let us set aside considerations regarding Russian and Chinese authoritarianism vis-à-vis the permissiveness of Western democracies in which artistic censure is no longer exercised by depriving individuals of their liberty, but instead through cultural politics and cultural budgets. Let us concentrate on whether the artistic practice itself contains or does not contain antagonistic elements.

POLITICS OF THE MARKETPLACE

Many artists creating critical or political artworks seem to triumph with little difficulty in art institutions and in the marketplace, although this appears to be a great contradiction. Institutional critique, which during the 1970s and ’80s tried to destabilize the art system from within, has already become a new orthodoxy within the current world of art. As Simon Sheikh notes: “What does it mean when the practice of institutional critique and analysis has shifted from artists to curators and critics, and when the institution has become internalized in artists and curators alike (through education, through art historical canon, through daily praxis)? Analyzed in terms of negative dialectics, this would seem to indicate the total co-optation of institutional critique by the institutions (and by implication and extension, the co-optation of resistance by power), and thus make institutional critique as a critical method completely obsolete. Institutional critique, as co-opted, would be like bacteria that may have temporarily weakened the patient-the institution-but only in order to strengthen the immune system of that patient in the long run.”² Let us now consider all of the artists involved in the “cultural wars” who are present in expensive collections such as the case of Hans Haacke.

Video still from The Yes Men Fix the World, 2009. Photos courtesy The Yes Men.

Nevertheless, it is true that what is produced in the marketplace cannot be patently appreciated or condemned based on its origin. The urban artist Banksy sold a piece for 80,000 pounds to help the Voina group with the payment of its bails and that of other Russian political prisoners. Under the slogans “”Dilettantes, rise up against art” and “Dada is political,” the First International Dada Fair in Berlin (1920) took place in the gallery of the collector and dealer Otto Burchard, who also produced it, and the Dadaist group of Zurich already had a relationship with the gallerist Han Coray dating back to 1917. It is widely known that the members and activities of the Internacional Situacionista were financed for some time at the end of the 1950s thanks to the sale of “industrial paint” in large quantities by Pinot-Gallizio before the Italian artist abandoned it due to his progressive estrangement from art. It is common knowledge that the Sex Pistols worked for a multinational, and that even though today they are considered just another product of the record industry, in their day they implied a true cultural rupture (rock-and-roll situationism, as their manager Malcolm McLaren declared). Fix the World, the latest documentary by The Yes Men, the artistic collective that best exemplifies the ideology of the anti-globalization movement, is being distributed by HBO. These are the same The Yes Men who have recently joined the international boycott against the Fourth Moscow Bienniale of Contemporary Art instigated by the aforementioned Voina group that accuses the institution responsible for the event of corruption.

Nonetheless, when political art is subsumed by money, transforming its creations into mere luxury objects destined for an elitist and speculative market, any critical power that the work may have is called into question. Furthermore, once it receives institutional critique, any cultural expression that in its day could have been subversive becomes part of the dominant culture.

If an artistic practice that considers itself political only directs itself to the marketplace and to art institutions, it cannot readily have political impact. To the extent that the same artistic practice is contaminated by other environments and is diluted in spaces other than those reserved for art, its political effectiveness would be greater-irrespective of the structure from whence it is projected, be it a museum or gallery, a record company, a protest or a movie or television distributor.

Nuria Güell, Displaced Legal Aplication #1: Fractional Reserve. "How to expropiate money from the banks" Handbook. (2009-2011). Courtesy of the artist.

In this sense, the Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas, recalling Mejor Vida Corporation-a social and political experiment centered on daily life, which distributed free tickets for public transport, barcodes to reduce the price of foodstuffs in supermarkets, student IDs for discounts or letters of recommendation using institutional letterheads from the museums and galleries that presented the project-wrote that when Mejor Vida Corporation started being noticed by contemporary art institutions, it began calling itself “project” and requiring authorship. However, this did not alter the way in which this “experiment” was activated through its connection with various autonomous resistance projects, and its community practices and “being art” served to multiply its presence and distribution capacity. More than a philanthropic entity, Mejor Vida Corporation considered itself to be an analyst of social and economic contexts within the capitalist system, making gratuitousness the basis for human exchange, thereby spurning money.

A NEW LEGITIMACY

Returning to The Yes Men, one of its members, Mike Bonanno, explained that its actions are intended to reach mass media so that people can be informed about the critical positions of the anti-globalization movement through the newscasts featuring their ironic “performances” (they prefer to speak about “corporate identity correction”). In one such action, they passed themselves off as members of the World Trade Organization, interacting at economic conferences and carrying the logic of the neoliberal politics of that organization to the point of absurdity (proposing, for example, the use of techniques for “recycling” human excrement so that hamburgers consumed in the First World could end hunger in the Third World).³

In the context of the crisis that is slamming Europe, the Spanish artist, Nuria Güell, is developing a project entitled Displaced Legal Application #1: Fractional Reserve, consisting of the creation of broadcasting and training platforms on strategies for expropriating money from banking institutions. This project that starts with art seeks and finds its legitimacy in its connection to autonomous, alternative and “indignant” movements that question the current situation of the subservience of politics to the marketplace and advocate civil disobedience. In this case, beyond the communicative activism that reveals how banks create debt, how they generate money out of nothing, the project becomes a pedagogical tool, an instrument of empowerment at the disposal of whoever may wish to use it to confront financial power.

Nowadays, critique should be an entirely public endeavor. Art that wants to be considered political can no longer be satisfied with its mere recognition in the field of art. It must function at the intersection of art and social movements; its legitimacy will come from there.

NOTES

2. “Notes on Institutional Critique” Simon Seikh, in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray, editors. May Flay Books, 2009.

3. In the documentary The Yes Men. Directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price, 2004.

Société Réaliste: Dealing with Politics, History and Social Commitment

raisa — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:22:07 +0000

Société Réaliste: Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy. Photo: Uros Hocevar, 2010.

Behind the Paris-based collective Société Réaliste, founded in 2004, are Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy, a Franco-Hungarian duo whose work has been increasingly embraced by the international art community over the past few years with shows in, among other major cities, London, San Francisco, Istanbul and, this last spring, Paris, at the prestigious Jeu de Paume. Empire, State, Building, the title of this first major solo exhibition, exemplifies several aspects of Société Réaliste’s practice, among which appropriation, deconstruction (the use of commas to subvert the original meaning and jeopardize the symbolic function of the name) and the use of language to spread their ideas in publications and lectures, but also as a blueprint for understanding other systems of representation, such as designs, buildings, maps and films. Their central goal is perhaps to understand contemporary politics via aesthetics (old and new) and the other way around. By creating mostly objects (maps, charts, inventories, graphs, sculptures, designs), films and environments (interior designs, exhibition presentations), which result from the use of methodologies and systems of representation used in fields traditionally understood as alien to art, such as mathematics, ergonomics, engineering and economics (to only name a few), they show the ideological purpose they serve and the power of images to create specific identities. This may be surprising, considering their longtime interest in revolutionary forms and rhetoric, as the result is often visually cold and clinical, as if the works on show had been shaped with the precision of a razor-blade incision. And although Naudy and Gróf might look like kids from the suburbs, they word their incendiary talks as a seasoned surgeon would wield a scalpel. Their next major exhibition will be the second phase of their project and exhibition Empire, State, Building, hosted by the Ludwig Múzeum in Budapest from March 8 through April 22, 2012.

By Catherine Somzé

Catherine Somzé - This last spring you presented the project Empire, State, Building at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. What did it consist of?

Sociéte Réaliste - Empire, State, Building is an exhibition that we have constructed through an ensemble of artworks at the intertwining between architecture and language. Our main focus regards how the political and economic powers produce spaces and discourses, i.e. talking spaces, places where you can only listen to objects. In other terms, how the various sceneries in which we live-rooms, buildings, cities, nation-states, continental alliances-imply a set of political practices and ideological panoramas, denying the possibility of a difference. Ecomorphism is an appropriate term to describe this phenomenon, shaping inhabitants in the form of their habitat, just like in Orwell’s book 1984, where the walls’ transparency presumes people’s own transparence. Far from a kind of anthropological origin of human spaces, this mythological past when people created their environments in accordance to their needs and capacities, Naypyidaw or Dubai serve as models for our century, completely designed cities with no other inhabitants than pure functions, no other constructions than global lingua franca symbols, no other project than photo-shopped views of urban volumes. The same type of encompassing strategies-controlling through edges and spatial syntaxes-can be found in the confiscation and confinement of languages. To that extent, the title of this project expresses both our target and strategy: the name of a building standing for the construction itself, and punctuation revealing a core meaning by the suspension of common locutions. To give an example of this approach, we have presented in this exhibition our first full-length film, entitled The Fountainhead. Our film is an appropriation of the 1949 eponymous Hollywood movie, directed by King Vidor and written by Ayn Rand. The original film tells the story of a modernist architect from New York, fighting in the name of individualistic values against the decadence of his time, advocating modernist architecture for an all-capitalist world. It is a Cold War movie using the weapons of modern art. In our version, we have removed the sound and systematically erased all the human characters of this film. What remain are 111 minutes of pure architectural settings, a decorum telling by itself an ideological story, the one of a world enclosed in its own fantasmagoric representations, where even voids are scripting the text of domination.

Société Réaliste, The Fountainhead, 2010, video stills, black&white, silent, 1h50. © Société Réaliste. Photo: Société Réaliste.

C.S. - Since its foundation in 2004, Société Réaliste has initiated projects for which it has consecutively become a trend design agency for Transitioners, an art corporation for PONZI’s and more recently a research unit for the project Ministère de L’Architecture. So, what is Société Réaliste exactly? And what is its purpose?

S.R. - Société Réaliste is a cooperative working from a broad range of perspectives and fields, such as territorial ergonomics, experimental economy, political design or social engineering consulting, deploying experiments that find their formalization in the domain of art.

C.S. - What does ‘Réaliste’ stand for in the name you have chosen for your collective? Is it a criticism of the status quo? Or what could be seen as the current triumph of economic and political cynicism?

S.R. - The origin of our name, Société Réaliste, is an inversion in French of ’Réalisme Socialiste,’ Socialist Realism, the official artistic style of the former Communist world. Originally, our collaboration started under this name as a curatorial project, aiming to exhibit aesthetic correspondences between this artistic movement, totally under a ‘socialist’ ideological control and various forms of contemporary art, eternally reproducing the values and views of the dominant order under the form of artistic artifacts. Our project quickly moved from a curatorial orientation to the creation of a cooperative for art production. Realism is a term, within this scope, underlining our constant interest not in salon chitchat or bunker daydreaming, but in the forms under which political and economical reality is produced, and the possibility to divert and hijack those chains of production.

Société Réaliste, MA: Culture States, The future is the extension of the past by other means, 2009. Mural inscription with the Limes New Roman writing system. Installation view, Istanbul Biennial, 2009. © Société Réaliste. Photo: Nathalie Barki

C.S. - Do you consider your work as political activism?

S.R. - Art is a production activity occurring in political contexts. Therefore, the question would be: Which art can pretend not to be a political activity? At the very moment when it becomes public, when it addresses subjectivities, art inscribes itself in the political field. The shape of a garden, the rhythm of a film, the transposition of an artifact in a sculptural installation, any production of form comes from a political situation created by political beings and generates a new state for the same beings. Is there any production that is not involved in a political paradigm? This is why such a thing as political art does not exist as opposed to a non-political art. There are antagonisms in political directions taken by productions, variations in scales and effects, differences in methodologies, in referent histories, in formal genealogies, contradictions in frames of perceptions or figures to which are associated the viewer, but none of them are strictly outside of a political order. What can escape social determination, if society is the continuous consequence of political struggles? Producing a several-meters-high sculpture of a dog made out of flowers is a political act, because it implies the mindset in which such a form is relevant and meaningful, a world in which the privileged position is the one of a poodle in the Garden of Eden.

Société Réaliste, Transitioners: London View, 2009, digital prints. Installation view, Hold & Freight, London, 2009. © Société Réaliste. Photo: Société Réaliste.

C.S. - In the face of the current crisis of ideologies and widespread skepticism towards protest as a valid strategy for change, do you think political activism can go further than being a commentary?

S.R. - The only concrete lesson we can extract from historical knowledge is precisely the unpredictability of history. Which external professional analyst could have predicted in December 2010 that civil societies of so many Arab countries would get rid of their dictatorial governments through massive protest? There is no political evangelism, no perfect world to build, no ‘good news’ to spread, no Bible for revolutionary politics. There are situations of conflict, sides to take, actions to lead, knowledge to advance, criticism to formulate, forms to shape, mantras to deconstruct. Protest is neither invalid nor the only way. Every single possibility to erode the dominant order must be taken. The ruling class of market economy has taken the ‘end-of-ideologies’ or ‘crisis-of-ideologies’ as a key concept of its renewed ideology. On the contrary, the liberal governments of the First World have never been as ideological as now, most probably because their axioms are sinking from all sides: Market-driven decisions are socially totally irresponsible, capitalism and democracy have definitively no links, the only realized internationalism is the globalization of oligarchy. Social orders are suicidal. It is our global duty to help them die. Euthanasia through all media, unite!

C.S. - And what do you think about artists such as Allora and Calzadilla and Thomas Hirschhorn, among many others, who started making art with a political agenda and then abandoned their initial quest in order to fit the demands of art institutions and the art market?

S.R. - We do not think about them. We do not know what is or was their agendas. We do not consider their quests. Artists are not of interest. Artworks are. And if it has been possible in the past to sell as artworks for institutions and markets dadaist busts, meter squares of void or canned shits, why would it be different today? Isn’t it unbelievable in the 21st century that no art collector has bought for the ornamentation of his/her private foundation garden the column of tanks from Tiananmen Square?

Société Réaliste, Empire, State, Building. Exhibition view, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2011. (Zero Euro, varnished sculpture in forex, 2011; Limes New Roman, enamel plates, 2010.) © Société Réaliste. Photo: Jeu de Paume, Arno Gisinger.

C.S. - At what point does an artist betray his or her initial political agenda and become an opportunist?

S.R. - Isn’t it already opportunistic to be an artist?

C.S. - You are currently developing a second stage of ‘Empire, State, Building’ that will be presented from March 8 at Ludwig Múzeum in Budapest. How does it relate to the exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris?

S.R. - The exhibition that we are preparing for Ludwig Múzeum will be a reformulation as well as an extension of the one we did at Jeu de Paume. In Paris, the scenography was influenced by the wunderkammer effect, artworks were on display on several levels of the walls, we used the space almost unchanged, linear and continuous. In Budapest, due to the size of the space on the one hand and to our will to displace our focus points, the exhibition will be thematized and organized following a topography. Most of the rooms will be broken by walls, blocked, following the repetition of a key form that will link our work on scales of perception to our ongoing research on utopian architectural patterns. The attempt to produce linkages between the writing of architecture and the architecture of writing will be treated in the exhibition space itself. In addition to several new works under the form of light boxes, sculptures, installations, inscriptions or typographic proposals, we will present at the Ludwig a new film, which will be a counterpoint to The Fountainhead. When The Fountainhead was interrogating the architectural narrative of a film, this new one will try to put the production of cinematic images at the timescale of a human life.

Push to Flush: Culture of Interpassivity

raisa — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 17:14:00 +0000

By Paco Barragán

I remember reading Culture of Complaint by Robert Hughes sometime toward the end of the 90s.¹ It’s still a very valid working title with an interesting perspective on American society by a still well-known Australian arts writer-his interviews on YouTube with Ronald Lauder and the Mugravi are a must see.

Witty, ironic, and at moments reactionary, the book offers a poignant reminder of the excessive linkage of political correctness and multiculturalism. Now, hardly a decennia of this new century has passed when this culture of complaint is constipated with a pervasive sense of “interpassivity.” We complain more and more because our society is absurd and we feel unfulfilled, dissatisfied, and anxious.

Let’s face it: (neo)capitalism has made us all “interpassive.” I wrote about it a while ago when I stated that collectors these days love the noble art of karaoke, which on its turn makes them interpassive. Just look around you: most collectors are buying the same stuff over and over again-but let’s not be too hard on them if we look at the artist list of most leading biennales!

View of Eugenio Merino's sculpture A Kick Away from Extinction. Photo: Paco Barragán.

Austrian cultural critic Robert Pfaller understands “interpassivity” as a concept opposed to “interactivity”, which entails “a delegated pleasure or consumption.”² One of the examples that Pfaller uses to exemplify his theory is the traditional taping of television program on a video recorder while the person is away; the program is recorded and then hidden away on a shelf without ever being watched again. How many videotaped series and programs do we have on our shelves that we haven’t watched again for years and years? Another pertinent example that Pfaller mentions in the same text, borrowed from Slavoj Žižek, is related to the American sitcoms that come with a laugh track included and makes thus viewers “interpassive.”

Nowadays in our media and technology-driven society, interpassivity is all around us. It’s sufficient to go to a museum like MoMA, visit a biennial like Venice, or stroll around an art fair like ABMB to see an even more exacerbated version of this phenomenon: thousands of people (especially youngsters) do not even look directly at the artwork, but rather enter the exhibition space with their digital or video camera or their iPhone and contemplate the artwork through their lens or display.

Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy have already explored in various books how the global screen defines contemporary times and how it deregulates culture’s time-space. This is yet another form of totalitarian fascist superstructure that provides nonstop canned, popular products, easy to understand, requiring no intellectual effort whatsoever, making us as spectators dumber and more passive.

I would like to push the envelope here a little bit further and argue that we are interpassive citizens in general, and in the art world in particular. Let me explain myself. The problem with the art world is that we are just much too focused on ourselves and too much disconnected from society. In the Arab Spring, the 15-M indignados movement in Spain, or now at Occupy Wall Street, there is hardly any important artistic presence. We like to sign manifestos-read Ai Wei Wei–post videos on YouTube or Facebook and send messages via Twitter.

And this is pure interpassivity, as we allow these social media to speak for us. But to the politicians, social media-representation–don’t really care, as they are only impressed and scared off by the physical presence-reality–of the citizen out on the streets and reclaiming public space, as happened in Madrid at Plaza del Sol or at Zuccotti Park. Maybe we should be honest for once: we consider ourselves the intellectual avant-garde of the system, but occupying the streets and going to the barricades doesn’t fit our sense of radical-chicness because our Prada shoes could get spoiled!

See now what Hughes wrote back then: “The academic left is more interested in race and gender than in class. And it is very much more interested in theorizing about gender and race than actually reporting on them. This enables its savants to feel they are on the cutting edge of social change, without doing legwork outside of academe” (Hughes 76). We could add that the major difference now is that it has become a real class struggle between the upper classes on one side and the middle and working classes on the other.

“The most celebrated,” writes Hughes once again, “widely reproduced and universally recognizable political painting of the 20^th century is Picasso’s Guernica, and it didn’t change Franco’s regime one inch or shorten his life by so much as one day. What really changes political opinion is events, argument, press photographs, and TV.” But art has lost that battle against television, cinema, advertising, and music, and its autistic, elitist, and bourgeois premises are unable to connect with real social or political movements.

NOTES

[1] Hughes, Robert. Culture of Complaint. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

2 Pfaller, Robert. “Backup of Little Gestures of Disappearance: Interpassivity and the Theory of Ritual.” Journal of European Psycoanalysis: Humanities, Philosophy, Psychotherapies 16 (2003). <http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number16/pfaller.htm>

Provoking Emotion with Form and Color. Interview with Regine Schumann

raisa — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 23:18:18 +0000

* All images are courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lausberg, Düsseldorf-Toronto-Miami.

Regine Schumann’s installations are much more than concrete art. Conceptualized as emotive spaces, Schumann’s color-filled light rooms provoke intense feelings of something otherworldly. A minimalist style affects everything from her choice of materials to the way she plays with form and color. One of her recent exhibits makes the visitor part of the installation itself; another encourages dialogue between art forms.

By Angela Boskovitch

Angela Boskovitch - You don’t make the actual materials for your work, but rather have them produced. Why is how they’re manufactured so important to your installations?

Regine Schumann - I develop the concept, draw the forms and choose the dimensions and colors of the panels to be assembled. These are special plates not normally available. They’re precision cut with a laser and then fused together. This work has to be extremely precise and done by hand. I don’t have the machines for such work. I’m a painter by training, and painters often use pigments with different materials to color them. That’s the case with these panels as well. Phosphorescent pigments mean that the colors in the plates are luminescent in black light. I’m kind of a pioneer here because I’m working with the firm producing the pigments to have them integrated directly into the manufacture of my panels. This means that the material is imbued with them, illuminating the entire panel rather than just the surface as it would if you painted them on with a brush. As a painter I used to do this work myself, but now I have it done, with the exception of the crochet work which links the plastic lights in a kind of net. That I do myself. I don’t find this to be something negative at all. My artistic approach begins with the room for the installation. That’s the decisive factor.

Regine Schumann, Connect, Back to Back, 2011, Fluorescent Plexiglass, 4.26’ x 6.56’ x 4.7”, 12 elements.

A.B. - And yet you don’t consider yourself to be a concrete artist?

R.S. - A lot of people think that I’m a concrete artist because the acrylic color boxes represent this concrete structure in a way. But if you really know me, then you know that I’m very playful, poetic and above all spontaneous in my work. I’m using the highest quality materials in how they’re assembled in plates, but I’m also playing with how to draw colors and forms into a room. I work in a way driven by feelings, where I sense the atmosphere of a room rather than work with mathematical dimensions. When I get started I’m thinking about the room and how it actually feels to be there. I’ve gone through it a hundred times in my mind. I like to create really intensive rooms with many different colors or to have one color that’s dominant while you go through the room. It’s about an atmosphere of intensive color which is like a shower. People say that I create a really special atmosphere out of our normal day-to-day life. When you’re in my rooms, it’s like you’re in another world. Not in the daylight installations, which are more like paintings, but under the influence of the black light, when the rooms are dark and all my pieces are glowing. Then you have the impression that there’s something special there from another world, separate from just normal art pieces. The installations really touch you.

Strudel, 2001, Plastiligth strings, fluorescent black light, diameter: Ø 13’. Installation at Galerie Baumgarte, Bielefeld. Photo: Ulrich Helweg.

A.B. - In your exhibit “Connect, back to back - Lichträume” at the Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie in Bielefeld, Germany, there’s an installation with four squares on the wall in combination with what resembles a mandala form. What experience is this designed to invoke?

R.S. - There you have both light situations. One room is rather dark with no daylight where these large squares hang on the walls and a large round crochet work piece is on the floor. It’s mind-altering in a way to stand there. I began netting the round piece in the middle until it became larger and larger, finally reaching a diameter of nearly four meters. I intentionally added many chain stitches in the middle so that it’s raised like a small mountain rather than being entirely flat. I wanted there to be plasticity within the round shape itself. Some nine colors are there in all. The large piece on the floor is very refined, almost moving within the room itself, scattering its light to the rather quiet squares on the walls. In the entire room there’s a really striking atmosphere of motion and movement which exists simultaneously with the quiet of the quadratic surfaces. I find squares to be quiet, while a circle is more dynamic with its movement. This is what’s experienced in this room.

Omega I, 2009, Fluorescent Plexiglass, 37.8” x 3.2” x 19”. Installation at Galerie Baumgarte, Bielefeld. Photo: Ulrich Helweg.

A.B. - And what about the boxes that contain forms in a series, which often find their way into your installations?

R.S. - These are works of successive additions that I really like-sequences of six to eight pieces. What I find really striking is the interplay of the colors. My materials not only contain luminescent pigments within them, but can also have black colors. In one hanging piece with a series, I use black. I’ve been using shapes in this way since the “Dreamteam” exhibit in Santa Fe. I was travelling this summer in Texas and Colorado and the idea came to me of combining black and white in a new way to expand my range of colors, and this is the result-a pallet of new, emotive colors. What’s important is the stirring aftereffect this now creates in my works.

A.B. - You also took part in the group installation “streng geometrisch” at the Museum Moderner Kunst Kärnten in Klagenfurt, Austria, where there was a piece that you could actually walk through. What’s your idea behind such a large work?

R.S. - This is really new. In the acrylic boxes there’s a flexible, moveable PVC band. I had the idea of using the flexibility of this material to create an installation which you could actually walk through, and this is it. They’re 1.32-meter-high panels put together with two screws, which is why I call the work “connect.” They create a new feeling because you’re actually able to walk through the work and become part of it. The panels are red and transparent blue, which intensifies in the dark light. My heart is really in large installations like these.

Regine Schumann, Dreamteam, 2006/2011, 60 Fluorescent balls and fine art prints (Alberto Frei). Installation at Art Santa Fe, 2011 in collaboration with Galerie Bender, Munich. Photo: Alberto Frei.

A.B. - And this is minimalist inspired?

R.S. - Absolutely. The idea is to work with minimal forms and colors in a way that the visitor can always experience something new in the rooms, in a world of form and color. That you’re there and yet can keep developing this in your own way is really exciting. This is industrial plastic, and to transform this into a kind of poetry is really inspiring. It’s a contrast in a way to all the man-made challenges constantly surrounding us. I need this as a comparison. There’s clarity in simplicity, and a kind of freedom can be indulged in through this world of form and color. This is what challenges me, especially in an installation such as this.

Touch Me, 2011, Plastilight strings, 9.8’ x 3.2’ x 23”. Photo: Eberhard Weible.

A.B. - In Madrid, you’re exhibiting concrete art together with your painting and sketches for the first time and in combination with the photography of Alberto Frei in “touch me.” How are you developing this?

R.S. - The plan for the show was developed with the gallery owner Rafael Pérez Hernando and is supported by the Goethe-Institut. The space will feature a comprehensive selection of my fluorescent light works together with Frei’s panoramic shots of Cologne and Texas-colorful landscapes which will also be shown under black light. “touch me” is imagined as a kind of dialogue between the plastilightstrings, large-scale fluorescent “colormirror works,” my previously unpublished drawings and Frei’s large-format photographs. In conceiving the space, I wanted to create a special environment that’s part of this substantive dialogue, one with day and night sides. The sculpture installations are made from fluorescent plastic materials-matter and light in a single entity-and play with color like chameleons in the room. The fluorescent colors produce a radiant glow during the day. Under the influence of the black light, the elements are transformed into pure light fixtures, and the room becomes awash in colored light. These luminescent “colormirror works” complement the photographic images in a very special way, moving them into adjacent rooms with their reflective surfaces. The photos react so brilliantly because they’re printed on a special paper, and they shine anew in black light. My drawings are also being shown for the first time. They’re not just of sculptures, but rather pieces which stand on their own where some are luminescent because they’re sprayed. With all these elements, I think this is going to be a very interesting dialogue.

* Interview conducted and translated from German.

Eva & Franco Mattes: Attribution Art?

raisa — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:27:45 +0000

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG. Project for the fake Nike Monument in Karlsplatz, 2003, print on canvas, 38” x 52.” Courtesy Postmasters Gallery, New York

Thanks to a friend, I recently read an impressive Walter Benjamin quote: “To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.” I loved it, because it is very telling of what I think not just about collecting, but also about appropriation, theft, and curating. All these actions have to do with taking something made by somebody else and making it your own property, legally or illegally.

Along with Benjamin, I believe that when you do this, you are actually freeing the object you take, allowing it to be more than just what it was in the intentions of its creator: more than just a photo documentation of a Rasta community, as in Richard Prince’s appropriation of Patrick Cariou’s work; more than just a toy, like in many Jeff Koons works; more than just a Walker Evans photo, like in the work of Sherrie Levine.

Eva and Franco Mattes are a couple of Italian-born, New York-based artists who made their first appearance on the Internet, under the label 0100101110101101.ORG. Their work has much to do with theft: recently, they even stole a radioactive ride from the Chernobyl area and reconstructed it in Manchester, United Kingdom. So, when ARTPULSE asked me to interview them, I thought it would have been interesting to interview some of the victims of their thefts instead: not to collect livid reactions, but rather to rouse a positive thinking about the beneficial consequences of this act of appropriation. We all know what they’ve lost; but what did they gain from Eva and Franco’s thefts?

By Domenico Quaranta

Domenico Quaranta - Dirk Paesmans is a Bruxelles-born artist and part of the artist duo Jodi. Started in 1995, their web project jodi.org was a revelation for many artists interested in making art on the Internet. In 1999, Eva and Franco Mattes copied Jodi’s website and published it unchanged on their own, 0100101110101101.ORG. In both cases, the website was the artists’ identity, and this brought the Mattes to take part in some shows in place of Jodi. “Copyright is boring,” they said. Dirk, do you agree?

Dirk Paesmans - I agree. If you don’t want your art to be used by others, then you’d better stay away from the Internet– keep it in your studio and show it in a gallery. On the Internet, if you can see it, you own it. Once you publish something online you are accepting that others may use it. And the other way around: our work is full of stuff we found online: code, images, sounds, it all comes from there and who knows who did it in the first place?

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG. Copy of www.Jodi.org, 1999, Website.

D.Q. - Darko Maver is currently a full-time professor of criminalistics at the Faculty of Criminal Justice, University of Maribor, and at the Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana. Back in 1998, the Mattes used his name to create the legend of an artist, wandering in decaying Yugoslavia and installing provocative sculptures in public spaces. Darko Maver was supposedly persecuted, arrested, and died in prison in April, 1999. In September, 1999, the Venice Biennale hosted a tribute to the dead artist. I asked the real Darko if he enjoyed this weird celebrity.

Darko Maver - I’m a criminologist, my job is to look at crime scenes to understand them. While, as far as I got, my homonym artist was setting up crime scenes as artworks, sculptures that looked like corpses. There is definitely something connecting our lives other than the name we share.

D.Q. - After resigning from his position of Director of the Holy See Press Office in 2006, Doctor Joaquín Navarro-Valls is now easier to contact. He was there when, in 1999, 0100101110101101.org bought the domain Vaticano.org and played the role of the Holy See for a whole year, rewriting encyclicals, collaging prayers, pop songs and fantasy tales, and hijacking pilgrims. Dr. Navarro-Valls, at the time you had to stop this bad joke. Twelve years later, what do you think about it?

Joaquín Navarro-Valls - Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn’t misuse it.

D.Q. - It was hard, instead, to get in touch with Philip Knight, chairman of Nike. I’m pretty sure that, in the end, my email was replied by a spokesman, but it’s interesting anyway. Mr. Knight, in 2003, Eva and Franco Mattes appropriated the Swoosh logo and the Nike identity, and made a weird advertisement campaign in your place. The action had legal consequences, and Nike lost the battle. Are you still upset?

Philip Knight - Many people compared this case to Andy Warhol using Campbell’s Soup for his paintings, but I don’t see any similarity. Warhol used to eat Campbell’s products and was celebrating its logo as an icon of his time. As far as I know this so called artists, who exploited our brand, don’t even wear our running shoes.

D.Q. - In 2010, Eva and Franco stole from a master of robbery. Using a popular Internet meme as a model, they made a fake Cattelan sculpture, and they showed it as a Cattelan in Texas, before claiming the prank. Maurizio, did they learn from you? And what did you learn from them?

Maurizio Cattelan - They didn’t steal anything from me– what they did is not “appropriation art,” I’d call it “attribution art” instead: they made an artwork and attributed it to me. I somehow feel better about having an idea added to my work than an idea stolen. To me ideas are like bicycles: if you got yours stolen, you are authorized to steal one yourself, but only after they stole yours, otherwise you’re breaking the chain.

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG. The Others, 2011, 10.000 photos found in personal computers.

D.Q. - One of the last Mattes’ works, The Others (2011), is a slideshow of 10,000 private photos found on personal computers, exploiting a hole in peer-to-peer software. Thanks to the Mattes, I was able to get in touch with Debra …., a 35-year-old woman whose touching photos of her pregnancy ended up in the slideshow. What the Mattes didn’t know when they exhibited The Others in Sheffield, United Kingdom, was that Debra lived there. She went to the opening.

Debra…. - When I realized the person in the photos was me, I was shocked. It was extremely embarrassing; these photos were not meant to be seen by anybody other than me and my family. But I’ve to admit that after viewing the whole work several times, my feelings started changing: I realized the victims of these thefts were not the subjects of derision; there is some kind of celebration in the amateurish way they are projected, maybe it’s the music. I was watching carefully the other visitors in the show and I sensed they had the same feeling. Then I realized that anyone’s life nowadays can be part of an artwork, willingly or unwillingly.

D.Q. - Between 1995 and 1997, the Mattes stole pieces of masterpieces from museums around the world. The first piece was a bottle top from an Edward Kienholz installation…

Edward Kienholz - In principle, I cannot excuse what they did, but I have to admit that I would have never noticed the absence of that bottle top, so I didn’t feel like my work was permanently defaced. One could put it this way: before there was one work, mine; now there are two, mine and theirs. As long as this doesn’t become a trend, I wouldn’t worry too much.

D.Q. - Recently, the Mattes - together with Corazon Del Sol - claimed the authorship of a piece by Dieter Roth exhibited in the show “Another Kind of Vapor” at White Flag Projects, Saint Louis, Missouri: a glass jar containing flies supposedly collected by Dieter Roth during the seminal exhibition “Staple Cheese (A Race)” (Los Angeles, 1970). The story goes that the whole exhibition (a series of 37 suitcases filled with cheese laying on the floor) was later thrown away in the desert by the gallery owner. Is the piece a fake? Or the remake of a lost original, mentioned also on Wikipedia?

Dieter Roth - I wish I had collected the flies myself! Unfortunately I didn’t. I think that the most profound experiences in life can’t be contained by gallery walls. All my life I tried to deal with this by creating art out of decaying materials, being it cheese or chocolate. I’m not surprised nobody doubted the jar with flies was a work of mine, as it resonates with my feeling that all objects in galleries and museum are what remains of the work, they are not the work itself.

D.Q. - Of course, the thieves themselves have been victims of a theft. If you befriended them on Facebook, you may have already realized that they are not the owners of their personal accounts. Back in 2001, when the Mattes were known only by their domain name 0100101110101101.ORG, the German writer and theorist Florian Cramer registered a very similar domain (0100101110110101.ORG), and for a couple of months made artworks and sent emails under that name. So, in order to fulfill the request from ARTPULSE, I asked Eva and Franco Mattes about it.

Eva and Franco Mattes - Plagiarism improves - but it still implies ideas. In the contemporary condition of information overload, the raw surplus of images, ideas and texts has become so great that the selection of material to plagiarize will inevitably be as much “creative” as the construction of those images, ideas and texts in the first place. If the aim of plagiarism is to make a radical break with “originality,” “creativity,” and its commodity value, plagiarists would have to give up the selection process and use some automatic method instead. But even such a method–for example, through a computer algorithm–presupposes artistic choice. It also does not prevent the use of resulting materials for the excess value called art. And if done in the name of established artists, it will just reinforce their brand. For us, “plagiarism,” “fake,” and “art” are just different sides of the same coin. We welcome outside interventions in our name when they perpetuate this perversity. The reverse is true as well: Don’t believe one second that through boycott or mere inactivity you would be able to free yourself from the market scheme of originality and creativity manifested through art and its double, plagiarism.

* Dirk Paesmans, Darko Maver, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, Philip Knight, Maurizio Cattelan, Debra, Edward Kienholz († 1994), and Dieter Roth († 1998) have been kindly played by Eva and Franco Mattes. Eva and Franco Mattes have been kindly played by Florian Cramer.

Fundació Sorigué

raisa — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 23:56:25 +0000

Fundació Sorigué night view. Courtesy Claus en Kaan Architecten

By Paco Barragán

Culture in general, and the arts in particular, are suffering, paraphrasing Chris Hedges, author of acclaimed The Empire of Illusion, because of “the utopian promises of unfettered capitalism and globalization.” Unlike in the United States, where most museums and contemporary art centers are primarily privately funded or have just a small public contribution, in Europe practically all arts institutions depend on state, regional or municipal funding. But this condition is about to change in most European states due to the severe economic crisis, and countries such as The Netherlands that traditionally have had a large and totally state-funded infrastructure are searching for new mixed models in which private funding takes on a major role.

Anselm Kiefer, Die 7 Himmelspalaste, 2005, mixed media on canvas.

In Spain, the situation is critical because most museums and art centers are suffering from heavy budgetary cuts, which are a consequence of the economic crisis and reduction of state income. This is killing many institutions, including MUSAC in Leon, Domus Artium (DA2) in Salamanca and even Centro Niemeyer in Aviles, Asturias, which opened its doors just six months ago. Acclaimed as the new Guggenheim, this impressive signature architecture will only operate from Thursday through Sunday after being paralyzed for a couple months.

This gives an idea of how complex the situation is in Spain, where some museums have no directors and other institutions have no programming budget. Consequently, whenever a private initiative makes a bid, stakes are high. This is the case with the private Sorigué Foundation in Lleida, as well as its future space for contemporary art and culture being built by renowned Dutch architect studio Claus en Kaan Architecten. Just 45 minutes away from Barcelona by high speed train, Fundació Sorigué was opened in 1985 by Julio Sorigué Zamorano, owner of the Catalan construction company Sorigué, and his wife Josefina Blasco Clemente. The various companies that comprise the Sorigué Group carry out their expertise in the civil works sector, from the construction of highways, tunnels, bridges and trains to residences, hotels, hospitals, schools, parking garages and hydraulic engineering projects.

Juan Muñoz, Piggyback Sequence of 4, 2001, bronce.

In recent years, Fundació Sorigué has been building a small, but interesting collection of around 600 works by national and international artists such as Juan Muñoz, William Kentridge, Bill Viola, Anselm Kiefer, Anish Kapoor, David Hockney, Julie Mehretu, Antonio López, Daniel Richter, Berlinde de Bruyckere and Jaume Plensa.

“We are fully aware that it’s a difficult moment in Spain, but we sincerely think it’s Fundació Sorigué’s social responsibility to give something back to society, and we are very confident that this project with Claus en Kaan Architecten will whisper fresh air into our lives,” says Ana Vallés, the director of the foundation. “On the other hand, we want to stage something new, different, that revolves around the concept of contemporary culture in a large sense. We understand contemporary culture, and particularly visual culture, as an ‘experience’ in which visual arts goes hand in hand with music, theater, DJ and VJ, literature, film and even culinary events. Basically, we want to reflect and analyze the complexities of our media-based and technological society and how culture fits in this new scenario.”

Let’s recall that postmodernism has put a challenging burden on most museums and contemporary art centers that still remains unresolved: From MoMA to TATE to Centre Pompidou, they are all stuck in the old categories of photography, drawing, sculpture, video, painting and performance while we are immersed in a visual culture in which everything is image and the way we receive, manipulate and distribute information is totally different compared to the former literary, or printing, culture. (Lets remember that scholars such as Debray, Jameson and Bourdieu have already questioned the authority of many intellectuals because their knowledge is the result of traditional typographic cultural forms and techniques.)

Julie Merethu, Half to rise, half to fall, 2008, acrylic ink.

“We are not interested in competing with traditional museums or contemporary art centers with a program of works from the collection and temporary exhibits,” ” says Artistic Director Julio Vaquero. “Even though we have some really interesting highlights in our collection, it’s just small, and that would be boring. And secondly, as the arts and culture are necessarily contradictory, we need to find new ways and new styles to render it accessible to new and especially young audiences.”

A SPACE FOR ARTS AND CULTURE

This new space for arts and culture that will be built entirely with private funding by the Fundació Sorigué is the result of a two-stage selection process in which Kees Kaan (Claus en Kaan Architecten), Carlos Arroyo (Carlos Arroyo Arquitecto) and Richard Gluckman (Gluckman Mayner Architects) were short-listed to propose their vision for the future building and park in Lleida.

In the end, Fundació Sorigué selected the proposal by Claus en Kaan Architecten, known not only for their buildings but also for their writings and teaching about architecture. The design thoroughly addresses the “warehouse” principle by configuring the building in an L-shape with formal, informal, representative and functional spaces in the park. This allows the building, visitors and surroundings to interact in many ways. It also becomes a symbol of gentle and subtle integration between the building and surrounding landscape. The structure of the building will allow for different configurations, which represents the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural philosophy of the foundation.

Is this the space for the 21st century we have been waiting for? How do entertainment, popular culture and mass media challenge the authenticity and prestige of high arts? Will visual arts and culture not compete as per definition, but revolve around a more critical and complex interpretation and self-awareness of visual culture?

These are some pertinent questions that Fundació Sorigué wants to tackle, eschewing the traditional dichotomy of containment and resistance.

Fundació Sorigué.  Alcalde Pujol, 4 25006-Lleida. Spain.

Phone + 34 973 282 080 / + 34 973 706 100

www.fundacionsorigue.com / info@fundaciosorigue.com

You Are All Individuals!

raisa — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:02:49 +0000

Castrum Peregrini - Amsterdam
Curated by Nina Folkersma

By Paco Barragán

One of the promotion clips of the show “You Are All Individuals!” showcases the famous scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) in which Brian, who is mistaken for the Messiah and tired of people following him, shouts out loud from the window: “You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You are all individuals.” Like goats, the crowd replies: “Yes, we are all individuals,” except for one who says: “I’m not!” Monty Python’s intelligent humor deals with the core of the matter. It’s refreshing to confirm how good humor never leaves us: “Expect the Spanish Revolution!” says a banner in Plaza del Sol’s square in Madrid where the ‘indignados’ with politics and capitalism are camped for a different future, hinting at the sketches, “I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition!”

Enrique Marty, 80 Fanatics (detail) (2008-10), sculptural installation, mixed media, Photo: Simon Bosch. Courtesy Castrum Peregrini, Amsterdam.

Beside the exhibition “You Are All Individuals!” curated by Dutch Nina Folkersma, the project comprises a magazine titled Fanatismo, an online fanaticism awareness test, workshops, and a public talk initiated and organized by Castrum-Peregrini.

In the actual wake of nationalisms, patriotisms, and populisms, both from the right and left wing, amid an economically, politically, and socially unstable state, being an individual can be not only hard, but equally frightening and lonesome. Individuals are not easily accepted let alone tolerated. Being an individual goes against the group and its rules and privileges, and being part of the group means feeling safe and benefitting from its power. The question that the exhibition poses is basically, how are we as individuals influenced by a group, and when does a group turn into fanaticism?

The exhibition tries to answer this by showcasing the old and new work of five artists-Yael Bartana (Israel/The Netherlands), Enrique Marty (Spain), Daya Cahen (The Netherlands), Köken Ergun (Turkey), and Daniel Svarre (Denmark)-and reflecting on the individual-collective dichotomy, which basically could be read in terms of assuming your responsibilities as an individual or, paradoxically, not assuming them as a member of a group.

Possibly the most noted presence is the work of Spanish artist Enrique Marty, whose smaller reinstallment is of the sculptural installation 80 Fanatics-different sculptures of himself in soldier uniforms with monster-like, bloody faces, together with the impressive wall painting, Sainte Guillotine, in which military as a religious ideology is reinterpreted both formally and conceptually in an obsessive manner. Next to the wall painting, but in an adjacent room, we find the film Birth of a Nation (2010) by Dutch Daya Cohen. This piece takes on the fascination for the military and its indoctrination techniques by looking at the Russian Military Academy Cadet School Number 9 in Moscow where girls age 11-17 learn how to become the ideal Russian woman and patriot. Outside, on the right, we find an older video work-Untitled (2004)-from Turkish artist Köken Ergun, in which the artist, in a tranquil and ritualistic manner, tries out different ways of wearing a headscarf with all its layered meanings in front of the camera. When we descend the stairs to the basement, which has been used as an exhibition space, we find one of the most compelling works in the show, We Lived Our Ordinary Lives (2011): a sound piece that reaches the listener from behind books and shelves with excerpts from guilty pleas from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the always contradictory concept of ‘due obedience.’ The omnipresent Yael Bartana presents a new optimistic reinterpretation of the legendary photographs of Leni and Herbert Sonnenfeld, in which Palestinians and Jews are portrayed together in a kibbutz in Tel Aviv looking into an optimistic future. Finally, the sculptural installation, Group 30 by Danish artist Daniel Svarre, consisting of 30 headless men holding each other in a closed circle, is a good metaphor of group forming, crowd behavior, fanaticism, and the scope of this interesting exhibition.

(May 7-June 12, 2011)