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Conferencistas: Susan May, Ousseynou Wade, Paulo Herkenhoff; Moderadora: Daniela Bousso.Auditório 1.
Relatores: Paula Alzugaray (resumo), Fernando Oliva (relato), Paula Braga (coordenação de relatos). Textos na íntegra
Susan May
Ousseynou Wade
Paulo Herkenhoff
Making Sense, by Susan May
How should art proceed in an age of global political, environment
and societal upheaval? As a question posed by this conference, it is
one that seems particular apposite for those of us living in the UK.
Just a month ago today, London witnessed the first suicide bombing in
Western Europe. The initial response to the atrocity was that the
perpetrators were assumed to be ‘foreigners’, radical fanatics entering
the country, intent on harming its citizens. What soon emerged was far
more shocking – the terrorists were from within, home-grown
British-born Muslims who through anger, disaffection and
fundamentalism, chose to stamp ‘a burning cross’ on the capital.
Following initial disbelief and alarm came the almost inevitable
backlash from the right, calling for limitations on immigration, asylum
and human rights, accompanied by fatal police errors. So to return to
the question, in a climate as turbulent and uncertain as this, does
(and should) art have something meaningful to communicate? Can art be
an agency for change?
While commentators continue to analyse the makeup of
multicultural Britain, a parallel examination of the cultural diversity
of British art is also taking place. In a few weeks time, the latest
incarnation of an ambitious series of exhibitions surveying
contemporary British art will commence. The British Art Show, which is
organised by the Hayward Gallery every five years, has a history
spanning over a quarter century, and is widely regarded as a barometer
of the most significant art made in Britain. Like any biennale, each
British Art Show is shaped by the culture of the moment and by the
ideological perspective of its curators. For the forthcoming show, the
curators Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker commenced the selection
process by distinguishing key influences on current British practice,
and in doing so immediately observed the increasingly diverse cultural
constitution of what is considered as ‘British’ art. In recent years
growing numbers of artists from across the globe have chosen to live
and work in the UK, usually after having first gone there to study and
deciding to stay thanks to London’s thriving art infrastructure. This
has accordingly enriched the attitude of contemporary art in the UK,
fostering a determinedly catholic (and international) outlook. As the
curators’ have noted: ‘In a cosmopolitan art world, in which artists
travel to make work and take part in exhibitions, the fact that an
artist is British, Brazilian or Chinese is of diminishing significance.
To compare artists from the perspective of their geographical origins
is often to emphasise the most superficial aspects of their practices.’
The curators’ selection consequently reflects a multiplicity of ideas
and intentions, framed principally by a range of artistic strategies
that have been adopted by artists over the past five years, ranging
from references to art and archetypes of the Modernist era to critical
engagement with broader political contexts and communities.
There are a number of formal and conceptual tendencies that
have emerged in British practice over the past few years, which are
specifically explored within the exhibition: ‘Revisitations’ features
art that looks to avant-gardes of the 19th and 20th centuries, yet
recast in a contemporary form – from fin de siecle and early
Modernist movements to geometric abstraction and formalism; ‘Relational
Practice’ which looks to art that is inherently collaborative and
participatory, involving audiences and organisations in the
development, production and meaning of the work; and the final area is
‘Geo-politics’, featuring film-makers who engage with global affairs
from personal perspectives, which is an area of particular relevance
here today. As the curators have noted: ‘The notion of the nation state
has been progressively eroded with the globalisation of markets, by
political and economic migration, cheap jet travel, the internet, the
dismantlement of old empires and the emergence of new ones. The fates
of peoples are now increasingly interconnected in dense and mutable
webs of economic, political, technological and cultural power …
everything is on the move and the UK epitomises this situation; the
cultural diversity of Britain’s population of artists can no longer be
attributed to the post-colonial diaspora alone; globalisation is at
least as great an influence’.
Art that has a dynamic engagement with the wider political
arena is of course nothing new; however, there does appear to be a
proliferation in current practice of art that sees urgency in making
sense of the world and looks at how personal and political struggles
are inextricably linked. One only has to look at the past Documenta in
2002 to see the re-politicisation of recent art and discourse. This of
course is shaped by the shifting political terrain on a global scale:
9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the troubles in the
Balkans and the collapse of one set of ideologies replaced by another.
Journalism and reportage play a major part in the dissemination of
information (and mis-information) of these events. The following
artists, who are all based in the UK, reveal a mutual ambivalence
toward the press and media, and in particular how it continues to
determine our understanding of global politics.
Phil Collins’ films bear witness to quotidian experience in
zones of conflict and unrest. While he lives among the communities he
is drawn to capture on film, his work raises moral questions relating
to the objectification of his subjects’ lives for aesthetic
consumption. The artist is clearly aware of the problematics of the
documentary, which are somehow assuaged by Collins’ evident social
conscience and empathy with the people he is filming. In How To Make a
Refugee, using a hidden camera, Collins travelled to the Serbian border
with a British journalist who was planning to interview a young boy.
The resulting film illustrated how the interviewer manipulated the
representation of the refugee. Collins’ more recent work They Shoot
Horses is a seven-hour video installation of a disco-dance marathon –
the title comes from Horace McCoy’s novel of 1935, which focused on the
subject of mass entertainment and human exploitation in Depression-era
America. In Collins’ version, two separate groups of young people from
Ramallah danced through the course of a working day, without any
breaks, save for calls to prayer and the occasional power cut. The work
not only portrays the universality of dance music and its ability to
transcend geographical and cultural borders, but also notes that while
the dancers are removed from their immediate political context, their
incarceration within the dance studio echoes the confinement they
experience in their everyday lives.
Zarina Bhimji was born in Uganda in 1963. Of Asian descent,
she and her family fled the brutal regime of Idi Amin after he issued
the Asian community with 90 days to leave Uganda. The family eventually
settled in Britain, and Bhimji’s early experiences of displacement and
isolation emerged later in her work as a photographer and film-maker.
In her acclaimed work of 2002, Out of the Blue, the opening scenes show
the lush, splendid landscape of Uganda. This panorama is abruptly
disrupted by the sound of low voices and crackling flames. The film
goes on to show places that may have been the scene of violence and
eradication. Whilst the work can be regarded within the tradition of
English landscape painting, from J M W Turner to John Constable, in
describing as it does the atmosphere and meaning of a place through the
representation of the countryside, the film also attempts to link the
conflict that took place in Uganda with those occurring in places such
as Kosovo and Rwanda. The artist has noted: ‘the work is not a personal
indulgence; it is about making sense through the medium of aesthetics.
I want to register these issues, to mark what has happened:
elimination, extermination and erasure.’
Breda Beban was born and raised in the former Yugoslavia, but
left the country in 1991 after the war broke out. Like a number of the
artists mentioned here, her work deals with feelings of dislocation and
loss. Her film Walk of Three Chairs shows the artist aboard a raft
floating down the Danube, accompanied by a male band of gipsy
minstrels. One of the men sings a Balkan love song, issuing the words
like an incantation requiring a response: ‘He Who Does Not Know How to
Suffer, Does Not Know How to Love’. As the artist tries to repeat the
lyrics, she hesitates and simply speaks them in return. After several
attempts she manages to sing the song, after which a ritualised dance
begins, with the artist walking across three empty chairs placed on the
raft, which continues its journey down the river. The landscape
surrounding this spectacle is significant – on one side, verdant
scenery is evocative of ‘old Europe’, untouched for centuries, and on
the other side, ‘new Europe’ is represented by a scarred, industrial
landscape.
Zineb Sedira was born in France of Algerian parents, and after
studying at the Royal College of Art in London has continued to live
and work in the city. Her work looks at the roles of women in North
African cultures and in particular their centrality in the preservation
of cultural identity by passing on stories of social and family history
from one generation to the next. Her video Mother Tongue portrays three
generations of the artist’s family – her mother, the artist herself and
the artist’s daughter. In the first account, the artist and her mother
chat in French, the language of the artist's childhood; in the second,
the artist is shown conversing with her young daughter in French and
English, the languages they use at home; and in the final chapter, the
artist's mother is shown attempting to communicate in her native Arabic
with the artist's daughter, who is unable to comprehend what is being
said.
French-born artist Marine Hugonnier uses the tools of film and
photography to explore the relationship between landscape and history.
For her work Ariana in 2002 she took a film crew to Afghanistan to
capture a panoramic view of the Pandjshêr Valley, a region that has in
the past held back invasions of Soviet and Taliban dogma. The film
chronicles the thwarted attempts of the crew to record the panorama, to
which they are initially denied access due to the strategic value of
the area and the crew consequently returns to Kabul to observe the
desolation and chaos of the city. Eventually the crew are granted
permission and as they film the territory across the Hindu Kush
Mountains, they experience a sense of exhilaration and fulfilment and
accepting they have achieved their goal, then choose to stop filming.
In Hugonnier’s recent works, Death of an Icon and Territory I, II and
III, the artist travelled to the West Bank in Palestine; the first film
was shot in Ramallah in the few days prior to the official announcement
of Yasser Arafat’s death; the other films feature explorations of the
architecture of the settlements and how it can be commandeered for
political ends. As the artist has stated: ‘it places architecture and
design as vehicles for ideologies. More precisely it looks at how
architecture and its original ideological implication can be shifted,
used and transformed to meet completely different political ends. The
film reveals how utopian ideas of Modernism become a politicised
promotional tool (the so-called Bauhaus style of Tel Aviv). From
villages, which appear like an oasis of green in the desert
(settlements in the West Bank), all the way to a traditional Arabic
house whose architecture is mimicked by Israeli settlers in search of a
sense of locality and authenticity’.
Back in London, it remains to be seen how artists will respond
to, or even simply make sense of recent events. Looking back to 9/11,
it appears that the effect on artists in New York was probably felt
most acutely at the time. This was particularly the case for the
handful of artists exhibiting in the city during the destruction of the
Twin Towers whose work immediately assumed a different significance or
that was somehow perceived as presaging the tragedy. Nancy Davenport,
who had been selected for the Sao Paulo Bienal in 2001 prior to 9/11
and who was also exhibiting at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in Manhattan at
the time of the event, worked with images that depicted photo-shopped
terrorist assaults on New York dwellings. One image revealed a dense
cloud of black smoke behind a series of buildings as another missile
approached the block. The artist’s intention for the work was to
highlight the conflict of political idealism between individuals and
institutions. However, following the attack, her images were seized
upon by the press, and the artist subsequently noted that she would
struggle to find a way to talk about the formal issues in her
photography for some time to come. Another artist infamously caught up
in the proceedings was Wolfgang Staehle. His work To the People of New
York was a live-feed video projection of the Lower Manhattan skyline
installed at Postmasters on September 6 (a week later the work was
renamed Untitled). The film, which was accompanied by simultaneous
web-cam views of a communications tower in Berlin and a hilltop
monastery in southern Germany, was fundamentally about communication
and how the viewer might consider how their experience of time. As
events unfolded on September 11, the media also looked to use the work
to make sense of what had happened and again the artist was left
feeling ambivalent about the original intention of the work: ‘My
landscape painting suddenly became a history painting. Everything’s
changed’.
It is now almost four years since those events and as Staehle
noted, everything has changed. The stability of world order has been
rocked to such a degree that in the aftermath, fear has given way to
mistrust, paranoia and censorship. While artists continue to tackle
sensitive issues and challenge existing orthodoxies, publicly funded
institutions have to find the right balance between gauging the
communal mood and defending freedom of expression. Recently the Drawing
Center in New York was subjected to criticism in the right-wing press
for its plans to move to a site adjacent to Ground Zero. The New York
Daily News commenced the offensive by attacking the Center for showing
‘anti-American’ political art; this was followed by the New York
governor George Pataki stating ‘we will not tolerate anything on the
site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom or
denigrates the sacrifice and courage that the heroes showed on
September 11’. The criticisms are based on a drawing exhibited at the
Center by Amy Wilson, A Glimpse of What Life Could Be Like in a Free
Country. It depicts an adaptation of the notorious image of the hooded
Abu Ghraib prisoner with electrical wires attached to his hands – in
the drawing the wires extend to spell the word ‘Liberty’. The artist
has noted that the controversy is clearly about ‘silencing political
speech’ and that the image in question is merely part of a complex
14-foot long drawing that depicts dozens of other figures and text.
While the debate continues as to the conceptual and aesthetic qualities
of the work in question, the issue of political censorship is one over
which we must stand guard.
Looking at many of the artists who have notably engaged with
broad political contexts and communities, what is striking in much of
their work is the significance placed on the correlation between
landscape and history, which in turn is predisposed to echo the
relationship between aesthetics and politics. Their work largely
remains objective, and in being so, it’s power and persuasion comes by
simply asking the audience to establish their own moral judgements and
response.
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