A Test of Faith
Simon Rees
I spent the last weekend before the 2004 Presidential Election in Washington, D.C. wandering around the [Capitol] Mall, visiting museums and feeling hopeful for the first time since the last national poll. I thought it was a done deal (being from Boston myself) when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in four games straight, beating the St. Louis Cardinals on the night of a full lunar eclipse. It appeared to be a unique historical moment when the cosmological would meld with the urgently political. The gods might be on our side for once. [1]
–Mark Alice Durant
"Populism" opened on Friday April 8, the day that Pope John Paul II was buried. It seemed a coincidence too good to be true. Bidding farewell to the man who had put the pope-into-populism while welcoming the critical ambivalence of the exhibition into one of Vilnius’ temples-of-culture. And there was the geographic synchronicity–Lithuania borders Karol Wojtyla’s native soil, Poland. I thought the gods might be on our side for once: something might be about to change. [2]
Curators Lars Bang Larsen, Cristina Ricupero, and Nicolaus Schafhausen designed "Populism" to engage trans-national media spaces and provoke debate, in the hope that art can still effect change. The four-venue, four-city "Populism" is currently staged in major institutions in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Oslo, and Vilnius [3]–each exhibition contains different works by different artists (with coincidences). The multinational structure was dialectical in its recognition of the ‘glocal’ nature of the contemporary media-scape: despite the globalizing force of media ownership and broadcasting, cultural events are typically reported locally.
The Vilnius exhibition was the largest of the four shows, comprising work by 40 artists and collectives, including the largest scale installations of the "Populism" project. The additional coincidence of the 60th anniversary of ‘VE Day’ occurring at the mid-point of the exhibition’s run imbued Austrian artist Anita Fricek’s wall painting with a new potency. Fricek’s work combines large watercolor portraits of twenty-somethings in distressed poses with pencil vignettes of historical images reporting WWII. Sprawling over an area of approximately 20 feet, the images read like an scrapbook picture album, or, as a schematic, pictorial representation of channel-surfing, the large portraits (reminiscent of Muntean & Rosenblum) could be from MTV, the small images, lifted from the Discovery Channel or CNN. The work opens discussion about socio-political responses to recent Austrian history.
Austrian society is beginning to recognize Austria’s role in WWII. The prevailing tendency within the culture and society has been to shift blame to the German Reich, to suggest that the Austrian populace was more unwilling to participate in the War (and in the Final Solution) than its geographic neighbors. This may explain the rise of the extreme rightwing party in Austria as voters have effectively disassociated arch-conservatism and evil. The young people represented in Fricek’s painting are members of her generation who are starting to dispel the Austrian political myth and protest the ill effects of the older voting public’s collective memory loss.
Formally, wallpainting is an ideal medium for art as social criticism. It bears a distinct heritage: it invokes the power of Diego Rivera, as well as the rebelliousness of graffiti; from a Lithuanian perspective, wall paintings also carry the ghostly taint of Soviet Realist murals. Wall paintings by 10 artists [4] dominate the gallery. In the white box of the gallery, the visitor’s confrontation with these works writ large is unmediated. Each passerby is forced to engage in a social experience–there is not the room for the ironic distance that the dark privacy of the cinema provides.
The brightness of the Vilnius exhibition space enables visitors to make comparisons between works. The clutter of the gallery–where works are deliberately crammed against each other–reflects the visual experience of the contemporary street. And the street, as we know in this age after Fluxus and the Situationists, is the meta-critical space of engagement.
Several of the exhibiting artists produce souvenirs of the gallery experience. And so the spirit of the hyper-street of the halls can in some small way infect the body of the city at large. Posters are the principal mode of transmitting information–they are more visible if less portable than souvenirs–and "Populism" the exhibition pops up in random forms around Vilnius. Superflex’s posters are for sale (the proceeds fund aid-projects they manage in South East Asia and South America); those by Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas and Norwegian collaborators Gardar Eide Einarsson and Matias Faldbakken are free to take away. Stacked in piles on the floor this strategy for feel-good dissemination can also be read as memento mori for Cuban artist Felix Gonzales-Torres who is the godfather of the technique. I recall Gonzales-Torres, as he made no hierarchical distinction between his work–highly polished installations and photography; billboard and bus stop works (often supporting the AIDS cause); posters and candies–and he encouraged conservative art critics to do the same.
"Populism" trains viewers to read the art as vehicle for ideas and assess those ideas accordingly. Many of the artists use their vehicle to propose similar ideas. A dominating critique in the exhibition is how Western democratic politics have continued on a tireless and seemingly inexorable march to the right; the sometimes depicted, often assumed corollary to this critique is that this change is aided, if not directed by mass media (vis-à-vis the United States). The curatorial selection highlights the tragedy of the decline of Social Democracy in the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as its stillborn state in countries like Spain and Mexico. The Superflex wallpainting of a Danish nuclear submarine and troops at war in Iraq is a visceral reminder, and Jakob S. Boesekov’s performative video Danes for Bush, 2004, a darkly comical reportage of that nation’s reactionary transformation. Remember, Denmark was an originator of effective mass passive resistance (vs. Nazi occupiers), the form of civil resistance crucial to reading and enacting protests and civil disobedience thereafter.
The satirical television interventions by the Estonian collective ESTO TV are indicative of the problematic and delusive status of Estonian democracy. In Choose Order, 2003, ESTO TV members infiltrate party rallies and congresses of the governing Res Publica party. Their strategy is simple: they are paid up members of Res Publica who are invited tot he rally but use the opportunity to raise hell. Half of the group appears in full fetish gear and drag to bait the other half who attends as neo-fascists. The response of party administrators and security personnel when (staged) violence breaks out between the opposing members of the ESTO TV infiltrators reveals the homophobic, xenophobic, and essentially capitalistic attitude of the party.
Lithuanian artists also organized off-site projects that collapsed the line between artistic intervention and political action. With Reclaim Lithuania Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas organized a sit-in at Vilnius’s ‘Lietuva Cinema’ in an attempt to save it from demolition at the hands of private property developers who currently hold an oligarchic power the future-scape (political and architectural) of the city. The outcome of the action is as yet unknown. Maybe the gods will be on Urbonas’ side?
Durant and I, however, were both wrong. George W. Bush was returned to the Presidency and the Catholic Church didn’t decide to quit its role. [5] Rather, a German replaced the Pole and proclaimed the permanency of the Holy See. Funnily, there is only one word for supreme leader in the German language–Fuehrer–used to refer to Pope John Paul II as well. The historical irony is palpable. It means artists will need to remain on-guard for some time to come. As will critics.
Footnotes:
1 Mark Alice Durant ‘Civil War in My Heart: Notes from the National Mall’ in artUS no.7 March-April 2005, pp 29-37.
2 This can hardly be read as offensive when the phrase ‘Pope-mobile’ has been used to describe the Pope’s bullet proof vehicle for some 20 years. He was also called ‘the people’s Pope’.
3 All exhibition dates 2005: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 30 April — 28 August; National Museum of Art and Architecture, Oslo 15 April — 4 September; Frankfurter Kunstverein 10 May — 4 September.
4 There are wallpaintings by: [Fricek], Fatma Akinçi TK, Marc Bijl NL, Matias Faldbakken NO, Jens Haaning DK, Henry VIII’s Wives UK, Jean François Moriceau & Petra Mrzyk FR, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen DK, and Superflex DK.
5 The Bush government, via Condoleezza Rice whom visited Vilnius in May, recently used Lithuania, as a pulpit for openly criticizing Belarus.
Info:
Simon Rees is a curator at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius and is editor of the new bi-lingual magazine CAC INTERVIU focused on issues surrounding contemporary art in Northern Europe.
