[-empyre-] Lonely Planet Art

[dt <david.teh@arts.usyd.edu.au>]

Lonely Planet Art
Or, Notes on the contempo-globo-pomo-poco-doco-dodo art fair, Part II

A second instalment. As you'll see, I'm still fumbling with the  
curatorial approach, but I want to talk about more actual works this  
time. Have thrown in a few pictorial links for those who haven't been  
to Kassel...

Throughout D12, a question hangs in the air: What is the relation  
between an older internationalism, that perhaps went into hibernation  
with 60s conceptualism, and the polemics of 'globalisation' that  
dominates the aesthetics and contexts of recent contemporary art? Will  
the art of globalisation remain forever stuck on the slippery turf  
between centre and periphery? (Are these even the right terms to  
define this field?) And how does an exhibition like D12 get traction  
here? (I'd like to hear comments on this from people who also saw D11.)

I'll start with a work by Romuald Hazoumé, a long boat called 'Dream',  
made out of plastic gerry cans, opened into strips and lashed onto a  
welded steel frame. (see QuickTime via:  
http://web.mac.com/rossner/iWeb/dmovies/documenta12/documenta12.html)
There's something anti-utilitarian and vaguely pleasing about this  
formal rumination on vessels, as the handles and cap-less mouths line  
up along the length of the thing. (A pataphysical study in porosity,  
like Alfred Jarry's boat, which was a copper bed, which was a sieve.)  
I suppose I should be praising it as a poignant emblem of our imminent  
inundation by either global warming or climate refugees (depending on  
where you live). Instead, I'm thinking, this thing is destined to sink  
somewhere on the long voyage between Waterworld and Arte Povera. It's  
exemplary of what I'm going to start calling Lonely Planet Art  - an  
art that has come to know its audience too well.

This genre effects an unholy marriage between Duchampian combinatory  
humour, the exoticism of folk arts and crafts ('native ingenuity') and  
our ambient eco-maniacal adoration of anything resembling recycling or  
creative reuse. Often teasing the boundaries of tourist art, it smacks  
of 1990s biennale-globalism. Hasn't the perceived revolutionary  
potential of this combination evaporated yet? 'Dream' is a work that  
could probably have been rescued with the throwing of a few timely  
curatorial lifelines, but alas, I was not lugging the right ballast  
around the Aue. I might not have come over so cynical had I had more  
information - who is Hazoumé? Where?s he from? What do boats mean to  
people there? The verse printed on the floor assures me it's about  
forced maritime migration in desperate and dangerous conditions, but  
is it a good thing that I'm prepared for this reading in advance? And  
does it say more about my knowledge of Beninese refugee struggles, or  
just about the art I've seen in the last 15 years?

Curiously, as I discover later in the catalogue, the canisters are in  
fact very multivalent signs in Hazoumé's native Benin, as we see in  
his other work here which - fortunately (for him and us) - needs no  
explanation, and avoids these pitfalls. His masks, drawing on the folk  
tradition of the Yoruba people, are outstanding for their character,  
their attitude and humour, their enigmatic presence, their economy,  
their virtuosic touches. They critically revise the  
modernist/colonialist fascination and fetishisation of tribal culture,  
but how, exactly? I'd like to know whether the artist would accept a  
feisty post-colonial reading, but the fact that I don?t expands,  
rather than pre-empts, my experience of the works. Both of Hazoumé's  
offerings comprise the same basic materials. Both are representational  
forms. But the masks are more interesting here, because when I  
approach them, I have no idea what they might be trying to say. I have  
to construct a message from scratch. They're invitations to the  
imagination. The boat is not. It certainly can't be accused of being  
didactic, but its global symbolism ? in transcending place ? ends up  
choking on a programmatic dialogue between North and South that is  
implied by the contemporary art jamboree.

The sort of abstraction that works best in D12 is not in any way  
opposed to the documentary, yet still gets away from the linear,  
evidentiary, obligatory speaking of truth to colonial power. Some of  
the best examples of this are by Europeans,  
http://regiowiki.hna.de/images/5/52/IMG_3643.JPG, e.g. Dierk Schmidt's  
cycle of ultra-synthetic paintings, reflecting on Europe's rush to  
colonise Africa and accompanied by documents from the Berlin Afrika  
Conference of 1884/85, at which most of the continent was carved up by  
Germany and 13 other nations. Rather than rehearsing a litany of  
German oppression of the Hereros (in what is now Namibia), Schmidt  
confronts the paucity of the historical record regarding this colonial  
episode. His reaction to this lack of information is a kind of  
abstract statistical topography, suggesting a modernist geometric  
language that's somehow complicit with colonialism's abstraction,  
analysis and administration of place.

Abstraction and Metadata: Documenta Unhinged

There's been discussion here already about the lack of metadata. While  
I agree that national categories are not the main issue, I still  
haven't heard any compelling reason for omitting such info, especially  
when the origins of the works are so geo-spatially random, and  
especially when place has provided such a vital and rich theme for  
conceptual work. Perhaps it's unsurprising then, that some of the most  
engrossing works were locative; one felt no lack of metadata since the  
data itself was geographic - such as Andrea Geyer's 'Spiral Lands',  
comprising documentation (ethnography, landscape photography,  
social/oral history, legal critique and personal memoir), really an  
extensive psychogeography of a site subject to land claims by Native  
Americans. On one panel she reproduced an American Indian Theory of  
'Justice as Indigenism', an 8-step plan written in the conditional  
voice, rather than as demands, giving the work a nice hypothetical or  
speculative bent. Geyer also provided metadata, publishing a printed  
magazine of extensive footnotes from her research.

The real stand-out in this category was David Aradeon's 'Movement of  
Forms, Antecedents of Afro-Brazilian Spaces' (2007). This work charts  
some crossings of West African slave cultures with those of Latin  
America (particularly Brazilian), an itinerary now well enough trodden  
by anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, artists and even popularised  
by mainstream documentarists. (Notwithstanding the attribution worries  
voiced here by Lucio,) it's refreshing and enlightening to see this  
intercontinental story told in a non-linear and non-anthropocentric  
language. Instead, in these photographs the figures and trappings of  
worship, or celebration, or architectural tropes, play and communicate  
with distant correspondants. The horizontal vitrine sets up an  
ethnological sort of viewing; small informative details give somehow  
ample political context to these migrations of forms borrowed,  
exchanged, transplanted - a planned revolt in Bahia in the 19th  
Century, for instance, inspiring the repatriation of "dangerous  
Africans" including Muslims from Benin and Nigeria. The formal  
groupings suggest sproutings off in other directions - a colonial  
façade crumbles to reveal the (presumably) indigenous (mud)  
architecture over which it had been rendered; its Portuguese-style  
detailing - and the juxtaposition ? reminds me of the old town centre  
of Phuket (Thailand).

Aradeon shows how very rich history can be without didactic forms of  
hard data. Like a history of ideas that floats above black-letter  
history, his histories of forms move across time and space with a  
rhythm of their own. There is no sentimental synthesis or conclusion  
to these visual correspondences, nor capitulation to the fantasy of  
some immemorial fraternity. In the foreground is the movement of  
correspondence itself, each sequence an index of the valency and  
adaptability of cultural forms. While the individual syllables of  
Aradeon's visual language are documentary, his phrases are more like   
life-for-an-interested-observer than any attempted mimetic record. It  
occurs to me that the supposedly 'representational' ideal is what  
nation-states already do with their demography, cultural marketing,  
etc; and that the curators, in seeking to liberate the art from (and  
deny) these national frameworks, are in fact performing a kind of  
abstraction thereof - an abstraction of place - since the work all  
emerges from some locative reality or other. (Again, it needn't be  
defined nationally, but could be ethnic, religious, diasporic,  
whatever.) I'd like to propose that this abstraction is not the  
curator's job, but the artist's. Schmidt demonstrates this, and the  
best work in this context, like Aradeon's, shows that artists can do  
it very well.

The wash-zone of contemporary art's unhinged ecumene is nowhere as  
cloudy as in the Documenta Halle. Almost nothing works in here except  
Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's 'Phantom Truck' (2007), a hulking monument to  
negative space and the un-freedom of information, lurking in the dark  
at the end of the lower level.
http://inigomanglano-ovalle.com/ A "platonic idealization" of the  
mobile WMD lab invented by the US to justify its disastrous invasion  
of Iraq, this physicalised void manages, wordlessly, to imply  
people-smuggling, media-critique, psy-ops, the politics of fear, and  
the simulated goose-chase for WMD. We negotiate it in near darkness,  
tentatively, squinting, seeing little, yet conscious of great mass. In  
the big theme park of political art, this is the scary ride called  
'The State of Exception'. But rather than literalising the lawless  
precarity of international relations, Manglano-Ovalle abstracts it  
into a sinister poetics. The eeriness deepens in the adjoining  
anteroom, furnished with nothing but a phantom radio in the same  
anodised aluminium, static noise coming from somewhere else, and a red  
film filtering the daylight into a pregnant but lifeless twilight.  
This clever intervention seems designed to foil a binary movement from  
darkness back into the illuminated/'enlightened' space of contemporary  
art and life. Thankfully, it also insulates the work from the rest of  
the venue.

From Cosima Von Bonin's inert 'Relax, it's only a Ghost' (2006) to  
Abdoulaye Konaté's 'Gris-gris pour Israël et la Palestine' (2006), the  
main exhibition space feels padded, stuffed and still. Awful green  
carpet dampens some tactile and textile-based works; a long 19th  
Century Persian rug hangs like a handtowel; Anatoli Osmolovsky's giant  
slices of bread ('Bread', 2006) carved from wood ? finely crafted and  
witty enough things on their own ? look like chintzy, over-sized toys,  
as does Peter Friedl's tatty, ungainly taxidermied giraffe, like the  
whole place was a kindergarten for giant demented child-robots. The  
only work that threatens to escape this horrible effect is Konaté's  
'Symphonie Bleue - 8R'  
http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/documenta/deu/2007/tour/documenta-halle/img-04.htm which is suspended far enough above the entrance to ignore the flaccidity of it all, but too far away to rescue us with its tactile energy. Konaté's catalogue entry is telling - the too-distant photo of this work suggests its precarious placement (showing ceiling, but no floor), but seems engineered to show off the enormous blue wall to its right. This boo-boo is redeemed by one of the more engaging texts in the book, penned by an unnamed 13 year-old viewer: "It is an art-work because you can sink into the blue, if you let it happen. And because you can paint it with your  
eyes."

[to be continued]

More soon, folks. Best,
dt


--
Dr David Teh
Independent Curator/Writer/Teacher
Bangkok, Thailand
m. +66 (0)84 673 7178
e. david.teh@arts.usyd.edu.au
w. bangkokok.typepad.com/platform | www.halfdozen.org