![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
High on horse
You'd think I'd have OD'd on art biennials after spending three days in Venice. But no, apparently not. Apparently I'm an art biennials "junkie" who needs his art biennials "fix". This weekend I was back to the "habit", warming the art biennials "spoon" over the art biennials "candle", ready to plunge yet another "syringe" full of art biennial "horse" into my "arm". The "stuff" in question was the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, rejoicing in the splendidly post-protestant title "Rethinking Dissent -- on the limitations of politics and the possibilities of resistance". It was "high-grade heroin" indeed.
Okay, let's junk the silly heroin metaphors -- exactly the kind of talk I was criticizing in my Down With Fun lecture-cum-Scottish-country-dance-performance on Friday. Biennials are great not because they're addictive, but because they needle and probe a bit deeper than the decorative, fun stuff on display in commercial galleries and municipal museums. They're the conscience of the modern city, the closest thing we have to sermons. They're serious and thoughtful, and art is a good way to think, a chaotic and charismatic way that comes up with some unexpected combinations and conclusions.
So while I also visited and enjoyed the lighter, more pretty, decorative and consumer-friendly art on show in Gothenburg's commerical galleries -- the Ragnar Persson show at Box, for instance, or the enormous and hilarious David Shrigley show at the Malmo Konsthalle -- it was the Gothenburg Biennial, spread out across four venues, that really interested me, precisely for its sermonizing, its high -- if you will -- "horse".
Here's how the blurb runs: "The title, Rethinking Dissent, is meant to encourage reflection on the meaning of 'Dissent' in a time characterized by the dominance of global capital, operating on a level above politics. A "scoundrel time", according to the philosopher and sociologist Slavoj Zizek, when even the political left has adjusted to the functioning of a globalized market economy and thus ceased to offer any real political alternative. Moreover, a time in which our lives and our understanding of the world are affected by a continuous state of war -- a war that is widely presented and explained to us as a clash between traditionalist Islamic fundamentalism and modern liberal democracy. Is this supposed ideological antagonism the main reason behind today's transnational conflicts? If not, what is this global war really about and what are the consequences of a prolonged state of emergency, legitimizing increased surveillance and a curbing of civil freedoms and rights?" Yes! Or should I say, No! Pump that negativity into my arm, minister, curator, or whoever you are! Because without it a city is just shops, flats and offices. A body without a soul, a mind without a heart, losing every part, woah woah!
Rethinking Dissent offered lots of video art about the Israeli-Palestine problem (Mario Rizzi's "Neighbours", for instance) and the Israel-Lebanon war (Beirut artist Lamia Joreige's "Objects of War"). It synced very aptly with the concerns of the city; I arrived at the Rote Sten, the biggest biennial venue (a warehouse under a bridge), in a taxi driven by an Ethiopian who told me about racial tensions in Sweden. A sound piece at the door, modeled on the notes to US visa application forms, proclaimd a long list of people who weren't allowed to enter -- a list that finally included every possible category of human being. It felt very much like a continuation of the conversation I'd been having with the taxi driver.
In other biennials news, the participants list for the 2008 Whitney was announced earlier this month. I was really pleased to see the inclusion of Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey of Dot Dot Dot magazine), Omer Fast, Mika Rottenberg (responsible for amazing installation performances, like the fat lady one shown above), DJ Olive, Phoebe Washburn and -- particularly -- Mika Tajima of New Humans and Luke Fishbeck of Lucky Dragons.
[Error: unknown template video]
Despite the inclusion of these wonderful artists (not to mention people like Spike Lee and Gang Gang Dance), this next Whitney looks a tad more twee-decorative, a tad less dissident-truculent than the last one. The 2006 was called "Day For Night". Next year's doesn't have a title, but the 2008 Berlin Biennial is called "Day and Night". What a junk title! They should have asked me, I'd have come up with something much better. How about "High on Horse"?
Okay, let's junk the silly heroin metaphors -- exactly the kind of talk I was criticizing in my Down With Fun lecture-cum-Scottish-country-dance-performance on Friday. Biennials are great not because they're addictive, but because they needle and probe a bit deeper than the decorative, fun stuff on display in commercial galleries and municipal museums. They're the conscience of the modern city, the closest thing we have to sermons. They're serious and thoughtful, and art is a good way to think, a chaotic and charismatic way that comes up with some unexpected combinations and conclusions.
So while I also visited and enjoyed the lighter, more pretty, decorative and consumer-friendly art on show in Gothenburg's commerical galleries -- the Ragnar Persson show at Box, for instance, or the enormous and hilarious David Shrigley show at the Malmo Konsthalle -- it was the Gothenburg Biennial, spread out across four venues, that really interested me, precisely for its sermonizing, its high -- if you will -- "horse".
Here's how the blurb runs: "The title, Rethinking Dissent, is meant to encourage reflection on the meaning of 'Dissent' in a time characterized by the dominance of global capital, operating on a level above politics. A "scoundrel time", according to the philosopher and sociologist Slavoj Zizek, when even the political left has adjusted to the functioning of a globalized market economy and thus ceased to offer any real political alternative. Moreover, a time in which our lives and our understanding of the world are affected by a continuous state of war -- a war that is widely presented and explained to us as a clash between traditionalist Islamic fundamentalism and modern liberal democracy. Is this supposed ideological antagonism the main reason behind today's transnational conflicts? If not, what is this global war really about and what are the consequences of a prolonged state of emergency, legitimizing increased surveillance and a curbing of civil freedoms and rights?" Yes! Or should I say, No! Pump that negativity into my arm, minister, curator, or whoever you are! Because without it a city is just shops, flats and offices. A body without a soul, a mind without a heart, losing every part, woah woah!
Rethinking Dissent offered lots of video art about the Israeli-Palestine problem (Mario Rizzi's "Neighbours", for instance) and the Israel-Lebanon war (Beirut artist Lamia Joreige's "Objects of War"). It synced very aptly with the concerns of the city; I arrived at the Rote Sten, the biggest biennial venue (a warehouse under a bridge), in a taxi driven by an Ethiopian who told me about racial tensions in Sweden. A sound piece at the door, modeled on the notes to US visa application forms, proclaimd a long list of people who weren't allowed to enter -- a list that finally included every possible category of human being. It felt very much like a continuation of the conversation I'd been having with the taxi driver.
In other biennials news, the participants list for the 2008 Whitney was announced earlier this month. I was really pleased to see the inclusion of Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey of Dot Dot Dot magazine), Omer Fast, Mika Rottenberg (responsible for amazing installation performances, like the fat lady one shown above), DJ Olive, Phoebe Washburn and -- particularly -- Mika Tajima of New Humans and Luke Fishbeck of Lucky Dragons.
[Error: unknown template video]
Despite the inclusion of these wonderful artists (not to mention people like Spike Lee and Gang Gang Dance), this next Whitney looks a tad more twee-decorative, a tad less dissident-truculent than the last one. The 2006 was called "Day For Night". Next year's doesn't have a title, but the 2008 Berlin Biennial is called "Day and Night". What a junk title! They should have asked me, I'd have come up with something much better. How about "High on Horse"?
no subject
(Anonymous) 2007-11-26 01:49 pm (UTC)(link)Always in the back of my mind, though, is the question of what would happen if we did achieve a reasonable amount of equality? If all of our foils were to disappear, what would we contrast ourselves with? Can there be any good without the bad? But again, that's only in the back of my mind, it rarely comes to the surface.
no subject
I suppose you're being subtly sarcastic here, but I don't think it's fair to characterize my position here as "There's no point in art which doesn't make you feel guilty". After all, I'm describing the Ragnar Persson show and the David Shrigley show in terms of pure pleasure here. Most art being made now is a dialectic between aesthetic and ethical concerns, between consumerism and conscience (my "high horse"), between bulimia and anorexia, between the bloated first world and the skeletal third world.
You can see that necessary dialectic at play even in the relatively formalistic work of Luke Fischbeck of Lucky Dragons, one of the Whitney selectees. If you watched the video, you'll have seen strangers touching each other and producing gentle music, and Fischbeck underlining that this creates a "positive social environment". That's politics. It's a meeting between the aesthetic and the ethical. Dialectics.
But I don't need to sell dialectics to you. They're already in the back of your mind, in the form of those questions you're asking.
no subject
Between, that is, the kind of horse that makes you high (consumer addiction, the drug of pleasure, the dreamworld) and the high horse (conscience, ethics, morality, clarity, reality). What I'm arguing for here is the necessity for both kinds of "high" "horse"!
no subject
mines not a high horse
no subject
no subject
As the situationists said, 'Art has a specific role to play in the spectacle. Production, once it is no longer answering any real needs at all, can only justify itself in purely aesthetic terms. The work of art - the completely gratuitous product with a purely formal coherence - provides the strongest ideology of pure contemplation possible today. As such it is the model commodity. '
Dissent in Art I suppose comes from the desire to confront or change a reality that displeases you. That is what I personally see as a healthy motivation for any intellectual exercise.
Sadly, as Robert Hughes said,“... in a mass media society (...) art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power”.