People in gold suits

[imomus]

Who should I run into at breakfast this morning in the Hotel Metropol, Warsaw, but Kajsa and Benjamin from Abake? Swedish Kajsa is the cover star of my Ocky Milk album, and French Benjamin is also part of music fashion label Kitsune. They told me they'd come to Warsaw to visit the artist Pawel Althamer, and started describing his Common Tasks project to me.



Like Abake (who mount socially-oriented conceptual projects like repairing park benches or setting up plant exchange schemes, and describe it as "design"), Althamer makes social interventions. For Sculpture Munster he made a path leading into the middle of a barley field, for instance. Common Task involves him dressing up a group of his Warsaw neighbours (he lives in a somewhat Stalinist tower block) in sci-fi gold suits and flying them (sometimes in a gold-painted Boeing 737) to various utopian locations: the Atomium in Brussels, Brasilia, or to Mali to meet the Dogon tribe.



Listening to Kajsa and Benjamin describing this over breakfast, I experienced "comparative visit envy". I'd come to Warsaw to sing (dressed up in a pair of spectacles with forecurls attached, as it happens). They'd come for a studio visit with this very interesting artist.

But actually Pawel Althamer had been a part of my visit too. As you'll hear when I post an hour-long podcast of my Warsaw wanderings tomorrow, I spent a while in front of a video of his yesterday at the CSW art museum. In 1997 Althamer selected a group of homeless people and got them to undress, hold hands, and dance naked in a ring in an empty white cube gallery space. I spent a minute or so describing the flabby bodies as they crossed the screen one by one. I didn't realise they were tramps; what interested me was how their middle-aged sag made it difficult to tell men and women apart.

A decade later Althamer would have dressed his tramps in gold foil and sent them on a golden plane to witness wonders.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm. Stripping tramps naked doesn't sound like social art, to be honest. More like life-hating Endemol acid. Elsewhere Althamer seems "eccentric", full of old school symbolism, and politically clueless. Decorate playgrounds like all the hands-on radicals!

I'd love to think that magazines and media companies have missed the whole point of the noughties, and that some day we'll discover a bunch of kids in a garage in a really unimportant town have been making a fresh ethos into something real.

agree with anon #1

[(Anonymous)]

You wrote about this before Momus: japanese ideas of construction vs. euro ideas of destruction. Symbolic wasted energy vs. fruitful labor (thus devalued).

Re: agree with anon #1

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to see where you see the destruction fitting in.

These actions seem to be in the mini-genre "allowing people contained by communism to travel". Another example would be Ai Wei Wei bringing farm workers from his local village to Kassel for Documenta. A pretty extraordinary gesture, when you think of the rush of new sensations those people had thanks to the piece.

The only reproach I could level against Althamer would be the overlap between this and post-communist triumphalism; the Brussels trip formed part of a "celebration of 20 years of freedom". And to fly in on a gold plane could look like a flashy bling gesture. Nevertheless, gold-wrapped asttonauts visiting the Dogon! What's not to love?

I'm in Poznan, but if someone could post that photo of Bowie with the Masai tribesmen I'd be grateful.

[(Anonymous)]

You're Just boring now. Isn't it time you wound this crap down your way to old for it . Leave it to the real hipsters who are living it in real time instead of constructed imaginings.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh god, at least check your spelling; appearing to be illiterate isn't any more hip than clumsily attempting to wind people up!

[ohshitman.livejournal.com]

I've seen so so much positively repulsive (anti-)"social" art involving the homeless or otherwise destitute that the very idea of using homeless people at all in art completely turns me off

suppose having them dance naked in a circle isn't quite as horrid as tattooing lines on their backs, having them shine the shoes of gallery goers, making them push around two ton blocks of concrete, or tagging them with radio transmitters like some endangered species of bird (http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/05/-the-radios-are.php)

still kinda exploitative though, dontchathink?

[ohshitman.livejournal.com]

btw, all those uncited examples are courtesy of Santiago Sierra

I also remember hearing about a piece where an artist paid homeless individuals to lay inside a cramped glass bench in a gallery while people sat on them
I wish I could find more information on that though

[subalpine.livejournal.com]

> More like life-hating

because nothing says I hate life quite like holding hands and dancing in a ring

[(Anonymous)]

Stop posting anon momu

[(Anonymous)]

Oh come now, it's no great secrets the best writers in the world were the worst spellers.These lame points are more tedious than the original postings.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe he'll get ask the longterm unemployed to bottle their tears and make a pair of glamorous ice clogs. Peter Bazalgette can wear them on Deal or No Deal!

Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

Destructive because nothing is built with gesture. It is poetic to spend energy in futility, but there are other ways to be poetic. Baking cupcakes for example. Those shiny costumes are neat, but the naked homeless gesture is insulting: we know homeless are "naked" before the maw of capitalism, but it was the "artist" who made them actually naked.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus was never a virtuoso musician but that never stopped him trying to write music. What is your point?

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

some more for the collection
http://www.santiago-sierra.com/200509_1024.php

http://www.santiago-sierra.com/200709_1024.php

[ohshitman.livejournal.com]

yeah, I really fucking hate that twat

art that replicates the same thing it's trying to critique is without a doubt my least favorite kind of art

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut

[st-ranger.livejournal.com]

and of course Bruno's Mexican Chairs!

Re: Destruction junction

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Althahmer's point with the piece was, I think, to remove the stigmatic signs of homelessness by removing the clothes. When I saw it, in fact, I didn't read any labels or descriptions, so I didn't know the people were homeless at all.

I think late period identity politics, as I was saying last week, tends to encode and intensify the very prejudices it seeks to hide. We reach for words like "insulting" because we believe so wholeheartedly in the stigma attached to the class of person we're trying to defend that we think any reference to them must be degrading, insulting, exploitative. (As an example, someone was describing the use of the word "lady" as "woman-hating" on that Judgment of Paris thread at the weekend.) Late identity politics confronts the problem of stigma by attempting to stage the invisibility of the stigmatised, and I'd say cries of "shame!" and "exploitation!" when someone shows us homeless people simply exemplify this.

Again: early identity politics is about visibility and shaking off stigma, late identity politics about invisibility and encoding stigma as something absolutely unquestionable. It's to Pawel Althamer's credit that he doesn't think this way. He is ahead, as an artist should be.

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

Showing homeless people is fine, working with homeless people is better, but getting them to take off their clothes at a whim displays an intact power structure. I could be wrong since I was not there, but I suspect it was a cool display of crisp Eurodollars (as they say) that convinced people off the street to remove their clothes in public. S.S. paid cash to desperate folks in Mexico DF for the "honor" of having a tattoo by the "artiste" across their backs. This behavior pretends to be a critique, but it is power on display. Artists are not outside the structure, as much as they (we) might like to think so.

Re: Destruction junction

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Out of interest, do you think Althamer should stay out of Mali, too?

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

Of course he shouldnt stay out of Mali. But he shouldnt pay Mali homeless people to do humiliating things either.

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

In fact, the space suits thing in Mali is very cool, very funny. But still an unproductive gesture.

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

many likely find it interesting that when commenters used clearly sexist language (addressing people as "lady" when they didn't refer to others as "gentlemen," and "hysterical" "overly emotional" not to mention "castrating bitch" for fuck's sake) you, momus, didn't make it a point to condemn it during the discussion.

i think the referred to entry on "beauty" etc was extremely fruitful and revealed just how deeply engrained sexism still is, even in supposedly hip readers of your blog; it was a fascinating moment.

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

many likely find it interesting that when commenters used clearly sexist language (addressing people as "lady" when they didn't refer to others as "gentlemen," and "hysterical" "overly emotional" not to mention "castrating bitch" for fuck's sake) you, momus, didn't make it a point to condemn it during the discussion.

i think the referred to entry on "beauty" etc was extremely fruitful and revealed just how deeply engrained sexism still is, even in supposedly hip readers of your blog; it was a fascinating moment.

Re: Destruction junction

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I am not a language policeman or some sort of pompous moderator here.

When the word "lady" is taken to indicate "hatred of women", something is seriously wrong. A blood-boiling sense of the stigma of womanhood, at that point, is seen to infuse all labels indicating femaleness. Anti-sexism and sexism have become the same thing.

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm. I don't think there is a stigma against being Dogon, as such. And would the spacesuits thing be a juxtaposition between technology, modernity and 'the primitive'? If so, a bit iffy.

Re: Destruction junction

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Difference is what disturbs us, because it always contains a hierarchy, and therefore a stigmatised element. We want to hide the stigmatised element, not realising that, by doing so, we grant absolute mastery to the dominant element.

The way out of this is to make things visible, not hide them. Making visible is what artists are good at, but also what offends many people in their work.

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

I honestly don't see what the 'stigmatised element' of being a Dogon tribesman is. Nor would I feel particularly superior or inferior. However, even in your example, the power is on the part of the definer of the stigma. Jim Davidson, Bernard Manning or Catherine Tate might also say "I'm only being honest. Better out than in!" But they can only do so because they know their voice is loudest and paycheck greatest.

Re: Destruction junction

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't see what the 'stigmatised element' of being a Dogon tribesman is.

It's not hard to imagine a scenario in which a Dogon rights activist challenges your "smug, privileged complacency" by emphasising Dogon economic disadvantage and the continuing weight of racist attitudes, points to very low life expectancy amongst the Dogon, and challenges you for wanting to preserve their difference from modern Western people just because of some touristic desire you have for there to be something interesting to look at.

In other words, once you accept -- as you, I think perceptively, do -- that "behavior which pretends to be a critique... is power on display", it's very difficult to ever decouple critique and power again; can you ever disentangle racism from anti-racism, sexism from anti-sexism, and so on? For instance, isn't there a case for saying Marx and Engels were being very, very insensitive and reductive when describing people just trying to earn a living as "workers of the world" living "in chains"? And then telling them to "rise up and lose them"? Talk about bossy, smug, patronising behaviour! It makes me sick! Did they ever work a day's honest labour in a factory themselves? How dare they speak on behalf of someone, and tell someone what to do, without going through what "workers" (their words, not mine!) go through every single day! Why, I'm getting so angry I'm going to have to commiserate with the boss. He hates you Marxists too.

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

Not at all. I assign the Dogon some freedom. I am relatively uninterested in them, in fact. I don’t assign them values drawn from my own subconscious. I don’t even see them as a mystery. They just are.

What unites the BNP and the more anthropologist Left is an obsession with race and cultural difference. Meanwhile most of us don’t even notice it. If I meet a Welsh person my mind isn’t suddenly flooded with leeks and daffodils. I don’t try to enter their mindset, try to get to grips with their worldview. I’m not so aware of difference that I mention Aberystwyth every two minutes. How much I like the place. How cool I am regarding corgis. Nor am I laden with aggression or jealousy about the inevitable hierarchies this embarrassing situation has dragged to the fore. I don’t really think about Wales unless THEY bring it up.

I suspect I’d be the same with a Dogon.

(Your examples of Dogon stigma apply beyond the Dogons – YOU are connecting very low life expectancy with Dogon-ism. I doubt they’d do this, nor would I).

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

Well if it had been a man they would have been called "Mr.Sensitive", right? Also, who but the ones taking offense mentioned "hysterical" or "castrating bitch"? It seems all the offensive language was coming from those who were offended and assuming offense when none was being directed at them.

I was equally disappointed with the readers of the blog but obviously for different reasons. I was hoping we'd scale some impressive philosophical/sociological mountain together and instead it never left the base-camp of:
"Guuugahhhh He attack who I is - me attack back uuugghhh"

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

nice way to say you couldn't be arsed as to whether people were being sexist or not (because, of course, it would have deflated your stance in the discussion in general).

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

"Well if it had been a man they would have been called "Mr.Sensitive", right?"

well, no. because there's not the same history of gendered (read: patriarchal and oppressive) language attached to men when they are expressing themselves.

Re: Destruction junction

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Everybody in that discussion was being sexist.

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

come now, you know that sexism, like racism, is prejudice PLUS power. so, sorry, it really doesn't work both ways...

Re: Destruction junction

[imomus.livejournal.com]

So poor people -- who have less power than the rich -- can't be sexist and racist?

Re: Destruction junction

[(Anonymous)]

Alright, I'll give you that. It was probably reductive.
But then again, contrarians like me tend to react to what they see as unfair attacks on their liberal sensibilities with "oh, yeah, if you think I'm like that then I'll BE like that!" So I was probably playing into it. I guess you could argue from that that I inherently hate women and that everything else I've done in life that contradicts that was simply shallow posturing. Either that or I have the debating skills of a 6-year old.

But, hey - at least I'm not hysterical!

Golden suits

[freiperry.livejournal.com]

Are they a cosmonauts? but i like there golden instead of white suits (http://www.megasuits.com) used by astronauts. by the way who's the photographer here?