April 26th, 2009
Valentina and I went on Thursday to Florence for the opening of the exhibition “Green platform: art, ecology and sustainability” at the Strozzina. it was nice to go see some contemporary art, since I arrived in Bologna a couple of months ago it’s been all focus on our bread project and valentina’s work at the Morandi exhibition at the MAMbo.
The show, while taking a political posture, was for the most part not very political at all. Rather, most of the work were aestheticized representations that had something in their subject matter to do with ecology but that actually didn’t really consider politics and ecology of material or technology. I was surprised to find works that used brand new materials where conceptually recycled or found material would have made much more sense. Or work that attempted to deal with ecological disaster while using wasteful oil based materials. However, in the context of an exhibition in Florence, I think just having contemporary subject matter is quite useful, and the best way to reach an art crowd in an artistically conservative town such as Florence is through aestheticized representation that doesn’t offend the desire for beauty and craft while also somehow inserting some message or topic for consideration.
Three works stood out for Valentina and I as the most interesting, two of which I was familiar with, but interested to see in exhibition: Superflex’s supergas, FutureFarmers’ victory gardens, and the third was from a relatively new artist Nikola Uzunovski’s My Sunshine.
Superflex’s project is quite old, from 1997, when they began a collaboration with Danish and African engineers “to construct a simple, portable biogas unit that can produce sufficient gas for the cooking and lighting needs of an African family.” The documentation of the project was the area I was interested in. They seemed to cover all the bases in documenting it for the gallery and in the process gave too much to the viewer. There was large painted wall text explaining the project, next to it a gorgeous glossy photograph of the biogas balloon installed in Tanzania, beside the photo was a video projection showing the artists at work with the locals digging the hole to install the biogas unit, interviews with the locals and the family using the unit. Finally, to complete the documentation, sitting next to video was an actual biogas unit, a big orange inflatable balloon, out of its use context and acting as huggable, lovely, aesthetic gallery object. By showing all of this documentation I couldn’t help but think what is the contribution of Superflex in this project? I understand very well the mission of Superflex, the interdisciplinary collaboration and breaking of barriers between areas of professional knowledge, that lead to unexpected creative solutions. I also embrace the idea of using art as a platform for social causes and the clear advantages of using an art project to avoid the beauracracies of areas of specialization. However, thinking about sustainability work that is already taking place in the third world, this certainly wasn’t offering anything too radically different from what engineers on a local level are already doing. So my question remains… what is Superflex as an artistic agency bringing that is inherently different from what is already being done by non-artistic agencies. To me it seemed like there wasn’t anything uniquely different about their proposal for sustainable fuel that somehow shed light or allowed for those within the situation to view their situation differently. As Austrian Artist and member of the art collective WochenKlauser says “Art lets us think in uncommon ways, outside of the narrow thinking of the culture of specialization and outside of the hierarchies we are pressed into when we are employed in an institution, a social organization, or a political party.” In the end Superflex just comes across as aestheticizing their collaboration in Africa. The documentation video was especially bothersome with the artists depicted doing the silly manual work of digging a hole for their gas tank, followed by interviews with the African users of the tank while one of the artists stands behind him nodding in agreement. And of course, problematic was the placing of the balloon tank in the gallery as illustrative object. Four forms of documentation and each one felt so dead in this exhibition.
Nikola Uzunovski’s My Sunshine was a curious project. An apparent four year quest to create an artificial sun that could be created and used by anyone in order to bring more light to Lapland during the winter months. The installation was a bit of a clumsy attempt at creating the mad scientist room, with notations and diagrams hanging along the wall accompanied by powerpoint images discussing the project and showing images. There was also a TV monitor showing a video of the artist dragging his “sun” (another inflatable round object) up a mountain that somehow looks sort of mars like but is somewhere in Italy, and attempt to position it in order to catch the reflection of the sun. sitting on a desk are strewn seemingly random but sort of scientific magazines and two computer monitors one showing the same powerpoint that is printed out on paper and the other one a slide show of images documenting the project. A couple of white boards are sitting in the room with dates of upcoming workshops and more “investigative” drawings. Finally, again, the actual object, a large transparent inflatable ball is sitting in the space. There was one more element to the installation, the artist himself. Nikola was there in character, making nonsensical diagramatic drawings and hesitatingly engaging people who paused long enough to speak. I have to admit that for the most part the project read as yet another artist romanticizing the mad scientist by taking on a seemingly ridiculous task and becoming completely obsessed by it to the point where the artist is entirely consumed by this and loses sight of reality and becomes the actual mad scientist. And through this staged insanity, the artist creates a reflection on truth and science, and also on art and ideology. In this sense it was kind of weak, especially because the main driving concept was silly… to bring more light to the north during the dark months. I did appreciate the presence of the artist and I am very interested in that dynamic as it is often a concern in my work. I sat down with Nikola for a few minutes and tried to get a sense of whether and how ironic he was being with a project attempting to create natural artificial light. In the context of a show on ecology, the project of an artist to bring artificial light to a place that is naturally dark for a certain period of the year is either a knowing wink at the audience, or some kind of misdirected naivete. And for me this was the most interesting part, though my friend Ricardo who works at the Strozzina and worked closely with the artists said that he didn’t think this was a performance of joke, and that he wasn’t being cynical. Assuming that it was a knowingly self conscious, cynical performance… for the most part he didn’t break character, even when I asked him if he was joking, and for that I was drawn into the piece because I was asking the question of whether he was actually serious about this project or it was all just a cynical joke. I tried to discuss this with him in a few different ways and he either deflected it by using quasi-scientific terminology, or he would use some very simplistic expressions of the purpose of art. He said that he really believes in the project that he wants to see it realized, that he’s been working on it for four years. And then he would say something like how cool it would be to see two suns over lapland, or that he is doing this as art because its fun, and because art will pay for it. So… okay, I say, serious or not, in the end it’s just kind of cynical and sad because its a joke on actual people. I don’t mind taking the piss out of the art institution, but it seemed more like he was taking a joke on people and that didn’t sit so easy for me. Reminded me of Renzo Martens Enjoy Poverty in that sense, and I wondered why so cynical?… I am not opposed to cynical art, I like Santiago Sierra’s cynicism, but it has some depth. In the end Nikola’s project feels like an empty joke and an empty utopian gesture and a romanticizing of a cliche. However he will be in the Macedonia pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and I wish him lots of luck.
FutureFarmers I am quite familiar with and participated in their Free Soil Bus Tour project last summer. I know about the Victory Gardens project as it has been discussed and shown in a number of different venues. This project from the late 90's was the successful collaboration with city officials and local people to transform unused public areas into vegetable gardens cared for and enjoyed by the people living in those neighborhoods. It's a beautiful project that highlights all of the great aspects of Amy Francescini's work. The use of media, collaboration across various social strata, the injection of aesthetics (plants) into industrial areas, the metaphoric and real use value. The documentation of the project was also super. The aesthetic was so carefully constructed and attention to detail so exact that there was a cohesiveness to the presentation that created a narrative, documentation of a real project, and visual pleasure. It consisted of hanging packets of seeds, books of an archived seed bank, three carefully chosen pictures showing people working, elements of the gardening kit that was distributed to participants along with some contracts signed by local people to take care of their gardens, a used gardening glove, and three beautiful posters announcing planting parties. Everything was held together with a cohesive aesthetic that referencing the old, the grassroots and still had a unique and contemporary branding to it. In the documentation I missed one thing... the sense of democracy in the project. The aesthetic cohesiveness left a heavy imprint of the presence of FutureFarmers and I wondered where and at what stage the participants came into the project.
In his essay “Art in the Age of Biopolitics” Russian Art critic Boris Groys writes that “art becomes a life form, whereas the artwork becomes non-art, a mere documentation of this life form. One could also say that art becomes biopolitical, because it begins to use artistic means to produce and document life as pure activity.”(54) I found these three works most engaging because somehow they addressed the biopolitics of art. Groys goes on to state that this form of art is only possible in this age because of biopolitics, the intervention of technology into life itself and the consequent affecting and transforming of life. All three projects in some way engage with this idea. Documentation becomes the key component of these works because it places them in history, it becomes declarative, it gives the activity life in its representation. Groys concludes with an assertion of the importance of documentation within installation, “the placing of documentation in an installation as the act of inscription in a particular space is thus not a neutral act of showing but an act that achieves at the level of space what narrative achieves at the level of time: the inscription in life.”(61) To me this implies that the experience of confronting the documentation within space must somehow reciprocate (artificially) the inscription of life that is being referred to. In the case of Superflex I felt in the end that I wasn’t being asked to do anything when confronted with the documentation. I was being presented with varioius representation of the same conclusive content. It was an easy reflection for me as an audience. Nikola’s installation was successful in that it blurred the distinction between the art in life and the documentation in gallery, to where it felt somewhat like a continuity and that maybe the gallery was just another platform for the continued research. It also failed in this respect thought, because after spending time within the installation, I felt quite certain (and disappointed) that the entire project as it exists outside of the gallery, in the end exists specifically and solely for its life and representation in the gallery. This flips the Groys model back to a traditional plastic art of product representing life. FutureFarmers documentation offered a narrative of events but also a promise, a potential and a desire for imagining your place within this narrative.
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