In Between

The World Fair Expo was exactly what you would expect it to be: a spectacle, a carnival of globalisation and a triumph of visual culture. In the bigger pavilions and theme parks, corporeal experience was suspended in an ecstasy of visualisation: at every step the visitor was surrounded by giant panorama projections on mirrored surfaces and water, LED displays and plasma-screens. And, as if the images themselves were not exciting enough, the screens were set in motion: moving on wheels, rails, and carousels. Stimulation never stopped - ceaseless stimulation that purported to be information. The overall effect was nauseating.

Of course, the crucial question is whether or not it made sense to show art amidst all this frenzy. Is it absurd to assume that a work of art could function at some kind of critical distance from such a spectacle? If you don't believe that art can compete with the visual power of Capitalism's self-celebration, then Expo gave you plenty of evidence otherwise. Co-curator Wilfried Dickhoff's claim that the 'heterotopian experience of art transcends the spectacle by virtue of its intensity' was not very convincing. Why should the experience of seeing Gabriel Orozco's Wheel of Fortune (all works 2000), a medium-sized ferris wheel installed so that half of its circumference is below ground level; or Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel's Eyeball, a dome shaped like an eyeball inside which gimmicky replicas of pigeons and rats rattle around on rails - transcend the experience of, say, a traditional dance performance in one of the pavilions? Epiphanies were available everywhere at Expo.

But then again, it's too easy to take refuge in cynicism and dismiss the whole project as a feeble form of decoration. Once you started investigating individual works with a little more sympathy (or suspended disbelief) it became clear that there were ways of subverting the spectacle. One was a strategy of deflation: Franz West replaced the logo of the Hanover fair, which was on the roof of the main convention centre, with a big blue ball entitled The World on a String (Dull Blue). The ball itself was more of a blob. It looked dreary and slightly battered. By virtue of West's laconic negligence the symbol for the world was turned into an empty signifier. Albert Oehlen's collage Bionic Boogie (Ego, Water, Technology), a design for a huge mosaic to be installed in a plaza, was equally provocative: based on a computer-collage, each one of the six million pixels is reproduced using one piece of mosaic. Yet the collage looks slack, and bears no relation to the size of the proposed mosaic. A photograph of Oehlen shot from below is combined with the photo of an anonymous man wearing glasses, a flower pot and some random Abstract Expressionist dots and doodles. In the middle of the Expo's multiple distractions the work was like a vast monument to indifference.

Other works explored the inevitable expectation and disappointment experienced during the Expo as you joined endless queues just to see another cheesy panorama projection. Paul McCarthy contri-buted a huge brown inflatable rubber sculpture, Chocolate Blockhead (Nose Bar Outlet), which looks like a seated Pinocchio with a mallet for a head. Inside the sculpture round chocolate bars shaped like Pinocchio's nose could be bought from vending machines, as if commanding the audience to buy lies. In Marijke van Warmerdam's film, Flecks of Light, a skinny boy stands silently on the bank of a forest lake, the dripping wet pockets of his yellow bathing shorts turned inside out. On the lake a duck paddles by. 'Does the boy jump?' a visitor inquired impatiently of the guard. He replied apologetically 'Sorry, no, he doesn't.'

It was hard to ignore the creepy feeling that the Expo gave you. In the German pavilion a hologram puppet theatre taught children how to adapt to the deregulated economy, how to become a flexible entrepreneur, change jobs and identities, ditch the social contract, and get a private pension-scheme. Worried? Relax! Biotechnology and the internet will save the world. And since every nation is a big community, foreigners are always welcome (as long as they play bongos, hop around half-naked or serve spicy dishes).