State of the Art

Summer rolls by. What to sift from the detritus of recent memories inhabiting what Dennis Potter described as ‘the squabble box on your shoulders’? Loose connections merge; recollection stutters into a curious congruence of editing (of yourself, experience, art, writing). The increasingly confused meaning of art’s relationship to politics rises to the surface. What to highlight, cut, clarify?

May: I visit the Bergen Kunstmuseum in Norway, a country with a history of enlightened approaches to the social welfare of its citizens. While looking at paintings in an exhibition titled ‘Fresh Air and Political Art’, I am joined, without warning, by the Crown Prince and Princess of Norway. Together we gaze at some late Picassos and then they silently leave. No security checks! Later that day the royal couple eat prison food with invited guests at the opening of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s ‘The Welfare State’: a high-production show of lumbering Kafka-lite metaphors. The show’s catalogue – an ongoing accumulation of statements about the idea of welfare – is more interesting than the exhibition itself, allowing, as it does, the idea of what welfare might mean today to emerge as something complex – not hackneyed. In Oslo we visit the about-to-be-opened Nobel Peace Centre, which aims to ‘reflect humanity’s best efforts to achieve peace […] while combining dynamic communication and artistic interpretations’. The centre includes modest documentary videos by Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc, who used her commission fee to provide renewable natural energy equipment to the Barefoot College in India and the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a school for teenage mothers in Detroit. Later we visit the National Museum of Art to see ‘Populism’, a show held simultaneously in four European cities that purports to explore ‘the relationships between contemporary art and current populist cultural and political trends’. An American writer speculates that ‘a show like this would never be put on in the US in a public institution. It would be considered too overtly political.’ In Oslo people argue over dinner that the show isn’t political enough and that it is too focused on the US. What ‘politics’ means in this context, and what is expected of it, seems nebulous: direct action, oblique documentary, satire, sociology and personal mythologies all seem to hold equal sway. On the back cover of the catalogue a statement from Dieter Lesage declares: ‘Populism has many different faces. Many different things can be called populist for very good reasons.’

June: At the Venice Biennale national pavilions seem divided between showing work that is supposedly interesting for various art-historical, critical or theoretical reasons and work that explores economic, social or cultural situations experienced by the host country. Occasionally these categories blur, creating confusion about the intentions of the Biennale: radical ideas of restructuring or re-examining knowledge are pitted against clearly defined geographical and cultural boundaries. On some levels recognition of precedent and context obviously makes sense – knowledge is cultural – yet in worst-case scenarios repressive governments can control and censor their own representation. The prizes awarded by the Biennale reinforce such distinctions; a vague hierarchy of value based, I suspect, on culturally specific notions of taste only serves to perpetuate a conservative, competitive nationalism.

Also at the beginning of June the timely exhibition ‘Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970’ opens at Tate Modern, bringing together the work of artists who ‘radically rethought the object of art in the late 1960s and 1970s […] a time of great social turmoil’. Although the show was curated by an American, Donna de Salvo, a critic from New York casually mentions to a colleague that ‘this kind of show would never be held in a major US institution; it includes too many artists outside the canon’ – lesser-known artists from Eastern Europe who are exhibited alongside the big stars of the last 30 years or so. The last work encountered in the show is Bruce Nauman’s Going Round the Corner Piece from 1970: as you circle an enormous white cube, video monitors allow you to see yourself from behind, disappearing around the corner. With the most economic of means the piece raises some deceptively simple and still pertinent questions: who controls whom in the gallery space? Does the experience of art we crave necessarily involve chasing – or perpetuating – an image of oneself? Leaving the show, the question is highlighted in a somewhat bizarre way: you find yourself in the Tate shop, which is impossible to avoid, full of people buying merchandise from the Frida Kahlo blockbuster – Day of the Dead picture frames, ‘Frida Kahlo fringed chomula bags’ and shelves of accessories. A sign above the price list solemnly declares that ‘dress, hair accessories and jewellery played an important part in building the identity that Kahlo chose to project’. Yet inside the show a wall text quotes André Breton: ‘The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon about a bomb.’

July: Karl Marx wins the BBC Radio 4 (bourgeois radio par excellence!) listeners’ vote survey for the ‘world’s greatest philosopher’. Whether or not he would have described himself as a philosopher is a moot point, considering his famous declaration that ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.’ David Hume comes second, and Ludwig Wittgenstein third.

In the recent Jean-Luc Godard film Notre Musique (Our Music, 2004) – an inconclusive meditation on war, terrorism and human nature structured as a Dantean triptych of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven – a woman murmurs: ‘If someone understands me, I wasn’t making myself clear.’ One protagonist professes a ‘love for the image even as the image repels’; another asks if ‘humane people start revolutions’. Godard, playing himself, replies ‘humane people start libraries’.