We Can Build You

In a 1972 episode of the British sitcom Steptoe & Son, the eponymous rag-and-bone men fall out so badly that the son, Harold, builds a partition in their shared lodgings, splitting the space in two and emancipating himself from his manipulative father, Albert. At first this Cockney peace wall has the desired effect, but then reality intervenes (how do you divide up a gas stove, or a lavatory?), and the younger Steptoe’s bid for freedom begins to falter. In the end it’s the experience of watching football (that most communal of sports) on a bifurcated television set that brings things to a head. Seated either side of the rickety partition, their eyes fixed on half a screen each, Harold and Albert goad each other by celebrating non-existent goals or groaning at penalty kicks that weren’t so much missed as never actually taken. Frustration turns to fury, the wall comes tumbling down and the Steptoes resume their life of soul-souring mutual dependence.

Space – who claims it and how those claims are enforced – is central to Christoph Büchel’s project. This is perhaps most obvious in Private Territories (2004), a mocked-up apartment the artist installed at the Swiss Institute, New York, which was partitioned in much the same way as the Steptoes’ home (although the Basel-born artist has never watched the show). But while
Harold’s wall was fabricated from frangible tinkers‚ junk in what was perhaps a subconscious acknowledgement of its future failure, Büchel’s was much more substantial. Constructed from cinderblocks fixed with toothpaste-y stripes of cement – the leavings of which were stamped into the apartment’s cheap floral rugs – it was impossible to breach, an object destined to be garlanded with barbed wire and slathered with protesters‚ graffiti and guard dogs‚ tangy pee. A poltergeist presence in the installation, the wall’s fictional architect appeared not to know, or care, that to splice the world into smaller and smaller portions is to atomize it. (It’s worth remembering, here, what happens when an atom itself is split; the terrible, irreversible trajectory of that act.) Private Territories, like much of Büchel’s work, is ultimately concerned with the high-wire tension between security and freedom. It demands A Room Of One’s Own. It demands Don’t Fence Me In.
Guantánamo Bay, the subject of Büchel and Gianni Motti’s Guantánamo Initiative (2004 – ongoing), is a legal and conceptual paradox. Leased in perpetuity to America from Cuba under the coercive, Vienna Convention-flouting terms of the Platt Amendment to the 1901 Cuban Constitution, it’s currently used as an internment and detention centre for ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ (not, note, the protected species ‘prisoners of war’), a use that contradicts the terms of the lease, in which the land was to be provided for the establishment of ‘coaling or naval stations only, and for no other purpose’. Although the bay is under its exclusive control, the US government maintains that it is sovereign Cuban territory, and as such not subject to US law. Guantánamo, then, is a place that is not a place – a phantom zone where a democracy’s darkest fantasies (of reprisal, of power unbounded by checks and balances) become all too physical realities.

Technically the current lease agreement between Cuba and the USA is null and void, a legal situation that has led Büchel and Motti to initiate negotiations with the Cuban government to rent Guantánamo Bay (the latest phase of this work saw the artists collaborate with the management of the Venice Biennale to make an official request for a new lease on the land, signed by Renato Quaglia, a leading member of Italy’s ruling Forzia Italia party). In a leaflet distributed at the Biennale this year Büchel and Motti stated that ‘as new tenants [we] will take necessary action against the United States of America’s illegal occupation of Guantánamo Bay’, after which they will transform it ‘from a military base into a site dedicated to the promotion of culture’. Herein, obviously, lies a problem or two. It’s hard to imagine what effective ‘action’ the artists might take against the presence of US troops – Fidel Castro’s administration has been protesting against it since 1959, to no avail – and even harder to avoid making lunk-headed, painfully apposite jokes along the lines of ‘so these guys are gonna scare the Marines outa Gitmo with an installation?’. Were Büchel and Motti to be granted tenancy (a hypothetical possibility, however unlikely it is in practice), their plan to establish not, say, a hospital or primary school at the bay but a ‘laboratory that situates culture at the centre of contemporary debates’ remains sticky, assuming as it does that art and Neo-Con militarism are Manichaean opposites, and that one is a salve for the other – in our contemporary image economy this is at best a category mistake. Perhaps, though, such woolly Utopianism is part and parcel of the artists’ point. Looking at the shipping container that acts as a command-cum-information centre for the project – stuck with copies of the relevant violated treaties and Xeroxes of 47 rent cheques for the territory that have gone uncashed by Cuba since Castro came to power, which the state plans to exhibit in a museum when and if US forces leave Guantánamo – we’re immediately reminded of the shabby, heartbreakingly earnest aesthetics of activism: mall-beached trestle tables heaving with pamphlets and biro-ed petitions, Clipart-heavy posters demanding an immediate end to this or that complex, contested wrong. Whatever their political efficacy (and it can be very little), these protesters’ props at least succeed in occupying space, in imprinting themselves on the world. This, of course, is what art does; it is its one common claim. Thought through as a piece of activism, Guantánamo Initiative is all activity and no dividend, a hamster spinning on its wheel. As art, though, it satisfies its own criteria, and, perhaps, sadly, that’s enough.

If Guantánamo Initiative uses international law as ‘material‚ for making art’ Capital Affair (2002), another of Büchel’s collaborations with Motti, does much the same with money. Invited to show at Zurich’s publicly funded Helmhaus, the artists proposed to take their exhibitions’ entire 50,000 Swiss Franc production budget and hide it, in cheque form, somewhere inside the empty venue. Any visitor finding the cheque would be awarded the money, at which point the show, ‘its purpose and budget exhausted’, would be declared closed. Structurally, Capital Affair seems at first to replace the idea of taxation as a social contract (everybody puts something in and everybody gets something out) with the idea of taxation as a lottery (everybody puts something in and one person, through luck or persistence, gets the whole pot). Look again, however, and this is not the case. Art, with its rumble of public good, is not expelled in Büchel and Motti’s proposal – there is still a work, there is still something to think about. There’s still a physical exhibition, too, albeit one that consists of the traces of the gallery-goers’ gold rush, of dangling power sockets and prised-up floorboards. Capital Affair is a sophisticated idea, straining as it does the often over-comfy notion of relational aesthetics through our less wholesome, but still democratically tenable, instincts (our greed, our tax grudges, even our fervour for officially sanctioned vandalism). This, though, was lost on Zurich’s then mayor, Elmar Ledergerber, who closed the show on its opening night for the duration of its run, an act of ‘public-mindedness’ that knew little of the public mind. The cheque, which Ledergerber won’t honour, remains hidden in the Helmhaus – a promissory note that promises nothing, a violated treaty, and a ripped-up contract.

Throughout his oeuvre Büchel seems tugged between fight and flight, between colonizing and abandoning space. One moment he is freezing the remnants of a rock concert he’s organized so that the guitars and empty beer bottles live the trembling half-life of an echoing power chord (Minus, 2002), the next he is auctioning his place in Manifesta on e-bay (Invite Yourself, 2002), a refusal of curatorial authority and a seemingly willing exchange of cultural capital for cold, hard cash that in fact only feeds his reputation, generating more shows, and more square metres to inhabit. Maybe it is best, then, to think of him as a migrant, like the absent protagonist of his installation Close Encounters (2003). The shipping container the piece employs was once home to a Muslim man working in Switzerland’s illegal economy, and Büchel preserves something of his harried existence, composing a tableau of threadbare prayer mats, winded mattresses and threatening letters from the immigration authorities. This realism is compromised, however, by objects that seem to belong to the man’s mental topography: a model of New York’s World Trade Center formed from instant mashed potato, clay models of the Ka’ba and the wailing wall, and a Tower of Babel built from roll of toilet paper. In Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Richard Dreyfus is haunted by visions of a flat-topped mountain. After re-creating this mountain as a sculpture – his hands pulsing with unaccountable artistry – he finally fetches up at its real world counterpart, where he boards a friendly alien vessel and waves goodbye to his native earth and hello to the vastness of space. The container dweller’s dream images are as discordant as Dreyfus’ are harmonious, but they are both born of the same phenomenon, one that threads through all of Büchel’s work. There is us, and there is not-us. This is why we keep moving. This is why we are moved.