Related Matters
At a recent talk at the Architectural Association in London (‘Revisiting Relational Aesthetics’, 30 October 2007), Hal Foster looked again at his arguments about relational aesthetics as well as the artists working with fictional archives, first laid out in the October article ‘An Archival Impulse’ (Autumn 2004). Heard again, Foster’s argument about artists who mine history to create present webs of meaning, or who blend fact and fiction in assembled archives, had an air of existential dispossession to it: the ‘archival impulse’, he stated, ‘is made within a world whose given connections are lost’. Such grey skies hover over the corpus of artists he is drawing upon: Tacita Dean, Joachim Koester, Sam Durant, Gerard Byrne – successful, and good, artists who have featured heavily in exhibitions over the past six years or so.
The argument was framed as retrospective – Foster was likely pitching it to an architectural audience – but it sounded particularly dated, in large part because of another group of artists whose methods are similar but whose tone is entirely different: joyous rather than sombre. The strategies are like those of the artists mentioned above: lateral thinking, a series of connections made between different registers and time periods that, in looping back or coming to rest, is represented in the gallery space as a series of letters, maps, photographs, in the narrative offered by a film or video, or in a mechanical model that physically enacts the imagined connections among its disparate parts. In contrast to the fictional archives built by Foster’s artists, the ‘systems of meaning’ symbolised by these artists are ones already existing in the world, and the feeling evoked by the networks is not one of elegy for a failed or unfulfilled promise, but one of almost wilfully naïve delight. At Momentum in 2006, the Nordic festival held in Moss, the artist Tue Greenfort calculated the amount of lignin – both a by-product of printing processes and an artificial substitute for vanilla flavouring – that would be produced by printing the festival’s catalogues, then used that amount to flavour gallons of vanilla ice cream, which he served to festival visitors in soft-serve machines. Michael Stevenson, at a show at Vilma Gold in London last year, re-created a hydraulic computer from the 1950s that was meant to demonstrate the Guatemalan banana economy; he gave this gangly show the slapstick title ‘Answers to Some Questions About Bananas’.
Despite the jollity of the work its source material is darker, and this is key to the project. The origin of much the material that supplies the connective systems is like that of the film Syriana (2005) – the connections between finance, politics, environmental disaster, money and influence – that, by becoming infantile or childish, this form of representation hopes to defang. For Greenfort, who often works with environmental material, it is the chemical by-products that are detourned into syrupy vanilla ice cream; at last year’s Venice Biennale Nedko Solakov took the story of an arms deal between Russia and Bulgaria and wrote it, toilet-wall graffiti-style, with the hokey tone of a fairytale. In a show in the Netherlands the British artist Mike Cooter connected an element he has used before in his artistic practice – the statue of the Maltese falcon, from the film of the same name – with a side-effect of American ‘gotcha’ politics. He noticed a statue of the Maltese Falcon in the background on a TV interview given by the conservative judicial nominee Robert Bork, whose failed Supreme Court nomination engendered the term ‘to bork’. Cooter then represented this connection in a series of letters to Bork, comparing Bork’s contribution to language to one in the field of artistic practice. More so than with Foster’s artists, this blurring of the parameters between registers – the political and the artistic, the economic and the aesthetic – seems under contestation: is framing the Guatemalan banana economy, an arms deal or conservative politics in an art context an act of elevation or misappropriation? In flirting with the real world rather than fiction, does the artist risk playing the holy fool? This debate is implicit in Cooter’s letters to Bork, with their alternation between hyperbolic formalities and naïve liberty-taking: ‘With that in mind, I would very much like to ask you the following: What do you believe is the purpose of art?’ That’s not really the central question here, but rather the act it entails: artists – newly – looking from the outside in.
Melissa Gronlund
Responses
Added by NWhite,
I am intrigued; big questions you’re tackling there - the role of art, what is fiction and what is the real world!
I am familiar with the work of Michael Stevenson and also saw the installation you mention last year at Vilma Gold. I understand the limitations of description in a comment piece like this, however, describing the work as a re-creation of “a hydraulic computer from the 1950s that was meant to demonstrate the Guatemalan banana economy”, is unfortunately, too reductive, and I think in terms of your question misses the point slightly.
Stevenson has in the past produced projects that dabble with not only a particular political / social archive (in this instance focusing on the US’s cold war foray into Central America under the guise of economic development) but also make reference to his own position - as an artist with a very peculiar background. The project as far as I recall was developed during a residency Stevenson undertook in the States, hence, perhaps, his choice of subject matter. However, the hydraulic computer recreated for the show was originally an innovative system designed by a New Zealander, a small detail, yet integral to the installation.
Stevenson made a similar connection to his home country and its legacy of DIY entrepreneurs in the 50th Venice Biennale installation, ‘This is the Trekka’, and I think the attempt to connect a ‘foreign’ political polemic to his own heritage transgresses a misguided foray into appropriation. It’s as much a comment on the notion of a transient global citizen - a question about what knowledge base one has access to or ownership of, as it is, for example, a lesson in the economic imperialism of the banana trade.
So should artists stick with ‘fiction’? Certainly not. But I do agree that at times ‘flirting with the real world’ can prove to be a little contentious. Take for example Sam Durant’s recent installation titled ‘Unique Mono-Block Resin Chair. Built at Jiao Zhi Studio, Xiamen, China. Produced by Ye Xing You and Du Wei Dong with Craftspeople Xu Liang Jian and Xu Zhi Hong, Kang Youteng, Project manager and Liaison [various colours]. 2006.’ Showing a series of handcrafted porcelain chairs the work was, in a purely formal way, quite lovely – minimal, silent and fragile. But that was apparently not quite the point as Durant provided a rather comprehensive description of the implications involved in travelling to China to commission a studio of craftsman to work for him; all very literal and not particularly interesting. There seemed to be a faint whiff of Lord of the Manor about the project. So I think this is my point; art should get busy messing around with the ‘real world’ but not just in a didactic manner. It makes much more sense to me (and one might even learn something in the process - yikes) to see a trace of the act - the research, the locating of one’s self in the issue, a snapshot, perhaps, of the artist looking from the outside in only to find their shadow right amongst it all.
