Red Thread
TANAS, Berlin, Germany
The curatorial statement for ‘Red Thread’ at TANAS takes for its central wager a line from Walter Benjamin: ‘The most hackneyed communist platitude has more hierarchies of significance than contemporary bourgeois profundity.’ Heavy with radical clichés, the text as a whole seems intent on testing out this inanity. Nonetheless the exhibition itself – a group show conceived by Zagreb-based curatorial collective What, How and for Whom (WHW) as a prologue to their forthcoming edition of the 11th Istanbul Biennial – is a qualified success, with a couple of stronger works carrying an uneven field.
One thing that WHW are good at is exhibition design. Near the door, Jesse Jones greets visitors with his video Zarathrustra (2008), showcasing a uniformed school band playing Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) in a drained swimming pool. The piece recalls Cornelius Cardew’s amateur-fuelled Scratch Orchestra, which also played Strauss, though Jones’ young musicians are appreciably more accomplished. Across from this monitor, Swedish artist Runo Lagomarsino’s indented wall-letters If You Don’t Know What the South Is, It’s Simply Because You Are From the North (undated) unkindly – and perhaps unfairly – reminded me of a line from Sean Snyder’s recent article for the e-flux journal: ‘Another whining artist waiting for a crate with his art to arrive. He opens it and it’s another neon. It looks like the neon in the last exhibition but it says something slightly different. Another slogan about non-conformity.’1 I note in passing that this figure (‘the whining artist’) should be understood, like Franz Kafka’s ‘hunger artist’, as a form of being in its own right.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its rhetorical armour, the spectre of Marxism is a dominant theme in ‘Red Thread’. Both K.P. Brehmer’s esoterically-conceived Seele and Gefuel eines Arbeiters (Body and Soul of the Worker, 1978/80) and the visual identity of the Istanbul Biennial (all sharp lines and Cyrillic-derived fonts) recycle – rather piously – constructivist strategies. Each suggests that Boris Groys may have failed with his book Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (1988) to end the use of Russian avant-garde iconography as ready-made signifiers of art-political seriousness. But in fairness to Brehmer, it isn’t easy to decode his project (a method for ‘critically interpreting contemporary social and political developments’) from the work on display, and it may be more subtle then it seems. Equally, the work combines surprisingly well with Igor Grubić‘s nearby video documentary work East Side Story (2008).
Symptomatically, the work about which the curators say least, East Side Story is the most directly political work in ‘Red Thread’. Made up of two video projectors, one channel shows footage from a gay pride parade in Zagreb, another shows a set of dance sequences performed by lone individuals in the same city. The crowd-conditioned violence detailed in the former, and recorded on its soundtrack, lends an edge to the solo performances in the latter. The dancers are queers, some of whom participated in the march as protesters: the contrasting choreographies present the problem of how to synthesize the two channels.
Two other pieces worth mentioning are Lisi Raskin’s Control Room (2008), a set of paper-and-Styrofoam sculptures which take leave of a ‘50s science-fiction film aesthetic, and Trevor Paglan’s Codes Names: Classified Military and Intelligence Programs Active Between 2001 and 2007 (undated) which incorporates two videos, but whose principle purpose is served by an alphabeticized list of surprisingly poetic titles: Pluto New Horizons, Utopian Angel, Zodiac Beauchamp, Packer Rib...
But easily the best work in the show is provided by Tashkent-based Soviet conceptualist Vyacheslav Akhunov, as irreverent and ironic as the curators are straight-faced and earnest. ‘Red Thread’ includes some of Akhunov’s notebooks (undated), displaying his designs for a Sphinx-bust with a Lenin head, and elevated urinals accessible via ladders. (Oddly, a very similar joke has been made by the German cartoonist Beck apropos Albert Speer, in an image depicting a uniformed Nazi frustrated by a monumental pissoir, and pissing all over the floor.) Meanwhile, a facing wall shows collages of iconic Soviets looming large in a pencil-drawn desert, and designs for fly-swatters (FLY BEAT REVOLUTION, 1977) that feature portraits of Communist heroes printed on the business-end of each instrument.
Akhunov’s work militates against simple answers being given to the status of the Marxist legacy. Wielding the same strain of jet-black wit which seemingly only existed in the Eastern Bloc (another noted example: Akhunov’s Polish contemporary Edward Krasinski) his art poses a deeper problem: it seems that you need the regime of stupidity to produce the humanity, just as you needed socialist discipline to produce the democratic revolutions of 1989. The curators, naturally, say nothing about this, proposing instead that Akhunov’s work ‘casts a shadow over the current incapacity of global society to project itself into the future’ – an interpretation I’m baffled by.
The 11th Istanbul Biennial will be centred around the totemic figure of Bertolt Brecht, the veritable image of the engaged Communist intellectual. Brecht, so the legend goes, managed to combine the avant-garde with the popular in his theatre, the aesthetically progressive with the politically progressive. For this, he has held a special place in the hearts of all militant artists who followed, from Godard on down. The biennial takes its title from Brecht and Kurt Weill’s song from The Threepenny Opera: ‘What Keeps Mankind Alive?’ I wonder if the event will successfully solve this riddle. Roberto Bolaño’s answer in 2666: ‘Supply + Demand + Magic’ seems as good a guess as any. Another idea would be ‘death’.
Daniel Miller
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