feature
allora &
calzadilla
Power Plays
The American-Cuban duo are upending contemporary art
into the world of global politics with impish humour
words J.J. CHARLESWORTH
portrait LEIGH JOHNSON
to consider our experience of political reality today can Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn approach art as a polemical,
provoke a strange mix of emotions. On the one hand, it seems as if rhetorical space in which the impasse of political and social change are
a world of crisis and degradation surrounds us, but always up close, represented and countered by an art of experience. And it’s this same
claustrophobically nearby: never has the image of a world in various hyperawareness of the dysfunction of politics that sets the scene for
states of trouble been so readily present, transmitted to us, all too the collaborative work of the American-Cuban duo Jennifer Allora
transparently, from the four corners of the globe. and Guillermo Calzadilla, whose work has steadily won a following for
On the other hand, this suffocating sense of presence is its subtle, biting and often humorous navigation of the strange scene of
matched by an equally overbearing sense of helplessness in the face globalised politics, and how art can do things with and to it. With their
of the apparently unstoppable chain of world events. Even things that inclusion in this year’s Istanbul Biennial, and a solo exhibition at London’s
happen down the street are ramped up to global significance. Floods Lisson Gallery this month, the Puerto Rico-based artists’ playful brand
in England? It’s global warming. Disaffected young British Asian men of political art further explores the margins of globalisation and its
suicide-bomb the London Underground? It’s the global clash of discontents.
civilisations. A little girl disappears in Portugal? It’s the global threat of Allora and Calzadilla’s approach fuses a keen sense of the
international paedophile networks. The political experience of reality particular cultures and histories of modern art with a curiosity about
is, for most of us, a threatening spectacle of fear, at once too close and how these might re-engage with the political situations of today,
too far away. a strategy of redeployment that renews attention to artistic histories,
That art can respond to politics is both a wish and a demand. but also seeks to dissolve them into something non-artistic, something
But what kind of art emerges when the experience of politics seems perhaps politically active. Early works like Chalk (2002) and Puerto
so present, yet so immobile in terms of how we might affect it? It’s Rican Light (1998/2003), for example, suggest how art appears and
this contemporary absurdity of political reality that has, over the last disappears according to context, and how political content emerges
few years, provided the context for a number of artists who confront as a something unforeseen, provoked by the form of the artwork.
political issues by exploiting art’s capacity for spectacle, as much as In Chalk, produced for Peru’s 2002 Lima Biennial, the artists scattered
acknowledging the limits of its ability to effect actual change. Artists like 24 weighty, oversize sticks of white chalk across Lima’s Plaza de Armas,
artreview 82
Allora + calzadilla.indd 2 7/9/07 16:31:32
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