Serpentine Gallery this April, they’re interested in humour “not as a
joke, as a one-dimensional thing, but humour as a disarming thing: you
laugh because it’s absurd. You see two things that you would never
put together, but you laugh because you understand something that
you already knew in a different way.” Clamor, like their more recent
installation Wake Up (2007), at the Renaissance Society in Chicago
(which concealed brass instrumentalists behind the walls of the gallery,
all improvising on the tune of the reveille), ensconces various trumpeters
in a mocked-up military bunker, each discordantly playing a variety of
military tunes of differing histories and origins. Clamor presents an
idiotic display of pomp and defiance, as the hidden performers make
their martial music safely protected from… who exactly? The ever-so
dangerous audience of contemporary art?
In Allora and Calzadilla’s works, these forms of politicised
address, or of politicised inscription (as with Chalk), become deliberately
unstable, which puts into question the process of ‘identification’,
of who is addressing whom. Allora and Calzadilla’s various trumpets
Returning a Sound, 2004, single-channel video with sound, 5 min 42 sec. take aesthetic (musical) form and cut it in and out of its implicitly
Photo: the artists. © the artists, 2007. Courtesy the artists and Lisson Gallery, London
social and political investments, investments which alternate between
authoritarian and anti-authoritarian positions. So in these various
heart of the capital’s monumental administrative centre. What might reversals, the relation between power and powerlessness is dramatised
seem like an innocuous gesture, minimalist of site-specificity, quickly by an artistic language. Returning a Sound (2004), one of a number of
turned into something else. People on the square found that, with each works made about and on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, follows
others’ help, they could use these anonymous ‘sculptures’ for other a man on a moped with a trumpet welded to its exhaust, puttering
purposes – to draw, write, decorate, scrawl love notes or whatever else round the island landscape. Vieques, partly occupied by the US
they realised they might wish to express. Then, as laid-off government Navy for wargames and munitions testing since the1940s, was finally
workers happened to march through, the chalking turned to slogans relinquished in 2003, after decades of protest by the islanders, over both
and protestations. Before long, riot police turned up with sanitation the loss of their livelihoods and the environmental degradation caused
workers, to collect the offending chalk and wash the square dry. by years of bombing. Rather than foot the bill for the cleanup, the US
It’s a work that suggests a complicated relationship between government redesignated the military areas as ‘wildlife reserves’, further
artistic expression – confined to the gallery, safely away from the ‘real’ preventing the islanders from reoccupying the island or profiting from
world – and popular political expression – regulated and policed in the its development. Returning a Sound echoes in an empty landscape,
public realm. Chalk’s success was in how the regulated notion of public the usually triumphant symbolism of the trumpet herald reduced to
art can so easily be transmuted into something politically unregulated a raspberry blown at the birds; Returning a Sound speaks about the
beyond it, leaving art as an odd residue, literally to be washed away. ambiguity of the environmentalist arguments in part used by the
Such questions of translation and transformation, shifting from the islanders, who those in power could turn against their interests.
language of political life to the language of artistic form, apply to
Allora and Calzadilla’s ‘gallery’ works too. Borrowing Dan Flavin’s 1965
fluorescent light work Puerto Rican Light (For Jeanie Blake), the duo
Clamor, 2006, mixed media and live performance with sound, dimensions variable
powered the neon with a battery that they had charged via solar panel
(installation view, Kunsthalle Zürich). Photo: A. Burger. © the artists, 2007
in Puerto Rico before installing the piece in a show in New York. Thus
Flavin’s rendition of Puerto Rico’s tropical sunset colours was made
conditional on the power of the ‘real’ sun over Puerto Rico, transported
to the mainland. It seems innocent enough, until one considers Puerto
Rico’s subject status as an ‘unincorporated territory’ of the US –
technically citizens of the US, Puerto Rico’s four million inhabitants are
nonetheless prohibited from voting in US presidential elections. The
formal-aesthetic romance of Flavin’s original – with its hint of exotic
travel among America’s tropical neighbours – becomes a reflection
on the economic and cultural hegemony that the US has continuously
maintained in its Latin American backyard; Allora and Calzadilla’s
impish humour – in reversing the ‘relation of power’ between the US
and Puerto Rico by making the canonical expression of American
modernist art ‘dependent’ on a dumb chunk of Puerto Rican electrical
storage – provides a criss-crossing of short-circuited meanings
about power, dependence, artistic idealism and political pragmatism,
a humour full of pathos about the immovability of US power.
As Calzadilla put it while discussing the recent presentation
of their sculpture/installation/performance Clamor (2006) at the
Allora + calzadilla.indd 4 7/9/07 16:34:25
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