speciAl focus
N
ot so long ago, political art was something that could more easily be located in
certain genres of art-making than others, and what you could think of as political was
relatively clearly defined. So if you thought ‘political art’, it would tend to be the case
that you’d think of photography, performance or video; those media that were newest
and most rebellious, and since the 1970s most caught-up in the strident politics of their
times, particularly the identity politics of feminism, race and sexuality. And in the 1990s,
with the advent of digital technologies and the Internet, you couldn’t help but notice
the expansion of new-media-specific art – Internet art delving into the politics of the
Internet.
Art tends to track the political themes of its moment, and if you’re trendspotting,
Allora & Calzadilla, Sediments Sentiments (Figures
of Speech), 2007, mixed-media installation, live
it’s intriguing to join the dots across a wave of artists making sense of the hot political performance and prerecorded soundtrack,
questions of today – globalisation, economics, democracy and cultural conflict – and
235 x 320 x 220 cm. Photo: Ken Adlard. Courtesy
the artist and Lisson Gallery, London
doing so not through new or alternative media, but through that old medium called
sculpture, and the point at which sculpture spreads out and becomes installation. And
the most remarkable aspect of this is how this art doesn’t appear at the margins of the
artworld, but right in the mainstream.
It’s not a movement but a cross-generational moment, and it tells us something
about how receptive the artworld and art’s audiences are now to responding to work
with political content. The key words here are ‘connect’, ‘reflect’ and ‘touch on’; rather
than impose a direct political rhetoric on the viewer, these works create a visual world of
association, metaphor – a kind of poetry: Colombian artist Doris Salcedo wows visitors
to Tate Modern with Shibboleth (2007), the unnerving chasm splitting the length of
the Turbine Hall. By a long stretch of poetic association, Shibboleth connects with ideas
of repression and exclusion – wire fencing protruding out of the edges of the crevice.
Or think of Kader Attia, a young French artist of Algerian descent, whose recent
installation Square Dreams at BALTIC comprises a maze of old fridges covered in
mirror-tiles; somewhere between skyscrapers, a disco fantasy and the dismal reality of
worn-out old consumer durables, Attia’s installations touch on a sense of displacement
and nonbelonging. Or how about Puerto Rico-based duo Allora & Calzadilla? Their
Sediments Sentiments (Figures of Speech), at Lisson Gallery last year, presented a
ghostlike anti-monument of excavated strata, traversed by pipes in which opera singers
lay and sang fragments from speeches by famous political figures, from Martin Luther
King to Saddam Hussein. Speeches in language that was meant to rouse and inspire
became fugitive and broken, dysfunctional, but something that might reflect on the
pessimistic lack of political alternatives that seems to be a global affliction.
Sometimes this poetry is rooted in conceptualist strategies. So for German
artist Jochem Hendricks, a glass bulb filled with grains of sand and shown as part of his
recent solo show at Haunch of Venison is titled 2,749,603 Grains of Sand (2000–02).
How does Hendricks know? Because he’s hired a team of low-paid assistants to count
them all; that may or may not be the truth of the matter, but the backstory is what
infects the experience of the object. It’s a backstory that immediately hooks the slightly
magical and mysterious artwork, gleaming serenely on its plinth, back into the drudgery
and mean exploitation of unskilled manual work, the artwork short-circuiting its own
privilege and aloofness.
Among all these, one discovers a combination of Arte Povera poetics and symbolic
associations, a conceptualist fondness for invisible connections and the reworking of
appropriated, nonart materials. The French art collective Claire Fontaine, in common
with almost all these artists, work across video, photography and sculpture, objects that
speak allusively and symbolically because they can’t speak directly. Last year’s Untitled Jochem Hendricks, 2,749,603 Grains of Sand
(Identité, Tradition et Souveraineté) – modified French tricolour flags mounted pointing
(2000–02), grains of sand, blown glass,
14 x 11 x 11 cm. © Jochem Hendricks 2007.
down, battered and dirtied, where each section of colour is unequally accounted for Courtesy Haunch of Venison, London
Artreview 72
ART TRENDS 2.indd 72 6/12/07 15:35:44
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