From
dot
dot dot #7
It would not be unfair to compare the thematic architecture of this
year's Venice Biennale with that of Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center.
The 50th Annual Biennale, called "Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship
of the Viewer," was staged in two primary exhibition venues: the
Giardini della Biennale, built in 1895, and the Arsenale, a former shipbuilding
yard located on the outskirts of town. The Giardini house the enormous
Italian Pavilion and 29 other national pavilions built by the participating
nations themselves. The recently restored buildings of the Arsenale
are home to independent satellite exhibitions and other large-scale
shows. Thus, the Giardini, with their bevy of national pavilions, are
like EPCOT's "World Showcase," the northern half of the park,
where landmarks and typical structures from nine countries are presented
around a lagoon in a miniature world tour of cultures and cuisines.
And, with the inclusion of "Utopia Station"—an exhibition
organized by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—the
far end of the Arsenale has become an analogue to EPCOT's "Future
World."
Disney & Utopia
"Future World," as the southern half of EPCOT is called, functions
as a showplace for possibilities presented by industry and technology.
The central, circular plaza of Future World is flanked by low, bunkerlike
buildings called the Communicore, and at the southernmost tip is a giant
geodesic dome, called "Spaceship Earth," after Disney's original
plans to have an air- and spaceship launching pad in EPCOT. The architecture
of Utopia Station is similar in form, with low circular shapes and surrounding
gardens, but it is in their missions—their thematic architecture—that
similarities between the two spaces are found most significantly. Originally
the crown jewel in his vast Florida Project, Disney wrote in his original
mission that the "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow...
will always be in a state of becoming. It will never cease to be a living
blueprint for the future." The complete plan for Utopia Station,
as described by its curators in their statement "What is a Station?"
is a similar kind of striving incompleteness: "The Utopia Station
is a way station.... It has been important to all concerned that the
plan not present itself as a finished picture." In short, the dividing
line between Utopia Station as an international art exhibition and Utopia
Station as a contemporary variation on the world's most profitable theme
park and tourist attraction is a very fuzzy one indeed, and this is
because the aims of Utopia Station, like those of EPCOT, are not simply
aesthetic, but also political and economic in nature.
While
the creators of Utopia Station may share a suspicion with the creators
of EPCOT about the ability of governments to enable the utopian project
as well as a desire to circumvent the normal workings of the public
sector, it is here that the ideologies between the two diverge—somewhat.
Whereas EPCOT would have a global megacorp as its organizing arm, Utopia
Station would have the global art market. "These activities imply
an activism," the curators' statement instructs, "For many
who come to the station, its invitation to self-organize speaks a political
language already known to them.... The proposal to build nonprofit decentralized
units and make them become the underlying mode of production, fitting
together through the real market... has already been made." There
is an assumption made by the curators that this "real market"
will function differently from "the monopolistically controlled
world market of the present system" by companies like Disney. But
if you're willing to believe the curators' claim in the context of the
international art market, I'd love to sell you some swampland in Florida.
While my aim here is not to dissect the architecture or artwork of Utopia
Station - indeed, I have not even been to Venice to see it—the
EPCOT comparison, and the themes it introduces—of commerce and
politics—will help in thinking about one of Utopia Station's most
important subprojects, the poster commission. As the curator's statement
instructs, "Each present and future contributor to the Station
is being asked to do a poster for use in the Station and beyond: wherever
it can hang, it can go." These posters were densely layered atop
Utopia Station's many plywood surfaces and collected on a website hosted
by e-flux.com,
a New York-based company that, in the words of their mission statement,
"is dedicated to worldwide distribution of information for contemporary
visual arts institutions via the Internet." There, you can browse
the ever-growing selection of posters (158 at the time of this writing),
download these posters as PDF files, and print them for yourself in
European A3 and American 11x17 formats. "The posters," the
website informs, "include new works by a group of more than 160
artists from all corners of the world." It's the happy globalism
of EPCOT combined with the placelessness and informality of that other
"experimental prototype," the Internet.
Sontag revisited
In 1970, one year before Walt Disney World opened its doors to the public,
Dugald Stermer, the art director of leftist journal Ramparts, asked
Susan Sontag to contribute an introduction to his collection of Cuban
posters. Her resulting essay, "Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political
Artifact, Commodity," is arguably one of the finest, most literate
pieces of criticism ever written about graphic design, and her complex
analysis of posters' cultural functioning is well worth revisiting in
the context of the Utopia Station poster commission today.
At the start of the essay, Sontag historicizes the poster as a form
that arose from the Classical tradition of the public notice, from which
it is now distinct. "Posters are not public notices," she
begins, "A public notice aims to inform or command. A poster aims
to seduce, to exhort, to sell, to educate, to convince, to appeal."
She contends that public notices are passive experiences, intent strictly
on conveying information straightforwardly, while posters are active
experiences: "The values of the poster are first those of 'appeal,'
and only second of information." This value system is in place
because posters are necessarily in competition with one another, all
crying for our attention in the "theater of persuasion" that
is the modern city. The poster's aim of consumption by a mass audience
is precisely what requires its production by mass distribution: cheapness
is a defining trait. The poster is a product for the masses. Its twin
goals, as Sontag sees them, are to build consumption via capitalism
and, later, to build nations via mass political participation. "It
is capitalism," she writes, "that has brought about that peculiarly
modern reformation of the public in terms of the activities of consumption
and spectatorship."
At
Utopia Station, an art exhibition that's part of the largest public
art exhibition in the world, visitors were given complimentary shopping
bags as they strolled the Arsenale. Emblazoned on one side was the exhibition's
logo, designed by artist Lawrence Weiner. Emblazoned on the other was
a sponsor's logo, the familiar signature of the French fashion boutique
Agnès B. The posters themselves, distributed for free via the
Internet, may be posted in any city in the world by anyone wishing to
print them, free to compete and seduce along with other posters, marketing
their product, which is not art at all, but, instead, the lifestyles
of their famous artists themselves. In an age where artmaking, like
activism, is more a demographic than a duty, Sontag's assertion that
posters "serve to disseminate already mature elitist art conventions,
...popularizing what is agreed on, by the arbiters of the worlds of
painting and sculpture, as visual good taste" seems truer than
ever before.
Plagiarism, quotation, and curation
With this popularization comes theft of a kind, or "plagiarism,"
more precisely, and "plagiarism," Sontag writes, "is
the main feature of the history of poster aesthetics." In order
for messages to be communicated without direct expression, the forms
of the poster, and the relevance of those forms, must already in some
way be known to us. Indeed, the vast majority of the posters commissioned
for Utopia Station exhibit this tendency toward recapitulation. Matthew
Barney displays his rich fabrics and waxes, his iconic beehive, and
his familiar five-part Cremaster structure. John Baldessari uses stock
photos and film stills from the past to comment lightly and ironically
on the present. Thomas Hirschhorn gives us one of his typically sloppy,
marked-up constructions. Harmony Korine gives us a disturbed image of
childhood. Bruce Mau's poster includes a URL for his project "Massive
Change" in case we're confused, and some charged language presented
in an "uncharged," knee-jerk documentary fashion. Yoko Ono
reiterates an old statement of John's, "Imagine Peace." Elizabeth
Peyton presents one of her washy paintings without comment. Ed Ruscha's
deadpan rendering of "UTOPIAN SLUMPS" is distinctly his own.
They're all doing themselves. Originality is not the order of the day;
quotation is.
Even so, several posters rise above the familiar gestures of their makers
and become something more striking and more real. Henrik Hakasson's
textless poster observes a loose grouping of blackbirds flying overhead.
The image is related to that of Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Weisbeck,
whose image of a swarming flock of pigeons can only be from the Piazza
San Marco, an emblem of Venice. These birds in their loose grouping
remind us of heaven and of Wallace Stevens's idea of heaven in "Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," where he writes, "I was of
three minds / Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds."
The plurality of viewpoints is close to heaven, or, less sacredly, utopia.
Also striking is the simple photograph of artist Anna Barbara Cliostratt
in a darkened room with glowing teddy bears and a globe: the child's
world is the closest to utopia. Deimantas Narkevicius also thinks about
utopia in terms of light and space—in this case an outdoor hallway,
the possibility of what's at the other end, arching, rainbowlike, with
the simple beauty of a grid of lights above. While each of these four
posters use the poster form to generate works of art, they succeed because
they back off. To see a poster without text is a striking thing, and
you interpret it as something different, which, in this case, is required.
My favorite poster from the show, however, is Doug Aitken's, which works
so successfully in both posterlike and nonposterlike ways: from far
away, the prominent image is of a hand holding a burning flare, a charged
image of revolution. As you approach, the flare is blocking an oncoming
Greyhound bus to Las Vegas, a city that itself is like a theme park.
Coming closer still, the scratchy handwriting of a sketchbook is visible,
and it reveals Aitken's doubt not just about his poster and its success,
but about the entire nature of the curators' implied brief.
But, unlike Aitken, most artists feel no need to reckon with the implied
brief—make a poster about utopia—because, technically, it
doesn't exist. Instead, the posters mostly do what posters do best:
advertise. Many of the poster-makers, such as Atelier van Lieshout and
partners Leif Elggren and Carl Michael von Hausswolff, take to advertising
their works from Utopia Station. Others, like Janus Magazine,
advertise directly: their poster is a well-built, half-naked man with
his pupils whited out and a jaunty product shot of the magazine in the
corner. Nearly all the posters are executed with a certain art-world
chic and a distinct bent on "antidesign" design. And, in the
end, the posters fulfill the unwritten brief of shameless self-promotion,
which is all most international art-parties such as this one are about,
anyway. It's the artists' notoriety, after all, that is their reason
for inclusion in Utopia Station. Each poster's authenticity as an art
object is legislated by the same mechanism that legislates a Coke bottle's.
The artists have packaged themselves, as commissioned, for display,
and it is the great magic trick of capitalism that limitation creates
desire. In this way, art and democracy are necessarily at odds. Were
the poster project to be a truly democratic one, a poster could be made
by anyone for Utopia Station, but the website contains no such "submit"
link, no means for the common man to participate in this utopian project.
Perhaps it's for the best. What do you have to advertise, anyway? You
haven't even had a show.
Ed
Ruscha
|
Nikolaus
Hirsch & Markus Weisbeck
|
Harmony
Korine
|
Travel
agents
Sontag begins with the notion that posters were a way of selling and
ends with the revelation that posters themselves are for sale. "Capitalism,"
she writes, "transforms all objects, including art, into commodities,"
and nowhere is this process more evident than in the collecting of posters
as such. The reasons people might collect and exhibit collections of
posters are varied, but Sontag's characterization of posters as "cheap,
unpretentious, 'popular' art" pretty much sums it up. This is not
where her interest lies. Instead, Sontag is interested in the criteria
for collection, and, more importantly, the claims and assumptions that
govern those criteria. She observes that while earlier poster collectors
focused solely on posters from around their homes and cities, the new
breed of collector seeks posters that are "ostentatiously international."
"It is hardly accidental," she writes, "that the beginning
of the craze for collecting posters, in the mid-1950s, coincides with
the rising tide of postwar American tourism in Europe." The fact
of capitalism and its promise of limitless acquisition is part of what
links them - she writes that "modern tourism turns traveling into
something more like buying" - but the formation of a postwar identity
is equally a part of the equation. Worldliness was newly desirable,
and, with posters, you didn't even have to go somewhere to seem like
you'd seen it. "Posters furnish a portable image of the world,"
Sontag observes, and, unlike photographs taken by present travelers,
posters are "substitutes for experience." Thus, users (like
me) who log onto the Utopia Station website are consoled by its curators
that "If you can't make it to Venice, or don't want to wait for
the Biennale this summer: we are pleased to present the first installment
of Utopia Station at e-flux right now!" With posters, I can seem
like I went there.
John
Baldessari
|
Matthew
Barney |
Doug
Aitken |
 Bruce
Mau
|
If the simple practice of modern poster-collecting strives toward worldliness
in general, then the juxtaposition and selection of these worldviews
by consumers seems to imply a more sophisticated process of identification.
Do you prefer the default stylings of Superflex or the grungy antistyle
of Uglycute? But this choice is an illusion. Pushed far enough apart,
the opposites converge, and an "eclecticism" forms without
"any notion of compatibility." Removed far enough from their
context, posters become not just diluted, but toxic. In her assessment
of Stermer's collection, Sontag writes that his posters are now "several
steps away from [their] original use," and Stermer's catalog, in
her judgment, amounts to a "tacit betrayal of that use." The
major difference between Stermer's collection then and Utopia Station's
now is that Utopia Station's posters resulted from a commission, not
a revolution. As a result, the project drifts ever more loftily from
reality and relevance: it is a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and its
artists are larger than life, full of hot air, and more than delightful
to their many rosy-cheeked, monied hangers-on.
This effect—that in commodifying their posters the artists commodify
themselves—is one disturbing result of Utopia Station and the
increasing number of exhibitions like it. Shortly after the Utopia Station
went up on e-flux in May 2003, Jens Hoffmann's "The Next Documenta
Should Be Curated by an Artist" was posted in late June. The project,
which continues through October 2003, involves about 25 artists, many
of whom were part of Utopia Station, all of whom sought to question
the fact that "curators occupy a more noticeable role in the process
of producing an exhibition than some decades ago." Of the ten sample
comments available on e-flux, John Baldessari's is the most interesting
and the most prophetic. He writes, "Curators seemingly want to
be artists. Architects want to be artists. I don't know if this is an
unhealthy trend or not. What disturbs me is a growing tendency for artists
to be used as art materials... to illustrate a curator's thesis. A logical
extreme of this point of view would be for me to be included in an exhibition
entitled 'Artists Over 6 Feet 6 Inches,' since I am 6 foot 7."
His comment reaches the core issue: that, today, the artist is more
and more a salable object, like a pop star. As in so much of Baldessari's
work, the observation from a fine-art point of view speaks to graphic
designers as well, because the tools and gifts of design are continually
required to make such kinds of celebrity exclusivity possible. The reason
more artists are exploiting design techniques in their work is because
being an artist has become more like being a brand, and exhibitions
like Utopia Station are more like halftime shows at the Super Bowl.
The aestheticization of protest
The political leanings of the Utopia Station project color its otherwise
strictly commercial purpose, and, critically, they are impossible to
ignore, even though most of its contributors seem to have successfully
done so. This is not to fault them. Artists may always, must always
make what they wish. But the question remains raised by "What is
a Station?" and it remains worth asking: though they are few, how
do the political posters of Utopia Station function? "Ours is not
a time of continually same todays," write the curators in their
final paragraph, "When we met in Poughkeepsie in mid-February,
around the world vast crowds marched for peace. Seven weeks later, when
we met in Frankfurt, the Coalition forces were entering Baghdad."
These statements and others like them position the Utopia Station project
as one of protest and make its posters the mouthpieces for this brand
of political insurgency. But what is the message? "Up with Utopia"?
And whose? And where? And how? The posters' cry to "eliminate the
priority given to the endless accumulation of capital" is a socialist
one, but it's undermined by their setting in an art world built on the
endless accumulation of precious objects or even-more-precious commissions,
prizes, and fellowships.
Sontag offers an explanation: "Posters have rarely voiced the avant-garde
of political consciousness, any more than they have been genuinely avant-garde
aesthetically." Then she goes on to question whether what's at
Utopia Station may rightly be called "posters" at all. "Good
posters cannot be an object of consumption by an elite," she writes.
"What is properly called a poster... excludes work, like the pseudoposters
of Warhol, produced directly for the fine-arts market." The artists
of Utopia Station have tiptoed around this issue by substituting one
kind of eliteness for another. No longer acting as individualized private
artists for the few, these artists are now a ruling order for the many.
And while this is done in the name of a new kind of artmaking practice,
a revolutionary spirit, Sontag is the first to warn that the absorption
of this kind of political terminology by aesthetic groups is necessarily
conflicted. "[Groundbreaking work] is defined as revolutionary,
even though, contrary to popular standards by which the merits of politically
revolutionary acts are measured—popular appeal—the avant-garde
artist's acts have tended to confine the audience for art to the socially
privileged, to trained culture consumers." In other words, this
revolution is not for everyone. (Are you beginning to sense a theme
here?) And "this co-option of the idea of revolution by the arts,"
Sontag warns, "has introduced some dangerous confusions and encouraged
misleading hopes." The poster is a form whose history is soaked
with propaganda. The German publisher Taschen, in a move similar to
Dugald Stermer's, has just issued photographer Michael Wolf's collection
of Chinese propaganda posters in book form. In the introduction, historian
Stefan R. Landsberger writes, "Once the People's Republic was established
in 1949, propaganda art [was] one of the major means to provide examples
of correct behavior.... The political message of the posters [was] passed
on in an almost subconscious manner." This same form—the
poster—is used in 2003 as a "revolutionary" art object
by an exhibition with a political ideology as its organizational backdrop.
This snarl of ideas gives rise to the most troubling contemporary effect
of the Utopia Station poster project, namely, its contribution to the
aestheticization of protest. As I said earlier, being an activist—like
being an artist—is now a kind of ownable lifestyle, a way of marketing
oneself. Nowhere is this more recently evident than on p. 107 of the
Fall 2003 issue of BlackBook Magazine, a New York fashion quarterly,
which depicts Scarlett Johansson, star of the new Sofia Coppola film
Lost in Translation, staring lustily out at the viewer. Johansson
is dressed in a "PROTEST" tank top designed by Cynthia Rowley
and unbuttoned army fatigues. The image appears again on p. 88 of the
2 October "HOT" issue of Rolling Stone. It is sexual,
startling, and utterly confusing. One assumes "PROTEST" refers
to the Iraqi war, but the army fatigues align Johansson with the military.
The context of the image—an edgy fashion magazine—erodes
any claim it might make on being serious political discourse, just as
it allows the fatigues to be read as a kind of ironic quotation, even
aligning Johansson with a countermilitia. With its possible readings
positioned squarely at odds, the photograph's imperative to "PROTEST"
is ultimately intransitive. That is to say, there no object of protest,
it is just protesting itself that is important.
Scarlett
Johansson
|
Black
Book Magazine |
Other stories in BlackBook take a similar tone. One particularly
irritating fashion shoot is set at a peace march, where mascaraed models
stride sexily about with bullhorns and made-up signs. Threaded throughout
the issue is a project curiously similar to that of Utopia Station's:
in his introduction to the issue, editor Aaron Hicklin writes, "Now,
during our own time, diverse forms of protest are again at the forefront
of youth culture's consciousness—a phenomenon BlackBook
celebrates with 'The BlackBook 13'; 13 specially commissioned
letters of protest from pop culture figures as diverse as Yoko Ono,
Pink, ... David Lee Roth, Tracey Emin, and George Plimpton." Thus,
pop singers like Pink and former Van Halen wildman David Lee Roth are
grouped with artists like Ono, who also participated in Utopia Station,
and Tracey Emin, whose work was featured in Venice as well. Hicklin's
introduction continues, "The rally cry of protest unites us all....
It is the common thread that ties together the controversial world dynamic
we call pop culture. Protest defines the identity of young Americans....
It is boycotting SUVs and buying Minis. ...It is what mainstream isn't."
Note that in Hicklin's formation, Protest may be nonmainstream, but
it is still utterly capitalist: he doesn't say "vote"; he
says "buy a Mini." As horrifically misguided as these statements
might be, the "poster pages" commissioned for the issue are
even more so. Alberto Korda's famous 1960 image of Che pops up again
and again and again: as himself, as Che(r), on Johansson in a different
tank top, on skateboards. The greatest poster of revolution and protest
is, in the hands of our aesthetic contemporaries, reduced to a high-contrast,
low-concept, cheap Photoshop trick.
In a final Che über-remix for BlackBook, designer Scott
King digitally adds the signature Nazi cap and mustache of Hitler to
Madonna's American Life album cover, which is itself a remix
of Korda's original poster done by the French design firm M/M. M/M also
contributed a poster to Utopia Station with their longtime collaborator,
the artist Phillip Parreno. That poster is a straight-faced parody of
those two great bastions of pop culture, Coke and Disney. Screened in
a Coke-can red, Mickey Mouse straddles a Coke bottle rebranded as Boing!
cola. He's dressed in a western outfit meant to evoke both the colonizing
cowboys of the USA, and, more specifically, Slim Pickens's nuclear bomb
rodeo-ride from Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. The bomb, here,
is not just the one that the U.S. was readying to drop on Baghdad, but
also the metaphorical bomb of American pop culture and all of its toxic
fallout. Donald Duck's face caps the Coke bottle and winks at the film's
title, La Batalla de los Patos, or The Battle of the Ducks.
Mickey Mouse, a warrior from outside the species, is off to save the
world, but his eyes are crossed, his look deranged, his gun already
fired. In a final touch, M/M has signed the piece by turning Walt Disney's
signature "W" on its head.
M/M
& Phillip Parreno
Full circle
The image brings us full circle, back to Disney, to EPCOT, to pop stars
and soda pop, to manufactured tourism, protests, and the like, and this
is absolutely the point. It's all related. In an earlier M/M project
with Phillip Parreno, Parreno and the artist Pierre Huyghe went to Japan
and purchased the copyright to a manga cartoon character called "Annlee."
According to the project description, she was cheap. M/M explains, "The
price of a manga figure relates to the complexity of its character traits
and thus its ability to adapt to a story line and 'survive' several
episodes. 'Annlee' had no particular qualities, and so she would have
disappeared from the scene very quickly." Annlee was condemned
to death. Parreno and Huyghe saved her life and set her to work, making
her image available for any artist to use, free of charge. Whether the
hell of an early manga death or a lifetime in image purgatory is preferable
is left to the audience. The project title, "No Ghost Just a Shell,"
drains Annlee of her soul in order to make her a vessel. While M/M concedes
that "the 'life-prolonging' measures... raise some 'melancholy'
humanitarian questions," they also point out, wisely, that the
project short-circuits fundamental assumptions about the artmaking process,
and this is rare. The "same" image repeats again and again,
but begins to articulate a kind of difference. Is an "Annlee"
shell always the same? What is the role of the people who operate it?
Are they subjective? How does identity come into being for characters
in cinema and in art?
M/M
(Paris) No Ghost Just A Shell, 2001, 120x176cm
(available from www.mmparis.com)
The Annlee of today is the Mickey Mouse of long ago, a commercial unit
in a network comprising thousands of people in every part of the world.
Her image is a poster for herself, which is a shell meant to be inhabited
by others. There is nothing simple about her new life, but this may
be what is beautiful and disgusting about it at the same time, what
is so fundamentally true. As she stares longingly, sorrowfully out at
us time and time again, we can not only stare back at her but also now
through her eyes. Annlee is ours, and we are Annlee. She has been saved
by culture in order to be exploited by it, and she has been invented
by culture in order to fuel it. That great symbol of fuel, the Shell
Oil trademark, an arbitrary sign, replaces the word "shell,"
itself an arbitrary sign, in M/M's poster for the show. Arbitrary, perhaps,
but essential to remember: I mean, wasn't our desire for oil part of
what got us into this mess? And wasn't controlling others in order to
save them part of it, too? It's hard to know, and it's hard to say.
This is the problem with posters.
|
