In an exhibition at BAK, curator and art historian Simon Sheikh speculates on the possibilities of life in an age that has moved beyond political chaos.
The term ‘horizon’ conjures up many images: postcard sunsets and panorama wallpaper, Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea or Paul Virilio’s theory of the ‘negative horizon’, according to which, in the age of simultaneity, we leave ourselves behind. Vectors of the Possible (12 September – 21 November), an exhibition curated by Simon Sheik as part of the Former West research project at BAK in Utrecht, shows none of these things.
The exhibition is based on the intense discussion between Judith Butler, Ernesto Lacao and Slavoj Žižek published in 2000 under the title Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Here, the horizon serves as a metaphor for room to manoeuvre in a post-political age where neo-liberal capitalism seems to be the only option. Instead of bringing about progress and social change, politics remains frozen in an aesthetics of administration that resembles an endgame of democracy. Today’s horizon is so oppressive that major progress and the declaration of new standards in the world appear impossible.
The debate on the potential for social counter-movements in this politically stagnant age, or, rather, on the question of how far away a horizon must appear in order for it to be politically effective as an image (a bone of contention that in the discussion between Butler, Laclao and Zizak eventually caused the theorists to break off contact with each other) is addressed in Vectors of the Possible by eight artists and groups of artists. They consider the horizon as a politico-philosophical construct that can be associated with artistic and political imagery. ‘I’m not sure if there will be an actual horizon line in the exhibition,’ Sheik told me in an interview. ‘It’s more of an abstract image that helps imagine time and movement.’
His questions for the artists are: How does postmodern art work with the image of the horizon, which in classical painting played an entirely different role, until the moment when Cézanne abandoned central perspective? Can an artwork even establish a political horizon itself? Which possibilities in the future or past does a horizon point to, and how far are these possibilities removed from where we are now?
These and related issues are also addressed by the Former West project scheduled to continue until 2013, of whose research team Sheik is a member: in panel discussions, publications and exhibitions, the focus here is on the loss of orientation in society since 1989 and the impact of this on art and politics. A conference at the end of this year in Istanbul will deal specifically with the problem of the loss of horizon: what happens when there is longer a position that opposes the all-dominating alliance of liberal capitalism and democracy?
For Vectors of the Possible, new works have been produced by the selected artists, which include Ultra-Red, a group founded in Los Angeles in 1994 working primarily with sound and performance, and the Chto delat? group from St. Petersburg that consists of artists, critics and philosophers, which has drawn attention with political actions and the publication of its own newspaper. But older works, too, seem to fit perfectly with the show’s theme. Matthew Buckingham, for example, has contributed a manipulated photograph depicting Mount Rushmore three millennia from now: the heads of American presidents carved into the rock have disappeared, washed away by erosion – it seems as if American history has simply been erased.
The history of a country that no longer exists is also the theme of the work by the Leipzig artist, curator and writer Elske Rosenfeld, whose research deals in-depth with the last East German constitution – the final horizon, on which work continued right up to reunification. She plans to pursue this project after the exhibition. Bureaucracy is also addressed by filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl, whose work was shown at documenta 12. Her short video on the Universal Embassy is about a place of refuge for stateless people in Brussels: in the former Somali Embassy, artists and illegal immigrants came together to form a support organization with an adapted administrative apparatus that includes ID papers, a flag, and even a language of its own.
The United States again features in the work by New York-based artist Sharon Hayes. In a slide projection with thirteen images, she is seen holding up placards with messages relating to historical actions, such as ‘I am a man’, a slogan from the civil rights movement of the 1960s. A similar degree of political commitment is displayed by British artist group Freee, whose three members are seen on a single large-format billboard: in front of a huge rock somewhere in no-man’s-land, they hold up a bright orange banner whose message – ‘Protest Drives History’ – appears absurd in these surroundings. One might think of Greenpeace. Or Sisyphus.
But anyone who, like Albert Camus, imagines the Greek anti-hero as a happy person, will also be aware that striking actions performed repeatedly can turn to farce – as when they regularly flicker across the screen during the evening news, communicating a semblance of protest by others in the name of the world, reassuring the delirious masses in front of their TV sets that political injustice is being combated somewhere out there, far from the living-room sofa. In reality, everything remains the same: blood for oil and wheel of fortune. Protest today has thus become a desperate romantic cause in which the few active protagonists have an outlook every bit as gloomy as Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea.
And indeed, walking round Vectors of the Possible, the allusions in most of the works may in fact be so similar that, finally, a single image remains – one that looks like a still from the evening news: the protester on the street, who can be zapped away when it’s time for your favourite soap opera. So if the research of Former West concludes that no new horizon is yet emerging in this world, then perhaps Vectors of the Possible at least offers a small room with a view on which to pin one’s hopes.
Gesine Borcherdt is an art critic and curator based in Berlin
Vector of the Possible
11 September – 21 November 2010
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht
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