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> FEATURE 01

Mark Prince on the critical distance between real life and presentation

ArturZmijewskiDemocracies(Warsaw2)

2009

video

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ON THE RELEASE OF STEVE MCQUEENS HUNGER, 2008 a feature filmabout the death of Bobby Sands by hunger strike in Long Keshprison in Belfast in 1981 a journalist interviewing McQueeninnocently used the term art film to describe the work. He appar-ently reacted with a fierce look: What I tried to do was make thestrongest film I could from the events and the story. Art has

absolutely nothing to do with it. Given McQueens background, it was a natural enough linkto draw between his previous work films shown in art galleries and this first outing in the world of general releasecinema. And yet his dissent strikes a note often sounded when political material is assimilated into an art context. Earlier

Art &Politics

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worst form of armchair pontification. Alternatively, if artignores or dismisses the gulf which separates it from thehistory and pitches itself as an engaged as well as a criticalelement, the question of its effectiveness comes into play,and it loses the freedom from function which constitutesits autonomy, and distinguishes it from propaganda.

The novelist Martin Amis qualified Northrop Fryes

definition of literature as a disinteresteduse of words byadding: You need to have nothing riding on the out-come. Zmijewskis declared intention is to gain empiricalpolitical knowledge through his work, and he claims to view the art context which accommodates it as simplythe most expedient forum. He filmed the short docu-mentary clips which make up the Democracies sequencehimself. If all of this would lead us to expect a subjectiveideological statement, his installation resisted theattempt to read it as representing any definable position.If he has an axe to grind he keeps it to himself. Democra-cies is a study of the various manifestations that politicaloutcry of whatever persuasion can assume. Ostensibly

left- and right-wing events are juxtaposed. A WarsawSolidarity gathering is shown alongside the mass attend-ance at the funeral of the extreme right-wing Austrianpolitician Jrg Haider; a Loyalist parade in Belfast along-side a Palestinian protest against Israeli occupation ofthe West Bank. The resistance of the clips to ideologicalgeneralisation makes crucial the question of how theymight be categorised. The demonstrations are ordered,sometimes theatrical events, not spontaneous eruptionsof violence, and the clue may lie in the title, Democracies,which implies the freedom of the public to express aspectrum of opinion within civilised limits. Zmijewski

zooms in on individuals on the chaotic margins andthen out to measure the collective energies of the crowd.The monitors were ranged in close succession aroundthe gallery, generating a merged cacophony of globalprotest, as though to underline how the outward appear-ances of public emotion resemble each other, despitethe differences in cause. There is no art in these movies,if we mean by that any aesthetic criteria beyond the doc-umentary attempt to show a social phenomenon. The artlies, rather, in the act of reaching beyond the art contextto capture a form of collective political expression, anddistil its essence without the author aligning himselfwith any particular cause, which would place the empha-sis on him rather than his subject. Art is synonymouswith disinterestedness. The patterns which build upbetween the clips, like the beating of drums and thehoisting of flags at various unrelated gatherings, func-tion as structural links in an artistic language. One ofthe effects of Zmijewskis scrupulous ideological balanc-ing of his material is to make us question the degree towhich the art gallery context in which Democracies wasshown upsets the scales. Does its inherent assumptionof the freest possible lease given to expression auto-matically assume a left-wing, and therefore one-sided,ideological debate?

Francis Alss Sometimes doing something poetic canbecome political and sometimes doing something politicalcan become poetic, 2005, was a filmed two-day walk which

Israel from Palestine. He carried a perforated can of greenpaint which left a trail along the road, an obviously inad-equate reiteration of the green line which was originallysketched on a map to mark out the divide between thetwo territories. The performance placed him on thedividing line between two sides of a political conflict,making his wandering figure a symbol of ideologicalagnosticism, as the dribbling trail made irony of thearbitrariness of the divide. This middle ground may be

arts critical prerogative, but Als has acknowledged feel-ing that the interviews he made in Jerusalem withIsraeli, Palestinian and European intellectuals, in con-junction with the performance, probably provided abiased picture of the political debate in being limited, byhis own sympathies and contacts, to predominantly left-wing opinion (InterviewAM323).

When Santiago Sierra has illegal immigrants volunteerto sit inside cardboard boxes in an art gallery for theduration of his exhibition, in a country which rejects theirplea for asylum, his intention would seem to be to inhabitperformatively the role of the forces he would like to resist.

In a country which would have these outsiders sweptunder the carpet, the art gallery is both a temporary havenand a sign of their exploitation. If it is an ideologicallybiased context, Sierra tries to rectify the balance by makingthe liberal sheep wear the wolfs clothing, at least withinthe theatrical conditions of his exhibition. It is a gesture ofstraightforwardly provocative satire, the exploitation con-fined to the comfort zone of performance. Alss series ofslide projections, Sleepers, 1999-2006, and Beggars, 2002-04, stray out of this realm of artifice into questions ofengagement. Photographing the derelict and homelesspopulation of Mexico City, he is again treading a fine linebetween two problematic positions. Is this a remote act ofwitness of the citys underclass from the safe and protectedremove of the art gallery, or a naive and possibly condes-cending attempt to engage directly with the problemsthrough commentary and awareness-building? Als cannotreally win: he is either a sentimentalist ensconced in hisivory tower, or a fraudulent Samaritan interloper, but therisk he takes in documenting the homeless on the streets,rather than turning them into symbolic theatre in thegallery, makes these slide works more potent and troublingthan Sierras broad satire. Sierra collapses the distancebetween real life and presentation into theatre; Alsattempts to maintain and manage it.

Sean Snyders films, which were shown at the ICA earl-ier this year, proceed from the position that if this distanceis inescapable, our only recourse is to consider how it

> FEATURE 01

>> Paradoxically, the political rigour ofan artwork may have to do with howconcentrated is the awareness it embodiesof exactly what lies outside its domain, try

as it might to surpass those limits.

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Sean SnyderAfghanistan circa 19852008-09 video still

original process of filming, its editing, as well as the artcontext in which it has ended up. In the terms of his work,to treat images as transparently imparting informationwould be cynical. The films do not so much attempt toarticulate a political viewpoint as to analyse how our inter-pretation of events may be manipulated by the ways thatthey are mediated for us. He is more concerned with thepolitics of images than the politics of world events.

Afghanistan circa 1985, 2008-09, one of three filmswhich were shown in London, is a ten-minute loop ofblack and white footage shot in a desert landscape duringthe Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It shows a gang of

Soviet soldiers, carrying assault rifles, watching a groupof unarmed Afghanis men and women in casual localdress laughing and dancing. The film might be a pre-cisely calibrated measuring apparatus to gauge theassumptions that an audience, and the context of an artgallery, bring to it. Is this a documentary record or is itbeing staged for the purposes of the camera? And if it isstaged, what is it trying to convey to the viewer and forwhat purposes? Coming upon the film in an art gallery,we naturally expect something artificial or performative,and this is indeed a film which records a performance ofsorts. If we immediately perceive it as good gallery-going liberals as a critique showing a suppressedminority coming up against those in power, doubt setsin as the film progresses and the soldiers are drawn, orseduced, into the celebration, ducking and bowingawkwardly in their stiff uniforms. Who is wielding thepower here, if anyone, and who is being manipulated?Snyder uses the film as a sufficiently open-endedmechanism to allow all these interpretations to res-onate without being resolved, while carrying viewersthrough a series of reconsiderations of how theirresponses might be founded upon preconceptions.Presentation is all: Snyder is not primarily concernedwith heightening our awareness of the sufferings of

the Afghanis, although, of course, the moral underpin-ning of his scrutiny is that we only receive what truth we can from recorded images if we are conscious of

den agendas that manipulate them.The footage for Afghanistan circa 1985was found in an

army training facility in Kiev. Compared to Zmijewskishand-held record, which attempts to reach beyond the para-meters of presentation and expose itself to an unpredictablepolitical reality, Snyders relation to his material is imperson-al, at a safely mediated remove from the events it describes.

Inversely, Zmijewskis direct representation would be seenas indiscriminately naive in the context of Snyders height-ened awareness of the film medium itself and the ways itcan be used to protect or promote various vested interests.These are mutually incompatible values prone to remain inequilibrium. Gillick proposes finding multiple sources forthe work as a solution to his singularity problem, as thoughit were not only the impersonality of the material whichmight be required to release art from solipsistic subjectivity,but its heterogeneous range. And yet, the impersonality andheterogeneity of Snyders sources prove to be signs that hiswork is confined to its study of representation. Is this notultimately a more solipsistic position than Zmijewskis more

subjective political documentation?Perhaps any resolution to these polarities is only possi-

ble when a lack of direct engagement is accepted, not as avoluntary restriction to the limits of presentation, but asthe truer political record. Gerhard Richters series of paint-ings 18 October 1977, made in the late 1980s from photodocumentation of the Baader-Meinhof group, allows thenon-literal statement, which the medium of paintingnecessitates even when it is based on documentary material,to operate as an index of political uncertainty. We do notknow whether the principle members of the group com-mitted suicide or were murdered by the authorities in their

cells at Stammheim prison. Richter avoids tailoring hisseries to support any political thesis and produces an ellip-tical portrait of thwarted and corrupted idealism, of thetawdriness of failed ideology. Assimilated into the paint-ings, the source images lose their direct causal link to his-tory, but the painting is never allowed to slacken its focuson those events, or resort to palatable pathos. The docu-ments may be translated into material for the solipsisticcultural exercise of painting Richter spoke of a shift fromhorror to grief but what is gained by the loss of trans-parency is a recognition of what cannot possibly be known,except by conjecture. Ambiguity is given precedence overthe categorical statement, undermining any assumptionsas to what might constitute effectiveness or empirical accu-racy in political art. The even-handed ideological distancewhich Zmijewski characterises as arts weakness as a polit-ical tool becomes its strength. Donald Judd interpreted hissculpture as implicitly political, in the sense of the judge-ment implied by all that it excludes from its language.Paradoxically, the political rigour of an artwork may have todo with how concentrated is the awareness it embodies ofexactly what lies outside its domain, try as it might to sur-pass those limits.

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