It is difficult to talk of politics in art without detecting signs of amnesia or panic on the face of others. Politics can be considered as having nothing to do with art or it can just as easily be forced upon art as an antidote to any general guilt about the pursuit. It is often felt that the suggestion of such a combination is inevitably worthy and moralistic; especially in the UK. The direct and literal correlation between one thing, one idea, some reality and an artwork can be truly forced. But when false politics are hooked, latched or co-opted onto an artwork the question arises of how much the artist believes he or she is really able to reflect a situation? Is it not dangerous for an artist to imagine that he or she is part of a simultaneous process of reportage, comprehension and perception? To primarily represent an idea of public need and understanding is to make a bad start, but to carry on doing so is potentially worse. A system that encourages art students, and then artists, to function as judge, jury and defendant of their own work is a struggle to break out of.
Faith and goodwill is forced onto art to
make it speak, be ‘about’ something. Often a claim will be made for a
subject, something is imposed from somewhere else – a vagueness about where
exactly that is. A sense that this is a troubled part of the world is mixed
with generalisations about what is said and ultimately who and what the
artist may represent in the first place. A myth of meaning starts to replace
artistic language.
Catherine Yass’ film and photographs of the colossal wall that purposefully
carves its way through the Occupied Territories is a perfect example of
confused direction. Yass photographs and films the wall from the Israeli
side and, while there is nothing wrong with this – in fact it could be
interesting – her relation to this physical fact remains ambiguous. Is the
wall pretty? Are the elements aesthetically pleasing? Or, much more to the
point, does the very fact of such attention lend itself to political
comment? The side from which the wall is filmed generally offers a view of
planted tarmac roundabouts rather than pockmarked broken roads and rolls of
barbed wire; but that is not the point either. Does Yass take ownership of
the significance of the wall but then deny that ownership by aestheticising
it? This wall might be taken as representing a political mess, but that
cannot be right either, as it has diametrically opposed meaning on its
opposing sides. Representation in this way leads to a situation where the
surface becomes a perfect metaphor for the projection of meaning, and not a
dangerous fact in itself.
In the name of artistic freedom, the very
specific is often not expected to impinge, and yet good art comes out of
being specific. Ed Ruscha, for instance, has always characterised the very
local, the particular of his own place, backyard and background. The fact
that it is California, one of the richest places in the world, means the
work will not be spoken about in the same way as that which comes from a
more exotic or more obviously needy place. Despite talk of a postcolonial
state and an extreme equality in the availability of information the world
over, there are, of course, real political and economic and differences
between places and situations, and this greatly affects a relation to
information and understanding, There are definite inequalities; access to
the internet, for example, is often either forbidden or unavailable. This in
turn will affect the allowance made for art as much as anything else. The
guilt that is felt about the existence of art means a generally felt need to
have it speak about the real world, albeit usually in a really vague way.
An artist can gain so much from a visit to somewhere else. Phil Collins goes
to troubled places – Beirut, Baghdad and Belfast – and photographs, at a
certain specific level, with such personal intensity that the particular
replaces an overview of subject matter. The embedded war artist, though, has
a difficult role – just as the war reporter will use army terms and see
where the bullet comes from, but never know how and where it lands.
The notion of tourism and ownership of place has extended and shifted over the last 15 years, and the sense that a visitor can never know as much as the long term observer has been replaced by more subtle notions of knowledge and subject. Simon Starling, however, might, like Collins, travel a long way and seem to follow a line or logic; but he then severs the links and burns the bridges of any initial rationale. Straight narrative will never really be confused or allowed to coincide with a need for understanding and interpretation.
The question filters through: there is a
war going on, these are sober times, what is happening to reflect that? A
hangover from a social historical interpretation of art means that, at some
level, everybody can sit back, confident that art, at least, will bring with
it a reflection of our time. This brings us to the Turner Prize – a perfect
illustration of such a tendency. The panel discussions on the prize, which
used to be encouraged throughout the UK, have always been caught between a
specific discussion of the short-listed work and criticism of the structure
of the prize and its institutional significance.
And the same could apply to now, when the Turner Prize coincides with the
war in Iraq. Langlands and Bell, for instance, were embedded as official war
artists in Afghanistan; Jeremy Deller revives a real-time struggle; Yinka
Shonibare turns colonial guilt pretty by mixing postcolonial dilemma with
the desire for the decorative. Here the artists’ and public’s need for a
certain work does seem to come together. Kutlug Ataman uses a vox-pop tactic
to evoke a slice of reality so general that the nine people giving a
personal account soon become mere phenomena. Ataman uses a realist,
big-brother atmosphere and the relationship between project, expectation and
12 individuals from South East Turkey, who speak straight to camera, which
is hard to settle in with. The project dominates and the people who talk
about their next and past lives fade in importance as the minutes tick by.
Any rush to understand what is going on would have been instantly and eventually thwarted by Mark Wallinger, however, during his recent project in Berlin’s Neue National Galerie. An upright bear shuffled across a marble floor, while people gathered in the street to look through the window and a camera simultaneously transported this distant reality to an invited audience in the German ambassador’s residence in London. A very temporarily ‘embedded’ Wallinger survived a durational performance for eight nights, from 10pm until 1am. At times he, as the bear, would hide behind the information desk to disappear from the continuous surveillance, for which he only had himself to blame. The constellation of place, meaning and function results in a work of touching fallibility.
So a brief shuffle through possible approaches encourages the understanding that the very specific makes good art, but that it is also possible to go anywhere to make it happen. Moralising about subject has nothing to do with politics, but is perhaps more a mad rush to avoid art being ‘for it own sake’, which has led artists to depend too much on the interpretation of what they do rather than believing in their own meaning. Although this is a problem of curatorial interpretation and encouragement as much as anything else, it takes strength to refute a very literal relationship between the vulnerable pursuit of art and a written and spoken explanation. The reception and understanding of a work, its place in the world, is not the same thing as the intention of the artist, let alone the work itself.
Sacha Craddock is a curator at Bloomberg Space, London, and Sadler’s Wells, London, Chairperson of New Contemporaries and Sports Editor for contemporary