On being socially relevant, on being indigenous
Dear friends and colleagues
I have been in the UK and Europe for almost all of October. The outstanding exhibition I saw was the big Brueghel show in Vienna – I had not realised just how phenomenal his drawings were. But he is hardly a tropical artist! So I can’t talk about him! Unlike the two previous years I found absolutely nothing from SE Asia at the Frieze art fair, so I can’t talk about that!
But I can say something about Artes Mundi which I saw in Cardiff.
This was the eighth edition of this Biennial prize. It prides itself on having the largest prize in the UK – 40,000 pounds – and on being focused on art engaged in its community. This year’s press release morphs that into “international artists exploring the biggest issues facing our world, from near constant surveillance and entrenched racism, to industrial exploitation on a global scale and state control of individual freedoms.” I guess you could say they want work that is avowedly politically engaged.
Bouchra Khalili had been commissioned to make a video about Jean Genet’s visit to the USA to support the Black Panther movement. It was awfully earnest and rather didactic. The fuzzy techniques added to make it “art”, not just a documentary – two narrators, split screens, images shown on mobile phones – added nothing.
Anna Boghiguian’s work was made partly in response to the Port Talbot steelworks and their being owned by the Indian firm Tata. A large, congested installation of paintings, sculptures and documentation it had a lot of energy. Strangely, many of the individual elements reminded me a bit of Felix Topolski’s chronicles and a bit of Josef Herman’s paintings of Welsh coalminers. Very retro!
Trevor Paglen work is well known by now. Conceptually it is fascinating but many of the photos were inevitably blurry or banal.
I liked Otobong Nkanga’s from Nigeria’s installation but hadn’t the faintest idea what it was about.
Alas, this is not an uncommon experience: I am purist enough to always try and work out the meaning (if any) without looking at the curatorial text. And sometimes, as in this case, forgot before I left to check it to see what I was supposed to think.
From Thailand there was Apichatpong Weerasethakul who showed a two screen movie. It was a very beautiful, wistful piece. Images of someone in a hospital bed, of sowing machines, the camera moving slowly. Everything was monochrome as if it was a shadow puppet show. It reminded me, with its shadows and muted reflections, of the very beautiful waterlily (Nympheas) paintings by Monet that the museum owns.
I really enjoyed the movie, but really had no idea what it was ostensibly about. Looking up the press release I am given to understand it “reveals the ghosts of Thailand’s political past, and the dark underside of political corruption that continues today.” Now I know.
Such cavils apart it was, all in all, a interesting show, far more potent than the Turner prize in London.
Almost as soon as I got back home and recovered from jetlag (it doesn’t get any better as one gets older, I regret to say) I was off to Taipei where at the Museum of Contemporary Art there was the Pulima Art Festival devoted to work by indigenous artists, that is to say those people in Taiwan belonging to the assorted Filipino type groups that inhabited the island before in the Qing dynasty they were driven into the mountains by the Han incomers. Much of it was too literal: worthy documentations of tribal practices, or chunky sculptures in bamboo or other local wood. What really worked were the videos of two dance performances, one by Kuo-Shin Chuang Pangcah Dance Theatre about urbanization and how one lost contact with one home village (see mini video attached) and one by Lin Chiao of people dancing circles in the countryside.
There was little perhaps to mark either work as belonging to the Pancah or Ayatal peoples, but if it was danced by them was that not enough? Mmm, this is difficult territory. Did I just respond because they danced well? Taipei has a thriving dance community so one saw them in that context. Should they explicitly talk about or signify their “identity”? Or is the blurb in the accompanying booklet sufficient to “place” them? Do indigenous artists always have to be about “identity” – what an imposition!
By way of a control or equivalent the extremely large and long video installation by Maori Lisa Reihana already shown at Venice and now at the RA’s Oceania show was also included. Well, it is ambitious and spectacular, and it did deal explicitly with first contact and colonialism, but I have to admit I wanted subtitles so I knew what everyone was saying in it. I got bored long before the full 64 minutes were up. Chuang’s dance was far more energizing, better art.
Then, taxi-ing back to the hotel any sense of authenticity or decorum was lost as the cabbie played a tape which began with Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, then after twenty seconds it slipped into Mozart’s Eine kliene nachtmusick, then into a ballad by God only knows, then more Mozart, a dab of Puccini and so on and so on. I have had this experience in Taiwan before, music compressed into a string of twenty second clicks. Can anyone really enjoy this?
Speak again next month
Tony