Queer as Agency in Contemporary Art
Denis Maksimov in conversation with Katarzyna Perlak for Arts Territory
‘Niolam Je Se Kochaneczke’ Video still (2016)
Katarzyna Perlak is a queer artist, filmmaker and educator, operating in the multimedia space of contemporary art and visual culture. Her work is embedded in ethos of the critical theory of social and political violence of the institutional power of normalisation, standardisation and oppression. She produces performances, video, photography, collage, textiles and is constantly experimenting with the new media of expression (www.katarzynaperlak.com).
Denis Maksimov (DM): Let’s start from your video ‘Niolam Je Se Kochaneczke’ (2016). Is it a title of a particular folk song?
Katarzyna Perlak (KP): The title is inspired by a folk song but it wasn’t the title itself, but part of the lyrics.
DM: Was it your intention to redefine the cultural heritage in the direction of queering its nature in the video?
KP: There are several layers to that. I had the idea for this film for quite a while; intentions for making it came for the most part from my lived experiences.
When I lived in Poland I participated in folk singing workshops and listened to EE folk, so I do connect to this music on a sentimental level, I always liked it. There are a lot of love songs, but they (not surprisingly) always represent heteronormative narratives. Queer love wasn’t represented, but definitely, it was present. Here came my idea of creating the archive that couldn’t be there. I wanted to reclaim these stories, if I may say so.
Secondly, it was important to have the conversation about how history and tradition is used - both in Poland and outside, in migrant communities - for nationalistic purposes. For example, images of folk craft are often used by Polish Diaspora Institutions, presenting this image of Eastern European heritage as a sort of culturally simplified entertainment with the focus on what the local public would immediately connect with. My goal is to complicate it and include multiply narratives that populate this heritage.
DM: It is the agency of ‘orientalisation’ (in Edward Said terminology) of this tradition, isn’t it? The gaze of trying to catch something unusual, sort of touristic form of catching the essence of something.
KP: I recently went for a research trip to the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow, and while there I had quite a few conversations about representation of folk traditions. There is a certain, very important social class problematic to it. The traditional folk songs were at times not ‘poetic’ or ‘sophisticated’ enough (or too obscene) for the people who collected and archived them, so at times they censored or modified them. The collectors of the ethnography were mostly coming from the upper class, therefore they were appropriating this heritage in a very specific way. They were trying to change the songs as they were trying to make them more usable for upper-middle-class context.
DM: They were trying to colonise this ‘rural’ experience to something they can understand and use in their ‘oriental’ perspective on the rural life, making a product of entertainment out if it.
KP: Not sure colonised applies here but appropriated them for sure. During the Communist period, there was an operation of adaptation of what was considered ‘low’ culture to ‘high’ places like palaces of culture, where the folk songs were performed for the party nomenclature and city audience. That is brilliantly presented in recent Pawlikowski’s ‘Cold War’ movie. It is interesting for me to register how this folk tradition interpretation is moving around depending on the particular ‘government of the day’ agenda.
In the video, I worked with folk singers from various backgrounds, I wanted to add the narrative of migration there as an inherent part of the whole picture, as well as raise polemics about Eastern European identity being majorly associated with whiteness while the reality of it is becoming multi-cultural and multi-ethnical.
I want to place queer relationships in the space of Eastern European history. Because even if it is unregistered, it had definitely had been there. For that reason, I have started to create the fictional archive of the folk songs.
My migrant experience has been also an important factor here. A need to self - define, free from both Western stereotypes and Eastern nationalistic absorptions. Since I have been living in the UK it became quite urgent and necessary.
DM: Where would you prefer to see this work presented? In contemporary art or folk art museum?
KP: I have mostly presented it in galleries and film festivals (in Western Europe); I would like it to be shown in an ethnographic museum in Poland though, as a fictional museum collection. Yet I wouldn’t want to make a choice between the two, because the audience can have a different experience of work depending on the context. But the impact for a wider public would definitely be more challenging in an ethnographic museum when the audience would be taken by surprise.
DM: Would you find it problematic to show this work simultaneously in both of the institutions of contemporary art and folk art for instance?
KP: In a way, creating this fictional art museum is an operation of thinking on a specific hypothetical level. For me presenting this work in an art gallery (in Poland) is already complicated, a museum seems like almost an impossible option. So it seems that breaking those walls in any form is a definite ‘win’. The spaces where I am so far invited to show it in Eastern Europe are specifically LGBTQ+ friendly, while I would be interested in exposing the work to the wider, “unprepared” audience.
Here in the UK, this border between ‘queer-friendly’ and something else is more subtle, while in Eastern Europe the struggle for visibility is still ongoing. I wouldn’t want the work, in general, to be only shown in a special “tolerant space”. I would like to reach out into further layers of the culture, to the audiences that would be surprised to see it. It certainly doesn’t decrease the importance of showing this work in specifically LGBTQ+ contexts of course, but seeing what’s happening politically around the world I think it is important to go out wider and avoid caving in.
DM: The language and references, I think, is extremely important in a conversation like ours. There is no outside-text, as Derrida was indicating. How do you define the difference between queerness, LGBTQ+ and ’same-sex love’ in your lexicon?
KP: I tend to switch between them depending of the context. I wouldn’t like to pour or to impose an identity on anyone while making work that relates to subjects whose experiences or identities might reflect in any of those terms, so in this way, it is also the question of openness. In my films, it is mostly women presenting subjects, but I don’t want to exclude any other queer identities from there of course so ‘queer’ opens up the narratives, particularly that in all the works main subjects have their faces covered, so gender can’t be easily assumed. Looping to another project, in ‘Happily Ever After’ (2017) the performers that are walking on the streets of Wroclaw have masks on them. Although they wore dresses, it wasn’t totally defined if they are female. This ambiguity is important.
DM: It is more about the strategy of communication of the message. The words are working as a toolkit. The clearness of the message is important.
KP: Yes, we also need to take into account what is lost in translation, or not even translated. In Polish ‘queer’ as term and identity only functions in English with no translation, similarly like gay, lesbian and ‘gender’. Which adds up to the idea that queerness is not part of Eastern European identity, but something that has been imported from Western countries.
I remember seeing once a Catholic poster in Poland on which was written: “Say NO to gender!” The word “gender”, connected to feminist/queer studies was aligned with queerness so what they meant perhaps what ‘Say no to queerness’ – yet the actual message was not knowingly in support of throwing the gender binaries away, which was quite ironic.
DM: Did you have a specific goal when you developed the projects?
KP: My goal was to contribute to the conversation on the visibility of queer narratives and lives in the Eastern European context, present stories that are not being seen or talked about.
DM: By the way, returning to something you said before about your project - I don’t think your work is ‘fictionalising’ archives, as all the archives are fictional if you approach them in a critical way. It is always the gaze of the archiver that turns subjective into objective, fictional into the real. No one could say there were no songs that same-sex lovers wrote for one another, we just didn’t write them down as they were probably not considered to be worthy of being recorded. Do you think we should create nowadays new rituals, maybe inspired by the fact that we don’t have the memories of something from the past, in order to create the legitimisation for the future we want to live in?
KP: Many recognised and recorded rituals came from collective, communal experiences and efforts and in that way is interesting to think how new ones can become alive, formed and narrated through the current collective experiences. I like the idea of the invention of the rituals in everyday life, of its transformative potential.
Anyone can create them for the individual experiences and journeys we have every day, but if we talk about creating them through art practice when they go beyond our individual experience then perhaps there might be some problem with the authorship. If you make an artwork, the whole conversation about the legacy, artist-genius and so on is inevitably coming up. What would be the elements of it to call it legitimate?
DM: Can queer inclusivity counter the agony of the political? Can queer movement become the first political force to avoid ’the winner takes all’ logic and go beyond potentiality to become a new suppressor, something that the right wing are crying about as their largest fear?
KP: Well the right wing has many fears, yet they all come more or less to the fear of losing the privilege and power white patriarchal heteronormative subject have been accustomed to. No ‘inclusivity’ in conversation is going to change that and resistance is going be there to any real (or imaginary) change of the established power dynamics.
Not sure how can you really fight that – big question quite a few try to answer now - but putting the care for these feelings in centre of the movement (if that’s how we call it) would be rather counter-productive.
The notion of queerness has been always ever changing, evolving, and unsettled so in some way it makes sense that it has the potential of becoming quite abstract. Yet its roots are in very real everyday stories and experiences of violence that LGBTQ subjects have been exposed to (past and present). These need to be remembered and not forgotten in this abstraction. Queerness was and has been a tool, strategy, a part of nourishing structure helping those that others want to erase to survive, not a trending critical theory that helps one to contextualize their practice and dip in and out of it when convenient.
The queer movement has been challenging oppressive structures based on patriarchy and heteronormativity but it also included complications of race, class, gender - the politics there has definitely expanded beyond sexuality. The history of the movement is about trying to embrace more conversations and imaginations that are not yet there, bringing them into a space of social and political visibility. We have so many things we still have to open up and confront, so many other ways of living. Exposing it equally makes it more inclusive, but we have to be wary of it getting it appropriated into something else - because those acts can deprive it from political agency.
DM: Maybe we are actually not yet at that moment of political agency, but rather we need to first explore more of those differences in ways of living and then see how we can structure the conversation? Maybe we are not there yet for the comprehensive politics?
KP: I would reply here with a quote from J.E. Munoz’s Cruising Utopia: Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine the future. The future is queerness’s domain. So yes we might not be there but we have to keep on going and trying as we are.
DM: Is it possible to escape the incorporation of the struggle by the market? Can we resist it?
KP: There is no easy answer. The political struggle becomes capitalised on all the time, and while the goals are not there yet and core establishment remains the same we are witnessing ‘moving on to the next thing’ as new trending concept etc arrives. These concerns are present and circulating, once an artist I am in conversation with said that queerness has to be weaponised again, which was a great way to put it.
What it could mean? The term queer was appropriated from something that was an insult. The resistance was to wear it with pride. But now it has been in some way ‘normalised’, and in it lost some of its radical agency. People before would have been disturbed by what it was associated with. Certainly many people still are. Maybe we should bring this element back, in a sense of keeping the uncomfortable, uneasy element in – in whatever context and conversations that un-comfort is needed.
DM: What do you think about the current right-wing movements, who try to use resistance to growing acceptance of the otherness as one of their core drives?
KP: Currently we see and hear things that not long time ago were unthinkable, both in language and in actions. It is driven by fear of losing the power/privilege and resistance to ‘political correctness’. I think we should speak more of political empathy than correctness; maybe this would change the way some engage with it. It is not about saying and doing things to present yourself as politically aware/correct (or however u call it), but truly feeling for those that have been and are discriminated upon and make a real change: personal, structural and institutional. What we are witnessing now is inauthenticity of correctness in the society that lacks in real empathy, with oppressive structures still being perpetuated.
DM: Do you see other ways of achieving visibility of the queerness beyond the art bubble, those special supporting spaces we talked about before?
KP: In my own experience, there is a great potential of achieving that through personal relationships, conversations and networks that have to be continuously built. I myself come from the working class background, which doesn’t have a direct connection with art or academia. Arts and theoretical discourses don’t reach working-class communities very often - even when arts try to be inclusive, it is still a bubble constructed by many forms of inaccessibility. Perhaps one of the ways to open it up is to open the language through which arts communicate and through which that bubble is constructed.
DM: Should then queer storytelling attempt to focus on producing stories in new forms, using contemporary and maybe even aim for the future media?
KP: Good question. Art still has a communicative component in its centre, even if it is very cryptic. Maybe again it could be about looking at how you can go out of this bubble and what this medium/language would be. Some of the public realm works perhaps have been trying to break to be a reason for conversations on the streets. I use public space performances/interventions quite often in my work for this reason. Internet could be an example, providing wider access to a new political space. Maybe looking at our working processes and methodologies is one of the ways.
For example, I recently started working on an embroidery project and I estimated the work would take me many months to finish. I was thinking how it is counter-productive in a way. So if you do something very slow, against the currents of constant acceleration, it becomes in itself a mode of resistance. But the challenge here is in the necessity to co-exist within this real we have now and how can one survive if you resist in this space of totality, constantly demanding a particular form of behaviour?
Ангажированное искусство: капитаны лгут, пока флот продолжает тонуть
Изображение уробороса в алхимическом трактате 1478 г. Автор — Феодор Пелеканос
Карнавализирующаяся Венецианская биеннале безусловно заслуживает весь поток институциональной, тематической и прочей критики, которая обрушивается на ее итерации каждые два года. События, разворачивающиеся во вне, но при этом около основных, становящихся каждый раз все более “карнавальными” мероприятий, представляют больший интерес. С момента открытия дворца в Венеции Фонд Прада почти не разочаровывал: выставки “Портативная классика” и “Когда подход приобретает форму” были в числе самых знаковых событий в Венеции в 2013 и 2015 годах.
Миучча Прада более известна широкой публике как одна из матрон мира высокой и не очень моды. Прада, вместе с мужем Патрицио Бертелли, координирует бизнес империей оцениваемой в несколько миллиардов евро. При этом она отличается как от коллег по цеху как в Италии, так и в мире креативных индустрий в целом. Одно дело продавать сумки, совершенно другое - заниматься искусством. “Искусство существует для выражения идей и видения. Моя работа продавать”. В начале 70-х годов Прада защитила докторскую диссертацию по политологии, принимала активное участие в феминистских и коммунистических движениях, несмотря на разочарование 1968 года. Унаследовав семейный бизнес по производству элитных сумок в 1978 году, она встретила своего будущего мужа и бизнес-партнера на профессиональной ярмарке. Критики всякой масти обрушивались на нее за то, что она концептуальна, но недостаточно авангардна и коммерчески адекватно, но при этом не консервативна, находясь в неком пространстве смежности. Прада никогда не относилась к этим комментариям серьезно. С аналогичной неприязнью она реагировала на отнесение ее к классу «коллекционеров современного искусства», видя в этом то, чему она противостояла в период своего взросления сначала в оппозиции консерватизму своих родителей, а после в оппозиции к мейстримам мира моды и дизайна.
View of the exhibition “The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied”. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani e Marco Cappelletti.
Выставку «Корабль дал течь. Капитан солгал» очень сложно описать текстуально, или сфотографировать. Объединенными усилими писателя и концептуального кинорежиссера Александра Клюге, художника Томаса Деманда и дизайнера костюмов и театральных сцен Анны Виброк в дворце Фонда Прада монументализировано продолжающееся на протяжении почти 7 месяцев «событие» многослойного слияния кафкианства и симулякры, разрушающей границы между «реальным» и «вымышленным», «естественным» и «искусственным», «натуральным» и «технологическим». Серия незаконченных декораций к пьесе, которую никто не собирался ставить. Тот же самый эпитет можно использовать для описания современной геополитической картины мира. Выставка не предлагает романтических решений мировых проблем, не формулирует концепций современных утопий и не атакует псевдо-моденизм настоящего. Пространство инсталляций ангажирует посетителя неопределенностью, ставит в тупик (фигуративно и буквально), подрывает уверенность в ощущении материальности. Критический характер пространства отражается в его функциональной, тематической и структурной анти-категоричности. Согласно определению гетеротопии Мишеля Фуко, «гладкое» пространство отличается от четко разграниченной иерархической структуры стратегическим использованием неопределенности как генератора возможностей и активатора потенциалов. Если выход из категоричных фундаментальных иерархий не представляется возможным, материализация идеи гетеротопии как события создает контекст для необходимого этапа в поиске альтернатив: альтернативного мышления об альтернативности.
Still from the video installation “Laboratory of Dilemmas” by George Drivas at the Greek Pavilion, Giardini, Venice Biennale 2017
Венецианская биеннале 2017 года, согласно концепции куратора Кристин Масель, посвящена возрождению из пепла нерелевантности раздираемой кризисами современности концепции «искусства ради искусства»: учитывая сезон открытия выставки, ей смело можно было присвоить второе название - «мир, труд, май». Несмотря на игнорирование заданной темы многими национальными павильонами (в частности финским и греческим, где ирония используется как стратегия), биеннале демонстрирует себя как бесхребетный, почти циничный проект, что является возможно последствием не злого умысла, а откровенной отрешенности, сознательного эскапизма. «Пускай едят круассаны!» - ответ, вряд ли данный королевой Марией Антуанеттой в Версале на вопрос вельможи о том, что французские крестьяне должны есть вместо хлеба после засухи. «Пускай наслаждаются эстетикой цветовой гаммы, формы и легкостью содержания!» - вряд ли сформулированная таким образом реакция куратора биеннале на вопрос о критическом, сложно поддающимся категоризации, субъективном, многослойном и требующим пристального внимания и анализа пост-концептуальном искусстве, которое имеет право называться современным.
New World Summit - Rojava. Courtesy of Jonas Staal.
Тотальность современной ультра-капиталистической системы практически невозможно избежать - формы революционного противостояния ей во имя изменения ударяются о скалы цинизма и двойных стандартов, а единственным способом утешения в условиях отсутствия форм «выхода» (за исключением фанатизма и суицида) становится повсеместная карнавализация. При этом субверсивные практики работы внутри системы имеют потенциал подорвать основы легитимности и фундаментальной “безальтернативности” нашего “вечного настоящего”. Работы на границах политики, искусства и социальной работы, которые часто именуются “ангажированным современным искусством” являются, с точки зрения промотирующих их художников и кураторов, языком актуальной оппозиции. Нидерландский художник Йонас Стаал, например, построил «парламент» для Рожавы - феминистского непризнанного государства на обломках горящей Сирии, которая управляется на основе принципов “безгосударственной демократии”. Парламент, построенный художником по приглашению министра иностранных дел Рожавы, заимствует дизайн и эстетику современного национального государства. Идеалы демократического конфедеративного устройства непризнанного государства отражены в эстетическом коде цветов флага и форм архитектуры и дизайна парламента, а также окружающего его парка. Символ прогрессивной демократии 21 века, построенный на базе неких универсальных ценностей художника, был сфотографирован с множества ракурсов. Эти фотографии были позже представлены на нескольких ярмарках современного искусства и проданы коллекционерам, которые являются пассивными или активными элементами того самого миропорядка, который критикуется ангажированным проектом.
Уроборос продолжает пытаться укусить себя за хвост.
The artistic in aesthetic and the politics of loyalty
© The New Yorker
The fuzz about robots producing “artworks” brings about actuality of fundamental dichotomy between art and non-art. Robots might (and surely will) be able to produce enjoyable and perfect aesthetic symmetries, enticing and attractive visually. They are able and will be to improve the technique of producing aesthetic material, which has little to do with art. Art is a language. This language manifest infinite number of poetic and visual appearances, forms and structures. I would say that this also applies to creative production retroactively, meaning that most of historical museums of “art” hold in their collections products of craftwork. Robots and craftsmen are in this sense synonymous. The richness of authentic poetry in creative production defines identification of the result as the piece of art. In this sense, furthering the statement of Peter Osborne’s statement about all contemporary art being post-conceptual, I would say that all historical products of creative labour is either conceptual, or has little to do with art. We look at Hieronymus Bosch or Lucas Cranach oeuvre with admiration because both were not only are outstanding in technical production, but most importantly had the conceptual agenda, for instance, of eroding the institutions of power that dictated norms, aesthetic standards and specific functionality of the “artistic” production.
© Denis Maksimov
The relation between poetry as artistic component in creative production is similar in the spirit to relation between loyalty as unconditional support (what Machiavelli was calling “love”), manifesting power, in politics. The aesthetic, functional component in creative production stands for design, where aesthetics is “tasked” to serve specific purpose - propagate specific set of principles, etc. In political it is similar to dichotomy between holding on to power versus possessing control- where power is sustained by loyalty and legitimate support, while control at the other end is resting on forced obedience and fear.
Underneath the socio-political matter of perceived reality: ‘video sculptures’
courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera
Interview with Emmanuel Van der Auwera (EVDA) by Denis Maksimov (DM) / originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (February 2016 issue)
Emmanuel Van der Auwera is a recent HISK graduate, and the winner of the 2015 Langui Prize awarded during the Young Belgian Artist Award exhibition. In Van der Auwera’s series of Video Sculptures, the notion of screen as window to reality is literally stripped of its flatness, symbolically revealing the underlying mechanics of the media through deconstruction by the artist’s hand. Prior to sculpting the hardware, Van der Auwera continues his extensive research of contemporary video content and identifies those he feels accurately reflect cultural currents in the flux of postmodern bizarreness. These range from all-encompassing, full of manipulative symbols messianic political events to cultural events and intimate confessional moments.
DM: Can you describe the process of making ‘video sculptures’?
EVDA: The screen, technically, composed of LED lights that lit up liquid crystal glass, two sheets of it. On the top of the screen there is an LCD filter. If you remove this filter, all you can see is a white screen - to catch the image you need to apply this filter somehow externally, for example by applying glasses with this filter. Depending on the brand of the screen the filter reacts very differently. Samsung screen is easy to tear off, takes half an hour, while Sony one takes a full day. I don’t pre-cut in advance - it’s not about creating the designed solution. I can only have a relative control over the process. In this way it reminds me of painting and drawing. I am organising it until I feel I reach sort of an equilibrium. It sometimes quite painful - right now I’m building the new sculpture and it’s Sony screen (the decision of buying which I almost now regret, for the reason given before), so the process is very complicated, kind of violent. I am shredding the LCD filter in separate pieces. I keep all of the remaining materials, this outer layers.
DM: Do you see that unpredictability of the result makes the process sort of impressionistic?
EVDA: Indeed. It’s an experiment all the time - I don’t feel control over the process of making. It’s reassuring, because it’s not an automatic gesture. There is no intention and possibility therefore of mass producing the sculptures, despite the fact that material is quite ‘industrial’ in a way. The magical in way transformation from the regular screen into the conceptual sculptural screen is done through the artistic process. There is an ambiguous border in the format of the work.
DM: Is there rituality in process?
EVDA: Yes, I always start from the around the screen with very precise cut. I quickly switch blades for cutting, depending on how the screen is reacting. There is something autopsic in it. An ambiguous border between painting and sculpture in my work is something that I’m still figuring out in the process of continuous work on the new pieces.
courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera
DM: Do you have ‘the bank’ of the videos or the list of the subjects which you are choosing from?
EVDA: I don’t have a precise idea of how I put the videos and screens together, it’s quite empiric. For example with the video of President Obama first inauguration. Initially I received a lot of criticism from people that they don’t want to see this image, so embedded in reality of today. Instead of being reminded and pushed towards self-reflection, they would rather want to see some aesthetic abstract images, beautiful and completely open for the widest angles of interpretation.
DM: Have you ever made live performances?
EVDA: I am thinking of doing a performances again, with cutting the screen in front of the audience. The one I made where I was cutting the screen while it way playing scenes of the first night the American invasion in Iraq during the Second Gulf War, specifically the CNN cover of the intense bombing. I heard the gasp of people in the audience who didn’t realise what was happening. The tearing in Samsung was very easy and you could have heard these sounds of static electricity, those kind of broken radio waves sounds. It’s almost humanising and definitely relates to the anatomical theatre of the Renaissance, while the human body is replaced with the ‘moving pictures machine’, that is so mystified in contemporaneity.
courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera
DM: How do you reflect on symbolism in your researches?
EVDA: There is sort of iconographic analysis. For example Kasimir Malevich, who was a spiritual man, was aiming to create the icon beyond representation. In my case of the white screen, the image is still there, but whiteness of the screen after the LCD layer removed and presents this cleanness of the surface. This what I connect to Suprematism of Malevich. You sort of see the magic and the awfulness of artificiality of the image which is represented to you on this screen - as soon as the top layer removed, you are confronted by bare whiteness of the surface. The image is still there - however to see it you need to apply LSD glasses.
John Carpenter’s demonstrates it interestingly in the cult movie ‘They Live’ - when the protagonist finds the box with glasses, that reveal him the nature of the control society around him. All the advertisements suddenly appear as ‘orders’ - obey, buy, consume, behave, etc. My work is the criticism of iconoclastic approach towards the everyday objects which we are surrounded with - I am bringing back the physics in the technology through the deconstruction of this ‘machine of illusion’, sort of an awful power of control over our vision of reality. Through it’s important to mention that I don’t have an ambition of patronising or teaching anyone - this is rather a critical assessment of the immensity of it’s impact on our perception of reality and everyday behaviour in modernity.
Interview with art collective AES+F
courtesy of AES+F collective
Interview was originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (October 2015 issue)
AES Group was originally formed in 1987 by the conceptual architects Tatiana Arzamasova and Lev Evzovich and the multidisciplinary designer Evgeny Svyatsky in Russia. Exhibiting abroad from 1989, the group expanded its personnel and name with the addition of the photographer Vladimir Fridkes in 1995. AES+F’s recent work has developed at the intersection of photography, video and digital technologies, although it is nurtured by a persistent interest in more traditional media — sculpture especially, but also painting, drawing and architecture. Deploying a dialogue among these media, and plumbing the depths of art history and other cultural canons, AES+F’s grand visual narratives explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary culture in the global sphere. By now the subject of almost 100 solo exhibitions at museums, exhibition spaces and commercial galleries worldwide. AES+F achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative, other-worldly Last Riot (2007), the first in a trio of large-scale, multichannel video installations that have come to define the AES+F aesthetics. In 2015 AES+F presented the new project Inverso Mundus at 56th Biennale di Venezia. AES+F visited Brussels in September for the opening of the solo show ‘THE TRILOGY plus’ in Aeroplastics Contemporary gallery and the opening of the exhibition ‘2050. A brief history of the future’ at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts [which Denis will review in the next issue of poliaesthetica], where their work is also exhibited.
Denis (DM) met with Lev Evzovich (LE), the ‘E’ of the group, to discuss collective’s work and it’s context.
DM: How do you define the medium in which you work?
LE: I think ‘-isms’ are passé. We don’t want to find ourselves in ‘boxes’, transdisciplinarity is the key today. We started from blending neo-Baroque rich imagery with realism and certainly have special relations with surrealism - which someone once told in our case can be called ‘social surrealism’.
DM: Is writing important for contextualisation of your creations on the vast territory of contemporary culture?
LE: Texts, that accompany our exhibitions or shows, are generally speaking unimportant to us. We focus on the image as the ‘discourse generator’. Interpretation of the image by viewers can be quite far from what we actually were thinking while producing the video - but this is something that we definitely enjoy. The role of the artist, in our view, is not to deliver perfectly articulated message.
DM: And what about response from ‘the art world’ - critics, curators, etc.?
LE: Critics and curators for us are less interesting than response we get through Facebook, Instagram. That’s where ‘the life’ is now. We saw over lunch in Venice Australian collector David Walsh, who recently built museum in Tasmania, and he said about our work that it is specifically interesting for him because half of the audience find it just visually ‘beautiful’ and don’t think of reflecting on it’s symbology, while the other half start to reflect on what we tried to hide behind this ‘beautiful surface’. I think he correctly noticed the foundation of what we intend to do: it’s somehow a game of aesthetics.
courtesy of AES+F collective
DM: So you prefer not to occupy the audience with the context?
LE: We don’t want to explain anything. We are beyond political activism. We offer freedom of interpretation of our work and embrace it.
DM: Have you thought of directing a full-featured length movie?
LE: Some of our works reach as long as 1 hours 10 minutes in length, so it’s already quite close to cinematographic format. At the moment we would have considered seriously the offer to work on the full-featured movie, however it of course requires considerations about budgets and another level of collaboration.
DM: I bet you were certainly compared before to Matthew Barney ‘Cremaster Cycle’ series. Renaissance and to some extent Baroque share this spirit of the idea of ‘the ultimate object of art’, the great masterpiece. Do you have an ambition to create it?
LE: We don’t think in this category at all. We are situated in the process of critical analysis and react on the world ‘as it happens’. For now we made a trilogy, our own ‘La Divina Comedia’ so to say. But Inverso Mundus [one of the latest video works], that is now exhibited in 56th Venice Biennale in as a part of collateral project, is rather different, unconnected chapter in our work both thematically and technologically.
DM: Does mysticism occupy special place on the background of your aesthetics? Would you side with Freud or Jung in conversation about the nature and sources of unconscious sensations?
LE: We side with Jung. Mass ideology, mass mythologies are very interesting subjects for us. Religion for us is more interesting as the system of signs. For example when the shape of beard is more important than Surahs of Quran and this pure symbolic feature becomes the reason enough to ‘validate’ justification of a murder. When the visual codes and symbols in religion, for example, overpower it’s scripts. We see it Russia now - the current ‘revival’ of Orthodoxy is not the revival of intellectual and spiritual anti-Soviet existential philosophy, but rather ‘white trash’ dogmatism that serves as the reason enough to justify violence and stupidity. This ‘rituality’, that becomes the basis of the idea for new identity building, concerns us very much. In Inverso Mundus for example, we take on the subject of bizarre subcultures of the suburbs in the big Western cities, setting the scene of orgy of those rioters, that were smashing windows and burning cars in London and Stockholm recently, with police in the royal Versailles-like huge bed, covered with sheets made with Fortuny fabrics, the most expensive in the world now.
courtesy of AES+F collective
DM: Strong aesthetic absurdity is very powerful when it’s full of complex, but easily recognisable symbolism.
LE: Indeed.
DM: The ‘political’ in aesthetics is important for your work.
LE: Politics is very important for us. The art that doesn’t contain politics to some extent is just not relevant. But at the same time, keeping the approach to politics on certain level of criticism in arts is no less important. We avoid by any means vulgar propaganda that sometimes is named ‘art’ - when the political message is on the surface and becomes the very reason behind the ‘production’ of so-called art.
DM: Is AES+F is open for ‘+’ someone else?
LE: We are a collaboration now and certainly will never close the door for engaging and working with other interesting people.
All the Worlds
The review was originally published in the 2015 summer issue of The Brussels Times Magazine
The world is changing and changing fast. Today’s world political structure, founded on the legacy of the Westphalian Peace Treaty from 1648, is evidently out of date. The global geopolitical map that followed after the end of World War II does not represent the actual political weights between today’s global powers. Futurologists speak of Europe as a ‘global pension house’ in 20-30 years’ time, as the median age in Europe will increase to 45 years by then.
We, as mankind, don’t live in ‘the world’ in the singular sense anymore. Just like before Columbus, we inhabit ‘the worlds’. They are interconnected and close to each other, thanks to technology. But it is quite obvious that the solidity of ‘the world’ as a neoliberal, democracy-driven ‘train’, with the United States as its engine, doesn’t exist any longer. The train has lost its steam, speed and the conductor got confused. Europe is one of the leading ‘wagons’ of this train and the actual ‘designer’ of the whole train in the first place. It is confused and lost:
although it denounced its past colonialist approach in order to maintain its conceptual world primacy, it still didn’t manage to come up with an alternative vision for its place in the new world. Europe is at a point of strategic reconfiguration of its self-esteem. Like a person in a mid-life crisis, it needs to take decisions that will affect its development for decades to come.
Venice is probably the most inconvenient city in the world for staging massive art shows. But that fact, on the other hand, makes it a perfect poetic space for
exhibiting contemporary art. The Venice Biennale established the format of the international art exhibition in 1895, which since then has become a benchmark:
there are more than a hundred biennales around the world at the moment. The Biennale in Venice remains the most prestigious of all. It is, in a way, the fair of fairs and the show of the shows. Every two years, one of the most prominent curators in the world takes over the planning of this magnificent, multidimensional event.
The event is colossal: 2 main exhibitions, around 100 ‘national pavilions’ and 50 ‘collateral’ events is just the official program of the Biennale. Each pavilion and
collateral event is basically an exhibition on it’s own. The two main exhibitions are so big, that you would need at least a day to just walk one through without too much haste. The whole experience of the Biennale is uniquely impactful: each day makes you feel like you have read hundreds of books.
In this year’s edition, the curator is Okwui Enwezor, the director of Haus der Kunst in Munich, the first chief curator of Venice Biennale with an African origin (he was born in Nigeria). The central theme of the mega-exhibition this year is at the height of what it means to be ‘political’ - ‘All the World’s Futures’. Enwezor’s
message is very timely - he invited hundreds of curators from all around the world to reflect on the subject of possible futures. The universality of the Western-led model of liberal democracy and capitalism is questioned. The world has already become multipolar, even though the leading ‘superpower’, the United States, will still occupy a special place on the world map for some time to come. The other global players - China, India, Brazil, the EU and Russia - seem to have the ambition to work out alternative visions of the world.
The point of departure and central text in the exhibition is Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’. I’m afraid that this is the biggest conceptual disappointment of the curatorial concept. Speaking about the future with the 19th century text of Karl Marx sounds to me rather outdated. I am not saying that this text is unimportant now - quite the opposite. The actuality of Marx’s legacy is the very essence of ultra-capitalism: the reduction of life to materialism explains why
his book is the most re-printed edition in human history after the Bible. But I would argue that it is much more important to look at the possible futures
with contemporary philosophical and conceptual perspectives. The works of John Rawls, Thomas Piketty, Gilles Deleuze are ‘fresher’ and more relevant
to current events.
Enwezor’s Biennale is definitely worth a mindful visit. Both main exhibitions, one in Giardini (the gardens, that were the first location for the exhibition more than 100 years ago) and the other in Arsenale (the former military arsenal of Venice - makes one recall that Venice was a mighty state once) provide plenty
of food for thought. The pavilions are still presented by countries, making Biennale look like a world fair (which is also staged in Italy, in Milan, by the way - just a few hours of train travel from Venice).
The ‘Olympics of Contemporary Art’ comes to mind, especially as one learns about the ‘Golden Lion’ awards that are presented by a committee for ‘best
artists’ and ‘best pavilions’.
The Canadian pavilion, which was playfully renamed to ‘Canadassimo’, is my personal favourite. You enter a fake regular small shop, the kind of which you find at gas stations in Canada, the US or elsewhere. It is full of junky stuff, but most of them are strangely blurred. The reference to our ever speeding consumer culture is evident: we don’t focus on precious items anymore. The abundance of logos, boxes of every kind and the crazy colour palette of the shelves makes us feel dizzy. You go further in the second room and find yourself in a ‘factory’, where copies and imitations are produced. Templates, paint cans, brushes, tools and everything else that is necessary to copy, paste, imitate and massively produce. Finally, you go upstairs to a constructed external balcony where you are invited to put a couple of euros into a meta-slot machine: and then observe how the coin will pass through the bouncing mechanisms and end up stuck somewhere in the transparent wall of the pavilion. The whole pavilion reads as a playful introduction to the market economy. The pavilion of the Nordic countries (Norway, Finland, Sweden) presents an amazing installation named ‘Rupture’ by Camille Norment with broken windows and sound pieces. It is produced by very unusual musical instruments.
The Belgian pavilion, directed by Vincent Meesen and curator Katerina Gregos, unpacks a post-colonial outlook from a group of artists covering history and present. The Netherlands pavilion treats Herman de Vries’ multidimensional artistic research about the future. The Spanish pavilion looks at the future heritage of pop culture by referring to the past.
Apart of the main projects of the Biennale covering the topic of ‘All the World’s Futures’, numerous respectable art foundations and centers also stage their own exhibitions in different locations around the city. Fondazione Prada is an ‘absolute must’: the conceptual quality of the show is at the very top of the spectrum. During the Biennale, the show ‘Portable Classic’, co-curated by Salvatore Settis and Davide Gasparotto, explores the origins and functions of miniature reproductions of classical sculptures. It showcases more than 80 artworks. ‘The copy of the copy of the copy‘ exhibition illustrates how Renaissance artists employed small-scale copies to elaborate hypotheses on the missing portions of the classical originals.
When you plan your travel, keep in mind that the best time to visit the shows is when they are not overcrowded, for example in August. The downside of this period would be the extreme heat, up to +40 degrees. Another good moment would be end of November, which falls during the last days of the Biennale. Some of the events, for example ‘Eccoci!’ (‘Here we are!’), a performance piece by Brazilian artist Berna Reale (imagine an artist who is also a forensic investigator in Belem’s police force in Brazil), will be re-staged during the last three days of the Biennale.