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| RECLAIMING THE EUROPEAN SPACE Stella Pelše Sculpture Quadrennial Riga 2004 - "European Space" Curators: Aigars Bikše, Kristaps Gulbis State Museum of Art exhibition hall "Arsenāls", the Latvian Railway Museum, the Riga city space | |
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The first conclusion that may be stated immediately is that the ninth Sculpture Quadrennial in Riga has gone way beyond the notion of a sculpture exhibition as a view of objects fashioned from hard and eternal materials. The only work that could be regarded as a delayed greeting from the abstract sculpture of the age of modernism is Romanian Peter Jecza's bronze "Splitting the Ball". On the other hand Norwegian Jon Gundersen's stone sculpture - prehistoric stone axes and stone mobile telephones entitled "A Stone's Throw from Reality" - merits a dissertation if only on the relationship between ends and means, i.e. a reflection on the metamorphoses of tools over the course of history. Fresh smelling wood, the most diverse synthetic materials as well as readymades and video dominate. I don't think today there can be any doubt that there is a respectable theoretical basis for calling anything sculpture, as long as it has a third, spatial dimension. The inclusion of a retrospective on the situation in the 1950s on both sides of the iron curtain (large format photo reproductions on stands in the city space) is a quite educational digression into the period of opposition of Realism and Abstractionism. Although in those days both sides were battling each other on an ideological base, sculpture still had the perceptible contours of a concrete art form. By keeping "sculpture" in the title, the quadrennial organisers nevertheless demonstrate a certain interest in explaining the contours of the specifics of the art and perhaps even its potential rebirth.
The form: readymades and attractions To this day, the surest ways to renew interest in an art object turn out to be the use of everyday articles, which are recognised and known by the viewer, and the involvement of the public in various activities. Ekke Vali's work "Exhibition Time" transformed the entrance to the exhibition into a ticket barrier seen in metro stations. A visitor had to insert a card on entering and on leaving the time spent in the exhibition was shown. Crossing a physical boundary between the profane and the sacred exhibition space, this sets one thinking about the autonomy of the sphere of art and its positive/negative role in today's context. The Slovak artists' shooting gallery "SEXYZ", Richard Fauguet's "Ping Pong Table", Paul and Anne Daniela Rodgers' installation "Carousel" heightened the annual fair feeling of the exhibition despite sending shivers down one's spine on seeing the uncovered skeletons and skulls of the carousel animals. On this occasion Gints Gabrāns chose to stay with the "living sculpture" tradition. He allowed viewers to wrack their brains over the most elementary questions, as can be seen in the visitors' book: 1) is the boy in the glass ball real? 2) if he's real, does he get replaced? One of the attraction type works that visitors were allowed and even encouraged to try deserves special mention. This was Croatian artist Vlasta Zanic's "Personal Experience Chair". However, the almost commandeering woman's voice, as she reads concept of the work and proclaims the falling over of the chair to be a rebellion against custom, arrogance and dogmatism (all that was missing was - against the patriarchal canon of modernism) begs the question: perhaps one can get a better overview of the world when the chair is in an upright position? The chair theme also appears in the installation "The System's Not Working" by Dalibor Nikolič (Bosnia & Herzegovina). However, if they are placed end to end in a kind of weightless situation, these linked chairs have to be understood in context with the explanation that they symbolise empty bars and the flow of the youth away from a politically and economically unstable Bosnia. In the end the object transforms into an illustration of the commentary. Content: nature and history Quite a number of works in one way or another touched upon the themes of nature and naturalness, life and growth, and which weren't without their ecological aspect: Heather Ackroyd's and Dan Harvey' practice of growing grass on buildings, Petras Mazūras' "Biotelescope" - a complicated structure for raising fragile plants in unfavourable climatic conditions, Erik Samakh's suggestive audioinstallation with self-playing flutes in the tree canopy, Dan Shipsides' rock climbing process extensively captured in various media, Nadine Rennert's strangely unnatural landscapes of synthetic materials; The monumental objects of Mindaugas Navakas and Frantisek Skala in the city space carry associations with the dimensions of prehistoric creatures. Several works, chronologically simultaneous in terms of their topicality, display a somewhat differently accented interest in their political and sociological message (Mustafa Skopljak, Gorki Zuvela, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Roza El-Hassan, El Perro and others). In the main however, the interpretation comes up against the framework of the concrete decoding and does not tempt one to return, but leads to a rather dry perception of the exhibition. The exhibition's Hungarian laureates András Gálik and Bálint Havas may also be included in this sub-theme. As Little Warsaw, their work "Marble Street" was a huge white silicone relief resembling a skin drawn over the façade of a building with a crumpled portal on which there was the figure of an unidentified helmeted warrior/invader in the repose of a classical god. The heritage of antiquity really can be interpreted as a form of dress tried on by various political regimes, making us swing between gloomy thoughts on the sunset of Europe and optimistic predictions on the future passing on of the heritage. (Self)colonised space On 5 June the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga hosted an international conference - "Colonised Space". The organisers had entrusted the selection of the participants to curator Anders Kreuger from Sweden. The relevance of the theme in an international context is not in dispute - alongside ethnic and sexual minority issues, it is very rare for an examination of the post-colonial situation to be absent in art history conferences and seminars. Although the first reaction from the Post-Soviet side is often a smirk about "their" invented problems, these different priorities could nevertheless, firstly stimulate an evaluation of the undeniable differences in the historical heritage and the common future outlook. Alongside the generally criticised export of Western values and lifestyle to the countries of the so-called Third World and the ambivalent consequences of this process, the conference also examined the view of the artist as a coloniser of space, i.e. the bringer of his ideas and vision into the public space. The overall nature of the event also provoked thoughts on the balance of representation between the Post-Soviet and the West in the art space. Most of what was said were western versions that could also be seen as examples of colonisation of the local space. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the locals themselves have adopted elements of the art language from "over there". This reminds us of the conclusion of Bulgarian historian Alexander Kiossev on the voluntary colonisation of the culture of Eastern Europe with the "import of foreign values and models of civilisation". (Kiossev, A. Notes on Self-Colonising Cultures // After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe. B. Pejic and D. Elliot (ed.), Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999, p. 114). The existence of these "self-colonising" cultures requires a review of the simplified models of cultural expansion based on the aggressor/subjugated relationships which brings versions of the mutual interaction into the foreground. This event had little connection with the quadrennial itself and the works on show. The greatest benefit came from the opportunity to learn from a curator's standpoint about the mainly socially oriented, communicative arts projects that had been carried out in various countries. Among the participants were Carsten Höller (Germany/Sweden), Ute Meta Bauer (Germany), Annie Fletcher (Ireland/Netherlands), Anton Vidokle (Russia/USA) and others. Latvia was represented by Solvita Krese, director of the Centre for Contemporary Art who spoke about the 2003 project "re:publika". It was not a theoretically oriented conference, the only exception being English art historian and critic Claire Bishop's paper "Politically Engaged Art or Aesthetically Engaged Politics?" This certainly merited greater resonance as it dealt with the theoretical problems that arise from an evaluation of politically engaged art. If, despite their apparent pretensions of public "usefulness", art projects are not envisaged as substitutes for social work (several speakers emphasised that the artist is not a candidate for the social worker's position), then it follows that there is the danger of the complete disappearance of the criteria for success and quality, if aesthetically based judgements are dismissed as being incompatible with a socially and politically active position. As a result, "engaged" art could become the destroyer of a specific field of culture and a servant of political interests. The differences of opinion among the participants in the discussion on the status of socially engaged art projects were very interesting; are they now already components of the institutionally supported mainstream or still a fragile and marginal minority? Any judgements on the quality, contemporaneity, relevance and usefulness of various art phenomena depend on the answer to this question in the most direct way. The exhibition itself was in no sense an example of these radical communicative experiments; however, in the local context, the overall scope of the project (a two-part catalogue is also envisaged), in introducing us to artists from 25 countries and their latest explorations "away from sculpture" on the background of 50 year old history, can certainly be regarded as a productive and in some senses, also a provocative investment in the various dialects of the language of contemporary art and in familiarisation with the aetiology of evolution. | |
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