ARTICLES

'The Pernicious Nature of Opposition Chic'

B+B‘THE ART OF SURVIVAL’
London Artists travel to Prague
Participation in the 2003 Prague Biennale
Exhibition: The Czech Institute, London, July 2003

By Becky Shaw
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The exhibition re-presents the work that curatorial team B+B presented for the Prague Biennale. B + B are an exciting and unusual organisation, weaving together a number of activities. Since 2000 ‘they have developed discursive activities which support artists and their collaborators in situations ranging from residencies and community-based projects to acts of consultation and activism’. They are currently in-residence, or ‘at home’ in the Austrian Cultural Forum, inviting artists and curators from central Europe and beyond to take part in an informal programme of activities.
For their participation in the Prague Biennale, the text describes how B+B began by exploring the complicated aims of the Biennale itself, including, as the Biennale claims, the potential for the ‘peripheries to become the protagonists’ and as a site to ‘document a revolt at the door’. B+B felt that although these claims were made there was little room at the Biennale to discuss what it actually meant, and the work within the Biennale was overwhelmed by the claims. In response, B+B sought to find out whether it was ‘possible to operate between the cogs of the Biennale machine- as a site of exchange, work in progress and as a testing ground’,. As a result, the work here really does sit in some difficult ‘in between’ territory. The work that most directly confronts the politics of a Biennale is by Paula Roush. She took the B+B brand logo and extended it with the text ‘boycott biennale’, printed on t-shirts. When sold outside the National Gallery, Prague, they all sold out in less than one hour, a fashionably edgy souvenir. Interesting developments occurred where participants in the Biennale also wore the t-shirts to mark different dissatisfactions- a group of painters hired by Mark Kostabi as performers wore them, as did the director of the National Gallery, and a group of ‘hunger strikers without demands’. All this information is presented in a hand-drawn timeline in the gallery, which also documents previous ‘boycotts’ of Biennale's, of which there have been many.

The artist describes how ‘B +B boycott biennale’ t-shirts are ‘without commercial attack‘ a boycott becoming yet another ‘shopping possibility’, like the global Biennale brand itself. As the development of the ‘Biennale brand’ continues, so do the boycotts, perhaps becoming an expected and required element to any Biennale. Each time there is a Biennale, there is an ‘emergence of political activity rooted locally…every time the local cultural scene loses ground to the global art market’.. Through the branding of the t-shirts the work points to real concerns of power in Biennales, but also reveals the easy ‘opposition chic’ that emerges. The market takes any novelty or ‘smell of radicalism’ and adds it to the list of desirable products. Any kind of opposition is now fashionable, from the predictable ‘anti-McDonalds’, to ‘anti-Monsanto’, to anti-large art institutions. While people’s dissatisfaction with society is genuine, it’s just too easy to be in ‘opposition’ these days- and this work falls, knowlingly, victim to this itself, gaining a chic high ground of its own. Sometimes I wonder if it is simply impossible to escape commodity fetishism- seeing the problem as the large corporations, the Biennales etc, because it’s so much easier to attack them than propose a better way for society to be organised, in fact, proposing a system other than capitalism can just seem passé. This work is fascinating and challenging in the double-bind it enters, being both critical, already absorbed, and also revealing its own absorption. However, the work doesn't give anything positive to work with afterwards- but perhaps I’m asking too much of one artwork.

Some works in the show are more straightforward- Ella Gibbs’ ‘campaign for spare time’ is an extension of her ‘Spare Time Job Centre’ project where she finds people jobs for their ‘spare time’. In Prague she asked people to supply images of where they would want to be in their spare time, for postcards. I find the resulting images truthful but depressing – they are all places without many people-rural paradises, bedrooms, in the company of partners, all ‘get-away-from-it-all’. The notion of ‘spare time’ is timely- is spare time the last act of self-definition against work-occupying our own ‘free’ time in our own way, or is it just another route for consumption? Just what do we really do in our spare time? We read books, shop, swim, drink, all involving consumption. I’m really not against consumption, it’s very nice, but is there really nothing else to do? So the spare time project is really relevant, but I’m left feeling that these postcards don’t reach the ideas in the same depth as the original ‘Spare Time Job Centre’ project does.

Barry Sykes and Sean Parfitt look for ‘Staying Alive’ tactics, drawing on the activities of survivalists. For Prague they wanted to make sure they had some control over the situation as they feared there would be many barriers to being able to realise a project. This again is a really pertinent observation- artists are often put in situations, contexts where autonomy is encroached, eroded or negotiated. To reference this the artists set upon a training exercise based on Ranulph Fiennes’ training manual, repeating the training for survival steps but in a London park. Again, it’s a great idea, particularly if your audience are artists who are fully aware of daily hoop-jumping scenarios. Photographs of training are accompanied by documents from the Biennale itself, where the artists took only a picnic table, and materials bought from the nearby stationers and began constructing geometric coloured forms, like a cross between origami, mathematical models, and a Rubic’s toy. The time-filling aspect of this was interesting- artists occupying their own time as they chose. While being a ‘hobby’-type activity, the activity for the ‘sake of it’ reminded me of the need some artists feel (myself included) to feel perpetually busy. I think the documentary photos here might be lost on an audience from beyond the art circuit- but this is also an interesting issue. The notion of an ‘art of survival’ and artist’s tactics, opens up a dialogue about the nature of artistic practice, the myths surrounding it, and also aspects of funding, commissioning etc. This is a very rich internal debate, but also, I imagine, one that could be developed to be of relevance to a wider audience, familiar with the agendas of exclusion and engagement in most current government policy.

Alisdair Hopwood developed the website ‘with’, and the screens and map of the website are presented on the gallery wall. ‘With’ provides services to make the consumer a better participant in cultural life- you can hire staff to ‘curate your record collection’ and go to the gym for you, and you can buy tattoos and signs that brand any activity you do as work time etc. The services remove the need for effort- and of course it is the effort put into anything of these activities that make them worth doing. It’s a good idea, and involves appropriately slick presentation. My question here though, is that isn’t this already 2 steps behind the real development of the service industry and marketing? There will probably already be companies that practically do the tasks of ‘with’. The advertising industry is already critiquing itself and its facileness as one more selling point to its highly-savvy and irony-loving audience (as in the current ‘Orange’ adverts). As a result this work just feels like one more ad and nothing else. However, like the Paula Rousch work, perhaps this imminent absorption is part of the work.

Another work by Czech artists, Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda uses the process of advertising. ‘Czech Dream’ involved creating a huge marketing campaign (or at least the promotional material- video and text, implies it was huge) for the ultimate new Czech hypermarket. Hypermarkets are very big business, and through their businessmen personae, TV and radio spots, posters and fliers, billboards and a campaign in newspapers, the artists drew 5000 ‘ready to buy’ clients to a green field where they were confronted with a huge image of the shopping centre, not the thing itself. The scale of the project is fantastic. About the purpose of the project, the text says,
‘the aim of the authors is to survey to what extent people are still able to think about publicity and to what extent they thoughtlessly accept it’
The punters on the video look happy enough, running towards what is obviously a huge poster. The project is funny and sharp but I wonder what the outcome for the recipients is- do they feel they have been made to look stupid by the clever artists? And what is the result of this, now the evils of consumption are made visible to them do they now determine to change their wicked consuming ways? Again, I’m concerned that in criticising the ‘stupid punters’ it moralises about individual behaviour, the individual hypermarket developers etc., rather than grasping the big issue of how our society should be organised. I am also curious to know how the artists funded this project- I hope that the investment of other developers and future markets paid for the production of the marketing material.

Finally, there was a documentary text pinned to the wall describing a project, ‘Social Game’, where the artist, Katerina Seda, had become fascinated with the similarity between all small rural villages and the community idyll they presented. In one village she first researched the average Saturday routine of the inhabitants. From this she then formed an average Saturday routine. Using lures such as a free newspaper and free food she then asked people to carry out an identical Saturday routine, including exact times for different activities. The artist explained her reasons for doing this clearly- that she wanted to explore the romance of the village where everyone acts and feels the same way. It seems that the village took part in the experiment. This project somehow opened doors that some of the other projects didn’t. The artist communicated her intentions openly, including the positive and critical within her inquiry. I can imagine that the experience of carrying out the routine was also fascinating- what would it be like to clean your step at the same time as everyone else? It would be like being in ‘the Prisoner’ or a version of ‘Groundhog Day’, or even ‘Metropolis’- it would be an experience worth having. On the other hand if you chose not to take part in it, there was a different experience to be had and you were still communicating through your actions. The most exciting aspect of this project was the upfront exploration of the artist’s complex relationship to the village including mutual influence and potential power.

‘ART OF SURVIVAL’ was a fruitful and fascinating project, and the show raised questions of audience, power and strategy. However, the most interesting aspects were the problematic relationships- when art uses the language of the media is it doomed to fail as it can never be as sophisticated or as high in production values as the advertising it mimics? Can artists maintain a critical position when this is so readily absorbed into the fashionable miasma? There is definitely a need for more work that explores this process. While the climate supports ‘opposition chic’ is it possible for artists to be really critical -and move beyond criticism of easy targets into constructive and positive views of society?