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The Foucaultian notion that power and knowledge serve to reinforce each other in the creation and maintenance of ideology animates much contemporary art practice. Several artists in Social Capital: Forms of Interaction elaborate on this idea, asserting that power itself produces knowledge. Power then is understood as relational and thus necessarily contested from within the very structures it has created. Whether considering the structure of human relations across a global spectrum or isolating local collective action, artists such as Mark Lombardi, Emil Hrvatin & Peter Senk, Luc Steels, and Renée Green engage viewers as conscientious observers. Although they employ art as a vehicle for conveying knowledge, they do not necessarily attempt to solve the contradictions they present, but instead, in a Brechtian manner, emphasize and amplify them. The viewer is then left with the responsibility of reacting to these prompts and subsequently making informed choices. Mark Lombardi confronts power structures of a global scale in his work by exposing long-obscured institutional operations and charting international webs of clandestine dependency. In his ironically titled Inner Sanctum (3rd version) (1996), Lombardi illustrates the Vatican Bank’s flow of tainted finances through a diagram on the smooth, reflective surface of a lightbox. Lombardi depicts patterns of corruption within a financial institution whose profits were originally intended to benefit the Roman Catholic Church’s charitable causesE1. His diagram reveals that many beneficiaries of the Bank’s largesse during the approximately twenty-year period under consideration in Inner Sanctum were individuals and organizations involved in illegal activities. From the fraudulent Sicilian financier Michele Sindona’s 1969 appointment as chief financial advisor to the Holy See to the public exposé of the scandal and the Bank’s ensuing downfall in the early 1980s, Lombardi maps and graphically delineates each inauspicious dealing. Lombardi limns the connections among a meta-network of unlikely alliances consisting of prominent institutions and figures, including the Irish Republican Army, the Mafia, and former President Richard Nixon. Other players include Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, the governments of Iran, Libya, Peru, Taiwan and Argentina, the President of Nicaragua, several American politicians, the FDIC, and UBS Geneva. Although the parties implicated in the illicit exchange of money are disparate and dispersed, together they form a powerful and nearly impenetrably inter-connected global organism. Their unscrupulous dealings metastasize across a decentralized system in which currents of power are embedded in a multitude of relationships among influential decision-makers. The sheer amount of information Lombardi presents initially may overwhelm the viewer, who is confronted with the large scale of the lightbox and the myriad implications of these murky operations. Formally, the artist offers no focal point from which the story unfolds, and without an established narrative center, one’s gaze wanders in random scrutiny of the rhizomic flow chart. Lombardi requires that we decipher this maze of activities for ourselves, forcing us to adopt the role of investigator vis-à-vis his comprehensive research. It is in the active participation of the viewer – a process in which knowledge is expressed, transferred and internalized – that the work is actualized.
Installed along three walls that enclose the viewer, the work forms a triptych of images depicting three possible camp locations. Potential situations for interaction between the refugee and local communities are illustrated in diagrams beneath these images. Proposing to occupy abandoned fields in Slovenia, the installation considers three different options: “open,” “permeable,” and “closed” camps. The open camp shares its basic infrastructure with the local community, as it is easily accessible from two bordering regional roads. The permeable camp is proximate enough to the local community to offer the possibility for interaction and cultural integration among the two groups, while the closed camp is excluded, isolated, and far removed from the nearest local settlement.4 On the installation floor lie charts that indicate the dimensions of the minimum living space recommended by the UNHCR, and the average minimum of actual living space in countries of various stages of development such as Chile, Namibia, Russia, and Sweden. The disturbing inequalities here and among the three schemas further emphasize the privileged position of the viewer who is enclosed within the structure. For, as exiles from the privileged first world, they are stripped of their contextualized identities and previous political and cultural rights as citizens, thus reduced to what Agamben refers to as “bare life.”5 By shifting the focus onto the viewers, Hrvatin and Senk encourage new ways of perceiving the refugee condition, prodding them to reflect on the human condition and to consider their options were they to become refugees. In an attempt to reverse the experience of disenfranchisement in viewers, Luc Steels envisions granting agency to them directly. One component of his upcoming project for an exhibition at ZKM6 is a poster entitled Communitas (2003), which explains the rationale behind his venture to involve and connect viewers through technology. By providing a software system and hand-held devices (PDAs) to viewers, Steels proposes to create networks among the project’s participants, enabling them to discuss and comment upon the exhibition while connected through a wireless peer-to-peer network. Each device will record sounds and store images, drawings or text on its screen. The resulting representations will be shared among the participants at the exhibition, stored in an archive, and broadcast over the Internet.7 The idea that direct communication and discussion requires arbitration by electronic devices is somewhat of a paradox. While it suggests a pessimistic prognosis for contemporary personal interactions to the extent that technology has become a necessary facilitator for human communication, it concurrently offers a utopian vision in which technology provides a relational experience unmediated by traditional organizing principles and values. Steels asserts that by creating a situation which encourages direct connection, the traditional social structure will be bypassed and the status quo undermined. While such a hope could materialize in the gallery context, it begs the question whether its “success” ultimately may depend on its ability to reach society at large. However, by equipping the traditionally passive viewer with a platform and tools for agency through the exhibition, Steels transforms the dynamic of the relationship between the art work and the viewing public. His belief that “everybody must be allowed to be both a producer and interpreter of representations”8 resonates with the anthropologist Victor Turner’s9 analysis of social rituals. Turner argues that the sense of alienation and exploitation that pervades contemporary society can be alleviated by finding a source of expression in the interstices of the relationship between social ritual and standardized social structures. Through the spirit of Communitas, Steels aspires to elicit a creative, participatory response for redressing the imbalance of power between the artist and viewer. Renée Green offers different methods and modes of expression for subverting established means of power. Through interviews with musicians, activists, and cultural theorists in her video Activism + Sound from her Wavelinks Series (2002), Renée Green explores the instrumentalization of sound for political purposes. The activist groups portrayed in the video literally refuse to be silenced, utilizing sound as a rallying point for their causes. They often employ music, frequently electronic, as a means of evoking elusive sensory sentiments in order to mobilize the public; they also appropriate words spoken by politicians into expressions of their own beliefs, or use evocative and conceptually specific field recordings to infuse sound with meaning (i.e. playing the sound of drilling in protest of threatened public-housing). Green downplays the aesthetic aspect of the video, thereby ensuring that the viewer is not distracted from its message: the pursuit of social and political change. However, even as a work whose critical schema is motivated by very pressing and real issues, Activism + Sound functions beyond the scope of the documentary. The mark of the artist is apparent in the formal elements of the video as well as in Green’s characteristic use of montage. Exploring the notion that a certain social reality can be produced through images, it recalls the curator Okwui Enwezor’s discussion of the dichotomy between ethics and aesthetics, or politics and poetics.10 As an architect of accounts based on actual events, Green engages what Enwezor describes as the tension between objectivity and the subjective employment of the image as a critical tool by which to navigate the truth. The ethos of Activism + Sound is deliberately unpolished, with rough cuts and chaotic moments marked by a cacophony of elements competing for dominance. The audio component of the video alternates between rhythmic beats and dissonant sounds, while the visual experience is similarly fragmented by frequent cuts. In what is perhaps intended as a distancing technique to rouse and thus engage the viewer, Green shot some of the interviews from awkward angles: a profile too close for comfort or a face filmed slightly from below. Through her approach to filmmaking, Green captures many dimensions of resistance and protest, for the very style of the medium embodies the complex and, at times, contradictory nature of the subject it examines. As the artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa points out in an interview in Activism + Sound, political activism has many guises, yet the solution is not to flatten the landscape of difference, but instead to build a coalition that accommodates disparate causes and movements. In the spirit of the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe’s model of agonistic democracy, Jafa suggests “finding a basis for solidarity”11 in which various groups can, in the words of a member of the collective Ultra-red, “clash, wrestle and learn from each other.”12 Green’s video likewise captures an atmosphere in which a multiplicity of voices mobilizes in the pursuit of its goals, articulating the necessity of a pluralistic democratic society. Elaborating on the problematic nature of consensus, Mouffe cautions that it “exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion.”13 While her words might express concern for the smaller and softer voices of political activism, she does not offer ways to ensure that they are heard amid the din. In this way, the artists under consideration here also engage viewers by enabling them to acquire an alternative knowledge that may inspire new ways of navigating the established social order.
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