| The politics of performing arts and its strategies: from Pocha Nostra to Refugee Camps for First World Citizens Tomaž Toporišic In the foreword to an issue of Janus magazine dedicated to notes on subversion Jan Fabre & Henrik Tratsaert ask themselves one of the most frequently asked questions of the last decade: “What strategies do artists, dramatists, performers, philosophers, scientists and others put into effect to undermine conventions, and to pervert and question society’s codes?” In our paper we are going to focus on some recent cases of politics and strategies within the field of performing arts. Our stating point will be Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s statement: “Each metier, language, genre and / or format demands a different set of strategies and methodologies” (Gómez-Peña, “Navigating the Minefields of Utopia,” 73). In the post-democratic world of global exchange artists (and along with them theoreticians) have to adapt themselves to the very fact that the manifestations of power remain as risky as ten or twenty years ago. As a specific result as well as an attempt of an artistic reply they produce hybrid and fragmented forms of politicised art. In Baudrillard’s postmillennial world of transpolitical, transhistorical and transeconomic art returns to tactics and strategies of the political and politicised. With less certainty about the possibility of their impact and with stronger consciousness of the utopist and marginalized nature of its own being. They have to face the fact Herbert Blau describes in his book To All Appearences, Ideology and Performance: after the fall of the Iron Curtain and other events of the 1990-s “nothing recent in our given circumstances – from deconstruction to perestroika (…) suggests that the situation of crises has in any way abated (…). At best we might be able to say (…) that the situation of crisis has been put into the subjunctive.” (Blau, 13) But after September 11th and the events that followed we have to be dubious even about the subjunctive. We will take the performance activism and oppositional art of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s La Pocha Nostra with its attempts of cross contamination and Emil Hrvatin and Peter Šenk’s politicised anti-utopian project Refugee Camp for First World Citizens as two examples of possible strategies of contemporary politicised art that – according to Mikhail Epstein and his theory of proto-formations in culture – could indicate new politics of performing arts beyond the postmodern paradigm. Their starting point is the awareness that – to quote Epstein –“the future in again advancing on us, not with an exclamation mark this time, but rather with a question, to which there is not and cannot be a known answer.” (Epstein, 330) In projects of Hrvatin and Gómez-Peña the first, the second and the third world meet in the vague future of a common history of either refugee camps or immigrations. Following Giorgio Agamben and his theory of the camp Emil Hrvatin takes in his project the camp as a biopolitical paradigm for the contemporary West. In his play of sliding signifiers he reappropriates the Western or First World idea of the camp as a state of exception and explores in his artistic project the paradoxes of this parallel legal system he describes as “an exterritorialized site where the usual legal system does not apply. And yet, exactly as such, it is a place or even a non-place to which the regular legal system can turn any time.” (Hrvatin/Šenk, 77) The starting point for his artistic intervention and special tactics he employs when dealing with the lack of ethics and humanism in global contemporary society of the democratic First World is a hypothesis that refugee camps are by-products of conflicts in the contemporary world as well as a by product of his assumption that “the world politics and the ideology of the First World are military rather than humanistically orientated.” (Ibid) Understood as temporary settlements for the Second and Third world citizens they produce “a law quality of life that often does not even meet minimal living standards. But it matches the image of the refugee, usually seen as a pour, desperate, exhausted, deprived person …” (Ibid) According to the policy of UN the isolation of the camps is recommended in order to avoid possible tensions between refugees and local population. As a part of the first project of his and Peter Šenk’s artistic project First World Camp, subtitles as “a platform for artistic research into the demilitarisation of capsular societies” he therefore proposes and elaborates a model of an anti-isolationist Refugee Camp for the First World Citizens: a first settlement that is ready to accept possible refugees from the First World. Thus he inverts the actual situation of the existing refugee camps and develops what seems to be utopic, yet very concrete proposal for a prototype that can be applied anywhere. He deliberately chooses Slovenia, advertised by its government “as ‘safe and peaceful land’, a land that according to the same government “does not feature on the map of possible terrorist attacks.” He concludes his argument with a logical statement: “This makes Slovenia a suitable location for refugee camps for First World citizens.” (Ibid, 78) In choosing a platform for artistic research into the demilitarisation of capsular societies which simulates the language of social sciences and politics in order to play with sliding signifiers and reappropriations of its logical reasoning Hrvatin takes very seriously the role of spectacle Guy Debord defines as follows: “Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not something added to the real world … On the contrary, it is the very hearth of society’s real unreality.” (Debord, 12-13) He is fully aware that “the real unity of the spectacle proclaims masks the class division on which the real unity of the capitalist mode of production is based. /…/ What creates society’s abstract power also creates its concrete unfreedom.” (Ibid) What he aiming at is unmasking this unfreedom with a simulation of the very language ideology uses via the implication of the social science. The First World Camp deals with what Gómez-Peña describes as globalisation’s dark side. The fact that “entire Third World countries have become sweatshops, quaint bordellos, and entertainment parks for the First World and for the inhabitants of the Southern Hemisphere the only options for participating in the ‘global’ economy are as passive consumers of ‘global’ trash, or providers of cheap labour or material prima.” (Gómez-Peña, “The New …”, 9-10) Hrvatin and Šenk are also more than aware that the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security, and ecology are disappearing, therefore they construct a seemingly coherent end extremely elaborated system of configurations for refugee camps in the nearest future to come. A kind of a humble project dedicated to unstable future of the First World Citizens after September 11th and along with the development of events in Iraq. Thus they propose a concrete artistic answer the question Richard Schechner asks in his book Performance Studies, an Introduction: “If a globalisation was treated as performance, what kind of performance would it be?” (Schechner, 227) Among various competitive scenarios they choose one that is not very optimistic and undermines a postcolonial mimicry with its own humanitarian jargon. Hrvatin and Šenk are fully aware that extreme art has a problem, that using on-the-edge tactics of shock therapists they would have little left in their armoury of shocking. That every fetish imaginable had already been inscribed on the web. They are also aware of the fact Gómez-Peña acknowledges very often: it is very difficult to find boundaries to push. This is the dilemma that every performance artist in the world is facing right now. Are there any margins left in a time when ‘gang members’ are being utilised to publicise Nike and when in a few months Bin Laden could become ‘pop culture in Japanese anime.’ Due to the fact that – according to Gómez-Peña once more – every possible outer limit has been comodified in the mainstream, the question rises: Who can artists shock any more? Is their new role just to reflect the impossibility of transgression? In his artistic work Gómez-Peña used various shocking techniques: in 1994 event he and Roberto Sifuentes crucified themselves in front of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to protest against the “xenophobic immigration policies” of then Californian governor Pete Wilson. In 1992-93 (in response to the many mainstream celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the “New World”) he and Coco Fusco put up a performance that parodied how exotic people were exhibited by and to Europeans and Euro Americans. They lived for three days in a golden cage in Madrid’s Columbus Plaza displayed as just discovered “primitive” Ameridians from an island in the Gulf of Mexico. The exhibit was seen also in London, Sydney, several locations in the US and Buenos Aires. Presumably as “Guatinauis” they carried on their lives under the gaze of spectators including dancing to rap music for small donations. Two guards led them on leashes to the toilet. Many persons knew this was a politically savvy performance, but a surprised number did not. There are some evident similarities in artistic strategies employed by Gómez-Peña and Hrvatin-Šenk. Both subvert the already blurred boundaries between art and politics. Gómez-Peña’s newly discovered Amerindians exposed uncomfortable parallels between international arts festivals, colonial expositions, museum displays and tourist expeditions. The project created a parallel world of art commenting on the state of ethics in post-colonial society. It also performed the task of a living artistic situation commenting on the impossibilities of a straightforward political art as means of revolutionising and changing global society’s vices. Hrvatin/Šenk share with La Poca Nostra the common denominator of their work: “the desire to cross and erase dangerous borders including those between art and politics /…/ ultimately to dissolve borders and myths of purity”. (Gómez-Peña, “The performance Activism”, 53) But this desire uses tactics of the political that differ from those of La Poca Nostra. They dissolve borders between politics and art by using politics as a basic field for their artistic research that is very difficult to interpret by means of using any identifiable aesthetics. Instead of the aesthetics of their own (in Gómez-Peña’s case self-defined as “robo-baroque” or “ethno-techno-canibal.aesthetic”) they pretend to research the politics and aesthetics of a specific by-product of the postmillennial global world: that of the refugee camps for citizens of the Third World. More than this. The politics of art they employ are the very tactics of the UNHCR, NATO and other trans-national organisms of the so-called “humanitarian”power. Their persuasion (which is off course linked to arguments of Agamben) is that phenomena like refugee camps are moving into the centre stage of today’s society. The future they predict as very possible and to which their project is consecrated and is kindly inviting the governments to join them in their task is the mirror image of the situation we have been living in for the last few decades. If Epstein comments on the contemporary society: “the future emerges as a soft form of negativity, as a vagueness within any sign, or diffuseness of any meaning,” (Epstein, 335) they give this soft, vague form of negativity a clear and organised picture: the Refugee camps for the Citizens of the First World. By taking those camps as Agamben’s biopolitical paradigm for the contemporary West they replace a classical artistic belief that art creates a parallel world with a statement that “the camp is always a parallel system, literally a ‘para’-system”. The analytical approach to contemporary political reality they apply in their project has some similarities to Mikhail Epstein’s analysis of the post-communist Russia with “post communism rapidly moving into the past, on the very heels of communism”. They agree with Epstein “there is a need to go beyond the confines of both Utopia and its resonating parodies. The “post-communist epoch can count only a few years to its name, having suddenly bogged down in the protoplasm of some new, unknown social system.” (Ibid, 330) The question raised by Epstein’s statement about contemporary Russia can easily be applied to the global situation after the fall of the Berlin wall, end of the cold war and the events after Afghanistan, September 11th and recent events in Iraq. Hrvatin/Šenk seem to be proposing to us that we are living in a new era of a new, unknown social system. This era can be defined as post-democratic, post-racial and some other denominations Peña uses or – in Agamben’s terms from The Face – “a global civil war, whose battlefield is social life in its entirety, whose storm troopers are the medias, whose victims are all the peoples of the Earth”. (Agamben, 99)As the communist and cold war histories remain in the past this only means – as Epstein puts is – “that the future has been cleansed of yet another spectre, or idol, and such cleansing, or demythologisation, of time is proper function of the future.” (Epstein, 335) In FWC project the future advancing on us, “not with an exclamation mark this time, but rather with a question” is clearly foreseen and in a process of detailed elaboration of its various possible aspects. In doing so the project relates to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the camp “not as a historical fact and an anomaly that /…/ belongs to the past, but rather in some sense as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live.” (Agamben, “What is a Camp?”, 39) The project takes the very fact that – according to Agamben - the sovereign power of the camp is founded on the ability to decide on the state of exception and is thus the structure in which the state of exception is permanently realized. It starts also from the assumption Slavoj Žižek makes when commenting the new American and global attitude to prisoners of war and immigrants: “Today as a term denoting exclusion, homo sacer, can be seen to apply not only to terrorists but to those who are on the receiving end of humanitarian aid (Rwandans, Bosnians, Afgans), as well as to the Sans Papiers in France and the inhabitants of the favelas in Brazil, in the African American ghettoes in the US.” (Žižek) By a proposal to invert this fact the project undermines the state of exception and together with it the very biopolitical paradigm.for the contemporary west. By proposing a refugee camp situation for individuals from the First World conceptualised as a network node that generates integration and interaction between refugees and local people, a prototype that can be applied anywhere, the project per nagationem speaks about the very fact of the biopolitical paradigm of the camps Agamben defines in his famous statement: “Inasmuch as its inhabitants have been stripped of every political status end reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most absolutely biopolitical space that has ever been realized – a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation. The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen.” (Agamben, “What is Camp?”, 40) Hrvatin/Šenk’s project reflects specificity and models a new reality of a refugee camp – interpreted in the line of Agamben as the very model that replaces the city as the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the First World -, which results out of that specificity in the following projects to take place in different European regions in 2005 and 2006: - Ship as a refugee camp (Venice and Rotterdam) takes boats as possible
temporary refugee camps, a kind of modern ‘stultifera navis’
which nobody wants to accept and focus on see refugee camps which would
be placed in exterritorial seas and would move from one to another hot
spots. In the project they propose to elaborate together with partners from several European countries and regions they are constructing a new paradigm of camps not as factories of death but, as Hannah Arendt puts it, a mode of life “outside of life and death”. A mode of life they are proposing to the First World individuals as a possible Noah’s Ark of the post September 11th 21st century biopolitical situation. As with Gómez-Peña’s performance activism it is hard to imagine how the politics Hrvatin/Šenk’s project might produce will serve as a real alternative to that which contests. But is this not the case with most of today’s subversive approaches to art. Was it not true also with the postmodern postsocialist politicised art in the Second World Countries? And was it not the case also with the trans-, neo- and historical avant-guardes, political theatre of the 79-s, 60-s and 50-s, politicised art of the 1990-s and 1980-s. Fabre’s question I quoted in the beginning of the presentation therefore seems to lead us to nothing more than a new series of question marks.
http://www.drustvo-za-estetiko.si/urnik_r04.htm Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics. (Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Blau, Herbert. To all Appearances. Ideology and Performance. London, New York: Rutledge, 1992. Dissident Voices / Notes on Subversion, Janus. 16 / 04, Antwerpen, 2004. Debord, Guy. The Society of Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Epstein, Mikhail. After the Future: The Paradoxes of postmodernism and Contemporary Russian, Amherst: University of Massachusets Press, 1995. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. “Navigating the Minefields of Utopia”. (A conversation with Lisa Wolford). The Drama Review 46, 2 (T 174), New York, 2002. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. »The New Global Culture«. The Drama Review 45, 1, New York, 2001. Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. “The performance activism and oppositional art of La Pocha Nostra”. Janus. 16 / 04, Antwerpen, 2004. (53-57) Hrvatin, Emil. Šenk, Peter. “Refugee camp for the first world citizens.” Janus. 16 / 04, Antwerpen, 2004. (77-79) Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies, An Introduction. London/New York: Routledge, 2002. Žižek, Slavoj. “Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?”
London Review of Books 24.10 (23 May 2002). |
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