Image Smugglersin a Free Territory
Shirin Neshat’s video Passage is set in the deserts of the Persian Gulf. Her film focuses on the state of limbo between life and death that can only be comprehended by art and religion. This no-man’s-land, where time and space become one, appears as a blank patch on the map. On the one hand it lies beyond the reach of the conquered world, on the other, it is like a spiritual force field that radiates beyond life. With this burial ritual, full of bewitching beauty, the Iranian artist celebrates a great moment of loss, but also of redemption.
The no-man’s-land referred to here has three dimensions, namely, physical-geographical, socio-political, and aesthetic. The first signifies not only mythical, uninhabited natural spaces such as mountain ranges, primeval forests and deserts, but also wastelands and abandoned zones in our big cities, be it “Ground Zero” in New York, or Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, that classic void of the Cold War where a forest of cranes is now thriving. These are augmented by hardly definable, highly disputed areas of all kinds: war zones, refugee camps, pirate radio stations, tax havens, letterbox firms, off-shore abortion clinics and smuggling routes in border regions.
Eighty percent of the city of Caracas is illegally inhabited, and seventy percent of Venezuelan children are born out of wedlock. Entire districts of Rio de Janeiro are extraterritorial zones exempt from state jurisdiction. Curiously enough the same applies to prisons. The population of most mega-cities is not known even to their mayors, and the rare city maps, when drawn up at all, are outdated within a year.
In the struggle to survive in the metropolises, strange sociotopes develop in the most unusual places: in deserted high-rise buildings or beneath freeway bridges where, in São Paulo for instance, craftsmen have settled in semi-nomadic conditions. These unstable zones are characterized by poverty and exclusion on the one hand, yet by astonishing productivity and creativity on the other.
On the socio-political level, no-man’s-land signifies that in many Third World countries the so-called informal sector comprises over half of the working population. But it also indicates that globalization feeds on invisible financial sources and the locationless Internet. At the same time, entire continents, such as Africa, are being uncoupled from the rest of the world and left to their fate. No-man’s-land also applies to the deficient social systems and the non-transparent political conditions in many parts of the world. In the meantime, human relationships have become increasingly deregulated and vague, often to the point of desolation. Even language has wandered off into a cultural no-man’s-land, which seems like an impoverishment to some, an enrichment to others. The cacophony of the mass media leads to speechlessness, and the flood of visual images results in a dearth of content.
The lack of points of contact between different civilizations produces a dangerous vacuum. In this way cultural differences, which could in fact be productive, become fixed and insurmountable. Can Brazil, whose population according to a recent survey embraces 143 different shades of skin colour, serve here as a positive model? The no-man’s-land of aesthetics begins where the normal world ends. Artists are the border guards of a realm that lies beyond reality, where the power of interpretation is no longer a sovereign right of politicians or economic gurus. The artists find their material in the “wasteland”. Powerful images are often discovered and brought to light where they are least expected. The colonies of art are places of seclusion and islands of resistance in a sea of uniformity. Art reveals those inner layers of the world that remain hidden to the superficial gaze of politics and sociology. There is a great deal to say in favour of the idea that art has taken the place of philosophy as the interpreter of the world.
Artists create a power-free zone and, as such, a counter-world running opposite to the existing one: a land of emptiness, of silence and respite, where the humdrum life that surrounds us is brought to a standstill for a moment. But it is also a land of riddles where the flood of images surging in on us from the breeding grounds of kitsch are encoded. By blazing a trail through the barriers of the material world, the artist becomes an intercultural smuggler of images.
Art knows no hierarchy. The question of what is old or new, peripheral or central, modern or primitive, poses itself in an entirely different way to that of economics. Art eludes the calculating ways and the hysteria of modern society. While industry continues to furnish the world, the prime task of contemporary art is to purify it.
Abstraction plays a privileged role in this context. It distances itself from the garrulousness of the modern world to create a sublime counterpoint. These refuges of art, which enable the imagination to extend beyond the everyday sphere, are in fact the corrective to the all-consuming maelstrom of the urban drama. The no-man’s-land of abstraction frees the world from all its ballast and makes a purified new beginning possible.
Although art does not necessarily make us better human beings, writes Harold Bloom in an essay on Shakespeare, it does help us to bear ourselves and our loneliness more easily. Art generates the desire to be another and to travel by time-tunnel to inaccessible places.
The Bienal As a Free TerritoryThere has never been a lack of attempts to colonize no-man’s-land in Brazil. We simply have to remind ourselves of the founding of Brasília, and before that, a good fifty years ago, of the Bienal de São Paulo. Both are natural allies, as they were created by the same enlightened spirit, and share the call to change. Each was conceived as a quarry of new images, and have together smoothed the country’s path towards modernism. The Bienal de São Paulo is an extraterritorial zone where artists construct their utopian settlements. It is a protected sanctuary where the streams of goods run dry and political strategies are to no avail. The Bienal sees itself as a place for retreat where critical mass and positive energy can be concentrated and combined to create basic formulas for transforming society and conjuring up premonitions of future forms of communal human life. Each generation of artists is called upon to make a new survey of this no-man’s-land and to draft its contours. Various subjects and interpretations are conceivable: - landscapes, real and abstract - maps, physical and mental - border zones, extraterritorial zones and deserted spaces of all kinds - devastation of the world and the soul - voids in the political, social and cultural order - undefined relationships between human beings - places of seclusion and islands of resistance - power-free zones - intercultural points of contact - fields of silence and areas of contemplation - utopian elements
The arts are unique in that they possess a universal reservoir of signs and archetypes that, through exchange, mobilize the collective memory of mankind. Consequently, since the artist is an image smuggler, the Bienal can act as an emporium in the realm of aesthetics, where curiosity coupled with the desire to discover suffices as the passport, and an alert mind serves as the entrance ticket to a place where priceless goods are traded yet no customs duties are levied.
Alfons Hug |