Art is always about the experience of boundaries, and about
transcending them. It is about how identities form, prove
themselves, and transform along their boundaries. This
is what makes art topical in a situation where almost all
boundaries are shifting, changing, sometimes even vanishing,
then forming anew: just consider globalization, genetic
engineering, or nanotechnology. Inside and out, in subjective
experience as in the experience
of subjectivity, in dealing with physical matter as in dealing
with information, the one thing today that is certain is that
nothing is certain.
It is indeed a time of uncertainty: the
grandiose mantra 'Anything
is possible' issued by a purportedly triumphant late
Modernism today also shows its frightening side, namely that
in fact anything is possible — both freedom and repression — and
that there are no established criteria or categories at hand
to relieve us from our responsibility at the one unalterable
boundary, that of decision.
The work of artists from widely
diverse cultures and aesthetic backgrounds from all over
the world that is presented in Peter
Noever's apexart exhibition, entitled O.K., America!,
casts some light on this situation. It makes it imaginable,
visible, and, above all, manageable. It also makes palpable
its spatial and subjective globality, thus also making it
clear there is no longer any possibility of opting out, of
exempting
oneself through some technical trick. Ever since it technologically
appropriated memory, technology itself is, by the standards
of traditional individuality, an unlimited possibility. On
the basis of electronically generated real-time information,
personal identity as defined by the laws of nature is doomed
to fail as a control unit. Where nano- and peta-units are
being manipulated, there is nothing left for human hands
to do. Any
typical computer spreadsheet program incorporates more experience
of frictionless, purposive interaction than all the world’s
brain trusts could ever contribute to a discussion, which
would in any case be thrown into chaos.
Assuming the role of the sorcerer's apprentice is
no way out, either. Technological progress, it is true, seems
to have thoroughly done away with the myth of nature as an
independent normative force. However, this is precisely what
reaffirms culture as a formative function, not merely a descriptive,
and thus perhaps nature-delimiting, one. Unlike nature, which
is common to all, there is no such thing as one culture;
hence
virtually no one culture can serve as an objective criterion
or standard. After the death of God, other gods have returned
in various guises and under many different names, and they
can no longer be banished by enlightened Reason or its emanation,
technology. However appealing the invocations of "tolerance"
and "correctness",
these are no universal values.
With the "new global
order" both the unity of
the body and of language have been lost. Or, at the very
least,
it has facilitated the insight that neither ever really existed;
they were but a projected goal. It is the same old story:
it is in battle or in its civilized form, competition — in
utopian terms, concerted work — that we, however different,
are united. It is victory that disrupts unity.
Identity is
contradiction, not affirmation. It is the palpable experience
of confronting
arbitrary limits, distinctions, established truths, and decrees.
The
culture of this contradiction is art, which also contradicts
anything it is supposed, or defined, to be, in favor of the
sake of the monologic power of affirmation: entertainment,
amusement, decoration — and self-realization. Art is not a myth, nor a
mythological force, but only the ritual of such a force,
and thus an expression of the reality of the myth.
This enables an experience of the reality of the mythological
force, as the sentimentality of dream unleashed in the everyday.
O.K., America! presents varying views of this dream, thrown
into
perspective through art. This is a dream the world has
come to call the American dream — a dream of freedom
from contradiction, of identity by affirmation, of sovereignty
as omnipotence — of the reality of the possible.
Peter Noever © 2004
Peepers
Police control and ubiquitous surveillance
on each and everybody makes one insecure whether to go into
hiding or start spying on somebody oneself. For the very
sensitive, this situation is not without fascination:
it is reminiscent of childhood fun, of games and naughty
boys’ tricks, like peeping at the girls through a secret
hole in the toilet wall.
If a normal human being, not a movie cop or TV detective,
is spied on or shadowed, all he wants to do is lie low, duck
or hide his head in the sand like an ostrich, or in a wall
or wherever. What else could he do? This is not any different
from the somewhat comical attitude of the socially harmless
figure of the artist; with him, you also never know whether
he wants to be in hiding, or rather keep an eye on somebody.
Peepers, a project by The Blue Noses Group (Dimitri Bulnygin,
Viacheslav Mizin, Alexander Shaburov, Konstantin Skotnikov)
captures this situation for the exhibition O.K., America!
-The Blue Noses Group, Novosibirsk
o.k., america and the others
...
Feeling the taste of Coca Cola on one's
lips for the very first time
Pronouncing the name of the President
Touching the computer keys
Reading a newspaper on one’s own
Getting a passport
Opening a bank account
Buying a car
Having one’s photo taken at the Statue
of Liberty ...
-Escape Group, Moscow
This exhibition is supported in part by the Austrian Cultural
Forum New York. apexart’s exhibitions and public programs
are supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Visual Arts, the Kettering Family Foundation, the Peter Norton
Family Foundation, and with public funds from the New York
City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State
Council on the Arts, a State agency.
The Blue Noses Group image by Valery Klamm. |