Stadt unter dem Himmel / City under the Sky, Part 3
6 October 2001 – 23 December 2001
The notion of freedom used to be an emotive concept for the Sixties’ generation; today, it seems almost like an anachronism, inextricably connected with successful marketing strategies rather than the rallying cry of any subculture.
The title 4FREE relates to the ambivalence that has been heaved onto the most prominent of human rights: It alludes to both the free marketing sample as well as to notions of „umsonst“, i.e. ‘free of charge’. The actions of the American president after the terror attacks on New York and Washington added another twist to the perpetual re-invention of the word, adding such terms as „Operation Enduring Freedom“, legitimated by the „War on Terror“.
4FREE sought to inquire whether or not the concept of freedom is valid within contemporary art practice and encountered diverse aesthetic „survival strategies“; anti-aesthetic, non-ideological solutions that seek to create new spaces within and through art.
Aesthetic survival strategies:
The artists contributing to 4FREE choose to combine their artistic and personal lives. The art object – to be contemplated from an aesthetic distance – disappears in favour of concrete strategies of the survival of the every-day. These works are not intended as one-off titillations of the exhibition-goer, but much more as proposals that acknowledge the disillusionment bred by the struggles for alternative life styles and the absorption of the subculture movements of the Seventies – proposals with a distinct lack of ideologies.
In what way are yesteryear’s alternatives relevant today? Aren’t they just nostalgic aberrations, escape vehicles from a hyper-aestheticized reality that constantly threatens to drown in its own flood of imagery? A hypocrisy, staged by today’s artist cum entrepreneur?
These „survival strategies“ shown at 4FREE convince by virtue of their idiosyncratic nature, their efficiency and autonomy – and by their renunciation of the ideological crutch.
Each work accentuates an involvement with social and institutional interactions, resulting in an intricate mesh of both acts of adjustment and defiance. The artists seek to challenge the system by way of mimesis, however within the realm the contemporary art.
An enormous crossed-out Superman logo, sprayed on the walls of the railway arches: With No Heroes, artist Johan Grimonprez elects to put away with the concept of the superhero in favour of self-interested solutions for every-day problems.
The exhibition presents several prototypes of such socio-political, yet anti-utopian approaches.
Esther Epstein first realized her Caravan Message Salon project in Zurich in 1996, where Esther and her artist friends experimented with ways of presenting art. Inside the caravan, an audio-visual archive was installed for use by visitors, documenting all the events of the Massage Salon.
Atelier van Lieshout builds equipment and objects for daily use, from sanitary facilities to kitchens, from complete living units to their very own “nation state“ of AVL-Ville. Van Lieshout’s objects promote second thoughts about habitual patterns and the revision of daily rituals, exposing the social structures that inform them. Capsule forms part of a project centred on the notion of group sex.
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s proposal office for the land. Chiang Mai is somewhat akin to an agency promoting an artists-in-residence program in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Are You Meaning Company’s laconic observations of two people who share a flat illustrate the intricacies and difficulties of social interaction.
Nils Norman’s Geocruiser is an „info vehicle dedicated to eco-political projects“ – a decommissioned bus, equipped with a library as well as its own bio-energy waste and renewal system. This is its first tour on the continent.
L.A. Raeven’s performance pieces mesh art and life. Here, the survival strategy is conveyed as an – affected – commitment to certain images and identities. In White Love, they confront the spectator with an excessive, hyperbolical invocation of the aesthetic principles of the fashion world, reminding us of the story of the twin sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons, who wanted to escape from their self-inflicted image-prison with self-chosen isolation.
Fiering & Luem show a staged wrestling-match between groups of teenagers in a Californian back yard. Terrifying and disturbing, this re-enactment of TV wrestling footage turns into a cruel game.
For Eugenio Dittborn, who lives in Santiago de Chile, the email is a means of – artistic – survival. His work Santiago/Berlin reconsiders previous mail-art projects. Printouts of messages unite current affairs bulletins with his personal associations to Germany.
Das atoll examines interactions of restriction, seclusion and connection.
With reinraus:prototype, realities:united have produced a chair that allows its owner to hang it out of the living room window, leaving the inside of the apartment behind while providing a new perspective on one’s own way of living.
In addition to aesthetic survival strategies, City under the Sky sought to contextualize politics and science. The invited artists commented on art’s connection with politics and media representation.
At Fabrice Gygi’s Polling Station, a barrier stops the visitor from entering the voting cabin, commenting on the right to vote, a highly symbolic part of Western democracy, as being a sham, evoking hidden power structures.
Tal Adler swaps photographs from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with comments from the exhibition’s visitors. Manipulation through images and the consumption patterns are subject of his work.
Jonathan Horowitz reflects on the personalization of politics by focusing on the persona George W. Bush jr. – his vices and virtues as well as his powerful supporters.
Thomas Demand’s work stapel/piles 1-5 also focuses on the recent presidential election. Demand re-builds the polling stations that were used during the recounting process of the Florida ballot-papers. An infinite number of piles – empty ballots, with nothing written on them – document the absence of meaning, the travesty of the operation, which nevertheless demonstrates in a unique way the obscure and incomprehensible interplay of power.
Dierk Schmidt reflects on politics and the media. His work Berliner Kapitel reveals applied culture-politics, exemplified by Berlin: Opinion formers and cultural entrepreneurs, the podia and the audience.
Mieke Gerritzen/NL design re-act with their ‘democratic design’ – billboards to the realities of the commercial world. Beautiful World represents the world of the brand, seemingly the only reliable factor in a world dominated by the post-industrial propensity to project desires into the world of the commodities.
For 4FREE, BüroFriedrich invited artists who seek a scientific or pseudo-scientific approach to their objects. Science and technology thereby serve as a means of communication with their object – nature that, through this sort of mediation, remains distant and enigmatic.
Håkannson records the sounds of crickets, indigenous to the Mediterranean that now practice their survival strategies in a Berlin park. Håkannson’s complex array of technology becomes an almost melancholic commentary on the futility of attempting to understand nature.
On their journeys through Berlin – their hometown of several years – Maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durham are fascinated by the presence of nature within the city’s limits. Alves searches for plant seeds on Berlin construction sites that may have been in the ground for centuries, having been carried there with the wind, or accompanying travellers that visited the city. The seeds were classified and subsequently cultivated; a history of the place where they were found was (re)constructed by way of determining their geographic origin. With Nature Diary,Jimmie Durham chronicles encounters with nature in the city.
Mvrdv estimates the size of agricultural space – based on sustainable farming methods – needed to accommodate current meat consumption patterns in the future. The result is called Pig City, a satellite town for pig farming. From her won office at the Institute of Genetics at Humboldt University, Yvonne Trapp examines the medical use of genetic material. Her Y-Verführmaschine transforms a large basin, originally used for the classification of DNA, into a swimming pool, alluding to the body of Darwinist theories that have nowadays being turned into worldviews.
At present, politics have become inseparable from its reflection in the media. In the light of the advance of new models of distribution, Danish artist collective Superflex installed the web project SUPERCHANNEL/SUPERFRIEDRICH, seeking to offer a platform for alternative communications.
Liam Gillick unites all of these different positions in his terror-design for the upcoming exhibition catalogue.
At the opening of 4FREE, Rirkrit Tiravanija – in continuation of the M(odel)4∞ project – opened the Brychcy Bar in railway arch #54.
