Philippe Pirotte (curador)

Objectif (Camouflage) - English version

A smaller version of the show (without the artwork of Vincent Geyskens and Pascale Marthine Tayou) was shown at Camouflage.Art.Culture.Politics, Brussels, Belgium, 11/12/2001-27/01/2002, as a co-production of objectif […], supported by the Flemish Community, Belgium; and Ccasa_Ccawa, center of contemporary art of southern and western Africa, supported by DGCI, Belgium

objectif [camouflage], focuses on the (im)possibility of cultural transfer within a global economy of desire and addresses notions of ‘appearance’, ‘exoticism’, and ‘inaccessibility’. The eventual goal of our desire is not the satisfaction of a need but the acknowledgment of the attitude of the other towards the self. Subjected to the gaze that decentralizes the subject, attitude relates in an ambivalent compensating way to that gaze, which as a form of non-personal looking seems omnipresent in a worldwide panopticum.

Another point of attention in this show is the dialectic between ‘exhibited things’ and ‘the performative’; an antithesis that becomes increasingly blurred in the actual ‘globalized’ culture of contemporary visual arts.

objectif [camouflage] doesn’t aim at illustrating these phenomena in a documentary but approaches the subject matter in an elliptical way, creating a space of intensity where content is revealed through the echo’s and confrontations between the different artworks.

Startled (2001), the work that Venezuelan artist Carla Arocha conceived especially for the exhibition consists of 15 mirroring surfaces installed in a corner of the exhibition space and reflecting the environment. On these surfaces, semi-transparents are applied in a play of circle forms that frustrate partly the reflection and engage an impulse of desire. The circles remind us of eyes with pupils and form an animated rhythm through the different surfaces. The spectator-voyeur is automatically turned into a narcistic subject by this installation. By the presence and the seduction of the semi-transparent ‘eyes’ the desire to become object of the visual drive is inevitable. One wants to be looked at in the same way as one looks upon the other. The voyeur wants to see what cannot be seen: him or herself as object of desire in the eyes of the other. In Startled, the antinomy between the eye and the gaze is visualized; the gaze is to the object and replaces the blind spot in the field of the visual, as the site from where the image photographs the spectator.

The voyeurism is taken over in Belgian artist Vanessa Van Obberghen’s video installation Still Life (2000), pushing a possible interpretation towards the cultural problem of exoticism. The objects in this still life, some bottles, cans and cups, are placed on the ground, on a richly decorated red carpet. It is continuously filmed without camera movement and mounted as a loop, shown on a small lcd-screen, hung at eye level. Nothing really happens in this scene, except for some minor dynamics created by a passing fly, a passing foot that quickly disrupts the tranquility of the image and some surrounding noise, not really understandable. The colors of the scene and the fact that these objects – the remains of a breakfast - are placed on the floor tell us that this scene is not belonging to a western tradition. The image – taken from a specific localized moment – hales us. It holds our attention until we realize that nothing really happens. Are we losing time? Is this an investment we are willing to make? In a western context, the loss of time is surely to be experienced as negative. Here, the possibility of loosing some is offered to the viewer. But can we really, from a western perspective, engage ourselves within this attitude?

Inaccessibility complementary to attitude within the drive of the gaze is broadened to the definitive impossibility of ‘thick description’ of different cultural codes. This inaccessibility is fundamental notwithstanding the general celebration of transparency within the ideology of globalization. Still Life takes part in a more elaborated installation by Van Obberghen, called Waxale. In Wolof, an historically only spoken language (Senegal) which complicates a written definition of the term, 'wax' means 'to speak', 'waxal' is the imperative 'speak!' and 'Waxale' one could translate as ‘We can talk about it (bargain)'. The praxis of ‘waxale’ demands a natural attitude and the ability to improvise verbally and physically. It is the most common form of trade in West-Africa. A social arena where the desire to possess something (a product or money) is equalized, and the prizes fluctuate according to the negotiation skills of the salesman and customers. Because a spectator can only observe ‘waxale’ from a distance (inclusive the exoticism and objectification he adds to it) it remains a concept in Van Obberghen’s installation, it is never defined. The act of ‘waxale’ is never shown on different black and white photographs, depicting street scenes in Dakar. All we are left to do is contemplate without true comprehension and satisfying closure within our ‘reading’.

The most imposing element within the installation is surely the large wooden cube, appearing massive and solid, covered with aluminum. It is literally filling the space with its shiny presence, vaguely reflecting the viewers entering the exhibition space. The grayish color of the aluminum rhymes with the black and white esthetics of the photographs, further sobering, balancing and quieting the entire on look and experience of the installation. Inside, a corridor surrounds a large windowed display case where two televisions seem to engage in a conversation. On the screen the sentences "Xuly bett – Xaly bett – Potu n’dox" (‘Why are you looking at me?’ – ‘Because you are looking at me’ – ‘Never mind’) appear alternated.

Again we are positioned as voyeurs, but the conversation on the screens seems to bring no clues as to what the nature of it is. Using text where we expect figurative images the artist plays with our imaginative powers. The sentences on the screen impel us to try and find a corresponding figurative image, only to be thrown back onto ourselves and realize that this is impossible. Obstructing the screens by placing them within an impenetrable display case also stresses that our perception of the other is more difficult than we expect or believe it to be. We are able to circulate around it, but never really grasp the core or essence of it. The choice of imagery and carefully balanced esthetics within this elaborate multimedia installation is measured and deliberately kept free from any rhetoric or overly expressive gestures, colors and motives. The viewer is entangled within a play of looking, being looked at, forced to take a distance then again to approach a certain image. This physical investment demanded from the viewer is as much a significant element as are the esthetics and the temporal qualities of the whole installation.

It would be tempting to see German artist Katharina Fritsch’s Madonnenfigur (1983) taking up the role of the commodified immobilized ethnographic object that is refused within Van Obberghen’s display case. But confronted with this figurine, we move again on shifting sands, making an affirmative interpretation impossible. As Lynne Cook wrote, "The objects she produces are neither fetishes nor trophies, relics from another life, but carefully constructed artefacts devised to act as catalysts […]. Their singularity is measured neither by notions of uniqueness nor by the idiosyncrasies of the eccentrically personal -- nor are they drawn directly from the realm of high art where affectivity tends to fall victim to the immutability of the masterwork. Indeed, she maintains: ‘I often choose objects that are loaded in themselves. They should be autobiographical and of general significance at the same time, in order to be comprehensible.’ Typically, Fritsch produces serial objects or forms which clearly betray their identity as casts or replicas."[i]

At first glance, many of Katharina Fritsch's sculptures may not appear to be very different from objects sold at thrift stores and tourist shops. Like the commercial items they bring to mind, Fritsch produced these sculptures in large quantities. These, three-dimensional art objects, known as multiples, unlike their industrial counterparts, are original works of art. On closer examination, it becomes apparent that Fritsch has elevated these objects above their associated environments by her fastidious attention to form and colour. The Madonnenfigur is based on a Madonna sold near the cathedral in Lourdes, France, but it's pretty clear that you wouldn't find this fluorescent figurine for sale there. The brilliant yellow colour and the figure's fixed, frontal pose work together to visually flatten the three-dimensionality of this work, removing it ever so slightly from the realm of traditional sculpture as well as from its original context. Questioning the reality of objects, commodities, and motifs which we can perceive every day and which are simultaneously subjected to a collective code of identification, the objects Katharina Fritsch uses are taken from everyday commodity offers, and the artistic concept, in its precise but differing reproduction or serial production, speculates with the phenomena of reality and appearance, standardisation and individuality, originality and the characteristics of commodities.

Adrian Piper (USA) started her series Funk Lessons: A Collaborative Experiment in Cross-Cultural Transition in 1983 from an apparent naive idealistic impulse. Funk points at a popular black music genre with its origins rooted in African ‘tribal’ music and dance. Documenting a group-participation performance piece at Berkeley, the video shows Piper teaching a roomful of white students, à la Jack LaLanne, how to dance. Bob the head up and down, she says. Slump down at the knees once in a while. "White People Can Dance" flashes on the screen. However you leave convinced of the absurdity of the "born with rhythm" cliché about blacks—as silly as envisioning Vivaldi fans as strictly white, Funk-dancing is constituted in a language of interpersonal communication and collective self-expression, that remained largely inaccessible to white culture, due to its connections with the Civil Rights Movement in the States in the 60’s and 70’s and to the very different roles of social dance in white as opposed to black culture.

The video cuts between shots from an interview with Piper about the history and value of funk, and several truly revealing scenes where a sea of kids awkwardly dances itself into a transcendent, collective self-awareness on the ballroom floor.

The Lessons aimed at transcending the intrinsic collective, participatory and socially unifying aspect of funk between cultures. With Funk Lessons Adrian Piper was hoping to transmit a physical language in order to restructure social identities by making something accessible that is perceived as closed on itself and therefore as a site of xenophobic fear, misunderstanding and hostility. Funk embodied all aspects of black culture that couldn’t be appropriated successfully by white culture: speaking patterns, conventions of social interaction within music and dance.

In the exhibition the video of Funk Lessons will function as a document that becomes very relevant in the actual frenzy of intercultural communication within the art world. However the performances were didactically conceived, retroactively seen the video reveals rather the element of fascination for something unknown. The naiveté of the lessons is pushed into an aesthetic realm turning towards a kind of nostalgia that again is objectified as ‘exotic’. In this sense they become historically complementary to Van Obberghen’s installation Waxale.

Belgian artist Vincent Geyskens’ painting Management 1 (2000) pushes the idea of the painting as a skin towards an extreme. Pictorial activity, as the body’s action on visual matter, is an optical perversion of visibility. Painting from magazine shots, Vincent Geyskens uses the pigment as if it were the flesh of the image, a second skin, an artificial skin through which spills the restrained vulgarity of the model on glossy paper. The mediatisation of desire in the form of images is an abstraction of this desire by creating a situation in which there is no direct relationship between desire and the object of desire. Incarnating the image in painting, making it substantial, violates its distance, brings it violently back, through obscenity in the realm of sexuality. Thus Geyskens goes overboard on the kitsch of the pornographic advertising iconography, which he uses as a fetish, exhibition to excess the meat that it lacks.

Most of the works included up till now function as an unsettling of affirmative notions in different directions. In Marco Jacobs’ (Belgium) photographic work, an apparent oppositional movement pushes a depersonalized visual drive searching holding ground in a physical environment. We get to see but fragments, the camera seems to palpate different surfaces; the image of a coherent environment remains inaccessible. The montage of the ‘fragments’ in a sequens suggests a filmic space. Jacobs’ images of the world’s surfaces transform into something else: walls become liquid, stone disguises as a graphical sketch, depth folds upon itself or pushes forward in a contradictory visualisation, becoming substance or even a frontality. The expected continuity of a spatial environment is made ambiguous. The technical perfection of the prints seems to come from the past, like some of the fragments of monuments on the pictures recall a past glory. We are forced to enjoy the surface of the prints in their materiality, but the fascination for the meticulous perfection doesn’t give us an access to the origin of the images. The remembrance of a story, a narrative behind these photographs is tangible but only as a supposition of an unavoidable necessity, without any clues for a plausible reconstruction.

A specific intervention by Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou will complete this dispositive of artworks and will be created on the spot for the Caracas venue. This new work will provide a forum for activating and literalizing global exchange, dialogue, translation, and untranslatability. The signature site-specific installations of Pascale Marthine Tayou include dense labyrinths of city detritus, graffiti, and diagrammatic drawings, all arranged in dynamic and chaotic improvisational compositions of a diaristic and absurdist logic. The accumulation, a product of Tayou’s obsessive gesture of collecting paraphernalia of his personal history, particularly tracing his history of travel, performs as a kind of altar to memory and migration. In this body of urban-scape installations, Tayou employs debris to illustrate that culture is both collectible and dispensable.

In an era where the cultural world is obsessed with issues of globalisation, post-colonialism and reparations of historical guilt, the aspect of desire is almost never assessed. With this exhibition we wanted to enter the perverse realm of the encounter, with its implicit conflictual ephemerality of attentiveness, as a temporary immobilisation within a permanently installed economy of attraction and unaccessibility. The exhibition tries to formulate something about our apprehension of this global economy of desire within the context of unsettling territories and cultural spaces, and searches to reinscribe itself in a specific locality. In this case this locality is constituted by the exhibition itself where the artworks function in a dynamic series of interactions that must be experienced, unfolding in time.

[i] L. COOKE, text on Katharina Fritsch, Website Dia center New York.