Art Review - March Issue - (Page 46)
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/mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 DISPATCHES
MUSIC, ARCHITECTURE, FILM, SHOPPING, NEWS AND THINGS TO MAKE AND DO…
ART, MUSIC, ARCHIT TALES FROM THE CITY: London ords J.J. CHARLESWORTH
There have been some odd things going on at the intersection of art, the
media and politics over the last few months: a grinning Tony Blair taking
a picture of himself on his mobile phone against the backdrop of an
exploding Iraq, presented as an image by artists Peter Kennard and Cat
Picton Phillips in a shop window on Oxford Street and then snapped by
passersby on their mobile phones. Elsewhere an anti-war protester’s
placards, relocated from Parliament Square to the galleries of Tate
Britain, appearing as an installation by artist Mark Wallinger and
presented as a picture in the newspapers because protesters have been
banned within a mile of Parliament. On TV, Indians burning British TV
executives in effigy, because of the apparently racist comments of
dimwitted Celebrity Big Brother contestant Jade Goody towards a fellow
contestant, Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, presented as a news story on TV;
and – wait for it - artist Mark McGowan burning an effigy of Shilpa
Shetty in counterprotest in London, flagged as a press release for an
event that never happens. Guy Debord, godfather of the Situationists and
author of the legendary The Society of the Spectacle 1967 , has been
pushing up the daisies for more than a decade, but he must be laughing in
his coffin. The flowers of the spectacle are blooming ambassadors or the
Nazis staging exhibitions of ‘degenerate’ modern art or Jeff Koons
taking pictures of himself teaching schoolkids to ‘exploit the
masses’, art regularly gets tangled up with political life. So you might
think that work like that by Kennard & Phillips or Wallinger are
straightforward examples of art with a political message; but what’s
interesting is that it’s now only in the circuits of the media,
apparently, that the spectacle of politics is being played out. Whether
it’s mobile phones or the broadsheet press or the evening news, it’s
hard not to notice how politics is dissolving into a kind of isolated mass
voyeurism. Debord’s pessimism about how people relate to life seems ahead
of its time: ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images’, he
declares; ‘it is a social relation between people that is mediated by
images.’ If this seems prophetic, it is only because it describes the
present better than the time in which it was written. As people’s active
involvement in political life has diminished, mediated experience takes on
a life of its own, filling the vacuum: when the prime minister of Britain
feels compelled to comment on what some idiot said on a reality game show,
you know it’s not just the prime minister who’s lost his grip on
politics. But in the current situation, anyone, including artists, can
fill that vacuum, and that makes for some interesting, provocative art.
McGowan’s ‘counter-protest’ in favour of racist Jade, and against
the elegant Shilpa, sounds dodgy, but it assiduously inverted all the bile
and scorn poured on Jade by the mainstream media, revealing how the
controversy had turned into hysterical denunciation of the ‘fat,
ignorant, racist’ whitetrash British underclass. And it didn’t even
have to happen to make its point McGowan merely advertised it in advance
and was warned by the police not to proceed; a flood of eager support and
furious objection nevertheless turned up in blogs, newspapers and his
voicemail . As politics falls apart, and the gears of the media
increasingly spin on air, it’ll be interesting to see how much further
art can short the circuits of the spectacle. Whether it’s mobile phones
or the broadsheet press or the evening news, it’s hard not to notice how
politics is dissolving into a kind of isolated mass voyeurism everywhere at
the moment, and many artists are positioning themselves in the space
between art and politics, at a time when, you could argue, both are
becoming ever more ‘spectacular’. Sure, art and politics have always
been in dialogue in one way or another; whether it was Holbein painting
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue
Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record
Art Review - March Issue
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