by Anne Peschken
The Sainsbury Visual Arts Centre is located
in Norwich, on the University of East Anglia’s
campus, in a building designed by Norman
Foster in the mid 70s. An impressive steel
high-tech structure, projecting a large,
aluminum and glass clad parallelepipedic
volume, considered a revolution in museum
design by some and a landmark of what others
sarcastically call “superstar architecture”.
A futuristic-looking, tilted glass front
opens up the underground part of the vast
building and its main corridors to the
lawn side; aerial bridges, now covered
in scaffoldings, connect it to neighboring
structures. The building was commissioned
to house Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury’s
art collection, a Contemporary Art Gallery,
the School of World Art Studies and Museology,
all in the context of a University Campus
that Denis Lasdun’s architectural vision
shaped into a combination between a monastic
space and a slightly dated sci-fi environment.
The
gallery building of the Art Center is now
closed due to major renovation and expansion
works and the entire site looks almost
as if redone from scratch, with several
huge cranes swinging their arms and the
constant hum of men and machines in the
air. Turning what would seem an annoying
obstruction to the Gallery’s functionality
into a theme, curators Amanda Geitner and
Sara Cooper were inspired to invite artists
from different parts of the world to install
site-specific work in the open, in the
vicinity of the spaces being remodeled.
The event, called Out There, joined a geographically
unlikely but conceptually coherent community
of artists who were first invited for a
local vision to inspect the terrain and
the local situation, and on this basis
they proposed works in situ.
Japanese weaver Machiko Agano covered an old tree with a fluid and improbable curtain of artificial fruit, hinting to human-induced transformations of the biosphere. El Anatsui, a Nigerian sculptor of Ghanean descent whose work was recently featured in the Africa Remix exhibition, showed a large boat sliced in half, its interior plastered with hundreds of small notes alluding to African proverbs. Fiona Foley, an Australian whose work is a vocal affirmation of Aboriginal people’s rights of (and a critique of their trampling) stored dozens of bags of salt on the well-combed lawn – a rather didactic allegory of Ghandi’s political struggle.
British land-artist Chris Drury arranged a huge vortex of blackened wooden logs that make the grass look like a sea visited by some Maelstrom. Seemingly in denial of earth’s solidity and of the nearby buildings, his sculpture opens a black hole in the lush English lawns sloping leisurely down to the river Yare, not far from a lake and a small but dense forest. Black holes capture popular imagination as possible portals into other worlds, if the function of this one is similar, than the surrounding world of Academy and Museum is not safe in the vicinity of such elemental force. Outside and around the whirlpool, Drury used a lawn mower to comb the grass into a geometrical pattern. The implications of this last intervention are possibly humorous: what does an Englishman do when he finds the crater of a past (or imminent) cosmic catastrophy? He rings it with a rational pattern of carefully gardened geometry, as if to tame the “beast” or to induce a layer of mediation between the two worlds: the natural/cataclysmic and the well-managed university.
Brazilian
sculptor Elisa Bracher took on a monumental
engraving project that saw both the wooden
matrixes and the resulting prints integrated
within the larger architectural frame of
the building site. Her piece, visibly born
from intense labor, could be mistaken for
a formal exercise in modernist sculpture
and printmaking.
In fact, its conceptual underpinning is
the critique of urban space and its biographical
background is Bracher’s social activism.
For the last decade, Bracher’s primary
focus has been (massively!) monumental
sculpture. Her pieces, weighing sometimes
thirty tons, are made of tree trunks, taken
from Brazil’s ever-shrinking rain forests.
These hard-to-miss reminders of a natural
order lost, land on São Paolo’s streets
and plazas, provoking lots of controversy.
In the artist’s own words: “People say
’you have destroyed this place’. But I
laugh and I say ’art is wonderful, it creates
a place where there was no place, and destroys
this place, all in one move’.” Indeed,
some of the urban spaces hardly had a name
before being “attacked” with her sculptures,
yet now they even have staunch defenders.
Far from being bitter and outraged, Bracher,
whose work is often removed after such
arguments, is elated, as in this rejection
she sees aesthetical validation à rebours.
Within this scale, the bronze effigy of
a man on a horse is ’invisible’, thus acceptable
and socially inexistent.
Eliza Bracher who displays a passionate
social awareness, also works with Brazil’s
disenfranchised children. To this purpose
she created Acaia (The Womb), an institution
grown from both her artistic practice and
her life. In her São Paolo studio, she
offers a place for personal and creative
development to 200 young students and employs
17 art educators who in fact often end
up cooking meals.
What made her open her own sanctuary and
workplace to irreverent youngsters, many
of whom are drug dealers and had more than
a brush with the city’s notorious criminal
ethos? Together with her son, she once
stopped to watch a group of young people
performing Capoeira on the street. Both
mother and child were told in rude terms
to leave, as their candid curiosity was
mistaken for an arrogant act of social
trespassing. Thus Bracher, unable to explain
to her child why they were so curtly rejected,
decided to do something about this seemingly
irreconcilable and aprioric clash of classes.
In her eyes, the future of Brazil (a country
with, among other problems, gigantic violence
indices), the future of her sons (whom
she does not want to see growing in a public
space divided) are both dependent on creating
peaceful spaces, such as Acaia, for an
embrionally existing but socially repressed
creativity.
Once we know all of the above, Bracher’s
piece in Norwich reveals itself as being
built around two contrasts.
One is reminiscent of her social ideals
and intrinsic to the oeuvre; it spans between
the humble materials (wooden planks and
newsprint) and the enormous amount of physical
work that impregnates them (the somewhat
cameral technique of woodcut that she used
for billboard-size prints). It is as if
the sheer mass of her usual sculptural
works has been replaced with a rather flimsy
set of wooden boards, whose only attachment
to a “natural” aspect of wood has transferred
to ephemeral prints on a large construction
fence, in a setting used more often for
publicity. The other contrast is between
the piece and its architectural surroundings,
Denis Lasdun’s ziggurat-style buildings.
The wooden surfaces’ configuration is a
pastiche of its glass-and-concrete neighbors,
in an ironical reversal of their pyramidal
shape, material, and modernist pedigree.
Bogdan
Achimescu, a Polish artist native of Romania,
installed four igloo-shaped tents on the
lawn in front of the Norman Foster glass
corridor. The tents surface is sewn out
of a special transparent fabric so as to
allow a hazy gaze upon the habitats inside.
Perhaps echoing the invitation policy of
the curator, each tent is dedicated to
a fictional migrant, coming from a different
continent, society and cultural background.
These “habitats” are assemblages of furniture
and household implements, posed in extremely
orderly fashion inside the tents. They
lack any other functionality but a presentational
one, as the tent’s height and lack of an
entrance wouldn’t allow normal usage of
the items. The objects only bear a slight
hint to the migrants’ origins and have
in fact been collected by Achimescu from
Norwich recycling centers and waste dumps
where potential or fictional immigrants
might be forced to look for basic equipment
rather than interior decorating when trying
to set up life in England.
The inherent transparency of the tents’
fabric allows the viewers to observe their
contents. Thus, despite hermetic tightness
they respond to their surrounding area;
they reflect the transparency of Foster’s
architecture, which seems to permit insights
but at the same time protects the permanent
collection of artworks coming partly from
former British colonies.
Achimescu’s ephemeral constructions retort
a museum context that, traditionally presents
objects in artificial surroundings, glass
cases and in rather sterile set-ups although
they once have served a function and were
used in daily life. They do so by imitating
and mocking. Their evocative element is
not the collection of objects per se but
a made-up scenario of the migrant’s daily
tactics, of a nomad’s way of life, a would-be
reconstruction of their portable protection
structures – extrapolations of their own
skins.
The migrant experience is also closely
connected to the artist’s personal biography.
Coming from a “poor” country himself, Achimescu
knows all too well about the difficulties
of getting visas, of being allowed to travel
and sometimes of being forced to travel
in order to make a living elsewhere.
He recently worked in Mongolia were tribal
nomadism has survived to this day and is
undergoing even a certain revival after
the collapse of the Soviet Union. Achimescu
recounts an observation that overwhelmed
him: a bulldozer operator’s family in Ulaanbaatar,
living in a richly decorated Yurt, just
like their ancestors used to. In fact,
the dwelling was situated just a few meters
from the construction site. As soon as
it was necessary to expand the dig and
the Yurt got in the way, the family performed
the entire ritual of a move, including
a meal with relatives and the communal
dismantling of the structure, only to move
their abode a few meters. An act of communion
with their millennia of tradition which
seemed greatly out of place in the smoke
and honking of hundreds of cars, squashed
between a newsstand, a night club and the
growing skeleton of a hotel.
Another biographical hint is the fact that
Achimescu used to be a mountain-climber
in Romania where he grew up. At that time,
during communism, mountain climbing was
seen as a sport offering a possibility
to overcome natural as well as political
obstacles and as one of the few chances
to gain personal freedom. Given the fact
that mountaineering equipment wasn’t available
in the shops at that time, climbers had
to produce the necessary hardware and clothes
themselves, copying them from catalogs
of inaccessible Western goods in a mix
of pragmatic practice and cargo cult1 mindset.
Achimescu himself excelled in sewing sleeping
bags, rucksacks, down jackets and even
tents. He consequently gained access to
a skill that now gets recycled into his
artistic methodologies, a skill that places
him, if only on a symbolical level, in
line with the expendable bio-mass of the
new world economy.
According to the artist,
the impression the museum’s architecture
makes on a typical East-European mind amounts
to a quick calculation of how much effort,
money and material is invested into a public
building thus clogging the mind with a
purely materialistic approach without leaving
much space for aesthetic joy or contemplation.
Achimescu finds it therefore necessary
to counterpose this massive architectural
and aesthetic investment with an extremely
low cost, ephemeral structure.
Tents can easily be put up, they can appear
and disappear according to the migrant’s
constantly changing life plans allowing
him to flexibly adapt to changing conditions,
whether they are imposed on him by immigration
laws, employers, outbreaks of civil war,
famines or personal calculations.
In fact, Norfolk County and Norwich, just
like about any other place, whether in
the poor or in the prosperous hemisphere
of the world, has its history of labor-related
migration. It has seen a massive influx
of textile workers from the Netherlands
in the sixteenth century and is nowadays
attracting thousands of workers, especially
Portuguese and Chinese, in its agricultural
and food processing industries. These people
exist in a space suspended between the
illusion of wealth and the reality of work,
the welcoming of some and the predatory
tactics of others.
Thus, at a superficial reading the tents
could be seen as pods crashed here from
outer space or as the droppings of giant
migrating birds that accidentally left
some traces behind. However, in contrast
with the so-called drop art (expensive,
socially disconnected sculpture that lands
in public space like an UFO), these artificial
droplets are a premeditated intervention
on the social tissue of Norfolk County.
Hurdled into each other they are the beginning
of a future and possibly growing provisional
settlement. The irregularity of the tents’
structural elements, their almost organic
shapes vibrating in the wind along with
their flimsiness form another facet that
enforce a general impression of fragility
and loftiness. They faintly remind of primary
school plaster works using wooden sticks
and bandaid for making small-scale sculptures.
This do-it-yourself mentality, borrowed
from campers and handymen and turned into
an implicit part of Achimescu’s art, hints
to makeshift identities and to the precarious
existence that is affecting an increasing
number of people under the impact of globalization.
Inserted into the appearance of a functioning,
conflict-free environment as strange, alien
presence, this colony reminds of another
world, of other living conditions, of the
Other.
Out There, Sainsbury Centre for Visual
Art, Norwich, July 2 – August 29, 2005Artists:
Bogdan Achimescu, Machiko Agano, El Anatsui,
Elisa Bracher, Chris Drury, Fiona Foley,
Claire Morgan, Ranjani Shettar
Curators: Amanda Geitner and Sara Cooper
www.scva.org.uk
Notes:
1. A cargo cult is any of a group of religious
movements that occurred in Melanesia,
in the Southwestern Pacific. The cargo
cults believed that manufactured western
goods (“cargo”) were created by ancestral
spirits and intended for Melanesian people.
White people, however, had unfairly gained
control of these objects. Cargo cults
thus focused on purifying their communities
of what they perceived as “white” influences
by conducting rituals similar to the
white behavior they had observed, presuming
that this activity would make cargo come.
The most famous examples of this behavior
are airstrips, airports, and radios made
out of coconuts, straw, and other jungle
materials that were built in the belief
that transport planes full of cargo would
land on them if they were built. Today,
most historians and anthropologists argue
that the term “cargo cult” is a misnomer
that describes a variety of phenomena.
However, the idea has captured the imagination
of many people in the First World, and
the term continues to be used today.From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Anne Peschken is an artist and curator based in Berlin. She is a member and co-founder of Berlin's UrbanArt group and of the KULA society.