Antidote to Dystopia

Abstract

BRAVE NEW WORLDS WALKER ART CENTER MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA OCTOBER 4, 2007-FEBRUARY 17, 2008 Viewing Brave New Worlds is an arduous experience, but worthwhile, for it is the most intellectually and emotionally courageous show I have seen in years and all the more bold for its emotive aspects). Although Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond rightfully laud the creative bravery of these twenty-four artists from seventeen countries who are to the 'world,' these two Walker curators are no less daring visionaries. Not only for proffering an antidote to Aldous Huxley's terrifyingly efficient future, but for eschewing the museum world's decades-long dependency on semi-shocking or incomprehensible spectacle as a means of attracting an audience. These seventy political, and poetical, artworks justly implicate the viewer. Rather than shame us, however, their subtle potency convinces us that we must be responsible to the too. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] exhibition is monopolized by the moving image, but this is no cheap attempt to mesmerize viewers. Instead, the incessant use of film, video, and televisual footage functions as a crystalline mirror of our world's most preferred mode of obtaining information. Erik Van Lieshout's Guantanamo Baywatch, Parts 2 and 3 (2007) is an anarchic video road show that follows the artist and his editor through New Mexico and Israel, and one cannot help but view these two holy fools as the artworld version of Beavis and Butthead. Accordingly, their ostensibly infantile banter is revealing in its vulgarity, and such inane refrains as Hothead Arabs, Jews, all is line! may very well scream what the mannered cannot. Sex and violence also collide within their expanded cinema's entranceway, where Van Lieshout's mixed media drawings of scantily clad women, the words Israel and Iraq scrawled across their breasts, resemble a twenty-first century DeKooning weaned on cable, crystal meth, and American Apparel Ads. Inside, the boys in the basement sensation is heightened by a random arrangement of thrift-store chairs. Stuck kamikaze style on the slanted floor, they force one along for a wild ride. In Schema (Television) (2006-2007), Sean Snyder more cynically proves Marshall McLuhan's belief that the medium becomes the message, but questions whether a universal penchant for cheesy game shows is really proof that we are all one global village. Snyder edits together seconds-long segments from hundreds of television networks around the world, accrued via satellite, then intersperses them with such seemingly cliched platitudes as Television always speaks the truth not the whole truth because there is no way to say it all. As they rapidly interrupt one another, a clip of a cow under a shower becomes no more significant than Vladimir Putin on a fighter plane: all is equalized. More frightening, however, is the recognition that this is precisely the same way and speed at which so many of us amass our own knowledge about the world's diverse cultures: we are all flicking through a thousand channels, considering each for no more than a millisecond. This superficial homogeneity brought on by globalization is perhaps the saddest aspect of the world illustrated within these heterogeneous works. As most capital cities now seem a standardized amalgamation of concrete and commerce, it is only the predominance of Arabic calligraphy or Chinese characters that indicate a place other than where you already are. Perversely, then, the images that lack such specificity become all the more powerful for their universality. One such series, The Sleepers, Tangier 2006, by Yto Barrada, initially appears to be comprised of photos of homeless men, all of whom lie prone upon grassy, trash-strewn public spaces. Their holey socks and ill-fitting shoes are the first universal iconographic element suggesting all is not right. And it is not. …