Carnival in the Eye of the Storm - Critical Essay

Trebor Scholz

It's us the armchair passengers who observe what passes, and decide what passed.... To "do" something doesn't always mean to engage oneself in the concrete practical situation. Grasping the meaning of historical events can have an impact an them.

--"The Bastard" (a global edition of Arkzin)

Receiving large wooden boxes from the Balkans, making telephone calls across the Atlantic, faxing, writing grant applications, looking at slides, emailing, installing artwork, finding relevant videos and films, reading articles and reports, writing and sending out press material, creating a website, searching through art online.

What followed were discussions with artists, critics, journalists, students, human rights activists, and scholars from Kosov@, Serbia, Germany, France, and the United States, who had come to Portland for Carnival in the Eye of the Storm. Some of us met in the morning in the exhibition to see Abdelali Dabrouch's installation Another Day of Harvest, in which the names of Kosovar Albanian refugees are embedded in a field of chalk. From there we walked to the conference. The day ended with the screening of films like Michael Benson's Predictions of Fire and Pictorial Hero's Victim of Geography at the Northwest Film Center. This event structure created an intense personal experience that gave me an emotional understanding of the numbers of displaced people in Kosov@. It placed faces with numbers. Eyes. Names. Voices. It also left me with a set of questions.

Dealing with the war in Kosov@, in spite of the confusing religious and political complexities and the web of historical events in the Balkans, was a balancing act. The Kosov@ War, one of the most visible wars of our time, demanded our intense attention. It was the first extensive war since World War II on European territory that directly involved the United States and the European Union countries. According to the language used by NATO, Serbia was bombed for humanitarian reasons. In his essay "NATO as the Left Hand of God," Slavoj Zizek criticized NATO's hiding of a war of political economical interests behind a so-called humanitarian intervention.

It was from within this war zone that Gordana, a Serbian friend, emailed me about sitting on bomb watch on top of a skyscraper in New Belgrade, located next to the military barracks. Her brother, an army pilot, had to sell pizza because his military job did not pay well enough.

There is never enough time--for an accurate knowledge of the history of the region, for reliable, confirmed information, for an instant theory that explains it all.--"The Bastard"

As for most people, the political situation was hard for me to comprehend. How could I possibly be sufficiently informed to comment appropriately on this conflict? It was difficult not to be trapped by the media spectacle, which tried to deepen the cliche of primitive peoples fighting for causes we do not understand. The enemy was portrayed as a blood-dripping monster. The NATO air strikes caused a profound split inside leftist groups that could not decide which side they should support. "Are you for or against these high altitude bombings?" What about allowing a position that looks for alternatives instead? What else could be done? How could it have been done differently? A contributor to the message board of the website of Carnival in the Eye of the Storm quoted George Steiner saying, "Men and women are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent." In the face of the refugee catastrophe caused by the forced deportation of thousands in Kosov@, silence becomes assent.

On TV many saw the ironic artistic intervention of Serbs wearing T-shirts with the target sign. Could anyone have imagined this same target sign on the clothing of escaping Kosovar Albanian refugees? And what about Germany, the United Kingdom, or France? There one encountered a significant absence of (art) activism in response to the seventy-eight days of bombing. In New York, Postmasters Gallery pointed to artistic responses in the exhibition War Bulletin. Also dealing with issues of war and the situation in Eastern Europe were exhibitions like War Zone in Vancouver and After the Wall in Stockholm.

How can artists and cultural critics respond to political events inscribing their work into social and art discourses alike? Martha Rosler's photocollages Bringomg the War Home, made in response to the war against North Vietnam, come to mind as a relevant example. Has art the right to aestheticize the trauma, suffering, and death of war? Michel Foucault denied this in the face of Auschwitz.

The silence of art is political and seems immoral. Which strategies could be used by cultural producers and political interest groups to engage diverse communities into discussion and reflection? In support of a civil society, art needs to reconsider codes of communication readable outside closed art circles. Then, of course, we tumble into the danger of art becoming propaganda. Robert Smithson was aware of this when he claimed, "The rat of politics always gnaws for the cheese of art." But is there not a moral responsibility for artists as public figures not to act indifferently? Could artists not simply reinscribe the structures they aim to criticize? Bertolt Brecht described capitalism as enjoying the poison thrown into its face by transforming it into a drug. Some suggest that artists should give up attempting to address political issues in the realm of art and to take these efforts to a different place altogether. At the conference, some raised the question of whether Carnival in the Eye of the Storm was a work of art or of social activism. The issues raised by the war in Kosov@ will stay with us.

In U.S. public discourse, the Albanian side was rarely heard. Newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post interviewed Albanians, but there was little active outpouring of text and image from Albania without mediation by the Western media. In the "democratic" public sphere of the Internet, one came across relatively few Albanians. Most online art and reporting about the war was dominated by the Serbs, who were on the privileged side of the on-/offline divide. Many of these online artworks illustrate a Serbian identity based on victimization and the threat of loss.

How were new communication technologies used during the events in Kosov@? Did alternative media play an important role in this process? There was the Kosovar Albanian reporting in real-time on his cell phone about Serbs marching into his village. The Kosovar woman who received a call from her friend in the Netherlands on her cell phone at the moment she faced a group of Serbian paramilitaries who demanded two hundred deutsche mark for her life. The online diaries of the Kosovar activist Sevdie Ahmeti describing the war zone. And then there was Warn Kat, who published his daily diary from Tirana, Albania, online. Many journalists called this the first Internet war.

While we were caught up with Kosov@, the United States kept its sanctions against Iraq in place. The reporting on the Gulf War was similar to that of the Kosov@ War in that the actual battlefield was never shown on television. TV war reporting as flashy video game. The depoliticized news reports of the Western media became instrumental in mediating the war on behalf of the United States and NATO. The media failed as information providers. It came as no surprise that CIA officers had moved into CNN's editorial office as advisers during the war.

It becomes clear that today everything, even art, exists in a political situation. ... ZIt becomes a matter of artist's power, of artists achieving enough solidarity so they aren't at the mercy of a society that doesn't understand what they are doing. I guess that's where the other culture, or alternative network, comes in.

--Lucy Lippard, "Interview with Ursula Meyer" (1973)

How was this war impacted by the existence of Internet communities such as Nettime (www.nettime.org) and Syndicate (www.v2.nl/syndicate)? How did it internationalize these political communities? How can a program about war create a discursive community thousands of miles away from the storm, away from the flames of war? The threefold structure of the project (exhibition, conference, and film and video series) and its placement in an educational context tried to invent a new forum for debate. The discussions became more engaged as we diverged from the traditional conference setting to an informal roundtable debate.

The works included in the exhibition took the form of single-channel videos, sculptures, satellite computer prints, paintings, installations, photographs, net.art, postcards, political cartoons, and sound works. The artists acted neither as exemplary sufferers, nor as self-absorbed individualists. Sislej Xhafa, for example, contributed a grid of snapshots of a few hundred Albanians, who were not portrayed as victims, but were laughing with hope for Kosov@. This mode of critique succeeds in going beyond black-and-white polarities to look at Kosov@ from many sides.

The bombing of Kosov@ has ended, but the war is not over. Each day Germany deports refugees from Kosov@, mainly Roma. "The Kosovo Report Card," issued in late August 2000 by the United States and the United Nations, looked with mixed feelings at their role in the occupied region. The elections in Serbia leave the country with the choice of boycott or nationalism, with or without Slobodan Milosevic. Carnival in the Eye of the Storm began the process of rethinking the Kosov@ months. Now, let us collaborate on informed, inclusive, and activating artistic responses to tomorrow's events.

Trebor Scholz is an artist and curator born in East Germany. A graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (studio) in New York, he has exhibited and lectured in both Europe and the United States. His book Surfacing at a Different Place (London: Green Press) was published in 1997.

In the early l990s, the situation for Albanians in Kosovo became increasingly unbearable because of their inability to win independence or autonomy from the Serb-dominated Yugostav government. By the end of the decade, fighting had broken out between the newly formed Kosovo Liberation Army, a small ethnic Albanian guerrilla group, and the Yugoslav military. Thousands of ethnic Albanian villagers fled Kosovo, a region smaller than Connecticut. After talks mediated by international negotiators held at Rambouillet, France, in February 1999 failed to resolve the conflict, NATO began an aerial bombardment of selected targets in Yugoslavia. The Serbian government responded by initiating a widespread campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against Albanian Kosovars; hundreds of thousands of refugees fled, or were deported to neighboring Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro. The NATO bombardment continued until June 1999, with a peace agreement that called for the withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo and their replacement by N ATO peacekeeping troops.

Curated by Trebor Scholz, Carnival in the Eye of Storm is a project organized in response to the crisis in Kosovo. It consisted of an exhibition on view at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, from April 6 to April 29, 2000, a film and video program, an international conference, and a website. In the project, Kosovo/Kosova is referred to as "Kosov@" in the attempt to retain both the "o" and "a" characters respectively used in the Serbian and the Albanian spellings.

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