Woodstock on the Brda - art camp - Construction in Process VII—"This Earth Is a Flower"

Art in America, March, 2001 by Richard Vine

Music-making, and social life in general, improves markedly with the arrival of Benin's Romuald Hazoume who, in addition to contributing three of his signature found-material "tribal mask" assemblages to the show at the Mill, supplies Camp Roma with skilled African drumming, a withering game of outdoor tennis and an "everybody dance" insouciance at after-dinner gatherings. Personifying the other extreme is the hermitlike Vlado Martek from Croatia, who holes up for days on end in his two-person cabin festooned with hand-lettered signs and a phalanx of strategically placed sticks.

Clearly, when it comes to intimacy with the creative process, few experiences can compete with life in Camp Roma. Having just published a "Report from Israel" [A.i.A., May '00], I now find myself sharing a cabin (and its one camp-quality bathroom) with six Israeli artists. The most voluble, Yaacov Chefetz, who has constructed at the museum a diagonal wall of rough lumber in make-do "Israeli style," is a 20-year former kibbutz member. He likes the communality of Construction in Process but finds the endeavor too amorphous in purpose. (His wall, demonstrating a clearer resolve, has a light and dark side: some of the everyday objects--a sink, a large box radio, chairs, a video monitor--attached to the light "public" side of the barrier penetrate to the dark, "private" side of the room, where they take on a more sinister air in their resemblance to spying devices.) Other cabin-mates have divergent opinions, all strongly expressed, and a sure sense of the "really important" art in Israel that was not captured in Art Focus 3, the biennial on which my report centered. I begin to have flashbacks to an old Woody Allen movie in which the bespectacled protagonist is pursued down a manhole by a relentless insurance salesman.

Construction in Process implicitly poses the question "what would the world be like if it were run by artists?" The answer, judging by Camp Roma, is "a small underdeveloped country." As in an army base, factory or prison (one of the remoter exhibition venues), numerous sick jokes--e.g., Kunst Macht Frei--linger, half-acknowledged, on the edge of consciousness here. Bonding is further enchanced by communal meals--imagine the old Monty Python routine with potato dumplings substituting for the all-purpose Spam--which we are served in the spartan camp "restaurant," so called because we await our fare at long tables instead of standing in chow lines. Then there are the walks down the road to the local general-goods shop ("we'll open anytime--just yell") for chocolate bars, cookies, cigarettes and under-the-counter vodka priced at 75 cents a bottle. The sentimental can also choose to stroll through a rolling field across from the restaurant, where Israel's Dodi Reifenberg has created a "meadow" of ersatz flowers out of 200 plastic bags fastened to waist-high wooden rods. Animated discussions take place at what I think of as the Bar at the End of the World, a tiny watering hole by the lake, the walls of its two-part interior--one room for guzzling, one for dancing to CDs--covered with 2-inch-thick log sections like so many plaques in a backwoods rec room. (Despite a reputation for hearty alcohol consumption, Poland seems to have the slowest bartenders known to man. This defect is offset, however, by their willingness to sell whole bottles at closing time, thus enabling new-found friends to greet the sun in proper comradely fashion as it rises through the mist at 3:30 A.M.) For the truly shameless, the Italian artist Emilio Fantin has taped a microphone beneath a bench in the woods where residents are asked to recount their dreams, to be broadcast under the nearby dock.