Exiles And Cosmopolitans - Carnival in the Eye of the Storm: War/Art

Afterimage, Jan, 2001 by Jacqueline S. Stoeckler

Carnival in the Eye of the Storm: War/Art

New Technologies: Kosov@

Pacific Northwest College of Art

Portland, Oregon

April 6-9, 2000

The Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), the Oregon Humanities Council, the Oregon Arts Commission, Mercy Corps International, the Northwest Film Center and the Regional Arts and Culture Council came together for the first time to explore and incite a discussion centered on politics and art practice that was unique in its immediacy and reflective of the growing critical arts community in the city of Portland.

In the struggle to represent an experience of rupture the event deployed all matters of media available. A film series, a symposium, a gallery show and an interactive Web site laid siege to the participants' own perceptions. "Carnival," as articulated by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bahktin, abrogates social hierarchies leveling convention in favor of experimentation. [1] In this "eye" the other silenced ones are purported to be represented and given voice. An impressive international cast of individuals and sometimes-disparate works around a contested theme made real the unsettling qualities of Balkan violence. The show was more a re-assemblage of pieces created spontaneously in a distant place; the reconvening of these commentaries detached from their immediacy lessened and perhaps even voided the force of representation.

The ubiquitousness of the violent conflict exposed directs the viewer to an image of visceral indexicality. Guns are, in this instance, not a tool for defensive action but as Dario Kavara's installation of a bag of guns labeled Sarajevo/Los Angeles (2000) aptly demonstrates, a fitful paradox. This moment, the collisions of the outer and inner experiences of ethnic conflict, is in part foisted onto the media and NATO in negation of the actual perpetrators of violence. Andrej lisma's photographic series titled "Glorious Victory" (n.d.) conflates pornography with the obvious phallic overtones of armaments. Female subjects are seductively and sometimes submissively posed while using images of missiles and aircraft as ersatz pasties. The immediacy of violence and the reaction of artists were in some part ahistorical focusing instead on the universal and timeless viscerality. Mary Kelly's Mea Culpa (n.d.) makes a direct critique of the hidden horrors through a series of narratives culled from news. In a rhythmic l aying out the texts are measured in four units, each made from compressed lint and framed under glass, the debris of domestic labor reworked into a critique of a repressed narrative of violence.

In contrast to Kelly's work, Andrew Herrscher played on a coveted object of cultural tourism: the postcard. In "Collateral Landscapes" (2000) Herrscher documented the evacuation of history through a visual inventory of desecrated historical monuments--each a photo postcard. Visitors were encouraged to take one as a macabre momento of the exhibition, which depleted the stack and thus mimicked the actual destruction of physical memory. Sisley Xhafa's visual memory palace, "When Memory Becomes Present" (2000), articulates the notion of "community" through 800 snapshots. Images of those back home remit to the audience the common connectivity among populations distant in space and culture. Headshots composed for the most part on indifferent backgrounds rely on a vocabulary of familiarity to draw the viewer to consider the possibility that those represented may in fact no longer be breathing.

Janine and Leif Rostron Liebenschuetz's Kosovo sound helmet (2000) an unwieldy head ornament covered in used clothes and emitting audio collected among refugees, parodies the virtual realities of a fighter pilot's helmet. This apparatus functions as an aural disjuncture of space where the audience "wears" the clothes and the sounds of another reality while negotiating the visual space of the gallery. Martha Rosler's "OOOPSI (Nobody Loves a Hegemon)" (1999) commented on the bombing of Kosovo. Almost too easy, the installation, made for a specific moment, seemed ungrounded and trite. Floating Coca Cola cans and an oil barrel canopied by a U.S. military parachute seemed stereotypical in its critique of U.S. involvement. "Atopic Site," (2000) by Peter Fend filled the main commons of the PNCA. It was an out of sync superstructure in a show that for the most part carefully attenuated the domestic/ international tension in the reporting and recording of events.

Most poignant in its simplicity and physical enunciation of meditative distance, Emily Jaci's installation "Untitled (Kosovo/Baghdad)" (2000) took the ritualized circle of socialization and divided it. On the floor of the gallery was a circle of small cups. Half of these Turkish coffee cups' interiors were painted black while the other remained white. This division articulates a divided social understanding of both culture and politics. In these cups one might have read the grounds of fortunes foretold now overcome by events--a meditative context of belonging which the space/time confusion of war can no longer be afforded. Evocative of the domestic spaces of gatherings no longer possible, this intallation's strength lay in its queer silence.