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Art and whose army? The Art Fund has launched a national tour of Steve McQueen’s Queen and Country, recently acquired by the Imperial War Museum with its assistance. The work, which commemorates British servicemen and women killed in Iraq, consists of a wooden cabinet with 137 vertical drawers, each containing a sheet of facsimile stamps reproducing a photograph of a dead soldier. A related campaign is under way to get the Royal Mail to issue a set of real stamps. As public art ideas go, this is a good one: a sober comment on an issue of national importance eloquently and simply expressed. No one could quarrel with it, or so I thought until I read the accompanying press release informing me that the tour would start in May at the Southbank Centre, "which is programming a series of projects that highlight the social and political importance of" - wait for it - "artists, and the power of art to influence communities". Not only are soldiers today paid less than traffic wardens, but it seems their social and political importance is now eclipsed even by artists. The effrontery of it! It’s enough to make a pacifist reach for his gun. Even if - and it’s a big ‘if’ - art does have "the power to influence communities", is this something its promoters want to brag about? In the old days regimes intent on influencing communities kept their propaganda weapons under cover. Waving them in the air looks suspiciously like a diversionary tactic to distract attention from the real powers in the community (substitute the word "Tesco" for "art" and you’ll see what I mean). But if communities need persuading of art’s importance, artists themselves are under no such necessity. Contemporary art is on the power trip of a lifetime. Once, hogging gallery space with enormous canvases was enough to pacify the artistic ego, but that didn’t satisfy the avant-garde for long. They progressed to packaging cliffs, but that didn’t work either. They planted giant installations in former power stations whose displaced turbines once powered London, but the novelty faded. They even peopled empty swathes of country with armies of life-sized replicas of their own ‘particular and peculiar bodies’, but that didn’t do it either. The Chinese tried that 2000 years ago, and anyway what use is a dummy army to a power-hungry artist? The post-modern artistic ego won’t settle for less than the command of a real live army - and in these days of a multi-tasking, community-friendly military, the army has been happy to oblige. First Cornelia Parker got the Army School of Ammunition to blow up a garden shed for her 1991 Turner Prize-nominated installation Cold Dark Matter - An Exploded View; then Simon Patterson called in the Territorials to set off a cannonade of coloured smoke grenades for his 2000 performance Landskip at Compton Verney – repeated five years later in Edinburgh with the support of the Tayforth Universities Officers Training Corps. You’d have thought in these days of shortened rations and leaking barrack roofs that the armed forces would think twice before offering their services - and explosives - in the cause of art, but noo. Meanwhile in Brazil, 3,500 troops paraded at the 2004 Sao Paolo Biennale to form an aerial portrait of the Pope under the command of Polish artist Piotr Uklanski, while even stony broke Bolivia somehow managed to spare 46 uniformed cops to assist artist Narda Alvardo in blocking traffic on a main artery in La Paz - a feat recorded for the benefit of British audiences in the Bloomberg Space’s 2004 exhibition In Plain Sight. Well I suppose it’s no more ludicrous than the Trooping of the Colour, and probably cheaper. The world has yet to witness the first international incident triggered by artistic military ambitions, though there was a nasty moment after British artist Alex Hartley declared sovereignty over a new island in the Svalbard archipelago recently revealed by retreating ice caps. Hartley was on a climate consciousness-raising expedition to the Arctic when he made landfall on the football field-sized outcrop, named it Nymark - Norwegian for ‘new land’ - and staked his claim in English and Norwegian in a baked bean tin. The Norwegian government, in whose waters it lies, was not amused, though so far they’ve refrained from launching a gunboat. They’re probably waiting for an artist to volunteer to captain it. All this playing at soldiers and explorers is a pleasant First World distraction from the genuine conflicts besetting the rest of the planet, but it merely underlines the true powerlessness of art. However big the ego trip for the artist, for the viewing public such stunts aren’t big, clever or even dangerous which, if memory serves, was once the point of avant-garde art. Any art that comes to us courtesy of the Army comes with a Health and Safety certificate attached. It has now become almost impossible for an artist to judged by officialdom to have ‘gawn too far’, though the feat was recently accomplished by ThŪravinn Ingi JŪnsson, a Finnish student at Ontario College of Art, who had the incendiary idea last November of leaving a bomb-shaped sculpture in the Royal Ontario Museum with a label saying ‘This is not a bomb’. He got no points for art historical references; instead he got a suspension from art college and bail pending trial on a charge of Common Nuisance and Mischief that could earn him 10 years in a Canadian cooler. Ulster loyalist Michael Stone met with a similar response when he tried telling the judge at his 2006 trial for being caught orange-handed attempting to storm Stormont with a bagful of pipe bombs that the attack was a piece of performance art. He might have capped JŪnsson’s art historical joke by assuring the court ‘This is not a pipe bomb’; his failure to do so furnishes further proof that his form of Blarney wasn’t learned in art school. But for most artists today, genuine or con, the last remaining chance of getting a rise is to target animal liberationists or Muslim Jihadists. The French-Algerian artist Adel Abdessemed hit the spot at the San Francisco Art Institute in March with his video Don’t Trust Me featuring animal slaughter, which attracted death threats from the IDA (In Defence of Animals) against staff and their families and forced the closure of the show. The Danish cartoon debacle, meanwhile, still rumbles on, with a fresh attack on the Danish Embassy in Islamabad in June. But even with Muslim audiences you can’t count on a backlash. The good people of Kabul didn’t turn a hair in March when Danish artist Claus Beck-Nielsens marched John Simpson-like through the city with a white flag, perhaps because the artist hadn’t realised that a white flag is the symbol of the Taliban. But a peace mission by the Italian Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, niece of Piero Manzoni, ended badly when the 33-year-old performance artist, dressed as a bride, disappeared in Turkey at the end of March and was later found murdered. There are some parts of the world where indulging artistic pretensions to social and political importance comes very low down the community agenda. In those places, Western artists wishing to exercise their power to influence communities would be well advised to procure military support. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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