{"id":1954,"date":"2018-02-10T18:20:20","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T18:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1954"},"modified":"2021-01-13T14:55:14","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T14:55:14","slug":"laura-gascoigne-whats-at-ishoo-with-political-art-july-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1954","title":{"rendered":"Laura Gascoigne: What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s At Ishoo with Political Art?- July 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Laura Gascoigne <br><em>July\/August 2018<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>When the betting opened on this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Turner Prize in April, Forensic Architecture were favourites to win at 13\/8. Architects just can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stay away from art; they keep turning up in the Turner like bad pennies. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only three years since the prize was won by Assemble, that well-meaning group of socially minded young things who repaired sink estates with bits of hardboard and sticky-backed plastic. This lot are different, international, flashier, more hi-tech, more pretentious \u00e2\u20ac\u201c based at Goldsmiths \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and more obviously political. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re part of a Turner Prize shortlist which, Tate Britain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s director Alex Farquharson proudly announced at the press launch, shows \u00e2\u20ac\u0153how artists are tackling the most pressing political and humanitarian issues of the day\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. The work of the other three nominees, Naeem Mohaiemen, Luke Willis Thompson and Charlotte Prodger, deals respectively with post-colonial identity, violence in minority communities and \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I quote from the press release, because I have no idea what it means \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u0153relationships between queer bodies and landscape, language, technology and time\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Is that a Henry Moore I see in the distance, Mummy? No darling, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a queer body in the landscape\u00e2\u20ac\u009d).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Forensic Architecture are not single-ishoo artists, nor are they artists at all in the usual sense. They are a self-styled \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcresearch agency\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 including among its 15 or 16 members (there seems to be some doubt about the actual number) designers, lawyers, investigative journalists, archaeologists and scientists as well as architects and yes, a couple of artists, on a mission to fight human rights abuses around the world. Like capeless crusaders armed with a burning sense of righteousness, overweening confidence and advanced computer skills, they fly in to support NGOs and human rights groups involved in court cases and official enquiries into miscarriages of justice, from the neo-Nazi murder of a Turkish-born internet caf\u00c3\u00a9 owner in Kassel in 2006 to the forced disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students on their way to a protest in Mexico City in 2014. Their support is technological and, on the evidence of exhibitions with titles like Towards an Investigative Aesthetics, consists mainly in constructing scale models of crime scenes, plotting the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcnarrative timelines\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of key players in human rights violations on maps, splicing video footage with CGI animations and summarising the results on enormous wall charts they call \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcmurals\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Muriels of the arty old-school sort they ain\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. The investigative aesthetic \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as developed so far \u00e2\u20ac\u201c is that of a corporate presentation at a global business convention designed to sell you something, in this case the concept of Forensic Architecture, Aesthetics, Oceanography, whatever. Adrian Searle tied himself in worse than usual knots trying to explain to Guardian readers how the group members \u00e2\u20ac\u0153interrogate not so much architecture as space itself \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the spaces between walls and windows, borders and intentions\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Their work has been described as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153data-driven spatial investigation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Basically it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s CSI with CAD or Tin Tin with blueprints, depending on your generation and cultural perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As one of the shows for which they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been nominated, Counter Investigations, was at the ICA earlier this summer, I went along to see what the fuss was about. Not since visiting the Joseph Beuys exhibition at Tate Modern in 2005 have I seen so many pairs of eyes glued to wall texts, though to be fair in this case there really was nothing else to look at apart from maps, charts and videos with robotic mid-Atlantic voiceovers. What all this actually contributed to any of the group\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s chosen causes was hazy, but an air of sanctimony and self-congratulation hung over it all. I was struck by the fact that all their interventions were in places like Syria, Palestine and Mexico where they could play a hipster version of the classic \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcwhite saviour\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 role \u00e2\u20ac\u201c there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a distinct lack of BME faces on their website. I wondered why they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t occupy themselves like Assemble with domestic problems, before I discovered that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re developing a 3-D video of the Grenfell Tower fire using crowd-sourced phone footage \u00e2\u20ac\u201c imagine, our very own Towering Inferno for Google Glass-wearers! \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and began to feel sick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, if they care so much about humanitarian causes, why are Forensic Architecture fannying around in art galleries? Why not join the NGOs they \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsupport\u00e2\u20ac\u2122? More to the point, why are they showing in an exhibition \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsupported\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 by BNP Paribas, a French bank that \u00e2\u20ac\u201c like so many corporate entities known for their philanthropy \u00e2\u20ac\u201c has a multitude of sins to cover. This is a multinational that in July of last year was fined $246 million by the US Central Bank for rigging foreign exchange rates, two years after paying a settlement of $8.9 billion in the US Courts for sanctions-busting in Sudan, Iran and Cuba. In the interim, the bank that shares initials with the British National Party paid out $40 million to a former Israeli employee who successfully sued it for anti-Semitism after being penalised for objecting to a training video in which an actor dressed as Hitler, accompanied by staff in Nazi uniforms, played the CEO of German rival Deutsche Bank. Well, it does sound more entertaining than Forensic Architecture\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s videos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Funny, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t it, how the more disengaged from politics we become, the more political art is rammed down our throats. I suppose it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s meant to distract us from the mess we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in: bread and circuses for the ABC1 classes. It works best when the politics is foreign, less well when they get too close to home. In America last December when Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph B\u00c3\u00bcchel had the bright idea of posting a petition campaigning to have Trump\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mexican wall prototypes in Otay Mesa, San Diego, designated a national monument, it caused an outcry. Why? Given that they cost around $4 million dollars it seems a pity to waste them, and in photographs they do look very like a henge \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a modernist Mexican Carnac. B\u00c3\u00bcchel has previous. During the 2015 Venice Biennale he turned the deconsecrated church of Santa Maria della Misericordia into a functioning mosque only to have it closed by the authorities two weeks later, despite a long and venerable history of church-mosque conversions and vice versa. His Trumphenge idea drew the loudest protests from fellow artists and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dccultural professionals\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, more than 500 of whom signed an open letter of condemnation. Ben Luke argued in The Art Newspaper that it \u00e2\u20ac\u0153could be compelling if allied to a condemnation of Trump\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s extremism\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but, as signatories to the letter had complained, B\u00c3\u00bcchel was more interested in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spectacle and irony\u00e2\u20ac\u009d than \u00e2\u20ac\u0153critically dismantling oppressive structures that undermine the lives of the most vulnerable\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Surely spectacle and irony are what the political art of the past, from Goya to Grosz to Guston, was always about? Critical dismantling is for critics; artists compel through visual imagery, sometimes involving humour, always touching nerves. In one of the interminable texts in their ICA show Forensic Architecture referred dismissively to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153photojournalistic trophy shots\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have given the whole of their exhibition for one truly memorable news photograph. Everything may be political, but not everything political is art. Art requires a degree of visual interest and a modicum of imagination, two ingredients conspicuously missing from Forensic Architecture\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nerveless brand of political posturing, which could only ever find a place on the self-serving merry-go-round of international contemporary art. \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcRing-a-ring-o\u00e2\u20ac\u2122roses, A pocket full of poses, At-ishoo! At-ishoo! We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve won the Turner Prize.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hope not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Laura Gascoigne July\/August 2018 When the betting opened on this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Turner Prize in April, Forensic Architecture were favourites to win at 13\/8. Architects just can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stay away from art; they keep turning up in the Turner like bad pennies. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only three years since the prize was won by Assemble, that well-meaning group of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[742,75],"class_list":["post-1954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-comment","tag-laura-gascoigne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1954"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1955,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1954\/revisions\/1955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}