Rayelle Niemann

From Outside and Inside

It is the difference between reality and fiction forms that the basis of works of art which – in sheltered surroundings – then go on to lead lives of their own. The works themselves, speak to analytical or whimsical responses regarding the artist’s experience. A special status is accorded to socio-critical positions. Uncertainty with regard to notional values and a loss of faith in politics and economics, contribute to the fact that nowadays, fluid boundaries between art and life are regarded as an established feature of contemporary art. This is the background against which the works of Costa Vece have to be read. His formal solutions and his choice of materials reflect his intense interest in historical references and the socio-political realities of life today.

History
Nowadays, it is all but impossible for us to fully grasp the radical nature of that moment in the 1960s, when the artistic solutions and choice of materials that were once intrinsic to the search for the sublime in art, were abandoned in favour of an artistic language capable of social criticism. By the mid-1960s artists were using their work to resist the all-pervading consumer society. Banal items were proclaimed as works of art. By deploying poor-quality, even transient everyday materials, artists launched an offensive of aesthetic denial and instigated a new, process based focus in art, epitomised in Arte Povera as postulated by Germano Celant. This new practice produced works that stood for self-determination, non-dependence on the market place and autonomous action, in answer to the prevalent social structures, that sought to entangle human beings in a “finely-meshed” system of artificially created needs. In 1967 Celant articulated the hope of liberation from consumerism,that lay behind Arte Povera: ‘The artist, who was exploited before, now becomes a guerrilla warrior. He wants to choose his battlefield, to possess the advantages of mobility, to make surprise attacks – and not vice versa.’1)
From a present-day perspective, these euphoric claims may appear naive and somewhat disconcerting, but a different political world order prevailed in those days. Today, it still lingers on in the different strategies, utilized to fight for a better and fairer world. In the 1960s, two opposing ideologies – Communism and Capitalism – were in conflict with each other and divided the world into two blocks. Both sides drew on all their available resources in the struggle. People lived in a climate of fear and threat. At the same time society was engulfed in major upheavals, above all in Europe and the United States. In Europe students and factory workers were emphatically questioning bourgeois values and the existing structures of political power. The Vietnam War united many people, both in the struggle against American imperialism and for peace in our time. As long ago as 1849, Wendell Phillips wrote in London, ‘When will Americans learn, that if they would encourage liberty in other countries, they must practise it at home?’ 2) The ground gained then and the opposing camps still in a sense exist today,.
The experiences and insights of that time are still ingrained in people’s worldview.

The World
In the late 1980s intellectuals and artists eagerly took on board the idea – born out of, amongst other things, the latest technological advances – of turning the world into a global village. The champions of this idea believed it would help to democratise the world and to do away with national borders. However, the fact that above all multi-national corporations now successfully exploit the potential of globally interconnected infrastructures to increase their profits by shifting production to cheaper locations and in the process, offloading goods in new markets has put paid to any such dreams. It is a sobering truth that international markets have not been opened to the benefit of the individual but merely in order to maximise the returns of transnational companies and their shareholders. Economics and politics are not inclined to go down the path of cultural inspiration; generally they still operate along the lines of older colonialist traditions. Present-day strategies to conquer new terrain, wrapped in the rhetorics of anti-terrorism and anti-fundamentalism, still rely on the notion that those to be conquered and ‘liberated’ are somehow ‘inferior’. In this respect nothing has changed since the late nineteenth century, when Joseph Conrad wrote, ‘The conquest of the earth . . . is not a pretty thing, when you look into it too much. . . . It involves taking land and goods away from people, who have “flatter noses” and darker skin than ourselves.’3)
The world may have shrunk in terms of the media, transportation and logistics. After all, today 1.5 billion football fans worldwide can be expected to watch the final of the World Cup, and products manufactured by the multi-nationals are on sale in the remotest corners of the Earth. But the tension between rich and poor has not lessened, nor has a fairer distribution or redistribution of goods and profits been achieved. Some much-needed development aid fordisaster areas and emergency zones, once implemented through international programmes, may even endanger and weaken local economic structures and lock groups of people into new debilitating economic dependencies, before they are forgotten again.
As we currently are witnessing, past strongholds of advanced capitalist societies, are unable to withstand the onslaught of those, who are forced to emigrate because of the desperate economic and social conditions in their own homelands. The economic and social integration of these peoples, proves time and again, to represent an increasing challenge to many Western nations. Before the mingling of different cultures can become mutually enriching and be seen as such, all those affected will have to radically change their thinking and alter their politics on a number of levels. A growing shortage of resources and jobs plus the erosion of social systems in Europe goes hand-in-hand with tales of ever more impermeable boundaries between different nations. Questions as to a person’s original nationality and class are treated with a new urgency. Every age and every society reconstructs its own ‘other’: ‘Far from being a static thing then, the identity of self or of ‘other’ is a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies.’4)
Many of Costa Vece’s works use national flags made from old clothes held together in a makeshift manner with safety pins. These flags stand for societies that define themselves on the basis of common ancestors and their fear of their neighbours. In extreme cases the irrational nature of such communities encourages xenophobia and a waning tolerance for ‘the other’. Paradigms of much-lauded internationalism are diluted in mutual exclusion and ‘flag waving’.


Today – Here, and There
In a rejection of the prevailing political and economic structures, the diversion of industrially produced and/or worthless materials into contemporary art production reflects a more differentiated, thoughtful attitude. Nowadays, the integrated analysis of the meaning of reproducibility leads to less auratic works than in the days of Arte Povera. In touch with reality yet poetic, Costa Vece brings together in his installations images of fury and despair. Islands of revolutionary violence are built from barbed wire, scrap wood, corrugated iron, oil barrels and burnt-out cars, all redolent of the barricades and hand-to-hand combat. These specially staged, situative moments – an everyday reality increasingly, for so many people the world over – direct our attention towards those who are currently fighting for their right to self-determination and recognition. Yet they also tell of our powerlessness should we ever attempt to stand up against international power structures. The installations that comprise the project Revolucion/Patriotismo cannot be entered by visitors to the exhibitions. They brook no entry, but ward people off. They express isolation and a sense of no escape. Instead of remaining mobile, the protest solidifies into a static scenario, imbued with the traces of a human patina. It tells of individuals who resist external determination and envisions an ever-recurrent interchangeability of an endless story on all continents. The title Revolucion/Patriotismo is a reminder that there may often be a very fine dividing line between the striving for freedom and reactionary policies.
Echoes of a stubborn melancholy resonate in the artist’s projection of his own face into the portrait of the freedom fighter. It reflects a yearning nostalgia that cynically sticks its tongue out at reality. Symbols of a guerrilla fighter, far from the sites of revolutionary struggles, disgorge their contents and disintegrate into marketable illusions of adventure and freedom. The image of Che Guevara on T-shirts and napkins has much in common with the spray-painted portraits of fallen martyrs on house-walls and hoardings, pock-marked with bullet holes, in Gaza or South America. Yet a chasm opens up between real existential threats and a chic lifestyle. A cloud of sadness for lost revolutions – for the broken dreams of combative ideas and ideals – intrudes between ourselves and these activistic personifications.


Of Huts and Tents
Huts made in the context of art from cardboard boxes and planks stand as symbols of the cardboard cities and shantytowns – these rhizomesque proliferating extemporised settlements – on the margins of modern metropolises. In his new works, Costa Vece turns to the image of the tent. Yet the tent does not serve here as a metaphor for romantic holidays and childhood games,5) nor does it point to the authenticity of nomadic peoples whose lives are founded on freedom, independence and flexible mobility. On the contrary, the tent calls to mind global catastrophes. Vast tented cities serving as refugee camps throughout the world – once intended as no more than temporary shelters – have been home to millions for years now.
The tent, kitted out with the bare necessities of Western civilisation – chairs, a lamp and a table – becomes a shelter that supposedly offers protection. The television, an additional light source and sign of contact with the outside world- all is transfigured as an instrument of fiction. As though reality were more bearable if it is explained with the tag ‘like in a film’. Escape into a fantasy world and the stuff that dreams are made of may provide a momentary way out, but the reality of this claustrophobic state can only temporarily forgotten. Images of recurrent catastrophes underline the fact that there is no way of escaping reality. They flicker across the television screen like the shadows of the people chained in the light of the fire in Socrates’ cave.
The national flags that Costa Vece’s tent is made of, symbolically represent people from non-European countries who make up the throngs of immigrants, asylum seekers and ‘illegals’ who so often have to fritter away their lives in exploitative conditions of production and service and who can only operate in the grey areas on the margins of society, wanted neither here nor there. The used socks, T-shirts, jeans and jackets that the flags are cobbled together from point to their distant places of origin, which are often the same as the addresses on aid deliveries. Conflict zones in places such as Kashmir, Darfur, Kukuma, Bangladesh, Thailand or the favelas of Brazil are often no more than a stone’s throw from cheap-labour production plants. The circulation of goods comes full circle and feeds into the re-use of items in the construction of a work of art.
The tent embodies both a hope and a curse. It has little scope for intimacy. Protection from extreme weather conditions and for one’s elf can only ever be relative. However small a tent, however meagre a hut, it can still hold out the promise of escape from misery. It is imbued with human beings’ ability to leave nothing undone that might help to restore a person’s dignity. The curse is that those intentions which were originally intended as temporary solutions have now become a permanent state for so many, and will continue to be so. Once a people’s misery has lost the attention of the media, interest in it ebbs away and, with it ebbs, the hope that things may ever change for the better. Sustainable improvements in people’s living conditions also require changes in political structures and economic interests.

The sides of the tent move with the wind, keeping some things out but letting others in.
The ‘outside’ world is always also part of what is inside.


@Rayelle Niemann, Cairo, April 2006

Translated from the German by Fiona Elliott



Literaturverweise

1 Germano Celant, ‘Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War’ in Arte Povera Art Povera, Milan 1985, pp. 35–37, revised 1998, transl. by Paul Blanchard. First published as ‘Arte Povera. Appunti per una guerriglia’ in Flash Art (Italian edn) No. 5, November/December 1967, p. 3.

2 Paul Robeson, ‘Our Right to Travel’, chapter 3 of Here I Stand (1958), Boston 1988.

3 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902), New York 1999.

4 Edward Said, Afterword in idem, Orientalism (1978), revised edn, New York 2003, p. 332.

5 Cf. Michel Foucault, France Culture, 1966, publ. Utopies et Hétérotopies, INA, Paris, 2004



Published in the catalogue:
Costa Vece. Dark Days, Kunstmuseum Solothurn
edition fink, Zürich
ISBN 3-906086-95-x