Anne Peschken	print
Out There at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
Out There, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, Norwich, July 2 – August 29, 2005Artists: Bogdan Achimescu, Machiko Agano, El Anatsui, Elisa Bracher, Chris Drury, Fiona Foley, Claire Morgan, Ranjani Shettar Curators: Amanda Geitner and Sara Cooper www.scva.org.uk The Sainsbury Visual Arts Centre is located in Norwich, on the University of East Anglia’s campus, in a building designed by Norman Foster in the mid 70s. An impressive steel high-tech structure, projecting a large, aluminum and glass clad parallelepipedic volume, considered a revolution in museum design by some and a landmark of what others sarcastically call “superstar architecture”. A futuristic-looking, tilted glass front opens up the underground part of the vast building and its main corridors to the lawn side; aerial bridges, now covered in scaffoldings, connect it to neighboring structures. The building was commissioned to house Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury’s art collection, a Contemporary Art Gallery, the School of World Art Studies and Museology, all in the context of a University Campus that Denis Lasdun’s architectural vision shaped into a combination between a monastic space and a slightly dated sci-fi environment. The gallery building of the Art Center is now closed due to major renovation and expansion works and the entire site looks almost as if redone from scratch, with several huge cranes swinging their arms and the constant hum of men and machines in the air. Turning what would seem an annoying obstruction to the Gallery’s functionality into a theme, curators Amanda Geitner and Sara Cooper were inspired to invite artists from different parts of the world to install site-specific work in the open, in the vicinity of the spaces being remodeled. The event, called Out There, joined a geographically unlikely but conceptually coherent community of artists who were first invited for a local vision to inspect the terrain and the local situation, and on this basis they proposed works in situ. Japanese weaver Machiko Agano covered an old tree with a fluid and improbable curtain of artificial fruit, hinting to human-induced transformations of the biosphere. El Anatsui, a Nigerian sculptor of Ghanean descent whose work was recently featured in the Africa Remix exhibition, showed a large boat sliced in half, its interior plastered with hundreds of small notes alluding to African proverbs. Fiona Foley, an Australian whose work is a vocal affirmation of Aboriginal people’s rights of (and a critique of their trampling) stored dozens of bags of salt on the well-combed lawn – a rather didactic allegory of Ghandi’s political struggle. British land-artist Chris Drury arranged a huge vortex of blackened wooden logs that make the grass look like a sea visited by some Maelstrom. Seemingly in denial of earth’s solidity and of the nearby buildings, his sculpture opens a black hole in the lush English lawns sloping leisurely down to the river Yare, not far from a lake and a small but dense forest. Black holes capture popular imagination as possible portals into other worlds, if the function of this one is similar, than the surrounding world of Academy and Museum is not safe in the vicinity of such elemental force. Outside and around the whirlpool, Drury used a lawn mower to comb the grass into a geometrical pattern. The implications of this last intervention are possibly humorous: what does an Englishman do when he finds the crater of a past (or imminent) cosmic catastrophy? He rings it with a rational pattern of carefully gardened geometry, as if to tame the “beast” or to induce a layer of mediation between the two worlds: the natural/cataclysmic and the well-managed university. Brazilian sculptor Elisa Bracher took on a monumental engraving project that saw both the wooden matrixes and the resulting prints integrated within the larger architectural frame of the building site. Her piece, visibly born from intense labor, could be mistaken for a formal exercise in modernist sculpture and printmaking. In fact, its conceptual underpinning is the critique of urban space and its biographical background is Bracher’s social activism. For the last decade, Bracher’s primary focus has been (massively!) monumental sculpture. Her pieces, weighing sometimes thirty tons, are made of tree trunks, taken from Brazil’s ever-shrinking rain forests. These hard-to-miss reminders of a natural order lost, land on São Paolo’s streets and plazas, provoking lots of controversy. In the artist’s own words: “People say ’you have destroyed this place’. But I laugh and I say ’art is wonderful, it creates a place where there was no place, and destroys this place, all in one move’.” Indeed, some of the urban spaces hardly had a name before being “attacked” with her sculptures, yet now they even have staunch defenders. Far from being bitter and outraged, Bracher, whose work is often removed after such arguments, is elated, as in this rejection she sees aesthetical validation à rebours. Within this scale, the bronze effigy of a man on a horse is ’invisible’, thus acceptable and socially inexistent. Eliza Bracher who displays a passionate social awareness, also works with Brazil’s disenfranchised children. To this purpose she created Acaia (The Womb), an institution grown from both her artistic practice and her life. In her São Paolo studio, she offers a place for personal and creative development to 200 young students and employs 17 art educators who in fact often end up cooking meals. What made her open her own sanctuary and workplace to irreverent youngsters, many of whom are drug dealers and had more than a brush with the city’s notorious criminal ethos? Together with her son, she once stopped to watch a group of young people performing Capoeira on the street. Both mother and child were told in rude terms to leave, as their candid curiosity was mistaken for an arrogant act of social trespassing. Thus Bracher, unable to explain to her child why they were so curtly rejected, decided to do something about this seemingly irreconcilable and aprioric clash of classes. In her eyes, the future of Brazil (a country with, among other problems, gigantic violence indices), the future of her sons (whom she does not want to see growing in a public space divided) are both dependent on creating peaceful spaces, such as Acaia, for an embrionally existing but socially repressed creativity. Once we know all of the above, Bracher’s piece in Norwich reveals itself as being built around two contrasts. One is reminiscent of her social ideals and intrinsic to the oeuvre; it spans between the humble materials (wooden planks and newsprint) and the enormous amount of physical work that impregnates them (the somewhat cameral technique of woodcut that she used for billboard-size prints). It is as if the sheer mass of her usual sculptural works has been replaced with a rather flimsy set of wooden boards, whose only attachment to a “natural” aspect of wood has transferred to ephemeral prints on a large construction fence, in a setting used more often for publicity. The other contrast is between the piece and its architectural surroundings, Denis Lasdun’s ziggurat-style buildings. The wooden surfaces’ configuration is a pastiche of its glass-and-concrete neighbors, in an ironical reversal of their pyramidal shape, material, and modernist pedigree. Bogdan Achimescu, a Polish artist native of Romania, installed four igloo-shaped tents on the lawn in front of the Norman Foster glass corridor. The tents surface is sewn out of a special transparent fabric so as to allow a hazy gaze upon the habitats inside. Perhaps echoing the invitation policy of the curator, each tent is dedicated to a fictional migrant, coming from a different continent, society and cultural background. These “habitats” are assemblages of furniture and household implements, posed in extremely orderly fashion inside the tents. They lack any other functionality but a presentational one, as the tent’s height and lack of an entrance wouldn’t allow normal usage of the items. The objects only bear a slight hint to the migrants’ origins and have in fact been collected by Achimescu from Norwich recycling centers and waste dumps where potential or fictional immigrants might be forced to look for basic equipment rather than interior decorating when trying to set up life in England. The inherent transparency of the tents’ fabric allows the viewers to observe their contents. Thus, despite hermetic tightness they respond to their surrounding area; they reflect the transparency of Foster’s architecture, which seems to permit insights but at the same time protects the permanent collection of artworks coming partly from former British colonies. Achimescu’s ephemeral constructions retort a museum context that, traditionally presents objects in artificial surroundings, glass cases and in rather sterile set-ups although they once have served a function and were used in daily life. They do so by imitating and mocking. Their evocative element is not the collection of objects per se but a made-up scenario of the migrant’s daily tactics, of a nomad’s way of life, a would-be reconstruction of their portable protection structures – extrapolations of their own skins. The migrant experience is also closely connected to the artist’s personal biography. Coming from a “poor” country himself, Achimescu knows all too well about the difficulties of getting visas, of being allowed to travel and sometimes of being forced to travel in order to make a living elsewhere. He recently worked in Mongolia were tribal nomadism has survived to this day and is undergoing even a certain revival after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Achimescu recounts an observation that overwhelmed him: a bulldozer operator’s family in Ulaanbaatar, living in a richly decorated Yurt, just like their ancestors used to. In fact, the dwelling was situated just a few meters from the construction site. As soon as it was necessary to expand the dig and the Yurt got in the way, the family performed the entire ritual of a move, including a meal with relatives and the communal dismantling of the structure, only to move their abode a few meters. An act of communion with their millennia of tradition which seemed greatly out of place in the smoke and honking of hundreds of cars, squashed between a newsstand, a night club and the growing skeleton of a hotel. Another biographical hint is the fact that Achimescu used to be a mountain-climber in Romania where he grew up. At that time, during communism, mountain climbing was seen as a sport offering a possibility to overcome natural as well as political obstacles and as one of the few chances to gain personal freedom. Given the fact that mountaineering equipment wasn’t available in the shops at that time, climbers had to produce the necessary hardware and clothes themselves, copying them from catalogs of inaccessible Western goods in a mix of pragmatic practice and cargo cult1 mindset. Achimescu himself excelled in sewing sleeping bags, rucksacks, down jackets and even tents. He consequently gained access to a skill that now gets recycled into his artistic methodologies, a skill that places him, if only on a symbolical level, in line with the expendable bio-mass of the new world economy. According to the artist, the impression the museum’s architecture makes on a typical East-European mind amounts to a quick calculation of how much effort, money and material is invested into a public building thus clogging the mind with a purely materialistic approach without leaving much space for aesthetic joy or contemplation. Achimescu finds it therefore necessary to counterpose this massive architectural and aesthetic investment with an extremely low cost, ephemeral structure. Tents can easily be put up, they can appear and disappear according to the migrant’s constantly changing life plans allowing him to flexibly adapt to changing conditions, whether they are imposed on him by immigration laws, employers, outbreaks of civil war, famines or personal calculations. In fact, Norfolk County and Norwich, just like about any other place, whether in the poor or in the prosperous hemisphere of the world, has its history of labor-related migration. It has seen a massive influx of textile workers from the Netherlands in the sixteenth century and is nowadays attracting thousands of workers, especially Portuguese and Chinese, in its agricultural and food processing industries. These people exist in a space suspended between the illusion of wealth and the reality of work, the welcoming of some and the predatory tactics of others. Thus, at a superficial reading the tents could be seen as pods crashed here from outer space or as the droppings of giant migrating birds that accidentally left some traces behind. However, in contrast with the so-called drop art (expensive, socially disconnected sculpture that lands in public space like an UFO), these artificial droplets are a premeditated intervention on the social tissue of Norfolk County. Hurdled into each other they are the beginning of a future and possibly growing provisional settlement. The irregularity of the tents’ structural elements, their almost organic shapes vibrating in the wind along with their flimsiness form another facet that enforce a general impression of fragility and loftiness. They faintly remind of primary school plaster works using wooden sticks and bandaid for making small-scale sculptures. This do-it-yourself mentality, borrowed from campers and handymen and turned into an implicit part of Achimescu’s art, hints to makeshift identities and to the precarious existence that is affecting an increasing number of people under the impact of globalization. Inserted into the appearance of a functioning, conflict-free environment as strange, alien presence, this colony reminds of another world, of other living conditions, of the Other. Note: 1. A cargo cult is any of a group of religious movements that occurred in Melanesia, in the Southwestern Pacific. The cargo cults believed that manufactured western goods (“cargo”) were created by ancestral spirits and intended for Melanesian people. White people, however, had unfairly gained control of these objects. Cargo cults thus focused on purifying their communities of what they perceived as “white” influences by conducting rituals similar to the white behavior they had observed, presuming that this activity would make cargo come. The most famous examples of this behavior are airstrips, airports, and radios made out of coconuts, straw, and other jungle materials that were built in the belief that transport planes full of cargo would land on them if they were built. Today, most historians and anthropologists argue that the term “cargo cult” is a misnomer that describes a variety of phenomena. However, the idea has captured the imagination of many people in the First World, and the term continues to be used today.From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.