The Politics of Small Gestures Chances and Challenges for Contemporary Art

Mika Hannula The Politics of Small Gestures Chances and Challenges for Contemporary Art art-is ISBN 951-85-6598-2 Graphic design: Murat Tosyalı Language Editing: Michael Garner Printed in Ofset Yap›mevi, ‹stanbul, December 2006 Mika Hannula, art-ist tasar›m prodüksiyon ve yay›nc›l›k, Revolver. ®C Contents 1.Introduction.........................................................................................................005 2.What’s So Funny About a Small Gesture? ...................................................... 013 2.1 How Do We Define a Meaningful Small Gesture?................................... 017 2.2 What Does the Small Gesture Stand For? ............................................... 019 2.3 The Politics of the Small Gesture............................................................... 023 2.4 A Political Gesture - Phil Collins’ The World Won’t Listen....................... 028 2.5 It’s a Cathedral - Hans Hemmert................................................................ 031 3.A Question of Context and Locality.................................................................. 037 3.1 Productive Questions About Misunderstandings................................... 044 3.2 The Politics of Identity Within a Locality ................................................. 054 3.3 The Horseman’s Story - The Everyday Politics of Fanni Niemi-Junkola ......................................................................................... 059 3.4 Sentimental Season - Johanna Billing’s Magical World .......................... 061 003 3.5 The First Birmingham Complaint Choir - Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen .................................................................................. 064 4.The Demands and Challenges of Committed Participation.......................... 073 4.1 On Reciprocity and Being in the World..................................................... 077 4.2 Networks and Collaborations.....................................................................084 4.3 Dreaming of a White Christmas - Peter McCaughey and a Bag Full of Snow............................................................................................ 093 4.4 Participation in Praxis Mobilitätshelfer (P M) ............................................. 096 4.5 Slap-Stick Comedy with a Cause - Ahmet Ögüt’s Somebody Else’s Car........................................................................................ 101 5.More Logo as an Alternative Strategy ............................................................. 103 5.1 The Quality of Participation - the Strategies of MORE LOGO ................108 5.2 Speed Kills // What are we FOR?................................................................ 120 5.3 Birgir Snaebjörn Birgirsson - There Is Nothing Wrong With Being Nice......................................................................................123 5.4 Olafur Eliasson and the Question of Situating a Utopia..........................124 6.Conclusions......................................................................................................... 131 Literature ...............................................................................................................135 PREFACE This is an argumentative book. It is openly opposed to quite a lot of different attitudes, trends and tendencies that are popular and widespread in contemporary art. It certainly has a good look at its enemies and a good go at them, but at the same time it tries to make a very precise point of also being for something else. In one simple sense, the whole book is about what that ‘something else’ can be. A ‘something else’ that comes in the guises and acts of small political gestures. A ‘something else’ that allows us to find and generate tools and the courage to find alternatives beside and beyond the instrumentalization of our life worlds, the society of the spectacle, the full blown commodification and mystification of artistic practice. As an argument, it does not come out of nowhere. It has a distinguished background, a certain acutely present ‘thisness’, and hopefully also a future of a productive and challenging kind. The background that it emerges from is my per- 004 sonal experiences in contemporary art over the last couple of years. You will find numerous reflections on these confrontations with individual works of art in the main argument. What needs to be addressed, already at this point, is the intel- lectual debt this book as an argument owes to the realization of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial, curated by Charles Esche and Vasif Kortun, and held in September 2005. This book is an extended and developed version of an argument first put forward in an essay published in the Istanbul Biennial read- er. I would like to thank the following people for their invaluable comments and support: Schirin Amir-Moazami, Tere Vadén, Minna L. Henriksson, Michael Garner, Vasif Kortun, Branislav Dimitrijevic and Marianne Möller. This book is dedicated to our kosmonaut Yuri Juhani Amir-Moazami Chapter 1. Introduction It’s kind of a funny thing. We increasingly find ourselves in a peculiar, weird situation in which contemporary art seems to attract attention and interest for almost everything but its content. There is more and more talk, more and more buzz and hype about its market value, social hipness and entrepreneurial clev- erness, not to forget the image it offers of flexible and oh-so-nomadic individual identity. What so very often goes missing are the content and the issues that contemporary art deals with and confronts. You know, themes like identity, sex- uality, love, death, and, not to forget, gardening. This book is an attempt to close the gap between the hype and the substance, between superficial interests and “goods internal to a practice”. (MacIntyre 1985, 219) It is an effort to see and articulate certain works and actions of contemporary art as vehicles for thought. Not as products, not as spectacles, and not as authen- tic expressions of something called reality, but as, well, something different, something else. And yes, that something else is the politics of the small gesture. 006 I will argue for a version of contemporary art that is a part of our everyday expe- rience. I want to see art as a partner in crime. A crime of passion, that is: partic- ipating in the processes of shaping and making the content of concepts and symbols. A web of processes that aims at generating sustainable conditions for knowledge production. It is a version of involvement in contemporary art that focuses on what it has to say to us about our lives. It is not high up there some- where, and neither is it down there anywhere. It is near, within sight, so close it tickles our imaginations. It is about meetings. Clashes and collisions. Careful caressings and wildly sway- ing wunderbaums. The starting point for our journey is the necessity of positioning ourselves within the broader framework of contemporary art. My value-laden proposition is to see contemporary art as a field within contemporary society that wants to be and is part of the whole fabric of which a given context is made. It is not in the vanguard, it is not conservative, and it is not nostalgic. It is active, right here, right now. It consists of acts and gestures that are available, accessible, self- reflective and self-critical. They are also, not to forget, highly enjoyable as challenges to our ways of understanding who we are and where we are the way we are. When some of these notions, or more precisely, when enough of them are Introduction combined, they provide a way of stealing back the momentum for content-driv- en choices and acts within this field. What I am talking about is the politics of small gestures. A small gesture is a political act that is either visible or embedded in works of art. It is these significant, distinct acts that I will be walking with and talking with throughout this book. They are gestures that are not the work of art in itself and are not the issue or theme of the work in question. What I am fascinated by are these embedded, significant gestures and choices that make the given work what it is; i.e. what makes it tick, and what turns it into something special. They are gestures that make the work become possible. Gestures as goods that are internal to a practice and which are found embedded in the work, in how it was made, communi- cated or, for example, mounted in an exhibition. They are acts through which these works become specific singularities in the process of being experienced by someone in a particular site and situation. Small gestures are by no means happening solely in contemporary art and visu- al culture. They obviously have anecdotal cousins outside the sphere of contem- 007 porary art. Acts such as we all remember, or acts that are more marginal in their overall significance. Acts such as the German Chancellor Brandt kneeling at the Warsaw War Memorial in 1971, in the depths of the Cold War. An act like the speech made by the Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim in 2004, when receiving the prestigious Wolf Award in the Israel parliament, the Knesset, by simply read- ing out the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, which guarantees all its citizens the same social and political rights, regardless of differences of race, religion and gender. Or the very specific, but not so well-known or appre- ciated act by the Finnish ice hockey player Esa Tikkanen, who used to drive the players on

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