Issue 3/2007 - Artscribe
Belgrade. The project »Breaking Step« is an aporia: a demanding and complex attempt at the cultural translation of contemporary British art into a Balkan context. Not only is the exhibition an obvious attempt to enhance understanding of the latest tendencies in British contemporary art: it also tries to bridge many known and unknown stereotypes or misunderstandings about British social values - humour, political engagement, and other important differences of ethnicity, religion and class etc..
One of the main gratifying outcomes of this project is that Breaking Step is the first exhibition of the younger generation of British artists in the Balkans to be commissioned for the Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art. The partnership between the museum and the British Council enabled the curatorial team to select artists that, despite being highly regarded in the artistic and cultural context of their origin, are almost completely unknown to a Serbian art audience. Almost all the available museum space (app. 5000 m2) is taken up by the 17 different projects.
The focus of the exhibition is on artists and works dealing with artistic research or with certain kinds of socio-political interaction: relational and participatory art projects, community- based artistic research projects and interventions addressing social change. The usual situation »Western curator selecting Eastern artists« was reversed; the Serbian curators Branislav Dimitrijevic, Sinisa Mitrovic and Jelena Vesic, with help from an »insider«, Caroline Douglas, were given the chance to select and present British artists. This shift gives food for discussion about the impact of this exhibition in terms of cultural and political change.
Something has changed profoundly on both sides: East and West. For example, it is difficult to imagine Jeremy Deller’s film »The Battle of Orgreave« (2001, Director: Mike Figgis) being screened in either the East or West during the period of the Iron Curtain. Deller’s filming of the event/re-enactment of the violent clash between workers and the police during the miners’ strike of 1984 does not paint a pink picture of British class policy. The restaging of the fight is a kind of resentful statement about a particular event in recent British history and takes an anti-Conservative position, quoting as it does the infamous statement by Margaret Thatcher about the striking miners being an »enemy from within«. The pointed social critique is only blunted by the fact that the Labour Party was in power in Britain at the time the film was produced and distributed. In his collaborations with Alan Kane, »Folk Archive«, 2007, though, Deller embarks on a radical socio-alchemic experiment that turns social or cultural rejects (everyday found objects from festivals, parties, fairs etc.) into artefacts that are presented outside of systematically evaluated frameworks.
»Enthusiasm: Films of Love, Longing and Labour«, 2005, by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska inclines towards an institutional critique of any elitist and formalist understanding of authorship in art. This ongoing archive of forgotten experimental film essays on love, longing and labour, produced in different amateur film clubs in socialist Poland from the 1950s to the 1980s, works towards blurring the modernist borderline between high-brow and low-brow art. By appropriating the widespread film clubs’ productions, which were typical of the socialist understanding of free time and leisure, the archive becomes a means of production of social and cultural translation between cultures.
The work of Mike Nelson could be interpreted as the most radical invitation to inter-cultural communication. He covers up the Croatian Ivan Mestrovic’s three-tonne marble sculpture »Velika udovica« (Great Widow), 1907, thus opening up many questions about the urgent need to question whether to reconcile or abandon nationalist, communist or modernist myths. The renowned Yugoslav-period sculpture thus becomes an allegory for the »burden« of the past that cannot be removed or ignored.
Some of the selected artists put more emphasis on humour, something that serves as a counter-balance to the projects heavily inspired by social injustices. Phil Collins’ media interventions, performances based on shows of the karaoke or »Pop Idol« ilk, are highly entertaining, despite being serious about social inclusion and participation. The video-based works by the artist duo John Wood and Paul Harrison use video as a tool for indirect painting. By employing accidental but calculated movements that depend on the laws of nature and physics (inertia, gravitation, chaos theory, etc.,) they mock any kind of pompous expectations regarding art. Jonathan Monk’s »Translation Piece«, 2003, takes a similar, yet very distinctive tack: by subjecting R. Barry’s original text explaining his telepathic performances to a succession of translations, Monk »utters« the impossibility of the translation of art and yet its continuous attempts to communicate.
This attempt at curatorial »translation« is incomplete: even though the exhibition points to the gap between presupposed ideals and existing societal values, there are certain positions missing. The counter-argument that not all social injustices could be listed in a single show cannot answer why there are no feminist projects and why the question of racial hegemony, although urgent for the fragile British democracy, is completely neglected.