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McCarthy Controversy; Groys on bin Laden; More
IN ROTTERDAM, McCARTHY'S SANTA CLAUS MAY LOSE ITS PRIME LOCATION
Paul McCarthy's sculpture Santa Claus has brought little mirth to Rotterdam's municipal government, according to a report in the Frankfurter Rundschau. If city politicians get their way, the figure—which is twenty feet tall and holds a bell in its left hand and a butt plug in its right—may be moved from its prominent place near the city's central train station.
As the paper's Anneke Bokern reports, the work was purchased several years ago for 280,000 euros (309,000 dollars) by a commission of art experts, including the collector Joop van Caldenborgh and artist Joep van Lieshout. Decisions about purchasing public artworks for the city have been entrusted to artists instead of local politicians for some time. But the rise of the populist right-wing party Leefbaar Rotterdam—founded by the late Pim Fortuyn—has changed the city’s once-liberal attitudes.
The city's conservative-populist coalition government is debating whether to reinstall Santa Claus in a less conspicuous location, such as the gardens of the Boijmans Museum. Surprisingly, city-council members from Pim Fortuyn's party argue that the sculpture should stay put, citing the high cost of relocating it.
Fortuyn’s followers may well have adopted their pro-public-sculpture stance for other reasons. The city will soon welcome two large realist sculptures of the slain political leader. Both works have been financed by private foundations.
"BIN LADEN IS BASICALLY A VIDEO ARTIST": GROYS ON ART AND TERRORISM
In an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau, theorist Boris Groys claims that terrorists are more interested in "occupying" the media than any other space. "We speak mostly about the occupation of geographical space, [like] the occupation of Iraq," says the fifty-six-year-old professor, who teaches at the Karlsruhe Academy of Design. "Media space is also a strategic space, and the attackers [of September 11] occupied it—for months, only these images were to be seen. The question is: How do I bring myself into the media space, and how do I occupy it, how do I acquire and exercise media power? It's a question that concerns all of us. It all begins with the videos from bin Laden."
Echoing comments by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and the artist Damien Hirst—who were both criticized for likening the attacks of September 11 to a work of art—Groys situates the actions of bin Laden in the realm of art. "Bin Laden is basically a video artist who produces videos and distributes them through Al-Jazeera and other media concerns," says Groys in the interview. "From the beginning, it was about a new video and media art at the level of the exercise of power, and a strategic game."
But Groys adds that bin Laden cannot be understood as an artist in the traditional sense of the term. When asked if describing the media realm as art makes the discussion of art obsolete, Groys answers in the negative.
"We speak about art insofar as specific actions, things in a tradition, are placed in an archive, and one lays claim to the archive to prove one's existence within it. This claim is not situated there; therefore I would not say that bin Laden—or the attackers of September 11—are artists in the sense of the Western concept of art. Rather, they were people who operated not in the archive but in the factual functioning media world as a field of the spectacular. To what extent they appeared to be interesting artists beyond the attacks—namely, to what extent what they staged will be placed in a tradition—that's another question."
MICHEL RITTER GIVEN ONE WEEK TO RESOLVE CONFLICT WITH STAFFERS
Michel Ritter, the new director of Paris's Center for Swiss Culture, may not hold his position much longer. As Libération's Elisabeth Lebovici reports, the foundation Pro Helvetia has given Ritter a week to find an amicable solution to a conflict with employees at the Swiss cultural center.
The fifty-three-year-old Ritter came to Paris in January after successfully heading the contemporary-art center Fri-Art in Fribourg, Switzerland. Lebovici writes that Ritter's appointment was initially welcomed in art circles as promising a renewal for the center.
But, since January, Ritter has been causing consternation, at least for his six employees. Ritter's major exhibition, “Mursollaici,” dared to include non-Swiss artists. And in addition to going beyond the borders of Switzerland, Ritter also went far over budget (although the director is known for having worked within restricted budgets at Fri-Art). Finally, Ritter's staffers are calling his focus on contemporary art "sectarian and elitist" as well as detrimental to the literature and theater programs at the center.
Lebovici reports that several figures from the world of Swiss contemporary art have publicly jumped to Ritter's defense, including artist Thomas Hirschhorn and the director of the Lausanne School of Visual Arts, Pierre Keller. Critics and curators Véronique Bacchetta, Stéphanie Moisdon, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist are among the signatories to an open letter to Pro Helvetia denouncing its treatment of Ritter.
A LOOK AT THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT'S LACKLUSTER AGITPROP
While Groys analyzes terrorist images, the Süddeutsche Zeitung's Andrian Kreye reports on a conference about antiwar iconography that was held recently at New York's Cooper Union School of Art. For Kreye, "Design Against War" could have made for an interesting confrontation between pop culture and politics, but the conference ended in a self-congratulatory evening for peace activists.
The conference, however unsuccessful, points to a larger problem for Kreye: the left's inability to accept the successful fusion of pop and politics in their own iconography. Kreye cites the example of the legendary photograph of Che Guevara taken on March 5, 1960, by the fashion photographer Alberto Korda. While Korda had left fashion behind by that time to work for the magazine Revolución, Kreye argues that the image reflected the savvy gaze of someone from the fashion world and thus quickly became an icon.
Kreye points out that the means with which to make iconic images abound; the current situation cannot be compared to the psychedelic and the punk movements, which did not have the benefits of computer graphics programs. But despite the availability of means, the graphics of the current peace movement, for all their abundance, have not had much staying power.
"At the New York demos, one could see the first attempts to transform the protest professionally, with graphics—in logos, stickers, Pop-art posters," writes Kreye. "But most agitprop designers have nevertheless remained anonymous. . . . The activists already know one thing: One must counter the power of the established media with a language that is at least equally powerful. Only then will one be heard."