A lion roars and the movie starts amidst a rising swell of music. Words made of light puncture the darkness, opening a path to distant locations illuminated in widescreen. These projected images of exotic, far off locales, present a system of fictions that haunt and saturate the contemporary world, but curiously these fictions of elsewhere are also crucially important for an unlikely range of discourses including urban planning, exhibition making and more importantly the inscription of value and legitimacy on globally circulating art works.
Hubs and Fictions was organised by the curator Sophia Hao as a satellite project to ‘Surplus Cameo Décor‘, Edgar Schmitz’s current exhibition at the Cooper Gallery. Developed as a touring forum, it interrogated the consequences of these fictions of elsewhere upon how we view, respond and acknowledge what lies beyond our immediate horizon of experience.
The exhibition ‘Surplus Cameo Décor’ was presented in three episodes, which in turn sketched out the infamous Palasthotel in Berlin, the headquarters of the Stasi’s secret surveillance in East Berlin; a remote Cuban holiday resort; and M+, a future super-museum in Hong Kong. It was amongst this changing set of two-way mirrors, swimming pool covers and plastic membranes redolent of construction, that a select cast of international art professionals were invited to perform cameos as themselves.
Scripted as ‘international celebrities’ in the Cooper Gallery’s publicity, they included Tobias Berger, the curator of M+; Lisa Le Feuvre, Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; and Wang Nanming, an artist and theorist from Shanghai who developed the idea of critical contemporary art for a Chinese context. Placed amongst an array of ‘props’, the cameo appearances were utilised as critical points of access to the supra-local narrative of exhibition making.
Mirroring the episodic nature of the exhibition, Hubs and Fictions took place at three venues; Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (Dundee), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead) and Goldsmiths University (London). The central motif that exerted gravity upon both the exhibition and the touring forum was the acknowledgment of the necessity of fiction, not just in the production of particular cultural objects but more importantly the position of fiction as a lubricant in the supporting structures of the international art world; the institution, the commercial art market and the offspring of urban regeneration, the cultural hub.
Double necessity of fiction
The 12 speakers invited to the forums addressed this double necessity of fiction from a range of perspectives and set out the groundwork for an expansive discourse. Among the contributors to the forums, it was Gemma Sharpe, who works for VASL, a cultural organisation in Karachi, Pakistan, who via Skype at BALTIC eloquently detailed a function of fiction. Drawing upon Ian Baucom’s idea of factual fictions, Sharpe explored the “usefulness of untruths” and “their claim to represent”.
Interweaving her own experience of living and working in Karachi with the experiences of a Pakistani film maker, Sharpe recognised how representations of identity and history, both in art works and in mass media news coverage, frame an experience of place. For Sharpe, the fictions of remoteness, codified in endlessly reproduced images, serve as a tangle of narratives that must be reflexively navigated before ‘speech’ can attain any legible and productive value.
In contrast, the notable writer and curator Guy Brett, in his presentation at the Goldsmiths forum, used a fragment of an archeological artifact given to him by Francis Alys, as a means to propose remoteness as a latent but inaccessible space of meaning. The artifact taken from an “ocean of shards” in Mexico, “could carry power, if it belonged to an immense system of belief”. Denied this system of belief, it exists as a fragment that can only allude to meaning. It is here that the exhibition Surplus Cameo Décor and the touring forum Hubs and Fictions converged.
The props, cameos and snippets of dialogue presented in the exhibition share the situation of Guy Brett’s archeological fragment; both exist on the threshold of meaning, on the edge of a system of representation. For Schmitz, this system is movie making; for Brett it is a system of belief. Both the exhibition and the forums lingered in the moment before meaning is irrevocably inscribed by either belief or the totalising gaze of the cinematic.
But this ambiguous and unsettled space offered a vital site for the exhibition viewer and the forum participants. Instead of the authoritative narrative of the traditional exhibition, embedded within art historical concerns or the reproduction of knowledge that usually determines conferences and symposiums, Surplus Cameo Décor and Hubs and Fictions operated as a discursive field which prioritised the potential meaning of objects, situations and subjects.
Hubs and Fictions took place between 30 November and 6 December, 2012. A full list of speakers can be found here.
‘Surplus Cameo Décor‘ is at The Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, until 14 December.
More on a-n.co.uk:
‘Surplus Cameo Décor‘ – Interface review by Alex Hetherington.
