- Venue
- Regents Park
- Location
- London
Art +Politics: 2009 – Frieze in the Time of Recession
It would be a matter of some surprise if Frieze, 2009, had much in the way of directly political art, and there is little, if you discount the self-serving exhortations to “ Buy, Buy, Buy” (the essential message of Mike Boucher’s Sell and Destroy and Supaflex’s Financial Crisis Projects), or the Long Live and Thrive Capitalism! banner (Image 1), displayed by the Andreiana Mihail Gallery. Frieze is, by turns, a fair with all its attendant fun, and a market place, where the ubiquitous Tracy’s splayed legs have more financial if not aesthetic appeal than, say, a golden Hitler-saluting gnome by the German artist Ottmar Horl, or a Jamie Hewlett water colour of a Bangladeshi child commissioned by Oxfam and currently on show at Dray Walk Gallery in the East End. Che (Image 2), at Galleria Sonia Rosso, hardly counts, though environmental and socio-political engagement was central to the works of Marcelo Cidade at Ver-melho and to the works of the Moroccan-French photographer, Yto Barrada, whose image of North African immigrants struggling to find passage to Europe was exhibited by the Beirut gallery, Sfeir-Semler (Image 3).
In fact, if you tried hard enough, it was possible to track down galleries that had to some degree bucked the prevailing commercial imperative. The Kilchmann Gallery from Zurich seemed prepared to put considerations of social relevance before those of commercial marketability. The artists’ exhibiting, from Mexico, Norther Ireland, Poland and the former state of Yugoslavia, all had a context that was both political and intrinsic, and reflected issues that related clearly to their countries of origin. An artist growing up in war-torn Sarajevo, like Maja Bajevic, could hardly avoid producing art that bore witness to the events of that period, whilst Polish artists sometimes seem incapable of escaping from a more distant legacy, one summed up by the nineteenth-century Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, when he called Poland “the Christ of Nations”, forever sacrificed on the cross of someone else’s dispute.
Kilchman exhibited Artur Zmijewski’s work Democracies. It was among the six works bought by Tate and also featured in an article in October’s edition of Art Monthly. In the article Art and Politics, Mark Prince quotes Zmijewski as saying that “Art is too weak to present political demands”, yet the twenty short documentary films that make up Democracies all relate to specific political issues, from the re-enactment of the Warsaw uprising of 1944 (reminiscent of Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave), to Polish Solidarity and Palestinian demonstrations. The films are political in terms of their content and, even if the artist was the disinterested film-maker that he claims to be, it is difficult to see how viewers of the films could have found them anything other than politically inspired. Elsewhere Zmijewski has argued that art has a responsibility to engage in a dialogue with political reality. Democracies does this, even if that reality is as much historical as current. All the films relate to Poland’s past or present condition, Palestinian statelessness a recognisable echo of the statelessness of Poles throughout the nineteenth century when, in 1795, Poland disappeared from the map of Europe and endured a national humiliation that was to last until the restoration of Poland’s sovereignty at the end of the First World War.
Kilchman was part of the traditional Frieze show, but political art was more apparent in Frame, the new departure for Frieze, a section for galleries less than six years old and generally more experimental and less commercial. The most obviously political art in Frame was in non-western galleries, located in those parts of the world where the production of works such as Hirst’s Golden Calf or Quinn’s Siren would seem less trivial than insensitive to the point of criminality. Sarnath Banajee’s work at Project 88 explored the social and political cracks in post-liberalisation India and there was a plethora of pertinent work from the former communist states of Eastern Europe. It is not only Polish plumbers that are moving in on the flesh pots of the west but also artists, and not only from Poland. Of the six works purchased by Tate two are by Poles and one by an artist from Croatia. (The other artists are from Canada, Lebanon and Britain) In addition, this year’s Istanbul Biennial was curated by gallerists from Zagreb, whilst the pavilions of Poland, the Czech Republic and Roumania all made an impact at the Venice Biennale. (The Roumanian artist Ciprian Muresan, at Berlin’s Galeria Plan B, reprised at Frieze the work he showed in Venice, a video in which puppet performers discuss a range of social issues.)
The Bucharest gallery, Andreiana Mihail, as well as their triumphalist capitalism banner – ironic, or not? – showed other works by Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor. Two paintings, based on photographs of political demonstrations referenced popular revolts against dictatorship and raised issues that are part of the warp and weft of current political debate in Roumania as well as other former soviet states or those that had been threatened by inclusion in the great, post-war Marxist experiment, like Greece. Both artists grew up under Ceausescu and experienced his overthrow. Their art is, in part, an exploration of the changes wrought by the events of 1989, and an attempt to assess recent progress from totalitarianism towards greater freedom and democracy. As Vatamanu has written “we need to look back to understand our past and somehow get at ease with it”. The two “Appointments with History” – to use the title of one of their recent exhibitions – exhibited at Frieze concern the Greek revolt of 2008, and a communist inspired, anti-fascist rally in support of Rosa Luxembourg, in East Germany, in 1947. Neither inspire great confidence in the success of the new democracies. Both challenge the notion that the collapse of communism was an unalloyed good. Similar in subject matter to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People but with figures that lack the clarity of form of the 1830 revolutionaries, the paintings’ lack of visual definition conveys the ambiguity of their political message. There are no romantic heroes, only obscure figures agitating in a myopic fog of conflicting ideologies. In one painting (Image 4), Greek students rebel against a democratic regime, corrupt, militarist and nationalist, yet a bulwark, since 1947, against the onward march of post-war, monolithic Stalinism. In the other, demonstrating German students invoke the memory of a Spartacist opponent of the German democratic Weimar Republic at the end of the First World War. Both are anti-fascist yet both question the conventional wisdom that the future is safe in the hands of liberal democracy/the U.S military-industrial complex. History is not dead and art (like “we three kings”), is the messenger from the East proclaiming these tidings of……
Terry Fairman
