msdm: mobile strategies of display & mediation

The main questions i have been asked refer to politics and to space. People want to know: on one hand if this is political art; why simulated attack and on the other hand why ljubljana.

This question in its multiple variations such as ‘ is art political?’, ‘should it be political’, and ‘is political art good art?’ still comes from a modern paradigm that separates art from information, and cultural production from its reproduction and dissemination. The whole lot of the art history throught the practice of political avantgarde and other socially engaged art groups has been dealing with this anxiety of contamination through all sorts of strategies, sometimes literally as the american artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles who washed and cleaned the art museums …before going on to work with the sanitation crews at a city wide level. Contamination in art?…most of the history of performance art since the 1960s has been looking at ways of expanding the clean paradigm of modernism, dealing w/ the white cube, incorporating daily life into the artistic practice.So some of my references come from early body art and feminist strategies that attempted to reveal the personal as political. However the use of housework as art work is in my work replaced by securitywork as artwork These days due to the pervasiveness of reality tv, staged scenarios and simulated terrorrist atacks, new art strategies are developing to deal with these power relations at another critical level engaging with fleeting representations of the body political that reflect the globalised space that the world and thus the gallery have became. In the post beslam and post-9/11 the nature of state of emergency has changed.

The other is the issue of the simulated decontamination of the art gallery, the p74 in
Ljubljana, at the invitation of Tadej Pogacar and the p.a.r.a.s.i.t.e. museum. This space appears as the perfect setting to deal with the bacterial threat ( to deparasite the museum) but one must be aware that the perception of local space is faced with an accelerated temporality with the progressive spread of incidents and accidents , daily life has become- particularly through the news- a non-stop parade of catastrophes, attacks, that do not only affect what is current reality but also produce anxiety, fear and a generalised paranoia… The global accident- to use the philosopher Paul Virilio’s expression- has been virtualised and new time coordinates point to a globalised state of emergency…a recent example has been russian president putin declaring the events in beslam as connected to international terrorrism rather than a national conflict…a strategy of deterritorialisation of the war machine that will have a wide impact for the relationship between east and west power formations.

In this context, Virilio speaks of the need for a museum of the accident where the mass accident that dominates the news can be experienced in a less heroic manner and become a subject for research and exhibition within the framework of live communication.
…in its format ‘exercise sos:ok’ refers to this pervasivemness of the accident in daily life and also to a specific genre, the simulation exercise, an amalgamation of participatory theatre and civil performance. Civil contingency exercises – and i explain: public performances in which non trained actors follow a non-scripted scenario, usually depicting an accident ( this can be a dirty bomb left by a terrorrist group or a fire started by unknown reasons) - have a big impact on the representation of current state of emergency … In former socialist countries I found evidence of a tradition of civil exercises particularly in relation to the possible threat of a nuclear attack both pre and post-chernobyl. Children in school used to rehearse for possible nuclear attack…I’ve also been looking at these exercises as they have been practiced in museums and galleries. The National Art Gallery in London, for example, regularly enacts them with their staff to prepare for specific attacks to their collections; and a few months ago the UK governmental task force set up to deal with emergency staged the largest simulation of a terrorrist attack at an exhibitions centre in Birmingham.

I am interested in the cultural politics behind this attempt to keep the cultural space clean and protected as it is always about containing the ideological disturbance of the attack through its evacuation from the institutionalised space of culture since ideology is completely articulated within cultural capital itself. The state of emergency virtualises the accident and the classic war machine elaborated by clawsewitz – made of strategies, tactics and logistics- becomes information, the information war. In this context, security becomes total performativity. This is very visible in widespread privatisation of security, with the same corporations now keeping art museums, galleries, public spaces, prisons, asylum seekers detention centres and governments under surveillance.