Southfork Ranch Romania
Mark Prince on the art of displacement
Larry Hagman, the actor who played the infamous JR Ewing in 80s soap Dallas, recently remarked that the US series was partly responsible for the fall of Communism. This is not as entirely preposterous as it first sounds when you consider that there is an exact but overscale copy of Southfork Ranch from Dallas built in Slobozia, Romania, as a local billionaire's zealous tribute to the impact of the show under Ceausescu's regime. I remember a newspaper feature during the war in Afghanistan which claimed that the popularity of a Pakistani version of The Archers had been powerful enough to breach the Taliban's ban on foreign broadcasting: images of anxious Afghans secretly pressing transistor radios to their turbans so as not to miss the latest from Ambridge.
The Romanian Southfork, in its ability to draw global narratives and mix disparate ideologies, is a useful template for a set of artistic practices which recontextualise and connect objects and events, from one part of the world to another, to tell stories which range from the far-fetched to the surreal. It can also be seen as a sculpture in its own right, which questions the status of Sean Snyder's characteristically journalistic account of the ersatz ranch (Dallas Southfork in Hermes Land, Slobozia, Romania, 2001). Snyder's work negotiates a dubious relation between what is visible in the gallery and its remote referents, between context and content. Is this a stale literary archiving or an agile crystallisation of cultural entropy? The art lies somewhere in the space between, with the artist taking the role of unreliable narrator.
Snyder's Berlin show last Autumn consisted of explanatory text and video material backing up forlorn photographs of a half-abandoned housing project in Shanghai, originally intended as a simulacrum of a North American suburb. One tries to measure the tone and weight of the gesture which distinguishes this from the purely informative thesis which it resembles. What is the nature of the artist's intervention and why do we need him if he remains only a po-faced lecturer on the deformed shapes capitalist structures take in some of their more far-flung outcrops? Snyder follows research to the juncture at which science would seek to ratify its propositions and then stops and lets the leads he has followed generate paranoia. He makes actuarial compilations of façade types which have as much to do with suburban alienation as the way corporate identity reiterates itself. Shanghai Links, Hua Xia Trip, 2002, balanced a disaffected impartiality — a monitor showing a disquisition on the influence of US capitalism on the Shanghai skyline — with a faintly subjective take on displacement and loss at the desolate margins of culture. Documentary and personal modes are ironically interwoven. Snyder's photographs studiously contemplate the moment when familiarity shades into the mystery and unavailability of coexisting worlds. They eerily depict landscape as non-place, a blank terrain forced to absorb a complex of alien values. This peripheral shift from the known world of factuality to the discoveries of uncertain perception is an incidental compensation which leavens the constellations of spectral data.
Roderick Buchanan's Yankees, 1997, is a set of quirky portraits, taken globally, of kids wearing New York Yankee baseball caps; another photographic series seeks out Glaswegian Sunday leaguers in Milanese football shirts (Work In Progress, 1995-2002). Like Snyder, Buchanan traces manifestations of imported cultures in unlikely places, but he grafts onto this taxonomic framework a group of surprisingly traditional portraits through which the metamorphosis of cultural aspiration is humourously observed, layer upon layer. The term site-specific is thus reinvented from a wraparound tying-in of surrounding space and location into a window giving onto a range of elsewheres and in precise relation to them. It is the degree of facility, from the glib to the resistant, of access to remote references and the density of its realisation for the viewer, that distinguishes a syntax of bland signs from a meditation on the limits of knowledge, on the slipperiness of what is not here but what we are prepared to presume is somewhere else. In the case of Snyder, the artist posits a global web of floating, endlessly breeding signs which are defined by their pan-locational adaptability, and yet his explorations depend on the lucidity of their presentation. How much does the work have to ground itself to convey its messages?
The installations of Simon Starling enact pseudo-scientific processes as a metaphor for narratives which roam expansively through time and space. His objects are signposts in an unravelling concept as well as ingredients in a recipe which is being cooked for us as a spectacle. Initially at least, he shows a greater willingness than Snyder to condense ideas into sculptural language. Cactus House, 2002, rigged up Frankfurt's Portikus as a makeshift greenhouse, pipes snaking along the walls like umbilical cords connecting a chugging Volvo's engine with the car itself which was hoisted up on a platform outside and, therefore, heating the space. In theory, the generated warmth accommodated a cactus which the artist drove in the Volvo from a Spanish desert to Frankfurt. These tenuous links were explained in a sentence printed along the gallery wall. Typically, the artist takes on a tentative performative role which leaves neat theatrical traces. The structural dynamism and the mild ecological slant of the installation attempt to justify the circuitous indulgence of the trip we mentally follow. The story has a whimsical tautological charm which romantically crosses borders in our name, but the form it takes is not much more than an objectified illustration composed of utilitarian counters which are too busy signifying their place in a didactic schema to be allowed to resonate with a sense of the distances they are being asked to span, or alternatively, to heighten our awareness of where we are. The Portikus architecture was tied into the physics of the installation, but its position as terminus of the cactus's journey remained abstract and arbitrary. Despite the flair with which ideas are translated into process, what experience do we encounter beyond a chain of objects which stands for a nebulous literary construct hovering somewhere between the press release and the wall text? The gesture is that of an omniscient creator motioning towards a direct engagement with the viewer but, on closerinspection, presenting a hermetic process, an imaginative ivory tower.
Starling and Snyder have been described as storytellers, and to follow the analogy through, the evolution of modern fiction describes a curve from the all-seeing, god-like narrator to the circumscribed world of a first-person voice, no longer confident of the authenticity of reaching beyond its own consciousness. For whatever historical reasons, perceptions seem increasingly to have to be lived through to be credible. Perhaps this is relevant to the ability freely to make reference to distant subject-matter from the vantage point of an ontological here and now. Despite Starling's fastidiousness, his confidence in the ability of his work to carry the mechanistic or metaphorical links he assigns to it can seem facile. Similarly, Snyder's exhaustive plotting of architectural types and their political correlatives does not guarantee a vivid conspiracy theory. But the disembodiment of these narratives is partly the point: another means of transferring emphasis from the bourgeois aesthetic object to a less obviously consumable meta-level of evoked associations. Distance condenses corrupt reality down to pure idea. For Snyder, the resistance to assuming a settled form reflects the drifting cultural shapes he traces, which like international viruses, briefly inhabit any place regardless of its local make-up. In this sense his installations struggle with a legitimate contradiction which the appearance of dry research represents more honestly than Starling's carefully arranged signs of process.
Rirkrit Tiravanija fuses what is remote, culturally and geographically, with a focus on the pure presentness on the occasion of each exhibition. Communication and consumption come first, and whatever content lies beyond can only be broached through the medium of those first-hand experiences. To return to the theme of the relocated building, last Summer at the Secession in Vienna, Tiravanija constructed a model of a section of Rudolf Schindler's house in Los Angeles. The original 20s building radically redefines the boundaries between public and private space, exterior and interior, but Tiravanija's installation was not merely an attempt to conflate the communal emphasis of Schindler's ethos with his own interactive aesthetic of participation and communication. He develops a historical and cultural palimpsest: the installation folded two modernistic architectural concepts from different continents and periods into each other — the European Art Nouveau, exemplified by the ornately domed Secession buildings, and the South Californian movement of Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and Schindler — and, as Schindler was born in Vienna, brought the latter home to the former.
Tiravanija's model was coated with reflecting steel which neutralised the grandeur of the grid structures, transforming the house into a self-effacing mirror of its surroundings: the corresponding glass ceiling grid of the main hall. On the opening night, visitors milled around the exhibition while the artist cooked for them. Whereas Starling's cactus earnestly took its place as a link in his vocabulary, Tiravanija's palm trees functioned as signs for the exotic — Sunset Boulevard in Vienna — ironically advertising their own fraudulent status as kitsch escapist décor. As such they contrasted with the actuality of the various events, screenings and concerts which took place throughout the show, and with the reflecting house in the background which became a nostalgic image of its own absence and the remoteness of the utopian ideology which created it.
There is absurdity in relocating, even if only figuratively, something as unwieldy as a house across continents and placing it in a large gallery. The idea represents the refractoriness of distances more than the fluidity of overcoming them. Ayse Erkmen's Shipped Ships, epitomised this double-edged implication of logistical extravagance. She transported three ferry boats and their native crews from Japan, Turkey and Italy, and let the boats operate along the River Main in Frankfurt for the duration of May 2001, timetabled for public use. In this case the relocation was quite literal and involved huge sums of sponsorship money from the Deutsche Bank. Visiting the River Main, at first glance everything was of the same order. When the ships were discovered in their role as foreign imposters masquerading as commonplace features of the cityscape there was a reciprocal gain in visibility which also galvanised their surroundings. The Japanese boat with its shanty-town upholstery, acidic colour scheme and oriental signs was a shrill note against the stodgy Frankfurt backdrop. The ships and crews carried their strangeness with them, sealed in, which was then released, like a precious scent. If the ships were for me unassimilable elements, they were being adopted as
magnets of cultural allegiance, a home away from home: on the Turkish deck, there was a crowded, communal atmosphere of local Turkish families, little boys chatting in Turkish to the captain.
What is at stake in this literal and imaginative dislocation? It takes the super-efficiency of contemporary means of global movement — travel freedoms and networks of digital information — as a pretext for complicating the confines of immediate aesthetic experience which is the limitation of Minimalism's legacy of the real object orientated within a real space and the concomitant first-person narrator unable to risk what lies beyond perceptual reach.
In fact, this is a variation on the familiar dialectic between what is present and what is alluded to, between the reliability of material and the remove of representation, a leap of faith which tries to invest mute objects with the detailed powers of signification which the history of abstract art has systematically dismantled. It is an attempt to circumvent the complacencies of sign exchange, a traffic of known quantities, in order to begin again with the opaque here and now and rethink how it might project beyond itself. The contradictions set in when the action is supposedly elsewhere and illustrated by a set of generalisations. But the foreign material can illuminate the place it is brought to as much as it carries news from where it originates. Removed from its habitual setting it can be newly perceived and also used as a conductor through time and space, one designed both to reveal and to question the possibility of revelation, a tool to plot imaginative maps, pivoting between the empirical and an escape from it.
Originally published in March 2003 / No 264, pp7-10.
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