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Grand Theory/Grand Tour: Negotiating Samuel Huntington in the Grey Zone of Europe
Dorothy Barenscott
University of British Columbia
© 2002 Dorothy Barenscott
All rights reserved
In conflicts between civilizations, the question is "What are you?" That is a given that cannot be changed. And as we know, from Bosnia to the Caucasus to the Sudan, the wrong answer to that question can mean a bullet in the head.
--Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (1996)
If the search for difference is widely presented as a tourist attraction, it is obvious that cultural differences are being negated. The new types of difference that emerge are hard to identify and require too much time to decode.
---Chris Rojek, Touring Cultures (1997)
1. In 1996, the Russian based photo-conceptualist group AES (made up of artists Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovitch, and Evgeny Svyatsky) launched its "Travel Agency to the Future" with the Islamic Project. Promoting a set of fictitious Grand Tours which would set out in the year 2006 into a radically changed and dystopic landscape, AES drew inspiration from Samuel Huntington's popular political paradigm of the mid 1990s, which anticipated the time when Islamic and Western cultures would come violently into collision. Well before the events of September 11th and well before George W. Bush's "crusade against terror," AES prepared clients for travel to the future through advertising and promotional material that featured fantastic projections of what the new world order would bring. More specifically, AES produced a series of digitally altered images, in the form of postcards, depicting the monuments and spaces of familiar tourist destinations (such as those found in Paris, Rome, Berlin, and New York) invaded, occupied, and altered by Islamic civilization. Not surprisingly, AES images were scattered among the many "ground zero" photographs widely circulated on the Internet in the days and weeks following the attack on the World Trade Center--a specific moment when a "Western" public was made to confront its own fears of an "Islamic" Other (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: New Freedom (2006)
Copyright © AES 1996
Over the past five years, AES, the agency, and its promotional material have been set in a variety of locations and spaces each with its own set of complexities, be they the spaces of the gallery, the spaces of the street, or the virtual spaces of its agency website on the World Wide Web.2 Central to the Islamic Project is the constructed tension between "East" and "West," a monolithic paradigm and theoretical concept that works strategically at many levels, be they geographic, economic, cultural, or political.
2. The unique position of AES, as a group of Russian artists, to begin exploring, problematizing, and articulating what is at stake in the construction of an East/West split emerges out of its own status as postcommunist citizens in what Piotr Piotrowski terms the "grey zone of Europe" (37). Therein, the processes and rhetoric of globalization and multiculturalism have played out on the terrain of a hotly divided and increasingly nationalistic social body where geographic tensions have undermined the West's call for a harmonizing of all divisions--a united Europe. We can begin to unpack AES's use of the conventions and identity of a travel agency and the circulation of postcards and other tourist objects as a productive way to explore, question, and problematize both the tourist gaze and the gaze of the global consumer--forces which activate and reinforce the East/West divide on many levels. As such, AES's images operate at progressive degrees and within multiple layers of desire, beyond the broader desire to travel and to consume. They are entangled with the intellectual crisis of a post-Soviet world coming to grips with issues of national and individual identity, the changing dynamic of cultural representation, and the removal of borders (physical, theoretical, cultural, and economic) in everyday life. Therefore, AES's Islamic Project can be read in relationship to a range of issues stemming from the articulation of difference through the guise of tourism and the ways in which the East/West divide is capitalized upon and upheld, and to what ends. These issues relate directly to AES's use of the manipulated image as a medium of cultural exchange, the spaces in which AES operates and proliferates its messages, and the kinds of monuments and places that are digitally altered and reconfigured within AES's artistic practice.
3. The impetus behind the project's conception was the emerging body of political theory in the mid-1990s that forecast new directions for American foreign policy and global relations. In the post-Cold War era, political scientists and government strategists began to formulate new theories about the state of future global affairs. Francis Fukuyama was among the most infamous for his announcement in 1992 of the "end of history" and the triumph of liberal democracy. But beginning shortly after the Gulf War when America and its Western partners faced combat with a new Eastern enemy, Fukuyama's grand theory was quickly eclipsed by that of Samuel Huntington, Harvard Professor and Chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. In a 1993 article for Foreign Affairs titled "The Clash of Civilizations?," Huntington sketched out what would become arguably the most influential and highly controversial political theory governing American foreign relations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In the opening passage of the article, Huntington declares a radical reconceptualization of politics (indeed for the discipline of political science itself). He states:
World politics is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be--the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years.
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. (22)
4. Huntington goes on to count a number of civilization "identities," which by the time of his 1996 book-length treatment of the original article (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order) numbers nine: Western (by which he means Christian and liberal-capitalistic); Latin American; African; Islamic (where he includes Indonesia as well as the Middle East and the northern half of Africa); Sinic (including China and cultures descended from it, e.g., Korea and Vietnam); Hindu; Slavic-Orthodox (i.e., Catholicism as localized in Russia in the late Middle Ages); Buddhist; and Japanese. With strong claims that conflicts will emerge as alignments of the "West against the Rest," and especially the West against Islam, Huntington appeals to Western civilizations to join against the common enemy. He sets out a number of goals, including the incorporation of Eastern Europe and Latin America into the West, the pursuit of cooperative relations with Russia and Japan, and the strengthening of international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values. Moreover, Huntington lists a number of "fault lines" of the world, relying heavily on examples from conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, to illustrate and support his overall argument that "as people define" their civilization-consciousness, "they...likely...see an 'us' versus 'them' relation existing between themselves and people of different ethnicity or religion" (25).
5. Indeed, what Huntington constructs through the various permutations of his argument is a paradigm--one that posits culture in all its subjective ambiguity as the distinguishing trait of political struggle. But perhaps more problematically, Huntington leaves open the question of whether his clash thesis places civilizational conflicts beyond the power and means of mediation through political partnership (e.g., the United Nations or NATO) and/or diplomacy. He therefore appears to suggest that all civilizations should live in peace with one another at the same time as claiming their inability to reach mutual compromise. In the end, Huntington's paradigm leaves the onus of successfully disavowing his theory upon those who can formulate a better hypothesis. Borrowing from Thomas Kuhn's discourse on scientific revolutions, Huntington establishes a highly convincing master system built upon a monolithic set of predetermined "truths."3 However, as critics have noted, these "truths" actively distort the vastly complex issue of globalization. Within the United States, much of the debate since 1993 has been limited to certain aspects of the clash thesis, seldom broaching the fundamental question of whether Huntington's views are in fact dangerous and even racist.4 Therefore, the most vocal and sustained opposition to Huntington has emerged from non-Western scholars, none of whom has exerted anywhere near the kind of influence that Huntington has in American foreign policy circles. Publishing in lesser-known journals or small collaborative collections such as "The Clash of Civilizations?" Asian Responses (published in 1997 in Karachi, Pakistan through Oxford University Press), these scholars established the discourse for the earliest critiques of the clash thesis, underscoring the very real consequences that such a paradigm holds and drawing out the weaknesses and potential danger inherent to adapting Huntington's model to transglobal relations. As Salim Rashid notes in the introduction to The Clash of Civilizations?: Asian Responses,
In the long sweep of history, Europe has continually looked with trepidation upon Asia. Whether it be the attacks of the Persians upon the Hellenes, or the Moors who long ruled Spain or the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna or the Mongols sweeping through Poland and Hungary, it is Asia that has continually threatened Europe with destruction. While three hundred years of European dominance have dimmed these memories, Samuel Huntington has succeeded in a charming revival of a long historical tradition. In an article entitled, "The Clash of Civilisations" one is struck first by the definite article in the title--not "A Clash" but "The Clash." (i)
6. This insistence upon empiricism in Huntington's arguments, the claim to describing the reality of the world, is at the core of critics' concerns since these claims revive a tradition of viewing the East, the Other, in highly mythologized and problematic ways. Therefore, if critics charge Huntington with escapism, reductivism, isolationist politics, racism, and fear-mongering, what lies at the heart of these concerns is the way Huntington mobilizes and trades in cultural myths to support his thesis.
7. In this connection, it is useful to recall Roland Barthes's analysis of myth in the section of Mythologies called "The Form and the Concept." "In myth," Barthes writes, "the concept can spread over a very large expanse of signifier. For instance, a whole book may be the signifier of a single concept; and conversely, a minute form (a word, a gesture, even incidental, so long as it is noticed) can serve as signifier to a concept filled with a very rich history" (120). Here Barthes stresses the uneven nature of mythic constructs. What's more, he describes these concepts as lacking fixity so that "they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, [and] disappear completely" (120). Barthes positions the distinguishing character of the mythical concept as something that is appropriated and recycled. In this way, what remains "invested in the [mythical] concept is less reality than a certain knowledge of reality" (119)--one that is often ahistorical and contingent upon shifting power relations. As Barthes goes on to state: "In actual fact, the knowledge contained in a mythical concept is confused, made of yielding, shapeless associations" (119). These aspects further situate the myth-making process as an act of deliberate distancing without clear fixity or return to origins, an ephemeral power of disconnection.
8. But more importantly, Barthes' analysis points to the inherent instability of the uneven processes through which cultural differences are most often communicated and internalized. And while the staging of AES's critique has manifested far beyond the original concerns of the non-Western critics, as we shall see, it is arguable that the first step to unpacking AES's engagement with Huntington circulates around this Barthesian sense of the mobilization of myths. Indeed, embedded in the very sign system of culture are a myriad of such myths that make Westerners feel secure when images of Islamic men shaving off their beards or Muslim women applying make-up signals the triumph of the West in its "war on terror." These cultural differences and the way they are signified, experienced, and circulated through media projections, fantasy scenarios, and manufactured myths of all kinds form a key construct of AES's Islamic Project.
9. Chris Rojek, in his provocative article "Indexing, Dragging and the Social Construction of Tourist Sights," describes the position of the "extraordinary place" as a social category in these very terms--places that "spontaneously invit[e] speculation, reverie, mind-voyaging, and a variety of other acts of imagination" (52).5 What is undoubtedly immediate in the AES images is that each depicts a spatial location already richly embedded with the aura of the extraordinary, holding a powerful draw to the average tourist--places such as the Statue of Liberty, Notre Dame Cathedral, Disney World, Sydney Harbor, Red Square, etc. Yet, as Rojek points out, these sites also abound in a "discursive level of densely embroidered false impressions, exaggerated claims and tall stories." It thus becomes "difficult... to disentangle" the "tradition of deliberate fabrications from our ordinary perceptions of sights" (52). Therefore, in order to make these sites legible, the tourist must draw on a whole range of conflicting signs to construct what is being seen. This process involves activating the tourist's familiarity with and relationship to the place through a configuration of these signs. And while this "activation" remains largely an abstract endeavor, often facilitated through media imagery, it does implicate very material spaces and contexts.
10. Rojek's specific discussion of indexing and dragging provides a fertile stopping point in this analysis. Here, Rojek appears to invoke the practice of clicking and dragging a computer's mouse to help explain the process through which tourists apprehend the "extraordinary" or the "different." In this model, indexing refers to a kind of inventory-taking of all the visual, textual, and symbolic representations to the original object (e.g., in Los Angeles, one might think of the Hollywood sign, the L.A. riots, the L.A. of Beverly Hills Cop, the TV show Melrose Place, palm trees, and Marilyn Monroe--not a uniform procedure by any means). Importantly, Rojek stresses that indexing takes account of metaphorical, allegorical, and false information resources, "interpenetrat[ing] factual and fictional elements" in order to "frame the sight" (53). The term "dragging" is thus evoked as both an abstract and a corporeal experience that illuminates the complex feelings one encounters as a tourist. Specifically, "dragging refers to the combining of elements from separate files [or indices] of representation to create a new value" (53). As Rojek explains, dragging is often facilitated "through tourist marketing, advertising, cinematic use of key sights and travellers tales" (54). The result is that a superficial/surface relationship emerges in relationship to the place, creating one extraordinary site after another in a laundry list of sites to explore and engendering a kind of blasé attitude toward the places of travel as well as a constant state of distraction:
The desire to keep moving on and the feeling of restlessness that frequently accompanies tourist activity derive from the cult of distraction. Pure movement is appealing in societies where our sense of place has decomposed and where place itself approximates to nothing more than a temporary configuration of signs. (71)
11. Notions of the touristic quest for authenticity as outlined by Dean MacCannell in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1989) are thus problematized specifically because the process of indexing and dragging precludes any attempt to experience any "real" place. As such, the restless nature of tourism is precisely envisioned by Rojek as the process of quickly moving from sight/site to sight/site, drawing on Virilio's emphasis that velocity, as a "potent source of attraction in contemporary culture," outstrips any temporally prolonged engagement with any one place (71). Importantly, Rojek distinguishes and continually stresses the important place of myth in all travel and tourist sites. This link emerges as a result of the physical remoteness of most tourist sights to the traveler and the accompanying speculation of the unknown, including the "fantasy about the nature of what one might find and how our ordinary assumptions and practices regarding everyday life may be limited" (53). Therefore, myths can come into play as a way to apprehend the unknown, to fill in the patches of what cannot be understood or ascertained.
12. Within AES's Islamic Project, these elements of re-presentation, tourism, and myth are strongly punctuated. First, in relationship to indexing, AES provides the photograph, index par excellence, and loads its images with a veritable file of indices (the effect of montaging multiple photographs) of both the West and of Islam. Importantly, distinctions are kept firmly within a binary of re-presentation. The West is most often signified in the images through its institutions, technology, and modernity, while Islam is pictured as traditional, religious, aggressive, and ubiquitous (I am thinking here specifically of the many Muslim bodies filling several of the images, tapping into Western anxieties and stereotypes about immigration and the fear of being outnumbered--see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Rome, (2006)
Copyright © AES 1996
13. Second, it is important to note that each of the digital photographs is created with existing imagery (appearing to fulfill the appropriating function highlighted by Barthes) and thus represents a kind of assemblage produced by indexing and dragging. This lends the images a feeling of familiarity, making them seem safe, yet still fantastical. Third, the familiarity of the images is further evoked through their seriality. The tourist can anticipate where some of the stops will be and begin the process of quickly looking from one image to the next, anticipating the next place, distracted from engaging with any one image. This sparks the process of movement, acceleration, and distraction in an attempt to apprehend the entirety of what is being presented and to collect or check off each site/sight visited. Fixity is further removed with the proliferation and flow of multiple objects in multiple forms (postcards, t-shirts, mugs, posters), objects that provide evidence of the visit while constructing new indices and contexts for re-presentation. And adding still further to the familiarity and seriality of the images is the distinctive green logo mark referencing Benetton's "United Colors of the World" campaign (see Figure 3)6, raising another aspect of Rojek's argument, the rise of "neo-tribes" or new virtual collectives in which social identity is expressed and recognized in conditions of anonymity and disembodiedness (61-62).
Figure 3: Northern Germany, (2006)
Copyright © AES 1996
This is a "controlled approach of disassociation" where interaction with others is ostensibly treated as a symbolic matter:
...the attachments are basically superficial and have the propensity to be reconfigured in response to the opportunities of contingency. In consuming this experience neo-tribes recognise that their attachments can be pulped and reconstituted to form other temporary attachments elsewhere. Mobility rather than continuity is the hallmark of this psychological attitude, and restlessness rather than anxiety defines this emotional outlook. (61)
14. In this way, the logo, itself a complex sign, signals the consuming aspects of tourism supported by a global economy and travel industry penetrating every corner of the globe. And, as Mika Hannula argues in his short essay "The World According to Mr. Huntington," the problematic success of the clash thesis emerges in a world where consumer behavior demands convenience:
There was the demand and voilà, before you could stutter ch-ch-ch-cheeseburger, there also was the supply. There was a huge demand for an answer, a schema that would explain the world in these chaotic, insecure post Wall times. There was fear, and there was uneasiness in the face of a pluralist, multicultural world awash with contingency. The fear was fuelled by images of rebels from far-off lands, and with hard-to-spell names, bluntly labelled Islamic fundamentalists' [sic] and, quite obviously, terrorists.... On the face of it, these claims do in general have strong argumentative force. They support deeply rooted prejudices, and help explain the world order, or disorder, and all the threats you feel when watching the evening news presented in a compact, consumable, comprehensible way. (4)
15. Hannula touches here upon two key concepts worked through the Islamic Project.7 First, Hannula underscores the relationship between consumer culture and the mass media in shaping ideas about cultural difference. Second, there is a suggestion of interactivity and contingency pointing to the type of virtual mobility that today's consumer can access through ever increasing and complex means. In turn, both dynamics relate to ideas around exchange and travel. And since it is through the theoretical and conceptual spaces of travel and tourism that most cultural differences can be and often are marked out, AES's choice to take up the identity of a travel agency, one which trades in images of difference, comes into clearer focus.
16. Reading AES's images in this context points to a number of important implications relating not only to the use of manipulated photographs and their relation to the social construction of touristic space, but also to the emerging cultural milieu of postcommunist Europe where newly opened borders allow for travel (both physical and imaginary) in both directions. In the context of these connections, we can ask what is the significance of an altered image, how is it conceived, and what does its relationship to the production and signification of difference mean? Moreover, we can explore how the circulation of that image, or a series of related images, calls up the mobilization of a tourist gaze and sensibility, and to what ends. As a mock travel agency, AES is able to stage the elements of tourism both inside the gallery and on its interactive website. In the gallery, the images are shown in postcard stands and on consumable items such as t-shirts and mugs (which can be purchased, becoming souvenirs of the exhibit). The artists, dressed as travel agents, mill around, passing out questionnaires (see Figures 4 and 5).
Figures 4 & 5: Photographs from inside the 1997 Installation of Islamic Project in Graz, Austria.
Copyright © AES 1997
Providing a nondescript corporate name, AES does not register the agency's Russian identity or artist identity any more than the promotional material or questionnaires (all of them in English) do. The corporate identity, streamlined office space, and glossy promotional materials create an environment of familiarity and comfort for the largely Western audience of gallery goers and tourists, new not only to the clash thesis but to postcommunist art as well.
17. This performance has the effect of distancing both the cultural identity of the artists and the subject matter of the individual images. In this way, the agency's visitors are initially distracted from the political undertones of the work and made to feel as consumers. To be sure, the exhibit as a whole becomes one of a number of sights that a gallery visitor sees. In Budapest, where AES installed their agency at the After the Wall show of "Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe" in 2000, the irony of consuming and touring cultures was played out when gallery employees gave perfume samples of Warhol perfume to gallery goers visiting the Andy Warhol show upstairs from After the Wall. AES and other postcommunist artists surely noted the irony of having its work upstaged and out-marketed by the American cultural export.8
18. On the Islamic Project website, the visitor encounters the touring and consuming dynamic somewhat differently when asked the question "Where do you want us to take you?," an appropriation of Microsoft's "Where do you want to go today?" trademark. Once inside, the visitor is presented with a map of the world. Prompted to click on geographic regions, the viewer is presented with a series of images and links, creating the effect of quickly moving from site/sight to site/sight. While on the home page, the visitor is confronted with a whole range of fictional and factual information that has been dragged into one frame, none of which is easy to discern (critical essay of Huntington, pictures of Muslim individuals, accounts of AES activities, order forms for AES merchandise, contact information that does not work, and the agency questionnaire).9 The very language of travel is elucidated through and embedded in the medium of the World Wide Web at successive levels with notions of discovery, exploring sites, surfing, bookmarking places, sending messages, e-cards, etc.
19. Returning to Huntington's paradigm, it is clear that cultural difference explored through the rhetoric, gestures, and construction of such a tourist gaze facilitates a mode of political engagement far removed from the specificity of place or history. The role of nation and civilization myths are therefore central to any analysis of cultural difference dependent on the model I've sketched out. This is a crucial aspect of Huntington's hypothesis since it allows stereotypes and oversimplified binary divisions to mask the complexities of the global age in which we live. This in itself is an important political strategy, one all too familiar to a postcommunist public shifting between political ideologies. As such, problematizing and exposing another aspect of AES's project, that of the fault lines between Eastern and Western Europe, links AES's more abstract critique of Huntington with a wider geo-political conflict emerging in Europe. Piotr Piotrowski's description of Central and Eastern Europe as the "grey zone" is apt and telling in this regard. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, any uniting ideological structures were not only abandoned in Eastern Europe but also made suspect to a high degree. For this reason, the urgent endeavors of the liberal democratic "West" to fold in the "East" have often been met with resistance and hostility. As Piotrowski writes, "the historico-geographical coordinates of Central Europe are in a state of flux... we are between two different times, between two different spatial shapes" (36). This state of affairs, in all of its complexity, is often too much to register. In interviews with a Ukrainian e-journal, AES likened Russia to a "porridge," a confusing muddle of interests that "you cannot make...out" ("AES Today"). Moreover, AES taps into the psychological minefield of the Chechen War through its montaged imagery portraying a civil conflict riddled with ambiguity and paradox, leaving individuals to grapple with who the enemy really is:
Chechnya is a unique phenomenon that is not considered by the civilized society from conventional aspects. Because Russia does not understand itself what Chechnya is--minority or terrorists. Even the Russian authorities do not have such ideas. What can we say, then, about intellectuals who are absent as such in Russia now? Now...they are just silent. ("AES Today")
20. What remains then is a deep intellectual crisis--a crisis where the notion of reality is what is most at stake. This crisis registers in AES's images in a number of striking ways, not surprisingly when the tourist gaze is momentarily suspended and the images critically interrogated to consider the importance of place. First, it is notable that when mapped out, the most violent, confrontational images converge precisely in the grey zone of the East/West split, what Huntington terms the "fault lines" of Europe. Notably, the Moscow (see Figure 6), Belgrade (see Figure 7), and Tel Aviv (see Figure 8) series illustrates the most violent conflicts, where the viewer is made to experience the clash of civilizations in a very direct and bodily way.
 
Figure 6: Moscow, Red Square, (2006)
Copyright © AES 1996
Figure 7: Belgrade, Serbia, (2006)
Copyright © AES 1998
Figure 8: Tel-Aviv, (2006)
Copyright © AES 1996
Here, the hacked-off hands of enemies, advancing tanks, and children astride canons underscore the local and specific bloody conflicts seen in the wake of postcommunism. The images are generally zoomed-in, with figures confronting the camera. The most confrontational gaze is strategically placed in Moscow, where one is made to consider on which side the Muslim Chechen-like fighters belong--East or West. Moving geographically outward, the images tend toward progressive abstraction as people appear more distant and then finally removed altogether at the sites furthest from the fault lines (see Figures 9 and 10).
Figures 9 & 10: New York (2006) and Sydney (2006)
Copyright © AES 1996
Here we are left with images that register an excess of signs, punctuated in the New Freedom 2006 image (recall Figure 1), where gender, religion, ideology, and culture are conflated into one penultimate, monolithic mega-sign of the clash between West and East. It is notable that AES took its travel agency to the streets of Belgrade and the Austrian city of Graz (see Figures 11 and 12), two cities signifying the imaginary dividing line between Eastern and Western Europe, while choosing to show only in the conceptual spaces of the gallery in America and Western Europe.
Figures 11 & 12: Photographs of the Travel Agencies in Belgrade (1998) and Graz (1997)
Copyright © AES 1998 and 1997
AES engages with a clash of cultures to this end through its depiction of the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York (see Figures 13 and 14).
Figures 13 & 14: Guggenheim Museum, NYC, (2006) and Paris, Beaubourg, (2006)
Copyright © AES 1996
Here, AES presents powerful stereotypes that suggest both the ghettoizing of Eastern European art and the guerilla tactics artists must employ to fight the myths of their identity. This tension emerges in relation to the Benetton logo with the significant 2006 date, the projected deadline for final European Union acceptance of several Eastern European nations.10 The appropriated logo also references the many forged name-brand goods produced and marketed in the "East" on the black market--the monies with which many operative groups fund their "terrorist" activities.11
21. In the final analysis, there is a peculiar ambivalence that emerges in the Islamic Project precisely because of the struggle AES encounters in its role as a group of Russian artists trying to find a place for critique. Emerging from the underground, from a time when art was made to fight crippling ideology, AES saw something familiar in the work of an American political scientist wishing to postulate a new paradigm to replace Cold War rivalries. Victor Tupitsyn, in an evaluation of the "Soviet mythologizing machine" reminds us of the process of Stalinist-era derealization as eerily familiar to our own world where, awash in images and sound bytes, we often stand dumbfounded:
the 'victory' over reality belonged to those who, firstly, controlled its representation and secondly, neutralized suspicions of the existence of its Other (i.e., the other of representation). Such suspicion was 'cured' and is still being 'cured' by hypnotizing us through the magic of repetition inherent in mass printing and by our inferiority complex in the face of huge numbers, large scales, and long distances, which manifests itself in the inability to distinguish between much and all. (82)
22. For Edward Said, it is precisely the reckless disregard for criticality that he fears in Huntington's work. He argues that the "Clash of Civilizations," like a bad take-off of Orson Welles's "The War of the Worlds," is "better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering inter-dependence of our times" ("Clash of Ignorance").
23. For AES, it seems that the place for criticality may indeed be receding, as its work circulates in ways and in contexts that it cannot control. Removed from the spaces of its mock travel agency, AES's images travel precariously and within the same uneven process of indexing and dragging that it seeks to question. And indeed, with the events of September 11th, the issues taken up through AES's Islamic Project have found a particular currency, positing its work as somewhat prophetic if not completely disturbing. To be sure, AES has been and will continue to be made to answer for their art. In a recent statement posted on the website of the Sollertis Gallery in Toulouse, France, AES attempts to make sense of its predicament:
When horrible terror broke out in America our artistic phantasm grotesque of 1996 seemed real and Mr. Huntington appeared to be right, we could feel as artists that [we] became prophets. But now all of us understand that revenge for the events in America would not be the last link in the chain, but the start of the 21st century history when mankind has to solve the problems of coexistence in [a] global world of poor and rich, religious and consumer societies. The project is neither anti-Islamic nor anti-Western, but tries to function as a psychoanalytical therapy in which phobias from both Western and Eastern society are uncovered and work[ed] through. In "Islamic project: AES--The Witnesses of the Future" we tried to reveal the contradictial [sic] ethics and aesthetics of our times. We believe that contemporary art does not solve the problems, but it can raise the major questions. (AES)
Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory
University of British Columbia
FORWARD. February 20, 1998, pp. 1, 8.
RUSSIAN-JEWISH ART ANGERS RUTGERS MUSLIMS
Soros-Sponsored visions of Islamic Future Irk ADL, Were meant as Irony.
By Blake Eskin, Forward staff.
FULL METAL VEIL: A Russian-Jewish art collective, Group AES, has digitally altered a photograph of Lady Liberty, putting a copy of the Koran in her hand and covering her face. The image, intended as an ironic comment on Western paranoia about the spread of Islam, is part of an exhibit at Rutgers University that has Muslim students calling for its removal.
Please see Page 8.
NEW YORK -- Muslim students at Rutgers University are calling for the removal of an on-campus exhibit by a Russian-Jewish art collective.
The installation, troika of artists from Moscow, group AES, contains doctored photographs that place a tiled dome and minaret on Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, a veil on the Statue of Liberty and an enemy tan battalion on a Tel Aviv beach. The handling of the exhibition has drawn criticism not only from local Muslim leaders but from officials of the Anti-Defamation League.
The group's name stands for the initials of the artists' last names. Their work and their travel to America was funded by the charitable empire of an American tycoon, George Soros. And the artists say they created the computer-generated collages shown in "Witnesses of the Future: The Islamic Project" as an ironic commentary on Western fears of the spread of Islamic culture. The administration of Rutgers has thus far stood by the decision to show the work, citing the need for free exchange of ideas. But representatives of New Brunswick's Muslim community say they fail to see the irony in images that reproduce stereotypes.
"What the artists are trying to do is to exaggerate a stereotype by superimposing pictures, but what really comes out is that Islamic extremists are taking over squares in major cities around the world," said a professor at Rutgers and the director of its Middle Eastern studies program, Hooshang Amirahmadi. "Overall, it's quite insulting, it's quite annoying."
The regional director of the ADL of New Jersey, Shai Goldstein, said he thought the exhibit was "a disturbing and possibly obscene one" and faulted Rutgers for not discussing it beforehand with local Islamic community leaders. Mr. Goldstein said, "A state university has the responsibility to explore this type of presentation with not only the affected group but maybe also an interdenominational group."
This latest flare-up of campus culture wars has arrived as America is mobilizing its armies and seeking international support for war against a predominantly Muslim country, Iraq. An addition, Group AES's roots in the post-Soviet art world add a twist to the usual tug-of-war between sheltering students from hate speech and safeguarding freedom of expression. One of the artists, Tatyana Arzamasova, said that the two goals are not contradictory, and that the unsubtle exaggeration of psychological fears was Group AES's way of starting a dialogue. "It's an area where one should able to discuss subjects openly and freely. Like Mr. Freud, we want to provoke people to talk about these things so they can become less of a problem," she said.
The exhibit, which opened at Rutgers' Mason Gross School for the Arts January 15 (it runs through March 1), has until recently received a mixed, but quiet, reaction. "At the opening, people said everything from 'It's clever' to 'It's should be taken down because it presents a stereotypical view of Muslims,'" said a professor of Slavic and Eastern European languages and literatures at Rutgers, Gerald Pirog.
In any case, Group AES does not shy away from controversy. Its photomontages of the aftermath of an imaginary jihad have been criticized in the German press for being anti-Muslim and in the Israeli press for making light of a serious situation. "In a Russian context, the more provocative, the more rude, the more aggressive the work of art is, the bigger a success it is," said a professor of photography at Mason Gross, Diane Neumaier. "If we had a demonstration, it would be really good art."
No demonstration is planned, but the director of the Islamic Society at Rutgers University, Muzammil Qaisar, said that students and community members are set to confront Group AES this week at a panel discussion at the gallery. "We plan on approaching the artists about these issues," Mr. Qaisar said. He said the Islamic Society, a religious and cultural student organization, "would like to see the display removed."
Complaints by Mr. Qaisar and Mr. Amirahmadi led to the posting of an explanatory essay by the exhibit's curator, Konstantin Akinsha, earlier this week. In this wall text, Mr. Akinsha clues in viewers to the intended ironic context by describing the anti-Islamic movements in Germany and France and the "clash of civilizations" concept developed by American political scientist Samuel Huntington. The complaints also brought about an end to the sale of T-shirts, on display in the gallery, of Lady Liberty in a full metal veil because of a concern that, outside the context of the exhibit, the T-shirts would spread the very fears that they purport to deconstruct. Mr. Goldstein of the ADL said of the dissemination of T-shirts and postcards, "The university may be faced with unintended consequences and should act swiftly to address them."
Ms. Neumaier, an organizer of the Group AES exhibit, said, "There's been a little bit of hissy complaint," and added, "If somebody put up a show about Jews and money, I would be offended. But between not offending people and no censorship, I would choose no censorship."
The chairman of the visual arts department at Mason Gross, Gary Kuehn, said that his department prides itself on its reputation for tackling questions of race, gender, and identity. "We're not looking for something sensational, but we have to take these risks," he said.
Mr. Qaisar of the Islamic Society said he felt the university should not be promoting the view that all Muslims are terrorists. "What we are asking for is the right to study in an atmosphere that is comfortable and respectful, and sometimes that supersedes the right to freedom of expression."
A spokesman for the Soros-funded Open Society Institute in New York, Michael Vachon, said, "We support a lot of different programs. Our intention in supporting these artists was not to offend any religious group." Mr. Vachon said he was not familiar with Group AES.
The curator, Mr. Akinsha, said that the work of Group AES was representative of the art being created in the post-Soviet era. "This art is disturbing art, but it's meant to be disturbing. We cannot send nice art to show."
Mr. Akinsha said he was happy the university had no intention of dismantling the exhibit, but he seemed disappointed that it was necessary to explain the work of Group AES. "People are not getting the irony. That's the main problem," he said. "I believe it's not necessary to explain the art."
The World According To Mr. Huntington
By Mika Hannula
From SIKSI The Nordic Art Review. Vol. XII ‹1 Spring1997.
Samuel P. Huntington, professor of international politics at Harvard University, says the current and future conflicts in the world are going to be and currently are caused by differences between representatives or groups from different civilisations. It is a highly speculative theory, stating that it is in the very nature of the conflicts between civilisations that they are almost irresolvable. The Moscow-based artist group AES provides a counter-image to the prejudiced cliches that Mr. Huntington seeks to prove and support.
AMID THE VAST, far-reachuig, complex uncertainties and rapid changes of our very lonely days, muddling shuffling struggling through, it is certainly satisfying to know for sure that some things just do not change. Those wonderful pillars of stability are, as we are all aware, such things as..., please fill in the blanks, and, yes, do feel so very good about yourselves.
And the correct answer to the unasked question is: the Golden Rule of liberal economics, the rule of supply and demand. This states, when cut down to the basics, that in a free world run by the force of the invisible hand, wherever there is a demand, there will also be the appropriate supply, generally sooner rather than later. And what’s more, the supply, that which is offered and delivered, relying on the outcome of fierce but fair competition, is bound to be as close as possible to the best available. Every time I think of Mr. Huntington’s theory of the Clash of Civilizations, and especially the incredible popularity of this theory, it is precisely then that I am totally overwhelmed by this nasty sensation, like, you know, someone is pissing on the shoes of your soul. It is then that I have to say, nice and politely but firmly, thank you very much for the ride, but please let me out now. Immediately. I think I am about to be seriously sick.
An extra sense of nausea develops when one realises how the word has spread from Washington via Bangladesh to Warsaw. It is claimed that his original article caused the most havoc and debate since George Kennan’s 1947 article, in which he forecast the Cold War and the threat of the Soviet Union. Mr. Huntington’s assertion, so to speak, is thus a new paradigm of world politics.
Mr. Huntington’s theory
Mr. Huntington begins his highly speculative argument by stating that the current and future conflicts in the world are going to be and currently are caused by differences between representatives or groups from different civilisations. In the era of the Cold Peace, ideological and economic explanations are no longer enough, or even valid. It is culture, it is civilisations that make the difference, and it is the differences between civilisations that shape the things to come. He even goes so far as to claim that if there is another world war, it will be between rival civilisations.
That was the first part. In the second part, the suspense thickens. Mr. Huntington counts nine civilisations: Western, Orthodox, Islamic, Confucian, Buddhist, Japanese, Hindu, African and Latin American. He claims that conflicts are most likely to emerge as alignments of the West against the Rest, and especially the West against Islam. What he is striving for is closer co-operation within Western civilisation, in which he includes North America and Europe. This is a final call, an eleventh-hour appeal for these two to get their acts together to face the common enemy.
At the end of the essay, he helpfully lists the tasks facing Western policy. Besides incorporating Eastern Europe and Latin America into the West, it is necessary to conduct cooperative relations with Russia and Japan. And then, «to prevent escalation of local inter-civilisation conflicts into major inter-civilisation wars; to limit the expansion of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to moderate the reduction of Western military capabilities and maintain military superiority in East and Southwest Asia; to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilisations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests; to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions.»
Then comes the third part. Mr. Huntington reassures us that it is in the very nature of the conflicts between civilisations that they are almost irresolvable. He does state, in the same breath that, of course, all civilisations should actually live in peace with one another, but then again, civilisations, per contra, are things that cannot reach mutual compromises. We are not far from echoes of a certain Oswald Spengler.
WASP worldview
It is an interesting world, this world according to Mr. Huntington, and it is definitely a worldview from WASP USA. Hallelujah. There was the demand and, voilá, before you could stutter ch-ch-ch-cheeseburger, there also was the supply. There was a huge demand for an answer, a schema that would explain the world in these chaotic, insecure post Wall times. There was fear, and there was uneasiness in the face of a pluralist, multicultural world awash with contingency. The fear was fuelled by images of rebels from far-off lands, and with hard-to-spell names, bluntly labelled Islamic fundamentalists’ and, quite obviously, terrorists.
There was also a gap in the market, since the main comprehensive solution from before the Clash of Civilisations, the previous flavour of the month for the minds of the lost and gone, was the End of History theory, which by this time had inflationarily run out of steam and impact. Interestingly, Francis Fukuyama was once a student of Mr. Huntington’s. Interestingly also, in his book The Third Wave from 1991. Mr. Huntington, while arguing for the world-wide expansion of democracy, still paid no attendon to questions of culture, actually viewing the role of culture as secondary.
The trouble with the new all-encompassing answer is that it is not only false, but that it distorts reality so very brutally, and effectively. It represents a monocausal, one-sided claim to have an answer to a question that is highly multi-layered. In response to this criticism, Mr. Huntington, who in his own words is a theoretical generaliser, retorts that sure, his method may have shortcomings, but then, what the heck, if civilisation is not the answer, what is? You try coming up with a better all-round explanation.
And it is there that the whole perversity of Mr. Huntington’s claim and worldview lies. With his fin-de-siècle pessimism, or even downright escapism, he has desperately sought for a theory that would explain with just a single answer the state of today’s world politics. Thus, this claim implies his own inability to cope with the complex insecurities of postmodern times, when all-encompassing answers and narratives are no longer available, or plausible. The bubble has burst.
McWorld’s. Jihad
It has to be remembered that Mr. Huntington is by no means alone in stressing the importance of culture. By relying on culture, some economists seek to show why Japan has so far been so splendidly successful economically, while certain historians claim that it is because of its culture, or in this case the lack of a certain culture, that Latin America has been under dictatorships for so long, and why democracy is still a foreign word in Palermo. In political science, another American professor, Benjamin Barber, has claimed that crises are and will be a matter of what he has managed to encapsulate into a fancy slogan: McWorld vs. Jihad, where McWorld stands for consumerism, technology, modernisation and democracy, and Jihad for local, cultural, traditional, and often religious values.
On the face of it, these claims do in general have strong argumentative force. They support deeply rooted prejudices, and help explain the world order, or disorder, and all the threats you feel when watching the evening news presented in a compact, consumable, comprehensible way. No doubt, these claims are also partly correct. Differences in background and culture can partly explain differences in economic results or political values. And quite correctly, there are and will be problems, conflicts and even wars between groups from different civilisations. Mr. Huntington frequently refers to the case of ex-Yugoslavia. Here were three different civilisations fighting against one another, in a war in which all the parties were supported by the members of the same civilisation.
The point, however, is that these general claims are not valid evidence for Mr. Huntington’s thesis of more or less inevitable and insoluble conflicts between civilisations. The aims, contents and conflicts of civilisations are not pre-determined. Or what about the ability of civilisations to make decisions? Even with all the talk of the demise of the nation state, Fouad Ajami, professor of Middle East studies at John Hopkins, argues, it is still states that control civilisations, and not the other way around. «States avert their gaze from blood ties when they need to; they see brotherhood, faith and kin when it is in their interest.»
Nor does it sound too convincing when Mr. Huntington uses the case of the muslim school kids in France who want to wear a veil as an example of an irresolvable conflict, since, brainstorms our main man, you simply cannot wear the veil at school every other day. Thus, according to the logic of the Harvard scholar, no compromises are ever available.
The problem comes down to the meaning of the concepts of culture and civilisation, which Mr. Huntington finds unproblematic. For him, culture is what people understand themselves to be, and civilisation is the highest level of common identification.
Mr. Huntington’s worst imaginable scenario
But let us move on to a vision of how the world would look if Mr. Huntington’s worst imaginable scenario were to be realised, say by the year 2006. This is the project of the Moscow-based artists’ group AES (Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovitch, Evgeny Svyatsky), labelled Witnesses of the Future. This well-known Russian-Jewish group has chosen 12 ultimately familiar images and symbols of big cities, such as New York with its Statue of Liberty and Berlin with its Reichstag, and then gone wild with the computer. Simply continuing the Clash of Civilisations with neverending clicks of the mouse.
The result is a vision of the future in which gung-ho, blood-thirsty fundamentalist Islamists have taken over the asylum, er, the whole wide world. It is a world in which the Reichstag has Muslim decorations and Arab beggars in front of it, a world in which the Statue of Liberty’s face is discreetly covered by a religious veil while she holds aloft the Koran. There are terrorists in Red Square, and even Sydney Opera House looks like a mosque.
At first glance, it seems like Mr. Huntington has found some good friends in this group, although they do not come from the same civilisation. But that is just the initial, superficial impression, because what AES actually provide is a fascinating and powerful counter-image to the prejudiced cliches that Mr. Huntington seeks to prove and support. So, precisely where Mr. Huntington goes astray and confirms distorted claims, the group breaks them down, calls them in to question, and in a rather disquieting way with their strikingly well-done computer collages illuminates how unbelievable and invalid these prejudices are.
In their own words «the project is neither anti-Islamic nor anti Western, but tries to function as a psychoanalytical therapy in which phobias from both Western and Eastern societies are uncovered and worked through.» The group did not take any of the photos themselves, but used and abused available material, playing with the fear of the Islamic fundamentalist, in a way that seems to come almost straight from a textbook on how to oppose media control of images. An anti-myth against a myth, or a perverted collage against an already-perverted collage.
The project was reproduced on posters and postcards; cards which mimicked the green rectangular space showing the date and the city in the lower right corner from that famous clothing company notorious for using images in a provocative way. It is also on the Internet. As a whole, the project takes powerful one-sided images so far, and with such precise irony, that the result is politically so incorrect and yet so astonishingly essential. It makes you see and think through the manufactured myths and images.
In an unpublished article by the Armenian artist Archie Galents, a member of the AES group, Lev Evzovitch insists that they are not underestimating the public in the old avant-garde fashion by putting themselves above the public. «Life is not politically correct, so why should art be so. Most people can interpret the project without falling into these either-or scenarios. Political correctness is too often a form of censorship. I think that our project also has a humourous and comical side, which could help people stand back from the troublesome conflicts between the West and the world of Islam.»
AES’s attitude strongly reflects the current climate in both East and West. One has to be an extremely clever media manipulator, or even a media terrorist, to achieve recognition in a country where the sick president is caught manipulating a video to try to present himself as more healthy than he is. Or what about when Yeltsin finally makes an appearance looking simply terrible, like he is five minutes from the grave. The level of the irony also needs to go scuba diving if it is to compete with a president who went vote-hunting with his saxophone, and who often smilingly assures his people that God is with us, the Americans. So, for obvious reasons, it makes a lot of sense that AES’s next major project, besides putting on a retrospective exhibition in Warsaw later this year, is a plan to make a TV series, a real soap opera, in Russia.
Forget Mr. Huntington
These concepts — culture and civilisation — are not clear-cut, unchanging entities, but interpretations that are constantly made and moulded, defined and modified. And these processes always apply certain interests, wants, fears and values. They are not neutral or harmless, but highly political — open to debate and to various interpretations. It is within these frameworks that we need to challenge Mr. Huntington’s bizarre worldview, offering playful, serious, or why not blatantly infantile, alternatives, burning down that house of prejudiced cards.
As Zygmunt Bauman so brilliantly puts it, the current postmodern situation is specifically the time when morality is at the core of everything, because it is now when you and I have to decide for ourselves, we have to choose and be responsible for ourselves.
— Mika Hannula is no longer applying for a green card In the US.
The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century,
Samuel P. Huntington, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel P. Huntington, Foreign Affairs,
vol. 73, no. 3, 1993.
The Clash of Civilizations and The Remaking of World Order,
Samuel P. Huntington. Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Hou Hanru
AES Group
This text was originally published in Cream. Contemporary Art in Culture,
Phaidon Press, London, 1998, pp. 160-163, ill.
At the end of the millennium, an inevitable common anxiety is: what will our world become in the next century? Some envisage the future as a utopic global village, in which all human beings will benefit from universal economic and technological advances. Others imagine a cataclysmic confrontation between different communities as a result of the decline of Western domination. In a radical example of the latter approach, the American futurologist Samuel Hungtington predicts a series of 'action movie' wars between the three major religious civilizations: the Christian West, Islam and Confucianism. To preserve Western interests (mainly the expansion of multi-national capitalism and liberal values), he suggests that Western countries should act together with other non-Islamic and non-Confucian countries to fight against these powers.
Coming out of Moscow, and therefore familiar with fearful Cold War-style propaganda, AES Group, composed of three Russian Jewish artists, aim in their series 'The Witnesses of the Future: Islamic Project' (1996-97), to reveal the absurdity of the Hungtington 'theory of the Clash of Civilizations'. Their strategy is to take his ideas to an exaggerated extreme by proposing 'the worst imaginable scenario'. Using computer-generated imagery, they have produced cityscapes of the main Western capitals from New York to Paris, Rome to Sydney, Moscow to Berlin, envisaged as they might be in the year 2006 under Islamic occupation. Western historical monuments are turned into mosques, surrounded by Islamic gunmen and nomadic tents. Even the Statue of Liberty is covered from top to bottom by an Islamic veil, the Declaration of Independence in her hand replaced by the Koran. To emphasize this ironic strategy, the artists set up the 'AES Travel Agency to the Future' in 1997, in which these scenarios are put on sale in the form of postcards, mugs, T-shirts etc, while questionnaires are distributed to visitors.
This hi-tech game of guess-the-future, central to the group's strategy, is an attempt to challenge our presumptions about the world. It aims not only to deconstruct the logic of fear as the ideological foundation of geo-political power games but also leads to a disintegration of the psychological constructs behind our perception of images and their meanings. On one hand, AES Group use shocking images to achieve visual impact; on the other, they set up sophisticated situations in which the spectator is invited to participate directly in the suspension of conventional morality. In The Suspects, Seven Innocent, Seven Sinners (1997-98), for example, the spectator is invited to distinguish seven murderous girls from seven innocent ones, a task made impossible by the standard, neutral portraits.
In a new project, The Berlin Wall - 2, New, Nice and Improved (1997), AES Group propose to rebuild the Berlin Wall with fluorescent, hi-tech materials. To celebrate the erection of the new wall, they chant: 'Lord! Divide the poor from the rich, the South from the North, the healthy from the sick, the West from the East, the civilized from the Wild'.
THE NEW YORK TIMES, Sunday, February 1,1998.
ART REVIEW
EASTERN EUROPEANS ENVISION THE FUTURE
by William Zimmer
NEW BRUNSWICK
Reviewing art from Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union used to be a dispiriting prospect. Wit and humor came in flashes against a sorry background of censorship. And the artists didn't have access to the best materials, so the work seemed makeshift.
A sea change has occurred in recent years. Political freedoms came just as video and digital technology were being perfected and made widely available, and artists have taken to the new media like ducks to water. Three strong examples of the change are visible in "Three Penny Exhibition", at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University here.
Occupying the large center room at Mason Gross is "Witness of the Future: The Islamic Project", the work of the Moscow-based Group AES group, which takes its name from the initials of it members, Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovitch and Evgeny Svyatsky. Using adobe Photoshop software, the group has composed almost convincing digitized images. Skylines and monuments of major cities are presented as they might appear in 2006, when the artists project that Islam will have conquered the globe. They are richly colored, but the humor is black and AES calls them "paranoia pictures".
The Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan is surrounded by mosques with glittering domes; the museum is given a colonnade of Islamic arches, some would say improving Frank Lloyd Wright's austere design. A fearsome guerrilla band is planted in Red Square. Vienna, which was besieged by Turks in the 15th and 16th centuries, in 2006 will see its famed opera house crowned by a Turkish-style dome.
The group knows that business entrepreneurs will still reign, so they have produced T-shirts hanging in rows on one wall, coffee mugs and racks of postcards with their digitized feats printed on them. In the center of the room is an arrangement of traditionally patterned rugs, but with the skylines of the future in the centers. Overhead are large banners featuring the Statue of Liberty, completely veiled. (....)
NOT-STRANGLED-YET
(VULNERABILITY OF THE IMAGE)
Ekaterina Degot
The new photographic series by AES+F group (Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, in collaboration with Vladimir Fridkes) is a candid representation of children’s simple, unsmiling beauty surrounded by a more elaborate, gilded beauty of a baroque palace. This is Russia; this could be (and will be, since this is an ongoing project) another country. The images look slightly disturbing, both in a predictable and an unpredictable ways. Any glamorous image of a child now, more often than not, would be considered dangerous for him or her; but a child represents some danger for an image, too.
Children are beautiful. All of them. This is because the pure state of existence, the Being, obscured in adults, is still strikingly evident in them. In a mysterious way, children are here – and this fact blesses them with an almost sacred beauty: in traditional thinking, devil is no more than God's shadow, everything that firmly exists is already on God's side.
But our culture sees beauty in the fact of being shown, rather than just being: it draws a line between those represented and unrepresented, creates the sense of absence, envy and desire. To involve a child in this culture of spectacle, inevitably sexual, is now often seen as barely appropriate; in contemporary language, children should be protected rather than raised.
Deep down, the culture believes that representation kills, that beauty is captured: looking at it intensely, then freezing its image forever is nothing but kidnapping it to some de-humanized space, thus murdering it. Especially in photography, where this murder is more focused, more technically prepared, more cold. And instantaneous. The unhappy paedophilic protagonist of Michel Tournier's "Le Roi des Aulnesâ" – after which AES+F work is named – was a keen photographer, sublimating his obsession in obsessive representation.
The early avant-garde, on its heroic way to abstraction, thought there would be no representation any more, nobody and nothing would suffer in a humiliating position of an object. Gradually, art dissolved itself in various practices, avoiding the cliché of a professional picture-maker. But what happened was the emergence of the role of a professional "living still life" in mass media and mass culture: the role of an object for the representation which would be more prepared to surrender to intrinsic humiliation.
Unlike 100 years ago, 90% of the images we are looking at are done from those whose job is to pose: film stars, advertisement starlets, professional models. Even in reality-TV, those who participate take the job of being shown – and the limits of what is O.K. to be shown are flexible in our democratic culture. Instead of ordering your own idealized portrait, as you would in the traditional art era, you are buying ready-to-wear fashion magazine with someone else's already ideal image on the cover. We are fine with the fact the glamorous design of contemporary culture of the spectacle has nothing to do with our own often humble appearance, as if we were the 18th century art lovers seeking the ideal in neoclassical statues. This is the neoclassicism we can get any minute on TV screen: a professional kind o f beauty which is completely done, ready for the look. We are constantly fed with those perfect images, even if some touch of imperfection is also calculated into the menu of perfectness. And there are more and more people whose job is to compensate, with their body and face, for the lack of the object in art.
Those whom AES+F work with are children who professionally show themselves – fashion models, ballet dancers, ice skaters. But they are novices. They are entering this culture but are captured in an awkward moment of becoming. In these photographs, the object is still moving, in every sense of the word, it is still alive and vulnerable, not ideal yet; some of the girls on AES+F photos are gracefully presenting themselves in the role of a star, others (especially boys) do so with angular clumsiness. All of them are breaking out of the image, not blending in yet. This is the transitional state of childhood which breaks the ice of the representation in this mirror-walled dance hall.
In his prophetic "Dehumanization of Art", Joseph Ortega-y-Gasset wrote that modern art could not satisfy itself with being dehumanized, devoid of life to become a pure and distanced sign; what it had to do was to reveal its dehumanized character by showing both life and its absence, by representing the "strangled victim" – still evident in Picasso’s tortured cubist figures, on e step before the abstract form which already showed itself through cubist lines (though Picasso himself never did the final step). The children by AES+F are one step ahead of the banality of the glamour image, an ultimate contemporary abstraction; this image is also already there, even if partly, even if the artists are not completely on its side.
Children are represented in a large crowd, and there is a totalitarian twist about it. Are they victims looking at the invisible tyrant giving them orders, as in Tournier’s novel where children are entering the Nazi youth camp and the totalitarian fascination with the fragile young beauty is addressed? Are they called by an invisible Forest King who will take them out of this life, turn them into statues? Or are they generating the stereotype themselves, willingly entering the realm of the image?
In a way, they are not "strangled victims", but rather "not-strangled-yet", which makes it even scarier. In cubist paintings, body is already disfigured; here, it is drifting serenely towards the disfiguration of a glamour image. In avant-garde death is already there, what we see are nothing but signs, evidence, as Walter Benjamin pointed out in his analysis of Eugene Atget’s photographs; like in a classical detective story, we are looking for the "what for", which will lead us to the "who". In contemporary post-teleological culture often overlooking the "what for" altogether, art takes a plunge of a thriller movie which makes us wonder "what next", rather r than what has happened already. Will the child follow the Ogre? A detective story with its analysis of the past is scary in a very relieving way; a thriller where there is no way back is scary as only life can be – as only future can be.
Childhood is often associated with fear; the fear of the unfamiliar and the unknown. But children themselves are unfamiliar and unknown: they are new. In a way, they are the new. Therefore, they confront us with our own fear of the future. And their serious, unsmiling faces are more than appropriate here.
When art proclaims death of art, as it is the case in early Avant-garde, it meets the inevitable with rare dignity but avoids the vulnerability of life which could be much scarier. When art proclaims the end of this death motive, a s it is with contemporary art, it opens itself to this vulnerability but looses in heroism. For a contemporary artist it is crucial to remain in the realm of the unknown, undecided, rather than to break free in an avant-garde gesture. The artist wants to distance him\herself from the glittering and polished spectacle of culture, remaining nevertheless as close to it as she could bear. Like children on these photographs, many artists today, including AES+F, are walking a rope of glamour stereotype, since they feel this is the only way through the abyss. Some are balancing dangerously, some are brilliantly falling and catching the rope again: the point is to be on the edge.
In any case, the show is unavoidable: these are those to be shown, these are those to take the ungrateful job of representation.
NU: The Nordic Art Review, VOL.III No.6/01, “Not-Strangled-Yet” pp. 70-71. Stockholm, Sweden.
Fotograf Prague
AES
/Simona Vladkova/
The name of this group is derived from the first letters of the surnames of three artists: Tatiana Arzamasova (b. 1955), Lev Evzovich (b. 1958) and E. Svyatsky (b. 1957). These three Muscovites of the middle generation started to work together as a group in 1987. Since the late 1980's they have worked on conceptual projects. The initial outcome of their collaboration was primarily in the form of installations. In 1996 the group was joined by the fashion photographer Vladimir Fridkes (b. 1956), and from that moment photography presented in the form of photo-installation has become the main medium of the individual AES + f projects. Later, from 1998, the group also began to use video and multimedia more intensely.
The AES projects, since the beginning of their cooperation, are based on a shocking visual quality that portrays the human body and its parts in a startling context, in relation to its environment or situation. Corruption. Apotheoses. (1996). for example, shows men in suits pulling bare and bloody intestines from under their well-pressed jackets and shirts; in Family Portrait in the Interior (1995) - a man and woman in suits suavely cut each other's throats in the area of their vocal chords with scissors, thus revealing to the viewer the anatomy of their speech organs. These works, as well as some other photo-concepts realized between 1993 and 1999, can be described as visually controversial, raw. shocking, unambiguous, ironic, tough, straightforward, uncompromising, and revolting. They work with physicality, revealing the body's vulnerability and impurity, bringing out a certain inadequacy in the contrast of the smooth and civilized presentation of the body as we are used to it from fashion magazines, television, advertising and so on. The titles of the projects also allude to other levels of meaning: however, it has to be said that the aggressive visual information often tends to destroy any subtler meanings. Thus these photographs serve mainly as a kind of subversion of the artificial image of physicality that is served to us daily, in glossy packaging, by the mass media. A photograph of a bald woman, with IVs and probes all over her body but, dressed in an evening gown Defile. (2000-2001) tells us how little we are able to perceive the body for what it really is - vulnerable to illness, old age and death - instead of an idealized and aesthetic image of the body which has little to do with reality. It is precisely this deeply rooted illusion that AES ventures to shatter with their sharp use of counterpoint, often going beyond the limits of good taste to shatter the illusion, mays, into whose grasp we are slowly falling. Although at first we tend to laugh at an illusion, we may soon find that we have stopped laughing and are quite earnestly living out that illusion ourselves- and what is worse, we may find that we believe in it as though it were the only legitimate, unchanging reality. Although among AES strategies is the use of the most shocking and disgusting images in order to create this reaction, their efficiency cannot be denied.
I do, nevertheless admit, that I prefer another facet of AES work - work that is more subtle, intuitive, deeper, more ambiguous as well as more open, unfinished, more implicit and visually non-aggressive. Among such works we may list Suspects. Seven Sinners and Seven Righteous (1997-98), an installation that does not employ a sense of visual shock but instead works with the meaning of the title and the method of photographing. It creates a situation where the viewer is the one passing judgement, evaluating, condemning. The viewer becomes judge - based on the photographs, he or she is supposed to distinguish seven innocent girls from seven teenage murderers. All the girls are photographed in the same way, in neutral, unified en-face, making it impossible to presume guilt or innocence from such indifferent portraits. This way of communicating a message, more subtle and implicit, creates a more present reaction, and is more thought provoking.
An uncompromising and ostentatious engagement, whether political or cultural, coupled with an aggressive visual aspect, has been since the beginning of 1990_s a well-tried PR strategy that allows one to rapidly transcend the limits of the micro-region and to export artistic activity onto an international platform. In this respect we should mention one of the more notorious AES + F works - a photo-mystification Islamic project (1996-1997, now reopened). The ikon of this project is the Statue of Liberty, whose face is covered by a burka and holding the Koran instead of the Declaration of Independence. The project was originally based on an exaggeration of the ideas of the American futurologist Samuel Huntington and his theory of the 'clash of civilizations'. It consists of computer-manipulated views of key cities of Western civilization (Paris, New York, Moscow, Berlin, Rome, etc.) in the year 2006 - under the rule of Islam. Caravans travel across Central Park, a ruined Gothic cathedral in France is converted into a Mosque. However, the current international situation makes the original exaggeration seem less absurd and unreal than it would have seemed in 1996, turning it into a chilling prophetic vision.
Returning to the less ostentatious aspects of AES + F one should mention their King of the Forest, a series of projects realized in 2OO1 and 2002. 'King of the Forest is the name of a mythological character appearing first in Germany as 'Lord of the Elves'. The protagonist of the myth abducts comely children and surrounds himself with these infants in his sylvan palace, fascinated by their precocious charm. This mythical plot has been exploited a .number of times, by such writers as J.W. Goethe or Michel Toumier, before AES + F decided to use it as basis for one of their more extensive works. The 'King of the Forest' series is in fact a chain of happenings that are supposed to take place in various countries - so far they have been realized in Russia and Egypt (France should come next). The first event, entitled 'Le Roi des Aulnesa' (based on the title of Michel Toumier's novel) took place in the Throne Hall of Catherine ll_ s palace in Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg. More than two hundred children between the ages of 3-5 and 11 were brought here from several specialized St. Petersburg sports and ballet schools, as well as modeling agencies. The children were deliberately given no instructions whatsoever as to what they should behave like. But the very presence of a video camera and a photo camera made these children - all trained and formed practically since infancy for work within the systems of advertising or top-performance sports - employ the forms of professional behavior they have been taught.
In this case the theme of the mass media exploiting ever younger children via advertising, sports or modeling is treated rather as documentation of a situation, a state of being, without significantly manipulating it - the approach is based on observation and statement. Models, as well as sports and pop stars, are very young. The boom of 'innocent aesthetics1 has been very visible in the last decade; one of the facts we come to realize when looking at the photographs of the children 'naturally and easily striking poses in the golden cage of Catherine's throne hall is that behind every child-star, behind every child's face in an advertisement, there is the unique life of an individual child. There is a real child behind every advertisement, a fragile creature with his or her hopes and dreams of a beautiful world awaiting...and at such moments one is seized with anxiety...
The following part of the series is entitled More Than Paradise (2002), and was photographed in Mohammed All's palace in Cairo. Again, there are over two hundred children of various ages - again there is the monumental architectural framework. The intention here, however, is different - to show the Islamic world not as a hostile, dangerous place, but instead to reveal its collective ritual aspect through the spontaneous behavior of children. They run about gamboling and frolicking in a hall built in the style of splendid traditional Islamic architecture, giving the viewer an inkling of a living, beautiful and at the same time mysterious rites of a culture different and unknown to us. Another aspect of AES + F can be glimpsed here - their interest in the Body in relationship to Architecture and Nature.
In static or dynamic form (still photography or video recording), AES projects reflect a wide range of contemporary problems, going across continents, civilizations, religious as well as political systems. The present introduction of the fifteen years of their activity is far from comprehensive. I have omitted some projects altogether, and some I have mentioned only in passing. Among the benefits of the information era, however, is the virtual Internet - AES + F being of those artists who make ample use of web presentation of their work. Further megabytes of their work are thus available to us at their home pages: http://www.aes-group.org, as well as at http://aes.zhurnal.ru. With wishes of a fast connection and a strong stomach.
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