States of the Empire. (Reviews).

Empire/State: Artists Engaging Globalization

CUNY, The Graduate Center

New York City 

May 24 - July 14

The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program Curatorial Fellows' recent show, "Empire/State: Artists Engaging Globalization," meets the concept of globalization half-way, at once investigating the political possibilities of a still-incipient left globalism and acknowledging the challenges provided by the recalcitrance of the nation-form. Featuring work in a variety of media (video, photography, net art, installation, CD-ROM projections, slide projections) by artists ranging from established stalwarts such as Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Peter Fend and Wolfgang Staehle to younger artists like Fatimah Tuggar, Francois Boucher, Marisa Yiu and Alex Rivera, "Empire/State" inventories critical strategies, timely and untimely alike, In the age of globalization. The defamiliarizing gesture of the show's title--typographically bi-secting Empire-State into Empire/State-calls our attention to the dilemmas of a public sphere in transition, in which familiar, "national" signifiers are subject to unpredictable, even prolep tic re-articulations. They are furthermore envisaged as part of an expanded radical democratic politics that corresponds to no familiar cartography of power. Rivera's Cybracero.com (1997-2001), a fictional e-commerce site trafficking in de-materialized Mexican migrant labor, devastatingly sketches the terms of a scenario in which virtual border-crossing by "telepresence" further "fixes and striates" workers, at once enabling the persistence of deregulated labor and blocking the possibility of a transnational public sphere, not to mention that of any politics whatsoever. While Rivera's work drolly alerts us to the de-politicizing spatial fixes of deregulated capitalism, Sekula's Waiting For Tear-Gas [white globe to black] (1999-2000), a timed slide-sequence of photos drawn from the Seattle protest, presents the occupation of space and the taking of time as forms of negativity still capable of activating the polis. Sekula's opaque, asignifying work offers us suspended views of a suspended city, forcing us to li nger over the diverse actuality and absent concept of the protests, forcing us to linger, in other words, in the temporally-uncertain zone between an event and its interpretation. Waiting for Tear-Gad, in Its patient and disciplined serial rendering of the intersection between the quotidian life of a city and the dueling abstractions known as global justice and globalization, reminds us that theories pass In and out of everyday sites in odd, halting rhythms.

Notoriously slippery, the concept of globalization is at once the crucial question of our times and something of a theoretical cipher. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's by now ubiquitous book empire is characterized by an attempt to move from a descriptive account of globalization to a properly political and philosophical mapping of its contours-an account of its Immanent possibilities as much as of its actuality--much writing on globalization still falls prey to a presumption of transparency and self-identity, presumptions utterly at one with the rhetoric of informational capitalism. And though Hardt and Negri do not devote much attention to the problems of art and cultural production, empire's unapologetic leap from the register of "what is" to the register of "what could be" aligns the book with one of the most historically valuable functions of art-the problematization (rather than strict description or representation) of the present. This subversive shift in registers assumes maximum power and effe ctivity when the rhetorical performativity of a text or object prevents this problematization from sliding Into a simplistic utopian escape from the present. Tropes and figures, such as Hardt and Negri's hotly-contested networked multitude, cross over from the "merely discursive to the real," though rarely in calculable or predictable ways and certainly without the verifiable results assured by positivism.

Tackling globalization head-on proves to be a knotty problem, and Hardt and Negri's tact, a kind of hyperbolic, well-nigh science-fictional totalizatlon, raises as many problems as it solves. There is no guarantee, for instance, that globalization is best understood as an historical rupture that necessitates the production of a new political symbolic based around the subversive redeployment of technological metaphors. (This move might be so enmeshed with the logic of the market and the New World Order as to be totally moot.)

Laura Kurgan's CD-ROM, Global Clock #1 (2000), operates pedagogically, at once formally demonstrating and textually explicating the dynamics of high-speed foreign exchange. Each hand of Kurgan's clock registers the speed/quantity of one of the three dominant currencies of foreign exchange--the dollar, yen and euro respectively, just beneath the clock, a text scrolls across the screen, interpolating lucid epigrammatic commentaries on the politics and form of these dominant capital flows. If, as one such blurb explains, the importance of the exact time of exchange heightens in proportion to the escalating rapidity of exchange itself, this emphasis upon the significance of precise temporal regulation to the workings of global capitalism is complicated (allegorically, at least) by the pressures of reading moving script-a process of losing one's place where time and space alike scroll away. Thickening the texture of Kurgan's work further, each textual burst appears three times per looped cycle, once each in Englis h, French and German (the hegemonic tongues of critical theory?). Insofar as these translations constitute readings of one another, the cagily multilingual reader interpellated by the piece will be moved to read these readings and reflect upon the disparate idiomatic inflections revealed in the comparison. Yet for all the cosmopolitan complexity of this interlingual exercise, this zone of reading appears to be incommensurable with the broadened geopolitical terrain and heightened speeds of globalization suggested by the piece.

These antinomies of the role of language in so-called information-society-i.e. the ever faster speeds of transmission and the returning labor of reading, critique and contemplation-play themselves out in a different way in Oliver Ressler and David Thorne's project Boom! (2002). Taking up the URL as the symbolic form par excellence of millennial capitalism, Ressler and Thorne present the Universal Resource Locator as an extended narrative of capital and globalization. While the form of the political poster has traditionally staged the problems of complexity, accessibility and historical/temporal efficacy associated with didactic, ends-oriented art, Ressler and Thorne's project suggests a new intermediate temporality for the protest-poster. While still attempting to balance substantive critique and signifying economy, this capitalist moniker run amok also reads as a distinct slowing-down (a re-languaging, really) of the logo/URL and its usual task-oriented, semantically impoverished functionalism. Disconnecting the address/site from the Web and retying it to an hysterical post-boom rationalization cum marketing plan, Boom! slyly mocks the self-reflexive turn(s) of postmodern capitalism. Also taking on the network form are works by Marc Lombardi and Josh On/Futurefarmers. The former, Banca Nazionale del Lavaoro, Reagan, Budh. Thatcher and the Arming of Iraq (1996), meticulously draws out on paper the complex web of laundered funds leading to the arming of Iraq while the latter, the wittily titled They Rule (2001), offers a convenient online schematization of the densely-overlapping memberships of the board's of the world's most powerful corporations.

By contrast to the cluster of works deploying some aspect of the metaphorics of the network form, several works aim to articulate globalization by way of signifying strategies that do not take their power from an assertion of contemporaneity. Though the "presentist" gamble of immanent critique more often than not strikes its mark in "Empire/State," of at least equal interest and force are these works that re-test and rework the tactics and procedures of earlier moments, most notably the moment(s) of conceptualism and post-minimalism. As if launching a one-man guerilla campaign against the forceful, historically entrenched interdiction barring the intervention of art in matters of government--a ban common to both Platonic philosophy and late-capitalist bureaucratic society (if interrupted by Shelley's notorious poetic legislator)--Peter Fend boldly issues forth a revision of U.S. energy policy informed in no small part by the lessons of Robert Smithson and other Earth works artists. Fend's installation, United Stated Global (energy) Policy (2002), uses a series of hand-drawn maps and diagrams (as well as texts) to outline both the shortcomings of the U.S.'s petroleum-centered energy policy as well as a series of environmentally-responsible alternative arrangements utilizing hydro- and solar-power, and algae-processing (I), among other resources.

Sergio Munoz-Sarmiento's impassive photographic sequence, Imaged of America, Chapter 3 (2000), shows us the unsettlingly undistinctive architectural typology of what must be understood as paradigmatic spaces of globalization-the maquiladoras. Each pictured facade, as seen in the drab, characterless setting of an essentially identical industrial park, registers to the viewer as a polemical denial of the intrinsic relevance (or unmediated historicity) of just such visual information. Munoz-Sarmiento's austere conceptual work conjures industrial labor as the absent referent of both the architecture and its photographic representation, a tactic that takes on particular force at an historical moment marked by the relentless spectacularization of these respective media. On a related note, Martha Rosier's airport photographs, taken from her series In the Place of the Public (1986), reflect upon the interchangeable, impersonal structures that constitute a crucial, concrete precondition for the developments of the glo bal economy.

Architecture, rarely in itself an effective vehicle of critique, nonetheless informs the engagement of a number of other critical projects in "Empire/State." Most strikingly, Emily Jacir's Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Which Were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948 (2001), a refugee-tent bearing the embroidered names of the titular villages, co-articulates the concerns of shelter and memorialization. All too frequently, the impulse to monumentality serves to place the memorial itself outside of history and politics, in the form of an imposing permanence that presupposes the historical completion of the loss itself. By contrast, the very frailty and portability of jacir's structure, as well as its explicitly-allocated blank spaces for future inscription, attests to the sustained effects, political and otherwise, of the 1948 events in the present. Beyond the phenomenological pull of the disconcertingly-placed physical object-an austere canvas tent in a gallery space-the signification o f the work is split in two asymmetrical, albeit overlapping directions. While on one hand the process of construction is inscribed in the work itself (Jacir organized and documented an open, collective effort of embroidering the names), the work, on the other hand, also points to the ineluctable, though never absolute, rift between shelter and its thematization. (Paraphrasing Althusser paraphrasing Spinoza, one cannot live inside the concept of shelter.)

In spite of what one might assume, at least from a technocentric or formalist point of view, Wolfgang Staehle's empire 24/7 (2002), a video-projection of a live web-cast view of the upper-levels of the Empire-State building, compliments Jacir's paraarchitectural intervention well. (As the exhibition's decidedly post-9/11 title, "Empire/State," would seem to aver, the deterritorializations inflicted by capital, as well as the quasi-uniformity of the so-called global city, still have to contend with violent boundary disputes and cathected signifiers of national identity.) Here too, architecture is de-monumentalized, though in this case the displacement proceeds by way of the foregrounded temporalization of broadcast and the banal digital flicker of the depthless image. While the incremental waverings of digital pixels effect a kind of lulling abstraction of this paradigmatic skyscraper form--a form aready significantly de-contextualized by its truncated look-the ultimate stakes of this piece lie in its invocati on of our collective vulnerability in urban space and the related sense in which heightened awareness of time's passage often imbues everyday perception with an apocalyptic or petrifying charge. A memento mori hovering in virtual space, Staehle's piece at once enacts liquefaction and ambivalently monitors the architecture of the status quo (or State).

A pair of digital photomontages by Fatimah Tuggar elaborate a techno-dystopian image of third-world/African development discourse, jibing well with Emily Apter's recent suggestion that globalization has prompted an invigoration of a sci-fi/futurist aesthetic long slighted by mainstream post-colonial theory and cultural production. Town Square (1996) places a group of rural sub-Saharan African women at the center of a mangled, disproportionately scaled cityscape marked by baroque obscurity and disjunction: we see apparently sourceless shadows horizontally traverse a set of train-tracks that themselves are dwarfed by human figures. Global telecommunication's promise of a smooth traversal of here and there and a universal setting for exchange is rewritten as a world-picture gone anamorphic. What becomes apparent is not just the continued reality of deliberately sustained "uneven development" on a global scale, but the violent desire to see the other, to make the other visible (to western eyes), in an enclosed re presentational space, no matter the distortions wrought by the haste of transposition (or what David Harvey has termed "space-time compression"). Tuggar's image thus maps a psychic space roughly equivalent to a just-unravelled fantasy of mastery in which we can begin to make sense of the fissure between alterity "itself" and its representation. (In more formal terms, it bears noting that these works also effectively turn digitization against its hegemonic incarnation, emphasizing that a non-indexical image need not take pride in its masterful reconstitution of a single homogeneous picture plane a la Andreas Gursky.)

Francols Boucher's meditative video-essay, White Balance (To Think Is to Forget Differences) (2002), offers some of the show's most challenging, conceptually robust work. At once geopolitical and geopoetic, White Balance brilliantly interweaves considerations of contemporary Hollywood cinema, the expansion of U.S. surveillance and intelligence, as well as of the U.S.'s persistent disavowal of its dependence upon foreign sweatshop labor--a disavowal sustained in the interest of a myth of U.S. freedom and autonomy. Dedicated to tracing multifarious, oft-contradictory operations of power, Boucher contrasts the still-Manichean imperatives of the Hollywood system/narratives, as it searches for a character/stereotype to succeed the post-Cold War(i.e., not Soviet) Middle-Eastern villain central to so many action-films, with the far more complexly differentiated micro-syntax of digitally-enabled state-sponsored racial profiling and surveillance. Taking as a starting point the blank white screen used as a reference po int for filmmakers and other visual designers as they adjust, or "correct," hues before capture or in post production (an enterprise with considerable ideological consequences in its promulgation of a racialized aesthetics of pigment and pigment-adjustment), Boucher repeatedly focuses attention on the political unconscious of everyday inscriptions and ostensibly neutral technological processes at the margins of design, aesthetics, fashion and urbanism.

Wryly rerouting the logic of the monochromes and blank screens and pages so dear to western aesthetic modernity (Melville, Mallarme, Malevich, Reinhardt, Richter, Godard's scenario du Passion, etc.), Boucher exposes the political stakes of any assertion of "blankness" (or neutrality). Repeating this deconstructive gesture, Boucher concludes (but does not "complete") his video with an aporia that serves as a goad to further ethico-political vigilance. Re-playing the moderate, more or less reasonable words of a liberal, U.S. commentator discussing the globally-prevalent perception of the U.S's lack of "fairness" in matters of foreign policy, Boucher seizes upon the racially-freighted connotations of "fairness" as a metaphor for justice. justice, following the logic of Boucher's video, always passes through both the aesthetic and the political, never dwelling safely in the neutrality of pure reason. Neither, then, does the differentiated conjuncture of "Empire/State."

DANIEL HOFFMAN-SCHWARTZ is a graduate of the Modern Culture and Media Program at Brown University and an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Program. He lives in New York City.