INTERFACE

REVIEW

Generosity is the new political

Wysing Arts Centre, Bourn, Cambridge
5 September - 1 November

Reviewed by: Olga Smith »

A walk through the rural calm of Wysing Arts Centre towards the newly built exhibition space takes one past Amphis (2009), a community centre made entirely from the architectural salvage donated by individuals. This monument to the endless possibilities of recycling, designed by Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser, acts as an intimation of what is to come: an exhibition exploring the political significance of the acts of giving, where the majority of works have been specially commissioned and created on site.

Inside, a cast iron stove that forms a part of Celine Condorelli's installation Life always escapes (2009) draws near with a promise of warmth. The transition from the outdoors inside is also that of the fuel for the stove brought into the gallery from the neighbouring Commons. The specific provenance of the firewood unlocks the significance of the other part of this installation: a collection of nineteenth-century postcards and photographs of the Commons, accompanied with a slide projection of contemporary photographic documentation of these spaces. Lush enclaves of wilderness, preserved for the public use as the democratic spaces of leisure (a little like Wysing itself), the Commons are the subject of Condorelli's ongoing research into the alternative models of ownership and sustainable living. Politics proper, however, enter quietly, through the backdoor accidentally left open by the wood gatherers: Marx's reflection on the rights of the "elemental class of human society" is initiated with his Wood Theft Debates (1842) that contained his defence of the right of the poor to collect fallen wood in private forests. Drawing on Hegel's definition of the poor as non-members of the civil society, Marx draws ontological parallel between the fallen wood in nature and those fallen by the wayside in society, whose "unincorporated" status acts as an immanent critique of the social order.

The notion of the common, examined in Condorelli's work in a sociohistorical perspective, extends to include a plethora of meanings that range from mundane and ordinary to the class distinctions in this international selection of works. The ironically entitled video I Love My Job (2008) by Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen presents the Proletariat in contemporary Western society as individuals trapped in secure but dreary jobs, whose frustrations, caused by work-related stress and their superiors' tempers, produce darkly comical revenge fantasies, without, however, ever erupting into a full-scale revolt.

Katerina Sedá's It doesn't matter (2005-7) offers another reflection on the private individual's daily struggle. At the origin of this project lies a drawing assignment the Czech artist designed for her grandmother with an ostensible aim of rousing her from her inertia and depression. This rationale, combined with the title, invites a reflection on the ordinary tragedy of a struggle for meaning when life suddenly doesn't matter; however the execution of this idea bears much more ambiguous results. The video shows the elderly woman struggling with drawing materials and straining to control her aged body, while remaining indifferent to the gesture of (supposed) care harnessing art for the therapeutic purposes.

The provision of care is the subject of Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson's The Caregivers (2008), a documentary describing the daily routines of two migrant care workers. The visitor is lured into the screening enclosure with the sound of angelic singing, which transpires to be an operatic cantata based on a journalist article reporting on the influx of the Ukrainian female care workers to Italy. A woman's voice sings harmoniously of social disharmonies that engendered this phenomenon: it sings of Italy's shortage of living-in carers; of Ukraine's unemployment and social instability; of wives separated from their husbands and the children left behind; of presents purchased in the seasonal sales to send home. For all its formal richness the film never ceases to startle as only documentaries can: the pink fluffy towel on whichthe Ukrainian carer wipes the feet of the disabled person in her custody at one point in the film is experienced as the extension of the velvety quality of the soprano, singing sweetly of the bitter price paid for the kindness of these strangers.

It was at moments such as these that this exhibition, devised by Lotte Juul Petersen, made most sense. The humble DIY aesthetics espoused by many works in this selection related narratives of social marginalisation as the tales of personal survival; an objective perhaps even more ambitious than the claim that generosity is fundamentally disruptive to the capitalist production, laid by the exhibition's title. Instead of summoning the ghosts of Derrida and Mauss, this exhibition evoked Jacques Ranciere and his "distribution of the sensible". This notion delimits politics as the struggle for equality in the social order where aesthetics maintains a regime of visibility that operates by exclusion of the 'unincorporated' from the systems of representation. Whether this representational failure is enough to act as a political critique remains a question.

Venue detail:
Wysing Arts Centre »
Fox Road, Bourn, Cambridge CB23 2TX

Post your comment

No one has commented on this article yet, why not be the first?

To post a comment you need to login

Back to top

Back to reviews »