International News Digest
THE BUSH AESTHETIC: IMAGES AS ACTIONS
The Frankfurter Rundschau’s Arno Widmann spoke with art historian Horst Bredekamp about the power of images and politics. For Bredekamp, President Bush attempted to reunite images with reality. Where Clinton was a master at staging photo opportunities for the press, Bush dislikes the media and attempted to cleanse images of all traces of showmanship by relinking them to actions.
“The politics of the image under George Bush is very complex and very difficult to analyze,” Bredekamp told the newspaper. “It was, if I observed correctly, at first an attempt to leave Hollywood high and dry, so to speak. Bush hates Hollywood. He hates television; he scorns basically all media.” Far from identifying Bush as a man of words, Bredekamp characterizes the exiting president as a man of actions. “He attempted to appear as a nonshowman of action. Today, we can no longer imagine why he was reelected. But this is one of the reasons.” Using images to illustrate actions belonged to the early media approach of the administration that Bush developed with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. “The suspicion that an image was only show—that suspicion was supposed to be taken away from the image,” explains Bredekamp, who qualifies Bush as an antipostmodern for shying away from the world of simulacra and simulations celebrated in the 1990s. “The radical bond of images with things and actions—that was his antimodel. Against Hollywood. Also, his so-embarassingly handmade MISSION ACCOMPLISHED staging on the aircraft carrier lies in this line of bringing back images to a concrete bond with reality.”
For Bredekamp, the lack of theatricality in Bush’s initial response to 9/11 characterized this approach while also announcing a new turn. “That was the start of a fatal overdrive, which was a reaction to the question of how to respond to the theatricality in the outrageous ‘image act’ of the destruction of the Twin Towers. When image and reality are to carry on corresponding to each other, then reality must engage with the theatricality of the images: war against terrorism also as a war of images.” For Bredekamp, Bush’s attempt to link images with actions subsequently took on a military tone. “That was the strategy of ‘Shock and Awe.’” With the bombing of Baghdad, a glittering city of one million was made to deliver memorable images linked to real actions: the fall of the Hussein statues, the examination of Hussein’s mouth, and, finally, his execution in what Bredekamp calls “real, unsimulated images.”
BONAMI’S “ITALICS” AS ART-HISTORICAL REVISIONISM?
The Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Henning Klüver reports on the critical reactions to Francesco Bonami’s large-scale group exhibition “Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution 1968–2008” at Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, an institution owned by French collector François Pinault. In his contribution to the catalogue, Bonami claims that Italian art, like large segments of Italian society, has been “raped” by “a political fundamentalism that has repressed their international instincts.” According to Klüver, Bonami criticizes influential critics for founding “families,” like arte povera or the neoexpressionist Transavanguardia, that he claims excluded many artists.
Some critics are unhappy with Bonami’s mixture of well-known artists like Mario Merz and lesser-known newcomers like Paola Pivi. Others accuse the curator of nothing less than historical revisionism in his attempt to show “a currently disappeared culture” thriving beyond the familiar ties of artistic movements. Achille Bonito Oliva, the “father” of Transavanguardia, already spoke against Bonami's “revisionistic” concept while labeling him a “lackey of the powerful.” Some artists are also unhappy with the show. Mimmo Paladino, who was not included in the exhibition, called the curator “a parvenu.” The Fausto Melotti Foundation refused to loan works from the late sculptor, who died in 1986. Jannis Kounellis used his lawyers to withdraw a work, Small Golden Shoes, 1971, that a collector had already promised to loan for the exhibition. Giulio Paolini and Michelangelo Pistoletto expressed solidarity with Kounellis, although they left their works in the show. As Klüver notes, however, not everyone is unhappy with the exhibition: “Bonami has come into favor for this kind of grouping among younger artists especially, such as Maurizio Cattelan, Sandro Chia, and Francesco Vezzoli, each of whom are in agreement with the exhibition concept.” “Italics” continues through March 22.
SANTIAGO SIERRA’S DEATH CLOCK
The Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Holger Liebs reports on the latest intervention from Santiago Sierra: a death counter. The LCD screen with rising numbers appeared on the facade of the headquarters of the London insurance company Hiscox on New Year’s and will keep count of the dead in 2009. The glowing number is estimated to reach fifty-five million by the time 2010 is celebrated. “This idea is not new,” writes Liebs. “We know all sorts of light diodes for the good of the people in public space, which follow the real-time balance of rising national debt, for example, or felled rain forests.” What is new is that Sierra has transformed his counter into his own life-insurance policy. Should the artist die in 2009, Hiscox will pay out the equivalent value of the project: just over two hundred thousand dollars. Sierra is not planning his death. As Liebs points out, such a plan would constitute fraud. His surviving relatives would not receive even a penny. “But if he doesn’t die,” asks Liebs, “what does the ‘Death Counter’ mean beyond a calculated game with the danger of dying?”