ART: At least they used to try
Lothar Hempel’s Propaganda at the ICA
Propaganda, the title of Lothar Hempel’s new installation at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, is a big name for a small show. But it’s not just the title that makes big claims. Lothar Hempel, a 36-year old German living in Cologne, has a long list of group and solo exhibitions to his credit, a rave review from Frieze magazine, and a contract with the alarmingly fashionable Anton Kern Gallery in NYC. So one goes to this show with every expectation that Hempel is going to be quite good. And the ICA seems pleased enough with its new commission. The ICA’s director Philip Dodd has helpfully set out its merits:
In a bewildered London art world and in a newly repoliticised Britain, it’s a great pleasure to welcome Lothar Hempel’s very resonant work. It addresses the cancellation of utopian imaginings in a world where all is propaganda, or at least often is – and it does so by engaging with the history of art. It’s a rare achievement.
To which I can only add, not nearly rare enough.
Propaganda is, in fact, an installation-by-numbers, a faintly lazy exercise in rounding up a few disparate items, pasting up a few sheets of the Frankfurter Allgemeine nearby and hoping that it will all end up in a pavilion at some biennale somewhere in a few years time. Its proponents display a certain anxiety about the way in which it ought to be read. Is it, for instance, about propaganda? How political is it? Or is it simply another one of those gut-churningly circular and self-referential conversations with which a certain strand of post-post-modernism insists on boring the shades of its ancestors? The latter, almost certainly – not that it much matters, because its tropes are so hackneyed, its visual force so weak and its faux-casual moments of prettiness so cheap. Why not stick up a few faded Polaroids of old Joseph Beuys installations and be done with it? Or to put it another way, if there’s a long lineage linking, say, David’s Death of Marat with the Russian constructivists and Fluxus and who knows what else, we can only hope that it is not ending up here, in the ICA, under these high vaulted ceilings with this melancholy autumnal light seeping in from St James’s Park and the tourists drifting aimlessly along the Mall outside.
So what is there to find in the first of the three rooms, titled Streik (Strike)? There is a sort of pierced wooden screen, a few upturned plastic chairs, two coffee-percolators but no cups, a non-descript hanging sculpture, a few boringly doctored newspapers pasted onto the walls, and a television monitor placed on the floor. The monitor shows a dreary black-and-white film in which a woman eats some pasta, finds a key in her mouth and extracts it, and makes an unconvincing show of using the key to open the forehead of another character. Of course we could all fill up several sides of A4 ‘interpreting’ this, or rather, nervously ascribing some sort of meaning to what might otherwise seem almost terrifyingly vapid. So the film makes references to surrealism, and the gothic resonances of the screen are about Catholicism and German-ness, and the newspapers are about the way in which the (conservative) news is obviously manipulated before it gets to us. As for the name, I struggled to connect it with anything in the room, other than those upturned chairs and their hints of arrested activity.
In Streik I was joined by a Chinese girl in an attractive peaked felt hat and another woman who wore pointy black shoes and a lovely A-line skirt. They were, frankly, much more interesting than anything else in the room, but eventually I abandoned them and went upstairs to seek out the rest of Propaganda. As I reached the top of the stairs, it suddenly occurred to me that that irritation, low-decibel hum that is the lingua franca of all installations serves at least one adaptive purpose, which is to enable critics to seek them out – or, who knows, perhaps avoid them – in the dark and underpopulated wastes of a mid-day, mid-week gallery visit. Eventually I reached the second room, Maschinen Herz (Machine Heart). This is, apparently, the ‘heart’ of the show. That means it is central and important. But actually it just looked very much like the room below, except that instead of that pierced screen, here the main feature was a sort of big, vaguely metallic cube-ish thing made up brightly-coloured panels. It looked half way between the sub-modernist school playground furniture of my infancy and a very large but not very entertaining desk-toy. This object was accompanied by the usual suspects: those newspaper pages, and the television monitor which was again placed on the floor but which was showing the same film scenario from a slightly different angle. At this point, whatever limited patience I had felt for Propaganda vanished abruptly and decisively.
Right – one more room to see, and then I could go. (I am not sure the other two women ever made it upstairs.) I crossed the corridor. The third room is called Abstrakter Sozialismos (Abstract Socialism). What is Abstract Socialism? Whatever it is, it can apparently be adequately represented by an old bicycle, mounted on a spinning platform, accompanied by those familiar sidekicks, the newspapers and the television monitor, still cranking out its increasingly pointless little narrative. According to the explanatory notes for the show, this was ‘a bike called Bismark’. Now, this really was enough to set anyone’s head spinning even faster than the platform was. ‘Called’? Do people in Germany really ‘call’ their ‘bikes’ by name? (I don’t think it was a brand name – I certainly saw no logo on the ‘bike’.) And this, in turn, begged the increasingly urgent questions – why ‘bike’? And, more to the point, why on earth ‘Bismark’ rather than ‘Bismarck’? There are some solecisms that even the most generous ERO editor finds simply unforgivable.
Alas, the explanatory leaflet provided by the ICA failed to answer these questions. It comes as no surprise that the curatorial claims made for the constituent parts of Propaganda only rarely correlate in any obvious way with the facts on the ground. The sort of expository writing that accompanies installations like Propaganda ambled off into its own literary sphere at, I suppose, some point in the 1950s. The conventions of its diction become ever more opaque, arcane and self-referential. Rather than describe the exhibition, let alone explain aspects of it, these texts simply provide a stylised icing of gravity on top of some rather stale conceptual cake. Thus we are instructed that
Hempel’s installations are highly composed and draw upon the graphic nature of animation. The materials he uses pull against one another to create a sense of anxiety and uneasiness in the work, enhanced by a contrasting mix of natural and artificial light.
For those who are able to get over the shock of this innovative ‘contrasting mix of natural and artificial light’ which is obviously so radically different from what most of us experience in, for instance, shops, offices and home, and for those who can surmount the ‘sense of anxiety and uneasiness’ stemming from ‘materials’ such as chairs and old newspaper, there is at least the consolation that the boring tat in these rooms is ‘highly composed’ rather than simply being a random collation of boring tat. Perhaps more helpful is the following:
The Mascinen Herz represents the empty shell of formalism and invites the viewer to not only concentrate on the object but also on the room and themselves [sic]. Formalism here becomes like the title Propaganda, merely a tool. The highly polished surface seems to make the sculpture dematerialise, at times appearing and disappearing.
So if once can make it past the failed grammar and patently false claims (no, the cube does not seem to dematerialise), then one is left, at most, with the contention that the heart of this show asserts – at a guess – the inability of the historic forms of modernism to articulate unproblematic truths about our political circumstances. And this, of course, is such a staggeringly banal point that one wonders why anyone needed two coffee percolators, let alone a ‘bike called Bismark’ to invoke it.
The best thing about Propaganda was the view out the upstairs windows through the end-of-summer plane trees and over the Mall, so it is cutely analogous that while this show was being set up, far more interesting reflections on the relationship between art and political reality were taking place in the world outside. On one hand, ageing yBa Damien Hirst managed to grab a few headlines by apologising for his contention, in a BBC Online video-essay aired on 11 September, that the result of the attack on the Twin Towers had been ‘visually stunning’, which of course it had been; on the other hand, a surprisingly good sculpture by the generally overrated Eric Fischl called Falling Woman was pronounced ‘offensive’ and removed from the Rockefeller Centre. So here were two interesting paradoxes. Hirst’s 11 September commemorative essay – overwhelmingly respectful and reasonable in tone – followed on from a predictable effort by Noam Chomsky, the point of which could perhaps be summarised without undue violence to linguistic niceties as ‘America deserved what she got’. Yet Hirst was the one whose contribution received all the attention – and the BBC, who chose to commission and publish both these video essays, is obviously above criticism. Who’s hiding from what here? Surely it says something interesting about the tame complicity of much of the media that Hirst, old master of the well-calibrated pretend-shock, is allowed to pretend to apologise for a comments that were not remotely upsetting in the first place? The Fischl story raises even more interesting issues. On 11 September, it was impossible to turn on the television or open a newspaper without seeing actual footage of the deaths of hundreds and thousands of people. Some of us might argue that the endless repetition of these images – their slow decomposition into shockless familiarity – probably is offensive, or at very least runs the danger of coarsening our deeper human sympathies, but the media obviously disagrees. Fischl, on the other hand, by compressing all too many tragic deaths into a representation of a single falling woman – a rather handsome nude – obviously crossed some sort of sacred line and is now being frog-marched back over it as promptly as possible. Leaving aside the question of Fischl’s intentions, one can only watch with wonder as public discourse hammers out the distinctions between different types of visual representation – the conventions that govern them and the seriousness of public response to them.
It is at moments like this when one can most easily see the naked outlines of modernism still there, so close to the surface of our culture. It is at moments like this that we can see most clearly what, if anything, the whole myriad set of activities and explanations bracketed as ‘art’ have to say in regard to political life. But Lothar Hempel’s Propaganda seems, in its pretty ICA setting, entirely cut off from all of this – simply a pointless gesture carried out in an academic style that has become an end in itself, and not even a very interesting end at that. It can say what it likes about politics, not only because its language is so arcane that no one takes it very seriously, but because the truths it tells are so banal that no one really need strain to listen. One can say a lot about the relationship between modernism and political reality, most of it negative. Art, I think, changes nothing. But all the same, it was hard not to leave the ICA with a heavy heart. Art changes nothing, but it is sad to realise how little it even tries any more.
Propaganda, an exhibition by Lothar Hempel, runs at the ICA from 20 September until 3 November 2002. Admission £1.50 Monday-Friday, and £2.50 Saturday and Sunday.
Bunny Smedley, September 21, 2002 11:04 AM