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Special Feature: Latin America: The Last Avant-Garde |
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Number 12: (In)efficacy |
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Utopia
Station: Manufacturing the Multitude |
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| Two divergent ideologies seem to be gaining strength in curatorial practice today. On one hand, the rapid construction of new and expanded arts institutions and a greater dedication to community-focused programming stresses the importance of locatedness and regionalism. Meanwhile, metropoli worldwide are scrambling to enter the international biennial and triennial circuit, and major museums are adding temporary installation series to their exhibition programs. The latter's proponents talk excitedly about collaboration, nomadism and international dialogue. On the vanguard of this movement is Utopia Station, a multifaceted project of curators Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Molly Nesbit and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, which attempts to reinvigorate utopia as a conceptual impetus for forward-looking collaboration. It has been the organizing principle of numerous exhibitions, symposia, and performances. Similar to the political formation of the multitude, as theorized by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, all Utopia Station’s projects strive to orient individuals of varying perspectives toward collective action. One of its earliest manifestations was Utopia Station, an exhibition included in the 2003 Venice Biennale. Its critical reception was dismal. Critics called the show a “directionless sprawl,” a “confusing cornucopia,” “particularly pretentious,” and “fatally separate.” After an extravagant three-day opening celebration, to later visitors Utopia Station was less an exhibition than the garbage-strewn scene of yesterday’s party. Despite its good intentions, Utopia Station did not inspire genuine interaction. It manufactured the multitude. The fiftieth anniversary of the Biennale di Venezia in 2003 marked a rupture in the fair’s 100-year history. Rather than formulating in the Arsenale, the Biennale's central exhibition space, a singular diagnosis of the current field of visual arts (a strategy trademarked by twice-Biennale curator Harald Szeemann), elected curator Francesco Bonami invited eleven others to organize separate shows in the mile-long stretch of gallery space. The result was a succession of intense, cacophonous installations of widely varying scope that, as one traversed the building’s length, took viewers on an overwhelming and disorienting ride. Assuming one had enough energy to reach the end of the gargantuan presentation, she would happen upon Utopia Station, the joint curatorial project of Obrist, Nesbit, and Tiravanija. Utopia Station occupied the final room of the Arsenale and spilled out onto an adjoining lawn. A number of plywood constructions occupied the interior space. Circular benches and tables designed by Liam Gillick sat before a stage-like platform equipped with a public address system. The stage was connected to a larger plywood structure that marked out a series of roofless rooms with doors, each devoted to a small installation or video. Outside, several independent, architectural constructions dotted the haggard turf. Over 150 artists designed small posters on the topic of utopia, and these were pasted throughout the entire space—within, on, and throughout the individual projects on display. Utopia Station was a scene of both organized and spontaneous performances, lectures, panel discussions, workshops, and film screenings. The exhibition’s haphazard organization and absence of interpretive literature, in combination with the amorphousness of many of the artworks, made the correct authorial identification of most displays impossible. It offered widely varying experiences to viewers depending on the time of their visit and was, at different times, a space for discussion, argumentation, relaxation, refreshment, meditation, and celebration. The sprawling spatiotemporal presentation of Utopia Station makes it difficult to describe, but Obrist, Nesbit and Tiravanija’s curatorial statement provides the conceptual framework that aspires to bring the entire project together.[1] They describe Utopia Station as a “way-station,” a “flexible” “conceptual structure” that “doesn’t present itself as a finished picture.”[2] It is “a place to stop, to contemplate, to listen and see, to rest and refresh, to talk and exchange.”[3] It is “completed by the presence of people and a program of events. Performances, concerts, lectures, readings, film programs, parties, the events will multiply. They define the Station as much as its solid objects do.”[4] Furthermore, Obrist, Nesbit and Tiravanija conceived of Utopia Station as one amongst many Utopia Stations.[5] The project lives beyond the 2003 Biennale, extending before it in time as meetings in Paris, Venice, Frankfurt, Poughkeepsie, and Berlin, and after it as various gatherings and exhibitions led by any or all of the three curators, in Munich and Sindelfingen, Germany, Porto Alegre, Brazil, and New Jersey, as recently as March 2006. The Venice exhibition curatorial statement is the first published declaration of the Utopia Station project as a whole, and in it the authors declare, “There is no hierarchy of importance between the gatherings, meetings, seminars, exhibitions and books; all of them become equally good ways of working.”[6] Utopia Station provides a conceptual framework for organizing a series of separate but linked projects, all situated in the visual arts but which are becoming, contra the scrambled message of Utopia Station, overtly political.[7] Between October 7, 2004 and January 16, 2005, Utopia Station appeared as a series of gatherings at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and the program included a lecture by Antonio Negri, co-author of Empire. The Munich program also included a press conference with Yoko Ono, a seminar by Martha Rosler, a discussion between Obrist, Nesbit and Tiravanija, lectures by Bruce Sterling and Edouard Glissant, and an open mic with Steve McQueen, Philippe Parreno, Anton Vidokle, Yona Friedman and Carsten Höller, among others. Shortly thereafter, Utopia Station emerged as a platform for discussion at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Utopia Station has amounted to a project much more vast and unruly than the already-overwhelming Venice exhibition because it was designed to be so. The curators’ declaration of Utopia Station poses the concept not as a finished statement, but as a mode of working inspired by utopia. They write:
This statement encapsulates two crucial characteristics of Utopia Station as a general project. First, it redefines “utopia” as a process rather than as a place, so that utopia now refers to utopic thinking in the present rather than to a space that is separate from here, is somewhere else, or is “over there.” Second, its success requires the collaboration of diverse individuals working cooperatively toward a shared goal. This second condition rings eerily similar to a concept of political organization preceding Utopia Station, which has undoubtedly influenced its formation—Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s idea of the multitude.[9] Though not stated explicitly by its curators, Utopia Station’s foundation rests on Hardt and Negri’s theorization of the multitude because the exhibition relies on the concept's ability to reconcile the singular with the collective. But, conversely, Utopia Station has something to lend to Empire. Obrist, Nesbit and Tiravanija use a multiplicious production strategy to reinvigorate the idea of utopia, which Hardt and Negri, in their immanent fever, have cast aside. Each project illuminates, complements and bolsters the other, sending light to unexplored corners and pushing the other forward to those places where it has not been able to go. The multitude and utopia, it turns out, travel hand in hand toward these new horizons. In their watershed text Empire, Hardt and Negri introduce a political formation they call “the multitude,” a postmodern revision of the proletariat that respects the singularity of subjects working collectively. The importance of the multitude, the authors insist, is that it is the only political formation capable of launching a counter-Empire. In their subsequent work Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Hardt and Negri fully explicate the genealogy, role, and potential of the multitude within Empire.[10] In a particularly exuberant passage, the logic of the multitude is aligned with Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of carnevalesque narration, which, through dialogue or “polyphony,” creates narrative through the interaction of many subjects.[11] In carnevalesque narration there is no central referent of meaning; rather, meaning is created out of free, spontaneous and collective exchange between individual subjects. Hardt and Negri liken contemporary forms of protest to Bakhtin’s carnevalesque to show how the multitude can embody the conflicting ideals of singularity and collectivity: structurally, in that protests are based on a decentralized network structure of different groups working collaboratively, and representationally, in their use of dance, song, puppetry, etc. Here is Hardt and Negri’s dramatic conclusion:
The polyphonic logic of carnevalesque narration is also that of the multitude. The secondary importance of the carnevalesque is that it provides an avenue to utopistic thinking about the construction of new worlds, which is the desire of the multitude.[13] Recalling Obrist, Nesbit, and Tiravanija’s statements on Utopia Station, then, the carnevalesque would also be the logic that brings together participants in their project. The multitude, “a theory of organization based on the freedom of singularities that converge in the production of the common,” could be, more specifically, “a theory of organization based on the freedom of singularities that converge in the production” of Utopia Station. Utopia Station, as a nebulous, continuously evolving project, would not be possible without the conceptualization of subjectivity offered by the multitude. Yet, while the curators of Utopia Station proposed the exhibition as a space for and by the multitude, it is a false representation of the multitude. In the spirit of carnival, the curators conceptually foreground interpersonal exchange to the display of objects, but in reality the exhibition must still rely on conventions of visual display. After an ecstatic opening program of events, the festival exhausts itself. The artworks-turned-props can only suggest actions and interactions that are no longer spontaneous but forced, at best. Utopia Station merely manufactures the multitude. Before further drawing out the relationship between Utopia Station and Hardt and Negri’s multitude, it is important to understand first the concept of the multitude. Hardt and Negri introduce it in their text Empire, which argues the existence of a recent global shift from modern sovereignty, based on the nation-state, to imperial sovereignty, or Empire, wherein supranational powers unite under the singular logic of capitalism. This shift is caused by the gradual re-investment in immanent rather than transcendent forms of knowledge and power that began with the European Renaissance. Hardt and Negri trace the discovery of this “plane of immanence” through the thought of Dante Alighieri, Francis Bacon, and Benedictus de Spinoza. Rather than being invested in the church, the crown, or even the People (for Hardt and Negri also a transcendent concept), imperial power is deterritorialized, decentralized, and distributed across a network rather than invested in the church or crown. In its immanency, imperial sovereignty erases the division between inside and outside; thus, any effort at resisting Empire must be made from within it. This leaves the multitude as the only political formation capable of raising a counter-Empire. Hardt and Negri locate the origin of this notion of the multitude in Spinoza’s Ethics, wherein he presents democracy as the only form of government proper to knowledge couched in the plane of immanence because democracy is ruled by the multitude, which satisfies desires for both individual and collective political representation.[14] This is the key for Hardt and Negri—that the multitude respects differences as it collectivizes. It is unlike the notion of the People, which, although embraced by contemporary democracies, is tied to monarchical systems and social purification programs, and maintains the integrity of the nation-state. The People is a concept that unifies and homogenizes the identities of a diverse population. The multitude, conversely, is “a multiplicity, a plane of singularities, an open set of relations…”[15] It is “an open network of singularities that links together on the basis of the common they share and the common they produce.”[16] The multitude is not united by identity but by its collective production, and it is an inclusive constituency. It occupies the void between the People and the individual, adopting the virtues of both. In Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Hardt and Negri’s follow-up to Empire, they utilize two conceptualizations of the multitude. The first is the multitude sub specie aeternitatis, the always-already, ontological multitude without which we could never have imagined the possibility of refusing authority.[17] The second is the potential, historical, not-yet multitude that lays in wait for a political project to bring it into existence. It is pure potential. The authors stress that these two conceptions are not separable, for “if the multitude were not already latent and implicit in our social being, we could not even imagine it as a political project; and, similarly, we can only hope to realize it today because it already exists as a real potential.”[18] This doubled articulation of the multitude was already latent in Spinoza’s thought, being that the multitude signified an “absolute democratic power” at the same time that it already possessed the tools for political revolution.[19] Under imperial sovereignty, these tools are not limited to those of the industrial worker. Hardt and Negri place so much emphasis on the multitude because it is seen as a necessary postmodern rearticulation of the terms of class politics. The proletariat, associated with a dialogical power structure, industrial labor, and modern (transcendent) sovereignty, is subsumed under the multitude, an expanded term that claims a generalized proletarianization of labor, so that “labor” can include newer, immaterial forms (service, communication, management, etc.). Membership is open to all laborers; it is guaranteed, but optional. The multitude is empowered by its “will to be-against,” which becomes all the more significant in Empire, where there is no outside.[20] “If there is no longer a place that can be recognized as outside,” Hardt and Negri write, “we must be against in every place.”[21] And the way the multitude does this is through nomadism, desertion, and exodus, which, rather than modern forms of dialectically positioned sabotage, take an “oblique or diagonal stance” in order to “push through Empire to come out on the other side.”[22] This suggests that the multitude must work within and throughout Empire in its production of a counter-Empire. It must be mobile and based on a network structure, i.e. immanent, just as power and knowledge have become. These charges are shared by Utopia Station’s triumphant curatorial statement, which introduces the show not as a representation of utopia-as-plan, but as a field of dialogue containing a plethora of incommensurable viewpoints all groping toward utopia. The curators recount various responses artists gave to the idea of utopia: “Liam Gillick asked us to avoid utopian mirage, instead asking for utopia to become a functional step moving beyond itself…Jonas Mekas warned of obsessions with ideas, since the dream, he said, could only succeed if we forget them…Nancy Spero sent a morphine dream. Agnes Varda sent us the song of the Cadet Rousselle.”[23] These ideas are not for the curators to evaluate, but to bring together in conversation. The participating artists represent not utopia but a multitude working toward utopia. Structurally, like the multitude, Utopia Station was a network of its own. The artworks on display were often self-regenerating, rhizomatic projects. Yoko Ono invited visitors to stamp the words “imagine peace” onto a map of the Middle East. A layer of ink built up so thickly around war-torn areas that place-names became illegible, but the words “imagine peace” were also to be seen on the map’s edges, on the surrounding plywood walls, in other rooms, and on visitors’ skin, to be displayed wherever they decided to wander. Superflex distributed bottles of GUARANÁ POWER, a drink they helped Brazilian farmers to produce, which quickly became empty containers littered over the outdoor lawn, the Arsenale and much of southeastern Venice. German artist Christoph Schlingensief constructed a creepishly quaint outdoor chapel for his Church of Fear (COF), a parodic religion seeking to cultivate fear in its followers. Viewers were invited to establish their own COF congregation at home. Hundreds of posters designed for Utopia Station were pasted throughout the exhibition, but they also appeared elsewhere in Venice and on the Internet, where one could freely download, print, and post them anywhere.[24] The limitless possibility of expansion for many of Utopia Station’s artworks relied on participation from viewers, who, in bringing the works to life, added to the carnevalesque narrative on utopia taking place. Utopia Station is one node in a network of events called Utopia Station; another parallel of the multitude’s network structure. Obrist has said, “After an initial appearance at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, the Station has developed into a kind of an evolving system. From being a very horizontal concept in Venice, it was transformed into occupying a ‘receptive’ zone, which can at any point be animated.”[25] Utopia Station has morphed through various incarnations as web site, exhibition, lecture series, performance program, or whatever other form its curators might envision, and it has appeared in various places at various times throughout the world. Obrist’s phrase “receptive zone” parrots the form of Empire, which Hardt and Negri have called “a superficial world, the virtual center of which can be accessed immediately from any point across the surface.”[26] If imperial sovereignty functions as a network, so must the multitude, and with it, Utopia Station. In this light, Utopia Station assumes the shade of a fiercely political project, one that attempts to mobilize the multitude against Empire within a visual arts context. Remember the words of its organizers:
Regardless of whether or not Utopia Station achieved its goal of creating “another state of being,” we can see that this turn of phrase is really the multitude in disguise. The exhibition was never really about accessing utopia, or as John Baldessari’s contribution to the poster might suggest, bringing the “there” over “here.” Rather, Utopia Station was clearly attempting to mobilize, or at the very least to represent, the multitude. The somewhat awkward equivalence I am trying to pose between the multitude and Utopia Station’s collective imagining of utopia points to the fundamental incongruence between the understandings of utopia held by the authors of Empire and Utopia Station. Can a political formation mirror utopia, that which is literally a non-place? It is possible because Obrist, Nesbit and Tiravanija redefine utopia in terms of imperial sovereignty. Instead of an “over there,” it becomes a working-toward the “over there.” They situate utopia in the plane of immanence, changing its significance from noun to verb, a concept to work with rather than a place of which we dream but can never reach. Meanwhile, Hardt and Negri have netted all transcendent forms of knowledge and politics in the plane of immanence but leave the island of Utopia still floating just beyond reach. When Hardt and Negri mention utopia in Empire, it is in opposition to multitude. They invoke Spinoza to suggest that the multitude is already equipped with the tools it needs to form a counter-Empire, but they detach this revolutionary potential from utopian thinking: “[A]ny postmodern liberation must be achieved within this world, on the plane of immanence, with no possibility of any even utopian outside.”[28] Their definition of utopia assumes a modernist dialectical structure of inside/outside, wherein utopia is always a place that is “not here.” Such a utopia belongs to the tradition of Thomas B. More, who in 1516 invented the name to describe an island society so ridiculously perfect that many readers thought his account to be non-fiction. More’s utopia is invested in modern sovereignty on two accounts. First, the citizens of Utopia are united by their belief in a transcendent power known as Mithra. More writes:
There could perhaps be no better definition of transcendence than this. The Utopians’ belief in Mithra is what unites them as a People under the flag of Utopia, a model of citizenship that answers to the conditions of outdated modern sovereignty. Secondly, Utopia itself is transcendent. It is ontologically a place outside of reality; utopia is alive to us only in our dreams and plans. This is a concept that the plane of immanence rejects. Calling for a counter-Empire political discourse, Hardt and Negri write, “There is not finally here any determinism or utopia: it is rather a radical counterpower, ontologically grounded not on any ‘vide pour la future’ but on the actual activity of the multitude, its creation, production, and power—a materialist teleology.”[30] If the multitude is imbued with power in its immanency, if it represents a materialist teleology, then for it, utopia as a strategy cannot maintain. Hardt and Negri do not revive utopia because, for them, it is associated with the power structure they oppose. Obrist, Nesbit and Tiravanija recognize that utopia has lost currency in contemporary political and cultural discourse, but they adopt the term anyhow. Their statement admits, “The work done in the name of utopia has soured the concept, left it strangled by internal, seemingly fixed perspectives, the skeletons of old efforts which leave their bones on the surface of the body as if they lived there.”[31] In a radical gesture, they turn their attention to a concept deemed frivolous and irrelevant to production under imperial sovereignty and refashion it in immanent terms. “We use utopia as a catalyst,” they write, “a concept so much useful as fuel.”[32] Beginning with Utopia Station in 2003, they have gradually coaxed utopia back into cultural debates. In 2005, they brought their platform to World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where over 150,000 people comprising thousands of diverse civil groups converged under the slogan “another world is possible.” If the multitude wants to claim that another world is possible, don't we still need utopia to imagine what this other world might be? Yes, but it must be refashioned for the plane of immanence because it has been trumped by Empire. “[T]he clearly defined crisis of modernity gives way to an omni-crisis in the imperial world,” Hardt and Negri write. “In this smooth space of Empire, there is no place of power—it is both everywhere and nowhere. Empire is an ou-topia, or really a non-place.”[33] The repositioning of utopia, fundamental to Obrist, Nesbit and Tiravanija’s project, is able to reconnect it intimately to the activity of the multitude and the creation of a counter-Empire that, like Empire, must operate in the non-place of immanent power. What rescues utopia from rhetorical purgatory is the term “station.” When the curators asked him about utopia, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami “refused the long perspectives of utopia altogether. He preferred to fix matters in the present, taking each day one hill at a time.”[34] Kiarostami’s take is Hardt and Negri’s, that the island of Utopia is a stale fantasy, archaic in the face of Empire. The curatorial team compromises: “We in turn have set our sights on the middle ground between the island and the hill. We will build a station there and name it utopia station.”[35] Utopia as station becomes a way of connecting production for the present to production for a desired future. Utopia Station is about working with Utopia in mind, not producing the thing itself. It is an inspired process. This place between the hill and the island is much like another pairing of Hardt and Negri’s: the virtual and the real. These two terms can be linked by the possible, i.e. production, but are held forcibly apart by imperial powers. “Living labor is what constructs the passageway from the virtual to the real; it is the vehicle of possibility,” Hardt and Negri write.[36] And of course it is the multitude that is charged with building this passage. Utopia Station is not possible without the multitude, and counter-Empire is not possible without a resurrection of utopia within the plane of immanence. Utopia Station’s catalogue includes texts by Immanuel Wallerstein and Étienne Balibar to give nuance to the idea of immanent utopia. Wallerstein calls it “efficacious utopia,” or his neologism Utopistics—the study of utopia.[37] The essence of utopia is its connection to imagination, not the creation of a definite plan, for “perfect societies not only do not exist, but in fact, cannot exist.”[38] Imagination and production are foregrounded to prediction and prescription. Balibar’s utopia is “an imagination of the present rather than an imagination of the future.”[39] Utopia attends to the here and now, not there and then. It is not a destination, but a state of working toward utopia, a point en route to itself. Or, by way of the statement accompanying Trisha Donnelly’s poster for Utopia Station: “The true Rome is man’s hope for the true Rome.”[40] In short, utopia is alive in process, not plan or product. That said, it is due time to shift our analytical focus from theories to practices. It is one thing to set one’s sights between the hill and the island and quite another to bring this vista to form. The practice of Rirkrit Tiravanija, a Utopia Station curator and artist, undoubtedly provided the working model for the reconceptualized utopia. Since the late 1980s, Tiravanija has made the process of exchange and collective production the focus of his work, inviting viewers to converse, eat, cook, dance, perform, sleep and relax together. He is known best for serving traditional Thai meals in gallery and museum spaces, a gesture he began experimenting with in 1989. His first cooking project, Untitled, 1989 (…) at Scott Hanson Gallery, New York, featured several plinths displaying plates of curry in different stages of the cooking process. The cuisine’s enticing aroma infused the gallery, but viewers were not invited to eat. In the earliest manifestation of Tiravanija’s long-term culinary project, the focus was on the active transformation of raw materials/vegetables into a visual and olfactory gift only. This gesture was brought to its logical conclusion, or rather its new horizon, when for his next project, Untitled, 1992 (Free) at 303 Gallery, New York, Tiravanija was in the exhibition space cooking and serving Thai food every day during the show’s duration. All that was on display was the artist’s makeshift kitchen and the continuous performance of cooking and eating. Untitled, 1992 (Free) begins a run of seemingly inexhaustible permutations of interactive encounters centered around spaces or actions. For Untitled 1996 (Tomorrow's Another Day), Tiravanija reconstructed his New York apartment and opened it to the public 24 hours a day. Untitled 1996 (Rehearsal Studio No. 6 Silent Version) was a free, equipped music rehearsal studio (Figure 7). The apartment installation has appeared in Germany, New York and London; the studio in Japan, Switzerland, and Germany. Meanwhile, Tiravanija re-presented the cooking project at various times and places. By the late 1990s, he had established a trademark practice that raised challenging questions about process, exchange, institutionalization, temporality and representation. For example: Where is the artwork located in Tiravanija’s practice? Looking at the interpersonal relations created by his projects, what happens to exchange when it is institutionally framed? What behavior is proper to a museum or gallery? How can his work be represented or documented? My point is not to answer these questions, but to suggest that, besides expanding the field of what is acceptable to arts institutions, Tiravanija has played a major (if not the central) role in bringing these questions to the forefront of both debates on contemporary art and the trajectory of art production itself. His approach makes a fitful companion to the working methods of the multitude and thus to Utopia Station. One of Tiravanija’s most complicated projects to date immediately preceded his involvement in Utopia Station. It was an installation entitled Untitled 2002 (He Promised) at Secession, Vienna—a steel and chrome, reflective, stage-like construction designed after architect Rudolf Schindler’s 1921 Los Angeles home (Figure 8). The original Schindler house was designed to achieve a seamless flow between inside and outside in order to maintain a sense of flexibility and spontaneity for domestic space and our actions within it. In Tiravanija’s homage, potted plants, cushions, and a television accessorized the platform and could be rearranged at will. An integral part of work was a program of lectures, performances, film screenings, and concerts. Despite the work’s title, there was no promise of continuous activity at the installation, but always the tension of the potential for activity to take place. Individuals would coalesce in significant events, stragglers would cross in and out, visits were a few minutes or several hours. The structure remained whether it was being used or not, though any person entering the space would activate it at some level, at least as much as his reflection would jump from surface to surface. It was a space to be used, not for anything in particular, but particularly for use. There was also a sense of incompleteness, a characteristic Tiravanija wanted to maintain. At the time of the work’s construction, he said, “We’re basically going to build it through the ‘opening’ so that there is no opening. There has never really been an opening for me. And I never feel the need to fix a moment where everything is complete.”[41] Untitled 2002 (He Promised) was a location for planned or chance meetings, open and flexible for different uses. Untitled 2002 (He Promised) was for Tiravanija a station, a concept and format he has been working with since 2000 when he founded the Namdee Publishing Station in Bangkok.[42] He has created television stations, magazine stations and demo recording stations. He works with stations because they are a “fluid construction”; they create a place where people can meet and disperse, which can themselves be transported or multiplied.[43] In a 2003 interview, Hans-Ulrich Obrist asked Tiravanija where his idea of the station came from, giving clear indication that the idea to use it as a conceptual framework for the Venice exhibition came from the Thai artist. Looking to Utopia Station, we certainly see the traces of Tiravanija everywhere. The exhibition is basically a Tiravanijan project writ large, and at this scale, the normally charming details of his improvised, boundariless aesthetic become somewhat incomprehensible and grotesque. To begin, Utopia Station’s plan, arranged by Tiravanija and Liam Gillick, divided the space into several loose zones designed to maximize interaction amongst visitors and with the various installations. A stage and public address system near the entranceway signaled that Utopia Station was a place for use, not just visual delectation. Circular benches were offered as seats for a proscenium-oriented audience or for intimate group discussions. But the invitation to utilize this equipment, however, was not accepted by many people outside the program organized by the curators. Beyond this first architectural arrangement, the eye followed a maze of small plywood cubicles, each enclosing a miniature exhibition, and commissioned posters were sporadically fly-posted along the walls. None of these spaces or works were clearly labeled. Outdoors, there was an unmanned GUARANÁ POWER kiosk offering (at the time of my visit) nothing—its inventory had become the garbage strewn across the lawn. Atelier van Lieshout had made an environmentally friendly toilet that no longer worked. The performance and discussion program had taken place during the first three days of Utopia Station’s run, and so for visitors unable to attend opening weekend, it seemed that the party had already left and followed the curators to their next station (an exhibition of the commissioned posters in Munich that opened before Utopia Station closed). Utopia Station’s schedule of events created a predetermined fullness, which reinforced a palpable emptiness when the space went unused. It recalls a project Tiravanija created for the 1993 Venice Bienniale, Untitled 1993 (twelve seventy one), where he served Cup O’ Noodles from a boat and left the garbage-filled vessel as evidence of the event. Utopia Station was heavily criticized for its incomprehensibility and emphasis on exclusive opening weekend events. Artforum critic Scott Rothkopf wrote, “[I]t appeared somehow more meaningful to its actors than its audience…[T]he overall presentation suggested a sort of troubling solipsism couched as activism, an insider’s conversation in the guise of global outreach and engagement.”[44] Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times called it “by far the sloppiest, most uninspired, enervating and passionless biennale that I can recall.”[45] Barry Schwabsky had this to say:
The major critique of Utopia Station goes for much of Tiravanija’s work as well: the idealism of the gesture is undermined by the fact that it cannot continue forever. All that remains after the celebratory unveiling is a collection of garbage and unused objects. The temporality of the carnevalesque is something that both Hardt and Negri and the curators of Utopia Station ignore. As a revolutionary tactic, its power is its ceremonious brevity; it upsets conventions, but only temporarily. When the carnival ends, its objects become lifeless oddities, artificial significations of joyful activity, and unused tools for manufactured relations. There were a few projects within Utopia Station that more or less succeeded in involving viewers, because they had a life outside of the exhibition. The curators’ commissioned poster project, Superflex’s GUARANÁ POWER, and Christoph Schlingensief’s Church of Fear gained strength from being carried out at a larger scale than the Venice presentation. If disused in Venice, they had been engaged with at some other time and place. The displayed history of their previous use gave them a small breath of life. It seems that the most successfully interactive work represented in Utopia Station had the same qualities as the Utopia Station project as a whole, which emerges not from a set of objects but from the actions of Obrist, Nesbit and Tiravanija. Utopia Station is collaborative and mobile, or rather, an example of the multitude working in the non-place of Empire. With every iteration, these qualities of the project have been exaggerated and its politics made explicit. Just before bringing Utopia Station to the World Social Forum in 2005, Nesbit wrote:
The trajectory of Utopia Station raises a deeply disturbing question. If, to be effective, the counter-Empire must work within the non-place of Empire—must “push through Empire to come out on the other side”—then political aesthetics must become placeless as well. To suggest political transformation, must the art object and the museum be replaced by nomadic, performative practice?
Natilee Harren is a doctoral student in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her interests include biennials and international exhibiting, social practice or "relational aesthetics", and diagrammatic models in 20th century artistic practice. Her current major project is a reading of Fluxus artist George Brecht's event scores as a continuation of the diagrammatic strategies of Duchamp and John Cage. She is a frequent contributer to artUS.
Endnotes [1] Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Molly Nesbit, and Rirkrit
Tiravanija, “Utopia Station,” in Dreams and Conflicts:
The Dictatorship of the Viewer, ed. Francesco Bonami (Venice,
Italy: La Biennale di Venezia, 2003), pp. 327-336. The statement
can also be found online at |
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