The choreography of the real
Fascination of the real
The use of genuine biological matter in art works is now a well established contemporary art practice, and artists working with plant, animal and even human material often attract a great deal of interest. A sculpture constructed by the artist Marc Quinn from his own blood in the early 1990s, called Self, caused a furore. Quinn collected blood over a period of a few months, poured it into a silicon mould made of his own head, and had the object frozen. The existence of the work depends on a cooling technique which protects it from melting, with the consequent irreversible destruction. The question arises as to why this blood sculpture stirred up so much attention since it could at any time be replaced by other human blood reserves or cattle blood from a regular abattoir. What is special about the original? Since there is no way of telling visually whether this piece is made of the artists real blood and is thus literally a self-portrait, it is the awareness of authenticity which becomes the decisive factor commanding interest in the work. Alongside an academic interest in anatomical preparations of human matter conserved in spirits, or complete body plastics as in the work of dissector Gunther von Hagens, it is this fascination of the real which attracts people to exhibitions. The exhibition Body Worlds, which has toured numerous cities internationally, attracts millions of visitors. The show exhibits real human bodies and body parts with the curator emphasising authenticity since they were not artificial anatomical models but real dead people on display
In his piece Crash (1995) Marco Evaristti also worked with real dead people, presenting not the real physical bodies in the exhibition space but representing them with real pieces of clothing and significantly their blood. Evaristti raised the issue of the serious but neglected problem of traffic accidents in Thailand which claim up to thirty lives a day. With the support of the relevant authorities he established his operations centre in the police station and over several months followed the emergency vehicles to numerous accident scenes. The exhibition was comprised of the blood of the fatally wounded which was stuck on the car wrecks, the clothing and pictures. It is the same blood we are accustomed to seeing in all its redness in daily media reports where we are denied the smell, but which now smells like real blood and is rapidly subjected to the natural process of change. The fascination of von Hagens clean and real anatomical preparations, experienced as they are in a clinical aesthetic, is quite different from the frequent deep rejection on the part of the public when encountering Evaristtis work. Whilst in the work of Quinn and von Hagens the knowledge of the realness triggers fascination but also disgust, the realness in Evaristtis work is directly readable for the viewer because of the context of the items from the accident, and is directly experienced with all the senses.
His dramatic re-setting of the actual accident scene is not a horror show but is firmly linked metonymically to the source material, the deadly loss of blood of the dying. Just as Quinns artists blood is literally a self-portrait, here the blood is an actual represen-tation of the dead. The authenticity of the material is the underlying cause of the controversy and media interest.
Choreographing the real on the media stage
Evaristtis work has for years attracted a great deal of media interest. His initiation of a debate on the problem of traffic accidents in Thailand, using real blood in his work, as well as the use of sperm in Kids (1996) at the Herning Art Museum caused evident media dis-comfort, as it did again when in a 1997 Bangkok exhibition he showed condoms and again bodily fluids, this time to address the serious problem of prostitution in Thailand. By confronting the public with tangible elements from everyday life, Evaristti overcomes any kind of intermediary space created by the media which is so characteristic of our mediatised consumer society. Whilst von Hagens uses the lure of the real to attract a hundred thousand visitors to his exhibitions and to interest them in human anatomy, Evaristti attempts to examine social problems and taboos and to provoke the visitors by direct confrontation with the material. The artist deals with issues such as prostitution, sadism, voyeurism, nationalism and environmental degradation problems too easily ignored. He uses dramatic methods in a calculated fashion, but in no way in a missionary or fanatical manner. He is a politically cam-paigning artist who does not subordinate himself to any ostensible limits set by the media and politics. He always operates within the existing system, for example with the co-operation of the Thai authorities in Crash, or in other projects with the Western media apparatus. The activation of media hype pushes the issues for a short time at least into the public consciousness. With this calculated involvement of the media, Evaristti succeeds not only in attracting extensive publicity for his critical interests but also exposes the way in which information is generated and managed. His work is not a reflection on art, but renders communication itself an art form.
The viewer as judge in the age of Big Brother
The greatest media attention enjoyed by Evaristti was on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition Eyegoblack at the Trapholt Art Museum in Kolding, Denmark on February 10th 2000. The opening catapulted Evaristti, the museum and the director, Peter S. Meyer, into the world headlines. Reports on Evaristtis installation Helena appeared in print, radio and television from the Danish daily papers to BBC World and CNN.
Ten white Moulinex Optiblend 2000 mixers were placed on a simple table. Each of these was filled with water and contained a live goldfish. The mixers were visibly plugged in and thus ready to use. Anyone pressing the yellow button would thereby kill the fish. The visitors thus became the judges of life or death. An hour after one of the visitors had pressed one of the buttons, the police would enter and order the electricity to be cut off. Meyer was charged with animal cruelty and fined 2000 Danish Crowns, upon which he appealed. During the following laborious trial expert witnesses were called to provide evidence on the way in which the fish were killed, ultimately establishing that, in contrast to customary methods, the short duration of the killing of maximum one second was one of the more humane methods. On May 19th 2003 the BBC reported Meyers acquittal with the headline Liquidising goldfish not a crime: ... But a court in Denmark has now ruled that the fish were not treated cruelly, as they had not faced prolonged suffering. The fish were killed instantly and humanely, said Judge Preben Bagger. The show trial in the service of the freedom of art reached its conclusion. Did Evaristti calculate in the factor of media reaction right from the outset? Was the killing of one or more fish his intention? Was the trial part of the art project?
Evaristti did not in any way encourage the visitors to kill the fish, but left the decision to them. According to eyewitnesses, the killing of the first fish created a charged atmosphere among the numerous media representatives who were present who virtually encouraged the visitors to press the button in order to initiate a scandal something they ultimately achieved. The public followed Evaristtis division of society into three groups: the idiot, who pres-ses the button [the sadist], the voyeur who loves to watch, and the moraliser. [...] The media and the public were the voyeurs and the animal protection groups and those others who protested were the moralists. The artist sees his installation as a social experiment in which he tries to interpret reality through reality, and not through a lie. Evaristti distances himself in this way from the representa-tion of horror in the sense of the classical art term, since he considers the interpretation of what happened as a falsification of reality.
What, then, is reality? Can reality even be represented through the real? Evaristti does not use substitutes but real goldfish, which can really be killed. The killing process is genuine, the artist making available to the visitor a real instrument of power over life and death. According to Rosalind Krauss, with Crash Evaristti achieves a type of signification beyond which there can be no other reading or interpretation. The choreography of the killing of the fish is provided; the execution is a question of conscience. Although the act of killing is real, it seems necessary to set this in the context of the general treatment of animals which are killed on a daily basis for consumption or in animal fights where they suffer deaths which are neither rapid nor humane. Whilst hundreds of thousands of people are tortured, abused and killed not to mention animals , in the three-year-long trial there was a dis-cussion as to whether these goldfish were killed in a humane fashion. Of course this trial was a part of the whole art project, since the artist had calculatingly set up the framework for this development. He exposes the hypocrisy of Western society, with its insatiable appetite for sensation, dominated by populist mass media which seems to be turned on by reports of death. Evaristti disrupts the pleasure in the passive experience of the real life of others, as in reality shows such as Big Brother or in intimate sport repor-ting. With Helena, he makes us aware of the media filter, and the principle of the micro camera: the viewer changes from passive spectator to active participant. Evaristti involves the viewers and turns them into active or passive accomplices, since pressing the button is an act of volition. The role of the media is ambivalent since through encouraging the pressing of the button they are also complicit. They use the art project in order to provide their readers, viewers and listeners with another scandal.
In September 2001, Evaristti developed a similarly controver-sial project where live rats were used in an installation called Election Day in the Rhizom Gallery in Aarhus. In the exhibition the artist took a stand on right-wing populism in Denmark. The rats were able to run around freely in a room which one could enter at ones own risk but where in contrast to Helena the visitors were made aware of this beforehand. In this the artist particularly empha-sises the act of volition of the visitor. If they enter the room they become part of the happening. I am not aware of what is happening in there. Maybe the rats will be provoked and even bite. When they enter the room they become a part of this work, and what happens is a direct consequence of their entering the room. Whether many visitors would have exposed themselves to this danger cannot be known as the animal protection groups obtained a permit from the organisers to shoot the rats in order to end the animal cruelty of allowing the rats to run around freely in the room. Similar to Helena the offer of interaction with the public was rapidly eliminated by the moralists, who exposed their own questionable standards. The communication initiated by the artist had repercussions long after the killing of the animals.
Art as politics at the margins of political discussion
In Election Day, visitors were forced by the presence of live rats to decide whether they wanted to enter the installation at their own risk and thus interact with it or not. The choice of laboratory rats should either put members of the public who chose to participate in an unpredictable and potentially physically distressing situation, or prevent them from entering, since we believe that rats are disgusting. At the same time, Evaristti attempts to make a political statement with these white rodents with an implicit historical and contemporary relevance since Jews were insulted in atrocious National Socialist propaganda as rats. The relevance to today is in the fear some people express of losing their language and consequently their identity. Evaristti chose the extreme right Danish Peoples Party as his reference point, seeing the laboratory rats as a political signal against nationalism and racism, because this kind of white rat with red eyes is malformed as they all originate from the same breed, (or race). A mixed society is healthier. The rats act as a metaphor for the irredeemable utopia of a pure society which the visitors can actually physically experience. Evaristti offers the visitors a real physical experience comparable to the killing act in Helena. The background is based on the daily politics of the unspoken social code, the Janteloven, which represents morality and decency alongside the official Danish law. Thus, the artist questions such societal consensus, which is all too often thought of as Danish idiosyncrasy. He writes his own laws which he calls Janteloven and transforms for example, You should not think that you are someone, into, I love you because you are nothing.
Evaristti comments on bourgeois conventions as well as social, political and current affairs issues. By pushing the limits of socially established norms and political correctness, he turns against the conventional order of discourse and the processes of exclusion. In The Order of Discourse , Michel Foucault remarks that there are two areas today operating within a very narrow framework and where taboos are increasing: the areas of sexuality and politics. It is exactly these areas the taboos, limits and polarisation of discourse which Evaristti explores and pushes. Clearly the discourse is in no way such a transparent and neutral element in which sexuality disarms itself and politics is satisfied. Rather it is a preferred space where some of its most threatening forces can unfold. The discourse may have the appearance of being nothing, but the relevant taboos manifest themselves only too quick-ly with their connection to desire and power. Evaristti is always on a narrow ridge at the margins of the discourse, and yet works from this system and thus within the system of exclusion. The work with the discourse is political, not only because it is relevant to much of the politics of exclusion, but because it also is an object of desire, and the discourse as history teaches us repeatedly is not simply that which is translated into language by political opposition or the power system: it is the reason for and the means with which one struggles: it is the empowerment for which one is searching.
In the project Brotherhood , Evaristti, a Jew who has in the meantime converted to Buddhism, exchanged blood with an Arab woman. What at first glance seems to be a somewhat eccentric way of expressing that he is a full-blooded humanist actually harbours real risks. Evaristti is breaching here the taboo against Jewish blood and signalling together with the Arab prostitute clear opposition to those radical extremists on both the Arab and Israeli sides who are against any form of peaceful rapprochement in the Middle East. A further risk is a health-related one, because although both have the same blood group and have been tested for HIV and hepatitis, one of us could go into a coma. Along with the health risk, both participants also hazard a potentially threatening situation for themselves and their families. The real blood transfusion, the deliberate exchange of one third of the substance of life, entails a mixing of their blood. The mixed blood will for a time become the foundation for their continued lives and is thus meant to envisage the possibility of peaceful cohabitation of these two groups of people. This is the form of union that finds its strongest manifestation in the miscegenation of the offspring of mixed marriages. Evaristti intends with this literal imagery to make the boundaries of the political discourse visible and to become himself the object of his art. While in his Traveling bags for the new mother fuckers (the new generation) he exhibits the real substances used to build a bomb made to kill people, he is now exchanging the exact substance whose loss in a bombing attack leads to death. What is merely a possibility in the case of the bomb materials, however, is actually mixed physically in Brotherhood. This mixed blood is for the above-mentioned reasons a highly explosive substance, moving along the lines of demarcation between peace and life, terror and death. It is not only a symbolic attack on the intactness of the artists own body like every act in the tradition of Body and Performance Art, but rather a real attack with all the dangers that entails. The balancing act walked along the borders of the discourse is a particularly tricky one, having to do with a (religious, political, philosophical) doctrine affecting the cohesiveness of a group, as demonstrated for example by the fate of Salman Rushdie. The doctrine binds the individual to certain types of statements and consequently forbids him all others. Whoever does not submit to the doctrine runs the risk of being excluded from the group of speaking individuals. Interpreting reality with reality itself also means submitting to the rules of that reality.
The real as the basis of the territory
The question of power is also fundamental to Evaristtis discussion about the political expression of territory which he first explores in The Ice Cube Project when he subjects himself, in the manner of an explorer, to the powers of nature in order to colour an iceberg red, marking it as his territory. Similarly, for the project Pink State, he marked out for the first time an area of the museum space at Kunstraum Dornbirn as the artists territory, only accessible with a valid passport. This territory has in the meantime spread to encompass several areas all over the world. Evaristti thereby created a new landscape composed of various real materials originating from the sovereign territories of Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Germany and Austria and invited the visitors to take an active part in this temporary nature reserve. His natural landscape was created from material taken from the original territory of the neighbouring countries and he also added a diorama in the background, making a connection to his territory in Greenland. In 2004, as part of an expedition setting off from Ilulissat on the autonomous but officially Danish territory of Greenland, the artist marked out his territory at minus 23 degrees by colouring an iceberg with a good 3000 litres of red dye. Thus he made a claim to a small temporary area with an average lifespan of between three and thirty years. This spectacular action resulted in a heated debate about the limits of art and this extremely elaborate and apparently pointless provocation. Evaristti was immediately accused of polluting the environment, something he could easily deflect since he had chosen a non-toxic, completely biodegradable fruit dye. Clearly, tons of food worldwide are treated daily with much less harmless colours, and millions of tons of toxic waste such as heavy metals, chemicals and household waste are sunk into the ocean. Evaristti is however not an environ-mental activist, but an interdisciplinary artist who consistently tests the boundaries between the media, politics, communication and the environment. Against the foil of his choreography of the real he questions territorial violence as a medium of political power per se, and examines the relationship of the space of landscape to the territorial expression of national identity.
Dieter Buchhart
