Adding that little s to the end of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World accomplishes one very important thing: it cuts through the novel’s dystopic vision of the future by offering up multiple worlds that are yet-to-be. Or as the exhibition’s co-curator Doryun Chong puts it, “innumerable terra incognitae […] to be discovered with all sense of indignation and wonderment, curiosity and solemnity” [Walker Art Center; October 4, 2007—February 17, 2008]. This slight, yet productive, supplement is only the first political gesture in a massive group show of seventy works by twenty-four artists from sixteen countries. Here, the politics is not the polemical, election-season variety that we’re used to. Stepping into the refreshing air just outside of party platforms and political manifestos, the works speak as their own individual worlds or worldviews. What’s more, they are installed, with few exceptions, so that you pass through one work into the next. Against the grain of multiculturalism’s unifying and generalizing glosses, they present the world as ever-fractured and irresolvable, continually negotiated but not impossible to imagine without conflict.
These worlds are also shaped by multiple temporalities and histories. Some open up to national pasts, personal presents, and fictional futures. Walid Raad’s Let’s Be Honest, The Weather Helped, 1984-2007, almost manages to speak to all of these. The series of seventeen screenprints of ruined Beirut cityscapes carries on the artist’s Atlas Group project: to aestheticize and fictionalize the events surrounding the Lebanese Civil Wars. In this archival project, each colored dot allegedly represents a bullet, labeled according to caliber and country of origin. Gleaning the war’s minutiae instead of wading through reams of historical documents, Raad’s strategy points obliquely to violent events and further draws our attention to a traumatized place. These images make a claim, like most archives, that what we see is the results of a comprehensive data collection project that requires analysis, organization, and categorization. Referring to his work as “aesthetic facts,” Raad make the verifiability of the claims tenuous; we may not be able to confirm whether there are any scars underneath any of these lovely little dots but we are nonetheless informed, somehow, that “something has happened” here.
Artur ?mijewski’s multi-channel video installation Danuta, Doreta, and Halina, 2006, essays, with unvarnished intimacy, the lives of three women who work low-level jobs: grocery cashier, bottle labeler, and drycleaner. The three fifteen-minute videos are simultaneously onto their respective walls and looped to multiply and amplify this endless staggered labor; it is as if you were watching three overlapping work-shifts. When the workday comes to a close, the women quickly transition from their jobs to domestic duties that end only when it’s time to sleep. As the videos continue and contexts change, labor remains the constant—a perpetual state of beginning, ending, and starting again for each and all three.
Feel free to fling your comments about globalized labor and an alienated workforce as you see them at their respective stations, watching as bottles and groceries whiz by, waiting for the early bus ride to work, or changing into their work uniform. But ?mijewski isn’t interested in using the rapport he’s earned with each woman to make clumsy comments on exploitation and isolation. Halina is happy to be working in a laundry because “I simply like ironing.” The time spent with these women isn’t for us to better label and mark these women as Polish, married, or working class. ?mijewski allows Danuta, Doreta, and Halina to come into being through their address, without us overdetermining them.
While ?mijewski troubles the documentary’s inherent claim to speak for a person, Erik van Lieshout shares similar doubts when trying to speak from or about a specific place. His Homeland Security, 2007, a twenty-six-minute video installation, could come across as a puerile reality-television road trip through Israel and New Mexico. Traveling through these zones of increased security, his filmed commentary is effective because it is somewhat indirect and balanced with the right amount of best-friend banter and jittery hand-held camera work. What’s essential here is what happens on the margins of their journey—everything that is off to either side of the highway and just out of the camera’s view. Van Lieshout and his collaborator Core focus on the heightened sensations of each place, which they then channel through video and voice-over. The project becomes less about what the camera can record and more about the cultural conditions in which the two travelers find themselves, so that burned-out bus skeletons, M-16s slung like purses, and Hummers stacked on semis all add up to a climate rather than individual points of verification.
Jorge Macchi’s Nuevo Mundo, 2006, is a collage of countries that, cut out from a map, Jorge Macchi then reorganized into micro-Pangaea formations according to color. It asks us to reconsider how these colors make assumptions about the coherency of each country— that is, that citizens share language, religion, and nationality. It is also an obvious play with maps as constructions rather than accurate representations. The resulting images create a counter-cartography that provides another, rather than an oppositional, global organization. In the end, however, this work and Macchi’s other map-based pieces just don’t sweat enough. They are too invested in preserving traditional mapmaking, stopping well short of contesting and un-drawing the borders of national sovereignty.
And what of the future? What are we to make, or more importantly, what are we to do with all of these worldviews? As a curatorial project that asks us to read and listen to each of the works as worlds in themselves, Brave New Worlds makes a fresh demand on us: can we look with rather than at these works? It’s a slight prepositional shift, but looking in this way recruits us, as an audience, to participate within the articulation, exchange, and critique of these different worldviews instead of passively consuming them.
