Doris Salcedo. Shibboleth *.Tate Modern. Turbine Hall 2007. A 167 meters long crack in the floor of Turbine Hall. Literally. A physical crack, that sends to the insurmountable difference between emigrants and natives. This is how the British press researched Salcedo’s work, a work about racism, division and perception:
Times Online: “Brazilian sculptor Salcedo says the work, entitled Shibboleth, symbolises racial division.”
BBC News: “Columbian artist Salcedo said the work – on display to the public until April next year – symbolised racial hatred and division in society.”
Daily Mail said: ”Entitled “Shibboleth” by Cuban sculptor Doris Salcedo, who received a £3,000 fee for the artwork, the full extent of the cost has only just come to light.”

Doris Salcedo is Columbian.

*1. a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons.
2. a slogan; catchword.
3. a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.

I don’t like the concrete worms and the piles of pigment, but it’s worth paying the entrance fee at the Royal Academy just to see four of the installations at the Anish Kapoor exhibition.

Madness: A huge, fetishistic cannon, like something out of a Terry Gilliam film, fires twenty pound shells of red wax across an exhibition space into the next room. The wax gloops down the wall and creates its own work of art below. The crowd waits in anticipation for the next explosion – the hiss of compressed air reminds us of roadworks and operating theatres. Then the bang; the brief moment of after-silence; and the gasps and giggles and conversations. It is just great, mad fun. It feels slightly anarchic, teenage. Then you realise that the antique-looking door-frame through which the pellets fly is a false one put in to protect the real one behind; they couldn’t take the risk of blowing up the real Royal Academy. The disappointment and the simultaneous delight in discovering that it is all a sham. The same as realising that Doris Salcedo’s crack in Tate Modern’s concrete floor was really a construction in an artificial platform.

Magic: A mirror – nothing more. 20 feet long, 8 feet high, slightly curved. But curved so cleverly, and polished so lovingly. If you stand 12 feet away, you are upside down; but you can see all those at 8 feet, who are the right way up. Walk closer, and you invert. If you stand 20 feet away, and look at someone just 3 feet from the surface, their face is so large and clear you feel you could reach out and touch it. Every shift in posture or position brings a new image, a new perspective. Everyone is looking at everyone else, without self-consciousness. Smiling. Frowning. Shuffling along to get the effect, even dancing. Where else do you dance with strangers in the clear light of day?

Mysticism: A wall, hollowed out and painted yellow – nothing more. But the precise curves and pigments, and the lack of definition, make it impossible to focus on anything properly. It’s not just the uncertainty of whether it is concave or convex. It’s the fact that you seem to be looking, at one and the same time, into a place of infinite distance, and into a presence that is just before your eyes, even a part of you. It suggests the mystery of knowledge, of what it is to know anything - which brings into your own experience what is really apart from you. It hints at a deeper mystery, a mysticism, of how something or someone Absolutely Other can remain other and still approach us in our physicality, our humanity.

Something of all three: And the showpiece and central folly manages to combine some madness, some magic, and also something of the mystical. A vast block of red wax, thirty tonnes, the size of a railway carriage, moves almost imperceptibly along a track laid across five rooms; gets to the end; and then turns around. Of course it’s mad. There is a lot of magic too. Not just in the questions raised (how does it move? is anyone controlling it? will it collapse?), but also in the visual experience of trying to track the movement of an object that seems not to be moving – like the Millennium Wheel. The mysticism took me by surprise – and it was in the attitude of others rather than my own personal response. As the wax got near the final room, scores of people were there waiting. The innocent excitement of the hall of mirrors had disappeared, and there was a solemnity in the air. It was like waiting for a God to arrive. A sense of religious awe – even homage. As if we were investing an event with meaning even though we had no understanding of what it meant. Fascinating and disconcerting.

Yes, you should go and see the exhibition. And if you don’t want to pay just go for the reflective spheres in the courtyard.

Installation for the 8th International Istanbul Biennial
Doris Salcedo
2003
Chairs

The wait is over–Season 5 of Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century is here! The new season begins tonight on PBS at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) with the episode Compassion, featuring William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Might a work of art move us to temper our more destructive impulses? In what ways do artists’ feelings of empathy contribute to works that tackle problematic subjects and address the human condition? Compassion explores these questions in the work of the three featured artists.

Be sure to tune in to PBS every Wednesday at 10:00 p.m. throughout October (check local listings) for more brand new episodes: Fantasy, featuring Cao Fei, Mary Heilmann, Jeff Koons, and Florian Maier-Aichen; Transformation, featuring Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE; and Systems, featuring John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu.

Read more about Season 5 at PBS, and visit ArtBabble for previews of all Season 5 episodes and artist segments.

Full episodes from Seasons 1 through 4–16 episodes total–are now available for instant viewing through the PBS Video Portal.

Season 5 episodes will be added throughout October for a limited period of viewing. Each episode will be posted to the PBS Video Portal on the morning after the national broadcast, every Thursday in October.

Click here to view B&W Gallery

]]> http://wvpt.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/season-5-of-art-in-the-21st-century-premieres-october-7th/ Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:41:16 +0000 davidmullins http://wvpt.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/season-5-of-art-in-the-21st-century-premieres-october-7th/

Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century  is the only series on television to focus exclusively on contemporary visual art and artists in the United States, and it uses the medium of television to provide an experience of the visual arts that goes far beyond a gallery visit. Fascinating and intimate footage allows the viewer to observe the artists at work, watch their process as they transform inspiration into art, and hear their thoughts as they grapple with the physical and visual challenges of achieving their artistic visions. 

Tune in for the series premiere which features William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo and Carrie Mae Weems  –  Wednesday October 7^th at 10PM on WVPT.

MAP

Two nights before I visited Peter Blum, I was walking across SoHo on Prince St., moving in and around people, dipping up and down curbs, and tip-toeing across a plywood slab that overlaid hot asphalt that had been newly-poured by a construction crew. Life in a city is entangled with the building and collapsing of infrastructure that directs the flow and motion of bodies. Usually, the evolution of infrastructure stops us in our tracks, interrupting the convenience of our daily routines. Construction brings the loud, steaming, and obstructive beasts of the city’s underbelly to the surface; Ochoa’s gesture of placing a site that oscillates between metaphors of the built/collapsed urban environment cages this force, containing and managing it so that the viewer can observe and contemplate its nature.

Ochoa’s installation is never resolved between the concepts of collapse, extraction, rupture/upheaval. The SoHo installation’s title, Collapse, seems counter intuitive to one’s perception of how the materials of the sculpture rhyme with the gallery space. The light gray “slab” is nearly identical in color and material to the gallery’s concrete floor, seemingly suggesting that some force has burst through the latter and upturned its foundational bedrock (an unstable, dry, red sand). This reading lends itself to a critique of the museum and gallery space that seems to have been resonating throughout the art world in recent years, most notably in Doris Salcedo’s 2007 Shibboleth installation in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. It’s quite apparent, however, that Ochoa’s red sand is far from indigenous to New York; thus, the piece maintains an “extracted” quality to it that situates it in a Robert Smithson-like use of the gallery space for his more expeditionary Nonsite sculptures (~1968-1969). Ochoa’s work refers all the more intriguingly to the concept of extraction once the piece’s artifice and fabrication become apparent as the viewer walks around the sculpture to the posterior of the work. Once the viewer becomes aware of the hollowness of the sculpture and the various cavities created by the work’s interior steel ribbing, chicken wire ‘hypodermis’, and plywood ‘dermis,’ the entire installation seems like an extraction from a film (as noted in the ArtForum review of the installation) or theater set (evoking Beckett) and suggestive of a larger action. In addition, Ochoa’s 2006 installation of the same work at LAXART under the title “Extraction” seems to read suggest alternative readings to the SoHo installation: collapse rather than upheaval (the roof of the gallery seems to have caved in à la Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed that stands as a monument to past and future urban catastrophes (such as freeway collapses).

Despite the sculptures massive scale, there was an eerie silence and emptiness that pervaded the gallery space; as this quiet bore more heavily on my own presence in the installation, the work became more grave and memorial. I quickly became aware of an internal desire to choreograph movement through the space, into, and out of the sculpture, as the installation was full of a potential energy that could have be released through an unbounded negotiation between bodies, obstruction, and sculpted space (as in Hélio Oiticica’s work). I inevitably wound up feeling detached from the installation, unable to experience the phenomenal installation tactically, a boxed-in voyeur who was forbidden from physical communion with the gallery’s treasures. Yet Ochoa’s piece seems to suggest a metaphor in rebuttle to this criticism: the infrastructure of illusions cannot bear the weight of physical being.

Święta jakimś dziwnym pędem przeleciały. W mediach dominowały doniesienia o tragediach. Najpierw trzęsienie ziemi we Włoszech, potem tragedia narodowa w Kamieniu Pomorskim i …nieśmiertelna dyskusja na temat: Co by było gdyby? Jeden z redaktorów TVN-owskich zażył mnie pytaniem do przeciwpożarowego eksperta – …czy najpierw należy gasić budynek, czy ratować znajdujących się w nim ludzi?

„Rozumiem” pod jednym ale, że świąteczny czas to okres dyskusji nad pierwszeństwem i priorytetami z cyklu – Co było pierwsze jajo, czy kura?

To nie jedyne absurdy dnia codziennego. Na szczęście są ludzie, którzy potrafią to lepiej ode mnie wyrazić. Lubię koncepcję zakładającą, że najwięcej dowiesz się o kimś patrząc na odpadki, jakie zostawia. Dlatego spodobały mi się instalację Doris Salcedo. Smutne pozostałości. Na szczęście artystka przemyca je „subtelnie”, ograniczając się do porzuconych mebli i ubrań.

Doris Salcedo makes sculptures and installations that function as political and mental archaeology, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events as her point of departure, conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means.

Pewnie nikt nie wpadnie na pomysł zrobienia instalacji odnoszącej się do pomorskiej tragedii, ale chyba nikt tak naprawdę tego nie potrzebuje. Szkoda.

Pozostając w temacie odpadkowym, to mam nadzieję, że trochę zmniejszy się wieszczarski trend, który zawładnął mediami i który wszędzie dopatruje się końca, samych mediów również.

Lekka “niepewność” zdaje się unosić nawet w interaktywnym świecie studentów – 53colors – prestiżowej Hyper Island.

Pewnie coś jest na rzeczy, tylko co?

Rada: Say cheeeeeese!

“Doris Salcedo makes sculptures and installations that function as political and mental archaeology, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events as her point of departure, conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means.” de aici

A lot of things can happen between the gaps, and down little alleyways and other narrow spaces between one building and the next. Like this installation by Doris Salcedo at the 2003 Istanbul Biennial, which fills a gap between buildings by lowering in 1600 chairs. Or this ridiculous house in Seattle, found by Kyle Gabouer. He says that it was owned and inhabited by an elderly woman, who “was so insistent on living her last days in the home that no matter the price, she refused to sell it in order to make way for construction. The contractors decided they’d build around her. I heard that she recently passed, and the building isn’t even finished yet…” Something to think about with “Manhttanville”, perhaps?

At that, Colombian artist Salcedo definitely seems like someone to look more into. Above is her 2007 piece “Shibboleth“, found at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. At the opening, she refused to discuss the technical specifics of the crack, but noted that it was “about the experience of being a third world person, here, now, in London.” Unlike more conventional installations or sculptures however, this work does as far as to intervene directly in its fabric itself, creating a rupture that reveals structure – not just of the building, but of all that it symbolises.

The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built. In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.

What I love about this perhaps is exactly is the way it visually represents both the idea of ‘rupture reveals structure’ – kind of what groups like the RAF and Weather Underground tried (and perhaps failed to a large extent) to do, on a larger societal fabric scale. And along with it, maybe even more so, the question of destruction and violence in the movement – against property, against people.

I’ve especially been thinking about this lately with the Gaza massacre, and Hamas’ policies, not to mention the current neo-McCarthian green scares. Most striking for me perhaps is the Nicholas Serrata of the Tate’s comment, that “Once it’s over, a scar will remain, and both we, and subsequent artists, will have to walk over it”. The idea of walking directly over these ‘postracial’ (as the US clearly is, now, with a Black president) scars and even making contact with them is interesting though, when compared to the collective habits of skirting carefully around periods like that of slavery, or the Holocaust. Hopefully this, as opposed to Eyal Weizman’s (incredible piece), Walking Through Walls instead.

A great article in the London Times here, explores how leading British artists got started.

Grayson Perry
Grayson’s tip Hone your personal skills. You can have all the technique and all the originality in the world, but if you’re not much fun to be around, nobody will want to work with you. Go to openings if you can, and meet people.

Tim Webster and Sue Noble
Sue’s tip Retain some doubt and discomfort. Always be asking: “Is this good? Will this be successful?”

Michael Landy
Michael’s tip Be patient. Young people often have bigger expectations now and it’s probably unrealistic. Success happens to people at different times of their lives.

Anya Gallaccio
Anya’s tip Be true to yourself, and resist pleasing the market. It’s easy now to make things that look like art, but actually making art is a totally different thing.

Susan Hiller
Susan’s tip Don’t pursue being artist unless it’s the only way you can express yourself creatively. If you can be a designer or an illustrator, or something else then do that instead, because being an artist is not an easy life. It’s a last resort.

David Shrigley
David’s tips It doesn’t matter whether you’re 20 or 50. Get a website and keep making work – if it’s good, it will find a place.

Doris Salcedo, sculptor
Doris’s tips I believe the most important thing is to be truthful to what you want to do, to your work, no matter what, no matter which obstacles you encounter on your way.

Jonathan Monk
Jonathan’s tip: People who really want to go to art school should go – it doesn’t matter whether they’re good or bad. You take your A levels at 17 or 18, and the art education you get to that level is not really similar to what you get at art school. Afterwards, hang out with lots of other artists, go and work in an exhibition context, and something will turn up.

It is with much sadness that I read about winners of the Turner Prize. It is with increased sadness when I recall that the Turner Prize is named after one of England’s finest landscape painters. So when I discovered the new piece unveiled by Martin Creed (titled Work No. 850), I feel an immeasurable sense of hopelessness. This sense is not born of any believe that I may be wrong about Creed’s lack of artistic vision or ability; nor is it born of a worry that the modern art world somehow undermines the epistemological ground for my tried and tested beliefs about aesthetic values. This sadness is always born of the fact that no real intellectual engagement with the problems of modern art will convince its advocates that they are not representing something that is vibrant, deep and challenging, but rather something quite the opposite.

Popular culture has, and always will be, a voracious carnivore. Its ability to offer something to any taste, all the way down to the lowest common denominator, means that it has a domino effect on serious art institutions that are forced to compete for the money and minds of the public. Many techniques have been devised to try to counter this ill-born child of Enlightenment values, among them is the shock value presented by many of today’s conceptual artists.

Creed is no exception: his work has included “defaecating, vomiting and sex” and the more I think about how conceptual artists struggle for the shock value often so dear to them, the more I see how self-defeating it ultimately all is. Amongst a public, saturated with shock, how many times can one show scatological images or write that “God loves fucking” before the meaning becomes lost in the banality? Stripped of their shock value, they are often left with nothing of any value after that. I can return to the Byzantine-style images of saints and iconography in Westminster Cathedral a thousand times (and am possibly nearing that now) and find a continually refreshed inspiration emerging from the images or spend hours finding new meaning or interpretation over works such as The Garden of Earthly Delights. When I look upon Was Jesus Heterosexual (by Gilbert and George, from which the above mentioned line about what God loves is taken), the skull beneath the skin is quite apparent: it is nothing more than intellectual vacuous religious commentary made manifest in an attempt to appeal to political liberalism. The shock fades and only the dust of banality remains.

Politics is another area where conceptual art seems to stake its claim. I once reviewed the piece Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo in the Tate Modern. It, like many of her previous works, offered criticisms very close to the art of the liberal mindset: it dealt with the negative experiences of immigrants coming into Europe. She wrote that it “represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe”. The metaphor of cracks to symbolise division is an old one and the easy option here is to attack the work’s banality and unoriginality. I want to make a further claim, though, in that I wonder what can be said of an artwork offering a much different viewpoint.

One could find works with all sorts of radical liberal-orientated viewpoints, politically (like the performance of Valerie Solanas’s play Up Your Ass, despite the fact that to describe the work’s value in anything other than scatological terms is to pay it too much credit). Despite that, it seems unrealistic to imagine an artist presenting even moderately conservative views to acclaim. What the work is often judged by is how readily it sits with the political mindset of the institutions (such as the Tate Modern) that present them. The art world is very politically-aligned and it makes it much easier if one is a liberal too.

The liberalism itself becomes antagonistic to the shock value of the piece. Adrian Searle, in a piece for the Guardian, noted that the “real problem for Salcedo has been to work in the knowledge that liberal institutions absorb the shocks artists inflict by assimilation” and this is a repeatable problem. Will Salcedo’s tired expression really shock White, middle-class liberals who devour racial and cultural guilt like sweetmeats? All the force of the point has already been absorbed by its intended audience and seriously shock them no more. She wants the safety of an audience who’ll applaud her values and observations while creating real shocks that can only come from an audience that may put her observations under unwelcome scrutiny.

The final flaw of this line of art that I want to address here is that its basis lies in the institutional theory of art. George Dickie (whom I had the pleasure of seeing speak as an undergraduate on R.J. Collingwood) presented this theory first in Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis in 1974. It has become a cornerstone of the philosophical grounding of conceptual art.

Yet, after a long and bloody debate on the matter, the institutional theory has aged poorly. We live in an age where the project of definition of art has only just started to recover from the scepticism of many who pushed it aside as being too knotted a question to ask. In the current age, the theory still has its representatives, but it is not in the healthiest shape.

My own problem with it centres on the creation of artworks. Work No. 850 features several runners going through the neo-Classical gallery of the Tate at some speed, all the while dodging art lovers.

My problem with this nomination of a space or event as an artwork leaves out any real criteria at all for what constitutes art. This theory was largely posited in response to the problem of readymades presented by Marcel Duchamp, which were a kind of “anti-art” in truth. Against Duchamp’s expectations, not only did the art world not reject his Fountain but accommodated it fully. One option sadly left unexplored seriously was the more sensible idea of theorists like Monroe Beardsley, who just rejected the idea that readymades were art in the first place. It was a period when it seemed any claimed counter-example to existing theories of art were taken as being such.

Without any real criteria, why go look at the works in the Tate, when one can just nominate a certain space or form any artwork? I was once told a humorous story about an individual who, upon leaving a gallery, accidently destroyed a “postmodern artwork” only to be told not to move the broken pieces as it was now an artwork and was beautiful.

The best comes when the artist comments with such crass as: “I like watching people run. It’s something you can do with your body without the need for a football or a pool. That’s why I think it’s beautiful.” Other comments included “it’s also an example of not standing still. Running fast is like the exact opposite of death. It’s an example of aliveness.” All of this is capped by his justification for such “instant” art: “Sometimes when you go around museums you feel it’s quite a laborious task.” Maybe Creed does, but I suspect he is not an art lover.

I don’t think the floors of Ikea are meant to look like Doris Salcedo’s work.

Both the cult of domesticity and the new imperialism found in soap an exemplary mediating form. The emergent middle-class values – monogamy (´clean´ sex, wich has value ), industrial capital ( ´clean money´, wich has value ), Christianity ( ´being washed in the blood of the lamb´ ), class control ( ´cleansing the great unwashed´ ) and the imperial civilizing misión ( ´washing and clothing the savage´ ) – could all be marvelously embodied in a single household commodity. Soap…”
Anne McClintock. SOFT-SOAPING EMPIRE. Commodity racism and imperial advertising. THE VISUAL CULTURE READER. 2002. Chap 44. p 506.

Resulta paradójico que cuando Doris Salcedo afirma con su, tan exitoso e imitado estilo acusatorio de urgencia apocalíptica y su deliciosa astucia teñida de raptos visionarios, en ese lenguaje ermitaño que hace que nos veamos casi obligados a reconocer, cómplices pecadores de la indiferencia original, que su trabajo es una especie de flor imprescindible de la rebelión que

“La historia del racismo transcurre paralela a la historia de la modernidad, y es su innombrable parte oscura”

y que

“El racismo no es, digamos, un síntoma de un malestar que sufre la sociedad del primer mundo, sino que es la enfermedad misma”. (1)

la corporación que financia su grieta en contra del racismo ha sido permanentemente acusada de imponer la cultura racista de “Piel blanca es mejor” en países en los que la población es de raza amarilla como en Filipinas o Japón u oscura como en India.

La obsesión de Unilever por la limpieza es única. Es solo comparable a la conocida obsesión del paciente obsesivo compulsivo por ésta. No solo gran parte de sus productos son productos de limpieza Ala, Axe, Brut, Cif, Clear, Cram Silk, Dove, Finesse, Good Morning Soap, Impulse, Lux, Minerva, Pepsodent, Persil, Ponds, Q Tips, Rexona, Rinso, Sedal, Suave, Sun y Sunlight entre otros sino que existe una obsesión por limpiar sus abusos y su interminablemente cuestionada imagen corporativa a través del arte. Pero no cualquier arte: el “arte comprometido”; o como lo llama Mouffe “arte en contra del statu quo” y Rancière, en su estilo entre neo-hippie y Goebbels, arte “políticamente sensible”. Las corporaciones en general están obsesionadas, desde el momento mismo en que fueron creadas, por la limpieza de su imagen y de hecho es Carnegie quien descubre en el siglo XIX que la mejor manera de limpieza de la imagen corporativa es la política de responsabilidad social; pero resulta poco menos un caso único una corporación que quiera limpiar su imagen y a la vez gran parte de sus productos sean productos de limpieza.

Las prácticas publicitarias de Unilever – que tienen sus raíces en la publicidad racista del jabón “Pears Soap” de 1903 que promociona el blanqueamiento de un niño negro (2) – han sido cuestionadas por racistas en India a raíz de las campañas publicitarias de Ponds White Beauty, Double White y Fair and Lovely. Entre varios comerciales hay uno en se muestra a una mujer triste de piel oscura convirtiéndose en una radiante mujer de piel blanca que no teniendo ya las limitaciones de imagen que representa su piel oscura debido al uso del pruducto, no tendrá problemas en la consecución de pareja. Pero el producto tiene otras ventajas: ayudará a la mujer a conseguir trabajo en campos dominados por hombres, incluso como locutora de partidos de cricket. (3)

Tal parece que, después de todo, Unilever posee la respuesta del racismo posmoderno al racismo moderno con el que Salcedo pone combustible moral a su hermosa y políticamente inocua obra decorativa. No se trata ya de pasar por el “trabajo social” al que nos impele la artista de cerrar la brecha, la grieta que separa a la raza blanca de las razas oscuras. Se trata más bien de que las razas oscuras se vuelvan blancas a través del jabón y los productos cosméticos. A través de Unilever el planeta entero será, en un futuro no muy lejano…blanco.

El racismo es ciertamente, junto a la esclavitud infantil, una infamia…Y quién lo creyera. No es el artista el que tiene la solución. Es el jabón. El círculo queda al fin cerrado: mientras la corporación limpia la cara del tercer mundo moreno con sus productos, la artista limpia la cara de la corporación del jabón con su espectáculo vehemente e inofensivo en contra del racismo y le agrega a su mecenas una ficticia reputación política y de liberalidad que le permite seguir actuando con impunidad moral durante un tiempo más.

El artista comprometido es ahora un nuevo producto de limpieza en la ya larga lista de la corporación.

______

Videografía

Dos amigas en Nepal se encuentran casualmente en el templo con un hombre “nepalí blanco” guapo y exitoso. Él solo se fija en la de piel más blanca. Preocupada, la de piel amarilla recurre a las propiedades blanqueadoras de Fair&Lovely y logra llamar finalmente su atención.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yxt7XndHfqE

“Me encanta explorar nuevos lugares soleados pero mi confianza se ve disminuida por mi piel oscura” se queja una mujer de resgos orientales en algún lugar de Europa. Es un comercial de Vaseline Healthy White hecho para las Filipinas.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rswz0sghYCw

Una mujer hindú tiene serios problemas para conseguir trabajo y atraer a los hombres exitosos hasta que logra blanquear su piel con crema Fair&Lovely
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCsnS4aJ-cY&feature=related

Sobre el impacto de la campaña “Blanco es mejor” en Holanda ( Blank is Beter, ben je blank dan krijg betere banen)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fyo3ElLxHo

_____

(1) http://www.tate.org.uk/about/pressoffice/pressreleases/2007/11986.htm

(2) Black faces often appeared only to emphasise their difference from white people. the product is powerful enough to “clean” a black child. “The suggestion was that being black was unclean,” says Sam Walker of the Black Cultural Archives. “It reinforced the idea that being black was negative, not least to children who may have seen this.”.
Black Representation in Advertising.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/02/uk_black_representation_in_advertising/html/3.stm

(3) Telling India’s Modern Women They Have Power, Even Over Their Skin Tone. The New York Times. May 30, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/business/media/30adco.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

______

Artículos relacionados

Indian Women Criticize ‘Fair and Lovely’ Ideal Run 04/28/03
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1308/context/archive

http://www.davidairey.com/the-hypocrisy-of-unilever-advertising/

______

Bibliografía

Anne McClintock. SOFT-SOAPING EMPIRE. Commodity racism and imperial advertising. THE VISUAL CULTURE READER. 2002. El epígrafe de éste libro es por cierto un slogan de Unilever que reza: “Soap is civilization”. El libro se encuentra en Google Books.

Carlos Salazar

[esferapública]

______

Artículos en [AgorArte] sobre «Shibboleth»

http://agorarte.wordpress.com/2007/12/16/shibboleth-un-shock-en-el-paraiso-del-simbolo/

http://agorarte.wordpress.com/2007/10/12/la-grieta-en-la-tate-entrevista-a-doris-salcedo/

http://agorarte.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/dos-obras-vaticinan-el-contenido-del-proximo-xxxxi-salon-nacional-de-artistas-colombianos-2008/
______
Pie de foto: Doris Salcedo, «Shibboleth»

We met up with the Colombians today downtown. It was good to catch up, as Ms C has been off travelling the world a bit.

We met up at the Tate Modern. I was glad, because I’d been meaning to see Shibboleth, the current and nearly-finished turbine hall installation.

It’s quite neat: the first artwork to actually interfere with the room itself, Shibboleth is a…well, a crack in the floor that runs the entire length of the turbine hall. It’s different from place to place. I’m not sure what it means to me, but I like it. The artist, Doris Salcedo, is from Colombia too.

Afterwards we had a bite to eat and a good ol’ chinwag to catch up.

 Chortle.

By Doris Salcedo. (Her current installation at the Tate Modern is genius.)

[via]