Andrea Tarsia

Contemporary Art 2

Szuper Gallery are, at one and the same time a proper and a collective noun: a gallery, albeit so far without a physical space. This semantic collapse between third person singular and first person plural is central to their artistic vision, one that - broadly speaking - engages in a critical debate with the gestural and stylistic codes of architecture, capital and artistic identity.
The group was founded in 1995 when Pavlo Kerestey was appointed curator of Galerie Szuper, a Munich-based gallery that at the time dealt in Eastern European modernist painting. Perturbed by a decline in business, the owner had invited Kerestey to increase the gallery’s profile and client base by introducing a younger, more contemporary generation of artists to its programme. From the start, in other words, Szuper Gallery operated within a context that made explicit, indeed derived from, the relationship between art and finance. More importantly, however, it also connected contemporary art with the more superficial spheres of marketing and fashionability: contemporary art brings kudos, is trendy, is ‘in’; it operates within a cultural framework that is defined in terms of ‘status’, ‘aspirational values’ and ‘life-style options’. To reflect this, the artists developed an exhibition programme which performed the procedures of a commercial gallery. In their own words, "The idea was to demonstrate a fully functioning commercial gallery to the outside world, but to fill the formal elements with new or different ideas. [We] showed work by different artists often in collaboration with [us]: the commercial gallery became an art project." Two years later the owner decided to close the gallery and the artists appropriated the name for their future collaborative practice.

Szuper Gallery’s interest in the fetishistic values – economic or cultural – with which art is imbued – has led them to inhabit, twist and subtly subvert "the formal elements" through which those values are inscribed: from clothes to events such as the private view and the exhibition itself. Their recent installation at Whitechapel Art Gallery for example, included Circus artists under the big top: clueless – and other business strategies, a video projection housed in an unusual structure: instead of the ubiquitous ‘black box’, the artists replaced two of the four walls with electronically operated white curtains. These closed at the beginning of each screening and re-opened for two minutes between the end of the video and the start of its subsequent screening. This act of continuous unveiling was mirrored in the installation of a number of images, collectively titled Contemporary Art II, representing works from Szuper Gallery’s ‘collection’ and displayed on the opposite wall. A white curtain hung at the edge of the display, this time to be manually operated by security guards as though at a formal and altogether more ‘establishment’ opening.
Not inappropriately, the exhibition was presented at Whitechapel Art Gallery, one of London’s ‘grandee’ institutions that comes with a formidable historical context. More perplexing than this doubling up of institutional form and artistic content, however, was the material that that the two curtains drew back to reveal. In Circus artists… Szuper Gallery roam around an anonymous building designed in what could be defined as contemporary corporate style. Wearing the ubiquitous art industry black, they are seen at a meeting in an office, in the cellars among what look like crates, walking down corridors… This is typical of Szuper Gallery videos, characteristically devoid of any clear narrative structure or dialogue; there appears to be no goal, no end-point to their actions. In the absence of any discernible content, we are left with a series of images that work entirely on a connotative level, images that quite literally represent, without any degree of interpretation. Our attention is drawn to surface elements – design, behaviour, fashion – as the sole purveyors of meaning and, as it is generally the power of capital that Szuper Gallery are interested in addressing, to the gestural styles through which it is communicated today.

In the past, Szuper Gallery videos have been set in the London offices of Bloomberg corporation, the finance information agency and ubiquitous sponsor of the arts ; or taken on the world of auction houses , the stock exchange and the police . In each instance, the quality of filming is pristine and impeccable video – no grainy 16mm or nostalgic Super 8 here. The feel, in fact, is closer to that of a corporate video, extolling the virtues of an influential organisation and its united workforce. In each instance, the Szuper Gallery ‘actors’ have taken on the look of each agency’s workers, inhabiting their spaces with a behaviour that is almost but not entirely appropriate to their surroundings. They are clearly acting, indeed hamming it up a little, while the lighting emphasises smooth and reflective surfaces. It is this heightened sense of reality, as much as the lack of narrative and the increasingly incongruous behaviour, that register as interference and disturb a straightforward reading of the organisation or agency presented, as though reality is being played back as a distorted déjà vu.
If Szuper Gallery provide more than a temporary ‘making strange’ of institutions, this is largely achieved through the creation of their own meta structure – the Szuper Gallery – through which their work is mediated and discussed. Continuing the act of appropriation that signalled its origins, Szuper Gallery exists, temporarily, at the moment in which the artists occupy their chosen target. With every video or installation, the space they occupy is transformed into the Szuper Gallery, precisely through their manipulation of its codes and functions. This is the déjà vu, or mirage, that they so skilfully create; the overlapping and simultaneous presence of the space they are showing in with the ideological space that the Szuper Gallery creates.
These are not the impassioned gestures of institutional critique as we knew it. Although they share a sensibility with earlier works, such as Chris Burden’s TV hijack, Szuper Gallery’s videos appear detached and disaffected, sharing the slacker attitudes of Generation X rather than, for example, Hans Haacke’s violent destruction of the floor of the German Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. Yet such gestures seem no longer possible today, when institutions both celebrate and neutralise the subversive. One option left open, Szuper Gallery suggest, is to shift the focus from a monolithic understanding, and reaction to, dominant power bases, to a performative reading of institutional power, addressing the discurisve processes through which its meanings are formed, communicated and grafted onto the individual. This allows Szuper Gallery to move from outside agitators to inside infiltrators, acting like hackers that infect institutional codes with disruptive viruses.

Such a strategy finds a precedent in the work of the American group Art Club2000, who in the early 90s produced a series of installations that had at their core equally polished colour photographs, depicting the group in a range of differing costumes and poses. Their lexicon derived primarily from the worlds of fashion, film and music, most famously in a series of images that highlighted the Americanised, corporate branding of youth marketed by the ubiquitous clothing company, Gap (a mantle taken over and developed to new extremes by Nike today). Like Art Club2000, Szuper Gallery are engaged in the positioning of the individual within a wider ideological framework, one that, in Szuper Gallery’s case, is specifically artistic. As they take on the roles of dealer, collector, financier or stockbroker, the artists draw attention to the ever-tighter alliance between art and capital, depicting the artist or curator as a cultural worker in a corporate world, where company headquarters and art institutions appear almost entirely interchangeable.
It is within this context that Szuper Gallery explore, in numerous works, elements of 20th Century and contemporary architecture. Their interest always lies at the juncture between architecture, capital and art, looking at the ways in which architecture both defines the art within it and the individuals for whom it is created. Contemporary Art II, 2001, for example, consisted of a wall display of text and images. The images were mostly colour photocopies or photographic reproductions taken from newspapers and catalogues, showing drawings by Frank Gehry, Herzog and de Meuron’s building for the Goetz collection, Boris Yofan’s ‘House on the River’ in Moscow… Together, they form part of Szuper Gallery’s ever expanding collection, an assembly of works sometimes borrowed from other artists, more often ‘stolen’ or appropriated from reproductions. Alongside these, printed texts focus on the owner’s brief, or on moments in the building’s history. Ingvild Goetz, for example, writes in her brief that "The house should not only have a purely museum-like character. We would also like to live austerely in it from time to time". Or Herzog and de Meuron on the Kramlich Residence in California: "The structure of the house is designed to be both a home for a couple and a place to show their extensive collection of electronic art. The design is characterised by intentional ambiguity: home as media installation or media installation as home?". It is easy to see how such an ambiguity would be attractive to Szuper Gallery, with its overlapping and multiple functions grafted onto one individual form.

As part of the same presentation, the artists launched a competition for the design of their own, ‘real’ Szuper Gallery. It is worth quoting from the brief at some length:
"It is planned that the gallery will travel to different institutions – museums, galleries, corporations, government agencies, administrative institutions, universities – to develop a new concept of ‘gallery in residence’…The gallery’s mode and level of interaction will change with each specific context. The gallery may physically be present inside or outside the main host institution. The gallery is intended to act as a ‘parasite’ to the host institution, profiting from the institution’s infrastructure and support. The Szuper Gallery Pavilion will be attached to the bigger institution and will perform similar formal elements, such as private views, exhibition, reception, client contacts... This shouldn’t be a simple gallery. A complex structure would determine the way Szuper Gallery will set out to interpret the functioning of the professional world. The artists are looking for a flexible resolution. The gallery should be easy to construct and dismantle. It should be transportable. It should have an element of luxury, tinged with the atmosphere of an exclusive business. It should be variable in size, to allow for the different spaces it will inhabit. Main areas should include: reception, viewing/screening area, exhibition area, office, archive, private space, discussion area/meeting room, party/bar area, secret door, full online connections."
Reading like something of a manifesto, the brief is reminiscent of the work of the Canadian group General Idea, in particular the Miss General Idea Pavillion which, throughout the 70s, provided the main focus point of their artistic project. During this period, the artists organised a series of installations that presented sections of the Pavillion, intended as a museum to house the works of General Idea themselves; they also showed architectural plans and works from the collection among a number of different initiatives. The project came to an end when the Pavillion mysteriously burnt down, a few black and white photographs of the burning ruins the sole testament to its presence. Of course, the Pavillion never existed. Like the Szuper Gallery, it was merely a construct through which the artists articulated their work. And although Szuper Gallery’s recent plans for a mobile gallery are real, they share with their Canadian predecessors a similar feel for self mythology, as a wider reflection of the roles of artists in general; a collapse between the artists and their work; and a wider interest in debunking some of the supporting organs of the arts industry.

One of the elements ‘salvaged’ from the Pavillion makes a cameo appearance in Szuper Gallery’s performance at Whitechapel, also entitled Circus artists under the big top… This is the Silver Bar [date] at which, in an effort to make art a less elitist drink and more palatable to a general public, new cultural cocktails had been mixed. In Szuper Gallery’s hands, these heady mixes have become "infectious mutations", "germs of art discourse" injected into the mainstream in an endeavour to affect some form of change. The context from which General Idea and Szuper Gallery are operating is profoundly different. If General Idea could still hope to open up artistic discourse and knock art off its modernist pedestal, today the arts participate in an altogether more complex cultural exchange.
In many ways, the performance of Circus artists… encapsulates the majority of Szuper Gallery’s concerns, taking the form of a humorous and occasionally poignant disquisition on the possibilities of affecting "socially conscious change". Paradoxically, as with previous performances, this is the least clearly performative of Szuper Gallery’s works. The three artists limit themselves to reading from a script in a dead pan manner, with little intonation, no interpretation, lighting or backdrops; the only ‘special effect’ is a voice modulator, which distorts the tone and pitch of their voices. Playing, as ever, with the particular format they are occupying – in this case the lecture – attention is focused on the words they are speaking, the modulator a performative gesture that serves to reflect the ideas that they convey.
***
It is becoming clear that the ever-widening encroachment of global capitalism is acting as a focal point for an expanding body of dissidence. Television and newspaper images of protestors in Seattle, Goteborg and Genoa have gained increasing prominence and attention, only partly dictated by the presence of a violent anarchist fringe. Remarkably, these protests are met with indifference at a political and corporate level; an indifference counterbalanced by the increasingly extreme degrees of brutality deployed against protestors, and increased surveillance engaged to protect politicians. Against this backdrop, a video presented by Szuper Gallery as part of programmes and exhibitions that they have curated seems especially pertinent. This is The Berlin Wall Still Exists, 1998, by Alexander Brener and Barbara Schultz, which shows the artists white-washing a section of the Berlin wall. Shot from a car window, the quality of image possesses all the hallmarks of underground activity: hand held, rough, unedited, underscored by the unprocessed sounds of the street. It is something of a shock to find such a potent symbol of an ideological divide - albeit extinct - ‘vandalised’ in this way. The graffiti that were sprayed and carved along the length of the wall were, after all, a testament to generations of protests, from both sides of the divide. Yet on reflection, this act of erasure is only a rendering visible of a cultural process that has already occurred. As sections of the Berlin wall enter museums and personal collections, its ideological significance begins to shift uncomfortably through the cultural towards the economic. The video ends with police putting a stop to the white-washing, while we are left to ponder quite what it is that they are there to protect.

In the video of Circus artists…, the only constant element in an otherwise diverse group of sequences is a deep red-orange drape. Held up to scrutiny, hung on a wall, discarded on the floor, the drape is also similar in colour and form to a computer generated study of a Gehry building and flown, at one point in the video, like a heavily symbolic red flag. A metaphor for an art object or an ideology perhaps, but mostly – like the white-washed wall - an empty vessel, an object devoid of any specific meaning. Onto this blankness we can project what symbolism we like and watch it, for one slow motion sequence, glide, suspended mid air, with poetry and grace.

Andrea Tarsia