About Error #9
Shadow Cabinet (Three Rendezvous) gathers videos, artworks and artist's documents around a centrally located platform. This project has become a group exhibition activated by three public gatherings, and will take place from 25 April to 10 May 2008. Shadow Cabinet regroups the work of fifteen international artists, among whom are included Paul Chan (HK/US), Maria Pask (UK), Mark Lombardi (US), Bruno Serralongue (FR), Matthew Buckingham (US), but also the Antwerp artist Sven 't Jolle and Jacques André from Brussels. They are all sympathetic to an artistic practice that treats politics as representation.
The title refers to democracies that have assumed the English parliamentary model. The Shadow Cabinet refers to a form of political opposition where the members of the most significant opposition party organise themselves into a virtual government. The Shadow Cabinet at issue here is of another nature. It brings together the works of artists who – in the shadow of the official (party-)political opposition – produce alternative representations and procedures. As opposed to the 'cabinet fantôme' (the French translation of the Shadow Cabinet), we propose here a 'cabinet des fantômes': a Ghost Cabinet. It has to do with a space whose function consists in questioning politics. 'Politics' here is understood as a representational illusion: more specifically, the tendency of 'politics' to use every means at its disposal to disguise the very existence of representations and prefabricated appearances.
Through their practice alone, the artists brought together here deconstruct precisely the pretension of politics (and the media) to name and label 'the common' with laws, codes, regulatory discourse as well as standardised and unified images. In contrast, the artists involved here, by means of the plurality of their identities (the artist in the role of citizen, the unemployed, union labourer, activist, archivist, lawyer, cartographer...), point out how the singular form and the individual spirit reintroduce a dissensus which – rather than a consensus – is at the basis of all politics. The work of art perhaps only becomes truly political when it can (potentially) disintegrate the social. In this way art could be – insofar as the social is concerned – an act of inaction; of not-doing; of undoing. From this perspective, art disbands being-together, expels the ghosts of 'belonging-to' that haunt every community.
Thus, on the one hand, we have Jacques André, Matthew Buckingham or Maria Pask, who utilise the icons of nineteen- seventies activism (Jerry Rubin, Starhawk...). David Evrard re-examines an alter-worldly demonstration with technological imagery which celebrates mass culture. Laurence Rassel and Terre Thaemlitz see creation in a social field by producing rights which are not just author's copyright. Kosten Koper and Catherine Vertige draw out the trajectory of a few leading artist collectives in Belgium in existence since the end of the seventies. In a similar way, by means of fiction, Alun Rowlands reexamines the scale of certain utopian models. Nicoline van Harskamp interrogates explicitly the ormation of public opinion in a series of readings executed according to a specific scenario, making use of reports on already-existing ideologies and creative staging. In the margin of legitimate artistic practices there also arise practices that border on the administrative: Mark Lombardi's diagrams, Jacques André's temples of unemployment, the robot portraits by Paul Chan, Sven 't Jolle's reports on union meetings, Bruno Serralongue's photographic documents or even Cop Talk by Chris Evans, which are interventions by the police recruiting corps in art academies.
Shadow Cabinet is a place that is 'activated' on a weekly basis. Everyone is invited to participate – and intervene – in the public gatherings. Our most important, most 'calibrated' connection to the community, to the communal – namely, that of the citizen – will be questioned by artists with an express sensitivity for the phenomenon of undocumented individuals. It concerns people who make themselves as invisible as possible, compelled to do by current legislation. At the same time, they refuse to be treated like ghosts: they want their voices to be heard by everyone, to have the same status as their 'fellow citizens'. Via a staged reading, a film and a performance, we will tackle 'having one's say' respectively: as a political performance (Nicoline van Harskamp, 24 April); hunger-strike as an instrument of the media (Tristan Wibault, 3 May); or again, about the possibility of exposing the weaknesses in the (hostile to immigrants) immigration laws via the issue of copyright laws (Patrick Bernier & Olive Martin, 10 May). Marko Stamenković (RS), a curator from Belgrade, will contribute to these three public discussions.
Vincent Meessen (1971, BE/US) is artist en studied and cultural policy. Most of his work is collaborative. Meessen usually establishes delegation protocol so that the work is always and already the result of an encounter. Vincent has also curated programs for UTIL (Brussels), e-flux (NYC), BAK, (Utrecht), Argos center for art & Cinema Museum (Brussels). His personal work has been exhibited at various arts centers and festivals.