|
Article Excerpt
Oliver Ressler lives and works in Vienna, Austria. His work, comprising projects for public spaces, installations, and videos, addresses social issues such as racism, genetic engineering, global capitalism, forms of political resistance, and social alternatives. His ongoing project Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies (begun in 2003), which can be realized in a variety of formats, has been produced twenty-one times, including solo exhibitions in Ljubljana, Luneburg, Istanbul, Madrid, and Belgrade.
Many of Ressler's works come to fruition as collaborations. Among these arc the installation in a shipping container European Corrections Corporation (2003--4), produced with Martin Krenn, and Boom! (2001-6), an extended on- and offline generation of protest graphics and texts, created with David Thorne. Together with the political analyst Dario Azzellini, he produced the films Venezuela from Below (2004) and (5) Factories--Worker Control in Venezuela (2006), a six-channel video installation shown at the Berkeley Art Museum as part of Chris Gilbert's controversial valedictory exhibition, Now-Time Venezuela. Both video projects examine the "Bolivarian process" that has allowed Venezuelan workers to expropriate large production facilities and to actively participate in the creation of small cooperative businesses. Ressler's films are presented in cinemas, art venues, and film festivals. In 2002 his video This Is What Democracy Looks Like! (2002) won the first prize of the International Media Art Award of the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. His project Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies was recently published in book form by the Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, Poland.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In 2007 Ressler was a participant in the international art project Holy Damn It: 50,000 Posters against G8. (1) This affinity group assembled ten artists and artist groups who produced posters to be distributed for free among groups mobilizing against the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany (June 6--8, 2007), and at lead-up demonstrations in Rostock. Proceeds from the sale of a limited number of copies were reserved for legal aid to arrested demonstrators. Concurrently, a number of artists committed to the de-escalation of antagonism between protesers and police participated in a group exhibition titled Art Goes Heiligendamm, Art Goes Public, a project organized by Adrienne Goehler for the city of Rostock (May 24-June 9, 2007). In the context of increased police intimidation and defamation campaigns against global-resistance movements in Germany, Holy Damn It refused to participate in this exhibition and publicly criticized its legitimization of G8 politics. Oliver Ressler and I discussed his participation in Holy Damn It via e-mail in June 2007.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Marc James Leger: How did the artists and artist groups come together for this collaboration? Did you form in response to Art Goes Heiligendamm?
Oliver Ressler: The initial idea for Holy Damn It came from Petra Gerschner and Michael Backmund. They proposed the production of a series of posters as an artistic intervention to be used in the course of the mobilization against the G8. The first meeting took place in September 2006 in Graz, Austria, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Forum Stadtpark. Five of the ten artists and groups who would eventually produce one poster each participated in this meeting. From that point on we were all of us invested in making the project possible. We proposed other participants, raised some money, created the webpage, and tried to build a network of exhibition and presentation sites in order to distribute the posters as widely as possible with our limited budget.
When we started organizing Holy Damn It, we did not know about Art Goes Heiligendamm. After making contact with our group, Art Goes Heiligendamm offered to present the ten posters. We later had a dispute due to dissatisfying e-mail conversations with its organizers. When we realized that they were not interested in discussing the problematic political aims of their project with us, we decided to make our contrasting political agendas public.
Leger: Art Goes Heiligendamm's proposed "third way," not to mention its stated motifs of "intercultural communication" and "cultural translation," seem like laudable goals, (2) At the same time, these themes, which are academically respectable, seemed to almost naively return to a moralistic argument that the two sides do not represent good and evil, black and white, thus setting up a simple dichotomy to "deconstruct" as one wishes. But the problem is not so simple, considering that the conditions in which the questions themselves can be posed are so heavily weighted by the discourse of neoliberal global capitalism. Tell me more about your collective response to the premises of Art Goes Heiligendamm.
Ressler: The project description of Art Goes Heiligendamm and the interviews with the curator, Adrienne Goehler, make it obvious that they seek to functionalize art in order to mediate between the conflicting parties gathered around the G8 summit. The instrumentalization of art is nothing particularly new, but what really disturbed me was the number of interesting, politicized artists who accepted the invitation to participate in such a project. While in Rostock and Heiligendamm, I spent my time at the blockades and demonstrations against the G8, which were a great example of collective intelligence. My experiences were so intense and rich during the week I was there that I did not want to spend my time visiting a show like Art Goes Heiligndamm.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
While my knowledge about the exhibition mainly comes from the webpage, I assumed that there was no real need to see a show whose subtitle, "Art Interventions on the Occasion of the G8 Summit 2007," already brings the failure of the curatorial concept to the point. How...
|
