Jordan Strom
Work in Progress?
Marketing now runs every modern cultural enterprise, for better and for worse, and the biennial brand should serve the Whitney’s mission. At present, things function the other way around. The collapse of a star creates an energy-inhaling black hole, which hovers biennially on New York’s swanky Upper East Side. Now that’s a quark of a different color. (Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times)
In a rare nod to the ever-worsening war in Iraq, Artforum recently featured an artwork of “unprecedented collaboration” and “defiant protest” on its front cover: The Peace Tower constructed and organized by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Mark di Suvero for the current Whitney Biennial. The acutely–angled, cropped photograph of the tubular steel tower under construction beneath a clear blue sky seems to refer to an emerging anti-war movement under construction within the American art world. The tower’s final form—which deliberately recalls Arnold Mesches and Irving Petlin’s Constructivist-inspired Artists’ Tower for Peace of 1966—and current installation sug-gest otherwise.
As Tiravanija explains, the idea to revisit Mesches and Petlin’s tower came out of his collaboration in the 2003 Venice Biennale’s “Utopia Station” project. The first attempt to install Peace Tower during the 2004 Republican Convention in New York never materialized. All of this is to beg the question: what does it mean for an artist like Tiravanija—who, in the past, incorporated into his “platforms” makeshift supper clubs in response to the completion of the Gulf War and DJ booths during the early stages of the more recent invasion of Iraq—to now turn away from the strategies of relational aesthetics and the revolutions of everyday life in favour of work of deliberate political protest In part, the answer has to do with the much broader trend in contemporary art in which poaching from vanguard practice and pop cultural aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s has become commonplace—and much in evidence in the recent Whitney Biennial as a whole. But the reason also surely lies in both the project’s original intent and the artist’s own established mission: to bring people together, promote debate, present speeches (in the case of the current Peace Tower), and take part in protest sing-a-longs—very little of which has transpired at the base of the tower at the time of this writing.
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About this Article
Work in Progress? was first published in Fillip 3 in Summer 2006. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Jordan Strom is a writer and curator who lives in Vancouver. He is a founding editor of Fillip
Notes
The views expressed in Fillip are not necessarily those of the editorial board or the Projectile Publishing Society.
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