Reviews
forward> Back<
|
|||
Universal Experience presents a comprehensive and far-reaching collection of works in various media, by artists including Phil Collins, Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons, Robert Smithson, Shirana Shahbazi, Zhan Wang and Felix Gonzalez-Torres (to name but a few) all seen through the complex framework of ‘tourism’ and the myriad connotations, meanings and implications of this term. The most interesting work in Universal Experience is that which explores the social and psychological meanings embedded in ideas of travel and tourism. Kunsthistorisches Museum III, Vienna, 1989 by Thomas Struth frames a notion of the tourist as a curious observer. In this piece, as viewers, we are looking at a work of art capturing a man looking at a work of art (by Rembrandt). ‘Looking’ as an act associated with tourism is evoked subtly yet strongly in this exhibition and is seen to have various implications. In How to Make a Refugee, 2000 Phil Collins reveals the imbalance of power embedded in relations of looking. In this piece, Collins films a Kosovan Albanian family who are victims of the war in former Yugoslavia, they are here being photographed by the media for a lifestyle magazine. A young boy is asked to remove his shirt to expose scars from bullet wounds; his expression is one of detached discomfort and embarrassment. Those doing ‘the looking’ have the power while those being ‘looked at’ become the object of the former’s gaze. As an uneasy viewer, we are implicated in this objectification and voyeurism. In Cannibal Tours 1988 Dennis O’ Rourke gives us the possibility of watching the interactions between tourist and ‘local.’ This documentary film follows an organised tour visiting the last cannibal tribe on an island in Papua New Guinea. O’ Rourke uncovers a complex set of relations where the local individual is not merely the object of the tourists gaze. Dominating a large part of the film an Aboriginal man from the tribe commands the narrative, he retells a history of German colonialism and emphasises the value of the work he makes for tourists, its price is non-negotiable. Cannibal Tours uses and subverts the format of an anthropological study, it is the white western tourists who come under the camera’s focus, O’ Rourke exposes their paternalistic colonial perspective, they are caricatures of the incongruous foreign tourist, ‘exploring’ the jungle laden with giant cameras and camcorders, revelling in the ‘exotic.’ One female tourist fears a loss of ‘authenticity.’ For her, through tourism authentic “primitive” arts have “deviated.” The idea of an ‘authentic’ tourist experience is communicated throughout Universal Experience. Andrea Robins and Max Becher’s photographic series German Indians, takes a humorous look at a population of German people who exalt and seek to preserve and perform their own constructed mythology of North American Native ‘authenticity.’ Several artists expose the artifice of tourism that seeks to remake the ‘authenticity’ of a place. Alexander Timitschenko’s photographs of Las Vegas emphasise the artificial and manmade, expressed through flat industrial structures, vivid and toxically lurid colours. The emphasis is on stimulus, tourism is here bound to a synthetic experience constructed to replicate and even make ‘more real’ the ‘real.’ Tourism is confounding and can involve a blurring of boundaries between entertainment spectacle and human suffering, as is expressed in the work of Darren Almond in Oswiecim, March 1997, here Almond displays tourists travelling to and from Auschwitz on two video screens. As well as difference and the unfamiliar, the exhibition explores the possibility of mutual understanding and shared experience as in the work of Shirna Shahbazi, who takes the imagery of daily life from around the globe to explore universalism and similarity. The success of Universal Experience
is in the way it disorientates. The deluge of diverse work and the constant
questioning of relationships, contexts, situations and states of being,
created by different experiences and understandings of tourism makes it
impossible to remain an uncritical traveller or observer.
|
|||