It is unforgivable to deny a political gesture an aesthetic analysis. And ExArgentina is a gesture: an exhibition that supports something and carries it further. »Something« is that jumble of sheer incomprehension, outrage and naked rage in the face of stupid or cynical (who can claim to tell them apart?) authorities. »Something«, however, is also a treasure that needs to be brought to light. A wealth of experience with, to put it concisely, non-institutional, informal, aesthetic, – in other words, interpersonal - forms of organization that were wrung from the state of emergency that was »Argentina in the winter of 2001«. It is an open question whether a state of emergency is the rule – as invoked by the pathos of political philosophy with reference to Benjamin. In fact, it can be observed how the current Argentine government is appropriating the revolutionary discourse for itself. This is accompanied by a historicization of social movements, which, so to speak, have the ground cut away from under them. And not just the ground of political action, but also the ground of symbolic liability, of seeing themselves as part of a »political narrative”, as the curators of the exhibition, Creischer/Siekmann, put it.

They both travelled to Argentina in the first year after the crisis broke out to get their own picture of the situation. And this picture, like a kind of reflected crisis situation, was now there to be admired in the Ludwig Museum. The poster itself gives a view of the curatorial method. On one colour level, red, is presented the welcoming protocol of the participants at the Cologne G-8 summit. Series of steps, like those in Warhol’s dance pictures, take the gaze from here to there, from Clinton to Schroeder, at this, the last summit that, as the curators write, »was able to proclaim its decrees in the open before a worldwide public, before the protests in Seattle made the red security zone mandatory for every summit meeting«. However, the exhibition is not about power in its anthropomorphic guise (if it wasn’t Schroeder, it would be someone else), but precisely about the series of steps – about actions that open up or rule out other actions (the actions of others). On the other, blue, level of colour are drawn the blockades of the roads leading to Buenos Aires that were set up by unemployed people. The picture of barricades is one of the topoi of 19th-century art, at least in countries whose bourgeoisie, when it came to the point, were of a revolutionary cast of mind. Parts of the Cologne audience, the so-called «educated classes«, had problems going down the paths into art history that were offered. Leon Ferrari’s dovecot, which, suspended over a reproduction of Lochner’s »Last Judgement«, secreted pieces of excrement in the form of crosses, was taken with false literalism and seen as blasphemy instead of as a reference to an available artistic tradition.

Historic rootedness, which, for the petit bourgeoisie, is both a mystery and a horror, is not based solely on local references, but also brought to bear as an argument, citing the research project »Tucuman Arde«. This is a group of conceptually-minded artists who in 1968 documented the consequences of factory closures in the Argentine province of Tucuman, and presented this reality to the art industry, with its then promise of modernity, internationalism and progressivity. (A book on this investigation has been published by b_books, so we shall not go any further into this subject. It is just important to see that the experiment itself, in the course of which the artists became political actors who ended up experiencing the entire repressive power of the state apparatus, grew out of an interest in the possibilities of aesthetic form. In this sense, the archive »Tucuman Arde« is also a historical task that the two curators must face.)

Altogether, the exhibition oscillates between aesthetic and political questions of form, just as it also oscillates between the specificity of the situation in Argentina and the situation on the spot, in Cologne. Josef Ackerman’s V signs from the Düsseldorf courtroom, but also other references to the Cologne or Berlin bank scandal flit like ghosts over the television-blue panels by Jürgen Stollhans, who uses the medium of school chalk no less virtuosically than Ingres employed the drawing pencil. The claim to virtuosity is also brought to bear in the configuration of the exhibition, which had to bring together elements of extremely different geographical, intellectual, material and aesthetic provenance. As indications, the concepts »negation«, »militant investigation« and, as has been mentioned, »political narrative« hover over the entire show and set off – in the form of a catalogue – a powerful allegoresis, which we do not deal with here, but which exactly marks the location of the audience, from whose engagement alone meaning is created. This engagement, as »Tucuman Arde« shows, is a mimetic one, for the reading of social forms, i.e. the »how«, is exactly what matters most in works like the wall newspapers by the Bureau d’Études and the Grupo de Arte Callejero, or the atlas »Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft« (Society and Economy) by Gerd Arntz/Otto Neurath (1920-27). Here, together with the film »Jarmark Europa« by Minze Tummescheit and »Entre/Acte« by Alejandra Riera and Fulvia Carnevale, there is also one of the most successful combinations in a formal, aesthetic sense. With their graphics displays behind acrylic glass, as well as atmospheric elements like chair, table, photo, video projection and temporary partition wall, the whole thing looks like context art, but, owing to the thematic coherence (»cartography«), it appears as a beautifully proportioned, precise, aesthetic, tight and simultaneously open spatial situation.

The highlight of the curatorial approach may be a museum in the museum, a replica of the Museo de Puerto, which has had its home in Bahía Blanca, one of the largest port areas of Argentina, since 1987. In its temporary accommodation, painted wine-red, the Museo refers back to classic museums of history, but, like ExArgentina, it does not follow any linear, historiographical view of things. Bilious green imported apples hang from the ceiling on strings, and the photographs on the walls show people hiding their faces behind a literally put-on smile. A video presents the masked »Choir of the Contaminated«, whose folkloric song is about the unhealthy effects of the new petrochemical plant in Bahía Blanca. In the Museo, museum narratives are broken up not with large gestures, but by a deliberate appropriation and adaptation of conventional exhibition formats. Thus, instead of archiving historical artefacts, the ever-growing collection of the Museo is composed of the many small stories and »contemporary eyewitness accounts« that characterize everyday life in Bahía Blanca. This internal style also corresponds to the self-portrait of the Museo in the exhibition, where a container blocks the steps of the audience. In front of and in the container, grains of wheat are scattered on the floor and stick to the bottom of the soles of their shoes. The strange smell, the claustrophobic narrowness, street noises and scraps of conversations convey the impression that memories and history are not only connected with the conscious employment of the memory, but also with direct physical, existential experiences. Since the petrochemical company DOW replaced cereal exporting in Bahía Blanca and the »Hamburg Süd« company invested in a hermetically sealed container system, there is not a single grain left on the side of the road to be collected to fatten the hens that serve the people as barter objects.
The company DOW, which shifted its production centre to Bahía Blanca because there are few environmental requirements there, has its headquarters in Stade, near Hamburg. Dierk Schmidt painted the building there on a semi-transparent tarpaulin that covers the entire length of the container. Because of the security regulations of DOW, however, the building could only be recorded looking back, in the car mirror. The picture is a present to the Museo, which can now also add the story of that location to its collection.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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