Klagenfurt. It’s only in photographs that the red, slightly translucent strips of cloth cover the Kunstraum’s facade; in reality they flap up and down in the wind and become entangled in the building’s slats. Two pin-men are painted on one of the red cloths beneath the phrases »Así no, Así sí« (Not that way, this way). The figures seem schematic and childish at the same time, the instruction on the red background and its incomprehensible binary order provoke us to ask in reply »Why this way and not that way?« They announce an unstable programme, which is at the same time a title and offers a way into the work of Chilean artist Mario Navarro.
In formal terms Mario Navarro is part of a generation of Chilean artists, who in the mid-1990s, shortly after the end of the dictatorship, began to work on strategies of a plastic-political disassembly of representation, on a new definition and utilisation of the concept of social sculpture.1 For some years now Navarro has set his works under the leitmotif of »The New Ideal Line«. He refers with this title both to the fractured social utopias in Chile in the early 1970s and to his country’s almost obsessive efforts to connect with the First World’s modernity and economic model in the 1990s.
The artist was invited to develop a work for the Kunstraum Lakeside, which at the same time would also be the first part of an exhibition cycle about British cyberneticist Stafford Beer’s project for Salvador Allende’s government; Navarro is now working on this as part of this year’s Liverpool Biennale.
In 1971 Liverpool-born Beer, responding to a personal request from Allende, developed a spectacular information technology project on regulating the Chilean economy, which was to find its symbolic culmination in the Cybersyn Operations Room. Although the so-called Opsroom was indeed built in cooperation with English engineers, its planned technical functions were never fully implemented. The room was destroyed after the fall of Allende and along with it the underlying idea of a new Socialist state and its unique tools to visualise complex economic processes and control them using telematics.
Navarro places fifty chairs in the interior of Kunstraum Lakeside in a context that is at the same time improvised and formalised, similar to the photo-montage in the »Two Rooms« project2 developed for the Liverpool Biennale. The chairs are lined up next to each other on a palette construction covered with a red cloth3, which runs around the room in a U shape. They look in various directions, with photos and texts from the people who have lent chairs to the artist hanging on the backs of the chairs, thus also incorporating a piece of the environment they come from.
The artist asked teachers and students from the neighbouring university, as well as Lakeside Park employees, migrants, a number of people from Klagenfurt and some from Vienna to describe their relationship to the term “control” in a short commentary. Each handwritten statement was attached to the back of a chair on an A4 sheet with a portrait photo of the author of the text.
This type of line-up does not make them representatives of a formation or an idea; instead they are »occupied« by the individual spaces, the story of their owners.
In the Kunstraum, Navarro has succeeded in installing a temporary space of sharings (»chairings«), which allows a common conceptual space to ponder control to come into being in the intersection of the chairs. The individual statements from people who have donated chairs raise questions about the social significance of decision-making processes, which people like to leave up to politicians, just as economic processes are left to anonymous laws of the market. »The New Ideal Line (así no, así sí)« does not claim to be either a political counter-model or a purely self-referential space. The beauty of the work lies instead in how it generates social relations and correspondences, enabling direct access for a »non-specific audience« (Navarro). That access is in no small part also a way in to Beer’s space, that socio-historical sculpture that aimed to make economic issues visible and comprehensible for everyone.
The strength of Navarro’s experimental arrangement lies in the artist’s calculated loss of control over his own work, which deals with its subject not just in terms of the content but also structurally, right through to the temporary »outsourcing« of the request for loans to those who created the exhibition and to the donors, who thus take on part of the authorship.
The artist’s intervention seems minimal and is often reduced to tiny details. And so it is only when we take a second look that we notice that Navarro has attached or tied the donors’ handwritten comments and photos to the chairs in a highly individual manner with red threads, cords or rubber bands. Small handmade connections – an ironic and almost imperceptible reference to the fragility and the human origin of all the technology without which Opsroom, Lakeside Park, and indeed each and every exhibition would not be possible.
Translated by Helen Ferguson