1 Lost Paradise - Armin Kerber

Lost Paradise – “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima”
sura sliced open by the two passenger planes crashing into the Twin Towers
of New York. In An eye for an eye by Francis Alÿs,
for example, the artist has attempted to extract more than our
stunned disbelief evoked by the precise orchestration of the
repeated images that have become so familiar since that long TV night in
September 2001. At last viewers seem to understand that we are dealing
with a kaleidoscope of coincidences, accidents, disasters and cataclysms
that hurl themselves at us ex-abrupto, but with ever greater frequency, and
at ever increasing rates, affecting art as much as the media, politics and
the economy.
Art, disasters, and the mass media — It is an advantage that, in the field
of tension between representation and communication, art should be more
complex than the mass media. Also, the total freedom of selecting its own
subject matter is its actual potential when faced with commercialised information.
In his 2003 study Kunst als Medientheorie (Art as Media
Theory), Hans Ulrich Reck ventures to present aesthetics as a “medium
to posit topics”, and “culture as an act of developing and implementing
programmes”. In so doing, he contrasts art’s open agenda with the information
media’s agenda, which reflects their struggle for viewer ratings and
their self-imposed compulsion to simplify, personify and be on top of the
day’s news. Art can allow itself the luxury of complexity, of not telling us
what to think, but what to think about. And so, art continues to create a
cartography of topicality, in its turn committing an act of media criticism
by identifying current social challenges.
Anri Sala and Galic/Gredig, for example, present war
zones, but do so not from the point of view of the day’s hottest
news. Their locations have been bypassed by the TV cameras
– they show zones of combat, for example, long after the journalists
have left. In his video piece Arena (2001), Sala shows us the
zoo of Tirana, where the only animals left are packs of feral
dogs. In his piece a very slow tracking shot reveals the desolate,
derelict zoo. The glory of the past has been replaced by oppressive
bleakness. Despite the calm, slow movements and relative inaction, the
location emanates disquiet and rebellion against decay. During Ceaucescu’s
dictatorship, the zoo held indigenous animals only. After 1990, in an optimistic
attempt to join the western world, the government acquired Afri-
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