ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
The extensive press coverage that resulted from this debacle led to the
Western artists writing an ‘Open Letter to the Art World’ accusing the
Russians of being ‘against art and democracy’ and Misiano of ‘using
theory to legitimise a new form of totalitarian ideology’. 60 (It is telling
that ‘Interpol’’s Western participants understood the performative exhibition
structure to be too determining, while for Troncy’s collaborators
in France it connoted non- prescriptive open- endedness.) The conflict
surrounding this open letter has been well recounted in a book documenting
the exhibition and its aftermath, edited by the Slovenian
collective IRWIN. Rashomon style, it offers four conflicting accounts.
From the perspective of post- ’89 cultural politics, the most revealing
aspect of the show is the degree to which it reinforces Cold War stereotypes
about the ‘capitalist’ or ‘careerist’ Western artists and the
‘collaborative’ or ‘collectivist’ Eastern artists. Misiano admits that ‘Interpol’
failed because of his ‘romantic desire to export the specifically
Eastern European collectivist experience into a Western European
framework’. 61 ‘Interpol’, however, forced a collaboration between two
groups of artists with completely different understandings of their role in
society. In Misiano’s words:
In art they [the Russians] are first and foremost concerned with the intellectual
quest, with the solution of global ontological and existential
problems. With regard to the weltanschauung aspect of their work they
are very much concerned with principle, but are more flexible in matters
of material embodiment. Swedish artists, for their part, acquire their
identity through social and institutional mechanisms. Art for them
represents an autonomous realm, a language of one’s own. That’s why
the material side of an artwork, its representative function is inseparable
from the sense of the work . . . Finally, for Russian artists, art is the
experience of living. For Swedish artists, it is the positioning of oneself
within the boundaries of the art world system. 62
However romanticised this reading, there is nevertheless a substrata of
truth in Misiano’s diagnosis, especially when he demonstrates the Russian
and European approaches to art through the opposed examples of Brener
and Cattelan. Brener destroyed someone else’s work, while Cattelan gave
the budget for his contribution to the show to the French magazine Purple
Prose: ‘in other words, during the exhibition, the East constituted around
the understanding of communication as destruction and protest and the
West – as the circulation of money’. 63
Intellectually and artistically, ‘Interpol’ seems to have been an unequivocal
failure, but as an exhibition case study it offers a vivid document of intercultural
friction underlying iterations of open- endedness in the immediate
post- Cold War period, and reveals much about the self- perceived role of
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