Women in Dark Times (29 page)

Both Esther Shalev-Gerz and Yael Bartana have received increasing international recognition, exhibiting across continents – from New York to Israel and London in both cases, in Berlin, Stockholm, Marseille and Amsterdam for Shalev-Gerz, Australia, Warsaw and Venice for Bartana (these lists are not exhaustive). Neither of them, however, are household names. They both belong on the margins of the official world of art, even where, as is the case with Shalev-Gerz, some of her works have been commissioned by the galleries and museums of Europe such as the Hôtel de Ville in Paris in 2005, the Queen’s House in Greenwich in 2007. Ever since her first ‘Monument Against Fascism’, created with Jochen Gerz in 1986, Shalev-Gerz has produced work that does not fit into any conventional mould – the question of ‘fit’ being literally enacted in the case of this famous monument as the twelve-metre-high column was struck into the ground in seven stages, once the people of the German city of Harburg, who had been invited to do so, had scrawled their names and thoughts on to its lead-covered surface. For this project to be viable, the people – whoever they are and whatever their political preferences – had to make their mark on the work as a way of registering their place in an unfinished history. ‘In the long run,’ the artists proclaimed in their inscription, ‘it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice.’

For Shalev-Gerz this was one stage in an artistic journey which has increasingly centred on the act of speech. Whether recording the testimonies of Auschwitz survivors barely managing to speak for the first time, or the random and mostly neglected stories of migrants in the modern city, which are then projected on to vast screens in her exhibition space, she brings her viewers into breathing proximity with a face and a voice they are unlikely ever to have confronted before. In her work, the close-up – Hollywood’s supreme means of covering over the ugliness of the world – is given an ironic, modern-day twist. Shalev-Gerz devotes her work to the unexpurgated, often pained, voices of a European legacy still pressing on the future – the trauma of the Second World War, the migrant shades of the modern city, which have been our companions throughout this book. Democracy has also been our theme. From Rosa Luxemburg to Tahrir Square, we have seen it constantly under threat. It is after all the challenge of democracy that people are listened to, that they are allowed to assert themselves in civic space. In her intensely focused attention to the unheard back-stories of the modern world, Shalev-Gerz has made herself the contemporary artist of democracy, giving to that challenge a new auditory and visual shape.

It was for me one of the most important traits of Rosa Luxemburg that she took everything just that little bit too far –
jusqu’à outrance
,
or beyond the limit, to use her own phrase, with the idea of something outrageous (French
outragé
or outraged) also hovering inside the term. That of course has been true of most of the women in this book, who would be of little interest if they did not push their claims and plaints beyond the realm of convention. Scandal commonly refers to a moment when something which should have remained hidden loses its moorings and erupts into the world – a messy in-mixing of public and private realms (the tabloids are of course the sniffer dogs of such potential eruptions, their noses permanently to the ground). Feminism has long argued however that the distinction is spurious, that intimacy, while not reducible to, is never wholly immune from, the violence and political power of the outside world. Feminism has been adept, we might say, at bringing the permanent scandal of a shamefully unequal world to our attention.

If Yael Bartana’s work has attracted me and takes up its place in these final pages, it is because she could be said to court scandal as an artist in a way that plays on these themes, but also diverts them on to new paths.
. . . And Europe Will Be Stunned
is the title of her most famous work to date, selected – although she is not Polish – to represent Poland at the 2012 Venice Biennale. In this case, what is hidden are the secrets of the Second World War, the Polish expulsion of the Jews, an ugly history which to this day is barely acknowledged in Poland but which has left its indelible traces on the nation’s unconscious. This is the nightmare with which her film trilogy begins. What she is demanding, what the trilogy demands from the opening image of the first film – the return of the Jews to Poland – is, she knows only too well, outrageous (
 . . . And Europe Will Be Stunned
). In this she could be seen not only as a film-maker evoking the spirit of Luxemburg, but also as the artistic blood-sister of Shalev-Gerz, telling stories that need but do not want to be told. Except that Shalev-Gerz is interested above all in the dignity of speech. This is nowhere clearer than in the footage she assembles of the moments when the Auschwitz survivors, trying to remember and to talk, freeze and halt, silenced in their tracks. Yael Bartana is we might say more brutal. She is dealing more directly with human guilt. She is asking a whole nation to tear off the mantle of self-deception. But the principle is the same: a reckoning with unspeakable thoughts, unspoken, to evoke Toni Morrison’s famous phrase once again.

In these final three studies, therefore, we will be following the work of women artists who in many ways could not be more different from each other. But each of them fulfils what is for me a feminist imperative – to push us all too far, by bringing to the surface those secrets of history and of the heart which most fiercely, and fatally, resist the light.

5

The Shape of Democracy

Esther Shalev-Gerz

I am always interested in survivors, the fact of their ‘living with it’, which for me has absolutely nothing to do with victimhood.

Esther Shalev-Gerz,
Does Your Image Reflect Me?

Sprengel Museum, Hanover, 2002

At this point in time it’s all right to say that you don’t know and that we should perhaps start over again. That it’s good to have contradictions and humility. But politically we’re not there by any means yet. There are still dictators out there. But we have ‘a foot in the door’.

Esther Shalev-Gerz,
Two Installations: White Out, Inseparable Angels

Historical Museum, Stockholm, 2003

I first came across the work of Esther Shalev-Gerz in 2008 when she was engaged in bringing one of her projects to the Midlands, into a new public space – indeed the gallery in West Bromwich was called ‘The Public’ – where videos of local city dwellers, migrants, immigrants and misfits talking about their lives were projected on to screens. What struck me was the strange balance, or rather imbalance, between the artist and her subjects. She was their interlocutor, she had spent hour after hour diligently listening to and recording their stories, stories you felt none of these people had ever told before, as I was to discover was often the case. And yet she appeared nowhere in these exhibitions. You never hear her ask the questions which drive and make possible the whole process, the questions which allow her subjects – often against their own perfectly honed defences – to speak. Her project is never ‘about’ her. I think it was this striking mixture of intimacy and impersonality which I found so arresting. She is the ‘voice-off’ of her own work. If Esther Shalev-Gerz opens this section of the book, it is because she seems to have found an artistic form which raises the underside of our world to the surface, but without ownership or claim. She is alert to the dangers of exposure, to the risk that the light she throws on her subjects will flood rather than illuminate. This has long been an issue for feminism. How do you bring the unspoken, the overlooked, the excluded to the world’s attention without submitting them to its harshest, most invasive, glare?

In her 2008 video installation,
Sound Machine
, five pairs of women, mother and daughter, sit absorbed in the act of listening. Behind them, a virtual image has been created from old blueprints evoking the factory, no longer operative, where the mothers had worked as young women, all five simultaneously pregnant with the daughters now sitting beside them. Shalev-Gerz’s first question to these women was whether they could even vaguely remember the continuous noise which their unborn daughters would have surely picked up in the womb. Behind that question lies a run of other questions. What did factory work in the second half of the last century do to its women workers? What did the factory owners know of these women? Did they know the women were pregnant? Did they care? Gradually the spectator realises that the movement of the machinery on the back projections is partly miming the slow, silent gestures of the women sitting in front of the screens – a turn of the head, a moment of eye contact between mother and daughter; as if, in an act of belated reparation, a machine might be not just mechanical or inhuman, but instead respond to the bodies of the women on whose labour it had so negligently relied. On a set of adjacent canvases, excerpts from interviews with the women are printed in the perfunctory style of a user’s manual: ‘Learning about the shutting down by a letter in a brown envelope’; ‘Inconceivable to be not warned’; ‘Mother and foetus exposed to noisy environment’; ‘Sound is physical’; ‘Unimaginable working in such noise’; ‘Noise ends at the time of birth’.
1

Returning to a world of work that no longer exists, Shalev-Gerz renders history pregnant with sound and silence, as she exposes what factory life enforced on its workers, alongside what that world could not bear or bother to see. As the first of my contemporary women artists, she brings us back to the start of this book, to the moment of birth on which, Hannah Arendt so suggestively argued, the fragile, always threatened, possibility of a genuine new beginning depends. This was for her the true shape of democracy which all totalitarianism hates and therefore has to destroy. Remember Charlotte Salomon arriving pregnant at Auschwitz. Esther Shalev-Gerz takes us, you could say, right inside the womb, to burgeoning life already under assault from the pounding of the modern world. In fact Arendt is one of her explicit references. In another of her exhibitions,
Echoes in Memory
of 2007, an image of a virtual 3D metallic sculpture of Arendt forms one of twenty-four such images of inspirational women hung around the vast empty space of the Queen’s Hall at Greenwich National Maritime Museum (they are also projected on to videos encrusted in the background of the hall). The hall’s ceiling had once been covered by a now lost painting – an allegory of ‘Peace and the Liberal Arts in the Time of the Crown’ – by Orazio Gentileschi and his famous, although originally neglected, daughter painter, Artemisia, represented by another of the sculptures in the hall (the twenty-four women are more or less aligned with what would have been the edges of the painting).

But if Shalev-Gerz takes us back to Arendt, her project also circles back to the life and times of Rosa Luxemburg, another woman for whom the grace and pain of working life, so often invisible, today almost vanished, has everything to teach us. (Again the link is real, as another work,
The Berlin Inquiry
, a performance co-written with Jochen Gerz, was staged in 1998 at the Berliner Ensemble, at the Hebbel Theatre, and at the People’s Theatre on Rosa Luxemburg Square.) This is the space of labour whose emancipatory promise – for which Luxemburg yearned and struggled all her life – might at first glance seem crushed by the histories of the women recorded by
Sound Machine
. It is therefore their presence and dignity which is first and foremost being reclaimed. Luxemburg did not of course witness the brute resilience of capitalism in its latest guise of multinational, global exploitation, nor indeed as one of its preconditions the effective destruction of Great Britain’s industrial base in the 1970s and 1980s under the aegis of Thatcherism – although she surely would have recognised the political venom against the workers so thinly veiled behind the rhetoric of economic and social progress that accompanied it. Nor did she live to see workers emancipated from labour, not by means of revolution, but by letters in brown envelopes shutting down whole livelihoods without warning: ‘Inconceivable to be not warned.’ Shalev-Gerz is interested in the asides of history, moments at once momentous and easy to miss (what we might call the ‘throw-away lines’). It is her talent to elicit intimacy from the most unexpected corners of the world against a backdrop reality that would destroy it. But she never overstates her purpose – in fact stating a purpose is not what she does at all. She is the artist of protest in a quiet voice.

While Shalev-Gerz takes us back in time, she is also fiercely contemporary, attuned to the ravages and crises of capitalism of which women have been the first targets – ‘austerity’ as the twenty-first-century new mantra against women: ‘70% of the £18 bn cuts to social security and welfare will fall on women’; ‘Cuts are widening the gender gap, report finds . . . Society’s most vulnerable “are hardest hit” ’; ‘George Osborne’s financial policies are hitting women three times as hard as men’.
2
An installation on the Adenauer Bridge in Braunschweig, Germany in 2000 projected on to the surface of the water a video of a perpetually spinning coin. It was just before the euro went into full circulation and there had been a stock market crash (a hint of what was to come). The exhibit was intended to demonstrate two human ‘dreams’ as she put it: one of perpetual motion (
Perpetuum Mobile
is the title of the artwork), the other to ‘master economic laws to allow the market to work properly’.
3
The spinning coin is a ten-franc piece ‘permanently deferring its final fall’.
4
The link between today’s crisis in the euro-zone and the collapse of faith in the markets gives this exhibition a sense of prophecy. Shalev-Gerz is another woman who exposes the deadly fantasy of omnipotence, turns it spinning on its head. As we should surely know by now, economic laws are unmasterable. They slip, and even if they are cruelly adept at restoring themselves, they can also fail (the idea of markets working ‘properly’ just won’t do it any more). This – as much as his advocacy of full employment and spending in time of recession – was Maynard Keynes’s most radical thought. But why on earth, as feminism repeatedly asks, would we want the world to be mastered or controlled? Shalev-Gerz lays bare the utter lunacy of such conviction, while alerting us to the overlooked bodies, faces, stories clamouring for life and air beneath.