The future has arrived,
but the Futurists didn't make it.
In the
early part of the 20th century, the Futurist
movement of artists in Italy, led by Filippo
Marinetti, glorified war as a dynamic organizing
principle for their artwork. If art was about
energy - and the raw power of the modern machine
age - where could you find more energy and
concentrated machinery than on the battlefield?
Art, they proclaimed in their manifesto, "can be
nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice".
Marinetti and his war-worshipping Futurists easily
fell in with Benito Mussolini and the Fascists. But
after Nuremberg, few artists
have followed their lead.
This month, at
the 10th Istanbul Biennale, the future has arrived
in the form of a very different kind of art. The
curator of the Istanbul show, Hou Hanru of China,
begins his exhibition catalogue with an unadorned
statement: "We are living at a time of global
wars." The rest of the introduction reads like the
agenda of the World Social Forum. "Most of these
wars, conflicts and clashes take place in the
developing world," Hou continues. "The center of
the empire has ruthlessly exported violence to
other parts of the world." Still, the Biennale's
theme is: "Not only possible, but also necessary:
Optimism in the age of global war".
This
narrative does not refer to any specific wars such
as Iraq or Afghanistan. Nor does it suggest
anything that might offend the Turkish hosts of
the event, such as Ankara's preparations for a
possible cross-border incursion against separatist
Kurds operating in the Kurdish area of northern
Iraq. Still, the art at the Biennale does not pull
any punches. In the same way that war represented
an ideal organizing principle for the Futurists,
anti-war serves a similar purpose for the Biennale
curator and many of the artists he selected for
the exhibition.
The Istanbul show does not
focus exclusively on the issue of war. One venue,
the Textile Traders' Market, is a complex of
classic Modernist buildings designed to promote
Turkey's role as a global economic crossroads and
to update the ancient chaos of the Grand Bazaar
nearby. Another exhibition installed at the
Ataturk Cultural Center, a ravishingly ugly
Modernist edifice once symbolizing Turkey's model
ascendancy to world-class nation status, focuses
on the failed promise of utopian architecture.
Nevertheless, some of the most interesting
art at the Biennale engages questions of violence,
militarism, and the creativity that arises from
conflict. But a question lingers over the show:
Does all this anti-war art add up to a movement
that can rival or even replace the Futurists?
Creative conflict Much of the
anti-war art of the Istanbul Biennale directly
comments on the Turkish experience. Perhaps the
most controversial contribution comes from
Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, whose
powerful 2002 film on the Armenian genocide,
Ararat, was also shown as part of the
Biennale.
In his original contribution to
the exhibition, Egoyan offers an eerie
re-imagining of the life of Aurora Mardiganian, an
Armenian teenager who survived the mass slaughter
of her people in Turkey in the early part of the
20th century. She eventually made it to the United
States, where she tried to find her brother, the
only other surviving member of her family.
Her story was compelling enough for the
early US motion-picture industry to dramatize in
the 1919 film Auction of Souls, which
turned out to be a blockbuster. Unable to
reconcile the tragedy of her life with her
newfound fame, Mardiganian disappeared from the
promotional tour before it even began, and the
film company hired seven look-alikes to fill her
shoes.
In Egoyan's short film
Aurora, seven women read
portions of Mardiganian's life, describing the
events leading up to the killing of her mother. In
the same space is another short film, by Turkish
video artist Kutlug Ataman, about his Armenian
nanny who can't recall a key event from her own
life. Both films are painful, slow,
and horrific, and convey the
unalluring reality of the violence that the
Futurists so fetishized.
Chinese artist
Huang Yong Ping also takes up the challenge of
engaging Turkish life and culture by turning the
top of a minaret at an angle and enclosing it in a
cloth fence. Tilted upward, the minaret looks like
an anti-aircraft gun, thus echoing a famous
Turkish poem by Ziya Gokalp ("The mosques are our
barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our
bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers").
Surrounded by a cloth fence, the minaret is
enclosed as if by a headscarf that both conceals
and reveals.
In Scary Asian Men, Turkish
artist Banu Cennetoglu takes what resemble
surveillance photographs of Turkish men. They are
small figures in unremarkable landscapes, relaxing
or talking beside the road that connects the Asian
part of Istanbul with the European part. Turkey is
a candidate for membership in the European Union,
but several western European government leaders
have expressed doubts about including a
predominantly Muslim country in the grand European
project. As Cennetoglu suggests, the European
governments have projected their long-held fears
of
violent Asian men - Ottomans, Huns, Mongols -
on to the unarmed, benign figures of Turkish
workers and peasants.
Sometimes the
Biennale art is quite graphic in its depiction of
violence. Britain's Jonathan Barnbrook has
designed posters that would not look out of place
at an anti-war rally, though their content is
somewhat more ambiguous. The mandala-like cycle of
violence depicted in one poster, of a symbolic
Muslim shooting a symbolic Jew shooting a symbolic
Muslim and so forth around in a circle, refuses to
assign primary responsibility to either side in
the conflict.
Pakistani Hamra Abbas
sculptures life-sized figures in imaginative
sexual positions from the Kama Sutra, and
yet the men wield weapons. The AES Group, the
initials formed from the last names of three
Russian artists, contributes a long, mural-like
composition, Last Riot, that depicts
hyper-realistic young people of various
ethnicities in a kind of apocalyptic Benetton
billboard. The girls and boys in battle fatigues
are on the verge of choking one another, stabbing
themselves hara-kiri style, and clubbing
their younger charges and small animals, all
against a montage of recognizable urban
landscapes. Their faces reveal not anger or
bloodlust but merely bored resignation, as if
playing a video game. Finally, perhaps most
subversively, there are the two large plastic
Coca-Cola bottles, taped together and fitted with
what looks like a timer, flashing ominously. This
home-made Coke bomb sits hidden beneath a
staircase inside the gallery space. There is no
nearby label to take the sting out of the
intervention by giving it a name, assigning it to
an artist, or otherwise enclosing it in a safe
package called "art".
It is anonymous, has
clear links to the United States and the global
economy, and might go off at any time - to destroy
itself and the Biennale. In security-conscious
Istanbul, where political violence is a recent
memory if not a present reality, and in a world
where we are constantly reminded that terrorism is
no joking matter, this Coke bomb is pure
effrontery.
Where are the
anti-Futurists? The Futurists are gone,
and no anti-Futurists have taken their place. Dada
briefly coalesced around a group of artists
disgusted with World War I, and some of their art
reflected their anti-war sentiments. But although
quite a few artists have taken clear anti-war
positions in their art, no art movement has taken
so passionately to the principle of anti-war as
the Futurists once did to war. There are several
reasons for this vacuum. Manifestos are rare in
this day and age. Artists are reluctant to launch
world movements. And didacticism is only
intermittently popular in an art world so
thoroughly soaked in irony.
But there is
another explanation as well. In the Biennale
installation RGB's War, Thai artist
Porntaweesak Rimsakul sets up remote-controlled
vehicles topped by army helmets that collide with
one another and with tiny houses filled with the
primary colors. From this battlefield emerges a
work of abstract expressionism. The very act of
painting depends on the collision of colors and
the use of machines like brushes reinforces the
essential point of the Futurists. Perhaps art does
in fact arise out of conflict, and artists are as
fascinated by technology today as they were in
Marinetti's time.
Indeed, many of the
anti-war artists rely on the power of violence to
drive home their points. The Biennale is full of
guns, missiles and bombs. All of this deadly
hardware is alluring, even if the weaponry is
deployed for anti-war purposes. The Futurists may
well be dead. But as long as war and violence
continue to hold such sway over our imaginations,
the Futurist ideology will live on in some small
way within us.
John Feffer is
co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the
Institute for Policy Studies (www.ips-dc.org).
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and horrific, and convey the
unalluring reality of the violence that the
Futurists so fetishized. 
violent Asian men - Ottomans, Huns, Mongols -
on to the unarmed, benign figures of Turkish
workers and peasants. 
