Micropolitiques

 
«Micropolitiques»
Contemporary Visual Arts, Londres, February-March 2000, p. 82

This large group show of political art brings together works by artists as diverse as Jimmie Durham, Kendell Geers, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Ann-Sofi Sidén, Frank Scurti, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gregory Green, David Medalla, Carsten Holler and Gordon Matta-Clark, to name only a few. As well the two-part show in Magasin's galleries (exhibits on one side, documentation on the other), there are interventions in and around the Magasin building and the town of Grenoble as a whole. The type of political art in focus is based on social presence: hence street art, community art and the inorganic forms of urban art all feature. These works are not effectively political posters, with slogans graphic-designed for immediate impact. Rather they are more subtle, taking a 'quieter' approach which aims to infiltrate the psyche of those that live with them in order to promote the questioning of existing social structures. The sort of art scrutinised is only secondarily an aesthetic object - its primary intention is to activate social spaces. Curators Paul Ardenne and Christine Macel use the phrase micropolitiques to refer to something that isn't traditional, didactic political art. This, they claim, is outdated in the context of contemporary western democratic societies, where sixties idealism has been supplanted by a realist approach to politics. Political art, they argue, must change in accordance. And yet simultaneously this new art still probes deeply - Frank Scurti's flyposter, pictured behind two pensioners walking through a graffitied urban environment bereft of greenery, questions the structuring and functioning of the city itself, whilst works like Regine Kolle's oil-on-canvas Seaside , with a huge McDonald's-style 'M' spanning the sky, clearly question the organisation of global power. Collective identity comes high on the agenda of the many participating artists, along with a questioning not of who holds power but of the very existence of power itself, whether on a global or a local level.

David Fulcher