Antidote to dystopia.

BRAVE NEW WORLDS

WALKER ART CENTER

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

OCTOBER 4, 2007-FEBRUARY 17, 2008

Viewing "Brave New Worlds" is an arduous experience, but worthwhile, for it is the most intellectually and emotionally courageous show I have seen in years and all the more bold for its emotive aspects). Although Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond rightfully laud the creative bravery of these twenty-four artists from seventeen countries who are "responsible to the 'world,'" these two Walker curators are no less daring visionaries. Not only for proffering an "antidote" to Aldous Huxley's terrifyingly efficient future, but for eschewing the museum world's decades-long dependency on semi-shocking or incomprehensible spectacle as a means of attracting an audience. These seventy political, and poetical, artworks justly implicate the viewer. Rather than shame us, however, their subtle potency convinces us that we must be responsible to the world too.

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The exhibition is monopolized by the moving image, but this is no cheap attempt to mesmerize viewers. Instead, the incessant use of film, video, and televisual footage functions as a crystalline mirror of our world's most preferred mode of obtaining information. Erik Van Lieshout's Guantanamo Baywatch, Parts 2 and 3 (2007) is an anarchic video road show that follows the artist and his editor through New Mexico and Israel, and one cannot help but view these two holy fools as the artworld version of Beavis and Butthead. Accordingly, their ostensibly infantile banter is revealing in its vulgarity, and such inane refrains as "Hothead Arabs, Jews, all is line!" may very well scream what the mannered world cannot. Sex and violence also collide within their expanded cinema's entranceway, where Van Lieshout's mixed media drawings of scantily clad women, the words Israel and Iraq scrawled across their breasts, resemble a twenty-first century DeKooning weaned on cable, crystal meth, and American Apparel Ads. Inside, the "boys in the basement" sensation is heightened by a random arrangement of thrift-store chairs. Stuck kamikaze style on the slanted floor, they force one along for a wild ride.

In Schema (Television) (2006-2007), Sean Snyder more cynically proves Marshall McLuhan's belief that the medium becomes the message, but questions whether a universal penchant for cheesy game shows is really proof that we are all one global village. Snyder edits together seconds-long segments from hundreds of television networks around the world, accrued via satellite, then intersperses them with such seemingly cliched platitudes as "Television always speaks the truth not the whole truth because there is no way to say it all." As they rapidly interrupt one another, a clip of a cow under a shower becomes no more significant than Vladimir Putin on a fighter plane: all is equalized. More frightening, however, is the recognition that this is precisely the same way and speed at which so many of us amass our own knowledge about the world's diverse cultures: we are all flicking through a thousand channels, considering each for no more than a millisecond.

This superficial homogeneity brought on by globalization is perhaps the saddest aspect of the "world" illustrated within these heterogeneous works. As most capital cities now seem a standardized amalgamation of concrete and commerce, it is only the predominance of Arabic calligraphy or Chinese characters that indicate a place other than where you already are. Perversely, then, the images that lack such specificity become all the more powerful for their universality. One such series, "The Sleepers, Tangier 2006," by Yto Barrada, initially appears to be comprised of photos of homeless men, all of whom lie prone upon grassy, trash-strewn public spaces. Their holey socks and ill-fitting shoes are the first universal iconographic element suggesting all is not right. And it is not. In actuality, they are waiting to illegally embark across the Strait of Gibraltar so that they can go somewhere, anywhere, one of those other places, in order to earn a living.

Perhaps the most haunting rebuttal to the "First World" belief that only "Third World" sweatshop conditions exhaust the body and strip the soul is Cao Fei's multi-screen installation Whose Utopia? (2006-2007). One screen shows clips from Fei's six months of interviews with young workers at the OSRAM China Lighting factory, a place so sterile one presumes all must be well. In the interviews, however, the teens reveal the particular circumstances that brought them here, and most attribute it to familial poverty. As one plaintively states, "After all, economy is what counts, it leads everything." Another screen, one far more lyrical, shows us these same workers performing their daydreams in the midst of factory production lines. One delicate girl desires to be a balletic angel. A young man imagines being a rock star, and Fei's deft melding of documentary and fantasy eventually renders the viewer mute. Whose utopia, whose fantasy is this? And more egregiously, how is our own greed perpetuating it? The installation component replicates an employee's dormitory bunk bed, embellished with the Asian equivalent of Teen Beat posters and pajamas that bear both Barbie logos and dancing Snoopies, the word "HAPPY" emblazoned across the bodice. As a counterpoint to the rational explanations of the workers, and their perpetually fluorescent environment, these material vestiges of something they can call their own are both poignant and pitiful.

At such moments, one cannot help but have little hope for our dystopic globe. The curators, however, have organized the three galleries so viewers aren't left completely bereft by the future's incontrovertible challenges. The very first image one encounters, My Teacher (1993), a mural-sized color photograph by Zheng Guogu, shows the artist and another young man squatting on the ground, the light of a late afternoon sun on their beatifically smiling faces. Guogo wears the "civilized" world's uniform: jeans, trainers, and a polo shirt. His "teacher" wears only shorts and filthy slippers; his lithe body and long hair are ingrained with an urban itinerant's grime. According to Guogu, the man had gone mad and was left to wander the city, but his "direct, unmediated relationship with the world" was an inspiration. Like Huxley's John the Savage, Guogu's teacher reminded him of what was truly essential to human existence. Likewise, Zwelethu Mthethwa's empathetic avowal, "I do not believe poverty is equal to degradation," may be a sentiment belied by grimmer artists, but his mammoth prints of South African laborers ennoble world citizens who might otherwise be viewed with condescension. Yael Bartana also humanely refutes the stereotypes foisted upon us by the mass media. In her video, A Declaration (2006), she dramatically warps the pacing of a young Israeli as he rows out to Andromeda's Rock in order to supplant his nation's flag with an olive tree. Bartana's intentional use of slow motion, a speed antithetical to the CNN-style lenses through which we usually view this ravaged region, forces us to reconsider what we think we know. The young man's persistent pull when the boat becomes stuck, and the golden haze of sunset over the harbor's horizon, asserts that one individual can indeed change the world.

Fittingly, Noguchi Rika's series of chromogenic prints, "The Sun" (2005-2006), lines the last gallery. Intentionally violating photographic rule by pointing her pinhole camera directly at our world's source of warmth and light, Rika offers us the momentary illusion that we've dared to stare directly into the sun itself. As a metaphor for this astounding exhibition, her quiet but brilliant emanations remind us that everything has the potential to be illuminated. You only have to be brave enough to look.

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ALISIA G. CHASE is an assistant professor of Art History and Visual Culture at State University of New York at Brockport.