An offline experience of the Biennial of Young Artists of Turin
by Snafu - 05/10/2002
[art]
This is the story of a BIG mistake.
At first glance, the three hybrids are recognizable by their organizational ambivalence. The first one is an activist group which pretends to be a headhunting company; the second is a bunch of troublemakers who present themselves as a subversive corporation; the third is an artist collective that plays with corporate aesthetics and grammar. The shaker, or the bartender, is BIG Torino (http://www.bigguest.net), the third Biennial of Young Artists currently on view in the regional capital of Piemonte (expiration date: May 19th). The reacting agent is the organizers' concern that the three hybrids' actions, and their rather ambiguous way of communicating, could irritate the Italian Government, and that the festival, directed by Michelangelo Pistoletto, could consequently lose the institutional support of the Italian Minister of Culture.
Thus, the original BIG concept was quite inspiring. Working under the assumption that the Internet is changing the way in which people communicate, the Festival was inviting many national and international artists to play a BIG SOCIAL GAME within the urban space of Turin. In other words, the call was to transfer the Internet game to the public "hardwired" arena in order to stimulate new ways of interacting and transforming the urban space.
etoy cordoned
On April 20th, the BIG directory board -- composed of Michelangelo Pistoletto, Luigi Ratclif, Giancinto di Pietrantonio, t.Omi Schneiderbauer and Teresa Alonso Novo -- invited the group for a talk. The directors asked Everyone is an Expert to retract the slogan, "as it would constitute an undesired provocation towards the Italian government." Moreover, the directors asserted that the slogan would be artistically uninteresting, as it would cancel the "subtle and constructive" critique contained in the Expertbase.
After consulting with the rest of the organization, the three German artists who represent EIAE -- Wolfgang Hauptfleisch, Frank John, and Paul Keller -- refused to withdraw the slogan, insisting on its full coherence with the rest of the project. Given the impossibility of a compromise, on April 22nd the group announced its intention to quit the Festival. However, the conference where the debate took place became the theater of a surprisingly heated discussion between two other groups: RTMark and Etoy.
RTMark is taking part in BIG with an installation called Blockbastard or Blockbusconi (http://www.rtmark.com/torino). It was originally part of a wider project, in collaboration with Barcelona-based collective Las Agencias (http://www.lasagencias.net). The two groups were supposed to share a Showbus, a vehicle fully equipped with video-recording facilities. The bus would have stopped in front of the thirteen Blockbuster stores in Turin, inviting Blockbuster customers to join in. Once on the bus, the customer could have recorded a personal message over the video previews section of the tape - by wearing a mask of Berlusconi or of any other politician. Then they would have returned the tape to the Blockbuster.
Since Las Agencias was kicked out by the Festival a few weeks before its beginning, RTMark could realize its project only by moving the recording equipment into a bar. By not benefiting from any proximity to the retailers, the project lost most of its impact. But there's more: once in Turin, RTMark was required by the organizers to sign a letter of responsibility for any possible defamatory message. The corporation did not sign the letter, deciding instead to push down on the accelerator. For the third act of this complex game, see the unwilling involvement of Austria-based group, etoy. For BIG, etoy has created an ambitious installation called etoy.DAY-CARE, made of two big orange containers placed right in the middle of the main square of Turin, Piazza Castello. The project is born from the visionary idea of a training for future generations, to be realized with elementary school students.
Access Denied
Thus, besides the friction between the groups who animated the Toywar back in 1999, BIG Torino is an interesting lesson in how Italian institutions perceive hybrid discourses which are born out of the Net. While in the Netherlands, in Germany, and to a certain extent in England, art has become increasingly a platform for public speaking, in Italy -- a country where activist networks are stronger -- a politicization of art looks almost impossible. It was sufficient that Alleanza Nazionale raised a loud voice against the Festival to activate the Foucaltian machine of self-censorship. When the BIG SOCIAL GAME turned into a political game, featuring real names and real conflicts, everything jumped. By obeying the heavy pressures of the political body, the Festival's direction was forced to retreat to more secure territory, and risked confining art to a pure function of urban decoration. So, while the Internet continues to be the laboratory which gives birth and feeds the new mutants, the urban space becomes sterilized, in order not to be infected by consuming bacteria. It is as if the game of simulation and linguistic contamination has to remain only as a pure metaphor.
