Performative Liberty - Usvajanje Slobode/Taking Liberty - Croatian artists in Boston

Usvajanje Slobode/Taking Liberty

Fort Point District

Boston, Massachusetts

March 31-April 14, 2000

Completing the cultural exchange, "Usvajanje Slobode/Taking Liberty," that began with Boston's Mobius Artists Group traveling to Istria, Croatia for a series of collaborative art events in 1999, members of the Croatian artists' group HDLU Istre traveled to Boston in the spring of 2000. Both groups are independently run artist groups funded primarily from private and state granting institutions like the funders of this artist exchange, ArtsLink, and The Trust for Mutual Understanding. The collaborative events, which evolved from the Croatian installment, emphasize performance art in public spaces, with four area galleries showcasing additional work in various media.

According to Mobius director Jed Speare in Mobius's newsletter, the aim of the exchange was a creative dialogue in a forum distanced from dominant art and commerce--a forum "where the crucibles of citizenship and cultural relations are heightened, expanded and sustained through an artistic and personal realm." The grassroots undertaking was made particularly poignant by its backdrop: the Fort Point District in South Boston, an art community threatened by rising real estate prices and waterfront development plans that include a new home for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Arts. [Ed. note: See Annette Koh's report in Afterimage 28, no. 3.] Whatever the artistic motivations of the collaborators, the location of the week's events (over)determined a range of interpretations. For example, it is possible that inadvertent audiences of the public performance pieces may not have been able to separate events from the situation of artists and their community. One passing pedestrian offhandedly asked, "What are they p rotesting now?" Though some participants snickered at the passerby, the confusion between the "art" being presented and the "protest" goes to the heart of alternative art practices that distance themselves from mainstream art/commerce practices.

While the title "Usvajanje Slobode/Taking Liberty" suggests that the participants might concern themselves with liberty as a thematic focus, it also connotes an act of radical impertinence. In fact, the artists consistently deconstructed the conventional notion of "liberty," offering a more fluid negotiation of personal freedom as a viable model for political intervention. The Croatian artists presented the most overt critiques of specifically American ideals of freedom, particularly in their two and three dimensional works. The performance pieces, however (most of which were collaborative), offered more nuanced reformulations of this theme.

The opening event of the week, "Interpretation I," and its complementary piece, "Interpretation II," were two such performances. Set in Boston's bustling South Station, hub for commuter rail and Amtrak, the stage was marked by three velvet ropes framing a podium, behind which were three chairs. Mobius member Yin Peet spoke into the podium's microphone in a mock ceremony, swearing in artists David Franklin, Pino Ivancic and Meng Lang, each standing on a chair behind Peet, as if they were testifying in a court of law. Using the headline article of the day's Boston Globe as a reference, each artist took turns spontaneously commenting on President Clinton's right to privacy in her or his second language: Lang and Ivancic spoke in English while Franklin spoke in Chinese. Peet reiterated and modified each comment using the language in which it was spoken. "Interpretation II" followed the same format. However, here Ivancic, Landon Rose and Sanja Svrljuga responded to a recent judicial ruling barring an area artist' s front yard sculpture as a municipal code violation. Both the presence of security and the distraught looks of curious onlookers highlighted one of the main goals of the performances--to enlighten the disparity between liberty as an ideal and liberty as practiced in the U.S. That few watched with concern or curiosity testifies both to the lack of appreciation for and disregard of noncommercial public utterance.

Nearby, in Harbor Park--a "public" space at the new waterfront Federal Courthouse whose metal and glass rotunda served as the performance backdrop--Ivancic and Peet performed a piece that illustrated the difficult juxtaposition of the "artistic and personal" when performed in a space that is deemed hypercivic and public. At first, much of the tentatively titled "Meditation" seemed innocuously formal. Working against the spare geometry of the Courthouse, Ivancic and Peet laid out a huge, square white canvas and for five minutes sat meditatively cross-legged at its edge. With curious pedestrians passing and wary security officers looking on from inside the rotunda, Ivancic moved to the center of the canvas where he continued his "meditation." Peet proceeded to "paint him in" using a roller brush and black paint, enclosing Ivancic in a series of concentric shapes--squares, triangles and circles. After several more minutes, Ivancic removed his shirt and set it on fire. Thus ended the ostensibly innocuous perform ance. Courthouse security (and presumably those officials they are hired to protect) reacted to Ivancic's impromptu use of fire by foreclosing on the agreed use of Harbor Park for subsequent events.

Although Margaret Tittemore was the next to perform at the location, her performance, "Crossing Over," benefited from its displacement. Instead of transpiring at Harbor Park, Tittemore performed without permit on the nearby Fort Point Channel's Northern Avenue Bridge, a turn-of-the-century structure once crucial to Boston automobile traffic until its recent relegation as a temporary footbridge. Tittemore began at the southern end of the bridge by covering her head with nearly 30 white veils that she extracted from a red baby carriage, effectively blinding herself. She then proceeded to haltingly traverse the expanse, slowing much of the pedestrian rush hour traffic. After returning across the bridge, she shed her veils, exaggeratedly made-up her face and disappeared among the pedestrians travelling south along the waterfront. Given the logjam caused by Tittemore's performance, her exploration of the trappings of femininity received one of the largest audiences (albeit captive) of any of the week's events.

The close of the week's events began with Nancy Adams's "Life Savings," a quadripedal trek from the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston's financial district to Mobius, across the Fort Point Channel. Adams began by placing her hands against the bank's exterior wall, assuming a "frisk" position. After a while, an assistant removed a fabric panel on the back of her shirt and wrote on her bare back, "YOUR MONEY"--to the vocal approval of nearby construction workers. Just as the bank's confused security personnel seemed ready to strike, Adams bent over, placed her hands on the sidewalk, and proceeded to protractedly "crawl" away from the bank, with crowd in tow. During the one-mile crawl, assistants repeatedly tossed pennies in her path, until she had ascended the five flights of stairs to the Mobius gallery. Once there, she seated herself facing away from a theater of spectators as an unloaded slide projector spotlighted her back. The words "OR YOUR LIFE" were then added before she turned to face the audience, bare-b reasted except for a penny affixed to each aureole. Ominous slide projections of the Federal Reserve Bank building then flashed across her torso, ending the more than one-hour performance. Although the performance was perhaps the most conceptually explicit of the week (as it wrestled with the state of personal liberty in relationship to particular state and financial institutions), its specificity to the area resonated with attending Fort Point residents, many of whom are currently under siege from said institutions.

The end of Adams's piece marked the start of the week's closing reception at Mobius and the adjacent Gallery 5 North. Most of the nonperformance work from "Usvajanje Slobode/Taking Liberty" was displayed in the spaces, ranging from painting to video and installation. Notable, were pieces by Marilyn Arsem and Speare. Arsem's "Darkness Begone II," a serpentine black fabric "tunnel" that decreased in its dimensions as one walked further into it, dominated the front gallery of Mobius. Attached to the interior walls were tiny motion-activated speakers that played low-volume audio loops of the artists in "Usvajanje Slobode/Taking Liberty" speaking unscripted in their first language about metaphors of darkness. Those in the gallery who made their way to the other end of the structure found that it took them into another room before turning back to the front gallery. At the end, the tunnel's dimensions were so small that one had to crawl before entering the light of the gallery again. The physical and sensory demand s of the piece made it one of the most manipulative, but one of the most rewarding in the show. Speare's piece was a bit more elusive. Occupying a dark corner in the back gallery, "Facing Uljanik" was a varied collection of small video monitors placed on the ground and on a rustic bench accompanied by a small floor-level video projection onto a sheet of Croatian folk music titled Tamo Doli. The projection was a video of Ivancic, Rose and Speare and sitting at a piano conversing and intermittently trying their hands at Croation folk music. The other monitors primarily displayed manipulated loops of an old but active shipyard visible from most anywhere in the tourist town of Uljanik. Though the town is identified with tourism, the shipyard is a constant reminder of the importance of labor to the region's past and present. The video loops mimicked memory as they independently mutated in color, froze and shifted, like a haunting visual symphony that sometimes jibed and sometimes clashed with the folk music compon ent of the piece. "Facing Uljanik" communicated a reverence of place and a relationship to the past that was particularly poignant when weighed against controversies over Boston's own waterfront only blocks away.

Despite such musings, the mood of the closing was festive with an abundance of other works (and occasional performances, of course) that provided a fertile context for reconsiderations of the week's events. The dialogues held over drinks, cigarettes and snacks focused on new goals for the group with personal and global ideals of liberty taking on a more abstract and multi-faceted character. In retrospect, the artists mediated agency, negotiating liberties within and without, while emphasizing the circuitous connections between freedoms and social institutions. Hopefully, these investigations will be useful to the Croatian artists in their native context. In Boston, Mobius and its neighbors continue to face powerfully sanctioned interests. Any measure of the efficacy of Mobius's investigations of personal and artistic freedoms in the face of a tired ideology of "liberty" must be held in abeyance until the fate of Fort Point's artist community is sealed. The legacy of this exchange may not end up being some Al thusserian cultural intervention flying beneath the radar of social institutions to promote a resistance that might trickle back up to them. The legacy may be the simple ironies and inconsistencies about each other's understanding of liberty that were recognized and shared in the exchange. Seeing oneself through an outsider's eyes is always enlightening and may in this case lead to more useful strategies and agencies for the participants not only as artists, but as citizens of their many communities.

[Ed. note: Mobius is continuing its collaborations with Balkans artists and organizations. For more information visit www.mobius.org.]

KEVIN GREEN is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of Rochester. JON LUCKETT is an artist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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