Text by Rein Wolfs
(from the catalogue «Day after Day», Center for Contemporary Art Fribourg, 2003-2007, translated from the German by Michael Craig)
At some point the world changed. Simple and clichéd as this statement sounds, its temporal reference is vague. “At some point” is imprecise – or more accurately, “at some point” is at best only an apparent reference to a specific point in time.
“At some point the world changed” could also be the first sentence of a fairy tale. In any case it isn’t true; to be true, it would at least have to be written in the plural. The world has changed more than once – it’s changed many times – and is in a permanent state of flux.
When we consider the world in which we live now, it’s probably 11 September 2001 that’s most often seen as the critical turning point in world events. The virtually incomprehensible act of destruction on that traumatic day has been by far the greatest upheaval experienced in our young millennium. Since then, September 11 has been blamed for almost everything that has gone wrong. The tenor of our era, dominated by fears of terrorism and economic disaster, seems to have been engendered on that fateful date.
But the seeds of September 11 were actually sown earlier. They lie in the religious coup in Iran at the end of the 1970s, where the United States was held in check by what was an almost endless hostage crisis, or in radicalisation and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Both mark the inception of moments when the world changed that predate the great turning point of September 11. After that fatal date, towards the end of the 1980s, came the fall of Soviet communism, which in retrospect seems to have been played out more as a sideshow. The response – a radically new relationship between church and state in the east, and American protection of so-called western values of freedom, two developments that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s – threw the world out of balance and marked the beginning of a new era of post-Cold War polarisation. In consideration of this, it is fair to say that at some point in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the world changed.
A European
On 20 June 1979, the 39th president of the United States, Georgia Democrat and former peanut farmer James Earl (Jimmy) Carter Jr., addressed the press with an impressive expression of his commitment to environmental and energy issues. He managed to make his forward-looking standpoint brilliantly clear, in both theoretical and practical terms. Carter’s speech marked no less than the symbolic launch of a new environmental policy, together with the inauguration of a solar panel installed on the roof of the White House at the behest of the president himself. America, according to Carter, stood on the threshold of a great future where solar energy would be the response to the politically driven energy crisis and a growing scarcity of fossil fuels. The magical Year 2000 was set as the target date when a new, sustainable energy policy would triumph.
Carter had already spoken of the need for a new energy policy in his first presidential address to the nation. According to critics, he made the faux pas of calling on Americans to turn down the heating and don warm pullovers. Americans are famously averse to discomfort, and, unlike Europeans, would rather wait for new technology to solve a problem than do without familiar comforts. If resources are running out, you go and find new resources; you don’t go the rough, spartan route of abandoning good old American values like prosperity, world leadership and economically-founded rationality.
But Carter didn’t stop with the pullovers and turning down the thermostat. During his four-year term he invested many millions in solar energy-related research. A proper Department of Energy was set up under his leadership. Carter’s newly formulated energy policy and environmental consciousness made people aware of the fact that the world could not go on using resources at the same pace forever. Was Jimmy Carter a precursor to Al Gore, an energy guru before the appellation was even conceived of? Whatever the case, in retrospect his commitment to sustainable values looks more European than American in light of that nation’s virtually proverbial refusal to combat global warming.
An American
Carter lost the next presidential election to his Republican opponent, Hollywood B-movie actor Ronald Reagan. One of the main reasons for Carter’s failure to gain re-election was his fumbled handling of the Iranian hostage crisis, where 52 US citizens were held captive at the embassy in Tehran for 444 days. In terms of foreign policy, Americans saw Carter as weak. Rather than opt for a military response to the Soviet invasion of an increasingly radical Afghanistan, he chose instead to boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, a move that did not go down well with voters. So Carter wasn’t the man to firmly counter the growing ambitions of Muslim fundamentalists or the expansionary plans of the Soviet communists. What people often forget is his decisive contribution to the Camp David peace talks between Israel and Egypt, and how he hammered out the SALT II arms accords with the Soviet Union. He was even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 in recognition of his efforts.
During the press conference held to dedicate the solar panel on the roof of the West Wing of the White House and to present his wide-ranging solar energy programme, Carter – perhaps lacking confidence in his statesmanship – also cast doubt on his own ideas. He raised the possibility that in a generation’s time, the solar heater could also be “a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken”. And indeed the heater had only been in operation six years before his successor had it dismantled and packed away. The next decade saw the neglected solar panel installed on a college roof in Maine, where, for all its presidential past and symbolic significance for the country’s energy policy, it was used as a power source for the student canteen.
In a society so utterly driven by success, it has become common for the new person in charge to radically break with the ideas of their predecessor. Constant renewal and reinvention are perennial features of a capitalist system built on values such as competition and freedom. Reagan, a capitalist monstrosity par excellence (certainly as compared with Carter), was the ultimate caricature of a free market economy personified – almost more American than the Americans. Poor Carter couldn’t have had a more utterly different successor. Compared with the straight-shooting actorprophet of capitalist expansion with his short-sighted focus on maximising profits, in retrospect Carter looks something like a philosopher, a long-term strategist with a sustainable agenda, who consciously accepted – and articulated – the risk that his politics could soon become a museum piece. Yes, like a philosopher or even an artist of sorts – whose policies were built more out of the sand of his global visions than the steel of the weapons favoured by his presidential predecessors. Everyone knows that sand is not as hard as steel, but it is more flexible, adaptable, agreeable and readily available for most people on our planet. The story of this artist-cum-president with a European tinge versus the grotesquely macho American actor could be the stuff of popular tragedy. As it turns out, it is the stuff of a subtle work of art about a world that, at some point, changed.
Two artists
A curiosity, a museum piece and an example of a road not taken is a composite work by Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller. Using contemporary artistic strategies, the conflicts outlined above are circumscribed, revealed and transformed into a transhistorical work of art. At the opening of the exhibition, Carter’s press conference was made into a performance through the technique of re-enactment. The technique of the black and white documentary film is used to transform the seemingly straightforward historical peregrinations of the solar panel into a many-faceted, pregnant metaphor of world history somewhere between fact and fiction. The technique of the installation is used to fuse the different levels of the exhibition space into a richly overlaid amalgam of different perspectives and approaches.
In a curiosity, a museum piece and an example of a road not taken, Hemauer and Keller confirm themselves as political artists whose artistic ambitions engage with political facts and events. The result is an art installation that tries to get to the bottom of the paradoxes of sustainability and economics (also the hidden theme of today’s over-commercialised art world). How close can art get to the commercial before its significance as a medium of sustainability is jeopardised? Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller’s installation at the Fri-Art Centre of Art is a contemporary 21st-century re-staging and displacement of a piece of largely neglected world history whose significance is decisively coloured, among other things, by today’s interpretation and the deliberate choice of artistic perspective. It is questionable whether Carter’s solar energy tour de force and its inevitable failure – given the historical and political developments – will be judged to be important in historical terms. Is the material from which Christina Hemauer & Roman Keller’s work is composed one of the decisive moments in 20th-century world history, or is it ultimately nothing more than a footnote to a greater, more epic text that has remained as a literary and documentary distillate of the post-age? Did the world really change at some point in the late 1970s and early 1980s?
A museum
While Jimmy Carter, in a speech characterised by the uneasy premonition and existential doubt usually reserved for Europeans, may have anticipated that his showcase project could ultimately fail and be consigned to a museum, he could not have foreseen that almost 30 years later, two Swiss artists would literally turn his solar phantom into a museum piece at a Fribourg exhibition. But maybe he secretly dreamed that his solar panels, with their limited life-span, would at some point end up moved to an institution whose very job is seen as preserving lasting values. Admittedly Fri-Art is not one of those museums dedicated to conservation, but as a centre of art it certainly deals with something that could be lasting: art. Now, so much later, it is in an art museum that Carter’s energy programme is again receiving public acclaim, an impetus to more profound reflection.
Hemauer and Keller look at the resolute course of history and transatlantic issues; they look at Carter’s energy policy, an historical and failed project, and the way art can behave towards reality. One could say they have made a museum piece out of a worn-out piece of propaganda and the way that perception of historical events can shift. Presented in an artistic installation in a museum, Carter’s speech becomes a grotesque in which everything turns into exaggeration – an exaggeration, however, that is simultaneously countered by the meticulous quality of the video documentation produced to accompany it.
The museum is the place of reflection, and art is a place where truth is put into question. If the art of the last hundred years has made one thing clear, it is surely that almost nothing is as it seems, that truth as such does not exist, and that perception and perspective are crucial to the meaning of things. Even though in most museums a clear art-historical approach is usually seen as the be-all-and-end-all, the contemporary museum is also a place that celebrates doubt, relativity and critical questioning. A museum could easily present Carter’s solar energy policy as a historical phenomenon with current relevance. But that wouldn’t make it art. It’s politics, or the politics of a dreamer, and slightly poetic – certainly compared with the ideologies of most American presidents.
In the museum-fit mental space of this artwork there is Carter meets Christina Hemauer & Roman Keller, and politics meets art. At Fri-Art the attentive viewer will realise that Jimmy Carter’s act was primarily political in nature, and that Hemauer and Keller have transformed it into an artistic act and converted it transhistorically into an act full of doubt, relativity and critical scrutiny. Carter’s Europeanlike doubt becomes artistic relativity, its significance interpreted in cultural or even artistic terms. And with an approach often reminiscent of a journalist’s, the two artists deliberately exert an influence on political events whose course they re-interpret from a 21stcentury perspective. A curiosity, a museum piece and an example of a road not taken fulfils the premise of Michel Ritter’s words: “Every artistic act is a political act.”