"Streets
are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective
is an eternally restless, eternally moving essence that,
among the facades of buildings, endures, experiences, learns,
and senses as much as individuals in the protection of their
four walls. For this collective the shiny enameled store
signs are as good and even better a wall decoration as a
salon oil painting is for the bourgeoisie. Walls with the
"defense d'afficher" are its writing
desks, newspapers are its libraries, letterboxes its bronzes,
benches its bedroom furniture..."
Walter Benjamin. Das Passagen-Werk.
Through the figure of the flâneur, Walter Benjamin portrayed
one of the key protagonists of modernity. This reader of
metropolitan signs, translator of urban experiences and
resonance point of the crowd was the witness of a changing
world at the dawn of industrialization and the patient teller
of city development and mass growth.
As Benjamin's Baudelaire did with the Paris of the end of
XIX century, Janez Janša and Mikael
Lundberg face again the metropolitan landscape.
But in this journey, at the beginning of XXI century, local
references have burst in uncountable sensorial fragments
that in their simultaneous presentation transmit the frantic
rhythm of six cities at the crossroads of information flows.
Taking to the extreme the tourist gaze, the artists condense
their route along those cities (Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki,
St Petersburg, Kaliningrad and Gdansk) in an incongruent
superposition of information channels: swift sightseeing,
texts dissolved in a sound mass, fragments of media, location
data. The cities express themselves through their linguistic
and architectural physiognomy, their monuments, their historical
chronicles, their ads, their heroes, their economic structures.
Big enterprises, cultural clichés and residues of a conflictive
past are the indifferent and parodic symbols of old State-nations
painfully resisting the pounding of globalization.
In the confrontation of local realities with the homogeneous
description of information flows there is a conflict between
two different scales, one human and the other planetary.
The first one unfolds in a dislocation of everyday life,
conveyed by partial and changing information, unfinished
stories and speedy rhythms. The constancy of habits, the
security of well-known places changes into an unstable reality
showing the consequences of global politics, migrations
and technological transformations. The planetary scale manifests
in the GPS data that document the artists' movements through
the cities. Its presence is also paradoxical. As location
instrument, GPS data is unable to inform about the local
particularities of the visited places. Instead, it appears
as an intriguing target that threatens the images, adding
a new menace to their precarious nature.
As Baudelaire's gaze crystallized in memorable poems, Janša
and Lundberg's do in an ephemeral symphony. Maybe it is
an uncomfortable format for art history, but it is the only
one capable.
|