SOPHIE kNEZIC
recent release of Arrival (2016) by the director Denis Villeneuve, based on the short fiction Story of Your Life (1998) by Ted Chiang. In these literary concoctions, protagonists are able to transport themselves light years into the future to witness radically transformed human (and nonhuman) social worlds or, more modestly aided by communicative alien heptapods, apprehend the future from the perspective of the present in a paradigmatic example of non-linear temporalities. However serendipitous the convergence of the two thematics of development and science fiction abstractly appeared to the curator, the works included in the Art Summit betrayed their somewhat awkward conjunction. The thematic of sci-fi was apparent in a handful of works, such as Katja Novitskova’s 2016 Pattern of Activation (model organism); an installation of scaled-up digital prints of C. elegans worms (a class of nematodes used in scientific experiments), which tangentially suggested the giant subterranean sandworms on the desert planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s sci-fi fantasy Dune (1965), or the human-terrorising worms known as ‘Graboids’ in Ron Underwood’s schlocky monster movie Tremors (1990). Similarly, Philippe Parreno’s Flickering Light (2013), a series of wallmounted tubular LED lamps, conjured the choreography of pulsating white light announcing the arrival of the UFO mothership in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) – although it remained a relatively feeble work. Ahmet Ögüt’s While Others Attack (2016), a twopart installation of bronze sculptures of humans assailed by attack dogs, implied more sinister visions of social orders of victimised citizens. The charging animals and fleeing humans suggested the über attack dog in Stephen King’s horror novel Cujo (1981), but in fact were based on actual documentary footage of historic acts of civil disobedience, such as the protests against South Africa’s apartheid regime. One of the most notorious works of 2014 was Pierre Huyghe’s Untitled (Human Mask); a widely internationally circulated nineteen-minute film of a monkey named Fuku-chan wearing a Noh mask and dressed in a girl’s tunic wandering around the empty premises of a traditional sake tavern – just north of Tokyo – where the monkey is actually employed as waiting staff. (However, given the impossibility of consent, Fukuchan’s ‘employment’ is an egregrious act of animal exploitation.) Untitled (Human Mask) screened alongside Huyghe’s Zoodram 4 – a hermit crab encased in a resin cast of Brancusi’s The Sleeping Muse (1910) – and Untilled (2012), a reclining concrete figure with a hive of bees colonising the figure’s head. Although not specifically evoking sci-fi, Huyghe’s works captured one of its key effects, as elaborated by literary theorist Darko Suvin, that of ‘cognitive estrangement’; a critical-creative reflection on reality that allows unfamiliar dimensions of normative systems or objects to emerge.5 The most spectacular example of cognitive estrangement was supplied by Ryan Gander’s Because Editorial is Costly (2016); a huge, polished stainless steel sculpture sited in an empty parking lot. With the asphalt at its base torn asunder, the piece suggested a crashed meteorite’s violent
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landing, but also theorist Mark Fisher’s observations on capitalism as the remnants of collapsed symbolic belief systems, when ‘all that is left is the consumer-spectator trudging through the ruins and the relics.’6 In typically humorous form, Gander elaborated a rambling anecdote explaining the work’s conception beyond its revamp of a sculpture by Belgian artist and De Stijl founding member Georges Vantongerloo (and yes, it did involve sci-fi). Other works more directly tackled the Summit’s ostensible thematic and critiqued the ubiquity of neoliberalist values. Angela Bulloch’s Rio Declaration – 27 Rules of Sustainable Development (2016) presented text of the 27 articles enshrined in the Declaration on Sustainable Development of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), which convened at Rio in 1992. Placing the articles in English and Japanese as large schematic wall-sized texts and posters in several of the Summit’s venues, Bulloch produced an elegant, non-interventionist gesture; the neutral presentation highlighting the discrepancy between the idealism of the Conference’s socially progressive principles and their currently unrealised status. On the eve of Trump’s presidential inauguration, the president-elect’s cavalier tweets conveying his intention to increase the United States’ nuclear arsenal, while encouraging nations such as Japan and South Korea to similarly upscale; his dismissal of climate change science as a hoax invented by the Chinese to reap trade advantages; and the global trend towards isolationism and xenophobia portend an era in direct contradistinction to the cooperative principles enshrined in the Declaration.7 A notable critique of the Summit’s nested topic of self-development emerged in Simon Fujiwara’s light box and video installation Joanne (2016), on the subject Joanne Salley; the Irish model and former art teacher, who was the victim of a media smear campaign in 2011 when explicit images of her were leaked to the British tabloid press. Fujiwara’s video is an exercise in re-branding, taking the format of an empowerment video that melds fact and contrivance in its savvy slippage between constructed personas versus ‘real life’ in a mash up of advertorial/documentary modes. In part a critique of the narcissism of social media, but simultaneously reliant on such platforms for its own distribution (excerpts were released in advance of the film’s completion), Joanne perfectly captured the aspirational dimension of corporate lifestyle training and self-enhancement. The instructional dimension of self-development was wittily evoked by Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s text-based piece How to Work Better (1991); a succinct treatise on how to achieve workplace success. A list of ten axioms (‘learn to listen’, ‘know the problem’, ‘smile’) was emblazoned on the side of a commercial building on an Okayama street, the infantilising and prescriptive slogans redolent of outdated corporate management manuals – the list in fact discovered by the artists at a ceramics factory in Thailand. Equally witty was Noah Barker’s Soundtrack for Development (2016), a seven-track score for a hypothetical