Global Players by Laura Schleussner
"What could artists do not to end up as cheerleaders for the advent of the global player?"--Werner von Delmont
Propelled by fiery plumes of exhaust, three Concorde jets take off from the runway in a
burst of acceleration. With their noses pointing in the same direction and wings aligned, the three jets have been optically fused into a single machine – a triplicate symbol of supersonic speed, technical mastery, and progress. Here the three-man German artist group BEWEGUNG NURR (Alekos Hofstetter, Christian Steuer and Lokiev Stoof) have chosen the planes as stand-ins for their own intended lift-off. However, as the title Disastrous Takeover I (High Noon) indicates, disaster looms, and economic forces are at play. The exact nature of the immanent threat initially remains unclear, and the playful malapropism of the titles — typical of Bewegung Nurr — suggests that an ill-considered business deal, i.e. the takeover and not the takeoff, is the problem. However, Kausalnexus another image in the series underscores the ambiguous blend of bad business and technical malfunction; it depicts the metal part that unleashed the terrible Concorde crash in
Paris in 2000, which ultimately led to the grounding of the world´s fastest passenger jets once and for all.
High Noon is not a quasi reenactment of sensationalized collective trauma à la Christoph Draeger. Instead, it is an example of Bewegung Nurr´s willingness to parody themselves within the context of capitalistic mores, such as competition and display of wealth. Pairing manifestations of power, capitalism, and the global economy with references to human failing or even outright disaster is a consistent strategy in the work of the group, which has taken on issues from AIDS, to corporate identity, global mobility, advertising strategies, and value creation. When the group places themselves in the center of the scene, they do so with self-deprecating silliness. As in Disastrous Takeover, they often make issue of their own ambitions and experiences on the market and the market of art. Ranging from photographs of the group members in various scenarios to animal representatives or objects in triplicate, the self-portraits essentially drawn on the nexus of individual and collective failure. The group assumes both the part of the individual and the guise of a corporate identity, but these are shifting roles that neither clearly argue for safety in numbers nor propagate the survival of the fittest. With a touch of tragic-comedy the portraits are a travesty of ordinary ambition, in which the superficial but effective mechanisms of power are juxtaposed with human weakness.
In two self-portraits from 1998 Haben Sie Auch Nichts Vergessen [Are You Sure You Haven´t Forgotten Anything] and Vertrauen Wagen [Try Trusting] Hofstetter, Steuer, and Stoof show themselves in the buttoned-down uniform reminiscent of sales associates at a discount media mart. White shirts, no ties, and an exaggeratedly anonymous nametag. This is a far cry from the elite tailoring of Gilbert and George or even the disheveled artist-intellectual jackets of the Slovenian collective IRWIN. Welcome to the service sector with its team of dressed-down customer representatives ready to help and inform. Accompanied by a pre-vacation checklist (e.g. pull out the plugs out of sockets, deposit an extra key with a person you trust etc.) Haben Sie Auch Nichts Vergessen shows the three giving "thumbs-up" gestures of assurance that we will be able to surmount all the complexities of our prepackaged existence. Can we put our trust in these men? Although Vertrauen Wagen suggests we can, the logo superimposed on the photograph indicates that the two standing members of the team dropped the ball, and the third is already on his knees. There is just something suspiciously amateurish about these three. The message is clear that we can't believe everything the front men in glossy brochures try to convey, no matter how secure we might want to feel. One needs a shave; a shirt needs ironing; and all of their fists are clenched a little to tight. Would someone get these guys out of here and bring in the real professionals!
But they are at it again in their B2Sex series from 2001. In a c-print three empty desk chairs personify the anonymous workers within the sterile environment of a call center. More help is on the way, although we never know who we have on the line. Is it someone in Madras trained to talk like a man from Louisiana? Are we calling Düsseldorf or Dublin? Culture and geography are purposely neutralized in the economy of international hotlines, but in the B2Sex video we get a look at the late-night antics of the men behind the voices. Dressed in soft pink shirts the three are apparently reacting to an overdose of professional behavior by letting off some erotic steam. Since they are looking into the camera, their object of desire is clearly not the computer, although they are undressing in front of it or giving it a lascivious lick. They are simply letting themselves go with a level of sympathetic wackiness that in the end makes the sterility and regimentation of the call center seem absurd. It is a small gesture of rebellion, a moment of acting out, in which the voices behind the machine exhibits their full-bodied desires.
Not only do we see the boys of Bewegung Nurr at work on the worldwide market, but we also see them in their personal efforts to succeed as a group. Here they shed their uniform attire and take the form of inflatable killer whales ready to perform a show in the Orkas series, three nauseatingly cute deer next to an asphalt road in Unsere Angst (Our Fear) or three jets in the aforementioned Disastrous Takeover. These shifting role-plays owe much to the tongue-in-cheek self-depictions of the Canadian artist collective General Idea — to the point of outright borrowing. However, Bewegung Nurr´s self-portraits are not so much about creating and celebrating an identity in the face of marginalization as it is about using a collective identity to unmask the "successism" of corporate identity strategies. Suggestions of uncertainty, performance anxiety, or failure have no place in corporate projections of success and competence, and these repressed anxieties are just what Bewegung Nurr brings to the surface. Ironically, it is this very lack of consistency and clarity—the shifting identities of group in each work—that can make Bewegung Nurr initially difficult to grasp. What do they want us to think? That's just it. Despite their mimicry of CI through a continuous stream of self-depictions, their refusal to serve up a uniform visual statement mirrors the consciously ambivalent strategies of Eastern European artists, such as Neue Slovenische Kunst, which were used to confront and subtlety subvert totalitarian ideologies. Like the group Gorgona from Zagreb, they seem to be "permanently suspicious of excessive clarity".
There is constant thread throughout Bewegung Nurr´s self-portraits: their self-stylized inability to master the game. At first, their mishaps and slip-ups in Cash Fall A and Spree—respectively featuring cameo appearances by the critic Peter Funken and the curator Inke Arns — seem self-referential to the point of art-world pandering. A disillusioned commentary on the artist-curator power relationship. But the curators played along in good humor, because they understood that more is at stake. Here the issue of Bewegung Nurr´s own success becomes most critical when it seems to require the fragmentation of the group or the loss of a member. In EWG only Lokiev Stoof successfully makes the victory jump over the tennis net, while the others tumble, and in the air tank of the emergency device in For Advancement Only there are three mouthpieces but only enough air for one. These portraits seem to reflect their own anxieties about the ability of the group to persevere under tough market conditions. What does it take to get ahead? The collective does not appear to be a strategic choice, and competition seems to require a special American brand of rugged individualism.
This is where their play gets serious. As Charles Esche wrties, "We could speculate that collective creativity is the normal artistic response to a moment of extreme individualism." However, Bewegung Nurr is not making a call to collective activism. They simply explore an ever-timely conflict in the value system of our global economy: the diametric opposition of community and greed. In the context of the current economic downturn in Germany, the three take on the role of likeable anti-heroes, the baffled German man on the street times three. In addition, the three members of Bewegung Nurr are from a generation that came of age in Dresden and Berlin in the chaotic era of (re)unification of capitalist and socialist Germany. Indications that they are grappling with the challenges of the contemporary economic situation are, at least in an artistic context, just an act. They have mastered the visual manipulations of the business media so well, that they could have decided to use them to their own advantage in the kind of semiotic convergence of art and market called pop. But they didn't. They may seem to be standing on the sidelines, but they're no cheerleaders. Of course, the more successful they are in their own market, the more our responses to their parody of failure will act as a barometer of our own attitude towards the global market or our personal anxiety about our position on the ladder of success. It's about time that somebody gave these zany players a prize. If someone does, I am sure that the three will capture the event on film and add it to their ironic oeuvre.
Note:This article also appears in "Klassik, 1989-2005", a recent catalogue published on Bewegung Nurr by Revolver, Frankfurt.
