Getting Real at Bucharest Biennale 4
By Daniel Tucker
Published in H-Art Magazine (Belgium), June 2010
Das Kapital, the book that changed the world, is the subject of Alexander Kluge’s 90 minute film contribution to this year’s Bucharest Biennale 4 (BB4). Excerpted from the 570 min original, this version of News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx – Eisenstein – Das Kapital was fittingly installed at the Institute for Political Research at the University of Bucharest, a unique space for critical ideas about regional politics. Like all of the BB4 venues, the IPR is not an art institution and embodies the organizer’s goals of using an exhibition to influence the culture and politics of Romania. Included in interviews between Kluge and a range of philosophers, there is a charming dialogue with Hans Magnus Enzensberger about how capitalist crisis can be represented in art. This soon transitions into Der Mensch Im Ding a small film within the film produced by respected Berlin filmmaker Tom Tykwer who uses Marx’s analysis of capitalism to dissect every manufactured material visible in a short slow-motion film scene of a woman running down the street. From the connection between her skirt and the global textile industry to the surprising story of fasteners uses to hold street signs in place, Tykwer elegantly exposes the inescapable complexity of contemporary capitalism in the materials, which make up our lives.
Kluge’s work is presented at IPR alongside the brilliant Golden Age for Children by Stefan Constantinescu and the simple and highly effective The Only Reason by Fereshteh Toosi which presents a 1970s American white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan membership card reading “The Only Reason You Are WHITE Today is Because Your Ancestors Believed & Practices SEGREGATION” detourned to read “The Only Reason You Are A CITIZEN Today is Because Your Ancestors Believed & Practices IMMIGRATION.” The cards were nonchalantly stacked on one of the building’s radiator, free for visitors to take. This casual display method generally worked well, blending the works into the context in which they were presented, even though sometimes it was cramped and difficult to identify which work was by whom and some of the installations seemed haphazard with audio levels off and video loops failing to loop.
Daniel Tucker 