Neutral State
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Some mystery blogger let us know that August the 1st is Swiss National Day. Good timing, then, both that we just happen to have this information and that Dan Halter, on a residency in Zurich, has done this installation in a shop window.
Typically of Halter's work, I found this one really succinct and strong. Sock it to 'em, Danny boy!
Labels: dan halter, Swiss National Day, Zurich
posted by Vince Condesini at 11:29 AM
12 Comments:
Neutral nation, neutral state. Where did all the comments go?
like all of Dan's work, this is safe, tame, self-conscious and fucking obvious. Dear god can someone give this lost Whenwe political asylum in Switzerland so we don't have to engage with this lukewarm dishwater any more.
I think the 'lost' bit is more that this work is lost on you, dumbass.
In this installation, the red of the Swiss flag is made up of cheap plastic Chinese bags, stuffed till they are bulging. The white cross in the middle, the emblem of the Swiss nation, is a gaping hole through which one sees between the bags to the plain board at the back of the display window, a board which has no function other than as a mere backdrop to the objects on display.
Chinese bags like these are seen all over Africa, piled at railway stations and markets. They are the most common form of packaging used by the dispossessed, the poverty-stricken, the migrant thousands roaming across the continent, grasping at survival, hauling wares, in grim and protracted struggle. The largest numbers in which I've ever seen these bags at once, is stacked at the central railway station of Johannesburg. I was told at the time that these bags contained the wares of traders hauling goods which would otherwise be unavailable in the strife-wracked chaos of Zimbabwe, home country of Dan Halter.
The functioning of white culture is a relatively new area in the study of hegemonic power. An overwhelmingly central means by which white culture retains power is that it positions itself as the unremarkable, blank backdrop against which other cultures are foregrounded as 'other'. It constructs itself as the normal and the objective, the rational and the given, while it constructs others as grasping, fluctuating, subjective, and consequently lacking. The spreading of white hegemonic power through colonialism has created this opposition between the background of 'objective sanity' of whites and the foreground of the irrational 'others' across the surface of the earth, and very emphatically in Africa.
In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, trauma is real insofar as it remains unsymbolisable and is a permanent dislocation at the very heart of the subject. The experience of trauma reveals how the real can never be absorbed into the social reality. No matter how we try to put our pain and suffering into language, to symbolize it, there is always something left over. There is always a residue that cannot be transformed through language. This is the real.
So in this one little shop window in Zurich, Dan Halter has single-handedly managed tocontrast the 'real' of African with the symbolic language of white culture as a featureless but ubiquitous background. He has summed up a number of extraordinarily powerful and painful social conditions and beliefs that pervade the neo-colonial relationship between First and Thirld World.
But other than that, the work is a safe, tame, obvious load of lukewarm dishwater. Shame on you Dan, how could you? Off with your head!
Exactly!
Never fuck with a man who has lost his country
Hi Ron!
Yo
Why not put 7:08's tract up next to the shop window? or print out copies of the pic with the writing and distribute liberally so that more, less intellectually inclined morons like police officers, politicians and so forth actually get the message. Just think. That might start something... and if two people do it... in harmony, they'll think they're both faggots so it won't work... but if THREE people do it...imagine... they may think it's an organisation. CAN YOU IMAGINE FIFTY PEOPLE A DAY POSTING THIS UP ALL OVER EUROPE???
Friends, they may think its a movement... and thats what it is. A bowel movement in C flat.
What is the title of the piece?
alice's restorant
racist baggage
oh dear
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