At the heart of Declining Democracy, the new show at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, is the realisation that in this new century, representative governments of the western world and the people they aspire to lead are moving farther and farther apart. Of the 12 selected artists and artists’ collectives who observe that gulf, some propose ways for politicians to reconnect with the individual citizen while others suggest ways to fill that void and make the people’s opinions heard.
Above all these exhibits remind us that, although society is engulfed by instant information from the world’s four corners, artists retain their vital, age-old role: through imagery and reflection, they help the rest of us make sense of the forces unleashed in a rapidly changing world.
Declining Democracy becomes ‘political’ by highlighting the limits of a representative system facing contemporary challenges. Multiculturalism is just one. Clashes between host nations and new communities in his native Germany, for example, led Thomas Kilpper to distill from the situation gripping Lampedusa, the Italian island where thousands arrive illegally each year from Africa, tense images encapsulating Fortress Europe’s controversial reaction to the free migration of peoples.
Significantly, Kilpper’s linocut prints stylistically bring to mind an earlier period of ideological polarisation, pre-World War II Europe. History supplies relevant lessons, and Italian artist Cesare Pietroiusti is offering workshops inspired by the scuole quadri that once trained Italy’s governing classes. Up-to-date solutions use the web to encourage people to ‘get their hands dirty’ with political engagement. The Italian group Buuuuuuuuu embraces new technology as the channel for posting dissenting messages that register opposition through satire and individual action.
By no means do all the artists represented here project partisan views. The impact of the fast-moving, wall-filling animation by German duo Michael Bielicky and Kamila B. Richter is sociological, even cathartic. Computer-generated symbols represent manmade threats and natural disasters. Using a joystick familiar from video games, visitors are momentarily empowered to blast bad news out of the landscape. All the while, a Twitter feed interprets real world events in terms of the dip and rise in stock-market prices.
Palazzo Strozzi catches the moment imaginatively with its current programme. The Money and Beauty exhibition in its principal gallery traces the iconography of modern banking’s medieval origins, its symbols and attributes. The subterranean rooms of Strozzina buzz with provocative perspectives on how market capitalism’s preferred ideology can recapture public trust in the wake of today’s calamitous global financial crises.
Where is the emblem of this modern challenge? Maybe Belgian artist Francis Alÿs is closest. In 2002, he organised 500 volunteers armed with shovels to move a massive sand dune in Peru 10 centimetres from its original location. The point of his magnificent film is not the small distance moved but the power of the collective act in directing change. As a metaphor for human will, this exhibition offers no stronger image.
