The existence of the expanded field of art, the fact that art no longer has to look like or be about 'Art', is something we should neither need to justify nor even take much time to explain these days.
We could simply state that the present condition of art is a consequence of modernism's last hundred years or so and modern artists' attempt to shift art away from the perceived docility of the bourgeois comfort zone. For reasons part political, part devilish and partly in the name of experimentation, art has now ended up near to the place where it was headed for when van Gogh happily found himself thrown out of the Brussels academy for lack of painterly skill.
A much more urgent, contemporary question then is how artists might use the sites that art occupies today in order to think things otherwise? In other words, how art can express an idea that catches the imagination of others? How might that work question a dominant world-economic system and throw into relief, disturb and even nullify that system's rhetoric of claims to apparent self-evident success? As the system might well announce: 'If you're not with us, then you're against us', it's clear that this invitation to be 'with us' suggests all that is required is submission to enjoying the good times ahead. So there are certain disadvantages, especially for those who might live on the wrong side of the world, but things are, self evidently, getting better 'over there' and the new factories are bringing employment and even a smattering of civil rights. For, after all, imperialism is finished and the rest is just business, isn't it?
Despite what may seem like cynicism here, I am actually more hopeful now of art's expanded potential than I have been for some time. Some things, some experiences, stop me in my tracks and make me rethink the value systems I have and complicate my complacent 'leftist' view of capitalism, while still making me want to see change. Many of those things, the ones that don't confirm but complicate, are works of art and it is here where Sean Snyder, amongst others, enters the picture.
For instance, when Snyder chooses to research the links between Dallas's JR Ewing and a (corrupt) Romanian soya-bean magnate who rebuilt the fictional family home Southfork in the Transylvanian hinterland between Bucharest and the Black Sea Coast, then out pops a whole series of unlikely, frightening, complicated relationships that stretch across the globe. From George W. Bush attending the Romanian magnate's wedding, to the latter's links with the Russian oil cartel Lukoil and on to his 'Disneyland' in the Balkans, we suddenly perceive a picture of another kind of global network: one that moves large amounts of money around and between its members, some of whom are celebrities, some unknown, some democratically elected, some not. Their original reason for being there is less significant than their actual (self-perpetuating) presence in the web. Of course, there's no easy ethical escape from this situation because we're all implicated in it through the exchange and representative processes of late capitalism. We buy, we vote, we read. And what could be more affirming in this respect than the warm melodramatic blanket of American television serials, where the particularities of one fictional US family becomes the only convincing role model for aspiring post-communist developers.
It is a similar story when Snyder goes to the outskirts of Shanghai to disinter the story of a perfect reproduction of American suburbia built there. Here, a whole estate has been flown in from North America and rebuilt by US labourers to 'exacting' western standards. The details even extend to the type of lawn grass and the design of the rubbish bins. The regional CEO's of multinational companies who live in this American 'utopia' face an almost complete detachment from the local culture and economy, and create for themselves a colonial detachment far more complete and extreme than anything experienced during the earlier European colonial period. Snyder is also one of the few artists to reflect on the most non-global country in the world, North Korea. Through a dogged persistence, Snyder extracts as much information as possible about Pyongyang urban planning from the tiny number of tourist reports and official information that emerges from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
These projects exemplify two particular skills in Snyder's repertoire: first, his acute second sense for revealing poignant details in a much bigger research project; and second, his ability to weave a narrative story around comparatively dry facts. Tracing the route of his Romanian work in detail, 'Dallas Southfork in Hermes Land', Slobozia, Romania begins with a tourist visit in 1999 in which Snyder experiences a rather different reality from the one offered in the established capitalist media. Initially Snyder was intrigued by the provisional use of the monstrous legacy of Ceaucescu's urban remodelling. As he has said: 'People patronised kiosks and small stores rather than western-style chains showing a sort of resistance or maybe lack of trust in anything standardised or official.' He was also drawn to the presence of diplomatic US contacts in the 1970s and 80s through large billboard advertising featuring Larry Hagman, or JR Ewing, from the soap opera Dallas. As he discovered that this programme was, for most Romanians, their only access to American culture before 1990, it became the trigger for his investigation to move away from an academic account of Romanian urban planning and into fantastic scenarios linking early capitalist extortion with the US Republican Party's international policy and a home-grown Romanian Disneyland failure. The presentation of the work in its first incarnation involved video, photographs, newspaper clippings and two architectural models. Telling the story through a connected visual narrative, the work took us through detailed models of two imagined Southfork ranches, the main stage for the Dallas series. One model was created using details gleaned from the television series, shot mainly in a studio but also using a real ranch for all the exterior shots. The other was based on the out-of-scale reproduction of the ranch in Slobozia, eastern Romania, 'rebuilt' by the soya-bean king. The scale of the Slobozian Southfork was probably wrong because the original series was shot with a wide-angle lens, distorting the dimensions of the architecture on screen, and the Romanian architects presumably measured the structure from video stills. The 'real' ranch that Southfork was based on, and which was used for all the exterior shots, was actually quite small and was shot in such a way to make it look bigger. The internal division of spaces inside each building was also completely different, with the Romanian version intended for use as a hotel or conference centre, and the televised version containing some apparently impossible, or mutating, architectural connections between the bedrooms of the various protagonists. Alongside the models were two monitors. The first one replayed scenes of JR in his pomp from the original Dallas, authoritatively shaking hands or sitting with his legs up on his desk. The gestures of power were all too clearly choreographed, but not unconvincing given the 'real' story unfolding around the walls. The other monitor showed how the architectural office that designed the ranch for the TV series employed different views and angles to emphasise the opulence of the location. Here, as in the rest of his installation/display, Snyder offers a number of clues to the story in the form of photographs and other simple forms of two-dimensional information: a newspaper article about George Bush's presence at a Romanian wedding; a news clipping concerning the arrest of the corrupt owner of Slobozian ranch; photographs of a replica of the Eiffel Tower with a sign in Romanian warning people to keep out of the park at night; and, finally, some marketing material featuring Larry Hagman promoting Lukoil.
To draw something from these elements we are forced to weave a story, one that not only speaks of globalism and its far-reaching tendrils but also of the dependent interconnectedness of an elite of politicians, celebrities and business people. The overt appearance of this network comes not exactly as a surprise but it does induce a slightly uncanny feeling of disturbance. Of course, most of us imagine such links exist but we cannot help wondering why they are not made more of by the media, especially if a single artist, working alone and with next-to-no budget, can reveal them. Snyder might wryly like to mention conspiracy theories here, but the fact that the media is itself a player in these networks cannot be insignificant. Why cause problems for yourselves when there's plenty of trouble to be made elsewhere?
It's possible that I am getting carried away with the implications of this work. Clearly, Snyder himself is led to these stories by a fascination with architecture and city design. Yet they always also seem to take him (and us) off on other narrative journeys through personalities and the histories of political change. Even the architectural rub is quite contradictory. The (re)creation of Southfork is actually a recreation of a hybrid, part-virtual and part-distorted, real building. Its construction involves quite a significant transformation from plywood and paint to bricks and mortar. In the television series Southfork signified the home of an established capitalist dynasty, whereas in Romania it stands as a monument to the failed speculative development of a 'wannabe' capitalist. The American version's seductive mixture of stage set and camera tricks belies the confident continuity of US capitalism while its physical manifestation in Europe was extremely unstable. The signs of Dallas and Southfork are certainly being recycled, but they are also having their nature and purpose changed. We can see through Snyder's work how what, on the surface, seems like a simple example of US hegemony and neo-colonialism is turned on its head under local or regional conditions.
In order for us to imagine the process of our future differently from the American model, we probably have to start by deciding whether we believe we are really at the end of social and political change. On that decision rests whether we choose to make the system work for us, or whether we try to change it. When Snyder illustrates a gap in the signifiers of capitalism, he provides a critical opportunity to observe the differences between the theoretical model of capitalism and the real existing conditions that capitalism imposes upon societies with very different histories. He gives us material to judge the effects. Thus the images of McDonald's restaurants in Shenzhen look like the McDonald's everywhere. Yet we cannot help but imagine how differently those pathologically familiar signs are read. The same applies to the skyscrapers of Pyongyang, or the suburban sprawl of the wealthy American ghetto in Shanghai. Snyder seems to be telling us that it is in these places where, finally, we have to judge the benefits of capitalism. Capitalism's claims to universalism, to an end of difference, and even (in its most extravagant hyperbolic form) to the end of history have to stand or fall on their ability to win over the rest of humanity and to subsume all other value systems - just like most religious beliefs in fact. What Snyder provides us with is some of the basic information with which to begin to make a judgement. The question he leaves open is whether the divergence in reading the products of US culture will narrow or widen as time goes by. It is one of the most crucial questions of our time as it pertains to whether the stage of capitalism is indeed the last stage of human social development. It is, of course, an unanswerable question, but maybe it is at the edges of the known capitalist world that we can begin to see the cracks in the self-evident certainty of it all.
This is why the expanded field of art can be simultaneously exciting, creative and disturbing. It is a field that provides space for work such as Snyder's: it can finance it and distribute it, and even give it license to be taken seriously as a cultural product. But, most importantly, the expanded field of art sets loose on the world propositions that can, in turn, become the seeds of other ideas of how, as a world population, we might deal with value and exchange, or at least indicate the future limits of the current political monotheism.
