By Ellen Mara De Wachter
Octagon Court performing as part of 'The Universal', 2012 by Berry Patten. Espace Arlaud, Lausanne. Photo by Nelly Rodriguez
On a Sunday evening in December, in a snowy Swiss pine grove, a gathering of festival-goers squeezed into ‘Salutations – Study for a Swiss Sculpture’ (2012), a 4-metre-tall silver pyramid created by Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski. The occasion was an impromptu finissage for Les Urbaines, a three-day festival in Lausanne. Now in its 16th year, the event was an eclectic and occasionally incongruous mix of around 40 projects in the disciplines of theatre, music and visual art, hosted by venues across the small city on the shore of Lake Geneva.
Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski, ‘Salutations – Study for a Swiss Sculpture’, 2012. Installation view, Jardin de l’Arsenic, Lausanne, Switzerland. Photo by Jennifer Lewandowski
The visual art component of this year’s festival – specifically the strand made up of artists from London – was its most coherent offering. Works made especially for the festival context highlighted some of its bureaucratic problems, while others, like Salutations, engaged with the physical and social experience of festivals, a format which may prove to be an increasingly popular platform for contemporary art in light of widespread funding cuts and pressure on artists to be ever more resourceful with time and money.
LePDF.ch (2012) by the Peckham-based collective Lucky PDF was an installation borne out of strife. The project began as a collaboration with Fred, a Lausanne-based tobacco start-up. If ever there were an enterprise that cried out for pungent critique, this was it. Lucky PDF invited artists to design packaging for the brand, with a view to selling limited-edition cigarette packets on the open market. The festival’s organizers, however, baulked at the idea of using public funds to enable an artistic partnership with such a controversial product and they vetoed the project. This knee-jerk censorship exposed something of the hollowness of the festival’s ‘commitment to emerging and experimental art forms’, as vaunted by director Patrick de Rahm. On the whole, its live programmes erred on the side of caution, and the event suffered from extreme shifts in tone among some of its elements, suggesting a lack of overall vision.
Nevertheless, a brush with censorship did not deter Lucky PDF from engaging with the economy of corporate arts sponsorship. They opened themselves up once again to the compromises that come with product endorsements. Festival organizers set them up with their next partner, Migros, which owns supermarkets, banks, bookshops, petrol stations and also funds the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich. Migros is the country’s largest retailing company and its biggest employer. And conveniently for Les Urbaines’ organizers, its shops sell neither cigarettes nor alcohol.
Lucky PDF, ‘LePDF.ch’, 2012. Installation view, Curtat Tunnel, Lausanne. Photo by Ellen Mara De Wachter
LePDF.ch consisted of the Migros logo festooned around a former bus station ticketing office, with an array of posters featuring quotes by and life-size cardboard cut-outs of artists in the collection of the Migros Museum, alongside a spinning hologram of household products, all arranged to resemble point-of-sale displays used in supermarkets. Lucky PDF asked the artists to choose their favourite product from the supermarket’s catalogue, bringing together Migros’s retail and art collecting branches, so we learn that Cory Arcangel likes the CD labels and Shana Moulton the strawberry yoghurt, an essential prop in her performances.
When I asked the members of Lucky PDF about the ethical implications of getting involved with a company that has such a monopoly, they were positive about the experience, valuing the relationship itself as a constituent of the work. LePDF.ch exists in a kind of virtual state relative to Migros given the theoretical possibility that the company might pick up the artwork as an endorsement of its activities and thus complete a cycle that began when Migros originally agreed to lend their name to the project. This kind of happy partnership is typical of a new mode of corporate critique, a kind of ‘collabo-critique’, which is light years away from the biting institutional critique of the 1990s. Lucky PDF’s work might be judged toothless when compared to an incisive practice such as Hans Haacke’s, an artist who has repeatedly attacked arts sponsorship by the tobacco industry.
Les Urbaines, Lausanne. Photo by Nelly Rodriguez
Beyond the financial entanglements of Les Urbaines, the projects included dealt with the experience of short-lived gatherings and the communities that grow out of them. Bringing a typically British cultural export to Lausanne, Berry Patten’s The Universal (2012) was a personal tribute to Blur’s 2009 reunion gig on the Pyramid Stage, the main venue at the Glastonbury festival. Patten’s work included a video collage of the gig, made up of YouTube footage and clips shot by friends and family. It was projected amid homemade tepees and billboards depicting kitsch views of Glastonbury Tor. The whole thing came alive during an opening night performance by the musical duo Octagon Court, who re-enacted Blur’s song Tender, down to the telltale signs of the fraught relationship between frontman Damon Albarn and guitarist Graham Coxon. A mystical icon and place of pilgrimage, the pyramid was a recurring theme in an eccentric festival that nevertheless might benefit from a re-assessment of its raison d’être and approach to risk and experimentation.
Ellen Mara De Wachter