WAR FEVER
Florian Waldvogel
The restructuring of inner cities along economic and administrative lines goes back to the 1970s. Inner urban space has undergone a process of
transformation and structural change from being a lived environment to
becoming a capitalized experiential space through the concentrated influx of retailers and commercial operations. Virtually all areas of the city have been functionalized into shopping districts, residential quarters and business parks. This hierarchical configuration of urban space also has the effect of regulating and disciplining the people who move within it. Over the last thirty years the public sphere, which was treated by the Situationists as also the Punk movement as a socio-political realm of action and an environment for the reconquest of the subjective, has developed into a gigantic shopping mall for satisfying even the most bizarre needs. The city as narrative space describes the mirroring of social conditions in a citys architectural and sculptural structure. The architectural character of a place reproduces its social structure, i.e. a sites architecture reveals the kinds of user it is aspiring to attract as its clientele. The ideal of the clean city is echoed in the appearance of its buildings, squares, streets and institutions as well as in their function. In order to firmly entrench the prevailing normative system and reinforce its authority, all dissenting strategies
of cultural interpretation and behaviour are repulsed. Following Roland Barthes, Henri Levêbvre qualifies the city as an urban Degree Zero, a juxtaposition of spaces and functions through which difference is levelled by homogeneity.
The city is a complex organism made up of different institutions, sites, actions, discourses and their protagonists. Accordingly, the urban web is a social, discursive and physical place. In material terms the physical place is constituted by concrete, glass, asphalt etc. As socially coded surfaces the materials symbolize the specific place and its scope for action. Social space is where actions and operations are mutually ratified. This is where techniques for appropriation, interpretation and their concomitant perceptions of the city are negotiated. The social sphere mirrors
the political order and its institutions in their significant forms of interaction.
Discursive space reflects the actions arising from notions of the city and
urbanity, their representative function and ideological connotations.
In relation to these observations I would now like to describe why Constantinos Taliotiss installation War Fever can be considered a kind of cultural performance.
In 1959 Ervin Goffman published a sociologist study which examines the
dramaturgical phenomena of everyday life. Here he discusses how people
behave in their daily contexts and considers them in terms of theatrical
narrative. In 1974 Goffman expanded his ideas in Fame Analysis, placing
human interaction in the organizational scheme of experience. He describes how a framework of convention endows unspecific actions with meaning. Goffman formulates this in terms of authenticated convention, an agreement between actor and audience to imitate real life that is as valid on stage as in real life.
This structure of perception allows dramaturgical procedures to be transposed directly onto reality, whereby naturalistic theatre reflects a particular form of behaviour in everyday life. From this perspective, Constantinos Taliotiss War Fever offers a portrayal of social reality and serves as a theatrical template for structuring perceptions of this reality. Understanding theatricality as a dynamic process reveals a parallel in Taliotiss work. The artificial environment created by Taliotis describes a playful strategy for dealing with our perception of public space. The homogenous image of the city becomes fragmented, while the city
as a single-point perspective projection of a unified whole is scattered, with all its separate parts rearranged to form new correspondences with one another.
As a category of aesthetic reception, this installation is thereby extended by a crucial element, since the distinction between viewer and actor is suspended and the performance no longer restricts itself to representing life but to depicting it as a form of life.
In Taliotiss work, playful strategies of dealing with urban space are intended as the means for creating situations. In this, the element of play inspired by computer simulations of paintball games offers a mode of experimentation with space and perspectives in space. It represents one possibility of subjecting prevailing meanings, functions and orders to a bout of discursive hiccups and using performance to invest them with new connotations. These constructed situations thereby initiate processes which conceive the perception of social structures and orders as a dynamic edifice and hence, open to negotiation. In this sense, War Fever can be described as a cultural performance.
The concept of cultural performance was coined by the American anthropologist Milton Singer, who used the term to describe his sociological studies of political, social and economic structures. Cultural performance stands not only for the reflection or passive expression of culture, but also for an active factor of change and for the act of crossing boundaries within the social and political balance of power.
Viewed from this perspective, the construction of situations can be categorized as a cultural performance, allowing them to be described in theatrical terms, besides also indicating how constructed situations are embedded within a larger social and political framework. The object here is the appropriation of urban space and the balance of power that is manifested in and by this space. Cultural performance involves an extension of our understanding of theatricality in relation to the practices that War Fever introduces into the public domain.
A key shift has entered into the process of individuation, the most prominent feature of modern society: In the conventional paradigm, the world was a given that the individual had to adjust to. In the new paradigm this relationship has been inverted if anything at all can still be considered a given, then the individual. [] From the world-related subject to the subject-related world: in terms of cultural history this marks the caesura of the second half of the twentieth century. This caesura is of such importance that in comparison to previous phases of modernity, present-day society has earned the moniker experience society (or fun society). Characteristic for this form of society is that experience itself has become the substance of life.
Inwardly oriented attitudes to life that place the subject itself at the centre of our thinking and actions have supplanted outwardly oriented attitudes to life. Typical for people in our culture is the project to aspire to a beautiful life. The individual has become the manager of his own experience and is directly responsible for whatever success or failure is encountered on the path to happiness. Authentic individuation is supplanted by a kind of pseudo- individuation, which is only a simulation: Instead, the simulation of individuality became a declaration of belonging. The place of the solitary individual has been usurped by the communal individual.
At events or organized mises-en-scène of exceptional experience the
communal individual acquires an opportunity to inhabit his own identity beyond the confines of his everyday context, to perceive himself in other connotational settings, while still being able to feel part of an event community. Experience thus placed on offer becomes a consumer product.
Constantinos Taliotiss installation War Fever, which reads urban consumption as a negative factor of identity construction, can be charted within the copious discourse surrounding the meaning of consumption in our society. Based on the example of the city of Nicosia, Taliotis treats the modernist/post-modernist conflict over urban development as a language system that enables self- reflective and outwardly oriented communication. In this sense, consumption serves both to construct communities and to foster the definition and communication of identity.
As examples of everyday practice, Taliotis translates the local and urban
conflicts of the Cypriot capital into a paintball game. The players construct their own identity and as producers whether in demarcation from or affirmation of prevailing urban identities mirror this situation.
Single identity in the sense of the Romantic ideal of authenticity is superseded by multiple identities which are experimentally tested, either successively or simultaneously. Thus everyday shopping transforms into an activity through which different facets of the self can be explored and represented.
Increasingly, life has become a terrain for playing out roles and imitating life styles, and the city is one of the stages where we can live this life.
It is precisely this dramaturgical function that Taliotis fulfils with his museum installation, by turning the city into a twofold stage. One stage for the city to enact its urban conflict, the other for its residents who are accountable for the use of urban space in this manner. But this installation by Taliotis could also be seen as a dream space which compensates for the subjects lack of experience in reality. We enter a new world of magic larger, more beautiful, exciting and authentic than the real world it is modelled on. This game-oriented realm of experience is an idealized version of reality (in Nicosia). Ultimately, it does not matter whether the search for extraordinary experience is regarded as a compensatory attempt to escape the alienated and disenchanted world of everyday life, as a positive extension of the horizon of individual experience, or
whether it is perceived as the logical transformation of Fordist industrial society into a late capitalist service-oriented society. The work War Fever is not merely a strategical intervention into public urban space, but, from its users perspective, it is also a unique space of potential, which the subject can share with like-minded subjects to give expression to facets of his identity. The constant pressure to succeed placed on the individual in pursuit of self- fulfilment and experience is what makes promises and offers of experience so attractive. This is precisely the point where War Fever directs its focus: whereas the city presents a range of graphically conveyed offers for identification, War Fever proposes an entirely new possibility of identification. It gives the consumer himself the chance to discover new identities, meanings and emotions among all the experiences on offer. As a realm of experience, War Fever relieves one of having a bad conscience: the consumer is no longer dependent on the town planner since he himself has become one.
Marius Babias, Ware Subjektivität. Eine Theorie-Novelle, Munich, Silke Schreiber Verlag,
2002, p. 70.
Cf. Walter Grasskamp, Kunst und Stadt, in: Klaus Bussmann, Kasper König, Florian
Matzner (eds.), Zeitgenössische Skulptur. Projekte in Münster 1997, Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz
Verlag, 1997, pp. 741.
Henri Lefêbvre, Die Revolution der Städte, Berlin, B-Books, 2003, p. 127; in Engl. transl. as
The Urban Revolution, Minnesota, 2003.
Ervin Goffmann, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, 2000, p.
35.
Ibid., p. 17.
