Anri Sala was born in Tirana, Albania in 1974 at a time just prior to when the Soviet Bloc countries were beginning to show the stress fractures of a post- war Socialist ideology turned Orwellian nightmare. From his poignant (and ingeniously determined) re-construction of his mother’s youthful involvement in Albanian Communist party politics in his 1998 video Intervista to his installation piece Le Clash, 2010, Sala locates destiny as character, rather that the other way around. That his destiny was to be born into a crumbling ideological system and then cast upon the Western world as a post- utopian Ulysses is what lends this show its weight.
Another one of his earlier videos, Dammi I colori, 2003, documents a fellow traveler in the person of Edi Rama, Mayor of Tirana, who is responsible for a program of overlaying a complex color array onto seemingly endless and undifferentiated “modern” apartment blocks that were constructed in the city, by the prior socialist state, in uniform ranks. We are taken on a tour of this colorization of the city in what seems like the back of a taxi with the mayor as our guide. He talks in a remarkable combination of symbolic metaphor and dialectical materialism about the effect of the project on the city and its people. To his credit Sala presents the narrative from a mostly objective stance in his deft editing of scenes of the city under construction/destruction and its citizens negotiating this no-mans land with forbearing aplomb. The video is a complex presentation of overlaid utopian visions, the Socialist State and the mayor/artist’s. What is great about the video is that it seems to leave as an open question whether or not successive ideological regimes replace each other interchangeably. The mayor states that one of his intentions with the color project is to make Tirana a city of choice rather than destiny, but one is left to wonder whose choice and whose destiny? It’s a great example of documentary film as art.
I’ve personally been witness to a 1960’s American perspective on Eastern European countries like Albania which were seen as “under the heel” of a Soviet jackboot, and held hostage behind the “Iron Curtain”. This story went that the people of these countries were long suffering but endowed with a resilient poetic spirit that would some day overcome and that they still managed to gestate the embryo of art in its collective Gulags. It was almost as if the West had delegated the task of maintaining the human soul to the East so they could get on with the business of cynical capitalist production without the drag of all those old- fashioned notions of nurturing communal human hearts and minds. The threat to the West wasn’t totalitarianism as much as it was a full- bodied contemporary humanism, which would involve all sorts of concessions by business toward non-profitable social services. (It’s important to remember that Martin Luther King was assassinated while working to settle a workers’ grievance and was set to lead a people’s march on poverty to Washington.) By covertly requesting of its own citizens that they substitute society for commodity, the West needed to maintain a picturesque version of embattled social ideals behind the Iron Curtain.
I don’t mean to take anything away from the people power revolutions of the last half of the 20th century in Eastern Europe. I do believe however that a cohesive social vision, ironically fostered by the East’s isolation from the West during those years, helped those revolutions to come about. This is not as wide a digression as it may seem with regards to a review of Anri Sala’s oeuvre. What feels radical and contemporary about this work is that its inherent character is old fashioned, and emotionally pathetic. I’m tempted to say Sala is a more soulful Pippilotti Rist but that would be like talking about similarities between bread and chocolate. If destiny were character then Sala’s would be tragic. He seems to toy with the tragic, maudlin sentimentality that is often associated with a cliché of the Eastern European character in much of the work in this show. In Le Clash, 2010, a vagrant looking man in a black suit, (the Mao Jacket of Eastern Europe) carries what looks like a shoebox with a tiny crank operating a tinkly music box that plays “Should I Stay or Should I Go” from the Clash’s Combat Rock album of 1982. The artist would’ve been about eight years old when the song came out, but you can imagine a coveted, smuggled bootleg of the record being played repeatedly in his childhood’s sonic memory. Then of course his destiny was to stay in Tirana as the choice was not a given to go. But the dream of the West must have been expressed in the brash chords of the Clash song in just the right timbre. Sala’s adult take on this has his vagrant protagonist wandering through the bleak remains of an outdoor concert hall (La Salle Des Fetes, in Bordeaux , France) including a mural- sized Modernist abstract mosaic. The wistful figure’s halting turning of the shoebox music crank is echoed in another scene of a couple struggling with a wheeled hurdy- gurdy machine playing the same tune. The utopian ideals that were promised by both Socialism and Modernism are presented here as ruins to be negotiated by aimless human spirits. The indeterminacy of the actor’s wanderings in the video and the indecisive struggle in the Clash’s song mirror one another in a frustrated love song to shifty cultural and personal politics. The sound in this piece is carefully constructed from various instruments, including the music box, singing from the woman in the couple, and a manic organ that repeats the musical refrain in an offbeat whoosh, which feels like a concussion of an explosion from a distance.
Marshall McLuan has made the interesting point, in his past explorations of mediated modern experience, that some archaic tribes in Africa considered the ear to be the human instrument of perception and the eye to be the instrument of the will. Sala seems to be hyper- aware of the use of sound as a perceptual cue and tends to use his videos to back up the aural experience. This is a canny inversion of what we are used to, the soundtrack backing the image. It’s also an effective way to create an aesthetic experience that doesn’t rely solely on a passive optical spectator but engages embodied space and time. In Answer Me, 2008, a rhythmically possessed drummer responds to what seems to be his lover’s request for a heartfelt conversation about their relationship with a loud riposte of drumming. It’s like an analogy of a lover’s disagreement played out in two opposing sound mediums- the woman’s soft voice and the man’s loud drumming. The piece sets up again the determined indeterminacy that dominates the exhibition. In a different, but sonically related installation, entitled Doldrums, 2008, single snare drum kits are scattered throughout the galleries and are wired for sound. When the drumming of Answer Me takes off, carefully balanced drumsticks placed on the snare drum heads respond rhythmically in a ghostly tattoo. The sound of one piece in this instance is nicely translated in a seemingly random way to another piece. Sala has carefully orchestrated these sound collages but the viewer/ participants are more or less left to make up their own minds about where the sonic intersections become significant.
What makes Anri Sala’s approach to installation a welcome relief to much of the spectacular use of video this day is that his works here seem under-girded with solid emotional histories. This used to be called authorship before the modern author died or went missing. Perhaps this is an old- fashioned idea but Sala puts it to good purpose in this show.
Tom McGlynn
copyright 2011
