Untitled (donkey), 2003 by Paola Pivi. Collection of Florence and Philippe Segalot, New York. Courtesy Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan. Photo by Hugo Glendinning. © The artist 2005.
Camelia Gupta packed her bag and headed for the south bank of the Thames and an artist's-eye-view of the world of tourism.
So, it’s a cold autumn day, you’ve packed your holiday clothes away and are glumly sorting through the holiday photos. Why not get down to the Hayward Gallery, where Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist’s Eye, running to December 11 2005, takes a look at tourism through the lens of 50 international artists.
The show asks some fascinating questions. Why do we travel? What do we hope to discover about our destinations and ourselves? What consequences does our travel ‘bug’ have for the world? How universal is our experience of tourism - from place, to culture, to person? Are there relationships between seeing or doing contemporary art and seeing ‘the sights’?
Attempts to answer are provided by installation, painting, video, photography and much more.
site specific_roma4 by Olivo Barbieri. Courtesy of Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporena Roma, Spazio Erasmus Brera, Milano.
Several artists replay a version of how we visit a tourist attraction. Images of Las Vegas recur, the drive to court the tourist dollar resulting in new ‘versions’ of the Sphinx and the Taj Mahal being built.
What’s the difference between visiting these and the originals? Why do we go?
Doug Aitken’s The moment (2005) is stunning in this respect. I walk from the brightly-lit first room into a vast pitch black room, lit only by plasma screens on which scattered but connected images play. The sudden change is extremely unsettling.
As an evocation of the confusion of arriving in a new place it’s striking. If you’ve ever had jet lag, you’ll recognise this all too easily. The gallery becomes somewhere that similar dislocations can be experienced.
The show provides a fascinating glimpse into global mythmaking, for example in Andrea Robbins and Max Becher’s German Indians series (1998), they present images of a German folk festival.
German Indian: Chief, 1998 by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery, New York. © The artists 2005.
Photographs of Caucasian Germans in full Native American get-up, gathered outside tee-pees, are intriguing and absurd.
To one side of the images, the roots of this festival in a German author, Karl May’s adoption of the Native Americans as brave rebels fighting the over-civilised white settlers is explained (he had not visited the United States when writing his ‘cowboys and Indians’ novels). They offer a fascinating description of how against expectation, this ‘legend’ was taken up by the Nazis and survives today.
On the other side, a more ‘basic’ description of a Native American folk festival makes us aware of the way in which ‘foreign’ narratives can be presented uncritically.
Other work investigates the dark side of tourism and the powerful visual language that the tourism industry has created.
Not Over Us, 2004 by Dinh Q. Lê. Courtesy of the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles. © The artist 2005.
In Dinh Q Le’s Not Over Us (2004) photogenic Vietnamese women are presented in an ‘ethnic’ scene familiar from brochures and television adverts. The slogan, however, is not ‘Enjoy your stay’ but a comment on the USA’s history with Vietnam, concluding ‘Come back to Vietnam for closure!’
Don’t miss Johan Grimonprez’s astonishing D.I.A.L History. The hour-long montage presents clips related to plane hi-jackings. A kitschy sound-track picks up the nostalgic feel of the footage and adds a sense of unreality at odds with the captioned statistics informing us what we are seeing.
We watch the trial of a Japanese bomber in 1969, the first recorded hijacking, bloody survivors speaking dazedly to the cameras after the Pan-Am bombing.
Images and music snowball and burn their way into my brain. Presented on a single television screen, I realise that I’ve seen many of them before, as a part of TV news, and a part of the fabric of my life.
Closest in format to a pop video, the lack of explanation and resolution makes for an emotionally wrenching experience. There’s no logic, the story goes on.
Cruise City, City Cruise, 2003 by NL Architects. Courtesy of NL Architects, Amsterdam © The artists 2005.
Fashions in tourism have changed, rendering for example, John Hinde’s staged tableaux of Butlins holiday camps (the most popular picture postcards ever produced in the UK) (1968-75, 2002), kitsch and fantastical.
Grimonprez shows us that these trends are paralleled by trends in terrorism. The terrorists become less flamboyant, more anonymous, in a vision that is horrifyingly relevant today.
I leave the show and wander back to the station. London’s status as premier tourist destination leaps out at me. I may see the streets where I’ve worked and lived but they are so much more and less to a visitor. I realise that much as I’ve oohed and aahed in Bangkok or Delhi, these cities are also home to locals, travellers, tourists, workers, all seeing a different city.
Universal Experience is an exciting sensory experience and a thought-provoking journey through the holiday-making that many of us take for granted. Buy a ticket, take a trip. You won’t be disappointed.
