Defenders

Description: 2001, photography and video, 100×100 cm, (with I. Chichkan) / 2001, fotografia i wideo, 100x100 cm, (z I. Chichkan)

The simple phrase by Marx aptly described how human behaviour is so often disengaged from a cognition of action in structuring an illusion of ideological proportions. When we look at the images of military officers languorously posing in gestures of staged repose placed next to the advertising from fashion magazines, we may simply assume a purposeful juxtaposition that clearly alludes to a mimicry that speaks of the perversity of power. However, these are not mere military officers neutrally staged in a visual game of war versus dollar. They are members of an elite brigade responsible for the launching of ballistic missiles for the Ukrainian army. Furthermore, they are a brigade also responsible for the gross error of striking a passenger flight overhead the Crimean peninsula during military exercises. The project rendered by artists Ilia Chichkan and Peter Style speaks of a more complicated notion of fetish that reverberates between Marxian and Freudian interpretation to speak of disavowal and displacement as a means to substitute ideology in the creation of a necessary illusion either to deal with pathological drives such as the death drive in indicating a human psychic apparatus subordinated to blind automatism that extends beyond pleasure seeking and self preservation. Chichkan and Style’s project including photographs and video documentation extends beyond a bracketing of a prototypical “look” evoking staged fashion photography implicit to advertising. The coded images allude to a discourse of desire immersed in the fetish as instigating an invisible movement that is almost physical in nature be it in the purchase of the commodity and the circulation of goods and hence money. Or be it in the notion of the military in the storage and accumulation of weaponry. Both point to systems of harboured secrets and illusions structured in the name of survival be that in psychic terms within protectorates of ideology. The Prada mule or the ballistic missile share in their existence as enigmatic objects that are sensuous, suprasensible and social. They are a fetish that displaces ideology in creating a necessary reality, but one that is nevertheless constructed and illusory. — Marta Kuzma

Komentarz Marty Kuzmy — esej kuratorski w oryginale angielskim / Marta Kuzma’s curatorial essay, English original.

”They do not know it, but they are doing it.”

Images