Centre Pasquart - 19.4.2009 - 14.6.2009 - Costantino Ciervo
Text for the documentation „Perversion of Signs, CentrePasquArt Biel
Editing: filmonauten video und film gmbh - info@filmonauten.ch
Text: Costantino Ciervo, Manuela Lintl, Andreas Stäuble
Translation/Speaker: Mark-Anthony Collinson
The installation „Perversion of Signs was shown by the internationally known artist Costantino Ciervo for the first time in the museum CentrePasquArt in Biel, one of the the leading exhibitors of contemporary art in Switzerland.
The visitors first pass through a wide, light corridor in which there are sketches and plans of the installation and preparetory works. Among them are also sketches of the performance that directly preceeded this work and was staged in Berlin.
After these drawings the visitors get attuned to the topic of the work then step into the dim light of a hall in the centre of which is a pyramid made out of 84 flat-screen monitors hanging on a scafold of structural steel.
The monitors are arranged horizontally in rows of six at equal distances from each other. The amount of monitors decreases from row to row beginning with six at the bottom down to one at the top, the point of the pyramid.
At the same time the viewer observes lights on the walls, in the beams of which are sheets of A4 paper: if you look closely at the sheets of paper you can read the personal and individual details of the people appearing on the monitors. They are all in the same form, therefore formally fixed, and also becoming a sign.
Plus, the accompanying noises you hear in the corridor as a quiet sound track are now much louder and clearer. The sound of smacking noises coming from dozens of mouths.
Altogether there are 84 videos that show different people - men and women of different ages and different social backgrounds who are licking and eating a series of pictogramms, logos, ideogramms and symbols made out of coloured icing sugar. The graphic signs evoke notions that are bound to our general existence - such as peace, authority, religion etc, and signs that evoke notions of life in modern society, such as security, information, communication, money, economy, terrorism, democracy, free market and so on.
The large amount of people displayed as an image detail focused on the mouth and tongue enhances the symbolic message of the whole work and immediately and intuitively reminds us of devouring and being devoured; a canibalistic process.
If you consider the installation further - the lights, the sheets of paper, the mouths, tongues and icing sugar symbols - more thoughts occur, especially to those who want to listen to them.
In this installation there are implicit critical references to the language of signs and language in general, also on communication and consumption in modern times. It raises questions about the power of signs and symbols and consequently on the power of systems and institutions, as well as the question of the power of the one who is eating them.
In this sense the work is utterly archaic, in the act of the eating the other, the stranger, the enemy we are strengthened by the power contained in what we eat. Who is using their power most efficiently, who is profiting the most? Who is winning what, and who is losing? Or are both sides winning?
It is one of the strengths of Ciervos work, and especially with Perversion of Signs, that it shows us things that evoke thoughts and feelings that are not finalized, but set things moving in our hearts and heads. The viewer who allows this to happen becomes the protagonist of the work of Ciervo and therefore becomes that which they are: a part of this society, and thus becomes a co-respondent.
The art work reflects a very critical attitude towards a partially achieved attempt at a flattening and standardization of human behavioural patterns and language. The critical aspect is especially accentuated by the generalized, greedy, passive and almost libidinous behaviour of the performers in the act of consuming and licking.
Its as if you are collectively swallowing a reality in a quasi-perverse ritual, whereby the ordinary, the banal, the conformity suddenly becomes essential, alluringly sweet, provocative and irresistibly attractive.
In a society in which the economy uses all the modern techonologies of information and communication availiable, to ensure the maximum degree of speculation and profit, the human being is always saturated by presumptious, aggressive and mystifying messages. We are permanently bombarded with signs and symbols whos only purpose is to show us how to act, how to believe, and how to appropriate. Everybody has the tendency to become a marrionette controlled by signs.
„And this makes us passive in relation to our beliefs, our power of judgement and our activities,
so wrote Charles Morris in 1946 in the book Signs, Language, and Behavior..... (weniger Infos)
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