Attracted to Controversy: Barb Claussen

Written By: Christina Schmid Constellation 03 9.19.09

“Don’t believe them,” the voice whispers before a male baritone decisively states, “there will be consequences.” Another voice loudly exhorts the values of loyalty, allegiance, and obedience, while slyly promising prosperity in between. Then, a barely audible whisper: “Be careful.” Pitting these utterances against each other serves as the soundtrack to Barb Claussen’s most recent installation, Modern Monoliths. The piece investigates the way in which disciplinary systems accomplish directives: by exercising force and making threats, by promising rewards, or by seducing through persuasion.[1] The whisper, so close to the threshold of intelligibility that we have to strain to understand, undercuts the authoritative messages by offering a subversive counterpoint.

Modern Monoliths presents a departure from Claussen’s past work. Whereas Claussen has been engaging with community-specific controversies, her new direction is less local, less engaged with one particular issue at a time, and more concerned with a general understanding of how systems—whether social, political, or corporate—exercise power and control. Still, understanding the trajectory of Modern Monoliths warrants a closer look at Claussen’s evolving creative practice.

Historically, Claussen’s work has been part of a new kind of art maProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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ng, marked by a radical departure from the modernist ideal of the autonomous artwork and an equally passionate embrace of a new, process-oriented aesthetic of the ordinary. In 2001, Larry Shiner, in The Invention of Art, envisioned this new direction in art as turning “away from the ideals of the autonomous artist and the self-referential work to embrace a democratic vision of collaboration, service, and social function” (301). In 2005, Grant Kester echoed this call for a new aesthetic that revolved around the art of conversation, dialogue, and listening rather than narcissistic self-absorption and past definitions of genius. Suddenly, terms such as “intersubjective vulnerability” and “empathetic identification” with collaborators and communities entered the lexicon of creative practice (86). This approach presented a drastic departure from the point of view embodied by an artist-genius-master and, according to Miwon Kwon, was best described as an activity centered on such verbs as “to negotiate, to coordinate, to compromise, to research, to organize, to interview” (44).

This newly minted creative practice is crucial for understanding Claussen’s work. As an artist, she has invariably been attracted to controversy: when the re-routing of traffic in Minneapolis and St. Paul, following the collapse of the 35W bridge, increased traffic along minor highways never designed for such numbers, Claussen mounted a community-centered project that represented the concerns of people living along these make-shift high-traffic corridors. Other projects revolved around the controversial construction of a sports arena on Nicollet Island and the dismantling of the historic dock in Canada’s Silver Islet. Distinctly local and always political, these public debates serve as the starting point for Claussen’s work.

Seeking to open up spaces for dialogue, to hear and record contrary points of view, Claussen oscillates between the roles of witness, ally, quasi-neutral observer, chronicler, and, occasionally, activist. What sets her work apart from other community-minded collaborations is a characteristic whiff of subtle irreverence, a trickster-like understated humor that means no hurtful disrespect but offers another means of diffusing a charged situation. For instance, in an ongoing project inspired by Stillwater’s public library, Claussen is studying the controversy surrounding the library’s terrace being rented out for events: the library’s need to raise funds collides with neighbors’ complaints about the late-night noise pollution. Claussen’s creative plans center on a performance involving portable soundproof bubbles that would allow for a private space in the midst of public noise. While this gesture runs the risk of being misunderstood as ridicule, Claussen is at pains to present the project as a means to raise awareness of the issues at stake, to think outside the box, and to offer alternative modes of approaching the subject.

The steady undercurrent running through all of Claussen’s past public art projects is the question of how to negotiate communal or corporate needs with individual rights to privacy and the pursuit of happiness: how much can an individual be asked, reasonably, to give up for the common good? More broadly speaking, how do we define public and private spaces, and why do we insist on the distinction? How, in the age of virtual panopticism, is the divide between public and private reinforced? These are the questions that immediately inform Claussen’s current investigation of behavioral imperatives in The Public Imperative Project.

In this project, Claussen re-contextualizes imperatives, such as “don’t talk too much” or “don’t interrupt,” meant to govern interpersonal behavior in the public sphere. Affixed to anything from monuments to vending machines, the imperatives take on unexpectedly political connotations in their new contexts, where it is no longer clear who is directing the imperative at whom and for what reason. Thus transplanted, regulatory mechanisms of the private sphere invite reflection on public disciplinary systems.

These very systems take center stage in Claussen’s most recent project, the red phone booths of Modern Monoliths. As icons of the waning era prior to cell phones, the booths evoke the possible benefits of administrative systems. As objects, the booths are profoundly modern in that they physically isolate the subject, who, in contrast to the postmodern nomad, is still tied to the location of the booth to communicate across long distances. As spaces, they offer transparent islands of putative privacy in the public realm. Their intended placement as a line in a heavily wooded environment has a surrealist air while also suggesting something clandestine and out of the ordinary. Then, there are those voices, repeating orders and promises, interrupted by the oddly obtrusive whisper that epitomizes the gist of Claussen’s creative and critical credo: never accept anything at face value, always question authority, and never blindly trust systems of any sort. And yet, she always hints that some systems are integral to a functioning society and the promise of peaceful coexistence. More importantly, Claussen suggests that we created them—and hence should be able to change them.

Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. 195—228.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Anatomy of Power. Boston: Houston Mifflin, 1983.

Kwon, Miwon. “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity.” Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Eds. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 32—54.

Kester, Grant. “Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially-Engaged Art.” Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Eds. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 76—88.

Shiner, Larry. The Invention of Art. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001.