An in-your-face provocateur
Adel Abdessemed displays things we don't normally see
CAMBRIDGE -An unnerving, fitfully brilliant show by Algerian-born artist Adel Abdessemed at MIT's List Visual Arts Center includes video footage of a cat eating a dead rat on a Paris sidewalk. We come to the work, which is called "Birth of Love," having already noticed several smaller TV monitors showing stray cats risking human contact to drink milk from bowls. If these smaller images call to mind human charity, even a certain sentimentality, what does the footage of the cat eating the rat suggest?
Cats are designed to eat rats; they are not designed to drink cow's milk. But that doesn't change the fact that watching this hungry little predator chewing on rat flesh, the rodent's skinny tail disappearing down its gullet, and the cat licking the blood-stained pavement afterward is a little hard to take.
Abdessemed has filmed this grisly vignette from close to the ground and magnified it so that it fills the best part of the gallery wall. There is nothing to distract our attention from the scene until, just as the rat's hind leg and tail disappear from view, we glimpse a man walking down the street, a newspaper folded under one arm, his other hand in his pocket. He is oblivious to the scene we have just watched with mounting revulsion.
Abdessemed is a political artist. He is interested in getting us to see what we would rather not have to. "I don't do illusions," he has said. "I have left ideologies behind and I'm not going back there." His work is raw and direct - sometimes offensively so (he is an artist with a strong urge to rub our noses in things) - but he can also be sly and funny.
He lives in New York now, but a lot of the work in this show, "Adel Abdessemed: Situation and Practice," was made in Paris, where he moved from Algeria in 1994. At the time, Abdessemed was stunned by how little the French knew, or wanted to know, about political repression in Algeria, where thousands of artists, journalists, authors, and other intellectuals had recently been killed by the government and Islamic militants.
France's close and, to put it mildly, vexed historical relationship with Algeria seemed to count for nothing: "The background to the Algerian situation was a complete blank for my colleagues," he said.
"Ombre et lumière" ("Shadow and Light"), the first video he made (it's also the first work in this show), could not have been simpler. Abdessemed filmed, from close up, a young woman wearing a veil. The woman turns away from the camera, lifting the veil as she does so. She continues to turn until she faces the camera again, with the veil now completely removed. An expression of blissful release is quickly overtaken by a moving mixture of fear and determination, as her eyes meet the camera again. The whole thing, like many of Abdessemed's videos, lasts only a few seconds, but is put on a loop, so we see the same action again and again.
Abdessemed was chosen to participate in Robert Storr's Venice Biennale last year (showing barbed-wire "wall drawings," among other things.) He became something of a cause célèbre earlier this year when, at the San Francisco Art Institute's Walter and McBean Galleries, he showed brief, looped footage of animals being clubbed to death. Animal rights activists protested, threats of death and sexual violence were made to gallery staff, and in response, the show was closed.
Here again, Abdessemed was wanting - gratuitously, many might feel - to rub our noses in it. The animals whose deaths he filmed were, in the words of San Francisco Art Institute president Chris Bratton, "part of an already existing circuit of food production in rural Mexico." But the manner of their killing was undoubtedly brutal. Certainly, it involved none of the factory-style mechanization that characterizes slaughterhouses in the United States, and that for unaccountable reasons we seem to find more acceptable.
That footage is not on view at the List, which I am grateful for. But animals do appear in a series of extraordinary photographs that also confront us with things we don't ordinarily see. Surreptitiously (because in most cases it was illegal), Abdessemed brought a series of wild animals - a lion, a snake, seven wild boars, and a mule - onto rue Lemercier, the street in Paris's 17th arrondissement where the artist had his studio and which he often appropriated for his art.
As with the cat eating the rat, Abdessemed seems to want us to think about the anomaly of the wild animal on the civilized street, and what it says about those things we prefer to exclude and ignore. It's not just animal behavior he has in mind, but other things society habitually represses, from illegal immigrants to political crackdowns.
Put this way, it may all sound a bit trite. But more important to Abdessemed than metaphors and analogies is the fact that they are acts. Abdessemed actually brought these animals onto rue Lemercier. The lion was there: It is not an illusion, not a metaphor. So was the snake. And so was the bucking mule. Whatever they might make us think, the images gain force from this.
Abdessemed, suffice it to say, is keen on reality. He is intensely suspicious of the separation between art and life, and he sees himself as waging a kind of war against false consciousness and the distortions of ideology, whether it comes in the form of religion, nationalism, economics, or aesthetics. He is also intent on exploring what Joseph Conrad called "the fascination of the abomination."
Thankfully, humor is the most important weapon in his arsenal. Perhaps the funniest work in the show is a video that shows a group of men dressed in white coats using a sheet to toss the artist repeatedly in the air. The scene resembles a traditional outdoor game famously painted by Goya in a work called "El Pelele" ("The Straw Manikin"), except that in this case it takes place indoors. Each time Abdessemed reaches his maximum height, he scrawls a mark onto a rug that has been attached to the ceiling.
It soon becomes clear that the marks add up to the phrase "Also Sprach Allah" - German for "Thus spake Allah." (That phrase is in turn a play on Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," a book that includes the famous line "God is dead.")
The references may sound abstruse, but the message - that in the hands of religious fanatics, individuals can easily become puppets carrying out mindless agendas - is wittily conveyed.
There are works in the show I was less keen on. When Abdessemed pays a group of prostitutes to transcribe copies of the Torah, the New Testament, and the Koran, I find myself uninterested in exploring the many questions it throws up (How do these religions view prostitution? How did the women feel carrying out their task? etc). Instead, I feel patronized, just as I'm sure the women felt patronized.
The exhibit as a whole takes up two large rooms. It's a frenetic experience, and it's extremely noisy because of the scrabbly sounds emitted by various videos on constant loop.
There are few galleries in Boston that would be game to mount such a show. But I'm glad the List has done it, because Abdessemed not only has something to say, he has the audacity to say it with brutal directness. 