WHEN NATIONS ARE BRANDS, WAR IS BAD PR

"Flying to Venice a couple of weeks ago I was leafing through Inflight - Easyjet's imaginatively-named in-flight magazine - when I came to an article about the joys of Warsaw. "Make a pact to discover Warsaw," ran the intro, punning daringly on the name of the military alliance between iron curtain states. The article itself began just as brazenly: "Have you ever wondered why David Bowie has called one of his tracks from the Low album Warszawa? Why Joy Division used to call themselves "Warsaw" back in the late 70s?" Um, let me guess? Because they wanted to conjure a "low" mood of urban desolation and sadness? Because they wanted to evoke chilly memories of ghetto massacres and concentration camps? It's a wonder the third rhetorical question wasn't "Haven't you ever wondered why Ian Curtis committed suicide?" Welcome to the thin ice, topsy-turvy world of national rebranding.
When I got to Venice I was confronted with something similar, but at least this time actually intended to be satire: Finnish artist Adel Abidin's "Abidin Travels" was a room in the Nordic pavilion turned into a travel agency advertising tourist trips to Baghdad. It was tragedy raised to the level of farce. But it was also an exercise in branding. One doomed to failure, certainly, but - as the Warsaw article shows - not quite as far from the realm of plausibility as we might think.
An art history grad student recently wrote asking my thoughts on a symposium paper she was planning on the idea that national identity in art is obsolete. I replied that I didn't think national identity was obsolete at all. Events like the World Cup, the Olympic Games, Miss World and the Venice Biennale all show how strong nation is as an organising principle. Various studies have shown that it's getting harder, not easier, to cross national boundaries, thanks to what I've called "the paranoid security state". Statehood for Palestine is a big subject in the art world just now, showing that nationalism isn't just a 19th century ideal. The current - and extraordinary - collapse of Belgium isn't because nation as a concept is dead, but because Belgium contains two nations which hardly talk to each other at all. Arguments against the nation tend to sound very 90s-retro now". (continua aqui)

(2007)