arabic
jokes
by Anne Ring Petersen
Anyone who at night seeks out metropolitan areas like Vesterbro, where
hotels, entertainment venues and sex shops cluster like night club
customer, will be familiar with the little stickers and flyers that
prostitutes use to advertise their services. And anyone who in the
daytime circulates in a multi-ethnic neighbourhood like Vesterbro
sooner or later will notice the outsiders in the jumble of clamouring
posters: the crudely printed messages in tongues other than the native
that stick out like the minorities who have posted them stand out
from the natives in terms of social standing and cultural identity.
As familiar and as much a part of the streets as the sex flyer and
foreign-language poster are, as disorienting is Jens Haaning's fusion
of two media. In other words, if you didn't know it, you probably
wouldn't recognise Haaning's poster as art, since there is no signature
or indication that it's part of an exhibition. It doesn't advertise
its origins, but merely shows the clash of a recycled newspaper pinup,
the embodiment of the dream of the sexually liberated Danish woman,
and information printed in Arabic script, graphically beautiful, but
incomprehensible to most danes. and even to those who know Arabic:
there is no meaningful connection between the fake (!) blond and the
jokes told in the text.
Despite that, the poster with unwavering precision strikes into the
heart of prevailing xenophobia, like both that of the majority and
the minority. The juxtaposition of text and image aims to rouse all
possible racial prejudices and sexual fantasies about Arab men with
Danish women. The buckshot effect is pulled off by the uncertainty
about the sender's identity and motives. To the non-Arabic speaking
majority the poster might as well have been posted by an immigrant,
perhaps as a warning about depraving relation with Danish women, as
by the Dane who wants to attract Arabian customers. HaaningÕs intention
of transforming his artpiece into a direct communications device draws
on experiences from neodada and conceptual art. Like the posters with
truisms that New York artist Jenny Holzer plastered all over Manhattan
in the late '70s, Haaning's poster builds on the dream of breaking
out of the closed circuit of the art institution and situating art
in society in order to effectively shape public opinion. Haaning's
poster demands that the spectator takes a stand, not to its aesthetics,
but to its sociality. by leaving it open whether the poster's message
is racist or anti-racist, whether it advertises, agitates or caricatures,
Haaning makes the spectator's horizon of expectation the real focal
point of the work. From behind the poster's focus on the mechanisms
of attraction and repulsion that we carry encoded within us, a major
sociophsychological issue emerges; the issue of how attitudes and
mentalities are really created within the web of mutual influences,
the social field, in which every individual is entangled.
Published in the catalogue of the exhibition City Space, Copenhagen
Denmark, 1996. |
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