When art uses a language that people do not understand, it becomes haughty and detached from its contemporaries’ concerns. Today's revolutions are akin to the graffiti artist Banksy’s subversive murals. So it was somewhat frustrating to visit the exhibition titled Revolution vs. Revolution at Beirut Art Center. Excessive tinkering at the edges of history, revolution, and politics in committed conceptual art can result in art losing its ability to touch one’s dreams and one’s pain.
Revolution vs. Revolution seems like a collection of disparate materials, unconnected to each other or to the moment, despite its organizers’ efforts to bring together some of the world’s most prominent pioneering contemporary artists.
Since the “Arab Spring” has yet to crystallize in contemporary artistic output, the Beirut Art Center looked elsewhere: to artists who addressed major 20th century political events in order to shed light on the sufferings of individuals at times of historic upheaval.
Iran’s 1978-1979 revolution is presented in the works of Iranian photographer Abbas. Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar thinks back to the students' revolts in Notes on 1968. German artist Phil Collins searches for what remains of the dreams of women who used to teach Marxism-Leninism in East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, in a documentary titled Marxism Today, which offers a nostalgic and somewhat utopian view of the Communist era.
China’s Cultural Revolution features in two photographic works by Hai Bo, which focuses on the passage of time, reinvention of the past, and the loss of individuals. Boris Mikhailov’s Red 1968-75, Vyacheslav Akhunov’s Doubt 1976, and Lenin's Plan for a Memorial Propaganda 1981 reinvent the legend of Lenin and the Soviet Union by playing on artistic symbols of that era: particularly the color red, statues of the leader, stamps, and revolutionary slogans, in addition to innovative icons of Marx's image.
