WORLD UPSIDE DOWN

The world upside down is one in which the symbolic order is turned on its head. It is a world visualized by artists where killer rabbits hunt humans and Superman is a hero of the Soviet Union. It is the Planet of the Apes and a planet where British aristocrats lose their heads when they find themselves dressed in “African” fabrics. In each inversion an artist turns a hierarchical dichotomy on its head, but in most cases the dichotomy itself doesn’t survive the trip. It breaks down under the strain of its own absurdity and for a moment we are liberated from its tyranny through this very particular form of social satire.

As an artistic strategy, symbolic inversion has the potential to illuminate and challenge the visual conventions that police social hierarchies. When power relations are suddenly turned on their head, we have the opportunity to recognize that some behaviours that we take to be natural and necessary are merely conventional – and perhaps not in our interests. For this reason, contemporary artists using inversion tend to seek out existing hierarchies, often satirizing the most venerated works in the Western canon. For example, Jim Logan’s “The Diner’s Club, No Reservations Required” inverts the codes of gendered and racialized representation in Manet’s, “Déjeuner sur l’herbe”. Yinka Shonibare has played similar tricks with canonical works. In Shonibare’s “Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads”, the artist has restaged Gainsborough’s famous painted portrait as a sculpture, but has decapitated the sitters, removed the landscape and dressed the subjects in colourful “African” fabrics that themselves have complex, hybrid colonial histories. Similarly, General Idea turn high modernist formalism on its head by introducing the previously repressed content of the AIDS crisis loose on icons of modernity. Robert Indiana’s classic 1960s “Love” graphic now reads “AIDS”.

Although this exhibition focuses primarily on how contemporary artists use inversion critically, it also draws on works that will give historical depth and pop cultural breadth to the phenomenon. Perhaps the most influential example of symbolic inversion in popular culture was the 1968 film “Planet of the Apes”, and a number of posters and stills are included in the exhibition, including one of Charlton Heston’s character sharing a kiss on the lips with the chimpanzee Zira. Also on display will be the DC comic “Superman: Red Son”, written by Mark Millar. Red Son posits an alternate comic book reality in which Superman’s rocket landed in the USSR and Superman grew up on a collective farm in the Ukraine to become a Soviet rather than American hero. In the “Shadow of No Tower’s”, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman contemplates how Bush’s America seems to have turned itself upside down in response to the calamity of the September 11th attacks.

More details are available at:

http://www.banffcentre.ca/wpg/exhibitions/2006/world_upside_down/