By Brian Holmes

Who are these laughing faces? Snapshots aligned in a grid on the wall, people chuckling, grinning, eyes twinkling with pleasure — not what you'd expect at an exhibition on war. The artist, Sislej Xhafa, is from Kosova. During the lecture series that accompanied the show, he will say that these images of smiling Kosovars are aggressive: "You don't think it's aggressive to show so many people laughing after a war?"

It is part of an exhibition, "Kosov@: Carnival in the Eye of the Storm," about the paradoxes of postmodern, or more provocatively, post-national conflict. The first thing the viewer encounters is a signpost showing travel distances from Pristina: 155 miles to Belgrade, 480 miles to Venice, 775 miles to Geneva — and 5,980 miles to the exhibition, in Portland, Oregon. For an American, Pristina seems far away. But the "@" in "Kosov@" becomes the signifier of uncanny nearness. Living in one place, you are constant touch with another, not just through impersonal information but through sustained contact, daily exchange. And the "@" has another role to play: it tries to mediate between the "o" used in the Serbian and the "a" used in the Albanian spelling (Kosovo/Kosova). The conflict inheres within the very languages of communication.

How can an exhibition approach war and its aftermath? What distances should it take? East German artist-curator Trebor Scholz structured the show at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in four interrelated parts: a film program, both documentary and fiction; a lecture series with participants of diverse nationalities and disciplines, including journalists and human-rights activists, as well as artists and critics; a Web site covering the event, with links to related material; and the exhibition proper, which featured artists from around the world. One could sum up the program as an attempt to create a kind of political theater: a dramatized, half-fictional stage on which both participants and visitors were called up to debate their beliefs about contemporary reality, against the ambiguous and often contradictory backdrop of artistic experience.

The Walls/The Screens

Sounds of nature — wind and rain — coax you through one gallery doorway, then another, into a shadowy room where the Moroccan artist Abdelali Dahrouch has created a piece entitled "Day of Harvest": a rough tombstone of hand-worked plaster, covered in raised letters that appear to spell out names. People? Places? The soundtrack plays; it is as though your own memory were washing away in the rain ... Shift to the film program, screened in the evening at a local theater. The camera pans down long brick walls, immobile, unyielding; you enter villages in the green, cultivated Kosovo hills. Serbs and Albanians tell stories of murders to Aleksandar Manic, who returned from Prague to his native land in 1998 to shoot this premonitory film: "The Walls of Kosovo." Only an expatriate ethnic Serb, at once native and doubly estranged, could ask questions to both sides as he did, intimate but powerless questions before the coming storm. In America, far from his own native land, Dahrouch reflected on his immaculate harvest room, in a text quoted in the exhibition brochure: "The walls are covered with embossed and whitewashed names of weapons of mass destruction, code names, semiotics of power ... vestiges of human folly and delusions of conquest."

In our technological world, computer screens are walls. Touch them: cool, glowing, visually mobile, exploding with images, but always under-laced with codes, infinite columns of information (people or places?). Jenny Perlin lays her hand on these screens. Sheets of paper in vertical rows make up her "Documents for a Report": incongruous statistics traced in pencil from the Web site of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo. The tracing on parchment-like paper rewrites not the content but the transmission of information, from screen to skin. Between the vertical rows, three untitled photographs open up to Central European landscapes: you can almost feel the breeze. But what about the imminence of violence?

On screens, the battles are video games. Web-artist Teo Spiller invites you to play in his satirical "War Games" (projected, along with other Internet works, in a media room). Renata Salecl, the Slovenian critic, speaks in her lecture of push-button aggression and celluloid soldiers, the Western fantasy of imperviousness and invulnerability, the psychic shield against anxiety — and, at the moment it shatters, the traumatic neurosis. When glass becomes flesh again.

Grappling with the Real

Leon Golub's "Mercenary II" leers at you — paint trying to muscle its way off the canvas, striking a blow for truth. For over forty years, Golub has lent the expressionistic power of his figurative painting to documentary subjects: soldiers, attack dogs, violence, war. Along with his wife, Nancy Spero, also represented in the show, he stands for political commitment within the so-called "fine arts." But does art have the means, or efficacy, of its politics?

That question keeps arising here. The installation by Martha Rosler, "OOOPS! (nobody loves a hegemon)," is an oil-drum suspended from an open parachute, flanked by Coca-Cola cans with smaller chutes. Imperialism as an American reality — and obsession. Two more drums support a computer connected to Web sites with information on the former Yugoslavia. A metaphor seeking connections to the real.

Gregory Shollette takes a direction away from factual information with his garishly framed studio photographs that show a toy-soldier of the Spanish Civil War collapsing heroically into baking-powder snow. Shollette explores the emotional collisions of kitsch and high idealism, and quotes from Georges Bataille's novella "Blue of Noon," where sexual desire mingles perversely with the bloodlust of war.

CLICK IMAGE FOR GALLERY

That confusion recalls a Web work visible in the exhibition's media room: Andrej Tisma's "Glorious Victory," which associates porno images with bombers and phallic missiles. But the reference to the somber 1930s also brings to mind the strategies of the art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK).

Working in Slovenia in the 1980s, while the tiny country was still under the Yugoslav communist regime, NSK broke all the taboos on historical memory by re-deploying avant-garde images from the early twentieth century. The group believed that these residual symbols, from both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, were embers of a totalitarian collectivism that also lay smoldering in the Yugoslav state. A brilliant film by Michael Benson, "Predictions of Fire," shows how NSK's "retrogardist" art sought to stave off a potential conflagration by deflecting these historically charged symbols into the consciously unreal realm of art.

Were they right to play with fire? It is true that Slovenia escaped the worst violence. But the aesthetics of endless repetition took on an opposite meaning in Serbian cinema a decade later, with Srdjan Dragojevic's excruciatingly comic film, "Pretty Village, Pretty Flame": a surreal replay of the deadly neighbors' war in Bosnia.

Arts of Survival

The installation by Emily Jacir, "Untitled (Kosovo/Baghdad)," stands quietly apart. It consists of small, handle-less, intricately decorated cups of the kind used for Turkish coffee, set down simply in a circle on the floor. Half the cups have been painted black inside, the other half left white, creating a graphic divide and various metaphors: the black-and-white value judgments applied to the targets of NATO's bombs, the coffee grounds where people try to read the future ... The cups are a message from the everyday, from ordinary. One thinks back to the story told by the Kosovar journalist Aferdita Kelmendi of her flight from Pristina, the endless journey on foot over the hills, her realization that everyone, in those moments, had to rely on something very personal, intimate, insignificant to the world — "an art of survival," she said. But that realization doesn't make her own judgments any less black and white: "You could hear people cheering all over Pristina when the first bombs fell," she also told. And this was part of her testimony before a Senate committee.

How are you supposed to respond to that, if you are convinced of the overwhelming oppression built into the NATO war machine? On the way out the door, your eye falls on a display of information sheets and color photographs showing Kosovar villages and towns put together by Laura Guimond from the humanitarian organization Mercy Corps. NGOs such as this one offer a way to work outside governments, to help people directly in the worst situations. But they also contribute to the humanitarian rhetoric that many speakers in the lecture series condemned, as a mask laid over the political confrontations which provide our only civilized procedure for facing the sources of violence.

The Unfinished Debate

The real issue, Croatian journalist Boris Buden claimed in the lecture series, is whether Kosovo will become a sovereign nation or remain a nominal part of Serbian Yugoslavia, under de facto NATO control. The latter "solution," he believes, is untenable. But Aferdita Kelmendi's position underscored the difficulty of a clear-cut answer. For her, Kosova aspires to independence — and integration into the European community. These are the contradictions of the "post-national" age, with repercussions far beyond the former Yugoslavia.

The international edition of The Bastard, a newsprint publication by the Croatia-based Arkzin collective, to which Buden belongs, made it onto the exhibition walls as Scholz's selection for the best alternative-media coverage of the Kosovo war. But Buden's lecture in Portland was a protest against the absorption of dissident journalism by cultural events. For him, the "culturalization" of such work neutralizes it, cutting off another avenue of political confrontation. Several activists among the public in Portland seemed to agree.

What then is the value of an exhibition like this? Consider a final work, the CD recording of "WAR!," conceived by Brian Conley for Immaterial Incorporated. It was an interactive struggle for audio domination, waged live over radio WBAI, New York, and B2-92, Belgrade, by Serbian and American artists armed with cartoon sound effects. The aim was to create and broadcast a contemporary theater of the absurd, probing national identifications at the symbolic level, while dissolving them in the trivialities of the commercial media. Clearly the work was influenced by the Slovene group NSK. A "theater" of this sort "simultaneously contains dissociation, the presentation of an image at a distance, and the shared implication of actor and spectator in a single scenario or 'moment' of consciousness," wrote French philosopher Etienne Balibar. It is to such a theater that he looks for a possible "civilizing of violent identities."

Simultaneous identification and distancing has everything to do with the uncanny nearness explored in "Carnival in the Eye of the Storm." This experience is undoubtedly the contribution that art can make to individual and collective sanity, in this dangerous moment of the nation-state's unfinished disintegration. But the strength of the exhibition is to maintain the demands of reasoned political confrontation amidst the theatrical experience, and to highlight the tools of media activism and non-governmental organizations alongside the ambiguities of art. Because the democratic institutions, indeed, the democratic culture of the postnational age has yet to be invented — and for that, a tremendous amount remains to be learned.

Maybe it's no accident that this event was held in a teaching institution. In his first large-scale exhibition, Trebor Scholz has made a startlingly innovative contribution to questions that will preoccupy us inside and outside the art world for a long time to come.

- Brian Holmes is an art critic living in Paris. He publishes regularly in Parachute Magazine.