What is ‘What is art’? Hirst, Manifesta, Fey as Palin Pt. 2

So, to reiterate, what would be a counter-example to Damien Hirst’s recent refusal to explore anything with his ‘new’ works but the lows to which bidders allow themselves to stoop to by even considering buying them?
If art is really simultaneously the exploration of possibilities of communication (i.e. future) and a self-reflexive memory system (i.e. past), then there were some pieces in Manifesta 7  that did give good counter-examples. Namely in the part curated by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg in Trento, entitled ‘THE SOUL (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)’, emerged a theme that highlighted the strong points of one particular strategy of exploring possibilities of communication: speaking in tongues.
‘Speaking in tongues’ is a religious concept (the Holy Spirit speaking through you), but the secular (technological and/or performative) version would simply be to detach the utterance from its source, displace it, and thus allow it to be heard, uncannily, afresh. There were several works in Trento that made use of that strategy to varying degrees: Omer Fast constructed a filmic scenario – Looking Pretty For God (After G.W.), 2008 – in which the embalmment facility of a funeral parlour is located right next to a photo studio with young children posing for a commercial product shooting. We hear the voices of funeral directors describing their experiences, but we see the children lip-synching to it. Last year’s The Casting was a great exercise in dissecting the Iraq war through a (staged) interview with a soldier on leave; but this felt a little laboured (and also derivative of pieces like Gillian Wearing’s 2 into 1, 1997), especially if you think of the complexity of a TV-show like Six Feet Under in comparison.
More explorative and daring was a video by Roee Rosen, The Confessions of Roee Rosen (2008). To call it bizarre would be a euphemism. It involved three protagonists – female immigrants to Israel, one of which is a mesmerizingly androgynous South-Asian – who recite the artist’s Hebrew text, seemingly without understanding what they are saying, sitting at a desk with piles of books to their side (the two titles I jotted down where “Solitary Pleasures” and The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Anti-Semitism”, both incidentally Routledge imprints, which also kind of delineate the spectrum of Rosen’s phantasmatic confessions). The exploitation of the immigrants is doubled by them being used as ‘parrots’ in front of teleprompters, all the more so given the conflicted nature of what they are reciting and enacting, including a nazi salute (makes Anselm Kiefer or Jonathan Meese look like milksops). But weirdly I never felt this was just a clever rehashing of worn concepts of taboo-breaking; rather, it felt sincerely engaged with exploring guilty fantasies, and fantasies of guilt, and the embarrassment of dreams, by means of ‘speaking in tongues’. (Re. Manifesta, also see Melissa Gronlund’s review).
Sarah Palin, incidentally, has been baptised as a teenager in a Pentecostal Assemblies of God church. Pentacostals ‘speak in languages they have not learnt’, which she clearly evidenced in her statements about the financial crisis in the by-now legendary CBS-interview, incoherently rehashing pieces of Republican newspeak. That comedian Tina Fey so eloquently re-impersonated  her thus provided a mind-boggling conundrum of speaking in tongues that speak in tongues.