Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 29

ON PEDRO REYES’ THE PEOPLE’S UNITED NATIONS (2013–2014)
discipline of visual culture 2 —i.e. it considers the engagement by a contemporary artist,
Pedro Reyes, with an international institution, the United Nations (UN) by means of
the former’s appropriation of the latter’s visual signs and tropes. This allows me to iden-
tify and analyse a set of continuities and lack thereof between the mission of the UN,
its institutional framework, the global circulation of its images via mass media, their re-
ception, their artistic appropriation, and the viewership of the latter. The People’s United
Nat ions (henceforth referred to as pUN, 2013–2014) 3 showed that these links are not
direct. On the contrary, this art project appropriated and displaced the images and the
rhetoric of the UN, inhabiting its inner tensions—namely, regarding the organisation’s
foundational values of universality, equality and dialogue on the one hand, and its mo-
dus operandi on the other hand. This is an argument that I develop in conversation with
authors whose understandings of mediation (Nick Couldry and Sonia Livingstone),
citizenship (Étienne Balibar), aesthetics ( Jacques Rancière) and participation (Claire
Bishop), among others, pay attention to issues of power dynamics.
My analysis will be structured into five steps: first, a description of pUN; second, a re-
flection on the idea of mediation as a connector between international affairs and con-
temporary art practices; third, a discussion of the project as an examination of the UN’s
rhetoric of democracy and deliberation; fourth, a reflection on the politics of represen-
tation of pUN, which inhabits the UN’s foundational contradictions; fifth, concluding
thoughts regarding the project’s ability to foreground some of the UN’s internal exclu-
sions. As I will suggest, the art project stresses that the UN’s rhetoric of democracy and
deliberation is in tension with its modus operandi. However, rather than criticising the
international organisation from an external position, pUN inhabited its contradictory
symbols and rhetoric and used them as its subject, hence suggesting without prescrib-
ing the possibility of institutional reform. This said, the analysis will also emphasise the
limits of the project to achieve what it implied, perhaps unintentionally—i.e. the possi-
bility of UN reform—and hence the (partial) disjunction between the fields of art and
international affairs.
Although the article’s focus lies on an art project that engaged with the UN, its findings
are potentially transferable to other international organisations—namely, to a reflec-
tion on the tensions between the viewership position that they demand and their open-
ness (or lack therein) to regular forms of participation. Its conclusions also contribute
to existing research on the overlaps between discussions of spectatorship and ongoing
debates around citizenship. Indeed, the value of studying artworks that refer to offi-
cial imagery and narratives for examining broader political and international questions
will become clear throughout the article: artistic appropriation and dislocation can be
understood as a type of feature-by-feature analysis, which compares and contrasts the
For a summary of the origins and the history of the discipline, see Dikovitskaya (2005); for a discussion
of the epistemological differences between visual culture and visual studies, see Moxey (2008).
3
The project was subsequently displayed at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from 31 January to 24
May 2015. My analysis focuses on its first iteration.
2
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