ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
institutional narratives of international organisations with their modes of work as well as art projects about such organisations . The ability to make explicit contradictions and blind spots in these subjects and surrounding discussions is the main strength of this approach .
Nonetheless , one must also acknowledge the main difficulty of studying this type of evidence : ascertaining whether there is a link between its scholarly analysis and the impact of the project , namely regarding how it was perceived by participants . While this would be an interesting focus for future research , I must stress that this relatively common critique of visual culture and art historical analysis derives from a mistaken conflation . This point confuses the fields ’ indebtedness to methods such as phenomenology and ethnography on the one hand , which allow them to take into consideration perception and embodied experience in their analyses of social phenomena , with the goal of the disciplines on the other hand : in the case of visual culture ( the field with which I align this chapter ), understanding the manifold meanings that images acquire as they emerge , circulate and change . This is made possible by the equal influence of other methods in the development of the discipline , such as semiotics and communication studies ( Mitchell 1994 , 2005 ). That is , although it would have been interesting to consider the response to pUN — in this case , how it was understood by its participants and viewers —, doing so isn ’ t required to validate an analysis of the project inspired in visual culture scholarship . This differentiation is clear when one looks at pUN : whether participants and viewers saw it as a reflection on the UN ’ s rhetoric ( both textual and visual ) or not does not change the fact that its participatory form enacted such a critique .
The People ’ s United Nations ( pUN )
Let us then consider the project in detail . As I will be arguing throughout the chapter , pUN foregrounded a set of fundamental contradictions of the UN .
Perusing several websites , databases and catalogues makes evident that the involvement of artists with the UN is only occasional and mostly indirect . Indeed , the number of artworks that can be found dealing explicitly with it is very low — which perhaps reflects the complexity of the organisation . 4 PUN , developed by the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes , is among the rare examples of an artistic engagement with this international organisation . It was presented at Performa 13 , a biannual performance art festival staged in the Queens Museum , New York , and comprised an exhibition ( on view from 9 November , 2013 to 30 March , 2014 ) and a performance ( taking place at midday 23 – 24 November , 2013 ) ( Reyes , 2013b ). Reyes , born in 1972 , lives and works in Mexico , and has participated in group exhibitions such as dOCUMENTA ( 13 ) in Kassel . He has risen to international
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For example , the visual culture scholar Gavin Grindon ( 2010 ) analyses the attempt by Copenhagen ’ s cultural institutions to engage with the United Nations 2009 Climate Change Summit . Grindon concludes that it ‘ revealed another crisis in contemporary art ’ s capacity to tackle issues of social change [...]. Instead , the art which most successfully engaged with the issues of climate change was that which had more affinity with extra-institutional activist practices ’ ( Grindon 2010:10 – 11 ).
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