Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 41

ON PEDRO REYES’ THE PEOPLE’S UNITED NATIONS (2013–2014)
ship. This is foregrounded in Reyes’ description of the Theatre of the Oppressed as one
of his main influences in pUN Workbook (2013). 8 As he states,
theatre of the Oppressed stages situations that contain several social
“errors.” At a certain point the play stops and you—the spectator—are
invited to become an actor, or a “spect-actor.” [sic] [...] Rather than de-
scribing a new situation, the spect-actor [sic] acts it out. There are no
experts here—knowledge that results from this experiment will be the
best we can attain. (2013:10)
This “acting out the situation” is evident in the fact that pUN’s events had no script—
only broad guidelines such as their time, format and duration. That is, instead of be-
ing about the UN, the activities that composed the performance were joined by their
echoing of the UN’s mission and rhetoric: fostering and maintaining peace and under-
standing among peoples (hence pUN’s focus on deliberation, relationship-building
and the topics of the debates and other parts of the performance). This is why I see
Reyes’ approach as fundamentally analogous to that of the artist Mark Wallinger in
Oxymoron (1996)—another rare explicit artistic engagement with political iconogra-
phy. This artwork, a flag combining the design of the Union Jack with the colours of
the Irish tricolour, was a reminder of the continued sectarianism in Northern Ireland.
As the artist and scholar Dave Beech states in a review of the piece, the artwork was
also an
emblem of politicisation not because it takes on one of the sharpest po-
litical conflicts of our time, but because it internalises those antagonisms
in its very fabric [...]. The first task of art’s politicisation is to struggle for
struggle. (Beech 2001)
That is, both artists engaged with political entities through their forms of visual (re)pre-
sentation, which they appropriated and combined. Additionally, like Beech suggests,
both highlighted the inner divisions that characterise those institutions or countries yet
are not usually visible in their official imagery—an absence that the artists corrected. In
this view, and considering the piece’s focus on the exclusionary character of citizenship
(as I mentioned in relation to the work of Balibar), pUN can be seen as aligned with La-
clau and Mouffe’s radical understanding of democracy and the political (1985), which
emphasises the centrality of conflict.
Finally, the significance of pUN’s appropriation of the UN’s images and narrative
in this manner can be further understood if one considers the argument developed
by Barbara Bolt. In Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image
(2004), and drawing on Heidegger’s counter-representationalist idea of handling first
developed in Being and Time (1927), the artist and scholar proposes that artistic prac-
8
Which, I must note, mitigates the importance of emancipation as the original goal of these theatrical
forms.
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