Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 42

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS tice exemplifies a relation of care that brings about a different understanding of the world to that offered by Cartesian representation. In this view, art and world are in a relationship of mutual indebtedness, in which the artist, the materials used by her and the creative process bring into appearance something that cannot be predicted fully by the artist. To make this case, Bold discusses Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s work, which stresses the existence of movement within the latter (see “Sending: On Representation” 1982). As she writes, “the process of translation necessarily involves corruption. It is this corruption that produces permutations and brings about meta- morphosis” (2004:33–35). To return to the initial part of my argument, Bolt’s argument confirms that pUN’s high- lighting of the coexistence of contradictory elements within the UN’s rhetoric was made possible by its focus on mediation. That is, pUN not only used the UN as its topic; rather, it also considered the organisation’s representation both in terms of how it represents itself and of who is represented in it. In doing so, pUN foregrounded the political dimen- sion (understood in light of Rancière’s work, that is, as a distribution of words and imag- es, and hence of the sayable and the imaginable, 2000) of representation within and of an international organisation that presents itself as universal and inclusive. In this context, the performative aspect of the piece was crucial. As Reyes affirmed: The performative aspect starts with the presence of one person from every country on Earth. [...]. But it’s important that these activities ac- tually happen. [...]. It’s very playful, but very serious, and that’s the kind of ambiguity we want. And that’s precisely why it’s called pUN. You have these two ideas to interpret. A thin line between being serious and doing pranks. (Brooks and Reyes 2013) That is, appropriating and performing the UN’s imagery and rhetoric, the artwork made visible the tension between the mission, values and ideas (such as universality) based on which the UN is discursively founded, and its modus operandi, which is exclusionary. pUN’s gesture can hence be understood as one not of critique but of criticality (Rogoff 2003) in that, instead of criticising the UN from an external position, it inhabited its contradictory symbols and rhetoric and used them as its subject, hence suggesting with- out prescribing the possibility of institutional reform (echoing similar calls for reform by UN experts, e.g. Slaughter 2005; Weiss and Thakur 2010). Conclusion: Foregrounding the Instability Within the UN Finally, the artwork revealed the impotence of the artistic realm—the latter can crit- icise the political sphere (here understood in a strict sense) but it cannot enact such ideas. This said, artistic forms of engagement with political debates may influence public discourse—by creating spaces for discussion and by considering issues that tend to be overlooked. 40