ARTFORUM
February, 2006
The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents
Claire Bishop
THE BRITISH ARTIST Phil Collins, for example, fully integrates these two concerns in his work. Invited to undertake a residency in Jerusalem, he decided to hold a disco-dancing marathon for teenagers in Ramallah, which he recorded to produce the two-channel video installation they shoot horses, 2004. Collins paid nine teenagers to dance continuously for eight hours, on two consecutive days, in front of a garish pink wall to an unrelentingly cheesy compilation of pop hits from the past four decades. The teenagers are mesmerizing and irresistible as they move from exuberant partying to boredom and finally exhaustion. The sound track’s banal lyrics of ecstatic love and rejection acquire poignant connotations in light of the kids’ double endurance of the marathon and of the interminable political crisis in which they are trapped. It goes without saying that they shoot horses is a perverse representation of the “site” that the artist was invited to respond to: The occupied territories are never shown explicitly but are ever-present as a frame. This use of the hors cadre has a political purpose: Collins’s decision to present the participants as generic globalized teenagers becomes clear when we consider the puzzled questions regularly overheard when one watches the video in public: How come Palestinians know Beyoncé? How come they’re wearing Nikes? By voiding the work of direct political narrative, Collins demonstrates how swiftly this space is filled by fantasies generated by the media’s selectiveproduction and dissemination of images from the Middle East (since the typical Western viewer seems condemned to view young Arabs either as victims or as medieval fundamentalists). By using pop music as familiar to Palestinian as to Western teens, Collins also provides a commentary on globalization that is considerably more nuanced than most activist-oriented political art. They shoot horses plays off the conventions of benevolent socially collaborative practice (it creates a new narrative for its participants and reinforces a social bond) but combines them with the visual and conceptual conventions of reality TV. The presentation of the work as a two-screen installation lasting a full eight-hour workday subverts both genres in its emphatic use of seduction on the one hand and grueling duration on the other.