Mark Wallinger "State Britain" Solo Exhibition

A view of the "State Britain" solo exhibition - art is a form of protest expression. Mark Wallinger's "State Britain" solo exhibition: on display at the Val-de-Marne Contemporary Art Museum from February 29th to June 22nd. Mark Wallinger (born 1959) is one of Britain's most representative contemporary artists and a pacifist. He was the representative artist for the British Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and in 2007, he won the UK's most prestigious contemporary art award, the Turner Prize, with this highly politically combative object-installation work "State Britain". Mark Wallinger's "State Britain" solo exhibition at the Val-de-Marne Contemporary Art Museum in the Paris suburbs is its exhibition abroad following its showing at Tate Modern last year. It aims to elucidate the universal significance of the work itself when detached from its socio-political context. Of course, within the Western anti-war and peace-seeking warrior alliance, consciousness and action are aligned, making this common stance against the Iraq war not difficult to understand. Protest, participation, and dissatisfaction are all possible forms of art, and the resistance of the artist-warrior is inevitable. Here, Mark Wallinger provides a situation for the plastic arts, exposing the violence of political power from a realistic standpoint.

From the perspective of the artist as warrior or the art world as battlefield, Mark Wallinger uses art to question religious beliefs, concerning personal responsibility and social obligation. Wallinger's artistic practice began with early painting, later expanding to photography, video, sculpture, and installation. As early as the 1980s, it was established from a social standpoint, exploring social identity and political participation through allusive aspects of mass culture, such as the 1984 painting "The Return of John Barleycorn". In the 1990s, under a radical social action consciousness, for instance during his 1992 solo exhibition at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London, he extended the gallery's water pipes from both upper and lower floors out onto the street outside, letting water flow, titling it "Fountain", echoing the most famous work in recent art history, Duchamp's 1917 piece. Later, he clearly manifested spiritual religious faith, such as the 1999 sculpture "Ecce Homo" (the theme comes from the famous words of Pontius Pilate), installed at the site of political protest on Whitehall in London, presenting a life-sized statue of a modern Jesus Christ crowned with a barbed wire crown. He also proposed the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, originally intended for a fourth equestrian statue; when the plan was abandoned leaving the plinth empty, it was converted into a space dedicated to exhibitions of contemporary art by young artists. The 2000 video art work "Threshold to the Kingdom" shows a passerby crossing through customs at London Airport, accompanied by the light rhythm of Gregorio Allegri's "Miserere", presenting a strong social consciousness within this threshold of a heavenly kingdom that is suffering. In recent years, he has continued to explore the limits of artistic freedom of expression and the boundaries of art within museums or contemporary art spaces; this "State Britain" work is a case study.

Mark Wallinger's "State Britain" is an extraordinary artistic transformation of real political struggle, and also the result of over five years of prolonged protest by the British civil group Brian Haw's peace organization against the British government's support for the US and participation in the Iraq War. The story begins with the artist's involvement in Brian Haw's peace organization. Since June 2001, peace warriors protested day and night on the street in front of the Westminster Parliament against Western economic sanctions on Iraq. They hung all these anti-Iraq war protest banners, slogans, pictures, news clippings, dolls, and objects in an installation on the street opposite Parliament, like a socio-political environmental art installation. This sparked widespread public debate. Protest is a civil liberty right, and a great political tradition of British liberal democracy, protected by law, allowing people to oppose the government provided it does not harm national interests. But after 9/11, under the security considerations of the "War on Terror", the British government re-examined this law in 2005. Parliament enacted a new law on "Serious Organized Crime", prohibiting protests within a certain distance of Parliament unless authorized by the London police headquarters. The government seemed unable to enforce this law against the anti-war peace protesters, but eventually, on the evening of May 23, 2006, could bear it no longer and sent police to dismantle and disperse the protest of these peace envoys. Soon after, Brian Haw's peace organization applied for and obtained permission to protest, but was confined by the police to a narrow, designated area on the street, so as not to disrupt traffic or the urban scenery.

The socio-political struggle of Brian Haw's peace organization raises two major questions: personal responsibility and social obligation. Mark Wallinger's groundbreaking "State Britain" exhibition takes all the anti-Iraq war peace protest banners, slogans, pictures, news clippings, labels, slogans, dolls, objects, tents, and plinths from this five-year-long socio-political campaign. Following photographic documentation, it meticulously replicates each object and reconstructs the exact arrangement, mirroring the protest site's appearance, within the contemporary art space. It appropriates and transforms these elements, like readymades, into an artistic monument, because these protest banners, pictures, and objects themselves possess inherent rich political content and diverse forms. Without addition or subtraction, they become Mark Wallinger's extraordinary object-environment space installation, radically making life the source of art. It also brings forth the material, social, and intellectual space of the museum, testing the limits of free artistic creation and questioning the very statutes of art itself. Is "State Britain" an extraordinary contemporary three-dimensional historical picture? Regardless, it at least raises a controversial question of rights, alongside the limits of art and its natural appearance within the context of the art institution.