Last summer an unusual group of artists took to the road in two large recreational vehicles. Three Russian artists, six Slovenian artists, and an American filmmaker set out in the blazing heat of late June from an Atlanta, Georgia in the grip of last-minute preparations for the summer Olympic games. Their destination wasn’t simply a chain of large and small cities strung out on the American Road -- though it was that as well. Their final goal, in fact, was to conduct a trip as an art event, an art event as a trip: a kind of coast-to-coast investigation, by Eastern artists, of that consummate “Other”: the United States. The idea was to meet American artists and conduct a dialogue, and not incidentally, also to conduct a dialogue within the smaller universe of the trip participants. This entire voyage -- from Atlanta to Richmond to Chicago to Kansas and the deserts of the South West; from the Grand Canyon to Death Valley to the improbable neon hysteria of Las Vegas (nadir of the American Dream); from the Mojave Desert to San Francisco and finally, Seattle -- was documented on digital videotape. The final project -- a coproduction between my small New York-based production company Kinetikon Pictures and the TV Slovenia Arts Program -- is currently titled: Transnational: An Untitled Road Movie

With a little luck, Transnational will prove to be a highly provocative exploration of some of the key issues of our time: issues involving freedom of expression, art as politics, the right to communication (free speech), and the role of art within social change. According to New York critic Jerry Salz in a recent issue of Art in America, “Conceptualism is a little like radiation: it never goes away.” I would prefer another interpretation about an art living primarily in the world of ideas: it’s a laboratory -- and one capable of out-guessing, out-lasting and out-communicating the best efforts of philosophers, scientists, and politicians. The artists participating in the Transnational trip have all distinguished themselves as researchers working at the cutting edge of contemporary social and political issues. They have shown, both during the trip and in their individual work, that they are fully capable of building new interactive models. They may even be capable of reversing art out of it’s current marginal position. Because that’s what’s at stake.

When Slovenia was one-fifth of an atypical “Eastern” country with a one-party political system, the collectivist art movement NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) was among the first to present a critique of the abuses of totalitarianism and the tyranny of state power. Their provocative art actions, which directly challenged the old regime, were a crucial early component of the civil society movement which opened the political system -- producing, eventually, democratic elections.

With the death of communism, Russian “unofficial” artists finally got an opportunity to present their work freely, without the interference of the state, in an uncensored atmosphere. They could move it out of their private apartments to real galleries. On the other hand, the Russians also got a vulgar capitalism, uninterested in subtlety and unappreciative of art; the main goal in Russia these days is to make as much money as possible.

The Slovenians, meanwhile, watched the spectacle of the most brutal war Europe has seen in fifty years unfold on their doorstep.

The experience of so-called Yugoslav self-managed socialism and Soviet totalitarianism, together with the experience of western “liberty”, in its various guises, met on the road in the United States last summer. Artists from Slovenia and Russia joined forces with some leading figures of American curatorship and conceptual art, for a month-long collaborative art action/road trip titled Transnational.

The meeting of these three decidedly different political, social, and therefore artistic views, subsumed within the Transnational concept and event, provided an opportunity to reflect on some of the ambiguities of the various dialectics described above. It also enabled a kind of micro-cosmic representation of what we might all experience in the future -- after, presumably, the differences of the past are gradually converted into a more common cooperation.

In short, a social experiment through and with artistic means took place for four weeks on the American road in the summer of 1996.

If we consider that art, even in the most radical view, is generally taken to be a vehicle transmitting universal values, this could well have been the most provocative artistic project in a long time. That it deployed the freedom granted by conceptualism and “public art” makes it even more valuable. Transnational was a journey as work-in-progress, a work in progress in the guise of a journey. It’s stated goal was to “research the potential models of interaction among different artistic communities.” For the Eastern artists at least, according to one of the participants, the Transnational road trip was “linked to the need to analyze and demystify our culturally-produced preconceptions about America.” Eda Cufer continued:

America is a large territory with great intersocial complexity corresponding to the universal complexity of the world as a whole. And this perhaps was our main reason for meeting and confronting American art communities: to learn about their own reflections and experiences of their inner complexity and to exchange views on the particular and global complexities of today’s world -- from the point of view of defined artistic and intellectual positions, of course.

I was there: documenting it, participating in it, and am now intent on presenting a summation -- an artifact -- of it.

Transnational: An Untitled Road Movie will be talk-heavy -- in a good way, like an involving conversation. The speakers will be Russians, Slovenians, and Americans. An extended cast will also feature: residents of large American cities. Atlanta. Chicago. San Francisco. Seattle. The film will document a month on the road. There will be tensions, disagreements -- and the opposite as well. There will be a great deal of pretentious and unpretentious discussion about art. There will be incidents on the road.

Transnational: An Untitled Road Movie will be music-heavy -- the music will periodically upstage the road-movie “action”, supplanting it, replacing it in the foreground. Six musicians recording two tracks in the Slovenian Postojna Cave main chamber -- one of the largest caves in Europe -- will be seen, providing “road-movie music.” However, the traditional filmic structure -- in which music provides a background to the action -- will flip, with music out front. Then it will flip back.

Transnational: An Untitled Road Movie will be framed by that restless constant of American life (motion) but also by that much-maligned constant of Russian and “Eastern” life: cramped communal apartments. What is a Winnebago, packed with six people per vehicle, other than a social experiment on the same order as Soviet housing? And what is the exact same vehicle, other than an embodiment of the so-called “American dream” -- a rolling icon of one of the myths we (Americans) live by? Although the cast of characters and view outside the window change, human nature is a constant.

The communication rituals I documented with something of an anthropologist’s eye (I hope) involve two basic threads. (1) The “East” -- i.e., the Slovenians and the Russians -- communicating with the “West” -- i.e., a number of American artists and people interested in art in several large American cities. (2) The East communicating with the East -- i.e., the Slovenians and the Russians. But of course the issues involved have no borders, and merge at various points.

Finally the road is another thread, providing a structural “spine”. But it’s more than that. Any reader of Keroac will know the hot black thread of the American road is also a character, capable of surprise.

During post-production, I plan to never make the cardinal error of forgetting that, to the vast majority of people in both the East and West, these people -- artists, what’s more, conceptual artists -- are simply strange, and probably quite humorous. Their concerns are not common concerns. They are not an “elite” (unless one tends to view life in a hierarchical way) -- but they are certainly rarefied. Their way of thinking and acting can be viewed with sympathy, but also unsentimentally, analytically, with a certain remove. I have no doubt this will result in fascination. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have wanted to shoot this project.

Structurally, the film will fall readily into chapters -- that’s the beauty of the road-movie format. It’s partially determined by the road, it’s of the road, and the dramaturgy of the road is something most people are familiar with. The road, and the actions required to negotiate it, will be my ally in making the sometimes obscure concerns of the avant-garde readable and entertaining. Two pre-requisites for holding any audience.

In conclusion: film resists improvisation -- but it is capable of it. The road requires improvisation. The musicians I plan to work with this spring, in the final production phase of the film, will be improvisational craftspeople.

The meeting of these elements will produce Transnational: An Untitled Road Movie.

In the half-decade since the Wall came tumbling down, the old East-West paradigm has suffered serious (though perhaps not irreparable) damage in Europe. The profusion of “eastern” license plates on the highways of “western” Europe, and vica-versa, gives evidence of a continent no longer fully divided. A restless “transmigration of souls” across the old cold war divide has been in force for several years now.

America and Russia stand to this scenario like distant planets in different orbits. They are vast, complex, and well-endowed with their own social and economic problems. The United States suffers a post-cold war identity crises far less severe than that afflicting the former Soviet Union, but it is noticeable nevertheless. Never entirely sure why it was playing such a large role on the world stage in the first place, the disappearance of the Communist counterweight has created an isolationist streak in US politics. Russia, on the other hand, remains culturally isolated from both Europe and the US. It is in the grip of strange, uncertain passions -- the kind associated with the making of money within a particularly brutal and lawless form of early capitalism; the kind associated with a “partial”, authoritarian democracy.

As for the arts, they largely function within the above scenario as repositories of surplus capital. Like the political left, they seem deflated at the end of the millennium, largely irrelevant, in both the East and West. In the West the collapse of the 1980’s art market has given rise to new opportunities, but also to a diminishing economic field. In the East the initial Western fascination with art initially regarded as “dissident” or “underground” proved unsustainable after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In retrospect the machinery of information-saturation, influential in the destruction of bankrupt states, was also the mechanism returning word of Eastern art. If the Wall was defeated by videocassettes well before it fell to jackhammers and chisels, then “Eastern” art was doomed by the fickle glance -- away -- of international interest in yesterday’s news.

Into this picture last summer drove a fascinatingly eclectic mix of artists from “East, West and Center.” But a simple documentation of this traveling caravan populated by creative personalities from Russia, Slovenia, and (at stops along the way) the United States is, itself, not enough for me. The film will be a collaboration with the artists involved, by an individual (myself) who has spent a lifetime commuting across the East-West divide. Thus the film will be clandestinely personal even as it seeks communication with a wide spectrum of personalities, and investigates some of the issues mentioned above. Transnational: An Untitled Road Movie will be something unique in film language: a documentary road movie about art, politics and cultural difference.

--Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures, Ljubljana Slovenia, 1/19/97

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