6.  Arte de Conducta: On Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper Series

According to Bruguera, the works belonging to the Tatlin’s Whisper series seek to,

…activate images, well-known because of having been repeatedly seen in the press, but are here decontextualised from the original event that gave way to the news and staged as realistically as possible in an art institution. The most important element in this series is the participation of spectators who may determine the course the piece will take. The idea is that next time spectators face a piece of news using similar images to those they experienced, they may feel an individual empathy with that distant event towards which they will normally have an attitude of emotional disconnection or informative saturation. The experience of the audience within the piece may allow them to understand information in a different way and appropriate it because of having lived through it. (Pérez Moreno 2009).

The name of the series, Tatlin’s Whisper, is relevant for two reasons. In the first place, the title alludes to what the artist calls “the present weakening of the impact of a moment of Western history in which great transformations took place as the result of social revolutions.” By this we can understand that Tatlin’s Whisper tries to highlight the historical process by which once radical, avant-garde artistic practices, such as Vladimir Tatlin’s art and architectural career, have become domesticated and assimilated by hegemonic discourses and ideologies. According to Bruguera, the series explores how “the intensity, credibility and exaltation of socialist revolutions, just as Tatlin’s tower, which was never built, were frustrated and utopia is rethought with the effort implied in a weak whisper.“ By conjuring the avant-garde aesthetic project of Tatlin in its title, the series redefines his practice based upon its failure and not its projected monumentality. In the Tatlin’s Whisper series, utopian grand schemes are rendered small, ephemeral, almost powerless whispers. The series revise “an icon of the enthusiasm and grandiosity of the Bolshevik Revolution”—as she describes Tatlin—and re-evaluates the “intensity, credibility and exaltation of socialist revolutions,” which, in many cases and as exemplified by Monument to the Third International, have been characterised by failure in the implementation of utopian designs (Pérez Moreno 2009).