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Art in the age of exception: Mark Wallinger's Sleeper in Berlin

Writing in the introductory chapter to this book which asked authors to address ways in which the ‘revolutionary impulse has been embodied in the arts in the consideration of unconventional methods in avant garde theatre, contemporary art and the modern novel’ the editors expressed a view that art and revolution are in a constant flux of language and desire, technical possibilities and aesthetic surprises. They also write, of Whittaker’s chapter on Mark Wallinger’s performance Sleeper (2004) that it ‘places a man in the bear suit moonlighting at the Neue national Galerie in Berlin in his proper social architectural, and historical contexts in order to exact the profound levels of meaning behind the carefully juxtaposed –but silent– act that won Wallinger the 2007 Turner Prize’ (Steele and Craig, p. 6). Whittaker explored how the legal term ‘state of exception’ could be applied to performative artworks. This involved close reading of the Italian philosophers, Massimo Caccciari and Giorgio Agamben, who trace the legal precedent increasingly used to explain necessary suspension of democratic rights in the political emergency of a financial crisis. Whittaker concludes that corporate architecture exemplified by Mies concept of the glass atrium colludes with high finance in maintaining this emergency. It is in the apparatus of Mies van der Rohe’s, Neue National Galerie that Wallinger vibrantly expresses this legal paradox in the overlit immured space. Whittaker explains that the background to Wallinger’s protest, even if not expressly part of the work’s intentions, was in the context of the necessary imposition of ‘ideological’ space that had its origins in the split between capitalism and communism historically sited in Berlin. Whittaker concluded that the clean, sanitized architecture of glass insulation allowed for a powerful metaphor for the current state of neo liberal capitalism and the (diminishing) possibility for a revolutionary art.