Real Politik versus Real Fantasy (Review of the Tate Modern's Border Crossing seminar)

At the Tate Modern's Border Crossing seminar, the artist/activist approaches of panelists Heath Bunting and Florian Schneider threw divergent light on the politics of migration.

Life is a burning up of questions, wrote Antonin Artaud. The projects presented at the Border Crossings seminar at the Tate Modern last Tuesday provided enough material for a bonfire, even if the ensuing discussion somehow failed to catch light.

After a useful introduction from Armin Medosch putting artists' current fascination with borders into historical context, net artist Heath Bunting presented his BorderXing Guide, an online resource commissioned for the Tate’s website. It documents his ongoing border-breaching walks within Europe (18 borders inside the EU crossed so far, mostly sans papiers) as well as providing advice on border crossing and a route planner. But although this artwork is on the net, it isn't open to all. Miming the exclusivity of physical borders as well as the closed community of a trust network, the artist has set certain limits to the accessibility of his database and documents. To see the site in full you must posses a static IP address that the artist then registers as a client of his site. If you do not have the requisite static IP or trust credentials, to view the site you must physically travel to one of a list of designated public, or publicly accessible locations. The published list includes the Tate Modern itself, internet cafés, media labs and libraries. The web consumer is invited to adopt a less privatised and passive attitude: either imitate data and migrate or open up your private terminal to public use.

Bunting guided us through a project that mixes picaresque boy's own adventure, samizdat publishing and conceptual art techniques of documentation. The artist takes globalisation ideology at its word, setting out to move as freely as capital while, in the small print, exercising a similar control over who's allowed in and who stays out of his knowledge base.

Deploying a similar tactic of over-identification with globalisation rhetoric, the evening's other main speaker was writer, activist and film maker Florian Schneider of the Noborder Network. Their No One Is Illegal and subsequent Everyone is an Expert campaigns provocatively embrace neoliberalism's claim that the world's borders are open to all ('Borders are there to be crossed'), pushing for an actualisation of the ideology. Schneider presented an analysis of the emergence of a new kind of border management. Borders are no longer physical, external limits on migration, he argued, so much as proliferating internal and virtual machines for sorting migrants into the useful and the illegal respectively. Not only does globalisation need immigrant labour, rendering older regimes of exclusion as undesirable as they are unviable, but illegal immigration is itself put to use. Through the border machine, the production of illegal subjects effectively feeds the demand for cheap, casual labour.

This analysis interestingly drew out the larger implications of Bunting's border activities. For example, the very ease with which, as an artist, Bunting is able to slip back and forth within Europe (while receiving the funds to do so from a major art institution!) reveals the selective, slippery and stratified action of today's border regime. The idea of 'crossing the border' which animates his project, of the border as punctual physical line of demarcation, is made to reveal itself as anachronistic, a romantic whimsy. Bunting's online documents include photos of the artist fording streams in bucolic surroundings as well as more minatory vistas like the fences of Sangatte; his lists of food and provisions sound more like a rambler's itinerary than a fugitive's bare necessities.

As Bunting himself pointed out, his attempts at unhindered cross-border movement may have a utopian or transgressive appeal but they don't reflect the reality of immigration. Real immigrants aren't trying to definitively evade capture, rather they aspire to remain within the nations they enter, to be 'caught' and integrated – albeit in less dehumanising ways than the state allows. Classified as passive subjects, 'seekers of asylum', their tactics are necessarily different from Bunting's self-imposed border games. In fact the artist's carefully recorded vagrancy makes more sense if read as a politicised latterday version of Richard Long's pedestrian pastorals, a search for first-hand knowledge of a situation which is disavowed, abstracted and sterilised by the media and politicians.

BorderXing Guide strikes me as more likely to stimulate thinking about the nature of the border regime than to directly assist would-be immigrants. Bunting seemed to admit ambivalence about the utility of his project even as its 'action man' risk-taking and community-oriented elements would seem to give it gravity. He described some of the trans-border trails given on the site's route planner as practically absurd, scenic rather than efficient ways of getting across the border. Equally, while access to the site is ostentatiously regulated, it is by no means secure enough to constitute a real trust network. Although the artist has registered the cybercafe at Sangatte, the difficulty of getting access to the net must generally make it hard for its supposed target audience to use. (And this doesn’t even take into account the social divides which bar access.) At the same time any genuinely useful information, given the kind of publicity the Tate can generate, is as likely to be intercepted by the authorities – even providing them with an update on loopholes in their security – as to empower refugees.

Whether or not artists' interest in making work about their plight helps or actively hinders immigrants is the most serious question thrown up by this initiative, but somehow the audience seemed too polite or too preoccupied to really tackle it. Instead some of the questioners appeared fascinated by the possibility that the artist was just trying to 'make his name' on the back of other people’s misery. The difference between cynicism and criticism was never more apparent, stopping short at the reflex suspicioning of motive rather than exploring the (more troubling) ideological content of the projects in their own right.

Considered as activism, BorderXing Guide may be prone to malfunction, but the very delinquency of Bunting's borderline art makes it less problematic than Schneider's more sober 'Everyone is an Expert' project. The latter involved the creation of a dedicated online employment agency for immigrants and declared that low-paid workers such as janitors should be as welcome and valued as their white-collar compatriots. Whatever the viability of the project per se (and again I would suspect that online initiatives can be difficult for poor and systematically disempowered people to access), as a propaganda device the adoption of an argument based on immigrants' utility ultimately reinforces neoliberal moralism and its economic rationale. Surely the demand for freedom of movement should be separated from any 'justification' by labour power.

While Schneider and the Noborder Network commendably oppose the distinction between political and economic asylum seekers, to pragmatically emphasise the virtuous employability of all immigrants is a much more dangerous tactic than Bunting's self-authorising flaneurism. In the end the artist's border crossing for border crossing's sake is a more effective and more timely way of invoking a fugitive freedom. It appeals to desire and possibility rather than human rights and economic rationality and as such allows a different conception of border politics to be discussed – even if on this occasion that discussion did not take place.

The Border Crossings seminar was held at the Tate Modern, London UK, 1/10/02.

http://www.tate.org.uk/audiovideo/live.htm

http://www.noborder.org

http://irational.org/cgi-bin/border/clients/deny.pl

cognitarian AT yahoo.co.uk