A long line of people move slowly in a procession through the streets of New York and across Brooklyn Bridge. They are wearing differently coloured simple uniforms—some with blue shirts, others white. Some of them carry reproductions of famous works of art—Duchamp's bicycle wheel on a stool, a Giacometti, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—all from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York. Leading the way are various curators and art world dignitaries. Over the sound of the traffic the horns of a Peruvian brass band can be heard. At the centre of proceedings, the feminist artist Kiki Smith is carried aloft on a chair, as if she were a statue of the Virgin.
The procession took place on 23rd June 2002 and was organised by the Belgian-born, Mexico-City-resident artist Francis Alÿs to mark the temporary move of Moma from Manhattan to Queens. Now—as represented by a series of maps, sketches, photographs, postcards, diagrams and a video projection—it forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition about parades and processions at the Parasol Unit, one of several recently opened, privately run contemporary art spaces in London. Alÿs's is a simple, clever work, bringing to life the familiar idea that modern art is a kind of religion. But it's also a sign of our times in a larger sense.
Upstairs, there is a huge installation called simply The Procession (2005) by the German artist Thomas Hirschhorn. The floor is covered with graffiti, mostly of people's names. On this surface are "pools" of blood (red-painted foam) through which hands rise, holding aloft Bibles and Korans and three large rectangular "coffins" covered with newspaper headlines which evoke a mix of Gulf war militarism, capitalist enthusiasms and journalistic cliché. The idea is that some kind of funeral procession is happening around viewers' feet, and the work is probably inspired by television footage of all those Hamas funerals. As with all of Hirshhorn's work, there is an infuriatingly superficial leftist politics, exacerbated by the restatement of the incredibly obvious, but it's vivid and there is discipline in the quartet of visual elements—hands, blood-foam, headlines and graffiti.
There are a variety of reasons why artists have now begun to "process" processions. In terms of postwar art, it follows on from the genres of performance art and "happenings." Instead of performing symbolic actions and gestures themselves, artists now orchestrate performances by groups of people. But there's also an academic art historical dimension. Recently, scholars have begun to analyse the pageants of the Renaissance and baroque as a distinct genre of art. And today, in the realm of official culture, artists have begun to be employed to design pageants once again. The Chinese contemporary artist Cai Guo Qiang, for example, designed the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. And politically, the more intense visual choreography of political meetings (especially in America) and popular protests has drawn artists' attention.
More basic motives are surely at work too. The parade and procession are richly visual symbolic activities. Yet they are ones in which artists—at least since the baroque era—have played little part. They have been works of art in all but name, devised and orchestrated by ordinary people. Isn't the new trend partly the result of artists trying to muscle in on a market for visual display in which they, until recently, had not made an impact.
