Arts & Culture
Beautiful strangers
Published 28 January 2002
Art - Morgan Falconer hooks up with the artist who has documented the prostitutes of Dubi
Because art and prostitution are both as old as the hills, their histories frequently overlap, taking you through such greats as Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin - with a dead, bloated whore being pulled out of the Tiber - to Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, starring ladies from one of his favourite bordellos.
But this shared history probably reached its logical terminus in 1975, at the high tide of radical feminism, when the performance artist Marina Abramovic swapped places with a Dutch prostitute for one night only. Apparently, she didn't pick up any clients - but even so, it's the sort of ne plus ultra beyond which only fools and imitators will go.
Consequently, perhaps, the Hayward Gallery's new exhibition by the Swedish artist Ann-Sofi Siden relies on none of the old stock devices; if prostitution offers any metaphors to Siden, it's as an image of the relationship between the post-communist eastern bloc and the wealthy west. Warte Mal! is a portrait of life in the Czech town of Dubi, about four miles from the German border; the title comes from the German for "Hey, wait!", the words the girls cry out to passing cars. Following the collapse of communism and the opening of borders, prostitution suddenly became big business in Dubi; Germans made flying visits, paid inflated prices, and soon a gold rush began. Today, the sexual economy is the only economy in town.
Siden found her subjects at a bar she came across almost by accident; from the characters who hovered around it, she gathered the set of interviews that form the core of the show. Various girls speak of their experiences, from Petra, a young Slovakian woman who was kidnapped and trafficked to Dubi by Russian pimps, to Miluse, an older ex-communist who took to streetwalking after envy and curiosity drove her to ask her next-door neighbour just why she was suddenly quids in. A town policeman also gave an interview, as did a regular client, but the pimps, not surprisingly, proved camera-shy.
If this sounds rather like journalism, that's because it is: Warte Mal! might be called a video installation, but in truth it's more like a fragmented, unedited documentary. Siden indicates this herself: "After the first interview," she told me, "I just felt I couldn't do it. It's too emotional, I'm not a journalist. I didn't know what I was getting myself into."
The layout of the show intervenes in this documentary approach only slightly: the interviews are separated into little glass booths (neatly reversing the sort of revelations that usually go in peep-shows), while extracts from Siden's diaries and two other films add different perspectives. A film of the girls relaxing and drinking through the night shows them to be a heedless, rather spirited lot, while drive-by footage shows them standing on the edges of town looking strangely absurd, as Madonna's "Beautiful Stranger" tinkles from Siden's car stereo with grotesque irony.
All this rightly provokes questions about how Siden persuaded the girls to speak, and whether what she has made for the western art world is of any worth to them. But Siden sees no need to invent excuses: "I went simply out of curiosity," she says. "When I heard the numbers involved, and when I had the experience of being there, I simply couldn't get out of it."
It was a story that demanded to be told, which is as fair a defence as any. This sort of passing interest is unlikely to yield anything new, and indeed it doesn't - at least, not in regard to the character of prostitution. But while the exhibition is in one sense a conventional call to conscience ("Warte mal!" Siden cries), it is also a compellingly "real allegory" of life after communism: an allegory of the squalor, gaudiness and corruption that have attended disintegration in the Soviet bloc, while also probably a fair reflection of the changing character of prostitution in Britain as more women migrate from the east.
There is a ghastly, religious dimension to this horror, but Siden is not interested in moralising - and quite rightly, because we would do better to understand the mechanics of prostitution than to round on any side. But as she says, cool rationality never seems much use in the face of it all. "It touches on the most atavistic, archaic relationships between men and women. But I think that, by having it so graphically drawn out - black and white, right and wrong - it all gets blurred again. And that's important. That's what made me go back there again. I was confused."
"Warte Mal!: prostitution after the velvet revolution" is at the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, London SE1 (020 7960 4242), until 1 April
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