Selecting these radically political artists to represent the US of A at the 2011 Venice Biennale was a potentially risky business. Indeed, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s main piece there was an upturned tank with an American track star jogging on the tread as though it were a running – rather than a killing – machine. A brash and noisy distraction in Venice, ‘Track and Field’ was nevertheless an exemplary state-of-the-nation address, portraying a competitive, bellicose psyche.
There are no such grandiose gestures at their follow-up Lisson show and neither will London be treated to their Fourth Plinth proposal for a giant organ played by depressions on an ATM keypad (also at the US Pavilion). Instead this is a quiet, largely unsatisfactory trio of videos, a mere curatorial curio from this artist duo’s impressive overall body of work.
Vieques, the site of these three shorts, is a Puerto Rican island used by the US navy for testing bombs between 1941 and 2003. ‘Returning a Sound’ (2004) follows a modified moped trundling across the recently demilitarised landscape with a trumpet in place of an exhaust, leaving a trail of parping sound among invisibly traumatised lush greenery, while ‘Under Discussion’ (2005) sees an upside-down table with an outboard motor navigating the supposedly ecologically damaged waters around Vieques. Athletes figure in the final video, ‘Half Mast/Full Mast’ (2010), contorting their bodies to resemble flags flying on poles, either in mourning or in celebration of the troubled backdrop – an unedifying ambiguity, rather than a display of strength.