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JOHANNA BILLING TEXT FOR CREAM 3 by CHARLES ESCHE 2003 "It was our parents' generation who brought the revolution. They took care of all that for us and we were told that now everything had been done and it wasn?t something we need be bothered with. We were to pursue a career and invest in our own lives." This is Johanna Billing speaking in 2001 about the failure of her generation to reinvigorate social democracy in Sweden. Her work is imbued with her country?s recent history and often touches on that sense of turning up after the party is over that preoccupies her peers. Billing's best-known work, Project for a Revolution (2000 takes its inspiration from the opening sequence of Michaelangelo Antonioni?s Zabriskie Point (1969). By removing from her video version all the dialogue, passion and action, she delineates a stagnant time during which the protagonists wait for something to happen, without providing any clues as to what this might be. In another video, Missing Out (2001), Billing uses the collective breathing exercises that she remembers from school as a vehicle to define the difficulties experienced by the individual within the group, the desire for conformity and its impossibility for some people. A young man tries to join in the activities of a group of people who lie stretched out on an institutional floor. Unable to settle, he gets up again as the film abruptly shifts to the interior of a car, then shows him standing on the street and later wandering around a supermarket. In each scene he appears more agitated than before. Eventually he returns to the bosom of the group and tries again to join in the simple exercise of communal breathing. A third recent video called Where She is At (2001) also plays with the isolation of the individual in society. A woman paces nervously on a high diving board unable to decide whether to jump or not, neither too frightened to climb down nor brave enough to take the plunge. The essential element in all these works is the emergence of ambivalence and indecision in the face of the pressure to conform. Perhaps this refers back to a critique of the institutionalized nature of Swedish social democracy, with its constant prioritization of consensus over conflict. However, Billing is not arguing here for the Anglo-American model as an alternative. By capturing these moments prior to the decisive act, she emphasizes the troubling nature of choice. To choose is to lose a potent zone of possibility, she seems to be saying. Neither the group nor the individual is paramount; neither social democracy nor the US monopoly capitalist model are the way forward. Yet, rather than a programme of action she offers us a strangely diffident sense of curiosity about what else might exist beyond the current choices, aware that any artistic reference to the revolutionary has to be shrugged off as ironic. Interestingly, alongside these video works focusing on inaction, Billing also runs an independent music label called Make it Happen, which successfully releases records and organizes concerts. This dichotomy in her work between action and inaction perhaps points to a subtle understanding of effective contemporary action, making things happen at the local scale while still keeping an eye out for the possibility of art as a broad symbolic language. Johanna Billing Born Jönköping, Sweden, 1973 Lives and works in Stockholm Charles Esche, 2003 <<<