contemporary visual ar t+culture b r o a d s h e e T
VOLUME 41.3 SEPTEMBER 2012
CRITICISM | THEORY | ART
campBeLLtoWn arts centre 2012 Dance proGram presents
OH! IWANNA DANCEWITH
in the gallery. in the theatre. in the in between spaces. across the floor. How exciting. shall we dance? the answer is yes.
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G AL L E RY O N E
sat 20 octoBer 10AM – 10PM Fri 19 octoBer 6PM – 10PM Opening night performance in gallery spaces of WETUBE by Ben Speth involving 150 local community participants, and 40 local Tea Dance Project dancers.
o c t o B e r
Featuring presentations by Paul Gazzola and Paul Granjon, Anandavalli and Narelle Benjamin, Anton and David Capra, Elizabeth Ryan and ROMANCE WAS BORN, Jochen Roller and Nadia Cusimano, Martin del Amo and Phil Blackman, Julie-Anne Long and introducing a special plenary performance by Andrew Morrish.
a L L
Campbelltown Arts Centre is a cultural facility of Campbelltown City Council and is assisted by the NSW Government through Arts NSW. The 2012 Contemporary Dance Program is assisted by the Federal Government through Australia Council for the Arts, its funding and advisory body.
e v e n t s
sun 21 octoBer 2PM Forum featuring talks with all artists, hosted by Andrew Morrish, and a Curator’s note with Emma Saunders.
a r e
F r e e
C A M P BE L LTO W N A R TS C E NT R E. C O M . AU
oh! i Wanna Dance With somebody is an onslaught of contemporary dance projects exploring how we relate to each other, how we disconnect, where we dance together and where we don’t.
AR T
15 projects. 15 artists. over 150 community participants.
R D
SOMEBODY
28 SEPTEMBER — 14 OCTOBER 2012
Gap Year Peter Blamey, Mitchel Cumming, Francesca Heinz, Jesse Hogan, Kusum Normoyle, Baden Pailthorpe, Zoe Robertson, Marilyn Schneider, Paul Williams Gap Year is generously supported by the New South Wales Government through Arts NSW
1 NOVEMBER — 9 DECEMBER 2012
The Color of the Sky Has Melted Marco Fusinato Curator: Charlotte Day
Presented as a joint project with the IMA, Brisbane With support from the Besen Family Foundation
43–51 Cowper Wharf Road Woolloomooloo NSW 2011 Sydney Australia www.artspace.org.au
T +61 2 9356 0555 artspace@artspace.org.au Office 10am–6pm, Mon–Fri Gallery 11am–5pm, Tues–Sun
Image: Marco Fusinato, Aetheric Plexus, 2009 courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney
ARTSPACE is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
ARTSPACE is assisted by the New South Wales Government through Arts NSW and by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding body.
ARTSPACE is a member of CAOs (Contemporary Art Organisations Australia) and Res Artis (International Association of Residential Art Centres).
Basil Sellers Art Prize 2012
15 artists tackle sport Until 4 November 2012 Brook Andrew, Richard Bell, Lauren Brincat, Jon Campbell, Eugene Carchesio, Greg Creek, Louise Hearman, Pat Macan, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano, Simon Perry, Kerrie Poliness, Patrick Pound, Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Christian Thompson
Free admission Image Jon Campbell Dream team (detail) 2012 enamel paint on plywood, 22 paintings, installation (variable): 300 x 300 cm Courtesy the artist, Kalimanrawlins, Melbourne; and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
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The Ian Potter Museum of Art The University of Melbourne
www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au Follow us on Facebook
Swanston Street, Parkville VIC 3010 Hours: Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm, Sat & Sun 12 – 5pm
IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL CENTRE'S 2012 OZASIA FESTIVAL
THE NEEDLE
ON THE GauGE
THE TESTIMONIAL IMAGE in the work OF SEVEN INDIAN ARTISTS
5 SEPTEMBER - 21 OCTOBER, 2012
Image: Veer Munshi, from the Pandit Houses series, 2009 Photo courtesy the artist
CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 14 PORTER STREET PARKSIDE SOUTH AUSTRALIA 5063 Tel +61 [08] 82 72 26 82 Fax +61 [08] 83 73 42 86 www.cacsa.org.au
the contemporary art centre of sa is assisted by the commonwealth government through the australia council, it arts funding and advisory body, and the south australian government through arts sa and health promotions sa. the contemporary art centre of sa is supported by the visual arts and craft strategy, an initiative of the australian, state and territory governments
FRANCIS BACON ‘His images ... arrive straight through the nervous system and hijack the soul.’ The Times, UK
17 November 2012 – 24 February 2013 Book now: artgallery.nsw.gov.au Strategic partners
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f Francis Bacon Portrait of Michel Leiris1976 (detail) Louise and Michael Leiris Collection. Pompidou Centre © The Estate of Francis Bacon. DACS/Licensed by Viscopy Photo: © Collection Centre Pompidou, Dist. RMN / CNAC, Bertrand Prévost
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GREENAWAY ART GALLERY : ADELAIDE
l tel +61 8 8362 6354
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INSTINCT
24 OCT - 18 NOV 2012
MATT HUPPATZ
OWEN LEONG
JUZ KITSON
DREW PETTIFER
TWMA logotype can appear in 2 ways. 1. Black only (shown below) 2. matched to PMS 7505 (swatch attached)
5 AUGUST - 9 DECEMBER 2012 CURATOR: VICTORIA LYNN
An assemblage of contemporary Australian artworks engaged with music, sound and voice.
ROBYN BACKEN LAUREN BRINCAT EUGENE CARCHESIO THE DONKEY’S TAIL MARCO FUSINATO NATHAN GRAY DAVID HAINES and JOYCE HINTERDING ROSS MANNING DYLAN MARTORELL VICTOR MEERTENS ANGELICA MESITI YUKULTJI NAPANGATI JAMES NEWITT TOM NICHOLSON with ANDREW BYRNE JOHN NIXON SANDRA SELIG CHRISTIAN THOMPSON RAY JAMES TJANGALA JOHNNY YUNGUT TJUPURRULA Performances by Dylan Martorell, A Scratch Ensemble, Snawklor, Victor Meertens and Alexis Ensor will be held on the first Sunday of every month at 2.00pm.
Angelica Mesiti ‘Some dance to remember, some dance to forget’ 2012, High Definition video, 16:9, stereo sound, 5:35 min. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Rd Healesville, Victoria, Australia OPEN 11am - 5pm Tuesday to Sunday PH (03) 5957 3100 ADMISSION $5.00 (pensioners & students free)
www.twma.com.au PRINCIPAL SPONSOR
TWMA MAJOR PARTNER
MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART PRESENTS
artists’ proof #1 4 OCTOBER - 15 DECEMBER 2012
SARAH BYRNE | ALICIA FRANKOVICH | NEWELL HARRY JOYCE HINTERDING | DAVID JOLLY | JONATHAN JONES ASH KEATING | ELIZABETH NEWMAN | ROSE NOLAN
THIS PROJECT IS SUPPORTED BY THE VICTORIAN GOVERNMENT THROUGH ARTS VICTORIA
Ground Floor, Building F Monash University, Caulfield Campus 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia
www.monash.edu.au/muma Telephone +61 3 9905 4217 muma@monash.edu Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm
Alicia Frankovich, I have slept standing up in the mountains 2012 Super 16 mm film transferred to HD video Courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite, Auckland rtist
VCA SCHOOL OF ART
Art: Live it Applications are now open for all visual art degrees at the VCA. The School of Art offers undergraduate, graduate coursework and research higher degrees in Drawing and Printmedia, Painting, Photography, and Sculpture and Spatial Practice. As a student you will be guided by some of Australia’s most progressive art educators and respected artists within a creative learning environment. Our programs include: • Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) • Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) (Visual Art) • Graduate Certificate in Visual Art • Master of Contemporary Art • Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) by Research Visit us on Graduate Information Night Thursday 13 September Pip Ryan, Master of Fine Art (Research), Happy Orang, 2011. Photograph by Drew Echberg
CRICOS: 00116K
ZO270021BSAJ-2
To apply, visit www.vca.unimelb.edu.au/art
For the avant-garde, the bookish, the boffinesque, the countersuggestible, the pin-headed, the intellectually curious …
DARK HORSEY BOOKSHOP australian experimental art foundation lion arts centre north terrace adelaide south australia | aeafbooks@aeaf.org.au +61-(0)8 82117505 | 11am–5pm Tuesday to Friday & 2–5pm Saturday
Specialising in art, architecture & design, cultural studies, feminism, philosophy, film & media, avant-garde & contemporary literature, catalogues and magazines.
The LEE MARVIN READINGS 7.30pm till late every Tuesday in November Poetry & prose by: Cath Kenneally • Jill Jones Laurie Duggan • Amy Mathews • Kelli Rowe Harry Freeman • Alison Flett and others Convened by Ken Bolton. $5 at the door
CRITICAL READING GROUP Discussing texts, ideas, society & art Meeting 2–5pm on Saturday afternoons 29/9 • 27/10 • 24/11 and continuing in 2013
GEOMORPHOMETRIES CONTEMPORARY TERRAINS
BRISBANE 28 OCTOBER – 25 NOVEMBER 2012
Magdalena Bors Woodland Scene (detail) 2006, courtesy of the artist.
supporting photomedia art in partnership with
QUEENSLAND CENTRE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY
Murray Fredricks, David Stephenson, Magdalena Bors, Mark Kimber, Jesse Marlow OPENING NIGHT: Saturday 27 October 5.00 – 8.00 pm EXHIBITION DATES: 28 October – 25 November 2012 QCP GALLERY: Corner of Cordelia & Russell Streets, South Brisbane 07 3844 11016 QCP: www.qcp.org.au PIMCO: australia.pimco.com Queensland Centre for Photography acknowledges the assistance of the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
QCP
SPINIFEX: PEOPLE OF THE SUN AND SHADOW 24 AUGUST - 12 OCTOBER JOHN CURTIN GALLERY Celebrating the enduring legacy of the Spinifex people and the Spinifex Art Project, this exhibition contrasts powerful recent work with rarely seen paintings from their pioneering bid for native title of their ancestral lands - lands that were the site for the controversial British nuclear testing program of the 1950s.
Carlene West, Tjitjiti, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 138.5 x 144 cm, image courtesy Spinifex Arts Project.
Open Monday to Friday 11am - 5pm & Sunday 1pm - 4pm. For more information phone +61 8 9266 4155, email gallery@curtin.edu.au or visit johncurtingallery.curtin.edu.au
CRICOS Provider Code 00301J CU-JCG-0044/BRAND CUJCG0032A Curtin University is a trademark of Curtin University of Technology
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Your creative journey starts here… Associate Degree of Visual Art | Bachelor of Visual Art | Bachelor of Visual Art (Hons) Commencing in 2013 the School will offer a BVA (Hons) for students who already hold an undergraduate degree in visual art and are looking to enhance their knowledge and skills in an intense studio based program, working with supervisors who are leading contemporary arts practitioners. Applications close 7 January 2013
Celebrating the recent success of our graduates and students… Liz Butler Finalist, SA Museum Waterhouse Prize
Alex Carletti Craftsouth Award, Youthscape
Katia Carletti Association of Icelandic Visual Art Residency
Ruby Chew Awarded 2013 Carclew Artist in Residency
Rebecca Hastings Winner, Pleysier Perkins Acquisitive Art Prize
Anna Horne
Independent Makers and Presenters Project Grant, ArtsSA
Claire Marsh
Highly Commended SA Museum Waterhouse Prize
Julia McInerney Lisa Nguyen
2nd Prize, 2D Category Overall Merit Award, Youthscape
1 – 15 December 2012 Bachelor of Visual Art Graduate Exhibition
Amy Joy Watson
Ruth Tuck Scholarship for Professional Development, New York
Glenn Kestell
Lyn Wood
1 – 29 September 2012 Stewart MacFarlane Ordinary Beauty: The recent and retrospective work of Stewart MacFarlane 6 October – 3 November 2012 Wish you were here! An exhibition of postcards by invited artists
Association of Icelandic Visual Art Residency
Helpmann Academy Residency, Artspace, Sydney Judges Award of Excellence, Youthscape
In the Gallery
Jess Mara
Finalist, SA Museum Waterhouse Prize
image Rebecca Hastings Rabbit Boy (detail) 2012, oil on board, 40 x 40 cm photography James Field
45 Osmond Terrace, Norwood SA 5067
T 08 8364 5075 info@acsa.sa.edu.au www.acsa.sa.edu.au
Ambassadors for Adelaide Central School of Art
spencer family foundation
CRICOS Provider 01126M Affiliated with Flinders University and the Helpmann Academy
12 Compton Street Adelaide, SA 5000 Open Hours: Wed-Sat: 1-5pm Or by appointment (0418 267 005)
APAINTING
Sam Howie
aDElaiDE fEsTival CEnTRE
ARTSPACE
GallERY
PERCEIVABLE (PAINTED) OBJECTS
Katie Barber
3 - 20 Oct 2012 GOOD MOURNING Elvis Richardson / Nana Ohnesorge Sarah Contos / Ray Harris / Matt Huppatz James Marshall / Riley O’Keeffe Matthew Bradley / Patrick Rees
7 - 24 Nov 2012
THE WRITING PROJECT Artists, writers, designers + curators mash up arts writing in 4 new projects BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE
Jacqui Shelton / Therese Keogh / Elliot Baxter / Vivien Hollingsworth
CRAZY IN LOVE
Brennan Olver / Holly Childs / Rohan Whiteley / Oliver van der Lugt
NUCLEI
Laura Hindmarsh / Claire Krouzecky /Alex Nielsen / Fernando do Campo
SAME
Marian Tubbs / Jack Jeweller / Robert Milne / Eleanor Weber
9 - 26 Jan 2013 W W W. F E LT S PA C E . O R G FELTSPACE@GMAIL.COM Image (from top): Sam Howie, view of the artist’s studio FELTspace, view of gallery exterior SAME, work in progress
OUR MOB 2012 A STATE WIDE CELEBRATION OF SOUTH AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS ART 17 OCTOBER – 2 DECEMBER ArtworkS for SAlE
fREE EvEnTs indigenous Writers Day Artspace Gallery Plaza 23 october 10am to 3pm
indigenous art forum lyrics 24 october 10am to 2pm
OUR MOB opening celebration Artspace Gallery 24 october from 6pm
(uPStAirS dunStAn PlAyhouSE) PhonE 8216 8850 hourS: wEd, fri, SAt & Sun 12-4Pm, thurS 12-8Pm
fremantle arts centre
performprint
joel gailer & michael meneghetti 22 sept–8 nov 2012
http://www.unisa.edu.au/sasa-gallery Image: Gerry Wedd, dead roo, 2010. SASA Gallery exhibition: Post Skangaroovian, 4 September - 12 October 2012
joel gailer, rodeo, 2010, signwriting on haybales, 3 x 5 x 3m, courtesy and © the artist
as/1003 broadsheet 05/04
Artistic license
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ADELAIDE FLOWER HOUSE
Art Stretchers offers South Australian artists an unparalleled combination of range, service and experience. A broad range of mediums is available including Art Spectrum oils (artists’ and student quality), watercolours, gouache, pastels, primers, mediums, papers, stretchers (and stretching service), linens and canvasses. We also stock sable, bristle and acrylic brushes and easels. Reliable technical advice is available. All Art Spectrum products are Australian made and of the finest materials. Parking is not a problem!
Art Stretchers Co P/L 161 Morphett Street, Cnr. Waymouth St., opposite Light Square. Adelaide. 5000. SA. Open Mon - Fri, 8.30am - 5.00pm and Saturday 9.00am - 12.00pm. Telephone: (08) 8212 2711 Fax: (08) 8231 7190.
43 unley road parkside sa 5063 tel: 08 8373 4800 www.adelaideflowerhouse.com.au
Contributors Nancy Adajania: Bombay-based cultural theorist and independent curator; has written and lectured extensively on transcultural art practice and the relationship between art and productive politics (including at documenta 11, Kassel; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Transmediale, Berlin; Kuenstlerhaus Wien, Vienna; and BAK, Utrecht); was Editor-in-Chief of Art India magazine. Her writing has appeared in numerous critical anthologies, journals and catalogues; edited the monograph Shilpa Gupta (Prestel, 2010) and co-authored The Dialogues Series (Popular Prakashan/ foundation b&g, 2011). She is a research scholar at BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht Michael Baers: Berlin-based American artist and writer; has participated in exhibitions throughout North America and Europe, usually with drawings or offset publications exhibited sculpturally. He has also contributed comics and essays to many publications and print initiatives. Currently he is working on a graphic novel based on his research of the Picasso in Palestine project for inclusion in Issue Zero, the new online platform of the Berlin Documentary Forum at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, a biennial program dedicated to documentary practices across a wide variety of disciplines David Broker: Director of Canberra Contemporary Art Space; currently coordinating a special program of exhibitions for the Canberra Centenary. He is also developing Science Fiction, consisting of two exhibitions with Benjamin Forster, Erica Seccombe and Professor Timothy Senden for Canberra 100’s science month 2013 Adam Geczy: Sydney-based artist and writer; Senior Lecturer in Sculpture and Art Theory at Sydney College of the Arts; his most recent exhibitions have been Decapitated at the Museum of Art, Györ, Hungary, and Beautiful Cities, Artspace Sydney; upcoming projects include Bomb in collaboration with Adam Hill at the AAMU in Utrecht, Holland.; author of several books including (with Michael Carter) Reframing Art (Berg, 2005) and Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions (Berg, 2008); latest book is co-edited with Vicki Karaminas, Fashion and Art (Berg/Bloomsbury, 2012)
c o n t e m p o r a r y v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b ro a d s h e e T Editor Assistant Editor Advertising Manager Publisher Design
volume 41.3 september 2012
Alan Cruickshank Wendy Walker Matt Huppatz Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Inc. Alan Cruickshank, Nasim Nasr
ISSN 0819 677X © Copyright 2012, Broadsheet, the authors and artists. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission. Broadsheet is published quarterly by the Contemporary Art Centre of SA Inc. print post approved PP53 1629/00022 The Contemporary Art Centre of SA is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments Editorial inquiries, advertising and subscriptions may be sent to the Editorial Office: Broadsheet 14 Porter Street Parkside South Australia 5063 Tel +61 [08] 8272 2682 Fax +61 [08] 8373 4286 Email: editor@cacsa.org.au www.cacsa.org.au Subscriptions: Contact the Administrator, Contemporary Art Centre of SA—admin@cacsa.org.au
Wes Hill: Art historian, critic, curator and artist, Sydney; lectures in Theoretical Enquiry, University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts; writes for art magazines such as Frieze, Frieze d/e, Artforum, Art & Australia and Eyeline; curatorial projects include This is what I do, 2012, at Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Hobart; exhibited Cultural It as Wilkins Hill (with Wendy Wilkins) at Galerie KUB, Leipzig, Germany, 2012
The views and/or opinions expressed in Broadsheet are those of the contributing writers and not necessarily those of the editor, staff or Board of the CACSA
Mami Kataoka: Tokyo-based curator and writer; Chief Curator of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, since 2003. From 2007-09 joined the curatorial team at the Hayward Gallery in London as the first international curator. During her tenure at the Mori Art Museum, curated a number of exhibitions, including Ai Weiwei: According to What? (2009), which is touring the USA 2012 onwards, and Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs to You Only (2012). She most recently guest curated Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past (2012), Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
International:
Carol Yinghua Lu: Beijing-based curator and writer; contributing editor for Frieze and writes frequently for international art journals and magazines including e-flux journal, The Exhibitionist, Yishu, and Tate Etc.; 2005-07 the China researcher for Asia Art Archive; jury member for the 2011 Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion Award; a research-based project she initiated and curated with Liu Ding Little Movements: Self-Practices in Contemporary Art was exhibited at the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, September 2011; co-curated the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale 2012; jury member for Future Generation Art Prize 2012; with Liu Ding will be the guest curator for Museion, Bolzano, Italy in 2013 Ian McLean: Research Professor of Contemporary Art, University of Wollongong; books include How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art, White Aborigines Identity Politics in Australian Art, and Art of Gordon Bennett (with a chapter by Gordon Bennett); on the advisory boards of Third Text, the international journal of postcolonial art, world art and national identities Astrid Mania: Berlin-based independent writer and translator; regular contributor to Süddeutsche Zeitung, Artforum International, Art Review and other international publications. Recent essays include ‘Mineralwasser ist auch keine Lösung – Die Ethik der Kunstkritik’ (Mineral water is no solution – On the ethics in art criticism), pending publication, and ‘Frosch in Untersicht – Über Zensur in der (modernen) Kunst’ (Kippenberger’s Frog – On Censorship in (modern) art), in Kunstforum International, ‘Redefreiheit’ (Freedom of Speech), April-June 2012 Christopher Moore: Publisher of randian 燃点 www.randian-online.com; from 2008-10 the Shanghai correspondent for Saatchi Online; has contributed to various other magazines and catalogues; has written monographs on Chinese artists Xu Zhen, MadeIn and Shi Jing Hans Ulrich Obrist: Zurich-based art curator, critic and historian of art; currently Co-director of Exhibitions and Programs and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London; prior to this engagement, served as the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, since 2000; named art’s second most powerful figure in 2010 by Art Review, after being its most powerful the previous year; since 1991 he has curated over 150 exhibitions internationally Gayatri Sinha: New Delhi-based independent curator and art critic; has authored a weekly column on art and visual culture for national newspaper The Hindu; edited Expressions and Evocations: Contemporary Women Artists in India and Indian Art: An Overview, the seminal study of Indian art and its passage through modernism into post-modernism; her primary areas of enquiry are around the structures of gender and iconography, media, economics and social history; has initiated Critical Collective, a forum for thinking on conceptual frames within art history and practice in contemporary India; exhibitions curated include Cinema Still (India Habitat Centre, New Delhi 2002) and Middle Age Spread (National Museum, New Delhi 2004) Alia Swastika: Jakarta-based curator and writer; from 2002-04 was Associate Editor for SURAT and Artistic Manager at Cemeti Art House, one of Indonesia’s most reputable art spaces. Since 2008 has curated exhibitions for Ark Galerie, Jakarta; received study grants from the Asia Europe Foundation (Berlin, 2005), the Asian Cultural Council (New York, 2006), Art Hub (Shanghai, 2007), and the National Art Gallery (Singapore, 2010); recent curated exhibitions include The Past The Forgotten Time (Amsterdam, Jakarta, Semarang, Shanghai, Singapore, 2007-08), Manifesto: The New Aesthetic of Seven Indonesian Artists (Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore, 2010); co-curated the 2011 Jogja Biennale XI and curated Art Dubai’s 2012 Indonesian focused Marker Program June Yap: Singapore-based curator; currently holds a two-year residency as Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, South and Southeast Asia—curating the first exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative which will open at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the winter of 2013; has worked in the curatorial departments of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum; since 2008 independent curator; curator Singapore Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2011 Dani Zuvela: Brisbane-based Curator, OtherFilm collective; curatorial projects include Australian Light (Grimstad/ Oslo 2012); PsychoSubtropics (Gertrude Contemporary Artspace, Melbourne, 2010 and Serial Space, Sydney 2012); the OtherFilm Festival (Brisbane, Meredith, Adelaide 2012); speaking At a Dinner Party: Setting the Table (WestSpace, Melbourne 2012); contributor to a number of journals including Eyeline, Art Monthly Australia and Continuum
Editorial Advisory Board RICHARD GRAYSON UK Artist, lecturer and writer, London BORIS KREMER UK Curator, translator and writer, London ASTRID MANIA Germany Editor, writer and curator, Berlin CHRISTOPHER MOORE Czech Republic Writer, Prague; Editor-in-Chief, Randian online VASIF KORTUN Turkey Director SALT, Istanbul JULIE UPMEYER Turkey Artist, Initiator, Caravansarai, Istanbul RANJIT HOSKOTE India Curator, writer, Mumbai COLIN CHINNERY China Artist, writer and curator, Beijing BILJANA CIRIC China Independent curator, Shanghai JOHN BATTEN Hong Kong Curator, art critic, writer PATRICK FLORES Philippines Professor Dept Art Studies University of Philippines, Manila SUE HAJDU Vietnam Artist, writer, Ho Chi Minh City RAY LANGENBACH Malaysia Artist, curator, writer, lecturer and critic, Kuala Lumpur LEE WENG CHOY Singapore Writer and critic EUGENE TAN Singapore Director Special Projects, Singapore Economic Development Board TONY GODFREY Singapore Gallery director, writer GOENAWAN MOHAMAD Indonesia Essayist, journalist, poet and cultural critic, Jakarta NATASHA CONLAND New Zealand Curator Contemporary Art, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tämaki, Auckland
Australia:
ROBERT COOK Perth Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia RUSSELL STORER Brisbane Curatorial Manager, Asian & Pacific Art, Queensland Art Gallery REX BUTLER Brisbane Writer, editor and senior lecturer, University of Queensland BLAIR FRENCH Sydney Curator, writer, editor and Executive Director, Artspace ADAM GECZY Sydney Artist, lecturer and writer CHARLES GREEN Melbourne Artist, curator, art critic and historian; Associate Professor, University of Melbourne IAN NORTH Adelaide Artist, writer and Adjunct Professor, School of Art, University of South Australia
c o n t e m p o r a r y v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b ro a d s h e e T COVER: Chto Delat?/What is to be done? (realised by Olga Egorova, Dmitry Vilensky and Natalya Pershina), sThe Tower: A Songspiel (video still) 2010 from Roundtable: the 9th Gwangju Biennale, 2012 Photo courtesy the artists
163
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THE DISCURSIVE BIENNALE: KNOWLEDGE EMBEDDED IN A REPLENISHED SOCIALITY Nancy Adajania
163
14 IN/DIVIDUAL ARTISTIC POSITIONS: LOGGING IN AND OUT OF COLLECTIVITY Nancy Adajania
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THE INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE Carol Yinghua Lu
168
THE IMPACT OF MOBILITY ON SPACE AND TIME Alia Swastika
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TRANSIENT ENCOUNTERS Mami Kataoka
175
A DISH SERVED LUKEWARM Adam Geczy
178
LORD HELP ME JESUS Astrid Mania
182
CURATORS SHOULD SHOW AND NOT BE SEEN Christopher Moore
186
the curator as all-seeing-god: AN OLD MODEL ON A DISHEARTENING SCALE Wes Hill
188
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NO GOOD TIME FOR AN EXHIBITION: REFLECTIONS ON THE PICASSO IN PALESTINE PROJECT PART 1 Michael Baers
197
NO GOOD TIME FOR AN EXHIBITION: REFLECTIONS ON THE PICASSO IN PALESTINE PROJECT PART 11 Michael Baers
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COSMOPOLITANISM AND CULTURE Ian McLean
204
THE DECADE REVISITED Hans Ulrich Obrist
207
THE DECADE REVISITED: A CHAPTER IN THREE PARTS Gayatri Sinha 182
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THE DECADE REVISITED June Yap
212
FESTIVAL OF AVERAGE IDEAS ALL OUR RELATIONS: 18TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY David Broker
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CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN WOMEN Danni Zuvela
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volume 41.3 SEPTEMBER 2012
Amidst the incessant march of an ever-growing number of international biennales and the archetypal behemoth, multi-sensory biennale-as-ultimate-culturalmaker-cum-social-event, it takes a certain degree of self-assured conviction to present a non-monumental series of narratives around such open-ended principles as non-hierarchical mutuality and dialogue. Yet this is exactly what ROUNDTABLE: The 9th Gwangju Biennale seeks to do. Collaboratively shaped by the six Co-Artistic Directors Nancy Adajania, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Mami Kataoka, Sunjung Kim, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Alia Swastika, and six interrelating subthemes, ROUNDTABLE confronts us with divergent reflections on a central hypernym. ‘Logging In and Out of Collectivity’ explores the navigation between evolving constructs of the ‘individual’ vs. the ‘collective’ and the entanglement of seemingly dissimilar histories at moments of crisis. ‘Re-visiting History’ presents history in flux, challenging what we remember and what we invent within both personal and national narratives. ‘Transient Encounters’ recogniaes the reality of continuous change and the necessity to be open to possibilities of transformation and temporal fragmentation. ‘Intimacy, Autonomy and Anonymity’ explores the multi-layered reality of history beyond grand political and social narratives, to reveal overlooked traces of individual lives within a city. The dominant neoliberal economic and political discourses place an even greater importance on the value of the individual spirit in remaking regional and global histories as we return ‘Back to the Individual Experience’. Cutting across all of these themes is the ‘Impact of Mobility on Space and Time’, as modern transnational realities and the simultaneous loosening/tightening of borders, migration and identity necessitate an investigation of different interpretations of mobility, spatiality, and temporality. With its stress on finding points of interconnection, the conversational structure of ROUNDTABLE resembles a complicated Venn diagram, as many of the Biennale’s over ninety-two participating artists and collectives could simultaneously be understood within multiple subthemes. The curators’ dialogue between disparate international, regional, and local spheres of cultural production naturally led to a series of residencies, new commissions and site-specific works created in direct conversation with the city of Gwangju while maintaining the integrity of individual practices of the participating artists.
ROUNDTABLE’s collective yet contrapuntal approach incorporates a multiplicity of perspectives that are allowed to comingle, unresolved, forcing us to reconsider basic presumptions about the biennale format and challenge inherent hierarchical tensions between curator and artist/artist and audience/exhibition and city/ individual and group. Forgoing the traditional is not out of character for the Gwangju Biennale, which, as the first contemporary biennale in Asia, has shaped the development of contemporary Asian art institutions and their international perception. Founded in 1995 in memory of the 1980 civil uprising for democratisation, since its inception the Gwangju Biennale has preferred to function as an experimental platform that is participatory rather than didactic. Resisting the tendency of biennales to operate as venues for nationalistic identity production, the Gwangju Biennale seeks to continually challenge its own identity through negotiations with the rapidly shifting discourses of contemporary global cultural production. By embracing plurality in theme, structure, and methodology, ROUNDTABLE continues this evolving conversation. The following texts by four of the six Artistic Co-Directors, Nancy Adajania, Carol Yinghua Lu, Mami Kataoka and Alia Swastika, on artists who they feel best explain the Biennale’s subthemes, and Workstation I which preceded the Biennale opening (which was followed by Workstation II and the Gwangju Biennale International Curators Course 2012), present a microcosm through which to understand the larger Gwangju Biennale project.
ROUNDTABLE: The 9th Gwangju Biennale September 7, 2012 - November 11, 2012
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THE DISCURSIVE BIENNALE KNOWLEDGE EMBEDDED IN A REPLENISHED SOCIALITY
Nancy Adajania When every edition of a biennale claims to make a fresh wager on the new and the experimental—indeed, on the contemporary—what is specific to the mandate of curating a biennale in 2012? I asked myself this question when I was appointed Co-Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale.1 This self-questioning comes at a time when the form of the biennale, which we regard as the legitimate site for the production of the contemporary, finds the ground of history shaking beneath its feet. During the last few years, the triumphalist neoliberal economic system has experienced a series of fundamental shocks. We have confronted ecological disasters, and stood at the edge of nuclear catastrophe. We have witnessed an upsurge of democratic movements in North Africa and West Asia as well as prolonged episodes of street violence in Paris and London. We have lived through agitations for reform in India and Iran, as well as the debates over a residual cultural nationhood in Germany, France and Switzerland, as these societies engage with global Islam and Islamism.
Political power, formerly held within a tight grid, is now leaking unpredictably across classes in many societies. The privilege of making art and producing culture is, likewise, being distributed democratically among the citizenry at large, beyond what were formerly hegemonic producers and institutions of culture. What sort of bridge can the figure thus far known as the artist build between the domain of symbolic action, institutionalised as culture, and the arena of practical, productive politics? That is one of the most urgent questions facing us in the sphere of art today. It is the kind of question the versatile form of the biennale is well suited to address, since it works at the intersection of diverse disciplines and retains the freedom to deploy a variety of methodologies. I do not make a facile distinction between theory and practice. Rather, I believe strongly in their conjuncture as praxis, and thus the first event I conceived for the 9th Gwangju Biennale was a gathering I called a “Workstation”. A series of Workstations were planned in the run-up to the exhibition, treating the exhibition not as the final destination but as one of many concurrent journeys. Within the biennial typology, I subscribe most to the discursively oriented biennial, a form whose lineage may be traced to Catherine David’s 100 Days, 100 Guests (documenta 10, in 1997), Okwui Enwezor’s Platforms (documenta 11, in 2002), and before these the 1989 edition of the Havana Biennal, which brought together knowledges from the “global South” that were, as Arthur Danto might have said, not part of
the conversation of biennial culture. This typology has the potential to counter what Elena Filipovic has justly critiqued as the “global white cube” dimension of the biennial.2 Against such a bulwark of generic global art production, the discursively oriented biennial embodies the hope that the discourse generated can leak outward from the art world to form communicative engagements with the arenas of civil activism and political protest. David’s one hundred days of cogitation at documenta 10 acknowledged the importance of foregrounding voices from outside generally acknowledged global cultural centres, but the exhibition proper included few such artistic practices. In documenta 11, on the other hand, Enwezor integrated his postcolonial preoccupations into his curatorial praxis by producing five discursive platforms, of which the exhibition was only one. The platforms accomplished their mandate not by making a token inclusion of African, Asian, and Arab artistic and theoretical positions, but by exposing to view a post–Cold War landscape in which the countries of the hegemonic North were as susceptible to sharing the fate of “transitional” societies—and their incomplete projects of equity and democracy—as those of the former Third World. Today, when the biennale form aspires (justifiably) to supplant the academy and the museum, it would be useful to recall the originary moment when the insertion of discourse into the warp and weft of biennale-making changed the rules of exhibitionary engagement forever. The organisation of a major international conference as part of the 1989 edition of the Havana Biennial represented, according to the critic Rachel Weiss, “a decisive step toward conceiving of biennials as discursive environments, in which the actual display of artworks is part of a much broader project of research and knowledge production”.3 At the conference, the notions of internationalism and contemporaneity were reformulated and interrogated from very diverse starting points, puncturing the ersatz solidarity that “Third World” countries were purported to share uniformly under the banner of resistance to global capitalism, or USA neo-imperialist ambitions. In my curatorial practice, I find it very important to embed the production of discourse in a replenished sociality, rather than treating discourse as a narrowly academic activity set at a remove from everyday life. This is why I chose the term “Workstation” to name this form of thinking, speaking, and working together, which descends from a genealogy of prior forms of discoursing together, including the academy, the symposium, the workshop, and the platform. None of these words originally had an academic connotation—not even the word “academy”. The Academia was the garden in Athens where the philosophers of antiquity, Plato and his disciples, took their walks. The symposium, originally, was a drinking party. The workshop, of course, was the place where artisans made things. And the platform was either an improvised stage, a speaker’s corner in a park, or a place where you waited for trains. Or where you waited for history’s nightmares to come to an end, or for the last call to resistance or freedom. In all these cases, a site of anticipation is denoted. My concept of the Workstation continues the dynamic play of conceptual activity that characterises the intellectual sphere, while also acknowledging and including its Benjaminian opposite—“felt knowledge”—as well as physical effort and social interaction.4 Above all, the Workstation does not endorse the recirculation of pompous zeitgeists or the reproduction of triumphalist worldviews. Rather, it carries the resonance of Walter Benjamin’s “jetztzeit”, or “now-time”. I refer to Benjamin’s conception of a Messianic time of renovation and redemption that lies within and beneath the rhythms of normal, everyday temporality and can be disclosed in times of crisis. In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, he writes that the observer of the “jetztzeit” “recognises the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognisance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework”.5 I conceived and moderated the first Workstation of the 9th Gwangju Biennale around the theme ‘Self-organisation as Ethic’. It was held in February in Gwangju and in Seoul, and aimed to generate an hospitable space for the enactment of various artistic and political entanglements.6 Workstation 1 proposed to reexamine various forms of artistic and political resistance premised on self-organisation, collectivity and contingency against the backdrop of recent upheavals such as the ‘Arab Spring’, the Occupy movements, and the Hope Bus Campaign in South Korea (a protest against the neo-liberal economy in South Korea). It made two interrelated moves: it retrieved lost or unacknowledged histories of the biennial form (for instance the 1989 edition of the Havana Biennial and 2002 edition of the Gwangju Biennale), and it analysed the vexed relationship between art and participatory politics (for instance, Bassam El Baroni ‘On why perhaps the “Arab Spring” or “Occupy” will not bring a change of season into contemporary art’ and Taek-Gwang Lee on the deployment of social networking media to activate the Korean public sphere during the Hope Bus Campaign). In his paper for Workstation 1, Gerardo Mosquera, the co-founder of the Havana Biennal, turned the curatorial canon on its head by arguing that although the Havana Biennal (1989) organised the first global show of contemporary art ever, the credit for this has so far been given to the exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre
held in the same year at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Les Magiciens de la Terre bypassed the question of wrestling with the contemporary by replacing it with the contemporaneous, bringing together painters, shamans, dancers and installationmakers from all over the world. On the other hand, Mosquera asserted that “the Havana Biennal ‘outed’ the biennale and exhibition practices to the world, away from established canons and hierarchies—it queered biennales”. Emphasising that “the Gwangju Biennale is a daughter of Havana”, he traced the manner in which the Havana Biennal had triggered a proliferation of biennales from non-Western countries. “Part of this”, Mosquera believes, “was also because Havana, as Rafal Niemojewski has indicated, established the contemporary biennale as a platform for the critique of modernity, reflecting the new transnational, multicultural, and diasporic identities”.7 While the Havana Biennal was an important intervention from the global South, the 2002 edition of Gwangju Biennale (Project 1), co-curated by Charles Esche and Hou Hanru with Sung Wan Kyung, explored the emergence of artistic self-organisation independent of the State and the market in Asia and Europe. Project 1’s insertion into Workstation 1 and biennale discourse at large was not only because of its discursive appropriateness in the time of political upheavals and collective mobilisations, but also because as Esche retrospected over the last ten years, it would reveal how ‘Asia’ was being constructed through contradictory social and political imaginaries in the early 2000s and not through any idiom of top-down continental essentialism.8 Workstation 1 also had an immediate, palpable resonance in the Korean cultural context. By directly addressing the question of contemporary politics and its impact on Korean culture, the Workstation went beyond performing a ceremonial homage to the Gwangju Biennale’s history of uprising and resistance, and instead took its transformative potential forward. This was its modest proposal and its promise of self-renewal. The morning after the Workstation, Yun-Jung Han, a journalist with the leftist Seoul newspaper, Kyunghyang Daily News, on her own initiative arranged an interview between me and the poet Song Kyung-Dong (on an eighty-six metre high crane), who crafted the Hope Bus Campaign against Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction, to support the demands of the worker Kim Jin-Sook, the organiser of a sit-in protest. Song Dong had just been released from the Pusan Detention Centre, where he had been held for eighty-seven days for planning the campaign. Even as we discussed the vanguard role that art could play in politics, he compared the Hope Bus Campaign to a “poem”. For me, this resonated beautifully with Mahatma Gandhi’s description of himself as an “artist of non-violence”. A performance artist avant la lettre, the Mahatma had turned the act of mobilisation into an art through his sit-ins, marches, fasts and prayer meetings, pioneering an early manifestation, not of civil society, but of a citizenry that could take political power from its overlords and reshape it to their own purpose. Notes 1 The other co-artistic directors are Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Mami Kataoka, Sunjung Kim, Carol Yinghua Lu and Alia Swastika 2
Elena Filipovic, ‘The Global White Cube’ in art e-conomy: Theoretical Reader, Belgrade: Marko Stamenkovic, 2007: 188–206
3 Rachel Weiss, ‘A Certain Place and a Certain Time: The Third Bienal de La Habana and the Origins of the Global Exhibition’ in Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989, London: Afterall Books, 2011: 14 4 Benjamin explains “felt knowledge” as “that anamnestic intoxication in which the flaneur goes about the city”, which “not only feeds on the the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but can very well possess itself of abstract knowledge—indeed, of dead facts—as something experienced and lived through. This felt knowledge, as is obvious, travels above all by word of mouth from one person to another [but can also be] deposited in an immense literature.” See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1999: 880 5
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (ed.) and Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1985: 263
6 The speakers at Workstation 1 were Charles Esche, Gerardo Mosquera, Maria Hlavajova, WHW (Natasa IIic), Markus Miessen, Dmitry Vilensky (Chto Delat?), Minouk Lim, Nikolaus Hirsch, Taek-Gwang Lee, Bassam El Baroni, Alia Swastika, Heejin Kim and Nancy Adajania 7 Gerardo Mosquera, ‘“Worlding” Art: Havana Biennial’, paper read at Workstation 1, 9th Gwangju Biennale held at Art Sonje, Seoul, 15 February 2012 8 Charles Esche, ‘A Decade On – Shifts in Biennale Culture and the World to Which They Belong’, paper read at Workstation 1, 9th Gwangju Biennale held at Chonnam National University, 14 February 2012
This is an extended version of the text, Nancy Adajania, ‘Knowledge Embedded in a Replenished Sociality: The Discursive Biennial’ in Jens Hoffman (ed.), The Exhibitionist No.6, June 2012, Berlin/Turin: Archive Books, 2012: 49-53
Page 161: Aki Sasamoto, Centrifugal March (commissioned performance/installation), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist
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14 IN/DIVIDUAL ARTISTIC POSITIONS LOGGING IN AND OUT OF COLLECTIVITY
Nancy Adajania An Intellectual Lineage ‘Logging In and Out of Collectivity’, my exhibition sub-theme for ROUNDTABLE: 9th Gwangju Biennale, braids together and teases apart concepts and actions such as: mobilisation, self-organisation, assembly, solidarity, performative democracy, all of which articulate the complex interrelationship between the individual and the collective, the civic and the political, between independence and interdependence in artistic, cultural and political practice. I hope to signalise those sparking points in cultural practice, where the interplay between artistic choice and civic volition can bring about a burst of critical agency, calibrated at a tangent to the numb momentum of a herd manipulated by the agendas of States and corporations. In such a situation, cultural producers may articulate themselves as distributed subjectivities; they may subscribe to reserve notions of utopia lost or betrayed; or they may retrieve erased protocols of critical citizenship. Some major theatres where such dramas unfold include the 2011 turbulence in societies across North Africa and West Asia (clubbed together as the ‘Arab Spring’), the ongoing self-scrutiny in post-Communist societies, and the emergent self-assessment within nations that belong or once belonged to the NonAligned Movement (NAM). My investigations into these scenarios will be conducted through specific tropes: the knotting of affinities, the entanglement of (dis)similar histories, the rehearsal of conflicts and resolutions originally identified with one society, but unfolding in another under the signs of resistance or revolution. What is negotiated in each case, through a heuristic and improvisational methodology, is the transitive relationship between a participant self and various conceptions of solidarity and collective action that are constantly in flux. My choice of artists for this thematic is informed by my research in the Arab world and in some of the formerly socialist countries in East Europe: situations where the fractured relationship between the citizen and the nationState has resulted in deep schisms. The Serbian artist Darinka Pop-Mitic feels compelled to recover an expansive trans-local solidarity (pioneered by Tito along with Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno and Kwame Nkrumah under the framework of NAM in the former Yugoslavia), which has been destroyed in the wake of the aggressive and mediaevalist nationalisms that erupted during the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s. The Bosnian artist Sejla Kameric and the Croatian artist Ana Husman deconstruct their respective national identities through a nuanced gendered reading. Since Communism assumed different avatars in different contexts, Yugoslav socialism allowed for a more relaxed relationship between the individual and collectivity, a respectful but nevertheless ironic detachment. As Pop-Mitic explains, One historian said that the Yugoslav Communist Party functioned more like a Marxist Institute for Theory and less as a hard-core Leninist party. This has become more evident as time went by. For example, like in other socialist countries, you had censorship (albeit more akin to Western countries of the period), but if you went in front of the censorship board you got to debate with well-educated colleagues about the Marxist merits of your work. They were not simply Stalinist bureaucrats.1 Meditating on the situation in the Communist Bloc, the novelist Milan Kundera observed that every Utopia has its septic tank attached. The Russian collective Chto Delat?/What is to be done? acknowledges this, and aims to find non-nostalgic methods of conceptualising post-Soviet forms of political struggle and art. While speaking of the Soviet times, when the individual’s identity was subsumed under the grand narrative of the State or Communism, one of Chto Delat’s members, Dmitry Vilensky, recalls poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht’s “quite striking and simple description in his book Me-Ti, of the existence of two people who love each other. This existence only acquires meaning and integrity when a third thing —dritte Sache—emerges between the two people. This third thing can only be some kind of cooperative action such as participation in a revolutionary struggle,
the striving towards truth via the practices of knowledge and art, or something else that grows out of this relationship but renders it meaningful and overcomes its limitations.”2 Whether it is the dritte Sache or Tito’s Third Way of Yugoslav socialism, the discourse produced by these artists is shaped in the interstitial spaces between art, activism and theory. And when these works perform themselves in the exhibition space, they will leave behind a “third thing”, the residues of the interaction between the viewer and artwork: anxiety, pleasure, and bewilderment. The more we circle around art, the more ambiguities are produced. At this juncture, I will elaborate on two artistic positions represented in ‘Logging In and Out of Collectivity’, that of the artists Fouad Elkoury and Darinka Pop-Mitic, and then loop their practices back into my exhibitionary constellation.
impose an official style. At the Students Cultural Centre, the BSA’s heroic-indigenist idiom coexisted with the avant-garde conceptualist performances of the Belgrade artists, invested in an anti-Stalinist Communism. Pop-Mitic’s archaeological act of reconstructing a mural from elusive evidence, to release its hidden meanings, places the fragment at the service of history, to resist closure.
Fouad Elkoury (b. 1952 Paris; lives and works in Paris and Lebanon) “Stages of collapse—whether places or moments—have always moved me”, says the Lebanese photographer Fouad Elkoury, whose poetics allude to the precarity of the margin and the ruin. Elkoury’s practice spans more than three decades; he began in the late 1970s as a partisan photographer committed to the Palestinian cause, documenting daily life in Beirut against the backdrop of the Civil War. He gradually adopted a more intimate, psychological approach, working in the interstices between public and private, fact and fiction. In 1997, he co-founded the Arab Image Foundation to archive the construction of complex Arab visualities. Elkoury will be exhibiting a rare historical document, revisiting his photographic essay Atlantis (1982), which portrays the leader of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) Yasser Arafat’s escape from Beirut on the eponymous ship. Plunged into the midst of the Civil War, Elkoury met Arafat in 1982, even as Israel invaded Lebanon, bombed Beirut, and attempted to assassinate the Palestinian leader. During this time, the photographer escaped a bomb aimed at him and eventually found himself on the same ship as Arafat. The ship’s name serendipitously invokes Plato’s legendary lost continent, which the Greek philosopher imagined 2000 years ago. For Arafat and his colleagues to be refugees on the Atlantis was a happenstance fraught with irony and melancholia, theirs being a quest for a lost homeland. What seems to be a straightforward representation of an ideological cause surreptitiously stretches out of its partisan frame, commingling mirage and reality. The figure of the heroic soldier is caught in the twilight zone where the conventional pose and the unfulfilled dream blur. To see Arafat on the Atlantis, floating in the middle of the infinite ocean, is to imagine Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia”, an interstitial space of otherness that lies beyond well-defined institutional structures of control. Darinka Pop-Mitic (b. 1975, Belgrade; lives and works in Belgrade) Darinka Pop-Mitic’s art evolves from her researches in the unstable ground between official history and floating memories. The Serbian artist will paint a monumental onsite mural for the 9th Gwangju Biennale. Titled Aktiv Solidarce’ (On Solidarity), it revisits a mural painted in 1977 on the outer wall of the Students Cultural Centre in Belgrade by Chilean artists belonging to the Brigada Salvador Allende (BSA), along with students from the Belgrade School of Painting. This 1977 mural was meant to express the “solidarity of the Yugoslav people with the people of Latin America”. During the Cold War, Yugoslavia maintained a position of nonalignment with the superpowers, while strengthening affinities with resistance forces in countries like Chile, where the Pinochet dictatorship ruled by terror after the overthrow and death of President Salvador Allende in 1973. The concept of “solidarity” is a troubled yet vital one for an artist operating in the post-Yugoslavian context, against the backdrop of the violent polarisations of the 1990s, when Tito’s dream of socialist unity was betrayed by group identities ruthlessly enforced through genocide. The “formerness” of the Yugoslavian past thus remains both a spectral presence and a source of redeeming possibilities. Pop-Mitic does not offer an ersatz rehearsal of Yugo-nostalgia. Rather, she retrieves specific histories of Yugoslavian socialism: those related to selfmanagement, collective effort, and mutual coexistence. The mural dramatises the collegiality between the BSA and the Belgrade artists. Since Yugoslavia had adopted a non-interventionist stance in international cultural politics, it did not
Pages 163 and 164: Fouad Elkoury, from the Atlantis Series, 1982 Photos courtesy the artist Page 165: Poklong Anading, untitled (nailing), 2011 Photo courtesy the artist
Logging back into the conversation Elkoury’s video will set up a conversation with the photographs and video of Indian artist Sheba Chhachhi (who will be critically analysing the second wave’of the Indian women’s movement) and the photographs of South Korean artist Noh Suntag (who will be commenting on the “state of emergency” in his society). All three began their practice in the realm of activism and have worked as photojournalists. But what happens when partisanship (the cause may be varied, Palestine, feminism or worker’s rights) finds itself breaking down under the weight of its own claims? What happens when the “structure” (Althusser’s term for the system of governmental, juridical and cultural control) dominates over “agency”—the case of the subaltern artist Jangarh Singh Shyam, comes to mind. He individuated himself from the interpellation of the “anonymous craftsman” only to die as one, his contemporaneity denied, his ancestral bondage re-imposed on him by the market? Or when artists make holes in the “structure”, turning the art of leakage into an idiom of questioning and resistance, as CAMP does? Now to address that bête noir, so-called “political art”, which has had a new lease of life since the onset of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. Much political art is a series of pictures of intention and well-meaning proposals, where the mode of “intervention” is only ever the shadow of a trope, never a tropos, or gesture of transformation. To adapt Wittgenstein, this kind of art is no more than a “picture theory” of the revolution. How can this “picture theory” be transformed into a “tool theory”?3 This question becomes ever more urgent when exhibitions are ‘renting’ out space for activism, and artists are enthusiastically participating in Occupy base camps. Palestinian-Jordanian artist Ala Younis (deploying the form of the contributor-driven anthology) and Egyptian artist Maha Maamoun (working with an assemblage of materials from popular culture and the Net) have been conducting their quiet work done before and during the ‘Arab Spring’ without making any claims for the ‘political’, but making art politically. I find the Buddhist conception of the “Net of Indra”, with its thousands of jewelled nodes, each reflecting the others, a very useful device with which to break down the binary of individual and collectivity. Buddhist thought does not recognise the concept of an indivisible, insular, atomised self, since the self is anatman or no-self, the individual is recognised through a series of affects arising from the interconnectedness and interdependence between provisional selves. Consider, in this light, the transnational political, socio-economic and philosophical entanglements with which the filmmakers Chris Marker, Allan Sekula and Noel Burch work. In their work, the destinies of people far removed in space, time and culture are interlocked by global circumstances. I would counterpose this complex vision of interdependence and “dividuality”4 (the ability to act as a productive plurality of selves) against the monological concept of the individual as sovereign locus of privilege, the centerpiece of “objectivism”, the deplorable philosophy of Ayn Rand which underwrites the greed and destructiveness of neoliberalism. To conclude, ‘Logging In and Out of Collectivity’ includes, as an unconventional artistic position, the West Eastern Divan Orchestra. Initiated by the Argentine-born Israeli maestro Daniel Barenboim and the Palestinian scholar Edward Said, WEDO comprises musicians from Israel, Palestine and the Arab world. It perhaps best exemplifies what I have earlier alluded to as the “tool theory” of artistic practice: here, the soloist is a “dividual” in the most productive sense, as a self entangled with the other, refining itself even as it weaves a concert together with others. A perfect metaphor for ROUNDTABLE: 9th Gwangju Biennale, which gains strength, not from the national identities of its participants, but from their critical positionalities. Notes 1 In conversation with the author, May 2012 2 Dmitry Vilensky in ‘A Conversation Between Alexei Penzin and Dmitry Vilensky: From the Perspective of Hope’ in Maria Hlavajova et al eds, On Horizons: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, 2011: 143 3
Nancy Adajania, 3rd Former West Research Congress, Vienna, 19 April 2012, ibid
4 See Ranjit Hoskote, ‘The Dividual Self’ in Nancy Adajania and Ranjit Hoskote, ‘Notes Towards a Lexicon of Urgencies’, Independent Curators International Research, Dispatch, October 1, 2010 http://curatorsintl.org/journal/notes_towards_a_lexicon_of_urgencies (accessed 31st July)
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The Individual Experience
Carol Yinghua Lu The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It’s not something that committees can do. It’s not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It’s done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, 1991 As we witness the dissolving of the neo-liberal economic system and the freedom of the market as the perfect scenario, the unprecedented and simultaneous eruptions of various political orders and the fall of their symbols worldwide, it’s time to rethink our reliance on any given system or imaginary order as the legitimate way of social organisation. It is by following this line of thinking and my deepseeded distrust and rejection of the co-called “system”, “structure”, “rules”, “order” and what is circulated as the “perfect knowledge” that I would argue the urgency of reiterating the importance of individual experience and individual spirit that can help us think beyond the present system. Obviously within each political and social setup, the challenges and syndromes differ from each other, but what generates changes in any given social order is ultimately led by strong human dissatisfaction, motivation, and imagination. It involves willingness as well as incredibly powerful subjectivity. It is this subjectivity that I would like to recognise in the Gwangju Biennale. I am employing a sub-theme titled ‘Back to the Individual Experience’ to look at the potential of individual subjectivity in terms of providing inspiration and radical thoughts towards reshaping our experience of the current system,and social dynamic. The most basic foundation of my discussion comes from perception. How do we perceive things? Do we perceive them within certain narrative structures or value systems in order for them to gain significance or validation or are we able to foresee their relevance and meaning on their own terms, in their original places? I want to throw out the idea of holding back the urge to give definition and categorisation based on existing “measuring” means. The present system, which is defined by the world hegemony of the free market economy, creates a democratic illusion of offering free choices everywhere, such as ‘mixing
and matching the toppings of your pizza or yogurt’ in cafes and restaurants. In authoritarian countries like China, international bookstore chains such as Pageone are imported to showcase and make available books of international languages as a gesture of multiplicity and openness. Close examination would reveal the scarcity of choices within the sections of philosophy and sociology. In most cases, choices are given within carefully designed and defined boundaries. The dictatorship of an ideology of economic efficiency and technology-based evolution gives the current system legitimacy, but reduces the individual to simply a component of a self-driven machinery. ‘Back to the Individual Experience’ subscribes not to any structure of efficiency, but is inclined to notions such as inspirations, independence, deep longing for freedom, creative subjectivities, intuitive, human instinct and spontaneity within these individual encounters, experiences, histories and practices. Like the two previous exhibitions, a variety of practices—not only artworks of contemporary visual artists, but works of philosophers, art historians, poets and filmmakers—will be presented side-by-side, with historical works next to contemporary positions. These practices and ideas were not chosen because they would fit any category of definition, be it visual art, or contemporary art, but because they were compelled by powerful individual visions and subjectivity. Conceived by Liu Ding, the spatial design turns corners, abandoned spots and neglected areas in exhibition spaces usually deemed insignificant and useless into actual sites for presenting works. A series of rooms of uneven heights would be built in the centre of the space and when wandering among them, one stops experiencing the so-called centre or periphery. Within this space design that eliminates the hierarchy of centre or periphery among the presences of the works, what we try to achieve is to allow each work to become a centre of its own, without creating spatial or conceptual pressure over one or another. Rather, the design is conceived to individualise each presentation and to engender unexpected connections between engagements by artists, art historians, filmmakers, philosophers, poets, publishers, and musicians, such as Josef Dabernig, James Cahill, Boris Groys, Alexandra Kojeve, Wu Tsang, Han Dong, Li Ran, Li Fuchun, Nastio Mosquito, Andy Hope 1930, Rasheed Araeen, Kelly Schacht, Varda Caivano, Lu Yue and Simon Fujiwara. My grouping of fourteen diverse practices in the exhibition is based on connectivity perceived among the works, much less in any practical sense than in a shared quality each of them carries as a subjective imagination of the world and human relations. In other words, these works that I have brought together are not just about the making of objects, but about the creation of worldviews. This approach is reflected within the work of two artists: Lu Yue and Wu Tsang. Lu Yue, The Obscure, 1999 Conceived by Lu Yue, scripted together with Liu Yiwei and filmed in 1999, The Obscure recorded a writers panel in Pi Xian—a scenic destination in Sichuan Province, southwestern China. To make this film, Lu Yue and Liu Yiwei invited eleven writers and poets to a one-week trip, preparing them for a three-day discussion to take place in the conference room of the hotel where they stayed. Instead of professional actors, A Chen, Zhao Mei, Wang Shuo, Xu Lan, Chen Cun, Ma Yuan, Xu Xing, Ding Tian, Lin Bai, Fang Fang and Mianmian—all mid-career or young novelists in China whose work Lu Yue admired—went along with Lu’s invitation and played themselves in the film. Prior to the gathering, each of the participating writers was given a slip of paper which bore two of the questions for their discussion. They were all asked whether there was any poetic outlook in the present time and for their perceptions of such popular media as film and TV. Shot on two cameras in a documentary style, the discussion revealed contradictions and sentiments, sometimes completely personal and individual, and at times evoking the prevalent attitudes at that time. At the same time, the woman who was waiting on the writers throughout the duration of the discussion, pouring tea, changing filled ashtrays and knocking at doors to gather them for meetings, was one of the only two professional actors in the film. As the discussion went on, the woman was to encounter by chance her former lover, who happened to be on a business trip and staying in the same hotel. He was an old schoolmate during their study in the Chinese department at university. Both married with children, they were to spend the last day together after the writers had left town, reminiscing and catching up with each other. The film closed with each writer being asked to speculate on how the two spent the last night together.
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Lu Yue studied photography in the Beijing Film Academy in 1978 and emerged as a leading cinematographer among the first generation of filmmakers in China following the end of the Cultural Revolution. He was nominated for an Oscar in the 1996 Academy Awards for his cinematography in Shanghai Triad directed by Zhang Yimou. Much lesser known as a director himself, Lu Yue’s two films, Mr. Zhao (1998) and The Obscure were among the most insightful surveys and depictions of humanity and conditions of a transitional society in the 1990s in China. Wu Tsang, For How We Perceived a Life, 2012 The awareness and feeling of simultaneously being both an insider and an outsider to a community defines Wu Tsang’s artistic approach and sensitivity to making works about different or marginalised groups, such as queer and transcommunities of colour. Most of Wu’s works are relentless attempts to develop a better understanding and to explicate repeatedly, rather than to impose any assumptions on the subject of his observation. His personal investment gives his work a sense of balanced perspective and humanistic compassion. There is no tendency to overindulge in, over-romanticise, or overlook the significance of what he’s dealing with. His works are also attempts to articulate his own personal, artistic and social positions. Born in 1982 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Wu Tsang now lives and works in Los Angeles. As a transgendered second-generation Chinese American, he explores human stories at the intersection of complex identities in many of his works. His engagement with his subject matter goes also beyond the making of his own work. He is engaged in activist works involving community-building, which expose him to different perspectives of inside and outside, although he never boasts of this aspect of his practice to his own advantage in the context of art. In the Gwangju Biennale, Wu Tsang is presenting an existing work, For How We Perceived a Life (Take 3)—a 16mm film that appropriates material from the iconic 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, and other archival sources—as a jumping-off point to explore issues of identity, agency, representation and exploitation. Parallel to this work, Wu is premiering a new production that is a prequel to For How We Perceived a Life (Take 3). This new film was developed, scripted and filmed in collaboration with Jonathan Oppenheim, the editor of Paris is Burning—Jennie Livingston’s influential 1990 documentary about New York City’s underground ball culture, which introduced ideas of voguing, serving and “realness” to mainstream audiences. Back to the Individual Experience… again If the making of an exhibition is not only about the production of a visual discourse in the space, but also about the production of social imaginaries and that of new forms of social relations, ‘Back to the Individual Experience’ rejects the accepted, integrated and subconscious orders of life, and draws attention to and ascribes great empathy to the significance of individual subjectivity in creating radical languages, radical shifts and visions for both understanding what art is and how human societies can be organised. It is not about the production of any object, but about imagining how objects might be linked with each other. Cornelius Castoriadis’ theory of society as an imaginary institution—“It is the instituting social imaginary that creates institution in general (the institution as form) as well as the particular institutions of each specific society, and the radical imagination of the singular human being”—I would like to apply to my practice in two ways. Firstly, I believe that exhibition making is also a form of ‘instituting’ and thus capable of creating imaginaries. Secondly, I would also extend the same idea to the making of works or any practice that involves creative subjectivity which can be considered equally as being capable of ‘instituting’ and ‘imagining’. In other words a single work or a single idea could be an ‘institution’.
Every practice and form of existence, be it individual or institutional, be it one single being or a collective, be it an ideology or a set of rules, consists of a centre which is as intangible as subjectivity. These multiple manifestations of subjectivity co-exist at the same time in different aspects of art-making, thinking and society-making. The perception and acknowledgement of “multicentricity”, a term that for American scholar Meiling Cheng recognises “the coexistence of multiple—and multiscaled—centres as a palpable phenomenon of our cosmic, terrestrial, social and individual existence”, provides a counter-perception to any form of oppressive power structure that appears in discernible or indiscernible ways of social organisation and structure, and implemented in aspects of our everyday life. The return to the individual experience and to individual subjectivity is to reiterate the independence of individual spirit, the equality of all positions, both in the makeup of the art system, and in that of our social structure and perception of the world. Individual subjectivity, be it instituted through individual practice and position, or implemented in the making of institutional structures, organisation of social relations, imaginaries of human histories, is a refusal to comply with a given prescription of social divisions, labour distribution and accepted orders of life. This proposal is driven by a desire to return things to their independent state of being, without having to rely upon interpretation or framing of any value system. This idea returns us to a state of having no coordinates, reference points or expectations. It is not a state of being part of a Lego empire —each of its component can only function in the logic of a construction. Rather, each unit, or component is a system and a construction of its own. At the same time, it doesn’t bear the pressure to grow into a system, a set of rules itself. It is to rethink how we should and can approach and appreciate the value of things on their own, without a commonly accepted system of references. ‘Back to the Individual Experience’ takes a comparative methodology of art-historical investigation, looking at practices across time, geography and genre of practice. The photography archive of Alexandra Kojeve from the 1920s presented as a curatorial practice of German art critic and philosopher Boris Groys; the online lecture series on appreciation of traditional Chinese paintings by American art historian James Cahill; Lu Yue’s film The Obscure; the Reading Room of Rasheed Araeed bringing together his minimalist structures from the 1970s and the entire archive of Third Text publications, which he founded in 1987; Simon Fujiwara’s “reunion” with his father in the form of a collaborative project with him and a number of recent works by artists from China, America, Belgium, UK, Angola and so on will meet in the space of the Biennale. The diversity and scope of the practices involved is as much a challenge to what is considered “fine arts” as it is to the consensus of the post-political world. It is both an imagination and an attempt to free the powers of imagination.
Page 166: Lu Yue, The Obscure (film still), 1999 Photo courtesy the artist Page 167: Do Ho Suh, Rubbing Project – Gwangju Catholic University Lifelong Institute, 2012 Photos courtesy the artist
THE impact of mobility on space and time
Alia Swastika Discourses on mobility and borders in the scope of geopolitics have become nearly classical subjects of discussions in the framework of globalisation, particularly in the areas of art and social science. If mobility is deemed to be absolute and inevitable in the current interconnected world, then a hybrid and plural identity is the result and the most real consequence. People mobility eventually builds the traffic of ideas, commodities and, of course, ideologies. In the past decade, acceleration and intensification of people migration, mainly influenced by increased information technology, has pushed for virtual migration and geographical interconnectedness with unimaginable speed and intensity. The idea of re-exploring the two key concepts as a curatorial base is an attempt to see more complex dimensions of mobility and its impact on present communities, and particularly to explore how the art community experiences, responds and acts toward this phenomenon, especially in terms of the creative process and in relation to world civilisation in general. Reading this phenomenon with a new perspective can bring us to analyse the complexity surrounding massive mobility projects, issues on geopolitical borders, identity and nationalism, colonialism, global capitalism and many others. Art practices, even further from the art system, are situated within the range of such great movement. The migration and temporariness of time and place are marked exclusively by the ever growing number of international art events, exchanges, artist residency programs and projects by artists from different countries. The world’s ‘corners’ have been interconnected and some have become the centres, while areas once considered peripheral—or that the cultural movement often deemed “alien”—have emerged as important loci in the development of contemporary art history. We can see that discourse on mobility and borders in the past two decades has gone beyond categorisations of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, thus composing a new map of the world. In reference to my personal experience, the idea of mobility becomes clearer when the internationalisation of art is growing in Southeast Asia, supported by more conducive and open political situation of the countries in the region. In 2006, visa restrictions were removed allowing Asians to travel more freely to neighboring countries, significantly encouraging meetings and art projects.
As a member of a new generation of artists in Southeast Asia, I also become part of a larger art community network, where numerous art contexts and socio-political histories meet to form an inseparable part of the new map of contemporary Asian art. Openness and movement eventually do not offer encounters, but demonstrate the possibility of collisions, and both become productive elements in art creation. In Indonesia, where I live and work, being part of the Southeast Asian community is an important step toward becoming an integral part of the world community. With limited art infrastructure Southeast Asian artists here become more dynamic in categories deemed established in Western art, and the desire to move towards the West grows because there they seemingly get validated as ‘international’ artists. Such dynamics, displaying political tensions—particularly in the context of art and culture in general—show the expanding complexity of the phenomenon of mobility. Although it is a phenomenon dating back through millennia, there are always intriguing motifs and modus operandi to revisit to become part of an attempt to redraw the world map and its constellation. Mobility also provides a chance to see how the bigger order influences an individual at a personal level; day-to-day experiences and memory matter in this study. Art practices also bring back one’s memory and individual experiences to integrate into the bigger picture of the world. At the same time, penetrating issues directly connected to the life of the ‘masses’ offer a chance for the art worker to redefine the role and position of art. My interpretation of mobility and migration has been widening to address not only mobility and the temporariness of space and time, but also relations between humans and the universe. A journey is a mind-opening activity to see where humans, as in J. Moltz’s view, find new knowledge, understand cultural differences and gain collective awareness and new ways of relating with the world. Artists and other creative beings have set out on travels through various modes—international exhibitions, residency programs, or field research —that go beyond just looking for new fields of thought and projects to also involve new cultural contexts, and to continuously question practices between the work of art and the pulsating dynamics of society. Besides displaying the important role of a visual diary of memories of past places and time, these works also refer to methods used by artists to interact with both public and audience in a bid to reach out for a greater role for art, offering the potential for this phenomena to be read as something that constantly changes; produced, consumed, manipulated and contested. These narratives also affirm uncertainty, that there is always room for change, even for the unexpected and the sudden in the civilisation order of contemporary society. In general, this curatorial project is attempting to re-address discussions on time and space, mapping through political and economic perspectives presented as a new set of visual codes. Mobility underlines the importance of investigating how the world is shaped and transformed through movement. It is no longer only addressing the way in which humans build knowledge about the world, but also how they physically and socially shape the world through the way they individually move people, objects, information and ideas. Through a critical in-depth exploration of studies about mobility, scientists and researchers influence the ways mobility can shape public policy. Artists have the same position as scientists and researchers in capturing those signs, particularly in mapping personal experiences over migration, those who move do not have enough distance themselves from their own experiences. Mapping with Tintin Wulia Boundaries create separation between people and countries, however at the same time they present opportunities for transcending or crossing between spaces/ realities/histories. Walls, lines and borders symbolise separations, in-between territory and the possibility of movement. Indonesian artist Tintin Wulia has been investigating issues of borders and migration throughout her practice, going back and forth in her personal narration and experience, as well as the bigger picture of current social phenomenona.
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Similar to the practice of Poklong Anading, Tintin Wulia’s work involves members of the local community, often collecting hidden stories and personal memories. Her series Nous Ne Notons Pas Les Fleurs began in Patna, India in 2009. Through a residency at KHOJ Residency Program, she sought to map out the mobility of people across India by using flowers to signify different parts of the country. Later iterations of the project expanded this inquiry to Jakarta (which refers to both a map of the world and global mobility), Singapore and Fort Ruigenhoek (The Netherlands). While each of these projects took into consideration the local context and prevailing public narrative, Wulia’s work also tries to offer a larger perspective on mobility and movement. Playful yet intriguing, small-scaled but ambitious, easily engaging but layered in meaning, this series offers the possibility of involving the audience in critical and creative interaction with this particular issue. For 2012 Gwangju Biennale, Wulia has created a work within Gwangju’s Daein Market, which has recently become a meeting point between small-scaled trading activity and art practices. As more people have replaced the traditional market with modern supermarkets, the Dein Market began to suffer; to counteract this trend the government now invites artists to use sections of the market for art projects. Through various means, the artists who work there often connect their projects with the stories of local people who work in the market and the evolution of the city of Gwangju. As they built up several experiences reflecting their personal memories and impressions of Gwangju’s evolution, these localised participants have begun to understand the possibility of contemporary art as something one can experience, as opposed to static exhibitions. For the first week of her Biennale residency, Wulia spent most of her time talking with members of the market community about Gwangju and how they might map out and remember the city. Her questions encouraged them to think beyond established ideas of a map, proposing they could freely imagine different visual forms that might describe or divide territory. Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Gwangju, demonstrates Wulia’s interest in how the individual shapes the city and how the city is personally experienced through the individual’s body. In her preceding works, the idea of mobility has not only been staged through the physical movement of the participants, but also manifested through performance, where the body is used to trace memories of mobility. In Gwangju, Wulia began the process of mapping with the imagery of the body, by questioning people in the
Opposite and above: Tintin Wulia, Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, installation views Fort Ruigenhoek, 2011 Photos courtesy the artist and Kaap/Stichting Storm, Utrecht
Daein Market: “Where do you think is the heart of Gwangju?” This ambiguously metaphoric question followed by playful questions on the idea of the city and the body, including “Where is, then, the belly button of Gwangju?” that pulls the perspective back onto the body itself. Visitors to the Gwangju Biennale will similarly encounter a question: “How would you trace your route around Gwangju today?” This invitation will invite them to become active participants, by using cobblestones to incorporate their immediate texture onto the ever-changing map of Gwangju that began in the market. The questions proposed by Wulia encourage the audience to question and map out their city in different ways, that might never have imagined. As observed by Tiwari Reena, the activity of mapping incorporates the body and rituals in the conception of the space. While moving one’s body in the market and in the exhibition space as a means to trace memory and imagine one’s physical surroundings, one can also indicate a form of ritual and performativity. As Dr. Reena Tiwari reflected in Space-Body-Ritual: Performativity in the City (2010), the city is a space of lived experience—an intricately layered space that gives people a poetic understanding in response to their memories. The contemporary relationship between the city and the body is often taken for granted, we assume we move our body naturally without being aware of social constructions that shape our movement. The history of the city and the changing urban landscape has altered the way people live and experience space. As the sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebrve writes, “the whole of the social space proceeds from the body... Within the body itself, spatially considered, the successive levels constituted by the sense (the sense of smell to sight), prefigures the layers of social space and their interconnections”. In the Daein Market, as participants were challenged to imagine the city as a body, aligning each part of the body with different territories of Gwangju, differences between the older and younger generations clearly emerged, directly reflecting the evolving social construction of the city. While many of the older generation would reference natural landmarks such as mountains or rivers, the younger generation focused on cosmopolitan landmarks such as malls, bus terminals or shopping centres. Wulia’s installation reflects two layers of mappings: one is the ‘official’ map of Gwangju and the other made by individuals during her performance in the market. The work shows how both the notion and convention of the map can be culturally specific in an anthropological sense and also vary socially within the individual. Official maps are used to formally delineate or represent an area’s geographical aspect, while individual mapping may have a less linear complexity. Wulia combines these two different aspects of mapping, not only to confront their contradictory nature, but also to create a new layer of narration that is constructed by the stories and memories of the people. Wulia also creates a more abstract sense of territory since most of the landmarks or borders inside the city have been transformed into symbolic and imaginative signs, such as the body’s parts. Extending the conversation with Poklong Anading Filipino artist Poklong Anading’s practice incorporates a multiplicity of approaches, including ideas of painting, photography, objects, interactivity and installation. His current series began seven years ago, inspired by irregularly-shaped trapezoidal-circular rags of remnant fabric from garment factories that he found discarded throughout Manila. His interest was sparked by his observation that they each presented distinct patterns, reflecting the random variation of their source. “The patterns are unique; they depend on the available material, done blindly, as those who make them don’t care about the patterns that they are making.” Anading interprets these objects as evidence of how non-artists make art without recognising the act of creation, and uses this imagery as a point of departure to explore a variety of social and artistic questions. His first project Unknown (Landmark) (2005), took the form of photographs mounted on light-boxes. Compositionally the trapezoid served to reference the Japanese flag. The conceptual framework evolved into an exploration of maps and territory. Anading imagined each rag as an invisible landmark of the city, recording a specific moment in space and time. He found a collection of rubble from the Manila Water Works System construction and painted the patterns of the rags on the stones. This culminated in Fallen Maps, marking his progression into mapping territorial and temporal realities. Anading’s practice layers issues of urbanism, environmentalism and ownership of space/place, and considers established methods and forms of art making. The series reflects an investigation into the notion of painting. Anading treated the randomly produced shapes as a parallel form of mark making, given the “spontaneous act of collage that happens as they are made”. Beyond its formal position in the trajectory of art history, Anading is interested in the practice of painting as a basic human act of creation. Many modern and contemporary artists
have explored painting as a performative act, yet what is intriguing about Anading’s approach is his insistence that innocuous daily activity be considered as part of this investigation. As a site-responsive new commission for ROUNDTABLE, Anading reinterprets these questions through the seemingly innocent act of painting fingernails. He again transposes the pattern of the rags—this time into nail art designs performed in the street as an intervention within marginal urban spaces. A radical transformation of conventional painting in term of medium, form, process, and audience, Anading upends the question “what is painting?” and instead probes how the act of painting can be a vehicle to connect and interact with others. Throughout the established practice of painting, most artists create individually in their studio. Anading’s project demands interaction and the involvement of others as part of the process. Like Wulia, Anading focused his project in Gwangju’s Daein Market. During a three week residency, he established contacts with the people working there, amassing an oral record of their personal narratives. In recent years Daein Market has been assailed by a variety of contemporary art practices, and the community has become accustomed to the occasional intervention of on-site artist projects. They were therefore quite open to Anading’s ideas and were even enthusiastic about participating. He came to the market daily, offering his services ‘door to door’ to paint just the index fingers of a cross-section of the market’s working public. Instead of enacting an isolated incident of painting, he integrated into his work an intentional collection of stories related to issues of domestification, the female body and masculinity. As a social space, the traditional marketplace is often seen as a feminine extension of the domestic sphere because it is defined by small scale trading activities involving household foodstuffs and materials. To reinforce this, most of its clientele and vendors are female. While the domestic is the market’s overarching social codification, at the same time it serves to underscore the valuable role of women as a main source of economic capital for the family. Daein Market is a fairly straightforward reflection of this archetypal marketplace. Anading interacts with the women he meets there, and through the simple act of nail painting, instigates within them a recollection of their own experience towards their body and individuality. By only embellishing the index finger, the act takes on further symbolism, emphasising ideas of power (as this particular finger is synonymous with giving commands) and connection (as a means to communicate with others). Many of the women reflected through the process that they had almost forgotten about the notion of giving pleasure and attention to their own bodies. This is diametrically opposed to the modern phenomenon of middle or leisure class urban female society, in which taking care of one’s body is an integral aspect of self-expression, connected with the experience of luxurious moment. Beauty salons are spread throughout the city, promising new ways of finding feminine identity. Compared to other salon activities (such as hairdos, facials, and depilation), manicures and pedicures are less visible and less direct; in some ways they are less about maintaining the body, and more about the idea of experiencing luxury. In the beauty salon women also interact each other, sharing experiences. Ironically, in the market—the territory where they are most powerful—these same women distance themselves of such experiences, acting as stand-ins for the family and delineated economic sector, often in relative isolation. From the moment Anading first invited participants, it became obvious that their interest was not the project’s end result—an elaborately decorated fingernail—but instead the longing for an intimate interaction with somebody (even a stranger) and the need to be listened to. The residency developed an emotional intensity for the artist, as the process drove each participant to share her life story. Anading also approached male workers in the market, whose involvement confronted the limitations of prescribed male versus female social interactions. Anading took photographs of each subject’s painted finger outstretched in an authoritative manner. The act evoked his previous projects on anonymity focused on the finger, Anading avoids any obvious aspect of identity, leaving the details of the shared narrative between him and his subjects. Documenting physical paintings or participatory art through photography adds a layered investigation. Photography not only serves as a means of representation, it also creates a visual symbol of a particular memory. The painting itself is transient, leaving no evidence of the intimate relationship for the subject, except through their memories. Anading retains the audio recording of the process, but does not share it as documentation and instead does so atmospherically to underline the process of social interaction. It is not the content of the story, but more the act and reasons behind it; who speaks and who listens. Dedicating his career to the conceptual, Anading consciously investigates so-called ‘conventional’ artistic practices, reinventing their context within the art historical tradition. Anading’s project for the 2012 Gwangju Biennale undertakes an overlapping series of weighty juxtapositions: of domestic and political spaces, of individual expression and social contestation, of intimate and distanced connections, of femininity and masculinity, and of small-scaled activism and artistic exploration.
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TRANSIENT ENCOUNTERS
Mami Kataoka One of the fundamental ideas of Buddhism is impermanence, according to which everything in the world is seen as constantly changing and never the same. Because we think of things as permanent, the fact that they are constantly coming into existence and disappearing gives rise to suffering. These ideas can be traced back to the ancient Indian view of the universe and in particular to the belief that Brahman, the origin of the entire universe, and the Atman, or inner essence of the individual, are linked by an invisible force and that emancipation from the cycle of birth and rebirth, or samsara, can be achieved through their unification. According to these beliefs, our individual lives and the present in which we live are part of the whole of creation, one moment in a constantly changing cycle. It is possible to compare the state in which positive and negative forces such as loss and emancipation exist in harmony, to the philosophy of yin and yang, which derives from ancient Chinese thought—also reflected in the taijitu, the symbol of Taoism. This philosophy holds that the natural order of things is maintained according to the mutual relationship between “chi (qi)” forces that both conflict with and contain parts of their opposite. The basis of yin and yang philosophy is not dualism, according to which the two forces would have to be in a conflicting relationship or a relationship of superiority and inferiority, but monism, in which the two forces absorb each other, giving rise to a state of equilibrium and thereby preventing the collapse of the order of the universe as a whole. Similarly, one could say this philosophy is connected to the ancient Chinese natural philosophy of Wu Xing, also known as the Five Elements, according to which the entire universe is made up of the five basic elements of wood, fire, earth, metal and water. The five elements also correspond to the four seasons, the points of the compass, colours, body parts and so on. Additionally, according to the ancient Indian view of the universe, the world is made up of “five great
elements” of void, wind, fire, water and earth, which found its way to Japan via the teachings of esoteric Buddhism. These elements also correspond to the chakras of yoga, which are regarded as being closely connected to the body’s internal energy. Other philosophies related to the forces of “chi” include I Ching and feng shui, for example, and all of these philosophies have become intricately codified and are permeating deeply into the culture, customs, food culture, annual events and other aspects of society in contemporary Asia, where modernisation continues apace. The image I would like conjure up here is of a state in which elements are in a simple nonhierarchical, horizontal relationship. Today, at a time when political and social upheavals are occurring in various regions around the world and different value systems are competing against each other, there would appear to be something to be gained from revisiting the idea that positive growth can arise from the influence of one element on another, as in the case where wood produces ash when it burns, or when one element destroys another, as in the case where water extinguishes fire or fire melts metal, antagonistic or incompatible elements try to maintain the order of the universe by seeking a state of equilibrium while maintaining their fluidity. This kind of relationship can be compared to that of Roundtable: 9th Gwangju Biennale, for which the co-artistic directors have endeavoured to create their own state of equilibrium while pooling their different political, historical, economic, and cultural contexts as well as their individual experiences, thought processes, personalities, and perceptions. If we regard the circular form of a roundtable as symbolising this kind of balanced, horizontal view of the universe, then it is also possible to regard the roundtable as a micromodel of the universe or the world, in which case I think references to the kind of traditional Asian way of thinking outlined above certainly have some validity.
Page 171: Motoyuki Shitamichi, Torii - Tenian Island, USA, 2006-12 Pages 172-173: Motoyuki Shitamichi, Torii - Saipan Island, USA, 2006-12 Photos courtesy the artist and Nap Gallery, Tokyo
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The invisible force linking different elements and its fluidity could be seen as analagous to the contemporary art and biennales, and other international exhibitions that have become more prevalent since the 1990s. Compared to the ideas of the museum as a place where artworks are collected, stored and displayed, and artworks as something physical, collectable and consumable, international art exhibitions could be said to exhibit different potential and energy due to their impermanence and cyclicity. Ephemeral, site-specific installations, performative practice, sound art and other examples of artwork that require actual participation in temporary spaces constructed especially for the event concerned, have become an increasingly common sight at international exhibitions. Given that these exhibitions are often seen as an opportunity to engage the cultural identity of the host city or country, regional political and social history, architectural or historical relationships with indigenous spaces beyond the ‘white cube’, they increase the meaningfulness of newly commissioned work. The same view can probably be applied to the curating of international exhibitions. The physical impossibility of representing—in the limited time available to any one individual—the present situation with regard to contemporary artistic production, which has expanded globally, is overt. The selection of artists is thus the result of each director discovering connections between the thinking and practice of various artists based on the director’s own positioning. Countless connecting points can thus be detected, all transient encounters linked by universal invisible forces, and at the end of the exhibition these connections will disseminate to all parts of the globe and to one point in history. Daisetsu Suzuki (1870-1966) was a major influence from the 1950s onwards upon the West’s focus on Eastern thought. Among those influenced was John Cage (1912-92), whose ideas were later taken up by avant-garde artists in the USA including Toshi Ichiyanagi (1933–) and Allan Kaprow (1927-2006). Suzuki emphasised aspects of Zen concerned with individual, practical experience and rejected the more intellectual aspects. Suzuki’s statements that Zen is “a sort of mental catastrophe taking place all at once, after piling up of matters intellectual and demonstrative”1 that “aims at the opening of satori, or at acquiring a new point of view as regards life and the universe”,2 hint at two polar viewpoints; the holistic point of view common to the various Asian monistic worldviews, and alternatively, a focus on the simple repetition of moments day by day. Hardly any of the avant-garde artists influenced by Suzuki, including Cage, became actual Zen devotees, but as the following quote indicates, they found their own ideological connections in the teachings of Zen. Many Zen principles appealed to Cage’s natural temperament and resonate strongly in his work: a belief in the interconnectedness of all people, things, and events big and small; the accommodation of paradox; privileging the comic over the tragic; valuing immediate experience in the present; a unidirectional view of time moving toward an enlightened (or at least, in Cage’s case, improved) future; and the importance of rituals. Cage recounts that Zen caused a change in ‘what [he] was trying to say in [his] work’ and ‘how it was making [his] work’—principally in embracing ‘a spirit of acceptance rather than a spirit of control’.3 Cage, who incorporated the element of chance and indeterminateness into his compositions, used the graphic notation method devised by Morton Feldman. In the graphic scores of Toshi Ichiyanagi, who studied under Cage, one can also see how improvised, indeterminate sounds produced by instruments or everyday objects are represented through the use of visual symbols. The score for Music for Electric Metronomes (1960), for example, incorporates the electric metronome developed in the 1950s as an instrument and combines its sound with that of various tools and people walking, jumping and performing other actions to its beat. For non-specialists in music, it is extremely exciting to imagine the score’s visual non-directionality being transformed into acoustic space. The performers who interpret the score also have ample opportunity to exercise their own creativity and freedom. The relationship between the score as a set of instructions for the performers and the extemporary outcomes has a strong affinity with the concept of the “happenings” created by Alan Kaprow. We ourselves are shapes (though we are not often conscious of this fact). We have differently colored clothing; can move, feel, speak, and observe variously; and will constantly change the ‘meaning’ of the work by so doing. There is, therefore, a never-ending play of changing conditions between the relatively fixed or ‘scored’ parts of my work and the ‘unexpected’ or undermined parts. In fact, we may move in and about the work at any pace or in any direction we wish.4 Kaprow ultimately decided upon a direction completely contrary to that in which the ‘happening’ later evolved, removing even the presence of the audience and presenting pieces dubbed ‘activity’ that were unrecognisable as art in the context
of increasingly personal relationships and spaces. In asking himself repeatedly the question “What is art?”, Kaprow focused upon the single moment of the present amidst the transience of life and searching for some kind of eternal truth: “If one cannot pass this work on to his children in the form of a piece of ‘property,’ the attitudes and values it embodies surely can be transmitted. And like so many quite acceptable but passing facts of our lives, this art can be considered as a semi-intangible entity, something to be renewed in different forms like fine cooking or the seasonal changes.”5 Once people are awakened to environmental spaces predicated on mutability and fluidity, an awareness of negative space or the invisible, immaterial realm arises spontaneously. This is expressed in the Theory of the Five Elements with its correspondence to the changing seasons as well as in the following comment by Kaprow on the way nature and the universe work.“If we bypass ‘art’ and take nature itself as a model or point of departure, we may be able to devise a different kind of art by first putting together a molecule out of the sensory stuff or ordinary like: the green of a leaf, the sound of a bird, the rough pebbles under one’s feet, the fluttering past of a butterfly. Each of these occurs in time and space and is perfectly natural and infinitely flexible.”6 These ideas have been projected onto the selection of artists for the 2012 Gwangju Biennale’s sub-theme ‘Transient Encounters’, for example Dane Mitchell (New Zealand) and Motoyuki Shitamichi (Japan), who are both informed by the history and culture of Korea. Dane Mitchell’s works are directed towards the ‘whole of creation’, his installations designed to raise awareness of the immaterial, invisible realm, including odours trapped in particular places, sounds that call to mind memories, and the spaces in which these are contained. Mitchell chose to work with the round, cylindrical space of Biennale Hall, equating the form of this space with the Cheonsang Yeolcha Bunyajido—a Joseon Dynasty astronomical chart from the fourteenth-century—with an act that reflects conversations he had with a Gwangju shaman. By immersing themselves in ‘constellations from the heavens’ projected within the space, the viewer became aware of its invisible energies, participating in a dialogue that transcends time and space. Emperor Taejo, the first ruler of the Joseon Dynasty, ordered his royal astronomer to carve the original chart on a flat, black stone that depicted two hundred and sixty-four constellations consisting of 1,467 stars, showing positions of the heavenly bodies in their natural order, allocated to their respective celestial fields. The map itself, designated as National Treasure of Korea #228, is housed in the National Palace Museum at Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul. Mitchell’s sculpture, on display at Mugaksa Temple, consists of recorded sounds of Mitchell himself repeatedly uttering the word “now,” buried deep within three round pieces of the pottery that rotate continuously on a stand. Motoyuki Shitamichi photographs historical sites that remain as heterogeneous entities in the midst of ever-changing landscapes, encouraging us to reconsider the political meaning behind such sites. The torii series (2006–12) contains some of his most representative works. From the Meiji Restoration up until the outbreak of World War II, Japan promoted a Shinto State policy as part of its modernisation program with ambitions to create a regional Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, and built shrines over Asia as a symbol of this vision. Although these shrines were dismantled after the war, Shitamichi focuses his work on the fact that these torii gates now exist in completely different landscape and social contexts. For the Gwangju Biennale, he conducted research in Geomundo Island and Mokpo in Korea, where either staircases or foundations are the only remnants left standing. Meanwhile his Bridge series, started in the wake of the Japanese earthquake of 11 March, 2011, features a continuous string of two hundred and eighty-six images of small bridges that Shitamichi discovered during a motorcycle journey across Japan. The little boards placed over irrigation channels by the side of the road are records of the modest ambitions and desires of anonymous people, who bridge distances for the sake of convenience. Notes 1 D.T. Suzuki, ‘On Satori–The Revelation of a New Truth in Zen Buddhism’, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Rider & Company: Grove Press, 1949: 261 2
ibid: 237
3
John Cage, Jeremy Millar, Lauren Wright and Roger Malbert, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage, London: Hayward Publishing, 2010: 74-75 4
Allan Kaprow, ‘Notes on the Creation of a Total Art’, (1958) Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Jeff Kelly (ed.), California, London: University of California Press, 1993/2003: 11-12
5
Allan Kaprow, ‘Assemblage, Environments & Happenings’, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc, 1966: 168-169
6
Allan Kaprow, ‘Notes on the Creation of a Total Art’: 10
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A DISH SERVED LUKEWARM freedom of speech!
Adam Geczy Censorship is to morality what morality is to ethics. They share much in common but are not the same. When censorship lost its allegiance to religion, it became a more volatile concept, or apparently so. Under religion censorship was a mere measure for winnowing, culling and ensuring that the common interests of faith and service were upheld. In the modern era, censorship played a different role, which was ostensibly to protect society from information, views and images that might threaten its wellbeing. But without the seamless relationship to abstract good and the means of instrumenting it, mythic or not, the very meaning of wellbeing has always been a presiding question. The revolutions in society, politics and art that characterise modernism were upheavals that sought to replace false consciousness with a truthful one, a mendacious morality with one at the service of its times. In more contemporary times the close relationship between censorship and social change has diminished, a condition attributable to the perception that no single political trajectory prevails. But the last five centuries has shown us that when society is perceived to be diffuse, less controllable and predictable, then censorship—and censoriousness—is more robust. This is far from saying that the Inquisition reigns in Australia at the moment, but at the same time it is worth looking behind the arras of equanimity. For political Australia is not divided so much as disaffectedly confused. (The political situation has finally caught up to art.) Our cultural landscape—from journalism to literature to art—is exceedingly tame. The calm, the equanimity, is almost so serene as to be ignored. From Syria to Iran, the commotion seems to be elsewhere. But like a failed marriage that is trying to keep face, is Australian culture straining under the weight of its apathy? This August a long-awaited report was finally passed down to the Arts Minister Simon Crean. Shepherded with the sweetener of more money were three recommendations: to politicise policy, to corporatise the Australia Council and to reconfigure the peer review process. This would mean ‘streamlining’ the panel into one body which would then pass judgment on poetry, music, performance and art as one conglomerate. Under this model, administration would also have stronger organising powers and a more voluble say. This has yet to be instrumented but it has serious consequences for arts funding. In an article in The Australian on 21 August this year, Rodney Hall (who was Chair of the Australia Council 1991-94) commented that he was not convinced; “that even the most brilliant poet can be relied on to know much about the needs, let’s say, of a young dancer embarking on a career; nor that the sculptor will grasp the technical requirements of composers working with computer software. I know I wouldn’t. Thus, in any such mixed panel, there will probably be only one person qualified to assess a given application. And that person will have unilateral power to make the decision.”
It is a process that suggests a microcosm of globalisation, in which categories are generalised and flattened for the sake of fiscal efficiency. There would be little space for passing decisions on delicate subjects and challenging submissions. Is this an elegant way of muzzling the arts? In 2003 the Media Arts Board began to be dismantled because of a teacup-storm in parliament over the funding given to a computer game about asylum seekers. At the time, I contacted the then Shadow Minister for the Arts, Tanya Plibersek, to alert her to what was happening. The issue seemed to have piqued her department’s interest. When I met her in person she told me that what she thought was wrong with the Australia Council was that they gave too much money to older artists. The fact that the ceiling of twenty thousand dollars (which is also taxable) for New Work for Established Artists has not changed in over a decade suggests that she was not overly well informed. These inconsistencies cannot be taken in isolation and have to be seen against the campaign by the Gillard Government to limit the powers of the media. This is the inevitable symptom of political stalemate and the absence of strong leadership, strong judgment and strong opinions. The politics of prevarication has now become defensive of anything that might seem to overturn it. It may be best to have a healthy serving of paranoia than a fatal case of naivete: the real scandal of the Bill Henson censorship debacle was perhaps not that of Henson himself but the glib condemnation of the work by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and the sequel to these events in the furore raised over the June 2008 issue of Art Monthly Australia with a naked girl on the cover, Polixeni Papapetrou’s 2003 image, Olympia as Lewis Carroll’s Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs. But honi soit qui mal y pense: to see this image as prurient is only to condemn oneself; the photograph was of a girl seated in a shell like object clasping her knee looking out at the viewer. Perhaps the reference to Lewis Carroll may have incited those in the know, however the child was Papapetrou’s own daughter. Moreover there was nothing sexually explicit about the image. The issue was withdrawn and the magazine also lost some of its government subscribers. This didn’t stop copies of the magazine being sold for twenty to fifty dollars on eBay. In 1994 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney staged an exhibition of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe who had died of AIDS five years before. The exhibition was one of the most ambitious in the life of what was then a young and financially fragile institution. The famous gay writer Edmund White, who had known the artist, was brought out from his then home in Paris to launch the show, which was concurrent with Mardi Gras. In the first weekend of the exhibition the museum received over ten thousand visitors, a record for museum at the time. What is not commonly known or discussed is that this event made redundant the antiquated but still regnant censorship law that forbade representations of the penis. The exhibition—which included the provocative (and hilarious) Man in Polyester Suit, of a semi-erect penis hanging like a serpentine alien from an unzipped fly, as well the notorious self portrait with the artist planting a bull whip up his anal cavity—had previously been shut down on both sides of the USA. Republican Senators zealously showed their family credentials by objecting sternly when the retrospective was held in Washington; similarly Ohio ensured that its nominal status as most conservative state was retained when the exhibition was also closed prematurely in Cincinnati. Eager to show a more developed and liberal attitude, the MCA held the exhibition without demur. By default, the law was effectively made redundant. But this was one of the last exhibitions to have delicate content. It was what we might call one of Australia’s few Indian summers of sexual and political radicalism in the arts. There is little interest these days in queer politics and there is not much art in this vein that is worth mentioning. What we might also ask is whether in recent memory there has been a controversy in Australia commensurate with the scandal of Juan Davila’s rebarbative Stupid as a Painter (1981), the ambitious mural-like frieze that was censored during the 1982 Biennale of Sydney. At the centre of the work, kept company by a leering Marylin stroking her lyrcapant loins is a Tom of Finland character with a Lichtenstein-like machine-gun for a penis. The title, Stupid as a Painter is taken from a quip by Duchamp, whose flip cynicism is taken further to condemn an establishment whose disempowerment of artists is through constant recourse to simplistic and convenient myths of culture and value. Davila offered a sexuality of danger and transgression where Brett Whitely had offered smut under a seductive line.
The disempowerment that now occurs is perhaps more stealthy and more insidious. In the last two decades institutions have been following a policy linked to audience reception: size matters. The latest Biennale of Sydney has brought home a fact that has been present for a long time, namely that art that is safe and entertaining wins out over anything against the grain. I can recall writing in these pages eight years ago about the Bridget Riley exhibition that opened at the MCA in December 2004. This, essentially a Christmas show, was at the expense of the possibility of exhibiting artists such as Paul McCarthy or Mark Dion whose forays into the uncanny, ugliness and upset were far more cathartic reflections of a time when the dissent was aggressively ignored. In retrospect, and in light of the Gillard Government’s attempts to limit the powers of the media, this problem may have been easier to isolate at the end of the Howard Government era. For at least the so-called Left could isolate the conservative enemy, whereas there is the implicit and naïve conviction that a left-leaning government is ‘on our side’. But the inaction of a senior politician like Plibersek even while in opposition tells us that the truth is far from this. It is also evident that any government with a marginal majority is more intent on its own self-preservation at the cost of commitment to cultural substance. The alarming indifference is part of the lukewarm attitude to art, criticism and more besides in that it does not have a physical face like the lunatic equivalent of Pauline Hanson. Rather, Australia has vaunted what the English art theorist and critic Julian Stallabrass in 1999 called “High Art Lite”, a term familiar to some, but woefully perhaps not familiar enough. Associated with the new wave of British artists patronised by Charles Saatchi in the 1990s, “High Art Lite” is characterised by sensationalism over substance, and eschews theoretical grounding in favour of accessibility. The art of the new millennium is therefore about appeal which makes it close to fashion. One of Stallabrass’ examples of this is Sarah Lucas’ Two Fried Eggs and Kebab (1992), a crude visual pun on womanhood: laid out on a table were the foods in the title, crudely mimicking the breasts and the vagina. Somewhere vaguely in the distance one could hear the rustling of feminist critique, but only in the distance, the sound was drowned out by laughing, a coarse derisive guffaw. (Stallabarass: “In this apparent burial of intellect, Lucas’ work stands out.”1) Feminist ideology, or any other for that matter, is historicised, made into a relic rather than reinterpreted as a necessary ethical project. With the jettisoning of theory inevitably comes the jettisoning of ideology. Ideology has two facets in art, one is dogged lipservice to unquestioned codes of belief, the other, more salutary, is that it provides avenues for the way the world is perceived and a critical, interrogative stance toward the world systems. At best, it encapsulates a world-view whose critical dynamic is to differentiate and re-order. But instead the artistic persona is given greater preference over what the artist actually does, namely what the work says about things in the world, and the manner in which it seeks to challenge as opposed to affirm its own rules and parameters. This is what can make works of art invigorating, when it takes risks and expresses a refreshing concept of the order of things. As Stallabrass explains, the premium given to persona and artistic celebrity places the viewer, in an interpretive trap from which there seems to be no escape. Certainly, as long as the work is considered only as a product of a persona rather than of a wider culture, it becomes impossible to place. As with spying, once a certain complexity or bluff and counter-bluff is reached, there is no way of knowing what any statement really means. Second, Lucas—and she is entirely typical in this—presents her work as neutral, as gesturing towards a matter of concern but saying nothing about it” ‘responsibility’ for reading is placed entirely on the viewer.2 This is not digressing from the original point since it situates artistic activity into the zone of celebrity over intellectual effort. It also helps to ask why for close to two decades now, there has been an increasing trend for art that looks like art. Transgression is treated as a metaphor, packaged into a safe product. For example, performance art is now ‘relational’; where it once was a move against institutions, galleries and the commodity market, it rides on its former glory of radicality to safeguard the look and feel of ‘cutting edge’ contemporaneity, and better, it affords a personal element that may even please viewers, much as an author who turns up at a bookstore to do a reading or book-signing. To travel through the new Kaldor Wing of the Art Gallery of NSW is to begin to understand the aesthetic climate that nurtures what is exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Kaldor’s Collection is strikingly packaged, accessible, maledominant and conservative. It is perhaps the collector’s equivalent of what passed as fair in Mad Men, the recent American teleseries about advertising executives. Here we are brought face to face with the hedonism and the flagrant misogyny of the 1960s. Kaldor’s greatest moment was his first, when he commissioned Christo and Jeanne-Claude on their first full-scale wrapping project, the Wrapped Coast at Little Bay in 1969. However, Kaldor’s projects have a patronising flavour, with a sense that his imported overseas artists are showing Australians how it is to be done. It is not for nothing that Gilbert and George have pride of place within the collection, known in their time for rebuking their contemporaries for being
17 7 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 3 2 012 overly recondite and difficult. Censuring what they considered artistic elitism, their philosophy was to ensure that there was no baffling element in a work of art so that it could be enjoyed by all walks of life. It is not for nothing that they were voluble supporters of Margaret Thatcher.3 We know that large collections have a decisive effect on culture. Kaldor’s will be seen by generations of school children and aspiring young artists. There is not a trace of a McCarthy clown hacking wantonly at an oversized hand, grunting and sobbing, or a Goldin-esque gay man watching as his partner withers from AIDS. We might as well also discount the possibility of seeing the work of Jock Sturges, best known for his photographs of nude adolescents and their families in communes around Northern California. (In fact, any representation of children requires a signed consent form from both parents. The obscenity has now gone full circle: the obscenity is now in the suspicion.) The Kaldor Collection is also a telling reminder of how powerfully works of art inform one another. The suite of four photographs by Jeff Koons of Art Magazine Ads (1988-89) are clever heterosexualised pastiches of the work of gay duo Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard, better known as Pierre and Gilles. Koons’ work still has resonance for those who remember them at the time when they were produced, but seen in isolation that are just bland reminders of 1980s self-aggrandisement together with Spandau Ballet and supermodels. Indeed, the safeness of the Kaldor collection lies in the way it is confirmation of a static and certain artistic world order. And it is of a piece in Australian artistic culture to want for what is, in effect, already known. To doubt this is not to have looked closely enough at Shaun Gladwell’s work in the 2009 Venice Biennale, which selfconsciously served up Mad Max together with a diluted comment of concern for dead animals. But it was sufficiently replete with motorcycles and cars to ensure fun for all the family and that the artwork had a sufficiently sexy, energetic edge. Its only real statement was not intended by the artist himself; it showed the extent to which Australian culture wants to conform to clichés of itself, while letting unsavoury truths slide. Would the Australian Pavilion ever house a work about the “Palm Island death in custody” (in Queensland) and resulting race riots for instance? Would it house a work about the 2005 (sectarian and mob) Cronulla Riots (in Sydney)? The choice of Simryn Gill for Australia’s representative for Venice in 2013 is a strategic move that ostensibly addresses this point. Born in Malaysia of Indian parents, Gill is an artist dealing in Southeast Asian colonisation and multi-culturalism. It is discernibly clever and packaged, and is like an Australian equivalent to the British artist Yonka Shonibare; both are darlings of the institution that their work implicitly or explicitly denigrates. (Shonibare’s insistence on having his MBE sarcastically tacked on to the end of his name is confirmation of this.) With both artists we have a double assurance: that the colonial past is being addressed but with the same reserve and elegance that ensures that the institution—artistic, political, what you will—is upheld and never threatened. It is pre-eminently legible, it elicits guilt but no so much as to cause offense. This is important as in the fifth paragraph on the Australia Council’s website of the announcement of Gill as Australia’s representative, there reads, “Australia Council CEO Kathy Keele said: ‘Representing Australia at the Venice Biennale is a significant achievement —over 190,000 people visited the Australian Pavilion in 2011’.” Visitation for art is now on par with box-office attendance. In 2006 the Pompidou Centre hosted a major retrospective of the work of Hans Bellmer, best known for his unsettling imagery of dismembered and hideously rearticulated dolls in disused rooms or in forests. But Bellmer was also a consummate draftsman whose graphite work and etchings are as virtuosic as they are humorous or grim. Like his Surrealist contemporaries, Bellmer’s gods were the visionary poet Lautréamont and the Marquis de Sade, whose work he interpreted in countless iterations of the bizarre, the visceral, the fantastic and the sexual. His drawing and paintings are unflinching in their sexual explicitness: a face is a composite of penises and vaginas; a vagina appears on the side of a face like a gaping wound. Would this exhibition be shown in Australia? What would Mr Rudd have said of it? This is not to forget the work of his contemporary, Balthazar Klossowski, better known as Balthus, who in 1934 at the age of twenty-six exhibited The Guitar Lesson at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. Here a stern woman with a mannish face supports a girl splayed over her knees. The girl is facing upward and her dress is raised to reveal her vaginal cleft. The woman’s hands dig into the girl’s flesh with merciless reprisal. While it is true that the purchaser of the painting James Thrall Soby was in no position to exhibit the work in America at the time, it had already had a public showing in Paris. And no-one demanded that the artist had letters of consent from the parents. The most apt question in Australian culture, from the media to art, is what is not being said or shown, and why. Dimitri Shostakovich famously remarked that he did two kinds of work: marches and work for the draw. Whether there are now some overflowing draws in Australia is a matter for some speculation, and scrutiny. Notes 1 Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite, London and New York: Verso 1999: 91 2
ibid: 95-96
2
ibid: 87
Opposite top: Bill Henson, Untitled #39, 2007-08 Photo courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Opposite middle: Sarah Lucas, Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab, 1992 Photo courtesy the artist Opposite bottom: The Doll, Hans Bellmer, 1935-37 Photo courtesy Artists Rights Society, New York and ADAGP, Paris Page 177 top: Julian Assange wall graffiti, Melbourne Page 177 bottom: Balthus (Balthazar Klossowski),The Guitar Lesson (Lezione di Chitarra), 1934
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LORD HELP ME JESUS Astrid Mania It didn’t have the best of starts—and that before it even started. But whether before or after its official opening at the end of April, this year’s Berlin Biennale was a somewhat difficult endeavour, to put it diplomatically. Hopes and expectations had been high when Artur Żmijewski was appointed Curator1, particularly since the 2010 Biennale had come up with a number of convincing works but no distinct position or thesis. Żmijewski, known for his politically and socially often controversial artistic oeuvre, would develop a compelling curatorial premise and serve some heavy food for thought. That had been the idea. There was no doubt this Biennale would be interested in questioning the notion of “the political”. Already in November 2010, Żmijewski initiated an open call, asking artists not only to submit material for the Biennale’s research process, but to specify their “political inclination (e.g. rightist, leftist, liberal, nationalist, anarchist, feminist, masculinist, or whatever you identify yourself with)”.2 Maybe it was a clever move to probe a certain complacency. After all, the ‘art world’ habitually considers its members to be leftist, liberal, feminist, activist, pro-gay, pro-trans or else just some kind of egotistic, apolitical monad. However, nothing much came out of this question that many felt was far too intimate, even though a considerable number of artists responded to it. But their answers were transformed into an illustration, a diagram displayed in the context of the Biennale, but not discussed or processed in any other way.3 Yet it had given the press something to write about. And the press got a lot more from this Biennale. A few months before its opening, the Biennale launched Martin Zet’s project Deutschland schafft es ab (Germany gets rid of it). The title is a wordplay on the infamous 2010 publication Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany does away with Itself—or, more literally, Germany gets rid of itself) by Thilo Sarrazin, a prominent member of, yes, the Social Democratic Party. In this book, Sarrazin paints a picture of Germany’s inevitable decline, which he believes is due to, amongst other factors, a decrease in the birth rate (read: of proper Germans) and a growing immigration from mostly Muslim countries.4 The book caused an outrage and inevitably became a top seller. Now Zet had called for handing in unwanted copies of the book. He had intended to turn them into an installation and to then “recycle” them.5 One could have thought that given the fierce opposition this xenophobic publication had met (despite its commercial success), Zet’s project would have been embraced, especially in the ostensibly leftist art world (see above). However, one could have also anticipated that the notion of gathering books and withdrawing them from public circulation would, in Germany, bring up uncanny memories of both the Stalinist and the Nazi dictatorships. Which it did. The Biennale had its first, and by no means last, scandal. Rumour had it that, at this stage, the Biennale’s funding (it is largely supported by the Bundeskulturstiftung, that had to deny this rumour) was on the edge. In the end, Zet’s project never materialised, as only a handful of books were donated. Many probably realised that, beyond the heated debate, Zet’s attempt to highlight “social segregation, exclusion and discrimination in Germany”6 was rather plain, populist and monodimensional, and in that not dissimilar to the bearings of its target. The exquisite failure of Zet’s project was symptomatic of a Biennale that proved, in many instances, remarkably oblivious to its place and time. No feelings were spared (not even those of Berlin’s Jewish community, but more on that note later) when it came to pushing for the Biennale’s self-declared aim, the promotion of an “art that actually works”, as Żmijewski and co-curator Joanna Warsza put it.7 This approach included an invitation (!) to Occupy Berlin and other grassroots initiatives to “occupy” the KW Institute for Contemporary Art—their camp in the institution’s open basement was aptly described as a kind of human zoo8—and resulted in a very curious and incoherent mix of all sorts of socially or politically engaged (sometimes artistic) projects. Among them were Joanna Rajkowska’s life project Born in Berlin (this and the following works from 2012). Pregnant at the time of her invitation into the Biennale, Rajkowska made a point about/an art work out of the birth of her baby in Berlin, turning her child into “a gift to Berlin, to this city which usually only brought destruction, at least for my family. A gift which was supposed to disenchant everything”.9 Other art projects were Khaled Jarrar’s appropriately difficult State of Palestine—visitors could bring their passports to have Jarrar’s own State of Palestine stamp imprinted—or Mirosław Patecki’s Christ the King, a replica head of his most recent monumental Jesus sculpture in Western Poland.10
Much could be and was said about the very variable “working” qualities of the different projects—here, for once Bourriaud’s notion of the ethical as a critical category for contemporary art not only proved useful, but actually indispensable as hardly any other category was applicable. Most critics, however, felt most strongly about the Biennale’s utilitarian claim on art: Żmijewski’s insistence on an art that has political and social agency resonated somewhat too strongly with those very neoliberal concepts of efficacy and evaluation this Biennale was allegedly trying to overcome. Yet there was no denying the structural resemblance in both the Biennale’s and the neoliberal approach to human creativity. Submitting art to a litmus test to measure its degree of usefulness is a dangerous game, particularly, but not only, in the Berlin context, where cultural budgets are notoriously precarious and art institutions are heavily submitted to economic evaluation tools.11 I would even suggest considering this Biennale under psychoanalytical or religious terms. It seems quite insightful to understand this unreflected, incoherent and often simply uninformed gathering of works (in the broadest sense) as a way to express a longing for some sort of redemption, one that attributes a therapeutic, or even messianic role to art. This approach was epitomised in Joanna Rajkowska’s instrumentalisation of her own child for the purpose of art and some sort of historical exorcism, but also in the inclusion of Żmijewski’s own 1999 video Berek. In it, a group of naked people play a game of tag in an ordinary basement, as well as in a former gas chamber: “The murdered people are victims— but we, the living, are also victims. And as such we need a kind of treatment or therapy”, is how Żmijewski explains his work.12 This is not to say that he was harbouring anti-Semitic feelings. But both the work and the statement speak of an astounding lack of empathy. What good is a healing process or therapy when it imposes a great amount of pain on others? These very few examples maybe indicate how difficult it was to find an appropriate vocabulary or category to talk about this Berlin Biennale, and why, and this proposition is neither ironic nor sarcastic, a psychoanalyst might actually be its most competent reviewer. After this in many respects catholic Berlin Biennale with its belief in transubstantiation, this year’s Manifesta seemed something like a protestant service: remembrance, yes, consecration, no. This is not to say that Manifesta 9 was boring or bloodless. It could, in fact, function as a showcase for, in this case nomadic, a biennale—if you want to adhere to this format at all, that is. Its strong points were its manageable size and its site-specificity. The 2012 Manifesta takes place in Genk, in the Belgian region of Limburg that experienced a strong economic rise in the heyday of coal mining after 1900 and suffered a subsequent decline from the 1950s onwards. While most Manifestas have taken place in several venues and even several cities, Cuauhtémoc Medina and co-curators Dawn Ades and Katerina Gregos installed their show at one spot only, in the main building of the former Waterschei mine, an (even in its slightly dilapidated state) impressive Art Deco structure. Drawing from the correlation between modernism and industrialisation on the European continent, the curators based their premise quite literally on coal. ‘The Deep of the Modern’ consists of three parts and in doing so, assembles art works and cultural artefacts that bridge a period from the eighteenth-century to the present. The historical section ‘The Age of Coal’, in its climate-controlled box, looks at the effects the mining industry had on art, both in terms of form and content. Dawn Ades developed a genealogy from landscape painting (including Jan Habex’ wonderful 1945 carbon-world-panorama Steenkolenwoud in de oertijd/ Coal wood in prehistoric times), over the depiction of underground worlds (in the Romantic mezzotints by John Martin, for instance, or in Henry Moore’s utterly unromantic drawings of miners) or the role coal mining played in propagandist Soviet art, to the use of coal as artistic material in movements like Land Art (even though the coal stacks by Richard Long or David Hammons were a bit redundant). But the first section visitors encounter in the multi-storey building is the so-called “Heritage Section-17 Tons” that gives testimony to the culture of coalminers and gathers non-art objects: prayer mats from the first Turkish immigrants, embroidered sayings that decorated the miners’ houses, the Lego model of a coal mine, and much more. This part of Manifesta was linked to the mine’s regular, permanent museum, displaying heavy machines and tools, but also religious paraphernalia such as a collection of St. Barbara statues, patron saint of all miners. Combining art objects with “the real thing” can be quite tricky and
often results in pure didactics or a sentimentalised notion of the “authentic”. Here, this risk was pretty high, since many of Manifesta’s visitors would have grown up at a time when the Western European coal mines had already been transformed into venues for culture or industrial museums. It is hard to decide why in Genk the inclusion of everyday objects worked. Maybe this is partly due to the exhibition’s overall rough and casual look that leaves little room for romanticism or kitsch, and partly because the exhibits were shown close to their natural habitat, so to speak. Still, the main focus of this Manifesta is on contemporary art and with that on the effects of globalisation, leaving the era of coal and modernism behind. As one would expect in such a context, China and its economic power featured quite strongly, in Paolo Woods’ photographic series Chinafrica (2007) about China’s often problematic investment into Africa, Edward Burtynsky’s Gurskystyle photographs of China: Manufacturing (2005) or Jota Isquierdo’s Capitalismo Amarillo: Special Economic Zone (2011-12), a diagram cum installation display about the route mass-produced goods take from Guangzhou to Latin America and Europe. Ante Timmermans’ Sisyphus-like performance of perforating sheets of paper, Make a Molehill out of a Mountain (of Work) (2012), Carlos Amorales’ Coal Drawing Machine (2012) or Tomaž Furlan’s Wear Series (2006-12), interactive devices between torture and bodybuilding facilities, focused on the estranged and repetitive nature of work. Speaking of work—the most popular one was Nemanja Cvijanovicć’s Monument to the Memory of the Idea of the Internationale (2010), a tiny music box that, when activated by visitors, played the anthem of the Internationale. It is only then that you realise where the unnerving, repetitive jingling music comes from that greets and farewells the visitor: the sound from the music box is amplified and travels outside. Labour works. The appeal of this Manifesta lies in its unagitated attitude, its—for biennale standards—modest size, and its in the best sense conventional, solid curatorial approach—also the inclusion of older art works or non-art works into a contemporary art exhibition is certainly not new. Cuauhtémoc Medina and Co. develop a historical narrative that builds on an art that is inseparably linked to political, social and economic developments, an art that does not necessarily aim for agitation and change, but an art that observes, comments and criticises. If the Berlin Biennale behaved like a child in its phase of defiance, or maybe more like an angry shaken teenager blind to the needs and feelings of others, the 2012 Manifesta looks like a reasonable, calm adult. But then, where would we be without those rebellious young ones? Notes 1 Zmijewski later appointed Joanna Warsza and the Russian artist collective Voina as co-curators 2 http://www.berlinbiennale.de/blog/en/projects/open-call-artwiki-digital-venue-of-the-7th-berlinbiennale-for-contemporary-art-18348 (downloaded September 1st, 2012) 3 Burak Arikan transformed the results into a “network map of artists and political inclinations” that is both on display at Kunst-Werke Berlin and online: http://burak-arikan.com/network-map-of-artists-andpolitical-inclinations-7th-berlin-biennale. (downloaded September 1st, 2012) 4 This is all second-hand information. Even though I followed the vivid, omnipresent debate closely, I didn’t read the book itself 5 Cf http://www.berlinbiennale.de/blog/en/allgemein-en/%E2%80%9Cdeutschland-schafft-esab%E2%80%9D-germany-gets-rid-of-it-%E2%80%93-book-collection-campaign-17487 (downloaded September 1st, 2012) 6
Artur Zmijewski & Joanna Warsza, ‘Martin Zet – Deutschland schafft es ab/Germany gets rid of it’, in 7th Berlin Biennale Newspaper, Act for Art – Forget Fear, Berlin 2012: 14, italics in the original 7 “The concept of the 7th Berlin Biennale is quite straightforward and can be condensed into a single sentence: we (…) present art that actually works, makes its mark on reality, and opens a space where politics can be performed.” Artur Zmijewski, Foreword, in 7th Berlin Biennale Newspaper: 6, italics in the original 8
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kunst/berlin-biennale-kritik-der-zynischen-vernunft-11731589.html (downloaded September 1st, 2012)
9 From the press release to Joanna Rajkowska’s coinciding show at her Berlin gallery Zak Branicka where another part of Born in Berlin was exhibited 10
Seeing is believing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_the_King_%28statue%29
11
I totally favour art that has political or social relevance. I like many of Zmijewski’s own art works. I also agree with much of Zmijewski’s hands-on political pragmatism as advocated in his older essay ‘Applied social art’. (Cf. Artur Zmijewski: ‘Angewandte Gesellschaftskunst’, in: Zmijewski ‘Körper in Aufruhr – Gespräche mit Künstlern’, Ariane Beyn, Berliner Künstlerprogramm/ DAAD, Stanisław Ruksza, CSW Kronika (eds.), Berlin: Bytom 2010: 25-33. There is an English version of this catalogue.) It is the ruthlessness and exclusivity of the claims made by this biennale that I found so disturbing 12
Cf. 7th Berlin Biennale Newspaper, ‘Berek’: 15. The work had been included in the exhibition Side by Side. Poland–Germany. A 1000 Years of Art and History at Martin-Gropius-Bau, 23 September, 2011–January 9, 2012, and then removed during the course of the exhibition when Gereon Sievernic, director of Martin-Gropius-Bau, blamed the work for “not respecting the dignity of the victims of the Holocaust”. Op.cit Page 178: Berlin Biennale catalogue frontispiece featuring the 2012 Biennale logo
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Above: Teresa Margolles, PM 2010, 2012 from the Berlin Biennale Photo courtesy the artist
CURATORS SHOULD SHOW AND NOT BE SEEN
CHRISTOPHER MOORE Dear George, As promised, here’s the letter on documenta. You’ve probably forgotten. But given your fall at least we can still talk about art, even if you forget. The exhibition was very much about memory. Let me remind you. “documenta” is the world’s biggest art exhibition —about art, particularly art now, how we are thinking about it, how we might think about it.1 You told me about it when I was small, do you remember? It is held in Kassel, a dull provincial city almost in the centre of Germany, very close to the old East German border. Every five years it awakes for documenta, Brigadoonlike, for one hundred days. Inevitably threads of Kassel’s and Germany’s history always run through documenta—it is really an exhibition of threads, connections and correspondences. Kassel was a medieval city (none remains). Later Napoleon annexed the region, naming it the Kingdom of Westphalia, his brother king and Kassel its capital. Early in the 1930s the local nobility joined the Nazis. The local concentration camp, Dachau, provided workers for factories and later, after Hitler became suspicious of them, also a home for the local nobility. Then in 1943 Kassel was bombed flat. Almost nothing of its historic centre survived and it was not rebuilt. Instead a very bland 1950s architecture was adopted. Deservedly, Kassel is ugly. Frustratingly, it is also boring. Early Friday evening and what few cafes remained open, closed. But for documenta, Kassel would remain an erasure. documenta was founded in 1955 by local artist, Arnold Bode, to show all the art that Nazis hated, including Expressionism and Cubism (in 1933 they had dismissed Bode from his teaching post in Berlin). Since then documenta has grown in status and scale, becoming the defacto benchmark for the state of art. From early on it received government support too, a public gesture against totalitarianism—fascist and communist—a statement about freedom (“free-doom” as Gil Scott-Heron said—you don’t like his music much but you don’t recall him either: he was a black American poet-musician and political activist—he died last year).2 Nearby in former East Germany is Eisenach, home to the Wartburg Castle, where Martin Luther figuratively or literally threw ink at the Devil (its historical importance was downplayed under communism). Also nearby is Weimar, Germany’s cultural heart, home of the German Enlightenment (including poets Goethe and Schiller) and birthplace of Bach, Bauhaus and Germany’s first democratic constitution—the Weimar Republic. It is also home to Buchenwald, another concentration camp.
So there is much history for documenta to feed on. So much it can get in the way, and does. Fortunately Kassel is also a city of storytellers. The Brothers Grimm lived in Kassel—Jacob was librarian to the King (Napoleon’s brother). F. W. Murnau, director of the first and best vampire movie Nosferatu (1922), grew up there, as did Paul Reuter, founder of the news agency. Storytelling is actually the main theme in documenta, though never explicit. The curator is an American-Italian, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, for many years curator and then director of Museo di Arte Contemporanea in Turin, Italy. She also worked at MoMA’s PS1 in Queens, New York, and in 2008 directed the Biennale of Sydney. Her foreword to the five hundred-plus page exhibition guidebook reads glibly, like the opening to an old-fashioned political manifesto, particularly the final paragraph: “dOCUMENTA (13) is dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory. These are terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic, and worldly alliance between current research in various scientific and artistic fields and other knowledges, both ancient and contemporary. dOCUMENTA (13) is driven by a holistic and non-logocentric vision that is skeptical of the persisting belief in economic growth. [though there is little skeptical about dOCUMENTA’s Euro 25 million budget] This vision is shared with, and recognises, the shapes and practices of knowing of all the animate and inanimate makers of the world, including people.” People, even! This could have been a quagmire but in effect it was a springboard for a poetic approach to curating exhibitions, rarely pellucid but teeming with entrances and associations—historical, literary, botanical, trivial, romantic, to name a few. But best ignore dOCUMENTA’s self-indulgent mix of didacticism and universal love. While its sometimes-pedagogic themes are often simplistic—if not always simple —its participants are diverse enough in vision and quality that you can take what you will and ignore teacher. Protest Let’s also ignore the prominent but confused participation by local Occupy protestors, along with their installation of minimalist white fake-tents bearing tendentious words like payola|Bestechung and repression|Unterdrückung. However well meant, it only undermined the credibility of both protestors and dOCUMENTA (13), reducing protest to a happening, mere performance (this was no Aboriginal Tent Embassy nor Mark Wallinger’s Iraq protest placards at Tate Britain). Less prominently situated but more politically productive was documenta IX’s popular Cocooning camping site for artists and visitors (the name referring to sleeping bags), which in overpriced Kassel provided an open forum for debate, free accommodation and cheap beer. By comparison, even on a sunny day the Occupy exhibits looked pretty wretched, also strangely exclusive. The protest theme worked better, if still superficially, in the background, with artists, situations and installations derived from, constituting or inspired by protests, including in Germany, Palestine, Afghanistan and Egypt. Again, it was the connections that mattered, linking art, people, history, and most importantly, individual lives, to the myriad other themes in dOCUMENTA (13). Brain documenta’s headquarters is the restored Fridericianum, the world’s first museum dedicated to contemporary art, situated on Friedrichsplatz, which connects the city to the sprawling eighteenth-century Karlsaue Park. Within the Fridericianum’s rotunda, is an exhibition-within-an-exhibition, which Christov-Bakargiev calls “The Brain”. Only forty people are allowed inside its glass-walls at any time—you queue. The wall is sculptural, with its title ‘The Middle of the Middle of the Middle of’, engraved on the glass, readable by those on the inside (insiders); repeated on the side of a house in Kassel (Lawrence Weiner, 2012). The Brain is a cabinet of curiosities, old and contemporary, damaged and fragile, particularly receptacles created with fire, like bottles, including The Brain itself (think of poison, wine and Djinns). There is a selection of bottles from Morandi’s studio, and some of the paintings of same for which he is famous. There are non-vessals by Paraguayan potters Julia Isidrez and Juana Marta Rodas and jars by Catalan ceramicist Antoni Cumella (1913-85).
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And there are destroyed things, including fused and melted ivory, glass and terracotta objects from the national Museum of Beirut destroyed during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) (metamorphosis?) and a collection of Man Ray’s Indestructible Object (1932-71), a cut-out of a photograph of the eye of Man Ray’s lover, Lee Miller, paper-clipped to the pendulum of a metronome. They are simulacrums, stand-ins for the 1923 original, which was lost or destroyed. Holocaust Also in The Brain is a series of postcard botanical drawings of apples by Korbinian Aigner, a Catholic monk from Bavaria who bred three new strains of apple while interned at Dachau, including “KZ-3 (Konzentrationslager), now Korbinian Apple —the fall of modernity? Christov-Bakargiev found one such apple tree in Dachau and planted another in the Karlsauer Park—she’s keen on (her) participation, even helping with the monthly cleaning/curating of an inverted fountain, commemorating the one destroyed in 1939 by the Nazis, a gift to Kassel by Jewish benefactor, Sigmund Ashrott in 1908 (Horst Hoheisel’s Negative Form, 1987). Nice gestures maybe but as part of the dOCUMENTA (13) program they take on a trivialising pretention, albeit unintentionally. Christov-Bakargiev thinks we need educating. I think curators should show but not be seen. Behind the dividing wall at the back of The Brain, ready to surprise, are Lee Miller’s self-portrait photographs in Hitler’s abandoned Munich apartment, the dictator’s clothes and trinkets left just so. Some she took with her, including Eva Braun’s perfume flacon, an A.H.-monogrammed bath towel and a massproduced ceramic nude figurine, all displayed. One photo shows Miller taking a bath, arm raised like the adjacent figurine. The date is 30 April, 1945, the day Miller visited Dachau and Hitler and Braun committed suicide. This is yet another of the many interesting stories primed by The Brain but it is too easy to reduce Germany’s contemporary personality to cicatrices, the Holocaust and ColdWar division. The problem here is not the contemplation of this horrific history but its theatrical superficiality, one where emotions come prepackaged for socalled social media. It is an infantile view, wherein Germany, now one of the most democratic and egalitarian countries in the world, is never allowed to grow up and no one else takes responsibility for their own histories of anti-Semitism and fascism. This is surely not the curatorial intention but a tendentious display of objects puts genocide in scare-quotes rather than explicating its morbidity.3 We have been here many times before, and rightly, but with time the debate has become much more complex, subtle and demanding (e.g. the absent fountain —absent its emoticon cleaner). Memory and absence: recalling time Two works by Pierre Huyghe and Ryan Gander have come to symbolise this documenta. For Untilled (2012) it’s best for Huyghe’s to explain himself: The head is obscured by a beehive. The colony pollinates aphrodisiac and psychotropic plants. Her headless body lies in the mud. The man moves through the day as an automaton. Animate the death with an infinite repetition of life, 1914. A fluorescent dog in the shade of concrete slabs, weans a puppy. A Beuys oak has been uprooted. Myrmecochory occurs, ants disperse their seeds. The blind crush them. There is no color, no odor. Even when truly cast in the eternal circumstance… where her arm protected her from the sun, they settled in. It is endless, incessant. (documenta guidebook, p. 262)
Untilled encapsulates this documenta, with its complex systems and experiments with communication and exchange, history and its recollection (WWI and mud), science and storytelling, biology and neurology, gardening and recycling, exclusivity and exclusion (one cannot approach the sculpture because of the bees), dogs (of an ancient, skeletal breed) and people, play and duty (the gardener who looks after the dogs and stops people from getting too close to the statue despite the bees). As I told you, it is one of the most bewitching, fascinating works of art I have ever seen and still its Pygmalion memory haunts me. So did the mud, which walked with me for the rest of the day. Ryan Gander’s work is the opposite of Huyghes. As one walks into either of the first galleries of the Fridericianum, a wind blows onto the back of your neck. I suspect this is a natural effect of the architecture that Gander has simply appropriated. And that’s all, except but only possibly for a couple of fluff balls on the floor that sometimes dance as people wander through the handful of rooms. It is whimsical and poignant, not-art art that skews the pretentions and egos of giant exhibitions but also maybe makes us think of what we can’t see or failed to notice, what we have lost, forgotten or ignored. (I Need Some Meaning I can recognise (The Invisible Pull), 2012)
Yan Lei must also be mentioned here. I interviewed him but he doesn’t say much. He once fooled lots of fellow artists by sending them fake invitations to documenta (some still haven’t forgiven him). He has filled a room with one hundred of his signature manufactured, sickly-hued paintings of pictures gathered haphazardly from the Internet: historical, political, American, Chinese, domestic, commercial, clichéd and kitsch. They cover the walls like in nineteenth-century Paris salons, hang thickly from the ceiling, and are packed into sliding racks. And each day, one is removed, taken to a local automotive factory, and sprayed a monochrome hue. Soon they will all be monochromes. It is about forgetting and being made to forget, covering up, and in contrast to Huyghes, it is one of saddest, most depressing works I have ever experienced. Afghanistan, Cairo…Banff, even I see that we have walked from one end of Karlsaue Park back to the Fridericianum and the documenta Halle. Actually this took me two days. dOCUMENTA (13) is spread over numerous pavilions, temporary spaces, and the huge Karlsaue Park but also Kabul and Bamiyan in Afghanistan, where Taliban religious extremists destroyed colossal ancient statues of Buddha, as well as exhibitions in Alexandria and Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the site of last year’s revolution against Egypt’s then military dictatorship. There was even an artist/curator retreat in Banff in British Columbia, Canada (they seemed to have had a nice time there). Afghanistan is particularly controversial in Germany, being the first and only place its soldiers have had a combat role since 1945. Many exhibition guides wore Afghan scarves. We first noticed this in the documenta Halle. The almost trivial gesture said more than the overbearing wall behind the guide in question: Thomas Bayrle’s Flugzeug/Airplane (1982-83), a vast photomontage of airplanes in the shape of an airplane—bombers? (his manic and moronic carparts robots were much better, including swishing wall-mounted windscreen wipers threatening to stab people).4 Other Afghan connections included Alighiero Boetti’s tapestry political map of the world, Mappa (1971)5 and Garcia Torres’ search for the One Hotel, where Boetti stayed in the early 1970s when he was in Kabul. There were also Bactrian Princesses carved stone sculptures (2500-1500 BC) from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan, as well as a sprinkling of works by actual, real Afghan artists: Abul Qasem Foushanji, Zainab Haidary, Mohsen Taasha and Jeanno Gaussi (their inclusion well intentioned, if of mixed quality). Footage of Tacita Dean’s commissioned video was ultimately unusable, so she simply sent old postcards of Kassel scenes touched-up in gouache with contemporary elements: a gate, a street-lamp, a banner hung from a balcony. I preferred these small works to Goshka Macuga’s double tapestry Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not 1 (2012). One half depicts the 2011 Arnold Bode Preis Award ceremony, restaged in the Karlsaue Park, and displayed in the Bagh e Babur royal pavilion in Kabul, and the other a banquet organised by the artist in the Bagh-e Babur and displayed in Fridericianum’s Rotonda. But then this wasn’t really about how the tapestry looked but communication between the people of Kassel and Kabul. It was complicated but only because it was grandiloquent. Walks dOCUMENTA (13) is a walk (or bike ride), from artwork to artwork, through the museums, around the park, each visitor finding their own path, in company or alone, conversation occurring along the way, at an energetic march or during an enervated pause (maybe in the glasshouse café, munching on a free Korbinian apple and choosing Yothu Yindi’s Treaty from Susan Hiller’s Jukebox of protest songs—Die Gedanken sind frei, 100 songs for the 100 days of dOCUMENTA (13), (2011-12). Or the memory of a walk, afterwards over dinner or in the following weeks and months. In Search of Lost Time begins with a walk through the fictional country-town of Combray in Northern France, becoming a minor leitmotif in Proust’s magnum opus. Of course the other great modernist novel, Joyce’s Ulysses, also involves a walk, over the course of a day through Dublin. Both novels use the premise of a walk to raise myriad associations, many of which return at later points in the novels. This is partly what dOCUMENTA (13)’s director means by “non-logocentric”—supernumerary intersections and interactions. This is her ‘non-concept’ concept. It is not about what we read but how. A walk is a story. Surprising that Richard Long wasn’t included. Old buggers (resurrection/redemption) You’ll like this. Old artists, particularly forgotten or underappreciated, are a theme too. Already I’ve mentioned Korbinian Aigner (1885-1966) and Antoni Cumella (1913-85). Also present are Julio González (1876-1942), whose delicate sculptures were displayed in documenta in 1959 and are included again in an identical installation in the Fridericianum. In the documenta Halle are abstractexpressionist paintings by Gustav Metzger (b.1926) and gorgeous, small, bright abstracted landscapes by Etel Adnan (b.1925). In the Orangerie, normally a museum of clocks, astronomy, optics and physics, was a display of all sorts of
cultural and scientific experiments by Konrad Zuse (1910-95), inventor of binary computing and an abstract painter (admittedly I saw this at a run rather than a walk, hunting for a bathroom, Serafina in my arms, the clocks ticking menacingly, it’s memory now frozen). In the Fridericianum as well as the more famous Dali, Lee Miller, Giorgio Morandi and even Ida Applebroog, were the less well-known Charlotte Salomon (1917-43, Auschwitz), Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970), a weaver of pacifist and anti-fascist tapestries, Fabio Mauri (1926-2009), a scenographer, prejectionist, dramatist, Horacio Larrain Barros (b.1929), fog catcher, and sculptor Aase Texmon Ryg (b.1925). More and more connections and links, asking when does ‘contemporary art’ begin and who is responsible for it? Australia There were aboriginal artists, including Doreen Reid Nakamarra and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri and the film-maker Warwick Thornton, whose Brechtian Mother Courage is an old van used to sell art to tourists, demonstrated with a film installation at the back showing the former owner (commercially) painting and (traditionally) singing. It was parked outside the documenta Halle entrance when I saw it but apparently it moves around the exhibition, all over the park. Gordon Bennett was included in the Neue Galerie, having fun with Margaret Preston and Mondrian, the former for her incorporation of Aboriginal symbols for a well meaning but homely and kitsch nationalist aesthetic, and the latter for his mod boogie woogie (Home Décor (after Margaret Preston) #8, 2010). For good measure, a Margaret Preston landscape was included, Grey day in the ranges (1942), again with bits of Aboriginal-ish decoration thrown in. Hmm, not sure this really needed to be included.6 Fiona Hall was also exhibited but I didn’t find her work—it was somewhere in the park. Lots of things were lost in the park. I think Nakamarra and Tjapaltjarri were included because of what they symbolised and because their paintings are very attractive. I’m not convinced it wasn’t a bit patronising —token Modernist abstractions by token Aboriginal people but maybe I’m being too delicate. Intentionally or not, the paintings did tie into the walking-storytelling themes. Gardening and dogs and politeness documenta was originally intended as a secondary event to the 1955 National Garden Show (Bundesgartenschau). So much of documenta (13) was in the Karlsaue Park. Apart from Hughes’ Untilled, also wonderfully baffling was Song Dong’s Doing Nothing Garden, a wild floral-grassy hill of compost that despoils Karlsaue Park’s rational eighteenth-entury perspective, the neon title garishly
visible at night. In China similarly hilly but traditional-looking gardens provide public space but without allowing large public gatherings (more than ten say; open space is dangerous) and sometimes also underground parking. The doggarden at the bottom of the park was fun too, filled with exercise structures based on modernist architecture and furniture design, such as Mies van der Rohe’s “Barcelona” chair and footstool. You could only enter in the company of a dog, much to the frustration of Serafina. (Brian Jungen, Dog Run, 2012) The director of dOCUMENTA (13) really loves dogs—her own is always with her. She thinks people who live with dogs are more likely to be understanding of other people, and species. Well, I guess she’s right but the banality of it is still eye rolling. The same goes for her riff on politeness. Two works in particular caught my attention. First, Khaled Hourani’s project, Picasso in Palestine (2011), which involved putting a Picasso portrait, Buste de Femme (1943), on display in Ramallah, Palestine, triumphing over bureaucracy and political obstacles, and recreated for dOCUMENTA (13), including Palestinian soldiers standing guard. Secondly, more directly, Ana Prvacki’s work on civility, drawn from growing up with her grandmother, who apparently was very gracious, including under communism in former Yugoslavia, warmly welcoming into her house both gypsies and members of the secret police who spied on the family (the State Security Administration’s file on Prvacki’s grandmother noted she was “always congenial and elegant and baked good cakes”). Based on my personal experience however, the special ‘politeness’ training for documenta staff could have been more thorough. I wonder if anyone tried to take a dog into one of the museums? Optics/Perspective/looking The Orangerie houses one of the world’s foremost collections of clocks and telescopes. Amidst this was a collation of Erkki Kurenniemi’s experiments with artificial intelligence, music synthesizers and his frankly obsessive photographic, video and sound recording and written documentation of his daily life. Also, only from one of the telescope displays can Anri Sala mutated clock, far away down the park, be seen ‘correctly” (Clocked Perspective, 2012). Perhaps the highlight of this theme however was in another building: Geoffrey Farmer’s installation of thousands of magazine picture cutouts—but I ran out of time to see it (an inevitable theme of dOCUMENTA (13)—you cannot see everything). I note Thomas Bayrle’s Flugzeug once more, which in retrospection—the perspective of memory —as one has time to think in terms of dOCUMENTA (13)’s different stages, becomes stronger.
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Writing and walking This meandering discussion of dOCUMENTA (13) has been long yet barely have I spoken of what there was. dOCUMENTA (13)’s scope was encyclopedic and its intentions a mix of well-meaning and heroic, though most often strongest when whimsical and obscure—such as the participation of quantum physicist, Professor Anton Zeilinger and his experiments in photon teleportation. But dOCUMENTA (13) is beyond synopsis. The only true summary would be a 1:1 Borges-like recreation of the entire exhibition over five years. Vast quantities of writing have been expended describing the individual walks through its miasmas and morasses, dreams and dogma, sometimes its revelations, even. For dOCUMENTA (13). By dOCUMENTA (13). About dOCUMENTA (13). So much that dOCUMENTA (13) now exists mainly in the directories and servers of Google. (Any doctoral analysis is simply redundant). We are compelled to write about it, walking-writing—writing about walking, from walking. But its magic can’t be bottled—a destroyed city with a rationalist-Baroque garden in which every five years artists awake to play free of commercial constraints, free of cold-marble reality itself, which for large parts of the world these days seems very cold. I am reminded of Germany’s equivalent of Waltzing Matilda (itself a song about walking and freedom): Thoughts are Free. Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten, sie fliegen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten. Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger erschießen mit Pulver und Blei: Die Gedanken sind frei! (Thoughts are free, who can guess them? They fly by like night shadows. No man can know them, no hunter shoot them with powder and lead: Thoughts are free!)7 You’ve probably already gone to sleep. And forgotten. Dream of bees and grey dogs, of empty museums with gentle breezes, of vanishing paintings. And maybe remember our long walks home, talking with me about art, about what art might be. Die gedanken sind frei. All my love. c
Notes 1 documenta is always written in lowercase, following Bauhaus designs, a typographic democratisation in response to German capitalisation of all nouns. The invented word possibly derives from the Latin documentum, itself from docere (to teach) and mens (intellect). Each version of the exhibition has written its title slightly differently but always preserving the lowercase ‘d’, e.g. documenta IX and dOCUMENTA (13) 2 In the 1950s the East German economy was arguably healthier than it’s West German counterpart, so government support for documenta was probably also propaganda. The organisers and participants of documenta however have always been somewhat less anti-communist, even as documenta has swelled in the wake of the fall of the Wall, reunification and renewed German economic dominance 3 I do wonder whether queuing to enter the Brain isn’t a misplaced reference to gas chambers. For alternative approaches, Austrian Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) is a much subtler causal examination of the Holocaust and Quentin Tarrantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009) a much more compelling re-appropriation of its history 4 Another example of size trumping concept was Julie Mehretu’s vast all-over and multi-layered technical drawing. Heroic in scale, prominently situated (in the documenta Halle opposite a glass external wall), and dense in associations from Afghanistan to Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Zucotti Park in New York, it was disappointingly grey in experience, the vital details lost in its vastness. Her smallerscale though still wall-filling painting-drawings for her show at the former Deutsche Guggenheim were much more powerful because more concentrated 5
Boetti’s Mappa was intended for documenta 1972 but arrived too late for inclusion
6
Because really it was only a footnote to Gordon Bennett’s work
7 I have slightly adjusted the Wikipedia translation of the first stanza so that it reads with a similar poetic emphasis to the original German, e.g. “fly” instead of “flee”, because in English “fly” has a greater sense of autonomy than the more hunted “flee”, notwithstanding the later reference to hunters, which in any event is cast passively
Page 182: Wall at the rear of the Neue Galerie, Kassel, that serves as a war memorial to German soldiers who died in World War I and II, facing Karlsaue Park Above: Khadim Ali, The Haunted Lotus (detail), 2011-12 Photo courtesy the artist Opposite: Rabih Mroué, installation detail of The Pixlated Revolution, 2012 Photo courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg and Beirut
the curator as all-seeing-god an old model on a disheartening scale
Wes Hill As has been stated in almost every review, dOCUMENTA (13) was a huge event and at times overwhelming in its scale. These types of exhibitions just keep on getting bigger; like the sublime, one’s experience is often defined by what one can’t fully see (or at least spend much time with!). This was especially the case in dOCUMENTA (13), which featured over two hundred participants and encompassed projects in Afghanistan, Egypt and Canada. Given the effort that one has to go to just to get to Kassel (a town which, unlike Venice, is not known for its tourist attractions), the spectacle of documenta undoubtedly overshadows one’s experience of specific works. Sometimes this can be a bad thing; however, I found the curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s approach to be inspired, intelligent and, in general, complementary to the artists involved. In the pre-exhibition publicity, Christov-Bakargiev claimed that dOCUMENTA (13) would have “no real theme. The most important point today is for me to work without a clearly stated concept”.1 In actuality the exhibition was based around four conditions, in which artists and thinkers might find themselves “acting in the present”. According to the press release these are: “being on stage”, “being under siege”, “being in a state of hope”, or “being in retreat.” The performative nature of art was pervasive, and works that used sound or music were particularly good, such as Janet Cardiff’s & George Bures Miller’s Forest (for a thousand years) (2012), Anna Maria Maiolino’s Here and There (2012) and Shinro Ohtake’s Self Portrait as a Scrapped Shed (2012). The exhibition also dispensed with the tiresome separation of genres, mediums and eras in order to frame art as theatrical engagements with identities via objects, as if accepting that it is viewers who ultimately make the meanings of these interactions themselves.
The anti-market sentiment of some of the works, and of some of ChristovBakargiev’s press statements, was the exhibition’s weakest link. ChristovBakargiev has stated that she is against “cognitive capitalism”. This seems like a purposefully murky term used to claim an opposition to capitalism, but it really just communicates that she is more interested in sub-cultures than mass-cultures. In A Public Misery Message: A Temporary Monument to Global Economic Inequality (2012) by Critical Art Ensemble, viewers of dOCUMENTA (13) were surveyed to give an indication of their net worth, after which they could be randomly selected for a ride in Karlsaue Park in a helicopter, which would slowly ascend to a height that symbolises this worth. The work is supposedly about capitalist inequality, but it came off as a bad Maurizio Cattelan performance that served to mask a guilty conscience. The budget for dOCUMENTA (13) has been estimated at over 25 million Euros—a figure that is based on documenta XII’s 26.89 million Euros budget.2 With this in mind, it seems a bit condescending to protest capitalist inequality while participating in the turning of its cogs. Christov-Bakargiev is not really against capitalism as such, but she is against the “persisting belief in economic growth”. While her verbal and written responses have at times displayed all the passion of a polemicist, the exhibition was far more nuanced. She presented an artworld that I would actually want to be a part of, showing how art can act for artists as a type of security blanket during bad times, and how personal identity is entwined with cultural history. This was the case in the most hyped works of dOCUMENTA (13), such as those of the Bavarian priest, activist and pomologist Korbinian Aigner, whose three hundred and seventy-two meticulously drawn apples and pears, in colour and close to
187 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 3 2 012 life size, represented his response to oppression by the Nazis. Aigner, who was self-taught as an artist, was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp where he developed four new strains of apples after being forced by the Nazis to work with agriculture. Hannah Ryggen was another self-taught artist whose dOCUMENTA (13) representation has been much-discussed. Born in Sweden but living most of her life in Norway, Ryggen was a tapestry weaver whose unconventional and striking compositions from the 1930s and 1940s protested the rise of fascism. In an online review the critic Quinn Latimer stated: “The radical intimacy of so many of the works and creative lives on view at dOCUMENTA (13) presented an expanded definition of the role of the internal life within institutional space.”3 This is an astute observation. Despite her apparent concern for the capitalist manipulation of contemporary art, Christov-Bakargiev did not attempt to question the institutions of art as such; it was a very museum-centric exhibition. This was made clear upon entering the Fridericianum, where depending on the direction one walked, one either confronted an empty space that was artfully filled with a cool breeze—Ryan Gander’s I Need Some Meaning I Can Memorise (The Invisible Pull) (2012)—or a museum vitrine in an otherwise empty space. Inside the vitrine was a letter by the German artist Kai Althoff, who wrote to the director to say that he couldn’t be in the show (a fairly lame Duchampian gesture that was then purposefully undermined by the inclusion of his unlabelled painting in another gallery in the museum). Ceal Floyer’s sound installation also presented a nearempty space upon entrance to the Fridericianum, consisting of a looped section of a Tammy Wynette song with the repeated lyric, “I just keep on trying/’til I get it right.” It seemed as if the institution itself was the focus of these entrance strategies—not as institutional critique, but as a way to highlight how art institutions effectively serve to filter the disarray of the outside world. In general, works in the Fridericianum relied heavily on museum plaques to explain their significance. Background information was certainly necessary to engage with the display by the physicist Anton Zeilinger, whose experiments purported to show the wave/particle duality of photons in the famous twoslit quantum physics experiment. The display alluded to Christov-Bakargiev’s preoccupation with inanimate things that look back at the viewer, as well as evoking how science has an aura of authority despite its often ‘invisible’ nature. The same can be said of the experiments by the DNA epigenetic theorist Alexander Tarakhovsky, who shared the gallery space with two works by Salvador Dali: Espagne (1938) and Le Grand Paranoique (1936). These paintings represented Dali’s uncharacteristic response to the Spanish Civil War, similar to the way in which Giorgio Morandi’s work was contextualised as a retreat from war. The coupling of Dali with a DNA theorist makes sense when we learn that Dali became obsessed by the double-helix, and that he included the motif in Butterfly Landscape (The Great Masturbator in a Surrealist Landscape with D.N.A.) (1957-58), created only a few years after the discovery of DNA in 1953. While highlighting the idiosyncratic ways that artists respond to social conflict, Dali’s inclusion also brought attention to dOCUMENTA (13)’s Surrealist undertones. Like Christov-Bakargiev’s curatorial approach, many of the artists emphasised the fantastical intersections of culture, politics and science via intuitive (or paranoiac) approaches. As Ana Pinto stated in her review; “If it were an animal—and the animal is definitively amongst the exhibition’s motifs —then dOCUMENTA would be best described by the oxymoron ‘urban wildlife’, a species neither wild nor domestic and created by the peculiar ecology of the refuse of civilisation, an animal that burrows in sewers and scavenges leftovers.”4 This balance of the “wild” and the “civilised” could also be read in terms of the triumph of the once repressed (literally or metaphorically)—however, this was not presented as a return to unbridled freedom so much as the attainment of correct institutionalisation. In this sense, perhaps Christov-Bakargiev focused on a type of “Surrealism without illusions”, substituting the early Surrealists’ striving for ideal and anxiety-free social realities with more pragmatic aspirations. In the case of Stuart Ringholt’s Anger Workshops (2008), one’s repressed anger finds its outlet not in pure expression as such, but in therapy. Christov-Bakargiev actually shares many of the early Surrealists’ ideals. Protesting against art that has removed itself from life praxis, the Surrealists bent history out of shape in their depictions of classical narratives, socialist values and contemporary technology; foregrounding mysteriousness, marvellousness and interconnectedness. The notion of the marvellous, representing a rupture in the natural order, was treated as a challenge to rational causality. Following André Breton’s lead, the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon was ardent in his attitude toward the marvellous; defining it as the “refusal of one reality, but also of the development of a new relationship, a new reality liberated by that refusal”. Christov-Bakargiev’s attack on ‘truth’, blending of histories, and capricious belief in the underlying complexity of non-human lives re-energises the Surrealists’ project.
As one of the most compelling representations of the exhibition’s Surrealist edge, Pierre Huygue’s work Things Made and Not Made (2012), created confusion regarding the installation’s actual constitution. Huygue’s work was located in the composting area of Karlsaue Park, drawing attention to the site’s current conditions through some interventions: a roaming groundskeeper, a roaming white Spanish greyhound called “Human” with his front leg painted pink, caution tape, plantings of marijuana, an uprooted oak tree that Joseph Beuys planted in the park many years earlier, and a large Classical reclining nude cast in concrete, with a huge functioning beehive on her face. The classical art-historical figure in a desolate landscape, with references to Beuys’ socialist politics and hallucinogens, appeared like an Ernst, Dali or Magritte painting converted into a contemporary public art installation. Thomas Bayrle evoked the Surrealists’ interest in technological automatism with his display Carmageddon (2012), which consists of eight kinetic sculptures of engines that he has cut open—revealing the artful engineering found in luxury cars and motorbikes. Bayrle has in the past been overlooked as a pioneer of West-German pop art; however, here he received overdue recognition by being awarded the Arnold Bode Prize for his documenta installation. Echoing Bayrle’s humanist machines, Haegue Yang’s work, Approaching: Choreography Engineered in Never-Past Tense (2012), consists of venetian blinds that were hung facing in different directions in the Hauptbahnhof section of the exhibition (where there was a concentration of high-quality performance-based works). The blinds were programmed to slowly go up, down and turn around at different intervals. Strangely devoid of metaphor, Yang’s blinds were, simply put, ‘nice to look at’, and reflected a particularly pleasant light in the space. In the rotunda section of the Fredericianium (referred to by ChristovBarkargiev as the exhibition’s “brain”) was a wunderkammer, or “cabinet of curiosities”, that displayed various editions of Man Ray’s Object to Be Destroyed (1923): a metronome bearing a cut-out photograph of the eye of Lee Miller, Ray’s one-time muse. The original artwork was destroyed but has been replicated. It was surrounded by other original historical objects that were not destroyed but could easily have been, including a selection of the actual objects that Giorgio Morandi painted, an assortment of Adolf Hitler’s personal belongings (books, a towel and a porcelain figurine of a nude), and Eva Braun’s ‘powder compact’. Facing these objects was a series of portraits of Lee Miller herself (photographed by David E. Scherman) in the bathtub of Hitler’s Munich apartment around the same time that he committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin. Miller wrote about this experience for a 1945 issue of British Vogue —original copies of which were displayed in yet another glass vitrine. To Nicolas Bourriaud’s rather corporatised view of contemporary art’s “negotiations, links and co-existences”,5 Christov-Bakargiev adds her own liberal and interconnected view of art, showcasing numerous artworks that, although museological, did not appear to be subservient to theory. Summing up dOCUMENTA (13) as an example of “Post-Art”, Jerry Saltz writes: To Joseph Beuys’s famous dictum that “everyone is an artist”, Christov-Bakargiev adds, “so is any thing”. The best parts of dOCUMENTA (13) bring us into close contact with this illusive entity of Post Art—things that aren’t artworks so much as they are about the drive to make things that, like art, embed imagination in material and grasp that creativity is a cosmic force.6 Whether “Post-Art” or not, dOCUMENTA (13) embodied contemporary art’s ‘folkloric’ trajectory, in which ‘artefactness’, ‘community’, ‘identity’, ‘tradition’ and the ‘performativity of meaning’ are foregrounded. At times the exhibition seemed genuinely symbolic of early twenty-first century art: lacking a model for what constitutes ‘good art’ but focused instead on being able to identify it. Notes 1 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev quoted by Karen Wright, ‘Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: In the Here and Now’, Under the Influence, New York: Philips de Pury, 2011: 35 2
‘Editorial’, documenta Magazine No. 1-3, Cologne: Taschen, 2007: 7
3
Quinn Latimer, ‘documenta 13’, Art Agenda online, June 9, 2012; http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/ documenta-13-2/, accessed: 8/8/2012
4
Ana Teixeira Pinto, ‘documenta 13’, Art Agenda online, June 10, 2012; http://www.art-agenda.com/ reviews/documenta-13-3/, accessed: 9/8/2012
5
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002: 26
6
Jerry Saltz, ‘A Glimpse of Art’s Future at documenta’, Vulture online, June 16, 2012; http://www.vulture. com/2012/06/documenta-13-review.html, accessed: 12/8/2012
Opposite: Man Ray, from left Objet indestructible (Indestructible object), 1923-65; Motif Perpétuel (Perpetual Motif), 1971; Objet indestructible (Indestructible object), 1923-65 Photo courtesy documenta
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NO GOOD TIME FOR AN EXHIBITION REFLECTIONS ON THE PICASSO IN PALESTINE PROJECT, PART 1
Michael Baers There is no vision without details. Hussein Barghouti The psychic and geographical centre of Ramallah is Al Manarah Square, a traffic roundabout where five streets converge at irregular angles. Cars and people circulate in apparent chaos around five carved lions statues —symbolising Ramallah’s five prominent families—which encircle a single Corinthian column, as if standing guard. One lion wears a wristwatch, and depending on one’s sense of the ironic, this detail can be read today as a cryptic joke about the materialist slant evident in contemporary Palestinian society, or as a mordant commentary on the duration of its status as an occupied territory. During the Second Intifada, the story goes, some of the lions had their carved tails smashed off by Israeli soldiers—an action that can also be read doubly, a term of endearment for the fedayeen being achebals, “young lions”, while Palestinian slang for a collaborator is to say he or she has a “fat tail.”
The West Bank is full of such polyvalent significations, an indication of how the conflict between Palestine and Israel is carried out at the level of semiosis as much as territoriality. From Al Manarah, it is a five-minute walk up Ada’a Street to the building of the International Academy of Art Palestine (IAAP), a villa that once housed Gallery 79, a well-known art space shuttered by the IDF during the First Intifada, and in the 1990s, offices of the Palestinian Authority (PA) Ministry of Culture. Although surrounded on two sides by pavement and concealed from the street by a nondescript office building, the villa retains a certain elegance. Its front entrance, surmounted by an uncovered patio, is lined by an iron balustrade, its portico flanked by twin columns with a hint of Arabesque filigree. It was there in 2010 that I first learned about Khaled Hourani’s idea of bringing a Picasso painting to Ramallah. I recall students saying it was to be exhibited there at the Academy. I recall being startled by the prospect. I may even have been told this while sitting in the IAAP’s single classroom, the room where, now subdivided, the Picasso hung for a month last summer.
In all likelihood you’ve heard about the project—how Picasso’s 1943 portrait of his lover Françoise Gilot, Buste de Femme, was loaned to the Academy by the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. (A parallel exhibition at Al-Ma’mal Gallery in Jerusalem displayed correspondence culled from the paper trail left by the two-year effort to realise the work.) The story was widely reported: the German newspaper Die Zeit assigned two reporters to follow the project’s development, publishing a lengthy account two days before its gala opening; The Guardian, Al Arabia and Haaretz published accounts; wire services and online news agencies ran the story; television networks sent camera crews; and, of course, members of the art press weighed in—including Frieze magazine, which in its online edition published a detailed report on the opening festivities by Nick Aikens, an executive from Outset Contemporary Art Fund, underwriters of the two days of talks which followed the opening. The recently published twenty-second issue of the Belgian art magazine A Prior is dedicated to the project, as is a planned documentary by Rashid Masharawi. Most of the news coverage subscribed to a fairly standard narrative and an equally predictable itinerary of facts. Though started on a whim, in the end, orchestrating the passage from Eindhoven to Ramallah of the most expensive work of art ever exhibited in the West Bank proved more complicated than raising the $200,000 necessary to fund the exhibition. Thousands of Palestinians flocked to see the painting on view, but despite extensive modifications to the Academy, the museological conditions were improvised at best. The central motive of the project—to canalise the sign-value of a work by Picasso, modernism’s most iconic artist, in the service of imagining what a normal institution of art in a normal State might look like—was clearly and repeatedly articulated; in a region where the news is unremittingly ugly, a “feel good” story is an infrequent occurrence; the law of scarcity demanded that the most be made of it. Having neither seen the exhibit in person nor followed its development, reading these accounts was the starting point for my own attempt to grapple with the project and what it meant. It was, after all, a fairly simple proposition, being, as Van Abbemuseum director Charles Esche phrased it at the opening, “only strictly concerned with the shipment of a small amount of wood, canvas, and paint from one country to another”. Yet, as I pondered the news reports, something remained elusive. The constellation of journalistic details seemed to circulate without coming to rest anywhere. I grew interested in what this failure to adequately pin down a meaning outside of several safe, uplifting messages—a failure I felt in myself and saw reflected in the media—implied for the project itself and the context of which it was a part. “In the making of Picasso in Palestine”, wrote Rasha Salti and Khaled Hourani in their contribution to A Prior 22, “the means are as interesting as the end. The means are, in fact, an end in themselves”.1 In being reduced to a couple of paragraphs or a minute-long news report, these means would inevitably fail to be explicated, and consequently, the project’s most interesting aspect—employing the protocol of museum loan policy to unmask the administrative relationship between Israel and the West Bank—would remain largely untold. Spatial limitations would reduce this recondite topic to a thin trickle of information. Entrenched journalistic habits of depiction would do the rest—the real conditions of occupation that the project ostensibly intended to address would be pushed to the margins by that set of stock clichés which stand readily at hand for depicting life in the West Bank. In speaking of our mental conception of space, the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre describes two commonplace illusions —the “illusion of transparency”, which goes “hand in hand with a view of space as innocent, free of traps or secret places”, and the illusion of opacity, or “realistic” illusion, which is closer to naturalistic and mechanistic materialism. Rather than opposing one another, “each illusion embodies and nourishes the other”, reinforcing an idea of the world where no obstacle interferes with our ability to conceptualise it, and that “‘things’ have more of an existence than the ‘subject’, his thought, and his desires”.2 Over the years I had come to suspect the successive Israeli governments of being masters at capitalising on these twin habits of mind. Most of the press coverage, however, appeared indifferent to how these habits were unsettled by the project; as blind to the complexity of Buste de Femme’s actual journey as to its metaphysical
dimension; incapable of seeing something—or to be more precise —sensing something underneath Picasso in Palestine’s ostensible goal of instantiating an encounter between a lone Picasso painting and the Palestinian public. Perhaps this something was a kind of immaterial non-event or non-thing, a form of administrative antimatter exerting influence while never becoming visible, maintaining control by remaining resolutely invisible. Or perhaps—more speculatively—it had to do with the transposition of an artifact of European modernism to another time and place in combination with the empty place of Israeli administrative control, the indeterminacy of modernist art production entering into uneasy orbit with Israeli occupation strategies, creating in a sense two empty places: the former marked by the refusal of pictorial realism (coherent representations of pictorial space, the suppression of surface incident) and the latter by the Israeli State’s particular way of exploiting a “democratic invention”, to borrow Slavoj Zizek’s term, that “consists in the very fact that what was previously considered an obstacle to the ‘normal functioning of power’ (…the gap between this place and the one who actually exerts power, the ultimate indeterminacy of power) now becomes its positive condition”.3 In attempting to address the many questions I saw unanswered in the press, I began conducting interviews, collecting news accounts on recent developments in the West Bank, and otherwise immersing myself in the story. But I soon encountered a limit to my understanding—a limit that also characterises the effects of Israeli occupation in the West Bank. This limit, this “grey zone”, exists (to the extent it is even localisable) on a plane where the allegedly hard facts of Oslo over time have deteriorated into something capricious and arbitrary. Even while granting this “Kafkaesque” grey zone pride of place, I was aware of another facet to the story. It concerned why, in the various methods of civil and military resistance employed by Palestinians, there exists a make-believe element, like the pantomimed game of cards Jean Genet turned into a central motif of Prisoner of Love, one of “the day-dreams people have to work off somehow when they’ve neither the strength nor the opportunity to make them come true”. I suspected Palestinians still possessed this proclivity, using it to toy with the threshold at which play-acting “stops being poetic negation and becomes political assertion”. In fact, the declaration coming immediately after this line precisely indicates the sort of temperament that could formulate the quixotic project of installing a Picasso painting in a tiny room at an art academy in Ramallah as a form of resistance: “If such imaginary activity is to be of any use, it has to exist.”4 1. THE BALLAD OF PICASSO AND PALESTINE Checkpoints, which litter the Palestinian landscape, speak to a central Palestinian predicament of a disordered experience of geography and space-time, whereby “Palestinian life is scattered, discontinuous, marked by the artificial and imposed arrangements of interrupted or confined space, by the dislocations and unsynchronised rhythms of disturbed time.”5 Where to begin the story of Picasso in Palestine? One can take the historical long view and say it began with the Zionist movement. One can take this view and from it elaborate a secondary, rhetorical dimension, pointing out that from its inception the language of Zionism extolled the benevolent, civilising influence of European culture to justify colonisation. One could also begin with the lengthy, non-controversial record of museum exchanges between Western and Israeli institutions, or, on a more abstract plane, from the assumption that Western culture and art have long been “in a ‘natural’ conversation with Israeli artists”, a characteristic noted by Khaled Hourani and Rasha Salti in their aforementioned essay.6 Seventy-five kilometres east, this same conversation is still considered “unnatural” and alien. If we are to be more specific, our story begins in January 2009 when Khaled Hourani visited Eindhoven as part of an ongoing roundtable discussion organised by Charles Esche involving culture workers from States within the former Ottoman Empire. Esche, whom I spoke with last July, described these meetings as an attempt to explore ways of facilitating broader cultural exchange outside the cultural parameters of the Van Abbe’s Western European home. During this
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particular round, Esche’s guests were shown around the Van Abbe’s facilities—the administrative offices, the collection storehouses, the conservation workshops—while members of the museum staff explained loan policy, conservation, storage, and the other myriad tasks involved in maintaining a collection. Convening later in a conference room together with staff curators Galit Eilat and Remco de Blaaij, Esche posed a rhetorical question: What would the participants do if they had access to the Van Abbemuseum’s substantial collection of 2000 drawings and 700 paintings, including works by Lissitzky, Kandinsky, Chagall, Beuys, and Pablo Picasso? Hourani answered, saying he would choose to “bring one of your Picassos to Ramallah”. His response was met, wrote Gareis and Salewski in Die Zeit, with mirth and incredulity; Esche replied, “You cannot bring Picasso to Palestine. How will that work?”Confirming this exchange, Esche recounted the story like this: “Basically, quite spontaneously, this idea arose. It did come up as a wild idea. And then it was laughed [at], dismissed—‘Oh yeah, that would be amazing’—but not really taken seriously.” Although initially made in jest, Hourani was immediately struck by how such a loan would inscribe Palestine within the administrative procedures of a prominent Western museum in an unprecedented manner. For several weeks, he did not speak openly about his idea. “I was not able to talk about it directly”, he said, “because I know it will blow with the wind if I did not do my own thinking and research how to make this happen without this being silly or about laughing and only making jokes.” When he finally chose to speak, Hourani began a cautious campaign of persuasion, initiating a dialogue with Charles Esche (facilitated by a meeting the group held in Istanbul some months later) and another with the board of directors of the IAAP, where Hourani serves as artistic director. Esche was at first skeptical. “I think skepticism isn’t wrong”, he told me. “It wasn’t a thing I embraced, like, ‘Oh fabulous,’ you know? There was a sort of questioning of what it would mean to take a Picasso from this Western European culture and show it in Palestine. Is it a form of cultural imperialism? Is it a colonialist form of educating the natives, if you like, to describe it in the crudest way possible? What would it mean for us to do that? Particularly, what would it mean for us to do that in terms of the message we’re sending about an institution that no longer assumes it knows its way in the world.” Around the same time as Hourani began conversing with Esche and his staff, he convened the Academy’s students in its sole classroom, where, as a sort of game, he reviewed the Van Abbe’s collection in a PDF presentation, asking them to pick a work to bring to Ramallah. Although the possibility of the students choosing a contemporary work had entered his mind, one can surmise Hourani was already intent on steering the choice towards Picasso: as a prelude to this exercise, Hourani had conducted a rudimentary sociological survey, finding that in Palestine, as in many other countries, the name “Picasso” is commonly bequeathed upon artistically precocious children. Hourani recalled the discussion like this: “I was thinking, for example, that they might choose a contemporary artwork—a video or an installation, whatever—but we began talking about modernity, about how we could use or revisit modernity somewhere else, in a contemporary art practice.” Of the three Picasso’s in the Van Abbemuseum’s collection, Buste de Femme (inventory number 387) was chosen. “There was one more painting from Picasso, also a portrait of a woman, from 1912”, Hourani related. “There was like a competition between the two works. But Buste de Femme—as a work from wartime—was more representative of Picasso than the one from 1912… The idea was not to bring a political artwork from Picasso, like a direct political work. To bring a portrait of a woman, it will open the discussion of the woman in art in general, and the history of representing the woman in Palestinian art, since it has been represented in different ways, as a symbol for the homeland, nationality, identity, and so forth. It has a lot of history.” 2. THE BUSTE DE FEMME ENTERS DRESSED AS LINA NABULSI From the start, Picasso in Palestine was intended to do more than simply introduce Picasso to the Palestinian public. The painting would not only have the destination of Ramallah listed in its provenance, it would also enter into a process of semiotic slippage, finding itself inscribed with an alternative set of interpretations and associations. By mentioning
the history of female representation in Palestine, Hourani is alluding in particular to depictions of the female form in post-Nakba political graphics and fine art, where, frequently in a gravid state, she signified the Nation, Palestinian identity and culture, and Sumud (meaning steadfastness or perseverance), the term for a set of techniques of passive resistance that came into practice following the ouster of the Jordanians in 1967. The logic behind this move is not unique, association and iteration being established parts of the Palestinian historical discourse. Discussing the PLO insurgency of 1968-71, a Palestinian friend once commented that in order to understand the enduring effect of its failure, you had to return to the Arab Revolt of 1937. Similarly, to understand the 1967 War, you have to go back to 1948, while comprehending Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 massacre of twenty-nine Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs requires returning to the 1929 Arab massacre in Hebron, or, for a second level of retributive motivation, to the biblical story of Purim itself, which involves a foiled plot by a courtier of the Persian king Ahasuerus to exterminate the Jews in his empire. Buste de Femme is especially in dialogue with Sliman Mansour’s famous painting Bride of the Homeland, which portrays the death of Lina Nabulsi, a Nablus schoolgirl killed by Israeli Soldiers in 1976 during a school protest.7 Such was the potency of this image that when a lithographic edition began to be distributed, the Israeli intelligence service immediately seized the remaining posters and the original painting as well. The comparison of Buste de Femme to Bride of the Homeland is emblematic of the type of reappraisal that would occur if Picasso’s painting were introduced into a new constellation of references, a détournement of significations that the organisers hoped would be reciprocal—affecting both painting and context alike. 3. “TO GO AS FAR AS WE CAN” Despite Esche’s reservations, throughout the summer he and Hourani continued their “critical analysis” of the project. Esche was eventually won over by Hourani’s determination. The IAAP posted an official loan request in August 2009, providing assurances that “the Academy realises full responsibility for adequate exhibition conditions and guaranteeing the safe return to the collection of the Van Abbemuseum.” The letter, delivered to the museum’s library, was duly stamped and filed, with copies distributed to Esche and director of collections, Christiane Berndes. According to Die Zeit, when Berndes read the letter, she immediately phoned Esche, shouting into the receiver so loudly he had to hold the phone away from his ear.8 Esche laughed at the memory. “Of course, the first thing she said was, ‘You can’t do that! There isn’t a museum, there aren’t the conditions, there isn’t insurance. It’s ridiculous. It’s the property of the citizens of Eindhoven, you can’t just throw it away, you know?’” Berndes might have mentioned very specific worries: the dilapidated state of the West Bank’s roadways, the many opportunities for calamity to occur upon them—especially at Israeli checkpoints—not to mention the lack of a facility with anything like the temperature control necessary for exhibiting a fragile artwork that only recently had been restored at no small cost. Esche placated Berndes’s concerns by turning the loan into a hypothesis: “We started talking about it, and I said, ‘OK, this is true, but nevertheless let’s see how far we can go down this line as perhaps a paper exercise, perhaps something that at the end of the process of discovering whether we can do it, we can’t do it. But let’s make an effort to go as far as we can’.” Remco de Blaaij, who would soon become the Van Abbe’s point man for the project, recalls Berndes reluctance this way: I think Charles was kind of subtle in preparing Christiane for the questions that would come out of it. And of course, Christiane has a very clear mandate in terms of being director of the collection, and that is to protect it from damage—and I’m also talking about weather and stuff like this. It’s a very straightforward, practical matter, but very related to the protection of icons and the protection of heritage, I would say. So, the questions that were holding her back, I think these were gradually shifted by Charles and also by Khaled’s visits to Eindhoven. Whereas she first thought it was kind of a threat, slowly, she saw the potential. Charles, me, and all the other people in the project saw it as
having potential, but we were a bit less aware of other scenarios in Christiane’s head. She worked with us to explain much more about the way she was working in the museum and all these kind of things. Having overcome Berndes initial reservations, Esche posted a letter in November, agreeing to explore the myriad “chain of problems” involved in sending a Picasso to Ramallah. It is difficult to establish a direct causal chain between Hourani’s request and Esche’s own aspirations for refunctioning the Van Abbe’s lending procedures, but the fact remains that even before the IAAP delivered its request, he was already in the process of developing an “active lending policy”.9 According to Esche, the lending policy up to approximately 2009 was entirely passive. When a letter or email requesting a loan arrived, the museum would respond, and ordinarily, these requests came from institutions with which the Van Abbe was already familiar. What Esche envisioned was a dynamic approach to the collection, seeking out new, unconventional exhibition situations and building a network of institutions, since “obviously, the difficulty with a passive lending policy is you basically lend to the people you already lend to or that fulfill all the conditions of the art system, which means you never break out of a very staid, bourgeois model of exhibition”. The Picasso exhibition would be a test case to see what challenges awaited a departure from this model. In fact, this apparently simple proposition entailed striking out into territory where the map possessed was vague and imperfectly understood. As Hourani phrased it: “It was clear from the beginning that this project would revisit and question all the political agreements, all the bureaucratic systems, all these things that are not necessary. All these details were for us to learn.” 4. THE ABCS OF ADMINISTRATION, OR, HOW TO PRETEND YOU’RE NOT OCCUPYING A TERRITORY It is not my intention to enter into a disquisition on Israel’s current policy of occupation, except to say that it is mutable. At the moment, it is based both on aggressive support for settlement efforts and a deliberate attempt to lighten some of the more obvious burdens of occupation, such as roadblocks, while other burdens, like housing demolitions and the restrictions on building in Area C, have become
increasingly onerous. The area of occupation that directly affected the Picasso project—laws governing imports and exports—have been liberalised to a certain degree, but the threat of a Gaza-style blockade is always a remote possibility. Goods may enter the West Bank with relative ease (exiting is a slightly more complicated story), but this surface normalcy in the sphere of economy is in itself deceptive. It is worth looking for a moment at how Israel has exploited the terms of the Oslo Agreement to create a situation of managed instability, for it is in the fiscal sphere where the Palestinian Authority is most straightened. Foreign aid still comprises the lion’s share of the PA’s operating budget, but the Israeli Civil Administration holds responsibility for disbursing tax receipts from imports, exports, and other sources. They have often used this duty as a means of expressing displeasure. Thus, Palestine often finds itself on the receiving end of an economic vise, as was the case in 2006 after the victory of Hamas in legislative elections, when Israel halted transfer of $55 million in tax receipts, or more recently, when a similar move followed the announcement of Egypt’s sponsorship of reconciliation talks between Fatah and Hamas. Far from negligible, this sum makes up a third of the PA’s operating budget, paying the wages of 160,000 Palestinian civil servants (among them 60,000 security and police officers), on which, in turn, a third of Palestine’s population depends. Predictably, the PA’s decision to unilaterally seek a vote on Statehood at the UN elicited a litany of threats directed at its pocketbook, not only from Israel but from North American and European donors as well. The latter also resort from time to time to threats of withholding aid, but are usually more hesitant than Israel to make good on their threats. This time their fulminations had a ring of authenticity lacking in previous oaths.10 Whatever else it does, considered as a psychic force, Israel’s occupation improvises upon a motif suggested by the contingency of current events to keep Palestinians in a state of perpetual discomfiture. I first started to comprehend, if imperfectly, how this ambiguous legal framework operates—that is, through a comprehensive set of legal codes on the one hand and a complete lack of clarity on the other—while working with DAAR (Decolonising Architecture Art Residency Program) in the summer of 2010. Their project involved the borderline between Area B and Area C—two of the three zones mandated under Oslo
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that have carved the territory of the West Bank into a patchwork of discontinuous jurisdictional islands.11 The project concerned a villa built on the borderline between Area B—under PA control (meaning control not only of security but also zoning ordinances, building permits, and so forth)—and Area C, under the control of Israeli security forces, where construction by Palestinians is forbidden without a permit from the IDF, which, as a rule, is never granted. A settler organisation, Regavim, had filed multiple petitions in the Israeli Supreme Court against the villa on account of this supposed breach.12 To an outsider, the case appeared easily resolved merely by consulting the Oslo map to determine if the villa fell within Area C. Except this is the West Bank, where surface appearance is only one facet of reality. The map possessed by the Battir municipality (in which the villa is located) showed the line in one position, while the PA copy placed the line elsewhere. The line itself, claimed Alessandro Petti of DAAR, had a volume ranging between five and ten meters in width, with the result that either most of the house or only a small fraction could be interpreted as lying inside or outside Area C. In the end, this detail mattered little, as the Israel Supreme Court had thrown out both of Regavim’s lawsuits (a fact relevant only because the owner of the villa had the wherewithal to hire a lawyer and the determination not to be harassed by a settler organisation, whereas in other situations, buildings have been torn down on a similar pretext).13 I could not understand what was going on. My incomprehension led me to Shaul Arieli, a former IDF colonel responsible under the government of Ehud Barak for drawing up the Oslo map. In his office at the Economic Cooperation Foundation in Tel Aviv, Arieli assured me that since the Oslo map was plotted digitally by the Israeli Cartographic Institute, the borders between A, B, and C had no volume. The Israelis, he said, wishing to avoid at all costs precisely these sorts of jurisdictional disputes, had distributed multiple copies of the map to the nascent PA. I wanted very much to believe him, but I didn’t quite. More than that, I wanted to believe in the existence, somewhere, of objective facts that could be appealed to in situations such as these: I was reluctant to concede their absence. Arieli’s asseverations to the contrary failed to reassure me. 5. THE BACK STORY OF THE BACK STORY While the ground was being laid for the Picasso in Palestine exhibition, Hourani was at work on another project. Produced for the 2009 Jerusalem Show (an annual event organised by Al Mamal Gallery in East Jerusalem), Jerusalem 0.0km consists of eighty handcrafted ceramic plaques distributed in towns and cities across the West Bank, Gaza, and outside the Middle East, listing the distance from the point of installation to Jerusalem (including a marker embedded in a wall adjacent to the bookstore of the Van Abbemuseum). At the ceremony commemorating the installation of the marker in Ramallah, Hourani spoke with PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, making arrangements to meet later in his office. There, according to Gareis and Salewski, Fayyad enthusiastically endorsed the project, offering to provide whatever logistical help was required. Which was considerable, says Hourani: “We had a logistic need. We needed a letter from the government to be written to the insurance company and the museum guaranteeing the safety of the artwork, of the $7 million artwork during the time when it’s in Area A. It had to be under the responsibility of the government.” That Hourani could have such ready access to the PA requires further explanation. In fact, his background is crucial to understanding both his ready access to the PA as well as the project’s objectives. Born in Hebron to a large family, Hourani is no stranger to politics or politicians; among his twenty-one siblings, several have been politically active. His brother Muhammad currently represents Hebron on the National Council. After starting as a fairly conventional painter and sculptor, Hourani has moved progressively towards curatorial and interventionist work in the vein of third-generation institutional critique artists such as Jens Haaning and Maria Eichhorn. But like many Palestinian academics, intellectuals, and culture workers, his professional activities—out of necessity or a natural bent for eclecticism or a combination thereof —encompass many fields and are inflected by political ideology and party affiliation in a manner seldom seen today in the West. He has written plays, curated exhibitions, and worked as a consultant and in advertising. His CV, replete with directorships and board memberships,
indicates a man accustomed to maneuvering inside the machinery of power: besides his current post at the IAAP, where he can typically be found ensconced in his office, wreathed in a haze of cigarette smoke, he has previously held positions at the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art, the Palestinian Artist League, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, as well as his lengthy tenure as Director of the Plastic Arts at the Palestinian Ministry of Culture. In Hourani’s case, his local prominence has its roots partially in his political activism. “Khaled’s Fatah, you know that, right?” So said Samar Martha, a Ramallah-based curator and Hourani’s former colleague at the Ministry of Culture, when we spoke. “His family comes from a Fatah background. His father has been political—I think he was in jail a couple of times during the occupation. Khaled was in jail, I think, during the First Intifada; his brother Wafa was in jail. Muhammad was in jail. Most of them were quite active in the First and Second Intifada, so he’s very much endorsing the PA as a structure and the way it functions.”14 6. FINDING THE RIGHT CHANNEL When Fatima AbdulKarim, who joined the project late in the fall after quitting her job at the PA Ministry of Foreign Relations, began working full time on Picasso in Palestine in the spring of 2010, the project had encountered its first setback. The in-house insurance broker for the Van Abbe, AEK, refused to consider the loan.15 AEK recommended another agent to Esche, Ruud Ijmker, a veteran manager at the Dutch firm SNS REAAL (which insures, among other things, the Majorcan tuna fleet). Ijmker, who possesses a certain notoriety in Dutch insurance circles (he is quoted in Die Zeit as saying, “Anyone can insure normal stuff, I’m the crazy one who goes for the extraordinary things”), was intrigued by the project. In April 2010, Ijmker was in Israel on separate business when Eyjafjallajökul, the Icelandic volcano, erupted, stranding him for several days. He used this unexpected turn of events to visit the IAAP and begin investigating the project’s potential insurance liabilities in greater detail. At the Academy, Ijmker photographed the locks on the doors where it was proposed the painting be exhibited, examined where security cameras should be mounted, where armed guards should stand. He drove to Jerusalem counting potholes and bumps. He encountered a snag when the question of national jurisdiction surfaced, since there is no real indication in the Oslo Agreement of what procedures govern jurisdiction and liability in the case of cultural exchange. But Ijmker, choosing to disregard Oslo in his calculations, concluded that the risk was insurable, writing a policy covering the painting’s travels “from nail to nail.” (AbdulKarim was quoted in Al Jazeera saying Ijmker decided simply to “erase Oslo from his mind”.) Following closely on Ijmker’s heels were Van Abbe Chief Conservator Louis Balthussen and Registrar Bettine Verkuijlen, who, between 2010 and 2011, made several trips to the region, examining the condition of the Academy and West Bank roadways in order to construct a careful plan for how to protect the painting against possible damage. This included inspecting, as Ijmker had, the roadways, the layout of the IAAP, and learning as much as possible about what sorts of contingencies might await the painting at Qalandiya Checkpoint. Balthussen hit on the solution of designing a crate fitted with shock absorbers to mitigate the bad road conditions, and as an added step, placing the painting within a second, transparent travel container that would further stabilise temperature but also act as a barrier should a soldier on duty insist on opening the travel crate, which was always a possibility. That way, at least, the Buste de Femme would be protected from the dust of a Middle Eastern roadway. Bathussen extended this idea to his concept for the exhibition space, designing a room-within-a-room that would help the temperature and humidity remain stable. The work of Balthussen and Verkuijlen, once they saw for themselves the conditions they would have to guard against to keep the painting safe, and Ijmker’s own difficulties in determining what to do about the Oslo Agreement, were easier solved than the organisers’s negotiation of the legal morass the project had created. “One of the considerations we had is that there was no way the Picasso would be entering without a diplomatic status”, said AbdulKarim. “This is the most sensitive thing that the press never got right, by the way. The painting needed to be cared for and transferred as: 1) a diplomatic package; and 2) a fragile, important Picasso art piece, etc. If it wasn’t the
Hourani and AbdulKarim began approaching embassies. According to AbdulKarim, the Dutch consulate refused to participate, issuing a response to the Van Abbe stating it was not within the “regulations and norms” of what could be sent under diplomatic cover, since it was not a governmental project. Because the project was a Low Countries issue, the French, German, Belgian, and Spanish consulates all declined to help. UNESCO agreed to help, but the Israeli Customs Office rejected their letter. By then, it was apparent to the team in Ramallah that its reading of the laws governing Palestine/Israel trade were insufficient. “This is a reflection of a general theme”, AbdulKarim elaborated. “Palestinians do not understand [that] Israel is not taking up all of its duties, and part of it is we don’t know what these are because the translations governing the various laws were slightly different.” Since the legal codes the team was consulting also stated that municipalities were tax exempt if they used the tax code of the government, Hourani and AbdulKarim approached Ramallah municipality. That didn’t work, according to AbdulKarim, because the municipality had always received its imports under the name of the sender.
two together, it would have been impossible.” Transporting Buste de Femme as a diplomatic package might safeguard the painting physically, and it would also solve another equally pressing issue. Since the IAAP is not recognised internationally as a museum, not only was it difficult to receive the customary assurances that the container’s integrity would be respected, but crucially, the IAAP would be liable for the 16% import duty Israel would levy on the painting’s value, appraised at €5 million according to Die Zeit, as one condition of the insurance policy. This figure was beyond the reach of either the Van Abbe or the Academy.16 An international agreement governing the tax exemption of museums has been in place for many years. At one point the IAAP attempted to apply for this agreement. They were not accepted. Without this agreement, the IAAP would have to look for another mechanism to avoid the import duty, since any country would require such an import duty if the borrower were not a registered museum. As Remco de Blaaij explained, Of course, the Academy is not recognised by this international agreement. This is the point. Secondly, how to deal with taxes in a country that legally does not exist. This is a problem. So then you see for all kinds of tax reasons you’re dealing not with the Palestinian territories, you’re dealing with Israel. And as the Academy is not an internationally recognised museum… well, it was a big problem for us. It was kind of a large sum that had to be paid, or had to be arranged, as a deposit and you would not be able to touch the funds for six months. Let me be clear on one point: if Munib al-Masri, the Palestinian Rothschild, had chosen to use some of his considerable wealth to underwrite an exhibition of the Mona Lisa in Nablus, there is little Israel’s custom’s office could do to avert such a spectacle. There is nothing illegal about loaning a painting and exhibiting it in Ramallah or elsewhere in the West Bank. The problems arose with the necessity of both the IAAP and the Van Abbe finding a way to secure a tax exemption; ultimately, all attempts to resolve the tax exemption of the painting would be accepted or rejected by Israel.
7. A CURIOUS INCIDENT The initial exhibition date of October 2010 came and went, as did a second date proposed for spring 2011, scotched on account of the ‘Arab Spring’. The team rescheduled for the summer of 2011, considered by Hourani a final deadline, since no one could predict what would follow the UN’s anticipated vote on Palestinian Statehood slated for the following September. “It was a very critical moment in the last months”, said Hourani. “Everything is connected in this region, and a lot of heavy political things were happening around that might affect the project. I was happy with the revolution in Egypt. As a human being, I was happy. But at the same time, I was afraid. I was a bit worried about the project. I was selfish. I didn’t want things to be upside down, to destroy everything. We were fighting to get the work on time. The project would not be possible in a year from now. This was the critical time.” Late in May, AbdulKarim secured a tax exemption number recognised by the Israeli tax and customs department (according to de Blaaij, this number was used in negotiations but not to transport the painting).17 Still, with only a week to go before the Buste de Femme’s scheduled departure, the sort of protection the painting would travel under remained unresolved. Sending it as a diplomatic package had failed, as had officially registering the IAAP as a museum. Using either the tax exemption number of the PA or Ramallah municipality had both come to naught. The only option left was to have Buste de Femme travel under the ATA Carnet and TIR Carnet treaties. Throughout the whole process of figuring out how to move the painting, several Israeli and Dutch art transporters—along with Samer Kawesmi (whose exploits in the accounts of many of those involved assume near mythic status)—had consulted with the Van Abbe and the team in Ramallah. Now Kawesmi, together with Globus and Kortmann—the two companies who had been awarded the contract from the IAAP to handle the painting—examined these treaties anew, having previously dismissed them as unsuitable. An ATA Carnet (Carnet de Passage en Douane pour l’admission temporaire) is a customs document allowing the operator to temporarily import or export goods to countries acceding to the convention without paying duties or other levies, provided that the goods are reimported into the country of origin by a certain date. The TIR Carnet is a UN treaty that allows for the harmonising of customs regulations for goods transported in sealed vehicles or containers. Outside of diplomatic immunity, TIR authorisation was the only thing stopping a highly motivated Israeli soldier stationed at either of the two checkpoints between Ben Gurion Airport and the West Bank from insisting the specially constructed travel crate be opened, exposing Buste de Femme to the potentially disastrous heat of a Middle Eastern roadway. While Israel is a signatory to both treaties, Palestine, as a non-State, is a signatory to no international agreements. As AbdulKarim discovered, Palestine is covered by all international treaties to which Israel is a signatory. Here arose a conceptual difficulty: to state Israel as the destination of the painting perverted the project’s entire concept. A struggle ensued over naming Israel as the destination country, but the conceptual barricade the team had approached proved impassable.
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“It was clear”, said AbdulKarim. “We have no airport, we have no borders whatsoever, and it needed to come through Israeli controlled borders.” Responsibility for granting the ATA and TIR lay with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce at Hoofddorp (the town closest to Schiphol Airport). For reasons of their own, they were at first skeptical that Palestine was the country of destination, and demanded additional documentation. In the end, an unknown combination of pressures convinced the officials in Hoofddorp to authorise the TIR. But for AbdulKarim, something in this confusion remains unpalatable: There was a request by the Dutch Chamber of Commerce that we get a letter from the Israelis [saying] that they know it is not coming to Israel but to Palestine. And this sounded very weird at that point. Very, very weird. I still can’t explain it. This is one of the things I would still like to return to from this project. We got the letter. I signed the power of attorney for the Globus team members to do all that was necessary. We sent it off, and Samer and Globus made things happen in their way. It wasn’t necessary at all, I would say. The documents came from an Israeli company that said “proxy company”, the proxy country was Israel and the end destination was Palestine, and the declaration of purpose clearly stated that it is in an exhibition taking place at the Academy, which is in Ramallah, not in Tel Aviv, etc. To me, that was really an unreasonable suggestion at that point, but something made them feel uncomfortable. So, I don’t know. I really cannot explain it. Charles Esche was more sanguine about the issue: As far as I can see, the guy who I spoke to a couple of times changed his mind at a certain point from being —I wouldn’t say obstructionist, but very bureaucratic, very precisely bureaucratic. He suddenly became helpful. It didn’t help that he googled the project, and at that time the number one hit was a comment from a hardcore Zionist website saying how this project was once again showing the Israeli government in a bad light.18 He came across that link and he said, “So this is purely a propaganda thing?” And I said, “No it’s not. This is a genuine loan that we’re doing, I can’t be held responsible for every opinion on the Internet about it.” Clearly, going to Palestine is an issue. And certainly one of the difficulties is that Palestine doesn’t exist. I mean, it’s not Israeli territory, it isn’t Jordanian anymore, it’s not Lebanese, it’s not Egyptian. So what is it? If you’re trying to ship something to a place that obviously exists physically but doesn’t have a clear identity in this world that is divided into these clear identities called nation-States, then for the bureaucracy, that’s difficult. There are developments in the Netherlands that are approaching fascism in ideology, but I don’t think the Chamber of Commerce in Hoofddorp is part of that. While one can attribute some of the reasoning in AbdulKarim and Esche’s statements to differences in their respective positions within the project, something else in this last minute chain of events remains absent in both accounts. A comment made by de Blaaij is perhaps the most telling concerning what kind of decision-making processes lay behind the final permission for Buste de Femme to travel to Ramallah: There was indeed a grey area that was constantly flashing in front of our eyes.19 I think, in the end, it was a combination of having the Ministry of Finance tax number, together with some diplomatic pressure, together with negotiations between the transport company and the Israeli authorities that control goods coming in and out of the West Bank. I think, adding up all these small parts, this led to the final acceptance of the painting going through. And I think in itself it’s already grey, because it’s not saying, OK, we have
this number here, we do it the completely legal way as it’s supposed to be, so it’s all fine. It’s indeed a whole gray area. But also again, you see how these things are built up. You see how grey the supposedly white Oslo Agreement can be. The Oslo agreements are supposedly very clear for everybody, for the two parties, but if you see the reality on the ground, you see that it’s nothing more than grey areas all the time, functioning by creating grey chaos. It’s kind of a controlled and regulated chaos. It’s weird to see this from very close, because in the end decisions come down to administrative and bureaucratic practicalities, but in these practicalities, so much politics is embedded, I would say, and this is something we were confronted by a lot, especially when we wanted to do this as legally as possible, with the tax number and all that kind of stuff. It is also so weird that when it comes down to seriously getting things done, nothing will be written on paper. As soon as you have something on paper, then you have evidence. So, a lot of the negotiations were by phone. The most serious stuff is in nobody’s emails, no paper trail, it’s really only on the phone. And I think this also tells you something about the politics embedded in bureaucracy, right? It’s a very clear signal that you’re entering either grey or black territory, because then there’s no way to produce evidence that you have an agreement with somebody. In the end, the man from the Dutch Chamber of Commerce signed the TIR and ATA Carnet forms. Despite these documents, the crate was opened by a customs official at Ben Gurion airport for three minutes (a duration found acceptable by chief conservator Louis Baltussen) before being gingerly placed in a waiting VW Transporter. When the van reached Qalandiya Checkpoint, the Israeli driver was replaced by a Palestinian (one holding a Jerusalem ID enabling the holder to cross freely across the checkpoints dividing East Jerusalem from the West Bank). The soldier on duty ignored the customs forms, giving only
a cursory look at the box before waving the van through. The precaution of arranging for a media scrum to be on hand to document the van’s negotiation of the three-kilometre no-man’s land between Qalandiya Checkpoint and Area A where awaited a PA security detail proved unnecessary—although this improvised element was essential to the insurance agreement, which stipulated the painting be protected throughout its journey from Eindhoven to Ramallah.20 There were no incidents then, or later on the road to Ramallah.
Salam Fayyad, who is now seeing his tenure draw to a close in an atmosphere of general rancor. It could be argued, equally, that following the assumption of power by a technocratic elite, corruption and overt party patronage has diminished, or the opposite, that today’s PA is no less corrupt than its ‘90s incarnation. What is apparent is that the power held by an economic elite has increased, and that in various ways, this increase is connected to political parties. Confronted by a resistance grown flush with foreign support and adulation, Jean Genet wrote, “It’s difficult to distinguish total devotion to a cause from a quest for position, ambition for money or power” (Prisoner of Love, 139). Today the same dynamic is repeated, albeit in a more legitimate form. Even the legendary resistance figure Leila Khaled, when I met her in 2009, spoke mainly of real estate. But maybe this was not meant to signify the transformation the resistance has undergone since Oslo—viewed by many today with a jaundiced eye —as much as the ways in which our individual concerns might correspond
This text has been reproduced with permission from e-flux journal #33, March 2012; see http://www.e-flux.com/journal/no-good-time-for-anexhibition-reflections-on-the-picasso-in-palestine-project-part-i/
15 AEK is an Amsterdam-based brokerage, research, and corporate finance company. It’s website states, “AEK Brokerage services consist of institutional sales, liquidity providing, and facilitating the ‘incourante markt.’” See http://www.aek.eu/copy_of_Brokerage 16
Notes 1 Rasha Salti and Khaled Hourani, ‘Occupational Hazards of Modern Art and Museums’, A Prior 22, 2011: 42 2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1991: 29-30 3
Slavoj Žižek, ‘Class Struggle or Postmodernism’, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, London and New York: Verso Books, 2000: 93
4
Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray, New York Review Books, 1986: 119
5
Helga Tawil-Souri quoting Edward Said in Jerusalem Quarterly; see http://www.jerusalemquarterly.org/ ViewArticle.aspx?id=345
6
Rasha Salti and Khaled Hourani, ibid: 46
7
When the crate in which Buste de Femme had travelled was opened forty-eight hours after first arriving in Ramallah (to give the painting time to acclimatise), Hourani insisted Sliman Mansour, whom he described to me as the “hero of using the woman as a symbol in Palestinian art”, be on hand to witness this historic occasion 8 Considering the layout of the Van Abbe’s offices, it is more likely Berndes would have gotten up and walked the four metres to where Esche customarily sits, unless, of course, he happened to be out of town when Berndes received the letter, which is more than likely the case 9
To date, Picasso in Palestine is the only project to be successfully realised under the new lending policy, although Charles Esche told me there are two other projects currently in the works—a longterm project with SALT in Istanbul and a collaboration with a Chinese artist who wants to arrange an exhibition in his home village in Hunan Province 10 See Ethan Bronner’s article ‘Before a Diplomatic Showdown, a Budget Crisis’ in the 27 July, 2011 edition of The New York Times; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/28/world/middleeast/28palestinians. html?_r=2&pagewanted=all 11
Those interested in how Israel uses zoning ordinances to restrict economic activity in the West Bank would be well advised to consult the Israeli NGO BIMKOM’s report on the matter, ‘The Prohibited Zone: Israeli planning policy in the Palestinian villages in Area C’, available as a PDF at http://eng.bimkom.org/ Index.asp?ArticleID=137&CategoryID=125 12 Regavim’s complaint about the villa was also part of a concerted effort to clog Israeli courts with lawsuits to combat State-mandated settlement building freezes on the judicial level and to garner political support within Israel for settlement as a political/demographic project 13 Petti also alleged to have heard that the PA possessed only a single second-generation copy of the map, the others having been destroyed in the assault on Yasser Arafat’s offices during the Second Intifada 14 In my experience, to say someone is “Fatah” connotes something specific, but not a specificity readily comprehensible to an outsider. Prior to Oslo it indicated (broadly) loyalty to Yasser Arafat and the PLO and a brand of Palestinian nationalism possessing neither the religiosity of Hamas nor the socialist orientation of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But this distinction is not altogether helpful; both left- and right-leaning factions exist in Fatah, and neither camp corresponds exactly with similar political orientations in the West. Similarly, multiple splits have occurred following Arafat’s death: between leaders of the old guard, who returned from exile and came to power after Oslo, and Marwhan Barghouti, who, although imprisoned for life, initiated the Al-Mustaqbal Party (which in 2006 ran a slate of younger candidates), and also between different factions of this “Young Guard” which is itself prone to schisms. Thus, a Fatah loyalist, while actively committed to resisting the occupation and fighting for the nationalist cause, might be politically progressive, or he might be entirely comfortable with Palestine’s traditional class society in which a small group of clans based in the cities and towns controlled much of the region’s wealth and political power. (The function of clan power might conceptually be fairly opaque in the West. One might think of the Kennedy’s family as roughly homologous, although this analogy does not take into account that Palestine’s social structure predates that of Hyannisport by over a millennium, and may, accordingly, be more intricate in structure.) Being “Fatah” is also not a uniform designation. It can indicate rank-and-file party activists, armed members of the al-Aqsa Martys’ Brigade (who, while remaining identified as the armed wing of Fatah, have maintained in recent years a somewhat shadowy existence, having been sidelined by the emergence of the PA’s security forces and a somewhat contentious amnesty agreement reached with Israel in 2007), or that elite group of families—often headed by politicians or academics—who returned from exile with Arafat in the ‘90s, and who have since reaped many of Oslo’s political and economic spoils. In the past, this has been one of civil society’s chief complaints with the PA, but following Arafat’s death and the resulting political vacuum, the fragmentation of political power has assumed a complexity that would require more space than this footnote allows. Suffice to say, after Fatah’s 2006 electoral defeat in the Legislative Council, power was assumed by a non-Fatah technocrat,
In the Die Zeit article, Galit Eilat is portrayed as having the unenviable role of the heavy—first as the Israeli national who some of the Middle Eastern visitors to Charles Esche’s rotating roundtable discussion were reluctant to sit with, and then as the deliverer of bad news about the Academy’s lack of status as a museum; AbdulKarim is thus set up as the plucky Palestinian culture worker who perseveres despite Eilat’s pessimism
17 According to AbdulKarim, the issue of tax liability was in itself irrelevant, since the Palestinian Ministry of Finance was ultimately responsible for enforcing the tax or not. This is what she related during our interview: “During my three hours at the Palestinian customs department, we discovered that paintings are tax exempted, and not even the staff members themselves knew this. They started looking and looking until they found out. It was illegal in the first place for the Israelis to ask for the money, but this is the benefit of the doubt for the Israelis that hope its coming through our borders. But there was a big discussion going on between Sabah Nabulsi, the lady I was working with at the customs department in Palestine, and her Israeli counterpart, [with Nabulsi] saying, ‘No, this is coming to Palestinian territories, it’s end destination is Palestinian, therefore, the tax money is requested by us, not you.’ And they [the PA tax authority] were ready to overlook that.” 18 Esche is referring to a posting on the Zionist blog Israel Matzav from February 22, 2011, in which “Carl in Jerusalem” wrote: ‘Picasso in Palestine another occasion to bash Israel’, “Eindhoven’s Van Abbe Museum [sic] is lending the 1943 canvas Buste de Femme to the Ramallah international art academy, and the occasion is being used to bash Israel (original emphasis) once again. A film is due to be made of the painting’s journey, including the Israeli border and other checkpoints. And then international audiences will be shown how the “cruel Israelis” insist on inspecting an “innocent painting.” This is just another excuse to try to open the checkpoints so that weapons can be smuggled in. What could go wrong?” 19 Curiously, Van Abbe curator Galit Eilat also uses the term “grey zone” in her response to a question on the use of art in promoting tolerance in a conversation between herself and Zmijewski published in the issue of A Prior (22) mentioned previously. Her notion of the potential political efficacy of art practice indicates a possibly homology between artistic constructions and the ambiguity of state functions described by de Blaaij. The pertinent passage reads: “Since art is considered autonomous, you can take even violent actions without being immediately labeled an enemy of the society. It still gives me a kind of gray zone to act in. This zone is never fully defined in political terms, that’s why it can accommodate change and be used as a tool for transforming the society.” 20
Another point where the official record is unclear involves precisely this question of how long Buste de Femme was left unguarded. In July, Hourani told me the following: “One of the scenarios was the Dutch transport company, Kortmann, would bring the work to Tel Aviv. From there, there would be an Israeli company—Globus—with security guards. They also have special security guards—not necessarily the government or the official police—like we also have some private security companies. Globus took care of the security of the work from there to Qalandiya Checkpoint. We had to change the car in the Jaffa road. We changed the car, and the van which would go to Ramallah, it arrived at Qalandiya, where there is a dead area in between Qalandiya Checkpoint and the area where the PA policemen can be with their guns. We had to create a very quick solution since the PA security men could not go next to the checkpoint with their guns. This is a very dangerous place. Thirty meters. We decided to protect the work with cameras. We invited the media, because the car had to go slow, so the cameramen from different media were shooting the work coming to Ramallah or Palestine. This was the creative solution for how to protect the work.” Hourani and Salti, however, published the following account this past November in A Prior 22: “From Tel Aviv to Atarot, a private Israeli security company accompanied the van and from Qalandiya to Ramallah, Palestinian police. There was a three-kilometer section, a no-man’s land, where only civilians are allowed passage, Israeli private security cannot tread, and neither can Palestinian national armed security. The van was unguarded by armed security, instead protection was provided by some twenty international media cameras that accompanied the van and broadcast its passage on that road live.”
Page 188: Palestinian guards with Picasso’s Buste de Femme Page 189: Picasso in Palestine signage Page 192: The guards taking pictures of each other, and Pablo Picasso, Buste de Femme, 1943 Page 194: Newspaper coverage of Picasso in Palestine Page 195: Picasso in Palestine street flags Page 197: The prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority, Salam Fayyad, speaks at the opening Page 198: Picasso in Palestine merchandise made by the Academy Photos courtesy Picasso in Palestine Facebook, Van Abbemuseum Page 199: Road to Jerusalem (2011), an artwork by Khaled Hourani of the IAAP, indicating the distance to Jerusalem (14km from the Academy). The Van Abbemuseum has this work in the collection as well, only the tiles then read “Jerusalem 3260km”. This work is installed in the Van Abbemuseum, to emphasise the link of the museum with the academy Photo courtesy the artist
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NO GOOD TIME FOR AN EXHIBITION REFLECTIONS ON THE PICASSO IN PALESTINE PROJECT, PART 11
MICHAEL BAERS The poems, at least in translation, left me unmoved, except for the beauty of the calligraphy. They were about struggle and disaster, but I couldn’t make anything of the imagery, which was all about doves and damsels and honey. Jean Genet1 1. THE USUAL FORM OF EVENTS For the official opening five days later, Khaled Hourani staged a gala event. Buste de Femme hung in its room monitored by two armed guards flanking the velvet stanchions that formed a barrier between viewer and painting. Visitors, allowed entry in pairs (to control humidity), queued outside on the veranda where they could distract themselves by examining the custom-built crate (fabricated by the German firms Hasenkamp Holdings and the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics) on display in the foyer. Like any blockbuster exhibition in the West, merchandise was on sale, though Picasso in Palestine differed from the former with respect to the folkloric dancers and musicians who performed and because of the speeches given that day, one was by a Head of State (if only a putative one), Prime Minister Salam Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority (PA). What has been written about the opening so far is largely celebratory: nor did I expect to hear an impartial account from the project’s organisers. I was curious, rather, how Ramallah residents of a critical bent had received Picasso in Palestine. During our interview, Hourani appeared even to invite such criticism, stating, “For me, the discussion around the project—for or against—is part of it.” So it was that I found myself one afternoon in July 2011, several weeks after the opening, speaking over Skype with Nicola Perugini. Perugini is an Italian anthropologist who I had met in the summer of 2010 in Battir, a village southwest of Jerusalem. He had visited the opening on the advice of his wife, Farah. “I decided to go to see more the setting than the content itself”, Perugini told me. “I mean, for me it’s becoming a preoccupation—looking at the kind of settings that are created around events. More and more I’m adopting this formalistic approach to what happens, how things are set up.” What, I asked him, was his formalist analysis of Picasso in Palestine’s opening? This idea of creating special “gadgets” for an event, and bringing all the well-known artistic Gotta of Ramallah. Acting as if this is an open event, and then finding the area closed for security reasons. You could not park your car and you have the whole Ramallah Gotta of arts. I mean, it’s not really public. You pretend that this is a public event in which Palestinians have access to Picasso for the first time in their lives, and then you discover that it’s a caged event with some buffet from a very well-known restaurant. One thing I was especially curious about was how Salam Fayyad was received at the opening, and, since one of Hourani’s principle talking points to the press was the notion that Palestine had yet to confront the cultural legacy of modernity, whether Fayyad also addressed this.
“It was a huge celebration for Salam Fayyad,” Perugini said. “A Jordanian king-style celebration, or something that I saw only in Morocco… a celebration for the king, with people playing traditional music. Even the Palestinians were astonished. The joke circulating was: ‘Is there a wedding today?’” But according to Perugini, Fayyad himself did not address the topic of Picasso’s cultural legacy, focusing rather on the success of the PA security forces in protecting the painting: It was simply a mirror discourse about security. The discourse of Salam Fayyad was: “We are very proud of hosting Picasso in Palestine, because we can show to the rest of the world that we have enough security to bring fucking Picasso to Ramallah.” This issue for him… [Perugini paused for a moment before continuing] he is completely drunk off this discourse that he’s reproducing everywhere about the State and “we” can grant security and “we” can assure security. Even Picasso is transformed into a security commodity. Any kind of reference to Picasso was completely erased. Vera Tamari, a retired professor of art from Birzeit University, was more sanguine. On hand to see both Buste de Femme lifted by crane into the IAAP’s premises and for the opening three days later, she waxed ambivalent about each. Of the former she said, It was a very moving experience for me. I had chills. It was very moving because having a piece of art by such a famous, well-known artist come to Palestine for the first time… and then it was also moving because all the people around the van—the police people, the shippers, the press people—they were oriented towards looking at it as a very important moment. The police immediately surrounded the van, and they went up on the steps like it was a combat zone. It was a bit sad, actually. I think they took it that seriously.
Her appraisal of the opening was expressed in similar terms: It was the event more than the painting, I think, that was attracting people: “Picasso is in Ramallah, you know?” I don’t know whether the value of the painting was in their minds so much as the event itself. It was a stunt, it was a performance, it was a festivity, it was singing, it was major speeches by officials. But everybody was happy. I can understand why people would be critical, but I would take it with a sense of joviality myself. Like everything else here, you have the folklore, you have the music, you have the officials, so it became like one of the regular functions. This is how regular functions generally are managed and manifested. When I spoke with Samar Martha, a Ramallah-based curator and Hourani’s former colleague at the Ministry of Culture, she repeated the joke about the wedding but was less critical of Fayyad than of Hourani, who had choreographed the folkloric element in the proceedings with no apparent pressure—my original presumption—from the PA: It was Khaled’s organisation, because I was totally shocked. I asked Khaled and I also asked the students, “Who decided on this?” It was Khaled who decided to do it. He asked the students and managed to convince them that this is what should be done to show Palestinian folklore. And I said, “But this kind of folklore is for weddings. Why for this occasion?” “Yeah, but it’s the wedding of Picasso”, they said. Martha paused. I heard the click of a lighter and an exhalation of breath. “But Salam Fayyad was really smart”, she continued. “At the end of his speech, he said something interesting. He said: ‘I have nothing to do with this music and this folkloric dance. I am coming here to celebrate the wedding of Charles Esche and Khaled Hourani.’” The conversation turned to the two days of seminars underwritten by Outset Contemporary Art Fund that followed the exhibition, the paucity of Palestinians in the audience, the fact that students from the academy were mostly absent. “It was like foreigners speaking to each other and the only heated debate was about funding”, she said. “And Khaled was a bit annoyed because, you know, it’s not acceptable in Palestine with the boycott issue to have any funding from Israel, and it was obvious this organisation was very much related to Israel.”2 2. COLLATERAL DAMAGE After ending our conversation, I felt a familiar confusion overtaking me. Frequently, speaking with Palestinians about life under occupation elicits the feeling that outside the crushing certitude of Israel’s ongoing territorial encroachment, there is no firm footing, no “facts” that can
be reliably appealed to. One is left, rather, with a plethora of opinions, conjectures, and matters too delicate to address. Even the Oslo Agreement, the basis for negotiating the painting’s passage, holds no legitimacy in international jurisprudence outside of the peculiar afterlife it has been granted, having expired in May 1999. Was Picasso in Palestine’s stated openness to operating on many different levels—a feature I initially perceived as one of its strengths—also a weakness? Or was it a weakness inextricably intertwined with virtue, as if neither were separable within the confused context of present-day Palestine? Picasso in Palestine operates on many different levels: on an explicitly public level concerned with the encounter between an artwork and a public, and on a more occulted level, where the slow, peristaltic bureaucratic processes of large organisations like museums and nationStates rumble along in darkness and obscurity. At least two further bifurcations mark the project’s encounter with a notional audience or public. Firstly, according to the Bourdieuian indices of cultural disposition, different sectors of the local public will have radically different experiences of the work depending on class position and education level. Secondly, there is a division between this differentiated local public and the work’s international audience, who remain —perversely—privileged “readers” of the work. A work such as Picasso in Palestine, in which a sharp division exists between these varied publics, can either make productive use of the gaps demarcating different sites of reception, or it can founder on the question of what sort of representation is disseminated and for whom. Considering the local audience, if one central premise of Picasso in Palestine was that it made visible a lack that Palestinians experience around institutions of art and encounters with artworks (a lack that, by extension, refers to the absence of an autonomous State in which an art museum might be ideologically and topographically situated), how this lack became visible, and to whom, is crucial in evaluating the exhibition’s efficacy. Fatima AbdulKarim estimated that 4,000 people from all over the West Bank and Israel visited the exhibition. Speaking to the intelligentsia was one thing, but I was also interested in this broader, subaltern public. Without any way to gauge the response of that over-generalised aggregate called “the public”, one was thrown back on supposition; since I could not presume to speak for them, their experience remained a cipher. Picasso in Palestine, I suspected, required a sociological as much as aesthetic analysis. Where the international audience was concerned, I stood on firmer ground, having experienced the exhibition, like them, most immediately as an image, a metonymic placeholder. Any documentation of the project could thus come to act as a représentatif, a surrogate standing in for the project as a whole. While still in the midst of my online news consumption phase, this question had preoccupied me. What material would congeal itself into a representation of the project? What would it signify, and how would this signification displace the unrepresentability of the process by which Picasso in Palestine came into being? Would it be an image of Buste de Femme ensconced in its acclimatised traveling case crossing Qalandiya checkpoint, or an image taken as the crate was hoisted by crane into the academy building? Would it be an image of the crowd at the opening listening to Salam Fayyad’s speech, or of the folkloric dance troupe that performed afterwards? Or would it be—the most widely reproduced image—the painting on display, flanked by armed guards stationed on either side of the double velvet stanchions? A project like Picasso in Palestine tests the assertion made by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville in Ici et Ailleurs that before producing one must distribute. 3. “IN ORDER THAT THE PORTRAIT MIGHT APPEAR” Images of Picasso in Palestine are already inscribed within the legacy of photographs and photographic practices that have been spawned by the emergence of the State of Israel, which, by creating one of the world’s most intransigent political situations, has provided ample opportunity for image production. In fact, images of the conflict play a substantial role for both parties as an auxiliary force in the public relations battle to shift international opinion one way or the other. What sort of images has the conflict produced? While the Nakba itself may have been sporadically documented, this cannot be said of the refugee crisis it produced, nor of the early years of the Israeli State, where Israel was largely responsible
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for producing its own photographic iconography of triumphal redemption in which images of a vibrant civil society intermingled with others depicting a nation of competent, technologically adept warriors. From the beginning, then, a situation existed where it was broadly agreed that Israel possessed the competency to shape its own iconography, while the image of Palestinians was shaped mainly by UN and Red Cross documentarians. The development of a Palestinian photographic iconography has thus been marked by a passage from being subjects before the objectifying lens of an Other to authoring their own unique iconography. The media savvy of the PLO, which in its early incarnation proved more adept at propaganda than strategy, played an active role in shaping this new Palestinian image. The PLO well understood that the battle for restitution or Statehood would, of necessity, be waged on the representational as well as the tactical level. Photography became a tactic in itself, where new images of Palestinians, depicted not as victims but as warriors, were produced to supersede those dating from the Nakba. Photographs of over-laden trucks, columns of woman with heaped panniers balanced atop their heads and barefoot children in tow, grandmothers traversing half-destroyed bridges and grandfathers gazing resignedly from the interiors of decrepit automobiles, while capable of eliciting sympathy, were ill-suited to the project of building a State. As my friend R. explained in a short course on Palestinian image production he gave one afternoon in his Ramallah studio, this new crop of images produced during the period of armed resistance from 1964 to 1970 differed both in subject matter and stylisation from those produced by humanitarians. Many were taken by Palestinian photographers educated in China, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere in the Communist bloc, and thus staged the anti-Zionist struggle through the lens of social realism, creating images like organisational charts, syncretistic amalgams of reference points and influences, aesthetic corollaries to the proxy wars then being waged between the Communist Bloc and the West.3 These photographs issued out of two imperatives: to respond dialectically to the pathos-ridden images of the Nakba, and to safeguard Palestinians from further disappearance even as renewing armed conflict made that likelihood inevitable. Thus they filled a double gap, the first created by the destroyed villages and towns left behind in the new Israeli State, and the second by the need to create a new iconography from the image of the fedayeen, one in accordance with the ideological imperatives of armed resistance, and one that would ensure that such images were endowed with the capacity to serve as surrogates, safeguarding against a second sort of disappearance that took the form of violent death or remand into Israeli prisons. This iconographic dilemma prompted Genet to write: The disappearance seems to be not only a vanishing but also a need to fill the gap with something different, perhaps the opposite of what is gone. As if there were a hole where the fedayee disappeared, a drawing, a photograph, any sort of portrait, seems to call him back in every sense of the term. Genet then asks a rhetorical question that, a quarter century after Prisoner of Love was first published, deserves re-elaboration: “Did he vanish deliberately in order that the portrait might appear?”4 Where Genet identifies an ethics of martyrdom involving the voluntary decision by a fedayee to give up his life in order to become an image, Ariella Azoulay posits another type of icono-ethical relationship inhering in the photographic topos of the occupation. In her book The Civil Contract of Photography, Azoulay asserts that photography is a tool for revealing the difference between citizens protected by the sovereignty of the State and Stateless persons who, deprived of recourse to law or political representation, exist in a no man’s land where catastrophe and disaster are perpetual features of the socio-economic landscape. More than an act of aesthetic appreciation, looking at (or as Azoulay puts it, “watching”) photographs is a civic skill activated by the apprehension that citizenship is not merely a status, a good, or a piece of private property, but rather implies an obligation to combat injuries perpetrated against citizen and non-citizen alike. Photographs create a semi-autonomous zone“, a space of political relations that are not mediated exclusively by the ruling power of the State and are not completely subject to the national logic that still overshadows the familiar political arena”.5 And just as Picasso in Palestine appears
to follow Godard and Miéville’s assertion that one needs to distribute prior to producing, in evoking a photographic space of mediated relationality, Azoulay also seems to refer to Ici et Ailleurs, particularly a section around the twenty-fifth minute, where the ethical stake of Azoulay’s theory of a photographic civic sphere is cast within the Hegelian concept of recognition: As a matter of fact it is likely that a chain also consists in arranging memories, chaining them in a certain order which will get everybody to find one’s place in the chain again. That is, to rediscover one’s own image. OK, but then: How does one find one’s own image in the other’s order or disorder? With the agreement or disagreement of the other? And then: How to construct one’s own image? One’s trademark, that is, an image that marks, that leaves tracks… by using the gaze of another that for convenience one calls my “likeness”. And under the gaze of a third person who is not yet there but is already represented by a photographic lens and who believes you or me, you and me when we look at this image. As a matter of fact it is likely that one constructs one’s own image with the other’s. Friend or enemy, you produce your image. You produce and consume your image with mine, distributing mine to your image.6 Invoked here is a Western subject interpolated by those unfortunate enough to have befallen the political disorder that the developed world so often propagates outside its borders, an ancillary cost to maintaining internal stability. Photography provides the proof of this process: “Taking photos, being photographed, and disseminating and looking at photos … provides a privileged access to the problem of impaired citizenship, as well as a moral practice in face of the vulnerability this condition creates.”7
4. PARTING SHOTS The work is the death mask of its conception. Walter Benjamin Azoulay, Godard, and Miéville’s appeal for us to locate our place in the image chain of late colonialism stands in contradistinction to the normative military, political, and semiotic operations by which, either tacitly or explicitly, subjugated peoples learn to accept their subjugation as an image along with the concrete situation it corresponds to. One could even asseverate that Picasso in Palestine’s most iconic, frequently disseminated image—that of Buste de Femme flanked by armed guards—banks precisely on the notion that a photograph possesses the capacity to make visible this differential relationship between citizen, non-citizen, and sovereign. That this image is capable both of staging the “impaired citizenship” of Palestinians and being a disturbing reminder of how fragile their government’s mandate actually is speaks to the iconic and discursive binaries that Picasso in Palestine navigated in its journey from Eindhoven to Ramallah. Navigating such disjunctures—between ostensibly stable democracies and occupied, fragmented societies—is part and parcel of the task of fabricating identity within a chain of images—“finding one’s own image in the other’s order or disorder”. This semio-ethical analysis fails to address what remains the knottiest element of Picasso in Palestine—that is, the irresolvable differential between the project’s structural implications and its documentary form. Few exhibitions in recent memory have so ambitiously intervened in a real political situation, and few have fallen as short in successfully representing this process concretely, leaving commentators such as myself to fill in the gaps. These gaps also redound to the limitations of photography, where, as Bertolt Brecht noted eighty years ago, “The situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG tells us next to nothing about these institutions.”8 This insight is all the more relevant considering Remco de Blaaij’s observation that much of the decision-making which ultimately allowed Picasso in Palestine to happen occurred behind closed doors, with little or no evidence—photographic or otherwise—to indicate how exactly permission for the painting’s passage was finally granted. How, in the end, does one represent the invisibility of bureaucratic procedure, when it operates not in accordance with the transparency of the law, but alongside it, in darkness? This is an especially apposite question considering that one of the project’s central presuppositions, by virtue of a synecdochic logic, is an assertion of the political and ethical efficacy of the ideals of universal right and transparency as embodied in and transmitted through the project of fabricating an art museum and installing within it a work of high modernism. The makers of Picasso in Palestine thus resuscitate both the museal project and that of “universal” autonomous art under the signs of their identification with an ascendant bourgeois civil society—perhaps doing so as a means of complicating the question of who is granted this privileged identity and who is barred from it, or perhaps not.9 Equally clear is that, conceptually, both museum and masterwork rest on a foundational claim identified with a prior (universal) cultural norm. As Judith Butler makes clear, the détournement of such a claim by those not authorised in advance to make it requires an act of translation to avoid appearing under the signs of a colonial, expansionist logic. However, any universal claim is itself not accomplished outside of being staged within a particular context, making it impossible to separate its formal from its cultural features. Picasso in Palestine’s deployment of the artist Picasso’s iconicity thus does not evade such a move’s historical baggage but rather enters into a situation of double infection contaminated both “by the particular contexts from which it emerges and in which it travels”.10 As Butler notes, the appropriation of the term “universal” by those who have been excluded from its purview commonly “produces a performative contradiction” that “is not self-cancelling, but exposes the spectral doubling of the concept itself”.11 One can cite the project’s deployment of a particular modernist artifact within its ersatz white cube as a carrier for this doubling, with its particular and universal aspects oscillating uneasily between the partiality of the local and “the ‘empty and ineradicable place’ of universality itself”.12 As claimants to the
legacy of a still-contested universality, neither Picasso nor Palestine escapes the shadow of either. This “confusion point” of particular universals and universal particulars might account for the unease expressed by many with how the folkloric Palestine of the fellah, with its traditional music and dancing, was deployed at the exhibition’s opening celebration. These elements, perceived by many as inappropriate or illfitting to the event, in themselves express certain tensions—between residual and emergent cultures, agrarian and urban lifestyles, conservative /religious and liberal/secular ideologies—that characterise life in the contemporary West Bank. I even came to suspect Hourani’s garish staging of the opening was a deliberate effort to tweak the sensibilities of the more westernised Palestinian culturati so as to make precisely this point. 5. THE PICASSO SYNDROME At some point I had begun to think of Picasso in Palestine as a vector in the epidemiological sense of demarcating the route of infection of a communicable disease, its passage through the mechanisms of occupation infecting the whole bureaucratic apparatus. In this viral capacity, I thought of the project as a dispositif for disambiguating how occupation is maintained, capable of marking the system it traversed —like the type of stink bomb the IDF has used lately against protesters in the West Bank which possesses a chemical signature capable of penetrating deep into the cellular tissue and persisting for days, creating a disagreeable and incriminating stench. Now I saw that the project’s potential was polyvalent. It could also be viewed as a Picasso complex, or, to use a term favored in Ramallah, a Picasso “syndrome”, a contagion producing illusions rather than symptoms—illusions further obfuscating the bureaucratic processes that the project hoped to uncover beneath a false representation of how they function. In this sense, Picasso in Palestine is a semiotically polymorphous work: Charles Esche could consider the work a successful attempt to refunction a museum collection as a political agent; Khaled Hourani could envision the work as anticipating (or promoting) a two-State solution; critics could claim that the project opened itself to instrumentalisation as publicity for the PA and its security apparatus; AbdulKarim could maintain that the project triumphed over insidious forces that attempted to thwart the exhibition; and on their website, the IDF could assume credit for waiving the normal sixteen percent duty “due to the special circumstances of this case” and for coordinating the artwork’s return to the Netherlands, adding as a parting comment that “the Civil Administration was pleased to contribute to this endeavor and will continue to assist in any and all such artistic and cultural efforts in the future”.13 It comes as no surprise, then, that the new analyses of Picasso’s sixty-nine-year-old painting are equally polyvalent. Buste de Femme can be “an ugly painting” (as AbdulKarim first thought) or, in a conversation recorded in the garden of the IAAP, Zizek could describe it as an “occupied face” whose gaze is split, with one “terrorised lively eye” cowering beneath a “horrible metallic eye like in Terminator”. The painting could be interpreted as depicting a pregnant or nursing mother with one eye on her child and another on the war, the opinion of a member of the security detail as recounted to me by AbdulKarim (repeating a story told previously to The Guardian newspaper). Even Picasso himself expressed this ambiguity. In one of the modern art galleries of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, there is displayed a wall text next to his 1943 painting Atelier Window (one of nine Picassos the museum owns or possesses on permanent loan), where one can find the following quote: “I have not painted the war but I have no doubt the war is in these paintings.” Depending on your perspective, Picasso in Palestine was a way of imagining a fully autonomous Palestine to come or a denial of its present unfreedom. All of these interpretations could be correct, and each, like the proverb of the blind men and the elephant, left other significations unread. Picasso in Palestine is, at heart, antinomic. The project, like the painting itself, had something for everyone, and its passivity towards being embraced by wildly disparate positions is perhaps what Charles Esche referred to when he spoke of the project as “ambivalent”. Some time during its passage from Eindhoven to Ramallah, it became a spectral double of itself, and this doubling was amplified by the dual scopic regimes the project, of necessity, came to inhabit: whatever else it stood for, it still stood for difference.
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6. WHAT DO PICTURES WANT? The question that has gone unasked, perhaps because on some level it is absurd, is: What does the Buste de Femme itself want? As W. J. T. Mitchell has noted, the default position of images is feminine, constructing spectatorship out of the image as bearer of a scrutinising male gaze. What a picture wants, Mitchell avers, is to switch places with the viewer, exchanging the passive acceptance of a look for the more active capacity to enthrall, to arrest, to capture the beholder’s attention, turning “him” into an image. “This effect is perhaps the clearest demonstration we have that the power of pictures and of women are modeled on one another and that this is a model of both pictures and women that is abject, mutilated, and castrated. The power they want is manifested as lack, not as possession.”14 Perhaps in Palestine even the most affirmative project lends itself to this sort of lack as a spectral double of its own aspirations, as if every catastrophe since the Nakba is always already inscribed there as a structural condition for becoming. The painting’s unconsidered desire could thus mirror the thwarted desire of Palestinians themselves: for a State, for restitution, for a museum to enshrine this State-to-come in a portrait, and in so doing, to resuscitate the primacy of a dominating masculine gaze. Palestine, prefigured as a woman within the tradition of resistance iconography, now appeared as a portrait without semblance, split within itself, and splitting, too, the vision of her beholders, whose gaze oscillated between the painting itself and the guards standing by with their weapons at the ready. Judith Butler writes, “To claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist that the ‘not yet’ is proper to an understanding of the universal itself: That which remains ‘unrealised’ by the universal constitutes it essentially.”15 What is “called back” by the image of Buste de Femme is not Genet’s lost fedayeen but a resemblance yet to emerge. 7. CODA When I first read of Mahmoud Abbas’s plan to press a vote for Statehood at the UN, for once my initial suspicion was born out by the passage of events. The crowds that gathered in West Bank cities to watch Abbas’s speech to the UN on September 23, 2011, might have perceived a hollow tone to their applause had they listened intently, for after the great fanfare and near universal enthusiasm that attended the submission of Palestine’s membership bid, a little under two months later, France joined Britain in agreeing to abstain, and the Security Council quietly announced its decision to postpone the vote indefinitely, saving the United States from the uncomfortable prospect of vetoing the measure. Wrote Chris McGeal of The Guardian, “The Portuguese ambassador, José Filipe Moraes Cabral, currently Security Council president, suggested that it was in no hurry to get to a vote. He said the council faces a ‘very busy workload’ and has yet to decide when it will meet to discuss the application.” After the UK announced its abstention, Foreign Secretary William Hague offered the absurd yet, in the context of the moment, eminently plausible explanation that while the PA “largely fulfills the criteria for UN membership”, granting it member status would impede its “ability to function effectively as a State.” The extended performance that was the UN membership application had foundered definitively on the shoals of realpolitik. During the months I worked on this text, I came to associate Picasso in Palestine with the UN vote, not only because the latter effected the scheduling of the former, but because they so clearly expressed the same desire: recognition of Palestine as a functioning civil society rather than some mutant affront to the smooth operation of international diplomacy. I also came to feel that they might, potentially, meet the same fate, episodes in a perpetually amnesiac news cycle, nothing changed and no gains accomplished. Outside of Palestine’s admission to UNESCO (a development that immediately prompted the United States to threaten withholding its contribution to the agency’s budget), the political theatrics that had appeared so heroic in September had by November been seemingly forgotten. When I spoke to Hourani in July, he said they were not sure what to do with the room where the Buste de Femme hung. It was still intact, its sheetrock walls ringing with a semiotic charge left over from the exhibition. Today it is used as a classroom. What it will be used for next remains an open question.
This text has been reproduced with permission from e-flux journal #34, April 2012; see http://www.e-flux.com/journal/no-good-time-for-anexhibition-reflections-on-the-picasso-in-palestine-project-part-ii/ 1
Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray, New York: New York Review Books, 2003: 19
2
When I asked Fatima AbdulKarim, who joined the Picasso in Palestine project after quitting her job at the PA Ministry of Foreign Relations, about Outset Contemporary Art Fund and its relationship to Israel (Outset, set up by Yana Peel and Candida Gertler—formerly a Goldman Sachs banker and a journalist, respectively—is a London-based arts charity with branch offices in Munich, Tel Aviv, and Mumbai), her answer was interesting for its diplomatic resourcefulness and careful negotiation of the issue: Outset is a British fund that we didn’t apply for: they swere interested in funding, we were happy to receive their funding. That was unconditional funding. Their money went into the Picasso talks, and the Picasso talks were set and planned by the IAAP, the Academy. Our guests were the ones invited. It was a discussion. It wasn’t an easy one, but we decided that this is a different kind of cooperation between institutions and different geographies. We did not look at them as partly run by Israelis with whatever agenda. And in fact, if at any point their help had become conditional, of course, the Academy would not put itself in such a position. But I mean, they do not represent themselves as partially run by Israelis, nor did we look at that side. This is what I feel about the involvement of Outset, which came by coincidence, and is perfectly fitting: I don’t see any problem with it. They do have an office in Tel Aviv, which is sponsored by Leumi Bank, but that is an affiliated office—just like UNESCO has an office in Tel Aviv and the Goethe Institute has an office in Tel Aviv. This is the way, unfortunately, things go in our country. My passport is stamped with a visa from Tel Aviv, although I applied to the German embassy in Ramallah. In a 2007 Sunday edition of the Times, Kate Spicer published an article entitled “They’re doing it for charity” about woman involved in charitable endeavors. This is what she has to say about the aforementioned Peel and Gertler: “Yana Peel and Candida Gertler… raise money through Outset, their contemporary art fund, to enable museums to buy new art; again, neither draws a salary. I had arranged to speak to them for this feature, but both pulled out after a newspaper piece appeared that focused a little too much on their wealthy husbands and the two women’s increasing social status, rather than the work Outset does.” (Gertler’s husband Zak is described online as one of the wealthiest property owners in Germany.)
3 Genet writes, “To anyone looking at their pictures on television or in the papers, the Palestinians seemed to girdle the earth so fast they were everywhere at once. But they saw themselves as swallowed up by all the worlds they travelled through.” (Prisoner of Love: 24.) He articulates a truth of which he may be only partially aware 4
ibid: 23
5
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Reva Mazali and Ruvik Danieli, Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2008: 12, 14
6
Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Ici et Ailleurs, Paris: Gaumont and Sonimage, 1976
7
Azoulay, ibid: 35-36
8
Quoted in Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’, in One Way Street and Other Writings, London: Verso, 1985: 255
9 While watching a discussion on YouTube among Hourani, de Blaaij, and Slavoj Žižek, my attention was arrested by the following exchange that frames the stake over asserting normalcy or non-normalcy in an interesting manner: Žižek: It’s not that you are here some stupid limited culture. No, you are the universal: enemies are making you particular! Hourani: Many people see this project like if it’s supported by the Salam Fayyad government, like it’s bringing a proposed kind of life [where] we could build institutions, we could make art museums, government… prepare everything for a state coming in the future. I’m not against this. Žižek: I’m not saying this is all. But I don’t like this symptomatical (sic) strategy. If it’s not already full freedom now, it’s collaboration. This is madness. Hourani: What makes things in-between in this confusion point [is that] if in Gaza you propose [this], if you are only in tunnels, in a very violent situation, in Ramallah, in the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank proposes [that] life is like a supermarket. There’s a well-known advertisement poster for the mobile phone company [from] three years ago. It says: “Ri nili”, “Call Me”. And I was asking a girl [who] comes from Gaza—she lives in Ramallah now—“Do you have this advertisement now in Gaza?” She said to me, “Now we have ‘Touk nili’—‘Shoot me’—Like [as] if we are living between the advertising of the mobile company or the advertising of Hamas militancy.” 10
Judith Butler, ‘Restaging the Universal’, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, London and New York: Verso Books, 2000: 40. The particularity of the universal haunts even its origins. Susan Buck-Morss asserts in ‘Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History’ that in conceptualising a master/slave dialectic, Hegel’s philosophical inquiry was inspired by his long advocacy of abolition and acute interest in the Haitian slave uprising against the French, which resulted in the first and only republic in the western hemisphere to be founded by former slaves, who based their political demands precisely on Enlightenment conceptions of universal rights denied them by the French
11
ibid: 32
12
ibid: 38
13 The post can be found at http://www.idfblog.com/2011/07/21/picassos-buste-de-femme-exhibited-inramallah/ 14
W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘What Do Pictures Really Want?’, October 77 Summer 1996: 76
15
Butler et al., ibid: 39
COSMOPOLITAMISM AND CULTURE
IAN MCLEAN Why read this book? The anthropologist George Marcus provides a good answer in the blurb on the back cover. Because it is by Nikos Papastergiadis, “the foremost scholar and participant observer of… art collectives and collaborations”. Though this is not even half of it. The book is about much more than collectives and collaborations; it tackles the thorny relationships between globalisation and contemporary art. Further, this foremost scholar is also a brilliant pedagogue (as opposed to demagogue). While the book is not all clear sailing—there is complex and at times difficult argument—like a good teacher Papastergiadis has the knack of distilling difficult ideas into clear sharp images. For example, in the closing pages of the book he visualises the structure of community formations in the age of globalisation as clusters created by the convergence of local (inside) and outside lines of communication or vectors of power and knowledge. Envisaging these clusters as more than a threshold, a liminal or third space, or sum of its lines, Papastergiadis pictures each as a shape and structure that, like a knot, has its own integrity. From this incisive image is constructed the argument of Cosmopolitanism and Culture.
Papastergiadis is one of the most influential sociologists of his generation, primarily because of his thinking about what happens at the intersections of cultures, particularly those that occur at the margins of mainstream society—in migrant communities, amongst refugees and other displaced groups. Why does this make him an honoured guest in the artworld? There are two reasons. Firstly, from the beginning of his career Papastergiadis’ sociology has in part been shaped by his experience of contemporary art. His early interest in the Outsider led him directly to the role of art as a bridge between self and Other. It also helped that this interest was shaped by the example of John Berger, who played a key part in the emerging new art history that now dominates artworld discourse and the interpretation of contemporary art. Secondly, sociology played a leading role in theorising the global turn that now drives contemporary art practice. This enabled Papastergiadis to make his mark, first through his early association with the leading postcolonial art journal Third Text, and then through his extensive writings on cosmopolitanism, hospitality, hybridity and cultural translations in contemporary art. For readers who have followed Papastergiadis’ writing over the last fifteen years or so, this latest book—Cosmopolitanism and Culture—offers little new in the way of theory or approach. Rather it is a summation, consolidation and distillation of his theoretical concerns over this period, providing an excellent introduction to his thinking and the significance of globalisation and cosmopolitanism in contemporary art. Here will be found his take on the full gamut of contemporary theorists. It is an essential book for anyone interested in contemporary art. The book is in two parts. The first part is sociological analyses of globalisation, with the second focusing on the impact of globalisation on contemporary art. This division might seem to undermine an essential point of Papastergiadis’ thesis, namely the entanglement of practice and theory, art and politics. It doesn’t help that, in an idealist fashion, we get the sociology (theory) first and then its application in art criticism (practice). However, Papastergiadis reiterates many times that art is not a reflection of theory but produces its own knowledge. Further, the second part is an exemplary account of the entanglement of practice and theory, and in the final chapter ‘Mobile Methods’, Papastergiadis embeds himself in the history he writes as if gesturing towards Stephen Muecke’s ficto-criticism or Pierre Nora’s “ego-histoire”. As a type of moving or ambivalent image, Papastergiadis’ writing is a symptom of its subject: the cosmopolitan condition of globalisation and art’s utopian impulse to be where it is not. I have a sense that Papastergiadis is grappling with a methodological conundrum that he has not yet resolved; a conundrum produced by the different sorts of knowledge produced by art and critical reflection. If the critical mode of the academy resists the blurring of difference—it is, in the scientific spirit, a practice of dissembling, of analysing through differentiation—this is not the case with art. Being a bridge between difference and incommensurability, art Papastergiadis says, “can hold together competing, if not conflicting, claims on identity”.1 Thus art is not a language or a logic in the sense that critique is. Papastergiadis suggests that it is an affect of the imagination in which the future is glimpsed. And just as artists once played a key role in imagining the forms of national consciousness before they became a power to be reckoned with, so today artists are shaping a post-national cosmopolitan imagination. This is one reason why Papastergiadis, the incisive critic, is attracted to the woolly domain of the aesthetic. The other reason is, that following Rancière, Papastergiadis believes that art does not simply reflect other forms of knowledge, but also produces knowledge and therefore power. Because art distributes the sensible (i.e. sensory knowledge), aesthetics is intimately involved in the political distribution of power. This is as evident in contemporary politics as it is in art. Papastergiadis quotes Jean Baudrillard and Boris Groys on this point: today “the act of war coincides… with its representation”.2 Thus aesthetics is not just a field of contemplation, as it has conventionally been conceived, but also a field of action, of praxis. It is unclear if Papastergiadis thinks this praxis is a universal condition of art or a particular characteristic of the contemporary (he seems to lean towards the former). However, the conjunction between art and politics is the central motive of his claim that art shows a political way through the paralysing fears that dominate current politics—fears largely associated with globalisation, as in
2 0 3 c o n t e m p o r a ry v i s u a l a r t + c u lt u r e b r oa d s h e e t 41. 3 2 012 the fear of refugees and the ‘War on Terror’. Papastergiadis insists that these “ambient fears” are not merely a media or shock-jock beat-up, but due to real ontological shifts in identity being forced by globalisation. Rallying against this fear is what he calls the cosmopolitan aesthetic and imagination of contemporary art, in which “the desire to stage an open conversation between the local and the global has emerged as a core aim among artists”.3 Papastergiadis’ interest in the aesthetic imagination demonstrates how deeply he has absorbed the discourse of art in the modern period. It also places his project at the centre of its avant-garde tradition, which Papastergiadis acknowledges despite also emphasising (in avant-garde and modernist fashion) the contemporaneous nature of his project and its difference from earlier forms of modernism. As an historian of ideas Papastergiadis has a clear grasp of the genealogy of contemporary art. Interestingly, for him Kant has not been dislodged from his throne in the pantheon of modernism despite the current activism of contemporary art. As the book reveals, the origin of Papastergiadis’ central concepts of the aesthetic imagination and cosmopolitanism can in large measure be traced to Kant’s writing on these subjects. Indeed, in a sort of Kantian doubling, Papastergiadis argues that “aesthetics is always cosmopolitan”.4 Despite its apparent ubiquity in the age of globalisation, today the cosmopolitan subject is marginalised in the discourse of the nation-State (this was not always the case). While today the cosmopolitan subject “appears both full in its proclamation of humanity”—because of its hospitality—it is also “spectral because it does not seek to be grounded in the form of the national citizen”.5 This explains why Papastergiadis seeks the cosmopolitan subject in displaced groups such as migrants, and insists that their political marginalisation does not equate to their irrelevance in a modern age so shaped by the politics of the nationState. (I would suggest that Papastergiadis underestimates the role of nationalism and citizenship in the migrant aesthetic.) As he puts it in his inimitable way: “Migrants move because they are already in the spirit of modernity.”6 And for him they are the harbinger of the future. The ambience of fear that stalks the politics of globalisation is, argues Papastergiadis the after-effect of an anachronistic nationalism, in which belonging is subjugated to the ideology of the nation-State. He calls this ideology “residentialism”. What we need, he counters, is “a new conceptual understanding of the interplay between mobility and belonging”.7 While Papastergiadis examines contemporary art within the frame of European humanism and its project of modernity, he investigates a good range of cosmopolitan experiences and geographical locations. In this respect the book points to the future trajectory of writing on contemporary art, which is now well articulated—as in the recent writing of Terry Smith. Nevertheless Papastergiadis’ theoretical models would benefit from greater attention to non-European notions of hospitality and cosmopolitanism. Further, obscured in his theorisation of the interplay between mobility and belonging is the modernisation of those nonEuropeans who stayed at home, and who now play central roles in the economy of globalisation and contemporary art. In Australia this latter category is most evident in remote Aboriginal communities. If their artists seem to be refugees in their own country, they are also residentialists with a deep ontological attachment to their country. Yet in an even more substantial way than any other form of cosmopolitanism, this indigenous residentialism eschews the form of the national citizen. Cosmopolitanism and Culture does consider indigenous cosmopolitanism. Given the indigenous history of this country and the ongoing Intervention it is difficult to see how the Melbourne-born and based Papastergiadis could avoid it. While he is more at ease with what might be dubbed the migrant indigenous aesthetic of artists such as Jimmie Durham—a Cherokee who for most of his life has chosen exile in Europe—Papastergiadis considers the initial Papunya Tula experience in the early 1970s to offer a limit case of his theory. It is the most difficult part of the book, testing the very notions of cultural interaction and translation. The early Papunya Tula movement tests the notions of cultural interaction and translation because of the incommensurability of worldviews and the extreme differences and inequality between the two parties. As Papastergiadis asked fifteen years ago, what if the indigenous “conceptual apparatus has been so damaged by the colonial encounter that the very possibility of exchange or dialogue seems no longer to exist?”8 The end result, argues Papastergiadis, was the necessity to invent the equivalent of “a previously unspoken mother tongue”9—which in this case was a type of aesthetic language evident in the acrylic abstractions of Papunya Tula painting. In framing the question in terms of a return to an original moment—the invention of language—Papastergiadis turns an aesthetic and political problem into an existential one evident in what he highlights as “the wordless awe” provoked by the art. Papastergiadis’ argument gets difficult when he attempts to wrest from an existential encounter the political ends that he normally associates with the cosmopolitan imagination. No wonder Richard Bell thinks Aboriginal art is a “White thing” to satisfy the romantic delusions of white people.
However, after an extended discussion on esoteric notions of the void, nothingness, sunyata (emptiness and radical impermanence) and kenosis (surrender), and the questions they raise, Papastergiadis unexpectedly announces; “In my mind, these questions are pointing in the wrong direction.” Returning to his senses, he suggests that an indigenous cosmopolitanism is to be found in the more commonplace “struggle to make your culture viable and extend its visibility amidst the global force of dispersion. It thrives in the desire to bring your culture into the cosmopolitan dialogue”.10 There is more mileage to be had in this line of argument than the belief that, in order to renovate their world, the Papunya Tula artists were required, like Dante, to spend a season traversing the void. Without wanting to diminish the accomplishment of the Papunya Tula artists against such great odds, their existential confrontation with the ground or groundlessness of language was no more or less than that of any outstanding creative achievement. Driving their cosmopolitan ambition was not a spiritual yearning—which they never lacked—but extreme political demands that they sought in the way they knew best and had most faith in: aesthetic means. Papastergiadis’ account of indigenous cosmopolitanism takes a different direction to his accounts of other forms of cosmopolitanism, and for this reason sits somewhat awkwardly in the book. However it plays a central role in his argument and introduces an important conclusion of the book: that the upsurge in collaborative art, especially amongst collectives’ groups, is the most engaged form of the cosmopolitan imagination in our times and the one in which the immanent relation between art and politics is most apparent. Drawing on Paul Carter’s brilliant examination of Geoffrey Bardon’s work at Papunya, Papastergiadis argues that the Aboriginal painting movement originated, amongst other things, in a collaborative venture between the white art teacher (Bardon) and the Aboriginal painters. His argument would have been better served if had focused more on Papunya Tula as a collective of artists, who not only worked in a collaborative spirit amongst themselves and Bardon but also emerged from a tradition in which art was normally part of collective and collaborative practices. As a theoretician and “participant observer” Papastergiadis unambiguously commits himself to the cosmopolitan aspirations of contemporary art to imagine the “new global self”, defined for example in this quote from the Fadaiat collective: “Our modernity has its own mobile borders, which, as always, are in search of the other: the external other that we call nature, and the internal other—subjectivity, ourselves in plural.”11 If, as David Harvey and Boris Groys have suggested, this puts contemporary art in the same camp as capitalism and offside with the Occupy movement—interestingly the Occupy movement has set up camp at dOCUMENTA (13), as if recognising which side the contemporary artworld is on —Papastergiadis believes (quoting Groys back at him) in “the capacity of art to exert ‘an autonomous power of resistance’”. He asks: “Why would artists that engage with cultural diversity ‘emerge’ only in order to fulfill the cannibalistic hunger of capital?”12 The rhetorical nature of the question gives away Papastergiadis commitment to the cosmopolitan imagination. The whole book could be considered an extended argument to settle this question. What makes it exceptional reading is that Papastergiadis’ commitments do not lessen his awareness of the utopianism of the cosmopolitan imagination and the unresolvable dialectic of our dealings with others. As Derrida argued, there will always be tension between the unconditional welcome of hospitality and the “imperative of sovereignty”, “the right to mobility” and the “hosts’ right to authority over their own home”.13 Notes 1 Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012: 7 2
ibid: 105
3
ibid: 9
4
ibid: 90
5
ibid: 77
6
ibid: 43
7
ibid: 53
8
Nikos Papastergiadis, ‘Tracing Hybridity in Theory’, in Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood eds, Debating Cultural Hybridity, London: Zed Books, 1997: 257-81 9
Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture: 149
10
ibid: 154
11
ibid: 72
12
ibid: 86
13
ibid: 58
THE DECADE REVISITED For the 5th year in a row as ART HK’s official education partner, Asia Art Archive presented ‘Backroom Conversations’, a series of discussions in which leading experts and practitioners in the contemporary art field consider key issues affecting the art world. For ‘The Decade Revisited’, Asia Art Archive invited art professionals to reflect on the past ten years through the introduction and consideration of three key works or projects that would be remembered as signifiers of the times and have the potential to impact upon the way we might consider contemporary art practice in the decade or even century to come. The following texts were presented by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-director of Exhibitions & Programs and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London; Gayatri Sinha, critic and curator, New Delhi; and June Yap, independent curator, Singapore, and are reproduded courtesy Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong and the authors. Based in Hong Kong, Asia Art Archive (AAA) is a nonprofit organisation dedicated to documenting the recent history of contemporary art in Asia within an international context. AAA is a point of convergence for critical thinking and dialogue and a proactive platform for diverse public, educational and residential programs for a wide range of audiences. http://www.aaa.org.hk
Hans Ulrich Obrist Revisiting a decade is as German author and film director Alexander Kluge has said something that usually requires “complexity”. We can consider a decade or a century in a large-scale exhibition, such as, for example, Okwui Enwezor’s The Short Century. Or it can be done in a book over many years, such as the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, in which he presents the idea of the impossibility of a synthetic image, something the Italian urbanist Stefan Boeri, who is obsessed by the idea of “the chronicle”, has always addressed. We are here, as Alighiero Boetti would say, on the nineteenth day of the fifth month of the twelfth year—actually in the second decade of the first century of the third millennium. And we are discussing here in Hong Kong the first decade of the first century of the third millennium. So, if I think back to this first decade, at the beginning of 2000, I met Tino Sehgal, who for me is one of the most influential and key artists of this decade. He was the youngest artist ever to have a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum only just less than a decade after having appeared in the art world. He uses exclusively human beings in his work. These works are not performances, what one could call “living sculptures”, that don’t have a beginning or an end; they’re a kind of a loop. I believe that his practice in retrospect (at a moment when two major works of his are about to open at dOCUMENTA [13] and the Tate Turbine Hall) has very much defined this decade, of not adding objects within what Hans Christoph Binswanger calls a “consciousness of limits of growth”.
The first decade of the first century of the third millennium has followed a very strict ritual for me. I have read every morning of every day (writer, poet and literary critic) Edouard Glissant, who died last year. For me he is the great author of the twenty-first century. Somewhat surprisingly, he is yet to be translated into English in any substantial way; many of his dozens of books are still only available in French. He was born in Martinique in 1928. His significance is to our time what Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze are to theirs. It was actually Alighiero Boetti who told me, when I met him as a teenager in 1986, to read Edouard Glissant, whose early ideas explored the reality of globalisation and its dangers of annihilating ‘difference’. It is this idea, of how we can think about producing ‘difference’ within a global dialogue, that is the key issue, in the decade from 2000 to 2010 in which the forces of globalisation have become more extreme than ever before. To summarise this idea of mondialite, Glissant proposes mondialite, as opposed to globalisation, as globalisation is very often homogenising and thus makes ‘difference’ disappear. Mondialite is an idea that does not refuse global dialogue, rather it engages a proliferation of dialogues, and thus tries to produce ‘difference’. This brings me to “creolisation”. Already in Glissant’s first novel, La Lézarde, from 1958, there is a blend of languages and cultures, which is such a decisive characteristic in all his work; this idea of “creolisation” being a process which never stops. One other key issue for this decade is the polyphony of centre. We no longer consider previous decades’ quest for one centre, where art and the avant garde were sited. Glissant thinks about islands and not continents, about island groups that have no centre, but consist of a stream of different islands and cultures. The exchange that takes place between them allows each to preserve their own identity, that within “the archipelago” there is “creolisation”—that while continents reject “mixings”, this “archipelagic thought” makes it possible to consider that neither each person’s nor the collective identity are fixed or finalised once and for all. In his summary of “archipelagic thought”, he stated that “I can change through exchange with the ‘other’, without losing or diluting my sense of self. That it is archipelagic thought that teaches us this.” To apply this thinking to museums led to his wonderful but unrealised ‘Museum for the 21st Century’, an archipelago museum perceived to include a network of interrelationships between various traditions and perspectives. This was not a museum where practices would be frozen into one, two or three, or a hundred objects; but one of shifting perspectives, a laboratory for the twenty-first century. I think for all of us who are engaged with art and art institutions, this is an extraordinary ‘toolbox’ (of thought) for our time. Glissant said we should revisit utopia, but not a utopia in a non-totalising way. An early twenty-first century utopia for him was a “trembling utopia”. “It must be said”, stated Glissant, “from the start this ‘trembling’ is not uncertainty, and it is not fear. In my opinion, every utopia passing through this ‘trembling’ thought is first of all one of instinctive feeling, it must reject categories of mixed thought and all categories of imperial thought. The whole world ‘trembles’, physically, geologically, mentally and also spiritually, because the whole world is looking for the point, not the station. This is a utopian point where all
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Opposite: Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Backroom Conversations, Art Asia Archive, Hong Kong, 19 May 2012 Photo courtesy Art Asia Archive Page 205 top: Tino Sehgal, The Kiss, 2006 (performance still, 4th Berlin Biennale) Photo courtesy the artist Page 205 bottom left and right : Jean-Luc Godard, Film Socialisme (film stills), 2011 Photos courtesy the artist
the world’s cultures and all the world’s imagination can meet and hear one another without dispersing or losing themselves. And that, I think, is utopia, above all. Utopia is a reality where one can meet with the other without losing himself.” And it is this that brings us back to what Glissant said about “the archipelago”. In a conversation I had with him Glissant said that if you think about the first decade of the first century of the third millennium, obviously September 11, 2001 positioned political events above all other realities. I think it is urgent to begin any discussion of this decade with ‘September 11’. One very compelling art project was proposed by Ellsworth Kelly for ‘Ground Zero’, a simple square expanse of grass, a lawn that would extend across the site. Ellsworth Kelly has written about the genesis for this idea—he said “I wrote to The New York Times about what to do with the World Trade Centre site, saying that an artist should solve the problem, not an architect or a designer. I suggested an enormous green mound for the space, and that was all; no beauty. The site should be a visionary experience. I sent to The New York Times a picture taken from the air of the site of a collage of green shades. This grass mound would be large enough so that all that was needed could be built underneath.” So this idea was not to add an object (into the situation), but to think about a ‘breath of oxygen’. This idea of injecting oxygen has much to do with another key figure who I consider has become another ‘toolbox’ for our age, the influential English architect Cedric Price, whose last project was the idea of bringing in air into the city instead of buildings. Somehow with the non-realisation of this idea by Ellsworth Kelly, something ‘went missing’. And this leads to another key work of this first decade of the first century of the third millennium, by Paul Chan. His amazing series, which we showed at the Serpentine Gallery, is a cycle of seven lights. In this series one light is a digital projection that addresses the notion of ‘September 11’, in which human figures continually appear to fall down. It is very much a work that resonates of this time and one about which I think of very often. We could also take into account Yang Fundong, one of the key artists in China of this decade. He worked for many years on his five-part film Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest. The idea of slowness in working, when artists are very often put on deadline, is something I observed frequently in the first decade of the first century of the third millennium, where they ‘liberated’ time and worked on something for five, six, seven, eight, ten years, that an artwork might take a decade to make. In this context of important artworks for the decade, we could also talk about Pierre Huyghe’s and Philippe Parreno’s No ghost, just a shell (2002), works which are clusters, exhibitions or social sculpture. It was a project that started in the late 1990s evolving over several years into the 2000s, as a series of exhibitions. Throughout the twentieth-century exhibitions have very often been the reality for art presentation. If we consider what are the three artworks of the decade, then we can also think about ways (of presentation) beyond the exhibition, such as those by Rikrit Tiravanija,
whose land art evolved into a kind of a social sculpture. Another work to consider would be Yto Barrada’s Cinematheque de Tanger, which started in 2005, again not an object but one of the most fascinating artworks of the decade that injected a ‘laboratory’ of cinema into the context of the city of Tangier. Or we could think about artworks that don’t move, about which I am currently most interested. The artwork that I have visited most in this first decade is Gerhard Richter’s stained glass windows in the Köln Cathedral, with its 11,000 mouth-blown square panels. Whenever you visit the cathedral it never seems the same, because according to how the light falls on it, each time it can be seen differently. As Richter told me, there is no depiction of sense, no message, and in a certain sense not even one of art, but ultimately it is art. Like the Rothko Chapel in Houston, there is this idea that there can be an artwork that we can visit, and which doesn’t move. We might also talk about archives for the twenty-first century. And finally we might talk about the last year of the first decade of the first century of the third millennium, which is the year 2010. It is interesting to end here, as it’s passing is recent. Something Dan Graham told me that he worked on in his time delay video installations was the idea of extended “present time”, being a “feedback to the brain” and a critique of the 1960s, when there was an interest in “instantaneous present time”, where everything was instantaneous, thrown away, disposable. Dan Graham’s work extends “present time”, extending into the “just passed” and then projected into the future. This obviously presents a connection with Walter Benjamin, who says we have collective amnesia about the “just passed” (or real history). 2010 is the pinnacle so far of the information age. In October of that year we saw the release of hundreds of thousands of classified USA diplomatic cables by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks. Activist media portals like Wikileaks exist in a state of suspended semi-autonomy, fundamentally important but also extremely fragile, generally steps ahead of their control or repression by the law. They are what anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey would call “temporary autonomous zones, fleeting pockets of anarchy that may exist today as perhaps the last possible revolutionary form”. As Hakim Bey says, “whether Wikileaks and its kind stand as the avant garde of a more open information future with an important introduction of new restrictions by the powers that be, what is clear is that beyond all the fog and flight disruption, even for Assange, he finally emerged at the eleventh hour to be the kind of cause célèbre of 2010”. That was certainly one of the most memorable things about 2010. And the last thing to mention in this presentation is ‘the cloud’. We must look at ‘the cloud’ as it is also an important event of the first decade of the first century of the third millennium. In the spring of 2010 there was this cloud of volcanic ash coming from Iceland. It temporarily brought much of Europe’s airspace to a week-long standstill, throwing us into a prolonged spell of confusion and setting the tenor for the remainder of the year. It revealed that the global technological interconnectedness of all things makes us especially vulnerable today in our over reliance upon this technology, which is obviously increasing in activity to obligate the observers of collective responsibility. In fact there has been a precedent for the 2010 ash cloud, in a similar persistent fog over Europe and North America that Benjamin Franklin described in 1783, which led to the famines and food shortages that have been attributed with a causative role in the French Revolution. And last but not least, one of the artworks I have probably looked at most in this first decade, of the first century of the third millennium, is Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme (2010). And it is this film of Godard’s that leads the discussion back to Paul Chan. In his talk (for AAA’s Intelligence Squared Asia Debate: Contemporary Art Excludes the 99 Percent), he said, “real freedom always feels alien at first and hard to comprehend”. I think that is very much true for this film. Paul then concluded that “the art I admire most is the kind I understand the least and keep on not understanding. It shows, uncompromisingly, that another world is possible.” This is an edited transcript of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s presentation for ‘The Decade Revisited’, and retains its spoken form. Page 206: Paul Chan, First Light (installation view) from the series The 7 lights, 2005-07 Photo courtesy the artist Page 207: Atul Dodiya, Breakfast Project/Piero Pierced, 2008 Photo courtesy the artist
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Gayatri Sinha A CHAPTER IN THREE PARTS I have responded to the subject of three leading expositions in ‘The Decade Revisited’ with three bodies of works from India and their resonance with the ‘Arab Spring’. My purpose is to look beyond a certain objectification of art, to see how an art work contains several moments and to relate these to our time. I would also like to turn out gaze away from the large exhibition as narrative to the individual gesture, or more specifically the moment. To quote Claudia Brodsky who describes an art work as a constellation of moments: “That an object can be made of, can contain ‘moments’ and that such ‘moments’ rather than any specific content are what compose its objectivity like that of truth must render such an object in the manner of Hegel an object that is always changing, and thus not ‘properly’ an art object at all.”1 There is a disturbing resonance in this decade with its defining book ends of 2002 and 2012. In February 2002 the Godhra carnage took place in the Indian state of Gujarat. In what is widely seen as a State-sponsored pogrom, nearly 3000 people were killed, their properties destroyed. The event tagged the reexamination of the word “secular” which is one of the founding principles of the Indian State. It shocked the nation, and had a far reaching effect on Indian and South Asian cultural institutions, and art production. Right through 2012, debates and judgements on the carnage, in the highest courts in India have been closely followed. This cultural volatility spiraled with other phenomenal markers of the decade. For the first time, the supremacy of Europe and America was met with a credible block, the rise of the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa as emerging cultural and economic powers. The BRICS have been refined further with IBSA or India, Brazil and South Africa that deliberately invoke their democratic identity to create a political distance from Russia and China. There is also IBSATI with India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey and Indonesia. We witness then the phenomenon of a postcolonial rising in the BRICS and the phenomenon of a strong Islamic component in IBSATI which stretches like an arc from Turkey to Indonesia. The decade began the way it ended, with the extreme vulnerability of art sites and art repositories, pushing for a reexamination of two key concepts which I will talk about: the postcolonial and the secular. From India to Hong Kong multiple readings of the postcolonial come into play. If the postcolonial is a perception of the Other from a distance, then the secular involves confronting the Other from within. Both of these concepts have been at the core of Asian contemporary thinking and a remapping of aesthetic territory, and have led to some of the most critically important art work of the decade. The Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 and the looting and destruction of the Kabul Museum, one of the richest repositories of Buddhist art, created a peculiar tension. It marked the beginning of a rising Asia, but a divided art world. There is today a faultline between those States where art institutions have an unbroken and proud history, and those that have been vandalised and are in a state of volatility. In the last decade artists in South Asia have obsessed over the destruction in the larger region through a remapping of concerns. Thus the Pan Asianness of the 2010s is very different from the ideals of Pan Asianism shared between Sun Yat-sen, Okakura Tenshin and Rabindranath Tagore of the 1910s with its poetics of cultural respect and integration. Lacerated and wounded bodies in Afghanistan and Iraq have been the subject of art, as much as their looted and emptied museums. Within India, the repository—the archive, the studio, the museum, the movie hall—have been violated in the name of rights. The three artists I would like to consider are Anish Kapoor, born in India and a migrant to Britain; Bharti Kher, born in England who returns and lives in India, and Atul Dodiya, who represents the profile of the urban Indian artist. Together they represent different aspects of “brain circulation”, and of postcolonial locations in diaspora, reverse migration, and urbanism. Anish Kapoor’s exceptional canonball work Shooting Into the Corner, was seen in 2010-11 in the large space of Mehboob studios in Mumbai. Once a flourishing site for Bollywood movies, of tragedy, love and romance, the stuff of the dreams of millions of Indians, the studio is now defunct. Kapoor’s canon shattered even the illusion of memory.
Every twenty minutes regular pulsating wax balls were fired from the canon which exploded like a bloody mass on the walls of the studio. The work evoked a slew of associations in India’s violent past. The artist has spoken of the corner in architecture as “almost symbolic of culture itself”. The aestheticisation of the violent gesture, of marking a territory, the spectatorial anticipation of loading the canon and a climactic shooting, are familiar from global media images as well as the domains of popular culture. The work also represented the faultline of an aesthetic rupture. The British High Commissioner to India spoke of Kapoor’s exhibition as “one of the biggest manifestations of British culture in India since 1947” —thus invoking the long history of the India British colonial exhibitions. Kapoor himself spoke of nation in personal terms, and said, “My India has found a voice in my art… I’m Indian, my sensibility is Indian. And I welcome that, rejoice in that, but the great battle nowadays is to occupy an aesthetic territory that isn’t linked to nationality.” Aesthetic territory in South Asia is marked with the memory of transgressions. It is also subject to territorialisation and remapping. Atul Dodiya has been a strong interpreter of the nation-State, of the uncertain legacy of Gandhi’s vision for India, and the insistent tension on its borders. In mimicking and subverting Gandhi’s patrimony Dodiya’s painting interrogates the modern Indian State. As an artist trained in the western academic style, he also engages in a sly subversion of the Western canon in a double act of mimicry. In the work titled Breakfast Project/Piero Pierced (2008) he takes Piero de la Francesca’s famous Arezzo mural and transfers it onto metal plates. This is not simple mimesis or quotation or citation. As a boy images of the mural were among his treasured books, and he chooses the book format to render the work. As the gaze lingers, seeking to decode this transfer of materials, we see that each of the small images bear a bullet-like hole. The silence of the works, stilled by the distance of history has been shot through with an embedded violence. The works reproduce the Arezzo mural’s climactic moments in the Christ cycle. But the artist intervenes with text which reads like lines from the daily newspaper. This is the everyday content of West Asia and South Asian
media reports, Dodiya’s chosen artistic and cartographic space, its peoples and its wars. Like the rhythmic certainty of Kapoor’s pulsating canon, in image after image, is Dodiya’s very deliberated act of inflicting damage on the simulacrum of an art object. Kapoor’s Shooting into the Corner creates a work by the violent projection of the pellets and the accretion of the wax. The large bleed of the sculpture spills into architecture with evocations of war and the monotony of violence before our eyes. Dodiya creates the work through the reverse. The act of shooting, has already taken place. The violence has a historical imperative, of long buried hurts and transgressions. From his location as a postcolonial artist, Dodiya uses the transgressive gaze, of looking back at the Western canon from the fringes. In a time of a borderless global economy, the violation of the art site returns us to the question of “aesthetic territory” and compels us to reconsider our temporalities. The third artist, Bharti Kher’s work implicates capital and labour, postcolonial response and a shift in power relations. In two recent exhibitions, Bharti Kher mimics the nineteenth-century colonial movement of raw products out of the colonies and the return of the finished Westernised goods. Kher imports her found objects from the West, alters the objects with her own imprint and then sends them to the West bearing the marking of the Third World. The first work is a number of room heaters or radiators that Kher bought from the USA and shipped across to India in 2006. They lay in her studio until she worked on them in 2010-11. As domestic appliances that provide comfort in the cold West, their presence in India would render them dysfunctional and redundant. Now recreated like a monument the work appears as a rotten carcass bearing the marks of death, traversing economic histories. Says Kher, “From where I sit, the winds blowing nowadays from the West—from the places that were seats of power and authority throughout the twentiethcentury—are no longer as strong or reliable as they were. Travelling east these radiators have became defunct. I suppose I am sending them back to the West as messenger and, perhaps, as warning.”2 Hot Winds that blow from the West (2011) mimics the junk and obsolete material carried controversially to Third World shores, dumped in India, China and Africa. Dumping of waste is a practice approved by the World Bank, because of the relative economics of labour and is widely known as waste imperialism or garbage imperialism. In this decade the relocation of over 40,000 American factories to Mexico, India and China also has a resonance in this narrative of defunct room heaters making the transatlantic crossing. Kher’s other work mimics colonial trade and exchange that involved eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French mirrors, art objects of the kind patronised by the French ruling class and avidly acquired by the civilised world. French mirrors were imported into India by French generals at the Court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and became much admired. Rococo or Regency style mirrors tended to be embellished with horns, claws, cherubs, masks, and chimera marks of an ancient mythos, flattering the patron as he gazed in the mirror. General Ventura’s palace in Lahore contained a room “adorned with a profusion of mirrors in gilt frames which have an excellent effect”.3 Another ruler, Asad ud Daulah,
the Nawab of Awadh, imported a pair of mirrors from France though Claude Martiniere for the sum of Rs. 200,000 in 1780s, at a time when such a sum of money could buy vast tracts of land or sumptuous jewels.4 Bharti Kher’s highly deliberated act, of buying and importing antique French mirrors, bringing them into her studio in India, smashing them with a hammer, reinscribing them with black bindis and then returning the finished work for the India exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2011 provokes a serial enquiry. What relevance does this act of receiving, destroying, and then covering over have, in our context? Is the act of smashing the mirror an irretrievable violence against everything that the mirror suggests—the vanity of colonial European wealth? Does its copious covering with bindis seem like an act of reparation? Or is it a mark of postcolonial overwriting of the kind that bears the mark of Asia in the twenty-first century, of mass migration to Europe, and the proliferation of cheap Asian sweatshops? The bindis made in low tech industries bear their own gendered identity. As a political gesture the breaking of the mirror is used across the spectrum of postcolonial nations. Zhang Peili in China’s early significant video artwork 30 x 30 (1988) drops a mirror and then tries to piece again together. Kher goes a step further. By breaking and overwriting, she creates a visual conflict between wealth and poverty, refined taste and mass production, Eurocentric masculine and Asian feminine. I would also offer another trajectory on whether these works respond to the larger desecration, of the art site itself. The artists that I quote choose materials and objects from elsewhere, and so destabilise other materials and art histories. One of the consequences of the ‘Arab Spring’ has been the desecration of sites of art, museums and archaeological sites.This phenomenon gives the notion of overwriting a different signification. It involves creating what historian Rudy Koshar describes as “memory landscapes” that may incorporate monuments, historical buildings, memorials and cemeteries, which in turn become the embodied as contemporary art. The Bamiyan Buddhas is 2001 the Kabul Museum from 1994 to 2001 are a preamble to one of the most challenging decades for Asian art archives monuments and memorials. This inventory peaked with looting of the Iraq museum in 2003 when (incorrectly reorted in the media) eighty per cent of the 170,000 items stored in the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad were stolen. Beginning in December 2010 in Tunisia and spreading in outward waves till May 2011, the ‘Arab Spring’ is also a record of the looting of archaeological sites in virtually all the participating nation-States. The breaking in of the Egypt museum in January 2011, and of archaeological sites in Al-Saddah district, Yemen, has also been well documented. Most recently, in February 2012 the Maldives Museum pre Islamist Buddhist and Hindu images were destroyed. At the same time in this decade museums have seen unprecedented growth in West Asia, China and to a much smaller extent in India. So we have parallel instances of heightened vandalism of early histories that goes hand in hand with fervid museum building activity on the other. The greater Asia region is seeing a surging discontinuous loop of destruction, attempted repatriation and new sites, creating a remapping of aesthetic territories. This compels the question about aesthetic territory, of the passage from history to memory. Recent examples remind us how artists respond to cataclysms far away from the main event. Atul Dodiya and Afghanistan, Anita Dube and Iraq, Bharti Kher and the colonial wars have all responded to the phenomenon. From the dematerialisation of art object to “memory landscape” to “the moment” argues that art objects contain moments rather than any specific content and that in the process the art object is always changing. I would refer here to the specific case of India and to an expanded notion of art site. In the aftermath of Partition the separation of cultures created a poetics of loss. Nevertheless, a wave of Muslimness swept over popular culture and what came to be known as the genres of the “Muslim historical”, or the “Muslim social” flourished in Bollywood. Instead of addressing the trauma of the immediate Partition, or demonising the Other, India’s leading poets, Hindu or Muslim, writers and cinematographers, intellectuals and thinkers devoted enormous energy into an evocation of an earlier Muslim era of nostalgia, grandeur and heroism. The wars with Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s did nothing to dim the enthusiasm for the Muslim social and historical. At the apogee of this wave stands the 1960 film Mughal-e-Azam, the story of the clash between the Mughal emperors Akbar, his son Jehangir and the dancing
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girl Anarkali. Dramatically, the film in its opening shot displays a map of undivided India and proclaims “Main Hindustan Hoon I am Hindustan”. After forty-one years, in 2006, when Pakistanis imported a film the one they asked for was Mughal-e-Azam. On its fiftieth anniversary in 2010 Mughal-e-Azam was reinvoked as a site of truth—every object or set used in the film had been made with authentic materials and hereditary craftsmen. Mughal-e-Azam stands at the pinnacle of what is described as “Muslimness” as a subject in Indian art. The question is asked by Anand Taneja that why at a time when the government of India celebrated progressive modern secular India through hundreds of documentaries made right through the 1950s and 1960s, did the cult of the Muslim film flourish in Bombay’s Hindi cinema.5 The subject of “Muslimness” in Indian cinema has been specifically read as one of opposition and resistance to the postcolonial modern nation-State, of the disjunction between anti-colonial and the postcolonial modern. In the overwriting, Hindi cinema asserted Muslimness and Urdu as a valid language for an historic nostalgia. This elaborate performance of Muslim identity stands in contrast to the demonised Muslim subject of cinema today. That the fictional reflects the real is seen in the treatment of the intellectual and artist. The attacks on artist MF Husain his works, his museums and his private property, the banning of the writers Taslima Nasreen and Salman Rushdie puts India’s secular credentials into question. Just as Bollywood has quietly buried the Muslim social or historical, the State is unable to meet the challenge of accommodating the Other, real and imaginary. In effect the secular is realised by law, while the space for cultural engagement has shrunk. For the artist the decade has reconstituted the state of the social imaginary. In the artists that I quote there is a commonality of approach: their text and images are from elsewhere. In their choice of materials there is a new cultural subsuming, as they destabilise other materials and other art histories. With the ‘Arab Spring’ notions of Orientalism have been dislodged and will never be the same again. The question is whether within Asia, the concept of Orientalism, what can be expanded to what cultural theorist Stuart Hall calls “the spectacle of the other” like postcolonialism and secularism has now bottomed out, and is compelling new cultural discourses? As our theoretical frames change how do they impact upon material culture? Digital activism has had far reaching consequences for the hitherto settled material culture of the art world. Is the unsettledness of the sites of material culture perhaps the new way for Asia’s negotiations with the past? If we are to take something from this decade then from the ground of Asia, rejecting the binaries of Orientalism and the West can create the space for a third view. I would like to quote Stuart Hall here, who asks “have the repertories of representation around ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ changed or do earlier traces remain intact in contemporary society?”6 I would like to end with a work by Atul Dodiya who painted the Indian goddess of knowledge on the shutter of a shop, of the kind you see on the streets of India. It opens to reveal the map of Qatar, where MF Husain took refuge. The artist’s response has a commemorative and interpretive authority. It is in art that we see and record acts of exile, desecration, violence. It is in the challenge to art sites that the response of the contemporary artist has been most keen, breaking existing binaries and theoretical frames. Like Bharti Kher’s smashed mirror then, the reflection returns from not one but many Asias. Notes 1 Claudia Brodsky, ‘Framing the Sensuous: Objecthood and Objectivity’, in Claudia Brodsky et al., Art and Aesthetics after Adorno, Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2010: 80-81 2
In conversation with the artist
3
Charles Hugel, Travels in Kashmir and the Punjab, London: John Petheram, 1845. Reprinted 2003 by Oxford University Press
4
The French in India: From Diamond Traders to Sanskrit Scholars, ed. Rose Vincent, Mumbai: Popular Prakashan Private Ltd, 1990
5
‘Muslimness in Hindi Cinema’, Anand Vivek Taneja Seminar, India 2009
6
Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications & Open University, 1997: 225 Page 208: Bharti Kher, The skin speaks a language not of its own, 2006 Photo courtesy the artist Page 209: Cheo Chai-Hiang, Don’t Sit on Me (installation view, custom made traditional signs which read “Sacrifice the lower head” and “Protect the upper head” and suspended baobei), 2011 Photo courtesy the artist
June Yap The Decade Revisited It is an interesting opportunity to be speaking in the context of an art fair and I think it reqires us to consider the changing form of art fairs, both in terms of how fairs are keen to be associated with discursive practices, and how of such occasions also affect discursive practice. While the proximity to the fair perhaps results in an expanded audience for what might otherwise be dry conversation, at the same time, this proximity also affects what one might decide to speak of, in order to remain somewhat relevant to the present environment. Given the quality of aesthetic finish that a fair generally implies, not to mention the enjoyable events and settings for convivial conversations, I would like to speak about the experience of discomfort—referred to here in a few different senses—of the practice of working against the grain, of being affected by unease, and of being able to embrace the awareness of disquiet. The framing of this discussion and its stipulation upon my presentation is a look into the past decade, to see what the benefit of hindsight might uncover. And in this brief presentation perhaps more to intimate than to analyse, but yet to call attention to a few practices under a certain rubric. As our moderator pointed out, the title of ‘The Decade Revisited’ immediately begs for its subversion. The notion of being able to divine significance via three artworks from anywhere in the world, but within the last ten years, is rather a daunting task, snd one that I am not sure I can satisfy. The plan then here, true to attempts at rejoinder, is instead to focus on a rather narrow and limited geographic and chronological range, to suggest perhaps that time and space do not necessarily know any better. And where I shall also sneak in a fourth artist, but we will pretend that it is really to background the overall presentation of the other three.
The notion of taking a historical view, even one just ten years long, is one that is productive in the sense that Constantin Fasolt suggests, that “history is the product of a technology. It does not simply lie around like stones or apples, ready to be picked up by anyone who pleases. It must first be produced”.1 As I mentioned, I am not planning here to produce a historical view via artworks as signposts of history. Rather, that I take history also to be somewhat of a dangerous thing, as Nietzsche in his rambling tome titled The Use and Abuse of History proclaims that one cannot be happy unless one can live “unhistorically”2, and also as Paul Valery lists, amongst the dangers of history is its ability to “cause dreams, intoxicate, keep wounds open, torment one and make nations insufferable and vain”.3 Against all indications this presentation is not entirely about history, though given its framing it is about time. And perhaps it is my way of taking up what Paul Ricoeur describes as the pathway of philosophical hermeneutics, where an attempt is made at “the consideration of the historicity of the human experience in general”.4 Such that while a historical perspective and history appear to be central, or at least returning repeatedly, it is not in fact so. What I shall be referring to then through a few artworks, that themselves I am suggesting are significant in the contemporary, is of loose employments of historical material or of historical experience in artworks set within a small timeframe, using the subject of discomfort. The idea of disturbance and discomfiture is perhaps more articulated in theatre than in the visual arts, at least I feel it is, even today. But what is the value of discomfort you might ask? “True theatre” as suggested by Antonin Artaud, isn’t necessarily what is immediately pleasant. Speaking of theatre, he says that our “petrified idea of the theatre is connected with our petrified idea of culture without shadows”, that true theatre, “because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way”.5 And this is where we shall begin. With a work by a doyen of Singapore contemporary art and in a way through performance art, relating to theatre in some simplistic way, though strangely recurring in this presentation, is the figure of Tang Da Wu, here as the smuggled-in fourth artist, but in the presentation as its first. In a recent series curiously titled First Arts Council, a work that the artist I think does not wish for me to speak of too much of as it is ongoing, looks back at the beginnings of the National Arts Council in Singapore—Tang Da Wu’s incidental involvement with the development of the National Arts Council occurred while he was in London—the Council was established in 1991. Singapore had prior sent a contingent to London to understand how the British Arts Council came to be founded. The short story is that somewhere in that conversation, the impetus as revealed by the British Arts Council then on its founding, was “to prevent another Van Gogh”, a situation where an artist failed to be recognised within his lifetime. In the third presentation of this work, at the entrance to the gallery space, Tang Da Wu had a sign outside the gallery door that read “Gallery” in English and “Opening” in Japanese. The reference to “opening” has to do with his critique of how openings, and perhaps art fairs too, function. In conversation at this dismally attended opening, he reveals that openings are events where people come and congratulate the artist and gallery for the act of opening. However, what happens after or between openings is not spoken of—that of the conditions of artistic practice, its difficulties and lack of concern of the in-between. The introduction of this work here is for its being itself ‘a decade revisited’, looking back at the developments of art in Singapore through the artist’s work. More importantly, it also introduces my approach to the topic, where the artworks are those making the assessment of the conditions of art production.
The first artist I wish to speak about is Cheo Chai Hiang, with a work he presented in Malacca, a UNESCO world heritage city, titled Don’t Sit On Me (2011). It was a collaborative project where the artist provided a series of instructions to artists he knew in Singapore and Malaysia, inviting them to contribute to the exhibition. Cheo’s collaborative project was shown at the Tun Tan Cheng Lock Centre for Asian Architecture and Urban Heritage in Malacca. His instructions to his fellow contributors were to take a chair or stool and transform it into a five-legged chair or stool, with three long and two short legs, that could freely stand in some manner or other. The reference for this adapted seating device is found in a plaque by Cheo produced in a familiar-in-an-earlier-time-before-neon-signage form of wood, carving and gilt paint that reads “Network of Treasures”, a phrase inspired by pioneer Singaporean playwright Kuo Pao Kun’s play, Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral, about Admiral Zhenghe of the Ming dynasty who is historically known for his maritime travels throughout greater Asia. History aside, the inspiration of this work began with a piece of graffiti that the artist encountered on a subway train in Singapore that showed a phallus accompanied with the phrase, “don’t sit on me”. The furthering of this idea was its combination with the history of eunuchs, a profession with not unsubstantial physical discomfort involved, yet one with historical social prestige. In Kuo Pao Kun’s play, he speaks of the Imperial Palace of Beijing in which there was a chamber dedicated to the dried remains of eunuchs. They were called baobei, or “treasures”, and were suspended from the ceiling. The work in its final presentation, originally comprising these chairs contributed by various artists, with gold plated forms of the detached bodily part intended to be placed together with the chairs, was to elicit an uncomfortable response from the organisers of the space. Uncertain if it might offend and fearing reprisals the organisers erred on the side of over-caution, and pressured the artist to change its presentation. The weighty“treasures” that the artist produced in a bronze casting facility in Thailand and which were to be placed on the chairs contributed by the various invited artist friends, were put into a room that audiences could not enter. Yet to some extent, as the artist observed, suspending these “treasures” disembodied, recalled the playwright’s observation of the display in the historical Chinese chamber. Subsequent to the opening, upon a request by the venue organisers, the exhibition was only available for viewing on appointment, which meant that the final effect was that only a select few would have the opportunity to view this contemporary chamber of “treasures”. The second work on discomfort is an artwork that while it did not face problems of censure, elicited some responses of unease. This work is by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen that centered around the figure and state of mind of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The work consisted of four performances between 2007 and 2008, beginning with a one-night theatre performance titled The Avoidance of Love, based on Stanley Cavell’s essay, ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’, that took the form of an audition for the roles of the three daughters of King Lear that was presented as ‘live’ to the theatre audience. The ‘live’-ness of the work was realised through providing the actors with a flexible script indicating what they said was to be determined by themselves—that firstly they contributed to the ‘writing’ of the script, and secondly in the process of which the authenticity of their responses to the viewers was clear. In contrast, the lines for the other characters of this work—such as the Director, the Assistant Director and the Producer—came from the academic essays that the work referenced. In addition, Ho avoided full rehearsals in the process of producing this work, with no rehearsal where all members of the cast, and cast members who were to act as the production team, were present together. On watching one felt that the actors were speaking as they would in an actual audition, there was the awkward moment and the ad-libbed line that made the immediacy of the performance somewhere closer to performance art than theatre. The second, third and fourth parts of the project form a trilogy, with the first part, or second of the whole project, ‘Lear Enters’, based on Marvin Rosenberg’s essay produced in the form of an audition for the role of King Lear; the third part, ‘Dover Cliff’ and the ‘Conditions of Representation’ referencing Jonathan Goldberg’s essay, in the form of technical rehearsals for the scenes from King Lear that had traditionally proved most challenging for lighting, sound and stage design; and the fourth and final part, ‘The Lear Universe’ based on G. Wilson Knight’s essay in the form of a post-show discussion that was
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completely staged in a way to deny the ‘real’ audience any chance of interaction. In my view (and I think perhaps the artist’s as well) it was the idea presented in first part of the work, The Avoidance of Love, that frames and drives the entire project, although as is often the case within Ho’s works, it is usually a multitude of subjects and topics that surface and interweave, but which would exceed the available time in the present to speak of. Briefly and rather simplistically, it is Lear’s skepticism and avoidance of love that causes him to cast aside Cordelia, his youngest daughter, the one who it would appear loves him the most. As Gerald Bruns observes in Cavell’s analysis of Lear in denial, “Lear turns on Cordelia because he knows, or fears, from her directness, possibly from her look, anyhow from her refusal to play the game, that she can’t feign feigning but genuinely loves him: and it is this love (Cavell thinks) (that) Lear cannot bear.”6 Going back then to Ho’s work, Lear’s denial of Cordelia is matched by Ho’s denial of the audience of their desired experience—that appears in the work through the denial of the apparent loss of the actor’s ego that is assumed in theatre, the denial of the illusion of absorption in the theatrical performance by its insistence on repetition and the lack of a seamless narrative, and finally the denial of audience participation in the alleged post-show discussion. In a way Ho Tzu Nyen’s artwork, like Cordelia, refuses to play the part of placating daughter, which then turns the audience into ‘Lear’, so to speak, in their response, one of a certain indignation. The reviews of the work in the days to follow would reflect on the experience of discomfiture with the work, although the same work received positive responses in Brussels where it first opened. While the pushing of the limits of theatre was recognised in the review in Singapore’s main paper, its critique did not lag far behind.7 An independent online review echoed this critique, that “the production wasn’t a popular success”8, a reading that was framed in terms of adverse audience response, of bristling at the repetitive segments of the play, its refusal to ‘move on with the plot’, lines that were not delivered in the customary illusionistic naturalness of theatre, and a dialogue session that ignored the actual audiences who had come to see the play—basically all the elements that the artist had constructed into the work. What these recriminations failed to grasp was what the role of the audience had wrought upon theatre itself, that theatre was considered good only if it was pleased. Although I think the local criticism that would become uncomfortable for the artist, finding himself having to defend the formal choices he had made against a criteria of stroking an audience’s ego, perhaps it finally also demonstrated what the artist had predicted would be their response, and therein, he observes after, lies the real tragedy. The third work is by Wong Hoy Cheong, presented in 2010 but which has a history that goes back to an earlier work in 1991 titled Sook Ching, about the purge of Chinese males in Singapore and Malaya during the Second World War by the Japanese. The artist’s father was one who had survived the harrowing circumstances of imprisonment and the mass executions. Wong Hoy Cheong had in the earlier work interviewed people in Penang, his hometown, who recalled their experiences, some visibly shaken by the memory of that traumatic time. The work in 1991 arguably provides a more raw experience with its direct interviews interspersed by news headlines, photographs from the war, and accounts of those who never returned. In contrast, the artist’s revisiting of the period in his film Doghole in 2010 may appear as an aesthecised retelling of the stories of his father, prompted by a conference in which he presented interviews of war experiences. The question of the discomfort of historical trauma is one that is often glossed over for fear of present-time sensitivities. Wong Hoy Cheong’s approach in this work was to shift from simply representing the horrors of violence, although violence is portrayed, to take up the challenge of how to create a beautiful and sensuous depiction of the war without sacrificing its reality. In this the artist takes the historical material a step further, to blur and complicate this history, and in so doing our response to a problematic historical period that most of us do not have direct experience of, but that remains in our historical consciousness.
In this work, the vivid image of gaunt figures curled up in the overcrowded prison-hole, looking dazed with hunger and fear, recreates more immediacy the condition of horror in our media-oversaturated minds than might the verbal accounts of the generation past. Spliced with these images are dream-segments the artist imagines his father would have escaped into under these dire conditions. These sequences are in defiance of the horror of violence, cheerfully colourful, lively and almost humorous. At an execution in the woods, his protagonist (and the audience) sees an incongruously dressed woman singing the oddly romantic song ‘Without You’ by Chinese singer Bai Guang, who was allegedly complicit with the Japanese, but whose songs the artist’s father enjoyed. The film ends with his father being released from imprisonment for reasons unclear, and recollects his father’s and mother’s holiday travels around the world including Japan to see the 1970 World Expo. Wong Hoy Cheong’s juxtaposition of nightmarish war-time ordeal with humour, produces an effect of dissonance that the viewer has to resolve on their own. The work in this sense refuses to satisfy its audiences’ simple desire for outrage or redemption. As with Ho Tzu Nyen’s Lear, what one is left with is the recognition of one’s desire, a desire whose recognition perhaps vanity would not allow. Through these works, the focus of their reading is limited by the extent I am able to speak about them within this timeframe. And this focus is on reception, or more specifically the problem of reception, a condition that I think with the burgeoning number of large-scale, publicly accessible and mobile exhibitions and fairs, is something that we should consider. It is clear that reception, read in terms of public response alone is deeply problematic. But at the same time, the idealised objectivity of reception by a specialist elite (and we know who we are), cannot not go unreflected too. In the words of Herbert Blau that Ho Tzu Nyen also references, the audience is not extant but constructed, and in this the audience is too in a sense a historical process, which then in my mind is less an audience that is postulated and given gravity for political or economic purposes, than one that is thus open to possible imagination and reflection. As with Ho’s Lear, Lear’s fault is not his apparent rashness, but his ability to see the truth of the love that Cordelia has for him. And in this the suggestion is that the truth of discomfort that these works produce for us, perhaps speaks of the capacity to recognise the realities of the nature of the theatre we have produced for ourselves. Notes 1 Fasolt, Constantin, The Limits of History, London: University of Chicago Press, 2004: XIV 2
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, Adrian Collins (trans), Indianapolis & New York: Bobbs-Merrill, c1949, 1957: 20
3 Paul Valéry, The Outlook for Intelligence, Dennis Folliot (trans) and Jackson Matthews (trans & ed.) New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks, 1962: 114 4 Paul Ricoeur, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 73, No. 19, Seventy-Third Annual Meeting Eastern Division, American Philosophical Association, 1976: 683-695 5
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, Mary Caroline Richards (trans), New York: Grove Press: 12
6
Gerald Bruns, ‘Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1990: 612-632, 619
7
Adeline Chia, ‘A project with potential’, Straits Times, 16 June 2008
8
Ng Yi-Sheng, ‘Kings of the Asylum’, The Flying Inkpot, http://www.inkpotreviews.com/2008reviews/ 0611,king,ny.xml
Above: Peter Robinson, Gravitas Lite (installation view Cockatoo Island, Biennale of Sydney), 2012 Photo courtesy the artist, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland and Peter Mcleavey Gallery, Wellington
Page 2014: Liu Zhuoquan, Where are you?, 2012 Photo courtesy the artists and China Art Projects, Beijing
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FESTIVAL OF AVERAGE IDEAS ALL OUR RELATIONS: 18TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY
David Broker “Craft”, “obsessive” and “over curated” were just three of many disparaging comments riding a wave of negativity that washed over the 18th Biennale of Sydney throughout its opening days. Biennale openings are tiring affairs and initial impressions nearly always harsh because audiences have had little time to process the overwhelming amounts of information that curators feel compelled to impart. While early commentary should be taken with a grain of salt, as I set out on another biennale odyssey it became increasingly apparent that on this occasion the critics might have had a point. Ironically, this was to be an exhibition reflecting a new positivism that moved against the grain of what curators Catherine de Zegher and Gerald McMaster refer to as “negativity and disruption as strategies of change”. It is an exhibition that draws a line between the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries focusing on the idea that there is “a changing reality” in the wind, that is “apparent in a renewed attention to how things connect, how we relate to each other and to the world we inhabit”. A little New Age perhaps, but could make for a refreshing change. Far from being swept away by any sense of renewed connectivity however, it was difficult to feel anything except nostalgia for the 17th Biennale whose spaces had been usurped by a lesser being. It has to be said that David Elliott’s The Beauty of Distance: Songs for Survival in a Precarious Age, for all its overblown darkness was infinitely more exciting than All Our Relations.1 Although I am suspicious of the curatorial posturing that accompanies every international biennale, de Zegher and McMaster are a counterpoint to Elliott, whose sprawling conceptual terrain encompassed “the affirmative power of art in the face of unprecedented threats: conflict, famine, inequity, environmental despoliation and global warming”. Conversely, All Our Relations mines the “inclusionary practices of generative thinking, such as collaboration, conversation and compassion in the face of coercion and destruction”. Leaving plenty of room for manoeuvre, it begins unsurprisingly with an active and expansive curatorial dialogue that “will include artists and eventually the audience”. So where the maintenance of a critical distance between artist, audience and art work framed its predecessor, All Our Relations makes way for an orgy of “inclusiveness” where collaboration would take place on many levels. I wonder if I am a collaborator simply because I am there. In principle the notion of collaboration should not be problematic. There are excellent examples in recent Australian practice from DAMP to Brown Council, The Kingpins and Perth’s pvi collective, all to some extent organic, and none included. While collaboration often requires compromise and compromise is seldom the artist’s friend, the exchange of ideas always has and will be a distinguishing characteristic in the landscape of contemporary art. We have seen it work. In the expansive context of co-existence, conversation, juxtaposition and “purposeful connectivity”, however, the practice of collaboration becomes variously forced, contrived and equivocal. Monika Grzymala worked with the Euraba Artists and Papermakers and Boolarng Nangamai Aboriginal Art+Culture Studio and the result bears little relation to that of the famed papermakers whose delicate craft was developed to express specific cultural events/sensibilities. Like mutant dandruff Grzymala’s suspended paper is made from cotton offcuts from the local clothing industry in Boggabilla, an area where cotton is the major industry. Naturally there are environmental issues involved and while she dedicates her work “to Aboriginal people and their land”2,its dislocated sentimentality and the absence of imaginative engagement does them little justice. Even more concerning is Nyapanyapa Yunipingu’s Light Painting (2011) about which little satisfactory information is provided. While Aboriginal people have a history of collaboration and incorporating new ideas and materials into their practices, it doesn’t ring true that this Yolgnu iconoclast from Yirrkala, known for her angry mark making and capricious brush strokes has suddenly taken to the computer. Presumably this work has something to do with breaking from tradition but Nyapanyapa already did this, without technology.
Notions of collaboration often draw a long bow on Cockatoo Island where Sydney’s popular post-industrial ruins frame the works and dominate audience responses. There is an implicit expectation that artists or curators should in some way address the histories and/or topography of the site. Fujiko Nakaya uses a natural ravine to reference (local) weather in Living Chasm-Cockatoo Island (2012), through which visitors can get together and commune with a fog machine. The reality, however, is a bunch of hyperactive wet people whose erratic behaviour highlights the marked difference between the still silence of a foggy morning and the experience an artwork that is essentially a novelty. By the time the fog gets to intermingle with the dry mist of Craigie Horsfield and Reinier Rietveld’s collaboration in sound everyone is drying off and no one is listening. Equally novel is the “most popular work on the island”, Philip Beesley’s Hylozoic Series: Sibyl (2012), a hybrid of sculpture, engineering, experimental chemistry and architecture. It is worth noting the small role played by art in this kitsch environment that attempts to function in a similar way to a living system and “allows human interaction to trigger breathing, caressing, and swallowing motions”. Unfortunately this fragile fairytale forest with ice cave leanings requires crowd control by bossy invigilators. In spite of an interactive component the work is little more than a distraction with delusions of grandeur; claiming to offer a “vision (a vision) of how buildings in the future might move, think and feel”. There are many threads of self self-satisfied sentimentality that binds this Biennale, not the least of which is to be found in Lee Mingwie’s Mending Project (2012) a participatory installation in which the audience brings items of clothing for the artist to mend among the gaily coloured, cone-shaped spools masquerading as wall works. The act of mending, he hopes, takes on an emotional value in line with the nature of the damage and becomes a transformative transaction through the production of an object that is better than the original. The dangers of collaborating with an audience are even more marked in Nadia Myre’s The Scar Project (2005-12), where people are invited to make representations of their scars—physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual. Judging by the mountain of unbridled indulgence Myre is collecting to describe “the hurt across cultures and continents”3, the opportunity to sew one’s own scar and write its story is irresistible. Among the most gratuitous of the artists’ collaborations is that of Korean artists Yeesookyung and Park Young Sook whose Translated vases lay New Age sentiment with a trowel. Piecing together ceramic fragments from the rejected vases of master ceramicist Park Young Sook, Yeesookyung constructs a gigantic ball of uncertain delicacy and a surface akin to crazy paving. ‘Mending the wounds’ 24 carat gold seams cannot save hybrid love child that, as the artist puts it, “will stand as a metaphor of the way people become more mature and beautiful as they overcome suffering”.4 The survivors, Park Young Sook’s austere yet imposing ceramic moon jars that represent the twelve months of the year seem almost unnecessary in the face of what they might have become. Several artists appear to struggle on the transition from folkloric or traditional crafts to contemporary art and most don’t make it. Liu Zhuoquan’s much talked about Where are you, you know more secrets (2011-12) employs a laborious method called Neihua, where fine angled brushes are used to paint the inside of the object. Seeking to produce a “reflective” piece inside hundreds bottles that represent commercialisation and commercialism, these paintings of snake skins in a dense liquid black background might be resolutely macabre, but the conceptual and contemporary integrity of this work is at best oblique. Average ideas with grandiose aspirations literally cover Sydney’s waterfront. There are a number of works for which size matters, because they have little more than scale to offer. Pinaree Sanpitak’s vast canopy of winged packages and glass balloons at the Circular Quay’s Museum of Contemporary Art, based on the idea of breasts, clouds, fragility and nurturing is a case in point. The sound that momentarily blasts at the audience moving under selected zones within the work provides brief moments of relief in its frigid and colorless attempt to produce a sensory experience. The obsessive emphasis on craft and scale that defines this Biennale is broadly responsible for its problems.
The Static Eternity (2012), an embroidered house by Gao Rong in the Art Gallery of New South Wales is undoubtedly impressive, but largely in terms of its intense labour. Of less interest, the artist is a highly skilled embroiderer who maintains the refined needlework traditions of her ancestors via the production of a replica or simulacrum, a memento of her grand parents’ house. An obsession with minutiae reaches a breathtaking but ultimately unsatisfying climax in City of Ghost (2012) by Nipan Oranniwesna. Using stencils made from cut-out maps, Oranniwesna creates an extensive map of ten cities from white powder, a work that, you guessed it, explores the fragility of contemporary society. There is abundant fragility, but little exploration in another work that is unable to step up to its conceptual aspirations. Peter Robinson almost gets away with Gravitas Lite (2102), his monolithic contribution to Cockatoo Island’s industrial zone. Massive polystyrene chains and blocks referencing the convict built part of the island are a conceptual departure from his “love hate relationship with minimalism” through which polystyrene has served him well. Out of context, they are literal response to the history of the Island. However, it is difficult not to be overwhelmed by this work that integrates beautifully into its space of hyperreal obsolescence, a pristine intervention that mirrors its corroded environment. Jonathan Jones also scrapes through with a midden made from oyster shells and smashed bone china that effectively contracts time and brings ancient Aboriginal cultures into the present with a wry colonial twist. The island is disdainful of artists who pay no mind to its potent industrial/ historical character and both Robinson and Jones have sensitively taken an ‘if you can’t beat it join it’ approach. Some of the arguably more successful works sit least comfortably in the context of All Our Relations and just when the feel good, warm and fuzzy overkill is making you squeamish, there is slight relief. Like Robinson and Jones, Judith Wright might also have escaped, reputation intact. Scattered across Sydney Harbour, her contribution in this context seems almost unhinged. One of the few works of consequence in the Museum of Contemporary Art (of consequence), Wright’s shadowy and surreal underworld installation imagines the life of a lost child who lives on in the unearthly recesses of the artists mind. Juan Manuel Echavarría also tells a story that raises the dead with a series of digital lenticular (3D) photographs of the graves of people murdered in routine country massacres. Inhabitants of local villages have adopted the anonymous dead to save their souls. The Graves of Requiem NN (2006–11) are presented like a wall
of graffiti imagining, like Judith Wright, another palpable way to approach life after death. The dead are also resurrected by Binh Danh who has made chlorophyll prints of archival images and portraits from the Vietnam War on the leaves of tropical plants, that memories of those people might live on in the landscape. All Our Relations offers few challenges other than the search for work with which one can have some form of meaningful engagement. Overwhelmingly the work is facile and if not, it’s in danger of being compromised by the Aquarian context. In his Broadsheet interview (June 2012, Vol 41.2) Gerald McMaster says that, “the artists we are presenting engage with deep ideas and world issues, in a way directly related to our senses, rather than in the negative and critical way we have become accustomed to”. It would indeed be unfortunate if artists and audiences had become so cynical that they were unable to recognise or process optimism, but this is not the problem. While artists in this exhibition might engage with “deep ideas”, it is in ways that rarely rise above the obvious. In producing work for any of the diverse spaces on Cockatoo Island, for example, it is not enough to make some literal reference to something that happened on site. Like all effective public work it must command the space while also being appropriate. The package as presented by de Zegher and McMaster had some potential via its focus on collaborative practices, but falls short by side-stepping critical collaborations for elusive notions of inclusivity. It is unfortunate that “critical” and “negative” are so often found in the same sentence when they are not mutually exclusive. What is missing from so much of this Biennale is incisive critical analysis, be it positive or negative. Artists use sophisticated techniques to skim across (often fine) textural surfaces while producing works that tend to avoid cerebral nuance. At least All Our Relations raises one pertinent question for its audiences. Why go to so much trouble for so little? Notes 1 Quotations from the catalogue All Our Relations: 18th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, 2012: 49 2
Artist’s statement http://bos18.com/
3
ibid.
4
ibid.
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CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN WOMEN Danni Zuvela Feminism Never Happened was the title of an exhibition at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art in 2010 that focused on critical antagonisms within contemporary women’s art practice. Specifically, that exhibition was concerned with an exploration of the peculiar state of affairs, by which the same work of art might be read with both a feminist and an anti-feminist frame; and moreover, how “what one feminism promotes another necessarily opposes”. Contemporary Australia: Women, the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art’s major homegrown 2012 exhibition, despite some cast crossover, took an entirely different approach to women’s art. Contemporary Australia: Women exchanged the provocation and thorny criticality of Feminism Never Happened for a diffuse celebration of “diversity” across women’s practice. A survey of the achievements of senior, established and emerging women artists, at a time when, as curator Julie Ewington notes in her catalogue essay, women are more active and engaged in public life than ever before, Contemporary Australia: Women asked a more straightforward question: “What are women doing and making and claiming? Here and now?” The show surveys some fifty-six artists whose practice includes indigenous dot-paintings, drawing and watercolour through sculpture and textile installation, cinema, photography, video, animation and performance art. The problems animating the art of Feminism Never Happened are mostly absent from Contemporary Australia: Women. The exhibition deliberately avoids works that frankly address the systematic structural injustice that renders life ineluctably more circumscribed and less fulfilling for women than for men. Confrontational words like “patriarchy”, “privilege” and “oppression” are shunned. Ewington explains this deliberate eschewal of feminism is part of a curatorial ambit striving for “impartiality”, so that the show could be “open to the broadest range of projects”.1 This is entirely understandable, and probably rather prudent, given GoMA’s unique high visibility as the leading public art institution in a State so prone to fostering tin-pot right-wing dictatorships—for whom modern art is always already an object of suspicion, especially when advocating for the less powerful. It is nonetheless a slightly weird spectacle: contemporary art—putatively problem-based, status-quo questioning and above all, with something to say —bending over backwards to not say anything like, “things are a bit unjust for half the world’s population”. It’s funny when faux-arch-Republican Stephen Colbert rants, in his typically declamatory mode, about how “the ‘war on women’ is a liberal fantasy fanned by the lame-stream media”. It’s less funny when such a watershed exhibition as Contemporary Australia: Women dispenses with feminism/s at the level of the exhibition, preferring to “do” its “liberal fantasising” in other ways (such as in the exceptional side program of events which included hugely popular fortnightly GoMA Talks partnership powered by the awesomeness of all-female Radio National hosts, or in the spirited catalogue essay by Emily Maguire, who happily champions the ongoing urgency of feminist agendas). What’s not funny at all is the feeling that, as laudable as “diversity” may be as an organising strategy, it can also work to subtly disendorse works, approaches and makers occupying the less polite reaches of the spectrum of political engagement. So, works addressing themselves to provocations and incitements, or dealing with the critical problems of womanhood, are in the minority—but that’s not to say they are invisible. Deborah Kelly continues her uncompromising commitment to calling out injustice with two works. Kelly’s photomedia works celebrating the range of loving families constituted by Assisted Reproductive Technologies, The Miracles (2012), are presented in tondo format and deliberately styled after Renaissance paintings of disputed provenance or authenticity. This anthology of devotion arms that history in order to deploy its aesthetic loveliness to astutely comment on the changing sociology of the family, and particularly, the ongoing rage headaches caused by “the price of motherhood”. Kelly’s single channel video work, Beastliness (2011) presided over the foyer between the GoMA cinemas. As is appropriate for artists’ film and video, it literally acted as a mediator between the white cube of the exhibition space and the black box of the GoMA cinemas. On one level, Beastliness reads as a bacchanalian interspecies romp, as Kelly collages human, insect and animal parts in a syncopated frenzy of myth, music and movement. On another, the teleology
of the orgy works to cleverly deliver, tucked away within its sumptuous visuals, a critique of media and power: Beastliness’ accelerating kaleidoscope of sexy legs, high heels, breasts, lips and hair speak of gains made by women in the public sphere, but also (especially when it comes to all that hair), what has been lost. Furry feminine hybrids literally explode on climax, and resolve by consuming themselves, ourobouros-like. Kelly’s point resonates in the recurring quotation of pioneering photomontagist Hannah Hoch, whose feminism similarly took the form of re-imagining contemporaneous images of women, in order to estrange conventionalised femininity. Nearly a century later, bizarre syntheses and amalgamations are again a perfect strategy to underline (and undermine) the commodification of idealised female bodies within the larger operation of power. Kelly’s adroitness lies in her ability to project a fantasy of total cornucopic abandon, via a highly controlled embrace of the visual rhetorics of advertising, pornography and the entertainment industries. And there’s not a hint of defeatism or capitulation. When it comes to the ongoing conditions of inequality that determine the limits of women’s experience, Kelly seems to be suggesting, nothing succeeds like excess. The intrinsically interrelated nature of sexual-power dynamics with broader social injustice is also at the heart of Judy Watson’s work, which sensitively explored her matrilineal heritage in Waanyi country in north-western Queensland. Based on two linked family stories, in our skin (2012) works outwards from the account of a brutal massacre on traditional lands near Lawn Hill of which Watson’s great-great-grandmother was one of only a few reported survivors. It incorporates the efforts, a generation later, as State policy shifted from extermination to assimilation, of her grandmother and other children evading State removal from their families. Watson’s installation includes an ochre stain symbolically filled with salt; a grisly assortment of wax ears representing the ‘hunting trophies’ collected by white raiding parties of Lawn Hill; and a sculpture referencing a windbreak that offered her forebears partial shelter from a Native Police ambush. Together with grandmother’s song (2007), painted after the passing of Watson’s grandmother Grace, an allusive layering of apparitional elements conspiring together like the tissue of memory, Watson’s work speaks to the ongoing and disproportionate suffering of indigenous women in the violence of dispossession. Its accumulation of sadness affords access to an understanding normally excluded from the average visitor’s comprehension by the contingencies of culture and history. In our disinhibited culture of oversharing, giving testimony to difficult experiences is almost normative, and the challenge for a personal narrative is to achieve a meaningful resonance. Watson’s work suffers from the opposite fate. Individually, the works are imbued with a quiet beauty, pride, ingenuity and hope, but taken collectively they express an almost overwhelming—and utterly compelling —intensity of loss, longing and fury. In spite of its disavowal of feminism at the level of curatorial agenda, many of the concepts the show does embrace and elaborate are consonant with the lived practices of feminism/s and feminist art. Most notably, collaboration, performance and textile work emerge as recurring themes in Contemporary Australia: Women. An entire performance ‘strand’ within the exhibition—‘Embodied Acts’—features women in performances and performance documentation, which are explicitly linked in the catalogue and didactics to prior traditions of feminist art. Collaboration characterises these performances (e.g. Brown Council), while featuring also in other disciplines—painting with the Amata painters; and video art, with Soda_Jerk, whose works included a remix of women in screen melodrama and a performance-lecture. The resurgence of performance as both an object and a product of technology (not just in the shooting and editing of contemporary works, but in the easy access to documentation of historical women’s performance art) is part of a dynamic that includes the simultaneous re-emergence of low-tech textilebased women’s art. As Ewington explains, “encouraged by the revaluations of the domestic arts, artists now raid the repertoires of media associated for centuries with women, particularly textiles, the pleasure of long familiarity spiced by fresh recognition”. Textiles are everywhere in Contemporary Australia: Women—from Rose Nolan’s tunnel-tent HARD BUT FAIR: POINT/LESS (2009) to Louise Weaver’s five gorgeous sculptures including Bird Hide (2011) and to Hiromi Tango’s eyecatching Pistil (2011), a womb-like interwoven structure whose cheerfully multicoloured embroidery inescapably recalled, in a manner both visual and olfactory, the motley hair-wraps braided around and through hippie dreadlocks.
Of the textile-based works, Sandra Selig’s perhaps seems to speak least obviously to the repetitive drudgery of the domestic sphere and the history of “women’s work”. Selig’s imposition of the frame, via an intricate web of spun polyester, in prisms remember you (2011) appears at first as a pristine geometric poem, an architectural force which delicately but insistently intervenes in the space of the gallery. However, like the spider webs that fascinate Selig (the Webs from my Garden series, 2004-05 and universes, 2007), prisms remember you is both a protrusion and a void, a demarcation and an invitation. That invitation opens the work to history: spiders, weaving and spinning are, of course, an extraordinarily long symbolic and material tradition within female cultures across the globe. From ancient weaver-goddesses and arachnid worship, to oft-quoted rejoinders against biological determinism exemplified by female spiders’ dominance, to the practices of anti-nuke and anti-war protestors in the 1960s, who weaved literal webs as a symbol of women’s—and humankind’s—inextricable connectedness, the identification with spiders and webs has been a way for women to stake out territory from the authorities. While it’s unlikely that Selig’s web work is directly referencing these practices (‘tangling the war machine’, etc), the work nonetheless connects with these historical lineages, acting as a bridge in the manner of Luce Irigaray’s “sensible transcendental”, which (re)deploys sacred discourses in a dynamic relation with the lived and the everyday. What Selig’s thread-based configuration does, and what other major textile pieces in the exhibition do, is a contemporary version of this historical practice of women staking out space. Together with the work’s audio component—strings plucked on a custom-made instrument ‘sounding’ the installation—prisms remember you establishes a dialogue about the production of space within the fabric of everyday reality. As it opens itself to multiple interpretations, Selig’s complex thread arrangement recalls Elizabeth Grosz’s argument that “the constitution of territory is the fabrication of the space in which sensations may emerge, from which a rhythm, a tone, coloring, weight, texture may be extracted and moved elsewhere, may function for its own sake, may resonate for the sake of intensity alone”.2
As a major exhibition dedicated to the vibrancy and breadth of women’s artistic achievements, there is then a sort of latent feminism running throughout Contemporary Australia: Women—the politics of representation rather than agitation, perhaps underlining Rex Butler’s argument from Feminism Never Happened that as feminist art can now take virtually any shape, it is impossible not to make feminist art. And though the curatorial statement and some of the artists may eschew the ‘f-word’, another theme, stealthily recurring throughout the exhibition, somewhat undercut this commitment to apolitical post-feminist “diversity”. In the jagged, grasping silhouette of Judy Watson’s windbreak; in Sally Smart’s dangling dadaist dolls, and especially in the exaggerated forms of the company shadowing Judith Wright’s uncanny orchestra, there is a distinctly dark tenor which runs counter to the cheery image of chandelier-swinging gaiety adorning the exhibition catalogue. What really emblematises the exhibition are these night-creatures creeping from the deepest recesses of the unconscious—halfglimpsed shadowy spectres whose claustrophobic surroundings gnaw at certainty and generate a disorienting, even phantasmagorical affect. Perhaps, despite the desire to repress it, feminism’s spirit is something of an unquiet soul, and what Contemporary Australia: Women shows is that it will always find ways to return.
Contemporary Australia: Women, at Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 21 April – 22 July, 2012. Notes 1 Julie Ewington, ‘Here and Now’, Contemporary Australia: Women (catalogue), Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2012: 22 2
Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007
Above: Deborah Kelly, Beastliness (detail, video still), 2011 Photo courtesy the artist
LOOK. LOOK AGAIN An exhibition of the work of female artists in Australia over the past 125 years from the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art.
20 October - 15 December 2012
LAWRENCE WILSON ART GALLERY lwgallery.uwa.edu.au
CULTURAL PRECINCT DR HAROLD SCHENBERG ART CENTRE LAWRENCE WILSON ART GALLERY
35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA, Australia 6009 P +61 (0)8 6488 3707 F +61 (0)8 6488 1017 E lwag@uwa.edu.au W www.lwgallery.uwa.edu.au Open Tues-Sat llam - 5pm
CRUTHERS COLLECTION OF WOMEN’S ART
Sangeeta Sandrasegar, Untitled (Self portrait) (detail), 2009 Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art. Courtesy of the artist.
SHOTGUN: 15 SEPTEMBER - 7 OCTOBER 2012 TASMANIA’S BRIGHTEST EARLY-CAREER ARTISTS NEW WORK, INDUSTRY ACCESS AND CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT
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Image: I thought I had paid for everything, Lucienne Rickard and Carnival of Souls, Joel Crosswell. Photo: Peter Angus Robinson