Dominance and Revolution : The Image, the Struggle and the Use of Force

DOMINANCE AND REVOLUTION THE IMAGE, THE STRUGGLE AND

THE USE OF FORCE

CALARTS SCHOOL OF CRITICAL STUDIES

DOMINANCE AND REVOLUTION THE IMAGE, THE STRUGGLE AND THE USE OF FORCE

Themes of dominance and revolution are not so popular today. The idea of a comprehensive re-orientation of our world is claimed to be impossible, and the notion that there is a visible concentration of power that might be called dominant has been eviscerated by neo-liberal global capital as much as by the disaggregating mechanics of critical theory which has preferred to speak about horizontal forms of power as opposed to verticality.

In such case, the question of our social and political future has been described as open but also limited. Accordingly, on the one hand we are told that there are no grounds, no ‘givens’, no truth, which seems to hold the promise of open possibilities, but on the other hand these possibilities struggle to be free from the conventions and habits that not only define the condition of capitalism but also constrain us to its ontology. We are limited then, by our own diagnosis of the past, made through our assessment of our political failures but also by our beliefs and the development of ideologies that have taken the place of facts. The legacy of this has left us today in the scene of a post-tragic failure, a failure to imagine a world that is capable of being extracted from the one we currently inhabit. In this sense, capital defeats the ‘we’, critique has demolished the future and both have defeated the truth.

In this book, we document a series of talks over one semester that are part of the MA Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series, Spring, 2022. The series is part of a core class for our MA Aesthetics and Politics Graduate students in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, where our visitors lead seminars with students as well as present talks and discussion topics.

The format for this series consisted of three sets of talks each featuring one speaker and one respondent. These included Katerina Kolozova and Alice Lucy Rekab, Gean Moreno and Jaleh Monsoor and Anthony Bogues and James Trafford. In bringing these people together we sought to enable new dialogues across practice and theory; to understand theory as a form of practice and to ask how the production of ideas, beyond and in artistic and curatorial work produce and define reality and the political.

With this in mind we explored the possibility of theorizing, thinking and picturing the relations of the past, present and the future in a constructive sense. In doing this we crafted seminars and public presentations that foregrounded the complex dynamics of belief, suspicion, explication, rupture, and the perennial question of the relation of and between aesthetics and politics. The question of context, constraints, temporality and spatiality became vital across these discussions as we addressed the history of resistance and the methods that this has manifest, which now often define art, critique and the leftist struggle for emancipatory power. In the context of immanent critique that makes emancipation suspicious, critique as method without ground, does not escape the idealisms that it opposed, for it risks overdetermining critical method towards naive forms of dogmatism, fate and belief. In the wake of these problems, we opened up contemporary questions on the possibility for art and critique today, and how the quest for scientificity and critical analysis might encounter desires for unity both in forms of knowledge and in forms of collectivity and connectivity. For our discussion, these themes of transcendence often landed us in conversations and propositions for new parallel realities, new objective fictions, which did not necessarily need material invention but moreover social recognition. Key to this is the political question as to how these other spaces are identified, recognized and valued, from what address and what forms of power are at work in this. Throughout, we asked about the role and force of the image, the validity of speaking about the class struggle, the role of critique and reason for class consciousness, as well as race and equality. The question of a politics that can re-think the human, the subject and the ‘we’ became woven through this

AMANDA BEECH

and especially when today, universals are normatively extirpated in the subliminal negativity of identity politics’ co-option by neo-liberal neo-expressivism, as well as made suspicious in critiques coming as much from the right as the left. Here, we asked what it is to understand, communicate and picture the political, one that can delve into the complex that is initiated by negativity and constructive affirmation?

At the start of this book, Katerina Kolozova discusses the possibilities of the structure of catharsis in the mode of the theatrical, where a form of tragedy takes place that repudiates a dialectic of human emotions at its center that can easily be unified as a holistic form. Instead, tragedy is seen as an assemblage of a clash of structures in time and space. Such an assemblage is resistant, for it articulates the irreducibility of alienation to philosophy itself, where philosophy is read as the pathology of an idealism that obfuscates and also fetishizes the foreclosure of the real. But it is also constructive since Kolozova asks us to redescribe the paradigms of human production with another metaphysics; a view that affiliates itself with the alienated, automated and structural elements of the human as animal-condition so as to see another story at work in what is often solely taken as the history of our self-narration. Alice Lucy Rekab responds to this work with a poetics of their own, that extends these questions to an alien anthropology, that included the degraded pixelated haze of cultic practices, alien autopsies and the working of primordial materials.

Both presentations ask us to consider if it is possible to take account of the complex form of science that we need to speak to today, that is; a science that knows that it cannot claim the hubris of objectivity but at the same time, that it must also understand that to sacrifice itself to humility, by declaring itself as a form of subjective mythology is equally an invention, and, is equally false.

In section two, Gean Moreno explores the complex history of revolutionary art and revolutionary politics focusing on the work of Juan Francisco Elso. His work deals with the antagonisms inside the Cuban revolutionary process as it sought to rectify and realign its politics with the dreams that had acted as the revolution’s original inspiration. Citing this tension

between this act of thinking and doing, and the force that is required to unify the abstract idea to empirical forms of practice in everyday life, Jaleh Mansoor’s response takes this question up directly by asking how the possibility of agency, dreams of social and political change can be prosecuted without the totalization of force over others. This undergirded her curiosity regarding the claims that various Cuban artists of this 1980’s generation were already working in the vein of decolonizing critiques and practices; manifesting a form of critique that had yet to be named.

Both bring us to urgent and difficult questions regarding the ways in which critical cultural works obtain an out-ofjointness; that is they demonstrate and reinscribe the dissonance of the impossibility of equality between idea and form, people and people, and at the same time, the impossibility of being unequal to that time.

Finally, Anthony Bogues’ text locates specific question on the dynamics of image-power in the structure of Colonial avant-gardist aesthetics and how this differs in structure to the operations of “marvelous realism” in the context of Haitian art and voodoo practices. The avant-gardism of Picasso that seeks an ‘outside’ to the conventions of Western aesthetic production did so by colonizing and reifying the non-western other, as its primary figure, thus aiding and abetting the infrastructural operations of Empire in the name of critique. Bogues brings to light the ironies and disasters of such methods by contending that there is indeed an ‘other’ that does not require such relations. James Trafford responds by working through Sylvia Wynter’s critique, in order to repose the question of the imbrication of politics and aesthetics that has congealed to underwrite a history of Colonialism and anti-Blackness. Both Bogues and Trafford bring us to face the question of where such fissures lie, where dehesion exists, but also how we must see how the relation that is this non-relation must be re-thought as a problem in itself.

The ‘we’ that is referred to in this introduction, is that abstraction of a collective ‘we’, one that is imagined to come, but of course this slips between that, and the ‘we’ in this local case; a group of graduate students from CalArts who engaged with these questions for a short semester. Some of the responses

deal specifically with reading matter that each presenter selected as resources, and some ask questions directly to the content of the lectures that were given on that day. In this way, the conversations that emerge and are made possible in this book offer a range of opportunities for new extensions and conversations. We acknowledge that this is just a starting point and we are delighted to share this work between student, presenter and respondent in this small volume.

AMANDA BEECH DEAN SCHOOL OF CRITICAL STUDIES

SESSION I

ARISTOTLE’S TECHNÊ: OF POETICS AS THE GENERIC MODEL OF ALL ARTIFICIAL

KATERINA KOLOZOVA

The concept of technê, which is one of the central terms in Aristotle’s discussion of what the moderns call “art” today is an examination of the poetic technique, craft and craftsmanship. In our 21st century, predominantly post-idealist context, it might resonate as debasing to art—creation is reduced to craft, no different than that of any other skill of human creation, even the most banal one (plumbing, for example?)1. But did Aristotle think any form of technē as inferior to what can be put in proximity to philosophy, which, in Ancient Greece, was taken to be a form of fulfilled living (a life infused with the love for wisdom)? I argue the opposite: my examinations of his Rhetoric, The Organon, Metaphysics, necessary for a book I am co-authoring with two colleagues from the UK on the topic of materialism in philosophy, sciences and computing, show that “craft” is a term Aristotle uses to describe a valid logical or scientific (philosophical) reasoning. But it is also the other way around. In Poetics itself, Aristotle argues that in the craft of the arts, or for that matter in any form of craft, we see at work the ability to detect something we will tentatively call structure and, by doing so, abstract it from its material foundation. Having begun our discussion here with an examination of the status of technē in Aristotle’s treatise, I will argue that Aristotle’s Poetics is a purely formal execution of an argument, laying out the elements and the principles of how the poetic craft is crafted—how art comes to being. It comes to being as a structure in a way, an organizational unity which “comes to life” by the workings of its elements according to particular inherent laws. It “lives” as a living organism, it brings forth lively

emotions (passions in the etymological sense or as Spinoza used the term)2 or contemplation, it moves the human psyche (or mind, if you will), and yet the coming to being of art— or tragedy, more specifically—is dismantled in order to study its mechanisms as the only way of explaining how it operates as an organic whole. The method resembles, I argue, Saussure’s approach to language whereby the utmost banal mechanicity (phonetic or otherwise) is not only in no contradiction with the organic self-development and branching out of language, and the sensation of it being naturally flowing in use, but rather explains these very possibilities3.

Aristotle’s core of the argument as to what constitutes tragedy, and thereof art/poesis in all its forms, does not lie in the dialectics of emotions (and morals) culminating in catharsis but in what he calls systasis—the ‘standing together”—of the elements of the tragedy that consist of movement and change (drama, in its etymological sense), i.e., of that which happens, of “events.” According to the classical interpretation of the Poetics, the essence of tragedy is catharsis (παθημάτων κάθαρσιν), and that section of the text 1449b21-28 is what is habitually treated as “the definition of tragedy.” On the other hand, thereis recurring reference to ἡ τῶν πραγμάτων σύστασις, or the “systasis of deeds” (or of things, elements) as the ousia, the true being, substance or essence of tragedy, namely in the following parts of the Poetics: 1450a15, a32, b22, 1452a19, 1453a3, 1453a23, 1453a31, 1453b2, 1454a14, 1454a34, 1459b21 и 1460а34. One of the leading classical philologists of what was then the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, Mihail Petrusevski, challenged the canonical interpretation by offering a dissident paleographic analysis of the original arguing that by medieval times an error in writing has appeared and the place which should read τῶν πραγμάτων σύστασις was erroneously reconstructed as παθημάτων κάθαρσιν. The dissident interpretation is presented in Petrusevski’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics into Macedonian following an elaboration of the discovery published in Macedonian at length and summarized in French in perhaps the most prestigious Yugoslav journal of classical philology of the time, Antiquité Vivante (1954).

The “definition” of tragedy according to which the essence of the tragic is catharsis was imposed as authoritative thanks

to the canon of interpretation beginning with the Renaissance period and relying on a particular script or rather a copy (of an older scroll) of Poetics. The words “catharsis of passions” are misspelled on the damaged and illegible place in the text, according to Petrushevski5. The classical interpretative solution is at odds with the other parts of the text that define tragedy or the work of art as systasis or composition of the elements or things or events, Petrushevski claims. It is also at odds with Poetics’ basic intentions in attempting to respond to Plato’s Phaedrus 268 cd.

A work of art, conceived as systasis (rather than catharsis), is therefore a self-sustained, finite system, with a virtually infinite range of structural rearrangements and branching out. It operates as an automaton in the sense in which Jacques Lacan, in his structuralist rendition of psychoanalysis, uses the term claiming to have found its origin (and the sense in which he uses it) in the work of Aristotle’s Physics6 .

I argue that the signifying automaton—or the poetic systasis cannot exist either in Aristotle, or in Saussure, or in Lacan, or in what I identify as the automation of value production in Marx, without a material support, without being determined in the last instance as matter, even if its identity of the last instance (“identity” as idempotence, as per François Laruelle)7 is “real abstraction” (in Sohn-Rethel’s sense)8.

Endnotes

1 Cf. Amanda Beech, “Concept without Difference: The Promise of the Generic,” in Christoph Cox, Jenny Jaskey, Suhail Malik (eds.) Realism Materialism Art (Sternberg Press with CCS Bard, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2015), 292.

2 Spinoza, Benedict de. 2003. The Ethics. Translated by R. H. M. Elwes. The Project Gutenberg Etext Publication, available at https://www. gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm, accessed on 7 October 2022.

3 Katerina Kolozova, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy (London UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 55-88.

4 Aristotle, ed. R. Kassel, Aristotle’s Ars Poetica (Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1966), available at Perseus Tufts Project URL http://www. perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0055, accessed on 30 September2022.

5 Antiquité Vivante/Živa Antika 4-2 (1954), 230, 234-235; Petrusevski’s argument draws on a prior analysis offered by Heinrich Otte, Kennt Aristoteles die sogenannte tragishe Katharsis (Berlin: Weidmann, 1912).

6 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 53–54.

7 François Laruelle, Theories of Identity, trans. by Alyosha Erdebi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016)

8 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. by Martin Sohn-Rethel (Haymarket Books, 2021).

A RESPONSE TO ARISTOTLE’S TECHNÊ: OF POETICS AS THE GENERIC MODEL OF ALL ARTIFICIAL

ALICE LUCY REKAB

Thank you for inviting me to present alongside Katerina and respond to this insightful paper. Today i will present a short reading bringing together some of my thoughts in response to reading Katerina’s work on Art, Materialism and non-philosophy and introduce my film Woven Earth Time Body, which I began making around the same time I started reading and writing non-philosophy and philo-fiction as part of my artistic practice. I will then read a list poem of terms I related to our respective work before screening the film, which has a soundtrack but no dialogue.

Woven Earth Time Body was made from fragments of existing footage and sounds gathered first in London in 2013 when I had just begun writing my PhD at The London Graduate School, exploring how non-standard philosophy could be used or lend its modelling to a practice of art making. Since that time the film has been added to, using original footage filmed on location in Sierra Leone, where my dad comes from, and continues to be a “work in process” today.

From the beginning, the work sought to explore ideas of mimesis and looping, both in terms of technology and in terms of visual storytelling, while thinking about the body through time, its relation to the earth and particularly how the earth and the body are narrated or re-told through visual representations of archaeology and geology respectively. I was also interested in how fiction, in particular science fiction, made use of this technology-based language of representation, a visual language of “science” or “facticity” to create rich and credible narratives about other worlds. Some of the footage in the film is taken from homemade Mars landing reconstructions

and pieces of subjective image analysis from YouTubers and conspiracy theorists. Another section of footage shows an alien/mummy autopsy that claims to prove aliens were with us since antiquity. The sound track is made from layered loops sampled from planetarium videos, the music that plays while graphics map the universe.

What the work was trying to do speaks a lot to what I was reading when I made it, on how an artistic practice can become a kind of processing centre for philosophical concepts but also how it can take those concepts and re-purpose them for its own uses. I was thinking about the body, experience, time and re-representation, and non-philosophies conception of the non-human as radical diad, both subject-object-subject, physical and conceptual, unlimited to standard definitions of what is human and what is and has been historically hierarchised and excluded from that definition. This thinking leads to an expansive theory which makes room for the future and opens up questions about the positionality, “stance” or “posture” of the past narrators.

On reading Katerina’s abstract and previous work relating to the subject of art, non-philosophy and materialism that informed my own research and practice at the time this film was made, I began to think about the practice of treating philosophy as art material equal to any other (clay, paint, video clips etc.) and of reaching into philosophical history as an archeology, or perhaps a forensics, a reconstruction of lost worlds from a single feature in an otherwise unknowable landscape–the exaggeration of a series of marks (language) that indicates: thought once happened here. Uncovering a figure in the dirt noting signs of struggle, processes of extraction, refinement and clarification–distinguishing meaning from non-meaning, truth from fiction, and knowing they are not so easily separated. I connect this gesture or approach to thought and making with what Francois Laruelle and AnneFrancoise Schmid have described as philo-fiction, and consider this film as philo-fiction that can act in response to the body of Katerina’s work, its exploration of the physical, poetics, catharsis and tragedy.

Thinking through the film, its origins, and the conceptual framework of Katerina’s project, I put together a list of words

that indicate what I see as a shared conceptual constellation, like a visit to the planetarium. I read these like the names of stars mapping out an area of the sky from a very particular position on the earth. The poem will act as a bridge between the two presentations and the film will follow immediately after.

Bodies

Being

Histories

sciences

Fictions

Recursive

Looping

Timelines

Model Figures

Burial

Riverbed

Mapping

Enmeshed

Entangled

Faded

Coded

Retold

Additives

Techné

Telos

Thanos

Mimesis

One

Unified

Equalised

lowered

Replica

Remote

Remade

Reconstitute

Edit

Excavate

Narrative

Object

Subject

Object

Third

Position View

Future

Imagined

Cyborg

Automaton

Golum

Ontos

Child of clay

A RESPONSE TO ARISTOTLE’S TECHNÊ: OF POETICS AS THE GENERIC MODEL OF ALL ARTIFICIAL

C. BAIN

i’m in a VR headset moving through animated constellations. I look down at my body and it isn’t there. Losing you quickly became a physical problem. Necrotic growth, the living tissue fighting blindly against the part that’s died. i’m being dramatic. If we understand tragedy, as Kolozova via Aristotle frames it, not as a catharsis of feelings, but as a series of inevitabilities, technology, automata, we understand extremes of feeling (which also constitute the highest form of art) as adjacent to computational language: inevitable. The moment when things had to be this way initiated when?

I take off the headset and you’re walking across the other end of the hall, your shoulders already turning away, a performance of not having seen me, a technique of not having seen me, my stomach lurching like a kicked dog. i look on google maps for a body of water, to get away from you, because you want me to get away from you, but there’s nowhere for me, really, to go.

i drive to the lake to cry and it’s horrible. A man-made water feature in a shopping center. Kolozova explains the need for Laruelle’s non-philosophy as a resistance to philosophy’s attempts to make the real into a thought that becomes a unified fabric enclosing what it represents, interchangeable with the thing itself. This is the action of philosophy; setting up dollhouse models of the real, claiming the real’s reproducibility. Families feeding geese. Geese puffing and hissing at each other. There is a kind of bridge or deck built over the artificial lake, brown plastic molded to look like woodgrain. Smooth jazz pumps through a series of speakers sticking out of the deck’s supports, like hold music. The vegetation,

the turtles; they are all, technically, real, but so aggressively engineered through human vision that it does not seem to matter anymore. There are a few tall, triangular structures coming out of the water that i guess are art, and are supposed to make one think of ships, as well as a cast metal sculpture representing a fleet of gulls in flight. Tragedy as structure would mean that the unthinkable is also immanence, that i created this through my terror of it. i’m deflating. White light oozing out of my abdomen, the fake petrochemical wood absorbing it like a leech. Anywhere you sit to look at the water, you also see the traffic. Of course i destroyed the relation that was most meaningful to me. Of course a child provokes a goose and the father needs to intervene. Of course there are both signs that interdict against feeding geese and dispensers of “fish food,” shaped like cheerios that the geese snuffle after in the water. Pain cascades up from my coccyx. Reality created through terror, or prohibition, as certainly as it’s created through any positive reasoning. It was of course the fact that i needed to talk to you that made it impossible for you to talk to me. Structural, unreasoning. Do i mean to call it unreasoning, because it’s unpersuadable, unspeakable, or is that reason at it’s truest, its most machinic, that you’re already gone? On google maps the lake has many positive reviews.

A RESPONSE TO KATERINA KOLOZOVA’S FORMALISM OF MATERIALIST REASON 1

YICHEN CHEN

In her text, Kolozova acknowledged the complexity of metaphysical questions and the anthropomorphic tendency in philosophy. Metaphysical questions are universal which implies that there is a diversity of culture subjectivisation. Kolozova, however, aims at a greater universality. She looks for a way to subjectivize philosophy not for a specific culture but the species being of humanity. To avoid the subjectivisation and anthropomorphic tendencies, Kolozova elaborates Saussure’s “from the concrete to the abstract and back to the concrete”2 process with Laurelle’s conceptual apparatus. Just as the formalization of scientific language, this formalization of philosophical language helps for universal communication and at the same time, can be applied locally in specific areas of studies.

The first movement of the process is the movement from concrete to abstraction. The concrete here refers to conceptual material originating in philosophy. Using the idea of formalism, or the forming of a structure, the movement begins with examining empirical data, finding patterns within, and lastly, naming them as abstract ideas. For example, Marx in Capital derived the abstract ideas, “commodity” and “value,” from empirical observation. This kind of abstraction is necessary, as an ideal phoneme which none can reach in the real world is necessary for one to practice actual phonemes.

As a scientific approach, “formalism can take the form of algorithms, and algorithms are finite automata in a way or are fractions that can stand alone as [or translatable to] finite automata.”3 Even though automata, or computers, are limited to performing available formal operations and, are not

metaphysical as they lack consciousness and self-reflexivity; Computers help in precision, credibility, and productivity as an external factor(unavoidable but not essential) in scientific research.

People desire to explain and to domesticate the real, as philosophy is dedicated to resolving metaphysical questions and creating a form of universe that makes perfect sense and reducible to sense. However, this attempt will always be unilateral because the real “is fundamentally different from sense because it is the object of thought’s unilaterally making sense.”4 As mentioned before, metaphysical questions, as well as their formalizations, are universal which implies subjectivisation. Very different formalism could be created due to different histories, societies, or political-economic frameworks; subjectivisation comes with them. In order not to be lost in the redundancy of anthropocentric arguments, to refer to the real, Kolozova proceeds to the second part of Saussure’s process. The second movement is to take the abstract back to concrete using Laruelle’s “philosophical impoverishment” procedure which it non-philosophically recreates the transcendental minimum of a concept. In other words, it traces back a series of identities of the previous instances to arrive at its very “last instance”, a destination of a realist account, the “transcendental minimum.” For example, “gender” as a concept and metaphysical experience to “the reproductive reality of a human society”.5 The complete process is:

Gender [concept] < performativity [concept/clone] < the real of the social distribution of sexualized subject positions [real/real abstraction] < the binary structural organization of femininity and masculinity [real/real abstraction] < the reproductive reality of a human society [the real as the physical determination in the last instance].5

Concepts arrived at their last instance are concepts in their pure form, a “formulaic expression.” It “submits to the real rather than to itself, and its self-referential coherence”6. The transcendental minimum’s semantic contents can then be communicated across sciences and philosophical studies. It can be tested

against practices, and the measurement of the practices can be fed back in to the formalization process.

ENDNOTES

1 Katerina Kolozova, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, p. 55-87.

2 ibid., p. 55, 67.

3 ibid., p. 68-69.

4 ibid., p. 66.

5 ibid., p. 79.

6 ibid., p. 73.

QUESTION CEDRIC BOBRO

What is the difference between metaphysics without philosophy and physics? On the one hand, since physics founds its laws of nature and axioms through induction derived from judgements a posteriori, it would seem that it therefore evades the founding principle of sufficiency that undergirds classical metaphysics, which begins a priori from the assertion that reason is the model with which thought seeks to unify the natural world (or reveal the world in its unity). But, on the other hand, physics seeks to unify its knowledge into a totalized picture of the physical universe, which is at least a secondary component of the principle of sufficiency that non-philosophy seeks to undermine. How does, therefore, non-philosophy propose its metaphysics via partial axioms of the real without seeking to unify them in a very basic way—deduction into natural laws—like physics does?

QUESTION CLAIRE BILDERBACK

Katerina Kolozova describes techne as fulfilling the desire by humans to explain the nature of reality: “...techne exacts operations over and through the physical, not in order to ‘transcend it’ but rather to use it in ways that help weighed-down animals, including human animals, in the physical reality they inhibit”1. In other words, techne reflects the human desire to explain metaphysical phenomena (phenomena that exists beyond the physical world, such as where life comes from or why humans are good or evil). The tendency to explain this is rooted in anthropocentrism, an ancient, Western philosophical tradition that places humans at the center of the universe. This viewpoint is derived from the story of the creation of the universe in the book of Genesis in the Bible. Techne and anthropocentrism travel hand-in-hand, and techne is the physical manifestation of the aspirations of anthropocentrism. Techne facilitates humanistic intervention into metaphysical phenomena. Kolozova’s example of language as techne allows humans to understand questions like “where does human consciousness come from?” within the physical world. Techne creates something that is not metaphysical phenomena itself, but rather a human-imposed version of it.

A peculiar and contemporary example of the use of techne to fulfill a humanistic desire to be the center of the universe can be seen in Hollywood’s depiction of technology. Very often robots in film and television will be depicted as having a kind of pseudo-consciousness. This pseudo-consciousness will often create empathy or distaste for the robotic character, but they will always be at least an arm’s length away from being an actual human. Stories with these kinds of robots will often involve a creation story, whether that be the creation of the robot itself (such as Luke Skywalker’s building of C3P-O in Star Wars)

or the creation of a new world (such as in Wall-E or Westworld, in which the robots create a new world for themselves).

The question is why do humans feel the need to attach the uniquely metaphysical and human experience of human consciousness to physical, non-human entities the way they do in film and television? The use of robots in this manner in film and television is clearly intentional, but it is rather peculiar that science-fiction tends to tackle human consciousness by omitting humans and metaphysics from the expression.

ENDNOTES

1 Katerina Kolozova. Capitalisms Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy, (London, England: Bloomsbury Collections, 2021), 58.

SESSION II

ONE IS ALREADY TWO: NOTES FOR A READING OF JUAN FRANCISCO ELSO’S ESSAY ON AMERICA

GEAN MORENO

In March 1986, Cuban artist Juan Francisco Elso presented four sculptures—La fuerza del guerrero (The Strength of the Warrior), 1985; Pájaro que vuela sobre América (Bird That Flies Over America), 1985-86; El viajero (The Traveller), 1985; and Los contrarios (The Contrary), 1985—grouped as Ensayo sobre América (Essay on America) at Galería de la Casa de la Cultura de Plaza in Havana. The quartet, under the same collective title, traveled to the Venice Biennale a few months later, minting the fact that the sculptures go together beyond any one-time presentation. There are the parts and there is the whole: “the essay,” endowed with a certain amorphous consistency as a relational structure constituted by the individual sculptures it brings together or that, conversely, bring it into existence; and individual sculptures which are, as a result, something more when gathered in this way—“a constellation in motion,” as Theodor Adorno would say—than what they are on their own1. The sculptures are composed of fragments drawn from vastly different historical strata and cultural contexts set in complex internal dialogues that, like the essay generally, when true to task, falsify neither an internal continuity between themselves nor a continuity in thinking that feigns the impossible inner coherence of experience under current conditions— whether we mean conditions forged by a world of capitalist production or those more relevant to the context in which Elso worked that were established by an atrophied socialism and a persistent coloniality.

Coinciding with Elso’s presentation of Essay on America, the leaders of the Cuban Revolution inaugurated a historical sequence defined by what is known as the “Rectification Process.” It was time, they said, to acknowledge and correct the errors and negative tendencies that characterized the previous decade and a half, a time of deep Soviet influence during which the morphology of the Cuban Revolution changed radically, redefining its state apparatus, ideological profile, and foreign relations. The Rectification Process was characterized by the eradication of a number of economic practices in order to curtail profit-oriented tendencies that had flowered and regenerated forms of private accumulation; by the recognition that a party and bureaucratic elite had emerged and wielded new power and privilege; by the renovation of ideological tendencies that had been set to hibernate at the end of the Revolution’s first decade in order to allow for deeper alliances with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; and, on a lower but still consequential tier of collective significance, by opening a space for cultural production that sought to engage in direct and critical exchange with cultural policy and contemporary realities2.

The Rectification Process was instituted before a looming domestic fiscal crisis and the institution of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union. Cuba refused to follow the general tendencies of the socialist world. Instead, facing new economic relations with a liberalizing USSR and its satellites, which no longer included debt payment deferrals and instead turned to hard currency exchange, the island doubled down on its radical tendencies and returned to the discourse that characterized its earlier periods. The adjustment Cuba faced was also determined by falling prices for sugar and oil on the global market, which shook the island’s steady income streams, and the depreciation of the dollar and its effect on both the foreign debt and financing Cuba secured to unprecedented levels during the prior decade.

These changes unfolded against a larger geopolitical shift that far exceeded national or even regional borders. The period of the Rectification Process came at a moment during which what used to be called the Third World restructured itself through

and for neoliberal experimentation, fostering the disintegration of revolutionary governments and the emergence of postcolonial societies looking to integrate into the world economy. These processes marked the slow disappearance of the conditions that made Cuba a pertinent international actor with the possible exception of its African military missions. Alongside these more immediate regional alterations, structural conditions of capital accumulation on the global scale also changed, which swept up Cuba as a trade-dependent economy.

In response to geopolitical changes, both inside and beyond the socialist world, leaders in Havana proposed it was time to go back to the original values of the Revolution. It was time to remind everyone that revolutions are moral enterprises as much as political and economic undertakings. Discourse around solidarity and working for the greater good replaced a fixation on productivity. The spirit of voluntarism was called upon again, exemplified in the reactivation at a larger scale of formations such as the microbrigadas, voluntary and unpaid workers who mobilized to build housing and social facilities. Revolutionary austerity and sacrifice were the call of the day, and plunging living standards were to be endured in the name of self-determination and national dignity. Che Guevara and his ideas, which had never quite aligned properly with Moscow, made a comeback3. (Che’s image had always been around, but his ideas and writings were scarce for a long time.) In other words, it was time to return to something similar to the Guevarist system that formally guided the Revolution on the political, economic, and ideological planes between 1966 and 1971, a system that prioritized subjective conditions and considered how advances in consciousness could drive advances in the productive base.

The question that haunts this moment is: With the Rectification Process, does the Revolution return as its own aftermath on the other side of some limit that encloses its vital moment? Does it return as a future that can only live by mimicking its past, enacting a kind of teleology paradoxically jammed on a repeat cycle? Does it return, from a structural point of view, as farce, as a process no longer adequate to a changed geopolitical context because it is not an imaginative response to it, since the very conditions of production

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and accumulation have themselves changed on a global scale? The seismic shift that came with the collapse of the international communist project just a few years after the Rectification Process began and the sharp about-face it forced on Cuban economic practices makes it useless to speculate on the long-term consequences the period’s reforms and ideological turns ultimately may have had (however, there are numerous pertinent studies on the immediate effects). What one can claim much more easily is that the Revolution “came back” in the mid-1980s having revealed, despite claims to return to its universal truth, its contingent character. It could become something else. It had. A smelting kiln that extracted from the boiling liquid of revolutionary fervor the lumpy porridge of mirthless bureaucracy, that distilled from the projected irrepressible soaring of a new people toward emancipation and self-fulfillment armies of gray technocrats and renewed market relations at the most granular levels of everyday life. It also revealed its contingent character in the farcical dimension it assumed by being out of step with a changed world, no longer a revolutionary force in it but, at most, an anachronistic irritant.

In a quest to routinize operations, the institutionalization of the Revolution during the decade and a half that preceded the institution of the Rectification Process came with a new constitution based on the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union; the aggressive expansion of the communist party, which was also based on its Soviet counterpart; the professionalization of the army, including a new ranking system that again mimicked the Soviet model; the establishment of a national economic management system and increased reliance of computational analysis for long-term central planning; the reorganization of grassroots and youth organizations; the reconfiguration of unions as instruments of workplace discipline rather than advocates for workers’ rights; entrance into COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), the economic agreement among countries aligned in the Soviet-bloc, alongside intensified trade with the West; the vigorous courting of foreign investment and the return of tourism; and the institution of the Organs of Popular Power and a number of ministries, including the Ministry of Culture.4 It also came with the end

of the Revolution’s organic, if unorthodox, unfolding, as characterized by an ideology that turned Marxist logic on its head, putting revolutionary will ahead of productive capacities, offering underdeveloped nations a path toward communist promises. The Cubans, in short, claimed that properly developed consciousness, the production of a “new man,” could alter the material base; sheer willpower would translate into accelerated development. A new people, it was suggested, can leap ahead of history and generate an egalitarian society by acting out their refined desire for such a thing and against every objective metric that claims such a thing is impossible.

Along with institutionalization and the cozying up to its socialist trading partners in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Revolution traded the idea of moral incentives for material ones through its public discourse and its claim to have tempered the “push to communism” without a developed productive base that marked its first decade. Instead, it generated policy and rhetoric that fostered a more reasonable “retreat to socialism,” a transitory economic stage in order to engage in a less radical treatment of the market. It succumbed to the abstraction of quantification in the system of quotas correlated to differential wages and bonuses. Cost-profit analyses, allocation of capital, investment, credit, interest—all pragmatically replaced the questions of need and sacrifice. What were once capitalist tools to be transcended came back as proper instruments to guide productivity. The power and responsibility of “the manager” was shored up through wage reform. Overtime work proliferated, as did its shadow companion, inefficiency. Price gouging, resource theft, corruption, bribing, and other “non-socialist” behaviors spread. The low-wattage humiliation that always permeates life subsumed under the protocols of alienated production must have coursed through everyone’s nerves and dug deep into the collective substrate. The pragmatic development of the material base during this period, and the changes it entailed in relation to the larger social order, should be read, insofar as it affected subjectivity, not in relation to some objective standard but to the heavily propagated discursive formations that trumpeted the exceptional character of the Revolution. Per its own revolutionary program and rhetoric, Cuba had become a social “deformation” riven with reifying processes

and differential distributions of power. In these conditions, it seems no great speculative leap to postulate psychic fragmentation born of the impossibility of reconciling subjectivity that has assigned itself the task of moving history forward to the immediate reality of spinning in place and turning to the past. Were it just a matter of clear contradictions, one imagines there could have been ways to mitigate the psychic fragmentation wherever official discourse and ideological production fell short. What complicates things is that this was also a period of social advances or, more accurately, of an oscillation of advances and retreats. There was the massive incorporation of women into the workforce to increase productivity, accompanied by the strong support system of daycares, maternity leave pay, and other amenities; an incorporation that proved not to be permanent by the early 1980s, even if it had originally been the spear tip of social advancement and enlightenment. There was the increased availability of consumer goods to satisfy the higher incomes that differential wages and a bonus system made available for at least part of the population, addressing new desires and power of acquisition but also setting the ground for a renewed class stratification. There was the nascent housing market and a resilient independent farming sector, parallel to the new agricultural cooperatives the state established, which were sustained by a black market, making street-level economies more robust and fending off penury. One finds in this “retreat to socialism,” in the establishment of the transitory step the Revolution once sought to leap over, a tangle of contradictions that only further underscored the improvisational and contingent character of the Revolution as a historical process.

Awareness of the contingent core that allowed the radical change—radical in the sense of being able to reconfigure itself as an antinomy of its foundational character—of a revolutionary process, now pulled from the depths of a social unconscious, marks the difference in the repetition. The “true character” in this return to the true character of the Revolution during the time of the Rectification Process, one imagines, must have graven in consciousness the distance between what the Revolution revealed itself to be through its concrete practices and their material effects and the illusory picture through

which it understands—or fantasizes—itself as a process that can change without changing, a process that has some constitutive truth at its disposal to go back to for renewal. In some way, it was the slippage between core and appearance and the need to overcome it, to really get back to something essentially revolutionary, or the impossibility of doing so, that, I think, explains the increasing radicalization and misbehaving of artists as a symptomatic reaction during this period.

By the time the Rectification Process was inaugurated at the 3rd Congress of the Cuban Communist Party, exhibitions such as the famed Volumen Uno (Volume One, 1981), which Elso participated in and that catapulted the careers of some of the most important artists that emerged at that moment, had been absorbed into cultural discourse as an event that signaled, on the one hand, a need for renewal after the leaden cultural atmosphere of the 1970s and, on the other, that there was a generation of young artists, the first born and educated under the Revolution and free of the “original sin” of the bourgeois intellectuals the Revolution inherited from the Republic, ready to lead in this renewal. There were more than a few features in the artworks of this emergent generation that distanced it from its predecessors and which proved to be highly generative. Among them was a new disposition drawn from the lesson of Conceptual Art and the embracing of installation and other “post-mediatic” formats; the employment of poor materials and improvisational modes of assembly that felt properly attuned to the concrete, everyday realities on the island; and a deep interest in popular, religious, and ancestral cultures, presciently foregrounding the Caribbean and the Americas as a dynamic composite of many kinds of temporalities and semantic systems, anticipating to a point what would be codified as processes of decolonization many years later. Above all, perhaps it was the immediate interpretation of this work as not only being intimately bound but also serving as an exciting new approach to the perennial problem of Latin American and Caribbean identity, particularly poignant before an emergent and homogenizing globalization, that resonated and has really stuck. What is striking from the historical distance we now have on this moment is how quickly the work produced at the time was subsumed under a particular narrative. I’m not suggesting

the reading of the work in relation to the problem of American and Caribbean identity was inaccurate or beclouding, but I’m merely underscoring my astonishment at how quickly this interpretative tendency was established and how deeply it was absorbed by the artists it affected. Until his last interview in 1988, Elso still claimed, “The first feeling of unity among our generation had to do with the ethical propositions … of making American art.”5 The consensus around this reading, perhaps because it felt so spot-on when first articulated and because it allowed the work to circulate without running into any ideological obstacles, has hardened in such a way that there seems to be a very narrow channel in which to maneuver when interpreting Elso’s work. This channel excludes, almost too precisely, how the work indexes the very moment of social transition it was bound to. The interpretative consensus finds much of its staying power by implicitly suggesting that the immediate social background against which the work was made could be magically muted and its inflections on the artwork dismissed. The cultural renewal is rhapsodically praised; the social regression that marked the moment out of which it arose obscured. Rectification becomes a key word in criticism that addresses the work of artists slightly younger than Elso, who are often referred to as the second cohort of the 1980s. Think Lázaro Saavedra, Tomás Esson, Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, Glexis Novoa, René Francisco, and Eduardo Ponjuán, etc. But let’s muddy this easy division. Not by spuriously claiming some never-before-seen similarity between Elso’s work and that of his younger peers, but rather by trying to bind Elso more closely to the moment at which the work matures, to look at how his sculptures symptomatically register the immediate social reality around them, how at some level they may be “nonidentical” to dominant readings of them. Our driving thesis: Elso’s work reports from the ground and not just from the American cosmos.

At some point in the mid-1980s, at the very moment the historical sequence defined by the Rectification Process was inaugurated, there was a break in Elso’s work. Most commentators, including Elso, have mentioned it, but few have really dropped the plumb too deep. This break has always been treated simply as the maturation of the work. As Elso stated: “I had to free myself of things I’d learned in school—forms, techniques,

solutions; I had to incorporate these things and transform them into organic processes and ideas, and I had to find more appropriate technical means.”6 Rachel Weiss, going deeper, writes that with Essay on America Elso “was no longer resuscitating ancestral cosmologies or reviving lost histories; now, he was proposing his own America.” We are witnessing in this work, she goes on to say, “the disappearance of the referent.”7 America, the thing out there and the codes and narratives that defined it, was being replaced by a new mythological artifact Elso generated. This overcoming of the referent signaled the full flowering of Elso’s work, the claiming of a territory of its own. This could be right, tracking an internal movement of development and the threshold of maturation, but to me it also seems to be naming one thing through the inability to name another. The referent that is not disappeared but seems incognizable to the line of interpretation that has consolidated around Elso’s work—and comes unstuck if you nudge things just right or plunge deeper—is the remainder that exceeds the one-dimensionality that pegged the work exclusively to the problem of American identity or American spirituality. Or, a better way to say this so as not to suggest the work is not bound to those things and wildly interesting and significant because of this bond, is that at a profound level, even if Elso was not deliberately looking for a coherent response to the moment defined by the Rectification Process, his work is marked by its contradictions. Perhaps it’s merely the moment silting its traces in the work, “marking” it in a way that seems closer to the bubbling texture of chemical seepage than a guided strain of reflection. It’s noise in the system, as the metaphor goes. At certain frequencies, before attentiveness that approaches aslant and stereoscopically, it’s noise that crackles free and cracks the full roundness of the work’s identity as a machine to reprocess (or invent) American myths. Elso is not exempt—why should he be?—from absorbing social raw material, kneaded out of renewed alienating practices and conditions. What was effected in the lived reality around him he worked out, like other artists often do, in the domain of representation—a process that itself is never straightforward. Thinking here of representation as a problem-space where reference and expression are pressured by the perennial instabil-

ity caused by the registration of social determinates over and often against the intended content of the work.

In their recesses, Elso’s sculptures are burdened by a tension bred by a refusal to carelessly extend an inner coherence to the ongoing moment of social reconfiguration. Elso’s sculptures register the simulacral and farcical character of the period defined by the Rectification Process that calls on an early organic moment of the Revolution without, of course, being able to reenact it properly—an early organic moment that had become all of a sudden the enchanted object that could beckon the future into presence without accounting for an altered global condition or for new desires that may have spouted immanently, through the vector of a new generation that shared few existential points of reference with the old guard, from the Revolution itself. The fixation on the ancestral in Elso’s work, particularly when it is without referent but self-generated, when it is assembled out of materials that come from vastly different historical strata and cultural contexts and anchored to no real ancestral tradition, whatever else it does, allegorically casts critical light on the fetishizing of the early years of the Revolution that characterized the times beholden to the Rectification Process.

I’m not claiming that Elso’s work is merely a repository of symptoms that index a historical moment. We know he activated modalities of artistic thinking absent from work being done on the island before he came on the scene. He incorporated a range of new materials and refused to altogether renounce Americanist discourses, incorporating references and aesthetic manifestations borrowed from both diasporic and ancestral cultures. He may have even invented a new mythical America, a capacious new imaginary that runs parallel to José Lezama Lima’s and Wilson Harris’s own re-mythifications of the hemisphere, as has been claimed. These elements and possibilities are what keep the work from being merely a symptomatic registry of the historical real, but none of them bar it from being such a thing at some level either. Studied and invented cosmogonies come down to earth and reveal not only the technics they generate and worlds they structure but also, processed in particular ways, concrete historical details that fall outside their ambit.

If the task is to unearth whatever is dissonant in Elso’s work vis-à-vis how it has been interpreted thus far, responding to the

reminder that anchors it to the specificity of his lived historical moment, we’ll have to lean on a very slim and elliptical facet in the works—a tenuous dimension of meaning ensconced in their creases, so to speak, that dominant readings have never cottoned to or even really mentioned, neglecting it to the very edge of expressive opacity. The work to be done here lies in offering quarter to that fugitive side in the work and swelling it with life, making its pulsation more acute, so that it opens its own path, even if narrow, perpendicular to the deep furrows of established interpretations, now ossified. The very tenuousness of the thing in the work we are relying on puts us in the awkward position of having to postulate that the work’s relation to its empirical context paradoxically needed a period of latency to surface, to wait for an approach that came at the angle at which the frequency clarified. A risky proposal, but a risk that, troubling the waters, draws another much more exciting risk to the surface: that something new will be said and the work can rise out of the nested layers of accepted readings that hoist on it that dull sheen, that perfectly even texture, that sticks to things that have said all they have to say.

ENDNOTES

1 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, Volume One (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 13.

2 See Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Market, Socialist, and Mixed Economies: Comparative Policy and Performance—Chile Cuba, and Costa Rica (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and Susan Eva Eckstein, Back From the Future: Cuba Under Castro (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

3 As Fidel Castro stated in a speech known as “Che’s Ideas Are Absolutely Relevant Today,” delivered on October 8, 1987: “It’s not strange if one feels Che’s presence not only in everyday life, but even in dreams if one imagines that he is alive, that Che is in action and that he never died. In the end we must reach the conclusion that for all intents and purposes in the life of our revolution, Che never died, and the light that of what has been done, he is more alive than ever, has more influence than ever, and is a more powerful opponent of imperialism than ever.” Full text of the speech can be found at the In Defense of Communism blog: http://www.idcommunism.com/ 2016/06/fidel-castro-ches-ideas-are-absolutely.html.

4 See Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Cuba in the 1970s: Pragmatism and Institutionalization (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978).

ONE IS ALREADY TWO

MORENO

6 Luis Camnitzer, “¿Utopía en Utopía?” in Por América: La obra del Juan Francisco Elso, exh. cat. (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999), 98.

7 Rachel Weiss, “La órbita de Martí,” in Por América: La obra del Juan Francisco Elso, exh. cat. (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999), 141.

A RESPONSE TO ONE IS ALREADY TWO: NOTES FOR A READING OF JUAN FRANCISCO ELSO’S ESSAY ON AMERICA

JALEH MANSOOR

Hi. Gean, thank you for this nuanced presentation. I’ve learnt enormously from it. I should preface by saying that my response to your presentation is broadcast from the unseated ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh peoples here in so-called Vancouver at the University of British Columbia in Canada. And that land acknowledgement bears to a great extent on some of my response to your important work.

First of all, I appreciated very much having an overview of this generation of artists who began to present a kind of attitude of irreverence toward the mainline history of the Revolution as it is received by the mid-1980s in Cuba. And we could say that what you’re elaborating is the beginning of a generation who are dismantling the iconology of the Revolution from within. And this quality of irreverence is part of that project. Some of the artists from this generation - specifically Elso - forge projects in which you locate pre-figurations of decolonial aesthetics. In other wordthe historical Revolution at this moment of The Rectification, or what you call revolution on a repeat cycle, or revolution become anachronistic irritant affords the beginnings of an incipient decolonial thinking. You note that this is the moment where artists begin to summon an autochtonist Cuban culture in order to begin to dismantle colonial and imperial epistemologies. I’m particularly struck by that line of thinking in your project, a new form of critique nested in frustration with the disappointments, the having become authoritarian, of revolutionary impulses that come also to be associated with forms of coloniality.

At the same time that a younger generation of artists are posing new questions at the moment of Rectification in an irreverent key, despite the fact that they see received iconography as an anachronistic irritant, despite the fact that they’re beginning to dismantle some of the cliches and stereotypes of the Revolution - their work is an index of a second wave of revolution. As you say elsewhere, “Revolution is back”. It’s “back in style” in the mid-1980s. Can we set these two strands, an incipient decolonial strain and a second revolutionary wave critical of the cliches of the first, into dialectical relation? I want to take these two tendencies: on the one hand, art sigannling indexically a return of the affects, drives and desires of revolutionary thinking but then, on the other hand, an interest within this first tendency to begin to dismantle a dominant epistemology that the Revolution is also part of. We could call this dominant tendency an unexamined Hegelian insistence on progress. So this brings me to the question with which Amanda Beech opened today’s event, and that is that revolution is not such a popular notion at the particular moment in which we find ourselves. But decolonizatio is. Part of that is that Revolution is understood, dismissively, through a variety of post-colonial and decolonial frameworks as itself a form of imperial domination. A common contemporary claim is that those who have a kind of fetish or nostalgia for revolutionary histories are partaking in a dominant Western Hegelian framework that is anathema to the forms of decolonial thinking that are just beginning at this moment. This seems to me a false proposition, an artificial binary that risks situating one or the other strand as reactionary.

I find the way that these two strands converge in your handling of the artists of Cuba of this generation utterly fascinating and I think we have a lot to learn from the knot that you locate in the mid 1980s in Cuba. I wonder if you could speak to that contradictory tendency that informs aspirations for radical Leftist politics that might motivate art praxis and that is still hovering along the horizon but is, on the other hand, continually under fire on the part of other discourses that claim to greater relevance in undoing a history of domination that locate would revolution as just another cliche and another form of imperialism.

A RESPONSE TO ONE IS ALREADY TWO: NOTES FOR A READING OF JUAN FRANCISCO ELSO’S ESSAY ON AMERICA

TERESA PIECUCH

Juan Francisco Elso’s sculpture, “Essay on America,” is an artistic expression of a time in the history of Cuba called the “Process of Rectification.” The “Process of Rectification” was an attempt to bridge the gap between the country’s history and its new political situation. By using natural materials and referring to religious practices, Elso embodies the strong tradition of the land. The sculpture’s composition—“fragments drawn from vastly different historical strata and cultural contexts set in complex internal dialogues”—reveals the gap between history and the new political reality.

In “One is Already Two, and Two are Many,” Gean Moreno looks into a formula for restoring the land’s peace of mind. He refers to the importance of religion in this aspect, pointing out the example of local shamanistic traditions. The pattern of a foreign system and people turning to religious practices is familiar to me; since this is part of the history of Poland, where I come from.

After World War II, communism was introduced in Poland. Catholicism formed the bridge between Polish history and its new reality. Religion became the grounds on which the society’s misalignment between the past and the present became visible. On one hand, restrictions and censorship were brought into place by the new government in order to remove local identities. On the other hand, the institution of the Catholic Church supported and celebrated traditional virtues. Religious practice connected people who sought spiritual freedom.

Elso’s artwork bears out a relation to mysticism in Cuba, which I relate to the spirituality that Poles nurtured during

the times of the regime. The tensions and attempts of “another arrangement of things,” occurred, too, in the Polish People’s Republic, when the Polish nation was struggling to avoid erasure of their identity. An example of these events is the pilgrimage of the copy of the venerated Black Madonna of Częstochowa’s painting. The Church introduced new ways of professing faith in order to escape the regime that limited religious expression. In 1957, the Church commissioned a copy of the sacred painting from Częstochowa and organized its pilgrimage around Poland. The event was repressed and the painting was seized. The pilgrimage did not stop, however, and continued with solely the painting’s empty frame. With time, the need for spiritual escape became a real support in an oppressed reality. For example, the Church in Poland, represented by the figure of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, mediated between the communist government and the striking workers in the Gdańsk shipyard. Both religion and communism might seem to have similarities in structure when it comes to rules and punishments; but from these two examples, it was a relation to the divine that turned out to provide the people with a feeling of freedom from communism that they started to look away from. Both in Cuba and in Poland, it turned out it was not possible for a foreign system to be fully acknowledged without making a connection to the places’ history. In Poland, the lack of this connection became one of the reasons that pushed the nation to democracy. Despite being distant in time and space, both nations manifested a pursuit for their own aura.

A RESPONSE TO ONE IS ALREADY TWO: NOTES FOR A READING OF JUAN FRANCISCO ELSO’S ESSAY ON AMERICA

CAMERON WEEKS

In One is Already Two, and Two are Many, Gean Moreno maps the relationship between the economic and political changes in post-Revolution Cuba and the production of creative works by Cuban artists, specifically by sculptor Juan Francisco Elso. Moreno stresses the importance of the country’s economic reliance on sugar production, which was and still is Cuba’s principal agricultural export. When the new, non-Leninist communist regime came to power in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a result of the revolution, market relations began to erode. Eventually, by the 1970s, sugar production and the country’s reliance on this agricultural industry became unsustainable and the communist government chose to retreat to socialism, adapting the Soviet model. This economic downturn and governmental retreat resulted in a deterioration in the quality of life for many Cuban citizens, a condition which was framed as suffering on behalf of national dignity.1

Moreno utilizes the production of art during this post-Revolution era to demonstrate the sentiment shared by those living through this tumultuous era in Cuba’s history. The artist in particular who has captured Moreno’s interest–Juan Francisco Elso, serves as the central figure of the essay. Elso was a Cuban artist best known for his captivating sculptural works, most of which were produced in the 70s and 80s before his untimely passing in 1988 at the age of 32.

In 1986, Elso exhibited a series of four sculptures, collectively referred to as Essay on America at La Casa de la Cultura de Plaza in Havana. In referring to these sculptures as an essay, Elso asserts that Essay on America must be presented as a collective work, as opposed to a series of unconnected, inde-

pendent sculptures. Moreno expands upon this designation of the set of sculptures as an “essay” and points to Theodor Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” to further elaborate this comparison. Adorno refers to the essay form as a “constellation” in motion and suggests that this form of writing is both open and closed. 2 It is open through its negation of “anything systematic,” yet closed in the sense that it “labors” on the form of its presentation. Through this consideration, Adorno argues, the essay resembles art, as it “constructs the immanent criticism of cultural artifacts … it is the critique of ideology.”3 Art serves as a vessel through which the individual can encounter and critique culture and systems of belief, a critique that is an inherent element of culture. This can similarly be accomplished through the essay, as both art and essay are means for experimentation and renewed perspectives. Comparatively, Elso’s “Essay on America” functions as a series of highly varied fragments that when drawn together form internal dialogues like that of an essay. This work also produces an “immanent criticism” of culture, specifically the complex cultural exchange between Cuba and the Americas and the lack of representation of the Caribbean diaspora.

Not only does Moreno situate Elso’s work as an essay through Adorno’s analysis of form, but he situates this “art-as-essay” in the context of The Cuban Revolution. The economic and cultural turmoil during Cuba’s process of rectification and retreat to socialism gave way to developments in art as well, specifically surrounding themes of the American and Caribbean identity. Through Essay on America, Elso was generating his own artifacts of a new America, rejecting the historical and ancestral codes and narratives which neglected the Caribbean diaspora.4 This mythologizing of American identity is consistent in Elso’s oeuvre, demonstrated in works such as Por América/For America. This wooden effigy of Cuban nationalist and poet José Martí depicts Martí’s body pierced by darts, in reference to the Christian martyr Saint Sebastian. These collective works converge Elso’s fascination with the Cuban-American identity and secularism and mysticism during this period of economic and agricultural downturn in Cuba. This is accomplished through the cohesion of evocative ancestral imagery and a nuanced critique of the artist’s contemporary socio-political conditions.

Through Moreno’s essay, One is Already Two, and Two are Many, the curator connects Adorno’s theory of the essay as form to the work of Juan Francisco Elso, as well as art as a form of essay in itself. Through the examination of 20th-century Cuban history as it pertains to Elso’s work, Moreno is able to illuminate the relationship between creative production and economic-political phenomenon. Elso’s body of work, specifically the series Essay on America, exemplifies this aforementioned relationship as well as the ability to translate visual art into the essay form. Approaching visual art production as a form of essay-making is precisely what gives Elso’s work its fragmented identity, as elements are gathered through varied historical and cultural contexts.

ENDNOTES

1 Moreno, Gean. “One is Already Two, and Two Are Many.” [Unpublished Manuscript], pp. 12

2 Adorno, T. W., et al. “The Essay as Form.” New German Critique, no. 32, 1984, pp. 165

3 Pp. 166

4 Moreno, Gean. “One is Already Two, and Two Are Many.” [Unpublished Manuscript] pp. 19

A RESPONSE TO ONE IS ALREADY TWO: NOTES FOR A READING OF JUAN FRANCISCO ELSO’S ESSAY ON AMERICA

SHU L. XU

In section four of “One is Already Two, and Two are Many”, Moreno presents the artist Juan Francisco Elso’s making of American art as situated from both the ground and the cosmos, and relates this making to Elso’s unmaking of his empirical education. As Elso puts it, “I had to free myself of things I’d learned in school--forms, techniques, solutions; I had to incorporate these things and transform them into organic processes and ideas, and I had to find more appropriate technical means.”1 In other words, while Elso is making his America through his work, he is going through his memories to unmake certain teachings which were constructed involuntarily by force from outside. Elso’s works, instantiated in multiple cultural strata, are produced during and share the multiple social strata of the Process of Rectification. It simultaneously points to the earlier revolution, “an early organic moment of the Revolution;” a reference that lacks physical material, unlike the revolution that has to be enforced in the Process of Rectification2.

Although Elso’s artworks sketch the world of materials “[...] that come from vastly different historical strata and cultural contexts[…] anchored to no real ancestral tradition,” they ultimately narrow down rapidly from the non-referential status to the time of the Process of Rectification gazing back to the revolution.3 To Moreno, this moment itself is crucial and particular to history, and it shows a contradiction between history and the prehistoric, the absence of the past and present as the past at once. In other words, Moreno considers Elso’s work to index a particular historical moment, and also to hold in view

an absence of this relation which is marked as”the absence of non-alienated production that socialism promised.”4 However, in describing Elso’s works as “the essay”, which describes their approach to political economy as a crystallization of the Process of Rectification, Moreno reminds us of an epistemological leak of the local essayist. For Moreno, Latin America’s most famous essayists, from Octavio Paz to León Rozitchner share a tendency of thinking within the realm of the Western Enlightenment discourse, and of the practical failure of maintaining a sustainable network for equitable economic growth, which ties them together with Cuba’s mistakes in the Process of Rectification.5

At the end of Moreno’s argument, the reader sees a contradictory position, in which Elso’s works, the “essays,” point to this failure but “index” historical strata and cultural contexts, undeniably disturbed, clashing, and collapsing, independently within themselves and contradictorily when they confront each other.6 To what extent is the use of the form “essay” clear enough, when it refers to the works of Elso, and when does it remain unspecified? The important sense of the essay is defined by the regular and complex use of the form, which is popularly taken up by canonical Latin American writers, though modeled on European predecessors. According to Moreno, Elso succeeds where previous artists failed, in remaking the “essay” form in a way more suited to expressing Cuban experience and needs.7 However, what exactly is the nature of Elso’s work that reveals itself as “essays,” and why does the fact that Elso responded to both history and the absence of history, necessarily link him with the essay form? For Moreno, the answer comes from Adorno’s conception of the essay as a “constellation” of ideas “out of joint” with the status quo.8 In this understanding, the essay, by examining a given status quo, points outside of it and suggests alternative arrangements of the world. This also made the essay form the necessary vehicle for Elso’s reactions to the moment of Cuban disintegration in the 1980s.

While the reader learns about the potential of the essay form and the political economic nature of Elso’s works, understood in terms of the “essay’s” unique ability to both describe and point outside the given social structure, the connection between the “essay” in general and Elso’s work isn’t as clear as one might

expect. Here, it would be helpful to know more about how Elso’s work announces itself as truly being essay-like, besides taking the essay as a name (or mask). What exactly do the “constellations in motion” which Elso made of his sculptures do to show their connection and twisting of the long lineage of written essays? How do they both come as a necessary response to a critical moment in collective Cuban life, and as an individual turn responding to that moment and the memories which came before it?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Moreno, Gean. “One is Already Two, and Two are Many.” Draft.

ENDNOTES

1 Gean Moreno, “One is Already Two, and Two are Many “ (Draft), 19. There are no page numbers in the copy of the writing itself, so I use the pdf page number as numbering for the article.

2 Ibid, 20

3 Ibid, 20

4 Ibid, 25

5 Ibid, 3-4

6 For Moreno’s discussion on the idea of “index”, see: Ibid, 20-9

7 For Moreno’s discussion with the canonical writers, see: Ibid, 3

8 Ibid., 7-8

QUESTION CLAIRE BILDERBACK

Juan Francisco Elso’s Essay on America was a quintessential work for the Process of Rectification in Cuba, though Gean Moreno acknowledges Elso’s work as more than “merely a repository of symptoms that index a historical moment.”1 But how would Elso’s work live on without that acknowledgement? The tethering of Elso’s work to the period of political unrest is not unwarranted, but it does point to a potential loss of control by an artist over the meaning of their work. Moreno points out earlier in the text, “...there seems to be a very narrow channel in which to maneuver when interpreting Elso’s work.”2 What sovereignty does an artist hold over the interpretation of their own work, especially during times of political unrest?

ENDNOTES

1 Gean Moreno, “One is Already Two, and Two are Many”. (2022), 21. Manuscript in preparation.

2 Gean Moreno, “One is Already Two, and Two are Many”. (2022), 18. Manuscript in preparation.

QUESTION YICHEN CHEN

Elso’ s Essay on America (1986) pointed to the mistakes of Cuba’s past revolution as well as the Soviets; he refused to carelessly proceed with the social reconfiguration that was proposed under the process of rectification that Moreno’s essay speaks to. However, art works produced at the time were subsumed under a very particular narrative that is defined by that time. According to Moreno, Elso had to “name one thing through the inability to name another.”

How is this a valuable capacity for art in terms of this difficult period? And does this ability that is built on failure have some relation to freeing art from the constrains of its political moment in time?

SESSION III

THE HISTORY, POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF HAITIAN ART: SOME REFLECTIONS

ANTHONY BOGUES

A framing

I want to begin with the conventional framing of Haitian art. The conventional framing of Haitian art typically considers Haitian art as naïve; as a form of “primitivism” and folk art in a cultural anthropological sense. These framings are deployed no matter what the different schools of Haitian art are; and there are many – the historical school which emerges in the north; the school of beauty, or the school of Saint -Soleii. In spite of these schools many critics and art historians describe all Haitian art production without understanding what schools these artistic forms are affiliated with. This means that they miss the internal dynamics that produce these forms of art and art practices. However it is important as well to understand where this notion of “primitivism” comes from and how it emerges to frame Haitian art.

If we return to the early 20th century in Paris one would encounter a series of colonial markets. These were visited by many French artists but two in particular have significance for my remarks - Picasso and Henry Matisse. It has been reported that it was Matisse who encouraged Picasso to visit the markets. The story is often told of how Picasso was captivated by the Vili figure which Matisse showed him.1 In these colonial markets there were African masks and sculptures. Many of these objects had religious value but in these markets, they were extracted from their context and became objects to be used in whatever way one wanted. Some writers and critics have talked about how both Matisse and Picasso as well as other French artists at the time became engaged with some

of these masks and sculptures. The critics have argued that this kind of adaptation was a form of Africanism and that this Africanism, they argue, then described as “primitivism” became a category with which to think about art. However there was a twist. The critics then further state that “primitivism” became a form of modernism undermining the French art establishment and, in the words of one, ‘an avant-garde gesture’. Others argued that the work of Picasso himself is that of expropriation–a sign of colonial extractive artistic practice. I was fortunate to see the exhibition, “ Picasso Primitif “ at the Quai Branly in 2017 in which there was a juxtaposition between his work, clearly influenced by African art and the original African art works themselves with the African artists now named. What was clear to many of us and to some reviewers was that there were ways in which one cannot think about certain pieces of the Picasso’s work without deep references to African art. Thus Picasso’s own statement when asked about how “Negro art “influenced his work and his quip “I don’t know it,“ is a troubling one.

There are of course two ways to read this particular moment and Picasso’s comment. One reading is where we say that for Picasso all art was art, therefore his quip was making it clear that he did not recognize art with any geographic appellation. Or we can read it as a form of disavowal in which he would not recognize the influence of African art upon his own work. What is critical though, for the purposes of these remarks is to grasp how quickly the discussion about “primitivism” moved from being a gesture of avant-garde often describing the work of artists’ collectives like the Cobra Group from Amsterdam, Brussels and Copenhagen, and instead became very popular in European thought as a form of cultural anthropological description of backwardness about the colonies and ex colonies.2 In this sense with regard to art “primitivism” no longer meant modernism but represented so-called states of “backwardness.” This was how the category came to be used to describe Haitian art.

Categorization and Haitian Art

One of the first books on Haitian art was published in 1948, Renaissance in Haitian Art; Popular Painters in the Black

ANTHONY BOGUES

Republic.3 Written by the American critic and writer Selden Rodman who also wrote extensively on Mexican art, the book created a stir. Rodman notes in the text that there was an absence of African sculptural forms in Haitian culture. He draws this observation from the work of the cultural anthropologist Melville Herskovits’s book, Life in a Haitian valley published in 1938. However the analysis of Herskovits about the so-called absence of African cultural forms in Haitian culture was a reflection of a specific set of ideas about African sculpture. It ignored the metal art in Haiti that was being pioneered at that moment.4 Rodman suggests in his discussion of Haitian art that there were two forms of Haitian art, what he calls “popular realism” and the other “religious art”. He notes that both popular realism and religious art belongs to the category of the “primitive.” In his discussion he spends time writing about the work of Hector Hyppolite, perhaps one of the most important Haitian artists in the 1940s. Hyppolite, he writes “is unlike any other of the Haitian primitives … (he) makes no effort to achieve a realistic effect in his pictures; if he ever went in for precise modelling details, he has abandoned it.”5 Rodman continues, “it would be unfair to say that his powers of observation are not good because his intentions so obviously are in the direction of expressionist fantasy.” 6

Rodman’s book begins a classificatory process which launches the conception of Haitian art as a form of primitivism7. This categorization of Afro Caribbean art in general continues for some time until influenced by the Black Power and anti-colonial movements of the 1960’s and early 70’s when there were attempts to begin to rethink this category. Thus in Jamaica the phrase “self-taught artist” and later on, “intuitive” emerges at that time to describe particular artists who did not have formal academic training and whose artwork were previously called naïve, folklore or indeed primitive.8

I want to now juxtapose to Rodman’s and others’ classifications, a different methodological way of seeing Haitian art. One which moves away from some of the formal categories of western art and attempts to grapple with the art and the practices of Haitian art itself from the inside out. In this regard the conventional art historical perspective which often constructs art into two distinct realms of the political and the

aesthetic are porous in Haitian art. Jacques Ranciere notes that politics and aesthetics are ways of doing and making that “intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making and that these maintain forms and beings of modes of visibility.9

“It is not my view that artistic practices and political practices are homologous. However, I would suggest that the chasm which has been opened up between them in our general theoretical formulations about art and politics are not tenable in Haitian nor in Afro-Caribbean art in general. In all of this one pays attention to the power of the western episteme as a way of knowing which names things. Let’s take for example the idea that Haitian art is a genre of surrealism.

In 1945 André Breton the founder of surrealism visited Haiti and delivered a talk to what has been recorded as a fairly large audience of over 500 persons. During the course of the talk he noted that the work of Hippolyte and others taught him things and that Haitian art was beyond surrealism. What happens next in this process of naming, demonstrates the power of Western framing as writers begin to speak about Haitian Art as surrealist art. This matter becomes even more complex because Breton brings Hector Hyppolite’s works to the UNESCO international art exhibition in 1947 in Paris.

All of this points to how critical the historical discursive contexts are in any understanding of Haitian art. In the case of Haiti this discursive context is how the Imperial archive of the idea of Haiti becomes located within a colonial episteme.10 The Imperial archive of the idea of Haiti both represents and constructs Haiti primarily as a site of chaos, a site of never-ending catastrophic events from the slave revolution of 1791 to the more recent earthquake. It is a dominant Western archive which creates Haiti as a fixed sign, marked by a strange kind of otherness, a place where “ black magic” happens. In dismantling these frames we begin to understand Haitian art in the words of Edouard Glissant as a “vocation of refusal”. This refusal, in my view, shapes both the practices and the processes of contestation within the making of Haitian art itself while occurring on the terrain of the popular. Stuart Hall makes the point that the “popular should be understood as a tension between what belongs to the central dominant and the elite and the culture and practices of the periphery.”11 From within this framework

ANTHONY BOGUES

I want to think through Haitian art on its own terms by grappling with both another current of literature and different perspectives on Haitian culture in the 1930s and 40s. This line of thought allows us to begin to posit categories along with Haitian thinkers as to what categories might we think about Haitian art. The essay I will deploy for this purpose is a remarkable one by the Haitian medical doctor, writer and novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis.12

The Marvellous.

Jacques Stephen Alexis attended the 1956 Black Writers and Artists Conference in Paris. This was perhaps one of the most important intellectual cultural and political conferences of 20th Century black radical intellectual life. Held at the Sorbonne, the conference was attended by a plethora of black writers, all ? cultural and political figures. Amongst those in attendance were, George Lamming, Frantz Fanon, Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Jean Price Mars and Richard Wright amongst many others. The conference remains a seminal event in the intellectual history of black critical thought and culture.13

At the conference Alexis delivered a speech on the “marvellous realism” of Haitian cultural practice. There he argues that “negro” art was fundamentally linked to life and that this link was a form of humanism which, “traverses history mysticism and naturalism.” He then goes on to argue that in Haitian art this realism “contains order beauty logic and control sensitivities which presents the real which is accompaniment of the strange and the fantastic of dreams and half-life of the mysterious… the marvellous in Haitian art seems to be looking for type.” He then poses the notion that he is deploying the word type in the Latin sense of the word actualis- “that which acts so actual that all particularised subjects can be found in it”.14 For Alexis, the imagination was critical to all aspects of Haitian culture but the work of this imagination was to grapple with the real.

In this formulation, Alexis is grappling with the ways in which Haitian art presents itself, the compositional form in which it presents and then represents itself. In defining Haitian art and culture as subsumed under the category of the marvellous, he is working within a tradition of Caribbean thought which attempts to posit a profound relationship between the marvellous and the conception of the real. This particular understanding of the

marvellous is in deep conversation with Caribbean literature and particularly with the work of Alejo Carpentier, whose novel, The Kingdom of this World was published in 1949.15 What is critical about this novel for the purposes of these remarks is that its main character, an ex slave Ti Noel as well as the chief figure who understands the specific radicality of the Haitian revolution is not the revolutionary leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture nor Jacques Dessalines, but the traditional medical healer/revolutionary, Macandal. The latter developed a political strategy and program of poisoning the planters in the colony of St Domingue. His political ambition was the establishment of a black republic. Macandal’s understanding of plants and herbs allowed him to remain on the plantation even when he had lost one of his hands in a slave work accident. The irony of his stay was that he sometimes healed as well as poisoned the planters. Both the healing and political practices of Macandal were outside the rationalities of Western knowledge. Carpentier’s novel foregrounds these. By deploying the term “marvellous realism” Alexis is positing that at the level of the symbolic order, the imaginary if you will, within Haitian art there is the practice of the real. Parenthetically, one of the fascinating things in the history of Caribbean and Latin American thought are the ways in which ideas and words travel. So that by the 1960’s marvellous realism becomes one basis for the emergence of magical realism in Latin America literature with the work of writers like Gabriel Marquez.

However, my point in these brief remarks is that there existed a Caribbean conversation around the conception of the marvellous. It is occurring in Paris where Alexis and other Caribbean figures are, including the Afro Cuban artist, Wilfredo Lam. But this is not a conversation confined to the colonial metropole alone, because it also occurs in Haiti as well within the French colony/ department of Martinique. In the latter, the key figure is Suzanne Cesaire.16 For Alexis, marvellous realism is the ground of Haitian culture but it is also historically specific to Haiti and the Caribbean, as he argues in the conference against Senghor’s universalism of a Black Culture. Alexis was also making an attempt to revise the conception of social realism. Thus, by the late 1950’s the marvellous emerges and becomes an aesthetic frame, a category for us to begin to think about Haitian art.

Other histories.

There is as well another history of Haitian art which we tend to forget and I wish to briefly explore this. Haiti was occupied by the USA. The American occupation occurred between 1915 to 1935 and created a political and historical context that obviously shaped Haitian society. Besides the occupation as a political context there was the emergence of a particular text by Jean Price Mars So spoke Uncle. A key argument of that text was that Haiti was an African society and that the enslaved population from the different African nations had created cultural practices which indigenized them within the Caribbean space. These cultural forms included the Afro–Caribbean religious practice of vodou and in the end were grounds on which cultural struggles could be waged against the American occupation. The Haitian art historian Michele Phlippe Lerebours has noted that Jean Price Mars’s work created the frame for a moment of cultural indigenous revolt.

One of the leading Haitian artists in the 1940’s Petion Savain in the moment of that revolt wrote a manifesto about Haitian art and established the journal, La Revue Indigene. In the journal he makes the point that art should engage “the most modern techniques and try to adapt them to the demands of Haitian Art.”17 Of course central to this indigenous revolt was vodou itself.18

This practice of vodou systematizes itself as a system of thought and practice and should not just be understood only as a series of religious practices. It is the ground of a symbolic order that was born out of the historical catastrophe of the African experience in the New World. It is rich with its panoply of gods, of spirits/ Lawas and alive with a sense of the marvellous. Thus many artists have drawn from this cosmological resource. It is at this point that I wish to draw your attention to the work of the Haitian artist André Pierre. The painting I draw your attention to is “ The Guinean spirits returning to Africa after the Haitian independence war. “ Now, there are many layer to this work and we could spend hours on it, but I just want to lightly touch on some of the things around this painting. One of the first things that I I want to draw your attention to is the dress of soldiers who are actually lawas/spirits within the Afro-Caribbean pantheon of vodou. That they are on a cloud

which is really a ship tells us that this is a reimagining of the slave ship itself. Finally, they are on their way back to Africa. What is also noticeable is the deployment of the word Guine. In African diasporic imaginary, Guine is a placeholder for Continental Africa. So, for Andre Pierre, these Lawas are returning to Africa after winning Haitian independence. In other words, Haitian independence would not have been won in 1805 without the intervention of these Lawas.It should be noted as well that they are returning to Africa after playing a part in the Haitian Independence War, not the war against racial slavery. What this means is that for the artist, the key moment in Haitian history is independence. Of course the Haitian revolution is a dual one – against racial slavery and then for political independence. Both of these open a distinctive space in Haitian art but it is the moment of independence which dominates.

Other categories

One of the difficulties in discussions about the categories of Haitian art is that many critics think that Haitian art is dominated by vodou cosmology,so I want to bring your attention to a work which is perhaps one of the most significant art pieces in Haitian art history. Recall the American occupation. This occupation was resisted by many and there was a group of guerrillas called Cacos led by Charleamagne Prelate who began an armed struggle against the occupation. Prelate was an inspirational leader so, what did the marines do? After capturing him they murdered him. They then took photographs of his corpse and dropped these images from helicopters all over Haiti. One such picture was then used by the Haitian artist Philome Obin who was neither a vodou practitioner nor a priest and was actually a Baptist by religious faith. From one of these photographs, Obin makes a painting called the “Crucifixion of Prelate.” It is a remarkable painting and is considered to be a seminal piece of historical art in Haitian art history. We should note as well that Obin wrote in various letters that he wanted to paint a history of Haiti.The point I’m making here, is that the questions of history emerges very forcefully in Haitian art and that if there is an aesthetic within the category of marvellous realism it circles around issues of what one might call “living history.19” Part of these aesthetic practices allow us to think through the

Edouard Duval-Carrie

Memoire sans Histoire, 2009

mixed media on aluminium, 94 x 208 in. Collection of Serge and Johanna Coles

meaning of the historical. This preoccupation of the historical both as thematic and aesthetic leads us to the discussion of the third artist – Edouard Duvall Carrie. This is an artist with whom I have worked with for some time and I want to briefly discuss this piece Memories without History.

In this particular artwork,there are six sections all stitched together in panels of aluminium. The artist is telling the story of Haiti. The figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture is central to the work. For the artist, given what he understands to be the history of Haiti, of occupation and authoritarian rule, he is invoking the return of Toussaint as a kind of saviour. In the work, Toussaint is on his horse trying to rescue Haiti. It is the recall of a memory to intervene in the present. In my view one of the things the artist wants to make clear is that there are all these memories of independence but within these are the Generals and the elite who have driven the ordinary Haitian to the wall. So he has juxtaposed memory to history, asking us to think or perhapsto recall the history of the revolution, not just its memories. He is asking us to live in history. In other words, for the artist, history becomes a form of critique not just the telling of a narrative tale.

In trying to think through this question of history itself. All three artists are attempting to establish a different archive of Haiti, about the idea of Haiti itself, as a new sign. This means we need to pay attention to how the historical functions in these works, because it is also linked to the issue of politics. The formal question of politics in Haiti is a complex one from the dual revolution to the divisions between the Haitian state and the Haitian nation, the ways in which the late Haitian intellectual Michel Rolph Trouillot argue that the state and the nation were launched into different directions.20 Thus formal politics in Haiti operates at many levels- there’s the operation of the state with a history of authoritarianism and then there are attempts to define certain popular subjectivities via elements of the population. What I want to argue here is that there’s a politics which also resides in the popular forms of art and that this politics circles around history.

I end here by saying that the matter of “living history” and its relationship to the marvellous real reframes Haitian art. The question of aesthetics of the marvellous realism in Haitian art does not circle around beauty in ways that we may conventionally understand aesthetics particularly through its Kantian formulation. Rather aesthetics may also be found in the making of the object; it is to be found in its relationship to the lived experiences of Haiti both his history and politics. In the end Haitian art (at least many of its currents) attempts to wrestle with both an understanding of living history as well as politics. This kind of aesthetic regime does not negate beauty but as I have said, it locates it elsewhere. Both Haitian and Afro-Caribbean art are distinctive grammars which require a rethinking of the conventional history and categories of art.

ENDNOTES

1 There is of course great deal of literature on how African masks shaped the composition of Picasso’s. Les Demoiselles D’ Avigon.

2 The Cobra Group came to attention with the 1949 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

3 Selden Rodman, Renaissance in Haiti: Popular Painters in the Black Republic (New York; 1948)

4 Of course by the late 1940’s and 50’s metal work artists like Georges Liautaud had emerged as a major figure.

5 Renaissance in Haiti, pp 68-69

6 Ibid

7 Important to note that there have attempts by Haitian writers to revised this category of the primitive and give a more complex art history of Haiti. See in particular, Gerald Alexis, Peintres Haitians (Paris: 2000) and of course there isthe two volume work of Michel–Philippe Lerebours, Haiti Et SES Peintres 1804-1980 (Port–Au Prince, 1989)

8 There continues today the categorization of some Haitian art as self taught see for example the recent catalogue Direct From The Eye: The Jonathan Demme Collection of Self Taught Art (Philadelphia: 2014)

9 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of the Aesthetics (London; 2004) p. 13.

10 The European colonial project was not only one of territorial conquest and a political economy of extraction it was also a project in which colonial power made vigorous attempts to create a “native.” At the core of that creation was not only violence and death but a series of knowledge regimes and common sense configurations in which ideological, political frame works, common sense as well imaginaries were created. The underlying episteme of these configurations was the colonial episteme. At the core of this episteme was a human classification system in which blackness signified being non human. The historical processes of racial slavery and colonialism, as Aime Ceasire makes clear is one which creates for the Black Native a state of “thingfication”

11 Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular” in John Storey (ed) Cultural Theory & Popular Culture: A Reader (New York 1998) p. 448.

12 Jacques Stephen Alexis was a Haitian novelist of note and a radical political figure. His most influential novel was General Sun My Brother. He was tortured by the Duvalier regime placed on a boat and never seen again.

13 For a discussion of this conference see Anthony Bogues, Caribbean Thought: Politics, History and Archive (Kingston: 2024)

14 Jacques Stephen Alexis, “Of the Marvelous Realism of the Haitians” in Presence Africanaine, Cultural Journal of the Negro World. No 8.9 10 June-November 1956. pp 249.

15 For a very good discussion about the marvellous and Caribbean literature see, Margaret Heady, MarvellousMarvelous Journeys: Routes of Identity in the Caribbean Novel (New York: 2008)

16 For a discussion of Suzanne Cesaire’s work see, The Great Camouflage Writings of Dissent (1941-1945) Suzanne Cesaire (ed) Daniel Maximin (Middletown: 2012) Trans Keith Walker.

17 Ibid, p. 716

18 There was also in the literary field the writing of novels which reflected the spirit of indigenism. Perhaps the best known of these is Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew

19 For a discussion of this idea of living history in Haitian art see, Anthony Bogues, “Making History and the Work of Memory in the Art of Edouard Duval Carrie” in Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits In the Art of Edouard Duval Carrie (eds)

P. Neil, M Carrasco & L. Wolff (Gainesville: 2018)

20 Michel–Rolph Trouillot, State Against Nation (New York: 1990)

AESTHETICS: RECUPERATE, REBALANCE, RUPTURE

JAMES TRAFFORD

Aesthetics as praxis

I want to draw this conversation together with Sylvia Wynter’s approach to politics and aesthetics –particularly in the context of what Derek Gregory terms the ‘colonial present’, and the question of history more generally.

In Rethinking Aesthetics, Sylvia Wynter considers aesthetics beyond disciplinary frameworks to ask instead:

What does aesthetics do? What is its function in human life? What, specifically, is its function in our present “form of life”? What correlation does it bear with the “social effectivities” of our present order, including that into which the real-life citizens and “captive populations” of the U.S. inner cities and the Third World shantytown archipelagos are locked?1

These questions are carefully positioned within an approach that situates aesthetics in the context of the broader training of sensory experience and also to account for the relationship between that sensory experience and the normative form of the social. Aesthetics, for Wynter, engages with “points of power” where sensory experience is intertwined with discursive codes–suggesting that “each mode of the aesthetic is isomorphic with a specific mode of human behaviour or ‘form of life’”.2 She uses this slightly differently to Wittgenstein to mean a system of agreed-upon meanings but also a state of representation/experience, and how these are embedded within socio-political and economic contexts.

Thinking with Anthony Farley’s work, we may also say that where Wynter points to governing rules of “forms of life,” those

rules do not themselves fix collective meanings, but rather “only training and desire fix the rules in any particular direction or meaning.”3 For Farley, “forms of life” are just the crystallization of repressed desire and training, producing patterns of behaviors that become normative through reinforcing feedback loops of sanction and support.

What we might call governing rules of “forms of life” are entrenched norms that interweave economic, political, and material infrastructures as much as “cultural personality” (to use Amilcar Cabral’s phrase).

Aesthetics and invention

Wynter suggests that aesthetics is a sociopolitical practice that so often involves securing social cohesion and producing a unitary system of meanings. Where aesthetics may function to reproduce forms of life, critique reifies its underlying metaphysics and hierarchy in performative autonomy and supposed distance from the codes through which critique is produced.

To decipher–rather than critique–is Wynter’s methodological approach that aims to reveal the systems and codes through which forms of life function. Decipherment helps us to see how the subject is instituted within the “replication of our present form of life.”4 The suggestion is that the normative epistemic and affective world does not index a reality of the social universe, but rather that which is formed under condition of the world’s existence–how that social order should be felt in order to consider how its structuring processes are dynamically induced and replicated. This is also to see how so much of aesthetic discourse intervenes to recuperate and rebalance to ensure the ongoing autopoiesis of the world of the colonial present.

Consider, for example, the spectacle of police violence–whether located in the mediation of report and state discourse or in the circulation of images of police brutality. Liberal critique points to how that spectacle indexes a reality requiring reform and even defunding. But this, to follow Sexton and Martinot, emphasizes how “spectacle is a form of camouflage. It does not conceal anything; it simply renders it unrecognizable. One looks at it and does not see it. It appears in disguise.”5

Instead with Wynter we might instead suggest that those spectacles signify a deeper set of codes that generate and fortify

antiblack violence. The editorial collective of (de)cypher: black notes on culture and criticism–taking their cue from Wynter’s work–say that “deciphering is an embodied practice seeking to intervene in the process of anti-black autopoiesis.”6

So, importantly, what we understand as the codes and rules of world-making are not simply things that could be re-engineered out of existence. This coheres with Wynter’s development of Fanon’s sociogenic principle to indicate how universals that are particular to specific genres of the human cannot be understood as mere fictions (e.g. as the imperial imposition of a European particular) that could be sloughed off, but rather are intertwined at every layer of existence. These codes may be written so deeply into the structure of thinking and experience that they suture representation and understanding to the constitution of the world. That which is entrenched therefore also productive of modes of life – of ways of being within the world–whose actions recursively constitute that world (as autopoietic structure).

But, Wynter’s move towards sociogeny (rejecting the ontocentric human) makes way for the alterability of these most entrenched codes. Where spectacle and its critique operates as structural reassurance to anti-black autopoiesis, decipherment, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson puts it, “is a praxis that Wynter avers catalyzes a transmutation of Man as a speaking/knowing/ feeling being.”7 Taking up Fanon’s suggestion “to reimagine the human in the terms of a new history,”8 Wynter poses aesthetic invention as that which may be inscribed into new codes of the human–and as rupture within history itself.

Overcoded novelty and rupture

These thoughts prompt a number of questions. If politics and aesthetics are ways of doing and being that intervene our forms of life -and I agree that the chasm between both aeshetics and politics and doing and being should perhaps be dismantled-then how can we understand their interaction such that they are not collapsible into one another? How should we understand the ways that both overcode and overdetermine so often in order to give succour to antiblack autopoiesis? Antiblack autopoesis here signifies not an ontology that could be negated or undone by appeal to blackness, but rather the impossibility of attempts to suture ontology through capture, control, and pre-emptive

AESTHETICS

JAMES TRAFFORD

annihilation. Anti-Blackness, as David Marriott writes, is both the condition of the world and also what ‘puts it into crisis’.9

Interwoven with these questions is how we may understand politics and aesthetics as potentially operational beyond or without that recuperative gesture, and through which forms of life might be punctured with the new. The structure of the novelty is relevant to how the colonial present operates not as a program of historical progress, but as a dialectical stutter that attempts to lock history within the movements of progress and falters. On this question, Marriott wonders whether Wynter’s reading of Fanon’s invention cannot then be one of rupture, but is more a kind of re-engineering of the human, since it requires that new codes must be graspable within the continuity of history.10

Perhaps, though, the position that Bogues suggests–of praxis that punctures–has the capacity to interweave rupture with ordinary lived experience. As such, rather than the new requiring coherence into contemporary codes, perhaps there are more mundane practices that are yet unknowable and therefore incoherent from within the form of life of the colonial present. That is to say, the new may appear to take the form of alterity, but only insofar as the form of life–which is an ever-shifting autopoietic system–is experienced as sutured rather than held together by force. Instead, and even in the everyday, we must ask what are these ways of doing and being that make life possible.

ENDNOTES

1 Wynter, Sylvia. “Rethinking ‘aesthetics’: Notes towards a deciphering practice.” Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean cinema 245 (1992), p.241.

2 ibid. p.253.

3 Anthony P. Farley, Accumulation, 11 Mich. J. Race & L. 51 (2005), p.60.

4 Wynter, Rethinking, p.263.

5 Martinot, Steve, and Jared Sexton. “The avant-garde of white supremacy.” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 169-181.

6 https://decypherednotes.com

7 Jackson, Zakiyyah. “Against Criticism: Notes on Decipherment and the Force of Things”. November, 30 (2021).

8 Scott D and Wynter S (2000) The re-enchantment of humanism: An interview with Sylvia Wynter. Small Axe 8(2): 119–207.

9 Marriott, David (2021). Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.138.

10 Marriott, David. “Inventions of Existence: Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Sociogeny, and” the Damned”.” CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (2011): 45-89.

A RESPONSE TO THE HISTORY, POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF HAITIAN ART: SOME REFLECTIONS

JACKIE HENSY

Any Given Sunday, curated by Raison Naidoo, was a socially engaged art project that unfolded publicly across the city of Cape Town in 2016. Anthony Bogues contributed an essay to a recent publication on the event entitled An art for whom? The public art of Any Given Sunday in post-apartheid South Africa. In the essay, Bogues offers a historical lineage of the political and cultural considerations that prompted Naidoo’s public art project, which Bogues describes as an act of “curatorial activism” driven by a “preoccupation of the relationship between art and the people.”1 While this line of questioning surrounding art and the public is not unique to South Africa, the context from which it arises and how the questioning takes form in African art has roots in radical anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements. African and Afro-Caribbean art (Bogues elaborates on the latter in his writing on Haitian art in this volume) and its relationship to culture cannot be understood through conventional art historical perspectives which separate art into the categories of the political and the aesthetic, an impossibility in Bogues’ thinking on African art and on radical art. Offering an important historiographical correction to the imperial archive’s idea of African art, Bogues provides insight into the relationship between art and the popular in Black culture by “[thinking] through [African] art on its own terms”. 2

When Western art practices such as the colonial market, the gallery, and the art school intersected with African cultures, constrained thinking of Western critics led to a mischaracterization and patronising framework for viewing African art. In the early 1900s, French visitors took artwork with religious, spiritual, or symbolic orders and circulated it outside of the context it was intended for (including Picasso and Matisse), describing

the artwork as naive and giving it the homogenous label of “Primitivism.” Bogues counters with an essay by Aimé Césaire written in 1935 that introduced a lasting “central claim of African and African diasporic art”, that “African art was about the ‘humanisation of humanity.’” The concept was expanded on in a talk on “Marvellous Realism” by Jacques Steven Alexis at the 1956 Paris Congress of Black Writers and Artists, which Bogues views as a seminal event in Black culture, Black art, and Black thought. Alexis describes the “fundamental link to life in Negro art” and reiterates African art as a form of humanism that “traverses history, mysticism, and naturalism” and “contains order, beauty, logic, and cultural sensitivities,” also described as the real. In interpreting Alexis’ thought, Bogues locates the real within that which is marvellous and necessitates Voodoo, a symbolic order established under conditions of racial slavery when African religions merged with French Catholicism, as critical in the understanding of Haitian (and African) art. The orality and popular imagination of the Caribbean people, which is bound up in resistance, is expressed through their art. Voodoo, marvellous realism, African art, and Black critique are “practice[s] which [puncture] the cosmology of the west.”3 Bogues pulls from W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, highlighting the second (oft forgotten) portion of Du Bois claim that “the negro has the second side.” From this marginal place in dominant society, insight is available into society itself and offers Black art its radicality. This intertwining of aesthetics and culture, this locating of art within the popular, explains how politics and art practices cannot be separated in understanding African art. This illustrates why the question of art’s relation to the public presents so differently in an African context. Returning to Any Given Sunday, the project emerged from “the long history of debates about the role of the artist and that of art within [revolutionary] movements,”4 many of which Bogues presented, but only a fraction of which are mentioned here, and in a time when “political equality had ended juridical and formal structural apartheid.” This shifted artistic discourse, introducing “the white cube spaces [as] the apex of one’s artistic dreams,” which is antithetical to the historical relationship between art and African culture. Naidoo stated that the project, to him, was

successful “when a member of the public stopped to look at a performance…which he/she would never encounter because they would never enter a museum.”5 In dissolving the boundary between the white cube gallery and the people, the elite and the everyday person, the artist and the public, Naidoo reaches to bridge a greater divide in repairing African peoples’ historical relationship between art and culture, which was fractured by the West’s intervention.

ENDNOTES

1 Bogues , Anthony. “An Art for Whom? The Public Art of Any Given Sunday in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Mail & Guardian. Cape Town, (January 21, 2022): 10–11. Pg 10.

2 Bogues, Anthony. “Art and History: Reframing Aesthetics and Politics - A Reflection on Haitian art.” Lecture with James Traffors as part of CalArts Aesthetics & Politics Online Lecture Series: Dominance and Revolution. April 7, 2022. YouTube video, 1:33:11. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wFvxGFUkdwI.

3 Ibid.

4 Bogues, January 2022, Pg 10.

5 Ibid., Pg 11.

A RESPONSE TO THE HISTORY, POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF HAITIAN ART: SOME REFLECTIONS

SHU L. XU

In his public lecture titled “Art and History: Reframing Aesthetics and Politics - A Reflection on Haitian Art,” Bogues first considers the conventional misinterpretation of Haitian art as ‘primitive’ and then suggests a historical dimension to Haitian art. The conventional framing of Haitian art is paired with ideas of ‘naive’, ‘primitive’, ‘folklore’. A clue about the use of such terms can be found in Picasso and Matisse’s cooptation of ‘primitive’ elements in African masks, sculptures, and possibly the color, blue, especially when both of them were looking to turn against the dominance of certain artistic forms in their own time. A visit to Paris’s colonial markets was one of the sources that helped them to learn about the primitivist ‘other’ However, whereas a primitivist turn of Picasso or Matisse may complement their roles as the avant-garde, the description ‘primitive’ links tightly to how some scholars think of or misunderstand black art. In this case, Bogues’s investigation suggests that the circulation of elements of black art both serve an inspiration to the avant-garde art which challenges one kind of dominance, and such use of diction and preexisting artistic elements creates another form of dominance: that the presumed understanding about black art, here, Haitian art, is always linked with the idea of the ‘primitive’. In other words, whereas the avant-garde sought to create the sense of otherness or outsideness, the Haitian art was pushed further from receiving a just interpretation but became the real ‘otherness’. Here, the description of Haitian art as ‘primitive’ obviously departs from a scale of Occidental comparison that operates on a hierarchy that compares ‘civilized’, to the ‘uncivilized’; or, with the ‘human’, against the ‘nonhuman’. The adoption of the term

“the primitive” when attributed to Haitian art ultimately heightens the superiority of the gaze of scholars influenced by, or standing within a place with which this “primitive” is used as such a comparative model. According to Bogues, one can hardly know the nature of Haiti in this comparative sense, if the comparative method were the beginning and the end of interpretation.

In addition to the historical dimension of the misconception of the Haitian art, the image of Haitian art also takes on a political dimension. In 1940s, when the surrealist artist André Breton visited the Caribbean and encountered the work of Hector Hyppolite and other Haitian artists, Breton said to the translator, “If I had seen the work of Hyppolite and others, I would not have gone into surrealism.” Regretfully, the translator captured this link as “Haitian art is surrealism.” According to Bogues, this is the point at which people started calling Haitian art “surrealist”. In other words, the circulation of “a slip of translation” registers a public impression of Haitian art. In the same vein, Bogues briefly mentions the imperial archive’s records of “Haiti as chaos,” suggesting that one who attempts to stay away from |the dominant western archives, ideas, or even mistranslations, has to transform the conventional images of the Haitian identity, religion and art from outside the dominant, the elite, and the misconceived imagery that has been allocated by the Western eye.

Bogues’s discussion on the conventional misconception of Haitians and Haitian art uncovers a less accurate historical and political approach based on comparative method utilized by the dominant groups. Haitian art needs the markers of a “real” political and historical reflections on itself, which announces three accounts of Haitian art: “the negro art is linked to life, as a form of humanism, which traverses history, mysticism, and naturalism”, the voodoo prince in the Haitian revolution in early 20th century, and ‘history’s dialectical relationship with popular imagery in Haiti. While the first account subjected to the quality of “life” in Haitian art was brought together with ideas of “order, beauty and control sensitivities” shared between popular and artistic constructs (marvelous realist fiction), the second account, the participation of the voodoo prince in both the marvelous realist fiction and the Haitian revolution, points to a mystical life behind the order and also creates an alternate

order for specifically Haitian fictional imagery and history. In the novel The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier, which Bogues introduces to us, he presents the protagonist as mad and a voodoo practitioner, who has knowledge of poisons and herbs. In the Haitian revolution, voodoo priests were leaders of the independence war which overthrew the French. In this sense, voodoo as both popular imagery and a historically proven form of activism, is an example justifying that “the history of Haitian is rooted in popular imagery”, while popular imagery finds its counterparts in real experience. What is further from the discourse of civilization and scientific knowledge than madness, voodoo, and herbalist knowledge? How are these different forms of knowledge practiced in these different political systems? The history and culture of Haiti can help with developing the vocabulary and concepts to understand Haitian art without the dominant perspectives that have often been used to describe it and fetishize it. When it comes to the form of Haitian art itself, it is “to live in history”. As Bogues puts it, “the way that Haitian society is constructed is through a living history.” We should be ready to live in history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bogues, Tony. “An art for whom? The public art of Any Given Sunday in post-apartheid South Africa.” Any Given Sunday, Mail & Guardian (January 21 to 27, 2022), 10-11.

Bogues, Tony. “Art and History: Reframing Aesthetics and Politics - A Reflection on Haitian Art.” Lecture.

Zoom: California Institute of the Arts Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series. March 17, 2022. https://youtu.be/wFvxGFUkdwI

ENDNOTE

1 Tony Bogues, “Art and History: Reframing Aesthetics and Politics - A Reflection on Haitian Art.”

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid. Bogues did not specify which history exactly, but I take his use of history both as an abstract reference to the idea of history, and concrete situation of Haiti from the colonial to the contemporary periods.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 This idea has benefited from Amanda Beech’s feedback and their help of framing it in an eloquent form.

13 Ibid.

QUESTION CAMERON WEEKS

When producing art in the public sphere, the relationship between space, artist, and audience directly impacts the way in which the art is received and represented. In “An art for whom? The public art of Any Given Sunday in post-apartheid South Africa,” Tony Bogues identifies the curatorial concerns of producing art for the general public, especially when that public may have little to no prior exposure, experience, or knowledge of art.

The ethical urgencies faced by curators, especially those outside of dominant Western theoretical and ideological models, heighten the necessity for a philosophical or methodological approach to curation. The presentation of socially engaged art, in particular, demands a critical curatorial intervention that centers how the public can, will, or should interact with art. The word “curator” itself derives from the Latin cura, meaning to care. With this in mind, must curators then adopt an ethos of care when presenting socially engaged art to the public? Again, try to articulate what is at stake here, for example, you might say what some of the pitfalls and issues there are if we consider art to be didactic or instrumental ? What is direct engagement? Is direct engagement a matter of being their physically with people, or communicating a message that is very direct and not ambiguous? It would be good to know more about what you have in mind so take a moment here to explain what you are referring to. Can a performer be ambiguous? Are you placing value on the need for direct engagement but also seeing that it goes against some of the principles that Bogues was valuing? What does Bogues say in this matter, so perhaps you could say. “In the text you say X and X, and you also say that political engagement is needed, so what kind of aesthetics are at work here? If the artwork is more open to interpretation can it fulfill these political ends?

If you can describe more fully what you mean by your terms and relate more directly to Bogue’s work this will work itself out!

QUESTION C. BAIN

I’m thinking of vodou as i think you describe it, as a symbolic system and system of belief which leads to political and aesthetic as well as theological impacts on the social. i’m thinking about symbols and images, and the proliferation of image-production and distribution, and what some refer to as a resultant globalization of western culture. i wonder what the theological impacts are, of this globalization. If the Haitian revolution relied in part on the meaning-making achieved by the symbolic system of vodou, is there any possibility that there is an equivalent meaning-making that could take hold in contemporary culture? (i guess inside my question there’s a fear that the relationship between image-symbol and meaning becomes more superficial as the quantity of imagesymbols increase, as structures of communication bring everything into a kind of loose conversation, assimilated through globalization into one plurality of difference. Is there a relationship between spiritual or religious symbolic systems and the mechanisms of overtly political image making, (propaganda, memes) that are synonymous with western capitalist cultural practices? Reading this in 2022, in the United States, i wonder whether americans are without symbols that are denotative of that kind of spiritual-political potency, symbols that hold the possibility of a rupture in the extant socio-political order? Or if we have arrived at symbols that we fail to understand as symbols; that we take as reality as given? Does a culture ever question their symbolic system, or understand their system as symbolic?

CONTRIBUTOR BIOS

SESSION I.

Dr. Katerina Kolozova: Senior researcher and professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopea, and visiting faculty at Arizona State University-Center for Philosophical Technologies.

At the Faculty of Media and Communications-Belgrade, she teaches contemporary political philosophy. Prof. Kolozova was a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California-Berkley in 2009 and a Columbia University NY-SIPA Visiting Scholar at its Paris Global Centre in 2019. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the New Centre for Research and Practice – Seattle WA and co-director of the School of Materialist Research (Tempe AZ, Vienna, Eindhoven, Skopje). Kolozova is the author of Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy published by Bloomsbury Academic-UK in 2019 and Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy, published by Columbia University Press-NY in 2014.

RESPONDENT

Dr. Alice Rekab is an artist, researcher and educator based in Dublin, Ireland.

Their practice is concerned with expressions and iterations of complex cultural and personal narratives. Alice takes their own mixed-race Irish identity as a starting point from which to explore experiences of race, place and belonging. Over the last ten years Alice’s practice has centred around collaboration and interdisciplinary work from which they produce film, performance, text, image and sculpture, creating new intersectional narratives and objects for gallery based exhibition and large scale public commission.

SESSION II.

Gean Moreno, Director of the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center at ICA Miami.

Moreno has organized exhibitions dedicated to the work of Hélio Oiticica, Terry Adkins, Larry Bell, Ettore Sottsass, and others. Moreno is also co-director of [NAME] Publications and the “Migrant Archives” initiative. He has contributed texts to various catalogues and publications, including e-flux journal, Kaleidoscope, and Art in America. He was on the Advisory Board of the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2018 Creative Time Summit. He edited Real Abstraction and Contemporary Art, an anthology that Verso released in 2019.

RESPONDENT

Dr. Jaleh Monsoor, Associate Professor , Dept of Art, Visual Art and Theory, UBC, Canada.

Jaleh Mansoor is a historian of Modern and contemporary cultural production, specializing in twentieth-century European art, Marxism, Marxist feminism, and critical theory. Mansoor’s research on abstract painting in the context of the miracolo Italiano and the international relations of the Marshall Plan era nested within the global dynamics of the Cold War opens up on to problems concerning the labour-to-capital relationship and its ramifications in culture and aesthetics. Her work includes: the book Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia, Duke University Press (2016) and monographic studies on the work of Piero Manzoni, Ed Ruscha, Agnes Martin, Blinky Palermo, Gerhard Richter, and Mona Hatoum. She is currently working on a new book, tentatively entitled Concrete Abstraction: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Labour, on the entwinement of labour, value, and “bare life” in the work of Santiago Sierra and Claire Fontaine, among other contemporary practices that examine the limits of the human.

SESSION III.

Dr. Anthony Bogues is a writer, scholar and curator. He has published 9 books in the fields of political thought and critical theory, Caribbean intellectual history and Caribbean art. He is currently working on a book titled Black Critique and a book/ sonic project on politics and music in Jamaica during the 1970’s. He is co-editing some of the unpublished writings of Sylvia Wynter, another volume titled, Race, Slavery, Capitalism and the Making of the Modern World, as well as the biography of the Haitian artist, Andre Pierre. He is the Asa Messer professor of Humanities and Critical Theory, Professor of Africana Studies and affiliated professor in the department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University . Bogues has curated/co-curated art shows in the Caribbean, South Africa, Paris and the USA. Currently he is the co-convener of two major historical art and cultural projects, In Slavery’s Wake with the National African American Museum of History and Culture and the project Imagined New: Black Life After Historical Catastrophe, in South Africa.

RESPONDENT

Dr. James Trafford is Reader in Philosophy and Design at University for the Creative Arts (London). They are author of The Empire at Home: Internal Colonies and the End of Britain (Pluto Press, 2020) and Meaning in Dialogue (Springer, 2017), as well as co-editor of Alien Vectors (Routledge, 2019), and Speculative Aesthetics (MIT Press, 2016). They are involved in immigrant detainee support, organising against border imperialism, and a large-scale class composition project with the collective Notes from Below.

KEYWORDS FROM “DOMINANCE AND REVOLUTION”

Places

Mechanisms

Language

Reality

Universal Technology

Objectivity

Dominance

Power

Metaphysical

Humiliation

Impossible

Space of potential

Revolution

Globalisation

Histories & Geschichte

Impoverishment

Cycle

Dyad

Administration

Tragedy

Farce

Limit

Exit Escape

Structures

Organisation

Invisible

Imagination

Possibility

Constraint

Collective

Picturing

Technê

Art

Materialism

Philosophy

Reason

Craft

Being

Language

Tragedy

Aristotle

Catharsis

Essence

Systasis

Finite

Infinite

Automaton

Material Matter

Abstraction

Identity

History

Culture

Colonialism

Economics

Revolution

Capitalism

Self-determination

Communism

Ideology

Nation

Material

Subjectivity

Contradiction

Change

Decolonization

Globalization

Rectification

Social Reality

Ancestral

Representation

Myth

Interpretation

BOOK DESIGN

STUART SMITH | NAVEEN HATTIS | HONGZHOU WAN

ISBN: 978-0-9916593-6-4

DOMINANCE AND REVOLUTION THE IMAGE, THE STRUGGLE AND THE USE OF FORCE

Today, the idea of a comprehensive re-orientation of our world is claimed to be less and less possible, and the notion that there is a visible concentration of power that might be called dominant has been eviscerated by neo-liberal global capital as much as by the disaggregating mechanics of critical theory, which has preferred to speak about horizontal forms of power as opposed to verticality.

In this collection of essays and responses, we address the history of resistance, revolution and power, and the methods of critique that this has manifested in culture and society. If we invest in themes of revolution, we risk trivializing resistance and freedom for the revolution defines our alienation, but without the thought of radical change, are there any hopes for reorientations of our future and how we act upon it?

This collection of essays and responses documents the Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series. Each semester a new theme is developed with a series of invited speakers to tackle contemporary issues across art, politics and society.

ISBN: 978-0-9916593-6-4

CALARTS

CONTRIBUTORS: C. BAIN

AMANDA BEECH

CLAIRE BILDERBACK

CEDRIC BOBRO

ANTHONY BOGUES

YICHEN CHEN

JACKIE HENSY

KATERINA KOLOZOVA

JALEH MONSOOR

GEAN MORENO

TERESA PIECUCH

ALICE LUCY REKAB

JAMES TRAFFORD

CAMERON WEEKS

SHU XU

A DOCUMENT OF

THE AESTHETICS AND POLITICS

LECTURE SERIES

MA AESTHETICS AND POLITICS

CALARTS SCHOOL OF CRITICAL STUDIES