Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry volume 24 Spring 2010

Foreword — Dieter Roelstraete

When Hal Foster first published his acclaimed collection of essays The Return of the Real back in 1996, he was among the first to signal (or at the very least theorise) the advent of ‘abject’ art — an art of trauma (‘traumatic realism’) and infantile perversions, gross sexual imagery and bodily secretions.1 Thus the ‘real’ referred to in the title of this book was to be understood in the capital-R Lacanian sense first and foremost, as that which exists outside the realm of language and resists all attempts at symbolic mediation or assimilation. The real, in abject art’s contentious case, was there to remind us of the crude, irreducible facts of ‘real’ embodiment amid the rising tide of ‘derealisation’. Indeed, it is worth noting that The Return of the Real came out when the first waves of technooptimism engendered by the various digital revolutions of the early-to-mid-1990s were ebbing away, and a certain measure of anxiety (as well as sheer fatigue) was starting to accompany any casual mention of the salutary effects of ‘virtual reality’ and the Internet-driven ‘dematerialisation’ — a tactic pioneered in the Conceptual art of the late 1960s, incidentally — of the world economy. Looking at the work of Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, John Miller, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith, among others, Foster observed both the unruly return of real bodies and the essential irrepressibility of trauma, and rightly identified the critical impetus that informed much of the work in this vein, some of which had been shaped by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. A decade and a half on from the publication of The Return of the Real, however, it is tempting to conjecture that what happened subsequently was not so much a continuation of the real’s gradual return among our midst as its accelerated disappearance. Only in the second half of the 90s did the dotcom boom really take off, to be perfunctorily interrupted by the Y2K panic, after which the first decade of the twenty-first century saw unprecedented economic growth thanks to the progressive deregulation of global financial markets. (The inner workings of which increasingly lost touch with all conventional notions of economic ‘reality’, let alone economic realism.) The effects that this loss of reality (and the concomitant depreciation of ‘realism’, of whatever kind, as a viable mode of representing this loss-of-reality as a reality in its own right) has had upon art is well-known, as the traditional concept of the art world was increasingly supplanted by that of the art market — by the proliferation of art fairs, the explosive growth of gallery circuits, the stellar rise of the twin figures of the collector and the superstar dealer as the era’s defining cultural icons (themselves replacements for the curatoriat of the 90s), and by both the diamond-studded skull of Damien Hirst (For the Love of God, 2007) and Hirst himself grinning at us from the gleaming covers of art magazines bloated with advertising. It is probably still too early to say whether this whole complex belongs to the past, as the effects of the current global economic crisis upon the contemporary art context are increasingly difficult to determine, let alone define — in fact, it is becoming more difficult by the day to define the nature of the crisis’s progress (what crisis?) as such: is it already over, is it in full swing or is it yet to make itself felt? However this may be, there is no denying that the reality check 1

2 | Afterall

See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the end of the Century, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1996.

Foreword | 3

forced upon both the world of art and the world at large by the planetary financial meltdown of 2008—2009 has reawakened interest in the topic of realism as the artistic tradition or paradigm that is most deeply committed to the idea of representing and interpreting reality (as opposed to a Lacanian ‘real’ that does not necessarily correspond to anything real in the conventional sense of the term): no longer just a return of the real, then, but a return of realism. As I am writing this foreword, Berlin (the location, last year, of a two-day symposium dedicated to ‘realism in contemporary art’, held at ICI Kulturlabor, the proceedings of which will be published as a book later this year) is gearing up for the sixth instalment of the Berlin Biennial, and this event has already made a promise to ‘question contemporary art’s relationship to reality’ — a process of interrogation that will be afforded its proper historic dimensionby means of an exhibition-within-the-exhibition of the work of German arch-realist Adolph Menzel, to be curated by Michael Fried. Though nowhere near as highprofile an event as this biennial, I could not help but notice that the Kunsthalle Emden and the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich, in the meantime, are organising an exhibition titled ‘Realism: The Adventure of Reality’ this spring and summer; it looks like it features its fair share of Photorealism, that North American 1970s painting fad that is experiencing its own modest revival (and which I consider in an essay in this issue), as was also attested by an exhibition titled ‘Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s’ at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin in 2009. (Judging by the examples here named, one could be forgiven for thinking that this revived interest in pictorial realism is a German affair first and foremost — the result, perhaps, of long years of exposure to the work of Thomas Demand and Andreas Gursky.) And indeed, on a couple of occasions during the meeting at which the broad contours of the current issue of Afterall were first drawn out, the subject of realism was broached — to be dropped again and picked up again later: as my colleagues have pointed out, for the last couple of years the subject of realism has been broached at every Afterall meeting — yet more proof, if such proof were still needed, that the question of contemporary art’s relationship to reality is steadily gaining urgency as everywhere around us reality is to be seen falling apart, evaporating, disintegrating, disappearing, not seldom (and this is of course of crucial importance here) with the active help of art. Three of the four artists under consideration in this issue raise questions in their work that address the complex entanglement of the real, reality and realism (three very different, but obviously interrelated concepts): the question of realism is clearly a relevant one to Portuguese film-maker Pedro Costa, and one of the essays devoted to his work is tellingly titled ‘Realism, not Reality’; realism as both a representational strategy and pictorial tradition is similarly central — in the shape of a problem as much as an opportunity — to the art of Kerry James Marshall; and the hopeful dream of really making an impact (i.e. in the ‘real’ world, not just the art world) can be seen to motivate many projects by Alice Creischer, whose work reminds me of the timely statement by Rosa Luxemburg that ‘the most revolutionary deed is and remains to state things as they are’. Hovering above these multifaceted practices, we encounter a host of concepts and ideas that add to the riches of the reality/realism debate, such as that of the document, historiography, reportage, re-enactment and truth, while the (primarily sculptural) work of the fourth artist in this issue, Leonor Antunes, lends acutely material, anthropomorphic (and -metric) weight to a discussion of realisms and realities that can easily lose sight of the sobering fact of our embodied being-in-the-world. The area around art is also treated in the contextual essays in this issue: the Brazilian architect Flávio de Carvalho’s buildings and clothing for a ‘new man of the Tropics’; Architectural Association founder Mark Cousins’s positioning of support and scaffolding as integral to our understanding of the built world; and finally, Pedro G. Romero’s discussion of flamenco and gypsy language in relation to the political and artistic forms of modernity. A return to the real rather than of the real, then: there is no use waking up from the sleep of reason if there is no real world out there to wake up to.

4 | Afterall

Modernism, Postmodernism and Gleam: On the Photorealist Work Ethic — Dieter Roelstraete

Dieter Roelstraete finds in the Photorealist's fetish for surface and gleam a reflection of the movement's investment in craft, on the one hand, and a historical reflection of the transformation during the 1960s and 70s to an immaterial economy, on the other.



It is the mark of all labouring that it leaves nothing behind. — Hannah Arendt 1 1. The Shining

Photorealism has long been, is and will probably always remain something of a guilty pleasure, and any and every consideration (such as, precisely, the present one) of that peculiar moment in North American art in the 1960 and 70s will forever come swathed in apology. It must always answer the same questions — why photorealism now, why photorealism at all ? 2 Not that it is in any way the sole standard against which all art-historical thinking and writing should henceforth be measured (though it certainly, if only by virtue of its size and agenda, aspires to that claim), but in the whole of the October team’s formidable, 700-page-plus Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (2004), for instance, I did not find a single reference to the entire Photo- or hyperrealist phenomenon. 3 The tome in question features plenty of Sur-realism, of course, some Socialist Realism, and even the odd nod to the non-extant movement of Capitalist Realism, but not the slightest trace of that all-American art movement Photorealism — even though it clearly was a sufficiently defining feature of late 1960s and early 70s art to warrant its inclusion in Harald Szeemann’s landmark documenta 5 exhibition in 1972. This exhibition, titled ‘Questioning Reality — Pictorial Worlds’ (this is all too often forgotten), was particularly important for its championing of a wide range of conceptually inflected art practices as belonging to the most vibrant, influential art ‘movement’ of the day, and we can assume Szeemann likewise understood the Photorealist program of Richard Estes, Ralph Goings et al. to be somehow aligned with the great wealth of radical questionings that informed forward-looking art practice in general at the time. It is clear, however, that this sympathetic view of the movement didn’t age very well, and as Photorealism went on to become a dependable source of income for a limited number of industrious US painters, it was gradually omitted from art-historical orthodoxy, and later also from art-historical heterodoxy — in short, from art history as a whole. Some 37 years on — the genre was the subject of a modest survey show organised at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin in 2009, and seeing that retrospective exhibition is what sparked most of my thinking on the topic 4 — Photorealism has been whittled down to something akin to proletarian 1970s folk art, 1 2 3

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958, p.87. This quote is taken from the book’s chapter on labour; a little bit further, another remark worth keeping in mind when reading this essay: ‘[T]he artist […] is the only “worker" left in a labouring society.’ Ibid., p.127. Already here I must warn the reader that we shall be looking at Photorealism first and foremost as a North American phenomenon. Hyperrealist painting techniques obviously also existed in art that was being made elsewhere around the same time (the Swiss Franz Gertsch and Germans Gerhard Richter and Werner Tübke come to mind), but nowhere did these scattered practices coalesce into a movement, complete with an actual manifesto, as was the case with American Photorealism. On the whole, the authors of the book, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss, do not appear to deem the various offshoots of the grand tradition of realism worthy of more than just the most fleeting and perfunctory of mentions: in their view, all realisms clearly and essentially belong to the domain of ‘art before 1900’. In this sense, their critical project appears to confirm the master narrative of twentieth-century art as the history of the progressive marginalisa- tion of both realism and the idea of realism.

On the Photorealist Work Ethic | 5

forced upon both the world of art and the world at large by the planetary financial meltdown of 2008—2009 has reawakened interest in the topic of realism as the artistic tradition or paradigm that is most deeply committed to the idea of representing and interpreting reality (as opposed to a Lacanian ‘real’ that does not necessarily correspond to anything real in the conventional sense of the term): no longer just a return of the real, then, but a return of realism. As I am writing this foreword, Berlin (the location, last year, of a two-day symposium dedicated to ‘realism in contemporary art’, held at ICI Kulturlabor, the proceedings of which will be published as a book later this year) is gearing up for the sixth instalment of the Berlin Biennial, and this event has already made a promise to ‘question contemporary art’s relationship to reality’ — a process of interrogation that will be afforded its proper historic dimensionby means of an exhibition-within-the-exhibition of the work of German arch-realist Adolph Menzel, to be curated by Michael Fried. Though nowhere near as highprofile an event as this biennial, I could not help but notice that the Kunsthalle Emden and the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich, in the meantime, are organising an exhibition titled ‘Realism: The Adventure of Reality’ this spring and summer; it looks like it features its fair share of Photorealism, that North American 1970s painting fad that is experiencing its own modest revival (and which I consider in an essay in this issue), as was also attested by an exhibition titled ‘Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s’ at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin in 2009. (Judging by the examples here named, one could be forgiven for thinking that this revived interest in pictorial realism is a German affair first and foremost — the result, perhaps, of long years of exposure to the work of Thomas Demand and Andreas Gursky.) And indeed, on a couple of occasions during the meeting at which the broad contours of the current issue of Afterall were first drawn out, the subject of realism was broached — to be dropped again and picked up again later: as my colleagues have pointed out, for the last couple of years the subject of realism has been broached at every Afterall meeting — yet more proof, if such proof were still needed, that the question of contemporary art’s relationship to reality is steadily gaining urgency as everywhere around us reality is to be seen falling apart, evaporating, disintegrating, disappearing, not seldom (and this is of course of crucial importance here) with the active help of art. Three of the four artists under consideration in this issue raise questions in their work that address the complex entanglement of the real, reality and realism (three very different, but obviously interrelated concepts): the question of realism is clearly a relevant one to Portuguese film-maker Pedro Costa, and one of the essays devoted to his work is tellingly titled ‘Realism, not Reality’; realism as both a representational strategy and pictorial tradition is similarly central — in the shape of a problem as much as an opportunity — to the art of Kerry James Marshall; and the hopeful dream of really making an impact (i.e. in the ‘real’ world, not just the art world) can be seen to motivate many projects by Alice Creischer, whose work reminds me of the timely statement by Rosa Luxemburg that ‘the most revolutionary deed is and remains to state things as they are’. Hovering above these multifaceted practices, we encounter a host of concepts and ideas that add to the riches of the reality/realism debate, such as that of the document, historiography, reportage, re-enactment and truth, while the (primarily sculptural) work of the fourth artist in this issue, Leonor Antunes, lends acutely material, anthropomorphic (and -metric) weight to a discussion of realisms and realities that can easily lose sight of the sobering fact of our embodied being-in-the-world. The area around art is also treated in the contextual essays in this issue: the Brazilian architect Flávio de Carvalho’s buildings and clothing for a ‘new man of the Tropics’; Architectural Association founder Mark Cousins’s positioning of support and scaffolding as integral to our understanding of the built world; and finally, Pedro G. Romero’s discussion of flamenco and gypsy language in relation to the political and artistic forms of modernity. A return to the real rather than of the real, then: there is no use waking up from the sleep of reason if there is no real world out there to wake up to.

4 | Afterall

Modernism, Postmodernism and Gleam: On the Photorealist Work Ethic — Dieter Roelstraete

Dieter Roelstraete finds in the Photorealist's fetish for surface and gleam a reflection of the movement's investment in craft, on the one hand, and a historical reflection of the transformation during the 1960s and 70s to an immaterial economy, on the other.



It is the mark of all labouring that it leaves nothing behind. — Hannah Arendt 1 1. The Shining

Photorealism has long been, is and will probably always remain something of a guilty pleasure, and any and every consideration (such as, precisely, the present one) of that peculiar moment in North American art in the 1960 and 70s will forever come swathed in apology. It must always answer the same questions — why photorealism now, why photorealism at all ? 2 Not that it is in any way the sole standard against which all art-historical thinking and writing should henceforth be measured (though it certainly, if only by virtue of its size and agenda, aspires to that claim), but in the whole of the October team’s formidable, 700-page-plus Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (2004), for instance, I did not find a single reference to the entire Photo- or hyperrealist phenomenon. 3 The tome in question features plenty of Sur-realism, of course, some Socialist Realism, and even the odd nod to the non-extant movement of Capitalist Realism, but not the slightest trace of that all-American art movement Photorealism — even though it clearly was a sufficiently defining feature of late 1960s and early 70s art to warrant its inclusion in Harald Szeemann’s landmark documenta 5 exhibition in 1972. This exhibition, titled ‘Questioning Reality — Pictorial Worlds’ (this is all too often forgotten), was particularly important for its championing of a wide range of conceptually inflected art practices as belonging to the most vibrant, influential art ‘movement’ of the day, and we can assume Szeemann likewise understood the Photorealist program of Richard Estes, Ralph Goings et al. to be somehow aligned with the great wealth of radical questionings that informed forward-looking art practice in general at the time. It is clear, however, that this sympathetic view of the movement didn’t age very well, and as Photorealism went on to become a dependable source of income for a limited number of industrious US painters, it was gradually omitted from art-historical orthodoxy, and later also from art-historical heterodoxy — in short, from art history as a whole. Some 37 years on — the genre was the subject of a modest survey show organised at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin in 2009, and seeing that retrospective exhibition is what sparked most of my thinking on the topic 4 — Photorealism has been whittled down to something akin to proletarian 1970s folk art, 1 2 3

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958, p.87. This quote is taken from the book’s chapter on labour; a little bit further, another remark worth keeping in mind when reading this essay: ‘[T]he artist […] is the only “worker" left in a labouring society.’ Ibid., p.127. Already here I must warn the reader that we shall be looking at Photorealism first and foremost as a North American phenomenon. Hyperrealist painting techniques obviously also existed in art that was being made elsewhere around the same time (the Swiss Franz Gertsch and Germans Gerhard Richter and Werner Tübke come to mind), but nowhere did these scattered practices coalesce into a movement, complete with an actual manifesto, as was the case with American Photorealism. On the whole, the authors of the book, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss, do not appear to deem the various offshoots of the grand tradition of realism worthy of more than just the most fleeting and perfunctory of mentions: in their view, all realisms clearly and essentially belong to the domain of ‘art before 1900’. In this sense, their critical project appears to confirm the master narrative of twentieth-century art as the history of the progressive marginalisa- tion of both realism and the idea of realism.

On the Photorealist Work Ethic | 5

and the strong whiff of nostalgia (for a long-lost, partly illusory idea of American-ness first and foremost) that infuses its low-key reanimation continues to exclude it from a standardised art history. With this essay, which does not (at least not in the first place) set out to analyse the various reasons why Photorealism has been considered such a minor art, I want to reconsider this movement as one of the truly emblematic ‘isms’ of the 1970s — much more so, perhaps, than many of the canonical forms of Conceptual art that now occupy our memory of that decade, and whose uncanny ‘other’ or mirror image Photorealism has so often been made out to be. 5

short, as much as dizzying suggestions of a culture of transparency — represented by the ubiquity of glass surfaces in Estes’s paintings — paradoxically remain resolutely opaque. At first sight, the Photorealist fetish for shiny surfaces may appear as a rather straightforward comment upon (and, in the Pop spirit of a James Rosenquist orTom Wesselmann to which it seemed heir, uncomplicated celebration of) the consumerist frenzy of the 1960s commodities boom. This paradox of a transparent opacity could be said to concern the ‘mystery’ of commodification primarily, in which the event of (window) shopping appears as the simulacral primal scene of all Photorealism. But upon closer scrutiny, the Photorealist obsession with the blinding sheen of these various surface effects — apart from (ironically!) tying in with Clement Greenberg’s basic characterisation of ‘flatness’ as the cardinal virtue of high-modernist painting — and the concomitant confusion of opacity and transparency, or ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, appears more closely connected with what may rightfully be described as the paradigmatic architectural feature of urban life in the early 70s, namely that quality which Fredric Jameson, in his authoritative

2. The Mirror Stage Back in the late 1960s and early 70s, to be a real, hardcore Photorealist, to prove one’s mettle in the already evacuating field of painting, one was required to focus almost

exclusively on the hyperrealist rendition of shiny, glossy and glassy surfaces — on gleam: of the chrome body of a car, truck or motorbike (the specialty of Tom Blackwell and Ron Kleemann in particular); spotless shop windows and reflecting telephone booths (the preferred motifs of Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy and Estes, the most widely known of the ‘pure’ Photorealists); glitzy diners and immaculately wrapped foodstuffs (Charles Bell, Audrey Flack and Goings’s field of expertise); the flickering skins of people and hides of animals (prize stallions in Richard McLean’s case, people’s glittering eyeballs in the work of Chuck Close, women’s torsos in John Kacere’s paintings). Mirrors, in

Richard Estes,

Ralph Goings,

Telephone Booths, 1967,

Airstream, 1970,

acrylic on Masonite,

oil on canvas,

121.9 × 175.3cm.

152 × 214cm.

© Richard Estes. Courtesy

MUMOK, Museum

Marlborough Gallery,

Moderner Kunst Stiftung

New York

Ludwig Vienna, on loan from the Ludwig Collection, Aachen.

4 5

‘Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s’, Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, 7 March—10 May 2009. Tellingly, this was the first showing of North American Photorealist painting in Germany since Szeemann’s 1972 documenta. That said, we of course must acknowledge the fact that Conceptual art (and its various offshoots) has come to occupy the major part of our memories of the art produced in the period spanning 1967 to 1972 precisely because, as a movement, it has proven so much more influential than Photorealism, which is rather a precisely defined historical phenomenon with a limited geographical scope: Conceptual art is, without a doubt, still with us, while Photorealism obviously strikes the contemporary viewer as much more remote — as remote as seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting, for instance. The point I want to make, however, concerns the remoteness of the world it depicts (as much as, if not more than, the remoteness of the genre or movement as such), which is exactly why it is worth reconsidering Photorealism after all.

6 | Afterall

© Ralph Goings. Courtesy

chronicle of postmodernism as the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, has called ‘depthlessness’. 6 Jameson uses this term (which comes laden with certain moral overtones) to describe buildings characterised by great sheets of glass and gravitydefying two-dimensional surfaces that seem unsupported by any volume, at least none that is ocularly decidable — leading him to deplore the fact that ‘many are the postmodern buildings that seem to have been designed for photography’ only (or, if we are allowed this quip, for Photorealism painting only).The building referred to by Jameson in this description is the 1983 Wells Fargo Center for the Arts by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in downtown Los Angeles, and although it did not, to my knowledge, become the object of Photorealist homage, the centrality given to it by Jameson in his

O.K. Harris Works of Art, New York. Photograph © MUMOK, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, on loan from the Ludwig Collection

6

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 1990, p.99. One of the (relatively few) contemporary artists referred to in this landmark study is Duane Hanson, the creator of hyperrealist sculptures which Jameson discusses, with a slight measure of pathos, in the following terms of simulacral confusion: ‘your moment of doubt and hesitation as to the breath and warmth of these polyester figures […] tends to return upon the real human beings moving about you in the museum and to transform them also for the briefest instant into so many dead and flesh-coloured simulacra in their own right. The world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin.’ Ibid., p.34. Hanson was the only sculptor, along with John De Andrea, to be consistently named in the company of the ‘true’ Photorealists.

On the Photorealist Work Ethic | 7

account of postmodern architecture certainly intersects with the Photorealist fascination with impenetrable glass surfaces. Both highlight the office tower block and similarly iconic sites of the burgeoning service industry (shops, diners, entertainment centres) as the primary exemplars of the profound transformation wrought upon the world of work in the mid-1960s to mid-70s — and the ‘world of work’ truly is the crucial phrase here. 7 Whenever I walk past the imposing row of identikit office tower blocks lining Midtown Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue, I think not only of the hilarious 1980 comedy Nine to Five, starring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin as three working women plotting to overthrow their insufferably sexist boss, but somewhere further along this stream of associations I also imagine none other than Richard Estes sitting down in the same diner where the Nine to Five women take their lunch, eavesdropping on their conspiratorial exchanges and preparing to commit this quintessential City of Glass scene to painterly memory. In this sense, Photorealism, as an art form enchanted with the endless proliferation of shiny surfaces that render all questions of both origin and substance oddly irrelevant, could be said to function as North America’s very own brand of 1970s Socialist Realism: it obliquely reflects (no pun intended!) both the central economic event of the era — the triumph, incarnated by the glass-sheet office tower, of the service (and culture) industries over more traditional, ageing industries from the secondary sector (such as steel and coal), whose Spartan work ethic and macho machineaesthetic still informed, in a melancholy kind of way, the Minimalism of Donald Judd and Carl Andre 8 — as well as, more literally, the actual conditions of labour (i.e. glassencased office work) in this new regime of consumption rather than production. Just like the original orthodoxy of Soviet Socialist Realism, Photorealism primarily commented upon the world of work, albeit a very different world of work (there is relatively little real domesticity or privacy in much Photorealist output, Robert Bechtle’s family portraits notwithstanding — the movement’s most persistent obsession was always the urban experience). In fact, it often seemed to depict work more directly than some of the explicitly politicised art of the time (the Maoist paintings of Jörg Immendorff come to mind, as do the writings of Art & Language), whose occasionally perfunctory rhetoric of labour activism and solidarity with the workers may now — enter the saddening ironies of historical circumstance — strike many as hollow. Of course the laborious production of a Photorealist tableau itself was definitely ‘work’ in a way that actively challenged the doxa of de-skilling then current in post-Duchampian avant-garde art. Responding to a question of whether there exists such a thing as a Photorealist work ethic, Louis K. Meisel, the gallerist who was the movement’s most influential impresario, proudly remarked that ‘Photorealists had to work eight or ten hours a day. [Truly ‘nine to five’ then. — DR] They didn’t drink, didn’t smoke or do drugs. They were among the most stable people of any that I’ve ever seen, just making work that required stability and seriousness. That may have made them boring to people who expect artists to be troubled and dissolute.’ 9 Disregarding for a minute the important fact that the laborious production of said tableaux made for rare and highly valued commodities (among art collectors who cared for such a thing and weren’t phased by the critical dismissal 7 8 9

I borrow this term from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (trans. Gregory Elliott), London and New York: Verso, 2005, which offers a riveting account of capitalism’s ruthless recuperation and appropriation of the many ‘artistic’ critiques levelled against it from the mid-1960s onwards — a campaign that was largely driven by the many practices connected with the Conceptual art boom. The one artist whose work most exemplarily bridges the gap between Minimalism’s nostalgic attachment to the golden age of industry (as represented by the steel mills of both Gary, Indiana and Magnitogorsk in Siberia) and the new regime’s emphasis on immaterial labour and corporate governance — of a type that rhetorically adheres to transparency (glass) but in actuality sticks to opacity (mirrors) — is Dan Graham. Graham’s glass pavilions directly reference the various architectural transformations required to accommodate these new conditions of labour (Graham’s Homes for America from 1967 had already highlighted the serendipitous concurrence of Minimalism’s sculptural vernacular with conveyor-belt-type domestic architecture). Even Graham’s interest in (literal) doubling and reflection — articulated in many classic video performances of the 1970s — collides with a similar set of concerns in Photorealist painting. Part of Graham’s (ultimately sympathetic) critique of Minimalism certainly concerned its staunch machismo: Judd’s reverence of the worker came to smack of patriarchy on occasion, and appeared progressively disconnected from the actual process of ‘feminisation’ to which the world of work became subject after the demise of traditional, male-dominated industries. That said, Photorealism as a movement remained a decidedly homosocial affair — Audrey Flack was the only woman painter of some renown in the core group. ‘They Were Really Nice Guys. Louis K. Meisel Talks to David Lubin about Photorealism’s Beginnings’, in Deutsche Guggenheim Magazine, issue 6, Spring 2009, p.18. Meisel first coined the term Photorealism in the late 1960s, and his SoHo gallery has been the world headquarters of Photorealism ever since. Obviously, this very close identification of a certain movement with a single commercial gallery has not helped Photorealism’s claims to be considered an important force in 1970s art.

8 | Afterall

of the genre by the New York intelligentsia), we are left with the intriguing paradox of Photorealism’s definite investment in notions of craft and the artisanal production of images, on the one hand, and its move to chronicle precisely those early years of postmanual, post-craft, post-industrial, post-Fordist post-production on the other. Already then, Photorealism must have struck many a viewer as deliberately nostalgic indeed — the works’ elegiac tone easily recast as an expression of its perceived reactionary agenda: here was a picture of a world (of sound American family values, among other things) destined to go up in smoke. But its emergence as a movement was also, indisputably, timely: it painted an accurate portrait (if not outright reflection) of the very processes through which this world was evaporating.

Don Eddy, Silver Shoes,

3. The Vanishing

1974, acrylic on canvas, 102 × 102cm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New York

In having to prove one’s mastery of the form by painting reflections rather than the things reflected, Photorealism as a diagnostic form is literally reflexive — but it is also metaphorically ‘reflexive’ in a way that is clearly reminiscent of the Impressionists (Édouard Manet foremost among them), whose pictorial interest in the confusing symbology of modern urban life was often expressed in depictions of steam as the spectral shadow of a process of industrialisation that was slowly moving into (and transforming) the contemporary life-world. Photorealist gleam as a cipher of the transition to postmodernism, then — much like Impressionist steam had been the

On the Photorealist Work Ethic | 9

symbol, a century earlier, of the alternately traumatic and exhilarating inauguration of a certain modernity, as T.J. Clark has noted in an essay appropriately titled ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam’ (2002). 10 Clark’s essay begins with the author’s admission that ‘Over the past twelve months or so I found myself thinking about modern art and steam’ — a stream of thoughts triggered by Tony Oursler’s video installation The Influence Machine from 2000, in which a ghostly oversized face was projected onto a cloud of water vapour in Madison Square Park in New York:

4. The Varnishing Like the gleam of shop windows lining Broadway in New York, the trails of steam that shroud so much Impressionist (or, in the case of Turner, proto-Impressionist) art figure as traces of the world of work, whose instability is the very essence of modernity — and its interrogation the well-established hallmark of all realisms. Indeed, the centrality of the depiction of (the modern world of) work, not just to Photorealism and/or Socialist Realism, but to realism as a whole is taken up by Linda Nochlin in her groundbreaking study Realism, published in 1971 (at a time, in other words, when, thanks to both the Photorealists and the interest taken by many politicised Conceptual artists in the legacy of Social Realism, the realist controversy seemed to have returned to centre stage). Noting how the working peasant had already appeared as a figural motif in his own right in the art of the Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Nochlin writes that ‘it was not until the 1848 Revolution which raised the dignity of labour to official status and the grandeur of le peuple to an article of faith, that artists turned […] to the depiction of work and its concrete setting as a major subject for art — as a possible subject even for an artistic masterpiece on a monumental scale. 14 [...] For the 1848 Revolution had raised the issue of labour as a major issue for the first time. The right to work became a crucial question. The working man played a prominent role in the revolutionary festivals of the new regime, the popular revolutionary form of address becoming “labourer”

… steam, in the art of the last two centuries, was never unequivocally a figure of emptying and evanescence. It was always also an image of power. Steam could be harnessed; steam could be compressed. Steam was what initially made the machine world possible. It was the middle term in mankind’s great reconstruction of Nature. Rain, Steam, and Speed. 11The speed that followed from compression turns the world into one great vortex in the Turner, one devouring spectral eye, where rain, sun, cloud and river are seen, from the compartment window, as they have never been seen before. Steam is power and possibility, then; but also, very soon, it is antiquated — it is a figure of nostalgia, for a future, or a sense of futurity, that the modern age had at the beginning but could never make come to pass. Hence the trails or puffs of steam always on the horizon of de Chirico’s dreamscapes. 12

J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway, 1844, oil on canvas, 91 × 121.8cm. © National Gallery, London

Later in the essay, Clark turns to Manet’s Le Chemin de fer (The Railroad) from 1873: ‘Steam is this painting’s great subject, clearly; and how people relate to steam, how they face it or do not face it; how they turn to face us. It does not take much ingenuity to see that steam in the Manet is a metaphor for a general, maybe constitutive, instability — for things in modernity incessantly changing their shape, hurrying forward, dispersing and growing impalpable’ 13 — for the tragic fact, in other words, that ‘all that was once solid, melts into air’, to quote a celebrated passage from The Communist Manifesto. Steam and/as appearance are Manet’s ruling tropes, not just in this painting, but in many more like it (think of the large mirror in the background of Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère from 1882): ‘steam is the surface that life as a whole is becoming’, as Clark puts it. How oddly appropriate this all sounds with regards to the culture of depthlessness and the simulacrum, as Jameson characterised the postmodern era we continue tolive in. 10 11 12 13

T.J. Clark, ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam,’ October, vol.100, Spring 2002, pp.154—74. Clark is referring here to J.M.W. Turner’s painting Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway (1844), now in the National Gallery in London. T.J. Clark, ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam,’ op. cit., pp.156—57. Ibid., p.158.

10 | Afterall

Gustave Courbet, La Truite (The Trout),

rather than “citizen”.’ 15 Here, we can finally turn to the father of realism in earnest, Gustave Courbet.

1872, oil on canvas, 52.5 × 87cm. Courtesy Kunsthaus Zürich

14 15

Linda Nochlin, Realism: Style and Civilisation, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971, p.112. The artistic masterpiece Nochlin refers to is Gustave Courbet's magisterial Casseurs de pierres (StoneBreakers) from 1849, lost in the 1945 bombing of Dresden. In an argument that echoes the subtle anachronisms of Minimalism’s attachment to the industrial mode of production at a time when its traditional position of economic primacy was being dismantled, Nochlin invokes the example of another realist classic, namely Ford Madox Brown’s Work from 1852—65, now at the Manchester City Art Gallery: ‘at the same time that the realists were creating a visual compendium of social injustices, they were also finding ways for declaring the heroism, dignity and probity of manual labour, without resorting to traditional symbolism or rather hallowed pictorial devices. Ford Madox Brown’s Work epitomises this attempt to create a new and relevant iconography with which to manifest the heroism of labour — a concept which was itself fairly novel at the time. […] Brown’s Work was extremely of the moment in the issue it raised, even if, ironically, somewhat nostalgic in extolling physical prowess at just the time when, as Michelet had sadly pointed out as early as 1846, the machine was making manly strength an anachronism.’ Ibid., p.127. Laurence Des Cars in Gustave Courbet (exh. cat.), Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008, p.426. These late works, so clearly loaded with Christian symbolism, singularly blend the personal with the political — a mixture that was not lost on Courbet’s contemporaries, one of whom noted in 1874: ‘I find in it memories of the Commune of Paris and I say to myself: these trout, so unappetising, do they not resemble a little those fish of the Seine, exhausted and dying, during the blockade of Paris?’ Ibid., p.127.

On the Photorealist Work Ethic | 11

Alan Michael, Cars and Houses, 2008, oil on canvas, 101.7 × 152.5cm. Courtesy collection Gaby and Wilhelm Schürmann,

12 | Afterall

Herzogenrath

On the Photorealist Work Ethic | 13

Pere Borrell del Caso, Escapando de la critica (Escaping Criticism), 1874, oil on canvas, 66 x 63cm. Collection of the Bank of Spain, Madrid

When I saw Courbet’s work assembled in two massive retrospective exhibitions held in Paris and New York two years ago, the greatest surprise came in the guise of the artist’s late still-lifes, which I had never really paid much attention to: magnificent stacks of apples, painted while he was imprisoned, late in life, for his role in toppling the Napoleonic column on the Place Vendôme during the heady days of the Paris Commune, and three mid-size paintings of gleaming trout. As Laurence Des Cars put it in the accompanying catalogue, ‘these canvases, which belong among the most poignant experiences of the real formulated by Courbet, allow painting itself its full metaphorical power’. 16 Could this metaphorical power not be located precisely in the dark gloss of the meticulously applied varnish that envelops Courbet’s trout, caught as they are in the agony of their last gasps for air — life’s very own tantalising gleam? 5. Afterword, After-Image What about Photorealism today? Most of the protagonists from the early 1970s are still painting and exhibiting, occasionally, at Louis K. Meisel’s gallery in SoHo. No doubt there is a crisis-proof market for this kind of work — and as we already heard from Meisel himself, the artists in his stable lead lives of a type that will probably see them continuing to ply their trade for some time to come. In Britain, I have come across the

14 | Afterall

work of Alan Michael, who has painted both the shiny, undulating body of a Mini Cooper (Cars and Houses, 2008) and the harsh gleam of freshly polished shoes (Untitled (Shoes), 2005): it is hard not to look at the latter without thinking back to Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980—81)series, which, along with the Wells Fargo Center, figure so prominently in Fredric Jameson’s passionate critique of our postmodern simulacracy. 15 An exhibition I saw of the work of Thomas Demand in Berlin just recently also reminded me of the fact that our deeply seated suspicion (if not outright hostility) towards hyperrealisms of all kinds is ultimately rooted in the low esteem that such fancies as the technique of trompe-l’œil painting have been held in historically — a residual trace of the original Platonic indictment of all mimesis, perhaps. 17 What ultimately matters most in any current consideration of Photorealism (or of the currency of Photorealism as such), however, is its relation to the tradition of realism more generally: perhaps the ‘problem’ of Photorealism is not so much situated in its retrograde dependence upon the largely discredited truth-claims of photography, but in its realist pedigree instead — and for much of the past century, pictorial realism has mainly been the object of scorn and condescension, or of pity at best. Indeed, aside from their fascination with the decidedly unsexy topic of work (and, just as importantly, the classes who perform this work), is it not simply their unflinching attachment to an unashamedly ‘realist’ agenda, as much as their industrial-like production that has ensured the systematic art-historical marginalisation of both Socialist Realism and Photorealism, as evinced by so many authoritative histories of twentieth-century art? 18 Some have been rescued since, so there may be hope for the critical plight of the Photorealists; their contribution to the intellectual history of realism, which I have attempted to locate in the historical relationship of their work to the transformation of the workplace, will turn up at the forefront of this eventual reappraisal. In the meantime, a new, post-Photorealist realism may well be readying itself to dominate the art scene in the decade to come — for crises truly breed realisms, and ‘crisis’ has been the unofficial name of our time for a little while now. Realism proper (that of the original nineteenth-century variety); Socialist Realism; Walker Evans’s, Dorothea Lange’s and Diego Rivera’s realism; Capitalist Realism; Critical Realism; and, most topically, Photorealism: they all belong to defining moments of economic, political, social and cultural crisis — the last, as we have seen, to a crisis that concerned the world of work in particular, resulting, precisely, in depictions and descriptions of its gradual dismantling. The fact that the glory years of Photorealism were also marked by an economic downturn (hence its sensitivity to issues surrounding labour, and its nostalgia-laden espousal of a good old-fashioned work ethic) is not without importance when considering this particular realism’s afterlife in the current era — one sorely in need of financial realism, and of a return to (rather than of) the real as in ‘real work’. 16 17 18

That is to say, it is hard not to look at Alan Michael’s painting of shoes without thinking back to the debate sparked by Jameson’s reading of Warhol’s shoes: Jameson famously discusses Warhol’s well- publicised shoe fetish in relation to an early icon of artistic modernity, Vincent Van Gogh’s Paar Bauernschuhe (Pair of Boots, 1883). In the former, he identifies ‘the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all postmodernisms. […] Then we must certainly come to terms with the role of photography and the photographic negative in contemporary art of this kind; and it is this, indeed, which confers its deathly quality to the Warhol image.’ F. Jameson, Postmodernism, op. cit., p.9. It is interesting to contrast Warhol’s morbid glaze with the heroic depiction of death in Courbet’s paintings of trout. Thomas Demand, ‘Nationalgalerie’, September 2009—January 2010, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. The ‘problem’ (if we want to call it that) of Demand’s work and working method is best explained by referring to the monumental installation Grotto, which was exhibited by the Fondazione Prada at the 2007 Venice Biennale — the first time, in fact, that Demand allowed the viewer to peek behind the scenes of his production process. In this exhibition, the visitor could not only admire Demand’s largescale photograph of a gloomy, cavernous interior, but could also lay eyes upon the actual model that was built for the occasion over a period of two years. The press release proudly revealed that no less than 900,000 different layers of cardboard had gone into the production of the 36-ton object, which thereby alone became the centrepiece of the exhibition. Here, Photorealism again crossed paths with the heroism of work — simple awe at the endless hours of monastic labour that, without a doubt, must have gone into the making of Demand’s model: the best ad hoc definition of a simulacrum one could imagine. See, for example, note 3. One could argue that both Socialist Realism and Photorealism have also been the victims of systematic art-historical marginalisation because much of the work produced according to its respective formulas turned out to be underwhelming or of inferior artistic quality — though this is obviously a problematic assertion to make, seeing as so many historical decisions on the contentious issue of artistic quality may in retrospect turn out to have been economically inspired only, i.e. in terms of a certain art form’s relative success in the art market. Boris Groys has commented upon this troubling equation of what we regard as ‘proper’ (‘good’) art with that which is validated by the art market exclusively in the following suggestive terms: ‘the official as well as unofficial art of the Soviet Union and of other former Socialist states remains almost completely out of focus for the contemporary art history and museum system. […] The only exception is the art of Russian constructivism that was created under NEP, during the temporary reintroduction of the limited free market in Soviet Russia.’ Boris Groys, Art Power, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2008, p.5.

On the Photorealist Work Ethic | 15

Flamenco dancer Pastora Imperio, pictured in Mundo

Preparatory Notes for Poetics and Politics Among Flamenco and Modern Artists: A Paradoxical Place — Pedro G. Romero

Gráfico, 16 May 1928

Flamenco was an object of fascination for both the Situationists and the early twentieth-century Parisian avant-garde, but today it is often seen as a popular tradition of limited cultural or political interest. However, in this essay Pedro G. Romero explores flamenco as a contradictory form — both neo-primitive and modern, Spanish and gypsy and therefore a-national, as a fixed text and as an improvisational, bodily performance — bringing back its politics of class and disruption, and providing a blueprint for the process by which cultural and political forms are constructed.

I On 5 October 1982, Guy Debord sent Soprofilms — Gérard Lebovici’s production company — the outline of his latest film project, titled De l’Espagne (On Spain):

Study and research on a film intended to retell and provide an exhaustive and definitive examination of the spirit of modern Spain, from the fifteenth century to the present. Avoiding both exoticism and patriotism, this film will not just express what foreigners (Europeans, Americans, Japanese, etc.) may imagine about this subject, nor even what Spaniards themselves may believe, but rather what Spain really is. The film should last approximately two to four hours, and will ultimately be aimed at cinemas and television channels (cable, satellite, etc.). Means should be dedicated to creating the atmosphere and wardrobe that will reflect contemporary Spain. We should also be able to call on Spanish extras and actors and, in the event of a co-production, some international stars. We shall meanwhile concentrate on the theme and plot combining all necessary aspects, locations and sets where the action takes place, and the precise choice of actors whom we wish to appear, with a view to providing an initial structure that involves a cinematographic approach to the subject. For several obvious historical and cultural reasons, the film should at this time be centred on Andalusia. 1

Debord’s Danish friend Asger Jorn was a communist activist and a member of the Situationist International from the moment it was founded in 1957. Twenty years earlier he was working at the Spanish Embassy in Paris, retouching photographs and preparing material for exhibition outside the embassy. 2 From the very start, the Spanish Embassy and Josep Renau, General Director of Fine Arts, stressed the need to display a series of educational photomontages showing the progress the Spanish Republic had made in education, agriculture and so on. These would be exhibited outside the Spanish pavilion at the Parisian Exposition Universelle. The architects Luis Lacasa and Josep Lluis Sert were therefore asked to give priority to this feature in their design of the building. 3 Jorn became involved in this photographic project at the same time he began work on a type of painting akin to Joan Miró’s studies for his various Bailarina española (Spanish Dancer) paintings of 1927 and 1928. Jorn’s La Petite Fille qui dansait aussi beau (The Little Girl Who Also Danced) of 1939 followed similar lines, although his 1952 paintings on the Spanish Civil War, Spansk Krigsdans (Spanish War Dance) and Spansk Drama (Spanish Drama), still present traces of gestures showing bodies as dancing ballerinas. His love of flamenco dated back to these years, he later confessed to the artist Antonio Saura, with whom he shared records, photographs and many an evening of flamenco cante jondo. 1 2 3

16 | Afterall

Guy Debord, ‘Des Contrats’, Le Temps qu’il fait, Paris: Cognac, 1995. For the English version, see G. Debord, Complete Cinematic Works (ed. and trans. Ken Knabb), Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003, pp.53—54. He also published an article titled ‘The Spanish Republic and the Arts’ in the Danish communist newspaper Arbejderbladet on 30 April 1938. The article ‘Sectarianism’ of 1 November 1938 similarly dealt with the Civil War in Spain. See Troels Andersen, Peter Shield, Pedro G. Romero et al., Asger Jorn (exh. cat.), Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002.

Poetics and Politics Among Flamenco and Modern Artists | 17

Jorn’s Dutch colleague Constant, fellow member of CoBra and the Situationist International, shared his enthusiasm. Constant’s Aerial Bombardments (1951) and his Gypsy Fiestas (1964) mark out the same cartography of Spanish modernity (Miró, Pablo Picasso), the Civil War and the music and life of flamenco artistes. Constant was also an accomplished guitarist who played flamenco and collected flamenco guitars. He had a general love for gypsy music and his repertoire also included Zingari violin. 4 His New Babylon architectural and town-planning projects (1956—74), characteristically Situationist, drew from his experiences in the nomad gypsy camps of northern Italy, southern France and Catalonia. He observed their trails and routes, adaptation to space, sociability and celebratory spaces. His mock-ups even had a rather unstable and unprofessional look to them, typical of the provisional buildings or shacks used by gypsies to make unwelcoming sites inhabitable. The anti-capitalist and somewhat criminal nature of the business practices of these nomadic gypsies, and their willingness to transform space through recreational activity (circus, song and dance, fiestas), are referred to throughout the guidelines of the unitary town planning developed by Constant in these works. If he was seeking examples of

recreational societies in order to challenge the utilitarian models of capitalism and socialism, then the gypsies provided such a model, as they had done for some time. Constant drew upon years of learning about and representing gypsies, the gypsy myth and everything picturesque and subversive, miserable and liberating, exotic and mutually supportive about them:

The gypsies who stopped awhile in the little Piedmontese town of Alba were in the habit of camping beneath the roof that, once a week, on Saturday, housed the livestock market. There they lit their fires, hung their tents from the pillars to protect or isolate themselves, improvised shelters with the aid of boxes and

4

See Maurice Fréuchet, Francesco Careri et al., Constant: une rétrospective (exh. cat.), Paris: Musée Picasso Antibes, 2001.



The ‘painting machines’ devised by Pinot Gallizio, 6 an Italian artist who belonged to the Italian section of the Situationist International until 1960, also turn to the tactics

Constant, Schets voor

Constant, Symbolische

een mobiel labyrinth

voorstelling van New

(Sketch for a Mobile

Babylon (Symbolic

Labyrinth), 1968, pencil,

Representation of New

watercolour, crayon,

Babylon), 1969, collage,

100 × 125cm. Collection

122 × 133cm. Both

Centraal Museum,

from: Mark Wigley,

Utrecht, on loan from

Constant's New Babylon:

Provincie Utrecht

The Hyper-Architecture

and strategies of the gypsy ‘way of doing things’. His attempt to transform industrialproduction machinery into unproductive playful delirium owes a great deal to his personal experience with gypsy markets, and the way in which these made use of the leftovers of industrial consumption. Metres and metres of painted fabrics replaced the image, art’s minimum unit of currency, in combinations that suggest a gypsy loom. The idea of continuum or perpetuum mobile, a metaphor for the machine, represents the endless wanderings of nomad wagons around the planet, the ribbons that close off the camp and the fabrics that mark out streets and homes — a succession of items that Gallizio also associates with the new temporalities of cinema and television. However

of Desire, Rotterdam: Witte de With, 1998

18 | Afterall

planks left behind by the traders. The need to clean up the market place every time the Zingari passed through had led the town council to forbid them access. In compensation, they were assigned a bit of grassland on the banks of the Tamaro, the stream that passes through the town: the most miserable of patches! It was there that in December 1956 I went to see them in the company of the painter Pinot Gallizio, the owner who had conceded them this uneven, muddy, desolate plot of land. They had closed off the space between some caravans with planks and petrol cans; they had made an enclosure, a ‘gypsy town’. That was the day I conceived the scheme for a permanent encampment for the gypsies of Alba and that project is the origin of the series of mock-ups of New Babylon. Of a New Babylon where, under one roof and with the aid of moveable elements, a shared residence is built; a temporary, constantly remodelled living area; a camp for nomads on a planetary scale. 5

5 6

Constant, in New Babylon (exh. cat.), The Hague: Haags Gementemuseum, 1974. See Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (ed.), Situationistas, arte, política, urbanismo/Situationists, Art, Politics, Urbanism (exh. cat.), Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1996.

Poetics and Politics Among Flamenco and Modern Artists | 19

contradictory this tension between order and chaos in the imaginaries of machine artists and gypsies may seem, it was not invented by Gallizio. Federico García Lorca compared the modest dwelling of certain Albaicín gypsies to Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living in’ 7 and, even earlier, Antonio Machado parodied the automatic forms of Futurist and Dadaist poetry in the ‘Máquina de trovar de Meneses’ (1936), a tale by Juan de Mairena 8 inspired by popular forms of constructing flamenco song. Alice Becker-Ho, the partner of Debord, has done some noteworthy research into argot languages, the jargons of the criminal classes and the slang of gypsies and bohemians. In the trilogy Les Princes du Jargon (1993), L’Essence du Jargon (1994) and Du Jargon: Héritier en bastardie (2002), as well as in Paroles de gitans (2000), Becker-Ho explores the archaeology of argot, which, particularly in gypsy speech, has preserved a space of freedom for words, a linguistic area that was not subject to the imposition of state languages (French, Spanish, English, etc.) at the dawn of modernity. 9 She considers this displacement, the acceptance of this modus vivendi, as a genuine form of political resistance opposing the family unit, social restrictiveness and the police state. These books, written in dictionary form and based on quotations and definitions, are true breviaries of Situationist poetry that delve into the mystification and myths surrounding a certain gypsy lifestyle. Yet far from being comprehensive attempts at assimilation and integration or appeals for cultural diversity, they emphasise the differentiating and excluding strategies that favour a coexistence full of examples of resistance and assertion. A deep and systematic interest in flamenco — such as that of true aficionados, transcending that of ‘seasonal’ gypsies and the popular fashion and forms of consumption these elicit — is related to the belief in what gypsies represent. In its most bastardised form, this belief has very little to do with culturally defined ethnic groups and much more in common with the inherent sociability of petty thieves or flamenco artistes — gypsy and non-gypsy associations organised around crime or around music and dance. These books compare the different jargons of gypsies and other ethnic minorities, prostitutes and delinquents, mercenaries and ‘assorted soldiery’ in Europe and the rest of the world. A thorough philology of these argots, their unsystematic laws and their bastard etymologies is impossible without sharing in their experiences. Frequent dealings with gypsies, attendance at Camargue festivals, such as that of Arles (source of phenomena such as the flamenco-inspired pop group the Gipsy Kings), and an exchange of altered experiences of reality induced by wild parties, alcohol and drugs were essential for Becker-Ho’s fieldwork. So was correspondence with Tony Gatlif, an Algerian film director with whom in 1981 Debord attended the première of the short film Canta gitano, based on gypsies’ experiences during the Holocaust. Dozens of hens were set loose in the cinema where the film was to be shown, because French gypsies are still contemptuously known as chicken thieves. Becker-Ho’s statement that ‘gypsies are our Middle Ages’ helps us to understand the poetics that Guy Debord and other Situationists discover in gypsy life. As Mario Perniola states in her book on the Situationists, ‘this source of inspiration is not so much ethic as aesthetic. The tradition from which Debord stems is that of poetic and artistic revolt. This tradition, which developed to an extraordinary extent in the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, dates back as far as the Middle Ages. The great fifteenth-century poet François Villon represented the meeting of cultures and alternative behaviours — in his case even criminal — that have lasted over the centuries.’ 10 We owe the living transmission of these forms and anti-forms to gypsies — they are the anthropological niche in which the Middle Ages still exist. 7 8 9 10

See Christopher Maurer, Federico García Lorca y su arquitectura del cante jondo, Granada: Comares/ Huerta de San Vicente, 2000; and Christopher Maurer, Agustín Sánchez Vidal et al., Ola Pepín!: Dalí, Lorca y Buñuel, Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes, 2007. See Antonio Machado and Juan de Mairena, ‘Coplas mecánicas: Cancionero apócrifo’ (1936), in Antonio Machado, Poesías completas (ed. Manuel Alvar), Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1987; and Manuel Balsameda y González, Primer cancionero de coplas flamencas populares según el estilo de Andalucía (1881), Seville: Signatura Ediciones, 2001. Alice Becker-Ho, Les Princes du Jargon, Paris: Gallimard, 1993; L’Essence du Jargon, Paris: Gallimard, 1994; Du Jargon: Héritier en bastardie, Paris: Gallimard, 2002; Paroles de gitans (ed. Albin Michel), Paris: Gallimard, 2000. The first book in the trilogy was published in English as The Princes of Jargon (trans. John McHale), New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. Mario Perniola, Los situacionistas: Historia crítica de la última vanguardia del siglo XX, Madrid: Acuarela/ Antonio Machado Libros, 2008, pp.170—71.

20 | Afterall

Pinot Gallizio cutting a piece of industrial painting in the courtyard of his home in Alba, 1959, with (from left to right): unidentified man; Gallizio; unidentified man; collector Paolo Marinotti; Gallizio’s wife Augusta Rivabella; and Willem Sandberg, Director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Courtesy Archivio Gallizio, Turin

In his book of memoirs, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife (1985), Juan Goytisolo tells of how he was introduced to the ‘other’ life of Paris by the extremely young Guy Debord and his then-partner, Michèle Bernstein:

In their healthy and consistent contempt for everything bourgeois and well-off, Debord and his friend used to visit Arab cafés that were then located on rue Mouffetard and the back streets of Maubert-Mutualité next to the Seine. One day they took me by bus from the Gare de l’Est to the proletarian suburb of Aubervilliers, to a dive frequented by old Spanish Republican exiles, whose walls and owner I think were filmed by [Marcel] Carné and [Jacques] Prévert in the beautiful motion picture on the poor children of that district. 11

Debord’s enthusiasm for Republican Spanish Civil War songs, flamenco and popular coplas or folk songs (the collections of verse compiled by Lorca, for instance) led to a project in collaboration with the French flamenco-influenced singer-songwriter known as Mara Jerez. The undertaking — which nowadays would be considered foolhardy — supported the political prisoners of the Segovia penitentiary in the 1980s by producing a record that distorted the lyrics of coplas, which often incorporate repeated verse such as, for instance, ‘Inquiring into the deaths of Begoña and Zapa: I went up to Begoña /And I asked /And I asked /And I asked / If any cops had died / in the attack // They answered / They answered / Today it’s been some of ours / but no cops / The commando is getting ready / The machine guns / The machine guns / The machine guns / This is not the time to stay.’ 12 The Spanish version, somewhat incongruously, alludes to the Comandos Autónomos, but was the copla really the ideal vehicle for communicating such lyrics in Spain in the 1970s and 80s? 13 What are we to make of this anachronism? What are we to make of the fact that the last modernist movement, the Situationist avant-garde, travelled the road of the pseudo-folk, the kitsch, the camp, the popular, etc.? Moreover, what interest did Guy Debord have in telling the Spanish who they were and where the spirit of modern Spain actually lay? Debord, translator of Jorge Manrique into French, is known for his appreciation of the works of Baltasar Gracián and other moralists of the Spanish Baroque. He never looked down on the interpretations of Spain made by Romantic travellers, by Théophile Gautier, or, even earlier, by Beaumarchais. 14 Furthermore, he had recently seen a series of documentaries on Spain made by Orson Welles for Italian television. 15 Debord always respected Welles’s attitude and film work, but it is not too much to assume that he initially intended to make Welles’s unduly touristy, unduly light-hearted vision more radical, as indicated by the notes sent to his producer that appear at the heading of this essay. Despite these affinities, the Situationist International and flamenco were to occupy conflicting positions, or at least discontinuous and apparently unrelated tempos, in the contemporary imaginary. It is not so much a matching of the models of flamenco artistes and Situationists, or even of giving them the same genealogical lineage. 16 Even the notion of what flamenco meant within the characteristic spirit of ‘Spanishness’ is likely to come up against historical certainties. Yet this inequality, however paradoxical it may seem, should be explored in the assurance that its faults will betray many of the frictions that have enabled flamenco to be at once modern and anti-modern, avant-garde and traditional, criminal and institutional, pure event and rigid text. ‘Le soleil sort quand il fait jour /Pour moi il ne sort que la nuit /Même le soleil est contre moi.’ 17 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Juan Goytisolo, Coto vedado, Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985, p.284ff. Translated into English by Peter Bush, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife, London and New York: Verso, 2003. Félix Likiniano et al., Comandos autónomos: Un capitalismo iconoclasta, Bilbao: Elkartea, 1996, p.10ff. The Comandos Autónomos Anticapitalistas was a Basque armed group of Marxist inclinations that originated as a split from ETA, and was active in the 1970s and 80s. See Shigenobu Gonzalvez, Guy Debord ou la beauté du negatif, Paris: Nautilus, 2002. Orson Welles, Nella terra di Don Chischiotte, 1961, television documentary series for RAI. See, for instance, Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1989; and Servando Rocha, Historia de un incendio: Arte y revolución de la Comuna de París al advenimiento del punk, Madrid: La Falguera, 2006. ‘The sun comes out by day / For me it only comes out at night / Even the sun is against me.' The French translation of this soleá is by Martine Joulia and Jean Yves Bériou, former members of the Situationist International, whose sole association with the art world today is the anthology of flamenco coplas translated into French under the title Je me consume. Martine Joulia and Jean-Yves Bériou, Je me consume 2: Coplas flamencas, Barcelona: Antoine Soriano, 2001.

22 | Afterall

II Discussing Becker-Ho’s Les Princes du Jargon, Giorgio Agamben writes:

Although this thesis [Becker-Ho’s thesis of jargon’s exclusivity] does not exceed the boundaries of sociolinguistics, it implies nonetheless another and more significant argument: as much as argot is not properly a language but a jargon, so the gypsies are not a people but the last descendants of a class of outlaws dating from another era […] This explains why scholars were never successful in interpreting the gypsies’ origins and in getting to know well their language and customs. The ethnographic investigation, in this case, becomes impossible because the informers are systematically lying.18

This is not an ethnic question and involves no racial debate. The gypsies mentioned here are the European survivors of the different gypsy emigrations and, strictly speaking, are marginal social groups that have different names in accordance with their social situations and occupations. In fact, ‘flamenco’ was the specific name given to certain gypsy or gypsy-like groups who settled on the outskirts of Andalusian cities in the mid-nineteenth century, declassed groups who worked with livestock and in bullfighting, and who practiced their own particular style of the arts of music and dance. The term ‘lumpenproletariat’ is rather delicate and the application of it to this social group is more descriptive than substantive. It is worth noting that while in The German Ideology (1845) Marx himself had defined the concept in connection with Hegel’s notion of Pöbel (the plebs, rabble), thereby distinguishing the workers’ proletariat from beggars, thieves and prostitutes (i.e. the dangerous classes), in The Class Struggle in France (1850) he described this class as ‘gens sans feu et sans aveu’ (‘people without heating and without opinions’), thus turning closer to Hegel’s more pejorative description. 19 Marx, however, believed that what both classes — the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat — had in common was that they were both ‘free’ and both could be either ‘bought’ or ‘corrupted’. The lumpenproletariat was therefore corrupted by, or corrupt because of, capitalism, the asocial practices of which placed them among the declassed. In a letter to Cafiero, Engels describes the lumpen mob as follows: ‘[T]he camp of whores and gypsies, and the resort of only the discontented peasant mass, enlightened and esoteric, mystical and rash, or of those scabby bootblacks, beggars and hit men, who are inevitably as much an enemy of the proletariat as the Reaction […] When the Proletariat is victorious it must crush them.’ Funnily enough, Engels and Marxist theorist Antoine Pannekoek consider all these to be traits of southern Spain, a generalisation that may explain why the workers of Andalusia were more sympathetic to anarchism. However, this definition of gypsies and gypsy-types as declassed and sympathetic to the reaction doesn’t seem to apply only to the specific historical conditions of Andalusia. 20 Evidence of this interclass alliance of reactionary and gypsy forces following the General Imprisonment Order imposed by Fernando VI in 1749 and the Decree enforced by Carlos III in 1783 against gypsies, 21 as well as the clashes between this enlightened monarch and the local noblemen who wished to maintain their privileges, can be found throughout Europe, in both agricultural and industrialised societies. ‘Gypsiness’ is therefore significant in that it gives a whole group of socially declassed people an identity. So we should not forget the importance of Agamben’s words, because the political relevance of the assertion that gypsies are not a people and that Caló is not a language calls into question our ideas on what constitutes a language, and what 18 19 20 21

Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Theory Out of Bounds) (trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp.64-65. Spanish version: Medios sin fin: Notas sobre política (trans. Antonio Gimeno Cuspinera), Valencia: Pre-textos, 2000. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845) (ed. C. J. Arthur), London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980; and K. Marx, The Class Struggle in France: 1848—1850, New York: International Publishers, 1964. See Lawrence Krader (ed.), The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972. Unknown author, Libro de la gitanería de Triana de los años 1740 a 1750 que escribió el bachiller revoltoso para que no se imprimiera, preface by Antonio Castro Carrasco, Seville: Junta Municipal de Triana, 1995; and Antonio Zoido Naranjo, La prisión general de los gitanos y los orígenes de lo flamenco, Seville: Portada Editorial, 1999.

Poetics and Politics Among Flamenco and Modern Artists | 23

Journal amusant, no.258, 1860. Front page with an illustration of guitarist Trinidad Huerta, whose guitar reproduced the sound of all other instruments

constitutes a people — the very basis of our political culture. ‘Gypsies are to a people what jargon is to language. However short-lived this analogy is, it sheds a dazzling light on the truth that the correspondence between language and people intended to conceal: all languages are jargons and argots.’ 22 One of the key factors with which ‘gypsiness’ constructs flamenco is identity, not so much because it allows for the impossible identification of a gypsy ‘people’ with flamenco singing and dancing, but rather because to date it has challenged all efforts to institutionalise this popular art as Spanish or Andalusian. The attempts made by sociological Francoism to consider flamenco the essence of lost ‘Spanishness’, or the recent decree by the regional government of Andalusia to make flamenco its own exclusive patrimony, come up against the identity crisis suffered by flamenco gypsies. 22

G. Agamben, Means Without End, op. cit., p.57ff.

24 | Afterall

In his Sociología del cante flamenco (1991) Gerhard Steingress accurately defines the sociolinguistic genealogy of the gypsy, gypsy-esque and gypsy-fied social group that eventually became flamenco artistes: bullfighting aficionados, musicians and dancers, people of different trades associated with festivals, bohemian poets, the gamblers and criminal groups who frequented them. 23 He documents their particular form of expression (incomprehensible, rude, gypsy-like, Andalusian, ruffianesque, etc.) that creates groups: the slang or jargon they spoke, in code, among themselves, was a sign of identification and exclusion. This is the social vehicle from which flamenco songs and dances arise, and this is their box of tools. As far as the common name ‘flamenco’ is concerned, it obviously seems to apply to an entire social group distinguished by speech, slang, by their form of expression. This is over and above the fact that the origin of the word ‘flamenco’ is uncertain: it is said to derive from emigrants from Flanders; from the knife known as ‘flamenco’, also from Flanders; or from the fact that to speak ‘Flamand’ means, in French, ‘to speak in a mixed, incomprehensible, jargon-like fashion’. What Becker-Ho’s books provide is the common denominator to many of these meanings in gypsy groups throughout Europe. Although it is futile to assume that in these argot groups the use of jargon obeys strict philological rules or genealogies, the observation of constants and the repetition of models are nonetheless worthwhile. The ‘fanander’, ‘flamand’ and ‘flamber’ family of argot is the basis for a series of semantic concurrences: on the one hand, ‘brother’, ‘colleague’, ‘accomplice’, ‘associate’; on the other, ‘to show oneself’, ‘to display oneself’, ‘handsome’, ‘elegant’, ‘pretentious’, ‘gracefully dressed’. In one group, terms from the family mean ‘brave’, ‘rough’, ‘flash’, ‘contentious’; in another, ‘trick’, ‘joke’, ‘witticism’, ‘chance’; or another, ‘life of crime’, ‘delinquent’, ‘bad way’; and yet another, ‘to shout’, ‘to speak aloud’, ‘to call’, ‘to make a noise’, ‘unintelligible’, ‘incomprehensible’, ‘meaningless’. 24 In the book, comparisons are made between the gypsy jargons of France, Spain, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, North America, North Africa and Italy. The latter is particularly interesting, as the Italian ‘mafia’ is also similarly indebted to argot. Even more relevant here is the Portuguese ‘fado’, which is also the name of a musical genre. There seems, therefore, to be a clear correspondence between these jargons and the semantic field covered by the meanings of the word ‘flamenco’. In Lumpen, marginación y jerigonza (1980), Alfonso Sastre gives an account of the host of words loaned by Basque to Caló slang, the secret language of the gypsies. 25 Indeed, the mysterious understanding between Carmen and Don José in Prosper Merimée’s Carmen (1854) arises after the gypsy woman utters a few words in Basque to the soldier: ‘laguna, ene bihotzarena’ (‘companion of my heart’). 28 It is logical that a language so different from Spanish should have come up with tools for the slang of a class that needed secrecy for its own survival. With regard to the latent political question of stateless languages, this digression on Basque and Caló slang is relevant to Agamben’s observations on Becker-Ho’s text, for knowledge of the territory that creates these jargons is essential in order to understand the interest of the Situationists and other modern experimentalisms in flamenco. Foreign language often plays a significant role in innovative creation, as for instance in the case of foreigners in Paris during the avant-garde era — Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, etc. It is not only a question of foreign languages, but of preserving the foreignness of all languages. Agamben concludes:

Languages are the jargons that hide the pure experience of language just as peoples are the more or less successful masks of the factum pluralitatis. This is why our task cannot possibly be either the construction of these jargons into grammars or the recodification of peoples into state identities. On the contrary, it is only by breaking at any point the nexus between the existence of language, grammar, people and state that thought and praxis will be equal to the tasks at hand. The forms of this interruption — during which the factum of language and the factum of community come to light for an instant — are manifold and change according to

23 24 25 26

See Gerhard Steingress, Sociología del cante flamenco, Jerez: CAF, 1991. A. Becker-Ho, Les Princes du jargon, op. cit., pp.80—81. See Alfonso Sastre, Lumpen, marginación y jerigonza, Madrid: Legasa Literaria, 1980. Prosper Mérimée, Carmen and Other Stories (trans. Nicholas Jotcham), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p.23.

Poetics and Politics Among Flamenco and Modern Artists | 25



times and circumstances: the reactivation of a jargon, trobar clus, pure language, minoritarian practice of a grammatical language, and so on. 27

Illustration from Luis de Castro and Vicente Escudero, El enigma de

Without bohemian life — literally, the gypsy way of life, aesthetic modernity cannot be understood. Mention has been made of Marx’s definitions of the lumpenproletariat, and in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) he states that: ‘Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call “la bohème”’. 28 Interest in this form of life is a logical constant among modern artists and flamenco artistes. The form of sociability that Roger Shattuck describes in his account of the early French avant-garde, The Banquet Years (1958), accurately fits the descriptions of flamenco bohemia, if you will forgive the repetition. 29 In fact, the Spanish presence at gatherings of the French avant-garde — I am referring to the world of Henri Rousseau, Alfred Jarry, Erik Satie and Guillaume Apollinaire, according to Shattuck’s book — was well celebrated. Satie’s piano piece Españaña (1913) illustrates the overwhelming presence of Spaniards — and Spanish music — in Paris in the early twentieth century: ‘A kind of waltz. Under the pomegranate trees. Like in Seville. Beautiful Carmen and the hairdresser. Maillot door. This good man Rodríguez. Isn’t he the mayor? Place de Clichy. Rue de Madrid. Las Cigarreras. At your disposal.’ 30 Indeed, the development of these forms of sociability is something that applied to modern artists and flamenco artistes alike. The age of salons (those of Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Édouard Manet, etc.) had its equivalent in the dance halls where new figures of music and dance were regularly presented. The world of bohemia, of literary and artistic cafés, had close ties with that of live music cafés. 31 Obviously, one cannot ignore the primary importance of Pablo Picasso, and to a lesser extent Juan Gris, then Joan Miró, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, within the Parisian avant-garde, particularly during the period of Cubism, when Spanish themes abounded in painting and sculpture. This abundance also had its social parallel, exemplified by the gatherings, galleries, parties and exhibitions in which Picasso played a central role and which gave rise to a certain ‘Spanish’ trend. The misunderstanding of these signs of ‘Spanish’ identity that appear as a theme in so many Cubist experiments (the guitar in still-life paintings, the Spanish dancer and the bullfighter in figurative portraits, etc.) is the result of a mistaken conceptualisation of the meaning of such signs. To some extent, the Spanish artists of the Parisian avant-garde help legitimise the national character of these signs, providing prestige to a collective imaginary that clearly derived from a lumpen culture, and granting a European, international or cosmopolitan standing to what they considered to be simply the shreds of a popular culture that could be used as a connection to personal memory precisely because it lacked a ‘national’ character. These signs were not qualified; they were discredited as great themes, commercialised and advertised, in vogue without being innovative, of a lowly and delinquent origin, vulgar rather than popular, kitsch. Beyond the ‘formal emptying’ of the theme (which we shall discuss later and which encourages free experimentation with the shapes of the guitar and of the female dancer) all these signs referred to a subculture that had little in common with the Spanish state, whether that be the monarchy, the Primo de Rivera dictatorship or the Republic. However, the identification of these images — the institutionalisation of these signs — was undergoing a logical process of expansion (the democratisation of culture that has 27 28 29 30 31

Berruguete: La danza y la escultura (The Enigma of Berruguete: Dance and Culture), Valladolid: Ateneo de Valladolid, 1953

G. Agamben, Means Without End, op. cit., p.70. K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1937, also available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch05.htm (last accessed on 5 March 2010). See Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France. 1885 to World War I, New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1968. Erik Satie, ‘Españaña: Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois’, 1913. Published in Spanish as ‘Españaña: Croquis y carantoñas de un gran hombre de madera’, Cuadernos de un mamífero, Barcelona: Acantilado, 1999, p.19. See José Blas Vega, Los cafés cantantes de Sevilla, Madrid: Cinterco, 1987; and Los cafés cantantes de Madrid 1846—1936, Madrid: Guillermo Blázquez, 2006.

26 | Afterall

Poetics and Politics Among Flamenco and Modern Artists | 27

triggered the emergence of social classes since the French Revolution). They would eventually be ‘nationalised’ thanks to the very effervescence of Republican culture. This was a paradoxical process driven by the same modernising and European-ising organisations as the Students’ Residence in Madrid, the Pedagogical Missions, Lorca’s plays, La Argentinita’s songs and the ceremony awarding Antonia Mercé, La Argentina, the second Ribbon of Isabella the Catholic, the highest cultural and political honour of the Republican government. 32 Although the populist ploys of King Alfonso XIII and the dictator Primo de Rivera evidently contributed to the propagation of this understanding of flamenco, it was the Republic that gave it state endorsement. The popularisation of the iconography derived from the cultural milieu of flamenco in the modern avant-garde arts also played its part. The use and abuse of these same icons by the official culture of the Franco dictatorship raised the iconic severity of the issue again, and it was Picasso who, virtually on his own, would engage in an ideological struggle with the dictatorship regarding the appropriation of these themes. Miró, on the contrary, found the abuse a reason for abandoning this iconography, as he eventually admitted. 33 The hostility shown by the Regenerationists of 1898 towards the ‘southern trash’, in particular by Miguel de Unamuno and by José Ortega y Gasset’s intellectual milieu (despite their paradoxes and nuances), triggered a symbolic rejection of all cultural elements of flamenco origin: songs, dances, bullfights, Holy Week celebrations, etc. The cultural niche of the lumpenproletariat is again worthy of attention. The most remarkable example is perhaps the anti-flamenco campaigns launched by the bohemian, late-Romantic and irascible intellectual Eugenio Noel. These campaigns travelled around Spain and parts of Latin America, speaking out in favour of modernisation and a learned Europe, and attacking everything with even the faintest suggestion of flamenco. Paradoxically, Noel’s texts have become an incontrovertible and passionate source of information on bulls, flamenco and the Holy Week. Board 32 of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924—29) features images that compose ‘grotesqueness’. 34 Warburg’s idea that certain configurations of image and their form conceal a series of meanings, semantic leanings, discursive tendencies preserved over centuries, or pathos formulae, reaches an interesting point here. Most of the pictures in the board are graphic representations of Moorish dances, with the odd image of ceramics. Although Warburg’s images in this section are all Italian in origin, any flamenco connoisseur will associate them with Spanish depictions of such dances and, specifically, with some of the most obvious traits of flamenco dance. The curves, undulating movements and arabesques are exaggerated to the point of confusing figure and ground, and constitute a possible origin of the monstrous decorations known as grotesque that semantically colour any decoration. The nightmare of the grotesque — in one of the prints a melancholic merchant appears threatened by wares suspended from a tree whilst simian-like creatures play with them, a nightmare worthy of Walter Benjamin — is the result of this unrefined understanding of decoration. Such a dread of wares had never been as convincingly depicted, at least not since mediaeval and Baroque vanitas, until the still-life paintings of Analytical and Synthetic Cubism. Consequently, the relevance of the Spanish guitar and the introduction of metaphors of the underworld (bottles of El Mono anisette, accident and crime reports, posters for bullfights, etc.) seem natural developments. Moreover, the interest in gypsy, Andalusian and flamenco figurations shown by Henri Matisse — and by fellow painters Francisco Iturrino, Kees Van Dongen and Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa — is connected to a taste for Orientalism which, as Agamben reminds us, also formed a radical part of the modern movement: ‘Apollinaire formulated this proposition perfectly when he stated in Les Peintres cubistes (1913) that “tout les artistes sont des hommes qui veulent devenir inhumains”. Baudelaire’s “anti-humanism”, [Arthur] Rimbaud’s call “to make the soul monstrous”, [Heinrich von] Kleist’s “marionette theatre”, Lautréamont’s “man or tree or stone”, Matisse’s “arabesque in which human figures 32 33 34

See Mechthild Albert (ed.), Vanguardia española e intermedialidad: Artes escénicas, cine y radio, Madrid and Frankfurt: Vervuert and Iberoamericana, 2005; Gabriele Morelli (ed.), Ludus: Cine, arte y deporte en la literatura española de vanguardia, Valencia: Pre-textos, 2000; Javier Pérez Segura, Arte moderno, vanguardia y estado: La sociedad de artistas ibéricos y la república (1931—1936), Madrid: CSIC, 2003. See Vicente Escudero, Mi baile, Barcelona: Montaner y Simón, 1947. See Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink), Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000.

28 | Afterall

and tapestries are confused”, [Paul] Klee’s “my ardour is rather that of the dead and the unborn”, [Gottfried] Benn’s “the human doesn’t come into it”, [Eugenio] Montale’s “nacreous snail’s trace” and [Paul] Celan’s “Medusa head and automaton” all express the same need: there are still figures beyond the human!’ 35 The body as a medium, the tool as a vehicle, thus concludes Warburg in his attempt to understand the circulation of this constellation of symbols. In each decorative order there dwells a monstrous figure about to change shape and attack the viewer as if in a nightmare. Many flamenco enthusiasts seem to be struck by this immemorial and irrational force, a sort of overinterpretative urge that intensifies the impetus of their gestures and signs. This is quite likely the source of the rhetorical excess we come across in flamenco studies. This coexistence of superficial and profound elements, and the transcendence attached to the déjà vu of a Manila shawl, are clearly connected to an understanding of the image, of the object as a symptom. No doubt the anachronism described above enables conflicting images and effects to coexist in one and the same scene, hence the force, the passion, the permanent movement of forms and concepts that prevail in an art as complex as flamenco: the superficial and the sublime, kitsch and transcendence, caricature and poetry, joy and death — everything takes place at once. Apropos a vignette in the comic Asterix in Spain, in which a group of gypsies announce, ‘Let’s celebrate! Let’s have a good time!’, and proceed to sing a copla along the lines of ‘Ay, ¡qué desgracia la mía, haber nació!’ (Oh, what misfortune to have been born!), French philosopher Clement Rosset — another surprising enthusiast — pertinently declares:

The fact that the intensity of joy is directly proportional to the cruelty of knowledge is undoubtedly a general truth. I am nonetheless pleased to state here that in Spain this truth encounters an exceptional field of expression, particularly in flamenco singing […] this is precisely because it is always accompanied by the sparkle to the contrary given to it by the cruel sentiment of the absurdity of all existence, which shelters it from all complacency or commitment […] Despite intensifying the joy of living, it does not forget that living will never be anything other than a miraculous resistance to death.’ 36 III

Stating that flamenco, like any other popular music genre, exercises political power seems obvious and indisputable. After all, popular music plays with power everywhere and in many ways. The songs we hear on the radio, that we play on a record and that we see performed on a stage or in a film reinforce authority; they resist oppression, mediate in conflicts and, in hundreds of different ways, they solve the discrepancies of public life. However, it is interesting that the most ordinary political moments in popular music (and perhaps the most effective) are moments that we do not fully understand, usually because we overlook them. They are moments in which bodies find themselves trapped by the politics of the music. Beyond the power exercised by obvious lyrics and the hidden metaphors in each passage of music, politics also materialises through bodies. Clarifying this view of music, of the body and of politics is no easy matter. Nevertheless, the flamenco genre offers itself as a musical laboratory in order to explore precisely this question. The intriguing and problematic issue that we have to examine is simply the fact that flamenco is said to be void of political meaning. Both the content and the unconscious nature of the flamenco performance suggest a detachment from politics. In spite of this, the ideological interest and the power of political persuasion of this music are beyond doubt. As a result, flamenco provides a perfect opportunity to explore a type of politics that has a great deal to do with bodies and very little to do with thought. What better place to search for a corporeal form of politics than in a music that is, at least conceptually, apolitical? 37 35 36

‘All artists are men who want to become inhuman.’ G. Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans. Ronald L. Martinez), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Author’s translation from the Spanish version, Estancias: La palabra y el fantasma en la cultura occidental (trans. Tomás Segovia), Valencia: Pre-textos, 2006, p.69ff. Clément Rosset, Joyful Cruelty: Toward a Philosophy of the Real (ed. and trans. David F. Bell), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Author’s translation from the Spanish version, El principio de crueldad (trans. Rafael del Hierro Oliva), Valencia: Pre-textos, 1994, pp.7—8.

Poetics and Politics Among Flamenco and Modern Artists | 29

The cover of Estampa, 24 April 1937. The text reads: ‘While Luisita Esteso was rehearsing in a theatre in Valladolid, the Falangists were beginning their killing in the streets…'

Taken from William Washabaugh’s book Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture (1996), this statement is key to understanding studies on flamenco singing and dancing, and helps reposition the field. Indeed, the political quality of flamenco — its forms of resistance, rebellion, radicalism and so on — does not lie in the relevance of its lyrics, despite the fact that they are often extremely apposite. Neither does it lie in the political commitment of some of its exponents or groups. Corporeality, the physical body — also understood as a social body which progresses physically and materially by means of signs, traces or corporate indices — develops a set of signifiers that preclude dealing with only the explicitness of this or that byword or gesture. This tendency is what enables us to adopt the dual position of seeing the two types of time mentioned above simultaneously, for this position is closer to the needs of card-tricksters than to those of compulsive liars, closer to a rough dialectics of survival than to the cynicism of double truths and closer to community-relations tactics that do not accept the imposition of the truth-lie dichotomy imposed by the powers that be than to the construction of a comforting belief system to guarantee the group’s social ties. Felipe Aláiz, the anarchist thinker who knew gypsies so well, considered their taste for faking antiques, a trade associated with flamenco, as just another facet of their art. 38 In contrast with the legitimisations of the past portrayed by history and scientific academia, the work carried out by these foragers — experts in archaeology, ‘antique’ furniture and art — questioned the certainties on which political power is based in our world. During the years that Aláiz spent in Seville as editor of the newspaper Solidaridad obrera, he encouraged members of the woodworkers’ union in Granada to forge Moorish vaulted ceilings and old mediaeval figures (so expensive for foreign travellers) by firing rounds of shots at virgin beams to simulate the passing of time and the existence of woodworm, a method he had learnt from the gypsies of the Albaicín district. Washabaugh also reminds us that the main problem encountered by flamenco researchers is that their informers lie systematically. So, rather than focusing on the accuracy of their information, one should consider the generous descriptions with which they regale researchers. Stating that the body is the key to understanding political humours is perhaps no way to conclude a historical account, and certainly is no basis for a doctoral thesis nor for establishing a clearly defined aesthetic canon. However, it does allow us to go some way towards a social understanding of poetic and political constructions. This insight provided by the body also helps us understand the liberation of women, transvestites and dandies in strictly male-centred environments, such as those of gypsy and Andalusian societies, structured around a long-standing phallocratic patriarchy. With these tools, the modern construction of flamenco may be explained under the hypothesis of an avant-garde influence that has shaped neo-primitive forms of song and dance, radicalising essential elements of voice timbres, polyrhythmic experimentation, dance austerity and so on. The 1922 flamenco contest held in Granada, often described as a revival of archaic forms, was merely the starting point for the construction of the variety of flamenco singing presented as jondo, a mystifying aesthetic appraisal with very little formal musical basis. We may consider this — though not the contest itself — as the critical moment, the epistemological break that favoured a new aesthetic understanding of flamenco. In this chain of transfers, lumpen tastes began to acquire prestige in several middle-class publications and newspapers, returning to the popular masses as a sign of identity and to the flamenco aficionado as a token of artistic excellence. 39 These years were important for the incipient middle-class Andalusian nationalism, and would lead to the foundations of a hitherto ineffectual cultural identity. However, it is at the 1922 Granada competition that this construction process appears more clearly, set against a political background of growing support for the popular republican democracy that would reach power in 1931. The neo-popularism of the competition’s main supporters, composer Manuel de Falla and Federico García Lorca, was based 37 38 39

30 | Afterall

William Washabaugh, Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1996. Author’s translation from the Spanish version, Flamenco, pasión, política y cultura popular, Barcelona: Paidós, 2005, p.127ff. See Felipe Aláiz, ‘Arte accesible’, Hacia una federación de autonomías ibéricas, Bordeaux: Tierra y libertad, 1947. See José Mercado, La seguidilla gitana, Madrid: Taurus, 1982; and Marta Palenque, El poeta y el burgués: Poesía y público, 1850—1900, Seville: Alfar, 1990.

Poetics and Politics Among Flamenco and Modern Artists | 31

on knowledge of tradition, on the one hand, and openness to the new aesthetic currents of European modernity on the other. Flamenco, in theory, was neither on one side nor the other, but rather at the apex. The invention of jondo, a more primitive, original and thus ‘purer’ form of singing, is related to this process; both the musician and the poet suspected that flamenco was too bastardised to be set firmly on the side of tradition. Lorca’s memory of how the idea for the competition was conceived is revealing. He was strolling in Granada with Falla when he heard the voices of popular gypsy singers through a window. They entered the room that Lorca subsequently compared to ‘one of Le Corbusier’s machines for living in’. The exoticism of the comparison — a humble abode with utilitarian furnishings and the minimalism that characterises the homes of the poor — would be anecdotal if it weren’t for the fact that it reveals the keys to a more complex aesthetic project. ‘Sketch de la nueva pintura’ (‘Sketch of New Painting’, 1928) and ‘Arquitectura del cante jondo’ (‘Architecture of Cante Jondo’, 1931) are two lectures written by Lorca for the same aesthetic project, and which often were given alternately. 40 In both of them, he describes the creative process that leads painting and song from historical presentation and representation towards a purer aesthetic. In the case of painting, this was done in the name of Modernism, leading to the pure painting of the Post-Cubists (a particular association of a trend which includes Amédée Ozenfant, Miró, Giorgio de Chirico and the PROUM works). In the case of song, it was in the name of the most deep-rooted lore embracing Arabic melismas and the exuberance of Baroque tradition, forming cante jondo, the most primitive form of flamenco song. The Granada competition was a great ideological and advertising success despite being an artistic failure and a source of popular controversy. But if we observe the aesthetic shift from Antonio Chacón, a member of the jury, and El Tenazas, the winner of the competition, we can infer the aesthetic qualities that were being sought, and yet failed to live up to expectations. Deep down, both Lorca and Falla knew that this aesthetic displacement was rigged. Of course, El Tenazas was no Manuel Torres, who represented the aesthetic model that in some way or another was being championed in opposition to Chacón’s classicism. Nor could the purity of sound hopefully ‘discovered’ — traditional ruralism, formal sobriety and polyrhythmic tempo — be clearly attributed to Torres. However, the shift experienced in the same aesthetic community inhabited by modern artists and flamenco and that originated in this Granada competition would continue to shape flamenco after the Civil War. This aesthetic ambivalence also extends to the different misunderstandings that arise around political militancy among flamenco artists during the last ten years of the Franco regime. Of course it is impossible for us to assert a separation between the poetic and the political in the case of flamenco artists. When Washabaugh pinpoints the body and its material representations as the source of aesthetic and ideological discourse, he does so precisely in order to blur their boundaries. Along the lines of Mikhail Bakhtin’s studies, the ambiguity of such politics situates the cause of protest and rebellion in the inversion of values that characterises carnival — acting against the grain as a position in the world, as in a permanent carnival. 41 In other words, like other marginalised groups in similar conditions — from the original environments of North American blues and Argentinean tango, Greek rembetika music and Algerian rai — flamenco artists are a permanent receptacle for dissenting social models, a refuge for all that appears inverted with regard to the dictums of official power. For precisely this reason, the distinction or dividing line between politics and poetics in other fields appears as indistinct and vague in flamenco. Such a conflicting condition is quite complex. When Juan El Camas — a cantaor who could be characterised as modern, anarchic and flamenco — was asked about his political ideas, he claimed: ‘In theatres I only sing about political issues; I write all the lyrics at home, but in theatres I say what has to be said on stage.’ 42 Of course, we know that El Camas never followed this claim in any systematic way, but it is still an explanation of sorts of the explicit visibility of flamenco at a time when Spain was experiencing the greatest outbursts of political freedom — during the Republic, from 1931 to 1939, and during the political transition to democracy, from 1975 to 1978. 40 41 42

See Federico García Lorca, Conferencias, Granada: Comares, 2001. See, for example, Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (trans. Hélène Iswolsky, 1965), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Pedro G. Romero, recordings on El Bizco Amate, 1995, unpublished, Library Máquina P.H., Seville.

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The flamenco that Guy Debord had known in Paris, that of the Republican émigrés, was characterised by these Popular Front and anti-system demands. Episodes from Spain’s political transition, such as the exile of flamenco-protest singer Manuel Gerena and the incipient politicising of flamenco singing in domestic resistance to Franco, may have been effervescent elements for the French radical Left, but they would still not enable us to identify flamenco with the Left. Nonetheless, it is true that they may have helped to dispel the stereotype that associated culture in the Franco period with flamenco writers and performers, considered the official artists of the regime. Repeating Lorca’s subtle distinction between exponents of flamenco and jondo — a distinction still made by French aficionados and scholars — one could conceive of a division between right- and left-wing, respectively. And yet, history would prove otherwise, for Guerrita and Angelillo were the stars of Republican flamenco, and their lyrics were very explicitly in favour of the Republic. But that, of course, is not the point. As we have already stated, it was the Republic that institutionalised flamenco as the Spanish genre par excellence. The cultural populism of the Pedagogical Missions and of La Barraca theatre group inspired the first cultural policies of the fascist Falangist movement. The Women’s Section of the Falangists carried out an intense campaign throughout Spain to reinforce the country’s traditional musical identity, in which flamenco played an important part, as it later would in the so-called Festivals of Spain.

Carlos G. Rajel, Skeleton-Fighting, wall tiles for Café Los Gabrieles, Madrid. Photograph by J.M. Gamboa

One of their most absurd tasks was deciding on the regional costumes for each province, which are still worn at local festivals; it so happened that in Seville the ‘gypsy’ dress, flounced and adorned with frills, was chosen as the regional costume, an ethnographical travesty which lives on in people’s imaginations. However, it was not until the popmusic revolution of the 1960s that flamenco as a mark of Spanish identity became a powerful consumerist advertising machine, placing the regime under the auspices of one of the few cultural indices that gave it prestige. Even today, Pedro Almodóvar’s highly successful films, which cleverly rework the concept of difference just as the sainetes (one-act farces) and zarzuelas (popular lyrical theatre) did at the beginning of the twentieth century, are marked by that Spanish identity in which flamenco plays such an important role. Any attempt to map or draw up an inventory of ‘jondo’, ‘flamenco’, ‘gypsy’, ‘Spanish’ or ‘Andalusian’ semiotics, with the aim of establishing a mark of identity, is doomed to failure. Writer and playwright José Bergamín was asked about the same issue in 1940, after a production of the Don Lindo de Almería (1926) ballet with music by Rodolfo Halffter. He replied, ‘It is not just a question of traditional Spain versus anti-traditional Spain. My interest in Spanish music and dance is not just a question of identities lost

Poetics and Politics Among Flamenco and Modern Artists | 33

in exile; at the end of the day, searching for roots is simply an underground version of beating around the bush overground.’ 43 Let us return to Giorgio Agamben, who in fact was a friend of Bergamín’s and his translator into Italian. In the article ‘What Is a People?’, published in Libération in 1995, Agamben discusses the ambivalence of the meaning of the word ‘people’, which in Spanish, Italian and French — and also, to some extent, in legal and political English — designates ‘both the constitutive political subject and the class that is excluded from politics, de facto if not de jure’. The ‘people’ in the sense of homeland, nation and state; and the ‘plebs’ in the sense of inhabitants, clan and tribe. Population and populace. In a thorough etymological, philological and political enumeration of the different uses of the term, he suggests that this bifurcation of meaning is one of the fundamental issues of modern politics, in which the growth of nationalism, the persecution of Jews and gypsies, popular fronts and political populism, class struggles and the expansion of the Third World are conflicts inherent and implicit. To a certain extent, Agamben realised that Debord’s interest in flamenco and gypsies, in Spain and its political conflicts, in the crudeness and the lessons of the Spanish Civil War and of historical anarchism was linked to the intuition that the urban sub-proletariat class — the gypsies and non-gypsies who shaped a world around flamenco song and dance — were exposed to a fundamental conflict. The different phases of their history, of their aesthetic construction, of their mythology, even the laws of their experimental dance and music — in short, their ways of life — were characterised by having transformed that exposure into something approximating a full life. Thus, the hieroglyphic problem of ‘Spanishness’, as heralded in Francis Picabia’s painting-cum-gag La Nuit espagnole (Spanish Night, 1922) and as in what is characteristically Spanish (its culture, its industrial production, whatever historical reality it has constructed) is related to that underlying dissociation between ‘People’ and ‘people’, and its aesthetic and political vicissitudes, at least since the French Revolution. As Agamben explains:

Such a widespread and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental: it surely reflects an ambiguity inherent in the nature and function of the concept of people in Western politics. It is as if, in other words, what we call people was not actually a unitary subject but rather a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the People as a whole and as an integral body politic and, on the other hand, the people as a subset and as fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; on the one hand, an inclusive concept that pretends to be without remainder while, on the other hand, an exclusive concept known to afford no hope; at one pole, the total state of the sovereign and integrated citizens and, at the other pole, the banishment — either court of miracles or camp — of the wretched, the oppressed and the vanquished. There exists no single and compact referent for the term people anywhere: like many fundamental political concepts [...] people is a polar concept that indicates a double movement and a complex relation between two extremes. This also means, however, that the constitution of the human species into a body politic comes into being through a fundamental split and that in the concept of people we can easily recognise the conceptual pair identified earlier as the defining category of the original political structure: naked life (people) and political existence ( People), exclusion and inclusion, zoe and bios. The concept of ‘people’ always already contains within itself the fundamental biopolitical fracture. It is part of what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a part as well as what cannot belong to the whole in which it is always already included. 44

43 44

See José Bergamín, Don Lindo de Almería, Valencia: Pre-textos, 1988. G. Agamben, Means Without End, op. cit., pp.31—32.

© This article first appeared in longer form in the catalogue for ‘The Spanish Night: Flamenco, Avant-Garde and Popular Culture 1865—1936', which was held at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid from December 22nd 2007 to March 24th 2008. Translated by Josephine Watson.

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35

Alice Creischer

37 The Art of Enlightenment: ‘Same Same, But Different’ — Maria Muhle 44 Dubai — Expanded Horizons 47 Keep Going! Ethics and the Political in the Work of Alice Creischer — Ellen Blumenstein

Alice Creischer, Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation of the

The Art of Enlightenment: ‘Same Same, But Different’ — Maria Muhle

Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Poverty, 2005—08. Installation view, MACBA, Barcelona, 2008.

Maria Muhle considers the political implications of Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann and Christian von Borries’s use of performed — rather than filmed or photographed — re-enactment as a means of critiquing history.

Photograph: Seber Ugarte. © Alice Creischer, 2007. Courtesy the artist

On 28 May 2008 a press conference was held at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin under the title ‘Dubai — Erweiterte Horizonte: Museen schaffen eine neue internationale Öffentlichkeit’ (‘Dubai — Expanded Horizons: Museums Create a New International Public Sphere’). It brought together the directors of the three largest German museums, who referred to themselves during the press conference as the ‘three generals’;1 they were ‘flanked’ by the Head of the Directorate-General for Culture and Communication of the Federal Foreign Office and by the Cultural Director of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (DCAA), representing the Dubai government. The aim of the event was to make public the plans for a large-scale collaboration project between the three German institutions (joined under the label ‘United German Museums’), the German cultural diplomacy and the Emirate of Dubai. The wholly unironic project consisted of the development of a ‘Universalmuseum’ to be located in Dubai, continuing another ‘very successful’ — as they put it — international cooperation between the three institutions and the National Museum of China in Beijing (which, once the extension work is completed, will be ‘the world’s biggest museum’). 2 This collaboration will eventually result in the exhibition ‘The Art of the Enlightenment’, taking place between September 2010 and February/March 2012 and which, through a selection of works and artefacts from the museum collections from Berlin, Dresden and Munich, will present the Enlightenment as a key chapter in the history of European thought and civilisation and, furthermore, will aim to ‘redefine the Enlightenment and China as forming part of a universal “intellectual world-heritage site”’. After this first experiment, the ‘United German Museums’ will expand their horizons even further, exporting European culture and its key notions such as cosmopolitanism, civilisation, public sphere and universalisation to other former countries of the Second and Third World. The plans by the three museums constitute a renewed colonising impulse, one in which the exhibition and historicisation of cultural goods renew the historic impulse to impose ‘civilised’ values on underdeveloped countries through state institutions which has always been characteristic of colonialism. Instead of critically analysing the history of European colonisation and, for instance, addressing the plundering of cultural goods from colonised countries, the presentation of these new cultural projects emphasises the dialogue between cultures as an example of an ideal speech situation, i.e. a state of undistorted communication, to use the words of a certain critical theory. For example, the conference’s discussion of the Dubai of fifty years ago — when it was mainly known for its pearls — focused not on the working conditions of pearl fishers, but on the role of pearls in the European Baroque, thereby subsuming a relation of exploitation under the ideal of a ‘universal art’. In times of post-colonialism, post-history and postmodernism, the arts and their institutions pretend to reflect on colonisation, history and modernism by re-enacting their strategies under the shelter of a meta-reflective position: the missionaries and militaries of the past, who brought alphabetisation and Western values to the colonised countries, are replaced by the cultural ‘generals’ who bring the pale reflection of colonialism — the archive of Enlightenment to the newly built 1 2

Peter Klaus Schuster of the National Museums of Berlin, Martin Roth of the Dresden State Art Collections and Reinhold Baumstark of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich. See http://www.skd-dresden.de/en/ausstellungen/andereOrte/Die_Kunst_der_Aufklaerung.html (last accessed on 16 February 2010).

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‘universal’ institution in Dubai — in order to establish a flow of cultural goods in tandem with the system of financial exchange. The interventionist and explicitly political re-enactments of Alice Creischer, made in collaboration with Andreas Siekmann and the composer Christian von Borries, unfold against the background of this cultural-political situation. Horizontalerweiterung (Horizontal Expansion, 2009), their latest re-enactment to date, addresses the colonial character of the institutional export of art and cultural goods taking place in the Chinese and Dubai museum projects by re-staging the ‘United German Museums’ press conference. By doing so, it deals with the relation between representation and historiography 3 Re-enactment is a traditional form of historiographic practice within popular culture, especially through ‘accurate’ and ‘objective’ re-staging of historical events aiming both at authenticity and immersion. In contrast, contemporary art destabilises these practices and, mostly looking for a political impact, includes them knowingly within visual, filmic or photographic representation through filmed tableaux vivants or re-enactments (as in Omer Fast’s 2007 video The Casting or, in perhaps a less reflective manner, in Jeremy Deller’s re-enactment of The Battle of Orgreave, filmed by Mike Figgis in 2001), or through the exhibition of historiographic ‘instruments’ such as archives or documents (as in the fictional image archives of the Atlas Group). What is especially interesting about the work of Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries is that they take re-enactment back to live performance — to the stage, its ‘original’ venue — and thus break with traditional documentary media, such as film or photography, and their ‘political’ claims. But this does not mean that Creischer et al. focus on re-enactment’s illusionist or immersive effect. On the contrary, they displace the ‘historicist’ — i.e. truthful and authentic — strategy of re-enactment and the discussion about the truth value of the documentary image, and focus instead on the articulation of several paradigmatic elements in order to construct a ‘series of series’, to use Michel Foucault’s words: the configuration of meaningful elements in order to produce or to highlight a meaningful context. 4 On 14 September 2009, the ‘Dubai — Expanded Horizons’ press conference was re-enacted at the Temporäre Kunsthalle, situated in the heart of cultural and historical Berlin. The site faces the void where the Palace of the Republic formerly stood and where the Stadtschloss, the City Castle, is to be reconstructed to house the ‘Humboldt Forum’ and the ethnological collection of the National Museums of Berlin. 5 A press release under the header ‘German United Museums’ was circulated by a fictional press attaché, announcing a discussion on the occasion of the ‘strategic partnership’ between Dubai, Berlin, Munich and Dresden, and the signing of a cooperation agreement with the government of Dubai. A specially dedicated website also made available press information, 6 which included the transcription of the original press conference, enriched with textual and visual commentary on the positions outlined by the ‘three generals’. One such was a photograph of the Kham hom Orchestra from Bangkok, 3 4 5 6

Several recent German publications have addressed these issues, such as Texte zur Kunst’s December 2009 issue, which was titled ‘Geschichte/History’, or the latest issue of Jahresring from 2009, edited by Yilmaz Dziewior, ‘Wessen Geschichte: Vergangenheit in der Kunst der Gegenwart’. There have also been several exhibitions dedicated to re-enactment, including ‘History Will Repeat Itself’ at HMKV Dortmund and Kunst-Werke Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin in 2007—08 and ‘Life, Once More. Forms of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art’, at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, in 2005. For a historical overview see Sven Lütticken: ‘An Arena in Which to Reenact’, in S. Lütticken (ed.), Life, Once More: Forms of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art (exh. cat.), Rotterdam: Witte de With, 2005, pp.17—60. In a recent article, Kerstin Stakemeier claims that re-enactment is ‘performed historicism’, and as such always assumes that mere repetition already bears a critical dimension. On the contrary, Stakemeier claims that ‘artistic re-enactment transforms actualisation into a symbolic dissolution, where the past is stylised into an event and becomes indistinguishable’. Re-enactments are then ‘historicist anesthetisations of the political’. Kerstin Stakemeier, ‘Reenacting: aneignen und abweisen’, phase 2, issue 32, 2009, available at http://phase2.nadir.org/ rechts.php?artikel=691 (last accessed on 16 February 2010). Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith), London: Routledge, 1972, p.8. Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries also helped initiate the critical platform ‘Alexandertechnik’ (ironically referring to Alexander von Humboldt), which reflects on the political changes conducted through the urban and cultural planning of the former centre of East Berlin. The new Humboldt Forum, for example, which is meant to represent the culturally and politically reunited German nation, celebrates the role of non-European art and culture artefacts in the enlightened project of cosmopolitanism set up by the ‘cultural nation’ Germany to peacefully colonise the world by ‘exchanging’ cultural goods, i.e. by exporting German Bildung (cultivation) and importing the ‘primitive art’ that now constitutes the ethnological collections. The bust of Nefertiti exhibited in the recently and spectacularly re-opened Neues Museum on the Museumsinsel is perhaps the most popular example. For more information, see http://www.humboldtforum.info (last accessed on 16 February 2010). See http://www.united-german-museums.de (last accessed on 16 February 2010).

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whose 1900 performance in the Zoological Garden in Berlin had been recorded by the German psychologist Carl Stumpf and was the founding sound document for the Phonogram Archive. 7 Additional comment on German colonialism and its universalising discourse is made through several pictograms — illustrations of the circulation of migrants and their labour, contrasted with illustrations of Western movements such as tourism, consumerism and export. While the re-enactment at the Kunsthalle aimed to maintain some semblance of veracity by ‘officially’ inviting the press and making it look ‘real’, at least in its initial stages, a second performance was held a few days later at the Sophiensäle Theatre in Berlin, in which the re-enactment was now explicitly announced under the title of Horizontalerweiterung. The programme labelled it as a ‘musical piece’ that continued some motifs from the collaboration presented by Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries during documenta 12 (2007). If that piece, Aufeinmal & Gleichzeitig (Suddenly & Simultaneously), was staged in a commercial centre in Kassel to explore the conditions of production of commodities, this one focused ‘on the value of culture in international import and export’, as the theatre programme euphemistically put it. 8 It did so by looking at German cultural politics at the crossroads of the recent discussions about

Christian von Borries, Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, ‘Dubai —

a German Leitkultur, 9 the reconstruction of historical Berlin as the heart of the New Republic and the fading importance of Germany, the former champion of world export, especially in comparison to new financial powers such as Dubai or China.

Expanded Horizons: Museums Create a New International Public Sphere’, performance. Courtesy the artists

7 8 9

The Phonogram Archive, co-founded by Carl Stumpf, is a collection of fragments of non-European music recorded during colonial expeditions by Germans and Europeans to different parts of the world, with aspirations to being comprehensive. The archive and especially its historical collection, which has been classified by the UNESCO as a Memory of the World, is today part of the musical-ethnological collection in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and preserves over 150,000 audio documents recorded between 1883 and 1954, mainly during the colonial expeditions. An interesting view on this archive is presented by Philip Scheffner in his film Halfmoon Files (2007), which focuses on the recordings of Islamic war prisoners from the so-called ‘Halfmoon Camp’ near Berlin during World War I. See http://www.sophiensaele.com/archiv.php?IDstueck=682 (last accessed on 22 February 2010). Leitkultur (‘leading culture’) refers to the consensual agreement on the fundamental values for society, and was a key discussion point during the German political debate on the modification of the regulations for the integration of immigrants in 2000. The conservatives claimed that immigrants had to respect and adopt the German ‘leading culture’. This position was criticised as replacing integration by assimilation, and therefore not respectful of the diverse cultural reality of German society.

Alice Creischer | 39

Even though the ‘illusionist’ aspect was absent in the second mise en scène, the staging of the press conference was similar on both occasions: the stage was divided in two parts, as if mimicking a split screen. The right side of the stage was the site for an average public event, with a table, five chairs and nametags; water and microphones; and a screen behind the table onto which the press conference’s slogan (‘Dubai — Expanded Horizons’) was projected. The left side of the stage was occupied by another screen onto which the photograph of the Kham hom Orchestra was projected. Once the conference started, the first fifteen minutes were a faithful re-enactment of the original event: as in role-play, the characters read out the original parts of the script from the conference. Seemingly aware of the salaciousness of the museum project they were presenting, the ‘three generals’ also included their own self-defence, averring that the financial and cultural wealth of the Gulf region does not only consist of oil, but also of ‘creativity and people’ and ‘morally neutral’ enterprises such as ‘construction, financial services, logistics and tourism’. They also assured the audience that even though most of the immigrant population of Dubai comes from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and ‘a lot’ of them work in construction, there are also wealthy businessmen from these countries living in Dubai. Thanks to this ‘cosmopolitan furore’,

as the script puts it, Dubai fortunately does not need a discussion about a Leitkultur of the kind Germany had just gone through. But it does need a ‘Universal Museum’ that is able to show as many aspects as possible of the cultural and artistic history of the region — the realisation of which needs to be handed over to European cultural institutions. On this prompt, the second screen was removed and an orchestra came into view. The 1900 recording of the Kham hom Orchestra was played through the speakers while the orchestra remained silent, its sound making the voices of the speakers inaudible. Subsequently, the orchestra began to re-play the recorded piece — re-enacting not the concert as an ‘event’ but its recording by imitating even its sizzling noises, and highlighting the difference between the record as an instrument for storing data and the live (impossible to reproduce) performance. The music was then disrupted by a paradigmatic theatrical artifice: a woman stepped out of the orchestra and

40 | Afterall

Christian von Borries, Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, ‘Dubai — Expanded Horizons: Museums Create a New

contextualised the music, explaining that the recordings were made by Stumpf in 1900, and are part of the Phonogram Archive in Berlin. The Phonogram Archive’s aim, she went on, was to produce as complete a collection as possible of fragments of all the music in the world. This first sound fragment, as the initial step towards a universal music, reflected the one-sidedness and paradoxical nature of the dialogue between East and West implicit in universalisation: the idea of ‘world music’, re-enacted by the musical score by mixing Western ‘exoticist’ music with this quotation from the universal sound archive, represents the institutionalised sublation and dissolution of non-Western music into a classifiable system. 10 This relationship between the non-European voice or music and the enlightened collector, scientist or artist was brutally reversed on the stage by the intervention of a Brechtian character: in the second half of the play, the actress who had stepped out of the orchestra explicitly intervened in the press-conference scenario, with the speakers seemingly unable to notice her, as she enacted her spoken commentary. In order to illustrate the process of recording, she took the head of the actor playing the Director of the National Museums of Berlin in her hands and directed his mouth towards an imaginary recording device, thus reversing the relation between those recording (the European scientists and directors of cultural and ethnological institutions that operate in the Humboldtian spirit) and those recorded (the musicians from Bangkok in 1900, the voices of the natives recorded during the colonial expeditions or in the prisoner camps in the German Reich, which also form part of the Phonogram Archive). Her spoken words turned into a moritat, a street ballad recounting horrible events and unspeakable crimes. Her subsequent discussion of recording practices as colonial instruments at the turn of the last century was then contrasted with an account of the contemporary construction of the largest museum of the world. Standing in front of the illustrations and hammering on a motorcycle helmet, the actress explained the real living conditions of workers in Dubai — their miserable pay, the camps in the desert where they live — before she tied the hands of one ‘museum director’ to his back, put the motorcycle helmet over another’s head and placed a blue, red and white striped plastic hold-all bag — the paradigmatic accessory of global migration — in front of them. Then she disappeared behind a white partition panel, onto which documentary images of workers leaving a construction site in Dubai were projected. This parallel montage allowed for a reformulated discourse on universality, the Enlightenment, the public sphere and globalisation, with the right side of the stage deconstructing the left side through the denunciation of a ‘new’ and double-layered colonialism: the European exportation of cultural goods to a country whose development itself is based on colonial strategies, including the exploitation of — for all intents and purposes — slave-like immigrant labour and that, at the same time, presents itself as the new paradise of financial freedom and the blossoming alternative to the decaying Western world. The ‘split stage’ thus constructs two images of history, or more specifically, two modes of writing history: on the one hand, the enlightened historicist vision of the progress of mankind carried by one of its most precious goods — culture — and, on the other, rephrasing Walter Benjamin, the story told by those who built the skyscrapers of Dubai, its opera house, universal museum, universities and other cultural institutions. Besides highlighting the concrete absurdity of the statements and self-image of the representatives of German culture, and their attempt to sell the trademark of ‘United German Culture’ from a ‘Re-United German Nation’, the central concern of Horizontalerweiterung is historiography itself, the institutions that administer history — historical, ethnological and natural science museums; art collections and cultural archives — and the documents that these institutions produce and safeguard.

International Public

•

Sphere’, performance. Courtesy the artists 10

The major issue for Stumpf and his archive was how to notate non-European music, which was impossible with the classical notation system and its diatonic scale. The classification of the music was thus done through its degree of deviance from the Western notation system, which implies that the music is not classified as part of the ‘history of music’, but as ethnological illustrations of a certain cultural and historical moment and consequently exposed as part of the ‘ethnological’ collection.

Alice Creischer | 41

In the introduction to the Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Michel Foucault relates the ambiguous status of the document to two strategies — the historical and the archaeological — within historiography. On the one hand, traditional history tends to reconstitute the past based on the interrogation of documents, of their authenticity or truth, by reading their fragile but still decipherable traces:

includes, for instance, a global or universal music and a global or universal museum, through re-enactment itself. In order to do so, they focus on and deconstruct the immersive or illusionist dimension of classical re-enactment. The key conceptual distinction to consider would be the opposition between a re-enactment that targets illusionism or immersion and the epic of Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Street Scene', what we could call, following Brecht, an ‘epic re-enactment’. 16 While immersion has a stabilising function — by proposing a synaesthetic (or harmonious) continuum between the senses, it creates a universe where the difference between reality and fiction becomes insignificant, insofar as the goal of fiction is to be sensed ‘as if’ it were reality — epic re-enactment, as performed by Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries, does away with this continuum and gives the representation a meaning for reality or as reality. This form of epic re-enactment does not pose history as an ephemeral ‘event’ (as does re-enactment in performance art), nor as the ‘truth’ of a society or a state (as does historicist re-enactment). Instead, it stages an archaeological movement in the Foucauldian sense: not as an institution of history but as constitution of a tableau, the creation of inter-medial, and therefore contextualised, networks of meaning. The re-enactment organised by Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries is therefore not the ‘more real reality’, nor the ‘truer reality’ or perfection of representation: it is potential reality insofar as it reflects on the conditions of appearance of something as ‘something real’. And it therefore presents another meaning of Enlightenment, one that Foucault calls in an enigmatic text ‘the critical ontology of ourselves’:

… history, in its traditional form, undertook to ‘memorise’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say. 11

On the other hand, the archaeological history transforms documents into monuments:

[It] deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form sets or complexes [and thus] aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument. 12

The consequences of this archaeological notion of history are multiple, one being that the possibility of a global history — relating to a traditional historicism based on the notions of Enlightenment, progress and necessity, giving way to ‘what is called metaphorically the “face” of a period’ 13 — vanishes and gives place to a general history whose central question is:

to determine what form of relation may be legitimately described between these different series; what vertical system they are capable of forming; what interplay of correlation and dominance exists between them; what may be the effect of shifts, different temporalities and various re-handlings; in what distinct sets certain elements may figure simultaneously; in short, not only what series, but also what ‘series of series’ — or, in other words, what ‘tables’ [tableaux] it is possible to draw up. A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre — a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall shape; a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of a dispersion. 14

This opposition between global and general histories intersects with Horizontalerweiterung on two levels. The piece itself displays what Foucault calls a dispersion, i.e. it constructs a tableau or a constellation of meaningful elements that are collocated by ways of series — or, to use Deleuze’s term, in a rhizomatic network — and it thus deconstructs the hegemonic claim for totality that has ruled the traditional understanding of (global) history and its colonising practices. But this deconstruction happens on a second level, paradoxically reflected through re-enactment, a method that claims to provide the most accurate documentation of reality. While documentary representation of reality has traditionally been the task of photographic or filmic media — whose ontological status has often been discussed both in terms of its alleged objectivity (on the basis of its mechanical nature) and from the perspective of radical doubt about the possibility of objective and truthful representations — historical re-enactments resume this faith in the truthfulness of the representation by re-enacting in the most accurate way historical battles or armed conflicts. This relates to a history based on the notion of authenticity: the possibility to capture ‘the “face” of a period’. As Sven Lütticken has put it, historical re-enactments are ‘historicism-in-action’, that is cultural historicism understood as ‘the re-use of various old or “exotic” styles and models in nineteenth-century art and culture’ and shaped by the nineteenth-century philosophy of history. 15 The historicist re-enactment is therefore one that reconstructs a global history based on a causal, logical and linear continuum between past, present and future. What Creischer, Siekmann and von Borries do, therefore, is to reflect on the historicism of re-enactment as a paradigmatic form of representation of ideological historicism: a global history that 11 12 13 14 15

M. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, op. cit., p.7. Ibid., p.8. Ibid., p.10. Ibid., p.11. S. Lütticken, ‘An Arena in Which to Reenact’, in S. Lütticken (ed.), Life, Once More, op. cit., pp.29—31.

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Invitation card to ‘Dubai — Expanded Horizons', September 2009, Temporäre Kunsthalle /



it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. 17

Sophiensäle, Berlin. Organised by Christian von Borries, Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann. Courtesy the artists

Horizontalerweiterung thus has to be understood literally as a series of horizontal connections of meanings and media (music, text, images) that expand beyond the theatrical stage. It performs the opposite to re-enactment: not duplication and illusionism, but a lapse and derailment of representation; not repetition of the real accompanied by an illusive faith on the possibility of political effects, but interventionist practice; not immersion, but a ‘critical attitude’. 16 17

See Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Street Scene’, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (trans. and ed. John Willett), New York: Hill and Wang, 1964, pp.121—29. M. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ (trans. Catherine Porter), in The Foucault Reader (ed. Paul Rabinow), New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p.50.

Alice Creischer | 43

In the restaging of the ‘Dubai — Expanded Horizons’ press conference in May 2008, a person ‘X’ sang about what the audience on 24 September 1900 might have thought of the Kham hom orchestra, from Bangkok, who played in the Berlin Zoo. The scientist Carl Stumpf recorded this performance with an Edison phonograph for collection in his Phonogram Archive. The song here suggests the phonograph, and the interest it facilitates in ‘understanding’ and ‘collecting’ non-Western music, as indelibly part of the colonial project of the time — and of the recent press conference. Person ‘X' sang: The women sang and danced, while the men played in the orchestra. The costumes of the women dancers were extraordinarily splendid, the tones and harmonies of colours admirable. The movements were strange and delicate, the boldness, the diversity, the eloquence of the hand is hardly comparable with what is found on European stages. His attempt to transpose the music to European notes failed. The scales contradict everything that one usually assumes of the motifs of natural scale formations. How can one arrive at these scales without root extraction and logarithms? The musicians listen to this attempt on the gramophone. They say: the beat of the stylus, the regularity, this permanent return hardly finds anything comparable in our hands The phonograph is taken along on expeditions to record persons and instruments. The singer’s mouth is forced to the funnel. He must place his lips as close as possible to the metal. Then and only then must he sing, when he is ordered to sing. He must sing as high as possible, so that his frequencies reach the membrane at the end of the funnel. At the end of the funnel there’s a membrane with a glued-on stylus. The membrane is set in motion by the frequencies. The stylus scratches the movements onto cylinders. They are made of wax. Their construction — the combination of rotation, circumference and spacing between tracks — necessitates that all this corresponds to a period of two minutes. ‘You will have to travel and record a lot, so as to save what can be saved before it’s too late’, Erich von Hornbostel wrote to the music ethnologist Jaap Kunst in 1930 on the phonographic recording of music in Dutch-India. And we ask ourselves, what elimination was meant this time.

In a rock by Spitzbergen, seeds of the entire world are stored. It was installed by corporations that destroy these seeds by appropriating them. You can now experience the construction of the largest museum in Dubai. Its walls measure 27 kilometres, it will stand on the banks of a creek like an endless fort. You can witness the movements of the workers and the mortar. The wagons, the cement lorries, whose rotation prevents premature hardening. The wagons with people, clocked by the exchange of exhausted by recuperated ones between construction site and camps built in the desert, where no one expects visits and ever sleeps because of homesickness, where time is counted grain by grain on this little hill of complete debt obligation for years. You could know as well their number and origin. Also the duration of a shift, the heat, the suffocation, the dizziness, the minutes needed to commute to the camp. You could know that wages lay between 400 and 600 dirham a month, as much as a scarf, a pair of sandals or a certain perfume in the duty free shop, or the promise of avoiding hunger for a month at home. All of Dubai is growing unceasingly due to this avoidance. This avoidance is now a universal form of expression. Its scarves, its sandals, its perfumes cannot hide the fact Its scarves, its sandals, its perfumes are not enough They can’t They are not able to perform this avoidance The chemical marriage of all purchased and sold days with arcane substances. Stones, metal, canvases with glaciers, pearly clouds, all that. Power, however, gazes at the process of appropriation in a face without grounds and time. It looks at itself. It becomes aware of itself. It says: I. The boldness, the diversity, the eloquence of the hand is hardly comparable with what is found on European stage.

The phonogram archive of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin was declared a World Cultural Heritage Site in 1999. It possesses two thousand metal cylinders cast from wax cylinder, with spoilt festivities, fear, with smashed contexts, holidays, time, with disgraced dedications and doing away with everything that goes beyond the mere body — oh, the barely tameable resource! The committee declared recorded music its own exemplar of a universal form of expression.

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Alice Creischer | 45

Alice Creischer, Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation of the

Keep Going! Ethics and the Political in the Work of Alice Creischer — Ellen Blumenstein

Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Poverty, 2005—08. Installation view,

Looking at three major works of Alice Creischer through the prism of Alain Badiou’s philosophy, Ellen Blumenstein considers the possibility of political art practices.

MACBA, Barcelona, 2008. Photograph: Seber Ugarte. © Alice Creischer, 2007

Alice Creischer’s work continuously negotiates the relation between subjects and society (or, more specifically, today’s capitalist society), and their ability to act within it. Her central concerns since the mid-1980s have been the examination of political issues by artistic means, and, closely intertwined with this, ethics, which she understands as a moral imperative to strive for enlightenment — for naming, revealing and highlighting the manifold injustices of the world, and for ‘having the heart’ to be consequent to her unwillingness to accept things as they are. 1 Creischer’s projects range from individual works — mostly in performance and installation form — to collaborative productions with other artists and cultural practitioners (first and foremost with her partner, Andreas Siekmann), curatorial projects and critical writing. The multidisciplinary character of her production emerged from the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the Düsseldorf and Cologne art scenes in the 1980s, where political (and feminist) engagement was rare. Creischer’s work from that period, such as the text-based installations Alle Tage Jericho, Ich Die Posaune (All Days Jericho/Me the Trombone, 1982) or Der Geburtstag (The Birthday, 1986), were experiments with handcrafted machines, which she installed in the exhibition space or took through the city, transforming them into performative tools. All Days Jericho, for instance, was an apparatus on wheels that Creischer pushed through Düsseldorf on foot whilst reciting a text that discussed this very action and which was amplified via a tube with several membranes. A system of mirrors facilitated navigation for the ‘driver’, and two cones re-directed sound from the environment back to the pilot. These early experiments with DIY technology examined the relation between text and image, and the viewers’ apprehension of the two on equal terms. Such investigation was followed in works like Die Betrachtung (The Contemplation, 1984) and Eine Operette (An Operetta, 1986) in the 1980s, and she still pursues it in current installations, in which text plays a crucial part (see, for example, Apparat zum osmotischen Druckausgleich von Reichtum bei der Betrachtung von Armut, or Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Poverty, 2005—08, which I discuss later). While her early works concentrated on the individual’s relation to the world, Creischer’s later works began to deal more explicitly with the search for a meaningful life, the living conditions in a capitalist society, consumerism and the logic of exploitation. For her short play ‘Verbrechen aus Leidenschaft’ (‘Crime out of Passion’, 1987), she developed a simple structure reminiscent of Brechtian pedagocial plays: the character Delarue is confronted with a realisation of the ‘infinite lack of being’ 2 when he meets his counterpart Pourpaubre, in whom the insignificance and emptiness of his own life is mirrored. Delarue falls into despair and dreams, almost as an escape, of erasing all banknotes, shares and other capitalist values in the world, as well as people’s desire to own them. 1 2

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As she says, ‘I do not agree with the world that surrounds me’. All quotations from Creischer come from a conversation with the author in Berlin on 19 January 2010. ‘Der unendliche Mangel an Sein’. See Alice Creischer, ‘Verbrechen aus Leidenschaft’ (1987), in Clemens Krümmel (ed.), Alice Creischer: Erpresserbriefe an die Geisteswelt (exh. cat.), Bremen: Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, 2005, p.36. All translation the author’s.

Alice Creischer | 47

This critical impulse also led Creischer, in the early 1990s, to temporarily stop making her own work and to collaborate instead with the artists’ groups Sammlung Brinkmann, Microstudio surplus and the initiative Park Fiction. With Andreas Siekmann, Birger Hübel, Michaela Odinius and Dierk Schmidt, she organised the alternative art fair Messe2ok. ÖkonoMiese machen in 1995. A self-organised, selffinanced project, Messe2ok took place parallel to Art Cologne, in the empty halls of the former Cologne post-office headquarters, and hosted panel discussions on the art-world economy from a critical perspective in addition to presenting artworks. As Creischer recollects in the project’s documentation, the fair brought together all those who ‘use the art context for project-based, theoretical and/or collective working methods’ and gave them the opportunity to approach ‘conventional art practice with a different kind of production and mediation’. 3 This project marked a transition from Creischer’s critical examination of the subject’s (the artist’s) position within society by means of texts and artworks to an expanded understanding of her practice as one that intervenes in the mechanisms of the art context. Emblematic of this approach is the project Ex Argentina (2002—04), for which she and Siekmann spent several months in Buenos Aires and collaborated with local artists and political activists. Ex Argentina explored artists’ concerns about ‘the problems of representing and visualising political and economic realities’ in the aftermath of the country’s financial breakdown in 2001,4 and has resulted in conferences on the relationship between art and politics at the Goethe-Institut Buenos Aires and at Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) Theatre in Berlin, and exhibitions at Museum Ludwig in Cologne and Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires. The curators invited artists, researchers and activist groups from Argentina, Germany and elsewhere to produce and present their work, which dealt with the recent situation in Argentina as well as a corruption scandal in a garbage incinerating plant in Cologne and a Berlin banking society (the Berliner Bankgesellschaft) that had just declared bankruptcy. Within the exhibition, posters by the collective Etcétera were shown alongside installations on the topic of ‘doom’ by León Ferrari, sculptures by Bernadette Corporation made of consumer packaging waste from Argentina and photographs of the ‘Tucumán Arde’ exhibition, which addressed the political situation of the city of Rosario in 1968. The works’ interrelations within the exhibition created an autonomous and multifaceted argument in space, which then became a counter-image to the ruling public discourse on Argentina. In order to get a more precise idea of Creischer’s conceptions of politics and ethics, perhaps it is of some help to look into the political philosophy of Alain Badiou. In his writings, Badiou maintains that radically innovative thinking not only is possible but also necessary to combat the liberal-humanist, moralising ethics of public discourse, which for him merely serve to justify the ‘absolute injustice’ of current international politics. 5 In Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (1998), Badiou positions himself against the ‘almost universally accepted argument that ethics essentially should concern the Other as such (as potential victim of violence or misrecognition)’ and instead proposes that it should concern the ‘Same’. 6 He thus endeavours to reconnect ethics and universalism, 7 since what is ethical is whatever runs under a name that is valid ‘for all’. 8 This ethics does not define a class, category or concept under which (and so that) particular events, moments or incidents can be subsumed. Rather, in Badiou’s ethics the one ‘opens into two’: while affirming the universality of the same, this conception of ethics simultaneously denotes difference. It is precisely this difference that is introduced into the situation by faithfulness to the universally valid name. This particular relation between ‘same’ and difference constitutes what Badiou also calls a ‘truth procedure’: a subjectivising process that splits the given situation and transforms it. Only if we affirm that every individual is essentially the same and, at the same time,

that ‘differences are what there is’ 9 can we move away from the conservative principle of human rights and its hierarchical assumptions and implications, which defines a particular through the normative power of the supposedly universal class, category or concept. In Badiou’s understanding of ethics, what emerges is the understanding of singular acts in given situations that have their ontological place in the sameness of what is not defined in that situation. The connection of these acts to a liberating ‘name’ is what makes this a ‘process of truth’ that changes the status quo.10 In the face of such truth, an ‘ethical position’ would be to remain faithful to this experience, which is why Badiou maintains that one must ‘Keep going!’,meaning that one has to follow the principles of clear judgement and discern true from false — that is, to examine what belongs to the event and what does not.11 However difficult, burdensome or dangerous it might be, changing the situation by examining each and every given element of it in the light of the event is the only ethics there is. Considering Creischer’s practice with these notions in mind, we could understand her intention to ‘articulate political thoughts’ as a way to interrupt the realm of the ordinary and the already established as analogous to Badiou’s splitting a situation

The Happy Unemployed, part of Ex Argentina, 2002—04. Curated by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann. Installation view,

3 4 5 6 7 8

See documentation/reader of the project, Messe2ok, Cologne/Berlin: Permanent Press Verlag, 1996, p.1. See the curators’ introduction on the project’s homepage, http://www.exargentina.org/_en/_01/ mainframe.html (last accessed on 15 March 2010). Alain Badiou, ‘Preface to the English Edition’, in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (trans. Peter Hallward), London and New York: Verso, 2002, p.lv. Peter Hallward, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in A. Badiou, Ethics, op. cit., p.xv. Ibid., p.xxv. See A. Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Cultural Memory in the Present) (trans. Ray Brassier), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, for a discussion of the name or, rather, the ‘name above all names’.

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Museum Ludwig,

by giving it a name.12 The position that Siekmann and Creischer adopt in Ex Argentina epitomises this stance. As curators, Creischer and Siekmann act as organisers of the exhibition and conferences that are part of this project, define their themes and outlines, guide the discussions and the invited artistic productions and arrange the exhibition display at the hosting institutions. Their intention was to initiate broad investigations, to commission new works — often from friends and colleagues they frequently work with — and to create a critical discourse that goes beyond the impact

Cologne, 2004. Courtesy the artists

9 10 11 12

A. Badiou, Ethics, op. cit., p.27. ‘Rimbaud was certainly not wrong when he said: “I am another.” […] There are as many differences, say, between myself and anybody at all, including myself.’ Ibid., p.26. Ibid., p.43. Badiou’s concept of truth is closely connected to Jacques Lacan’s ‘Real’ and follows the maxim ‘do not give up on your desire’. See Jacques Lacan, Séminaire VII (ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Denis Porter), London: Routledge, 1988, pp.314—19. A. Badiou, Ethics, op. cit., p.52. See http://www.kunstaspekte.de/z-creischer-dis/, an interview by Lothar Spangenberg with Alice Creischer on 31 August 2005 in Berlin (last accessed on 15 March 2010).

Alice Creischer | 49

With this in mind, it is important to look at the ways in which Ex Argentina can be considered political. Creischer sees cooperation as essential to her practice, and she recognises each of her collaborators as an equal partner. For Ex Argentina, for example, she and Siekmann collaborated with the workers of the Brukmann textile factory in Buenos Aires. The result was the series Eight Suits (2003), onto which they drew or embroidered communiqués from the 1999 G8 summit held at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, as well as the story of how the workers took over and transformed the Brukmann factory into a cooperative after it had been abandoned by its owner in 2001. Each of the suits that make up the work is based on a model from Brukmann’s product line, and is titled after one protagonist, site or key event in the factory’s crisis and subsequent recovery. After proposing the two topics, the artists discussed the ideas for the realisation of the project with the workers, who then stitched, sewed or glued the small cut-out figures, images and slogans. The workers’ successful subjectivisation (in not only preserving their own jobs, but also in actively transforming the given situation and finding artistic expression for it), I would submit, qualifies as an event in Badiou’s terms, both in the field of politics proper and in the politics of art. The suits create an image for the workers’ actual labour, and the joint investment in its making poetically symbolises the potentials for solidarity in the Brukmann case. However, the way that Creischer and Siekmann set the precondition for the work’s content — merely involving the workers in questions of realisation — and in their bringing together of the two topics seem to me problematic. Apart from appearing like an imposition, the work’s possible impact is undermined by a lack of a compelling internal necessity for the equation of the two on the level of content. Without adding a new perspective on the obvious connection between the breakdown of a country and international politics, the work’s two parts remain loose — in terms of content, and in terms of form. The suit as a product and witness of actual labour refers back to the workers and ‘their’ factory, but it does not establish a connection with G8 politics — any more than any commodity implicitly bears testimony to the conditions under which it has been produced. Speaking in Badiou’s terms, Creischer and Siekmann fail to connect the ‘singular act’ to a ‘liberating name’ — as the apparent relation between the two issues alone is not sufficient to ‘split’ a situation (to set in motion a ‘process of truth’), but remains in the realm of the status quo.

of a singular artistic statement. Their political position here is well-defined: rejecting the idea of ‘objectively’ collecting facts that are then to be processed as knowledge, or of simply collecting artworks, they instead engage in a medium- or long-term collaborative shaping of a vision that offers an alternative to the common assumption of how to deal with the political, economic and cultural consequences of the crisis in Argentina. In every respect, an urge to act and to adopt a clear position drives their curatorial practice. • Badiou finds truth in four different fields: love, art, science and politics. Whereas love concerns only the ‘two’ of the subject of love, politics affects the collective dimension, and art and science could be described as ‘mixed spheres’, as they are set in motion by individuals but affect the collective — insofar as they have the power to expand what can be thought or done, or as Badiou puts it, to ‘punch a “hole” in these [the instituted] knowledges’. 13 At first glance, the idea that the process of truth takes a different shape in the sphere of politics than in art might seem obvious. But this differentiation is crucial

•

— for Badiou, innovation in the arts lies on the side of form, or precisely in finding new forms for content. 14 Badiou appears indecisive about how to deal with concretely political contents (such as globalisation or post-colonialism, in the specific case of Creischer) in the arts. He does not explicitly ‘ban’ political topics in art, but he makes one thing very clear: the more explicitly the work of art tries to ‘overcome the internal tension of the politics of art’ — meaning the more politically explicit the work is on the level of content — the more this very politics is ‘reduced to welfare and ethical imprecision’. 15 13 14 15

A. Badiou, Ethics, op. cit., p.43. ‘I propose to say that a world is an artistic one, a situation of art, a world of art, when it proposes to us a relation between chaotic disposition of sensibility and what is acceptable as a form.’ Alain Badiou, ‘The Subject of Art’ (transcription Lydia Kerr), The Symptom, no.6, Spring 2005; also available at http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/badiou.html (last accessed on 18 February 2010). Ibid., p.96.

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Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, Brukmann factory workers, Eight Suits, 2003. Collection Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid. Courtesy the artists

As mentioned above, writing is crucial to Creischer’s work. The relation between text and image settles somewhere between independent artistic practice and accompanying curatorial statement or mediating text, and can best be observed in her most complex work Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Poverty (2005—08). In this multi-part installation, which was included in her solo exhibition at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2008, she combines material from her travels to Argentina (some of which already appeared in the context of Ex Argentina), India and Bolivia. The Apparatus itself consists of a double structure: the visible objects of the installation, which are strung up in the exhibition space like pearls on a chain, and the accompanying legend, based on symbols, imagery and text, running parallel along the wall. Creischer’s main intention with the work was to ‘repeat a situation that cannot be resolved’: 16 a ‘history of exploitation indeed exists between these countries, which clearly goes in one direction, and a history of exotic longings and projections going in the other’. She placed a staged photograph of herself as a coloniser in India at the centre of the installation, exposing her ‘shameful’ condemnation to the position of the ‘observer’ in the face of poverty. 17 The material and textual levels of the Apparatus are not obviously linked, but require the visitor to make connections between them. The information provided on colonialism and contemporary globalisation addresses the ‘potential of consumption’ of the Indian middle class today, the debts owed by the Spanish monarchy, the cooperatives running silver mines in 16 17

A. Creischer, ‘Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth’, in A. Creischer, Bartomeu Marí, Clara Plasencia (ed.), Alice Creischer: Works and Collaborations (exh. cat.), Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008, p.85. Ibid., p.86.

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Potosí, Bolivia and the history of famines worldwide since the nineteenth century. 18 By means of collage, embroidery, cut-out texts and images, and an elaborate system of symbols interconnecting the text and the objects, Creischer brings together facts, eyewitness testimonies from historical sources, archival and current photographs and her own texts to create a multi-layered portrait of today’s world and how it came to be that way. Surprisingly, both her political and artistic positions here differ significantly from those of Ex Argentina. Here she exposes herself as a character within the work along with other exponents of the ‘middle class’, the ‘poor’, the ‘creditor states’, staged by Creischer’s partner and friends. 19 With this strategy, Creischer symbolically equates herself with the powerful and the poor — an arrangement that does not break down the hierarchical relation between the protagonists, as Ex Argentina did. Rather, the work’s title suggests an uncertainty or even helplessness towards the inequality between the individuals as well as the social groups they stand for, and towards how this inequality might actually be compensated. As the title suggests, only ‘wealth’ can be compensated through osmosis, while ‘poverty’ can merely be contemplated. The narrative staged by the installation gives the impression of introspection and self-reflexivity, and, in some way, breathes an air of sadness and melancholy — it is as if Creischer were mourning her incapacity to actively change the course of the world. As Badiou reminds us, however, the politics of art does not consist in actively interfering with reality (as in the realm of politics), but in its new conceptualisation. 20 Art can interrupt the given forms that determine what can be seen, said or thought; it is political in its ability to interrupt the given conception of the situation, not political like politics itself, which aims to transform the real of the situation. It cannot and must not mistake the differing internal logics of the two spheres. If we choose to interpret the work as an attempt to tell us about the depressing political reality we live in and are aware of, I would be tempted to interpret her political position as a form of romantic melancholy. But what if the Apparatus this time does not start from a necessity to act politically, but rather intends to find an artistic form for her frustration? In this context the Apparatus inventively and convincingly visualises Creischer’s fully subjective rage (which obviously has not decreased in strength since her early practice in the 1980s), helplessness and exhaustion. In the sphere of art, the Apparatus is indeed political; it overcomes a subjective dilemma — that of trying to find ways of being political in art — by exposing its very failure. There is no easy congruence of form and content in art, and I doubt that Alice Creischer’s manifold practice is merely an attempt to achieve that congruence. I would rather say that her work can be defined as an ‘ethics’ of confrontational interventions into ‘objective knowledges’ by the means of subjective truths, and that she pushes her need for distinction and precision to the limit by examining different options for how to be political. The options are not necessarily dependent on each other, and this is what I have aimed to show by carving out different modes of articulating internal structures in her practice: for the exhibition project Ex Argentina, she took the role of the curator and also contributed as an artist. On the one hand, her interest was to compose a political counter-image to public discourse by means of an exhibition (whose politicality in the realm of art I could only examine superficially here), and on the other, she acted as an artist-collaborator for the project Eight Suits. This work departed from a political event, but did not succeed in developing an independent politics within the art context. Finally, although taking a melancholic rather than a political stance, with Apparatus — the most recent of the works discussed here — Creischer seems to shift her focus from the need to act in the political realm to finding an expression within her own sphere: thematising the very difficulty to be political as an artist.

18 19 20

Ibid., pp.93, 97 and 114. Ibid., p.93. As Badiou writes, ‘[artistic experimentation] is not only something else; it is a new manner of thinking of the infinite itself.’ A. Badiou, ‘The Subject of Art’, op. cit.

52 | Afterall

53

Pedro Costa

55 Realism, not Reality Pedro Costa’s Digital Testimonies — Volker Pantenburg 63 Frames and Bodies — Notes on Three Films by Pedro Costa: Ossos, No Quarto da Vanda, Juventude em Marcha — Jean-Louis Comolli

Pedro Costa, O Sangue (Blood), 1989, black-andwhite 35mm film,

Realism, not Reality Pedro Costa’s Digital Testimonies — Volker Pantenburg

95min, still, detail. © Pedro Costa

With the historical categories of realism in film as background, Volker Pantenburg analyses the shift in Pedro Costa’s modes of production to locate a singular form of digital realism within his work.

I In the last ten years, the Portuguese director Pedro Costa has established himself firmly in the international film-festival circuit. His films have been shown to critical acclaim in Canada, the USA, Japan and Europe, and a recent retrospective at Tate Modern (in autumn 2009) has given his name further resonance in contemporary art contexts. Those who do not care much about cinema or contemporary art but follow Jacques Rancière’s writings have had the chance to come across the director’s name on more than one occasion. In Rancière’s theoretical framework, Costa plays the role of an upright counterpart to the political endeavours of those artists associated with Relational Aesthetics, a movement that, according to Rancière, lacks integrity and shows how ‘the attempt to overcome the inherent tension of a politics of art leads straight to its opposite’. 1 In No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room, 2000), on the contrary, Rancière identifies a force ‘that lies in the tensions between the settings of a miserable life and its inherent aesthetic possibilities’. 2 At first glance, it seems difficult to reconcile what has become known as the Fontainhas trilogy — Ossos (Bones, 1997), No Quarto da Vanda and Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006), all of them set in the poor Lisbon neighbourhood of Fontainhas — with Costa’s beginnings as a director. (The Criterion Collection has recently released this trilogy in a DVD box set titled ‘Letters from Fontainhas'.) In terms of production, the turning point in his career comes with Vanda. After Vanda, all of his films, including the documentary on Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (Où gît votre sourire enfoui?, or Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, 2001) and his recent portrait of the actress and singer Jeanne Balibar (Ne change rien, 2009) — have been shot with digital cameras, while the preceding three feature films owe themselves to comparatively conventional modes of production. In Costa’s case, the shift to digital, low-budget technology is by no means circumstantial, but accompanies and permits decisive changes in his working methods and, particularly, in his conception of realism. II Costa’s first film, O Sangue (Blood, 1989), an oneiric black-and-white epic about two adolescent siblings on the run, is a stupendous debut feature. The very first two shots — a boy getting slapped in his face by an adult in the midst of a nondescript field — enact what they depict: they are themselves slaps in the face. The power of these shots results from Costa’s rigorous sense of framing and from the abrupt violence that we are thrown into without warning. Yet this power is also due to Costa’s strong allusions to film history. If one is familiar with D.W. Griffith’s early films for the Biograph Company, one cannot help but feel reminded of the sparse field that the miserable peasant crosses to till his seeds in the anti-capitalist 1 2 3

Jacques Rancière, ‘Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien’, (trans. Maria Muhle), Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen, Berlin: B-Books 2006, p.96. English Translation the author's. Ibid., p.98. See Helmut Färber’s meticulous study of D.W. Griffith’s film in Helmut Färber, A Corner in Wheat von D.W. Griffith: Eine Kritik, Munich and Paris: Verlag Helmut Färber, 1992.

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classic A Corner in Wheat (1909). 3 And when the father lifts the suitcase and leaves immediately after hitting his son, you are not mistaken to identify this suitcase with the one that Karl Rossmann (Christian Heinisch) forgets on deck of the steamship in Straub/Huillet’s Kafka adaptation Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations) made five years prior to Costa’s debut. Costa’s film self-consciously inscribes itself into a strong cinematographic tradition, and in retrospect, it seems quite different from the films he made later in Fontainhas, both in aesthetic and economic terms. 4 For although O Sangue was a small and independent production, it was made with a team, a script, actors, lighting technicians, an assistant director and so on. Costa felt uncomfortable with the burdens and impositions of a regular film production, but it took him until In Vanda’s Room to find an alternative. The two films he made in between, Casa de Lava (1994) and Ossos, were shot in colour, but the basic parameters of production stayed the same: he still operated with a bulky production network, used 35mm stock and worked with a director of photography. However, between Casa de Lava and Ossos, a different kind of reality began to impose itself. The artificiality that every film production entails is confronted with forces of resistance due to political and economic realities. Casa de Lava is set on the Cape Verde Islands, one of the earliest sites of Portuguese colonialism and a crucial location for transatlantic slave commerce. In Ossos the Fontainhas neighbourhood of Lisbon, a shanty town and home to a large number of immigrants from continental Africa and Cape Verde, slowly becomes the protagonist of the picture. Between the reality of Casa de Lava and the reality of Ossos, Costa himself acts as a messenger. As he has recounted numerous times, he took on the role of an amateur postman: We were accommodated in a small village, and at the end of the shooting on the Cape Verde Islands, the people gave us letters for their sons, husbands or cousins who had emigrated to Lisbon. They handed us news, presents, tobacco and coffee for friends and family members. When I arrived in Lisbon, I looked for the neighbourhood that is situated a little north of the city — an African and particularly Cape Verdian neighbourhood — and played the postman. I told them: your son is fine, we made a movie together, and since I spoke a bit of Creole, I was accepted very quickly. I was constantly invited for dinner, to a party or wedding and I started staying there, passing the time, talking to people and making observations, drinking with them. This is how, one day, the idea came up to make a movie in this neighbourhood. 5 At first sight, this sounds like nothing more than a pretty anecdote. Yet beyond the anecdotal character, Costa’s recollection indicates a shift on several levels: from the film-historical references of O Sangue and Casa de Lava to the social reality of Fontainhas, from fiction to documentary, 6 from working under ‘professional’ conditions to working in small communities akin to family contexts. The roots in film history that are so clearly sensed in O Sangue are at the time of making the trilogy complemented by a method that draws its energy from a particular location — Fontainhas — and the non-professional actors that Costa has been collaborating with ever since Casa de Lava, in Ossos, In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth. 4 5 6

Costa even tried to hire Stanley Cortez, the director of photography of Charles Laughton’s classic The Night of the Hunter (1955) for O Sangue. He wrote him a letter without knowing that Cortez was already dead at the time. See Mark Peranson, ‘Pedro Costa: An Introduction’, Cinema Scope, issue 27, Summer 2006, p.9. Johanna Bedeau and Mariani Diphy, Passeur du réel: Pedro Costa, radio feature, France Culture 2008 (author’s translation). Letters have been a prominent, almost allegorical element in Costa’s films since Casa de Lava. In Colossal Youth a letter from the earlier film resurfaces and becomes a central relay connecting the different temporal layers. Rancière has devoted a beautiful essay to Ventura and his letter. See Jacques Rancière, ‘La lettre de Ventura’, Trafic, issue 61, Spring 2007, pp.7—9. Costa has talked at length about his particular (if somewhat counterintuitive) understanding of ‘documentary’ on the occasion of a seminar at the Tokyo Film School. The transcript has been published online by Rouge. See Pedro Costa, ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’, Rouge, issue 10, 2007, http://www.rouge.com.au/10/costa_seminar.html (last accessed on 11 March 2010).

56 | Afterall

III This shift is already perceptible in Casa de Lava. Costa initially wanted to remake Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), an uncanny tale of vodun and obsession set in the West Indies. Casting Edith Scob for one of the female leads added a second strong reference — she had worked regularly with the French film-maker Georges Franju as a young girl, and in particular in his horror classic Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960). Costa’s notebook bears witness to his original plans for the film — they show collages directly confronting stills from Franju’s film and other film-historical sources with photographs from the Cape Verde Islands. 7 Yet the story as it eventually unfolded detached itself from these bonds: the comatose exiled Cape Verdian construction worker Leão (Isaach de Bankolé), who is accompanied to his native island by a young nurse (Inês de Medeiros), has clearly been marked by Portugal’s colonial history and its post-colonial echoes. And when one watches the movie, one can sense that the location — the jagged, volcanic hills and exuberant colours of the Cape Verde Islands — as well as the non-professional actors from the local population offered resistance

Pedro Costa, Casa de Lava, 1995, colour 35mm film, 110min, still. © Pedro Costa

to Costa’s scripted ideas and made the film change its direction. ‘Casa de Lava may be the film of Costa’s that poses the most constant and furious tug of war between Hollywood narrative and the non-narrative portraiture of both places and people, staging an almost epic battle between the two,’ Jonathan Rosenbaum writes about the film. 8 IV By the time of In Vanda’s Room, this tug of war — to pick up Rosenbaum’s metaphor — had definitely been decided in favour of the ‘portraiture of both places and people’. Costa’s film shows the lives of Vanda and the other inhabitants in between the noises and rubble of the demolition works. The film can be seen as both a subtraction and an expansion. A subtraction, in that Costa works without a script and without ‘action’ in a conventional sense. He does not use a cameraman and 7 8

Excerpts from Costa’s notebook, mostly collages of texts and images, are to be found in the extras of the French DVD of Casa de Lava. Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘A Few Eruptions in the House of Lava’, 25 June 2008, http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=8094 (last accessed on 11 March 2010).

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focuses mainly on one location — Vanda’s room — which gives the film its title, and acts like centre of gravity, a shelter in the midst of the deafening works of dredges and wrecker’s balls tearing down the neighbourhood. 9 On the other hand, In Vanda’s Room is the result of an immense luxury Costa allowed himself: the luxury of taking his time, spending months and years with the people living in Fontainhas. Both In Vanda’s Room and its ‘sequel’ Colossal Youth only became possible under two conditions: they required that Vanda Duarte and her sister Zita, Ventura (whose surname we never get to know) and the others — the characters in his films as well as the people he lived amongst — accepted Costa not as a film-maker but as a trustworthy fellow inhabitant. And they required the technical means to give testimony to this situation of duration and togetherness without having to involve a large team. This is where digital technology and a particular form of realism come into play: when he started working on the film with Vanda and the others, Costa bought a small low-priced digital camera (a Panasonic DVX 100), and started working with light reflectors rather than additional light sources.10 What kinds of realism does this shift make possible in Costa’s work? And how does it relate to traditional discussions of realism?

Pedro Costa, No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda's Room), 2000, colour 35mm film, 178 min, still. © Pedro Costa

V Traditionally, there have been two distinct (if sometimes overlapping) ways of thinking about realism in the cinema. On the one hand, realism was conceived of as a quality inherent in the photographic character of the medium. Often referred to in terminology building on C.S. Peirce’s semiotics as ‘indexical realism’, it means that the images taken by the camera and stored on the filmstrip are inextricably tied to the objective reality, regardless of what exactly they recorded. 11 Siegfried 9 10 11

The expression ‘without a script’ by no means implies that Costa didn’t develop scenes and acting routines with Vanda and the other locals of the neighbourhood. As Costa explains in the illuminating conversation with Cyril Neyrat, the process usually began with an observation of some everyday gesture, dialogue or interaction that Costa would ask Vanda, Zita and the others to repeat several times. See Cyril Neyrat (ed.), No Quarto da Vanda. Conversation with Pedro Costa [DVD and book], Nantes: Capricci, 2008, pp.63—73 (especially the chapter ‘Le texte et la répétition’). Costa shot In Vanda's Room and Colossal Youth with a digital camera but transferred the footage onto 35mm film for the final print. Tom Gunning has recently made an interesting suggestion to reconsider cinematic indexicality in terms of movement rather than in terms of photographic referentiality. See Tom Gunning, ‘Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality’, differences, vol.18, 2007, pp.29—52. See also Philip Rosen, ‘Old and New: Image, Indexicality, and Historicity in the Digital Utopia', Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, pp.301—49.

58 | Afterall

Kracauer’s ‘redemption of physical reality’, Stanley Cavell’s ‘automatic world projection’ or André Bazin’s ‘ontology of the photographic image’ all point to this same quality, no matter which metaphor the process attracted (the image as ‘trace,’ ‘imprint’ or ‘transsubstantiation’ of the real). This model has, of course, been much criticised since the 1960s, when terms such as simulation, construction or deconstruction were given far more credit than the supposedly naïve concept of realism. On the other hand, realism was used as a label for stylistic features attributed to specific historical film contexts or movements. French ‘poetic realism’ of the 1930s, Italian ‘neorealism’ or what some critics recently described as contemporary North American ‘neo-neo-realism’. 12 In these cases, the label is not meant to describe an a priori capacity inherent in the medium, but a particular way of utilising it: this might imply mobile cameras and smaller teams that make it possible to work without film studios and artificial lighting, or it might imply the prominence of the long shot and stories dealing with marginalised social groups. I would argue that Costa’s films since In Vanda's Room challenge us to replace the ontological question what realism is by an attempt to locate different forms of realism at different points of the production and reception of movies. Without any claim to completeness, I would propose to differentiate four phases of realism, or, more aptly, four phases where effects of realism are produced: (1) There is a form of realism that presents itself as the result of specific means of production. The fewer people involved in making a movie, and the fewer props and technology you need, the greater the chance to capture something ‘real’ without suffocating it in logistics. Historically, this form of realism has regularly been propelled by ever smaller cameras and sound equipment: 16mm stock and the Nagra tape recorder, digital cameras, etc. (2) There is a realism specific to the photographic process. However, this indexical realism, I would argue, constitutes just one aspect of the whole complex of realism, and it depends much less on the filmstrip and the chemical process of inscribing and storing than is usually understood. Rather, it is much more closely linked to the lenses and the physical transmission of light onto whatever support these are then inscribed onto. I would tentatively call this ‘testimonial realism’. (3) A third aspect of realism is produced by disproportionate elements within the narrative. In his famous description of the reality effect in Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart (1877), Roland Barthes ascribes this effect to the numerous details in Mme Aubain’s room — details that do not have any narrative or psychological purpose but, as he puts it, ‘finally say nothing but this: we are the real’. 13 If one applies Barthes’s concept to film, one would have to identify disproportional elements on different layers of the film: I am thinking of excessively long takes that do not use time for narrative necessities, or of dialogue that does not aim at getting somewhere. A movie such as Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966) best exemplifies how the absence of an imposed storyline or script leads to a strong feeling that something ‘real’ is happening in front of the camera. (4) Realism is a mode of perception; it has subjective components on the spectator’s side as much as it has objective ones in the apparatus and the technical process of making the film. This aspect was much discussed when Jurassic Park and Forrest Gump took computer-generated imagery to a new level in the 1990s. Yet the term ‘perceptual realism’, coined in this context, might also be adequate for the time modulations in James Benning’s latest movie Ruhr (2009), where he conflated the 60 minutes of ‘real time’ showing a coke-quenching tower — a mechanism for absorbing gases released in the processing of coal — with the light changes that occurred over 90 minutes. 14 12 13 14

See A.O. Scott, ‘Neo-Neo-Realism’, The New York Times, 17 March 2009 and Richard Brody, ‘About Neo-Neo-Realism’, The New Yorker, 20 March 2009. Scott discusses Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008) and Ramin Bahrani’s films Man Push Cart (2005), Chop Shop (2007) and Goodbye Solo (2008); he tries to relate them each to Italian neorealism and a somewhat idiosyncratic choice of what he understands as other historical examples of neorealism. Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, The Rustle of Language (trans. Richard Howard), Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. p. 148. See Benning’s clarification in the comment section of the ‘Rotterdam Film Festival 2010 Diary: Part III’, http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/blog/rotterdam-2010-part-iii/ (last accessed on 11 March 2010).

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VI

Tom Gunning has stressed that in cinema we are dealing with ‘realism’, not ‘reality’: ‘Theatre, for instance, makes use of real materials, actual people and things, to create a fiction world. Cinema works with images that possess an impression of reality, not its materiality.’ 18 This distinction has been made repeatedly in the history of film theory, yet it risks being forgotten when people mistake the world on screen for something they can dive into and identify with. Costa is unambiguous about this crucial difference when he — counterintuitively, you might say — describes the ethical task of documentary film-making as a gesture of ‘closing the door’ between film and spectator. ‘We film life, and the more I close the doors, the more I hinder the spectator from taking pleasure in seeing himself on the screen — because I don’t want that — the more I close the doors, the more I’m going to have the spectator against me, perhaps against the film, but at least he will be, I hope, uncomfortable and at war. That is, he will be in the uneasy situation of the world.’ 19 Costa’s martial notion of the antagonism between film and spectator situates ‘realism’ on yet another level: the realities on screen and of the audience are not linked by any direct form of empathy or identification. What unites them is a feeling of uneasiness.

Pedro Costa has given a comprehensive definition of realism that combines technical, economical and contextual aspects. ‘I’m always within a kind of realism,’ he says: Everything feeds into this realism: the way I work, the decision what to spend the money on, which camera you use, which microphone. All that is part of what I call ‘realism’. And I know very well that every transgression — of a threshold or a border that I vaguely call realism — makes me risk losing myself and the film. This means: if I have too many people around me, too sophisticated a machine for the location where I'm filming […] I think, we have established a kind of balance between the technical means, the people and the money, all these things. We have established an equilibrium that runs into the film, I think. In any case, something runs from us into the neighbourhood, and from the neighbourhood, a lot runs back into the camera and to us. 15 In the light of the aforementioned four phases of realism, I would describe Costa’s digital realism as follows: (1) It is explicitly bound to an intimate and collective production process that guarantees a proximity and forms of collaboration that would not be conceivable without a small camera and practically unlimited stock. (For In Vanda’s Room, Costa shot more than 150 hours of footage; for Colossal Youth, the material amounted to more than 300 hours.) Digital production thus is the primary precondition for films such as the ones Costa has been making over the last ten years. (2) The integrity of the indexical process has been much contested in digital imaging, yet, as I would argue, in Costa’s Fontainhas films the ontological doubt that has infested discussions about the potential manipulations of digital images does not really carry weight; it is more than compensated for by the testimonial powers of the lens and the optical apparatus. No one will have any doubt that Ventura, Vanda, Nhurro or Bete were actually there at the moment of the shooting, in the narrow alleys, between the ruins or in the newly-built quarter that the inhabitants are relocated to.16 It makes no difference whether the images are stored digitally or on filmstrips; nobody will question the fact that In Vanda's Room depicts the present of the derelict houses and improvised sheds of Fontainhas in a specific and very concrete manner. (3) The third facet of realism results from the aesthetic and temporal structures within Costa’s films. The time that they depict does not follow narrative concerns. The fixed shots tend to sink in and persist, not flow. When asked about potential models for his way of addressing reality, Costa not only mentions D.W. Griffith and the journalist and photographer Jacob Riis, who photographically documented the lives of ‘the other half’ of the US population in the 1880s and 90s — the poor and aggrieved — but also Andy Warhol’s work as a film-maker. He states that Vanda is a close relative to Edie Sedgwick in Warhol’s Beauty #2 (1965), which emphasised the long duration of shots instead of hewing to a scripted dialogue and tightly measured takes. Similarly, in the very first take in Vanda, we witness Zita and Vanda smoking heroin on Vanda’s bed over a period of almost five minutes. Vanda’s severe coughing and her yawns cannot be subsumed to any psychological or narrative purposes. Rather they inject a strong sense of contingency and bodily presence that rigorously insists on just being there. (4) In both Warhol’s and Costa’s films, realism is a temporal form of experience that needs a certain extension in time. This realism relies on duration and patient observation, on the side of the director as well as on that of the spectator. This is why Costa has been reluctant to have his work shown in a museum or gallery context and wants his films to be seen in cinemas: ‘I’m not a video artist, I am a film-maker and film is a construction. Pieces are made to fit together, if they don’t the whole thing will collapse, or worse, will lack movement and tension. Every shot or scene I do depends on the one that comes before and on the one that will come after.’ 17 15 16 17

J. Bedeau and M. Diphy, Passeur du réel: Pedro Costa, op. cit. Translation the author's. In the film we never get to know the surnames of most of the people/actors. ‘From black box to white cube’, round-table discussion with Pedro Costa, Catherine David and Chris Dercon (moderator), Jan van Eyck Video Weekend, 26 May 2007, http://www.janvaneyck.nl/0_4_6_text_files/David_Dercon_Costa.html (last accessed on 11 March 2010).

60 | Afterall

Pedro Costa, Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth), 2006, colour 35mm film, 155min, still. © Pedro Costa

This form of realism, one could sum up, is nothing that is simply there to be taken and consumed. It results from an experience of sharing a life and a time, be it with the human beings in Fontainhas or with their portrait on screen that contains their collaborative testimony. It remains an open question where Costa’s endeavour takes him now that one of the pillars of his outstanding form of digital realism, the reality of Fontainhas, no longer exists.

18 19

T. Gunning, ‘Moving Away from the Index’, op. cit., p.44. P. Costa, ‘A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing’, op. cit.

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Pedro Costa, Ossos (Bones), 1997, colour 35mm film, 94min, still, detail. © Pedro Costa

Frames and Bodies — Notes on Three Films by Pedro Costa: Ossos, No Quarto da Vanda, Juventude em Marcha — Jean-Louis Comolli In a close analysis of the role of the frame in film, Jean-Louis Comolli highlights how Pedro Costa's Fontainhas trilogy makes the invisible film frame visible: a political gesture, a response to the confusion of the world with its spectacle.

I The question of the body in cinema — of the filmed body — is inseparable from the question of the frame. Like the visible body, the visible world is framed by cinema. 1 We could say that everything that is cinema, good or bad, is framed and has always been framed. The filmic image, the photogram, the shot are framed and cannot be otherwise. This is not the case with visual events we can group together under the heading ‘spectacles’. A fireworks display, a circus act, a military parade, an airplane taking off, a tall building exploding: all these appear to their initial viewers as unframed, meaning that they are viewed within the same spatial field as normal human vision (180 degrees). These events are only placed in a frame when they are filmed. In opera or the theatre, the stage is framed on three sides, but the very nature of these dimensions — despite the fact that they are fixed — keeps the stage’s wings from functioning like the off-screen of cinema: one knows that the wings, backstage, are contiguous with the stage, that they are its extension and do not amount to the otherness of an ‘outside’. This is not the case in film. There the frame by definition restricts our normal field of vision, which becomes limited, constrained, truncated. The viewer’s gaze is framed at the same time as the space being observed. The film frame, therefore, is a direct expression of the confinement of the scopic impulse. My desire to see has been framed: limited and formatted by this rectangular opening which is not present in normal perception and comes into play only when watching a film. The cinematic viewing experience becomes radically different; it separates itself from any visual experience encountered outside the darkened cinema. The frame distinguishes between nature and art. It is artifice, and the value of this artifice is precisely that it is not natural. This is why there is something desperate — an unease, a phantasm of normality — in the temptation of a naturalist aesthetic to which so many films yield today. This naturalism is something that the deliberately pictorial quality of Pedro Costa’s films rejects. The trilogy of films Costa made about the Fontainhas neighbourhood in Lisbon, which today no longer exists — Ossos (Bones, 1997), No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room, 2000), Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006) — tells us forcefully that it is up to art to cast in relief the world that has been lost. But the figuration and locating of this world must refuse to re-naturalise the very thing that ruined the world: the present-day reign of merchandise. The abasement of the weak and the ruination of the losers — the obsessive concerns of the persecutory logic governing competition — are taken up by art as if they were an opening onto grace and a direct path to beauty, beyond good and evil, the opposite of any form of miserabilism: the grace of the weak, the beauty of those without any power, the angelical forms of those who are ‘nothing’. And yet this restriction of the visible brought about by framing is an opening, a call to the non-visible. Taking a section of our normal field of vision, the frame cuts out a portion of the visible and confines and encloses it. In this way the field, a portion of the 1

In this article the author makes full use of the range of a word’s meaning in the French, which is often difficult to render in translation. In the original, the visible world is not merely ‘framed’ by cinema; the verb used, encadrer, also means to regulate, monitor, control, legislate, etc., often in a repressive and/or official sense. The noun form used in the previous sentence, cadre (frame), thus carries a sense of repression and confinement. This term, for example, also designates workplace management personnel, while workers lower on the ladder are encadrés: their work is regulated and subjected to disciplined control. These sorts of meanings underlie the terms frame and framed throughout the text. —Trans.

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visible determines part of the non-visible — what is leftover or outside that, unframed by definition, can be surmised to be without boundaries in time or space. Inseparable from the screen, the off-screen is cloaked in indeterminate shadow. II The cinema frame acts like a scalpel in its division of the filmed world into the visible and non-visible. This operation is a form of violence against the all-powerful imagination of human sight, in the first place, and secondly against the field of vision itself, rendered artificial and unnatural. To frame is to inflict violence — a virtual violence, naturally, but a highly visible violence that is especially apparent when its victim is the filmed body. The frame constrains the body; the amputation is seen, visual in nature. Once the filmed world and the filmed body are grasped in their very movement, the task of the cinematic frame is to cut, in time as well as space, in duration as well as movement. The full meaning of this term ‘cut’ must be appreciated. The frame cuts and cuts up the visible. The presence of a knife with a gleaming blade in the hand of the mutinous woman in the pre-credit sequence of Colossal Youth indicates that something is about to be cut — to be framed. Cut what? What we see from what we don’t see. André Bazin said simply that ‘the frame is a mask’. 2 The portion of the visible obscured by the framing, no matter what the focal length of the lens but in proportion to it, is quantitatively greater than the framed portion of the visible. In other words, what is made visible by framing and in the frame obscures everything that the ordinary eye would see beyond this frame. In Ossos, the first film in Pedro Costa’s trilogy, there is a shot in the first five minutes that poses the entire question of the frame and the mask. In the frame we see a young man, played by Nuno Vaz, prostrate in a chair in a vaguely well-appointed living room. The frame, rather broad for the purpose of taking in Nuno’s body alone, is immediately filled with the noise of a motor (a vacuum cleaner) off-screen. After a few seconds, during which the young man looks towards the right edge of the frame, part of this vacuum cleaner appears, cut by the edge of the frame, along with Vanda Duarte, who is pushing it back and forth. Vanda’s body thus enters the frame only in synch with the vacuum cleaner, and this is how she crosses and exits the frame, when she is cut off, this time, by its left edge. In the space of a few seconds, what comes to pass is this passage, Vanda’s body appearing and disappearing as if off-screen space is preferable: she is out of sight for a period of time equal to or greater than the amount of time she is in the frame. Her temporary ‘disappearance’ is not without dramatic or narrative effect. The time is that of the automatic repetition of gestures and movements. Nuno, the young father, looks at the ground; the young woman, often filmed in splendid close-ups of gentle violence, looks vaguely off-screen towards a place that is no more than an emptiness taking the place of the viewer. We are informed that there will be absence, want and lack. That the characters will only be intermittences. That the sounds beginning off-screen at all times threaten to take over the frame. This will also be the system governing the second film in the trilogy, In Vanda’s Room. The rigidity of the frame, the way it cuts space, only increases its exposure to ambient noises and sounds. The immobile frame is run through in every direction with the unassigned mobility of sound. More than anything else, the edge of the photogram, of the series of photograms that make up what we call a shot, is cutting, sharp and distinct like a razor’s edge. As such, it alone carries out a kind of violence with and against the real or potential mobility of the filmed bodies entering and exiting the frame. And these bodies or objects, cut by the frame edge, which exist on the boundary between the on-screen and the off-screen, which flirt with the fine line between the visible and the non-visible, are pleasantly described by film theorists as eroticising the edge of the frame. The combination of contrary forces and desires — the necessary rigidity of the edge of the frame and the irrepressible mobility of the filmed bodies — gives rise to a vibration, a palpitation, invisible and yet sensible, with the effect, precisely, of being hewn from living beings. A cutting caress of the edges. This caress recurs throughout Ossos, which is made up of immobile shots framed with distressing rigidity, which is to say cuttingly. (With at least one extraordinary exception: the long lateral tracking shot that accompanies and supports the young hero’s race to the hospital, which does not leave him short of breath.) 2

III The cut-off part of the body, that is to say, the hidden part of the filmed body, can be presumed to be eroticised, precisely because it is hidden. Hidden by what? By the frame itself, which has the boundary of the screen in its power (and thus the boundary of the off-screen)? As a result, it has the power to piece back together the body chopped up by the frame — just as, beyond that, it can piece together what comes next in the story. For what is hidden by the rectangle cut out by the frame is, we might say, every next thing, near and distant, of what is actually framed. The off-screen is the site of what remains: what remains to be shown, to be acted out, to be experienced. A reserve, a surplus, a beyond. An emptiness that the fullness of the frame empties and fills to measure. This is how Ossos progresses, in a cut-up of filmed bodies, through the breaking up that the frames subject them to and which do not thwart their inertia and slowness — on the contrary. In a swelling of sounds which is also on this side of language or its partial disappearance. Thus the system of frames, aided by that of shadows, works to ensure that we never know much about the characters, apart from the fact that they wait and pass by, caught in a game of hide-and-seek with everything that could feed a plotline: the story itself is off-screen. A part of the filmed body is cut off, and thus hidden by the frame. The framed fragment continues off-screen. Every viewer realises without seeing them that there are bodies attached to filmed heads, arms at the end of filmed shoulders, two legs beneath the cut boundaries of medium close-ups. Just as viewers see their own bodies as whole, the actors’ bodies are imagined by viewers’ bodies as whole, even though they appear partial. The breaking up of the filmed body into pieces suggests an off-screen space where the entire body can be found. This is how the amputation of the filmed body by the frame remains virtual, like the body pieced back together off-screen. In film, what we see is what we believe. The often immobile and tight frames of Ossos convey this constriction of filmed bodies that occupy the frame, filling and thus overwhelming it, as they in turn are overwhelmed by what happens to them. Ossos is a film made off-screen. The on-screen, through the power of its immobile frames, its restricted space framed by tight shots and the severe constraints placed by these frames on the actors’ bodies and their very faces and gazes, is haunted by its off-screen. A part of the acting space, a part of the situation playing out, a part of the action underway, and so forth, is off-screen. But it is not only the portion of the space framing the frame that is hidden; in fact this space is not even space: it is time. The off-screen is temporal: there is a before to entering the frame, a during the movement through the frame and an after exiting the frame. This before, during and after define the off-screen as a temporal sequence: the memory of the action, the action and the promise of future action. This is the sense in which the off-screen, in its classical conception, is said to bear a threat or promise: what is not there can happen, must happen, must be avoided, etc., not only because this indefinite action can be believed to be to the side of the frame, but because it is always already imminent (desire, which is to say Eros). This possible of the off-screen functions, of course, as a narrative and/ or dramatic reserve. But when this reserve is shown to be empty, as it is in Ossos, and not just once but every time, the off-screen acts as a threat to the film itself, to the very figuration of the filmed bodies. What is present in the frame is threatened at every moment with being thrust into this essential off-screen space of emptiness or nothingness. The shadow cast by death on life becomes the film’s work, running counter to the (mythological) classic function of film, which is to constantly project life onto death. This cinematic frame poses the question of the body in its entirety and the body broken into pieces, more extensively than photography and painting do, even though both these also frame their images. The film camera’s ability to faithfully record and reproduce the movements of things and bodies (animal and human) is undoubtedly the source of its singularity: the film frame is capable of containing bodies in movement without stopping them, without freezing them in time. It is also capable of accompanying them, of following or preceding their movements, and this combination of the movement of the camera and the movement of filmed bodies heightens the frequency of the cuts, which thereby disappear into the movement itself.

André Bazin, ‘Peinture et cinéma’, Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999, p.188.

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IV

Not only to assert that the visible world is framed, but to make this framing, finally, noticeable, perceptible, sensible; to bring the off-screen into play as if responding to a need to join the invisible and the visible, but at the same time to make it appear like a dramatic or narrative remission — so many ways of proceeding which, in their stray beauty, are decisive and even violent responses to the general alienation that merges and confuses the world with its spectacle. Put another way, the mutilation of filmed bodies by the frame is evident in this film, while it is so often denied in other films in which the off-screen does not function as a boundary of the visible, as a cutting edge which keeps us on the side of emptiness. In which every part of the entire body that is not shown is supposed, on the contrary, to be on the other side of the frame. On the other side the same can be found. That is reassuring. But the visual and narrative obscurity of Ossos is troubling.

Cinema thus adds a frame to the visible world, presiding over the way apparatuses like advertising and the police frame the world. And because cinema is not the only way this happens — it also occurs in television, photography, posters, magazines and advertisements — the visible world has become almost entirely a frame, the frame that is everywhere but which we see nowhere. We see it without seeing it as a frame and which, because it is not seen as such, shapes our way of looking. In fact all the screens we watch also watch us and are frames formatting us. And because it is the human gaze that is being framed alongside the world itself, the frame becomes increasingly natural. This is a triumph of the ideology of transparency. The awareness that the world is framed by machines of the visible has not yet taken place. Will it ever? This is a political question. We call — I call — for the definition of a critical viewer for whom the screen will not be transparent and the frame not invisible. The industry of visual reproduction, the commercial empire of the visible, from Hollywood to Tokyo and from Seoul to Cupertino, has achieved the tour de force of bringing together fabricated and necessarily artful and artificial images with so-called ‘natural’ images, the images our eyes ordinarily perceive.

What is always framed (screens of all kinds: films, computers, televisions, games, mobile phones) produces images which appear to resemble (all things considered) what in the world is not framed. These imperceptible frames fabricate framed images that overlay our unframed gaze and perhaps take its place. In other words, we increasingly see through frames and the optical adjustments of machines for seeing. All of cinema’s striving for ‘technological’ development (the transition from black-and-white to colour, from the almost-square frame of early cinema to the excessively wide screens of today, from silent to sound and then talking cinema and now to 3-D) has been a way of naturalising the film image, of domesticating it and making it familiar. Art has become a family affair. Goodbye to troubling strangeness, goodbye to irrecoverable otherness, goodbye to a reality that cannot yet be framed. Every mutation requires that we be aware of what is changing, of what is won and lost. It is quite apparent that the entire vast and ancient effort to compute the world is receding into a scarcely less ancient effort to commercialise it, and into another parallel but accelerating effort to convey visually every thing and every dimension, as if selfishness and the market needed to move en masse into the visual. What is targeted and destroyed here is the possibility of the off-screen, meaning the possibility of a place that eludes the inquisition of all by all. The invisible is also political. This is exactly the way in which I see, as a political gesture, the concern in Ossos for severe framing, sharp spatial and temporal cuts and the continuation of the off-screen.

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Pedro Costa, Ossos (Bones), 1997, colour 35mm film, 94min, still. © Pedro Costa

V In Ossos the frame stands out because the sharpness or assertiveness of the framing is often emphasised by the play of a mise en abyme. When there exists a frame within the frame, as there has been in cinema for a long time (for example, in Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton), it is because film wishes to be seen as a frame, which is to say as artifice, even if it means that the visible world in the frame within the frame takes on a more natural aspect (in Abbas Kiarostami’s films And Life Goes On… [1992] and Through the Olive Trees [1994], for example). In Ossos, it is more a case of increasing the frame’s constraint or, better yet, of carrying it in two directions: to the gaze of the characters and to that of the viewer. The characters’ bodies are in fact doubly enclosed in the frame within the frame. Their room to manoeuvre is reduced accordingly. At the same time, however, the viewer’s gaze is faced with a part of the frame which, in this instance, functions explicitly like a mask. What is constrained is my own gaze, inside a frame that I may not see as a constraint but which deprives me of the part of the visible to which I would normally have access. The frame within the frame thus both restricts the actor’s performance and frustrates the scopic impulse still active in the viewer. Five minutes into Ossos, for example, we see a rectangular window in a closed door: a frame within a frame as two silhouettes approach, poorly defined at first and then more sharply, but always framed by this fixed rectangle. The two hazy figures take shape: they are two women, one behind the other. The second one carries a baby in her arms. They come closer still, and the face of the first woman finally becomes distinguishable (it is the face of Maria Lipkina, Vanda’s fictional sister). Her face is framed ever-more tightly by the rectangular window. In the end we see only her eyes, once again lost in a void that extends off-screen, in front of them. This gradual sharpening of her features is accompanied by powerful reframing that comes from the actress’s body itself: as we come to distinguish the young mother’s features, her body is reduced to her face, her face to her eyes. Her framed gaze is directed not far from the centre of the lens — a little lower, a little to the left — and is met in the subsequent shot, strangely enough, against all expectations of verisimilitude, by Vanda’s identically framed gaze, as if she were exactly on the other side, symmetrically, of the rectangular window and had come to occupy exactly the same place as Maria in this frame within the frame. The frame within the frame lends itself to shot/counter-shot of their eyes in extreme close-up. But this creates a slight degree of unease. The extreme proximity of the two shots, that of the frame and the counter-frame on each side of the window, barely leaves viewers space to insert themselves, for them to become the imaginary third party who wants the gazes (the desires) of the characters looking at each other in the framecounter-frame to pass through their own. No, these two gazes do not express the desire to pass through the gaze of the viewer. They are the gaze of death or paralysis. Between the shot and the counter-shot there is neither air nor space; between the two frames within the frame is the obstacle of the closed door: the mask. To continue, the young father rummages through the garbage in a market. Bars and grates multiply the number of frames within the frame, which are increased further by the oblique line of the high-angle shot. His body and face are unmasked/masked by these obstacles. A window marks the space between the kitchen and the counter of a canteen or restaurant. Bordered on the left by a pile of dishes and on the right by a few glasses, the frame is closed above and below by the edges of this window. Here, in the frame

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VII The final film in the trilogy, Colossal Youth, is perhaps more distressing still. (This distress, of course, is that of the age in which we live.) With the exception of the few very scenes in which we hear Ventura’s letter to his wife, almost every shot in the film is shot with a short focal lens, with considerable empty space at the top of the frame. The characters’ bodies instead no longer occupy the centre of the frame but are cast to its edges, like light in which only a small part of the image is illuminated. There is a clear mismatch between the scale of the characters and that of the frame. Here we are even farther from frames that cut off or mutilate, from bodies that spill over the edges of tight frames, than we were in the film In Vanda’s Room. Ventura’s entire body moves spaciously through the images. It is as if the entire filmed space were visible in each shot. The frame, in other words, no longer functions as a mask. The regular use of lenses with short focal lengths opens up the screen and makes the actors’ bodies float in a frame much too large for them. Many compositions, in order to frame even more space and no doubt to destabilise the filmed bodies, are not only shot at a low-angle but also from the side. The world depicted no longer has the equilibrium to which cinema had long

within the frame, the torsos and faces of the two cooks are framed in turn as they pass dishes to an off-screen waiter. What is staged by this new mise en abyme, once again, is the fact that seeing is problematic. We want to see, we try to see, and doing so makes contortions and restrictive framings necessary, bending and moulding our body. In this way the viewer’s gaze is framed in turn by the frame that constrains the actor’s body. This, once again, is the project of a subversive mise en scène, which thwarts the ease or even the obligation of seeing found in Western society (the question of the veil). As if one needed only to desire in order to see. As if there were only seeing. As if there were only the visible, voyeurs, exhibitors and exhibitionists. As if the world could be reduced to its spectacle. Not only does the frame asserted indicate the fact of seeing and the role of the viewer, not only does the frame within the frame heighten this effect of watching, and in so doing lead it to awareness, but because the function of the frame’s mask is present within the frame itself in the form of obstacles or filmed screens, what is shown is nothing less than the limits of seeing. VI With In Vanda’s Room, the second film in the Fontainhas trilogy, off-screen space becomes more precise and settled. The film is made up of two sections, or branches, which intertwine. Vanda’s room, the first space, is connected to her mother’s home but without our understanding exactly how. The second space is the neighbourhood, which surrounds the home and within it Vanda’s room, and which is in the process of being demolished. This neighbourhood is filmed like a character — not only when Vanda enters it to sell cabbage or lettuce but with its clandestine passers-by, the furtive silhouettes who haunt it day and night. The two ‘sets’, one closed and the other open, are not treated in exactly the same manner. The light in the bedroom is less mysterious than the shadows in the abandoned houses taken over by squatters. Here again, anti-naturalism takes the form of compositions of frames and colours which distance the neighbourhood’s ruins from any form of miserabilism. The light of grace mingles with the shadows of the world. This, however, is true especially outside of Vanda’s room. In her room, in a hardly-flattering light — not at all clinical but suggestive of the domestic light sometimes found in Edgar Degas — the bodies of Vanda and her sister Zita are framed as freely as possible, given the cramped dimensions of the room. The framing is wide because the question here perhaps is no longer about the mutilation of bodies but rather the destruction of the neighbourhood, matched by Vanda’s fiercely willed self-destruction. Off-screen space is thus not what the frame cuts off, not what it conceals: it is what is outside the house, outside the bedroom — a whole series of other nearby and contiguous places, but which are not connected to on-screen space as its invisible extension. Here off-screen space is positioned — we might almost say surveyed — even as the bulldozers lay it to waste. The bedroom functions as the on-screen and the neighbourhood as the off-screen. It has a face, a form, a design, a destiny; this is why I spoke of it as a character. The off-screen space of the bedroom loses any dimension of invisibility, apart from the shadows filling it. I would say, without fear of ridicule, that here the off-screen becomes visible. The film’s cleavage into two scenes, the neighbourhood and the bedroom, turns each into the other’s off-screen space. Yes, but isn’t the off-screen merely the nightmare of the on-screen? Its inevitable fate? If this is the case, the film contrasts in a subtly mechanical way two phases or aspects of the same reality: the interior and the exterior, neither one of which has an outside reality because they are each other’s outside reality. It seems to me that the possibility of remission is here being closed off, that any compassion or charity is being done away with. The pitiless passage of the present becomes the very form of the film. There is only Vanda’s fierce pride; refusing to yield to her better feelings, she rebels in a more determined way than we do, perhaps, but this rebellion is as deprived as ours of any horizon. This film, with its matching of on-screen and off-screen space (the two complicit faces of the same reality) and their interaction (outside sounds are heard all through the inside) makes it impossible to imagine any kind of vanishing point which might be a line of escape. Here the viewer is someone who must concede that his or her desire to arrange the world using sounds and images (cinema) is destined to fail. If there is no more off-screen space, there is no more freedom.

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Pedro Costa, No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda's Room), 2000, colour 35mm film, 178min, still. © Pedro Costa

accustomed us. Everything has become topsy-turvy. A kind of programme we might comically call ‘Cubist’ has broken space up. Viewers are no longer in their customary position, good or bad. This position no longer exists, only an open chasm. The film is both strangely beautiful, like expressionism beyond any form of expression, and frightening. In the immense frames in which bodies lose themselves there is a single hope: that a zone of shadow, a ring, an aureole will encircle the spot of light that isolates the filmed bodies. This shadow in the frame brings the bodies, somewhat, within the grasp of desire. And this shadow, omnipresent in what remains of Fontainhas — the sections of walls, ruins, piles of stone, holes in the wall, little mazes, cracks in the façade just large enough for a body to pass through — appears more rarely, in a less marked fashion, in the new neighbourhood where Ventura’s apartment is located. The neighbourhood, most often an immaculate white, is practically deserted. We are reminded of the contrast described by Tanizaki Junichiro in his book In Praise

Pedro Costa | 69

71

of Shadows (1933) between the traditional world, in which shadows have a fragile and mannered depth, and the modern world, bursting with neon signs in which everything must be visible. In the old world shadows are still in the frame, but are in the process of disappearing. Light is in the new world; shadows still float there, in a visible and unliveable clarity. Low-angle shots always present the world the way a child sees it. But this world in the film, which is our world, was not made for childhood. It is too big, too empty, too white. Nothing happens from one shot to the next apart from this emptiness. There is no off-screen: everything is the same from one frame to the next, persistent and monotonous. What has become of the off-screen in the ruins of Fontainhas? Hasn’t it passed completely into the image, the frame, the zone of shadow that obscures part of the visible in on-screen space itself? But this obscuring is in no way equivalent to that of the frame as mask. What is hidden here is a part of what is framed. Shadows are a part of the frame. They are a part of the programme, not what catches it out. The force of the offscreen derives precisely from the fact that it is not framed. Shadows in the frame are not the same as the off-screen in shadow; in this film, the off-screen is deliberately out

of the picture. It took three films to arrive at this shelving of an old accessory of classical cinematic dramaturgy. Goodbye Jacques Tourneur, goodbye Nicholas Ray, goodbye Fritz Lang! And even Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, goodbye! Here Ventura can only repeat and reread the same letter, begin the same gestures and gazes over again. Here the characters no longer have any freedom. And the viewer? Hardly any more. We can take this poorly, become alarmed that the system of frames prevents and even forbids any escape into the off-screen. We might (we should) suppose that the world bears within it a piece of reality which coincides with the non-visible and which might thereby elude the domination of the spectacle. That is not the gamble this film takes. But there will be other films by the same film-maker that won’t take the same approach. The last film in the trilogy speaks to us about today; it obliges us to see this visible version of the world that we do not wish to see. And therein lies all its grandeur. Translated by Timothy Barnard.

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Kerry James Marshall

73 Kerry James Marshall’s Tempting Painting — Terry R. Myers 81 Kerry James Marshall: The Painter of Afro-Modern Life — Kobena Mercer

Pedro Costa, Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth), 2006, colour 35mm film, 155min, still. © Pedro Costa

Kerry James Marshall, Vignette #5, 2004, acrylic on Perspex, 72 × 60cm,

Kerry James Marshall’s Tempting Painting — Terry R. Myers

detail. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

What is the line between a painter and an artist who uses paint? In this exploration of Kerry James Marshall’s iconic paintings — and his moves away from them towards installation — Terry R. Myers investigates what is at stake in calling an artist ‘a painter’.

Unaware or unwilling to admit that some would be tempted to call certain artists painters because, funnily enough, they make paintings, in an interview that preceded the opening of her documenta X (1997), Catherine David resorted to what is now called ‘spin’:

Robert Storr: Other than, possibly, Ryman, definitely Richter, and, alas, not Polke, were there any other artists making paintings that you saw as at least potentially part of this discussion?



Catherine David: No. In the exhibition, there are some artists who deal with iconography who you might be tempted to call painters — but I think that label is irrelevant. We invited Kerry James Marshall; we invited Lari Pittman; we invited David Reeb from Israel — and I don’t think it’s helpful to describe their work as painting. They are privileging cultural operations, crossbreeding, questioning cultural identity and using specific image-strategies.



RS: Lari Pittman is most certainly a painter, though.



CD: For me, the iconographical work is the privileged point of access to his world and discourse.



RS: Yes, but that’s a very limited reading. Because if he builds the surfaces the way he does, or if he strips them down the way he does, that’s within a language of painting — where the significant meanings have to do precisely with how the iconography appears, not just that it is there.



CD: You can call them painters, but it’s not really relevant in this documenta, where we’ve tried to be very precise about image-strategies. 1

Whether painting, poetics or politics, one person’s precision can be another’s erasure. No one, of course, needs to tell Kerry James Marshall this: for more than thirty years he has taken aim at the exclusionary centre of painting even (or especially?) when he began to open his work up to other media in his contribution to the 1997 documenta and other major exhibitions that same year, such as the Whitney Biennial. Nonetheless, it was still surprising that when push came to shove his dramatic paintings were given a golden opportunity to resist the misrepresentations of David’s wilful blindness in the installation of documenta X. Isolated in one of the large, light-filled and very painting-friendly galleries of the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, several of his large canvases were positioned in the literal centre of the city-wide presentation. (Another large space in the museum was devoted to Gerhard Richter’s photo-based Atlas [begun 1964], while Robert Ryman wasn’t included after all, and Sigmar Polke never submitted his required ‘proposal’. David Reeb’s rather unassuming work was pretty much lost in the mix of the show, and Lari Pittman’s enormous and stunning painting was marooned in an upstairs 1

‘Kassel Rock: Robert Storr Talks with Documenta’s Catherine David’, Artforum, vol.35, no.9, May 1997, p.129.

Kerry James Marshall | 73

space that was more hallway than gallery. 2) Why Marshall’s paintings alone were afforded such respectful treatment remains unknown, but I recall thinking at the time that there was no way that David would have had the nerve to stick these particular works of Marshall’s in a hallway. Taken from Marshall’s series The Garden Projects (1994—95), the canvases shown in Kassel depict scenes from public-housing projects in Chicago and Los Angeles that were given names with what could be considered — if one were to be generous — wishful thinking: for example, Rockwell Gardens, Wentworth Gardens, Altgeld Gardens and Nickerson Gardens. The latter refers to the place where Marshall lived for two years during his childhood and adolescence after his family moved from Birmingham, Alabama to Los Angeles in 1963. Receiving his BFA from Otis in 1978, he would move

to Chicago in 1987, where he remains to this day. (Biography, of course, is anything but incidental here — a consideration that Marshall himself has often put front and centre. 3) It could be that the presence of such imagery merely satisfies the terms of David’s concept of ‘iconographical work’, which she considered to be the privileged access point to everyone’s work, as least in the case of her documenta. If this is what explains his inclusion, then I could stop there, but some of us might be left asking, ‘Is that all there 2 3

Mindful of the various dismissals of painting that he first encountered while a student at CalArts, Lari Pittman had his own concerns about the exhibition but was appropriately playful about them: ‘On the one hand I can see that painting is commercially privileged in America […] that painting can actually sell. But I’m wondering if the problem is that there is a part of the art intelligentsia that is so rigid that doesn’t allow […] I guess I’m thinking of my upcoming meeting with Catherine David, and I’m wondering if this isn’t just the stupidest work that she’ll ever see — and on top of that it is painting!’ See my 1996 interview with Lari Pittman for the Journal of Contemporary Art, http://www.jca-online.com/pittman.html (last accessed on 22 September 2009). To cite only one example, in the book Kerry James Marshall, Marshall contributed not only a foreword (pp.9—10), but also a very thorough autobiographical text titled ‘Notes on Career and Work’, in Eve Sinaiko (ed.), Kerry James Marshall, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000, pp.113—23.

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is?’ For me, these paintings remain some of Marshall’s best works, prime examples of how much the material and formal conditions of painting are still able to intensify rather than obscure a critical message, regardless of the history and/or future of its position of privilege in the art world or the museum, or, conversely, its lack of presence and influence in broader cultural production. Take, for example, Watts 1963 (1995), the painting that references the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Los Angeles, which, two years after Marshall lived there, became a site of the 1965 Watts Riots. Far from depicting any unrest or difficulty, the large canvas is painted like the dream it presents: supported by an actively painted field of green lawn, the scene plays different styles of illusionistic representation against specific types of material abstraction again and again, weaving a visual and

Kerry James Marshall,

Kerry James Marshall,

Watts 1963, 1995,

Bang, 1994, acrylic

acrylic and collage

and collage on canvas,

on unstretched canvas,

264 × 305cm.

290 × 343cm. St Louis

Both images courtesy

Museum of Art,

the artist and Jack

Museum Minority

Shainman Gallery,

Artists Purchase Fund

New York

tactile complexity without which the point of the painting’s irony would be severely diminished by remaining only iconographical. It can’t be an accident that ‘nature’ is made to do the heavy conceptual lifting in these works. In this painting, flowers in particular stand as popular symbols (the ‘flower-power’ daisies in front of the Housing Authority sign planted in the painting’s lower left quadrant) as well as pure gestures (the Twombly-esque pastel bursts around the same sign). Despite their pictorial and painterly differences, both sets of blossoms pull the deep space of the picture up to its surface, complicating it in that well-rehearsed yet hardly exhausted manner that painting still is capable of performing unlike other media. Moreover, this painting — like most of his others — is unashamedly decorative, made even more strident by two banners that simultaneously break and reframe the top half of its edge to significant effect. The painting is at once its own world and from another. The large red banner is broken in two, its incomplete statement reading ‘There’s … d more of everyth…’, while a smaller, more ribbon-like white banner fills the gap between

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the fragments, completing the picture with its key message: ‘HERE WE REST’. To decorate here means to commemorate via a self-conscious construction of something worth looking at even after the collective memory fades. Marshall’s embodiment of the commemoration of this memory in the emphatically two-dimensional bodies of three children is hyper-symbolic, continuing a trope of ‘ultra-blackness’ that began with some of his earliest works. Marshall described this notion in a letter responding to the film-maker Arthur Jafa: ‘The figures I paint are a literal representation of our rhetorical identity. “Black” people — highly stylised, unequivocal and completely self-conscious. […] Their undeniable spiritual power is at once irreverently profane, formally complex, viscerally accessible and hauntingly beautiful.’ 4 The flatness of Marshall’s figures is as powerful as their blackness, as each of them — while standing, kneeling or curled up in a foetal position — is placed on shadows as black as they are. In Watts 1963, the shadows — shaped almost like surfboards — put the children in two irreconcilable places at once: ‘resting here’ in the fantasy of the painting while also standing next to the Housing Authority’s sign, a reminder of a living situation not in the painting — an irreconcilable state of depiction and reality reinforced by the materially plain and ideologically provocative unstretched state of these raw canvases. Painted on dropcloth-like tarpaulins (complete with grommets), Marshall’s garden paintings are gorgeous yet remain grounded, providing yet one more resting place for his — not to mention our — vision.

In 2000, only a few years after documenta X, Marshall announced a change in his trajectory, resetting the terms for a significant broadening of his practice (which had already partially begun in 1998): I gave up on the idea of making Art a long time ago, because I wanted to know how to make paintings; but once I came to know that, reconsidering the question of what Art is returned as a critical issue. A painting is a material object: measurable, readable, knowable. The concept ‘Art’ resists easy definition and is therefore contingent on shifting ideas and relationships. Paintings and other art forms aspire to the status of Art, but these things don’t necessarily meet. I wanted to understand what the painters I admired knew that made them able to achieve such marvellous effects. I tried to codify the difference between really great work and mediocre pictures. […] Surpassing the achievements of the masters was out of the question, but getting up alongside them on the wall seemed reasonably possible. I’ve spent all my energies trying to do that much. 6 In 1998, a large exhibition of Marshall’s post-documenta X work travelled for two years to several venues in the United States. Titled ‘Mementos’, the exhibition included nine paintings: four that continued the pictorial structure of the unstretched canvases

‘Kerry James Marshall: One True Thing, Meditations on Black Aesthetics', 2003. Installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Works shown by L. Eduardo.

It is important to recognise here that despite its privileged history, painting gives no guarantee that any message it contains will remain intact, despite attempts to permanently endow materiality with meaning. With The Garden Project, I am reminded in particular of Georges Seurat’s Un Dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884—86). (Given its permanent home at The Art Institute of Chicago, I am confident of its significant influence on Marshall.) Regardless of Seurat’s attitude toward those people in the park, and — more importantly — his conception of Divisionism as requiring visual labour from its audience, his painting is largely understood as a celebration, so much so that it once provided the inspiration for a Broadway musical, ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ (1984). The question remains: when the memory fades of what Marshall’s ‘gardens’ actually were, what happens to the message, not to mention the irony? 5 4 5

From a letter in response to another from film-maker Arthur Jafa, published in Judith Russi Kirshner, Gregory Knight and Ursula Prinz (ed.), Korrespondenzen/Correspondences: 14 Artists from Chicago & Berlin (exh. cat.), Berlin and Chicago: Berlinische Galerie im Martin-Gropius-Bau and Chicago Cultural Center, 1994, p.95. Stephen F. Eisenman’s important work on Seurat is to the point: ‘by its contradictory mixture of idealism and materialism, epic and comic, classic and contemporary, the Grand Jatte ironises aesthetic and social convention. In addition, its Chromo-luminarism demands the collaboration of its audience, thereby positing the revolutionary ideal of overcoming the alienation of artistic producers from consumers within capitalist society’. From his ‘Seeing Seurat Politically’, The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol.14, no.2, 1989, p.214.

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Photography © Museum

Kerry James Marshall,

of Contemporary Art,

‘Mementos', 1998.

Chicago. Photograph

Installation view, Santa

by Michal Raz-Russo

Monica Museum of Art

from The Garden Projects while making their commemorative status even more explicit (Souvenir I—IV, 1997—98), and five smaller paintings on plywood panels that memorialised Martin Luther King, Jr. and John and Robert Kennedy. If these nine works had been the entire exhibition, it would have neatly continued the trajectory of his practice as a painter who was confident in his technical abilities as much as in his grasp of the history of the medium. However, they were hardly half of the show. In fact, ‘Mementos’ was Marshall’s first incursion into full-blown installation. Included alongside the paintings were photographs, sculpture, prints and a video installation, all of which related in various ways to the overall subject matter of the exhibition: the struggle for civil rights in the United States in the 1950s and 60s. As someone who had begun to appreciate the formal and conceptual focus of Marshall’s paintings in the overall painting-poor environment of documenta X, at first I couldn’t quite fathom why the artist himself seemed interested in deliberately adding what seemed like distractions in the face of the significant pictorial focus of his earlier work. For example, several sculptures of oversized rubber stamps and stamp pads that were used to make large prints of slogans like ‘WE SHALL OVERCOME’ seemed to be little more than antagonistic challenges to the paintings, which, by the way, had been made 6

Kerry James Marshall, ‘Foreword’, in E. Sinaiko (ed.), Kerry James Marshall, op. cit., p.9.

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even more decorative than before with the addition of substantial amounts of glitter. In a text published during the tour of the exhibition, Barry Schwabsky remarked that the critical reaction to the exhibition had been subdued when it debuted in Chicago, and went on to make an astute observation:

[T]here may be more of a contradiction than Mr Marshall is willing to admit between his desire to be seen ‘not as “the painter” but as an artist’ and his passion for the ‘material involvement in the process’, which is so much more easily fulfilled in a traditional medium like painting than in more distanced, directorial modes like installations and video. 7

In other words, maybe Marshall was trying to have it both ways, to blur the line between being a painter and being an artist who uses paint. An extreme yet critical example of the latter is Felix Gonzalez-Torres. In his brief career he produced just one painting: Forbidden Colors (1988). Made up of four monochromatic panels painted in the colours of the Palestinian flag, it takes full advantage of all of the historical weight of painting by virtue of being the only one in his oeuvre. Marshall’s work for ‘Mementos’ could be seen as an investigation of what it would mean to make more than the only one, transforming his work to reflect oppositional points of view that have been set up to dismantle hierarchies, but without abandoning his proficient grasp of the Western European aesthetic tradition of painting. Marshall’s ambivalence about the operation performed by calling an artist a ‘painter’ seems different from David’s, and more keenly related to the politics and contextualisation of painting practice — rather than David’s more art-historically inflected attempt to undermine the idea of a ‘medium’ of painting by privileging non-medium-specific ‘image-making strategies’ instead. Marshall extended his investigation of what is signified — and excluded — by ‘painting’ even further when he transformed a mid-career survey in 2003 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago into anything but another painting show, that is, moving beyond painting in order to reflect the diversity of styles used by black artists by including some of them directly in what was originally intended to be ‘his’ exhibition, upending a presentational and curatorial model that still dominates what a survey should be, particularly for painting. The show’s title, ‘One True Thing: Meditations on Black Aesthetics’, referred to his desire to examine how artists and institutions have influenced what has been known as ‘black aesthetics’ since the term ‘first emerged within the 1960s civil rights and Black Power moments as a way to raise awareness for black rights, foster black cultural pride and develop strategies for African Americans to participate more actively in the mainstream of US society’. 8 Presented at a time when the concept of ‘post-black aesthetics’ was emerging, Marshall’s intention was to examine, if not complicate, the conundrum itself: ‘The world I see is filtered through black-culture lenses. I can’t not make work from a black perspective, even if I wanted to. The attempt to do so itself is determined by my position as a black person in America. The fact that this can be formulated as a problem, as a possibility, comes out of current and historical experiences of black people in the United States.’ 9 Continuing his commitment to community-based traditions, Marshall invited several other artists to exhibit work alongside his own, relinquishing not only the focus on his work overall, but also, again, his status as a painter whose work would necessarily demand a particular focus on the part of both maker and viewer that also requires the exclusion of other media, contexts or situations that remain apart (and could possibly distract) from the irreconcilable situations that exist within his (and most) painting itself. Marshall’s recent works suggest that painting has recaptured the full range of his attention. In a series of seven paintings called Vignette (2005), he rendered a mise en scène that contains a black couple in love (or, as one of the paintings shouts: ‘L–O–V–E’) in the guise of French Rococo, albeit predominately in black, white and shades of grey. The humour of this painting is a provocative development, allowing its use of pastiche to 7 8 9

Barry Schwabsky, ‘Mementos of a Moment and Its Movement’, The New York Times, 6 September 1998, p.AR29. From an unattributed text in the exhibition brochure at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Marshall in Elizabeth A.T. Smith, ‘One True Thing?’, in Kerry James Marshall: One True Thing, Meditations on Black Aesthetics (exh. cat.), Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003, p.viii. Taken from an unpublished interview conducted in 2001 by Julieanna L. Richardson for The HistoryMakers, a non-profit organisation in Chicago that compiles oral histories of prominent African Americans.

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Kerry James Marshall, Vignette #7, 2004, acrylic on Perspex, 183 × 152cm. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

work on us in ways we are not accustomed to in Marshall’s work. Conversely, and most recently, he has completed an exceedingly large two-part mural for the atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that will be on view though 2010. Titled Visible Means of Support, it depicts distorted views of the plantation estates of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The work takes Marshall’s never-ending commitment to the razorsharp precision of his image strategies to a whole new level of scale and presence that is rarely done in painting today, returning us to its most opulent and most ideological moments (think Michelangelo and Diego Rivera) while reinstating the focus not only on painting, but on Marshall himself. It is premature to conclude here that Marshall has merely retreated to the relative safety of painting, not only because of the communal requirements of producing such a mural (it is also important to note that it can be viewed in the museum for free), but also because of the absolute consistency of his willingness to challenge his — and, of course, our — assumptions of what his work could ever be.

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Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir I , 1997, acrylic, paper, collage

Kerry James Marshall: The Painter of Afro-Modern Life — Kobena Mercer

and glitter on canvas, 274 × 396cm. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Bernice and Kenneth Newberger Fund

Kobena Mercer considers Kerry James Marshall's paintings set against a backdrop of different modernisms: Greenbergian Modernism, with its dialectic of addition and substraction; postmodernism, with its disdain for painting; and Afro-Modernism, with its negotiations of historical and contemporary contradictions.

Souvenir II, 1997, acrylic, paper, collage and glitter on unstretched canvas, 274 × 396cm. Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA. Both images courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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Over the past fifteen years, Kerry James Marshall has become the history painter of post-Civil Rights USA. In his large-scale canvases, figurative groups placed among scenic backdrops often evoke the utopian aspirations of the 1960s, and in this way his paintings open onto an imaginative or even fictional space in which the relation between past and present becomes the subject for a fresh set of narrative possibilities. Structured by the recombinant principle of collage and a painterly interest in the formal properties of flatness, Marshall’s body of work is best understood as a manifestation of Afro-modernism on account of its critical relationship to prevailing conventions of modernism. By examining his early work, my intention is to show how Marshall arrived at a set of choices that led him to an alternative to the discourse of postmodernism that prevailed at the beginning of his career in the 1980s, even as he maintained a complex relationship to the discourse of High Modernism that was associated with abstract painting and the views of critic Clement Greenberg. Marshall’s enigmatic compositions, with their figures often in pairs or groups, suggest potential scenes of dramatic action, but any straightforward access to narrative content is intercepted by a rich ensemble of painterly effects in which various drips, dots, strokes and scumbles are scattered throughout the textured surfaces that are so distinctive to Marshall’s paintings. To the extent that such painterly ‘noise’ interferes with the figure/ground distinction as a foundational aspect of painting, it acts as the locus of conceptualisation in Marshall’s work, marking the point at which alternative understandings of ‘history’ are brought to the threshold of representation. By questioning the conditions of representation surrounding African-American history, Marshall’s concern with the 1960s parts company from the nostalgic treatment conveyed by a work such as Spike Lee’s 1992 film biography of Malcolm X. In addition to displacing documentary realism, Marshall also eschews the ironic handling of the 1960s that is expressed in the retro-kitsch aesthetics of Blaxploitation imagery. Rather, what Marshall achieved in his mid-1990s breakthrough, with paintings such as De Style (1993) and Lost Boys (1993), was a mode of historical reflection in which lived experiences of the past are invoked through a subtle poetics of allusion. The Souvenir series (1997—98) touches upon the politics of the Civil Rights era directly, in the form of a background tapestry that depicts Martin Luther King, Jr. alongside John and Bobby Kennedy, above a motto that reads ‘We Mourn Our Loss’. But more often than not, Marshall alludes to the 1960s indirectly, such that a more diffuse sense of ‘pastness’ associated with childhood memories and the intimacy of family life takes precedence over the public sphere in which the tumultuous events of the period took place. In the Garden Projects series, works such as Better Homes Better Gardens (1994) or Untitled (Altgeld Gardens) (1995) convey a precise feel for the period in the shape of the mass housing projects that were built in the inner cities during the 1960s. Yet even as the distinction between public and private space on the canvas is literally blurred by splashes of paint — thus overriding the separation between the two realms, as well as interfering with the spatial separation of figure and ground — there is an affective charge of unsettlement, disturbance and violence that, I would argue, is conveyed by the way such painterly effects ‘deface’ the illusion of pictorial depth. Far from summoning history as though it were a given body of knowledge passively

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waiting to be depicted or narrated, it is the opacity of the ongoing relation between past and present that Marshall throws into the forefront of the viewer’s attention. In this way, the poetic interference activated by the disparate materials collaged onto the picture plane issues a break with the realism and naturalism associated with the genre of history painting in the modern West. But if we could accurately describe Marshall as a modernist whose work operates from an alternate methodology of collage, in which meaning is generated by the dialectical collision of heterogeneous elements, then we still face the question of how to describe exactly what kind of modernist Kerry James Marshall might be. There is something undeniably strange and haunting about the jet-black figures that have featured in almost all of Marshall’s paintings since the early 1990s. At one level, it is their colouration that gives them their estranged and de-familiarised quality. Where African-American skin tones might be rendered in a naturalistic setting with solely brown-blacks or red-blacks to convey warmth, Marshall’s palette overlays a colder tonal range of blue-blacks and grey-blacks as well. If this was not enough of a de-naturalising gesture in its own right, Marshall’s figures possess an equally uncanny quality at the level of line. As a work such as Past Times (1997) demonstrates, by occupying the illusory space of pictorial depth such bodies acquire a solidity that fills out the spatial recession of figure and ground, even as their ‘cold’ colouration deprives them of shadow and hence draws attention to their flatness as mere shapes that exist purely on the picture plane. By virtue of this move, Marshall plays upon the ambivalence of blackness as a signifier, which may refer at one and the same time to the abstract phenomenon of colour and to the concrete reality of historically constructed ‘racial’ identities. Having de-naturalised the visual inscription of ‘race’ in this way, Marshall also plays with the tension between the figurative — a codified system of shapes and lines we read in terms of a likeness or verisimilitude to human bodies — and the figural, the random inchoate mass of potentially signifying material as it exists prior to being given distinct form or bounded shape. In other words, while presenting instantly recognisable as (African-American) figures, Marshall’s painterly handling of blackness means that the figurative is always brought to the edge of abstraction, which is what the concept of ‘race’ often did in modern Western history — abstracting concrete humans into signs upon which to hang someone else’s idea of otherness. The philosophical and political implications of Marshall’s treatment of ‘race’ grow in scope once we observe how Marshall’s black figures are arranged into neo-classical ensembles that openly quote from the Western canon, such as the pastoral constellation of the group in Past Times. Andrea Mantegna first comes to my mind when beholding the monumental scale that imparts grandeur and gravitas to these figures — and as Marshall’s canvases are in the range of eight by twelve feet (2.4 by 3.6 metres), his figures are literally larger than life. The artist acknowledges the wide range of citations he makes, from Raphael or Rembrandt to Picasso, as an integral part of the cross-cultural dimension of his practice, which also includes chalk vévé diagrams from Haitian vodun rituals and African Powers (1989), a series of woodcuts based on Yoruba divinities such as Shango and Esu-Elegba. But when critics seek to capture the strangeness generated by these cross-cultural dynamics, the notion that Marshall simply ‘inserts’ black figures into the pictorial grammar of Western painting, whether classical or modern, fails to grasp the agency of transculturation that modifies commonplace understandings of difference and identity. Instead of merely adding ‘black’ content to a neutral formal container, as though each retains its pre-existing identity intact, there is a double-sided move at play that is best captured by Houston Baker’s description of black modernism as a set of artistic acts that perform the ‘deformation of mastery’ while asserting the ‘mastery of form’.1 Taking the latter part first, we can understand why Marshall does not identify himself as postmodern, as he suggests in an interview with African-American cinematographer Arthur Jafa. Declaring a ‘sense of obligation to advance the discipline’,2 Marshall seems to echo Greenberg’s view that ‘the essence of Modernism lies […] in the

Kerry James Marshall, Garden Party, 2003 acrylic and paper on canvas banner, 274 x 305cm. Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

overleaf Kerry James Marshall, Past Times, 1997, acrylic and collage on canvas, 274 × 396cm.

1 2

Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Kerry James Marshall, quoted in Arthur Jafa, ‘Fragments from a Conversation, June—July 1999’, in Eve Sinaiko (ed.), Kerry James Marshall, New York: Abrams, 2000, p.74.

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use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself’. 3 Born in 1955, Marshall is slightly older than the generation of Neo-Conceptualists working in the medium of photo-text and installation, such as Renée Green or Lorna Simpson, who were associated with a paradigm shift around ‘race’ and representation in the 1980s. And although he is roughly of the same age as Fred Wilson or Carrie Mae Weems, his choice of medium sets him apart. Graduating from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1978, where he studied with the African-American artist Charles White, Marshall made formative choices during the decade when contemporary art, at the turn to postmodernism, had announced nothing less than the death of painting. But while the issue of medium specificity meant that the primary focus for debates on appropriation, quotation and re-signification took place in relation to photo-text and installation work with the found image or the found object, it is crucial to note that these concepts were equally applicable to Marshall’s aims. While his statement, ‘I don’t think there’s anything worse than having a good idea that’s poorly realised’, might imply a dualism between material-based and idea-based practices, the full statement expresses Marshall’s primary concern with the process of conceptualisation:

if you hope to break through to something meaningful […] it’s gotta come out of a more experimental approach to material. That way, you see the possibility in materials for constructing meaning. If you don’t understand the capacity of materials to carry meaning […] you’re limited in your range to simple expressions rather than complex ideas.4

3 4

Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1961), in Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (ed.), Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, London: Open University and Phaidon, 1992, p.308. K.J. Marshall, quoted in Arthur Jafa, ‘Fragments from a Conversation’, op. cit., p.29.

McCormick Place Convention Center, Chicago

Kerry James Marshall | 83

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Kerry James Marshall | 85

Picking up on Marshall’s painterly interest in flatness, Helen Molesworth points out that instead of the outright rejection of formalist principles (on the part of the post‘Pictures’ generation) and instead of the retreat into endgame abstraction (on the part of painters such as Peter Halley), Marshall responded to the ‘death of painting’ by striking a path between elements of abstraction, collage and representation. By virtue of the picture plane acting both as a flatbed receptacle for collaging disparate elements together and as a pictorial ‘window’ that supports illusory depth, Marshall’s collage methods bridge a wide range of picture-making traditions into a transcultural formation. In contrast to the Greenbergian doctrine of purity, we find that Marshall’s combinatory principles not only bring into play elements of linguistic script and musical notation — in Past Times, The Temptations’s tune ‘Just My Imagination’ is shown sounding out from the radio — but that as a result of such inter-media reciprocity the paintings elicit a mood of contemplative reflection from the viewer.

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Kerry James Marshall, At the End of the Wee Hours, 1986, cut-paper collage, 24.4 × 20.3cm. Collection of the artist, Chicago

In the Garden Projects series, Molesworth sees the paintings as meditations on the historical failure of the grand projects of modernism and modernisation that gave rise during the 1960s to Greenberg’s ‘American Type Painting’, on the one hand, and to the late modernist architecture of inner-city apartment blocks, on the other. Where such a pensive tone measures the distance between past and present, Molesworth discerns neither the pathos of nostalgia for a lost age nor the cool irony associated with the postmodern, but rather finds in Marshall’s paintings a tender distanciation from the 1960s in the form of a literary quality that is ‘born of having believed or having wanted to believe in the thing now treated ironically’.5 Applying this insight to Marshall’s portrayals of girl and boy scouts, or the ‘patriotic’ scene in which a group of children pledge allegiance to the US flag in Bang (1994), one might ask whether Marshall sees the Civil Rights movement as another historical ‘failure’ of modernity. Considering that for many African Americans this moment was their point of entry into the American dream of suburbia and consumerism, my sense is that Marshall presents the viewer with a perspective that could be labelled ‘post’ Civil Rights not because he passes judgement on political successes and failures but because, on the contrary, he opens up a novelistic or fictional space in which to reflect upon the unresolved ambitions that spill over from past to present. Far from presenting a conception of history that is closed or completed as a fixed narrative, Marshall’s paintings suggest that the relationship between the past and the present can be imaginatively reconfigured by the mode of narration in which historical events are understood. By engaging the viewer in reflection on the hopes of the 1960s that went unfulfilled, and the dreams of the Civil Rights era that were lost as a result of the later triumph of neo-liberalism, Marshall’s version of history painting treats the past not as memorial or monument but as a genealogy in which traces from a previous era can be reawakened in the contemporary moment. After all, it was in Chicago’s low-income housing projects, such as Altgeld Gardens, that Barack Obama began to address his political constituencies. Marshall’s combining of a formal interest in flatness with the referential dimension of the figurative thus achieves a fresh perspective on the political imbrication of ‘race’ and nationality in US history. But if the ‘literary’ quality of novelistic reflection that imparts a proto-narrative drive to his works would be anathema to Greenbergian modernism, which disdained literary reference of any kind as an unwelcome legacy of eighteenth-century academic art, then it should also be noted that Marshall’s interest in the political legacy of black struggles of the 1960s does not fit within dominant definitions of postmodernism either, where the ‘past’ was cancelled out as a topic for artistic enquiry by the neo-liberal view that the West had arrived at the ‘end of history’, as Francis Fukuyama stated in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. So if Marshall’s practice does not fit within received definitions of either High Modernism or postmodernism, how else might we characterise what Structuralists would call ‘the combinatory’, out of which he generates the originality and difference of his painterly practice? The most appropriate candidate, I would suggest, lies in the concept of Afro-modernism, especially when the term is understood in light of the heuristic distinctions that Peter Wollen makes in his notion of the ‘two avant-gardes’.6 By distinguishing two major axes in twentieth-century art — abstraction as ‘purification’, on the one hand, and collage as selection and combination, on the other — Wollen also undercuts the art-historical impasse that often arises between formalist and contextualist modes of analysis. Understood as a distinctive variant in twentieth-century art that originated from a specifically African-American source, which subsequently migrated through the Caribbean towards European contexts that include black British artists of the post-1945 period, Afro-modernism is an imaginative field of investigation driven by the impersonal rules of a code that makes use of the signifying differences thrown up in the space of cross-cultural encounters as a generative matrix for artistic decisions, choices and procedures. In this sense, what makes Afro-modern practices culturally ‘black’ is not just the biographical or ethnic origin of the artist nor the social conditions under which the work is produced and exhibited, but rather the critically dialogical relationship that 5 6

Helen Molesworth, ‘Project America’, frieze, issue 40, May 1998, p.56. Peter Wollen, ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’, Studio International, November/December 1975, pp.171—75.

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such practices engender in relation to the prevailing discourses of modernism in their outlying surroundings. Taking this view, there are two crucial strands of Marshall’s work prior to his mid-1990s breakthrough that need to be taken into account in order to grasp how he arrived at his distinctive cross-cultural combinatory. ‘I asked myself, what would happen to Analytical Cubism if you kept that fragmented structure but put back in all the stuff they took out?’ 7 Discussing At the End of the Wee Hours (1986), a paper-collage series he produced on a miniature scale, Marshall clearly aligned himself with the axis of collage that Wollen distinguishes from the axis of abstraction, which was coded as a logic of extraction, subtraction and purification for the formalist tradition in contrast to the combinatory logic of selection, addition and multiplication by which readymade elements, such as found images or found objects, are ‘put back in’, so to speak. The collage axis of the ‘two avant-gardes’ would include artists as diverse as Hannah Höch or Romare Bearden, but what differentiates Afro-modernism is the asymmetrical gradient whereby the collage episteme of selection and combination acts as a counterweight to the exclusionary and absolutist consequences of ‘purity’ in abstraction. Marshall’s aesthetic of recombination refers not only to his canvases but also, as mentioned before, to the system of conceptualisation into which his disparate source materials are placed: Marshall’s title, for instance, was actually a quotation from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1938—41), as though to underline the fact that his papier collé exists in an inter-media condition of impurity. Around the same time as making At the End of the Wee Hours, Marshall quoted Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) in a series of paintings — including Two Invisible Men Naked (1985) — that enacts the ‘deformation of mastery’ by summoning up the old racist canard that it is only by the whites of their eyes and teeth that blacks are visible in the dark. While their jokey aura meant they were mostly misread as a critique of stereotypical renditions of blackness, these paintings actually marked the point at which Marshall began to play with tonal ambiguities among warm-blacks and cool-blacks in such a way that made figure and ground virtually unreadable. Taking this latter method a step further, Two Invisible Men (1985) pushed the figurative through the figural to the point where mark-making gave way to the monochrome (the ultimate form of abstraction). As a diptych comprised of a white and a black canvas, Marshall visibly played with notions of ‘racial’ polarity, but where the work quietly quotes Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), it also summons up a liminal condition in which the blank canvases put painting under erasure — just as surely as the work suggests that the very idea of absolute difference in ‘race’ and ethnicity breaks down when the figure/ground distinction is no longer readable. Exploring two kinds of flatness, this mid-1980s work enabled Marshall to arrive at the two principal co-ordinates of his history paintings — the play on the border between the figural and the figurative which brought about the denaturalisation of blackness, on the one hand, and, on the other, the use of the picture plane as a receptacle for the referential ‘stuff’ that one strand of modernism wanted to ‘take out’ but which another strand wanted to ‘put back’. To the extent that the conceptual dimension of Marshall’s paintings has often been overlooked in favour of their sensual beauty, it is vital to stress that the artist is centrally preoccupied with ‘beauty’ not as a secondary element added to the surface textures of his work but as a constitutive aspect of an Afro-modernist outlook that addresses the protean beauty of blackness as a multi-voiced signifier that can never be fixed or brought to closure. By virtue of the ‘discipline’ of painting that informs his individual aesthetic choices, Marshall's pursuit of beauty thus steps aside from the sentimental or the merely expressive, which is where blackness so often gets trapped in naturalism and realism. As he states in his characteristically trenchant style: ‘It’s not about self-expression. If it were really just about self-expression, then that would require a receiver who is so sensitively attuned to your sensibility that they are capable of recognising an intrinsic value — not in what it is you are doing, but who it is you are.’ 8 In the cleavage of this distinction between the ontological and the epistemological, the impassive monumentality of Marshall’s figures bears witness to the violent histories of Afro-modernity, even as their shape-shifting figurality hints at the beauty of what blackness may yet become. 7 8

K.J. Marshall, quoted in Arthur Jafa, ‘Fragments from a Conversation’, op. cit., p.46. K.J. Marshall, quoted in Wesley Miller, ‘On Museums’, 25 September 2008, http://blog.art21.org/ (last accessed on 8 February 2010).

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Leonor Antunes

91 Of ‘World Lines’ and Other Forgotten Voices — Doris von Drathen 99 Perturbing Vision: A Leonor Antunes Portfolio — Nuria Enguita Mayo

Leonor Antunes, modo de usar #18 (how to use #18), 2010,

Of ‘World Lines’ and Other Forgotten Voices — Doris von Drathen

brass tubes, brass wire, lined wood box, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

Doris von Drathen finds in Leonor Antunes’s work an attempt to extend the idea of ‘measurement’ to a dimension where it becomes — similar to writing or drawing — a tool of grasping the world.

Among the absurdities of language, which we use against better judgement to describe the world as we experience it, is the substitution of infinity for what is immeasurable. Most people, for instance, articulate their perception of the horizon in terms that pretend to offer the possibility not simply of envisaging space- and timelessness, but even of physically observing it. Yet the average distance between observer and horizon is rarely ever more than thirty kilometres — the limit of our range of vision. So the habit of projecting our narrow frame of perception onto the world, in the presumption that the dimensions of existence are equal to the limited scope of our perception, induces us to imagine infinity at relatively close proximity. As if, of its own accord, the act of measuring were a way of ascertaining the world, just as writing and drawing are, Leonor Antunes has developed a body of work in the space between that which is measurable and that which is not. It visualises the discrepancies between the existing and the calculated world, takes the phenomenon of measuring and its possibilities to absurd limits and, on the tip of a yardstick, catapults us out of reality. Fragile shapes are suspended from the ceiling, shimmering and swaying. Sections of three-millimetre brass wire, flattened by hand into straight lines and bent at their ends into hooks and loops, trace out a system of triangles in mid-air. Leonor Antunes has produced five of these geometric sculptures, as fine as spatial drawings, laying each of them into one of her ‘construction kits’. These kits are each named modo de usar (how to use, 2003—ongoing), as each one comes with its own list of instructions. The viewer/user is directed on how to remove the objects from the box and then on either how they should be assembled and placed on the floor or suspended from the ceiling, as in the case of the triangular forms. As with most works by Antunes, observation alone will not reveal how the wire sculpture should be grasped as an object. It is distinctive of her approach that each work appears constituted of a visible and an invisible dimension. On the one hand we encounter a tangible, albeit hermetically abstract object, on the other a covert yet profuse realm of imagery that is disclosed when one has the opportunity to read the journal-like commentaries she compiles on her works as documentary material in order to publish in catalogues. Frequently these annotations bring to light the veiled and immensely fertile narrative underlying her work. In the case of the triangular shapes made of brass wire, one is dispatched by the artist into a long-forgotten episode of the French Revolution through which one learns about the particular relevance of the triangulation method developed between 1792 and 1798 by Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain to calculate the meridional distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona. Delambre and Méchain’s original technical drawings show five segments of an arched itinerary composed of triangles, copies of which now make up the five kits belonging to the work Dunkerque—Barcelona (2010). Accordingly, the brass wire plots the system of these triangular measurements in the air, reminding us of the French Revolution’s endeavour to calculate a universal unit of measure dedicated to ‘all men and all times’ — the metre. In 1791 the Academy of Science in Paris defined the length of a metre as one ten-millionth part of a quarter of the meridian, seeking to end the archaic confusion and disputes over methods of measurement that varied from country to country and between regions and towns

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throughout Europe. 1 The idea of a universally valid unit of length issued from the same Zeitgeist as the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Yet these swaying and, initially, arbitrary-seeming triangular forms made of glistening brass wire might also indicate the idea of error on a philosophical level. If one delves deeper into the background of the metre’s origin, one learns that a mistake occurred in the process of surveying the distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona. The first ‘true’ metre bar based on this survey, used as the standard measure for over a century, was short by 0.2 millimetres. This discrepancy resulted from the miscalculation of the projected distance between the North Pole and the equator, which had not taken sufficient consideration of the erratic nature of the earth’s surface. Antunes alludes not only to this chapter of revolutionary history in her work, or to the standardisation of units of measurement, but also to the inconsistency between measurements of observed phenomena and the phenomena themselves. Nature and its living development are largely independent from our measurements of them and our choice of measures. Antunes, so it seems, evolves her works in the gap that opens up where the world deviates from our description of it. By stretching, as it were, and pushing to its furthest limit the phenomenon of nature’s independence, the artist lends nature’s separateness a palpable, graspable immediacy. Based on the measurement of things, her oeuvre builds a world of its own, a world which subsequently becomes detached from and loses almost all relation to the very things being measured. Antunes carried out her first triangulation survey in the Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro, the largest urban tropical park in the world, in 2008. The (re-)plantation of this forest was ordered by Emperor Pedro II of Brazil to counter the dramatic fall in Rio’s water supply following the environmental devastation wreaked by coffee farming. The park’s vast space spreads out like a jungle within the confines of a second, urban jungle. The object Antunes chose for her survey was a sprawling woody vine, the liana. With her interest in architecture and engineering she soon understood this vine as constituting something like the forest’s infrastructure, with animals using its trailing creepers as bridges and viaducts. It was precisely these hundreds of impenetrable twining convolutions that Antunes sought to map. She found a group of topographers in Rio who went to work armed with sketchbooks, plumb lines, crampons and climbing ropes. Advancing segment by segment, branch by branch, the topographers looped plumb lines around the twisting stems of the vines, dangling their plummets to the ground. In a piecemeal fashion, the measurement of angles and medial axes — in other words, of triangular segments — allowed them to calculate a single, uninterrupted median line. Antunes re-plotted this line with six hundred threads twined together, and hung her stretched out ‘meridional’ extension of the liana in an exhibition space: a two-centimetre thick and thirty-metre long cable made of twisted threads. Emerging from the shadows and reflections on the floor is an abstraction not of the liana itself, but of its triangulation. We find ourselves standing before a mathematical result, a formula. The work’s title, architectura (2008), evokes the forest’s immense vegetational edifice; it also betokens the futility of measurement, as the natural ‘architectura’ of the wildly proliferating liana has long since left the artist’s painstakingly compiled survey behind. Like a different form of photography, the triangular measurement of the liana is only capable of capturing a moment. Even as the measurements are being performed, the enormous creeper has invalidated the values registered by the plumbing lines. Yet Antunes’s line of thread, although nothing but a mise en scène of the isolated moment of measurement and the product of measurements dissociated from the object under study, bears an affinity to the Kantian description of numbers which appear autonomously without relation to counted objects. These numbers that do not count are absurd, and strike a vertiginous blow: thrust to the boundary of conceivability, it is severed from what Kant termed ‘Realverknüpfungen’, from connections with reality. 2 The trace made by the act of measuring is not by itself capable of offering orientation. On the contrary, it leads to the blankness of an abyss, to a scale of measurement that drifts towards infinity: once these measurements are disconnected from their real-world reference they morph into a dizzying void — 1 2

The meridian is the imaginary longitudinal arc over the earth’s surface joining the North Pole to the South Pole. Immanuel Kant, ‘Realverknüpfungen’, from unpublished notes, cited in the edition of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, N 4174.

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similar to how the additions of columns of figures and dates in Hanne Darboven’s century work (Ein Jahrhundert 00/99, 1971—73) are detached from any real occurrences they might once have been counting. Divorced from time itself, they resemble the vision formulated by Jorge Luis Borges in his revival of the ancient idea of a ‘labyrinth of the straight line’: ‘I know of a Greek labyrinth that is but one straight line. So many philosophers have been lost upon that line […].’ 3 Antunes’s use of measurement as a means of departing from reality is evident in the large body of work original is full of doubts (2009), dedicated in its entirety to a house designed by the modernist architects Eileen Gray and Jean Badovoci. In September 2008 the artist visited Gray’s iconic villa E–1027 in Roquebrune on the Côte d’Azur. She paid particular attention to the elements that marked intervening spaces — the ceiling-high room dividers, windows and shutters and sliding panels which Gray designed to be movable, and which were capable of being folded, tucked away or in some way modified. Antunes set about measuring their dimensions and relative proportionality. Repeating the same motif of the folding screen’s lacquered leaves four times, Antunes re-constructed a curtain from the house in a rhythmic pattern of rectangular brass rods. Similar to a sweeping musical score, the composition of threads traverses space, casting shadows on the floor. Responding to features such as the sliding panels, windows or

Leonor Antunes, original is full of doubts, 2008. Installation view, Le Crédac, Ivry-surSeine. Courtesy the artist

paving stones in the garden, each sculpture is twinned with a second component, as if doubled by its own echo. For example, what had been a black room divider made of fibreglass in the original villa here becomes a rectangular, folded leather form which, in one instance, is lying half-rolled up on the floor and in another is seen extending from the wall at a 90-degree angle. Similarly, the leather panels referring to the paving stones in the garden occur horizontally and vertically in the exhibition space. These pieces were made by a saddler in Lisbon, one of the last craftsmen in the city still running his own leather workshop and surviving on individual orders. From early on in her work Antunes has been interested not only in natural materials such as wood, leather and brass, but also in the skills involved in working with them. Thus, for instance, the floors in Gray’s villa are echoed in a net made of rope knotted into squares that was produced by a fisherman in Lisbon who, before he died, was one of the last still performing this craft. These works are not replicas or metaphors, nor are they architectural models of actual given objects. No theatrical references are made to a reality beyond the works. 3

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘La muerte y la brujula’, Ficciones, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, S.A., 1971, p.162; in English, ‘Death and the Compass’, Collected Fictions (trans. Andrew Hurley), Harmondsworth: Penguin/Viking, 1998, p.156.

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seeking the carpet, Antunes plumbs the depths of an object, exploring the layers and the states of its reality: this is the dynamic momentum that surprises us whenever she relates how a work — which at first sight strikes us as so hermetic — gradually, step by step, comes into being. As if intending to resuscitate the other voices inhabiting reality that in our fragmented perception we have long since forgotten, as if seeking to disinter the secret paths of the buried memory inhabiting things, Antunes commenced a five-part series of works in 2004 exploring the grafting together of East and West Berlin. When the two were suddenly reunited after the fall of the Wall, many people were surprised that, rather than just a pair of adjacent segments, two quite distinct cities had emerged after more than forty years of division. When Antunes visited the sewn-together city in 2004 she was struck by the number of public buildings in the West that had a Doppelgänger in the East, and vice versa. With the observational acuity of a visitor she discovered in one district — today still recognisable as erstwhile East Berlin — a second academy of arts,

Leonor Antunes, the space of the window, 2004/07, artist's book printed in offset, with white leather cover, linoleum floor, furniture made of walnut wood and formica, vitrine by Jean Prouvé, sculptures of plasticine. Installation view, Air de Paris. Courtesy the artist

What they harbour is a broadly ramified system of reference to some object that already exists — such as the triangulation maps from the French revolutionary period, the liana in Rio’s Tijuca Forest or the architectural elements in Eileen Gray’s villa. Through her work process Antunes clearly and consciously emphasises that she neither believes in the possibility of an original, nor is she intent on creating one. The title original is full of doubts is itself a play on the title of an essay written by Gray: ‘From Eclecticism to Doubt’. 4 Antunes creates not a dialogue with the already existing object but something closer to an expedition to fathom and record subterranean veins of water, a search for correspondences linking everything together. This insistence that in their inner structure all things are deeply connected, that precisely this, and nothing else, is what spawns the meaning of their reality, reminds me of an old Persian legend: one day, a young man visits an old sage in the hope of purchasing the old man’s wisdom. Rather than a sale, the sage suggests an exchange — he tells the young man to procure a carpet, in return for which the old man will give him his wisdom. So the young man sets off to see a carpet seller, who instructs him to call on the weavers, who tell him to bring them yarn. The cotton spinners send him away to fetch wool, the shearers then dispatch him to the shepherd to get a sheep, the shepherd asks him to build a stable, the carpenters send him to the forest to gather wood. The woodcutter first demands that he marry his eldest daughter. From there the young man retraces his journey in the opposite direction. When he finally delivers the carpet to the sage, the old man tells him to keep it, since in the meantime the young man had accrued all the wisdom in the world. Like the man 4

Eileen Gray, ‘From Eclecticism to Doubt’, in Caroline Constant (ed.), Eileen Gray, London: Phaidon Press, 2000, pp.238—45.

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Leonor Antunes, modo de usar #4 (how to use #4), 2003, wood box, engraved (30 × 11.5 × 5cm); elastic rubber with variable dimensions; two gold hooks, engraved; two plastic plugs; instruction guide. Courtesy the artist

a second ‘Nationalgalerie’, a second city library, a second television tower and a second museum of applied arts. Again, her investigation was essentially a land survey, except that in this case it traced and registered an oscillation between two sets of commensurate circumstances. From each of the Doppelgänger buildings in former East Berlin the artist selected an architectural detail — a column, a section of flooring or a piece of one of the prefabricated slabs which typically clad the outer walls of buildings in the GDR. Antunes faithfully reconstructed these architectural fragments in a one-to-one scale model, drawing the outline of each segment in the air with metal rods, as well as placing these rods together with wing nuts into a ‘kit’. The viewer/user thus is able to assemble them and walk inside the ensuing ‘air-space’. Each of these objects gives the forgotten Doppelgänger palpable presence, while their better-known ‘Western’ counterparts become an invisible absence. The boxes in which the metal rods are kept also contain, as their title promises, ‘instructions’, or, as the Portuguese titles says: modo de usar. Not only do the architectural segments relate to existing objects, the boxes themselves are also modelled on a prototype, on an old box of measuring instruments Antunes once came across in a flea market. The measurements she made record the forgotten voices of a repetition. The division of Berlin had spawned a twin city. In the figures of these Berlin Doppelgänger history is not merely inscribed, it is also built. This series of modos de usar became the starting point for a sequence of further building ‘kits’ no longer centred solely on Berlin. One of her most recent works (discrepancies with villa teirlinck, 2009) — as well as Dunkerque—Barcelona — shows a clear correlation to her Berlin-based structural analyses constructed in the air. Asked to participate in the Beaufort Triennial for Contemporary Art along the Belgian coast,

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Antunes chose to show work in the seaside resort of Knokke, where she observed how beach huts seem to ‘arrive’, occupy the broad sandy beach for a season, and then disappear again. At the same time, she was struck by the almost total dearth of modernist architecture among the mass of concrete buildings that within the last few decades had wrecked the coastline. One of the rare exceptions became her field of operation: the Cubist ‘double villa’ designed by the Belgian architect Victor Bourgeois. 5 Antunes focused on the villa’s twin bay windows and took measurements of fifteen architectural details. From these she constructed fifteen beach cabins with bowed window fronts — white and otherwise hermetically closed wooden cubes that formed an ensemble of quasi-Minimalist sculptures that can all be entered and used. No two huts are alike, but each one is paired with another as a complementary counterpart in an oblique allusion to the twin bay windows of the villa, while also gesturing towards the old dream of injecting the aesthetic qualities of modernism into everyday life. At the same time, by being reduced to bare structures, it is as if the huts were measuring their relation to a Doppelgänger, which itself had been doubled, but here remains invisible. It is in this relation to a pre-existing object of everyday life that, on repeated occasions, Antunes has succeeded in transgressing the boundaries of reality — or, to put it more appropriately, that she forges an awareness for its various tonalities and threshold ambiguities. In a few cases she directly inserts such an object of reference into a work, incorporating it as a visible element. This is evidenced in the space of the window (2004), an intermediate zone she created in her studio in Paris. She had mounted a metal shelf into the window frame from which, by creating a measure between her thumb and index finger, she began an examination of the featureless inner courtyard that her window looked out onto. Here a firewall, there a projection of a wall or a staircase, a ground lamp, the gable of a mansard window, perhaps a ledge as well, or a supporting pillar. With the gap between thumb and index finger she determined the dimensions for the miniature sculptures she then began making: an arsenal of geometric forms inspired by the second generation of modernist artists. The works of Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Robert Morris or Sol LeWitt functioned as references for her copies of these architectural segments of the courtyard, which Antunes formed in grey plasticine with discreet irony. One after another, the objects lined up along the metal shelf in the window, standing in exactly the same order as the real objects they reproduced. Subsequently, she photographed reality and likeness in such a way that the details of reality were left as a blur, while the sculptures stood out in sharp focus. And this is where an unsettling change occurs: what had originally been reality appears in the photograph as an illusion, a distant echo of something observed. The imitation, on the other hand, in the form of the kneaded miniature sculptures, dons the appearance of sharply delineated, graspable reality. With their physical presence and ostensibly gigantic dimensions they supplant what had once been anchored reality. Here Antunes lends immediate pictorial expression to the reality of a work of art that is looking at me, whose intrinsic essence and palpable, inspired presence transport it beyond the reality of our observed everyday surroundings. With just a small amount of modelling clay she measures this phenomenon lodged in the intermediary space between the shifts of reality, and with such precision that it becomes almost impossible to evade. The title of the work points to the artist’s field of operation: characteristically, she calls this arsenal of sculptures and her photographs of them not ‘the space in front of the window’ but ‘the space of the window’ (emphases mine) — as if the window were a space of its own. It is the very ‘non-space’ of the window, its threshold space, which Antunes addresses as her theme.

•

The works of Leonor Antunes not only explore the secret, hidden paths of various layers of reality; not only do they trace the inner threads of invisible correspondences and presences, but they also cast out a line which stretches on in an endless trajectory from one impulse to the next — as, for instance, when a viewer stands in a darkened room looking into a luxuriantly illuminated display case. Inside the case is a polished block of wood with a circular hollow moulded into its centre, in which nestles a massive clump of gold of slightly irregular shape, as though it had just dripped from a furnace into the cavity. 5

Built in 1928 for Herman Teirlinck, an important Belgian writer, and Karel Maes in Saint-Idesbald.

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Leonor Antunes, discrepancies with villa teirlinck, 2009, 15 beach cabins, painted wood, acrylic. Beaufort Biennial 03, KnokkeHeist, Belgium. Courtesy the artist

The gold, we are surprised to discover, is 14.3 carats, and the block holding it is made of precious Brazilwood, which has been a protected species for some considerable time. (The rarely available stocks of this tropical hardwood sell at high prices for making bows for fine violins.) The gold lump emits a mysterious gleam. How could one ever guess the story behind it if Antunes didn’t tell it herself? In Rio de Janeiro she acquired a coin from an antique dealer. Stamped on one face was the year 1763. The coin measured 3.16 centimetres in diameter and was 1.13 millimetres thick. In her notes the artist describes how in the aftermath of the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 the Portuguese government issued a decree ordering all gold and silver coins found in the ruins to be bought up for a low price and melted down to mint new coins. At the time Brazil was a Portuguese colony; and Antunes has called this work 1763—2008 (2008) to mark the year of the coin’s being struck, and the year she was given use of a jewellery workshop to melt down the old coin in the presence of the jeweller and some of her colleagues. (A certificate accompanying the piece testifies to the event.) The gold clump draws behind it, in the wake of its gestural form, the invisible presence of the melted-down objects from the earthquake. This piece is emblematic of Antunes’s practice as a whole. In its innermost invisible structure it brings to mind the vision of a ‘world line': the continuous and measurable line that Hermann Minkowski, a scholar of experimental physics and once Einstein’s teacher as well as his rival, postulated that every living being and particle left in space-time — while we continue to exist, to circulate, to meet others and to move on. 6 6

Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin, New York: Bantam/Random House, 2004, p.93; also see Hermann Minkowski, Raum und Zeit, Leipzig: G.B. Teubner, 1909.

Translated by Matthew Partridge.

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Leonor Antunes, the state of being possible, 2007, leather,

Perturbing Vision: A Leonor Antunes Portfolio — Nuria Enguita Mayo

dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

Nuria Enguita Mayo addresses the problems of duplication, faktura and restriction as they appear in Leonor Antunes’s work.

Leonor Antunes’s sculpture is configured in space by means of an extremely precise staging, which in turn generates and transforms the space it occupies. Her sculptures strike up a dialogue which constantly renews itself; a dialogue into which the spectator can furtively enter through its intervals — the spaces defined by the presence of the sculptures, between their shapes and their surroundings. Once inside, apprehension of her work necessarily entails abandoning the hope of any symbolic interpretation. Her sculptures are not rooted in any primordial origin, nor do they represent or document a reality that is outside of them. As a result, viewers are always perturbed by her work: in the first place by its density, its texture and its composition — the means by which it constructs its meaning. In this sense, the work could be said to be typically ‘modern’, as it vindicates its formal nature, its ‘construction’. But the sculptures also recognise their historical and anthropological context. For Antunes, sculpture must be related to the way it appears and the way bodies gain access to it. All her work partakes of the silent anthropomorphism that Georges Didi-Huberman discusses in relation to Tony Smith and Robert Morris’s sculptures (in opposition to Rosalind Krauss’s understanding of Minimalism as lacking inner signification). Size, scale and proportion are key to her work; her sculptures focus on this connection, on the interval between us and the presence of the works. Disproportion, miniature and monumentalisation are lines of investigation for Antunes, but in her work the human scale, that ‘silent anthropomorphism’, is perturbed in many other ways. • Modos de usar #1, #2 and #3 (how to use, 2003—ongoing) are three measurement instruments made of rubber and copper, designed by Antunes for the space where they were to be used — the MARCO museum in Vigo, Spain, a former prison with a panopticon structure. Antunes called attention to the scale of the building by constructing on the floor a platform of the same measurement as one of the skylights in the exhibition room. Placed just below its model, the platform supported the tools that were made to measure it, the three modos de usar. Through this transformation of the vacuum of space into the solid of the platform, Antunes disrupts the objectivity of measurements and of its conventional instruments, proposing instead a new means of experiencing and observing that allows for a more intense relationship of bodies moving in space. Modo de usar #4 (2003) further explores this will to actively intervene in the space and unsettle the spectator, by giving him or her an eye-bolt screw, two golden nails and an elastic band with which to measure the exhibition space. Through this arrangement, space is marked and narrated, and each visitor’s life is made manifest as an element the moment the action is executed — an act of archiving that also enables us to think of the present as an archive. When the visitor is finished measuring, the instruments are returned to their box — its sculpture — which is also a container. As in children’s games, which create their own spatial reality, the sculpture lives exclusively in its use. With this work, Antunes refers to Marcel Duchamp’s Sculpture de voyage (Sculpture for Travelling, 1918), in its always temporary appearances, its transportability and its capacity to transform the spaces where it is installed.

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Antunes belongs to a genealogy of artists (Duchamp, Hamish Fulton, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, John Cage, Rodney Graham…) who, starting from a fixed structure, method and form, suggest that memory and imagination don’t obey precise instructions or given concepts, and that measurement — despite or specifically because of its strict regulations — cannot avoid the immaterial. For Antunes, contingency is an integral part of any effort to measure or symbolically codify time and space, because, as Didi-Huberman says, ‘space is not given when measured, when it's objectified. Space is distant, deep, inaccessible. It is always there, around and in front of us.’ 1 Duchamp’s concept of the inframince, the potency of meaning derived from his readymades, and the writing of Oulipo members Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec in works such as Exercises in Style (1947) and Life, A User’s Manual (1978) have already been mentioned elsewhere as possible antecedents for the modos de usar. 2 These are apparent in the artist’s interest in measurement as an area of possibility (in relation to body and space) and in the material potency of pure gesture — as opposed to ‘making’ or ‘playing’. Further, she takes a dialectical approach to shapes and forms from the past, both by duplicating the static (in reference to the object) and the temporal (in reference to the event). Like Duchamp or the members of the group Oulipo, for whom literary and artistic creation was not only practice and game but also labour, Antunes thinks of sculpture as work and, furthermore, as a tool, in its material and contingent nature. 3 The literary experiments of Oulipo push to the limit the notion of ‘restriction’ applied to the literary work, while following the teachings of Stéphane Mallarmé, for whom language can (must) be treated as an object in itself — as matter. Starting from the belief that all literary work must follow a series of pre-established rules, these authors propose new restrictions, based on the importing of mathematical concepts or the use of combinatory principles. Surprisingly, in this strictly arbitrary following of the rule, where there is no trace of ‘authenticity’ and ‘sincerity’, a stimulus, freedom or subjectivity might emerge. Other masters in the use of chance, such as John Cage, also proved that the arbitrary and the aleatory, its mutations and combinations, allowed for a discipline without intentionality. (Here chance is not related to Surrealist automatism, which is always attached to memory and personal taste.) This notion of restriction is fundamental to Antunes’s work, and is apparent in her obsession for both measurement and duplication. Her focus is on the investigation or measuring of what is given, what already exists, and the examination of what happens when it is duplicated, when it is disturbed in the present. As Doris von Drathen has pointed out, each of her objects constitutes ‘a reservoir of levels of appearance’ — an appearance that is not related to the transcendent or to belief systems. 4 Modos de usar #7, #8, #9, #10 and #11, all from 2005, are construction kits for geometrical structures that must be assembled by the audience, to reproduce, with the same materials and at the same scale, a fragment (part of the floor, a column) of some specific buildings ‘duplicated’ after the partition of Berlin — modernist icons built between 1961 and 1989, such as Hans Scharoun’s Staatsbibliothek, Rolf Gutbrod’s Kunstgewerbemuseum, the Fernsehturm, Werner Düttmann’s Akademie der Künste or Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie. With these works, Antunes offers anachronisms, fragments that she has taken out of context and which therefore acquire a new reality. The sculptures, made of brass, copper, aluminium and stainless steel, do not suggest interiority, but are made accessible in the space in a way that subjectivises them, allowing for a productive access to the past and its memory. • 1 2 3 4

See Georges Didi-Huberman, Lo que vemos, lo que nos mira (trans. Horacio Pons), Buenos Aires: Ediciones Manantial, 1997, p.89. For example, see Ricardo Nicolau, ‘O futuro de onten nao é hoje ’, in Miguel Wandschneider (ed.), Leonor Antunes (exh. cat.), Lisbon: Chiado 8 Arte Contemporânea, 2008, p.25; and Doris von Drathen, ‘The Inexistence of the Real: On the Utopian Sculptures of Leonor Antunes’, duplicate (exh. cat.), Berlin: Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, 2005, p.12. The Oulipo group (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature) was formed in 1960 by writers and mathematicians who made works starting from constrained writing techniques. Founding members included Perec, Queneau, François Le Lionnais, Claude Berge and Jean Lescure, among others. D. von Drathen, ‘The Inexistence of the Real’, op. cit., p.10.

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Leonor Antunes, the surface of a room on which one stands, 2007, brass, wenge wood, Scandinavian wooden lamp, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

Leonor Antunes, ‘duplicate', 2005, installation view, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. Showing modos de usar #7—12 (how to use #7—12), 2007, each comprised of an engraved wooden box; book; two acrylic protractors; brass, copper, aluminium or stainless steel wing nuts; and a brass, copper, aluminium or stainless steel lamp. Courtesy the artist

Recently, Antunes has focused her attention on the work of several modern architects from whom she has taken forms for her sculptural objects: Eileen Gray, Carlo Mollino, Robert Mallet-Stevens and Flávio de Carvalho, among others. The villa E-1027: Maison en bord de mer, built by Gray and Jean Badovici between 1926 and 1929, can be said to offer the fundamental grammar of forms active in Antunes’s work, perhaps because Gray thought of architecture through a structural understanding of form, and consequently proposed ‘a return to emotions purified by knowledge and enriched by idea’, and by the sentiment provoked by a balance between exterior and interior. In Antunes’s work, constructivist details, forms, patterns and furniture from diverse buildings are removed from their original environment, their lived context, to become isolated objects. Each element, duplicated at a real-life scale and ‘estranged’, literally pulled from its context and moved away from its original, develops a hidden potential that generates a new perspective on it — a concrete perspectives that exist by function of actually lived time. Original is full of doubts is the title of a solo exhibition of Antunes’s work that took place at Le Crédrac, Ivry-sur-Seine in 2008, within which she presented paving stones across the entire garden, spine wall suppressed all thoughts, avoiding mistral wind and the lacquer screen of E.G. (all 2008). On this occasion, drawing closer to Russian formalism, modern architecture and Eva Hesse’s post-Minimalism, Antunes defends the autonomy of their forms, both in terms of their material and their meaning — as the Russian Constructivist would say, their faktura, their texture and materiality, as well as the use of the inherent characteristics of their materials, chosen precisely because of their expressive abilities: their form, weight, texture and colour. Antunes also defends the organic nature of their form, understood as process and development. Lastly, and as mentioned earlier, these sculptures make apparent their means of construction (through repetition, seriality or geometry) and the gestures that lead to their assemblage (oftentimes elementary gestures, such as tying, folding, hanging, aligning or bending). Hanging from the ceiling or the wall, lying on the floor and illuminated in a way that creates perspectives and contrasts of light and shadows, the sculptures are inscribed within a bodily and temporal present. They refuse to be read through a symbolic content, but rather through the tension that is integral to their form and the extraordinary material density they display. Antunes’s work, like that of Eva Hesse, but also Mira Schendel or Gego, turns sculpture into a space of possibility, a place of habit, the locus for constructing an experience. • Continuing her interest in reproduction and doubling, and the exchange between different systems, in 2008 Antunes (who is Portuguese) travelled to Brazil, a country into which the Portuguese language and architecture were transplanted, and specifically Rio de Janeiro, a city that lived through some of the most intense cultural and political developments of modernity — which has resulted in a rich and complex cultural heritage in architecture, visual arts, cinema, literature and music, thanks to authors such as Mário de Andrade, Flávio de Carvalho, Lucio Costa, Lina Bo Bardi, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Tom Zé, Caetano Veloso and Glauber Rocha. Architectura, which she made during her stay in Brazil, focuses on the idea of an architectural nature, a designed nature, constructed as part of the utopic dream of modernity. The Tijuca Forest is a man-made, urban forest that was declared a nature reserve in 1861; it was planted in the second half of the nineteenth century under the rule of Pedro II as an attempt to bring back some of the natural resources that had been destroyed to make room for coffee farms. With the help of a group of architects and topographers, Antunes set herself the task of measuring a liana, a vine that for her ‘represents a structure within the forest — an architectural space defined by a system of trees’. 5 To treat an organic structure (apparently chaotic, but in fact with a complex and precise internal order) as architecture — in an impulse opposed to architecture’s naturalist tendencies — suggests a mental displacement in both the artist and the viewer that sparks off a heightened internal formal expressiveness of the object. The liana creates a habitat where movement can take place, much like architecture, which Antunes 5

Statement from the Beca de Artes Plásticas Award, Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander, 2008.

Leonor Antunes | 103

also conceives as a physical experience or movement. The resulting work is a sculpture that measures 30 metres in length, made with 600 black threads and 600 needles. The length was determined by the triangulation of an area of the Tijuca Forest; once installed in the gallery, where the initial referent is lost, the sculpture becomes pure texture and materiality. (Given the importance Antunes gives to materials, it would be foolish to ignore the qualities of those that comprise this piece: the fragility of the thread, in contrast to the sharp rigidity of the needles — although this might merely be the result of practical necessity, the need to make the thread tense with the appropriate object.) • In 2004, Antunes was invited to intervene in a former water deposit in the Casa da Cerca, a building that is now the Centro de Arte Contemporânea de Almada in Portugal. As in all of her interventions in specific sites, the space itself determined her approach — not because she makes the work ‘for’ the place, but because she aims to activate the place with her intervention by doing violence to it in order to reveal a tension. For this work titled apotoméus, Antunes also duplicated a real object, in this case a spear that, after being replicated and decontextualised, experienced a radical change in its qualities. Made from a single, solid piece of brass, with another solid stainless-steel piece on one end, Antunes’s spear is too heavy to be thrown. At the Casa da Cerca, she drilled a small orifice into the building, and without warning, dropped the spear from the opening which traversed the two lower floors and landed, vertically, on a pile of sand in the basement.

104 | Afterall

Leonor Antunes, modo de

Leonor Antunes,

usar #14 (how to use #14),

1763—2008, 2008,

2006, engraved wooden

Brazilian/Portuguese

box, copper, copper wing

gold coin dated from

nuts, book, two acrylic

1763, Brazilwood,

protractors, copper

certificate.

lamp. Courtesy the artist

Courtesy the artist

About this work, Antunes has said:

I think about the ‘here and now’, about physical existence and about taking place […] about the way that objects and events merge in space and time, while events are occurrences that stir time up. I’m interested in the idea of the fourth dimension for objects, in the notion that they expand through time as well as space. In meta-physical terms, there is no distinction between the object and the event: both are forms of the same ‘material that inhabits space and time’. Whereas events seem to develop rapidly in time, as [Willard Van Orman] Quine says, objects are relatively ‘solid and internally coherent’. The javelin / object is a potential event and object, as its cutting or piercing action takes place in a period of time, while the end of its movement and its cutting of the space also acts in time…. 6

Apotoméus is resolved through a gesture that is an action without aim. It is not the gesture of the actor who wants to be understood, or the writer who intends to be interpreted. It is merely matter in action, an event that doesn’t mean anything. It only has a life within the spatial and temporal tension it unleashes, in the space it traverses and the time collapsed in imagination and memory — a transcript of that physical and malleable limit that Antunes mentions. 6

‘A propósito de un dardo que vai ser largado para dentro da Cisterna da Casa da Cerca. Entrevista a Leonor Antunes por Catarina Rosendo’, in apotoméus: Leonor Antunes (exh. cat.), Almada: Casa da Cerca, Centro de Arte Contemporânea, 2004, pp.55—56.

Leonor Antunes | 105

In contrast to this radical and almost invisible gesture, another of her works, 1763—2008 (2008), proposes a different approach to condensing time. Also made while in Brazil, 1763—2008 reflects Antunes’s interest in history, the duration of the past and its possible reconstructions in the present in a manner close to Walter Benjamin’s consideration of remembrance when he discusses the sparkles of history that, in the form of an image (here a sculpture), present us with new knowledge. 7 In Rio de Janeiro Antunes bought a gold coin made in 1763, during the rule of King José I. 8 In an iconoclastic gesture, Antunes recast the coin in gold as if to restore it to its original state, and placed it on a wooden block made of Pau-Brasil (or Brazilwood), a type of wood that owes its name to the Portuguese ‘fathers’ (Pau), and which has almost become extinct. The work was completed by a certificate of purchase of the coin. Through the transformation of the coin into simple gold, the effigy as a trace that gave value to the coin and gave form to the economic transactions in the old colonies was erased. This erasure, this absolute denial, constitutes the work and overcomes the connotations of the initial object, placing the object in an expanded time and space. Didi-Huberman has written: ‘Benjamin understood memory not as the possession of what is remembered — a having, a collection of things past — but as an always dialectical approximation to the relation things past have to their place, that is, as the approximation itself to its taking place.’ 9 Leonor Antunes’s sculptures share these anachronisms, that transference of objects in time, these returns. Through her insistence on obsessive formal repetition and precise moments of appearance that outline a singular composition of spaces and times, her sculptures deactivate the routines that we assume in order to help us understand the proprieties and shapes of objects.

7 8 9

Walter Benjamin, ‘Tesis de filosofía de la historia’, Discursos Interrumpidos (trans. Jesus Aguirre), Madrid: Taurus, 1973, p.180. After the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, José I, ruler of Portugal and its colonies — including Brazil — ordered that the gold and silver found in the rubble be turned into coins. G. Didi-Huberman, Lo que vemos, lo que nos mira, op. cit., pp.115—16.

Translated by Pablo Lafuente.

106 | Afterall

107

Events, Works, Exhibitions

109 Flávio de Carvalho: From an Anthropophagic Master Plan to a Tropical Modern Design ­— Inti Guerrero 119 Support Structures: An Interview with Mark Cousins — Céline Condorelli

Flávio de Carvalho, Experiência no.3, 1956, downtown São Paulo. Courtesy the estate

Flávio de Carvalho: From an Anthropophagic Master Plan to a Tropical Modern Design ­— Inti Guerrero

laboratories placed in concentric circles: a teaching centre, a breeding centre, a laboratory of erotica (where inhabitants could exercise their libido without repression), a laboratory of religion (located within the latter) and a

of Flávio de Carvalho

huge research centre where inhabitants could discover the wonders of the universe, the pleasure of life, the ‘enthusiasm to produce things, the desire to change’. 4 These areas of individual creativity, de Carvalho told the participants in the Congress, were absent from their cities and denied to the population in their current bourgeois organisation of labour. Being part of a generation of functionalist and systematic architects who evaluated the In 1930, Brazil’s Antropofagia avant-garde

productivity of their creations through the

group sent the architect Flávio de Carvalho

symbiosis of their form and function, de

as its representative to the IV Pan-American

Carvalho also defended his rhizomatic urban

Congress of Architecture, which took place

composition, one that was meant for the

that year in Rio de Janeiro.1 De Carvalho

tropics, based on the grounds of its efficiency.

(1899—1973), who had returned to Brazil

In his case, however, efficiency was defended

in 1923 after having studied engineering and

by the productivity of people’s energy: de

painting in Durham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne,

Carvalho’s urbanism presupposed an existing

delivered a lecture to the Congress introducing

energy within the subjectivity of the

a master plan for a new city to be built in the

individual, a type of energy coming from a

tropics. His proposal, ‘A cidade do homem

person’s psyche and the impulse of his or her

nu’ (‘The City of the Naked Man’), imagined a

desires, which would be stimulated within

metropolis for the man of the future, which he

the different urban scenarios.

saw as a man without god, without property and without marriage. A ‘naked mankind’ that

Individual and crowd psychology therefore

had stripped itself from its cultural constructs

were major interests within de Carvalho’s

— or in de Carvalho’s words, from ‘scholastic

diverse and multidisciplinary work, which

taboos’ — would be ‘free for reasoning and

included expressionistic portrait painting,

thinking’, and could begin a painstaking

engineering, theatre directing and playwrit-

process of wonderment, change and becoming

ing, amateur anthropology, dance, scenography,

in this new city. 2 In his proposal, de Carvalho

art criticism, journalism, film-making,

also urged the architects participating in the

fashion design and, of course, architecture. His

Congress to understand the anthropophagic

creations were analytical, highly influenced by

nature of their subcontinent on which the

the writings of Sigmund Freud and of the social

city would be built: ‘the City of the Naked Man

anthropologist James Frazer. Freud’s Totem

seeks the resurrection of the primitive, free

and Taboo (1913) and Frazer’s The Golden Bough

from Western taboos […] the savage with all

(1922) were extensively quoted in de Carvalho’s

of its desires, all of its curiosity intact and

own writings as a journalist and author, and

not repressed […] as it was by colonial conquest.

formed a core part of his atheist, iconoclastic

In search for a Naked civilisation!’ 3

secular attitude, which saw traditional religious institutions as a cultural rather than

De Carvalho envisioned this anthropophagic

theological phenomenon. Freud would become

urban utopia as a number of centres and

the basis for Carvalho’s research on crowd

1 2 3 4

108 | Afterall

The term ‘antropofagia’ was used by the Brazilian artist and poet Oswaldo de Andrade (1890—1954), for his ‘Manifesto Antropófago' from 1928. The term, synonymous with cannibalism, was used by Andrade to mean cultural appropriation, a kind of ‘cultural cannibalism’. The Antropofagia avant- garde movement represented the attitude of a group of modern painters, sculptors and writers based in São Paulo who self-consciously mixed and layered references, origins and genealogies within a territory and a population that shared a mixture of indigenous, African and European lineage. ‘Tupi or not Tupi’, the third line of the manifesto, announces this type of unfixed cultural identity: phonetically, the sentence refers to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but the Tupi were the main indigenous population of Brazil. Flávio de Carvalho, ‘A cidade do homem nu’, lecture presented at the Pan-American Congress of Architects in Rio de Janeiro (1930). The lecture was later published as an article in Diario da noite, 1 July 1930, republished by Luiz Carlos Daher, in Flávio de Carvalho: Arquitetura e Expressionismo, São Paulo: Ed. Projeto, 1982, and published in English in Valeska Freitas (ed.), 100 years: Flávio de Carvalho: Revolucionario romantico (exh. cat.), Rio de Janeiro: CCBB, 1999, p.58. Ibid. Ibid.

Flávio de Carvalho: Tropical Modern Design | 109

psychology in relation to the city, modern

reaction to the Government Palace’s

Flávio de Carvalho,

architecture and urbanism — an investigation

destruction three years before: in 1924 an

cover for Experiência

that led to his most intriguing propositions.

uprising led by a military faction sought to

no.2, 1931. Courtesy

overthrow the oligarchic political-electoral

Bacanas Books

City of Anguish

system of the Republica Velha, or Old Republic,

As a journalist for the Rio de Janeiro newspa-

which had been established in Brazil after the

per Diario da noite, and along with literature

abdication of Emperor Pedro II in 1889. Under

critic Geraldo Ferraz (who was the editor of

the Republica Velha, a political coalition of

Revista de Antropofagia), de Carvalho inter-

elites from the states of São Paulo and

viewed Le Corbusier upon his first visit to Rio

Minas Gerais alternated in the position of the

de Janeiro in 1929. 5 During the interview de

presidency. The rebels of what it is now known

Carvalho directed the conversation towards

as the ‘forgotten revolution’ burnt down the

the topic of architecture’s ability to awaken

Louis XIV-pastiche Governmental Palace,

diverse feelings in its users, and focused

popularly known as the ‘Champs-Élysées

especially on the feeling of anguish. 6 Confused

palace’ and were later attacked by air by the

by de Carvalho’s psychological take on

Federal Government, which resulted in the

architecture’s consequences, it is said Le

destruction of two São Paulo neighbourhoods.

Corbusier smiled, 7 perhaps because for him modern architecture was meant to create a

Three years after these events de Carvalho’s

place from where the individual looked out;

Eficácia paradoxically seems to attempt to both

his houses were mechanisms for seeing the

strengthen the political status quo and to expose

world outside, not places for looking in,

its vulnerability. Though Eficácia was not

especially not into one’s subjectivity. 8

chosen by the selection committee, it received an enormous amount of media attention. Its

Prior to Le Corbusier’s 1929 interview,

‘oddity’ sparked controversy and triggered

psychological factors in relation to the

public debate, as it was a clear break with the

efficiency of a modern design had already

tradition of architecture in Brazil and, more

started to become of great importance in

importantly, because it was a hostile building. 9

de Carvalho’s own architectural proposals.

One could say that Eficácia entered the public

An example of this is a 1927 design he made

realm through the debates in the media, despite

in response to an open call to build the new

its not being actually built. It caused anguish

Government Palace in São Paulo, which he

in the public because of its violent vision of a

titled and signed with the pseudonym Eficácia

government that is in a position of self-defense

(Efficiency). His proposal was a fortress

towards an unstable polity, and also for being

constructed from monumental and austere

perhaps a premonition of the repressive

volumes that hosted gun machines, catapults

regimes that were to come.

and a heliport — all of which at first instance had the manifest goal of improving the

Perhaps because his career as an architect

stability of the government. His futuristic

was not going that well — he did not win any

(and militaristic) plan may have been a direct

of the public architecture competitions he

5 6 7 8 9

Le Corbusier was a key figure in the development of modern architecture in Brazil. His esprit nouveau resonated with powerful intellectuals in the country in the early 1930s. He was commissioned to design, with Lucio Costa, a new building for the Ministry of Education and Public Health-MESP in 1936, for which Oscar Niemeyer was an intern. The questionnaire that structured this interview included the following questions to Le Corbusier: ‘1. Do you think architecture is a philosophical problem?; 2. Should architecture be logical? What logic?; 3. Should architecture have colour? Which is the predominant factor: colour, form or the functional idea? What qualifies as pleasant in colour and form? […]; 6. Is that pleasantness subjective or objective?; 7. How to introduce the psychic factor in architecture?; 8. Should the idea of the structure be sacrificed because of the psychic factor or not?; 9. Should the desire to progress grasp humanity or should mankind grasp the desire to progress?’ Geraldo Ferraz and Flávio de Carvalho, Diario da Noite, 24 October 1929. Questions translated by the author. Antonio Carlos Robert Moraes, Flávio de Carvalho, São Paulo: Editora Brasilense, 1986, p.17. In Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1998), Beatriz Colomina compares the experience of the gaze favoured by the architecture of Adolf Loos to that of Le Corbusier: the first keeps the inhabitant’s eyes within the house, experiencing its interiors, so that when you walk through a space in a Loos house you always turn back to see it again. In contrast, Le Corbusier’s houses, because of their ‘horizontal window’ principle, produce a cinematographic perspective from the inside towards the panoramic outdoors. De Carvalho, through his interest in psychology, brings yet another approach to the gaze in modern architecture: the psychological interiority of the individual. Although de Carvalho’s Eficácia is considered a founding moment of modern architecture in Brazil, two years earlier, in 1925, Russian émigré architect Gregori Warchavik wrote the foundational manifesto ‘A cerca da arquitectura moderna’ (‘About Modern Architecture’), and in 1927 he constructed his Casa Modernista in São Paulo, considered the first modern house in Brazil. However, if we take into account the domestic aspirations of Warchavik’s architecture, Eficácia may well be the first truly modern public building in Brazil.

110 | Afterall

overleaf Manchete magazine, 27 October 1956, showing Flávio de Carvalho's New Look: Moda de verão para o novo homem dos trópicos (New Look: Summer Fashion for a New Man of the Tropics), 1956. Courtesy Bacanas Books

Flávio de Carvalho: Tropical Modern Design | 111

112 | Afterall

Flávio de Carvalho: Tropical Modern Design | 113

participated in 10 — in the 1930s de Carvalho

place where 25 years later, in 1956, de Carvalho

began to analyse crowd psychology more

staged his next Experiência, this time bringing

directly and with greater economy of means

together performance, his architectural

than in his architectural proposals. He

utopian desires and fashion.

initiated a series of actions he called Experiências, which could be considered art perform-

Tropical Modernity

ances avant la lettre. The first known one,

Splitting his time between his modernist

dating from 1931 and titled Experiência no.2, 11

farmhouse on the outskirts of São Paulo and

took place early in the morning during a Corpus

his accelerating cultural and social life in the

Christi procession in São Paulo’s city centre. De

city, by the 1950s de Carvalho was an active

Carvalho ‘infiltrated’ the procession without

and leading figure of the modern art movement

removing his cap, thereby demonstrating

in Brazil. He co-founded the Club of Modern

disrespect to the religious ceremony. Stared at

Artists (where concerts, artist's talks and

with anger by the Catholic devotees, he began

exhibitions were held), founded and directed

to walk against the direction of the crowd,

the short-living Theatre of Experience and even

leering libidinously at the women taking part

represented Brazil in the 25th Venice Biennale

in the procession. Ultimately a group of men

(1950) with a series of paintings. However,

began chasing him while the crowd chanted

it was not until 1956 that he created his

‘Lyncha! Lyncha! ’ (‘Lynch him! Lynch him!’);

Experiência no.3. In this case, de Carvalho

he took refuge on the rooftop of a café until

deemed the dress code for male office workers

the police arrived and took him to the station,

in São Paulo — a pair of trousers, a matching

where he was released after explaining to the

blazer, a long-sleeved collared shirt and a tie

officers that he was simply analysing crowd

— inappropriate for the high temperatures and

psychology. Months later, in order to leave

humid conditions of the tropical metropolis,

a record of Experiência no.2, de Carvalho

especially during summer. His main concern

published an artist’s book that included a text

was the unhygienic conditions caused by a

in which he discussed the emotional crescendo

regular suit’s enclosed design, which trapped

of the religious crowd (again leaning heavily

the body’s sweat within the heavy clothing’s

on the writings of Freud and Frazer), and

texture. De Carvalho’s solution was culturally,

the way in which his irreverent act led them

economically and climatically specific: a

to abandon their secular, civilian ethics for

two-piece suit consisting of a white pleated

unbridled vigilantism. As he writes, Experiên-

miniskirt and a black, red or yellow striped

cia no.2 intended ‘to reveal the soul of believers

short-sleeved blouse, with holes in its armpits

through a mechanism that made it possible

and an inner-wire corseting structure that

to study their physiognomic reactions, their

separated the thin cloth from the torso of the

gestures, walk, gaze; in summary, to feel the

person wearing it. The design of the suit also

environment’s pulse, to psychically touch

included a removable neck cloth to garnish

the tempestuous emotion of the collective

the blouse, fishnet stockings (to cover varicose

soul, to register the expression of that emotion,

veins) and raw leather sandals. Titled after

to provoke revolt in order to see something

a Christian Dior haute couture advertisement,

of the unconscious.’ 12 De Carvalho’s text

de Carvalho’s New Look: Moda de verão para

Flávio de Carvalho,

was accompanied by a series of illustrations

o novo homem dos trópicos (New Look: Summer

drawing for New Look:

recounting the different moments of the

Fashion for a New Man of the Tropics) enabled

Summer Fashion for a

street action, interspersed with surreal and

the free circulation of air around the body.

New Man of the Tropics,

expressionistic drawings that interpreted

As the schematic figure from his sketches

1956. Courtesy the estate

the feelings of anguish, fear and repulsion

suggests, body temperature would vary

of Flávio de Carvalho

experienced by those devout worshippers who

according to the velocity with which air

eagerly called for de Carvalho to be killed. The

came in and out of the suit; it was designed

street — ‘the only region of valid experience’

‘to function as a pump or a valve to pump air

as André Breton would say 13 — was again the

[…] with only three arm movements air would

10 11 12 13

114 | Afterall

De Carvalho did build two architectural projects, but they both were private houses. One is known as Alameda Lorena (1936) and another, his own country home, Fazenda Capauva (1929). Flávio de Carvalho’s biography O comedor da emoções (São Paulo: Unicampi 1994), written by his friend J. Toledo, and the book Flávio de Carvalho by Antonio Carlos Robert Moraes speculate over what would have been Experiência no.1. According to both, Experiência no.1 may have been a public action at a social event during which de Carvalho faked choking to death. ‘[D]esvendar a alma dos crentes por meio de um reagente qualquer que permitisse estudar a reação nas fisionomias, nos gestos, no passo, no olhar, sentir enfim o pulso do ambiente, palpar psiquicamente a emoção tempestuosa da alma coletiva, registrar o escoamento dessa emoção, provocar a revolta para ver alguma coisa do inconsciente’. Flávio de Carvalho, Experiência no.2, Rio de Janeiro: Nau, 2001. Translation the author’s. André Breton, Nadja (trans. Richard Howard), New York: Grove Press, 1960, p.113.

Flávio de Carvalho: From Master Plan to a Tropical Modern Design | 115

be refreshed’. 14 The outfit was a mechanical

biological implications of the use of curves

between the New Look and the parangolé is that

to a certain extent by the Costa-Niemeyer-Marx

symbiosis of body and clothing, form and

or straight lines in fashion. De Carvalho

Oiticica’s corporal experience, although highly

tradition, clearly belonged to a hegemonic

function, as if it were one of Le Corbusier’s

speculated, for example, on the number of

influenced by the social components of his

language that had expanded worldwide

machines à habiter: cheap to fabricate, easy

layers in women’s skirts as a sign of fecundity,

surroundings and even performed within

precisely because its austere symbiosis of form

to wash and dry, fitting both the fat and the

in relation to the need to increase or decrease

his vernacular context, did not seek to modify

and function was a-contextual. De Carvalho,

skinny and, last but not least, with ‘vivid

procreation; or he associated the adoption

it directly. In contrast, de Carvalho, with his

by contrast, modified the architecture of

colours that would restrain desires of

of the same waistline height and the use of

tropical modern design clothing, sought to

the body through a modern design that was

aggression, avoiding wars’. 15

the same fabrics in male and female fashion

modify behaviour by acting upon the everyday,

conceived specifically for the new man of

in certain historical periods to the abolishment

by introducing what, according to him, was an

the tropics. Despite not realising his master

On 18 October 1956 de Carvalho launched

of a gender division of labour. His intent was

adequate design for the modern tropical man.

plan for a ‘City of the Naked Man’, with the

this tropical futuristic outerwear in the same

that by the time the New Look was presented

De Carvalho’s functional and efficient suit

New Look and Experiência no.3 he succeeded

streets of São Paulo where years before there

to the public, it would be legitimised by his

subverted social conventions but, at the same

in undressing the city, freeing those who

had been calls to lynch him whilst performing

published argumentation. Rather than

time, was based on one of modernity’s main

followed him from ‘scholastic taboos’ in

Experiência no.2. This time he strolled through

portraying it as the development or logical

subtexts, hygiene. The improvement of

their contemporary urbanity.

the city centre wearing, or rather cross-

conclusion of Western fashion, de Carvalho

hygienic conditions justified the fundaments

dressing into, his New Look, followed peace-

claimed it was the result of a deconstruction

of modern design, architecture and urbanism,

fully by an amused crowed composed largely of

of this tradition and its normativity. The

which sought to regulate and standardise

businessmen. The walk in the financial

New Look was derived through a sophisticated

urban and domestic space; homogenising and

district of São Paulo included a stop for coffee

process of quotation, appropriation and

medicalising life. 21 Perhaps de Carvalho used

and a fifteen-minute visit to a cinema that had

cultural cannibalism (i.e. Antropofagia)

hygiene in an ironic manner in order to defend

a strict jacket-and-tie dress code, and concluded

that synthesised various historical fashion

the functional efficiency of his dress, which

at the headquarters of the media enterprise

archetypes, leading to this transgendered,

was both liberating and emancipatory but

Diarios Associados, where, standing on a table,

transgressive, primitively modern and

at the same time normative, as the New Look

de Carvalho gave a press conference explaining

functional tropical suit.

also seems to have been designed as a kind

the qualities and advantages of his creation.

of uniform for the future in the tropics. The New Look, with its attempt at psycho-

The launch of the New Look had been announced

logical and socio-cultural transformation

The year de Carvalho introduced his New

months before through the media, including a

through the suit’s bright colours and ‘simple’

Look was also the year that the newly elected

Time magazine article titled ‘Brave New Look’,

forms, suggests de Carvalho as a precursor of

president of Brazil, Juscelino Kubitschek,

in which de Carvalho was quoted as saying:

Neo-Concretists such as Lygia Clark and Lygia

began plans for the flagship of his radical

‘When people realise that my new style is not

Pape. 18 Indeed the use of cloth in his design and

modernisation programme: the new federal

only more cheerful, edifying and comfortable

the performative aspect of his Experiência no.3

capital, Brasilia. A brand-new metropolis was

but economical too, everybody will try it. I

directly connect it to Neo-Concretist corporal

to be built in the tropics, with an architectural

will have liberated mankind from a depressing

experiences, and perhaps even more to Hélio

language that was a far cry from the anthro-

slavery.’ 16 Since March of the same year,

Oiticica and his parangolés, which date from

pophagic urban plans of de Carvalho’s ‘A cidade

de Carvalho had also published 39 articles

1964 onwards. However, it is important to

do homem nu’. Brasilia, conceived by the

under his weekly column ‘House, Man and

underline that the cultural transgression of

urbanist Lucio Costa and built in collaboration

Landscape’ in Diario de São Paulo newspaper,

de Carvalho’s outfit was different from the

with Oscar Niemeyer and landscape architect

where he wrote a ‘universal history of fashion’.

sensual and poetical one of Oiticica’s capes. The

Burle Marx, appeared as the end product

Going from the Neanderthals to his New Look,

New Look sexualised the male body not

of a history of official Brazilian modern

and mostly dealing with Western references,

by an abstract ‘stimulation’ of its sensuality, 19

architecture, which by 1956 had already

every article was illustrated with miniature

but by subverting the cultural signs of

been internationally celebrated. 22 The state

silhouette drawings of human figures copied

gender division: by dressing a man in the

endorsement of a modernist vision through

from historical paintings and archaeological

cultural codes of women he is simultaneously

the construction of Brasilia seems paradoxical,

artefacts which de Carvalho had seen in

transformed into a desired, feminised body

intending to create a national identity through

European museums. 17 The recurrent narrative

that exteriorises its sexuality by virtue of its

the implementation of the international

throughout the articles was the cultural and

exposure. 20 But perhaps the greatest difference

architectural style. This style, even though it had been locally appropriated and adapted

14 15 16 17 18 19

From the writing on Flávio de Carvalho’s sketch drawing of the New Look. Translation the author’s. Ibid. ‘Brave New Look’, Time, 25 June 1956, p.30. Between August 1934 and February 1935, after having delivered a lecture at the VIII International Congress of Psychotechnique in Prague, de Carvalho travelled throughout Europe. His notes and drawings made during that period became the foundation for ‘House, Man and Landscape’, and were also printed in his book Os ossos do mundo (Rio de Janeiro: Ariel, 1936; republished by Editora Antiqua in São Paulo in 2005). The book narrates his departure from São Paulo, conversations with intellectuals at bars in London, his quest to interview the King of Gypsies and the Nazi participation at the congress in Prague, amongst other subjects. The ‘Manifesto neoconcreto’ (‘Neo-Concretist Manifesto’) was published in the Jornal do Brasil in March 1959. ‘Already Hélio's earliest parangolé capes, as clothing, are by nature transsexual. They have no attachment to conventional signs of either masculinity or femininity. […] Gay sexuality could be traced in his work, but all his proposals related to sexuality seem to be non-divisive, transexual.’ Guy Brett, ‘The Experimental Exercise of Liberty', in Hélio Oiticica (exh. cat.), Rotterdam: Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, 1992, p.233.

116 | Afterall

20 21 22

In 1956, a woman’s skirt would reach roughly below the knee. By ‘modern architecture' I do not only refer to the historical avant-gardes where de Carvalho’s utopias can be located, but also, to the great civic reforms which purified urban and domestic space (i.e. eighteenth-century sewage) where hygiene was used within the discourse of progress, creating social, racial and religious divisions. ‘What emerges during the last decades of the 18th century is a “curing machine” [machine à guérir] […] a technology of power that allows a whole knowledge of the individual, but through this also a new form of individuation to take place. The forms of architecture have to reflect in the most precise way the new forms of techniques for assessing and determining health (to separate, but also to allow for ciculation, survelliance, classification, etc.).’ Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Essays, Lectures, Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007, p.384. During the first mandate of Getulio Vargas (1930—45), architects Costa and Niemeyer built the Brazilian pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair in an austere modern language, showing to an international audience that Brazil was modern and progressive. In 1943, the Museum of Modern Art of New York endorsed Brazil’s specific take on what the museum itself had coined as the ‘international style’ by programming the exhibition ‘Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1652—1942’.

Flávio de Carvalho: From Master Plan to a Tropical Modern Design | 117

Céline Condorelli, Support Structure 7, 2006, print, dimensions

Support Structures: An Interview with Mark Cousins — Céline Condorelli

might call fantasy, and how we imagine them as a consequence of that in reality. I partly think as a consequence of the way in which our

variable. After

fantasies work, we have an abiding preference

Oliver Chanarin and

for thinking of objects as freestanding, or

Adam Broomberg.

independent.

Courtesy the artist

I have sometimes asked students to close their eyes and think of an object in space. It is very interesting, because when you ask them to describe their fantasy in words, they will often say that they imagine a very simple object, quite often a kind of elementary, Platonic object like a sphere, a triangle or a cube. And it is in the middle distance. The following interview took place in

Sometimes, in order to give it a more real

preparation for the reader Support Structures

aspect, they mention a horizon which maybe

(2009), a manual of things which can bear,

cuts at the back. But this is not about drawing,

sustain, prop or hold. 1 While the work of

this is about fantasy, which is always in

supporting might traditionally appear as

relationship to a point of view. What the

subsequent, unessential and lacking value

fantasy reveals precisely is that one is one’s

in itself, this manual attempts to restore

own point of view. Moreover, I think it is

attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial

the minor aspects of such stories that are often

modes through which we apprehend and

of greatest interest. It is the fact that, for

shape the world. Mark Cousins is Director

example, the object is in the middle distance.

of Histories and Theory at the Architectural

What the middle distance signifies here is that

Association, London, and has spoken and

the object is not so close as to impose upon a

written on the relation of the human sciences

subject, to the point where it might begin to

and psychoanalysis. Here he identifies support

overrun your own perception. It seems to be

as what philosophers call the condition of

important that the field of vision should take

something, and discusses it not with the aim of

in the whole object at once, and for that to be

spelling out the actual concepts one would need

the case it is likely that the object is in the

to think through a new subject, but rather to

middle distance. The horizon appears because

outline a framework for thinking those out,

it enables the fantasy that the object is

and start establishing an entirely new set of

standing on a ground, though the ground here

terms which could be appropriate to a position

is somewhere between a physical ground and

like that proposed by support.

an abstract ground. It is a notional ground as it is simply projected at the back of the object.

Céline Condorelli:

This is where the meaning of a ground bisects

Scaffolding is a temporary framework used

both its logical sense as being the support

to support people and material; it is both a

of an argument and its physical sense of

clear and visible example of what we may call

being grounded.

structures of support. Scaffolding can occur before as well as after the making of architec-

Now if this a very simple fantasy of an object,

ture, and as such exists against it in an

it already shows us that the fantasy wishes

uncomfortable proximity, next to but never

to ignore something. What is interesting

intrinsic to a building itself. Scaffolding

about the interpretation of a fantasy is that

touches on and cooperates from a certain

you can interpret what is not there, but should

exterior position. Scaffolding can hold a

be. That is to say that there is nothing in the

building and a city together, and in that way

fantasy that shows the object has the means of

maintain them on the brink of impending

being supported, and yet that must be implied:

disaster and collapse. What is the relationship

hence the ambivalence of the ground. The object

between object and support?

should be supported by the tectonics of its structure, whereas the fantasy just imagines

Mark Cousins:

the cube without having any interest as to

To try and clarify this question, we might

whether the cube has attributes that will

contrast how we imagine things in what you

enable it to stand.

1

118 | Afterall

Support Structures (2009) by Céline Condorelli was co-produced with
Support Structure (Céline Condorelli & Gavin Wade) and James Langdon, and published by Sternberg Press.

An Interview with Mark Cousins | 119

It seems to me that it is at this point that you

CC:

Céline Condorelli,

can realistically bring in the other condition,

What is being produced and what is being

Support Structure 5,

which is of the body. I am not speaking in

supported?

2006, print, dimensions

terms of phenomenology here — because I am

variable. After

not particularly sympathetic to it — but I can

MC:

Oliver Chanarin and

think of architectural historians or thinkers

Once you have said that an object always has

Adam Broomberg.

who express this condition directly, such as

a system of support, we can think about that

Courtesy the artist

Heinrich Wölfflin, the nineteenth-century

in terms of its physicality. But the more the

art historian, who says at the beginning of his

support seems secondary, supplementary and

paper on a theory of architecture: ‘I can only

external to the object, the more it opens beyond

understand architecture on the condition that

the field of the structural into the field of what

I have a body.’ 2 What he means is that the body

you might call the discursive. To put it very

is not only itself an object, but also a kind of

crudely, people first of all have to accept that

instrument. The body of the subject, as it were,

the object is there and not destroy it. That

literally goes out into the world and feels

constitutes an invisible form of support for the

the form of something, which can be that of

building, so you could even argue that in order

a building. This is the body as architectural

for a building to stand up it should not violate

critic, and this statement allows you to

certain social norms. Sometimes objects raise

differentiate between architectural styles

enormous objections; I suppose the two obvious

by thinking of them as different forms of

ways in which this happens are in relation-

bodily deportment. This is why clothes are so

ship to religious or hygienic norms. If the

important for Wölfflin; they are like interme-

object is thought to violate the place, then

diaries between the body and objects. Gothic

people will destroy it or have it removed.

clothes were crucial for him to understand

The point surely is that the issue of support,

Gothic form.

even if it starts as a construction of a supplement, is a notion that leads onto the word

But in order to address the question of what

‘support’ as having a double signification: on

a support is, let’s move to a proposition: all

the one hand, it is support as a kind of tectonic

bodies must have support, in the most general

metaphor, and on the other hand, it refers

sense, in order to stand up. Support here is a

to social or intellectual acceptance.

consequence of gravity. We tend to think that gravity is a simple force and yet we take it for

CC:

granted in architecture. Of course, what you

Does this have any relationship to agency?

are looking for here is precisely those things that are taken for granted. The consequence of

MC:

gravity, in respect to the fantasy we discussed

Well, different agents will have different

above, is that you can only imagine those

relations. Maybe we should look at scaffolding

objects if they are capable of bearing the load

structures to think further. Scaffolding itself

of their form. You can express this in a number

isn’t primarily a form of support; it is part of

of ways. In any case, you can say there is no such

the process of construction, and far from being

thing as an object without a supplementary

a support for the building, it is a means to

dimension of support. That can be thought of

get the building in a position in which it is

architecturally in terms of the tectonics of

able to support itself. It is a platform to a

the building, but those tectonics themselves

construction, essentially based on the subject’s

constitute a kind of supplement to the object,

or the builder’s relation to gravity. Without

so that it is not possible to determine whether

it you could not build above your own height.

a flying buttress is a support of the building or

What scaffolding does is open up the issue

part of the building — what’s the difference?

of support, and what we are moving towards slowly is the idea of scaffolding as the means

So we have already established a problematic,

for an object to enter into a certain kind of

which is that the very notion of an object

subjectivity. The scaffold is initially a

requires its support in one way or another. This

subjective object, because it is not a support for

might be internal and invisible, or it might be

the building; it is a prosthesis for the builder.

because the object as such provides the means of

But then when the integrity of the building

supporting. Or those supports may become more

is at stake, it becomes a kind of artificial limb,

and more differentiated from the object itself.

something like a prosthesis for the building,

2

Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur’, doctoral thesis, Munich: University of Munich, 1886. Also published in Kleine Schriften (ed. Joseph Gantner), Basel: Schwabe, 1946. Mark Cousins’s paraphrase.

120 | Afterall

An Interview with Mark Cousins | 121

Contributors

Céline Condorelli

and it is then a different use of scaffolding —

from the ‘real’ object. I think a lot of people

essentially as a kind of buttress. Scaffolding

are relieved when they see scaffolding come

Céline Condorelli works with art and

functions in general to hold stuff up. Scaffold-

down, a feeling of ‘Oh, it’s all right’. It is one’s

architecture, is the author/editor of Support

ing as such repeats the same technique in

unconscious fantasy that if something has

Structures (Sternberg Press, 2009) and one

construction as buttresses, but fulfils an

been put under scaffolding it must be in danger.

of the founding directors of Eastside Projects,

entirely different function. We think of

We do not like admitting that objects have

Birmingham. Recent exhibitions include

scaffolding as temporary. I remember being

conditions. The most obvious example is in

commissions for ‘Generosity Is the New

struck by this after seeing an office building

painting, when it becomes conventional to

Political’ at Wysing Arts, Cambridge,

in Karachi that was so badly built that it had

say in the fifteenth century that a painting is

and ‘And the Columns Held Us Up’ at Artists

fallen down. It was not inhabited, but the

like a window on the world, which allows one

Space, New York (2009), ‘Park Nights’ at

scaffolding surrounding it was still there.

to account for and then repress the problem of

the Serpentine Gallery, London (2009) and

The scaffolding was obviously quite well

the edge of the painting. This belief continues

‘Far-West’ at Arnolfini, Bristol (2008),

done as everything else just crumbled. That is

until Kant’s great definition of the art object,

amongst others. Long-term projects include

particularly interesting because the question

which not only posits the frame as exterior

developing Support Structure phase 1—10

arises of why we experience scaffolding as

to the painting, but almost uses it to deframe

temporary when it is often in place for years.

or disframe within the painting.

Scaffolding looks temporary because the

Ellen Blumenstein

with artist-curator Gavin Wade, and, previously, taxi_onomy with artist Beatrice

From 1998 to 2005 Ellen Blumenstein

Gibson. Condorelli has been teaching since

appearance of the scaffolding is not the same as

It would be interesting to think about objects

worked as a curator for KW — Institute for

2000 (University of East London, London

the order. Scaffolding is very close to percep-

where you cannot really distinguish the

Contemporary Art, Berlin, where she initiated

Metropolitan University) and is a PhD

tion itself — the moment we see it, we separate

object from the support, in any sense. We want

and co-curated the project ‘Regarding Terror:

candidate in Research Architecture,

it from the building and then we contextualise

the object to be independent and freestanding,

The RAF Exhibition’ (2005). She has since

Goldsmiths, London.

it and reconnect it to the building. And we do

but it never is. There are either logical or

curated ‘Between Two Deaths’ at ZKM — Center

that in order to keep a clear distinction in our

real conditions, or constructed ones. This

for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (with Felix

Doris von Drathen

heads between building and support. Reading

is really an explanation of why we always

Ensslin, 2007), and organised the summer

The Paris-based German art historian Doris

the scaffolding as temporary — which is one

resist thought, because thinking through this

academy ‘Agulhas Negras — On the Necessity of

von Drathen is the author of Vortex of Silence:

way of trying to undercut it — goes back to the

problem means revealing a state of complexity

Discussing Social Functions of Contemporary

An Art Criticism Beyond Aesthetic Categories

fantasy of the object as freestanding. What the

that we like to think is not there. So the whole

Art’ in São Paulo/Campos do Jordão, Brazil

(Charta, 2004), where she develops her own

scaffolding does is unconsciously remind us of

problem of support stands at a conflict between

(with Carla Zaccagnini, 2008), amongst others.

method of perception, by extending Warburg’s

the muddle of the world, which we do not like

perception and analysis. What you see is not

In 2009, she founded the curatorial collective

ideas of iconology to the invisible image in

to think of; what we are trying to preserve is

what you get.

The Office together with Katharina Fichtner,

contemporary art. She is also the author of a

Maribel Lopez and Kathrin Meyer. Its goal is

number of monographs, including Rebecca Horn

CC:

to re-discover the city, to channel and transmit

(Hatje-Cantz, 2005), Pat Steir and Rui Chafes

CC:

What is the difference between support

information and to provide space for discursive

(Charta 2006 and 2008), and is in the process

How does scaffolding affect the subject that

structures and infrastructures?

thinking in constantly changing settings.

of publishing a monograph on Jannis Kounellis

MC:

Jean-Louis Comolli

Infrastructure is a special case of support

Organiser of the ciné-club of Algiers (1959

the Architectural Association in London,

MC:

structure. What you mean normally in

—60). Cinephile at Henri Langlois’s

Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and since

If we go back to the original fantasy, why is

architecture is the plumbing, drains, electric-

cinémathèque in the rue d’Ulm (1961—1963)

2007 at the École Spéciale d´Architecture

it that we prefer an ideal freestanding object

ity conduits, etc. What is interesting is the

and later at Chaillot in Paris. Began at Cahiers

in Paris.

and why do we not like the apparatus of support

long history of the repression of infrastructure

du cinéma in 1962. Editor-in-chief from 1965

to be visible? It is interesting to maintain,

from architectural drawing. Why not include

to 1973. Directed La Cecilia (1975), L’Ombre

for as long as possible, the idea of support as

it? Here one has to go back to the arguments

rouge (1981), Balles perdues (1982), followed

combining what you might call a construc-

of Jacques Derrida, who showed over and over

by more than forty documentaries, including

tional sense and what you might call a logical

again that objects need supplements in order

a series about the political battles in Marseille:

sense — what philosophers would call the

to function. His argument was that the picture

Marseille contre Marseille (1989—2001).

condition of something. Our desire to

needs the frame to function as a picture.

Taught at l’IDHEC and then Femis, in Paris;

immediately decouple the idea of support from

And you could say that idealisations of objects

in Barcelona; Belo Horizonte; Buenos Aires;

the idea of the building is partly based on the

in general try to repress the supplement, the

Strasbourg; Geneva. Published Voir et pouvoir

wish to maintain our own body as a free object.

scaffold. It seems to be that scaffolding is quite

in 2004, and, in 2009, Cinéma contre spectacle

It is a reaction, almost in horror, at needing

a nice architectural term that corresponds

(Verdier). Writes in Images documentaires

scaffolding to keep us going. It is what Freud

to Derrida’s idea of the supplement. And the

and Trafic.

would call hysterical identification. The

analysis of any object always implies showing

example that Wölfflin gives is that you go

their complicity with all the supplementary

to a concert and someone starts coughing and

machines and mechanisms that support them.

immediately you want to cough as well.

The attributes we like to fantasise about

the ideological, the ideal.

experiences it? Is it a process of subjectification, about making objects into subjects?

(Charta). She has taught at the École des hautes études and the École des beaux arts in Paris,

are also the ones we would like to think of In a sense that happens with a building when

as relating to ourselves. And we don’t like

you feel compelled to separate the scaffolding

any supplement to that.

122 | Afterall

Contributors | 123

Contributors

Céline Condorelli

and it is then a different use of scaffolding —

from the ‘real’ object. I think a lot of people

essentially as a kind of buttress. Scaffolding

are relieved when they see scaffolding come

Céline Condorelli works with art and

functions in general to hold stuff up. Scaffold-

down, a feeling of ‘Oh, it’s all right’. It is one’s

architecture, is the author/editor of Support

ing as such repeats the same technique in

unconscious fantasy that if something has

Structures (Sternberg Press, 2009) and one

construction as buttresses, but fulfils an

been put under scaffolding it must be in danger.

of the founding directors of Eastside Projects,

entirely different function. We think of

We do not like admitting that objects have

Birmingham. Recent exhibitions include

scaffolding as temporary. I remember being

conditions. The most obvious example is in

commissions for ‘Generosity Is the New

struck by this after seeing an office building

painting, when it becomes conventional to

Political’ at Wysing Arts, Cambridge,

in Karachi that was so badly built that it had

say in the fifteenth century that a painting is

and ‘And the Columns Held Us Up’ at Artists

fallen down. It was not inhabited, but the

like a window on the world, which allows one

Space, New York (2009), ‘Park Nights’ at

scaffolding surrounding it was still there.

to account for and then repress the problem of

the Serpentine Gallery, London (2009) and

The scaffolding was obviously quite well

the edge of the painting. This belief continues

‘Far-West’ at Arnolfini, Bristol (2008),

done as everything else just crumbled. That is

until Kant’s great definition of the art object,

amongst others. Long-term projects include

particularly interesting because the question

which not only posits the frame as exterior

developing Support Structure phase 1—10

arises of why we experience scaffolding as

to the painting, but almost uses it to deframe

temporary when it is often in place for years.

or disframe within the painting.

Scaffolding looks temporary because the

Ellen Blumenstein

with artist-curator Gavin Wade, and, previously, taxi_onomy with artist Beatrice

From 1998 to 2005 Ellen Blumenstein

Gibson. Condorelli has been teaching since

appearance of the scaffolding is not the same as

It would be interesting to think about objects

worked as a curator for KW — Institute for

2000 (University of East London, London

the order. Scaffolding is very close to percep-

where you cannot really distinguish the

Contemporary Art, Berlin, where she initiated

Metropolitan University) and is a PhD

tion itself — the moment we see it, we separate

object from the support, in any sense. We want

and co-curated the project ‘Regarding Terror:

candidate in Research Architecture,

it from the building and then we contextualise

the object to be independent and freestanding,

The RAF Exhibition’ (2005). She has since

Goldsmiths, London.

it and reconnect it to the building. And we do

but it never is. There are either logical or

curated ‘Between Two Deaths’ at ZKM — Center

that in order to keep a clear distinction in our

real conditions, or constructed ones. This

for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (with Felix

Doris von Drathen

heads between building and support. Reading

is really an explanation of why we always

Ensslin, 2007), and organised the summer

The Paris-based German art historian Doris

the scaffolding as temporary — which is one

resist thought, because thinking through this

academy ‘Agulhas Negras — On the Necessity of

von Drathen is the author of Vortex of Silence:

way of trying to undercut it — goes back to the

problem means revealing a state of complexity

Discussing Social Functions of Contemporary

An Art Criticism Beyond Aesthetic Categories

fantasy of the object as freestanding. What the

that we like to think is not there. So the whole

Art’ in São Paulo/Campos do Jordão, Brazil

(Charta, 2004), where she develops her own

scaffolding does is unconsciously remind us of

problem of support stands at a conflict between

(with Carla Zaccagnini, 2008), amongst others.

method of perception, by extending Warburg’s

the muddle of the world, which we do not like

perception and analysis. What you see is not

In 2009, she founded the curatorial collective

ideas of iconology to the invisible image in

to think of; what we are trying to preserve is

what you get.

The Office together with Katharina Fichtner,

contemporary art. She is also the author of a

Maribel Lopez and Kathrin Meyer. Its goal is

number of monographs, including Rebecca Horn

CC:

to re-discover the city, to channel and transmit

(Hatje-Cantz, 2005), Pat Steir and Rui Chafes

CC:

What is the difference between support

information and to provide space for discursive

(Charta 2006 and 2008), and is in the process

How does scaffolding affect the subject that

structures and infrastructures?

thinking in constantly changing settings.

of publishing a monograph on Jannis Kounellis

MC:

Jean-Louis Comolli

Infrastructure is a special case of support

Organiser of the ciné-club of Algiers (1959

the Architectural Association in London,

MC:

structure. What you mean normally in

—60). Cinephile at Henri Langlois’s

Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and since

If we go back to the original fantasy, why is

architecture is the plumbing, drains, electric-

cinémathèque in the rue d’Ulm (1961—1963)

2007 at the École Spéciale d´Architecture

it that we prefer an ideal freestanding object

ity conduits, etc. What is interesting is the

and later at Chaillot in Paris. Began at Cahiers

in Paris.

and why do we not like the apparatus of support

long history of the repression of infrastructure

du cinéma in 1962. Editor-in-chief from 1965

to be visible? It is interesting to maintain,

from architectural drawing. Why not include

to 1973. Directed La Cecilia (1975), L’Ombre

for as long as possible, the idea of support as

it? Here one has to go back to the arguments

rouge (1981), Balles perdues (1982), followed

combining what you might call a construc-

of Jacques Derrida, who showed over and over

by more than forty documentaries, including

tional sense and what you might call a logical

again that objects need supplements in order

a series about the political battles in Marseille:

sense — what philosophers would call the

to function. His argument was that the picture

Marseille contre Marseille (1989—2001).

condition of something. Our desire to

needs the frame to function as a picture.

Taught at l’IDHEC and then Femis, in Paris;

immediately decouple the idea of support from

And you could say that idealisations of objects

in Barcelona; Belo Horizonte; Buenos Aires;

the idea of the building is partly based on the

in general try to repress the supplement, the

Strasbourg; Geneva. Published Voir et pouvoir

wish to maintain our own body as a free object.

scaffold. It seems to be that scaffolding is quite

in 2004, and, in 2009, Cinéma contre spectacle

It is a reaction, almost in horror, at needing

a nice architectural term that corresponds

(Verdier). Writes in Images documentaires

scaffolding to keep us going. It is what Freud

to Derrida’s idea of the supplement. And the

and Trafic.

would call hysterical identification. The

analysis of any object always implies showing

example that Wölfflin gives is that you go

their complicity with all the supplementary

to a concert and someone starts coughing and

machines and mechanisms that support them.

immediately you want to cough as well.

The attributes we like to fantasise about

the ideological, the ideal.

experiences it? Is it a process of subjectification, about making objects into subjects?

(Charta). She has taught at the École des hautes études and the École des beaux arts in Paris,

are also the ones we would like to think of In a sense that happens with a building when

as relating to ourselves. And we don’t like

you feel compelled to separate the scaffolding

any supplement to that.

122 | Afterall

Contributors | 123

Nuria Enguita Mayo

Terry R. Myers

Nuria Enguita Mayo is a co-editor of Afterall.

Terry R. Myers is a writer and independent

She is part of the programme arteypensamiento

curator based in Chicago and Los Angeles,

at the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía

and Associate Professor of Painting & Drawing

and of the curatorial team for the next

at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Encuentro de Medellín 2011. From 1998 to

He is the author of Mary Heilmann: Save

2008 she was chief curator at Fundació Antoni

the Last Dance for Me (Afterall Books, 2007)

Tàpies, where she organised exhibitions

and editor of Painting (Whitechapel Gallery

of the work of Chris Marker, Renée Green,

and The MIT Press, forthcoming 2011).

Victor Burgin, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina and Jon Mikel Euba, amongst others. She was a

Volker Pantenburg

co-curator of Manifesta 4, Frankfurt, 2002.

Volker Pantenburg lives in Berlin and works

Inti Guerrero

at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy

Inti Guerrero is an art critic and curator born

(IKKM) / Bauhaus University, Weimar.

in Bogotá, Colombia and based in Amsterdam.

He has published the books Film als Theorie:

He studied History and Theory of Art &

Bildforschung bei Harun Farocki und Jean-Luc

Architecture, and General History at Universi-

Godard (2006) and Ränder des Kinos: Godard —

dad de Los Andes in Colombia and Universidade

Wiseman — Benning — Costa (2010). In 2006,

de São Paulo in Brazil. He is a former curatorial

he co-edited Minutentexte. The Night of the

fellow of de Appel’s Curatorial Programme and

Hunter, in which 93 film critics, actors,

former Curator-in-Residence at Fondazione

directors, film historians and theoreticians

Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and Capacete

each write about one individual minute of

Entretenimentos in Rio de Janeiro.

Charles Laughton’s only work as a director.

Kobena Mercer

Dieter Roelstraete

Kobena Mercer writes and teaches on the

Dieter Roelstraete is a co-editor of Afterall,

visual arts of the black diaspora. He is an

curator at M HKA, Antwerp, and a contributing

inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize

editor to A Prior magazine. He has written

for Excellence in Arts Writing and was

extensively on contemporary art and related

Reader in Art History and Diaspora Studies

philosophical issues. He is also a tutor at

at Middlesex University, London, and Visiting

de Appel Curatorial Training Programme

Professor at the Center for African American

in Amsterdam and at Piet Zwart Institute

Studies at Princeton University in spring 2009.

in Rotterdam. He currently lives in Berlin.

In addition to Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994), he is

Pedro G. Romero

the author of monographs on James Van Der Zee,

Pedro G. Romero is an artist. He is part

Isaac Julien, Adrian Piper and Rotimi Fani-

of the PRPC (Plataforma de Reflexión de

Kayode. He is series editor of Annotating Art’s

Políticas Culturales) and of arteypensamiento

Histories, whose titles include Cosmopolitan

at the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía.

Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction

Since 1999 he has been working on Archivo

(2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007)

F.X. and Máquina P.H. The former has

and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008).

recently resulted in the exhibition ‘Silo’

Maria Muhle

at the Monasterio de Silos, Spain, and a contribution to ‘La comunidad inconfesable’

Maria Muhle is Academic Assistant at the

(‘The Unavowable Community’), exhibited

Chair for History and Theory of Artificial

as the Catalunya Pavilion at the 2009 Venice

Worlds, Institute for Media Studies, Bauhaus

Biennale and at Bolit in Gerona. He has also

University, Weimar. Her research focuses on

published the second issue of the Boletines de

aesthetic realism in the context of a political

Archivo F.X. and a novel, Las correspondencias

aesthetics. Latest publications include: ‘Anna

(Editorial Periférica). In connection to

Artaker. History and Infamy’ in Camera

Máquina P.H., he has taken part in bailaor

Austria (2010), ‘Ästhetischer Realismus:

Irael Galván’s El final de este estado de cosas,

Strategien post-repräsentativer Darstellung

at the Festival d’Avignon (2009), curated

in A bientôt j’espère und Classe de Lutte. Chris

‘Ocaña 1973—1983: acciones, actuaciones,

Marker und die Medwedkin Gruppen’ in Das

activismo’ at the Centro de la Imagen Virreina

Streit-Bild (Thuria and Kant, 2010) and Eine

de Barcelona, and published La exaltación de

Genealogie der Biopolitik. Zum Begriff des Lebens

la visión: ‘Fuego en Castilla’ de José de Val del

bei Foucault und Canguilhem (Bielefeld).

Omar (Editorial Mudito).

124 | Afterall

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